I’ve never really fit neatly into one box.

For a long time, I thought I was supposed to.

Pick the right labels. Know what I believed. Know who I was. Know what was right and wrong. Be consistent. Be understandable. And preferably don’t change your mind too much once everyone has gotten comfortable with the version of you they already know. 😂

I was pretty good at that for a while.

Or at least I was pretty good at trying.

But if you’re new here—and a lot of you are—I should probably tell you something about me:

My life has not followed a particularly straight line.

I’m an author who never planned on becoming an author.

I spent years in ministry. I was a community pastor. I worked with people in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives. After losing my son, Cole, I eventually became a hospital chaplain, sitting beside other families as they faced illness, death, impossible decisions and grief of their own.

Faith was once at the center of nearly everything I understood about myself and the world.

Today, my spirituality looks nothing like it once did.

That didn’t happen overnight. And it certainly didn’t happen because I woke up one morning and decided it would be fun to blow up everything I believed. 😂

Life asked questions that my old answers could no longer hold.

So I started asking different questions.

My Life Has Surprised Me

I married my high school sweetheart, Trent, and this year we celebrated 37 years of marriage.

Thirty-seven years.

There are things about the two teenagers who fell in love all those years ago that I still recognize completely.

And there are things about the people we are today that those two kids could never have imagined.

Somewhere along the way, our marriage became anything but traditional. Our ideas about relationships changed. Our ideas about sexuality changed. Our understanding of ourselves changed.

We’ve had to learn how to let each other grow without requiring that we grow in exactly the same direction.

And then, because apparently my life wasn’t interesting enough already, our unconventional relationship ended up on reality television. 😂

That was definitely not on the high-school-sweetheart bingo card.

Neither was writing a book.

Neither was moving across the country.

Neither was discovering parts of myself in my 50s that I didn’t even know were waiting to be discovered.

And honestly, I kind of love that.

There Are a Lot of Versions of Me

I’ve been a wife for most of my adult life.

I’m a mother.

I’ve been a pastor and a chaplain.

I’ve been the person other people came to when their lives were falling apart.

I’ve also been the person whose own life was falling apart.

I’ve known profound love and devastating grief. I’ve buried a child. I’ve lost relationships I thought would always be part of my life. I’ve watched beliefs that once gave me security become beliefs I could no longer live inside.

I’ve started over more than once.

And somehow, I’m also the woman who loves getting dressed up, being sexy, traveling, laughing until my stomach hurts, meeting interesting people, having conversations that go way deeper than anyone expected, and occasionally making choices that would probably shock several previous versions of myself. 😂

All of those women are me.

I don’t need to choose between them anymore.

I Love the Questions

If you spend much time around me, you’ll probably discover pretty quickly that I’m fascinated by people.

I want to know why.

Why do we believe what we believe?

Why do we stay?

Why do we leave?

Why do we hide parts of ourselves?

Why are some people able to change their minds while others cling more tightly to what they’ve always known?

Why do we judge things we don’t understand?

What happens when the life we’re actually living no longer fits the story we’ve been told we’re supposed to live?

I can happily spend hours talking about grief, religion, relationships, sexuality, shame, healing, family dynamics, human behavior or what makes us feel truly known.

And then I can immediately switch gears and become deeply invested in whether I packed the right shoes for a vacation. 😂

Both are important.

Okay, perhaps not equally important.

But you get the idea.

I’ve Changed My Mind

This may be one of the most important things to know about me.

I have changed my mind about a lot of things.

Things I once believed deeply.

Things I once taught.

Things I once thought were unquestionably true.

Things I once judged because I didn’t understand them.

And I don’t see changing my mind as a failure anymore.

Sometimes changing our minds means we’ve learned something.

Sometimes we’ve met someone whose life doesn’t fit our assumptions.

Sometimes we’ve lived long enough to discover that the world is much more complicated than we were told.

Sometimes our own life becomes the thing that changes us.

I’m much more interested these days in curiosity than certainty.

I want to be able to say:

I don’t know.

Tell me more.

I hadn’t thought about it that way.

I used to believe that too.

I was wrong.

I’ve changed.

There is an incredible amount of freedom in those sentences.

Becoming Has Changed Meaning for Me

For a lot of my life, I thought becoming meant figuring out exactly who I was supposed to be—and then getting really good at being her.

Now I think becoming might be almost the opposite.

Maybe becoming is allowing ourselves to be complicated.

To change.

To discover.

To outgrow something without having to hate the person we were when it fit.

To say, That used to be true for me, but it isn’t anymore.

To be serious and sexy.

Strong and tender.

Deep and ridiculous.

Confident and still learning.

To know exactly what we want in one part of our lives and have absolutely no idea what we’re doing in another.

To belong to ourselves enough that we don’t have to make ourselves smaller just so we’re easier for other people to understand.

At 55, I don’t feel finished.

Thank God. 😂

Actually… given everything I’ve just told you, perhaps I should choose a different expression.

Thank goodness. 😂

Because I don’t want to be finished.

There are still places I haven’t been. People I haven’t met. Conversations I haven’t had. Things I haven’t tried. Stories I haven’t written. Parts of myself I haven’t discovered yet.

And there are probably things I believe today that I’ll understand differently ten years from now.

I hope so.

So, If You’re New Here…

You’re probably going to encounter a lot of different parts of me.

You’ll find the author.

The mother.

The woman who loved her son fiercely and had to learn how to keep living after he died.

The former pastor.

The woman who questioned the faith that once defined her.

The wife who has been married for 37 years and is still learning things about love.

The reality-TV personality whose actual life is considerably more complicated than what fits into an episode.

The woman who talks openly about relationships, sexuality, grief, belief, change and all the messy places where those things intersect.

And you’ll definitely find the woman who can make something serious inappropriate in approximately four seconds. 😂

I don’t want to flatten any of those parts into something easier to explain anymore.

And I don’t want to do that to other people either.

Because beneath all the labels and roles and beliefs and choices, I think what interests me most is the same thing:

The whole person.

The parts that make sense.

The parts that don’t.

The things we’ve survived.

The things we’re still healing.

The things we used to believe.

The things we’re brave enough to question.

The lives we’ve inherited.

And the lives we’re choosing now.

So yes, I’m still figuring out who I am.

I’m still changing.

I’m still becoming.

And after spending so much of my life believing I needed to arrive at the correct version of myself…

I think not being finished might be one of my favorite things about being alive. ❤️