Whoo-hoo - or - I still blog here sort of

Well, I've been away for awhile or perhaps you've noticed.

I am very excited today, because I am now officially a freelance writer!! I have a gig writing for a Lutheran confirmation curriculum website. It's really a small thing, but to me, it's amazing! (And total validation that networking counts - the editor turned out to be someone I went to jr high and high school with!)

So this is all very exciting.

I will also start part-time as a baker at the new Super Wal-Mart in my little Iowa town sometime in the next two weeks. I expect it should be odd to see what that will do for my perspective on Wal-Mart. I guess I kind of think of Wal-Mart workers as gnomes that live in the store and pop out when you need to check out or the Kraft dinner shelf is empty. Now I'll get the picture.

Ok, well that's my news for now.

And to copy Mark over at Stumbling, I too am going to an ordination this weekend at 3pm on Sunday. She was one of my bridesmaids and one of the people who knew me best at seminary. I hope I make it through the the service without crying, but somehow I bet I'll probably tear up at least once. (The weird thing is my husband probably could process in with the other rostered leaders. OK, that's odd.)

More news hopefully on Monday.

Amazing post at Real Live Preacher

Check the state of the blog address at Real Live Preacher. It's amazing. I cried and thought - that's exactly what I've been looking for with my sisters and brothers in Christ. That's what's been missing. How does one create that or find that? Where is this party hiding? And where does every one go after they leave?

I had a great birthday party yesterday. Mmmm...pizza. We went to Chuck E Cheese. We had fun and plowed through 180 tokens. Crazy.

I'm going to try to get some work done now. Let's see if I can do it. I've been struggling to write because Sunday School curriculum is not catching my imagination. Let's see if I can do better.

I bet I can.


P.S. Congrats to Tara Ulrich the 109th Diaconal Minister. She was consecrated this past weekend in North Dakota. She's a first for her synod. Blessings, Tara, as you start your ministry!

Keeping promises

Well, I'm not doing very well on starting my habits for good work. In fact, I've found a number of them easily superceded. I need to actually write something substantial this week to make me feel like I've completed something. Hopefully, that can be tomorrow.

On the other hand, I have been doing research reading rather steadily. I'm reading one of my church history textbooks that I didn't read in seminary. It's really good. I'm perplexed that I didn't find it interesting in seminary. However, I'm thinking there's a difference between reading for a test and reading to savor something.

I'm getting ready to dive into the first Sr High Discussion Group that I'm co-leading at Kevin's church. I'm a little nervous as this is his place and I'm not quite sure who these kids are. I think it doesn't help that I'm part of an experiment to re-shape the discussion group from a free-for-all back to a discussion group. However, I'm a little nervous that no one is going to show up for our part of it. The older kids were pretty much scared away by the younger kids who didn't want to discuss anything and have been disruptive to every attempt to pursue discipling or devotion. Maturity gap I guess. I'm just shocked that the disruptors kept coming and the one who wanted to be there left. What does that mean????

Well, we'll see what happens. The older ones are being enticed back with carrots of reform, but let's see if anyone remembers that it starts the week after Easter.

After I helped the high schoolers with their fundraiser Lenten soup suppers and Easter breakfast, I kinda feel like Easter graduated us out of church commitments too. (That's a really terrible thing to admit, but part of the truth of the year before National Youth Gathering. Fundraising is the youth program this year.) I'm just hoping that I will be pleasantly surprised.

Ok, I'm ready to go see what's going on in the ten minutes leading up to the group.

God, I'm ready for a surprise!

Too Gay for Cumberland

So a young man just got the boot from University of the Cumberlands for being gay. The quandry seems not so much to be about his sexual orientation (he's gay and at a Baptist college in the South - what did he really expect?), but about the student handbooks that stated the policies of the school.

The handbook he came in under didn't explicitly state homosexuality as an expulsitory crime. However, this last school year's handbook did. So which handbook is applicable? And then comes the question was it necessary for the proper enforcement of the new policy to give the kid the boot just weeks before the end of the school year, especially when he was already planning to transfer out the next year.

The skeptic in me says that this was two parts stupid. One part stupid belongs to the school that probably was hoping to use the young man as an example. Message: Get out before you are kicked out. The other part stupid is that this young man knew the climate he was in and that the new policy was in place, yet he advertised that he was in direct disobedience to that policy on his MySpace site. Both parties are going to reap the whirlwind on this one. The school may lose it's government funding (more than likely a good idea to begin with - public funds should not be used to advance narrow private agendas that are not to the greater public benefit) and young man won't get credit for his work this past semester (and the shame of being told to get out the very night he was confronted).

