Clearing What Is Ours to Clear
Each of us lives with plans and demands on our time. They arrive with urgency and insistence, persuading us that what is scheduled is what is necessary. Even faith can become another obligation—something to be managed rather than received.
But grace does not usually arrive on schedule.
What if interruption is not a failure of discipline but a threshold? What if some of what we think we “need” to do matters less than what love quietly places in front of us?
I have been shaped by women who lived with this kind of attentiveness—Beth, whose presence continues to instruct me, and Lucy, whose goodness is a daily constant. Neither acted in order to be seen. They did what was right because it was right. I have had to reckon with my own temptation—often hidden even from myself—to hope that such goodness might be noticed or returned. That hope belongs to me. Their faithfulness does not depend on it.
Recently, I suggested to a group of friends that we do something for someone who goes out of their way to help us. There was no response. I let it be. When I returned home, I noticed snow had not been cleared where my children park their cars. So I cleared them.
That was all.
No larger gesture followed. No unseen heroics. Just the work immediately before me.
Faith does not always look expansive. Sometimes it is bounded, ordinary, and quiet. It does not perform well. It does not multiply itself to prove a point.
Still, it counts.
Grace is not measured by how much we do, but by whether we are willing to do what is ours to do—without applause, without enlargement, without pretending it was more than it was.
God gives fire for light, not for ruin.
Many of us are tired.
Not just busy—tired in the bones.
We have watched things we care about erode. We have seen people suffer needlessly. We have tried to speak, to help, to hold ground—and anger has found a home in us.
That doesn’t make you a bad person.
It makes you human.
Anger often begins as love that has nowhere to go.
But if you are feeling scorched inside—if rage has become your daily fuel—you are not failing morally. You are overburdened.
You were never meant to carry the weight of the world on anger alone.
You are still called to care.
You are still allowed to resist what harms.
But you are also allowed to rest from outrage.
Contempt feels powerful, but it is a thin power. It burns fast and leaves little behind. Love is slower. It requires breathing room. It needs light more than heat.
If all you can do right now is tend one small good thing—do that.
If all you can offer is restraint instead of rage—let that be enough for today.
Your vocation is not to be consumed.
Your presence matters too.
There is a fire that warms without destroying.
May you be given that fire again.
It’s Been a Year
It’s been a year.
Both of us were treated for cancer.
She also underwent a heart procedure.
And still—
we made it to the Azores.
We found rest for a while in Boothbay Harbor.
I began my first novel and am close to finishing it: 37 chapters, 147,500 words.
I started drafting two more.
The second is emerging quickly, with its hinge chapters complete.
The third is conceptually structured, waiting its turn.
I’m wrapping up a devotional guide for Lent.
I’ve been publishing small pieces—one or two most weeks.
My writing coach keeps urging me to slow down, reminding me that as cancer treatment continues, the emotional cost of writing increases.
She said:
Protecting your pace right now is the same as
resting between surgical cuts,
letting a bruise declare itself before touching it again.
Ignore this and you’ll still be productive—
but the book would begin extracting something from you it has no right to take.
So I’m learning to tell the truth about limits.
Not to stop.
Not to hurry.
But to refuse any work that asks for more than it is given.
Still here.
Still listening.
Still writing.
Christmas Night
There is a kind of fullness that doesn’t feel like happiness and doesn’t ask to be.
It isn’t sweet. It isn’t savory.
It simply rests.
Tonight I feel absence more clearly—not only my own, but the quiet spaces carried by people I love and others I care about. Some have lost children. Some have buried spouses. Some have said goodbye to friends only days ago. Some may not feel anything sharp at all—only a hush they can’t quite name.
I don’t know what anyone else is carrying tonight. I don’t even know that they are struggling. But I know that if I were standing where they stand, this night would ask something of me.
I sat with family today, grateful and at peace, and still aware that the deepest part of me was keeping watch elsewhere. Not lost. Not lonely. Just faithful—to love that has shaped a life, and to lives shaped by love that did not end when death arrived.
This isn’t grief that wants to be fixed.
It’s recognition.
I’m learning that much of what draws me to write is not the need to be understood, but the hope of finding witnesses—people willing to stand quietly together and notice what still abides. How love, once fully given, continues to act in the world through memory, attention, and changed lives.
If something in these words feels familiar to you tonight—unnamed but steady—know this: you are not behind, and you are not alone. Some things do not pass. They remain. And learning to live with them is its own kind of peace.
Christmas Eve
Christmas does not arrive in triumph.
It arrives in peril.
A child born to frightened parents.
A promise given without guarantees.
Power revealed not in taking, but in bearing.
Tonight, the world still trembles under lies told for safety’s sake.
Still mistakes strength for domination.
Still prefers what can be seized to what must be received.
And yet—
God comes anyway.
Unarmed.
Truthful.
Willing to carry what we cannot.
This is the joy of Christmas.
Not loud.
Not sentimental.
But faithful.
May we receive it in truth.
On a whim... 