Tabitha

I want to find my place

amongst the people of Advent

but I can’t quite decide who I am.

I want to be pregnant with God

but it takes such a toll on the body.

I have given birth to things before

And labor is hard and untimely //

I want to welcome angels and say yes,

to anything.

but if I saw an angel I would hold him

hostage and send a ransom note of questions

“If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusing God’s incomparable power with us. As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that we’re not much to look at. We’ve been surrounded and

“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it. In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.”

Mary Karr in the Introduction to The Liars’ Club 10 year anniversary edition

“One of the most pervasive myths about writing is that specificity is limiting. It’s just the opposite. You might think that a poem about love or truth or freedom—a large abstraction—would reach more people if it were written with universality in mind. But if your goal is to speak to everyone, and to remove particulars from the piece because others

“But rationalizing what God does involves the risk of losing its difficulty and otherness to human expectations. His great forgiveness of the first criminal offends people’s sense of justice, unless they can find a way to read vengefulness into the tale. We are instead to learn that mercy is nearer than justice to Godliness, and that mercy can

Who are our debtors, literal or figurative, and what do they owe us? Most of us could probably come up with a list. The verse makes us God’s debtors. What do we owe Him? Everything. More than we can conceive of. But a debt is an obligation. The prophets make it clear that sacrifice does not satisfy the Lord’s requirement of us. Doing justice and