Not Quite Home

I decided to return to my old church for a visit. Readers of Bearings will recall that it’s been a while since I’ve crossed the threshold of the church that nurtured me through graduate school and the various ups and downs of life at that time. I’d been mulling a holiday return. I wanted to see how much changed in the intermittent years, and I wanted to know... Read more

Giving Up for Lent … Or Maybe Not

Posted in 21stCenturySpirituality, From Our Archives.

The sight of my marked forehead on Ash Wednesday brings the inevitable question: “What are you giving up for Lent?” I have a stock answer: Lobster Newburg and healthy thoughts. Truth is, I genuinely struggle each year, knowing that whatever I choose to give up will be short-lived and followed by a guilt chaser. Yes, I am aware that Lent is not just a period... Read more

Practicing Gratitude as Healing

How do people who’ve been robbed of so much ever come to feel grateful for anything again?

Posted in 21stCenturyCulture, From Our Archives, Gratitude.

As a rare breed of news reporter with divinity school training, I sometimes feel like I own the tragic violence beat. Editors send me in just as the TV news trucks are pulling out after a horrific event. When eerie stillness looms and survivors are crying out to God or to the abyss in the wake of disaster, I wipe away my own tears and straighten my tie... Read more

Joy is the Secret of Resistance

Posted in From Our Archives.

On January 21, a group of women from my congregation traveled to Augusta, Maine, for our nearest “sister march” to the Women’s March in Washington, DC. Too sick with a cold to join them for the march itself, I gathered with them anyway in our church parking lot to send them off with a prayer and blessing. I ended my spontaneous prayer with a hope that whatever... Read more

Where Can I Run To?

Creating Sacred Space as a Black Woman

Posted in 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, 21stCenturyReligion, 21stCenturySpirituality, From Our Archives, Sacred Space.

The 1990s R&B girl group, Xscape, has a famous song entitled “Who Can I Run To?” The song discusses the complexity of whom to rely on when one needs love. I can relate. I entered my thirties this year full of hope, only to be hit with three significant losses in a six-month time span. I lost the love of my life, then my job, and then my father passed. It... Read more

Beyond Prophetic Rhetoric

Jesus and Justice in Practice

Posted in 21stCenturyMinistry, 21stCenturyMission, Bearings Review 2017, From Our Archives.

It’s not news to say that this has been a crazy, rancorous election season—perhaps the most ugly in modern history, many pundits claim. Maybe. But when I reflect back on earlier election cycles, there seems to have been plenty of media-infused hostility that we tend to mute in our nostalgic remembrance. The 2008 election of “hope and change,” for instance, was... Read more

Loving in Public

Why I Won't Stop Talking About Racial Justice

Posted in From Our Archives.

Originally published in Bearings January 2016 | On December 29, 2015, my 14th wedding anniversary, I spent most of the day researching and thinking about the death of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old African-American boy gunned down by the police in Cleveland, Ohio. His murder had happened a little over a year earlier. Yet my shock, outrage, and grief over his death... Read more

Bridging the Sacred and the Profane

Ministries of Compassion in the World We Walk Together

Posted in From Our Archives.

Originally published in Bearings April 2015 | Not long ago, heading home from a distant airport because of a cancelled flight, my husband and I found ourselves in a rest stop at 2:30 in the morning. Just over the Maine border from New Hampshire, we stopped to switch drivers and he took the opportunity to pop into the men’s room. Wearily I crossed to the passenger... Read more