(There are no photos of me playing football. My mom was already breaking church rules by coming to the games and wisely chose not to document the crime. So instead: little Brian, sometime in junior high, geared up for what I think was winter pond hockey and very ready to take on the world.)

I was fifteen when I gave my heart to Jesus and, as a consequence, quit the high school football team. Let me explain. From the outside, I was doing fine. I had friends. Good grades. I captained the freshman team, started fresh-soph, and was one of the few freshmen invited to dress for varsity Friday night lights. I played strong safety. Run or pass, I could find the ball and make good on every bad intention of hurting whoever had it. My parents still recount another mom turning to them in the stands, genuinely shocked that Brian “nice-guy” Sauder could hit and throw people around like that.

Nice Brian was real. So was that angry kid on the field. What nobody could see was how miserable I was. I was molded in a church culture that taught me to scrutinize whatever in me seemed sinful, worldly, prideful, or simply too much. Goodness had a clear shape: obedient, kind, useful, dependable. I tried rebellion at twelve. Hard. I lasted about a year and learned how exhausting it was to push against a mold the church treated as morally required. Eventually, I learned to police myself.

Football was one of the few places where all that force had somewhere to go. I could be loud, fast, aggressive, hit somebody as hard as I could, and have adults slap my helmet in praise afterward. But I still wasn’t okay internally, and the answer the church offered was everywhere: give it all up and follow Jesus. Desperate, I did.

When my baseball coach pressed me on why following Jesus also meant quitting sports, I told him I got too angry when I played and anger was not a fruit of the Spirit. Anger was a sin. He paused and made one of the great theological arguments of my adolescence: football, sure, he had seen me on the field, but baseball was basically a pacifist sport. Why not give up football and keep playing baseball?

I told him it didn’t work that way. I needed to give up the unruly, worldly, angry things and focus on Jesus.

What a thing to truly believe at fifteen.

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Nearly three decades later, one of my favorite things I do as a Mennonite minister begins with a very different invitation: wander toward what catches your attention. Notice. Listen. Engage.

Once a month, I help lead what’s called Wild Church with Pastor Celeste Kennel-Shank and the Chicago community she gathers, Moveable Feast. We gather in the woods or on the beach, sing, hear an opening scripture reading, and then, instead of a sermon, I send people wandering. Maybe toward a tree, Lake Michigan, or a bird with strong opinions. Whatever in the more-than-human world catches you, I invite you to stay awhile. Enter a conversation.

I hold space for the possibility that God might speak through creation. Earnest, I know, but an idea as old as the Bible itself. Moses turns toward a bush on fire that is not consumed, and a voice calls him from inside it. Elijah finds God in the quiet after wind and fire. Jesus hears himself named beloved beside a river and is driven into the wilderness with the wild animals. Mary Magdalene meets the risen Christ in a garden. I love how little of the Bible’s best God stuff happens indoors.

Letting creation preach also means I only prepare an invitation instead of a full BS sermon…a Brian Sauder sermon. Everybody wins. Celeste asked me to offer the opening reflection for today’s Wild Church, so I am double counting it here. Feed two birds with one scone sort of thing.

Her prompt comes from Hurray for the Riff Raff’s cover of “(What If God Was) One of Us”: if you were faced with God in all their glory and could ask just one question, what would you ask? I overthought the logistics and decided I face God, ask, receive an answer, and then get dropped back into Chicago. That frame helped me formulate a question I’d like answered in the here and now.

Picking one is brutal, so I started wondering what some of my favorite writers and thinkers might ask. Wendell Berry would probably ask how we learn to live somewhere without destroying what we belong to. I bet Robin Wall Kimmerer’s question would include the word reciprocity: what do we owe back to a world that keeps feeding us? Thomas Merton might ask who we are underneath all the selves we have mistaken for ourselves. Parker Palmer might ask how we become undivided, how the life we show the world might finally belong to the life inside us. James Cone might look God straight in the face and ask what it really means that God is found among the people the world is crushing. Barbara Brown Taylor might flip the whole thing around and ask why we insist on looking for God somewhere other than where we already are.

But Celeste did not ask my bookshelf. She asked me. And the question I keep carrying into that imagined room is much more personal:

God, what did you give me all this anger for?

I ask because the amount of anger I carry still scares me. I know what happens when my own anger takes over. My body fires, my vision narrows, proportion leaves the building, and anger grabs the steering wheel. Christianity often doesn’t help. This week I read a recent article from an evangelical pastor once again arguing that anger and wrath are both sinful. It sounded familiar, not far from what I believed at fifteen. I understand the concern. But God, I cannot believe you gave me this capacity only so I could spend my life apologizing for having it.

Paul says something stranger: “Be angry, but do not sin.” Anger gets to stay. Maybe the question is what we let stand beside it. Mark gives us Jesus looking at people with anger and grief at the same time, anger braided with sorrow, heat held alongside heartbreak.

For too long, I imagined only two places for my anger to go. Turn it inward and it becomes shame, resentment, the quiet violence of deciding the problem must always be you. Follow that road long enough and you can disappear inside yourself. Hurl it outward and anger becomes rage, the kind of force that makes everyone else smaller. I know enough about both to want neither.

So God, is there another way to carry this anger?

In my body, anger moves toward. Up and out of the chair. Toward the ball. Toward the crossed boundary, toward the person being harmed, toward cruelty being renamed normal. Anger says, No. Something different has to happen. I need that part of myself. I just don’t trust anger to see the whole field.

Maybe an undivided life means anger gets a voice but not the whole meeting. Grief tells me what has been lost. Love reminds me what is worth protecting. Humility asks whether this is injustice or just my ego demanding attention. Community tells me when I am full of myself. A settled body can decide where to direct the heat.

Maybe Wild Church has been teaching me this practice all along. What if I approached anger the same way I invite us to approach the living world: wander toward it, notice it, listen, engage? Listening is not obeying. I don’t have to shove anger down or unleash it in fury. I can stay with it long enough to ask what it knows, what it fears, what it loves, what it is trying to protect.

Moses turned toward that strange bush: on fire, somehow not consumed, with God speaking from within it.

At fifteen, I thought faith required me to put out whatever burned too hot inside me. Now I wonder whether the deeper spiritual work is learning how to carry the fire without being consumed by it or using it to consume somebody else. Maybe anger does not need to disappear. Maybe it needs company: grief to soften it, love to aim it, humility to question it, community to keep it honest, and enough rest and steadiness in my own body to decide where the heat should go.

God does not wait for the fire to go out before speaking.

God speaks from within it.

Maybe the parts of us we were taught to fear are not always obstacles between us and the holy. Maybe some of them are places worth turning toward. Places to notice, listen, engage. Maybe holiness is not waiting on the other side of finally getting ourselves under control.

Which leaves me right back where I started, still wrestling:

God, what is this fire for?

Maybe I would get an answer. Maybe I would get dropped back beside Lake Michigan with the same question still burning, only now with an invitation to wander toward it, notice, listen, and engage.

Either way, faithful Weeder, I want to hear your question and whatever thoughts my story and question stir up for you. If you were faced with God in all their glory and given one question, what would you ask? Just the question is enough. If you want to say more, I’d love to hear that too.

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Rain 1 out of 3 days this past month in Chicago. My spirit insists it must be more like 3 out of 3. I heard the word “derecho” so much that I googled it to read what my soul already knew: a fast-moving, direct line of severe thunderstorms. One result: we’re into day 12 for friends, staff, and faith partners in Gary, Indiana, without electricity. 12. And there have been 19 confirmed tornadoes in the Chicago–Northwest Indiana corridor in roughly that same 30-day period. 19. The 75-year average for this area is around 11 per year. Now 19 in 30 days.

It’s back-to-school time. And football time. I tuned into my favorite Bears sports show the other day, CHGO, hoping for the usual preseason hopium. Instead, the show’s most gregarious personality was trying his best to show up for the audience while navigating the frustrating loss of power at his family home in...you guessed it, Northwest Indiana. Meanwhile, all the rain has disrupted Bears practices and reporters’ ability to attend and watch.

I didn’t think this was possible, but it all makes the conversation about taxpayer support for a potential new Bears stadium feel even more absurd. We cannot reliably get electricity to the people already living there, but the McCaskeys are still dreaming about billions of dollars, giant stadiums, and Super Bowls. The latter, for the record, I heartily support. But if I ever get to meet a McCaskey, I’d like to suggest the indecency, maybe even the immorality, of playing smoke-and-mirror games with politicians in Indiana and Illinois to extract as much taxpayer money as possible while the region around their proposed stadium sites floods and those lucky enough to have generators are running pumps to keep water out of their homes.

Meanwhile, the boys in D.C. keep dropping bombs, we are more than $40 trillion in debt, and affordability is something I guess the President’s sons spout about while getting richer from their latest crypto scheme. And now we also HAVE TO build these monstrosities of data centers everywhere because China, China, China. More land, more electricity, more water, more transmission, and apparently no time to ask whether building these AIs is something we actually want, even as the CEOs building these frontier models raise those questions themselves.

Blah blah blah.

Everything is coming so fast these days. Storms. Politics. Screens. Demands. It feels like there is barely time to absorb one thing before the next comes flying around the corner.

Tuesday evening, it wasn’t raining and I was walking the twins back from summer science day camp when a guy on a Divvy bike came zooming up and blew through the stop sign just as we were starting to cross. I grabbed the girls and pulled them aside, “Hey, there’s a stop sign!” He removed his AirPods, looked back, and started yelling, calling me a b-word, an a-word, and the n-word. Over and over and louder and louder as he rode away.

I yelled back an invitation to come say those things directly to my face, and I must confess, this Mennonite pacifist was ready for my own derecho if he accepted the offer. Thank God he didn’t. A mom appeared behind me and said firmly in my ear that she had my back. The girls, below me looking up, were worried and asking why that man didn’t obey the stop sign. How precious. Did I say a hearty thank you to God, yet, that he kept riding? The twins recovered quickly and moved on. My nervous system took a few more hours, but at least I could calm down at home and not in jail.

I want to write here a few sentences that help me, or maybe help you too, dear weeder, understand all these things arriving so fast. How they connect. Why they matter. Especially when I think about the relatively small number of corporations getting absurdly rich all these decades while dumping greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere so that now we have derechos and canceled football practices and houses running on generators and 4-year-old girls who ask their daddy before bedtime if a tornado is going to come tonight.

But I don’t want to explain it all again. The science has been telling us about these new realities for decades. The fossil fuel companies have spent hundreds of millions getting us to obsess over carbon calculators and individual responsibility while they sat in boardrooms making the same choices, knowing full well the consequences, and collecting their big checks. Making their fortunes even bigger, as they continue to do today, while others are sitting in Gary, Indiana, waiting for the lights to come back on.

I did therapy this week. On a screen. Grrr. Everything is on a screen. My phone doesn’t stop screaming at me to look at it. A surprising percentage of my career now as an environmental advocate consists of staring into a glowing rectangle while talking with other people staring into glowing rectangles about nature, community, and human connection. Then I get on another screen to talk to my therapist about how I need less stimulation, fewer demands, more boredom, more space where nobody needs anything from me.

I had lunch with my mentor of more than 16 years on Friday. She knew me before I was married, before the titles and graduate degrees and children, before I could define the word derecho. We were talking theology, as clergy are obliged to do over lunch. We reflected on how much we want to believe in emergence, in this idea that underneath all the chaos and breakdown something new is being born.

She started talking about ants. Maybe, she said, at the end of the day we are just animals. We build our anthills. We stay busy. We expand and consume and keep carrying little pieces of dirt from one place to another, telling ourselves elaborate stories about why the next thing we build is absolutely necessary.

I found this deeply depressing and strangely relieving. But the more I thought about it, the more jealous of the ants I became. They truly belong to this world, to the soil, to the mounds they build. There is no kingdom coming to lift the ants out of the dirt. There is just dirt. And a fellow ant to help move it with you.

My mentor fed me an egg salad sandwich while we talked. She knows I like those.

So I ate.

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(A quick pic of the scene at Creation Care Camp this week at Tower Hill. Think church camp for people of faith who care deeply about the planet, including Green Team leaders working to turn that care into action back at their local congregations.)

The church camp was more rustic than I expected. On Wednesday evening this week I was at Tower Hill, a United Church of Christ (UCC) camp near Sawyer, Michigan, speaking at a creation care camp. I had the after-dinner slot, scheduled for 6:30, but by the time everyone rolled in we started around 7:15. You know how it goes. The night was muggy, and a few minutes into my presentation I was sweating through my polo. Thank God I wore that polo. I had briefly considered a sport coat, which, after arriving and taking in the vibes, I realized would have been a major camp sin.

Still, a few minutes in, I could feel the room coming alive. Every time I paused, questions came fast. Folks were in it.

Near the end, after we had gone way over time and I had sweated enough to make the evening feel like a baptism, a pastor in the back raised his hand. It is always the quiet pastor in the back. He was seasoned, and although I did not know his story, I could see some of it in his face. Sadness. Wisdom. Kindness. The look of someone who has spent years loving people who, of course, are often difficult to love.

His congregation was what we call purple. Democrats and Republicans who worship together. He understood how hard it can be to talk with people who reject climate science, but what bewildered him even more were the people who deeply understood the scale of climate destruction and still did nothing.

“What do we do about apathy?” he asked.

I do not know whether it was the late hour, the sweat, or the fact that I had poured myself empty speaking, but more than sixteen years of doing this work, hundreds of congregations, and thousands of hours spent teaching, preaching, organizing, and sitting in church basements seemed to flash through me at once. My deepest frustration with the congregations I have been lucky enough to work alongside is not that we do not care. We care deeply. A few people get passionate, so they form a committee, read a book, make a Google Doc, and produce a church-specific action plan. It is beautiful. And I feel sad.

Because we have this unhealthy ability to be really good at acting on our care inside our own silos.

Every congregation is located somewhere, and that somewhere is already alive with people trying to change things. There are neighborhood groups, environmental justice organizations, nonprofits big and small, organizers, coalitions, faith communities, book clubs, and volunteer groups already fighting for clean air, affordable energy, healthy communities, and political power long before a church Green Team schedules its first meeting. Yet inside our church basements we so often begin from scratch, as though we have been handed the climate crisis and told to report back before the next council meeting.

Our congregational isolation shrinks our imagination before we even begin.

That is how good people end up offering solutions wildly out of proportion to the problems they hope to address. We name climate collapse and then plant pollinator gardens, replace Styrofoam cups, put solar on the roof, compost, recycle, and organize book studies. Please do these things. Especially get rid of the Styrofoam cups. They are awful. For both people and our planet. I digress.

My point is not that these actions are too small. A garden is holy. A solar panel is testimony. Small actions can be the first step out of paralysis. The problem is when the first step becomes the destination. When an isolated action gets celebrated as the solution to a crisis of an entirely different scale, that is when it becomes pathetically puny.

Climate destruction is entangled with utilities, transportation, agriculture, housing, political power, and trillions of dollars of infrastructure.

I have begun to wonder whether much of what we call apathy is actually despair wearing sensible shoes. We ask people to confront an existential crisis and then hand them a recycling bin. Of course they lose energy. Their care is not too small. The container we give them is.

Organizing around campaigns has given me a bigger container.

Organizing asks different questions. What are we trying to win? And by when? Who has the power to make it happen? What power do we already have? Who else do we need? What could become possible if we acted together?

The relief is almost spiritual: your church does not have to save the world alone.

Let me give you an example. The campaign to pass the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act in Illinois. Faith in Place was one part of a much larger coalition, and importantly, we were not the protagonist of the story. Environmental justice leaders carried years of wisdom and vision. Policy experts understood the legislation. Organizers built relationships. Lobbyists knew the Capitol. Elected officials became champions on the inside. Communications teams shaped the public story. As faith communities, we brought clergy, voters, stories, moral language, and stubborn hope. We brought our part to a much larger whole.

Together, through years of norms building (oh my goodness, so many years of norms development), thousands of Teams meetings, and even more community listening sessions, we had enough.

