jesus kicks off holy week by hanging out with a guy he’d raised from the dead. just chilling with martha and mary, of martha and mary fame, and with lazarus, who is reclining at the table like it’s just another day in the neighborhood. um, my dude, you died! now you’re just going to eat
Categorythe church
jesus died for you and other sentences that don’t mean anything
“i’ve heard so many teachings on why he had to die, but it never seems to stick in my head.” i’m looking out at the frozen neighborhood. sentences can freeze and crack, too. the meaning they once held is nowhere to be found. they are brittle, ready to snap. “the question of sin used to keep
when madeleine l’engle kicked my ass
after i hung up the phone and told joshua what i’d just learned, we knew that our tiny church plant was done. there had been signs leading to that moment in our kitchen. but this was it. the final nail. he leaned over onto the counter and put his head down. and that was a
failing at jesus stuff
she told me their church had split and that people were saying terrible things about them. i nodded my head and listened. silent, i nodded. churches are trouble, i thought. churches are the problem. they’re so messy, i thought. and when i looked out on the landscape of faith, i felt hopeless. but i was
the perfect christian life and anti-depressants
(this article originally appeared in catapult magazine. the topic has been on my mind, so i thought i’d bring her back out and put a new dress on her.) A close friend knocked on our door a few weeks after our daughter was born. He told us he’d waited these six weeks before coming by,
have you eaten from the tree?
the tension in the word of god swings like the young girl in the trees with my son. she is agile and lovely. my boy tries to keep up with her. i try to keep up with paul as he lays out plain as day how we have traded the real god for a dollar
ferris wheel church metaphor
the ferris wheel never stopped. they opened the doors like greeters on a sunday morning and ushered you right to your seat. it was unnerving. i hesitated like at the mall before an escalator. it inched. barely perceptible. it kept moving. the wheels of the machine don’t stop. i got in. of course i did.
o lord, make haste to help me
our help is in the name of the lord. our life, like a bird, has escaped from the snare of the fowler. indeed the snare has been broken and we have escaped. they say that when times are good that it’s easy to forget the lord. then when times are hard, we call out to