Tell Me Your Story
/It’s how my favorite podcast by Brene Brown always starts- “Tell me your story…” It’s a question so simple and yet so profound. What details does the guest include? What big moments get only a mention while other details get elaborated on? I’m beginning to think that how we tell our stories, and what we choose to say, changes depending on our audience and our season of life. The things I would have included five years ago are far different from what I would say now. And so, as a practice of self-reflection and examination, I give you my story.
Chapter 1: Prologue
I am a fourth-generation Californian.
All four of my grandparents were born and raised in California during the Great Depression. Their childhoods, both beautiful and painful, shaped the adults they became and the children they raised. My mom was the youngest of four siblings, my dad was the oldest of three. Both were raised in White, Christian families surrounded by nearly all-white worlds in rural, Northern California. I am the oldest granddaughter by more than a decade on one side and the youngest by almost two decades on the other. The huge age gaps meant that I understood myself all on my own as if I was a product of my own making. It took me decades to understand how wrong that assumption was.
What I didn’t know as a child was the way that my loving, wonderful parents were inheritors of both the privileges and traumas their parents had passed on to them. My paternal great-grandmothers both died when their children were young, leaving my grandparents with no mothers to raise them. They grew up with loving fathers but no language to describe or understand their feelings. They taught their children to care for the land and their tools but not one another. My family still struggles with the language of emotion and I have spent years in counseling coming to develop my own.
Chapter 2: Childhood
When I was a child, my family moved to Salem, Oregon where my younger brother was born. In many ways, my childhood was what I would wish for all children— free of burdens, filled with hours spent playing with neighborhood children in the summer, trips to the family farm, and plenty of presents under the Christmas tree. My mom and dad met when they were living in Italy and Samoa, respectively, and travel was a part of my life from the very beginning. My parents took me backpacking for the first time when I was only two weeks old and across the world when I was just a year old. I learned to walk in Italy and was on my second passport by the time I was in first grade.
My world was small and I liked it that way. You can be a big, bossy fish in a small pond. Growing up in Salem, I had two worlds- my evangelical church and my public schools. I knew almost no other Christians, so I assumed that all other Christians worshipped and believed exactly the same way I did. My church gave me great love and taught me to love others, but it wasn’t until adulthood that I understood the harm it did me as well. The core theology that I internalized as a teenager was, “if the people around you don’t convert to Christianity and worship Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior then they are going to hell and it will be your fault.” The anxiety that theology caused me is incalculable and I mourn for my teenage self who always worried she was eternally letting her friends down.
I wanted so badly to be a good Christian. I wanted not only to do everything right but to believe all the right things. I remember walking into my youth pastor’s office in high school and saying, “Okay. Tell me again why it’s wrong to be gay.” I knew what I was supposed to believe, but I also knew that it didn’t make sense with the wonderful people in my life, from my lesbian theatre teacher to my theatre friends who confessed to me in secret that they were gay. Why is this wrong? I couldn’t make sense of it.
Much of my teenage years passed this way— internally trying to make sense of my faith and the world around me. I loved my honors classes, volunteered at church, and was in every single play at my high school. I didn’t understand politics or have the language to understand the core beliefs that were taking root within me.
Chapter 3: College
And then, I went to college. For the first time, my world exploded with nuance and understanding. Somehow, the world got more complicated and I started to find the answers that I had been looking for. At Seattle Pacific University, I learned about the Israel-Palestine conflict and truly read Isaiah 58 for the first time. I heard the phrase “school to prison pipeline” and described myself as a feminist. And that was just as a freshman. In college, I was exposed to Christians who worshipped and believed in radically different ways than I did and they were all still Christians. The diversity of the church was so exciting to me and I realized I could still be a Christian without believing all the things I was once taught.
SPU wasn’t perfect and I have more than enough cringe-worthy memories of my time as a college student, but I think that’s just a part of growing up. I remember constantly wondering if I would meet my future husband at college (ironically, I did meet him there but didn’t realize it until 8 years after I met him). During college, I studied abroad in Palestine, got involved in student government, lost a race for Student Body President by a handful of votes, and found my way to a dorky Presbyterian Church that was the only church in the neighborhood with a female head pastor.
Chapter 4: Church
It was at that church that I first encountered liturgy and the liturgical calendar. I loved the unpretentious worship that felt so different than the hipster, “attractional” churches made up of all 22-year-olds that I had previously attended. These people didn’t care if they looked cool in church (which is good, because they definitely didn’t) and it was in those pews that I began to find my home. One Sunday, I saw a job opening in the bulletin for a Middle School Coordinator and I told them in my interview, “I love middle schoolers and I love organizing.” The job was mine.
Little did I know that job and those students would change the course of my life. I went from being a 21-year-old college student with lots of energy but not much experience to a real leader in my church. I was given opportunities to preach and influence other areas of the church beyond the youth department. I realized my students saw me as their pastor and holy shit, I wanted them to. Leaving them to go to Seminary was one of the most bittersweet decisions of my life. As it turns out, saying goodbye to a church is almost always bittersweet.
Chapter 5: Seminary
My years in Seminary grew and stretched me in all sorts of ways. I chose Columbia Theological Seminary because I wanted to be in a different culture in the US and there’s nothing more different from the PNW than the Deep South. It was in Atlanta that I gained a new perspective on the land and the people I’d left behind. I’d expected every stereotype to be true but what I learned was that racism and white supremacy take many different forms. In all my years of public school in Oregon, I was constantly told “we aren’t racist- the South is racist! They had slaves!” What my teachers failed to mention was that Oregon didn’t have slavery because they didn’t allow Black people to even move to the state! Oregon was the KKK’s model state- a world without black people. My hometown had a sign at the rail station until the 1960s that read, “Welcome to Salem, 99.9% white and proud of it.” But of course, it took moving to Georgia to learn all that.