Enough to change the energy policy of an entire state. Enough to create an estimated 280,000 green economy job years. Enough to invest $1.7 billion over a decade in equitable workforce training and communities navigating the clean energy transition. Enough to catalyze billions more in private investment. Enough to put Illinois on a path toward one million electric vehicles and eliminate an estimated 1.1 billion tons of power sector carbon emissions by 2045.

That is what happens when care gets organized at a scale big enough to meet the moment.

I see your solar panel on the church roof, and I love it. Now let’s connect that solar panel to a movement capable of changing how an entire state produces and uses energy.

Plant the pollinator garden. Put up the solar panels. Change the Styrofoam cups.

And then organize enough people into a campaign bigger than any one of us could build alone and change the whole damn system.

LET’S GOOOOOOOO.

Whew. Ok. I’m back.

Here’s another thought. Remember the ecological term “ecotone”? It describes a place where living systems meet. A forest meets a prairie. Land meets wetland. Different communities encounter one another at the edge.

Ecologists have another term for what can happen there: the edge effect. Sometimes where two ecosystems meet, the resulting edge becomes more diverse, more dynamic, more alive than either system on its own. Something becomes possible in the meeting that was not possible before.

This Substack is called The Weeding Edge, after all. Maybe I really should have seen this coming.

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That is what can happen when congregations get outside their own little (or even big) centers and learn to live in the ecotones around them. The pastor meets the organizer. The Green Team meets the policy advocate. The mosque meets the neighborhood coalition. The person who planted the pollinator garden meets the person who knows how to move a bill. The lawyer meets the preacher, the comms professional meets the activist, the teacher meets the organizer, the professional nonprofit meets the scrappy one.

Nobody has everything. Everybody brings something. The difference is the resource.

And maybe that is our own kind of edge effect: something becomes possible between us that none of us could produce alone.

Private concern becomes public power.

And, ok, one more thing. Maybe this is what our spiritual traditions have been trying to tell us all along. Separation is a lie. We become ourselves through relationships. Power does not merely live inside heroic individuals or heroic congregations waiting to be exercised. Power appears between us when we decide to act together.

So how do we get from a rustic, sweaty church camp with a handful of UCC congregations to changing the world?

Campaigns. Organizing. Getting beyond our own four walls and learning to live in the ecotones.

The pastor this week asked me what we do about apathy. And somewhere in answering him, I realized I am no longer sure apathy is the problem. Maybe people already care more than we know. Maybe they are waiting for a way to connect their care to something large enough to carry it.

Maybe our salvation begins when we stop caring alone.

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(The essay I spent years trying to disprove. And the mirror I eventually could not look away from.)

A long time ago, I was eighteen. Maybe nineteen. A freshman at the University of Illinois.

I remember a particular moment. A specific classroom. Fluorescent lights humming. A fan pushing warm air. Most students slumped in their seats. Some were sleeping. Not me. At least not that day. The climate change data upfront had me upright, sweaty, on edge.

The projections our professor showed us in charts twenty-four years ago that day are now our headlines: cities coughing beneath wildfire smoke, families fleeing floods, extreme heat killing people in their homes, fields of crops failing, coastlines disappearing, and entire communities facing migration and impossible insurance costs. Again and again, those losing the most did the least to cause it, while wealthier nations keep burning fossil fuels like there is no tomorrow.

What an apt figure of speech that turned out to be.

I was wide eyed in my Christian faith then. Earnest is the generous term. Theologically overcaffeinated is more accurate. I talked about Jesus with everyone. I was a golden retriever with a King James Bible.

Beneath all that intensity was a sincere hunger. I wanted my faith to matter. Heck, I wanted to matter. That day, a question broke open in me that has stayed ever since: Why was the church not talking about climate destruction and doing something about it?

Here was my logic. Jesus said that whatever we did unto the least of these, we did unto him. Our church fed people, prayed, built houses, and held the casseroles afterward in extremely high esteem. Yet here was suffering on a scale I could not comprehend, and the church was not only absent. It was hostile. Climate science was a liberal thing. It had nothing to do with faith.

That question convicted me and eventually carried me to seminary, though the road there was not scenic. After much prayer and anguish, I left the church that had formed me. The only official way out was excommunication, a magnificent word for a members only meeting where everyone was informed that I was no longer a “brother in the church.”

That classroom question compelled me to leave certainty, community, and the only spiritual home I had known. My not yet fully formed brain also assumed I was giving up my best chance of finding a wife. Our church community did not date. We had a fascinating marriage by faith system that I will explain another time.

The point is, I believed and felt at that moment that I was leaving everything to pursue this question. Off to seminary I went.

Paid subscribers will receive early chapters from the book I am writing, including the longer and considerably stranger story of how I requested my own excommunication.

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Seminary gave me language for the question. Nearly every conversation about Christian environmental ethics began with Lynn White’s essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” Every lecture. Every book. Every discussion. By year two, I wondered whether the entire field had agreed to write the same opening sentence.

White argued that Western Christianity had created the ecological crisis by telling a story in which humans stood apart from nature, above it, and entitled to use it. God was up there. Humans were down here, but still above everything else. Nature was over there, looking scenic and waiting to become lumber.

For years, my professors, colleagues, and I pushed back against White’s thesis. He had to be wrong. Had to be. Christianity could not be the problem. I searched the Bible for greener interpretations and pointed toward saints, mystics, and theologians who understood creation differently. Some of that resistance was intellectually honest.

Much of it was fear.

White was not only criticizing an idea. He was threatening the story that had given me certainty, identity, and belonging. I could not yet see that I had inherited the Christianity he was describing: a faith colonized by empire, shaped to serve violent men and the institutions built around them, then presented to us as the will of God. It taught us to distrust our bodies, submit to domination, and look beyond this world for salvation. I thought I was defending Christianity.

I was defending what had been done to it.

Eventually, I had to admit that White named something real. A colonized and diseased Christianity had taken a Bible overflowing with gardens, rivers, animals, soil, Sabbath, incarnation, and resurrection and turned it into an evacuation plan. We were taught that the most important truth about us was that we were bad. Bad, bad, bad. God was outside us, creation was beneath us, and salvation meant being rescued from both.

That is a strange story to tell about a faith built around incarnation.

Or perhaps it is not so strange once you notice how useful it is to empire. If salvation happens somewhere else, violent men can do almost anything they want here.

But God does not remain at a safe distance shouting instructions for escaping the world. God becomes flesh. Breathes air. Drinks water. Touches soil. Enters a body and enters a world God has already called good. The problem was not that we needed grace. It was that grace had been described as rescue from our bodies, our neighbors, and the earth itself.

Empires, powerful men, and the religious authorities who blessed them took a story of divine intimacy and rearranged it into a chain of command: men over women, white people over everyone else, humanity over creation. Salvation was severed from creation, spirit from body, and people from land. Once the world becomes matter beneath us instead of a community around us, everything can become a resource. Land. Bodies. Labor. Others.

It was one thing to ask why the church was late to the emergency. It was another to recognize that distorted Christianity had started the fire.

I have spent much of my life since then working with religious communities through Faith in Place. Many have named and rejected empire’s colonized version of the gospel. I have watched and partnered with congregations install solar panels, fight pollution, organize voters, and stand alongside communities treated as acceptable sacrifices. What keeps me in the work is participating with people of faith who are actively inhabiting another story: land as neighbor rather than property, political action as love, and frontline communities as partners rather than charity projects.

We need better laws, cleaner energy, and enough pressure to make elected officials suddenly discover they have always cared about the environment. But policy is not enough. Laws grow from values, economies from desires, and institutions from stories about who matters and what the world is for.

The crisis beneath the climate crisis is spiritual.

Reading Rainn Wilson’s Soul Boom this week, I recognized another version of what White named. Human beings live inside stories. If we imagine ourselves as isolated individuals competing for comfort and status, we will build systems that reward consumption and domination. Eventually, the world outside us begins to resemble the story inside us.

The climate crisis is the story of separation made atmospheric. It happens when we forget that our bodies are made of soil and water, that our breath comes through forests and oceans. We imagine ourselves independent from the earth and one another. Then we build an economy around the fantasy.

The best of our religious traditions carry practices capable of healing this separation. Sabbath refuses the belief that land, workers, bodies, or economies must produce without end. Communion reminds us that life is received, broken, shared, and made whole in relationship. These are not quaint examples of rituals added to the serious work of climate policy. They are practices for becoming people who know how to belong.

Perhaps salvation was never about being extracted from the world. Perhaps it is about being restored to relationship within it: with God, with one another, with our bodies, and with the soil and water that make life possible. Grace is not God arriving from far away to rescue us from being creatures. Grace is God meeting us in our creatureliness and calling us back into communion.

At eighteen, I thought climate change was an enormous problem the church had failed to care about. What do I think now? I think climate change exposes a deeper problem: a faith that preaches love of neighbor while teaching us to imagine our neighbors, our bodies, and the earth itself as separate from us.

The work before us is not simply to care more about a crisis happening somewhere out there. It is to become a people who know there is no “out there.”

Back in that classroom, the fan kept pushing the same warm air over all of us. I thought I was learning about a crisis happening somewhere else.

What I know now is that I was already breathing it.

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As usual, I had planned to publish a new essay this morning. But I have been sick this week, right in the middle of Climate Week events in Chicago, so instead I am reposting one of my favorite early essays from The Weeding Edge, first published back in March.

The essay is, fittingly, about getting sick during another local climate and clean energy conference.

The timing feels suspiciously appropriate. Maybe my immune system has developed a principled opposition to local climate and clean energy gatherings?

There is also a remarkable update to the story. On Friday, I learned that a generous donor who heard about this speech from a colleague has now funded the full project. More on that at the end

Give it a read, and let me know in the comments what you think about the essay, this wonderfully strange turn of events, and this increasingly elaborate experiment in turning asthma, theology, climate work, and bad timing into essays.

March 2, 2026

I regret to inform you that my lungs remain the main character.

I know. Another asthma post. I, too, would prefer new content. Preferably stories where I am strong, eloquent, and breathing normally. But alas. Here we are again.

Quick refresher. Two weeks ago: a flu-inspired asthma flare-up. ER visit. Full respiratory reboot. Steroids for a week. Nebulizer as needed. I learned prednisone is basically espresso with a side of anxiety. I did not sleep. At all. Very productive, actually. Which may explain the recent flood of social media posts. After all, at 2:47 a.m., everything feels profound.

After a week, the steroids ended. But each morning still required the inhaler, then the nebulizer, just to get my lungs calm enough to function like a normal adult. And in that second week, without prednisone buffering things, the nebulizer introduced a new twist.

It took my voice.

Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. Not in some poetic “finding my voice” sense. Just a basic side effect. Love that for me.

Voice gone. Like my cell service every time I drive under the 47th Street bridge in Hyde Park.

Oh, and of course this happened the week of a big Midwest conference of clean energy advocates and funders. The work week where I would really like to show up polished and persuasive, representing Faith in Place well.

Instead, I sounded like I’d been chain-smoking since the Carter administration.

Wednesday I navigated. Folks were gracious. It truly is a relationship-centered community of powerful and brilliant clean energy partners. Thursday my voice declined to utter silence. By Friday? That was the question looming in my mind that Thursday morning. Because Friday morning I was a finalist in a Shark Tank–style foundation pitch. Five-minute speech. $25k for Faith in Place on the line.

I had worked hard on that speech with our team. Very me. Very reliant on my best preacher voice.

Sigh.

So Thursday morning I texted Kira, Faith in Place’s Comms and Strategy Director: “I have no voice. Cool. Can you give the pitch instead of me?”

No hesitation. Let’s go. We’ve got this.

We met that afternoon. Somewhere between script edits, we had an idea. What if Kira gives the speech… and I stand next to her holding ridiculous one-word placards? Visual punchlines. If I couldn’t talk, I could at least become a prop.

Kira ran to the store that night for poster board. We rewrote the speech. We laughed while brainstorming what words belonged on the placards. We practiced first thing the next morning.

Then we walked on stage and did it.

It was fun. It was weird. It was better than me solo wheezing through five strained minutes sounding like a haunted harmonica.

Honestly, it was better than what we originally planned. We didn’t walk away with the $25k. But we walked away reminded that flexibility always wins over perfection.

Voice still croaky.

Our team is not.

Placards ready, just in case.

An Update

Apparently, the placards kept working long after we left the stage.

On Friday, I learned that someone who had heard about the speech from a colleague decided to fund the full project. We may not have walked away from the competition with the $25,000, but the project found its funding anyway.

It is a fitting ending for a story about plans falling apart and something better emerging because other people stepped forward.

Voice still unreliable.

Team still strong.

Project now funded.

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(A lifeguard rows through wildfire smoke over Lake Michigan on Chicago’s North Side. Photo credit: Jen Walling)

Fires Within

Michigan Avenue. Ten floors up. Hundreds of chairs faced windows where Lake Michigan rested in the distance. Hands down, the best view at any public hearing this side of the Mississippi.

We gathered Wednesday evening because Peoples Gas wanted Chicago families to pay another $202 million each year for gas service. Then, just before the hearing, the company lowered its request to $144 million. Maybe the growing public backlash finally reminded them that the affordability crisis was more than a memo to ignore. I was not impressed by the sudden performance of restraint. Trimming an excessive demand at the eleventh hour does not make it reasonable.

At the front, two regulators sat to the left. Two Peoples Gas representatives sat to the right, wearing heavily trained poker faces. A single microphone for the public faced them from the center aisle. No podium. A podium invites a person to settle in. The shot clock did the opposite. Three minutes. Then two. Then one. Time up.

This past winter, Faith in Place, the nonprofit organization I serve through my ministry, worked with Chicago faith communities to test indoor air in 101 homes served by Peoples Gas. With scientists documenting the risks of burning gas in our furnaces and stoves, and industry representatives working hard to dispute them, we decided to find out for ourselves.

We bought professional air monitors costing nearly $4,000 each. That is the kind of expensive that makes nonprofit people like me nervous every time one crosses a room. There were careful instructions. Calibration. Protective cases. More than one silent prayer that nobody dropped anything.

Knowing the truth about the air our communities breathe was worth the investment and the nerves.

Our findings were startling and deeply concerning.

In more than half of the kitchens, nitrogen dioxide rose above the Environmental Protection Agency’s one hour outdoor standard after only 30 minutes of cooking. Nitrogen dioxide irritates and inflames the airways, worsens coughing and wheezing, reduces lung function and can trigger asthma attacks.

We also detected concerning carbon monoxide readings around gas burning equipment in eight in ten homes, even though standard alarms did not sound. Carbon monoxide interferes with the blood’s ability to carry oxygen. Exposure can cause headaches, fatigue, dizziness and confusion. At high levels, it can kill. The readings did not trigger standard alarms, yet they revealed pollution families could neither see nor smell.

About an hour into the hearing, they called my name. I used my three minutes to lay out our findings and looked directly at the Peoples Gas representatives as I concluded:

“Peoples Gas is asking our families to pay more for an outdated, dangerous and dirty system that delivers pollution linked to asthma attacks right into our kitchens. There is something morally upside down about that.”

I thought I saw a wince. Maybe that was projection. Their poker face training must be top notch.

Perhaps that is how systems like this endure: responsibility disappears behind procedure. The extra charge on a family becomes a filing. The pollution becomes a data point. The asthma becomes someone else’s unfortunate circumstance. By the time everyone has done their job, no one feels responsible for the whole thing.

The testimony continued into the night. Three minutes at a time, Chicago told the truth about unaffordable bills and the absurdity of pouring more money into a system becoming more expensive and obsolete.

Through the east windows, I watched the Wednesday night fireworks burst over Navy Pier as the final speakers finished. There was something poetic about watching controlled explosions light the sky while we argued over paying for the fires inside our homes.

Then the room emptied and the microphone went quiet.

Thank you, truly, for reading this free Sunday essay. Paid subscribers receive early access to book chapters and a free copy when the book is published. You can support this writing by becoming a paid subscriber here.

