Jul 25

Jul 25 Dune

There are still parts of this country that I am just now learning about. These are places that are so fantastical that it seems like they feel like sprung up from the pages of science fiction. That is the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area: 40 miles of otherworldly sand dunes on the Oregon coast that served as partial inspiration for Frank Herbert’s foundational sci-fi series Dune.

Formed by wind and water and tens of thousands years old, these dunes are huge (some can be up to 500 feet tall) and constantly changing (more on that in a bit). I caught my first glimpse of the dunes traveling up Highway 101 and gasped to the point that everyone else in the car thought something was very wrong. Nothing was wrong. It was just a mountain of sand that I had only seen accompanied by the acting of Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet; except this dune was looming behind a Dollar General.

So what does one do when they are in such a place? Of course, you marvel at its beauty and meditate on the stunning array of creation on this planet.

You also get someone to hurtle you around the dunes at 65 mph in a buggy with a roll cage.

Jul 24

Jul 24 Detour Revisited

Chris Cox

Western Sketches

Places speak to us. Whether we are in our childhood home, a beloved camp, the beach, or wherever else, there is something about being in a special place that makes the past burst forth into life. In scripture, people were always erecting altars to remind them of the places in which they felt close to God. They could return to that place and remember. Or they could point to those stones and gift the story of those holy encounters to younger generations. If we’re fortunate, we get to go back to those places.

About a decade ago, EA spoke at a conference that gave us the opportunity to travel to Portland, Oregon. That trip began my ongoing love affair with the Pacific Northwest and introduced me to the glorious wonder that is Powell’s City of Books. It was also an interesting time in my life because I was at a personal crossroads. I had made the difficult decision to leave a vocation that I loved and was uncertain of what was next. This simmering existential anxiety came to a head and a holy place on that trip during a solo hike to the top of Multnomah Falls.

Our boys were little—one and three—when we made that first trip so we left them home with my parents. So it was really surreal when we pulled into the parking lot at Multnomah for the second time ever and so much looked familiar except there was an 11 year-old and 14 year-old piling out of the backseat. I would like to document that in the moment I thought, “Ah, yes, now the time has come to gift the story of this place to our children” but I was probably making sure that our sons had water bottles and hats.

Jun 24

Jun 24 Mixing Up Messages of the Cross

Chris Cox

I have been thinking about the cross a fair amount this weekend. We are in South Carolina to celebrate 50 years of my Dad doing chalk drawings as part of his ministry (it should go without saying that what I write here represents my thoughts, so any beef should be directed at me). The drawing that he has done more than any other—and that he did this weekend—is a scene of three crosses on the hill of Calvary. The drawing is one of the indelible images in my mind.

Yet the cross is an inescapable image in the American South. It adorns churches on seemingly every block. One can find the cross on billboards and bumper stickers on virtually every interstate and highway across the region.

It was a bumper sticker that began to haunt me these last couple of days. And it was one I had already seen everywhere from Nashville to New York state. There is a decent chance you have seen a variation of it too. It is a series of pictograms that typically leads off with a cross, a gun, and a heart with the message “Pro God, Pro Gun, Pro Life” underneath.

Jun 21

Jun 21 Yes, and...

Chris Cox

It is January 2001. I am 17 years old and standing in the pulpit of a Baptist church in Southeast Kentucky. Our senior class in youth group was visiting the area—where our youth group would visit for a week in summers—for the weekend. I don’t remember what my purpose in that pulpit was. Maybe I was giving a sermon, maybe I was just sharing some thoughts.

What I do remember is that I started talking about Whose Line Is It Anyway? I’d like to think I was the first person in that pulpit to reference the improv variety show, but maybe not. I was talking about how life is like an improv, how you have to make things up as you go along. Whereas on Whose Line “everything is made up and the points don’t matter,” in our lives everything is made up and everything matters. Seventeen year old me thought that was a killer line oozing with profundity. It feels a little heavy handed to me now, but the kid’s heart was in the right place.

