Relief/Diner Online Submissions System

This morning I hear an all too familiar sound of knocking at the front door at an ungodly hour of the day.

"Do they come and knock as loud as they can on purpose?" I groggily ask myself

The constable states that "they" said my rent's late even though it's only the 19th and we don't have rent due.

"I've heard that before," I wearily reply.

This "they" is the apartment management. I've come up with a new term for them: "chupacabra." You can Google that one if you don't know what it means.

I say "Okay, you have a great day sir."

Why don't I say what I really think?

What I really think is, "How much do 'they' pay you to come and deliver this note to me at 5:51 in the morning?" and then I think, "How much are 'they' charging me for this note you're delivering?"

"Christian faith is spoken into our bodies." ~ Marc Ostlie-Olson. Luther Seminary God Pause. 9-4-2009

I had decided to give up drinking soda for Lent.
Not exactly because it was a sacrifice that would bring me
closer to God and etc, etc, etc.
I felt I should lose a few pounds. But then I noticed something strange
after I began my Lenten diet-- I was actually gaining weight.
“Someone must have told Him my plan.” This, of course, made me
very upset and I called up my friend Peter. “Pete,” I said,
“did you tell Him my plan?” “Which one?” He asked. “The one
where you try to trap and kill all of the Atlantic seals in the

My husband asked, “Why do these things always happen to us?” We live between enough and not enough. We depend on plumbers to call and honor warranties without hesitation. We wait, in our ignorance of basic home maintenance, shivering through cold showers when our hot water heater quits working. At the mercy of our own choices, some foolish, others misguided, some crafted out of the naïve assumption that love always finds a way, we fight bitterness as we splash cold water on our faces each morning.

My daughter and I walked down
to the bridge on main street, laughing
as we slipped along the sidewalk in the
dark, she cuddling her small dog to her
chest, and I leading the way, walking
swiftly, ducking the fingers of low branches
that sought to snag our hair. We stopped
on the corner, before crossing, listening
to the loud report of fireworks. Still, we
could not see their bloom in the sky
before us. Misty rain coated our skin,
hair-raised, goose-pimpled. We laughed.
Should we go on? The rain began to soak
into our clothing. The sign changed to walk;
we raced across the street, turned, and hurried
past the apartment building blocking our view
of the river. We reached the bridge
on Main Street, panting lightly. Turning,

“Do you mind waiting out here?” My husband glances towards the room where his friend is hooked up to half a dozen machines, brain dead according to his wife. She had her daughter call to ask his friends to come and say good-bye. I wait in the hall of this bright intensive care unit, large oval command center surrounded by rooms with glass doors. Some closed off with curtains but most exposing the occupant to any passing stranger. I try not to peer into those spaces, keep my eyes averted from bleak possibilities that I’m not ready to consider. My birthday is this week – 50, half a century, old to the young and young to the old. Harold is 67. He was born only five years before my husband. Sixties contemporaries. My husband returns. “Let’s get out of here.”

There were 12 of us sitting in a small, faintly lit room, much like
the one you are in now. The first man who decided to speak,
(a professor, you understand) said plainly with the confidence of a saint,
“my Jesus is a Pacifist.” A woman with glasses sitting to the right of him

shook her head and replied, “No, no sir, my Jesus is the Holy of Holies.
He is a king. And a king does what kings need to do.” A young man with a beard
lifted one eyebrow and said “My jesus would have to love zombie movies.
He would just have to. And he isn’t a god at all.” To this I replied, “Well I think, maybe,

possibly, that my Jesus would love every song The Jesus and Mary Chain ever wrote,
though He would probably feel conflicted about most of the lyrics.” Someone behind

How phantasmagorical his visions were! John saw something indescribable and yet he tried with all his might to depict what Jesus looked like on the throne in the book of Revelation. In his book, Crazy Love, Francis Chan reminded me of two words John used to describe Jesus on the throne. Jasper and carnelian.

“At once I was in the Spirit and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian.” Revelation 4:3

According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, “Jasper is an opaque, impure variety of silica, usually red, yellow or brown in color,” while carnelian “is a reddish-brown mineral which is commonly used as a semi-precious gemstone”.