Here is the Church.

Here is the Steeple.

Open the Doors and See all the People.

I had an interesting encounter today. I attended the start of a new satellite church in my own tradition. I’d been waiting for some time to attend, but it did not go as planned. What follows is merely a reflection on how I experienced the morning.

After a year away from the US without access to a United Methodist Church, and after some time in California where Methodism appeared quite different, I had been looking forward to the reopening of a United Methodist Church just next to my home. I had been anticipating today for several months and was excited to make my way over about 15 minutes before the initial service.

As I turned into the parking lot, I realized that I should have come earlier. There was a line of cars waiting to enter the lot, and I had to go to the very last section to find a spot. The church had done a great job of providing attendants in the lot to help control the chaos. I found a space and parked—then I walked up the back steps to find the entrance to the church.

When I entered the foyer, I was greeted by everyone I passed. It was a very welcoming and non-threatening experience. I made my way to the sanctuary entrance and was greeted with another line. It was immediately apparent that there were more people than the church could hold. Just my estimation—but there were roughly 200 more people than the sanctuary could accommodate.

Volunteers were scrambling to gather more seats, including deck chairs from outdoors. I found a place along the back wall and stood. The sanctuary continued to pack in more people.

In very short order, the crowd began to overwhelm me—and it became more than I could stomach. Years of military trauma have left me hypervigilant in unfamiliar crowds, and I could feel my fight-or-flight instincts taking over.

I could feel my heart rate increasing and my breathing becoming more rapid and shallow. My anxiety was skyrocketing, and still the people kept coming. Like many other Afghanistan combat veterans, I am not a fan of crowds, especially crowds of people I do not know. And I am even less a fan of crowds that aren’t being properly managed. There was no room to put all these people.

My mind went immediately to what might happen in the room if there was an emergency or someone up to no good. It was simply more than I could handle. I quietly made my exit, and immediately the anxiety began to resolve—yet several hours later I am still agitated by the experience.

The church is sanctuary. It should be a safe place for all who inhabit it. On this Sunday, that is not what I found when I attempted to enter a place of safety and worship. Again—I do not question the church’s intentions, but I do want to raise questions that clearly were not asked as this day was planned.

Having watched as an outside observer in their Facebook group for the new start, I knew that the home congregation was seeding the initial service to ensure that the room felt full. I believe they did just that—but perhaps there should have been some clear guidance on numbers and a limit to the seeding.

Creating a satellite location is indeed a sacred project. Drawing the circle wider created a place of worship and belonging for those seeking a spiritual home. But overfilling the space on the first day with those who will normally worship elsewhere failed to account for those unable to find peace in the midst of an unfamiliar crowd.

I may be the only person who left—I do not know. I will try again on another date and another date after that if I need to do so.

My experience today raises a set of questions that may have been overlooked but that are essential to embracing the spiritual lives of those who have served in the military over these last 25 years, or who have experienced trauma through other circumstances.

What does ministry to the Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Iran generation look like? What questions should be asked? What does sanctuary mean in the lives of those who have trouble settling into peace? What is the church’s role and responsibility—if any—to resolve this anxiety?

Existentially, I knew the spirit of the room. No one had any ill will or intention to raise my anxiety—in fact I believe they were attempting to do just the opposite—yet unless church leaders plan intentionally, the needs and feelings of veterans and others similarly affected risk being overlooked. And in a period of our history when more than 17 veterans die by suicide each day, the church simply must expand its planning considerations to account for those who experience the world through a different lens.

Creating sanctuary—not a room, but a spirit—requires intentional thought and planning. It requires answers to questions about the meaning of trauma in the lives of those who may come to the church’s doors, and it requires purposeful accommodation to the problem of anxiety. In his work, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk notes that trauma is remembered by the body beyond the normal concept of psyche—that it can reshape the brain and body and leave the survival system reactive long after the threat has passed. This is not offered as an excuse, but as the means to fully understand the impact of trauma in the lives of those who have experienced it. The church must embrace the hope that sanctuary offers something more than sacred space.

While not wholly analogous to combat trauma, the disciples carry a similar imprint of trauma in their bodies after the crucifixion. John records their gathering behind locked doors as they hide from the powers that threaten them in the same way Jesus was threatened. They create their own safe sanctuary in a private place, hoping against hope that they will not be found out. Although the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them, bringing peace into the anxiety of their gathering. He does not shame them; instead, he comforts them in their trauma.

What if sanctuary is then the acknowledgement of the gathering’s anxiety—complete with its safeguards—and not merely the preservation of a dedicated space?

I have no way of knowing how many other combat veterans were gathered in that place this morning. With over 500 people present, I’m certain that there were others. But trauma isn’t the exclusive domain of veterans. Churches are filled with the victims of trauma, and thanks be to God for the sanctuary they provide. Invisible wounds enter the doors of every single church, every single Sunday. The myriad details of that catalogue of trauma are endless, yet the church is charged with welcoming the stranger with whatever bags they happen to be carrying. This requires careful and considerate contemplation of how the church makes space for the anxiety people carry and provides true sanctuary for the woes of the world.

The same questions must be asked about people with disabilities or other access needs whose experience of sacred space may differ from that of those who planned it.

What then should sanctuary look like?

Capacity should be observed. The church is not in the business of turning away people, but it must be prepared to feed the masses when the gathering is larger than expected. In today’s case—those seeding the congregation could have been invited to make room for new people. The leadership could have added an additional service time to allow for the excess crowd to return later in the morning.

Clear aisles and visible exits should be the expectation rather than a convenience. Accommodation should be made for those who need additional space or an awareness of their surroundings—including overflow spaces that account for anxiety in crowded spaces.

Ushers and greeters should be taught to recognize the signs of those triggered by the experience. Guests should be free to walk away without comment or being pursued. Space should be maintained, and clear exits marked to ensure that no one feels trapped or threatened by the moment.

Sanctuary never fully resolves anxiety, but it does create space for anxiety to be resolved of its own accord. Anxious people should not be expected to explain or justify their needs. They should likewise not be expected to overcome their anxiety or conceal their anxiety in order to be welcomed with sanctuary. They should be welcomed and cared for just like the man in the ditch on the road to Jericho.

Trauma enters the lives of individuals in a myriad of ways, but regardless of its source, it clouds the lens through which the recipient sees the world. For me it is blood-stained glass. I don’t say that to amplify the image, but to explain that I will always see the world through a lens clouded by the loss of those who are no longer here to experience the same sanctuary. As a church, we must begin to account for the perspective and experience of those who encounter the world through the persistently clouded lens of trauma.

Today was not good for me. There is no guarantee that even if all of my questions had been asked and answered as plans for the first service were made that my experience could have been avoided. But that’s the thing—I don’t have the luxury of choosing when anxiety will appear. I just do what I can to live through it.

I will go back.

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This time it was someone I knew, and it went something like this. I’m not good right now. Can you meet me in fifteen minutes? Yes, that would be great. And so, fifteen minutes later we sat down and he shared the depth of the pain he was experiencing.

What unfolded over the next hour was a story of betrayal and pain that had reached a dangerous point.

I listened. I encouraged. I wanted to understand what had brought him to this moment. And he answered with details that surprised me and disappointed me—the person at the center of the story was someone he had trusted, and that trust had been repeatedly violated.

What I heard that morning disturbed me. In fact, it rattled me because I had been completely unaware of what he was experiencing.

When he finished sharing his grief, I acknowledged it and validated his feelings. And then I expressed my concern for what he’d said and recommended that we find additional support.

I told him that he had come to me because he knew something needed to change. I asked that he trust someone else as he had trusted me.

And he did.

I made sure he was connected with the care he needed.

Over time, the course he had imagined for his life would change.

Looking back on that phone call, he was placing what remained of his hope with the one person he trusted to listen.

I only listened and cared. I could not manufacture hope for him, but he allowed me close enough to his anxiety to help stoke the hope he realized was slipping away.

What happened in that moment was sacred. The encounter allowed a pause in the chain reaction—space to understand that the world seemed upside down but was still worth experiencing.

In the midst of life’s storm, when everything is in turmoil, sometimes what we need most is an anchor to something stable. For some reason he chose me to be that anchor point on that early morning. I think it was trust.

Perhaps this is something that we misunderstand about hope. Hope is not only something that we cultivate inside ourselves; sometimes it survives precisely because we invest what is left with a person who can stoke it.

An anchor does not stop the tossing and turning of the waves, but it can keep us from being driven onto the shoals of our lives. That is what happened that day.

But once we find that small moment of stability, our focus returns to the horizon. What is next? We want to speed through the storm and reach the calm again, yet this is not as simple as it may seem.

We need smaller goals as we seek to restore the balance in our lives. Navigating to the next waypoint helps us plot a course toward restoration, even when we cannot yet know what restoration will look like. He allowed me to be both the anchor and the first waypoint, and more waypoints immediately followed.

Support. Care. Healing. All waypoints on the journey to restored wholeness. Our lives are plotted with waypoints, and sometimes we need to shift those intermediate goals when the course we had planned is interrupted by heavy seas.

PIM—Position and Intended Movement—describes where we are and where we intend to go. But the course we intend to follow can change when circumstances require it. There are storms to avoid, heavy seas, and unexpected ports to explore. Life’s PIM unfolds in exactly the same way—and this is what began with that early morning phone call.

Life has a way of introducing hazards of which we cannot conceive. It requires us to remain willing to adjust our course. The waypoints we had plotted in our ideal plan for life are sometimes overwhelmed by the storms of life. And we are forced to plot a new course, finding different waypoints toward an unexpected destination.

This requires us to attend to the horizon—to look toward the next waypoint, even when we cannot see all the way to the goal we are pursuing. OTH—over the horizon—describes what lies beyond our present line of sight. In our lives, we sometimes have to orient ourselves toward goals that remain beyond our present line of sight.

His original PIM did not survive. He did.

He has since earned his degree and has adjusted his course so that he can become an anchor for others who experience the storm.

This is the greatest gift a chaplain can receive: to discover that stumbling to answer an early morning phone call and simply listening can lead to something far more beautiful than either person could conceive on that day.

Hope. Hope may be the most beautiful revelation of the story. It can be difficult to define, it can be derived from different wells, but it can become the light that helps us navigate the storms of life. Throughout thirty years of ministry, I have come to understand hope as something essential to cultivate in our lives and in the lives of others. It is not derived from some kitschy phrase about resilience or spirituality but rooted in the fundamental good revealed to us through imago Dei.

Each of us reflects the image of God. Fundamental to that image is the desire to live and to blossom. No matter how rough the seas of life, hope helps us see through the storm.

It is easy to assume that the opposite of this hope is despair, but I have come to believe that it is anxiety instead. Everyone faces anxiety in life—some more than others.

Anxiety is not the same as fear. Fear is almost always directed at an object; we fear something. Anxiety presents differently because it forces us to confront uncertainty, finitude, guilt, grief, death, and meaninglessness.

Paul Tillich describes this as nonbeing.

When anxiety threatens to overwhelm us, we lose our ability to see clearly over the horizon. We lose sight of the next waypoint. We cannot find a place to anchor. Simply put, anxiety disrupts our ability to navigate.

I have not always been the anchor. Sometimes I am the one who has needed the help of others to see through the anxiety that clouded my own vision in the midst of the storm. Dark thoughts have crept in; the light has been obscured. Hope has at times faded. I am thankful that others have provided that safe anchorage in my own life.

Something similar happens in Acts 27. Paul is being transported to Rome when a violent storm overwhelms the ship. For days the storm churns and they are no longer able to see the sun or the stars. Everything they rely upon to navigate becomes obscured. They fall victim to forces they have no power to control.

And then comes the detail that matters most for us: their hope evaporates into the storm.

Paul speaks directly into that loss of hope. He does not promise that the ship will be saved. He does not promise them a return to the PIM of their journey. Instead, he offers them a seed of hope: there is a future after the storm.

They cannot see the shore. But they take soundings and discover that the water is growing shallower. They understand that they are approaching danger. And so, they do something straightforward and simple—they drop four anchors. And held for the moment, they wait for the daylight.

Truth be told, nothing really changed with the storm. The waves still crashed, the shoals were still an ever-present threat, but the anchorage allowed them time to wait for the morning.

In a time when navigation depended heavily on celestial observation and line-of-sight, the anchors gave them time to see again in the morning light.

On that morning so many years ago, a simple phone call did not quell the storm. It did not calm the anxiety. But it did create the possibility for a restoration of sight—the possibility of seeing beyond the storm.

We are given a great gift when we become the momentary anchor in the storm of someone else’s life. We cannot manufacture their hope, calm the waters of their storm, restore their PIM, or promise what lies over the horizon. But we can provide something to hold onto until the morning comes.

Sometimes we are the anchor. Sometimes we are the ones hoping to cast them.

While the horizon limits how far we can see, it tells us nothing about what lies beyond it.

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The collective atmosphere was the perfect Louisiana gumbo. I encountered frustrated passengers and the train staff that were exasperated by them. I met interesting characters who were probably better suited to the days of steamships and Mark Twain. I remember praying that the air conditioning would keep working because a Louisiana swamp is not a place you want to hang out when it is hot.

My own experience of the day was enlightening. I learned more about the extent of my patience, and I developed a lifelong habit of packing water and snacks for any journey. I learned that I truly love train travel, but that Amtrak belongs in the same era as the steamships and Samuel Clemens. Eventually I was resigned to the unfolding experience.

Every year, during the first week of August, my mind drifts back to the journey on that train. As my spirit revisits the memory of one particular moment in my life and ministry, I am drawn again to consider how our lives can be like the journey on the City of New Orleans.

