Since early September, our youngest son and I have been doing weekly “Dinner, Discipleship, & Dad” meetings or “D&D&D” for short (last week, we added another “D” when we had deep dish pizza). Liam is wanting to take the next step in his faith by getting baptized. At our old church he would have been getting ready for a confirmation class of sorts. Though we are attending another church, he doesn’t really feel comfortable there yet. So we’re pressing forward with our one on one confirmation class, which sometimes feels like I am going rogue yet I take some solace in that I am ordained and seminary-trained.

It’s one of my favorite times of the week. Part of it comes from the fact that any time you get to have one-on-one time with your kid, it’s special. We have dinner. We talk a little about school and then we talk about forgiveness or the life of Jesus. We pray. Nerd and former youth minister that I am, I make up colorful worksheets about whatever we are talking about that night.

As awesome as it is, I feel a certain weight to talking with my kid about faith. On one hand, I know that God is bigger than whatever shortcomings that I have. On the other hand, I want to give him a good foundation with which he can grow.

This verse is where I started. Truth be told, it was the version in Mark because I like how the “Hear O Israel” part connects to the Shema in Deuteronomy. But it was the Greatest Commandment. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. Is it obvious? Yes, but we are not trying to be clever or cunning here. In fact, one of the things I love about the Greatest Commandment in Matthew is Jesus’ assertion that all of the Law and the prophets hang out these two things.

Oct 15

Oct 15 Water Like Thunder

Chris Cox

There is a ferocity to Niagara Falls that surprised me a bit. You always know where the falls are even when you can’t see them because there is a constant pillar of mist hovering above it. The sound it makes is a roar. When the 1901 Pan-American Exposition was held in Buffalo, a hydroelectric plant funneled the power of the falls to light up the city.

Cave of the Winds is where we got most up close and personal with Niagara’s might. As our tour guide Dan told us at the beginning of the day, it’s not an actual cave. It used to be one, but they dynamited a dangerous overhang in the 1950s. Now it is a series of decks at the base of Bridal Veil Falls (which along with the American and Horseshoe make up Niagara).

Visitors get a chance to stand beneath and witness 60,000 gallons of water per second crashing down. There are a series of decks that allow you to get closer and closer if one wishes until you reach the Hurricane Deck where winds can reach up to near 70 mph. Our youngest fought the wind to stand closest to railing next to the falls. In that corner, you are doused by frigid water. I went in face first, but quickly had to turn my back because the water stung too much.

I know all of that may sound awful, but it wasn’t. It was actually amazing.

Oct 9

Oct 9 All Things Go, All Things Grow

Chris Cox

One of my favorite things in the world to do is to travel to new places. I love driving roads I have never driven before. I love seeing new sights even if they are completely ordinary. I love remembering that the world is bigger that wherever I spend most of my days.

There are so many times that I have experienced new locations as a sacred place. God grabs my attention a little bit better because I am thrown out of routine. Getting out of your comfort zone has a knack for opening your eyes and recreating you.

It is Fall Break and today our family started the first leg of a journey to some brand new places. Before we head out into our personal frontier, our first destination was a city that all of us have been to before: Chicago. EA and I spent a Spring Break there many years ago and then we brought the boys along for another Spring Break that was cut short when the world began shutting down for Covid.

Oct 1
Oct 1 The Middle

Chris Cox

Weekly Lectionary

Today has been a good day in spite of also being a very heavy day, which means there is not much in the tank for Ye Olde Weekly Lectionary. So I simply have two thoughts that Rev. Sides shared this morning and the inevitable weird pop cultural direction my mind immediately went with one of those thoughts.

The passage today is about the people quarreling with Moses because there wasn’t water after last week the people quarreled with Moses because there wasn’t enough food. And this is kind of the carousel of regress that keeps the people wandering in the wilderness for forty years. It is very easy for us—centuries later and very comfortably removed from the narrative—to shake our heads. But that’s not exactly fair.

Rev. Sides shared an insight from a seminary professor that God will let people wander in the desert for forty years just so they can get their heads on straight. The sermon looked at this story from a perspective that I had not really thought about before: the fact that some of God’s best work takes time. Experiencing freedom and grace takes time. Growing into who God wants us to be takes time.

