In 2010, Kate Aver Avraham and Anne Sibley O’Brien published a children’s book called, “Who Will you be, Sara Mee?” It celebrates a traditional Korean ceremony on a child’s first birthday called “toljabee.” Various symbolic objects are placed in front of the child, and the one that the child chooses predicts what they will be when they grow up. The child, of course, has no idea, which is half the fun, as the family gathered round makes their own guesses.

While prophecy is part of a desire for certainty, because we want to know what’s going to happen, it’s hard to say what will transpire between a first birthday and adulthood. And little children don’t care. They dress up and play pretend to try out different roles and professions. Their imagination is active, much like artists, as they come up with different possibilities and different ways to present to the world.

I recently read a poem called “Fruit Guy” by John Wojtowicz (https://rattle.com/fruit-guy-by-john-wojtowicz/), which describes a conversation the author has with his preschooler about who grows fruit. The parent, of course, is more knowledgeable, but (spoiler alert) eventually gives in to the preschooler’s logic and description of the “Fruit Guy.” He ends by saying, “And because this is a reality worth escaping into— I let Mr. Banana live.” The world described by the preschooler does not reflect the reality the parent knows is true, and yet, it is a world worth living in.

So much of the world is unknown to young children, such as who grows the fruit. At the same time, they’re okay with not knowing and are willing to fill in the gaps with their own imagination and creativity. They want to learn about the world around them. They are still growing and changing.

Growth and change are more obvious in young children as they develop and mature. We adults forget that we are also changing and evolving. To be human is to be always changing and becoming. The opposite is to stagnate, wither, and die. We are not ever totally fixed beings, and this doesn’t just refer to our physical life. We are always unfinished, always left with some uncertainty.

I remember years ago hearing pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber say that if the you of five years ago wouldn’t consider the you of today to be a heretic, then you’re not growing spiritually. We are always changing, in so many ways, and those changes bring uncertainty with them. Our choice is in how we respond. We can embrace it and accept it, like the artists, guides, and little children; or we can resist change, double down on our beliefs, and turn faith into certainty. The problem is if you have certainty, then you no longer have faith.

May we all be more comfortable with faith and uncertainty and become a little more uncomfortable with certainty. There is so much we don’t know that we don’t know.

I’m curious, where do you need to lean more into uncertainty? Leave me a comment below.

“I don’t know where we’re going today,” is how the captain of our whale-watching cruise greeted us passengers. He explained further, “No two trips are alike. The crew and I watch the seas and scan social media for reports of whale sightings and that’s where we go.” While a little unnerving at first, his reasoning made sense. Wild animals, even when having usual migration routes and nests, can still quite easily change course and do not hang out in the same area day after day after day.

Wildlife guides, by necessity, are comfortable with uncertainty. They know how to recognize animal tracks, droppings, and homes. But they cannot guarantee a sighting on any given animal. That’s why dolphin and whale-watching trips will offer a free make-up outing if you don’t see any on your particular excursion. It’s an uncertainty that these captains are comfortable with, based on reasonable expectations and reality of understanding the creature’s habitat and habits.

As a hospice chaplain, I find myself in another field where we know what to expect, signs of imminent death, and life expectancies of less than six months. Yet even the medical professionals making that prognosis qualify it with, “given typical disease progression.” What they cannot say, and are well-aware they cannot say, is if your disease will follow normal progression. Some of our patients improve, and are discharged from hospice. Others continue to gradually decline for a couple years, four times as long as the initial prognosis. No medical professional can predict with certainty which path any given person will follow. Yet those who work in hospice, those who work as end-of-life guides, seem more comfortable with uncertainty than most of the rest of the medical world.

Granted, we generally want certainty from our doctors. We want to know the specific diagnosis and what to do about it. The first can be done with a great deal of confidence; the second is more like hospice work: here’s the treatment that we know works best for most people. Will it work best for you, in particular? We won’t know until you try it. Sometimes we are part of the “most people” category; sometimes we’re not. Sometimes our guides can think more creatively; sometimes they’re stuck in one way of doing things, insisting on the same route.

Some ten years ago, my then-rheumatologist told me that “Nothing more can be done for you medically. It’s your busy lifestyle,” as for why I was experiencing so many flare-ups. I went to a new rheumatologist, and he explained that the efficacy of my main arthritis drug had worn off since I had been on it for ten years. Some of these biological medications were not intended for such long-term use. His opinion was that it was time to change drugs. I did, and was the better for it. For that reason, he remains my favorite rheumatologist out of all the ones I’ve seen since my diagnosis twenty years ago. Some guides will tell you that there is only one path. Others will say, I’ve got experience, I know the signs and what to look for, and I don’t know exactly where we’re going.

Perhaps more so than at any time in history, we are a people who want knowledge and certainty. We want the assurance that we are right, that we know the answer, and that we know what to do in any given situation. Among the persons who are still more at ease with not knowing are artists. You are much more likely to find ambiguity in song lyrics, paintings, unresolved melodies, and poets or writers who don’t fill in all the gaps in the story (not plot holes, but unanswered questions).

Not everyone likes abstract art because we generally want to know what we’re looking at and be able to identify the subject of the artwork. It takes more time and imagination to look long enough at a painting where it’s not immediately clear what we’re looking at and create our own interpretations and wonderings. Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism and Pablo Picasso’s cubism are examples of this type of art.

