Previously posted in March of 2020. What kind of women are women of valor? I think they are women who are courageous enough to use their God-given gifts, others-oriented, and are willing to buck the status quo to follow Jesus and bring forth goodness and justice. Right off of the bat, I think of St. […]
T.S. Eliot writes, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” I am forty-one and a half. And lately, I’ve been sensing that God is calling me, like the prodigal, to return to my senses—to […]
All day and night I’ve had a hard time breathing—barely able to catch my breath. My best non-expert, but been-down-this-road-before guess is that it has to do with anemia. I’ve had bouts of anemia with these same symptoms throughout my life. My body doesn’t absorb iron well (and we don’t eat a lot of meat […]
I have discovered that lots of pastors and church leaders frequent my favorite coffee shop. All of us patrons in the coffee shop are in close quarters. And so, if one speaks at a normal decibel level or even a bit loudly, the next table over and the one on the other side, will hear […]
Since the age of 23, I’ve been on staff at churches within a few different streams of Christianity and at a Christian university. I noticed that those at the conservative leaning Christian university where I worked were obsessed with sex. They talked about sex all the time—mostly in the sense of needing to avoid premarital […]
One of the wisest of human beings, the philosopher-king of Ecclesiastes, said, “For everything there is a season, a time for every activity under heaven…. A time to be quiet and a time to speak” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7b NLT). I have spoken. I have cried out again and again about some of the things which matter […]
We don’t know what we don’t know— unless our eyes are opened. A first realization: the cafeteria lunch ticket. It was on display for all to see when I handed it to the lunch lady. No way to be discrete. Its bright color marked me as eligible for a free lunch. Sometimes sheer embarrassment […]