Holy Manual Labor!

Baker holding halved loaf of bread at bakery

One sweltering day last summer I locked myself in a back bedroom at a friend’s lake house. While she watched my kids (thank you!!), I spoke on the phone with an old college friend who started a bakery. We talked about the spiritual significance of ordinary, physical tasks; the theology of bread; the ways American […]

Holy Embodiment Tip #1 and Some News

Tranquil close-up of water ripples in a shimmering pond under the scorching desert sun, framed by lush palm trees in an oasis setting

Happy New Year!!!! (We still say that this many days into 2025, right? OK cool.) In January, a lot of us are reexamine our relationships with our bodies – be it eating, working out, sleeping, or getting a handle on depression and anxiety (Seasonal Affect Disorder, anybody?) Yet a lot of us see no connection […]

Since I’ve Been Gone Pt. 1: Can You Go Home Again?

I’m deeply grateful be back in America – but it’s not the country I left. Slurping a perfectly ripe peach, I watch a 400-year-old play from a lawn chair and think about the America I used to know. Meanwhile, As You Like It careens towards its – spoiler alert! – four-wedding finale. (In Shakespeare’s comedies, […]

When You’re The Friend In Need

I lay in bed with a pounding sinus infection, the day before an 18-hr international flight. My doorbell rang. My newish friend Millie had brought me samgyetang, a nourishing Korean soup of chicken, jujube, and ginseng. We weren’t close enough for her to bring me soup, but she had. We weren’t close enough for her […]

Heavenly Bodies

Girl wearing blue denim dress shirt

Offering Our Pear Shapes and Fuzzy Brows in Worship “I hardly ever do things like this,” my friend Becky told me on the phone yesterday, “But my daughter needed makeup for a play she’s in, so I took us down to the makeup counter at kind of a nice makeup shop on Main, and I […]

Since I’ve Been Gone, Pt 3:Triggers and Shibboleths

Part 3 of a series on America’s changes: So here I am, sweating on the scattered mulch of our school playground, trying to make a new friend in our first month of Normal Life In America. It’s late August, 2022. Muggy. Cicadas screaming. I’m waiting outside my kids’ school to pick them up, and I’m […]

The One About Fashion

Fashion can matter to you.It doesn’t have to.But it doesn’t have to not. When I was younger I took everything so seriously that style was not allowed to matter. It was a waste of time and energy that could be spent SHARING THE GOSPEL. (Obviously I was a very fun highschool hang.) But then in […]

New Scar

So in between writing conference workshops last week I popped over to have my first American dermatology appt. I went in for a mole to get checked out which the Korean doctor in Seoul had okayed, but he’d never had a patient with so many freckles, and was frankly a little too amused by mine. […]