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I carry this sorrow like a stone in my pocket. It’s always there, sometimes chiseled sharp, painful to touch.

There are days here in Alberta when the weather is just about as perfect as one can imagine.

With the Amen this dog

knew her kingdom

had come. Scraps of fat,

burnt potatoes, beets,

everything proceeded

The teacher in the book of Ecclesiastes says, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.”

Fast from discontent.
Feast on gratitude.

Fast from anger.
Feast on patience.

Fast from worry.
Feast on fai

When I was a child about 5 years old, I would go to my grandfather’s small Baptist church.

It really was, as the cliché goes, a dark and stormy night.

The picture on the next page hangs in my church office. Parishioners often ask if there is a story behind it.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

—Psalm 139:13

While visiting the Chicago Botanic Garden, my husband and I spent the better part of a day strolling from an English walled garden to a J

Picture a small discussion group. One day the group gets talking about prayer. “What do you struggle with in your prayer life?

From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.

It takes you by surprise

It comes in odd packages

It sometimes looks like loss

Or mistakes

It acts like rain

I have a rule for my garden this year. I won’t allow myself to buy any seeds.

And I am a seedaholic.

When someone asks what I plan to give up for Lent, I often can’t help flashing a self-deprecating smile for the fleshly me, who kno

These are the days of darkness in the Northern Hemisphere.

EXPECTING. We associate this seemingly innocent word with (among a good many other things) pregnancy.

I hate the glitz and the busyness, the worries over spending too much, the cleaning, the hours spent in the kitchen trying to create the

It was an innocent suggestion, that game of hide-and-seek.

An article in the January 2006 Banner titled “Going to the Extreme” carried interviews with several people who engage in high

His eyes open each morning
to the same lines, the same dots
in the ceiling.
The same fluorescent lights.
Teal carpet,

A friend, recently and tragically bereaved, wrote me of the tears that came upon her during a chapel service at her daughter’s scho

My husband was to fly in that night. No problem. I’d gladly meet him after a week’s separation.