So, it’s probably no surprise to you that when I saw the acronym DNF everywhere, I thought someone intended to type DNR (do not resuscitate) and instead made a slight move south on the keyboard and got an “F.”

Turns out DNF means Did Not Finish.

I guess this book lingo has been around a while but I just hadn’t noticed. I was too busy reading.

I used to finish every book I started, but at this point of my life, I just don’t have time to keep reading things I really don’t like.

This is not the same thing as dropping a book that challenges me or makes me question myself — I like books that push me and my thinking.
These books were just bad.

And so, when it comes to lame reads, I side with Bartleby the Scrivener, and say, “I would prefer not to.”

Here are all the books this year that I’ve journeyed partway into and rather than continuing, thought to myself, I would prefer not to.

2026 DNFs to Date

My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

I hated this book. I hated the characters. I hated the writing. But I was willing to hang in there (sort of), because I had it on Audible and that always feels like an obligation. The main character, and her love interest, are absolutely insufferable and nauseously self-serving. I got to Chapter 23 of 30 and just got so annoyed and angry that I did not even care to find out how it ends. For other DNFs, I might look up a summary — but for this one — No.

Do people like this book?

Please weigh in.

Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Adventure by Rhys Bowen

I got about halfway through before I realized that the characters were going to remain cardboard cutouts, the plot was predictable to the point of utter boredom, and the writing was vapid. I have a feeling there is a giant audience for this type of comfy, formulaic stuff, but it isn’t me.

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

This book broke my heart. I was so excited that Barnhill was writing a novel for adults that included women turning into dragons. Dragons! Her earlier novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, is one of my all time favorites: a gorgeous collection of truth and magic and growing up. But this book was so disappointing. The dragon-stuff felt coerced and contorted to fit a political statement. It isn’t so much that Barnhill has a clear point of view she wants readers to understand, but it was so didactic and so forced that I couldn’t hang with it. Apologies, Kelly. I hope that you decide to rewrite this for children because I think that would be brilliant.

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

Normally Liane Moriarty and I get along pretty well. I know what she’s going to give me, and I generally enjoy it. But I couldn’t finish this one. Violence against women is really hard for me to muscle through, and if the characters aren’t likeable, it’s just a no.

Quicksilver by Callie Hart

This is the moment where you all find out that I’m not much of a romantasy fan. Couldn’t even get through the first chapter of this one.

The Theater of War by Brian Doerries

This entire book mansplains what humanities majors learned in our first semester of college. So condescending. Nothing revolutionary here.

After all that vitriol, are we still friends?

Your turn. Tell me what you’ve thrown off your book stack this year.

Share

Subscribe now

I went to see Hamnet, the film adaptation, a few months ago.

I was absolutely floored. Emotionally wrung. Stunned. It was poetry in motion. I cannot stop thinking about it. It was the most visceral, moving portrait of motherhood I’ve ever seen.

So when I saw Hamnet on a table at the bookstore, I bought it: a.) because the cover is gorgeous and b.) because I was so curious what sort of writing had prompted the film. If the movie was poetry, did the book have that same feeling?

Happy to report that Maggie O’Farrell knows how to write a sentence. It’s the best possible combination of lyricism, compelling characters, and plot that I’ve read this year.

My Rating: 5 out of 5

Genre: Literary fiction that’s also a little bit historical fiction and sort of witchy, while also being a reader favorite.

Format: Read it book in hand every night before bed.

Read it If: You’re a sucker for a good sentence, interested in the ways history can be imagined, and have been looking for a little grace for Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife.

Steer Clear If: You get bogged down in lyrical prose or if a novel about a young child’s death would be too much.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Yes

Ephemera: Loved The Book Club’s take on Hamnet. If you’re not one for spoilers, watch the film and read the book before listening.

And if you’re the sort of person who wants another opinion on whether or not to read Hamnet, you’ll love Proofread’s quick take. (Such a great podcast for figuring out if a book is for you in 15 minutes or less.)

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

As soon as I finished Hamnet, I scrambled to get my hands on another Maggie O’Farrell novel.

I picked up The Marriage Portrait and was not disappointed.

Admission: I think I’m about to read everything Maggie has ever written. It just hits me so right.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 (because I feel like I should stop rating every book 5?)

