The public world can’t grow the private me. It never could. I was fifteen and full of dreams with a brand new Bible I’d highlight in the late hours after friends went home, before the days when those friends were always accessible to broadcast my every...
He wasn’t different in the sort of mysterious-let-me-find-him-out sort of way. To me, his different wasn’t other, it was just wrong. I was twenty-something and ambitious and full of all sorts of ideas about how life should be lived and, from the way he...
So she says to me, “I want what you have in Him … ” and immediately my mind flashes back to that one afternoon. The sun was overhead and I was still in my sweatpants, thankful to be working from home on the day the tears kept coming. I blubbered,...
She reads just like me, finding time where there isn’t any to rip through pages and chapters … until she reaches the near-end. Then she slows to almost a halt, wanting to linger in a story that is now a part of her. We didn’t see her for hours as she...
Sometimes you have to see it starkly in another before you can fully realize it in yourself. I asked her, “can I tell them your story, sweet Lil’, because it’s really my story?” “Sure,” she said, without the shame that years of...
I see you, Mama … You were on lunch duty, volunteering. You watched her from across the room, sitting alone at that long rectangular table that could fit twenty, while girls dressed just like her filed in and jammed their small bodies into tables all around her....
