I have cancer. On Monday, March 27, I woke from a routine gall bladder surgery groggy, disoriented. Do you know your name? Can you tell me your birthday? Anesthesia makes everything distant and dreamlike. I was barely conscious when my doctor’s voice arrived like an echo… Sally Anne, you have ovarian cancer. He’s my […]

A common question pastors ask is, Can you remember a time when you asked Jesus into your heart? I understand the question, but I can’t answer it. And I suspect some of you reading this can’t answer it either. Not because you’re not saved, not because you don’t know the reason for your hope…but because, […]

While our girls are at school, these home halls echo my shrill voice, things I’ve said in a tone I should never use. Hurry! Stop! Don’t! And sarcasm. Someone said, An English teacher should never speak sarcasm. Neither should a mom, but I do. I walk past their bedrooms, their morning lamps still glowing like […]

I once read the confession of a Nazi soldier responsible for rounding up a Jewish community for relocation to a ghetto. When he entered one home, he found a woman on her knees, scrubbing her floor as if she were expecting company. The soldier recalled asking her, Woman, don’t you know I’ve come to take […]

What if I told you we got it wrong, The Greatest Story ever told? That our cultural ignorance and loyalty to tradition have cost us the truth and beauty of our Messiah’s humble birth? Sometimes in the West we like to think we invented Christmas, that maybe we know the beloved story of Jesus better […]

When I was a teacher, I had a student who never brought a pencil to class. Not ever. It felt like a calculated attack on my authority and demeaned my position as Podium Queen. Unpreparedness is rude, yes it is, so I punished him with detention. Then one day at a teaching workshop, an old […]

One of my favorite traditions comes after Christmas, when we’re packing it away. I spied Mama doing it all my life, and now I do it, too. After she’d folded The Tree’s arms across its chest and laid it back in the box till next year, she would write a small paragraph on the cardboard […]

I stumbled out into morning sunshine slating across the table. I wasn’t ready to shine yet…needed a few more minutes to sulk under the cloud waiting at my bedside. That faithful gray cloud is often waiting, but it’s fragile as death, and just as easily overcome by Love. I fumbled blindly for Abba’s Love and […]

After the tornadoes of 2011, the whole South was left reeling. Nearly everyone lost someone or knew someone who’d been taken by the wind. We were all changed, scared, scarred. Even after the monsters had moved on, we were still afraid of the question that swirled like debris: Why did God allow this? The following […]

When Selah was little, something dark settled over me, something that felt a whole lot like depression. But one day, I overrode my dizzying dread of leaving home and braved the park with my toddler. It felt like the top of Everest to me, that 2nd floor of the stone pavilion where we shared Chinese […]