Like many folks, I've spent a lot of time this week keeping up with coverage of the horrific tornadoes that hit Moore, Oklahoma. As I looked through pictures in this article at the Daily Mail, it literally took my breath away to see the wreckage of the town, which one local described as "scorched earth." With tears in my eyes I remembered when an F5 tornado leveled a neighborhood five miles away from where I lived in 1997, and knew with a sense of dread that the pictures did not even come close to capturing the devastation.

In a temporary lapse of judgment, I scrolled down to the comments section of the Daily Mail article. One never expects open comboxes to be bastions of charity and...READ MORE

A while back I found myself at a social event where I didn't know many people, and I decided to try an experiment:

For the first half of the event, when anyone asked the common icebreaker question, "What do you do?" I would answer accurately and say, "I'm a stay-at-home mom."

For the second half of the event, when anyone asked the same question I would reply by saying, "I'm a writer." That description of myself felt like a bit of a stretch, since I spend 90% of my waking hours right now doing anything but writing, but I went ahead and owned that title for the event as part of my experiment.

Sure enough, by the end of the evening, the experience confirmed something I've long...READ MORE

A few weeks ago, our front door broke. The handle became completely useless, to the point that there was no way at all to open the door. It was like Introvert Christmas. Salespeople, Jehovah's Witnesses, neighborhood kids and a few other folks all came knocking on my door, and I had a legitimate excuse not to interact with them. "I'M SORRY, MY DOOR IS BROKEN!" I'd shout from inside my house. "YOU'LL HAVE TO COME BACK LATER."

My husband finally fixed the door after a couple of days of this, bringing my exciting foray into the life of a recluse to an abrupt end. On some of my more overwhelming days, like the afternoon when the baby's nap was interrupted twice by loud knocks at the door, I...READ MORE

It's been an interesting year here at the Fulwiler household (and by "interesting" I mean "absolutely insane, mostly in a bad way"). First, I was diagnosed with pulmonary embolism (blood clots) in both lungs while I was 24 weeks pregnant, which left me hospitalized for the better part of a week and extremely tired and short of breath for the rest of the pregnancy. Then, as the baby's due date approached, I was back in the hospital to have a filter put in a major vein to prevent any clots that might form during labor from traveling to my lungs and heart; to everyone's frustration, especially mine, the doctor realized midway through the procedure that it wouldn't be possible, so it was all...READ MORE

I didn't do much for Lent this year. As anyone who's followed the whining over at my personal blog knows, 2013 has already brought me a veritable cornucopia of opportunities for detachment from worldly pleasures and redemptive suffering, so I knew better than to push myself to try to take on much more. However, as proof that God blesses even the most minuscule efforts of his weakest children, some of my smallest sacrifices from this season have borne more fruit than the much larger ones I undertook in previous years. In fact, despite my inability to "do" much at all, I'm coming out of this Lent with a renewed perspective on my relationship with God -- and the things I tend to put before...READ MORE

On an April day in 2005, my husband and I turned on the television to watch some show, but the program had been interrupted by coverage of the funeral of Pope John Paul II. I switched to another channel, but that one was broadcasting the same thing. I lifted the remote to turn off the TV, but my husband told me to pause. "Wait. Look at this," he said.

The cameras panned over the crowds, which seemed to have no end. I'd never seen so many people gathered in one place, and marveled at the endless variety of ethnicities and nationalities represented. It was like one of those intergalactic conventions in a sci-fi movie: There were nuns and monks wearing strange (to me) habits, people...READ MORE

"God is love." I heard the phrase countless times when I was growing up. Even as an atheist, I couldn't avoid the concept: I'd see it on youth group pamphlets, bumper stickers, and the occasional Precious Moments figurine. It certainly didn't have any impact on me as a nonbeliever, and even when I began to research religion I didn't think much about it. The way I interpreted the phrase, it seemed to be a nice, throwaway statement that believers used to describe their deity: God (that Guy we believe in who's kind of like a dad, only nicer) is love (meaning he's really, really, really loving).

It was only late in the conversion process that I came to see that I entirely misunderstood the...READ MORE