Church Closets

Do you stand where I stand with your hand in my hand, with your side by my side as I look on with eyes wide? Do you hear what I see and do you see what I hear because I’ve gone far too long without anyone else here and the silence that once taught me has now come to haunt me as my privatized cries fall on deaf ears. For I was under the illusion that if I hide my confusions that they’d all eventually go away, but if I disguise my face to hide my pain I’ll never obtain any spiritual aid and the tragedy of a story untold is that of a heart which alone grows cold beneath the secret skeleton’s chest - a rotting rib cage that dies yet never rests.

If only church closets could tell the stories of the souls that die inside them. Of those who feel the need to hide that which they believe defines them only to find that secrecy is that which truly confines them to suffocate in a shallow grave of claustrophobic head-space. For we all supposedly have skeletons in the closet, but what if we’re the ones who’ve decomposed inside and the bones are all that’s left to hide of what used to be our closed off minds?
Because the secrets we keep in church closets deep are of the most perilous kind - we lock ourselves away just so they can’t say whether or not we’re worth God’s time. We die in isolation to give you the gratification of the thought that we might be just like you.

Did you ever come to think that our stories might be important too? The stories that nobody wants to hear, the stories that everyone fears, the stories where we finally tell you about the giant pink elephant that’s always been standing here! Stories where the moral is that you’re basically wrong, that it’s finally time to change up your song, that our hiding is the lying that you’ve been living for so long.

And we know it’s not the whole story you’ve missed, but when our characters become complex it’s those chapters you skip because when the time bomb finally begins to tick it’s so much easier to just plead ignorant.

        So do you stand where I stand with your hand in my hand, with your side by my side as I tell our stories with eyes wide? Do you hear what I see and do you see what I hear because I no longer want to go on without anyone else here.

Gray

In the beginning there was nothing, yet our concept of nothing always seems to look a lot like something - it looks like He’s already started.
         In the beginning man was alone, yet he also wasn’t: we count fellowship with God as not being alone, yet He Himself doesn’t.

So why is that beginnings seem to very gray? A fact that we all vaguely recognize, but would never really say.

We’ve talked about the beginning of earth as well as the beginning of man, and no one would say that a murderous brotherhood was God’s idea of a standard family plan.

         Then there’s the fact that Abraham was an uncircumcised pagan and Isaac wasn’t really his firstborn son. Jacob lied, cheated, and fought with God, yet always somehow won, and this father of the nation of God was also the second son.

Politics

                Give me liberty or give me death says the supposed commander of his last breath – the words of a foot soldier who believes he’s king, who thinks his marching orders might actually change everything.
                What’s funny is that his enemy thinks the very same thing. He dies with a smile while with his last breath he sings songs of freedom that reflect that of the very men that killed him.
                When will people realize that they actually aren’t so different?

Poets In Autumn Tour in New Orleans

                        This October 7 the "Poets In Autumn" tour is coming to New Orleans! If you are a poetry buff or love theatre this event is something you'll want to see. This show will feature Jackie Hill Perry and Preston Perry, Janette...ikz and Ezekiel Azonwu, as well as Chris Webb. These guys are some of the best Spoken Word artists in the business and perform every couple of years at the biggest spoken word shows out there with more than 3,000 people attending live.
                       

         

                  So why am I telling you all this because (1) I am excited that I am going myself and that VIP tickets are so affordable! (2) I will be there with a merch table selling my poetry books! I will be selling them a little cheaper than you can find them on the internet and you'll get to see a great show. I'll even have some book marks and post cards for you to pick up. You can find tickets here as well as share the event with your friends and tell them about it. Can't go? Still share this with your theatre, literature, and all your artsy friends. 

Why I Wrote a Book...

             So, as many of you may or may not know, I write – a lot. Not just missionary newsletters either. I usually write poetry and have been doing just that for the past 12 years. What many of you may not know is that about 8 years ago I almost published a book. It was going to be a random collection of poetry that I had written when I was 16 of about 100 something poems which I considered to be from my best writing streak. I had submitted it to an editor and it had been looked over and we had a meeting. Now, if he was just stroking my young and fragile ego I will never know, but he said that my work was really good and had quite an original voice. Part way through all that, it fell through and I ended up not publishing and less than a year later I ended up moving to South America and my life completely changed.  

