Me…and Tom. 6am. Allegedly exercising.

The water was ninety degrees when we started.

It is Jacksonville in summer and the pool had been sitting in the sun for months and what we were stepping into was less swimming pool and more very large bathtub. We did not care. We got in anyway.

That was a month and a half ago. The water is closer to eighty-two now. The summer is releasing its grip, degree by degree, the way summers do.

We are out there every other morning. Six a.m. The sky doing what early morning skies do — that particular quality of light that hasn’t quite committed to the day yet. The birds already awake and talking among themselves. And beyond the back fence, which sits essentially on the road line of a well-traveled street, the surprisingly loud evidence that the world does not actually sleep as late as you might hope.

We try not to make noise.

We do not succeed.

Two large humans moving through water at six in the morning produce a certain inevitable physics. The water does not cooperate with dignity. What we intend as moderate resistance exercises reads, from the outside, as something closer to Elaine Benes attempting interpretive dance — arms, water, ambition, and the complete absence of grace, scaled to pool size and producing waves of corresponding drama. We try to keep our voices down. The water, however, has no such commitment — it does not keep our secret. It sloshes and surges and makes itself known to anyone nearby who might have been hoping to sleep past six.

The neighbors have not complained.

Yet.

Here is why we are in the pool.

The morning aches. The ones that used to shake off in twenty minutes and now require considerably more negotiation. The energy that isn’t what it was. The strength that has been quietly, politely, without announcement, leaving the building.

And Ellis.

Our grandson is five months old and already rolling over and finding his voice and doing the specific, relentless work of becoming a person at full speed. He will be walking before we are ready. Running before we have adjusted to the walking. And we want to be able to keep up with him — not watch from a chair while he runs, not beg off because our knees aren’t cooperating, but actually be there, in the yard, on the floor, in the water, present in our bodies for whatever comes next.

Getting in the pool at six in the morning is, at its heart, a love letter to a five-month-old who will never know we wrote it.

I lead our sessions.

This is its own comedy. I adapt dance moves for water resistance, which I will allow you to imagine rather than describe in further detail. Tom follows along. He has been married to me for thirty-five years — which is excellent preparation for the particular patience required when some decisions have already been made, some questions have obvious answers, and the 6am pool sessions are simply easier when he follows instructions.

We have been doing this for a month and a half. And somewhere in the doing of it, something has shifted — not just in our bodies, though there is that too, but between us. There is a particular kind of connection that comes from fixing your attention on the same goal with someone you love. Showing up in the same water, at the same hour, for the same reasons. It is not glamorous. It doesn’t look like anything Instagram would feature. But it is real in the way that shared, unglamorous, consistent effort is real.

Genesis 2 says it is not good for the human to be alone.

Before I enrolled in seminary I used to understand it to mean God was talking about marriage between a man and a woman. My LGBTQ+ friends taught me to read that passage differently. They gave voice to something the conservative tradition I grew up in had flattened — that God’s observation wasn’t about marriage as a destination. It was about the irreducible human need to reach toward another person and grow in the reaching.

We need someone in the water with us. The goal feels different when someone else is also reaching for it. More possible. More worth the 6am alarm.

Tom is the reason I keep going back.

I suspect I am part of the reason he does too.

The water is eighty-two degrees this week. The aches are slightly less argumentative than they were in July. Ellis is rolling over in another city, parents sending video evidence, growing up at his own relentless pace.

And we are in the pool before the world is fully awake, making waves, startling the birds, trying to become people who can keep up with whatever comes next.

The neighbors still haven’t complained.

I choose to take that as encouragement.

Me. Every Thursday. After I hit publish.

I want to ask you a question I have been afraid to ask myself.

If I stopped writing, would anyone notice? My dogs looked at me quizzically when I posed the question to them.

I send a blog into the world every Thursday. A devotional every Monday. I sit down each week and try to find the truest thing I can say about what it means to be human and faithful and alive in a complicated world. And most weeks, almost nobody responds. The readership is small. The silence after publishing is its own kind of weather — not hostile, just vast. Like shouting into a room you’re not sure has anyone in it.

Some weeks I wonder if I am doing this for God. Some weeks I wonder if I am doing it for myself. And some weeks — the honest ones — I wonder if I am still writing to prove something to people from a long time ago. A firing squad that went back to their lives weeks after they did their damage.

Sixteen years ago, my voice was taken out.

Not silenced gradually. Taken out. The way you remove something you’ve decided is a problem.

