For too long, too many of us have spent our lives in relationships, systems, jobs, churches, families, and institutions that have convinced us that who they are, and what they believe, and what they do is worthy of our death. That salvation is somehow inextricably bound up in their maintenance and influence and ongoing power, and if we want to “make it” (whatever that might mean for your world), we best swallow our pride, and our spirit, and those weird parts of us that stick up no matter the amount of hair gel we use. 

the reason why the words “me too” have the power to topple studio executives, empires, and lucrative franchises is because they are divinity incarnate. 

I suppose, rather unexpectedly, this is what being baptized is supposed to feel like. An experience where what you think you knew about yourself, about the world, about where you come from, about how these sorts of things should work, and about what holds all of us together is drowned (sometimes against your will) in the river outside town. No matter the circumstances or who did the plunging, what manages to float to the surface on the other side of whatever hell you went through in the process of becoming who you are is probably worth holding on to. 

on the futility of waiting on white dudes with microphones to speak morality into being. 

Perhaps my own lack of fit involves a divine call to something other than providing hospice care for the final days of people who mostly believe the answers to the questions I (and those like me) have about the limping, partisan, anxious, and much-hotter-than-it-should-be-world they’ve left us, is to condescendingly allow me the privilege of directing the flow of ever-dwindling numbers of Buicks into the church parking lot. 

affordability isn’t just a component of our moral decision-making; it is the very whole of our morality.

What if our struggles as aspiring minimalists, millennials, and middle class Christians are rooted not in the fact that we didn't take the message of the Church (whatever it may call itself for you) seriously enough, but that we took the message we received too seriously.

What fills the nooks and crannies of my 32 year old heart is the prevailing understanding that if I have enough money I never have to explain myself, my choices, my renovations, my weekend plans, my preferences, my car(s), my beliefs, my politics, and my son’s exhausting extra-curricular calendar to anyone, ever.

Maybe the point of awareness isn’t the realization that we should be somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else, but that when we finally wake up from the sometimes paralyzing dreams of other, far wiser, braver, and decidedly more eloquent souls, we uncover the ability to dream our own dreams about the place our feet actually meet the floor in the morning. 

a Christmas story for the rest of us.