Suicide and Sweet Potato Fries

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 […]

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 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, […]

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 […]

Accepting the Process

It’s a pat​t​ern 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 […]

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 […]