Not so long ago I received an email from a nice gentleman I’ve never met. He stumbled onto A Different Story looking for some resources on diagramming sentences.

(Yeah, we’ve done that here.)

Not seeing an About page, his inquiry was simple: Who are you?

I live with myself all day long, so I figured it should be easy enough. I punched up Reply and set about drafting an answer.

::

About two hours later, I was still staring at a blank screen.

Turned out it was a hard question.

Really hard.

::

We tried something like this:

I am the wife of a teacher and coach, and mom to an eighth grader and sophomore. I follow my guys to courts, fields, greens and diamonds all year long.  I do my thinking in the bleachers and my writing in the living room with balls flying and bats or clubs swinging and ESPN on in the background. (If Spongebob is on, I have to leave the room — I start to watch and get nothing done.)

I still think I’m from the city, though I’m content to have spent most of my adult life in rural northeastern South Dakota.

By day I handle property and casualty claims (yes, one of those people) and do some bilingual customer service work on the side. If love is God’s first language, Spanish must surely be His second.

About every five years or so, God reroutes my career path. (We just came through one of those years.) In my previous incarnations I worked in fundraising and PR for a social service agency, youth ministry, retail sales, custom framing, web design, tech support and software training, and I owned a family business selling trophies and awards.

Parents, warn your college age children: This is what happens to people who leave the university with a degree in political science.

::

I think the most important thing I can tell you about myself is that I am loved by the King.

He purchased me at an unthinkable price.

And I am His.

::

I have no glamorous writing story. He didn’t waken me with a grand vision and I can’t say I even really know exactly why we do this. He used the loss of a friend and coworker to nudge me into blogging but really, I write because I write.

I don’t know how not to.

Mostly, I love the Word. I love words. And I think the combination is blast.

::

(One of my longer term goals is to get my statement of faith posted, in the not so remote possibility that I don’t manage to clearly articulate my core faith in my posts. In the meantime, the Statement of Beliefs of the North American Baptist Conference is a good representation.)