I should clarify that I have never done improv comedy before. Yet the format has long interested me and, though I am not the first, I do think it has much to teach us about living. One of the basic ideas in improvisational comedy is “Yes, and…” which is basically this: you accept what another scene partner has stated (“yes”) and then build your actions off of that scenario (“and”). You can disagree with the direction that your partner(s) take the scene in, but you can’t just blow up the premise because you don’t like it. You have to work together and work with what you have.

May 18

May 18 To Jim on His 14th Birthday

Chris Cox

One of my favorite things happens maybe once a month if we are really on our game. It is those school mornings where both you and your brother get out of bed at the first call, each of you does an efficient job of getting ready, and we do not get ensnarled in some ungodly traffic quagmire on the way to school. Because if all those things happen and the weather is nice, you and I will get to your school and you’ll ask if we can go for a walk before you head into study hall.

We talk sometimes about school, more often about Star Wars or the latest minutiae you have absorbed about DC Comics. Even more precious is when those conversations turn to your worries, your hopes, your friends, and your questions about the world. I am typically a fast walker and have to consciously remind myself to go at the pace of the person who I am with (your mom will attest to this quirk of mine), but I don’t seem to have that issue on these morning walks with you. I like the slower pace. It is on those mornings in which we get to walk one or two laps around the field at your school that things don’t feel like they are flying by so quickly.

You are turning 14 years old today and then three days from now you will have your 8th grade graduation. It is hard to remember life without you and in my mind’s eye, you have always been a kid. Now though you are barreling towards high school and are a year off from learning how to drive and your voice is deep and you occasionally shave. Do not misunderstand me, you are still very much a kid and will always be our kid. Yet it is getting more and more difficult to deny that adulthood is creeping closer.

Mar 31
Mar 31 Woke Us Up Again

Chris Cox

It is that time of year to share one of my favorite quotes about Easter. This is from Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright:

Easter is about the wild delight of God’s creative power…we ought to shout Alleluias instead of murmuring them; we should light every candle in the building instead of only some; we should give every man, woman, child, cat, dog, and mouse in the place a candle to hold; we should have a real bonfire; and we should splash water about as we renew our baptismal vows. Every step back from that is a step toward an ethereal or esoteric Easter experience, and the thing about Easter is that it is neither ethereal nor esoteric. It’s about the real Jesus coming out of the real tomb and getting God’s real new creation under way….

Easter week itself ought not to be the time when all the clergy sigh with relief and go on holiday. It ought to be an eight-day festival, with champagne served after morning prayer or even before, with lots of alleluias and extra hymns and spectacular anthems. Is it any wonder people find it hard to believe in the resurrection of Jesus if we don’t throw our hats in the air? Is it any wonder we find it hard to live the resurrection if we don’t do it exuberantly in our liturgies? Is it any wonder the world doesn’t take much notice if Easter is celebrated as simply the one-day happy ending tacked on to forty days of fasting and gloom?…..

Mar 28
Mar 28 Washed Feet and Holy Places

Chris Cox

One of my earliest memories is not so much a single moment as a ritual whose repetition is ingrained in my mind. My toddler brother and I are in the bath. The bathroom in our Midlands South Carolina home had brown carpet. The carpet has a slight shag to it; not 70s shag but more than you normally see these days. Sometime it is Dad bathing us and sometimes it is Mom. Sometimes they were both in there. They would kneel next to the tub.

They wash our hair with Johnson’s baby shampoo and rinse it off by pouring bathwater out of the old plastic cups that had been collected at Paladin Stadium over many falls. This was how our hair was rinsed off at my grandparents’ house too and I was probably six or seven years old before I realized that not every child in the Palmetto State was baptized in the reminder of Furman football’s 1980s dominance of the Southern Conference. We get out of the tub fingers pruny. Mom or Dad dry us off and my bare feet settled in to the tickle of slightly shaggy brown carpet.

It’s this consistent memory of our parents caring for us by washing us. Which is what you do for a child when they can’t wash themselves. It can be a sloppy process. There’s usually a lot of splashing. Clothes get wet. If the kid knows that bed comes after bath time, it becomes a high stakes game of aquatic chicken. For a parent, it can be fun or it can be a chore. But it’s something my parents did out of love and something EA and I tried to do out of love for our own boys.

