Every few months, I see some version of the same bad take related to high school athletics: our schools would be better off if we got rid of high school sports and spent the money on education.

I get the reasoning behind this particular opinion, I really do. As a public high school teacher, I’ve seen my fair share of financial waste and the disproportionate money invested in athletic programs while arts programs get starved out of existence, and teachers take on second jobs to survive.

But no one will ever convince me that getting rid of athletics is the solution to much bigger problems.

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I am a high school English teacher. I have spent nearly 25 years trying to teach teenagers how to be better readers and writers. I have taught critical thinking and argument, literary analysis and research. I have watched all kinds of students come through my classrooms in both private and public schools.

I also directed high school theater for seven years, producing eight plays and five musicals. I’ve sat through football and basketball games and witnessed state runs. I’ve walked past art rooms and wondered at the artistic abilities of my students, abilities I will never possess.

My years as both a high school student and a high school teacher have taught me that extracurriculars of every kind matter in schools. No extracurricular activity is more important than the other. No extracurricular activity has a bigger impact on individual students than another. Any opportunity to get students to practice their individual gifts outside of the classroom is an opportunity to give them a complete education, one that feeds their minds and bodies.

To those who believe our schools would be better off if they just focused on academics, I say I believe in the importance of high school athletics.

I’m also a fine arts kid who believes it is wrong to cut funding to any school arts programs.

I’m not blind to the problems. I know that high schools often spend significantly more money building sports facilities while auditoriums, music rooms, instruments, and art supplies fall into disrepair and disappear. I know the successful teams (and sometimes when it comes to the big sports, even terrible teams) get the praise and support of school administrations, while kids who spend entire weekends competing in speech, on the stage, or on the marching band field get ignored. I know the pressure to pass a student who is ineligible is real and negatively impacts both the student athlete and the classroom in which they are struggling. I’ve juggled make-up work from students who have missed my class because of excused absences for competition or inability to finish their work after getting home far too late from games, practices, and rehearsals. (Although I will say this was actually significantly worse in the private schools I taught at as opposed to the public school I teach at now.)

But I never stopped seeing the role sports played in my school community. I enjoy going to football games and basketball games. I see the kids who needed extracurriculars of all kinds (athletics, music, drama, art, etc.) to keep them engaged in school.

And now I’m watching it with my own children.

My daughter decided in eighth grade that she was not an athlete, instead embracing choir and everything she could achieve there. We have spent the last three years attending choir concerts and Saturdays at show choir competitions. We’ve lamented questionable scoring and biased judges. We’ve watched her grow and flourish in an environment that allows her to be her truest self, surrounded by people who share her passion for music. She is a good student, but a daily dose of choir keeps her hopeful on the worst high school days. It has given her a safe place to land when the AP and Dual Credit courses get to be too much. It has made her high school experience significantly better for all of us.

Our son starts his freshman year this fall, and he is already in heavy workouts for football and basketball. After four years of middle school track, he will make that decision when spring comes around. He is a good student who loves STEM and will be taking honors classes in both science and math this year. He doesn’t need the threat of eligibility to stay on top of his classes, but he needs the friendships and activity that sports give him every day after school. He’s needed the activity and chance to see his friends nearly every day since school got out, as he has worked to stave off boredom while on summer break. I don’t just enjoy watching him play sports that he loves; I love watching the young man that it is shaping him into, a young man who is responsible and driven and has well-rounded goals.

Here’s what people who argue against high school athletics don’t understand: the problem isn’t school-sponsored athletics. I’ve seen how school sports help students find their people and activities that inspire them in both their academics and personal lives. I’ve seen athletics teach students healthy habits and build confidence. I’ve seen how a successful sports team can bring together an entire community, both inside the school building and from the community surrounding the building.

The problem isn’t sports in and of themselves. The problem is a lack of funding foresight that cuts money for school systems and forces them to make decisions about which programs bring in the most money and which programs cost the most. The problem is forcing school districts to decide which students should be given the opportunity to grow and thrive as both students and as people. The problem is creating a hierarchical system that ranks which activities and students are the most important, while leaving everyone else in the dust.

As both a teacher and parent, I believe in the power of all extracurricular activities to build up young people into adults ready to participate as citizens. I believe that when communities support all extracurricular activities by showing up for every band and choir concert, every play or musical, every sporting event for boys and girls, they are not just showing that those activities matter; they are telling students that they matter as well.

So what if, instead of complaining about the money our schools are spending on activities we believe are meaningless, we looked ahead to the fall and a new school year and started adding school events onto our personal calendars? What if we started showing up with our bodies and dollars and showed all high school students that they matter?

I truly believe it would make a meaningful difference in our schools and the communities they serve.

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I’m a Cold War kid.

Growing up as a Christian in the 80s, I was repeatedly told how lucky I was to live in America. As an American Christian, I could worship where I wanted and how I wanted. I could read my Bible in public. I didn’t have to hide my faith. There were Christians in other parts of the world where Communist governments didn’t just prevent them from worshipping God; they would be punished for worshipping God. The freedom to worship God in the way I was being raised is what made being an American special.1

I know, I know. I’ve oversimplified everything I was probably told as a child. But I was a kid. That is how I understood it. That is the narrative I took with me into my teen years as I read news reports about war breaking out throughout Eastern Europe after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The images from Tiananmen Square floated in the back of my mind as I learned more about baby girls in China who were aborted or abandoned by their families, families who wanted boys who would be able to take care of their parents in old age.2 And the stories of people who escaped communist Europe and settled throughout the United States continue to inspire me.

As a young white, Christian American, I believed that freedom is what made America special in her founding. Freedom is what made my situation as an American Christian blessed. Freedom was an American ideal that could never be taken away from me.

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I don’t know when the veneer of the idea of “freedom” started to be chipped away. Maybe it was when I started studying American history as a history major at a Christian university, and I started to understand that the story of American history is one group after another working to achieve the same level of freedom the Founding Fathers enjoyed. Maybe it was when I traveled to Europe and realized I was freely traveling through countries that weren’t the United States and worshipping God with fellow believers in a democracy that wasn’t the United States. There was nothing holding me back from saying and doing what I wanted to do, except for similar laws that I left behind at home. (And even that was a little skewed by the fact that, as a 20-year-old, I could purchase and consume alcohol everywhere I went, something I would not be able to do in America.) Or maybe it was this fictional speech from the opening of HBO’s The Newsroom, a show I devoured every week it was on in the early 2010s.

The older I got, the more I read, and the more I experienced, the more I realized that the American Experiment has consistently been a journey in pursuit of additional freedom for a previously oppressed populace. We are a nation built on land taken from native peoples, tribes that tried to maintain their culture and heritage while land and lives were being stripped away from them. We are a nation built on the backs of Africans who were enslaved for 400 years, individuals like Harriet Tubman and Fredrick Douglass fighting for their own freedom before working to free others from the same bondage. We are a nation built by immigrants, people from all over the globe seeking economic, religious, and political freedom and finding it in a new land with new opportunities and challenges.

To live in a country where freedom is a celebrated virtue means everyone is free.

I won’t get into a purity testing contest with anyone over this. I know that freedom has always been nebulous, at best, in the United States. But as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a document that espoused the belief “All men are created equal,” freedom must refer to everyone, whether or not you like their religious beliefs, political views, or economic position.

And Christians should be the first in line standing up for this position.

We far too often forget what comes after “All men are created equal.” Our imperfect founders also believed, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

If we believe in freedom for all in the United States of America, we should believe that all people within her borders should have the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

We don’t get to decide what that means for someone else. We must acknowledge that sometimes this means standing aside and allowing people to make decisions we might not agree with. This means we let people live their lives, as long as the life they are living doesn’t infringe on the rights of another to live their lives. This means we give people the liberty to practice free will, a right given to them by their creator. This means we don’t get to set the terms for what is and is not included in the pursuit of happiness.

Unfortunately, there are far too many American Christians who believe in a single idea of freedom: the freedom to practice their faith the way they believe it should be practiced without criticism or challenge from people who think and live differently from them. This includes fellow American Christians who do not believe exactly as they believe or have chosen different lives for them and their families.

To believe there is only one way to truly be Christian, one way to truly be American, and one way to truly be free, is dangerous.

It ignores the freedom given to us at Creation.

God gave us free will. God gave us our own minds. The Declaration of Independence might have been written by a bunch of deists struggling with their decision to maintain a system of chattel slavery while declaring all men deserving of freedom, but at least they were willing to fully acknowledge that our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were divinely inspired and God-given.

We don’t have to like the decisions our friends, families, and neighbors make about their daily lives, but we do have to respect their rights to make those decisions, especially if those decisions are not causing us or others genuine harm.

The beauty of being an American is living in one of the most diverse places in the world: Our landscapes, our ecosystems, our food and languages, and even our regional cultures. Our diversity is our strength, not our weakness. God has called American Christians to live faithfully in a pluralistic society, witnessing to our neighbors by our words and deeds, not with a sledgehammer and laws that strip people of their own free will.

As we celebrate America 250, let us remember that loving our neighbor means allowing them the same level of freedom we expect for ourselves.

We all need a little bit more of that Grace right now.

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I started playing school sports in fourth grade.

When we moved from Michigan to Illinois, my new and small Lutheran elementary school did not have enough girls to field a 5th and 6th-grade basketball team, so they opened the team up to the fourth-grade girls. While it took my dad and me some convincing, my mom finally agreed to allow me to play with three of my friends on the JV girls basketball team. I spent the season learning a sport I knew very little about and slowly gaining skills. I added nothing to the team that first year, but I learned enough to earn measurable playing time in my fifth-grade year.

In the spring, I joined the softball team, again knowing nothing about playing the sport, except what I had learned attending Tigers baseball games in Detroit. Despite nearly breaking my nose after a ball bounced off my glove into my face, I enjoyed the season and then spent the next two summers playing Little League softball in our town’s summer league. My fifth-grade year was again full of basketball and softball, and I was looking forward to finally being allowed to also cheerlead my sixth-grade year, but then we moved to Wyoming.

And thus ended my athletic career.

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There were no school sports for sixth graders at my new elementary school, despite my PE teacher being impressed with my minimal basketball skills during our basketball unit. When my dad started a Lutheran elementary school, and I was dropped into seventh grade with only two other classmates, athletic opportunities were slim. In high school, I attempted track, but I was too slow for sprinting, which made my long jump attempts pitiful. I should have listened to my biology teacher, who tried to convince me to run cross country for him, but who wants to run three miles every day? (Apparently, I do. I finally learned to love running in my thirties, and I went on to run in two half-marathons in my forties.)

I ended up a fine arts kid who loved choir, played piano for my choir when given the chance, participated in theater, and student-directed the school talent show as a senior. But I never forgot the athletic experiences that helped keep me in shape (temporarily) and developed important friendships, all while giving me a sense of place in my respective schools.

I married a man who loves sports. He had a very active athletic career through junior high, giving up playing most sports once he was in high school. Throughout our marriage, he has gone through spurts of playing pick-up basketball whenever possible. We knew that when we became parents, we would want our kids to also have as many athletic opportunities as possible, within reason. So when our children were young, we made two important sports-related decisions.

First, our kids would participate in sports for as long as they enjoyed them. When I signed up our son for soccer when he was five, our daughter complained because she thought she also should be able to play soccer. (We tried basketball with her in kindergarten and it did not go well. We weren’t sure she would want to try sports again after that.) Not one to tell my daughter she couldn’t do something her younger brother could do, I also signed her up for soccer at our local soccer club. While the soccer club did develop a travel league, the organization’s mission was teaching soccer to kids of all ages using paid coaches who knew what they were doing. Both kids loved it, and we kept it going for as long as we lived in Houston, playing both fall and spring ball. The winter after they started playing soccer, we also signed them up for Upward basketball, giving them both a chance to learn basketball in a rec league that was more focused on teaching them the sport than on winning tournaments.

