Thankful Tuesday: Mystery and the Rally to Restore Unity

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If you haven’t heard, Rachel Held Evans has officially declared this week the Rally to Restore Unity in the blogiverse. What does this mean? It means we’re making awesome pictures of ourselves holding signs that are adorable and clever. And it means we’re actually communicating with each other about our differences within Christianity.  Look at the Facebook page. And read Rachel’s blog posts about it. It’s Thankful Tuesday. And in honor of the Rally to Restore Unity, I’m … [Read more...]

Entering Lent

Lent is my favorite season of the Liturgical year. I love it for a lot of reasons. For one, I’m secretly a melancholy girl full of laments. I connect to the idea of a season that’s not about celebration but about ashes, confession, and removing a little of our cultural addiction to ease so that we can recognize how much our comfortableness makes us unaware of our need for a savior. I love the liturgical beauty of entering in to these forty days of sacrifice, examination and renewal with … [Read more...]

The Waiting

Yesterday was the first day of Advent. The word comes from the Latin, “Adventus,” which means, “arrival, approach, coming.” Usually, we think of this entire season leading up to the big day of Christmas as “Christmastime,” but the church throughout history has not celebrated Christ’s arrival until the actual day.  During the days of Advent, the days leading up to the 25th, we’re challenged to practice a solemn period of contemplation, almost a miniature Lent.  It’s a time of … [Read more...]

Preemptive Love

This was the first official Thankful Tuesday that you haven’t heard from me. I may fail to bring you my brain on various other days of the week, but on Tuesdays you can usually count on a thankful post. Today, however, it wasn’t happening. I stayed up late with my brother and sister in law, slept a little later until August stirred, rushed to get the boy to his school by 9, stuffed laundry in the washer and dryer, drove my bro and sis in law to the airport, got lost on the way and … [Read more...]

Why I call myself a “Christian.”

Since Anne Rice’s declaration of her rejection of “Christianity” last week, the blogs I read can’t stop talking about it. (See proof here, here, and here.) It’s not that Anne Rice is (or was?) such a superstar Christian and that the believing world is devastated, it’s that she brought up what many in my generation have been struggling with for years. How many times have I heard someone say: “I follow Jesus but I can’t refer to myself as a Christian”? Or, to quote Ms. Rice, … [Read more...]