I was six years old the first time I felt it.
My early childhood had been hard in ways that don’t need explaining here, and my mom had brought me to sing in a gospel choir with her co-workers. Standing in that choir loft, swaying, breathing, feeling the harmony sung over me, I felt something I didn’t have a name for yet. A presence, a love that didn’t need me to earn it. I can still see the dust particles in the light from the stained glass windows. I can still feel the weight of my braid on my shoulder.
That was the moment I first felt the palpable presence of a God who loves me, knows me and desires to heal every wound. I felt this presence say, “You and your family are going to be ok.” and that presence was exactly right.
That moment is where my ministry began, even if I didn’t know it yet.
By thirteen I was preaching. My missionary grandparents saw gifts in me and began taking me with them as they served in orphanages, conferences and others churches where I would lead worship songs and preach throughout middle school and high school. By seventeen I was on paid church staff. I spent the next two decades in United Methodist ministry, from a pastoral internship through college and seminary, to eleven years as the full-time Children and Family Minister at First United Methodist Church in Winfield, Kansas. I founded Tuesday’s Table in 2008, a free weekly community meal that has served 80-100 lower-income guests every Tuesday for eighteen years and counting. I led retreats, managed 35 volunteers across five concurrent programs, and wrote original curriculum for multi-generational audiences.
The work I loved most, though, was always the pastoral work. The one-on-ones. The grieving parent at the end of a Sunday service. The volunteer quietly burning out. The teenager who didn’t have words for what she was carrying. Those conversations were the ones that stayed with me.
Since I was sixteen, I’d felt a clear call to ordained ministry. I became a certified candidate for ordination in the United Methodist Church and chose Bethel Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, in part because of its strong emphasis on curriculum writing and pastoral care, and in part because the format, two weeks on campus per quarter, meant I could keep my position at FUMC Winfield while I studied. Bethel was on the approved list of non-Methodist seminaries for the ordination track when I enrolled. It was removed from that list after my first year, and the UMC declined to grandfather existing students in.
That was a hard moment. But somewhere in sitting with it, I realized it was also clarifying. The closer I’d gotten to the ordination track, the more I could see that what energized me wasn’t running the institutional machinery of the church. It was the pastoral care. The curriculum. The volunteers nobody else had time to develop. I was a certified candidate who chose to step off, and I made that choice deliberately, completing my MA rather than transferring seminaries to chase a credential that would have pulled me away from the work I was actually called to do.
My graduate work at Bethel deepened that calling. I focused on pastoral care, curriculum development, and multi-generational ministry, and have spent the years since continuing that education through frameworks in trauma-informed care, Internal Family Systems, narrative identity theory, somatic psychology, and attachment theory. I didn’t pursue these modalities because they were trendy. I pursued them because the people sitting across from me needed more than I knew how to give, and I take that responsibility seriously.
During my years on staff at First United Methodist Church in Winfield, I assisted with weddings and funerals alongside our ordained clergy, doing the pastoral work those moments require while the official rites remained, appropriately, in ordained hands. What I noticed was that even after I left professional ministry to launch my coaching business, people kept finding me. Friends. Family. People who knew what I could hold. So I became ordained through the Universal Life Church, not as a statement about institution, but as a practical way to say yes to the invitations that kept coming. I’ve officiated weddings and funerals in that capacity ever since.
I’ve thought about that pattern a lot. Every time I’ve stepped away from ministry with a title, the ministry itself has followed me, just wearing a different name. Coaching. Writing. Podcasting. Sitting with someone at a graveside. It keeps finding me, and at some point I stopped being surprised by that.
In 2017, I published my first book, The Bluebonnet Child (Wipf & Stock), a practitioner’s guide for churches, nonprofits, and educators working with children from homes of neglect or abuse. Writing it brought me into a new kind of ministry, speaking at national and international children’s ministry conferences and coaching faith leaders through the International Network of Children’s Ministry on preventing passion fatigue and burnout.
From 2019 to 2021, I served as Director of Engagement at the Institute for Discipleship at Southwestern College, where I co-produced The Listening Chair, a podcast on vocational discernment and spiritual formation, and coached approximately 50 Christian online course creators through BeADisciple.com, a platform that has served 10,000+ students since 2006.
In 2020, I launched my own writing and marketing coaching business, helping nonfiction and memoir writers publish their stories. What I found, working with 73+ clients from multiple continents, was the same thing I’d found in twenty years of ministry: the blocks were rarely about skill. They were about shame. About the deep, quiet conviction that their story didn’t deserve to take up space. The coaching work became pastoral work, same as it ever was.