When our daughter was in fifth grade, she could play on her Lutheran school soccer and basketball teams, so we increased our practice times and the number of games to watch her play with her classmates. Somewhere along the way, our son also picked up flag football before he, too, was eligible to play on his Lutheran school soccer and basketball teams. In the spring, when he was given the opportunity to run in a few track meets, I told him he had to try it for at least one season because we just needed our energetic kid to be moving and doing something physical. Then, in his sixth-grade year, he finally picked up tackle football, much to the chagrin of his nervous mother.

Second, we agreed sports would not dominate our family life. We would prioritize family time and family vacations over spending money on travel leagues and all-star teams, and we would focus on one activity at a time.

We were a lot better about the first item than the second. Once our son convinced us he wanted to do flag football at the same time as he was playing soccer, the “one activity at a time” rule went out of the window. When we agreed to let him play tackle football in his sixth-grade year, he still wanted to play soccer with his friends whenever his schedule would allow, so we still found ourselves at soccer games and a soccer tournament in between football practices and weekend games. As a three-sport athlete in eighth grade, our son was working on football weight lifting during basketball and track season, and is now spending all of June going back and forth between weights, football cleats, and basketball shoes in preparation for high school sports.

But family time is still a priority. I still try to make it so we can eat meals together whenever possible. When we take vacations, we are not trying to fit in sightseeing between tournament games and travel. When we went to Yellowstone two summers ago, I told the seventh-grade football coach that we would make sure our son was still working out on hiking trails even though he was not going to be at summer workouts for two weeks. We are still going to Michigan this summer with my sisters and parents, and our son and his high school cousins are going to have to figure out how to keep working out along the shores of the Great Lakes.

Our daughter gave up sports when she switched to public schools in eighth grade, but she fully embraced the fine arts. She auditioned twice her freshman year to get into show choir, and that is where she has flourished. Sometimes we have to divide and conquer, each of us taking an activity, but most of the time we are able to do both, even if it means traveling all over the city on a given Saturday. It keeps us busy, but we also try to keep it reasonable, both financially and in terms of time management. Have we had moments when we’ve wondered if we’ve done enough to help our kids succeed in the activities that they’ve chosen? Yes, especially as we nervously go through the ever-narrowing world of high school basketball. But as he’s gotten older, we have also increased opportunities when he has wanted them, and time and money have allowed, without making extreme sacrifices as a family.

I don’t believe there is a perfect formula for children’s involvement in every kind of activity. The kids and sports debate (or art, music, theater, etc.) requires a nuanced conversation that takes all sorts of factors into consideration. Do I believe that youth sports culture has gotten out of control? Yes. It costs too much and asks too much of both parents and young bodies. I’ve had students write papers about losing their love for a sport because they were doing it too much, and then competing against peers who had been doing it even more. In the wake of COVID shutdowns, I even had a couple of D1-bound students admit that the time away from everything helped them realize how much of their teen years they were missing by constantly being on the go, not just doing school sports but also club sports all year round. In the pursuit of a handful of scholarships and state and national championships, we have lost the plot.

Could we do better? Yes. Youth sports involvement should not be dependent on how much money a parent makes and how much time a family is willing to sacrifice to help their child learn a sport and see some level of success. But does that mean there is something wrong with sports? No. I would argue we need more access to sports. Many kids need sports in their lives. They need the physical activity and the discipline sports give them. They need to build confidence and coordination. They need to build relationships with teammates and learn how to work well with others.

We can rebuild community sports structures that give kids all of the above, but there has to be enough will to do so. Our son continued to play rec ball through Upward during his seventh and eighth-grade years, even though he played on the junior high school team. The local league had decided to add the seventh and eighth-grade levels in the last couple of years because enough kids wanted to keep playing when they didn’t make the junior high team. There are discussions about keeping it going through high school for kids who still want to keep playing but can’t compete with the school team. This is a community organization deciding to serve kids who aren’t chasing championships or scholarships and instead just want to keep playing a sport they love.

Parents want their kids to be active and off phones. Kids want to move and be social. And communities want to rebuild…community. There will always be a need for elite leagues for the super athletes among us, the ones who will win national championships and represent the United States around the globe.

But for the rest of us, there is a better way. We just need the will to build it.

Support my writing

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I am a cradle Lutheran. As a baptized and confirmed member of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, I spent my entire life deeply entrenched in law and gospel. In confirmation class, I learned how the law served as a curb, helping guide us to be the people God wanted us to be. The law was designed to help us make good choices and better serve our neighbors. The gospel was there to pick us up when we inevitably screwed it all up.

From the time I was young, I was consistently reminded that I was not perfect, I made mistakes, I should do everything possible to avoid making really big mistakes, and no matter the sin, the gospel reminded me that Jesus had paid the ultimate price and that I was forgiven.

It sounded simple, but as a 90s teen raised in the height of purity culture during a time when teen movies celebrated drugs, drinking, and losing your virginity as normal rites of passage into adulthood, it was a confusing time. And as someone who has spent the last 25 years of adulthood doing a lot of deconstructing and reconstructing my faith because life experience has forced me to ask a lot more questions, it’s still a very confusing time.

Why? Because I’m beginning to wonder if the people who spent years telling me that human beings are sinful and that the law is the tool we use to curb our sinful human nature, truly believe it.

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I want to be fully transparent here. I’ve lived on this planet for nearly (GULP) half a century.1 I’ve experienced the good, bad, and ugly of humanity. I know some truly good people, human beings I would trust with nearly anything. I know good people who have made harmful decisions, both for themselves and others.2 And I know people who have caused significant harm to others, sometimes as a response to their own past and sometimes because they are just not good people. And with all I’ve seen, I still believe what I was taught as a child: human beings are sinful, and we live in a broken world.

But that belief also gives me an unreasonable amount of optimism. When we operate with the understanding that perfection is not available to us, progress becomes a little more achievable. We aren’t looking for perfection in our leaders or institutions. We’re looking for something better that we can keep building on.

Unfortunately, seeing the world this way requires an amount of humility that far too few people are willing to accept. I’ve discovered that the people most eager to say all humans are sinful are also the least likely to see that sinful nature in themselves. Instead of choosing to work with the world as it is and with human beings who are all fundamentally capable of both good and evil, they have chosen a theocratic lens that empowers them to ignore their own flaws while exaggerating the flaws of others.

How should Christians approach living in a pluralistic society with fellow humans of all stripes?

One can believe that capitalism is the best of an imperfect series of economic systems, but if Christians truly believe that human beings are sinful and that businesses are built and run by human beings, then those businesses and people running them need laws (a curb, if you will) to keep them from harming their fellow human beings.

One can believe that people should be able to use their God-given intellect and abilities to make as much money as they can, but if Christians truly believe that human beings are sinful and that greed is a sin consistently criticized in both the Old and New Testaments, then we need laws to prevent people from using the accumulation of wealth to steal from their fellow human beings.

One can believe that justice requires people pay for their crimes against their fellow human beings, but if Christians truly believe that all human beings are sinful and deserving of God’s grace, we need a criminal justice system that treats all who commit crimes equally and allows for repentence, reconcilliation, and renewal once a debt is paid.

One can believe that God created the heavens and the earth and gave human beings dominion over everything on it, but if Christians truly believe that human beings are sinful and that the Earth is a gift from God worthy of our stewardship, we need laws and regulations that keep us from destroying the only home available to us from birth until death.

One can believe that representative democracy is the best of an imperfect series of governmental systems, but if Christians truly believe that human beings are sinful and that the inspired word of God gives us plenty of examples of absolute power corrupting absolutely, then everything from local to national government needs laws to keep those in charge from using their political roles to harm those with less power.

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Why are so many of my fellow Christians willing to turn a blind eye to the sinfulness that is destroying our social fabric and ruining their neighbors’ lives, all while spending countless hours being keyboard warriors attacking immigrants, the homeless, the LGTBQ community, racial minorities who have been harmed by sinful systems, women, and so much more? Why are they willing to ignore the sinfulness of business and political leaders, but they can’t tolerate it in those who have significantly less power? Why are they so eager to pass laws that will prevent people from living freely in their communities and force them to follow a specific Christian ethic that even Christians in the United States can’t come to a consensus on? Why are they so afraid of rules and regulations that will curb our sinful human nature and prevent further harm to our most vulnerable communities?

I believe acknowledging that humans are going to human requires us to approach society with the law and gospel that I was raised to believe was an essential part of the Christian tradition. God gave us free will, and with that free will comes a significant amount of freedom and responsibility. Throughout the Old Testament, laws were as much about God establishing guidelines for holy living as they were about creating a cohesive community that protected and benefited those living within it. When sinfulness breaks the social contract, laws are supposed to produce justice. When repentence is offered, communities are to offer grace in a way that minimizes harm. When power becomes imbalanced to the point where those in charge harshly dole out the law to those with little to no power, while offering undeserved grace to those causing the greatest amount of harm, we have lost the plot. Not only have we lost the plot, but we become terrible witnesses to the faith we claim influnces every sector of our lives.

God doesn’t need humans to rescue the Christian faith from godless heathens. He doesn’t even need humans to rescue the Christian faith from well-meaning believers forcing ideologies onto their neighbors. He asks us to love him and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Period.

And that starts with seeing each of our neighbors, literal and metaphorical, as both image bearers and humans who are going to human. It’s not our job to keep people from making decisions we may or may not agree with. It’s our job to create a society where we have the freedom to be human, the infrastructure to catch those who become victim to imperfect human systems, and the opportunity for justice when our human nature causes others harm.

That would be a greater witness than any “Christian” society could ever create on its own.

Support my writing

Read more about our family’s camping and travel adventures by ordering your own copy of The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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This is the third post of a three-week series. I explained how we ended up in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge for our 2026 spring break in the first post. Part two discussed our explorations of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg.

I am a national parks junkie. I want to see them all. I don’t just want to visit them for the stamps, although a full national parks passport book is a worthy goal. I want to hike the trails, visit the historic sites, and sit with nature in some of the most beautiful places in the United States.

It isn’t the tourist traps and food that kept drawing me back to the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg region over and over again; it was the beauty of the Smoky Mountains.

I am a mountain girl, but when it comes to mountains, I’ve always preferred the majesty of the mighty Rockies over the soft crests in the Smokies. However, our multiple trips driving through the national park and hiking up to waterfalls have been enough to give me a healthy appreciation for the crown jewel of the American Southeast.

And I couldn’t wait to share it with our kids.

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Our first adventure roadblock was discovering that Laurel Falls, one of my favorite hikes in the entire park, is closed until 2027 as the park repairs and upgrades the trail leading up to the falls. We were thwarted from taking our children to the falls when they were toddlers because of a rainstorm and the presence of multiple black bears in the area. Now I was being prevented from getting a family photo in front of the famous falls by construction crews. So, I swallowed my disappointment enough to accept an evening drive through Cades Cove after a day of exploration in Gatlinburg.

Our 25-mile drive on winding roads from the Sugarlands Visitor Center to Cades Cove came to a halt when we encountered an emergency vehicle rerouting traffic because of an accident that was blocking the road in both directions. We had to turn around to find the alternate route to the entrance of the 11-mile loop. Frustrated, but not yet deterred, we made a stop at The Sinks, a man-made bend in the river running through the national park. It fed my need to see a waterfall and got our kids climbing on rocks, a favorite pastime even though they are full-grown teenagers now.

Then we took the recommended detour to the other entrance to Cades Cove. It was long and I was getting hungry and frustrated, but the rest of my family was determined to make it work. So we didn’t give up. We kept going until we got to the entrance of the one-lane road, 11 miles of meandering through the historic community of Cades Cove.

We saw old cabins, different styles of southern country churches, graveyards, an old mill, black bears, and even a young couple getting engaged in a field. I don’t know what it is about Cades Cove, but I love it. It is a lovely and peaceful step back into history, but also a witness to both ecological and historical preservation.

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The next day, my family promised me a hike in the mountains, but first we were going to drive all the way to the state line in the national park and see if the road to Cliffman’s Dome was still closed for the winter. It was…for one more week. Frustrated that we wouldn’t be able to climb to the high point of the park and get a panoramic view, we accepted the pictures we took at the state line and headed back down to look for a hike in the Tennessee portion of the park, stopping a few times along the way.

