Elizabeth Sands Wise

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Big News!

December 10, 2018January 2, 2019 / Elizabeth

we live here announcement

P.S. If you enjoy reading the letters I post regularly to my daughters here on the website, I hope you’ll consider helping me spread the word about my most recent book project. It’s the second fifty letters in a tidy 180-page paperback. It makes a great Christmas present!

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books, daughters, family, hospitality, letters, love, motherhood, mothers, parenting, wisdom

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← The Hundred-and-First Letter: Personality Types & Praying in Walmart (Advent 1)
The Hundred-and-Second Letter: Love Wins (Advent 2) →

The next 50 letters! Now available as a paperback on Amazon. (Click the image to purchase.)

Thanks for visiting, friends.

You can find some free digital print downloads under the “Sharing & Freebies” tab.

A great gift idea! This collection is coauthored with my husband. (Click on the photo to purchase on Amazon.)

Purchase the First 50 Letters as a paperback or Kindle book on Amazon!

This Sacramental Life: The First 50 Letters to My Daughters

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We are bringing all the sunshine inside we can. Anyone else? #howthelightgetsin #spring #Lent #thankyouformerhomeowners
I’m just over here working on practicing what I preach, etcetera. In other news, I found a use for those pieces of old TV cabinet. 🎨 🎨 🎨 #myfrontporch #loveyourneighbors #stayathome #handlettering #upcycle
My girls’ Sunday school teachers recorded a Sunday school lesson for their little class on YouTube, and I nearly wept watching it. Not because it mattered to me that they had Sunday school, but that the love shown was so simple, so straightforward, and so lovely. In the recording, they sang the Sunday morning greeting song, read a Bible story, taught the motions for Zacchaeus Was a Wee Little Man, recited the Lord’s Prayer, and taught them how to make a Resurrection Garden as we prepare our hearts for Easter morning. I watched my girls bow their heads and pray solemnly along with the video, sing Zacchaeus, and get excited about the stone rolling away in the Resurrection Garden on Easter morning. Easter morning. There is much loss for me as I think about not having Holy Week and Easter services with my gathered church community. We have such lovely traditions–bell ringing, carrying Easter lilies down the aisle to recognize each family who has lost a loved one over the previous year, beautiful music. Christ the Lord Is Risen Today. Gosh, I tear up just remembering what it is like to be present in that space. But it has helped this week as I’ve thought through all the ways our local community is reaching out and being the hands and feet of Jesus in this season, all the ways I am grateful that we already practice such sincere and selfless community, all the ways that the light is shone to my girls by a whole community that loves them and prays for them and has committed to journeying alongside them, through every season, Covid-19-social-distancing-live-streaming season or otherwise. Yes, I am grateful for this small town church in the middle of America. And I am grateful we planted our own Resurrection Garden here in the middle of Lent.
I’ve taught classes about and written often about one of my favorite things about the cycle of the liturgical calendar, and it’s precisely this: it happens over and over again. And when we honor it as a gathered community, we get to walk alongside others and remind them, even when circumstances suggest otherwise, that we are still on the journey. And that it’s okay to not “feel” a season. Some years, loved ones die on Christmas Eve and we mourn while others celebrate. And some years, babies are born on Good Friday and we celebrate while others mourn. And we keep marking time and pointing to the work God is doing in the world through us and through the church. Still. I wanted to say this, here on this fourth Sunday of Lent: It doesn’t feel like Lent to me. Days go by sometimes, and apart from coloring this little piece of a broken cross on our printable calendar, I can go days without reflecting on Lent. But the truth is, it doesn’t matter whether I “feel like” Lent or not. The liturgical calendar isn’t about how we feel. Because the truth also is this: we are currently living through what is perhaps the most Lenten of seasons the world has known in our lifetime. But, friends, Easter is still coming.
Piano lessons will be via FaceTime today, but we are lighting candles at every meal.

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  • The Hundred-and-Sixteenth Letter: Marking Time & Social Distance
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  • The Hundred-and-Fourteenth Letter: The Arbitrariness of Beginnings
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  • The Hundred-and-Eighth Letter: In the beginning was the Word
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