His Vigorous Heart

Hey friends! I have been hesitant to share an update on my life, because it involves a job, and a job ( for me ) has always involved a mixture of pride and identity and an unhealthy fixation on money, and announcing that on social media just adds a dangerous new spin on all of those things--all wrapped up in the fact that it’s a ministry position and I want to be sure I’m doing it for the right reasons and not just so that I “look cool” or whatever. That said, I also think it’s a bit disingenuous to not share about what God has been doing in my life and in the lives of others through me. In light of all the things I’ve been learning about grace the last few years, it seems a bit weird not to share what is perhaps the biggest example of grace that I’ve experienced in this whole process. And it begins with a story. One Friday morning in August I was sitting at my office desk stuffing envelopes and researching cheap plane tickets in my downtime. I had just come to terms with the ...

That’s a provocative title, so maybe I’ll come up with something else to call it by the time I’m finished writing. (Here’s hoping) Here’s the deal. I work at a desk job where I do nothing but stuff envelopes all day (and don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for it in so many ways; it’s teaching me a thing or three about grace , and I’ve already made more in 5 months than I’ve ever been paid in an entire year, so that's cool), but my point is, it’s not exactly what I want to be doing. I have a lot of time to listen to podcasts and reflect on my life and the deeper questions and issues therein, though. And in the process, I’ve discovered a few things about myself and my decisions and the shape my life has taken. So naturally I’m going to talk about it on the internet. First, (and these are in no particular order), I’ve noticed that it’s really, really hard to teach the way of Jesus inside a church. Here’s why: people who go to church already think they know everything. Most of them...

"New beginnings give me hope, but they also scare the living daylights out of me. Will this be the one? Will this make me happy? Will I be successful here? Can I serve Jesus here? Will it meet my expectations? What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t belong? What if I fail? What if I’m miserable? What if I suck at my job? What if I can’t do the things I want to? What if I’m too old? What if I’m too young? What if it’s not what I thought it was? What if…? So many questions, so many doubts, so many fears. As a millennial entering his 7th job and 6th city since graduating college a scant 4 years ago, I’ve had more than my fair share of transitions. From a support-raised ministry position in Chicago that burned me out, to a non-profit internship in Shreveport where I attempted to heal, to a swim school instructor job in Richmond just to do something different, I’ve put a lot of effort into keeping my options open. ...Mostly because I’m scared of commitment. If there’s one...

Pictured below is the piece of art I made to commemorate my Yellow House experience, which was hung on the living room wall (slightly crookedly) just in time for our final house show/Goodbye Party last night. I’ve always wanted to be artistic, but I’ve never really experimented with it until my time here at the Yellow House. Since my most notable creative accomplishments this year have been my feeble attempts at string art, I chose to use that medium for this reflection piece. I should probably note that I see life as a journey and God as an ocean. I am a sailboat gliding across His sea, and His Spirit is the breath in my sails. Maybe it’s because of the small fisherman town I come from or the fact that my childhood home was right on the Bay; maybe it’s because I taught sailing for two joyful, magical summers and fell in love with the complex simplicity of it; maybe it’s because I resonate with the idea of a powerful, moving, deep, mysterious, and ever-changing yet ever-steady p...

We were sitting around the living room, sprawled out on couches or on the floor, when one of the high school guys in my small group spoke up. (Actually, he’s a seventh grader. We have a bit of a diverse group.) “Hey, Jesus is kind of like the hot wings at Buffalo Wild Wings.” We’ve been going through the book of Mark, using Timothy Keller’s King’s Cross   as our guide. It can be quite a challenging book, especially for teenage boys who are more interested in playing Just Cause 3 on their Playstations or who have the attention span of, well, teenage boys. Tonight we read the part where Jesus comes into the city of Jerusalem as a king riding triumphantly...on a donkey. This strange juxtaposition of royalty and poverty seems to plague Jesus’s entire ministry, symbolizing His manifesto for a Kingdom that is upside down to our world, completely backwards to our natural way of thinking. And those apparent contradictions aren’t just limited to kings and donkeys. The youth p...

I’m Nine-ing so hard right now. For those of you unfamiliar with the Enneagram, it is a personality assessment tool that we have found helpful at the Yellow House to help manage and understand our differences. Essentially, it categorizes 9 primary personality types that people can fall into, along with associated “wings” and periods of health and unhealth that expands and encompasses a wider range of emotional fluidity….whatever, it’s all very mathematical and complex and has already filled up countless hours of conversation in our house, with people who love it and people who are absolutely sick of hearing about it. (I fall somewhere toward the latter, but I do find it fascinating.)  The Enneagram goes deeper than the Myers-Briggs and other similar tests, looking not only at how we act, but our motivations for doing so. Apparently, this tool stretches all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, developing popularity among the monastics and Eastern Orthodox priests, and is st...