Because we’re going through our lives, and we’re trying as hard as we can, and things just seem to always blow up in our faces, and we keep going, ‘God, God, why?’ We don’t know what he’s doing. So just let him do it. If you really believe he’s good, then let him […]
If you try to have faith, you will be attacked by doubts you never knew you were capable of. But you keep on believing, even if you fall, even if you struggle with doubts, you keep on believing. And if you live a life that is marked by hope, by […]
Except that I’m just not really all that sure that God is all that concerned about being entertained. I’m not sure except that’s just a human thing. Sometimes you try to impress God with all the right words and I just don’t think it’s an easy thing to impress God […]
Now, although a fiddle may never be fooled by the folly of human thinking, very much like us, they have pain. Their necks are stiff and their nerves, their strings, are stretched. They feel the friction of the bow, and inside their beautiful brown little bodies they have only a […]
By the time you get this issue of Release and read (if you do read) this little essay of mine, I will have celebrated my fortieth birthday. In my mid- to late-twenties, I had some romantic, highly exaggerated notions about an early death – taking off at thirty-three – joining […]
I don’t know what you do up here in Northern Indiana. Where I came from, on Friday nights, we used to get in our Dads’ trucks cause they used to build those trucks so that you could run over anything and it wouldn’t hurt them. You know, the old gravel […]
His major contribution to the world was not a set of aphorisms. He was born in a turdy barn, grew up in a dirty world, got baptized in a muddy river. He put his hands on the oozing wounds of lepers, he let whores brush his hair and soldiers pull it out. He went to dinner with dirtbags, both religious and irreligious. His closest friends were a collection of crude fishermen and cultural traitors. He felt the spittle of the Pharisees on his face and the metal hooks of the jailer’s whip in the flesh of his back. He got sweaty and dirty and bloody – and he took all of the sin and mess of the world onto himself, onto the cross to which he was nailed naked.
In his work and in his words, Jesus is making promises to the beaten, the torn, the broken, the depressed, the desperate, the poor, the orphan, the abandoned, the cheated, the betrayed, the accused, the left-behind.
He is, believe it or not, promising to fix it all.
