About Me

Hey there!  I'm David.

Thanks for checking in, and for reading.  I've been writing this little blog for about a decade, first on xanga, the now defunct social media platform, and then here on blogger.  There are books, too, which you're welcome to peruse by clicking on the link.

Why so much writing?  I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say, as Flannery O'Connor once put it.

You've clicked, and so presumably want to know about me, so here are seven semi-illuminating factoids:

1. I was born in early 1969, in Washington DC.  As the story goes, my newlywed mom and dad were delivering food and supplies to a black church--they were called "black churches," back then--in DC during the riots following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.  They encountered tear gas, and it was stressful and intense, and when they got back to their apartment, well, 9 months later I showed up.  That's the story, anyway.  I'm sticking to it.
2. In the Myers-Briggs personality typology, I'm an INFJ.  I'm deeply introverted, largely intuitive, split almost evenly between rationality and emotion, and I like closure.  What's my Enneagram type, you may ask?  Pish posh.  I don't buy into that strange witchery.  It's just spit, incense, and monkey entrails, as far as I'm concerned.  Oh, and online Harry Potter sorting hat quizzes put me consistently into Ravenclaw.  This is still a more valid metric than the Enneagram. Ahem.
3. I ride motorcycles.  Just one at a time, typically.  I ride in the rain and the cold.  That means when it rains, I get wet.  When it's cold, I feel cold.  It's just how I prefer to get around.  They are efficient and fun, in equal measure.  Why we feel obligated to cart around several tons of excess metal everywhere we go is beyond me.
4. I do not eat meat.  I have a whole bunch of complex theological reasons for it revolving around minimizing suffering and caring for creation, but honestly, I started being vegetarian because my girlfriend/fiance/wife didn't eat meat.   Though I've not intentionally ingested flesh in nearly two decades, the smell of burgers on the grill still makes me salivate.  We're omnivores by design, after all.
5. I grew up in the Presbyterian church, wandered off in my late teens and twenties, and came back because I just had to.  I felt called to the ministry, and not in a subtle way.  Meaning, it wasn't a "process," or an abstract desire to do something good.  I got whupped upside the head by dreams and visions and theophanies, to the point where I felt a little crazy.  Which, honestly, I probably am.  Oh well.
6. I am a Presbyterian pastor, married to a Jewish woman.  Together we have raised two Jewish sons.  This is apparently unusual, but to be honest, it's felt like the most natural thing in the world.
7. My faith-influences include many folks, but my first, earliest, and perhaps most influential teacher was C.S. Lewis.  When I was a bookish little boy, meaning four or five, I read the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  We were living in Kenya, and there was no television to speak of, so there was little else for a little boy to do.  So I read, but I do not remember the act of reading.  What I remember is being in Narnia.  The crunch of snow underfoot, a circle of sad little stone creatures, blood on a stone table, and the warm touch of Aslan's fur.  Books and words are, as Clive Staples taught me, very Deep Magic indeed.

There you go.  It's a little all over the place, I'll admit, but then, so is life.  So is this blog.    

Feel free to poke around at your leisure.  If anything moves or helps or challenges you, or you'd like to be in touch, just zap me an email at belovedspear at gmail dot com.

If you'd rather say hello in person, you can roll by Poolesville Presbyterian Church, where I tend to be most Sunday mornings, being that I'm the pastor and all. 

Thanks for reading!