An Easter discipline? Isn’t that for Lent?

Yes, it’s been a bit quiet around here. Some of the things keeping us temporarily away from the blog: a new small person has arrived (congratulations, Haley!); Easter Sunday was welcomed with feasting and friends; I got to attend the Wheaton College theology conference; and the usual rounds of preschool, ballet, tennis lessons, Sunday school [...]

Reading through Holy Week: Good Friday

I’m not actually inclined to do a lot of reading, or talking, today. As far back as I can remember, Good Friday has been a day for keeping quiet, for reflecting, for watching and waiting. For realizing that nothing we, or any book, can say has any weight next to the eloquence of what’s happening [...]

Reading through Holy Week: Maundy Thursday

Last night, we read Mark 14:1-52. I had planned to stop at verse 31, but we were both so into the story that I just kept going. Two things (apart from the young man fleeing naked at the very end – unwise choice on my part to stop there!) really caught my daughter’s attention: Judas’ [...]

Reading through Holy Week: Wednesday

Today’s reading: Mark 14:1-31 In Mark’s gospel, this is the part where the story really picks up and gets moving. (Well, the whole book is kind of fast-paced, but this is where everything starts to accelerate towards the climax!) So I think we’re just going to read big chunks and let the story wash over [...]

Reading through Holy Week: Tuesday

Our walk through Holy Week continues! My five-year-old daughter and I read Mark 11:12-33 tonight. She was distracted and I was tired, so I was afraid it was a wash — until, while we were looking at my study Bible picture of the Temple, she commented, “I have a picture of this story in my Bible!” [...]

Reading through the events of Holy Week

This evening is Palm Sunday, and as always, it feels like this week has snuck up on me. In my ideal world, I would have cleared my calendar for the week; already have Easter baskets done; have the menu for Easter dinner mapped out and a shopping list complete; and be ready to settle in [...]

Looking for some spring break reading?

I don’t know about you, but our family reading goes in cycles. That is, we’ll bring home a stack of books from the library or a new volume from the bookstore, and we read them over and over. And over. Then they go back to the library, or join other well-loved titles on the shelves, and we [...]

The Clown of God

The Clown of God Tomie dePaola Harcourt Brace, 1978 I’ve loved The Clown of God for a long, long time. I remember checking it out from the library over and over as a child. Before I had kids – and thus, before I had any sense about what a new mom might need – I [...]

Reading Over Their Heads

Last week, in the midst of a nasty bout with strep throat, my five-year-old daughter and I snuggled up on the couch with E. Nesbit’s classic, Five Children and It. Typically, we read one chapter book at a time, making our way slowly through at bedtimes and while her brother naps. We had just finished Pippi [...]

Glory

Glory Nancy White Carlstrom and Debra Reid Jenkins Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2001 “Glory be to God for dappled things,” wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in “Pied Beauty,” a paean to the unchanging God who is nevertheless author of “all things original, counter, spare, strange”. Creation, in its dazzling multiplicity, calls us to praise in [...]