Things Dr. Curtis Is Right About #5918

i think about religion in terms of research papers, mostly.

when others hear a sermon, i hear doctrines, theologies, greek, hebrew, editors, church history, connections to sociology, hauerwas' ecclesiology, rauschenbusch's social gospel, the enlightenment, the west, the east, the contemplatives, centuries of developments to get us here...

i think about spirituality in terms of reflective essay assignments.

when others talk about ministry, i hear methods, motivations, doctrinal assertions, assumptions about systems of injustice, implications like gentrification on poor communities...

its good. i hear this is the time for it.

i think deeply and care deeply and am in awe of this thing I study and love. but my mind is full and my heart must catch up.

in developing a gift there is a time to act and a time to stop acting. gifts are not at our whim and cannot be forced. if my gift is guiding others toward their spiritual growth, there's a time for me to let the gift rest.

a time to let the ground lie fallow.




candler already gave me permission to defer enrollment for a year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Wednesday Refrain

It's Wednesday today, the smack-dab-middle of the week; I didn't sleep again last night. Before the sun was up, my spirit was already bent beneath the weight of the day, like the trees under this new snowfall. A silent bearing, a stark remaining. My work is hard. I'm three years in, but there were three years before that, and four before that. Maybe it's not the duration so much as the intensity, the all-of-me that it requires, the vigilance and the attunement and the background-app-refresh of working with complex ideas day in and day out. Being a theologian means pondering the unknowable yet not turning away, almost as if what can't be known urgently must be known.  And indeed, it must. Or maybe the hard part is not the work itself, but coming to realize that who I am and what I produce is always going to be at the fringes of my profession. It's a reckoning with loneliness, I suppose. To look around and realize the brightest minds in bioethics are always going...
Read more

Staying Outside

So welcome to mid-September, when pumpkin drinks make their annual debut and candy corn lines the outer walls of grocery stores. But have you stepped outside in Georgia lately? It's still really summer, guys. I always have this frustration with our refusal to see a season all the way through. There might be some mornings when, if you wake up early enough, the dew on the grass and chill in the air talk to you about autumn. But I say let's be here now, in our summer selves, barefoot and warm in the sunshine. Autumn will come soon enough. School will get busier, fall races will be run, pools will close. But for now we have the magic of trees green and lush, tomatoes fresh from the ground, and a sun that flushes cheeks, and my soul isn't ready to come back inside yet.
Read more