Tammy Boyd Perlmutter's Blog, page 4

Soul Bare Giveaway!

 
A small hybrid press announced a new community project called Soul Bare: Reflections on Becoming Human, created by Cara Sexton. The original call for submissions was announced on July 12, 2012, with a deadline of November 1, 2012.
 
It was to be a collection of raw, personal stories by some well-known Christian writers and some newly discovered. I considered it, looked at the list of contributors, got intimidated, and gave up before I put a word on the screen. 
 
Over the next few months I would have twinges of regret, wondering if I made the right choice. With the new year approaching, it was almost time to pick a new One Word for the year. My word for 2012 had been fearless. That same Cara Sexton had even created an image for me when I saw the same one on her blog.

 

 

Fearless. I launched into 2012 with a list of things that scared me and I set about to meet each one of them as bravely as I could. And that year I accomplished an amazing amount of things, but apparently my courage was waning by then and I was already looking for a replacement word. 
 
Cara announced a new January 1, 2013 deadline for Soul Bare. On New Year’s Eve, hours before the deadline, I mustered all the fearlessness I could, pulled together an essay, and sent it off. Then promptly detached from that reality. It was a deeply personal piece where I revealed more of my story and brokenness in writing than I ever had before. I actually felt sick to my stomach after I hit send.
 
On January 25th I received an acceptance letter with congratulations. My piece had been chosen. 
 
I was overcome by elation mixed with disbelief. I had to read the email a few more times that week to make sure it was still true. The contributor list was emailed to everyone and there were even more illustrious names on it. Our edits were sent to us in June, and in July our bios were requested.
 
On March 29, 2014 the news we had been waiting for arrived: “The final manuscript is with the publisher now, awaiting the completion process, which will include a revised cover design, release date scheduling, and the like.” It was really happening!!
 
Until it wasn’t.
 
The press dropped off the face of the earth and left Soul Bare hanging in the wind. 
 
But God . . . 
 
He’s been at the center of this from its inception, and he was far from done with it. Cara took back the manuscript and sent it to agent Chip MacGregor who LOVED the book, shopped it to a few publishers, and by the end of June 2015, the offer was accepted and InterVarsity Press announced as the new publisher! Helen Lee took a chance on an anthology and I am constantly impressed by her. 
 
There was another round of major editing including a number of essays being pulled, and I doubted that mine would be chosen again. It was a long, nerve-wracking three and a half years of acceptance, approved edits, losing a publisher, gaining a publisher, losing fellow contributors, until I held my Soul Bare baby in my hands. 
 

 
I am profoundly grateful for Cara’s unswerving faithfulness to this project. Without her vision and tenacity it would have been scrapped long ago. She battled severe chronic illness flare ups and a host of other scary medical issues but never let it cool her passion for Soul Bare. She seemed to always have a spoon left for us. 
 
I am deeply honored to be among such brilliant, brave writers and I want to give a special shout out to Sarah Bessey who gracefully endured my stalking her at The Festival of Faith and Writing and hugged me tight when she met me.
 
The writers who fill these pages with story and experience, lessons learned and regrets confessed, are some of the finest writers I’ve encountered. You’ll want to pause after every essay to tweet a quote, thanking them for their willingness to bare their souls, and may even want to bare yours. 
 
Soul Bare is coming out August 8th and you can preorder it now and be the first on your block to read it! I hope it meets you where you need it and helps you feel less alone wherever you are. 

I’m giving away 5 copies of Soul Bare, courtesy of InterVarsity Press! Send a tweet or like our Facebook page to enter. Winners will be chosen on August 5th. You can enter once a day. Share this post with your friends!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Check out the first book trailer with Shannan Martin!

 

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Being Present in the Need

I traveled to Guatemala in April with a team of writers for Children’s Hope Chest. We were there on a Vision Trip, visiting communities, schools, homes, and after-school programs, in order to choose which Care Point the four of us writers felt called to support.

We didn’t want to be voyeurs witnessing the degradation and poverty these children were experiencing. We want to pool our resources, the writers and readers of our four blogs, to generate support for the community and sponsorship for the children.

The most striking thing I noticed is how happy the children were. They were exuberant and excited, smiling and laughing and falling over themselves to interact with us. Some of these children lived in corrugated tin shacks near the dump where their mothers gathered food and things to sell, competing with dogs and other women and children. The moms would run alongside wagons heading for the dump, pulling out plastic to recycle, grabbing bags of carrots discarded by the produce stands. The kids would run across the street with arms full of things they had dug in the dump for, presenting their collection to moms and sisters crouching in the shade.

