About

I’m from this family tradition of stories. Most of them funny, all embellished for effect and they seemed to shape my interest in hearing others share their stories and in sharing the stories known as life.

I’m  a  wife, mama, MeMe, sister, daughter, recovering controlling person, music-lover, learner, listener, talker, laugher and generally loud person.

I say I love God and I do but it’s a daily battle to let go of my will and submit to his. I try to follow God’s directions to make my path straight but more times than not I wonder off the edges and find myself in the thicket.

Faith

In one of my favorite books, Messy Spirituality, Mike Yaconelli describes faith this way, “faith is the unbalancing force in our lives that is the fruit of God’s disturbing presence.” For me, life is viewed through a filtered lens called faith. My faith is placed in God. The God of the bible, the God of all, the God who is love. 

Family

My family is big and small, strewn across the country and I miss them all too much. My greatest joy and privilege is being mama to Heather and Jonathan and seeing them become wonderful adults with loving spouses and one delightful granddaughter. We laugh and cry together and find ourselves in the arms of a loving God sitting with us through it all.

We walked through the journey of dementia with my Mama. You’ll find times when I’ve shared part of that journey here. God took mama home in 2016. While she forgot the three she’d born she never forgot the God she served.

Recovery

I am a grace-learner, having learned most of these lessons from our ministry in the recovery community. This is where my husband and I find ourselves, side-by-side, day after day, serving men in a residential 6-month program. These men have found life unmanageable, most due to substance abuse. As Heather Kopp says in her book Sober Mercies: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk, “people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs.”  They  have turned my boxed up faith into free-form and are the inspiration behind this blogs title: Living In Graceland

The Salvation Army

                                                                                                                                                                                          The Salvation Army has been our family church for generations. It became the church where we received our ordination, both of us, him and me, and it is through them our lives are spent serving others. It’s hard to separate this in a category as it overlaps much of our life but the posts I’ve written specifically about the ‘Army’ have been some of the most popular.

Me

Taken by our friend, Jim.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           I’m learning to call myself a writer and artist. Depending on the day, these realizations are impossible or certain. They are only day by day.

We are blessed to be back in South Florida, the place we call home. We’re at the beach most Saturday mornings, camera in one hand and Pepsi in the other.

I am incredibly blessed to be part of the church of drop-outs, losers, sinners and fools. We are living in Graceland. There’s room for you to come along.