Genre: Historical fiction with a very generous slice of imagination.

Format: Library hardback.

Read it If: You’ve been desperate to know how Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke in Florence, died in the 1550s.

Steer Clear If: You demand historical accuracy, and you need a tidy ending. Or you physically can’t touch a book that Reese’s Book Club has recommended.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Yes

Some Favorite Sentences from the Book:

She covers page after page with [illustrations of] children . . . Babies on the backs of their parents, babies in cradles, babies on horseback, babies taking flight on outstretched feathery wings, to mingle in the blue and skim over treetops.

Share

Subscribe now

Rereading that piece, I still feel that moment, like ice on my tongue. The sharpness of grief still taking space inside of me.

No one really preps you for what it’s like to lose an imagined future.

It’s these expectations, baked into us, that transform ordinary things like soccer games into great gashes of emotion that we can barely contain or understand.

I had built a future in my mind for me and my husband and our two kids: it was full of hikes and burned hot dogs and homework around the kitchen table and inside jokes and sitting on the porch and games of Boggle.

It didn’t happen.

But, the arc of life is long, and not all dreams died on that soccer field.

Over these eight years, I’ve built a career, made a home for my kids, found new dreams. Resurrected old ones.

I’ve become someone.

And this weekend, that someone loaded up the 2001 4Runner and took a load to the dump, tossing the red chair on top.

It was broken beyond repair from many years of happy sideline sitting. I saw my son find his groove in ultimate frisbee from that chair, saw my daughter play basketball, sat along the banks of rivers, propped myself up on the back porch. The red chair, turns out, was still a gift — even if it wasn’t always easy to see.

Goodbye, Red Chair.

I hope a squirrel keeps nuts in your drink holders and pulls threads for a nest. I hope your red reminds someone of a cardinal settling into a tree. I hope that you can fall to pieces, gently, turning back into earth, into a sigh, into the breath of someone else’s dream.

Share

Subscribe now

Have you read this? If you have, can we talk?

This book reads like Agatha Christie hired Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, and a few characters from The Great Gatsby to write one of her murder mysteries — all while Sophocles and Plato were in the corner of the room smoking and making snide remarks.

The writing is bonkers good. The characters are absolutely absorbing.

I kind of want to go back and read it all again.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Genre: Literary fiction that is also somehow mass market.

Format: Audible listen while I was folding laundry for 22 hours and 3 minutes.

Read It If: You miss feeling like you’re in college. This book will keep you on the edge of your seat and also make you feel like you’re forgetting to turn something in to your professor.

Steer Clear If: You don’t have the stomach for 1980s racism, bigotry, misogyny. Or you’re not very good at suspending disbelief.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: No.

Bonus: I can’t get enough of — and their new podcast, , did a great episode on The Secret History. Definitely recommend you listen after reading. (Or before, if you’re into knowing a lot about a book before committing.)

Share

Subscribe now

Here are the reasons, beyond the normal ones, that this is remarkable:

1. I’m a single mom with full physical custody and a “co-parent” in another state.

2. I work full-time. And work another job part-time.

3. I’m short and it’s hard to find pants that fit right.

4. I started an MFA over twenty years ago and wasn’t able to finish because of stuff.

5. I thought that my dream of being a writer was over and out-of-reach and impossible and impractical.

6. I’m 46. And, word on the street is, this year I will be 47.

So I am proud of myself. And if you asked me how do it all, my only answer is, I’m not sure. But also, maybe ADHD.

There is a couplet from a particular poem that I’ve had tucked in my mind all these years. The poem is titled “The Ghost in the Picture Room”1 by Adelaide Anne Proctor and here’s the bit that I carry with me:

I believe that: We always may be what we might have been. It gives me hope.

At this same moment that some of my long-ago dreams are coming true, I’m also facing the reality of chronic health issues that are really bumming me out and some really difficult stuff with one of my kids. I spent most of yesterday in random, hiccuping sobs.

For some reason, there’s a part of my brain that believes someday I’ll reach a point in life where I am simply happy. Where I’m not always carrying hope and disappointment, grief and joy, success and failure.

But if life has taught me anything, it’s that emotions don’t ever come in the singular. There isn’t a magic moment where we can feel only our grief, process it, and then move on to joy. It’s always a mumble and mess of everything at the same time. I would prefer something tidier, but it just isn’t tidy, is it?