To read the rest, visit In Some Measure, Jesus People USA’s blog.

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Suffering Is Not for Its Own Sake

For The Mudroom.

I know I’m supposed to write a brilliant, moving post about the amazing people of Guatemala and how God is doing incredible things and how deeply I was touched and changed by the experience. I don’t know if I can write that post.

I have been changed by the experience but I know I will be processing this for a long time. But for now, here are my first thoughts. 

I went on this trip as an act of faith. I suffer from chronic pain and I knew a trip of this kind would trigger all the symptoms for me. And it did. The walking, the standing, the sitting, even the sleeping all caused intense discomfort and fatigue.

It was worth the pain. It was worth the triggering of memories from my own impoverished early years. It reminded me that we are called to suffer with Christ and with one another. It’s not an option. In A Beautiful Disaster, Marlena Graves writes about the necessity of spiritual formation and the unlikely source:

“Growing up, I begged God to take the cup of suffering from me, but mostly he didn’t. Instead, he used my pain and difficulties, my desert experiences, to transform me—which in turn alleviated my suffering. He redeems what we may deem our living hells, if we allow him. The hard truth, then, is this: everyone who follows Jesus is eventually called to the desert. God uses the desert of the soul—our suffering and difficulties—to form us, to make us beautiful souls” (italics mine).

While in Guatemala, I would fall into bed the moment we returned to our hostel at night. I prayed for healing, for relief, blinking back tears of discouragement from another difficult day. I considered staying at the hostel on Wednesday, not knowing if I could make it through the whole day. The next day we visited Life Unlimited in Caserío Las Flores. We walked 3.5 miles and, due to the inclines in the mountainous area, climbed the equivalent of 32 flights of stairs. I wondered how the local residents who also suffered chronic pain coped in this rural, mostly walking life.

Read the rest at The Mudroom.

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Things That Are Saving My Life Right Now: March

 

For Sick Pilgrim.

Tammy Perlmutter writes from Chicago and is the founder of The Mudroom.

My infinity scarf. Yes, I have had to enlist the help of others on how to get it to fall just right, but I think I’ve pretty much mastered it now. It’s like being hugged around the neck all day long. I sometimes sleep with it on too. (*Jessica also sleeps in a scarf, because she lives in Northern Michigan.)

Sci-Fi. With reality being what it is these days, I need somewhere to escape to that is not the inside of my mind. I’m immersing myself in Star Trek, Doctor Who, Ender’s Game, Blade Runner, Firefly, The Hunger Games, Pacific Rim, X-Files, and Dune. These stories remind me that the hero is not dead, but just lives in another universe, on another planet, or in the future.

The Mudroom & Sick Pilgrim. Working alongside a community of readers and writers encourages me to go deeper and write more. Their presence, investment, and friendship has made this year one of the best I’ve ever had.

To read what is saving the lives of my fellow Sick Pilgrims, click here. 

What is saving your life this month?

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Catholic Books Even a Protestant Could Love

 

For Sick Pilgrim.

I’m not Catholic, but some of my favorite books are.

I came of age during the 80s, the heyday of evangelical youth group culture. By the time I was 17, I’d descended into a Christian subculture of punks, skaters, metal heads, and goths. That felt more like home to me. We had an understanding and appreciation of the darker side of life and asked more questions than we answered. My peers understood what real temptation and real falling looked like, because they were experiencing it themselves and were willing to talk about it.

I was disillusioned with evangelical culture, overwhelmed by the lights and lasers of worship, suspicious of the clever maxims about gratefulness and joy. I needed something deeper, darker. I needed mystery and unapologetic awe, exquisite art on every surface imaginable, the constant reminder that confession is not a fearsome command, but an invitation.

The Way of Perfection  by Teresa of Avila

When Teresa of Avila was a little girl, she and her brother used to run away “in hopes of attaining martyrdom,” and she would build little hermitages. A few years later, during an illness, Teresa read the Letters of Jerome, the monk who translated the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), and decided she should be a nun. But after she entered the Carmelite convent in Avila, it took 20 years for Teresa to experience inner conversion. At this point in her life, she’d been taught by Augustinian nuns, entered the Carmelite order, left due to another illness, and returned once more. I love this about Teresa. I trust a woman who requires that many tries to find her spiritual home. She eventually tired of the worldliness that had crept into the monasteries, so she struck out on her own to build a convent, St. Joseph’s, founded on the two characteristics she believed were essential in a spiritual mature religious order: poverty and solitude. Her reforms inspired her pupil, St. John of the Cross, to push for similar reforms among the Carmelite friars.