I also remember the feeling of delay—how the unknown created anxiety and frustration, how the boredom seeped in, and how I had too much time to study. In retrospect, I think the journey was teaching me how to resolve my own frustrations and how to process moments in life that have suddenly gone off the track.

The memory of that journey remains fresh in my mind as I consider what the train teaches us about life. The train always moves forward, it continues along the track, it seeks to complete its journey, and when delayed it maintains its desire to arrive.

I have come to understand what that particular train ride has done to give me some of the tools to make sense of a moment in life that transformed every single thing that followed.

Grief affects all of us, and it affects all of us in different ways. Sure, the basic building blocks are the same—but every single one of us encounters moments of grief influenced by both the magnitude of the loss and the state we are already experiencing at the time. Complicating things further, every experience of grief we encounter risks revealing the cumulative effect of past grief. Like the train, the process of exploring grief deposits us somewhere along a journey toward healing but we often find that we have not progressed very far on the journey of a past encounter with grief. That was the case with me, as I was still working to make sense of my time in mortuary affairs—a journey that even now continues. And I found myself dropped into an experience of grief unlike that deployment but even more immense.

The experience of new loss—however that presents—has a way of returning us immediately to the moment of a past grief. For me, the magnitude of loss in that August immediately ripped off the bandaid of mortuary affairs that I was so carefully and diligently maintaining. It exposed for me just how deep the journey can be and how much further I still need to go just to find something approximating normal.

Grief is a part of the human condition. In many ways it is life’s attempt to heal loss and fill in the absence created through that loss.

No matter where I have found myself engaging grief in the lives of the people I have encountered, the concept of closure is never far from the surface. We seem to have created a cultural norm that defines closure as the ultimate goal of grief. I have, however, found that closure is a fleeting concept—that truth be told—closure is an ideal that we never fully realize.

It’s understandable why we have spent so much time developing this potential outcome. Grief hurts. It immediately shifts us from the day-to-day experiences of our life directly to the deepest parts of the valley of the shadows, inviting us to struggle deeply with both the journey through the valley and any number of paths that promise a route back to the summit.

On top of this reality, I have observed that people very much want to arrive in the mythical land of closure but simultaneously deny themselves permission to journey down the path because they conflate their own progress with the sense that they are being disloyal to the person lost.

At least in my own experience, and from what I’ve gleaned over thirty years of ministry, there is no such thing as closure per se. That is to say that we never arrive at a place where the grief is fully resolved and that we are restored to where we were before the loss. Instead, we are all transformed—the question is what we do through that transformation.

In my own life, I’ve encountered grief almost constantly. Some of that grief has been realized through the loss of family members, but it has been compounded by the loss of those I have served in ministry. And unlike many of my clergy colleagues, the losses I encounter are almost always the young instead of the aged. At least for me, this makes the burden different.

In time the weight of compounded grief has changed how I see and approach the world. It has made me increasingly introverted and isolated while also making me much more empathetic toward the needs of others, especially in crisis. I’ve also noticed an increasing desire to ensure that people receive just treatment in their lives—especially when they are beholden to a system that is designed to treat people equally but sometimes fails. These may seem like positive outcomes, but they have become intensified and as a result affect relationships in ways that I do not always perceive or understand. And at the same time, they have honed my pastoral care skills around death and dying such that it is my strongest skillset—I no longer walk into the presence of loss wondering what to do or say.

I’ve come to believe that grief follows a journey much like a train, but that it appears like a glacier: large, overwhelming, and multi-faceted. Sometimes it grows, sometimes it recedes, and on occasion it calves. The formation and recession of glaciers unfolds at a glacial pace. The same can be said of grief—nothing is fast, nothing is certain. But also, like glaciers, different processes can be occurring simultaneously—affecting different facets at different rates.

The ideal closest to the mythical concept of closure is the return of Joy to our lives. Joy polishes the facets of the glacier. I’ve come to believe that Joy is the closest thing to what I think people mean by closure. Grief can still be part of our lives, even if combined with a return to Joy.

Joy helps us move forward on the journey, but love is what makes it meaningful.

In the end, I believe love—abiding love—for the one we lost is the summit we are struggling to reach. It is where the train has always been heading. It is what happens when grief calves and abiding love remains.

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Sisyphus’ story has endured for millennia because we find ourselves reflected in its simplicity. We identify with what it means to invest ourselves in work that never finds completion, attempting in vain to solve the same problems we’ve solved before. We wake each morning with the realization that yesterday’s efforts affected the outcome less than planned. Sisyphus has become for us a universal image of perseverance in the face of human futility.

Albert Camus believed that the story of Sisyphus could be read as a triumph. Even though the gods had condemned Sisyphus to an endless task, Camus argued that Sisyphus still found his own freedom by embracing the task. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he famously announced. His interpretation is arresting—one that has shaped generations of readers who have continued to find dignity in their refusal to surrender to despair.

I think I understand why.

For my formative years, that was how I understood the story. I admired endurance while falling into the trap of believing the highest calling was to be the person willing to keep pushing toward the prize when everyone else had gone home. I even attempted to mirror it in my own life and career.

My attention eventually wandered from the man and settled on his task instead. I began to wonder whether the myth had distracted us from a deeper meaning. We spend so much of our time admiring Sisyphus’ determination that we have failed to critique the world that requires so much of him in the first place.

Why is he the only one carrying the weight?

The question risks sounding absurd for a myth never intended to include another character. Yet myths persist precisely because they refuse to remain confined to their original telling. They become capable mirrors for later generations to see their own reflection.

We recognize ourselves in Sisyphus fundamentally because we too have carried burdens that seemed impossible and some that truly were. We are less able to perceive how often those burdens exist because we often miss that something foundational has stopped working as intended.

Eventually, a responsibility that was once shared quietly shifts to become the responsibility of one person. Sometimes this happens because that person is gifted for the exact purpose. Sometimes because they are compassionate. And sometimes still because they simply refuse to accept failure. No matter the reason, the pattern is remarkably consistent, and in retrospect—crystal clear. Once a person begins compensating for a weakness the larger community is ignoring or no longer notices, the ecology loses interest in confronting it.

Once established, the arrangement appears normal: work gets completed, crises are resolved, relationships survive, and the system appears normal for a while. The organization rewards itself for resilience and creativity, rarely recognizing that both qualities have become dependent upon a single member; that a single point of failure has now been introduced into the process. Later, people stop questioning whether the person compensating for the burden is in fact responsible for the task. They simply become grateful that someone is willing to carry the burden.

Sisyphus still has lasting instructional value—not because he keeps pushing the stone, but because everyone else has apparently become comfortable watching him do it.

He never escaped the eternal climb, but we need not be bound to his fate—especially if we allow ourselves to learn from his story. Humans are not tied to solitary stones. We exist within ecologies—living, breathing networks of relationships whose health relies upon continual adaptation, and the restoration of balance.

The vocabulary of ecology belongs as much to the world of theology as it does to biology. Paul presents life as an interlaced whole: a body composed of many members; John, a vine with many branches. Health is never judged merely at the individual level; it is always relational.

Inside healthy ecologies, burdens are acknowledged, and the collective resists the permanent transfer from one member to another. These burdens are recognized and shared among multiple members to resolve the weight in ways that restore the health of the whole. The goal is not merely to keep the system functioning, but to return the system to flourishing.

Real life, thankfully, does not rely on the myth.

Healthy ecologies still have burdens. Their health is measured by how—and how quickly—they respond. Illness, grief, aging, and tragedy generally require others to carry more than their weight for a time. Healthy ecologies understand that this temporary imbalance is necessary rather than normalizing it as permanent.

Not every burden arises from a place beyond our control. Some appear because a single member repeatedly refuses duty, places self-interest above the whole, evades accountability, or ignores their responsibility. This has the potential to create burdens that someone else must carry.

When that individual refuses their own responsibility and the ecology likewise refuses to make the correction, the burden is forced to migrate elsewhere. A further failure comes when a compensating person’s faithfulness is accepted as the cure. The compensator creates an illusion of health, which denies the work of restoration.

Perhaps the tragedy of Sisyphus lies not in the stone that keeps rolling downhill, but in an ecology that never evolves.

Living systems do not endure when they cannot adjust.

Sisyphus occupied a world where none of the adjustments were allowed to happen. The ecology fails to adapt. There is no healing.

In family systems, it is often the oldest child who learns to keep the peace by channeling stress before anyone else is even aware it exists. In congregations, it is often the volunteer who quietly fills every empty role, working until exhaustion and eventually departure.

Family therapist Edwin Friedman observed this pattern repeatedly—most clearly in family systems.

He noted how anxious systems can concentrate their dysfunction in one member. Sometimes that person becomes the identified patient—the one in whom that concentrated distress becomes visible. He also noted that the imbalance can manifest as overfunctioning: when one overly responsible person carries what truly belongs to the whole.

Through his lens, the story looks different.

Sisyphus’ tragedy runs deeper than the condemnation to eternally push a stone.

As long as he keeps pushing, no one asks why the burden belongs to him alone.

When bills are paid, when meetings continue, when the children get to school, when the church doors remain open, or the mission succeeds, we naturally assume that everything is functioning exactly as it should.

Friedman suggested that symptoms are rarely the deepest dysfunction in a system.

Most of us read the story of Sisyphus and instinctively imagine ourselves in his place pushing the stone. We recall seasons in our own lives that demanded more than we had the capacity to give.

Through his work, Friedman invites a more unsettling question: Where are we standing on the hill? Are we the one carrying the weight? Are we guilty of having quietly come to depend upon someone else to accomplish work that is rightfully ours? Or have we become so accustomed to the work of the compensator that we no longer recognize the imbalance in the system?

I recognize this quandary because I realize I have occupied multiple places on that hill, even when I did not understand it at the time.

Discernment begins when we stop relying on the hero and start asking whether the system itself has become dependent upon an individual’s heroism.

Healthy communities resist the tendency to resort to perpetual heroes. They require people who are willing to notice when the weight has become uneven—and who have the courage to own it.

Long before Friedman’s family systems theory gave us language for this dynamic, the Apostle Paul described the church as a body and the function of each part. Even before we understood ecological systems, Paul was giving theological language to describe this reality.

A healthy body is constantly responding to address its own needs. When one part is injured, other parts attempt to compensate—long enough for healing to occur. Every biological response is designed to restore the whole.

The dilemma begins when the remaining parts of the whole stop responding to their own signals.

Instead of addressing the wound, they have learned to absorb someone else’s pain.

Over time, what appeared as compassion instead becomes dependency.

Every family experiences seasons when one member must contribute more than another. Those moments are not the signs of dysfunction. They are signs of sacrificial love.

When temporary sacrifice quietly transforms into permanent expectation, something inside the ecology has failed. What began as a genuine act of grace can stunt true healing. The individual faithfulness that once sustained a community may end up preventing it from confronting what it needs to return to proper function.

This is why discernment is essential.

Not every burden should be set down. But neither should every burden be carried or transferred forever.

Sometimes the most loving question we can ask isn’t, “How can I keep pushing?”

It is, “What needs to change so that I won’t have to?”

I no longer read the story of Sisyphus the way I once did.

I continue to admire his endurance. I am still impressed by his willingness to shoulder what others would abandon. But I can no longer celebrate the steady state of the hill.

The deepest tragedy of the myth is not that Sisyphus never reaches the top.

It is that no one ever joins him.

The mountain never learns.

The system never heals.

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I remember it like yesterday when my grandmother asked the question with complete sincerity.

She spent her later career as the head of ticket sales for Music Maker Productions at Mississippi State University. Her days were spent meticulously tracking tickets in the days before the conglomerate clearinghouses and helping people attend concerts. Even with such close proximity to world famous musicians, celebrity never seemed to impress her very much.

When I asked her for front row seats so I could see the Smashing Pumpkins she lovingly obliged. But her question stuck with me because she wasn’t making a joke. She literally thought smashing pumpkins was their act.

“Why would anybody want to pay money to watch someone smash pumpkins?”

That was my Meme. She spent years working around concerts without becoming impressed by the people on the stage regardless of how familiar their names.

Years later, I realized I had slowly become unimpressed too.

For me, it didn’t happen all at once. Rather, it unfolded through a series of encounters with people the rest of the world seemed determined to idolize.

It would be years before I realized how much I had learned from her.

During seminary, I began meeting people whose names carried weight in academic circles. Professors whose books prepared generations of pastors and theologians. Preachers whose sermons instructed and inspired. Scholars whose presence arrived well before they ever walked into the classroom.

And then they started talking.

Some were every bit as wise and much more gracious than I had imagined. Others were dripping with brilliance but were at the same time surprisingly ordinary. A few seemed to have bought into their own reputations. The longer I was in their presence, the more I noticed that their titles told me very little about the person standing in front of me.

It was my first lesson that influence and character are not the same thing.

The seminary lesson stayed with me, but it wasn’t fully tested until I deployed to Kuwait in 2009.

One afternoon, Arnold Schwarzenegger arrived at my airfield while waiting to fly into Iraq on a USO tour. He had long been one of the most recognizable people on the planet. Soldiers, Marines, Sailors, and Airmen all knew exactly who he was. Heads turned. Conversations stopped. People suddenly found reasons to be nearby.

My job wasn’t to be impressed. It was to take care of a guest—and to make sure he made it on the right plane to take him forward to the troops in harm’s way.

We found a place to wait. We talked for a while. He smoked a cigar and passed the time in the customs area. I remember quietly hoping he wouldn’t light another match since we were so close to the aircraft.

