Mar 31

Mar 31 Friday and Sunday

I remember one summer when we were kids, my brother and I were bobbing in the ocean when he asked, “If God is outside of time and we are with God when we’re in heaven, then couldn’t we be watching ourselves right now?” That broke my brain a little bit. Periodic reminder that my little brother and sister are consistently brilliant people.

I don’t know what I believe about God and time nor do I want to suggest that was the endocarp to my brother’s theology on the subject, but that memory popped into my head today. I have been thinking a lot today about how we assign names and numbers to make sense of the ever-flowing stream of time. The months, days, and years that we have placed on time in concert with the earth’s rhythms are why I am 37 years old instead of eighteen and a half or 148. Today is Wednesday, but someone at some point could have just as easily decided that this day would be called Ralph.

All of that sounds very much like some zoned out late night college dorm room conversation. Being 148 years old on this gray Ralph morning is not why time is on my mind. It’s because it is Holy Week. It is that moment in time when we mark out and remember the final week of Jesus’ earthly ministry: his triumphal entry, his sharing in a last supper, his crucifixion, and resurrection. It is during this time of looking back and forward and within that time becomes a bit unmoored.

Mar 28

Mar 28 Save Us Now

Chris Cox

Weekly Lectionary

“Save us now!”

That is a cry that starts in the heart of peasants in 1st Century Palestine and it hangs in the air circling and reverberating around the globe some twenty centuries later. We still want to be saved; from Rome, from heartbreak, from hunger, from war, from pandemic, from violence, from hatred, from ourselves. And we still cry out.

Often that for which we cry out is not going to save us. In Jerusalem, they wanted a conquering king to overthrow the Empire that oppressed them. They wanted and we want a blow in the cycle of conquering and vengeance that keeps on turning. We still often want an earthly kingdom that will establish rule for people like us. A kingdom that will rule by power, by sword, by gun. We want a leader on a war horse and the eradication of our enemies.

Mar 19

Mar 19 To Liam on His 8th Birthday

Chris Cox

As I write this, I am sitting on the floor in the room of my childhood home. You are laying on a mattress intently reading a Scooby-Doo book as you wind down for bed. I close my eyes and think about when we first met you eight years ago. How you fit in our arms. How your face was round and squished up. Today you seem impossibly big and impossibly old, but I think that is how all parents feel on their kid’s birthday.

We were walking in a park the other day with your grandparents and you did something that you have done on our many other walks in this pandemic year. You slipped your hand into mine and held it as we walked along. Your animated voice bouncing from one idea to another as your other hand waved and gesticulated in all directions.

I’m thankful each time it happens because I know moments like that probably aren’t long for this world. I hope and know that others will take its place; other gestures and moments that connect us as you grow up. But those times when you put your hand in mine grounds me. It calms me in a world that has been anything but calm. It’s a reminder that when everything is changing that you will always be my son, I will always be your dad, and there is a love that holds us together. Those reminders are a gift.

Mar 16

Mar 16 Mascot Madness 2021

Chris Cox

It’s NCAA Tournament time again. And that means that it is time for me to go down my annual rabbit hole in which I fill out a bracket based on the question, “Which team’s mascot would win in a one-on-one fight?” After doing an Ultimate Bracket last year when there was no NCAA Tournament, I decided this year to film myself going through this year’s entries as I explain which mascot I believe should be crowned champion of Mascot Madness 2021.

Mar 14

Mar 14 The People Became Impatient on the Way

Chris Cox

Weekly Lectionary

Patience is difficult. If there is something that we do not like or with which we are not comfortable, we don’t usually want to stick with it. I get that. It makes complete sense. Yet just because we want something to be over doesn’t mean that it’s over. Just because it becomes more than we want to deal with or we lose interest that doesn’t mean we’re done with it or it’s done with us.

The people following Moses became impatient on the way. They were witnesses to their misery in Egypt and to the incredible acts of God that rescued them. But the wilderness was difficult. They had what they needed but they were uncomfortable. They had food, but it wasn’t good enough food. “Why did you bring us out here to die?” they asked. They weren’t going to die, but things got tough and it felt like they were.

