When I read the book Me Before You, I hated it. I kicked myself for not trusting the title, which made me recoil. How selfish. How anti-the-way-I-want-to-life-my-life. It was so totally wrong, I even wondered if I’d interpreted it incorrectly.

A friend loaned me her copy, saying it was good, and inspired by the recent (at the time) release of a film based on the book (and being a woman in that vaunted 18-35 commercial age range), I read it. I read a tear-jerker while I was pregnant and in the process of moving. What did I expect?

Parts of it drew me in, and of course, the hunky lead didn’t hurt, but I was disquieted by the ending. I watched the film yesterday while getting dinner ready and doing some cleaning, and while they blunted some of the sharp edges of the story for the sake of cinema, it had much the same effect. **spoilers to follow** Continue reading →

Yesterday felt like a bit of a failure.  Continue reading →

For forty years, what Scripture counts as an entire generation, the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness. In our day and age, with medical advances and technological developments, the span of a life is seventy years, maybe in strength, even eighty — or beyond; yet 40 years is a long time by any mortal measure, at the least, it’s half a life, the majority of a person’s time on earth. And this was how long God’s people walked and walked around, without home or land to possess, without a place to build a life, or a place to rest in security.

God’s people had little comfort, nothing to fall back on, and small hope of deliverance from this condition — the only one who could really deliver them was the one who’d put them here in the first place, their God. And of course there was complaining against him, but the complaining didn’t really make things any easier, and it didn’t shorten their sojourn.

I wonder where you might feel like you’re wandering in the wilderness this morning. I wonder if there’s a relationship you’ve sort of given up on ever changing or making progress. I wonder if you’ve given up hope in your job, or maybe you never had it to begin with, that you absolutely hate your work, dread where you drive to every day, if you set your teeth and grind your molars through your days. I wonder if there’s something inside of you that feels like wilderness, maybe it’s loneliness, or maybe it’s being so behind on the promises you’ve made for yourself, maybe it’s the shell you feel like you keep up pretty well on the outside, but is just a straw man compared to the reality of your life. Maybe you are feeling wilderness in a medical diagnosis — your own, or someone else’s — maybe you don’t even have a good reason to point at, but your mind and heart feel full of sand, full of tumbleweeds, full of nothingness. Continue reading →

At a church I once served, there was always much anticipation and discussion surrounding the choice of the real, live baby Jesus in the yearly nativity pageant. Continue reading →

“Cars are the most evil invention.”

So said a friend of mine in seminary, wielding his bike lock with pride. I imagined him to mean that they pollute the air, give humanity an air of too much power and self-reliance, and cause all kinds of fatal accidents, but this past weekend, I came to a new understanding, and I wonder if this is some of what he meant. Continue reading →