Hi friend! I’m Emily. I’m so glad you’re here!

I’m a former therapist turned writer and theology student. In the early mornings and middle minutes while kids are at school, you can find me in my home office writing about hope, grief, spiritual practices, and Biblical literacy—all things that have changed my life and light me up inside.

Today’s email is part of a monthly series I’ve been writing for over 2 years called So I Won’t Forget. It’s the overflow of a life full of the goodness of God and the simple way I practice remembering as a spiritual discipline, something I talk about a lot. It’s my most read and most personal writing.

I hope you’ll stick around!

Prefer to listen? Let me join you on a walk via the audio narration of this post. You can find it right here in the app or wherever you listen to the We Have This Hope podcast. 🤎🎧🎙️

#1…on gerbils & bracing my core

I own two gerbils.

This is noteworthy only because I grew up in a home where animals were essentially not welcome. I know that sounds harsh, but I come from a long line of women who don’t like to touch animals. Dare I say, myself included. Inviting them to live in your home has generationally been a bit of a foreign concept—save the time my sister and I bought a miniature dachshund while my parents were out of town and they kept it long after we moved out. My grandmother once saved a cat who had gotten stuck in a car window and the real miracle wasn’t that the cat had been saved, but that my grandmother had been the one to do it. This story became family lore: The Time Meme Touched a Cat.

Many moons have passed and I now find myself in a home with four pets: a fish, a big, hairy golden retriever, and two gerbils—Nutmeg and Snowball, to be exact.

On the eve of our twins’ eighth birthday, we succumbed to what can only be described as relentless begging from our youngest daughter who clearly did not inherit the “it’s gross to touch animals” gene. As is often the case with mothers, I walked into PetCo that day propelled only by selfless love because, let me be clear in conveying, I had (and continue to have) zero interest in owning gerbils. Alas, we marched back to our car with two poorly assembled cardboard containers holding essentially mice that we paid money to bring into our home. I thought people paid to have mice removed from their home? Why does this feel backward?

Once home we rearranged her room to fit a cage much larger than I expected and filled it with the essentials including toilet paper rolls. Did you know they eat the cardboard from paper towels and toilet paper because their teeth never stop growing? Like beavers, people, tiny beavers who live in the upstairs of my house. File this under things I never thought would be true about me: Gerbil owner. Mother of twins.

Later that night I made the twins take a picture with me—one I’ve been taking since the day they were born. With a fifty pound kid on each hip, I had to bend my knees and brace my core just to hold them. I certainly couldn’t have walked up and down the stairs with them in tow like I used to. I went to bed looking at old pictures of them on the day they entered the world, both at just four pounds each, the tiniest babies I had ever seen. Eight years ago, this same core was effectively ripped wide open so that those two babies could enter the world and change the course of history forever. I’ll never get over the miracle—their lives, the fact that my core went back together, all of it.

I marvel at their lives in the same way I marvel at those two little gerbils upstairs—things I never thought would be true of me and yet things that have settled into the reality of my life. I think my takeaway this year is that sometimes we learn to steady ourselves, to brace our core and hold rightly the things we’ve been given to steward, but often this wisdom comes on the heels of tremendous surprise, delight, and a healthy dose of motherly surrender. This month I found all of that at the strange intersection of kids birthdays and pet ownership.

Here’s to Nutmeg and Snowball, may their surprises be contained to their cage and may they continue to bring us delight—but like a normal gerbil-amount of it. Let’s not get too crazy.

#2…singing in public

There are only a few times in my life that I have sung in public with a microphone. One of them was my senior year of high school when I played Sandy in Grease. You read that correctly—yours truly was Sandra Dee, circa 2004. To be honest, I had almost no business being cast in that role, but at the time I was the only blonde girl in the theater production class and I suppose that qualified me more than my actual singing abilities.

These days I keep my singing to strictly low stakes environments and if you lived in my home or rode in my car, you would know that to be true. The older I get, the more I marvel at people who have the ability to perform or share an art form publicly. I suppose that’s what writing is although with writing I can hide behind my computer and I can edit. In my mind, there is really nothing more vulnerable than singing in front of an audience.

And that is exactly what my son did this past week.

He is the bravest kid I know, full of a confidence tempered by a humility I hope he never loses. For the last six months, he’s been taking ukulele lessons. It’s a totally delightful instrument and perfect for an eight-year-old trying to make his mom swoon over his future guitar-playing skills. For the recital this year, he decided he would both pluck and strum his song. But in order to strum, he would have to use his voice to sing the melody—something he, without hesitation, decided was a perfectly suitable thing to do.

