There are some weights I’ve carried silently across years, my skin and bone growing right around them tangled complicated. The heaviness buried. Still, I grew into my frame. I softened, curved found my way. I’ve made beautiful things. I can be both/and. But then, on a day still close, words spilled inky and echoed across […]
Out Here on the Brink of Eternity
by on September 20, 2018 38 Comments
It’s lonelier than I imagined, this aging thing. I remember being impatient with my dad when we pushed my parents to move from their much-loved last home, built 15 years earlier, into a retirement community a little bit closer to us. He was suffering from Parkinson’s and atherosclerosis and my mom was wearing herself out […]
What an Australian Bushfire Taught Me About Faith
by on August 12, 2018 2 Comments
By Madeline Twooney When l was six years old, l experienced my first bushfire. I grew up in Victoria, Australia, in a set of low rural mountain ranges called the Dandenongs about 35km east of Melbourne. That summer had been a real scorcher, with little rainfall and strong winds. The majestic eucalyptus gums that surrounded […]
Nothing Worse than Being Ordinary?
by on June 26, 2018 7 Comments
By Shelbi Anderson Gesch Do you think I’m ordinary? When she asks this question, Angela, the superficial, too-beautiful-to-be-real girl in the movie American Beauty embodies the darkest, deepest pain inside me. I hated her—until that scene at the end of the movie, where she nearly gets what she wants, and then comes to the […]
We Grieve and Then We Hope
by on June 21, 2018 12 Comments
By Gina Butz | twitter: @gina_butz “I don’t know if I’ll ever find what I have right now again. There’s just so much that’s unknown.” That was our son’s deep cry as we talked one night. He’s slogging through the final weeks of his senior year of high school, staring down freshman year at one […]
