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10 Affirmations for People Who Don’t Like Affirmations
When it comes to affirmations as a useful tool for healthy mind, body, and spirit, I am a decidedly late bloomer. In fact, I remember attending a leadership workshop in my late 20s where the leader suggested to a room full of clergy that we begin each work day with the affirmation: “I will overwhelm this day with my competence.”
I burst out laughing.
When 5th Grade Bullies Grow Up
It is long past time for a lot of adults to catch up on their science and history in summer school.
Here are two lessons from biology and sports we need to share if we’re going to resist the 5th grade bullies who still haven’t grown up.
Recent and Future Reinventions
For seventeen years, I’ve been seeing myself much like this artist did. Which makes it exceedingly strange to be stepping away from the role I’m inhabiting on that paper there.
Beginning last month, I am taking a break from this work. I don’t know for how long.
Goodreads Giveaway Winners!
Congrats to Sam, Thomas, Rachel, Jill, and Jose who won our Advent giveaway on Goodreads! I'll be dropping your copy of Loving What Doesn't Last in the mail soon. Looking forward to hearing your reflections as you read.
Some Bodies Count (Or, Why I Wrote this Book)
It took burying 68 bodies in 5 ½ years to pitch me headlong into a reckoning with how divine human flesh can be. Not just some of it, but all of it.
Can We Talk About “the Media”? (Part 2)
These many years later, I don’t remember which department my colleague worked in. I only remember him flying across the newsroom with a proof sheet in his hand, suit jacket and tie swinging, as he made a beeline toward the Editor’s Office. I was a nobody junior reporter on the business desk trying to find my footing in my dream job at a medium-sized metro daily newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for its 1993 series “A Question of Color.”
I could tell my colleague was mad that day. Mad enough to risk looking like the angry black man.
Psalm for Losing a Job
When the most junior 10 percent of us got cut free, God seemed to hide her face. I was more than dismayed. I got clinically depressed. It took another layoff 10 years later to remember my worth.
All Kinds of Healing
I come from a family that lives in the Venn diagram where the science of medicine and the care of the soul overlap one another. How — in the middle of a pandemic — can we speak of healing?
10 Affirmations for People Who Don’t Like Affirmations
When it comes to affirmations as a useful tool for healthy mind, body, and...
When 5th Grade Bullies Grow Up
My friend choked on the words as she leaned in to repeat them across appetizer...
Recent and Future Reinventions
Packing up my office a month ago, I came across this pencil sketch one...
Goodreads Giveaway Winners!
Congrats to Sam, Thomas, Rachel, Jill, and Jose who won our Advent giveaway on...
Some Bodies Count (Or, Why I Wrote this Book)
I have unofficially studied the body my entire life: from childhood...
Can We Talk About “the Media”? (Part 2)
Consider this a big hairy asterisk and caveat to my previous love note to the...
Psalm for Losing a Job
The first time I got laid off, I ran to a bathroom to cry. I am quoted in a...
All Kinds of Healing
It’s impossible – in the middle of a pandemic – not to notice how often the...
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Love and Life
Current Events & Culture
A Message From Christina
I grew up on a hill in the middle of nowhere Northeast Ohio.
My words feel forged there, watching styrofoam cups melt at night in a burn barrel on a back 40 I imagine defending with a shotgun and my miniature Doberman pinscher.
(Disclaimers: It was the ’80s. We didn’t know any better than to burn styrofoam. It was more like an acre and a half, and my dog’s bark was much bigger than his bite. I also never owned a shotgun.)
From that little piece of Appalachia, I’ve transplanted several times: Minneapolis, Cleveland, and now non metropolitan but magical Southern Oregon.
A writer, editor, and refugee of the Fourth Estate, I am also an ordained pastor puttering in the spiritual R&D department of wherever Jesus is taking us next.
My best guess? It won’t be so much in the “thin places,” but the thick ones, those dense moments of human existence that feel like banging your forehead against concrete block, where the chasm between what is and what should be gapes, as impossible to traverse as the canyon between Lazarus and Dives.
What I look for is Love showing up with skin on. Right here.
Christina Kukuk
Writer + Preacher
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“Well, It Isn’t Junk to Me”
I’m not sure what epitaph will be engraved with the artist’s palette Grandma picked years ago for her grave marker, but this would be my choice.
I heard Grandma say it more than once when extended family members (read: daughters-in-law) disparaged the piles of seemingly useless materials she saved.
The piles got completely out of control: stacks of foam meat trays in not just white, but blue, green, yellow, and pink; empty spools bare of thread; buttons, clothespins (especially the old fashioned kind), empty baby food bottles and their caps, bits of cloth, yarn, ribbon and thread. She collected natural materials, too: dried thistles and milkweed pods, money plant, gourds.
These worthless things became craft projects, costumes, floral arrangements. She flooded the entries to the local County Fair with milk-pod interpretations of “The Owl and the Pussycat” or “Alice’s Wonderland.” Once, when she broke her leg falling into a hole the dogs had dug between the shed and the back-porch door, she gave her ample plaster casts a second life. Turned on end, with an extra bit of paper mache and paint, they made the best camels I have ever seen grace a home porch Nativity creche.
“Well, it isn’t junk to me,” Grandma would say….