Shortly after my miscarriage, I made my most depressing Amazon purchase ever: A collection of books about miscarriage, loss, and grief. Among them was Mike Stavlund's A Force of Will: The Reshaping of Faith in a Year of Grief.

Despite having...

The point at which I realized this school year was going to be a challenging year of ministry came even before it officially began.

It happened last August at a music conference I attended with several of my colleagues. Despite considering myself...

Dear Senior -

For four years, you've graced our ministry with your presence. Now as your graduation approaches, I've found my thoughts drifting to you more and more frequently. I've used each thought I've had of you as a call to prayer.

As I've...

I have a t-shirt from Youth Enterprise that has the word, “Whatever” written on the front with this passage written on the back:

“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—...

In Lent, as we discussed the story of Jesus' arrest, my students were intrigued by Jesus' command to Peter to put away his sword because “all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”

Immediately, students began asking about...

As a lover of memoir and an advocate for refugee ministry, Sarah Thebarge's The Invisible Girls quickly stole my heart.

In this book, Sarah weaves together her battle with breast cancer (which she was diagnosed with at the age of 27) with a...

As you know, I think it's incredibly important to discuss controversial topics like addictions, war, and gay marriage with high school students. What's more, the recent increase in the amount of resources (books, curricula, blog posts, and the...

Women.

Their stories litter the pages of Scripture, sometimes as main characters in the story of God and sometimes as more peripheral ones. Yet even in churches that affirm women in ministry, too often we overlook these women. We fail to...

If you look at the teaching schedule for the last month of my high school ministry's program year, you'll see the following topics listed: War, gay marriage, and the question, “Who's a child of God?”

What each of these topics have in common is...

Almost a decade ago, I was flipping through a youth worker magazine and came across an ad for a Welcome Pack. Unlike most ads, this one wasn't selling something. Instead, it was trying to convince youth workers to have their students complete a ...

As you know, my very favorite kinds of books are those that leave me in tears one moment and cause me to laugh aloud the next. Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed by Glennon Doyle Melton is definitely one of those books.

In this...

I'm 32 and childless.

Though this has not always been the case, right now, that's an incredibly painful thing for me to say.

My husband and I have been married for 10 years. We got married young and knew we didn't want kids right away. But after...

Three years ago, as part of a graduate school class I was taking, I conducted a thorough assessment of my high school ministry. Among other things, this assessment revealed that in the three years prior to it, only 22% of my congregation's...

This week's review is of Masterpiece: The Art of Discipling Youth by Paul Martin

What the book's about: As it's name suggests, this is a book about the faith formation of youth. Specifically, it's about discipling teens. What makes this book...

When I started my current youth ministry position nearly five years ago, my office was overflowing with old youth group t-shirts. I inherited hundreds of old shirts from a decade's worth of special events.

I felt as though I couldn't get rid of...

My husband and I were on our way home from a brief trip to a local state park on Monday when we stopped for lunch and heard the news about the bombings at the Boston marathon.

Immediately, my heart sunk. As I watched the images from Boston flit...

Next to fiction, memoir is my favorite kind of book. My love for memoir attracted me to Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, a book she calls the “happiest story in the world with the saddest ending”.

Indeed, it...

Whenever I mention my youth ministry's rummage sale to people, they usually ask in disbelief, "You're really doing that again?"

To be sure, rummage sales are a ton of work; but as a youth worker, I love how they encourage people to purge in a...

Google the musical, The Book of Mormon, and you'll almost certainly find people using the words “irreverent”, “crass”, and “ridiculously funny” to describe it. It's a show that uses wit and humor to explore faith and in particular, the Mormon...

Following a morning devotional time during a mission trip, one of my students found me and announced with a great deal of frustration and fury, “Job sucks”. After asking this student several questions, I learned she'd chosen to read Job during her...