The Last Minute

As I scroll through my facebook newsfeed and am inundated with a sea of red equal signs, all I can think about is that one scene in The Lion King, you know the one, where Rafiki finds out Simba is alive and pressing the pad of his thumb into ink paints hope alive; a mane around the head of the faded cub he neglected so long ago. Then in his joy and excitement he says, "It is time". I feel like we, in the United States of America, are standing at that pivotal precocious point. We are living in a land that is barren and dark, wasted and neglected. It is a land that has been greedily stripped of its nutrients, it is a land that is painfully broken. Now, because this is a metaphor, I don't mean the land itself (at least, not in this instance). But a people. We've forgotten how to take care of each other, how to make sure the circle of life envelopes all the kingdom. We have upset the balance of power and neglected to extend the place the light touches to everyone. So th...

I don't know about the rest of you out there but after this week my feminist hackles are raised. I am in a fighting mood and I am not ready to back down. So, some things about me that are important going forward: I am a straight, white, married, woman in my mid-twenties. I was raised in a middle class, urban, democratic, feminist household. I attended public inner-city, elementary and high schools in an North-Eastern mid-size city. I have attended a rural primarily white college I have attended an urban community college I graduated from an urban all-women, overwhelmingly liberal, fairly diverse, woman's studies focused undergraduate institution. I currently attend a small Presbyterian seminary that I consider conservative. I offer this because my educational background, and the spaces I have occupied over my life are integral to how I view the world. These experiences, while limited in their scope of my life, give a peak into where I am coming from. They are hardly...

Dearest child, Though you have barely been imagined, though you have not yet been yearned for and you don't have a star in the sky I point to and call yours, I am writing you this letter because my heart is heavy with the world today. Someday, when you are here, and running barefoot in a green backyard and I am watching you with my feet in a blue plastic kiddie pool filled from the hose, I might remember this letter. Someday when you are dripping in hormones and slamming me out of your bedroom (like I did to my mother) I might slip this under your door. I may not know if you are gay, or straight, or transgender, or if you don't believe in labels. You may not know who you are yet either, and that is wonderful too. None of these things change the part of me that is also a part of you. The part of me that gave birth, or adopted, or fostered you into the person you are now, the part of me that heaves in pain with you in one breath, cries out with joy in the next. Whoever you ...

--> “Since when have things been easy?” My dad said this to my mom while she ferociously unloaded the dishwasher. It’s been months of angry housework. The rest of us stayed out of the way. I sat in the dining room, staring at decades of photographs. Dust tickled the insides of my nose—my eyes watered and I sneezed. The memorial was in two days. **** Death never comes at a convenient time for the living. Even with months to brace for impact, knowing full well that someone is in that oily place between living and dead, grief’s seatbelt is a chokehold after the crash. My grandfather’s death was a year in slow motion. The stroke happened like most strokes – without apologies. That night on the phone he was still groggy, his voice muffled by an oxygen mask. Comfort came only in stirs of mumbled vowels. At least he was alive . People handed me this counterfeit hope regularly, watched me walk face first into a spider’s web and didn’t say anything at all.    ...

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” -- Mahatma Ghandi  Because ministry is a competition Who can have the craziest, busiest life? Who can have children? Who can get married the fastest? Who gets the call first? Who passes all the ordination exams, has the most life experience, ministry experience, is the least sinful?  Seminary is a lot of "nananana boo boo I'm better and more equipped for this than you are!"  Someone in one of my classes told a group of students, at least three of us under 30, that she prays for the young people essentially because we don’t have the experience of ministry that she does and that we aren’t equipped with enough life experience to do the job right. I held up my end of the bargain as a sassy young person by rolling my eyes. At the same time this attitude that young people are ill-equipped to do the amazing things that ministry requires and be leaders in the...

I hate that phrase and phrases like it. As if our emotions bear weight on us, tear at us physically. I have always struggled with that notion, finding it especially amidst writing that waxes poetic. I muscle with it, trying to discern how we could ever emote in units of measurement I am light and happy, our hearts are heavy, I feel a thousand pounds lighter, I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders... until I remember depression, how my body just didn't move, couldn't move. How everything screamed with a dull ache, from behind my eyes to the soles of my feet and light, porous precious light, made the marrow in my bones turn to lead. I've been feeling an unexpected heaviness, a pain crouched in the caverns of that place I might call a soul crying to be undone, let free, unchained. It isn't depression because as much as I want to stay in bed, there is a flicker of something still there. The flint and steel still spark, I still walk, heavily as it may be, to the ba...

I can feel my body shutting down. Exhaustion is closing in, and I am struggling to stay awake. In two hours I will wake up itchy with worry.  It will settle comfortably for the night in the pockets of veins not yet occupied by things I have to remember to do. The truth is, I am stressed. It's been two days since school started again. I have never felt more out of place in a learning environment. Uncertainty appears suddenly in my vision, vitreous detachment, then it is usurped by the list . You know the one you make that never gets finished; by the time you've crossed something off another thing has been burned into flesh in its place. These are the things you really really promised to do. But not tonight, because there are other lists that come first.  I've had some terrible people experiences lately. They aren't by nature evil people, certainly human at their core, but I've let them in. Like the rhino whose attitude was soured by the sand sneakily left in his ...