cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
God chuckled the day I articulated, “I can work from any kitchen table with Wi-Fi in the lower 48 states.” My time as a widow had been a dark 6 years—almost 7, years in which my heart and mind begged God to stop my breath. Then, as abruptly as my widowhood had begun, it ended.…
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Dinner or supper? I used the terms interchangeably most of my life until I was invited to an Epiphany dinner. The meal was elegant and intentionally derived to mark what the prior year had held for each dinner guest. Epiphany is the season in the church calendar when we feast to celebrate the wise men’s…
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still a child, after years of believingthe role of church was to give out scoldings,to plant seeds of you-are-not-good-enoughinside my fertile, waiting fields my Aunt Vera told me God loves me
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Upon finishing graduate school, my new husband and I were wide open to all the places we could move. We were young, and the world was our oyster. The big dream was to move to Boston so he could attend a trade school, but the job hunt for me was hitting dead-ends and we were…
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As I sit here writing this morning, my son at preschool for a few hours, a pine-scented candle burning, and the mess of holiday break all around me, I notice the quiet and the stillness that surround me too. Our lovable and attached Goldendoodle gazes up from beneath the creamy coils around her eyes, taking…
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I remember first noticing that my feelings about women’s Bible studies had slowly been changing after I’d just finished hosting a different sort of gathering in my home. While having the obligatory post-processing session with my patient husband, I realized I wasn’t working through or, frankly, complaining about what had or hadn’t been said. It was…
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I have spent four decades trying to get back to basics. Yes, St. Paul: when I was a child, I thought as a child, and I have put away many childish things. I no longer have nightmares of the Large Marge scene in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. I do not take a nibble of every new…
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Silence was the language of my childhood—in our home, in the car, walking side-by-side. When our kids were born, I wanted to make sure car rides were filled with music and laughter and conversation. Some of the very best of the latter have taken place on the way to school. Here is one of my…
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In my 20s, when I was part of a “soft complementarian” church that did not quite believe in women’s leadership—one that put gendered limitations, sometimes explicit and sometimes just quietly understood, on the roles women were expected to play and the gifts women were (or were not) expected to offer—I spent so much time unsure…
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The last time I said to Dan, “I am just telling you the truth,” I was fed up with what he was doing. There is, of course, a place for anger, but in this case, I was not concerned about him. I wanted him to stop his annoying remarks. The problem with “telling the truth”…
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