Posted on

Two Years. The Same Road. The Gift of Being Here.

Last night I found myself driving from Camas to Walla Walla, late into the evening, to drop off our election ballots.

I’ve made that drive countless times.

But this one was different.

Because two years ago, almost to the day, I made that same drive.

Same road. Same Columbia Gorge. Same late night drive darkness.

Only that night, something was wrong and I didn’t really know it.

I had worked all day and wasn’t feeling the best. As the evening went on, things got worse. I remember thinking it might be stress. Maybe anxiety. Perhaps a panic attack, although I’d never had one before.

Just a couple of months earlier, I had returned from sabbatical, having walked more than 500 miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

I had walked across a country.

And now I was struggling to make it through a night.

Funny how life works, right?

I spent much of that night trying to breathe my way through the pain. By morning, Amy knew something wasn’t right and took me to the emergency room.

And then everything happened fast.

A heart attack. A medical emergency. A Life Flight to Richland. Four stents placed in my heart.

And suddenly, the life I had been so busy living looked a little different.

Not because everything changed.

But because I had been reminded how quickly everything can change.

So last night, as I drove that familiar stretch of highway, I found myself reflecting.

No pain this time.

Just gratitude.

For Amy. For the life we’ve shared and the years we’ve been given.

For my children. For my grandkids, whose laughter, smiles, and little voices have a way of reminding me what life is really about.

For friends.

For the extraordinary privilege of walking alongside people, leading and serving, sharing in their joys and sorrows.

And for the simple gift of being here.

Breathing.

Living.

Loving.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much of life we spend trying to get somewhere. Accomplish something. Build something. Fix something.

And those things aren’t necessarily bad.

But somewhere along the way, we can miss the wonder of simply being alive.

The ordinary moments that aren’t really ordinary at all.

A conversation with someone you love.

A grandchild reaching for your hand.

A quiet evening with your wife.

A drive along the Columbia River.

Another sunrise.

Another chance to begin again.

Two years ago, I was reminded that life is fragile.

Two years later, I’m still discovering that life is also astonishingly beautiful.

And that’s part of what it means to grow older. Not simply accumulating years, experiences, or accomplishments, but becoming more awake to the life we’re actually living.

More present.

More grateful.

More generous.

More willing to let go of things that don’t really matter.

And above all, more capable of love.

Because in the end, isn’t that what all of this is about?

Learning to love God, others, and this beautiful world a little more deeply.

I don’t know how many more trips along that road I’ll get to make.

None of us do.

But I do know this.

I’m not the same man who drove that road two years ago.

And I hope two years from now, I’ll be able to say the same thing.

Not because I’ve accomplished more.

But because I’ve learned to love more.

Still here. Still becoming. Still grateful.

Posted on

When Did We Become Comfortable With This?

Reflections on the things we are learning not to feel.

There was a time when certain things troubled us.

Not because we were weak.

Not because we didn’t believe in justice, or consequences, or the responsibility of a nation to protect its people.

But because somewhere deep within us, we understood that there are things human beings should never learn to enjoy.

I’ve been thinking about that this week.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced plans to livestream the execution by firing squad of a man responsible for the horrific murder of thirteen people at Fort Hood.

Thirteen lives. Thirteen families forever changed. A terrible act of violence that deserves justice.

And yet, somewhere along the way, someone decided the rest of us should be invited to watch another human being die by execution .

And I find myself pondering…

When did we become comfortable with this?

Not the question of capital punishment. That’s an important conversation, but it’s not the one I’m having here.

I’m asking something beneath that.

Something about us.

About what happens to a people when the public display of death begins to feel like a demonstration of strength.

What is happening to us when punishment becomes performance, and the taking of a life becomes something to broadcast.

And perhaps what troubles me most is hearing Christians defend something I would have hoped our faith would cause us to question.

I understand the argument for justice. I understand the desire for accountability. I even get the deep anger that arises from within when innocent lives are ruthlessly and violently taken.

What I don’t understand is how followers of Jesus have become so comfortable confusing the public display of power with moral courage.

Those are not the same thing.

There is a strange thing that happens to us when we spend enough time around cruelty.

