Opinion

After four years of battling infertility and other challenges, our long-awaited baby arrived healthy and whole. Then the nightmare began, and the caregiver became the care receiver. Here are some things I learned about caring for people in the worst moments of their lives.

Southern Baptists’ carrot-and-stick evangelistic strategy was perfectly suited to a denomination that was born defending slavery, that came of age in a season of Jim Crow segregation, and that had spent the previous 20 years dismissing the civil rights movement as a communist plot. If the Southern Baptist hell was real, evangelism must be the first and only mission of the church.

My longtime friend and mentor Samuel Hill affirmed “evangelical Christianity” for its emphasis “on righteousness, love of neighbor, disciplined behavior, and a sensitive conscience.” Restoring those now-diminished gospel traits will require strong doses of “moral chemotherapy,” beyond culture privilege. It’s worth the treatment.

I share the concern of conservative Christians for the unborn. Pro-life means that all life (at all developmental stages) should be honored, respected and valued. But when did the unborn become more valuable than the born, especially those born into tragic life circumstances?

Just as Jesus takes, blesses, breaks and gives the bread to the hungry gathered in Galilee, so he does with us. He takes us, blesses us, breaks us and gives us as his continuing embodied presence. We are to be “bread for the world in mercy broken.”

To commune together, even when there’s good reason for withdrawn civility and hostile incivility, seems a miraculously unlikely experience. Which is probably why the Church has spent the majority of its life protecting the metaphor of Communion instead of practicing its meaning.

Shepherds play an important role in the biblical narrative. Shepherds appear frequently in both the Old and New Testaments, often in reference to leaders. One of my favorite images of a shepherd is that of a caregiver. It is common…

A few ant bites were a reminder about three kinds of relationships that provide a solid foundation for my life, and that I should never take for granted.

Algunas picaduras de hormigas me recordaron sobre tres tipos de relaciones que proporcionan una base sólida para mi vida, y las cuales nunca debo de dar por sentado.