I recently accepted a position as the communications specialist for a church in the town where I live with my husband, and the pastors of the church asked me to share part of my testimony during tonight's service. This is what I shared: I spent eight years as a high school English teacher, but at the end of the last school year, I felt God's call to leave the classroom. I didn't know exactly what that would mean for me, but here I am in this new position. In June, I married the love of my life, and the past six months have been a period of adjusting to the new roles of wife and stepmom while also adjusting to the loss of the title of teacher. But this period of change isn't new to me. I am twenty-nine years old. Throughout my life, I've moved twenty-two times. I've lived in seventeen houses in ten different cities and in three different states. And those numbers don't even account for the six different dorm rooms I lived in when I was in college. You see, I ...
I'm currently taking a free online class through the University of Michigan on storytelling for social change. For the first module, our task was to write a brief (100-250 words) story that included a protagonist and an antagonist. Here's what I wrote: "Becky, I don't care what you do with your life when you grow up as long as you don't get fat," he said as we were sitting in the front seat of his car, riding home from dinner. I was about eleven at the time, visiting my father after having recently moved back to Georgia from New York. I didn’t say anything; I fought back tears, looked down at my chubby belly, and then turned my head to look out the window. He ignored the silence and changed the subject, asking me about school and how things were at home. I answered his questions and smiled when we finally got to his house. I had gone so long without seeing him, so I wanted to make the most of it. I tried so hard to forget....