The Art of Filling
I can still feel the day I realized what real thirst meant. Not just the parch-lipped, sticky-tongued kind of thirst of breathing hard on a hot day or even the wobbly buzz of sweaty dehydration. This was something else entirely. When my youngest was a toddler, I had to fast for a while before a medical procedure. This wouldn’t have been a big deal if my daughter hadn’t silently shared a brewing stomach bug with me as a parting gift. Within a few hours after my procedure, I couldn’t even keep water down. I don’t remember much about the following 24 hours, but my husband tells me I don’t really want to. What I do remember is a blur of saline drips and frantic ER doctors trying to manage my crashing blood pressure – that, and for some reason I can’t explain, being...
Read MoreWhy We Need Forgotten Stories
A solemn little one-room church in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains has stood empty for nearly a hundred years. The doors hang in open, welcoming silence, the pews and pulpit still in place like they’re waiting for familiar voices to echo off the plank walls. There have been stories in this place. Generations of worship and weeping, baby laughter, passionate vows, and whispered gossip, all silent and forgotten. Even here, where thousands of tourists wander in and out every year, most of the stories will never be heard again. That’s true for almost all words spoken since the beginning of time. Few stories make it past a generation or two. Most words are born and die in quiet corners without ever finding a stage. Does that hiddenness make them less valuable? As a...
Read MoreThe Myth of Calm and the Better Peace
The tiny, tender leaves outside my window are dancing hard in an aggressive spring rain, whipping and twisting so much that I wonder how they’re holding to their stems. Rain brings life, I know, but this storm seems like a threat to new growth. Hold on, little leaves. The storm will roll by. You’ll be okay. I’m talking to myself. I know that rain-lashed feeling, the uncertainty whether my fragile unfurling will survive another downpour. It’s been a season of loss and change — beautiful, exhausting upheaval full of feelings too large to fit in my chest. In the past, I would have wanted to return to emotional equilibrium as soon as possible. Big feelings press and stretch in uncomfortable ways. A sense of steady calm seemed like a pleasant, respectable goal — even...
Read MoreWhy I Still Choose the Church
There’s a little white hilltop church in an Ohio mill town where everything used to be right with the world. In that sanctuary, with wooden beams stretching overhead and stained glass light laying like a patchwork quilt across my lap, I was known. I was Jim’s granddaughter, Jo’s firstborn, a kid who sang solos in the Christmas pageant and ate Mrs. Tillery’s homemade cookies in the basement with the youth group. The night I was baptized, my grandfather prayed a blessing over me. I don’t remember what he said, but his words wrapped my seven-year-old heart in settled safety, and I knew being a Christian was the best thing in the whole world. I didn’t understand then how Christians can fail, how we can tear into each other with gossip and accusations and silence and...
Read MoreThe Bible Makes Me Uncomfortable (And That’s a Good Thing)
I jumped off a cliff the summer I was 16. It seemed like a good idea at the time… until I was hurtling toward the water below. Let me tell you, water isn’t always a great cushion. Flailing like Wiley E. Coyote trying to run on thin air, I tilted back just enough that the force of impact dislocated my right shoulder. I didn’t know what was wrong. I just knew I couldn’t move my arm. Without my bones, muscles, and nerves laying where they were designed to, I had no feeling or function at all, not even in my fingers. As I struggled to hoist myself up onto the rocky bank, my shoulder snapped back into place. It hurt. A lot. And it took several weeks of rest, ice, and careful exercise for the ache to fade and my strength to return. There wasn’t a pain-free way to...
Read MoreAgain and Again
We’re in a season of some pretty big change in our house. Our oldest is leaping from childhood into the strange new world of college classes, car insurance, and grown-up decisions and responsibilities. And for the first time in his ministry career, my husband is serving primarily adults instead of teens. He’s upgraded his goatee to a full beard and his office décor from a plunger in a vase (seriously) to coordinating wall art and real, live potted plants. I love my new role with Wycliffe Women of the Word – like really, really LOVE it – but after years of homeschool and coffee dates and leading Bible studies and writing mostly whenever the whim hit, it feels weird to have deadlines and an editor and a swanky new podcast on the horizon. (I told my unendingly...
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