Wax Heart Press

It's been a while, and this isn't about fairy tales, but I officially own a publishing company! Wax Heart Press is currently selling three chapbooks.

thin is about eating disorders and recovery, Dear Somebody is about asexuality, and Lord is about faith. All are available starting tonight!

https://www.waxheartpress.com/

The Cottage

I bought a house!

As long as I’m rearranging everything else in my life, I thought this would be a good time to rearrange my writing, marketing, and social media presence as well. Now, these things aren’t going to all take effect right away, since I’m working on them in the middle of getting set up in this new place. But here are some things you can expect moving forward.

For a fairy tale blog, I get bogged down in church issues a lot. To prevent this continuing in the future, I’ve started a separate blog exclusively for church issues. For the first few months things are mostly going to be recycled, but I’ll have new content up in a while.

I’m also preparing to start a series of book reviews for every Beauty and the Beast retelling I’ve come across. And more poems are going to be posted as I continue to work on my next book.

Over the next few months, keep an eye out for updates on goals and rewards on Patreon, new content, and information about my upcoming projects. I’ll try to make sure all content is on Patreon, as well as whatever site it originates on, so if you want to keep track of everything, just head over there; things are free to read unless I’ve specifically stated otherwise. Remember, financially supporting me on Patreon gives you access to my novel Lindworm!

The Conservative Christian's Guide to Not Sucking: Love

My first memory is of a little boy in a red shirt. My second and third and fourth memories are of church.

A lot of people are leaving the church these days, especially people my age. And honestly, I’m more likely to sleep in most Sundays.

It’s not about God. It has nothing to do with my faith.

I think it’s worse if your parents are pastors. I think it’s worse if you’re from a small church.

See, my early memories aren’t of sitting in a pew while adults drone on. I remember being in basements for Bible study, playing with dolls on the floor. When I get bored they set aside their Bibles to hold me. A prayer meeting turns into a birthday party, with a Barbie princess themed cake. The people at church often babysit me. I love them. They’re my friends. They’re my family.

And then they’re not.

That’s the problem with being the pastor’s family. You’re born into it, and you don’t realize what it means. Not until it’s much too late.

There will always come a time when you are set apart. Something in the church goes wrong. Your family has to move on. You have to leave. And they never call, and on the streets when you see them they don’t smile, and everything is over. Everything is gone.

You grow up, and you move far away, and you go to a church where you’ve never been what you always are—the pastor’s daughter.

And you stay there for months, and no one even learns your name, and you realize things will never be the same.

These people don’t love you. These people are not your family.

And even if they were, what then? What’s the use in loving, when the people who love you always leave?

I have plenty of good church memories, but they always end when people ditch me, and everything is tainted by the sting of abandonment and betrayal. And it’s been eight years but I still don’t quite know how to forgive. And I’m so afraid to let a church be my home again, because it hurt so much when I ended up alone.

So. A word of advice for those concerned about young people leaving the church: if you remembered how to love us every day, maybe we wouldn’t have to leave.

You cast us aside so easily.

The second church family I lost, it was because some people were mad at my dad. It was nothing even to do with me. But they vanished from my life like I was nothing.

I wasn’t allowed to go to a movie theater until I was eleven, because someone at church disapproved, which is unimportant in the long run, but it’s always troubled me.

I thought you loved me. You thought the big screen was sinful.

I never expected any of you to be perfect, but eight years later I’m still stumbling beneath the weight of the pressure that was the unspoken center of my childhood. Be good. Be better. Be perfect. Be the kid that all the other kids can look up to like their parents look up to your dad, and the moment either of you fails to be flawless enough all bets are off.

Here is the thing you have to understand: you drive us away.

Your response to mistakes and disagreements is rejection. Every time.

Here is what the church becomes to me, on a Sunday morning as I think of getting up and dressed and going. Church is about being turned away at the door because your skirt is too short. It is walking in with tattoos and shoddy clothes, walking right out again to escape the disapproving, judgmental, even frightened stares. It is your baby left undedicated because you are an unwed teenage mother. It is a pastor refusing to perform a marriage because it will never last. (Forty years later they prove him wrong.)

What we learn from our mistakes in church is mostly that Christians cannot be trusted. It has little to do with God.

How can you honestly say you want to reach new people when you actively drive away the young and confused ones you already have? We were born in the church. You never even had to reach us. You only had to keep us. And you failed.

