My hypothetical husband, the spy

This week, I'm visiting my hometown in Indiana. My mother and I just had the following conversation, and it was too good to keep to myself: 


Mama: You've had enough big life events in the last year. Let's not get married this year.

Me: Married? But I'm not even.....

Mama: Oh, I know, I know. But these things happen.

Me: Even if I were to fall in love and decide to marry someone, I wouldn't want to be engaged this year.

Mama: But you always said you wanted a Christmas wedding....

Me: Good grief, Mama, I've been unmarried for twenty-nine years already; I think I could manage to wait until the next Christmas.

Mama: But there might be a war.

Me: A war? So, you want me to move up the date of my hypothetical wedding because of a hypothetical war?

Mama [nodding]: He might be a spy. [pause] You know, I had a friend in college who had to get married in a hurry because her husband was going to jail. [pause] Don't marry someone who's going to jail.

Me: I won't. Unless it's for defending civil rights, or something like that.

Mama: Right. Don't marry someone going to jail unless he's going for a just cause.

Me: Okay, Mama. I promise.

(From the  State Library of Queensland. No known copyright restrictions)

Listening and hospitality

"Listening," says servant-scholar Henri Nouwen, "is a form of spiritual hospitality."* Listening has never been one of my strengths. I spent much of my childhood alone, amusing myself during my parents' many meetings and events, or sitting in classrooms where I mastered a concept long before the teacher had finished explaining it. Consequently, I learned to read, to ponder, to make lists, to doodle, and to work ahead, but not to attend closely to the words around me. 

More problematically, I have a wicked instinct for turning a everything to myself. I leave many conversations angry with myself for telling one of my own stories when I should have asked a question, annoyed that I missed a chance to listen to someone I want to know better.  Sometimes a story is the beautiful and best way to talk with someone, but too often I speak only because I want to make a good impression or draw out laughter or remind everyone, "This is me. I am here. You should care." 

For Lent several years ago, I fasted from sharing my own stories, opinions, or feelings unless someone directly asked me about them. I committed to asking questions, rather than telling, in my conversations with others. 

This fast changed not merely my language, but my attitudes and postures toward others. When telling my own story was not a possibility, I grew more careful and patient, no longer simply waiting for a gap into which I could insert my own tale. I found myself studying the faces of my friends, pondering how much untold joy, sorrow, hope, and uncertainty could lie behind the most familiar eyes. 

Lent has given way to Easter, yet moving into my new house has renewed my desire to listen well. At home, I know who I am. At home, I choose the pictures on the wall and I shape the bread on the table, so I have no need to prove myself. I am present and secure, and that security allows me to forget myself. To ask you questions. To smile in silence and notice the color of your eyes. To listen. 

If you come to my house and I spend our time talking only about myself, then I have not welcomed you. I have put myself on display, perhaps, but I have not invited you to make this place your home. When you speak and stay, however, you take ownership of this house with me -- if only for an hour, you belong in that chair by the window or at this place at the table. 

Since Friday alone, I have had nearly twenty different friends and students come here for a meal or a moment, and I have tried very hard to listen to them. Now when I walk through my dining room, my kitchen, or my yard, I hear their voices. Reminding me to listen, they are well come. 

Do you listen well? What circumstances or practices help you become a better listener? How do you know when someone is listening to you?

* from Bread for the Journey

How to Feel at Home on the Gulf Coast

For a little more than a fortnight, Alabama has been my home. I spent a week unpacking, a week working, and then, a week entertaining guests. Last Sunday I took a two-hour Megabus ride from Mobile to New Orleans. There I met up with my aunt, uncle, and one of my cousins from Houston. We spent a few days exploring the Big Easy, including its abundance of beignets, pralines, and gumbo. We wandered the French Quarter, tried on Venetian masks, toured a plantation, and (my favorite) saw the sculpture garden at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Beignets at Cafe Du Monde

New Orleans Museum of Art

From New Orleans, we drove back to Mobile.  I was a little concerned about how comfortably four people could inhabit my wee flat, but having so many guests helped me feel at home in some surprising ways. Here are some things I learned--or was reminded--during their visit:


1. Taking the back roads is (almost) always better

Returning from New Orleans, we abandoned I-10 for Hwy 90, which runs within sight of the Gulf for most of its course through Mississippi. We stopped several times along this road, enjoying houses, train depots, and coffee shops that looked nothing like the shops and buildings I know from Indiana, Texas, or Tennessee. Old roads tend to go through the hearts of towns and cities, to challenge hurried and harried travel, to veer away from homogenous chains and obnoxious billboards.

