This is a grace, and there is no more beautiful expression in the Bible to describe a married couple than Peter’s “heirs together of the grace of life.”

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which in infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings;and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeking
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
–e.e. cummings

tangled and true, our love matters

stairwell accompaniment:Patty Griffin

I spent the first eighteen years of my life trying to impress God, among others. Not until the spring of 2001 did I realize how plaintive, how empty: a palm-sized bird flapping unbent into a hurricane, avid to find rest in God’s eye. That spring, I stopped this graceless flying and allowed myself to fall: the falling action, were my life a movie script. The rest, my life since and ever, is me unraveling: fade to the credits.

God only knows precisely how I got to that point—-His memory is better than mine. I write to remember and I have enough of the script to make sense of things. Now and then.

the first unplanned addition to the family. call us optimists. God-fearing optimists.