I’m not one of those people who remember dreams, for the most part. Something about the way I wake up in the morning makes my mind work like an Etch-a-Sketch, erasing whatever was created during the night as I shake myself into consciousness. But I think I had a dream last night that refused to go away, one that has taken all day to break the surface, one with a haunting quality that I don’t think plans to fade away anytime soon. It’s pretty straightforward. There aren’t any symbols to unpack or metaphors to mine. I’m sharing it in search of resonance. Somewhere in the world, someone is already doing what I dreamt; I don’t have to reinvent the wheel (or the stove) to see my dream incarnated. Someone out there knows whom I need to know. Therefore, trusting in the connections of grace that bind us together, I share my dream.
I dreamt I had a restaurant – a diner, actually – that was open for lunch Monday to Friday. The inside of the place was filled with round tables that sat six or eight people. There were no tables for twos and fours. In the kitchen was a team of good cooks, people who were serious about making good food to draw people together. Each day we prepared a plate lunch: salad, entrée, sides, and dessert. The menu changed depending on what we could get our hands on to cook. Regardless of the ingredients, we made comfort food, community building food, food made to be eaten together.
The doors opened at ten-thirty or eleven, and people found a seat wherever they could as they came in. The point was to break bread with people you knew and some you didn’t: to break barriers and open hearts. When folks sat down, we brought their drinks and then started bringing their food. When the meal was over, those who could paid for lunch and those who couldn’t, well, didn’t. Some learned to give out of their abundance and paid for more than one meal without making a big deal about it. Some paid by joining the staff of the restaurant and doing what they could to help feed folks. When the food ran out, we closed the doors for the day and started working on what we were going to make the next day.
What we learned, over time, was there was a way to feed people’s hunger for food and community and make a living doing it. (Here’s where I need to know who has figured out how to actually do this.) There has to be a way to create excellent food and make it available to anyone who is hungry, not just those privileged enough to afford it. I dreamt of a place Isaiah described:
Hey there! All who are thirsty, come to the water! Are you penniless? Come anyway—buy and eat! Come, buy your drinks, buy wine and milk. Buy without money—everything’s free! Why do you spend your money on junk food, your hard-earned cash on cotton candy? Listen to me, listen well: Eat only the best, fill yourself with only the finest. Pay attention, come close now, listen carefully to my life-giving, life-nourishing words. (Isaiah 55:1-5, The Message)
What I dreamt is real. Someone out there is living my dream. Please tell me who they are. I need to learn from them; I need them to feed me.
Yesterday was Ginger’s last Sunday of vacation, so I spent the morning, once more, reading Sara Miles. The heart of her book is about starting a food pantry at her church in San Francisco. In the process of telling her story, she says some profound and confrontive things about faith and action.
As a grateful member of the United Church of Christ, I’m a part of a denomination that willingly owns the labels “liberal” and “progressive.” Words like justice, peace, and inclusiveness are a regular part of our vocabulary. Someone has said if Christianity were a neighborhood, the UCC would be the last house on the left. When I read about Miles’ Episcopal church in San Francisco, I imagine her congregation is not so different from the ones I’ve known in the UCC: mostly well-off and well-intentioned white people whose faith matters to them and who as averse to being made uncomfortable by their faith as anyone else. I think we do want our faith to matter to us and what we do with our lives to matter to God and to others, and it’s hard to break out of our patterns of faith, action, and relationship to be converted and transformed by the Spirit.
As Miles talked about the growing pains and gains of the food pantry, she said, “We were all converting: turning into new people as we rubbed up against each other” (138). I immediately thought of fiddlehead ferns. (Didn’t you?) To clean fiddleheads before you cook them, you put them in water and rub them up against each other. The dark outer layer – dirt, skin, whatever – comes off leaving a beautifully bright green skin that sparkles in the sauté pan. They don’t clean up well one by one; they have to rub up against each other to be transformed.
