Dear God, I don’t know if this is anything, or not. Your biggest fattest robin I’ve ever seen just tapped at my window. She did not fly against the glass by accident but tapped it with her beak. I didn’t imagine it, surely, God. She was dusted in your snow just like I was a… Read More
I’m running and running. Like a bad dream. If I slow down my own shaking scares me more. I am running and trying to pray but words have left me—all sucked into fear that the worst is not over. I keep running. My side aches. Still running. The landscape changes. I have run a long… Read More
Mark 11:1-11 John 12:12-16 Approaching Jerusalem, Jesus paused. It had been another unsettling week for the disciples – a week full of parables they struggled to understand, an unexpected lunch with a tax collector, and a morbid take on this trip to Jerusalem. But seeing the city in the distance and knowing that ahead lay… Read More
Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16 Romans 4:13-25 Mark 8:31-38 Now that we’ve officially launched Lent 2021 and the big joke is that people think they never left Lent 2020, it’s the perfect opportunity to remember that somebody’s always in Lent, pandemic or no pandemic. Yes, every day of every year people face their mortality, great losses, fears,… Read More
What would we do without you, sun and earth and air and water? Praise you, Creator, who set them into life and introduced them to each other! For the air has warmed enough for the dog and I to stand silent and safe in the road where snow and ice melted down to pavement, a… Read More
The earth sounds different when it’s cold, God. Your molecules of creation slow down. The hum of life vibrating doesn’t surround me and my dog on our morning walk. We are explorers of a new world way too far below zero where snow sounds like hard polystyrene foam when we step on it. It’s a… Read More
Flattening the curve for nearly a year now, God. At first, mostly so we could all get back to doing what we were doing before. Then people were dying. We were caught off guard and couldn’t lay them to rest as we were taught. We couldn’t wrap our arms around shocked people or sit quietly… Read More
In the Mystery of all our beginnings And all our endings, I am hanging out with You, in the middle. Here I am less sure of where it all belongs In the story of me—in the story of all. Here I am worn down from what has been And what I think I’m trying to… Read More
Authority can be a slippery thing within a community of faith. We can make many mistakes around it. We may give it to those who can’t live up to it. We may reject authority altogether and lose its voice. We may pick and choose where authority can speak to our lives. These texts invite us… Read More
Why is he here? And so it began—the long human wondering, imagining, arguing, asserting, interpreting, deciding, proclaiming, expanding, emphasizing, controlling, re-ordering, etc. of reasons for Immanuel, God with us. Yes, there was wondering before it happened. It was a particular responsibility, rich with meaning and a belonging held in trust by some and not others.… Read More
