Note: This review contains numerous spoilers. To read more about tales of winter, check out my original Story Warren post here, as well as my review of Jonny Duddle’s The Pirate Cruncher. Any honest plot summary of John Christopher’s young adult The Sword of the Spirits trilogy will have most conscientious Christian parents squirming in…
See the young father coming home from work. He is bone-tired, especially between the ears. If this was the late 1950s, he would kiss his wife on the way through the kitchen, pat his kids on the head on the way through the living room, and disappear with an adult beverage into the den for…
Two weeks ago I went grocery shopping with fifteen stickers on my face. The night before, news had come. It was news about someone I love – the kind of news that etches a mark on your timeline, dividing life before from life after. I was devastated. I woke up the next morning full of…
I am not a poet. And I know it. However, I am occasionally surprised when poetic verse somehow leaks out of my pen and onto paper. I want to share one of those leaky pieces with you here not just because it’s a poem, but because it’s a poem about art, faith, and imagination.  I…
If you want to read to your kids, but the stories you choose seem hit or miss, let me offer a few genre suggestions based on age breakdowns. This might help you to hit the bullseye a little more often. I learned this in college, and these categories seem to make sense, though it might…
I love this section from the preface to Brennan Manning’s The Ragamuffin Gospel: [The gospel is] for the bedraggled, beat-up and burnt-out. It is for the sorely burdened who are still shifting the heavy suitcase from one hand to the other. It is for the wobbly and weak-kneed who know they don’t have it all…
Two years ago, on a blustery October day just like the one out my window, I took a walk with six children down a country road near Boston. When it was over, I felt that I had sojourned in a different world and I almost hated to come back to my own. It wasn’t the…
A couple of weekends ago I spoke at a conference called Hutchmoot. Hutchmoot is a physical manifestation of the online community known as The Rabbit Room. Around 200 folks from homes scattered across North America left chores, bills, jobs, kids, and the isolated safety of cyberspace, and gathered at Church of the Redeemer in Nashville,…
Note: To read more about tales of winter, check out my original Story Warren post here. What child doesn’t love pirates? During my youth in south Florida, I used to wander the beach with parents, picking over driftwood, chasing sandpipers and looking for Skull Rock. No mere mental homage to J.M. Barrie, Skull Rock was…
Bear with me. This will make sense in a moment. I got a new car this year. Gently used, actually. I turned in the keys to the family van that had been mine, a well-worn 2002 Honda Odyssey. Sally wisely declared that at 61 it was time for me to have a bit more manly…
This morning we were sick together. I heard you at five stepping down the last four wooden steps in the dark, barefoot and concerned, dragging your striped blanket. Something wasn’t right. You knew it. You crawled in bed beside me, buried the fevered weight of your forehead into the white softs of my inner arms,…
What can I say? When I was 2—long, long ago, back in the time of caves, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and parents left children in cars—my sister (a fresh plumpy newborn) and I were left in the back of our Humber car while our parents popped out—just for a second. When they left us,…
