home sweet home

its good to be back

offensiveness and the gospel

Jeremy has been arguing that the gospel itself is not offensive, we are. In his second post on this subject, The Unoffensive Gospel of Jesus, he further expands on what he believes the gospel is and is not, along with introducing why the gospel itself shouldn't offend anyone:

"The gospel is not simply that Humans sin or are sinners and need a savior. The gospel is not simply social liberation. The gospel is not simply that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of Humans. The gospel is not simply the destruction of injustice. The gospel is not simply about being saved from hell and salvation unto relationship with God or heaven. All of these things reflect aspects of the good news of Jesus, but neither of them (by themselves) are the fullness of the good news of Jesus. Rather, the fullness of the good news that Jesus articulated throughout His ministry and life is the Kingdom of Heaven, an idea that should not be offensive, and communicated properly is unoffensive."

A lot of times reading novus lumen is like attending seminary for free and without the homework! Isn't the internet great?!

Words and the Diminution of All Things by Charles Wright

The brief secrets are still here,

                            and the light has come back.

The word remember touches my hand,

But I shake it off and watch the turkey buzzards bank and wheel

Against the occluded sky.

All of the little names sink down,

                           weighted with what is invisible,

But no one will utter them, no one will smooth their rumpled hair.


There isn't much time, in any case.

There isn't much left to talk about

                           as the year deflates.

There isn't a lot to add.

Road-worn, December-colored, they cluster like unattractive angels

Wherever a thing appears,

Crisp and unspoken, unspeakable

                           in their mute and glittering garb.



All afternoon the clouds have been sliding toward us

                                     out of the

     Blue Ridge.

All afternoon the leaves have scuttled

Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.

And now the evening is over us,

Small slices of silence

                 running under a dark rain,

Wrapped in a larger.

moving plates

at the place i volunteer there is a man that swears he can feel an earthquake days before it comes. since the 1970s he says that before a quake he will experience a uniquely terrible headache. he believes that he is ultra sensitive to energy that is released in the earth. because of this, he claims to feel it coming.

i also know a different guy who lives in ohio, claims to be an "apostle", and has a website where he exploits people for money and instructs people with fine detail on how to live their lives. he is into the whole fivefold thing and has used this way of thinking to claim that he is superior in his ability to discern what God says and wants in specific situations--indeed, in almost every situation.

so how do we know what God is saying or doing or wanting when all knowing is only perspective? when does it become dangerous to think that God is on a particular side or behind a particular cause or acting in a specific situation? Obviously we all know the extreme examples of the abuse of this-- the guy in Ohio for example--or things our ancestors did or things that even our contemporaries do in the name of God. But what about having small insights and intuition about things?

sometimes i think i have a glimpse of what is going on; not really a vision, but the outline of a puzzle piece. but then, all of us, all of humanity is driven to create stories and give meaning, give a coherence, a narrative, a morality to events and happenings. i want to know how we know this meaning is from God and not produced by our own spectacularly fantastic imaginations?

a maybe miracle; or at least a weight off my mind

i am not going to go so far as to say this is a miracle, even though that is my instinct: my step-grandmother will not be coming. Just like that. They wanted to stay for two nights and my uncle (who they were riding with) cannot stay that long. Because of this she apparently decided not to come for dinner at all.

She had also wanted my mom to arrange for my grandpa to be able to go hunting with less than 24 hours notice. This was a request impossible for my mom to arrange. Whatever the real reason, she is not coming.

I am not calling this a miracle, because I don't think I am totally in the right to feel so much hatred toward her. Even so, it still feels like a miracle to me personally. The idea of her visit had been stressing me out to the point of having nightmares.

To top it all off last night it snowed.....Evan and I had hoped it would.

The snow makes everything look so beautiful and clean.

hatred, pain and unforgiveness: happy holidays!

1. Yesterday mom and i drove the truck to town and at the store I ran into a woman from my old church. It was really good to see her, but a weird thing happened when we started talking. I noticed she was using a lot of church speak. I had sort of forgotten about this I guess. She started talking about how one of the old pastors of that church had been filling in as pastor for another church and "then he got the calling" and how the "church is ready to receive" and how "God doubled" this and that and how so and she was glad to see me so "blessed". I just sort of nodded and smiled. I guess I forgot about all that jargon.