Somewhere in the middle of that ordinary conversation, Arnold Schwarzenegger stopped being Arnold Schwarzenegger. Somewhere in the midst of a visit on a random flight line in the Kingdom of Kuwait, he became simply another human being waiting on a flight, passing the time like everyone else.

During that deployment, and in future assignments, that experience would repeat itself.

A few years later, I was assigned as the Chaplain of Camp David.

For most people, Camp David is a place wrapped in mystery. For those of us who were blessed to work there, it was simply where we went to work every morning.

Presidents arrived. Vice Presidents followed. Kings and monarchs, cabinet secretaries, members of Congress, generals, admirals, foreign leaders, entertainers, athletes, and business executives came through those fortified gates.

After a while, the titles faded into the background. And I found myself paying attention to something else entirely.

One cold February morning, a young Marine stood beside the chapel bell waiting for the Vice President to arrive for Sunday worship. Snow covered the ground and the chill in the air cut through any layers we were fortunate to be able to wear in uniform.

As the Vice President approached, the Marine came to attention, rendered a salute, and said, “Good morning, Mr. Vice President.”

The Vice President returned the salute, reached out to shake the Marine’s hand, and gave a gentle tug toward the chapel.

“Son, come inside. It’s too cold for you to be out here.”

The Marine did as he was told.

But almost immediately, and likely because the First Sergeant was lurking in the bushes, he returned to the bell to complete his assignment and stand his post. Orders were orders.

Without hesitation, the Vice President stepped back outside.

“Hey, Marine. I told you to come inside.”

Not every encounter unfolded that way.

I stopped paying much attention to the position each visitor held, and I became far more interested in how they treated the people no one else noticed.

A random staff member.

The steward.

The gate guard.

The Marine standing in the cold.

Those encounters told me far more about a person’s character than any title, office, or reputation ever could.

On another occasion, a senior government official was present for a visit.

After a meeting concluded, he erupted over something that most people would never have noticed. The target of his frustration was not another elected official, a senior officer, or a member of his own staff. It was a young sailor whose only mistake was being the nearest person in uniform.

During one of my grandmother’s visits to Washington, we had lunch in the White House Navy Mess.

In the middle of our meal, several senior officials, including the President and the Vice President, walked past the dining room on their way to the Situation Room.

My grandmother stopped eating and watched them disappear down the hallway.

She never expected lunch at the White House, and she certainly never expected the President to walk by.

The person who left the deepest impression on me wasn’t a president, a vice president, a king, or a celebrity.

He was a young Marine named Kyle.

Kyle was the kind of Marine everyone hoped would stand their watch. Quiet. Dependable. The sort of person who did the right thing because it was the right thing to do, even when no one was watching. More importantly, Kyle was the kind of guy every other Marine hoped to call a friend.

One day, while driving back toward Camp David, Kyle saw a stranded motorist alongside the road. It was pouring down rain. He pulled over to help.

As he stood outside his vehicle assisting someone he had never met, another car struck him and then fled the scene.

Kyle died doing something no title could ever make a person do.

He loved his neighbor enough to stop.

A few days later, I buried Kyle in North Carolina.

I found myself impressed by quiet acts of kindness, humility, and sacrifice. The people who changed me most were seldom the ones whose names appeared in newspapers. They weren’t the ones occupying concert stages. They were the ones who quietly loved their neighbors.

I’m grateful my grandmother taught me that lesson before I realized she was teaching it.

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After my freshman year of college at LSU, I served as a camp counselor at a summer camp for boys in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Several times a week after the campers were asleep, the counselors and staff would gather for prayer and Bible study. That summer wasn’t the first time I had encountered biblical literalism, and it certainly would not be the last. I had seen it before, and I had already learned better than to accept it wholesale.

I wasn’t primarily disturbed by biblical literalism itself. Rather, it was watching the faith I love so dearly become so fixed that it no longer had room to breathe.

Eventually, I reached the point where sitting idly by and accepting it without asking whether it could withstand the weight of the biblical witness was no longer possible. Thirty-five years later, I understand the moment was inevitable. After all, I was a Methodist spending the summer on a camp staff with several seminary students from a drastically different perspective.

My anxious curiosity drove me to test the water. I chose a question I already knew the answer to—not to win an argument, but because I believed honest faith could withstand an honest question. I also believed that a faith hardened into concrete rarely has a chance to breathe again without first developing a crack.

“Why,” I asked, “does Mark capture Jesus telling the disciples to take a staff and follow him while Matthew and Luke record him telling them to leave it behind?”

I am not sure what I expected. Memory makes me hope it was conversation. Yet the reaction was unlike anything I expected or could conceive. My small question visibly rattled the room. They checked and double-checked the text. They took stabs at explaining it away. They made a concerted effort to dismiss it and move on. But the crack had already started. Eventually, calls were made to seminary professors sincerely hoping for a satisfactory explanation. What no one disputed, however, was that a simple review of the Greek demonstrated the differences. This wasn’t simply a quirk of English translation. It is what the Gospels actually said. I had hoped to crack the concrete. Instead, I seemed to have pulverized it.

The room had been shaken in a way I had never witnessed before, and don’t remember witnessing since—and I hadn’t even begun my own seminary journey quite yet. If a question this small had the power to shake the room to its very foundation, perhaps the room had been standing on something far less solid, far more fragile than anyone anticipated.

On that night, I realized that it wasn’t Scripture that feared questions—it was people—and our response too often looked less like faith and more like the defense of the Alamo.

In retrospect, summer camp was not the first time I had witnessed this phenomenon.

Years earlier, while attending an independent Baptist high school, another student asked a question in class. His question wasn’t disrespectful. It wasn’t disruptive. He simply asked a question. The teacher responded by belittling him in front of the class. Before I had time to think, or consider my thoughts, I heard myself say, “You’re being mean.”

The teacher turned toward me without hesitation—and the belittling of my classmate was redirected. He took me to the principal’s office, paddled me himself, and sent me back to class. I hadn’t asked the question to crack the concrete. I had simply objected to the way another student was being treated for a genuine curiosity.

I have often wondered whether that moment stayed with me because of the paddling and the moral injury it inflicted or because of what it represented. The lesson seemed unmistakable: some questions were not to be asked, and those who defended them could expect consequences as well.

The details of the incidents were different. Their pattern was not. In one telling, a particular reading of Scripture seemed more important than allowing the text to speak for itself. In the other, authority mattered more than extending the same grace to an inquisitive student that Scripture itself repeatedly commends and frankly demands.

The Bible is filled with people asking questions of God with astonishing honesty. Abraham challenges God’s justice. The psalmists demand an answer to God’s absence. Thomas refuses to accept the truth of resurrection without seeing the physical wounds. Their questions are different, but God does not condemn any of them for asking. He engages Abraham, receives the psalmists’ lament, and meets Thomas in his doubt.

What is striking is not that these questions were answered; many were not. Some were only partially addressed. Some even received silence. Yet nowhere does God suggest that examining the truth of faith through questions was itself a failure of faith. Again and again, Scripture portrays honest questions as one of the primary ways we learn to trust the faith, not as an enemy of the faith we hold dear.

What has stayed with me was never the differing accounts in Mark, Matthew, and Luke. It was the visible anxiety on the faces of my fellow camp counselors. One small question had unsettled a room full of people who believed their faith was unshakable. I had hoped only to crack the concrete. Instead, I seemed to have pulverized it.

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At the time, I could not have known that. I was simply a prospective student wandering across campus, exploring every nook and cranny I could find. I browsed the bookstore, examined theology books displayed there and on shelves outside professors’ offices, studied bulletin boards and photographs, wandered through Seminary Hall, peered into classrooms, and tried to understand the character of the place. If I was going to spend the next three years of my life there, I wanted to know its soul before I ever sat in one of its classrooms.

Seminary Hall had seen better days. The floors creaked beneath generations of seminarians, and the walls bore the unmistakable marks of a building that had been loved far more than renovated. It possessed the kind of character that cannot be manufactured. It can only be earned through decades of faithful use.

What captivated me, however, was not the building itself.

It was the people.

Students hurried between classes. Professors lingered in the hallways, deep in conversation. Everywhere I turned, someone seemed to be discussing theology, ministry, Scripture, or the Church. The building buzzed like a beehive, but these were unlike any bees I had ever encountered. They were seminarians.

Only years later did I understand what I had sensed that afternoon. Heather Elkins would eventually teach me the Hebrew word ruach—breath, wind, spirit—but I had experienced it long before I knew its name. Seminary Hall felt alive, not because of its architecture, but because of the people who inhabited it.

The first person to embody that spirit for me was Randall Hand, the Theological School’s Director of Admissions.

I remember Randall as an older gentleman who welcomed prospective students with genuine kindness. I remember almost nothing we talked about that day. I remember something more important.

I remember how he made me feel.

Before I had attended a class, before I had submitted an application, before I had earned a place in the community, Randall somehow communicated that perhaps I already belonged. It was not salesmanship. It was hospitality. He loved Drew, and because he loved Drew, he wanted others to discover what he already knew about it.

I did not have language for it then. I simply knew that I wanted to become the kind of pastor who made people feel the way Randall had made me feel that afternoon.

Years later, I would apply to Duke for a Th.M. The people there were gracious, professional, and encouraging. I remain grateful for that experience. Yet as I reflected on both schools, I realized something important.

Drew had welcomed me.

Duke had evaluated me.

Neither approach was wrong, but they were profoundly different.

Randall never made me feel as though I needed to prove I belonged before I walked through the door. He embodied something I would spend the next quarter century trying to practice in my own ministry.

Before I ever sat in a classroom, Randall had already begun teaching me what pastoral ministry looked like. I have rarely encountered anyone who understood hospitality more naturally.

I arrived at Drew from rural Mississippi carrying a degree in Biological Engineering from Louisiana State University. At first glance, engineering and theology seem to have very little to say to one another. My experience suggests otherwise.

Engineering had already disciplined my mind. It taught me to examine assumptions, assess risk, respect reality rather than preference, and understand that actions almost always have second- and third-order consequences. Above all, it taught me that truth does not fear investigation.

The engineer came with me. Drew simply gave him a different set of questions.

Before classes even began, another student knocked on my dorm room door. His name was Brady. He stood there rather sheepishly and asked whether there was any chance I wanted to go get a beer.

I remember exhaling with a smile.

We have been friends ever since.

Brady had spent time living in a Buddhist monastery doing translation work. His experiences, questions, and perspective were unlike anything I had encountered growing up in Mississippi. Long before any professor began lecturing, my education had already started. It simply happened over a beer instead of behind a lectern.

Then classes began.

Nothing in my Mississippi upbringing had prepared me for the conversations that filled my first semester. We debated God and gender, inclusive language, BCE and CE instead of BC and AD, race, hermeneutics, textual criticism, and questions about Scripture that I had never before imagined anyone asking in good faith.

At times, I was convinced the questions themselves were dangerous.

I would be dishonest if I claimed I embraced all of it immediately.

I did not.

I was defensive. I was unsettled. Looking back, I was also naïve. My upbringing had given me many gifts, but it had also left me with assumptions that I mistook for self-evident truth simply because no one had ever asked me to examine them.

I also mistook questions for attacks and disagreement for disrespect. It took years before I understood that honest questions are not the enemies of faith. More often, they are among its greatest allies.

Looking back, I realize I had misunderstood what was happening. Drew was not trying to dismantle my faith. It was asking whether my convictions were sturdy enough to withstand honest questions. If they were true, I had nothing to fear.

Drew never asked me to surrender my convictions. It asked me to understand them well enough to explain them, defend them, question them, and, when necessary, refine them. It consistently chose the harder path.

No two faculty members better illustrated that than Tom Oden and Heather Elkins.

Theologically, they could hardly have been more different. They even engaged in a public dispute over language used in worship that eventually found its way into published books. Yet sitting in their classrooms, I never felt that either wanted to manufacture replicas of themselves. They wanted students who understood why they believed what they believed and who could carry that discipline into questions they had never personally addressed.

Obery Hendricks challenged assumptions I had never questioned. Herb Huffmon introduced me to textual criticism in ways that were both uncomfortable and liberating. Heather Elkins gave me ruach and taught me to recognize the breath of God in places I would never have thought to look. Even conspire, she reminded us, once meant “to breathe together.” Tom Oden gave me the Great Tradition.

Together they taught me how to think theologically.

Their example also convinced me that pastoral formation is extraordinarily difficult apart from incarnational community. Information can be transmitted online. Formation must be fostered over time. Incarnation is not bits and bytes. It is flesh and blood. It happens in hallways, over a beer, in classrooms, in worship, in disagreement, in hospitality, and in the countless ordinary moments where people slowly become who God is calling them to be.

Even before I arrived at Drew, I had been considering spending part of my seminary education overseas. If I was going to devote my life to serving the Church, I wanted to experience the Church beyond the world I had always known. Drew maintained an exchange relationship with Queen’s University Belfast. More practically, it was the only exchange offered in an English-speaking country, an important consideration for someone whose vocabulary did not extend much beyond English. There was another reason as well. My family is almost entirely Irish by heritage. Belfast felt both foreign and strangely familiar.

What happened next was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.

Very few students had taken advantage of the Belfast exchange in the years before I arrived. Drew possessed an endowed fellowship intended to encourage precisely that kind of cross-cultural formation. Heather Elkins encouraged me to pursue the opportunity and made it possible.

She gave me Belfast, and with it the opportunity to see the Church beyond America. It was there that I began to distinguish between the gospel and the American assumptions through which I had first learned it.

