On Sunday nights, after I’ve tucked in the boys, after I’ve packed my bags for another trip, I write each of them a note. I tell Caleb that I love the way he takes care of his younger brothers, or that I love his inquisitive spirit. I tell Eli that I love his perseverance, or …
I think the cook at a local eatery gave me an e coli burger because he didn’t like my hat. That’s the theory I’ve been operating under the last 48 hours. We went to the pumpkin patch as planned yesterday regardless, and it was lovely. I was miserable, but it was lovely. It’s good to …
I stepped out onto the wet sidewalk this morning and looked up at the sky and tried to see whether the grey clouds were dissipating or gathering tighter, because sometimes on a dark day I just want to know whether the light is spilling in or fading away. I looked up to heaven and a …
Faith is this knowing in the center of you that will not leave. It has been to you a light that guides, light that illumines the worst of yourself, weight that steadies, weight that holds you where you do not want to be. Perhaps, when it first stirred inside your chest, you tried to build …
Church is light streaming in, mingled voices, the expectation — sometimes against all experience — that this time God will meet you here, or at the very least, that you will leave your miserable ways long enough to meet Him. It doesn’t happen every week or even more than a few times in your life. …
As I write, there are nine minutes left in Father’s Day, which is just right, given that every father I know feels like he has so much left to do, and just a scrap of time in which to do it. I’ve had two and a half lovely days at home, and tomorrow as well …
Tonight I introduced Isaac and Isaiah to the Tickle Monster Game, which I used to play with Caleb and Eli. (And which I write about in my book. Have I mentioned the new book today?) I armed them both with rubber swords and told them I would be hiding somewhere in my bedroom. When I …
Yesterday the Eastern Orthodox celebrated the saints, and today many Americans celebrate fallen soldiers, and in the midst of remembrances of saints and soldiers I find myself thinking on a little girl who fought a great battle, and endured worse than a bullet, and who now watches from the blessed cloud of witnesses. It’s a …
I remember, the day they told us our three year-old daughter would die, sitting on her hospital bed, Celeste and I together, holding her and weeping. We never really knew despair, I don’t think, until that day. We held Caroline and we cried, and the doctors stood there, because this is all they were good …
Leave it to John Piper to devise an Easter message without using the word love. It’s from 1983, and to his credit by 2009 he comes up with an Easter sermon that does use the word, though not applied to God’s intention toward man. A far better exposition on what happened at Golgotha, and what …
“The Father turns His face away. . .”, goes the song. How comforting, then, to read in the 21st Psalm (22nd in the Protestant Bible): Nor has He turned away His face from me; And when I cried out to Him, He heard me. Which reminds us that Christ on the cross, while fully man and …
From Dietrich Bonhoeffer, by way of Lance Nixon’s piece on Down Syndrome and human worth in last month’s Touchstone Magazine: “The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.” Nixon notes a …
Five year-old Isaac decided that he wanted to ride his bike without the training wheels. “They slow me down,” he explained. If you knew this boy, you would understand why I was reluctant to give him more speed. But there he stood with Eli, who volunteered to “learn him how to ride.” If you had …
“Did you commit sin? Enter the Church, repent for your sin, for here is the physician, not the judge. Here, one is not investigated; one receives remission of sins.” (St. John Chrysostom)
This is why I write to you, boys with me, girl who is gone. I write to you because when I am with you, when I look into your soft brown eyes, I do not have the words. They come to me in pieces, in a thought or a dream, and always our time is …
Alder Hey Children’s Hospital does a small but important and dignified thing in burying the organs its employees stole from dead babies. It is small because babies are small, and the parts of them even smaller, and because crimes against the weakest bodies in the name of science have a sickening commonality in human history, …
Some of you might recall research floating about suggesting that having children reduces happiness. My own point of view has been that immediate happiness is not the point of a fulfilling life, at least not for the Christian. Now I’ve just come across research (this is always the case for me — a day late …
I read once that the historian’s admiration for authority affects his assessments of civilizations past — that oppressive regimes, with their monuments to state power, will draw his eye and his imagination more readily than a nation of citizen farmers. That’s probably true for most people; we can’t help but watch the parade’s prancing exhibition of the …
“My heart only has entrances. It doesn’t have exits. Whoever enters remains there. Whatever he may do, I love him the same as I loved him when he first entered into my heart.” (Elder Epiphanios of Athens). This is a heart, as Father Stephen observes, like the heart of God, burning more fiercely with love …
He sees her as we circle the parking lot a second time, an aimless, wandering circle, a time-killing circle while we wait for their mother to finish a bit of shopping. I have already seen the woman — a girl, really, with tangled dark hair and downturned gaze. She sits on a little concrete median …
Yesterday morning Isaiah came to our bedroom, enacting his self-appointed role as Mr. Rise and Shine. He stepped on our knees and ankles and flopped about with sharp elbows until he staked a position between us. Isaac followed. Wife rose to roust the rest of the household and begin her daily routine of re-establishing the …
I must confess that my first reaction, upon hearing about the thug who had his seven year-old tattooed with his gang’s symbol, was that the solution seemed pretty straightforward: a bullet under the chin of the sperm-donor, along with a good home for his son, and if someone will pay for two plane tickets to …
The problem with too many modern commentators on parenting, I think, is their inability to distinguish love from acceptance. This confusion is apparent in Alfie Kohn’s New York Times essay, where he writes: “In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of …
We are at the fair, and the sun has disappeared below the treeline, so that the illumination from the rides has become our daylight. We are watching Caleb twirl and spin about in some contraption that his brothers are either too afraid or too small to ride, and which his parents are too old to …
Sometimes the words don’t seem like they’ll get close to the truth of anything, and so I just stop writing. That’s not completely true; I’ll write fiction perhaps, because those people in the stories inside my head haven’t yet worked themselves into corners where the words are like sunfaded fabric or covered-over grass or the sigh …
You yearn for a holy place because, in the time between waking unable to recall where you are, and drifting again into the half-sleep that is all you’ve known for the longest time, you stand in the darkness of your sterile hotel room, peering into a mirror to see that you are nothing like what …
I have just come home, and Eli runs up to me. “Dad, I left you a Boxcar Children book on your nightstand. It’s your Easter present.” “Thank you,” I say. He turns back toward where he has been playing. “Eli,” I say. “Where’s my hug?” He smiles, and walks back in my direction, slowly now. …
The two younger boys crept into our bed in the black morning, driven by a snarling storm. They curled into me, shivering, as if I am a safe harbor. There is no keeping out the storm; this is what I thought. The cool peaceful evenings line themselves up between the vibrant days, and we forget …
Caleb has borrowed my Essential Charlie Parker, and I don’t think he’s ever giving it back. He likes to listen to it as he falls asleep, and so I hear it drifting down to me from his bedroom, the cool sound of that inimitable saxophone, and with it the knowledge that my seven year-old is …
Valentine’s evening, after the rush of work and dinner was over, three little boys gathered around my chair. Caleb and Eli each handed me brown lunch bags covered in heart-shaped stickers. Inside Caleb’s was a collection of elaborate cut-out hearts, two Reese’s peanut-butter cups, a little candy bar, and a handful of those confection-sugar hearts …