All in Faith
In these days of coronavirus fear, everything around us is amplified. Our attention to the news is greater. Our perceptions of threats all around us are greater. In fact, every emotion we experience seems to be amplified. We’re all on edge, and our emotions run a hair trigger away from exploding. Most of us can go from calm to panic in 60 seconds flat. That is because our emotions are amplified. Everything we feel is amplified right now.
What troubles me most about the people I meet for the first time at the cemetery is how many of them failed to live life beyond basic expectations. And granted, maybe I’m imposing on their lives my own expectations for what a good life should be. It’s likely they died quite content with the lives they led and the love they gave.
Luke and Tori gave me hope not just by their obvious love but by their willingness to invest themselves in a future none of us can forecast. They are old enough and mature enough to know the state of the world they’re inheriting. And they have chosen to face that future with hope, gift-wrapped in love. That is a joy that is contagious, even to a jaded minister like me.
Before I entered my spinal cord injury doctor’s office for my check-up last week, I stopped by the men’s room near the elevator where I had my first sobbing fit two years ago. I was calmer now than I was on Dec. 22, 2017, when I had just been told it was a miracle I was walking.
It turns out I wasn’t there for the reason I thought I was. I was in Raleigh that night because both my driver and I needed hope. This is not one of those pastor stories that ends with someone saying the sinner’s prayer and getting baptized. And yet redemption traveled with us that night. Hope was born anew.
We suffer today from new forms of scriptural and cultural proof-texting that should remind us of the need for good principles of interpretation all around: Always consider events in the broader sweep and stop taking single events out of context to prove what you want to believe.
Last year on Ash Wednesday, I was a broken person. Probably what we’re supposed to be on Ash Wednesday. But I also don’t recommend it. The lesson on how we are created from ash and will return to ash hit home in a way it never had before because at that moment I was struggling to adjust to the new reality of life with a spinal cord bruise.
We've got more information, more data, more facts, more research available to us today on every subject imaginable than ever before. Most of us are not lacking in access to information. What we lack is willingness to consider all the available information and to think critically about that information.
There are many things the church universal and churches more specifically might – or should – admit we were wrong about. But admitting any error does not fall easily from the lips of religious folk – ironically, the very people who want others to confess their sins and turn from their wicked ways.
Access to quality health care really is the difference between life and death — and the difference between the kind of life you want to keep living and the kind of life you don't. At any step along the way, my outcome could have been dramatically worse if I had been denied access to the right providers at the right time.
Several weeks earlier — before the surgery that cured my first problem but unexpectedly created the spinal cord injury — when I was living with unbearable nerve pain that seemed to have no cure, my friend Jakob called me one afternoon to ask a brave question: “As your friend, I need to ask you: ‘Are you considering taking your own life?’” My answer formed slowly: “No, but I now understand how people get to that point. And if I get there, I promise to call you.”
“Miracles” aren’t limited to the parting of the sea or turning fives loaves and two fishes into a meal for thousands. Sometimes, miracles are smaller, more personal things. Sometimes, miracles involve the healing of relationships. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned as a pastor, it’s that there are a lot of ruptured relationships out there, many of them wrapped up tighter than a Christmas package. A few years ago, a Christmas Eve gathering at our home turned out to be the place of annunciation for one such miracle
