fear

owning our stories

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typing-handsGoing home is always an experience. Now the “home” I just came back to visit is not the city I grew up in, nor the town in which I currently live, but the place of my deepest and most resonant friendships.

A few weeks of hanging out with so many of my very favorite “peeps” has filled my soul like hardly anything else can.

I have laughed, and cried, and laughed until I cried. I have joyfully celebrated great victories and tearfully mourned great struggles – many of which I am, regretfully, just learning about. I have met the children of close friends for the first time and caught up with these amazing parents until my heart overflowed. My peeps have even helped me make a few new friends who are already kindred spirits (apparently the peeps of my peeps are also my peeps, lol).

I don’t know how to express it other than this: I have LIVED . . . outside of my own headspace . . . for the first time in way too long . . .

Funny thing is, all this living I’m suddenly doing has made me look back at the last season of my life and wonder . . . READ ON

help my unbelief

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praying-handsI do believe; help my unbelief (Mark 9:24).

That verse was always confusing until I went through an experience that made it come alive for me. I was praying one night and my thoughts wandered to my financial situation – which had improved tremendously over the course of the prior year, but was still somewhat tenuous at the time.

Gradually, I became gripped with fear that I would end up back where I had been and that potential shattered me. I began . . . READ ON

the dark side of . . .

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vaderThe Force. Well, apart from the quaint metaphor, and the whole midi-chlorian debac – um . . . decision – George Lucas wasn’t really all that far off the mark.

[ . . . ]

Having grown up as Princess Leia – or as literally as I could make it given that we practically shared a name (just for the record, I did come first) – the Dark Side was always the enemy, the interloper, the usurper, the “other.” Good was where it was at; I knew this instinctively way before I ever became a Christian. Luke and Leia and Han and Chewy and Obi-Wan were the heroes; Vader the archetypal villain.

The Star Wars mythos became the cultural icon of my young life . . . READ ON

the fisher of me . . . ?

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setnet-siteI have killed more fish in my lifetime than most people even realize exist.

Growing up in the family business of commercial fishing and canning every summer in Alaska, I made my way in the world off the guts and gills of several million pounds of Sockeye, Coho, and Chinook salmon. But the one thing I never did in all those years was stop to think about exactly what I’d put them through. Well, God in His infinite . . . humor? . . . Irony? . . . Okay, fine, wisdom . . . showed me first-hand one pivotal night a decade ago.

Now in order to understand the end (of this particular portion) of the story, there are a few not-so-minor and not-so-painless details that must be shared. To start with . . . READ ON