Emily Wierenga
12 min read ⭑
“I met mothers in Uganda holding babies who looked like newborns but were actually 18 months old. Mothers who mixed dirt with water for dinner and who lifted their arms in hallelujah because, for them, God’s goodness was not dependent on their circumstances.”
Writer and artist Emily Wierenga says she’s a small “e” with a big God. She has seen him work in the villages of Africa and Asia, in the streets near her home and within her own life. Having struggled with anorexia, she went from starving to feeding others, a transition she talks about in her memoir, God Who Became Bread. She’s also the author of Commune with Me (a devotional), Atlas Girl (a lyrical memoir on finding God at home), Chasing Silhouettes (advice on helping a loved one struggling with eating disorders) and more. Her nonprofit, The Lulu Tree, equips churches, families and children in remote African villages.
Below, she gets honest about the places where she encounters Jesus most, the people the Holy Spirit is calling her to serve and the books and habits that strengthen her faith.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
Our table has a hole in the middle, and inside the hole is a flame; the flame burns like the day I saw him breakdance at a college party. We talked for hours back then about mundane things like Christmas trees. The day we wed, I wore a wreath of flowers, and we broke bread and drank wine under an arbor in the sun.
Our love is officially 23 years old now. We find our way to the back of the restaurant, past Korean couples drinking Soju and frying meat. We fill up little black plastic baskets with mushrooms and onions, strips of pork and spiced beef, and find our way back to our booth. We fry, and we laugh — a wrinkled kind of laugh, one that is comfortable, like a pair of old socks. We drink water with lemon and try to use chopsticks, and we remember Wonju. Wonju, with its tired Korean children taking classes morning to night. Wonju, with the mountain we hiked and the man who did it barefoot, who reminded us of Moses. Wonju, where we went when I stopped breaking bread and was only drinking wine. I was starving for real food and real drink, for a kind of love bigger than any flame, and I found it around the table in Wonju. When the restaurant meal is over, we’re given little containers of ice cream. I choose vanilla; he chooses strawberry. We scoop it out with little wooden spoons and laugh our wrinkled laugh.
Deep sonowal; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
I find church in a flower shop. Only the flowers are real people. Outside the store is a sign that says “Flower Shop on Main.” I enter it one day, obeying a quiet whisper. I step inside, and a man named Geoff tells me I’ve dropped something. “Your shadow!” he says, and he slaps his thigh and laughs. All around me are people with mental or physical disabilities. Some are watching fish swim in a tank. Others are seated by a large window at a square table. They’re making collages from cut-out magazine pictures.
A girl named Collette is wearing a cowboy hat. She comes up to me, tells me her mom doesn’t love her dad anymore, and asks if I’d like to come and have some dinner. Then she takes me to the back room where there’s another table, a long rectangular one, and a kitchen with a cook in it. People are eating at the table. One guy in a Calgary Flames hat waves at me and says, “Hi, is the Easter Bunny coming today?” In the weeks to follow, I bring my guitar and strum songs. A small group gathers with me. Ben, wearing a Calgary Flames hat, sings “Jesus Loves Me” at the top of his lungs. Then he shouts “Hallelujah!” and prays for his mom and his cat. They cry when they learn Jesus died for them. And they give me tomato plants to take home and grow. I find church here at the Flower Shop on Main.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you confront its power?
She’s wearing her Northern Reflections sweater today. Her head is drooped. She’s seated by the window next to all the plants she used to water. Now they droop, too. I’ve come home early from Korea to take care of my Mum, who has brain cancer.
I bought a little house down the street. I burned my leg with the rototiller while putting in a garden. I peeled off all the wallpaper and pulled up the laminate and stained the floor green and made it a home. Trent will be arriving in a few days after finishing up our contract in Wonju.