2.There are two people in this world who cause me more emotion and pain than I think anyone should have to experience. One of these people is my step-grandmother on my mom's side. My step-grandmother makes me feel extreme rage when I see or think about her. I am so angry at her, I cannot think straight. I have to separate myself from her because being around her is unhealthy for me personally. I honestly believe I am justified in hating her because of what she did to my mother. My mom on the other hand is a saint and is trying to have a relationship with her. I cannot stand this. The other person who just thinking about causes unfathomable pain is my father. I only feel dull anger when I think about him. No rage there anymore, the reality of his life and actions have in some ways destroyed me. Instead of feeling rage about my father whenever someone mentions anything having to do with fatherhood or fathers in general I feel like I am being repeatedly stabbed. Sometimes I have even caught myself flinching. But at least I don't have to see my father.

My mom invited her stepmother over for dinner and to my horror they accepted. Is it unchristian of me to hate these people? I really honestly feel justified, outraged and everything else in disliking them. I know that you are supposed to forgive people. But I think there are exceptions. How convenient for me I guess.

I had to cut these people out of my life for my own self-preservation, but now in adulthood I am biannually forced to pretend like everything is dandy, to fake that everything is and always has been wonderful. What a crock.

God have mercy on me, but I will never be able to forgive this woman. I mean come on, at some point doesn't self-perseverance take precedence over forgiving? I cannot think about these people or I will not be able to function. Maybe that's why God created alcohol.

michigan

The weather here is simillar to what we left in Washington, minus some of the rain. The skies are grey and the majority of the leaves have fallen. No snow yet.

I don't know if I blogged about this or not, but at the end of last month my stepdad was tboned pulling out of my mom's drive way. It totalled their Explorer. My stepdad was miraculously uninjured. So two week's ago my mom bought a used Taurus. It died on her on her way to pick my partner and I up from the airport. Things worked out though. They borrowed a car from someone and we didn't have to wait very long. Now mom's car is at the shop, probably at least until we leave. It was the transmission.

The guy that sold it to her told her that he was "going to be the first car salesman to get into heaven".

So these last two days I have sort of been thinking about what a low down guy this person must be. Well today she called him and told him what happened. To my suprise he actually offered to pay for most of the cost. Maybe he will be the first car salesman in heaven.

It is strange to be back here, back home. Last night when I was laying in bed I kept thinking to myself what a dream my life back in the northwest seems like from here. I kept thinking to myself: Did I really graduate college, am I really going to a church that is granting sanctuary to a homeless camp, am I really part of making this camp work, how is all of this possible?

Then I started thinking about how I actually got out of this place, how I actually made it out of here. I started thinking about the different people that saved me, that helped all of us survive. If things hadn't happened exactly like they did, I wouldn't be where I am today.

I really want to start writing out my story.

Well, I am on dial-up internet here, tying up the phone line, so I better go. I am hoping to be able to go to my old church this weekend. I may have to drive my step-dad's 1960-something manual transmission pickup the five miles there though. The good news is that I can actually drive a truck like that. I really want to go and see who is still around.

Ten years ago this coming Sunday I was baptized in that church. I remember going down under the water thinking it should mean something.

Hey all you "progressive men": Be a real man this Thanksgiving-- help make dinner or do the damn dishes

With Thanksgiving quickly approaching my partner and I are headed home to Michigan. Inevitably this Thursday my mom will wake up at 6am and begin the long process of creating turkey dinner. Invariably my sister and I will assist her, along with other women in the family, in an attempt to make things easier. After dinner, my mom will predictably yet still sneakily (as always) try washing the dishes herself until another woman catches her doing it. Also inevitably, my sister and I will likely be doing a lot of knowingly agitated nods at one another. And why? Because at least 5 males, but probably more like 8-10 males, all will camp out in front of the television and transform into total jerks while the day goes on. And even the guys that don't enjoy football, for this one day, will pretend.