I was a pastor serving a congregation. The passion that had always been the engine of my calling, and my refusal to play by rules that would have required me to be someone I was not, was reinterpreted — formally, institutionally — as evidence of a mental illness. Both of those things — the fire and the refusal — made the powerful uncomfortable. And when power gets uncomfortable enough, the solution is not to listen more carefully, it reaches for a diagnosis.

The institution didn’t just dismiss my voice. It attempted to make my calling the evidence of my incompetence. Which was, I think, their fear wearing a clinical costume. I represented something they couldn’t categorize or control, and so they attempted to have my passion certified as mental illness — to make my incompetence the premise and my diagnosis the proof.

The diagnosis was wrong. I am not mentally ill — or no more than any human being navigating the full weight of being alive. What I was, was inconvenient. Prophetic voices tend to be.

When your passion is diagnosed as your pathology, something happens that is very hard to name and harder to recover from. My instincts were labeled outrageous. So I dug in further, which only confirmed their diagnosis. My voice, when it was taken out, left me feeling powerless. Small. The woman who had always known how to speak truth into a room suddenly questioned whether she had the right to take up the air.

But the deepest wound was my sense of call. When they questioned that — when the burning bush moment, the recovery room, the yes I had said at ordination were “put on trial” — it felt like rejection by God. As if the one who had called me had changed the divine mind.

What got handed back to me was a box labeled outsider. With a pink slip attached. Handwritten: we don’t take your kind of crazy here.

It was trauma. It left PTSD in its wake.

Sixteen years later I am still angry at myself that I continue to slog through the mud of it. Still feeling the sorrow of a voice that was told it didn’t matter — and that some days still wonders if it does. When I send a blog into the silence and almost nobody responds, something old and unwelcome stirs. The verdict surfaces again. They were right to silence me. Nobody was waiting for what I had to say.

I am aware that the firing squad (and you are not the firing squad) is not staring me down anymore. I am also aware that PTSD is not always reasonable about that.

And then — and this is the part that shames me — I think about my friend.

She is Black. She has faced her own firing squad, her own version of passion-as-pathology, her own institutional silencing. But she has also faced something I have not — a world that makes its judgments before she speaks. That sees her before it hears her. That requires her to fight for visibility every day in ways my body has never had to.

My wound is real. And my wound is not the same.

I sit with that honestly. The embarrassment of still drowning in a single event — when she navigates a world that is structurally organized to force her to live inside the flood.

She is a risk taker. A truth teller. Someone willing to look power in the face and refuse to treat it as though it deserves her fear. Years after my own reckoning, she walked into her own — a different room, a different institution, a different version of the same ancient pattern of power deciding that a woman’s passion was a problem to be managed rather than a gift to be received.

She knows what devastation is left behind from her voice being executed.

She also keeps showing up. She is opening a door right now toward something new, something that will use exactly the voice that was once told it was too much.

She knows what the silencing costs. And she knows what it cost me.

She will do whatever she can to guard me from being harmed that way again. That’s not sentimentality. That’s the specific love of someone who understands the wound from the inside.

And yet here we both are. Still showing up.

I preached on two midwives this past Sunday. Two women actually named in Exodus and their audacity to lie without flinching to a tyrant’s face. When I think about the two of us, I keep thinking about them.

Shiphrah and Puah were midwives in Egypt. Pharaoh called them in and gave them a simple order: when the Hebrew women give birth, if it’s a boy, kill him. Efficient. Cold. The kind of order a man gives when he expects to be obeyed simply because of who he is.

They didn’t.

They lied to Pharaoh

The text says God was good to them for it.

No footnote. No qualifier. Just — God was good to them.

The question I am mulling over is this: why does this specific, unvictorious act of defiance matter to God?

Every person Pharaoh was trying to erase bore the image of God. When Shiphrah and Puah refused — with a calculated deception, with a straight face, with whatever they had — they were insisting that what God made cannot be unmade by a man with a throne.

God blesses their refusal because some things are not Pharaoh’s to decide, no matter how much power he holds.

My friend and I are not Shiphrah and Puah. But our stories don’t repeat — they rhyme.

So why do I return to the keyboard?

I have been sitting with that question for weeks. Is it self-flagellation — returning again and again to the place where I was hurt, offering my voice into a silence that confirms the old verdict? Is it vanity? Is it compulsion?

I don’t think so.

I think I return because in the writing I have agency. And in this space, I can refuse. I can say, plainly and without permission, that what God made in me — this particular voice, this particular way of seeing — cannot be unmade by a firing squad’s verdict. It was not Pharaoh’s to take, no matter how much power he held. Every blog I send is a small act of insistence. Some things are not Pharaoh’s to decide.

