East Tennessee is grieving.

“I don’t usually get so emotional about celebrity deaths,” the shopkeeper said to me as he was ringing up my purchase.

“Me neither,” I replied as tears formed in my eyes. “This is different though.”

Of course he is talking about Dolly. We all are. Impromptu conversations like these are happening between friends and strangers alike across the southern mountains and beyond this week. School kids are wearing pink in her honor. Coffee shops have their Dolly playlists on repeat. Text chains lamenting her loss are being shared among friends. We are checking in on one another. What is most certainly a national loss is absolutely a regional tragedy.

I spent much of my childhood growing up in East Tennessee. If you’ve never lived in East Tennessee, you might not understand just how large Dolly’s presence looms there. She smiles down on you from towering billboards. Books from her Imagination Library fill your bookshelves. Somehow, you know dozens of her songs by heart, even if you don’t own any of her records. Dollywood is the ultimate vacation destination. If the two-room cabin she grew up in doesn’t remind you of your own house, it reminds you of a house just down the road. When she sang (whatever she sang), you heard in her voice inflections of the songs your family sung at church or the old tunes your granny would hum.

Outsiders looking in might observe Dolly’s life and think, “Sure…she seemed like a really nice person. Great singer. Great performer.” Others may balk at the way she presented herself to the world, call her cartoonish. I understand that. Her look isn’t exactly a style to which I personally aspire.

But I think there was always more to Dolly’s presentation than met the eye. I once heard an interview in which she was asked why she was always decked out in wigs, heavy makeup, and rhinestones. She told a story about a time when she was a little girl, and she’d gone into town with her family. There, she saw a woman with big blond hair piled on top of her head, bright red lipstick, and high heels. She said she thought that was the prettiest woman she’d ever seen. But the people around her told her that lady was “trash,” the town trollop, and they called her names.

I can’t help but wonder if when other people saw trash, Dolly saw treasure. She saw something she thought was worthwhile and beautiful and decided she didn’t care what other people thought. As if to say, “You think this is trash? Let me show you what this trash can do!”

Trash. Trailer trash. White trash. Hillbilly. Redneck. These pejoratives are so familiar in this region. We know that when outsiders look in on our rural mountains, many of them see aberration. Some see nothing but the struggles (and the stories city folks write about them). For many people, the land of hills and hollers Dolly called home is a nonstarter, a place that time, progress, and prosperity forgot.

Not Dolly. Dolly saw the region she came from as a treasure. When other people looked down their noses at her culture and deemed it no more than a cute curio, Dolly saw incredible potential. As if to say, “Oh they think we’re hillbillies?? Well ok then, let’s give ‘em HILLBILLY!” And she opened a theme park bearing her name that featured all the caricatures and kitsch of mountain culture. She made a fortune off people’s enjoyment of it, then she turned around and gave much of that fortune right back to the people to whom that culture always belonged. She helped kids from her hometown learn to read and go to college. She supported rural healthcare and helped build a new birthing unit just miles from that two-room cabin where she was born. She gave Sevier County fire victims money to rebuild their homes. She invested in the ecological protection of the mountains.

It’s brilliantly subversive if you think about it. She played the “dumb blond” and outsmarted everyone, proving herself to be the one of the most brilliant businesswomen of her time. She played the “dumb hillbilly” and then brought hillbilly music to the radio waves and into homes across the country. She made mountain folks feel like theirs was a culture worth celebrating, and she used the money she made off mountain music to address systemic poverty in the place she loved. Where other people saw trash (or primitive simplicity) she saw treasure (complexity and plenty).

I’m slowly working on a master’s degree in Appalachian studies, and in class the other day, we talked about how so much of the academic world of Appalachian studies is geared toward deconstructing stereotypes and disrupting tropes, assumptions, and nostalgia about mountain culture.

But our professor offered us a wise warning before class ended: Don’t ever lose the magic. Don’t lose your love for the mountains. In an effort to dismantle stereotypes, don’t lose sight of the beautiful idiosyncrasies and gorgeous cultural threads of this place. Celebrate them. Revel in them. In other words, don’t become crusted over with cynicism.

“Do you ever feel that you’re a joke? That people make fun of you?” Barbara Walters once smugly asked Dolly in an interview.

“Oh, I know they make fun of me!” Dolly replied cheerfully. “But actually, all these years the people has thought the joke was on me, but it’s actually been on the public. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

She went on to say: “I am sure of myself as a person. I am sure of my talent…I like the kind of person that I am.” And I think what Dolly wanted most for people, especially the people from her home, was for them to feel that same kind of confidence in themselves, for them know their own agency, to know their own strength. Contentment, if you ask me, is always subversive in its own way.

To the less sophisticated observer, Dolly may look like a purveyor of mountain stereotypes (and perhaps an affront to feminism). But those of us in East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and the rest of the Mountain South know she was a keeper of the magic. If she was “hillbilly” hyperbolized, she had every right to be because she was from here. If she leveraged the classic redneck iconography, she did so to get the world’s attention and then offer it a more robust, nuanced encounter with this place and its people. She was glamor on overdrive, proving that you can be both pretty and smart, cute and cunning, soft and strong, feminine and still a force to be reckoned with.

And somehow, she did all that while still being so…nice. Kind. Joyful. She proved that you don’t have to be mean or cutthroat to make your way in the world. If people take away nothing else from her life, I hope they see that a legacy of kindness will long outlast a legacy of power and control. Celebrating the beauty of people, just as they are, no matter what the world sees, was the consistent ethos of her life’s work. And it’s contagious. She made you want to love and celebrate people. To be nostalgic about the right things. To choose benevolence over bullying.

And so, East Tennessee (and beyond) is grieving. Truthfully, I’m still a bit mystified by my tears. I was never what you would call a super-fan of her music, and whilst in Sevier County, I always preferred a long, quiet hike in the woods to the crowds of Dollywood. I will always choose a soft flannel over rhinestones.

But somehow, Dolly felt like my neighbor. Or the lady who sat in front of me at church. Or the teacher teaching me to read. She felt like one of us. And she made us all feel special. She was a person who sang and performed for the sheer joy of it, an unapologetic delight in music. She reveled in her love for people.

And if you don’t get it, well….maybe the joke’s on you.

It’s a loss deserving of our grief. We will always love you, Dolly.

Don’t forget, my book Provisions: Finding Home through the Food Folklore of the Appalachian Table is now available for pre-order here!

When I first began writing about Appalachian culture and history, I did so with both excitement and caution. For generations, people have been writing about this region in ways that are reductive and agenda driven. They have relied on centuries old tropes and stereotypes: the dimwitted “hillbilly,” the clannish, Scots-Irish rogue, the “redneck” simpleton stuck in the past. And now, I’m seeing an Appalachian “vibes” movement online, as modernity-weary millennials and Gen-Zers embrace the nostalgia of a noble, yeoman past that supposedly persist in the hills and hollers of the Southern mountains.

Even the term “Appalachian” is fraught. I’m certain my Granny from Bakersville, North Carolina never referred to herself as an “Appalachian.” She simply thought of herself as a mountain woman. She was the daughter of a Viriginia coal miner, a farm wife, a schoolteacher. “Appalachian” as a collective identifier really only emerged in the aftermath of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and the Appalachian Regional Commission (an effort to reduce poverty and uplift the mountain society). Thus, the term Appalachian is beset by the defining images of that social and political initiative: derelict coal mines, barefoot mountain kids standing on bucolic cabin porches, and toothless old-timers chugging Mountain Dew in broken down trailers.

While those images were indeed captured in Appalachia, lawmakers and reporters neglected to document other aspects of the region that would have deviated from their compelling narrative of destitution. A new generation of Appalachian scholars and activists have now pushed back on these over-simplified accounts, highlighting the region’s resilience and diversity. Now the term “Appalachian” has become a reclaimed designation of pride and purpose for many.

Still, I use it with a lot of trepidation. Appalachia is a region that stretches from Central Alabama to Eastern Canada. Millions of people live here. How can a place and people so vast and varied be categorized and captured in one, simple term?

But we like simple terms, don’t we? We prefer to reduce people and places to a few common denominators and streamlined sound bites. We want to feel like we can wrap our minds around mysteries, brush off the people and places we don’t understand…to contain them, to set ourselves “above” them somehow. We assign monikers that are memorable and easily weaponized: “inner city,” Red State, Blue State, “flyover” country, the South, coastal elites, urban, rural, “the Bible Belt,” etc. We put these monikers in our memoirs and “think pieces,” knowing mental hyperlinks exist in our readers imaginations.

I wrote a book about the Appalachian table. And with every page, I endeavored to demonstrate that my story is just my story, and that every place and every group of people is chock-full of complexity and surprises. I wrote this in the introduction: “Appalachia is not a place to be parodied or pitied. Its people are diverse, demonstrating both hardiness and vulnerability, resilience and woundedness. My goal for this book is to celebrate Appalachia without fetishizing it, to honor the particular cultural contours that are unique to this region without ignoring the cultural outliers that make this place ever-bewildering in the most beautiful way. Appalachian food tells a magnificent American story.”

I hope you read the book. But, for now, I wanted to share a few guiding principles I used as I wrote it, convictions I fought to maintain (hills to die on) when it comes to thinking and writing about the mountains I call home. I posted them on Instagram last week, but here they are again with a few additional reflections:

Appalachia is not “another America.” It is not somehow apart or sequestered from the rest of the nation. Yes, our challenges are unique. The negative impact of extractive industries like coal and timber are particularly acute here. But they are indicative of the same greed, consumerism, and environmental neglect that plagues the rest of America. Likewise, our assets and opportunities reflect broader American assets and opportunities.

You don’t have to get out of the mountains to make a better life for yourself. Lots of people from Appalachia stay. Lots of people go. Some people leave and come home later in life. Our comings and goings are driven by all sorts of motivations, many of them quite personal and only sometimes related to the regional setting. The “impossible rise from Appalachia to Ivy League” is a compelling story. But it’s not an outlier (there are a lot of very smart, very well-educated people here). And it’s not the only path to a good life.

There is more diversity in Appalachia than people think. Race, politics, religion, personal values…Appalachia is not a monolith, and our differences can create tensions just like they do everywhere else in this country. They can also create a lot of beauty and innovation. Yes, there are some common cultural threads here that we celebrate: the importance of kinship ties, work ethic, love of land. But all kinds of people demonstrating all sorts of values live here.

Poverty doesn’t define Appalachia. There is no doubt that many communities here have been disadvantaged by extractive industries and predatory drug companies. But this land is wealthy in resources, culture, and generational knowledge of the land. The people here are not inherently prone to poverty. Many of the economic disadvantages have been imposed on the region by absent landlords and profit driven companies that have no interest in the long-term wellbeing of the region. Moreover, different areas of the mountains experienced these impositions disproportionately. The impact of coal was different than that of timber. Some areas (like Western North Carolina where I live) have benefited immensely from tourism and easy access to large population centers. These benefits come with costs (like being priced out by rising real estate costs). My point is this: you can’t paint the region with a broad economic brush.

Appalachians are not “yesterday’s people” (as the title of a popular 1965 book supposes). Yes, many traditional values and ways of life persist here. But a love and respect for the past doesn’t make mountain folks apathetic about the future. Appalachia is full of innovators who want a prosperous future for their children.

Appalachia is more than “Dueling Banjos,” cornbread, and moonshine. Now, I love and celebrate the traditional Appalachian arts like quilting, flatfoot dancing, and old-time music as much as the next person. But lots of artforms exists here, often shaped by both tradition and outside influence alike. Old-time music itself is a genre that emerged largely from the fusion of West African banjo plucking and Irish fiddle tunes. Punk rock, indie films, sculpture, ballet, fusion foods, comedy, poetry, video games…all kinds of art and creative work is made in these hills and it’s ALL Appalachian.

Appalachia is not just a vibe. It is vast and varied. And for many of us, it’s home.

Now, I didn’t figure any of this out on my own, and so for this week’s provisions, I’m going to list a few of my favorite books about the region that helped me arrive at some of these convictions (and hills worth dying on!)

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll

What You are Getting Wrong about Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll

Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon by Anothony Harkins

Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks

Uneven Ground: Appalachia sine 1945 by Ronald D. Eller

Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People by Erica Abrams Locklear

And one last reminder, my book about Appalachian food traditions (Provisions: Finding Home through the Food Folklore of the Appalachian Table) is now available for pre-order and will be on shelves November 10th!

PRE-ORDER HERE NOW!

I’ve sat down so many times over the last few weeks to write this email. I’ve stared at my screen as the minutes ticked away, deleted multiple drafts. How do you introduce a labor of love you’ve spent the better part of a decade dreaming of, working on, pouring yourself into?

It’s hard to know when a book is born…when the first inkling of an idea coalesces into a larger story and pen hits paper (or fingers touch laptop keys). They say authors write the book they wish already existed. But I think this book has existed in me since I was a little girl. Months after I signed a two-book contract for A Hole in the World and Holy Unhappiness, I was already sketching out chapter outlines for this book, putting piecemealed paragraphs in a Word document. I remember feeling guilty for “cheating” on the books I was contracted to write, wiling away the hours on a book that might not even have a future.

That said, if you’d told me when I was young that someday I’d write a book about food (complete with recipes), I’d laugh (and maybe cry) in your face. My relationship with food has always been fraught. As a millennial woman, I came of age during the height of the diet culture of the 90’s and early 2000’s. I spent most of my life avoiding the kitchen, fearing the indulgence of delicious food.

And if you had told me I’d be writing a book about Appalachian food specifically, I’d probably laugh again. What could be so special about mountain food? As I write in the book: “Appalachian cooking doesn’t exactly feature prominently in the high-brow world of fine cuisine or health-food forums. The Appalachian table is rumored to be sparse, set with unhealthy pork-fat drenched food made by simple, untrained cooks with limited resources.”

I first left the South when I was 18 to study in New York for my freshmen year of college. When I told people I was from a small town in East Tennessee, I heard plenty of jokes about missing teeth, kissing cousins, and Dueling Banjos. And over the years, if I ever told people that small town was Dayton, Tennessee, home of the Scopes Monkey Trial, I’d get more eyerolls about religious fundamentalists and hillbillies being stuck in the past.

When I say that this book has been in me since I was young, this is what I mean: I’ve spent a lifetime learning to be proud of the place I call home. And I’ve spent a lifetime learning to be proud of the body I call home.

When Tim and I finally settled down in Boone, North Carolina 15 years ago, and it became clear that I’d probably be calling Southern Appalachia home for the rest of my life, I set out to truly understand the place as best as I could, to reclaim my own heritage from the derogatory stereotypes and false narratives. My grandmother has roots in these mountains that stretch back before the Revolutionary War. The Blue Ridge is in my blood.

After my first daughter was born, the desire for rootedness (and the need for personal nourishment) became even stronger. I began reading Appalachian history books, combing through old records and family trees, learning old-time mountain ballads….and working my way through traditional Appalachian recipes (like soup beans, apple stack cake, and chicken & dumplings).

The cooking part proved to be the greatest challenge. The fear of fat and carbs I’d acquired in the 90’s was triggered by almost every recipe I attempted. Moreover, my grandmother (who’d moved away from Appalachia in the 1940s) hadn’t passed down any of her traditional cooking know-how to me. I was a novice in the kitchen (a place I’d often seen as a domain imposed upon women by patriarchal expectations). I spent those early years of my endeavor tossing out chewy cobblers, burnt pies, and dry, flat biscuits.

But over time (and with the help of lots of old-timers and resourceful mountain cooks you’ll get to meet in my book), my skills improved. As I sunk my teeth into my finally fluffy buttermilk biscuit, the melted butter and gooey sorghum dripping deliciously off my lips, I remember thinking: “Is this allowed?” Something as sweet, savory, and satisfying as this biscuit must surely be sinful, right?

Looking back on those cooking projects, I realize that as much as I wanted to reconnect with my heritage, I was also wanting to reconnect with my own self, to heal my relationship with the nourishment God had provided. I wanted to return - return to the land, return to my people, return to my body. I’d been adrift for so long. And it turns out there’s nothing like food to help you return. What you believe about food says a lot about what you believe about the world, about others, about God, and about yourself.

