i confess i can't / the time for silence

I am combining two posts into one here. The first part was planned last week, but the second park snuck into the corners of being yesterday evening.

It's Wednesday, so I should have a post for you about why I'm still Baptist, but I don't. I don't, because I confess I can't. I'm still Baptist, whatever part of me there is that can claim that in whatever form it takes. When I try to write that out, however, I am displeased.

This blog has been and remains at its best when I tell you stories or when I write unplanned, off the cuff, address issues as they arise. When I try to sit down and do the theological nitty-gritty of denominational lines, I find myself writing dribble. At least for this space. I managed academically, but this doesn't work here.

I tried about seven different versions for today: I couldn't stand any of them.

So I need to not write them. I need to take a step back and just keep telling you stories. I'll still answer any question you ever have, but I'm not ready to make whole posts about this stuff. Maybe someday, but not yet.

I'm sorry, but that's my honesty about where I am right now.

---

And, speaking of ...

I have some friends who are truly hurting right now. Their hurt makes all my hurt, a lifetime of hurts, seem so small. Some I cannot name directly, some I cannot tell you, so I ask that you pray for the unspoken.

But pray. Pray specifically, for Amber and Seth and Titus.

I didn't have words last night, so I painted and listened to Smetana on repeat, again and again.

Today, I'm offline. Along with some of the other contributors to Deeper Story, I'm going quiet today. No Twitter or Facebook, blog reading or responding. I'll be on work email and for emergencies, but otherwise, you'll hear from me again tomorrow.

It's time to draw circles.

Let's gather around our people. Let's put Smetana on repeat and paint out all the hurt onto Him on whom all this was laid.

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.