I’m Sara—a writer, chaplain, and mom to a one-year-old little girl. I believe that stories—the ones we tell ourselves, the ones our bodies carry, the ones we consider holy—have the power to heal us.

As a writer, I write stories of love, hope, and healing—both from my own life on this blog, and as an author.

As a chaplain focusing on fertility, pregnancy, and loss, I help women reclaim their narratives, especially when those stories have been interrupted by trauma and grief.

My own journey to motherhood was marked by three traumatic losses and the discovery of a brain tumor. Those experiences, and the overwhelming joy of finally giving birth to my daughter, put in perspective the everyday struggles and burdens of my day-to-day life. Now I live with a posture of celebration and gratitude—because I know from firsthand experience that life is too wonderfully, beautifully fragile not to savor when we can.

Welcome to this space. I’m so glad you’re part of the story.

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I’ve had this blog since 2012, and I’ve lived a lot of life since then, from college to changing continents and careers, to getting married and becoming a mom. If you’re looking trying to orient yourself after reading an old blog post, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane so you see how it all fits together.

Gap Year: travel and falling in love

I started this blog and flew to the Netherlands for my gap year. My parents are Dutch, so I’d spent a lot of time in the Netherlands as a kid and was ready to find my roots. Instead, I bumped into my future: I met Ken, my now-husband, the day after I landed.

College and Faith Journey

I headed to college in the States, where I majored in Religion. Ken and I continued dating long-distance, and I spend my junior year abroad at Oxford University. Here’s a few personal posts from that time.

• Oxford Diaries series, the posts I wrote about my time at Oxford
• Walking at Wellesley, Four Years Later

Faith journey
This is also the time in my life where my faith was finding its footing. I was raised in a “spiritual but not religious” home and spent my teenage years planning to convert to Judaism. When I met Ken, that picture shifted, and throughout college I explored and deepened my faith and was eventually confirmed in the Methodist Church. These two posts capture a snapshot of the start of that journey.

• A Messy Methodist
• Confirmation

Bible journaling books
That summer, I started writing about a then-new practice called Bible journaling, where people made devotional art in the margins of their Bibles. The post became a series, and in the fall (just six months after my confirmation), I started an Advent challenge that really took off and became a series of seven devotionals, four of which are still available now.

• See my Bible journaling posts
• See my devotionals here

Move abroad and career changes

I moved to the Netherlands in the winter of 2017, just after graduating college, to live with Ken. We got married, and I worked in the tech industry for several years, before deciding to come back to the United States to get an MDiv at Princeton Theological Seminary.

Fertility and motherhood

Ken and I started trying to become parents a few years after getting married. Unfortunately, we were met with 18 months of infertility, followed by three back-to-back losses, one of which nearly killed me. After moving to the US for me to start grad school, we learned the cause of my losses and finally had our daughter. Here are some posts about that experience and how it influenced my motherhood today.

• Lessons From the Dark
• Stella Maris, on ectopic pregnancy
• The Maternal Gift of Grief
• Mamababy, on early motherhood

I now work as a perinatal chaplain at Wild Honey Perinatal, where I support women on journeys of fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and loss. As part of my work, I am a certified Birth and Bereavement doula through Stillbirthday, and am working on my PMH-C through Postpartum International. Alongside that, I write books (women’s fiction and romance) and am joyfully mothering a one-year-old daughter.