Good Friday isn’t just a set-up for Easter Sunday and the ham and new shoes that accompany that day. Good Friday is about grief. It’s about death and dying, pain and loss, emptiness and hopelessness. To beam the light in too quickly will render us unable to see.
Justice and joy combined in the words of Mary
Justice and joy are intertwined, not unlike the link between joy and pain. To love is to suffer, as the mystics remind us. Deeply acquainted with the recesses of the human heart, C. S. Lewis wrote: “Joy is distinct not…
Three tips from the trail for those who are struggling
In all my planning for our section hike of the Appalachian Trail last week, I apparently only read the blogs that talked about the incredible views I would see along the way. Mountain peaks and rolling hills. If folks wrote…
The year clichés stopped making sense
There is something wrong with 2016. That may be the most self-evident and non-controversial statement to come up in your Facebook newsfeed in quite a while. In fact, it has become an almost universally acknowledged truth. So many of us…
No one warned me that ministry would make a mortician out of me
I want to build the casket and dig the hole. We usually hire those jobs out, but I want to do it myself. Remember the scene in Harry Potter where Harry buries Dobby, but refuses to use magic? Something about…
A Christmas to remember
Earlier this week, Amy and I spent a very memorable day back in South Carolina. Over the course of those 24 hours, we experienced joy and celebration; uncertainty and apprehension; followed by relief and profound gratitude. It was the kind…
Taking it all in – the pain and the joy
Joseph Andrew Haynie’s eyes were blue. Reading his Army discharge papers fifty-eight years after his death, I learned this simple fact. Joe Haynie married Katie Louise Clyde in the tumultuous year of 1941 – and left not long afterwards for…
Leadership and bearing pain
Termination meetings — those uncomfortable sessions in which an administrator tells an employee that he or she is being fired — are primarily shaped by legal considerations these days. The instructions from the HR office are clear: Make sure that…
Healing (a parable)
Leah was getting burned out. She didn’t know if she could continue at this pace. The solutions were more draining than the problem. Leah had a troubled past. Having been abused by her father, rejected and used by other men,…