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Embodied Living

 I recently read The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary McBride; I had heard such good things, and I now truly believe everyone should read it.  For the first time in 42 years, I have finally learned how to accept and love my body as she is.  I won't claim to have achieved full enlightenment on the matter (I know I still have a lot of room to grow and learn) but I feel like my eyes have been opened. I was a skinny kid with high metabolism but of course I still got teased in elementary school and middle school, cause kids are mean.  In between 8th and 9th grade I briefly went to modeling school because people thought I should, but I quit because it wasn't what I really wanted and it felt so shallow and toxic.  When I think back on my teenage years, I had mixed feelings about my body and there are a lot of reasons why.  I grew up in evangelical Christianity, and I blame "purity culture" and church in general for making me think that my body was evil.  I was ...
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My Calling

Leave it to a Taylor Swift docuseries to give me an earth-shattering revelation.  If you know me well or have read my blog, you will know about my very long struggle with vocation and what that means for me.  When I was around five, I wanted to "cut hair".  Flash forward to early college, I wanted to do youth ministry which turned into music which turned into I should just graduate already.  I had a string of random jobs to help pay the bills while we started to grow our family.  As I got older, I started to wonder "what am I doing with my life"?  I regretted being in debt for college when I wasn't "using" my degree to make money.   At one point I thought it might be fun to go to massage school and maybe that's something I could be good at.  Then when we were in Iowa, I realized I had a strong passion for social justice and began a certificate program but only took one class because we had to move pretty suddenly.  Once we got back to Se...
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She, He, Them

 The world we live in was built on the Patriarchy and it bleeds into everything, especially religion and faith.  Growing up in the Christian church, I thought that was how it should be because that's what I was told to believe.  If you ever for one second questioned that, you were headed down a "slippery slope".  I remember one day my dad asked me "What if God is a woman?" and you would think by my reaction that he had asked me to commit murder.  That's how deeply entrenched I was in the idea that God is and must be and can only be a man.  Fast forward about 30 years and last weekend on Mother's Day I'm sitting in my mom's church (Normandy Park United Church of Christ), celebrating "Mother Earth Sunday" and singing:  "She's got the whole world in her hands, she's got the whole world in her hands..." The idea that God is only Father can actually be very hard for people that have never had a close relationship with their...
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I have this one life

 I've been going through something lately.  For the longest time I didn't really know what I wanted to "do" vocationally, so I bounced around to various jobs because it met our financial needs.  About 7 years ago I started to finally realize what I wanted to "do"...go to massage school and become a massage therapist.  I knew I couldn't at the time but eventually I would try.  We moved to Iowa and well, let's just say it...Iowa brought out the feminist/revolutionary/social justice advocate side of me, so I went back to school to get a certificate in social justice.  I took one class and then we had to leave and move back to the Pacific Northwest.  Being back home here has been great but financially, it's just not possible for me to continue my education.  Life happens, rent goes up, you do what you gotta do. A couple months ago I started a new job.  It's been a good opportunity in the sense that it helps me provide for our family, but I don...
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How do you grieve the living?

 How do you grieve a relationship with someone who is still living?  Sure, I have experienced break ups and the loss of friendships that were very hard but nothing like this.  My Dad and I have always had a rocky relationship, and I never wanted to "give up" but at 41 I feel like I've finally reached that point.  I have some good memories from my childhood...exposure to healthy eating, being taught how to work hard and the value of being entrepreneurial.  I was exposed to other belief systems and still retain their value and meaning.  He knew the importance of culture and music and I even saw a production of Hair and the musical duo Tuck and Patti.  I get to say I lived in Maui when I was a toddler because my Dad loves to wind surf.  He taught me to question, even though at the time it was scary and unthinkable to question my beliefs.  I wasn't sure he would come to my wedding, but he showed up to the rehearsal in a suit, with a manicure....
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Bus Driver

  I first heard Caedmon's Call at Mt. Gilead, a Christian camp I went to when I was growing up.  I honestly don't remember how old I was but considering they came out in the early 90's, it was either late elementary school or middle school.  I had listened to Christian music for years, but there was something different about them.  They wrote worship music and sang about Jesus but the music was very genuine and sometimes came from a place of struggle and question.  I remember Bus Driver from their first album and thought at the time it was kind of funny and different, but that's about as deep as my thoughts went.  Who knew that almost 30 years later, I would finally get it and resonate with it so personally. Last night I had the privilege of seeing Derek Webb (one of the founding members of Caedmon's Call) on his It All Matters After All tour.  He sang many of the songs they wrote over the years and told a few stories behind them.  One of the stor...
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What Was I Made For?

 It was probably about 8-10 years ago that I really started the deconstructing/rebuilding phase of my faith journey.  I grew up in the conservative Evangelical Christian tradition and the older I get, the more I realize how much it really messed me up (I actually toned that down quite a bit).  In the late 90's/early 2000's there was a lot of focus on how we should live our lives for Christ and what that meant vocationally.  It was drilled into me that I could either be a missionary to a foreign country or have a ministry job in a local church, but anything "main stream" couldn't possible be God's will for my life.  There must be "more" than that, right? When I was in high school I was very active in my youth group and the president of the Christian club at school (cringe).  I even got a job working for Family Christian Stores.  I was deeply entrenched in the culture.  As a junior, I started looking at Christian Colleges and decided to go to the on...
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