His Vigorous Heart

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...

"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...

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...

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...

The sun beats mercilessly through the windshield as I wind my way through the streets of Highland. Yet again, my arms are not so much glistening as they are dripping with sweat. The seatbelt has already stamped a diagonal wet mark across my chest, and I haven’t even been driving for 5 minutes. It’s a good thing I remembered to stash an extra pair of clothes in my backpack this morning. My car has a leak somewhere in the air conditioning system, and none of the windows roll down--so in this Louisiana heat, some days can get pretty miserable. I arrive at the Cedar Grove Friendship House where I volunteer with under resourced high-schoolers every afternoon absolutely drenched, mumble some hello’s, and head straight for the dirty bathroom in the back that never seems to have any paper towels. As I stand there trying to wipe off enough sweat to avoid soaking my fresh change of clothes the moment I put them on, it hits me: This isn’t easy. And I’m not just talking about crappy cars or Caju...