It sometimes feels as though we are living in two parallel universes.

In one, the entire world order is crumbling around us. Institutions we once trusted are failing. Political leaders openly traffic in cruelty, grievance, and fear. Churches that once proclaimed good news have aligned with power, exclusion, and domination. Rights we assumed were secure are being stripped away. Violence is normalized. Lies are repeated until they become the air we breathe.

The old world is coming apart, and it is not doing so quietly.

But at the same time, something else is happening.

People are finding one another. Communities are learning to speak the truth about histories they were taught to ignore. Survivors are breaking their silence. Pastors and theologians are recovering a gospel that does not require enemies. Young people are rejecting forms of faith that demand the sacrifice of their integrity, their bodies, or their neighbors. Across lines of race, religion, gender, and nationality, people are imagining ways of belonging that are not organized around domination.

A new world is struggling to be born.

On my website, I use a line adapted from Arundhati Roy:

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

I have loved those words for years. But lately I have been thinking more deeply about what it means to say that another world is “on her way.”

Birth is not sentimental.

It is both bloody and bodily. It is frightening and exhausting. It involves pressure, waiting, uncertainty, and pain. There are moments during labor when nothing seems to be happening, even though your whole body is working. There are moments when the pain becomes so intense that it feels less like something new is coming and more like everything is going terribly wrong.

Perhaps that is part of what we are experiencing now. The apostle Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” Creation is not described as quietly improving. It is groaning. Something is wrong with the world, and something within the world is reaching toward life.

Paul’s image does not deny suffering. It gives suffering a direction.

Not every painful moment produces transformation, of course. Suffering by itself does not save us. Oppression does not automatically give birth to justice. Empires do not simply collapse, leaving beloved community in their wake. Sometimes one violent order is replaced by another.

Birth requires participation. It requires people willing to become midwives for the world that is coming. This is where Christian hope must distinguish itself from optimism. Optimism looks at the evidence and insists that everything will probably work out. Christian hope looks directly at the world’s wounds and refuses to believe that violence, domination, and death will have the final word.

Hope does not ask us to pretend the old world is not dying. It asks us to discern what is trying to be born—and to place our bodies, resources, courage, and love alongside it. Jesus called this coming world the kingdom of God. But he did not describe it as a distant realm we would escape to after death. He spoke of it as something already drawing near. A seed hidden in the soil. Yeast working invisibly through the dough. A pearl worth rearranging one’s entire life to possess. A banquet where the excluded are brought inside. A community in which the last are first, enemies are loved, debts are released, and power is measured by service.

The kingdom is already here, but not yet fully present. We live between worlds.

We can see the old order grasping to preserve itself. We can also catch glimpses of the world Jesus announced. We see it whenever someone chooses solidarity over self-protection. Whenever truth is told after years of silence. Whenever a table is made longer. Whenever a church relinquishes power instead of hoarding it. Whenever someone refuses to let fear determine whom they will love.

These acts may seem small beside the machinery of empire. Yet Jesus always compared the kingdom to small things: seeds, yeast, salt, light. Perhaps the new world rarely arrives with the spectacle we expect. Perhaps she comes quietly at first, carried in ordinary bodies and hidden acts of courage. This does not mean we stand at a safe distance and wait for her arrival.

Those who follow Jesus are called to live now by the values of the coming world. We tell the truth even as lies still seem profitable. We practice generosity within an economy of scarcity. We foster belonging in a culture addicted to exclusion. We refuse dehumanization even when contempt is rewarded. We protect those put at risk by the old world’s desperate attempts to survive.

We become signs of the future.

This is difficult work because the old world is not merely outside us. Its hierarchies, fears, prejudices, and hunger for control live within us as well. The birth of another world requires more than changing governments or institutions. It also demands the painful transformation of our own desires.

What forms of power are we still reluctant to give up? Whose suffering have we learned not to see? Where have we confused our comfort with peace? What might need to die in us so that something more loving can live?

The Christian story tells us that resurrection comes, but it does not bypass the tomb. Holy Saturday is part of the story—the long, disorienting space between one world ending and the next not yet visible. Perhaps this is where many of us are living.

We do not yet know what will emerge from this moment. We should resist easy claims that every crisis is secretly a blessing or that history inevitably bends toward justice. History bends because people, communities, and movements put their hands upon it and bend it—often at enormous cost.

Still, I believe the Spirit is moving. I believe God remains present in the groaning.

I believe something is being born among us whenever frightened people choose courage, whenever wounded people seek healing without becoming what wounded them, and whenever communities practice a love strong enough to resist domination.

Another world is not only possible.
She is on her way.

She is coming through the cracks in the structures we believed were permanent. She is breathing beneath the noise of cruelty and collapse. She is present wherever people begin to live as though every human being bears the image of God. And perhaps our calling in this moment is not to predict exactly when she will arrive. Perhaps our calling is to listen for her breathing, to protect the life that is emerging, and to become faithful midwives of the world God is bringing to birth.

Yesterday, we lost Dolly Parton—a woman who seemed to understand that love is not merely something we feel but something we give. She gave us her music, her laughter, her stories, and her unmistakable joy. She gave millions of children their first books. In a world that so often confuses greatness with power, Dolly showed us another kind of greatness: generosity without pretense, courage without cruelty, and love spacious enough to make room for everyone.

Perhaps that, too, is how another world comes—through lives that leave behind more tenderness, beauty, laughter, and possibility than they received.

And so I will let Dolly have the final word. Let these words be our benediction as we grieve what is passing, bless what has been, and turn our faces toward the world still struggling to be born:

“I hope life treats you kind.
And I hope that you have all that you ever dreamed of.
And I wish you joy and happiness.
But above all this, I wish you love.”

Rest in peace, Dolly Parton.

May the world she leaves behind become a little more like the love she wished for us.

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Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.

Your Body Is Not Your Own

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139:13–14 (NRSV)

This chapter tells part of the story of childhood harm, pastoral abuse, religious shaming, and the long work of finding my way back to my body, myself, and God. Please read with care.

Before I understood what the cross meant, I loved him.

Our parish church had been built as a replica of a church in Rome. The materials came directly from Italy: marble, stained glass, and the distinctive weight of old stone. Above the altar hung a larger-than-life crucifix, with Jesus exactly as I would have imagined him: a crown of thorns, a wound in his side, and letters carved above his head that I could not yet read.

I was very small. The world outside those walls was not always safe. But in here, in the scent of incense and candlewax, in the hush that falls over a room where people are trying to be honest with God, something struck me as peace, love, and something vast I had no name for yet.

I would look up at him and know, without words for it yet, without theology or doctrine or any of the language that would come later: he did that for me.

Because he did, I loved him.

That was the whole of my faith at five years old. It was enough. It would have to carry me a long way.

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Over the last few days, I have had the privilege of previewing several of the conversations that will be part of our upcoming virtual summit, Leading in Polarizing Times.

I thought I was watching them to make sure the videos were ready. Instead, I found myself taking notes. And then stopping the videos. And then sitting with what I had just heard.

These are difficult days to be a Christian leader. I don’t think I need to convince many of you of that. We are leading communities shaped by political polarization, fear, exhaustion, mistrust, and competing versions of what faithfulness looks like.

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether we even have the language for what we are experiencing.

Which is precisely where Dr. David Gushee begins.

We need better language.

David’s opening session was originally framed around defining white Christian nationalism, which he did. But David prefers another term:

Authoritarian Reactionary Christianity.

I found myself paying attention to every word. Authoritarian. Reactionary. Christianity.

He carefully distinguishes what he is describing from patriotism, civic engagement, or Christians bringing their faith into public life. Those things are not the problem. The problem comes when Christianity becomes entangled with the pursuit of power, authoritarian impulses, fear of cultural change, and a determination to recover something we believe has been taken from us.

Naming matters. Not so we can finally identify the bad people. But because sometimes we need language before we can tell the truth about what is happening around us—and perhaps within us. And yet naming something is only the beginning.

We cannot argue people out of what they were formed into.

Then I watched Dr. Chuck DeGroat. His session is called From Ideology to Formation: Discipling People Out of Christian Nationalism.

Those of us who care about truth can sometimes place an enormous amount of faith in information. If we could just show people the facts. Recommend the right book. Correct the bad theology. Make the better argument. Surely they would see. But human beings are more complicated than that.

Chuck reminds us that our beliefs are tied to our identities, our attachments, our fears, our communities, and our need to belong. We are being formed all the time, often without realizing it. Which means the pastoral question cannot simply be:

How do we convince people they are wrong?

It has to become something more patient and more difficult:

How do we help one another become different kinds of people?

People less governed by fear. People capable of staying present to difference. People whose imaginations have been formed more by Jesus than by the anxiety of the moment. People who can lose power without believing they have lost God. That kind of change rarely happens because somebody won an argument.

It happens through formation. Through relationship. Through practices repeated over time. Through communities where another way of being human becomes possible.

And then I watched our final session.

Silence is also a choice.

Dr. Keny Felix closes the summit with Faithful Leadership in a Time of Unveiling.

I was already carrying Dr. Felix in my heart before I pressed play.

Dr. Felix is a naturalized American citizen from Haiti and a leader among Haitian pastors. In recent weeks, as I have watched the news about Haitians losing Temporary Protected Status and seen images of immigrants wearing ankle monitors and being treated in ways that diminish their dignity, I have found myself praying for him and for the communities he loves and serves.

And then Dr. Felix said something I wrote down immediately.

He spoke about how silence in the face of injustice contributes to the economy of injustice.

I stopped the video. Because there are moments when silence can feel like the safest pastoral choice. We tell ourselves we don’t want to be political. We don’t want to divide our churches. We don’t want to lose people. We don’t want to say the wrong thing.

And some of those concerns are real. Leadership requires wisdom. Not every moment requires a microphone. But Dr. Felix’s challenge is harder than that. There are also moments when silence communicates something. There are moments when refusing to speak becomes its own kind of speech.

And in this moment, he argues, silence is not an option for Christian leaders.

What I appreciated most is that he doesn’t simply tell leaders to be braver. He gives us seven practices for becoming the kind of people who can remain grounded, hopeful, repentant, and courageous while living and leading in fractured times.

Because courage, too, requires formation.

Maybe the question is us.

By the time I finished these three sessions, I realized something. This summit is certainly about Christian nationalism. But underneath that conversation is another one.

What kind of people are we becoming?

Can we name what is happening without allowing contempt to take root in us? Can we understand how people are formed by fear without reducing them to caricatures? Can we tell the truth about injustice while remembering that the people with whom we disagree still bear the image of God? Can we resist the seduction of power without becoming seduced by our own certainty? Can we speak when silence would be easier? And can we do all of this while remaining people who still believe that transformation is possible?

I don’t think these are primarily political questions. I think they are discipleship questions. They are questions about what it means to follow Jesus when the ground beneath us feels unstable and when fear offers itself as wisdom. They are questions about the church we are becoming. And perhaps about the church we still might become.

I thought I was previewing videos this week.

Instead, I found myself being invited again into the harder work of formation—of paying attention not only to what I oppose, but to who I am becoming in the way I oppose it.

If you are carrying some of these questions too, I hope you’ll join us for Leading in Polarizing Times.

Not because we have figured everything out.

But because perhaps one of the faithful things we can do in a fractured time is gather together, tell the truth about what we see, listen carefully to one another, and keep asking what love and courage require of us now.

I hope you will join us. Register & read about the speakers for Leading in Polarizing Times here.

I read those words and found myself thinking about Ruth, not because Ruth was Muslim, of course. Islam would not exist for more than a thousand years after the story of Ruth takes place.

