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Every spring, I go out to the garden with whatever version of repair tools and products I have decided on, and I patch the bird bath. I had help to build it. It is made of rock, and it is a deliberate copy of the one that stood in the garden of my childhood home. I can still hold the visual memory of that one. The shape of it, and how my dad built it himself. When I created my garden in my newly built house, I wanted that. I also mimicked his design of rockeries. So, I found

Why your best ideas sometimes get lost Recently I had one of those a-ha moments — a genuinely brilliant idea, surfacing in my awakening mind like a breeze, just before I was fully awake one morning. You’ve probably had that happen, too. My bad for not keeping a notebook on my nightstand. A few hours later the idea was gone. Not fuzzy. Gone. I couldn’t even reconstruct the concept that had intrigued and excited me. An idea has a shelf life That experience reminded me of someth

Think about the last time you were halfway to work and suddenly weren't sure you'd closed the garage door. You probably did close it. You always do. It's such a well-worn pattern that your brain didn't even bother keeping you in the room for it — it ran the routine and moved your attention elsewhere. That's not a flaw. That's your brain doing exactly what it's designed to do: automate anything it can, so it can save its energy for what actually needs thought. The trouble is t

A few weeks ago, I undertook the worst kind of gardening work. Not the pleasant kind, where you trim a few overgrown branches and step back satisfied. The real fight — dandelions all through the lawn, and clover creeping through the landscape rocks, so quiet and unassuming you almost don't notice it until it's taken over entire sections. If you've ever pulled a full-grown dandelion, you know the truth about weeds: what you see is never the real problem. The real problem is un

If you've ever felt like your life is too chaotic and scattered, you don't have the time, the money, the skill, and, in fact, everything is just too much of a mess for God to do anything with...I want to share a scripture lesson from an easy-to-skim passage of Scripture that says otherwise. 1 Samuel 13 tells the story of Israel's army on the edge of collapse. Saul's men are terrified, hiding in caves and thickets and cisterns, watching an enormous Philistine force gather agai

I live in two time zones. Sometimes three, depending on the season and which continent I've landed on. My calendar looks like a small air traffic control tower — Apple Clock has a permanent row of cities pinned to it, Google appointment scheduling saves my brain from all the calculations, and makes it easy for my clients, no matter where they live. It's a small, ongoing comedy — the mental gymnastics of living across time zones while still trying to show up fully for the pe