Dear Awkward, I work at a large Fortune 500 company. Recently one of my coworkers, Carlos, was promoted and now leads a small team. Since the promotion, Carlos has been trying to assert his new authority—even over people, like me, who don’t work for him. For example, in meetings with senior executives, he mansplained the …
Dear Awkward: My Pastor and Air Yeezys
Dear Awkward, What do you think if the Instagram account @preachersnsneakers? How do you see wealth, spending, and responsibility in church and or in the kingdom? Is there a place for judgement? Mara Dear Mara, After I received your question, I decided to re-take the Slavery Footprint survey, and discovered that I, personally, employ 52 …
Goals Don’t Need to Stress You Out
I used to think goals were like rock climbing, or more specifically, like those tiny little plastic handholds in an indoor climbing gym. When I set goals, it was like choosing, with zero understanding, the shape and size of each grip, as well as their placement on a sheer cliff face. Once they were installed, …
A Little Yes Live: Goals that Nurture Your Inner Toddler
A lot of time when people talk about setting goals, they say goals make us more focused, productive, and successful. Quote honestly, I think wanting to be more productive is a TERRIBLE reason to set goals. That sounds stressful and unappetizing to me. You see, goals aren’t about doing more, being more, or becoming someone …
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Three Lies that Keep You Busy in Your Faith
Does your faith often feel more like a to-do list than a place of respite? Do service projects, devotionals, Bible study, committees, Sunday school service, and discipleship sometimes feel like a full-time, very thankless job? At the root of our overwhelming faith are choices. We make thousands of tiny decisions to say yes instead of …
Houseplants Are Zombies of the Apocalypse: The Mudroom
Last night, after I finished packing for a long trip, I decided to move all my succulents outside for the duration of our weeklong vacation. I have nine pots of various sizes on the bookshelves in our front room: one tiny barrel cacti, four plants that look like desert seaweed, and assorted echeveria in dark …
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How Courageous Persistence Can Lead to Hope: For iBelieve
Generally, clicking “Buy Now” shouldn’t make your hands shake. It shouldn’t make your stomach tie in knots or pump adrenaline through your body. You shouldn’t feel so jittery you want to run screaming from your computer. But that’s exactly how I felt the morning I sat down to purchase a web domain name for a …
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The Tender Necessity of Taking Care of Myself: for SheLoves
It’s never good when your kindergartner sees blood dribbling down your chin. It started with the oral surgery. Receding gums meant a graft of tissue from the roof of my mouth to the overexposed teeth. I was expecting the surgery to be uncomfortable, expected my gums to be sore. What I did not expect was …
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You Are Not the Problem: For AndiLit
When I was first trying to write regularly twenty years ago, I could not, for the life of me, finish anything. At the time, I was trying to write fiction. I wrote one story about a husband and wife making a hard decision over the phone. I could hear their voices in my head, imagine …
3 Surprising Ways to Stop Digital Distraction: For iBelieve
At least once a day, I find myself scrolling through posts on Facebook looking for…something. Here’s the problem: I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I itch to be entertained. Maybe by a juicy bit of internet outrage? A snappy food video? Cats in costume? Often while I’m wasting my time, my children are …
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I Won’t Say I Read Trashy Books Anymore—For The Mudroom
My friend Melissa has a way of being kind that also makes me think. We were out for coffee, talking about books. Specifically: about my anxiety about wanting to read more. By most measures, I read a lot, but with the advent of smart phones and parenthood, I read less then I used to. Recently, …
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how I read the Bible almost killed me
In college, I read the Bible every day. I prayed every day, writing out my prayers longhand in journals I decorated for the purpose. I did inductive Bible studies too, sometimes from a devotional guide, sometimes using the Observation, Interpretation, Life Application method. It sounds lovely, doesn’t it? So spiritual. Except I hated it. Nearly …
Anxiety and My Closet
Guys, anxiety is just weird. I want it to pop up in seeming worthy places: race relations! Politics! Finding my passion and deciding who I am in this world! And I do get anxious about those things. But I also get anxious about ticky-tack stuff like what book to read next, whether the necklace I’m …
It’s Scary to Wear Jewelry: For SheLoves Magazine
A necklace really shouldn’t cause anyone this much anxiety. I bought it from a friend selling those fabulous accessories made by women moving out of poverty. Cute jewelry + women’s empowerment. Win-win. I haven’t gotten myself a new necklace in years, I thought. It’s for a good cause. I scrolled through the catalog and found a …
The Unity of My Body and Mind: for The Mudroom
I got migraines regularly as a kid. The pain would start as a pinch above my left eyebrow, travel to the back of my neck, and soon send out sparks of light into my vision, nausea into my belly, and, if I didn’t retreat to a dark room soon enough, puke onto our white carpet. …
Focus on the Exhale
When my husband Dyami and I were first dating, he said something about breathing that changed my life. His father’s a musician and music teacher. Driving down the freeway that day, Dyami mentioned his dad taught voice lessons occasionally too. “I hated voice lessons,” I said. I took them on and off through childhood, learning …
For the one who feels incompetent
Can I let you in on a secret? When I try something new, I always assume I’m incapable of it. For example: after college, I worked as a technical writer for a consulting company. A local manufacturing facility wanted us to create a small- to medium-sized website for one of their departments. My boss told them I’d be …
Holy Curiosity About Fear: For Cara Meredith
The other day, one of my kids got upset about some schoolwork in her least-favorite subject. “You can do it,” I told her. She stared at me. I didn’t blame her. Talk is cheap. So I posed a different question. “What’s the worst-case scenario if you fail?” I asked. She told me, her eyes worried. …
A Back-to-School Sanity Check
Back when I had preschoolers, I used to get all judgy about overscheduling. People throw their children into too many activities, I sniffed. Those poor kids. And then my daughters hit elementary school and wham, I realized how exponential family time commitments were. If we say yes to two things, suddenly our calendar feels overfull. It’s incredibly hard …
From Stinginess to Simplicity: For The Mudroom
The other day, my husband caught me darning my underwear. The pair had a hole near my hip. They’re a few years old, so I had thought about tossing them, but pulled out my needle and thread instead. This frugality runs in my blood. My mom grew up poor, her mother was a child of …
The Wall I Pretended Not to See: For You Are Here Stories
A half hour from my house stands an icon I used to rarely think about. It doesn’t look like much: stopped cars on a wide freeway, a low-lying government building. And in red letters, on a white overhang, a sign: Mexico. The San Ysidro Port of Entry is considered one of the busiest border crossings in …
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How To Seek A Tiny Bit Of Beauty Right Now: For SheLoves
Almost once a month in my twenties, I’d have a sickening crying jag, where my self-worth plunged into the toilet. If I’d been given a wish back then, I would have crumpled myself up like dirty Kleenex and demanded God start over. I want to be someone else, I’d think. I couldn’t have even told you why. …
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Are you more competent than you think?
When people learn I can speak Spanish, their first question is, “Are you fluent?” And for a long time, my answer was no. I speak Spanish well, I reasoned, but I was hardly fluent. If I have to tell a story about my hopes, dreams, fears in the past, I get tangled in the verb …
Six ways to conquer a terrifying first step
When you get stuck behind a mountain of fear, what do you do? Often I get frustrated I’m not just braving the terror, sucking it up, and moving forward. Lately, I’ve come to see that yelling at myself is not terribly helpful. And there’s more than one way to get up a mountain. With that …