We don't just want people in our lives, we ache for the ones who know us fully and stay anyway. This week we sit with the longing for connection that goes beyond convenience or proximity, and ask what it might mean to stop settling for less than we were made for.   LINKS: Keepers of the Fire |  Connect  |  YouTube  |  Coming Up TRANSCRIPT: Relationships: What we reach for in each other Before we get into anything else— before really introducing this conversation series or today’s particular theme— I want you to pull something out of your Sunday Papers. It's called a Daily Examen. If that word's new to you, here's the short version: it's an old prayer practice— centuries old, actually— where instead of asking God to fix your day or explain your life, you just look back over it. Slowly, and gently. You notice what moved you. What you're grateful for. What quietly grew you. And you ask, at the end, what all of that might be inviting you into next. Super simple prayer practice that requires no performance or right answers. Just noticing. We made our own version of it for this series— for the next six weeks we're calling Keepers of the Fire— and instead of just talking about it, I want us to actually do it. Right now. Together. So take a minute. Look at the front side. Grab a pen, or just sit with it in your head. Let yourself notice what you're actually grateful for. Then, let yourself notice what's brought you joy, energy, a sense of coming alive lately. Don't rush to explain any of it or fix it or figure out what it means or anything like that. Just let yourself want deep, big things. Let yourself ache a little. I’m going to give you a little time here to think about it, and then write or draw in the boxes on your page. However that landed for you, however much or little showed up, that's okay. That's the practice. Now, flip it over. The back side is a second copy, identical to the one you just did, because this isn't a one-time thing. Take it home. Do it again tomorrow, or Tuesday, or whenever you can steal five or ten quiet minutes this week. The fire you just noticed doesn't go out when you leave this room. And underneath all of that noticing is a question we're going to be living with together for six weeks— a fire most of us have learned to keep quiet in any number of ways. So before I tell you what this series is about, I wanted you to spend a little time with your own fire first. When you're ready— when you've done a little dreaming, a little longing, a little honest noticing— we'll talk about where we're headed. Starting with the first thing that fire always wants: relationship. SECTION 1: A turn in the road For the last many weeks we've been in The Book of Forgiving, looking back from where we stand, at real hurts, real wounds, charting a kind of path forward that can only be achieved through forgiving. That was important work, and I hope it did something for you. Today, we’re turning around. We're going to spend the next six weeks not looking back, but looking forward. Standing where we are and trusting a gut feeling. A sacred impulse. A fire in the belly that says: things can be better than this. That feeling has a lot of names. For the next six weeks, let’s call it The Ache. What is The Ache? The Ache is that restless, reaching, yearny feeling. The sense that the world could be different. That you could be different. That there's more available — in your relationships, your life, your world — than what you're currently experiencing. Kids feel it when they want a best friend who really gets them. Adults feel it when a conversation goes surprisingly deep and they think, “why don't I have more of this?” We all feel it when we watch the news and think: it doesn't have to be this way. [I felt it this weekend as I thought about 250 years of the American experiment, and remembered that there’s a reality behind all the mythologies that deserves attention as we work to continue collectively rejecting tyranny.] Th

After five weeks asking what it means to forgive, this week we flip it and ask the harder question: what kind of person am I in the lives of others? Becoming forgivable turns out to be one of the most liberating, and most demanding, practices there is. LINKS: Book of Forgiving  |  Connect  |  YouTube  |  Coming Up

Reconciliation isn't the same thing as forgiveness. We've probably been confusing the two for too long, and it’s had real consequences for real people. In this episode, let’s look honestly at what genuine repair actually requires, who's responsible for what, and why it's worth the hard work of getting it right.    