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'A small life, small steps, arcing towards good through all election outcomes
Last week we visited a team whose trajectory has been slow and steady, small and sure. No dramatic earth-shattering victories that broadcast we are on the winning team. But dozens of friendships that...
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Christmas Apocalypse
Apocalypse comes to us via Latin "revelation, disclosure" from Greek "to uncover, reveal". . . but in 2024, the connotation of a world-ending cataclysm layers our perception of the term. And no...
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Watch, Pray, Shine: Christmas Candlelight
Candlelight in Bundibugyo in 2024 flickers more from necessity than for atmosphere. The rotting power poles in this tropical rainforest mean the entire national grid connection, which is less than 15...
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Breaking meager loaves to feed thousands: LET'S FILL THE GAP
Dear person who cares about kids in Bundibugyo . . . Compassion moved Jesus to break bread on the wilderness mountainsides where crowds had flocked to his teaching and healing, attracted to his...
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Dust & Ashes, Cloud & Fire
Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the season of Lent, a 40-day attention to our mortality. God knows we gravitate towards denial. Towards comfort, health, wealth, ease, youth . . . all good things but...
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Spring Conspiracy Theories
Equatorial living for all but two of the last 31 Springs (?) renews the wonder of the season. Bulbs planted decades ago, divided and dispersed, erupt splotches of bright yellow from nearly colorless...
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The Buckhannon River, and the River of Life
John 7:37 On the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. 38 He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of...
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Waving palms, turning tables, and a reversal narrative of more radiation than...
SundayAn artist depicts miraculous research in the radiation oncology clinicJesus, palms, and donkey: reversing expectationsIn a day of presence, voice, and handwriting (no printing let alone radio, no...
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Radiating peace into reality
Six treatments down, 22 to go in the first course of external beam radiation therapy (then another 28 in the second). Daily Scott has to be precisely positioned on a table of technology, scans...
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Presence is the only promise
Upheaval pictures our life and many others in 2025: it carries the image of quaking earth, of erupting lava, of crashing wave and upturned boat. Forces far beyond our control, on scales of impact...
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Happy or Alarmed: Mother's Day 2025
Everyone had a mother, so it's really the only universally experienced relationship. And both mothers themselves and the holiday today can conjure either gratitude or grief, or most likely some of...
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Ordinary Cancer Time
Monday I opened my lectionary app as I do every morning, to “ordinary time.” Two thousand years of tradition have knit patterns of reading through Scripture, and remembering history, to the calendar....
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Cheerfully searching for the path to resist evil, cancer, bombs . . .
Are we all reeling from the whiplashing events and press releases of the week, and wondering how to respond when God's name is invoked? Trying to sort out how to live with wars and graduations, cancer...
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Turning Tables for Justice
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and...
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Paradoxes of progress and partitions: cancer, politics, complexity and hope
Because of cancer, our life in 2025 took an abrupt turn. A turn that cost us deeply: our home, community, much of our day to day job and purpose, our view of the future, our normal life. One of the...
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All Hallow's . . on saints, eves, death, and leaves
Death, the universal experience least discussed. A metric of development might be how adeptly the average person in the area can avoid this reality. In our 30+ years in Africa we went to more burials...
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He shall be like a tree: Happy Birthday to Scott
The most important person in my life is turning 65 on Wednesday. First of all I am thankful he’s reaching that milestone. As we grew up, “65” was considered the legitimate end of a working life, the...
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Gratitude and Grief (again): Thanksgiving 2025 edition
Gratitude and grief were key words for us over the past few years, starting with my near-death accident and moving through dwindling team and stolen resources and personal betrayals. And we’ve...
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Construction and Comfort: Isaiah's call to attend Advent 2025
One more week of normal work until the week of Christmas brings us close to the end of 2025. Light is fading on our WV farm as we brace for plummeting temperatures and a winter storm watch today....
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BundiNutrition: Aid that Works
Following the Star . . . This season's Christmas story brings into focus the vulnerability of becoming a baby in a marginal place of poverty. Like Jesus' family, many of our neighbors in Bundibugyo and...
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Epiphany, an ongoing season of eyes wide open
'Til the season, of . . . epiphany, which has somehow come to mean a very individual big-idea insight, rather than a conspicuous manifestation of a reality. So in deference to the original meaning of...
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Prostest as lament; locating our story in God's
Like many Americans who are people of faith, we've been pondering a Biblical framework in which the current story fits the big story of God's arc from "in the beginning" Gen 1 to "all things new" Rev...
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Hands capped, hands clapping
I've been, literally, hand-capped for about 5 of the last 7 months. Two broken wrists, the first one old-fashioned casted and the second one requiring a surgical plate and screws, then a thumb tendon...
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Redeeming Ebola: 19 years later, hope continues
In the Fall of 2007, nearly 20 years ago now, a brand new strain of Ebola virus crossed from the Ituri forest into the people of Bundibugyo. Our dear friend and medical colleague Dr. Jonah Kule, who...
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Ebola Bundibugyo again: a lens for seeing and caring about Congo
Sixteen days ago, a puzzling cluster of severe illness and death in eastern DRC was finally attributed to the Bundibugyo ebolavirus. The same Ebola variant that killed Dr. Jonah 19 years ago, one of...
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