Being touristy in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi

Within Mobile, we also ventured off the main roads several times.  Not all of these routes actually took us to our destinations, but they did give me glimpses of the city I might not otherwise have seen, such as the railroad yards and docks that help me see what it means to live in a true port city.

2. Wandering is wonderful

I prefer to do my wandering on foot, but my apartment location doesn't really allow that. However, my aunt and uncle were more than happy to drive all around my neighborhood and city to see what there is to see. Thanks to them, I discovered that the grocery store down the road sells boiled peanuts, a Southern treat I had never tried. We also found a little restaurant across the bay that serves delicious shrimp and grits, a dish I am now determined to learn to cook.

Enjoying "the South's favorite snack" with my uncle

3. Hospitality is home-making

My aunt kept saying, "We're making such a mess of your clean apartment!" but I was happy to see dishes in the sink, leftovers in the fridge, and unfamiliar shoes on the doormat. Of course I like to keep things clean, but hosting my family was my first chance to really use most of my space, cookware, towels, and more. Watching beloved people move through my rooms, I seemed to hear them say, "This is your place, your home. Otherwise, how could we be here with such ease?" I'm so thankful they came, and I cannot wait until my next guests arrive.  Could it be you?


How do you make yourself at home in a new place? And when are you coming to visit me in Mobile?

Comforts, Quirks, and Company

Hoosier Winter

This Christmas is very much a working holiday. I'm striving to complete my final dissertation chapter by December 31, so I'm not indulging in nearly as many movies, walks, or visits as I normally do when visiting Indiana. However, even while racing toward my deadline, I have been able to appreciate many of the good things about being here, in my first of all homes:

1. Kind Inquiries from Federal Employees: As I stepped onto the porch to retrieve the mail on Tuesday, the postman stopped and shouted, "Well, how is Baby Bear? Get good grades this semester?"
2. Things that Do Not Change: For more years than I can remember, my mother has used the same wrapping paper to wrap my presents. I suppose when you save a certain paper for one person, it can last a long time.
3. Creature Comforts: Writing a dissertation is much more pleasant with a purring cat curled up on my lap (or, less conveniently, in front of my keyboard)
4. Other Things that Do Not Change: My parents' Christmas tree will always be, in my estimation, the best of all trees.  Every ornament has a story. I especially like the angels made from aluminum foil, which Mama made when she and Daddy were first married.

Grocery shopping with Mama

5. Deliciousness: On Wednesday, Mama made eight casserole dishes full of homemade party mix. As far as I am concerned, this is our Christmas feast.
6. Quirks I Did Not Realize Were Quirks until I Left Home: On our living room walls, my parents have maps of Narnia and Middle Earth, but there is not a single family portrait to be found on any wall in the house. 
7. New Delights: Daddy is reading Harry Potter for the first time (he's just started the sixth book), and I love hearing his first-time reactions to the stories.
8. Quotidian Grace: Mama and I spend quality time together by running errands.
9. Sartorial Redemption: The Helping Hands thrift store in West Terre Haute, Indiana yields many treasures.
10. Good Company: Miscellaneous college and international students are in and out of the house at all hours.
11.  Ties that Bind: I spent last night and most of today with Lennon, Amy, and Andrew--kin by so much more than blood. (Amy, by the way, is a fabulous baker and blogs her creations here. If you're in central/southern Indiana, you should hire her to bake you a cake!).

