No one ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and one is not the same person. – Heraclitus I am returning to my blog and website after a long time away.  Having been immersed in interim ministry that required the exhausting process of...

One phrase I hear often in conversations about church gatherings is the phrase “showing up”:  people talk of the need to show up, the importance of showing up, just how a person shows up.  With the pandemic, we learned a whole new way of showing up that had not...

In a recent meeting of those leading antiracist work in the church I presently serve, we were asked to reflect on how we “step into discomfort” in our lives.  The question has its roots in the recognition that in order to do antiracist work, specifically the part of...

Perhaps because of the wonderful availability of GPS systems that can guide us to almost any destination, even give us options of routes that allow us to avoid road construction or tolls, we may fall into believing that no matter the course of our life journey, we...

In my own work on recognizing unconscious racism, I see patterns of racist behavior that are strikingly similar to patterns of addictive behavior.  Which has me wondering whether racism might be a form of addiction, a particularly destructive and insidious form of...

The fundamentalist church of my childhood fed me a steady diet of sin.  Week after week, I heard in Sunday School lessons and sermons that all of us were sinful, hopelessly mired in evil, and nothing we did could make things better.  Though the church offered us the...

In the early days of the lockdown, I remember noticing how quiet the world had become.  Less traffic when I drove, less traffic noise on the streets outside my home, fewer sounds of people going by on the sidewalks because everyone separated as they drew near.  Across...

Many spiritual traditions include stories of natural disasters or unusual and overwhelming natural events as interventions by God to challenge humanity’s present ways of proceeding and call all to repentance. In such stories, repentance is less about being sorry for...

  Another insight we may eventually discover from our experience of the pandemic will come from the incomprehensible numbers of deaths, staggering figures of lives lost despite the care many of us took to follow safety guidelines, to wear masks and wash hands and...

With the race to be vaccinated underway, with many celebrating being able to resume a semblance of normality, with churches discussing how to reopen safely, we can perhaps begin to contemplate what the meaning of our pandemic experience has been, recognizing that such...