“No, Mom,” my son whispered. “They’re asking if we’d like to go to a late breakfast with them.” I sighed audibly, smiled, and nodded. The lightbulb of understanding was finally on. After several minutes of trying to decipher what the Spanish-speaking couple was asking me, my son had come to my rescue and translated the…
“I’m just not sure how to move forward with her,” my friend Sarah said. She had been telling me about recent struggles with a family member. Sarah and her relative were coming to the table with different perspectives, and I honestly didn’t know if they’d ever see eye to eye. Age, family dynamics, and desired…
Stepping into this first month of 2021 feels categorically different than other years. It feels different because it is different. Twenty-twenty changed us. The crises we encountered may inspire us to ask, “How does our experience in 2020 affect the posture we take toward 2021?” I chose that word—“posture”—carefully because I mean it literally. Here’s…
We all know that 2020 has been a dumpster fire so far. One thing has become clear to me during all of the upheaval: it is exceedingly difficult for people to exit their echo chambers and try out empathy for a change. I get it. Empathy comes unnaturally to me. I favor the sweet logic…
“The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of…
How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity! (Psalm 133:1 NIV) There we were, the body of Christ, beautifully diverse, lifting our voices in one chorus to the heavens. I remember the moment like it was yesterday. We had been living in Shanghai for a few months when my husband…