I woke up this morning with the word WAIT impressed upon my heart and my mind. Wait. It is a word both comforting and uncomfortable all at the same time.

Wait. Not something we like to do. We are insta-gratification, get-'er-done kind of folk. And yet in a time when we feel much powerlessness and constraint, it is something we all can and must do.
Wait. Wait on God. Wait for the curve to flatten. Wait for a vaccine. Wait for the death toll to stop climbing. Wait for gatherings, community, shared meals, travel and all the previous freedoms we enjoyed in our pre-corona-existence.

Of all the invitations to wait, waiting on God seems to be front and center. The longer this quarantine continues, the greater my need and dependency grows on the presence of God to sustain me. This is hard. There is no way around that. We are all experiencing losses now compounded over time. To be clear, as Coronavirus deaths have reached 100,000 in the U.S. in just over four months, we are experiencing a collective trauma. And so we must be gentle with ourselves. We are exhausted. We are tired. We are spent.

Aside from the overwhelming grief and constraint, we simply are not receiving what we are used to receiving in community. A touch, a smile, a look of understanding, the synergy of a room, a warm embrace, the delight of a shared meal, the feeling that it's gonna be okay because we're all in this together. Instead, we are having to settle for Zoom screens and phone calls and we are giving everything we've got to be present and to stay connected. And it's good and we're trying and doing the best we can. But it's not the same. And so we find ourselves depleted and worn down. All the energy expended bouncing against the walls of our screens and little being transmitted across the digital waves. So in a time of much giving and depletion, we've got the figure out ways in which we can receive.

And this is why we are committed to practices of presence, present to God, our neighbors and ourselves — for we are created for connection and communion. So don't miss out on the gifts of presence available to you right here and right now — look, listen and wait.

This week is Pentecost Sunday and we find Jesus' followers waiting too. Waiting to receive. "While he was with them, he commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the Father’s promise." [Acts 1:4] For Jesus knew that as he would no longer be physically present with his disciples, they were receiving a new gift of presence. A presence that now would be poured out on all who would receive, awakening, sustaining and empowering them.

And so in these challenging times, we must wait. We must wait to receive. The life-giving power of the Spirit. The very breath of God. This is what will sustain us, strengthen us, encourage us, and empower us. On Pentecost, the Spirit transformed a motley crew of disciples who were confused, doubting, disillusioned, and hiding into the emboldened and empowered apostles of the early church.

The Spirit ignited a revolutionary fire in the midst of great oppression and persecution. And God's purposes of hope and renewal unfolded in spite of much upheaval and even the demise of their beloved Jerusalem. So in the midst of tumultuous times, we must not despair. We must wait to receive. For surely, the Spirit of God is at work in the world even in our current birth pains.

I pray even in the midst of the hard, the uncomfortable, and the uncertain, that we will be filled, empowered and awakened to the work of the Spirit that is unfolding in us and in our neighborhoods.

May we receive — everything we need and more.


by Jessica Ketola

I find myself tired today. Tired of the madness, the terror, the violence, the greed, and the misuse of power against black and brown bodies, against the poor, against the vulnerable. I join in the lament, "How long, O Lord, how long?" [Psalm 13:1]

I'm tired of living in a world divided and polarized, fragmented and pillaged, ravaged by greed and hostile to human flourishing. I'm tired of the evils of white supremacy and racial violence that are embedded in the very fabric of our country. And if I am tired —as a white woman with privilege—I can't imagine how weary our black and brown siblings are. There are no words. Only tears.

“Black People Are Tired” was anonymously authored and circulated through social media in the wake of Ahmaud Arbery’s death. Yet black souls like Breonna Taylor keep being stolen from us. Red Letter Christians has created this tribute to bring light to these tragic injustices and honor the lives of those lost in a world still infected by white supremacy and violent racism. May they rest in power. May we fight for love and justice so that no one else has to see their loved ones become a hashtag.
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Please take a few minutes to let the weight of these stories impact you.

Mourn we must. Grieve we must. As my friend Sunia Gibbs, a parish pastor in Portland, has articulated so profoundly, "Distance is a privilege we have to surrender."

We must relinquish the comfort of our denial. We must listen to the stories and perspectives of those who are experiencing what we do not understand. And we must learn, think differently, and repent. I thought this video by actor Sterling K. Brown (This is Us) was moving as you could viscerally feel the weariness and anger of his lament. You can also feel it in a statement put out by our black Vineyard pastors.

I am listening intently to my fellow colleagues who are my teachers. Here is a post by Silas Sham who was a part of our community for a short time before being hired on at Bethany Northeast.

Dear Christians, I speak as a pastor and person of color:

If our numerous cries of lament, injustice, and shock in the wake of Ahmaud Arbery don’t cause us to rework how we live our lives, we will fail to honor Ahmaud.

If our posts don’t translate into unfettered, embodied denunciations of racism, white supremacy and our religion’s role in propagating such ideology (particularly from the pulpit) we can’t pretend to say that our posts this week have been prophetic. Instead, we must own and admit that our witness has been nothing less than pornographic.

Tragedies like this are not isolated occurrences. From condemning micro-aggressions to confronting macro-aggressions, we have the responsibility and response-ability to participate in making God’s Kin_dom on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Fellow Christians, by all means continue to post and share. But don’t let that be the only thing we do. #Irunwithahmaud #morethanaweek #pocreality #propheticnotpornographic

Edit: Put another way - It’s like we’re all at youth camp and everyone’s just gone up for the altar call. Everyone is broken and humbled before God but that experience won’t change most of our actual life patterns because that is the deeper harder work. Commit to whole life transformation - not just drive-by reconciliation. - Silas Sham

As The Practicing Church, we are committed to the long road of repentance and whole life transformation. It is not enough to be outraged.

