In this day and age, our identity is often tied to our work. It’s why we add “just” before “stay-at-home mom.” We point to our productivity as a sign of our worth. We monetize our hobbies into side-hustles. We declare ourselves a “girl boss” and then we slay the day. We outdo each other with […]
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I had a gift card burning a hole in my pocket, and that’s how I came to be out our local Barnes & Noble one Friday morning. The last time I stepped into a Barnes & Noble, we were living in a different state, and the bookstore had been connected to a mall, back when […]
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One of my responsibilities as part of my new job as Director of Children and Family Ministry is to teach preschool chapel once a month. Like many churches, we have a thriving preschool on our campus and it’s a delight to see all those 3- and 4-year-olds gathered together in a squirmy mob on chapel […]
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Our sphere of control is comically small: this is what we all learned in the early months of the pandemic. As we bumped up into our new reality—not knowing how long quarantine would last, being unable to make plans for the future, feeling the stress of uncertainty every day—we faced our own extreme limitations. During […]
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Last year was my first time observing Lent by “giving something up.” Throughout the years, I was vaguely aware that Christians from other denominations participated in some sort of fasting during the 40 days that led up to Easter. I always thought this was strange and unnecessarily hard: why wouldn’t everyone just skip to the […]
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When we lived in the south of France during my junior-high years, we had a cherry tree in our small backyard. Our house shared walls with a row of houses on a busy street near the edge of town. My parents had chosen to rent this house for all the space it afforded us: three […]
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My French is rusty. It pains me to admit this, because I have a lot of pride about growing up bilingual as a missionary kid. My family moved from California to France when I was seven. We attended language school for a year, and then I was dropped into French public school for the rest […]
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Reading is my favorite thing to do, and this year I read over 75 titles! Narrowing down my favorite reads each year is torture, but I’d love to share my favorites with you here. I used the following categories to make it simpler: top fiction, top historical fiction, top Christian nonfiction, best of memoir, and […]
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Maybe you’ve seen it. Maybe you’ve seen it so many times, you have the scene memorized: Buddy the Elf, played by Will Ferrel, is beyond excited that Santa will be coming to the department store. But when Santa arrives and invites a boy onto his lap, Buddy senses that something is amiss. He gets right […]
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The house was quiet. I was sitting on the couch, wrapped up in my favorite blanket, with a book on my lap and a scented candle flickering by the window. I took a sip of my tea, and thought: this is a sacred moment. But was it? Because on the heels of that thought came […]
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Sarah K. Butterfield 