Somewhere I have pictures. During the summer of 2011, a group of young people and adults from our church went to Birmingham, Alabama to help clean up after the devastating tornado that had dredged a path of destruction a mile wide from Tuscaloosa through the Magic City. We drove up to the north side...
Read more →it’s a quiet pentecost morning and I’m out of town on a side street of life where I ducked out of the drizzle only to find myself in hart and soul coffee everyone here speaks my language though silence is not my strong suit it strikes me that it takes some quiet for the...
Read more →“Do you want to get well?” The whole story swings on that sentence. The story I’m speaking of is Jesus’ encounter with the man at the pool at Bethesda. Soon another Feast came around and Jesus was back in Jerusalem. Near the Sheep Gate in Jerusalem there was a pool, in Hebrew called Bethesda,...
Read more →I realize I have been silent here for a couple of weeks. For a number of reasons, I have found it hard to get here. I could not let National Poetry Month pass without one more poem, however. I have been moved by this image and the story of the discovery of the landing...
Read more →You say you see no hope, you say you see no reason We should dream that the world would ever change You’re saying love is foolish to believe ‘Cause there’ll always be some crazy with an Army or a Knife To wake you from your day dream, put the fear back in your life…...
Read more →these are days littered with losses the absences seem more present perhaps because we marked eighteen months since my father-in-law died now the news comes of others – one who made me laugh and one who reminded me God laughs, too hard to navigate life without hitting these pot-holes of the heart even the...
Read more →Yesterday morning I went to breakfast with a room full of people who make me proud to live in Durham. The group was the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, which is a profound collection of folks who are working diligently to end violence in our town, or as they say, “Our mission is...
Read more →only steps away from the empty tomb and already we’re walking back to the cemetery alongside a friend who must bury his father most of our footsteps it seems are aimed toward the grave rather than away from it — lazarus could tell you that we are like sheep headed for slaughter we sat...
Read more →One Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, I posted a video on my Facebook page of a group called The Lone Bellow singing their cover of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery,” which is my favorite song. I captioned the post, “Here is our invocation for the morning.” A friend wrote back questioning the...
Read more →Most every year, I am struck by how hard the story must have been to live through the first time around when no one had any inking of Easter on Good Friday. Here’s how that idea came out tonight. then and now by the time Jesus died most everyone had left him in failure...
Read more →Maundy Thursday is a disquieting day for me — a cosmic juxtaposition of hope and despair that strikes on an intensely personal level. Here is how I put it into words. litany syrian war invades a campus that acts as a sanctuary the light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot put it...
Read more →by now in most marches — at least at this latitude Easter is made to look like a foregone conclusion new life springing forth in every bed and byway as though resurrection were as natural as daffodils but this year the dirt has stayed as cold as bones and the daffodils duped into blooming...
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