Dan was first to board the tube, and I herded the kids in behind him and then hopped on as the closing doors grazed my backpack and the British voice on the overhead speaker bellowed, “Mind the gap!”

The kids settled into seats, and I turned to Dan, who was standing in the aisle, holding on to a pole and studying Google Maps on his phone.

“What’s our stop?” I asked.

“Canary Wharf.”

I watched the overhead digital train map and counted the stops: London Bridge, Bermondsey, Canada Water, then Canary Wharf.

As we pulled away from Canada Water, I made eye contact with each of the kids, one at a time, and mouthed: “Next stop.”

All three nodded back at me in succession as they grabbed their backpacks and straightened their backs in preparation for the quick hop off. As our family filtered through the onslaught of passengers coming and going, Dan led the way, and I brought up the rear. Together, we hemmed the kids in and kept them safe.

This scene was typical of our family life as our kids were growing up.

We were present. We prioritized family and togetherness. We took our kids on adventures. The family formation was always the same whether we were on a bike path, a hiking trail, or a busy city street: Dan, at the head of the pack, was the trip planner and navigator. The kids were in the middle. I hemmed in the line at the back, acting as the rear guard to ensure no one was lost or left behind. We enveloped our kids with safety, protection, and love.

I cherished my spot in the back of the line where I had the best vantage point to take it all in as I watched my favorite people and counted my blessings.

On our many adventures, strangers on buses or footpaths encountering our family would strike up a conversation and encourage me to “cherish the moment.” If I had a nickel for every time someone told me this when my kids were little, I could’ve probably used the earnings to put one of them through college.

These strangers had a vantage point, not from the back, but from the future. One where there are no sticky hands that need to be held and no little ones to keep track of, but one where there is also a lot less energy, joy, and wonder. They’d give anything to teleport back in time just to savor the moment with their own kids a little longer.

There were certainly times on those family adventures when I wasn’t cherishing the moment. Being in the back of the family line was stressful, particularly in busy cities: making sure no suitcases got stuck in the gap as we were boarding the subway and counting heads regularly to make sure no kid got lost in the shuffle of a crowd. The constant vigilance was not something I necessarily enjoyed, but I cherished the little people I was looking out for.

Now that two of my children are legal adults and the “baby” is in her last year of high school, it’s harder to coordinate our schedules for family adventures. The kids often travel on their own or with friends now. One big kid is living abroad this year. Another is planning his wedding. The third just paid her enrollment deposit for a college out of state. Times are changing, and the family order is changing, too.

We made a trip in the spring of 2025 to visit my older daughter who was studying abroad in London. She controlled the schedule and the navigation, and Dan fell to second place in line. It was strange, yet beautiful, for us all to follow her lead.

On a recent trip to New York City, my son took over both my rear guard position and Dan’s navigation role. My son plotted the routes and counted the stops. He waited for the rest of us to hop on the subway, making sure no one was struggling to get a suitcase on the train. As we approached our stop, he’d catch my eye, nod, and mouth to me, “Mom. Next stop.”

He was taking care of me.

The family roles and the family formation had shifted.

All those strangers were right: the time went by so quickly, and I can’t get back the time that is gone. The moments were precious and fleeting. Our family roles are changing, and the five of us are about to become six.

But I like these changes. I like these young adults that my kids have become and are becoming. I couldn’t love my future daughter-in-law any more. Those long-gone days were the best days, but these are the best days too.

I don’t know what the future holds. I’m expecting there will be many more wonderful days but also grief and heartbreak mingled in, as life goes. For now, I’m counting my blessings and cherishing the moment, even as I wait for the next big shift.

I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me.

What if I insult his dignity by insinuating he’s not capable of handling things on his own?

Is he my responsibility?

Do I have a savior complex?

He’s probably fine.

I turned away and went to the next checkout line, but I kept turning my head and raising my neck to glance over and reassess the man’s situation. The effort it took for his shaky hands to drop bills and coins into the cashier’s outstretched hand squeezed my chest. I kept an eye on him as he slowly maneuvered the electric cart out the front doors. I decided to look for him when I left the store. If he still looked like he could use a hand, approaching him was worth the risk.

