Blood Is Not Partisan
Blood is the river we all share — given, not chosen.
How many lives would be lost without donors? A stranger’s gift flowing into another’s veins—life itself, offered unseen.
As a boy I dreamed of making a blood pact, binding myself to a friend as “blood brothers.” Only my friend was a girl. What would it mean to cut ourselves and mingle blood across that boundary? Innocence and danger mixed together in one gesture.
Now I wonder: in our divided era, could politics ever stain the gift? Might some refuse to give—or to receive—because of the donor’s convictions? Can blood even have an orientation? Or is it the last unshakable proof of what we share?
I think of the hymn about water and blood flowing from Christ’s side. Blood as salvation, blood as mystery. The chalice in worship. And the old Roman whispers that Christians were child-sacrificers, drinking blood—scandal and holiness poured into one cup.
And then the small, human side: my cousin who fainted at the sight of it. A nosebleed in school was enough to bring him down. Blood terrifies, even as it sustains.
It can save a life, it can signal the end of one, and it can bind us together in ways both strange and holy. Blood is the river we all share—flowing through strangers and kin alike, past every boundary, carrying us toward one another.
P.S. Perhaps the wonder is not that blood is so often spilled, but that it is still given.
Roundabout
A funeral procession circled the roundabout, bound for the cemetery. An impatient driver nosed in, cut between the mourners’ cars, and darted out the other side. The only one not in a hurry was the passenger in the hearse.
We pretend life gives us two choices: hurry, or not. Yet most of us choose hurry and excuse it with refrigerator wisdom: Stop and smell the roses. We don’t. We grumble at those who slow us down, and bristle at those who outpace us.
They say we live in constant change. I wonder if nothing changes—because we never pause to notice. Children leap from infancy to adulthood, and we miss the quiet growth—or quiet loss—of the spirit. We hurry to work, hurry home, hurry on.
And then, in the end, we arrive at the one appointment that never runs late.
The God who receives us is never in a hurry.
Tell Me About It
O God Almighty—
You must see this endlessly:
our jagged apologies,
our letters unsent,
our bruised words
and unnamed wounds.
How do You hold it?
All these lives
turning like loose pages in Your wind.
I am only one of them,
stumbling through shame and bewilderment.
Tell me about it, Lord.
Tell me how You bear it
without breaking.
And as You tell me,
teach me how to let go
what I cannot mend.
God in the Silence
There are silences that wound. The silence between two people who no longer know how to speak to one another. The silence after a loss so great that words cannot carry its weight. The silence of God, or what feels like God’s absence, when prayer becomes little more than breath.
.
I have lived with such silence. I thought it safer than speech, thought it might protect others from the depth of my sorrow. But silence has its own cost. It isolates. It hardens. It makes a person a stranger even to those who love them most.
.
And yet, in Romans Paul dares to say that even silence can be prayer. “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words.” Which means that what I cannot say, God still hears. What I withhold, God still knows. What weighs me down with unspeakable grief, God lifts up and carries into the very heart of heaven.
.
This is a mystery. That the silence which feels like absence may, in truth, be full of God’s presence. That the groan we never utter may already be on the Spirit’s lips. That even when our mouths are closed, intimacy remains possible.
.
And perhaps this is our calling as servants of Christ—
not always to speak, not always to fix,
but sometimes simply to sit in the quiet with those who cannot speak.
To believe on their behalf.
To let silence be enough.
.
Because in the silence, God is already there.
.
Do Your Duty
Every citizen has a duty to perform. Some of us choose to fulfill that through military service. When someone learns I am a veteran, they often say, “Thank you for your service.”
I should probably reply, “It was an honor.” But I don’t. I pause.
Because truthfully, I feel a mix of embarrassment and frustration—embarrassment that I don’t quite know how to receive the thanks, and frustration that such words sometimes seem to serve as a kind of inoculation, as if my service relieves others of the duty we all share.
What I wish I could say is this: “Don’t thank me as though my service absolves you. Do your duty too.”
Even better, I would love to hear someone say:
“Meeting a veteran reminds me that I also have a duty to my country, my community, my neighbors. Here’s one way I’ve been living that duty… Thank you for reminding me.”
Because service, after all, was never meant to be mine alone. It belongs to us all.
On a whim... 