After attending Salem Lutheran Church in West Central Spokane for the past year, Pastor Liv Larson-Andrews contacted me to speak to the question of why I chose to attend Salem. It was easy and immediate to answer. Salem has always felt like coming home. I started my faith journey with Lutherans at Trinity Lutheran in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Emotional forms of ministry have their place, but as a woman in the church I am eager to move beyond the emotional woman stereotype and thus the surface-level understanding of my God-given talents and attributes. Therefore I constantly strive for a hopeful realism that exercises the complicated discipline of holding both cynical and idealist realities together in tension.