John Russell Dunn

Entertaining and encouraging through the written and spoken word.

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Messing with Words

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I want to fuss with them, I want to dawdle and linger and arrange. I want to try this set of ideas on for size and apply this base coat of adjectives. I want to tickle and whip up and contrast and linger. To savor and dally and finesse.

I want to explode with words and juggle and carouse, debauched and unrepentant. I want phrases that caper, sing, shriek or wail. I want to squeeze each of them one by one until the juice runs down my wrists and I know what each smells like as it expires.

I want to play.

I want to spend copious, lackadaisical, unobstructed, remorseless, unaccounted-for time on this great endeavor, mining my own peculiar ore of verbal chaos.

Must I sell it all? Do I get to keep any of them? Must they all be tallied and inventoried? Adulterated, neutered, and packaged?

Aren’t there any production over runs? Over stock? Factory seconds? Factory recalls?

What do I do with the words that don’t go into any great works? No magnum opi for this lot. Just words. Rack ‘em, stack ‘em; log ‘em, slog ‘em.

Fried Chicken and Gravy

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My wife and I recently read Sherri Schoenborn Murray’s book, Fried Chicken and Gravy. This light Christian romance about cooking, carburetors, and concealed cabbage had us laughing out loud in places. Murray’s writing is full of warm, sympathetic characters and engaging dialogue. Well worth your time.

Breaking Bread

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Jesus invited his disciples to break bread with him at the last supper. There at the table, Jesus told them the bread, the bread that had been part of the Passover celebration for centuries, represented his own body, which would shortly be brutally slaughtered for them. In the process of bringing the bread to their lips, they were told it was Jesus’ own flesh they were consuming.

Did some of them balk? Did they hesitate? I might have if I had been there and had my wits about me. What he was saying was too vast to be absorbed.

We, down through the ages, are commanded to continue the bread consuming, wine drinking, person appropriating, life absorbing practice that Jesus initiated (actually consummated) that night.

With the benefit of hindsight, we understand we’re being invited to fully identify with Jesus, to take on his power and his nature, to subject ourselves to whatever change that plenty-potent morsel might initiate in our being, to declare out dependence, and remind ourselves of our victory, through Jesus’ life.