grace

  • The Things Logic Cannot Feed

    The Things Logic Cannot Feed There is a peculiar poverty in a life that has learned how to explain everything. We have become suspicious of mystery. We want to know why the child died, why the marriage failed, why the heart broke, why the stranger appeared at precisely the right moment. We dissect our suffering…

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  • When I Mistook Fear for Faith

    There was a time when I confused trembling with devotion. I was a shattered, self-destructive girl, forever sweeping up the glass of my own life, believing God was standing over me with a ledger instead of open hands. I knew how to run from Him. Then I learned how to perform for Him. I traded…

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  • We Pretend We Don’t Know Miracles

    We have a strange habit of explaining away the things that should stop us in our tracks. I have carried a needle full of Hepatitis C into my body. I’ve looked down the barrel of a gun. My heart quit beating at twenty-seven. We speak about miracles as though they belong to another century. As…

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  • The Strange Gift of Pain

    I spent years trying not to feel. Not just pain. Joy, too. Longing. Grief. Love. Wonder. The whole unruly mess of being human. I learned early that some feelings seemed too dangerous to touch. Trauma teaches you that. Addiction reinforces it. Before I ever put a needle in my arm, I was already looking for…

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  • Decency Without Courage Is Useless

    There is a kind of person modern society praises endlessly. The agreeable person. The one who keeps the peace, who tries to understand every side, who smooths the air in a room the moment tension begins to gather. They are thoughtful. Careful. Generous with the benefit of the doubt. And yet I have come to…

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  • The Audit

    The Audit

    What exhilarates me about Christianity is not that it comforts me. It does. But more than that, it challenges me. Exposes me.  The scale is so high of what Christ demands. God does not come to me like a therapist with a clipboard or a consultant asking for my preferences. He comes as the one…

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  • Heart Work Comes First

    Heart Work Comes First

    Some mornings it feels like my heart is its own little plot of land, stubborn and overgrown. Not a polished garden, just soil that needs attention and a woman determined to show up anyway. That’s the real work: tending what you’d rather ignore. I’ve learned that resentment grows fast if you let it. Neglect does…

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  • Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder

    I would love to hear from you! A Jewel: I’m reading through the book of Isaiah right now. It’s a bit of a hard read but I understand fully what Isaiah was saying in his time. He was a “piercing poet, who understood the two-sided nature of God’s character; mercy and judgment, grace and discipline,…

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  • Grace in the Ashes

    When one’s family of origin is a nest of suffering, it is as if life begins in exile, cast out from the warmth that should cradle the soul. The walls are soaked with weeping; the air hums with the static of unspoken anguish. A child born into such a place grows not like a tender…

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  • Somewhere along the road, we were told that to matter, we had to harden. That softness was weakness. That to succeed, we had to compete like men, speak like men, perform like men. And in many ways, the world rewarded us when we did. But something sacred was lost. Womanhood is not a costume to…

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