Raindom Thoughts

Hate Is a Love Story Gone Wrong. Sit with that for a moment before you read another word. Because I know what it does to you. I know the resistance that rises, the instinct to push back, to say “no, hate and love are opposites, they cannot share the same root, they cannot come from the same broken place inside a human being.” But stay with me. Because if you have ever loved someone who needed to diminish you to feel powerful. If you have ever been in a relationship that felt,

I need to remind you who is writing this before I write another word, because this particular conversation requires that kind of honesty. I am an ordained minister. A former hospital chaplain. A theologian who has spent more years than I can easily count sitting with the sacred in its most unguarded forms. At bedsides where death was making its slow and certain approach, in therapy offices where the accumulated weight of religious wounding had finally become too heavy to carr

A colleague of mine, a healer in her own right said something to me recently that I have not been able to shake, and I suspect it will stay with me for a very long time. We were talking about the growing number of people from the Global Majority who are now stepping into formal mental health spaces, walking through the doors of therapists and counselors and clinicians, finally willing to be seen and held and helped. And that, in itself, is a beautiful thing. It really is. But

There is a question I have been sitting with for a long time, turning it over in my hands the way you turn over a smooth stone you found somewhere meaningful and carried home without quite knowing why: Why do we weep for a dog we never met, but look away from the grief of a mother cow whose calf has been taken? I am not asking this to make anyone feel guilty. I eat meat. I have sat at a table with a ribeye in front of me and felt, in a moment that might sound strange to some

The movie theater smelled like butter and nostalgia and the collective exhale of two hundred strangers who had just spent two hours watching somebody else's imagination bleed across a screen. Kwame Aman sat in the dark as the credits rolled, watching names he could not pronounce scroll up into oblivion, and he felt that particular ache that comes when art shows you something beautiful and you realize the beautiful thing is not quite true. The film had been about time travel.

I want to start with a night I have carried with me for years, because I think it belongs at the beginning of this conversation more than anywhere else. I was a hospital chaplain, called to a room in the middle of the night where a man was dying. I had learned by then what it felt like to open a door into a room where death was present and family was gathered. The way something in the room would shift slightly when I arrived, the way grief exhausted people would allow themsel