A lovely young woman sits across from me in my small therapy office, buttoned up so tight it looks like she’s hardly even breathing. Her lips are pressed together as she carefully folds, then refolds, the Kleenex on her lap. Then she stops, looks up at me, and says, “If I tell you what happened,…
“All together now—applause for God! Sing songs to the tune of His glory, set glory to the rhythms of His praise. Say of God, “We’ve never seen anything like Him!” When your enemies see you in action, they slink off like scolded dogs. The whole earth falls to its knees— it worships you, sings to…
“…If we believed that even a little tree in our front yard is a miracle, we’d have to spend all day in gratitude to God. We’d have to pray without ceasing.” —Alan Noble Alan Noble, founder of Christ & Pop Culture, professor at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a…
Our hearts are restless, looking for connection in the most casual of places: a People magazine in the grocery store line or the trailer of an upcoming movie. In this entertainment saturated culture of ours, we spend hundreds of hours and dollars seeking diversion and amusement from the daily grind of life, searching for a way…
As a lifelong reader and writer, I’ve always been attuned to language, perhaps the same way a painter is attuned to light and color, or a chef to texture and flavor. The words we use, their resonances and layers of meaning, deeply affect me, making something like reading a poem exhilarating, while sometimes making life…
When I got the email, it felt like a slap in the face. A cold, disembodied feeling stole over me. All I could say was, “Oh.” My husband and I had recently been embroiled in a debate with our church over the role of women in leadership. With his full support and blessing, I penned…
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who lived in a snug wooden house deep in a forested valley. There was a shallow, rocky river across the dirt road from her front door with a rope bridge to Widow Pearson’s cottage downstream and an old brick bridge she liked to ice skate to…
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…
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…