I used to take unconditional love for granted. Now, it mostly makes me laugh, since it’s either that or cry.

I would love to be in church on Sunday. Give me a reason. Give me love. Give me trust. Make me feel safe, and maybe I’ll come back.

Eve's Children

As I have mentioned in the past on multiple occasions, the Grimms’ version of God needs to Chill. Additionally, I am presenting this story as further textual evidence that the Grimms absolutely did not wander the countryside collecting tales from peasants.

So Adam and Eve are at home with the kids. A lot of kids. (No word on whether this is before or after the Cain and Abel fiasco.) And God decides to come over for a visit.

Now Eve wants to show off how well she’s doing after being kicked out of Eden. So she hides all her ugly, stupid kids in the basement, and gets the good ones dressed up to meet God.

And God is all like, wow, Eve, what a great batch of kids. I’m going to make them kings and queens and priests and governors.

Eve’s pretty pleased with this result, so she figures she’ll get the rest of the family out of the basement, see what cool stuff He’ll do with them.

And God’s like, well, I’m all out of good jobs, so they can be beggars and stable cleaners and stuff, I guess.

And that’s it. That’s the story.

“God made us rich and powerful because we were smarter and prettier than you.”

“Poor people are ugly and stupid and God doesn’t love them.”

What about “The meek shall inherit the earth?” What about “The first shall be last and the last shall be first?” What about “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God?”

And you expect me to believe you got this off one of those basement kids? Yeah, not unless you asked them in front of the king or something.

Jacob. Wilhelm. Guys. Come on. This story is not biblically sound, and your source material is a blatant lie.

-6/10. Very poor work. You’ve disappointed us all, dudes. You’ve disappointed us all.

The Conservative Christian's Guide to Not Sucking: Gay Edition

Okay. Here’s the deal. We’re not talking about whether it’s right or wrong. That’s completely irrelevant to this issue, okay? Here are the rules. If homosexuality is a sin, you are allowed to disapprove of it to the exact same degree that you disapprove of divorce, premarital sex, and any other sins of that type. Would you kick a divorced man out of your church? If a woman was killed while spending the night at her boyfriend’s house, would you say she deserved it because she shouldn’t have stayed over in the first place?

If your answer is yes, please take a moment to come to terms with the fact that you are scum. If your answer is no, congratulations. You have completed step one of being a Decent Human Being.

I read a story once—Grimm Brothers—called The Three Green Twigs. In this story, a hermit sees a man being led to the gallows, and has the passing thought that the man is getting what he deserves. God sends him a message, and as penance, the hermit spends the rest of his life begging from door to door, never staying more than one night in one place, carrying a dry branch until it comes alive and sprouts green twigs. He dies the night it sprouts.

The Grimm Brothers’ version of God needs to chill, as evidenced by many, many other stories, but I’ve always found this a good illustration of the instruction “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” I remember being in tenth grade humanities, watching a fight unfold between a dozen kids about whether or not all sins were equal in the eyes of God. And I think what I contributed to the conversation was that regardless of where God comes down on the issue, humans aren’t going to treat all sins as equal—obviously you can’t punish a serial killer the same way you would a kid who stole a candy bar. 

But there is absolutely no way to justify not treating all of the sexual sins as equal. (With the exception of adultery, which actually hurts other people, and rape, which I put in the same category as murder in terms of how despicable it is, except for the fact that you can kill someone in self defense, and there is never, ever any way to justify rape at all, but I’m getting off topic.)

If you wouldn’t tell your recently divorced aunt she’s going to hell, how dare you say that to a teenager holding hands with another girl? Seriously. What is wrong with you?

I once told someone very important to me what I’d read about the shooting at that Florida gay club—how the youngest victim had just finished high school the week before, how she’d gotten into such a good college, how she had so much life ahead of her, and now she was dead. The response? “She shouldn’t have been there.”

This was a few years ago, and we never talked about it again, and I don’t think about it much—I doubt she even remembers saying it. But every once in a while, those words will float through my head, and I’ll wonder. Would you love me if. Would you mourn me if I died and I was gay? Was it because she was gay that you said that? Was it because she was in a club, probably drinking underage? If I died drunk would you be sad? If I died in a club? If I died in love with someone you didn’t approve of? How much do you love me? Where do you draw the line?

Judge not, lest ye be judged by God. Judge not, lest ye be judged unworthy of your loved ones’ trust.

