Last summer we traveled to the home of my husband’s aunt in Tennessee. Her house is nestled in what we southerners call a “holler,” a term that technically refers to a small valley between mountains but which we use for a place that’s tucked down in the woods somewhere and hard to find without precise…
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When You Feel Too Unworthy to Serve
I remember the first time I stood up in front of a group of women to teach the Bible. My shirt was damp with sweat, and my voice wobbled into the microphone. My knees might actually have knocked together in fear. But it wasn’t fear of failure or of public speaking. It was fear that…
Gather Around the Word
It was awkward at first. A good kind of awkward, but still. We felt the oddness of forced intimacy while the four of us sat at our local small-town coffee shop, carefully offering thoughts on the passage of Scripture we’d studied throughout the week and aggressively sipping our coffee when the gaps of silence got…
A Long, Short Walk
Ordinarily I wouldn’t take a walk in the heat of July through the neighborhood with my two-year-old. But yesterday that’s what I did as we practiced hand-holding no matter what and not running into the street. What began as a short three-block walk to donate books to the Little Free Library was in actuality a…
Running Toward Godliness
I used to be a runner. I ran almost every day and planned my Saturdays around higher mileage long runs. I cross-trained on my days off and organized my family’s evening meals around what kind of run was on my schedule the next morning. I had all the weird accouterments that runners like to collect:…
He Will Be Strong in Your Weakness
When I took the stage, I was one hundred percent confident in my message. My new boots pinched a bit as I climbed the steps to the piano, but I was certain of the words I would speak, sure that the melodies wrapped around the truth of God’s goodness to us in suffering were the…
The Story of the Song: “Every Sky”
It was night. I stood on the sandy shore of a beach in Georgia listening to waves I couldn’t see crash on to one another in an effort to aid the rising tide. There was no moon that night, no sliver of reflective light to separate sky from water. I was standing in a dark…
My New Album: Hold Me Fast
My album, “Hold Me Fast,” released this morning, and I couldn’t be more excited to share it with you! I have a lot of weird, mixed emotions about releasing an album at almost-36 years old. I even wrote an article over at Seeking the Still about what it feels like to put my music into the hands of…
The Goodness of God in a Closed Womb
Her words were a sledge hammer to my future. “It is unlikely that you will ever conceive.” The doctor patted me on the shoulder awkwardly. Just like that, the future I had assumed and imagined ended in an explosion of grief. Raining down on me for the next decade were shards of dreams, double-edged fissures…
Simplicity and Front Doors
Dishes are stacked high in both sinks, spilling over on to the counter tops. Of course, there are also the stock pots on the stove, waiting to be scrubbed down. Trails of bread crumbs meander through the house, evidence of children who found the table to be too crowded with adult conversation. Hardened, dried spaghetti…