For Better. For Worse. For Reals

I’ve been living on the road since October 2014, traveling across the U.S. (and to four countries) to speak at events related to themes from The Invisible Girls.

When people ask me questions like, “Where do you live?” or “Where’s home for you?” I pause because I don’t have an answer. I live everywhere. I live nowhere. I don’t know.

I own a townhome in Portland, Oregon, which has been rented out to tenants for the past two years now. I had an apartment in California but I gave it up in October when the lease was up because I knew God was calling me to make traveling and speaking my vocation for now. And now it’s just me and a large wheeled duffel bag with 9 months’ worth of clothes, my laptop, my passport, and a few books.

When people hear about my transient life, I often get ooohs and ahhhs and aren’t you lucky’s. And I acknowledge how blessed I am to be on this adventure right now.

I also realize that the transience and the frequent speaking engagements come with their own complications. As a for instance…

Last month I picked up a rental car that smelled like cat pee and cigarette smoke. And I couldn’t take it back because if I took the time to do that, I’d be late to the event. So I had to suck it up. Three hours in a car that smelled like an incontinent, chain-smoking cat had driven it last.

Last week I was at an event in North Carolina to speak at a few events at a school here. The first morning, I was sitting in my rental car (that, thank the Lord, does not smell at all), and my contacts felt dry. So I pulled some eye drops out of my bag and instilled them in my eyes, and as I blinked, one of my contacts fell out and I couldn’t find it. My glasses were in my hotel room, which was a 15 minute drive from the event.  I didn’t have time for a 30 minute round-trip drive before the event started.

Jesus, I prayed as I was sitting in the front seat of my car using the rear-view mirror to inspect my eyes, Please help me find my contact lens so I don’t stand on stage for 45 minutes squinting with one eye shut like a patchless pirate.

I looked again, and found the lens on the sleeve of my shirt.

I had an amazing time speaking at the event, talking to a group of middle school students about the Good Samaritan and the life of compassion that God calls us to. And then as they were leaving the assembly, one of the boys tripped and fell and broke his arm. So I set it and splinted him and sent him to the E.R. and then, a few minutes later, started teaching back-to-back composition classes.

Does this happen to Rachel Held Evans when she speaks at events? I wondered.

Tomorrow I have to get up at 3 a.m. to catch my flight, which is a pretty regular occurrence. I’ve changed time zones more times than I can count. I’ve been up for long stretches (my longest to date is 46 hours.)

There are lots of other stories that I will write more about later. I think the point is that no matter what life we have, it comes with its plusses and minuses. It comes with its excitement and its obligations. And it’s so easy to lose sight of the fact that everyone’s life is like that.

It’s easy for single women to glamorize marriage, and for married women to glamorize the single life.

It’s easy for childless women to glamorize the lives of moms, and for moms to long for a clean, well-decorated, silent studio apartment with a large ceramic bath tub.

It’s easy for people who aren’t in full-time ministry to glamorize the lives of those who are — and for those who are in full-time ministry to spend every birthday wish wishing they could, for one Sunday, sit anonymously in the pews.

It’s easy for people who have stable home lives to glamorize those who travel, and for those who travel to glamorize (and in my case, sometimes intensely envy) people who stay at home and get to retrieve their clothes out of a dresser instead of a suitcase, get to eat all their meals at the same dining room table, get to go to the same gym a few times a week, get to go to the same church every Sunday….

What I’m realizing is that all of us, no matter our situation, we have lives that are beautiful and complicated and blessed and hard. And it’s easier to glamorize the life we don’t have than to appreciate the life we do have.

And the win is to learn and practice contentment. To accept the hard parts and live into the good parts. To realize that there’s no such thing as a perfect life — for us or for anyone else.  To walk with each other through the ups and downs of our lives, accepting life for what it is.

For better.

For worse.

For reals.

Sarah Thebarge has a Master’s degree in Medical Science from Yale and was earning a Master’s in Journalism at Columbia University in 2010 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27. After nearly dying, she sold everything and moved to Portland, Oregon, to start over. While still undergoing cancer treatments, Sarah developed a relationship with a single Somali mom and her five daughters, who taught her how to love and be loved again.

