December 21, 2024 This is the season where Christians worldwide commemorate a birth. But before the birth comes the waiting, the in-between season of Advent, a space for holding contradictions. Christ is coming, Christ has come. I love the contradictions. They don’t force a choice, don’t foreclose possibility. Is the world desperately broken or is there redemption? Am I hopeful or afraid? Is it...
April 19, 2024 “I shall not want” the chorus echoes, a refrain I hold like a worn lovey. It is hard explaining this to my children, who cannot fathom a world without the primal fire of wanting, or why that would be a good thing. “Think about everything you want, the things you need, the things you enjoy—and all of those things not being there. We call that absence “wanting.” So, to ‘not want,’...
Did you have a time when you asked what you would do with your life? Did you find an answer, then stop asking? I thought, when I was younger, that’s how it worked. People got jobs and that settled it. Fireman. Teacher. Pilot. As a college student, back when it wasn’t weird to be unsettled, when we were supposed to be dreaming about who we would become, I wrote a poem reflecting on this...
December 2022 There’s always a lot of dust and contractor trash bags before there’s anything that looks nice on Instagram. As with renovations, as with life. For the longest time, one of the main hindrances to using our basement as a retreat space has been the dilemma of how people would get there. Not as in maps to our neighborhood but as in passing from the door of our house to the basement...
October 20, 2022 It’s unfortunately the case that roasting a rotten eggplant does nothing to improve the situation. I love eggplant, enough that I displaced some tomatoes this year to make room to grow it for the first time. I’d call it a success; we harvested a few fruit before leaving for a long summer west coast visit; a handful grew while we were away, and were, I’m assured, contendly...