Fire and Rose by Kondratj on deviantart.com

Back on June 19, 2012 I began Sign of the Rose as a creative space for me to think through many of the changes I was seeing in the church and the world. As I look back I’m pretty proud of the previous 99 posts, there is some pretty cool stuff in the midst of the last 9 months of work.  I’ve certainly learned from the process of writing.

Sign of the Rose began with the question of authority and how to approach it, and so last summer I spent a lot of time working with history, what would end up being a much longer series than I anticipated and which I plan to return to. As it stands if you look at the Place of Authority series (under Historical Reflections) it runs from the time of the Judges in Ancient Israel (prior to 1000 BCE) through the time of the early Catholic and Byzantine churches, a span of approximately 3000 years. I still plan to pick up with the time of the emergence of Islam (some of the reading coming up soon on my reading list deals with this) but at the end of July my posts slowed to a crawl, since I had both of my kids for the end of the summer and then the school year started and I needed to refocus some of my energies back into the congregation I served. I also had a lot of other interests that I was neglecting.

In September and October my sporadic posts moved to Philosophy and Psychology. I had been reading a number of things influenced by Postmodern Philosophy, but I wanted to take a little bit of time and try to understand some of the basics of the philosophy itself. Then in one of the most helpful books I have read, Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly I spent a little time on the issues of shame and living courageously.  I hit a dry patch as I continued to try to press ahead with the Place of Authority, knowing that I needed to take a break and rethink the direction I was going but like most writers encounter at some point I had a bit of writers block.

In February I rethought  and recommitted to the process of writing, and part of that was expanding the horizons of creativity. I began to include my own personal study in going through the bible as a part of my own learning. So beginning with Haggai and Esther (which were chosen because I was going to preach on each of them) and currently Jeremiah I tried to share with you in my discovery process. In this time I also shared some of my poetry I had been writing. I have written poetry for years, but most of it ended up in trashcans somewhere, and I decided to put it out there. I also was at a time, during lent, where I was preaching more frequently and I began including my sermons as well for people to see.

What I am left with after 99 posts is a hodgepodge of interesting work, some more parable like trying to re-imagine what church could be, some historical, some biblical, some sermons, philosophy, culture, music, people who were important to me, but all in all some interesting pieces. There is more to come because I enjoy the process but sometimes it is just nice to look back before moving forward. I’ve got a lot of bits and pieces of things that I want to go back to and spend some time with and we shall see together what ends up finding its way on here in the next 100 posts.