I don’t care if homosexuality is a sin or not. The people in my life are arguing constantly about it—my conservative family, my liberal classmates. Guess what? It doesn’t matter. Your job as a Christian is to love people. Your job is to be there for them. And you don’t hurt the people you love.

I’ve seen Christians forgive rapists and murderers more easily than gay men. Is it because, if you’re interacting with the murderers and rapists, presumably they’ve repented, where the gay man hasn’t? Does it matter? No sin get treated like this. No children kill themselves over the bullying when they cheat on a test. No people are murdered in alleys for robbing a grocery store.

If you think quietly and privately that homosexuality is a sin, just like lying and skipping church and having kids out of wedlock, cool. That’s alright. But if you treat it the way—let’s be real—most conservative Christians treat it, you’re a bigot, and I bet God is ashamed of you.

Maybe you’re older, and your friends are older, and more likely to be conservative, so you don’t know. But I’m twenty four. That means I’m surrounded every day by extremely liberal peers, and they talk about this stuff. All the time. I can’t remember the last time I went an entire week without reading a news article about a teenager committing suicide over sexuality. This is the world you helped create.

So get over yourselves, treat gay people like you treat other people—hello, Golden Rule, do unto others as you would have them do to you—and remember. For every nasty, careless thing you say, someone you love is wondering, would you love me if?

You don’t get to judge. And if you can’t love people the way God loves people, regardless of everything, what is the point of you? Kids are dying over this. Try not to suck.

The Trouble with Christian Fiction Part III: Keep It Simple, Stupid

We’re going to start this post by talking, again, about the movie God’s Not Dead. The problem for today is widely prevalent in Christian fiction, and in specialty fiction in general, but God’s Not Dead is an extreme (and therefore particularly useful) example.

The real reason I hate this movie is that I could have loved it. I could have loved it two or three times, at least.

The thing you need to understand about God’s Not Dead is that it has, like, fourteen different plot lines. There’s the evil atheist professor (See Part II). There’s the Muslim family with the daughter who converted to Christianity. There’s a couple of depressing romances,  mostly with a focus on conflict due to religious differences. Someone’s dad is dying.

Like, just chill, guys. Not one of those stories got the attention it deserved. And they were all crammed into the space of a couple weeks.

I’ve talked before about how to salvage the evil professor bit. But do you know how much I’d pay to see a sincere, respectful portrayal of that conversion subplot? Hint: it’s a lot. I mean, think about it. The sense of betrayal when your daughter casts aside your faith. The struggle on both sides, loving someone but knowing they’re wrong, not knowing what to do, what to say to them, how to interact anymore—there is so much potential here for a powerful story about love and doubt and reconciliation, about relearning how to be a family when something huge, like your core belief system, has torn you apart.

But instead you made it a halfhearted subplot in a crappy movie full of halfhearted subplots all overwhelming each other and the mediocre main plot.

So many stories, particularly Christian stories, are like this. My wife’s in a coma, my house burned down, I have two kids, and I’m mad at God. I read that book, and the wife actually fell into two separate comas.

Look. If you’re writing a six book epic fantasy, you can include all the subplots you want. But no one has the energy for a novella where you’re mourning your dead daughter, developing feelings for a man who doesn’t share your faith, struggling to cope with the knowledge that your little brother had premarital sex, and helping your parents transfer into a nursing home, all while you’re in the process of moving to a new town where everyone is atheist and trying to found a church despite violent opposition from city officials. It’s just too much.

Find the story you want to tell. The real, main thing. Is it the aftermath of losing your daughter? Is it developing a relationship with someone who doesn’t share your beliefs? Pick a plot.

Subplots are meant to build a story up, not bog it down in inconsequential side notes.  Find subplots tat will connect to and clarify you main story. Aim for thematic resonance.

Every story doesn’t need to do everything. And you shouldn’t try to make it from a decent writing standpoint , but also because it leads you into one of the standard pitfalls of Christian fiction: the martyr.

We talked a little about this last time, in the context of the atheist bad guy, but it bears repeating. Embrace reality, people. The persecution plot? It’s getting really old. You’re a Methodist in modern Midwestern America.

The world is not out to get you, okay? It’s just not.

So if it’s not the atheist bad guy, you make it about death and unemployment and natural disasters. In order to actually be persecuted, you would have to do something other than writing crappy, self-indulgent stories about how much you suffer because of your faith.

