Categories: Meanderings (look it up), moments of truth, Things that Will Probably Get Me In Trouble
Happy New Year!
Like many of you, I get particularly reflective at the dawn of a new year. It’s really just a date on the calendar, nothing particularly spiritually significant about it from my perspective, but it is a time to take inventory, in a manner of speaking–to take a breath and get ready to go again.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up)
As I write this, it’s the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11, the day America changed. Now that I’m living in New York where it happened, it feels even more weighty to me, as observances are happening at Ground Zero and all around the area. As horrifying as it was to watch on a small screen, I still cannot imagine what it must have been like for those living here at the time to go through it firsthand.
This isn’t really a 9/11 post–I suppose it just enhances my pensive mood this morning.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up)
Um….wow.
I was all set to write something else this morning (and probably will, in another post). But I got sidetracked when I looked at my dashboard and saw that this would be the 800th post I’ve put up on Losing My Religion.
That’s a lot of blogging. (Instead of doing something else.) A lot of time on the computer.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up), moments of truth
Welcome to 2015!
I’m not sure what it is about the New Year that carries such significance for us as humans. There’s no real spiritual significance that I know of. Calendars are simply a way for us to mark time, and we don’t all follow the same calendar, at that. The Jews have their own calendar, for example; so do the Chinese. So the “new year” is actually different days for different ones of us. If you think about it, the New Year is just the changing of the calendar.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up)
After my melancholy-laden last post, I feel better today. Thanks for asking, 🙂 But I have to tell a (semi) funny story, and then I’ll ramble a bit more.
Right after I hit “publish” on the last post, a friend of mine in the coffee shop where I was blogging came and sat with me to chat. He knows a bit of my story, and since the stuff I’d written was fresh on my mind, I began to relate to him what I’d been thinking about–about feeling exiled from the institutional church and the platform of corporate worship, and missing those moments of God’s presence, and feeling like I don’t fit anywhere right now, blah blah blah….
Categories: Meanderings (look it up)
Can we talk?
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time (and/or if you’re one of the few stragglers left since I moved the blog), you have probably picked up that I live in a sort of irony–a tension between the new and the comfortable. I’ve spent a lot of time here talking about the flaws and inconsistencies of the institutional church system, how I became alienated from that system but haven’t lost my faith, why I feel I can’t go back to it, etc., etc. But I’ve also talked about how my journey out of that system was more one of “kicking and screaming,” of being ejected more than of walking away voluntarily.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up)
So while I was away visiting my Mom last weekend in Tulsa, The Wild One and The Director had something up their sleeves. When I came home, I found that my office/studio had been totally redone. Curtains hung, walls painted, clutter put away (thankfully not thrown away, ‘cuz you know, just because it’s messy doesn’t mean it’s junk), furniture moved around–they just made it a really nice haven to work, study and create. A great surprise, and it really meant a lot to me.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up), My Story
It’s Labor Day. And you’ll never guess where I am…
…Blogging from a coffee shop in Tulsa.
It’s been five years, almost to the day, that my family and I left this place, shaking the dust off our feet. That day ended a 10-year struggle that I’d never want to re-live. We’d been faithful, done everything we felt God wanted us to do, but we had seen very little visible fruit, and in the face of it we’d encountered everything from subtle resistance to outright hostility from the religious community. In short–Tulsa kicked our arses. We left free, but bruised and broken.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up)
In the past two posts, I’ve rambled a bit about the idea of leaving the institutional church, and shared some more of the story of how I came to leave it. To sort of wrap up this train of thought, I figured it was worth discussing whether there is any circumstance under which I might return to the institutional church.
Categories: Meanderings (look it up)
I checked up on this here blog this morning and realized I hadn’t blogged since Christmas. That’s not a huge span of time these days (I’ve been known to skip out for 2-3 weeks from time to time), but for some reason it seems a world away, even though the holidays are barely over. Seems like a lot has transpired since I’ve been away. Here are just a few things that have happened since Christmas:
1. This blog quietly turned six years old on December 30.
2. Thanks to a generous gift, I made some significant updates to my home studio to help with my music composition projects.