Author: Jill

Inspiration

Breakers

Ever felt like you were drowning? That the circumstances surrounding your life were metaphorically stealing the breath from your mortal body? I was listening to a Florence and the Machine song recently that includes the lyrics, “the arms of the ocean are breaking over me…carrying me…delivering me.”  As much as the song seems like a cry of desperation, you can also choose to hear a deliverance, with a slight change in perspective. My 21-year-old son experienced a literal near drowning, on a mission trip to Costa Rica when he was 15 years old. He wrote: “We went to swim in...

Featured

Morning Glory

My son has a planter box on our back deck. At some point, he filled it up with potting soil and wildflower seeds.  He watched and watered it closely and did get wildflowers the first season he had it.  As a homeschooled child that counts as an A in gardening, but I’m afraid we both forgot about it after that. Towards  the end of  last summer, he and I were doing some math outside when I noticed the planter again. It was a royal mess. There were some thin, brown, crispy, weed-like threads snaking up the deck rail, but not...

Challenges

Worry

I sent this photo of Marilyn Monroe, blowing a pink bubble, to a friend the other day, for a laugh. The expression on the photo is not really true for me, but it’s definitely a goal of mine. To defeat the tendency to worry. When I was 23 and pregnant with my first child, I worried about everything. I tried to become informed about the whole adventure but eventually had to trash the books, turn off TLC (The Learning Channel) and just waddle out the 40 weeks. When I reached week 42 and the boy showed no signs of making...