Hey, just wanted to say - your book is great! I’m a children’s librarian and had to read it for my job (“had to”) and I loved it! You should be proud

this is about james dobson :3

gorgeous subject delight to paint

easter sunday proves that there is resurrection coming for us all. that power can never kill the God they see in us, not in a way that matters. because we’ve done this before. they killed God, but God came back.

“in this world you will have trouble. but take heart! i have overcome the world.”

but the scars prove that jesus heals like a human heals; and as we share his death, as we are killed both in spirit and in body by the same forces that killed him, and for the same reasons-we can rise with him, too. he is like us. he dies like us. he rises like we would. what can we take from that?

i think that if jesus came back just as he’d been, as if nothing had ever happened to him, it would prove that he is not like us. that he, by being God, is imbued with some sort of magical power that is unique and special and sets him above all of us - and apart from all of us.

because the unfortunate truth about healing is that we always bear scars. our wounds may heal but we’ll never go back to being the same people we were before we got them. often this sucks balls; sometimes it’s whatever. sometimes it’s even kind of cool. but it’s always true. pain changes you.

but personally i see those scars AS scars - a visible reminder that jesus just got murdered by the roman empire . that he went through something unbearably awful, and even resurrection couldn’t undo that.

that’s kind of a downer, right? but i really like it.

they killed jesus because that’s what power does: it kills love and hope and vision. it kills the weird and the poor and the non-conforming. it kills the threateningly strange. it kills God.

today, on good friday, consider this: if power is trying to kill you, maybe they see God in you, too.

he was an ally to those of lower social status as him. he defended “sinners”, even people his own friends had legitimate reasons not to like. he talked about a better world that could exist - a world where the last shall be first and we will be recognised by our love.

and he was Big Weird, even as a child - the bible says so, including in quotes from his mother.

that aside, we know jesus was brown; he was minoritised racially and ethnically by colonising forces, even though he was not technically a minority. we know he was poor and working class.

it would be insane to describe jesus as autistic and queer in the modern sense. it was two thousand years ago and i never met the man. but he did live a life outside of the norm for his day - he was a wandering prophet, befriending random men and women, rather than a respectable family man

but before, because God came and became one of us - showed us what God would look like if He were a guy.

and what God looked like was a person power wanted to kill.

so my thoughts today are less a sermon than a question: how can we love at the end of the world? how can we have God with us even as we’re dying? how do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

let me know if you think of anything.

i am thinking today of psalm 173, which is about oppression and exile and living after the end of the world. and then being asked to sing.

“how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

i’m not judging the man. i fucking get it. jesus himself clearly didn’t hold a grudge. but i want to be better than that. not to kill myself senselessly for some ideal, but to be willing to stand with the people i love and love them truly, no matter the cost. to be brave. and i’m scared that i won’t