Krysann Joye

It wasn’t even half an acre of land, but it had our name to it and the acreage stretched when the shoreline waned because somebody decided to drain the lake or we didn’t get enough rain that year. It was my favorite patch of dirt and rocks and grass on the planet. I knew it like a friend; preferred sore feet from jagged rocks and brittle shelled oak leaves to wearing shoes because you don’t wear…

It has been a decade now – plus a few hours – since I met you and everything changed. I told you last night, curled up in your bed, what you taught me, what you keep teaching me. I told you it was more of a remembering. Something I knew when I was little, but forgot and your existence made it unavoidable. I looked at you for the first time outside of my body and I loved you. Not for anything…

“Find something to look at,” she instructs from her little square on the zoom call. We are practicing presence and we’ve primed ourselves with quiet to pay attention. So I scan my bedroom – the big, cozy bed on which my carefully chosen pillows and comforter lay neatly fluffed and smoothed as a gentle invitation to rest,  the decorations on the wall I chose with intention to remind me that the…

God’s Dream

The first time I heard someone call it God’s Dream it was my own voice reading Desmond Tutu’s words (which were paraphrasing Jesus) to my children. 

Everyone who wants to see God’s dream come true must see with the eyes of a child.

Desmond Tutu, Children of God Storybook Bible

Something in me stirred. 

“The Kingdom of Heaven” is sometimes taught to mean the place we go when we die (or the…

For the whole big wideness in us that sees and hears and knows, and for the focused presence, too that knows nothing more than what's in front of us.

I am reading on a Sunday morning and my husband is sitting in the chair next to me meditating or sleeping – I can’t really tell. I love mornings like this. Slow, light-filled, quiet. I love indulging in the open time, ignoring the chores we’ll have to get to so that we can be comfortable here in order to just be comfortable here.

One of my children moves around upstairs. I know because I hear…

Today marks 4 years of time without my mother.

Which seems absurd. Something about another revolution around the sun makes me a little sick, like on a carnival ride. We’re moving too fast. How the hell did we pass the Fun House again already?

I was prompted this morning to consider that grief reveals the things that matter most to you. I get that. I miss being seen and known by her and…

The Right Way to Quarantine - finally. An answer.

I said goodbye to my husband of almost exactly one year for his 15 month tour in Afghanistan and drove myself back to the military house we called ours. I got three steps in and collapsed onto the grocery-store-tile flooring and Samson, my somewhat antisocial dog, took pity on me, sat through the big emotions and confusing sobs. I was scared Gabe wouldn’t come back from the war, scared I wouldn’t…

It cracked Loud. All the way open. My heart tore bridges down in the crashing Made scratched up waves of concrete into dust And bedrock didn’t mean a thing – what bedrock? The counterfeit of solid? Iron rusts. Ha! My heart found torrid joy in decomposing

It fell. Quiet. Didn’t know it could. My spirit ached and rattled with last breathes Before it closed its eyes and let us drop through disbelief

I am going home, you said, I relish every word you left, bereft Of every one you didn’t yet And every one I didn’t coax out of you when I could. Those are the ones that might be wood.

But it’s only straw instead.

Home is it? and you insist, But when your heart stopped cold I missed The home at the part where your last breathe kissed This end of eternal sowing, sighed Into the harvest of your life

If Jesus is actually saying that God will give you food and clothes and the things you need to survive if you ask for them, he's just wrong.

We asked. We prayed. We hoped. She died.

Did I pray hard enough? Did I want it bad enough? Did I hope with enough expectation?

My mom should be here. I need her, not just the love she taught me that doesn’t go away or the likeness of her in other wise women. I need her.Only she has the stories I need to hear, the particular wisdom about half my DNA, the face that my eyes saw first, the…

I have wonderful memories of childhood Christmases – pajamas and rare hours of togetherness without a television playing. Christmas is family and warmth and presents and too much delicious food. It’s indulgence during scarcity: you eat jam long after the bushes that grew the berries have gone dormant. It’s a time to remind ourselves that death doesn’t last, that sweetness and ecstasy are not off…

Instagram wouldn’t let me say as much as I apparently needed to say about this book so here’s a post! A book review-ish.

It takes me a very long time to read anything (ask my friend Brynn, who has not given up on me yet, but also went more than a year without seeing her copy of Anna Karenina and I still hadn’t finished it). But this little gem is hard to put down and frankly, these words work their asses off to get themselves into just the right order and say the Important Thing and I have got to tell you about it.

When was the last time I scooted over for Jesus to sit down? When did I stretch my hand out to hold his invisible one for the final grip? When did I stop assuming he was there and begin to wonder?

I didn’t realize other people didn’t believe in God. There was something more real than real about God to me. Special. God was special. I was special. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that he loved me; of course he did, he made me.

I remember talking to God in the back of my Dad’s pickup truck or during class. Wherever I was, whoever was around, I could find a space where it was just me and my…

It strikes me today that the liturgy of Ash Wednesday teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on. Whether you are part of a church or not, whether you believe today or your doubt, whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic or a so-called “none” (whose faith experiences far transcend the limits of that label) you know this truth deep in your bones: “Remember that you are…

I started this for a writing prompt and here it is with a little polish; mostly raw, enjoy the mixed metaphors. :D Happy Spring, friends!

I’m not sure precisely why our calendar falls the way it does. I imagine it has to do with the length of days, but whatever the reason, I like that we experience New Year’s in the middle of winter and that Spring comes well into our failed resolutions.

The natural sermon of life and death and resurrection are evident in every season, crescendo over every year. It’s unavoidable. Spring is birth,…