I thought about her because Ruth was a Moabite, and that matters. We tend to remember Ruth as a love story. Ruth and Boaz. A faithful young widow. A kind and honorable man. A mother-in-law who helps move the story along. Eventually, there is a wedding and a baby, and everything broken at the beginning is gathered up again.

It is a beautiful story. But it is also a far more dangerous story than we let it be. Because Ruth was one of them. The narrator will not let us forget it.

Again and again, she is called Ruth, the Moabite.

She came from a people Israel had reason to distrust. There was a history between them. Old wounds. Stories of hostility and betrayal. Even Scripture contained warnings about the Moabites. Deuteronomy says, rather starkly, that no Moabite should be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.

And then, sitting right there in our Bible, is the Book of Ruth, one of my favorite texts in all the Bible. A Moabite woman walks across the border into Bethlehem.

She is foreign. She is widowed. She is poor. She worshiped other gods. She has no husband to protect her, no land of her own, and no obvious reason to believe Israel will make room for her. She arrives with Naomi, her equally vulnerable mother-in-law, and goes into the fields to gather whatever grain the harvesters leave behind.

Israel has inherited stories about the Moabites, and none of them are kind. Boaz would have had every reason to keep his distance and assess the category before he saw the woman. Instead, he asks about her. He has heard how she stayed with Naomi when she could have gone home. He knows she left her own country and family to care for an aging widow. He sees her courage, loyalty, and generosity.

He does not encounter a category. He encounters a person.

And what he discovers in this foreign woman is something Scripture prizes enormously: hesed.

It is a difficult Hebrew word to translate. Lovingkindness. Steadfast love. Covenant faithfulness. Mercy that becomes action. Ruth, the outsider, is practicing the very faithfulness God’s covenant people are supposed to embody.

Fear works by subtraction. It takes a person and leaves a category.

Muslim.

Immigrant.

Refugee.

Foreigner.

Moabite.

Once we have placed someone in a category, we no longer need to know their name. We no longer need to ask whether they are kind or cruel, faithful or unfaithful, or trustworthy or untrustworthy.

The category has already answered the question for us. Fear turns people into categories. Hesed gives them back their names.

That is why Rep. Nancy Mace’s statement troubles me, especially when I hear similar rhetoric from Christians. Not because questions about national security are illegitimate. Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens. Public officials should be scrutinized, and power should be held accountable.

But that scrutiny must be based on what people do, not simply on the religion they practice. To say that every Muslim who holds public office is a threat is something different. It declares millions of people suspect before we know anything about them. And Christians, of all people, should recognize how dangerous that kind of thinking can become. We have seen it before. And Scripture has seen it before too.

The Bible keeps letting the outsider in.

There is something wonderfully inconvenient about the Bible. Just when we think we have figured out who belongs within God’s purposes and who remains outside, someone crosses the boundary. Rahab is a Canaanite. Ruth is a Moabite. Naaman is a Syrian. The Good Samaritan is a member of the despised people across the border. Jesus praises the faith of a Roman centurion.

Again and again, the person presumed to be outside becomes the one through whom God reveals something to those who believe they are inside.

Ruth may be one of the clearest examples. The story doesn’t end with Israel graciously allowing a foreign widow to live among them. It goes much further than that. Ruth marries Boaz. They have a son named Obed. Obed has a son named Jesse. And Jesse has a son named David.

Ruth the Moabite becomes the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king.

Centuries later, when Matthew begins telling the story of Jesus, he opens with a genealogy. Most ancient genealogies centered on men. Matthew does something unusual. He names several women, including Ruth. He could have simply moved from Boaz to Obed and kept going, but he doesn’t. He makes sure we remember her.

Ruth. The foreigner. The outsider. The Moabite. She is part of the family tree of Jesus. Apparently, God was not nearly as frightened of the outsider as God’s people were.

Maybe this is the question for us

I am not suggesting that ancient Moabites and twenty-first-century Muslims are equivalent. They aren’t. Their histories and religions are entirely different. But the human instinct Ruth exposes is painfully familiar. We become afraid. Fear needs an object. Soon, an entire group of people seems dangerous in our imagination. Exclusion then begins to feel like wisdom.

Eventually, if we are not careful, suspicion can even start to feel like faithfulness. This is where I think we who follow Christ need to pay particular attention, because Jesus did not teach us to recognize people by the categories they belong to.

He said we would know them by their fruit. And our Muslim neighbors are not abstractions. They are physicians and teachers, parents taking their children to school, small-business owners, soldiers, and neighbors. And yes, some are elected officials who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution.

Like Christians, some will exercise power wisely, and some will not. Like Christians, some will be people of extraordinary character, and some will disappoint us. Like Christians, they should be judged by their actions rather than declared dangerous simply because of the God they worship or the community to which they belong. I am old enough to remember the fear that arose when John F. Kennedy ran for president as a practicing Catholic.

That test, known by its fruit, not by its label, cuts both ways. If we are honest about it, the people who should worry us are not the Muslim officials who took the oath. They are the ones in our highest offices who took the same oath and are breaking it, detaining immigrants and even U.S. citizens without charge or due process, disappearing people the Constitution says cannot simply be disappeared. If we are going to name threats to the republic, that is where I would start. Fear keeps pointing at the neighbor. It almost never points at the mirror.

Religious freedom means very little if it applies only to the religions we prefer. And democracy becomes something else entirely when belonging depends on passing a religious test. But there is an even deeper question for those of us who follow Jesus.

What kind of people are we becoming? Fear does something to us. It narrows our world. It makes neighbors seem like threats. It makes us lose our curiosity. It convinces us that loving our enemies was a beautiful teaching for another time, while fearing our neighbors is simply common sense for this one.

Ruth offers another way. She asks us to come closer, to step out of the category long enough to encounter the person, to watch for hesed, to pay attention to faithfulness wherever we find it, and perhaps to remain open to the unsettling possibility that God may already be at work among people we have been taught to fear.

That has always been one of Scripture’s surprises. God keeps showing up on the wrong side of our boundaries. Ruth the Moabite. Scripture does not erase her foreignness before giving her a place in the story. It doesn’t rename her Ruth the Acceptable, Ruth the Assimilated, or Ruth the One Who Finally Became One of Us.

She remains Ruth the Moabite.

And somehow this woman from the people whom Israel had been taught to distrust becomes part of the lineage through which Jesus enters the world. There is something both beautiful and terrifying about that. Because it means we should be very careful about declaring entire groups of people dangerous. We should be very careful about deciding who could never belong.

Christians should be especially careful when someone urges us to fear our neighbors. Our Scriptures have warned us about this before. Sometimes the stranger at the edge of the field carries hesed. Sometimes the person we have been taught to fear is the one showing faithfulness. Sometimes the outsider is already part of God’s story. And sometimes, while we are busy guarding the boundaries, God is quietly bringing redemption across them.

God who keeps showing up on the wrong side of our lines,
you have never feared the stranger the way we do.

Forgive us for how easily we trade a person for a threat.
Teach us to watch for hesed
in the widow, the immigrant, the one who prays differently than we do,
the one we were sure should never be let in.

Turn our gaze from the neighbor to the mirror,
and make us people who come closer.

Amen.

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Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.

Staying Inside the Lines

Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse?
— George Herbert, “The Flower”

Seattle — Spring 2016

Our house was a split-level. You entered through the front door onto a small platform. From there, you could go down seven stairs to where our bedroom was, or up seven stairs to the main house, the living room, the kitchen, the dining room, the ordinary life of home.

Fourteen stairs. Seven up, seven down.

For the first months after I came home from the hospital, either direction left me unable to breathe. I would climb them slowly, hand on the rail, willing my body forward, and arrive at the top or the bottom wrecked, sitting down wherever I landed, waiting for something to return to normal. It could take hours. My body would simply stop, like an engine, and I would have to sit there in the quiet and wait for it to reboot.

I had preached to hundreds of people. I had led a region of over forty-six churches. I had sat with people in the hardest moments of their lives and known what to say.

I could not climb seven stairs without losing myself.

Before I left the hospital, Dr. Worth had declared me medically disabled, unable to return to pastoral work. My heart could not sustain the stress of it, the weight of a congregation, the constancy of need, the impossibility of leaving the work at the door. Rich met with the board and the leaders. Our associate pastor was voted in to lead the church. That story is for another time. What I knew was only this: the thing I had built my identity around for decades had been taken from me, first by the accusations, and now, finally, by my own heart. I didn’t have the strength to grieve it properly. Not yet. I barely had the strength to climb the stairs.

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When most of us think of Martha, we picture a woman distracted by dinner. Poor Martha. For two thousand years, she has been remembered for one afternoon in the kitchen, while Mary gets all the credit for sitting at Jesus’ feet.

But that’s not the last story the Gospel tells about her.

In John 11, Lazarus has died, and Jesus has waited too long. By the time he arrives, grief has already settled in the house like dust. Friends have come, meals have been prepared, tears have been shed, and the future everyone imagined is gone. When Jesus finally arrives, it isn’t Mary who goes out to meet him.

It’s Martha.

She walks toward him, carrying words that sound more like an accusation than a prayer: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

I have always loved that Jesus doesn’t correct her. He doesn’t tell her to have more faith, remind her that everything happens for a reason, say he’s in a better place, or ask her to look on the bright side.

He lets her tell the truth. I have needed that permission more than I know how to say.

Somehow, we’ve come to believe that faith means certainty. It doesn’t. Faith tells the truth. It says, This hurts. It says, I don’t understand. It says, Where were you? And sometimes it says all of that while still taking one more step toward Jesus.

That feels important right now.

We live in a time when certainty is rewarded. Social media favors confidence over curiosity. Politics rewards outrage over listening. Even our churches can make us feel that every question is a threat and every doubt a failure. A few weeks ago, I sat in a detention hearing where certainty held all the power and honesty had none, and a person told the truth about their life to a system built not to hear it. I have not stopped thinking about the asymmetry: how the machinery of the state performs certainty, and how much courage it takes to keep speaking the truth anyway.

Martha offers another way.

She doesn’t pretend. She doesn’t perform. She doesn’t hide her disappointment behind religious language. She tells Jesus exactly what is breaking her heart.

And somehow, that conversation becomes one of the most profound theological moments in all of John’s Gospel.

Jesus doesn’t leave her where she is, either. He meets her honesty with a claim: “I am the resurrection and the life.” Not a correction but an invitation she must answer while her brother is still in the tomb.

And Martha doesn’t suddenly understand everything. She still has a brother. who has passed. She still has unanswered questions. She still has tears ahead.

Yet she answers, “Yes, Lord. I believe you are the Messiah.”

Not because all her questions have disappeared, but because faith was never the absence of questions.

My first memory of Jesus is exactly this kind of knowing. I was four, maybe five, in the Catholic church of my childhood, looking up at him on the cross. I understood nothing, not the theology, not the history, none of what it was supposed to mean. But somehow, I knew, the way a small child knows, that he loved me and that whatever was happening up there, he had done it for me. I have spent the rest of my life trying to understand that moment, and I am not sure I understand it much better now than I did then. But the knowing came before the understanding. And it has outlasted every season when the understanding gave way.

There have been such seasons throughout my life. I have walked that road more than once, when my own body was failing me, and the life I had built had come apart in my hands. There were stretches when I could not have told you I believed much of anything with certainty. And still, when I was honest, the only thing I could hold onto was Peter’s question in John’s Gospel, spoken after the crowds had thinned and Jesus asked the twelve whether they wanted to leave too: “Lord, to whom shall we go?”

Still, where else would I go? I don’t remember ever having triumphant faith. It was closer to Martha’s. Not that I have it all figured out, but I have nowhere else to take this. I don’t understand you. I am grieving and afraid, but I am still here.

