I can do all of this? Really??????

I live in the Hawkeye state, otherwise known as Iowa. Even I, who cares very little for sports, have heard of the prowess of the female American basketball player Caitlin Clark. It’s hard not to miss it, since her name has been mentioned a great deal this year at both the collegiate and the professional […]

Go ye into all the world….

The other day, while the other half and I were out and about, we came back from shopping at one of the bigger farm stores in the area to find someone had crammed a cartoon gospel tract into the handle of the driver’s side door of the other half’s vehicle. The tract was a reminder […]

Perfection in the celebration

This past week, there was a celebration at the tiny church the other half and I attend in my little swath of the Midwest. Ten years ago, our current pastor started his walk with us. In those ten years, there have been numerous high points and low points, both globally and a little closer to […]

Why can’t we all just get along?

America is known for being a place of freedoms. Look at the first amendment to the Constitution, where the freedom of speech, freedom of the presses, freedom to peacefully assemble, freedom to petition the government and freedom of religion are all protected, even valued as fundamental to the lives of the citizens. We have the […]

Changing the belief to live the story

This past Sunday was Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of the Christian Lord. As a storyteller, I have always been fascinated with how the story on Saturday played out. On Friday, the hope that Jesus’ followers and disciples had was dead. Grief was heavy. A story that they had hoped would be everlasting had […]

Rabble-Rouser

For most of the Christian world, we are in the midst of what is known as Holy Week. It is the week that begins with Palm Sunday and culminates with Easter. It commemorates the last week in the life of Jesus. But the Holy Week depicted in the Bible wasn’t a celebration. It was a […]

Beautiful messes

Many of us have been called labels instead of names. Self-centered. Narcissist. Radical. Socialist. Sinner. Dumb ass. Stupid. Selfish. Crazy. We carry these labels, shouldering them alongside the weight of all that we are, all that we need to do, all that we have to be. Sometimes, we carry so much weight and have so […]

Love thine enemy

It is super hard to be nice to people who are mean to us. Ask any person who works in customer service or retail and they will tell you so, since they are expected to be friendly even as anger and vitriol and snide comments are thrown their way. Between the entitlement stories and the […]

Blessed are….

In my fantastical adventurous Portals Series, there is an enemy to magic. It is not dark magic, for even sorcery has a place in my fictionalized world of portals and realms even as some look down their nose at it. It is rather an ideal, an entity called evil. Evil is twisted, created from the […]

Recognition

This past Sunday, the tables in the narthex of one of the local churches in my little swath of the Midwest were full of people enjoying camaraderie and some scrumptious cheesecake and coffees. They all had something in common…. they all had volunteered to make this little swath of the Midwest a better place for […]