December 18, 2025 An incredibly convoluted announcement of changes coming next year, as only an Enneagram 4 could write. XOXO – Jeannie Rose “Why don’t you have a website using your name?” It was the third or fourth time someone had suggested it recently, as I’ve been seeking advice and on how to build the platform I apparently need to sell a book. It’s a totally normal approach, on...
December 15, 2025Isaiah 58 Below is my contribution to our church’s 2025 Advent devotional, written for today, December 15, on today’s Old Testament reading. Sunday after church, and all my kids want is a screen. “No screens on Sundays” doesn’t compute as a way to rest—what is rest but zoning out, no one bugging you? One’s hogging the couch where another wants to sit, and Sabbath...
December 5, 2025 Prayer is my mind racing to try and solve the various work on my plate: write the stubborn paragraph, cook the meal I’m responsible for next Monday, hash out an agenda. But the paragraph is comprised of thin wisps of words which float away as soon as I’ve thought them, however brilliant they shimmered for a moment in my mind. The meal remains illusory, the agenda wavers and melts...
“How can you tell a story about plants or chores that would be very interesting?” A friend offered this honest response to my invitations to join the upcoming experiential storytelling workshops. “Maybe it takes someone who’s good at creative writing,” he continued, with an unspoken note of regret: And I’m not that someone. Perhaps you have also asked this question. Maybe, like my friend...
April 19, 2024 “I shall not want” the chorus echoes, a refrain I hold like a worn lovey. It is hard explaining this to my children, who cannot fathom a world without the primal fire of wanting, or why that would be a good thing. “Think about everything you want, the things you need, the things you enjoy—and all of those things not being there. We call that absence “wanting.” So, to ‘not want,’...
October 17, 2024 “I don’t think she likes me anymore,” my daughter confided after school, talking of her new best friend—the one she’d made over the summer, just after her previous best friend moved across the country. Tears glistened in her eyes, lips quivering, brows tilted inward and down. Her normally bright face looks up at me, asking for me to make it untrue. “Oh honey, I’m sorry, that...
[Fortitude as an essential virtue which allows the ‘house’ of our soul to be kept in order for the presence of God; “s]uch fortitude is not the virtue of the dashing soldier. It means rather the virtue of the keeper of the fortress; the inconspicuous heroism that sits tight. And in the life of the spirit there is a great deal of sitting tight; of refusing to be frightened out of or decoyed away...
September 13, 2024 As I’ve simultaneously embarked on my sabbatical, which ought to make me rested, and my training to be a spiritual director, which ought to make me good, I’ve stumbled into an uncomfortable reality: I am often cranky. Angry, even. Without dwelling too long upon the actual anger and what to make of it, the subject of a longer essay I’m working on, suffice to say I don’t feel...
November 10, 2022 The evangelist appears to me in the form of a 70-something man in bright green bike shorts, pausing along the trail and waving frantically in the direction of where I sit below, by the creek. A woman walking a dog passed by–was she the object of his motioning? No, she continues on but he keeps waving, striving, it seems, to make eye contact with me. Do I know him? I do not. In...
October 20, 2022 It’s unfortunately the case that roasting a rotten eggplant does nothing to improve the situation. I love eggplant, enough that I displaced some tomatoes this year to make room to grow it for the first time. I’d call it a success; we harvested a few fruit before leaving for a long summer west coast visit; a handful grew while we were away, and were, I’m assured, contendly...