I’ll confess, I didn’t hear the Christmas tree come crashing down in the middle of the night. I vaguely remember my husband asking me if I heard dishes shattering. Just another bizarre dream, I thought. No thief in the night…
The generosity experiment
If Simon Peter’s brother, Andrew, had found an adult with a lunch of five barley loaves and two fish, instead of a young boy, I’m not sure the 5000 would have been fed that day. “My little lunch is not even…
Fasting from words with friends
“This is the big one, Elizabeth!” I could feel it. It had to be the fasting. Okay, it was only fasting from Words With Friends… for a week. But it’s harder than it sounds. For a Sunday School lesson on the…
The intentional gardener
It takes a lot of nerve to ask Sunday school teachers to tend to a zinnia seedling for two months when you’ve got dead ivy sitting in your kitchen window. But it was too perfect an exercise to underscore the…
Rachel’s coat
When I lived in NYC I worked at an Episcopal church overseeing their programs for the homeless – an overnight shelter, a lunch program, a food pantry. One day, Tom, the rector, came to talk to me. I could see a…
The sixth sense
My only excuse is that it was getting late and no one turned on the light in the foyer. I heard voices at the front door and came around from the living room to see who was there. My husband…
It is finished
I love my planner. I particularly love the sheet where I get to list my weekly tasks – ideally so I don’t forget to do them. Often they stare back at me from the page like a puppy certain it…
One car length
“Has this ever happened to you?” I inquired of my pastor from the middle of the highway. “Over four hundred funerals,” the text came back. “Not once.” I blame it on the merge. If you’ve ever driven in New York…
Margin for error
As I pulled up to the middle school for my child’s sixth grade awards ceremony recently, I couldn’t help but think back to a similar day just a few years ago. It was a Friday, my day off, and I’d…