Your turn: what’s something simple yet good in your life right now? Please share with us in the comments below.
Archive for the ‘Inspiration’ Category
21 Mar
It’s Good to Get Outside
20 Mar
Creativity Beckons
Greetings, Dear Reader,
It has been literally years since I last wrote here and I’m feeling drawn back to this space. Back to writing. Back to my creative self.
Some things have changed and some have stayed the same. It would be difficult to summarize all that has happened with me, my life, my family, and…the world since I last wrote. So I won’t try to sum up all the things in their entirety in one neat little blog post.
I will tell you this: my mental health is better than ever, I have had some interesting starts and stops in my vocational journey as a minister and theologian, and I finally had that baby I had been praying for (he’ll be two years old next month). It’s quite likely that more about these matters will come out on the blog sooner or later. Time will tell.
And the world…well, I won’t elaborate on what you what you already know. These are strange times we are living in with a pandemic afoot.
What I do want to say here and now is that this is the fullness of time for my creativity. I want to go on record about this–just as I did in the beginning with my writing. I’m claiming this as my call.
I’ve been feeling the call for a while now to get back to the blog. And to get back to writing in general.
I’ve missed my creativity as I have felt somehow out of touch with it for some time now.
But especially as the world feels as if it has entered The Twilight Zone, my creativity is beckoning like never before. A writer has to write. I have to write. And I need to be creating to make sense of my experience and maybe…maybe to inspire a few people along the way too.
It’s good to be back to the blog and to respond to this prompting I feel as creativity beckons.
Your Turn: What’s calling to you in these strange times?
1 Oct
What it Means to be Lutheran and Why I’m Part of the #decolonizeLutheranism Movement
Lately I’ve become involved with a movement within my Lutheran Christian world and I want to tell you about this movement and why it has captured my heart.
The movement is called #decolonizeLutheranism.
A fundamental question of the #decolonizeLutheranism movement is what does it mean to be Lutheran? And honestly, I didn’t know this answer on a theological level until I got my theology degree. But I experienced it to the bone in my home congregation in my youth without knowing that’s what was happening.
Now, there are a lot of cultural norms that come out of predominately white, European-decent Lutheran expressions in the US. But those are not the core of what it means to be Lutheran.
To me, what it means to be Lutheran is to be a people so intimately acquainted with the grace and goodness and love of God that we can’t help but live grace and goodness and love as we move about our lives.
Art by Jennifer Clark Tinker
When I look back on my childhood congregation, that’s what I remember of the people who touched my life most profoundly.
Sondra Johnson
Marv Schmehl
Marie Renner
Ric Barnes
These are just a few of the people who lived and breathed grace to me in how they related to me as a child of Holy Redeemer Lutheran Church (HRLC) in Pickerington, Ohio.
As a mission congregation, started in the 1970s, HRLC drew a crowd of Christ-followers from various religious backgrounds. To my knowledge, we had folks who were raised Methodist, Catholic, Jewish, as well as those raised with little to know religious upbringing. We were not your typical, established, European-ethnically-Lutheran congregation. We were predominately white because of our location in a the suburbs, yet in many ways we were outside of a lot of Lutheran cultural norms.
My family didn’t even begin attending church at all until after I started school. We chose HRLC as our church home because of the grace and warmth we received there from the very beginning. This mission congregation, despite its position on the fringes of Lutheran culture, was right in the heart of Lutheran theology. And it spoke to each member of my family of origin. My mom had grown up Methodist, and my dad had grown up without a church, my brother and I were unsure of church coming into our lives in our childhood, but we all resonated with what the Spirt was doing in and through HRLC. My mother joined the church, eventually my brother was baptized, then I was baptized too at the age of 9. Finally, even my father was baptized at HRLC.
But as time went on, I grappled with the faith. I have never been one to accept easy answers to complex questions. And as a youngster who wasn’t a “cradle Lutheran,” I had a lot of questions. I mean, a lot, a lot. I don’t recall always being particularly tactful in asking them. Sometimes I was outright irritated about what I was being asked to believe about God and Jesus.
I know I can be argumentative. I know I can. In fact, in 8th grade, I had a teacher tell me I ought to be a defense attorney because I was one of the most argumentative people he had ever met.
I tell you, I can be difficult. If you don’t believe me, just ask the other students from my Sunday school and confirmation classes from the time.
In another time and place, in another congregation where people didn’t know grace so intimately as the folks at HRLC did, this may not have ended well for me. But the teachers and other adults graced me with their patience and forbearance. They gave me answers when they had them, but they didn’t make stuff up when my questions were too hard. Sometimes they just let me have my questions. They just sat in my questioning with me.
HRLC is closed now.
There is a Starbucks where my childhood congregation used to be.
But I carry the legacy of HRLC in my heart. The grace upon grace I experienced at HRLC in my youth is what it really means to be to be Lutheran. Anything that holds us back from doing and being this needs to be shed, laid at the cross.
We’re not great at diversity in my particular denomination of Lutheranism–the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American (ELCA), but we’re not just a white, European denomination. We do have people and congregations among us who are of other cultural backgrounds. It’s sad then that even people of color who have been born and raised in historically Lutheran congregations get asked, “When did you become Lutheran?”
Never in my white, Lutheran life have I ever been asked when I became Lutheran. When it comes to heritage, there are black Lutheran congregations that go back for generations! In fact, the oldest ELCA congregation is Frederick Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Virgin Islands; it is a black congregation that was established in 1666. They are more firmly rooted in Lutheranism than this questioning little soul from Methodist and unchurched parents. But no one questions whether I belong because I’m white?