Perhaps that’s the invitation for us. Not to become people who always have the right answer, but to become people who keep walking toward Christ with our whole hearts, our grief, anger, hope, and unanswered prayers still in our hands.

Maybe that is what courage looks like in this moment. Not shouting louder than everyone else. Not pretending we are unafraid. Simply refusing to let disappointment turn into distance and walking down the road toward Christ anyway.

The kingdom of God has always made room for people like that. Not because they are certain, but because they are hungry for what is true.

And the One who welcomed tax collectors, fishermen, grieving sisters, and doubters still knows what to do with those who speak the truth. So, we gather what remains of our faith, carry our questions with us, and walk down the road toward him anyway.

May you find the courage to tell the truth.

May you discover that Christ is not afraid of your questions, your grief, or your disappointment.

And when certainty feels beyond your reach, may honesty be enough to keep you walking toward the One who has always been walking toward you.

Amen.

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.

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Last week, Rich and I went to a detention center to accompany someone to his hearing.

We had never done this before and were unsure how it worked. People in our congregation who are working tirelessly for detainees’ rights had given us instructions.

We drove to Tacoma, found the facility, parked, and walked to the entrance. Inside, there was a young man and woman behind the counter. To our right was an X-ray machine leading to the first waiting room; to our left was a wall of small lockers. We walked to the counter, signed our names, and wrote down the name and number of the person we had come for. They handed us a key to a small locker where we were required to leave everything: phones, keys, wallets.

We were allowed to go through a second door where we waited to go into the courtroom. We sat in that small waiting room beneath the fluorescent lights until someone opened the door and told us it was time. Only then were we allowed in. There was an older African American man whose role I am not sure of- maybe a guard; he was behind the locked doors with a camera so he could see who was in the waiting room. Every so often, he would open the door and look at the clipboard on the wall that held the names and hearing times. He told us the bailiff would come and get us when we could proceed to the courtroom. He was very kind to us.

When it was our time, the bailiff let us in; we were led down a small hall and into the courtroom. It is not a public courtroom. There is no gallery, no row of benches where anyone may enter and observe. There are only the people the state has arranged to be there and those who have come to accompany the detainee.

The detainee was already seated. There was a judge, a government attorney, a bailiff, and an interpreter because the man could barely follow the proceeding that would determine his future. It had all the appearances of a courtroom that could bring justice, but it failed. His own attorney appeared on a screen from another state. As the hearing went on, we learned that he had been assigned the case just two hours earlier.

Two hours.

Two hours to learn a man’s life before participating in a proceeding that could end that life as he knew it. Everything in the room had the trappings of justice: the bench, the official record, the interpreter, the lawyer beamed in from somewhere else. Every role had been filled. Every form appeared to be in place. Yet almost none of the substance was there. The room had everything it needed to resemble a fair chance.

It was not one.

We watched as the judge became the inquisitor, the defense attorney had nothing to say, and the government attorney sat at a computer and typed as if he were the court reporter. Every voice, every sentence, had to be interpreted. We could tell the detainee was confused over and over again; his attorney never stepped in to clarify or defend!

After the hearing, we gathered our things from the locker and waited to debrief until we were outside, away from being overheard. A man who had been with us was fluent in Spanish. He was irate; he told us how the court-appointed interpreter was not accurate in his interpretation to the detainee. He felt powerless because he could not say anything in the court as it was happening. At one point during the hearing, I knew he was having a hard time; he opened his hands in a prayer posture, closed his eyes, and was praying. The three of us were angry, frustrated, and felt so powerless. Here are our observations:

I thought judges were impartial triers of facts, the impartial voice of reason; that is not what happened. The judge was the chief prosecutor. He asked questions as if he was trying to learn facts; in truth, he turned those answers into traps against a man who could not understand the language. When the government attorney was asked if he had any questions (over an hour into the proceeding), he answered, “The court has already asked all I had; I have two short questions.”

The defense attorney appeared on the screen and let the court know he had only received the case two hours prior to this proceeding. He did nothing to defend his client. In fact, the only two questions he asked his client added to the client’s confusion.

Our conclusion, it was not a just hearing on any level. The detainee was not prepared to respond to the intense grilling the judge put him through. The court’s decision: deportation.

Leading up to the presidential election of 2024, advocates of mass deportation vilified immigrants, calling them the worst of the worst, rapists, murderers; that’s who they claimed would be deported. We found none of that at the detention center. Common people picked up off our streets, thrown into a detention center with an unjust trial is what we witnessed.

We were all told that this would be about criminals. That those who had done harm would be the ones sought out and removed. I am not naive about the state, and I am not here to litigate every policy question. What I saw did not match the word we had been given: criminals.

I saw a man who could not understand the language of the court deciding his fate. I saw people who believed there was a process and discovered, once they were inside it, that the process had been rigged against them before they arrived.

We are often told the story from the perspective of the person who feels displaced: the citizen who believes something familiar is being taken from them, the taxpayer who sees only the cost, the traveler who loses a hotel reservation to frightened immigrants escaping who knows what, the voter taught to experience the stranger as a threat.

We hear far less about the people on the other side: what road brought them here, what they fled, what they endured, or what a locked door, a clean bed, and one night of safety might mean after a journey we cannot imagine.

Here is what my faith tradition will not let me unsee.

The prophets did not reserve their fury for obvious acts of violence. They saved some of their sharpest words for the gate, the place where justice was meant to be done. Amos watched the courts of his day preserve all their outward forms while losing the weight of justice itself, and he did not soften his words:

You who turn justice to wormwood.

The gate still stood. The proceedings still took place. The right people still occupied the right places. But the thing the gate had been built to hold was gone. And beneath that is a command older still, repeated throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as though God knew how easily we would forget:

You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

The ger: the sojourner, the one living without the protection of belonging, the person in a land not their own. Not a suggestion. A memory we are forbidden to lose, because fear can rewrite a people’s memory of their own arrival with astonishing speed. We were given a word: criminals. And in those rooms, something else was being done.

I do not have a resolution for you.

I drove home carrying the stale air of those rooms with me: the image of the attorney’s face on the screen, the hum of the fluorescent lights, the sound of words being interpreted for a man whose life was being decided sentence by sentence. I did not feel hopeful in the way that resolves a thing. What I have is smaller and harder, and I think it may be truer.

Accompaniment is not a strategy.

It does not stop the machinery of the state. The inquisitor judge, the non-existent defense that appeared on a screen, the irrelevant government attorney, the interpreter who appeared bored and angry, and the bailiff watching everything, reading the room.

Accompaniment is only the decision to be in the room.

To bring your body to the place where suffering is happening and refuse the small mercy of looking away. And this: In a room the state had arranged down to the last chair, there were also witnesses it had not arranged.

The man was not tried unseen. He was seen. And in a tradition shaped by a God who says, I have seen the affliction of my people, really seen them being seen is not nothing.

It may be the thin edge of everything.

So we will keep signing our names. We will keep writing down the numbers. We will keep sitting beneath the fluorescent lights, waiting for the door to open and for someone to tell us we may come in because it is a confession of what we believe: about who counts, about who is watching, and about what a word is worth.

May the God who sees
keep us from looking away.

May those reduced to numbers
be remembered by name.

May justice return to the places
built to hold it.

And when we cannot stop the machinery,
may we still have the courage
to enter the room,
to bear witness,
and to stand beside those made to stand alone.

Amen.

This September 3–4, The Center for Transforming Engagement will host the virtual summit Leading in Polarizing Times. One of the sessions, “The Long History Behind the Border,” with Dr. Joel Aguilar, will trace how U.S. foreign policy, Cold War intervention, commerce, and state power have helped create the conditions driving migration across the Americas today. The session will help faith leaders understand immigration, borders, and belonging through a historically grounded and geopolitically honest lens one that deepens compassion, resists scapegoating, and offers a broader imagination for responding to ICE, policing, and state power.

You can register here.

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.

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What My Heart Knew First

So would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
— Denise Levertov, “The Avowal”

A gentle note before reading: this chapter includes a serious medical crisis, heart failure, surgery, and reflections on trauma and mortality. Please read with care

April 2016

I came home from Thailand knowing something was wrong. For weeks, I had been losing my breath in ways I kept trying to explain away: in the ocean, on the jetway, on the fast boat crossing to Koh Phangan. For months, I had called it bronchitis. I reached for my inhaler. I told myself I needed rest. I told myself I had been traveling too much, working too hard, carrying too much. I was following doctor’s orders.

All of those things were true.

They were also no longer enough.

Somewhere over the Pacific, on the long flight home, the story I had been telling myself ran out of room. I could no longer fit what was happening inside the explanation of bronchitis.

When I arrived home, I called my doctor. She heard my voice and told me it was time to be tested. She arranged for me to have an echocardiogram Monday morning at the cardiology office across from the hospital.

My friend Sharon said she would meet me there. We would get the test done and then go to lunch. I drove myself because Rich was working an hour away and because it was only a test. Nothing to be afraid of. Nothing that required him to leave work. Nothing that required me to admit I might need him. That is what I told myself on the drive over.

It was one more appointment. One more thing to get through. One more ordinary day of showing up, not yet knowing that ordinary was about to give way beneath me.

The room was dim and cool. The echocardiography technologist spread cold gel across my chest and pressed the wand into my ribs, turning it, holding it, turning it again. On the screen my heart moved in gray and shadow, and through the speaker I could hear it — a wet, uneven swishing I had no way to read.

I asked the technician how long it usually took to receive the results. “Twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” he said. Then he added that if he saw anything concerning, the cardiologist would come in immediately to speak with me. I stored that information somewhere in the back of my mind and tried not to touch it.

When the test was finished, I got dressed. There was a knock at the door. A nurse opened it, and the technician stood just behind her, slightly to the side, the way someone stands when they are unsure what to do with their body.

“Mrs. Swetman, can you wait here for a few minutes?” the nurse said. “The doctor wants to talk with you.” As she spoke, the technician caught my eye. He mouthed, I’m sorry. Something in my chest went very still. I already knew.

I went into the waiting room and told Sharon. Then I called my sister Karla, who came immediately. The three of us sat together. I watched my hands resting in my lap, as though they belonged to someone else. I tried not to let my mind go where it had already begun to go.

We talked in the careful way people do when they are trying not to say what they are thinking. Should we call my children? Maybe we should wait. We needed to know something first.

Sharon called Rich. He was an hour away, and I was sitting in a cardiology waiting room after a technician had mouthed, I’m sorry at me. Then she went to Starbucks and came back with coffee and pastries, because sometimes love looks like bringing food no one can eat.

I held the warm cup in both hands. I tried to take a few bites of pastry, but my mouth had forgotten how to swallow. Still, it gave me something to do, something ordinary to hold while everything ordinary was disappearing.

There was nothing else to do but sit there, breathe, and wait for the doctor to finish his rounds. That hour was one of the longest of my life.

When they called my name, Sharon and Karla came with me. I did not yet know how much I would need others to remember what was said, to ask the questions I could not form, and to hold pieces of reality until I could bear to pick them up myself.

Dr. Worth entered and stood across from me. He was a large man with a grandfatherly presence, the kind of person whose steadiness made you want to believe everything might still be all right. But there was a gravity in his face. He had delivered hard news many times and had learned not to soften it beyond recognition. The kindest thing he could offer me was the truth. “Your heart is in very bad shape,” he said.

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Jesus said, “The mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”
—Luke 6:45

I have usually heard that verse applied to individuals. Watch what comes out of your mouth, and you will learn something about what is happening inside you. But lately I have wondered whether the same is true of a culture.

Every society develops a vocabulary. Over time, certain words begin to reveal what we love, what we fear, and perhaps even what we worship. They are repeated until they become familiar, and then familiar enough to feel true.

