Peanut Butter & the Marriage Supper of the Lamb

I bolted up the stairs, heart racing in response to my husband’s call. He was the calm one, the unflappable med student; that level of urgency in his voice froze my blood. Bursting into the bathroom, I saw. Our one-year-old son, his eyes and lips swollen, his perfect round baby belly splotchy with an ugly red rash. My husband, already on the phone with the pediatrician, asking, “Do we give Benadryl, or bring him into the ER for Epinephrine?”

Our life changed that moment.

Okay for Now: Re-reading & Grace in a Season of Uncertainty

In his beautiful collection of short stories The Wild Birds, in a moving tale of generosity and adopted family, Wendell Berry writes, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” Berry’s concept of membership is one familiar to his readers: an ideal of interwoven, interpersonal community, a giving and receiving that is the opposite of American culture’s rugged individualism and our current state of isolation.

Baking Bread as an Act of Hope

As a young, poor newlywed, trying to make a life on love and peanut butter money, I desperately wanted to learn to bake bread. Memories of my childhood home, a tiny house we moved out of when I was in high school, are permeated with the warm, curling scent of fresh bread, unrolling fragrant steam in the house. I think that house always smelled like bread. At least, every single memory does.