This book is the story of my return. It is part memoir, part history, part cookbook, part spiritual reflection. Food tells a magnificent story. It reveals hidden histories and situates us within ecologies we too often ignore. It speaks of the comings and goings of people, plants, and animals. It reflects biases and discriminations, theologies and values systems.

I’m so happy this book does, indeed, have a future. In the spring of 2025, as Southern Appalachia was still recovering from the ravages of Hurricane Helene, as the ramps began pushing their way through the soil, and as my first daughter was herself learning to make biscuits, I signed a contract with HarperOne (and the incredible editor )…and I’ve been hard at work ever since, making those piecemealed paragraphs into a book that would mean something to my readers.

A publisher’s job is to identify a “market base” …essentially an ideal reader who is going to buy and read your book. Of course, most authors start out thinking EVERYONE will love my book! But I truly think this book has a broader appeal than may be apparent at first glance. It’s not simply a book for foodies, cooks, or millennial women wanting to reconcile their relationship with food or the kitchen.

If you live in Appalachia, love the mountains, or are part of the Appalachian diaspora, this book is for you. If you are learning to love the place you call home, even if it feels cast aside or unnoticed by the larger world, this book is for you. If you love history or you are fascinated by hogs or ramps or heirloom vegetables, this book is for you. If you are interested in a theology of food and are struggling with the mixed messages religious folks have offered around food, pleasure, and the body, this book is for you. If you are interested in care for the environment and how that intersects with communal traditions, this book is for you.

Basically, if you are a person who EATS…this book is for you!

And now, I want to ask for your help. I am always astounded by the kindness and enthusiasm of my readers. I write part-time, in the messy margins of life as a mom with two young children. That anyone would be encouraged or inspired by my words still feels like a miracle to me. If you are one of those people, and this book sounds like something you’d want to read, could I ask you to pre-order it as soon as possible?

I know, I know - authors are annoying repetitious about the importance of pre-orders. Why would you spend $25+ on a book you won’t get until November? But pre-orders really help a book make a good start in the world. Strong pre-order numbers give the book more visibility online and generate interest from media outlets, providing publicity opportunities that a book really needs to be successful.

Finally, would you be willing to help spread the word about this book? There are all sorts of theories about what sells books and marketing plans to help you put those theories into practice. But I believe word of mouth is the greatest asset an author has for getting their book out into the world. I’ll be posting about the book on my social media, so would you be willing to share that post on your social media or restack this post on Substack? Or maybe text a friend about it? Or call your local indie bookstore and tell them you want them to stock this book?

Authors will often tell you this is the hardest part of the process. Selling a book is a lot different than writing a book. But this time around, I’m just so excited to share about my book. I can’t wait for you to read it so you can meet all the amazing gardeners, foragers, seed-savers, old-timers, and tradition bearers that helped bring this book to life. I can’t wait for you to hear more about my ancestors and the people who make this misunderstood region so very special. I’m a perfectionist. This book is certainly not perfect, and I’m still on my journey in many ways. But I’m proud of this book. I’m proud of how far I’ve come. I’m proud of what my community created together. Will you join me for this next step of the journey?

As we approach the 250th anniversary of American Independence, my social media feed is filled with either exaltations of our nation’s exceptionalism or lamentations of its failures. Officials in Washington are scrambling to fix the murky waters of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and small towns across America are prepping their fireworks for the grand display.

Meanwhile, I’m just happy for any excuse to immerse myself in the past. I love a historic holiday and a celebratory milestone. If you need me, I’ll be over here reading Common Sense, eating traditional Hasty Pudding, and sipping a Rattle Skull.

When I look back on our nation’s history, I’m filled with awe. I think it’s pretty fascinating that a group of colonial rebels envisioned a form of government unlike any the world had ever known, and they convinced their countrymen - a diverse and widespread collection of rag-tag farmers, frontiersmen, and tradesmen - to take up arms and fight to make it real. I’m thankful they did so. I’m thankful to live here.

And I think it is a sobering glimpse into human nature that these men - who so esteemed liberty - thought that freedom shouldn’t be extended to the men and women whose bodies they enslaved and labor they exploited, nor to the communities of native tribes who had been stewarding the land of this so-called “new world” for generations.

Much ink has been spilled about whether or not America is a Christian nation founded on Christian values. I tend to agree with Thomas Kidd’s assessment -that biblical principles informed many aspects of the framing of our government (i.e. the doctrine of common creation of all humanity; fallen sinful nature necessitating checks and balances, etc.) But I’m realistic about the fact that America has, from the start, very often failed to live up to its ideals.

Being confronted by America’s failures doesn’t shock or mortify me. The founding fathers aren’t mythological heroes to me, nor does the story of America feel like a personal origin story. It is simply one of many stories that interact with my present life, making me who I am and making my community what it is.

Speaking of stories…

My church here in Boone is working our way through 1 Peter, and a few weeks ago, my friend Ethan Hardin preached on 1 Peter 2:11-12 (you can listen to the whole sermon here). The text reads as follows:

“Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul. Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day he visits us.”

Ethan noted that the apostle Peter is calling to mind a specific story for these new believers who are living in a pagan, Roman society. The story is, of course, Israel’s exile in Babylon - another pagan land that was filled with suffering and longing for their home in the promised land. But God gives his people some unexpected instructions during their time in exile:

^“This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper’…This is what the Lord says: ‘When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’” (Jeremiah 29:4-7, 10-11)

Generations later, Peter wants these new believers in a hostile land to orient their lives around this story, anchor themselves in its themes and meanings. Ethan explained the importance of a foundational story, noting it is from story that we derive ethics and determine what our behaviors should be.

He gave the example of a James Bond film. If you find yourself in a fancy tux, sipping martinis (shaken, not stirred) and taking orders from MI6, you know to expect villains, shootouts, and high-speed chases. You know you are a spy on an important mission, because the story has determined the ethic and the actions you are to take.

Likewise, if you are a hobbit carrying a mysterious ring across a dangerous landscape, helped along by some elves and wizards and dwarves, you know what you need to do: get that ring to Mordor and destroy it. The story determines the ethic and the mission with which you are to be preoccupied.

Ethan thinks what Peter is getting at in this passage is that followers of Christ who are part of an unseen, “already, but not yet” kingdom should anchor themselves in Israel’s story of exile and return. They should let that story determine their ethic, their way of being in the world. They are to settle down and invest in the good of their communities, all the while remembering that in the future, a better and more just kingdom is coming in all its fullness. Yes, plant gardens in the now, but send down your roots into the soil of the hoped-for future to come.

Throughout our lives, we are presented with all sorts of stories. Some are more compelling than others, and for the Christian, these stories often compete with the story of the Gospel for our hearts, our attention, and our allegiances.

The American story is one such story. It is compelling. It is meaningful. It situates our lives within geographic and historic context, unifies us with our fellow citizens. But for the Christian, it is not the main story. Thus, it does not determine our ethic or how we should show up in the world. Only the Gospel can do that.

I don’t read a lot of fiction. But I’ve watched enough great TV to know that every legendary story has a main plot and a bunch of interesting subplots. Take, for example, The Office. Michael Scott’s search for meaning and belonging within his ordinary place of employment is the main plot of that series, its driving force. Yes, there are a bunch of fun subplots (Dwight’s beet farm, Angela’s cats, Pam’s artistic endeavors) that make the show more interesting and serve the larger narrative. But those stories could be written out, and the show would still go on, for they aren’t the driving force behind the narrative. Without Michael’s earnest and fumbling efforts to find belonging, the show has no anchor, no primary purpose (hot take: this is why IMO the show was never the same once he left in season seven).

I know a lot of Christians who live as if the American story is their primary plotline. If America ceases to be (in their mind) a “Christian nation,” catastrophe will ensue, so we must be preoccupied with empowering those who share our faith (or at least claim to). These believers compromise all other principles in service of this outcome, throwing their weight behind “strongman” politicians who they think will achieve their aims. They want to feel safe, knowing their faith is mainstream and they will not be persecuted. They long for the “good old days,” an imaginary time when every American citizen embodied Christian virtues. So enamored are they with our nation’s sanitized origin story that their love for country rivals their love for Christ himself.

Likewise, some people are so animated by their disdain for this country that vendetta becomes their driving narrative. Their activism becomes not just an expression of their faith, but a new form of faith, one that insists our ultimate hope is in a government that embodies their ideas of justice in the here and now.

These kinds of stories get mapped over every experience, every news story, every current event: left vs right, oppressor vs oppressed, Democrat vs Republican, rich versus poor. These are noteworthy stories describing very real and very consequential societal structures. But for the Christian, they are not the plot line we are primarily meant to orient around. We are to view the world primarily through the lens of the Gospel story: all are beloved, all have sinned, all are extended unfathomable grace from a loving God. That’s the story that determines our ethic, tells us how we are to see the world and show up in it.

After all, it is Christ who so often upsets common plotlines, loving both the sinner and the saint, serving both the rich and the poor, setting captives free and then turning around and liberating the captor as well.

I don’t want to minimize people’s desire for a safe, righteous, and just homeland. It is a God-given desire, and we are called to that work as believers. It was for justice, righteousness, and restoration that Christ died! But some of us seem to have forgotten that injustice is God’s to avenge, and that “God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.” (Ecclesiastes 3:17). When this nation fails to be everything we want it to be, we can lament, but we don’t need to despair. For we are rooted in a far greater, far more ancient, and far more grounding story.

And so, I’m heading into the semiquincentennial feeling celebratory but sober, thankful for this nation that (for me) has been a blessed subplot in my life. In the spirit of Jeremiah and Peter’s exiles, I might plant a garden. I will pray for the good of the nation. But I’m holding onto the fact that this nation is only 250 years old. Our kingdom - and therefore our main plot, our meaning, and our ethic - is eternal. Every other story shrinks in comparison. Every other story gets rewritten in the end.

AND NOW FOR SOME PROVISIONS:

One of the books I’m really soaking in during this semiquincentennial season is this new offering from my friend and Brian Miller entitled Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination. Ben and Brian challenge some of these national origin stories that sever us from place and from one another, exploring a better path forward for understanding where we are and thus who we are.

I’m also excited to share that I’ve published a piece in Plough Magazine entitled Down the Tunnels of Richland Creek that reflects on the hidden stories in my own hometown. America is made up of thousands and thousands of communities that are humming with forgotten histories.

And finally, and I are eagerly anticipating our upcoming Bake and Pray retreat in Valle Crucis, North Carolina. The dates are October 18-20 (perfect timing if you are feeling a little stressed out about the November mid-terms and need a reminder of the greater story of hope to which you belong!)

Here’s the catch: we need to know if enough folks are interested in this retreat for us to move forward with planning. If you’ve been thinking about this event, now is the time to let us know! Head over the Kendall’s Substack to learn more!

“Tim, do you remember the name of Miss Mary’s mule? Was it Mudd or Mutt??”

Tim was a bit taken aback by the question, as it had been years since we’d seen Miss Mary - our sweet neighbor who lived in an old cabin down the road from our first house in Boone. Mary died in 2017, but I’ve been thinking about her a lot because I share some stories about her in the new book I’m working on.

And I know for a fact that Mary hated for people to get her beloved mule’s name wrong. When we first met her, she told me that someone had once printed a story about her in a Watauga County history book (at 90’s years old, she was a true mountain woman and kinda a legend around these parts), but they’d gotten the name of her mule wrong, and it made her madder than a hornet.

Here I am, almost a decade later, and I can’t remember the name of that mule.

“It was Mudd,” Tim said. “I think…Right?”

My effort to rightly remember Mary’s mule’s name has got me thinking about the writer’s task and the permanence of print. Many writers I know, including myself, live with this ambient sense of dread that our words will get it wrong, those words will go to print, and those words will take up permanent residence on bookshelves across the country.

I am told these risks are just the hazards of the job...the cost of doing business with words. It’s the burden that comes with the privilege of writing, but one that feels so heavy to me I’ve considered at times putting down the pen permanently (or shutting my laptop for good).

This worry feels especially acute as I am in the final stages of editing the aforementioned book that I am really excited to tell you more about in the months to come. I am excited…but I can’t help but wonder: What if we miss typos and grammatical errors? What if I don’t get all my facts straight? What if my notes weren’t meticulous enough and I accidently steal someone else’s idea or neglect to cite something properly?

And what if I share an opinion in this book and then a few years later (*gasp*)…

….I change my mind?!

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I’ve written two books so far, and while I’m proud of both books, neither book is perfect. We’ve had to make changes for future printings, correct a few errors. I am told this is totally normal even if you are a careful writer, publish with a big publisher, and have a team of copy editors (70,000 words is, after all, a lot of words to get just right).

Yes, there are the misspellings and there are some grammatical errors (my mom was a fourth-grade teacher and always adamant about the importance of proper grammar, so these hit me hard).

But there are also some places in both books that I wish I’d spoken with more precision or clarity. There are a few times I reflect on a theological interpretation of a particular scripture but now wish I’d shared some of the other possible interpretations.

In my books, wherever I’d mention someone else in a story, I worked hard to send them early versions of the manuscript or get their permission. Are you comfortable with this? I ask. Is this how you remember this happening? But I’m sure some bits and pieces fell through the cracks, incomplete or imperfect renderings of moments and memories where others are present.

Here’s another correction: In my first book, I said in my bio that I’d worked for a while as a social worker (because that’s how we colloquially referred to a non-profit service role I had back in my mid-20s). But I’ve since learned that even the simple term “social worker” is a protected title in most states reserved for people with a particular undergraduate degree (which I don’t have). When I learned this, I immediately asked my publisher to reword my bio in future printings, and I made sure all my personal online bios did not include the term.

But still, the idea that I might have accidentally exaggerated my own credentials in print has really bothered me (I am nothing if not self-deprecating) and left me wondering if this whole business of writing is simply too onerous…inherently too hazardous for my own risk tolerance.

(Oh, and not the mention the paragraphs that are just…poorly written. I don’t even want to talk about those!)

Some may say I’m a perfectionist (I am) or obsess on scruples (I do…pathologically, but that’s a post for another time). But beyond these errors I’ve just noted, I worry about some of the broader messages and impact of my books. Did I commodify bereavement or romanticize it in some way? Did I imply that our grief is untouchable for God, beyond the reach of the Holy Spirit whose fruit is joy and peace?

Maybe.

But here’s the thing: When I wrote those books, I wrote from a particular time and a particular place in my own journey. I did my best with the information I had at the time. For better or for worse, books have a way of putting authors in a time capsule, of locking in their thought process and opinions wherever it is in the point it time of the writing. This is the reality of writing, the reality of print. The world changes and writers change with it, even as our printed words stay static.

Books freeze authors in time - freeze our ideas, our perspectives, our outlook -forever black ink on a white page whose material existence in the world will long outlive us. In this way, our words take on a life of their own. They live and move and have their being in the world - on people’s nightstands, coffee tables, bookshelves, and back packs.

And we can’t get them back. Much like children who you raise as well as you can and send stumbling away from home to college or the workforce…you have to release them. You have to let them go.

So, what does it look like to raise a book well? Perfection shouldn’t be the goal (it can’t be the goal), but responsibility matters. Below are a few things I’ve learned over the years to help ensure you are doing the best you can as you write:

Involve others: Editors at big publishers are great, and many are wonderful creative partners. But not all of them are reading with “truthiness” in mind. What I mean is, many editors are sometimes more like project managers for the book. They ensure the book makes it smoothly through every stage of production. Yes, they edit the contents of your book, but many of them prioritize readability and marketability in their review. And even when they are concerned with truthiness (and I’ve worked with some great editors who are deeply committed to beauty and goodness), an editor still doesn’t always know you that well…

A friend, however, can say to you: hey that doesn’t really sound like you? Are you sure that’s what you meant? A pastor or mentor can say to you: You wrote this, but I don’t think it coming across how you really intend. A family member can say: I’m not sure that’s exactly how that happened.

I’m not saying I have my pastors and friends read every single page of all my books. But I do have a strong community of folks in my life who I can send “trouble” chapters to and trust that they are going to give me honest feedback. Writing is immensely vulnerable and intensely lonely. Inviting others into the process not only improves my books, but it also helps make the process more fun and collaborative. Some of my best ideas have come from conversations with friends generated by this feedback mechanism!

