Everyday Miracles

It’s December 30. Time to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. The last time I made a New Year’s resolution was in 2020. I had decided to take charge of my health by losing some weight in order to lower my blood pressure. In fact, I lost 70 pounds in 2020 and my blood pressure went from borderline problematic to low in the normal range. In addition I became a certified Health Coach in June of 2020. Unfortunately, over the next two years I put about half of that weight back on, but still, it’s a win. With that win under my (much smaller) belt, I decided to get back into daily writing. I had already started my new blog: Everyday Miracles [1] . But with only one post since its November inauguration, the inspiration I had enjoyed at the beginning had faded. What to do? Well, I used to teach creative writing. I always told my students to make a daily appointment with themselves: a minimum one hour in their most creative time of day (eight in the morning for me). During that hour t...

Katie called me a few minutes ago, breathlessly excited to share what had just happened. First, a little context: Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina almost two months ago. I was there. God had protected me so that for me and my family, the devastation amounted to an inconvenience [1] . I know Katie from church in Hillsborough, about four hours from Asheville. Katie has a house in a small town in Mitchell County. She wasn’t there during the hurricane and in fact didn’t go to see the aftermath until over a month later. There were a lot of downed trees on her property and the pipe from the cistern had been wrenched right out of the wall. She spent the weekend doing cleanup and repairs, but wondered what she was going to do about the trees. She doesn’t have a chainsaw. And even if she did, she’s not strong enough to move fallen trees by herself. It was clear that she’s going to need help. She decided to pray about it and turn her attention to more immediately pressing matte...