Lennon, Amy, and Andrew with "Aunt Bethany"

A more typical glimpse of our time together.

Where are you this Christmas? What are some of the good things about being there?

A Shelter from the Storm?

“At least I’m going to die with people I love.” This was my anchoring thought as I watched my first Texas storm mount the horizon, its black clouds racing over the clear-sky blue.  

In retrospect, my reaction seems melodramatic, but as I felt the warm April air give way to a cold fury that day in 2007, I really thought my friends and I might be swept away.  We--mostly friends from my church lifegroup--had gathered to watch one couple’s son play in a Little League game.  No forecast had prepared us for the rapid storm, and I doubted aluminum bleachers would provide much shelter from a tornado. I don’t think we actually saw any funnel clouds, but I, true to form, jumped to the most interesting (and, in this case, terrible) conclusion: that we were all going to die in the storm. 

I quickly realized, however, that no one else seemed to share my resignation. Everyone else, including my friends, were rushing themselves and their families to the our nearby cars. I realized that I, too, would have to get into my car and try to drive back to the city.

Only then did I begin to panic. Grabbing hold of a friend’s hand and waiting for the storm didn’t terrify me, but the prospect of driving home by myself did.  This reaction certainly had something to do with my temperamental passivity, and also with the fact that, at the time of this storm, driving made me nervous even on halcyon days.  Even more, I was deeply troubled by the idea of enduring a storm alone. As a child I had waited out tornado warnings with my parents, and once or twice in college the residents of our dorm would be ordered into the basement when the weather raged.  Those storms had worried me, but they did not make me feel as wretched as having to outrun danger on my own.  

That first storm was on my mind last Thursday, when news of tornadoes compelled the residents of Waco to seek shelter in closets, halls, and bathrooms.  My roommate and I were both home when the sirens began to wail across the river, and our friend Steph joined us in our makeshift storm shelter.  We waited for nearly an hour, listening to the wind and hail. Fortunately, the storms passed with little damage, and the three of us were almost merry (or perhaps a little giddy) as we waited for news that it was safe to emerge. 

Steph snapped this photo from her couch-cushion fortress in our bathroom.
I am eating a fajita, while roommate Adrienne distracts us from our storm-worries. 

This time, I did not think we were going to die, but I was grateful to my core that we were together, and as we stepped into the bathroom, I had a strange peace about the possibility that maybe, just maybe, my worldly goods, or my car, or my walls and windows, might be gone when I came out again.  At the same time, I wondered how many in my apartment complex, neighborhood, and city felt alone as they listened to those sirens.

Home--we often say--is a place we find shelter from the storm. This saying is wise and good. But tornadoes remind us that those shelters can and will fail. Our walls can give way to winds, our churches can hurt us, and our friends can never give us all we need.  Thus, like the bewildered disciples, I am beginning to wonder if home must be something else: some love that stands unshaken as the storm makes black the sky. 

Kickball and the Kingdom of Heaven

“Hey -- thanks for getting me home,” Dustin said as I walked back toward the group.

“Mm, yeah, you’re welcome,” I mumbled lamely, utterly confused. 

By the time I had reached the others, I realized that Dustin’s message was hardly as cryptic as it seemed.  After our church’s Palm Sunday worship service in a neighborhood park, our Sunday School class had accepted a kickball challenge from the youth group.  The air was warm but not oppressive, and our whole congregation was enjoying the fine April Sunday as much as any festival.  The game itself was a merry affair; the youth were full of vim and bravado, and we, being both moderate Baptists and twenty-somethings, had chosen the ironic team name, “No Mercy.”  There was lots of laughter and joking from all sides, and several spectators cheered for our respective teams.

I was trying very hard to have fun.  

This picture--a shot of me trying desperately
to catch a frisbee--should make it clear
why team sports aren't really my forte. 

Team activities have always made me nervous, either because I fear disappointing my teammates (if the activity is volleyball, for example), or because I am afraid my teammates will disappoint me (if the activity has anything to do with my GPA).  The root of the problem should be obvious: I have always seen these group activities in terms of myself, and whether I will appear excellent or foolish, talented or inept. 

