If you’re stressed, anxious, or depressed, this is your counterintuitive medicine

Loving your neighbor, who is like you, whose identity you share, is not enough.  You must stretch the boundaries of love to wrap into its embrace the stranger, the people in our society who are furthest away from power.  To counter the frenzy of rhetoric and the aspirations of policy that demonize these human beings, we need to love them fiercely.  We need to love them fully.

One day our dreams will be realized. Just not today. And not tomorrow. And maybe not for many years. But just as hope doesn’t die, dreams don’t die.

There’s an eerie resonance between the Noah narrative and this week.  What does Noah’s Flood teach us about navigating chaos and coming once more to land?

After the death of a beloved child in our community to suicide, we reaffirm our commitment to combatting shame with tenderhearted love, to meeting one another in the dark, to never giving up on each other. May Benjamin Ellis’s memory be a blessing.