Confession: Sometimes I think that being Mennonite is like being part of a big butte out west. That’s what my husband says. When you look at a butte, you think—Whoa, where’d that growth come from? What subterranean forces heaved it out of the earth? But it didn’t grow at all. At one point the whole […]
I see some of us are still frozen with horror at the idea that anyone would actually love being a Mennonite. Or not love being a Mennonite. I said “sometimes,” alright then? I didn’t mean to sound arrogant, as though Mennonites have a corner on church life. I recently heard Anabaptists described as the “vanguard […]
Confession: Sometimes I love being Mennonite. This is not a popular thing to love nowadays, and I confess I don’t love it always. Sometimes I do. Our congregation has been working for some time on hammering out what we call our “covenant”—our statements of faith and practice. This spring we had four issues at hand: […]
Confession: I never saw much point in jellybeans. The only ones I ever truly liked were the Buttered Popcorn variety from Jelly Belly. But their chief virtue lay in how much they tasted like something else. Sigh. Still, when I found a poem* justifying their existence, I decided to share it with my Sunday school […]
Confession: You already know this about me–sometimes I write about caterpillars when I can’t write about cataclysm. My grandfather is dying today (my only grandpa, pillar around which my earliest memories twine), and my sister is in the ER for the third time in a week (my only sister, oh my sister). I hold this […]
Confession: If I were choosing a Meadville area church to attend based on the beauty of the building, I would choose either St. Mary of Grace (Water St), which is the darlingest, or First Presbyterian (Liberty St), which is the most beautiful. I […]