As a teenager, therefore, I would have abstained from kickball altogether, keeping a dignified but lonely distance from the game.  For years, I have trained myself to participate in frightening things, and I have discovered (thanks be to God) that self-consciousness will wither if you don’t feed it with attention. Nevertheless, I still feel a kind of catch in my stomach when asked to play a game, whether kickball or Candyland.  I was proud of myself, therefore, for joining in on Sunday, and even more proud when I managed to kick the ball well enough to make it to first base.  When the next person from our team made a successful kick, I ran for second but was caught.   It was as I walked back from the field that Dustin passed me and thanked me for getting him home. I had been so preoccupied with my own bolt to first base that I had not realized Dustin had been waiting for a chance to run to home plate, and my kick had given him that chance.  

I started this blog because ideas about home troubled and teased me throughout college, and these ideas have only become more complex and promising in the last five years.  I wasn’t expecting to learn anything about home during a Sunday kickball match, but as “No Mercy” battled the Calvary Youth, I found myself in the midst of a little parable.  

I don’t mean to say that the Kingdom of Heaven is exactly like a game of kickball, but Sunday’s match reminded me how rarely we see the ways our actions affect others.  It is good to know that whether or not we feel ourselves to be at home, we might be helping others to a good place. It is good to know that even when we aren’t trying to be good or charitable or hospitable, God can use us in spite of ourselves. 

Can you think of a time when you learned that your actions had brought some good or benefit to others without you realizing it?

Homes & Honeysuckle

In Indiana, we could find it a block away from my childhood home, massed on the fence of a dilapidated and rather menacing house. Eruptions of loud music and acrid chemical odors were the only signs of life from this ramshackle, which we generally avoided on our evening walks. But there was always a night in early June when Mama or Daddy or I would step onto the front porch, inhale the evening air, and say, “Oh, I smell the honeysuckle.”  On those nights, we would venture near the fence, risking the wretched house for a deeper breath of that wild perfume. 

In Tennessee, it spangled the trees along the walking trail behind campus.  I would walk for hours, back and forth, back and forth, first through the winter, when the trees were bare, and into spring, when evening sun and young leaves made a tunnel of green.  A little girl who lived along the railroad tracks met me there one evening, just a week before I was to graduate and leave Tennessee. She was riding her bike, and stopped to ask me if I was a gypsy, and if I knew her teacher, and if I knew her mama, and if I knew where the trains went, and if knew how to suck the sweetness out of honeysuckle.  I didn’t, and she taught me.

In Texas, I first found it in the alleyways near my garage apartment. Tangled along back fences and dumpsters, its scent often startled me as I carried the trash to throw out, or walked my landlords’ dog in the evening. Here, in my second apartment, it overruns the riverside, and, mingling with the grape vines, covers my favorite shelter with a sweet canopy. 

I know it comes every spring. I know the places it loves to grow, and the kinds of breezes that carry its scent. But the scent of honeysuckle always surprises me, always catches me unaware as I try to rush through a late spring night, weary and worried with papers to write and grade. 

Startled, then stilled, by a sweetness I neither tended nor expected: this is one way I know I am home. 

Life Undivided: A Place We Are Free

"I hope you're pleased with yourselves. We could all have been killed - or worse, expelled.”  (Hermione Granger, Harry Potter and the Sorcorer’s Stone) 

Like Hermione, I have always I have always been a rule-follower.  The impulse to push against the boundaries established by parents, teachers, or others never made much sense to me. As a shy child, happy to slip through a day without notice, I could never understand why so many of my peers seemed determined to make trouble for themselves and everyone around.  Even as an adult, I sometimes catch myself raising my hand when I want to speak among a  group of friends. No one who knows me will be much surprised at this pledge of my rule-following, but perhaps they should be.  Could we go back in time and ask a five, ten, or even fifteen-year-old Bethany, “What are the rules in your house?” that younger-me would have been baffled.   

