Blog
Sequins and Gratitude for the Small, Ordinary Details
Both of my children are competitive dancers. They dance year round, but starting in the late summer they meet with their teammates beginning a schedule of jazz, ballet and choreography to prepare them to compete in the spring. Like other athletes they discipline their...
Book Review: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
I have always loved historical fiction for the way it transports a reader into a time and place, making what you read about in school seem real and tangible. However, over the last year or two my historical fiction reading habits have changed. While I used to love...
Deep Listening in a Culture That Wants Fast Fixes
My first call in ordained ministry was to a congregation that was planning on going multisite a few months after my arrival. Part of my portfolio was to create, implement, and evaluate a small group ministry from the ground up. To create a ministry where one...
Book Review: This Tender Land
I don’t know if it’s a remnant of being a voracious reader as a child consuming Rold Dahl books about children cast away by adults to creatively discover who they are or The Boxcar Children camping and foraging in a railyard but I love an epic “clever kids on a heist”...
Why I Am Only Attending Essential Meetings
I joke that in the past month in addition to being a ministry consultant, writer, mother and spouse I am now also the principal, gym coach, cafeteria worker, guidance counselor and two grade level teachers at our new home school set up. But really, it’s no joke. This...
Grief Brain and Holy Week
I don’t know about you, but I have some serious grief brain right now. I am forgetful, less productive (that could also be the whole homeschooling two children thing), easily fatigued yet sleeping less, easily overwhelmed when I am generally resilient and anxious. I...
To Find a Steady Center: Maya Angelou
When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around...
To Find a Steady Center: Denise Levertov
In this dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all. -Eye Mask by...
To Find a Steady Center: Osip Mandelstam
And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear, Myself I stood in the storm of the bird–cherry tree. It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self–shattering power, And it was all aimed at me. What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth? What...