When I spotted him in the parking lot, he was near the wheelchair-accessible parking spaces, standing beside his electric store cart.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” he said, relief exuding from his voice.

His hand was shaking uncontrollably, and I immediately understood that he was unable to pick up the two plastic bags in his cart.

I grabbed the bags and moved them to the back seat of his car and then held his hand to steady him as he walked to the driver’s side door. Even while holding onto my hand, he had a hard time getting his feet going to take the dozen or so steps to his car. He would take a few tentative steps at a time, and then his feet seemed to be planted, unable to move.

When we finally got to the car door, he paused for a few moments and then admitted that he was unable to retrieve his car keys from his front pants pocket. He couldn’t figure out how to guide the shaky hand into the narrow slit of the pocket opening.

We hadn’t even exchanged names, but there was a trust that had grown between us in the few short moments we shared, and I offered to fish the keys out of his pants pocket for him.

When I placed the keys in his hand, he told me that he had fallen the previous day. He sighed and said, “It made me lose my confidence.”

I raised my eyebrows to communicate my surprise. I thought it was pretty courageous (and also dangerous and ill-advised) for him to be running errands by himself in his current physical condition.

I helped him fall gently into the driver’s seat, and then he smiled sweetly at me and said, “The people at Walmart are so nice.” I chuckled. He had probably never heard of #peopleofwalmart and had a totally different perspective of the big box store’s clientele.

As I shut his car door, I really couldn’t imagine how this man was going to drive himself home. I wished there was something more I could do to help him. I felt almost sick about sending him out on the roads, where his hands and feet might not react to a road hazard in time.

Later, I regretted that I hadn’t encouraged him to not drive. I prayed that he, and everyone in his path, made it home safely that day, and I hoped that I hadn’t made a mistake in letting him go.

I’ve been thinking about this experience from a few years ago a lot lately, as I have been grieving “the wrong” that “seems oft so strong” in my Father’s world. When I helped the man at Walmart on that Sunday afternoon, I didn’t do anything particularly heroic or unusual. I’m observant and a “noticer,” but I simply did what any other decent human being would’ve done upon crossing paths with a needy, elderly individual at Walmart.

Yet, in a world where human decency is on the decline, showing empathy feels revolutionary.

Maybe the most radical, counter-cultural, and influential thing I can do at this moment is to notice the people around me more and take more opportunities to offer neighborly love to strangers.

Maybe it’s the antidote to a world turned upside down.

My pastor frequently reminds us that we’re all just trying to help each other get home.1

We’re fellow pilgrims on this journey of life-–”wayfaring strangers,” as the song goes. We’re frail and needy travelers. We make mistakes and take wrong turns. Every one of us has griefs, burdens, and insecurities we’re carrying on our backs. Many of us feel lonely, disconnected, and invisible even when we’re surrounded by other people.

“Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asked Jesus.2 What he really wanted to know was, Who am I responsible to love as I love myself? Who are the people that I’m supposed to help get safely home? Jesus taught the lawyer in the parable of the Good Samaritan that true Christian love is radical because it notices the needs of outsiders, foreigners, and enemies, and it doesn’t pass by and say, It’s not my problem. He’s not my responsibility. He probably brought this on himself.

It stops to help.

I can’t carry the weight of the needs of the world right now. It’s too heavy a burden. But I can help a needy man in the parking lot at Walmart. Some are able to carry more, or different, loads than I can. But I can do a better job of noticing others. I can look for big and little ways to lend a hand to my fellow travelers who are struggling on the journey, especially to those who are being overlooked by the modern day “priests and Levites.” And if a butterfly flapping its wings in India might eventually precipitate a tornado in Iowa3, maybe my small deeds will create a ripple too.

Let’s help each other get home.

“I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

— Stephen Grellet (1773–1855), Quaker missionary

“The righteous are willing to disadvantage themselves to advantage the community; the wicked are willing to disadvantage the community to advantage themselves.”

• Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 1-15 (Grand Rapids, 2004), p. 97.