Seminary was a strange and wonderful season of life for me. After 3 years of working in ministry, seminary felt like weirdly selfish time. Every decision I made- what classes to take, where to attend church, what to make for dinner- was solely based on what I wanted. I’m glad I realized then what a weird, privileged, temporary season of life it was. I have aways been a naturally good student and seminary was no exception. I loved learning (except perhaps for biblical languages!) and was supported well by staff and faculty. When it came time to do my hospital chaplaincy internship, I thought to myself, “Vermont sounds nice in the summer” and so that’s where I went. My religiously-diverse cohort helped stretch me as I learned how to sit patiently with others.
In my last year of seminary, I spent 5 months living and studying in the Czech Republic at Charles University. I didn’t realize it then, but those months were some of the final great adventures of my single life. I traveled with friends, family, and alone. I ate new foods, made dear friends, and learned in a completely new context. I loved being single and all the autonomy and freedom it provided me. In my time in seminary, I traveled to 16 countries and every state on the Eastern seaboard. I am proud of how I spent that time, especially now that that season of life has ended.
After seminary, I knew I wanted to go straight into a job as an associate pastor. I couldn’t stay at my seminary apartment and I wasn’t about to haul my belongings all the way across the country to live at my parents’ house until finding the perfect job, so I was open to moving anywhere. I ended up accepting a call in Dayton, Ohio, which was a state I’d never even been to until my interview. I bought a house and got ready to move at the end of the summer after graduation, after spending one last summer back in the Pacific Northwest.
Chapter 6: First Call
So, naturally, that’s when I fell in love with my future husband, who had just bought a house in Tacoma the same week I bought mine in Dayton. David and I knew each other from college (two of our best friends and former roommates are married and we were in their wedding together), but we never really crossed each other’s radars. Certainly not romantically. But in 2019, things changed and we began to talk long-distance and I found myself looking forward to his calls and texts more than anyone else’s. While I was in Washington that summer, we started spending time together and eventually dating. By the end of the summer, I was moving to Ohio with a long-distance boyfriend I was pretty sure was going to be in my life indefinitely.
The first few months of my call as an Associate Pastor in Ohio were hard. I quickly learned that my seminary’s approach to preparing pastors was woefully lacking. When I was a student, CTS tried to lure in two kinds of students- those who wanted to be pastors and those who wanted to go to seminary for other reasons- but provided only one track for studies. This meant that neither group had their academic and vocational needs met and I felt those gaps acutely. I wasn’t prepared to navigate change, moderate conflicts with people three times my age, or understand how a church budget influences ministry priorities. Those lessons came with a high cost and I struggled to find my footing alone in a new city.
In December, David proposed and we officially began planning for our life together. We had dreams of a big wedding surrounded by all our friends and family in Seattle and then spending the next few years living together in Dayton. And then, of course, March 2020 came around and our whole world changed. There would be no big wedding. In the end, we managed to have a small ceremony with our few closest friends and immediate family, which was a beautifully bittersweet day. We started our life together in Ohio during the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic, which meant we had few friends and difficult jobs.
Our first year of marriage was hard. It took us a long time to build a community of friends since we were so focused on pandemic safety. It wasn’t until we adopted our dog Penny that we began to make friends. Our jobs as a teacher and a pastor were stripped of nearly all the most life-giving parts and it made living so far from family even harder. By Christmas, we were ready to be open to new ideas. When I brought David home to the Nile family farm in Mount Shasta for Christmas, we began dreaming of what life could be like if we moved there to help take care of the farm and my Grandma. By the end of January, we had decided to move, although I wouldn’t tell the church till May.
Chapter 7: Coming Home
Moving back to the West Coast was, without a doubt, the best decision we could have made. David and I come alive in the mountains and living just a few minutes from hiking, swimming, and skiing has been both a literal and figurative breath of fresh air. Small town life isn’t all glamorous and we won’t be in Mount Shasta forever, but it has been the right place for our little family at this time. I started an MBA program part-time online while living in Ohio and moved to full-time in the fall. An online grad program is certainly different than in-person, but I loved stretching my brain in new ways. I particularly loved learning about human resources and all the elements of business that make work a better place for employees. I’m now extremely passionate about helping churches develop theology-driven personnel policies to hire and retain good staff members. Treating employees well seems to be harder than it sounds for most churches and I would love to use my church and business training to help churches live out their values.
In December of 2021, my husband and I found out that we were pregnant. We’d barely been trying, so it came as a bit of a surprise. Nine months is both a very long and very short amount of time. I’ve been extremely lucky to have a complication-free pregnancy and have been able to remain active throughout each trimester. Applying for jobs while finishing my MBA didn’t quite turn out how I expected and so as I entered my third trimester, we decided to put the job search on hold until after the baby arrives and our family finds a new equilibrium. I never imagined my life without formal work for an extended period of time, but I’m doing my best to enjoy the freedom it brings.
Chapter 8: What’s Next?
That brings me to who I am today— a passionate thinker, a wife, a preacher, a soon-to-be-mom, an artist, a friend, a dog owner, a granddaughter, a hiker, and so much more. I don’t know what the next few years of my life will look like, which both scares and excites me. David and I have dealt with constant transitions since getting married two years ago and we’re both ready for the next season of life to have more stability and consistency. We both want to find work that excites and enlivens us as well as time to enjoy life with our growing family. There are a thousand ways we can do that, but we have no clue which path we will end up on. The story of my life is far from finished, but I am grateful for each chapter that has led me to this one.
