09/13/2026

Christians in History:

Dom Hélder Câmara of Recife (1909-1999)

Born in Fortaleza Brazil, Dom Hélder Câmara became a bishop of the Catholic Church and was one of the 20th century’s greatest apostles of nonviolence. After joining a conservative political movement as a young priest, Camara experienced a conversion while ministering among the poor in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Câmara was informally called the "bishop of the slums" and was an advocate of liberation theology. Câmara preached for a church closer to marginalized people. He is famously quoted as having said, "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist."

Câmara worked tirelessly for democracy and human rights in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), even as he watched friends and fellow priests imprisoned, tortured, and killed.  Once, when a hired assassin knocked on the elderly Camara’s door, he was so moved by the sight of the bishop that he blurted out,” I can’t kill you. You are one of the Lord’s.” As evidence of his commitment to justice and to the poor, near the end of the Second Vatican Council, Câmara led a group of forty bishops who celebrated Mass in the Catacombs of Domitilla outside of Rome. (The catacombs are where the early church would meet in secrecy before Christianity became the religion of the Empire under Constantine.) The bishops all signed the Pact of the Catacombs, which challenged their brother bishops to live in humble poverty, to serve the poor, and to be open to all, no matter their beliefs. Câmara died in Recife on 27 August 1999, at the age of 90.

09/06/2026

“It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts: It is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is the Lord’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us. No sermon says all that should be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the Church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. That is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted knowing they hold future promise. We lay foundations that we’ll need further development. We provide yeast that affects far beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very, very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the Master Builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future that is not our own.”                                                             ~Archbishop Oscar Romero

08/30/2026

A Prayer

by Mechthild of Magdeburg

Lord, I am grateful to You

that in Your mysterious love

You have taken away from me

all earthly wealth,

and that You now clothe and feed me

through the kindness of others.

Lord, I am grateful to You

that since You have taken away from me

the sight of my eyes,

You care for me now

through the eyes of others.

Lord, I am grateful to You

that since You have taken away from me

the strength of my hands and heart,

You care for me now

through the hands and hearts of others.

Lord, I pray for them,

that You will reward them in Your love,

that they may continue to faithfully serve

and care until they come to a happy end

in eternity with You.  

08/23/2026

It Would Be Easier to Pray if I Were Clear

by Ted Loder

O Eternal One, it would be easier for me to pray

     if I were clear

          and of a single mind and a pure heart;

     if I could be done hiding from myself

          and from you, even in my prayers.

But, I am who I am,

     mixture of motives and excuses,

          blur of memories,

              quiver of hopes,

     knot of fear,

           tangle of confusion,

                and restless with love, for love.

I wander somewhere between

     gratitude and grievance,

          wonder and routine,

                high resolve and undone dreams,

                     generous impulses and unpaid bills.

Come, find me, Lord.

Be with me exactly as I am.

Help me find me, Lord.

     Help me accept what I am,

          so I can begin to be yours.

Make me something small enough to snuggle,

     young enough to question,

           simple enough to giggle,

                old enough to forget,

                         foolish enough to act for peace;

     skeptical enough to doubt

           the sufficiency of anything but you,

     and attentive enough to listen

           as you call me out of the tomb of my timidity

                into the chancy glory of my possibilities

                     and the power of your presence.

08/16/2026

For when you just need to put one foot

in front of the other

From The Lives We Actually Have:

100 Blessings for Imperfect Days, 

 by Kate Bowler and Jessica Ritchie

Oh God,

the thought of trying for a new & improved me

makes me tired.

I am barely getting anywhere,

so draw me closer to a different vision,

one that sees I don’t need perfection—

I need love.

Free me from the expectation

that life should always be better.

From the everyday stressors—

the bills, the pressure, the dependents,

the existential fears about the future

and the worries of right now.

I am threadbare.

Blessed are we, remembering

that the world is not ours to shoulder alone.

Help us put one foot in front of the other

as best we can.

Oh God, today,

give us enough to go on,

give us hope to see a future,

give us joy to see a present

lit up by your love.

