These Precious Days: Essays

“Emphasizing the scriptural ideals of love and community through service to the homeless, our Campus provides faithful people of Nashville an opportunity to respond directly to the broken and the disenfranchised among us. The fellowship with the poor is at the heart of our purpose.” What that means is that I am the person the Campus is serving. Par

And maybe that’s true, except that of all the myriad and conflicting words I could use to describe Tavia, lucky isn’t one of them. At every turn, happiness was her decision.

How do you take care of your internal compass? You don’t listen to anyone who tells you to do something as consequential as having a child. Think about that one for a second.

it may be art but it’s also a fact.

Books were not just my education and my entertainment, they were my partners. They told me what I was capable of. They let me stare a long way down the path of various possibilities so that I could make decisions.

Greatness had come through once, which is really all that we could hope for, and the world that had been so justly represented took back the one who loved it best.

From the first minute she was a force every bit as recognizable as her mother. That feeling of life coming into the room was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, a flood of joy. I thought of it ten years later when I climbed into my grandmother’s bed and held her while she died. The light pouring in and the light going out.

Influence is a combination of circumstance and luck: what we are shown and what we stumble upon in those brief years when our hearts and minds are fully open.

Her true work, which had lingered for so many years in her imagination, emerged fully formed, because even if she hadn’t been painting, she saw the world as a painter, not in terms of language and story but of color and shape.

Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim, and make good use of the days we have.