Laura Stembridge

When I volunteered for this panel, writing an article on what forgiveness looks like seemed relatively easy. To my mild surprise, my thoughts on the matter deadlocked so that I ended up mired in writers block until my dog Winston was attacked by two other dogs.

After attending Salem Lutheran Church in West Central Spokane for the past year, Pastor Liv Larson-Andrews contacted me to speak to the question of why I chose to attend Salem. It was easy and immediate to answer. Salem has always felt like coming home. I started my faith journey with Lutherans at Trinity Lutheran in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Emotional forms of ministry have their place, but as a woman in the church I am eager to move beyond the emotional woman stereotype and thus the surface-level understanding of my God-given talents and attributes. Therefore I constantly strive for a hopeful realism that exercises the complicated discipline of holding both cynical and idealist realities together in tension.