Last week, Dawn and I celebrated our 41st wedding anniversary. Forty-one years. It hardly seems possible. Like most couples, we’ve experienced seasons of abundance and seasons of scarcity, moments of certainty and moments when we wondered how everything would work out. We’ve made wise decisions and foolish ones. We’ve had victories worth celebrating and mistakes […]
We Didn’t Drive Away in a Corvette Read More »
My wife, Dawn Wesley, is abnormal. Well, maybe that’s not the right word. Special? Gifted? That might be closer. Dawn has this strange ability to know exactly how many stairs there are in every place we’ve ever lived. Not approximately, not “about ten” or “around fifteen,” but exactly. She knows how many steps lead up
The rain started sometime after midnight. Not the violent kind of storm that rattles windows or sends people scrambling for weather alerts, just a steady Appalachian rain falling softly through the darkness. Before going to bed, I had accidentally left the door cracked open, and during the night the opening widened and the house slowly
Open Windows, Rainstorms, and Resilience Read More »
Our relationship with our parents doesn’t end when we become adults. It just changes form. And when that relationship is strained, it doesn’t stay contained in the past. It seeps into identity, into marriage, into how we see ourselves in the mirror. For better or worse, our parents are our first reference point for what
The Long Shadow of Our Parents Read More »
I have been thinking all week about the confession of Philip Yancey. For decades, Yancey has been one of the clearest voices in evangelical Christianity, a writer who made grace feel believable again. His books didn’t just defend Christianity; they humanized it. He gave language to the weary believer, the bruised skeptic, the person who
When Christian Heroes Fall: Hypocrisy, Grace, and the Strange Work of Truth Read More »