Dear reader,

For more than a decade, I have pined over how to both write authentically and occupy space on the Internet in a way that feels human, despite the inhumanity of it all. How do I faithfully love the people physically around me, who I can see and touch, and also carry words to people I cannot see through a screen? I guarantee that I won’t do either perfectly, but I hope that makes you feel all the more welcome in this space with me.

I’m still plenty young, but I’m rather weathered by this world already and I suspect you may be too. I have fled childhood trauma, wandered through churches, rebuilt from literal natural disasters, relied too heavily on my own navigation through life, wobbled on jelly legs in the sea of parenting, and been battered against the rocky shores of the Christian imagination. But through it all, the grace of God is the constant, Christ my Northern Star to keep finding the way.

Flannery O’Connor, a writer who knew suffering and pain in too many ways, once wrote, “Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”* Grace will intrude in the darkest moments, when we are feeling like the most grotesque versions of ourselves, but we must train our eyes to see it all for what it is. That’s what I’m writing toward, toward the grace and peace that can break through as light—even in the worst of storms.

Grace and peace,

Alexis Brubaker

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