And then there’s the Christian fantasy angle. Like, oh my goodness, the instinct to read  in the dark and hide the book in my underwear drawer is way stronger when I’m reading Christian fantasy than anything else—it just tends to feel dirty. Demons and dragons and ill-conceived allegories full of blood and gore. Distortions of love and memory. Demonic monkeys. Angelic monkeys, which frankly I find even more disturbing.

And if I let myself go any further down this road, it’ll morph into a Ted Dekker rant, so let’s move on.

Everything doesn’t have to be so uncomfortably over the top. You’re not doing yourselves any favors with the death and drama and demons. Just keep it simple.

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Relevance vs. Authenticity

I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of different churches over the years. You’ve all heard about my adventures with the church in European tourism. But today we’re going to talk about the mess that is millennials in the American church. This might be a problem in other countries as well, but I don’t have the data for that, so we’re going to focus on what I see right here.

My grandpa has a habit of collecting books about Christian issues. I have a habit of reading everything in sight. So what a lot of my grandpa’s books tell me is that the church is dying. It’s dying because young people don’t go to church. It’s not even that they don’t believe. It’s just that they don’t go.

Well, I’m young, and I’m here to tell you why. It’s simple, really. It’s because you’re trying too hard. Worship is all smoke and mirrors and pop songs. Like, seriously, sometimes I listen to the radio for ten or twenty minutes before I even realize I’m on a Christian station, because it all sounds like generic love songs. All the old traditions are out. For crying out loud, there’s a modern American slang translation of the Bible.  I have had to read, with my own two eyes, things like, “And then Jesus was like, hey, man, that’s not cool,” and some translator out there probably thinks he did me a favor.

My grandpa’s books also told me that if someone who doesn’t go to church is going to, they’ll go for an old, fancy, traditional one.

And you’re out here trying so hard to be relevant, to appeal to the young adult demographic by being cool and modern and whatever—we don’t want it. It isn't real. It comes off exactly like the marketing technique it is, and I don’t go to church because they’re selling something.

I have never once felt the presence of God in a church designed to appeal to my generation. That’s not to say He isn't there, because He is, but you sure have buried Him under a whole lot of crap.

Kids don’t want relevance. Kids want authenticity.

If your primary focus is drawing in a younger audience, that means your primary focus isn't God. And that’s why you fail.

Don’t give me upbeat pop songs and sermons full of fandom references. Give me faith. Give me hope. Give me love.

Give me something real, and maybe I’ll give you my attendance.

The Trouble with Christian Fiction II: Compromise

Come on, you didn’t think I was going to leave it at that, did you? God and books are two of the most important things in my life. There is so much more to say.

Let’s think about how we look at other people, and how that makes them look at us. Fair warning: this is going to be a common theme in any post tagged “church stuff.” I’m not here for this crap about how we’re better than everyone else because we know God. We all suck, guys. That’s kind of the point.

Sometimes, sometimes in a story by, for, and about Christians, there will be a character who is both non-Christian and non-Awful. It’s pretty rare.

A lot of the time, the non-Christian is a bad guy of ridiculous proportions. Think Sauron. Think Voldemort. Except they’re just chilling in the middle of some perfectly ordinary contemporary realism. To fully illustrate this point, we’re going to expand our definition of Christian fiction to include other forms of media, not just literature.  Specifically, we’re going to talk about the movie God’s Not Dead. (Fair Warning #2: I have Strong Feelings about this movie, and it will come up again.)

I watched it with my family, because it’s the kind of thing that people like my family watch, without any high expectations, because it’s the kind of thing that people like me hate. But guys, it surpassed all of my expectations, because it wasn’t just mediocre acting, writing, and production like I expected. Among other things, it featured the Atheist Bad Guy.

ABG is a big problem. It’s the problem that this whole post is about. In the movie, it’s an evil professor who demands that all of his students renounce God. Now, this is a story that’s been circulating in my community for years and years, long before it was a crappy movie, so maybe it’s based on true events or something. I don’t know. I don’t care enough to research it. What I do know is that the movie’s interpretation of the story is ridiculous. We’ve got our evil professor, our Voldemort, our ABG, who spends a movie totally neglecting to actually teach his students anything in favor of getting into a pissing contest with a teenage boy. Dude. It’s a freshman course. Probably Gen. Ed. The dude is not going to be nearly this invested in things, and he’s going to be smart enough to know his students aren’t, either.

