(xaris and shalom)

Shel Silverstein's poem "Helping" ends with the stanza And some kind of help is the kind of help That helping's all about And some kind of help is the kind of help We all can do without. (helping (?) in the kitchen!) For some reason, having an 11 month old Bean causes me to think of these words frequently.  But particularly, for the last day, I've been pondering how she loves to "help" me fold the laundry.  This little girl derives the greatest of delight from sitting on our bed when I dump out a full basket or two of clean laundry.  She used to simply enjoy playing with the socks and dryer balls, but recently she's begun taking a more active role in "helping" -- namely, grabbing articles of clothing and throwing them over her shoulder and off the bed as quickly and enthusiastically as you can imagine. Yesterday Jason and I met with our pastor and were discussing various ministries, our involvement in them, and the disappointment of not see

This space has been pretty quiet, hasn't it? Knowing how much I love writing (and need to write), friends periodically ask me what I've been writing and how it's going, but the truth is that I am writing less these days than I have in a long, long time, and thinking less about writing stories than I have probably ever since I started (so... grade school!).  I still journal sporadically, write emails, update Instagram accounts as a sort of public journal, and have recently been working on an essay for this year's ACNA contest, but an awful lot of my creative energy is poured into the small human I spend most of my days with.  Watching her grow is a joy and pretty consuming!  Cooking and baking is my other main creative outlet, and more fun than ever with consistent folks to feed.   All that being said, I wanted to pop in here for a few minutes to reflect on the past year. It's been a rough year for the world, catastrophic in many global theaters, but it's been a