The Pregnant Pastor

It was my third time in the fetal nursery. That’s what I had taken to calling the evaluation room directly across the hallway from Labor and Delivery. Fetal heartbeats echoed loudly throughout the room like a person incessantly testing a hot microphone. These heartbeats were hampered only by the screeching of doctors’ and nurses’ pivoting […]

A Prayer for the End of Nursing

O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You knew the moment when that sweet baby skin first touched my chest when that sweet little mouth gaped like a fish when that shocking moment of connection was made: Mother. Child. One. You knew. You knew the struggles, and the pain. The mostly sleepless nights […]

The Family of Faith

My son is starting Sunday School. Or, rather, my SON is starting SUNDAY SCHOOL!!!! Somehow, my infant child has transformed himself into a fast talking, faster-running 4-year-old. He is all legs and arms and questions now. He’ll creep into our bed around six o’clock in the morning and whisper, “So, Jesus is in my belly?” […]

To Till the Ground

It was Sunday morning, eight weeks from my last menstrual period, three weeks since the first faintly pink positive result appeared, ten days since the darkened line confirmed it, and a measly 24 hours until my first prenatal appointment. It was Sunday morning, and I was bleeding. Marrett and I had been trying for this […]

Stumbling Towards Bethlehem

“While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”               Luke 2:6-7 I discovered I was pregnant one early autumn […]

A Heart to Hold it All

A couple of weeks after I returned from maternity leave following the birth of my first child, I sat at the lunch buffet with a parishioner. He was older than my dad would have been, with children of his own. He asked me, “How has becoming a mother changed how you think about God?” It […]

The Words I Could Not Pray

My son was born on a sunny, beautiful day in September. I went into labor at 4am, and got up to make cookies, because I wanted to pass them out to the nurses. I told my husband to work from home that morning because after four days of false labor, I was pretty sure…cautiously sure…that […]

Generation to Generation

I’ve always been a birth geek. I loved the experience of being pregnant with my son. His birth (at home, without drugs; with the baby’s father, two midwives, and my mother present) was the most intense and painful experience of my life; I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Even before becoming a mother […]

The Kindergartener’s Gospel

I remember well the famous “All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten” poster which hung in every one of my elementary school classrooms in Alabama, with its purple handwriting on lined paper, and a shiny red delicious apple followed by a typed list of dozens of kindergarten insights. The poster featured such […]

The Snow Day

In the Shriver household, the morning did not start well. I knew it was cold, so as soon as I woke up, I checked my phone. Yep. School’s closed. Today was a Snow Day. Well, to be precise, today was a Cold Weather Day. The local school district, where my two sons are enrolled, closes […]