08/09/2026

My father was sharing with me about a church service he attended earlier this week. It was a worship gathering done in the style of what is known as a “dinner church,” which typically contains three movements: communion, a meal together, and some type of Bible study. The particular church he was attending is in a lower income community with a higher homeless population and those folks are part of this particular gathering, so often it can be a rougher group of folks. On the evening my dad was visiting, one of the men that dad was eating with suddenly took issue with another man who was at the table with them. There was then a yelling match with lots of threats of violence and everyone had to patiently and calmly make sure that the two men wouldn’t come to blows before continuing on with the remainder of the meal and moving onto their Bible study and communion together. Rather than being dismayed by these events, my father was laughing uproariously at the situation saying with great joy, “It was a wonderful worship! It was worshiping with exactly the type people Jesus actually hung around with!”

 Sometimes we like to imagine the crowds that surrounded Jesus as being reverent and awed by his mere presence and the message of the good news, and I’m sure there were moments like that, but I have to wonder if a lot of the time, it was just pure chaos. The crowds must have been filled with people with all kinds of issues, concerns, or axes to grind with other people present. It’s hard for me to believe that there wouldn’t have been hecklers and those in disagreement with Jesus shouting and causing all kinds of ruckus. And yet that type of setting was exactly where Jesus ministered, healed, taught, and broke bread with others. If he had only waited for peaceful and serene moments where people were on their best behavior to share the Good News, he wouldn’t have been able to share much of it, would he?

08/02/2026

I Screamed at God 

by ullie-kaye

I screamed at God

in my car today.

If my steering wheel

wouldn’t have heard it

then my pillow would have.

Or the tides.

Or the trees.

And I don’t know

if I should beg Him

for forgiveness or

if He’s happy that

the words I bring Him

aren’t always pretty.

Because most days

I’m not strong.

I’m just a weak human

with a strong God.

07/26/2026

What I Learned from My Mother

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once you know how to do this, you can never refuse. To every house you enter, you must offer healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

zacdbzacdbzacdbzacdbz

I found the gripping reflection by Julia Kasdorf, above, in a book recently added to my library, The Good Funeral: Death, Grief, and the Community of Care, by Thomas Long & Thomas Lynch. It seemed appropriate for this week.

07/19/2026

In recent months, Clarke and I have returned to having a schedule that allows us to share in a daily devotion together, and we have chosen to revisit one of our favorites: Common Prayer: a Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals, written by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro. Today, I thought I would share this reflection on the challenges of Peacemaking.

    Peacemaking begins with what we can change—ourselves. But it does not end there. We are to be peacemakers in a world riddled with violence. That means interrupting violence with imagination, on our streets and in our world. This peace that is “not like any way the empire brings peace” is rooted in the nonviolence of the cross, where we see a Savior who loves his enemies so much He died for them. Peace is often not our instinct, which is why it must be cultivated and grown in us. Even Jesus’ key disciple, Peter, picks up his sword when the soldiers approach Jesus. Jesus’ response is brilliant: He scolds Peter, and then He heals the wounded persecutor, only to be dragged away and hung on a Roman cross. If ever there were a case for “just war” or justified violence to protect the innocent, Peter had it. Yet Jesus rebukes his logic of the sword.

    The early Christians said, “When Jesus disarmed Peter, He disarmed every Christian.” For hundreds of years, Christians were never seen carrying swords, and they followed the way of the Prince of Peace even unto death, loving their enemies and blessing those who curse them. It does not look like a good strategy for running an empire, but it is the narrow way that leads to life. Undoubtedly, it does not always seem to “work.” As we look at history, and even as we read the Scriptures, there seems to be evidence that violence has worked at times and failed at times, just as nonviolence has worked at times and failed at times. In the end, the question is, Which looks most like Jesus? For we are called not just to be successful but to be faithful to the way of the Cross, even unto death. The way of the cross did not seem to work on Friday, but the promise is that Sunday is coming. In the end, Love wins.

07/12/2026

Jesus walked among the people and spoke the words of peace and brotherhood to any who would listen.

Suppose we did that.

Just imagine it!...

What if we really did it?

