Posted in Church, Music, Roots on April 15, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I love it in your room at night
You’re the only one who gets through to me.
My sister and I grew up with a family friend (we’ll call her G). She was a few years older than I, and we both looked up to her. She taught us how to put on makeup the cool way (glitter shadow, shiny lip gloss – basically everything sparkly). She kept us informed on who the hottest heartthrobs were.
She introduced us to The Bangles.
Posted in Church on February 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I’m guest-praying at Osheta Moore’s Shalom in the City today. Today, we say “we don’t know,” and “help.” Please come join us.
Also, read these things:
Posted in Church on February 25, 2014| Leave a Comment »
I will be guest-posting/guest-praying on Osheta Moore’s blog on Thursday, so I will be back to remind you then, but I don’t want you to miss the rest of this series. So I’m letting you know today, because today is when it starts.
This might be the most important thing I am a part of this year. Not that it’s a competition. But if it were, this might win.
Posted in Church, Hope on January 16, 2014| Leave a Comment »
Today, I had the honor of guest posting at Preston Yancey’s blog as part of his series on what women want from the Church.
I see that God works through the Church, but sometimes, I have anxiety about it. The Church deems much of what I see God doing as inappropriate. Hop over to Preston’s to read the rest.
Posted in Church, Hope, Poetry on December 8, 2013| 2 Comments »
My question for you…
I’ll get to that.
First things first –
Your church and I?
We don’t like each other.
We “love” each other.
I love them like I love the prim biddy with corseted heart who preempts every hello with an are-you-seeing-anyone and looks down her highway of a nose when I talk of Those People.
They love me like they love their drunken, cantankerous uncle who embarrasses them at Grandma’s funeral by saying, “shit,” in front of the preacher.
But that’s not liking.
And that’s not enough.
How is it my fault?
That question is neither
“Tell me how wretched I am so I can wallow in my filth…”
nor
“Strip me of unpopular conviction so I can baa in tune with the rest of your sheep.”
If you require those responses
I’m not your girl for the job.
I am a dissenter.
I am a peacemaker.
If everything is possible for you,
How will you reform my soul to make it so?
I dreamed of a wall.
I cried.
I softened the mud between the bricks with my tears.
I planted seeds there.
I woke too soon,
But not before I saw the strongest root begin to nudge one of the bricks out of place.
I think you have begun.
I want in.
My Story Sessions sisters and I are doing 40 Days of Poetry. Hopefully there will be more that I want to share.
Posted in Church, Hope, Work on December 4, 2013| Leave a Comment »
“Sometimes, wrestling with wait looks a lot like believing in spite of and sometimes, it looks like pushing back with every ounce of strength you have within your bones.” Elora Ramirez, Story Sessions (do it)
Advent has always been difficult to me. There’s so much rush, and I’m supposed to be waiting? There’s no time! I have parties to attend and throw, gifts to choose or make, and if I manage to finish all of that early, I’d like to send cards (purposely sent – if at all – after the first day of Christmas so they can be holiday cards without anyone getting fussy, because I just don’t want to hear it). Oh, and there’s also those two jobs where it’s dead week and finals week, so the first two weeks of December are the busiest of the term.
This year, I get to add being sick for a week to the mix. Good times.
I also have temper issues with waiting. I’ve never waited on a child of my own to come into the world, but I’ve waited beside friends, and even from the outside, it’s frustrating as hell. It’s frustrating in the last few weeks of the perfect pregnancy, when she’s miserable and exhausted, and if one more asshole asks her, “Wow! You haven’t had the baby yet?!” or remarks on how huge she is, she might have no other choice but to calmly and rationally stab them in the neck. It’s agonizing to swim through the sea of paperwork required for adoption, especially when after doing all that paperwork, there are still delays and Facebook posts that taunt her with ten thousand pictures of everyone else preparing for Christmas with their little people for whom it is still new. It’s heartbreaking to have the long-awaited child within her grasp, only to lose him or her to miscarriage or an inconveniently changed heart.
But these are not my stories. I don’t know the wait for a child from any perspective other than outside.
My waiting is of a different sort.
My waiting is for a set of larger boots to keep mine company by the front door. It’s for lazy Saturday mornings where we pretend that we’re out of town but we really just sleep in and make waffles way too close to noon to call it brunch. It’s for a forever plus one. It’s for a hand held, a back had, and names that sound like poetry when spoken by the other who was meant to speak them the most.