LINKS: Book of Forgiving  |  Connect  |  YouTube  |  Coming Up TRANSCRIPT: Ian calls kids up and shares puppets (all the animal characters from Wally and Freya) Setup: We've been talking about Wally and Freya for a few weeks now. But there were other animals in this story— a whole community. And when something happens between two people, the whole community has to figure out how to respond. I need some helpers. Each of you gets a character. Facilitate a short, lively role play — you narrate, kids voice their characters: Wally did something that hurt Freya. Now everybody has to decide what to do.Name each option clearly as kids play them out: Get even — someone decides to do something mean back to Wally. Throw a tantrum — someone just explodes with feelings. Ask for help — someone goes to a trusted adult. Forgive — someone decides to let it go and move forward. Choose the relationship — someone decides whether they even want to keep being Wally's friend. Wally & Freya book Here's what I want you to notice: in any situation where someone gets hurt, everybody has choices. Not just one choice, but a whole menu of them. Some of those choices help. Some of them make things worse. And some of them are really, really hard. The hardest one (and the most interesting one) is what we're talking about today. The word you are going to hear me use is called “reconciliation,” and it means making a relationship better. It's not the same thing as forgiveness. They're related, but they're different. Here's the difference: Forgiveness is something YOU do, inside yourself. Reconciliation is something that happens BETWEEN PEOPLE. It takes both people showing up. Painting rocks… what are words we could use? The Distinction We Were Not Taught We have spent this whole series untangling forgiveness from the myths we inherited about it. Today we untangle one more, and it might be the most practically important one. Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. We use them interchangeably. We shouldn't. Collapsing them into one action creates real damage: It pressures the wounded person to restore a relationship before they feel safe. It lets the person who caused harm off the hook for the actual work of repair. It produces what we might call false reconciliation, a surface-level "we're fine" that buries the wound rather than healing it. The Tutus: "The preference is always to renew unless there is a question of safety." But — and this is important — reconciliation is the fourth step of the Fourfold Path, not the first. You cannot skip to it. And sometimes, honestly, you never get there. To be clear: not reaching reconciliation is not s sign of failure either. That's reality. Lessons from the TRC In 1995, Nelson Mandela appointed Archbishop Desmond Tutu to chair South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission… a body tasked with the nearly impossible: helping a nation begin to heal from decades of apartheid-era atrocity. The TRC was empowered to grant amnesty to perpetrators who confessed their crimes truthfully and completely to the commission. Not automatically. Not cheaply. Truth first. Tutu's final remarks after submitting the report were: "We have looked the beast in the eye. Our past will no longer keep us hostage." Notice what the commission was called. Not the Reconciliation Commission. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Truth comes first. Always. What Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the TRC understood, and what we so often get backwards, is that healing actually does have an order. You cannot reconcile what you have not first actually named. You cannot repair what no one has ack

Here's the uncomfortable truth: forgiveness isn't primarily for the other person… it's for you. (Ugh, we know.) This week we explore what it might mean to stop letting a past wound have the final word over your present life.   LINKS: Book of Forgiving  |  Connect  |  YouTube  |  Coming Up TRANSCRIPT:   Retell from Freya's perspective — what was she feeling as Wally spoke? Name those feelings out loud and mark a stone with washable marker for each one as you name them: Angry. (mark) Sad. (mark) Embarrassed. (mark) Lonely. (mark) "Look at this stone now. Pretty marked up. That's what it looks like when we've been carrying a lot." Watch the video — Freya bringing Wally back, returning him to their community. Unpack: What did Freya choose? She didn't pretend it didn't happen. She didn't say it was okay. But she chose something — and whatever she chose, it changed things. We're going to do something with these stones in a little while. Hold onto yours. Hand out stones and washable markers to kids. Send them back to seats to mark up their stones and work on kids Sunday Papers. Adults — I want to talk to you now. But kids, you're welcome to listen in! Where We’ve Been Brief catch-up for anyone new or returning: We're in The Book of Forgiving — drawing from Desmond and Mpho Tutu's framework for how forgiveness actually works. The Fourfold Path: Tell the Story → Name the Hurt → Grant Forgiveness → Renew or Release the Relationship. In the first week: We told our stories. Last week: We named the hurt: the feelings underneath the facts. Today: we take the hardest step. We talk about what it actually means to grant forgiveness. The Uncomfortable Truth Here's where we have to say something that cuts against almost everything our culture tells us about forgiveness: Forgiveness is not primarily for the other person. It's FOR YOU. (ugh, I know.) That feels wrong at first. It can even feel like a betrayal of the seriousness of what was done. If I forgive, doesn't that