Yesterday was one of those unexpected gifts. In a region where summer lingers and lingers like an unwanted houseguest, the air was cool and drizzly. It was as if Nashville and Portland temporarily switched places. I ran in the morning and I wasn’t a walking puddle of sweat at the end. Each time I went outside, I was greeted by mist and breeze. I could get used to that.

I won’t get a chance to get used to that because the temperature will flirt with 90s again within a couple of days. It will be mid to late October before we maybe (maybe) get that kind of cool weather consistently. But, my goodness, yesterday was nice. It seems like it has been summer for a year and, for a little while, we were reminded that autumn is somewhere down the road.

We need fall. I am not a fanatic about the season. I am not one of those people who loves Halloween and starts guzzling pumpkin spice lattes when they appear way too early in late August. I do like football season (although I have some growing internal conflict about the sport; another post for another time). And I am looking forward to wearing my zip-up hoodie regularly because, in my humble opinion, that is the best article of clothing that humanity has conceived.

When I was a kid, there was a big comic book event that I read called Zero Hour. The conceit was a bad guy sought to wipe out all of history by somehow devouring the time stream of history from both ends. I know…but comics. The ending of one issue in particular has always stuck with me. Lois Lane stood on the top of the Daily Planet building and watched as a blinding whiteness consumed the city in front of her. The color on the page faded panel by panel. The inked lines around her lost volume and became dashed marks. Finally she vanished. The panels became white and the last two pages were completely blank.

Everything was gone (everything eventually got better) and that filled my child-aged mind with this existential horror. It was upsetting. What if everything I loved, everything I knew, all just disappeared?

Part of me feels like something that I loved and knew well has vanished. It has been fading for years and yet it keeps gnawing at me. I have been writing about the unhealthy marriage between the evangelical church and conservative American politics for as long as I have been an adult. And I thought that I had healthy distance from it. I moved to attending a Lutheran church and then a more moderate Baptist church and now I work in a Disciples of Christ congregation. 

But as we keep plunging further down a rabbit hole of this present administration, I feel like I am experiencing a genuinely painful loss.

I write this while E.A. is reading bedtime stories to our two sons. They are locked into her voice. They fidget a little, but they are with her. I'm trying to think what we were doing 13 years ago. Were we still talking to people at the reception or had we started making the trip to Charlotte? I'm not totally sure. I can tell you that she was breathtakingly beautiful in her wedding gown on that evening. And I can tell you that she is breathtakingly beautiful as she sits on the couch in our sons' room right now.

Thirteen years ago, I could not have anticipated the twists and turns that our lives have taken. Who could? When you get married, you think you know what the future will hold, but you really are just drunk on the wonderfulness of the now. Young love and all of that. I still don't know what the future holds, but I can tell you that I want this woman to be part of it; even more today than when I meant with all my heart then. She is my absolute favorite person in the world and I can't believe how lucky I am that I get to share life with her.

I'm working on a sermon for Sunday. The text is Psalm 51 and preaching from such a familiar passage is both a blessing and a curse. I've been been examining this song of repentance from every angle. What it says is so simple, but often the simplest things are the most difficult to say. Trying to go to sleep tonight, my brain kept turning the passage like a Rubik's cube and then a refrain from a song made my eyes spring open.

And I totally cannot use it in my sermon.

But it was not your fault but mine
And it was your heart on the line
I really f----- it up this time
Didn't I, my dear?

Yeah...songs that drop the f-bomb multiple times don't really make for good Sunday morning illustrations. But it is post-midnight on Wednesday so I'm going to try to write Mumford & Sons' "Little Lion Man" out of my system so that I can move forward.

A couple of days ago, I started to write a post entitled "No Sanctuary." It was about how this has been a long summer and how I am just completely fried physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. And I would have written about how there does not seem to be any place that I can recharge because I work at a church, have children who need attention, yada yada yada.

I realized fairly quickly that it would have been really whiny. So I stopped. All of what I felt was real, but my heart wasn't in the right place. I was complaining.

Yesterday I went for a run. It was a bit of a slog despite the fact that it was a rare afternoon when the temperature wasn't oppressively hot. When I got done, I pulled a towel and a Gatorade out of my car and sat down on a slope of grass. Nothing special. It's what I usually do when I run that particular route.

And I felt peace. Peace that I had not felt in maybe two months

RISE! AND SHINE! AND GIVE GOD THE GLORY! GLORY!

For many summers, Friday mornings were for screaming that at the top of my lungs while furiously pumping my arms up and down because we are to give God the glory, glory with all our being and not just daintily swaying our hands back and forth. I was part of a group that was known as the Not Yet Ready for Evening Worship Service Singers (Not Yet Readies for short).

The Not Yet Readies were the camp staff members who were a little less talented in the musical department. We didn't sing solos in worship services. We typically weren't multi-instrumentalists though a fair number of drummers and bassists (guilty) were in our ranks. But what we lacked in tuneful talent, we more than made up for with heart. We would lead our three songs during morning celebration in a state of supernova delirium. We were loud and silly and proud of our not-yet-readiness.

I think about those Fridays often during the summer. Whenever I hear a VBS-style song that is done with motions, I always want to crank the energy up just a little bit more. By the way, did you know that there are regional variations to "Rise and Shine"? There are. Also, if people aren't prepared they will be a little bit terrified if you scream the song at the top of your lungs and throw your whole body into the motions. It's true.

I have a tough time with the Fourth of July. I enjoy the fireworks and the grilling out, but I have difficulty genuflecting before my homeland. Do not get me wrong: I love this country deeply and am grateful that I was fortunate enough to be born within its borders. But many people today will proclaim that we are the greatest country in the world, a shining city on a hill in a dark global landscape.

And I am not so sure about that.

It is not solely because our present government seems to be a moral and ethical dumpster fire. To be sure, it is stupid difficult to celebrate a country that treats children the ways in which children at our border have been treated. But the reality is we have always had our flaming piles of garbage. Drone strikes that have killed innocent people, sending weapons to what turn out to be terrorist organizations, a place where many a person has to fight tooth and nail uphill because they are not a white man.

To be sure, there is good amongst those stories, but the tenor of Independence Day pretends as if the bad didn't happen. To some people, it seems almost blasphemous to mention the wrong that this country has done. Yet it is hard to shake that we took this land, killed and subjugated the people living here. It is difficult to forget the backs of slaves on which much of the country was built and how those people were seen as property; the ugliness of the Three-Fifths compromise etched into the Constitution. It's slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, "go back to where you came from," and All Lives Matter.