Hi, my name is Carmen. Welcome.

In December of 2013 I decided to leave the community and home that I was familiar with in Victoria, B.C and move to the other side of the world. London, England to be exact. With a shortage of jobs over in Canada, the opportunity to teach and have an adventure was a call too strong to ignore. The move to a new city and falling into a job teaching children at a school with Severe Educational Needs has stretched me and broken me in ways that I wasn’t prepared for.

I find that writing helps me process what is going on in my life and as a result this blog was born. Over the years it’s morphed from a way to share my art with people, to a travel/here is what’s going on in my life on the other-side of the world, to it’s current iteration where I try and figure out how I feel about what I see going on in the world around me and the church.

I have a serious love/hate relationship with The Church and I’ve walked away from it and come back several times as an adult. At the end of the day I’ve chosen to try and figure things out in the midst of a community even though it may be a dysfunctional one. One of the reasons I often struggle in churches is that I’ve always found I don’t really fit neatly into any of the church boxes. I’m too loud, too opinionated, too strong willed and too ready to call bullshit on some of the things that occur all the time without anyone asking why they are done or why we believe them. I’m also a Single, Bisexual, Feminist Christian in my thirties all of which make me problematic for most churches as they don’t really know what to do with someone like me (they struggle enough with people carrying only one or two of those labels).

I grew up in the church and could sit here and give the perfect answers and play the part of a good Christian all day but I would be dying spiritually and mentally through that process, and I often wonder how many other people are doing the same. The older I get the more comfortable I am in my identity and all the complexity that brings. I honestly believe that if we stopped trying to be so damn perfect all the time the church would be a whole lot more appealing to people outside of it and we would all be richer for it.

This blog, After Adlette, is named for my grandmother, a woman who I greatly admire and whom I feel possesses many of the qualities that I strive for. She is elegant without being fussy, naturally beautiful, and of strong but gentle character. While they have always lived on the opposite side of the world, my grandparents have been an excellent example in how to live a life with a passion to serve others and a heart for those in need; I hope to be able to live up to their example even though our lives may look very different.

Thank you for stopping in and joining me on this journey, I warn you now that it will be messy, I’ll probably swear at some point and I can be quite sarcastic. However, if you choose to drop in and travel alongside for a while I hope that you will also find that I am trying my best to love people and love Jesus even though I’m often very bad at it.