Yet as I learned in horror two years ago, it isn't just the Midwest, and it isn't just middle aged men perpetuating this tradition. You see two years ago, I was unable to go home for Thanksgiving. Instead I met up with a group of friends here in the pacific northwest and we all made dinner together. All the women that is. Now, these friends are what most people would consider extremely progressive individuals. We all were students at a very progressive college and all of us were young, involved with volunteer work in the activist community, and certainly aware of things like sexism and gender roles. Yet on Thanksgiving Day, none of that mattered. Each one of the men there would've claimed to either be a feminist or to be in solidarity with feminists and they each would've professed to be genuinely serious about equality and egalitarianism. And yet every single "progressive man" there camped out in front of the idiot box watching football while us "progressive women" slaved away in the kitchen. We women also did the dishes afterward. As one friend succinctly put it: "bullshit!". We attempted to get the men to help, and they would not. Sure every once in awhile one of them might come into the kitchen and stand around but none of them helped or asked if we needed help. Instead they would flatter us with compliments about how good everything smelled and then sheepishly flee.

So be a real man this Thanksgiving and help with dinner or at least do the dishes afterwards! And ladies, if you want to be equal, try actually letting the men help if they ask. If you enjoy doing all the work on Thanksgiving, that's great. But if you secretly want help, you cannot banish any well-meaning guys to the couch to watch the football game. This Thanksgiving I really really want to be thankful that our moms and aunts and sisters didn't have to do 2 hours worth of dishes! And many kudos to those of you out there who already have this issue under control. Happy Thanksgiving!

Into the Park by Maxine Kumin

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
--you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park.  He laid on me not doing anything.  I could feel his heart
beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them.  For Roscoe Black you might say
all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels.  Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there's a Hell, little is made of it.
No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as. 
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot.  In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

Update

Well, I have cooled off quite a bit. The protests still continue and 50 people were arrested last night. Apparently after that happened some of the protesters ran through downtown throwing things (dumpters, newspaper stands, pieces of concrete, even a row boat) into the intersection, at cop cars and breaking some bank windows. They've also tried cementing railroad tracks. Now I'm not in favor of anyone getting in trouble, but earlier when someone else was talking about this, they mentioned how cementing railroad tracks and trying to derail a train could count as domestic terrorism. For the sake of the people down there, I really wish someone would get a handle on the people committing these acts or else people could really find themselves in a lot of trouble.

In my last post I was very angry about the idea of protesting shipments returning from Iraq. I am still upset about that. But I am also upset that a few protesters are being allowed to co-opt what is happening down there. The more responsible protesters need to get a handle on the people that are being destructive.

I believe in protesting and have a done a great deal of it myself, but I am strongly committed to non-violence. If they want to commit civil disobedience fine, but I don't agree with violent tactics.

For me personally war is incompatible with my spiritual beliefs. Jesus himself gave up his life rather than fight, and when his disciples tried to attack the people that had come to get him, Jesus healed the guy that the disciples had attacked.

Anyway like most people in this community, I am extremely anti-war, but I am not pro-violence.

I also think that we need to think of more ways to "support the troops" without supporting the war or the lies of our government. For example this morning i had the chance to listen to a veteran of the Iraq war talk about the protests. He said things like "Iraq attacked us on 9/11" and talked about seeing one lone Iraq man fire shots at troops from his home even though there were 300 guns aimed at him. I "supported" this veteran by not saying anything even though my instinct was to try and correct his misinformation about Iraq and 9/11 and talk about how maybe that Iraqi man was just trying to defend his home. Instead I said nothing.

Is it really "supporting the troops" to let veterans tell a bunch of lies they have been fed from the government-- things we KNOW are not the truth? I don't know what the answer is, but I know what the answer isn't: brick throwing and violent protesting, especially illogical (the equipment is returning home) protesting.

All of this (the throwing of crap into the road at least) has been taking place about two blocks from our apartment. Last night after I went to bed (i am a deep sleeper) my partner heard the screams of protesters getting pepper sprayed, along with loud bangs and the sound of people screaming outside. He turned on the local alternative radio station, concerned that someone was maybe getting shot. Instead he heard what was akin to a street party with kids joking around about all the trouble they were causing. This was live on the air. His empathy vanished.

Strangely, him telling me about this gives me peace of mind. I have felt guilty at times for not being down there, even though I do not support what they are doing, just because some of my friends are down there and I do not want them to get hurt. But it is out of my hands. And from the way things sounded on the radio according to my partner, they were having a kind of protest street party in the middle of harassing the cops. Anyway, my conscience is clear.

