http://www.kylajoyful.com/2012/07/when-deserts-become-oasis/
Serious faith for misfits, lousy joiners, and other homesick souls
Author: Doug Harrison
It was more just panic than panic attack. I had faired pretty well and even stayed in the hospital a couple extra days this time after I had my second foot hammered and puttied back together and I am glad I did. I stuck around where I wouldn’t have to worry about getting my own food and water and where I had access to what you might call, “the good stuff,” to help stave off the pain. So why I had a sudden sense of panic when the young nurse told me I was about ready to check out is as much a bit of surprise to me as to anyone else.
I was not panicking because I would have to go home, not at all. I was extremely eager to get out of the hospital. Extremely. It was only a little bit like seeing the
finish line or the light at the end of the tunnel that makes one run a little faster. But this panic was a little different still and it took me a few days to even begin to understand it.
The only way I have been able to describe it so far is that it was like the feeling that a Doctor had come to me with the great news that an arm cast was about to be cut off in an hour or so. But it was as if she and said it and left the room only seconds before a cockroach flew into the and all I could imagine was an hour of that little bugger crawling rooting around right against my skin for too short a time to rush things and too long a time to be able to bear it. That is what it felt like. I needed to be home. I needed to be there “now!”
In the story of the loaves and fishes, Jesus takes the little bit of food offered to him from a small boy and breaks it, blesses it and gives it to those who had been following him for days who had become hungry. That small gift ends up feeding several thousand people to the point where there are several baskets full after everyone has eaten. It is another one of the miracles a lot of people love to reference to show Jesus’ supernatural powers. But I spent some time with some friends this weekend that reminded 
me of another reading of that story. It is one with less magic but one that might actually be a bigger miracle.
(dedicated to my dear friends from RedCamp)
This year will be my eighth year at Burning Flipside. While I certainly have a lot of amazing memories and moments (like, I dunno, burning a two story hula dancer for example?) my favorite time at flipside is always the hours right at
dusk. Things quiet down just a little as people return to their camps to get a little grub, cover themselves in paint, fetch their poi for fire dancing, grab all the fabulous they can fit in a fanny pack, and rinse the cup to carry with them. It is a moment of both frantic scrambling around and wild anticipation. Adventure lies ahead.
Its is the second worst storm I endured since I moved to Texas, making it the second worst storm of my life. I had been praying, trying to center, and needing to be present. The storm hit my house exactly within the first five minutes of sitting down with someone for spiritual direction. The wind was rattling the windows and tossing bits of the back yard around. The whole house chilled. I considered ending our time together because I was able to give the moment only 99% of my attention. I was being tugged away by one haunting thought. Will the tree hold?
We live in a moment in history in which truth is only found in this fairly new thing we reinvented called a ‘fact.’ “This is a table,” we say. It is a fact that the thing I just set my cup on is a “table.” Ta-da! End of story… It is an idea that seems pretty hard to argue with until all of a sudden I take that same table apart and plan to build a flower bed out of it. Fairly quickly it becomes lumber. So it is now not a table after all. Er… right? That is the case until I decide without making any changes to the pile, to burn it in a fire. Without moving an inch, by mere planning in my head, it becomes fuel. This pile of wood is fuel for my fire, end of story. …Or perhpas this is where the importance of ‘story’ just begins.
I am on a train, the whistle just blew the wheels have begun to turn. I am watching the backside of downtown Austin and it feels very much like I am on a ride at Disneyland or on a tour of a movie studio where I, for one second, get to peek around a corner and see how the magic happens. Trains, I am guessing, are quite heavy and the wheels, as they say, have been put in motion. Like it or not, I am going somewhere.
“Well,” Fr. Francis said, “That is a relationship and relationships go through 
transitions.” Of all of the things I have been mulling over in trying to make sense of a painful friendship, this one made the difference. It was so simple, and apparently truthful because it made my gut ache.
When I was young I would go to camp or a youth service where I was told that what I needed was a personal relationship with Jesus. It made a kind of sense as a lot of things do for children because I was still relying on other people to teach me how to make sense of things. So I agreed, with no regrets.
However, I happen to be the kind of person, and have been since childhood, to throw myself headlong into the task at hand whatever it may be. So I was bound and determined to have the most personal relationship with Jesus a person could have. This is a dangerous prayer. The trouble began when I took it so seriously it started to take my life in some surprising if not shocking directions that none of my youth pastors had anticipated.
J. Douglas Harrison. The Patient
In the next few weeks I will occasionally be posting some reflections on what it can mean to have faith in a time when the Christian faith may seem, at least to many people, quite unreasonable.
I won’t try to provide irrefutable evidence in favor of the Christian faith. I will not be presenting argumentative ‘facts’ or try to show that Christianity is obviously intellectually superior to everything else as others may have tried to do. I have nothing here to prove. I have nothing here to buy or sell. Instead, I believe there are different genres by which we come to see what moves people to live as they do.