So here I am: happy and sad, thrilled and disappointed, fulfilled and confused, content and nervous.

Even with these heavy binaries, I’m ready to keep looking for hope wherever I can find it.

If I can always be what I might have been, then so can my kids.

And so can you.

May that hope easily find you, wherever you are.

Share

Subscribe now

I’ll keep reading all the beautiful things on Substack that are free. And maybe someday, when the financial crush eases, I will subscribe to all of you.

In the meantime, keep coming back here for random advice, wandering observations, bits of philosophy and poetry, that hopefully keep taking us to a place of larger hope.

Share

Subscribe now

I woke up, scanned the headlines.

Rescanned the headlines, just in case I made it all up.

Took my dog for a walk.

The world feels alien when I read the newspaper, but, outside in the morning, seeing the way my dog sniffs the curb, pees on a forsythia bush, barks at the sound of leaves blowing across the street — all against the backdrop of some of the most beautiful mountains in the world — reminds me that nature is more stubborn and more sure of herself and more solid and dependable than all the powerful men in the world.

Which makes me think of windows. (Also, defenestration, but that’s a thought for a different day.)

I had a poetry professor who said that the job of a poet is to show the reader the view out the poet’s particular window.

So, let’s pretend that everyone who says anything, is a poet. And all the poets (be they good or bad) are only showing us what they see out the window.

If you were sitting next to me right now, looking out my window, you might see a chimney, a street lamp, the beige stucco house with stains down the eaves. And when I look out my window with you, I might see the thumbs of leaves from the silver birch, the pink edge of the clouds, the snow etching out ridges on the mountain, the memory of the night we all ran out in the rain.

Same window. So many possible stories.

Right now though, it doesn’t feel like we’re looking out windows. It feels like we’re all looking through hula hoops — and we’re chasing these hula hoops down the street as they roll and roll and the stories change and change and change.

So, I guess the thing is, we all need to make sure we’re chasing the hula hoop we want to be chasing.

Like George. George from the 1985 film adaptation of A Room with a View. In one of my favorite scenes, he climbs a tree and then shouts with all the energy of his soul:

Joy!

Beauty!

Truth!

Love!

And his father explains to the picnickers nearby that:

He’s saying his creed.

He’s declaring the eternal yes!

I guess that’s the hula hoop I want to chase.

I want to look out at the world with people who have a creed of joy, beauty, truth, and love. I want to be with people declaring the eternal yes.

I can’t start wars, or end them. But I can at least write about the view from my room. And remind myself, and maybe even you, that the roots of the mountains are deep and the sky is enchanting at all times of day.

Share

Subscribe now

I don’t recall ever getting the answer right.

But, let’s all think of this a different way. Imagine you’re looking out at the ocean from the white sand beach in Florida or that you’re nearing the summit of a mountain with carpets of wildflowers spread out under your feet or you’re piling up the leaves in your yard and it looks like gold or you see the first glimpse of a gold crocus blooming in spring.

Now imagine someone asks you, “What does it mean?”

It’s kind of a silly question, and I would guess that it wouldn’t bother you in the least if you didn’t have an answer.

The answer is: it’s just beautiful.

Beautiful things are beautiful. They don’t need a reason or an answer or an explanation.

That’s how I feel about poetry. Reading poetry is just like seeing something beautiful. It doesn’t need an explanation or an answer.

You can read it and say to yourself, “This part was especially beautiful.”

No other expertise required.

In honor of National Poetry Month, I want to share some of my favorite poetry collections. But if that thought induces panic, just think to yourself, Jes wants to show me some beautiful things.

First up, Heart in a Jar by Kathleen McGookey.

I love this book. It’s something I pick up over and over when I want to feel connected to the divine, when I want to feel like my story is part of the whole human story.