I go to Mum and ask her how she’s doing; there’s a bit of spit in the corner of her mouth. I fill up a basin with some warm water, begin to wash her feet, and she starts to smile. And even as I wash her feet, I ask God to help me want to become a mother. Nothing in me wants to have a baby. Mostly it’s because I don’t want to gain weight. Korea has taught me how to eat, but I still want to hold onto my size 6 jeans. I still sometimes wrap my fingers around my wrist and measure. So I pray, and I wash, and there’s a stirring inside me, even as Mum stirs. Like a birthing within of something holy and pure, a longing for something bigger than me. Something I cannot control. For me, control is everything. But maybe it doesn’t need to be anymore.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
It started with me going to Africa. It was an undoing, really, of all the Christian things this pastor’s kid ever learned. I went at the age of 33, a mother of three. I went on a blogger’s trip intent on becoming a famous author. I came back a shattered jar. I met mothers in Uganda holding babies who looked like newborns but were actually 18 months old. Mothers who mixed dirt with water for dinner and who lifted their arms in hallelujah because, for them, God’s goodness was not dependent on their circumstances.
I came home and fell on my knees, night after night before God. He told me to help these mothers, to help them help their children. I started The Lulu Tree and gave up writing for a decade. Then God gave it back to me, said to write about how he’d become my food, my drink, my everything. It’s the story of my life, this anorexic child of the church who was starving for true love. I mean, Christ should be the greatest feast, but truthfully, we are much more excited to eat lunch. So I wrote a memoir called “God Who Became Bread.” Then I wrote a follow-up book, a 70-day devotional on Communion — one of the only books on the eucharist — called “Commune with Me.” In it, I invite people to feast on Jesus — the real Jesus, the One who sits in the gutters with society’s downcast and serves them supper.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
There’s no amount of chocolate that can inspire a word. I still eat the chocolate, though, as I beg God for inspiration, and he gives it. He gives it when I get out of the house and down to the nearby campsite where I’ve heard a man and his partner are living in a tent. It’s winter. No one should be living in a tent in winter.
My kids and I bring them blankets and food, and the man’s face splits wide, revealing broken teeth, and I tell him Jesus loves him. And this man, named Greg, says, “I love him too!” We give him a gospel of John and his partner, Melinda, asks me where we go to church. I tell her, and they say they want to come. We make plans to meet on Sunday. And I go home, and I write about the face of God. How it looks a lot like Greg’s, pockmarked and worn, this Ancient of Days, whose eyes light up when they see us. How the color of God’s footstool is like the color of Greg’s tent — a blue lapis lazuli, the kind Exodus talks about. I want to hide, monk-like, with my Bible and my coffee, to sit in the sun like a cat, curled up in my pajamas, begging revelation to find me, but it’s on the pavement that it comes. It’s in the highways and byways with the flesh and the dirt. That’s where the word — and the Word — is.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
Communion became a life calling during COVID. We were seated in our living room, missing church. Missing the morning breath of the worshipper beside us, missing the unironed cotton shirts and overpowering perfume and babies crying in the middle of the sermon. All we had was a TV screen and awkward singing with our three children.
So we pulled out a white tablecloth and a loaf of homemade bread. We put the cloth on the coffee table and poured grape juice, and my husband read from the “Jesus Storybook Bible.” And even as he read, I stared at the candle flickering in the window, and Jesus said, “Will you do this in remembrance of me, Emily?” Only the “Do This” was suddenly something else. It wasn’t about eating and drinking anymore. The “Do This” was an invitation to become bread and wine. To do as Jesus had done and lay down my life for his people. To become food and drink for a world starving for love. I realized there are layers to this walk with Christ, much like a trifle with its pudding and cake. The more God trusts you, the more he asks you to suffer with him. To become his hands and feet, to die with him, for them — the very ones we were missing, the church body. A church comprised of all sorts of bodies and all sorts of hungers. And as we become broken bread and poured-out wine, the world can finally see him.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
I am a book person. I mean, I’m a writer. I love the smell of the pages, like fresh cotton on a clothesline. It smells like a friend. I love to earmark pages, to highlight sentences, and most of all, I love biographies of saints. People who’ve died so they might truly live, people like D.L. Moody and Hudson Taylor and Amy Carmichael. But if I can only choose three resources, these would be the ones I’d choose:
1) “Rees Howells, Intercessor.” Next to the Bible, this is the book that has taught me the most about what it means to be like Jesus. Rees was a coal miner’s son who simply obeyed the Holy Spirit. He didn’t worry about theology. He simply lived with the Spirit. His prayers changed the outcome of history.