Cultural presuppositions about Lutheranism are in the way of the Good News of Jesus Christ actually getting out. If an impertinent, back-talking girl like me can be permitted access to the grace of God, I want that grace flung far and wide. And where that grace is already abounding and shaking up our safe, cultural ideas, I want to see us learn from that and lean into that.
These are the kinds of things I see the #decolonizeLutheranism movement doing, and this is why this movement is so very close to my heart.
If this sounds like something you want to be part of too, join me at the first ever #decolonizeLutheranism gathering in Chicago on October 22 and/or donate to the cause.
20 Aug
Make Your Mark!
I had the opportunity on Wednesday night to speak at a live show hosted by my friend, Kinyo. My family and I drove to San Antonio for me to be part of the panel of guests.
I also got to share a bit of my story of how my art has evolved from doodles to something that matters to other people. It was a great night and a great opportunity to meet some new people.
Several people spoke with me afterwards to say that they were inspired by what I shared about my art journey, so I wanted to share some of the resources that have helped bring me to this point.
That night, I talked about the basic drawing books by Ed Emberley. Emberley’s “Make a World” was given to my son when he was younger, and I learned a lot about drawing from that one.
Later, by chance, I happened upon a copy of Stefanie Corfee’s “Creative Doodling & Beyond.” That book really opened my eyes to ways that my drawings and doodles could be meaningful gifts and keepsakes.
Then I found Joanne Sharpe’s book, “The Art of Whimsical Lettering” which helped me see my own handwriting as worth cultivating for use in my art. Before that, I kept thinking I had to learn some fancy calligraphy or complicated fonts, but Joanne Sharpe helped me see my own handwriting as uniquely my expression and an art form all its own.
Somewhere along the way, I also discovered a website called Daisy Yellow Art by Tammy Garcia (http://daisyyellowart.com). This site is a treasure trove of inspiration and instructions for art and art journaling. The emphasis at Daisy Yellow Art is on the doing–the process rather than on the results. I would say that this mentality has been key in helping me with my relentlessness in doing art on a regular basis.
If the idea of expressing yourself artistically appeals to you, maybe some of these resources could be helpful to you. But most of all, please know that there isn’t some secret formula to personal expression. There aren’t hard and fast rules that dictate how you should express yourself. Just begin. Just make your mark.
5 Jan
My Resolution for 2016
I thought I wasn’t a resolution kind of person, but I’m actually finding a way to make the New Year’s Resolution thing work for me. Last year my resolution was to doodle more and call it art. And that worked because it was something that my heart and soul needed!
Resolutions that don’t work for me are those that my inner critic “shoulds” me into. I know I should exercise more, I should get out more, I should keep my temper in check, and I should write X number of words everyday.
Oh, I should do a great many things.
Whenever I’ve based resolutions on these kinds of “shoulds,” two things generally happen: (1) I fail quickly, and (2) I feel even worse about myself when I don’t measure up.
There are always going to be the “shoulds” of life and they are relentless. Even if I successfully fulfilled one of the “shoulds,” there would be another and another and another. I could run myself ragged trying desperately to be who I think I should be and do what I think I should do.
It is an exercise in futility. And is the fast-track to burnout.
I think I’m still recovering from my burnout of 2014–that was a year with a lot of “shoulds” and I ended up dropping a lot of things by the end of that year.
I’ve tried since that year of burnout to pick back up only the things that I can’t not do. Maybe that’s a weird way to say it but it makes sense in my head. I mean, there are all kinds of influences that tell me what I should do, but there is often a still, small voice that gives me sweet inspiration. These are the things I can’t not do because if I don’t do them, then my heart and soul atrophy, and wilt.
When I follow what the “shoulds” tell me, good may come of it. But just as likely I will feel run ragged.
But when I listen to that still, small voice and do what I’m inspired by it to do, then good always comes of it. That goodness is sometimes just something that happens in my own spirit–joy, relief, energy, vision, etc. But most often that goodness radiates out to others who see or hear what I’ve done or who I interact with after having done it.
With all of this in mind, I am making my 2016 resolution as inspired by that still, small voice.
Oh, the “shoulds” clamored at me as the calendar was beginning to turn. They wanted to weigh in with their demands of how I ought to be better, smarter, kinder, more social, and so on. And they make some good points.
It was tricky, but I let those “shoulds” recede into their din.
I focused in on what my heart and soul truly need in this new year. Then I came up with something beautiful and rich and life-giving. It is so simple as almost to be ignored for its profoundness. I know now that the single, most important resolution I can make is…
Create and call it therapy.
This is somewhat of an extension of last year’s resolution, yet it is more broad to account for the various forms of creativity I enjoy. At the same time, this year’s resolution is more specific–that the purpose of creating is to be therapeutic for me.
I wrote once before about how ranging so broadly creatively has made it hard to feel like I have something to “show” for myself. But creating for the sake of therapy frees me from worry about where any of it will end up, and allows me to create whatever I need to whenever I need to.
There is part of this resolution that sounds a bit selfish. And I really don’t want to be selfish. Relationships and the connectedness of us all are very important to me. It’s just that I know that when I am creating art/music/writing, that it shifts my spirit in a way that helps me relate better.
When I let myself be dominated by my inner critic–“shoulding” all over myself–I feel worse about myself and I behave worse toward others. I sometimes shut down and withdraw altogether even in relationships that are the most important to me.
I assure you, even if this new resolution sounds selfish, it has all of our best interests at its heart.
May you too find the resolve to do that which nourishes your heart and soul in this new year!
Jennifer Clark Tinker 