I created an Evite that looked like this:

I invited 24 women of different ages and stages, and 15 came. I purposely tried to choose friends from my various social networks who are simpatico in their reading choices.

We started out by mingling, drinking and eating. Eventually I gathered everyone in a circle in the living room, and we went around saying our names and answering an icebreaker question. The question I chose was, “If you could have dinner with one author, dead or alive, who would it be?”

After the icebreaker, we went around the room and each person read the description they wrote about the book they brought. Then we took a little 15 minute break to refill our plates and glasses and go to the restroom.

After we returned to the circle, we drew numbers and did a typical White Elephant gift exchange. The person who drew number one went first and chose a book to unwrap. After she chose a book but before she unwrapped it, we all tried to guess what book it was, based on the card’s description. For each person who followed, she could either steal a previously unwrapped book or unwrap a new one. We decided together that a book could only be stolen twice, and after that, it was safe and secure with its owner.

There was a lot of variety of books that were brought, from memoir to poetry to spiritual formation to different types of fiction. The stealing component was really fun and brought a lot of laughs and good-humored banter. A few books were widely known by us all, and others were entirely new to the majority of the group. As soon as the first few books were unwrapped, we decided to start writing the titles down to send out to the group, because everyone wanted to add several titles to their TBR pile.

I think I chose the perfect time of year to do this: after the holidays and during a month when a lot of women feel some winter blues. The women who came were really excited with anticipation for the event, and everyone had so much fun that we hope to do it again in a few months—just in time to swap some good summer beach reads.

Let me know if you do something like this. I’d love to hear how you modify and adapt this idea to make it your own!

But I’ve had a dawning realization lately: I am, actually, a hoarder. I don’t hoard newspapers, clothing, or kitchen items.

Instead, I hoard resentments.

It’s as if I have a big storage unit located in my brain where I keep all the unresolved conflicts from my past. I might need this someday is what I tell myself.

Recently, someone hurt me. By itself, the slight was small, but the shelf in my resentment storage unit with that person’s name on it was already sagging from the weight of hurts that had been accumulating for decades. The undealt with resentments were starting to feel toxic to my well-being. When I tried to add the newest injury to the pile, the whole shelf with this person’s name on it collapsed. I couldn’t ignore the pile any longer.

I told the person we needed to talk. During our conversation, I brought them into my storage facility and showed them the pile with their name on it. The person looked at each item I held up and apologized for every charge.

Suddenly, those resentments I had safeguarded for years didn’t need to go back on my shelf. They were now garbage that was cluttering up my peace. I thanked the person for claiming the items, told them they were free to throw them away, and promised that I would keep shorter accounts in the future. It felt so good to be rid of that pile of dead weight. My honesty and their willingness to own the offenses brought freedom and healing to both of us.

My conversation with this person helped me clean up one pile of resentments, but, unfortunately, that was just one shelf in my mental warehouse. Name a person who has hurt me, and I can tell you the exact aisle and shelf where their resentment file is stored. Jane Smith? Ah, yes. Follow me over here to Aisle 2016. September. I have the receipts. I’ve told myself that holding onto resentments is important because the evidence might defend me from future harm.

Like hoarding tangible items, hoarding resentments is self-protective. It often originates in the place where unmet needs start to accumulate. A hoarder of items might hold onto possessions that felt scarce in her childhood. Likewise, a hoarder of resentments might have learned to minimize her own needs. Or she might hoard because the decision-making that is required for cleaning up and getting rid of items feels too overwhelming. When I feel paralyzed to speak up-–from the fear of being characterized as too confrontational or “not as sweet as she used to be”—resentments start to pile up.

One compliment I’ve received a lot throughout my life is that people perceive me as being “steady.” Hit me with either good news or bad, and my reaction won’t go too high or low. I’ll remain calm on the outside, but my “steadiness” is not so much a lack of strong emotion but rather an absorption of those emotions into the tenderest and hidden parts of me. I stash and stockpile my feelings for lots of reasons: to avoid conflict, to try to keep things from getting worse, and to give myself time to think before reacting. I figure I’ll settle the score eventually, but dealing with the problems sometimes feels too overwhelming, so I tuck them away. Meanwhile, keeping the receipts in my mental storage unit gives me a small sense of justice and self-righteousness.