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Fires Without

Under the cover of darkness that night, smoke from wildfires up north settled over the city.

I woke up feeling it in my lungs. I have severe asthma, so air pollution does not remain theoretical for long. It becomes pressure in my chest. Fatigue. The small negotiation of every breath.

At home, one of my four year old twin daughters knows how to help set up the nebulizer in what we call Daddy’s cozy couch corner. She pours in the liquid, helps screw on the lid and waits for the machine’s low mechanical hum. She has her momma’s nursing instinct.

It is very sweet. It is also heartbreaking. Breath is never abstract when it belongs to someone you love.

By mid July, nearly 850 wildfires were burning across Canada, more than 180 in Ontario. A warming climate does not light every match, but it dries vegetation, lengthens fire seasons and creates more days when a spark can become a catastrophe.

Even as the forests burned, Canada moved forward with plans for a pipeline designed to carry one million barrels of oil each day from Alberta toward the Pacific. A pipeline is a promise to keep burning for decades.

The contradiction traveled south with the smoke. Canada was planning a new artery for oil while its forests burned. In Chicago, Peoples Gas was asking families to provide another $144 million for its gas system while our kitchens filled with the pollution it delivers.

Leaders name these projects as investments. And our lungs experience the returns.

As wildfire smoke blanketed Chicago, the advice was familiar. Stay inside. Close the windows. Find cleaner air. Yet cleaner air is not guaranteed by a front door.

Gas stoves and other unvented appliances can release nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and particle pollution into rooms where our children eat breakfast, finish homework and tell us about their day. One peer reviewed analysis estimated that gas stove use is associated with roughly one in five childhood asthma cases in Illinois.

Read that again. One in five.

Outside air pollution rightly becomes a public emergency. Phones buzz. Schools cancel activities. Chicago beaches close. News stations explain the air quality index. But indoor air pollution settles more quietly into the ordinary rhythms of home. A little blue campfire beneath a pan. A child coughing at night. A parent opening a window in January because the kitchen feels wrong.

The harm follows the same old fault lines. Renters cannot simply replace a stove or cut a vent through the wall. Families with less money have fewer ways to purchase cleaner air. Communities of color already breathe the exhaust of highways, industry and aging buildings, while children, older adults and people with asthma feel the damage first. The people with the least control over their homes are too often asked to carry the greatest burden in their lungs.

This spring, Illinois lawmakers considered the Family Indoor Air Protection Act, which would require a simple warning label on newly sold gas appliances that are not vented outdoors. Even this basic act of consumer transparency and choice stalled at the Statehouse. Now families denied a basic warning are being asked to invest more deeply in the system carrying the risk into their homes.

The wildfires up north and the little blue fires in our kitchens differ in scale and chemistry. Yet both reveal how thoroughly we have arranged modern life around combustion and asked human lungs, living forests and a warming atmosphere to absorb the cost.

Ordering modern life around combustion once looked like progress. Fire cooked food, heated homes, forged steel, moved people and helped build extraordinary wealth. But the bargain was never evenly made. Some people accumulated the profits while others lived beside refineries, highways, pipelines and polluted buildings. Some communities surrendered far more of their lungs than others, often without ever being asked.

Combustion carried us forward. It does not follow that we must remain there. Progress only remains progress when we keep moving.

Heat pumps, induction stoves, energy efficiency and cleaner electricity can keep our homes warm and food cooking. They can support a robust workforce, create good jobs and allow companies to prosper without treating our lungs and climate as acceptable business expenses. Our leaders should invest on both sides of the front door: cutting the pollution that fuels wildfire smoke outside while helping families create healthier air inside. The Illinois Commerce Commission should reject the Peoples Gas rate hike, Illinois lawmakers should pass the Family Indoor Air Protection Act, and Canada and the rest of us must stop pouring money into pipelines that lock in decades more combustion. For the love of God and all things holy, let us invest in the future instead of financing the fires consuming it.

My daughter has already learned the choreography of medicine cups, masks and the low mechanical hum of a nebulizer. I would rather she spend these fading summer nights learning to write her name, tell a joke and catch fireflies. Every child deserves air outside that is safe enough to run through and air inside that is safe enough to sleep in, breathing so easily they can remain absorbed in the ordinary wonder of being a child.

I love hearing from you. Share your reflections in the comments.

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(With Faith in Place colleagues at the Eldorado Solar Project near Eldorado, a small southern Illinois town of about 3,700 people. The 342 megawatt project is expected to generate $42 million in local tax revenue over its lifetime, including $23 million for local schools. In its first year of operation, it also donated approximately $1.5 million to youth education, workforce development, energy bill savings, and other community needs.)

So this happened. I was a much, much younger climate activist. At the time, my immediate family attended a large evangelical church near Peoria, Illinois, that had grown dramatically. Over the years, the congregation had added services, planted churches, and moved into a sprawling new campus. Twelve hundred parking spots sort of big. With my parents’ help, I was able to set up a one-on-one meeting with the senior pastor, dreaming that I might use the time to persuade him to take climate action as an outgrowth of our shared Christian faith. To no one’s surprise except mine, I did not succeed. But I remember one image from that meeting. He asked me to picture the Earth at night. The places lit up with cities and highways were more prosperous. The places left dark were struggling with poverty. His Christian economic imagination saw the need to put lights where there were none, and fossil fuels were the most realistic way to turn them on.

This also happened. Several years later, I had moved to Chicago to lead the organization I serve, and we had just helped pass the Illinois Future Energy Jobs Act, opening the door much wider to wind and solar in Illinois. I cared especially about the hard won provisions we pushed to connect people returning home from prison with solar jobs and to move our electricity away from dirty, asthma causing coal. I was so excited about these victories that I was likely insufferable. Soon afterward, I was back in my small rural hometown for a campout with high school friends. While we fished from a canoe in a farm pond, I eagerly told a guy a few years younger than me about our victory. He stared back at me and said, “I’m trying to decide whether to drown you now or kill you later.” Then he explained. “Coal is the only thing we have left in rural America.”

I have been thinking about both stories this week. One involved a pastor picturing communities denied electricity and, with it, economic opportunity. The other involved a small town man afraid that the place where we had grown up was losing one of the last industries holding it together. Both men were asking the same moral question: Who is going to be asked to live with less? Beneath both concerns flowed the same current: climate action is punishment.

I suspect that same concern is helping drive the current turn toward climate hushing. The example that makes me most anxious is Democratic candidates being advised to practice climate hushing. Talk about affordability instead of climate, as though a stable climate and an affordable life have joined separate political parties. My concern is that when leaders who care remain quiet, their silence gets mistaken for indifference. Silence does not reassure people. It simply makes our concern invisible. Meanwhile, the climate itself has declined to participate in any form of hushing. It keeps shouting that our systems are breaking as intensifying heat waves, floods, fires, and storms arrive with the social grace of a playground bully fresh out of detention.

Thinking about these two stories helped me slow down my frustration with the current climate hushing and consider more carefully the wisdom buried inside the fear. For much of its history, the climate movement has, intentionally or unintentionally, described climate action as punishment. Drive less. Fly less. Eat less. Buy less. Want less. I believe some of that instinct is right, especially when we consider that wealthy Americans consume far more than our share and do not seem any happier for it. Any honest climate future will ask more of those with yachts, private jets, and more money than God. But we have become so practiced at describing what must be surrendered that we have forgotten to describe what ordinary people might receive.

I keep thinking about that pastor and that conversation in the canoe. Fossil energy used to be relatively cheap and renewable energy relatively expensive. Climate policy sounded like paying more and using less. But the ground has shifted. Solar and wind are now among the cheapest ways to produce new electricity. Did you know that Australia is producing so much solar power during the day that households are being offered free electricity for several hours in the middle of the day? How does free electricity sound? Pretty good, actually.

My electric Hyundai Ioniq 5 is the best car I have ever owned. Nearly every EV owner I know tells some version of this story. It is fast, quiet, and more fun than a climate conscious vehicle has any theological right to be. Did I mention that it is fast? I love it. The cleaner option can also be the better option. Heat pumps warm and cool homes efficiently. Induction stoves boil water faster without the asthma causing pollution of an indoor campfire. These things are not grim substitutes we must endure for the sake of our shared home. Once we get over the predictable hump of learning something new, many of these technologies are simply better. Easier to maintain. Cheaper to operate. Faster. Cleaner.

Rural America needs jobs and a tax base, and my fishing companion, can I call him that if he was considering drowning me, was tapping into the deep history of rural economic abandonment. But clean energy can offer another future. Take Illinois, where a study of the state’s largest wind and solar projects found that they had paid more than $478 million in local property taxes by 2022, including $59.1 million in that year alone. More than $302 million went to school districts. And that is where the study ends. Since October 2022, Illinois solar capacity has nearly tripled. That means classrooms, teachers, firehouses, and a new tax base, alongside steady income for participating farmers, in communities too often told that decline is their destiny.

The pastor was on to something too, though the imagination exercise was incomplete. Darkness on a map does not mean the absence of wisdom, culture, community, or life, and flourishing does not require copying American waste. But neither should we romanticize energy poverty. Take the refrigerator. How much can it change for a family? It stores vaccines and insulin. It keeps food fresh. Bill McKibben, whose recent conversation with Ezra Klein inspired much of this essay, told of visiting a village in Ghana where a solar microgrid brought refrigeration. His hosts kept proudly bringing him bottles of cold water, a simple sign of what clean energy had made possible for their community.

Why not use energy that does not have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz? The sun does not send a fuel bill, and no foreign government can use it as a poker chip in war.

The fossil fuel industry could not be more threatened by this abundant future, which helps explain the ferocity of the backlash and even the climate hushing talking points it is helping to fuel. Oil executives donated record sums to our current president, and his administration has responded by spending billions attacking wind power and propping up coal, even as critics warn that these policies are raising Americans’ bills. The damage is real, but the industry cannot make an old technology young again. It can delay the flourishing of the sun. It cannot stop the sun from rising.

Sunlight is freely given, but that does not mean its benefits will be freely shared. Solar panels do not decide who owns them, who gets hired, whose bills fall, or which communities receive investment. That still requires organizing, public policy, and enough people power to insist that everyone belongs in the future we are building.

I wish I could return to those earlier conversations. I would tell the pastor that he was right about the lights. I would tell the man in the canoe that he was right to fear his community being abandoned. Then I would tell them both that the assumption beneath the choice we thought we faced was wrong.

Climate action is not punishment. We do not need fewer lights. We need more lights, less smoke, and enough for all of us to flourish.

(Frederick Douglass with Helen Pitts Douglass and Eva Pitts, Cedar Hill, ca. 1880s. National Park Service, Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.)

Our country turned 250 this weekend, and many of us are tired in a place sleep does not reach.

The birthday brought songs, speeches, flags, family arguments, fireworks, and sheet cakes with frosting thick enough that I wonder if it should require a special zoning permit. Some of it was sweet, especially time with family and friends. Some of it was bracing, especially the essays and sermons in my inbox telling the stories of our history and trying to make sense of what is being asked of us now. Much of it is exhausting, loving a country we cannot explain to our children, or ourselves, unless we tell the truth about the violence beneath the celebration. That kind of truth telling often requires a second cup of coffee for courage, or something stronger.

That exhaustion is a clue. We are tired because too much remains unlamented. The same wounds keep getting reopened for political gain. The same fears keep blooming for the purpose of domination. The same violent weeds keep coming back.

A life of gardening adventures has taught me that weeds are rarely as surface level as they appear. I am currently gardenless in Chicago, awkward for someone who named his Substack newsletter The Weeding Edge, but I grew up weeding large vegetable gardens, a loathed chore that formed me against my will, and adulthood has included enough improvised garden experiments to keep the title from being total fraud. I learned early that you can make a garden bed look better quickly by snapping off the green weeds you see.

Then morning comes, and the green shoot is back. The life of the thing was lower down, hidden in the soil, gathering morning strength while I admired the temporary evening cleanliness of the garden bed.

I have started to think of our country that way too. The visible weeds have names we recognize: cruelty, white supremacy, greed, Christian nationalism, racism, violence, and fear dressed up as patriotism. Those weeds did not simply appear. Many were planted and tended across 250 years by men with power, for a purpose. Violent purposes were excused as economics, progress, security, and order. Freedom was planted over land and labor already taken.

And pain gathers around those roots.

Pain itself is not the enemy. Pain is often an invitation to tell the truth. Pain can become wisdom, compassion, solidarity, and repair. And here is a really important point: the pain of someone whose land or body was taken is not the same as the discomfort of someone being asked to tell the truth about it. The wound of being crushed by violence is not the same as the fear of losing power. Forgetting those differences is one way we can lie to ourselves.

The danger to any real liberty and justice for all is pain buried by power and protected by myth. Pain that cannot be told truthfully. Pain that cannot be lamented. Pain that gets renamed as tradition, patriotism, order, realism, even faithfulness. That kind of pain feeds violent weeds in the dark until one day we look around, exhausted, wondering why the same weeds keep coming back.

We have all seen this in our own lives and homes. A person under unbearable pain cannot face it and turns toward numbness. A family refuses to grieve a loss, and everyone learns to walk around the wound. A church avoids confession and calls the silence peace. A leader never tends their own fear and makes everyone else live inside it. A nation refuses to lament what it has done and starts calling the pain tradition.

Lord, have mercy on all of us.

This is why so many of us are tired. We care deeply, and still cruelty keeps roaring back. Violence keeps roaring back. Randy Woodley recently reminded his readers that, depending how one counts, the United States has been at war for roughly 222 of its 250 years. A nation does not live that way by accident. Something underground is feeding what keeps breaking through.

We keep cutting the stem of violence and wondering why the garden will not heal.

Our country has real beauty. There are neighbors with jumper cables, teachers buying classroom supplies, nurses remembering names, librarians guarding wonder, organizers knocking doors, grandmothers praying with casseroles, pastors and teachers refusing to let us forget our history, and children inviting other children to join them in drawing chalk rainbows.

There is beauty here, and there is buried pain.

The soil remembers those who were removed. The soil remembers those who were enslaved. The soil remembers children taken, languages punished, treaties broken, labor stolen, bodies made into wealth, and land called empty because conquest needed a cleaner story. That same soil keeps producing the violent weeds we see today. Unless we tend the deeper roots, we will keep repeating the same old patterns.

Frederick Douglass refused to let the United States hide inside its favorite story about itself. On July 5, 1852, he asked what the Fourth of July was to the enslaved. I sort of wish this were required reading every July 4th weekend. His question was lament sharpened into truth. What is freedom when its language protects someone else’s domination? He asked because he loved freedom too much to let a slaveholding nation sing off key.

Lament is what happens when love refuses to lie. Those of us who lament are participating in a deeply patriotic act. Lament tells the truth in the presence of God. It begins the work of repair.

Jesus never seemed confused about wounds. He touched them. He named them. He listened to people who had been told to be quiet. He wept. He got angry. He exposed powers dressed in religious respectability. He forgave without pretending the cross was anything other than an execution tool of empire. He brought buried pain into the open when respectable people and clergy would have preferred everyone calm down.

This is slow gardening work, which is unfortunate because I prefer immediate holiness and national repair by Monday afternoon. The roots in our soil need deeper tending. We yank. The stem snaps. We sigh in a way that is technically prayer. We loosen the soil. We go deeper.

It is not lost on me that a garden needs more than weeding. It needs planting. Compost, water, attention, patience, and the daily practice of relationship. It needs truth planted where denial used to grow. Repair planted where theft once took root. Gratitude planted where entitlement exhausted the ground. Courage planted where fear kept reseeding itself.

The United States at 250 needs people willing to tend the roots and plant toward life. People willing to lament pain before it becomes cruelty again. People willing to tell the truth about the land. People willing to dig at the roots of supremacy, domination, extraction, greed, and fear.

I still believe this garden can flourish.

But after the fireworks this weekend, the roots remain.

The question is whether we will keep hiding the weeds beneath patriotic flowers, or become gardeners willing to tend the soil deeply enough for freedom and equality to take root for all.

