Tanara McCauley

Culturally Imagined Stories

Category: Faith, Relationships, and Other Topics

  • The Knight in Blue Jeans

    My phone alerted me to a text. I paused to read it and shook my head. It was from my husband, his latest response to a series of messages between us. I tapped the reply square. “You’re such a man.” And I didn’t mean that in a “you’re the hunk of my dreams and I…

  • A Wrecked Perspective

    “In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” ~ 1 Thessalonians 5:18 Recently, on a day like any other, my three kids and I set out for an evening of gymnastics and Kenpo practice, with a potential coffee stop squeezed in. The smell of mint wafted from…

  • The Goodness of God

    I would have lost heart, unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. ~Psalm 27:13 It was Valentine’s Day, 2009. The NBA All-Star festivities were taking place in Phoenix, and my husband Jon and I decided it would be fun to go as a…

  • When the Odd Bird Flies

    Odd bird. It’s an expression my family uses for something or someone who strikes us as unusual. The context can be positive, such as a quirky or endearing oddity; or it can be of the don’t-make-eye-contact variety. A bird of the former type attends my daughter’s gymnastics school. She’s tall and pale, all angles and…

  • What We All Need and Almost Never Get

    For many of us it seems the more rest we need, the less we get. Between taking care of my family, actively seeking the Lord, and trying to launch a writing career, (plus all my other projects and obligations) getting sufficient rest can be as far-fetched as finding out that book I’ve never pitched has…

  • Race for the Chicago Hot Dog…A Food Tour Tragedy

    On my way to the American Christian Fiction Writers (ACFW) conference in St. Louis, I made a two-day pit stop in Chicago to visit a dear friend who’d just moved from my town to that town. My sister, who lives in Boston, jumped at the chance to join us, and we spent days before our…

  • Mercy Despised

    Not too long ago I had a wrestling match with my youngest daughter, something we do quite often. This particular day I had to cut our bout short. I trapped her legs between mine, clamped her arms to her sides and her back to my chest in a one-armed hug, and applied enough pressure so…

  • Today

    Be grateful for today and don’t worry about tomorrow. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

  • Risky Embrace

    I saved a life today. Not intentionally, and not of the most precious variety, but a valuable life all the same: that of a fat, feisty lizard. He lives in my backyard. And our relationship is…uh…complicated. (A vague adjective, missing all the negative connotations applicable to our feeble ties, but I’ll go with it.) See, I…

  • Unpopular

    My oldest daughter wears glasses…sort of. She has a prescription. And a set of lenses matching that prescription. And a nifty little case to put them in. It’s a fight, however, to get the glasses out of their felt-coated den to perch stylishly upon her pretty little nose. They spend a lot of their time…