When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God's Presence

Can we rest yet? Is it time? The dizzying, never-ending buzz, the exhausting, contentious election season, It feels like the answer is no, right? Because now we shift to our prayers and preoccupations over a peaceful transition of power, as well as our preparations for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and Winter.

It’s not a very glamorous story. And to be honest, it doesn’t reflect well on me. But I’ll tell it anyway.

About fifteen years ago, while working on being a more loving husband, (which, by the way, should be on the list of Official Spiritual Disciplines) I acted very impulsively and asked my wife how she would like to be loved. What could I do that would make her feel, really and truly appreciated?

“Unload the dishwasher. Every day. I hate doing it, so if you could, that would make me feel loved.”

I foolishly believed she was going to ask for flowers. Or maybe a bracelet. Do women wear bracelets anymore? That’s how out of touch I was (am). But, fine. The dishwasher thing was good. Simple, too. Not a problem.

So, for the first two weeks I unloaded the dishwasher without hesitation.

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My Dad told me he was gay when I was 13 years old and I made the decision in that moment to accept him for who he was. That is not to say I actually did accept him for who he was immediately. I meant to. I wanted to. I made the decision to. But the reality was I had no idea what that acceptance meant, and I had no idea how that acceptance would change who I am.


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This podcast is about love, so let’s talk about what the church preaches about love. We say that we should love others as Jesus first loved us. We say we should love our enemies. We say to should love generously, sacrificially even. But do we practice what we preach?

Yes, of course we do. Sometimes. I’ve seen extraordinary love inside the church, and from the church toward the world. I’ve spent most of my life working in the church, and I’ve seen a lot of exemplary love in those years. I’ve also seen us fall short plenty of times. After all, the church is made up of people, and we’re all sinners. So the church will never be perfect, at least not until Jesus comes again to sort it all out.

For now, I wanted to celebrate a time I saw — I felt — the church practice what it preaches.

It all happened in 2022 when I almost died. I was passing through Singapore airport on my way to Vietnam for vacation. But my body had other ideas. My heart stopped. And when I collapsed from my heart stopping, I hit my head and received a pretty serious brain injury. After 59 minutes of CPR, I was rushed to a nearby hospital. It turns out that the hospital closest to Singapore airport is one of the best heart hospitals in the world.

I was in the hospital for two weeks, including several days of complete sedation so the swelling in my brain could go down. When I was discharged from the hospital, I was in a wheelchair. My brain wasn’t quite working right, as it continued to heal. By then, Sherilyn, my spouse, had arrived. We couldn’t go home until the doctors said my brain was well enough healed to travel by air. So we were stuck in Singapore for a few weeks.

I went to Italy for the first time in February of 2000. I was a 20-year-old Junior in college, and I was minoring in Italian. I had no Italian ancestry, and no cultural obsession with Italy or the Roman Empire. I was not in love with an Italian coed. I tell you this only because these are all the questions I get asked when I mention studying Italian.

My reasons for studying Italian were much more capricious. I had taken Spanish, German, and Japanese classes at different points growing up, and heading to college I decided I wanted to try a new language. I also decided that I should try to become fluent in whatever language I chose. I was 18 when I decided this. I did not expect to advance any specific career or spiritual goal. I just wanted to be able to watch the Godfather movies without subtitles, and to listen to Italian-American singer Louis Prima and know what he was singing half the time. This was the depth of my decision making.

During my sophomore year it became apparent that studying abroad for at least a semester was an expectation, so I set about looking at programs in Italy, and settled on one in the Northeastern city of Padova (we English speakers call it Padua) because all the classes were taught in Italian, and they had no lessons on Fridays, so students could have long weekends to travel.

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The only symptom of pre-eclampsia that I knew of was swollen ankles, and my ankles were fine. I was 25 weeks pregnant, and running late to my follow-up ultrasound appointment…late enough that I almost skipped it. I had figured that the headaches and occasional blurry vision I experienced were probably related to the stress of my first year of teaching. I didn’t realize that those were signs of a problem with my pregnancy. My husband John had to work late that day, so I went to the doctor’s appointment by myself. I figured that it would be routine. I was thinking about what I would make for dinner that night. I didn’t notice until later that the ultrasound technician was far less talkative than he had been during my last appointment, 6 weeks prior.

By the time I opened the door afterward to return to the consult room, the technician had pulled my obstetrician from a delivery. The doctor was standing in the doorway in his blue surgical scrubs. He told me that the ultrasound showed that I had severe pre-eclampsia. He said that there was a 100 percent chance that my baby would be born premature. He said that I was in danger of having a stroke, and that the wait would be too long for an ambulance to take me to the hospital, so his nurse was going to drive me. Then he asked me to sit down so that he could check my blood pressure. It was…high.

For the next ten days, I was on monitored bed rest at the state teaching hospital. I underwent treatment to prevent a stroke, and received two rounds of a steroid to develop the baby’s lungs. After ten days, when my blood pressure rose to a dangerous level and stayed there, and the baby was showing signs of distress, the doctors delivered her. Our daughter Katherine Grace was born at 27 weeks’ gestation. She was twelve inches long. She weighed one pound, four ounces.

