Sarah B Anderson

Why Veteran’s Day This Year is Different

Posted by Sarah B Anderson | Nov 10, 2017 | Culture, Personal Growth | 0

I read two things this week that caught my attention. One said, “a sign that you’re an adult is when you start thinking on a spectrum, and not in binaries, when things move from being mutually exclusive and black and white ideals to more gray and more complicated.” The other said, “every day, 22 veterans commit suicide.” I could personally relate to the first thing. The past decade of life or so has been a slow move away from well-defined categories and towards more nuanced thinking. It has caused me to look at my faith differently, my politics differently,...

The One Thing We Can Agree On When Handling Tragedy

Posted by Sarah B Anderson | Nov 8, 2017 | Culture, Faith, Personal Growth | 0

I have spent the past several nights away from my phone. It wasn’t a decision I made myself. I think it went something like, me scrolling through my twitter feed, occasionally stopping, and speaking, with an elevated blood pressure dictating the words coming out of my mouth, fueled by anger, frustration, and all kind of swirling emotion, my husband listening calmly, and then reaching over and taking the phone from my hands. “What?” “You need to be done.” So I was, done, this scenario repeating itself several times over the course of a week. The problem Sunday night, when...

Northern Ireland: On Walls

Posted by Sarah B Anderson | Oct 26, 2017 | Culture, Faith, Personal Growth | 0

Before we left on our trip, we were told how charming the people of Ireland were. That we should hit the local pubs and, if we spent more than 30 minutes there, we would walk out with the names and numbers of our new best friends, and an invitation to come back and visit. From our first ride in the cab in Belfast, we knew everything we had heard was true. The people were charming. Their friendliness, irresistible. They were down to earth, eager to connect and so very thankful that we would visit their piece of the world,...

Wrangling Respect

Posted by Sarah B Anderson | Sep 28, 2017 | Culture, Parenting, Personal Growth | 0

A couple of weeks ago, as we were creeping towards the end of summer—and the end of the pool being open—we loaded up with the cooler, the pool bag, the inflatable raft, the circular tubes, the goggles, the towels, the books and the sunscreen, and made our way to the neighborhood pool where a new lifeguard was on duty. We unloaded our stuff, my boys patiently waiting at our circular table for the adult swim time to end. “Your boys are going to have to do a swim test, so I can make sure thy are okay to jump...

The Nashville Statement and the State of the Church

Posted by Sarah B Anderson | Aug 30, 2017 | Culture, Faith | 1

A couple of months ago my husband and I got in a big fight. We both stated our positions and why we felt the way we did. We both had solid evidence to back up why we thought our opinion was correct. We used tangible examples and well thought out reasoning and still, we were at impasse. Round and round we went, the cyclical argument going nowhere. But even though it was clear we were never going to land on the same page, I couldn’t stand not having closure—meaning, I couldn’t stand not having him on my side, seeing...