I mentioned to y’all that i’m starting work on a book about our adoption journey.  It loosely falls into the genre of memoir, so I’ve been practicing with that a little bit.   I thought I’d share with you a short piece that I posted as an exercise on The Write Practice recently.  This is quite a departure from what I’ve been posting lately, but I have a special orphan-related surprise for you on Saturday.  Stay tuned. * * * Her hospital bed fills the end of the narrow room, a faint dent where her body had recently withered.  The […]

Read More

“I want to write a book” I’ve heard you say it.  I’ve said it. We’ve written chapters in our heads at the grocery store.  We have files on our hard drives.  We have notes on characters and plot points or chapter outlines written on napkins in the “book pile” somewhere safe in our house. And for most of us, that’s as far as we get. We Dream We dream of someday becoming a writer.  When all the other obligations of our lives suddenly melt away.  When we win the lottery.  When we retire. We act like writing is something to […]

Read More

  my ear cries out my brain is a scrambled egg i hate being sick Sick I am. dreaming of french kitchens and flying people.  Watching every episode of Castle stored on the TiVo. “We have met the enemy and he is us” What I’ve learned:  How much is too much.  I am my worst enemy. The last few weeks I’ve packed too much in, and my body finally cried “Uncle!”  I need to find a better balance.  Scale back a little bit. And as hard as it is to do, one thing I need to pull back just a little: blogging. […]

Read More

Perhaps it’s a function of getting older, but I’ve been pretty introspective lately.  Searching my heart.  A lot.  At this rate, I’ll be examining the meaning of my spleen by the time I’m 55. But in the past few months, I have been taking a look at my life and at how I’m focusing my time and talent and treasure and at how I’ve gotten here and where I need to be heading.  And each time I look at how the puzzle pieces of my life have fit together, I see the beauty of how a God who is so […]

Read More

…More bits of wisdom discovered in Saturday’s Killer Tribes conference!  Don’t miss Volume 1, containing The Big Idea and visual presentation notes from Alli Worthington, Daddy-O, Sarah Mae, Mark Hughes, Derek Webb, Bryan Allain, Jon Acuff, and Jeff Goins!  Or download a PDF of the full set of notes here. ***We will return to our regularly scheduled random river of thoughts later this week…but again today, I want to share a new experiment in visual note-taking.  I saw a lot of great visual notes from the SXSW conference last month, and thought I’d try my hand at it, even though I suck […]

Read More