God called me into women’s ministry in 1974 at a Winsome Women’s Retreat in Warsaw, Indiana. I was 18 years old and newly married to my high-school sweetheart. I clearly remember that day. I was a baby Christian, however, and it would be years before I fully understood the calling and became immersed in that…
We are told that in the beginning, God brought something out of nothing. Out of silence and darkness, out of ponderous expectation, came forests, waterfalls, and antelopes. We are then told something more amazing—that humankind bears a unique likeness, endowed with the Creator’s ability. In my day-to-day life, I doubt this to be true, until…
Wedding Ceremonies usually happen in a church or with a minister. The celebratory union of two lives is blessed by God, sealed by vows, and witnessed by family and friends. In contrast, divorces happen in a courtroom with a judge. There is no blessing, a gavel seals, and few witnesses attend. Society’s exaltation of love…
I can link many of my insecurities to my parent’s divorce. I can also link many of my greatest blessings, including my husband, to my parent’s divorce. It’s one of the juxtapositions that cause us to lie awake and ponder the healing grace of our God. When I was eight my parents told my brother…
There were two fears I carried early in life, two circumstances I begged God to never allow happen: losing a child and divorce. I’m not quite sure why those two particular issues scared me as they did—maybe because I’ve seen the devastation loss like that creates in life, the aftermath of the destruction, and the…
My personal library is full of books on how to deal with difficult people. Pages in these books are dog-eared so that I can easily find sections in times of crisis. Sentences are underlined multiple times for emphasis, and exclamation marks and notes fill the margins. The humbling part of reading these books is recognizing…
Someone may see me in passing, take a glance, and ask, “Where do you come from?” Depending on my mood, I may answer, “I’m from Seattle,” then walk away. Or, if I feel like disclosing more information, I may answer, “My parents are from the Philippines, but I was born here.” It used to bother…
It was another typical hot, sunny, Southern day. I felt the red clay beneath my feet heating up like hot coals. We were outdoors for recess, in a softball field, and no one else could hear the conversation, far out of earshot of the teacher on duty. My classmate turned to me, hatred and bitterness…
When you have a painful problem, what do you do? Some of us ignore it, and stuff it down deep in our gut. Some of us lash out at others, projecting our ills onto them. Some of us become workaholics, thinking if we just work harder and faster, then we can somehow overcome that irksome…
My husband and I process conflict from opposite ends of the spectrum. When I’m angry, I become a hedgehog who curls up in a ball and tries to become invisible. He morphs into a loud, intense rhino with defensive tendencies. Without really being aware of it, we were following the same broken patterns that our…
When I was invited to join an online panel conversation about race, mutuality, and community, I wasn’t sure what to expect. All five panelists and our moderator were at least loosely part of the same Anabaptist blogging community, so we shared some basic understandings about Christian discipleship as following Jesus, the church as a gathered…
It started out like any other day. I worked in a small National Tea Grocery store. It was Friday and the store was pretty full. The time would fly when we were busy, and that was fine with me. Other than a “price check,” it was business as usual. Or so I thought. I remember…
We unthinkingly live the narratives that we are raised with or we rail against them. When you are the parent, you craft the stories. As our children move toward adulthood, we often miss the necessary shift in order to have robust and respectful relationships with these adults we have raised. What does it mean to…
“I want to keep it handy in case I need it,” she said, matter-of-factly. She wasn’t talking about a flashlight. Not a package of tissues. Not a cell phone—they hadn’t been invented in 1978. She was talking about Isaiah 55. “I liked it,” she went on. “So I memorized it.” “Come, all you who are…