At The Kitchen Window Chapel
"To be with God it is not necessary to always be in church. We may make a chapel of our heart whereto we may escape from time to time... Begin, then; perhaps He is waiting."
--Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection
(17th century Carmelite monk)
@sofiareadwritelove #kitchenwindowchapel
“About Me” is an impossible headline to live up to. People are delightfully complex, each of us a unique blend of light and dark, strong and delicate, and a million other ingredients.
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Getting to know a new person (or discovering new sides of someone I already know) is one of my absolute favorite things. I wish you and I could sit down and have a long conversation over a glass or two of wine, laugh about all the ways in which we’re alike, and learn from the ways in which we’re different. But right now, these words on your screen are all we’ve got.
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When I was preparing to write Reasons For Our Hope, I spent a lot of time doing interviews. So it seemed fitting, for this website bio, to write an imaginary interview with myself. Here goes!
How would your friends and co-workers most likely describe you?
Probably the first thing they’d say is "assertive." Sometimes this trait has gotten me into trouble... but more often it has been the start of good things. I’m a project starter, an invitation sender. The one who gets the ball rolling for a girls' night out (remember those?), a kids' book exchange during lockdown, or whatever else has popped into my head.
For better or for worse, I'm a person who steps up to the microphone when it's offered, and sometimes when it's not. I'm constantly taking lessons from my wise, thoughtful husband on the art of knowing when to make suggestions and when to keep quiet.
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The next thing people would probably say about me--and this is something that comes very naturally to me now but it didn't always--is that I look for the good in others. It's not that I'm unaware of the bad stuff; I just try not to let that be the focus of my thoughts, or more importantly, the words I speak.
As a teenager I was very inspired by some of my peers who stood out from the crowd by their resistance to going negative. The ones who didn't badmouth others behind their backs, and who, if they were present when a conversation turned in that direction, would speak up in the person's defense. I decided that was the kind of person I wanted to be.
It's obviously not a one time decision, like the flipping of a switch; it's something I've worked at very intentionally over the years. Something I've prayed many times for God to help me with...and He has. At this point in my life I would say that accentuating the positive has become a noticeable part of my personality.
Finish these sentences: "I feel most alive when I'm..."
Dancing--especially to Latin or Arabic music, but 80's/90's pop will do just as well. If we're at an event that has a dance floor, I'm on it for most of the night and it's only with great reluctance that I can be convinced to leave.
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"I feel most at peace when I'm..."
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Sitting in my backyard flower garden enjoying the morning shade, a good Bible passage, and a cup of strong black coffee. Once it gets warm enough in the springtime, that's where you'll find me every morning.
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"I love being married to someone who..."
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Pushes me to go higher. Sometimes literally. Two summers ago, our family was in Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. As my husband and I were watching our kids slide down the smaller dunes and helping them climb back up, I looked up to the highest dunes, the ones that were about 800 feet tall, and thought, I bet there's a great view from up there. But no way can I climb that high, that's crazy! It wasn't long before he turned to me with that adventurous gleam in his eyes and said, "Let's take turns hiking up to the very top!"
I went first. If you've ever tried to walk up a huge pile of sand, you'll understand why I say that, aside from childbirth, that was the toughest physical challenge I've ever done. I'm in good shape, but there were parts of the climb where I could only go a couple of steps before having to stop and catch my breath again. But I am extremely persistent (i.e. stubborn...that's probably the first word my parents would have used if asked to describe me). So, slowly but surely, I made it up there.
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The next time someone invites you to do something that's crazy-hard but that you may not have another opportunity to do, just say yes. The view from the top is beyond words. Running down feels like flying. But most importantly, you get to remember for the rest of your life that you did it. And be grateful for that person who pushed you.
What's the one decision that has impacted your life the most?
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Saying 'Yes' to new adventures has been a pretty consistent theme in my life. But the first, and most important, happened when I was a senior in high school. It was the day I decided to, as Carrie Underwood sings it, let Jesus take the wheel.