Finally, I would also place yogis in this category as well. A good yoga teacher is a bit of an artist and certainly comfortable with not knowing, as they will offer a variety of modifications to any given pose. They place knowing within each person and do not presume they know what will feel best for anyone else’s body. Offering alternatives to the practice of yoga is helpful for me because, with my arthritis, I don’t always know how any given position will feel until I try it. I appreciate the flexibility yogis offer because the goal is to stretch your body in ways your particular body needs; the goal is not uniformity or a particular set of movements. Therefore, there’s a level of ease with uncertainty within any yoga practice, as you approach as a student of your own body, each time.

When I discussed this with my sister, who’s a yoga teacher, she noted that offering modifications empowers the individual and decreases resistance to the practice of yoga over all. She also shared in that the Yoga Sutra, two of the tenets describe comfortability with uncertainty. One is the Ishvara Pranidhana (Surrender to the Divine Mystery), which, in the surrender, seeks to cultivate acceptance that there are things you will never know. The second is Vairagya (Detachment / Letting Go), which is releasing the outcome of your actions. It says the mind craves certainty because it gets attached to specific outcomes.

For example, I could write a Substack post that goes viral and will get read and widely shared and lives will be transformed because of it. (Yes, that’s tongue-in-cheek.) Instead, I write, as an artist, what I feel led to write, the ideas that come in mind, I’d say through the Spirit, and the ones that I can flesh out enough are the ones I write and post. Then I have to let go of any outcome, and let the answer blow in the wind.

Ten years ago, Biblical scholar, theologian, and professor Dr. Peter Enns published a book called, “The Sin of Certainty: Why God Desires Our Trust More Than Our ‘Correct’ Beliefs.” He explores an idea that I’ve shared from time to time with my parishioners and patients, which is that certainty, or knowledge, is the opposite of faith. If we know something, then faith is not needed. Faith, by definition, is for things we are not 100% sure about, that we don’t have evidence for, that we cannot prove. Otherwise, it’s not faith.

However, we like the world to make sense. We want the world to make sense. One of the most common phrases I hear lately among teenagers through middle-aged adults is “everything happens for a reason.” We really want everything to have a reason behind it! And, ideally, we want to know, and be okay with, that reason! For a fuller treatment of the problems with that idea, I highly recommend Dr. Kate Bowler’s “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.” Suffice it to say, we really want life to make sense, and some things just don’t make sense. Sometimes bad things happen. Or, as they said in the 60s, “Shit happens.”

Moreover, the more you lean into certainty and knowledge, the more you circumvent things like mystery and fantasy, creativity and possibility. If your structure is rigid, then there is no room for creative solutions or a third option; it’s black or white, yes or no. It places our salvation in certainty, instead of in faith. A lack of certainty, however, leaves more to the unknown, which can inspire creativity and the imagination for what might be. The downside is when your anxiety is in charge of your imagination, and you come up with everything that might go wrong. When your anxiety is properly in its place, however, then you use outside-the-box thinking and creatively problem solve or come up with extraordinary ideas.

Most of us are not very comfortable with uncertainty. Outside-the-box thinking is great for others, but we want to know. Our quest for looking for a reason behind everything assumes that there is a reason, and the reason is something we don’t know, that we have to search for and find. Thus, we place authority on outside sources, instead of trusting our inner knowing, or just plain being okay with mystery. Instead, we are inundated with so many detective TV shows and movies, with resolution coming when the mystery is solved.

In 2024, a movie called “Conclave” came out, based on the book of the same name by Robert Harris. As you might imagine, it’s about a conclave meeting to elect a new Pope. In both the book and the movie, Lawrence, the Cardinal leading the conclave, says, “Let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”

My working definition of sin is anything that separates us from God, from one another, and from ourselves. Certainty, especially related to religion, certainly separates us from God and from one another. You could argue that the original sin from the Garden of Eden was the desire for certainty. Adam and Eve wanted knowledge; they wanted to know for sure about good and evil. When you have absolute knowledge, also known as certainty, of what’s good and what’s evil, then it makes it easier to judge others. Judgment creates separation. Certainty obscures the presence of the Divine.

Instead, mystery allows room for possibility and spurs the imagination to consider what could be. In this series, we’re going to explore who is more comfortable with uncertainty, and what times and when we are ourselves are more at ease with not knowing. If you’ve already got thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Please leave me a comment or message me.

This Latin phrase means “to the stars through hardships.” It is the state motto of Kansas, among many sundry organizations, and can be found in many book, movie, and music titles. Unlike my previous posts in this series on the stars, this saying is intended more metaphorically than literally. The idea is more of the necessity of persisting through difficulties in order to achieve greatness. Anything worth doing will run through struggle, not around it.

While the earliest origins of this phrase stem from Ancient Rome and Stoicism philosophy, it certainly runs countercultural to modern life. The period since World War II has been a period of boom and of making life easier, more convenient, and more comfortable. There are mixes for just about any dinner or dessert, if you don’t just plain buy it pre-made. We have dishwashers, coffee makers, and see-through refrigerators, so we don’t even have to open the door anymore to see what’s inside. We have gadgets and gizmos galore designed to alleviate and prevent struggle and hardship. Some of these are incredibly helpful, such as the small insulin pump that means people with diabetes no longer have to prick their fingers every day in order to test their glucose levels. Medical advancements certainly make a positive difference.

