At Home in God’s Kingdom

Tala Azar
Hospitality, Justice, Truth
One of the places I felt most welcome in Canada was church. After leaving our first church in Ontario, we attended four different churches over seven years, but I felt at home in all of them in different ways. In all of those churches, worship included singing songs from all over the world, and we often sung in different languages. I heard the story of a world promised to us, where all people have a home and family.
On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

On Songs and Stories: Tokens of Knowledge in Another, Deeper, Rarer Form

Steven Garber
Bookish, Truth

Each of these authors tell the truth about the human condition, so their books are “good” in the deepest and truest sense. Not ever moralizing, so that we feel the authors are cheating, insisting on a “Christian” voice that does not belong in the story, or even worse perhaps, a revising of honest faith that does not allow for the breadth and depth of human existence, glories and shames that we are.

The Ball Field

Lindsay Crandall
Place
We went to one game, then another, and suddenly we were back to an old familiar rhythm, the liturgy of the ball field. Take a lawn chair and iced tea (preferably obtained at a gas station on the way to the game), have a chat with one eye on the field, scream wildly at good plays and bad, and take the game personally.

Voices

Eric Peters
Truth
They are with me from the moment I awake: as I brew a pot of coffee, each time I lose patience with my kids, when I see my stubbled face in the mirror, when I peek at my bank account balance, when I scrape my knuckle working on a project, when I am unable to make eye contact with another human in my perceived inferiority, until the moment I finally lay my head on the pillow at day’s end. Sadly, they are loudest when I write, when I seek to string together words and bring something beautiful into the world.
Learning to Cook, and Why it Matters

Learning to Cook, and Why it Matters

Andi Ashworth
Feast, Hospitality

Learning to cook has opened the door to a more flourishing life. Through cooking, I've learned to comfort, celebrate, care for the sick, create traditions, welcome loved ones and strangers, and create environments for relationships to grow. Cooking has a power that goes beyond meeting our basic need for food. Creating good food and welcoming tables speak to the deepest parts of our being. We are created to live artfully in daily life, to need real food to nourish our bodies, to have tables at which to belong, and to have stopping places where we can know and be known.

Rhythm, Time, and the Nine-to-Five

Michelle Gallagher
Vocation
... sometimes working shifts makes you feel as if you are living on another planet far from your neighbors. God has given all people good work to do, and some — nurses, restaurant staff, music teachers, personal trainers, and so on — have been given the gift-burden of odd hours. So let us be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to judge. If you see your neighbor dozing off during the sermon or not attending on a Sunday morning, do not assume they lack faith. They may have just worked a night shift.

Provenance

Laura Lynn Brown
Crafty
Those unfinished projects no longer seem tragic. They’re comforting evidence that, like me, like all of us, mom lived with gaps between intention and fruition. I have the choice, and the privilege, but not the obligation, to finish some of what she started. Though I am my mother’s uncompleted work, I think she would approve.

Bequest of a Bookseller

Lanier Ivester
Bookish
I can still hear the jingling of the bells on the back basement door as we opened it and stepped into the cool, dim interior. The air was sweet with the must and dust of the ages, a fragrance to quicken the pulse of any book-lover, and little elf-lamps of light were clipped to the door frames and adorning the shelves, lending a friendly warmth to the gloom.

Brothers and Sisters

Cameron Dezen Hammon
Music
My conversion was real, but it divided us. I had no finesse in my clumsy attempts at evangelism, but I ached for him to join me, to understand. I was baptized on Coney Island in a lightning storm, and ever faithful, he stood on the beach and watched, hands dug deep in the pockets of his Levi’s. I knew he wrestled with the turn I’d taken, but we stopped talking about it. We suddenly got polite.

Believing the Seeds of Wonderland

Alice Smith
Hospitality
What she said that day gave me freedom and permission to look into the eyes of a friend and see a painting in progress, to be surprised by the melodies of memories triggered at perfect moments, to tease out the poetic rhythms of any given day. I began to realize that while many of my friends make art with guitars or paintbrushes, my preferred medium is the fabric of human relationships: making lasting connections between people and seeking to illuminate the image of God that each person bears.

In High Cotton

Kierstin Casella
Place
Give me a porch swing, a balmy night, and some fireflies buzzing around, and I’m a happy clam. From March to September, our turntable crackles with Louis Armstrong’s Louisiana jazz. On weekend evenings we go no farther than our front steps to hear the best local fiddle players; their songs echo through a field of oak trees between our house and our town’s local dive bar. And as much as I like to pretend I have a modern bent, a homespun aesthetic politely oozes from inside our home, too.

Food as Gift

Christine Bailey
Feast
It’s exciting for me to see someone’s eyes light up at the first bite of a Texas blueberry sweeter than candy, especially when I was there when those blueberries were delivered in wooden crates by the farmer who grew them. It’s fulfilling to see parents and two kids riding their bikes home from our store with produce stuffed into the front baskets or a couple walking home each holding one side of their produce bin, swinging it between them as if it were a happy toddler.

Five Poems

Daniel Bowman Jr.
Bookish
The kneeling me looks like
a man who has kept to himself
for too long upon learning
he had been fooled by a grand idea.
He repents only in the face of death.
The dead me is white as an angel,
young and crowned with seaweed.

Elizabeth

Wendy Knight
Creation Care
I grew up the daughter of a gardener and helped can tomatoes annually. After high school, I worked in a nursery, rescuing reject plants, putting them wherever I could find a spare patch of soil. Wherever I moved I planted, leaving a trail of perennials and flowering shrubs in my wake. When my husband and I purchased a half-acre lot in Nashville, I surrounded the home with flowerbeds while a sizable kitchen garden grew out back. Still, it didn't seem enough.
Of Silence, Wildness, and Saint Ignatius

Of Silence, Wildness, and Saint Ignatius

Mary Van Denend
Truth

To get there you must first drive an hour and a half northwest toward the ocean, then meander through a national wildlife sanctuary (with a band of donkeys wandering the hillsides) until you can’t go any farther. All along the way, you’re slowly enveloped by a web of forest and fog, mist and mystery. You must trust that the circuitous gravel road does indeed lead somewhere . . .

"Sweet Land": the Waltz of Olaf and Inge

Jenni Simmons
Stage & Screen
Inge’s faith gave her the gumption to arrive on strange soil with little more than a possibility of love. She continually forgave a community who would not reciprocate the courtesy. And though she and her beau were shunned in the eyes of the law, they triumphed by having faith in each other. Like any good love story, they found something they needed in the quiet eyes of the other.
Namemaking, Weary Work for Whales and Men

Namemaking, Weary Work for Whales and Men

Charlie Peacock
Truth

When someone’s name is that pervasive you’ve got to ask, “Why?” What makes some personal fame timeless? What kind of spirit embeds itself in words and names to give them oomph? I’ve come to believe famous people come in two varieties: famous for all the right reasons like Jesus and Johnny Cash, and famous for all the wrong reasons like Joe the Plumber and John Sutter.

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