After Helene: And the Leaf Still Holds

Walking out your front door, you rarely consider how different life will be when you return home. When you walk back through that door. Like a portal, you leave one home behind … and return to another altogether. On September 21, I left Asheville for a road trip to visit family and friends across Pennsylvania. On October 2, I returned home to a hellscape like nothing I’d ever seen.

Everybody Needs an Uncle Pat

I became an uncle six years ago, and Uncle Pat has always been my template for uncling. Because everyone needs an Uncle Pat. Someone to remember them on their birthdays, buy them Slurpees, ask about their lives, and drive them around on special journeys. If my nieces or future nephews ever have anything positive to say about their Uncle Tom, it will be because Uncle Pat showed me how to uncle well.

Am I a Writer?

At the end of the day – or, rather, at each day’s sacred start – despite all the excuses or hard realities, I must ask myself this question: am I a writer? Do I still self-identify as someone who writes? Because if I’m not doing that regularly – writing – am I, by definition, still a writer?

I Can’t Believe I Came From Her

My grandmother died. These words rattle around my heart like pinballs that won’t settle, even a week beyond her funeral. And yet I wonder if the settling of these pinballs would be any better – the finality of their lodging into the belly of that machine, no longer kept alive by another flap of the paddles. Mayme Alice was the last of my grandparents to leave this earth, and undoubtedly the one with whom I grew closest.

Older Than Jesus

Growing up, Jesus always seemed so much older than me. Not like eighty or ninety or a hundred “old,” but when you’re only eight or nine, thirty years old feels a hundred years away. But now to have lived the ages of 30 to 33, I have a new perspective on the life of Jesus. Turns out he was way younger – and way stronger – than I’d thought. I’ve had a tumultuous three years; perhaps the most shaping three years of my life. Again, as a storyteller, I can’t help drawing parallels with Jesus’ thirties.

Beyond the Rot of This River

I’ve become more justice-minded in this year of isolation – to do something with this faith of mine. To borrow a vivid example from Ronald Rolheiser’s “The Holy Longing”: to not just retrieve dead bodies from the river, but to go upstream and find the source of all this death.

Another Dawn Closer

What a comfort. What an assurance. That no matter how much the last day or last four years have tested us, drained us, broken us . . . the sun rises anew. Gives us a new chance to absorb the light and also a new chance to shine it. Or as poet laureate, Amanda Gorman, perfectly put it at today’s inauguration: “For there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”

Coming Out to Myself – 14 Years Later

It’s LGBT+ History Month, and October 11th is National Coming Out Day. After pondering this video idea for a few years, now felt like the right time to relive my first coming out – by re-reading the journal entry I wrote at 19 on a raw, tragic night in 2006. I hadn’t looked at these words in 14 years. T’was the night I came out to myself and to God: a same-sex attracted or gay or queer Christian. Soon after this, I’d come out to my parents too.

I Have an Autoimmune Disease. How You Can Help.

After spending a week in the hospital last month, I got diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease: a form of vasculitis called granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA), formerly Wegener’s disease. Now begins the long journey toward remission.

A Time to Refrain from Embracing

Looking down at my precious niece in my arms, I realized it’s really something, how we need physical touch to survive. Need to be swaddled. Need to be held. Need to feel the warmth of another human emanating against us, if only to affirm to one another we are not alone in this desert. To embrace for my soul or not to embrace for my body? Life with an autoimmune disease during the pandemic of the century: one calculated risk after another.

40 Days of Ashes

Forty days ago, I sought to burn my psalms for Lent. Writing one in the back of my journal before bed each night, then ripping out the page, entering my closet and closing the door behind me, and setting fire to my words in an old toolbox. It was a different sort of Lenten season this year, for many reasons, and I have three main thoughts.

Mortality

It’s there in my consciousness, a shadow sitting in the corner, unmoving. My mortality. Just . . . there. I will die one day, and this is how it’s always been ordained. This is nothing new. Why has it taken me 30+ years to realize this – really realize this? More than ever, I want to make every moment matter. I want to live every day I’ve been given to live. It’s such a crime for anyone to stay settled and never venture out. I cannot bear the thought for myself.

My Name on a Stone

I traveled to Pennsylvania for Christmas, my first trip there since Ahh died this summer. My grandfather’s gravestone wasn’t chiseled until just recently, so this was my first time visiting it. Seeing it. It was the first time I’d ever seen my name on a stone.

A Decade Without Annie

The vortex of my loathing for November stems from this date a decade ago. The day I lost my dog, Annie, to a freak accident. An accident I was convinced was connected to my first bout with pornography and God’s judgment. A decade later, I’ve laxed on the whole God punishing me thing; a decade […]

Inhaling Grace: Reacting to Fred Phelps’ Death

According to a recent USA Today article, Westboro Baptist Church’s Fred Phelps is “on the edge of death.” In another article, Fred Phelps’ estranged son further reports that his father had been recently excommunicated from the very church/cult he founded. A man rejected by his own hate group, now facing death’s doorway mere months later? The whole […]

I Still Miss You, Annie

Friday, October 19, 2013: It is the final night of my first return to Georgia in a whole year. And for the first time since abandoning the South three years ago, I am actually sad to be flying back “home” to California tomorrow. Normally, I am not sad; normally, I am beyond ready to return […]

November: I Kinda Really Hate You

I hate November. Those who know me best know this isn’t much of a secret. Ever since my dog died six years ago this month, I’ve dreaded these 30 particular days of the year. Truthfully, I can’t remember experiencing a “good” November since 2006 attacked. I always anticipate strife and struggle and regret and remorse […]

November Angst

Today is hard. Five years ago today I lost one of my best friends who just so happened to have four legs and an excitable little tail. And just last year, almost to the day, I lost a friend who I’d never even met in person, and yet profoundly impacted — indeed, continually impacts — […]

TMZ: Struggler

As mentioned in my last post, I’ve basically been observing since the day I was wheeled from the hospital room. Being an observer has always been engrained in me, and I’ve got 23 (soon to be 24) journals to prove it. As for being a struggler: this is a relatively newer facet of my life. […]