let them off the hook? No. And we'll come back to that. But first… someone wise once put it this way: "Forgiveness is the act of giving up all hope of a better past." Sit with that for a second. Forgiveness isn’t giving up on justice. Or saying that what happened was okay. Its not pretending it didn't happen. But instead, forgiveness is releasing the white-knuckled grip on the belief (conscious or not) that somehow, if we hold on tight enough, stay angry enough, rehearse it enough, the past will change. It won't. And the holding on costs us. What the Holding Costs Us This isn't just spiritual intuition. There’s reliable research proving it. When we hold onto unresolved hurt— ruminating, replaying, rehearsing— our bodies respond as if the threat is still happening. Cortisol stays elevated. The nervous system stays on alert. Over time this contributes to measurable increases in anxiety, depression, cardiovascular stress, and immune suppression, among other truly serious health issues. We are not built to carry this indefinitely. The body keeps the score, and it charges interest. If we want to “make America healthy again,” it turns out denial just isn’t actually gonna do it. Developing cultural practices around forgiving and healing, though? That’s the ticket. The Tutus frame the alternative this way: in the Revenge Cycle, we reject our pain and try to make it go away by hurting the person who hurt us. In the Forgiveness Cycle, we face our pain. We don't deny it or minimize it. And we choose to move toward healing instead. The Tutus: "In the Revenge Cycle, we reject our pain and suffering and believe that by hurting the person who hurt us our pain will go away." It doesn't. It never has. It simply multiplies…  There’s all sorts of bumper sticker opportunities here: “hurt people hurt people” The trap: waiting to forgive until the other person apologizes. They may never. They might not even know or appreciate what they did. They may never. But if your

Forgiveness has a pace of its own, and sometimes the most honest thing we can do is admit we're not there yet. This episode explores what it means to give ourselves (and each other) permission to be in process, without the pressure to be further along than we actually are.    LINKS: Book of Forgiving  |  Connect  |  YouTube  |  Coming Up   TRANSCRIPT: Brief framing before reading: We're talking about forgiveness in this series. About what happens when someone hurts us — or when we hurt someone else. And about the choices we have when that happens. I'm going to read you the first half of a book today. We're going to stop in the middle on purpose because the most important part of the story for TODAY is actually what happens right... here. And we're going to finish it next week. Read first half of Wally and Freya. Brief unpack after reading: What's happening in the story: someone got hurt. Both of them, actually. And now they have a choice. Two roads: get even, stay hurt… OR something harder, and maybe even braver. Forgiveness doesn't always happen right away. It takes practice. And the very first steps are: tell somebody you trust what happened, and then tell about what it felt like. When somebody does something that hurts me, I feel sad, and kind of mad. Sometimes it feels like I don’t matter much to them. Just saying that out loud is an important thing to do! In the story, Wally and Freya are both sad. Both hurt. And now they have a choice to make. So do we. We'll find out what they choose next week. The Stone — Kids Practice Give each child a stone. This stone is like the hurt we carry when someone has hurt our feelings, or our bodies, or our hearts. It has some weight to it, just like the hurt does. You can return to your seats and work in their special kids Sunday Paper: Trace the stone on the paper. Inside the tracing, write or draw what the hurt is. Hold onto your stone. We're going to do something with it in a few minutes, everybody together. You can also listen in to what I’m saying, if you want to hear more about forgiving! Catching Everybody Up//Recap Welcome anyone who is new or wasn't here Week 1. I want to do a brief recap: We're in a series called The Book of Forgiving, drawing from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho's important work on what forgiveness actually is, and how to do it. The Tutus aren't theorists. Desmond Tutu chaired South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Mpho lost her husband to violent crime. These are people who have earned the right to talk about this. Their framework is called the Fourfold Path: Telling the Story → Naming the Hurt → Granting Forgiveness → Renewing or Releasing the Relationship. In wk 1 we looked at the first step: Telling the Story. Today: Naming the Hurt. The big idea underneath all of it: We desperately need an imagination bigger than the revenge cycle we live inside culturally. That cycle is everywhere— in our politics, our entertainment, our instincts. The Tutus show us a different road. The Problem with How We Do Forgiveness Let's be honest about why forgiveness is so hard to practice, even for people who believe in it. We've collapsed forgiveness into remorse. Someone says "sorry!"