Thirty, Flirty, and Falling: How Making an Audio Drama Saved My Life

My 30th year on earth was shaped by two forces. The first: A bad thing I did, a mistake I made that hurt people, myself included, and from which I’m still reeling. The second: A good thing I did, a story I lived and breathed and refashioned into an audio drama.

I have never fucked up as badly nor created anything as beautiful as I did this year.

One threatened to drown me, spiraling in the pain and mess of it all; the other kept lifting my head above the water and making me laugh and giving me something to love, something to fight for.

What is saving your life right now? It’s a question Barbara Brown Taylor asks in her book An Altar in the World. I’ve seen other bloggers answer this question, have answered it myself, but never before have I been so sure about what is killing me and what is saving me.

This year, what saved me was telling my story by telling someone else’s story, someone else who grew up evangelical, someone else who got depressed and drank too much, someone else who got hurt by people who claimed to speak for God and stopped seeing God altogether and felt so very, very alone.

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Night Driving: A Story of Faith in the Dark {a review & giveaway}

How do you know God is real?

Because you’ve felt him.

Until you don’t anymore.

Addie Zierman’s second book, Night Driving: A Story of Faith in the Dark, officially came into the world one week ago Tuesday. It arrived on my doorstep that night, and as I absorbed myself into it, I found myself within its pages. Like her first book, When We Were On Fire, it took me to familiar places, hard places, true places.

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When You Miss the Darkness

Is it strange that I miss the darkness that sucker-punched my soul?

This was four years ago. I was living overseas, six months split between two continents, saturated in Christian community that was young and fiery and expectant. I was young and fearful and depressed, but this was my chance. This could be my cure.

One day, we left our drafty English manor with its roast dinners and familiar faces and small groups for the Midlands, for Coventry, for Evangelism Week.

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The Unraveling

I am unraveling.

The illusion is broken: I can’t always trust myself. Sinking deep into the beats and even the palpitations of my own heart was always my saving grace, my peace and my candle and my anchor.

Maybe it’s just that I haven’t had enough time to sift and plunge into the clamoring silence with my bare hands. Maybe I didn’t go deep enough, maybe my eyes weren’t clear enough, maybe I wanted it too little, or too much. Or maybe not. Maybe it was always going to implode, no matter what I did or didn't do.

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