I’m starting to realize, though, just how bad hoarding resentment is for my health and my relationships.

There’s a cleaning principle called the “One Touch Rule” or the “OHIO (“Only Handle it Once”) method. The idea is that you put things away immediately instead of setting them aside to deal with later. I like the idea of applying this rule to my mental storage unit. When a hurt comes my way, I need to deal with it right away, instead of squirrelling it away onto a mental shelf where it will only clutter up my life and steal my peace.

When I warehouse a resentment, I withdraw from the situation and the person who hurt me. While not everyone who has hurt me will respond as humbly and bravely as this one person did when confronted with my resentment pile, I need to be willing to ask those who can be trusted to help me deal with resentments instead of sending them into storage. I realize, though, that some people who have hurt me can never be trusted to go into my mental storage facility. Through the power of forgiveness, I can still let go of items that are weighing me down, understanding that the resentment is crippling me rather than protecting me.

I’ve started working on cleaning out the storage unit. So many items in there are just not worth holding on to. I hope to someday walk away from the warehouse entirely and to throw away the key, but for now I’m at least committed to not continuing to add to the piles. Clearing out the clutter feels really good.

Wish me luck.

In order to get my five miles in, I left the trail and ran through the adjacent Mountain Brook neighborhood. I marveled at the lush lawns, the stone entrance gates, and the multi-million dollar homes that looked like they were straight out of Southern Living magazine. Growing up in central Indiana, there was nothing like the affluence and social stratification I observed in Birmingham. I didn’t know the story of this community, but I suspected that such a peaceful enclave just outside the urban center of the city had come at a cost.

A few hours after I finished my run, I joined my husband, Dan, for lunch in the fellowship hall of the local church where he was serving as the guest clinician for the choir’s weekend retreat. As I worked my way down the food table, filling my plate with salad, grilled chicken, and roasted vegetables catered from Taziki’s, the pastor of the church was side-stepping down the other side of the table across from me, and I told him about my morning.

“You know,” he said as he pointed the salad tongs at me, “The guy they named that park after–Robert Jemison– was the architect of many of the white flight neighborhoods around here.”

Ah.

The serene and wealthy neighborhood had a human cost. White flight. Segregation. Racial inequality. Injustice. Some got stepped on while others climbed.

After lunch, Dan and I headed downtown to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. I wanted to visit the historic site where in 1963 four girls were killed in a racially motivated bombing that changed the course of the Civil Rights Movement. On the way to the church, I Googled “Robert Jemison white flight” to read more about Jemison Park and the Mountain Brook Community. Turns out, Mountain Brook is one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the entire country.

The first article I came across was written four years ago, and it gave me a glimpse of the cost that segregation and white supremacy have exacted on the community. One hundred years after the Mountain Brook neighborhood was built as a haven and an escape from racial and economic diversity, the local school district’s racial makeup is still 97% White, while the Birmingham City schools just down the road are 92% Black. Many residents in the Mountain Brook community have opposed diversity education in the classroom, even though Birmingham is still plagued with de-facto segregation.

As I thought about this lack of progress on the tour of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, tears streamed down my cheeks. While the bombing was a turning point in the Civil Rights cause, the cost was enormous: a house of worship terrorized and four innocent little girls dead. But how much progress has been made, what is the enduring legacy that Jemison and others like him have left behind, and how far away is the community from justice and reconciliation?

The accumulated cost that segregation and racial injustice have passed down is enormous, not just for those who are the target of injustice, but for those who benefit from it. When parents raise children in protective enclaves and leave them blissfully unaware of suffering on the other side of town, is this best for our kids’ formation as future citizens and community leaders? When children are raised to believe that social, economic and racial disparities are only the result of poor personal decisions and choices, how many beautiful, interesting people are our kids missing out on knowing and learning from? Getting outside of our social enclaves, listening to the stories of others, and teaching our children the lessons of compassion, humility and empathy actually make our lives all the richer.

