On a whim…

I remember a reckoning.

It was the kind of afternoon that should have been filled with the sounds of play, but instead it was filled with the smell of gasoline and the realization of a terrible mistake. Several children had been playing—mixing fire and fuel. When I first heard the cries, my mind, seeking refuge in abstraction, thought, They really shouldn’t do that; people will think they are hurt.

But when I crossed the yard, the abstraction vanished.

I found a child smoldering. Small flames still flickered at his skin. I could see the white of his bone. He was entering shock, and in that clinical stillness I knew that shock—not the fire—would kill him if I didn’t anchor him to the world.

In that moment, I did not ask whose fault it was.

I did not wave a finger at a boy whose flesh was charred to lecture him on the dangers of fire.

I did not demand proof of his standing before deciding whether he deserved help.

I sat in the dirt. I looked him in the eye. And I asked him if he played baseball.

For fifteen minutes, we didn’t talk about fire. We talked about life on third base. We talked about the velocity of a well-hit ball. We talked about anything that would keep his heart beating until help arrived.

The Second Crime

I have been thinking about that boy lately as I watch our systems of enforcement—particularly when the law is applied with speed but without mercy.

I believe in the law. But I also believe a profound truth: justice without mercy is another kind of crime.

When families are left smoldering under the weight of systems they did not fully understand, or when individuals are crushed by rigid bureaucracy in the name of order, our first instinct must not be to wave a finger.

The Roman jurists had a name for this failure: Summum ius, summa iniuria—the extreme application of law that becomes the greatest injustice. The second crime is not the violation itself, but the refusal to see the human being burning in front of us.

The Call of the Witness

As an ordained minister, I find myself in a predicament. If I do not speak about this injustice, I am complicit. If I do speak, I know some who currently listen to me may choose to walk away.

But I remember the boy in the yard.

If I could sit in the dirt with a child who had broken the rules and choose his life over his guilt, how can I remain silent now?

Our job is not to stand over the suffering and demand to see their papers.

Our job is to sit in the dust, recognize the humanity being charred, and talk—steadily, patiently—about the velocity of a life worth saving.

Each of us lives with plans and demands on our time. They arrive with urgency and insistence, persuading us that what is scheduled is what is necessary. Even faith can become another obligation—something to be managed rather than received.

But grace does not usually arrive on schedule.

What if interruption is not a failure of discipline but a threshold? What if some of what we think we “need” to do matters less than what love quietly places in front of us?

I have been shaped by women who lived with this kind of attentiveness—Beth, whose presence continues to instruct me, and Lucy, whose goodness is a daily constant. Neither acted in order to be seen. They did what was right because it was right. I have had to reckon with my own temptation—often hidden even from myself—to hope that such goodness might be noticed or returned. That hope belongs to me. Their faithfulness does not depend on it.

Recently, I suggested to a group of friends that we do something for someone who goes out of their way to help us. There was no response. I let it be. When I returned home, I noticed snow had not been cleared where my children park their cars. So I cleared them.

That was all.

No larger gesture followed. No unseen heroics. Just the work immediately before me.

Faith does not always look expansive. Sometimes it is bounded, ordinary, and quiet. It does not perform well. It does not multiply itself to prove a point.

Still, it counts.

Grace is not measured by how much we do, but by whether we are willing to do what is ours to do—without applause, without enlargement, without pretending it was more than it was.

It’s been a year.

Both of us were treated for cancer.
She also underwent a heart procedure.

And still—
we made it to the Azores.
We found rest for a while in Boothbay Harbor.

I began my first novel and am close to finishing it: 37 chapters, 147,500 words.
I started drafting two more.
The second is emerging quickly, with its hinge chapters complete.
The third is conceptually structured, waiting its turn.

I’m wrapping up a devotional guide for Lent.
I’ve been publishing small pieces—one or two most weeks.

My writing coach keeps urging me to slow down, reminding me that as cancer treatment continues, the emotional cost of writing increases.

She said:
Protecting your pace right now is the same as
resting between surgical cuts,
letting a bruise declare itself before touching it again.

Ignore this and you’ll still be productive—
but the book would begin extracting something from you it has no right to take.

So I’m learning to tell the truth about limits.
Not to stop.
Not to hurry.
But to refuse any work that asks for more than it is given.

Still here.
Still listening.
Still writing.

There is a kind of fullness that doesn’t feel like happiness and doesn’t ask to be.

It isn’t sweet. It isn’t savory.

It simply rests.

Tonight I feel absence more clearly—not only my own, but the quiet spaces carried by people I love and others I care about. Some have lost children. Some have buried spouses. Some have said goodbye to friends only days ago. Some may not feel anything sharp at all—only a hush they can’t quite name.

I don’t know what anyone else is carrying tonight. I don’t even know that they are struggling. But I know that if I were standing where they stand, this night would ask something of me.

I sat with family today, grateful and at peace, and still aware that the deepest part of me was keeping watch elsewhere. Not lost. Not lonely. Just faithful—to love that has shaped a life, and to lives shaped by love that did not end when death arrived.

This isn’t grief that wants to be fixed.

It’s recognition.

I’m learning that much of what draws me to write is not the need to be understood, but the hope of finding witnesses—people willing to stand quietly together and notice what still abides. How love, once fully given, continues to act in the world through memory, attention, and changed lives.

If something in these words feels familiar to you tonight—unnamed but steady—know this: you are not behind, and you are not alone. Some things do not pass. They remain. And learning to live with them is its own kind of peace.