In recent years, I have noticed how often the same words return:

Caravan.

Invasion.

Communist.

Radical.

Enemy.

At first, they sound like descriptions. But repeated often enough, they become more than that. They become frames ways of deciding what we are seeing before we have taken the time to look.

A family seeking asylum becomes an invasion.

A political opponent becomes an enemy.

A disagreement becomes evidence of betrayal.

A complicated human being becomes a category.

And once someone has become a category, it is much easier to stop loving them.

Scripture has always understood that words are formative. God creates through speech. The prophets call people home through speech. Jesus heals, blesses, forgives, and confronts through speech. James says the tongue can set an entire forest on fire.

Words do not simply report reality. They help create the reality in which we live.

This is why I believe Christians should become especially attentive when political rhetoric depends upon repetition. Not because repetition is always dangerous. Repetition is also how we memorize Scripture, pray the Psalms, sing hymns, and teach our children what is true.

But repetition always forms us toward something. So perhaps the question is not only, Is this message effective? Perhaps the more faithful question is, What kind of people is it making us? Is it enlarging our capacity to love our neighbor? Is it deepening our wisdom? Is it making us slower to speak and slower to judge? Is it helping us recognize the image of God in people whose lives, politics, faith, or stories differ from our own?

Or is it narrowing our imagination until every stranger looks like a threat and every opponent begins to look less than human? We become what we repeatedly behold. We become what we repeatedly hear. And, eventually, we become what we repeatedly say.

The earliest Christians understood this. They lived under an empire that had its own language of power, conquest, and allegiance. Yet they gathered around a different vocabulary.

They called Jesus not Caesar Lord. They spoke of peace instead of domination. Neighbor instead of enemy. Blessing instead of curse. Reconciliation instead of vengeance.

This was not political naïveté. The early Christians knew evil was real. Many of them suffered under it. The gospel does not require us to pretend that injustice does not exist, that borders do not matter, or that every claim is equally true.

Truth matters.

Justice matters.

Accountability matters.

But fear is a poor spiritual director.

Fear may warn us of danger, but it cannot teach us how to love. It cannot tell us who our neighbor is. And when fear becomes the organizing principle of our imagination, we gradually stop seeing people. We see threats, labels, voting blocs, criminals, radicals, enemies.

The gospel asks something much harder of us. It asks us to tell the truth without surrendering to contempt. To pursue justice without abandoning mercy. To resist evil without allowing evil to dictate the condition of our souls. To refuse the lie that cruelty becomes righteous when it is directed at the people we have been taught to fear.

Every generation must decide whose words will disciple it.

The loudest voices in our culture understand that repetition forms people. They know that a phrase repeated often enough can become a lens, and that a lens worn long enough can become a way of life.

Christians should understand this better than anyone. For two thousand years, we have gathered around another set of repeated words:

Peace be with you.

Do not be afraid.

Love your enemies.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Christ is risen.

These words are not sentimental decorations. They are practices of resistance. They train our imaginations toward another kingdom and remind us that fear, domination, and contempt do not get the final word.

And before I ask whether our culture has been formed by fear, I have to ask whether I have. What words echo most often in my own mind? Which voices narrate my days? What names have I learned to use for people I do not understand? Where has repetition hardened something in me that Jesus may be trying to soften?

It is easier to diagnose the language of a nation than to examine the vocabulary of my own heart. But discipleship always brings the question home.

The Spirit is usually quieter than the voices competing for our allegiance. The Spirit does not shout slogans or reduce people to categories.

The Spirit simply keeps asking:

Who are you becoming?

And perhaps just as importantly: Whose words are helping you become that person?

May the words of Jesus become louder in us than the language of fear.

May truth make us brave without making us cruel.

And when the world teaches us to say enemy,
may the Spirit teach us again to say, neighbor.

Amen.

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience, telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.

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This week, the news carried more names than a heart can hold.

Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva was forty-five years old. On Monday morning, he was found unresponsive on a transport bus, being moved between two immigration detention centers in Georgia. His family says he had asked for his medication and did not receive it. He became at least the twenty-second person to die in ICE custody this year.

A week earlier, in Houston, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo as he drove his construction crew to a job site. Federal agents had been surveilling a white van; the men they were actually looking for were not in it. Salgado Araujo was fifty-two. He had lived in this country for nearly thirty-five years, had no criminal record, and had applied for legal residency. Officers say he tried to ram them with his vehicle. The men riding beside him say that is not what happened, and the shots came from the side. There is almost no footage. The county medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

That same Monday, in Biddeford, Maine, an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero. He was twenty-six, a Colombian man who cleaned buildings and delivered food, and who left behind a partner and a three-year-old daughter. He was authorized to work here. He was not the person the officers had come for, either.

Three deaths in a handful of days. And behind the count, the same shape repeating.

A man leaves for work and does not come home.

A person asks for his medicine and dies in the custody of the government.

A family learns from a stranger’s phone what the government would not tell them.

We must tell the truth about that.

I understand why people are using the word murder. I understand the fury. I feel it too.

There are moments when words like incident and encounter become a kind of hiding place. They turn a dead human being into an administrative event. They place distance between the body on the ground and the power that put it there.

There is nothing Christian about looking away. We must demand investigations, accountability, policy changes, and the removal of power from those who wield it without restraint. We must protect the people being hunted, detained, and disappeared from workplaces and courthouse hallways, treated as though their legal status has erased their humanity.

But I have also been paying attention to what happens inside us when cruelty appears to be winning.

I have noticed how easily my hope can shrink into a desire for reversal. Let the people inflicting terror become terrified. Let those who humiliate others be humiliated in public. Let everyone who blessed this someday feel exactly what they made other people feel. It is not hard to understand. When justice has been delayed, distorted, or denied, vengeance can begin to look like its only remaining form.

And then I came across a passage someone posted from the Scottish theologian William Barclay’s autobiography. Barclay called himself, plainly, a convinced universalist. He believed that in the end, every person would be gathered into the love of God.

He did not mean that evil does not matter. He did not imagine a sentimental God waving everyone through the door as though nothing had happened. He believed there could be judgment, severe correction, painful truth, and what he called ages of purification. But he could not believe that punishment was God’s final purpose.

He was reaching back to Gregory of Nyssa, who understood divine judgment as something closer to surgery, or to refining fire. Not the destruction of the person, but the burning away of what has distorted and diseased them. In that vision, judgment is not God abandoning people to evil forever. It is God refusing to let evil remain in them forever.

I do not know whether I am prepared to resolve every question about universal salvation. I do know that divine judgment must be consistent with the character of God.

God’s justice cannot be less loving than God is.

It cannot look like the cruelty we condemn, only magnified and made eternal. It cannot be the satisfaction of watching our enemies suffer forever and calling that holiness. It cannot ask us to believe that torture becomes righteous the moment God is the one administering it. Whatever judgment finally means, its purpose must move toward truth, repair, healing, and reconciliation.

That does not mean there are no consequences.

Reconciliation without truth is not reconciliation. Forgiveness without an end to the harm is not peace. Grace does not ask the vulnerable to stay within reach of those who are still dangerous. Love does not require us to pretend that the person holding the weapon and the person lying beneath it bear equal responsibility.

Some people must be stopped. Some must lose their authority. Some crimes must be exposed in full daylight. Some structures must be dismantled so thoroughly that no one can rebuild them under another name. There can be no restoration that does not reckon with what was stolen, whose body was broken, whose family was shattered, and who benefited from the suffering.

But accountability and annihilation are not the same thing.

This is where Christian hope asks more of me than outrage does.

Outrage can tell me what I am against. Hope has to tell me what I still believe is possible.

Christian hope is not the belief that everything will be fine. It is not optimism dressed in church language. It does not soften the names of the dead or ask grieving families to look for a silver lining. It tells the truth about death and still refuses to give death the final word. It tells the truth about evil without granting evil permanence.

I find myself returning to Paul’s strange, enormous vision of the end: all things gathered under Christ, every power and dominion brought to nothing, the last enemy, death itself, destroyed, until God is all in all. Not God presiding over a universe divided forever between the beloved and the abandoned. God all in all.

I do not know what such restoration would require of those who ordered the raids, separated the families, neglected the sick in custody, pulled the triggers, lied about the dead, and blessed all of it in the name of God. Perhaps it would feel like hell.

To face the humanity of every person you refused to see.

To face the full truth of the suffering you caused.

To face the sons whose father did not come home, and the child who will grow up knowing how her father died.

To face the God whose image you would not recognize in them.

Maybe judgment is what happens when there is nowhere left to hide from love. A love that does not flatter. A love that does not excuse. A love fierce enough to burn away every lie, and unwilling to surrender either the wounded or the one who caused the wound to the permanence of evil.

I want justice for those being harmed now. Not someday. Now. I want the raids stopped. I want the detention centers opened to scrutiny. I want the independent investigations the UN human rights chief has already called for. I want officers who kill people held accountable under the law. I want churches to stop calling state violence righteousness simply because it is aimed at people they have been taught to fear. I want what has been hidden brought into the light.

But I do not want cruelty to teach me what justice is. I do not want this administration, or any administration, to shrink my moral imagination down to deciding who deserves to be treated as less than human. I do not want to grow so used to vengeance that I can picture no victory larger than the suffering of my enemies.

The hope I need now has to be larger than that. Large enough to protect the vulnerable and confront the powerful. Large enough to name murder without falling in love with punishment. Large enough to demand consequences and still refuse to believe that any human being was made for evil’s keeping.

Perhaps the final victory of God is not that every enemy has been destroyed.

Perhaps it is that every enmity has been healed.

Until then, we resist. We tell the truth. We stand between vulnerable bodies and the powers that would consume them. We grieve every life that was treated as disposable.

I think of a porch in Houston where a man used to sit in the evening and listen to music, and of the empty chair now. I think of a three-year-old in Maine who will not have to be told how her father died on his way to work, because she was there to see it. I think of a sister in Georgia who begged them to let her brother keep his medicine.

These are not incidents. These are not encounters. These are the images of God, and the God whose image they bear does not forget them.

Cruelty will not have the final word. Neither will fear. Neither will ICE. Neither will empire.

The final word belongs to the God whose judgment tells the truth, whose mercy does not surrender, and whose purpose, in the end, is the reconciliation of all things. Amen

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.

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A year ago today,

the world went on without asking us

whether we were ready.

Morning came.

People answered emails,

stood in grocery lines,

made dinner.

And you were gone.

But grief does not understand

the clean arithmetic of calendars.

It does not believe that twelve months

should make an absence smaller.

You are still there

in Christmas Eve candles

and carols sung in a darkened room,

in long dinners that became traditions,

in Italy, where you walked out front

with the map in your hand

while the rest of us tried

to keep up

and shop.

You are there in laughter,

in dry remarks delivered perfectly,

in the stories we have told so often

they have become part of the family.

Twenty-eight years of friendship

does not disappear.

It settles into the bones.

I think of the last time

I held your hand,

the quiet hum of machines around us,

the way you softened when we prayed.

I kissed your hand

and told you I loved you.

I am grateful

those were not words left unsaid.

A year later,

I still do not know

what to do with the empty place

your life once occupied.

Except to notice

it is not entirely empty.

Love remains there.

So do the dinners,

the journeys,

the prayers,

the laughter.

So do you, Dave

not as you were,

and not as we wish you could still be,

but braided into us now,

part of the story

we will keep telling

until we meet again.

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these reflections, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers. Chapter One is free, and you can begin here.

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Something that had been building for years stopped hiding this year.

Raids in workplaces. Arrests in courthouse hallways. Fear moves through congregations like weather. And over it all, a version of Christianity that blesses the fear instead of casting it out, a Christianity that has confused the flag with the cross and called the confusion faithfulness.

