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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There are blonde jokes, lawyer jokes and Polish jokes. And then there are Mennonite jokes. As a Mennonite, and a plain Mennonite at that, I like the Mennonite jokes best. It is the perverse nature of humanity...
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“I wanted to be big, real. Heard.” — Lucinda J. Miller, Anything But Simple I don’t know what it is in me that drives me to want to be heard. Once upon a time, a friend told me that she had detected a...
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There are people who say they don’t believe in God. In our own moments of faith and confidence, we look at them wonderingly and think they must be crazy deluded, or else they’re lying to us. Because God is...
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I have never voted in an election. Not because I don’t care about my country. I care very much. I love this country where I live. I love its beauty; love the broad sweep of its land, the diversity of its...
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