However, when so much in life is convenient, it can become more of a struggle to deal with inconveniences. It can become easy to expect that everything should be easy. Social media influencers generally don’t post their early videos before they learned how to do a skill. They rarely show the struggle, whereas 80s movies excelled at the montage piece showing the main character working and practicing to achieve their goal. “The Karate Kid” and the Rocky movies, among others, had extended training sequences. Now, these montage scenes of learning and mastering a new skill are largely missing, and we’re only shown the finished product, as if it were easy and took no work whatsoever.

The truth is that struggle and hardship and difficulties are part of life. They are unavoidable. They cannot be edited out. Just as much, we don’t always get to choose what the difficulty is or who will help us with it. Anything worth doing is not going to be easy and it’s going to come at a cost. You can’t wake up one morning and decide you’re going to the stars that day. It takes years of hard work to learn and study and prepare. Great heights are not achieved instantaneously. We can’t put them into a box mix. The only way to the stars is through struggle.

A few months ago, I came across the etymology of the word “disaster”: it comes from Latin and literally means “to be disconnected from the stars.” The idea of disaster as being disconnected from the stars stuck with me and was one of the reasons behind doing a series on the stars. When disaster strikes, when calamity befalls us, it can feel as though we’re rent asunder from the rest of the universe. These days, that can feel quite literal if a natural disaster cuts off telephone and internet access. Other disasters do not disconnect us physically, but in more of an emotional sense of feeling apart from everyone and everything else.

The history of the etymology of disaster, however, is not simply separation but also bad luck. The prefix “dis-” can mean a disconnection from; it can also mean ill (like dis-ease), or bad. So, when combined with the stars, disaster used to mean not just misfortune, but bad fortune, unluckiness, and ill-fated. This original meaning from the mid-sixteenth century when some thought that the stars determined one’s fate. For example, the “star-crossed lovers” of Romeo and Juliet, which was written in the late sixteenth century.

Speaking of Shakespeare, my high school senior thesis on Macbeth was about whether Macbeth had free will or a fate predetermined by outside forces. Ultimately, I came down on the side of free will. Yes, some things seem unlucky, and misfortune happens to us all. Some disasters are completely out of our control. However, the Merriam-Webster dictionary says nothing about the cause of a disaster in its definition of one: “a sudden calamitous event bringing great damage, loss, or destruction.” Sometimes disasters are our own doing. Either way, we feel disconnected from the stars, from the universe, and sometimes even from the compass that guides our sense of well-being.

The result is that we’re unable to orient ourselves. We can’t tell which way is north if we can’t find the North Star. We’re disoriented when we’re disconnected from the stars. Not knowing where we are means it’s also impossible to navigate a way forward. The GPS cannot map a route for us if it doesn’t know where we are to start. Last, without connection to the stars, we’re unable to find patterns and make sense of things. The ancients connected stars to create constellations. They used the stars to tell stories about the world and about themselves, to make sense of their world.

The difference in response to disaster is free will. If disaster is more apartness than misfortune, then we can do something about that. With disconnection, we have agency to act. If it’s fate, then we’re helpless. The idea of separation, therefore, is more helpful than simply bad luck. Disconnection means re-connection can happen. It argues for free will, and not just fate. It allows one to change one’s stars, to make one’s own luck, or, at the very least, to recover from bad luck. Disasters can feel like the end of the world. Fortunately, the end of one world is often the beginning of another as we re-orient ourselves again and learn again to navigate a way forward.

One of my all-time favorite young adult authors is Katherine Paterson. If I ever do a Young Adult Book month (like I’ve done for Children’s Books), I will definitely include her 1981 Newbury Medal winning, “Jacob Have I Loved.” One of her later novels is called “The Same Stuff as Stars,” published in 2002. It’s about an eleven-year-old girl who lacks stability in her home life. Her dad is imprisoned and her mom abandoned her and her younger brother at their great-grandmother’s farmhouse. The one place where she begins to find hope and a sense of steadiness again is from a neighbor who teaches her about the stars. In their first conversation, this neighbor tells her, “The same elements, the same materials that make those stars up there is what makes you. You’re made from star stuff.” The girl replies that that doesn’t make sense, as the stars are shining up in the sky and she’s on the ground, not shining. He replies, “Well yes, but that doesn’t mean you’re made from different stuff. Just that something different is happening to those same elements. You’re still close kin to the stars.” (p. 80).

Another favorite author I only discovered a few years ago is Jan Richardson. She is best known for her books of blessings, especially one called “The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief.” However, her newest one, released just six months ago, is called “How the Stars Get in Your Bones: A Book of Blessings.” “How the Stars Get in Your Bones” is a poem in a series of blessings of healing, which uses gentle metaphors to convey images of peace and love.

For months, I had trouble reconciling the two titles: “The Same Stuff as Stars” and “How the Stars Get in Your Bones.” How can both be true? Either the star stuff is there, or it’s not. I struggled with even getting into the book of blessings, until I used the title as a writing prompt and wrote my own poem: (I firmly believe that all good art inspires more art.)

How the Stars Get in Your Bones

Do they get in, one by one,

Speck by speck,

Gradually building

And becoming more than the sum of their parts

Until you are shiny

And radiate cosmic energy?

No, they start there all along.

Do you not know? Have you not heard?

You are made of the same stuff as stars.

You can already radiate cosmic energy

And expose what is hidden.

