The Flight & Challenge of My Life
“God left me here for a reason,” I inserted later into the indelible conversation.
Breast Implants & John the Baptist
It’s just interesting to me where I and other people draw our differing lines and how those lines seem to sprout into moral boundaries.
The King of Self-Promotion
I want to chase the God who instantaneously spoke undiscoverable galaxies into being, shrugged his figurative shoulders, and documented it for an eternity of spectators with just, “He made the stars also.”
Confronting the Cheater in Me
I’m going to stay up here and talk to God until the mosquitos chase me home.
Sovereign Irony
And the one morning all this seems to come together, I’m an unwilling participant.
Flipping the Litmus Test
The best distance to affect spiritual formation in another is three feet or less.
Tailgating the Holy Spirit
As I’m letting go of my OCD, checklist faith, I’m growing in my confidence that the Christian life does trump the alternative—and not just for the post-death part.
Breaking Out of My Caste [System]
So, as with a company, we assume that spiritual success is at the top of the ladder. It’s not.
Truth in a Lover's Words
That shouldn’t surprise us: that’s how God designed it to work.
Why God Blesses Us With, "No."
One of those plans prevents us from devolving into the freak show world we’d own if we always got our way. We’d probably blame God for that little wonderland, too.
East of Halfdom
The Christianity I now know conquered my formerly-prefabricated faith.
Who Let the Songs Out?
What if worshippers didn’t have the restraints of religion?
Spontaneous Corruption?
Is it that hard to think there’d be more than one way to communicate with the God of creativity, variety, and inspiration?
The Heartbeat of the Church
That sounds so liberal and lazy to my old churches—probably because they can’t measure it, codify it, cross it off of their OCD lists. I know; I used to be that checklist guy.
Finding My Place
Almost every week, someone getting out of their car says, “You look like you love this,” or “You have way too much energy!”
Is God in Numbers?
Sometimes, the people who successfully run ministries simply prove equal to their for-profit counterparts. That doesn’t make them prophets or wolves; it doesn’t brand them omniscient or Satanic. Any extra credibility proves man-added, not God-added.
Death of a Salesman
They mean good. Their goals seem eternal. But I don’t remember Jesus persuading anyone, selling anyone. People were drawn to him.
Third Time is the Charm
This was what baptism was meant to be, how it was supposed to feel, what it was created to communicate. It’s designed to be one of the most monumental days in life, a watershed moment. For me—at least this time—it was.
Minutes From the Top
About two thirds of the way up, I noticed a dark horizon to the north. My stride lengthened; and I pushed the pace just a tad, then more then a tad, then to breathless. Thunder. Victory stood at the top with me on the pinnacle boulders.
(un)Dressed for Success
I should be used to this. We all should be. But I’m too weary and wary to take it anymore: the concept that we dress up for God (that we can impress him).
Sacrifice of Praise
As I sang these words, I struggled to say them. Something inside me pushed me to lift my arms, as the Psalmist requests—as my spiritual heritage condemns as “vain glory.” I pushed through my trained restraint, raising my fists above my head, almost victoriously.
Eiffel Power
Like Farrell’s Harold Crick, I have lived for the past few months with the premonition that my life is at least somewhat scripted, that I have a choice to embrace destiny or pretend with a sense of control. I have talked to invisible ears, asked questions of ‘the omniscient third person.
Christ-centric Communion
It’s like all of the fundamentalist litmus tests: they take the elements of superstitious monasticism they can abide and chuck the rest as non applicable. They rip the temple curtain at their point of perforation.
[D]Evolution of the Pulpit
That pulpit, then, becomes the wall between a certain spiritual have and the have nots. I remember the spiritual place I felt attained by the times my dad lent me his pulpit, a sense of worthiness either doled or earned—sadly the antithesis of what that place should generate.
Can You Hear God’s Voice on MTV?
Too often, I demand my birth rite, my share of my heavenly inheritance. The joke’s on me, though, as I get closer and closer to taking God’s freedom to the pig pen. I’m the chunky chick exposing her immaturity to the watching world.