Leaving for a month. 15 countries in Eastern Europe. We’re renting a Skoda.
Photos and stories will be here as time allows.
Tonight I fly to London, then Frankfurt, and finally to Slovenia.
I will also Twitter while on the road. Instant updates! And how!
(photograph taken by Kenz)
Mackenzie is in Oaxaca, Mexico for 2 weeks to study under Mary Ellen Mark, a brilliant photojournalist. M.E.Mark is holding a 10 day workshop for 10 photojournalists from around the world, and Mackenzie got to be one of the 10.
She’ll be writing about her experience here and putting up photographs as she goes.
You can look through Mary Ellen Mark’s work here.
My faith is not firm.
I doubt. I wrestle. I get angry. I don’t understand. I get frustrated.
I yell at God. I curse. I weep. I walk away and stumble back.
Sometimes I think God wants me to put up my fists and challenge him to a fist fight.
Maybe God wants a fight. Wants to wrestle. To be questioned. Maybe God wants people to deeply struggle with the text and with relationship between God and humans.
And for me, there is a holy reverence to challenging God to a fight.
In college I was told You just have to believe, and I don’t buy it, nor did I buy it then. I don’t have to believe. I have the choice, and I don’t think I’d love a God who didn’t allow choice.
I heard a pastor I respect once say that he didn’t know if God found him first or if he’d found God first, meaning that he wondered if he would have possibly followed another religion if he had found it first. But he didn’t; he and God met before that could happen.
I like that story. I like the choice that it portrays.
I can’t say much about the Christian faith, for there are too many things I do not understand. My irreducible truths are few.
But I can say this: Every week I come to the table with my friends at Wits End. We take the wine, take the bread, and eat and drink together to remember the redemption. And every week I sit there with tears in my eyes as I think about the absurdity of the incarnation, the death and the life, and the beauty of the story I find myself in.
I bring to the table the anger, the questions, the fighting, the cursing, the tears. But then I take the wine and the bread, and for a peaceful moment in time God and I weep and feast together.
25 years old and till wearing party hats.
Mackenzie took these photographs at my birthday party.
Dating a photographer is fun.
“So fun!” -Kenz
So apparently I needed to reserve a grill at Golden Gardens. Pssh.
The Birfday Extravaganza is taking place tonight at The 135 @ 6ish instead of GG. Here is a google link.
Kenz and I are setting up a makeshift photo booth in my backyard to get photos of people with birfday hats on. As she would say, “So fun!”
I am really sick. Achey all over. Sniffly. Cough. Mleh. I’ve got two papers to write tonight and tomorrow, then one week before I leave the country for a month. Must. Get. Better.
Hot Toddy to the rescue.