Sep 29

Sep 29 The Beautiful Letdown

Chris Cox

Last night, EA and I saw Switchfoot perform the entirety of The Beautiful Letdown in celebration of the album’s 20th anniversary. It was one of the best concert experiences of my life. Those songs came out right in the middle of our sophomore year of college and it was one of those albums that is inextricably tied up with a specific time. It was special to be in the room singing along with a sold-out Ryman Auditorium to every lyric of an album that meant so much to us when our relationship was beginning.

There was a simultaneous healing and ache as we soaked in those songs twenty years on. Lyrics like “This is your life / Are you who you want to be?” hit different for a 40 year old who has seen some crap versus a wide-eyed idealistic 20 year old. There is a certain cynicism that can sand down the hope of a song like that if you’re not careful. I remember sitting on a dormitory balcony with EA and earnestly talking about who we are and who we want to be. The songs were an invitation into what he hoped would be a better world. When Jon Foreman sings “I want to see miracles / to see the world change,” we were right there wholeheartedly.

Singing those songs last night made me miss the kid I used to be a lot.

Sep 24
Sep 24 Quailderness

Chris Cox

Weekly Lectionary

When people ask me how I’m doing, I don’t really know what to say. Or at least, I don’t know what to say if I’m being honest. I am not good or fine, but I am certainly not doing poorly either. I wonder if this is a limit of the English language. Other languages like German seem to have these words for the really specific situations that we find ourselves in. For example, waldeinsamkiet is a word for the peace and spiritual stillness that one feels by walking through the woods. I love that. English doesn’t seem to have those kind of words.

I want a succinct way to say, “I am surviving and doing as well as I can in what has been a very challenging season.” It’d be great if there was a word for that. Because when you cue up that mouthful I just wrote out, people aren’t going to ask you how you’re doing again. But that place (whatever you call it) is where I am, where I’ve been, and maybe where I’ll be for awhile.

With that in mind, my ears pricked up during the first reading in church this morning. The Israelites have made it out of Egypt, which is great. Yet they are also now in the wilderness and it is definitely a challenging season. They don’t know how long they’re going to be out there. As most of us are wont to do, the people start complaining. “It would have been better if we had just died in Egypt.” Over dramatic? Yes, but I think we’ve all found ourselves there at some point.

Sep 17
Sep 17 A Whole New World of Grace

Chris Cox

Weekly Lectionary

When I was a more literally-minded child/youth, I was terrified of the 77 threshold. Because we were reminded regularly that all of us sin every single day and there are 365 days in a year then surely the math would eventually catch up with me. I am going to screw up in at least one particular way seventy-eight times. Then what? Is that it? Grace is going to run out. I got a little reprieve when the footnotes told me that Jesus could have said “70 times 7 times” which would get us to the number 490. BUT WHAT IF WE LIVE LONG ENOUGH THAT WE HIT 491 FOR SOME SIN? How could God ever forgive us of something like that?!

(I have come to realize that my overactive imagination made me a very anxious child.)

Jesus was not giving a number to loom over our heads. He was not warning us about some sort of expiration date for God’s mercy. He was kicking down the door into a world of grace that we could not even imagine. That becomes more clear when you find out that the unmerciful servant in the parable that Jesus tells was forgiven a debt that was worth 20 years worth of wages.

The numbers are not the point. It’s like when we tell kids that we love them 3000, to the moon and back, or times infinity. Quantifying it does not do any justice. I know that “Amazing Grace” is the one hymn that everybody knows, but when you really sit back and think about grace, it truly is something staggering. And I forget that sometimes having been in church my entire life. Yet God’s grace and love for us is unfathomably amazing.

Sep 8
Sep 8 Inigo Montoya, College Football, & the Limits of Words

Chris Cox

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” - Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride

I don’t like to go all “old man yells at sky” but I am going to indulge for a moment: College football is presently hellbent on rendering parts of the English language meaningless. It all started back in 1990 when the Big Ten Conference added Penn State and raised their membership to eleven. It was actually kind of cute and fun back then; they even hid a number 11 in their logo. But those were simpler times.

That conference is collecting school like Pokémon and the Big Ten will soon have 18 teams. The Big 12 Conference, which had recently dipped below a dozen members, will have 16 teams next year.

