I know it’s coming, but I’m not prepared. Fill in the blank with “it.” It could be dinnertime each day. I’m not prepared to answer the daily question, “What’s for dinner?” “It” could be the next difficult season up ahead, or it could the wildest season of joy. Why do I assume it will […]
I held the plastic cup of juice in one hand, a tiny square cracker in the other. In my chair, I tried to focus my thoughts on God and let all else fall away. This symbolic act of taking communion was designed to bring me closer to the Lord. Head bowed, it was just me […]
First published July 13, 2016. I’m becoming my mother. Whenever she comes to visit us, her greatest ambition is to cook for our family. She asks which of her Korean homemade dishes we’d like to eat, and even prior to her stay she prepares in advance by shopping for groceries we can’t find locally. She’s […]
Charting a Course Alone “You can be anything you want,” they said. “If you can dream it, you can be it,” we were told. My generation grew up believing we could follow our bliss, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and every other cliche of the American dream. We were led to believe we were […]
The summer sun is high, although the afternoon clock inches toward six. The sprinkler water play in my front yard has turned into mud soup creations. I watch my children as they gather ingredients with the neighbor kids. Buckets hold their pulled-up weeds and mud. Garden tools turn into mixing spoons. I yell towards the […]
Walter Breugeman talks a lot about the pharaoh the Israelites left behind. He says pharaoh is a stand-in for all the empires that have ever been: Egypt. Rome. Western capitalism. I remember being shocked in college when I first heard somebody question capitalism. You can question that? I thought. Boy, can you! As an economy, […]
Jane Harper’s books transport the readers to some of the most challenging locations in Australia and its surrounding areas. She regularly sets her stories in inhospitable locations like the infamous outback such as in The Lost Man or a remote seaside village in Tasmania in The Survivors. Both of these books are murder mysteries but […]
I was searching for a spool of black thread last summer. I couldn’t find one. Supplies were depleted in brick and mortar stores, and nothing was available at the online marketplace named after a gargantuan river. A simple roll of black thread proved to be a scarce commodity. All I needed to do was mend […]
I stand on a dirt path in the Philippines. It has been raining for weeks. The path is muddy and rocky where rivulets of water have washed away the dirt. Above me a young mama looks out the window. The frame of an open window. There is no glass pane on the […]
When the darkness closes in around us, will we still know that God is good? When the storms rage inside, will we be able to abide in the truth that Jesus will be with us to the very end of the age? What keeps us anchored to God in times like these? We, too, need something to keep us steadfast when it would be easier to cut ties and run from communities of faith that seem to be crumbling all around us.
There is no place we can magically find God, no one Christian tradition or person who holds the answers. We all spend our life in the slow, stumbling surrender to the mystery
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings! Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth. –The New Zealand Anglican Lord’s Prayer I wanted to savor each sip of chai in the tiny aluminum cup. I didn’t mind its heat on my hands even though my scarf already stuck […]
Not long after my husband and I were married over 15 years ago, one of our first “grown-up” purchases was an antique, oak kitchen table. It can expand to make room for more guests. Through the years, many guests have indeed dined there, resulting in several scratches and knicks that add to its charm. The […]
Mutual friends said we’d get along, this new friend of mine and I. They recognized our common interests and desire to go deep. Plus, we were both mired in the mess of transition, looking for new connections, longing for rootedness here. We chatted over coffee and discovered our mutual friends were right—we did hit it […]
The heaviness that settled over my chest that morning was as dense as my husband’s weighted blanket tangled around my feet. I kicked off the covers but the anxiety wouldn’t lift. It was one week into the Coronavirus crisis that had settled over our country like a dense fog. It started on a normal Thursday […]
The day I crossed from green to brown, from chirping birds to revving motorbikes, she wore a pink headband and a faux fur collared coat. She was already waiting on the couch, in between the nursing mama and the wife of our host, one of the 6 women he had summoned to the corrugated metal […]
In Honor of Women’s History Month, our March theme, “Women of Valor,” is dedicated to Rachel Held Evans. In 2012 Rachel Held Evans published The Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master.” In its pages, she gave us a […]