by Michelle Stiffler | Jan 6, 2024 | Literature
Eugene Peterson’s Run With the Horses found me the summer of 2021, a few weeks after an emotional meltdown on the shores of the Florida Keys. Our family vacation had been too long and too full. Tension was high and being the family thermostat, I was over it. The sun...
by Michelle Stiffler | Dec 1, 2022 | Lifestyle
I wake to two of my favorite things: a cup of coffee on my nightstand and a sky warming for the sunrise. Gratitude should be first on my mind, but in the split second between sleep and awake, my mind rests on an unsettling word: depersonalized. Indicators of burnout...
by Michelle Stiffler | Sep 1, 2022 | Spiritual Growth
Rain drove me to the desert. Years of rain, actually. I’d grown up under gray Midwestern skies that lasted weeks in a row during winter and spring. And fall. Recess was soggy grass and slick playgrounds, a purple raincoat and foggy glasses. At fourteen, we moved to...
by Michelle Stiffler | Mar 1, 2022 | Faith and Culture
I grew up in a central Indiana trailer park that smelled of antifreeze and the continuous waft of a neighbor’s cigarette. A half-charred trailer leaned at the park’s entrance, a monument to the short-lived relationship between fire and manufactured homes. All my...
