The Last Minute

This is a placeholder for an upcoming blog post that is taking me a really long time to write. These are the core ideas of what I have learned in my first totally full semester of studying social work, and how that relates to my degree studying theology. Figured I'd share so it motivates me to finish the other one. 1. This country founded on the very principles of a privileged few and we can do so much better. It is fraught with inequality and our policies consistently represent selfishness and individualism. This is the opposite of everything I understand to be of a Christian ethic. 2. There a lot of people who want to change things and are willing to put in the hard work to do it. Some of those are definitely white, privileged, and Christian. 3. I'm still not totally sure how the church fits in this, but I'm working through that. I think the term "building relationships" as a solution is mostly an excuse to not deal with serious institutionally systemic is...

All I have to go on for this is my own experience, my own story that is still being scratched across history as we speak, bleating and wailing and ripping at the corners of me to get out. I don't know who reads this, or if anyone will. But more than anything I know it needs it's own space outside of me.  I don't mean to undermine the realities of an eating disorder but dealing with language is a bulimic experience for me. When I read, it is with a voracious appetite; I consume quickly and without stopping. I become only a mouth that gobbles character development and plot lines and chomps desperately at everything within my line of vision. When I write, it is always a purge; it comes out in gasps and furious fingers that can't keep up. Writing is the experience of spilling out over and over until I'm empty. This pattern is compulsive. It's how I've always been, however, from the time I learned to read and sneaked chapter books under the classroom table an...

Prologue: I'm not very good at waiting. When I want something it burns and itches and scratches on my mind much like an STI: an infection on my psyche. I have to give in, be distracted by something else, or ride it out. A wave crashing against the shores of my head, I pray that eventually I will come up for air. Sometimes I drown. I let everything else fall to the wayside and become hyper-obsessed with possessing, doing, or being whatever it is. I get all-consumed by controlling this one variable, if you will, and stop breathing life into anything else. Then, when I've satisfied the itch and cooled the burn, I move on. It is often a battle with myself to finish the things I start after that fire goes out. I frantically blow on the coals trying to light it again, sometimes I'm successful, other times I become so exhausted I collapse in on myself. You should see the drafts of half-finished blog posts sitting in my cue and unfinished poems on my hard-drive. After heari...

I'm not a huge crier when I'm sad or even happy. 99% of the time it happens because I am PMSing and otherwise it's because I am so incredibly stressed out I no longer have a hold on my emotions. So...usually tears arrive before I take a test or because it's 3am and I'm on page 20 of a ten page paper and I still have like 30 things to talk about. But since said alien took up residence in my uterus I cry all of the time. At least once per day. I have no grip on my emotional filter at all. This manifests in more ways than tears. Like the time I wanted to cross the street and this guy was being a total douchecanoe in his fancy little mid-life crisis penis car and I gave him the finger like it was no problem and screamed a nasty little list of profanities about how pedestrians had the right-of-way. I promise I don't behave like that in public generally. But pregnancy makes you do scary things. I generally don't recommend it if you don't want to experience s...

So, I've been incredibly frustrated with my Seminary experience for a number of reasons. I won't go into that much more right at this moment, other than to say a lot of times I get frustrated by the hypocrisy of the community I'm a part of. If you are interested in the frustrations I have had, you can read my personal experience that I wrote last year about why I love Jesus but hate seminary. I recognize that this is not everyone's experience with Seminary but it has been by and large mine. I'm not going to apologize for it, but stand by the words I said there and leave it with the caveat that none of us are perfect, only Jesus is. Moving on. I've lived in this community over two years now in Seminary owned apartment housing next door to the campus. I've been surrounded by neighbors who both attend Seminary and some who attend other schools in the region (or both, like me). This is a very very University dense city and cheap housing is of paramount impor...

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...