The scene is burned into my memory. It’s been fifteen years, but I remember the day I began to doubt God’s love for me. It was a Sunday. It was that window of fellowship after church just before people start heading home for lunch and naps. I stood in a circle of women, listening to […]
Every Sunday night we have movie and charcuterie night at our house. I slice up cheese and sausages, lay out crackers, pickles, dried fruit, and popcorn, and I put stacks of napkins on the coffee table in lieu of plates. Everyone puts on their pajamas, and we crowd around our snacks together on the floor. […]
(the following is an adaptation of a talk I gave recently at a women’s retreat) I grew up in the church culture of the southern part of the U.S. in the 80’s and 90’s. I like to joke that I lived in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Though I was raised in a church […]
Nothing has encouraged my relationships with other believers like praying consistently for them. I used to feel embarrassed by my often-offered platitude, “I’ll pray for you,” because I seldom followed through, and I knew it. When I did happen to remember to pray for someone as promised, it usually amounted to an awkward and rushed, […]
When I was fifteen years old I read a book about faithfulness that impacted me greatly. It was a novel, actually, and the main character had promised God when she was young that she would remain faithful to Him no matter what happened to her in life. Of course, the plot thickened with all these […]
When my husband and I first married, we had to work through that adjustment period of learning to live as one family unit instead of two adults independent of one another. With a vow and a ceremony, a white dress and a black tux, with a signature on a license and a lifelong promise, suddenly […]
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 […]
I was sitting with my back to them, the two young women sipping iced coffees and talking loudly in the quiet coffee shop. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could hear nearly every word of their discussion. Anyone in the shop could hear their discussion. I tried to absorb myself with my open laptop […]
There are 132 tiles covering the ceiling in my bedroom. It’s an old house, and when the addition was built several decades ago, the homeowners thought it prudent to tile some of the ceilings. Six of those 132 tiles still bear water stains from the spring of 2015 when we discovered our roof leaked. And […]
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 […]
