Dear Sweet Girl, For You, Justice Looks Like Healing

Dear Sweet Girl, Hear me. As I hold your freckled face between the palms of my hands, I believe you. You are wearing the navy blue shoes your dad bought for you last year. Before. Before everything changed. Before your wrists were pressed into the cold white sheets that December afternoon. Before you looked outside […]

I Am Not A Godly Woman

I am not a godly woman. I wanted to be one for a long time. I was told for most of my life I should aspire to be one. Men apparently looked for them to date and marry. Preachers spoke longingly of them as the idealized, female archetype. In fact, the only type of woman […]

The Gift of Intensity

My first steps into the world of social justice and activism happened in second grade, when I really began noticing and paying attention to things like environmental impact of goods and capitalist economies, thanks to Scholastic News articles about the safety of dolphins in tuna farming and the closure of my favorite grocery store chain. […]

I Am Planting Flowers

This past week at work we had our Staff Appreciation Tea. At the tea we honored people for their years of service and there are also three awards handed out for outstanding achievement—one for safety, one for creative solutions and one for people who live out our values in an exemplarily way. Out of 650 […]

We Were Not Made to Be Nice

The word “nice” is not in the Bible. It is nowhere to be found in the half dozen translations I’ve searched. There’s not one single time Jesus directs us to be nice. Kind, yes. But not nice. So why have we spent generations extolling the virtue of niceness to our daughters? Why has the Doctrine of […]