According to Numbers, God sent poisonous snakes to set the people straight. Did God do this? The reader can judge for themselves. I have a hard time believing God does something like this. Partly because we seem to do a pretty good job inviting the poisonous snakes to the party ourselves. Our impatience clouds our judgment and then it bites us in the butt.

Feb 17

Feb 17 A Kingdom of Dust

Chris Cox

The de facto joke (if you can call it that) as we enter into Lent is that no one wants to give anything up because we have already given up so much in the last year. We’ve been in Lent since mid-March. We had to give up time with friends, going to restaurants or the movies, seeing our favorite teams play, and so much more. Lent came for us, elevated its game, and then stuck around for well past forty days.

One of the refrains of Ash Wednesday—this first day of Lent—is “Remember you are dust and to dust you will return.” I usually think about that in very narrow terms. The minister says it to me as she or he imposes the ashes on my forehead. Yet this last year has been a reminder that all of this is dust. The world as you and I know it can vanish with a gust of wind: a pandemic, a diagnosis, a fractured relationship, anything. Our world is dust.

What do you do when you and all around you is dust? I guess that you could sit in the ashes and mourn its fleeting nature. Or you could just throw caution to the wind and roll around in as much dirt as you can while the getting is good. You could grow numb to the seeming meaninglessness of this whole random venture. Sometimes we feel like doing all three of these things in one Tuesday.

Jan 7

Jan 7 A Late Epiphany

Chris Cox

I'm still up because both my boys woke up in the middle of the night, so I'm sitting with them as they fall back asleep. I'm going to treat this like it's still Wednesday because in the chaos of this day I forgot that it was Epiphany, which is when we remember the Magi bringing gifts to the Christ Child.

I was explaining to my boys the other day that we don't know how old Jesus was when these visitors arrived. We only know they came from the East and, in Asia, the East covers a lot of territory. We don't know how many there were.

What we do know is these individuals of high honor lavished this young family with immensely valuable gifts. That they knelt before a child and simply being in his presence brought them great joy. We know that they did not tell a tyrant king desperate to hold on to power where that child was.

Jan 3

Jan 3 Grace Upon Grace

Chris Cox

Weekly Lectionary

A funny thing has happened in perpetual reassessment of faith in adulthood: I believe in total depravity. Not necessarily in the theological construct that posits that we all are born into corruption because of original sin. One of the most consistent parts of my faith journey is that hardcore Calvinism has always seemed problematic to me. I just mean that I believe that we as humans are really, really screwed up. I believe we all hold that divine spark from God too; that Imago Dei.

But, good Lord, we are a messed up people.

You can look around for ample evidence. I won’t point it out to you, because I could look within for evidence as well. There is something askew and off the mark about us. There is something about us that is not quite as it should be. Now because we are made in God’s image, there is that capacity within us to be more like what we should be. We just often cannot or will not access it.

Jan 1

Jan 1 This New Day

Chris Cox

Today was supposed to be rainy and dreary. But it wasn’t. The rain came through more quickly and thoroughly washed away the last vestiges of 2020. And this morning the sun broke through the clouds. The air felt like spring. It was a new day in a new year.

Of course, this does not mean anything in the grand scheme of the world. A beautiful January 1 in one town does not mean that the tide has turned any more than the flipping of the calendar magically changes our circumstances. The things that made last year so difficult stubbornly still exist: the pandemic and the maddening number of people who don’t take it seriously, the leaders tilting at razor-bladed windmills for political gain, the sickness, the dying, the heartbreak.

The lingering of the past year made me stop in my tracks this morning. It literally stopped me. I took advantage of the beautiful morning and went on a new year’s run. The route I usually run takes me near 2nd Avenue where a suicide bomber set off a massive explosion on Christmas Day. Several streets downtown are still closed which meant that I had to stop and figure out a different way to find my way home. Despite the cleansing rain and the bright new day, the echoes of a harsh year still resonated.

