Latest Reflections
Stories of faith, memory, Scripture, and the quiet ways grace meets us in ordinary life.
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The Sacred Role of the Firekeeper
I recently came across a beautiful idea found among some Native American traditions. In certain tribes, those entrusted with remembering the stories, histories, genealogies, and sacred memory of the people were sometimes referred to as firekeepers. The image has stayed with me ever since. A firekeeper was not merely someone who tended literal flames. The…
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How the Czech Language Carried a People Through History
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…
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Maybe One of the Rooms Has Grandma’s Table in It
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…
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The Language That Never Left Him: Words We Learn Before We Know We Are Learning
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…
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The Safest Place I Knew-Even At The Edge of Death
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…
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Grandma’s Kitchen Table: The Safest Place I’ve Ever Known
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…
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Song Sung Blue and the Memory of My Mother’s Love
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,…
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“It Is the Lord”: John 21, Breakfast by the Fire, and the Mercy We Didn’t Earn
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…
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What We Lost When Small-Town Grocery Stores Disappeared
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…
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