I love everything about photography. Pictures tell stories and spark imaginations. Images invite us to wonder, celebrate, mourn, and remember. They provide glimpses of life, history, and potential without saying a single word. During my senior year in college, I signed up for a beginner-level photography class with aspirations of learning how to capture wonderful…
The past year has been a difficult one, full of challenges much like the decade before it. I sometimes feel like a battered ship struggling to stay afloat in an unrelenting storm. And last fall, the seemingly endless stress of balancing marriage, motherhood, and caregiving—while trying to “keep it all together” and hide my depression…
Watching my parents fight cancer for two years forced me to consider what life would be like without them. Talking to my single friends about their loneliness puts a sad ping in my stomach. Seeing my girlfriend worry about her widowed mother, I panic a little on her behalf. Watching a military wife while her…
Eighteen months ago, my husband and I were co-teachers of an adult Sunday school class full of people we considered friends. The eight couples who regularly attended were people with whom we shared our lives—the good and the bad—and they did the same. We studied God’s Word together, we prayed for one another, and we…
The church is a wonderful thing. Messy sometimes, yes. Comprised of broken people, yes. Politically confounding, yes. Globally fragmented, certainly. But the older I get, the more deeply I realize that I don’t want to live a life outside the body of Christ. As a transient adult (I’ve lived in six different cities since my…
I had one of those come-to-reality moments when I opened the photo gallery on my phone today. You know, an icky sinking moment when you realize your life looks nothing like the filtered pictures you seek out on Instagram from time to time? To make matters worse, I then stumbled upon the Instagram page of…