Note: I wrote this over a year ago (though it hasn’t been previously published). That’s why the ages are all wrong and I’m even balder now. Why haven’t I published it till now? Well, it’s more intimate and self-revelatory than I’m usually very comfortable with. (I am, as that one man once said, a man.)…
I’m bad at keeping up with trendy ideas. I only recently ran across an idea from 1898, written by Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst in his still-respected book, The Painter in Oil: Talent is just another name for the love of a thing.” But I’m a quick learner, and soon found an essay by Seth Godin, which…
There was a bad storm rolling, so we piled in the basement to wait it out. As far as I can remember, I was five, which means it was probably the spring of 1977. Your grandparents have always been fond of simple, self-driven entertainment. They respected me enough to believe I could find something worthwhile…
I am very pleased, on behalf of the entire Story Warren criminal syndicate, to welcome our newest partner in crime, Julie Silander. I’m joking about the crime thing, of course, unless I mean stealing your hearts. Julie has been a friend and ally to SW from the beginning and is a personal friend to my…
As you can probably guess by now, I really enjoy stories where everything doesn’t end well, where a hard fall illustrates difficult truths, and where there’s a dearth of sunshine and kittens. I enjoy tales of winter not only because they appear in the literary canon, but also because they turn up in Scripture. And…
It’s been five days since that terrible thing happened in America. You and I have talked about it some, though I never know how thoroughly to explain a tragedy. As a parent, it is difficult to know when to act as your shield and when to give you glimpses into the world you must one…
Children are great givers. Oh, they’re takers at times, too (aren’t we all?), but time and again the children in my life have astonished me with their willingness to give sacrificially. And as we stand on the threshold of Advent, we have some great opportunities to celebrate and encourage that beautiful inclination of their young…
She was a little too brazen for my liking. “If you’re going to go the special-needs route, you will need a sense of humor,” she said. “This process is awkward, and people say stupid things. Laughter is one of the best ways to fight that.” “We’re funny people!” I said, trying to thinking of something…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
