Seth Haines's Blog, page 22

A Monday Poem (Yes, You Need Poetry)

The world is off kilter (if’n you ain’t noticed). There’s no need for me to provide the laundry list of proofs. You feel it, don’t you? These seasons beg me to remember the gentleness of faith, and today, I’m offering this poem as just such a reminder.

And as a brief reminder, let’s discuss how to read a poem. Consider the title, what it might say, or foreshadow. Then, read the poem slowly, line by line. Using your imagination, see the text come to life. Then, move to the next line and do it...

Look for Rest Somewhere Else, Working Man.

Who knew yesterday’s piece, “Do What You Love, And You’ll Work Every Day Of Your Life,” would resonate with so many of you? I certainly didn’t. I’m thankful for the number of messages and emails I’ve received, and if there’s one common theme to those messages, it’s this:

I once thought another job would give me the joy and validation I needed; I thought it wouldn’t feel like work. Guess what? I was wrong.

Thanks for you honesty, all.

Today, allow me to restate yesterday’s working premise anot...

Do What You Love, And You’ll Work Every Day Of Your Life

I heard that old line again, this time from a friend.

“It’s like they say: do something you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life.”

Hogwash, I say.

It’s been almost a year since I left the practice of law. For eleven months, I’ve been doing the thing I love most–writing, editing, mapping books for some fine folks–and I can say this with great clarity: every day of the work I love is a war of attrition.

The work of creation is unrelenting. It looks something like this:

Make the...

You are Fraud; You are Family

There is a universal secret, a uniform truth so many of us tuck between the religious things we read from notecards. (Secrets, secrets they’re no fun; they seem to weigh a metric ton.) What’s the secret?

So many of us feel like frauds.

On an average Sunday evening, I gather with a liturgical community in a sacred space rented from an evangelical, non-denominational, non-liturgical church. The bell rings, the cross processes down the aisle, and I cannot help but notice the elongated shadows of...

On Racism and Repentance

I took a month-long break to enjoy the end of summer, then came back yesterday with my first Tiny Letter installment in a month. Though I don’t generally repost the content in full here, today I am. We’re at a crossroads, a point of decision. This piece represents an invitation, especially to my white friends. Come along?

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On the White Racists

It’s been a few days since the powder keg blew at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. The images made the internet rounds late Friday ni...

The Poem For Redeemer, Kansas City

A few years ago, I stumbled across the poem “The Waking” by Theodore Roethke. It’s a villanelle, a nineteen line poem characterized by rhyme and repetition. Roethke does something with the form, turns it into a sort of personal devotion, and when I read it for the first time, it seemed to work its way under my skin, got into my veins, did the thing any good drug does once it found the proper neural receptors.

This is your brain on poetry.

This spring, I spoke to a group of pastors in Kansas...

Rejection, Dementia, and a Really Bad Breakup

I took the month of July off (more or less) because I needed a break, a vacation. If God took the seventh day off, couldn’t I practice his character by taking the seventh month off?

Okay, that’s a stretch. I ain’t that holy.

I’m scratching out words again today, but it’s really just a toe-back-in-the-water attempt to break my mini-sabbatical. I’m here to draw you in, to lure you to follow me elsewhere.

I wrote a poem a while back, a poem for my friend John Ray. I submitted that poem, “Dementi...

The Dead End of Democracy

Trigger Warning: This is an overtly political piece, a piece about America, freedom, and the dead end of democracy. If you’re prone to fits of violence over political issues, feel free to move along.

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It’s Independence Week, the week we celebrate our nation’s birth. It’s a festive week, a week to wallow in and indulge our freedoms–the freedom to grill meat, launch miniature missiles made in China, and overeat Aunt Maude’s famous apple pie. Freedom–ain’t it grand?

It’s an American tradition...

Collective Failure and a Drunk President

I’ve explored failure this week, the ways our recognition of it and honesty with it can instruct, refine, and guide. It’s a lesson I’ve learned from experience, from years of floundering in a failing faith and drinking away the pain. This season of alcohol dependency was an acute season of failure, and the smell of that failure–the juniper of the gin, the oak in the whiskey–lingers. It reminds me that my doubts were only resolved by walking through the failure and into the healing of true inn...

The Disciple of Failure

The photograph header for this series on failure includes an icon I keep in my planner. It’s an icon of Thomas, the doubter of doubters, with his too-long fingers stuck in the side-wound of Christ.

“I won’t believe,” he said, “unless I feel the wounds.”

Faith?  Nah. Give me the evidence, man.

Christ gave him that evidence; he appeared in the upper room and invited Failing-Faithed Thomas to touch his sticky wounds. Thomas’ did, and his response was simple and faithful–“My Lord and my God.” It w...