Dear Awkward, Several years ago, our family got involved in fostering children with significant medical needs. The nudge to do so came from the teachings of our church…to love God and to love people. But, the very church family who encouraged us to jump in did not throw the life-preserver we expected. Fostering got hard. …
When Empathy Led Me Astray: For The Mudroom
In my premarital class, our pastor had everyone take a Myers-Briggs assessment. When my husband and I both got our results, we smiled at each other: we were just one letter apart. He was an INTP (introvert, intuition, thinking, perceiving), and I was an INFP (feeling). It made sense. Similar as our temperaments are, there’s a …
When Holidays Stress You Out: For The Mudroom
You know what my idea of a holiday is? A normal day. Laundry, hanging with my kids, and, by 9:30 pm, watching a murder mystery with my husband while I eat raisin bran. Even better: doing all that in slippers. Normal days are easy. On a normal day, I have a routine. I know what’s …
Memory and the Miracle of Love
Do you ever worry you are not creating enough good memories with the people you love? I do: I wonder if my time with my kids is rich enough, or special enough. Wonder if I am intentional enough in cultivating friendships and sustaining bonds with my husband. And yet, sometimes, I think we worry too …
When You Fail to Become the Perfect Spouse: The Mudroom
The last night of my honeymoon, almost fifteen years ago, I set an alarm to wake us up for our first day back at work—and started to cry. “Our honeymoon is over,” I wailed. “Things have been so great so far, but this has been the easy part. What will happen when things get harder?” …
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The Biggest Hindrance to Creativity Isn’t Time: For The Mudroom
Before I had kids, I got a master’s degree in creative writing at San Diego State. I had quit my job as a technical writer not long before, and my husband earned enough that I didn’t need to work. So throughout my degree program, I had all day to write. You would think having that much time motivated …
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Have I Repented Too Much? For the Mudroom
The book I use for daily prayer, The Divine Hours, includes a lot of confessions, like this classic: Almighty God, my heavenly Father: I have sinned against you, through my own fault, in thought, and word, and deed, and in what I have left undone. I wince almost every time I read this prayer. It’s cliché to wince …
Revelation Is Not A Guarantee–for The Mudroom
For a three-month stretch when I was seven or eight, I tried to learn how to pray. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d pull a children’s prayer book down from the shelf and move it to the crack of light that shone in from the hallway. I opened it up to the Lord’s Prayer and read …
Endurance Is Not Cold Tolerance: for The Mudroom
When I was a new mom, I read that children go through periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium that last about six months each. I kept hoping my daughter was nearing the end of a period of disequilibrium. After all, my sweet girl had been pushing all my buttons for months with expert grace, and she was about to have her …
Surrendering to Communion for The Mudroom
“Asking is, at its core, a collaboration.” Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking It only took nine unsubscribes to undo me. I use some software to manage the subscribers to my blog, and if there’s activity—people signing up (yay!) people un-signing up (sigh!), I get an email. Lately, I have been sighing more than normal. …
Are you willing to listen to the darkness? for The Mudroom
I used to have a kind of waking nightmare. It started in college. I’d be alone in the dorm bathroom, my toiletry caddy in hand, going down the aisle of shower stalls, their white plastic curtains like ghosts’ hems, all in a row. All of a sudden, the dread of what lay behind those curtains …
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The Night I Almost Stopped Being a Christian: for The Mudroom
The night I almost stopped being a Christian anymore, I sat alone, at midnight, in the living room of the house I shared with three other women. I was twenty-two, almost six months out of college, depressed, and despairing. I’d discovered I was depressed in my therapist’s office the summer before. The revelation was like a pin …
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