Books Can Keep You Stitched Together

The first book to ever hold this type of “keepin” power for me was, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I slept with this book under my pillow every night. I was even willing to pay the “lost” fine fee that my middle school library would eventually charge me for not returning it. […]

Spoken Blessings

When my twin sons accidently caught 17-acres of land on fire while filming a World War II movie with their high school friends, it wasn’t the scorched trees I remember most. Or the helicopters flying over head to drop water. Or even the news stations capturing the flames on camera. It wasn’t the shots of […]

Hurdles to Healing

I have never been a very good runner. In the short time that I tried to run, I was pathetically slow, did not have very good form, and managed to injure my ankle. That is mainly the reason why I find the Bible’s beautiful running metaphors to be about as effective as the ones about […]

The Waging and the Waiting

This essay is an excerpt from the anthology Soul Bare: Stories of Redemption published by Inter Varsity Press in August 2016. In 1977, my mother left my brothers and me with sitters to go looking for an apartment and didn’t return for days. When she finally did, after what most people considered a “lost weekend,” my […]

The Mast Year

We have an acorn problem. That is a total understatement. We are currently being held hostage by a number of acorns I previously did not believe was possible to be shed from one oak tree. The sky is literally falling. After a few months of scratching our heads and wondering if our beautiful oak trees […]

Joy in the Pain

I sat on my couch listening to the words of an “oldie but goodie” song that I love. “Joy and pain, like sunshine and rain…” I had been dealing with a lot of anxiety, fear and just the craziest up and down emotions. I wasn’t feeling my best and I really didn’t know why. Well, […]

One Small Square

The sigh was collective. Weighted with a tangible disappointment it was all we could do to make space for it as we gathered after class one day. Numerous stories of police violence against Black women were being highlighted within the national consciousness and our emotions were all over the place. Female members of the student […]

Straining for the Light

For a long time the threat of a new year brought with it an onslaught of more darkness, more enervating melancholy, more long, gray days ahead to suffer through. It was nothing to celebrate.  At the end of one of those especially difficult years I met Alece Ronzino online. She too had experienced a year (or more!) like […]

Cast Off Your Chains

Cast off your chains, my friends, the ones that have been weighing you down. On the left wrist, the chain reads “try harder” on the right “do better.” Wrapped around both ankles is the chain of “you are not enough,” it is held together with the links reading: “should.” I should be thinking this, feeling […]

I Know Why They Chose to Sink

I came across a journal the other day with one of the only poems I’ve written in more than a decade. My college years were spent between literary criticism, philosophy papers, and procrastinating by writing poetry. But after life got increasingly full and more complicated, I let verse fall to the wayside. That fullness quite […]

Who Sees You?

I took an art class as a college elective. The first assignment challenged me to communicate the divide between who I was and who I thought I was supposed to be using only a black marker to draw basic lines and shapes on a four-inch square of white paper. As I brainstormed ideas in my […]

The Places We Are Pierced

“Wondering what it means to follow a God who points to his scars as a sign of resurrection.” – Antonia Terrazzas It is the Thomas part that they always harped on in Sunday school. Thomas, the guy who was doubting, the guy who didn’t believe. It was not the Jesus part, and it certainly wasn’t […]

Dead Stone Come to Life

When I think of resurrection, I think of a stone on my kitchen counter. I picked it up at the beach last year. It’s smooth and gray, like most of the rocks on the beach, with one difference: The holes. One hole pierces its middle. Two opened seashells lodge in another empty space like baby […]

Free Fall

  May 27, 2009. This is the day I learn I have cancer. Weird. I never thought I’d hear those words. I am still drowsy from anesthesia. The doctor just comes in, and she says, “Well, we thought it was hemorrhoids, but it’s not. It’s a tumor. It’s cancer.” Just like that. Now I am […]

Into the Storm

What happens when you vow to live awake and alive? What happens when you open yourself to the stir of Spirit symphony? What happens when you become an active participant in your own destiny? What happens? Excitement. Fear. A massive upheaval. In a word: Storm. I was going to keep a secret about this. My […]

Surviving the Storm

I recently watched (read: sobbed through) an interview of a woman whose children were killed in the Tornado that savagely tore through Arkansas last year. One minute their hands were clasped together in the living room, the next she was face down, pantless, and severely injured, lying in a field of nothingness. But when she […]