In 1565-1566 Teresa wrote The Way of Perfection to provide instruction for the sisters. Who wouldn’t want to read a book with chapter titles like: Why we must avoid our families and how we can find our true spiritual friends?

“I do not know why anyone is in a convent if she is willing to bear only those crosses she thinks she has a right to expect.”

*Drops mic.*

If you want to meet Dorothy Day and Rainer Maria Rilke continue reading over at Sick Pilgrim!

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The Prodigal in the Pig Yard

For Sick Pilgrim.
Dark Devotional: The Fourth Sunday in Lent:

A Reading from the Gospel According to Saint Luke.

Now the older son had been out in the field and, on his way back, as he neared the house, he heard the sound of music and dancing. He called one of the servants and asked what this might mean. The servant said to him, ‘Your brother has returned and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’ He became angry, and when he refused to enter the house, his father came out and pleaded with him. He said to his father in reply, ‘Look, all these years I served you and not once did I disobey your orders; yet you never gave me even a young goat to feast on with my friends. But when your son returns who swallowed up your property with prostitutes, for him you slaughter the fattened calf.’ He said to him, ‘My son, you are here with me always; everything I have is yours. But now we must celebrate and rejoice, because your brother was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.

Whenever we hear this story, it seems to come with the object lesson of the prodigal son and the father. You can always come back, God will always forgive, and you will be restored to the kingdom.

For much of my life I related to the prodigal son. I spent years rebelling against God and getting tangled up in my own pig field. There were many returnings and much rejoicing.

I believe in the extravagant God who welcomes the prodigal, but I really can’t imagine a father like the one in this parable. I simply have no context for this. In my experience, fathers abandon you, deny you, hurt you; they are marked by an emotional lability that instills fear into young hearts.

I’ll always have a bit of the prodigal in me. But after 20 years as a Christian, I don’t find myself in the first 14 verses of this story anymore. I don’t sin as dramatically as I used to, I’m not in as much danger of falling away. The real and present struggle for me is what C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy: not ceasing to believe in God, but coming to believe “such dreadful things about him.”

This is where the older brother comes in. This is where I come in.

To read the rest, visit all us elder brothers at Sick Pilgrim.

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Tammy Goes to Guatemala

It started with a question:

“I wondered what would happen if we could find a bunch of bloggers to all point their blogs to one spot to make a difference in the lives of orphaned and vulnerable children.”

I’m not usually the person things like this happen to. Honestly, I’m usually the one feeling a little pang of jealousy and wishing I were included. Then I get this text from Melanie Dale, the one who dared ask the question:

 

I’m leading this blogger trip to Guatemala right after Festival of Faith & Writing to check out a community in Guatemala City to get orphaned and vulnerable children sponsored and partner in community transformation. My goal is to focus a bunch of blogs on one community to develop a relationship that will create sustainable development and hope for these kids. I know it’s right after our conference and will completely understand if you tell me I’m crazy. But you’re so totally invited and I would love to have the Mudroom involved and if you want I can tell you more about it. The dates are April 18-22. I know. So close to the conference. I almost didn’t tell you because the turnaround is ludicrous, but then I thought, “Hey, she’s a grown up who can decide things for herself. It doesn’t hurt to ask!”

 

I got a little weepy. Melanie Freakin’ Dale was asking me to be part of her Blogger Dream Team Fantasy! Melanie has been serving as a sponsorship coordinator for a village in Northern Uganda with Children’s HopeChest.  She started blogging about their adoption process and the kids who needed sponsors.  She continues to write about orphan care and adoption, and doesn’t stop at writing or talking about it, but goes to those places where the need is overwhelming.

She explains the purpose of the Vision Trip in the announcement in her blog post “Blogger Dream Team Fantasy:”

We partner with all local leadership; people who are in their communities and know what they need will guide us on how we can help. Our goal is community transformation, because the best way to meet the needs of orphaned and vulnerable children is to create a healthy, safe community around them. We work in relationships, between sponsor and child, between child and local discipler. We focus on asset-based development, looking at what assets a community has already and how we can empower them. We work humbly, going in asking, “How can we help?” rather than “Here’s what we’ll do.” This is about sustainability, not creating dependence. We are not the leaders, or the teachers, or the workers. We are the relationshippers, the cheerleaders, the faithful friends. We get the glorious role of being the sidekicks as the superheroes tackle poverty and injustice in their own towns.

This will be my first time traveling out of the country! We fly in on Monday, April 18th and return Friday, April 22nd. Friends, family, and even new online connections donated to this trip and I am overwhelmed by their generosity and support. 

