Minute of Grace

It’s our “go-to” as Midwesterners, when we want to start a conversation standing in line, or at a gathering where […]

Have you started packing yet?  For some Memorial Day weekend is the start of summer.  For clergy types, it’s often […]

There are a lot of things I’ve never done in my life.  Some call it a bucket list.  Do you […]

Those two boys had nothing but trust in our Sunday morning sacred gathering.  No fear, no awareness of how to get under chairs or lock the doors and turn off the lights, no awareness that the moms and dads, teachers and preachers, ushers and other adults will throw ourselves over and in front of them if it’s ever necessary.  They only know that they traveled down a long aisle with a strange and rather loud woman in an odd black dress and a whole mess of oddly different people welcomed and clapped for them without them doing anything but being.

When will they say we gave up?  Confronting and trying to seriously solve gun violence in the United States?  Will they say when people like me who still understand responsible gun ownership but are very clear the need for automatic and assault weapons used for nothing but killing people should be regulated more strongly than receiving a driver’s license or deciding for women what to do with their bodies?  Will they say it was when people like me gave up thinking reasonable and logical regulation of firearms is a fantasy?

He was 17th as they came around the final turn.  17th out of 20.  Everything had to line up perfectly […]

From the beginning of the beginning, humans have wondered and wandered and reflected and written deep thoughts about eternity.  We had to read a bunch of it in seminary, and after all and out of all of that, Buechner’s thoughts are the ones that stay with me.  “Not endless time, or the opposite of time, but the essence of time.”  I cannot explain how much I love that.  What is the essence of time for you?  Buechner talks about when you’re with someone you love, when you’re doing something you love, when you have little if any sense of the passage of time because you’re so in whatever moment you’re living, that’s what the “essence” of time is and thereby a glimpse of eternity. 

Are there things that don’t fit in your life?  I mean besides pre-pandemic clothes.  Are there things that you do, or say, or have, or think and it suddenly occurs to you, that really doesn’t fit me.  So I was driving to Lawrence a few weeks ago to visit with an old friend from a former appointment, and along the way I thought, “you know, maybe I better slow down.”  I know, right?  That thought rarely if ever occurs to me. 

Then after Easter and facing the future unafraid . . . our challenges are still present to be faced.  Our Bishop sent out a letter today announcing a special called Annual Conference for the Great Plains in September specifically for the subject of division and discussion for all of us, those leaving and those staying, around process for those churches that want to disaffiliate. sigh. General Conference has been delayed again and the movement of those who desire to separate over issues of inclusion have decided not to wait. 

I’ve been caught by a story told by theologian and author Suzanne Stabile sharing that one of the most difficult lessons for humans to learn is that our deepest understandings most often come through failure.  The paradox of that, of course, is that few if any of us ever want to fail.  She chuckles and goes on to say that whether we want to or not, whether we’re prepared or not, whether we think we can manage it or not, it does happen . . . failure.  The only question is how we go on from whatever that failure looks like in each of our lives.