Lessons from My Best Friend Leaving

Today my best friend left. She loaded her things into her SUV and began a 25-hour journey away to join her soon-to-be husband in Colorado. We’ve been close friends for about three years, feeling like the only grown single women in our small town. Together we’ve weathered the storms of shared tears and laughter about […]

Breakaway Rising

I was fiercely fighting in forcing myself to stay. To be the “bigger person” and rise to the occasion. But after nine months, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had to break free. And I was terrified it would be anything but a clean break. Tears flowed by the buckets that weekend, all because […]

A Clean Break from Technology

The thought came to me in Rome, sitting on a small balcony overlooking the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. The shell windchimes hanging just inside the window of the apartment we’d rented for a few days were tinkling on a soft breeze carrying the peal of church bells from across the Eternal City. There were […]

Clean Breaks

“He’s lucky, it was a clean break.” People say this sometimes when a leg or arm or ankle is broken. I teach high school and I am always surprised at how often my students end up injured, often seriously. “It was good that the break was clean.” How can a break be good? I’ve never […]

Dreaming Big

  I do my best dreaming in the shower. Not fairies and Ryan Gosling kind of dreaming, but world-changing and life-exploding dreaming. I started dreaming those kinds of dreams about two years ago, dreams that keep building on one another and making me ask, “Really, God, REALLY?” {Sitting here now I can almost hear Him […]

The End of Secrets

I am a blogger who is good at keeping secrets. Believe it or not. Even in this world of the overshare and the commodification of experience, even through two years of writing out my life, still: I’m like a vault. I have held on to certain things I do not tell, and I have kept […]

Welcome to The Mudroom

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 that sense of secrecy, the privilege of beholding a work of art before anyone else does, the camaraderie of common deadlines and […]