December 2009
27 posts
“jesus made love the mark of sovereignty.”
– mlk
November 2009
37 posts
i wrote this poem six years ago and sang it...
20 years
Twenty years from now Ill be 45 and the blond in my beard will be gray. My memory may be even more selective. And their will be people that I will have given myself over to. My friend mentioned this idea today that involved trinitarian economics, an idea of gifting to people the things we own-like the Father has gifted his Son.
Twenty years ago I was five and I had a green jacket and overalls. My...
the fabric|| no.4
The Jews always understood wisdom as the part of God that made things work—that held it all together. Why do the mountains not fall into the sea? Because through God’s wisdom and logic he made them. Like the logicboard of a laptop or the fabric that holds your pack, tent and boots together so God’s wisdom is to the world. The first Christians understood Jesus in a similar way. Jesus makes God’s...
“the purpose of silence and solitude is to be able to see and hear.”
– richard foster
shhhhhhh|| no.3
I was skipping stones on a lake not to long ago. The whole time I was trying to see if I could get over ten skips, but I wasn’t having much luck. So, I lay down on the beach for a while and then sat back up and looked over the water. It was completely still…all the ripples had settled…there was no noise. I could see clearly the reflection of the mountains that fed into the lake. I could hear the...
bearded wanderings
When we look pass what we front toward one another or better what we present toward one another as our person-hood we find out where our fears and ultimate loyalties are rooted. If selfness is rooted in ourselves then what we feel and who we are as people gets corrupted by a kind of egocentric love that has little overflow. It is a love focused on self preserving loyalties that dictate to us a...
“Leave… Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful...”
– don miller
find your sinai|| no.2
In the chaos where do you run to hear from God? Elijah ran to Mt. Sinai and upon reaching the mountain the ‘word of the LORD came to him’. Moses goes up to Sinai to receive the Law from God. Paul the apostle after encountering Jesus retreats to Arabia, where Sinai is, and Jesus Christ teaches him for three years. There are places that when you are there you can’t help but tune in to what God might...
sorry signs on cash machines
So I sat or better laid on the floor wondering what voices had been occupying my ear all day. Most of the day was spent studying and learning, wandering and growing. I thought for a while about a trip to the mountains and how big those mountains were. I thought how they echoed something big and grander than themselves. I thought about a conversation I had with a friend about trees-oaks and palms...
“blessed are those who never read a newspaper, for they shall see Nature and...”
– henry david thoreau
the echo|| no.1
God created the world by speaking it into existence. The psalmists describe creation as an echo of the presence of God. As his creation God has left intimate words within us. What would it look like, from the daily drab, to actually listen and hear those words? Because a day filled with noise and voices can be a day of listening, if the noises become for us the echo of the presence of God. When we...
wrote and recorded before i was fully awake but...
stumble
be without and don’t doubt
feel but when you think to kneel
…wait
…fidget
…steal
shake it off and make
bid your love goodbye
…produce
…consume
…die
hear and now draw near
close enough to toast
…celebrate
…love
…boast
in the things that matter most
your bride and the ebb of the tide
…wonder
…imagine
...
cosmic in the common
There are moments when you breathe deep enough… to think through that breath. In that breath there is an echo of the voice that once said, ‘Let there be’ and there was. I am not saying you we or me are gods rather I am saying ever so briefly that the earth is full of the stuff of God. His voice and peoples and wild asses, they all find a common sharing resolve in the one who is...
wrote this from a place of real pain around summer...
he rides
he rides with his inner man
with the ares of salvation close at hand
gallant and fierce, on the plain he rides
with the memory of injustice in his side
as a shepherd seeks the wandering soul
he races to his lost, kicking up the earth’s nole
waves of thunder are parted and darkness hits a wall
as he rides the clouds break and mercy is poured out for all
out of the dark clouds come a...
whirlwind stories
I have this can of Ginger Altoids sitting on my desk. It has been with me for sometime now. In my experience here are things that we take along on trips or other ventures not because they have some monetary value but because they have nuzzled out a place in our space and it would seem wrong to throw them away. When you are moving these are things you don’t think twice about bringing to the...
