In Gennesaret

In a recent post, I mentioned people who were evidence to me of the validity of the Christian life when I was doubting everything. Barbara Bath was one of those people. She was my Sunday School teacher my last two years of high school. She was also a fellow drama nerd who organized a variety of performance opportunities at my church and always got me involved. I cannot sufficiently express the impact this woman had on my life. For forty years, my aim has been to be Barbara Bath when I grow up. Love just oozed out of every pore of her being. During some trying times in my early adulthood, one of my big struggles was the image I had of God. I won’t go into all the things that factored into this, but the God I pictured in my head was quite distant, quite cold. Intellectually, I could read my Bible and know that God loved me, but I certainly didn’t feel it in my heart. And I had reached a point where I desperately needed to feel it in my heart to keep moving forward. Here was my solu...

Recent events in my life have reminded me of a truth I’ve learned over the years and have mentioned before in this space: We are all so messed up. All of us. Every one of us is damaged goods – damaged by broken parents, by neglectful teachers, by heartless playmates, by careless lovers, by threatened colleagues, by self-absorbed neighbors, by prejudiced people, by oppressive churches. We’ve got wounds, old and new, deep and wide, fresh and scabbed over. Every. Single. One of us. Most of us acknowledge that this is so. Some of us can even articulate the nature of our own damage. And few brave souls among us have taken steps to find repair. But I’m so distressed over the masses who continue to live their daily lives with battered souls and bruised spirits – especially those who are aware of their broken state and choose to remain in it. Let me issue a plea here. You, dear one . . . y ou deserve healing from your wounds. You do. It doesn’t matter if they were self-inflicted o...

Let me tell you about a director I worked with several years ago. He was a nice guy, an older guy. He had been directing plays for many years, I suspect. I had a very small role in this particular production of his (he was apologetic at the size of the role when he offered it to me, but I was cool with that). But as the rehearsals went on, I ended up taking on more and more responsibilities . . . mainly because I offered. And I offered because this stuff wasn’t getting done , doggone it, and it was irritating me – and often making me nervous. “So . . . I could work with the chorus on these songs while you’re working that scene with the others, yes?” “Um . . . would you like me come up with some blocking for the extras in these scenes so they’re not just standing there staring at the people talking?”   “We open in two weeks . . . and we still have no choreography for this party dance. You want me to give it a shot?” In the end, it wasn’t a great production – not terrible, but no...

“Revision” is the third step of the writing process. All of my middle school students can tell you this because they learn the Five Steps of the Writing Process in the first quarter of sixth grade, they list and define them on every semester exam from then on, and we talk about them in class all the time. The definition they memorize for revision is to improve the writing . “Make it mo betta,” I tell them (and they snicker at my lame attempt to be cool or something, but my lameness helps it stick in their brains). Add or subtract content . . . move things around . . . pick a better word for that . . . put ideas together into sentences in a different way . . . go back to your thesis and make sure it’s clear . . . make the paper better than it was back when you were just throwing something down on the page to hand in because the Initial Draft was due tomorrow. I also point out to them that “revision” means “ RE-vision ”. “Vision” is looking at something, and “re-“ means doing it agai...