This weekend, Mother’s Day, while joy-filled for many is full of anxiety for others. If you’re in the anxiety producing camp, know I am with you. It’s so hard to have complicated feelings about the mothers in your life. It’s so hard to have longings for children (or relationships) unfulfilled. Or to be grieving when …
loss
How Do Grieve During the Holidays?
Someone around you is grieving right now. Even if you don’t know his or her name. Even if you don’t know why. Even if you’ll never know why. So many people grieve on overdrive at this time of year. Recently, I was teaching at “Attending to the Grief We Don’t See” workshop at a congregation …
Gifts I’ll Take From Infertility: A Guest Post by Lauren Bennett
Hey friends- thanks for hanging with me this week during National Infertility Week hearing these stories. I hope you’ve had your eyes opened to how common infertility is– touching people in all walks of life. I’m so glad to meet Lauren, a friend of a friend and blog reader this week. I was so excited to …
Gifts I’ll Take From Infertility: A Guest Post by Lauren BennettRead More
Infertility Doesn’t End with a Baby: A Guest Post by Ronda Gentry
Friends, it’s National Infertility Awareness week. Welcome to several new readers of Preacher on the Plaza! And I’m happy to use this blog over the next couple of days to give others a platform to share their stories of grief, loss and deferred longing. Even if “infertility” is not your thing and you read my …
Infertility Doesn’t End with a Baby: A Guest Post by Ronda GentryRead More
What Job Loss Birthed: Guest Post by Amy Gabriel
Could sudden loss of a job birth anything good? Today, I’m glad to introduce you to my friend, Amy. Amy and I met as freshmen in college and hung together for the next four years as part of a small group, choir and all other sorts of shenanigans. Now we both have daughters named Amelia. …
What a Divorce Birthed: Guest Post by Alice Stanton
Can anything good come from divorce? Today my dear friend, Alice joins the Birthed conversation that I’m picking up again this Lent. (If you missed the Advent series you can start reading here). I’m so glad to share Alice’s hard earned wisdom today. I know you’ll find it as moving as I did, no matter …
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Birthing Peace: Mary Wright Baylor
During these weeks of Advent, I’m thrilled to offer you the voices of some articulate storytellers— storytellers with wisdom to share about how their experiences of pain or loss is birthing in them something beautiful. Not in a Pollyanna sort of way of course, but in the spirit of what Leonard Cohen once wrote: “There …
How I Got Through Dark Times
These feel like dark times, don’t they? I feel like the world in which I called to minister changed dramatically post 11/8. No matter who you voted for President. No matter if you were happy with the results. No matter if you were deeply troubled. No matter what. The world felt different. The way we …
The Difficulty of Mother’s Day
As many of you know, I’ve written a book about my journey as both a pastor and a person who’s struggled with infertility due out with Chalice Press in October (so exciting!). And so with this true as you might imagine . . . Mother’s Day has been a difficult day. For it elevates a …
Living with the Discomfort
Gandhi once said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world!” And, truly, God bless the fixers in this world because there are so many big problems out there that need solving. There are children who need to be feed– if only someone will figure out the resources of how to get them …
Speaking to Pain
What do you do when the unspeakable happens to those you love? A month or so ago, a dear seminary friend, Rebekah who had recently lost a baby at 20 weeks shared this list on Facebook as a way to help people know how to care (brave and awesome of her!). It was a handout …
Surprises in Grief
Yesterday I preached on I Samuel 15:34-16:13, and though I thought I would be writing a sermon about God’s unlikely choices this ended up being a sermon about grief. Surprised me for sure! I just couldn’t seem to get the “How long will you grief for Saul?” verse out of my mind as I prepared. So, I just went with …
