Posts Tagged ‘faith’
What Cannot End Us
Mark 16:17–18 NRSV
“And these signs will accompany those who believe…”
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These words are difficult. Very difficult.
They were spoken on Sunday and I found myself wishing I had not heard them.
They sound like promises of protection.
As if belief could shield the body from harm.
As if faith could prevent what we know, from experience, is not prevented.
I have lived too much to hear them that way.
Bodies fail.
Suffering comes.
Prayer does not always turn it aside.
I cannot wish them away.
So what are we to do with words like these?
Perhaps they are not describing a life without harm.
Perhaps they are trying—imperfectly—to speak about a life
in which harm is no longer the final authority.
They will pick up serpents.
They will drink what should destroy them.
They will lay hands on the sick.
It reads like invulnerability.
But it may be something else.
It may be the language of people who have come to believe
that even what wounds them
cannot end what has begun.
Not because suffering disappears.
Because the meaning of suffering has changed.
The cross remains.
The wounds remain.
The body still bears them.
And still—he stands.
If these words promise anything, it is not that we will be spared.
It is that what we endure
does not have the last word.
I cannot say this easily.
I have stood where this was tested.
But I cannot say that suffering is all that remains.
Something resists that conclusion.
Not enough to explain.
Not enough to prove.
Enough that I cannot call it final.
Perhaps that is what these words are reaching for.
Not protection.
But persistence.
Not safety.
I know one thing:
A life cannot be closed by what would destroy it.
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Prayer
God, when suffering speaks as if it is final, teach me to live as though it is not.
Enough for Today
Matthew 6:11 NRSV “Give us today our daily bread.”
By then, time had lost its markers.
Days were no longer distinguished by plans or progress, only by light and dark. Morning arrived without promise. Night came without relief. The body existed inside a narrow range of possibility, and even that had to be negotiated.
Breathing took effort. Sitting up required calculation. Food was no longer something to enjoy, only something to attempt. A few spoonfuls of broth were an achievement. Not a metaphor. An achievement.
This was not the moment for courage or clarity. It was the long middle, where survival does not feel noble and faith is reduced to what can be managed. The body learned to ask a smaller question.
Not How will this end?
But What is possible now?
Scripture knows this reduction. “Daily bread” is not abundance. It is enough. Enough to remain. Enough to get through the next hour without collapse. Enough to keep the body tethered to the day.
In that room, far from home, nothing was resolved. No meaning announced itself. There was only the discipline of accepting what could be received and refusing what could not. Rest when rest was required. Effort when effort was possible. Waiting without a clock.
This is not resignation.
It is endurance.
Faith, in such moments, does not look upward. It stays close to the body. It learns the measure of what can be held and does not ask for more.
Enough for today had to be enough.
Prayer
God, help me trust that what is enough today is enough.
The Middle of Hope
This morning’s worship service caught me off guard.
The reading was Micah, chapter 4—the vision of swords beaten into plowshares, nations unlearning war, people sitting unafraid beneath their own vine and fig tree.
It is a beautiful passage.
Almost too beautiful to trust.
Which may be why it has endured.
As the words were read aloud, an image returned to me—not as memory, but as presence.
It was an image Beth kept close.
A poster she chose.
A prayer she lived with.
At its center: a battlefield grave marker.
A helmet resting on the butt of an inverted carbine, the rifle stabbed into the earth.
Dog tags hanging quietly from the stock.
The sign of a soldier buried where he fell.
Nearby, the words:
Blessed are the peacemakers.
I first saw it in 1972.
I was young, unsettled, and already committed to enter the service of the United States Navy. The war was unpopular. The country was divided. And I was trying to make sense of my own decision to serve.
There were nights when I wondered whether duty and peace could inhabit the same body.
When I first saw the image, I took it as affirmation.
My service was sacrifice.
My sacrifice was a pursuit of peace.
I did not think that belief was naïve.
I still don’t think it was simple.
Years later I realized, Beth chose that image—not as endorsement, but as prayer.
She did not display it to resolve the tension.
She displayed it to live inside it.
This morning, Micah 4 reopened what I once thought settled.
Micah does not offer reassurance.
Micah offers an end that has not yet arrived.
Before plowshares, there is judgment.
Before fig trees, there is disarmament.
Peace, in Micah, is not imagined.
It is adjudicated.
Violence is not denied.
It is named—and then relinquished.
Suddenly, the image Beth loved no longer functioned as approval.
It stood as witness.
The rifle in the ground has not been transformed.
It has only been stopped.
Silence is not the same thing as peace.
Sometimes it is only what remains when the carrier is gone.
The weapon is quiet not because the world has learned peace, but because someone paid the cost before it did.
That realization did not undo Beth’s prayer.
It completed my hearing of it.
Blessed are the peacemakers names the way.
Micah 4 names the end.
The grave marker names the cost in between.
Hope has a middle.
And the middle has graves.
Standing there in worship, grief did not isolate me.
It did not collapse into memory.
It opened into communion—mediated, costly, and real.
Not nostalgia.
Not recollection.
Communion through what she loved.
Communion in the way of seeing she inhabited.
The call that came with it was not loud.
Live this way.
Do not turn aside.
Do not lie about the cost.
But I left accompanied.
God gives fire for light, not for ruin.
Many of us are tired.
Not just busy—tired in the bones.
We have watched things we care about erode. We have seen people suffer needlessly. We have tried to speak, to help, to hold ground—and anger has found a home in us.
That doesn’t make you a bad person.
It makes you human.
Anger often begins as love that has nowhere to go.
But if you are feeling scorched inside—if rage has become your daily fuel—you are not failing morally. You are overburdened.
You were never meant to carry the weight of the world on anger alone.
You are still called to care.
You are still allowed to resist what harms.
But you are also allowed to rest from outrage.
Contempt feels powerful, but it is a thin power. It burns fast and leaves little behind. Love is slower. It requires breathing room. It needs light more than heat.
If all you can do right now is tend one small good thing—do that.
If all you can offer is restraint instead of rage—let that be enough for today.
Your vocation is not to be consumed.
Your presence matters too.
There is a fire that warms without destroying.
May you be given that fire again.
Vive la différence!
Recovering from Silence
I watch the women in my life — and who could resist? Each a marvel, her own constellation of strengths and mysteries. What strikes me most is their uncanny attunement: they know when something is right, and when it is not. Perhaps this is why their lives, more often than ours, run longer — they listen to themselves.
These days I find that same listening rising in me. My history, long buried in hidden folds, presses forward and names itself. The fiftieth anniversary of my marriage to Beth, my late wife, has brought me into strange country. Difference is not only what I admire in others; it is what I now confront in myself.
For years I kept my inner dialogue under lock. Sadness and joy alike I carried in silence. When I remarried, I spoke Beth’s name, but I hid my grief. I feared it would wound my wife to know sorrow still haunted me, so I consigned memory to the shadows. Silence gave sorrow room, but never joy.
Now the landscape shifts. What was once rolling and familiar has grown sharp and perilous. The gentle curves of remembrance have narrowed into hairpin turns; the easy hills have broken into sudden ridges, blind crests, and heart-stopping overlooks. Change no longer waits at a distance; it walks beside me.
I have wept more in the last month than in decades past. But the tears are welcome, because in speaking aloud — in sharing what I once held back — grief no longer stands alone. Joy has stepped out of hiding to take its place beside sorrow. And together they travel with me, companions at last.
Women are sometimes faulted for their sensitivity, their willingness to notice change within. But I am learning this is not theirs alone. It is human. And that discovery — that I too can listen, can open, can live — is the real difference.
Vive la différence!
On a whim... 