What if we dropped our conferences and

     our high-level politics

 and our big-time lectures and our capital investments

and went out among the people

as brothers (and sisters) and (people) of God—

Might we find the divine spark in our own time:

Might we not find followers,

hundreds, then thousands, our brothers/sisters and fellow (citizens)?

What if we touched the chord that set the   chorus?

What if we uttered the word that started the prayer?

All the longing of the people

who we have left behind,

all the hope of men (and women)

who yet may seek,

all the profound yearning of the children of God—

waiting to be set in motion.

What if we dared?

--O brethren,

let us pray.”

Shared from October 1950 issue of The Gospel Messenger, Invocation for Another Conference.  Authored by Kermit Eby, adapted by Werner Bloomberg & (Melody Capsel)

07/05/2026

God of every people and every language, you spoke creation into being and called it good.

You formed many cultures, many songs, many stories, and breathed one Spirit through them all.

Forgive us when we have feared difference, when we choose comfort instead of community, when we listen to reply instead of to love.

Teach your church to accept one another as a gift, not a threat.

Slow down our speech and deepen our listening. Let humility be our strength, and curiosity be our attitude.

At your table, remove the walls we rebuild. Where accents differ, foster understanding.

Where history wounds, heal; and let patience develop. Where power comes together, teach us to share.

Make us a people who notice who is missing. People who create space before taking space, who learn before leading, and who follow Christ together rather than alone.

Send us into our neighborhoods as neighbors, gentle in spirit, courageous in justice, and loyal in friendship across all boundaries.

May our life together declare that your kingdom is not one culture welcomed, but everyone reconciled in love.

In the name of Jesus, who gathers us and transforms us into one body.  Amen!         !            !

Shared from June 2026 issue of Messenger Magazine.  Authored by Founa I. Augustin Badet, Director-Intercultural Ministries for the CoB.

06/28/2026

“First, we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.”

~ From The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard

     Far too often, I fall into patterns of thinking about how amazingly blessed I am going to be when…

…the house is finally organized the way I want.

…my devotional and prayer life has reached a certain level of discipline.

…that debt is paid off and there is finally more financial freedom.

…I retire and finally have more free time.

…the situation I am most worried about is finally resolved.

     On its face, there is nothing wrong about looking with an expectation of hope towards the future. It is arguably an important discipline of our faith. However, when I find myself only concentrating on the potential joys of future blessings it becomes easy to miss the moments of blessing that are occurring in my messy and chaotic life. Right now. When and where I least expect it. And once I start to notice, once I follow the advice of that old hymn, I find that the blessings I already have are beyond count and I realized that God never waits to provide us with blessing. God isn’t waiting for enough to have been accomplished or a more opportune, organized moment to divvy out blessings.    After all, today is

 all we are really promised anyway.

      Rather, God has already woven blessing into the very fabric of our lives, into the nature of creation itself. We are blessed. Where we are and as we are. We just have to be willing to see what God has already done.

06/14/2021

Take His Peace

©1976 by William J. Gaither and Gloria Gaither.

When the whirlwinds of doubt, churn their way into your soul, Take His peace.

When your world’s reduced to ashes, leaving nothing pure and whole, Take His peace.

There amidst the broken wreckage in the midnight of your day,

In the apex of the storm cloud, He’s the quiet place to stay.  Take His peace.

When you’re worried and you’re fearful for the children you hold dear,

Let a loving Heavenly Father share each joy and dry each tear, Take His peace.

God has promised if we lead them and we guide them from the start,

Then the seed of truth and peace shall find rich soil in their heart. Take His peace.

When your mind gropes for answers to the questions that you face;

When your past comes back to haunt you and you need amazing grace,

Aww, there’s an answer beyond question…it’s the truth for which you yearn,

There’s forgiveness without merit, there’s a love you needn’t earn, Take His peace.

When you’re weary of the struggle and you need a place to rest,

When you lose more than you’re winning, and you’re failing every test, Take His peace.

There’s no need to fight a battle that’s been fought and won before,

You can lay back in the victory, freely share His boundless store,

Take His peace.    Take His peace!

