History, Real Life, and Faith
We drove out to Cobb Mountain on Saturday to work on the site of a house that burned down last month. A dozen of us from St. Mark Lutheran Church arrived at the burned-down home of a church member. I hadn’t been up to Lake County since the Valley Fire. I’d never glimpsed a scene quite like it before. Middletown…
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This is a story about heeding the Holy Spirit‘s direction. People ask all the time, “how do you know God is telling you to do something?” This is an example of what happened to me. And since my friend wrote about how it affected her, you get “both sides of the tapestry.” My friend Hillary lives in Sicily where she…
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October 12, 2015, marked the 100th anniversary of British nurse Edith Cavell’s execution by a German firing squad fifteen months after the start of World War I. Hailed as a saintly British nurse-martyr by some and called a victim of the British propaganda machine by others, Cavell’s life and the reason for her death was more nuanced than that. Many…
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Do you have someone in your life who can say “no” to you and you’ll accept it? Why not? Are you never wrong? Passages in the Bible admonition us to love one another and to speak the truth in love. Sometimes that means saying “no,” and it’s important we all have someone who we’ll listen to and either reconsider, or…
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Do you live your faith life within a frame? I hadn’t thought about that aspect until I met up with a friend from my childhood several years ago. 26 years had passed since we’d last seen each other (curiously, in line at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics!), and we met at a Starbucks to get a look at each other. She…
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Writing is notoriously a solitary work, but this writer could not do her job without her writer friends. The fact I’ve been part of five different novella collections means I’ve worked with other writers my entire career. But two writers in particular have been with me through half these collections and I want to talk about them and our work…
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