Dec 30

Dec 30 Albums I Listened to in 2020

Chris Cox

In an effort to get out of my typical music patterns, I set out in 2020 to listen to as many different albums as possible. Many of these are albums that were new to me interspersed with some old favorites. The project got derailed in the last quarter of the year, but I still got to listen to a lot of great music. I listened to 67 unique albums this year and I’m hoping to hit a hundred in 2021 and hopefully hit 100 unique albums. Anyway, here in alphabetical order are albums that I listened to this past year:

June 15, 2026

Dangerous Memories and Unfinished Futures

“’Do this in remembrance of me.’ Jesus invites you to commemorate his betrayal, death, and resurrection. His invitation makes space for ‘dangerous memory,’ a memory that, as post-Holocaust Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz tells us, ‘puts pressure on and questions our present because in it we remember an unfinished future.’ Memory can unsettle the unreconciled present and open up a future for the hopeless and the forgotten, the failed and the oppressed….Remembering keeps the ghosts alive so that they may warn and comfort, haunt and inspire the living: dangerous memories that rush toward an unfinished future. Making the absent present allows for processing grief, strengthening commitments, and opening up vision. Such remembrance commits you to work for a future for those who have been forgotten, erased, and left behind.”
-Hanna Reichel, For Such a Time as This, 88, 89

I believe that most of us experience an internal tug-of-war between the past and the future. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’ titular demon supervisor advises his underling Wormwood that one of best ways to keep a human from doing good is to keep them ping-ponging between those two times that are not the present. One keeps trying to recapture or reach towards moments that are mist. It can keep a person from doing something.

The quote above resonates with me because it harnesses the past and unfinished future into a catalyst that animates our present. We remember the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus because it means something today and compels us to presently work for the Good that is already here, but also not yet. We remember the hope and pain of the past to do something that help us take some sort of step each and every day. We realize that the hope which exists within the gospel story is not yet fully realized. Many people are still being left behind and forgotten. The realization, as the theologian Metz states, puts pressure and questions on the present.

June 1, 2026

First Day of Pride

Being a parent forces you to take a close look at yourself. Of course, you don’t have to be a parent to self-examine, but there is something about the reality that another living human is under your care and protection for the foreseeable future that makes you take stock of your strengths, weaknesses, and beliefs. For example, I used to think I was a far more patient person before I had kids; like superhumanly patient. And then a crying toddler shows you the folly of that belief. On the flip side, time has moved on and having two teenagers affirms that, yes, I am ridiculously patient and that has been a strength as a parent.

Among many other reorienting moments that came with parenthood was full acceptance of our LGBTQ+ siblings. That process began many years earlier. As someone who studied religion, I knew that the biblical case against these individuals was not nearly as airtight as I was previously led to believe. Science and stories from people gave strong indication that this life was not a choice. And I had met gay and lesbian folks who were good people. The old axiom that you will know a tree by its fruit applies here.

But the tipping point was holding a tiny infant who I loved more than I thought possible and knowing that I never wanted him to be ashamed of who he is. I did not want a potential future in which one of my children came out as something other than heterosexual with the fear that we would not love them. Not accepting my child was not even conceivably on the table. So we raised our kids to know that LGBTQ+ were beloved members of God’s creation.

May 24, 2026

Not a Defeat If You Can Find a Way to Laugh About It

There is this typical ice breaker question that is some variation of “If you could have dinner with anyone famous living or dead, who would it be?” And one of my steadfast answers for almost twenty years has been Stephen Colbert. Through both The Colbert Report and The Late Show, he has given hours upon hours of laughter and more than enough on which to ponder. I feel like we’d have a lot to talk about since we are both unabashed nerds, products of the Palmetto State, and he just seems like a good hang.