The readership is small. The silence after publishing is vast. And most of what I am up against will not be defeated by what I write here.

That’s what Shiphrah and Puah understood. The refusal matters even when it isn’t the ending. The quiet no, spoken into the face of everything that could crush it, is worth something in the eyes of God.

My friend knows this. She keeps showing up too. Two women, different rooms, different firing squads, different wounds — same refusal.

I don’t know if you’d notice if I stopped writing.

But I think I’m starting to understand that the answer to that question isn’t the reason I keep going.

Me….Thinking here’s the theologian we never expected.

My brothers announced, with complete sincerity, that they prefer pool temperature in the upper seventies. They were both gingerly wading into eighty degrees at the time. Elbows up. Shoulders to their ears. Breath coming in small theatrical gasps.

Eventually each one took a deep breath and let themselves sink in neck deep.

My twin brothers were here last week. We floated. We stood in the shallow end. We hung on the edge of the pool in the deep end.

I kept thinking about that moment. The gasping in the shallows. The breath. The sinking in. And how once you’re actually in it, it feels different than you thought it would from the outside.

We are all in our fifties. We are not young people sorting out who we are. We are people who have already sorted — careers, families, philosophies, faiths — and are now discovering, in a backyard pool in Jacksonville, that some of the sorting happened on top of things we never fully addressed.

We talked about things that have been stuffed for a very long time.

Decades of stuffed things, it turns out, do not stay stuffed forever. They just wait for the right container — the right combination of water and time and people who finally have enough distance from the original wound to be in the same pool without drowning each other.

We talked about how we hurt each other. About what our parents gave us and what they couldn’t. About the self-awareness we have been slowly, arduously, painfully gaining — each of us on our own path, at our own pace, in our own direction.

One brother issued a challenge I am still sitting with. He asked us to reflect on what our parents provided beyond the material.

I have not done it yet.

I am aware that I have not done it yet. I am also aware of why — the hurt might be larger than whatever gratitude I can find for them, and I am not yet sure which one will win if I actually look. Avoidance is almost always multilayered. This one is too.

My brothers and I use the same words. This is what I keep coming back to — not the wounds, not the apologies, not even the stuffed things still waiting to be unpacked. The words.

One of them pronounced for themselves, “We cannot love others if we don’t first love ourselves.”

All three of us would say this. All three of us believe it. And all three of us mean something different by it.

For one brother, love has been primarily intellectual — a philosophy, a framework, a system of understanding. He said it himself, with a kind of hard-won honesty that landed in my chest: he has spent his life chasing knowledge, functioning from intellect, and has come to realize he is not whole. He is now endeavoring to function from his heart.

I have known this about him for a long time. Hearing him say it himself was something else entirely. I felt ironically vindicated — and more appreciably, a tenderness for his vulnerability. A connection that felt like the mysticism found in a beautiful wave crashing on the shore.

For another brother, love is still mostly oriented inward — the work of becoming whole enough to offer something to others. Which is real work. Important work. The kind of work that, if abandoned, leaves a person hollow and their relationships hollow alongside them.

And for me — love has become something I understand as necessarily communal. That understanding felt like wholeness. Like liberation. Like the humbling recognition that God doesn’t ask me to generate love from my own depleted reserves — but invites me to participate in an abundance that was already overflowing. The outpouring. The sacrifice. The willingness to consider how your choices land beyond your immediate circle. To stand in the gap for and with those who are marginalized. This doesn’t require you to have arrived at some sufficient level of personal wholeness. Love asks this before you feel ready for it. We sat in the same pool using the same words and meaning different things.

John 13.

Jesus is at the table with the people he knows best. He knows what they’re capable of — their rivalry, their misunderstanding, their tendency to argue about who among them is greatest while he is trying to show them something else entirely. He knows Judas will betray him before the night is over. He knows Peter will deny him three times before morning.

He knows all of this.

And he gets up from the table, takes off his outer robe, wraps a towel around himself, pours water into a basin, and begins to wash their feet.

He does not wait for them to arrive at sufficient self-awareness. He does not make the foot washing contingent on their personal growth. He kneels in front of people who don’t yet understand what love requires — people who are, in their own ways, still mostly oriented toward themselves — and he washes their feet anyway.

And then he says: do likewise.

Not do this once you’ve healed your family wounds. Not do this after you’ve figured out what love means. Not do this when you feel ready.