Maybe when we get back from Michigan I will start standing with the women in black.
I definitely want to do something. I just don't want to engage in violent tactics or in illogical protests that only further split the movement and confuse and anger the majority of the antiwar public.

Seething anger

I have been trying really hard not to post about local current events or do anything that may indicate where exactly I am blogging from. At the end of my last post I mentioned that the military was unloading supplies and material just back from Iraq.

There is a large protest movement where I live. I used to be quite extensively involved with it. Over the last year I have watched it continuously splinter, disintegrate, and then regenerate into newly formed but mostly ineffectual groups.

Three week or four weeks ago I indulged myself with a rant over at Justice and Compassion. I thought I would repost some of it here, because it is my most articulate expression to date about why I am so pissed off about the anti-war movement:

"I was 2o years old on 9/11 and 22 when we went to Iraq. I participated in protests, walk outs, I went to meetings, signed petitions, wrote my congressmen and senators. I voted, I campaigned for Democrats for one election cycle and for the Green Party the next. I went to an “alternative” college specifically to learn economics and study politics from a non mainstream, “progressive” point of view. And in college I dropped banners over overpasses, I wore bandannas at protests where I raged against things like the concept of private property, I put my body in front of military vehicles, I was pepper sprayed by the police, I helped shut down streets. I did all of this out of “moral obligation” because I didn’t want the blood spilled by my government on my uncalloused hands.

I did this for 4 years. Guess what? Nothing changed. I saw my friends split over “ideological differences”, became disgusted by extremisms, by arguments over the most “radical” strategies and tactics. I saw good people turn into ugly human beings obsessed by their own temporary stardom as activist giants, I saw good men revert to sexism while claiming to stand up for justice, stupid professors push vulnerable minds toward an imaginary revolution that ended in year long trials, skewed interpretations, all the consequence of young people participating in civil disobedience without wanting to pay or even understand that civil disobedience comes at a price.....

I am not an “Activist” anymore in the sense that you will not find me on the streets of Seattle at the end of this month, wearing a bandanna over my face, trying to “change the world”. I am sick and tired of holding signs while assholes honk their support for peace and smile at us thru their SUVS. The only thing I am sure of is that I cannot even fathom the amount of suffering this government has caused the people of the Middle East– and not just the people of the Middle East, but literally millions– the US government participating in secret wars, in trade agreements,– there is no end."

It feels especially blog-appropriate behavior to quote myself commenting on another blog.

Fast forward to today. Many of my former "comrades" (can you hear the sarcasm in my voice) have just spent the last 5 days protesting equipment coming back from Iraq.

This pisses me off so much when I think about it, its hard to speak logically about it. And I KNOW these people. And I cannot BRING myself to be in solidarity with them. Am I just swinging back on some ideological pendulum? I still think the war is wrong, I just think it is moronic to protest incoming shipments.

Another thing that really pisses me off is people that want to protest for the sake of protesting. Also people that are not committed to non-violence. Watching video of these kids throw shit into the street in front of traffic makes me seethe! Do you they really think this is helping?

But I KNOW they think its helping. Even though I was always committed to nonviolence and never did anything more "radical" than be in the same general area where other people were engaging in "direct action". Or how about college kids doing graffiti that says "No war but class war"?????????? ARE YOU freaking kidding me? These are college students! But they are so brainwashed they think they can be the vanguard of the working class! AHHH

I had a "radical" professor that knew my history in the church and used to warn me that if I wasn't careful I could get disillusioned with the left and swing to the right. I don't know. I am not right wing at all! I mean seriously! Just because I don't believe in committing asinine illegals acts doesn't mean I am right wing! AHHHHH

and what does all of this have to do with Christianity? I'd rather just not talk about it and wait for things to blow over. Either way I am out of this town in 5 days, lucky me.

WWJS (part one)

so Jim has asked bloggers to write about what they think Jesus would say to us individually (WWJS)

First of all I have been thinking about how we can discern what God is saying. On the one hand I have personally concluded that I don't really know what God is saying. After all when I pray and meditate I don't hear God saying literal words. But what is pretty amazing is that I do find myself drawn toward certain ideas. Sometimes I am not sure if these ideas come from God or myself, though once in awhile I am convinced they are from God, or that the reason I gravitate toward certain ideas over other ideas is because of God.

