cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
As I consider my final Red Tent essay, I remember the distinct feeling of writing my first piece. It came flowing out of my heart in a hospital room, and it “had to be” shared. In the midst of my processing and growth, the tent has felt like a protected space that holds my historic…
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What does it mean, now, for me to show up? Is it me, my body, clean, clothed, and correct, a physical form occupying space? Saying yes, smiling, sorting through small talk while inside my heart races?
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“You never know what may cause them…But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them…
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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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I remember my grandma‘s white lace curtains hanging over the windows in her bedroom. I would stare at them with tear-stained eyes as I sat on her bed, telling her of my sorrows and loss. It didn’t matter if I was 8 or 38 years old; she would listen compassionately and then touch my shoulder…
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Should I stay or should I go? Here’s an interesting thing: Just when I was accepting what I thought my clear understanding was, based on experience—that I could never, never, ever go back—there was a shift of awareness that this time, in this place, for so many reasons, it was time to turn around and…
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We were newlyweds, in our first apartment, performing the dreaded church-shopping. We visited nearby churches, each one similar to the ones I attended as a child. Pews, pianos, choirs. They were sparsely attended, and though it was obvious we were visitors, very few people greeted us. So we moved on. I had heard of a…
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In early 2020, while COVID and civil unrest engulfed our country, an ongoing conflict with an abusive pastor came to a climax when my husband and I were shown the door at a church we had served for over fifteen years. I was untethered, wondering what life in the world would look like in the…
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This morning, I went back to church. For more than two years, like many, I have been provided with and found reasons to attend church virtually or, truthfully, not at all. It has been a sort of rebellion. Rebellion against decades of church involvement and all the forced Sundays of my youth. A rebellion against…
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A nervous shudder ran through my body when I saw his name in the subject line of the email. I braced myself for some kind of ploy. I rushed to make sense of things in my mind. Was he reaching out wanting to make things right or to humbly apologize? I quickly knew the…
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