Over the holidays I wrote three... let's call them "devotionals" for my church family at Orange UMC, Chapel Hill NC. It had been a long time since I have written for general consumption, and it was a nice reminder that I really do enjoy writing. In this era of large language models - which, to be frank, are paying my bills, so I'm not complaining - I enjoyed writing entirely as a human during this exercise.
I called them the appetizer, entree*, and dessert to friends who read all three - originally they were scheduled to run right in a row. Brood, the middle one, is my favorite by far - my original note to my editors asked that they help me make Written good enough that people would bother to read the next one. I do think we accomplished it, and I think they ended up being a good trio. For your amusement:
https://www.orangemethodist.org/advent-devotionals/written
https://www.orangemethodist.org/advent-devotionals/brood
https://www.orangemethodist.org/advent-devotionals/abundance-a8zkl-ybtmb-gg657 (aka Unquenchable)
I have been pondering since how I might do some more creative Christian writing, but between my lack of experience and generally abysmal lack of theological and historical and Biblical knowledge - and, frankly, complete lack of interest in quitting my job to pursue any of those professionally - I don't have a lot of great ways to scratch that itch. In the interest of getting a little practice I have decided to start writing through the weekly lectionary; this gives me a structure and a prompt, and hopefully it will prove fun for me, and if it's not then I'll just quit doing it! If you find them useful, that's great, and of course feel free to drop me an email if you have any thoughts you'd like to share.
General plan:
- I will use the Revised Common Lectionary (I am a United Methodist, after all): https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/
- At the beginning of the week, I will read through the passages for third week out (so, today being the 1/11, I will read the passages for the 2/1). https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/calendar/2025-26/?season=epiphany This gives me a week to write, a week to edit and still be on for the following week. Is there any particular reason for this? Well, not really, but it seems like the pace that I will need to keep to be sustainable.
- I will write something related to at least one of the passages during the week. It might be well-researched; it might not be; it might be as marginally-related as "Unquenchable" above. For all the reasons mentioned in the introduction I don't expect they will be great works of art or theologically robust.
- I might just write a prayer, or a response, or some thought, or... who knows, maybe I'll start writing in iambic pentameter, and churn out a story about polar bears. Might be good, might not be; that's not the point. I am just trying to be faithful to write.
- I assume these will be rather embarrassing writing generally, but I am making them public because... honestly, there is no rational reason, it just seems like it is time to start writing again and I am more likely to stick with it if I do it publicly. If it follows other things I have done it will get better over time, I hope!
- I am not a professional theologian, ordained, or anything more than a hobbyist layman. Nothing I write is binding on the church, or an official position of anyone; in fact there is a decent shot that it won't even be an official position of me after some further thought! But I don't intend to intentionally shy away from things because they are divisive; if you are worried whether I am eating food sacrified to idols I certainly respect your concerns, but if you want to know what I think, today, you will need to accept that these are my writings, and my venue, and not yours.
- At the moment - no comments! I do not have time to moderate, and this exercise is about writing, not debate. If you want to contact me, you should be able to find an email address without too much searching. Feel free to publicly respond to me elsewhere but I'm not searching, so I would request that you send me a link.
- I reserve the right to remove or edit writing. Sometimes other people correct me, I may put in a correction or remove a passage or just decide I don't like something. This goes with the above - if I remove something, I probably have a reason, so please respect that I have removed it. It may mean I have changed my mind, or don't have time to deal with it, or don't like the writing, or used too many prepositions, or the meter doesn't sound right, but once it is gone from my site (and I know the Internet Archive is forever) please respect that it is gone from my thoughts or at least my public discourse. I am not trying to hide anything, but this site is about personal growth for me.
- Which brings me to my next point: I am often wrong. Sometimes I learn to be better. Just because I wrote something doesn't mean it is set in stone, or even currently reflects what I think. Please be gracious in your interpretations and corrections.
- I reserve all rights to my writing. Feel free to link to this site, and I accept the presence of the search bots, but no AI scraping or text replication; my database can't take the amateur hour that is the current state of AI spidering.
- If I decide to quit, I'll quit, and try to remember to put my reasons up. But I'll try to give it a fair shot, with some grace that if I get busy or bored or sick I might miss some weeks.
- No large language models, no out-of-band editing (well unless somebody decides to edit for me, I guess), just raw unfiltered human writing.
So... here goes! Queuing up the second Sunday after Epiphany of RCL year A in 3... 2... 1...
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