— maybe genuinely, maybe not— and suddenly the pressure shifts entirely to the person who was hurt: Now you have to forgive. We skip the whole middle. That's not forgiveness. That's cruel urgency dressed up as something kind. We've made forgetting the goal. But the Tutus are clear: forgetting is not only impossible, it's actually counterproductive. Memory is part of how we protect ourselves. Part of how we stay honest. Forgiveness is not amnesia. We've weaponized it. In religious spaces especially, "forgive" has been used to protect people who caused harm and to silence people who were hurt. When forgiveness gets wielded as a command that bypasses accountability — when it becomes "Jesus says you have to forgive, so stop talking about what hap

Before we can forgive anything, we have to be honest about what actually happened without minimizing, over-spiritualizing, or skipping to a resolution. This week we slow down to affirm this first step in the process: naming the hurt with precision. As it turns out, telling the truth about your wound is the first act of healing.   LINKS:  Current Conversations | Connect | YouTube |  Coming Up TRANSCRIPT: The Word We've Been Mishandling Forgiveness might be the most talked-about and least practiced idea in all of spiritual life. Not because some people are hypocrites (I mean aren’t we all a little bit?) but because if we’re honest, we've been given almost no real tools for it. Tension point: most of us are carrying something. And most of us have been told– by religion, culture, entertainment, even well-meaning people– to just... let it go. But letting go of something you haven't fully held yet isn't forgiveness. It's just suppression with fancy vocabulary. Brief series preview: over the next six weeks, we're going to do this differently. We're drawing from Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho's book The Book of Forgiving– one of the most honest, rigorous, and compassionate treatments of this subject that I’m aware of. We'll talk about what forgiveness actually is, what it isn't, why it gets weaponized, and what it might mean to actually get free. The Tutus give us a four-step framework for genuine forgiveness. If you’re curious about each one of the steps in more detail and want to take the time it takes to really wrestle with that, I’d love to invite you into the Tuesday night book club and Discord server… talk to me after the gathering if you’re interested! There’s an underlying premise that when hurt happens, there’s a cycle of revenge we often get stuck in (marked by the hurt/harm/loss, experiencing pain, choosing to harm, rejecting shared humanity, getting revenge/retaliation/payback, that ultimately leads to some form of violence that creates new or additional harm. What they’ve provided for us– based on their own experiences of injustice and violence (apartheid, violent deaths, etc.) is what they call The Fourfold Path, that similarly starts with hurt/harm/loss, followed by an intentional choice to heal. And if healing is the choice, then the fourfold path can be traveled:  Telling the Story (today) Naming the Hurt Granting Forgiveness (Recognizing Shared Humanity) Renewing or Releasing the Relationship. You don't have to be at every week to get something meaningful from this. But if you can, come back. This is worth doing slowly. The task we’re in today– telling the story– is both simple and challenging: before we can forgive anything, we have to give ourselves space to be honest about what actually happened. Because there are a lot of real, identifiable reasons why we rush past pain and jump straight to resolution. Why We Skip the Hard Part Some of our work today, as we launch this series, is to be honest about why we skip the hard part, and end up missing out on actual forgiveness… For many: religious pressure |  "Jesus said forgive, so I should feel forgiving." The command becomes a performance. We say the words because we're supposed to, not because anything has actually shifted. (Note: forgiveness as a practice you choose vs. a feeling you perform — that distinction matters and we'll return to it.) Toxic positivity/"move on" culture |  American culture is deeply allergic to sitting with pain. We pathologize grief. We celebrate resilience in ways that quietly shame people for still hurting. "Good vibes only" is a spiritual bypass wearing a bumper sticker. Protecting ourselves from further abuse / Not wanting to further upset the person or system that hurt us |  This one deserves weight. Often the pressure to "just forgive" comes from the person or institution that caused harm. The church tells the abuse survivor to forgive the abuser. The family tells the wounded child n

