palms and thin places (together at the table).

While I don't plan on linking all of my posts for Together at the Table back to this blog, I thought I'd share an excerpt from yesterday's post, centered on Palm Sunday and the start of Holy Week. This is such a special, important time of the year, and I pray for Christ's presence in your lives, sweet friends. Here's to a blessed Holy Week.

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The church I currently attend sings quite a bit of hymns, and often ones that I don’t recognize. And while I’m loving this change of pace, I’m still not entirely used to it. Church often entails me clinging to my bulletin for dear life, not realizing we’re singing a hymn until halfway through the first verse, at which point I frantically scour my bulletin for the accurate information, then spend nearly the rest of the song searching for it in the hymnal.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus’ peaceful and triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and marking the start of Holy Week, one of my favorite times of the year. I have the fondest memories of this day at my old church, where the children would all circle the adults in the sanctuary, eyes lit up like spotlights with palm branches soaring above their heads. It was such a simple, meaningful, and quite literal expression of child-like faith, and it always reminded me of how much I have to learn from children about Jesus.

But back to my current church. We were all given palm leaves upon entering, and were invited to circle the sanctuary with them during the processional. Per usual, the organ started, the congregation sang, and I found myself scrambling through the first verse for the right page in the hymnal. Add this to the fact that we were encouraged to leave our pews to walk with the processional, and I found myself actually growing anxious.

I finally found the right page, processional creeping ever closer, and decided flat out to stay where I was, to let the processional pass on by and simply focus on singing the right words of the hymn.

But then they passed by, palms high above their heads, and there was a still small voice saying, Go. Forget the rest and go.

Click here to read the rest of the post!

together truth at the re:write conference.

I wrote a little post last week over on Together at the Table about the Re:Write Conference last weekend, tapping into just a few of the identity statements that were spoken over the audience during our time there.

I've been trying to write this debriefing post for a while now, but my thoughts still aren't melding together coherently - rather ironic for a post on a writing conference, I know. So, just as a warning, my thoughts will probably jump all over the place. And I guess it's strangely fitting for how the conference spoke to me - little bits and pieces of Truth and Life that hit me at different times and for different lengths. 

That's the thing about the conference - for as much as it was an all-out writer's conference, filled with speakers and information about the publishing industry, plotting one's novel, and building a platform as an author, it was almost equally an identity conference - one where the goals of publishing a bestseller took a backseat to writing just to WRITE. To write to tell the truth, to bleed on the page, to search desperately for meaning and life and light in the world.

I told my dad that I had never been so content with the possibility of not getting published after the conference - mostly as a joke to get him riled up.

But at the same time, it's so very true to my experience at the conference. I listened to author after author speak about the struggles of the writing journey, and how placing one's faith and security and identity in nabbing a book deal will always lead to disappointment and rejection. Because the writing journey is often times filled with rejection. Lots of it. (I learned that C.S. Lewis was rejected 799 times before being accepted on the 800th submission! Talk about crazy.)

I listened as author Mary DeMuth talked about writing as "soul work" to find out the Truth that each person is called Beloved by God.

I listened to author Ted Dekker as he explained his Superman analogy - the fact that most of us believe that we're Clark Kent, despite the fact that with our identity anchored securely in Christ, we are Superman! I chatted with him ever so briefly after he spoke, and he pointed straight at me, reminded me to never forget that Superman was right there. And then he was gone, off to converse with another writer. A few seconds, and yet it was enough to breathe fresh air into my self that often tends to fall back on lies of "not good enough" in times of insecurity.

I listened to bestselling authors speak candidly about how they still struggled with similar feelings of doubt and insecurity, that they still have their dark moments of seriously believing the lies.  You know those demons? The ones that curl up in the back of our minds with their demeaning whispers like

justshutupandgiveupalreadyyou'renotagoodwriterandyou'llnevermakeit.

But then we were all together, writers and poets and dreamers and artists, some well known and some just beginners, showing up together to sit through the lies and call them out as exactly that: lies. 

More than anything, this conference was about Truth, about writing as a form of searching for truth in the dark, in the cracks and crevices of our own hearts, hoping to catch glimpses of something Brighter along the way.

Clark Kent.   SUPERMAN.

Not good enough.   ENOUGH.

ACCEPTED.

BELOVED.

These truths are what the conference ultimately came down to for me. Yes, my brain was filled with different strategies and tips and exciting new ideas for my next steps with Yellowtree and my own journey as an author. I made connections with different writers, speakers, companies and publishing agencies. But none of that makes any difference if I don't believe the core truth that I. AM. SECURE. No buts about it. That truth will stay the same no matter where my writing future leads.

These aren't truths solely for writers, either. For we're all Truth Tellers, in a way, no matter our artistic ability. At our very core, image of God selves, we're really all the same.

Halfway through the conference, Ted Dekker was talking about this mysterious phenomenon of loving your neighbor not "like" yourself, or "similar to" yourself, but literally "as" yourself. He had us turn to the people around us and greet them with, "Hi me." And he challenged us with how different we would treat others if we saw them as ourselves. A revolutionary thought, indeed.

I left the Re:Write Conference feeling the most encouraged I've ever felt as a writer, but also as a human being. For although I am a writer, I am a child of God first.


You are a _________, but a child of God first.


We are ____________, but children of God first.