Thoughtful Thursdays

Musings on faith, family, & fiction

Keep Moving
I'm no athlete, but occasionally I think back to gym class, and to that brief period when I ran cross-country. I remember the times when I or a friend would stumble and fall, maybe twist a knee or an ankle. I remember those flashes of pain and the thought of, "There...
New Every Morning
I live in the Appalachian Mountains (the part that pronounces it APP-uh-LAY-shun, not LATCH-uhn, thank you). My house is in the middle of a forest, trees towering all around. Here, we can track the drift of the seasons quite easily, as leaves first bud in a splendor...
The Dim Mirror
More life lessons from watching beach sunrises incoming. Or rather, in this case, eternity lessons. As I mentioned last week, watching the sunrise over the ocean in the Outer Banks is one of our favorite things to do on vacation. In years past, I would always wake Xoe...
Receiving His Gifts
I'm currently sitting in a rented beach house in Avon, North Carolina--one of my favorite places in the world. And one of our favorite things to do while we're on vacation here in the Outer Banks is to watch the sunrise. Now, in September, this is no great feat. The...

Though a novelist by trade, one of the trademarks of my books is the spiritual depth and exploration I includes as my characters work through what it really means to walk out their faith. Faith, in fact, is one of the things I like to ponder most. In these once-a-week articles, I gets thoughtful at the crossroads of faith, family, and fiction.

Thoughtful . . . About What to Write

As I near the end of a manuscript (which I'm doing now), my mind starts moving ahead to the next project. With me, there are always other projects waiting. If someone were to look in my My Docs folder, they may just shake their head. In addition to the three dozen or...

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Thoughtful . . . About Optimism

I confess. I'm an optimist. Not just a fleeting optimist, mind you, an eternal one. As the hero in my Work In Progress just said to the heroine, "You go way beyond optimist. You don’t just see the glass half full–even when it’s empty, you say, ‘Yay! Now I get to fill...

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