However, to this young man I say that if you want to stand up against the powers that be in the form of free speech, be prepared for things like this to happen. I'm sure there was a clause in your admission contract that says the handbook could be altered at any time. You made a choice, and right or wrong, you put yourself on this path. The Internet is not a closed book that only a few can see, and there are snitches everywhere even as you grow up. But if you want to be an activist for your own identity, be prepared for the responsiblities and consequences that come with that decision. You may have just learned your first real lesson of college. And of growing up.

Am I "emerging"?

I'm wondering if i am actually "emerging" (as in emerging church) or if I'm actually just hoping to get in on the next new thing.

It's amazing that the further I explore the Big E Emerging church (aka Emergent, the talking heads of movement, Peter McLaren, etc) that I'm finding less that I'm interested in and more fad wrapped in academic language. I'm not saying that there isn't something genuine in the midst of this. I really respect some of the ELCA players (Karen Ward, Nate Frambach) in the larger discussion.

However, what does anything of this mean towards multi-generational/modern/post-modern/post-post-modern people all in together? How does this change anything ultimately to have one more new splinter group? I'm suspicious after watching the Willow Creek phenom become the mega-church monster. It is just one more cool group. One more spiritual product or designer label to buy and be popular. It's popular to be emergent now, just like it used to be popular to be seeker-friendly.

What I hope will stick will be a reflection on micro-community awareness. Karen Ward talks about her "tribe" and how her faith community reflects their particular needs, strengths and weaknesses. That just makes sense to me. Just like a new leader can't walk in to a foriegn community and authentically demand the entire community conform to that leader's idea of correctness, a generalized theology of "Every Church" that prescribes styles, practices and functions to everyone regardless of who, where, when and what they are as a part of the whole.

Anyway, it's a thought.


On another note, don't put stacks of folded fabric into a washing machine until the machine is full. Apparently, when i tried to wash my grandmother's sewing stash last night (they had four inches of sewage in their basement last week, yuck), I actually put *four* loads in the washer because I didn't unfold the material. Oops.

Forcing myself to electronically write

Well, here I am again. But with a difference...

Now I've quit my full-time computer-harnessed temp position to actually jump into writing full time and mainstreet America part-time money wrangling (whatever will hire me downtown basically).

So to make sure that I am treating this as a regimented thing, I am forcing disciplines on myself. One is to read Karen Ward's aggregated emerging church blog. Two is to keep up with the Emerging Leaders Network. Three is to blog here regularly. Four is to read for an hour from a theological book. Five is to walk somewhere at some point in the day. Six is to write for four hours on my porfolio for Augsburg Fortress.

This will be my reflection place where I don't have to work about punctuation and that sort of thing. I just need to flow here to get my praxis (the joining between thinking and practice) on.

I can't believe I just committed to that. Very exciting stuff.

Now for the clean-up break and grocery shopping so I can get back for the last three steps of the day.

Updating - do I really wanna?

Well, I guess it's just human nature, but I wanted to make my friend, the Spiritual Ninja, happy and update my blog.

Maybe I should take this on as a Lenten discipline. I don't know.

I'm trying to write more. A little bit everyday. I'm trying to put a writing sample together to apply for an MFA creative writing program. That's due in October. But what I am feeling like writing about - I don't want to write about.

My husband's brother attempted suicide this weekend. I don't want to talk about it, but I do. I want to talk about how going into his apartment and cleaning it out while he was locked in the hospital made me feel. I want to talk about how others have talked to me about it when they were trying to comfort me. But I don't know if I want to write about it.

It doesn't feel like it's my story to tell, exactly. He's not really related to me by blood. I'm not really part of the family. But this time (he's tried four times now that we know of) it's opened something up in me. I dont' know how to explain it yet, but it spread life out before me like opening a pop-up book. Things were thin and squeezed to together. Now life is wide and unfolded - three dimensional.

It's not necessarily a good thing. I had trouble watching some of my favorite crime dramas this week because the bodies reminded me of things I didn't see in his apartment, but envisioned in my mind. His organization of the things he marked for his parents, brother and ex-wife. The careful lining up of pill bottles along the bed. Even making the choice of what to watch as he lay down on his bed expecting shortly to die. Then the emptiness of the apartment after he was taken to the hospital, the discarded remains of desperate actions outlining the negative space of him. He was taken away. Somehow the act remained. In the room. And hung there as we cleaned things, threw things out and carried boxes of things away. It hung there when we left and stared down at us from the window. And we left it there.

No, I don't think I do want to update this blog tonight. But maybe it helped. Some.