Lisa notes

Find the Hidden Clues: Be a One Word Photo Sleuth
{One Word 2024 May Linkup}

Link all of your ONE WORD blog posts below. Share an update about your One Word in the comments.

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Monthly Challenge: Take Photos

Do you have a phone? Or a camera? Then you are equipped for this month’s One Word challenge!

Be a One Word photo sleuth.

Look all around you for hints of your word. Find them in objects, people, or places. Snap a photo of these things. Include yourself in at least one of the photos!

The more you look for your word, the more you’ll find it.

Photos with My One Word: Curiosity

Jeff and I vacationed at the beach last week. Here are 3 photos of things that sparked my curiosity while we were there.

1. EXCAVATOR ON THE BEACH

I’ve never seen an excavator on the beach before. After storms had shifted sand around, clogging up the outlet that connects nearby Lake Powell with the Gulf of Mexico, this excavator spent the morning returning the sand back where it belonged so that water could exchange freely again between the ocean waters from the Gulf and the coastal dune waters from Lake Powell.

2. GABBY, THE UNUSUAL ANIMATRONIC

One of our favorite restaurants in Panama City Beach is Angelo’s Steak Pit. Their steaks never disappoint. But what has always been curiously strange to me is Gabby, an animatronic they’ve had for years in the lobby of the restaurant. Gabby used to talk to you as you walked past him. He always startled our daughters when they were young. Now he’s mute, but he’s still a bit creepy even in his silence.

3. A VERY, VERY CLOSE BIRD

What you can’t see in the photo is the wild bird that was practically on our heads as we walked out of dinner at Pompano Joe’s in Pier Park. He was sitting very close on a wire above our heads, screaming his little lungs out nonstop, apparently oblivious to the customers that were walking all around him. We stood there for a few minutes and he never let up.

Share Your Photos and Comments

Stay aware this month. And share. We’d love to see where you find your One Word. If you blog, share a post with the photos you take at our blog linkup here.

Also, tell us about your One Word in the comments.

Next Linkup

This One Word linkup will remain open for 2 weeks for your One Word posts, closing at midnight on Friday, June 7. Link as many posts as you’d like about your One Word. Each link will also be shared in our One Word Facebook group.

Our June linkup will open on Monday, June 24 (and on the 24th of each month for 2024).

If you’d like to receive our monthly One Word emails and ideas, join here any time of the year.

May you find your One Word as often as you seek it.

What is your One Word for 2024? Where have you seen it? Leave a comment here.

Get more One Word ideas here

Link Up About Your One Word!

The Exvangelicals: If You’re Curious About Why They’re Leaving the Evangelical Church

By LisaNotes May 21, 2024 Book reviews, Church 15 Comments

Statistics consistently show that more and more people in the U.S. are leaving their churches. Some change religions, some change denominations, and some leave faith behind altogether.

But do you know why?

It may not be why you think.

This is what Sarah McCammon writes about in her new book, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church.

McCammon was once all-in among the evangelical culture. She grew up with a sincere Christian faith in a deeply evangelical family. But bit by bit, the questions and doubts she had about her own beliefs as well as about the Christian world around her grew too loud to ignore.

She discovered she was not alone. She writes that people leaving conservative religious communities (“exvangelicals” emerged as a common hashtag in 2016) are “finding ample resources, a widening array of spaces for dialogue around deconstruction, and new opportunities for building communities around this shared experience.”

But why are they leaving?

There’s no single, simple answer. McCammon writes:

“For many of the exvangelicals I’ve met, those Christian spaces feel less and less like home, and Jesus seems harder to find in them. And for some, following Jesus, or, at least the truth as they see it, means stepping out of those spaces—out of that ‘parallel universe’—and onto a new and unfamiliar path.”

As she points out in her book, everybody has their own story.

So if you really want to know why someone you know has left the church (or if you are that person yourself), have a conversation about it with them.

Don’t assume you know. Don’t buy into rumors floating around. Don’t read one article on a blog and think now you understand.

It’s often more complicated and nuanced than you’d imagine, including this explanation often used about them: that they leave the church so they can just please themselves and have a good time.

McCammon writes:

“The idea that people leave evangelicalism out of nothing more than a desire to ‘sin’ is frustrating to many of the people I interviewed—and to me.”

The Exvangelicals is full of first-hand stories as well as data from multiple research studies. McCammon, a national political correspondent for NPR, writes with clarity and grace, using her in-depth journalism skills to tell a complex story in an easily digestible way.

Instead of judging those who leave, listen to them talk about it. And if you can’t talk with someone in person about it, at least read books like McCammon’s to hear from the exvangelicals themselves.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

my thanks to NetGalley for
the review copy of this book

How Splashy Is Your Wave of Influence?

