I was four or five years old when I learned to be afraid of tornadoes. For most kids, it is monsters, or the dark – but for me, it was tornadoes. I remember my dad showing me pictures in the National Geographic of a storm that came out of nowhere, so powerful it could destroy [...]

• Preview – I had a maternity session today with a friend from my chiropractor’s office. I just HAVE to share this one with you! I made some decisions yesterday, with the new year coming in. They might not be popular decisions, but I needed to make them. • Kelly Sauer Design – I am [...]

I’d met her online. I knew her broken heart, knew her story. But I had not seen her worship until I met her in person. I sat in a back-ish row of the old school auditorium, surrounded by badly-painted concrete memories from my elementary school days as a public school student, surrounded by the crazy [...]

Opening my home is not an easy thing for me. It involves cleaning my house and preparing my kitchen for extra mouths. It means that I won’t have my own space, the little that I get in between my littles on a given day. It often means that I have to take care what I [...]

I could always believe at Christmas, believe that the things that were tearing me up could really be okay. I decided to transfer colleges at Christmas after a rough first semester in Iowa. I fell in love the first time over a Christmas break. I believed I could keep loving over the next Christmas. The [...]

Tolkien’s description of Bilbo’s living-tired, “thin, like butter spread over too much bread,” it is echoing through me this morning. I am up early, aching tired and wide awake – and half afraid to admit it, because I don’t blame anyone for it, and I don’t want it all to stop, because this is the [...]

“But I thought I could detect a moment–a very, very short moment–before this [my duty to please the Creator turned into the deadly poison of self-admiration] happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may [...]