"Show and Tell: Waking Up to Participation" Show and Tell Most of us remember show and tell from elementary school. You brought something from home — something that mattered to you — and you stood up in front of the class and you showed it and you told about it. Why it was special. Where it came from. What it meant. It was a simple practice. But underneath it was something profound: the assumption that what you've experienced, what you've been given, what you've come to love — matters to other people. That your story is worth telling. That the room is changed when you share it. That's the practice we're talking about today. Except the stakes are a little higher than a favorite baseball card. The Viewmaster and the Commissioning For the last month we've been using Easter stories the way you use a ViewMaster — holding them up to the light, letting the depth and color and detail get in us, and then setting them down changed by what we saw. We're not here to relitigate what literally happened two thousand years ago. We're here to ask: what do these stories do to us when we really look at them? What wakes up in us? And here's what's interesting: every single one of the writers of the four gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John… the life and times of Jesus…  ends their account of these resurrection stories with some version of the same moment, which doesn’t always happen.. Jesus gathers the people he's been walking with, and he says: go. In different words, with different emphases, but the same essential movement. “You've seen something. Now go and live like it.” Four different writers, writing to four different communities, with four different angles on the same moment. And in every single account — the last thing he does is send them out. The word for someone who is sent — the Greek word apostolos, where we get the word "apostle" — literally just means: one who is sent. It’s a word basically used in Christian spaces, so it often sounds like a religious status, but that’s it… someone who has been given something, and is sent to share it. That's it. That's the commission. You've been given something. Go share it. The Whole Series in One Movement So let's trace what we've been given over these five weeks — because I think it forms a single, cumulative movement, and I don't want us to miss it. Week one: Mary at the tomb — waking up to being seen. You are known. You are named. You are not invisible. Even in your grief. Even when you can't see clearly. Someone calls you by name. Week two: Breakfast on the beach — waking up to being fed. There is enough. More than enough. The fire was already burning before you got to shore. And the story of scarcity that tells you there isn't? That story is manufactured, and we don't have to live by it. Week three: Thomas returning to the room — waking up to belonging. The wound is allowed in the room. You don't have to clean yourself up to come in. Saying the true thing is what keeps you connected, not what disqualifies you. Week four: The road to Emmaus — waking up to beauty. The image was already there. The presence was walking beside them the whole time. Soften your gaze. Pay attention. What you've been looking for might be right in front of you. And week five — this week: waking up to participation. You've been seen, fed, welcomed, and awakened to beauty. Now the stories ask: what are you going to do with that? Awakening is Not Private Here's where I want to say something plainly, because I think it matters: Awakening is not a PRIVATE ACHIEVEMENT. It is a COMMUNAL RESPONSIBILITY. There is a version of spiritual growth that becomes a kind of spiritual consumerism — where we collect insights, feel transformed in the room where transformation is happening, and then go back to our regular lives essentially unchanged. Where the ViewMaster stays pressed to our eyes and we never put it down and bring what we saw into the world. The commissioning — in all four versions of its telling — pushes

Two travelers walk miles with a stranger, their eyes somehow unable to recognize who he is… until suddenly, they do. Like a Magic Eye image, beauty and meaning are often already present; sometimes we just need to soften our gaze to recognize it.   LINKS:  Current Conversations | Connect | YouTube |  Coming Up TRANSCRIPT: "The Road Is Already There: Waking Up to Beauty" Opening:: The Magic Eye Show Magic Eye… bring a couple ppl up to “race”... ask what their “trick” is… Do you all know what this is? Maybe if you’re like me, you also know the particular frustration of standing in front of one of these and seeing absolutely nothing. Just noise. Just chaos. Everyone else around you is gasping and pointing — I see it, I see it — and you're standing there thinking: there is nothing there. This is a scam! And then — maybe — something shifts. You relax your eyes. You soften your gaze. You stop trying so hard to find it. And suddenly, almost against your will: there it is. A dolphin. A spaceship. A whole three-dimensional world that was present the entire time, completely invisible until you stopped straining to see it. The image was always there. You just needed a DIFFERENT WAY OF LOOKING. That's the story we're sitting with today. The Story: Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35) It's the same day as the resurrection. Two of the people who had been learning from Jesus are walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus — about seven miles away (from here