We ended up on the Chimney Tops Overlook Trail. The trail didn’t look simple, and at 3.5 miles round-trip, we knew that we would get a workout, but it was far more than we expected.

It was beautiful, with rushing creeks and waterfalls and spring growth making a bright appearance.

And it was steep, full of stairs and climbs that none of us had done in a really long time. The only one not winded was our 14-year-old, who was taking a weeklong break from track practices and football workouts. Even with me still running up to ten miles a week, I spent the next several days struggling to move, muscles I hadn’t used in a long time making it clear that I had neglected them for far too long.

But the views? Gorgeous. And it was the last item I needed to knock off my list for the spring break trip.

No, we did not get to Laurel Falls. No, we did not get to replicate our family photo on top of the Cliffman’s Dome Overlook. But we still got to have some valuable time together as a family, climbing through nature and reaching a worthwhile peak.

The national park may not have been everything I wanted it to be when we made last-minute plans to spend our spring break in eastern Tennessee, but it was everything I needed before we all jumped right back into the busyness of the end of the school year. And now my kids will actually remember this national park stop instead of just listening to their parents’ stories about black bears and rain-soaked adventures. That made the whole trip worth it.

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Read more about our family’s camping and travel adventures by ordering your own copy of The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.

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When my husband, who had a MySpace account, convinced me to jump onto the newish platform Facebook, I hesitated just a little.

After all, why did I need a social media platform at all? He had just convinced me that texting was a much more convenient form of communication for two busy 20-somethings. Once I discovered I could text my husband without disturbing my director responsibilities during play rehearsal, I was sold. But social media? Did I really need an account for some website where I could learn about people’s lives and see their pictures and post my own news?

It turns out that was exactly what I “needed.”

I reconnected with high school classmates and even found my childhood best friend from Detroit. I found college classmates whose email addresses I had lost, but with whom I was still interested in keeping in touch. I friended aunts and uncles and cousins who were old enough for their own accounts, allowing me to easily communicate with my large extended family. And then former students from the first five years of my teaching career found me and asked if they could keep that relationship going by sending me friend requests.

It was all so magical.

Then we got pregnant with our first baby, and I had an easy way to share our journey to parenthood. When my husband got transferred to Fort Wayne from Indianapolis, Facebook was my way to keep in touch with old friends and try to make connections with others in a new place.

For a few years, at least, Facebook was a place where I could easily keep in touch with friends across years and miles and hold onto relationships that still meant something to me. And when I moved to a new town where I didn’t want to be, those online friendships helped me remember that I still mattered to people outside of my husband and children. When I was dealing with difficult moments, some of those friendships helped get me through. It was good to know I was not alone, even if it was mostly in spirit.

Over time, Facebook changed. It wasn’t just a place where I could get information about my friends’ lives; it was also a place where I could connect with teachers in groups that focused on my specific concerns as a new AP Language teacher. It was a place where I could find help as a parent. And it was a place where I could get news, although I had very little understanding of the hidden algorithms shaping my actual newsfeed.

As an avid reader, political junkie, and general social justice warrior without direction, I found the news element to be the most intriguing new development. In between pictures of our growing kids, blog posts about home renovations, and commentary on the latest episode of The Walking Dead, I could share my thoughts about some of the most pressing issues at the time. One St. Louis friend with deep ties to the Ferguson community regularly shared updates with me about life in Missouri and racial tensions after the Michael Brown shooting. As someone who had watched the news unfold concerning Columbine while I was a sophomore college student studying to become a teacher, the shootings at a Littleton movie theater and Sandy Hook elementary school hit me especially hard. Even as a teacher in conservative Lutheran spaces, I didn’t see anything wrong with sharing what I was learning and how I was thinking through these increasingly controversial topics in an online space that had originally been developed for simple friendship and connection. It felt like a natural progression and so many others.

Then 2016 happened, and everything that has occurred in the aftermath turned what had been a beautiful place for meaningful connection into a toxic wasteland giving people permission to be their worst selves.

My eyes were opened to the realities of injustice.

I got angry.

Then I got sad.

Then I got angry again… Before becoming despondent.

People found courage behind a keyboard, and those people included me. People who raised me into the woman I am today became online versions of their worst selves, making me wonder if everything they had taught me as a child and teenager had been a lie. Friends I had known for years spread falsehoods or were deceived by bots. The online world had never fully been reality, but now I could see many groups of people breaking off into silos that only served to increase partisanship, hyperpolarization, and distrust in our neighbors.

And we’re more locked in now than ever.

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I have spent the last two years breaking away from social media more and more. Oh, I’ve backslidden in places. I took Facebook off my phone, but I’m still occasionally logged in on the browser on my cell, which defeats the purpose. I got rid of my Twitter account and instead started using Threads. I might not have Instagram on my phone, but I still occasionally scroll my Substack app. In some ways, I’ve regained time I was wasting online, but have fallen into old habits with new tools that both keep me informed and feed on my fears and rage about the world around me.

But recently I’ve started getting nostalgic about the “good old days” of social media. In the last year, we’ve started attending a new church, and as I meet people and try to learn names, I’ve added a few to my Facebook feed. I’ve added some of my kids’ friends’ parents over the years, hoping to increase those relationships beyond just “hello” on the sidelines. The schools share all of their news items and sometimes important information for students and parents on both Instagram and Facebook. Our church also shares news updates online, and I want to get them before they are sent to my email inbox. I’m trying to do better about supporting local businesses, but again, they share most of their news and updates on Facebook and Instagram. As a local Indiana writer, I’m trying to get into more local author fairs and make connections with my fellow Hoosier authors, and, you guessed it, most of that information is still being shared on both Facebook and Instagram.

Our world is now built for news and connection online. But when I get online? It’s AI slop, advertisements for items I might have done a Google search for once, people or organizations to follow in which I have no interest, people who I’m still holding onto in my life who are sharing harmful (for a variety of reasons) posts, and occasional real updates from people I care about.

I just want a space where I can build an online community that spills out into my IRL community and allows me to maintain the longtime friendships that mean the most to me. Is that too much to ask?

So, where is the genuinely altruistic tech geek who doesn’t want to make billions and would prefer living in a pristine forest in an underserved community to living a fast-paced life on one of the coasts who would like to create this unicorn of a social media platform that does not eventually become enshitified by greed and corruption?

She just might become the problem solver we are all looking for.

Support my writing

Read more about our family’s camping and travel adventures by ordering your own copy of The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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It’s been a school year.

Not a bad school year. In fact, there have been elements of the past 10 months that have been simply amazing. I learned a lot about myself and grew as a teacher when I stepped back into an English 10 classroom two times a day. I have an amazing new Dual Credit Composition co-teacher who helped me take a curriculum I designed that I really liked, into a curriculum I love, one that I feel prepares the 150-200 students in our academic care for both college and productive citizenship. I loved my new classroom, and after five years of healing, I finally feel like myself again.

But I was crawling to the finish line.

For the first time in several years, I was bringing work home, but I rarely had the time or energy to work on it because three 8th-grade sports for our son (who also filled in the gaps with additional basketball and then flag football) and slightly higher stakes for show choir for our daughter meant parenthood often butted up right against teacher life. The teenage years right now are the best and worst, sometimes at the exact same time. I’m trying to soak up every single moment I can.

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And that is why I wrote so little this year, especially as I got into the second semester. Writing, which has so often been a necessary outlet for me over the last 15 years, suddenly became a chore. I had the ideas, but I didn’t have the mental energy to write anything of substance. I would jot down thoughts, but they are currently sitting in a drafts folder here in my Substack or in my Google Drive. I definitely had opinions about the world unfolding around us, but like many, the weight has often been too much, and even taking the time to write about those concerns seemed like too much of a burden to bear at the time

But as of 8:15 this morning, I am finished with my official duties for the school year. I will need to make a few stops in my classroom over the following week to straighten things up and grab some more papers for recycling, and I have an Early College Summit to attend this week, but otherwise, the fog from my brain is slowly starting to clear.

So I will finish that last post about our spring break trip to Tennessee. I will share my complicated views on AI. I will present my American 250 wishlist. I will write about our family vacation to northern Michigan. I will keep reflecting in my Shifting Sand series. I will add lesson plans and posts to my teaching Substack, Styf Teaches English. I will write about everything in between. And because it is summer, I will post when I can, as I can, and I won’t worry about a schedule because summer is for unscheduled activities (says the mom whose son has a packed schedule for the month of June).

And maybe I’ll finally finish writing my book about being a Midwesterner living in Texas. The last time I was actually able to meet with my local library writing group, they gave me some good ideas for new directions, and I think I’m going to go with them.

I’m back, baby, at least for a little while.

Support my writing

Read more about our family’s camping and travel adventures by ordering your own copy of The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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This is the second post of a three-week series. I explained how we ended up in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge for our 2026 spring break in a previous post. Part three will discuss our explorations of the national park. Stay tuned!

As we drove from our cabin down the main stretch in Pigeon Forge, our 14-year-old son said, “This looks like Vegas.”

Mind you, our children have never been to Las Vegas; their only point of reference is movies and pictures we showed them after our trip to Vegas several years ago, but we could see where he was coming from.

If you’ve never been to Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the drive down the main strip can be a bit of a shock to the system. The drive into Sevier County includes a lot of billboards for attractions one will find along the main strip with the Smoky Mountains—usually covered in a gray-blue haze—rising in the distance. As you drive into town along U.S. 441, you will encounter hotels, souvenir shops, mini-golf, local and chain restaurants, and carnival games and rides for the next several miles. There is a small break in the commercial bombardment in the transition to Gatlinburg, but once you get into town, you will encounter much of the same, only this time the gaudiness is masked by the charm of mountain-themed architecture.

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We didn’t make plans for our trip beyond driving to our cabin and eventually making it into the national park. After all, how do you even start to explain the tourism-driven nature of the Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg region? Have we found ourselves trapped in gift shops and roadside attractions over our years of national and state park exploring? Sure, but we usually did one ridiculous thing (because how can you pass up the Corn Palace or Wall Drug?) and then moved right along. Did we find ourselves doing as much as possible on our two family vacations to Orlando? Yes. But Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg are an entirely different world. And our family was completely different now as well.

When we were young and broke newlyweds, we weren’t going to do much. The same was true at five and then ten years. The two times we had gone with children, they were young enough that we had the freedom to tell them what they wanted to do. A toddler might complain about being put into a hiking backpack, but they don’t have much of a choice. And what little one isn’t fascinated by fish and mermaids?

But teenagers? Teenagers see everything. Teenagers pay attention to thrills and are attracted to shiny lights. Teenagers want to do.

The week before we left, our son had asked if we could go to Dollywood. He knew nothing about where we were headed, but he had heard it was a place we could go once we were in Pigeon Forge. I told him we would think about it. I wasn’t excited about spending a whole day (and the money) at an amusement park, but it was the only place he had heard about in the Smoky Mountain region, and he loves thrills. It seemed like a reasonable request.

We got a discounted additional night at the cabin and decided to make the trip down to Tennessee on Sunday instead of waiting until Monday. We got to town before sunset and then decided to drive the strip from Pigeon Forge into Gatlinburg, parking at the aquarium so we could get out and stretch our legs. They quickly discovered there were so many things to do and see. Our son was ready to do something immediately, and our daughter wanted to stop in every tourist shop, but it was after nine, and we needed to get back to the cabin and our dogs. Instead, we told them to start making a list of places they wanted to go. Our son wanted the thrills of mountain coasters. Our daughter wanted the curiosities of Ripley’s. I just wanted to spend time in the national park.

We would find a way to do all of those things.

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Vacationing with teenagers is a different experience from vacationing with small children. They want agency, they realize they are making their own memories, and they need sleep. Their bodies want to stay up playing pool or sitting in a hot tub or doing things, and then they crash and sleep in until 10 A.M. That is not conducive to a vacation with four people who combined have a long wish list of activities they want to do. We learned that the hard way when we went to Disney two summers ago, and we had to get them up so we could maximize our time in the parks. It didn’t help that the most affordable cabin we could find that would allow us to have our dogs was 30-45 minutes away from everything we wanted to do in either Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg. But we found a way to make it work.

