There's a detail in the Gospel of Mark I keep coming back to during Holy Week. Each evening that final week, Jesus left Jerusalem and walked back to Bethany to sleep. He didn't stay in the city overnight. He went back and forth. Temple in the morning. Arguments in the afternoon. And then the long walk back, probably tired, probably processing, knowing what the week was building toward.

I don't know why that image lodges in me the way it does. Maybe because it's so human. Or maybe because it makes Holy Week feel less like sacred tableau and more like someone living through a series of difficult, necessary days, one foot in front of the other.

I had one of those days today.

There are moments in congregational life when something small reveals something much bigger.

During our Sabbath worship service at Southminster last weekend, the sanctuary went completely dark. Windows covered. Lights off. A holy hush. And then, under blacklight, the gospel began to glow.

What most of us saw was beauty and creativity. What many of us didn’t see were the hours (LOTS of hours!) spent beforehand: taping, draping, adjusting, re-taping, lighting, and rehearsing. The kind of quiet labor that makes it all possible.
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It occurs to me that the Puppet Proclamation that night is a parable of what it is to be church together.

I woke up yesterday morning to heartbreaking messages out of Immokalee, Florida—eyewitness accounts and urgent posts from people I knew during my years there. Before the sun was up, immigration officers and state agencies were sweeping through farmworker neighborhoods. Mothers were taken. Fathers were taken. Kids were getting ready for school and didn’t know why their parents suddenly weren’t there.

Here's one of the early news reports, for broader context.

I’ve been reflecting a lot this week on how we respond, as people of faith, to yet another act of gun violence. It feels like these moments are never far from our headlines.

​Over the years, I’ve grown cautious about reshaping worship every time tragedy strikes. If I did, we’d find ourselves changing the liturgy nearly every week. Gun violence has become that frequent. That routine. That expected. And yet, even when I don’t rewrite the bulletin or throw out the sermon draft, I still carry the grief.

It always sneaks up on me.

I can go weeks without thinking about that time—those months a few years ago when life unraveled in ways I still struggle to put into words. Days pass with routine and normalcy. But suddenly, my chest tightens, my heart races, and panic sets in. Nightmares resurface. Old fears return like they’ve just been waiting for a quiet moment to pounce.

​Dear panic attack: hello, ol’ friend. I can’t say that I’ve missed you.

Over the weekend, we bought our sixth “half flat” of fresh berries at the farmers market. You know the kind—overflowing pints of strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, marionberries, boysenberries, and blueberries, each one practically glowing in the morning sun like they’d been hand-polished by angels on berry duty.

As soon as I bit into the first one, I said it out loud without even thinking: “Berries are proof that God exists.”

It was a joke. Sort of.

You've probably seen them around the Treasure Valley: the little signs in yards and windows that simply say, "Everyone is Welcome Here." They're about the size of a campaign sign, but they're not campaigning for anything. Not a candidate, not a ballot initiative, not a political party. They're not a protest sign or a piece of propaganda.

They're just a promise. A simple statement of shared human values: decency, hospitality, dignity. And although it's not intended to be a religious message, it is nevertheless a modern-day echo of spiritual teachings in the scriptures of almost every world religion. Welcome the stranger. Love our neighbor. Seek the image of the divine in every human being.

​Apparently, that's too much for some people.

There will be no comfort in saying “this isn’t who we are.”

We’ve said it too many times.

After every tragedy. After every policy that robs the poor to enrich the powerful. After every cruelty justified in the name of security or prosperity. After every moment our elected leaders make a mockery of the gospel – calling good what is evil, and evil what is good.

​We need to get comfortable with this fact: this is who we are. This is who we've always been.

It’s been a while since I last wrote here. Seriously. My last post was July 2024. (Remember how quaint the world was back then?!)

That probably says something already.

Lately I’ve been paying attention to the things that are teaching me... not in a “perfectly curated lesson plan” kind of way, but in the quiet, lopsided, occasionally laugh-out-loud ways that life teaches all of us. Some of these lessons have come through grief. Some through joy. Most through just trying to be a halfway decent human in a time of chaos and pain.

​So, in no particular order, here’s what I’m learning these days:

Our nation’s heated political rhetoric of the past decade has reached a fever pitch, soaring to dangerous new heights with yesterday’s assassination attempt on former President Donald J. Trump. My soul grieves for the space in which we find ourselves, what it says about who we are, and what it says about who we will be in the months and years ahead.

​First, a note about violence (which I hope will come across as "obvious"). I condemn it. It is evil. Full stop. I am mourning this news just as I have mourned the stories of every other mass shooting that has filled our airwaves with fear and anxiety.

​Yet, I also acknowledge that this particular violent act stands apart, indicative of a specific situation in a specific time of our communal life. This mass shooting is not altogether like other mass shootings. In a way, we’ve been living witnesses of a rapid denigration of shared ethical norms… a slide to the bottom that seems to have been leading us to this moment all along.