Tag: deeply rooted (page 1 of 6)

“Behold the King”

Writing about Christmas is one of my favorite ways to skim the emotional stuff off its surface and to remember that Christmas isn’t meant to be a season in which we all make everyone we love happy for four straight weeks, but a remembrance: the One who “neither sleeps nor slumbers” (Ps. 121) became a baby, vulnerable and finite, for us. The One who is everywhere at every time became, for thirty-three years, a man bound to seconds and minutes—for us.

I need to spend weeks each year considering this, looking at it from new angles, and so I’m quick to volunteer for the Advent and Christmas writing assignments. This year, I explored (and at times, it felt like a true adventure) those silent centuries before Jesus’ birth and the way God worked out his plan through them and through Jesus’ coming:


Four hundred years of silence.

After the roars and pleas of the prophets, that silence rang—as audible, in its way, as a lament. The Israelites had grown accustomed to the prophets and their noise, which often ran behind the clamor of daily life, a muted hum. . . .

But then that steady hum ceased. The last prophet’s words hung in the air: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Malachi 4:5–6). The Messiah is coming, the prophet said. And before him, one will come running—a herald, announcing his arrival.

Those were the last words the people heard from God for 400 years.

You can read the full article here.

“3 Questions to Ask Before You Take My Advice”

Ah! I meant to go silent, but then this came up: a little something extra to share with you. Deeply Rooted recently republished an article of mine—an old one, from Issue 8. This is a lengthy article, written for the print magazine rather than the blog, but it’s on a topic that’s especially dear to me: how do we filter out the nonsense we hear daily and decide which authors, speakers, or friends are giving legit parenting advice?

When I was small, my dad kept a running joke about something he called The Book of Dad. “I’ll have to look that up in The Book of Dad,” he’d say, or, when I put him in parenting quandary, “I don’t remember anything about this in The Book of Dad.” To me, he seemed to know everything, a fact that I credited to that book (which I never saw but still believed in).

But now, as the mother of three small daughters, I appreciate the joke in a whole new light: there is no Book of Mom, though I desperately wish on certain days that there were. My children look to me for answers, and I feel like I really ought to have them, as though centuries of parents might have had the decency to compile them for me.  .  .  .

This article is, I think, a glimpse at how I strive to approach motherhood, and I’m so grateful to Deeply Rooted for running it again.

You can read the full article here.

Deeply Rooted, Issue 13: Holiness

I carry the cold in with me and stand for a moment, still in my coat, and warm my feet over the vent before I sit down. Pumpkin bread presides at the table, attended by the French press, the cream, and a stack of napkins. April, in the kitchen, gathers mugs. A timer dings. We call quietly back and forth—How are you? Tired. A laugh. You?—keeping our voices low so we don’t wake her sons sleeping upstairs. As I take my Bible and notebook from my bag, the front door groans open then closed, and there is Megan, shaking her boots off onto the mat, rubbing her gloved hands together.

We sit down in our usual places and each claim a mug; April pours out coffee. The sound of it, the bitter smell, warms us as we talk for a moment about which kid woke most last night and how that first foster placement is going. But we don’t talk for long. We don’t have much time.

For the most recent issue of Deeply Rooted, I got to write about the Bible study I share with two close friends. This isn’t an instructional, “Five Steps to a Better Bible Study,” but an intimate peek at one of our mornings together—ukulele interludes and all.

The whole issue is, as always, beautiful both in form and content. In it, you’ll find articles on holiness, on identifying different biblical genres, on the story behind the hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy.” You’ll find DIY spa recipes, and an article on how marriages are shaped by a shared Christian faith according to extensive, long-term research. And more! You’ll find this issue a great late-summer read, perfect for reading at beaches, on benches by playgrounds, or while looking out over a hazy, smoky-pink lake (that’s what’s happening here, anyway).

You can order a copy here.


Deeply Rooted Magazine
Issue 13: Holiness (2018)

“An Interview with N. D. Wilson”

You know the question that goes, “If you could meet any author, living or dead, who would you choose?” It probably gets asked as a “getting to know you” question at book clubs, I guess, and it overwhelms me every time I hear it. Just one? Why not five? Or ten?

Twenty?

I don’t know what my list would look like or which names I’d have to whittle off to reach the single digits, but I am confident of this: N. D. Wilson‘s name would be on it.

Or would have been on it. Because I did  get to talk to him. And it was fantastic.

I had the privilege of (or, I should say, I super-professionally begged for the privilege of) interviewing him for Deeply Rooted about his gorgeous nature documentary The Riot and the Dance. He was as articulate and intriguing as one might expect and said things like this:

When you’re able to sit in awe of an ant war on the sidewalk in front of your own house, then the awe that you experience looking at God’s creation near you, where he has placed you, will lead you outward. It will give you a desire to see more of his work, to walk through the rest of his museum.

And this:

If we’re the art appreciators—the ones who understand that there is an artist and this is his work, and we want to celebrate it—then we need to do everything we can to create a beautiful artifact ourselves and not just have talking heads explaining fairly bland cinematography. We wanted to use our words and our cameras and our lenses in a more effective imitation than that. We wanted to tell the truth, and beauty is part of the truth.”

Normally, this sort of post—a “here’s something I published elsewhere” post—would be a midweek bonus affair, not something I would publish in place of a book review. But I think you’re going to love what N. D. Wilson had to say so much (I did, even after listening to the recording a half-dozen times as I transcribed it) that I decided to publish this instead of a book review this week. Go forth! Read and enjoy!

You can read the full interview here.

5 Books on Church History for Kids (and Grown-Ups)

I wrote a post about great (sometimes pop-up) church history books for Deeply Rooted. It boasts a few books that you know well and a few you haven’t met yet, and I think you’ll really like like them. (I know I really like the photos, which were taken by my neighbor Felicia, who has a knack for that sort of thing.)

My father used to read to me from The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. He read it in answer to some question about my homework, some question that probably did not involve the Romans, and he read it at length. I know now that that was an awesome thing to do—take my homework question and place it in context by linking it to the historical moment that preceded it—but as a sophomore eager to finish that assignment so I could get back to living life (i.e. watching MTV while I waited for my hair color to set), I did not appreciate my father’s approach. 

I appreciate it now. Just as we can’t pull Leviticus out of context and expect to understand its laws and commands, we can’t pull our point in history out of context and expect to understand how we got here, where we are headed, or what we must do to change.

You can read the full post here.

5 Books on Church History for Kids (and Grown-Ups) | Little Book, Big Story
Felicia Marie Photography