There’s only enough coffee in the canister for one cup.

This is the “worse” of “for better or for worse.”

My friend is leading a prayer before the U.S. House of Representatives, and he’s worried about his prayer being perceived as “too political.” I shared with him a quote I encountered this week, a paraphrase of John Howard Yoder in a book called Evangelism after Christendom: “The question is not whether the Christian should be political or not. The question is rather to what sort of politics the Christian is called.”

The author also observes that “The interpretation of Jesus’ life and ministry as apolitical is itself a political option.”

This is not mere wordplay. The impact on politics of women and men of faith who try to avoid the “political” is tangible. It affects not only who gets elected, but also where public moneys get appropriated and which laws become enacted.

We can’t not be political. Living is political, especially when it’s done collectively, as by a church.

It was warm enough yesterday morning to allow me to walk to a train station that’s about 30 minutes away for my morning commute, rather than the one that’s five minutes from the school where I drop Daughter off at 8:15.

Just a few minutes into that walk I ran into someone from my church. They were leaving a dentist appointment. We had a pleasant, brief, exchange, and then I continued on my walk.

Perhaps 10 minutes after that I passed someone else from the church, a coworker, on the sidewalk. We shared a surprised “Hi!” as we passed one another, and neither of us broke stride.

Finally, just a block from my destination, a third encounter with a church person. We walked the last two minutes together, talking about his recent trip to Amsterdam and Paris.

There’s nothing like a little sunshine and two walking feet.

I spent last Friday morning reading the “faith narratives” that my church’s 27 Confirmation students wrote. They range in length from a few paragraphs to three pages, and they express a wide spectrum of understanding–the Bible, the church, God: there’s a lot in there, and a lot of it I don’t remember teaching.

And yet the thing I have decided to care most about in these narratives is desire. Do these students want to be part of the church? If they do (and we work hard to give them a real choice to say they don’t), then the understanding they express comes in a distant second place; we can work with desire.

Confirmation is invitation to young people to say “yes” to faith. We grow with them from there.

I had an evening to myself and I wanted to watch a movie. I don’t do that often in the day-to-day march of work, parenting, and helping to run a household, so it was an enticing opportunity. But what to watch?

Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, iTunes, YouTube, HBO Now: I have access to all of these services, and all of them will generate recommendations for me. There is an algorithm under all of their hoods that knows my age, gender, zip code, my viewing history, and who knows what else. A recommendation from any of them would be reliable. The marvel of technology.

Instead I asked my friend, the one who loves movies so much he runs an office pool for the Oscars. I texted him a simple request: tell me what to watch and I’ll watch it–no questions asked. He did, and my solo movie night was a success.

Oh the marvel of technology.

The end of a program is the right tie to evaluate, but it’s not the best time to make new commitments. What went well? Yes. What went less well? Yes. What will we change? Hold the phone.

I fall into this trap once a year. The program is ending, and the time until it needs to start again stretches out in front of me as if to infinity. Anything is possible: write a new curriculum; recruit new leaders; change the schedule; add a retreat. I am never more bold in committing to a new direction and fresh material than when I’ve just finished with the old material. I’m practically unrestrained. And I always regret it.

The old stuff is going to look better when you get further out from it. Compared to theoretical new stuff, of course it looks inferior. Also, you know the old stuff’s potholes. You feel acutely the ways in which it didn’t measure up to your expectations for it. But you’re going to wish you’d chosen to improve it rather than to scrap it and start over once the deadline is looming to, you know, start over. A year from now you’ll be right back here again.

There is something motivating about always wanting the work to be better. But doubting the quality of the work such that we start from scratch every time doesn’t get us closer to perfect.

It always catches me a little off guard whenever someone asks me if I’m ready for Easter. Because it seems precisely the wrong way to relate to Easter to try to be ready for it. The whole impact of Easter is humanity’s utter lack of preparation, the sheer impossibility of imagining such a thing, much less arranging tables and chairs in anticipation.

Easter should surprise us and catch us flat-footed, the same way it did the women and men who first experienced it. Luke’s story of the two disciples encountered by the risen Jesus en route to Emmaus is so funny because they didn’t even know they were allowed to imagine such a thing, so they completely missed it–until it was gone. Even then, though, it wasn’t too late. Because it’s never too late.

But back to ready. If we’re getting ready for Easter we’re doing it wrong. I think the way we get ready for Easter is to get ready for Passion and Good Friday. If we can allow ourselves to give ourselves over completely to the story at that stage, as members of the crowd who call for crucifixion, as disciples who beg off and disappear into the masses, as authorities protecting Pax Romana, then we will be quite ready for the announcement that none of that matters more than resurrection.

It happened again last weekend: I watched volunteer leaders run youth groups and I remembered that this is what we’re supposed to be doing, inviting and supporting the leadership of congregants, not doing it all ourselves.

It’s so easy to overlook the insight, the experience, the faith and the no-joke skills for ministry with youth that live in our congregations. I see commitment, sure; why else would people show up Sunday after Sunday or give up their entire weekend, much less a week or more to go on a mission trip? All these other gifts are there too, though, waiting to be called upon.

Youth ministry is grownup ministry too.

Know your audience, yes. But know the venue too.

We saw a band last Saturday night at a local theater, and they were amazing. They played to the crowd, the brought audience members on stage, they improvised, they encore’d multiple times. It was a terrific experience for the audience (and also, presumably, for the band).

The experience was 180 degrees removed from the last time we saw the very same band, at an outdoor amphitheater where casual fans picnicked on the lawn and chatted over Chablis. Then, the band were visibly annoyed. They chastised the audience. The audience, in turn, tuned out the band and tuned into their picnics.

Don’t blame the audience for behaving the way the venue encourages them too. And don’t try to force this venue’s audience act like that venue’s audience.

Different venue, different audience, different work.

Adolescents aren’t good at empathizing with their parents, as a general rule. Developmentally, they are highly attuned to the cues for approval and disapproval coming from their peers, and that can lead them to treat their parents with a kind of cold disregard. I left a birthday party full of neighbors and family the day I turned 16 so I could impress my friends with my new drivers’ license and drive us all to the movies.

It kind of hits us in early adulthood that our parents are human beings with complicated desires and needs. If we have kids of our own, then, we empathize even more, as our appreciation for the Herculean task of keeping an infant alive opens up on the realization: my parents did this! Who knew they were so capable?

As our kids grow up and we begin to endure the same kind of turmoil we doled out to mom and dad, we become keenly aware of what raising us must have cost them. And what about their parents? Did the people who raised us not also have this same realization about what their upbringing cost the people who raised them?

It’s not all turmoil, of course. It’s just that the turmoil is the thing we’re completely blind to. It’s the character-shaper we’re not accounting for as we regard our parents as static figures who only are as they always have been. Of course they were kids once too. They were adolescents. They were parents of infants and teenagers coming to an awareness of their own parents’ growth and development and their own role in it.

This stretches backward, too. The kids we’re trying to raise are a long, long way from a nuanced appreciation for our humanity and our experience. But they will get there, and the question for us is: who are we going to be when they do?