As she began to get to know the people who came to the food pantry and then volunteered to help run it, Miles writes,
Where had all the people like Nirmala been, all the years that St. Gregory’s was holding services and trying to entice worshippers, one or two at a time, into the experimental liturgy?The people who came to get food at the pantry had been, to regular middle-class churchgoers, basically like Jesus – that is, invisible. We knew they were there, but we couldn’t see them, and their sufferings and loveliness were imagined, not incarnate in a specific body.But as I got to know them, I started to ee more clearly now the people who came to the pantry were like me: messed up, often prickly or difficult, yearning for friendship. I saw how they were hungry, the way I was. And then, I had a glimpse of them being like Jesus again: as God, made flesh and blood. (128-29)
I picked up my pen and wrote in the margin of my book, “How do we make church more physical, more visceral?”
Chef made a mistake during service last night. He knew we were going to be busier than usual for a Sunday because of the holiday weekend, but he only put one dishwasher on the schedule. Since Sunday is usually Chef’s day off and he worked, he left about eight-thirty. As Ashad and I were cleaning up after service, he commented on the huge stack of dishes that faced Leonardo, our Brazilian dishwasher who leaves work at eleven or so to go to his second all night job.
“We should help him,” Ashad said.
I finished wiping off the counters and headed back to the dish room. I started rinsing things out and stacking them so Leo could begin washing. Ashad joined in a couple of minutes later and began putting away the things that were clean. By staying an extra twenty minutes we had cleared the dish area and kept Leo from being there for a couple of extra hours. Sous saw what we were doing and had a couple of cold beers waiting for us to say thank you. It wasn’t about doing the dishes nearly as much as it was about helping Leonardo. We work together, we rub up against each other; we are being transformed.
This morning, my friend Jay, who is staying with us for the weekend, told me about a story he saw on the Today Show about an organization called Kiva that makes micro-loans to people around the world who are trying to get out of poverty. Since the organization was founded in 2005, they have loaned almost $11 million from 94,000 lenders to fund almost 15,000 loans averaging about $650 each. The repayment rate on the loans is 99.72%. The average lender gives in $25 increments. I found this Frontline documentary, which gives a more personal picture of the process:
The first week Sara Miles and her friends opened the food pantry they served thirty people. Now, on average, they serve 500 families a week. The food is set up in the sanctuary of the church and people come in, ten at a time, with grocery sacks and “shop” for what they want. The pantry is staffed almost completely by people who were once standing in line to get food. They have become “The Church of the One True Sack,” as she calls it. Miles, again:
This is what gets left out, I was realizing: not just left out of the national public debate but also left out of religious discourse. Politicians talked about welfare – usually to blame and scapegoat – and occasionally made speeches about poverty. There was no shortage of talk about the poor and social service from church leaders off all stripes. But the experiences of people such as my volunteers, the texture and specificity of their incarnate lives, were missing from the story of what Christianity was like now in contemporary America . . .
The thing that astonished me sometimes – listening to tales of terrible damage, psychosis, loss – was not how messed up people could be but how resilient; how, in the depths of suffering, they found ways to adapt and continue . . .
You can’t hope to see God without opening yourself to all God’s creation. (216-17)
At the last church I served, as part of my sermon one Sunday I had people get up and physically change seats as a way of encouraging them to find a new perspective. At deacons’ meeting the next week, one person was less than complimentary of the sermon. “I don’t do come to church to be made uncomfortable,” she said.
As easy as it is to demonize her, when I look at my life I have to admit I understand her sentiment. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that a truly incarnational faith is messy work. Bumping up against one another is uncomfortable, even painful. Christianity would be easier if it were only about ideas and concepts. Perhaps that’s why we emphasize and fight over orthodoxy more than orthopraxy. It’s not so much about believing the right things as it is doing the true things:
Feed my sheep.
Bear one another’s burdens.
Forgive and forgive and forgive.
Love one another.
Ginger and I have spent the last two days finishing all the things we’ve lived with unfinished for the last six years so our house could go on the market today. As we were leaving our realtor at the house, a couple was coming in to try and imagine themselves in the space we have called our own. I found myself humming this song as I drove away.
if I travel all my life and I never get to stop and settle down long as I have you by my side there’s a roof above and good walls all around you’re my castle you’re my cabin and my instant pleasure dome I need you in my house ’cause you’re my home
This poem is a response to two prompts: one from Christine with this accompanying image and the other being the final prompt at Poetry Thursday, which was “open window.” They reminded me of jazz artist Chet Baker, whose story I first learned of through David Wilcox’s song, “Chet Baker’s Unsung Swan Song.”
open window
The smell of the sea wafts in through our open windows, curtains billowing like full sails of a tall ship riding waves of adventure.
