These past few days have been filled with grief in the lives of some of those closest to Ginger and me. Though their stories are not mine to tell, I have been touched as well and reminded again of how much death and grief are a part of life for all of us. In...
Read more →Not from our home in Durham is the Liberty Warehouse, which once housed tobacco auctions. The building is not beautiful; it is, however, historic because it is one of the last of its kind still standing, a visual legacy of what our city once was. It is also on its last legs. Its most...
Read more →I know I said this a review of Mike Stavlund’s book, A Force of Will: The Reshaping of Faith in a Year of Grief, but I’m going to start by talking about why Patty Griffin is a great songwriter. Trust me: they’re connected. I finished the book last week and was so moved and...
Read more →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 →“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 →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...
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