If you lead people, you have probably felt the pressure to say something.

Maybe you do not know what to say. Maybe you know exactly what you believe, but cannot find a way to say it without setting the whole room on fire. Maybe you are trying to tell the truth without losing your people or losing yourself.

This summit is for you.

Leading in Polarizing Times is a seven-part online video series, available September 3 and 4, 2026, for pastors, priests, bishops, and formation leaders who are trying to lead faithfully while Christianity is being conscripted into public life.

This is not punditry. It is not another hot take wearing a clerical collar.

It is seven teachers doing the slower, harder work of definition, discernment, and formation. The first three help us understand what has taken root—Christian nationalism, the misuse of Scripture, and the entanglement of race, religion, and the American imagination. The final four turn toward faithful response: how we discern, lead, and form people without surrendering to fear or simply adding more noise. Our guides are:

• Dr. David Gushee — what white Christian nationalism is, and why naming it clearly matters now
• Dr. Angela Parker — how Christianity is co-opted by power, and how Scripture is used to bless that power
• Dr. Ron Ruthruff — race, religion, and the American Christian imagination
• Bishop Shelley Bryan Wee — state power, ICE, and the gospel: discernment without fearmongering
• Dr. Joel Aguilar — the history behind the border, and the forces that drive migration
• Dr. Chuck DeGroat — why arguments rarely change hearts, and how formation can
• Dr. Keny Felix — faithful and courageous leadership in a time of unveiling

I am deeply grateful for the people who said yes to this conversation. I invited them because I trust the seriousness of their work, the courage of their witness, and the care they bring to people who are trying to find their way through this moment. They do not all approach the questions in the same way, but each one helps us see something we might otherwise miss.

Each session stands on its own. Together, they form something closer to a discipleship arc: a way of seeing more clearly, and then a way of leading more faithfully.

The word behind apocalypse means unveiling.

And this is a season of unveiling.

We are seeing more clearly what is happening in our country, what has taken root in our churches, and what we have been willing to excuse—or even bless—in the name of God.

The church has been conscripted by empire before. But the church has also remembered, again and again, that Caesar is not Lord. That fear is not a fruit of the Spirit. That the cross is not a symbol of domination, but of self-giving love.

That remembering is the work. Come do it with us.

Registration is open. Click here.

May we have the courage to see clearly,
the humility to listen deeply,
and the faith to remember that fear is not our shepherd
and empire is not our Lord.
May we lead with truth, tenderness, and hope.
Amen.

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience, telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome — three breakings across thirty years, and the mercy that met me in each. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers.

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What the Body Carried

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
— Dante Alighieri, Inferno (trans. Longfellow)

A gentle note before reading: this chapter tells part of the story of church conflict, accusation, panic, and what the body carries when fear has nowhere to go. Please read with care.

Seattle — Spring 2015

For almost a year before any of it broke open, we had been asking the same question: why was our church in decline?

Rich and I had co-pastored the church for fourteen years. Two years earlier, he had stepped back from the co-pastor role, reducing his hours and remaining on the board while I continued as lead pastor. He made this choice for several reasons. First, he is older than I am and wanted to move toward retirement, and this would be the first step. Also, he was always an ally and advocate for women in ministry; he wanted me to experience the role of lead pastor. A decision we have often questioned in the aftermath.

We went through everything the church-growth literature tells you to examine. Parking. Greeting. Visibility from the street. Music. Preaching. Hospitality. We discussed it all in board meetings that stretched late into the evening, sitting around tables with legal pads, half-empty coffee cups, and the strange earnestness people bring when they are trying to save something they still love.

Again and again, we arrived at the same conclusion: we were good enough. Something else was happening.

What we believed was happening was this: unchurched people were not coming. People exploring faith, people uncertain about belief, people who might sit around a table and ask honest questions, but would never walk into a sanctuary and sit in a pew. We wanted a church that could hold them gently, a place where faith could still be forming.

After a year of discernment, prayer, long staff meetings, meetings with various community constituencies, and many difficult conversations, our board voted unanimously to adopt a Sunday evening dinner church model. We would launch over Memorial Day weekend, continue through June, and then Rich and I would leave for three weeks in Italy for my daughter’s wedding.

At the end of the meeting, we agreed not to tell anyone until communication plans were in place. We wanted to do it carefully.

That agreement lasted less than a week.

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On Saturday, I sat on the sidewalk in my neighborhood with people I love, watching the Fourth of July parade go by. Marching bands, local businesses, Mary’s Towing’s entire fleet — who knew? Later, we barbecued with friends, and for a few hours, the country felt like what it says it is on the box: neighbors, tables, enough for everybody.

Tonight the World Cup comes to Seattle, the U.S. versus Belgium, thirty minutes from my house, the kind of match this soccer-loving region has waited decades for. And it’s tainted. Our star striker received a red card last week, which, under the usual rules, meant he’d sit out tonight. Then the President of the United States called the head of FIFA.

For only the second time in World Cup history and the first since 1962, a player sent off in one match was cleared to play in the next. Europe’s football body called it a line crossed. A former FIFA president asked the only question that matters: red cards are overturned by rules and evidence, not by political phone calls, so what, exactly, is FIFA now? For the record, I didn’t agree with the red card. I thought it was harsh. But that is precisely why the process matters. A bad call should be corrected by rules and evidence, not by proximity to power.

I am thinking about the distance between Saturday’s curb and tonight’s kickoff. Two days. That’s how long it took to travel from the country as promised to the country as practiced: the one where, if you’re powerful enough, the referee’s call is just an opening bid.

1776 gave us two founding documents. In Philadelphia, the Declaration of Independence. In London, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. The republic and modern capitalism are twins. They turned 250 this weekend, and only one of them got fireworks.

The other one got something better than fireworks. Three weeks before the anniversary, on June 12, America minted the world’s first trillionaire. A rocket company went public, its stock opened for trading, and by lunchtime, one man’s fortune had crossed a line no human had ever crossed. He’s since dipped back under it and over it again, his status flickering with the ticker — as if even the number can’t quite believe itself.

If you earned a thousand dollars a day, every day, starting the year Jesus was born, you would still not have a trillion dollars. You wouldn’t be close. And this milestone arrived not at some distant future date but here, now, in the same summer we hung the bunting for the republic’s 250th birthday. The twins celebrated together after all.

I’ve recently been told that I’m thinking about this all wrong. A meme made the rounds: a trillionaire isn’t somebody with a trillion dollars, it explained patiently. A trillionaire is someone who owns companies and gives people jobs that make a bunch of things people buy.

Give. As if a job were a Sunday dinner at your nonna’s table and not a trade your labor, your hours, your body, for a wage the owner sets.

Here is what concentrated wealth actually does, since we’re being precise about definitions.

This spring, one of America’s most profitable tech companies laid off thousands, part of a broader wave of tech cuts justified by restructuring, AI investment, and the relentless demand for capital to achieve a higher return. The notice came by email. At six in the morning. Not because the workers failed, but because the capital that paid their salaries had found a better use for itself, in data centers, mostly, for the machines. Nobody with a vault of cash did that. Owners did that.

And what did we watch this weekend? The same grammar, in cleats. A red card is the most democratic object in sports. It applies to the superstar and the substitute alike; that’s the entire point. Until the most powerful man in the world found it inconvenient, made a phone call, and discovered that rules that had held for sixty years were, it turns out, negotiable. The meme wants me to believe that concentrated power is really just job creation. The weekend wanted to show me what it actually is: the ability to get the whistle swallowed.

The founders, whatever their catastrophic blind spots (and they were catastrophic; the man who wrote “all men are created equal” owned human beings while he wrote it) were at least clear-eyed about one thing. They had just fought a war against concentrated, unaccountable power, and they were terrified of it reconstituting itself here. No titles of nobility, they wrote into the Constitution. No American aristocracy. They could not have imagined a single citizen holding wealth equal to the treasuries of nations, because in 1776 such a creature did not exist. It took us exactly 250 years to build one. Happy anniversary.

The prophets, meanwhile, would not be confused at all. Isaiah saw it twenty-seven centuries ago: woe to you who join house to house and add field to field, till there is no room, and you live alone in the land. That’s not a warning about cash. It’s a warning about ownership, about what happens when accumulation becomes the whole point and the land empties of neighbors. Amos never once asked the wealthy of Israel about their asset classes. Mary, a poor girl in an occupied province of somebody else’s empire, sang that the rich get sent away empty — and she didn’t carve out an exception for wealth held in equity.

Scripture is strangely uninterested in the form wealth takes. It is relentlessly interested in what wealth does and to whom.

So here is where I’ve landed, 250 years in. A trillionaire is not somebody with a trillion dollars. The meme is right about that. A trillionaire is somebody with a trillion dollars’ worth of power over other people’s lives, over who works and who gets the six a.m. email, over what gets built and what gets abandoned, over which calls get reviewed and which rules get to keep meaning something. The meme offers that as a defense.

It’s the indictment.

I’ll watch the match tonight. I love this game, and I love this city, and the players on that pitch didn’t make the phone call. But I’ll be watching the way I watched the parade on Saturday, holding the country as promised and the country as practiced in the same aching hands. That’s not cynicism. That’s just what love looks like at 250.

May we remember that we are dust and breath, citizens and neighbors, small beneath the stars yet still responsible for one another.

May we refuse every power that teaches us to look away.

May we keep loving what is still possible, grieving what has been betrayed, and practicing the country we were promised in the places we can reach: the sidewalk, the table, the neighborhood, the field, the open sky.

And may the God who scattered galaxies like seed give us courage enough to tell the truth, tenderness enough to remain human, and hope enough to begin again. Amen

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome — three breakings across thirty years, and the mercy that met me in each. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers.

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This week, the United States turns 250.

There will be fireworks and flags. There will be speeches about liberty, courage, sacrifice, and the genius of the American experiment. There will be stadiums full of people chanting together as the World Cup unfolds across North America. For a few hours at a time, strangers will become one body, lifted by a game, a goal, a song, a flag, a shared hope.

And I understand the longing for that.

I understand the ache to feel connected to a country again. To believe there is still something here worth loving. To want one unifying moment that cuts through the cruelty, the corruption, the contempt, the exhaustion. To stand shoulder to shoulder with people we do not know and remember that we belong to something larger than our fear.

I love this country.

Not the myth of it. Not the flag-wrapped version that asks us to look away from corruption, cruelty, greed, or the suffering of our neighbors. Not the sanitized story that pretends liberty was ever handed out evenly or that justice has ever arrived without struggle.

But I love the possibility of this country.

I love the stubborn dream that people from many places, many languages, many histories, and many wounds might still learn how to belong to one another. I love the fragile, unfinished promise that “we the people” might actually come to mean all the people.

And on the Fourth of July, I will celebrate in our beach community of Edmonds, Washington, as we have for many years. We will put our chairs out the night before to save our place for the parade. We will walk down in the morning with coffee and sunscreen and the easy familiarity of neighbors doing what they have always done. We will watch kids wave flags, veterans pass by, local businesses roll through, and families gather on sidewalks in red, white, and blue.

And then, when the parade is over, we will walk back up the alley and barbecue with friends.

I love that part of America.

I love the small-town rituals. The beach community. The chairs lined up before dusk. The way neighbors wave, even if they do not know each other well. The ordinary goodness of people gathering around food, laughter, children, memory, and summer light.

That love is real.

But love is not the same thing as denial.

St. Teresa of Avila wrote, “Remember: if you want to make progress on the path and ascend to the places you have longed for, the important thing is not to think much but to love much.”