At first, it shocks us.

Then it becomes familiar.

Then we find reasons to explain it.

Eventually, if we’re not careful, we start applauding the very things that once disturbed us.

And the frightening part is that we rarely notice the change.

We just call it being realistic.

Being strong.

Standing for what is right.

But I wonder if something else is happening.

I wonder if we are slowly losing our capacity for reverence.

Reverence for life. For human dignity. For the sacred responsibility that comes with power.

Even when that life belongs to someone who has committed unspeakable evil.

Especially then.

Because dignity is not something we bestow upon people once they have earned our approval.

It’s something we recognize because they are human.

And if our understanding of human dignity only extends to people we consider worthy of it, then perhaps we have misunderstood dignity altogether.

Which brings me to something that has been bothering me even more.

Jesus.

The center of our faith.

A man publicly executed by the governing authorities of his day.

His death/execution was meant to send a message.

To demonstrate power.

To warn others.

To make an example of someone.

The Romans knew what they were doing. Public execution was never simply about ending a life. It was about shaping the imagination of everyone watching.

This is what happens when you challenge our authority.

And the astonishing claim at the center of Christianity is that God was present in the one being executed.

Not in the spectacle.

Not in the machinery of power.

But in the suffering human being.

I wonder what would happen if we really allowed that to sink in.

If we allowed the story of Jesus to shape not just what we believe, but how we see the world.

Maybe we’d be a little more careful about celebrating the humiliation and death of another human being.

Maybe we’d be quicker to recognize when violence is being presented as strength, or cruelty is being dressed up as righteousness.

And maybe, before joining the applause, we’d find ourselves asking whether any of this actually looks like Jesus.

And yet here we are.

Living in a moment when some of the loudest defenders of Christian values seem increasingly willing to defend things that bear so little resemblance to the Christ whose name they carry.

I don’t say that glibly.

I say it with sadness.

Because I believe the Church has something profoundly beautiful to offer a world that seems determined to keep lowering the bar of what it means to be human.

We are supposed to be people who help lift the human imagination.

People who remind the world that strength and cruelty are not synonyms.

That justice does not require spectacle.

That accountability does not demand humiliation.

That power is most trustworthy when it is restrained.

And that the measure of a nation’s greatness is not simply what it has the power to do, but what it has the moral wisdom to refuse.

Maybe that’s what troubles me most about all of this.

Not simply the decision to broadcast an execution.

But how quickly we can find ourselves defending the indefensible when the people making the decisions happen to be on our side.

And before we point fingers too quickly, perhaps that’s a question for all of us.

What have I learned to excuse?

What no longer troubles me that once would have?

Where have my loyalties quietly begun to shape my conscience, rather than my conscience shaping my loyalties?

Those are uncomfortable questions.

But discomfort is not always something to overcome, sometimes it’s the soul reminding us that we haven’t lost our way entirely.

That there is still something within us capable of recognizing when we are becoming less than we were created to be.

I want to believe we can recover that.

Not by becoming louder.

Not by finding another group of people to condemn.

But by refusing to surrender our humanity in the name of defending it.

By recovering a deeper reverence for life.

By remembering that the way of Jesus has never been about proving how powerful we can become.

It’s about revealing what love looks like when power is placed in its hands.

We can believe in justice without becoming fascinated by death.

We can hold people accountable without turning their suffering into a public event.

We can grieve the victims of terrible violence without allowing that violence to determine the kind of people we become.

And we can love our country enough to say, without embarrassment or apology:

We are better than this.

Or at least, we should want to be.

Because the real question isn’t whether we have the power to broadcast a man’s death.

It’s what happens to us when we want to watch.

And what happens to our souls when we no longer know why that question matters.

Posted on

The Isms That Are Eating Us Alive

I’ve spent all of my adult life in the church.

I love the church. I’ve given my life to it. I’ve seen people healed in the church, marriages restored, addicts find freedom, lonely people find family, and people discover a God they never knew was looking for them.

Which is probably why some of what I’m seeing right now troubles me as much as it does.

We seem angry.

Not just angry about things. Angry at people… suspicious and afraid.

