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This Valentine’s Day we want to come together, purely and simply for the benefit of our Batwa friends in Bubanza by pooling our resources, so they may have a fresh water well. (Who needs roses and chocolate, if our friends can have water?)   Would you consider asking nine of your friends to stand with you and form a Circle of Grace—each person contributing $10–so we can build this well together? Altogether, we are asking 100 SheLoves friends—yes, you, Beautiful one—to form a giving circle with…

His hands were full of blue cardstock identity cards. The first one hundred recipients waited for him to make his way toward them. Batwa people invisible to most, living undocumented lives on the margins of their own country, swayed with anticipation as he walked nearer. That little blue card represented citizenship, rights and visibility. I noticed the first photo he sent back. All those women so proud… I asked him where the men were. “The first one hundred identity cards…

http://vimeo.com/58395993 Richard Rohr has profoundly shaped my spirituality in recent years, along with Desmond Tutu, Barbara Brown Taylor and Madeleine L’Engle. But one of the ways Rohr has both challenged and freed me is his description of prayer. I grew up thinking that prayer involved hands folded, eyes closed, head bowed and then all the words. Maybe, as my Catholic tradition taught, the words were set like The Our Father, Hail Mary or other liturgical prayers. Maybe, like the my…

This month we will be reading Inspiration & Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament by Peter Enns. I've heard much buzz about this book in the last year, and as both a former seminary student and lover of the Old Testament I was intrigued to read his approach. I've encountered Peter Enns on his Patheos blog and enjoyed this thoughtful commentary on a variety of contemporary cultural matters as well as Biblical mentions. I also consider him one…

How crazy to participate in two link-ups on one day! I guess you could say one thing I'm into is linking into conversations with other friends this month. Totally true. Imperfect Prose. As a writer, I want to cultivate a creative praxis that keeps me fresh, stretching and igniting my imagination. I've discovered Emily Wierenga's weekly Imperfect Prose prompts do just that for me. The last four weeks I've taken each prompt as an invitation to free write in my…

John the Baptist, a wooly and wild guy, advocated for a better religion located outside the temple with the dirty Jordan River as the baptismal font. But even his faith had a rigid edge – camel hair clothes, locusts for food and adherence to other Nazarite laws. I can image his curiosity about his cousin, the rabbi he once baptized. The word got out that he ate with the wrong kind of people, drank too much and broke Sabbath. The…

I am a bicultural person. I’m both Burundian and American. I live on both continents – the school year stateside and summer on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. I juggled passports and, for a long time, identities. Being both wasn’t easy. Then I realized that Jesus is bicultural, straddling two different kingdoms. He’s fully at home in heaven and equally at ease in skin. I began to see how many Biblical men and women moved between lands and cultures. Think…

The Central Market is the economic heart of the city, pumping out all manner of goods from fresh produce and fish straight out of Lake Tanganyika to cooking pots, second-hand clothes and locally produced palm oil. My favorite part of the market – the fabric stalls. Imagine bright African block fabrics draped, layer upon layer, at least ten feet high, in each kiosk. The colors, brilliant; the patterns, dizzying; the possibilities seemed endless as I craned to see the ones…

Tomorrow Claude and I celebrate eleven years of marriage. I could never do it justice in words. But there's this. When asked this summer to name the best decision I've even made in my life, what sprung instantly to mind was saying yes to Claude's wild proposal of marriage. I've never regretted our partnership. We've lived between the US and Burundi. We adopted kids. We're raising kids. We've started a network of African friends, two community development projects, a community…

If I’m honest, raising a son is hard. His constant motion, excited yelling, incessant questions and natural velocity try me. Every day. Keeping up with his curiosity, appetite and homework wear me out. But it’s not what keeps me up at night. How do I mother my spirited son toward peace in a world bent toward violence? This circles round me like a small but ever-present, ever-determined mosquito. Spending summers in Africa I know something of determined mosquitoes – get…