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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Adventures in Odyssey: Moments Like These (written in 2008)

I would only have a few seconds with them, and those seconds had to matter, to mean something – if not to them, to me. After a lifetime of devoted fandom that has only increased as I’ve moved out of the target age range, and after months of anticipation, I looked forward to walking through the autograph line, but with a sort of trepidatious anxiety. How could I convey depth of feeling and gratitude in one handshake and a few words? Soon it would all be over, they would be greeting the next person, and I would have lost my chance to tell them how much they had impacted my life.

It was the 20th anniversary of Adventures in Odyssey that was fast approaching. This now-popular kids’ radio program had announced a “birthday bash” to commemorate this momentous occasion, the highlight of which would be a live show in Colorado Springs featuring a dozen of the actors.

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When You Say Goodbye

You hold out your autograph book, the one with the multicolored pages and the dinosaur cover, the one you got when you were a child. You hold it out with pride, not embarrassment, for the decade and a half of memories it carries — of names and notes, of crossed-out words and hard-to-read cursive. You’ve taken this book overseas twice, and you safeguard it in ever-increasing ways after each pen or pencil addition.

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I couldn’t be happier, right here...

All day, I’ve had “…because happy is what happens, when all your dreams come true” stuck in my head. And after I figured out where it was from (Wicked: "Thank Goodness"), I decided that another line from that song would fit well here, even though I didn't write this blog today or with that song in mind.

One late morning in August, three years ago, my dad and I pulled out of the driveway in my little gray car and headed east. We were Indiana-bound, but we had one important stop to make along the way.

Two days later, we were in Colorado Springs. This was my first time in Colorado. These were three of the best days of my life.

I was in Colorado Springs for the 20th anniversary of Focus on the Family’s much-beloved radio drama, Adventures in Odyssey.

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