And I’m increasingly unconvinced that anger is the actual problem.

Maybe anger is the symptom.

Maybe the deeper question is:

What has been forming us?

Because we are all being formed, all the time. By stories and families and churches. By advertisements and algorithms. By politics. By what we fear and what we love. By what we repeatedly give our attention to.

And I wonder if part of the current crisis in Western Christianity is that while we were working really hard to get people to believe the right things about Jesus, we didn’t always pay attention to all the other things teaching us how to live.

Things with names.

Consumerism. Individualism. Fundamentalism. Sectarianism. Sexism. Racism. Nationalism. Politicism. Celebrityism. Tribalism.

That’s a lot of isms.

And I’m not standing outside all of this throwing rocks. I’ve breathed this air too. Some of it has formed me. Some of it probably still does.

That’s the uncomfortable part.

None of these things arrived at the church door one morning and announced, “Hello. We’re here to distort the gospel.”

They came quietly.

They borrowed Christian language. They learned our songs. They quoted our Bible verses. Sometimes we even built theology around them.

And eventually we stopped noticing they were there.

The Gospel According to Me

Consumerism taught us to ask a very simple question:

What’s in this for me?

We shop for shoes, phones, restaurants, experiences, neighborhoods, and eventually churches.

Do I like the preaching? Do they have something for my kids? Do I like the music? Am I being fed? Did I get something out of it?

I understand those questions because I’ve asked them too. None of them is necessarily wrong. But something happens when they become our primary questions.

Consumerism tells us that life is found in acquiring. More experiences. More stuff. More recognition. More options.

More.

And individualism whispers that the most important project in the whole thing is me. My calling. My purpose. My platform. My spiritual gifts. My destiny. Even my personal relationship with Jesus.

There is truth in some of that.

But then I listen to the prayer Jesus taught us.

Our Father. Give us our daily bread. Forgive us. Deliver us.

There is a stubborn plural pronoun running through the gospel.

The first Christians weren’t simply individuals who happened to attend the same religious event. They were learning how to become a people.

Maybe that’s one of the things we’ve lost.

Consumerism says, Acquire.

Individualism says, Protect yourself.

Jesus keeps saying things like:

Give. Share. Forgive. Come to the table. Lose your life.

Those are very different visions of what it means to be alive.

When Being Right Becomes the Point

I grew up in a stream of Christianity that took truth seriously. I’m grateful for that. I still take truth seriously.

But there is a difference between conviction and certainty.

Fundamentalism has sometimes taught us that the more certain we are, the more faithful we are. Questions become suspicious. Curiosity feels dangerous. “I don’t know” sounds weak.

So we define the boundaries, defend the boundaries, and eventually police the boundaries.

And before long we can become more interested in being right about God than actually becoming like God.

That should bother us.

Because Jesus seemed remarkably comfortable with mystery. He answered questions with questions. He told stories that confused people. His own disciples regularly misunderstood him.

And he somehow managed not to panic about it.

Maybe humility is one of the spiritual practices we most desperately need to recover.

“I don’t know.”

“I could be wrong.”

“Tell me more.”

“I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

Those might be deeply Christian sentences.

The trouble is, once we’re certain we’re right, it’s remarkably easy to decide who is wrong.

Then come the tribes.

Evangelical. Progressive. Conservative. Liberal. Reformed. Charismatic. Traditional. Fundamentalist. Deconstructed.

Pick your group. Learn the language. Learn the heroes. Learn the villains.

Eventually we stop seeing people.

We see categories.

I’ve watched this happen in the church. I’ve watched it happen in myself. And I think this is one of the ways otherwise kind people become cruel.

We become convinced that something so important is at stake that our cruelty is justified.

Sometimes we even convince ourselves we’re defending Jesus.

Jesus, strangely enough, never seemed to need that kind of defending.

When Power Gets Baptized

Some of these isms go deeper because they haven’t simply distorted us.

They’ve hurt people.

Sexism is one of them.

For generations, the church could say women and men were equally valuable while constructing systems where women were not equally heard, trusted, empowered, protected, or given agency.

Sometimes we called that tradition. Sometimes protection. Sometimes biblical order.

