about this blog

After a twenty-year walkabout from God and the Church, I've come home. Now I'm a candidate for ordination as a deacon in the Episcopal Church. I serve as half-time missioner at a small inner city parish.

This blog began as a form of public discernment around my diaconal vocation. I explored what it means to minister in the breach between church and world. Then, in the autumn of 2009, I was diagnosed with autoimmune arthritis. What at first seemed like a detour became a new and unexpected path, one that would lead me into a new kind of breach: chronic illness. As my sense of isolation grew, I found it impossible to continue the blog. I couldn't write about my vocation of serving in the margins without writing about my own (new) experience of living in them. It seemed a risky business--to expose myself that way. Vulnerability has never been my strong suit.

So the blog went dormant for a while until, with the encouragement and permission of my bishop, I decided to relaunch it as a place where I could explore the intersections of vocation, illness, and everyday life--a convergence where God seems to be turning up lately in unexpected ways.

My mom used to tell a story about a kid who is digging through a pile of manure. He digs and digs and digs with great enthusiasm, until his father says, "Johnny," his father asked, "what are you doing?" "Well, Dad," Johnny answers, "with all this shit, there must be a pony here somewhere."

This blog is my shovel. What I'm looking for is grace.