Take extensive notes…and cite generously. A lot of research goes into my books, so I’ve learned over the years that I need to be very careful and methodical to indicate when a specific idea is uniquely mine versus when it is someone else’s. This means every note I jot in my journal has either my initials or someone else’s name scrawled next to it.

Ideas, of course, are nebulous and rarely entirely original. Other writers’ words coalesce with my own thought process, and it can sometimes be hard to discern where their ideas end and mine begin. Our own words are indeed a product of many other words from many other people. But when in doubt, if I feel someone else’s fingerprints all over my sentence, I try to name or cite them as the inspiration. In the end, it is a joy to introduce your readers to other writers and thinkers you admire! It’s immensely generous and your readers will thank you for it!

Read a final manuscript out loud. Yup, this is time consuming. But reading a book out loud is the part in the process where I usually find the most mistakes (and identify where the flow is clunky or off). It situates you in a new vantage point, allows you to see your words afresh, and therefore note what may need a little more work and editing.

But even with all these safeguards in place, you will still make mistakes and say things in ways you regret later in your book. And so, my final piece of advice is this:

Be gracious with yourself. Mistakes are an inevitable part of life. Everyone who works has a “bad day at the office” - a meeting that goes awry, a report you get wrong, a project that goes sideways. A bad day at the office for a writer, unfortunately, sometimes ends up permanently on record. But that doesn’t mean it defines you.

Your work and your words are not who you are…or at least, they are not the sum total of who you are. At the end of your life, you will have a body of work (yes, your writings, but also your relationships, other projects, your community, your ministry, your family,) that will tell the story of who you are. A book can feel like everything when it is first written. But it will eventually collect dust…just like every other effort in life…and become but one small chapter in the very large tome that is your true body of work: your life’s story.

So, demonstrate compassion…toward your mistakes, your inadequacies, your best efforts. And in your caution, don’t forget to be bold. Nothing curtails creativity like fear - fear of saying something wrong or imperfectly (my editor once very kindly told me my disclaimers and caveats were killing the vibe!) Let the words flow bravely from your pen, knowing that perfection isn’t the goal. Truth is. And there is a subtle, but important difference between the two.

Maybe it doesn’t matter too much if I get that old mule’s name right. But I’m gonna do my best. And if, in the end, I get it wrong, I’m gonna trust that Mary and Mudd (or Mutt!) are somewhere smiling down on me, just happy that their story got told.

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I want to begin by saying that had it not been for my Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, I’m not sure I could have gone through the last eight years and lived to tell the tale.

I began seeing her shortly after I returned from a particularly difficult deployment in a conflict area when I worked in staff care for humanitarian aid workers. The sights and sounds of my very brief stint near the front lines of a violent conflict had taken its toll on me, so I decided to follow the advice I often gave the staff members I supported: Go talk to a professional.

This counselor debriefed me, and she was so helpful that I decided it would be a good idea to see her every two or three months, almost like a mental health oil change (I was, after all, in an emotionally challenging line of work).

And it’s a good thing I had her as a resource. Because as the years passed, and I struggled through a season of infertility and pregnancy loss, we upped our sessions to once a month. When my sister got sick and died, I talked to her almost every week for the better part of a year.

I’m endlessly thankful for her (and the privilege of health insurance to cover my sessions). In my darkest days, she helped me find a path forward. During our sessions, I developed skills for processing my grief and anxiety. Together, we worked through some of my childhood experiences and how they had shaped my response to stress. She helped give a name to my specific mental health struggles (something I think I’d been needing since I was 9 or 10 years old) and get the specific treatment I needed.

And also…she would likely be the first to say that she is just one tool in a much larger toolkit needed to maintain my overall health and wellbeing.

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“America has reached peak therapy,” a recent Time Magazine article by Jamie Ducharme stated. Indeed, more people are in therapy now than ever before, with nearly a quarter of adults in the US seeking professional treatment for their mental health. Millennials like me talk openly about our mental health; “So…I was talking to my therapist the other day,” is how we begin half our conversations (honestly, sometimes it’s kinda a flex - a way of demonstrating self-improvement matters to us). We’ve even dedicated an entire month to the topic of mental health (May, actually…which is partly why I’m posting these reflections today!)

Therapeutic language has worked its way into our everyday vernacular. We diagnose our co-workers with narcissism, scream that our spouses are gaslighting us, debrief the trauma of a tough day at work with our girlfriends, set boundaries with extended family and avoid triggers. Our collective savvy is due in large part to online mental health influencers who coach us in self-awareness as we scroll through our feeds and munch on popcorn at the end of the day. I’ll admit some of these influencer accounts have been helpful for me once my counselor and I began moving toward naming my specific experience of anxiety. They gave language to what I was feeling and offered some ideas for managing some of my symptoms.

But for all this self-awareness and all these resources, Americans are reportedly as unhappy as they’ve ever been; anxiety, depression, and suicide are all on the rise. There’s obviously a lot contributing to this: the pandemic, social and political division, and the massive escalation in screen time. And of course, there’s the increased self-reporting due to broader awareness of mental health and wellbeing.

Let me be clear: I am not a mental health professional. Everything I’m about to say is based purely on my own experience. But I want to tell you what I’m worried about.

I’m worried that we’ve outsourced and professionalized the work that used to be embraced by an entire community. I’m worried that we’ve so emphasized the (very important) role of clinical intervention and neglected the role of pastoral and community care.

I think a lot about pastors when I think about mental health. This is because I’ve seen so many pastors handle mental health needs in their congregations poorly. When I was in my mid-twenties, my own pastor at the time was so skeptical of mental health diagnoses that he suggested my own struggles were simply my sinful nature winning the war for my heart. I didn’t need therapy or medication, according to him. I needed to pray more and confess my sins.

Let me say this as strongly and precisely as I can: That was wrong. That was harmful.

But since that time, I’ve had trauma informed pastors who understood their own limits when it comes to some mental health challenges without neglecting the unique gift they can offer to their communities. It’s a gift I think we are sidelining far too often as modern, 21st century, self-sustaining, individuals (who are frankly a bit allergic to anything that whiffs of spiritual authority or instructions from our elders).

As much as I appreciate my counselor, I recognize she has some limits. The goal of most counselors is not to dictate advice or tell you what to do. Rather, it’s to offer a safe place for you to verbally process your feelings, identify tools for coping, and work together on finding solutions. This is all done in a very contained environment. We meet online. Were we to see each other out and about in town, she would not approach me. She is bound to a certain set of guidelines when it comes to confidentiality. She knows me well…though what we have isn’t exactly a friendship, nor should it be. These professional boundaries are appropriate, and they safeguard the inherent purpose of the relationship (both for her and for me).

Unlike a counselor, a pastor can’t diagnose a mental health disorder or prescribe medicines that can help. They aren’t licensed in the various modalities of mental health treatments.

But here’s what a pastor (or mentor or trusted friend) can do that a clinical counselor or therapist can’t typically do: They can observe me in my day-to-day life to see how I’m actually engaging with stressors as they arise and with the people around me. They can note my habits, see the way I talk to my friends and family members, and offer an eye-witness perspective on how my anxiety is practically playing out. They can watch me fail and succeed, see how I respond. And with this information, they can sometimes offer gentle advice and admonition on habits or behaviors that might need to change. In other words, they can actually walk with me through the nitty gritty of life, navigating boundaries that are a bit more porous, sharing words that are a bit more pointed.

When I think of my own mental health, yes, I think of my counselor, and I think of my pastor. But I also think of a whole constellation of support, countless points of light across the night sky that have helped me find my way forward. I think of my mentor who also lost her sister and came alongside me as I was grieving my own. I think of my friend who I can text at a moment’s notice to ask for prayer. I think of my other friend who listens to my busy mom-life frustrations on repeat through the almost daily voice texts that we exchange. I think of the trusted elders who I’ve given permission to call me out if they ever see me start to lose my grip on my values.

I think of the community that is present with me and helps me lift my gaze from the inward to the up and out, sharing their own wounds with me, so that I might help them mend. Health/well-being is not constant self-analysis and self-protection. Health is coming to a place where you can both receive the support of others and give support in turn.

If I really wanted to, I could keep my counselor at arm’s length, tell her only my side of the story, pretend I’ve got my act together (though, she’s pretty smart, I’m sure she’d eventually pick up on my charade). Or I could end our relationship immediately…just stop scheduling sessions. I kinda like relationships like that, ones that stay in a box (or in a square screen). Ones I can control or that have tidy (and very rigid) boundaries.

My relationship with my counselor has its very important place. But I think if we want to be whole and healthy, we need a few relationships that we simply can’t keep at arm’s length. We need to invite trustworthy people into the most intimate spaces in our lives, ask them to speak hard truths to us, and develop a tolerance for some of the friction that can come from it. We need the entire constellation, the whole village of light, to survive the rigors of being human.

As we close out Mental Health Awareness Month, I want to encourage my readers to seek the help they need for whatever they are struggling with. There is no shame in seeing a therapist (nor is it a flex!) - it’s simply a wonderful tool that I believe God has provided, one I’m especially grateful for in my own life. But it is not the only tool, and I hope today you will be reminded that we can seek a village of support…and we can also be part of a village of support for someone else.

AND NOW FOR SOME PROVISIONS…

Some people think that therapy and pastoral care are antithetical to one another. I couldn’t disagree more. Below, I want to share the names of just a few folks on Substack who are writing about mental health from a faith-based perspective.

The first is who writes a lot about trauma and cultivating compassion for yourself and your wounds. For an example of her work, this is a moving post she wrote on a painful anniversary of grief.

Next is , who is also a licensed therapist and is the most trusted voice I know for pastors who want to lead from a place of wholeness and help others who are struggling. Here is an excellent piece he wrote about how actual therapists experience therapy culture, and the pressures that ensue.

I also want to direct you to the writings of . He’s not a mental health professional, but he shares a lot about his own struggles with mental health and how it relates to his faith. I really appreciated this post he wrote about some of the harmful teachings coming from Christian counselors about OCD (a topic I care a lot about!)

Finally, I’ve recently discovered the writings of , a spiritual director who reflects a lot on the nervous system. Here’s a lovely piece she wrote entitled “Engaging the news without losing my soul.”

Some say seven is the perfect number, a quantity of completion and divine perfection. After all, it was on the seventh day of creation that God finally rested, and in the seventh agricultural year that the people of God were told to give the land and livestock respite and dismiss debts that were owed. With the number seven comes rest and release…or so it should be.

But when it comes to relationships, year seven is rumored to be anything but restful…indeed, it is said to be a season of restlessness and even rage, as the euphoria of love wears off and the day-to-day frictions finally take their toll. Studies indicate that the length of a first marriage before divorce is seven to eight years, with relational dissatisfaction becoming at that point a bit like an itch you can’t scratch, a concept made popular by Marilyn Monroe’s 1955 film, The Seven Year Itch…(though - fun fact - it should be noted the phrase was originally a reference to the skin disease scabies).

Seven years, it seems, is long enough to see a thing for what it is, to have tried it on not just for size, but for actual fit, to test the durability.

Seven years ago this month, my sister died quite suddenly. I’ve heard that some people, in the immediate aftermath of death, feel the impulse to pick up the phone and call their deceased loved one or stop by their house. It’s like they know their loved one is gone, but some part of them believes they are here. The neural pathways of their brain haven’t rewired to the new reality, and their bodies are still operating from the muscle memory of a love that was very much alive and present.

That never happened to me in those early days. When Rachel died, it was like my whole body knew she was gone. Immediately. Everything caught up to the new reality all at once with jarring clarity. I never once picked up the phone to text her, never thought, “I should ask Rachel what she thinks about this.” It was like I could see the decades and decades ahead of me without her presence (and all that meant) with agonizing precision.

Rachel’s death coincided with my entry into motherhood. My first Mother’s Day was spent on the road, back and forth between my house in North Carolina and her house in Tennessee, my new baby (a miraculously good car rider) sleeping in the backseat. There were so many family needs to attend to after Rachel’s death that I had to learn to compartmentalize that jarring reality to some degree, keep it locked away in a room in my mind so that I could function from day to day, show up for the people who needed me, and not be overwhelmed. I think in some ways, this was my body’s way of protecting me…protecting what was left of my life.

Of course, some might say this was unhealthy, that I wasn’t really processing or integrating my grief. But over the years, this ability to compartmentalize has served me well…at least to some degree. Because of who Rachel was, I often find myself at a grocery store or a conference or a playground with my kids…and a stranger approaches me with tears in their eyes to tell me how much my sister’s writings meant to them. I can tell they are (usually) a bit hesitant to do this, but I mean it when I tell them I appreciate it, that it never gets old hearing about the impact Rachel had on the world.

Part of the reason I can be with that person and hold their sorrow for Rachel in that moment is because I’ve figured out how to shove my own grief in that dark room in my mind and lock the door. I can smile (genuinely) and nod without being barreled over by grief. After all, I need to be able to finish grocery shopping, to monitor my kids on the monkey-bars…I can’t always afford to be cast into grief mode unprepared. So, I’ve leaned into those compartmentalization skills. I’ve learned to switch it on and off. I’ve literally set aside time to sit in my car and grieve so my life isn’t suddenly and unexpectedly derailed. I schedule my grief (or at least try to).

I decide when I grieve. No one else does.

This was the arrangement grief and I had, the terms of our relationship.

But it seems my relationship with grief has started to…well…itch. Our dynamic is ill-fitting. I’m feeling the fracture of the “on again/off again” nature of our relationship, how it’s starting to break the previously agreed upon rules.

Oddly enough, it’s only now that I’m suddenly feeling the urge to pick up the phone and text Rachel. The muscle memory of yearning to tell her everything that’s happened and all that she’s missing has been reawakened. The pain of her never knowing what my children are like, of her never even knowing my second daughter even exists, is excruciating. New issues arise that I so want her wisdom and input on. More than any time in the last seven years, she seems like phone call away. But chronologically, she’s farther away than she’s ever been.

And so, when it comes to grief, seven years hasn’t brought me rest or release. It just feels like more of the same. More wishing she was here. More wondering how we could have saved her. More thinking this is all so unfair.

“Isn’t this supposed to end,” I find myself asking?

Unfortunately, you can’t end a relationship with grief, can’t divorce it, can’t kick it out of the house for not paying rent.

But what you can do is invite other people into this relationship…essentially, make it non-exclusive. For me, this means slowly decompartmentalizing and allowing others to see me in my pain so they can be there for me. It means opening the door and letting others into that dark room of grief in my mind, trusting that the world won’t fall apart if I do, believing that there are others who can pick up the pieces for me.

When I reflect on those difficult days of Rachel’s sudden illness and death, lots of images come to mind, memories that are both profoundly traumatic and achingly simple: the beeping of the hospital room, the sound of her baby’s cry in the night, the grass growing a little too high at her house and mine, the daily updates from the doctor, the look on everyone’s faces when we realized she was gone, the dishes that piled up, her hairbrush still sitting on her bathroom sink.

But let me tell you what else I remember. I remember the pressed lips of the church ladies who showed up with casseroles and hugs. I remember the kind nurses who squeezed our hands. I remember my friend Megan who worked at the hospital where Rachel died, staying so close to us until the very end. I remember my friend Dan who dug through Tim’s closet to find his suit, and my friend Joni who drove it all the way to Tennessee for us (and then took me out for a big breakfast of chocolate chip pancakes). I remember my friends Lizzy, Emily, and Laurie who washed my sheets and mopped my floors and stocked my fridge while I was gone. I remember my friends Erin and Tiffany who packed snack bags for the long trips back and forth. I remember strangers online who sent prayers and money so Rachel’s hospital bills could be paid. I remember my friend Lucas who invited me, when I was ready, to sing with him on a new song he wrote: “Let the light come in,” the chorus repeats. “Let the light come in.”

Indeed, what I remember is that great swell of love that pushed against the locked door again and again, sliding messages through the crack underneath. I remember a great chorus of love, and resounding song that goes on and on (like that annoying song you sing at camp: “yes it goes on and on my friends”). I remember a love that was stalwart and enduring and unforgetting of what I’d gone through. Just last week, friends across the country sent flowers. “Remembering Rachel",” the card read.

“Isn’t this supposed to end?” I find myself asking. The sympathy? The care? The deep compassion?

