My name is Lore Ferguson Wilbert. Yup. It’s pronounced Lor-ee. My good friends call me Lo. My oldest friends call me Lor. My brothers call me Sister. But my best friends call me Lowly and I hope I can live down to that.

My life is small and simple. Grace is the marked measure of all things in me. God is the ultimate Creator and He’s crafted all things for His glory and my good. I learn this, albeit slowly at times.

I am a Christian for whom doubt has been a near constant thread. I am not funny or vivacious or the life of the party. I am the one who hangs out on the margins, the one who sounds slightly, maybe impressive until you meet me, the one people don’t recognize when they see me. And it has taken me nearly 40 years to finally be okay with that.

I have lived in ten states. Nowhere is quite home. The writer of Hebrews quotes the Lord as saying, “They’ll never get where they’re going, never able to sit down and rest.” A favorite author, Wendell Berry, says in one poem, “We must arrive at the ground beneath our feet,” and in another, “at peace, and in place.” I have done neither, not completely. I am perpetually homesick and I wonder if God did that to me on purpose, so I would never feel too much at home on this earth.

I began blogging in 2000, when blog wasn’t a word and we still thought you could keep things private on the internet. I haven’t stopped writing since then, though the nature of this site has changed with time.

Author Bio: Lore Ferguson Wilbert is a writer, thinker, learner, and author of the book, Handle With Care. She writes for She Reads Truth, Christianity Today, and more, as well as her own site, Sayable.net. You can find her on Twitter and Instagram @lorewilbert. She lives in New York and has a husband named Nate, a puppy named Harper Nelle, and too many books to read in one lifetime.

About Sayable:

The name of this site is called Sayable, taken from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called The Ninth Elegy. These lines made a significant impact on me in college:

The wanderer does not bring a handful of earth,
the unutterable, from the mountain slope to the valley,
but a pure word he has learned, the blue
and yellow gentian. Are we here perhaps just to say:
house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window–
at most, column, tower… but to say, understand this, to say it
as the Things themselves never fervently thought to be.

Is it not the hidden cunning of secretive earth
when it urges on the lovers, that everything seems transfigured
in their feelings? Threshold, what is it for two lovers
that they wear away a little of their own older doorstill,
they also, after the many before,
and before those yet coming…lightly?

Here is the time for the sayable, here, its country.
Speak and acknowledge it. More than ever
the things that we can live by are falling away,
supplanted by an action without symbol.

The idea that we make things more real by naming them, saying them, this concept sticks to me. This is why I write. I want ideas that float around in my head to stick to me, to you, to us. I want us to see creation as Adam did in those first hours: naming it newly. I want us to process thoughts newly, freshly, see them in ways that shock and empower us, bless and complete us in the context of the gospel. I want to make thoughts, ideas, concepts, abstractions, sayable.

Disclaimer

Occasionally there will be posts on this site linking books, movies, items, or other things I enjoy. If you use a link from Sayable to purchase something I've recommended, it earns me a small commission. Think of it this way: I love a book and recommend it, you click on my link and purchase it, a commission from that sale goes to my account from Amazon, which enables me to continue the work I do here. So thank you!