Moments in Grace

“You read me my Bible, Mommy?”   He asks this same question every single day sometimes several times a day, this three year old voice chirps like a baby bird hungering for more.   He carries his Bible everywhere and during morning family devotions he sits with his Bible storybook trying to follow along with the others. Each time I ask a question about any passage in the Bible that we have just read he says, “I know, I know!   Jesus die on the cross?” Yes, I say, Jesus did die on the cross for our sins. But this day as we are sitting in the afternoon sunlight, he asks for the story in his Bible storybook with the picture of the cave with the stone that is rolled away. First, we have to read the story of the cross, I say. So we do.   When we get to the picture of the cross, he knows this one by heart. “Jesus die on cross!   Jesus die on cross!   For us! See, see!” “Yes,” I say with a smile, “he did, but that is not the en...

There are days when you feel like the walls are going to close in on you and suck you down, collapsing into the mess of life.  January, this month of unending sickness it stretches on.  Just when you feel like you're coming out of it, the waves come crashing again and again, and if you're not careful, you could get sucked into the rip current of life and pulled out to sea.  Flailing and floundering until you feel that you've got no strength left to swim.  I was telling a friend at church on Sunday that I thought that we were coming out of it.  The sick subsiding from this house like the ocean tide, receding back to the depths where it belongs.  I walked in the door from saying that only moments earlier  to find my six year old running, hand over mouth, to the toilet to vomit.  Awesome. Then the next morning, awakening to another child sick with a fever and oh, is this ever going to end? I could feel it, the self pity rising l...