On our first full day in the region, we managed to get our kids to Pigeon Forge in time for lunch at The Old Mill, one of my favorite places to eat. The homestyle Southern comfort food is delicious, and I couldn’t resist the multiple corn fritters that arrived on our table. The kids loved their chicken and dumplings, and I savored my fried pork chop and mashed potatoes. Then we spent a little bit of time checking out the shops around the restaurant.

By the time we finally parked in Gatlinburg, it was already early afternoon. We looked into a couple of the sky lifts, but decided that if we wanted to fully enjoy that experience, we should probably wait until the next day to do it. Instead, our daughter got her trip to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, where we explored all of the oddities inside the three-story building. It was what she wanted to do most and made her very happy.

Then it was time to get our son the thrills he was looking for by stopping at the Rocky Top Mountain Coaster on our way back to the cabin. There are several mountain coasters throughout the region, each with its own claims to excitement, but this appears to be the longest of the coasters (our ride was about nine minutes) and has four separate climbs and, therefore, fast descents. Our daughter stayed behind and sat at a picnic table while the rest of us climbed into our individual cars and controlled our own speeds down hills and around sharp turns. It was so much more fun than I expected. If the cost wasn’t so high, I would have gladly gone several more times, even though I’ve gotten far more rollercoaster averse in middle age.

The next day, we prioritized getting into Gatlinburg before we had lunch. We stopped at the Gatlinburg Visitor Center to park for free and take the trolley into downtown. We then headed straight to the lift for Gatlinburg SkyPark.

In our five previous trips to the region, we had looked at the handful of skylift options, looked at the price, and decided to continue on to the national park. This time, we decided to take the family on the lift to a high point where we could see the entire town and the surrounding peaks. We settled on Gatlinburg SkyPark, which would take us to a bridge, a restaurant for lunch, and short hiking trails on our way back to the lift to return to Gatlinburg’s main street.

The trip to the top was fun, as Jeff and I each got a kid for both the way up and down. The bridge was incredible and gave us a chance to see the landscape from above. The burgers at the top were good, and the atmosphere gave us space to play while we waited for our food. And the short hike back to the lift got us moving since we weren’t going to get a hike in the park on that day. It was a worthwhile couple of hours.

The next night, after a day of national park exploring (more on that later), Jeff and our son went to the Pigeon Forge Racing Coaster to get one more mountain coaster experience. I enjoyed some rest and relaxation with our daughter back at the cabin. They thoroughly enjoyed one more ride. (And I was honestly a little jealous.)

In addition to far too much time in shops, we capped off our visit to the Smokies with a night at the Pirates Voyage Dinner and Show. Jeff and I had enjoyed the show in Florida long before we had kids, and we thought our teenagers would enjoy an evening of food and entertainment. Dolly’s Stampeed wasn’t really our thing (for a lot of reasons), but pirates? We’re up for those anytime. It was a good way to end our family vacation before getting ready to head home the next day.

Doing the touristy thing in Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg adds up, especially when your kids are adult-sized and have minds of their own. There were things we missed, such as doing a wine trail (for me) and more moonshine tasting (for Jeff, although he got quite the fill at Old Forge Distillery right across from the Old Mill), and still, we got plenty of taste-testing in the time we were there. Most importantly, we enjoyed our time there, and memories were made.

But before we could return to Indiana, we had to show them the national park.

Support my writing

Read more about our family’s camping and travel adventures by ordering your own copy of The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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In this first post of a three-week series, I explain how we ended up in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge for our 2026 spring break. Parts two and three will discuss both the touristy side of the region and the national park. Stay tuned!

We were walking around the grocery store when I finally admitted to my husband Jeff, “It’s times like right now when I really miss living in Texas. I just want to be able to pick up for a few days away during spring break and head to a state park.”

“Well, we could always drive down to Gatlinburg for a quick trip.”

Startled, I looked right at him. “But we agreed we were never going back there. We were done with trips to the Smokies.”

“Yeah, but the kids don’t even remember our last trip. And it’s the easiest place to get to on our short schedule.”

We did have a shortened schedule. My kids and I are lucky enough to be in school districts that give us two full weeks for spring break, but our daughter is in the high school show choir, and for the last two years, the Indiana state finals have been in the middle of our two-week break. Last year, we entirely gave up making plans, despite my growing anxiety about having a high schooler who would be moving out and heading to college sooner than later. This year, I was going to jump at any opportunity to spend extra time away from home with my whole family.

And why had we sworn off going to the Smoky Mountains?

To be clear, it wasn’t because of the national park. I love the national park. It doesn’t have the same rugged beauty as the Rocky Mountains, but it’s still pretty.

It’s just that Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg had been our go-to vacation spot when we didn’t know where else to go for pretty much the first 15 years of our marriage.

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Our first trip to the region was for our honeymoon nearly 25 years ago. We were young, barely employed, and we would be spending six months in a tiny apartment in southwest Michigan while I finished the last general education class I needed to take in order to finally graduate with my degree in education. My in-laws’ wedding gift to us was paying for our honeymoon accommodations in the location of our choice. We just had to pick somewhere that we could afford to visit.

We got married at the end of December, so while I wanted someplace a little warmer than Michigan, I knew I still wanted to be someplace cozy. Beaches would have been nice, but even in December, flights to anywhere consistently warm were out of the question. My father-in-law looked through the book of time-share options and suggested Pigeon Forge. I had been through Tennessee during my teens, and spending time in the somewhat warmer mountains south of us seemed like as good an idea as any. So we booked flights to Nashville, paid for a rental Ford Ranger (I still don’t know how we managed to rent a car at the ripe old age of 22, but they gave it to us), and headed into the mountains.

We loved it. We really did. We spent time driving around the national park. We went to the Ripley’s Aquarium of the Smokies. We ate at the Old Mill, and I fell in love with their corn fritters. We even took in an evening at the Comedy Barn, taking home a souvenir VHS of our evening there.

When it was time to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary, we were looking for a place we could easily drive to from Indianapolis. We rented a cabin in Gatlinburg and spent a long weekend enjoying the mountains and returning to the Old Mill. When our daughter was born, we took a quick long weekend to the region at the end of the summer and stayed in a hotel, enjoying a short and somewhat affordable family mini-vacation before I had to return to work full-time.

By the time we returned for a fourth trip for our tenth wedding anniversary, we decided that it was a great place to visit, but we were pretty much done with the area. We sat through a time-share presentation (the cost of getting free tickets to the Titanic museum) and determined we had bigger dreams for our growing family. We now had two small children, and we wanted to see the world with them. We wanted to camp and explore the outdoors, and there was more to the outdoors than eastern Tennessee.

Then my dad’s extended family decided to do a big family reunion in Gatlinburg, a mere six months after we said we were done. Jeff resisted a return to a region we had just said we were never going back to, but I insisted. This was about family, not the Smoky Mountains. We packed up our two toddlers and enjoyed a few days with extended family and adventuring with just the four of us. We took the kids to the Ripley’s Aquarium and struggled to get their little bodies to the top of Clingman’s Dome, Jeff doing the brunt of the work by carrying one kid in our hiking backpack. Jeff and I rode our bikes through the rain in Cades Cove, and then we tried to hike to Laurel Falls with both kids, before a rainstorm and black bears prevented us from finishing the hike. Instead of a family picture in front of the falls, I have pictures of all four of us, drenched from head to toe.

And then we swore, again, that we were never going back.

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Instead, we have spent the last fourteen years camping and traveling all over the United States, showing our kids places we’ve loved and experiencing new places together. And yet, since returning to Indianapolis, I had frequently thought about returning to the Smokies with our much older children, teenagers who didn’t remember their first trip to Eastern Tennessee.

So with Jeff’s permission, I made camping reservations just north of Gatlinburg. Jeff made Harvest Host reservations at a Kentucky farm with Highland cows. Then he insisted that I call a mobile tech to check our brakes and axles, just in case. The news wasn’t good. The axle that had given us problems on our way back from Columbus last summer was completely shot. It needed to be replaced, and it couldn’t be done for at least two weeks. We would not be able to safely travel to Tennessee and back with the current axle in place.

Normally, this would have sent me into a spiraling panic, but this time, Jeff and I both decided separately that we needed to just go anyway. I knew it was going to be more expensive, and it wouldn’t be the trip I had dreamed of, but we only had two more spring breaks with our whole family. We needed to go.

Did I want to spend the extra money? No. Was I worried that five nights in a cabin would convince our teenagers they no longer wanted to camp with us? Yes. Would the trip come with extra challenges and be easier in some ways at the same time? Yes and yes.

We decided to squeeze the whole family (including our two dogs) into my new hybrid Santa Fe for the trip. We brought minimal food and had to go grocery shopping once we got there. (And then had to figure out what to do with the extra food once we packed up to go home.) I didn’t have the ability to safely walk the dogs very far for breaks at the cabin, but they survived. We didn’t have extra recreation at the campground, but we did have a pool table and hot tub that got regular use. We had to do a lot more driving because we were further from both Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg than we had planned, but because we had the hybrid, we saved money on fuel, even if we weren’t saving on time in the car.

And while we all enjoyed the time in the cabin and the ease of unpacking and then packing up again to leave, the camper was missed. More than once, the kids and I referred to when we got “back to the camper,” only to have to remind each other that we were returning to a cabin we didn’t own. The camper is still our home away from home, for now.

We don’t regret going anyway, even if it wasn’t everything I wanted it to be when we first started planning the trip at the last minute, and that’s ok.

Next week, I’ll share details on what it was like to try avoiding tourist traps with two hyper-aware teenagers.

Support my writing

Read more about our family’s camping and travel adventures by ordering your own copy of The Life I Never Knew I Wanted.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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I like feeling smart.

I like learning and knowing things that other people don’t. I like teaching facts and new ideas to my high school students. When I read an article or a non-fiction book that blows my mind with some new information, I need to share it with anyone who will listen, much to the chagrin of those closest to me.

My childhood desire to be a stay-at-home mom wasn’t driven by the belief that I shouldn’t go to college and do what I could with the intellect I had been given. I was just basing my plans on what I had seen my own mother do after I was born. I always planned to go to college. There was never a conversation in my childhood home that assumed going to college was not a given.

And while I would find myself at a small Christian university in a small town in Nebraska, there was never a question about how hard I would have to work to earn a teaching degree in two reading and writing-heavy subjects: English and history. Over the course of those four and a half years of college, I fell in love with learning like I never had before, and that love for learning has never left. I want to know all the things, and when I struggle to understand, I learn what I can and accept that some things are just beyond my understanding, because even if we want to know all the things, we humans were not created to know everything. Experts are experts in their specific fields for a reason.

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But we were created to be curious. We were created to seek knowledge and understanding of the things that perplex us. We were created to pursue that knowledge in community with others and learn from each other.

So why are so many of my fellow Christians today afraid of curiosity and knowledge?

Yes, I realize that “people of the Book” have always had a complicated relationship with knowledge and education. Throughout history, the desire to know more has been encouraged in some and discouraged in others. At times, new information has been seen as a threat to both power and belief systems.

But for people of faith, most of human history has included a pursuit of knowledge as God’s people seek to know him better and gain a greater understanding of the world around them.

The ability to read was always important for at least a small number of Hebrew boys, because that is how they could internalize and understand the Jewish scriptures. The Levites passed along their love of learning and the scriptures from one generation to the next.

The apostles of a new religion of Jesus followers sent letters to new churches popping up all over the ancient world. Material to write these letters was expensive and sometimes hard to come by. Each word was carefully considered before it was committed to paper, and the final letters traveled weeks or even months to their final destination. These letters had to be read to communities and then discussed at length as the people considered the importance of the words to a developing faith in a hostile environment. The ability to read and understand these words again highlighted the importance of education, at least for those who had access to it.