The Southeastern Conference did their damage in the realm of geography. They stretched the concept of the southeast by adding Missouri and Texas A&M several years ago and are soon adding both Oklahoma and Texas. “But wait,” you might say, “isn’t Texas a part of the South?” No. And that question is how I know you are not from the South or Texas.

Yet the most egregious offender for my money is the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Aug 30
Aug 30 Brand New Colony

Chris Cox

There are times when a song will take root inside my head. Sometimes it is because the tune is catchy. Others because the lyrics resonate deeply. Often it is some combination of both. For the last two weeks, that song has been “Brand New Colony” from Give Up, the Postal Service’s one and only album.

Writing about the strange chemistry that makes you like a song is a fragile thing. Let me dissect something that is ineffable and lay it out for you. Yet songs often get their hooks in us because they are telling us something. Truth is, songs usually stick with me when they accidentally trip into the holy.

Not that “Brand New Colony” is actually a song about God. Ben Gibbard—who sings the song and is its main lyricist—does not seem to have anything ethereal in mind other than love here. His main gig, Death Cab for Cutie, came out with the song “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” which is a deeply gorgeous and firmly agnostic song about love, death, and what happens next.

“Brand New Colony” is about that very human kind of love, but I think that sometimes people find themselves inching closer to the sacred when they sing about “human” things than some do when they aim to sing about God. It’s not always the case, but I think it happens more often than we’d think.

Aug 21
Aug 21 It's Never Too Late

Chris Cox

There is a quote in a recent feature in the Washington Post that I have not been able to get out of my head for a few days. The story is a bout a group of mothers from the Covenant School who have been doing the hard work of trying to get Tennessee state legislators to hear their stories in hopes of some sort of reform to the Volunteer State’s gun laws. There is presently a special session of the Tennessee Legislature that was called in the wake of the March school shooting in which three children and three adults committed to serving children were killed.

You should read the entire article just to get a sense of the grinding boots-on-the-ground efforts that many people have taken up in the midst of tragedy. But the quote that I cannot get out of my mind comes from a state senator by the name of Todd Gardenhire.

In a pair of quoted interviews, Gardenhire declared, “Where were these young, rich white mothers when the Black kids in my district and Memphis were getting slaughtered?…It doesn’t mean their issues aren’t valid, but it’s a little hypocritical.” and “They’ve never been involved until it hits them, and now they want to change the world. I’m not minimizing the pain and agony that they felt. But where have they been in the past?”

First, the man is absolutely minimizing their pain and agony. Secondly, you would think that someone actually concerned about the Black kids in his district getting murdered would be more sympathetic to…well, anyone. But instead he is using the victims of tragedy as a prop to discredit other victims of a tragedy. I do not know Gardenhire’s heart, but his comments read as extremely callous and cynical and insulting to mothers of both Black kids and white kids. Like Gardenhire, I am a white, college-educated male and I am aware that we are way over-represented in governing bodies. If you would like to remove all of us from legislatures for one term, go for it. It would probably do some good; kind of like turning off your computer and turning it back on.

October 30, 2026

What's My Name? What's My Station?

I have a new office in our home and one of the things I am enjoying is decorating the space. I have placed books, Lego sets, and Funko Pops on the shelves. My wall has photos of family, places that I have traveled, artwork my siblings have given me, diplomas, etc. Across from my desk on the wall, hangs a cross that we got from a church in Reykjavik and a small colorfully-painted tile depicting Assisi. On the floor beneath them is the one item in here that I haven’t yet put up: my certificate of ordination.

I was ordained as a minister ten years ago today. It was a step with which I struggled for awhile. My Baptist roots fostered in me a firm belief in the priesthood of all believers. If you say that you are a follower of Jesus, then you are a minister. So the hierarchy implied by being called “Reverend” made me feel a little uncomfortable. I did not use the title for myself often unless I was writing my Congressperson. Despite these qualms, I did ultimately pursue ordination. I am glad that I did. I am just not totally sure what to make of it now.

I don’t serve as a vocational minister anymore; not in a church, not as a chaplain, not in some sort of parachurch organization. I am an Administrative Assistant in a hospital Spiritual Care department. In fact, I haven’t even attended a church service in maybe a year and a half save an Ash Wednesday service that I snuck off to at the beginning of Lent. I did officiate a wedding in a church over the summer; an experience that I loved and was very meaningful for me. But I don’t really know what to do about that ordination certificate. Or church.

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.