How Sweet the Sound

A box sits in the corner of the fellowship hall at church – a milk crate labeled with a laminated page that reads “Lost and Found”. The box overflows with forgotten things gathering dust. Every once in a while someone will empty the contents onto a table with the vain hope that the sippy cups, […]

The Growing Uncomfortable Edge

I am untethered, unmoored, unrecognizable to myself. My husband passed away in a hiking accident, and life is altered on every level.  I feel disoriented, trying to make sense of my disassembled life—like lying on the couch and watching TV sideways.  Everything has changed, and my brain has yet to catch up to it all. […]

A Creed

Click below to hear Rebecca read her piece.   We Believe in God the Father, Almighty Creator of Heaven and Earth –  We jumped in feet first – followed quickly by heart and head  – 15 years ago now – and said yes to a church plant. We said yes to building community around a […]

Announcing our Fall Themes!!

We need your voices! This September, The Mudroom is launching a four-month series titled “Lost & Found: Stories of Belonging in a Bruised and Broken Body.” We desire to amplify the stories of those who’ve ever felt unseen, untethered, or set adrift from the Church—and those who have found or are finding, their way back. […]

The Feast of Friendship

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 […]

We Were Never Meant to Walk Alone

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 […]

Seasons of Community

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 […]

Cloud by Day (Fire by Night) 

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, […]

The Beauty of Community

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 […]

A Spool of Thread and a Piece of Pie

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 […]

Love Justice

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 […]

Stumbling to Stability

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

This Open Table

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 […]

The Stories We Make Up

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 […]