I took a photo after all, of the one thing of hers that I have asked for: her pencil cup, made of rolled magazine pages, pencils included. It came out blurry. Once I pulled the car up the drive and loaded my bags, she was ready for the customary parting hug on the front stoop. But I had one more task, to be completed indoors, so we returned to the kitchen.

Aug 23
Aug 23 Finding a Workaday Tune

Barbara Lane

Music, Truth, Vocation

I train my eyes to rest on these beautiful things during work days, reminiscent of the time I discovered an open E chord on my guitar and played it for a solid half hour in as many ways I could, with my ear resting on the body of the instrument to soak up the resonance. There’s a stability I’m finding here that is good and right, that reminds me of the growing stability of my hands mastering those first basic chord shapes and transitions.

Aug 9

Aug 9 Interview Series: MAKING — A Conversation with Kim Thomas

Charlie Peacock

Bookish, Truth, Visual Art, Vocation

I absolutely think that the history of frequent moves, adjusting, new people — all that affects my making today. It takes a lot of courage to be a maker of any kind. It requires many decisions, commitments, and lonely times in your head. The nomadic life built up my courage for new things and change, sort of immunized me to sameness, and made me invite the adventure of mystery and unknown.

Aug 9
Aug 9 A True Name

Daniel Bowman Jr.

Place, Truth

Name is related to identity, and identity comes in part from story. When I learned more of our stories, I could see my family and myself in a new, larger context; I could enter into relationship — into community — with both the quick and the dead; I could inhabit a richer understanding of what community means. I could even “burst into poetry” and celebrate my heritage, my name.

Jul 26
Jul 26 Monotony and Memory, Ritual and Remembrance

Flo Paris Oakes

Truth

We were driving home to Nashville after visiting family in Chattanooga — a 2-hour drive that we do fairly often. The moon was out, the kids were asleep in the back, and all was silent except for the hum of traffic as I held my husband’s hand and laid my head against the window. I tried to count how many trips we’d made like this when suddenly, the sweetest thought dropped into my heart. This is what I’m going to remember when I die.

Jul 26
Jul 26 An Epistolary Confession

Jenni Simmons

Crafty, Truth

Her note was written on an old index page of a ledger and she too adhered a bird sticker to the faded surface. She ripped the page right out of the book; I loved the spontaneous, rustic aesthetic. The postcard did in fact bear her greeting from four years ago as well as a dignified black cat on the glossy cover along with French writing — she went to Paris, too. Belated, yet thoughtful. I don’t know many people who’d realize they’d forgotten to send a postcard four years ago, then actually send it upon the moment of realization. My friends are a rare, whimsical, priceless bunch.

Jun 7
Jun 7 The Visitation

Jessica Eddings-Roeser

Creation Care, Truth

I twisted around in my seat to watch our newborn daughter, cuddled with her blankets and sleeping through the ride. I wanted to say that it would all grow back. That I, too, would one day take a bluebonnet picture of my own daughter shaded by live oak trees. That the trees surely dropped seeds and those seeds would grow into seedlings, saplings, and young trees. But we passed in silence. The Loblolly pines would recuperate, but live oaks grow too slowly. Hundreds of years would have to pass. The land cannot return in time for my daughter.

Jun 7

Jun 7 Hospitality for Modern Pilgrims

Meredith Schultz

Hospitality, Truth

Hospitality from the margins is a widow’s mite welcome, made abundant by its sacrifice. Perhaps it means simple spaces. Tuna sandwiches around an undressed card table. Popcorn and cocoa by candlelight. Makeshift beds on the floor of your dorm room. Family holidays open to those who are far from family. Hospitality that is “real and costly,”5 not because it required a $300 grocery bill, but because it came out of your poverty. Extravagant generosity with financial, physical, and emotional resources, regardless of the social standing of the guest.

May 24

May 24 The Graduation Card

Molly Nicholas

Justice, Truth

If I was looking for a card for an 18-year-old high school graduate, I’d still have my usual inner turmoil, but it would be a little different story. In this case, our graduating friend is in his 40s, getting his master’s degree after a two-year program at a university in the U.S. that is 7,000 miles away from his wife and children and community in Africa. English is his third language — he only heard it spoken for the first time 10 years ago. He comes from an economically poor community that has experienced a great deal of trauma, and he will be returning there soon.

Apr 26

Apr 26 April in Paris

Mary Van Denend

Music, Truth

My mother adored Daddy, as she called him, but she swooned for Ravel. Family legend has it that a recording of Ravel’s best known piece, Bolero, which somehow turned up in my mother’s possessions when in high school, was promptly destroyed, being deemed far too sensuous for the impressionable oldest daughter of a Swedish Baptist preacher. And she could painfully recall not being able to attend a friend’s birthday party as a child in Pasadena, because the planned activity for the group was to see a movie — a novel, rare treat in 1930. The first time I saw the film Babette’s Feast, I had some inkling of the dilemma my mother’s upbringing must have wrought in her blossoming creative life, as it would later in mine.

