Connected Streams

It is hard to know what is okay to share and what violates our children's privacy. In the world before blogging and social media, where would we share our hard-earned celebrations of promotions, won games, and first steps? Where would we seek solace when the dream hoped for was deferred or when a loved one was lost? My first thought is Sunday School. My second thought is around the table on Wednesday night. They call these dying pieces of the institutional church, but they are what I knew growing up, and they are what I have known at every church since. Faces of the Church - individual and corporate - appear before me as I revisit such pivotal moments too personal to even hint at. And it makes sense that this is where such sharing would occur. We rub shoulders with those who would shape us and with who would allow us to shape them in return. We are invested in one another. I find that some of the same does happen in the mega-room that blogging and social media allow even as I am ...

(2014) Yesterday, as we do every year on the Sunday closest to January 6th, the gathered body of Christ celebrated Epiphany. In Sunday School Brennan joined in a search for baby Jesus. Conveniently his arrival meant there were three boys available to make the trek and re-enact the legend of the three kings -- a tale derived from Matthew's account of wise men bringing three kinds of gifts to the infant king. The boys found the swaddled baby beneath a hanging star, interestingly back in the same classroom where they had begun their search. If you know the story, then you know that the wise men are warned in a dream not to return home the way they had come. Matthew says they left for their own country by a different road. *** I have tended to think of Epiphany as a sudden shining moment, illuminating what has been hidden, making clear what has been murky. Some truth exists in this, but I have come to realize that epiphany only becomes such when preceded by preparation and followed b...

While on vacation, I dreamed that I had given birth to eight babies. The dream began in medias res -- the actual birthing process was done and not particularly relevant. Instead the drama focused on the integration of caring for these new family members while finishing what I had started before they were born. I was mid-semester in classes, working fifteen hours a week for money, however small, that we could not afford to give up. I had already been off several days and needed to get back to it. I was wondering how I might quit the job and simply nestle in with these newborns, yet I wanted to finish classes. Double pull on my soul, triple when considering the financial questions within the context of the dream. Meanwhile, my milk suddenly came in. With breasts bursting, I realized I did not have my breast pump, loaned out as it was, and I was stressed not knowing what to do -- stay or go? Meanwhile, I looked at these totally adorable, peacefully sleeping bundles in my husband's a...

I hate starting things. I don't know if it is my recovering perfectionistic nature or my impaired ability to make a decision when faced with endless options, but the task of beginning can leave me at the edge of the water, dipping a toe in here and there, agonizing over the entry point. And so that is why I write blog posts in my head on a day by day basis but have yet, until recently, settled on the defining title and jumped in. This paralysis is debilitating during a move. Nine months ago our family uprooted ourselves from a perfectly lovely home in NC where we had friends, a church that we had become deeply invested in (with loving members who were mutually invested in us), and a familiarity with all the back roads and shortcuts that only comes from settling down and knowing a place like the back of your hand. I can still remember feeling turned around three or four years after we moved to Winston-Salem, a town most certainly not built on a grid. After ten years, however, I co...