C.J. 
There are nations built upon borders and there are nations built upon armies.And then there are nations like the Czechs, a people who, for centuries, survived because they carried their nation inside their language. For the Czech people, perhaps more than almost anywhere else in Europe, the writer became the nation. When governments disappeared, kingdoms … Read more
A Reflection on John 14:1–12, Memory, and the Homesickness of Heaven There are certain tables that never really leave us. Even after the house is sold, after the chairs sit empty.Even after the people who gathered around them have gone home to God. Some tables become part of us. Lately, as I have previously written … Read more
There are some stories that arrive all at once. And there are others that wait quietly for decades before finally revealing themselves. Lately I have been thinking about language. Not simply vocabulary or grammar or pronunciation. But language as memory.Language as belonging.Language as identity.Language as the invisible architecture through which we first learn how to … Read more
There are moments in life that cannot be explained neatly. They can only be remembered with reverence. For me, one of those moments happened in November of 2020, during the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was on a ventilator, in a coma, fighting COVID and bilateral pneumonia. I was not aware of … Read more
There are rooms we pass through—and then there are rooms that hold us. Grandma’s kitchen was the latter. It wasn’t large. It wasn’t styled for magazines. The linoleum bore the soft scuffs of years. And at the center stood the table, solid, worn, and quietly beautiful, built by Grandpa’s hands. You could see it in … Read more
A reflection on music, memory, and the quiet safety of a mother’s love Sometimes a movie does more than tell a story. Sometimes it reaches down into a place you did not even realize was still living inside you. That is what happened to me while watching Song Sung Blue. I expected a film about music, … Read more
A Shoreline, a Fire, and a Voice We Know They had gone back to what they knew. Boats. Nets. The long patience of a night with nothing to show for it. After everything, the Cross, after the empty tomb, after whispers of seeing Him alive. Still the disciples are back on the water. It feels … Read more
The Bell on the Door There used to be a bell. Not a notification ping. Not a barcode scanner chirp. A bell—hung loosely above a wooden door that opened with resistance, like it knew something sacred was about to happen. You stepped in, and before your eyes adjusted to the dimness between flour sacks and … Read more
The Silence No One Prepares You For (written especially for my brother and sister-in-law, but also for all who have experienced miscarriage and infant loss) There are losses that the world knows how to acknowledge. And then there are losses it does not. Miscarriage and infant loss often fall into that second category—not because they … Read more
A Reflection on John 20:19-31 and St. Thomas Didymus The Door Was Locked The Gospel tells us the doors were locked. Fear has a way of doing that—closing things, narrowing space, reducing the world to what feels manageable. In John 20:19-31, the disciples are not gathered in triumph. They are gathered in uncertainty, behind barriers, … Read more