The details of Sarah and the Somali girls’ story of survival, recovery and redemption are recorded in her memoir: The Invisible Girls. All of the proceeds from the book are going into a college fund for the Somali girls. Sarah has written for The Huffington Post and Christianity Today. Her book was chosen as the First Year Experience book for incoming freshman at Mississippi State University, where she delivered the convocation in August 2014. She is also spokesperson for Vanity Fair Lingerie’s Women Who Do campaign and Compassion International.

Bring her to speak to your group or at your church event: Book Sarah Thebarge

By |June 29th, 2015|Invisible Girls|1 Comment

Wild and Precious

I’m writing this post at 35,000 feet on a flight from Phoenix to Los Angeles.  I just saw the Grand Canyon for the first time in my life! As I’m flying back, I’m thinking about bucket lists.  And death. And what it means to be alive.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer nine years ago.

I had two recurrences, five surgeries, eight rounds of chemo, 30 days of radiation, one year of Herceptin infusions, three years of Zometa infusions, five years of Tamoxifen and Zoladex, and now I’m halfway through another five years of Arimidex and Lupron.

I have doctors appointments every three months. There’s a blood test my oncologist can check to monitor my cancer.  If the marker spikes, it means my cancer’s back and I need to start chemo again.

I did some research and found that checking the marker doesn’t improve your chance of survival.  It just lets you know sooner that your cancer’s back and you might die.

“Why would I want to know my cancer’s back sooner if it doesn’t improve my survival?” I asked my oncologist

“The only reason you’d want to know is if you’d live differently if you knew you were dying,” he said.  “Like — if you’d want to quit your job and have time to parachute out of an airplane or fly around the world or spend more time with loved ones.”

“Let’s cancel the blood test,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he asked me.

I nodded.  “I already live like I’m dying.”

And it’s true.

When you read my memoir The Invisible Girls, you’ll learn that when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was seriously dating a man named Ian.  Shortly after my mastectomy, he picked me up from my apartment one evening to take me out to dinner.

He suggested several restaurants that we’d enjoyed in the past.  And I became irrationally angry.  “Why would we want to go there?” I demanded.  “We’ve BEEN THERE BEFORE.”

After facing my mortality at 27 years old, I became acutely aware of how short and how precious life is.  And I didn’t want to retrace any of my steps.  I wanted to blaze new trails — even if it meant doing something seemingly insignificant, like dining at a new restaurant.

It’s been nine years since my cancer diagnosis, but I still feel the same sense of urgency.

The world is a big, beautiful place. There are so many things to see and to do.  I’m not going to live forever. So let’s start exploring now.

Lots of people talk about their bucket lists.  It’s a list of things to do before you die, but for most people, it becomes a list of things to do as you are dying. 

What if we rethought the idea of bucket lists?  What if, instead of filling up a bucket with experiences and memories and then kicking that bucket over shortly afterwards as you’re dying….what if we fill up buckets to carry with us as we’re living?

What if we look at live as an adventure?

What if we see the world as a land of endless possibilities and experiences?

What if we celebrate life by slowing down and noticing that we are, in fact, alive?

What if we create space in our lives to do the things we’ve “always wanted to do?”

What if we stop procrastinating and look for opportunities, even this week, to experience the world in a unique way?

What if we stopped thinking about what we want to do before we die, and started thinking about what we  would enjoy doing while we are pain- , disease-, and deadline- free?

What if we already lived like we were dying?

In the words of Mary Oliver,


“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

Sarah Thebarge has a Master’s degree in Medical Science from Yale and was earning a Master’s in Journalism at Columbia University in 2010 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27. After nearly dying, she sold everything and moved to Portland, Oregon, to start over. While still undergoing cancer treatments, Sarah developed a relationship with a single Somali mom and her five daughters, who taught her how to love and be loved again.

The details of Sarah and the Somali girls’ story of survival, recovery and redemption are recorded in her memoir: The Invisible Girls. All of the proceeds from the book are going into a college fund for the Somali girls. Sarah has written for The Huffington Post and Christianity Today. Her book was chosen as the First Year Experience book for incoming freshman at Mississippi State University, where she delivered the convocation in August 2014. She is also spokesperson for Vanity Fair Lingerie’s Women Who Do campaign and Compassion International.

