8 posts
All that immense productivity cost me the ability to be curious, reflective, creative. I don’t want to argue that this is valuable—I’m taking for granted here that it is. I’m just observing that productivity came at its cost. Where is the life we have lost in living, as T.S. Eliot asked; where is the beauty and curiosity and creativity we crowd out with our productivity, I add.
What I didn’t understand then was that the work was a calling for a lifetime—but at that organization simply for that season. That organization was a temporary assignment.
A few weeks ago, my schedule created an accidental interesting mashup of ideas: the Center for Christianity and Public Life conference (which I wrote about here), overlapped briefly with a trauma-informed care course I’m taking. To join a live small group conversation with the course trainer, renowned psychologist Dr. Dan Allender, I...
This is the season where Christians worldwide commemorate a birth. But before the birth comes the waiting, the in-between season of Advent, a space for holding contradictions. Christ is coming, Christ has come. I love the contradictions. They don’t force a choice, don’t foreclose possibility. Is the world desperately broken or is...
Did you have a time when you asked what you would do with your life? Did you find an answer, then stop asking? I thought, when I was younger, that’s how it worked. People got jobs and that settled it. Fireman. Teacher. Pilot. As a college student, back when it wasn’t weird to be unsettled,...
“I shall not want” the chorus echoes, a refrain I hold like a worn lovey. It is hard explaining this to my children, who cannot fathom a world without the primal fire of wanting, or why that would be a good thing. “Think about everything you want, the things you need, the...
December 2022 There’s always a lot of dust and contractor trash bags before there’s anything that looks nice on Instagram. As with renovations, as with life. For the longest time, one of the main hindrances to using our basement as a retreat space has been the dilemma of how people would get there. Not as...
It’s unfortunately the case that roasting a rotten eggplant does nothing to improve the situation. I love eggplant, enough that I displaced some tomatoes this year to make room to grow it for the first time. I’d call it a success; we harvested a few fruit before leaving for a long summer...