Questions for the garden

A few questions I’m carrying today:

• Where are you tempted to “keep the peace” instead of telling the truth?

• What do you reach for when pain starts asking to be heard?

• What are you trying to plant right now, in yourself, your family, your community, or this country?

I’d love to hear what you are noticing.

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(Ida and Irene, four and a half, on a hiking adventure with Dad near Lake Michigan)

Dear Ida and Irene,

You are four and a half now. Almost five! Impossible. In my imagination, you are somehow still babies and already teenagers. My experts on yogurt pouches, unicorn dresses, butt-busters in the pool, coloring, and all things turtles.

Every so often, when you walk too close to the sidewalk edge, when we are in a busy parking lot and I reach for your hands, or when we are getting bikes out and you are protesting your helmets, I return to Dad’s favorite question.

“What is Dad’s number one job?”

And you both know the answer I have taught you.

“To keep us safe.”

You say it with such confidence now that I almost believe I can do it. I can hold your hands. I can cut your grapes. I can insist on helmets. I can scan the playground like a Secret Service agent who holsters applesauce and yogurt pouches. I can remind you that streets are for cars, stoves are hot, pools require grownups, and yes, shoes are generally expected before we leave the house.

But this Father’s Day, I want to write to your future selves about something I am still learning. Keeping you safe is my first dad job. It is not my only one.

The deeper calling is to cultivate the conditions for your becoming. To bear witness as you rise, each of you, your own unique wave in this world. And, God help me, to do that without making you carry my fears, my wounds, my anxiety, or my unfinished business.

I do not promise an unbroken world. That would be silly. But I can help you know you belong to love, and I hope that belonging helps you stay awake, curious, tender, and free. Free with laughter and tears. Free to love yourselves without needing the whole internet to clap for you first.

You are growing up in a world that pushes us more and more to stare at screens and count ourselves by numbers. Likes. Followers. Subscribers. Steps. Calories. Scores. Ratings. Rankings. Maxing this and maxing that. The whole world is becoming like one long preschool sticker chart, except nobody ever gets enough stickers and somehow everybody is still so exhausted.

You know your dad is spiritual, even if I do not say much to you about it yet. It flows through me when I ask you to pause on hikes to say hello to trees, when I ask you to stop and help me name a flower, and when I sit in my cozy couch corner with a book, resisting the little glowing rectangle that keeps calling me away from the people and the world right in front of me. Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I do not. This, too, is a daily spiritual struggle.

And just as I want to keep you safe from cars in the street, hot stoves, deep water, and the frightening lessons from those awful preschool shooter drills, I also want to help protect you from religion that can harm your spirit.

I know because I have tasted more than a healthy portion from the buffet of American religion. There is a confused kind of religion built on escape. It says this world is awful, you are awful, and someday, if you believe the right things, you can get out of here.

That kind of religion is attractive because it promises a false safety from the disturbing things. It does not, however, free us. It numbs us while stirring up more anxiety. It turns God into a cosmic report card. And once God becomes a report card, everybody starts desperately cheating and demanding that everyone else conform to their path.

But there is another way. For me, the lucky one who gets to be your dad, that is the way of Jesus. The Jesus I keep trying to follow does not protect us from the world by teaching us to escape it. He protects our capacity to love it. He sends us outward to resist cruelty, protect the vulnerable, love our neighbors, and say no to greed and domination. And he sustains that work by calling us inward, close as breath, near as the ground beneath our feet, into silence, wonder, rest, and oneness with Christ.

Wendell Berry, and yes, someday I look forward to you rolling your eyes and saying, “Dad, stop quoting Wendell Berry,” once wrote that “the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,” but by “a spiritual journey...of one inch,” a journey that brings us back over and over to the ground beneath our feet and teaches us to be at home. Home. Here. Present in this moment. Belonging together in the now.

I have learned over time that I cannot think my way back to God. I have tried. Your dad can overthink almost anything. But usually what I need is more ordinary and more embodied. I need water. I need trees. I need breath. I need my feet on the ground. I need the world God made to remind me that I am not separate from it.

This Father’s Day I am coming home to you from a camping trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the land touches Lake Superior. It was a cold fifty to sixty degrees outside, and I still got into the even colder water each day to submerge myself in her arms.

I did it because I need to remember. I need to fill my cup back up as I seek to be the best dad I can be to you. I need the shock of that water to wake me up. I need to feel my body held by something so much bigger than me, ancient and alive. I need to remember that the lake, and all creation, is not scenery. She is life. She is relation. She is part of the great web of Christ’s creation that holds us, feeds us, humbles us, and calls us into oneness with her, with each other, and with ourselves.

That is what I mean by being alive to the world. Not admiring it from a safe distance. Not escaping it by obsessing over some imagined future from this life. Belonging to it here and now. Letting it reach you. Letting it change what you love and how you live. Today.

For a little while, our lives rise up out of the water like waves. We have shape. We shimmer in the light. We move toward the shore. And then, when our wave has passed, we return to the water we were part of all along.

That comforts me. It means our lives are precious not because they last forever, but because they are part of everything. Ida, Irene, you belong to God, to the earth, to each other, and to the great waters of love from which all life rises and to which all life returns.

So yes, my loves, Dad’s number one job is to keep you safe. But real safety is not being kept from the world. Real safety is belonging deeply enough to engage it, inch by inch, day by day, turning toward home over and over again.

You two have already given me more joy than I knew one heart could hold. I love being your dad. I love the way you run toward the world, ask questions, and turn ordinary rooms into hospitals, restaurants, rocket ships, animal clinics, and occasional disaster zones. I love you for who you are and for who you are becoming.

And I cannot wait to see you today and the next day. For as long as we get to keep riding this wave together. For as long as we have shape. For as long as we have breath. For as long as we are given to flow together in these vast and holy waters of love.

Love,

Dad

(Pete the Pelican on Pompano Pier, wondering who made the sargassum mess on his favorite beach.)

The other day one of my four year old twins tearfully asked me if I ever broke things as a child. This was right after she dropped and broke a small glass turtle that had become dear to her. Yes, my love. In fact, your dad was very good at breaking things.

One December, right before my dad was piling us boys and Mom into the van for a long vacation road trip, I was outside in the cold shooting hoops because I was just that dedicated to becoming a basketball star. I threw a stylish behind the back pass, aiming for the brick wall. It hit the office window. Crash. Dad boarded it up with plywood before we left.

Another time, maybe right before that same trip, I got a remote control car for Christmas. I was downstairs zooming it back and forth across the concrete when it clipped the leg of a folding table holding a jungle of houseplants. I watched in horror as the table tipped, paused, and then surrendered.

Crash.

Crash.

CRASH!

Mom came running down the stairs. Soil everywhere. Leaves everywhere. The brooms and sweepers came out.

We worked as a family to clean up my messes. Then we piled into the van, and Dad drove through the night, pointing us south until the air smelled like salt.

The Florida ocean ignited an exuberant wildness in us boys. We ran into the waves and laughed as they turned us upside down and spun us like we were trapped in a washing machine. Eventually we found cheap masks and snorkels, and a whole new world opened beneath us. We swam far enough from shore to make both Mom and the lifeguards nervous.

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We still tell stories about the barracuda we met under an old rusty pipe. We still remember dropped snorkels retrieved from fifteen feet down. The water was scary, but that did not matter. The adventure was not to be missed.

Those early experiences created a mysterious love of the ocean in all of us. Her mystery. Her danger. Her invitation. I think it is why we all scuba dive today, now with kids, nephews, and nieces. Somewhere in that holy foolishness, the ocean became part of our family story.

Which is why, on my recent trip back to that same beach of my childhood memories, all that sargassum got my attention. Thick brown mats of it had washed over the shore and up the beach.

The local paper, The New Pelican, put it on the cover: “It Just Keeps on A Comin’.” I noticed right away that the article does not say climate change. Not once. But it does talk about warming waters, higher volumes of seaweed, beach crews trying to keep up, and cleaning a beach without harming the life that belongs there.

It talks about a beloved place becoming harder to care for.

Sometimes climate change shows up as a slow apocalypse. Seaweed on the beach that, if left too long, decomposes and smells of rotten eggs. Seaweed that threatens local tourism. Seaweed that requires cleanup. Rakes. Tractors. Increased budgets. People asking, “Was it always like this?”

Out in the open ocean, sargassum is habitat. Fish, turtles, crabs, birds, and small creatures depend on it. The problem is not sargassum itself. The problem is too much of a good thing in the wrong place. Warmer waters from climate pollution, combined with nutrient runoff, help create the conditions for a sargassum siege.

In ecology, the right amount matters. Rain waters the earth, but too much floods the house. Heat helps things grow, but too much becomes dangerous for life. Seaweed provides habitat, but too much becomes a rotting wall between a child and the water. Climate change takes what we love and changes the conditions that make love possible.

But here is the part I keep thinking about. When I broke the window, Dad did not gather the family and announce a new household policy against basketball. He did not say, “Well, I guess we cannot have windows anymore.” He said basketballs belong on the driveway, not against the house. Then he got plywood and fixed the window.

When I knocked over the plant table, nobody launched a campaign about personal responsibility for houseplant safety. The brooms came out. I broke it. I had to do what I could to help clean it up.

You make the mess, you help fix the mess.

And yet, when big polluters break things, the message somehow comes back to the rest of us. Use the paper straw. Bring the tote bag. Take shorter showers. You, ordinary person in the checkout line, must save the world through better consumer choices.

Fine. Good. I am not against those things. I take personal responsibility. But I refuse to ignore those who caused the mess in the first place and continue to cause it. Yes, I am looking at you, corporate polluters.

We are dealing with systems. Fossil fuels. Fertilizer runoff. Sewage. Coastal development. Political choices that allow powerful industries to treat our living world as disposable. Corporations that make a gigantic mess, pocket the profits, and hand the mop to everyone else.

The people who live by and vacation at the beach did not cause the sargassum stink. But here they are, cleaning it up. Raking the sand. Paying the bills. Managing the smell. Protecting the tourists. Protecting the turtles. Protecting a place they love from a mess they did not make.

That is what gets me. My childhood love of the ocean makes me notice the sargassum. It makes me grieve it. It makes me want to fix what is broken. I want children with cheap snorkel masks to swim too far from shore and come back wide eyed with stories. I want our children to inherit a world that can still scare them in the holy way.

I want climate polluters to pay to clean up the mess they made for their profit and at our expense. If my daughter has to learn responsibility from a broken glass turtle, surely polluters can learn it from causing a warming ocean.

So here is my question for you. I would love to hear from you in the comments. What is one thing you love that climate change threatens? A beach. A reef. A river. A garden. A food. A season. A drink. Hello, coffee.

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What have you noticed changing? What do you want protected? Who should help clean up the mess?

Name it. Love it. Protect it. Then join me in advocating for policies that make those who created the mess help clean it up.

When you break the window, you board it up and replace it. When you knock over the plants, you sweep the floor. When polluters break the things we love, stop handing the cleanup bill to the community. Tell the truth. You made the mess. Now help clean it up.

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(Gab and me on our honeymoon, fifteen years ago, shortly after my remarkably unhelpful scuba diving sales pitch. We have barely aged, obviously.)

Fifteen years ago, Gab and I got married. Where does the time go? We went to the beach for our honeymoon. I was excited to try scuba diving and wanted my new bride to try it with me. She required some convincing.

Before boarding the plane, I picked up a scuba-diving magazine at the airport. Inside was an article about a couple who had completed hundreds of ocean dives before attempting their first dive in a freshwater lake. The lake was unfamiliar. The bottom was muddy. Unlike the clearer ocean floors they knew, clouds of silt rose from the lake bottom as they moved. Visibility disappeared.

One diver became caught on a submerged log. Startled, trapped, and unable to see, they panicked and began flailing. Their partner tried to help, but in the struggle the trapped diver tore away the other diver’s weights. The partner shot toward the surface. The trapped diver lost their regulator and drowned.

I finished the article and thought: Aha. My newlywed mind believed I had discovered a useful cautionary tale. Surely Gab would feel more confident if she understood the lesson: no matter what happens, do not panic. So I handed the magazine to my new bride and said, “Read this. It’s helpful.”

She read it, then looked up in disbelief. “THE DIVER DIED?” There was a pause. “YOU THINK THIS WILL CONVINCE ME TO GO SCUBA DIVING WITH YOU?”

In retrospect, this may best be described as NHN: New Husband Naiveté.

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I was trying to help Gab overcome fear by giving her more information about the thing she feared. There is something human about this instinct. We imagine that if we understand the worst-case scenario, we will be ready to act. Another graph. Another article. Another story about the killer log at the bottom of the lake.

Warnings matter. They help us make better decisions. Fear is a signal. But a warning is not the same thing as an invitation. Fear can tell us about the hidden log. It cannot, by itself, teach us why the ocean is worth entering.

Eventually, despite my unhelpful airplane PSA, Gab agreed to dive with me.

Scuba diving is strange. You strap a tank to your back, place a regulator in your mouth, take one giant stride off a boat, and descend into a new world. Strange. Wonderful. During those first dozen dives, some ancient part of your brain riots: HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BREATHE UNDERWATER.

Every inhale sounds loud inside your mask. Your air suddenly feels precious, thin, and finite. Your skills shaky. Your buddy matters.

Before diving, you learn a handful of hand signals. I am okay. How much air do you have left? Ascend. Descend. Slow down. This thing I am pointing at—my mask, my ears, my leg—is not okay.

As Gab and I prepared for our first ocean dive, we came up with a signal of our own: three taps. Each tap means a word. I. Love. You.

I know. Gaggggg. We were cute newlyweds.

But underwater, you cannot lean over and say, “You are doing great,” or “I am right here,” or “Slow down and breathe.” So we looked at each other wide-eyed through our masks and tapped three times. That gesture did not make the ocean less wild. But it made fear more inhabitable.

Learning to scuba dive well takes time. Many dives. Dive by dive, you trust your equipment and yourself more. You stop staring at your air gauge every fourteen seconds. You breathe more slowly. You notice light moving through the water. You notice fish suspended in currents you cannot see. You notice the strange and holy feeling of entering a world that is not arranged by or for you.

Over the years, diving has helped us imagine ourselves differently. We are divers. Travelers. Explorers. Adventurers who enter unfamiliar worlds side by side.

That shared imagination matters. We are not formed only by the dangers we fear. We are also formed by the futures we choose to imagine together. Fear, when listened to with curiosity and held in relationship, can become a guide rather than a jailer.

I smile when I think about how badly we want to see sharks now. As a child riding on a boat in the ocean for the first time, I remember being terrified of them. Formed by the entire Jaws universe, I assumed that if I fell overboard, a shark would immediately appear and eat me.

Splash. Ding, ding, ding. Dinner time.

But after hundreds of dives and surprisingly few sharks, that early formation has transformed. Now, when Gab and I descend beneath the surface, we actively look for them. When one appears, we follow at a respectful distance and enjoy their peaceful presence.

June is not only our anniversary month. June 8 is World Oceans Day. Remembering our honeymoon has me thinking about the distance we create between ourselves and the living world. We speak of the ocean as though it is somewhere else: a vacation destination, a frightening place filled with sharks, a repository for headlines about warming waters and rising seas.

The headlines matter. The dangers are real. But the ocean is not somewhere else. Its currents shape the climate we inhabit. And there are oceans within us too: currents of fear, longing, memory, and imagination.

Moral imagination does not silence fear. It listens carefully, holds fear in relationship, and asks what else is true. It invites us to remain present to a world that is beautiful, wild, vulnerable, and beyond our control.

That kind of presence takes practice. It takes relationship. It takes a shared imagination of the life we want to inhabit together. Sometimes it takes meeting each other’s eyes through a dive mask and tapping your own arm three times: I.Love.You.

Then breathe. Look around. The ocean is still here.

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Questions for reflection

This week’s essay is a parable that attempts more than one doorway into it: marriage, climate work, fear, dialogue, and the inherited stories that shape what we see. I would love to hear which doorway opens for you. I’m curious to hear your thoughts in the comments.

