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When I first met Jason, he had long curly hair and had already wallpapered his dorm room with Bob Marley posters. We couldn’t have been more different – he was a free spirit, a wild child, and I was pretty much a rule follower. But there was always something that drew me to him, some familiarity, like finding a long-lost brother (maybe it was simply the fact that we were born on the same day).

Our spiritual journeys have probably matched our exteriors: the free spirit and the rule follower. Yet the old familiarity remains, and our quests for truth, while often taking separate roads, criss cross with incredible regularity.

I once asked him, “Jay, are you a Buddhist or what?”

“No,” he said. “I’m a Christian in exile.”
Continue reading “Emails From a Christian in Exile: Today’s Christianity is Man Made”

Today’s guest post is brought to you by Brenda Boitson, a wonderful writer and lovely person. Today she writes about her main writing project, a story that began with her husbands diagnosis with cancer.

In July 2008 my husband told me I needed to tell our story, to write it down and share it. He told me this while laying in a hospital bed. I began writing our story soon after he died. I would spend hours at the local cafe crying over my chai and netbook. The words poured out of me.
Continue reading “When Your Dream Emerges From a Nightmare”

One of the most important things you can remember when it comes to writing is this:
Continue reading “When Someone Tells You It’s Not Good Enough”

So often we want people to arrive. We want them to know.

We have our heritage of modernity to thank for this, our obsession with facts and figures, statistics and scientific methods. And lists, endless lists. Many churches have articles of knowing faith that say in relatively plain language, “Here it is. This is what we believe. These are the theological rules that we play by. Disagree with these and we might kick you out.”

And slowly, subtly, the 11th Commandment oozes into view.
Continue reading “The 11th Commandment”

The little boy sat by the window, staring through the dusty screen. Flies twitched up against the mesh, their jerky flight eventually finding a way through. The boy lifted the fly swatter slowly. He was a ninja, or perhaps The Karate Kid.

Wax on, wax off.

Smack. Another dead fly. Another penny. Then he went back to waiting. Continue reading “My First Bicycle, or The Ugly Brown Bike Meets the Thorn Bush”