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.

the resurrection comes for the limping. 

everyone's a pastor, we just might have different congregations. 

Wherever we find ourselves sociologically or geographically, most of us are just trying to make it, and the point of faith in the Jesus-style is that it asks us to band together by throwing off unhelpful and rather weighty beliefs we may have about God, the Bible, the Remington Bolt Action Shotgun, and whether or not two-dudes can get married in our state, in order to free up a bit of bandwidth to say yes to the Incarnation and Resurrection awaiting all of us arguing with one another about the direction of our country and the place of our religion in it

God isn’t so much a king or a ruler, furiously demanding fidelity from slaves charged with erecting his temples and towers, as much as God is a tree, quietly converting the carbon dioxide of our fears about the future, our regrets about the past, and our anxiety about the present into oxygen and light and shade for generation after generation after generation.