And then you watch Jesus.

Women fund his ministry. Women sit at his feet as disciples. Women engage him theologically. Women remain near the cross when others disappear. Women become the first witnesses announcing resurrection.

And I find myself wondering:

How much of what we’ve defended as God’s order was actually our order with God’s name attached to it?

That’s not a question I ask casually.

But I think we have to be willing to ask it.

Racism requires the same kind of honesty.

Sometimes racism is obvious. But sometimes it is remarkably polite. It can live in neighborhoods, friend groups, leadership tables, church histories, the stories we tell and the stories we don’t tell.

It shows up in whose pain we instinctively believe. Whose anger we consider understandable. Whose anger makes us uncomfortable. Whose voice sounds authoritative to us. Whose presence feels threatening.

This is where I think we Christians sometimes rush too quickly toward reconciliation.

I believe deeply in reconciliation.

But reconciliation without truth usually means somebody is being asked to pretend the wound didn’t happen.

Jesus never seemed interested in that kind of peace.

He kept crossing lines. Talking to the wrong people. Touching the wrong people. Eating with the wrong people.

Then he tells a story about a man bleeding beside a road and makes the Samaritan the hero.

Wrong ethnicity. Wrong religion. Wrong tribe.

He was the hated “other.”

And then:

Go and do likewise.

Become that kind of neighbor.

When Jesus Gets Wrapped in a Flag

This one is particularly hard to ignore right now.

There is nothing wrong with loving your country. I do. There is nothing wrong with participating in politics. We should. Policies matter because people matter.

But something changes when our political identity begins discipling us more deeply than Jesus does.

Nationalism tells us that protecting our nation is somehow synonymous with advancing God’s kingdom. Politicism tells us every election is apocalyptic, every disagreement is existential, and everyone on the other side is dangerous.

Fear is remarkably effective at forming people.

It keeps us clicking, watching, posting, donating, raging, and coming back tomorrow to find out what terrible thing they did overnight.

I don’t think this is making us well.

And I’m fairly certain it’s not making us more like Jesus.

Jesus lived under an empire. He understood politics. He understood oppression. He understood power.

And yet he announced another kingdom.

A kingdom where enemies are loved, peacemakers are blessed, greatness looks like serving, forgiveness interrupts retaliation, outsiders become neighbors, and power kneels down and washes feet.

Jesus remains incredibly inconvenient for every political party because nobody gets to own him.

I think we need to remember that.

And perhaps this is connected to another strange development in Western Christianity: somewhere along the way, we started confusing visibility with significance.

Big churches. Big platforms. Big conferences. Big followings. Big everything!

Christian celebrities.

And then we were surprised when Christian leaders started building their lives around being seen.

I understand this temptation too. Being noticed feels good. Being invited feels good. Watching something you created succeed feels good.

But Jesus spent most of his life in obscurity.

Thirty obscure years before three public years.

He walked away from crowds. He noticed people who could do absolutely nothing for his platform: children, widows, lepers, the poor, the inconvenient.

Maybe heaven measures influence differently than we do.

I suspect some of the most important things happening in the kingdom of God today will never trend. Nobody will write a book about them. Nobody will invite them onto a stage.

And heaven will somehow be just fine with that.

What Kind of People Are We Becoming?

That’s the question I keep coming back to.

Not: Are we winning? Are our churches growing? Is our theology airtight? Did our candidate win? Are people listening to us?

But:

What kind of people are we becoming?

Are we becoming more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, gentle, self-controlled?

Because those were supposed to be the indicators.

Fruit.

Actual human beings becoming more alive in the Spirit.

And if our version of Christianity continually produces people who are angry, afraid, suspicious, defensive, exhausted, and contemptuous of their enemies, I think we have to be courageous enough to ask what is actually forming us.

And then comes the question every pastor loves:

So what do we do?

My pastor brain immediately wants a strategy. Give me the framework. The book. The conference. The seven steps.

But I’m not sure we need another program.

Maybe the way out is far more ordinary.

Maybe we eat with people.

Not networking.

Dinner.

Invite someone over. Cook something. Pour something. Stay at the table longer than you planned.