The earliest monasteries and then convents were places of not just prayer, but learning. Monks spent long hours every day copying and translating ancient texts. Martin Luther’s great awakening happened as he was translating scripture. Some of the earliest universities in the Western world were started by the Church. The earliest universities in the United States were founded by religious organizations. The Christian Church throughout history has been the founder of schools, hospitals, and orphanages, filling necessary social needs where there was no government will or ability to do so. Were those institutions perfect? No. Were those institutions necessary? Yes, and they changed many lives for the better.

And yet, even with all that emphasis on learning, when new knowledge has challenged long-held Christian beliefs, there has been backlash.

Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest for daring to argue that the Earth went around the sun.

The Puritans became obsessed with witches and executed 19 of their own Salem citizens to protect the community from the evil plans of the Devil, most of them women who fit outside of the “norm.” (As women have been historically left out of the education discussion.)

Darwin went from a faithful Christian to an agnostic on his deathbed, because his new discoveries conflicted with long-held beliefs, and no one could figure out how to square a round hole. He chose the simplicity of disbelief over the complexity of a nuanced understanding of both science and the scriptures, something later scientists would embrace.

There are a lot of reasons why faith and science often collide. The Bible is a book of history and literature, wisdom and truth about God’s plan for humanity. It was written in an ancient world that was still learning so much about the way the world worked. That doesn’t make it outdated, but it is why understanding the cultural context of the letters Paul wrote to the different churches across the ancient world becomes so important. He was speaking to different cultural and intellectual conflicts with the word of God.

The Bible is not a science textbook. It does not tell us how the earth works or how to heal disease. Instead, it teaches us how to use our knowledge and understanding of the world around us to live in community with each other. Intellect is a gift. One only has to read the book of Proverbs to see praise for wisdom and disdain for foolishness.

God gave us brains and the ability to create, problem-solve, and make discoveries. Art is how we express our humanity. History is how we better understand our past and present. Math and science are gifts that have helped us improve the world around us, improving our food and water supply, building cities, and healing diseases.

So why are so many Christians today fearful of education? Why do so many Christians deny the science behind vaccines and climate change? Why are so many Christians willing to believe outright lies and reassurances from political leaders who say one thing but defy the Gospel with every one of their actions?

I wish I knew. I wish these fellow believers could see how their willingness to deny the evidence of their eyes and ears and the admonitions of experts with years of experience has made the entire Christian faith a mockery, not just in the United States, but throughout the Western Hemisphere. I wish they understood just how small they have made the God they believe in.

In a 2023 episode of French Friday, Skye Jethani and David French discussed the possibility of aliens and how that would impact their faith. As someone who loves Star Wars and has a healthy appreciation for science fiction, I found the conversation fascinating. It’s a question I hadn’t allowed myself to consider because what would that mean for my faith? How would that impact my view that my humanity was special? Would the discovery of aliens from another planet be enough to convince me that God didn’t even exist?

Must like the discussion in the podcast episode, I came to the conclusion that God didn’t need my protection. If I believed in an all-powerful God who was responsible for the creation of the Universe, he was not only big enough to handle my questions and doubts. He was also big enough to have had a hand in life on other planets and in other galaxies. Is it interesting to think about? Yes. Does it matter to my human existence on earth? No.

I refuse to make God small, and isn’t that what Christians are doing when they deny themselves intellectual exercise and debate? I’ve read the work of some very smart people in the sciences who also have strong beliefs in the Triune God. (Katherine Hayhoe and Francis Collins are primary among them.) Their extensive and influential work in the sciences has helped to solidify their faith in an almighty creator. Instead of making them more fearful of knowledge, their faith has propelled them forward to discovery.

I look forward to a day when being an intellectual Christian open to discussion and debate is seen as a given, not an exception. He created humans for life on this planet. I don’t believe he wants us to live any less of an existence.

Note: I found this particular Holy Post episode fascinating, especially as it relates to the creation/evolution debate.

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Human beings are not wired to love change.

Yes, we all know people who are outliers, who live to change relationships, jobs, homes, cars, etc., with dizzying frequency.

But the vast majority of us do not like change. And if we do want change, we typically want it to be gradual so that we barely notice the impact on our daily lives. It’s why many experts caution against making too many changes at once, such as getting married, starting a new job, and moving to a new city all in a matter of months. That much change at one time can cause a significant amount of internal and, by extension, external conflict.

Unfortunately, change is also a natural part of life. It is just part of being human. Even in the most secluded regions of the world, change comes as families are formed, children grow, and leadership ages. Those changes can bring both grief and joy, destruction and renewal, conflict and reconciliation, but the changes themselves are inevitable. It is a natural part of being human.

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However, living in an age of significant progress has also meant change coming at us faster than most of us can process. The Industrial Revolution transformed manufacturing and exploded the size of cities. The invention of the train, the automobile, and finally the plane changed the way we interact with the world. The invention of the radio and then the television sped up the way we got information and entertainment.

As a Xennial, I have watched technology change nearly every year of my life. As a child, I went from a record player to a tape deck to CD player for all of my music needs. I remember getting our first VCR in early elementary school, and then my boyfriend (and eventual husband) buying his first DVD player once I was in college. I didn’t get an email address until I was a senior in high school and a cell phone until I had graduated from college and was a newlywed.

And now? I can’t imagine my life without a smartphone that can do all of the above with a swipe of my finger.

Progress is not linear. We often experience stops and starts along the way that convince people the old ways are better, even when they aren’t. Most people over the age of 35 remember the controversy over lightbulbs as innovation moved from the incandescent to CFL to affordable LEDs. CFL lightbulbs were more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs and far more affordable than the original LEDs, but their light was harsh, and when they inevitably broke on the kitchen floor, the tiny amount of mercury inside posed a health risk to everyone in the room. People railed against laws requiring a transition away from manufacturing less energy-efficient lightbulbs because it took away individual freedom of choice. But progress and innovation won out. The vast majority wanted to spend less money on both electricity and on constantly replacing the lights around their homes.

This is one small example, but human history has hundreds of examples of people fighting against progress, the innovation behind that progress being messy and needing work, and life being better for the vast majority on the other side of that mess.

People like being comfortable and despise nearly every kind of discomfort. It’s natural not to want to struggle through messiness and be intolerant of painful change, even if that pain is temporary. Change comes with risk, some risks significantly bigger than others. We can hope for a positive outcome, but that doesn’t mean a positive outcome is promised.

But we are to the point in modern human history that we don’t have much of a choice. Change is coming our way whether we like it or not, from unpredictable climate, unstable governments, and exploding technology. Where we do have agency is in how we respond to that change, mitigate the potential harm, and work toward solutions that will benefit the maximum number of people.

I’ve been a huge believer in solar energy for years. When we finally got solar on our roof in Houston, I wanted to share the new data with everyone. During the time we lived in Houston, we drove across West Texas multiple times, past large windfarms next to oil derricks, the energy future mingled with the energy past. For all of the outsider talk about how Texas is stuck in the 19th century, there are plenty who are dealing with the realities of the present and the needs of the future. In fact, by the end of 2025, solar overtook coal in power production across the state.

This was my lens through which I saw the western United States when our family went to Yellowstone two years ago. Traveling across Wyoming in the summer of 2024 drove home the reality of what happens when people hold tightly to the way things have always been and turn away from the way things could be. We saw plenty of wind farms throughout western South Dakota, a conservative state that appears to have decided that wind power is more practical than it is “woke.” But Wyoming, with its plentiful sun and windy, wide-open ranges, has little of either wind or solar energy collection. Our drive through eastern Wyoming on our way home also revealed a lot of poverty in the non-touristy portions of the state: desolate towns with few places for commerce and limited access to health care, small houses in disrepair, and nothing available for miles and miles, including gas stations and rest areas. Fear of change and progress is keeping citizens from tapping into the resources that would make lives better and keep their growing children from leaving for better opportunities elsewhere.

It lacks imagination. It lacks growth. It lacks an awareness of the way things both could and should be.

Even when it is necessary, change hurts, and progress is not free. Losing my job early in 2021 crushed my soul and left me reeling. But it forced me to make some career changes and our family to move back closer to home, a change that, nearly five years later, has made our lives better. The town we moved to has been making slow changes in infrastructure, and like a lot of towns in the greater Indianapolis area, adding roundabouts that improve traffic flow and cut down on collisions. The road on which my son attends junior high was shut down for nearly six months to a single lane of traffic as construction crews widened the road, added a roundabout, and created walking and biking lanes connecting two main thoroughfares. The progress on the road was slow, annoying, and caused traffic back-ups at the junior high and the elementary school next door for several months. My daughter got turned around the first day she drove her brother to school after she got her license, making her a few minutes late in her arrival at the high school. But now? The road is great. I frequently see people walking, running, and biking along the path. And the more people who use it, the more leaders will be persuaded to do the same in other parts of town that also desperately need those improvements in transportation and outdoor recreation.

Right now, a lot of us feel like the future looks bleak, and I have a lot of days when I wonder if we are just doomed to live in collapsing mediocrity with no end in sight.

But change is a constant in human history. The way things were 20 years ago is not the way things are today. People 200 years ago would wake up thinking they were on a different planet if we were to place them into nearly any modern neighborhood.

For those of us feeling despair right now, there is good news. This is not the way it will always be, and it is up to us to decide what is going to be different about tomorrow.

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Dear Reader - In case you haven’t noticed, my writing has been a little sporadic lately. And while the thoughts all just keep spinning in my head, I’m finally figuring out how to put them into words and have the time to do so. I hope this speaks to some of your own thoughts over the past few months, and I promise the opening story has a point.

Our kitchen sink stopped draining in late February.

It had been running slow for a while, and yes, I probably should have considered dumping some enzymes down there when I first noticed it, but I figured simple plunger action would fix it.

At the end of a weekend waiting for it to go down, I finally told my husband that I had given up trying with simple fixes, so we went to the store and bought a 25-foot snake.

Still nothing.

My husband, who normally works at home, was traveling for the next three days, so I took a day off work to call a plumber and see if they could come fix it. Nope. He couldn’t find the clog either, but he had a several-thousand-dollar plan that would fix all of the plumbing in our crawl space.

Then we thought it might be the septic, so while my husband was still in Michigan, he got someone to come out in the afternoon, and I had to take off another half day so I could be around for the guy to clean out our full septic tank.

Still, the water didn’t go down.

Since I was already home, I called another plumber. That didn’t work. Another plumber came out to try later in the week, but still, nothing.

I’ve been washing dishes in a dishtub and tossing the water out of our front door for weeks, through freezing temperatures, rain, storms, and wind. We think we’ve finally figured out which stretch of drain is the culprit, but we haven’t had the time to struggle underneath our house to open it up. We have to decide how much money to spend and what really needs to be done, all while spending our weekends watching show choir and our weeks running our son to track practices and football conditioning. Time is not on our side.

This minor inconvenience continues to disrupt the lives in our household and serves as a constant annoyance, but then I open my phone and read the latest news about my country.

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ICE is still terrorizing cities, the GOP refuses to just fund TSA which causing long lines at airports, the Western states didn’t have a real winter and my friends and family out there are terrified of what that could mean for summer fire threats, fire is sweeping across Nebraska, and in Indiana we’re experiencing daily weather swings that have brought tornadoes and snow within 24 hour periods.

All of that awfulness pales in comparison to the news coming out of West Asia (a more geographically accurate term for the Middle East),1 where our president decided to start a war that very few American citizens ever wanted, and the consequences of which are going to be paid by nearly all of us for at least the next decade.

Whoever said, “May you live in unprecedented times,” must have been really bored, because I could go for a good case of boring predictability right now.

I remember reading Chuck Klosterman’s book The 90s and being struck by just how much happened in the decade that encompassed my entire adolescence. Seeing everything stacked on top of each other reminded me just how much breaking news shaped the adult I would become: the Oklahoma City bombing, the Branch Davidian compound, the OJ Simpson trial, etc. And while the 2000 election and 9-11 both happened officially in the next decade, they still felt like part of that era, the shift happening shortly after as we entered a new war in the West Asia.