She gave me Northern Ireland during the Troubles. She gave me professors and classmates whose assumptions had been shaped by circumstances I could scarcely imagine. She gave me the opportunity to worship, study, travel, and ask questions in a place where reconciliation was not an abstract theological concept but a daily necessity.

Like so much of what Drew had already been teaching me, Belfast did not require me to abandon my convictions. It invited me to examine them more carefully. It taught me that faithful Christians often arrive at different conclusions because they have lived different stories. It did not weaken my faith. It humbled it.

There were, of course, boundaries. Certain professors insisted upon particular classroom practices. Some discouraged gendered language for God. Obery Hendricks had little patience for students quoting the King James Version in class. Those expectations were real. Yet I never experienced them as an attempt to manufacture theological clones. Looking back, I realize that Drew was never trying to tell me what to see. It was teaching me how to see.

The lens I inherited growing up in Mississippi often caused me to see the world as though I were looking backward through a telescope. Everything beyond my own experience appeared farther away, making it easier to dismiss.

Drew quietly exchanged that telescope for a microscope.

Suddenly, I could see details that had always been there. People became more complex. Theology became richer. The Church became larger. The world itself became more interesting.

My convictions did not disappear. They matured. Once you learn to see that way, you cannot unknow it.

Drew expected us to wrestle, and that wrestling was not always comfortable. There were days when I left class frustrated. There were conversations that challenged assumptions I had carried for years. At times I wondered whether the questions themselves were dangerous.

Every reading of Scripture is already an interpretation, shaped in part by the experiences, assumptions, and traditions we bring to the text. Drew did not create that reality. It simply refused to pretend otherwise. Once I understood that, I could never again confuse my own perspective with God’s.

I discovered that faithful Christians could disagree without abandoning either Scripture or Christ. They could arrive at different conclusions while sharing a common desire to seek the truth. I did not agree with every professor, and I suspect many of them did not agree with me.

Somewhere along the way, almost without my noticing, Drew exposed an arrogance and a set of blind spots I had never realized I possessed. It taught me that conviction and humility belong together.

Thirty years have passed since I first wandered through Seminary Hall. The professors who shaped me have aged. Some have retired. Some have died. The students with whom I argued in classrooms and over a beer have scattered across the world. The building itself has undoubtedly changed in ways I no longer recognize.

Yet I continue to draw from that well.

I find myself returning to Drew with surprising regularity. Sometimes it is a memory of a classroom discussion. Sometimes it is a question first asked by a professor that continues to unfold decades later. Sometimes it is the voice of Heather Elkins reminding me to pay attention to ruach. Sometimes it is Tom Oden’s insistence that the Church does not begin with us. Sometimes it is simply the reminder that faithful Christians can disagree deeply while remaining brothers and sisters in Christ.

I have discovered that wells do not nourish simply because they exist.

Someone must return to them.

My great-grandparents had a well. The water did not leap from the ground into waiting hands. Someone had to lower the bucket, draw the water, and carry it home. The well possessed tremendous potential, but until someone drew from it, that potential remained unrealized.

The same is true of the people and places that form us.

We receive no nourishment from books left unopened, friendships left untended, memories left unexplored, or wisdom we never revisit. We must continue drawing.

That is why I find myself writing these essays.

Drew was never perfect. Neither were its professors, nor its students, nor the conversations that shaped us. None of that is the point.

It became one of the deepest wells from which I continue to draw, and it taught me to recognize others.

If there is any grace in my ministry, any wisdom in my writing, or any clearer vision with which I now see the world, much of it can be traced back to that worn building in Madison where professors, classmates, and friends quietly taught a young man from Mississippi not what to think, but how to think.

They helped wash the mud from my eyes.

Thirty years later, I am still drawing water from that well.

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The slow road led first to a tree and then to a bridge.

There is almost nothing between Monroeville and Selma: fields, forests, and an occasional country store that seems to have stood at the crossroads forever. The road itself invites attention, reflection, discomfort, and those pregnant pauses that are increasingly rare in modern life.

The emptiness also gave me time to think. Somewhere along that lonely road, I called my friend Harold. It was the first time we had spoken since his wife, Clodagh, died, and we talked for a while as the fields and forests passed by my windshield. Somewhere along that road, history gave way to grief and friendship.

I have loved To Kill a Mockingbird for most of my life. Outside of Scripture and theology, no book has had a greater influence on my moral imagination. Harper Lee was my generation’s Plato, and she was certainly mine.

The town is proud of Harper Lee and Truman Capote, and rightly so, but it remains what it has always been—an ordinary Southern town.

Perhaps that is fitting. The extraordinary so often emerges from ordinary places.

It was hot as Hades, the kind of Alabama heat that settles onto your shoulders and makes you wonder how anyone functioned before air conditioning. The smell of cut grass, perspiration, and humidity filled the square. Inside the old courthouse, the floorboards creaked beneath my feet, and suddenly the world of Scout and Jem became tangible. I could feel the textures of that time and place.

Standing in the courtroom, I found myself looking not at the judge’s bench or where Atticus would have stood, but at the balcony. My first thought was of Tom’s wife sitting there and looking down into a courtroom where her husband’s fate was being decided by people who held absolute authority over his life.

The crux of Maycomb was always the balcony. That is where Tom Robinson’s family and Reverend Sykes sat as they sought to make sense where none was possible. It is the place from which the powerless witnessed proceedings orchestrated by people who held authority over their lives—lives for which they did not care.

As I stood there, scenes from the movie came alive with an almost lived memory. I could see Tom, and I could see his family, and I could hear Reverend Sykes saying, “Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”

The children are everywhere in Monroeville. Scout, Jem, and Dill are depicted repeatedly. Their statues stand beneath a tree but not the tree, and their likenesses appear on murals. Harper Lee is remembered well, too. Tom and Boo, however, are harder to find, and that absence stayed with me.

The tree itself no longer stands. What remains is a weathered section of trunk, preserved beneath glass like a relic.

Twelve-year-old me would have wanted to throw a ball with Jem and climb the tree. The child wanted to climb the tree; the man wanted to sit in the balcony.

I left Monroeville carrying the world of Scout and Jem. The balcony came too.

Then I drove to Selma.

There is almost nothing between the two places except lonely roads and country stores, and the emptiness gave me more time to think. I wondered how many times Harper Lee had made that journey in her lifetime. Then it occurred to me that, in another sense, Scout Finch had made that journey every time a reader carried Maycomb’s questions into the real world.

I entered Selma by unexpectedly crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Only after I had crossed did I fully appreciate what had happened. I had entered the city in the same direction that the marchers had been driven back on Bloody Sunday. Of course, I was free to turn around at any time. They were not.

It was every bit as hot in Selma as it had been in Monroeville, but the asphalt and concrete made it feel warmer still.

The first thing I noticed was the name: Edmund Pettus Bridge, emblazoned in large black letters. Named for a Confederate general and Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the bridge seemed determined not to let history become too tidy.

The second thing I noticed was the incline. As an engineer, I immediately saw the grade. The bridge rises just enough to conceal what lies beyond its crest.

I was alone except for the occasional car crossing the bridge.

I parked and walked back toward the bridge, but I did not walk across it. I remained on the Selma side, convicted by time and place.

The blood of Selma was real. I found myself thinking about James Reeb, the Unitarian minister who came to Selma because conscience demanded it and who was beaten to death for being there.

That bridge is holy ground. Some places invite us to enter them. Others ask us to remove our shoes. This is barefoot ground.

Monroeville gives us the lived memory of a story. Selma gives us the lived memory of sacrifice.

I bought two things at the visitor center before I left: stickers for the stamp to go in my National Park passport, which I’d left at home, and a John Lewis Good Trouble sticker. The sticker was not really a souvenir; it was a question.

What good trouble is required now?

I found myself thinking about two people who have shaped my moral imagination in very different ways—Harper Lee and John Lewis. I thought about my grandmother, who helped everyone who crossed the threshold of her country store while still carrying some of the prejudices of her era. I thought about a family member who likely stood at Ole Miss when James Meredith entered and not in a good way.

I thought about myself. I often wonder whether I would see the world in the same way had I been born in a different era. Would I have been a good Methodist, or would I have beaten Tom? I hope I know the answer, but history is filled with decent, respectable, churchgoing people who answered that question poorly and chose a different path.

I am part Jem, part Boo, and part Dill. When I grew up, however, I was mostly Atticus, with all his impurities. I have spent much of my life trying to shed the layers that obscure discernment, and I refuse to accept that anyone is less than me because of how their lineage was formed.

Somewhere on the road home, another question emerged: will the balcony hold?

I came home by way of Monroeville and Selma. The day itself was peaceful, but my spirit was not. I left Monroeville carrying the world of Scout and Jem, and I left Selma with the acknowledgment that we still have a great deal to overcome.

Somewhere between a tree in Monroeville and a bridge in Selma, a question took a seat in the balcony of Maycomb and refused to leave. I suspect it will ride home with me for a very long time.

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“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
— Matthew 5:9

On the morning of June 15, while sitting at my father’s house in Alabama, I learned that Clodagh Good had died in Belfast the evening before.

News like that has a way of collapsing time.

Nearly thirty years disappeared in an instant.

The first thing I remembered was a kitchen table.

Not Stormont. Not the Good Friday Agreement. Not the many public stories that could be told about Rev. Harold Good and his quiet role in the work of reconciliation in Northern Ireland.

I remembered a kitchen table.

I could see it clearly. The sink and window looking out the side of the house. Plates of familiar Irish food—potatoes, carrots, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, gravy, perhaps roasted chicken or fish. The easy rhythm of conversation. Most of all, I remembered the welcome.

By then, Harold and Clodagh were living in retirement in Holywood, County Down. I had returned to visit them several times over the years. Their home had become, in some inexplicable but undeniable way, another home to me.

But the first table I knew was not that kitchen table.

The first table I knew was in the manse. It stood in a dining room rather than a kitchen, but the welcome was the same. There was always room for one more person.

I arrived in Belfast in the summer of 1997 as a student from Drew University, spending a year at Edgehill Theological College. I was young, curious, occasionally defensive, and carrying all the assumptions that come with being an American abroad. I was also, though I did not know it at the time, about to be taken in by two people who would shape my understanding of ministry, reconciliation, and hospitality.

Over time, I came to realize that people from many different places found their way to that table. I remember one meal shared with Paul Boafo, then a doctoral student from Ghana who would later become a Methodist bishop. Whether my memory has arranged the details correctly or not, the larger truth remains: that table gathered people and quietly sent them back into the world changed.

Somewhere along the way, the relationship changed. They opened their home to me, gave me a place to be away when I needed to be away, and took care of me. Eventually, they became family.

I cannot tell the story of Harold and Clodagh without telling it around a table, because tables were where so much of their ministry happened. Hospitality was not an occasional act for them. It was simply the way they lived. People were welcomed, fed, listened to, and cared for.

That lesson would stay with me.

So would they.

Harold was also my supervisor in a ministry placement that year. On one occasion, he gave me a patient’s name and directions and sent me on ahead by myself.

When I found the room and knocked, a man in a suit answered the door and invited me inside. He then pointed me toward a second closed door.

When I stepped into the room, I understood immediately. I was in the prison ward. Inside sat an inmate, his prison tattoos immediately recognizable even to me, and he appeared high or strung out. Then I realized that the man who had answered the outer door was a police officer.

I remember being glad to leave the room in one piece.

There was fear then, though there is no longer fear in visits like that. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. Harold and I talked about the visit afterward, as we often did after hospital visits and visits to parishioners’ homes. He had a way of teaching by experience and then by reflection.

Years later, the world would come to know Harold Good because of his role in helping bring peace to Northern Ireland. I knew him first as the man who welcomed a young American seminarian into his home, walked hospital corridors with purpose, and taught by experience and reflection.

I would later realize that those things were not separate from one another. The qualities that made Harold a pastor also made him a reconciler.

At critical moments, some of the quiet work of peace in Northern Ireland unfolded in Harold and Clodagh’s living room. They opened their home to senior figures from opposing sides of the conflict and hosted conversations in secret. The secrecy was not intended to protect reputations so much as it was to protect the process itself and preserve the possibility that a lasting agreement might emerge.

Only later did I recognize the consistency in all of it. The same couple who welcomed students and parishioners into their home also believed that people who regarded one another as enemies should meet, talk, and listen. Harold believed relationships mattered and that trust, however slowly, could be built.

He possessed an unusual ability to build relationships across lines that others regarded as fixed and immovable. He was patient, trustworthy, and willing to sit with people who distrusted one another—and, at times, distrusted him as well.

Not everyone understood what he was doing. Some believed he was operating outside his lane as a Methodist minister. Others questioned whether he should be involved at all. But Harold seemed less concerned with protecting his reputation than with the possibility that another future might yet be possible.

From time to time, we talked about the long history that had shaped Northern Ireland and how difficult it is to build trust after generations of violence and fear. Harold never seemed particularly interested in quick answers. He believed reconciliation was patient work.

I remember the referendum campaign as exhausting. The signs, banners, flyers, mailers, and commercials seemed endless, much like the final days of an American presidential election. The community itself felt deeply divided. There were loud voices insisting that peace was impossible, but there was also a quieter groundswell of people who hoped another future might be possible, even if many were hesitant to say so publicly. I remember the Republic of Ireland feeling noticeably more hopeful about the referendum and its promise of peace than Northern Ireland itself.

I attended services at Martyr’s Memorial Presbyterian Church on several occasions and heard Ian Paisley preach. I remember the certainty of his opposition and, perhaps most strikingly, hearing familiar hymns of John and Charles Wesley with altered words that reflected the bitterness of the moment. It reminded me how deeply the divisions ran.

