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Loving the people I don’t like. That was my Lenten discipline last year, and it is again. I’ve not made much progress in the last 12 months. It started with some prayerful reflection on what it means to love God and neighbor as the most important part of fulfilling the deepest intention of the law. Neighbors are not always easy to love, especially if you don’t like them. The generalized Christian claim that “I love everybody” just doesn’t cut it.

The other day my husband was telling me about a conversation he'd had with a young colleague of his, recently married. They have been contemplating getting a dog, a big move for them. When he asked how the process was moving along, his colleague confessed that he was very nervous about the prospect, and thought it might be a mistake, although he also thought it might also be inevitable."Did you ask him why he was nervous about it?" I asked my husband.

I was 12 years old and away at summer camp for the first time. She was the counselor assigned to my cabin. I remember her long dirty blond hair, wavy and wild. Her weathered hiking boots and the lilac shirt she tied around her waist each morning. Her birch-bark name tag read Marion, but we all chose French pseudonyms for our two-week cultural immersions.

"Daddy, build something." My son and I are sitting on the floor of his room in front of a tub of Legos. I played with most of these exact pieces when I was his age, and I've been excited and proud to see him so interested in them as well. 

She was looking at her fingers. I was zeroed in on my laptop with my own fingers flying over the keys typing an e-mail when I glanced over at my mom sitting next to me on the couch. Her hands. She stretched her fingers out turning them over and back again and again periodically wincing at both the pain and sight. She looked at me and said softly in Korean, “They look strange, don’t they?”

The 14th-century Sufi poet and mystic, Rumi, wrote, “Return to the root of the root of yourself.” His words remind me that I often live on the periphery or circumference of life, disconnected from the root of my being and existence. To “return to the root of the root” of myself ultimately means returning to God. For me that returning necessarily involves intentional silence. 

Many of us might assume that a church with only 32 members automatically qualifies as a “struggling church,” or even a dying church. But in the case of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Keansburg, New Jersey, many of us would be wrong.

I had a funeral recently, a small funeral in our chapel for a retired teacher from our community. She had just a few, particular requests for her funeral: that we would read Ecclesiastes 3:1-13, that we would sing "Beautiful Savior," and that a woman from our congregation would sing. She did not designate a particular song; she just wanted this woman to sing, an alto from our church's choir.

Over the last few weeks, I have been mulling over an interesting passage from Marilynne Robinson’s fine novel, Lila. The Reverend John Ames, an elderly Midwestern Methodist preacher is in conversation with his much-younger new wife, Lila, who has come to find rest, shelter, and love after a brutally hard life full of abuse and neglect. The conversation is about hell and the final judgment. Lila knows little of theology and metaphysics, but she has questions. Hard questions. How, she wonders, could the many people she has known who struggled and suffered so terribly on earth be made to suffer further in eternity because they didn’t become Christians? Who could believe this?

Evidently being able to bend over and touch the palms to the floor isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And here I thought I had received high marks for my excellent flexibility. Why did I not learn this until I was 50? To make a long story short, here is my learning: flexibility is great, as long as it is matched by strength. The opposite is true, too—strength is great as long as it is matched by flexibility. So my chiropractor tells me I’m not allowed to stretch anymore, not until I’ve built up some strength. I think this might be true for church, too.

When pastors make the news, it’s often bad (e.g. murderous DUI, sexual abuse, or curious stunts). It was particularly interesting, then, to read the positive coverage of #usemeinstead—initially positive, at least.

We have to let go. We knew that, right? People told us from the beginning. The years fly by so fast and before you know it, they’ll be grown and enjoy this time before it’s gone. We smiled and looked down at the baby in our arms. 

One of my favorite lines in the musical The Book of Mormon is from the song “You and Me (But Mostly Me).” The main characters, Elder Cunningham and Elder Price, talk about their upcoming mission. Elder Price sings, “Something I’ve foreseen, Now that I’m 19, I’ll do something incredible, That blows God’s freaking mind!” I crack up every time I hear it, its full intended effect sending me into a fit of giggles. For me, it’s funny in a self-deprecating way, because I was Elder Price at 19.

On my way home from the grocery story last night, I listened to a woman reading her poetry. (Yes, it was public radio.) The poetry was lovely, but I could only listen for a little bit because the woman was reading in Poetry Voice.  Do you know what I mean? 

About six months ago I started a new call as the senior pastor of a church in New Hampshire. I truly loved the congregation I previously served, but with a wife who had just graduated from seminary herself, and a feeling that God was nudging me to something new, I began the long discernment that comes with a pastoral search process. Unlike my first search process, where I sent my profile (the UCC version of a pastor’s resume) to just about every church that was searching, I was more selective.

I have a sneaking suspicion this is what matters most. Not the anticipation of Advent, the celebration of Christmas, the long journey of Lent, or the exuberance of Easter. But the everyday of Ordinary Time.