Here are a few lines from a few poems throughout the book that are just beautiful:

• Whale bones litter the only sky

• The pregnant skunk moves into the dollhouse—it is available—then nibbles hard-boiled eggs at the table set for three

• The mice let me crochet spiderwebs into a necklace for my teacher

• The star was dying, but I bought it anyway from the shop that sold used things

• The monkeys inside me are sick of speaking the wrong language

• My heart has fetched the stick so many times it does not feel like my heart anymore

I love the sort of magical, surreal, bittersweet way Kathleen McGookey puts words together. I can imagine bringing a star home, letting a skunk live in a dollhouse, crocheting spiderwebs. And they all feel like beautiful things. Things that help me feel like someone understands me, even though I can’t tell you with any sort of certainty what McGookey means by those phrases.

She is an absolute master of the prose poem. This particular book grew out of a moment in her life where she was thick in kid-raising while also confronting the aging of her parents and then the death of her father. The poems are quirky, heartfelt, and gorgeous. They are beautiful pictures you can look at again and again. Highly recommend.

Format: Paperback

Genre: Prose Poetry

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Read it if: You think you don’t like or understand poetry. Or you’re a mom (or dad) with complicated feelings about literally everything. Or you’ve ever wanted to hide under a desk at an elementary school Halloween party.

Steer clear if: You don’t have a heart.

Share

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Share

But, I guess I’m not here to talk about how I understand the book now or Margot Robbie as Cathy (or Catherine?) in an R-rated fever dream.

If you could step inside my ADHD mind, you’d find a tiny, wuthering swirl of Catherine and Heathcliff, the Epstein Files, ICE, drought, Ukraine, and Trump’s face — along with my grocery list, that moulding container of soup in the fridge, and how I need to find someone to help me carry a dresser downstairs.

Somehow all of this adds up to me thinking about my own experience with partner abuse. If that was a big leap, I get it. Not everyone looks in the fridge and gets riled up about the treatment of women throughout all of time. My mind takes pretty big steps.

I hate watching this disappointing slide in public discourse that encourages us all to laugh off sexual abuse, to call things “love” that clearly aren’t, to excuse men who are so far out-of-line, unrepentant, and repulsive that I cannot control my anxiety when I think of them. I want it to stop.

I want it to stop.

So here’s a list.

In case you’re looking for something different to say. This is a list of things that I would have loved to hear as I was trying to disentangle from an abusive situation. (And, honestly, I would still be happy to hear any of this, over and over. Reassuring a victim of abuse is always welcome — no matter how much time has passed.)

1. I see how much you have suffered. I see it, and it breaks my heart.

2. I see how afraid you are. I see that you are afraid all the time. I see that you cannot sit at the kitchen table, fill in spreadsheets at work, or get into your car without being afraid. No one should have to be so afraid.

3. I’m not sure I know what it’s like to be that afraid, but I do know that I want you to feel safe with me.

4. I will do whatever I can to help you feel safe. Maybe sometime you’ll feel safe enough to tell me what that is.

5. When you say you don’t feel lovable, I know you’re not fishing for attention. That man tortured you so thoroughly that you had no choice but to believe you were not lovable. It isn’t the truth. I will tell you how lovable you are as many times as you need to hear it.

6. You did not do anything to deserve being treated that way.

This list is me begging for a gentler world — for me, for my children, for you, for the people you love.

So, dear, Heathcliff and Catherine, Epstein and Trump, Putin and Zuckerberg leave your version of love to be eviscerated on that turbulent moor.

We don’t want no part of this crazy love.

Share

Subscribe now

While I was waiting in line to go inside, a young man, clearly outfitted as a member of the track team for the nearby university, came sprinting from the other side of the parking lot. I was struck by the way he nearly floated over the pavement. Running isn’t my thing, but when I see people running like that, I’m envious — I try to imagine how it would feel to be so strong, so light, skimming across the world in that way.

He came running up to the end of the line, but he didn’t stop. He ran past all of us, dodging through carts and people fumbling in their wallets for their cards, holding his card under the reader while he sprinted on, into the store and disappearing into a display of shampoo.

In front of me in line was a mother with her little girl. The little girl turned to her mom and said, “Mommy, why is he running?”

And her mother answered, “Because he’s so excited to give flowers to his girlfriend.”

The little girl nodded. Satisfied.

Share

Subscribe now

I loved it! A perfect listen: lots of tension in the plot that pulls you back over and over, but it doesn’t create existential panic. Excellent sound design in the audio version. Great characters. Burritos in space!

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Read it if: You need something distracting. You have a soft spot for sci-fi that’s character driven. You think aliens are cool.