From upstairs, I can see the small whitecaps landing on the sand with gentle introductions; it’s hard not to feel free on such a day.
They found Chet underneath his upstairs window early one Amsterdam morning. Despite all the melodies, he thought he needed
a needle to be free. When I hear his horn I wonder why he couldn’t find wings in the music that carries my heart
out beyond my burdens. Perhaps it felt different on the other side of the horn. Some places breezes can’t blow no matter how open the window.
One of the things I admire most about Chef is his thriftiness: nothing goes to waste.
Last Saturday our produce supplier left a case each of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries – about $130 worth of fruit — when all we had ordered were a couple of pints of each to use as garnishes on the dessert plates. When Chef called to tell them of their mistake, they said we could keep the fruit since they couldn’t get back to pick it up. They gave us a credit for it as well. Even though it was free, Chef hardly lost a berry. Our pastry chef used some of them in special desserts and then Chef made a blackberry sauce to use with a duck special this weekend, a raspberry vinaigrette, a blueberry-vanilla vinaigrette, and a strawberry chutney. We made a mistake and ordered an extra case of arugula, so he had me make an arugula pesto to use with a halibut special tonight. In the six weeks I’ve worked there, I’ve not seen him throw away anything that went bad before we could use it.
The amazing thing to me is he is thrifty and creative at the same time. The surplus of greens and berries gave birth to the evening’s salad special: rocket greens (a cooler name for arugula) on a bed of Bibb lettuce with raspberry vinaigrette, Blue Hill gorgonzola cheese, and candied walnuts. The halibut dish was a pan roasted filet served with lobster mashed potatoes (that’s right: mashed potatoes with pieces of lobster meat mixed in), arugula pesto beurre blanc, and a salad of baby arugula and tomatoes from our garden. Both dishes were made with things we were using up and things we always have on hand.
He makes it look easy. It’s not.
Our kitchen is set up, much like many restaurants, where each station has containers to hold both hot and cold items to be used to prepare the dishes. The restaurant term for this is mise en place, a French word that translates “everything in place.” The idea is to do as much of the preparation as can be done ahead of time so the final dishes can be prepared in a timely fashion. At my station, I have a cold bar that holds sixteen “six pans,” each one with a different item or sauce. I also have four refrigerated drawers that hold the fish and the vegetables I need to function. Each drawer holds six or eight things. Chef has a similar set up at his grill station and between us is a steam table with all the sauces we use.
One of the ways he keeps up with things is to have us change out all containers that hold our mise en place every night. No exceptions. The primary issue is one of sanitation, but not too far behind is the idea that we have to check everything every night. We know what’s there, what’s not, and what needs to be done the next day.
This morning before I went to work, Ginger and I spent some time working on getting our house prepared to go on the market this weekend. (Want to buy a house at the beach?) I carried some things out to the garage, which is the antithesis of Chef’s kitchen. Besides the jumble of things we use, there are boxes in the back that have not been opened since we moved them from our last house in Charlestown and put them in the back of the garage. I don’t even think I’m going to open them. I’ll just take them straight to the dump.
In the kitchen I keep a clean and efficient station. I have what I need and only what I need. At home, I’m a pack rat. I have way more than I need. If mise en place means “everything in place,” I need the French term for “everything in every place” – maybe mess en place would work.
Ginger and I are working hard to take as little stuff with us as we can. Rather than telling the movers what we have and let them tell us how much room we’ll need, we’re thinking about choosing a container and then letting it determine how much stuff will go with us. When it’s full, that’s it. I hope we can pull it off. I have shelves and shelves of books, most of which have served me well and deserve to find life with someone else. I have a number of them I consider to be life long companions, but a good deal of them – probably most – need to find new life without me. The library is just the beginning. I need to do the same culling with my clothes, my CDs, all of my belongings. If everything is to be in place, then I need to have less everything.
What I want to take are the things I need to be myself and to be prepared to do what I need to do. Truth is, I’m not sure that’s a very long list at all.