Yet I also remember spending time on a Habitat for Humanity build in a Catholic neighborhood during that same period. It was the first time a Protestant team had ever gone into a Catholic neighborhood to help build Habitat homes. Even then, it felt like a small sign that old boundaries did not have to remain permanent.

I still have the voter information booklet and some of the campaign literature urging people to vote yes or no. I kept them because even then it felt as though we were living through something important. When the agreement passed, there was hope, but nobody I knew thought the hard work was over. If anything, there was an understanding that something new had begun and that the long work of reconciliation still lay ahead.

Years later, I visited Harold and Clodagh in their retirement home in Holywood with my parents. At some point, Harold took us into the garden and showed us a tree.

It was a Star Magnolia.

He told us that it had been planted at the conclusion of the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement. Over time it had become known as the Peace Tree.

The tree stood on the edge of the lawn in their traditional Irish garden. It was not especially large or imposing. There was nothing about it that demanded attention. Yet Harold was quietly proud of it and grateful for what it represented.

Like the best symbols, it pointed beyond itself.

It spoke of patient conversations, of trust painstakingly built, of people willing to risk criticism in pursuit of another future. It reminded me that peace rarely arrives all at once. More often, it is planted, tended, and hoped for long before anyone can be certain it will endure.

It seems fitting to me now that the Peace Tree was a magnolia. I was raised in the Magnolia State, where hospitality is measured by tables and porches and whether there is room for one more person.

I have thought a great deal about why a kitchen table came to mind that morning in Alabama. I think part of the answer lies in the Mississippi that formed me. Hospitality mattered in my childhood. It mattered in the quiet conversations that helped make the Good Friday Agreement possible. And it mattered in Harold and Clodagh’s home.

Perhaps that is why I remembered a kitchen table before I remembered history. History remembers agreements and referendums. We remember people differently. We remember where they sat. We remember what they served. We remember how they welcomed us. We remember being fed.

The world will rightly remember Harold for his role in the peace process. I suspect I will always remember Harold and Clodagh around a table.

Looking back, I have come to think of them as a seamless pair, each caring for people in different but deeply complementary ways. Harold’s gifts often carried him into public places and visible roles. Clodagh’s care was usually quieter and more personal. She simply cared about people and had a way of helping them that drew little attention to herself, but mattered nonetheless.

There was also Clodagh’s dry humor. Harold was forever imagining another project, another idea, another possibility. At just the right moment, Clodagh would offer an aside—never cruel, never dismissive, but delivered with impeccable timing. She had a gift for gently reminding everyone, including Harold, not to take themselves too seriously.

I had planned to return again. COVID intervened, and then life and distance did what they often do. I thought there would be another opportunity.

There wasn’t.

On a June morning in Alabama, before I remembered negotiations or referendums or even a peace tree, I remembered a kitchen table, a window overlooking the garden, and two people who made room for one more person. I remembered the sink, the plates, the easy rhythm of conversation. I remembered being welcomed before I had done anything to deserve it.

That is what remains.

If this essay has stirred your interest in Harold and Clodagh Good, I encourage you to read Harold Good’s memoir, In Good Time: A Memoir. It offers a deeply personal account of a remarkable life of faith, reconciliation, and hope.

If these essays have encouraged you, challenged you, or helped you see something differently, I would be honored if you shared Drawing Water from the Well with a friend.

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It sat in the balcony of First United Methodist Church in Starkville, Mississippi, on the left side if you were facing the chancel. Painted white, it stood only about mid-calf high. An adult could easily step over it. In some places, the pews terminated into it, creating a literal barrier. In others, it simply divided the aisle.

I noticed it as a child not because it was architecturally interesting but because it was inconvenient. If you wanted to move from one side of the balcony to the other, you had to step over it.

So I did.

Over and over again.

I do not remember asking anyone why it was there. I simply accepted it as part of the architecture.

Years later, I began to wonder. Even now, I wonder if the wall is still there.

I do not get back to First United Methodist Church very often, and I know there have been renovations since my childhood. Perhaps it is gone. Perhaps it remains exactly where it always stood.

What I know is that I eventually began to wonder why it had been there in the first place.

I do not know its original purpose. I cannot say with certainty that it existed to separate Black worshipers from white worshipers. But in a church in Mississippi, with an entirely white congregation and an entirely Black Methodist church sitting directly across the street, the possibility is difficult to ignore.

Even if that was not its purpose, the wall still raises questions. Did anyone else ever wonder why it was there?

Were there people in the congregation who knew exactly why it was there?

Did earlier generations leave it because they had forgotten its meaning, because they thought it no longer mattered, or because no one had ever thought to ask?

Or did they leave it because they knew exactly why it was there? I do not know.

I only know that, years later, a small white wall in the balcony of a church became a question.

The wall, and the mere possibility that it could represent something sinister, eventually caused me to ask larger questions.

What else had I inherited without taking notice? What assumptions had become so familiar that I allowed them simply to become the architecture of my life? What stories, habits, and ways of seeing had been handed to me so gradually that I no longer recognized them as inheritances at all?

I have spent much of my life asking questions like that.

And yet, when I think about what I inherited, I cannot begin with the wall. I begin with First United Methodist Church itself.

The church that formed me was entirely white in my experience. My youth group was entirely white. Across the street stood the Black Methodist church, a reminder that even congregations sharing the same tradition sometimes inhabited different worlds, even when they shared the same street corner.

I did not think much about that as a child. It simply was.

What I can say is that First United Methodist Church did not teach me to fear people who were different from me or to regard them as less than myself. Quite the opposite. Through children’s Sunday school, sermons, hymns, liturgy, pastors, youth group, and the ordinary rhythms of church life, it taught me that God loved me and that God loved everyone else too.

Looking back, I think the church gave me many of the theological tools that would eventually lead me to ask difficult questions about the world I had inherited.

I remember another moment years later.

During my senior year at Starkville High School, my graduating class gathered in the gymnasium to take our class picture. There were 199 of us. The teachers directed us into the bleachers and told us where to sit generally, but they left it to us to figure out the details.

No one assigned seats.

No one told us where to go.

And yet, by the time we settled into place, all of the Black students were on one side and all of the white students were on the other, with an aisle separating the two groups.

No one seemed surprised. I certainly was not.

It simply happened.

Looking back, I find that moment more unsettling than I did at the time. We had all grown up together. Starkville was not a large town. We knew one another. We were friends and classmates. We had shared classrooms, ball fields, and much of our childhood.

And yet we still separated ourselves.

Years later, I would come to think of that class photograph as another kind of wall. No one had built it. No one had intended it. And yet there it was, a barrier we somehow constructed together without ever speaking of it.

Some underlying force was driving us.

I do not believe we invented that force ourselves. We had received an inheritance. Some of it had been taught explicitly. Some of it had seeped into us so gradually that we hardly noticed it. Some of it may have been little more than habit and familiarity. Whatever its source, it had become part of the architecture of our lives.

The thing about inheritances is that they seldom come to us in a clear or orderly way. They come to us as gifts and burdens, wisdom and assumptions, treasures and blind spots. Some help us see the world more clearly. Others obscure our ability to discern the truth.

The work of faith is learning the difference. I inherited many gifts.

I inherited a love for God and for the church. I inherited hymns and liturgy, the rhythms of the Christian year, and an early sense that God might be calling me into ministry. I inherited the safety of a congregation that gave me room to ask questions and a place where I learned that faith mattered.

Most of all, I inherited the story of Jesus.

It may have been little more than childhood Sunday school theology, but sometimes childhood Sunday school theology is the most Christlike of all. Before I learned all the reasons people give for drawing boundaries around God’s love, I learned that Jesus loved people.

I learned that he touched lepers, ate with sinners, welcomed children, spoke with Samaritans, and identified himself with the least of these. A golden thread seemed to run through all of Scripture: God loves people and expects us to do the same. God forgives people and expects us to do the same.

Even as a child, I found it difficult to believe that isolating people, discriminating against people, or treating people as other could possibly be acceptable in the eyes of God.

Not all of my inheritance came from institutions. Some of it came from people. As a child, the most important person in my life was my great-grandmother.

In my eyes, she was perfect.

I know enough about people and memory to understand that she was not actually perfect. She was a country Baptist woman from Mississippi, and it is entirely possible that she carried assumptions and prejudices that I was too young to see.

But that is not what I remember.

What I remember is kindness. Gentleness. Holiness.

Long before I had the language for it, I saw in her a person who seemed to be striving toward what John Wesley called Christian perfection—not sinlessness, but a life increasingly ordered by love.

What I remember most is making biscuits with her. Country biscuits.

I doubt I was much help. I probably made a mess more often than I contributed anything useful. But she never seemed to mind. She made room for me beside her at the kitchen counter and invited me into her work.

And, if I am being honest, I have spent much of my adult life trying to lose the pounds she helped me gain.

That is how children often learn love. Not through grand lessons or profound speeches, but by being welcomed, by being included, by being given a place at someone’s side.

The people who loved me best were not perfect people. They were products of their time and place, as we all are.

But they also handed me gifts.

They taught me kindness and gentleness. They taught me hospitality and generosity. They taught me that faith mattered and that people mattered.

And those gifts eventually gave me the tools to examine the blind spots that came with them.

I also received gifts from a tradition that was not fully my own.

I learned this in small glimpses: through funerals, through the occasional joint service, through Christmas community gatherings. Over the years, I came to love the music, the preaching, the energy, the emotion, the hand fans moving in unison, and, of course, the food.

I discovered another way of telling the story of Jesus.

The Jesus I encountered there was deeply familiar and yet wonderfully new. He was proclaimed with an urgency and importance that made it clear he had a deeper or different meaning in the life of that community of faith. There was a call for deliverance that was unique from my experience, born from an inheritance different from my own.

I sometimes wonder what gifts we deprive ourselves of when we allow walls—literal or figurative—to remain standing.

My own tradition contained both inheritances and counter-inheritances, moments of conformity and moments of courageous resistance.

As a youth, I encountered Keith Tonkel. Only later did I become aware of his role in Born of Conviction, a 1963 statement in which twenty-eight white Mississippi Methodist ministers publicly opposed racial segregation, and of the courage it took for clergy to challenge the assumptions of their culture.

That realization was something of an epiphany for me. It opened my eyes to the problems of inheritance.

The signers of Born of Conviction understood that Christian faith sometimes requires us to challenge the assumptions of our culture, even when doing so is costly. Sometimes deeply costly. Life-trajectory-altering costly.

I sometimes wonder whether some of those lessons are slipping away.

Years later, one of my professors at Duke Divinity School, Dr. Amy Laura Hall, taught us the discipline of close reading.

Nothing was exempt from examination. Every assumption required examination.

Texts. Traditions. Institutions. Practices. Inheritances.

Everything could be read closely. Everything could be interrogated. Everything could be asked to reveal what it was saying and what it was hiding.

I have often thought about her while reflecting on that small white wall in the balcony of my childhood church.

Looking back, I realize that Dr. Hall gave me the words and the mechanism to do what George and McKinley, two older Louisiana pastors, had been asking me to do for many years.

She taught me how to examine inheritances, to interrogate assumptions, and to read closely the stories, symbols, and practices that had shaped me long before I knew to question them.

The wall may have had an entirely innocent purpose. I still do not know. But close reading taught me that the question itself matters.

Even if the wall meant nothing, someone unfamiliar with its history might reasonably ascribe meaning to it, drawing that meaning from the context and history of the South.

Even if it had another purpose entirely, it still communicated something. The same is true of all inheritances.

We inherit stories, symbols, practices, and instincts. Some reveal truth. Some obscure it. Some require us to ask difficult questions, not because we are looking for reasons to condemn our ancestors, but because we are trying to understand ourselves.

Perhaps that is one of the responsibilities of faith: to look closely at what we have inherited, to tell the truth about it, and to decide what deserves to be carried forward and what must be left behind.

A few weeks ago, my friend Tasha told me that after living in her neighborhood for years, she suddenly realized that every single street bore the name of a Louisiana plantation.

Some of the names were not obvious because they preserved the names of plantations long erased from memory.

She had driven those streets countless times. She knew every turn and every house. Yet she had never really seen the names.

Now she could not unsee them.

The names had not changed. She had. Or perhaps she had simply learned to read more closely.

That is how inheritances often work. They remain invisible until something causes us to ask a question. Once we do, the landscape changes.

The plantation names were not walls in any literal sense. Yet they functioned much the same way. They were remnants of an inheritance hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone to ask a question.

The South is simply my inheritance. It is not the only place that leaves complicated inheritances.

During my time in Belfast, I learned that inheritances are often written on the landscape. A painted curb or a mural could tell you where you were and something of the history that had shaped a neighborhood long before anyone introduced themselves.

Northern Ireland is hardly unique. Every place carries its own inheritances, its own memories, and its own wounds. The North has them no less than the South—Ireland and America.

Every culture leaves gifts and burdens to those who come after it. Every generation inherits stories, symbols, assumptions, and wounds.

The question is not whether we have received an inheritance. The question is what we will do with it.

We are not responsible for what previous generations handed to us. We are responsible for what we do with it.

The measure of every inheritance is the story of Jesus.

Not the story of Jesus encumbered by our prejudices, our fears, our politics, or the baggage we have asked him to carry.

The story of Jesus as clearly as we can possibly see him.

Part of the journey of faith is the lifelong work of discerning who Jesus really is and who Jesus expects us to be.

Perhaps that is why I still think about a small white wall in the balcony of my childhood church.

I still do not know why it was there. Perhaps I never will.

But it taught me to ask a question.

And sometimes a question is the beginning of seeing.