But that’s the thing about love. It’s generative. It’s reproductive. It “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7 ESV). So, I am not alone, and my life is not fully fractured. I may never be released from this journey. But I do know I’ll never walk it alone.

I spent the weekend driving the backroads of Southwest Virginia on my way to the HopeWords Conference in Bluefield. It’s no exaggeration to say this is my favorite stretch of road in the entire world. I have family roots in this area that go back at least seven generations. One of my ancestors helped start the Bridle Creek United Methodist Church five miles east of Independence in the late 1700’s. It still exists today. On my drive, I got out at the church and rested awhile. The building is, of course, not the original structure. But the hills surrounding it, I know, are unchanged.

Those hillsides were dotted with houses, some of them marked with signs saying: “Vote NO on April 21st.” The state of Virginia, however, had voted yes on the proposed redistricting amendment. And I wonder how long those signs will stand resolutely in the green grass of this rural stretch of the state.

I know enough to know there’s a lot about politics I don’t understand. I don’t comprehend the ins and outs gerrymandering (and all the politics surrounding it lately) enough to have formed a definitive opinion on the Virginia referendum. But I do know that I’m feeling pretty unsettled about all the tit-for-tat politicking right now. I don’t like seeing our congressional maps sliced and diced like they have been in states across the country in the last year. I don’t like that all these partisan games mean Black and Hispanic communities end up being underrepresented in some states…and that rural folks (like those in Southwest Virginia) end up being underrepresented in other states.

If you’ve read some of my recent posts about politics lately, you may think you know “where I stand” on issues or which party I tend to vote for. I promise you my political views are probably more complex than you think they are. I hope yours are complex too.

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But here’s what is simple to me: What makes this nation great is the fact that those in power work for the people. What makes this nation great is that all the people get fair representation. And for that to happen, we need bipartisan commissions to draw our congressional maps.

I understand that the current administration started these gerrymandering games when it first pressured Texas to redraw their maps. I understand counteractive measures from the other side make great tactical sense. But something about the responses in California and Virginia make me uncomfortable. This is not because I have some brilliant political insight or have scaled some moral high ground. I’m just perplexed. Why do we think we can right the wrongheaded actions of leadership by engaging in the same wrongheaded ways?

Let me tell you what else I’m lamenting today: I hate the fact that there have been three assassination attempts on our current president. I hate that anyone thinks more violence will solve any of this. I hate that this news feels so normal now, a blip on the radar. A culture that lives by the sword dies by the sword. Violence, like a virus, is terrifyingly transmissible.

I’ve been working on a project for one of my graduate courses on representation of Old-Time music in films. So, I spent much of my drive through Southwest Virginia listening to director Ryan Coogler’s thoughts on the blues, Irish jigs, and folk songs. Thus, I’ve been thinking a lot about vampires and the vampiric effect of cultural exploitation, yes, but also the greed and scarcity mindset that drives it. I’ve been thinking of Faustian bargains, or (in Coogler’s words) the parts of yourself you are willing to give away in order to gain whatever benefits the devil offers.

Blues figures like Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson were said to have sold their soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for musical talent. We’ve got similar folk tales around here, stories of brilliant fiddlers who came by their gift in some nefarious way, making deals with shrewd and sinister forces. Coogler seems pretty preoccupied by the question: What, ultimately, do we lose in the deal? What part of our souls can be so easily bought, and how are we transformed once the deal is made?

Greed (or fear of lack) is the ultimate vampiric effect. It can create a hive mind, and we are all drawn to the frenetic buzz of hate, panic, othering, and self-protection.

There’s a verse in Ephesians that warns us against giving the devil a foothold. I think about this verse all the time. I ponder the footholds in my own life. I’m not always sure how much ground I’ve given away in exchange for my perceived sense of safety. My best guess is…a lot.

But here’s what I do know: If we’ve gotten to the point where we only denounce political violence when it is committed against “our side,” we’ve probably given the devil a foothold. If violence no longer shocks and grieves us, we’ve given the devil a foothold. If threats of genocide and war crimes are dismissed as merely negotiating tactics, we’ve given the devil a foothold. If we’ve lumped all our neighbors into one of two politically manufactured categories (red or blue, left or right) and thereby view them as either friend or foe, we’ve given the devil a foothold. If we are so committed to a strongman (that we believe will protect our interests) that we are unwilling to recognize and name unjust or irreverent behavior on his part, (and sometimes even praise it instead) then we’ve given the devil a foothold. If we denounce certain actions as unjust and then engage in those same actions to gain the upper hand, then we’ve given the devil a foothold. If we are so crusted over with the apathy and exhaustion of it all that we can’t see our neighbors who are truly hurting, then we’ve given the devil a foothold.

And, as a person of faith, if I put my ultimate hope in any person or any system other than Christ, so much so that I’m willing to surrender to that person or that system the parts of myself that I hold most dear (my virtue, my compassion, my peace), then I’ve given the devil a foothold.

We operate in a world of broken systems and faulty institutions. But we all participate in those systems in one way or another, either by active promotion of them or passive acceptance. As David Dark and others have noted, “we become what we normalize.” We resist by fighting tooth and nail to keep the parts of ourselves that the devil has no business taking. We resist by declaring that some things simply can’t be bought.

Sometimes I am criticized for not speaking out more adamantly during these chaotic times, for trying to “build bridges to nowhere,” for making too much space for differing opinions. Some say I’ve capitulated to people-pleasing, to “bothsides-ism.” I take this criticism seriously, pray and reflect on it. I do believe times like these require bold voices speaking bold truths.

But I will not let the hive mind of hate erase the parts of myself that are nearest and dearest to me. I won’t give up my audacious hope in exchange for the seemingly more sensible cynicism of this age. I won’t give up compassion for my enemy in exchange for the invigorating thrill of anger. I will die on the hill that insists every last one of us is made in the image of God and is worthy of some measure of dignity. I believe kindness is generative, and I’m just not yet willing to give it up (even though my own proclivity for smugness and impatience means I always feel the sharp point of the vampire’s teeth).

I’m sad for our country. I’m not giving that up either. I won’t make a deal with the devil of optimism that gives us a free pass to look away, to pretend this is all normal and fine, to go about my business. The darkness of grief is where hope shows up and shines brightest. I won’t give that light up either.

Driving through Southwest Virginia, seeing those signs, I felt so sad that it had come to this - that we all feel so unseen and lost in these chaotic political times, that these systems feel so complex that it seems the only choice we have is to live or let live. The “deal” we are being offered (by the algorithms, the influencers, the people in power…and yes, maybe even the devil himself) is rooted in fear, scarcity, and greed. The proposition is that we must exchange our integrity in the name of strategy, sacrifice compassion on the altar of power….because the stakes are too high to play nice. The risk is too great to turn the other cheek this time.

“We are at a crossroads,” some say, and perhaps the phrase is overused. But if it’s true, then we must resolve to never surrender to the hive mind, to not to give any devil or any vampire a single inch of ourselves. Because to lose a soul is the greatest risk of all.

Yes, I was raised by my parents.

But you could also say I was raised by institutions of faith.

On this past episode of The Side Aisle (a six-episode podcast I’m part of with and ), I hosted a conversation about how this cultural and political moment is impacting our relationship with Christian institutions, be they churches, organizations, conferences, or publishing houses.

I spent my early childhood toddling through the pews of Shades Mountain Bible Church and later attended a Christian school for part of my elementary school years. The very first job I had was at a Christian College, one I eventually enrolled in and graduated from with a degree in Liberal Arts, Bible and Philosophy. My post-college internship was with a Christian ministry in India, and when I returned home from that assignment, I landed my first full time job at a small faith-based non-profit in Nashville, Tennessee. Years later I applied to work at a very large Christian humanitarian aid organization. After a decade there, I resigned so I could stay home and with my babies and write part time. My first publishing deal was with a Christian publisher.

All this time, not a year has gone by that I’ve not still found myself in the pews of a church.

You might say I am a professional Christian. When it comes to faith-based institutions, I’ve been around the block. I’ve seen a thing or two.

Sometimes I wonder if churches have a reputation for being places where people get hurt simply because they are one of the few remaining social organizations that are still largely attended. As Robert Putnam is good to remind us, we are all “bowling alone” these days, often working from home and disconnected from our neighbors. If church attendance is one of the last vestiges of the communal commitments of a bygone era, then statistically, it’s just inevitable that people are going to get hurt there…for wherever people gather, they are bound to wound one another.

Still, there’s something particularly insidious about the nature of harm done in faith spaces. A pastor who claims spiritual authority over your life can do damage to the most tender, vulnerable places in our hearts. Organizations that insist they are doing the Lord’s work often take advantage of people’s spiritual earnestness and desire to serve. Secret abuse can run rampant and burnout can become an all-too-familiar theme.

Over the years and in my experience at Christian institutions, I’ve often had to contend with the question should I stay or should I go? I share more about this in the podcast episode, but my husband and I were part of a church when we were first married…a church, we learned over the course of our time there, that was not true to some of our own most deeply held values. When we tried to talk with the pastor about it, the situation quickly deteriorated as he questioned our loyalty and tried to pit my husband and I against one another. This, for us, was a clear signal: it was time to go. And even though we left as peaceably (and expediently) as we could, we still bear scars from that tender time in our lives.

But there have been other times when the answer to that question of going or staying seemed less clear, the path ahead obscured.

There are lots of reasons to part ways with a community or institution of faith: shifts in vocation, new seasons of life, health needs, relocations. But then there are the harder issues that tug at our sleeves: the friction on teams, the rhetoric of leadership, your own changing values. This is especially true in today’s political climate, where world events become spiritual flashpoints within religious communities. We may find ourselves drifting away from what feels like the norm or the socially acceptable positions within the group…a place we’ve been calling “the side aisle.”

The side aisle isn’t necessarily a place of marginalization. But it is a place of loneliness and uncertainty. You may wonder if you are the problem, if you are being too dramatic or too contentious. You may wonder if everyone else has suddenly gone crazy. You weigh whether or not it is your role to speak up, to “be the change you want to see.” And eventually you begin to ponder the possibility of leaving altogether - a prospect that can be particularly intimidating if your livelihood is tied up with that institution or your entire friend group calls that community home.

I have stayed in Christian organizations where I’ve struggled. And I have left them. Of course, countless hours of prayer and seeking counsel went into those decisions. People sometimes ask me how and when I decided to go (or stay). After four decades of staying and leaving, here are some questions I’ve learned to ask when faced with a decision like this:

1. Are the issues I’m concerned about stylistic or substantive? Are my scruples merely with a leadership style or frustrating personalities? Is my concern about essentials or non-essentials? If it is the former, it might be time to say goodbye, and if it’s the latter, it might be possible (and good!) to stay.

2. Is there movement? By this I mean, are you able to raise your concerns safely and be heard? Is there ongoing dialogue? Are leaders open to change or working with you to help bridge the divide? Is curiosity and a desire to understand present on both sides of an issue? Even if you are struggling to find common ground, if there is any movement toward each other or toward the change you desire, it might be worth it to stick it out.

3. Is staying going to generate an irretrievable loss in me? We all know it when we feel it: the deep weariness, the cynicism setting into our bones, the resentment that has a way of throwing a wet blanket over hearts. If you’ve reached that level of burnout and disillusionment within a church or organization, it might be time to step away, rest, and heal before the roots of your faith get plucked out of the ground. And if the wounds are those of blatant abuse, it’s certainly time to leave (and if applicable, report that abuse to the proper authorities so others can be safe too).

4. Is this decision rooted in fear or anxiety, or is it grounded in alignment? Fear is one of the most animating features of the human life. Sometimes fear drives us to jump ship because we are afraid of being associated with the organization, afraid of raising our voices to enact change. Other times we are too paralyzed by fear to leave, scared of what people will think, scared of being judged. And sometimes what lies beyond a community of faith that you love is uncertain. A wise decision is rarely made in fear. Rather, we must look at our deepest values, the truths we see in scripture, and the wisdom of our own experiences to know if an organization’s purpose and practices are in alignment with who we are and who we want to be.

5. What would my mom (or best friend, or cousin, or someone who really cares about me) want me to do? This might sound funny, but what I’m really getting at here is self-kindness. It’s ok to be a little self-protective sometimes. If you are being treated poorly enough that it would make your mother mad (and your mother is a reasonable person), you should probably consider leaving.

That said, it’s important for me to say this: my preference is always to stay (if it is physically and spiritually safe to do so). I believe making and keeping promises to one another is one of the most underrated practices of a good and (ultimately) happy life. I believe the Church is a family God puts us in to strengthen and encourage us.

In the podcast episode, read a description of monastic fidelity from the Sisters of Saint Benedict in Southern Indiana: “The vow allows us to rub the rough edges from ourselves and each other. It helps us to say that we choose to be faithful to this way of life in the good and bad times and the time of finding the pearl of great price and the time of losing it. We are working towards the buried treasure of monastic life together.”

Some of the best moments of my life have been within the walls of Christian institutions. So have some of my worst moments. I’ve met some of the best people I’ve ever known in faith spaces. And many of them have hurt me. And when this happens, we must indeed contend with the question of staying or leaving.

That said, for all the value of staying, to part ways with an institution is not an indication that you have failed or you are a failure. The beautiful thing about our faith is that it goes with us wherever life leads us. God is not bound by the walls of a church, and ultimately our commitment is to God and not some human-made institution. And so, the decision to stay or go isn’t tied up in your worth or value as a person. But it is a decision worth approaching with care and caution, because sometimes the work (and risk) of staying is worth it.

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A note! If you’ve enjoyed the Side Aisle, we’d sure appreciate if you rated or shared it, so more people can join the conversation!

Every spring, I imagine myself stepping gently into Holy Week fully present and attuned to God. Months before, I buy purple candles and trim the wicks; I picture myself rising early and reading the gospels by the light of those flickering flames and the sun’s first rays peeking over the mountain ridge. I envision hot coffee and quiet contemplation. Slowness. Stillness. Peacefulness. Attentiveness.

To all this, I aspire.

Instead, this year, I’ve found myself barreling into Holy Week frazzled and feeling frenetic. If life is a highway, I’m flying at 100 miles an hour, and the brakes don’t seem to be working…not even for Holy Week.

I’m feeling spiritually unready. I’m six days behind on my Lenten reading. I’m stuck with the disciples in Mark 9:31-32, when Jesus foretells his death and resurrection, but no one is able to absorb it or comprehend what is coming. I’m distracted and out of rhythm. My house is a mess. There are orange peels and string cheese wrappers on the floor of my car. I need a haircut.

Of course, I never meant for this to happen. Back in January, I looked at my calendar, considered my work, family, and social responsibilities, and “balanced” it all. Two graduate school courses, a temporary role at church, finishing up a book, school drop offs and pick-ups, daily house-keeping, a few conferences…all this seemed doable coming off the glow of Christmas break.

And maybe it would have been…were it not for the unplanned interruptions I should have planned for. The snow days. The sick days. The unexpected opportunities and unanticipated needs. The things God truly seemed to place before me to do. Life is both haphazard and serendipitous. I’m trying to be present for it all while also knowing my limits.

Sometimes we find ourselves here, don’t we? Stuck in seasons where we did our best to balance it all, and still we end up stretched way too thin. We know there’s an offramp, but it’s still in the distance and white-knuckling is our reality for the foreseeable future.

There are camps within Christianity that wholly endorse this way of being. For them, what God wants most is your work ethic, your best effort, your sweat equity. They build the Kingdom brick by brick at a dizzying pace, unwilling to waste a single moment.

Other Christian circles would shake their head in distain at my current situation. What God really wants, according to them, is our rest, our trust, our stillness. After all, God didn’t really need me to say yes to all this work.

Here’s the truth: my entire life, I have been stuck in the messy middle, struggling to reconcile these two realities, to balance the importance of work and rest.

When it’s hard to make sense of life, metaphors can help. My friend writes a lot about the rhythms of baking, how dough requires both the vigorous work of kneading along with the mysterious stillness of rest. The dough simply does not rise unless our eager, aching hands release it to the hidden, miraculous microbial work. Bread requires both work and rest.

I think of gardening too, especially this time of year. This week, we are doing the heavy, harrowing work of tilling the soil hardened over by winter. We are pulling weeds and stirring in compost. We are mending fences knocked over by eager rabbits and hauling mulch. Once the plants go in later this spring, we have nothing to do but wait and watch as the sun and the rains and the soil do their slow work. If we meddle too much at that point, we’ll hurt our chances of a bountiful yield.

