Nothing in my hands I bring. It’s a line from an old hymn, and a refrain that periodically echoes through my imagination. Any Christian could tell you it describes a core element of our theology, that salvation is not earned, but is a grace freely given. But true as this may be as a matter of doctrine, as a matter of practice this lovely idea wars with the implicit assumption most of my life...
September 16, 2025 “I didn’t want Charlie Kirk to die, I wanted him to be different,” my friend Jonathan wrote in a recent substack. Jonathan is a black man, the kind of person Kirk might have had in mind when he said “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.” –...
June 3, 2025 There’s a scene in Gossip Girl, a show I greatly enjoyed while living in New York City during and after law school as a mental break from all that law—and which made me, in its portrayal of the emotional and relational challenges of my city’s super wealthy, grateful for my ordinary life, and in full disclosure, a show which I’m enjoying again years later, watching through a second...
“How can you tell a story about plants or chores that would be very interesting?” A friend offered this honest response to my invitations to join the upcoming experiential storytelling workshops. “Maybe it takes someone who’s good at creative writing,” he continued, with an unspoken note of regret: And I’m not that someone. Perhaps you have also asked this question. Maybe, like my friend...
May 7, 2025 From the chair where I sit most mornings to pray and write, I can see out a window to an expanse of sky draped lavishly over a spread of trees, a break in the city-scape afforded by a sliver of a national park that follows a through road in a stream valley several stories down from the second floor of my house, where I perch. The sky is often inky gray when I first come, early, to...
April 28, 2025 I was supposed to run a Ragnar Relay this past weekend, something I’ve always wanted to do. These are the long-distance races that often cover enough ground could see the distance on a globe, from a coastal range peak to the ocean, for example. Two hundred+ miles. Absent divine intervention, there is no way I could run to hundred miles. But in the race I was meant to take part in...
April 10, 2025 All my life I’ve wanted to publish books. When I went on a mission trip to Haiti as a youth, I filled a small spiral notebook with a line by line of the entire experience, the intended first draft of the book I planned to publish about it. On family trips to the beach, I’d skip sandcastles and hole up with a laptop overlooking the ocean, pecking out paragraphs. I’ve started...
January 27, 2025 I don’t know about you or your community, but my community has been shaken over the past few weeks. Not in order of importance, and not exhaustive: The intense local grief for a neighbor who died in a house fire the other night, several others made homeless. The mundane challenge, for federal worker friends and neighbors, of the need to abruptly reorient to fully in-person work...
January 9, 2025 I’m sorry this is late. It is Thanksgiving. Recovering from the Thanksgiving holiday. Preparing for Christmas. Christmas. Recovering from Christmas. New Year. Kids at home for days etc. etc. Back to school chaos. Snow days. Sick days. Unfortunately, I suspect we may all be running out of excuses reasons for whatever it is we’ve been putting off, though the clever amongst us can...