Dust off your bones.

You’re already shiny.

You were shiny all along.

You’ve had the ability to radiate cosmic energy all along.

You’ve had the power to nurture life and enhance growth and reveal.

Why did it get covered up with grime and soot, with dust and ashes?

Fear.

Fear of standing out, of rejection, of the power to change the world.

Fear of scarcity, of not enough-ness, of difference.

Fear of losing control, losing shininess, losing yourself.

But fear does not get the last word.

Love does.

Love yourself. Take care of yourself.

Wash off the layers of grit.

Treat yourself gently.

Remember, you’re used to the grime.

It will take time, likely.

Your bones aren’t used to showing the stars that are in them.

When your body has learned to hide, it takes time for your body to learn it’s okay to not hide,

To trust the open sky

That’s full of stars

Just like you.

Our first series this summer is going to be on the stars, hence “Stellar” Theology. The stars create a sense of awe, remind us of the divine, and help us find our place in the world. If you have some interesting insights or trivia, I’d love to hear them. Please leave me a comment or send me a message.

Today, we’re beginning with awe. Looking up at the night sky on a clear night can inspire a sense of awe and wonder. It can help us feel connected to each other and to the earth and remind us that we’re not alone. A sense of awe and connectedness can calm your nervous system and reduce stress. Looking at the stars can simply boost your sense of well-being as you’re able to take deeper breaths and more calmly assess your situation and your place in the world.

When Stuart Hine loosely translated the hymn “How Great Thou Art,” from its original Swedish into English, he took artistic license to list the stars first when

“...consider[ing] all the works thy hands hath made.

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

thy pow’r throughout the universe displayed!”

The Swedish hymn, first written by poet and minister Carl Boberg after an intense thunderstorm in 1885, had separate verses about the heavens and the thunder.¹ (It was originally nine verses long!) Both poets, however, refer to a sense of awe upon witnessing the power of God in creation.

The ancients also found the divine in the stars as many of the names of constellations come from Greek mythology. Creating constellations is a way of finding patterns in the night sky and making sense of one’s world. We all want things to make sense, even when they don’t.

Learning to read the stars helped early civilizations orient themselves in the world. Sailors used the stars to navigate and help them find their way. Astrology, as well, is a way of using the stars and lunar seasons to help one make sense of the world and determine how to act and what course to set. For one final more specific example, Harriet Tubman knew how to find the North Star to get her bearings, pointing her way north on each perilous trip seeking freedom for herself and others.

Today, we still use a solar calendar, based off the largest star in our solar system. Where would we be without our calendars, telling us where to be when and organizing our appointments, vacations, and other events? In modern society with electricity and windowless rooms, we may not be quite so consciously aware of how we construct our day and our time around a star, yet we still do. Everything has a time and a season to it. Stars help us orient ourselves and navigate our way through, even when we’re not looking up at the night sky.

Easter, also, is a process. Resurrection, rebirth, new life: it’s all a process; it all takes time. Plant shoots don’t suddenly burst forth from the ground; you can gradually see them forming and taking shape. My puppy did not actually grow overnight.

Major, traumatic events can happen in a split second, or just a few minutes, like the Oklahoma City bombing national memorial park reminds us. Recovery, the new life afterward, achieving a new normal takes a lot of time and a lot of work. Anyone who’s been thru any kind of rehab, physical therapy, occupational therapy, etc., can tell you about the time and effort needed for recovery.

That time and that work are part of why I didn’t write on Substack during this past Lenten season. I have to have bandwidth to write, and I didn’t have it this spring. The other part is that I’ve struggled with what to write. I can’t pretend things are the same. I’m not sure I can write how I used to – I’m not who I used to be, even just in the three and a half years since I started this Substack. A friend of mine changed the title of her Substack a year after starting it, to convey a more accurate message of its content. I’ve debated changing mine, but I don’t know to what. Confucius said, “The beginning of wisdom is naming a thing rightly.”

I think this Substack is still named rightly. Liturgical seasons are still important to me, even if sometimes I struggle to switch gears with the turn of the calendar page, and reflections are among my better forms of writing. So, we might just keep going, and see how, or if, things evolve. As always, I’m open to any feedback and suggestions you might have. Thank you for continuing to read.

“I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observe a holy Lent...”

This year, I did not observe Lent. I lived it.

No, no one died and no new diagnoses. Hopefully, in the future I’ll be able to write details. Right now, I can tell you that my Lenten season was spent in shock and overwhelm and tears and trying the best I could to hold everything together.

The pictures below are how my 11-year-old processed it in real time.

The above photograph is three versions of his new character that he found himself repeatedly drawing on his schoolwork. He named this character “the Lord of Chaos.” A shadowy figure with a hat, of whom all you see is a silhouette amid intense background patterns; the Lord of Chaos brings chaos and disruption. The chaos itself is neither good nor bad; it all depends on your interpretation. The Lord of Chaos might destroy a bad world, which is good. Or, the chaos might destroy your world, which presumably you would see as bad. We had a lot of chaos and disruption in our household during the Lenten season.

A couple weeks after first showing me his drawings, I asked my 11-year-old more questions about the Lord of Chaos; and he presented me with a new drawing. It includes the Lord of Chaos, but provides a container for him, a supreme being who created everything and holds the whole universe, chaos and all.

