For that dedicated, regular time away to be respected and honored, we must develop grace-filled, compassionate cultures within our churches that destigmatizes mental health and emphasize self-care for both congregants and clergy.
The parables of Jesus are embedded in the life of the hearers, even as they are at the ready to lift up the Reign of God as the work of God, not humanity, in breaking into the mundane and sin-fractured world we know all too well.
Jesus took time to sit, to breathe, to eat, to grieve, to lament, to pray, to be silent. Why is it so hard for us all to follow the model set before us?
Clearly the massacre in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919 had a racial component, one for which all of us should repent and work for reparations. But Elaine, and Memphis, and so many other moments in our history, are also and just as much about the violent repression of workers as they are about race.
It falls upon the listener to be able to discern truth from lies – to listen as a critical thinker.
While the glacier’s till looks like the dirty snow piles a snowplow leaves behind in suburban parking lots or along the berms of interstate highways, the till may become a moraine, a rich soil with potential for new growth. This is also part of glacial faith — when what has been pushed aside becomes fertilizer for whatever new thing God may be doing in the world.