I was recently asked to share on Sunday morning, with several others, how God communicates with me. This was my response. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was there with God in the beginning. All things were created through Him, and apart from Him not one thing was created that has been created. - John 1:1-3 CSV When I heard this as a child, I immediately took it literally - that Language equals God. The concept of language still amazes me, especially when it is written. A thought occurs, then travels down my arm and out onto a page with no particular effort. I can then hold and examine my thought outside of myself, or share it with someone else. That blows my mind. The creation, cohesion, and community contained in language is extraordinary and strikes me as something that not only only God could invent, but also only God could sustain. In her poem She Said, How Do You Know When You Are Hearing From God?,  Amena Brown writes, "I w...

Maker post! I actually haven't made much this month, in the usual sense at least. I have been catching up on a podcast (the Bible For Normal People, highly highly recommend) and I wanted something to do with my hands while I listened, so I got Jennifer Berg's (link goes to Ravelry)  Fingerless Lajish pattern and three colors of yarn to play with.   My favorite pair so far is the black background - the color values worked the best together, I think. I've made it through two seasons of the podcast, and I still have a white background pair in progress and quite a bit of yarn left (the Emma's DK I'm using had generous yardage). I plan on keeping one pair, but I'm not sure about the others - gifts, or I could put them in the free food pantry this winter. We'll see.  Another project I've worked on this month has been finding spiritual practices that resonate with me. Two that I've especially connected with have been a grounding meditation in which you cho...

When faced with a question, my immediate impulse is to find a book about it. No problem cannot be overcome with sufficient research, right? I've managed to think my way through a lot of things, but unfortunately my brain is only part of me, and throwing books into a tornado just makes it messier rather than making it go away. The formal spiritual education of my childhood was very mind based. Lots of theory, lots of self reflection, lots of emphasis on time alone with God. As an adult, I experienced moments of epiphany, but struggled to string them together. Finally left alone for a few months several years ago, God firmly sat me down and began to unpack my mental boxes. (I realize that may sound bizarre, but I have no other way to describe what happened). For several hours each evening, beginning with the most recent and working our way back, we looked at key memories together. I felt a lot of shame and failure at each initial unpacking, and every time I was met with a reframing. ...

How do you fill  a bowl  with light?  You hold it,  empty,  up to the sun. My earliest introduction to fireflies was at my grandparents' house in the Ozark mountains. They had (still have, in fact) a huge sturdy oak tree that had been twice struck by lightning - a scar on the broad trunk its only acknowledgement of an event that reduced its ash neighbor to scattered splinters - and fireflies rose from the acidic soil like shards of lightning returning to the sky. I danced beneath the oak, gazing up into branches thick with leathery leaves and clusters of mistletoe, the air thick with humidity and jarfly screeching, and the scattered twinkle of fireflies. I caught them gently, one by one, whispering a wish and letting them go, watching them rise to join the stars. No one taught me this, but in my child heart I believed that if any earthly creature could carry my small desires to the Creator of the Milky Way, it was these tiny light bearers. In the sanctuary of th...

An interesting thing that's come of the last year and a half's forced cloistering has been a fairly extensive time of self discovery, and a dramatic clean out of all the junk ideas I've accumulated and a dusting off of the solid core beliefs at the bottom. There were fewer of them than I thought - I didn't realize how many things I'd been handed (and picked up) along the way. While my childhood (and as much of my current life as is possible) was spent largely outside, in terms of my inner life I feel I've been a cicada larvae, crawling around underground, exploring roots and dark places without any sort of context for understanding the bigger picture or how it all worked together. But I have begun to tunnel toward the surface. Gratifyingly, I've found that I'm not alone. I had been living in the crushing isolation of burial for so long that it didn't occur to me there might be a resurrection at some point. But there has been a collective emergence, a...