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A letter

A letter to the men and women of Mobile, Alabama, specifically many of the University of South Alabama Wesley Foundation students; with whom I have spent some 700+ days learning and growing.  To my brothers and sisters:  I am writing to you to express first of all, my gratitude. I thank God for bringing me to you and you to me. You have profoundly impacted my life in ways I will continue to unpack for years to come. You all have shown me so much about God, the world, others and myself. Our time together was truly a blessing and I look forward to watching and praying with you all as you walk into new steps of your lives.  I also want to share with you a prayer. I wrote this prayer for you all to encourage and challenge you because there is a lot of work left to do. The work of the Kingdom is found in every single corner of our world. It is our job to accept the work and to figure out our place within the work. It is important that you love and care for the place where you
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Recent posts

Among the Trees

Rhythm, or out of rhythm rather, is how I feel most days lately. I am among change and transition. My thoughts linger between what has been and what will come. Some days I hardly feel like I am present to the moments that surround me. I am here but I am more elsewhere. I like change...mostly. Change brings about new sight, seeing things and places with fresh eyes. Change is also exhausting. Learning where things go, how things work and how you fit. I find more pain in transition than in change, though. Transition begs for time to process. Transition requires you to sit among the things you've learned and unlearned in a time frame and to think about how this pushes you onto the next thing. Transition asks me to be aware of how I have been and who I want to carry with me to the next place. Transition is the mental process of the action of change for me. Not so long from now I will finish a master's degree in social work. I will tie up my time working at my current job an
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An ode to my wiser self

I've been thinking about blogging a lot lately. Well, writing, rather. I used to write a lot. It was therapeutic and life giving for me. It helped me to be in a constant state of process where I was not just taking in life but searching for and digging for meaning. It kept me grounded and real, for lack of better word. I have been starting to write more lately and have several little bits I'm working on. In the process of digging out my blog from the depths of the internet, I found this jewel that I wrote years ago. Yes, that's right... years ago. I thought it was beautiful and worth sharing. So, in an attempt to revive this way of sharing my thoughts and processing... Here is an ode to my younger (and probably wiser) self: Welcome to The Chronicles of a Confused Citizen. Here I am, residing in the country I was born in, living the life I knew from my birth to year 22. It doesn't quite feel right, though. Recently, as I found myself living in Mongolia, I s
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The Prayer of the Empty Water Jar

Jesus, I come into the warmth of your presence knowing that you are the very emptiness of God. I come before you holding the water jar of my life. Your eyes meet mine and I know what I'd rather not know. I came to be filled but I am already full. I am too full This is my sickness I am full of things that crowd out your healing presence. A holy knowing steals inside my heart and I see a painful truth. I don't need more I need less I am too full. I am full of things that block out your golden grace. I am smothered by gods of my own creation I am lost in the forest of my false self I am full of my own opinions and narrow attitudes full of fear, resentments, control full of self-pity, and arrogance. Slowly this terrible truth pierces my heart I am so full there is no room for you. Contemplatively, and with compassion you ask me to reach into my water jar. One by one, Jesus, you enable me to lift out the things that are a hindrance to my
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bring it on, world.

October 26, 2011. That is the day I last wrote a blog. That's not the day when my life changed but it is a day that I can recognize as one of the last ones when I knew who I was and what my purpose was. I'm not generally a quitter. Sure, sometimes I quit on books or I quit on small projects but in life, nope. I  try hard at most things, usually right until the end. I won't say that quitting is not a thought that meanders through my being when something gets tough but I have come to learn that when I stick things out I come out having learned a thing or two. But I did quit. I quit a big commitment. I said I would live in Washington, DC and I would do my best. I tried. I also had my very first panic attack, too. It was too much. I couldn't think or breathe. I couldn't cope with the devastation I felt for leaving Mongolia early that March morning. I couldn't cope with no one understanding what Mongolia had meant to me and how it had changed me right down
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this is what i'm here for.

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a book.

i've heard about this book for a couple of years now, but never had it in my hands. someone unintentionally put it in my hands this past sunday so i've started the journey through. be on the lookout for snip-its here and there from me. i have a feeling it's going to be liberating. "Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both..." "...Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both..." pg. 44, Paul Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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