I am beyond honored to be representing The Mudroom as part of this. The people who read us and write for us are lovers of justice and staunch advocates for broken families and marginalized children.Your prayers are appreciated, and while you’re at it, think about how you want to be involved in some way. We’ll be coming home with ideas and I hope you’ll join us!

 

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Putting Out Into the Deep

For Sick Pilgrim’s Dark Devotional

Click here for the complete mass readings for Sunday, February 7, 2016.
 

I’m drifting in deep waters
Alone with my self doubting again
I try not to struggle this time
For I will weather the storm
I gotta remember
Don’t fight it
Even if I
Don’t like it
Somehow turn me around
No matter how far I drift
Deep waters won’t scare me tonight

~Portishead, Deep Water

A Reading from the Gospel According to Saint Luke

While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening
to the word of God, he was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret.
He saw two boats there alongside the lake; the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets.
Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore.
Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon,
“Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”
Simon said in reply, “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets.”
When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing.
They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come to help them.
They came and filled both boats so that the boats were in danger of sinking.
When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said,
“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”

What does it look like for us to listen to God? For people in ancient Israel it meant going down to the lake, surviving the swarms of mosquitoes in blistering heat while hemmed in behind and before by fishermen, carpenters, sellers of purple, the lame, the blind, and the halt. They were most likely suffocating from the amount of body heat mixing with the humid air passing over the lake mingled with the scent of the unwashed masses. People would do anything to hear Jesus speak. They had been known to let people down through ceilings and climb trees for a glimpse of him.

Me? I complain about the Sunday service starting too late or going too long. I get huffy when my favorite worship leaders aren’t on the stage. I wouldn’t stand for a sermon in air conditioning, let alone outside during a Chicago summer where people have died from heat exhaustion. I rarely see reading and studying scripture as a privilege. It’s just something else I’m failing at.

Come over and read the rest at Sick Pilgrim!

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The Breakthrough to Community

Brenna D’Ambrosio wrote the introduction to this post at The Mudroom.

 
Every Friday needs a story about hope. Stories of God coming into the mess and finding us there when we had all but given up. Stories of radical redemption. Stories of finding home.
 
Today we invite you to check out the podcast Spark My Muse by Lisa Colon Delay. Join us for Episode 44 where she speaks with The Mudroom’s very own Editor and Founder, Tammy Perlmutter, about hope, community, downward mobility, and even how The Mudroom began.
 
Part1: What  is Communal Living Like?
 
Part 2: Community Life and the Power of Confession
 
“In confession the break-through to community takes place.” ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Faith in Community
 

Jesus People USA is a self-sustaining, *tentmaking community located in inner-city Chicago. They support their home, church, and ministries through both creative and practical businesses they have created.
 

*Tentmaking: refers to the activities of any Christian who, while dedicating him or herself to the ministry of the Gospel, receives little or no pay for Church work, but performs other jobs to provide support. The term comes from the fact that the apostle Paul supported himself by making tents while living and preaching in Corinth (Acts 18:3).

 
Jesus People USA: A church and an intentional community, living together, creating a place to discover who you are and to be challenged to live an authentic life in Christ. Come visit for a day, a week, a month, or more.

Wilson Abbey: Community. Faith. Art. Concert venue, theater, art gallery, conference center in Uptown, Chicago.

 
JPUSA Internships: 3-12 month internships in specific businesses and ministries.

Group Missions: Bring your small group, church, youth group, family!

Friendly Towers Low-Income Senior Housing

Cornerstone Community Outreach: Homeless shelter

The Rummage Room: A re-sale boutique whose proceeds go entirely towards Cornerstone Community Outreach.
 
Uptown Tent City: Providing protection, support, and material needs for homeless living under the viaducts in Uptown.

Zeppelin Design Labs: Avant-Garde Audio and Electronic Products.

Grrr Records: The home of Glenn Kaiser, GKB, The Crossing, Leper, Aracely, Exegesis, Resurrection Band (aka Rez), Anti-World System, and many others.
 
Tone Zone Recording Studio
 
Citizen Skate Shop

Everybody’s Coffee: Professionally-trained baristas devoted to making delicious, soul-warming, fresh brewed fair-trade coffee and urban artisan baked goods.


Nine3Nine Creative: A web and graphic design business doing top quality, cutting edge work.
 
Lakefront Roofing Supply

Lakefront Sheet Metal Supply
 
Belly Acres Designs: High-quality screen printing.
 
Deeply Rooted: A Gathering. A one-day faith and creativity gathering in Chicago for women, taking place in May and November.
 

Worship Play Work Social Justice Art Music

Photos by Tom Wray

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