Prefer fewer emails? Click here to stay subscribed but stop receiving monthly updates. It was an underwhelming hiking trail, by every measure. The path was mostly gravel; we could see the parking lot nearly the whole distance; and as soon as we entered the "forest" we were subject to merciless dive-bombing but all manner of black flies, gnats, and mosquitoes. But I had insisted that we had to get out into nature before arriving at our destination, and I had found the "hike" on a map, and I...

Prefer fewer emails? Click here to stay subscribed but stop receiving monthly updates. Feeling all the feels...is impossible. Just when we started feeling so good again (sun! flowers! summer coming!) May hits us like a freight train. And it's a freight train barreling out of control toward our souls, filled with complicated things like Mother's Day, birthdays, end of school hooplas, teacher appreciation, graduations, awards assemblies and all the other life stuff that keeps life-ing us while...

So much of our perspective is shaped by our own story. What we embrace, what we reject, what we believe are a response to the good or a reaction to the bad that we ourselves have experienced in life. One of the great shaping influences in my own life is being the middle-big sister to two brothers--my brother Matt, 14 months younger--and my brother Steve, who joined our family in 1983, when I was seven and he was a toddler. He was adopted into our military family, the beloved caboose in our...