Idle and Blessed

I want the things that make me come alive. I know that means not-Atlanta. It means not-church-ministry, and not-Baptist. It means not-office, not-sitting, not-idling. What does it mean? I’m really introverted most days, and that forces me to live with heightened awareness of my energy. Where it goes and when it returns, what things drain it and what things sustain it. I have to choose where I invest it, because when it gets down to the bottom of the barrel, everything else must wait. My energy drains in the city. My energy drains in traditional ministry. I cannot be sustained in an office or cubicle, or in a life of being still. I’ve been watching how my energy surges in academia done right, in rooms of people with ideas and solutions. Bioethics meetings. Management meetings. The days when I go in and out of yoga classes, ethics classes, running trails, and important work. I am drained by monotony and jobs that don’t matter. I am drai...

All of the real things are born out of darkness. The whole earth began as darkness hovering on the face of the deep. From it the light was formed, and the rocks and the trees, and then the more lively loud things like elephants, and human beings. Our common origin was deep darkness, something we instinctually fear but remember. Babies enter the world through darkness. Rain falls through dark clouds. We wake up every morning from darkness, a new awakening. A new birth. A tiny creation story. All of the true things are spoken out of silence. First there was silence, "then God said," and it was so. We know God speaks this way, sending voices to cry out in the wilderness. God is one who speaks from the stillness, and we know it when we get still enough to hear, to give up our own unceasing loudness. I know this: real things are born into my life through darkness. Nothing valuable has ever come to me without pain. And true things are spoken to me in the silence of selfle...

Kels and I have this thing where we pick a word for each new year. I think it's actually a thing for lots of people, but we keep ours on the DL. So little-known fact: I have a word for 2015, and it's a positive uplifting idea that makes a lot of sense for where I am in life right now. But you want to know something? If I had to describe this year so far in one word, it would not be that one. It would be "overwhelmed." I started 2015 by taking an intensive seminar course on immigration and the American church. 43 hours of class time in the first week of January is a very interesting concept. It was a fantastic course, but after being immersed in the complexities of American immigration and its effect on the church, "overwhelming" is the only word I have to describe it. I take on the problems and the sadness of certain issues, and immigration is one of them. Last Sunday, the second weekend of 2015, I was received into the Episcopal Church by Bishop Wrigh...

I was there with the first mythmakers and monks who made up your stories, traced your runes. But now I see you: wind, woods, and water, roaring at the rim of Christendom -- you, land, to be left in darkness. I want to utter you. I want to portray you not with lapis or gold, but with colors made of apple  bark. There is no image I could invent that your presence would not eclipse. I want, then, simply to say the names of things. I'll leave aside kings and their lineages, their deeds and battles. For you are the ground. The ages to you are only seasons. from Rilke's Book of Hours

There is a lot I'm afraid of. There's a lot that makes my heart race when I sit still enough to notice. Sometimes I have the sun to make me brave, on the days when it can shine strong enough through the clouds. Other times I have the trails. There's sometimes the liturgy, which makes a home-feeling settle me down. I can be brave for a day after that. The stars, too, or the silence of winter, or the right song through my headphones on a Monday. And then sometimes none of that finds me and I forget I was ever free at all. But that was yesterday, and today I feel hope, because there are one or two people in my life who remind me about freedom, which is the Spirit of God in me, even when I am afraid. Even when the sun can't shine strong enough through the clouds. Maybe even more so then.

I like to be prepared for things. I like to know I'll be good at them before I try. When I was little my sport was soccer (well, first it was tee ball, but I'm not sure that's a sport in itself). I remember doing drills in my front yard over and over with Dad, making sure I'd be able to stop that ball when it came at me from the feet of another team. The games mattered so much. The technique mattered so much. But it was the practice that mattered the most. When I learned Russian I didn't speak much until I knew complete sentences. At the end of my first 3 month trip, Slavik said, "How did you go from knowing 3 words to saying everything? I've never seen anything like it." I like to know I'll be good at things before I try. It doesn't mean I don't love a good challenge. A marathon in the driving rain, 50k of Appalachian terrain, getting a Masters degree, living in Russia…I thrive on challenges, but these are my cha...

There's always a foreground and a background in life, and most of the time we pull only the biggest events to the front, like on our Instagram feeds. The noise and the laughter and the glitter jump forward, and we ignore the rest. Do you remember the 20 minutes you spent in the car going home last night? Of course not. We forget the spaces in our days, if we ever noticed them at all. Yoga teaches that we should pay attention. That we should pull the spaces to the foreground and let some of the busy things fade. There are downward dogs and warrior 2's but there are also the transitions between them, and they're harder. It also teaches us to notice the spaces between the breaths we take. We know there's an inhale. We know there's an exhale. But there are also spaces in between, where we're all empty or all full, and maybe we don't ever notice that, but we should. Because in our frantic hurry, our raging consumerism, our constant need for stimulation, we a...