I knew postpartum depression was coming for me. The darkness of depression has companioned me during various seasons of my life, and I knew my hormones weren’t going to give me a break after having a baby. It lasted for…
Reading Christmas through the lens of Advent’s anguish
“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” —French philosopher Henri Bergson For several years running, my sister and I played a little game to ease the boredom of our family’s four-and-a-half hour drive from West…
We’re all waiting, but waiting is nothing new for women
It is the day after the election, and we’re waiting. Once again, we’re waiting. But waiting is not new to women. I imagine what it would have been like for Mary Magdalene and the other women who waited a day…
Prayerful waiting can endure long lines, traffic jams and even Trump, minister says
Alaina Kleinbeck offers a very simple and practical solution for Americans yearning for a speedy end to the next presidential term — before it’s even begun. Just wait. Kleinbeck said she doesn’t mean the twiddling your thumbs or flipping through a…
Looking, straining, yearning, waiting
By Adam McDuffie We find ourselves in the midst of Advent, waiting once again. Every year, we go through every day and every month, but come December, we find ourselves in the same place: waiting once again. O come, O…
Savoring the ‘sacrament of the present moment,’ with a little help from The Decemberists
Christian thinking about the world we live in and God’s goals for it wrestles with a tension. What God envisions for the world is already being made manifest in the Easter reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and in…
The chaos of waiting
Clearly there had been some mistake. Mark was thirty-four-years old and healthy. He had never even spent a night in the hospital. We had a two-year-old son. We had plans for a vacation and our careers and our family. How…
What they don’t tell you about Advent
Advent as parenthesis
A parenthesis is a break in the flow of a thought, an interval, or a time between two events. We experience many events in life that embody this idea of waiting either in anticipation or in dread. Life transitions are…