Several months after I moved to China, a friend invited me to her cousin’s wedding in a remote village. When we arrived at the bride’s home, the family surrounded me and...

Water is remarkable. While sometimes soft and soothing, its fearsome power is on display in ocean waves or during floods. But water’s most remarkable transformations come over time. If you visit...

“It’s not about you.” It was just an exasperated retort by my then-boyfriend, but it turned out to be one of the more liberating and clarifying statements of my life. It’s...

Imagine you’ve spent an entire day running errands around town. When you get home, you realize something is missing. Would you go back and retrace every step if you were missing...

When I was growing up, my father often called me “my Bethie.” No one else was allowed to use a diminutive form of my name, much less with a possessive pronoun,...

My toddler is a master of destruction. Every once in a while, I can convince him to build a block tower or a sandcastle, but he much prefers that I build...

It’s tempting to read this psalm with an “us and them” attitude. The psalmist complains about “fools” who denounce God and do terrible things, and it’s easy to think, like the...

After graduating from law school, I worked with the Environmental Review Division of a major city to identify any potentially adverse effects of proposed construction projects, assess their significance, and recommend...

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to travel to different cultures and experience a kind of shopping where prices are not on display. I ask in the local language, “How...

While a prisoner in Rome, Paul wrote a carefully crafted personal letter to Philemon, a fellow Christian and owner of an enslaved person named Onesimus, who had stolen from Philemon and...