His Vigorous Heart

A while ago , I said I would think about starting a series sharing some of the more controversial tidbits from my personal musings. Because my recent Easter reflection  still won't leave my brain, I decided to go ahead and start round 2 of this series. (Y'know...only four years later.) — We think there’s a great big barrier between us and God, but it doesn’t exist. We think our sin separates us from Him. But even in Genesis, when God knew Adam and Eve had sinned, He still chose to go walk in the garden in the cool of the day to be with them. Yet it was *Adam and Eve* who hid themselves from God, not God who hid Himself from Adam and Eve’s sin. — We were taught somewhere along the way that God can’t stand to be in the presence of sin. But Jesus—who was God—regularly broke bread with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners. That’s one of the main reasons that the Pharisees tried to prove he *couldn’t* be the son of God. Would God really commune with these sorts of p...

Easter. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the colorful candy, the whimsy of dyed eggs, the thrill of the hunt. As I grew older, I learned the story of the God who became man, who loved us so much that he died in our place. They call it the most beautiful story ever told. But as I got older still, I began to question that narrative. Because no matter how I tried to contort my brain, I couldn’t get that to align with the rest of the Bible story. When I read the teachings of Jesus, I saw him proclaiming a God who had been completely misunderstood by humans. “You have heard it said this...” he would say, and then he would flip the common understanding completely upside down. Jesus taught about forgiveness, non-violence, peace, love, mercy, and grace, and then said that “if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” (And frankly, it was precisely this subversive teaching that made the religious people conspire to kill him.) And so when Christian churches tell the Easter story, I cring...

I should start a whole blog series called "Notes from my phone" because that's where most of these ideas have started. (Although a friend of a friend already beat me to the punch.) I've toyed around with the idea of posting some of my notes under a "Devil's Advocate" moniker, but that's not entirely what they're about. Mostly, I've been avoiding blogging recently because even outside of college I feel the pressure to write well/be perfectly articulate, and I just don't have the energy for that on this space that's supposed to be a refuge and release for me and for others who may be just like me. The joy of writing has been snuffed out by the need to perform.  So as a practice of overcoming fear--and also just because I am genuinely curious and fascinated about this topic and others that I've typed into my phone but haven't been brave enough to share with the world--I'm going to put it out there in the hope and beli...

Recently, Nadia Bolz Weber shared an article written by my friend Connor about deconstruction. And today I came across a comment about deconstruction while I was stalking a Facebook post by a friend of a friend (as one does on the internet....no? Am I the only one? Alright.) 10 years ago--even 5 years ago--deconstruction meant something different than it does now. Back then (when cell phones still had hinges) it seemed like a perfect phrase for what I was going through. Like everyone, I had a boat , a house of cards, that I grew up within and was very familiar with. Not a "bubble", per se, but an entire personal framework and foundation for viewing and understanding the world around me. You could almost think of it as my identity; it was the way I interacted with the world, the container in which I held my conception of reality. It was comfortable in my little house, and I had a place to store every single thought or idea. But then slowly I started encountering things th...

Hey! It’s been a while (yet again) since I’ve posted. So much for New Years’ Resolutions of staying on top of my blog game.  You might remember from last time that I had just moved into an exciting new community house in Roanoke, VA. I’m still here! Things are slowly shifting into place, and we’ve been hard at work making the house a functioning environment. We just welcomed our third member this weekend after he graduated from college, and we’re looking forward to a summer full of events to kick off the Aidan Community in style. (Come on out if you’re in town!) Some of you guys have asked me where I’m working, how life is going, etc. I’m fortunate enough to work right across the street from my house. (You might also remember that my car sort of...exploded...in November and so I was without a set of wheels for about 5 months.) It’s not a thrilling job -- I sit at a desk stuffing envelopes for most of the day -- but it provides my needs, it’s within walking distance, a...

There is a very thin crack between the worlds, and I always seem to find myself stuck at the bottom of it, wedged between its narrow walls, stuck between a rock and the proverbial hard place. Once again, the world has chewed me up and spit me out. Once again, its system has allowed me to somehow slip through the gaps and fall through the cracks, forgotten, unnoticed; The Crack Between the Worlds, my forever home. Maybe we all live here, or have at least visited it a couple of times. Maybe we don’t like to talk about it. Maybe we’re all too uncomfortable with the idea to even admit it to ourselves, even in the privacy of our own souls. Or maybe I’m just different. Unique. ...Broken. But from my vantage point in this chasm so often accompanied by loneliness and despair and the shadow of death, I can see the outlines of two very distinct cities on the clifftops above me. To one side is the world we’re all familiar with, full of jobs and cell phones and money and Netflix and...

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...