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The Presence of God in Perilous Times

(From Pixbay) To admit the obvious but often unspoken truth: a lot of us are struggling these days. How could we not be? In my conversations with folks, I’m hearing, far more often than even a few weeks ago, expressions of weariness and distress: I feel overwhelmed ....

The Gift of Responsibility

As I recover, slowly and gratefully, from heart surgery and continue to receive regular treatment for cancer, I’m thinking a lot about responsibility. Responsibility is “the ability to respond.” To say “I’m responsible” is to say “I have the will and the capacity to...

I Trust

On a day in late June, before sunrise, I was in the rocking chair passed down to me from my grandfather, having read the morning lessons and a poem or two. I was troubled, for good reasons: the rising death-toll from COVID-19; the murder of George Floyd, and the...

Interlocking Crises and Getting in Good Trouble

photo: wkrg It’s bewildering to reckon with the interlocking crises we face. To name only some of them: soaring case-rates of COVID-19 infections, overburdened hospitals, politicization of mask-wearing and school-opening, rising unemployment, nonprofits cutting staff...

Choosing Silence and Being Silenced

Often, I crave silence. I long to retreat from the noise of news, the sirens of social media, the din of demands, and the clamor of emails and text messages. I know that, if I retreated for a long time, I’d experience FOMO, the fear of missing out, but that’s not a...

Loving the Neighbor and the Neighborhood

I heard Jesus’ Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37) for the first time when I was six years old,  during summer Vacation Bible School at First Baptist Church of Conley, GA. My teacher illustrated the story with flannel-graph figures of the priest, the...