An Open Letter to My Fellow Up-ended Missionary
Dear Friend, First I want to just sit with you for a minute. I may not know what’s happened for you, but I know the ache. I am sorry you’re in this place. So, so sorry. It’s ok to feel breathless. Life just knocked you onto your back. And it’s right to grieve. You’ve lost something precious. Maybe your dreams, or your security, or your innocence. Maybe relationships, or your ministry, or even your home. Maybe, like us, you’ve gone over and over what you could have done to keep that Thing from happening (or what others should have done). But that road’s a dead end, because it happened. It’s done. And this place is where you are. I know how hopeless this place can feel. It hasn’t been too many months since my family was struggling to regain our footing in the wake...
Read MoreLighten Up
I just turned forty, and it feels like a deep sigh. There’s something about beginning a new decade that hits a reset button. My thirties were a time of gathering – living new experiences, picking up pieces here and there to build a life and make a home for my family, taking hold of my own identity and passions. As I’ve entered my forties, I’m finding that it’s a time of laying down – a time of sorting through my possessions and heart to put aside extra things that weigh me down. Having given away or sold most of what we owned before we moved to Papua New Guinea for a time that ended up being much shorter than planned, my family has had a chance to start fresh. When we moved back into our house last month, beautiful people came around us like a rising tide and...
Read MoreFar As the Curse is Found
We drove home from Ohio the other night. The air smelled like winter, and strings of lights hung like halos around picture perfect houses, but there was something not right hanging low on the western horizon. Smoke. There are these places burning in the Appalachians. Memories and plans burning to the ground, and the hungry fire roars on. There are these songs on the radio about how all is calm and all is bright, while the flames turn beauty to dark ash. There are these toys in store aisles, and there are these parents burying children taken out by a madman on a school bus. There’s this woman, this sweet friend with a brilliant smile, who just heard that her cancer is back and growing fast. And there’s this husband and son being brave and working hard to make...
Read MoreOpen Letter to the Man Who Holds My Hand in the Dark
Dear Man of Mine, A couple of months ago when we were at a friend’s wedding, I stood in the fellowship hall before the ceremony wrapping the stem of the bride’s bouquet with a white ribbon, silk over thorns, and I thought. I thought about the day sixteen years ago when we stood, bare toes on rough carpet in a plain little sanctuary, and you held my hands as we made promises for better or worse. Someone had put red glitter in the foot washing water, and the pictures took so long that all the food was gone by the time we made it to the reception, and it didn’t matter one bit because I had you and you had me. And a couple weeks later we sat in the car by a pond and talked about all the things we didn’t know yet. And it’s true. We didn’t know what was coming. But you...
Read MoreThe Broken Body
A few weeks ago I went through some testing for several autoimmune disorders. The tests eventually came back normal, but while I was waiting for the results, I started hearing story after story from people who were living with everything from lupus to rheumatoid arthritis. When a body starts to attack itself, it’s not a pretty thing. Something that’s supposed to function as a unit starts to have all kinds of issues when it turns its weapons inward. We Jesus followers are intimately familiar with the ugliness of internal conflict. We’re all a bunch of humans, with a tendency to act really human-y. We limp ungracefully along, looking more like the Bride of Frankenstein than the Bride of Christ. The Church, the Body of Christ, is a giant, complicated mess, with as...
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