Wild + Waste

Reflections on my 1 year newsletter anniversary

Well friends, we’ve made it.

12 months of writing in this digital oasis. 12 months of toiling and writing and deleting many shitty first drafts. 12 months of seeking through words. 12 months of connecting with other writers and discovering I’m not alone in the struggle. 12 months of publicly sorting through the nuances and complexities of faith and doubt, and the spiritual wildernesses we find ourselves in.

I was apprehensive when I created this newsletter 12 months ago, nervous to ask overly-subscribed folks to subscribe to my ramblings. I doubted my ability and feared retribution for voicing things that were not easily digestible or understood within evangelical spaces. My goals from the beginning were to write with truth and grace intertwined, to provide space for honest thoughts and difficult questions, to willingly say “I don’t know,” to find common ground in our shared humanity, and venture beyond the easy platitudes of western evangelicalism. 

I’ve used the term deconstruction. I’ve also cited Abraham Heschel and his phrase “self clarification.” Whatever we call it: deconstruction/reconstruction/doubting/rethinking/reimagining, etc., we are (as I’ve written many times) seeking truth amidst the excess. 

A New Name

I named this newsletter The Bread Box on a whim. I’m a part time novice bread baker. By that I mean I occasionally bake sourdough bread in my humble, poorly-lit kitchen. I started baking sourdough bread months before the pandemic when a dear friend mailed me an envelope of dried flakes from her own mother source. There’s much I don’t know (or have patience for) when it comes to baking, but sourdough became a creative and necessary outlet during a lonely and professionally stressful season. 

There are countless parallels between life, writing, and baking. For 12 months, my about page read: Baking bread often reminds me of writing. The process of writing isn’t dissimilar to that of bringing a flaky bit of starter to life; a dried, dead-looking thing with the tiniest bit of possibility. To write is to bring the tiniest, flakiest idea to life; to wrestle, to delete and rewrite. The act of writing, as Madeleine L’Engle says, is to enflesh: to bring together words in such a way that speaks truth into existence. It is a process that, like sourdough bread, takes time. It cannot be forced or rushed. But the process eventually yields results.

Sourdough became a comfortable rhythm with practice. The same can be said for writing. I didn’t know where I was going with it; I just knew I had to write. For those first nine months, I delivered The Bread Box to your inboxes every Friday. I even managed to scrape one together two days after my appendectomy. I didn’t realize this simple routine was allowing me to hone my voice and develop my skill. I started finding direction. Little by little, I began thinking beyond the occasional essay and newsletter, and forming the tiniest book idea. I joined a writing group. I met with an agent. I joined another writing group. Things have moved slowly, but they have moved. My book idea is still barely an ember, but an ember is still something.

This brings me to the new name, a name I think represents the new year and goals for this digital space I inhabit. While listening to The Bible Project podcast, I learned the Hebrew phrase tohu wa-bohu, which means wild + waste, referring to the very beginning (at least the story we’re given in the beginning of Genesis), before anything was created when whatever existed was void, without form, wild and waste. In this life, we are constantly forming, taking new shape, undergoing minute transformation. Inevitably, we will find ourselves in the wilderness, sometimes for prolonged periods. I’m writing for those who have felt the pang of disbelief, whose certainties have crumbled, who are left feeling void and unformed. But even in the unforming, in the undoing of much belief, we are being formed anew. We are wild + waste, awaiting the new birth of creation, bursting with mystery, divinely loved, with goodness radiating from our marrow. Not the goodness of perfection, but the goodness of existence. Our existence matters to God; our questions are not sending us to hell. They’re leading us to truth, further into mystery but deeper into hope. 

The Stories We Tell

I majored in print journalism to tell stories. Stories make us human; compel us towards the creativity we may think we lack until we’re entrenched in the telling of our own stories. These days, I’m wary of a traditional testimony of lostness and foundness, wrongness turned to rightness. Because life isn’t a straight trajectory. Even in belief, we may find ourselves in a dry desert. This is why it’s important to tell the stories of struggle, deconstruction, grief, self clarification, doubt and disbelief. It does no good to anyone to act like the conversion is the ending point, the decision that leads us out of mystery into absolute truth.  

Stories also lead to camaraderie, me-too-ness found in the sharing of similar feelings and experiences. Stories allow us to process divine mystery and cosmic confusion, to fixate on the beauty of our surroundings that awakens the senses and reveals the lingering wildness and wasteness of this ancient world. If you’ve been around these past 12 months, you’ve read my stories of faith and doubt intermingled with musings of the Rockies, glacier lakes, and literal deserts. I’m inspired by a good cup of pour-over coffee as much as I am by a mind-blowing book. The joys of life and despair of mental anguish all merge together here.

Thank You

If you are subscribed, you’re a part of a small community of nearly 300 readers. I’m humbled and grateful. This next year, I hope to go further than I’ve gone, to include interviews and series and book reviews, to offer giveaways, to continue serving as a digital oasis for anyone who needs a respite. As always, please feel free to comment and reach out, and follow me on Instagram for mountain and food photos alongside *sometimes* deep musings. Writers need readers and I’m so, so thankful for those of you who read my words. What a gift!

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Loving & Savoring

• Drinking (For Denver locals): Corvus Coffee Roasters — Our first apartment in Denver was just a few blocks from Corvus, and it quickly became my favorite local coffee shop to walk to for it’s amazing beans and delicious pour-overs. Good coffee gives me joy and I can’t help but feel excited every time I visit a new place and find the best local coffee spot. It’s one of my favorite things.

• Watching: Hulu’s The Dropout – a dramatization about Elizabeth Holmes, the biotech entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud. I’m fascinated by shows and documentaries about startups and their founders, and the ways power and success can cloud judgment and inhibit ethics.

• Reading: At Home in the World by Tsh Oxenreider – I first read this a few years ago and loved it. Now that I’m planning and dreaming of some future trips, I wanted to read it again and take in Tsh’s stories of budget travel and connecting with people, food, and experiences throughout the world.

• Playing: Quordle — Surely by now you’ve heard of Wordle. But have you heard of Quordle? It’s quadruple the fun!