In Gennesaret

My word of the week: Kummerspeck . That’s pronounced “koo-muh-shpeck”. It’s German – it refers to the extra weight you gain from emotional eating. For real, friends. The literal translation is “grief-bacon”. Grief-bacon . Y’all. Tell me you’ve heard a more hilarious word and I’ll call you a liar because I’m tellin’ you, you have NOT. “I am accepting and embracing my Kummerspeck .” “This Kummerspeck gives me a great excuse to buy new jeans.” “He loves me, Kummerspeck and all, bless him.” German is the coolest language, people. There are legitimate German words that are as long as your arm because they just cram together a mess of small words to give a name to whatever complicated concept they need a name for. The potential for linguistic gold abounds here. I mean, “grief-bacon” . It’s POETRY. Allow me to suggest a few more useful terms: Aufgabeverflieg: “mission-evaporate”. Walking into a room and immediately forgetting why you are there. “I’ve had three attacks of au...

 You see this puzzle here? My youngest gave this to me for Christmas 2018. It’s a collage of photos of me and my girls. I LOVE this puzzle. In our old house, I kept it out on our dining room table so I could stop and mess with it anytime I wanted, and it’s out again on the dining room table here in the new place. For the past few months, I’ve been doing this puzzle over and over. (You might be able to see how worn it's becoming.) I know it so well, I can pull a random piece out of the box and lay it almost exactly where it goes – and that’s often how I complete the puzzle. Other times, I work from the outside in. From top to bottom, or bottom to top. I tried it upside down a while back – that worked, too. Over and over . Believe it or not, this is soothing to me. It always has been. When I was a kid, I had a pile of about seven jigsaws that I would do repeatedly in my room, just cycling through the pile when I was bored. And again, I knew them well enough to pick a random piec...

  The chaplain of a club I was in in college used to entertain us greatly with her devotionals because she usually forgot she was supposed to even do one. The president would turn to her during our meetings and say, “Okay, Miss Chaplain, time for devotions” . . . and her eyes would bug out for a moment. She would stutter a bit and then pick up whatever object she could find at hand and start to extemporize. “So, ladies. Tonight. I want to talk tonight about . . . this pen . This pen is a very useful device. You can write with it. You can draw with it. You can, um, poke a hole with it. But you see, the thing about this pen . . . (here you’d see the wheels cranking in her head) . . . it doesn’t do those things by itself. It is only useful when it is in the hands of a writer . Yeah . . . yeah, there we go . . . so we are like pens. We are tools in God’s hands to write the story He wants to write. Yeah. Amen.” Smirk. Good improv, Donna. This semester, I’m teaching a playwriting cl...

During announcements in online church yesterday, one of the pastors started talking about how it would be nice to be able to hit a “reset” button on your life and go back. And I did a little internal “mm-hmm”, as is my default when someone says something that sounds like it should be right. Then I actually thought about that statement. What if I did have a reset button? When exactly would it reset to? I think he was referring to starting over before the pandemic. But that’s not where I would want to start again. My life was already a hot mess a year ago. Gotta go back further than that. Before San Antonio? Before Sioux City? Before kids? Before marriage? Nope, nope, no, and oh heavens no. The more I thought about it, I really could not figure out a period in my life that I could label as The Time When Things Were So Much Better Than Now. Life has always been hard. Not always the way it is hard now, but hard in its own unique way that makes me glad to not be there anymore. ...

  Friends, I am newly obsessed with Jesus. A new Jesus. This Jesus smiles a lot and has a perpetual twinkle in his eye. This Jesus dances and sings at wedding parties. This Jesus blows raspberries with his mouth to entertain children. This Jesus gently joins Simon to tease Andrew about his bad dancing. This Jesus looks the outcast in the eye and says her name with love and delight. This Jesus is someone I want to hang out with. He’s as joyful as a Texas sunrise, as natural as life, and as comfortable as my favorite loveseat. My friend Maureen introduced me to The Chosen , a film series about the life of Jesus. I’ve been seeing advertisements for it all over my Facebook for weeks – maybe months – but I’ve pointedly ignored them. I rarely see film depictions of Christ that I like . . . partly because I’m very particular. I still have nightmares about Robert Powell in Jesus of Nazareth back in 1977. I mean, he looked stoned, right? And kind of creepy. He scared me a bit. Was I th...

 I don’t remember the man’s name, but he speaks frequently at our school’s weekly chapel service – a young guy from a local ministry who always does a good job communicating with the kids. He started particularly well this particular day with a funny story about his daughter that got all the kids laughing. But I don’t remember where he went next because my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about the lesson I had coming up next . . . and a million other things. My brain does that. All the time . I think about conversations I had with my daughter last night. And conversations I WISH I had had with my daughter last night. And confrontations from five years ago. And lyrics of the song I heard in the car on the way here. And plotlines from TV shows. And plotlines of plays I might write. And imaginary plotlines of what I wish my life was like right now. And stories I want to tell this friend next time we talk. And explanations and justifications I will give to another friend for this th...

 As I mentioned earlier, I used to have another blog. I wrote there for about four years – for a while, I was posting two or three times a week. But I stopped writing in 2016. I kind of ran out of anything hopeful to say. It was an election year, and the ugly political atmosphere was seeping into my community atmosphere, and I was feeling smothered with the ugliness and condemned by friends I disagreed with for being stupid and evil and condemned by friends I agreed with for being weak and accommodating. I didn’t have the emotional strength to fight the despair I felt for the church or the turbulence I felt within myself. A lot has happened in the last four years – in the country and in my life. The despair for the church has increased. The turbulence within myself is abating. I’m still a little afraid . . . but I need to open my mouth again. (Lord, help.) The election in November unsettled me. The QAnon movement has stunned me. The insurrection at the Capitol shocked and sadde...