wife. mother. pastor.
I have always had a strange relationship with Mother's Day - it has held the biggest both/and for me of the Hallmark holidays, and this year that both/and has only increased. Growing up, our family wrestled with the dance of how to celebrate my mom and stepmother and also honor the powerful life and legacy [...]
(Trigger warning: miscarriage) Over the last three months, my husband and I have experienced two miscarriages. One just before 5 weeks and now currently one in the process at 8.5 weeks. I’ve heard this described as such a strange and lonely grief—indeed it is. I find myself simultaneously wanting to tell everyone and also not [...]
Growing up in a broken home, one of the most significant struggles of my young heart was the inability to grasp that my definition of family could expand. For years upon years, I thought that if I loved my father, I could not therefore love my mother and her new new husband, and if I [...]
This day - this day between the burial and the resurrection - this day where lingering hope must have felt stifled, where unanswered questions overwhelmed, where darkness seemed to envelop, where life must have stilled, where grief dominated and silence was impenetrable. Last night, our Good Friday service walked through the final words of Christ [...]
a Holy Week devotional adapted from a homily I presented at my church on Maundy Thursday 2013... Each year of my childhood, my church would offer a Maundy Thursday service where they also held the traditional Jewish Seder meal in celebration of Passover. Honestly I tried to concoct many clever excuses in my early years [...]
Tayll Ahm Taynkee, Tayll Ahm. Tayll Papa Gohd Taynkee. What He Do Fah Me, I Go Tayll Ahm Taynkee. Only a few short weeks ago, I was sitting with my family in a dusty room with faded paint, which could not contain life and hope from radiating inside its walls. It was here, in this [...]
As with most of us, my heart is full and cannot shake the shocking and overwhelming news of the Newtown shootings last week. Such darkness. So many unanswered questions. And every single day in the news, there are more devastations from around the globe of atrocities my brain cannot quite grasp. And I look around [...]
(my post on our team's blog from Wednesday, September 5th) As the hum of laughter and conversation (and sleep) fills the bus tonight on our way back to Kyoto from Osaka, my mind begins to dance through the moments of this full and rich day. The unique tune of the famous “Nightingale Floor” of Nijo [...]
Often it occurs during the plane ride as my heart beats with wild expectancy for all that a trip will hold - you don't have to know me well to glean that one of my love languages is most certainly travel and experiencing the world - feeling the unique rhythm intrinsic to each land, pulsing [...]
jenn crider 