Mar 19

Mar 19 To Liam on His 11th Birthday

Chris Cox

For a while you have been trying to master riding your bike. Considering that all you have to work with was a uneven alleyway behind our house, you had made pretty good progress. And then a couple of weeks ago while I was out of town, you decided that you were going to finally figure it out. And you did. Like in one afternoon. I left town holding on to your handrails and bike seat. And by the time you turned 11, you and I were riding nearly 4 miles together on the Greenway.

You have probably grown more in this past year than in any other since you were brand new. The growth hasn’t been so much in inches and pounds (though there has definitely been growth there), but in your capability in taking on the world around you. That growth has been staggeringly difficult at times this past year. Yet when I think back on where you were last March or at other points along this year, I am amazed at how far you’ve come. You’re not done of course, but none of us are.

One of the ways I have seen you mature in this past year is that you have grown into your big-heartedness. You have always had big feelings, but I have watched you hone those feelings into a desire to help the vulnerable. You want to take care of what is around you whether that is taking care of the earth on the Green Team at school or your humongous love for every animal you encounter or the concern for marginalized people when we talk about what you are learning.

Mar 14

Mar 14 Holy Nerdery

Chris Cox

One of the more difficult quests that I have faced as a father (and when I was a youth minister) is finding quality devotionals. There are questions of theology, age appropriateness, interest, etc. and it’s all kind of a crapshoot. It is one thing when you are trying to find that devotional for yourself. It is another thing entirely when you are trying to pass that devotional along to a young person about which you care and want to help foster some sort of spiritual practice.

Compounding problems is that there are so many devotionals that adhere to an incredibly narrow views of gender. Try to find a devotional for girls that is not in princess-like pastels or a devotional for boys that is not steeped in sports metaphors. It’s difficult. And the Christian publishing industry skews more towards the more-conservative-than-our-family-is side of things. This is not to say that there aren’t good devotionals out there, but with our oldest, it finally got to the point where I decided, “Fine…I’ll do it myself” (Foreshadowing…genre foreshadowing, not action foreshadowing).

So I am writing a devotional for Jim based on our shared love for nerd culture—comics, Star Wars, video games, Pixar, the MCU, etc.—and calling it Holy Nerdery. I know, this is a huge shock given virtually everything that I have ever written on this blog. While I am getting my ideas together, I thought that I’d write here a little about why my nerdery and Christian faith actually go hand in hand.

First, I am really glad that my son is living in a world where being a nerd is a bit more socially acceptable. This was not always the case. I was embarrassed about my comic book collecting when I was his age. I would admit to being a nerd in a self-deprecating way but it wasn’t until my college girlfriend (now wife) started wearing an “I ❤️ Nerds” shirt that I took the title as a badge of honor. Now it is a bit more mainstream. Heck, I went to see Dune this past week and the theater was packed. Dune! Glad things are different for the kids today.

Mar 3

Mar 3 The Most Magical Places on Earth

Chris Cox

A few weeks ago, EA told me that I should go on an adventure at the end of the month. She would be heading to QuiltCon in Raleigh for about five days which would leave me solo parenting for a bit. She knew that I would need some sort of break and distraction. First I checked to see if there was any space at the Abbey of Gethsemani where I had such a profound spiritual experience last year. When I found out that they were full, I decided to fly off in a wildly different direction. I wanted to see if I could go to Disney World with my brother and sister.

(“Monastery or Disney World” is probably a succinct encapsulation of where my interests lie)

So I texted both my siblings and asked if I could kidnap them for a couple of days at the end of the month for a Sibling Adventure. We’d meet down in Orlando, share a hotel room, spend a day hopping around several Disney parks, and then hurry back home to our respective families. It was a ridiculous idea and I was pretty doubtful that it could come together in such a short time. Both Taylor and Shari excitedly agreed and (more importantly) all our spouses signed off on the idea. This ludicrous scheme was going to happen.

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.