Posts by John Blase

If you share everything with us in the spring, keep a running crawl of your life’s news on display, then we’ll quickly find you tiring. Sorry, but that’s the God-est truth. Better to tuck away some negatives of intrigue in an old shoe box and pull them out in later autumns and point and ask…

It was like a call to prayer, this noisy feeling that this second morning of January must begin with the verses of Bill Holm, that now-dead won’t-die voice for soul-sanity who lived with one foot anchored in Minneota, Minnesota while the other danced in Iceland. And so I took and read, and was braced further…

I realize sons of preachers have always been problematical items but as a child I never once thought asking Jesus into my heart meant the dear Lord would take up residence in that fist-sized muscle thrumming in my chest. When I hear young people these days sweating blood over that kind of salvation language I…

I’m sorry. The oranges in the bowl on the kitchen counter are moldy. I didn’t eat them quick enough because I’ve been binge watching episodes of our great big american documentary of loss.   I’m sorry. That’s somewhat unprecedented for me because you know how I hate to waste things. Yeah, they’re just oranges. I…

If love is for real and not just a word then show me. I know you’re frightened. I am too.  But that is the feeling imperfect people always have as they row closer home.  

How do you keep a soft heart in an exhausting culture where a little colorblind boy in baseball cap with coffee in one hand and a gun in the other gets a viral hard-on and we’re the ones who stroked him?   How do you keep your sanity in a crazy time when self-hatred poses…

The story goes that from that time many of his disciples went back, and walked with him no more. Sounds familiar as I am often sheared by words from the gentle lamb of God. In those moments he is too much. There, I said it. God is too much. So I turn back and sit…