[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 2, 2024 It’s the same joke every time: “to be alone in nature, we need all this?” This, followed by a sweeping gesture at the mounting stack of bags of equipment and bins of gear we assemble for our few days in the woods. In the bags and bins, a portable bedroom, kitchen, furniture, which we tote from our urban basement past the suburbs, up a mountain road, to a gravel covered square...
July 2022 This is a sweet season with my five year old son, or as he explains it when introducing himself to church friends coming over for a potluck tonight, “I’ll just say I’m six, because I’m almost six.” He learned to read this year, practically overnight. We were on vacation for the school’s mid-winter break, a spontaneous trip where we packed almost no toys, and a handful of books. One day...
1/28/22 Our daily routine doesn’t leave a lot of free time: get the kids ready, school/daycare drop-off, work til a few minutes before pick-up ends, rush to pick-up, playground detour, make dinner, eat dinner, bedtime…and only once all that is done, a few precious obligation-free moments. Often by the time they’re all down, it’s late enough that all I want to do is passively take in something on...
For the last year, our oldest child has been begging for a toy kitchen. Our former neighbors had the ubiquitous IKEA kitchen. Before they moved, our son would plead to go play at their house, even though their kids are younger, so he could access his favorite toy. Now that vaccines have made playdates possible again, I frequently hear about the magical lives of other kids in other families who...