DEEP WATERS

My Parents in their Twilight Years -- Still Sharp and Beautiful Last year Easter was very challenging for me.  When Easter arrived last year, I was reeling from the loss of my parents just months before. I was deep in the "acute grief" that a counselor had taught me about, given me vocabulary for and helped to walk me through. Honestly, I don't even remember anything that happened on Easter day last year. I think I was pretty numb to the celebration of Jesus' death and resurrection. In my head I knew that He'd given me - and the whole world - the most awesome gift ever when He died on the cross for my sins and rose from the dead.  But last year, I wasn't exactly feeling it. This year has been different. As I've approached Resurrection Sunday, I have been very contemplative. I've thought a lot about the depth of Jesus' sacrifice. I've been reading the Passion story -- the story of Jesus' death, burial and resurrectio...

If you're like me, you've been watching the 24-hour news stories about yesterday's terrorist attack on Paris, France.  If you're like me, you were mortified over the news. If you're like me, you're asking lots of questions... How can people have such hatred for perfect strangers? Why do such horrible things happen to good people? How do we make sense of the senseless? I honestly don't have answers to these real life questions. And yet, today I purposefully opened my heart to God's voice while praying over this tragedy.  This is what I heard God say in my spirit... Carla, you've spent most of your Christian life pursuing comfort and safety. But I haven't called you, or any of my children, to a life of safety.  Instead of a life of safety, I've called you to a life of meaning and purpose. Hearing these words from the Lord made me think about  The Barbarian Way,  a book written by one of my favorite pr...

I guess you can say I've been in a bit of a funk. It's been a rough couple of years. Marital issues. Major challenges with one of my children. Losing my Dad earlier this year, then losing my Mom exactly three weeks later. And so on and so on. But God's grace is truly sufficient, and I am still here. I'm still standing. And I'm believing that He will make me better on the other side of all this. I'm believing that I'll be testifying like Job one day... " But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold."   * But I ain't quite there y'all. So... while laying here in this spiritual cocoon , I made a decision to keep my mouth shut until I could share something with at least a drop of hope and joy. I've barely visited my social media sites. And I haven't written very much. I'm still doing my freelance writing, but that's relatively easy. When I'm creating an e-newslett...

Last night I completed my latest read, a book that I'd been hearing about for months - The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd , author of The Secret Life of Bees . This was a good read - a great one even. The Invention of Wings tells the story of Sarah Grimke, the daughter of Southern slaveowners in early nineteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina and Hetty, a.k.a. Handful, a slave girl owned by the Grimke family. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah receives a special gift from her parents - her very own slave girl. That girl is Handful. This story follows both women as they come of age in the early 1800's, as they share the sense of powerlessness they both feel as women, and for Handful, as an African American slave woman. We dip into the valley-lows with the women as they experience loss, betrayal, rejection, and paralyzing fear. But we also follow them to their mountain-highs as they embrace purpose, friendship, love and courage. We witness them finding their voic...