Published Mbird.com - June 2025

“Even so, I miss the end of a day on a job site, my body loose and glad in its weariness, the sun low in the sky, the air cooling. I remember packing up my tools, standing in the middle of my work — a wall, a roof, a deck — and it was real. I could see it and touch it. “This. I did this thing today.” I miss the feel of my Skilsaw sliding through a piece of wood, the weight of a work belt on my hips, the feel of a hammer in my hand. I miss taking raw materials — wood and block and steel — and making something of use, something I knew was solid and true. I miss knowing that, for that day, what I had done was good, and it was enough.”

Published mbird.com - October 2024

“Don’t hinder the children,” Jesus said. “Theirs is the kingdom.” And I think he meant: “Let ‘em whoop. Let ‘em run. Let ‘em trip over themselves in feral joy and bring all the innocent gladness of life to me.”

Published in fathommag.com - September 2021

“So Idaho gal leaves for the weekend, gone away with high-schoolers for church camp, which should earn her the Congressional Medal of Honor or a bottle of wine, or both, and in her good-doing I am left with Minion 1 and Minion 2, whose little, blond, caffeinated heads bob and weave around the house, their still developing selves spinning out in raw energy and movement and noise and questions.”

Published in Ekstasis Magazine - Summer 2021

“In the corner of my office is a white cardboard box filled with my grandfather’s academic papers. Samuel Richey Kamm taught political science at Wheaton College from 1940 to 1973. Soon after retirement he died of a heart attack on his way to guest teach at Westmont College, where I began my undergraduate studies in 1984.”

Published at fathommag.com - April 2021

I faintly remembered how easily I used to move in the world. It occurred to me, like a jolt, that anxiety is an insistent god. If I continued to bow to anxiety and sought out the comfortable, the mundane, the safe, then it would insinuate itself into every decision and every dream. My world would shrink, and my life would become a sad, pallid thing.