This boy sings all over our house, particularly in the bathroom because…well…acoustics and time. He spent the week leading up to the recital bellowing out the words to “Everybody Loves Saturday Night,” a simple song that will forever be embedded in the brains of the other four Curzons who live here and use the same bathrooms.

On the night of the recital, he was the only performer to play an instrument while singing along and I was so proud of him. Sure, there were a couple of notes that maybe fell a bit sharp, but overall that kid marched up to the front, did his thing, and bowed ever so quickly as he ran over to sit back down. One of my favorite things about being a parent is knowing intimately the subtleties of your own child’s facial expressions. His little grin was the perfect blend of relief, pride, and the twinkle of a new neuropathway forming to say I can do hard things.

It left me wondering today about whether my face ever tells the story of the hard things I have done or continue to do: parenting, seminary, generally trying to be a kind and healthy human. I don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that it’s hard work out there being a adult, let alone one who is hoping to mature in the ways of Jesus and embrace hardship as discipline. I suppose that’s why sabbath has been at the forefront of my mind lately. I need to rest in order to do hard things.

And so the queue I’m taking from my kid this weekend is not necessarily singing in public, but rather embracing a little bit of rest so that come Monday I can do hard things again.

Maybe this is why…🎵 Everybody Loves Saturday Night 🎵…

#3…Lectio Divina

I am writing this to remember a spiritual practice that is forming me right now—and to remind “Future Emily” that she has a repertoire of things to draw from depending on the season.

Lectio Divina is an ancient, contemplative Benedictine practice used for centuries as a form of spiritual reading. For most of my life, I’ve approached Scripture through study—digging into context, language, translations—and this is far and away my favorite way to engage my imagination and intellect spiritually. I love to understand how the pieces fit into the whole and God has used this deep work to form me in ways still rippling effect in my daily life.

But my life also includes groceries and laundry and school drop-offs and friendships that need nurturing and bodies that need moving and floors that need mopping and you get the idea because you live one too. Sometimes in-depth study can’t squeeze its way onto the plate like it used to when my only responsibility was maybe going to class on time.

As I’ve leaned further into the Anglican tradition and into my seminary work thus far, I’ve discovered some contemplative practices that have opened a “side door” into spiritual formation—the most recent of which is Lectio Divina.

In a recent class cohort, we walked through the process in small groups and it essentially looked like this:

Someone read a passage of Scripture 4 times.

Each time followed by 2 eternally long minutes of silence.

Resist the urge to interpret or analyze.

Invite the Spirit to draw out a word or phrase. Listen and reflect and receive.

Here’s an article with significantly more detail. The app Lectio 365 is another good place to start. Or read through Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book (an OG favorite of mine) for a more thorough overview on this general posture toward reading the Bible.

For those of us who grew up in the Bible Belt in the late 90s and early 2000s, the word “meditation” might carry some long-buried negative connotation not too dissimilar from that one time you tried yoga and weren’t sure if your mother would approve. I’m only slightly kidding. In general, there was a time in our Western evangelical traditions when mediation or the idea of listening, rather than studying inductively, sounded a bit too “woo-woo” for comfort.

The reality is that the practice of mediation has been embedded in global Christian traditions for centuries and I can’t help but wonder if some of us have been missing out.

Perhaps in this season, contemplative prayer and meditation is exactly what I need. In ways almost too innumerable to count, the way of contemplation is wildly counterintuitive to the inertia of my inner and outer life. I know someone reading this can relate. In these slower postures, I still find the Scriptures to be ripe with wisdom. I can spend an entire day dwelling on two words from a verse in Colossians and feel connected to the work of God even while I walk through a seemingly relentless to-do list.

This may be a totally foreign concept to you, or you may be among the wealth of writers and readers who have been practicing this for a decade. Wherever you land, I hope you might consider trying on something contemplative like Lectio Divina and seeing how it feels—especially if you find yourself in an overflowing season of life.

The Spirit is there, moving and speaking—this is our reminder to slow down and listen.

So many of you responded kindly to my most recent essay The Year of Whole Numbers. I can’t tell you have meaningful it is to hear back from readers. Some of you told me over coffee and some of you commented from another part of the country. However you responded, I wanted to express my gratitude and my heart’s desire that this work would play some small part in turning your thoughts and affections toward the God who speaks through writing.

That being said, I owe you something: the last half of our Stack Study on Proverbs and I’ve decided to release all of that via email on May 14th.

There, I said it, so now I have a deadline.

I will be releasing each lesson via Substack only as those get through final edits so if you’re eager to do something with them, you can watch for those to roll out in-app. Otherwise, subscribers will get the full thing in their inbox on May 14th.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wehavethishope.substack.com/subscribe