Writer | Editor | Artist | Ordinand
I can't believe it has been a year since my friend Kyle and I packed our bags and made the transatlantic journey to Ireland and England. In many ways, it feels like just a few days since I was last walking the streets of the cities I so quickly came to love.
When you take a trip, you hope to bring something back with you — to somehow be changed by your experience... Ultimately, what I took from my visit to Ireland was a bigger, broader view of three things: the world, the Church, and myself.
Transcendence describes something that transports us beyond our physical existence, something whose whole is on another spiritual plane than the sum of its parts.
As any hobbit knows, much of the joy of a good day's walk comes from the friends who travel by your side.
As I walked along the banks of the River Liffey on the last day of my journey, I think all the energy of the ancient cities I had visited––London, Oxford, and Dublin––began to course their way into me.
When I return to my hometown, I realize I am a fish out of water. I recognize the sights, the sounds, and the flavors, but they are no longer mine. There is an aesthetic, verbal, and all-around cultural disconnect. The experience is bittersweet.
In the story of redemption, the grievance is from one direction and the reconciliation from the other.
I graduated from seminary almost four years ago now. I still live in the city where my seminary is, and I even work full-time at the school. Because of this, I'm able to talk with a lot of current students and my fellow alumni. I've noticed some common threads that weave through these discussions and … Continue reading On Going to Seminary
I was talking with a coworker recently. An English major when he was in college who loves writing stories and reading Dostoevsky, he is now studying at the seminary in order to hopefully plant a church overseas someday. We spoke of stories we liked and environments that seemed to inspire us, like gothic buildings and … Continue reading The Artist-Pastor Identity Crisis, Part 2
Today at church, I sat behind a friend who was part of my first community group at Sojourn, over six years ago now. Beside me sat a friend whose baptism and membership interviews I did two years ago when I was an intern. On my way out of the service, I met a man who is … Continue reading The People of the Church
