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Holding Hope When Everything Hurts

This Lent has been heavy. Not the kind of heavy you can name neatly or wrap up in a tidy prayer. The kind that sits in the room with us, in red eyes, in long hugs, in the quiet “I’m okay” that isn’t really okay. A colleague reminded me the other day, softly, “Easter is coming.” And I took a deep breath, but what does hope mean when everything still hurts? Author Sophia Dembling writes about a man who reached out to her just weeks after his wife died, asking, “Please write something hopeful.” I’ve been sitting with that. Because if we’re honest, some of our hopes in grief are impossible. We hope the door might open and everything will be as it was. We hope for a way around the pain. A prayer that makes it disappear. But grief doesn’t work like that. There is no way around it. Only through. And that is not the kind of hope most of us want. But maybe hope isn’t about escaping grief. Maybe hope is what we practice inside of it. Hope looks like showing up when your heart is breaking. Lighti...
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Love With Nowhere to Land

This week has been heavy. As a pastor, I sometimes feel like I’m supposed to be the steady one. The one who knows how to hold grief. The one with the words. The one who helps other people walk through loss. But this week I lost my dog. Our beautiful girl. My companion. My hiking partner. The one who quietly regulated my nervous system just by being beside me. The one who padded through the house like a soft presence of grace. And the truth is, my heart is broken. The strange thing about grief in ministry is that it rarely comes alone. In the past month, people in my congregation,  people I love deeply,   have lost brothers, mothers, lifelong friends, and  spouses. Hospital rooms. Funeral homes. Phone calls that start with that familiar pause. You begin to feel like the whole community is carrying loss at the same time. And in the middle of all that very real human grief, I found myself whispering a quiet question inside my own heart: Is it okay that I’m th...
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Lent Is Not a Punishment. It’s a Practice.

Every year, Lent arrives quietly. No glitter. No fireworks. No grand announcement. Just ashes pressed onto foreheads and a whisper: Remember who you are.  Lent is not about spiritual theatrics. It is about slowing down enough to notice our own lives.  We live in a culture that prizes speed and noise. We scroll. We hustle. We perform. Even our exhaustion feels competitive. Lent interrupts that rhythm. It invites us to step off the merry-go-round and ask a deeper question: What in my life is life-giving? And what is not?  For centuries, Christians have marked these forty days by adding or subtracting something. Fasting from habits that numb us. Taking up practices that root us. Not to prove devotion. Not to impress God. But to become more awake.  Sometimes subtraction is necessary. We let go of patterns that drain us. We name resentments we’ve been rehearsing. We let go of the need to win every argument. We unplug from the constant stream of outrage. We notice the smal...
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Holding Light in the Aftermath

There are moments when the world feels like it has split open. A school shooting in a small community. The kind of place where everyone knows the hallways, where teachers remember siblings, where grief travels faster than the news cycle. When something like this happens, it doesn’t stay contained. It moves through memory, through relationships, through the nervous system of anyone who has ever stood in a classroom and promised children they would be safe. There is no tidy theology for this. No sentence can make it make sense. There is only lament. And alongside the heartbreak, another reality is already surfacing. When the identity of the shooter intersects with queerness or transness, we know what often follows. Grief becomes weaponized. Entire communities are blamed. Fear hardens into rhetoric. Rhetoric spills into policy and playgrounds. Those who are already navigating a world that questions their dignity suddenly feel the ground shift again. This is where the church must be v...
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The Grace of Being Kind to Ourselves

 There’s been a quiet conversation happening in my heart this week. One about attitude. About how we carry the weight of our days. About how easily life can feel heavy without us even noticing when we picked up the load. Last year at this time, everything felt like too much. Christmas was busy in all the ways it always is, the lists, the gatherings, the expectations. My dad was sick. My mom was stretched thin and stressed. And somewhere in the middle of trying to hold everyone together, I forgot to hold myself. I kept going. Kept showing up. Kept caring for everyone else. And I didn’t rest. It’s something I talk about all the time in pastoral care. I sit with people and gently remind them to be kind to themselves. To breathe. To slow down. To take the afternoon off. To stop carrying what was never meant to be carried alone. I offer compassion so freely. And then I go home and don’t take my own advice. I think many of us do this. We can feel endless empathy for...
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When Presence Is the Point

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I took this photo in a lobby, one of those aesthetically pleasing places that makes you feel grounded. The words caught me off guard. Without community there would be suffering. Not less joy. Not more loneliness. But suffering. It stopped me because it names something we often try to explain away. We like to imagine ourselves as strong, self-sufficient, resilient. We tell ourselves we should be able to manage on our own. But the truth is more tender than that. Humans were never designed to carry life alone. Isolation does not just make life harder. It hurts us. Community is the web that holds us when our own strength gives out. It is the people who notice when we go quiet. The ones who bring soup or send a text at exactly the wrong-right moment. It is the friend who sits with us in grief without trying to fix it. The neighbour who shovels the walk. The therapist who offers language when our own has disappeared. And then there is church, when it is at its best. Church community ...
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A Question I Can’t Shake

  I have been thinking about loneliness lately. Not in a dramatic way. More like the quiet kind that sneaks in between appointments. The kind that shows up even when your calendar is full. I wonder if you have noticed it too. We live in a strange moment in history. So many of us work from home now. We order groceries without speaking to a human. We text instead of knocking. We scroll instead of lingering. Our lives are efficient. But not always connected. We tell ourselves we are in touch because we see each other’s lives online. We know who got engaged. Who had a baby? Who went on vacation? We double-tap and leave heart emojis and call it checking in. But knowing about someone is not the same as being with someone. Community used to be something you stumbled into. Now it is something you schedule. And loneliness has a way of slipping through the cracks. I think about the single thirty-something who goes to weddings more than dinner parties. The teenager who feels invisible in...
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