When we close our eyes and ears to the needy, neglected, and mistreated, what happens to us? When we are the perpetrators of injustice, or when we perpetuate the legacies that were handed down to us, what is the toll to our souls? When we give our children the best we can afford but don’t pass down an inheritance of compassion, humility, and curiosity about people who don’t look like us, what is the cost?

Note: I saw Stephen Mangum’s series “Illusions of my Childhood” on display in the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama in the summer of 2023 and I was so moved. Most people I know who are in the racial majority are not overtly racist, but ambivalent about America’s racial past. They prefer to remain blissfully unaware of the stain and legacy that white supremacy has left on our communities. Mangum was raised in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era, and his work so powerfully juxtaposes the innocence of childhood with the racial brutality that was in the background of his life. To learn more about the artist and to see more paintings in this series, you can find his website at:

https://www.stephenmangumartist.com/

Isaiah 1:17a “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.”

No, it was, actually, months.

I’d be on my way home from the store, my brain would be on auto-pilot, and I’d start to drive to the old house.

In 2017 my husband and I sold the home my family had lived in for ten years. It was the house I brought my youngest baby home to. The house where all the kids learned how to ride bikes, how to read, lost their baby teeth, and spent ten consecutive Christmas mornings. It was the only house any of them had actually remembered living in.

We didn’t move far. In fact, our new neighborhood butted up against our old one. We loved our old house, but we wanted more space to accommodate my husband’s home office, my homeschooling paraphernalia, and all the kids’ musical instruments, lego creations, and craft projects.

We also hosted small groups from church and often had out-of-town houseguests. We wanted more space, and a house upgrade felt like a good investment. The problem was, we had put a lot of love into our old house, and we didn’t realize until we packed up our things and gave the keys to the new owners how much leaving our beloved home was going to hurt.

My kids had very different responses to the move. All three of them missed the creek in the backyard of the old house and the sweet neighbor kids who met them to play every day in the cul-de-sac. My oldest was excited to have her own room and was ready for a new adventure. The youngest liked the new house’s big basement where she could spread out her toys, but she missed sharing a room with her big sister. For my middle kid, who depended on routine and rhythms, the change brought deep loss and instability.

I missed knowing intuitively how to work the oven and which drawer to open to find a spatula.

It was the little nostalgic things that stung the most. In our old house, there was a false drawer front on the kitchen island, and the builder, for some reason, had put a hinge on the bottom of it instead of nailing it down. When you pulled the knob, the drawer face would flap open to reveal a solid surface instead of a hole for a drawer. The kids, over the years, had used the fake drawer as a secret mailbox where they would leave each other messages in sealed envelopes. When we were packing up the house, I wondered, “How will the kids leave each other messages now?” It was a sweet childhood ritual they would’ve eventually outgrown, but because there was nothing like a secret flap on any of the drawers in our new kitchen, we had to say goodbye to it early.

The new house was wonderful, but at first, it didn’t feel like ours. The house we were leaving had our fingerprints and memories all over it–the paint colors I had chosen, the fire pit Dan built by the creek, purple coneflowers and Black-eyed Susans in the yard that we planted and anticipated blooming each year, and light dimmers on all the overhead light switches, because we are “dim light people.” The new house, on the other hand, was filled with its previous owners’ fingerprints and ghosts.

My kids felt far away in bedrooms on a separate floor from my own. And that fancy chandelier in the entryway was beautiful, but it definitely didn’t feel like me.

It was going to take time to make the new house our own. To make it feel like home–our landing spot, the place that reflects who we are and our family culture. As we were transitioning from one home to another, I felt so lost.

During those first few weeks, I grieved. But I felt like a brat for feeling so melancholy about a house upgrade. My new house was big and beautiful. It wasn’t as if I wanted to change my mind and cancel the move. I just somehow wanted to hold onto both the new house and the old at the same time. The old house was a repository of a million beautiful moments and memories, and it felt like they went along with the house, like the window blinds and the appliances.

Meanwhile, because we didn’t have enough furniture to fill it, the new house was cavernous and empty. The walls were bare, and all the comforts of home were packed in boxes. In fact, one of my kids pleaded that he wanted to go “back home,” but he was referring to the house that now belonged to a new family.