Steer clear if: You hate sci-fi. You hate apocalyptic fiction, even if it’s funny. You are too cool to read things that are going to be made into major motion pictures.

Share

Subscribe now

Why?

Not sure. Probably because I want to have my own experience with the book before being overloaded with someone else’s experience.

But, I still love book recommendations.

So, that’s what we have here: Book reviews without too much plot info or formal review, but just enough so you can decide whether you want to read it or steer clear.

All of us are beneath it. All of us. And every morning it grows beautiful with light and in the afternoon it warms to the blue of birds and at night the sun sinks down to reveal a belly of stars. And you can find all of us below it, that sky.

I want to tell you a story about someone who lived under the same sky too.

I was a missionary a long time ago in Krasnodar, Russia, and I went about the city with another woman, both of us in our twenties, to find people we could help. It was a beautiful city with wild grapes that draped off buildings and watermelons in the summer dripping onto the streets and wisteria winding through old bricks.

Every week we visited a woman named Baba Tonya. She lived on the outskirts of a smaller village outside Krasnodar. No running water, no electricity. When we would knock on her door, she would pull back the curtain on her peep hole. She would look to the left and to the right. If she saw only us, she would open the door a crack and pull us in. She was old with paper thin butterfly wings of eyelids and taught, wiry muscles pulled over bones.

Every time we saw her, she would tell us the same story about the KGB, holding up her left hand that was missing a finger. My language skills were poor at that point, but I know her story revolved around the KGB and her missing finger. I know that she always whispered, afraid she would be overheard. I know she kept a little black and white snapshot of her son tucked inside the strap of her bra. I know he was killed by someone who shouldn’t have been killing people, for a reason that didn’t exist.

And no matter how many times we visited. No matter how many times we held her hands and sang to her and took her red bucket to the water pump and scalded her milk, she was still afraid.

I was the last person to see her the day before she died, holding her hand, smoothing back her hair. And she asked me if the angels were finally coming to take her. I was so relieved to say yes. So relieved that her lifetime of fear would soon dissolve into the great beyond and she would find peace.

And, right now, as I watch the fear rising around me — fear in me, in my family, in my community, in my country, in my fellow people underneath the sky — I have this to say,

A nation of people who are afraid of their own government, who worry constantly about what will happen next, aren’t a nation of people who live in a democracy.

Whether you’re to the left or the right or are so far spun around you’re neither, it’s time to remember that the sky covers all of us. That we are here to love each other. Love the people who are beneath the sky.

This is the sky.

Share

Subscribe now

Share

Subscribe now

And yet, we also must continue to continue putting out good into the world in whatever way we can. How else do we spread large hope?

Today we released a very tender episode for me on with interviewing David Hudson, former US National Commander of The Salvation Army, and star of this little essay. For me, Dave, is one of the clearest examples of Christian goodness I’ve had in my life.

Not only do you get to hear his incredible story in this episode, you also get to hear me on air (for the second time ever) describing the few years I worked at National Headquarters with him. When I listened through this morning, I found myself in tears, feeling all over again how intensely grateful I am for good people who do good things.

I hope you’ll give it a listen. And I hope by the end you’ll feel like doing your own good thing.

Share

Subscribe now

Instead, it’s January 8th and I’m not sure how to untangle the last few weeks.

I spent Christmas with my parents and brothers’ families while my kids were with their dad. After all that festive fun — and a moment of silence for the reality that sometimes festive fun isn’t fun when you’re missing someone(s) — I sort of buried myself in my house, turned off social media and the news, and finished a rough draft of my thesis. (Not to interrupt the narrative, but if the people want to know, I’m finishing an MFA in Poetry and my thesis is a collection of prose poems about divorce, kind of.)

Finishing the draft was huge and cool and stuff, but also kind of like asking for a gut punch over and over. Very painful to relive and re-embody. But also important.

With the draft turned in, I got my kids from the airport, and we spent a wild 36 hours pretending it was Christmas. And then at about 2:50 p.m. on Sunday afternoon I was hit with some sort of GI something. It was bad. I’m talking eating spoiled fish at a buffet in Cairo bad. I kept fevering, moving in and out of consciousness, sleeping. Waking up in pools of sweat. Moving into nightmares that left me gasping.

