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When I was growing up, my brain worked in perfect harmony with disorder. My room hosted piles and piles of (mostly) clean clothes, some...

“Mom, it looks like a church van,” she texted me the day we were supposed to leave for the beach. “What do you mean?” I texted back. We had reserved a Ford Transit wagon (15-passenger) with one of those tall roofs. “It looks awful,” she continued. “Send me a picture, Lily.” The next two pictures that came through almost made me laugh out loud. Lily was right. The photo of the van we reserved and the van in the parking lot at pickup were very different. For one, it looked just

It’s no surprise to anyone close to us that this has been a tough season. I don’t mean tough like ends won’t meet or there’s bickering at home. I mean tough like we can barely show our faces in public some days and we weep into pillows when no one is around. The month of January started with a bang. We had our healing trip at the beach, celebrated my mom’s fourth year in heaven on the 3rd and flew back into our routine like we had never missed a beat. Then at the start of th

I am a statistics girl. I love studying numbers and can’t sit in a restaurant without trying to estimate what their hourly profit might be after expenditures. It’s why I love fundraising. After we lost Liv, I started a t-shirt fundraiser for local causes, and we would always set our profit margin to $10 a shirt. With this margin, I knew that selling just 100 shirts meant we could make $1,000. Year after year, we have raised at least that much, and the drive to support the com

Don’t Look Back When I was five years old, my parents sold our dryer. Right before the clothes were folded, I would climb on top of the warm pile, using the cylinder space as a warm hideout. There was nothing particularly special about this dryer-- it was brown and had a few rust spots, but I sure loved that aged appliance. Before the buyer showed up at our apartment, I climbed back into the dryer one last time and took a black permanent marker with me so I could sign th

When I think back to my first four decades on earth, it’s easy to try to divide my life into heartache and triumph. Heartache looked like losing Liv and Jettson in the second trimester, heartache felt like the worst rejection I’ve ever faced from those I trusted most, heartache sounded like speaking at my mom’s funeral after she passed away in an accident. Triumph felt like giving my life fully to Jesus at the age 19, triumph looked like having Judson as a double rainbow baby

The Miracle of Reconciliation Merriam-Webster defines reconciliation as: “the act of causing two people or groups to become friendly...

When I was growing up, going to a restaurant was considered a major treat. Monday through Friday, we ate dinner as a family, with places...