On March 9, 2001, I and a group of my fellow graduate students at the University of Oklahoma went to lunch to celebrate the 29th birthday of one of our own. Charlie had started the program a couple of years after me, and he and his wife Angie quickly became…

I, like apparently everyone on planet earth, watched the Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan. Honestly, I would watch Oprah interview a bowl of apples. I spent all of the nineties crying in front of the television with Oprah. Oprah has saved me thousands of dollars in therapy (to be…

One thing that was always clear to me in my conservative Christian upbringing is that we preferred to talk about the sins of others more than our own. Even when discussing types of sin common in the church–divorce, fornication for instance–it was framed as an invasion of sorts, with believers…

You quote me chapter and verse As if I’ve never read them You can tell me with confidence What God thinks of my sin. You dish out the condemnation Like hot apple pie But only your piece tastes sweet. I’m a problem A category A person to manage Contain Exclude. …

All of this, all of this can be yours Just give me what I want and no-one gets hurt –U2, “Vertigo,” How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb One of my least favorite aspects of missionary kid-dom was our family being “special” almost everywhere we went. Except in the rarified world of other missionaries/missionary kids, we were treated like some kind of royalty, and while as an adult, I could…

I don’t know. This was not something I felt I could say earlier in my faith. It was imperative to to always have an answer to any theological question. With Christian friends, I did minor battle over baptism, predestination, the rapture, what heaven would be like, speaking in tongues, whether…

Our last conservative/evangelical church–which honestly, is still a wonderful, beautiful community, we meant no disrespect by leaving, and I mean none by what I will write here–was comprised of mainly young, urban professionals, most of them single. The married couples were generally newlyweds, and there weren’t many kids. Most people…

Dear Friends, It’s 1984. I’m a little American girl living in Kenya, the child of evangelical missionaries. We have no TV, no radio, no real phone, really, just deliveries from America from time to time, or visits there every couple of years, where we pick up little snippets of the…

I can love the broken They pour themselves out Like a wild waterfall Strange and off-putting But sticky and present I can drink in Something so quivering and substantive They apologize for themselves With each breath It’s easy to forgive. I can love the abject failures They can’t hide They…