When Jesus rises from the water after being baptized, a voice from heaven says that he is the Beloved. That moment is a small but an important factor in how I understand my faith. The notion is a tapestry of this passage, God loving the world in John’s gospel, nothing separating us from the love of God in Jesus in Paul’s letter to the Romans, the twin commands to love God and our neighbor as ourselves in the Greatest Commandment. All of which is to say that if Jesus is beloved then I am beloved too. And so are you.

Thus I view baptism as this great reminder of God’s grace, new life, and our belovedness. I think to the baptism of both my sons, which I was so fortunate to administer for both. I cannot put a value on how much I love Jim and Liam. Their belovedness is off the charts and I am a finite and flawed parent. Even when they are mean to one another, act like surly adolescents, or are rude to myself or their mom, they are still beloved. I hope that they will always know that they are beloved by God, their parents, and many more people. Seeing ourselves through that lens can change our lives. Seeing our neighbor through that lens can change the world.

Growing up in a Southern Baptist church, I heard a great deal about “Absolute Truth.” I was warned to guard against the many lies that the world would throw my way. If I wanted to be grounded in any sort of reality then I needed to trust God (and, by default, my particular denomination’s interpretation of God which is where things got dicey). Now I know that it is more than a little bit arrogant for a human or institution to make claims of being the sole arbiter of Truth. Life can be complicated. Yet I have found myself more and more frustrated with what a tenuous grasp we have on any sort of shared semblance of reality.

After the 2020 election, the guy who was the President at the time insisted that the election had been stolen from him. This claim had been debunked time and time again, but he persisted to perpetuate a lie and many people believed him. Five years ago today, he held a rally on the Mall in Washington, D.C. on the day that Congress was to certify the election. A mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol and many eventually breached the building. This was something that our whole entire country witnessed in real time. People on both sides of the political aisle were horrified.

I had a semi-recurring dream last night which dragged me back into a difficult period in my past. As a result, I woke up blindingly angry at a lot of people. I could not get my mind off of the hurt. Then I felt stupid for letting the past continue to wound me in this brand new year of 2026.

The calendar is something both kind and cruel. One one hand, new days and new years allow us the opportunity for fresh starts. We often need those kind of signposts to propel us forward. Yet a new year can also be intensely frustrating when you don’t feel new. Maybe you wouldn’t beat yourself up if you felt like you were stuck on some random day. But this is a brand new year so you feel like you need to get your crap together.

Maybe the best way I can get my crap together is to remember that we don’t move in the same linear fashion as the calendar. Traumas, memories, breakthroughs, and the like will sometimes make a person feel like they are making huge progress one day and fifty steps backwards the next. I confess that it sometimes makes me wonder whether I am healing or I just had a really good distraction. It is an easy way to frustrate yourself.

I don’t know if I can say enough good things about Wake Up Dead Man. Yes, it is another twisty Knives Out mystery with Rian Johnson and his stellar cast taking the series in a darker, more gothic direction. This whodunnit—set in a remote parish in upstate New York—is particularly in my wheelhouse because it creates the space for this to be a story about faith and skepticism.

Far from being a didactic, both sides are given virtuous, fully drawn characters which allows the film to be a genuine conversation between the ideas. Wake Up Dead Man also delves into the ways in which faith is twisted by fear, power, and the love of wealth into something that can cripple personal lives and poison communities on a larger scale. It is entertaining, mysterious, funny, and takes seriously grace, forgiveness, calling, and doubt.

Yet a couple of days after watching the film with my family, what lingers with me most is a particular scene about midway through the movie. I will try to tiptoe around spoilers as I provide some context. Detective Benoit Blanc (played by series mainstay Daniel Craig) and a young priest named Jud Duplenticy (an excellent Josh O’Connor) have teamed up to figure out a seemingly impossible crime for which Jud is a person of interest.

Usually my Christmas season listening is a steady diet of A Charlie Brown Christmas by the Vince Guaraldi Trio and a curated list of merry favorites. But this year there has also been a steady dose of the album Getting Killed by Geese. I saw the album on numerous end-of-the-year “Best of” lists and figured that I should give it a listen. I almost didn’t make it past the album opener “Trinidad,” which features a cacophony of drums and guitars as frontman Cameron Winter wails, “There’s a bomb in my car!” This ain’t Christmas music. But it might just be Advent music.

I am not going to sit here and tell you what any of these lyrics mean. Sure, I can posit what a hundred horses dancing in times of war and conversations with Joan of Arc convey but it would all be shots in the dark. But how does the album feel? In the chaos, noise, anxiety, and brief moments of grace, it sounds like now. Both now in the sense of this time and place in history and now as in Advent. This is a season of waiting, expectation, and hoping for some light to come into a dark world.

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

What does it mean for someone to be a peacemaker in the world today? For a long time, I thought that I knew. I am a textbook Enneagram 9 aka “The Peacemaker.” I crave peace in the deepest parts of my spirit. Yet for a long time, I confused peace with an absence of conflict. This approach can work in the short term, but it doesn’t often lead to any lasting peace. To make peace, to try to create some sort of place where there is flourishing for everyone involved requires more than being nice, sending good thoughts, or offering up prayers.

Niceness, thoughts, and prayers are good things. Yet to make peace out of strife requires something more from each of us. We have to be honest about where hurt lies and humble enough to listen to those who disagree with us. I have not figured this out, but this is my good faith albeit flawed effort.

No one should lose their life for what they believe or say in public. Full stop. It is a tragedy any time a person is a victim of gun violence. People lose their loved ones or, at best, watch them go through needless suffering. Lives that could go in all sorts of directions are cut short. What happened to Charlie Kirk, what happened to the students impacted by the shooting in Colorado, what happens all too often every day is a tragedy that we have gotten way too familiar with in this country.

If you follow me on Instagram, you likely noticed a trend on Tuesday nights this past year. At some point I would post a photo of a stuffed animal somewhere in the vicinity of a hospital. When I began my chaplain residency at Vanderbilt, my youngest son was anxious about what I would face while working at a hospital. He was especially concerned about my weekly overnight shifts. So each Tuesday morning, my son would select a stuffed animal to be my Overnight Shift Companion to keep me company. And I would take a picture of that friend at the hospital to let Liam know all was well.

The truth of the matter was a little more complicated. All was well, but there were many nights when I would sit with the dead, dying, and grieving. These are moments that are sacred and a natural part of life yet they are still incredibly difficult. As the year went on, I became more comfortable sharing appropriate glimpses of these hard moments with my boys. And I still kept taking fun pictures of plush friends every Tuesday night. There was room for both.

Our residency cohort—which included a Black Baptist pastor, a Methodist, an Episcopalian from Massachusetts, a Muslim Imam, and a Catholic priest from India—witnessed a great deal of turmoil both inside and outside the hospital. We had many discussions about the various dumpster fires that were going on in our country. Not to be overdramatic, but there was sometimes a foreboding sense that the world was coming crashing down.