I was at the fish station and Chef was on the grill, which are the two main sauté stations. We share eighteen burners, three ovens, and more sauté pans than I can count and, once dinner service gets into full swing, we keep the burners blazing and the pans flying. For the first hour and a half of service, everyone that came in ordered meat. I had only two small tickets. That changed around seven-thirty: I got slammed. All of a sudden I had five salmon, two swordfish, two or three cods, and a couple of pasta dishes that are assigned to my station. Chef had a line of tickets of his own and called for the Sous Chef, who was the floater for the night, to come and help us get the food out. I had thought through the orders and had a plan for getting the food out expeditiously and well timed with the food from the other stations. She stepped on to the line with her own plan and in a matter of minutes I felt superfluous.
Chef and Sous have worked together for seven years along with two of the other line cooks in our kitchen. They have all been very welcoming to me and willing to help me learn the ropes. I get along with everyone in the kitchen. And as the two of them fell into their familiar rhythm, I knew I was an outsider. I also knew they had no idea they were pushing me out of the circle. Sous was stepping up to a station that was hers before I was hired; she had no need to ask what I was working on or how I planned to deal with the tickets. She had her way. She was going to do her thing and she did.
As I drove home reflecting on the evening, I thought, “This is how church feels to some people.” People join a church because they feel welcomed and they are encouraged to get involved. Somewhere along the way they have an experience (or seven) much like my night on the line when one of the Ones Who Know steps in to help and simply takes over, leaving the new person on the sidelines not knowing how to get in the game as something other than a sub or a replacement player. The action by the long term member is not malicious, but it is alienating. It would have felt different to me if Sous had simply asked, “What can I do to help?”
Saturday night, Sous was on both pizza and garde manger. My station was closest to her, so Chef asked me to keep an eye to whether or not she needed help. Again, my station started slow and her tickets were stacking up. Every time I saw three or four salads come up closely followed by a pizza or three, I asked her if she needed help.
“I got it,” she said.
She didn’t have it. She was in the weeds, but I was not the one who could help her. Not long after she waved me off, I looked up to see one of the cooks she has known for years at garde manger making salads. I don’t know if she asked for help or if he just went in there and started throwing lettuce in the bowls, but the situation reminded me again I am not an insider. I am welcome but I don’t belong.
One of the ways we describe ourselves in the UCC is as people of “extravagant welcome.” I love the phrase and the sentiment, and church has to be more than a welcoming place if we don’t want people to end up feeling like I did this weekend. We need to be a community of extravagant belonging.
When Ginger pastored in Winchester, one of the enduring phrases within the youth group was, “There are no lunch tables at church,” meaning we all belong as much as anyone else. Jesus calls us to crash through cliques and disregard labels. We had kids from every layer of high school society in the group and they learned, both at church and at school, how to break the boundaries between the lunch tables and belong to and with one another.
Somewhere along the way I heard or read of someone saying, “If you’re on a church committee or board and you are not actively training your replacement, you’re doing it wrong.” I think at some level it’s hard for us to remember that when we say “our church” the pronoun is descriptive, not possessive.
I don’t know an easy way to do it. I’ve been the one in Sous’ position – both at work and at church — and barreled over whomever was trying to be a part of things with much less tact than she pushed past me the other night, I’m sure. Here’s what I wished had happened: when she came on to the line she would have said something to the effect of, “It looks like you have an idea of how you want to handle these tickets. How can I help?”
What I wanted was for her to treat me as a member of the team and not the new guy.
In every church of which I have been a part, I’ve seen people stand on the sidelines trying to figure out how to get in the game. I think a lot of folks get tired of being welcomed but fade away because they aren’t given clear indication of how they can belong. The shared histories of those already there is often intimidating. The mostly unintentional code of conduct and procedure that exists in most churches is unintelligible to the uninitiated. The biggest difference between being welcomed and belonging is in the vulnerability it takes to trust one another.
Tonight, she was doing pizza and garde manger again and, at one point, she said, “Milton, can you help me by making two baby spinach salads and one Caesar to go with these pizzas?” I jumped at the chance. She had no idea how good it felt to me for the two of us to be standing there in “our” restaurant.
Lat night at the restaurant, I was the utility infielder, if you will, doing whatever prep projects I could find and then jumping in to help whoever was getting “in the weeds” as we say. A good deal of my time was spent shucking oysters since Gianni has a hard time doing it. It’s not that I’m a super shucker myself, but I was the one with the time to do it. I found this video clip that shows how it’s done:
Multiply that by about fifty and you get an idea of how my night went. Needless to say, I’m a better shucker than I was when the dinner service began. Practice, in this case, improves both confidence and competency.
