Lord willing, our generation will never go through another pandemic. Lord willing, those living with Long Covid will be restored to full health. Lord willing, we will all heal from the emotional trauma of these past four years.  How I do pray that the Lord is willing!  Hearing “Lord willing” makes me think of Madge Huff, who helped raise our three children, and whom we called “Miss Madge.” She died in January of 2020 at age 90. Soon afterwards, the pandemic hit, with all of its misery. I remember often pausing, in those early months, to thank God that Miss ...

Opioids come from the opium poppy.

And church needs you, too. Pandemics are isolating. Four years ago, so much was unknown about COVID-19, but one thing was certain: It spread from person to person. Hence the need to keep people separate. This meant avoiding group gatherings, which was painful, because we are social creatures. For Christians, the gathering we missed the most was church. I know none of us want to go back to those early months, even for a minute. For medical practitioners in particular, the confusion of the unknown was compounded by the sorrow of knowing so many people were sickening and dying. I ...

How long is grief? I guess what I’m really asking is, “Does grief ever end?” Last week I had a five-hour drive ahead of me, so I looked at my list of downloaded audiobooks borrowed from the library. Seasons of Sorrow by Tim Challies was one of them. The subtitle was “The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God.” That was all I knew about it. Who had recommended that I read it? I did not recall. It was due in a few days, so I started listening.  Within a minute I was plunged back into the world of grief I ...

Permit me to humbly suggest the following: If you are ever invited to a 100th birthday party, consider attending. And if the centenarian is one of your dearly departed mother’s most treasured friends, do whatever you can to attend. And if she was also someone you yourself loved since you were a child because she stayed involved during sleepover weekends with her daughter (involving dress-up playing, and pool swimming, and butter making), then attending her party needs to be your highest priority. And if, during your college years, she poured love and comfort into your life when you were far ...

There’s a short film I’ve watched over and over. It’s brilliant and profound. It speaks to something we all long for, and yet receive precious little of: Validation. That’s also its title. The film opens with a sad, bedraggled man bringing his parking ticket to the attendant for validation. “Ah,” I thought the first time I saw it, “this movie is about that kind of validation. The parking lot kind.” But the attendant does much more than stamp his ticket. He also looks, really looks, at the bedraggled man, and says, “You… You are awesome. You have an amazing face. You’ve got ...