Tell us a bit about yourself, will you? I love leopard print, bold lipstick, getting lost in stories, and all the big ideas. Besides that, I have PhD in English from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. I’m a writer, speaker, the wife to a church planter in the southern California suburbs and mother to 4. My writing has been featured in such places as The Gospel Coalition, Books & Culture, and Christianity Today. My first book is Finding Holy in the Suburbs: Living Faithfully in the Land of Too Much (IVP).
Let’s talk about your book: what, in a nutshell, is it about anyway? Finding Holy in the Suburbs is more than just my story about learning to find my place in the suburbs. It’s about how places form our loves and tell us what to hunger for. When we hunger for what the suburbs say is the “good life” (individualism, consumerism, safety, etc.) we will always come up empty. When we repent and live out of our belovedness, we will move toward our neighbors in hospitality, generosity, and shalom. Think of it as your on-the-ground primer for living out your faith in your neighborhood.
Do tell, what was the inspiration behind it? I wrote Finding Holy in the Suburbs to reckon with this disconnect many people have: that we’re living rather ordinary lives but feel we were meant to live extraordinary lives for God. We’ve connected our sense of mission and calling often more to where we live than how we live where we do. Or, we’re unaware of how our places form our loves, for good or ill.
Also, I confess to being a bit snobby about moving home to the suburbs to plant a church three years ago. I felt like I could cover my life in metaphors if I lived in a city or in the country and moving home to suburbia initially pulled me up short. I needed to find a way to live for the Kingdom of God in a land of strip malls and tract homes and to realize that wherever we live we can love God and love our neighbor.
How do you hope readers will be changed by your words? I want readers to be empowered to stay put and start small right where they’re placed. I want them to take a good, hard look at how they’re being shaped by their places without even knowing it so that they can then see the goodness of God show up on their culde-sacs and in the school pickup line. I want readers to join together in book clubs to consider how to implement practices of welcome. I desire nothing less than transformation— not because my words are so great, but because God is a God who wants to meet all our hungers with himself right where we’re at.
Lest we forget, how have you been changed by writing the book? I’d supposed I thought that at the end of writing the book, that all my longings for a different place or a different context would be swallowed up securely in the larger story of the gospel. Yet, I’m learning it’s a discipline and a practice in my body each day. I still walk our suburban paths. I make lunches and take my kids to soccer. I pray with friends and people in our church. I’m learning the long, slow walk in the same direction of obedience and loving a place.
Yet writing has also been the mechanism where I’ve staked my claim on God actually being good. He runs to meet us and covers our shame. I’ve pressed into that. I’ve also been grateful that so many reviewers, readers, and interviewers have seen what endorser Seth Haines said: “she only cuts where she can bring healing.” That idea — that we can critique and yet be kind, implicated along with our reader, and point to something better — was my prayer while I wrote.
How and where can we find you on the internet? I’m at www.aahales.com and on Instagram and Twitter at @aahales. I’m also staring a podcast called “Finding Holy,” where we connect the dots between the things that matter and your everyday, holy life. I can’t wait for you to listen!
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