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I was 20 years old, walking a trail on the side of a hill in Northwestern Italy when I heard God speak to me. I was by myself, having walked far ahead of my traveling companions, and I was stuck in my head. These particular hills are right on the edge of the Ligurian Sea, and every single view is breathtaking, and I was paying attention to none of them. I was too busy being heartbroken. Throughout college I was mostly involved with one person, and our relationship ended and began again a couple times. This was one of the times it had ended.

My guest today is the Reverend Dr. Herschel Wade. Herschel is the Associate for Discipleship here at the Church of the Redeemer, and I am so grateful for him. He has been with us for just a few short months in this job and he's still relatively new to the priesthood, but he brings so much to the table, so much passion, so much energy, so much joy and laughter, and so much thoughtfulness.

While growing up, my life at home was never peaceful or stable. My father ran the streets and slept around with other women. He spent little time at home. When he was at home, he physically, emotionally, and psychologically abused my mother and beat us regularly at the drop of a dime. My mother turned full-alcoholic and gave up on everything except trying to keep my father from leaving for good. The long fight to keep him and endure the abuse would effectively break her spirit and strip her of her remaining dignity. She never seemed to recover.

Somehow through the beatings, I hit a breaking point. I grew tired of watching him beat my mother while courting and pampering other women, who could not have loved my father as much as my mother did. One night stands out in my mind. Like a crazy fool, I attempted to stop one of my father’s attacks on my mother. He was beating her on our front porch for the world to see, again. “Leave my mama alone Goddammit. Leave my mother alone!” My father chased me down the street. You damn right to assume he did not catch me. Had he caught me, the chance of me being able to retell this story would be less zero! The effects were no less devastating. My father kicked me out of the house; my mother packed my bags. Sadly, my actions that night would have long lasting effects on my younger sister. She, too, caught the “I don’t give a damn bug” and cussed my father out minutes after my departure. She would depart in the same way I did that night. She was twelve and would not return for years—yes, years.

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As part of our When Love Shows Up Throwback Series we are re-posting this podcast which was originally posted on May 12, 2023


Where is God when things are terrible? Where is God when I pray for the healing of a loved one and they get sicker? Where is God when I pray for their healing and they die instead? Where is God when people are being torn apart by AR-15 bullets?


Where is God?


I ask this question a lot, and I get asked it a lot. A friend who is really going through it recently asked me, and followed up by saying they were not asking rhetorically. It’s not a new question. Some biblical scholars believe that the Book of Job is the earliest story in our Scriptures. Which means not only is “Where is God?” not a new question – it might be the oldest question anyone who believed in God ever asked. And it’s important to remember that “Where is God?” is asked most frequently by people who believe in God, because we often think it’s a question rooted either in faithlessness or cynicism. But in my experience it is one of the most faithful questions anyone can ask.


Where is God?


I need to tell you that I will not answer this question in anything like a satisfactory way. So please know that going forward. Just the same, my first answer is that God is with us. This is the stated belief of the Christian – even when we don’t understand, even when we question, even when we doubt, even when we are furious with God. God is with us. When I was growing up, the spectacular Bette Midler sang, “God is watching us from a distance.” It was beautiful and it was believable, but it was also not true – at least not according to the Christian narrative. We say that God is here right now.


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Today at the gym I overheard a conversation. I did not mean to. I was not eavesdropping. Well not at first anyway. In my defense the person working out next to me was talking at normal volume on their phone. She was not using, as it’s called in elementary school, her inside voice. And because I had misplaced my headphones, I could only mind my own business for so long. Even without knowing the context of the conversation, I heard pain. Then I heard her say these words to the person on the other end of the line:

My preference would be to see evidence of God’s presence when things are going my way, and evidence of God’s absence when things are not. And I know I am not alone in this: Many people find themselves questioning the existence (or at least the efficacy) of God specifically when they see the mess we are in as a planet. The reasoning seems to go, “What kind of a God would allow all of this?” And when things are going right? “Oh, God is blessing me.”

It's worth remembering that all of Jesus’ disciples died horrible deaths; that St. Paul was jailed repeatedly, stoned, and executed; that Job, who is most famous for his faithfulness, lost every one of his children, his home, and all his livestock in one day; that Moses died in the wilderness, never setting foot in the Promised Land. It’s also worth remembering that none of these stories are told as tragedies: Every life is described as part of a larger redemptive reality at work in the world, played out in both the prosperity and the adversity of the faithful.

The truth is that pretty much every single book of the Bible was written for, by, and about people who were in tough situations – living in exile, surviving under oppressive rule, being persecuted, their lives threatened, their religion made illegal, their lifespans brief and rife with danger, famine, and pestilence.

Sometimes – especially when I’m in my head - I see things going wrong as evidence that there is no God; or that if there is a God, maybe they’re impotent, or uncaring. Yet the words of hope that have most shaped my life come from people whose lives were objectively much worse, much more difficult than mine has ever been. Faith, it seems, may be more fertile in suffering than prosperity.