She had me with the story of the pink dress. The pink dress for a child she had never met—a child she had prayed for, dreamed for, and wondered about. A child named...
If I told you I read a book about Wilbur and Orville Wright and then built a new kind of flying machine, would you believe me? Would you go flying with me? Probably...
Bad Blake is my favorite Hollywood pilgrim of 2010. When I first met him through a RedBox-acquired DVD of Crazy Heart, I didn’t see a pilgrim at all. Blake just smoked, chased and...
I sit in the car, waiting for my girls. They're practicing for an October production of the opera Tosca. The sun is warm on my knee and crickets trill in nearby woods. I...
The words of my youth were simple words. They were good words, functional words, words with concrete meaning. Even the bedtime stories my mother told us had an obvious purpose. ...
This morning I sat out back and read the final chapters of The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. My son joined me on the deck with his...
I thought about Mary Ainsworth when I read Julia Cameron’s chapter on Roots in The Right to Write this week. ...
I drive with the windows down and the air conditioning on. The sun burns through the windshield but it is not enough to be cool--I must let the breeze ripple my hair, feel...
Harold Sikkema is a recent honors graduate of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. He met L.L. Barkat...
There is a season for love and birth and death and creativity. You know when the season has come, but you could never have predicted it.
May we "play skillfully" at work, in our communities, as we serve at church, in our families, and in every other facet...
In one of his most loved poems, Robert Frost describes a solitary workman raking a field who comes upon a tuft of flowers spared earlier in the morning by the mower. The discovery...
The nomadic Israelites worshiped God in a tent—of gold, silver, bronze, stone, fine woods, and leathers. To create the tent and its lavish furnishings, God appointed Bezalel—a skilled craftsman...
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Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to create media that kept kids asking the big questions, while it kept...
"Set your seal upon this rebel girl," ...
A Conversation in Two Acts
The poet John Keats thought he was a failure. A trained hospital worker, he still couldn't cure his brother's tuberculosis. After his brother died, Keats diagnosed himself with the same disease....
I envied my friend's job: five times a week he types out a column for a big city newspaper, poking fun at local politicians and red tape . . . and gets paid...
