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"So tell us about a time when you experienced failure and how you handled it." I was 21 and interviewing for my first job out of college. It was a multi-day interview, and this question came over lunch with two local ministry directors for whom I wanted to work. Like...

Nate says he fell in love with me the night he saw me ugly cry, in grief, over a young friend I'd mentored who had died tragically. The grief was of the stage in which it came like a summer storm, surprise-darkening my thinking that had just minutes before been clear....

Mrs. Van Horn’s second-grade class was the right place to dream. I felt safe in her classroom, even though Craig Assenmacher, who sat behind me, told me it looked like I had a bird’s nest on my head after I got a risky haircut. (I received a bob and discovered I was...

I let a friend down. Or, I should say: I let *another friend* down. I can tell she’s mad, not yet hurt. Just mad. I receive her frustration with me, and my mind instinctively flashes to that old friend of a phrase: you just don’t get it. … I’m late. I ran a red light,...

(This might be an email to earmark and tuck away for the future, as this isn’t for everyone. Some of you are in the dream-forming years … as you need to be.) Is it time to bury the dream? Ouch. Nearly every set of eyes reading this sentence is connected to a heart...

I love (almost) everything about the turning of a calendar. Whether a new school year in August or a new calendar year in January, I drool at the thought of new pens and journals and other (both unnecessary and necessary) paper products. Last week I cleaned my desk...

A tree doesn’t survive the winter without healthy roots. Neither do we. I remember that bleak February morning when my husband and I loaded up our car and drove through the stripped-bare forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains to move into my parents’ basement. Everything...

At sixteen it all seemed so obvious. You either had a cross around your neck and a Bible in your locker, or a drink in your hand on the weekends. Back then, it was follow Jesus or party. My best friend and I slid each other Bible verses on scraps of paper in between...

My sister was on homecoming court two years in a row. For many, that means nothing, but when you grow up in middle America (where the best of life happens under the Friday night lights), homecoming court makes celebrities out of seventeen year-olds. I was in the...