Then again, I have lots of ideas. So how can I discern which ones are from God? I can't! Sometimes I have a feeling that something is from God, but then I just have to wait things out and see what happens. This is all very abstract. I guess that goes back to what I mentioned in the beginning of this post-- that I am not really certain of what "God is saying".

I feel a lot of (what i hope is) healthy fear for my soul or sometimes anxiety over my relationship with God (i hesitate to say "fear of God" because i know all of the baggage and stereotypes that come with that idea for a lot of people). Anyhow I genuinely hope that I am making the right choices and getting better at living the best that I can, and I also hope that God will help change me, that I will let God change me (because i believe that can happen). I am also hyper sensitive to what humility, service, and real love toward others, especially toward people that i don't already like-- should look like-- at least for me-- and i am very conscious of how short i fall in living up to the ideal.

And on my best days I am open to God. But not only on my worst days, sometimes on my regular old average days, I am not very open at all.

On that same note, Jim did a follow-up post where he mentioned the fact that some people heard Jesus speak to them, changed, and then their lives were never the same. Yet others heard Jesus speak, didn't do anything and missed their chance:

What inspired me to create it [the post] was the thought that there are so many stories in the Gospel where Jesus met a person, said just a few sentences to them, and their life was changed forever. Most of us want to believe that as Christians, disciples, if Christ talked to us directly, in the flesh, we would be the ones following Him every day, hanging on to His every teaching, recording what He said (and arguing like dolts over who was first amongst us). Who says we would be that lucky? More to the point, who says we'd get that much hand holding? Maybe I would warrant only one interaction with Jesus. The Gospel makes it clear - those who got only one chance with Jesus were often changed for life, and those who He spoke to that didn't change missed out, forever.

It's a scary thing to think about, at least that last part. Because I definitely don't see myself as one of the people that immediately left everything and followed Jesus. I have always worried when reading the New Testament, because I mostly related to the people who didn't respond to Jesus, or even to the people Jesus didn't speak to. I just know myself and don't think I would've just dropped everything and followed Jesus. I see myself asking what Truth is or looking back at the burning city, or not being the good soil or not loving my enemies or not always forgiving so i can be forgiven. And it's not because I believe in hell that I think about these things, it's because I really do want to do good, be good, help others, give of myself to others unconditionally.

Then there is also the culture, time and place I find myself within. I don't want to be too political but I deeply believe it is extremely difficult to live a life like Christ in this capitalist consumerist culture, as a citizen living during the beginning of the decline of the american empire.

Even now as I type this I could easily step outside and hear the hum of a giant warship parked at the port a half mile from our apartment unloading its gear just back from Iraq, where close to a million civilians have been killed. And I am not doing anything about it because it seems like protesting it will not bring about the end of the war. But it still haunts me. My questions become: Am I complicit? Am I complicit in the deaths of innocent people like so many Germans were complicit in the heinous acts of their government? What does this mean for me as a moral, spiritual question?

I guess I don't know what Jesus would say about this or other things.

i tag Jeremy and Heidi - what are your thoughts on WWJS

starting out simple

i want to write about my old car.

it was a blue-green 1996 Geo Metro. It is pictured here parked in eastern washington with a tumbleweed on top of it. (i used to get a big kick out of tumbleweeds, being from the midwest and all).

this car was a miracle car. i had been driving a '93 ford escort that had been hit by 3 different deer (i never hit these deer- though one of them did run into my drivers side door once- another miracle story). people harassed me about it alot, about the old beat up escort. i loved it though, plus i didn't have a lot of cash. well i was a youth leader back in these days at my old church. i made the comment one day that the only way i would get a different car is if it was a geo metro because i knew they were good on gas millage. well lo and behold someone knew someone and the next thing you know i had this car for $2000. it was in perfect shape with only 67,000 miles on it. It was a manual transmission and I got about 45-50 miles per gallon.

to make a long story short, i went everywhere in this car-- went all over the country, including the east coast, canada and to southwest missouri several times, where the people who are like my second parents were living at the time. one time, before i went to see them, i got the car an oil change. then i proceeded to do 85mph down to Missouri on a 3-cylinder engine without checking the oil once. i thought it would be ok since i just had an oil change. wrong!

