...and if we are strong enough to be weak enough, we are given a wound
                       which never heals. it is the gift that keeps the heart open.
                                                             ~oriah mountain dreamer


I was a girl of nineteen when my heart was first broken. Time brings healing, they said. In some ways, they were right...but in other ways, I feel like ever since that first heartbreak my heart is being broken over, and over, and over again.

I do not think this is a bad thing.

Painful, yes. But as my heart breaks for the hurting, the abused, those who themselves are broken, I also feel my heart open. I feel in it the song of the One who has given me this strange gift, to be broken and yet whole.

It was that summer when I was a girl of nineteen that my worlds began to shift. I came to know Christ at a young age, and grew up in various non-denominational Christian churches, moving around enough that I experienced many different versions of the church. I was homeschooled. These things lent themselves to various conservative - and often legalistic - interpretations of spiritual life. The summer my heart was broken, I began moving into a different spiritual life. One that doesn't always make sense (as the rigid interpretations of my past had attempted to do) - one which is full of pain - one in which A+B does not necessarily equal C. And yet one in which there was life...much life.

Life, I have discovered, is often found in brokenness. This blog is where I work out what it means to live, to be broken, to love. It is my record, my way of remembering, my way of keeping my heart open. I am a writer, a violinist, a budding photographer...a wife of three years to the most amazing man in the world...a daughter, a teacher, a friend.

Thank you for visiting, and I hope you stay awhile and share your heart with me. That's what it's all about, isn't it?