And yet, with all of that breaking news, there were still moments that were so boring. I didn’t have “breaking news” constantly coming across my social media feed because social media didn’t exist. I had to call people if I wanted to talk to them outside of school or work. My peers and I were pretty much watching the same television shows, and we had to wait a week between episodes before we would find out what would happen next.

That’s not to idealize the 90s. There was plenty we could have done better, and I don’t want to demonize the very technology that I’m working on right now to write this blog post. But the 2020s have just been…a lot.

A pandemic, an insurrection, hope in progress wiped out with a single election, diseases making a comeback, rights being erased, friendships and family relationships destroyed by the political climate, faith in institutions destroyed, and so much more.

I miss going for weeks without being concerned about what the president was saying or doing. I miss believing my elected leaders cared more about what was happening to their country than they did about their bank accounts. I miss believing my fellow Christians were more concerned about reflecting Jesus in their actions than in seeking political power and influence. I miss believing the future looked bright and that progress was a constant slope upward.

And like many, I’m looking for hope in the strangest of places.

I missed it the first time around because I was a college student who barely had time for ER and Friends when it launched,2 but I’m finally working my way through The West Wing, because I want to see idealized fictional characters leading my country with their humanity intact. Seeing these characters deal with national and personal disasters with competence and grace gives me hope that this is still possible in America, but not America as it is right now.

The only excitement I want in my life right now is change that makes life better for me, my family, and my neighbors. I want there to be consequences for those who are destroying my children’s future, both the economic future in careers they hope to build and the environmental future of the world they inhabit. I want to be bored of people showing compassion to those who are less fortunate than them as they raise them out of poverty and despair. I want to yawn at the competence of leadership at all levels because they are so good at their jobs that we no longer have to constantly rush to fill the gaps and repair what gets broken along the way. I want to be so used to progress that improves the lives of every citizen that innovators come up with new and fresh ideas that even the most creative science fiction writers never imagined.

I want a boredom that gives me the freedom to read, write, and explore the world around me after a full day of doing a job that both pays the bills and brings me some measure of personal pleasure and fulfillment. I want a boredom that makes a clogged bathroom drain the biggest worry in my day, instead of just one more thing on top of so many other things occupying my heart and mind.

Is that all really too much to ask?

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Walking through my faith deconstruction/reconstruction journey has required a lot of vulnerability. That is why there is a paywall below. If you want to support my writing but do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation. I will give you one month of access to all paid content.

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The previous chapter

And now

I opened my phone after having it turned off for the last 48 hours. I immediately began seeing the news threads pop up on Facebook. Various versions of “Trump issues Muslim ban” repeatedly came across my news feed.

I caught my coworker’s attention once I was sure none of the students on the bus would be able to hear me. “Uma, he did it. He passed the travel ban.”

“Here we go,” was all he could muster in response.

We had just spent the previous 48 hours chaperoning a group of students from our school’s Christian Social Action class as they participated in a poverty simulation in Waco, Texas. While we were learning along with our students, the ground shook under the country. An immigrant himself, Uma had been openly apprehensive with me about the incoming administration, sharing concerns that he could not openly share with most of our very conservative colleagues. He had survived civil war in his home of Sri Lanka and the first place he found refuge, Sierra Leone. He knew what it was to need a safe country to land, a place where he could get a fresh start and make a new life for himself.

I thought about my upcoming unit in Pre-AP English 10. In the next week, I would start teaching Elie Wiesel’s haunting memoir, Night. I had taught Holocaust studies in varying degrees since my first year of teaching, and had read Wiesel’s short work numerous times. I had been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and visited Dachau when I was a college student studying abroad. I had spent years studying the Holocaust, determined to help my students learn how to prevent similar humanitarian disasters around the globe. Now that it appeared a similar disaster was unfolding in my own country, I felt helpless. What was I supposed to do about this in my own very conservative corner of the world?

When Donald Trump came down that golden escalator in June 2015, my husband Jeff and I were in the middle of busy preparation to get our house sold, find a new home in Houston, and start a new life in a new state 1000 miles away from our families. I watched the footage of the announcement with mild curiosity, convinced it would be over before it began. After all, there were several traditional, tested, and reasonably competent Republican contenders vying for the nomination. No one could possibly take him seriously.

We moved from conservative northeast Indiana to conservative North Harris County, Texas, where we knew that our moderate political viewpoints would continue to keep us in the minority in our work and church circles. But I had also started teaching at a Lutheran school that seemed to embrace being the hands and feet of Jesus. My previous school had made a valient effort to encourage service and community Bible study; my new school had students consistently leading weekly chapel worship, theology classes that actively taught them how serve others by putting their Christian faith into action, and female theology teacher who was encouraged to speak during chapel. (This was a welcome change in a denomination that repeatedly argued against women preaching in any context.) I knew we had not moved into a less conservative space, but between our new church’s active Bible study culture that didn’t appear to shy away from difficult conversations and my new school’s apparent openness to challenging the synodical status quo, I was encouraged in my belief that there was no way Donald Trump would gain enough support for the presidential nomination.

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“Have you ever considered hiring someone to clean your house once a month?”

My mom’s words felt more like an accusation than a helpful suggestion.

I knew why she was suggesting it. I was a new mom. I had decided to keep working full-time. And we had a Siberian husky who shed her body weight in fur every year.

Even before I had my daughter, I was far from a good housekeeper. I was a busy English teacher who directed both the fall play and spring musical. After long days at work, I was either continuing my work on the couch or snuggling with my husband while we watched TV before we finally decided to go to bed. We both had bad habits that were difficult to break, but my arch nemesis was paper. Piles of paper that I never knew what to do with: bills, junk mail, newspapers, ads, coupons, letters from family, etc. These piles built up until my husband would get so frustrated, he would sit me down and tell me to sort. I would get through 90% of the piles, give up, and allow the piles to rebuild on the mountains I had cut down to hills.

It is something I have never stopped struggling with.

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I know that when my mom asked if I had ever considered getting help once or twice a month to manage something that I clearly could not manage on my own, she was just trying to be helpful, but I felt like a massive failure. My mom stayed at home when we were kids, so while our childhood home was far from perfect, she was able to stay on top of the worst of it. As we got older, the four of us girls had chores that helped her with basic cleanliness, putting us in charge of bathrooms and vacuuming. My mother-in-law had also stayed home with my husband and his siblings for part of their childhoods, so she had developed a specific expectation of cleanliness as well.

My house never met the standards of my childhood, but I didn’t want someone else coming into my home and cleaning it. I didn’t even know where to start. We had so much we needed to clean and sort and purge ourselves that even the thought of inviting someone else into our home to make our house better seemed impossible. And that didn’t even take into consideration the additional cost to our already very tight budget to have someone help so I could just worry about basics while working and parenting.

I’m not above realizing that there are things I’m not gifted at, that I genuinely don’t like doing, and that I’ll procrastinate on, often to my own detriment. Several years ago, I suffered a significant allergic reaction to fire ant bites when I was trying to do my own landscaping at our home in Houston. I had tried, and failed, many times to rehabilitate our landscaping. The weeds were thick, and while I love the outdoors, I do not enjoy working outdoors. A hike in 90-degree weather with a full water bottle and beautiful landscapes? Great! Working outside in the same weather with a hoe and rake and dirt? No, thank you. After I visited urgent care, my husband and I decided it was time to get some help with our landscaping. We found a great landscaper who came a few times a year to clean out our flower beds, edge our lawn, and replenish our mulch. He was reasonable, and he genuinely loved his work. Even in the worst Texas weather, he arrived at our house with a smile on his face. I didn’t always love the bill, but I loved the way our house looked after he and his crew were done.

But for some reason, I’ve never been able to accept the same help with the inside of my home.

No one likes to have their weaknesses pointed out to them, and cleaning is definitely one of my biggest weaknesses. I have good intentions, but I get easily distracted. I want things to be clean, but after a full day of work, the last thing I want to do is spend more time working at home. And I hate asking for help, so even though I should be better about asking my kids and husband for help with specific things, I don’t. I want to control what is done and how it is done, and that means nothing gets done.

And once I get behind on one thing, I get behind on all things. The dog fur from two long-haired dogs builds up under furniture and in the corners. Some bathroom surfaces get cleaned, but not nearly frequently enough. The dining table becomes a dumping ground for nearly everything (including my endless piles of paper that need to be sorted), and we spend less and less time eating at the table together as a family.

I genuinely hate cleaning. I know a few people who love it, who have a passion for keeping their homes spotless and find joy in doing so. Cleaning does not bring me joy. A clean house brings me joy, but the actual act of cleaning makes me angry. Angry at the amount of stuff we have, angry at the dogs (who I really do love), who bring so much dirt into the house and shed so much fur, angry at myself for the piles of paper and for letting things go for so long.

Maybe it was the pressure of a school year that has had me spinning since August. Maybe it was my frustration over not even having time to sit and write for longer than 15 minutes for the last two months. Maybe it was fighting with my teenager over his once-every-six-months cleaning spree and his insistence that everyone else in the house work as hard as he was. Maybe it was the realization that I really do want to have more people over to our house without embarrassment. Or maybe it was a perimenopausal fit of PMS rage and anxiety.

But I finally contacted a local company for a deep clean of my house so we could get back on track.

It would cost a lot more for a deep clean to get us back to equilibrium, but I hoped it would be worth it.

So on President’s Day, when the kids and I were off and my husband, who works from home, would be traveling for the day, I had the cleaning crew come and get the filth out of our house.

They cleaned for hours doing things that not only would have taken me days to complete, but most likely would never have gotten completed because I would have given up, even if we had been working together as a family to get most of the work done.

And while I don’t relish paying the extra, I feel like I actually have a reset. Maybe my mom was right all of those years ago. Maybe I do just need to do this on occasion to give myself a sense of peace so I can focus on other things. Cleaning isn’t my gift. Maybe I need to find a way to let someone else use their skills so I can get a clear mind to focus on my job of teaching and managing our family of four. I fully recognize that we are finally in a financial position where I can allow myself this one luxury. I recognize it as a privilege, but also perhaps one I need to finally embrace.

Society works best when we help each other, when we use our individual gifts and talents to build each other up and support our neighbors emotionally and yes, financially. As a working mom who sent my children to daycare from the time they were infants, I have always strongly believed that it takes a village. We need each other. And maybe part of needing each other includes admitting when we just can’t do something anymore, and we need someone else to take the reins, even if it’s a once-in-a-while situation.

But for now, I’m going to try to enjoy a little less dirt in our lives. I’m going to spend a week or so staying on top of my family members and reminding them to clean up after themselves. And I’m going to tackle my office/guest room, because that is where all of the paper has ended up.

I wasn’t letting anyone else near that room. I have to pay my own dues there. I’m just thankful that the clean house gave me the peace of mind to finally sit and write, so maybe it is its own kind of therapy.

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It’s Sunday morning as I start writing this, and the snow just keeps falling outside. In central Indiana, we’ve gotten at least eight inches of snow, and we have several more hours of snowfall coming our way. Winter Storm Fern has shut down our entire region, and announcements for online learning have finally arrived.

Yesterday, I was sitting at a rec league basketball game when my sister sent me the message, “Sarah, the video in Minneapolis…”

My husband and I had spent our morning watching our son’s eighth-grade team suffer a heartbreaking loss in the conference tournament. We raced home to get him to his rec league game to help all of us recover from the reality that he wouldn’t be playing in the championship like he had last year.

I would finally watch the video when we got home a second time. While we had been doing normal parenting things in the Midwest, a fellow American citizen was being executed on the streets of his city several states away. While we had been living our lives in the safety of Indiana, citizens of the Twin Cities were standing up for their lives and the lives of their neighbors, and another patriot lost a life protecting the more vulnerable.

My social media was full of updates. I saw the lies spread by the administration. I saw the truth of it with my own eyes. I saw the Minnesotans who came out after the shooting to continue to protest the occupation of their city. From the comfort of my warm house, I liked additional posts on Threads while staying far away from Facebook. I went for a run at the gym, listening to team comment on the video. I went to the grocery store to find the last staples I needed, nervously driving my new car on the increasingly slick roads.