1. When has a warning helped you make a wiser decision? When has fear narrowed your imagination instead?

2. What practices or relationships make fear more inhabitable for you?

3. What inherited image (your version of the shark) has shaped how you see a creature, place, person, or possible future?

4. What future are you trying to imagine with others strongly enough that you can begin practicing your way into it?

5. What changes when you stop imagining the living world as somewhere else?

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(The Chicago pope keeping an eye on me each morning as I walk past on my way to the Faith in Place office at Catholic Theological Union.)

“He has the whole Gospel of Mark memorized. Word for word.”

This was shared in an almost whisper about an older minister in the church down the road by the middle aged men huddled around post hymn singing snacks.

This is the sort of guy talk I grew up around.

“He runs a whole marathon before breakfast.” “He is so clever at business he has already started and sold three companies.” “He has never had a single argument with his wife.” “His children are like soldiers, always obeying and never causing trouble.”

As a young boy wanting to become a good man in the church, I listened carefully. These comments shaped my imagination. They told me what counted. Know your Bible. Be successful, but make it look effortless. Do not be messy. Do not need too much. Don’t ask for help. Do not argue with your spouse. Keep your children obedient, your emotions managed, and your life impressive without ever appearing to try.

Bend and bind your presence until you become the kind of man others whisper about with reverence: “He’s such a quality guy.”

It is taking me a lifetime to unlearn that formation. I know now that what was being praised was not quality or goodness. It was conformity to a perfectionist ideal. It was acquiescence to the demands of a religious system built around control.

I did not expect these memories to return while reading Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. I know. I know. I am a Mennonite minister who keeps finding himself appreciating this Chicago pope. Pray for me.

But Pope Leo is not only asking what machines can do. He is asking what vision of the human person guides them and what ends they teach us to pursue.

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And that brought me back to the men of my childhood church.

Long before anyone was talking about artificial intelligence, we already had an ideal human being in mind: disciplined, composed, productive, impressive, and almost entirely free from need.

Pope Leo writes, “The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce.” Our worth comes before our accomplishments. We do not have to earn it through our usefulness, efficiency, or ability to keep producing.

That stopped me because long before I knew what a large language model was, I had already been trained by another kind of machine:

The machine of religious perfectionism. The machine of John Wayne style masculine self sufficiency. The machine of productivity dressed up in the garments of holiness. It taught me that my value was tied to my usefulness and that my goodness could be measured by my ability to stay composed, manage more, need less, and never become a problem for anyone else.

These are images of becoming without mess. Without much humanness. But love, grief, relationships, parenting, and community are messy. The very soul of our humanity lives in these messes. Our spirituality is not meant to help us escape them. It is meant to find us there and guide us through them. And still, the demands of the ideal self sufficient man continue to chant: be impressive, produce more, stay efficient, hide the strain.

Artificial intelligence did not invent this imagination. But reading Pope Leo, it dawned on me how easily AI can magnify it. The tools may be new. The human imagination hiding inside them is not.

AI can tempt us to ask: How can it make me even more efficient, more productive, more impressive, more self sufficient? How can it help me become more like the adult perfectionist machine of my childhood dreams?

And here Pope Leo challenges our imaginations. He does not suggest that efficiency is irrelevant. But he insists that it is not enough. Whatever the technology, whether a pencil, a printing press, a combine, a web browser, or a large language model, the deeper questions are questions of moral and social discernment.

What vision of the human person is guiding this tool? Does it safeguard human dignity? Does it protect the vulnerable? Does it strengthen our relationships? Does it serve the common good? Or does it deepen the old fantasy that the highest form of humanity is to need no one?

Pope Leo reminds us that building for the common good means accepting the limits and weaknesses of humanity “without considering them an error to be corrected.” They are features of the authentic, vulnerable, dependent humanity we are called to honor.

And so I pause and ask myself: What is the purpose of the technological tools I allow into my life?

The questions we ask together shape the people we become.

May we have the imagination to remain profoundly human.

Faithful weeder, I am curious how you are answering that question in our new age of AI. I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

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(Preparing to Plant Peace Garden, 2011)

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“Brian, I’ve been wanting to ask: Is there any religious significance to your beard?”

We were bent over a garden bed when he asked. Pulling weeds. Watering tomatoes. Trying to peacefully manage the occupation-minded strawberries.

We gathered every Saturday morning in a small garden shared by the local Mennonite church and mosque. The garden was not large. But somehow, every fall, the harvest surprised us.

The garden asked ordinary things: attention, patience, repair, and showing up again.

Even better was the growing of new friendships.

Week after week we weeded in the morning sun. Watered. Hauled mulch and straw bales. Slowly, we learned names. Then stories. Then jokes. Then questions.

This particular question from my new Muslim friend was more vulnerable than it sounded.

“I wear a beard for two reasons,” I told him. “First, I like the way it looks. Obviously. Ha! Second, I was not allowed to have facial hair in the church community I grew up in, so I guess now it is my own little petty protest.”

He laughed at my direct honesty.

Then he told me why he had asked. In Islam, he said, there are many perspectives, but for some men facial hair can be a sign of following teachers in the tradition. A visible reminder that you belong to a community with different values. A small refusal to let the dominant culture define you completely.

I loved that.

I told him I suspected there was a deeper story in my own tradition too. Later, I went looking. Amish-Mennonite beards. Plain beards without mustaches. Peace witness. Refusal of militarism. Distance from nationalism. Later, for some, even resistance to the authoritarian masculinity that gathered around Hitler’s toothbrush mustache.

Facial hair had a whole theology.

Who knew?

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I also learned that my own community’s ban on beards had its own story. They had split from an Amish-Mennonite sect in Central Illinois over a dispute about the Holy Spirit. Then, in the low church ethos of entrepreneurial American religion, they started something new just down the road. Similar enough to be confusing. Different enough to justify existing. No beards became one way to mark the difference.

I learned all of that because someone who seemed different from me trusted me enough to ask.

I still wonder whether that question would have surfaced in a formal interfaith dialogue circle.

I doubt it.

It came because the garden had given us sweat on our brow and dirt under our fingernails together.

That story returned to me this week after the horrifying shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego, where two teenage gunmen opened fire during midday prayers. Three Muslim men were killed: Amin Abdullah, Mansour Kaziha, and Nader Awad. Community members describe them as heroes who helped protect others during the attack.

Families lost fathers, brothers, sons, and friends. A congregation lost people who had simply shown up to serve and pray.

On Wednesday, Chicago clergy gathered on Zoom with Muslim leaders connected to the San Diego community. People spoke of fear. Exhaustion. The terrible familiarity of it all. Another shooting. Another sacred space turned into a security concern. Another community wondering how to protect people who simply come to pray.

As people shared memories, anger, love, and solidarity, someone said, “It happens so often it is so easy to forget to stop and grieve.”

So we stopped.

And we grieved.

On one hand, I do not understand how there can be so much hate for our Muslim brothers, sisters, and siblings. That disbelief comes from the good fortune of having so many Muslim colleagues, friends, and partners in the work.

On the other hand, I do understand because I have heard too many Christian sermons, jokes, warnings, and end time theologies that speak of Muslims as threats before they ever speak of them as neighbors. Our country’s obsession with Christian nationalism, anti Muslim rhetoric, and Islamophobia forms people to fear before they love. These are the desires of the American empire and its addiction to war. And they are sustained by Christians willing to bless violence while rejecting the way of Jesus.

That fear driven theology spreads. It closes down curiosity. It teaches the heart to lock the door.

Which is why I believe we must turn toward one another.

Not only through statements or panels where everyone politely agrees dialogue matters. We need shared work. A garden. A meal. A cleanup day. A tutoring program. A vigil. A campaign. A place where hands are busy enough and trust is slow enough that real questions can rise.

Muslim communities have long practiced this kind of neighboring work, often while carrying the burden of suspicion themselves. That was true in our little garden too.

This is wisdom I first learned from Eboo Patel decades ago, and I still believe it. Shared action can open doors that discussion never will.

So today, in the grief of yet another shooting, my plea to you, faithful weeder, is simple: do not let fear colonize your imagination. Do not let theology harden your heart against your neighbor. Remember the old commandment to be a neighbor. Serve. Listen. Love. Ask better questions. Let faith overcome fear.

Today I share my love for Muslim communities grieving yet again, and for the exhausted imams, pastors, congregants, children, and community leaders still trying to stitch neighborhoods together while our country keeps rewarding suspicion.

May our shared labor grow tomato by tomato, weed by weed, conversation by conversation.

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(Silver Maple Tree at Holy Wisdom Monastery)

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“I’m asking you to go have a conversation with a tree.”

We were standing in tall grass, in a circle between the pond and the housing at Holy Wisdom Monastery near Madison, Wisconsin. A group of Christian ministers had gathered to explore clergy life in the age of climate change.

The air had that monastery quality of making you believe your inbox is less powerful than God. Victoria Loorz, co-founder of Seminary of the Wild and one of the leading voices in the Wild Church movement, was leading us. There was a drum, circle movements toward the east, south, west, north, and an invitation to see the more-than-human world with new attention.

Then Victoria gave us a strange assignment.

Go out onto the land, she said, and notice what invites you into conversation.

“Go,” she said, “have a conversation with a tree.”

I nodded with my spiritually mature face. As I left the circle, I found myself mumbling: What kind of hippy-dippy silliness have I gotten myself into now?

I care deeply about the earth. I believe the environmental crisis is a spiritual and moral crisis. I have preached about creation groaning and organized people of faith around climate justice. I am very much on record as pro-tree.

Still.

Go have a conversation with a tree?

I scanned the trees as I wandered. Now, dear reader, I know more than the average bear about trees. I did take dendrology in college. My favorite class by far. I was not the best student, but I loved it, and all these years later I still find myself looking up at leaves as I pass trees, peering at bark, trying to remember their names. Family. Genus. Species. Common name.

I rounded the corner and was drawn to a very large, old, knobby silver maple near the edge of the parking lot.

Silver maples are fast-growing, shallow-rooted, branch-dropping, sap-leaking, sidewalk-lifting chaos machines. In professional tree circles, they are often called dirty trees. Trashy trees. Humans love quick-growing shade until they have to pick up the twigs. We love beauty until it stains the car or swing set with sticky sap. We love growth until it cracks something we were trying to keep smooth.

And there she was.

Old. Bulging. Scarred. Messy. Her bark looked like she had served on too many church committees. Her limbs reached with the generosity and inconvenience of something that had never once asked permission.

I walked up to this rooted elder, Victoria’s instructions ringing in my heart, and said the first honest thing that came to mind.

“I hear you are a trashy tree.”

Now ain’t that a thing to say to kick off a conversation.

And then I sat down beside her and listened.

Earlier that day, Victoria had invited us to consider John 1 differently. “In the beginning was the Word,” the text says. But Word is the English translation of the Greek word logos, and logos is larger than our usual understanding of Word. It can carry speech, meaning, reason, pattern, order, relationship — the living logic by which things hold together. Victoria invited us to hear logos alongside our understanding of Dao: flow, way, movement, the deep current of life.

Maybe Word had become too small in our hands. Too fixed. Too easily used by systems that want doctrine without relationship, certainty without wonder, control without communion. She invited us to listen for something closer to Conversation.

In the beginning was the Conversation, and the Conversation was with God, and the Conversation was God. Through the Conversation all things were made: stars and soil, cattle and rivers, fungi and foxes, the whole shimmering community of creation. Creation is not scenery for the human drama. Creation is speaking, groaning, warning, dying, resurrecting, and trying to get our attention.

Beautiful, really.

But real conversation gets messy. Conversation requires the possibility that I am not the only subject in the room. Conversation requires me to stop treating the world as scenery, resource, backdrop, or inconvenience.

Conversation requires relationship.

It was not lost on me, sitting beside that silver maple, that I spend my days advocating for the land and yet had rarely attempted a relationship through conversation with the land.

So I sat and listened. I did not hear actual spoken words back from that silver maple. But as I sat there with my hand against her bark, my mind kept returning to that dirty word.

Trash.

And then, slowly, uncomfortably, I began to realize why that tree had found me. I related to that label more than I often care to admit.

Trash.

I eagerly spent much of my childhood in the woods. My brothers are five and seven years older, so I had a lot of alone time to wander beneath trees and along the edges of fields. I did not have language for it then, but the woods were one of the few places I felt okay just being myself.

Not impressive. Not useful. Not religiously corrected into something more manageable. Just there. Wild and at peace in the woods amidst the trees.

The church culture of my childhood was full of pressures. Ubiquitous pressures of conformity. Holy pressure. Smiling pressure. Pressure with Bible verses and morality attached. Pressure to become less intense, less curious, less rambunctious. Less wild.

The trees did not do that to me. They welcomed me. They did not ask whether my hair was right, my face was shaved, my will was properly submitted, or my soul was arranged in a way that conformed to the pressures of the system. They let me be a creature among creatures.

Sitting beneath that so-called trashy tree, I realized she knew something about being called dirty by all the professionals. Shade was welcome, but roots were not. Beauty was welcome, but mess was not. Growth was welcome until it cracked the sidewalk.

And I knew something about that too.

There is a diseased Christian imagination that is always trying to give you a final Word.

It does not always shout. Sometimes it arrives with a finger in your face and a Bible verse sharpened into a weapon. More often it comes politely. Through discipline. Through systems. Through rules no one calls control. That would be too honest. Through the spiritual panic of adults who were taught to fear children becoming fully alive.

The language is polished, because spiritual harm often is. But the message is clear enough. You are the problem. Your questions. Your body. Your anger. Your sadness. Your joy. Your intensity. Your roots going places they shall not go. Your sap getting everywhere. Your growth cracking the pavement.

You are trashy.

So keep the rules. Keep the haircut. Keep the answers acceptable. Keep the face shaved. Keep the Word fixed, final, controlled, and useful to those managing the system. Do not become inconvenient. Do not make a mess.

That diseased Christianity loves a final Word because a final Word can end the conversation. It can rank people. Silence children. Discipline bodies. Bless violence and call it order. Turn living faith into a locked room where certainty sits at the head of the table and wonder is told to wait outside.

But the silver maple preached a healing gospel.

You are not broken beyond belonging. You are not an inconvenience to God. You are not holy because you finally became tidy enough to be loved. You are beloved before you are useful. Held before you are fixed. Invited before you are impressive.

You are invited into conversation.

With God. With neighbor. With the land. With your own body. With the more-than-human world that has been speaking — already whole, already alive — longer than we have been listening.

I keep thinking about that silver maple this weekend because the news is covering a large prayer gathering on the National Mall in Washington. There will be prayers. Music. Scripture. Flags. Christian language about America and God and destiny and rededication. I do not doubt some people there will be praying sincerely. I do not doubt many are longing for goodness and healing and meaning.

But I worry about any Christianity that arrives on the Mall with a final and exclusive Word for the nation and no room for conversation.

I worry about prayers that do not listen. I worry about worship that blesses violence but cannot hear creation groaning. I worry about Christian language that can sanctify domination while ignoring the cry of rivers, soil, forests, children with asthma, migrants at the border, queer kids hiding their fear, the poor carrying someone else’s glory, and communities breathing what industry and empire leave behind.

I worry about a Word strong enough to demand conformity but not tender enough to heal.

Because the divine conversation is already happening. The trees are speaking in rings and roots. Rivers are speaking in flow and flood. Birds are speaking in song and silence. The atmosphere is speaking in spring and heat. Soil is speaking in growth and in what it can no longer hold. Bodies are speaking in asthma attacks, anxiety, grief, and exhaustion.

The more-than-human world is not waiting for permission to testify.

The question is whether our faith can remember how to listen.

Like Moses before the burning bush. Like Elijah on the mountain, listening past wind and fire into silence. Like Jesus in the wilderness. Like Muhammad in the cave. Like the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree. Like Guru Nanak at the river.

Again and again, the holy meets us outside the buildings we mistake for the whole of religion.

Which brings me back to the silver maple. To the so-called trashy tree by the parking lot. To the old rooted elder with sticky sap, inconvenient limbs, and no interest whatsoever in anything fake.

