I realized, my first Sunday morning volunteering at the Rusk County Jail, how very unfair my life has been. My sister and I sat across from two women in bright orange suits, locked with them into a small room...
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As the map in The New York Times fills with red, I’ve been sorta blue. Thanks, COVID-19. Church, writers’ events, community gatherings — all canceled. COVID-19 corresponded with a natural bout of...
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Maybe it’s laughable for someone who’s been married three months to try to say anything at all about it yet. All the same, I know a whole lot more about marriage now than I did 91 days ago. Here are a few...
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I made my own wedding dress. I have sewed dresses for myself since I was a teenager, moving from frustration and seam rippers to calm satisfaction in watching the pieces fit together, just so. My wedding dress...
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This column is a combined effort by my fiance and me, written before our wedding on Nov. 23. Ivan: I like to read; therefore I get a few book catalogs. One day I noticed an ad for a new book, Anything But...
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“I don’t want to call God an idiot or anything,” I told Ivan, “but if I had created the world, I would have done things differently.” Someone I love made a choice that hurt me, and that is why I said...
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When I am sad or lonely, I like to hold a little bear my fiance gave me, whom I call DanDee after the name on his tag. I like to look at the red heart on DanDee’s chest. When I place four fingers on his back...
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There is only one place in the world where I can walk into the local TV station and get instant coverage just by picking up the mic, smiling into the camera and announcing myself. That place is a First Nations...
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What to you makes a satisfactory life? The apostle John writes of an incident soon after Jesus had risen from the dead that is very telling. Jesus had just prophesied Peter’s death by crucifixion. Peter, in...
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In a bare, block-walled room I see them: young mothers. Their faces hang in that state of half-life between breath and desire, hungry. “Do you have any children?” I ask them. “How many?” “How old are...
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The story starts in 1981 when Grandpa and Grandma picked up the Xiong family — Hmong refugees with a passel of skinny, dark-eyed children — at the Eau Claire, Wis., airport. Well, actually the story starts...
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Tears come to my grandma’s eyes when she tells us goodbye and thanks us for coming to visit. “I’m not worthy,” she says. Silly Grandma. We have visited her seldom, far less often than she deserves. She...
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I sit in a departure lounge of Logan International Airport — late, late. Boston’s winter weather is chancy, and today — flying home for a visit — I drew the wrong straw. The lounge is empty except for...
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This fall, I moved from Rusk County, Wis., to Boston to attend college. Not one of Boston’s big-name institutions like Harvard or MIT, but Sattler, a college of a different stripe. Named for a 16th-century...
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Criminals and I have something in common: I view myself as a good person. Better than most, even. “Perhaps the most surprising discovery in my early years of trying to understand the criminal mind was that,...
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A book called Prayer, by Ole Hallesby — a Norwegian Christian who wrote in the early 1900s — changed my understanding of that basic-to-our-humanity, up-reaching thing we call prayer. I will share in my own...
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My dad smells of hay and manure, the soil and the outdoors, spiritually speaking. His relationship with God is a sturdy thing, like coveralls that have hung always in the basement between chorings and are...
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I recently visited China with my younger brother Chad and returned home with a wealth of sensations and memories. China is a country both traditional and modern, atheistic and Christian, wealthy and poor,...
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I made a promise once. I meant it with all my shaking soul. I think it would be difficult to recount what an influence that promise has had on my life, impossible to count how many times I have read it again...
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I met her at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, two and a half hours from my home in rural Rusk County, Minn. She was tall and dark and beautiful. She wore a bandana that covered her hair completely and gave...
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