But that’s not true of everything.
I’ve spent most of my life moving. I’m fifty years old and I’ve lived in five countries, close to a dozen cities and towns, and have had at least forty different addresses. I am practiced at saying goodbye but, unlike oyster shucking, it has not gotten any easier. In fact, I think it has become more difficult.
This morning, Ginger announced to our church that she is resigning to become the Senior Pastor of Pilgrim United Church of Christ in Durham, North Carolina. It’s goodbye again.
One of the things I love about the UCC is the intentionality to which they call their pastors and parishioners when it comes to parting ways. I grew up in Baptist churches where the preacher stood up one Sunday, resigned with a two-week notice, and was gone before anyone had time to feel much of anything. The UCC suggests somewhere in the neighborhood of a sixty day farewell process, ending with a wonderful liturgy where both pastor and parish give and ask forgiveness; offer words of affection, gratitude, and encouragement; and release one another to what is yet to come. Yes, two months is a long time and the goodbyes are hard and yes, it’s worth it. We have stories to tell, things to do, and – of course – meals to share. What lies ahead in Durham is full of good people and amazing possibilities. At coffee hour, some folks asked me questions about the church there and the town as well. It is a cool church and the move is the right one for us.
But today was the beginning of goodbye, which we must do well both to honor those whom we love here and to open our hearts to those whom we will love in the days ahead. Ginger and I married in April 1990 and moved to Boston in August. For the last seventeen years we have had a Massachusetts address and a zip code that begins with 0. We have been able to listen to Joe Castiglione call the Red Sox games on the radio when we couldn’t see Remdawg on TV or get to Fenway in person. We watched them build the Big Dig from start to finish (well – sort of a finish). Ginger has weathered not only the Boston winters, but my three major career changes and my depression. We found our home in the UCC here in churches in Winchester and in Marshfield. Ginger earned her doctorate and has carved out a significant place in the Mass. Conference of the UCC. We know how to drive in Boston traffic, know what a “regular coffee” is, are both loyal and addicted to Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, regularly use “wicked” as a superlative, can push a mean snow shovel, have laid on the grass along the Charles to hear to Pops play on the Fourth of July, and, week in and week out for the last seven years, worshipped and fellowshipped as members of North Community Church.
As much as I love gospel music, one old hymn that has always bothered me is
This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through . . .
because I can’t come to terms with thinking of our lives as nothing more than way stations. All the joy, pain, sorrow, hope, love, and heartbreak are the existential equivalent of a bus station: we’re just waiting for our ride.
No. I’m not here forever, but I’m doing more than passing through.
One conversation I had at coffee hour today was with a woman who is a wonderful artist. She was asking me about my new job (which I get to say goodbye to as well) and I rambled on for a couple of minutes. She then noted she could see my passion for cooking even though she didn’t share it. In the course of her explanation, she said, “I think part of it for me is it’s so temporary. You finish fixing the meal and then it’s gone.”
Yes. Exactly.
My culinary art is lucky if it stays intact two or three minutes from the time I put the final garnish on the plate and notify the server. As we talked some more she said, “I guess what endures is you get to create something that lives on in what happens at the meal.”
Again. Exactly.
The table nearest our open kitchen filled up about eight last night and, when I finished cleaning my station at ten-thirty they were still sitting there. The food was long gone, but their conversation and laughter had been the soundtrack for the final hour of my evening. In the course of human history there have been very few days, if any, that resulted in something permanent. All of our art is housed in temporary exhibitions.
What a gift that we have been created to attach to one another, to love one another, even when we know the goodbyes are inevitable. If we were only passing through, it wouldn’t hurt like this.
The prompt from Poetry Thursday this week is to write a poem using the last line of a previous one. The line comes from this poem. Here is my offering:
Today
Marking time until daybreak in Frasier reruns and infomercials, I doze in-and-out of late night TV: this is the day you come home.
I don’t sleep well alone. I don’t awake well, either.
The pups bookend my body as I stretch out on the couch, missing you in dog days without benefit of explanation.
