Lord, teach me. . . .

Never let a bad situation bring out the worst in you. Be strong and choose to be positive. –Anonymous What a peculiar time we are living in. Truly, some days up seems to be down . Truth is subjective; lies, verifiable and dangerous, run rampant. Beyond the challenges of this nation, the whole world seems, at times, to have gone mad! How did we ever stray so far from the teachings of Jesus? And more importantly: how do we find our way back? Have we gone too far to turn it around? (Remember? Repent means to turn around, to do a full 180.) No. Not ever. Not as long as we believe in a gracious God who loves us all unconditionally. Our task is to accept that grace for ourselves, so that we can then extend God’s love to others. It starts with the recognition of the value of every person with whom we journey, until we come to the realization and belief that in God’s Kingdom, there is no other . We are all siblings in Christ. Start small. Start with your words.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. –C. S. Lewis It just seems to get deeper and deeper, doesn’t it? Every news cycle brings a new cause for grief: another shooting, more looting, fresh hot spots for that virus that keeps our lives out of whack. Every time we take a step forward, it seems something else pops up to remind us: we are not in control. Nope. Never were. We just like to act that way. We are a nation in grief over so many losses, and our grief has been so intense that the whole world is joining us as we weep in anger and anguish. We grieve lost freedoms. We grieve lost or delayed dreams for our children and grandchildren. We grieve the way things were before—or grieve that we let things be so wrong for so long. Some days, it feels as if we will never recover. We want to strike out, to make someone else feel what we are feeling—except all our friends already have enough grieving of their own going on. How will we ever get through this???

What is history? An echo of the past in the future, a reflex from the future on the past.  –Victor Hugo I am wondering if our time in self-isolation and quarantine has become something of an echo chamber. You know. We are stuck with a handful of folks, and we watch or listen to the same news over and over again. We tend to believe what we believe—with even greater fervor. Which is fine—unless the things you are reinforcing fly in the face of Truth. Listening to people tell their stories, when it all seems so alien to what you’ve experienced, is really hard, especially when their life narrative makes me out to be part of the problem. Ouch. Here is where we are. Following the deaths of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and so many more, white people are [again] being confronted with our privilege. But this time, it almost seems different, doesn’t it? This time, it feels like maybe change is gonna come. But we need to do our homework. And we need to prepare t

Rise up, People of God! Have done with lesser things! Give heart and soul and mind and strength to serve the King of Kings! --Phil Keaggy During this weird season of self-isolation, many folks have rediscovered the art of baking bread. There’s really nothing like it: kneading works your hands and arms; the smell of baking bread fills the whole house; the reward, slathered with butter or honey (or both ). . . . Bread of heaven. Jesus tells a brief parable about bread—well, really, about yeast. The Kingdom of God , he states , is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour, until it worked through all the dough . Sixty pounds of flour. My arms are tired already. But think about what this says about the power of yeast. In a typical yeast bread recipe, it might take a teaspoon or two of yeast, and five to seven cups of flour. You stir in the yeast, and it simply disappears. . . . But as the bread rests, the magic begins. The dough grow