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 […]

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 […]

Emmanuel and Showing Up

The first few days of Advent, I felt irrationally angry. I tried to call it irritable or easily annoyed, but when I sat down to dig through it all what I found was anger. Advent is an invitation to the waiting, and frankly, I would like to decline. No thanks. Can’t come. Wish I could […]

Singleness & the Myth of Scarcity

“I’ve never known a love like this.” The refrain often found below posts of diamond rings and starry-eyed kisses. A declaration in the midst of thoughtful vows said in white dresses with peonies as far as the eye can see. “I’ve never known a love like this.” Printed on picture frames with tiny squishy baby […]

The Math of Friendship

Math has always been my hardest subject. I still count on my fingers and only know my times table by rote. If my life depended on solving a quadratic equation, I would be absent in the body and present with the Lord. But no math vexes me quite like the math of friendship with my […]

Why Didn’t You Call Me?

I never need to call #SQUAD in a crisis. They’re already here.   Every single time life takes me to the gates of hell, I remember that I haven’t yet determined effectively how to clone myself. Each time, I thank God for Grace, since I never need to know how to do it all.  This is […]

A Letter to My Muslim Sisters

I don’t remember your name. I do remember your laughter, your patience when you helped me with my pronunciation of sounds that are difficult for the English-trained tongue. I never saw you again after our college Arabic class ended but the look in your eyes has remained with me all these years—the fear and sorrow […]

There Are No Experts

I listened carefully as the man in the center of the room, a well-respected black civil rights activist, shared about his years of experience in community organizing and advocacy. Then he said a word that made my insides clench in shock: “Orientals.” I hoped it was a slip of the tongue. Surely a longtime native […]

Witnesses to Our Rebirths

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. -1 Corinthians 13:12, NLT I don’t recognize her anymore. Her short hair […]

A Bridge to Span the Divide

It almost ruined our friendship. A cancerous disagreement gained cells every day while it remained unspoken, avoided, skirted in conversation. The longer it remained buried, the bigger it grew, until it could no longer be ignored. Through tears, we hashed out our grievances, listened, apologized, and contended for hours over the phone and in person, […]

Selling Out by Settling Down?

Like Belle, I never planned to live a provincial life. I, too, wanted “adventure in the great, wide somewhere.” I wanted it more than I could tell. But today we bought a house. An ordinary, provincial house with a two-car garage and a Whirlpool dishwasher. As we walked out of the title office, giant trees […]

Becoming Gap-Bearers

There comes a point at which we stand in the gap, with and for each other, when we can’t bridge the gap ourselves. We get sick, in body and in head. Our schedules are eaten up by deadlines and assignments and responsibilities – by all the Really Good Things we’ve said a hearty “yes” to. […]

Friends for a Season

I see them smiling together on Facebook, their photos gleefully captioned “Mom’s Night Out!” as they escape their kids for wine and pedicures. They comment on each other’s throwback Thursday pics, poking gentle fun at the teased bangs one had peeking out from under her graduation cap. I imagine they wore the matching heart necklaces […]