Give God 5 Years

November 16, 2015.Reading time 5 minutes.

This weekend I was texting with a friend from MAPP class, who is also adopting. “Can you believe how much has changed in just a year?” I asked. At exactly this time last year, we were in our final adoption-licensing class. I’ll tell you more about the whole thing in another post, but suffice to say […]

Teaching The Cherubs About Faith

October 16, 2015.Reading time 10 minutes.

Once Steve & I met The Cherubs, we began thinking about how to teach them about faith. About Jesus, specifically, and the Bible, and why these things matter so much to us that we’ve built our lives around them. The first step, we thought, was to find a church, one that would (hopefully) become a […]

Praying

October 1, 2015.Reading time 5 minutes.

The other night a friend & I had a long conversation about prayer, and how weird it is when the challenge of your faith shifts: When it’s less about the fear that you’ll disappoint God, and more fear that God might disappoint you. I’m not in that season right now. But I’ve been there. And […]

Shalom Shattered

September 24, 2015.Reading time 12 minutes.

Last night I was going through documents on my computer, trying to bring order to the chaos. I found notes from a talk I gave a couple of years ago at a women’s retreat in Maryland, called “Shalom Shattered.” It stuck with me, especially after reading Sarah Bessey’s blog yesterday about how reluctant we are to […]

Three Books & What They Mean to Me This Week

September 23, 2015.Reading time 10 minutes.

It has been a fabulous reading week for me. I’ll tell you about three books I’ve loved, and then a bit about what I’m trying to do with what they’ve taught me. Consider it part of Project Stretch & Grow. (Which is not actually a project, but makes me smile when I think of it […]

The struggle to write about how I still have faith

September 18, 2015.Reading time 7 minutes.

Sometimes people ask me how I still have my faith after all that we’ve been through. I never know what to say. The truth is, I’ve been trying to figure that out for the better part of two years now. Memoir #3 is hopelessly bogged down in this quagmire, my narrative arc looking like a […]

The Remaking

September 10, 2015.Reading time 5 minutes.

It’s been an interesting week for me artistically. I’m listening to three songs from Nichole Nordeman’s long-awaited new project, The Unmaking. The basic theme is that sometimes God tears down all the things we build and leaves us standing there, wondering what to do next. Then He rebuilds in ways we never could have imagined. As […]

Why I Don’t Struggle With Forgiveness

September 9, 2015.Reading time 4 minutes.

I don’t struggle with forgiveness because the Psalms -particularly the ones scrawled by King David – are perfect for people like me who don’t get over things immediately or think loving thoughts of light and healing in the face of an ugliness and betrayal. The Psalms assure me that people who do wicked things? They. […]

Love for Accidental Saints

August 27, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

I know I rave about books a lot here – I tend towards the jazz hands side on the review scale of life (Which is essentially: Ballet = “I found this to be a quiet, but important, read;” Modern Dance = “this book is weird;” Jazz Hands = “OMIGOSH I WANT TO HAND THIS TO YOU […]

Book Review: Searching for Sunday

April 26, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

This might be the most growth I’ve seen in a memoirist from one book to another. In Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church, Rachel Held Evans (author of the somewhat snarky takedown of Fundamentalist Christianity, A Year of Biblical Womanhood), offers a heartfelt and achingly honest account of her attempts to reconcile […]