I came to her with skepticism and sarcasm.

And still, she invited me into a conversation.

No lecture. No correction. No final Word. Just enough presence for something true in me to speak again. Just enough silence to remember what the trees had been witnessing all along: you are whole and complete.

Maybe that is where the conversation picks up. Not with certainty. Not with another final Word shouted over the living world. But with sitting long enough beside what we have been trained to dismiss.

So, today, as a Christian nationalist vision takes center stage, I join Victoria in her invitation.

Find a tree. Or a river. Or a patch of weeds. Notice what draws your attention. Notice what feels messy, ordinary, inconvenient, or too close to something in yourself you learned to reject.

Pause longer than is comfortable.

Enter the conversation.

Go.

Have a conversation with a tree.

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“You don’t really know the love of Jesus until you have three children.”

My fork hit the plate hard as I tried to comprehend what I had just heard.

This was years ago. Gab and I were out to dinner with another couple. I had met the husband at a conference, and he had expressed interest in my work at Faith in Place. He kindly invited Gab and me to say hello the next time we were swinging through Denver. So months later, we did. We sat down for what I thought might be a warm meal with potential new supporters.

At the time, Gab and I were in the long, exhausting years of infertility. We wanted children. IUI. IVF. Rounds of hope followed by rounds of no. Pain. Frustration. Breaks. Calendar math. We traveled a lot then. We loved to travel and adventure together, and we were determined not to let unsuccessful rounds of IVF prevent us from living big lives.

We were traveling through Denver on our way to snowboard together. I had already spent some relationship capital convincing Gab to go to this dinner on the way. “They seem wealthy and generous,” I probably said. “This could be great for Faith in Place.” A romantic lead-in, I know. Nothing says HOT DATE like your husband bringing you along while he tries to fundraise over dinner with strangers.

Then came the line.

“You don’t really know the love of Jesus until you have three children.”

I couldn’t believe someone would say that so seriously. I looked at her as I dropped my fork. She was so serious. They had no idea about our IVF journey, but even without knowing that, what was this new acquaintance thinking? I looked at Gab. There was a fire in her eyes. Fire I know well. Grace had just left the room and truth was putting on its boots.

I recovered my fork. I resisted wanting to stab my own eye out and set it back down too hard. “Um, excuse me, but as far as we know, Jesus didn’t have children. Does that mean Jesus didn’t fully know the love of God?”

The woman across the table did not appreciate the point. She dug deeper. “You can’t really understand sacrifice,” she explained, “or love, or the way of Christ, until you are outnumbered by your own children.”

A heavy SIGH is the most polite thing I can write.

That dinner did not end well. The phrase “bless and release” feels apt. Bless the meal. Bless the people. Bless the awkward silence. Release the fantasy that this couple was going to become major donors and underwrite the faith and climate movement through one inspiring dinner conversation.

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I think about that night often around Mother’s Day. I don’t even remember this person’s name, but the interaction is illustrative. While it is usually not that explicit, the attitude is everywhere. We privilege parents and parenting. We unconsciously talk as if marriage is the real beginning of adulthood and children are the final proof of love. We emphasize family in a way that assumes a mom, dad, and 2.5 children, as if everyone else is living in the footnotes of the real story.

Then Mother’s Day weekend arrives, and we buy cards, candy, brunch, flowers, and gift cards for mothers while often accidentally handing harm to everyone else. The infertile. The childless. The motherless. The estranged. The grieving. The exhausted. The queer kids and grown adults who had to build chosen family when biological family failed them. The ones who mother without recognition. The ones who wanted children but never got to become mothers. The ones who became mothers and are just trying to survive. The ones who don’t want children but still mother friends, coworkers, pets, communities, and a weary world every day without anyone naming it holy.

Mother’s Day has always been more complicated than the greeting card aisle wants us to believe.

One of its historical roots is Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and then, horrified by the carnage of war, issued what became known as the Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870. She called women to rise up against war and bloodshed, to refuse the logic of empire, to insist that sons not be trained to injure the sons of other women.

Repeat it loud for those in the back: Mother’s Day is rooted in a movement to protest war, violence, and bloodshed.

And not only that. Later, Ann Reeves Jarvis organized Mothers’ Work Clubs to improve public health, sanitation, and community care. During and after the Civil War, she worked across the lines of Union and Confederate grief, tending the wounded and trying to rebuild the possibility of community. Her daughter, Anna Jarvis, fought to establish a national Mother’s Day to honor her mother’s legacy. And then, when the day became commercialized into cards and flowers and profit, Anna Jarvis hated what it had become so much that she tried to have the holiday recalled.

So yes, Mother’s Day is rooted in protest. It is also rooted in community care.

Which means the most faithful way to honor Mother’s Day may not be to sentimentalize mothers for one weekend and abandon the work of mothering the world on Monday.

Not everyone is a mother. Not everyone wants to be. Not everyone should have to translate their life through that word. But all of us can join the chain of care that keeps the whole world from falling apart.

Bring a meal. Watch the kids. Fund childcare. Protect immigrant families. Fight for housing, healthcare, clean air, safe schools, and a livable planet. Tell the truth about war. Flowers may be nice, but they are no substitute for justice.

So I celebrate this weekend with that justice lens. I am grateful for my momma, and for all those who kept us alive as children, fed us, taught us, challenged us, forgave us, protected us, and loved us when we were not especially lovable. Lord knows some of us have required extensive patience…

And I celebrate the aunties, teachers, nurses, organizers, neighbors, pastors, foster parents, friends, chosen-family builders, and fierce-hearted humans who mother a weary world without always having that love named as holy.

But I also remember that Mother’s Day is born of grief. Grief over war. Grief over children lost. Grief over the arrogance of leaders, still mostly men, who send other people’s children to die and call it strategy. I grieve the mothers lost. The children lost. The families carrying ache quietly through a weekend covered in flowers. I grieve the violence still dressed up as necessity, as if another mother’s child is a reasonable price to pay for pride, power, land, oil, ego, revenge, or whatever holy costume empire is wearing this week.

Julia Ward Howe cried out, “Disarm, disarm!” Ann Reeves Jarvis organized women to care for wounded communities. Her daughter, Anna Jarvis, fought for Mother’s Day and then raged against the machine that turned a day of gratitude and remembrance into another consumer trap.

Years ago, my fork hit the plate because someone tried to make the love of Jesus smaller than it is. This weekend, I want that dropped fork to become a ringing witness of gratitude for everyone doing the holy work of peacemaking, justice, and healing our world.

The children are still being trained for war. The earth is still crying out. The greeting cards are still not enough.

Disarm. Disarm.

That is the Mother’s Day spirit I seek to remember and honor.

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Introductory Note:

I found Bill McKibben’s recent essay “Let’s TALK Climate” both compelling and upsetting. He traces how corporate polluters, right-wing pressure campaigns, and even some Democratic political strategists are converging around an impulse toward climate hushing: don’t say too much, don’t make people uncomfortable, don’t center climate too loudly.

That instinct got me thinking about Luke 19:40, where Jesus says, “If these were silent, the stones would cry out.” In the gospel story, authorities want the crowd quieted. Jesus refuses. Truth does not disappear simply because powerful people would prefer softer language.

That connection prompted the sermonic rant below.

It’s more of a hot take than my usual writing here. Less careful gardening. More grabbing the shovel and heading for the weeds. But I do think it edges toward an important wisdom: when institutions start urging us to hush reality in order to preserve comfort, strategy, or stability, that impulse deserves deep skepticism.

Also, while I have your attention, I want you to know something: I have now drafted five chapters toward an emerging book project.

This whole Substack experiment is, in part, about building momentum toward that larger project. I am trying to write my way toward a theme strong enough to carry the whole journey: childhood, fear, faith, environmental justice, church exile, organizing, ministry, becoming a nonprofit CEO, and whatever wisdom might emerge from surviving all that with a soul still intact. Mostly.

Ambitious, I know.

Right now I am in the strange work of rethinking and refining a book proposal while continuing to draft chapters. Some days it’s fun. Most days it feels like wandering around in the woods carrying a map no one asked for.

All that to say, thank you, sincerely, for subscribing, reading, and commenting on these essays. It means more than you know!

And if you want to support this work more directly, paid subscribers help sustain the project and receive early access to draft book chapters, opportunities to offer feedback as the book takes shape, and a free copy of the book when it is eventually published. You can do so by becoming a Founding Weeder and joining me in the messy, hopeful work of figuring out what this book wants to become. Founding Weeder - clever, I knowwwww.

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Ok, now to Luke 19:40. Curious what resonates with you, what doesn’t, and where this lands.

CLIMATE HUSHING: Luke 19:40

All this election talk around climate hushing has me preaching Luke 19:40.

“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would cry out.”

These are the words of Jesus as he stages a street protest against the Roman Empire’s attempts to terrorize people into silence during Passover. His donkey street skit gets the crowd loud. The protest stirs them not to fear the violent oppressor, but to proclaim the holy memory of Passover: freedom from violent oppressors.

The authorities tell Jesus to quiet his disciples and the crowd. Tone it down.

He smiles:

“I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would cry out.”

Silence won’t prevent the stones, and the whole world, from proclaiming the truth.

Today’s stones are crying out about the impacts of climate change. More basements are flooding because of heavier rains. More asthma attacks and hospital visits are happening as smoke and pollution make breathing harder, especially for those already vulnerable.

And the planet is running hot. 2025 was one of the warmest years on record. The last eleven years are the eleven warmest in the modern record. Heat means more violence. More strokes. Higher electric bills. More heat-related deaths. More strain on crops, livestock, and food systems.

So when the advice comes, “Don’t talk about climate change,” let’s call it what it is: control.

Polluter power trying to hush the truth so the fossil fuel machine can keep burning.

Empire does not only crush bodies. It manages language. It teaches people which truths are safe to say and which ones must be buried.

The stones are crying out anyway. We know climate change is raising the cost of food, utility bills, and healthcare. Why would we hush about the root cause?

The polluters want silence because silence protects profits. Some Democratic strategists want silence because they fear climate talk hurts candidates. Neither changes the truth.

Voters already know something is wrong. The grocery bill knows. The insurance market knows. The flooded basement knows.

So we join the stones and shout.

Because the answers are already here. Solar. Batteries. Cleaner grids. Lower bills. Better jobs and wages. Healthier air.

What is stopping us is not some shortage of ideas. It is fossil fuel power, political cowardice, and the failure to build fast enough.

To cry out with the stones is to refuse that silence. It is to stand with creation against the forces that would rather keep us quiet.

Say it loud. The stones and all of creation are groaning at levels we have never heard before.

In a time of political cowardice and spiritual dishonesty, we tell the truth.

The stones around us already are.

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Introductory Note:

It has become one of my favorite annual traditions to guest preach at Unity Temple in Oak Park.

Unity Temple helped incubate the beginning of Faith in Place in 1999 under the leadership of community minister Rev. Clare Butterfield, who founded the organization and served as Executive Director until 2013.

In 2014, my wife and I moved to Chicago, and I stepped into that role. Since then, returning to Unity Temple at least once a year to preach and teach has been a real joy. I feel incredibly lucky to preach in a historic Frank Lloyd Wright building.

One comment I often hear when I preach with UUs is that folks are not used to hearing the stories of scripture. That makes it especially meaningful for me to tell these stories in a trauma informed way, lifting up their wisdom while helping shed some of the harm that has been done with them in other contexts.

You can check out that approach in the scripture and sermon below.

Scripture: John 21:1-14

Those of you who are familiar with the Bible know that when you read from it, you have a choice. You can choose which translation, which version you want to use. The King James Version. The New Revised Standard Version. The New Living Translation. The Message. And on and on…

A whole host of ways the same story gets told.

So today, in choosing a translation for this Mennonite minister to read the gospel text to you Unitarian Universalists…

I decided to go with the BS version.

That’s right. The Brian Sauder Version.

Soon to be carefully edited by Pastor Roger… and released by Unitarian Press later this fall.

So now. Hear these words. The BSV of John 21:1–14…

After these things, Jesus appeared again to his disciples by the Sea of Tiberias.

This is how it happened.

Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael from Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two other disciples were together.

Simon Peter said to them, “I’m going fishing.”

And they said, “We’re coming with you too.”

So they went out and got into the boat.

But that night, they caught nothing.

At dawn, Jesus stood on the beach.

But the disciples did not know it was Jesus.

He called out to them, “Friends, you don’t have any fish, do you?”

“No,” they answered.

He said, “Throw the net off the right side of the boat, and you’ll find some.”

So they threw the net.

And they could not haul it in because there were so many fish.

Then the disciple Jesus loved said to Peter, “It’s Jesus.”

When Simon Peter heard that it was Jesus, he tied his outer garment around himself, because he was stripped down for work, and threw himself into the sea.

The other disciples came in the boat, dragging the net full of fish behind them, because they were not far from shore.

When they got onto the land, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread.

Jesus said to them, “Come, have breakfast.”

None of the disciples dared ask him, “Who are you?”

They knew.

It was Jesus. Jesus came and took the bread and gave it to them.

Then he did the same with the fish.

This was now the third time Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead.

Sermon

The disciples gather on the beach of the Tiberias Sea, a few weeks after resurrection, with nothing to show for all they have given.

They are still scared and confused. The risen Jesus has appeared to them and told them peace is among them, but they do not see peace anywhere they look. Their spirits are restless and raging.

The crosses of execution still stand high across the horizon on the hills, their very presence terrorizing the misfits and the troublemakers, the creatives and the truth tellers, the preachers and the playwrights, the storytellers who refuse to allow the threat of the cross’s violence to buy their silence.

The poor are still hungry. The grieving are not suddenly comforted. The men who killed Jesus did not wake up transformed by a soft spring sunrise and a slice of Easter cake and suddenly decide to repent and dismantle the machinery of Rome’s dominating violence.

No.

The disciples gather on the beach because the streets are still dangerous and cruel. The threat of execution for following Jesus is still there, waiting in the background like a drawn blade. Their leader, Jesus, the one they gave up everything to follow, was legally murdered for his ministry.

Maybe they are next.

They have given up everything to follow Jesus. All they have seen, all they have lost, all they have misunderstood, all they have failed to become.

They have nothing to show for all they have given.

Peter is there. Broken Peter, who was once told by Jesus that he was a rock and that the church would be built upon his proclaimed faith.

Have you ever had someone you respect name your talent and your potential, and then you let them down?

For Peter all of it cracked when the threat of a soldier’s sword got too close. Peter, who swore loyalty and then denied Jesus, not once, not twice, but three times before sunrise.

I imagine he cannot stop replaying the sound of his own cowardice as he tries to go to sleep at night. Peter knows what it is to be the kind of man who meant every brave word when he said it and still could not live up to it when it mattered most. So when Peter says, “I’m going fishing,” it is not a plan. It is not a strategy. It is a man at the end of himself trying to find one familiar thing to do with his shame.

Thomas is there. Thomas, the twin, who needed scars he could touch, not just stories of resurrection he was expected to believe. Thomas, who got what he asked for and still woke up the next morning in the same dangerous world. He has seen. He has touched. He has confessed. But even after all that, the empire still has weapons. The government can still take his life. Resurrection has happened, and safety has not. Thomas knows what it is to pray and ask for something real and then discover that even the real thing does not remove the terror.

Have you ever touched grace and still gone to bed scared?

Thomas has. So when Peter says, “I’m going fishing,” Thomas says, “Why bother? I’m coming too.”

Nathanael is there. Skeptical Nathanael. The one who, when Philip first told him about Jesus, said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathanael knows what it is to wonder whether skepticism was wisdom after all. Maybe he was right not to hope too much. Maybe nothing really changed with the prophet from Nazareth. Maybe Nazareth was still just Nazareth. Maybe Rome was always going to win.

Have you ever kept hope on a short leash because disappointment feels safer?

Maybe disappointment was the safer bet. So Nathanael says, “Enough. I’ll go fishing with you.”

