Not all stories need to be told on the public stage. My story first needed to be told in a therapist’s office. Lying on the couch in my living room. Crying with my husband. Punching my pillow. Breaking glass on a country road. All stories, however, need to be told; we need to be known;…
My mother gave me the sex talk in fourth grade, only after my public-school teacher had shown the class an educational video on the topic, to my evangelical parents’ horror. So, to correct my public school’s overreach, my mother planned an excursion for her and me: she would perform her due diligence as a good…
Before I moved overseas as a missionary, I learned a phrase guaranteed to help with those inevitable collisions with my new culture and the way they did things. “It’s not wrong. It’s just different.” That one-size-fits-all saying worked for everything. I whipped it out when I wondered what my adopted country had against nice, orderly…
As part of an English unit in junior high, I was assigned to debate a fellow classmate on the issue of abortion. Relieved that I was able to take the “pro-life” side, I delved into reading and research and pulled up the science that supported life inside the womb. A good exercise would have been…
“In a world so torn apart by rivalry, anger and hatred, we have the privileged vocation to be living signs of love that can bridge all divisions and heal all wounds.” – Henri Nouwen Every breath of air is rationed by the excessive amount of people in this room. An elbow pokes close to my…
“If you’re offended when you look on your Facebook page, and you see someone call Hillary Clinton or Maxine Waters the b-word or the c-word, you should be equally offended when you see someone call Ivanka Trump or Ann Coulter those words” – Dr. Brene Brown speaking at the Washington National Cathedral, January, 2018. These…
The first thing I noticed as I entered the auditorium was the pile of Ken Ham books. Titles like The Lie: Evolution screamed at me from the table while I tried to take in the scene. I needed to introduce myself to the speaker for that evening’s lecture, a biblical scholar presenting “Creation and Evolution:…
Los Angeles in December is beautiful to me. Sunny skies that backdrop the bustle of dense 405 North and South traffic along with cool nights that rest upon the city’s shoulders make space for just the kind of reflection my introvert soul enjoys. I spent six days in the City of Angels a few weeks…
The tables were all set with festive tablecloths and centerpieces, and light twinkled from votive candles as we awaited the arrival of our guests. Christmas was in the air. As more than 40 of our close friends gathered in the warm Florida December evening to celebrate the birth of Jesus, I addressed the group to…
I woke to the song of mourning doves. Their soundtrack seems a part of the landscape here in the Texas Hill Country, along with the buzz of locusts on hot summer afternoons and the chirp of tree frogs in the scrub that separates our home from a fairway often inhabited by golfers with a penchant…
Sankofa is a word from the Akan people of West Africa (primarily Ghana and the Ivory Coast). It is both a word in the Twi language and one of over a hundred Adinkra symbols used by the Ashanti people (one of many Akan subgroups). It translates to “go back and get it,” illustrated with a…
The blue lines on the pregnancy test appeared within seconds to form a bright, blue cross: we’d never done this before, but we knew exactly how to read it. I waved the stick with glee at my husband: “Positive! We’re pregnant,” I squealed. I looked down at the test again: our family was definitively plus…
I keep thinking about bodies lately. My own as I pick something I can control, scrubbing my kitchen floor furiously, convinced that keeping it clean can fix things, change things, make things better. I think about my mother-in-law Nancy’s body, beginning its swift descent back to the earth. I think about what it means to…
Trail of rain pulls down the sky like tufts of seagrass before a storm. A shift in water’s hues—silver to steel to aqua. Drops fall through tree branches, splattering my porch roof, the yard. I tuck my arms into my sweatshirt, huddle my body warmth as close as possible. This is the underside of autumn,…