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 […]
community
Teaching Me Hope
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 […]
Rachel Held Evans’ Call to Valor
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 […]
Welcome to The Mudroom
This is the first-ever post written for The Mudroom, back in February 2015. It’s as relevant now as it was then! Back in the day, I used to write for Cornerstone magazine. The staff was a community inside of a community: artists, proofreaders, marketing, writers, mailroom. It was frantic and insane and glorious. I miss […]
Finding Quiet For Our Disquiet Souls
“I accept whatever He gives and I give whatever He takes.” – Teresa of Calcutta It’s not something you talk about in polite company—not being quite okay and being willing to admit it. When people ask how are you, they don’t expect an honest answer. I know; I’ve been answering honestly for months, unable to […]
Defining Warrior Faith from Bey to Z
Before I was a warrior, I differentiated between the secular person I was and the spiritual person I became weekly on Sundays. Sabbaths were for study, praise and worship, and a time to set those things aside in favor of regular life. That was before; I’m a big girl now. That was my first evolution, […]
How Not to Lose Your Footing on a Tilt-a-Whirl
I admit to being a bit spoiled: my husband hardly travels much for work anymore. Now, as a church planter, we practice staying put, putting down roots, being placed. (How else, can we plant an outpost for God’s kingdom if we’re always moving on?) But over the holidays, I sent him off on a plane […]
When Sacrifice Yields Life: Leaning into One Another
I got something really big, really wrong this year. It came out of a sincere desire to make a difference and what I thought was an ingenious invention. I love to leverage the offerings of concerned citizens (donors, activists, front lines service providers) to meet needs and fill gaps. For years, I have galvanized our […]
The Mystery of Breaking Bread
I’m sitting on the washing machine, finishing my coffee, waiting for the timer to go off. My Eucharist bread is in the oven. “This cup is the new covenant.” I’ve been hearing pastors and priests say that for thirty years, in little Baptist churches and at fabulous Catholic mass. Priests in robes, holding chalice and […]
Fighting for Community (or Fading Away)
I know what it must feel like to be a ghost. I am haunting the life I used to live but haven’t moved on yet, hanging out on the fringes of what I once called mine. I watch everyone around me go about their days as they always have but I am on the outside […]
A Reflection on Finding Community in the Church
“It’s hard to find community,” they say. I sit across from them at Starbucks or at my dining table and listen to them share about the difficulty of finding people they connect to, people with whom they can build a solid friendship and grow together in faith. “They” have been college students, single young adults, […]
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 […]
My Improbable Love of “Happy Birthday”
I should get bonus points when I surprise my friend Shoshana: she’s remarkably unflappable. If I’d told her I was getting a giant bat tattoo on my behind, she’d probably nod and say, “Oh, interesting.” But the other day on the phone, when I told her I love it when people sing “Happy Birthday” to […]
From Information to Transformation
I have worked in several organizations where personality tests were a common language, sometimes they became a default for conversation or the butt of many jokes. It was not uncommon to be able to identify strengths, introversion or extroversion or a myriad of other descriptors of one’s work, communication or social style. While this was […]
A Different Kind of Unity
Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn. – Richard Wright Nestled between the land masses we call Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, […]
The Comfort of Luminous Lights
“He is my God though dark my road He holds me, I shall not fall Whatever my God ordains as right To him I leave it all. Sweet comfort, sweet comfort Yet shall fill my heart” –Sandra McCracken, Sweet Comfort The past few years have been the most difficult of my life. I’ve been […]
When Compassion is Exhausting
The first year of giving a crap, that’s the exciting one. For me, it was back in 2009 and Twitter was a twinkly new toy and microgiving was a new buzzword and everyone had a birthday campaign. “This year for my birthday, all I want is clean water for a village, all I want is […]
Come Eating and Drinking, Come Hungry
In my father’s last days, his hunger vanished. As he shrunk like a hollowed out husk, his spirit being gathered by the very hand of God, his appetites died within him. The hospice nurse handed me a pamphlet about the stages of death and closed her palm gently over the back of my hand. “Fluid and food […]