long story short, it made it there. We loaded it up with oil before i left again for michigan, and i was told to just keep checking the oil. but then on the way home transmission started to go out in gears. through missouri it would only get into 4th-- by the time I got through Illinois it struggled in 3rd. In kalamazoo i called my stepdad who informed me that if i couldnt get it home i might as well kiss the car goodbye. i loved that car! and i got in home in 2nd gear! i thought it would die. but it didn't it kept fighting! what normally took 12 hours took 21 hours, but i made it home safe and with my car.

it never ran out of gas. what i mean is i would risk it all the time because it got such incredible millage. once i had the car a couple of years i started to get really careless about it. for example, i knew that it took about $1.85 to get to my mom's house from the community college and visa versa. it would be so low i would pray to God not to run out of gas in the cold even though it was my own stupid fault in the first place for not putting enough in. sometimes i just didnt have the money. but i knew that if i could just come up with something like 80 cents by the time i got to the gas station between the college and the house, i could make it!

in the winter i used to run outside with my hair wet in the morning (in michigan a bad idea). i would sleep late, not have time to warm my car up and just jump in like a mad woman. the college was 45 minutes away, and i was always running late. i would jump in shivering before the windows were even totally defrosted and then drive east into the rising sun down a snow covered glacier-like road for 5 miles while my hair turned into ice... and back then i still smoked too. so throw smoking clutching coffee careening down hilly 19 mile road into the sun with no visibility into the mix.

i never had an accident. i would have premonitions of deer, slow down and then, lo, deer (this happens to a lot of michigan drivers though, deer are everywhere, we are always thinking about them).

i used to basically plow my way home through insane blizzards in this car. one quarter i took classes at the more northern campus, which was a huge mistake. at the time though i thought of it as a challenge. i had fun plowing through snow in my ridiculous geo.

in the summer of 2002 this car actually was submerged in the chippewa river. thats right, but by "coincidence" (i dont believe this) i found a guy to fix the whole thing for 500 bucks! we're talking new engine, plus a bunch of electronic stuff.

the car was never the same after the river incident. i wrote a poem about it years ago but i don't have it any more. it started out something like "the day the river ate my car i was ...(something something)". basically the emergency brake failed while i was obliviously enjoying the day at the park: note to self, never park on a hill by a river.

in 2004 when i moved to eastern washington to do americorps, this little baby made it! By then it had 140,000 miles on it. thats right, i put 70,000 miles on the car in about 3 years. i am very bad at math, but like i said, i always got at least 45 miles to the gallon. that tells you about how much running i did in this car!

when i lived in eastern wa i used to floor it to Ptown in my geo. i could make it from Othello to southeast Portland in 4 hours if i didn't stop. once i made it in 3 hours and 45 minutes. I just floored it. Those trips were crazy. I never had enough money for gas but always made it home somehow. Maybe this was more about my being bad at math than God intervening, but that drive was just really wild. There is this one exit, in between Umatilla and the Tri Cities called Locust Grove Road. I was always below E on gas when passing that exit, usually at about 2am. It was about 15 more miles from Locust Grove Road to the nearest gas station and usually this was "ok even though im not sure i believe in God i am going to pray right now" time because i always always always thought i was going to run out of gas. I could never drive by there, even when i had enough gasoline, without thinking about it. It was like a joke between me and God.

The geo is gone now. I sold it in Othello for $500 bucks. I had to. It needed too much work. I begged the guy I sold it to not to scrap it but to promise to try and fix it. He probably thought I was nuts but he promised anyway. I hope it is currently helping someone else get someplace, any place.

So, I don't know if this story counts as talking about God in my life. I certainly thought about God a lot in that Geo, thats for sure. Part of it too i think was just the vulnerability of driving that vehicle so much. I damn well knew if I hit anything i mean ANYTHING even at 35 miles per hour, it was pretty much going to be over for me.

I was hyper aware of my own mortality in that car. The roof of it was practically made of aluminum-- if a kid sat on it, it would start to dip and cave in a bit.

Anyway, that was the little Geo.

It was definitely a faith experience, cruising around in that thing.

Cats on the blog: Evan knew this day would come :)

Losing track by Denise Levertov

Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:

you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way

a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water?

and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the

tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,

mud sucking at gray and black
timbers of me,
a light growth of green dreams drying.