Do likewise. Right now.

The practice precedes the wholeness. The kneeling is part of how the wholeness comes.

The pool conversation and the foot washing are the same story.

People who love each other and who know each other’s dysfunction — who have hurt each other, who carry decades of stuffed things, who use the same words and mean different things — gathered around water, bobbing about, trying to work out what love actually requires of them.

The church I am serving is also the same story.

This is what I keep seeing — the way a family system and a congregational system suffer from the same disease. The stuffed pain that calcifies into dysfunction. The people who cannot yet name what they’re angry about. The ones who have gathered so much knowledge about their faith that they have forgotten to function from their heart. The people that speak fluently about love while remaining primarily oriented toward their own survival and comfort.

The same infectious fracture in smaller and larger systems.

And the same medicine: someone has to kneel first. Someone has to pick up the basin before the others are ready. Someone has to model what it looks like to love past the point where it’s convenient, past the point of personal readiness, past the point where the family system or the church system or the cultural system has done enough self-work to deserve it.

I am still avoiding the reflection my brother challenged me to do.

I will do it. Probably soon. Probably when I am ready to find out which is larger — the hurt or the gratitude — and to sit with whatever the answer is without looking away.

The thing about kneeling with a basin is that it changes you as much as it changes the person whose feet you’re holding.

Maybe that’s what I’m waiting to be ready for.

Not the interior examination itself.

What it might ask of me on the other side of it.

My brothers eventually took a deep breath and let themselves sink in.

I’m still standing at the edge of my brother’s challenge — to name what our parents gave that wasn’t material.

But somewhere along the way I picked up the basin.

That, it turns out, is its own kind of sinking in.

God. Basically. All week.

Sunday afternoon.

My husband was rocking Ellis in the other room. My son and daughter-in-law were at the climbing gym. I was on the couch with a sermon still bouncing in my head, brothers arriving later in the week, and a Jeep with an overheating engine sitting in the driveway like a question I couldn’t afford to answer yet.

And then the rain came.

Not polite rain. A wall of it. Lightning first — blinding, decisive — and then thunder rolling through the room and into the chest before the mind had time to brace. The thunder was so close on its heels of the flashes that Nitro, their pup, who is not easily impressed, reconsidered his position on the couch.

I didn’t move.

And for a few minutes, watching the wall of rain from that couch, all of my mind in chaos became a faint image. Not gone. Just — behind the thunder that shook the room before I could brace for it.

I was soothed by something I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t have manufactured.

I didn’t know yet that the storm was also a harbinger.

The Jeep diagnosis came later this week.

I bought the Jeep with some of my retirement money. I’ve watched enough of my future disappear to know better than to wait for it. The Jeep was that decision made visible. A small act of not waiting.

And now it has broken in an expensive way and I am heartbroken.

Not devastated. Not undone. Just the particular heaviness of an expensive week landing on a decision that made complete sense when I made it.

I pulled out of the funk faster than I would have before. The heartbreak arrived and moved through me and I was still standing on the other side of it without the usual residue. Something had shifted — or something was holding me up that I hadn’t accounted for.

The knee jerk still fires. Let me be clear about that. My survival instinct registered the Jeep as a crisis and responded accordingly — the particular tightening in the chest, the rapid calculation of cost and consequence, the low hum of anxiety that follows an expensive diagnosis home.

What was different was what happened next.

Somewhere in the last year — in the slow, mostly invisible work of paying attention to my own life, of writing toward what’s true, of loosening my grip on things I had been holding too tightly — something shifted underneath. Not the reaction. The recovery. The heartbreak arrived and moved through me and left less residue than it once would have.

I think this is what introspection actually does when you stay with it long enough. It doesn’t eliminate the feeling. It shortens the grip.

Which is, I realize, exactly what Hinneh requires.

You cannot perceive what’s already springing up if your hands are full of what just broke. Wonder needs a loosened grip to find its way in.

Hinneh.

A Hebrew word. It doesn’t translate cleanly into English. It’s the word you use when something is happening right in front of someone and they are completely missing it. Urgent. The word you use when you want to grab someone by the shoulders and turn their face toward the window.

God uses it in Isaiah 43.

Hinneh. Look. Don’t you see it? I am doing a new thing. Now it springs up.

Not, I will do a new thing. Not, remember what I did before. Now. Already happening. Already pushing through the surface.

And God’s question hangs in the air like something that has been waiting a long time to be asked:

Do you not perceive it?

