“Your father has had a stroke. We are on our way to the hospital.” The text message came from my mother, just as I was finishing a worship service at a youth camp in the mountains of Arkansas. The next…
My Coronavirus Summer: Coping with grief and seeking joy
None of us are exempt from significant loss at some point in our lives — loss of loved ones, property, health, income. Losses often pile up on one another, and the world seems to turn upside down overnight. After my…
Amid a pandemic and a fractured nation, how do we live ‘in the meantime’?
What’s going on with your feelings these days? In an old comic strip, Shoe, the curmudgeonly newspaper editor, is sitting at his desk. He declares, “There are mood swings and there are mood bungee jumps!” Some days are like that…
Q&A: Is that grief or depression you’re experiencing due to COVID-19?
People are recoiling from multiple aspects of the reality that’s impacting their lives on social, emotional and financial levels.
I’ll get to hope. For now, I need to sit in the ashes and mourn
This pandemic is not a theological crisis. It’s a moral one. We would do well in this moment to take the prophet Jeremiah’s advice to “put on sackcloth, lament and howl.” We need to mourn and rage and contemplate what led us to this moment.
‘Watch with me’: on the other side of our long night of grief, space to reimagine our world
The people who die from COVID-19 will come from every walk of life in every town in the country. But in aggregate, the pattern shows now and will continue to show that deaths by the disease are political deaths – ones set into motion by racism and oppression.
‘You can’t get a Ph.D. in caring’: COVID-19 calls for believer-priests | #intimeslikethese
With all this grief, on a societal level perhaps not seen since 9/11 or the stock market crash of 1929, we pastors and other church staff sure could use more ministers. For Baptists, this shouldn’t be a novel idea.
The ‘Common Weeping’: Instead of airing our grievances, let’s uncover our griefs | #intimeslikethese
If we truly enter into the “Common Weeping” during this time of tragic suffering, we can be saved from our cruder emotions. Instead of airing our grievances, let’s uncover our griefs. The first destroys community; the second builds it.
From spreading ashes to administering them: Ash Wednesday for a broken and grieving minister
On Ash Wednesday, I will try to reconcile with a Jesus who stands before me, ready to offer the love I desperately need. I will try to find his hand amid my darkness, a brokenness that has nothing to do with my sin.