We say we value life. After years of walking people home, sorting what they left, and erasing them from the system, I am no longer convinced most of us mean it. If gratitude only arrives after the next upgrade, it was never the life being cherished. It was the accessories.
Tag Archives: Caregiving
Twin Tree Project Presents | Angel of Death: The Calling Few Understand (Short Film)
This is the story of a rare and isolating calling: walking people home as an “angel of death.” A testimony of decades spent in the thin places, the cost of obedience, and the quiet turn from resentment to gratitude.
The Author’s Perspective | On Mortality: Witness
Have you ever watched someone pass away? I don’t mean “heard about it later.” Not “gotten the call.” Not “arrived after the fact to sit with the body already still.” I mean actually watched.
Have you been present, sitting there as a body fails in real time? Have you watched the chest rise and fall, then rise less, then not rise at all?
Because I have. And I’ve reached a place in the understanding of my own grief where I genuinely don’t care how uncomfortable it makes people to hear about it. Why? Because it’s coming for all of us… and if you don’t really look at that, you are not actually living.
The Author’s Perspective: When the Mirror Stops Reflecting the Familiar
Looking at unexpected snapshots of myself, I did not recognize the person looking back. After years of caregiving, loss, and feeling like an orphan on earth, the face in the photos simultaneously said “this is who you are now” and “who are you now?” This is the quiet, tear filled space of delayed grief and spiritual becoming, where the outer form no longer matches the inner knowing, yet I remain a child of God, fully known even when I do not yet fully know myself.
I Hate July.
There is a version of my father that exists on paper. It lists the facts of him the way facts do, accurately and without warmth. This is not that version. This is the one where he drove a demon out of his daughter’s house without flinching, opened his blue eyes one last time for her and nobody else, and taught her without ever once saying so that love is not a feeling you manage. It is a decision you make and keep making. I learned that in five days in July. I have never loved any other way since.
Look Again | Abiding: Two Trees, One Field, Two Realities
I was headed to a local wildlife management area before the world fully woke up, camera bag on the seat beside me, fog still thick across the fields. That is when I noticed the trees. Two of them, standing in perfect alignment with one another, maybe twenty feet apart. The one closest to the pond’s edge was full — genuinely, quietly full. The other stood at that twenty-foot distance from the water and it showed. Same pasture. Same sky. Same drought. Twenty feet of distance from the source, and two entirely different realities. I have lived in both of those trees.
Sunday Sessions | Blows of Fate: Beethoven and the Symphony of Grace
There is a story behind the most recognizable four notes in all of Western music. Most of us have heard them: that short, insistent dun-dun-dun-dunnn that opens Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. We associate it with grandeur, with concert halls, with something important arriving. What we do not always know is that those four notes were born in something far less majestic. Beethoven called them the “blows of fate,” a phrase he used to describe the recurring difficulties that punctuated his life. The knocks did not stop. They kept coming. What he did was write them into the music anyway, and then he wrote past them, into something that sounds, unmistakably, like triumph. Not because the difficulties were resolved. But because he moved through them without being destroyed by them. I have thought about that a great deal lately.
Authenticity Unveiled | The Law You Cannot Cheat
There is a law woven into the substance of how God made the world, and it does not bend for anyone. Not for institutions. Not for governments. Not for the people who love you or the people who have hurt you. It operates in every place where human beings interact with one another and with God — and it has a name most people recognize without understanding what it actually costs them. The law of reciprocity is not a social nicety. It is a spiritual reality. And the place where it becomes most dangerous is the place most of us examine least: our own double standards. God does not grade on that curve.
Verse & Vision | June 1, 2026
This is the fourth time in five days that the verse of the day has been personal. Yet again it is beyond spot on for where I am, what I need. Because he can’t speak, I speak it out loud for him. That phrase is older in my spirit than I consciously realized – until I started researching today’s verse of the day.
Verse & Vision | May 25, 2026
The soul is not always lost dramatically. Sometimes it just drifts. A long season of difficulty, of pouring out more than is coming in, of caregiving, of grief, of waiting for answers that are slow in coming – and somewhere in the middle of all of it you look up and realize you are far from yourself. Not in crisis exactly. Just depleted. Thin. *Yeshobev nafshi.* He returns the soul. Not fixes it, not replaces it, not upgrades it. Returns it to where it belongs, to who you actually are underneath all of it. You are not taken to the quiet water because you are doing fine. You are taken there because you are a sheep, and sheep do not know how to find it alone, and the shepherd does. He does not restore a better version of you. He restores you.
Verse & Vision | May 23, 2026
There is a version of self-sacrifice that looks like the cross but isn’t. It gives and gives and gives, not from the overflow of a full and grounded soul, but from the hollow place of someone who has confused loving others with losing themselves.
Today’s passage does not call us to that. It calls us to something harder and more clarifying: the mindset of Christ, who emptied himself with full intention, for a defined purpose, in submission to the Father’s will – not in compliance with someone else’s desire for him.
Being true to yourself, in the way God means it, is not selfishness. It means honoring the soul God placed in you, protecting the purpose he put you here for, and refusing to sacrifice what is sacred on the altar of someone else’s comfort or convenience.
Self-surrender to God first, and then, from that grounded place, genuine love for others that actually does them good.
Verse & Vision | May 22, 2026
The last fifteen years have been a lot. Cancer. Alzheimer’s. Caregiving. Loss after loss – the kind that moves in and stacks up until it pulls you under with it. And layered underneath all of that, my own mess. But He was before all of it. And in Him, somehow, all of it is holding together. Not in spite of the wreckage. Through it. Anything good you see in me is just God. It comes from being dragged by Him through the refiner’s fire, and Him giving my heart the strength to beat at all.
Presence, Not Passage: The Hours We Don’t See | Daily Bread
Everyone I know has said it at least once this year: “Where is the time going?” But I’ve been sitting with a different question lately. Not “where is the time going,” but “when did we stop paying attention to it?” Because I don’t think time is actually disappearing. I think we are.
The Quiet Vigil (A Personal Reflection)
It’s midnight. Someone I love is sleeping beside me, deeply and peacefully, completely unaware of the quiet watch taking place over her. Her name is Echo, and she is my eldest dog. Echo has terminal cancer, and it’s been progressing fairly quickly lately. Earlier tonight there was a small medical moment. It was nothing dramaticContinueContinue reading “The Quiet Vigil (A Personal Reflection)”
When the Yoke Breaks
In that day their burden will be lifted from your shoulders, their yoke from your neck; the yoke will be broken because you have grown so fat. (Isaiah 10:27) There’s a moment in every true spiritual journey when you realize that the burden didn’t disappear — you outgrew it. We talk a lot about GodContinueContinue reading “When the Yoke Breaks”
What Caregiving Is Really Like (Series): The Many Layers of Grief in Caregiving
Caregiving is a profound, sacred journey that takes us through various emotional, physical, and spiritual landscapes. Yet, one of the most complex and often misunderstood aspects of caregiving is the grief that caregivers experience. This grief is not just tied to the death of a loved one but begins long before that final loss. AndContinueContinue reading “What Caregiving Is Really Like (Series): The Many Layers of Grief in Caregiving”