I’m 17 months old and I don’t need to learn to talk. I have a language of my own that works perfectly well.
One of the benefits of being a chauffeur for your children is that somehow the minute the car starts, you become invisible. Conversations go on in the back seat that you would never have been privy to under other circumstances. I
I forget what I am called to do: to live a fearless life. To choose in my relationships, not the way of fear, but the way of love.
A little bit of magic goes a long way to relieve the long hours and hard work of being a working parent.
Once in a while, when my girls were young, I would stop the car at a park on the way to the sitter’s house in the morning, and we would spend twenty minutes on the slides and swings. We would have the park to ourselves, first thing on a weekday morning. And I got a little extra play time with my girls… The best present in the world for me.
Once I asked my mother what it was like to live through really hard times, like Pearl Harbor and WWII. Mom was a young woman in nursing school when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mom told me that they gathered around, listening to radios… She said it was hard to believe it had happened, that it didn’t seem real.
Waiting has its gifts. Waiting has taught me patience. Humility. Waiting has knocked the top layer off my ever-present and arrogant assumption that I know what’s best for myself and for everyone else in the world. Best of all, waiting has brought me closer to an always loving, always compassionate God.
What does it feel like to be 70? What it feels like to be 70 is to be living in a kaleidoscope, where past memories and present experiences and glimpses into the future all come at once.
What I love about women is the way we gather as a community to celebrate other women. We seem to do it almost instinctually, at every major milestone. Recently we gathered here at my home near Chicago for a baby shower for my daughter Shannon.
One of the most difficult spiritual lessons I’ve ever had to learn is that God loves me unconditionally, no matter what I do or don’t do. It is so much easier for me to think that I can at least partially earn God’s love and approval through my good works. After all, my thinking goes,… Continue reading God’s Refrigerator
When I was sick with Covid, doing pretty much nothing but aching, resting, and sleeping more than I’ve slept in years, I got a call out of the blue from a young mother I had met months before. She needed to talk. She told me that the call helped her, but I know it really… Continue reading “Changing Direction”: The Art of Positive Distraction