to downtown Hopkins, or here to the State Fair). One is named Cleopas, and he’s traveling with another person the author of this book leaves out… They are walking away. Away from the city where everything fell apart. Away from the site of the execution. Away from the tomb and the wild, confusing reports the women brought back that morning that nobody quite knew what to do with. They're processing. Talking through the wreckage. And a stranger falls into step beside them along the road. The stranger asks what they're talking about. And they stop — looking downcast — and say: are you the only person in Jerusalem who doesn't know what happened? There's something almost darkly funny about that. They proceed to explain the whole story to Jesus. He listens. Then he walks them through the scriptures, reframing everything. They reach Emmaus as evening falls. The stranger acts as if he's continuing on — and they say: stay with us. It's getting late. He stays. They sit down to eat. He takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, gives it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished. They turn to each other: weren't our hearts burning within us while he talked to us on the road? They had been walking with him the whole time and couldn't see it. Until the bread broke, and their eyes softened, and there it was. What They Were Walking Away From I want to sit with this story and look at it through the lens of liberation for a moment, because it matters who these people are and what they were carrying. Cleopas says to the stranger: we had hoped he was the one who would redeem Israel. The Greek word there — lytrōo — means to liberate from an oppressive situation. To set free. These weren't abstract spiritual hopes. They were political hopes. They had hoped this was the one who would break the power of Rome, dismantle the systems of domination, set the occupied people free. And instead he was executed, in an extremely public, humiliating way Rome had devised specifically to crush movements and make examples of leaders. So they're walking away not just from grief, but from the particular grief of crushed political hope. The grief of people who believed change was possible and watched it get squashed. That is not a distant or unfamiliar grief. Many of us carry some version of it. And the story doesn't say: get over it. Go back. Pretend it didn't happen. The story says: a stranger joins you in it. Listens to you talk through it. And eventually — in the act of sharing a meal with an unexp

Thomas gets a bad reputation for doubting, but maybe he was just honest — and maybe that honesty is exactly what brought him back into the room. This week we explore how naming what's broken, rather than hiding it, is often the very thing that opens us to belonging.   LINKS:  Current Conversations | Connect | YouTube |  Coming Up TRANSCRIPT: "Touching the Wound: Waking Up to Belonging" Open: Poor Thomas Starting with a little rehab here… Thomas has been getting a bad reputation for about two thousand years. Doubting Thomas. We've turned his name into an insult— something you call someone who won't take your word for it. Someone who needs proof. Someone who's being difficult. But here's what I want to suggest today: Thomas wasn't being difficult. Thomas was being honest. And that honesty — that refusal to pretend he was okay when he wasn't, to perform belief he didn't have — might be exactly what brought him back into the room. The Story: Thomas (John 20:19–29) (Set the scene) It's the evening of the day of resurrection. The disciples are huddled behind locked doors — afraid, bewildered, not sure what to do next. Jesus appears, shows them his hands and his side, breathes peace on them, and sends them out. It's an extraordinary moment. And Thomas isn't there. We don't know why. The text doesn't say. Maybe he needed air, or to put his feet on grass. Maybe grief just does that — sends us off alone sometimes. The others find him and say: we have seen Jesus. And Thomas says — and here the Greek is vivid and visceral, not politely skeptical: unless I put my finger into the wounds in his hands, unless I thrust my hand into his side — I don’t buy it. Not a mild maybe. A raw demand, dripping with grief. Show me the wound. Don't tell me it's okay. Show me. My most recent– and now maybe permanent– memory of this person is intimately tied to his death… A week later, Jesus appears again. And the first thing he does is turn to Thomas and say: here. Put your finger here. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. He doesn't scold Thomas. He doesn't say why couldn't you just trust the others? He shows him exactly what Thomas asked to see. And Thomas says: my Lord and my God. The most complete confession of faith in the entire Gospel of John — spoken by the one who has  been labeled “the doubter,” as if that’s a bad thing. What Thomas Actually Did I want to slow down and look at what Thomas really did here, because I think we've been reading it wrong. Thomas did not hide his doubt. He did not perform belief he didn't have. He did not sit in the back of the room and smile and nod and go through the motions. He said the true thing. The hard thing. The thing that probably felt embarrassing and exposed and maybe even a little dangerous to say in a room full of people who claimed they'd already seen. I need to touch the wound to believe it. That is not a failure of faith. That is an act of extraordinary courage — the courage of honesty. And because he said the true thing, because he named what was real for him, he got to be there when Jesus showed up again. He was in the room. What if the doubt wasn't the obstacle to belonging? What if naming the doubt was the very thing that kept him connected? Mr. Rogers and the Mentionable Fred Rogers understood something about this — and he spent his whole career trying to teach it to children, and really, to the rest of us. His full version of the famous line is this: "Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone." Not just: if you can say it, you can handle it. But: anything human can be said. And saying it is how we stop being alone in it. Rogers was actually an ordained pastor who believed deeply that the most spiritual thing you could do was tell the truth about

Jesus shows up on a beach after the worst week of his friends' lives and asks a disarmingly simple question: have you eaten anything? This week we push back against the lie of scarcity and practice the defiant, countercultural act of believing there is enough.   LINKS:  Current Conversation | Connect | YouTube |  Coming Up TRANSCRIPT: Eat Something: Waking Up to Being Fed The Question That Shouldn't Be Radical A beat of honesty to begin… This week's message is built around a phrase that should not be controversial. It shouldn't raise anyone's blood pressure. It shouldn't feel political. It shouldn't require courage to say. The phrase is: There actually is enough. And yet… depending on your life experience, where you grew up, what your bank account looks like, what neighborhood you're in… that phrase might land anywhere from obviously true to laughably false to offensive, because you don't know my life. So before we go anywhere else, let's hold all of that. Let's hold the complexity of that sentence in the room together. The Story… Breakfast on the Beach (John 21:1–14) Tell the story… Let’s paint the scene: It's after the resurrection. The disciples are rattled, confused, grief-stained. They've seen what they've seen, but nothing has quite settled yet. So they do the thing people do when they don't know what else to do: they go back to work. Peter says, I'm going fishing. And the others say, We'll come too. They fish all night. They catch nothing. Then, as dawn is breaking, a figure appears on the shore. He calls out: "Hey, you don't have any fish, do you?" They say no. He tells them to throw the net on the other side of the boat. They do — and suddenly there are so many fish they can't haul the net in. And then — and this is one of my favorite mental pictures of Jesus ever — they get to shore, and he’s already has a charcoal fire going. Fish already on it. Bread already there. He doesn't wait for them to bring what they caught and make it into something. There is already something prepared. And he says: "Come and have breakfast." There’s no moment of like… “let's debrief the last week.” or “I need you to understand what just happened.” Come and have breakfast. Pull up some sand and have a seat. The first thing the newly-alive Jesus does with his bewildered, grieving, exhausted friends is to feed them. The Lie of Scarcity Now — here's where we need to be honest with each other, and honest about the world we actually live in. Because it is not true that everyone in this room or in this city, or this country has always had enough to eat. Or enough to feel safe. Or enough to rest. In 2024, nearly 1 in 7 U.S. households — that's 47.9 million people — experienced food insecurity at some point during the year. Nearly 1 in 5 households with children were food insecure, the highest rate since 2014.  And those numbers are not distributed evenly. Almost 1 in 4 Black households, 1 in 5 Hispanic households, and nearly 1 in 3 American Indian and Alaska Native households were food insecure in 2024 — at least double the rate for non-Hispanic white households. These inequities reflect the impact of structural barriers rooted in systemic racism and other forms of discrimination that result in higher rates of poverty.  So when we talk about scarcity — we have to say this plainly: for a lot of people in our lives and community, scarcity has not been a philosophical problem or a spiritual metaphor. It has been Tuesday. An embodied, lived reality. And we have to also say: that is not because the earth doesn't produce enough. It's not because there isn't enough food, or enough housing, or enough care to go around. The pie is plenty big. But the slices are cut unevenly.. Research from the Federal Reserve Board shows that Black families' median wealth was approximately 15% that of white families — $44,900 compared to $285,000 — in 2022. Studies indicate these racial disparities persist even when factors like income and education are accou