Part of me wonders if finishing the draft started an exorcism. I will ask my therapist and report back.

Anyway, this is all just a backdrop.

This morning, I woke up feeling more like myself and did a tentative poke into the news. I wish I had just found a bunch of articles about Taylor Swift’s wedding, instead I got Venezuela, the ICE murder, and another deadly shooting at a church in Salt Lake City.

Was this another feverish haze?

I couldn’t breathe.

More shootings? More international and intentional mess? Was I reading Station 111 or something?

Does anyone else feel like they’re a throw-away character in a post-apocalyptic novel?

(Or would this be the novel about the apocalypse?)

I don’t know how to hold the incongruity of me, here, sitting on my couch, next to my little dog, watching my neighbor’s Christmas light flash from red to green to white to red again, feet up on the ottoman, typing to myself, up against the madness going on out there in the world where I can’t see. I feel so powerless, like whatever peace I’m living isn’t earned because so many other people aren’t living it.

What do we do?

Truly, what do we do?

I have no answer.

And I have no idea how writing this helps, except to reach out to anyone else who feels like they’re in a fever dream.

The thing is, I don’t think the bad guys win. And maybe it’s because I watched too much 80s and 90s TV where everything was solved in 30 minutes, plus commercial breaks, or maybe it’s because the hope I carry is stubborn and old and has been through some stuff. I don’t know. But I just don’t think the bad guys win.

And if the bad guys don’t win, it’s probably because there are plenty of good people everywhere.

So, good people, wherever you are, let’s make good things happen. It won’t make any news app’s buzzy headline, but let’s stuff 2026 with as many good things as we can anyway. Like unexpected compliments and warm loaves of bread and walks with friends and planting flowers and just being kind.

I’m going to be kind, 2026, and you can’t stop me.

Share

Subscribe now

Here’s what I see: me in my sweats, working to finish a final portfolio for the graduate poetry writing workshop I took this semester, my house in disarray. Shoes scattered around the front door. Piles of clean clothes, piles of dirty clothes. Socks the dog decided to steal. Shredded napkins and tissues and dismembered stuffies, also thanks to the dog. Unopened packages, open packages, packing material, unwashed dishes. Plates of mostly finished dinner, forks still spearing the zucchini. Piles of notebooks, some spiral-bound, some hardback, sitting next to stacks of poetry collections and heavy tomes like Emerson and Dickinson. The bishop and counselors sitting three in a row on the couch holding their elbows in, me on a strangely orange chair I picked up off Craigslist.

And with the scene set, we exchange pleasantries, as one does.

And then one of them asks me, “What do you want for Christmas?”

Let’s take a full stop here.

Do you want to know the last time someone asked me that question? So do I. Because I have no idea. Not in recent memory, that’s for sure.

The way Christmas works in my little family of three, as a single mom, is that I do everything. I decorate with my funny birds wearing scarfs, I put up the lights on the front window, I drag the massive tree out of the basement, I decide what goes in the stockings I pieced and quilted and embroidered, I buy the presents, I stay up late on Christmas Eve to make it all look like magic. (I should note that my daughter will often pitch in on some of these activities, lest she thinks I don’t appreciate her help.)

If I have a few presents under the tree Christmas morning, it’s because I bought them for myself, and then wrapped them for myself. I suppose I could pester my kids to buy me a present — but something about that doesn’t fit my personality.

If this were a therapy appointment, I would tell you that my life is strung so tight, wishing for something at Christmas feels like a thing for other people, not for me. (We can certainly unpack that if you want to play therapist later.)

On the other hand, I’m full of wishes all the time. I wish for snow. I wish I could support my family on one job. I wish that my A1c levels would magically come down. I wish I could paint. I wish my sewing room was organized. I wish I had ruby slippers. I wish I had naturally curly hair in beautiful ringlets. I wish I wasn’t a single parent. I wish someone would pay for my kids to go to college. I wish I had a pony.

Wishing is easy.

So, what is this post even about? When I first started writing about this particular night, I wanted it to end with some call to action to remember someone on Christmas who you think gets remembered but doesn’t. But as I pulled at that idea, I realized that the amount of people who are celebrating Christmas in a way they never imagined or expected is probably off the charts. Also the number of people who don’t have a present under the Christmas tree unless they buy it themselves. So maybe this whole thing isn’t about what we want for Christmas at all.

