Some days, I’m hard to live with.

Ask my husband, David. God bless him.

Maybe you are too?

David is a carefree spirit whose motto in college was, If I can crawl over it, I can sleep on it. He eats whatever I cook and seldom notices piles of laundry or dirty dishes. If an opportunity for fun or adventure presents itself, he’s all in. He’ll figure out the details later. He’ll abandon even the best laid plans to help someone in need—especially children and the elderly.

When our church’s small group leader asked how we felt about doing an extended prayer experience together as recommended by the curriculum we were using, some of us were hesitant. Thankfully, enough trust had been built in the group that people had the courage to voice their misgivings. Someone shared about how extended prayer times felt impossible for how their brains worked—too easily distracted. Others said long periods of prayer somehow left them feeling more distracted, distant from God, and guilty. Someone shared that they would probably find it peaceful but very likely fall asleep!

There’s a cliche, “time heals all wounds.” This rang true to me for many years after my father divorced my mom when I was a little kid. The pain of him leaving dulled as I learned to live life without him. But some moments pick at the wounds and the pain demands to be felt no matter how hard you try to shake it.

We were a family in disarray, like a bunch of pickup sticks dropped to the floor. Our young daughter was seriously ill—again. Months before, she’d been rushed to Children’s Hospital, where her lungs finally opened up, allowing her to breathe freely after eleven hours of constant asthma treatment and a near miss admission to the ICU.

“Your flight has been canceled.” The notification popped up on my phone during team-building sessions. I tried to stay focused on the intense conversations about our personality styles while wondering what new travel plans I would need to embrace. Knowing that my driving nature can get things done but can also alienate others, I wanted to be present in the meeting. I breathed a prayer, asking Jesus to help me.

Clicking open the email, I smiled at the subject line: “LGA instructions with my artistic map attached.” For the past few years, I had been planning a solo trip to visit our daughter who lives in New York City. She and I finally had the margin to make it happen. Wanting my trip to be as easy as possible, she sent me an email with the best routes from the airport to her apartment. I had traveled to New York City numerous times, but this was my first time flying into the city instead of driving.

I’ve never considered myself athletic. Sports and disciplined workout regimes were for athletic, coordinated people; I was not one of those people. I’ve enjoyed jogging for most of my life, but that didn’t make me think of myself as someone athletic or strong. Anyone could put one foot in front of the other. I ran because I wasn’t athletic enough to do any other sport!

But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. —Matthew 6:15

As I’ve looked back over my life and my bouts of depression, I’ve realized there’s something else that contributed to my blues. And when left unaddressed—or dare I say untreated—that feeling can grow and produce more harm than I ever imagined. Now I’m not saying every episode of depression has a direct correlation to an emotion or incident. Sometimes it is genetic or based on hormones or something we cannot explain. But sometimes, if we’re honest, loss can cause our depression. I talked about the grief of losing my mother earlier, but in the midst of that mourning period, I realized I had also lost a dream. I was grieving an opportunity I thought would flourish into one of my life’s dreams, but instead, it had not and had left me feeling lost and with little hope. My next move was unknown and this was tough to handle.

The high school youth group I attended with my boyfriend before I became a Christian was at one point studying the book of Job. I couldn’t find this apparent vocational guide in the new NIV Study Bible my mom bought me for Christmas. It seemed weird to me that it wasn’t the book of Jobs, unless maybe there was just one job that was appropriate for Christians? It was time to turn to the book of Job, but, alas, the Bible’s table of contents was not alphabetical. I didn’t grow up performing “sword drills” in Sunday school classes, and, if you must know, I didn’t know, at first, that “Job” was pronounced J-OH-B, not J-AH-B.

This morning I stood in front of my new community garden long box and thought about what I would soon plant. These are my joys in gardening:

• planning a garden

• buying plants

• getting them in the ground

• cutting flowers to brighten my home

• enjoying and sharing the food my time and care have produced

Most people who know me well know I’m a pretty avid knitter. I’ve been obsessed ever since I learned. If I’m sitting, I want to be knitting. So it really made me think when one of my favorite knitting podcasters, Laura from Penrose Knits, mentioned one of her knitting goals for 2023 was to knit less. (What? Why?!) Laura explained that she’d realized she needed to make more space and time in her life to focus on her mental and physical health in other ways like therapy and exercise. Even though she loved knitting, it was necessary to be intentional about knitting less in order to take the pressure off herself and leave more space in her life for health.

Viewing art used to feel like a marathon. I needed good running shoes on my early visits to art museums as I raced through the hallways to check off having visited all the most important works in any gallery. I had looked at the canvases, sculptures, or installations, but I hadn’t seen them. Over time, my pace slowed down as I began to be captivated by the art. Van Gogh’s Olive Trees resonated with me for both its beauty and the reminder of Jesus in Gethsemane, so a reproduction hangs above my office desk. The stunning portrait of the man chosen to carry Jesus’ cross, Simon of Cyrene by Egbert Modderman, stopped me in my tracks. And the many paintings of desert flowers by Lilias Trotter bring me joy for their beautiful tenderness.

“I am the way.” John 14: 6

When my husband stopped driving, I started fretting. Did I see well enough at night to drive us? Would I get lost? Could I ignore his “back seat driving,” telling me which lane to take, where to turn, or which route to follow to get us home?

We have a counter in our home covered in a strange, ugly, tan, bumpy tile. It’s been there since we moved in almost twenty years ago, but it’s just one of those things we live with, because what do you do with ugly tile?

“A bruised reed he will not break” (Isaiah 42:3).

Our Norwegian Forest cat Mystique, who has long impossibly soft, black fur and big, yellow eyes, is a little princess. She loves cuddles, belly rubs, getting brushed, and falling asleep on my lap every evening (also picking fights with our other cat Heathcliff whenever he gets the attention she craves). She’s so at home in her life with my husband and me that it’s sometimes easy to forget what she was like when I first met her years ago as an underweight, malnourished street cat with tangled fur. She was too skittish to be touched, just brave enough to beg for food that she’d eat while keeping a cautious eye out for any threat coming too close.

Before I was “officially” saved, I required a lot of evidence that Jesus was the Son of God. Even after God rescued me in my dorm room the fall of my freshman year, I still sought out books and arguments that supported my feeble faith. I felt I needed to be certain that God was the One True God before I was going to give my life over to Him.

I have an old, fading snapshot sitting on my desk. Not sure how it got there. It’s a three inch by three inch picture from a long-ago December in 1969. I was thirteen, and my family was visiting relatives in Florida over our Christmas break. My aunt, uncle, and two of my cousins are standing outside the door of their home. It’s a family photo I’ve gazed at now and then throughout the years. But today I looked at it and spied something I don’t believe I’d noticed before. My older sister Nina (eighteen) stands on the far left of the photo camouflaged by trees behind her, a few branches in front of her, and the shadow of leaves on her and the house to her right. (She probably thought she was far enough away to be outside the picture). What adds to the camouflage is her white sweater against the white of the house, dark slacks that fade into the shadows near her feet, and dark glasses.

My husband proposed twenty years ago this May, on the day I graduated from college. We went to dinner together at the Macaroni Grille to celebrate my brand-new degree, and then, with my leftovers tucked neatly at my feet, we headed towards his parents’ house.

But instead of turning onto their street, he asked, “Want to go for a walk?”