Looking for the Perfect Fit

No matter what anyone says, no matter what I even believe about myself—Jesus’s furious longing for me will not change. I haven’t quite found it yet—that custom-made place he created for me in the Body of Christ. Maybe you haven’t either. Maybe you still feel like a kid playing dress up or like you’re still trying to squeeze into last winter’s jeans.

Shame on Me

I think I’ve been brainwashed.  The unexpected thought pierced my sleepy fog. Although after midnight, we girls were dragged from our sleeping bags for a special lecture. Clumped together on a couple of couches, we yawned and tried to listen. I was sadly aware that my alarm was going off in less than six hours. […]

When We Don’t Want Others To Belong

  I’m looking for spaces that are a homecoming. I’m realizing it’s not easy to find places of true belonging and it’s even harder to be a person who offers it. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t want to belong, but I know many who want to disconnect, to distance, to separate and […]

Choosing to Belong

We hadn’t been going to any church regularly for a couple of years, yet we felt the yearning to belong to a local part of the body, to be connected. We had a few friends at a church who had invited us along, so we made a decision: we would go for an entire school […]

Does Your Church Smell?

I had read two books on Orthodox Christianity. That’s it. So obviously, I had no idea what to expect when I visited St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church for its Sixth Hour Prayer service. What I did know was that for some time now, I’d felt a deep desire to silence myself before the Lord, and […]

Benediction For Unity

Benediction for Unity It is hard to admit this because we are kind people but we wouldn’t know unity from contempt we wouldn’t know togetherness from war we wouldn’t be able to say that the church body is whole we are too mixed up with who is for us and who is against us we […]

Sometimes I Leave the Room

I can’t take it. I walk outside and text my husband to see when he would be back to pick me up. “Leaving now,” he writes. Soon, then. Thankfully. I don’t want to feel this way, like I have to leave a room when good, well-meaning people talk about people in poverty. I don’t want […]