I think about that sentence. Not because I think love is sentimental. Not because I think love asks us to soften the truth or make peace with what is destroying us. But because, in the Christian imagination, love is not passive. Love is not pretending. Love is not politeness in the face of harm.

Love tells the truth because it is still committed to healing.

Love grieves what has been betrayed because it still believes something sacred is worth saving.

And so I cannot celebrate this birthday without telling the truth.

The United States is turning 250 during one of the most corrupt and morally compromised seasons of government I have ever seen, and I was glued to the television the summer of the Watergate hearings that led to another corrupt president’s resignation.

We are watching a presidency that treats power as possession. A Congress that too often confuses loyalty with cowardice. A Supreme Court that many of us no longer experience as a guardian of justice but as an instrument of ideology. Institutions meant to restrain power have instead learned to bless it, protect it, excuse it, or profit from it.

And this is what makes the birthday feel so haunted.

Because the question is not whether America has ideals. Of course it does. The question is whether we still have the moral courage to be judged by them.

The Declaration of Independence did not make us righteous. The Constitution did not make us faithful. The flag does not make us free. These are symbols and promises, and promises can be betrayed.

That is why the arrest of Air Force Major Jason Watson has stayed with me.

An active-duty officer stood on the Capitol steps and called for the impeachment and removal of the president and vice president. He did so as an act of civil disobedience, arguing that unconstitutional use of military power violates the very oath service members swear to uphold. He was arrested for demonstrating in a prohibited area.

Whatever one thinks of his strategy, the image is clarifying.

A man in uniform stood not for a party, not for a personality, not for revenge, but for the Constitution. He stood where so many elected officials have learned to sit quietly. He risked his career to say what many with far less to lose will not.

For those of us formed by Scripture, this should not surprise us.

The Bible is full of people who understood that obedience to God sometimes requires disobedience to empire. Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, refused Pharaoh’s order to kill Hebrew baby boys. They had no power. They had no army. They had no institutional protection. They had only their fear of God, their moral imagination, and their refusal to cooperate with death.

Daniel kept praying even when the king made prayer illegal. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused to bow before the golden image, even as the furnace was being prepared. In Acts, when the apostles were ordered to stop speaking, they replied, “We must obey God rather than human beings.”

This is not lawlessness. It is a deeper obedience.

Faithful resistance has always known the difference between order and justice, between legality and righteousness, and between peacekeeping and peacemaking. Scripture does not ask us to worship stability. It asks us to discern faithfulness.

So when someone stands before power and says, “This violates the oath, this violates the Constitution, this violates what we are called to protect,” I may still ask questions about strategy. But I cannot pretend the act itself is foreign to my faith. It belongs to a long tradition of people who understood that conscience is not disloyalty.

That is patriotism.

Not the cheap patriotism of spectacle. Not the kind that waves the flag while dismantling the republic. Not the kind that confuses criticism with disloyalty or obedience with virtue. But the harder patriotism of accountability. The kind that remembers that love of country is not the same as loyalty to empire. The kind that knows an oath is not to a man but to a constitutional order meant to restrain men.

This is where I find myself on America’s 250th birthday: grieving, loving, and still responsible. I do not want to abandon the language of democracy to those who hollow it out. I do not want to surrender the word freedom to those who use it to protect domination. I do not want to leave patriotism in the hands of people who have mistaken power for greatness.

But neither do I want to pretend.

There is no honest celebration without lament. No faithful birthday party without confession. No “America the Beautiful” without also naming the ugliness we have tolerated, the people we have harmed, the truth we have avoided, and the ways our institutions have failed the vulnerable while shielding the powerful.

Maybe that is what this 250th anniversary requires of us: not nostalgia, but moral memory. Memory that tells the whole story.

Memory that remembers the enslaved people who heard declarations of liberty while remaining in chains. Memory that remembers Indigenous nations whose lands were taken in the name of expansion. Memory that remembers immigrants who built the country while being scapegoated by it. Memory that remembers soldiers asked to serve ideals that politicians betray. Memory that remembers every generation has had to decide whether America’s promises would remain poetry or become practice.

And maybe the World Cup offers a strange mercy in the middle of it all.

Because sport, at its best, reminds us that human beings still know how to gather. We still know how to cheer, weep, sing, hope, and be surprised together. We still know how to become neighbors for ninety minutes. We still know that joy matters. But joy is not denial. It gives us enough breath to keep telling the truth.

So yes, I will put out my chair the night before. I will watch the parade in Edmonds. I will wave at children and neighbors. I will eat barbecue with friends. I will watch the games. I will cheer. I will let myself feel the beauty of people from all over the world filling our streets and stadiums. I will welcome the reminder that nationalism is too small a container for the human family.

And then I will return to the harder work. To love much. To tell the truth. To resist corruption. To refuse despair. To defend the vulnerable. To remember that democracy is not a possession we inherit but a practice we either embody or lose.

The United States is turning 250.

The question is not whether we can throw a party.

The question is whether we can become worthy of the promises we continue to celebrate.

May you love this country enough to grieve it,
and grieve it enough to stay.

May you refuse the cheap patriotism of spectacle
and take up the harder patriotism of truth.

May you find your people on the sidewalk,
pass the food, wave at the children,
remember that joy is not denial
it is the breath we take
so we can keep telling the truth.

And when the last sparkler goes dark,
may you rise to the unfinished work:
to love much,
to defend the vulnerable,
to practice the democracy we have not yet become.
Amen

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience — telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome — three breakings across thirty years, and the mercy that met me in each. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers.

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Over Father’s Day weekend, more than four thousand men gathered on a bluff above the Columbia River for a thing called Freedom Con.

They came with their sons. They came with their pastors, their hunting buddies, their Bible study friends. There was a CrossFit contest and an obstacle course, and a station where you could practice changing a tire. There were lassos, a plank competition, and a man billed as the Warrior Poet selling tactical gear. Both nights ended with worship.

I want to begin with the thing that gets lost the moment the mockery starts: some of this is the answer to a real ache.

A father drove up from Arizona to stand next to his son. Men who had been drifting found a reason to get sober, to go to counseling, to set down the bottle and the anger they couldn’t explain. You do not have to admire the theology to recognize the hunger underneath it. The hunger is real.

What happens when that hunger is handed to leaders who mistake domination for discipleship?

That is where the ache turns dangerous.

Because when a man’s longing for belonging is met not with tenderness, repentance, or mutuality, but with a story about reclaiming power, the wound does not heal. It gets organized.

And then the pastor took the stage.

“Heterosexual, sober men who marry girls and read Bibles, we’re the new punk rock,” Mark Driscoll told them, and the men rose to their feet.

Girls. Not women. Girls. The word did not slip past me.

The organizers had hoped for twenty thousand. Around forty-five hundred came. Almost the only women on the grounds, besides the venue staff and one reporter, were volunteers from the host church, each of whom had paid $55 to be there. The men paid one hundred ninety-nine.

Up the hill, a small pergola had been set aside as a women’s listening area, where a whiteboard read, in looping script: Ladies, please be considerate and enjoy this space quietly. We want to minimize distractions so our men can listen. I mean, this seems like a playoff of “women stay silent in the church.”

I have been thinking about all of this and remembered a film.

In 1999, Fight Club gave us an unnamed narrator, an insomniac, hollowed out, drowning in catalog furniture and fluorescent work, and the man who comes to rescue him from all of it: Tyler Durden.

Tyler is everything the narrator is not. Unafraid. Unbound. Magnetic. He starts a basement club where men beat each other bloody and come up feeling alive. The basement becomes an army. The army becomes Project Mayhem. And Project Mayhem ends in detonation.

Tyler and his bare-knuckle disciples became instant icons to a generation of disillusioned young men who felt numbed by consumerism, work, debt, fatherlessness, and the vague humiliation of not knowing what their lives were supposed to mean.

But the question has always been: what message did they take away?

The film was not, at its deepest level, a celebration of Tyler Durden. It was a warning about what happens when male pain is given a uniform, a ritual, an enemy, and a violent sense of purpose.

Tyler diagnosed something real. The men were lonely. They were spiritually hungry. They felt replaceable. But his cure was domination masquerading as liberation.

And here is the part the imitators always forget: Tyler Durden is not real.

He is the narrator’s own mind, split off and given a face, the ache turned outward, handed a body and an enemy to fight. The whole tragedy of the film is that the war was never with the world. It was the wound, projected onto the world, and then detonated.

That is why the resurgence of muscular Christian men’s movements deserves more than mockery.

Something real is being named. Many men do feel lonely, ashamed, displaced, and unsure how to inhabit a changing world. But the danger comes when that ache is organized around grievance rather than grief, authority rather than healing, and conquest rather than communion.

This is what concerns me about the new religious masculinity gathering around figures like Mark Driscoll and the broader revival of Promise Keepers–style energy.

The draw is not hard to understand. It offers men a place to belong, a role to play, a battle to join, and a story in which their confusion becomes holy rage. But when Christian formation turns male disillusionment into a campaign to “take back” power, it is no longer discipling men into the way of Jesus.

It is giving cover to the very wound it claims to heal. I do not write that from a distance. I was there at the beginning.

In 2006, I was co-pastoring a small Vineyard church in Shoreline, just north of Seattle, while Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill was becoming the largest, loudest thing in our city.

At the time, Mars Hill was not a fringe church. It was shaping the imagination of pastors across the country. What was said there did not stay there.

He had a column in the Seattle Times. He had a blog. And on both he wrote about women in a way that landed in the places I read, again and again, in the bodies of the people who came to see me, women who had been taught that submission was in their DNA, men who had absorbed the lesson that contempt was a spiritual gift.

I was binding those wounds on the back end. I knew where the rhetoric went, because I kept meeting it after it arrived. When a citizens’ group announced a protest at the Ballard church, a young pastor from another city wrote to me, alarmed.

Rose, we can’t start protesting churches. You’re a pastor, can’t you do something?

He had assumed I was one of the organizers. I wasn’t.

But I had been so disturbed by what was being said, and how large it was growing, that I sat down and did the only thing I knew how to do.

After many attempts to meet with Mark. I wrote him a letter. An open one. And I tried, the whole way through, to come not as an enemy but as a peer.

“I speak to you as your peer and your equal before God,” I wrote, which, given his theology, was itself the argument.

I named the rhetoric plainly: the women called “chickified,” the ordained minister he had mocked as a “bunny rabbit” who needed to “man up,” the slippery-slope claim that women in ministry were the battering ram that would open the church door to everything he feared.

I quoted his own words back to him. And I told him where I actually stood: I no longer live in Genesis Chapter 3.

Then I named the thing underneath all of it the thing I would still name today, twenty years on, if you put me in front of that stage at the Gorge: This boils down to an issue of power and how leaders steward it.

Scot McKnight posted the letter on his blog, and it traveled. And then Mark himself reached out, and we set a meeting with local pastors, the protest organizers, and the two of us. The organizers came to ask for one thing. Not his theology. Not his job. An apology for how he had spoken about women.

He would not give it.

What he gave instead, a few weeks later, was a public statement that he was “sad and sorry” that some had “taken issue” with his words.

He was not sorry for what he said. He was sorry that some people took issue. The harm had been quietly relocated onto the offended; the speaker walked away untouched. The protest was called off. It worked.

The counterfeit apology did exactly what it was built to do: it bought silence and changed nothing. He had learned that the appearance of repentance is enough to make critics stand down, and that the substance of it can be skipped altogether.

Eighteen years later, he is on a stage above the Columbia, telling four thousand men they are the new punk rock, and a whiteboard up the hill is asking the women to be quiet so the men can listen.

I tell you this not to settle a score. Mark Driscoll is not, finally, the subject. He is the clearest example of a pattern that will outlast him, and would outlast him if he vanished tomorrow.