 In my experience, professors don’t expect you to rearrange your personal life and belief systems in order to be allowed in class (hello, it costs something like $70/class session, you are certainly not getting my entire worldview in addition to that cold hard cash). They also don’t cast aside their lesson plans in favor of fighting with students. They don’t mock their students for coming to conclusions they disagree with.

Side note: if your professors do this, they suck and should probably be fired.

The ABG occurs in a lot of Christian fiction. It’s a random dude whose life goal is, for some reason, to strip you of your beliefs, moral code, place of worship, whatever. The ABG is cartoonishly evil, performed with complete sincerity.

If you’re producing and consuming media in which the only non-Christian characters are absurdly villainous and out to get you solely because you love God, what does that tell real-life non-Christians about how you see them?

Let’s jump to the end of book. The Atheist Bad Guy—any non-Christian character, really—faces one of two outcomes. Death or conversion. Now let’s talk about what that says about how you see non-Christians.

Ideally, your ABG sees the error of his ways and is introduced, by your patient kindness in the face of persecution, to the Truth. Guys, this isn't ancient Rome, okay? If you’re going to set your stories in the contemporary US, try to maintain an element of realism—the vast majority of people are not out to get you. We could stand to be a little more prosecuted; it might be a sign that we were standing up for what actually mattered, instead of getting caught up in dumb political crap.

Anyway, back to the ABG, who probably isn't persecuting you in real life. He sees the light. He finds God. Whatever. You’re not stupid. You know the drill.

The other option is that he dies renouncing God.

(There’s a third option where he accepts the Lord on his deathbed, but I am not about to get dragged into a rant about the sickening laziness of that writing.)

Understand that what you’re saying, when you buy into this narrative, is that people who don’t convert on your timetable don’t deserve to be alive. Understand that what you’re saying when you buy into this narrative is that every human who does not find God is utterly worthless.

No. God loves all of us. And if you’re actively driving people away from Him by perpetuating the idea that he doesn’t, whether you do that by crashing funerals or waving hateful signs or writing books about the ABG, you are disgusting. Sorry; I’ve been sitting on a lot of righteous anger for a long time, here, and I’m done pulling punches. You sicken me.

Let’s try a more realistic, and incidentally more accessible, alternative. Someone isn't a Christian. Hey, maybe someone hates you and thinks you’re stupid because you are. Maybe the professor makes that challenge, and gives you some class time to build a defense. You present your argument, and he says no, not good enough, you didn’t consider this aspect. But maybe he also says, hey, that’s cool, I didn’t consider that aspect. No one stops believing what they believe, but your professor ends the story more open-minded than he started it. You’ve earned his respect by fighting for what you believe in, and he’s earned yours by listening to your arguments instead of attacking you.

The bad guy isn't bad. A lot of bad guys are, I know. But you’re not writing about Hitler, you’re writing about some random atheist, and you’re writing him like Hitler. He isn't bad, he just doesn’t agree with you. He doesn’t see things the way you do. Maybe he will someday. Maybe he won’t.  But either way, you can make him an interesting, dynamic, three-dimensional character who adds something to your story other than unrealistic levels of tension.

The Conservative Christian's Guide to Not Sucking: Evangelism

Sometimes my dad tells this story about how he met a televangelist, and the guy was praying for him, and then he just kind of pushed him. Like, you know how sometimes someone will just be so overwhelmed by the Spirit or whatever that they just keel over? This guy was trying to…encourage that, I guess.

On the subject of my personal experience with evangelism: Once, in a seventh or eighth grade study hall, I watched a group of girls attempt to convert a boy in our class to Christianity. There are two pertinent things to note here.

      1)      The boy in question was an immigrant with a very recent family history of death by way of religious persecution, hence the immigration.

          2)    The girls were quite concerned, and made it clear that they were concerned, about his inevitable eventual placement in Hell, should he not see the light.

To be fair, we were twelve, and they were genuinely concerned about his well-being. I would like to believe that most evangelists are genuinely concerned about the well-being of those they minister to. But a lot of them, even the trained, professional ones who went to Bible school, seem to have missed a majorly important memo: “You are going to Hell” is not an effective method of evangelism.

Let’s take a moment and think about it logically. People are not going to be influenced by the threat of something they don’t believe in, okay? You can’t tell an atheist to shape up or he’s going to hell, anymore than you can tell a thirty five year old to shape up or Santa won’t come this year. It’s the same reason you can’t have a creation-evolution debate with the Bible as your main source of evidence, no matter how much you try, or how much you whine about it. People are not going to be swayed by something they don’t believe exists.

