I asked Brita more about the religion. She explained that she and Howard had left the church years earlier. What she couldn’t reconcile was the belief that theirs was the only religion allowed into heaven. When she asked other church members about it, expecting openness or thoughtful discussion, she was instead met with hostility.
She had truly believed these were people who knew God’s love—that a sincere question would be met with care.
Instead, she was told that if she didn’t like it, she could leave.
So she and Howard, and their five children, did just that.
Dinner followed shortly after. Along with Brita and Howard, their sons Jack and Dale joined us, as well as Brita’s nephew, Jon.
I helped set the table: plate, fork, knife, glass for milk or water. After we took our seats, Howard said a prayer thanking the Lord for the meal and for my joining them. After the amen, dishes began making their way around the table.
Conversation came easily there. Curiosity and listening took center stage.
At one point—maybe it was Jack or Dale—someone observed that if politically and religiously divided people could simply sit around a table like this, genuinely trying to define what actually mattered and what didn’t, and then work together toward something better, we’d all be better off.
There was something deeply satisfying about that thought.
It has been over a decade now, and I’ve sat in enough living rooms to know how uncommon that feeling is. Too often, I find hostility or passivity where curiosity and questions could have lived. I can feel it in my body—that tightening across my chest, the heaviness that comes from watching certainty stack itself brick by brick into walls of assumptions and judgment. In spaces like that, I retreat. I know there is little room for ideas once people become more committed to being right than becoming curious.
Brita served pasties. Not the nipple-covering stickers. The food.
The word immediately launched me into another memory.
Years earlier, during the most random spring break imaginable, my friends Nathan, Hilary, and I piled into Nathan’s brand-new truck because, as he put it, it “needed breaking in.” Somehow we ended up in California, Arizona, and Las Vegas, with almost everything mysteriously paid for along the way.
It was on a friend’s cigar boat on Lake Havasu that my sheltered country-girl brain expanded yet again. For the first time, I saw women wearing nothing over their breasts except tiny decorative stickers.
Pasties.
That had been my introduction to the word.
I laughed, and everyone around the table laughed with me.
It struck me that this trip kept doing that. One moment, I was learning the Finnish pronunciation of sauna. Next, I was learning that a pasty could be dinner instead of a wardrobe accessory. Everywhere I went, another assumption quietly dissolved.
Later that evening, Jon and I talked long after dinner.
Somewhere in that conversation, he told me about a wilderness program for teenagers who had been labeled as “problems.” He described one boy in particular—the kind adults wrote off as defiant, unreachable, always in trouble.
Then they sent him into the wilderness.
Alone. In the dark. During a storm.
And what came back wasn’t a hardened delinquent; It was a frightened little boy.
That story stayed with me.
I’ve learned enough about people to know behavior rarely appears out of nowhere. What looks like defiance is often protection. What looks like rebellion is often survival.
Maybe that’s why the Redwoods affected me so deeply.
The Redwoods are breathtaking. Truly. Time stops. You feel a hitch in your chest and an expansion inside yourself, as though your body is trying to make room for what your eyes are seeing.
These real-life forest giants take center stage, and the result, for the minuscule twig of a human I am, is some strange combination of awe, fear, and a loudly muttered swear word.
Until you’ve stood among something this ancient—or beside something equally immense—you might still believe you’re in control.
But standing there, surrounded by trees that had lived for centuries before me and would continue long after I was gone, I understood something.
Some experiences don’t ask us to become bigger.
They ask us to become smaller. To stop fighting and performing. Long enough to discover what was there all along.
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