The pattern is what frightens me.

Take a generation of men who are genuinely hurt, lonely, ashamed, unsure how to be men in a world that keeps changing the rules, and instead of leading them down into grief, where healing actually lives, hand them a grievance and an enemy and a stadium.

Tell them their ache is holy rage. Give the wound a uniform. That is Tyler Durden in a worship set. It is the basement, sanctified. And it ends where it always ends, because a fist cannot hold what only an open hand can carry.

Here is what I keep returning to, and where, against everything, I find hope.

In that room in 2006, the other way was on the table. Literally.

It came as a letter from a woman who refused both the protest and the silence, who addressed him as an equal, named the harm without contempt, and ended not with a verdict but with a question: Will you sit down and talk?

He was handed the way of grief and communion, in his own theological language, by someone given to peacemaking. And he chose the fist.

The lonely men at the Gorge, the ones who drove a long way with their sons because something in them is hungry for a father, for a brother, for a name that isn’t an insult, they are not my enemy.

They are exactly the people Jesus kept feeding. The tragedy is not that they came hungry. The tragedy is who gets to set the table.

So I will keep setting a different one.

To the men who are tired of being angry: there is a stronger thing than rage, and it is grief that has been allowed to finish its work.

To the men who feel replaceable: you were never a means to someone else’s empire.

To the boys lassoing in the dust while a whiteboard teaches their mothers to stay quiet: there is a Father whose first instinct toward you is not contempt, and a way of being a man that has nothing to prove and no one to conquer.

Jesus did not heal men by giving them enemies. He healed them by restoring them to love. The wound is real. It was always real.

But it does not need to be dressed up as faithfulness.

It needs to be healed.

Amen.

Reflections is where I write at the intersection of faith, power, and resilience, telling the truth about the times we’re in, and where hope still holds.

Alongside these, I’m serializing a memoir, Broken Heart Syndrome — three breakings across thirty years, and the mercy that met me in each. New chapters every other Saturday, for paid subscribers.

Other People’s Faith

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.
— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Seattle — October 2011

It was a Sunday afternoon. After church, we went to a local bar, the kind of place you go when you need somewhere ordinary to sit with something that isn’t ordinary at all. We sat on stools at the bar. Golf was on the television. We ordered food.

Rich looked at me. He was almost not there. That is the only way I know how to say it. His body was on the stool beside me, but something essential had gone somewhere else, somewhere the news had arrived before the rest of him had caught up.

Earlier that week, we had been on a Skype call with his son Ben. Ben had found a tumor. A soft tissue sarcoma is aggressive, fast-moving, the kind that doesn’t negotiate. Rich had held himself together on the call the way fathers do, listening, asking questions, saying what needed to be said. But now it was Sunday afternoon, golf was on, and there was nowhere left to hold it.

He said, “I can’t do this again. I don’t have the faith. I love my son. I am going to have to have other people’s faith carry me.”

He had buried his first wife. He knew what aggressive meant. He knew the shape of what was coming, the treatments and the hope and the slow, terrible arithmetic of a body losing ground, and he was telling me, plainly and without apology, that he did not have what it would take.

I told him he didn’t need to. We would hold it for him. You say that because you mean it, because the person beside you needs to hear it, and because love, at its most essential, is just showing up and saying: I will not let you do this alone. Golf played on. We sat at the bar. The thing we were about to walk through had already begun.

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There have been countless times over the years when I’ve asked Rich to do something he wasn’t planning to do. Or I’ve changed plans we had already made. Or circumstances beyond either of our control forced us to let go of something we were looking forward to.

I can usually see it immediately. A look crosses his face. His shoulders drop ever so slightly. Something shifts. For years, I interpreted that look as anger. Was he upset with me? Had I done something wrong? Was there an argument coming?

Eventually, Rich began saying something that has stayed with me, and to this day, he still has to say it to me in these moments.

“It’s okay for me to be disappointed.”

At first, I didn’t know what to do with it. I still have a hard time. I want to explain. To justify. To make the disappointment disappear. Surely, if I could help him understand why the plans had changed, he wouldn’t feel disappointed anymore.

But disappointment, he was teaching me, wasn’t a problem to solve. It wasn’t anger, blame, or rejection. It was simply the feeling that arises when reality and hope part ways. The older I get, the more I think much of life is learning how to live in that space.

When we’re young, disappointment often feels temporary. We assume there will be another opportunity, another relationship, another promotion, another season. Time stretches ahead of us, and hope is quickly replenished. As we age, disappointment takes shape. Some dreams come true. Others quietly die. Some relationships heal. Others never do. Some prayers are answered in ways we recognize. Others seem to vanish into silence.

I am approaching seventy now, and I have discovered that disappointment is not an occasional visitor. It is one of life’s most faithful companions.

There are disappointments in ministry. When I was younger, I believed that if people encountered the love of God deeply enough, transformation would follow. Sometimes it did, and those stories still take my breath away. But I also watched the communities I loved come apart, and people who once passed the peace to one another stopped meeting each other’s eyes. I learned that love poured out is not the same as love received, and that you cannot keep a community tender by wanting it badly enough.

There are family disappointments, and I will not name them here, because they belong to people I love more than I belong to this essay. I’ll only say that love offers no exemption from heartbreak, and that the people closest to us hold the greatest power to disappoint us precisely because we hoped the most from them. Grief, I’ve found, often comes in through the door you propped open for joy.

And there are disappointments the body holds. I have learned, in my own flesh, that faith offers no immunity that the heart can break, that the life you were promised in your own bones is not always the life you get. I won’t tell that whole story here. But I have lain in a place where reality and hope had plainly parted ways, only to discover that grace did not arrive to reverse it. Grace arrived to sit with me in it. A friend at the right moment. A meal at the door. A hand to hold. Not the healing I asked for. The presence I didn’t know to ask for.

What I have come to believe is that disappointment itself is not the enemy. Bitterness is. Disappointment tells the truth. Something mattered. Something was hoped for. Something was loved. Bitterness demands repayment for the loss. Disappointment grieves. Bitterness calcifies. Disappointment keeps the heart open, while bitterness closes it.

Perhaps this is why Scripture is filled with people who are disappointed. Abraham never saw descendants as numerous as the stars. Moses never entered the Promised Land. Mary watched her son die. The disciples expected a conquering king, but instead received a crucified Messiah.

The biblical story is not a record of people whose expectations were met. It is a story of people who discovered God present amid unmet expectations. Maybe that is faith. Not believing life will unfold as planned. Not pretending losses don’t hurt. Not forcing ourselves into gratitude before grief has done its work.

Maybe faith is trusting that God’s presence can still be found even after disappointment has stripped away our illusions. These days, when I see that familiar look cross Rich’s face, I try to understand it differently. He isn’t angry. He simply allows himself to acknowledge that something hoped for is no longer possible. And then he moves on. No drama. No resentment. No scorekeeping. Just honesty, and I can see the wisdom he has around all the ways disappointment shows up.

The older I get, the less interested I am in avoiding disappointment and the more interested I am in learning to carry it without letting it harden into something else. Because disappointment held honestly can soften us. It can deepen compassion. It can teach us to hold our plans more loosely than we did at twenty, when we still believed loss happened to other people.

The life I am living today is not the life I imagined at twenty, or forty, or even sixty. Some dreams were fulfilled. Others quietly died, and I could not tell you the day they did. Some losses still ache when the weather changes. I want to be careful here, because I said earlier that we should not force ourselves into gratitude before grief has done its work, and I meant it. The gratitude I have did not arrive on time. It did not replace the grief. It arrives late, in part, and on most days it is less a feeling than a decision I make again in the morning.

But it comes. Not because the story resolved. Not because the losses turned out to be worth it, some of them weren’t, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. It comes because, looking back, I cannot find a single stretch of road where I was finally, fully alone. The presence I kept asking to fix things mostly just stayed. And it turns out that staying was the point.

So I am learning to let disappointment do its quiet work in me and to keep my heart open as it does. To grieve what was hoped for and to bless what actually is not the same thing, never the same thing, but both held in the same open hand.

May your heart remain open to what it cannot change. May you bless what was beautiful, grieve what was lost, and release what was never yours to keep. May disappointment soften you rather than shrink you. May the hopes that died make room for wisdom, and the losses you carry deepen your tenderness toward others. And when the night feels long and the road uncertain, may you discover again that the One who made the stars is still keeping company with you beneath them.
Amen

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I saw this post on a friend’s social media about how Elon Musk’s rocket company had gone public and made millionaires out of welders, technicians, and the people who ran the cafeteria line. An immigrant who took a twenty-eight-dollar-an-hour welding job in 2015, who said he didn’t even know what the company was, now holds shares worth nearly a million dollars. Underneath the post, someone had commented a single word.

“Amen.”

That “Amen” is a church word. It means “let it be so.” It means “this is the truth, and I bless it.” And I wanted to know exactly what was being blessed.

I was agitated when I read it; something in my gut was uneasy.

The same event that minted those millionaires carried Elon Musk across a threshold no human being has ever crossed. A trillion dollars. And the man who crossed it is the same man who, eighteen months earlier, took a chainsaw to the agency that fed the world’s poorest children.

Over two decades, that agency’s unglamorous work on malaria nets, HIV medication, and food sent into famine—affected areas helped prevent something like 91 million deaths. Thirty million of them children. In a matter of weeks, it was gutted: more than eighty percent of its programs revoked, its doors closed, its staff sent home. The peer-reviewed estimate of what those cuts will cost by 2030 is more than 14 million lives, over 4.5 million of them children under the age of 5. The researchers ask us to take the precise numbers with a grain of salt. The direction is not in dispute. People will die in very large numbers, and a great many of them are small.

So the same hand wrote both stories. The hand that lifted the welder is the hand that cut the line that fed the child.

I have heard this called an irony. It is not an irony. Irony is what we call injustice when we would rather not call it sin.

There is an older word for it, and it comes to us from a teenage girl singing in somebody’s kitchen. He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. That is the world Mary saw coming — the great reversal, the lowly lifted, the proud scattered, the hungry fed at last. It is the whole shape of the gospel in two lines.

What we are being asked to bless is that song run backward. The rich filled. The hungry sent away empty. And a chorus underneath, singing Amen.

The inversion runs on theology, though it rarely admits it. It holds that worth is something you produce — that the welder’s dignity is proven by his eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars, that value is whatever the market will pay for what your hands have made. Follow that theology all the way down, and you arrive precisely where we are standing: at a child who will never weld anything, never build a rocket, never create value in any column a market can read — and therefore, when the budget tightens, a child who can be permitted to die. The logic is clean. That is the part that should frighten us. It is not cruelty breaking the system. It is the system, working exactly as designed.

Someone will object. Someone did, underneath that same post. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else, and the ones who complain about men like Musk are usually just guilty of the sin of covetousness.

Set the first half aside, because it is an argument about engines, and this was never an argument about engines. You can run any economy ever devised and still arrange it so the welder is carried up and the child is set down — or arrange it so the table holds them both. Mary’s song is not an economic system. It is a description of the direction God moves, and the direction is always toward the one who has been set down.

It is the second half I want to ponder, because it is the more revealing. Covetousness. The word names the desire to take what is your neighbor’s, the tenth commandment, the eye that lingers on the house, the field, the ox that is not yours. A real sin, and an old one. But notice what has to be true for the charge to land here: to grieve a child who will die of a canceled malaria program, you must first be assumed to want Elon Musk's money. Lament is read as envy. Protest, as greed. The charge cannot imagine that anyone might object on the child's behalf rather than their own, and that failure of imagination is the whole disease, now wearing a clerical collar. It is the theology of produced worth turned to defend itself: if dignity is something you earn, the only reason to resent a rich man is that you covet his earnings. There is no room left in the ledger for the child.

