Kelsey Timmerman's Blog, page 66

"I Slept with the Prophetess" and other ways not to start a query

I'm hoping to develop a longer version of my Faith in the Poor post for a magazine. So, I pitched a hip Christian magazine that likes to challenge their readers. I began with this…

I slept with the Prophetess. How many folks can say that?

Yep, probably not the best way to begin a query.

Needless to say, I probably won't be hearing from them. If they made it through the whole sleeping with the Prophetess bit, they were probably put off by the question that followed. Sleeping with the...

Breathless

Because I'm up to my ears in an audio project and being a dad and because I wish I was underwater…

How I learned (the hard way) not to give your father the finger

(This is an excerpt from a column I wrote 5 years ago.)

I was five when my dad presented me with the throne.

It was made of plywood and 2×4's; most people would have called it an ugly chair, but to a seven-year-old it was a throne.

My father built me the chair to preserve his own sanity. For some reason the swiveling roller chair, which I had previously occupied at the dinner table, annoyed my father. After a hard day's work, watching me execute 360's and figure eights, while I skillfully...

Big Butter Jesus is Toast

I'm not one to laugh about flaming religious icons, but there's just something about a flaming Big Butter Jesus that cracks me up.

I try to justify it by thinking how tacky and wasteful a 60-foot, $500,000 Styrofoam Jesus is, but I still feel somewhat guilty about it. Look, every religion has their excessive spending – Buddha statues, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican. So who am I to wisecrack about Big Butter? I defer to Heywood Banks on the issue.

In the lyrics of his song Big Butter Jesus, Banks ...

$10 for Tuesday: Suicide- The Ultimate Crisis

The man across from me could've been any man.

He served me tea. We small talked and then he told me about how is son killed himself by jumping off the bridge in Limerick into the River Shannon. He recounted the days spent on the river searching for his son. He talked about the man who found his son and how he came to the funeral.

"And that's not the end of it," he said.

Three months after his son jumped in the river to his death, his wife did the same thing, leaving the man with five kids to...

Big Butter Jesus Destroyed by Fire

Okay, before you read this you need to start the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I bet Heywood Banks, the comedian singing the uber-catchy melody that should be playing right now, has a full inbox this morning because Big Butter Jesus was struck by lightning last night.  This is all that remains…

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One of my Facebook friends described it as a praying mantis.

I've driven by BBJ, located just off I-75 between Dayton and Cincinnati, many times. I will miss him, not as one who...

My heart of stone

There's a pebble in my pocket.

The pebble is polished from countless times checking to see that it was still there. On a deforested hillside swinging a pick next hardworking day laborers, tearing up stumps in Ethiopia, I checked for the pebble. Spending the night on a small couch in the Mathare slums of Nairobi, I checked for the pebble before attempting to close my eyes. In Uganda while talking with a single mother with AIDS about the future of her children, I checked for the pebble. In ...

Thankful Home

My buddy Tim Bete, former director of the Erma Bombeck writers workshop, who forever holds a special place in my heart for dragging his daughters through 10 inches of snow to my first ever reading, is editor of a cool new project – ThankfulHome.

Here's how Tim describes ThankfulHome:

ThankfulHome.tv allows people to share their stories about housing issues by submitting short videos. Visitors to the site can share why they are thankful for their homes or talk about a difficult housing...

Nuru International's Be Hope To Her Retrospective

The day I left Muncie for my recent trip, NURU hosted one of their Be Hope to Her events in town.

I wanted to go, but the timing just wasn't good. I would have had to leave from the event and go directly to the airport. I was milking those last remaining moments with my girls and opted to not be hope to her, but be a dad to Harper.

Nuru's grassroots guru asked me to share a post about their Be Hope to Her events that took them around the country. It's not out of guilt that I'm posting it...

"You can't eat money" and other deep thoughts

Andrew and I have been in touch with one another throughout our Nothing Personal project and one thing keeps coming up…this ain't easy work. It's uncomfortable and emotionally fatiguing to talk to folks whose lives have been shattered by the crisis.

I'm tired of living this crisis and talking about it. But we have a lot more important work to do. The events of 2008-2010 have changed my life and the lives of countless others.

Here's a windblown me trying to make sense of it all.

And here's m...