Dear Servant #1 (or as I like to scream at you, Mommmmmaaaa!),
As I have been crawling around the kingdom, I’ve noticed that the palace floors are not quite as clean as you seem to think they are.
Just today, for example, I found seven pieces of fuzz stuck to the carpet under various furniture.
Although these fuzzies [...]
The first message I ever received from Renee Johnson said just this:
“How do I NOT know you?!?!”
When I checked out her bio, her website, her book, I got what she meant.
Renee is a spirited twenty-something.
She has a background working in Outreach Events.
She wrote a book for twenty-something people of faith.
It does sorta seem like we [...]
So I’m still not a vegetarian.
But I tried my 1st fast-food veggie burger.
It tasted like a giant bean.
Which is to say, it tasted alright.
If you like big thick, bean cake with your pickles.
Long story short: it might have to grow on me.
Any suggestions for spicing up said-bean-patty (that do not involve sprinkling hamburger meat on it, although [...]
I’m sitting cross legged on the floor at LAX in California.
Not because I prefer the floor.
Especially the dirty, public floor of an airport.
But because it is the only seating available.
Well, at least its the only seat within reach of the an electrical outlet that isn’t already being dominated by fellow travelers.
I plug in my phone [...]
So, not that many years ago, I was enviro-oblivious.
One of those Americans who doesn’t think of themselves as particularly wasteful, but whose garbage can was always mysteriously refilled as soon as it was emptied.
Then one day I made some changes.
They weren’t anything catastrophic.
I didn’t chain myself to any trees on the chopping block. I have [...]
A few reviews have compared my writing to Donald Miller lately.
I was a little surprised by that.
I’m more manic that Donald, I think.
I go on and on.
Don is straight forward.
I packed more Christian ideology, more Bible-y, churchy stuff into my books than you’d find in all of Don’s books combined.
But I still get the comparison.
Don [...]
I do not live in Hollywood.
I do not live in New York City.
I don’t even live in a more mid-size-city, like Atlanta or Pittsburgh or Nashville.
So sometimes it amazes me that anyone anywhere ever hears anything about my book.
A book written by this middle class white girl…
In tiny prison city.
In the economically shrinking state of [...]
There once was a gentleman reading,
A book that was very misleading.
With a dandelion on the cover.
You’d expect women to love her.
But even the men picked up weeding.
***
An observant reader pointed something out to me this week:
Based on my book’s cover–which sports the not-so-masculine fuzzy tuft of a dandelion–a reader might assume my book is chick [...]
Yesterday I heard that one of my former students took his own life.
Its a dull, achy, surreal sort of feeling.
One that jars you out of normalcy–the way we sometimes tend to sleepwalk through life–and reminds you of just how bad things can get.
Of the emptiness that a human being can leave behind.
The school where I [...]
If you’re like me, you’ve been around the church block a time or two.
You know the lingo.
Redemption, sanctification, all that jazz…
But every once in a while, a new term sneaks onto the scene.
One of these, for me, has been the concept of “spiritual direction”–a term that started popping up in my circles over the last [...]
