Kristen LaValley is a gifted writer whose words provide a refreshing perspective on faith and spirituality. Her writing resonates with those who carry tensions in their faith, offering insights that intersect doubt and belief, hope and suffering, beauty and heartache, complexity and simplicity. With a deep love for the Christian faith and a willingness to explore its complexities, Kristen's writing offers nuanced conversations that challenge readers to think deeply and wrestle with important questions.

Kristen lives in Massachusetts with her husband Zach and
their five children - Jonah, Emery, Anna, Chloe and Lydia.

Kristen’s writing is featured most frequently on her substack blog, Things I’m Thinking About.
Her popular Wintering series gains thousands of participants each year.

But here are some other places you might know her from :

From the years of 2013-2015, Kristen ran a popular mommy blog called When At Home. Her writing was featured on Huffington Post, Deseret News, Scary Mommy, ABC news, and a few other news and blog outlets. Her most popular posts were Let Your Husband Love You, Did I Love You Enough Day, and Are You Lonely, Mama? Kristen would like it known that some of those words were written before her frontal lobe was fully closed and she has grown and changed many times since then. She wouldn’t write those posts the same way today, but she’s thankful for the good things and amazing people they brought into her life.

After she closed When at Home, Kristen transitioned into writing more about faith, culture, church and where all of those things intersect. She and her husband, Zach, left full time career ministry in 2015 and shifted into life outside of the traditional church. Kristen writes honestly and openly about the faith that she loves and the system of church that she doesn’t. She and Zach work closely with individuals who have been spiritually abused and have become disenfranchised with the system of evangelical church. Most of that work happens offline and in the safety of relationships, but the outflow of the work shows up in Kristen’s writing on instagram, substack, and in her books.

In more recent years, a crisis twin pregnancy put Kristen and her family’s lives on hold. The story went viral on instagram with the help of Kristen’s community and a few other internet communities who adopted her family in prayer and offered financial support as they fought to save their daughters’ lives — all while living in an RV and trying to find suitable housing in the middle of a national housing crisis, as the journalist from the Washington Post so graciously and eloquently pointed out.

Kristen’s first traditionally published book, Even if He Doesn’t, details this experience. It’s a book that bears witness to all kinds of pain, exposes the theological tropes that bring harm to those who are hurting, and offers a better, more compassionate way of engaging with our hurts and the hurts of others. You can read more about it here or you can read it for yourself here.

If you’d like to listen to some of Kristen’s podcast interviews, they can be found on this spotify playlist :