I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while..

Good therapy helps. Good friends help. Pretending that we are doing better than we are doesn't. Shame doesn't. Being heard does..

No matter what circumstances, it's hard to be a parent and maintain a sense of self and identity in the world..

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all….

Nothing heals us like letting people know our scariest parts: When people listen to you cry and lament, and look at you with love, it's like they are….

Anything you say from your heart to God is a prayer. But "why" is rarely a useful question. When Job keeps asking God why he has had such loss and su….

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend ….

No" is a complete sentence..

I love readings and my readers, but the din of voices of the audience gives me stage fright, and the din of voices inside whisper that I am a fraud, ….

At some point I started getting published, and experienced a meager knock-kneed standing in the literary world, and I started to get almost everythin….

I don't have very sophisticated taste in music. I listen to a lot of folk music. I like reggae..

My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a ….

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you ca….

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus..

I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kind of things. Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace's arrival. But no, it's ….

Frequently, as so many poets and psalmists and songwriters have said, the invisible shift happens through the broken places..

And that almost everyone was struggling to wake up, to be loved, and not feel so afraid all the time. That's what the cars, degrees, booze, and drugs….

That's about 90 percent of my theological life - radical self-care. Put your own oxygen mask on first. I watch the self-talk that goes through my min….

You keep working on your piece over and over, trying to get the sections and paragraphs and sentences and the whole just right, but there's a point a….

I got a lot of things that society had promised would make me whole and fulfilled - all the things that the culture tells you from preschool on will ….

Grace arrived, like the big, loopy stitches with which a grandmotherly stranger might baste your hem temporarily..