Especially with people whose stories complicate your categories.

It’s harder to demonize someone while passing them the potatoes.

Maybe we learn our neighbors’ names. Actually know them. The woman across the street. The guy who makes our coffee. The immigrant family at the park. The person whose history is nothing like ours.

Love becomes much harder to sentimentalize when it has a name.

Maybe we practice enough.

Enough money. Enough recognition. Enough house. Enough success. Enough ministry. Enough followers.

Enough.

Consumerism needs us perpetually dissatisfied.

Gratitude breaks the spell.

Maybe we give some power away.

Listen before defending. Invite voices into the room that haven’t historically been there. Ask who gets to decide. Ask who carries responsibility without authority. Ask who benefits from the way things currently work.

And then be willing to change something.

Maybe we become curious again.

How did you come to believe that?

What has your experience been?

What am I missing?

Tell me your story.

Curiosity may be one of the quiet forms of love.

It says, You are more interesting to me than my assumptions about you.

And maybe we do some things nobody knows about.

Give money. Help somebody. Visit somebody. Fix something. Pray. Serve.

Tell nobody.

There is something cleansing about doing good that cannot become content.

And then walk.

Make things.

Plant something.

Sit in silence.

Put the phone down.

Watch the sunrise.

Stand beside the ocean.

Laugh until your stomach hurts.

Take the long way home.

Pay attention.

Becoming Human Again

I wonder if beneath all these isms is an even deeper problem.

We’ve forgotten that being alive is astonishing.

We keep fighting about how the world should work while barely noticing the world.

Jesus noticed.

Birds and flowers. Seeds and bread. Wine. Children. Weather. Weddings. Fields. Trees.

Ordinary things.

Maybe the kingdom of God isn’t primarily somewhere else.

Maybe it’s hiding in plain sight.

And maybe the great spiritual task of our moment isn’t winning the argument.

Maybe it is becoming human again.

Less angry. Less afraid. Less addicted to being right. Less willing to excuse harm because it comes from our side. Less obsessed with being seen.

More curious.

More generous.

More present.

More willing to listen.

More willing to tell the truth.

More willing to repair what we’ve broken.

More willing to sit at tables with people who complicate our categories.

More willing to say, “I don’t know.”

More willing to love without needing to win.

Because maybe the opposite of all these isms isn’t another ism.

Maybe it’s a way.

A way of walking through the world. A way of seeing people. A way of holding power. A way of opening our homes. A way of paying attention. A way of forgiving.

A way of becoming free.

Jesus called it the kingdom of God.

And he didn’t simply tell us to believe in it.

He said it was near.

Here.

Among us.

Available.

Which means the invitation isn’t to escape the mess we’ve made.

It’s to start living differently inside it.

At our tables. In our neighborhoods. With our money. With our politics. With our power. With our enemies. With our attention.

With the next person standing in front of us.

Maybe that’s how things begin to change.

Not all at once.

Not through another angry movement.

But one human being at a time becoming more fully alive.

And helping somebody else remember how.

Posted on

Labor Day

When Work Remembers The Worker

Tomorrow we celebrate Labor Day.

For most of us, that means a long weekend, a barbecue, maybe one last trip before summer disappears. But Labor Day began with a much more disruptive question:

What is a human being worth?

Not what can they produce. Not how much can they accomplish. Not how efficiently can they work.

What are they worth?

By the late 1800s, America was exploding with possibility. Railroads were crossing the continent. Factories were filling cities. Steel was rising. Industry was booming. Fortunes were being made.

America was becoming an economic powerhouse.

But underneath all that prosperity were millions of people working incredibly long hours, often six or seven days a week, sometimes twelve or fourteen hours a day. Children worked. Factories were dangerous. Job security was almost nonexistent. Workers had few protections and very little power.

The system was creating enormous wealth.

But it was also raising a question we are still asking:

Who gets the benefit of the system?

In 1882, about 10,000 workers walked through the streets of New York City in what became the first Labor Day parade.

Think about that.

They stopped working.

And walked.

Together.

Their presence was the message:

Look at us. We are here. We built this. We matter.

