Sincerely Sophi

 Hi dear friends :)  I'm not gonna lie, I tried to write a blog post on grammar for my writing class about three different times. Despite the pressure of the time crunch, and my sudden memory of the fantastic 7th grade musical film my friends and I made turning punctuation marks into the characters from Dr. Suess's Are You My Mother?  (complete with costumes and original music for each character to sing about their grammar function)...despite these things...each attempt turned into an uninspired sentence or two before I resolved to go to bed.  But then, at the most inconvenient time, of course , I had a striking moment of inspiration. In true Sophi fashion, my thoughts on grammar have less to do with grammar, and more to do with life.  As many of you may know, I am in the musical Oliver!  put on by George Fox University Theatre. I had a brief moment where I was waiting backstage during a scene, and I started thinking about the show and people's responses an...

There’s something so unnatural about being in your early 20s. About becoming an adult.  I’m not married, with children, building my own family.  Yet, I’m not living at home, under my mother and father’s care, direction, and schedule.  This is not a misogynistic statement saying women need men or women must have children to have purpose . I’m all for women being independent (well, I think we all are dependent on people…woman or man…but that’s beside the point).  This is me, a newly twenty year old, sitting in a coffee shop, thinking back to moments with my family growing up, and thinking about how much I miss my Mama, and realizing…I don’t live with my family anymore.  Thinking about the fact that I haven’t had my family by my side (physically) for two consecutive months now. I’ve done this before…gone months at a time without them. After all, I am a junior in college now. This is my fifth semester living away from home.  But…it is SO strange. I mean..I hav...

Have you ever walked into a space that made you feel so small? Not because someone was cruel to you or belittled you. But because the space is so big and glorious and in it you realize how small and weak you are. In a humbling and beautiful way. Life is full of moments like this. But not always because we are in a big, glorious, beautiful space. Sometimes it is because we are put in a very lowly, needy place.  A place so humbling, where you realize you have no control at all.  Places like being stuck in the bathroom, gripping your stomach and staring blankly at the tile floor. You have no choice but to sit still and pray. Letting your body do what it will as it reacts to a new allergy you have acquired to something in your favorite birthday meal.  Or standing outside in the smoke. With your chest tightening and your head feeling light. There is no choice but to focus on your breath. And you realize that at any moment you could simply stop breathing. And that song about ev...

It’s hard to distinguish the ways in which my writing has been influenced by others. As they say, there’s nothing new under the sun. My writing is a patch of grass sitting under that sun, made up of grammar lectures, English teachers, mentors, friends, and a handful of spicy language I have acquired from who knows where.  At some point I decided we need phrases like “let’s girl boss this shit” when mustering up the strength to grocery shop after a long day or getting yourself to swim early in the morning. And I have somehow acquired the phrases “babe” and “Queeeen!” even though when it was trendy to say them I cringed so hard at the sound of them. I'm pretty sure a youth leader or my high school swim team sparked the phrase "hydrate or diedrate" but it has morphed into my personality trait. "Hydrate or DIEDRATE BabYYYY!!!" Some of this language came from middle school friends who rubbed off on me at a time when all I wanted to do was be cool like them. But the w...

  This week for my studies in writing class we were given the question: “What is one person who has influenced your writing?”  I only glanced at the prompt, so as I thought about it through the week, the question morphed in my head into “Who is one author that has influenced your writing?”  It must be the combination of my analysis of another author’s writing process alongside the prompt for this blog floating in my head…but I thought that was the prompt and it sent me spiraling.  I began to panic. The last books I remember reading and truly loving were in middle/elementary school. I’m sure there were some in high school, but the era of immersing myself in books, thinking like them and writing like them faded as my work load and life schedule increased.  Surely I’ve read books since middle school…?  I think through the books I’ve read in college. I am a junior. And an English major in the Honors program. I supposedly have read a lot of books.  I began...

       I have the privilege of taking Theatre as Ministry with Ben Tisell at the same time as acting in the production he is directing, Oliver! The Musical .      In Theatre as Ministry we are making our way through the book Art and Faith by Makoto Fujimura, as I have previously mentioned. If you are any kind of artist, or a person of faith, and you haven’t purchased this book yet, please do…you will not regret it, and if you can’t tell from my blog posts, it has been pretty formational for me as an artist of faith.       The beautiful gift of engaging in this class alongside the production process for Oliver! is that we get to think about the concepts we are learning in relationship to the show we are creating together.      A common theme of discussion is how we, as artists of faith, are telling a story of redemption in the work we do.       From the beginning of the Oliver process, Ben has arti...