Bring her to speak to your group or at your church event: Book Sarah Thebarge

By |June 22nd, 2015|Invisible Girls|0 Comments

The Invisible Girls

by Sarah Thebarge

I was riding on a crowded train during rush hour in 2010 when a little Somali girl, who couldn’t find a seat on the train, climbed into my lap and fell asleep.

While I was holding her, I started talking to her mom, who told me in broken English that they were refugees from Somalia. Her husband had left the family shortly after they arrived in the U.S., and now she was stranded here, raising five children by herself, without any income or language skills or job training.

Then the woman leaned her head against the window as tears welled up in her eyes. “It’s too much,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too much.”

I sat there silently, holding the sleeping child while her exhausted, overwhelmed mother cried. And as the minutes dragged on, I grew more and more uncomfortable.

I didn’t have a clue how to help a refugee family. I didn’t have any strong opinions about how to fix the problems with our immigration system. And, if I was really honest, I avoided most people who talked about “social justice” and “immigration reform” because the terms felt overused and overwrought. They seemed to require a significant amount of information and energy, and I didn’t have either of those things.

Shortly before I met the Somali family, I had been diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27. After nearly dying of it, I had bought a one-way ticket from the East Coast to Portland, Oregon, landing in the new city with nothing but a suitcase of clothes and a broken heart.

Even now, as I held the sleeping Somali girl in my lap, I was still undergoing cancer treatments. I had no mental or emotional capacity to rescue a refugee family — most days I felt like I needed to be rescued myself.

“God, you dropped this Somali family into the wrong person’s lap,” I thought as the train traveled down the tracks.

And then I felt an overwhelming peace, almost as if God had whispered in my ear: Just do for this family what I’ve done for you.

God had pursued me — chased me across the country, in fact — and encountered me in my loneliest moment. So I asked the Somali woman for her address and went to check on the family a few days later.

God had loved me when my bald head and mastectomy scars made me feel unlovable. So I began to spend more time with the Somali girls, loving them when their stained clothes and broken English made them feel unlovable.

God had shown me that He was Immanuel, the God who dwelled with me — not instantly changed or fixed me, but dwelled. So I began spending most evenings at the girls’ apartment, sitting with them in their dark, cold apartment because their mom was worried they’d run out of money for food if she spent too much money on utilities.

The more I loved the family, the more I began to see that the reason I used to dislike phrases like social justice and immigration reform was because it made the problems seem like massive, institutionalized, politicized systems. And I don’t have the interest, let alone the ability, to overhaul a system.

But when I dug through the rubble of the system, what I found underneath were people who were just like me. Girls who were scared and scarred and broken. Unlovables who wanted to be loved. Invisibles who wanted to be seen.

I ended up writing a memoir about the adventures I had with the Somali girls as I helped them navigate life in America for the first time. It’s called The Invisible Girls and all the royalties from the book are going into a college fund for the five Somali sisters featured in the story.

As I’ve been on this adventure with the girls (and with God), I’ve discovered that there’s a lot I can’t do in this world. But I can love God, and I can love my neighbor the way God loves me.

And maybe that’s enough.

Sarah Thebarge has a Master’s degree in Medical Science from Yale and was earning a Master’s in Journalism at Columbia University in 2010 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 27. After nearly dying, she sold everything and moved to Portland, Oregon, to start over. While still undergoing cancer treatments, Sarah developed a relationship with a single Somali mom and her five daughters, who taught her how to love and be loved again.

The details of Sarah and the Somali girls’ story of survival, recovery and redemption are recorded in her memoir: The Invisible Girls. All of the proceeds from the book are going into a college fund for the Somali girls. Sarah has written for The Huffington Post and Christianity Today. Her book was chosen as the First Year Experience book for incoming freshman at Mississippi State University, where she delivered the convocation in August 2014. She is also spokesperson for Vanity Fair Lingerie’s Women Who Do campaign and Compassion International.

Bring her to speak to your group or at your church event: Book Sarah Thebarge

By |June 12th, 2015|Invisible Girls|1 Comment