I have been thinking all week about wonder and hinneh — and how they live in each other. Wonder is what happens when hinneh finds you. When the thing already springing up finally breaks through the surface of your attention and you see it — really see it — and something in you opens that had been closed.

You cannot manufacture wonder. You can only be available to it.

Which is harder than it sounds.

Ellis wakes up happy. He wakes up and the first thing he does when he sees a face he loves is smile. His whole face does it. Not just the mouth, which has no teeth yet and doesn’t need any. The whole face — eyes first, then everything else — and the effect is something I don’t have adequate theology for. My body feels like basking in the sun at the ocean’s edge on a perfect day. I can breathe again.

Sometimes the soothing arrives first. The harbinger is patient.

Maybe you have your own version of this. These things arrive when they arrive. Unrequested. Unscheduled. A smile, a storm, a dog reconsidering his position on the couch. Something that made the chaos become a faint image, even briefly.

Hinneh.

Look.

Don’t you see it?

The new thing doesn’t wait for the expensive week to resolve itself before it springs up. It doesn’t check whether the conditions are adequate. It just — arrives. In the smile of a four month old. In the thunder that rolls through the chest before the mind can brace. In the rain that soothes before it harbingers.

Wonder and hinneh live in each other.

Most of us are moving too fast to notice. The week fills itself with broken things and unfinished sermons and questions we can’t afford to answer yet — and somewhere in the middle of all of it, something is already springing up that we are completely missing.

The storm doesn’t wait for a convenient moment. Ellis doesn’t check whether the conditions are right before he smiles.

Don’t you see it coming?

Me. Watching her walk in already wearing it.

There is a particular held breath that comes with opening the front cover of a book you have been waiting to read.

You know it’s coming. You chose it. You carried it home.

It still catches you.

My daughter processed into the room already wearing the white coat. She had told us ahead of time. I held my breath anyway.

I had imagined it differently — the coat placed on her shoulders like a laying on of hands. A visible before and after. Instead, she walked in already changed, the white coat already part of her, and what I felt in my body was something I don’t have a single word for. Awe. Joy. Honor. Hope. All of it at once, vibrating.

My daughter is starting medical school at Tulane University.

She is older than most of her classmates. She waited — circling, questioning, impervious to the voices that said hurry up. She was listening for something deeper than urgency. When her bones finally said yes, she moved.

Each student was asked to offer one word to carry into medicine — a single word spoken aloud at the White Coat ceremony to introduce themselves to the room. She walked onto that stage on Sunday and the word she chose to describe herself to a room full of strangers was intuitive. I had suggested tenacious. She received this the way Sydney receives most things that aren’t quite hers yet — as though it hadn’t quite been spoken. And then she stood before a room full of strangers and said intuitive.

When she said intuitive I felt a small private disappointment. I had wanted her to lead with something that would announce her before the room could diminish her. Something with armor in it.

I saw tenacious. She knew intuitive. We were both looking at the same woman.

The keynote speaker at the White Coat ceremony told these fresh med students earlier they will never be the person they are today again.

That the coat they are wearing makes them different. That stepping onto this path means becoming someone new — that the responsibility and the respect and the weight of it will reshape them in ways they cannot predict from where they’re standing.

He told them that patients are the canvas and their hands, head, and heart are the tools.

He was telling them not to lose the heart part.

He knows the system will try.

There is a garment I wear when I preach. A stole — draped across the shoulders, falling on either side. It represents the yoke of ministry. The weight of being called to something that will ask everything of you.

The white coat is medicine’s version of that garment.

Jesus said his yoke is easy and his burden is light. I used to think that was a promise about difficulty. I think now it’s a promise about alignment — whether the calling fits the person wearing it. The burden feels light when you’re carrying what you were made to carry.

Sydney waited until she was sure the yoke fit.

I watched my daughter walk in wearing that coat — already changed, already brave, already carrying the word intuitive like a compass heading — and I felt the particular terror of loving someone who is about to walk into a system that will work very hard to sand down exactly the things that make her extraordinary.

Her compassion. Her empathy. Her tenacity. Her intuition —the quality she now leads with in a room full of people who will shape who she becomes as a physician.

Medicine is a system driven by results. By efficiency. By the machinery of outcomes, patient volumes, productivity metrics and protocols — and rightly so. These are not arbitrary demands. Lives depend on precision. On certainty. On the right diagnosis delivered in time.

