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. 

The idea that what people do together for an hour a week in business causal before complaining about the wait at Applebees could also be confused for the thing motivating millions of people across thousands of years to give up everything in the name of a self-sacrificing God desperate to put the world back together even if it kills him is (in a nutshell) everything that is wrong with Christianity in America

To spend the whole of our lives working tirelessly to trap and wrestle to the ground every worthwhile moment of our existences for posterity or our friends to notice on the Internet is to fundamentally waste the best parts of our lives.