My second book, I Am My Own Sanctuary (Quoir Publishing), came out of my own experience with that particular kind of shame. It’s a memoir for people healing from toxic religious conditioning, and it was praised by Dr. David Dault of NPR’s Things Not Seen as “a full-steam comedic rant” (I choose to take that as high praise).
My third book, There, He Holds Her, released on June 9, 2026, and it may be the most pastoral thing I’ve ever written, even though it’s a novel. It follows two women, a mother and daughter separated by four decades, as they reckon with generational trauma, religious conditioning, and the long, quiet work of finding their way back to wholeness. One reader described it as “a portal into deep healing and love,” saying they weren’t prepared for how deeply it would affect them. A pastor wrote that it reminded him that the Divine isn’t only found in sermons and sanctuaries, but in the raw, unfinished places of our stories. Another reader said it made her want to call her mother.
That’s exactly what I was reaching for. The book asks readers to sit with questions that ministry has always wrestled with: How has my trauma shaped my theology? Am I performing for approval or actually healing? What family stories did I inherit that might no longer be serving me? What would it mean to believe that my deepest longings are sacred rather than shameful? These aren’t new questions. They’re the same ones people have been bringing to pastors, chaplains, and spiritual directors for centuries. Fiction just gets past the defenses in ways that instruction rarely does. No walls go up when it’s a story.
The book is already being used in small group settings, book clubs, and women’s ministry communities, generating exactly the kinds of conversations about inherited faith, embodied spirituality, and spiritual formation that I spent twenty years trying to create from within the church walls.
What I bring to ministry leadership is a combination that I don’t think is all that common: genuine theological depth, twenty years of practical pastoral and programmatic experience, real competence in curriculum development and team leadership, and the kind of intuitive, attentive presence in a room that makes people feel safe enough to be honest. I’m warm. I’m also direct. I can hold sacred space and I can run a meeting.
I believe deeply in the Wesleyan tradition’s insistence that grace is prevenient, that God is already at work in every person long before they walk through a church door, and that our job is mostly to create the conditions for people to recognize what’s already true about them. That conviction has shaped everything I’ve done, from Tuesday’s Table to retreat leadership to sitting with a client who hasn’t touched her manuscript in six months because she doesn’t believe her story matters.
She does. They do. You do.
That’s the through-line of my entire ministry, whether I’ve been doing it from a pulpit, a podcast, or a Zoom call.
Vision & Mission
My Vision
I help people find their footing again, in their faith, their calling, and their sense of who they are beneath all the performing and people-pleasing.
That looks different depending on who’s sitting across from me. Sometimes it’s a grieving family that needs someone to hold the room. Sometimes it’s a volunteer on the edge of burnout who just needs someone to finally ask how they’re doing. Sometimes it’s a writer who hasn’t touched her manuscript in months because she doesn’t believe her story deserves to exist. The work is the same. Sit with people in the darkest, most honest places they’ve been afraid to go, and trust that the living light of Christ meets us there. Not around the pain. Through it.
I’ve never believed our job is to rush people out of their darkness. Some of the most sacred work I’ve ever done happened in the pit, just being present long enough for something to shift.
My Mission
To create spaces, whether in a sanctuary, a small group, a coaching call, or the pages of a novel, where people can ask the questions they’ve been afraid to ask, grieve what actually needs grieving, and reconnect with the call that’s been there all along underneath all the noise.
Part of that work, for me, involves reminding Christians of what we’ve always had access to. Our tradition is older and richer than we sometimes remember, full of contemplative, healing, and formational practices that the church has carried for centuries. When I equip people in those ancient streams of our faith, something wakes up in them. They start to recognize their God-given gifts not as incidental, but as essential. Their calling stops feeling like a burden and starts feeling like an inheritance.
I believe the church is at its best when it does exactly that. Not when it manages people’s doubt, but when it makes room for it. Not when it produces religious performance, but when it tends to the actual human being in the chair.
That’s the ministry I’ve been doing for twenty years. It’s the only kind I know how to do.
Who Am I When I’m Just Being a Human?
I’m a giant sack of intuition & emotion, an- easy-laugh, a daughter, a friend, a sister, a wife, a mom, bedtime story reader, bird-watcher, a tree-hugger, a moon-talker, an improv actor, laundry-folder, sultry-alto, dog-person, early-bird, master air-guitar player, medium-rare-steak-lovin’, body-of-water-jumpin’, British comedy-obsessed, fuzzy-sock-loving human.
Contact Me
Want to explore working together?
Book a discovery call and let’s talk about your book and/or author brand goals or possibly joining the online community I steward for women, The Treasure Within.
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