Maybe it’s actually about how I see myself.

That description of the house at the beginning could mean something unflattering about me and my ability to hold things together. I could decide that I am not delivering on the mom thing. I could feel like a low-grade failure.

But, I could also see myself the way those three men saw me last night. Because the other thing they said was, “You look so good.”

And I agree with them. I have come through some really difficult challenges, and sitting in that orange chair, I knew that I had hit a benchmark of survival — three years post second divorce and all that horror.

The dirty dishes mean my kids live with me. The laundry means I was caught up in my dream world writing poems for hours on end. The disarray means that for a few weeks I’ve come home from work, dropped my bag, and hurried to some amazing concerts. The fact that I even live in a house is cause for celebration. What joy to have a roof! To have walls! To have carpet!

I think the greatest gift you and I can give to ourselves this Christmas is to see every effort as success. To see ourselves with gentle eyes and a mushy, cellophane wrapped forgiveness. To see in the possible failures, the fact that we even made the attempt, and the endless room to try again a different way. To look at our face in the mirror and remember how precious we are.

In short, take a minute to remember that the little baby Jesus we are celebrating sees in you infinite beauty and potential all the time.

Share

Subscribe now

But first I have to tell you that 12-ish years ago, I moved from being a stay-at-home parent to being the primary breadwinner for myself and my two children. This was a brutal upheaval for a lot of reasons, divorce being one of the central ones, but it was also a really intense change to go from a day-to-day schedule that focused on caring for the kids and the home to being in an office for eight or so hours a day.

When I went to my first in-person interview for an entry-level editing job, I was wearing a handmade skirt with a wonky hem. No makeup. No professional attaché case. No power suit.

I headed toward DC in my rough and tumble 4Runner, a car never intended for narrow city streets, and pulled into the parking garage under the organization’s building only to find myself stuck: it was a tight space with only one open spot that I couldn’t quite maneuver into. I’m not going to admit here how many times I have prayed about parking, but this was definitely one of them.

And then a man appeared out of nowhere and stood to the side of me, telling me exactly how to turn my wheels, etc, to sneak into the last space. When I got out of the car, he was gone.

Trembling, I made it into the building and to the interview. The first question was about my greatest weakness. I never prepped for this question, thinking no one would ask it, so I fumbled about and said something about not liking to talk on the telephone. I remember everyone laughing except me.

The rest of the interview kind of went the way the first question did. When it was over, they asked me to stay in the small room where we had been talking. So I did. Sweating and pulling at my hands, wanting to be back in my little house making the kids tuna sandwiches for lunch.

It was a tense 15 minutes or so before the door opened again and I was offered the job on the spot. And I said yes.

My full-time career started the next Monday as a copy editor for The Salvation Army at their National Headquarters in Alexandria, VA.

I would like to pretend that the transition was all merriness and roses and dancing and puppies, but it wasn’t exactly. I sat in that beautiful office, overlooking the Potomac, and cried most of the day, every day. For an entire year.

I entered that building a timid, broken little thing with rock-bottom confidence and a tear factory that never took a break.

But, over several years, working at The Salvation Army changed my life.

It was seeing people of all faiths coming together to do good. I can promise you that when The Salvation Army says they’re out to Do the Most Good, they really are.

My Christmas story starts here with retired Salvation Army Commissioner David Hudson and his wife Commissioner Sharron Hudson. While I was working at headquarters, Dave was the National Commander—kind of like the head of everything for operations in the US—with Sharron working alongside. They might have been in charge of a lot, but they treated every single person in that office as someone with a name and a story and a reason to be loved. They ate lunch with us. They took midday walks along the river with us. And they, specifically, noticed me.

In case I didn’t make it clear enough before, I was a bit of a mess, and while Dave and Sharron never drew attention to my state of being, they did find so many moments to make me feel like my contribution was particularly needed and particularly important. Their generosity and knack for noticing is a gift to everyone around them.

My first Christmas at The Salvation Army, Dave slipped me a bill during a handshake. I used that money to buy blankets for my kids as a Christmas present. (And, let me tell you, nothing makes you feel more like a struggling single mom than buying blankets as Christmas presents.)

