Welcome to The Things I Carry

Hi! I’m Elizabeth Harwell. I like to write about things that have happened to me, so that we can laugh about it and make room for grace. I live north of Atlanta with my husband Andrew (a church-planting pastor, a poet, a woodworker), and my three kids (a scientist, a magician, and an animal-whisperer).

I’ve written two children’s books on the sacraments:
The Good Shepherd’s Pasture
The Good King’s Feast

And have a handful of essays and podcasts in other places….

But what I really love is revisiting seemingly sad or embarrassing stories from my life, telling them in essay form, and waiting for beauty to show up.

When I was a sixth grader, I had a gem of a best friend who would listen to me read excerpts from my diary nearly every Friday night. These were not inner-most-thoughts diary entries, but more like on the ground reporting from Calloway County Middle School: which teachers we thought might secretly be in love, for instance. Or that mean thing that Jessica said to us at recess. In my memory, my friend was begging for more: “Please, please—read the one again where….” But we all like to be the hero of our own stories, don’t we?

These were holy moments we shared, though. I do know that. We laughed until our whole bodies collapsed and we pleaded for our next breath. My joy was in naming the things that I carried. It was hard to live in this world; But I had a best friend who lived in it with me, and she wanted to laugh about it. Her joy was in someone re-telling her story— shaping her days into beginning, middles and ends. Telling our life in stories gave time a frame. It allowed us to study moments, to marvel at them, or to make the heavy ones feel a little lighter.

The Things I Carry will be something like that. Bi-weekly, I will retell some stories of my life, and I hope we laugh about it. The Things I Carry might also be things that you carry, or have carried. I would love to hear about it. Maybe in our tellings, we can make room for grace. It’s hard to live in this world; Let’s swap stories about it while we pilgrim on.