It’s a waiting that might never be realized for a husband who might not actually exist.
It’s a waiting that’s more often a fight than an anticipation.
My waiting is about pushing back when might-not seeps into my thoughts with a louder, stronger Might. It’s about remembering that the importance of desire is not diminished by not yet having it. It’s believing that there are far more things that are or will be than I can see on my clearest day.
It’s no mistake that in Spanish, “to wait” and “to hope” are the same word.
So I wait. And I hope. And maybe this year, they’ll become the same thing in my soul. Maybe this year, espero.
Posted in Church, Hope, Thanks on November 18, 2013| 2 Comments »
Linking up today with Tara Owens’s synchroblog on Coming Home.
Christmas means going home to me. I always go home (to my parents’ house) for Christmas Day, and that starts a week of celebration for me. It’s the end of the rush – the end of the preparation. It’s time for celebration.
Going home is not always easy. I don’t have a lot in common with my family, other than bloodlines and Jesus, and we approach Jesus differently. Their Christmas ends December 26, when mine has just begun. I’m also somewhat of an anomaly because I’m 38 and have never been married. My parents have been married since they were 19 and 23. My younger sister and brother-in-law are celebrating their fifth anniversary this year. My aunt is widowed, but in order to be widowed, you have to have been married (twice, in her case). I think they don’t know what to do with me. I think they don’t understand (I don’t really understand either, but that’s another post for another time).
So going home is often lonely. It’s the loneliness where you’re surrounded by people who love you but you still feel like the other – the one on the outside, peering into the foggy window to the beautiful scene that you can’t quite reach and don’t quite know how to fit into (or even if you’re supposed to fit at all).
But being away from home on Christmas is worse. To be lonely and also alone is bad. One year, north Texas had a freak snowstorm around Christmas. But it was December 24, and I was not going to let it deter me. Then, when I called my mom to let her know that I was on my way, car fully packed and fueled, coffee in hand, she told me that conditions were so bad that their road had been closed and that I shouldn’t come. It wasn’t safe. She tried to soften it by saying that Tammy and Matt were stuck in Oklahoma to let me know that I wasn’t the only one missing, but it didn’t soften it. They were stuck, but they were together. I had no together.
So I spent Christmas Eve how any responsible, mature Christian would – with baked goods, a bottle of wine, DVDs of Lost, and my sad feelings. My friend Maranatha invited me over for the evening, but that was after the second glass, so I wasn’t getting back in the car.
The next morning, however, she and her family wouldn’t take no for an answer. Her two sisters and her mother both called to inquire if I was on my way. I was coming for Christmas brunch if they had to come get me themselves. They fed me, plied me with coffee, and somehow managed to have a gift for me, which was totally unexpected, so that I would really feel a part of the whole celebration. They let me be sad when it got overwhelming.
I love those people. It was the next best thing to going home. They still gave me Christmas Day with my family – just a different family.
A couple of days later, the roads were clear, and I was able to go to my parents’ house. I ended up driving right behind Tammy and Matt the last five miles of the trip, so we timed it perfectly. Everything was back to the way we meant it to be – just a few days later.
I am lucky. I am blessed. I am happy (most of the time). I am pleased with my life (again, most of the time). I am whatever-adjective-you-prefer-for-the-relatively-charmed-life-I-lead.
However…
I yearn to move from “going home” to “coming home.” I have spent the last week musing about what the difference is, and I can’t quite put my finger on it yet. What I’ve come up with so far is that I don’t want to have to leave the little pocket of existence that I think of as my life to go home. I want home to be a part of life – a place I come to – a place I find not only my family and the people who mean home to me but I also find myself.
This will be the first year that I’m with a church that observes the liturgical year. This will be the first year that I am not doing Advent and Epiphany and Lent alone (or as the weird girl who sporadically appears at Vespers, shifty-eyed and guilty-faced, like she’s cheating on her church). They’re very difficult to do alone. Doing it alone is not doing it right (and we all know how I like to be The One Who Does It Right). I hope that this helps me see home as a place I come to rather than a place to which I go.
Speaking of Coming Home, Tara Owens is offering an online Advent course. It runs December 1-January 11. If you are looking for your season to be different, too, sign up!
