cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
I was ten years old when I traveled with my mother, brother, and grandparents to Throckmorton, Texas, to spend a few days with my mother’s grandparents. We drove for three days from Ohio and stopped at tourist places along the way. Carlsbad Caverns astounded me. It was as if the “bigness” of the world was…
Read More
How many times I have taken myself for granted The power I hold My opinions My voice My endless opportunities
Read More
Cradled and held close to his chest, my entire body lay completely limp, my arms and legs dangling from the strength of his arms. The image came quickly to my mind as I rocked in a white wicker rocker on my front porch with tears streaming down my face. In silence with no words, I…
Read More
Today, I am present to my sense of participation in an impossible game. Addressing racism and biblical justice as a faith leader and woman of color is a place of relational compression. Everything is constantly squeezed, and I can feel the bones and weight of my competing responsibilities creaking and cracking. In the middle my…
Read More
I married a man who often has a swirl of controversy about him. It seemed like a good fit because I was the skinny girl on the playground who faced down big six graders for being unkind to the brown third grader from India. If someone made fun of the wheelchair bound child with hydrocephalus…
Read More
Standing in the bathroom, a place of horrific and shameful abuse. I am getting another haircut that strips away my femininity. I’m 11 years old and in the midst of a war that revolves around my hair length. Much of my childhood has already been stolen. My inner little girl is screaming “Please mom, stop! Don’t…
Read More
I turned off the television and stomped my foot and almost growled with agony and anger. I couldn’t help it! I turned around and harshly spoke, “Why hasn’t the church spoken about this? I am so mad! Why isn’t more being said from our pulpits?”
Read More
I never thought much about my whiteness until I mingled in spaces where my white skin stood out like a scar. For five years, I lived in a remote city in China with a total of four foreigners. Attention from strangers was so common that on trips back home to the United States, I felt…
Read More
Four years ago, on a wintery morning, a fierce, truth-telling woman whom I cherish as my elder told me something I have never forgotten: “You can’t know where this story leads. All you can do is look at this moment and do the next right thing.” At the time, we were speaking of a romantic…
Read More
News of the shooting of Trayvon Martin broke the day after my husband and I were married. We were catching our flight to the Bahamas while our home-state was becoming embroiled in one of the most controversial cases of racial injustice in recent memory.
Read More