I assured him, “We’re going to build new memories in this house, and someday you’re going to feel just as attached to this one as you do the other house. It takes a bit of time. But we’ll get there.”

I hoped I was right.

We often think that grief is associated only with death, but we grieve a lot of different kinds of losses: a broken relationship, loss of our health or a physical ability, leaving a church community, losing a job, or saying goodbye to a dream. Grief can be mingled with joy when a kid graduates high school and moves on to the next phase of life or when retirement brings desired freedom but also a loss of identity and purpose.

All of these different types of grief are real, and feeling sad about moving to a different house is legitimate and normal. But the move was not primarily a loss; it was mostly an opportunity–to build new memories, new traditions, and to maximize the potential of a new space.

As soon as we moved in, we chose paint colors that felt more “us.” We put light dimmers on all the overhead light switches. We kept Wayfair, Amazon, and Pottery Barn in business while we filled and furnished all the rooms. We hung family pictures and placed mementos on shelves and table tops. Outside, we planted a ridiculous amount of flowers and fruit trees that we could anticipate blooming and bearing fruit every year.

We started putting our fingerprints everywhere.

Little by little, we filled the house, not only with stuff, but with memories and special moments–Indian feasts and Quiplash games with friends and family; visits from friends who live in Kansas, Alabama, Germany, England, and Thailand; neighbors who drop by because they think of us at the apple orchard or the donut shop and gift-giving is their love language; birthday parties and high school graduation parties for two of our kids; and a Covid quarantine that gave us more of a sense of home than we could’ve ever imagined.

I think the fact that we were sad when we moved eight years ago means that we did something right while we lived in our old house. We loved it well and maximized the home we were blessed with.

And the good news is, I was wrong about the old memories staying with the old house. Somebody must’ve sneaked them onto the moving truck at the last minute. Turns out, we’ve still got them.

Do you know someone who is moving and could use to read this essay to help put words to feelings? If so, feel free to share this essay with them!

Share Meaning-Making

Pink and yellow hues in the sky reflected on the glassy water as my 16-year-old daughter, Jenna, and I took an evening stroll along the shore line to look for shark teeth. The evening was perfect. The breeze stroked our skin as we walked, and only a few families dotted the area we were walking. The atmosphere was bliss, and I was enjoying the sweet one-on-one time with my youngest daughter.

Until it all got disrupted.

As Jenna and I walked slowly along the tide line with the water lapping our feet, I heard a female voice calling in our direction something about “give…space.” I looked up and turned around to see who was calling and whether, for some reason, the person might be calling out to me.

I immediately saw a lady in a floppy straw hat and a black and white chevron dress several yards away who seemed to be trying to get my attention. She hollered “Give it space!”

Give what space?

I stopped in my tracks and looked around me apologetically. Was I in the way of some poor child trying to boogie board to shore? But as I scanned my surroundings, there was no one near me. The only thing anywhere nearby was a sandpiper, a few yards ahead of me, tottering on its stick-like legs and pecking into the sand.

I looked back at the woman with wrinkled eyebrows and scrunched eyes. By that point, she had jogged over to me. I asked, “I’m sorry?”

She began gesturing with her hands. “I was telling you to give the SHOREBIRD some space. The poor thing is FORAGING for food, and every time he starts to peck in the SAND, you keep walking toward him, so he scurries to get ahead of you again and again, and I can just TELL how NERVOUS you’re making him.” She looked over at the bird lovingly. “And it’s just BEAUTIFUL to watch him forage.”

She looked at me and waited expectantly for me to respond, but I still couldn’t process what was happening. All I could do was continue to look at her with my head tilted, eyebrows scrunched, and lips pursed. Surely I was missing something. Was she an ornithologist or some type of beach police-expert-authority who had been appointed guardian of the “shorebirds?” Was I actually doing any harm to the sandpiper?

I took another glance at the bird, who gave me a brief side-eye and then went back to pecking.