If these essays have encouraged you, challenged you, or helped you see something differently, I would be honored if you shared Drawing Water from the Well with a friend.

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The rheumatoid arthritis had twisted her fingers sideways at the knuckles. She had difficulty grasping things. Writing was a challenge. Even a handshake seemed more complicated than it should have been. Her hands were impossible to ignore.

What surprises me now is that I never stopped noticing them.

Over time, however, I noticed Lee more than I noticed her hands. The hands remained. They were still marked by disease. They were still bent and misshapen. Yet eventually they became less important than the person attached to them. Looking back, I think they came to represent something else entirely. They were outward marks of a life spent doing the hard work of ministry, not only among the people she directly served but among the students she was cultivating to serve others.

I first encountered those hands shortly after arriving at Drew University, a place I had chosen because I wanted my assumptions challenged.

I had grown up in Starkville, Mississippi. I loved my hometown. I loved First United Methodist Church. The pastors who served there helped shape my faith and pointed me toward God rather than toward culture. They gave me roots and, in many ways, gave me the confidence to leave home.

But I also knew there was a larger world beyond Starkville. I knew I carried assumptions that I had inherited from my upbringing, my region, and my experience. At the time, I would have said I wanted to develop critical thinking. Years later I would call it discernment, but I did not have that language then. I simply knew I needed my horizons expanded.

One of the approaches that became part of that expansion was the Newark Project.

My memory is that we met periodically in a forgotten room in the basement of a graduate residence hall. The room had seen better days. It felt isolated from the rest of campus. There was nothing particularly inspiring about it. Yet week after week we gathered there to reflect on what we were seeing and experiencing in Newark. Looking back, it felt less like a traditional classroom and more like Clinical Pastoral Education before I knew what Clinical Pastoral Education was.

The real classroom, however, was Newark.

I remember driving there for the first time. I remember being nervous. I remember wondering if I was making the right decision. I remember considering whether I should switch to the non-Newark version of the course. I remember returning home and realizing that the only white face I had seen all day was my own in a mirror.

Some of my classmates adjusted immediately. Some came from urban environments and did not think much of it. Others, like me, found themselves navigating unfamiliar territory. By the second trip, and certainly by the third, the anxiety had largely disappeared. I began to enjoy going. I found places to eat. I explored neighborhoods. The city gradually became less of an idea and more of a place filled with actual people.

That was, of course, the point.

As part of the project, I was paired with a man named Lenny.

The introduction took place through a social service agency that worked with people living with AIDS. A woman there introduced us. I cannot remember her name, though I remember her presence. She cared deeply about the people she served and played a role in helping students like me enter their world.

Lenny was suspicious of me.

Frankly, I was suspicious of the entire arrangement.

The first things most people noticed about Lenny were impossible to miss. The disease, the addiction, the homelessness, and the poverty were real enough. But they were not the whole story.

Lenny was an IV drug user who had contracted HIV through a contaminated needle. He was homeless. He was poor. He was sick. Like most AIDS patients of that era, he was dying. What exactly was this white seminarian from Mississippi supposed to do for him? What exactly was I supposed to learn from him? Why did he agree to this? Why did I agree to this?

The questions lingered for a while.

Yet week after week we kept meeting.

We talked about his life, his family, his struggles, his exposure to HIV, and the difficult years that followed. He warmed to me. I warmed to him. I spent the semester with Lenny, trying to learn how to see. I would not say I was walking in his shoes. That would be too much. But I was observing what life required of him and what life had done to him.

This was the era of Ryan White and the AIDS Quilt. AIDS was not viewed then the way it is viewed now. Fear surrounded the disease. Stigma surrounded the disease. Many people assumed AIDS meant gay. Others viewed it as a moral judgment rather than a medical condition. Entire communities had been devastated, and many Americans seemed perfectly comfortable looking the other way.

Lenny lived inside that reality every day.

AZT was the only medication capable of extending his life in any meaningful way, but obtaining it was a full-time job. He had to travel to one agency to secure a voucher and then travel somewhere else to wait in line for the medication itself. The process consumed entire days. Then he still had to find food, shelter, make medical appointments, and somehow find enough strength to do it all over again.

It was as if the system had been designed to exhaust him.

What strikes me today is not simply that Lenny suffered.

What strikes me is that he persevered.

The moment Lenny became Lenny was not when I learned he had AIDS. It was not when I learned he was homeless. It was not when I learned he had used drugs. It was watching him continue. It was watching him carry burdens that should never have been his to carry. It was watching him refuse to surrender.

Lenny was carrying society’s buckets, even when he could barely carry himself.

AIDS happened. Lenny was responsible for the decisions that contributed to his illness. He would have acknowledged that himself. Yet none of that changed the fact that he was created in the image of God.

That may sound obvious.

It was not obvious to me then.

Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I believed it theologically but had never really tested it.

I had heard sermons about the image of God.

I had studied the image of God.

I had written papers about the image of God.

What I had never done was sit across from it.

Lenny taught me that AIDS was not a penalty but a plight. He taught me that people are more than the first thing we notice about them. He taught me that a person can be an addict and still be created in the image of God—a homeless man and still be created in the image of God—an AIDS patient and still be created in the image of God.

He also taught me who my neighbor was.

Years later I would realize that Lee was teaching much the same lesson.

At the time, I thought she was teaching a course about AIDS and culture. Looking back, I think she was teaching discernment. She was teaching us how to see. She was teaching us how to examine assumptions and test them against reality. She was teaching us that critical thinking was not merely an intellectual exercise. It required us to encounter actual people and then ask whether our assumptions could survive the encounter.

Without Drew and without Lee, I do not think I would have arrived there.

That is not a criticism of Starkville or of First United Methodist Church. They formed me in important ways and gave me gifts I still carry. But Drew expanded my world, and Lee forced me to examine parts of myself that I had never previously questioned. She helped me escape some of the limitations of my Southern upbringing without requiring me to abandon everything that upbringing had given me.

Lee was one of the most effective pastors I have ever had, though most of the ministry she offered me happened in a classroom rather than from a pulpit.

She was not merely imparting knowledge. She was equipping ministers to see.

She was empowering students to become Aaron and Hur for people carrying burdens too heavy to bear alone.

The truth is that I did not understand most of this while I was sitting in that basement classroom.

I do not think I understood that Lee and Lenny were teaching the same lesson through different lenses until years later in ministry. The lesson took time to ripen. Some truths do. We encounter them long before we understand them.

When the semester ended, I was glad.

Like every student, I was ready for a break. The assignments were finished. The papers were submitted. Life moved on.

At some point afterward, I learned that Lenny had died. My recollection is that Lee told me, though I cannot swear to it all these years later.

I was sad.

I was also relieved.

Heaven is a much better place to be than life as a homeless, impoverished, drug-addicted AIDS patient in the inner-city Newark of 1996. Not because I wished him dead. I did not. But because I wished him peace, and because there are circumstances in which death becomes a kind of healing.

Thirty years later, I still find myself returning to Lee and Lenny.

They gave me some of the foundational encounters and theological truths upon which I would build a ministry. They taught me how to see people. They taught me how to question assumptions. They taught me that discernment is not an abstract exercise but an act of encounter.

Most of the encounters I have had in ministry have been Lenny moments.

The actions I took in response were my attempt to have Lee moments.

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CNN was on the television, but I wasn’t paying much attention. Then a familiar face appeared on the screen.

It was Nicholas.

I recognized him immediately, and the tears came without warning.

That surprised me.

By that point in my life, tears were scarce.

In the moment, I struggled to understand my reaction.

Why this story?

Why now?

Why Nicholas?

I don’t remember finding an answer.

But I had seen those faces before.

A few years later, I had a similar experience.

I was visiting the National Museum of the Marine Corps. I had gone specifically to see the newer exhibits related to Iraq and Afghanistan. They weren’t open yet, so I wandered into a small theater tucked away behind a set of doors intentionally made of shattered glass.

The room was dark.

A movie was playing.

Funerals. Burials. Arlington.

I watched quietly until the camera moved across a row of snow-covered headstones.

It was completely unexpected.

It caught me off guard.

It was like a punch in the gut.

I recognized the names immediately.

The names belonged to Special Operations Sailors, not Marines, and I was standing in a Marine Corps museum.

They were part of my story, not the Marine Corps’ story.

Again, the tears came.

Not a flood. Not uncontrollable sobbing. Just tears.

Without warning.

Uninvited.

As though some door I did not know how to open had briefly opened itself and let a little light shine in.

I can think of a handful of moments like that.

My grandmother’s death.

A movie called Taking Chance that I found myself returning to year after year.

Small moments.

Unplanned moments.

Moments when the tears appeared as suddenly as they had vanished.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost them.

I am not entirely sure when.

Looking back, I can point to plenty of places where grief accumulated.

Over the years, the list grew longer.

As a young pastor, I spent two days each week visiting hospitals throughout Shreveport. Most days were routine. Some were not.

More than once I walked into a room expecting a visit and discovered that death had arrived first.

I still remember walking back to a nurses’ station one day and asking a nurse to come with me because something did not seem right.

When we reached the room she looked at the patient, looked back at me, and said, “Honey, something is definitely wrong. She’s gone.”

Years later there would be other deaths.

Funerals.

Notifications.

Hospital rooms.

Families.

The kinds of experiences that become part of a pastor’s life and a chaplain’s life.

I learned to carry them because there was no other choice.

Or maybe I learned to set them aside because there was no other choice.

I’m not sure those are the same thing.

For a long time I assumed I was handling grief because I was still moving forward.

More than that, I thought my practice of ministry was improving.

Ministry felt sharper.

My instincts were better.

I was more comfortable in difficult situations than I had been as a young pastor.

I could walk into hospital rooms, funerals, casualty notifications, and crises with a confidence I did not possess years earlier.

The work continued.

Life continued.

The mission continued.

And in many ways I became more capable.

That is part of what made the tears so confusing.

The grief did not seem to be making me less effective. If anything, the opposite appeared to be true.

Years earlier, while serving in Mortuary Affairs, one of the moments I feared most happened.

The remains belonged to someone I knew.

I still did my job.

Because that was what the moment required.

Years later, a Marine-on-Marine shooting brought that grief much closer again.

This was not somewhere else.

It was my base.

My Marines.

Suddenly, I found myself caring for people on every side of the tragedy.

I carried parts of the story that could not be revealed.

Things I knew.

Things I heard.

Things I could not forget.

I carried it because that was my job.

At least that is what I told myself.

And for a while, I believed it.

Until I couldn’t.

I began losing weight.

At first I didn’t think much of it.

Then the weight kept coming off.

Nearly forty pounds in six weeks.

One day I was walking through the clinic when a flight surgeon stopped me in the hallway.

He wasn’t my doctor.

He simply took one look at me and said, “Come with me.”

He could see it.

The weight loss. The gaunt look. Something wasn’t right.

He wanted blood work.

Diabetes. Cancer.

Anything that might explain what he was seeing.

I told him I already knew what it was.

Grief.

He ran the tests anyway.

And then he suggested that maybe it was time to talk to someone.

Grief is stubborn that way.

Understanding it is not the same thing as escaping it.

Yet every now and then something would happen.

A face on a television.

A name on a headstone.

A movie I had seen before.

And suddenly the tears would return.

As though grief had been waiting patiently in a room I had forgotten existed.

I think about that sometimes when the Psalmist writes about the valley of the shadow of death.

Most people focus on the comfort in that psalm.

I find myself returning to the valley.

Not because I enjoy being there.

But because the Psalmist never pretends the valley does not exist.

The valley is real.

The shadows are real.

The journey through it is real.

For much of my life I thought I was accompanying other people through that valley.

Pastors do that.

Chaplains do that.

We walk with people when they are frightened, grieving, dying, or alone.

What took me longer to understand was that companions walk through the valley too.

Not the same valley.

Not the same grief.

But a valley nonetheless.

The mistake was thinking I was only passing through.

Maybe that is why lament matters.

Not because lament fixes anything.

Not because lament resolves grief.

Certainly not because lament makes the valley disappear.

Lament simply allows us to tell the truth.

It allows us to sit in the muck for a while.

It allows us to acknowledge that grief exists without demanding that it be resolved.

It allows us to keep walking.

I do know that the tears have not fully returned.

Maybe the better question is whether they still come.

And they do.

A face.

A name.

A memory.

A grandmother.

A valley.

And for a moment the water flows again.

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Even after twenty-two years of active duty, multiple deployments, and assignments scattered across the globe, I have always found a way to come home in June. The Annual Conference is my spiritual home. It helped shape me. It ordained me. It sent me into ministry.

In many ways, I am both an insider and an outsider.

I belong here. Yet for most of my adult life, I have lived elsewhere, serving in communities far removed from the annual rhythms of conference life. Like a missionary returning home, I come back each year with gratitude, affection, and perhaps a perspective that distance sometimes provides.

Over those thirty-four years I have watched the conference change. Every community changes. Every institution evolves. Some changes bring growth and renewal. Others are more difficult to understand.

For a long time I thought the tension I sensed in the room was theological. Then I thought it was political. Later I assumed it was connected to disaffiliation and the painful divisions that followed.

Those things certainly played a role.

Over time, however, I have come to believe that something deeper is at work.

I have come to believe the tension is less about theology or politics than about discernment.

When I was younger, every Annual Conference seemed to have a George Calvin and a McKinley Franklin.

They were different men, shaped by different experiences, but they served a similar role in the life of the conference.

Both were African American. Their ministries were shaped by the civil rights era and by experiences many others in the room did not share. They had lived on the receiving end of the biases and actions that many institutions, including the Church, were still struggling to confront honestly.

