Gilead

I've been thinking of this line lately that I heard in a podcast I was listening to on Sabbath. It was talking about how the Israelites left Egypt and then God created this rule that they needed to honor the Sabbath day so that they could get Egypt out of them. I've sat with this idea for almost a week now, knowing I needed to blog about it but not quite knowing where to begin. I stopped attending church a number of weeks ago (I don't know the exact number anymore but I know my 'fast' started the first Sunday of Lent) and until recently I feel like I was holding my breath. Waiting to go back to a church building, to be fed theology that I may or may not agree with, to stomach watered down Christianity that is less about following Divine Love and more about an institution with rules and a set way of thinking and being. This past week I feel like I finally exhaled. And while I left a while ago its taken this long - these many Sundays of observing Sabbath and listeni...

Luke 1:45 "Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord will fulfill His promises to her" I've been pondering this verse for a while now. As i hold it in my heart and meditate on it, it sinks deeper and deeper and feels more like one of those life verses. The word blessed feels like a breath, a prayer, a soft floating exhale. I say it over my own body and everything about me softens. I'm the woman believing the Lord will fulfill the promises made to me. I've been thinking lately, as i held this verse, that it seems as i opened one door in my life to deconstruction and healing so many others followed. When I made the decision to stop attending church, it wasn't just about church. This conscious opening was about spirituality and sexuality and politics and family and my marriage and my friendships. So many things have been blown open. I feel like i'm looking out on stormy seas. On the wind and the waves and the lightning and thunder. What i thought i ...

I was listening to a podcast today during my lunch hour at work and they were talking about inflammation. They were talking about how inflammation signals to the body that healing needs to be done. When there is inflammation present, our first response is to grab the ice pack, to find something to soothe the pain. But sometimes, when that inflammation is present, we need to sit with it and let it be there so the body can heal. Something about this struck a chord with me. I've been thinking about it all day, going over what was said about inflammation and the body and how this isn't just a physical thing but for spiritual and emotional inflammation too, that the body doesn't just refer to the single human body but to the faith community body and the family body and all these different systems that we are a part of. How our first response to pain is to find something to kill it, but in reality when we do that we may be prolonging the healing process. I've spent a lot of...

March 7 came and went and I didn't say anything. I realized I didn't want to say anything. I stayed off facebook the whole day after scrolling bleary eyed through my newsfeed that morning and colliding into a post made by someone I love talking about the memories, the good times, the loss. Things I don't understand how they could write about knowing my side of the story too. For my own self care, to respect my story and the stories of others, I decided to unplug. I've been writing a lot about the memories that surround that day for me, in my journal and on pieces of colored paper with crayon in the break room at work, in the back seat of my car and in tiny fragments on my instagram feed. But for the most part I've stayed silent, not because I don't want to say anything or because I think my truth doesn't deserve to be heard but because I don't know what to say in a way that is still kind and honors both my truth and the truth of so many others. I wrote...

“Faith does not need to push the river because faith is able to trust that there is a river. The river is flowing. We are in it.”    Richard Rohr I wrestled with this decision for a long time. If you look at it closely, maybe years. Years I sat in pews and rows and felt like something was missing, but I never knew exactly what it was. I heard the words and yet something in them didn't sit quite right with me. And yet who was I to question them? Pastors have been given this super power by God by which they can say no wrong, right? It's why at the beginning of sermons pastors pray that any words that are not from God not even reach the people's ears? Now I know this isn't true, and yet it was so deeply engrained in me as a truth I had just picked up along the way that it felt true. These pastors and teachers and men of God had some sort of Divine revelation that I did not and because I wasn't given any of that revelation or wisdom it meant I had to sit down and go a...