This being reminds me of the phrase from the book of Acts in the bible, “...in him we live and move and have our being.” Curiously enough, the footnote tells me that when Paul is addressing the Athenians about the altar “to an unknown god,” he is quoting from the Greek philosopher Epimenides from the 6^th century BCE. This supreme being provides a space for all: good, bad, chaotic, orderly, all of our actions and lives.

Incidentally, I wrote most of this post on Easter Sunday, six weeks ago. Yet I struggled to get it finalized to share with you. Perhaps Easter Sunday was still too soon. I asked the school counselor to meet with my 11-year-old, simply telling the counselor that we’d had “a rough spring.” The counselor’s report back to me began by saying, “You were not, uh, you were not exaggerating.”

This Lent/spring was unlike any other. It appears things that were disrupted needed disrupting. We have gotten more help besides the school counselor. Thank you for reading and stay tuned for Part II of my update with what I’ve learned about Easter.

Both characters have made judgments about the other. Both are speaking from a place of pain in this conversation and lets the other one know what they think of them in no uncertain terms. Wesley believes Buttercup lacks loyalty and betrayed him. Buttercup knows the Dread Pirate Roberts reputation for no survivors, no mercy. Other than Roberts hiding that he’s also Westly, they’re both speaking directly and frankly about their hurt.

On one hand, this line epitomizes capitalism. Advertising targets pain and fear – buy our product and feel better, feel happier, feel safer. Twenty-first century western civilization also seems to believe that you should never be in pain. Numb it, fix it, ignore it, but we rarely directly sit with it or address it, as Buttercup and Westly are doing here. They know exactly why they are in pain, and yet their beliefs are both faulty. Buttercup is still mourning the presumed death of Wesley. She did not move on quickly to the Prince, as Roberts believes. Checking their assumptions, which finally happens when Buttercup pushes Roberts down the hill, reveals the truth.

Sometimes, our pain is from unchecked assumptions. Sometimes those assumptions are correct and we may gain a little bit of peace from having them confirmed. Other times, it turns out we were wrong and that shifts the story we were telling ourselves and may ease our pain as we adjust to new information. It was a healing moment for me when a male Baptist pastor invited me to pray recently. I shrunk a little bit when I first heard he was coming. Another male Baptist preacher, back when I was still in seminary, asked me to explain how I could possibly be called to ordination given how he read Paul’s letters in the Bible. As you may imagine, my answer did not change his theology. Ever since, I presume male Baptist ministers will not recognize me as an equal, and I do so for my own self-protection. This one changed the story, however, and later, I sent him an email to thank him for checking my assumption.

The problem with simplifying life to equal pain is that pain is not the whole story of life. Life is also beautiful and fragile, and inspiring and so many other things. Life involves pain, yes. Life is ups and downs and you can’t have one without the other. Life is not all pleasure, and it’s not all pain, either. There’s good and bad, twists and turns, some pain and some joy, too. Life is more than pain, or needs to be in order to move past survival and into thriving.

This week, we enter the more somber, although not necessarily more painful, season of Lent. We journey with Jesus to the cross. It’s a time to check assumptions, about faith, the stories you tell yourself, or things you’ve assumed about others but never actually verified. I encourage you this Lent to pay attention to when your thought is an assumption, and if you’re able, to check it. My godmother loved to say that when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME. If you need a Lenten discipline, perhaps consider one in which you refrain from making assumptions, jumping to conclusions, or judging, without finding out the rest of the story. Let’s gently check our assumptions so that we can live a more peaceful life.

Today, life is... strange.

This predictive text surprised me, as I’m unfamiliar with the title. Turns out “Life Is Strange” is a video game that premiered in 2015.

The game uses the style of the “choose your own adventure” books that were popular when I was growing up. I disliked them, because I always chose the safe course of action and the story ended in about five pages. When choosing my own adventure, I need more information than a paragraph of text in order to be able to decide! My preference is for calculated risks, so I can guess what may happen and not be taken by surprise. Also, I’m not sure I’d be able to act any more boldly with a video game, except that “Life Is Strange” explores the supernatural realm. In a fantasy or science fiction scenario, I might be more curious about what’s behind closed doors and down dark staircases when I know it’s not real life. Instead, real life is strange.

The American author Mark Twain wrote in 1897 a fictional travel book, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” Since I started writing this post and now, finishing it, we have seen many strange things that would feel unrealistic if they were in a fiction novel. The unrest in Minnesota. Greenland as a flash point. What is happening in these places would be conceivable if science fiction, but not realistic fiction. Yet they are reality. Life is, in fact, strange.

In a recent Daily Meditation email, Father Richard Rohr shared his paraphrase of a quote from an evolutionary scientist almost one hundred years ago. In 1927, J.B.S. Haldane published “Possible Worlds, and Other Essays,” in which he wrote, “Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” Fr. Rohr rewrote it to convey his own idea that “God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.” The universe is strange. God is strange. Life, too, is strange.

All of these iterations harken back to a Bible verse I’ve shared almost annually with y’all, Ephesians 3:20, “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” God can do more than we can imagine. That’s why life is stranger than fiction. Reality is not only rarely what we would choose, but often beyond what we can imagine or dream of. That’s why the good news is that God is also strange enough to do beyond what we can imagine. Our imaginations, even overactive ones, are still limited. Some of us have learned to contain them on purpose. Other folks just seem to never have developed theirs. Thus, we have encouragement to follow our dreams, to be creative, because while our imaginations can run away with us, especially when giving into fear, they are also the source of change. Imaginations that lean into the what if life was not just different, but different in a way that improved quality of life for many. Life doesn’t have to be boring and predictable and the other antonyms of strange. While there are times when we long for a routine life, or at least an uneventful week, that’s not life as a whole. Life is ups and downs and twists and turns and we do not get to determine all of that. We do our best to create regularity in our lives, and we can expect life to throw us a curveball. Or ten. That’s because life is strange.

