Bill and I experienced our first wildfire in November. We never dreamed it would be on our property.

I learned a new word. 

Perseverate. 
 
To repeat something insistently or redundantly. To get stuck, to ruminate, to loop back over and over. And over.
 
As in, “My 91-year-old mother perseverated.” 
 
My mom passed away a year ago. But I’m still haunted by echoes of her three looping ruminations.

Pandemics. Politics, Social struggles. Global tragedies. These past years have felt unreal. But what has been most crazy making for me is the deep divisions in the Church. How can we find our way back to loving each other and our neighbors and seeking His Kingdom? I need reality checks: Scripture; honest, diverse community; prayer. I need to continually recalibrate back to the Christ revealed in Scripture.

Jonathan Rogers is a rare combination: a great writer who is able to teach and encourage others. He curates and encourages a community of people who write (and some who still choke over calling themselves "writers!') at The Habit Membership.

Ephesians is my heart book, where I grappled with the “believe it or not” truth of God’s love for me. This is the book where I caught the picture that it is through all of our individual puzzle pieces fitting together that we show Jesus Christ, God’s great Masterpiece, to the world.

How will we emerge? That’s the question I’m asking myself and others in this “unprecedented” year. If I tune into the daily news or read the statistics, that question ripples through me with uncertainty and fear. If I lay the uncontrollable “we” down, and focus on me, I can answer. I want to emerge with some “more” in a year filled with “less.”

In the past month, we've attended too many funerals (masks and distancing making it even harder). For an 11-year-old boy who drowned in a creek. For a man who succumbed to suicide leaving a wife and three children. For a mother who died in her sleep five months pregnant. I’m flooded with “it-should-not-be-this-way” raging shouts in my head.

My first GPS would say “recalibrating” when I took a wrong turn and reroute me. That’s what I want spiritually—to quickly find out when I’m lost and reorient.

If Wendell Berry were a musician, I think he’d have been Allen Levi. Allen is a man tied to the land and a man who chooses his words and stories with care and compassion. He’s a man who loves Jesus, truly listens to people, and makes beautiful music.

It’s not my mother’s fault. She told me to stand up straight. But after years slouching over my computer keyboard, I confess I am a “slumper.” A slumper who also is easily distracted and frets too much.

Because of that, I developed a recalibrating practice I call my “morning stand,” a way to engage my whole body to anchor my scattered soul as well as straighten my sagging posture.

The third voice in this series of thoughtful people is Jim Branch, author of the Blue Book and other books, challenging us that this season may be teaching us less is more.

The world has changed in a heartbeat—changed in ways that we could never have thought before. Sometimes I think of Mother Earth shaking us off her back because we have been handling her so poorly and now she is telling us to stop, become sensible, and listen.