Also (and this one is as much about basic human decency as it is about logic), if you have to resist to scare tactics to push your product, it’s probably not worth having.

The words “You are going to Hell” are, indeed, a dire warning, but they are not functioning in the way you intend. They don’t say “change your ways and accept the Lord.” They say “here comes a total jerk I gotta get out of here.”

Not the message you’re going for, right?

Here’s how you actually reach people: Love. Acceptance. Open-mindedness and a willingness to listen and try to understand. Don’t ever approach someone with the goal of “saving” them. Approach them with the goal of making a new friend, and let things go from there.

If you have to talk about religion, this is how you’re going to do it. You’re going to ask them about the details of what they believe. You’re going to ask them why they believe what they believe. You’re going to offer the same information about yourself, if requested, and do your best to provide an honest, thoughtful answer, something well beyond “because it’s true” or “the Bible says so.” You’re going to offer something personal. You’re going to ask for clarification when something about their belief system doesn’t make sense to you, not as a stern interrogator looking for holes in an argument, but as a friend genuinely seeking to understand an alternate point of view.

You may recall, when Jesus gets to ranking the commandments, his list goes as follows:

       1)      Love God

       2)      Love everyone else

Golden Rule, right? So, hey, if you wouldn’t like some random stranger screaming in the street about how wrong you are, try not to be that person, ‘kay?

The Trouble with Christian Fiction

Hi. My name is Jenny, I’m a Christian, and I hate Christian fiction. Like, deeply. Passionately. The entire concept disgusts me. I’m guessing that’s not the reaction they were going for.

In my experience, there are two defining characteristics of Christian fiction.

1. Poor Quality. We have done ourselves a huge disservice by breaking away from mainstream publishing. The editing skill is, frankly, just not there. Christian publishers publish books on the basis of their being Christian—not on the content, style, or actual skill level of the authors. The writing is mediocre, the plot is mediocre, and no one has pushed these writers to excel at anything beyond including God in their work, as if a book is good merely by virtue of being Biblically sound, and there is no point in aiming for any additional goals.
   
   
2. Selfishness. I have never, never seen a book marked “Christian Fiction” that was even remotely accessible to non-Christians. I’m here for a story, people. If I wanted a sermon, I’d be in a church, not a library. Even if the stories themselves were accessible, that little “Christian Fiction” tag on the spine would turn away any non-Christian readers.
   
   
   Guys. As Christians, your job is to share the word of God with others. I mean, fishers of men? Come on! This is like setting a mouse trap in the basement and calling it fishing.
   
   
   Newsflash: it is possible to write a book with Christian characters and/or morals that can still be enjoyed by people who are not Christians. Like, if you’ve been given a talent for writing, how dare you use it to help other Christians hide away in their own little sanctuary of perceived holiness instead of using it to help touch people who actually needed to be helped and reached out to? It’s the ultimate example of preaching to the choir. You’re not here for that, guys. You’re not here for that. 

I’m a Christian, but I would much rather read a book about a Muslim girl than a Christian one. Why? Because there’s not a “Muslim Fiction” section at the bookstore.  A book about Muslim characters may include all of the values and worldviews that go along with Islam, but there’s not an exclusive little club for that book, so it’s going to be accessible to me, despite my general lack of knowledge or interest in Islam. It’s going to be designed to reach a broader audience.

If you’re a Christian, your goal should always be to reach a broader audience.

No other religion has a genre to itself. And no religion should, including Christianity. It’s a poor marketing strategy, is what it is. If we got rid of this whole stupid Christian fiction thing, and Christian authors had to go through normal publishers, being “Godly” wouldn’t be enough, and the books would be held to a higher standard of quality, as they already should be. You wouldn’t get away with writing a book that, by its very nature, excluded a large part of the reading population, because no publisher would stand for it.

By all means, write books as Christians. But please, please stop writing Christian fiction, because its very existence is a disgrace to both your faith and good literature.

The Christmas Play

            The angels are crying. This is probably because Joseph has been pulling their hair. Again. I put him in time out. Again. I would threaten to recast him, but the show is tomorrow, and you can’t ask seven year olds to memorize new lines in a single afternoon.