There is some debate about who first imagined Labor Day. Peter McGuire, a carpenter and labor leader, often gets the credit. Matthew Maguire, a machinist and union organizer, may actually have been the one who proposed it.

Maybe there is something fitting about not knowing exactly whose idea it was.

Because Labor Day was never really about one person.

It was about the people whose names don’t end up on buildings… the carpenter, the machinist, the railroad worker, the seamstress, the miner, the factory worker, the immigrant. The person who shows up every morning, does the work, goes home tired, and does it again tomorrow.

And somewhere in the middle of that history another idea began gaining momentum:

Eight hours for work. Eight hours for rest. Eight hours for what we will.

That phrase gets me.

Because buried inside it is a deeply spiritual idea:

You are more than what you produce.

You need work. But you also need rest. You need relationships. Play. Worship. Time when you aren’t accomplishing anything at all.

Which sounds remarkably like something God said thousands of years earlier.

Six days you shall labor.

And then…

stop.

Sabbath.

It is striking that one of the commands God gave Israel after freeing them from Egypt concerned their work.

Egypt had taught them another way.

Pharaoh’s economy said:

More bricks.

More production.

More output.

And when the people couldn’t keep up?

Take away their straw and demand the same number of bricks.

That is Pharaoh.

More.

Faster.

Again.

So God leads these slaves into freedom and says something revolutionary:

One day every week, you stop.

You don’t make bricks. You don’t build cities. You don’t increase production. You don’t prove your worth.

You rest.

And not just you. Your children rest. Your servants rest. The immigrant rests. Even the animals rest.

Because Sabbath wasn’t simply a day off.

It was a declaration:

You are not a machine.

You are not property.

You are not what you produce.

Your worth does not come from your productivity.

Your worth comes from God.

Perhaps this is why Labor Day matters more than we realize.

By 1894, after years of strikes, violence, organizing, conflict between corporations and workers, and growing social unrest, the United States made Labor Day a federal holiday.

The nation was trying to say something:

Workers matter.

The people doing the work matter.

Human dignity matters.

And over the decades that followed, the labor movement helped secure things most of us now barely think about: shorter workdays, weekends, restrictions on child labor, workplace safety, overtime protections, minimum wage, and workers’ compensation.

Those changes did not happen because powerful people suddenly decided they were good ideas.

People struggled for them.

People marched.

People organized.

Some lost jobs.

Some were beaten.

Some died.

That makes Labor Day considerably more interesting than a mattress sale.

And maybe there is another question worth asking.

Because Pharaoh hasn’t disappeared.

Pharaoh just changes clothes.

Sometimes Pharaoh is a corporation. Sometimes it is an organization. Sometimes it is a church.

And sometimes…

Pharaoh lives inside us.

More.

Accomplish more.

Build more.

Grow more.

Earn more.

Answer another email.

Take another meeting.

Prove yourself again.

Until somehow we begin believing that exhaustion is evidence that our lives matter.

It isn’t.

I say this as someone who loves vision, movement, possibility, and the next thing. I can turn even meaningful work into something that consumes me if I’m not careful.

Which is why perhaps Labor Day is not merely a celebration of work.

Maybe it is also a reminder of the limits of work.

Work is good. Meaningful work is a gift. Creating something matters. Building something matters. Serving people matters.

But work makes a terrible god.

Because eventually it will always ask you for one more brick.

Jesus offers another way:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

Not increased productivity.

Rest.

Maybe that is the word worth carrying into Labor Day.

You have work to do.

Absolutely.

There are things in this world only you can contribute. Places where your gifts matter. People who need what you carry.

But you are not valuable because you work.

You work because you are already valuable.

There is an enormous difference.

So tomorrow perhaps we raise a glass to the workers who came before us – the people who marched, organized, struggled, and insisted that human beings were worth more than the economic value they could produce.

And then perhaps we practice the freedom they fought for.

We stop.

We eat.

We laugh.

We sit around a table.

We take a walk.

We notice the people we love.

We receive the world again.

And for one day, at least, we leave the bricks where they are.

Because there will always be more bricks.

But there is only one life.

And it is far too sacred to spend all of it working.