06/21/2026

Father's Day Prayer  

by Kirk Loadman

Let us praise those fathers who have striven to balance the demands of work, marriage, and children with an honest awareness of both joy and sacrifice. Let us praise those fathers who, lacking a good model for a father, have worked to become a good father.

Let us praise those fathers who by their own account were not always there for their children, but who continue to offer those children, now grown, their love and support. Let us pray for those fathers who have been wounded by the neglect and hostility of their children.

Let us praise those fathers who, despite divorce, have remained in their children's lives. Let us praise those fathers whose children are adopted, and whose love and support has offered healing.

Let us praise those fathers who, as stepfathers, freely chose the obligation of fatherhood and earned their step children's love and respect. Let us praise those fathers who have lost a child to death, and continue to hold the child in their heart.

Let us praise those men who have no children, but cherish the next generation as if they were their own.
Let us praise those men who have "fathered" us in their role as mentors and guides. Let us praise those men who are about to become fathers; may they openly delight in their children.

And let us praise those fathers who have died, but live on in our memory and whose love continues to nurture us.

06/07/2026

     One of the unexpected joys of Spring in my home in Indy has been the humming birds. We’d never actually seen any hummingbirds in our area, and I wasn’t really sure that in a major city there was actually going to be much of a population of them. Much to our delight, they started showing up immediately and would even hover at the windows eye level with our cats (much to their excitement and frustration). Now we have come to expect them as a typical harbinger of warmer weather. When the windows are open, even when we aren’t looking, we know that they are there, because we can hear the tell-tale sound of their particular wings fluttering at that amazingly rapid pace. It’s beautiful and calming and always brings a smile to my face. It also always surprises me though. My logical brain is taken aback that the sounds of the smallest bird in the world’s fluttering wings can be heard so clearly over the street sounds of a city of almost 900K very loud and noisy humans. It seems like such a thing would be impossible. Maybe I hear them because I am listening for them.

     This is how I imagine it is with us and the Spirit. The Spirit is always present, even when we haven’t taken the time to previously notice or pay attention, and once we become aware of it and attuned to listening for it, all the background noise and distraction can’t prevent us from hearing it. God is ever speaking to us, through the Word, through Creation, through our Neighbors and our Fellowship of Faith. The only question is if we are listening.

05/31/2026

Poured Into Our Hearts

A Blessing for Trinity Sunday

by Jan L. Richardson

"And hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love

has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit

that has been given to us."

–Romans 5.5

Like a cup

like a chalice

like a basin

like a bowl

when the Spirit comes

let it find our heart

like this

shaped like something

that knows how to receive

what is given

that knows how to hold

what comes to fill

that knows how to gather itself

around what arrives as

unbidden

unsought

unmeasured

love.

05/24/2026

 Pentecost

by Malcolm Guite

Today we feel the wind beneath our wings
Today  the hidden fountain flows and plays
Today the church draws breath at last and sings
As every flame becomes a Tongue of praise.
This is the feast of fire, air, and water
Poured out and breathed and kindled into earth.
The earth herself awakens to her maker
And is translated out of death to birth.
The right words come today in their right order
And every word spells freedom and release
Today the gospel crosses every border
All tongues are loosened by the Prince of Peace
Today the lost are found in His translation.

Whose mother tongue is Love in every nation.

05/17/2026

     I’m not particularly good at being still. When I consider the words of the hymn, “Peace, be still, and know that I am God,” I long for a magic day, a blessed season of life, when I will finally have a pattern of living that will be settled enough or secure enough that I can finally make regular, sustained time to just be peaceful and still with God. I wish for more than just the few blessed moments that I can be snatched here or there in the usual chaos of my life. This isn’t necessarily surprising, having grown up in a culture and society that often equates busyness and productivity. 

     Sometimes, even my prayer and devotional time can fall into the patterns of productivity. Placing completely self-inflicted expectations surrounding checklists of who to pray for, or needing to read a certain amount of scripture in a specific timeframe, or only giving myself time in my day for meditation and reflection if it will be able to have “real quality” to it. And yet those words from Christ in scripture, “Peace be still,” are not spoken as advice for a more grounded spiritual reflection, but rather a command to a literal storm he and the disciples find themselves in.

