Category: Spiritual Discipline

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Making Straight

Pictured left is my blue-eyed first born, my “trainer baby” (the one on whom I’d practice motherhood). I witnessed with awe and excitement every nuance of this kid’s growth, including the cutting of the first tooth. From the first one at 6 months to the many more that followed, those baby teeth erupted out of her sweet baby gums in neat rows of shiny white. Her smile was perfect. She was in first grade when she lost the first baby tooth. More followed suit, and as she grew, that little smile kept changing. Teeth came loose one by one, making room for new ones. Continue reading “Making Straight”

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Winterizing, Christ Bearing & Spiritual Discipline

A house built for Florida makes my feet cold on the morning our city breaks its low-temperature record. It’s not that it hasn’t been colder than 21 degrees Fahrenheit here before, but it’s not been that cold on the 8th of December.  I don’t remember having this much trouble warming up, not when I spent hours playing in snow as a kid in the northeast and not in the ‘burbs of Chicago when I would walk the 13 blocks back to the college dorm in minus-zero wind chills after finishing the night shift. But then in both of those cases, my life involved a whole lot more physical activity, and I came home to rooms outfitted with storm windows and steam heat from oil burning boilers. Generally speaking, homes were winterized. But this is Florida, and I live in a house built in 1939. If there’s such a thing in the insulation industry as a negative “R” value, I think this house has one. It just wasn’t designed for winter. Continue reading “Winterizing, Christ Bearing & Spiritual Discipline”

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Waking from Slumber

The trumpet blast sustained for a time as the herald cried out, “Awake, you who sleep. Arise from the dead!” I did, roused slowly by the trumpet’s sharp tenor as it finally broke the spell of sleep. I came to, rubbing the crusts of sleep from my eyes only to find in my stupor that I sat amidst a terrible battlefield. The slain were to my right and my left. Some mounted on beasts were horribly wounded but still slicing the air with their weapons. Some wielded long, shimmering swords. Others covered their heads with only bare hands, trying to absorb the blows of an enemy I was blearily trying to make out through the fog of my own daze. I was so astonished at the idea of a battle, so stunned at the thought of an actual enemy that for a long time I could not move. Until the horrific stare of its eyes turned towards me.

Continue reading “Waking from Slumber”