I have three children. My third is fierce and improbable. There was a less-than-one-percent chance of me getting pregnant with her, since I had an intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD) and my husband and I were full up with two boys, five and three.When I found out I was pregnant with this

I grew up in a Christian household, but not a fundamentalist one. My parents were strict, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I was focused on school and being a musician more than I was hanging out with friends and going to parties. Yes, I pushed their boundaries a bit with my clothes, but I

When I was 13, social media wasn’t what it is now. There was no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat. But as a middle-schooler, I was very active in online message boards associated with a magazine I subscribed to. The magazine had some vaguely Christian overtones, which is probably why

After my mom died of cancer when I was in my early twenties, my entire sense of self was lost. Before she died, I would say I was a good Muslim girl for the most part. I never drank, and I prayed as much as I could. But after she died, I drifted away from God.A few years later, I met a guy named

In tattered jeans and a Bible study T-shirt, I arrived home to a beautiful three-story house nestled in a gated community of the no-man’s-land of Pasco County, Florida. I had just spent two months in Bethlehem, where I sweated out my summer days shoveling gravel to pave a parking lot for a