                Did any of you know that my plans before that of becoming a missionary were to be a writer? I even started my first novel when I was 13 – not saying it was that great or anything, but I wrote it and I was 13. When God started guiding me towards missions I thought it was just something that I had to give up – you know give up my dreams and take on the dreams that God had for my life. I just didn’t get that God was taking away my dreams, but adding on to them. As the years went by and my professional writing dreams far behind me I actually started writing less in general. The thing is I hadn’t started writing with any intention whatsoever of people reading my poetry – it was a dream that came along later. I started writing because someone made an offhand comment that writing how I feel might help me to feel a little better. So, as I began to write less and less I really began to miss it. But these things are like muscles – you stop doing something for a while and it’s hard to start back up; you remember how but it takes time for your muscles to get back into shape.

                So as the years went by I tried and tried and tried to get back into writing and every once in a while I’d come out with something, but I just never really did get back into the swing of it. I kept trying nonetheless and then I felt God pressing upon my heart to finish what I had started. To take the idea I had originally for my book - which was to be an autobiographical poetry book about coming out of depression – and finish it and publish it. So that’s what I did

 

 This is the name of my first book - "Soul CPR" and it is a book of poetry about my journey with God through years of depression.

Closing In

              I remember the day that Alex Haley changed my childhood. That night long ago in the land of yesteryear sitting on my living room floor staring into the TV watching the man from “reading rainbow” in chains. Awakened to the marvel that people in different countries have different sounding names. Saddened by the fact that what people don’t understand they often try to change. And troubled by the thought that my skin color was linked to a heritage that brought me shame.
                I looked like the bad guys! I hated the fact that I even looked like I was on their side. The oppressors were not the ones with which I identified and thus that movie marked my very young life.

                

                Growing up I knew people of every shape and color – from black to Mexican to Asian; from family to friends – and I loved every last one of them.
                Their differences didn’t scare me and I didn’t find them weird – I thought they were some of the most beautiful people to every have appeared. My parents happily confused as to the type of child they had reared. I never even realized that I was the one considered “socially weird.” Thinking that all people are equal is a moral to which many people find difficult to adhere.

                

             And now I’m all grown and my husband isn’t white. Maybe he’s not black, but his Latin brown is close enough in societies frightened light.
              My children will be mixed, lacking blonde hair and America’s blue eyes; and I often wonder how they’ll be treated in their mother’s countryside.  Speaking a different language and probably accented English, will they be treated differently by the country they share blood with?

                

               Why is this the world we live in? Why is this ignorant bliss something people are willing to sit in.
                No one speaks and no one shrieks as long as the silence holds them steady on their pinnacled mountain peaks.
                It finally hit home. I know it happens, but I thought “this ain’t Chicago.”
                I thought we were the south. I thought we were kin. I thought people had learned to look past one’s skin. So many people unknowingly have blood with black in it. 

Fantasy Fiction

               I am a nerd. It all started out in childhood with Superman, Batman, and Spiderman – your classic alien, outcast, mutant mutiny against the machine that we call society. My parents had birthed a fan girl.
                I fell in love with that imaginary place we hide in our brain where the underdog on the outskirts of society was actually something more than just a victim. Where the people´s hero was somehow also the system´s villain. “The man” never could handle things that seemed all too different.
                And then there are references that few will actually even get about adopted adolescent aliens and the Scooby gang marveling over “9^th wonders,” an old book of shadows, and meteor rocks over after school coffee at the Tallen. They were the people and places that told you you didn´t have to be all growed up to save the world or have everything figured out in order to make a difference. It´s surprising how people wonder why we applaud the non-existent. They take those that seem forgotten and make us feel significant. And it wasn´t even their superhuman ability that we envied, but their unparalleled unity and undeniable calling to some higher duty.

           
                   Our younger selves understood more than we give them credit for. They knew that ideals both did and had to exist. That people are so much more than what so many are impressed with. And that the “it” people are many times the ones that few times get “it.”
                   Comic books and pulp fiction remind us that we may not actually know absolutely everything. That things are not always as they seem and that heroes don´t walk around in a super suit and wings. Heroes could be reporters, scientists, photographers, and millionaires. Even a group of teenagers could protect us from things crawling out of the mouth of hell or whatever may wander the deserts of Roswell.
                  And just like when they “saved the cheerleader and saved the world” through the life of one man humanity was cursed yet through the death of Another life was reimbursed.