By LisaNotes May 17, 2024 Encouragement 19 Comments

Another ocean wave crashes into the surf. Line after line the waves come, one after the other.

For a brief moment in time, each wave receives its glory. The loud boom. The crackling splash. The dizzying chaos of bubbles and foam and water.

Who will make waves today? Whose influence will splash the farthest? Whose noise will capture the most attention?

We watch our numbers. How many followers and likes? Does the bathroom scale weigh more approvingly today than yesterday? Is the bank account cushioned sufficiently for goods now and later?

Are we popular enough? Do we have enough friends? Have we created enough fame or fortune to be remembered after our splash has been assimilated back into the ocean?

Even the flashiest, noisiest, most attention-worthy of us will only have a brief moment to spray. The thin 15 minutes of fame is only good for one, two, or three generations at best, and only a limited number of news cycles at most.

So why all the hustle to rise above the rest? Perhaps we should ride the wave we’re on and celebrate the splashes around us, knowing we’ll all quickly enough be returned to the ocean water just like every other drop. Each valued for what it is, yet more important as part of the whole. The whole of humanity. The whole of belonging. The whole of beauty and life and love for eternity.

Make your splash, my friend. But don’t try to cling to it. The wave won’t linger past its time. Its beauty is in its movement from here to there, then back to the ocean.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

What Can I Do? For Now, This Is My Something

By LisaNotes May 14, 2024 Compassion, My stories 15 Comments

Can I Ask You Something?

We chat outside her front door. It’s a normal Monday afternoon. She smiles and we make small talk until it’s time for me to move on to the next door.

But she asks me to hang back. She wants to ask me something.

I get nervous.

What if her ask is bigger than my give?
What if she needs something I don’t have?
Or if she asks for something I don’t want to give away?

It Turned Physical

We’ve known each other for a few years on a casual basis. Jenna and I stop by once a week to see if she and her husband would like a free meal off our cart. Sometimes we’ll swap a recipe. Or she has a gift she wants to give Jenna’s boy, my grandson.

It’s only been this year that we’ve swapped phone numbers. And she’s shared more of her life’s circumstances.

What now? I ask her what’s going on. She tells me there’s been a disagreement with a neighbor. Last night, it turned physical.

And now, after several years of living in the same apartment with no trouble, she and her husband are being evicted because of the fight with the neighbor.

My emotions go into high alert. I feel . . .

sad that my friend will be leaving,
angry at the neighbor for pushing her to the ground,
and still nervous about what she’s about to ask me next.

Now I Feel…

At last the question comes. She’s only asking if I know a place they can move to. I wish I did. I’d love to provide an answer, a solution. But I don’t have one.

Now I feel…helpless.

We talk a few more minutes. I offer what little encouragement I can. I tell her I believe her side of the story, that I can’t imagine her ever starting a fist fight. I tell her I’ll miss her when they leave.

She says she’ll give me their new address when they find a place. She’ll want updates and photos of my grandson so she can still see him grow up.

And then I walk away, feeling like I’ve done nothing. Sure, I’ll stay aware of housing options I might hear along the way. But that feels so small.

This Is My Something

Jenna and I finish our rounds at the apartment complex. We get back in the car. We haven’t even pulled out of the parking lot when my phone rings. It’s my friend. She says her husband wants to ask me something. I listen.

It’s the same request: do you know of anywhere we can live?

Again, I say I don’t know. I wish I did. I’ll let them know if I do.

And then we drive away.

I did nothing to help. All I did was listen. All I did was let them know I hurt, too. All I did was say I’d keep my ears open.

But maybe, for now, listening to someone’s pain in their own words, being a witness to the ache in their circumstance, is not nothing. It is something.

Just showing up alongside our friends, feeling emotions with them, and giving them our attention does count for something. I know it counts for a lot when someone does it for me.

I still wish I could offer my friend something more, such as an address for a new home to move to. But for now, I’ll just stand beside her once a week in her old home as long as she’s there.

It’s not much.

But for now, this is my something.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

revised from the archives

The Curiosity of Arguments: It Depends If It’s Yours or Mine

By LisaNotes May 10, 2024 Curiosity: One Word 2024 16 Comments

The two older gentlemen were amusing me. But they weren’t amusing each other.

Their volume was increasing. Their voices were losing their calm sheen. Their facts were volleyed back and forth to prove their own point right, and the other man wrong.

Along with several others, my husband Jeff and I had gathered at our local public library for an interesting presentation on the history of our town. The speaker traced it back to the indigenous peoples, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, up to current city growth.

