Pull up a chair and exhale
Mental Health Counselor · Mother · Former Church Planter · Writer
I write as a mother, a counselor, a former church planter, and a fellow traveler. Not as an authority with easy answers.
Once you’ve had the conversation with your child at home, there is a specific kind of loneliness that joins you in the meet-and-greet portion of the service at church. It comes on again, maybe even stronger, in the car on the drive home. As your kids cram into the seat behind you, the painful questions ring loud in your ears. Where is God in this, and is He still good to my family?
I know these moments firsthand. I’ve walked into my sanctuary hugging other mothers hello while my arms were trembling under the weight of fears for our family’s future. I’ve cried through sermons wondering if the promises were for me and mine after all. I’ve made that drive home, feeling just as confused and alone as you are.
I write for parents whose LGBTQ+ child has taken a different path than the one they once imagined for them. I don’t write to fix people or situations. I don’t write to argue them or you or anyone else out of or back to certainty. I write merely as a way of joining you around the ash heap of your broken dreams. I find myself there on a regular basis, for myself as well as for you, holding tightly to a tenacious hope that unexpected beauty rises from what seems dead.
I’m a mental health counselor and a former church planter. I’m also a facilitator with The Allender Center, where I was trained in storywork and narrative-focused trauma care under Dan Allender. That work — sitting with people as they name what happened to them and discover where God has been present in the story all along — shapes everything I write.
I’m not writing to you as an authority. I’m writing as a woman who left the tables that were set for someone different than I turned out to be. I’m writing as a mother who left rooms in which theological power was wielded against my children. I write as a deep lover of Jesus who went looking, and found, Him at a shockingly spacious table. One that has a seat for every single one of us.
My words are intended as a sort of Holy Feast that offers goodness to us all.
Pull up a chair and exhale.