Their questions often concerned equity, fairness, representation, and whether the church was truly living into the values it professed.

They were persistent.

Not everyone appreciated their questions.

Some undoubtedly found them frustrating. Others may have viewed them as cantankerous.

Yet they kept asking.

What strikes me now is that I cannot remember a single specific question either of them asked.

Not one.

I remember the questioning.

I remember the persistence.

I remember the microphones.

I remember the occasional sighs from those who thought they were slowing things down.

Most of all, I remember their presence.

Years after George’s death, someone was telling stories about him and offered an observation that has remained with me ever since.

“Do you know that thing in the middle of a washing machine?”

“The agitator?”

“Yes. The agitator is there to clean the clothes.”

I understood the joke immediately.

I did not understand the wisdom until much later.

When George and McKinley died, we lost more than two conference members.

We lost institutions.

We lost memory.

We lost perspective.

We lost voices that had become part of the conference’s conscience.

Many of the questions George and McKinley raised concerned events that occurred long before I attended my first Annual Conference in 1992.

One example involved the merger of Louisiana’s white and Black conferences following the end of the denomination’s racially segregated Central Jurisdiction in 1968. I did not witness those events. I inherited them.

George and McKinley had not.

They remembered the promises, expectations, and commitments that accompanied that historic moment. When the conference drifted from those commitments, they asked why.

At the time, I thought they were asking questions about decisions.

Looking back, I think they were helping the conference remember its own story.

Through their questions, they were helping the conference to revisit forgotten commitments, examine assumptions, and wrestle honestly with truths that might otherwise have remained hidden.

When I was younger, I sometimes thought George and McKinley were slowing us down.

Today I find myself wondering how many mistakes they helped us avoid—and how many truths they helped us remember.

Communities forget.

They forget promises.

They forget lessons learned.

They forget the cost of getting to where they are.

They forget truths that once seemed self-evident.

Memory matters.

And communities are often far more forgetful than they realize.

As I have reflected on their absence over the years, I have come to believe that George and McKinley understood something that took me much longer to appreciate.

Discernment is not the search for a new truth.

It is the disciplined work of uncovering a truth that is already there.

We inherit assumptions. We inherit traditions, loyalties, fears, preferences, and biases. Layer upon layer they shape how we see the world until we begin mistaking our assumptions for reality.

Discernment strips back those layers to reveal the truth beneath them.

Those layers may be prejudice, politics, fear, or simply forgetfulness.

That work begins with questions.

What are we missing?

Who is not being heard?

What assumptions are we making?

How did we arrive at this conclusion?

What if we are wrong?

The purpose of those questions is not conflict.

The purpose is clarity.

George and McKinley understood that.

They understood that questions are not obstacles to discernment.

Questions are among the tools that make discernment possible.

The challenge is that questions are often evaluated through the lens of motive rather than content.

A concern is met with defensiveness.

A question is received as an attack.

A critic is treated as an enemy.

The conversation shifts from the substance of the question to assumptions about the person asking it.

Once that happens, discernment becomes difficult.

Not because the questions disappear.

Because the listening does.

This year, I found myself paying closer attention to how the room responded to questions. At times, the question itself seemed to matter less than the assumptions that followed it. Before a concern could be explored, conversations sometimes shifted toward why the question was being asked rather than what the question was asking. Curiosity gave way to defensiveness. Listening narrowed.

I found myself watching faces across the room. Some reflected curiosity. Others reflected frustration. A few seemed to communicate that the question itself was unwelcome. In a deliberative body, those reactions matter. They shape whether people feel invited into the conversation or discouraged from participating in it.

The lesson was not that every question was correct.

The lesson was that discernment requires us to wrestle honestly with questions before we decide what to do with them.

Healthy discernment demands something more.

It requires assuming righteous motives, listening carefully, acknowledging our own biases, and maintaining enough humility to accept that someone else may see something we do not.

In short, it requires the courage to remain curious.

Healthy communities make room for the people who ask questions that challenge their assumptions.

They resist the temptation to become defensive when those questions arise.

They understand that curiosity is often the beginning of wisdom.

Annual Conference has always been more than a legislative gathering for me. It is one of the institutions that helped shape me. After years spent serving far from home, I return each June hoping to find respite among the people who first taught me what it means to be Church.

Not because I expect agreement.

Not because disagreement is a problem.

But because discernment becomes difficult when curiosity gives way to defensiveness and questions are treated as threats rather than opportunities to learn.

Perhaps what I am really hoping for is that Annual Conference remains a place where difficult questions can be asked and honest listening can occur.

These days, I find myself thinking more often about George and McKinley.

Not because I agreed with every question they asked.

Not because they won every debate.

But because I increasingly understand the role they played.

Some of the truths we celebrate today first arrived in the form of uncomfortable questions.

Some of the changes we now embrace began with voices that were dismissed, misunderstood, or resisted.

Communities need people willing to ask hard questions.

Not because questions are sacred.

Because truth is.

George and McKinley understood that.

The older I get, the more I think they always did.

They were not trying to win arguments.

They were trying to help us remember who we were.

Every washing machine has an agitator.

It creates movement.

It stirs what has settled.

It creates turbulence.

It makes noise.

It is not always appreciated.

Without it, the machine still runs.

But the clothes never get clean.

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I was tired from travel, anxious about what lay ahead, and eager to finally get where I was supposed to be. Heidi, my Religious Program Specialist, was with me. She would become my teammate through thick and thin during that deployment. We were both exhausted, excited, and ready to get to work. Heidi was a pistol. She never seemed to travel light and appeared to be carrying enough weapons in her cases to win the war herself.

We were unexpectedly flown to our destination that night.

From my experience, Chaplains don’t fly at night.

An hour later we were crossing Afghanistan under the cover of darkness.

It was my first time flying at night in a combat zone. Looking out the window, I could make out little beyond darkness. Occasionally the terrain emerged below us before disappearing again. We were flying low enough that I occasionally found myself wondering whether the next thing I might see would be the flash of a rocket leaving the ground. The only light visible to me came from the green glow of the pilots’ night vision goggles and the faint hint of the moon.

Eventually we landed at my site in Afghanistan, on a completely darkened airfield. I remember dragging my bags through the darkness, exhausted and disoriented. I remember being welcomed by people I had not yet met. Most of all, I remember the relief of finally being where I was supposed to be.

I was home.

Not home in the usual sense. Home to my unit. Home to my mission. Home to the place where I belonged.

Years later, I found myself thinking about that flight. There had to be lights guiding us to that landing. Infrared markers perhaps. Signals visible through the pilots’ night vision goggles but invisible to me. The lights were there all along. I simply lacked the ability to see them.

For years I have returned to the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

On ne voit bien qu’avec le cœur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

“One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

I first encountered those words as a child and have returned to them throughout my life. On a recent trip to Paris, I purchased a special edition of The Little Prince, a reminder that some companions travel with us for a lifetime.

What continues to draw me back is not merely the beauty of the sentence. It is the truth of it.

Again and again I have discovered that the most important things in life are often the things least visible to the eye. Worth. Hope. Love. Grief. Human dignity. The image of God.

Several years ago, a Marine called me.

We had met during a deployment that had shaken the world. Years had passed since we last spoke, but he still had my number and remembered that I had once told him to call if he ever needed to talk.

One day he did.

For nearly four hours he talked.

What struck me was not the event itself but what the event was doing in his psyche.

During the deployment he had taken an action exactly as he had been trained to do. The outcome was not what anyone anticipated. At the center of the story was a child.

Years later, he still saw her.

The image had never really left him.

He could not sleep. He could not rest. Again and again he returned to the same moment, examining it from every possible angle and searching for certainty that never came.

For years he had been struggling with his worth and what he understood to be an unforgivable sin. As I listened, I found myself hearing something deeper than a Marine recounting a painful memory. I heard a soul trapped inside a single moment, searching for a way to understand himself, his actions, and whether forgiveness remained possible.

The facts had not changed in years. What he was searching for was a way to live with them.

Over time, the memory became the lens through which he judged himself and his life. The image remained so vivid that it obscured other truths, including two of the most essential: his worth and his hope.

I do not know what happened after we hung up. I do not know whether he ever found the certainty he was seeking. I do not know whether he ultimately found peace.

What I do know is that for nearly four hours he did not carry the burden alone.

As I listened, I began to perceive his call not simply as a search for answers, but as a soul searching for forgiveness. Not only forgiveness from God, but the possibility of forgiving himself.

Listening to him, I found myself thinking about how often the most important truths in our lives remain hidden from us.

As a teenager, I learned to develop photographs in a darkroom. I enjoyed the craft of it. As an awkward kid, it was something that felt uniquely mine, a skill few of my friends understood and fewer still knew how to do.

What I remember most, however, is the smell of the developer and the quiet of the darkroom itself. There was something safe about that space. Away from the noise and expectations of the world, I could focus on the image in front of me.

A blank sheet of paper would slide into the developer tray and slowly reveal what had been hidden from view.

The image was not being created.

It was already there.

Processing simply revealed it.

Over the years I have come to believe that people are much the same.

During the COVID pandemic, a young Marine came to us with an impossible situation. She had COVID. Her profoundly disabled brother had COVID. Her parents had been hospitalized with COVID and were unable to provide the care he required. She was the only available caregiver, yet a standing policy prohibited travel for personnel who tested positive.

I remember sitting in discussions focused on the policy. The policy mattered. It existed for good reasons. Yet the longer the conversation continued, the more convinced I became that we were discussing a policy while overlooking a person.

What I saw was not a COVID-positive Marine requesting travel.

I saw a daughter.

I saw a sister.

I saw the only available caregiver for a vulnerable human being.

Eventually she was allowed to travel and went home to care for her brother because there was no one else to do it.

Everyone involved had COVID. The letter of the law did not apply to this situation.

Some in the room saw a policy.

I saw a person.

Much of ministry feels like that.

People often arrive carrying stories, wounds, fears, failures, and hopes that remain invisible to everyone around them. Institutions see policies. Organizations see processes. Human beings often see only what is immediately in front of them.

Yet beneath all of that lies a deeper reality.

Christians call it Imago Dei—the image of God.

We believe it is written into every human life. It remains present beneath success and failure, beneath shame and accomplishment, beneath the stories we tell ourselves and the labels others place upon us.

It remains even when we can no longer see it in ourselves.

Human beings possess a remarkable capacity to overlook what is most essential. Yet our failure to perceive something does not negate its reality.

Truth remains true whether we recognize it or not.

Dignity remains present whether we acknowledge it or not.

Hope remains possible even when we can no longer see it.

Perhaps that is what Saint-Exupéry understood.

Perhaps it is also what John was trying to tell us.

When Jesus declares, “I am the Light of the World,” I do not hear merely a promise of comfort. I hear a promise of revelation.

The Light reveals reality.

The infrared markers did not create the runway. They revealed it.

The darkroom light did not create the image. It revealed it.

A difficult conversation did not create a Marine’s worth or his hope. It helped reveal truths that had been obscured by a single moment.

The Light does not create dignity.

It reveals dignity.

The Light does not invent truth.

It reveals truth.

The Light does not create the image of God.

It reveals what was there all along.

Even when we cannot see God, feel God, or hear God, God remains. The limits of our perception do not diminish the reality of God’s presence.

The light shines in the darkness.

And reality remains what it has always been, waiting to be revealed.

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Before we could care for the 2,400, we needed to care for the three.

A few days after leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport, three chaplains sat down with me in a private room in Kuwait.

I had arrived as the lead for a SPRINT team tasked with providing spiritual and psychological support to roughly 2,400 Marines and Sailors involved in the evacuation effort. There was no shortage of people who needed care. Yet before beginning that work, I needed to check on three chaplains.

Two were my responsibility and while the third was not directly mine, he was for the time-being.

All three had spent days at HKIA during the evacuation. They had done what chaplains do. They listened, prayed, encouraged, and walked alongside people enduring extraordinary uncertainty. Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, special operators, civilians, and Afghan refugees all passed through those days carrying fear, exhaustion, grief, and unanswered questions. The chaplains carried a portion of that burden with them.

By the time I saw them in Kuwait, they were safe. At least physically.

I have spent enough years in ministry to know that physical safety and recovery are not the same thing.

I wanted to know how they were really doing.

More than anything, I wanted to make sure someone was caring for the caregivers.

Once we were alone, the emotions spilled out. What they had been holding back, the emotions they had been containing for the sake of those in their care, began to flow. In the same moment, I could see both the burdens they had been carrying and the relief that they could finally lay them down—on the altar, if you will.

I led them in prayer and gave them the space to add their own. I assured them that whatever was said in that room would remain with me. Then I gave them time to share whatever was on their minds and hearts.

As I listened, I found myself wrestling with a question of my own. I had trained two of these chaplains for the kinds of challenges they might face as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit. I knew they were capable. I trusted them. Yet I could not help wondering whether I had given them enough.

Of course, there was no way to foresee what they had just experienced. The evacuation from Afghanistan would become the largest noncombatant evacuation operation in American history.

No training plan anticipates that.

There was relief in that room. Relief that they were out of the fire. There was exhaustion. There was laughter and there were tears, often both at the same time. There was a continuing commitment to care for their people. There was even some guilt, the lingering fear that they might not have been enough, that they might not have done enough, that somehow they should have been able to carry more.

What stayed with me was the palpable sense that something was being set down. Not completely. Not permanently. But for a little while, the room gave them permission to stop carrying everything alone.

Looking back, what I remember most is how sacred that room felt.

