I filled in to lead worship for my pastor daughter today. Her amazing worship team put together an engaging and inspirational multi-media worship experience unlike any I have ever been a part of. It’s a new world we are living in, and my message was about how I have taken the lessons I have learned from my brain injury to think about life after the Pandemic. How we might use our religious imaginations to see what “new normal” might look like, because in the life of faith there is no going back:
Ride leader. BCA Wednesday Ride
On August 5, 2000 I set off to ride the Greylock Century Ride, a grueling 100 mile ride through the Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. I had already gone up and over Mt. Greylock, the highest point in the state, and up the famous “Hairpin Turn” on Route 2, “The Mohawk Trail.”
At mile 33 I found myself off the road in a drainage ditch (I found out later they are called “paved waterways” and are designed to keep then snow melt off the road.) The waterway led to a grate. It was too steep to ride back on the road or onto the shoulder so I literally went head over heels onto the pavement, still clipped into my pedals. Continue reading
“Behold I make all things new!” – Revelation 21:5
Twenty years ago my life changed forever in an instant when I flew over the handlebars of my bicycle and landed on my head. Like Humpty Dumpty I “couldn’t be put back together again.” The name for my new situation is traumatic brain injury (TBI), the injury so many of our troops return with from war. Continue reading
Happy Easter. The good news on this Third Sunday of Easter is that Christ is still risen. Hallelujah! But it’s a different Easter season this year, isn’t it?“ Continue reading
Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.” —Luke 12:13-21 NRSV Continue reading
In the Beginning: 2009-2010
I’d like to thank all of you who have dropped by this blog over the years. It is hard for me to believe a decade has passed since I began it. I started to write again as a personal act of healing which in time morphed into a new chapter of my ministry. Continue reading
Last spring, when your pastors Bruce and Barb invited me to come be with you I didn’t realize that I would be with you on a momentous day. For today is the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended The First World War on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. So before this service is over we will have reached that centenary. Continue reading
“Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.”—Romans 12:15
One of the stranger symptoms resulting from the traumatic brain injury I got 17 years ago is my tendency to cry at odd times, such as while watching sappy jewelry commercials on TV or foolish pet videos on Facebook. Continue reading
(This is a talk I gave to “The Saints” which is the United Church of Christ retired clergy group in the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. The talk was in Cromwell, CT on May 14, 2015)
I’d like to thank you for inviting me to be with you today. I have great respect for ministry as a high and holy calling, and I enjoy the company of ministers. I am proud to be a minister, and this year is the 40th anniversary of my ordination. And it is good to be in the Connecticut Conference. I never served here, but my daughter, Rebecca Floyd Marshall, is an ordained minister here in CT, serving in Westport. If you bump into her at a Conference meeting introduce yourself.
My talk today is entitled “Taking the Long View” which was the title of a UCC STILL SPEAKING Daily Devotional I wrote for March 14 of last year. I see it was re-printed in your newsletter. I’m going to share with you some of my personal back-story behind the writing of this particular devotional.
I began the devotional with an anecdote about Ralph, a congregant of mine in my first church, who owned an apple orchard: “I drove over to see Ralph at his hilltop orchard a week after I had presided over his wife’s funeral and burial. He was well into his nineties and they had been married for seven decades. I was all of twenty-seven. It took me awhile to find him, because he was out planting apple trees. He seemed glad to see me and said, “You may wonder why I am planting trees that I will never live to see bear fruit. But it’s what I have always done, and I am not going to stop now. There were apple trees in this orchard when I came here that somebody else had planted, and there will be apple trees here after I’m gone.”
I’ve held onto Ralph’s words for forty years, and lately they have helped me as I think about what it means to be a retired minister. That hasn’t been easy for me. Because when I left my role as a pastor it seemed, at first, and for a long while, like the loss of my calling as a minister. Now I have come to realize that, although I am no longer a pastor of a congregation, I am still a minister. When I turned 65 the UCC Pension Boards mailed me a good little book by Paul Clayton entitled Called for Life (Perhaps you all got one, too). I love the play on words in the title, and I do believe we are “called for life” in both senses of the phrase. Continue reading
I have a brain injury. It is one of the bald facts of my life like being tall or having brown hair. Unlike those facts though, I was not born with a brain injury, but acquired it on August 5, 2000 (see “I Lost My Marbles on the Mohawk Trail”). In my life story that day is a dividing marker. There is the time before my injury and the time after my injury, just as ancient Israel divided its life into before and after the fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile.
The great thinkers and writers of Israel who gave us some of the best parts of the Bible were preoccupied with why their exile happened. Or more precisely, they asked “What had they done wrong to cause the exile?” Why had God done this to them? As Rabbi Kushner asked in the title of his best-selling book: “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
I honestly don’t ask that question about my accident. I don’t feel guilty about my brain injury. Some things in life just happen that we are powerless to do anything about, and I believe this was one of those things. I don’t believe God throws people off bicycles. And I’m not ashamed about my brain injury, although it has taken me awhile to deal with the strange reactions of many people to my disability.
I bump into people in the grocery store, and they ask me if I am feeling better, and I smile and say I am doing OK, which I am. But the real answer in regard to my brain injury is “no.” I’m not better and, like Humpty Dumpty, I’m not going to be put together again. The task for me is to take care of myself and adjust to my disability from day to day as best I can with a lot of help from my family and my professional caregivers.
So it is what it is. I sometimes grieve for the life I expected to have. I am sometimes sad because I miss my ministry and the purpose and meaning that came with it. But I am unable to do it anymore and that is that. I am grateful for the thirty years I had to do it. I am grateful for my wife and children and family and friends. I am grateful I still have speech and memory, and the cognitive capacities to write and imagine.
And I am one of the lucky ones. Of the roughly 1.4 million who sustain a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) each year in the United States 50,000 will die. One of the reason I choose to speak openly about my TBI is there are many of our neighbors out there who have TBI and they are struggling. The CDC estimates over 3 million Americans have a long-term or lifelong need for help to perform their daily activities because of a TBI.
And there will be more. Many returning veterans have TBI from concussive injuries. Many of these heroes will daily struggle to manage stress, control their tempers, solve problems, and deal with life’s emotional issues. Many will have difficulty finding and keeping a job. Many will be unable to work. I am glad that Gary Trudeau has created a sympathetic character with TBI for his Doonesbury comic strip. The more people know about TBI the better.
One of the reasons for better education is that many people with TBI go undiagnosed. Many of these will self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. Untreated and unsupported such people with TBI will have very tough lives, and so will their family and friends.
So I choose to talk and write about brain injury so that more people can know about it, and can seek the support they need. There is support and services for people with TBI. I have been helped by the Massachusetts State Head Injury Program (SHIP). Massachusetts has an active Brain Injury Association, as do other states, and there is a National Brain Injury Association with a good website.
I was recently driving on the highway and saw a billboard from the Brain Injury Association. It pictured a camouflaged helmet, the kind our troops wear in Iraq and Afghanistan. The sign said: “You can’t camouflage a brain injury!” It’s really time we stopped trying to do that.
When I Survey . . . 