I am also reflecting on giving birth, the pain that swells and subsides as life is brought forth. Throughout scripture, God frequently compares his own divine work of justice and love to that of a woman in labor. Surely in making the comparison, God was thinking of both the rest and exertion, the breathing and the pushing.

“For everything there is a season,” Ecclesiastes tells us. The present isn’t permanent. Whatever season you find yourself this week, I hope you can trust that God is present and pleased with both in your labor and your rest. We are all trying our best. We all have limits. Life doesn’t always perfectly align with the church calendar. None of us ever shows up fully spiritually fit or ready for Holy Week.

In fact, that’s kinda the point.

And now for some exciting updates and upcoming events!

For the last year, I’ve had the privilege of being involved in some really beautiful projects. And I’ve been so busy lately, I’ve not had a lot of time to tell you about them.

CHURCH: First and foremost, my church here in Boone (The Heart) has made the big decision to move locations after twenty-years of meeting in the high school. If you know me well, you know that my church is the heartbeat of my communal life, and I’m really excited about the opportunity for us to be in a more permanent space where we can serve our community throughout the week. I share some personal and theological reflections about our move here at our website. I also recently wrote a guest blog for Women of Welcome about how we as a church engage in difficult political and theological conversations. P.S. - If you find yourself in the Boone area at Easter and looking for a church to visit, please know you’d be welcome: 10am at 215 Boone Heights Drive.

MUSIC: Last summer, I had the opportunity to represent the HopeWords Writers Conference for a collaborative project called the Storytellers Collective, where communities from across the country shared their stories of gospel hope. Together, we all teamed up with Common Hymnal to release Storybook, a seven-song album shaped through those stories of hope, struggle, and perseverance.

The songs we wrote for HopeWords (“Light of the World” and “You Don’t Know My Name”) were inspired by the story of Bluefield, West Virginia where the writer’s conference takes place. Bluefield is so much more than a “boom and bust” coal town. It is a place of hope, revitalization, and hospitality. Listen in and learn more about some of the other great organizations I got to work with!

PODCAST: In case you haven’t heard, I started a limited release podcast with a few of my friends: , , and called The Side Aisle. It started as an offline conversation, just four writers trying to figure out how to show up with grace and wisdom in this increasingly vitriolic moment in history. In hopes our conversations might help others who were struggling, we hit record and this morning released our 3rd episode. Listen in and share if you like it!

UPCOMING EVENTS:

FESTIVAL OF FAITH AND WRITING: I’m really honored to be speaking at the Festival of Faith and Writing in Grand Rapids April 16 - 18th! I know many of you who subscribe to this newsletter are writers yourselves, so please come find me at the festival if you are there and say hi! I’ll be speaking at 4pm on Thursday on the topic of Writing in Place and will be on a panel with Jess Ray and Andrew Peterson about songwriting on Friday at 2:30pm.

Wednesday night before the conference, I’m joining and for a panel moderated by about writing with hope in these difficult times we find ourselves in. The event is free, but we need to know you are coming, so register here!

HOPEWORDS WRITER’S CONFERENCE:

If you follow me at all, you know that this conference in Bluefield has my heart. It’s always one of my favorite weekends of the year. The conference is April 24 - 25 and it’s not too late to register. I’ll be singing some songs and sharing some reflections on the enduring power of story. I hope you join us!

It’s a familiar grouping, these three key offices that are spoken of so often in the Old Testament. Prophets, priests, and kings together are seen as the summation of the various Christian vocations, with Christ perfectly embracing each role during his time on earth.

Priests, the highly revered keepers of sacred space and sanctimonious rituals, acted as mediators between God and the people. They were the theological experts responsible for teaching the law of God. They had religious authority and maintained religious institutions.

The role of kings was to translate the laws and ways of God for the political sphere, to maintain communal order through righteous statutes and social codes. Theirs was the power of the sword, and they acted as protectors of national boundaries and civic order.

And then there were prophets. Their job was to challenge the failures of both priests and kings, to demonstrably reprimand the people and their leaders when they had missed the mark. They did so through song and poetry and even some astonishing acts (like marrying a prostitute or cutting and burning their own hair). You might say their lives were metaphors, and they painted a vivid picture of the state of God’s people.

Many of us view our own lives and work through these three offices, imagining ourselves taking up the mantle of the prophet, the priest, or the king.

The role of the king is certainly appealing. Power seems like the most straightforward and efficient way to create the kind of world you believe to be just and right. Still others are drawn to the role of priest, for what could be more important than to serve as a gatekeeper protecting the historic belief systems and sacred religious institutions of the faith?

But in my personal opinion, no role is more popular these days than that of the prophet - the wild-eyed artist flipping tables, dismantling systems and institutions deemed to be unfair, laying down prophetic poetry, and shouting the truth from the rooftops (of Instagram and TikTok).

Each sacred office has its place. But these days, as the rulers of the world clamor for power, religious gatekeepers argue about theology, and the unrelenting din of the prophetic multitude is deafening, I find myself thinking of another office that appears in the New Testament just as the Church of Christ is born, and that is the role of the pastor.

In Scripture, this position of leadership within the Church goes by several names: elder (presbuteros ) or overseer (episkopos). But I think my favorite term is pastor (poimēn) which could be translated as shepherd. The job of the shepherd is to walk alongside the people of God as they stumble down the narrow way of Jesus, wisely guiding and protecting them on the long, arduous journey of faith.

The Apostle Peter gives pretty ardent instructions on how these pastor/shepherds are to operate: “To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ’s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them - not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:1-3).

There is nothing glamorous about shepherding. It is hard, smelly work. Keeping sheep safe is tedious, laborious, quotidian. To pastor a Church is to commit oneself to the messy business of being in someone’s life for the long haul, of nurturing them as they grow, of nudging them to the left or right when they stray off the path. The office requires watchfulness, often through the dark night of someone else’s soul. The survival of the sheep is the chief aim of the shepherd. Thus, when done well, pastoring results in very little prestige and few accolades for the practitioner.

Every vocation has its risks. “A prophet has no honor in his hometown,” and kings have the misfortune of being deposed from time to time. History will scrutinize the work and writings of renowned priests and theologians. But it is the humble pastor who often bears the most dreadful curse of all: anonymity.

I could be wrong, but I think what the world needs right now - more than kings who control, priests who gatekeep, and prophets who wail - is pastors who shepherd. Truly shepherd. Pastors who don’t clamor for power or prestige, who aren’t characterized by performative acts. Pastors who are content with anonymity this side of Heaven. We need pastors who are willing to simply sit and be present with people as they struggle through the mess of politics and faith and division and chaos. We need the “non-anxious presence” of true elders, the spiritually wisened who know when to speak and when to listen, who can exhort and admonish with care because the survival of the sheep is their only aim.

Yes, Jesus is said to perfectly embody the offices of prophet, priest, and king. But Jesus, likely drawing from the imagery of Psalm 23, also says he is the good shepherd. And if there was ever a time when the world desperately needed a good shepherd - the persistent, sacrificial, humble, heartfelt work of a pastor - it’s now.

There’s something I want to say right out of the gate. I know how it can come across when a privileged person like me starts to opine: “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Easy for me to say, right? I live in a system that has pretty much always worked for me. It isn’t my family being held in a detention facility. It isn’t my husband serving as a law enforcement officer. It isn’t my life that’s being threatened.

But, before you close out of this post, can you hang with me?

Like many of you, I’ve been watching the news, scrolling social media, and hearing from my community this week. In recent days, I have seen a very influential conservative Christian leader joke on X about wanting to shoot an ICE protester and I watched as her followers joked along with her in the comments. I’ve seen one of the most influential Evangelical leaders in America say that people who are protesting are simply pawns being used by some radical left agenda. I’ve heard a left-leaning acquaintance say that they think it would probably be best for us all if someone just “took out” the president. I’ve seen liberal friends post that silence in any form right now is an indication that you would have been complicit with Nazis during the Holocaust.

On television we saw images of ICE deploying tear gas near schools, and all I could think about was how frightening that must have been for those children! We’ve also seen videos of angry protestors storming into a church in St. Paul where families had gathered to worship, and still my thought remains: how frightening that must have been for those children!

Of course, everyone immediately took to social media to argue about whether or not those protestors were justified. That was the point when I realized that didn’t have it in me to even form an opinion. I was too weary to do anything but weep. There are no sanctuaries left, and no sacred spaces remain that have not been desecrated by our deafening discord. Our children’s tears are the evidence of our collective folly.

A little window into my inner world: When I lived in India, my host family had a secret nickname for me: The Diplomat. “You are always so careful about what you say,” my friend Karleen told me when she finally revealed the moniker. She complimented me for always figuring out how to talk to both sides (and kindly added that I could do without so many disclaimers and caveats).

It’s an impulse that I think I’ve always had (though I have yet to identify the defining childhood moment that made me this way). On my worst days, I do it because I hate conflict…because I want people to like me. On my best days, I do it because I truly want to build bridges of understanding and unity. I suppose it’s the difference between peace keeping and peace making.

But right now, I have no idea how to build bridges. The chasms in this country feel a thousand miles wide. I’ve heard people say, “how do you find common ground with people who __________!?” (they list some unforgiveable sin). Still others say, “how can you build a bridge to nowhere?”

I want to be clear: I’ve made my thoughts known about this current administration, that I think many of these policies are dangerous and immoral. It’s not the algorithm that’s swaying my opinion. I have so many friends whose lives have been devastated by these cruel policies - from the abrupt dismantling of humanitarian aid, to the imprisonment of lawfully present immigrant family members, to the interruption of adoptions through the suspension of visa processing.

And though I’ve said all these things, the criticism I get most often online (from both sides) is something to this effect: “You aren’t angry enough!” And because, in reality, I’m quite angry, I can only take that to mean: “You aren’t being mean enough!”

When I was a little girl, my dad and I would always watch the movie Ben-Hur at Easter time when it was broadcast on television. If you aren’t familiar with the premise, the protagonist is a young, first-century Jewish man (Judah Ben-Hur) living during the time of Jesus who is betrayed by his Roman friend Messala. Judah is falsely accused, sent off to be enslaved, and his mother and sister are condemned to prison where (spoiler alert) they eventually contract leprosy. The entire movie follows Judah’s journey of vengeance, a retributive wrath that is only interrupted by the compassionate pleading of his long-suffering companion Esther…and the words of a young Rabbi named Jesus.

There’s a poignant scene where Judah has decided to begin a (justifiable) uprising against his Roman conquerors. But Esther pleads with him to put his rage (right though it may be) to rest. She says: “There is a law in life that blood begets more blood as dog begets dog. Death generates death, as the vulture breeds the vulture. You seem to be now the very thing you set out to destroy, giving evil for evil. Hatred is turning you to stone.”

Esther is right. Rage is generative. And there is indeed a law in life that says whenever I belittle, despise and dehumanize my neighbor (or enemy), I lose a part of my own humanity. At some point I have to choose not to be complicit in my own dehumanization. I will not participate in it. Nor will I give the treasure of my attention to a rage economy driven by algorithms that only profit men who are already rich and already powerful. I will not allow them to rob me of the grace I know I am called to.

By grace, I don’t mean capitulation to injustice or passivity at the expense of the oppressed. Jesus, (whose entire mission was predicated on the love and grace of God) turned over the tables of the money changers in the temple and had some pretty choice words for corrupt religious leaders. He broke laws in the name of love, healing on the Sabbath and touching lepers. Grace and justice are not mutually exclusive.

At some point, I have to take seriously the command to love my actual enemy, just a Jesus did. One of the last things He uttered on the cross was a prayer for the people who were quite literally putting Him to death: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” My whole religion is based on the stunning reality that even when I was an enemy of God, lost in my brokenness and need, God took me in as a child of His own, forgave me, and called me beloved. Who am I to withhold grace, or deem anyone beyond that kind of love, that kind of redemption?

There is a place for rage in the work of justice (if you follow my writings, you know that I love a wild, unhinged, prophetic wail of lament!!) But lately I’ve been asking myself the question: Is “F*** ICE!” really getting us anywhere? Is “F*** around and find out!” really changing anyone’s mind? We need to commit ourselves to more articulate rebuttals than this wrath-filled quips.

And if there is a place for rage in the work of justice, is there not also a place for grace? Grace is, yes, virtuous…but it is also practical and pragmatic. By choosing to remain in relationship and in conversation with someone with whom you vehemently disagree, you maintain hope for change, for deeper understanding. I’m not saying that we compromise our values or reject healthy boundaries (if you aren’t safe in a relationship, you should leave). What I am saying is, if by grace and by courage, we can keep the conversation going with someone on the other side, we may learn something to help us chart a way forward.

I’ve heard it said that after World War II, the enemies of America admitted that our great nation would only fall if it was divided from within. I’ve also read some scary reports that our current geopolitical enemies are actively engaged in our social media feeds, sowing seeds of disinformation meant to divide us. I mean it when I say that our inability to talk to each other has become an existential threat. There is no “us” versus “them.” There is only us. We rise and fall together. We must find a way to keep talking. Or as Ezra Klein said recently, “We are going to have to live here with each other.”

And talking (to actual humans) was the best thing I did this week. Our church opened up a space on Monday morning for people to come and pray and process together over coffee. We are a small church, and the conversation was informal…no script. But these were essentially the four questions we tackled:

• How are you processing this political moment? How is it feeling in your heart, your head, and your body?

• What experiences have you had that have influenced the way you are feeling?

• What does it look like to show up as a faithful witness of Christ in this moment in our community?

• How are you staying grounded in Christ’s kingdom (and keeping your nervous system regulated!) right now?

The conversation was a balm. It was hard. We cried with those at the table who had suffered the most significant consequences of recent policy changes. We noted some of our differences. We resolved to take things a day at a time, one act of change or service at a time. We talked about Scriptures that were speaking powerfully to us. We spoke directly about the things that were unjust and unfair. We laughed and lamented and looked each other in the eye. (So much better than doomscrolling). With every minute that passed, I found my body relaxing, my heart and mind releasing the anxiety that had had such a hold on me all week.

And so, hope was reborn in me this week. My community was my bridge to hope.

AND NOW FOR SOME PROVISIONS:

Our friends at World Relief Triad are in need of some provisions. They have made us aware of some new and pressing needs in the refugee community due to the government's launch of Operation Post Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (or PARRIS). Essentially, refugees who have been previously (and thoroughly) vetted and invited to begin a new life in the US are now at risk of detainment if they have not yet received their Green Cards. World Relief knows of legal refugee families in Minnesota who have been detained. They are asking for partner churches to learn more about Operation PARRIS, pray for at-risk refugee families, and advocate for these refugee communities with your legislators. There is also an opportunity for you to give financially as they seek to provide legal services and resources to impacted families.

One provision that’s helping me navigate all this is a podcast called Left, Right, Center. It has 3 journalists (whose backgrounds span the political spectrum) analyze the news and offer their take. I think it’s important right now to understand how people of different political persuasions are processing things, and this podcast is a concise and simple way to do this.

And finally…stew. Our region is about to get slammed by a huge snow-storm, so we’ll be eating our fair share of hearty, warm stews. This potato sausage stew from Fascinating Recipes has been our favorite this season. It’s really easy and affordable to make (a few notes, I added a red pepper and did NOT skimp on the dill and it was delicious!)

The New Year is bringing with it a few changes for me, some gains and some losses.

This is the first time in seven years that both my kids have been in school all day. The girls are growing up, and with that comes a relief for the reprieve from those white knuckled days of chasing toddlers 24/7. But also…a sentimental kind of sorrow and sense that a sacred season has come and gone.

Years ago, we found an adorable wooden rocking horse at the thrift store and brought it home. The girls have gotten hours of enjoyment from it. But in the last few months it’s become clear they’ve outgrown it. Finally, a few weeks ago, I tossed it in the trunk to return to the thrift store in hopes another family would get as much use out of it as we did.

Something about letting go of that little rocking horse broke my heart. As I drove away from the donation lot, many questions came to mind: Did I make the most of these years? Did I savor all those tender moments - the baby giggles and first steps and sweetly mispronounced words - as much as I could? Did I faithfully steward these little lives in their most vulnerable years?

