when these ashes aren't magic -- today at deeper story

I'm sharing today at Deeper Story.

I have been making lists lately.

There are two sides within me, this part that wants to speak grace like cool water unto every person, to run hands across ash-smeared faces and whisper ancient promises; this part that wants to bring fire to the paradigms of oppression, to burn the institutions of false gospel down.

I have recorded and scripted out the slip-silver transgressions and sins, the scatterings of self that litter my awkward gait, the fumbling steps I make in this world trying to be this person—these two persons?—who is both now and not yet, who is still being made into an Image, who does not know upon waking some mornings if he is truly a temple of the Holy Ghost or a temple of a bastard god with no name, dancing to a song of Dionysius that no one else seems to hear.

I have been making lists lately.

If I don’t publish this post now, someone else will say it before me.

Another email saying that I write about sex because it gets hits. Maybe it gets hits because it’s a conversation the Church needs to be having.

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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.