My children ask me things that I used to have answers to. “Where is [deceased person] now?” “Were Adam and Eve real?” “Why did Jesus ‘have’ to die?” “Who is God’s mom?” “Did God really kill all the firstborn sons in Egypt?” (thanks, Prince of Egypt, for that one… oops) But the questions didn’t come to me then, when I would have turned toward countless Christian-parent resources and colored pictures of Noah’s Ark and talked about how God is just and hates sin, but loves us. The questions come now when I have run almost entirely out of printable answers on which we can color inside bold black lines. I…
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Telling the Truth
Instagram wouldn’t let me say as much as I apparently needed to say about this book so here’s a post! A book review-ish.
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There was a school shooting…
There was a school shooting near my home today. Not many details have been released, but there was a school shooting near my home today. Parents – friends – received automated voice messages from the school district informing them that their children were on lockdown. News footage covered the school like it’s covered so many – too many – before. There are cliches around this now; how did that happen? A friend of mine texted me a link to a news article while I was plunked down at the YMCA getting some work done, my babies safely playing mere feet away from me in the child watch, oblivious to the absolute…
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How to Take Communion (whether or not you're a Christian)
As my faith has shifted I have become underwhelmed with much of my tradition. I’ve hodge-podged new rituals out of other practices and looked in dusty nooks of this one for meaningful expressions of a spirituality that no longer fits in the boxes I was given. But one ritual has never lost it’s mystery to me. Even when I couldn’t really consider myself a Christian I appreciated communion. Because this is Christianity’s addition to the universal groaning. Not a religious rite for the “in” crowd, but a deeply human, bestial cry. This is our admission that things are not as they should be, that we are broken and bleeding and…