They know only to hate suitcases; they are not pack animals.
It’s not that you have been gone long, it’s that you have been gone. It’s not that I can’t live without you, it’s that I don’t want to.
It’s daylight and Gracie runs upstairs convinced she will find you.
“She’ll be home tonight,” I say as she slinks back and sits at my feet. Lola lays heavy on your purple pillow. Pining is exhausting work.
The day feels like a week for us all. I pour my coffee and leave yours in the pot.
For better or for worse, we said — for richer and for poorer. I want to go back and add one simple line: for bed and for breakfast.
“To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness.” (Albert Einstein)
______________________________________
When I consider your heavens,the work of your fingers,the moon and the stars,which you have set in place,what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them,human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3,4)
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Ginger’s on vacation, so my Sunday morning has meant time for reading my Utne Reader. Go get you one. The current issue is awesome.
Here’s a way of looking at it: There are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on Earth were charged with naming his or her share, we’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them.
Another article in the same issue is called “Running the Numbers” and shows the work of artist Chris Jordan as he seeks to humanize the overwhelming statistics of our existence. Every thirty seconds, for example, Americans discard 106,000 aluminum cans. Jordan took an equal number of cans and created a reproduction of George Seurat’s, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Here’s a close up of the detail:
In the middle of the issue are two or three features calling aging baby boomers to action. (Hey! That’s me!) We, the generation that thought we were going to change the world a generation ago, now have the experience and resources to do it. They call us to mentoring, to reflection, to community, to action. Perhaps we begin by gazing into the night sky and then pulling our eyes down to see the cans that need to be picked up. The dance between the wide expanse of the universe and our narrow slice of experience is what we were created to do.
In the early eighties I was a hospital chaplain in Dallas, Texas. One of the patients I saw was a man from Odessa, Texas who had AIDS. He was the first person with AIDS I ever knew. His mother was the only person who came to visit him, though he had a very full life with lots of friends, she said. He was gay, but not openly; his mother told people he had cancer. When he died, I called one of the largest local funeral homes to come pick up the body for burial. When they got to the hospital and found out how he had died, they refused to take the body. I called one of the hospital administrators who even brought down the head of our Infectious Disease department to explain there was not a safety issue. Nothing doing. After about an hour of dealing with the funeral director, he said to me, “You’re not for these people, are you?”
“What ‘people’ would that be?” I asked. And I glared at him.
He just didn’t want to bury a gay guy. I was livid.
I spent the rest of the afternoon on the phone and finally found a funeral home in Austin – two hundred miles away – that would do the funeral.
“It’s one thing to watch your son die alone,” his mother said. “It’s another to have someone say they won’t bury him.”
Now, twenty-five years later, High Point Church in Arlington, Texas refused to allow the funeral of Cecil Sinclair, a gay man in their church. They had agreed to host the service because the man’s brother was the church janitor, but when they found out the deceased was “openly gay,” they reneged on their offer because it would compromise the church’s principles. This article in the Dallas Morning News quotes the pastor: “Can you hold the event and condone the sin and compromise our principles? We can’t.”
I realize if I quote Sara Miles much more I’m going to have to give her a co-writing credit on this blog, but here she is again:
I thought how outrageous Jesus was to the church of his time: He didn’t wash before meals; he said the prayers incorrectly; he hung out with women, foreigners, the despised and unclean. Over and over he told people to not be afraid. I liked all that, but mostly I liked he said he was bread and he told his friends to eat him.
As I interpreted it, Jesus invited notorious wrongdoers to his table, airily discarded all the religious rules of the day, and fed whoever showed up by the thousands. In the end, he was murdered for eating with the wrong people. (92)
If there is a principle to uphold in our faith, the principle of outrageous, welcoming love seems like the one. How else can we live like Jesus?
High Point is an easy target: a giant, slick, megachurch in the heart of Megachurchland who is advertising a men’s paintball retreat on their weekly highlight video. The associate pastor hosting the video says a lot of exciting things are happening at High Point. I’m sure they are. But I’ve got to wonder what it has felt like for that janitor to come to work this week and clean up after the people who wouldn’t bury his brother.
Principles provide little comfort or hope. Jesus didn’t die for principles.
I got your principle right here: God loves Cecil Sinclair – and all the rest of us. Period.