There are other changes. Some really close friends of ours are moving out of town. They are moving because of a wonderful work and ministry opportunity, and for that we truly celebrate. And yet their departure leaves a significant hole in our communal life, and I find myself wondering why there is no manual on how to handle it when a friendship doesn’t die…it just…moves out of state.

Yesterday, it was announced that a new book of my sister’s most popular essays/blogs is being released into the world, a collection that was edited by the lovely and wonderful . It will never get old hearing about the breadth and depth of Rachel’s impact. It is a balm for my grief. But it is always bittersweet whenever her work is newly revived. Again, one of those experiences for which there is no manual: Your sister dies but her words long outlive her…and those words are forever a taunting reminder of all you’ve lost.

Speaking of words and print, last month I submitted my final revisions for a book I’ve been working on for three years. The protracted timeline was due, in part, to the above-mentioned toddlers. But also, the project required more research than any other writing work I’ve undertaken. I’ll say more about the book in the coming months, but for now, know it was a lengthy labor of love. It has been my cognitive companion, my late-night preoccupation, and the ambient creative hum in my head for a long, long time.

Watching a book go off to final edits and print is like watching your kid go off to school. You wonder if they’ll be ok out in the wild on their own, if you’ve prepared them enough, if there was more you could have done. Mentally and creatively, I feel like an empty nester.

But there is much to fill the empty space! Next week I begin graduate classes at Appalachian State University, aiming to chip away at a masters in Appalachian Studies. My hope is to write more in-depth about the region, and I look forward to the mentorship and guidance that an academic institution will bring. But still, I find myself missing the familiarity of book writing, and do not enjoy feeling like a scholastic novice (at 41, it’s been a long time since I’ve lugged a backpack to a classroom).

On a final personal note, my counselor and I have finally begun to put a name to some of the anxieties I’ve faced over the years. That’s all the detail I’ll share for now, but I will say something about a diagnosis offers, yes, relief, but also some sadness. The hope of targeting my struggles and symptoms is encouraging, and a lot about my past makes so much sense now. But with that hindsight comes renewed heartache for how hard and it’s been at times.

For a long time, I’ve searched for just the right word to describe the feeling of these little losses, these quiet travails. None are catastrophic. Some are just a result of life churning ever onward. Some are the bittersweet byproducts of growth and wins.

Some folks would call it grief. But I’ve always felt rather protective of the sacredness of that word. There needs to be vocabulary reserved for the loss of a living soul you loved to mortality. Death deserves a distinct lexicon.

Regardless of my inability to settle on a word, I do believe even our little losses deserve to be lamented. And apparently, I’m not the only one.

Lament is having a moment. In recent years, the bootstrap mentality of previous generations has given way to a high tolerance, even (perhaps) preference for vulnerability. Voicing your pain and “holding space” for sorrow are now seen as evidence of psychological maturity. Gone are the days of grinning and bearing it. Sure, there’s “power in positive thinking” …as long as you aren’t toxically positive (though, I’m not altogether sure where the line is). Any influencer worth their salt better be trauma informed, and entire Instagram accounts exist to besmirch “spiritual bypassers.”

Leave it to late capitalism to make grief a commodity.

If you are beginning to sense my smugness, please know that I truly believe the shift was needed. Heck, I’ve been a huge proponent of the movement! Speaking of commodities, I wrote an entire book about grief and another book that is literally titled Holy Unhappiness!! I’ll always believe that a willingness to speak our sorrows aloud is part of a whole and healthy life. After all, one-third of the Psalms are Psalms of lament.

One-third. But not all.

Sometimes I worry that we’ve over corrected. If grief is on trend, then we can be tempted to linger in the lament a little too long. We can forget that sorrow and joy aren’t mutually exclusive. There’s something about thankfulness that is generative. My losses matter and they need to be named. But it’s also important to remember that in the grand scheme of history, if I have a roof over my head, food on my table, healthy kids, and a few good friends, then I am among the most privileged, the lucky few, the wildly and extravagantly blessed.

This doesn’t mean I’m “too blessed to be stressed.” But it does mean my stress should be viewed in light of all the other things that are true and good in my life. After all, aren’t God’s mercies new every single morning?

When sorrow becomes our default (or just our vibe), we run the risk of cheapening or diluting real grief. Lament in a powerful and holy form of worship in the face of true suffering, real injustice, and serious sin. Moreover, when sadness is just a social media aesthetic or brand, we put ourselves in a position of being penalized for being…well…happy. “Are you like…the grief girl on social media now?” my husband once asked shortly after I published A Hole in the World. “Gosh, I hope not!” I said to him. I do plan on being happy again someday!

One thing I’ve noticed about people and cultures that have historically experience significant hardship or oppression is that they are deeply committed to delight. They habituate joy. They work celebration into the rhythms of life. And boy, do they know how to PRAISE THE LORD! Real activists know that joy is part of resistance, because, in the words of the poet Jack Gilbert, “To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the devil.”

And so, as I’ve received and offered the greeting of “Happy New Year!” this week, I’ve thought of the things I am lamenting this January - kids growing up, a friend’s departure, a beloved project finished, career changes, mental health struggles. Each one of these have aspects worth grieving and worth celebrating. And I’ve begun to believe that what a flourishing life requires of us is to be fully present for the whole spectrum of it, to offer our intentional attention to both the good and the bad, the easy and the hard, the joy and the sadness. Show up for it all, recognize it all, demonstrate curiosity towards it all, and express it all. Life is not either saccharine or sorrowful. It is forever and always inexplicably both.

I’m ok with grief being on trend. As long as joy never goes out of style.

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It’s that liminal time in between Christmas and New Years…the holidays…(or Holy Days if you are getting to the root of the word). Maybe you are on the road like I am today. Maybe you are in the passenger seat, scrolling and trying to pass time while your kids argue in the back seat.

Maybe you are thinking the last few days were as magical as you imagined they’d be. Or as painful. Or exhausting. Maybe you are longing to get back to routines or dreading the return of routines. Either way, here we are.

I’ve been in Wisconsin the last week with Tim’s family. It’s been wonderful, snowy, the Fox River frozen solid all the way across. On Christmas Eve we went to my in-law’s church’s Christmas Eve service. Their congregation has an inordinate number of classically trained instrumentalists. So, as the violin strings cried out for Emmanuel to come, o come…and as the harp tenderly pinged the melody of Silent Night, we all stood in a circle at the edges of the sanctuary, spilling into the center aisle and lit one another’s candles (as is customary). A dark room began with only the light from the Advent candles, the Christ candle newly lit. And one by one the darkness was illuminated as we lit each other’s candles, little wicks touching little wicks, and our own flickering flames leapt to life.

There we all were: young and old, friends and family, babies crying, tired mothers whispering their reproofs, grandfathers bent over by time and worry, little children gleeful, grown children begrudgingly present, doubt filled, faith filled, some making noises they have no idea were inappropriate, some singing loudly, some barely humming, dressed in gowns and dressed in jeans, family crammed up against family. And I began to think that this was a room full of people who belonged to each other. For better or worse. For richer or for poorer. In sickness and in health. Lighting one another’s lives, one by one. Together making one great light.

My friend Erin Williams Banks just released a Christmas song called Dark Cloud that some might say is far from festive. I think it’s the most hope filled song she’s ever written. It’s about loving someone through the holidays even in the shadow their sadness casts. Erin posted this about the song: “Loving someone changes you a million times…you never stop looking different…you change shapes a million times to keep holding their hand.”

I’ve been reading Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow…a book about a bachelor who finds belonging in the community of a small town called Port William. It is a book about what Wendell Berry refers to as membership, the undeniable reality that together we rise and fall. He writes:

“What I saw now as the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection…It was a community always disappointed in itself, disappointing its members, always trying to contain its divisions and gentle its meanness, always failing and yet always persevering a sort of will toward goodwill. I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth...And yet I saw them all as somehow perfect, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.”

When we talk about love being supreme…when we say that yes faith and hope remain, but love is greater still, and when we say that God is love, therefore there must be something uniquely divine and elemental about love, we don’t mean love in the fragile, tenuous sense that we so often assume to be its entire meaning.

No, we mean love as in loyalty. As in kinship and ties that bind. We mean love as in shared labor, and enduring together what cannot be changed, sometimes shoulder to shoulder, sometimes back-to-back, sometimes face to face. If the world was made by God in love, and if it is only sustained by love, then love is all we can really ever hope for.

I don’t know where you are coming from or where you are going. I don’t know who you are passing these Holy Days with, but I do know this: For all our hurts, the wounds we caused and the wounds we received, our ideological and political and religious disagreements, we need each other. Love is supreme. Love can change shapes. It is perfected beyond time and passes our own understanding. So may the God of love keep you. And shine His face upon you. And give you peace.

AND NOW FOR SOME PROVISIONS:

I can’t say enough good things about Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow. All I’ll say is that I can’t think of a better book to end (or begin) the year with!

And here is my friend Erin Williams Banks’s new song Dark Cloud:

Last holiday season, we were making the 15-hour drive home from our annual New Year’s visit with Tim’s family in Wisconsin. It’s a long haul, and we are always careful to keep a close eye on any potential winter weather before we set out.

But last year, a storm we thought we were well ahead of caught up with us when we were just four hours from home. It’s the portion of our drive that traverses the winding, up-and-down backroads of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia. With whiteout conditions at the storm’s leading edge, we started getting pounded with snow and knew immediately we were in trouble.

If you know my husband, you know he is famously even keel. I’ve only seen him flustered a handful of times in our entire married life. That drive was one of them. The car was sliding all the road, and the snow was falling so fast, the windshield wipers kept freezing in place. Tim was white-knuckled, and the kids were whimpering in the back seat. But we knew that if we stopped, we’d be stuck wherever we were for the next 24 hours, buried in the snow.

We were in a very rural area. No hotels, no restaurants, very few gas stations. Whenever I’d get signal (which was intermittent at best) I searched my phone for any available Air B&Bs where we could crash for the night, but there was nothing near us. After another tense hour of crawling down the road, our car slid into the parking lot of a Hampton Inn in Norton, Virginia. We were all cold, irritable, hungry, and most of all relieved!

Miraculously, the Mi Finca Mexican restaurant next to the hotel was open. As we enjoyed our tacos, I took a photo and posted on social media that I was “stuck in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere.”

But almost immediately, I began to think about that idea…middle of nowhere. What exactly made that area of Southwest Virginia “nowhere?”

I remember once, I read an article about a Florida couple whose RV had gotten stuck in the mud on a back road in my community of Meat Camp…a place they assumed and articulated in the article was the middle of nowhere. I remember chuckling to myself at the time and thinking “that’s not nowhere! That’s just over the hill from us, next to Danielle and Lucas’s house! That’s home!”

Turns out, a place only seems like nowhere if you don’t know anything about it. Norton, where we were stuck that New Years, was certainly somewhere to somebody. Probably a lot of somebodies!

After spending the afternoon snuggled under the covers in the hotel and watching Wizard of Oz, we noticed the snow had stopped falling. So, we ventured out in search of dinner. The only other place in town that was open was the Wood Booger Grill. (If you don’t know what a Wood Booger is, imagine an Appalachian version of Big Foot). Now my Granny had been scaring me with stories of Boogers since I was little. I looked a little closer at the map and realized Norton, Virginia was just 20 minutes from the town my own Granny had grown up in. Norton had no doubt been somewhere to her!

In fact, a Google search revealed that Norton was located on the famous Wilderness Trail and must have seen countless travelers pass by in the early years of our nation’s founding. It was also a hub of the timber and coal boom of the late 1800s and was an important stop on the Norfolk and Western Railroad line. (And I’ll add that the fudge brownie I ate at the Wood Booger grill is one of the best I’ve ever had).

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My experience in Norton got me thinking about all the places in the world that have been labeled as “nowhere,” places we see as far-flung or “flyover”…forgotten places or communities whose best days are said to be behind them. We have a lot of little places like that in Appalachia, boom and bust coal or timber towns that time seems to have turned its back on.

“But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times” (Micah 5:2). Jesus was born in a small, humble town, a community of perhaps 1,000 residents.

“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” These were the words of future disciple Nathanael when his buddies told him that they’d found the long-awaited Messiah…and he was from Nazareth. The region where Jesus grew up was looked down upon, its people derided for their lack of culture, their unsophisticated accents, and their contact with Gentiles.

In fact, of all the places in the world God could have chosen to inhabit as incarnate flesh, he chose the farthest edge of the Roman empire, a land and a people that had been conquered and colonized, a poor, working class family in a rural region. Some might call it the middle of nowhere. Flyover country. Many believed its best days were behind it.

One of my favorite lines of any Christmas carol (and there are many beautiful ones) is from Phillip Brooks’s “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” It says:

“Yet in thy dark streets shineth the everlasting Light

The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

God’s redemptive story came to its climax in a forgotten place, amongst a defeated people. All of history’s pain, fear, and chaos…all of humanity’s hope, longing, and resilience coalesced into meaning with the birth of a tiny baby to an unwed teenage girl in a small town. The middle of nowhere became everyone’s holiest somewhere.

In this Advent season, how might we see something or somewhere in our nothings and nowheres? How do we notice God at work in the unexpected - the people and places who garner no notice or accolades? What would it look like to cultivate a watchful heart, a spirit of curiosity about humble spaces? These are the places that God seems to show up, often unnoticed. When will we finally realize that our understanding of a place doesn’t determine its beauty, power, or worth?

I don’t know about you, but the holidays always come with a lot of…feelings for me.

There are the usual suspects: sentimentality, whimsy, the warmth of family and friendship. If you’ve followed my work for a while now, you know I love rituals, traditions, and communal gatherings. The holidays were made for such as these, so I am naturally inclined to overpack my schedule and say yes to everything. Despite the onslaught of activities, I maintain a constant feeling of FOMO: Am I squeezing all the joy and fellowship I can out of this season? Am I making memories worthy of my children’s future nostalgia?

Some of this, I know, is a byproduct of grief. Mourners will tell you grief has a way of rearing its ugly head during the holidays. You long for the presence of family members who have died, wonder how you can possible sit down to a Thanksgiving table without them and the special side dish they used to make. We do our best to eke out that longed-for happiness in the midst of the pain. The expectation of magic and mirth are high (especially if you have children).

Moreover, the joy of the holidays can also come with a sizable helping of shame. If you grew up in the toxic diet culture of the 1990s and 2000s, you know that the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are for “sinfully delicious” food, “cheating” on your diet, and “being bad” when it comes to sweet treats. The language we leveraged to talk about food when I was coming of age associated the delight of food with the wickedness of indulgence.

This (I now know) was not ok. But my body so thoroughly absorbed the shame of eating food, that I have to work really hard to not spend the holidays overshadowed with guilt, anticipating all the wellness and weight-loss programs that will find their way to my social media feed come January 1st.

All these feelings are, of course, set to the steady, buzzing hum of my children’s sheer gleefulness. Their zest for life (i.e. hyperactivity) is never more pronounced than during the holidays. They are loud, giggly, constantly moving, and sleeping poorly. I want to be a mom who makes space for that, who doesn’t squash it because she’s too stressed and busy trying to make the holidays…well….cheerful.

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So, if your feelings match mine at all, I have a few provisions for you:

First, I’m happy to share my official 2025 Christmas Playlist with you. Many of you know I take great pride in my playlist, providing you with songs that are hopeful but not overly cheery, reflective but appropriately upbeat, a mix of classics and new songs, and just the right dose of medieval choirs and clawhammer banjo, guaranteed NOT to overstimulate your already rowdy children. Enjoy, and you’re welcome.

Second, if you are feeling overwhelmed by the needs in the world and in our own country and are looking for a way to be generous this season, I’d love to direct you to the World Relief Gift Guide. This is a hard time for refugee and immigrant communities in our country, and World Relief is working hard to help churches “welcome the stranger,” knowing that baby Jesus himself was a refugee who fled to Egypt under threat of violence.

Finally, the piece that follows is an excerpt from the forthcoming book of my newfound friend Hannah Miller King. Hannah beautifully addresses the theological knots we’ve tied around the question of food’s goodness. (Turns out, what we think about food says a lot about what we think about God and ourselves), so I think this piece is especially important for the holidays.