Grace Lee Boggs said that "You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it; Unless you see yourself as belonging to it and being responsible for changing it."

This is why I am so passionate that we as the church stop living above our places but instead root in our neighborhoods to embody love. I am tired, but I would be completely lost and despairing if not for the hope of love here on the ground. Here in the neighborhood, we have the opportunity to become the beloved community that Dr. King and Saint John imagined.
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This last week as I participated in a spatially distant happy hour, I reveled in our diversity: Latino, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese, Nigerian, English and Texan — Muslim, Christian, Agnostic — gay and straight, gray-hairs and babies, single and married, families with bundles of kids and those with the canine variety — construction workers, nurses, counselors and engineers. Where else on earth would we all be coming together to weave a fabric of care? Left to our own devices, we so often choose the comfort of homogeneity — people just like us.

​But this is our block, our neighborhood and we must take responsibility for it, for the land and for one another. Here in the neighborhood, we have the opportunity to practice skills like listening, empathy, compassion, generosity and peacemaking. We can create gardens, connection, and beauty that catalyze the gifts of the community. We have the context to engage the slow and long work of transformation that is so needed today.

So yes, we mourn and grieve. We are outraged. We are tired. We are beyond tired. In fact, in pandemic quarantine, we are almost too tired and overwhelmed to process all the injustice. We cannot keep up with the growing mountain of grief.

And yet there is something we all can do. It is simple yet difficult. It is small yet profound. It seems that Jesus was truly onto something.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Whether it is your neighbor seeking asylum or your neighbor practicing Ramadan. It may be your neighbor experiencing homelessness or your unemployed neighbor who cannot pay their rent. It may be your Asian American neighbor who is facing undeserved harassment and public bullying or your Black neighbor who puts their life in their hands every time they wear a mask.

It is here in the neighborhood that we can begin to stitch a new garment of love and community for all.
I will reiterate the words of Sonya Renee Taylor, "We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. we should not long to return my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”


​by Jessica Ketola

​Last week, we talked about how interior freedom is found in consenting to that which we did not choose. For there is a paradox here that we cannot become truly free unless we accept not always being free. To achieve true interior freedom, we must practice deep acceptance of our lives just as they are. [Interior Freedom by Jacques Philippe]

And tied to this idea, we must fully accept ourselves just as we are. Of course, this is not easy. We are a culture steeped in the "not enough". Most of us struggle with feelings of inadequacy, feeling that we are flawed, lamenting our defects and limitations, and wishing we were more gifted. But as Father Philippe points out, God's grace does not operate on our imaginings, ideals, or dreams. It works on reality, the specific, concrete elements of our lives. For only in the inglorious everyday of our lives can glory be found.

The person that God loves with so much tenderness is not the person that we'd have liked to be or ought to be. It's the person we are. God doesn't love "ideal persons" or "virtual beings." God loves actual, real people. And so all of our deprecating, envying, and lamenting is a sheer waste of time and energy — and it actually impedes the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

"What often blocks the action of God's grace in our lives is less our sins or failings, than it is our failure to accept our own weakness — all those rejections, conscious or not, of what we are really are or of our real situation. To "set grace free" in our lives, and paving the way for deep and spectacular changes, it sometimes would be enough to say simply "yes" — a "yes" inspired by trust in God to aspects of our lives we've been rejecting." - Jacque Philippe, Interior Freedom

Mic drop.

These words came flying off the page this last summer as I spent time in solitude and silence. And I realized that there were parts of my life and even parts of myself that I was rejecting. Of course, there is so much I am longing for in my life, so much that I am hoping to grow into — but the simple truth is this. We can only transform reality if we accept it first. To receive the grace that will transform us, we must "receive" ourselves — and accept ourselves as we really are.

Accepting ourselves is much more difficult than it might seem. We have our pride, our fear of not being loved, our stories of wounding, and our conviction of how little we are worth. We are terrified to be found out, to fall, and to fail. These beliefs are deeply rooted in us, and yet they must be unmasked, not clung to. In consenting to be what we are, we accept ourselves in our poverty but also in our richness.

Only in the loving gaze of God can we fully and truly accept ourselves.

For it is in the mediation of another's eyes that we receive grace. It is here that I have received so much healing in my life as I hear these words that astound me every time, "You are my beloved in whom I am well pleased." [Matthew 3:17] "As a father or mother has compassion on their children, so I have compassion on you. For I know you inside and out. I know your frailty."[Psalm 103:13-14] "No more will anyone call you Rejected, and your life will no more be called Ruined. You'll be called My Delight, the one whom I commit to for a lifetime. [Isaiah 62:4] "You are precious. You are mine. You are honored and I love you." [Isaiah 43:4]

This week, may you hear these words spoken over you as you sit in the loving gaze of God. For it is the purest, truest, most tender, most loving, and hope-filled gaze. May you feel yourself loved so wholly and completely that you will receive the grace of accepting yourself — wholly and completely. And may this pave the way for deep and spectacular changes as you begin to simply say "yes" to the parts of your life and yourself you've been rejecting. And in doing so, may you "set grace free" in your life!

by Jessica Ketola