Category Gratitude

The Pursuit of Beauty

On February 20th of 2015, I was exhausted. My wife was struggling to survive, and there was no guarantee she would end up on the list to get the transplant she desperately needed. I was struggling with the burnout that…

Connection

I spent this past weekend in one of my happy places – the mountains of North Carolina. I love it there, even if it is not home in the way the hills of my native North Mississippi are home to…

What We Leave Behind

I bought some life insurance last week. I’ve been putting it off for ages, ostensibly because I wanted to research my options, but the long list of other things I have procrastinated on speaks to the lie in that scenario.…

The Heart Transplant Diaries

My wife Renee was born with a particularly aggressive form of heart disease – Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. Yeah, I have trouble saying it too. By early 2015, she was in heart failure, and her quality of life was plummeting, so her…

The Woo Woo

I tend to be very pragmatic. It’s not that I don’t have room for the supernatural: It’s just that it has, in my experience, often been used as an excuse by people who don’t really want to actually take tangible…

My Favorite Picture

In 2014, due to the generosity of friends, we had our first (and to date, only) trip out of the country together. Together, we went to Costa Rica, where we stayed with some friends in an amazing house on the…

This Blog Is Reader Supported

For the last 15 years, my vocation has been doing what my brother once called “do-gooder work”. While officially a pastor, my real work has been around food insecurity, homelessness, drug addiction, voter and healthcare advocacy along with organizing faith…

The Journal

My Dad was a quiet man. He seldom raised his voice. He virtually never cursed. And he was an intensely private man. You would never know who he voted for – you might suspect, but you would not hear it…