I recently read a poem (which for the life of me I can’t find; I really need Google-for-real-life) in which the speaker talked about how much he hated it when adults laughed at him for stuff he did as a kid. You know what I’m talking about? I’m not talking about laughing when kids are […]

Tell us about five people, places, or things that have brought surprising, healing joy into your life.

Both of my children bring unexpected joy, but I remember M’s ultrasound as a particular joyful surprise. We’d always planned to have two children and I somehow figured I’d get one of each. So when the technician said, “Ah! […]

It is reported that when William Stafford was asked how he was able to write a poem every day, he said, “I lowered my standards.”
And in that spirit…
for the CGs
we had often giggled over dinner,
doodled the names of our future children on butcher paper,
ripped into hot bread, too hungry to wait,
passed it one to […]

today is the twenty-seventh of October.
Twenty-seven Octobers ago, I was in first grade. (I’ve skipped a lot of years, eh? The memory gets fuzzy.)
I don’t remember much about October of that year. I don’t even remember my Halloween costume, but I do remember the big Halloween carnival that took place in the front courtyard of […]

Today is October eighteenth.
Eighteen Octobers ago, I was in high school, I lived in Dallas,
and we went to the fair every year.
the texas state fair in 90 seconds
big tex
fletcher’s corn dogs
funnel cake that burns your fingers but you can’t wait
the texas star ferris wheel against a faded denim sky
family
the music hall
the cotton bowl, texas/oklahoma […]

Today is the 14th of October.
Fourteen Octobers ago, I was a sophomore in college.
Put simply, fall of sophomore year was a warm steaming barrel of shit. Honestly. It was just a big pile of manure.
I spent the second half of freshman year, and the summer following, basically between a rock and a hard place. The […]

Today is the eleventh of October.
Eleven Octobers ago, it was 1994.
That month, R and I got married.
I wrote something for our tenth anniversary last year, but didn’t say anything about the actual event. Here are a few quick memories about our wedding…
How it all began
In January of 1994, R and I were seniors at Rice […]

Today is the fifth of October.
Five Octobers ago, it was 2000…
I remember a particularly wonderful fall day with R in north Georgia, at Amicalola Falls State Park, a pumpkin farm, and even a little shopping at an outlet mall. Hey, I am not too granola (there’s that word again) to say that the Williams Sonoma […]

As I said, I’ve always loved the month of October. There have been some memorable Octobers and some mundane ones over my 33 years. So I had this strange idea for a blogging discipline this month—take the day, count back that number of years, and write something about October of that year. For example, on […]

Katrina was tough, but Rita is tougher for me on a personal level.
Mainly because we’ve all been shown in the last few weeks how bad it can be.
But also because it’s hard to see the people of Houston, still my hometown in so many ways, who have come together to support and minister to Katrina […]

night
awake from a dream,
I squint at three dispassionate numbers,
stare them down like it’s high noon
(but it’s 3:45).
then I sigh and flutter closed,
sink down, burrow deep,
but it’s too late:
behind my eyes
the dream is a poem now, scarcely even born,
yet she wants me to
come get up,
come play,
come feed me
now!
she’s yanked the covers back,
knotted them at my knees
so […]

Sept. 2, 2005 | HOUSTON — As they drove into Houston on Interstate 10 Thursday morning, evacuees from the New Orleans Superdome saw a “Welcome” sign. Local residents had hung bedsheets over the edge of overpasses and erected signs on trucks with messages like, “Welcome New Orleans, Our House Is Your House.””They were […]

In honor of PPB’s 100 things post, here is my list. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
100 things about me (aka, I’m thoroughly sick of myself now)
1. I am the oldest of four
2. I am a Texan by birth, living in the diaspora
3. I’ve been married almost 11 years
4. I am a reverend
5. and […]

part I
So here we are, Pastor G and I, in our Jesus Year, still young enough to be considered young, but not as young as we used to be. We’ve got nothing on paper, no proposal, no clergy cohort group, no projects on the horizon.
But something interesting has happened. After spending a couple of years […]

PastorG and I have been thinking and talking for years about the spiritual lives of young women. It began when we were very young women ourselves, hungering for a book or resource that addressed where we were in our lives. We had a couple of basic questions:
First: For women in our generation, who came of […]

In 12 hours C and I are boarding a plane for Dallas, where we will spend the weekend saying goodbye to Favorite Aunt, Mamala’s sister, who has battled valiantly against the devil that is ovarian cancer. Her kidneys are failing and we are told it will be days. (R will come on Saturday–tomorrow he is […]

Dad died on a Tuesday night during the January term of my last year in seminary. Two weeks before his death, the search committee from Suburban Presbyterian Church piled into a fifteen-passenger van to make the 1200-mile roundtrip to interview me and hear me preach, since I was great with child and unable to travel. […]

The last time I was pregnant, somebody died. I’m not kidding. My pregnancy had, like, casualties.
“Oh, that’s a horrible, vulgar thing to say.”
Yes, it is.
But it’s true.
And it was horrible. And vulgar.
Before seminary I volunteered as a grief support group facilitator for teenagers who had lost a parent. Half of the kids in the group […]

C.
P.
E.
Clinical.
Pastoral.
Education.
For the uninitiated: what is CPE?
The simple answer: a semester or more of hospital chaplaincy, for credit and (usually) no pay.
The more complete answer: hospital chaplain work, combined with individual and group supervision (read: therapy-lite), during which one works through the issues that come up during the CPE process and how they might impact […]