Prelude to missing my family and my church for two weeks

July 7, 2026 Mark Brians

On Saturday I will leave these beloved islands for two weeks. I am thankful to say I will miss my family and my church very deeply, it’ll tear my heart out. I shall not be able to bear it.

It will slay me every morning to awake in a house outside of Birmingham where the halls don’t echo with children’s feet running at 5:30 am, and enter into a kitchen where milk (or something worse) has not already been spilt (at least twice), and sit down to a quiet dining room to sip hot coffee while I wait for the van to leave for 3rd Presbyterian…

Crowns of fire

May 18, 2026 Mark Brians

…The list goes on. Everywhere, it seems, on God’s green earth heroes, gods, angels, divine sages, are given haloes as a sign of their being hallowed…. There just seems to be something universal about being clothed in living flame…

Joy is the thing that is really real

July 17, 2024 Mark Brians

There is, first, a kind of naivete —a not knowing innocence. Looking back on moments of naivete we often lend to them a happiness they did not actually possess, charged with nostalgia and sentimentality: “oh those were the good ole days when things were good” we say. And when we say this we imply a moment when things stopped being happy. The “when things were good” is followed by a “before [insert event] happened.”

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