cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Last week I finished reading Jodi Piccoult’s book, Small Great Things. I set it aside several times, pausing to read other books that were less disruptive. The book centers on the relationship between two ordinary women – Ruth Jefferson, a black nurse on trial for the death of a baby in her care (a baby…
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