When Love Shows Up: Weekly Reflections about God’s Presence

WLSU, Growing In Love - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I wrote in a recent blog post that historically I have been obsessed with numbers as a church leader. Many of us are. We talk about church growth, and we are almost always talking about literally increasing the number of people associated with our community. And I understand that. I can't totally disown it. If we believe that what we're doing matters, that it makes an impact, and that our community can transform people's lives, why would we not want to increase the number of people who experience that?
But this is not the growth we are talking about in baptism. In baptism, we are talking not about numerical growth, but about our maturity, our development, our spiritual growth alongside and towards one another as we see more clearly how to love like God loves. It is totally fine to love baptism because it means new members of our church. But I hope we can see past that as well and recognize that these babies, these nascent humans, these brand-new Christians, are pushing us to grow, to develop, to mature. God put them in our lives on purpose. How will we respond to that? How will we let them shape us? What will we learn from them about Jesus? How will we grow together?
We talk about growth in our Vision Statement. There's a whole bullet point dedicated to it, and we will be focusing on that bullet point throughout this program year. In it we say that we envision a church that is "Growing with people of every age, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic situation, and political persuasion." We wrote that four years ago, and I will freely admit that when we wrote it, I was thinking about numbers. I was thinking about increasing the number of people that are connected to Church of the Redeemer. But the language we used pushes us beyond that. When we say we want to grow not only in number but in the type and age and experience and perspective of our membership, we are saying we want our understanding of who we are to grow. We are talking about the growth, development, and maturity of how and where we see love.Want to support our podcast?
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WLSU: To Live That Belief - Guest Speaker

Have you ever been transformed by love only after believing in it for a while?
I have.
Here's what I mean: Have you ever had an experience of transformation that is connected to a person, a belief, a moral idea that you have proclaimed for a time - months or years- and then suddenly in a clarifying moment you are, for lack of a better word, converted to the thing you already believe, or know, or have?
Maybe I should give an example. When my husband Andrew and I were trying to become parents we were chosen by a pregnant woman to adopt her child, as yet unborn. For prospective parents in an infant adoption process in the USA this is an incredibly exciting and fraught moment. Exciting because the months of waiting and wondering if we would ever actually be chosen to parent someone seem to be coming to a close. Fraught because no woman can actually choose to give up a child until that child is born. This is both practically and legally the case - a woman cannot relinquish a child until she has given birth. In most states there is a waiting period after signing papers where the mother can revoke her relinquishment.
This is a good thing. Giving up a baby should only happen if it must, and if the woman chooses. It's never a happy thing for a parent to lose their child.
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WLSU, A Really Broken Ankle - Guest Speaker

It was one of
those mornings. In the labyrinthine hallways of the ministorage, where I was
converted through the incredulous look and gentle words of Jamie, one of my
dearest pals. I crutched around a corner
with a pillow in my teeth to meet Jamie, who was returning to the unit for
another load. He looked at me for a
second with that look of surprise, and, then, with a measure of concern, said,
"Jimmy, what are you doing." Through clenched teeth, I said, "I'm helping. I
can still help." To which he responded something like, "if we need that kind of
help from you right now, we are in real trouble."
I was good at helping. I was good
at giving. I was good at being there for folks in need. I was and still am
almost always game for showing. I was no good at receiving. I wasn't any good
at letting others give me a bit of help or care along the way, and my
unwillingness to ever be set to receive, rather than send, impeded my real
ability to experience the kind of community that I had envisioned to build in
this new venture. It was a block for me,
and my dear friends stupefied gaze and matter of fact words caused me to turn
around and see how The capital K Kingdom wouldn't work without a real measure
of interdependence. How we can't just give, give, give. How something loving
like giving can become absurd under certain circumstances. A grown man, on
crutches, with a pillow in his teeth at 7:30 in the morning with a hive of
people working around me.

WLSU, An Intervention (Transformed by Love) - Guest Speaker

My cousin had somehow convinced me that we could get away with smoking in my Granny's bathroom. I have no idea why I believed him. There wasn't a chance that we weren't going to get snared.
Later, when my mum questioned me, I knew that we were busted and there was no point trying to hide it. So I told her the truth. And -- as our conversation went on -- I told her the whole truth. It wasn't just the smoking. My friends and I had been stealing booze, getting drunk and putting ourselves in seriously dangerous situations. I knew I had screwed things up. I knew I had broken the rules. I knew I was in serious, serious trouble.
My mum, as you can imagine, was devastated. It was heartbreaking to come clean and see what I was putting her through. What scared me, however, was what would happen my dad found out. I begged her not to tell him but she wouldn't keep it from him. He was away for a couple of weeks so I lived in fear of what was to come.
When he came home, mum told him everything and he came straight to me. He told me to get in the car. Too afraid to ask any questions, I obeyed. I got in with no idea where we were going.
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WLSU, Are You Tired - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

Can we rest yet? Is it time? The dizzying, never-ending buzz, the exhausting, contentious election season, It feels like the answer is no, right? Because now we shift to our prayers and preoccupations over a peaceful transition of power, as well as our preparations for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Winter.
Who's got time to rest with all that?

