I wrote this a year ago as I was moving across the country. And yet I held it close, because it felt taboo. We’re supposed to get excited about what feels good in our bones, right? Instead, I felt the Wrong Emotion: grief, layered on expat grief.
“Do you want seven children?” A few months ago, I stopped by my parents’ church and sipped a coffee while listening to a rather scattered sermon. (Not that I’m complaining—attention-deficit pastors are my *favorite*, because I love watching how their rabbit-trail sermons explore the whole territory of human life….
A few years ago: I saunter up to an apartment building and a man rings me in. Inside, the apartment door is open; shoes lie scattered in a wood-paneled entryway. A large woman sits on the sofa, and a short one introduces herself. Amy* then follows her infant son around…
My first encounter with missionaries—like that of so many children—involved presents. A Christmas bauble from Burkina Faso, given out to each child at a small church in Ohio. A stick of Juicy Fruit from the American woman in a burqa, for answering the Why Jesus Saves Us question. Growing…
As you might know if you’re… an ancient history scholar… there are three major branches of Christianity. First, the Eastern Orthodox, who developed out of the ancient Byzantine Empire and live mainly in Eastern Europe, Russia, Greece, and parts of Asia. Next, the Roman Catholics, who inherit a 2000-year…
I’ve just finished the altered book I started seven years ago, tearing all the boring parts from an old college writing textbook, and adding in collage and color. God’s Grandeur is a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest in Britain’s Victorian era. Hopkins was known for heavily twisted-together poems of…
1995. Pastor Danny is drumming, people are chanting. Around me children sing, wave their hands in the air, kneel down on the tarp laid on the ground, and pray. We’re in a row of metal folding chairs, at the Vineyard Kids camp, kids surrounded by adults. It’s getting towards…
On Andy Stanley’s Enemies of the Heart Religious self-help books are easy to dismiss, but Andy Stanley has an interesting premise here. Framing his book around the Hebrew proverb, “Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life” (Prov 4:23 NASB), Stanley suggests…
My friends here are constantly teasing me for my, umm, constant talk about boys. “Do you really want to be an oil wife?” Molly asks me, as she pauses in her story of the expat wives. Bored expat wives, see, meet in the mornings at the local cafe and…
It’s Sunday morning soon before church in September. Lana, a Russian friend, is just setting down with a cup of tea, a new tin of sweetened condensed milk, and fresh crispy toast on a small platter. She pulls her bibles (!) to the side of her, neatly folds her…