And the system struggles to make space for the doctor who sits with someone’s humanity before reaching for a diagnosis. The system will teach her to be objective. To manage rather than feel. To be successful in ways that may require her to compromise the very things the keynote speaker was trying to name and protect.

I know this pattern. I have watched it work on people I love in other systems. I have felt it work on me.

Someone told me recently that I am a tornado. The pastor before me was a gentle breeze. I understood immediately what was being said — and what wasn’t. Women like me are aggressive, not assertive. Angry, not passionate. Too much, not enough. The system has a very specific shape it prefers, and it will spend considerable energy trying to make you fit it.

I watched my daughter walk into another one of those systems. Most of us have watched someone we love walk toward a system that often isn’t nimble enough to see what the exceptional bring to it.

And I wondered — watching her process into that auditorium, already wearing the coat — how my husband and I managed to have such a powerful daughter in a world of institutions and structures that work overtime to diminish women.

The students recited a commitment at the end.

To their education. To the community. To honor the dignity and humanity of every person who will sit in front of them, regardless of that person’s story or stature.

My daughter’s voice mingling with the other 189 students.

She has been honoring the dignity and humanity of people her whole life. She learned it the hard way — as someone whose own dignity and humanity were not always honored by the systems she moved through. She knows what it costs to be missed. She knows what it means to finally be seen accurately.

That knowing is not a liability in medicine.

It is exactly what a patient needs from the person holding their chart.

The speaker said they will never be the person they are today again.

I believe him. And I am holding that truth with both hands — the hope of it and the grief of it simultaneously. She is stepping into a story I don’t get to write. The path will show her things about herself that neither of us can predict from where we’re standing.

I just want to be nearby when it does.

I want to watch with wonder.

Some of you know what it is to watch someone you love walk toward a future you once weren’t sure they’d have.

You know the particular weight of that kind of watching. The joy that has old fear folded inside it. The pride that knows exactly what it cost to get here.

I am holding all of it.

She is about to become a doctor.

And I am still vibrating.

The autopilot. Working perfectly.

I am afraid of butterflies.

Not metaphorically. Actually. Genuinely. Butterflies…well…moths too.

I know how this sounds. I have made my peace with how this sounds.

My mother painted monarch butterflies on…

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Silence. Patient. Persistent. Pulling up a chair.

Let’s sit shiva together.

That’s what the silence says to me now.

Not what it said twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years ago the silence said: you are behind…

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Me. Staring at my own handwriting.

Tom and I have been arguing about the backyard for six weeks.

Not arguing exactly. Circling. …

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Me considering if the hills are really my battleground.

I can’t believe I live in a world that hasn’t matured.

That was my first thought reading the back windshield of the truck in front of me.

Freedom isn’t free.

I felt irritation. …

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You shouldn’t have.

We say it before the wrapping paper is off. A reflex so practiced it feels like manners. Something in us returns the gift before we’ve decided whether we want it.

Reflexes and déjà vu are kissing c…

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Me. In every church meeting since 2002.

I picked up a piece of sandpaper last week.

We bought an old dining table off Facebook Marketplace — the kind with rough spots and a history you can feel under your hands. I spent Friday afternoon…

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Me. Just now catching up to a conversation God clearly started a while ago.

Apparently, I am the subject of last week’s blog.

Last week I wrote about side entrances — about God and Rick Riordan and Percy Jackson and the particular grace…

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I didn’t plan to stay.

We had come over for dinner, my husband and I, the ordinary Tuesday version of living in the same city as people you love. My daughter-in-law was already on the couch wh…

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The pool came with the rental.

So did the neglect.

The previous owner lives out of state and trusted a pool guy he’d never really checked on. By the time we arrived — boxes still stacked in the living room, a new city, a new season of l…

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About seven years ago I preached a sermon in a Supergirl costume.

Not by accident. On purpose. With intention and theological foreth…

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(Fair warning: this blog contains both cardboard boxes and a Supreme Court decision. I did not plan it this way. The week had other ideas.)

We are moving. Again.

This is…

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(No grandmothers were permanently put in a corner in the making of this blog. The elephant, however, took some negotiating.)

I became a grandmothe…

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I paid someone to hurt me last week.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in a way that required paperwork or a conversation with my therapist afterward.

I got a Thai massage. …

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I needed something this week that wasn’t heavy.

So I am starting with Jesus on a bungee.

The world has been loud. The news has been relentless.

Layered with seven weeks of…

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Last summer I was invited to sit in on a podcast recording.

A friend of mine is in seminary in Kansas City. He had an assignment in his church history class that he approached as reco…

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