Beyond all of that, I appreciate how honestly and humbly Colbert approaches his faith. There have been numerous times over the years when his comedy and conversations take a turn into the spiritual that is challenging and convicting. I remember an episode of The Colbert Report where one minute he was making a joke about Ben Franklin’s predilection for French prostitutes and then organically made his way to the following quote:

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.

Then there are the interviews that he has conducted on The Late Show. Colbert has said that he sort of found the heart of his show when he had a conversation with then-Vice President Biden about grief. Indeed the loss of his father and brothers at a young age has led him to create an empathetic space to explore loss in the midst of celebrities promoting their most recent projects (my mind immediately comes to a conversation that he had with Andrew Garfield about the loss of the actor’s mother).

May 21, 2026

While I Breathe, I Hope

On the way to school, the youngest burrowed his head into my arm. “I don’t like that you’re getting older.”

“Why is that?”

“Because you’re one year closer to death.”

“There it is.” That’s my kid. Very sweet. Very sensitive. Brutally, bordering on inappropriately blunt. “Well, it’s better than the alternative.”

“Getting younger?” He thinks for a second. “Oh…dying.”

“Yeah, you can’t get younger.” I scratch him on the head. “And hopefully I have a ways to go. Ideally, I’ll still be kicking around when you turn 43.”

“You’ll be 73. So that’s reasonable”

“Yeah.”

“Granddad will be 103.”

“Less likely. But maybe. I hope he is as long as he’s happy.”

“And healthy. Happy, healthy, and alive.” Then he goes into a bit from an episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine which makes me laugh.

Birthdays, as my oldest posited this morning, are kind of weird when you get older. Or at least they morph into something different from the second Christmas-esque excitement when you’re a kid. Because there does get to be that point where it creeps into your mind that you are a year closer to death. And that forces you take stock of your life which is a hit-or-miss affair due to being human’s volatility.

May 18, 2026

To Jim on his 16th Birthday

One day last week, I picked you up from school after took one of your AP exams and then I moved over to the passenger seat so you could practice driving. In the midst of being hyper vigilant about your speed, how quickly you stopped, how close you were to the side of the road, and what every single other car on the road was doing, I had a distinct moment of looking over at you and realizing that so much is changing. And we’re only at the start.

Today you turn 16. You are about to wrap up your sophomore year of high school. You’ll take a driver’s license test in just a few weeks. We have three more summers before you go off to college. There are times it seems like yesterday when you were sitting in the living room watching cartoons with a couple of dozen superhero toys. There are times it seems like last week when you were a newborn sleeping in my arms.

The feeling of you being 16 is kind of like being the passenger in the car while you are driving. I have a ton of confidence in you and trust you. And I worry about your lack of experience in a big, sometimes frightening world and whether I have taught you well enough. I am wary of everyone else on the road. I wonder if you are going too fast even though you are going an appropriate speed and I am the one who encouraged you not to go as slow in the first place. It is all very exciting, humbling, frightening, and new.

April 21, 2026

What Nintendo Can Teach the Church

Christmas 1988. My brother Taylor and I receive the Nintendo Entertainment System packaged with Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt and we have been fans ever since. We have grown up with the Japanese company’s gaming systems; the adventures of Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Link, Zelda, Donkey and Diddy Kong, and more have been a consistent presence in our lives. Even though we are in three different states now as adults, Taylor, my sister Shari, myself, and our kids will get together every so often and play Mario Kart online. We love Nintendo, which is a weird thing to say about a corporation that makes a billion dollars but it is what it is.

With all that said, I loved the Keza MacDonald’s book Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play. Not only is it an engaging journey through video game history through the lens of Nintendo’s iconic (and less iconic) franchises, but the book also has a great deal to say about creativity, community, and culture. In fact, it is that last idea that got me thinking about how this video game company can teach the church (or any other organization) even as I am a bit of an outsider to that world presently.

Here is one of two quotes that jumped out at me from the chapter “Splatoon” which looks at how Nintendo continues innovate and create over 40 years into its video game endeavors:

April 12, 2026

Easter Orphans, A Lost Cat, and A Tightrope Called Hope

“Happy Easter?”

