Jump into the Deep End
I decided to attend the popular girl’s party and overcome the fear of being an imposter. It was beyond anything I could have anticipated.
What “The Breakfast Club” and Redbud Retreat Taught Me about Belonging
With each conversation over the following two days —at meals, before breakout sessions, even standing in hallways—I bore witness to God’s abundant grace as each woman shared her good story and spoke hope others needed to hear.
I Don’t Have the Margin to Write Alone
Uniting with others around the desire to honor Jesus with our creativity established a new refrain: I don’t have the margin to write alone.
A Slowness to Let Go
The poem “Mourners” by Ted Kooser,1 about folks meeting at a funeral, ends with the following lines: They came this afternoon to say goodbye, but now they keep saying hello and hello, peering into each other’s faces, slow to let go of each other’s hands. In this poem, we see the longing of the mourners to…
The Benefit of Sharing Our Poetic Words
How would you describe the summer of 2020? What images and words come to mind? For me, I see my fingers curling around a cobalt blue pen, my knuckles dried out from floods of hand sanitizer. I’m sitting on a bench by a local river on a sunny June afternoon. A few days before, the…
You’d Do the Same for Me
We’ve been invited to a church member’s home for a meal just three times in three years. As an accidental experiment in the Colorado city where we moved three years ago, we visited 17 churches, landing at 2 for about a year, 3 for a month each, and visited the others once or twice. Not…