Theological troublemaker. Orthodox Christian.
I posted this to Facebook yesterday. I was going to try to get it on my blog then, but I was too busy trying to give my wife a good Mother’s Day.
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When I was nine, I was identified as gifted, but my undiagnosed ADD made it hard for me to keep up with the faster pace. So I decided to give up, because you cannot fail when you do not try. (But you can fail your classes.) Continue reading “An Open Letter to My Mother”
For those of you who are worried about the government brainwashing our children with Obama’s “socialist propaganda,” I present my daughter. My problem with Obama is that I do not think he is socialist enough, yet Kyla comes often comes home from school parroting political opinions that make me throw up in my mouth a little.
Last night, she told me that she was going to do a civics project where she had to write a letter to her senator about a topic she cared about. She chose gun control, or as she put it, “I want to write against people who are trying to take away our right to own guns.”
Ick.
Continue reading “A Letter to My Daughter for her Civics Project”
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By Mark Timson
I became Orthodox because I didn’t want to be gay anymore. I wanted to write a high-minded, spiritual reflection for you about my deepening walk with Christ, but I’ve torn up rewrite after rewrite because none of them were true. I became Orthodox because I was a gay man in denial, which as we all know is more than a river in Egypt!
I was raised by devout Evangelical Protestant missionaries in the developing world, longing from middle school on for some way to change who I was, to stop being one of the guys responsible for the collapse of Western Christian civilization as my parents’ church knew it. I couldn’t love God and love another man, and I was tormented by this reality. When I finally discovered the strong, deep peasant Orthodoxy of my parents’ last mission field I thought I finally had a way to live in God as well as all the rules I needed to live righteously. And if you live in righteousness, the evils that beset you will be removed. Right? Right…
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By Sheila Mullican
I became Orthodox because God hurled me into it. Arms flailing. Guts wrenching.
My whole life has been a chasing after God. I first knew Him in a tiny church in Appalachia. My earliest memories include flannel-graphs, brush arbors, and foot washings. As an adult, I followed Him to a mega church in the city where I played in a rock and roll band (my daddy’s words) and offered the love of Christ to those far from God.
In all of those places, God was. And I had meaningful encounters. But I craved an intimacy with Him that eluded me. Though I would have told you my hope rested entirely in the grace of God, I frantically tried to prove myself worthy of His love. I volunteered for everything, certain that if I did just a little more He would be happy with me and want to be with me. Continue reading “Into Orthodoxy: Hurled into Heaven”
Read about the “Into Orthodoxy” series here.
By Amir Azarvan
I am Orthodox because:
Read about the “Into Orthodoxy” series here.
By Fr. Lawrence Farley
In my journey home to Orthodoxy, I took the long way around. I was born into suburban respectability in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and therefore attended Protestant Sunday School like all the other respectable kids my age. Since Christian Faith in my home was more nominal than real, when Sunday School became boring (the ultimate indictment), I stopped attending and soon sunk into agnostic adolescent mediocrity. I didn’t give ultimate questions much thought; I was more interested in girls. (Sadly, they were little interested in me.) But around midway through my teenage years I thought that life must consist of something more than a meaningless dance of atoms, and so I went back to my United Church looking for answers. There I encountered a few people my age who introduced me to the Jesus Movement (it was 1970), and in the Jesus Movement I encountered the Lord Jesus. It was a very high-voltage part of the Jesus Movement, replete with speaking in tongues, prophesying, and effervescent evangelism, characterized by a direct experience of the overwhelming love of God and the power of the Spirit. Continue reading “Into Orthodoxy: The Long Journey Home”
