Posts Tagged ‘work’
Tweeting My Theology
May 16, 2017
When I went to seminary, there was concern. Friends whispered. Had I gone rogue? Or worse: been “saved”? Would I suddenly start dropping things like washed in the blood into regular conversation? Admittedly, the calling to serve the church was sudden and powerful, like lightning. I had always considered myself a Christian, even if I…
Read MorePoetry Friday: “New Year, Good Work”
December 30, 2016
A delightful scene is set in this poem. At the start of the new year, the speaker and some friends are doing volunteer woodwork to repair their church’s altar. As the speaker details the steps of their careful work, we’re carried along by the poem’s base rhythm of iambic pentameter. Soon religious language enters the…
Read MoreA Farmer’s Lament
November 29, 2016
Last weekend, I cooked lunch for three farmers. One of them was my husband. The other two were a couple who were being forced to close down the small organic vegetable farm they’d been building together for nearly a decade. I could see the loss in their weary smiles, in the holes in their clothes,…
Read MoreSo Much for the American Dream
March 1, 2016
My six-year-old son caught me off guard. “I wish we had a backyard,” he said one afternoon. He had been playing more or less quietly with his Legos, and I was enjoying a book. “Oh, yeah?” I responded. “Why is that?” “Then we could just play outside and you wouldn’t have to watch us,” he…
Read MoreThe Work is Calling
September 13, 2011
“It was only love we were looking for….” —Patty Griffin Part of my task at Good Letters, for myself, is to work on my first book. With the ways that daily life squashes my writing time, I’m trying to see these posts as ways into my memoir. The book that I’ve wanted to write, and…
Read MoreFalling into Grace
October 25, 2010
I’m sitting at my home-office desk, unable to concentrate because the men painting the outside of my house are scraping the wall exactly two feet from my ears. It isn’t the scraping sounds that distract me, but their conversation, which I can hear every word of through the wall. The older man—I’ll call him Evan—is…
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