Thankfully, my daughter Jenna had more presence of mind and social grace than I did at the moment. She gave an understanding nod to the woman, smiled warmly, and said, “Thank you!” while I continued to be frozen with a confused grimace on my face.

The woman backed away, and Jenna and I cautiously moved forward on our walk, stopping and starting to make sure there were several yards of space between us and the sandpiper. I looked behind me a few times and saw “Beach Karen” (we’ll just call her “Karen” for no apparent reason, okay?) with her hands on her hips, chin up, and narrowed eyes directed at us as we cautiously crept forward. Eventually, the sand piper flew away, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I could stop hyper-focusing on not offending either the sand piper or the Chevron-wearing, self-appointed guardian of the shoreline.

As Jenna and I continued down the beach, I felt confused and flustered. Had I done something wrong? Had I been unintentionally reckless and selfish, walking along the shore with a disregard for wildlife? Did Beach Karen have a point?

I like to think of myself as someone who is very respectful of natural resources and all God’s creatures. I wouldn’t purposely do something environmentally disrespectful, but I know I’m not above accidentally causing harm. Because I’m a sensitive person who takes any rebuke seriously, I felt a twinge of guilt over the fact that someone had perceived the need to call out and correct my behavior. The walk that began with a search for shark teeth turned, instead, into an examination of my own respect for nature.

I tried to remain open to the rebuke and asked Jenna, “Do you think there was some truth there? Were we being thoughtless?”

Jenna assured me that the woman’s chastisement was invasive and unfair. The bird was fine. There was no chance we were going to harm it; we would’ve stopped before we got in its way. The rapid running and pecking that Beach Karen interpreted as “nervous behavior” was very typical of sandpipers. Maybe I didn’t give the bird the amount of space Beach Karen would’ve, but it was silly for her to confront us about something so minor. While she might’ve thought her confrontation was harmless to me, the self-introspection that it caused dampened my mood and left me feeling defeated.

“That woman obviously has a control problem!” I said to Jenna. And then, because I tend to empathize, I wondered what might’ve made her that way. Maybe she comes from a chaotic background. Maybe her mother was controlling. Maybe she knows what it’s like to be vulnerable, so she has a tender heart for vulnerable things. I could relate to that.

And then I wondered, How often am I even a little bit like her?

How often do I come across a little too strong, a little too condescending, a bit too controlling or all-knowing, in my attempts to be a protector, a defender, a reconciler? I can imagine that Beach Karen’s motivation is similar to my own when I try to over-manage the world. The ends seem to justify the means. But I was learning in real time what it felt like to be on the other end of a meddlesome rebuke, and it didn’t feel good at all. It put me on the defensive and made no positive impact on the bird’s quality of life. It just created more distance between me and the sandpiper, because now I was afraid I might create unintentional offense.

When Jenna and I turned around to head back the way we came, we spotted a huge, colorful parafoil kite whipping through the sky and swooping toward the ground. The young man flying the kite dug his feet into the sand as he squatted and braced his elbows into his hips to keep control of it.

As the kite made a sweep close to the ground, I said to Jenna, “That kite is powerful! It could take a person out!” Just then, I looked down the shore, and, sure enough, Beach Karen was speed-walking toward the young man. Elbows swinging, she was clearly on a mission to rescue the beach from all potential kite dangers.

What an exhausting way to spend a beach vacation, I thought. She’s taking joy away from everyone, including herself.

The sandpiper was fine. The young man flying the kite was fine, and everyone admiring the kite on the shore was fine too. I’m glad I met Beach Karen, and I hope that, in some way, my baffled response to her behavior impacted her as much as thinking about the interaction impacted me.

I choose to believe that Beach Karen has good intentions, but I hope she finds freedom from believing that she has to be everyone’s savior.

And I hope that for me too.

Side note: Apologies to all the nice Karens out there. I’m sorry your name has come to represent a certain type of person. All the Karens in my life are absolute gems. If you know a nice Karen, show her some love, tell her that we don’t think any less of her, and assure her that it’s ok to advocate for herself.

Although no shark teeth were found on the “Beach Karen” walk, Jenna and I managed to find twelve over the course of the week.

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