2) “Crazy Love” by Francis Chan. Francis Chan says it as it is. He doesn’t mince words. He bleeds passion as he begs people to wake up before it’s too late, to realize the mockery we are making of the true living God, to stop pretending we love him and get out of the pews and into the ghettos. To love on God, through his people. This book says everything I’ve felt but could never say as a disillusioned pastor’s child.
3) “Telling the Truth” by Frederick Buechner. This book taught me how to write about faith. Next to Annie Dillard, I think Frederick Buechner possesses the most beautiful pen. He also possesses incredible insight into the topic of the church.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. Does technology ever help you this way? Has an app ever boosted your spiritual growth? If so, how?
To be honest, I’m not an apps person. I’m not a techie person. But with running a global ministry and dealing with different time zones and languages, I am ever grateful for things like the World Clock and Google Translate and, mostly, the YouVersion Bible app.
I prefer to sit down with my coffee and Scripture and turn the pages of my Mum’s old NIV. On a perfect day, I have different translations laid out before me, so I can compare the Amplified with the NLT with the NIV and so on. But sometimes I can’t sit down, and on those days, when I’m running, I listen to the Bible app. I prefer to listen to the Streetlights Dramatized Version in NLT, and then, too, I can easily switch between translations — all 400 of them, if I wanted to — not to mention copying and pasting certain sections to share with my kids or colleagues.
It helps, too, that YouVersion now carries two of my devotional plans — one associated with “God Who Became Bread” and one associated with my devotional, “Commune with Me.” But what I love most of all is that, when we purchase secondhand phones for our Lulu Tree mamas around the world, upon their one-year graduation from our discipleship and sustainability program, they can download the YouVersion app for free, in their own language. Yes, the app frequently asks me to contribute. But it is not forced, and for that, I’m grateful.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
She’s sitting in a chair across from me with her two babies — one is a grandson and the other, a baby of her own. And I’m wondering, “How did I get here?” Her name is Sandra, and she lives in a First Nations reserve near my house.
I’ve been here once to drop off clothes. But I never went inside very far. I never went in far enough to see the gutted-out houses. I never went far enough to see the tiny store, which serves over 1,000 residents.
Candace has a “God Bless Alexis” poster hanging in her window. She has Bible verses tattooed all over her arms and neck. And even as she tells us that no one has work here, and no one has purpose; even as she shares about grandmothers sleeping in tipis because their homes are filled with danger and drugs, “Praise Jesus,” she says, “because he can change everything.”
This is the journey I’m on. This journey of listening to the Spirit. Lately, he’s been saying to start helping vulnerable mothers right here in Canada, so I’m here in a living room with Sandra, listening to her stories, listening to the prompting of the Spirit, keeping my hands and heart open for whatever he wants. I try not to make plans. I try just to obey. I make a lot of mistakes. But I’ve learned one thing in life — striving never prospers. Faith looks a lot like surrender, and it’s my happiest place, now.
There are several ways we can serve others — from a desire to gain recognition, a desire to redeem ourselves and a desire to give from what we’ve been given.
Jesus showed us how to walk in the latter when he washed his disciples’ feet before the Last Supper. The night before his crucifixion, he wrapped a towel around his waist and, like a servant, rinsed the filth of the streets off his friends’ feet.
“Do you understand what I have done to you?” he said. “You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet … just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another” (John 13:12-14, 34, ESV).
How has Jesus loved you, friend? How can you demonstrate that same love to someone else today?
Emily T. Wierenga is an award-winning writer and commissioned artist. Her new devotional, Commune with Me pairs with her latest memoir, God Who Became Bread. Both are available on Amazon or wherever Christian books are sold. Other books include Atlas Girl, Making It Home and Chasing Silhouettes: How to Help a Loved One Battling an Eating Disorder. Emily founded The Lulu Tree, a nonprofit serving vulnerable families around the world. She lives with her husband and three children on a farm in northern Alberta, Canada. You can find her on Facebook or Instagram.