First up: Life Is Good.

Life is Good is a clothing line founded in 1994 by two brothers who had been selling handmade t-shirts out of their van. When they created the upbeat brand name, they realized they could use it to create connections and send good vibes into the world. I currently have two shirts, a car magnet, and a sticker on my current journal from them.

The appeal to me is the affirmation that life is indeed good even when things are hard. For a friend of mine, their clothing is 100% cotton and so she does not have an allergic reaction to it.

For Christians, the original “life is good” idea goes all the way back to Genesis 1 in creation. There’s a refrain that “God saw that it was good,” throughout the story, but it doesn’t begin until the third day, the day God created life in the form of vegetation. On the first two days, when God separates light and dark and brings about waters and the sky, there is no comment that “it was good.” Instead, days three thru six, when God creates plants, animals, and humankind, it is good. Even when God creates the stars, great balls of gas that only exist for a time, these are declared good. Last, when God creates humanity, we alone of creation are declared “very good.”

So, yes, life is good. And yes, I’m aware I’m writing this in early January 2026 when political unrest and upheaval are increasing, and tensions are escalating within our country and across the globe. It does not seem like a great time to be alive in some ways. How do we still affirm that life is, indeed, good? With random acts of kindness. Cultivating beauty. Being creative (not productive, and regardless of the result). Remaining grounded and in tune with what’s important. Acting on and from our values. We can create small havens that are pockets of peace in a world that feels less peaceful by the day. Tend to your needs. Help those around you. Remember that each of us is created in the image of the divine and that divine love flows in and through each one. Find what you need for your own emotional regulation and help others co-regulate when tempers flare. Life is good, and it is better, together.

I started this Substack at the beginning of Advent in 2022, just over three years ago. This third year that I just completed saw 44 posts, out of a possible 52. That’s fewer weeks missed than it felt like to me. However, I noticed that I slid from weekly writing to about three times/month. The struggle, since my last concussion October 2023, is to have the mental bandwidth to write in addition to life. It helps when I pick a theme that’s intriguing and that y’all submit questions for, such as my 3AM theology series last summer.

My word for 2025 was Empowered. Here are some of the parts of my life this year where I was empowered, and yet sometimes it resulted in not having that bandwidth for writing the next post:

• I transferred my ordination from The United Methodist Church to the Federation of Christian Ministers.

• I began work as a hospice chaplain, first PRN, then part-time, and in one week will shift to full-time.

• I participated in a summer yoga program at Serenity Farm Yoga Studio in Durham, NC. (I highly recommend it for those of you who are local!)

• I advocated for my child’s health, both in the medical system as well as the school system, resulting in a school transfer this fall.

• I stepped up leadership with my child’s soccer league when I became the last team staff member standing after a series of unexpected changes.

• I took two trips that were true breaks: to NYC with my husband for our anniversary and to Puerto Rico as a family.

• I took two trips that were incredibly restful and involved a lot of sleep: to the Outer Banks and to where the Neuse River empties into the Pamlico Sound near the Southern Outer Banks.

• I took one trip that really pushed me, to the NC mountains, where we saw the damage from Hurricane Helene and where I almost didn’t reach the top of Lookout Mountain! Thankfully, my child reported it was just around the next bend from where I was ready to call it quits. I’m pretty sure there’s a message in that!

  

• Finally, I made the decision to stop being in process, vocationally-speaking; to stop pursuing the next level of certification, endorsement, or other approval. It felt like a weight off my shoulders. Not long after I made the decision, I started walking regularly again in my neighborhood.

Looking ahead in 2026, I start full-time hospice chaplain work in a week. It may result in limited mental bandwidth as I expect the cognitive load to temporarily increase while I learn a new geographic area. That limited bandwidth may result in continued inconsistent posting. The other reason for some inconsistent writing lately is that we adopted a new puppy three weeks ago! Her name is Charli and it has been a big adjustment for our whole household. She’s a fourteen week old ball of energy and cuteness.

Also, two particular ornaments made it on our tree this year, in memory of our past dogs:

I’m curious, what are you remembering from 2025, and what are you looking forward to in 2026?

This is where I am. I’m struggling to get into “the Christmas spirit” this year. I’m struggling to get into the Advent spirit. Our tree is up. It has one ornament; a 3D printed star my husband made a few years ago that hung at our doorway until at some point I took it down and put it in a drawer. I found it the other day and my daughter hung it on the tree.

We only just put up our outdoor lights last week. We’ve done some Christmas shopping, made some plans, I’ve worn some of my holiday jewelry. We’ve lit candles on our Advent wreath. But we haven’t been feeling “it.”

Turns out, many others aren’t feeling it, either, this year. Some are my hospice patients and their families comment on how this holiday season is very different from previous years. Then there are others of us who are in a deep state of lament over the state of the world. Wars, more wars, unprovoked violence, mass shootings, lack of sympathy and empathy, it has been harder to find and celebrate the good things and the good times. It feels like one has to bury their head in the sand in order to access joy. Who’d have thought that joy was buried in the sand?

