Diving into Death

It’s always difficult to talk about one’s own fear of one’s own death. It usually comes across as a little melodramatic and seems to carry with it the appearance that somehow your fear of your death is somehow felt more deeply, analyzed more fully, or experienced more truly.

In short, when people start whining about their fear of death. It can be annoying. I acknowledge this. And yet, here I am, telling you all that I am really, really scared of death.

When I mention this to people that know me as the guy who writes a lot about faith and seems to believe these things pretty deeply, people are (for some reason) shocked to hear me explain just how deep my fear of death goes. I know it’s not logical, but I somehow find the past works of God more easily believable than the future acts of God. I know you can’t have one without the other, but the human heart is a storm of contradiction and paradox.

And for some reason, Death has occupied my thoughts of late. Sure, I’ve wrestle with it’s reality, thought through it’s theological origin, seen it in the faces of the hurting, wrote about how to live in spite of it, and even engaged it in poetry and in song, but something has really captured me recently. I’ve been sitting in the presence of this fear.

God’s good gift

“Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.”

–from The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Haha. Love this.

I really miss blogging…

It’s not that I haven’t had enough time….

(I’m caught up on all my TV shows, I’m a season-and-a-half into The West Wing, and I’ve finished several books in the past few weeks.)

It’s not that I haven’t had inspiration…

(I have several posts half-written and so many lined up and outlined out.)

It’s not that I’ve been uninterested in blogging…

(I’ve missed it so much!)

It’s not even that I haven’t had the energy….

(I’ve been writing many other things for church, work, school, etc.)

There are just times when things just need to relax and rest. Rest takes striving. And I feel very rested right now. I like it. I also feel the need to commune with that which is above, below, and around me.

If you’ve been here before, you know what I mean.

I want my writing to emanate from within more than from without. Does that make sense?

So, will tomorrow have a post? I don’t know.

We’ll see if I feel like it.

Well, it seems I’m going to back to seminary.

Yesterday, I received my acceptance letter into the Newbigin House of Studies, a distance Masters of Divinity program in partnership with Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan.

The seminary belongs to the RCA family of churches (including my own) and is in the Dutch Reformed tradition (here’s a good article on some of the differences between Dutch Reformed thought and other “flavors” of Reformed thinking).

In a couple of months, I will be having my five-year anniversary of living in Philadelphia. What brought me here from college in Richmond, Virginia was my decision to attend Westminster Theological Seminary. Eventually, for several reasons, I left the seminary (reasons that a lot of people didn’t like).

See the Official Guatemala Blogger’s Trip Photo Essay

Though I love to take pictures, I didn’t take that many shots when I was in Guatemala with Lemonade International alongside the rest of the team of bloggers there. This was because we had a professional, dedicated photographer with us. I wrote about Scott Bennett and my thoughts on his work before the trip.

Each night as we writers sat down to blog, he’d show us the pictures he took for the day, and we’d fight over which ones we got to use in our posts. He took some amazing pictures, and shared many of the raw, untouched photos with us.

Well, now that he’s had time to dedicate more time and resources to focusing his creative eye on the pictures, he has now released his official photo documentary  from the trip, as part of the site Visual Peacemakers.

This photo essay beautifully captures the essence of our time and the people there as well as (if not better) than the words of us writers. I encourage you to spend some time with these pictures and let their weight and beauty affect you. Then, would you consider joining with Lemonade International in their continuing work in the La Limonada community of Guatemala?

Ascension: Our glory & the Bible’s hinge

Today in the Christian church calendar is Ascension Day, the day we celebrate Christ ascending into heaven 40 days after his resurrection and now sits at “the right hand of God the Father.” (You can read a prayer and poem I posted earlier for this Holy Day)

The Useless Ascension

The idea of “Ascension” doesn’t seem to get a lot of play nowadays in the Church. This, in spite of the fact that it is an essential part of all the Church’s earliest doctrinal formulations, and the subject of the most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament:

The Lord says to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”

Compared to other, non-creedal things like Hell, homosexuality, and “attacks on biblical authority”, the Ascension isn’t really talked about. Maybe this is because the Ascension isn’t really a “doctrine”–it’s an “event” and a “declaration”.

And we western Christians love our systematic “doctrines” that we can pick apart as nauseam and/or figure out how we can “apply it to our lives” in such a way that we can feel like we’re “good Christians.” But honestly, the Ascension doesn’t have many direct applications for today.

prayer & meditation for Ascension Day

Grant, we pray, Almighty God, that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heaven, so we may also in heart and mind there ascend, and with him continually dwell; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

(from the the Book of Common Prayer & the site Morning Prayer)

Also read my own meditations on this Holy Day.

Trickle-Up Resurrection (Guatemala Lessons)

My church is currently in a series called “Resurrection Stories” in which we’re going through each of the non-Jesus stories of resurrections (or “resuscitations”—whatever) found in the Bible. It is, after all, still Easter.

A few weeks ago, as we were talking about Elisha raising the Shunnamite’s son, our pastor pointed out that most of these resurrection stories seem to center more on the people around the dead person than the dead person themselves. And so, in a sense, these resurrections are more for the people affected by death than the one dead; the ones that “receive” the true resurrection power are mostly those around the resurrected one.

Further, as he pointed out, most all of these people that “receive” the truest benefits of these resurrections are women—the most alienated and disempowered group throughout world history.

From Above: What’s better than Tom’s shoes? I’ll show you.

WordPress’s Photo Challenge theme for this week is “From Above“

I have been very proud, up to this point, of not having ever posted an Instagram picture of my feet. I don’t know where that trend came from, but I’ve bucked it for so long. Until yesterday.

That’s when I received the above shoes in the mail.

No, those are not Tom’s, the shoe company famous for its idea of giving away one pair of shoes to a child in a developing country for every pair that is purchased.

Instead, they are Otto’s.

Biggest Guatemala Take-Away: No More Murse. [casual fri]

Murse (n.): 1. a purse carried by a man. 2. used to describe a male handbag, or man-purse.

I’ve been a big fan of messenger bags, ever since college (my chiropractor can confirm this). From early on, these bags became known as my man-purses, or “murses”. After starting my new job, I decided to get a more “economical” bag off Ebay that ended up being a little more purse than man (see “before” picture above).

And then I went to Guatemala.