That kindness, like so many other kindnesses (let’s not forget the angel in the parking lot at the beginning), stacked up in a way that when I left The Salvation Army to move across the country, I was a different person—in a good way. No longer crying (as much). No longer unsure how to dress or behave or make decisions or believe in my expertise. Or talk on the phone.

I buy my kids blankets every Christmas in honor of that other Christmas and the blankets are always (just like the first time) their favorite present.

Being able to have Dave on the podcast was a little dream come true for me. The link below takes you to his advent episode about the red kettle and the bell-ringers. And I’m thrilled to say that we have a longer interview with him that will drop in February.

Being able to share this with you makes me really happy.

And if you have the means, maybe think about dropping something in the kettle this year. Or even buying a blanket for someone who could really use it.

Share

Subscribe now

I was an exchange student in Moscow as a junior in high school, around 1997.

I grew up in a semi-rural county in Colorado, spent most of my days riding my bike and exploring the mountains. I lived in a four bedroom house with two parents and three siblings and a dog that once attacked the neighbor’s poodle. I had seen unhoused people in downtown Denver on the handful of occasions my family made the trek there for a play or concert, but my concept of true need was narrow. Mostly I thought about horses.

But, my first day in Moscow, chasing after my host family, I saw a man at the entrance to the metro tied to a skateboard, a below-the-knee amputee on both legs. He was playing the violin, soulful and beautiful, with his cap turned up on the ground to catch coins. People were rushing past him on all sides, but he continued to play, and I stopped up short. I couldn’t move. I don’t know if it was seeing someone who used his hands and a skateboard to get around or hearing him play the violin or watching the people rush past him like he was a flock of pigeons, but our eyes met and I reached into my bag and put all my rubles into his hat.

I have never forgotten that man. I have never forgotten his eyes or the way his fingers hovered expertly across the frets. And I haven’t forgotten my distinctly immature feeling that I would never be in a position like him.

Fast forward to 2006, I was 27 and pregnant with my first — a boy!

I worked part-time in the Anthropology department at Case Western Reserve University (spending a good chunk of those hours in the bathroom) and my husband at the time was in dental school. We were struggling. I was trying to finish up my thesis for my MA from a distance, balance a difficult pregnancy, and support the dentistry endeavor. Our meager savings had been depleted by school and the impending birth had us elated but also terrified. It wasn’t clear how we were going to manage the real-life-ness of it all.

Is this situation really like the man at the metro? No, it isn’t. But is it a story about a person without financial resources who didn’t know what to do? Yes, it is.

I decided to apply for SNAP and Medicaid, spending countless hours tunneling through mazes of paperwork, endless phone calls, and uncomfortable appointments to get approved. It was not something I ever planned to do, and I felt deeply conflicted about it, but in the end, we needed the help and didn’t really have any other options.

When I think back to those few years we had government aid, it’s with deep gratitude and with a profound understanding of what I owe back to my own community.

I later returned to Russia in 2001 as a missionary for a year and half and had even more experiences seeing need so deep I could barely breathe. And I had to watch a government that fundamentally didn’t seem to believe in helping anyone.

So, you put all of this together, and I’m not sure how to process what’s currently happening with welfare benefits in my country.

I don’t pretend to know all the ins and outs and moneys and economies and all that. I will be the first to raise my hand and admit I’m no expert.

But I am a Christian. And the desire to really be a disciple of Christ is at the core of every decision I make. I hope that conviction is obvious to those around me.

But this decision to remove food aid and medical support seems clearly un-Christian to me. I know there are people who would fight me on that, but I’m intensely non-confrontational, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

I just think Goodness calls us to be good.

And I’m so pleased to know that in this confusing world and bizarre political climate, there are other people who believe in doing good.

I had a chance to talk with Philippe Lazaro from Plant with Purpose this week. And a few things he said really stuck with me. He said, the seeds of hope are already in the ground. And later, he reminded me that holiness arrives at a time that feels dark or forgotten or busy, in quiet spots that are easy to overlook.

So how can we water the seeds of hope that are already planted?

How do we turn a desert into a garden of abundant generosity?

How do we find the holiness that is already here?

Share

Subscribe now