I like the word “disheveled”. It makes me think of people who aren’t perfect. People who don’t take themselves too seriously. People who accept this about themselves and are the better for it.

I also like theology, though not in a capital T kind of way, a “Let’s have deep conversations about eschatology while we drink black coffee” kind of way. I’m more of a “What have your kids taught you about God recently?” kind of theologian.

That’s because I like stories.

Here’s my story:

I live across the street from Iowa, in the middle of cornfields, and soybeans, where ‘possums slink along the edge of the house, questing for supper, and everybody eats lutefisk at Christmas, or at least they pretend to.

I live with my husband, an engineer, whom I married because I didn’t want to be a starving writer living in a garret, subsiding on nothing but oatmeal and shivering through the Minnesota winters as starving artists are wont to do.

That and I loved him. Love still. Present tense.

We live on a gravel road which sometimes gets plowed in the winter and sometimes does not, meaning that it was a good thing that our youngest child was born two weeks early because otherwise she’d have been born at home in the middle of a snow storm in which neither Iowa nor Minnesota were able to get to our road until three days after the storm hit, meaning that all the Y2K dried milk I had stored up came in very handy.

Just kidding. But we did contemplate using my grandparents’ freeze dried strawberries which they’d bought masses of in the 1950’s to line the walls of their bomb shelter and which we found, decades later, perfectly preserved and ready to fight the Red Menace.

True story.

Like I said, I like stories. The kinds I like best are the kinds where the stories lead to God, and not to me.

Where do your stories lead you?

That’s a question I embrace whenever I sit down to write my newspaper column, The Disheveled Theologian, and it’s a question I have addressed repeatedly as I’ve worked on turning my columns into a book. A book of parables, of a sort.

A parable is a story with a purpose. My purpose is to show people that God isn’t as far away as maybe they thought he was. I don’t mean that he’s lurking around every corner ready to pounce, but rather that we can be aware of his presence through things as ordinary as rays of light breaking through the clouds or a family of geese strolling along a busy road.

It’s about applying Bible verses to ordinary experiences. About finding Biblical truth in any story we tell.

I have had the privilege of writing The Disheveled Theologian column for six years now and it’s nothing short of a joy whenever people come up to me and tell me how much they enjoy reading it.

Our three children think it’s awkward but cool when complete strangers come up to me and tell me they liked my column or when the lunch lady, in the middle of plopping a big helping of mashed potatoes onto their lunch tray, says, “Tell your mom that I agree with her about the geese,” and they just nod their heads and say, “Ok,” and then they come home and tell me, “You know that lunch lady with the red hair? She likes your stuff.” And I’m left wondering if there’s a secret society of lunch ladies who read the newspaper during their breaks and how I could possibly fit that in with God, maybe, somehow, perhaps.

Because I’m always thinking of good stories to tell from my life and figuring out how I can apply a Bible verse to it. I look at it a little bit like canning. Only instead of preserving fruits and vegetables I’m preserving words.

It is my prayer that those words will always lead to finding God in the ordinary moments of life. Moments like when I accidentally forgot about the sliced almonds I was toasting in the toaster oven and they caught fire and then in my panic I opened the toaster door, thereby making the fire exponentially larger, thereby needing to quickly unplug it and throw it into the (mercifully empty) sink and then, ultimately, into the garbage.

Moments like that. When I can tell the story and then thank God for sparing our entire house from burning down and I can find a verse that applies and give thanks to God for saving us because how would I ever replace my egg cup collection if our house had burned down?

I think that Proverbs 3:25-26 would apply nicely in this scenario. “Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked, for the Lord will be at your side and will keep your foot from being snared.”

He’ll keep our feet from being snared and he kept my home from being burned by toasted almonds and for that I am extremely thankful.

(And yes, I really do have an egg cup collection.)

My egg cups and I have lived in Minnesota for more than 26 years now, but prior to that I moved around like a crazy person for a few years and before that I lived for 15 years on an island in Washington State.

When I was 8 months old my dad was layed off from his job as a pilot with Pan American World Airways and my parents packed up and moved diagonally across the nation as far as you could possibly go from Miami, Florida, to Orcas Island, in the northern end of Puget Sound.

That’s right: We went from one kind of paradise to a very different one. One where hippies reigned. But my parents weren’t hippies. They were regular, church-going folk, fond of gardening and classical music. And they raised my two sisters and me to love God and play the piano because those two things seem to go hand in hand.

We lived at the top of a 90 foot cliff overlooking the ocean, where orca whales roamed past our deck, bald eagles roosted in our trees, and Mt. Baker, on our horizon, steamed from it’s volcanic depths to remind us that we were just little people, after all, in God’s wide plan.

And that’s how I came to understand that God shows up in little ways, all the time. He was with me when we moved off the island to Central Oregon for 11 months, he was with me when Dad was then recalled to Pan Am, 14 years after being laid off, and we moved to West Berlin, West Germany. He was with me when I went off to the University of Oregon for college, when I moved to the Mid West a few years later, when I went to work at a Bible camp one summer in northern Minnesota, met my future husband, went to Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, got married, moved to Southwest Minnesota, and had our three children.

In the midst of all that regular, everyday stuff, God never stopped showing up. And now, living on the edge of the prairie where whales and mountains are far, far away, I still see God show up in the craziness of everyday life. In the little things my kids do and the little things I forget to do. In the surrounding fields of corn and the 10,000 frozen Minnesota lakes.

And it is good.

And I am thankful beyond words that I’m here getting ready to share my parables with the world.

Thanks for tuning in.