Faced with a sudden and very clear conviction that my will and God's differed on the issue of whether I should pursue a career in politics (yes, those of you who know me IRL, feel free to laugh), I decided then and there to lay down my own ambitions and trust that in time God would show me a better way to use my talents. One that would have more of a lasting positive impact on others and also bring greater happiness in my own life.
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From that day on, in big decisions as well as small ones, I have tried (with varying degrees of success and failure) to consider what God's will might be and to walk in that direction. So that first 'Yes' contained all the future ones inside of it.
So you didn't go into politics...but what did your career path end up looking like?
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A little circuitous! I went to Rice University in Houston, TX, where I got my bachelor's degree in History because that's what I was most on fire to learn about, but after a while I realized I didn't actually want a career in academia.
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My heart felt drawn to full-time ministry or missions work, but my head pointed out that I had both student loans and credit card debt to pay off first. So after graduation I went in a very different direction, working at the Houston office of a big consulting firm that had done a lot of recruiting at Rice.
To be perfectly honest, my go-getter side really enjoyed the challenge and competitiveness of the corporate world and the lifestyle it made possible. But after less than a year I had realized two things. One, that a person who cries when her manager tells her she's been reassigned to a different project is probably too softhearted for the business world. And two, that the thing that gave me the most joy was the one hour a week I spent as a Junior Achievement volunteer, teaching business skills to fifth graders at a school in a very different part of town from where I worked.
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And the rest is history... I stepped off the corporate treadmill and never looked back. Earned my master's degree in education from Loyola University in Chicago. Taught fourth grade for four years and absolutely loved it, but made another career shift to full-time mother when my husband and I started having kids.
After moving to Iowa City a few years ago, I began to work on writing a book. To read more about this surprising plot twist in the story of my career, you can download and read the book's introduction here.
Most recently (dare I say "finally"... probably not, God always has more surprises in store!) there's been the addition of a part-time job at our church, as coordinator of youth groups. So, the ministry thing came back after all, just not in the form that I expected.
What's one way in which your childhood has shaped the person you are today?
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If you’ve read Little House on the Prairie and other books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, you can imagine a childhood shaped by many moves and a tight-knit family that was my one fixed point.
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My parents left their native country of Sweden to start a new life here in the United States when I was two years old. Fourteen years and three moves later, they bought a piece of land in central Texas and started their own vineyard and winery business. Like the Ingalls family, we were always setting off on new adventures.
And although leaving the place that had become home was painful every time, I learned that this pain was temporary and that I would get through it just fine. That when one chapter ends, a new one is just a page turn away.
Knowing these things made me more resilient and more able to enter into new situations with confidence. I don't think I would trade my moving-around childhood for one that was more rooted-in-one-spot if I had the choice.
Are there other well-known fictional characters you would compare yourself to in terms of personality?
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If you’ve read Anne of Green Gables, you’re familiar with the starry-eyed side of me. Anne is a girl who lives in the world of books and imagination, in whose eyes a small pond becomes The Lake of Shining Waters, and who is always on the lookout for beauty and for “kindred spirits.”
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There's also a side of me that's a lot like Scarlett O'Hara from Gone With The Wind--her strengths as well as a few of her flaws. She's self-assured and assertive, a get-it-done kind of girl who's fiercely determined to "find a way" no matter what obstacles she faces. This kind of personality often comes with hard edges, but I've learned over the years how to soften mine with the addition of gentleness and compassion.
Like Scarlett, I tend to be driven by strong emotions and have done my share of chasing what will never bring true happiness. But the biggest good news in my life is that, by the grace of God, I'm living the happy ending that she maybe lost her chance for (depending on how you imagine her story ends). No matter what happens in my story from here on out, I will always have reason to give thanks for the fact that, as the famous last line in the movie says, "tomorrow is another day."
