On steering past the spireas—and surrendering our burdens
Michelle Hauser
February 2, 2022
The myriad attempts to back out of my long, narrow driveway are embarrassingly comical.
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The myriad attempts to back out of my long, narrow driveway are embarrassingly comical.
Apparently, the vibrations from the street outside have been less than good for my old church. Thanks to heavier and heavier trucks travelling faster and
Panic had left the man no room to be polite. An abrupt tap on my shoulder was all he could manage before getting down to
As long as there’s money in faith-based films, and there’s plenty of it, apparently, Christian audiences can expect the canon of Bible movies to continue to expand.
Whenever my daily bread becomes a daily bother, I try to turn the negativity around by conjuring the “irie” of an old flame who taught me how to cook.
One of the toughest challenges my husband and I faced last year was having been companions to his mother’s downsizing. At the age of 91, Harriet Hauser divested herself of the creature comforts of an upper middle class life.
Like many churches, ours is a hive of activity on Sundays. She and her steeple absorb all the people and when worship is done she channels us into innumerable activities and eventually sends us back out into the world. But sometimes people get lost in the leaving.
“Communion is so gross!”
The cruel words, which were whispered but still plenty audible, cut quick and deep.
Groggy from a long night of flight connections across North America, I could make out the tiny silhouettes of my nephews peering down the basement stairs. My emergency pull-out crash-pad was their play zone and they wanted it back.
Random Acts of Evangelism usually leave me grappling with a complex set of emotions. First and foremost, there’s anger.
In one of the earliest memories I have of my father’s mother, Dorothy Campbell, she is an outline of herself, back-lit by the upstairs window of an old farm house, bending over a creaky iron bed, her ear within a few inches of the wrinkled lips of the oldest person my young eyes have ever seen.
I’d walked from my back door to the car and my bunions were already screaming at me to go back inside the house. The heels I’d chosen were the lesser of several evils, but I was still facing another great battle with fashionable footwear.
I was setting up chairs for Sunday School when I overheard the coffee hour team in the kitchen debating about the urn and how many scoops they should use and why on earth wasn’t the recipe written down somewhere.
The majority of the writing I do these days is for secular media, which means I spend a lot of time denying God.
Mostly I try to rationalize my denial as banal, classifying it as errors of omission and therefore, not as egregious as outright denial. Although, when you think about it, St. Peter had armed Roman soldiers with a penchant for sadism and committing horrific acts of violence to contend with-what am I so afraid of, anyway? No one’s going to nail me to a cross or feed me to the lions.
The bilingual bookmark was meant to be a peace offering-a talisman around which my mother and I could meet religion halfway.
The kitchen at our church has a pass-through window with a bird’s-eye view of one of the children’s ministry spaces. During Vacation Bible School last August, within earshot of this open space, I was chopping candy bars and other build-your-own sundae ingredients while listening to the morning’s carpet conversation.
The New York Times estimates that nearly 1.6 million people marched in solidarity through the streets of Paris this past weekend. World leaders linked arms-Christians, Muslims and Jews alike-Francois Hollande, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ibrahim Boubackar Keita, Angela Merkel and Mahmoud Abbas, to name a few.
You could set your watch by how quickly my dad would come uncorked after my aunt’s Christmas newsletter arrived-about 3.5 seconds, if memory serves. Auntie M. was famous for her long legs, enviable year-round tan, and saccharine seasonal epistles.
As I pointed to the shoebox on the table,the word “Sa-mar-i-tan” hovering behind me on the flip chart, I asked, “What goes in here?”All the hands in my Sunday school class shot up.
“I owe Mark some tomatoes,” she said, gruffly, handing me a basket at the back door.
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