Michelle DeRusha's Blog, page 58

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: Faith Takes All Forms

I attend a fair number of Christian conferences every year, and I often feel a bit out of my element in that environment. Not only are my peers typically a little more conservative in their theology than I am, they are also much more demonstrative when it comes to worship. I find myself standing awkwardly with my arms at my side or crossed over my chest, while most everyone else around me raises their hands heavenward, eyes closed, swaying passionately to the music. More recently I’ve taken t...

Weekend One Word: Star

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Jesus Lives in the Grocery Store {#SmallThingsGreatLove}

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m convinced Jesus lives in the grocery store. SuperSaver on 56th Street in Lincoln, Nebraska, to be exact. I know, technically he lives everywhere and is in all places and in all people. But he really lives in the grocery store. SuperSaver is Jesus’s tabernacle, his temple. He lives right there amid the StarKist tuna and the Hamburger Helper.

Last week a woman stopped me in the pasta aisle. “This may sound like a strange question,” she said, her par...

One Small Thing Done in {slightly irritable} Love

So last Saturday I ventured over to Hobby Lobby to pick up four spools of ribbon. You should know, Hobby Lobby in December is Dante’s seventh circle of hell. I really think they need to post a sign over the door with Dante’s words, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Suffice to say, it took me 40 minutes to purchase my four items. I sweated in my goosedown parka. I breathed the serenity prayer. I channeled baby Jesus. There was only one woman ahead of me in the check-out line, but she seeme...

Hear It on Sunday: Use It on Monday: Praying for a Joseph-Sized Faith

Joseph was one crazy-courageous guy, that’s all I have to say. Think about his situation for a minute. Happily engaged to be married to his young sweetheart Mary, he learns that she’s pregnant, ostensibly with another man’s child. Rather than make a big fuss and create a scandal, Joseph decides to quietly break it off with Mary — until, that is, an angel of the Lord appears to him in a dream.

“Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife,” the angel tells Joseph. “For the child within her was co...

Weekend One Word: Light

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When Advent’s Not All Perfect and Pretty

It begins with inappropriate words uttered over the breakfast table, followed by a discussion of those inappropriate words, followed by a retraction of the promised ice cream outing to Ivanna Cone scheduled for that evening. Then here’s the crying and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth (by both child and mother).

And the next thing I know, the nativity has been rearranged on the coffee table.

…I’m over at Diane Bailey’s lovely place today, talking about what happens when Advent isn’t all per...

24 Days of Advent: Small Soles, Big Hope (#SmallThingsGreatLove)

Pushing the silk Christmas table runner and the glittery glass balls aside, we traced and cut, pinned and matched, our heads bent low over bright striped cotton and denim cloth. We were quiet, Christmas carols from the iPod filling the dining room as we guided pinking shears and scissors along Sharpie lines, tracing patterns for toddler size tens that will make their way from Nebraska to Uganda.

“Just think about this for a second,” Brad said, holding up a pair of castoff jeans. “A little kid...

Hear It on Sunday, Use It on Monday: When You’re Unwilling to Let God Be God

The people I love most in the Bible are those, like Zechariah, who wrestle with doubt.

Zechariah actually starts off on the right foot. When Gabriel visits him in the temple, the priest is properly awed, trembling in amazement as he stands at the incense altar before the angel of the Lord. But when Gabriel prophecies that a baby — a son filled with the Holy Spirit, a son who will lead the Israelites to the Lord — will be born to the aged Zechariah and Elizabeth, the priest’s faith wavers. Skep...

24 Days of Advent: Small Things in Great Love

I’m going to say it straight-up: I dread the Christmas season. I understand and appreciate the real point of Christmas, of course – the birth of Immanuel, God with us in the form of a tiny, vulnerable, life-saving baby. Yet every year, it seems, the real point of Christmas gets overshadowed for me, obscured by the myriad tasks — buying, wrapping, decorating, baking, card-mailing, socializing, traveling — that little by little push God with us and his love into the background.

Today’s newspaper...