Rooted

“Will power and discipline alone can never fix your soul. Striving, pushing, and trying harder will not recover your life.”  – Adele Calhoun My proposed path winds through a gate and disappears into the rolling grass fields of a local 35 acre mountain retreat. In the gushing fall breeze, I wrestle with flapping paper and find my place on the …

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Hometown Street Signs

Come with me, back to my Midwest church girl roots with a visit to South Park Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. Loud music bounced wildly off the dark wood panels of a north side Chicago Irish pub.  Thirty years after high school graduation, we milled around tall bar tables, leaned in close and shouted catch-up …

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Umbilical: Lessons from a Deathbed

  Umbilical 18 Days in December   Those days bleed together in my mind the way the blood slowly pooled in her body after her heart stopped. I sit at my writing desk and sift through recent piles of wedding programs, Christmas cards, and funeral notes. I sort the collision of occasions like an upturned …

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Rich American Christians at the Top of the World

Pike National Forest, Colorado Every night outside my living room window, at the top of what the Ute Indians called the ‘Great Peak’ one lone light flickers.  Across miles of foothills, above tundra and timberline, a single white light shines visibly in the distance. It hangs just above the highest point of the peak like a …

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