When I was nine years old my grandmother took me on a Greyhound bus tour from Chicago to California and back…twenty-one days on the same bus with the same passengers, our own tour guide and driver, and I was the only child.  The experience of being doted on and exposed to this big beautiful country ...

I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, born at the end of May, when the city is putting on its biggest celebration, the Indy 500.  The year that I was born my mother’s doctor, an old friend of my dad, sent his nurse over to stay with my mom four days after my birth, so that he and my dad could go to th...

One bloom opened up on the hibiscus tree.
She offered her voice in a song to the sky.
The song that she sang was a plaintive cry.
“I’m alone,” she sang.  It is only me.”

The sky sympathized with her lonely state
“I’m here; I see you.  You must not grieve.
Others will join you; if you will believe.
It’s e...

In the account of the formation of the early Christian church in Acts 11, persecution in Jerusalem has scattered and dispersed the new Christians to the wider world.  They go proclaiming the Lord Jesus, first to the Jews, but eventually to the Greeks and other Gentiles as well.  God had made it clea...

In less than a month my husband and I will begin our pilgrimage across the country to our summer place on Lake Michigan, in a community called Epworth Heights.  When I first started returning to Epworth as an adult, it was for eight weeks each summer.  It felt like a decadent amount of time to retre...

crucified
            a poem for Kilmar  

I taste the salt in my tears,
in his sweat the bitter taste of blood

I watch him carted away, buried in a tomb,
a prison built to set all of us free.

Separated from his mother,
from all his beloved tribe.

The ground could not hold him;
rising, he released the...

Who do you say you are?  Do you identify yourself by gender, by job or by calling?  For instance, I am wife, mother, grandmother.  I am a curator and chronicler of stories, a lover of books and writers and literature. 

Recently I had the opportunity to interview writer Adriana Trigiani via Zoom for...

Each year I forget about the bulbs
lying dormant in the earth,
the ones I planted years and years ago,
a secret stash of buried treasure.
Suddenly one morning there’s a frenzy
of yellow daffodils—botanic fireworks.

Purple hyacinths follow
arriving fully formed from under
the winter ground;
I’ve never even ...

You are my best friend,
and I hate to leave you,
which one day I shall have to do
unless you leave me first.

These are the eventualities of life:
the long solo walk
the journey we can only take alone
the yearning for a hand to hold ours
the darkness with no candle
to light our way.

In spite of this, my ho...

“The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.”  Psalm 103:6

Righteousness can be defined as being set apart, in particular, set apart by or for God.  Sometimes justice demands set-apartness.  When the scales have been tipped in favor of one group of people over another, then s...