     While peace and stillness can be cultivated in spiritual discipline, it would serve me well to remember that more often, stillness is something we must learn to demand in the middle of life’s storms. Something we faithfully carve out in the middle of life’s chaos, when we are most busy or feeling overwhelmed, and when we seem to have the least time. Not because God needs it from us as a demonstration of faithfulness and devotion, but because we need it for ourselves, so we might better know God’s peace.

05/10/2026

    The history of our modern Mothers’ Day is a complex one. The version of Mothers’ Day celebrated today is rooted in the work of Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis (1832–1905) and her daughter, Anna Jarvis, who established the holiday to honor her mother. After having more than a dozen children, most of whom died from diseases such as diphtheria or measles, which were common during her day in the Appalachian area of Virginia, Ann Maria worked hard in her community to try to help other mothers and families avoid the tragedies she had suffered. She organized “Mothers’ Work Clubs” and promoted special “Mothers’ Work Days,” when women would collaboratively collect trash and undertake other projects to improve local environmental conditions and their neighbors’ understanding of hygiene. The focus of Jarvis’ work changed with the Civil War. Her region was deeply divided with local soldiers fighting on both sides of the conflict, and guerilla warfare was rampant. Jarvis insisted that the women’s groups she organized help both Confederate and Union troops who were sick or wounded, and she worked to promote peace and unity following the war. In 1868, despite threats of violence, she organized a “Mothers’ Friendship Day” to bring families from both sides of the war together to try to restore a sense of community. It was her deep belief that women—and especially mothers—were best suited to bring people together with a goal of peace.   

     Her daughter, Anna, set out to honor her mother’s legacy by establishing a national Mothers’ Day on the second Sunday in May, the day her mother had died. Anna, who never married or had children of her own, did not focus the holiday on peace activism but on the idea of honoring one’s own mother. Anna succeeded in her quest for official recognition, and President Wilson issued a proclamation of the first national Mothers’ Day just before the start of World War I in 1914. Anna Jarvis, however, soon grew discontented as she noted increasing commercialization of the celebration. What she had wanted to be an earnest “holy day” had become, in her eyes, a crass holiday benefitting florists and greeting card companies more than honoring the mothering work done by women. Anna was so distraught over the way Americans observed the holiday she had worked hard to establish that she started a petition to have it recalled in 1943.

    Mothers’ Day provides an excellent opportunity to reflect on and honor the role of mothers in our own families and in the rich and complicated history of our nation.

05/03/2026

    A fellow pastor once shared the story of when his normally outgoing and boisterous father was in the hospital following a major heart surgery. While he was with his father, members from his father’s church came to visit and pray with him. His father looked frail and was hooked up to lots of machines, so he was not in the setting or in the emotional or conversational state that the fellow members were used to seeing him in, and the pastor observed that the visitors seemed awkward and uncomfortable at times while they fumbled with what words to say. The pastor noted and recognized their kindness and commitment in visiting during such a difficult time, but also could not help to think that they weren’t very good at it. In the end though, none of that apparently mattered, because upon their leaving his father turned to him and said with great conviction, "Anyone who doesn't have a church home is stupid."

    While both my fellow pastor and I would strongly hesitate to use his verbiage as an outreach effort or argument for the importance of the role of a church community in people’s lives, the intention of the sentiment is nevertheless appreciated. There are times when God's people do not live up to the expectation to love one another which Jesus so clearly lays out for us. However, this is often less because we do not care, but rather out of fear. Fear that we won't do it right. Fear that we won't be enough. Fear that we will intrude where we might not be welcome. And yet, we have also experienced ourselves over and over again what love looks like in the company of God's people, in spite of (and perhaps sometimes because of) its imperfection. The kind of love that shares time, resources, hopes, and prayers even when they aren’t as polished as we might wish. Love lived out through the sort of folks who, though far from perfect, often do what they can to build up, to support, to simply walk alongside those in need. To walk in the footsteps of Christ to the best of their ability. Leading with presence rather than perfection.