For most of my childhood, I can only remember being given a few explicit rules.  On the first day of kindergarten, for example, my mother made it very clear that I was not to let anyone call me “Beth.”  Years later, when I was in high school, she delivered a rather vague prohibition against “weird” clothing at church, but only if I were singing in the choir, where a tie-dyed cape or black veil (yes, veil) might distract people in the congregation.  Aside from these rather particular mandates, my childhood and teen years were shaped by an extraordinary experience of freedom.  I can never remember being told to do my homework--indeed, I can never remember my parents asking much about my homework. As a teenager, I never had a curfew, and often stayed out until the wee hours of the morning, so long as I had told my parents beforehand when to expect me home.  My time was my own from a very early age, and when I would accompany my parents to the conferences and retreats they led, I would spend entire weekends roaming a campground or conference center while my parents and their students attended the official programs. My teachers treated me in much the same way, allowing me to direct much of my own studies even in elementary school. 

Of course, my parents could afford to have few rules because, for the most part, I did the things I was supposed to do.  If instead of rules I think about the habits and practices of my childhood home, I can make a long list: we prayed before meals; we did not work or shop on Sundays; we kept rooms clean and tidy; we did not watch rated-R movies; we avoided any waste of food, electricity, or water. While these practices might look like rules to outsiders, for me they seemed intuitive. They felt like freedom. 

When I grew old enough to realize that this absence of rules was unusual, at least among the households of my friends and relatives, I began to ask questions that have been haunting nearly every realm of my life and attention lately:

What does it mean to be free? How do people come to use their freedom well?

I am posing this question on my blog because I believe that home should be a place we are free.  I’m still pondering precisely what this means: perhaps that home is a place we do not need rules because we desire good things. Or a place where we are trusted, where we have authority because we work for the sustenance of the whole household. As I have studied history and literature, as I have learned to be a teacher, as I have watched my friends begin to parent children, as I have worshipped in a “free church” tradition, as I have watched this spring’s uprisings and revolutions  in the Arab world, the question of becoming free has felt increasingly urgent this year.  

From my own experience, I can see that I learned to be free by having freedom, and that from the examples of many wise adults and peers, I saw that love for God and others, not mere deference to authority, should be the force that governs my will and choices.  At the same time, there have been seasons as an adult when I felt my freedom to be an extraordinary burden, and I had to learn that living a life of freedom requires courage as well as love.  

However, as my friends constantly remind me, I am not normal, nor can I generalize answers to such important questions from my experience alone. I have encountered many ideas on this subject -- passages from Scripture, ideas from various philosophers, poets, and patriots, aphorisms and cliches -- but to synthesize all that would be a dissertation-length project, and I have one dissertation to write, already. Thus, I’m hoping you will offer some of your ideas and experiences on the subject of freedom. In future posts, I hope to return to this topic, perhaps dealing with some of the specific ways freedom is linked to vocation, life as single or married adults, and church, but for now I am risking some big questions: 

 What does it mean to be free? Are the ideas of “home” and “freedom” linked in your experience or philosophy? If you are a parent, how are you teaching your children to handle freedom? What are some ways in which freedom can be difficult? 

Introduction: Letters from Home?

Last Friday, as I sat at a “S’mores and Sex” Sunday School party, I realized something was terribly wrong. The party was not the problem: despite the provocative name, I was enjoying the tame but happy gathering of other graduate students and young professionals.  Our Sunday School class has recently welcomed a new couple as our teachers, and they had suggested our class should have social events in addition to our regular Sunday-morning Bible studies. So far, so good. After mingling over s’mores, cider, and snickerdoodles, one of our teachers introduced the night’s discussion topic, “Singleness,  Marriage, Sex, and Everything In Between.”  He asked a number of questions about what it means to be a young adult--especially an unmarried young adult--in today’s churches.  As I listened to my peers’ answers--which ranged from dating to family, hermeneutics to vocation, and beyond--I realized that my own concerns about how churches treat young adults were not merely idiosyncratic worries. The lawyer sitting next to me, the sociologist across the room, the seminary student--they also had realized something was amiss. 

