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How to want what God wants before you know what it is.

I am a Roman Catholic Christian. A “God person,” according to the not-so-into-God kid who called me that when we were students at the Protestant school I attended for fifth through twelfth grades.

Church is my jam. I pray. I underline stuff in the Bible. I believe that God is good, that providence is real, that Jesus is my homeboy – you know, the whole bit. So you can imagine my own surprise the night I realized that I had never actually wanted what God wants for me.

Click here to read the rest of this post, which I wrote for a vocation/calling series on fellow author Tyler Braun’s blog.

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Conquer yourself each day from the very first moment.

While I drove back to work from home one day last week after my lunch break, I vented by phone to my friend Leah Darrow: “I have so much to do, and no time to do it.”

She gets it. She is also a writer and a speaker. She has as much writing and speaking to do, plus a husband and two kids. While we commiserated, she asked a question I didn’t expect: Continue reading “Conquer yourself each day from the very first moment.”

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The ‘morality clause’ controversy calls for fortitude.

While I read several news stories out of San Francisco last week, I felt sick. The general public, they said, led by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, had picked a fight with the Catholic Church.

A clause had caused a controversy. Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, had announced the plan to add it to the faculty handbooks at archdiocesan high schools. In multiple paragraphs, the clause says that adults who work for the schools — which, to be clear, are Catholic schools — are supposed to uphold Catholic teaching.

In an op-ed he wrote last week, Dennis Herrera, San Francisco’s city attorney, called the clause “a chilling directive.” It requires teachers, he said, “to ‘conform their hearts, minds and consciences, as well as their public and private behavior’ to tenets of church teaching that include ‘chastity’ and ‘abstinence from all sexual intimacy outside of marriage.'”

To which Herrera, and the Board of Supervisors, and hundreds of Catholic school teachers in San Francisco essentially said, “How dare you?” Continue reading “The ‘morality clause’ controversy calls for fortitude.”

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What I learned about God by giving a sex talk to teens.

I couldn’t see their faces. So I smiled at the silhouettes of the sixth through twelfth graders who sat silently on the bleachers while I stood in the spotlight.

As a chastity speaker (and writer), my target audience never has been teens or tweens. But I stood last Wednesday morning in the mostly dark gymnatorium at a private, Protestant Christian school — the same gym in which I graduated from fifth, eighth and twelfth grades, 18, 15, and 11 years ago, respectively.

And in my head, I kept saying “this is weird.” Weird to be in this room, in front of these kids, on this morning, doing what I would not have guessed I’d ever do when during my eight years as a student there, I sat in those same bleachers.

When I got the invitation to speak, I was totally game. I was honored. Moved, even, because I’m Catholic and we’re talking about a school that circulated anti-Catholic Bob Jones and Jack Chick literature until my parents and I asked them not to.  Continue reading “What I learned about God by giving a sex talk to teens.”

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5 important lessons to learn from ‘Old Fashioned’

WHO DIDN’T SEE FIFTY SHADES THIS WEEKEND? This girl! I, did, however, see the film Old Fashioned — a PG-13 alternative strategically released the same weekend. I didn’t hate it.

The movie is about Clay (Rik Swartzwelder) and Amber (Elizabeth Ann Roberts), whose worlds collide when her truck runs out of gas in his neighborhood. There, with her gas tank as her only guide, she — romantically albeit unrealistically — decides to rent an apartment.

The apartment belongs to Clay, the quiet owner of the antiques shop beneath it. She thinks he’s a prude. He thinks he’s prudent. (And yes, there is a difference). She’s flirty. He doesn’t sleep with the women he dates. The plot thickens while their attraction to each other kindles a unique relationship and their pasts threaten to extinguish it.

I won’t tell you how it ends. But I will tell you what we who watch it can learn from it: Continue reading “5 important lessons to learn from ‘Old Fashioned’”