Rooted

“Will power and discipline alone can never fix your soul. Striving, pushing, and trying harder will not recover your life.”  – Adele Calhoun My proposed path winds through a gate and disappears into the rolling grass fields of a local 35 acre mountain retreat. In the gushing fall breeze, I wrestle with flapping paper and find my place on the …

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Hometown Street Signs

Come with me, back to my Midwest church girl roots with a visit to South Park Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. Loud music bounced wildly off the dark wood panels of a north side Chicago Irish pub.  Thirty years after high school graduation, we milled around tall bar tables, leaned in close and shouted catch-up …

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Umbilical: Lessons from a Deathbed

  Umbilical 18 Days in December   Those days bleed together in my mind the way the blood slowly pooled in her body after her heart stopped. I sit at my writing desk and sift through recent piles of wedding programs, Christmas cards, and funeral notes. I sort the collision of occasions like an upturned …

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