Hannah is a priest and writer in the Anglican Church in North America. She writes for Christianity Today and serves as the associate rector at The Vine Anglican Church in western North Carolina. She and her husband, also a priest, have three children.

Hannah and I connected as fellow moms wading through the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in our region. I love celebrating Appalachian based authors, so I wanted to share this excerpt from her book Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness which will be available February 17th (gentle reminder that pre-orders are SO IMPORTANT for authors!)

So, there you have it, an adaptation from Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King:

Broken Bread for Broken Bodies

When I got married, I didn’t know how to boil noodles.

At least, that’s the story. Maybe it wasn’t quite that bad—but I did come into marriage without much cooking experience. I’d only lived on my own for two years, in a house with other busy young adults who rarely had time to sit down for meals together. It seemed like a lot of work to learn how to cook—and clean—for one. So I mostly stuck to sandwiches and the occasional fried egg. My more culinary housemates sometimes shared their fare with me, which provided superior nutrition to my standard lunchmeat but also proved that better food could be had if I was willing to do the work. I was not. Until I found myself setting a table for another. Suddenly, boiling noodles seemed both relevant and necessary to the welfare of someone I loved. Getting married changed my relationship with food—and, by extension, my relationship with embodiment in general.

Like many American Christians, I grew up without a very robust theology of the physical world. God made it, so I knew it was “good,” strictly speaking, but material creation didn’t really enter the conversation beyond that (See Gen 1). Aside from specific moral commands regarding how to live in our bodies and how to treat the bodies of others, it seemed that God’s real concern was with our souls—the spiritual, immaterial part of us that is housed inside our physical frame. This is the part of me I believed would be “saved,” whisked off to a disembodied heaven after death. When my father died, my great consolation was not that his body would be resurrected and renewed but that his spirit would live on, immaterially, forever. If anything, it was a sin to love the body too much—to fixate on the husk of the real, redeemable center of a person.

Odd as it may sound, cooking for my husband (and his cooking for me, which admittedly was the tastier option at first) called this paradigm into question. As I learned to lovingly feed the body, I began to understand what generations of moms and grandmothers have demonstrated with their after-school cookies and Saturday pancakes and perpetual second helpings: to feed the body is to feed the soul. Somehow, the spiritual and material parts of us are not as distinct as I once thought.

Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann also recognized food as an entry point to a more integrated way of understanding the world. He wrote:

“Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite—the last ‘natural sacrament’ of family and friendship, of life that is more than ‘eating’ and ‘drinking.’ To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that ‘something more’ is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life.” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy [St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963], 16).

I was not a secularist; I believed in something more. But I didn’t realize the “something more” of Christianity had anything to do with the food on my plate. I grew hungry for sacramental life when I started to connect the dots between my embodied existence and God’s redemptive purposes. This had little to do with formal, churchly sacraments at first. But I knew I needed a bigger frame for my faith—a spirituality that incorporated the material world rather than dismissed it.

The tendency to denigrate physical creation isn’t new. It’s actually quite old. In the ancient world, it was common to pit material realities against spiritual ones. Some prominent philosophies even taught that the physical world was evil, a prison from which to escape (For a fuller treatment of the Gnostic threat and the church’s response, see Marcellino D’Ambrosio, When the Church Was Young: Voices of the Early Fathers [Servant Books, 2014], chap. 8). In their view, the soul was good but the body was bad.

It’s easy to see how these ideas contributed to religious understandings of salvation as escape from the physical world into the immaterial, spiritual one (namely, souls in heaven). But this was not the message of the early church.

From its birth, Christianity was good news not just for souls but for “wholes,” as N. T. Wright puts it (N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church [HarperOne, 2008], 199). Instead of demeaning material creation, ancient Christians bore witness to its rescue through the ministry of Jesus. His resurrection showcased God’s ultimate future for human bodies. And he instructed his followers to worship him through bodily practices like baptism and the Eucharist.

In fact, the church fathers saw the sacraments as proof that salvation extends to our bodies. In response to those who denied this, Tertullian wrote, “How can [they] allege that flesh is incapable of the gift of God, . . . seeing that the flesh is fed on the flesh and blood of the Lord and is a member of him?” (Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 8, cited in Christopher Hall, Worshiping with the Church Fathers [InterVarsity Press, 2009], 53). In Jesus, God comes to us materially, to redeem us materially. He gives his body to our bodies.

This conviction also put matters of social welfare on par with sexual ethics in the early church. Theologian Christopher Hall argues that for the earliest Christians, “to denigrate the body would undercut our concern about what we do with our bodies or the suffering of others in their bodies” (Hall, Worshiping with the Church Fathers, 52‑53).

If Jesus has come to renew all things, then the way we treat all things has moral implications.

For me, cooking for someone I loved was the gateway to understanding how a physical reality could simultaneously be a spiritual one. Once I conceded that, I wanted to uncover all the ways God might convey his love to and through our bodies. I wanted to understand how, and why, the things of heaven could be intertwined with my experience of earth.

***Adapted from Feasting on Hope by Hannah Miller King. ©2026 Hannah Miller King. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com. 

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of preaching on John 11 and the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. I love this story, not just because it involves grieving siblings and a death-to-life miracle. I love it because John offers us a different perspective on two Biblical characters who have too often been defined by their worst moments: Thomas and Martha.

Thomas (monikered “Doubting Thomas”) is most often remembered for his faltering faith, that moment of grief and trauma where he couldn’t find it in heart to believe that the Lord had resurrected.

Martha is the practical, self-striving, bossy older sister who was too preoccupied with housework to sit at the feet of Jesus like pious Mary.

But in the lead up to Lazarus’s resurrection, both of these individuals complicate the simplistic narrative we are often told about their characters. Thomas, (the doubter) demonstrates great faith in his willingness to return to Jerusalem even though religious leaders are plotting Jesus’s death: “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (John 11:16), Thomas says. Mary (the busybody) demonstrates remarkable faith by making one of the most wholehearted and definitive statements on Jesus’ divinity in all the gospels: “'Yes, Lord,’ she replied, ‘I believe you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is come into the world’” (John 11:27).

These moments, however, are rarely highlighted. They are often lost between the lines of scripture, the monikers maintained.

We like simple stories, don’t we? We like to be able to put someone in a box. We like straightforward cautionary tales and demonstrable fables. We like placing people into categories: hero or villain, sinner or saint, martyr or mischief maker.

The Bible doesn’t do this though. Our holy scriptures seem almost recklessly intent on bad-mouthing its own protagonists (David was an adulterer and murderer, Moses pouted and disobeyed, Rebekah was a manipulator, and Peter denied his faith), and sometimes even humanizing its antagonist (God protected Cain even after he slayed his brother, Nebuchadnezzar eventually turned to God, and Saul - later Paul - repented of his violent vigilantism).

Moreover, the Bible tells very few simple stories. Israel’s history is case in point. God’s people meander back and forth between faithfulness and faithlessness. Their circumstances are politically, geographically, and ancestrally fraught. Their struggles are so multifaceted that God uses poetry, song, history, and prophecy to provide layers to narrative. God told the long, arduous story of his salvific work, of human belovedness and failure, and of redemption in no less than 750,000 words (if you are reading it in English, that is).

That’s a lot of words. That’s a lot of reading. And we aren’t really good at reading these days, are we?

In his pivotal work Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman writes about a time in American history when people had the capacity and attention span to read long form, persuasive political discourse. Debates between political rivals would last for hours and hours, and people sat attentively through it all. Postman talks about how farmers would carry books and exhaustive government treatises to the field to read while they were plowing and sowing.

But these days, books have been largely replaced by social media. Paragraphs have been swapped for soundbites and quick quips. We like rallying around the memorable slogans: Make America Great (or Healthy!) Again, Defund the Police, Build the Wall, Put I.C.E. on Ice, or Drain the Swamp without taking the time to unpack the practical policies (the how) behind our catchphrases. We elevate our preferred politicians as either fault-free champions or fully-flawed saboteurs.

But this isn’t working, right? By almost every measure, we are more disconnected, more mentally unwell, more politically and socially disenchanted than we’ve ever been before. If you dig into the data, most of your neighbors would probably fall into the category of moderate when it comes to policies and politics. But it’s the extreme voices that commandeer the internet. The noise on social media makes us believe anyone on the opposing side is radical: violent, unpatriotic, ignorant, vindictive. So, we live in fight or flight (a disposition that significantly reduces our ability to think rationally and complexly). It’s a cycle really. The bombastic, simplistic headlines scare us. We fester in that fear. Therefore, we are unable to absorb anything other than simplistic, bombastic headlines.

So how do we get out of this cycle? How do we get off the hamster wheel of hate that we’ve found ourselves on (and that plenty of media corporations and influencers are profiting off of).

Resistance might be as simple as strengthening our attention spans. It might mean reading a book or a long form article from a reputable journalist about an issue (like Palestine/Israel or Immigration or DEI) rather than simply reading a tweet. And I get it…it’s hard to make time to read in between jobs and kids and life. So maybe it’s listening to two subject matter experts debate on a podcast…or listening to a podcast that represents differing view than the ones you hold, judging for yourself the merits of the argument rather than letting someone else do it for you.

And perhaps, most importantly, its having deeper, more vulnerable conversations with your neighbors and family members, even those who you know see things differently than you. Instead of going into the conversation with the goal of winning them to your side, aim to understand and to be understood. Ask questions like: “How are you processing all the changes in immigration policy?” or “What was it like for you when news of that political assassination broke? How are you feeling now?” or “Here’s something I’m learning lately. What’s something you’ve been learning?” or “I wonder where the common ground here might be?”

As long and complex as the Bible is, Jesus has a way of offering elegant summaries that can steady us as we approach the complexity: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. And love your neighbor as yourself. “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:40)

If love is the lens by which we view all this complexity, then I believe we can develop the capacity to take it on, not because we believe we can singlehandedly solve the world’s many problems...but because maintaining our humanity requires us to get off this hamster wheel. When we dehumanize others (by hastily besainting them or hatefully belittling them), we dehumanize ourselves.

So practice attending to issues with your attention. Training our minds to slow down and weaning ourselves off the dopamine hit of doomscrolling is one of the best things we can do for democracy. Practice thinking again rather than being told what to think. Practice listening and sharing vulnerably. Practice courage instead of fear, calm instead of chaos. Stop skimming and start reading. (and believe you me, it takes PRACTICE, phew). Practice love, not just for the sake of your neighbor, but also for the sake of your own humanity.

AND NOW FOR SOME PROVISIONS:

I’ve just finished reading Sara Billups brilliant new book Nervous Systems: Spiritual Practices to Calm Anxiety in Your Body, the Church, and Politics. This book almost unnerved me because it felt like Sara had been camping out in my brain for a month or two, and then wrote a book about what she’d seen. Her words helped name and shed light on all the things I spend my time worrying about, and offer yes, solidarity, but also a path forward. If you struggle with anxiety related to your health (or the health of someone you love), if you are a caregiver, if you find yourself nervous in church or spiritual spaces, or if politics has you pulling your hair out, I highly recommend this book. Here’s a snippet:

“The more I thought about the personal, the church, and the political anxiety of our era, the more my central tension crystallized: Jesus said to not worry, but it does not seem possible to live in our world free of personal and pervasive systemic anxiety. The two postures—Jesus’s calm and our worry—did not seem reconcilable. They weren’t, until some- thing changed in my own heart.”

And finally, since I’m encouraging everyone to sit at tables and have conversations, I’d love to share the latest album from The Porter’s Gate: Table Songs. My friend Kendall Vanderslice helped bring this album to life by getting a bunch of food theologians, cooks, and food justice workers together with the phenomenal musicians at Porter’s Gate. It was so fun being a fly on the wall for the creation of these songs. I know you will love them.

I used to think that I could change the world.

I blame my Evangelical upbringing for this. There is so much I cherish about the faith traditions of my youth. But looking back, one qualm I have is with the late 90s/early 2000s Evangelical preoccupation with impact. I know it was all well intended. But something about the messaging (at youth conferences, in CCM music, in Christian non-fiction) made you feel like unless you went to the farthest reaches of the earth…unless you founded a massive international outreach organization or started a multi-ethnic mega church in some bustling urban center or had a mission career that included converts in the thousands…then you had wasted your life.

“Here I am! Lord, send me!” was the mantra of my youth.

Growing up, I had a lot of dreams about where I would go, and what I would do. Like most kids in rural Appalachia, I thought I had to get out in order to be something. Deep down - beneath the hum of excitement about my future intercontinental, holy endeavors - I always felt a bit forlorn about this. I loved the hillsides and hollers of home, loved the creeks and rivers, loved the towering trees and red clay.

Initially, my career did indeed take me to faraway places. For those experiences, I am forever grateful. But then, life happened. I had kids, my only sibling passed away, and members of my extended family needed more and more care. As I got older, my world got smaller and somehow heavier at the same time. It became clear that I needed to stay closer to home indefinitely.

Still, the pull of the faraway tugs at me…mostly through my devices. Every day, geopolitical events and national tragedies demand our attention, our opinions, our activism. If we do not type out our own hot takes on the latest political drama happening in Washington, then “our silence is violence.” The pressure to do something still keeps us up at night, and doomscrolling global tragedies can often feel like doing something.

Meanwhile, we may fail to notice that life is happening right outside our windows.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve begun writing a lot about Western North Carolina and the region of Southern Appalachia. Sometimes I am asked why I do this, why I have such an interest in the region and why it’s become so important to me.

I’m not exactly alone. In recent years, I’ve noticed the rise in popularity of social media accounts featuring some aspect of Appalachian culture or history. In some ways, Appalachia has become a recognizable aesthetic, a bit like a cultural brand or a way of distinguishing yourself. I’m all in favor of celebrating the aspects of our culture that are unique and beautiful. But ultimately, I’m coming at this from a slightly different angle.

Several years ago, I read a reflection from Wendell Berry that completely redefined how I think about my place in the world and my personal calling. He wrote: “No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it. Where we live and who we live there with define the terms of our relationship to the world and to humanity.”*

No sentiment has done more to shape me in recent years. I realized that for all my grand aspirations of global impact and for all my adamant online posts, the way I treat my actual neighbors is the only real evidence that proves I am who I say I am, that I value what I say I value. My relationship with this place does indeed define the terms.

For all our interconnectedness, we are still placed people. Landscapes, culture, embodied communities, tangible spaces - they shape us more than we realize. And so, knowing that I was likely going to end up living in Southern Appalachia for the rest of my life, I set about the work of trying to understand and appreciate this place as much as I could. I tried to learn its history, its geography, its cultural contributions. It turns out, when you start digging, there’s a lot to find. Beauty, ugliness, tragedy, triumphs. Loving a place means telling the truth about the whole of it…and seeing how you fit into the grand scheme of it all.

This year the Town of Boone Council proclaimed October Appalachian Heritage Month (if you are a town leader in Appalachia and would like to follow their lead, message me and I’ll send you the entire proclamation!) The first week of October, they raised the Appalachian Regional Flag (also known as the Quilt Star Flag) over City Hall. After much input and contributions from Appalachians across the region, Benjamin Logan Wyrosdick designed the flag to be “a symbol of belonging, one that every Appalachian can see themselves in, without exception.”

Rather than featuring political symbols, Wyrosdick focused on the thing the unites and defines nearly every person living in this region: the land. The green is a tribute to our lush forests (some of the most biodiverse woodlands in the world) and the blue peaks are reminiscent of the soft blue haze of our hills and mountains. The gold reminds us of the color of our skies as sunrise. And the quilt design is an ode to the creative ingenuity of mountaineers. (You can read more about the flag’s design at this link!)

This week, we hung the Quilt Star Flag from our house. Flying this flag on the pole where we normally hang the American flag is a reminder that any allegiance to this nation must include allegiance to my neighbor - to their wellbeing and wholeness. I cannot live faithfully in this world if I am not living faithfully in place - with love for proximate communities, respect for the land, and humility before its history.

This doesn’t mean that we forgo our responsibility to be global citizens. We are all undeniably interconnected. My consumer choices and decisions in the voting booth have an effect on people across the globe. My husband still works in international aid, and I’ll always be grateful for my exposure to the global church.

