Find a Way to Bear Up

Posted in life, recommendations, women's stuff by Life is For Living book

Several years ago, I took six poetry workshops on Zoom with Danusha Laméris, a beautiful, gifted poet who lives in California.

Danusha was making a point that I’ve forgotten, but her story remains with me and I think of it almost every day. She told us that she had a young son who was hospitalized multiple times with a chromosome deficiency that no one could diagnose. He died before he became a teen. (I can’t remember all the details and I wish Danusha would find this blog post to correct it.)

The stress of having her son deathly ill for years with no answers was agony, and the medical staff tried to be helpful by promising her that some day there would be resolution.

But there was one tall, wise doctor who carefully and lovingly explained to her that there might never be an explanation. “You will have to find a way to bear up while not knowing what is wrong with your son.”

Danusha said he said it gently and kindly and full of love, and his words helped her shift into a way of living that, though still hard, made it possible to go on.

I often think of that wise doctor and how his words apply to all of us in some way.

Life is beastly hard in many ways and places, and there are often no good ways out of the hard pieces.

Singleness is hard and marriage is hard.

Raising children is hard and being childless is hard.

Forgiving and budgeting and exercising and being sick and hosting and grieving and waiting and deciding and repairing is hard, hard, hard.

Difficulty doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re doing something wrong and need to correct it. Difficulty means that there might be no quick resolution to this, so our next goal has to be to learn how to carry this weight well. We need to find a way to bear up under the hard.

Sometimes I think that’s a key part of being an adult: finding what strengthens me and then doing that regularly.

Finding a way to do hard things doesn’t mean that we should grit our teeth and muscle through the next big task. I think living well in difficult seasons requires nurturing a heart that is both soft and strong.

That’s what Danusha did. Over the years marked by griefs, she has kept her eyes open to the light and the beauty around her and puts it into poetry. The sting of multiple losses pierces her lines, and grief is a pervasive theme for her, but it doesn’t have the last word in her story.

You don’t have to write poems to deal with hard things, although I bet you can write a better poem than you think you can.

To stay soft and strong, some people pray breath prayers.

Or take daily silent walks.

Or cry when they need to.

Or set the timer for ten minutes and read or nap.

Or laugh with children.

Notice how these physical responses can help to build the muscles that help carry emotional or spiritual weight.

Those tears when you see the morning star before dawn? That’s your soft heart, sensitive to beauty and wonder.

That grin and deep sigh before you walk into the next big assignment? That’s your strong heart keeping you vertical and resilient.

The world doesn’t need more harsh, strident, strong women. We need sensitive, impressionable women with strong, resolved, steady, thoughtful hearts that keep doing the next right thing without crumpling. And when they crumple, they cry awhile then get back up.

Soft, not flabby.

Strong, not strident.

Being soft and strong is a way to bear up in the hard places that might never be resolved until the new creation.

The way Jesus lived and loved models a way for us to be soft and strong, able to bear up under heaviness as He did. And the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is in you and ahead of you and over you. He is very strong on your behalf. And His heart is soft toward all that is beautiful and all that is broken.

My book is about living well when you find yourself in a story you hadn’t planned. You can buy it here!

6Apr2026

Tracing Lines, by Lori Hershberger

Posted in Art, books, poetry, recommendations by Life is For Living book

One of my favorite memories of last year is the serendipitous breakfast I had with Lori in Pittsburgh. A group of us were gearing up for our second day at REACH and we needed coffee and the line was too long at the hotel. So we found a coffee shop around the corner from the venue and inside the door was Lori!

I crashed her solitary breakfast, joined by another friend who is unnamed because she’s currently in a closed country. We were three friends who are never ever together: Lori from Thailand, our friend headed to the far east, and me, and we talked as fast as we could around our coffees and shared breakfast sandwiches. Lori was so brave in her cloud of jetlag, and very gracious because she had come to be alone, and we didn’t give her a chance to stay alone. We talked about words and travel and introverts and time zones and I needed to leave way too soon.

Now, a year later, I get to hold and read and announce Lori’s new book of poetry! It has been fun to watch it evolve from a distance. I’ve seen some of the poems before via her blog, but reading them on paper is a far better experience.

Most poets have recurring themes they visit. My themes often circle around light and darkness. Lori’s themes are often about specific places, geography, and distance between places. But the places are fully embodied, never only about dust or wind or water or airports, but also the deep wells of memories, hopes, loves, and griefs connected to those places.

And I love the way she uses repetition to give weight to her lines. When I finish reading a poem, I feel a little thud of recognition and wistfulness because I understand without knowing fully, and I wish I could write like that.

I also love how Lori’s poems give a nod to or enter conversation with other poems and their writers. Like this one:

Lori loves widely and deeply across the time zones and cultures. Her daily life of teaching English and living in a foreign country both enrich her and cost her deeply. I especially love how she pours out her life for her students. She makes it look easy and happy but I know there’s much I can’t see.

One of her talented students illustrated this book and did a fantastic job. I’m paging through the book now, trying to choose the best poem and illustration to share here, but I can’t choose. You will have to get your own copy, and quickly!

Ordering details from Lori’s blog:

If you’re in the US, you can order a copy for $10 on Amazon here: US Amazon link

You can also order it on Kindle for $6.99 if you prefer to read on Kindle: US Kindle

If you’re in Canada, you can find for $13.66 it at this link: Canada Amazon Link

If you prefer to order directly, you can send me an email at georgeinthailand620@gmail.com, or call me at 620-878-0733, or wherever else you already have my contact information. Allow 7-14 days for your order to arrive. For the US, expect shipping to be around 3 dollars with 50 cents added on for each book. For Canada, shipping is $4.25 with 75 cents added on for each extra book. For direct orders from Canada, I can only accept Paypal, no checks.

Are you wondering if you should order on Amazon or order directly? If you’re not in a hurry, and it’s before April 20, feel free to order directly. I’ll be around to send out the orders (I’m home in Kansas until April 26) and I make a little more money through direct orders, and Amazon gets less. This is always a good thing, no?

13Dec2025

A Poem-Long Sentence

Posted in poetry by Life is For Living book

I wrote this poem some time ago, but it works now too, except for the line about summer! I took this snowy picture two days ago and the snow is still falling and it’s beautiful beyond words.

I could write a poem about stopping by the woods on a snowy evening, but
Someone much wiser and more profound than I has already written a poem beginning with
that line and
After I read that I feel that I can never write so sparse and rich so why should I try,
But I have words in me that Frost never did, so that gives me permission to try to push out
Words, pat them into line, riffle through, discard or choose the precise ones to show, not tell,
The mood and texture of the vignette I have in mind
And even though it’s not about horse or downy flake (I drive a car, it’s high summer, and I don’t Collect Currier & Ives prints) my soul holds
Pictures of thin spaces, moments, sparkles, glistenings, that would be fun to take
out of storage, unfold,
Hold up to the light, adjust, unwrinkle, because, even though out of sight, they shape me,
and maybe
They could nudge someone and set the compass for a friend’s reference point of what is
Good and beautiful and true since stable compasses are scarce these days and we need them
Even though we don’t say it, however insightful we are and however experienced
because we are all
Mostly shuffling our way toward home, knowing we’re not there yet and it might be
Awhile—probably miles to go before we sleep—but we’ll get there someday and meanwhile
we hold
Each other’s hands to find the path and share the light we see because beauty must be shared, not Hoarded, which has to be why Frost gave us his snapshot of his woods and horse.