“They said their teacher has not come,” said Peter, the education facilitator for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) partner Across, translated from Anyuak to English.
“Where are your friends?” came the next question to the 10 boys sitting in the muddy field.
Surgery, complications from surgery, adverse reactions to medications, and more emergency room visits than I can remember have been an unfortunate fact of life for us as a family. When we’d go to the emergency room, I was always prepared for, yet staggered by, a question the triage nurses are required to ask of everyone: “Are you safe at home?”
As a boy growing up in Brazil, the Rev. Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes said he was afraid of the dark. At bedtime it comforted him that his father had the light on in the next room. “I could see the light where he was, and that was my resting place,” said Carvalhaes, associate professor of worship at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, during the recent “Responding to an Exodus: Gospel Hospitality and Empire” celebration of 35 years of ministry by Presbyterian Border Region Outreach, formerly Presbyterian Border Ministry, and hosted by Frontera de Cristo. Carvalhaes led a workshop he called “Preaching from the Darkness” at First Presbyterian Church in Douglas, Arizona.
Raised in both Douglas, Arizona, and nearby Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico, which is just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, artist and community college instructor M. Jenea Sanchez has an interest in the kind of public art that’s a simultaneous expression of hope and resistance.
According to the Rev. (Capt.) Lyman M. Smith, director of the Presbyterian Council for Chaplains and Military Personnel, “more than 18 million veterans live among us. And of those 18 million, some 18 are likely to die by suicide today.”
In mid-August, a video crew supported by Blessed Tomorrow, a Presbyterian Hunger Program partner, filmed a chapel service at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville. Portions of the service, as well as an interview with the Rev. Dr. Diane Moffett, the Presbyterian Mission Agency’s president and executive director, are now featured in a climate action video, “Jesus Calls Us” (available at vimeo.com/370339034).
At her lowest point, the Rev. Tamara John cut off her hair and gained 50 pounds.
“Subconsciously, I wanted to make myself look and feel as ugly as possible,” she said.
On the front lines as an RV park minister to the community where she lived in a fifth wheel custom-made RV, John said she was feeling responsible for the loss of a man in her community who had died by suicide.
In the shadow of what many consider the worst refugee camp in Europe is a beacon of hope, operated mostly by volunteers, a group called Lesvos Solidarity.
Thirty-six presbyteries in the United States have formal ties with partner churches in Africa. There are practical reasons for that, the Rev. Debbie Braaksma recently told worshipers in the Presbyterian Center. Among them: The safety of the gospel depends on seeing how it’s lived out in other cultures.
When faced with chaos and danger, four World War II U.S. Army chaplains on a critically damaged Army transport together chose to offer their shipmates the peace they could. When nothing more could be done, these same chaplains laid down their lives, giving a few of those around them a chance for life. (For more about the Four Chaplains, see fourchaplains.org/the-saga-of-the-four-chaplains.)