Posted in Church, Proverbs 31 on November 11, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Many Christians have their favorite verses of the Bible. I have mine. Micah 6:8 is sometimes the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning – “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (KJV). The poetry of it rolls off the tongue, even when grumbled into a pillow. And the book of James? Just all of it. Sometimes, when I’m enjoying a meal alone, I imagine that James is there, and we talk about his book and what a grand thing the kingdom of God will be when all of that comes to pass.
You know what passage I don’t love? Proverbs 31.
To be fair, it’s probably not Proverbs 31’s fault. It’s possible that it’s been overused by (hopefully) well-meaning people to teach me what I should strive to be as a woman. It’s likely that I have been told so many times in so many ways that I fall short of the feminine ideal *cough*stereotype*cough* that my automatic defense mechanism is to discard mentally anything that is supposedly “for women.” It’s conceivable that I’m tired of hearing story after story of women who are stuck in the muck of condemnation because they don’t think they can ever measure up to this to-do list but have been told that they have to in order to be a good Christian.
It’s probably not the passage itself. It’s just that I’ve been stabbed with this particular edge of the sword of truth a little too often to have happy thoughts about it.
Yet there it is, in my Bible. Taunting me with its unseen-by-me treasures. Calling out, “Spend time with me. I’m good stuff. I promise.”
So we’ll see.
I’m going to be spending some time with Proverbs 31. I’m going to jot some thoughts down here, and I welcome your comments. Expand, extol, critique, disagree. There’s room for all of it.
More later. Thanks, friends.
Posted in Church, Thanks, TV, Writing on November 1, 2013| 2 Comments »
“Lord, your saints come from every nation and every tribe. Such is the beauty of your kingdom, where every race and -people are honored and recognized as being made in your image. Help us live lives of peace and reconciliation that pay homage to the diversity of your great cloud of witnesses. Amen.” Common Prayer
November is a month of reeling from the furious writing of NaNoWriMo. It is also Thanksgiving month. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. The special combination of gratitude, delicious meals, family, and the kickoff to my family’s holiday season extravaganza makes life magical.
This morning, I changed my calendar to November 1. My friend Melissa bought me a Castle calendar, and November’s picture is a close-up of Nathan Fillion’s face. That was the first thing I was thankful for this month.
November 1 is All Saints Day. I am thankful for those who have come before me.
Today, I am thankful for:
1. My Story Sessions sisters and the NaNoWriMo group. This is going to be fun.
2. I am thankful for Mary. I did not grow up in a tradition that talked about Mary a lot, so I’m late to the party. I am open to reading recommendations.
3. Getting feedback on my Fishbowl story from my workshop group. With their help, this story is just getting better and better.
4. My favorite Elvis song. I wish I could find a clip of Jesse L. Martin singing it on Ally McBeal, because that’s actually my favorite version, but I suppose this will do:
5. And let’s not forget – Nathan Fillion.
Posted in 31 Days, Church, Food on October 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »
I love Sunday. It’s my favorite day of the week.
Sunday is the day we’ve chosen for Supper Club.
When I was regularly attending services, Sunday was the day I went to lunch with people I loved.
Since my attendance has been sporadic as of late (i.e., the last year or so), Sunday has been baking day.
Sunday is usually a good writing day.
On Sundays, I feel un-rushed, inspired, at peace, at home (even when, technically, I’m not).
This Sunday, I went to Kincaid’s with Margarett, Micah, and Raven. It had been a long time since I’ve been there. I forgot how good those hamburgers are. There might have been moaning.
Then we went to the Fort Worth Friends of the Library Book Sale. It was $15-a-box day. This has nothing to do with food. I just wanted to bask in the goodness of a book sale one more time. Well, I bought some cookbooks, so I guess that’s related.
I drove past Taco Casa, which I love, and I wasn’t even tempted. That crispy salad shell doesn’t even come close to the hamburger I’d just had (and could easily afford, since no money was wasted on fast food this month) or the food I had waiting at home.
Then I came home to the lingering smell of the caponata, and I cleaned the kitchen, grateful for the weekend of food, friends, and relaxed productivity.
This was the best weekend I’ve had in a long time.
Themes, Observations, and Lessons:
– My desire to drive through seems to be inversely related to the time I spend planning for and making easy options at home. What a surprise that…isn’t.
– Sundays = ❤
I’m going 31 days without fast food, and today, I don’t even miss it.
M. Suzanne Terry 