The cross is a hard thing to look at. It is rough wood. Cruel wood. A place of suffering and shame, where human beings were nailed and left to die. There is nothing gentle about it. Nothing soft. Nothing in the scene itself that would draw us in by beauty. It is a place of…
Tag: suffering
Writing While Able
I have lived for some years now with a certain kind of uncertainty, the kind that quietly follows me even on ordinary days. It is not always loud. Sometimes it sits far enough in the background that I can almost forget it is there. Life feels normal for a while. I breathe a little more…
Ink from Pain
I recently joined a writing group that meets at a local church — something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s become one of my favourite outings now, this gathering of minds and hearts, of stories and pens. There’s something grounding about sitting in a quiet room with others who feel compelled to…
Good Morning Twenty Twenty-Four
I find myself waking up, or perhaps more truthfully, trying to pull myself into a new year. It feels like a tug-of-war between the sweetness of dreamland, which keeps calling me back, and the quiet desire to get up and savour the very first chai of twenty twenty-four. The temptation to sink deeper into sleep…
Kintsugi
Kintsugi is a 15th-century Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The word comes from kin, meaning gold, and tsugi, meaning joinery — to join with gold. The more I think about it, the more deeply it speaks to me, because it feels like so much more than an art form. It feels like…
The Anchor Holds
Have you ever lived through a season when adversity arrives like a wave, then another, and then another still? Not the kind of wave that merely unsettles the surface, but the kind that rises suddenly and breaks over the whole of your life, sweeping away all sense of normality. The kind that leaves you disoriented,…
Hope
Have you ever wondered why, in the very worst moments of human history, hope so often seems to rise most clearly? It is one of life’s great mysteries. In the midst of war, natural disasters, sickness, grief, and all manner of human sorrow, when everything appears broken and the future feels uncertain, hope still finds…
Winter of Discontent
Lately I have found myself living in a season I would never have chosen, yet one I seem unable to hurry through. It has come quietly, almost unnoticed at first, and then all at once it was simply there, settling over my days, my thoughts, my body, and my spirit. The phrase “winter of discontent”…
Apples of Gold 