In the past month, we've attended too many funerals (masks and distancing making it even harder). For an 11-year-old boy who drowned in a creek. For a man who succumbed to suicide leaving a wife and three children. For a mother who died in her sleep five months pregnant. I’m flooded with “it-should-not-be-this-way” raging shouts in my head.

In a recent large group Zoom meeting with Harvard students, I asked them to find two empty containers, labeling one Lost and the other Found. In small groups, we took five minutes silently to write our losses on slips of paper and place them in our Lost jar. We did the same with our Found jar, and then we shared with each other what we wrote—ambiguous loss made tangible.  

I was introduced to the term ambiguous loss—having and not having—after my sixteen-year-old son suffered a brain injury playing football and became severely disabled for life.

If Wendell Berry were a musician, I think he’d have been Allen Levi. Allen is a man tied to the land and a man who chooses his words and stories with care and compassion. He’s a man who loves Jesus, truly listens to people, and makes beautiful music.

The thing most about-to-marry girls want to hear is how to prevent the mistakes their parents and everyone else in the world have made.

Beauty and brokenness are a package deal. If I live only in beauty, I live in denial. If I live only in brokenness, I live in despair. Beauty in the midst of brokenness is the cup of cold water, the hint of hope that there is more to come.

I’ll take sticks and stones to break my bones any day because it’s words that hurt me. Sadly, it’s not someone else shouting them at me. It’s my own inner voice whispering them in my ear.

Do you know how to totally paralyze a book lover? Tag her in a Facebook message challenging her to list her top ten books.

All I could hear was Miracle Max’s voice from Princess Bride. Was the vine “mostly dead or all dead?”

My late-bloomer bucket list is long: running a marathon, having straight teeth, singing on key.

Choosing the "AND" Life in an Easy-Button, Less-Filling World

When I think of the word believe, I hear Peter Pan’s pleading voice, “Do you believe in fairies? Clap if you believe in fairies!”