Posts

The Lonesome Valley of Birthing this Holy Week

New life is coming into a sick and suffering world for me this Easter, just as it did that first Easter. As I sat reclined in the dim monitoring closet of my OBGYN’s office listening to the heartbeat of the new life growing inside me, I realized I was beginning to understand Holy Week in […]

God Grew Bigger: A Review of This Is My Body

Hannah Shanks’ This is My Body came out the same week that I learned I was pregnant. I had already been planning to buy and read the book – the author is a friend – but that pee-saturated stick gave special urgency to my reading. On the first page the author finds out that she is […]

Our Bodies, Our Selves: Women’s Bodies in the Pulpit

I was just one year past the anniversary of my ordination and ten weeks pregnant with my first child when my partner and I sent out the invitations to the annual Holiday Party at the Manse. We were waiting until after Christmas to tell the church about my pregnancy, so we hadn’t told a soul. […]

Becoming a Grandparent

2 Timothy 1:5  I am reminded of your sincere faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice and, I am persuaded, now lives in you also. About a month ago, this amazing thing happened: I became a grandmother. In and of itself, that doesn’t seem out of the ordinary; after all, […]

Keep Calm and Carry on with Hope

A little over a month ago a man named Thomas Eric Duncan was getting ready to leave Liberia for Dallas, Texas. Prior to departing he helped a neighbor get a sick pregnant woman into a car to go to the hospital for medical care. Or so is the story the media twisted, and spun out […]

“Waters of Love” and “Birth Water”: New Poetry

Pastor and poet Sharon Benton sent these poems last month with the comment, “It’s the end of January, so baptism texts may be over…” And yet the themes of void, chaos, formlessness, and being born to new life are timely as we approach Ash Wednesday and the reflective season of Lent. In Mark Jesus’ baptism […]