Over the course of my ministry I have stood in many sacred places. Hospital rooms. Funeral homes. Memorial services. Places where the living gathered to mourn the dead.

Yet this was different.

Perhaps it was the most sacred encounter of my career that involved care for the living rather than the dead.

It was sacred because a United Methodist, a Southern Baptist, a Roman Catholic, and a Seventh-day Adventist could enter a room carrying different traditions, different assumptions, and different understandings of the faith and still encounter the presence of a loving and unifying God in that place.

When I left that room, I knew they would be okay. Not because the burdens had disappeared or because they were finished processing what they had experienced.

I knew they would be okay because they were still focused on the right things. They still cared deeply about their people. They were willing to be transparent and vulnerable about what they were carrying. Despite their exhaustion, they were still functioning.

They needed time, respite, and space to process what they had experienced.

But they were going to be okay.

As I listened, I realized that another generation of chaplains was now encountering some of the same realities of war that had shaped so much of my own generation.

Yet even in that room it was obvious that no two experiences were identical. Each chaplain was in a different place. Each possessed a different level of resilience. Each had experienced HKIA differently. Each was carrying a different burden and would travel a different road in the months and years ahead.

As I think back to that room and continue to process my own experience of that moment, I realize that I was witnessing different responses to the same event. Each chaplain carried away something different. Each would process it differently. Each would carry burdens that extended far beyond that room.

Yet that is not what has stayed with me most.

What has stayed with me is what unfolded in that room.

It would take me years to understand fully why that room remained so important to me.

Before we could care for the 2,400, we needed to care for the three.

Before they could continue carrying the burdens of others, someone needed to help carry theirs.

In the years since, I have found myself reading a familiar passage of scripture differently than I once did.

For most of my life, when I read the story of Moses standing on the hill while Israel fought below, I paid attention to Moses.

These days, I find myself paying attention to Aaron and Hur.

Because Moses isn’t the only one doing the work in the story. Aaron and Hur enter the scene and fill a fundamental role that is at least as important as the role Moses plays.

Moses is the leader God has called, and Moses is up to the task. But the task is enormous and the weight of the task is overwhelming.

Aaron and Hur can see and feel the weight Moses is carrying. They recognize his exhaustion. They see it in his changing affect and failing strength. And so they step forward to distribute the load.

They become the literal foundation for Moses’ continued success.

They carry the weight so that Moses can remain functional.

We notice Moses when we read the story because Moses is God’s chosen leader in one of the most important moments in the history of Israel. We tend to overlook Aaron and Hur because they are not the main characters. They are only a small part of the story.

Yet reflecting through a career of witnessing chaplains carrying the water, their actions have become a model for something much larger. The burden of caring for a community was never meant to belong to one person alone.

We often celebrate the people carrying the water. We should. Their work matters. Yet too often we mistake admiration for support. We assume that because someone continues to carry the burden, they no longer feel its weight. Healthy communities do something different. They recognize when the load is becoming too heavy and step forward to help carry it.

Aaron and Hur remind us that healthy communities recognize who is carrying the weight and choose to help bear it.

Aaron and Hur understood something we often leave unspoken: empathy.

They understood that Moses was the leader. They understood that Moses was the one called by God. And yet they also understood the burden of that leadership and of that role. They could literally feel the weight of Moses’ burden through his changing affect.

And their empathy encouraged them to act.

One of the fundamental emotions that makes chaplaincy effective is empathy. The ability to consider what it is like to walk in someone else’s experience.

This is what made the three chaplains effective at HKIA.

This is what made Aaron and Hur so effective.

This is what made the room in Kuwait so sacred.

Yet empathy does not belong only to chaplains.

It belongs to all of us.

It is what allows us to recognize when someone is carrying more than they were ever meant to carry alone.

Aaron and Hur did not become Aaron and Hur because they held a title. They became Aaron and Hur because empathy moved them beyond awareness and into responsibility. They noticed, they understood, and they acted. They helped carry the burden.

Looking back, I think that is what happened in that room in Kuwait. For a brief moment, three chaplains who had spent days carrying the burdens of others were given permission to set some of that weight down. The burden was not removed, but it was shared.

Perhaps that is what makes community possible. Not that some are called to carry the water, but that others are willing to help bear its weight.

The community owns the weight of the water—not just the caregivers.

Disclaimer: The essays published in Drawing Water from the Well reflect my own experiences, observations, and opinions. They are written in my personal capacity and do not constitute official statements of policy, doctrine, or position of the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.

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There was a well at my great-grandparents’ home. It sat partway down a long sloping front yard beneath a small roof, protected by a wooden cover. A bucket hung from a pulley. By the time I was born, no one depended upon it anymore. The house had plumbing. Water came from a faucet.

Yet the well remained.

As a child, I rarely thought about it. It was simply part of the landscape.

Only later did I begin to understand what it represented and how it had given life to generations of my family.

My great-grandparents depended upon that well. Every bucket of water for cooking, cleaning, bathing, and daily life came from that place. Long before faucets and water lines arrived, the well sustained them. It was not merely part of the property. It was part of their survival.

Every bucket had to be drawn.

Every bucket had to be carried.

A well is a reminder of dependence.

Modern life makes it easy to forget such things.

Water appears when we turn a handle. Electricity arrives when we flip a switch. Food waits for us on grocery shelves. Most of us spend very little time thinking about the things that sustain life until they become scarce.

Looking back, I realize that water continued to appear throughout my life.

Years later, while stationed on Diego Garcia, I lived on the third floor of a bachelor officers’ quarters with no elevator. Because the tap water could not be trusted, drinking water came from a large freshwater station outside the building. Every few days I hauled heavy five-gallon bottles up three flights of stairs.

It was exhausting.

At the time it seemed like little more than an inconvenience. Today I remember it differently.

The easiest water to reach was not the water I trusted to drink. That lesson extends far beyond water.

In Afghanistan, water arrived by convoy and was stored in large water buffalos scattered throughout the base. Most of us rarely thought about it. We simply trusted that it would be there when we needed it.

Only later did I appreciate how much effort, planning, and risk stood behind that trust.

Water was never simply water. It was life, carried from one place to another by people willing to bear the burden.

Over time I would discover that water is not the only thing people carry. Some things we carry give life. Others leave us searching for it.

Scripture repeatedly returns to water because water reveals something essential about life.

At Marah, Israel discovered that finding water and finding drinkable water are not the same thing. The people were thirsty, but the water they found was bitter. What appeared to be the answer could not satisfy their thirst.

Centuries later, Jesus sat beside Jacob’s well and met a woman who came looking for water. Like so many people, she arrived carrying a bucket and expecting an ordinary day. What she found instead was living water.

Jesus revealed that her deepest thirst had little to do with water. It was a thirst for belonging, grace, reconciliation, and God.

She arrived carrying a bucket.

She left carrying living water.

Over the years, I have found living water in many places.

Sometimes I have found it in the ordinary—a conversation with a friend, a quiet morning, or a moment of unexpected grace.

Sometimes I have found it in the extraordinary—in ancient churches, remote corners of the world, moments of profound beauty, seasons of deep suffering, and encounters that changed the way I understood myself, others, or God.

The deepest sources are not always obvious. Yet looking back, they are often the places that sustained me when other wells ran dry.

What I gradually came to understand is that these were not separate sources at all. They were different places where I encountered the same living water.

In Ezekiel’s vision, a river flowed from the presence of God. As it flowed, it became deeper. Wherever the river went, life followed. Trees flourished. Barren places became fertile. Even the waters of the Dead Sea were transformed.

The prophet’s vision suggests a profound truth: life follows the waters that nourish it.

Scripture ultimately points beyond wells, rivers, and streams to the God from whom life itself flows. We become dependent upon whatever sustains us.

And over time, what sustains us helps shape who we become. Perhaps that is why the image of the well has remained with me. The older I become, the more I notice how many people are thirsty. Not merely for water.

They are thirsty for belonging in a fragmented world. Thirsty for meaning amid constant activity.

Thirsty for peace in an age of outrage.

Thirsty for relationships deeper than transactions.

Thirsty for something sturdy enough to withstand life’s inevitable storms.

The world offers no shortage of distractions but surprisingly few things that truly satisfy.

We spend much of our lives drinking from shallow sources and wondering why our thirst remains. Not every well is trustworthy.

Some sources nourish us. Others merely occupy us. Some help us grow.

Others slowly deplete us.

We often mistake relief for renewal and distraction for sustenance.

What satisfies us in the moment is not always what sustains us over time. Wisdom often lies in learning the difference.

There is another image that often comes to mind. I imagine a person walking through a savannah.

The landscape changes slowly. Trees become fewer. Water sources become farther apart. The ground becomes drier. The changes are so gradual that they are barely noticed.

Then one day he looks around and realizes he is standing in a desert.

By the time he realizes where he is, he can no longer identify where he crossed the boundary. Life can be like that, existentially.

The responsibilities accumulate. The demands increase.

The years pass.

One day we discover that we have drifted farther from the sources that sustain us than we ever intended.

The desert rarely announces its arrival. It simply appears.

The lesson of the desert is not merely that water is scarce.

It is that the quality of the water matters.

When water is abundant, we rarely think about its source.

When the landscape becomes harsh and the journey becomes difficult, suddenly the source matters very much.

Deep sources matter.

Trustworthy sources matter.

Life-giving sources matter.

Because sooner or later, every life encounters a wilderness. The savannah slowly becomes desert.

The landscape grows dry. The easy sources fail.

And in those moments we discover what has truly sustained us all along.

The old well at my great-grandparents’ home taught a lesson it took me years to understand. Not every well is trustworthy.

Not every source that promises life can actually sustain it. But where living water is found, life follows.

Over the years I have found living water in many places. Yet beneath them all flowed the same river.

The challenge is not simply finding a well.

The challenge is learning to draw from deep sources before the savannah becomes desert. Every bucket still has to be drawn.

Every bucket still has to be carried.

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What I remember most is not the politics or opinions of the men and women who came through those doors. What I remember are their faces.

They came from different parts of the country. Different races. Different backgrounds. Different beliefs. Different stories. Some likely disagreed deeply about the state of the world and the future of the nation they served. Yet in death, those distinctions often felt much smaller than the shared humanity they carried and the common purpose that united them in service to something beyond themselves.

That experience changed the way I think about people. It changed the way I think about faith too.

Lately I have found myself reflecting on how easily faith becomes entangled with outrage, certainty, and tribal identity. Not because conviction is wrong. Conviction matters. Beliefs matter. Scripture matters. But Christianity was never meant to become another slogan, another camp, another way of sorting ourselves into tribes. Faith was never supposed to make us less human toward one another.

The older I become, the more I suspect one of the great temptations of modern life is the desire to make God small enough — small enough to fit neatly inside our own assumptions, preferences, and instincts. We want clarity where humility may be required. We want certainty where discernment is required. We want victory where reconciliation may be the harder and holier path.

But God has always been larger than our systems.

The Christian tradition has never been sustained by Scripture apart from the living work of the Holy Spirit, the wisdom of the Church, reason, experience, and faithful discernment across generations. Christians have wrestled with difficult questions from the very beginning. That struggle is not evidence of weak faith. It is evidence that we are human beings trying, imperfectly, to follow a God whose fullness none of us can completely comprehend.

Christians believe we come to know God not merely through words on a page or through human certainty alone, but through the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit — the Spirit who reveals Christ, shapes the faithful, and calls the Church again and again toward love, mercy, humility, and truth. The Spirit still convicts, comforts, teaches, reconciles, and transforms. The Spirit does not simply affirm our fears, grievances, or tribal instincts. More often, the Spirit calls us beyond them.

That should produce humility in us.

It should also produce mercy.

When Jesus spoke about loving our neighbor, he did not place conditions around who qualified for compassion. When he washed the feet of his disciples, he demonstrated that greatness in the Kingdom of God looks very different from greatness in the kingdoms of this world. Again and again, the Gospel pulls us away from self-righteousness and back toward love, sacrifice, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

And yet Christians, like all people, are still vulnerable to fear. Vulnerable to outrage. Vulnerable to reducing one another into categories instead of seeing human beings bearing the image of God.

I do not write this as someone standing above that temptation. I write this as someone increasingly aware of how easy it is to lose ourselves in noise, performance, outrage, and certainty. The world pressures us constantly to choose sides first and forget that we are speaking about human beings made in the image of God. Faith calls us to reverse that order.

I think often about an old brick-covered well that stood in the yard of my great-grandparents’ home. Wells only remain useful if they are replenished. Draw from them endlessly without renewal and eventually they run dry.

The same is true spiritually.

A faith built only on outrage, fear, identity, or constant conflict eventually exhausts itself. But faith rooted in grace, humility, prayer, mercy, community, and love of neighbor can still draw living water from deeper places.

Perhaps that is part of what the Church is being called toward again.

Not away from conviction, but away from the illusion that conviction alone is enough.

Not away from truth, but away from the arrogance of believing our understanding is complete.

Not away from public life, but away from the temptation to treat other human beings as enemies before seeing them first as neighbors.

I think again of the men and women who passed through that morgue years ago. In the end, what remained most visible was not ideology or identity, but shared humanity, sacrifice, and the fragile dignity carried by every human life.

I still believe the Holy Spirit calls the Church beyond fear, certainty, and tribalism. I still believe reconciliation is possible. I still believe Christianity is strongest not when it seeks dominion, but when it reflects the quiet and difficult teachings of Christ: love your neighbor, care for the vulnerable, forgive generously, seek peace, walk humbly with God.

Maybe what many of us need is not a louder faith, but a deeper well from which to draw.

“…the water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” — John 4:14

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