But the stumbling block came when a date was questioned from the crowd. Exactly when was the elementary school for the African American kids built in the 1950s?

Gentleman A spoke up from the audience and said the school was built in 1949. Gentleman B countered with 1951.

“No,” Gentleman A said, “it was before 1950 because I joined the Air Force in 1950 and the school was already there.”

“Wrong,” Gentleman B said. “I was born in 1945. I attended school first at our Black church because the elementary school wasn’t built yet. Plus, I have lived across from that school all my life, so I oughta know.”

How easy it is to be entertained by the gentle arguments of others, especially when the crossfire doesn’t involve me.

But with my curiosity now piqued about who was right, I pulled out my phone and googled the school’s construction date.

Both men were wrong (well, assuming the article I found was accurate). The school had been built in 1953.

I smiled to myself, but kept my mouth closed. The meeting continued on.

After it ended, I stayed behind to chat with some fellow citizens from my youth. One woman commented on how close I had lived to the elementary school years ago.

“No,” I said. “I never lived close to the school. My family’s house was several streets over.”

“But not when you were really young,” she replied. “You lived by the school.”

I responded negatively one more time.

Then I realized what I was doing. It was the same thing I had seen the older gentlemen do just thirty minutes earlier.

When they were disagreeing over a fact, it was amusing. But now that I was doing it? It was annoying.

Catching myself right in the act was startling. My curiosity piqued again. How human of me to argue over minor details! The awareness of this common tendency among us all was enough to stop me in my tracks.

Instead, could I hold space in my imagination for amusement about my own disagreeableness? Could I allow curiosity to win the argument instead of insisting on being right?

Some facts can be proven as right or wrong. Where I once lived was a provable fact. But not right then and not right there.

Sometimes you just have to let things go for the greater good, and let memories remain a mysterious and curious thing.

I stopped arguing. And continued the conversation with the friend as if she were right. It had been a lovely evening. Why spoil it?

The importance of maintaining a relationship was stronger than winning an argument.

* * *

When I got home, I did text my siblings though. We never lived near the elementary school, right??? They agreed we did not. (Maybe I haven’t totally lost my mind yet.)

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Silent Escape: A Nun’s Journey from Confinement to Freedom

By LisaNotes May 7, 2024 Book reviews 11 Comments

A Leap of Faith: Joining the Convent

After Catherine Coldstream’s father died when she was just 24 years old, she felt unmoored, unsure which direction to go next in her life.

So she did what few do: she became a nun.

She joined the rigidly-tight community of sisters at Akenside Priory. In her memoir—Cloistered: My Years as a Nun—Catherine shares what it was like when she entered the confines of the basically silent monastery to live the Carmelite life. She took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience so that she could be married to God.

Parts of the monastic life went well for Catherine.

“The teachings were all so extreme, and the prevailing atmosphere of faith so powerful, that the material sacrifices came relatively easily, and seemed almost natural once you put your mind to it.”

The Downside of Monasticism

But bit by bit, life in the convent became suffocating.

“Both in and out of choir, eyes were to be kept lowered, and, like all the other senses, suitably restrained. We were to mind God’s business and our own, never other people’s.”

Being cut off from society wasn’t in itself horrible to her, but being cut off from even the people in her own small community was.

“It was odd. We were meant to be suffering, uniting our pains with those of our spouse, the great Redeemer of the world, but if ever you let on that you were in pain you were told to Pull Your Socks Up, and Get On With It, and – Elizabeth, I had now begun to notice, loved the words – not be such a Cry Baby.”

Sister Catherine longed for human touch, for human communication, for human joys. Instead, she was given distance, silence, and isolation. As the years went by, Catherine grew increasingly suppressed by the autocratic leadership of the Mother in charge and the cliques among the sisters.

“If I’d been able to be honest with myself, I would have admitted that my dream had turned into the beginnings of a nightmare.”

Shaking Loose the Shackles

Eventually what happened made her life torturous. After a decade of trying to make it work, Catherine decided she needed out, if she would remain sane.

“Psychologically, of course, things were far more complicated. No one felt genuinely free to leave at any point, however nominally enshrined the possibility might have been on paper.”

In the book, she details her frantic escape from the monastery, where she went next, and the plans she made afterward.

“After over a decade of straining for the highest monastic ideals (and being shocked when others didn’t) I’d broken one of the most fundamental of our rules, that of enclosure. I’d broken it, not out of laziness, or because I didn’t care, but because I cared too much.”

This is a fascinating true story of good intentions in a community gone bad, set in the backdrop of faith and the human spirit.

Share your thoughts in the comments.

My thanks to Netgalley
for the review copy of this book