Roots: A Communal Journal

Here I am again. It's Sunday afternoon and I'm frustrated, angry, helpless, and lonely all at once. Like when the high school youth group gets a turn leading the musical worship: I'm trying to sing along but everything is just...off. Sometimes I wish I hated my church. It has been a painful journey but I am now at peace with sloughing off the "evangelical Christian" label. I no longer feel the discordant crush of contradictory feelings and beliefs that holding onto White American Evangelicalism forced me into. I feel a freedom to question everything and find a faith that is more beautiful, inclusive, and academically rigorous. I feel thinly restrained fury when I look at what the American church has become now that I am choosing to be an outsider. Being able to hate (or at least feel repelled by) the evangelical church has made it easy to discard. But I don't hate my church. My church is full of people who love fiercely. My church has urged vaccination and fol...

We're thinking about schooling for our kid now, and I know that most of you who read this blog are in the same conversations as I am. I'm re-reading my senior thesis from a fellowship program I participated in throughout my last year of college. It was intense. I bit off way more than I could chew. I read, observed high school classrooms, met with professors, attended teaching conferences, and despite many important distractions in my last quarter (senioritis, parties, falling in love with my now-husband), I somehow managed to prepare a 30-page thesis entitled "Education and Equality: Tracking in the English Classroom." In preparing for tomorrow's conversation, I've read a handful of articles and listened to a podcast. This whole conversation on education felt so  familiar and I had nearly forgotten about the whole year I spent listening to educators argue with one another about all of this. (Thank you, classroom trauma!) I decided to peek at my thesis again, ...

I’ve spent time thinking this week about the things keeping me from resting and enjoying Christmas. I feel aware of the extra work I have to do this season while I know people who are already on vacation. I find myself wondering when the Christmas magic will set in for me, and worrying that I might miss it.  And then I think of all the others who will put in work to create that magic for others. Or those who work to keep us safe and fed and alive, even when the rest of the world shuts down.  And I realize that no adult is out here just fully basking in Christmas cheer without any part to play in making it happen. When you’re young it often all happens for you. As we grow up we each find our part to play in making it happen.  I want stop longing for that childhood time of watching it unfold, and find joy in the part I get to play.  This is about more than just Christmas, it’s really how we work in the world all year long.  My neighbor who mows lawns up and down t...

Christ appears, even in locked rooms. Abandoned or in bands in spare rooms or in bright we hide, woozy and downcast— and Christ is present wedding our future to his past. Christ appears, just in locked rooms. Host as guest he arrives for the missing, the not-yet-present the downcast, the cast aside— Christ appears just in locked rooms to unlock them from inside. Christ disappears, becomes for us the unlocked room. But never absent in his absence present not as body but as breath keeping those within, anxious for those without— Christ becomes our unlocked room making space for us to doubt. Christ remains; provides all the room we need. So doors, swing open—wide and wide! And friends, uncork only the best wines! Everyone, everyone’s invited, near and far— Come, Jesus will greet you and bend to kiss your shining scars.

  This too shall pass, they say.  A virus that has consumed our lives. Quite literally, over five million of them. Five million mothers, fathers, friends, children, teachers, caregivers. As if time were stopped in its tracks. Smiles covered, families broken, learning halted, livelihoods ruined. A fallacy that defies understanding. An unwavering belief in lies - lies that reject science and contradict every notion of our shared humanity. Lies that continue to hold us back from emerging from two years of darkness. Lies that put self over others, that endanger one's own community. A murder, and another, and another, celebrated by many, mourned by the voiceless, yet unpunished by the powerful. Murders incited by hatred, encouraged by our systems, and dismissed by our institutions. Murders that remind the rest of us that the White man still towers over us. A fanaticism beyond comprehension. An irrational fervor for one man whose sins are never too great - not for those who worship ...

I ’ve thought about vaccinating you in your sleep. About flying across the country to break into your house and flooding your body with mRNA and teaching it to fight and protect itself and stand up against this stupid, homicidal virus. Even if you hate me for it. Even if it’s wrong to do that type of thing. But I won’t.   Instead I’ll write. I’ll write all the things I wish I could say, that our family Facebook thread can no longer bear, after a year and a half of us brandishing articles like swords, and all-caps billboards of threatening Scripture, and the occasional whiplash of swerving from a vitriolic debate to a cute picture of someone’s baby in the next line to a conspiracy theory in the next. Text-to-text will never be the same as eye-to-eye. So here I am, writing this. I wish I could see you, in person, not through a screen, and we could sit tucked into the corner of a sectional, or on the floor of our parents’ oversized closets like when we were kids. We could giggle behin...

Before I was anything, I was yours. Fearfully, wonderfully made, or something. But I wonder sometimes if you meant me to be this a half of something, a shadow of something, a flickering image of light or wrath or... something else entirely and I wonder if I am missing that part of cruciformity that looks like the cross because I don't want to bear anything anymore I just want to be back to that something Was I radiant? Was I free? Was I loved? Was I enough? Or am I just a fool, hoping for mirrors to tell me I am more than I am, more than a severed vine, rotting, worthless more than a shameful creature, cowering in the corner of the Garden more than someone else's Something this is your body, broken for us here's my body, broken for someone but here's my body, broken for nothing sorry, I know you wanted me to be something or was it Some Thing?  Someone's Some Thing? i can't remember but this is your blood, take I have been bleeding for three weeks straight and fe...