Even if I wanted to, I could not transcribe Friday’s long conversation. However, the refrain of our questions and stories was this: very few of our churches had taken an active interest in the spiritual formation of young adults, especially if they are unmarried.  

Ours was not a bitter conversation, nor a session of complaints.  We all lead meaningful, satisfying lives. Some there are involved in serious relationships, others who attend our class but were missing Friday are married.  However, I heard many substantive, moving questions about how our churches train young adults to be part of the Body of Christ. I came home thinking about many of my own (usually-unvoiced) concerns about what it means to live the life I am living: the life of a teacher, a scholar, a daughter, a deacon, a friend, an unmarried twenty-something.  Questions about what it means for you to live the lives you are leading. Hopes about how these lives are meant to come together. 

On Saturday, I decided to start this blog. Admittedly, I am a little late to the blogging bandwagon, but my mother taught me to keep quiet until I have something to say.  

I have a few things to say. I think you probably do, too. Somewhat to my surprise, I think I intend to write a blog about relationships, and about how life in Christ upsets many assumptions about our  friendships, marriages, parenthoods, and more. For years I have been pondering the idea of “home,” and I want to use this electronic chronicle as a place to work out questions about what it means to be at home--with one another, with ourselves, and within our churches.  

 Many of the things I have to say come from my experiences and observations as a single person in a church culture that tends to worship the nuclear family, but I am not writing this blog only for single people, or for young people, or for women.  Many of the things I have to say have been gleaned from my generous, and wise married friends.  Indeed, much of what I hope to do here is pose questions that you, my friends, can answer, extend, and complicate.

I thought about several titles for this blog, including

“The Single Person’s Guide to Abundant Living” (too narrow in its audience, and it sounds like something from the self-help aisle at Barnes & Noble)

“The Married Person’s Guide to Keeping Single Friends” (again, too narrow, possibly snarky, and it sounds like a pet-owner’s manual)

“Radical Hospitality” (better, but “radical” is becoming dangerously trendy)

I have settled on “Letters from Home” because it best captures the sense of both sadness and hope I feel when I look around my church, my city, my country, and this world, hoping to glimpse the Kingdom of God.  We have been promised a home, but we are not there yet.  A letter signals both presence and absence: I can cherish the envelope in my hand, knowing that the sender also held it, but  holding an envelope is not as sweet as holding someone’s hand. Letters are sent when distance interferes with complete communion. Letters provide our records of the early churches.  I’m attempting a to send and receive a few letters from this promised, obscured, real, imagined, holy, humble home. I want to gather ideas, questions, and meditations on how we can create home for one another.  Like my other ideas, this title has its dangers. To some, it probably seems sentimental.  So be it. I don’t mind thinking of this blog as a kind of cross-stitched sampler I am hanging on the internet’s cluttered wall, and if “home” has become a sentimental word, I would rather fight sentimentality with honesty and laughter than with cynicism. 

With all these hopes and questions in mind, I intend to post entries in the following categories: 

Abundant Lives: Profiles of people whose lives overflow with grace, love, humor, strength, and courage

Making it Home: Ideas about what it means to practice hospitality, ranging from the lofty (Sabbath-keeping) to the mundane (bread recipes)

Life Undivided:  Questions, thanksgiving, complaints, and meditations on what it means to walk alongside each other as fellow pilgrims

To review: I hope to use this blog as a forum for questions and thoughts about how life in Christ affects the way we live as friends, children, spouses, parents, siblings.  Because of own stage of life, many of my posts will relate to my experiences as a young adult and an unmarried person, but I am interested in hearing from all my readers, even (especially!) if you are in a different season of your life.   

Coming up next time…..”Making it Home”: How a Crockpot May Have Saved My Life

You have patiently listened to me thus far, and now I want to hear from you:   1) What does the word “home” mean to you? 2) Does your current church provide a sense of home for you? If so, how? If not, what could your church do differently?