This is the oldest move there is, older than the book it quotes. When Amos named the scale, the priest Amaziah did not answer the charge. He told Amos to go prophesy somewhere else, to go eat his bread in another country. The comfortable have always heard the indictment of a cruel arrangement as the bitter complaint of the envious, because that is the version that requires nothing of them. The other version requires that they look at the scale.

And if we are going to speak honestly about covetousness, our faith is not shy about where it actually lives.

The gospel runs the other way. The child’s worth was never in question. It was never eight hundred thousand dollars, and it was never twenty-eight dollars an hour. Dignity does not wait on productivity; it precedes it, the way a face precedes a résumé. Sixteen centuries ago, Basil of Caesarea told his congregation that the bread they hoarded in their cupboards already belonged to the hungry, that the coat kept in the closet belonged to the naked, that the surplus had never been theirs to begin with. There is your covetousness, if you want to find it. Not in the woman grieving the child. In the arrangement that calls for a trillion dollars earned and food-line waste. Amos, older still, refused to moralize about wealth in the abstract. He named the mechanism: they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals. The scale tipped. The poor were priced. The prophets always watched the scale.

I have said before that a trillionaire is not a success story but a policy failure, and I meant it. But it is more than a failure. It is a confession. Power always tells the truth about itself in the end if you watch who it protects and whom it exposes. Here, the welder is protected, and the child is exposed, and the protecting and the exposing are done by the same set of hands, in the same eighteen months, and we are handed only the first half of the ledger and told to call it grace.

I will not say Amen to that.

But I will say this, which is the older and the truer Amen:
May we be people who can still tell a gift from a theft dressed as a gift. May we refuse to call the emptying of the poor a success story. May we keep a table where no one’s worth is checked at the door. And may the hungry yet be filled with good things, every welder, every child, every one, and the song be sung again the right way round.

Amen. Let it be so.

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Broken Heart Syndrome, my memoir, is unfolding here, one chapter at a time—the story of getting broken more than once and the mercy that kept showing up. It is written now from the scar, not the wound. Chapter One is free to everyone; the remaining chapters are for paid subscribers.

Some stories can only be written from the scar and not the wound.

Broken Heart Syndrome is one of those stories.

It is the story of getting broken more than once, and the mercy that kept meeting me.

I’m sharing Chapter One freely with everyone. If you find yourself wanting to keep walking with me, the remaining chapters will unfold here, one chapter at a time, for paid subscribers.

Thank you for beginning this journey with me.

Content note: This memoir includes stories of loss, illness, and abuse.

The symbol at the head of every chapter in this book is an unalome. I carry it on the inside of my arm as a tattoo, and this first chapter is the story of how it came to be there.

CHAPTER ONE

Unalome

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.

ISAIAH 43:2 (NRSV)

Koh Phangan, Thailand — April 2026

I don’t plan to get a tattoo. The shop is open to the air, the kind of place you almost miss if you’re not looking for it. A fan hums somewhere behind me. The heat sits on my skin. I can smell oil, something faintly medicinal.

Pae pulls a stool close and takes my arm in her hand, turning it slightly, studying the inside of my forearm like she’s looking for something already there. It’s the same place where, ten years ago, something in me gave way. I didn’t know it then. I was here for a celebration. I kept going. I kept showing up. I kept moving through the days as if my body were fine. But it wasn’t.

Now I’m back. Same air. Same heat. Same body. Older. Slower. Listening more closely. She presses the stencil against my skin. When she pulls it away, the faint outline of a line remains thin, almost disappearing if you don’t look directly at it.

I watch her hands as she prepares the needle. There’s a moment just before it begins where everything quiets. Then the sound starts. A low, steady buzz. The first touch is sharper than I expected. My body tightens, then adjusts. The line begins to take shape under her hand, small movements, precise, deliberate.

I focus on my breath. In. Out. The line moves across my skin in loops and turns before straightening, then rising into a sharp peak like something breaking through before settling again.

I came in with an image of a heartbeat. Something simple. A sign that the rhythm had returned. But Pae knows my story. She was here ten years ago. She was here twenty years ago, too, the first time I came to this island.

Rich and I have already made a family from grief and love by then. His five children, my two, and later Alex, the child who somehow belonged to all of us. Though “blended family” never quite captures how families like ours actually form: slowly, unevenly, through meals and losses and ordinary days no one realizes are binding people together until years later when they are.

The first time I came to this island, I was here to officiate my daughter’s best friend’s wedding on the beach. Thirty-something young people filled the week with sunburns, scooters, late-night swims, and before it was over, most of them ended up in Pae’s chair getting tattoos. Rich and I did too. She remembered us.

Ten years ago, when I came back barely breathing, I didn’t make it to her shop. But word travels on a small island. She knew what had happened. So, when I walked through her door this time, she didn’t ask what I wanted. She looked at my arm, at the same place where something had given way ten years ago, and she already knew.

She sees what I cannot yet see. The needle lifts. Returns. Lifts again. Time shifts in places like this. Not quite fast, not quite slow. Just held.

At one point, I realize my hand has relaxed. My shoulders have dropped. I am not bracing anymore. I am here. Alive in this moment. In this body. In this place that almost took me.

The buzzing stops. She wipes my arm gently and leans back. “Look,” she says. I turn my arm toward me. It’s a single line. It begins in small, tight loops — circling, returning, crossing over itself — before widening, loosening, then straightening into something almost clear. Just before the end, it rises sharply, a sudden break, and then continues on.

Not straight. Not simple. But unbroken. I trace it lightly with my finger. Ten years ago, the line nearly ended here. I look at my arm again. And yet. It didn’t. Pae says something about the design, about the way the line moves. “Not straight,” she says, smiling. “But complete.” She tells me the pattern has a name.

Unalome. A line that begins in tight circles before opening, before becoming something like clarity. I turn my arm again, following the line with my eyes. It doesn’t feel like clarity. It feels like circling. Like returning to the same places, the same questions, the same wounds, only now with a little more space, a little more breath.

There are places where the line doubles back. Places where it loosens. Places where it rises sharply, like something in my body refusing to stay hidden. I hadn’t asked for all of that. I had only asked for proof that my heart was still beating. But this feels more honest. Not a clean rhythm. A life.

—

Koh Phangan, Thailand — April 2016

The trip from Seattle to Koh Phangan takes the better part of two days if you count it honestly. Seattle to Taipei: twelve hours. A layover of four. Bangkok. Then Koh Samui, a small island you reach by air, and finally a fast boat across the water to Koh Phangan, the island we were all heading toward.

I don’t remember most of it clearly. What I remember is the tiredness. Not the ordinary tiredness of long travel, the kind that lifts after you sleep. Something heavier than that. Something that had been sitting in my chest for weeks, maybe longer, that I had been explaining to myself as stress, as age, as the particular weight of a difficult year.

I was out of breath on the jetway. I didn’t say anything. I was there for a celebration, the tenth anniversary of a couple I loved, whose wedding I had officiated on that island. My daughter’s family, chosen friends, a gathering that mattered, and I had decided, somewhere before we left, that I was not going to be the one who made it harder. I was going to show up. I was going to be present. I was going to feel better once we got there. That is what I told myself for the entire journey.

—

Seattle — February 2016

Eight weeks before the trip, I had gone to the doctor. Then again. Then a third time. Each visit was the same: no tests, a listen to my chest, and a diagnosis of chronic bronchitis. Each time, the inhaler was stronger. Each time I left, believing I was being cared for, that this would lift, that I just needed to be patient with my own body.

The day I was leaving for Thailand, the actual day, hours before my flight, I called the office again. Something had shifted in my worry. I told them I thought I might have pneumonia. They had me come in for a chest X-ray. The call came before I finished packing. No pneumonia, they said. But your heart is enlarged. Come in as soon as you’re back from your trip.

I hung up the phone. I finished packing. I got on a plane. This is what trust looks like from the inside. Not naivete. Not recklessness. Just a woman who believed that the people responsible for reading her body would tell her if something couldn’t wait. They didn’t. So I went.

—

Koh Phangan — April 2016

My granddaughter was four years old. She was having a hard time those first nights wanting her mom, unsettled by the heat and the newness of the place. Her parents were out late, the way you are when you are celebrating. At bedtime, she and I would watch a movie on her iPad.

I don’t remember which movies. I remember the light from the screen in the dark room. I remember her small body eventually going still beside me, the way children collapse into sleep without ceremony. She would wake before me, she always did, and make her way to her mother’s room in the early morning. I would lie there after she left, trying to find the energy to begin another day.

There was a massage hut right on the beach in front of our hotel. I went every day. Most times twice. I told the Thai women I had bronchitis, which is what I believed, what the doctors back home had told me, what I had been telling myself for eight weeks. They adjusted accordingly, concentrating on my back and chest, working at something that wouldn’t yield.

After each massage, I could breathe a little more easily. I told my daughter how much better I felt. She said, “Mom, get as many as you need if they make you feel better.” At the time, I did not know that she and a friend of hers in EMT training were talking quietly between themselves, thinking something was really wrong. They would check on me every morning.

With every massage, I felt better. Not fully. Not well. But enough to continue. I understand now what was happening: my chest cavity was filling with fluid, my heart straining, my body doing everything it could to compensate for what it could not sustain. Those women, pressing on my back and chest in the heat, were doing something the medicine wasn’t. They were buying me time. I didn’t know that then. I just knew I felt a little better after every massage.

—

One afternoon, we were all playing in the ocean. The water there is calm, no large waves, nothing dramatic. The Gulf water around Koh Phangan held that impossible shade between turquoise and jade, so clear you could see your own feet stirring pale ribbons of sand beneath you. The surface shimmered like hammered glass under the afternoon light, and every so often the sea carried the faint smell of coconut oil, sunscreen, and distant grilled garlic drifting from the beach restaurants. Even the sound was gentle, small lapping rhythms against our bodies, laughter floating farther than it should, longtail boats humming somewhere beyond the bay.

We waded out slowly. It was the kind of water that feels like rest. I got to just above my waist. And I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t a wave. It wasn’t panic. It was simply the pressure of the water around my chest — gentle, ordinary ocean pressure — and my lungs had nothing left to give against it. I told someone near me. I don’t remember who. They turned me toward shore, walked me in, and as the water dropped below my chest, I could breathe again.

I stood there at the edge of the water, catching my breath. I didn’t tell anyone else. I didn’t want to ruin the trip. In my bag, I had an inhaler. I used it more and more as the days went on, reaching for it in the morning, after the walks, after the ocean, in the night when my chest felt heaviest.

I would find out later that the inhaler was a steroid that was making my heart work harder. Every time I reached for the thing I believed was helping me, I was adding to the weight my heart was already struggling to bear. I didn’t know any of this yet. I only knew I was tired. I only knew I didn’t want to ruin anyone’s time. I just kept hoping I would feel better.

—

Koh Phangan — April 2026

That was ten years ago. Now I am sitting in this open-air shop, watching Pae complete the line on my arm, and I am thinking about that woman. The one who got on the plane. The one who didn’t want to ruin anyone’s time. The one who handed her granddaughter the iPad each night, held her until she slept, and told herself that getting through the day was the same as being well.

For now, there is just the buzz of the needle, and the line taking shape, and Pae’s steady hands, and the heat of this island that almost took me and somehow did not. The buzzing stops. She holds up a small mirror so I can see its full length. The line begins in tight circles and slowly opens into something almost straight. Not a clean rhythm. A life. Still moving.

—

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However you come along, thank you. This story has been waiting a long time to be told. I’m grateful you’re here for the telling.