Unexpected Healing in Sharing Your Story “I have your dinner reservation confirmed. Is this a special occasion? What are you celebrating?” the voice on the other end of the line said. I didn’t know how to respond to her question. Because the dinner I’d planned with other women was a special occasion—but it was an unusual […]
God Told Me to Blog
I started blogging because God told me to. It is a little weird, right, to admit that a feminist Christian blogger got her start at a Women of Faith conference but there it is. God told me to blog and I started doing it. I think that may have been the last time I heard […]
When Your Heart is Yearning For a Better Father
I don’t talk to my father very often. On Father’s Day I consider the choices. To send a card? Or not? Should I lean into the wound? Or get myself out clean? Is it time to press into the brokenness of relationship? Or it is time to gather myself and walk away? There isn’t […]
For Those Who Love Jesus, but . . .
I didn’t mean to stay for three hours. And it was more than the rose leaf tea, more than the endless Super Why episodes she put on for my three-year-old. It was more than the familiar story of young love and marriage, or the moment we both confessed that our moms are our best friends […]
Love is in a Midnight-Blue Towel
They lie next to each other, on our bathroom rail, one grass-green, one midnight blue. They are the same Egyptian cotton towels we were given for our wedding, fifteen years ago. At the time, as I recall, I thought them outrageously expensive, yet they are still here, fifteen years on. Every day, I take […]
Zen and the Art of Acceptance
My sister and I sat cross-legged, waiting to learn about meditation. Someone filled the little porcelain cups with steaming green tea; they grew warm in our hands. I looked around the makeshift temple in what looked like it used to be a gas station. Bars on the windows reminded us we were in the heart […]
To the Pastors’ Wives Whose Marriages are Quietly Falling Apart
I’m a pastor’s wife.* And sister, I know how it is. You smile for the family pictures. You corral your children Sunday after Sunday; just getting out the door in time for church feels like you’ve already run a marathon. Maybe you, like me, can feel resentment for this life bubble up now and […]
I thought I’d do a new friend a favor and not make friends at all
I realized Joy went to church with me on Pentecost Sunday. I sat with my parents at the special outdoor service, held in the local high school stadium. In the bleachers before the service, I shaded my eyes with my hand to see the stage. There was a girl up there. A girl my age. […]
To Be Married
For someone who has been telling the internet all the things about all the things for the last few years there is one thing that doesn’t get a lot of press: my marriage. It isn’t that I haven’t tried. Like I write my girls a letter every year on their birthdays, I have wished to, […]
Community: Slamming Doors and Kitchen Messes
I was 19 and had nowhere to go. I had been couch surfing for nearly a year and was running out of options. A friend and I had talked about going out to Chicago to check out a Christian community known for its ministry to lost hippies and punks and the homeless, as well as […]
The Night Jesus Played a Bass and Rocked an Afro
She bought my ticket months ago when she saw the hair standing high, like a full sunrise shining and the name Esperanza in the same line of Ode Joy. I had said yes to the invitation but had totally forgotten about the plans we had made. You see, my Big Sis Doreen is a planner […]
I’m Not Going to Preach About Josh Duggar
I am not going to preach today about Josh Duggar and the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. We’re all too addicted to these stories, of how the famous rise and fall. We have too much invested, in their fame in the first place, and then the […]
The Parable of the Exploding Ketchup
We pulled out of the zoo and immediately they started asking for more. “Can we go out for Ice cream?!” “Can we go out for dinner?!” “Oh please Mom! Oh please!” We’d just spent hours traipsing around the zoo, petting the wallabies, climbing the wooden train and tracking down the tigers. We weren’t there for […]
When You Feel Like You’re Losing Your Faith
It starts with an itch, the slightest feeling of discomfort. You sit at the back of the church and ignore the questions hovering in your mind. You sing the words of the hymn extra loudly, looking at the faces around you who all seem to be rapt in wonder. You think about the word, ‘rapt’, […]
Accepting the Process
It’s a pattern that’s been there since the beginning, but it’s taken me most of my adult life to see it. I am an achievement-oriented person. I love to check things off lists and accomplish goals. In a society like the United States, it’s a pretty common way of interacting with the world. It is […]
What I Learned From an Everyday Wednesday
Emily Freeman taught me to listen to my Tuesdays. Mine showed up a day late. It was an everyday Wednesday. I stood, feet askew, stirring the carnitas in my red dutch oven for our friends coming over for lunch that day, like they do every week. There was a pause as my husband passed by, […]
Let Them Live
My husband is from the Cascade Mountains in Washington State. He’s at home in the outdoors. He’s a skier and a hiker and a rock climber. He loves the idea of overnights in the wilderness, navigating with a compass and the stars. My preferred form of adventure is trying a new grocery store, but I’ve […]
Carrying Hope
My hardest days at work aren’t the days when my students are loud or disobedient or unkind to each other. Those days are hard, don’t get me wrong, but they aren’t the hardest. We have procedures and consequences in place for those things, we learn from them and then we move on. Those are the […]