Although, that reminds me of some of Jesus’s parables, like the ones about seeking the pearl of great price and finding the treasure buried in the field (Matthew 13:44-46). To find the treasure buried in the field, you must narrow your focus on the dirt, even if you don’t actually put in your whole head. Both parables are about focusing on what matters most and ignoring that others may think you’re crazy for doing so.

I noticed this week that it feels like more houses put up holiday lights this year, not just in my neighborhood but in others that I drive thru as well. When I commented to my husband, he replied that people are looking for joy and creating it on their own. Sometimes we do have to be single-minded and intentional in our pursuit of love and joy. Yesterday was the Winter Solstice, the day with the fewest hours of daylight, the night with the most darkness. But it’s in the dark that the holiday lights and the stars are most visible.

I’m curious, are you seeing more holiday lights this year than in previous years? Where are you finding joy?

The tip of the pyramid of emotional needs is wisdom. Dr. Susan David explains it using examples of learned wisdom: “Life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. We are young until we are not; healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knees. Courage is not the absence of fear; courage is fear walking.”

I find it interesting that we have an emotional need for wisdom. We don’t merely need knowledge; we need discernment and judgment about such knowledge. I can know that it’s cold outside, but unless I think through the implications of that fact, I won’t grab a coat and gloves before I head out the door. Some wisdom we learn on our own; other sayings we hear around us and, if we are wise, determine whether there is wisdom in such adages. “Measure twice, cut once,” yes. It’s practical advice. “Don’t go to bed with wet hair or you’ll catch a cold,” no. This is more folk knowledge from before we knew about germs and viruses.

Then, even though we need wisdom, it can be hard to put into practice. Sometimes our wisdom is dismissed, doubted, or devalued, which can cause us to dismiss, devalue, and doubt that we know what we know. Other times, nuggets that we’ve learned get confirmed through conversations, reading, or even on TV shows or movies. These are times where what is said by someone else resonates deeply with us, even if we’ve never spoken or written those exact words before.

One place where I find myself often experiencing that resonance is in Dr. Kate Bowler’s work. She finished her Ph.D at Duke University the same year I earned my M.Div. and was the head preceptor for my American Christianity class. We spent a week together in El Salvador the next year and I got to know her better. A few years later she was diagnosed with stage IV cancer and she wrote “Everything Happens” as a love letter to her young son. The book morphed into more books, a podcast, and then a whole project as she continues to explore these truths and write about life full of uncertainty. The mural pictured in the YouTube thumbnail below reflects the same wisdom that Dr. Susan David ends with, life is beautiful, and life is hard. Life is fragile, more fragile than we tend to think about it being. It can change in an instant. And there is such beauty and wonder in the world as well.

Reset: Cultivate values-based habits. After redefining your values and priorities, your current way of being may no longer feel right. - Dr. Susan David

As we near the top of Dr. Susan David’s Pyramid of Emotional Needs, I find it interesting that one of them is to occasionally reset. It’s helpful to periodically evaluate our priorities and what’s most important to us to determine whether our actions and our lives reflect those values.

There are many reasons we may have outgrown old habits as our lives and those around us are constantly changing. Yet, sometimes, we stubbornly hold on to old habits longer than we should simply because of the comfort of familiarity. The action is no longer serving us like it once did, but we grieve no longer doing it.

My relationship with the Church has changed this year; reset, if you will. I transferred my ordination from one ordaining body to another, and I quit striving for approval and acceptance by the former. Once I stopped being continually in process for almost two decades, pursuing ordination and then endorsement, it was like I could breathe again. I could walk again, as in go for a walk in my neighborhood, which I had not done in months.

Five days before my last Sunday as the lead pastor of a church, over five years ago, I began this unfinished poem:

Healing 

Healing 
Is like 
Breathing 
Again  
For the first time 
In a long time 

I hope to be able to breathe 
Deep breaths 
Down thru my chest and abdomen 
No more shallow breaths 
No more anxiety and apprehension and tongue-biting 

My relationship with the Church needed resetting. Is still resetting. Is still healing. It’s a process, and an emotional need. There are also no timetable and no urgency. My pace is my pace.

What area in your life needs resetting? If you’re willing to share it, please leave a comment.

This idea was one of my biggest takeaways from the 2023 Pixar movie, “Elemental.” The main character, Ember, is a Fire element, and she occasionally loses her temper. Wade, a Water element, tells her, “Sometimes, when I lose my temper, I think it’s just me trying to tell me something I’m not ready to hear.” How often do we bite our tongue so that we don’t fly off the handle? What’s more, sometimes we use anger as a protective emotion to prevent ourselves from feeling a more vulnerable emotion. It can be easier to be mad than to be sad, especially when we’re around other people. Ember lost her temper because she didn’t want to continue the family business. (Spoiler alert, sorry.) When Ember finally acknowledged that she had other dreams and hopes for her life, first to herself and Wade, later her parents, then her temper calmed down. Ember wanted to want what her parents wanted for her. And, when she was willing to be honest with herself, to figure out why she was getting so upset over it, she realized that she actually felt sad and guilty that she didn’t want the same thing that they did. The anger had been covering it up. She didn’t think she was allowed to want something different.

