©2016 by Janet Crouch Photography Today it's just this striped chair facing a wall of windows looking out on a green space where pines and cedars are blowing a wind that might bring rain. It's this room of books and undertones and people thinking, and I'm thinking of the low hum in Uncle Andrew's study --…
Five Minute Friday: Hold
I've made several false starts today, trying to write on the Five Minute Friday prompt. Each ended with a few sentences on the page and me staring off into space. But while I fail to write, I am held, oh, so tenderly. And so tonight I'm sharing this, a journal entry from an odd five…
Five Minute Friday (on Saturday): Reach
There's a story about Abraham Lincoln that says when he was asked how long a man's legs should be -- by people intending insult to his unusual lengthiness in that department -- he answered that they ought to be long enough to reach the ground. I've always been entertained by the image this conjures,…
Five Minute Friday (on Saturday): Belong
The sidewalks with the mockingbirds chortling on power wires over head, the deep magenta crepe myrtles drooping on rain-heavy stems, sunshine drying up the rain puddles except in the deepest sidewalk cracks, and me walking like I know where I'm going -- because I do -- so that people recognize it and ask directions of…
Five Minute Friday: Release
Release. My last morning at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries' Summer Institute, where we've been circling around the topic of "Freedom" through various permutations all week. The prophet Isaiah publishes salvation in my morning reading, chapter 52: "Shake yourself from the dust and arise; be seated, O Jerusalem; loose the bonds from your neck, O captive daughter…
Five-Minute Friday (on Saturday): Close
"Are we almost there?" We're all familiar with this stereotypical question, asked by children on road trips. When my baby brother was three, he asked this, two miles away from our house in Massachusetts as we set out to drive to our new home in Texas. Two miles, of a nearly two-thousand-mile-trip. Yeah. Not even…
Five Minute Friday (on Saturday): Grateful
Grateful. For a sudden shower that swept across the pond and misted me on my porch-seat, while all the while the sun shone. For children, "lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes," and lovely in voices, filling the house for a night and part of a morning: so alive. For a God who prevented the…
Look.
When April's sweet showers have pierced to the root March's drought, bathing each vein in a liquor whose potency makes flowers spring forth and little birds sing -- ah, Chaucer, my frenemy! -- then, when I'm not longing to go on pilgrimage, as Chaucer says spring makes people long, or longing to be in love,…
Five-Minute Friday: Writer
I'm more comfortable calling myself a "writer" than calling myself an "author." I'm even more comfortable simply saying "I write." It's interesting, the layers of distinction, of connotations. To me writer is someone who writes. An author? I don't know: someone who has written and has something meaningful to show for it, maybe. There's a…
Five Minute Friday (on Saturday): Mighty
Woken by huge thunderstorms in the wee hours, two nights in a row. Mighty? Yes. Going on nine years in a state which seems to specialize in huge and damaging storms, where tornado watches are routine, I like to think I've gotten used to thunder. I like to think I'm less afraid than I used…
Between Blue Rocks 