And then my family and I hunkered down to await the snowstorm which promised to dump several inches to several feet of snow on half of the country.

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I’m a high school English teacher who has read a lot of books. I’ve taught dystopias and Holocaust literature. I’ve studied the history of multiple genocides and totalitarian governments. I’ve read about the psychology of men who convinced themselves they were doing the right thing while participating in death squads. I’ve devoured stories of Jews and the small number of rescuers who did what they could to help keep their neighbors alive. I’ve studied fictional stories about fictional timelines where the people have become oppressed by the government.

These books and stories served as warnings. They helped me see patterns of human behavior. But they didn’t prepare me for the disconnected realities of living in such a timeline. They didn’t prepare me to feel my heart, brain, and body disconnected as I try to parent teenagers in a world I never imagined for myself, and certainly never wanted for them. They didn’t prepare me to have loved ones who would refuse to see the pain and suffering around us.

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While people are bundling up to march to protect their homes and neighbors in Minnesota, I’m in Indiana running faucets to prevent my pipes from freezing in sub-zero temperatures. While teachers and children in Minnesota are forced into online learning to keep students and their families safe, I’m preparing for an e-learning day for myself and my own children because of snow. While I’m trying to avoid fighting with my liberal husband as he asks for my help fixing the snowblower, there are women living in fear of speaking out because of their MAGA husbands. While my kids and husband and I all enjoyed a night of darts, multiple families now are mourning the deaths of innocent loved ones at the hands of federal agents. While I was sad to miss church this morning because of impassable roads, there are people who cannot attend church at all right now, fearful that ICE agents will show up and illegally rip them away from their family and friends.

Being an engaged and concerned citizen in 2026 means living in multiple realities at one time, fully aware that the experiences of fellow American in another state several states over could become your experience at anytime. It means understanding that fears can become reality, safety is relative, and isolation might be the only thing that protects you from any kind of harm. It means coming to terms with the reality that America has always silmultaneoulsy been a place of hope and despair, promises kept and promises broken, innovative progress and unfettered greed.

The American Experiment has always been a work-in-progress. Non-white people and immigrants throughout American history have told stories of the split screen that is life in United States since her founding. Colonists got a fresh start while pushing indigenous peoples off of their lands. Plantation owners got wealthy while using slave labor. Northern factories benefitted off of the cheaper materials coming from the enslaved south while paying white immigrants poverty wages under dangerous conditions. Railroads were built on the backs of Chinese immigrants who would not be granted citizenship. And the list goes on and on.

But America has always held onto the promise of a “more perfect union.” It has taken steps forward and steps backward, but the people never quit. Oppression was met with resistance, over and over again. Through it all, the world kept spinning. People had to keep working, living, and loving. There were homes to protect and children to raise and communities to maintain.

Books prepared my brain for this moment, but not my body and my heart. They didn’t prepare me to go from cheering on my 14-year-old to watching video of a man being brutally murdered. They didn’t prepare me for how to teach about genocide and oppression in the past while watching it happen in my own country. They didn’t prepare me to keep going about the business of life while knowing moms a few states over are trying to hold together their families and communities.

There are so many things making me so tired, but quitting isn’t an option. Life needs to keep going on so my family can face another day. I need to keep going because I want to see the sunrise on my country after the long, dark night.

Life keeps going, so we keep going. We keep living in a world with split screens, but we recognize that those screens are showing different angles to give us a more complete picture of world we live in.

And we don’t give up hoping and working so we can merge those separate screens into one imperfect vision in constant pursuit of something so much better in the end. It is what I continue to cling onto, the thing that keeps me from completely losing hope, because giving up on the dream of a more perfect union is not an option.

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When we turned the calendar from 2020 to 2021, we were supposed to be breathing a sigh of relief.

And I was. Joe Biden wasn’t my choice to defeat Donald Trump, but I felt better about the future with him soon at the helm. Our family had gotten through the year without getting COVID and vaccines were on the horizon. We had just installed solar panels on our house and we were looking forward to the financial benefits of getting the majority of our electricity from the sun. Our family returned from a fun and renewing winter break vacation to Palo Duro Canyon, celebrating our wedding anniversary during an overnight stay at a state park as we escaped a snowstorm covering the Texas panhandle.

Things were looking up, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was still waiting for us on the horizon, something we couldn’t see that would continue to turn our lives upside down.

Three weeks later, everything I thought I knew about me, my faith community, my career, and our lives in Texas completely shattered.

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Here’s what I can say: Before I discovered January 15, 2021 would be the last day I would ever teach in a Lutheran school, I had never stopped believing that my role as a Lutheran school educator meant that my English classroom was a place where my students learned how to think for themselves and put their faith into practice in the real world. We read books that challenged my students to think about how they would and should respond as Christians to a broken world. I assigned research projects that pushed them to understand bigger issues and to question their preconcieved notions. I wanted them to be kinder, more compassionate, and more curious. I wanted them to see the complexities surrounding them. A dear friend and former colleague from Fort Wayne would laugh when her honors English 10 students walked back into her classroom to visit after leaving one of my AP Language classes. Students frequently asked her, “So…is Styf a Republican or a Democrat, because I can’t tell and it’s driving me crazy.”

That is how I wanted it to be for the rest of my career…and then 2016 happened.

I was never-Trump from the jump because of my faith. And because I felt a strong responsibility as a Christian educator to help my students be more faithful Christians and responsible citizens, I struggled to continue to show my students “both sides” of the issues because one side became increasingly harmful. For four years I had suffered as a silent minority in both my workplace and faith community. While I refused to stay silent on social media (in a fruitless attempt to persuade my loved ones to see the truth about what was happening to the Church and our country), I spent my days suppressing the urge to tell my students exactly what I thought about the Trump administration. For years, my politics had been easily muddled; now, the fact that I fought for the oppressed and taught about women’s rights made me a clear bleeding heart liberal.

And after January 6, 2021, that would no longer be acceptible in staunchly red Texan spaces, even if we did live in one of the bluest counties in the state.

On MLK Jr. Day, broken in ways I never thought possible, I angrily dumped a pile of branded clothing on a table and cleared my classroom of everything that was uniquely mine, leaving the following sign on my classroom bulletin board as my final message to my students.

And for the last five years, our family has been going through the long healing process. I’m finally able to “love the thing I most wish hadn’t happened to me.” (Thanks for that, Stephen Colbert.) I know that God brought us back “home” because this is where we needed to be.

However, it’s been a constant cycle of grief and renewal.

I had to grieve the loss of Lutheran education for me and my kids. I learned to love teaching again once I was in the public school system, and then discovered new opportunities for my own children once we moved them both to our local public schools. I am so thankful for the Lutheran school teachers they had over the years, for the faith development and education they received. Now they are thriving in the public schools, and I am thankful for that as well.

I had to grieve again when I realized that the gift I had clung to for years came at a cost. Teaching in Lutheran schools gave me the opportunity to integrate my faith into my favorite subjects: English and history. My goal was always sending more knowledgeable, more compassionate, more complete young adults into the world. But it did come at a cost. I had to hold myself back even though I felt morally obligated to do more.

I found new freedom in public education, able to be more myself with my colleagues with less personal pressure regarding the moral education of my students. My personal politics are no longer tied to my value as a Christian educator. There is freedom in not feeling responsible for my students’ faith development. There is freedom in knowing that most of my English colleagues have the same desires for both education and the country. And there is freedom in not worrying about how or if my children’s teachers are shaping their moral education.

My kids are thriving, I’ve rediscovered a love for teaching that had been slowly beaten out of me, and my kids see and know their extended family in ways they couldn’t when we moved over 1000 miles away for six years.

Occasionally my son will ask my husband and I to name the favorite place we’ve ever lived, and we can honestly say that is has always been Indianapolis. Then he’ll ask if I ever miss Texas or regret living in Texas, and I can honestly tell him no. Every place we’ve lived gave us something, and there was more good than bad in our six years in Texas. A lot more good than bad. Unfortunately, our last six months were exceptionally hard, and for a long time, we were left with that period being far too fresh in our hearts and minds.

But now I look at pictures of our travels around Texas and I’m filled with warm memories. Photographs of our backyard and gatherings with friends scroll across the screen in our kitchen and I’m thankful for the found family we had during the time we lived in Houston. There were friendships that made me a better person. I had experiences that made me a better teacher. Worship and Bible studies at our church helped me grow in my faith in ways I hadn’t experienced since I was a teenager.

Five years ago, I couldn’t see a way out. I thought I would never teach again. I lost most of my community and didn’t know how I was going to rebuild my life. I felt like I was drowning.

Last November, my husband reminded me that the only way out is through. He was talking about the outcome of the election, but this has been true for our family for far longer than the last year. It took awhile, but we eventually found our way out of the darkness. And when the pattern repeats, we just keep going through until we get to the other side.

Five years later, the wounds have healed, even if the scars remain. But those scars are only part of the story, and I truly believe I am now stronger on the other side.

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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I have chosen a word for the year since 2020. Months before a global pandemic took over and we experienced shutdowns and many of our lives were changed forever, I chose the word “hope.” In 2021, less than a month before everything was turned upside down for our family, I chose the word “light.” In 2022, just days before I would come down with COVID for the first time, I chose the word “heal.” The next year, I decided it was time to look “forward.” And the last two years, because I first failed and then decided to try again, I went with “intentional.”

At first, choosing a word for the year allowed me to follow a fad that didn’t force me to make New Year’s resolutions I was most likely going to fail on within a month. It gave me a goal and a purpose, a fresh mindset moving into the next year.

But this year, coming up with a single word for 2026 has been hard.

In so many ways, 2025 has been a good year personally, while also being a frustrating year as a citizen concerned about my country, a Christian heartbroken by what Christian Nationalism is doing to the American Church, and as a human being who just wants to see a better world for my children.

How could I possibly find a word that would help me turn everything around? Or at least, turn around everything within my limited control?

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In many ways this past year, I’ve been experiencing a series of disconnections. I’ve spent far less time on Facebook and have rarely opened Instagram. (Taking both off of my phone has helped.) A series of financial decisions and two busy teenagers with uncertain schedules meant we didn’t take a family vacation this past year, something that made me feel both disconnected from myself and my immediate family. Two teenagers and a personally packed school year have kept me away from creative projects and partnerships that had been giving me new life.

In recent conversations with my college roommate, we were both struggling with what we wanted for our individual words for 2026. We’ve sent countless Marco Polo messages back and forth talking about our desires to spend less time on social media and more time with ourselves and our families. Almost simultaneously, we texted each other our words for 2026. She was considering “disconnect,” as in disconnecting from social media and technology distractions keeping her away from reading, self-renewal, and her family. I was considering “connect,” because as much as I want to disconnect from outside distractions, I want to connect with things that are real and far more tangible.

And so, after much consideration, my word, my “Sarantee”1 for 2026, is “connect.”

How do I hope to see that playing out in the coming year?

Connecting to others

Friendship has always been as important to me as it has been difficult. Moving many times during my life has meant many different relationships and trying to maintain friendships across, not just time, but miles.

And when change has been a constant in your life, adult friendships just become harder. I don’t have a long history with a lot of people. Those I do have a long history with live in different states or our relationships have experienced serious disruptions for a variety of reasons.

Additionally, finding time to maintain old friendships and build new ones becomes increasingly difficult when there are nearly constant demands on time from career and growing kids, but I want to do better, because friendships IRL matter.2 I will be forever grateful for the handful of friendships from high school and college that I still maintain online and through text, but I want to settle in where we are and build connections for the second half of my life in a place I have no desire to leave.

I also want to find every opportunity to suck out the last year and a half of being a family of four under the same roof. Staying close to our kids while also watching them grow up and become their own people has been as challenging as it has been rewarding, and I want to keep doing what I can to let them know that we will always be a safe place to return to while making their way in the world.

Ultimately, I’m ready to find my midlife village and to keep weaving strong ties to the family I was born into and the one I helped create. I believe that truly connecting with others may be the most revolutionary, patriotic thing we can do as we approach our country’s 250th birthday, because change starts in our families and communities. This is the hope I am going to hold onto in 2026.