But in recent years, my prayer has shifted from “Lord, send me!” to “Lord, help me stay well.” Help me to be fully present where I am. Help me to love where I have been placed with my whole heart. Because I no longer believe that I can change the world. But I can change this place (or perhaps more importantly, I can be changed by it…taught by it, shaped by it, humbled by it).

*(From Wendell Berry’s essay “The Body and the Earth”)

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Helene, and lots of us here in Western North Carolina and East Tennessee are feeling tender and reflective.

I’ve been thinking about how beautiful the weeks leading up to the storm were, how that September the air was crisp, but the skies were sunny. The Goldenrod and purple Ironweed seemed to grow taller and more vibrant than they ever had before. We’d spent summer’s end picking apples and floating on the river, sitting around campfires and foraging along the greenway. While Helene was forming in the gulf, I attended my first ever sorghum boil and played my banjo for an event at the Todd Mercantile. The days felt golden, perfectly peaceful.

“This place is healing.” It’s a sentiment I’ve heard over and over again since we moved here 14 years ago. And I know when people say it, they are referring to more than just the pretty views and the fresh air. No, healing seems to seep up from the ground here. Maybe it’s the age of the mountains (they are some of the oldest in the world), or maybe it’s the abundance of trees and vibrancy of the understory (our forests are some of the most biodiverse in the world).

Maybe it’s the way the hills rise up around you and remind you of your smallness in the grand scheme of things. As Annie Dillard once wrote, “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain, and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back.” I just know this place is fundamentally good for the body and the soul, that this land is benevolent at its core.

And so, when quite suddenly, it was not, I think we all felt a sense of betrayal.

Our beloved local meteorologists, Brad Panovich and Ray Russell, warned us it would be bad…as bad perhaps as the flood of 1940, an event we’d all heard about from the old-timers. Still, we never could have imagined it would be as catastrophic as it was. I’ve been thinking about how it started raining two days before the storm even hit. It absolutely poured all night Wednesday and all day Thursday. Friday, we woke up to a howling wind. The rivers were well past flood stage, but things were just getting started.

I’ve been thinking about how long it took for us to realize just how bad the flood was. When we finally attempted to drive to town, we arrived to the entrance of our neighborhood only to find that a huge chunk of the bridge was missing. “Wow, we must have gotten the worst of it,” I thought.

We hadn’t. In fact, we got 10 inches less rain than some of our neighbors to the south.

We carefully crossed what was left of our bridge. I remember every road into town seemed to be sagging. A tractor trailer truck was laying on its side on highway 194 next to the Goober Peas Country store. How did that happen? I remember thinking. A house we drive by every day was simply gone, washed clean off its foundation. The entire region was cut off with cell signal down, but our phones seemed to load updates in spurts every three or four hours. I remember seeing that the Department of Transportation had issued a statement that every road in Western North Carolina should be considered impassable (for the record, that’s an area almost the size of the entire state of New Jersey). That’s when it finally began to sink in.

I turned to my husband (a career disaster responder): “Are we in a disaster zone?”

Sometimes it takes a while for reality to dawn on you. He nodded, and so began the slow rise of dread as every day we learned of another place we loved that was damaged or destroyed, another family we cared about that was displaced or without a home. Our beautiful mountains, our beloved home, an entire region full of our best memories and most cherished landmarks had been totally ravaged by the storm.

The weeks and months that followed were unbelievably hard for so many in Southern Appalachia. Our family was fortunate; our home sustained no major damage. But over 70,000 homes in Western NC alone were damaged or destroyed by flood waters, falling trees, or landslides. Just over 100 people died in our state. Some of them were never found. Almost everyone lost power, water, and communication. Roads and bridges across the region were washed out, affectively cutting off thousands of people from the outside world.

As always, it is in the worst of times that you see the best of humanity. That was certainly true in the aftermath of Helene. Everywhere I went, there was a spirit of comradery, of shared sorrow and shared hope. That hardy mountain resilience was on full display.

But then, communications came back up. And people started getting on social media.

In the last two weeks, I’ve heard the governor of Utah Spencer Cox refer to grifters who intentionally stoke division online as “conflict entrepreneurs.” I honestly cannot think of a better term. It only took a few days after Helene for the rage economy of these conflict entrepreneurs to kick into gear. People who had never stepped foot in our mountains started posting videos about how no one was showing up to help in Western NC, how the government response was a total failure (this despite the fact that the National Guard, FEMA, and roadworkers and linemen from all over the country were on the ground). Depending on your algorithm, you were fed either a steady stream of sheer optimism about the response or abject pessimism and despair.

And then the rumors started. Conspiracy theories began to circulate, about how the government was coming to kick people out of what remained of their homes so they could steal their property and dig lithium mines. Some even said the government had generated the storm using weather altering tools in an effort to cut off the cluster of Republican counties in our state (remember this was just a month before the 2024 presidential election and North Carolina is a swing state).

Then, a few reports surfaced of local “militias” running off FEMA workers with their shotguns, and though these appeared to be outliers, the stories evoked centuries-old and deeply entrenched stereotypes about violent, backwards hillbillies…and so that story became the headline.

Tropes are particularly useful to conflict entrepreneurs.

And then there was the lone FEMA worker who refused to help the folks who had Trump signs in their yards. You can imagine how that went over in the media.

If you’ve never lived here, you may wonder why these wild rumors about lithium mines and man-made storms gained so much traction. The history of this region is a history of land dispossession. It began with the removal of native peoples from this place. Later thousands of families lost their land to extractive industries like coal and timber after signing one-sided deals and contracts with fine print they couldn’t read. In some cases, they were forced off their land by violence or intimidation. The projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority alone displaced 120,000 people. When mountain folks hear that the government is coming to push you off your land so they can dig a lithium mine, you better believe that rumor seems legit because land theft is ancestral memory here. It’s a generational trauma.

I’m sharing all this because for years we’ve all heard the talking points about how bad social media is for us, how it’s dividing us, and changing our brain chemistry. But when Helene happened, I watched the ramifications of algorithms and echo chambers play out in real time. Conflict entrepreneurs (no doubt many of them Russian bots) politicized and monetized our catastrophe, leveraged the suffering of my neighbors to grow their platforms and drive engagement. They took advantage of our painful history. In the guise of advocacy, they actually hurt our recovery (the number of folks who actually applied for FEMA assistance in North Carolina was much lower than in other states hit by Helene, largely due to the mistrust perpetuated by social media).

The government response in North Carolina was not perfect. But we couldn’t even engage in meaningful conversations about real solutions to the actual problems because every channel of communication was being jammed by false accusations and hyperbolized accounts.

It was clear to me then and it’s been clear to me these last few weeks with all that has happened in our nation: We are all captives of the conflict entrepreneurs. The attention economy only works if you are mad, if you think your neighbor or your government or your family members are your enemy. Algorithms are designed to detect our deepest fears, and they prevent us from telling and hearing complex stories. Every issue has been reduced to a soundbite or twenty-second-long reel. We are no longer operating off of a different set of opinions. We are all operating off of a different set of facts.

And I worry this is how it will always be. Disasters used to bring us together. Catastrophes used to be moments of great unity. No longer. Every disaster, every act of violence, every global conflict is an opportunity for a politician or online influencer or bad actor to pull you deeper and deeper into their agenda, and further and further away from your actual neighbor. And one has to wonder, have “we the people” changed? Or have our platforms of communication simply made us believe we have?

I pride myself on maintaining a hopeful outlook. But I’m beginning to think we won’t survive this.

I think when people say that “our feet need to touch grass,” what they mean is that we need to intentionally pull our dopamine addicted brains off the conveyor belt of online rage. We need to get out of the digital world and back into the flesh and blood world. The truth is, in the aftermath of Helene, when I was scrolling through my phone, I felt despair. But when I looked up at my actual neighbors, I was filled with hope.

A couple months after the storm, two guys from FEMA knocked on our door. They wanted to make sure we knew how to apply for assistance if we needed it. I could tell based on the way they talked, they weren’t from around here. I asked them how they were doing, if anyone had pointed a shotgun at them or threatened them. “Oh no,” they immediately replied. “Everyone’s been really kind and grateful.”

Kindness. Gratefulness. Let me tell you what else I remember from Helene, what I’ll never forget. Let me tell you what is real.

I remember that those were days of wonder. Churches I thought had shuddered long ago flung open their doors and served hot meals for months, proving just how enduring a family of faith can be. Fire departments sent out armies of ATVs, horseback riders, and hikers crawling and clawing their way up into the most remote hollers, delivering oxygen tanks, medicine, diapers, and non-perishable food. Old kinship networks lit up like a wartime switchboard. In these mountains, we know our people, and no one was forgotten. Neighbor looked after neighbor no matter what their politics were. People with electricity and water let strangers come in and take showers and wash clothes. Garages became supply warehouses. Nearly every single citizen of Western North Carolina became an aid worker for a month.

Lineman came from all over the country (and Canada!) to restore power. Road workers came too, in droves…their yellow Mac trucks a sign of hope that soon, we’d be able to get to each other again soon. FEMA, the Army Corp of Engineers, and aid organizations from all over showed up…worked around the clock to get us up and running again. Folks drove pick-up trucks full of water bottles and supplies from all over, red states and blue states. Friends across the country I hadn’t talked to in years sent me money on Venmo or Paypal. “I know you are there and helping people so just use it however you need.”

When people say “what unites us is greater than what divides us” I think what they mean is that our common ground is astoundingly spacious. There’s plenty of room here. Our differences are real and consequential. But when disaster strikes what we all really want is to be ok…for our neighbor to be ok. And we will go to incredible lengths to make that happen.

We still have an awfully long way to go here in Southern Appalachia. Many are still displaced, waiting on insurance to assess their claims, waiting on FEMA, waiting on bridges to be rebuilt. I remember after the flood hearing people say “we will survive this. We have to. We have no other choice but to move forward.” I think that’s true for our nation as well. But in order to survive the conflict entrepreneurs, who (and I don’t say this lightly) are literally coming for the heart and soul of America, we must all actively choose to be formed LESS by digital spaces, and be formed instead by flesh and blood spaces, neighbor to neighbor spaces, real and embodied spaces.

We will survive this because we must survive this, and I won’t dignify the grifters by allowing them to steal my hope.

I never used to think too much about Labor Day. For most of my life, I saw the holiday as simply an opportunity to sleep in and maybe enjoy a cookout. Unlike Christmas, I’ve never seen a bumper sticker telling me what the “reason for the season” is.

But over the last few years, I’ve begun to understand more about Labor Day’s origins. The holiday was initiated in the late 19th century as a way of recognizing all the achievements and contributions of American Laborers. This was a time when the average American laborer was working twelve-hour days, sometimes seven days a week in horrific working conditions, and (with no minimum wage) at a pay rate that was subject to the whims of greedy overseers. Young children often worked alongside adults at only a fraction of the pay. With the Industrial Revolution at its height, the Labor Movement began organizing to demand safe working conditions, fair pay, and shorter work weeks.

The Labor Movement is especially important in the history of Appalachia. As the Industrial Revolution made its way into the region, subsistence farmers increasingly began working in the mines or in mill towns of the Piedmont. While many went freely, compelled by false promises of good pay and a better life, companies had their way of coercing the population into these jobs, including one-sided land deals and company hired “security” forces.

Coal miners were paid in company scrip, lived in company housing, and sent their kids to company schools which meant the company controlled every aspect of their lives. If a miner died on the job, his widow and children were often kicked out of company housing. Men were paid based on how much coal they dug, but coal operators often rigged the scales, cheating the men out of their hard-earned pay. The mines were incredibly dangerous, blackening the lungs of the workers who faced constant threat of cave-ins or explosions. During World War I, you had a better chance of surviving as an enlisted military member than you did as a West Virginia Coal Miner.

Extractive industries like coal and timber basically controlled the entire economy of Appalachia for decades. Moreover, they destroy the ecological base that makes subsistence farming viable. So once the mountains were all stripped of their trees and the mines shut down, there was little left for the people. The timber and coal that came out of these mountains built America’s most glittering skylines, won two World Wars, and turned the lights on across the nation. But too many mountaineers continue to struggle with poverty, work-related injuries, and poisoned rivers.

This week marks the 104-year anniversary of one of Appalachia’s most significant historic events, though it’s likely you’ve never heard of it. The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed labor uprising in American history. After a series of injustices - including the terrorizing of unionizers, violence against striking miners’ families, and the assassination of their leader, over 10,000 coal miners turned their buckets over and went on strike. They marched towards Logan and Mingo Counties to make their demands of the coal company. Black, immigrant, and white workers all marched side by side wearing red bandanas. But company-hired strikebreakers had set up defenses on Blair Mountain and a battle ensued. Eventually the federal government intervened on behalf of the coal companies who dropped bombs leftover from World War I on the miners. It’s one of the only times in our nations history that US air power has been used against its own citizens.

Though the striking coal miners lost the Battle of Blair Mountain, the incident raised national awareness about the horrific working conditions faced by miners and the need for all workers to unionize. I’ve heard it said that if you appreciate having a middle class in this country and enjoy a five-day workweek, workplace safety regulations, and getting paid overtime, you have a bunch of West Virginia rednecks to thank for it.

Sometimes when I tell people about Appalachia’s history of labor disenfranchisement, they furrow their brows. Most people never studied the Battle of Blair Mountain in school. Even among many social justice advocates, there is little knowledge of what all transpired here. Few have ever heard about Ella May Wiggins, a mill worker from the mountains who believed unions should be integrated and used her songwriting skills to write ballads calling workers to action. (She was assassinated by mill employees at the age of 29, leaving behind five orphaned children). The average American citizen doesn’t know what a strip mine is, hasn’t heard of mountaintop removal.

I’m not trying to suggest that Appalachia is the epicenter of injustice in this country. Nor do I claim any marginalized status myself (I’ve enjoyed all the privileges any white, middle-class woman would).

I’m simply saying nearly every place in this country holds a hidden history, stories that are too often untold or misunderstood by an outside world. Many of these are stories of pain, of disenfranchisement, of struggle, of triumph, and of tragedy. And I can’t help but wonder what bridges might be built if we demonstrated more curiosity towards one another’s hidden histories.

I was talking with a friend recently about how the story of Appalachia has some similarities with the history of his own ancestral homeland in the Caribbean. The story of wealth being pulled out of a place at the expense of the people who live there is as old as time itself. Poverty doesn’t just occur in a vacuum. But sometimes we are too caught up in our own histories, our own struggles to see our commonality with others who are also struggling. I do this all the time: when I judge someone for their hardships, when I assign character flaws before considering context.

Because guess what! This is what people in power do! They pit the stories of the those they deem weak - those they want to control - against one another, sowing seeds of mistrust among us. Because they know if we unite in a common cause they will lose their power.

I think sometimes of how coal operators integrated the mines, not because they were remotely justice oriented, but because they assumed that Sicilians and Hungarians and Black migrants from the deep South and “hillbillies” would never unite to form a union or go on strike.

The Battle of Blair Mountain proved them wrong.

So, on this Labor Day, on this anniversary of the Battle of Blair Mountain, let’s remember all those who sacrificed to win some of the privileges and protections we enjoy today. And let’s be on guard against the disunity that is so often used as a tool of the wealthy and the powerful to keep the people down.

AND NOW FOR SOME PROVISIONS:

Hazel Dickens was born in 1925 to a mining family in Montcalm, West Virginia. She was a bluegrass musician and songwriter whose ballads told of the struggles of mine workers and the need for women’s rights. She stood on many a picket line, fighting for the rights of the people she loved. I’m particularly fond of the lyrics from her song Fire in the Hole.

“You can tell them in the country, tell them in the town

Miners down in Mingo laid their shovels down

we won't pull another pillar, load another ton

or lift another finger until the union we have won

Stand up boys, let the bosses know

Turn your buckets over, turn your lanterns low

There's fire in our hearts and fire in our soul

but there ain't gonna be no fire in the hole.”

If you want to learn more about the Battle of Blair Mountain, Denise Giardina is an Appalachian author who wrote a beautiful fictional retelling of the story in her book Storming Heaven. I love this little passage from the book:

“I have traveled outside the mountains, but never lived apart from them. I always feared mountains would be as jealous, as unforgiving, as any spurned lover. Leave them and they may never take you back. Besides, I never felt a need to go. There is enough to study in these hills to last a lifetime.”