That is the first thing EA said to me as I woke up on Easter morning. I stretched and rubbed my eyes.

“I still believe in Jesus. It’s just the church that I’m not sure about.”

Some context: This was the first Easter in our 20+ years of marriage (and likely in either of our lives) in which we did not have a church to attend. It’s been about a year since we’ve gone to church as a family. Honestly, the church that we attended after I stepped down from working in a congregation had a tall order to tend to our hurting family. It was a good group of people, but the services and community never really clicked with our boys. Then early last year, I got moved to a Sunday morning shift. EA tried for a bit to go by herself but it wasn’t what she needed. In the end, I was gone for about eight months before anyone in the church really noticed and we decided to take a break.

I acknowledge my uncertainty about the church is a bit over-dramatic. Of course, there are great churches out there. There are wonderful people in congregations where my family and I have experienced the most pain. It’s akin to writing off burritos for life because you got violent food poisoning from one (This is based on a true story; I have not written off burritos just that particular Chipotle location). But the church hurt is real. As is the MAGA-fication of the denomination in which I grew up that feels so antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. So we don’t have a place to call home and it’s weird and sad and understandable.

April 1, 2026

Lent Fail

Absurdist Note: I really want to add “Woo-ooh!” after the title. If you know, you know.

I have not pulled off this year’s Lenten disciplines the way that I set out to. When this 40 day period began, I set out to take on this fasts/spiritual practices:

Stop drinking Coca-Cola
Stop eating French fries
Stop playing Disney Solitaire on my phone
Do a daily devotional from Richard Rohr’s Wondrous Encounters
Write a blog five days a week

When the war in Iran began and threw another log on the fire that is the world, it pained me both spiritually and physically. One of the ways that played out was headaches and since headaches were already part of removing the caffeine of Coca-Cola from my life, I decided I probably shouldn’t compound a problem and began drinking Coke again. I have had French fries a few times; not many, mind you, but enough to break up the fast. There have been several multiple day stretches where I did not do my devotional. And my efforts to blog five times a week quickly fell by the wayside. I have managed to keep from playing Disney Solitaire, but that still puts my Lenten average in Mendoza Line territory.

March 29, 2026

An Awkward Parade (Revisited)

Several hundred, some may say several thousand, years worth of anticipation hung thick in the air. Like summer humidity that sticks to your shirt the second you step outside, you couldn’t avoid it if you wanted to. Especially not during Passover week.

There was a guy making his way into Jerusalem; a guy claiming to be the Messiah. This was nothing new. He would not be the first that people claimed would save us. There had been tons of guys going around saying that they were the One; saying that they were going to show Rome what’s what. So a would-be messiah making his way to Jerusalem was about as common as a singer-songwriter making their way to Nashville.

But this felt different. He seemed different. Now there was a fair amount of debate whether he was the right or wrong kind of different. For starters, word got out that he had tried to keep a lot of the messiah talk and even tales of his miracles under wraps. But it is difficult to keep those kind of stories quiet: dead men walking, the blind seeing, demons plunging a herd of pigs over a cliff, and thousands fed from a lunch meant for a single kid. You can tell people to keep that hush-hush all you want, but it’s not going to happen.

March 24, 2026

Blooming Broken Branches

In front of our house there is a branch that is barely hanging on to its tree. The limb is a casualty of the ice storm that tore Nashville earlier this year. As we cleaned up the debris afterwards, we tried to tear it off the tree as we did with a few other broken branches out front. But this branch was more stubborn than the others. So even though it is hanging on by a thread and nearly perpendicular with the ground, it remains as a reminder of a storm.

Now that branch is in bloom. Still hanging on by a thread, still touching the ground but now with flowers and the buds of leaves. It was a surprise at first. We did not really expect that branch to still be alive as it was barely connected to its source. But it is very much alive and now a symbol of beautiful tenacity. Even though it looks askew, I cannot imagine trying to rip that branch from its tree and I don’t think my sons would let me if I wanted to.