Connecting to my faith

I’ve spent a lot of screentime over the past decade or more writing about and reflecting on my faith journey.

And it’s been an epic journey.

It’s been a journey without an end in sight, and I truly believe that is the way faith should be. We should always be learning, growing, asking questions, and coming away with deeper understanding of God, ourselves, and our place in the greater story of Creation. I honestly don’t trust anyone who has never struggled with doubts along the way of their faith journey.

But the last five years have been particularly rough. I’ve had a lot more questions than answers. I’ve had a lot more doubt than certainty. And I’ve had a lot more hesitancy than determination.

I’ve also had to deal with a lot of fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of rejection, and fear of taking big steps away from ideas and traditions that have caused a lot of harm to me and others. I want to move toward something new, but those fears keep haunting me because that something new is unknown and could cause further rejection.

I know that remaining frozen in place isn’t just hurting me; it’s hurting my family as well. I’m once again having to learn how to let go and let God do his thing. We’ll see what that looks like on the other side.

Connecting to me

As I’ve said before, 2025 has been a lot.

I’ve told teacher friends that I feel more like Mrs. Styf the teacher than I have in years. That has meant I have had a lot of amazing “aha” moments over the past year as I’ve have improved some areas of my instruction.

It has also mean a lot of “what am I doing?” moments as I’ve tried to keep a lot of new balls in the air.

For the first time in years, this has meant bringing work home and working in front of the television at night instead of just hanging out with my family on the rare night that someone doesn’t have a game, practice, rehearsal, performance, or work. It has meant unfinished writing projects and more frequent writer’s block when I have actually had time to sit down to write. It has meant jumping into planning the next unit instead of reflecting on the previous unit and posting on .

“Connecting to me” is about more than just having some much needed “me” time. After all, I’m four and half years away from an empty nest and I don’t want to rush it. I want to soak it all in. But connecting with others and my faith both play a role in connecting to me. I need those connections to help me find the most authentic version of Middle-Aged Sarah. I will try to be patient when I don’t have a quiet Saturday morning to write. But also, I will try to be happy with a few quiet minutes to read when no one is bothering me, and I will put away my phone so that I’m more engrossed in the pages of a book than I am in nonsense that has nothing to do with me or my loved ones.

I want to find connection in all areas of my life, because I want something better in the now and something more to look forward to in the future.

And now I pass the question to you: What is your word for 2026? What are you hoping for in the coming year?

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

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Walking through my faith deconstruction/reconstruction journey has required a lot of vulnerability. That is why there is a paywall below. If you want to support my writing but do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation. I will give you one month of access to all paid content.

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The previous chapter

And now

“You sound so happy and light,” my friend Alicia said as we talked on the phone.

“I am,” I responded. And I was.

Our years in Fort Wayne, while difficult for me, also helped to transform my career. I loved graduate school and thrived as both a student and a teacher. Once I had my own high school classroom again, I dove into teaching AP Language, leaning into my passions and discovering a whole new world of pedagogic possibilities.

When I started my new position in a much bigger school with a much bigger faculty than what I had experienced in Indianapolis, I was a mom to a toddler and a newborn. The administration was perfectly content allowing me to just teach my classes without asking me to pick up extra-curricular activities. Once I was done with graduate school, I had more time than ever before to dedicate to my teaching craft. But graduate school and motherhood also softened my edges. I learned to have more patience and adjust as my students needed. Now in my 30s, I took on the teaching persona of “nurturing hardass,” which some of my former students highlighted when they wrote a poem about me in their senior English class.

I didn’t like Fort Wayne, but I loved my students. I wasn’t leaving them, or even the job I enjoyed. I just needed something different. I nearly cried when one class handed me a journal full of handwritten notes and a framed certificate naming me the “Patron Saint of Rhetoric.” I gave them my email address and told them to write me if they needed letters of recommendation, and I meant it. I didn’t want them to think I was moving halfway across the country to get away from them.

I just needed to get away, period.

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I’ve been selecting a word for the year for the last several years. For two years in a row, I picked the word “intentional.”

And while 2025 was significantly more successful than 2024, it hasn’t been easy. I’ve done better in some areas than others, and those who have been following me for years have probably noticed that the last several months, I’ve struggled to just write regularly, something I’ve had to pursue with intense intentionality.

In 2025, I had plans for how I was going to be intentional. How did I do?

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Intentional With Relationships?

Yes and no.

The nature of being a mom to teenagers is that you are forced to be in relationship with a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons. We spend a lot of time with the same people at football and basketball games, track meets, and show choir competitions. My husband and I love it all, no matter how exhausted it makes me, and we really enjoy the company of the parents we spend a lot of that time with.

But I want to do more. (Hence my yet unannounced word for 2026.)

How else did I work on relationships this past year?

I traveled with my parents to Kansas for my grandfather’s 95th birthday and enjoyed seeing aunts and uncles and younger cousins that I haven’t seen in years. My sister and I did pretty well at planning family dinners at the beginning of the year but fell off as the second half of the year got so stinking busy. I try to make it to writing group whenever possible. (So whenever I’m not sitting in a stadium or gym.) My college roommate and I are regularly sending each other Marcos. I’m trying to send more texts and spend less time on social media.

I’m a work in progress. I’ll always be a work in progress. But I still have half a lifetime to live (God willing), and I don’t want to be doing it alone.

And like I said last year, we can’t change the world by sitting behind a computer or phone screen. The greatest changes come when we connect with real human beings in real life. I keep working on stepping away from “social” media and working to do more IRL, so if you want to hear from me, email might be your best bet right now 😜

Intentional With Writing?

I had dreams this year of completely finishing my book about being a Midwesterner living in Texas, but this semester has taken nearly every ounce of energy I have. My friend Alicia and I cannot make our schedules work to record for because we just keep passing each other in the universe. After finishing Sarah Bessey’s book Fieldnotes for the Wilderness and Jenn Hatmaker’s book Awake, I finally felt ready to do the deep work with my faith explorations in Shifting Sand as I continue to process the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a churchworker’s kid who decided to go into churchwork, but that work is hard and emotional and takes time.

Regardless, when I have the time, I do write. I continue to need to write. And I have a feeling my story is going to become more important in the years to come, at least to my own family.

I’ve also continued leaning into my role as a local writer. I will keep applying for every opportunity that comes my way, and it’s been good for me personally and professionally, even when I don’t make much money at a single event. Connecting locally matters, and it’s where I feel like I need to do the most work.

Intentional With Stuff?

I said I would say how good I’ve been at getting rid of stuff, and all I can say is that I’m doing better. (And I wrote about it a little earlier this year.)

I finally got back into budgeting and realized that YNAB had made it so much easier now that I can connect all of our accounts to the program. It takes some time every month, but now after a year of tracking our expenses, I’m ready to create an honest monthly budget and hopefully stick to it. We still have stuff to get rid of. I still have a house to clean. We still have goals to meet, but I did much better this year than in years past.

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And now it’s time for me to start processing my word for 2026.

Support my writing

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗

I love my country.

I love the geographic diversity of the Great Lakes, the Rocky Mountains, the West Texas canyons, and the Kentucky caves. I love our regional diversity, each corner of the country offering distinct cuisine, music, experiences, and colloquialisms. I love our cultural diversity, the way states lean into the things that make them unique, the remnants of the indigenous tribes who were often pushed out, and the immigrants who settled in those states and had to adjust old traditions to match a new land and reality.

I both love and grieve our complicated history, a country of immigrants who took over a continent by destroying the people who had lived here before us and building something new on the backs of those who had little choice. America is a story of oppression and throwing off oppressors, innovation and protecting those who had more power and influence, the pursuit of freedom for all and the backlash of those fearful of losing their position, the constant pursuit of a more perfect union and one step backward after taking two steps forward.

I love my country, and because I have a hopelessly optimistic view of the long arc of history, I brought two children into the world with dreams of the roles they will play in building their nation’s future. I voted for Barack Obama to become the first Black president when my daughter was in my womb. I brought my son into the world during the second year of his first term.

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The future looked so bright. Social media connected us. We only used young AI to help us grammar-check our writing. We still occasionally went to the video store to check out new movies or waited for Netflix to send us a disk in the mail. Email on my cell phone was still a novelty that I hadn’t learned to hate. My digital camera still took better photos than the phone I used mostly for phone calls and texting. Looking back, it is hard to believe just how much things have changed in the last 15 years.

It’s more than a little disorienting.

There’s an old adage arguing that the older a person gets, the more conservative they become.

Maybe that is true for certain people. Maybe that was more likely to be true in a time when life just kept getting better the older you got and the stability was there and there was no fear of your children having a worse future than yours.

But I am a Xennial raising two children at the tail end of Gen Z. I have been teaching high school English for nearly a quarter of a century and have seen all the ways the world has changed for Millennials, Gen Z, and soon Gen Alpha. I’ve seen the ways those cultural, political, and environmental changes have changed them.

And I want so much better for my babies.

I want them to have clean air and water and a healing planet. I don’t want them to have to sacrifice modern comforts like electricity and motorized travel, but to live in a world fueled by clean energy that works with nature, not against it.

I want them to care for others and have people in their lives whom they trust to care for them. I want them to see their fellow citizens as human beings made in the image of God and worthy of their friendship and compassion. I don’t want them to believe they have to go out of their way to change the world, but that they can have a positive impact on others in their own community and to strive to do so.

I want them to be challenged intellectually and encouraged to develop their own ideas. I want them to be surrounded by teachers and instructors who inspire them to see the importance of arts and the humanities in tandem with science and technology. I want them to seek truth based on established facts and to understand that they can believe in God without checking their intellect at the door.

I want them to have the full college experience, forming close friendships that will last them a lifetime, learning from professors who challenge them to be both better scholars and better humans, and to leave fully prepared to start careers they love. I want them to be able to do all of this without worrying about graduating with crippling debt that will put off their ability to build independent adult lives and prevent my husband and me from eventually retiring.

I want them to have fulfilling careers that offer them intellectual stimulation, quality relationships, and financial stability. I don’t want them to have to sacrifice their health or integrity in order to put food on the table and a roof over their heads.

I want those jobs to give them the money and time to freely travel, see the world, and return refreshed and renewed. I want them to be able to afford a home of their own and live a comfortable, but not indulgent, existence.

I don’t want them to worry about whether a health scare or need for occasional mental health care will bankrupt them. I want my daughter to have the freedom to decide what to do with her own body, and I don’t want my son to worry about pregnancy complications killing his future wife or destroying their hopes to have further children.

I want them to want to have children, not because I want to be a grandmother someday, but because I want them to see a hopeful future and to have the resources available to them to have those children without fear of never being able to retire. And if they choose not to have children, I want it to be because they have found other ways to build up the world they are living in.

Ultimately, I want them to be able to flourish as the people God created them to be.

And I don’t want them to have to leave their home to make that a possibility. I want them to be able to do all of the above in the country I love. I want it to be a country they can also love and be proud to live in, not because of some mythological belief in greatness, but because it has finally lived up to the promise of a more perfect union for all who live within its borders. I want our country to look toward the future, building a foundation for something stronger that will last beyond a generation that will be gone in less than three decades.

Therefore, I have no interest in leadership that doesn’t want to build a future of fulfillment and flourishing for my children. I have no interest in listening to citizens who only want to purity test ideas and are more interested in their version of perfection than in solving actual problems. I have no interest in those who see pluralism as our enemy instead of our strength.

My children and their peers deserve so much better, and I’m going to keep fighting to ensure they have it.

Support my writing

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While most of my work here is free for all subscribers, it is still a labor of love that I fit into the few hours I have when I am not teaching or being an attentive wife and mom. If you want to support my writing but you do not want to commit to being a paid subscriber, please consider a one-time donation.

One-time donation

You can also support me by ordering my book or books from my favorite book lists at my Bookshop.org affiliate page.

Bookshop.org Affiliate

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Store Link

If you want to be a regular supporter, you can upgrade your subscription from free to paid and get occasional content only for paid subscribers.

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And thank you for supporting my journey 💗