Tag: Jesus
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Last Call: On Grief and Time
When someone my age dies, grief comes from all angles: from parents, from siblings, from friends, from children. The older ones carried the deceased as far as they could in the ways they knew how. The ones younger expected to be carried, guided, molded. But when someone…
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The Tender Year
I have now lived in Charleston, SC for a full year. I have approximately 3 weeks left of my residency. Several weeks ago, I was praying on the beach about my future, my next step in the next season. And it was such an uncertain time of prayer. This time last year I knew what…
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Mary
It’s hard to imagine the heart failing of someone who loved me so well. Maybe she was finally convinced we’d be okay without her. Maybe her body was just finished; certainly not her mind. Maybe it was just time. I think I’ve learned you can prepare to make an end of living, but not death, for…
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Wealthy Mercy
“But God is so rich in mercy…” I believe you can tell how rich and deep someone’s faith is by how generous they are with mercy. I believe this because according to God’s sense of justice, people deserve harsh consequences for their wrongs, yet God is slow to deal judgment. In Ephesians 2:4, the Apostle…
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On Loneliness, Loss, and Lasting Love
This is it folks, the blog post that will break the internet. If you couldn’t tell by the title I’m ambitiously going to person-splain the meaning of life. But before I get into it and switch gears, allow me to set the stage of the state I am in while I’m writing. I’m eating candy…
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When the Game Slows Down
My orientation into chaplaincy has begun. Who knew orientation could feel so disorienting? While inundated with information, it is amazing how many golden nuggets of truth and wisdom I have received in a weeks time. One statement I am fixated on, even though I have not yet visited a single patient is this: “The game…
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What do I do with these blank pages?
In 2010 I wrote to be funny, more specifically I wrote comedic fiction for a class to counterbalance writing my thesis on Islamic extremism in Southern Russia and what exactly that looked like. But what I was most proud of is a story called the Cheesebringer, which was a dumb coming of age story about…
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A Time Before Certainty
Matthew 13:1-32 I worked on an organic farm for 4 seasons. It’s interesting how many factors go into having a fruitful crop: the seed, the soil, the sun, the water, the bugs. Some of these can be controlled. We can add water, we can spray pesticides (technically not in organic farming). Much of farming maintains…
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The Gospel of Love: Fill the World with Stories
John 21: 15-25 – Word Feed If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. The Gospel of John ends with the author telling us that Jesus did too many good things to contain in writing. Jesus, likewise,…
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The Catching Gospel: Assured to Shore
John 21:1-14 – The Dive-in Depths It never ceases to surprise me how quick I am to stumble, how at such arbitrary times our struggle with sin seems to affect us and leaves us without excuse. I am prone to wavering in my affection and in those moments I feel as if I forget myself.…
The Reconstructed 