The brothers of Zebedee are there too. James and John, the sons of thunder. Hot headed. Glory hungry. The ones who once thought the answer to Jesus being rejected from a Samaritan town was to rain down fire from heaven and burn the whole town down.

Have you ever looked at all the violence in the world and wondered whether kindness was just too weak to matter?

The sons of thunder. The ones who sidled up to Jesus one day and said, “Hey Jesus, when your kingdom comes can you hook some brothers up?” Their discipleship still had the longing for empire in it. And now, they are back by the sea, with that awful suspicion creeping in. Maybe peace was too weak. Maybe “put away your sword” was too fragile. Maybe Jesus should have hit back. Maybe violent power only responds to violence in return. This sure didn’t feel like winning. Frustrated, restless, still burning, they say to Peter, “Forget it. We’ll go fishing with you.” And maybe they used a stronger F word than forget.

And then there are some unnamed disciples at the beach. We do not know their stories, but we know they have them. They too showed up having given everything with nothing to show for it.

They too turned to the familiar.

Because that is what we do when we are at our wit’s end. We go back to what we know. We fall back on the familiar. Back to muscle memory. Back to old patterns. Back to whatever our hands can do while our hearts are still trying to survive.

Is that not what we do?

When our ministries and our daily work feel fruitless, we fall back on comparison. Look at their church. Look at that colleague. Look at their platform. Look at their numbers. Look at that perfect married couple and their nice green grass over there.

One of my heroes in ministry, Rev. Wright, often says that comparison is like quicksand. The more you compare, the faster you sink into the pathos of a pity party. Be careful of comparing your lawn to the green grass on the other side of the fence. You do not know the cost of watering it. You do not know if it is fake turf. And for all you know, there may be a whole septic tank of stink and poo underneath that pretty lawn.

When you have nothing to show for everything you have given, you want to go back to your old habits, your old ways. We go back to fishing. I am not talking about literal fishing. I am talking about striving. Numbing. Performing. Comparing. Proving. One more attempt to secure our worth by having something visible to show for ourselves.

I know that feeling. I relate to Peter, replaying the moment of shame over and over in the quiet of the sleepless night. To Thomas, finally getting what you want and realizing you are still the same old you. To Nathanael, deciding not to hope too much because disappointment feels safer. And to the sons of thunder, feeling the urge of violence well up inside as I see the violence all around me.

These old fishing habits. I start desperately acting from that place of comparison, as if my value depends on visible impact, measurable success, recognition, proof. Something I can point to and say, there, see, all this pouring out was not for nothing after all.

It is a brutal way to live. An exhausting way to spend all those nights. Striving and fishing in vain.

And it is not unrelated to what we do to our mother earth.

Because the same empire that teaches us to value our lives by output teaches us to value the land that way too. What can this field yield. What can this river carry away. What can this forest be turned into. What can this atmosphere absorb. What can this neighborhood produce. What can this body provide. What can this life be made to yield before it collapses.

That is the comparison message of Rome. The metric of empire.

A message rooted in violent extraction.

And on this Earth Sunday, some of us feel deep in our bodies the violence we are living through today. We have organized and planted and preached and passed environmental regulations and defended and educated and built coalitions and tried to protect what is vulnerable and sacred. We have struggled for cleaner air and cleaner water and healthier soil and saner policy and a future that is not simply sold off to the greediest men in the room but is gifted to our children and their grandchildren. We have tried to love the world in public.

And still here comes Rome.

Here comes the empire in a fresh suit with an ancient appetite. Undoing protections. Rewarding polluters. Gutting commitments. Feeding the madness that treats creation like a carcass to be stripped, burned, poisoned, and sold. Pouring more heat into the atmosphere. More water into basements. More smoke into asthmatic lungs. More burden onto the poor.

And we wake, and we work, and we lament.

We have nothing to show for all we have given.

Like the disciples, we fish all night. The nets come up empty. The boat holds only tired people and the weight of another long fruitless endeavor.

And then, just after daybreak, Jesus shows up on the beach.

Not in Caesar’s palace. Not in the offices of the men making the mess. Not in the halls where domination and cruelty pass for leadership. He shows up on the shore, at the edge of exhausted people, at the waterline of their failure.

“Have you caught anything?”

And they answer, not knowing it is Jesus, “No.”

No. The empire did not collapse. The poor are not suddenly safe. The earth is not okay. The grief is not over. The work is not finished. I do not have anything to point to this morning. I cannot fake triumph today.

No.

And Jesus does not argue with their no. He does not shame it. He does not ask them to clean it up and make it sound more faithful. He does not ask them to turn the emptiness into a success story.

He just calls, try the other side.

That is all.

Same boat. Same sea. Same nets. Same tired hands. Just the other side.

And somehow, in that surrendered turning, the net fills.

Peter then realizes it is Jesus on the beach and throws himself into the water to swim to shore. The others drag the net behind them. And as they come into sight of Jesus, John tells us something beautiful.

Jesus already has breakfast going.

A small beach fire as the sun lifts off the water. Fish are sizzling. Bread beside it.

Before the disciples can prove themselves useful, breakfast is already there. Before they have anything to show for the long night, breakfast is already there. Before the catch becomes a metric, breakfast is already there.

That is the invitation of this story.

Because Rome has an economy too. Rome knows how to count. Rome knows how to measure. Rome knows how to rank worth by output. Rome knows how to shame people into producing more. Rome knows how to squeeze the earth and squeeze our bodies and call the whole thing responsibility.

If we try to heal the earth using the same mindset that harmed it, we are not creating something new. We are just repainting Rome green.

If our message is only do more, perform better, consume correctly, be more responsible, feel worse, measure harder, then we are still trapped in the same old exhausted logic of comparison. We are still arranging the outputs. We are still asking people to justify their existence by what they can produce. We are still living by the metrics of empire.

This story invites us to redefine what is worthy.

This is how justice can still emerge after a long night. Not as a trophy we drag back to shore to prove we mattered. Not as a return to everything exactly as it was before the loss. But as love finding us still here in the morning. Repair finding us still here in the morning. New life finding us still here in the morning.

Jesus does not tell them that their value lies in the fish. He does not tell them their dignity lies in their productivity. He does not tell them they matter because of what they caught in the night.

He feeds them first.

That is a whole different economy.

An economy of abundance. An economy of gift. An economy of enough. An economy where the earth is not raw material to be extracted, but the place where God keeps feeding creatures. An economy where our value is not earned by our output, but received in relationship. An economy where we do not stand over and against creation, but within it, among it, dependent on it, nourished by it, and therefore responsible to it.

And maybe that is where the environmental movement most needs spiritual conversion. Not just cleaner goals. Not just better policy. Not just greener outputs. We need a spiritual conversion of imagination. Because if we keep trying to save the earth with Rome’s message, we will just produce more shame, more exhaustion, more burnout, more people collapsed on the beach with nothing left in them.

The story of Jesus offers another way. Not extraction, but communion. Not productivity, but provision. Not worth earned by striving, but dignity received in belovedness. Not empire’s hunger, but breakfast by the sea.

Maybe you are broken and ashamed like Peter. Maybe you are restless and unconvinced like Thomas. Maybe you are skeptical like Nathanael. Maybe you are still carrying more empire in your heart than you want to admit. Maybe you are exhausted from trying to save everything by the force of your own effort. Maybe you are simply tired.

Then hear the invitation.

Jesus is already on the shore. Jesus is already at the fire. Jesus already has breakfast ready.

Come and eat.

Because morning has come, and new life is still possible.

Benediction

Go now, still here in the morning.
Not because everything is fixed.
Not because the night was easy.

But because you have been fed.

Go and plant what you can.
Repair what you can.
Love what you can.

Not to prove your worth,
but because you already belong.

And may you find, again and again,
that new life is still possible.

I preached this sermon on Sunday out of John 21:1–14.

It is for anyone who has poured themselves out and wondered what there is to show for it. For anyone exhausted by striving. For anyone trying to care for the earth without simply baptizing the same old logic of empire.

At one point, I put it this way:

“And if our earth care work is just one more version of that, then we are not preaching Jesus. We are just repainting Rome green.

If our message is only do more, perform better, consume correctly, be more responsible, feel worse, measure harder, then we are still trapped in the same old exhausted logic of comparison. We are still arranging the outputs. We are still asking people to justify their existence by what they can produce. We are still living by the metrics of empire.”

You can listen below or read the full sermon.

Sermon: John 21:1-14

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The disciples gather on the beach of the Tiberias Sea, a few weeks after resurrection, with nothing to show for all they have given.

They are still scared and confused. The risen Jesus has appeared to them and told them peace is among them, but they do not see peace anywhere they look. Their spirits are restless and raging.

The crosses of execution still stand high across the horizon on the hills, their very presence terrorizing the misfits and the troublemakers, the creatives and the truth tellers, the preachers and the playwrights, the storytellers who refuse to allow the threat of the cross’s violence to buy their silence.

The poor are still hungry. The grieving are not suddenly comforted. The men who killed Jesus did not wake up transformed by a soft spring sunrise and a slice of Easter cake and suddenly decide to repent and dismantle the machinery of Rome’s dominating violence.

No.

The disciples gather on the beach because the streets are still dangerous and cruel. The threat of execution for following Jesus is still there, waiting in the background like a drawn blade. Their leader, Jesus, the one they gave up everything to follow, was legally murdered for his ministry.

Maybe they are next.

They have given up everything to follow Jesus. All they have seen, all they have lost, all they have misunderstood, all they have failed to become.

They have nothing to show for all they have given.

Peter is there. Broken Peter, who was once told by Jesus that he was a rock and that the church would be built upon his proclaimed faith.

Have you ever had someone you respect name your talent and your potential, and then you let them down?

For Peter all of it cracked when the threat of a soldier’s sword got too close. Peter, who swore loyalty and then denied Jesus, not once, not twice, but three times before sunrise.

I imagine he cannot stop replaying the sound of his own cowardice as he tries to go to sleep at night. Peter knows what it is to be the kind of man who meant every brave word when he said it and still could not live up to it when it mattered most. So when Peter says, “I’m going fishing,” it is not a plan. It is not a strategy. It is a man at the end of himself trying to find one familiar thing to do with all his shame.

Thomas is there. Thomas, the twin, who needed scars he could touch, not just stories of resurrection he was expected to believe. Thomas, who got what he asked for and still woke up the next morning in the same dangerous world. He has seen. He has touched. He has confessed. But even after all that, the empire still has weapons. The government can still take his life. Resurrection has happened, and safety has not. Thomas knows what it is to pray and ask for something real and then discover that even the real thing does not remove the terror.

Have you ever touched grace and still gone to bed scared?

Thomas has. So when Peter says, “I’m going fishing,” Thomas says, “Why bother? I’m coming too.”

Nathanael is there. Skeptical Nathanael. The one who, when Philip first told him about Jesus, said, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathanael knows what it is to wonder whether skepticism was wisdom after all. Maybe he was right not to hope too much. Maybe nothing really changed with the prophet from Nazareth. Maybe Nazareth was still just Nazareth. Maybe Rome was always going to win.

Have you ever kept hope on a short leash because disappointment feels safer?

Maybe disappointment was the safer bet. So Nathanael says, “Enough. I’ll go fishing with you.”

The brothers of Zebedee are there too. James and John, the sons of thunder. Hot headed. Glory hungry. The ones who once thought the answer to Jesus being rejected from a Samaritan town was to rain down fire from heaven and burn the whole town down.

Have you ever looked at all the violence in the world and wondered whether kindness was just too weak to matter?

The sons of thunder. The ones who sidled up to Jesus one day and said, “Hey Jesus, when your kingdom comes can you hook some brothers up?” Their discipleship still had the longing for empire in it. And now, they are back by the sea, with that awful suspicion creeping in. Maybe peace was too weak. Maybe “put away your sword” was too fragile. Maybe Jesus should have hit back. Maybe violent power only responds to violence in return. This sure didn’t feel like winning. Frustrated, restless, still burning, they say to Peter, “Forget it. We’ll go fishing with you.” And maybe they used a stronger F word than forget.

And then there are some unnamed disciples at the beach. We do not know their stories, but we know they have them. They too showed up having given everything with nothing to show for it.

They too turned to the familiar.

Because that is what we do when we are at our wit’s end. We go back to what we know. We fall back on the familiar. Back to muscle memory. Back to old patterns. Back to whatever our hands can do while our hearts are still trying to survive.

Is that not what we do?

When our ministries and our daily work feel fruitless, we fall back on comparison. Look at their church. Look at that colleague. Look at their platform. Look at their numbers. Look at that perfect married couple and their nice green grass over there.

One of my heroes in ministry, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, often says that comparison is like quicksand. The more you compare, the faster you sink into the pathos of a pity party. Be careful of the green grass on the other side of the fence, he says. You do not know the cost of watering it. And maybe on closer inspection, you might find out that it is actually fake turf. And he goes on to say, for all you know, there may be a whole septic tank of stink underneath that pretty lawn.

The more you fall back on comparison, the faster you sink into the pathos of a pity party.

When you have nothing to show for everything you have given, you want to go back to your old habits, your old ways. We go back to fishing. I am not talking about literal fishing. I am talking about striving. Numbing. Performing. Comparing. Proving. One more attempt to secure our worth by having something visible to show for ourselves.

I know that feeling. I relate to Peter, replaying the moment of shame over and over in the quiet of the sleepless night. To Thomas, finally getting what you want and realizing you are still the same old you. To Nathanael, deciding not to hope too much because disappointment feels safer. And to the sons of thunder, feeling the urge of violence well up inside as I see the violence all around me.

These old fishing habits. I start desperately acting from that place of comparison, as if my value depends on visible impact, measurable success, recognition, proof. Something I can point to and say, there, see, all this pouring out was not for nothing after all.

It is a brutal way to live. An exhausting way to spend all those nights. Striving and fishing in vain.

And it is not unrelated to what we do to our mother earth.

Because the same empire that teaches us to value our lives by output teaches us to value the land that way too. What can this field yield. What can this river carry away. What can this forest be turned into. What can this atmosphere absorb. What can this neighborhood produce. What can this body provide. What can this life be made to yield before it collapses.

That is the comparison message of Rome. The metric of empire.

A message rooted in violent extraction.

And on this Earth Sunday, some of us feel deep in our bodies the violence we are living through today. We have organized and planted and preached and passed environmental regulations and defended and educated and built coalitions and tried to protect what is vulnerable and sacred. We have struggled for cleaner air and cleaner water and healthier soil and saner policy and a future that is not simply sold off to the greediest men in the room but is gifted to our children and their grandchildren. We have tried to love the world in public.

And still here comes Rome.

Here comes the empire in a fresh suit with an ancient appetite. Undoing protections. Rewarding polluters. Gutting commitments. Feeding the madness that treats creation like a carcass to be stripped, burned, poisoned, and sold. Pouring more heat into our atmosphere. More water into our basements. More smoke into our asthmatic lungs. More burden onto the poor.

And we wake, and we work, and we lament.

We have nothing to show for all we have given.

Like the disciples, we fish all night. The nets come up empty. The boat holds only tired people and the weight of another long fruitless endeavor.

And then, just after daybreak, Jesus shows up on the beach.

Not in Caesar’s palace. Not in the offices of the men making the mess. Not in the halls where domination and cruelty pass for leadership. He shows up on the shore, at the edge of exhausted people, at the waterline of their failure.

“Have you caught anything?”

And they answer, not knowing it is Jesus, “No.”

No. The empire did not collapse. The poor are not suddenly safe. The earth is not okay. The grief is not over. The work is not finished. I do not have anything to point to this morning. I cannot fake triumph today.

No.

And Jesus does not argue with their no. He does not shame it. He does not ask them to clean it up and make it sound more faithful. He does not ask them to turn the emptiness into a success story.

He just calls out, “try the other side.”

That is all.

Not try a different boat. A different cove. A different sea. Same boat. Same sea. Same nets. Same tired hands. Just move a little to the other side.

And somehow, in that surrendered turning, the net fills.