Sometimes we don’t know where our emotional reaction is coming from. We surprise ourselves at how we feel. It’s like being an adolescent again, with a big emotion seemingly coming from out of nowhere. About six months ago, I had a bit of an adult temper tantrum, including literally stomping my foot. (It sounds funny now.) It was three months later before I could look back at that event and follow the calendar to all that had happened the week before to realize why I was so upset that particular night. I had been horribly triggered at another event, that, in hindsight, affected many of my actions and my mood that following week.

Dr. David writes, “Stay open to tough emotions. They can help you identify what matters most. The willingness to accept and learn from our emotions is courageous.” Now, typically, while you’re in the big emotion is not the time to be self-reflective. You have to wait until later, a movie montage of three months or maybe even longer, until it’s time to learn from it. The key is that you’re willing to learn from it, to explore it, to figure out why you responded how you did. Were you covering up another emotion? Is there a truth you were reluctant to acknowledge? Were you not acting aligned with what’s most important to you? Whatever it is, it takes courage to feel emotions we’d rather avoid and courage to be willing to determine why we felt that way at all.

Let’s not sweep emotions under the rug and ignore them. Let’s learn from our outbursts and discover what we need to face, however uncomfortable.

And yet we still struggle with it. We don’t want to need other people. So, we struggle with maintaining connections. We struggle with being in community when there’s conflict. We struggle with staying connected when there are overwhelming life events. I live in a household of introverts, and our tendency is to withdraw and pull back when we’re tired, or stressed, or even just hungry. I can’t speak for extroverts; I just know the human tendency to disconnect from other people when life becomes too much. And that’s often the exact time when we need our connections. Not necessarily in person; a text, phone call, email, or even personal note written on paper can suffice.

The truth is that we are connected. This is true whether we like it or not, whether we pretend otherwise, or wish otherwise. In Scripture, Paul writes about how we’re all members of one body and when we’re upset with one body part, we don’t cut off the offending limb. When we stub our toe, we don’t cut it off. We take the weight off it; we may put some ice on it. It gets a little extra TLC.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Prince T’Challa, aka the Black Panther, pictured above, tells the UN, “Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another, as if we were one single tribe.”

We are, actually, one single tribe, one human race. All of our divisions are arbitrary - gender, political, favorite sports teams, the social construct of race, class, etc. In Sunday School this past Sunday, the pastor said that whenever we draw a line in the sand, over whatever division we create, Jesus is always on the other side. I’ll be chewing on that idea for a while.

This year, I’m rereading the Beartown trilogy by Fredrik Backman. I highly recommend all of his novels. Personally, I find the settings in his native Sweden refreshing and while the details of day-to-day life may be different from life in the U.S., he writes about human nature and the human condition that is universal to us all. I just finished, for the second time, the second book in the trilogy, called “Us Against You.” (The first time through, the third one was my favorite; I’m curious to see if that is true again.) Backman explores themes of loyalty, what may cause you to change your loyalty, whether to a person, team, or community, and how communities change and evolve over time.

We all need community and connection, whether you find it at work, where you live, where you worship, or where you work out. This sense of feeling part of something larger than ourselves is not something that tends to happen organically when we’re adults. We’re no longer all part of the same class at school. Some workplaces do more effective team-building than others. Instead, we must be intentional about nourishing our connections and leaning into our connections in order to have them at all. Don’t wait for the other person to reach out first. Relationships are two-way streets. Feeling connected isn’t just going to happen to you. Nurture your connections and build new ones, knowing that we have a better sense of well-being when we feel connected.

Psychologically and emotionally, even physically, we need routines. We need to know what to expect, how things typically go, and be able to successfully navigate them repeatedly. Routines give us a sense of stability and accomplishment. They allow us to maintain some order. Life isn’t just complete and utter chaos when we have routines and procedures we consistently follow. Our bodies and our minds know what to expect.

Moreover, especially for those of us who have experienced head injuries, routines lighten the cognitive load. I don’t have to think as much about how I’m going to drive to work if I drive the same way to the same place every day. In college, I had classmates who had previously attended schools with mandated uniforms, and it was common for someone in my dorm to pull out her old uniform to wear one day because it was easier than deciding what to wear. There was a routine, so there was no decision to be made. If I don’t have to give thought to my routines, then I have more cognitive space for other things, like creativity.

We all need routines, not just for stability but to help us cope with the un-routine irregularities in life as well. Routines can help us face the unfamiliar, because we are starting from a grounded, secure place. When we are successful and stable in routines areas of our life, we can feel a little safer to experiment and try new things. We can roll a little easier with the unexpected. Routines can help us let go of what we cannot control. We know what is our usual, and we know when something is different.

At the same time, flexibility is needed within our routine so that the routine does not become a rut. We can pack the same lunch every day, but if we insist on only that same meal, then we will miss out when a coworker brings in homemade persimmon bread to share. Or we will not be able to allow ourselves to try new food at a food truck. I’d rather have the same commute over constantly learning new roads. However, I appreciate the variety of occasional new roads. A little variety, especially somewhat controlled changes that I’m in charge of, keep my brain engaged and my routine from becoming a rut.

Routines cannot be created for everything. You cannot control one hundred percent of your life. But you can create routines that provide stability around the basics: when you eat, when you sleep, the beginning and end of the day. Simply following the routines can increase your inner sense of stability and security, enabling you to be more resilient when uncontrolled changes come your way.