Apr 26
Apr 26 Harm into Healing

Dyana Herron

Bookish, Truth

You have been betrayed by your body, when you had gone around all this time thinking you and your body were one thing, inseparable, a winning team. And although the doctor’s approach you with their sterile, shining instruments and unfailing clinical cool, still you panic, and inside you feel hurt.

Because you are hurt.

And although doctors now have treatments for most maladies, what comes after that — the healing — is something one must do alone.

Apr 26
Apr 26 Means of Grace

Kate Harris

Truth

The remarkable thing about the non-celebrity crush, then, is what it says about the crush-er, so to speak. The unsuspecting object of your enthusiastic esteem serves as an indicator of something you yourselves aspire to do. Just as the celebrity culture feeds on those who long to attach their identity to an admired other, the object of your own great admiration tells you quite a bit about your own loves and longings. It tells you a little bit more about how you aspire to contribute to your world.

Apr 12
Apr 12 Beauty in the Blend

Erica Crotts

Truth, Vocation

Something within us — though we seek to give an impression of total control — wants an adventure. I’m beginning to understand that this adventure we end up experiencing is different from the one we seek in childhood or in our youth as twenty-somethings. It is not solely world travel, fame, or even the chase of seemingly impossible dreams. The adventure is in community, in sharing life together, and in the natural chaos it brings.

Mar 29
Mar 29 Lenten Reflections

Alice Smith

Artful Kids, Truth

Just behind me, all of the sprouts for our garden lean towards the sunlight and serve as yet another reminder of new life. Surrounded by gifts of life, light, growth, beauty, feast, story, and love, I sit down. I pause. I wait and I color these tiny Lenten pictures. When I steal away for a few minutes to color, I feel myself wanting to savor the project, and I work with a purposeful slowness, hoping the exercise will be one that lasts much longer than I know it will.

Mar 29
Mar 29 Eating the Easter Bunny

Margie Haack

Feast, Truth

Americans have moved so far away from the process of butchering and a lot of us have sworn off eating meat due to health reasons, or for the sake of morality, that we can’t bear to trap the mice living in the couch or the spider making a web behind the toilet. Most of us are removed so far from the family farm and rural life that we have lost even secondhand experience of the cost of blood and butchering. If we buy meat at all, it is sealed in plastic and perched on a white tray with a diaper underneath to absorb offensive liquid.

Mar 29
Mar 29 Art House North: The Goodness in the Gathering

Judith Hougen

Hospitality, Place, Truth

So we enter the swim of people, words, laughter, a table laden with desserts, the dusky scent of coffee steaming from the cup in my hand as familiar faces sift through the crowd. And amid the lovely clamor, I’m reminded that what we’re experiencing is something artists desperately need — this coming together, this connection. All art is a conversation. The artist of faith negotiates a rich and multifaceted dialogue with God, the work, and community.

Mar 15
Mar 15 Death by Neti Pot

Towles Kintz

Truth

On the other side of anxiety, I always feel a mixture of amusement and renewed lucidity, secured by a corrected sense of what is and is not reality, grateful that I can see the truth plainly. Unlike my husband, who gives me incredible grace in this area, I regard the part of my brain that believes in the anxious and ridiculous with impatience and disdain. As a writer, I am grateful for my imagination, but when my anxiety is at its worst, I wish for the rational, calculating mind of an accountant or a doctor.

Mar 1

Mar 1 Commonplace Cathedrals: the Architecture of Hospitality

Meredith Schultz

Hospitality, Truth

Extravagant meals are neither possible nor advisable every single day. But there is a way to weave an everyday extravagance into our spaces; it depends not on expensive food and furniture but on sacrificial care. In a culture of perpetual indulgence and breakneck busyness, the less tangible resources, like time spent, convey the most meaning. A loaf of homemade bread. A simple centerpiece cut from local flora. A guest bed with turned-down sheets and freshly washed towels.

Mar 1
Mar 1 Hopes are Shy Birds

Eric Peters

Bookish, Truth, Visual Art, Vocation

There is never a simple answer to the question I am frequently asked: “What do you do with your time when not touring or playing music?” Perhaps the better question is, Why do you do what you do? Why cull together (more like cobble) a mishmash income year-in and year-out — each year the same, each one different, each one in hindsight a miracle? The years carry with them the same struggle, the same burden, only clothed in different hides. Some years are grimier, more pungent than others.

That word: struggle.

Mar 1
Mar 1 Perfected in Weakness

A.S. Peterson

Bookish, Truth, Vocation

We, as creators, need to acknowledge that we are ourselves created, that we are characters in a bigger story. And when we empty ourselves of the responsibility for striking the creative spark, when we understand our “gift” as something given to us, something we don’t deserve and can’t earn, when we open ourselves up and confess our weakness in our own sub-creation, we are open to the perfection of a strength far greater than our own.