WLSU, The Dishwasher is Full (Again) - Guest Speaker

It's not a very glamorous story. And to be honest, it doesn't reflect well on me. But I'll tell it anyway.
About fifteen years ago, while working on being a more loving husband, (which, by the way, should be on the list of Official Spiritual Disciplines) I acted very impulsively and asked my wife how she would like to be loved. What could I do that would make her feel, really and truly appreciated?
"Unload the dishwasher. Every day. I hate doing it, so if you could, that would make me feel loved."
I foolishly believed she was going to ask for flowers. Or maybe a bracelet. Do women wear bracelets anymore? That's how out of touch I was (am). But, fine. The dishwasher thing was good. Simple, too. Not a problem.
So, for the first two weeks I unloaded the dishwasher without hesitation.
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WLSU, Accepting Blessing - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

My Dad told me he was gay when I was 13 years old and I made the decision in that moment to accept him for who he was. That is not to say I actually did accept him for who he was immediately. I meant to. I wanted to. I made the decision to. But the reality was I had no idea what that acceptance meant, and I had no idea how that acceptance would change who I am.
The teaching of the church in which I grew up was clear: Only heterosexual attraction was part of God's plan and anything else was sinful and unnatural. Any sexual attraction or activity that strayed from heterosexuality was abhorrent to God. And anyone who was gay was questionable at best - their orientation dubbed a "lifestyle", their very being called a choice and a bad one at that.
I believed all these things when I was 13. I was taught them as a matter of fact, so I did not question them any more than I questioned that 1+1=2.
And then my Dad told me he was gay.

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WLSU, When A Church Practices What it Preaches - Guest Speaker

This podcast is about love, so let's talk about what the church preaches about love. We say that we should love others as Jesus first loved us. We say we should love our enemies. We say to should love generously, sacrificially even. But do we practice what we preach?
Yes, of course we do. Sometimes. I've seen extraordinary love inside the church, and from the church toward the world. I've spent most of my life working in the church, and I've seen a lot of exemplary love in those years. I've also seen us fall short plenty of times. After all, the church is made up of people, and we're all sinners. So the church will never be perfect, at least not until Jesus comes again to sort it all out.
For now, I wanted to celebrate a time I saw -- I felt -- the church practice what it preaches.
It all happened in 2022 when I almost died. I was passing through Singapore airport on my way to Vietnam for vacation. But my body had other ideas. My heart stopped. And when I collapsed from my heart stopping, I hit my head and received a pretty serious brain injury. After 59 minutes of CPR, I was rushed to a nearby hospital. It turns out that the hospital closest to Singapore airport is one of the best heart hospitals in the world.
I was in the hospital for two weeks, including several days of complete sedation so the swelling in my brain could go down. When I was discharged from the hospital, I was in a wheelchair. My brain wasn't quite working right, as it continued to heal. By then, Sherilyn, my spouse, had arrived. We couldn't go home until the doctors said my brain was well enough healed to travel by air. So we were stuck in Singapore for a few weeks.

WLSU, The First Time - The Rev. Philip DeVaul

I went to Italy for the first time in February of 2000. I was a 20-year-old Junior in college, and I was minoring in Italian. I had no Italian ancestry, and no cultural obsession with Italy or the Roman Empire. I was not in love with an Italian coed. I tell you this only because these are all the questions I get asked when I mention studying Italian.
My reasons for studying Italian were much more capricious. I had taken Spanish, German, and Japanese classes at different points growing up, and heading to college I decided I wanted to try a new language. I also decided that I should try to become fluent in whatever language I chose. I was 18 when I decided this. I did not expect to advance any specific career or spiritual goal. I just wanted to be able to watch the Godfather movies without subtitles, and to listen to Italian-American singer Louis Prima and know what he was singing half the time. This was the depth of my decision making.
During my sophomore year it became apparent that studying abroad for at least a semester was an expectation, so I set about looking at programs in Italy, and settled on one in the Northeastern city of Padova (we English speakers call it Padua) because all the classes were taught in Italian, and they had no lessons on Fridays, so students could have long weekends to travel.
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Ordinary Miracles - Guest Speaker

The only symptom of pre-eclampsia that I knew of was swollen ankles, and my ankles were fine. I was 25 weeks pregnant, and running late to my follow-up ultrasound appointment...late enough that I almost skipped it. I had figured that the headaches and occasional blurry vision I experienced were probably related to the stress of my first year of teaching. I didn't realize that those were signs of a problem with my pregnancy. My husband John had to work late that day, so I went to the doctor's appointment by myself. I figured that it would be routine. I was thinking about what I would make for dinner that night. I didn't notice until later that the ultrasound technician was far less talkative than he had been during my last appointment, 6 weeks prior.
By the time I opened the door afterward to return to the consult room, the technician had pulled my obstetrician from a delivery. The doctor was standing in the doorway in his blue surgical scrubs. He told me that the ultrasound showed that I had severe pre-eclampsia. He said that there was a 100 percent chance that my baby would be born premature. He said that I was in danger of having a stroke, and that the wait would be too long for an ambulance to take me to the hospital, so his nurse was going to drive me. Then he asked me to sit down so that he could check my blood pressure. It was...high.
For the next ten days, I was on monitored bed rest at the state teaching hospital. I underwent treatment to prevent a stroke, and received two rounds of a steroid to develop the baby's lungs. After ten days, when my blood pressure rose to a dangerous level and stayed there, and the baby was showing signs of distress, the doctors delivered her. Our daughter Katherine Grace was born at 27 weeks' gestation. She was twelve inches long. She weighed one pound, four ounces.
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