Blessed Are the Freaks

Siblings in Christ, today a miracle is happening. I am joining the Catholic church. For some of you, if you're anything like I was about a year ago, that may sound like the opposite of a miracle. It certainly did to me when my wife first confessed interest in RCIA classes (that's basically Confirmation for adults) around September of 2016. I thought today might be a good time to reflect on how I got here. If you've read my older posts, you might be able to see some of my journey on them. My earlier themes of submission and communion in retrospect seem like obvious seeds in the soil of my heart, but at the time I wrote them I was in a very different place. I grew up in a Lutheran household, which probably tells you all you need to know about the stance towards Catholicism that I was raised around. For some reason it is always the differences closest to us that we lash out the most strongly against. Still, I have always believed that all Christians who profess the b...

If you've read, well, pretty much anything I've written, you probably know that I like bugs. I maintain a pretty tight wardrobe, but I still have multiple shirts that are covered in creepy-crawlies. They're fascinating creatures, and while most people are utterly repelled by them, I think they can be a great place to see God's creative spirit at work, and to remember that our idea of beauty isn't God's - and that's a good thing! I have a pet leopard gecko (named Nithogg) who I feed live cockroaches. He can eat a variety of foods such as meal worms, frozen pinky mice, and specialized little lizard sausages, but I like the roaches best for several reasons, but ranking highly among them is that cockroaches are so interesting . Have you ever inspected one up close? From a distance, they just look like a squirming oval, but when you get up close you can see the evolution of them: the grasshoppery head, the segmented body hidden under the shield-like shell, the...