children

Light and Darkness

What of the horrific shootings today in CT and the stabbings in China? My heart breaks, along with the hearts of all decent people. These are a few sentences I wrote for this week’s sermon, yesterday. I am reading them today with new eyes and will not deliver them Sunday in the same way IContinue reading “Light and Darkness”

Losing My Daughter

And so it begins again — the feeling that I am losing my daughter. That somehow, despite the glass being half full, and something about girls always loving and needing their daddies, and something about how I will always be the first man who mattered in her life, I am, once again, losing my daughter.Continue reading “Losing My Daughter”

Letting go of our children

Letting go of anything/anyone we love is never easy, and letting go of our children is surely one of the hardest things we will ever have to do. I was dialoging with a close friend about that over email recently, and she so beautifully captured the agony and ecstasy of the letting go season ofContinue reading “Letting go of our children”

God’s Love, prt. 3

Remember, Jesus himself invited the comparison of God’s love to the love of human parents for our children. If you extend your love to your children constantly, every second, for a specified number of years, are you then justified in killing or torturing them for having not responded? Could you even desire to? IfContinue reading “God’s Love, prt. 3”

God’s Love, prt. 2

[Start at the beginning of this series] Jesus invited us to understand God’s love by thinking of our love for our own children. He did this mainly in two places. One is the parable of the prodigal son. The other is when he said, “If you, though you are evil, know how to give good giftsContinue reading “God’s Love, prt. 2”

Heartquake

Until the moment my first child was born, I didn’t have the capacity to love a child. I know this because of the magnitude of the heartquake I experienced when I first saw her. In that moment, everything began to shake. All of my assumptions about myself. All of my selfish worries that I couldn’tContinue reading “Heartquake”

It is said that to have a child is to have your heart walking around outside your body. Think of that imagery. So dangerous, so fragile. Our physical heart is behind a rib CAGE for a reason — it is precious. But we can’t keep our children in cages. All we can do is hopeContinue reading “Children”