Besides, no one else wanted to be Joseph. No sense in punishing some poor Wise Man who’s behaved perfectly all month.

Last year I was only helping with the play. Granted, this meant memorizing the entire thing and putting on a silly angel costume, clothes hanger wings and all, so I could follow kids around the stage and whisper the lines they inevitably forgot, but I’ve been doing that for years. It may be tedious, and occasionally embarrassing—imagine being the only seventeen year old on a stage full of toddlers, wearing a pipe cleaner halo. Now imagine your crush sitting in the front row, watching his baby sister play Mary. But at least I knew where I stood. I had my job, and I did my job, and I moved on. Someone else was there to handle all the real work, to tell me what to do, and to put a stop to wrestling matches between the shepherds.

Now I’m in charge—completely, single-handedly in charge—and if I hear one more sheep scream because his shepherd pinched him, I swear, there will be bloodshed. And it won’t be mine.

It is occurring to me that I may not have been the best person to put in charge of twenty three little kids. I’ve never been exactly patient.

And how seventeen children can collectively forget the words to “Away in the Manger” after four weeks of rehearsal, this year alone, is completely beyond me. Everyone knew it on Sunday. Everyone knew it five Sundays ago, before we even started practicing. But today. Today they forget.

Six children have also each grown or shrunk since the costume fittings last week, and I won’t be sleeping tonight. Why? Because I have to take in two angel costumes, lengthen the hem for one of the shepherds, swap two Wise Man outfits, take in the hem for one, and widen the collar of Mary’s dress, because apparently she can’t breathe. After that, I get to make new crowns for two of my three Wise Men, because they broke them this morning, make four new sets of angel wings for the same reason, wash the angel costume a little sheep threw up on, and find a new box of myrrh. Ours went missing, by which I mean Joseph probably stole it last week and left it at his grandma’s house.

Celebrating Jesus’ birth? Forget about it. I’ll be too busy praying the angels don’t set the church on fire with those stupid candles someone’s mom insisted they hold.

Christmas is my favorite time of year.

Moneylenders in the Temple

I’ve never understood the thing where big ancient churches hang signs on the door demanding silence. Or the ones that kick you out if you’re not wearing the right kind of clothes.

Seriously, guys, the Vatican was cool, but after they check your passport and your purse, they check your skirt length.

Church has always been loud for me. Faith is loud, just slightly discordant singing, kids shrieking and laughing in the background. The fights you get into with your friends between Sunday school and service, the boys who throw balls that get stuck on the roof. It’s arguments about set lists and your dad downstairs rehearsing his sermon. It’s puppet shows in the morning, a teenage girl trying to be a middle-aged cowboy. Little kids sticking Bible stories on flannel boards, the littler ones crying in the background. Church has been a lot of things. It’s never been silent.

Notre Dame is beautiful. You can light a candle for five euro. For one or two, you can have a penny stamped to look like the pope. Maybe it’s exactly what some people need. I saw them praying there.

And Canterbury, well, that was an amazing place. All those artifacts, all that history. The restaurant and the gift shop right between the front door and the back pew.

They’re incredible. But I can’t find God beneath those high ceilings.

Faith is dying in Europe. That’s what they say. I guess I wouldn’t have much faith either, if my church was mostly a museum. And it’s not fair, maybe, to be so judgmental about it. People worship in different ways. But I don’t like to walk out of a church feeling empty, and if they spent less money on maintaining their stained glass, they could spend more on helping people in need.

It’s pretty, sure. But the first church I remember was held in a Jazzercise, and windows or not, it was just as good as Notre Dame.

Faith is dying in college. They say that too. Or high school. Well, as a college student, I can tell you one of the reasons why.

We’re passionate, in our teens and twenties. Full of hope and anger and righteous indignation. We want to change the world. We want to save it. And all through our childhoods we’ve talked about the church, and how it does that. When you’re twenty one, you just want everything to be fair. You want to help people. So you walk in on Sunday morning ready to give to the poor, feed the hungry, defend the defenseless. And then you find out all they want to do with the money you’re giving is install a new bell tower?

No wonder we’re leaving in droves.

And there have been books written—so many books, and I’ve read them all—about how to keep young people in the church. Well, here’s how you do it, guys: Stop selling overpriced crepes and pope dolls in the foyer, and start actually living like Jesus did.  

I’ll post all my pictures of the cathedral on Facebook, but give me a church in a closed down factory, any day.