Mike Tatz inked one tattoo on my left wrist and one on my left chest on a Tuesday afternoon in January 2013. It was my half-century gift to myself. Why two? I loved the gorgeous artwork Mike created but it would have covered my entire wrist.

The rebel in me wanted the complete tattoo, but she compromised and let the pleaser hide the full piece of art under her shirt. The pleaser chose a smaller design for the wrist, easily concealed under a watch or a band aid. Story of my life: compromise. Hide the rebel long enough to let the pleaser shine.

I have always loved the rebel in me because she is fierce. While sitting in the tattoo artists’ chair, I wanted to show I was tired of hiding her. Growing up in a legalistic church world, the daughter of a minister, I knew all of the rules and for the most part, I followed them religiously, at least when people were watching.

The first time I ever cursed, the word flicked off my tongue like a spark. There was something rich and bold in saying it out loud.

“You shouldn’t say that,” my friend from elementary school said.

“I know.”

Minister’s kids always know. Early on, we learn the written and unwritten rules of how to get through life. When you live your life under the microscope, life plays out on a stage. If I wasn’t actually on the stage, which I often was, I was sitting in the front pew. I found no place to hide in this black and white world I was born into, but I longed to hold a few secrets in my pocket where no one could see them.

I believed the church leaders when they told me that rebellion was wrong and following the rules was the only way to live. It was a balancing act between black and white but sometimes I wanted to curse out loud.

I learned how to please my rebel in ways that were acceptable. In sixth grade, the band director told us when we picked our instruments that boys played brass and girls played woodwinds. I chose the trombone the biggest brass instrument available to us. I had to carry the twenty-five-pound trombone to school in a wagon because I was four-feet-eight and weighed less than eighty pounds. I earned first chair honors, doing everything I could to prove the band director wrong.

When I was a junior at my Baptist College in 1983, I accepted the invitation to preach at student led revival, even though many of the preacher boys, studying to be ministers, condemned it and wouldn’t attend the service. In their world, women were not allowed to be in the pulpit as preachers. Forty-three years later, most of them still believe that.

I often wondered if God created the rebel in me. What if questioning the establishment comes from him? What if I should embrace the very trait I have danced around, right out in the open. Maybe he loves my rebel heart. He calls to me through music and art and tattoos, all things that light me up. Legalism never lit a fire in me.

When I became a mom, I found out I had only skimmed the surface on knowing what it meant to be a rebel. I write about that journey in my memoir, “Wrestling With a Rebel” out October 1, 2026 through Shake Ridge Press.

In the meantime, meet me at the altar where we can take off our masks and empty our pockets. Let’s dive deep into what he has called us to do because life is too hard not to welcome each other as the rebels God made us to be.

Life’s a journey. Pay attention.

“Jesus is writing the story of our lives,” Nick said.

Yes, he is, I thought and moved closer to take a photo that would show more detail. The image stayed with me all day.

_{Photo by Krista Gibson}

My mother may not have held the ink pot like Mary, but she did give me a journal when I was in junior high school and told me to write the words that I could not say out loud. She instinctively knew I was keeping my thoughts to myself and knew that it wasn’t healthy. Thus began my love affair with pens and paper and writing words that mattered to me.

I declared English as my major at Gardner-Webb University as a seventeen-year-old because I wanted to have a career as a writer. In literature classes my freshman year, I discovered Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Walt Whitman. I loved the power of words before college, but reading and discussing these authors opened up my desire to write even more. I still remember how their words felt like home to me. It was exactly where I wanted to be. More than forty years later, I carry that feeling as my muse when I write.

Arnold’s “The Buried Life” awakened in me the desire to write words that resonated with others the way his words touched me.

“…But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,

But often, in the din of strife,

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life…”

Tennyson’s “In Memorium A.H.H.” was another poem that held my attention. When I read “In words like weeds I’ll wrap me o’er” I wanted to find a cubicle in the deepest recesses of the library and continue to wrap myself in words.

Growing up a minister’s kid, I learned to bury and deny any feelings that weren’t tied up in the Sunday School lessons and sermons I heard. Now that I was far away from their influence, I was fascinated by the possibility of what I had been missing when I read about the buried life. It was as if Arnold and Tennyson had given me permission to explore my desires and feelings.

Reading in I Corinthians for my freshman New Testament class, I felt God encourage the writing career I dreamed about. The words leapt off the page in Chapter two, verse thirteen, “combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.” I was so moved that like Whitman, I let out a barbaric yawp. I had found my calling.

Writing as a career didn’t always look like I thought it would. I wrote for newspapers and for nonprofit newsletters. I penned letters of encouragement to pastor’s wives and struggling friends. I felt like I knew all the answers until I became a parent to two teenage boys. When God asked me to write the story of my failures as a parent and the secret struggles I was ashamed to admit, I didn’t want to do it, but the seventeen-year-old me that shouted for joy when God blessed my dream, was still there. She was the one that said this is what God meant when I read “who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him.”

No one knew this story but me and by telling it, perhaps another mom, who is thinking they don’t know how to take one more step, needs me to tell them how I did it. More than that, they need to know that with God’s help, there is joy on the other side.

In October, my memoir will be published and it is proof that Jesus, with his feather pen, is still writing the story of my life. “Wrestling with a Rebel” is the story of two buried lives, mine and my son’s and our struggle to find our way back to each other through drug addiction and unmet expectations. I hope through our story, moms of children that rebel and walk away from our rules find hope. Jesus is still writing the story, dipping his pen in the ink pot held by his mother.

Life’s a journey. Pay attention.