the thirty-ninth formica friday

It's that time again, another Formica Friday, a treasure trove of hodgepodge, random tidbits, and a bit of this and that. In particular, it is the place where I can celebrate the best posts I read this past week and want to share with you.

A quote:

But this is why those historians would be wrong, why all those scholars who try to explain away the Great Awakening are wrong, why my senior thesis was wrong. They recognize that conversion is complicated, that it is about family, and geography, and politics, and psychology, and economies. They just forget that it is also about God.

-- Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

A list, in which I describe what I am thankful for:

email exchanges between close friends, sharing the hurting and beautiful places
learning to step forward in active faith, not active apathy
that I still get that feeling in the core of my stomach, like a spiritual compass, when I know things are very wrong and not of Him
being commissioned to paint the largest work I have been privileged to produce to date, all splattered grace and drying problems and acrylic-caked hands
Sister Sophia, who helped me turn the tabbed pages during Vespers, and laughed with the mirth of angels as she cooked
life, laughter, and some wonderful rants about how we read the Bible with Melissa over some of the best albeit forgotten cheese grits I have ever eaten, all the while being reminded that there is still hope, that there is still a reason to be, to fight, to write
Goat Cheese and Cognac Fig ice cream, Sweet Corn and Black Raspberries ice cream, Young Gouda and Vodka Cranberry ice cream, and essentially some of the weirdest, wildest, most delicious and ridiculously expensive ice creams you could ever think of ...

Posts, websites, trinkets, and the Internet week in review revue: (short this week, as I have been away)

for being one the best--somewhat undiscovered--writers I have the remarkable privilege to read, Micha with Because grace is brave and it always wins (seriously, someone get her a book deal already!)

for articulating a number of feelings I have myself, especially as I feel on the brink of beginning this journey, and being a true mentor in how this path should go, Rachel with Scattered thoughts on my life in the Christian “industry”

for grace. for bravery. for things that can't be spoken. Tamara with A Letter to My Rapist

And, as always, an old post from me:

who i was today, letter five, preston to hilary

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Have a post from the week you'd like to share? What was your best post this week? Or did you read someone else you just have to let us know about? Leave me a note in the comments below!

Meet Preston

Preston is a twenty-something once-upon-a-time conservative Southern Baptist from Texas who learned to read saints, cross himself, and move across the world to China, England, and Scotland. Since, he's been theologically conservative, oft politically liberal, but radically pro-life, a believer in sacraments and sacramentality, a sort-of Christian feminist, an idealist pacifist who also understands the need for civil defense ... and a handful of everything else in-between. He thinks of himself now as a haphazard and patchwork Bapto-Anglican, though he is becoming confirmed in the Anglican tradition. This blog is his repository of working this whole faith thing out day by day, bird by bird. His first book, Tables in the Wilderness, a memoir of God found, lost, and found again, is due out autumn 2014 with Zondervan.