The Life and Times of My Heartburn

Come with me on a journey with acid reflux. I promise it won’t be as gross as it sounds. It’s also a journey with stress and pressures that lead to real physical symptoms. It’s also a journey to find balance between rest, play, family and meaningful work. This journey takes a lifetime I’m sure, but I feel like I’ve been in the thick of it the last three or four years.

The short version of those last few years is that our family of four left a nice suburban life to live at a farm in Waco, TX that teaches sustainable agriculture and international development. After that we moved to Bolivia to work on water and agriculture issues with Low German Mennonites and indigenous people. After just getting settled in and comfortable with our work and life, we were deported from Bolivia and found ourselves starting over again back in Waco, TX. I found a full-time job to pay the bills, but continued building a small social enterprise called Edible Lawns, not to mention we are part of an intentional Christian community which demands more of us than the average church. To top it all off we had our third child in January of 2013. All of this leads me to often ask the question, “What the hell am I doing?”

My Closet of Anxiousness

For what it’s worth I wanted you to know, dear reader, that I no longer feel guilty about how slow I am to post things here. I used to stress about keeping up a regular schedule and making it a discipline to write and post. The truth is I don’t have time for that and I also don’t have space in my life to feel anxious or guilty about more things. My closet of anxiousness and guilty feelings is full. (I really should clean that out.)

So, I will post things when they are finished and when I have something to say. Now, the truth is that I always have something to say. So, while I can’t guarantee how frequent I will post here, you can at least know that eventually I will say something. I pray that it is something worthwhile.

You may now return to your shopping and general Christmas craziness.

A Beautiful Piece of Heartache

In the midst of the non-stop election news and the beating our collective psyches take from campaign season, I needed this hymn for election day from Over the Rhine.

“What a beautiful piece of heartache
This has all turned out to be
Lord knows we’ve learned the hard way
All about healthy apathy”

Thanks to Chris Smith. Original Source: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slowchurch/2012/11/06/a-hymn-for-election-day/

Something got into me today. Started writing about some thoughts that were sparked by a class I just taught at WHRI on missiology and development. Look for it starting next week.

Reconciliation: Adventures in Avoiding Community

In the previous post, I gave some background about our community in reference to recent conversations and teaching we have had about reconciliation and conflict resolution. So, the question I want to tackle here is why these divisions persist among us, even within an intentional community committed to reconciliation.

The dynamics at play, while certainly personal and relational, also have to do with systemic, structural and cultural conflicts. For example, in any household, if the husband dominates the wife, whether its verbal, emotional or physical, there is more than just personal or relational conflict at play. Obviously there is a relational conflict, but there are also structures and cultural norms that make that dynamic both normal and more likely. If you only address the relational conflict and not the underlying problems inherent in cultural norms and structures, then you have just scratched the surface of what is really happening within that family dynamic.