This helps Peter realize it is Jesus on the beach, and so he throws himself into the water to swim toward shore. The others drag the net behind them. And as they come into sight of Jesus, John tells us something beautiful.

Jesus already has breakfast going.

A small beach fire as the sun lifts off the water. Fish are already sizzling. Bread provided.

Before the disciples can prove themselves useful, breakfast is already there. Before they have anything to show for the long night, breakfast is already there. Before the catch becomes a metric of success, breakfast is already there.

That is the gospel.

Because Rome has an economy too. Rome knows how to count. Rome knows how to measure. Rome knows how to rank worth by output. Rome knows how to shame people into producing more. Rome knows how to squeeze the earth and squeeze our bodies and call the whole thing responsibility.

And if our earth care work is just one more version of that, then we are not preaching Jesus. We are just repainting Rome green.

If our message is only do more, perform better, consume correctly, be more responsible, feel worse, measure harder, then we are still trapped in the same old exhausted logic of comparison. The quicksand that sinks us into the pathetic pathos of a pity party. We are still arranging the outputs. We are still asking people to justify their existence by what they can produce. We are still living by the metrics of empire.

And that road ends the way it ends for the disciples. Burned out on the beach. Empty nets. Empty spirits. Nothing to show for all they have given.

But Jesus does not show up at the waterline of failure to rearrange the outputs.

He comes to redefine our worth.

He does not tell them that their value lies in the fish. He does not tell them their dignity lies in their productivity. He does not tell them they matter because of what they caught in the night.

He feeds them first.

That is a whole different economy.

An economy of abundance. An economy of gift. An economy of enough. An economy where the earth is not raw material to be extracted, but the place where God keeps feeding creatures. An economy where our value is not earned by our output, but received in relationship. An economy where we do not stand over and against creation, but within it, among it, dependent on it, nourished by it, and therefore responsible to it.

Jesus’s breakfast economy is not about human doing first. It is about human being. We are not human doers. We are human beings! It is about being held, being fed, being part of a whole, being one creature among creatures in a world where God still provides.

And maybe that is where the environmental movement most needs spiritual conversion. Not just cleaner goals. Not just better policy. Not just greener outputs. We need a spiritual conversion of imagination. Because if we keep trying to save the earth and each other with Rome’s message, we will just produce more shame, more exhaustion, more burnout, more people collapsed on the beach with nothing to show for all they have given.

But Jesus offers another way. Not extraction, but communion. Not productivity, but provision. Not worth earned by striving, but dignity received in belovedness. Not empire’s hunger, but breakfast by the sea.

Church, maybe today you are broken and ashamed like Peter. Maybe you are restless and unconvinced like Thomas. Maybe you are skeptical like Nathanael. Maybe like the sons of thunder you are still carrying more empire in your heart than you want to admit. Maybe you are exhausted from trying to save everything by the force of your own effort. Maybe you are simply tired.

Then hear the good news.

Jesus is already on the shore. Jesus is already at the fire. Jesus already has breakfast ready.

Come and eat.

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(Preaching at First Mennonite Church - CU, April 12, 2026)

Introductory Note

This sermon began with Doubting Thomas, and as I wrote, I found myself embodying Thomas through my own lament, plea, and longing to experience resurrection for myself rather than live on someone else’s account.

I preached it on the Sunday after Easter. I’m sharing it here for anyone who has ever needed faith to be honest before it could be hopeful.

Prefer to listen? You can hear me read this sermon while following along below.

I Can’t Live on Someone Else’s Easter

A sermon on Doubting Thomas, doubt, scars, and the longing to experience resurrection for ourselves.

Scripture: John 20: 19-31

Then Jesus looks at Thomas and says, “Go ahead. Look at my hands. Touch my side. Do not let your doubt be the end of the story.”

And Thomas says the only thing he can say:
“My Lord and my God.”

I can’t live on someone else’s Easter.

One week later, the room is still locked. The empire is still standing. Still? I thought this whole project was about overthrowing the empire that is killing us in our streets. I thought resurrection meant something had broken open for real. I thought the machinery of domination might at least shudder. But one week later, Jesus, still there is terror.

One week later, Rome is still Rome. Caesar is still trying to make Rome Great again. He has his coins with his face stamped on them and little masked men playing soldier boys in every province.

Meanwhile, the crosses of execution are still standing high on the hills to terrorize the misfits, the troublemakers, the creatives, the truth tellers, the preachers and the playwrights, the storytellers who refuse to allow the threat of the cross’s violence to buy their silence.

The poor are still hungry. The grieving are not suddenly comforted. The men who killed you do not wake up transformed by a soft spring sunrise and a slice of Easter cake and suddenly decide to repent and start dismantling the machinery of domination.

No.

One week later, Rome’s killing machine is still humming along. Did the resurrection of Jesus do anything to stop it?

The door is locked. That same upper room in the house where they ate the last supper and Jesus washed their feet. Now they are all huddled back there, together in fear.

And when Thomas hears that Jesus appears and shows them his scars and they run to him and say, “Thomas, we have seen the Lord,” Thomas says, “I cannot live on your miracle. I cannot build my life and my faith on your memory. Unless I see the wounds myself, unless I touch them, I am not there yet.”

And neither am I.

I can’t raise children on borrowed resurrection. I can’t keep ministering on secondhand joy. I can’t keep planting trees in the last hour of the apocalypse because someone else says they saw you once. I can’t keep building a life on religious leftovers. I need more than their memory. More than a church voice saying, cheer up now, Christ is risen.

I am ready to scream to drown out your “Indeed.” I need contact. I need to know whether resurrection can survive collision with this world as it actually is.

Because all these centuries later, the violence machine continues to thrive.

Our world groans under war and displacement and hunger and heat. Families driven from home. Children crying out for food. Nations breaking relationships and turning again to cruelty in the name of safety. Creation itself running a fever. The earth, the poor, the vulnerable, all of it still bearing the marks of state-sanctioned violence.

All this talk of resurrection, and all these centuries later, Jesus died and rose again and we tell the story over and over and still the seemingly unstoppable reign of leaders and systems driven by arrogance, fear, and an unquenchable thirst for power and wealth not only remains, but thrives.

Oh, they are even better dressed now. Better branded. Better poll tested. Their violence comes with hundreds of millions in ad campaigns and talking points and an atmosphere of numbness driven by an all knowing, all present, mindless social media machine that keeps me distracted from their greed and perversity.

Our bombs are wrapped in moral language and blessed with today’s empire-friendly pastors. Our oligarchs dream loudly. They do not even hide it anymore. Their politicians grin without shame. Their platforms reward our numbness. Their markets monetize despair. Their lies travel faster than prayers. And I am supposed to stand here, in this world, and live on someone else’s Easter?

I can’t.

The news just pours and pours out over me. It’s so personal. Values so long held so quickly swept aside by men with power and appetite so grotesque they make even Satan blush. Their violence is here in the feed. In the body. In the atmosphere.

So Jesus, I need to touch your scars. Because I am wounded. I need to feel your scars. Because I need to know my wounds can heal. I need body contact. The losses are too great to turn anywhere else.

The weeks of therapy. The days of Zoom calls and advocacy and parenting. And trying, God, trying to be a spouse no one has to make excuses for.

I keep getting held back by these wounds. The same old wounds. When I think my latest moves have healed them, up they rise again.

Daily leadership keeps asking me to sacrifice, and I faithfully die a little and die again. I keep praying and asking you- where is my resurrection? I hear these stories of others, but I do not have their resurrection in my grasp. So I need to see. I need to touch your healed wounds. I need to experience it in the places in me that keep dying.

I feel my own body resisting my higher efforts to stay kind, to stay grounded, to stay open. What should be a small cut is no longer small after ten thousand thin slices. The wound has gone so sore that even the slightest touch can set it burning again. These are the wounds that make me want to leave my body, slam the heavy door shut, lock it, and hide.

I can’t live on someone else’s Easter.

Show me your hands, Jesus. I need to feel your signs of resurrection. I can’t decorate my despair with somebody else’s alleluia. If resurrection is real, let it find me in locked rooms and let it come close enough to touch.

Your scars, Jesus. Why do you still have scars? You are Jesus, after all. Shouldn’t you have healed like some superhero? Shouldn’t resurrection have smoothed everything over? Shouldn’t the story come back cleaner than it left? But you came to Thomas and you showed him your scars. You let him have his own resurrection.

So. Where. Is. Mine?

I take from you keeping your scars that I cannot get rid of mine. So be it. But I need help healing those wounds that haven’t scarred yet. I need help bringing the wounds of dark rooms to light. I get that your resurrection does not cancel my history. But can’t it change my future? What has it done so far? Here we are.

Do not give me your Easter best, your hallelujah choruses, your glory without the scars. Do not give me hope without honesty. Do not give me resurrection without crucifixion. Too much Easter mood has blessed empire. Too much cheap religion has laid hands on war makers and called it peace. Too many men have cheered the dropping of bombs instead of crying when wars begin. Too many churches have skipped past the wound and by doing so, become useful to the very powers that put you on the cross. If we will not look at the scars, we will eventually bless what caused them.

Here I am, Jesus.

Relationship wounds.
Shame from stories past.
Church wounds from childhood.
The bodily exhaustion I carry.
My asthmatic lungs gasp and cough and revolt.
The body keeps score even when the mind tries to move on.

I cannot let these wounds have the final word.

So. Where. Is. My. Easter?

And then, not with an argument but with your body, you answer.

Here are my hands, you say. Here is my side. Here is my body, broken for you. Here is my blood, poured out for you. Here is the scar still tender, still telling the truth. Rome strikes so hard. And here is love. Broken, broken love. Not erased. Not airbrushed. Not spiritualized into some floaty idea that no longer has skin in the game. Love with a side wound. Love with nail marks. Love carrying the receipts of empire in its own flesh.

So let my wounds see your scars, Jesus. Let me feel them and be in contact. Let me rest. Oh my God, let me rest. Let me weep and lament with healing tears. Let me dance not from denial but from being seen and understood and surrendered to a higher power. Let me stop pretending my wounds are an interruption to ministry and let me understand they are where I am begging for contact with you.

Let me resist violence with hugs. Let me fight fascism by feeding someone. Let me move through my cravings by having someone feed me. Let us not Drill, Baby, Drill but Plant, Baby, Plant and return destruction with new life for a future we cannot yet see.

Meet me in that locked room, in the aftershock, in the one week after it all, and give me enough bodily contact to take the next faithful step.

Toward the next breath. Toward the next wound turned scar. The next prayer. The next meal shared. Tree planted. Neighbor defended. Truth told in public.

Enough contact to love this world without pretending it is not brutal. Enough to keep going without having to fake Easter. Enough to know that resurrection does not erase the wound, but it does leave a scar to remind us violence does not have the final word.

Because I cannot live on someone else’s Easter.

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Benediction

Go now, not on borrowed Easter,

but with your own wounds in your own body.

And may the risen Christ meet you there,

in locked rooms, in honest doubt, offering not answers but the testimony of healed wounds turned scars.

May you be given just enough -

enough breath, enough courage, enough love -

Enough, to take the next faithful step.

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I write for people who still care deeply but are tired.

People trying to stay compassionate when cruelty seems to have better marketing. People who want to be hopeful without pretending the news isn’t the news. People paying attention to climate change, public life, family, faith, grief, power, and one another, but who would also prefer not to become numb, cynical, or the person who turns every dinner conversation into a briefing on the collapse of civilization.

The Weeding Edge is a free Sunday-morning letter about the strange work of staying human in hard times.

Once a week, I send one story-driven essay to your inbox. Most begin with whatever I cannot stop thinking about: something one of my twin girls said, a garden bed, a church basement, a ridiculous conversation, a storm rolling through Chicago. Then, maybe, the small thing turns out not to be so small.

I tend to write in the territory where the serious and the ridiculous keep bumping into each other. That also happens to be where I live.

If that sounds like the kind of company you could use on a Sunday morning, I’d love to have you here. It’s free.

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There is no shortage of information about everything going wrong in the world. You probably do not need another person yapping at you about climate change, democracy, politics, institutions, religion, artificial intelligence, data centers, or civilization before you have finished your coffee.

I keep wondering what all of it is doing inside us and between us. What does fear turn us into when we breathe it all day? What happens to grief when we never give it a name? Why do we keep acting like we are separate when a garden, a power grid, a neighborhood, and a family will all tell you otherwise? How do we tell the truth about what is happening without confusing despair with wisdom? And how do we keep caring without convincing ourselves that we have to carry all of it alone?

Underneath almost everything I write is some version of the same question:

What kind of people are we becoming while the world changes around us?

Apparently, that question has no respect for boundaries. It follows me into tornado warnings and power outages, legislative hearings and sweaty church camps, climate organizing and old theology, family life and gardening, political absurdity and grief. It also follows me into conversations with my almost-five-year-old twins that begin innocently enough and somehow end with me reconsidering my entire philosophy of life.

That, more or less, is where The Weeding Edge lives.

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Why “The Weeding Edge”?

The name comes from gardening, although gardening has mostly taught me how little control I actually have.

Weeds do not disappear because we shout at them.

I know. Disappointing.

They recede when we pay attention to what is happening beneath the surface. What kind of soil are they growing in? What conditions keep feeding them? What happens if we stop yanking at whatever is visible long enough to understand the roots?

Somewhere along the way, I started wondering whether our common life works the same way. Fear has roots. Cruelty has roots. Loneliness has roots. The stories we tell about scarcity, independence, power, belonging, and who matters have roots. Fortunately, courage does too. So do relationship, imagination, humor, repair, and collective action.

That is the stuff I keep digging around in: the place where a private hurt says something about public life, or where a weird little moment turns out to be carrying more than I realized when it happened.

A miserable dinner conversation during our years of infertility became an essay about Mother’s Day, war, grief, justice, and the people who mother a weary world. A tree someone called trashy became a meditation on ecological relationships and the things we dismiss because we have forgotten how to see them. A sweaty speaking gig at church camp led me to wonder whether apathy is really our problem at all, or whether people already care deeply and simply have no idea how to connect their care to something large enough to carry it.

And sometimes the world becomes so overwhelming that the most spiritually honest thing I can come up with is simply:

Blah.

That became an essay too.

A few places to begin

If you’re new here, these are probably the best places to start.

Blah.
Too much world to metabolize.

Storms, power outages, climate anxiety, parenting, belonging, and a brain that has simply had enough inputs for one week.

Mother’s Day Wasn’t Meant to Be This Small
For everyone who has ever been handed flowers when what they needed was justice.

A painful dinner during our years of infertility opens into Mother’s Day, war, grief, chosen family, justice, and the people who mother a weary world.

The Crisis Beneath the Climate Crisis
What if the deepest problem is the story we have been told about ourselves?

The one where I started wondering whether the climate crisis is also a story crisis: about separateness, control, and what we have forgotten about belonging to a living world.

We Care Alone
Against the illusion of self-sufficiency.

A sweaty church camp, the ecological idea of an ecotone, and a question about whether people are really apathetic or just tired of caring by themselves.

A little about me

I come to this from a few worlds that do not always fit neatly together. I’m a Mennonite minister and climate organizer, and I serve as President & CEO of Faith in Place, an environmental organization working across Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. I’m also a husband, a dad of twin girls, a gardener who keeps learning the same lessons the slow way, and a person trying to live a spiritually honest life in public without losing my mind, soul, or sense of humor.

Those worlds collide here more often than I expect.

You do not need to be religious to read The Weeding Edge. You do not need to work on climate change. You certainly do not need to agree with me about everything. What I hope this can be is a place where we pay attention together: to what is happening, to what it is doing to us, and to what might still be possible if we refuse to mistake hardening for wisdom.

If you are asking some version of those questions too, come sit with me on Sunday mornings.

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If you want to help sustain the work, paid subscriptions are there too. Paid subscribers receive early access to draft book chapters, opportunities to offer feedback as the book takes shape, and a free copy of the book when it is published.

No pressure. Seriously. Free readers are part of this little patch of soil too.

The weeds are real. So are the roots. So is the soil.

Let’s keep digging.

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