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Why I gave my son 5 M&Ms when he asked about Donald Trump
“Mom, how much money does Donald Trump have?” “Millions, billions,” I answered. “So, he’s rich? I wish I was that rich.” “Hmmm. Yeah, he’s rich.” “Someday I’m gonna be rich.” “If you had $100,000 right now, would you be rich?” “No.” He looked confused, frustrated as if I just could not understand what rich was.…
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Confessions of a Stay-At-Home Momwriter
I never wanted to grow up to be a writer. I wanted to be something like the President…. Ha! And I didn’t move to Nashville to be a songwriter. Instead, I moved to be a lawyer. BIG difference. But I’ve been writing my whole life. From essays, short stories, and poetry as a teenager, to…
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Project: Suffering
I’ve read the entire book of Job in one sitting twice in my life. The first was on a plane. A window seat in an aisle to myself was the setting for my anguish and my desperate reading. I was pregnant. But not for long. The day before I’d been told that my hormones would…
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Life is short. Ask … anyone.
Yesterday our community, and our family personally, felt the horrific loss of Sharron Cantrell, the principal of Spring Hill Elementary School, Case’s school. It was a shock to everyone. I know that there are many, many people who feel the loss in a greater and more personal way than me, Case, or the rest of…
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Proud resident of Chaos, Tennessee
A dirty shirt still 20 feet from the laundry basket. The matching pants 10 feet further, still inside out. A toy that will pierce the bottom of your foot. Next to one that’s broken because it already has. A few crumbs on the floor… well, a lot of crumbs. Even more crumbs next to an…
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Every.Single.Soul.
I was sitting in a terminal of Chicago Midway airport, surrounded by throngs of people preparing to visit family, take a vacation, or travel for work, when I had an unremarkable epiphany. God cares about every…single…soul…here. Every one. Not only that, He cares about every thought, feeling, worry, prayer, experience, heartache, and fear of every…single…soul…here.…
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I’m No Angel
God never gives you more than you can handle. If I’ve heard that phrase once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. As if God created me with some extraordinary amount of patience, hope, perseverance, and strength. Sometimes people think that parents of children with special needs or terminal illnesses were hand selected by God because…
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A Re-imagined Christmas List
I’m kind of at my wits’ end with Christmas lists. Are there things we’d like? Sure. Are there things we need? Not so much. But still we go through the process every year of looking through catalogs, daydreaming, and scrolling to find just those additional things to fill our house to (over)capacity. So why then…
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Who you are
I heard a song recently and one line particularly stuck with me. It said, “sometimes pain’s the only way that we can learn.” Maybe that’s true. I found my true self on April 6, 2009, lying flat on the floor sobbing for the life of my child. But what if that hadn’t happened? What if…
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I want to be a peach
We were not meant to have a mediocre life. We were meant to live a radical, blessed, edgy, open, screaming about the love of Jesus life. I’ve heard people sometimes being referred to as an onion, and even in the movie The Blind Side, Leigh Anne and Michael are each referred to as onions, where…
