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.

The office in my high school was on the first floor, in the center of the building.

This Easter, as they have for nearly 2,000 years, Christians will celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the tomb.

I’m visiting a dank, dusty hallway in the basement of our house. I don’t go there often, and the lighting is poor.

Dear friends, I’ve found something important that I believe we need to approach with careful pastoral discernment.

I can feel January coming —feel it in my soul.

A few years ago I was driving along, daydreaming and only half listening to Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac”

C. S. Lewis taught many people many things, but he couldn’t teach his own dog to fetch a bone.

An astute third-grader once asked me, “Do you ever wonder if life is real?

Have you ever written a spiritual autobiography? You know, a story about your own faith journey.