“how we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives.”
– annie dillard
“The ghosts of our glories are grey-bearded guides.”
– ellery
wrote this after living in cali for two weeks but...
in the drops
The night is a quiet space when you think about it. The darkness seems to absorb the sounds and the streets are so empty. When I ride at night I feel so fast too. Maybe its because I can only see so far and shapes seem to fly by just a half a second faster than the norm. It is in those half seconds that I feel invited to reach down to the drop bars.
Now it may seem odd, because it is, but the...
just wrote this there is a typo in...
worried shoes
It is not that I am scared or angry or mad but I am unpleasant in my soul and the soul is the whole self and so I allow myself to be ripped apart by thoughts instead of saying them out loud. It is the nature of being a seven (technical enneagram language) that can lead to isolation and a withdraw that is so uncharacteristic that I almost don’t recognize myself in these moments. Who is this...
reworked this one-messy enough
worlds with words →
homer on home
‘for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not dare about it.’ (Homer, Odyssey, book IX)
I read that in the context of studying the exile of the Israelites and with out much need for interpretation it seemed true. The thing is as a Christian...
stepping in
”and God does not punish the farmer but only marks him forever as the future of a lost past. There is no counterviolence from God-not even the appropriate divine vengeance when, as God says, “your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”’
(John Dominic Crossan, God & Empire: Jesus against Rome then and now) ‘He looked this way and that, seeing...
isaiah|| the seventh woe
‘Repetition is, I would guess, the feature of biblical narrative that looks most “primitive”” to the casual modern eye, reflecting, we may imagine, a mentality alien to our own and a radically different approach to ordering experience from the ones familiar to us.’
(Robert Alter. The Art of Biblical Narrative. p. 88) With this in mind the prophet Isaiah begins with...
isaiah|| utterly estranged
‘Ah, sinful nation, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, children who deal corruptly, who have forsaken the LORD, who have despised the Holy One of Israel.’ [1.4]
In the verse after this there is reference to a beaten body which is a clue to some of Isaiah’s thought. Israel is collective and this message, or should I say announcement, collectively addresses. There...
mark|| who am i
When we seek to define ourselves and others there can be pressured to associate with a certain kind of cultural trend or even ideology. She is so retro or he is so postmodern. These labels are not always helpful because it would take tons of stories and years of knowing and commitment to actually know how to define someone. The process for ourselves is odd because as soon as we think we have...
mark|| making it fruitful
At a lecture I attended yesterday one of the leading scholars in New Testament studies said something to the effect-and here I am quoting him from one of his commentaries:
“Our actions belong to a larger pattern of significance than that of our own lives, and the church’s obedience to God’s will matters urgently, because it is apart of God’s strategy for the eschatological...
“winds cycle through the open ocean thousands of miles away to crash on our...”
– one california day
seat in hell
I was reading a book the other day about survival. Who dies who survives and why. It followed the story of many who fell into disaster and took steps to survive. The way these individuals these ‘survivors’ (whether they lived or died) looked at reality was a huge contributor to whether they would survive.
After being on a lifeboat for seventy-six days a guy named Callahan summed up...
god of trees
I have looked up to trees all my life. In the very literally sense that I physically have never been at a place in my maturity where I towered over any tree but also in an admiring sort of ‘looking up’. The strength, beauty, wildness, and upward reaching pose have drawn me into fascination over the years. I will occasionally tell a story about being on a playground in grade school and...
two staff girl
I had been walk for only about two weeks but the weight of the day and the long miles I sentenced myself to had worn me into the ground. I was hobbling at this point because of the blood blisters on both of my feet and my shoulders had developed a strawberry colored rash that was ignited by sweat. So I had made a mental plan. I say ‘mental’ because I had made the plan in my head, not...
beards boars & bears|| intro
Beards are, among many things, biblical. In the Torah (Numbers 6 is a good place to look) men and woman would take this vow where they would separate themselves to the LORD for a time and along with not drinking vinegar or wine they would not shave. Now most women can’t grow beards and perhaps that is enough said in that direction. But while in high school it was common knowledge that the...