Sarah Arthur Archives – year of small things

Three cheers for Sarah Arthur’s Pushcart nomination

December 15, 2017December 15, 2017Erin Wasinger

Many, many congratulations to coauthor Sarah Arthur on her Pushcart Prize nomination from Awst Press! It’s a big deal. She’s a big deal, but she won’t let anyone say that, of course.

From her essay, The Least of Us:

“… I know from experience how this conversation goes. I will say, “I’m happy to buy you a ticket, but I can’t give you money.” And he’ll say some variation on, “I won’t catch a train right away, so really, a couple dollars for a sandwich while I wait…” And then I’ll say, firmly, “I have a granola bar and a cheese stick right here.” But by then the game will be up.

I suddenly miss my two little boys with an ache like mild electrocution. I look him in the eyes. I want him to see that I see him. I want him to know that he is known—if not by me, then by a God who, like a mother, knows us. All our desires, longings, addictions, agonies…all of it.”

Read the full, heartbreaking story on Awst.

If her story leaves you wondering how one lives with a heart broken open like she describes, welcome. You’re in good company: our lives swirl around that question. (Yet, I assure you, we’re also capable of laughing at ourselves. For example, I’m laughing now because I remember Sarah saying that writing this piece for Awst was going to be the death of her. I’m grateful she exaggerates.)

Join the conversation and augment it by reading through The Year of Small Things with a friend or two (or your church, your small group, your neighbors).

Nab your copies online:

Small Things is available online:

Peace for your conversations and for your Advent season.

This was new monasticism before ‘The Irresistible Revolution’

September 14, 2016October 25, 2016Sarah Arthur

Lunch. Simply lunch, spurred into being by that announcement at Asbury Temple UMC.

Innocuous enough, and yet life-changing for the Arthurs. I won’t go into how we fell in love with not only the household but the vision, how we prayed, and talked, and came over for more meals. Suffice it to say, by fall semester we did not renew our lease on the one-bedroom near Duke.

We moved into the ‘hood–and stayed. For three years we shared a household with other community members committed to simplicity, hospitality, sustainability, and reconciliation—as well as with women and children in transition out of homelessness.

One lunch, one mission: desegregate ourselves by race and by class

September 13, 2016October 25, 2016Sarah Arthur

You know that feeling of regional vertigo, when you’ve been traveling so long that when you climb out of the car or step off the plane you can barely remember your own name, much less what state or country you’re in?

Maybe you’re hungry, and you think, “I’ll just grab a burrito from Cosmic Cantina on the way to the hotel,” and then you realize that Cosmic Cantina is roughly 867 miles away, and you haven’t a clue where to get food around here. Yeah, that. In addition to the bodily weirdness of traveling so far, there’s now a mini existential crisis, a spiritual displacement, as if your very identity, including the God you worship, is now up for grabs.

All because you walk on unfamiliar ground. Which is another way of saying that place matters.

From the inner city to a suburb the Arthurs would call ‘home’

September 12, 2016October 25, 2016Sarah Arthur

“I think we’re almost there,” I (Sarah) said, hands at ten and two on the wheel of the moving truck we had called home for the past thirty hours. As we eased down the suburban-country road south of Lansing, Michigan that Memorial Day morning seven years ago, our rusty Subaru trailering behind us, Tom and I gazed with interest out the truck windows. A newish subdivision, a church or two. Two farm stands (hooray!), followed by a barn with pygmy goats, and then more subdivisions. Garage sale signs by the dozens. Bus stops. Most properties well-manicured, even picturesque. And then–unexpectedly–a trailer park, across from which we read the sign for yet another subdivision, “English Meadows.”