Ten thousand hours is a good benchmark—that’s one hour a day, five days a week, for forty years (with two weeks of vacation each year!). If every Christian decided to spend 10,000 hours developing their capacity in a single cultural domain (painting, stress fracture analysis, genomic sequencing, you name it) and also 10,000 hours on the spiritual disciplines that embody dependence on God (solitude, silence, fasting, study, prayer), in forty years we’d have a completely different world. How are you spending your 10,000 hours?”

How Faithfulness Makes a Genius

Dormant geniuses lie sleeping… Read More

Light falls in the orchard, dappled among the gnarled limbs, and the apple blossoms fall too, a perfumed carpet for children’s bare toes. They’ve come, the children. Come to play under spring’s cloud of petals. They’ve come with teacups slid into great-grandma’s tapestry purse, a teddy bear stitched up for a long-ago birth, a blanket that once wrapped a newborn.

I string out laundry, wooden pegs between fingers.

The wind carries their voices with the blossom snow.

“You be Thelma and this is your tea set. The plastic… Read More

It’s the slow, heaving pant on the other end of the line that wakes me. No words in the receiver, just this heavy, exaggerated exhale of a body.

My brow crinkles. I don’t open eyes, searching for a way out of dreams, to figure out who, why.

And then a voice, hardly audible:

“I think it is today.”

Today?

It registers. My sister’s voice. And today. The Saturday before Mother’s Day.

I know this place. I been here before. Thirteen years ago on the eve of Mother’s Day, it… Read More

Sky’s flushing red from today’s long race and children lie in beds and I sit on worn chair in the hallway.  It’s my nightly post, seat at day’s finish line.

From chair there under light, I open pages and read into doorways, into those bedrooms with children tucked under quilts, children waiting (or not) for sleep to slip under covers too.

I’ve found our bookmark in Little House in the Prairie, opened to where we’d left off last night.

“No! Don’t read us a story!” Child voice calls… Read More

They’ve captured me on film wearing it, like a toga slung over one shoulder, like a mantle flung over and hanging, and sometimes I wave hands, waving off that clicking shutter because I’m wearing this thing, and sometimes, frankly, I entirely forget that it’s there, it flowing from me.

And yet there are ways, after all these years, it’s only now becoming who I am and what it means to love.

They’re meant to hang on racks, these dishtowels, or drape over oven handles, or slip on the knob of

It’s 11 a.m. and Toddler’s crying. Her brother kicked her.
I rock Toddler. And recap The Big Three with guilty brother:

• What did you do wrong?
• Why was it wrong?
• What are you  going to do differently in the future? 

And then, as always, The Deal:  Is that a commitment? Can I count on you? He nods, shakes my hand, hugs sniffling toddler.  

Then Daughter screams that Oldest Son stepped in her room, daughter whaps him in shoulder, Oldest Son falls to floor in Oscar winning… Read More

It’s an unlikely place to spend the final hours of the Christmas holidays.

The planet twinkles in the glow of lit trees circled with family. And this family works in the barn. Sows grunt, piglets root and nuzzle udders for milky warm. Snow falls soundlessly out there in the dark.

I am supposed to be feeding hungry sows, but the sounds mesmerize me:

were these the first earth sounds that reverberated in the Babe’s ear drums? From the lofty arias of the heavenly host to this, this snorting of beasts, this banging… Read More

I lose it two weeks before Christmas Day in the morning.

The kids string popcorn by the fire, untangle lights for the tree, curl sprays of shimmering ribbons, and I wildly dismantle the house. Losing a ring, a gift that had been sent to me from Iona Abbey, makes me lose it. Centuries of pilgrims had made the journey to the stone monastery in Iona, Scotland, to kneel low and pray long. And my Iona ring, a Celtic knot, was like a silver string around my finger, reminding me… Read More

Later I would learn that Uccello painted the Battle of San Romano with tempera on wood panel in 1435, a scene recounting the victory of the Florentines over the Sienese.

But walking through the Louvre that day I didn’t know any of that. Frankly, the painting’s spirited clash of metal, charging horses, flapping banners appealed little to my pastoral, peace-loving sensibilities. But it was that boy sitting there….

If it hadn’t been for that cross-legged boy sitting on the floor of the gallery, a few feet from this masterpiece that purportedly once… Read More

“It’ll get better if you get closer.”

John’s mom laughs as she untangles five-year-old John and Malakai, two boys practicing for a three-legged-race at a community gathering.

But our Malakai’s close to tears as I unknot him from a snarl of arms and legs and feet.

“Really, if you’ll get closer, put your arms around each other, you’ll find it gets easier.” John’s mom takes an arm and wraps it around a shoulder and I find one too and direct it around a neck, and the boys shyly giggle and… Read More