February 2026

I saw a picture of medical personnel lined up along the walls in a long hallway that Alex Pretti used to walk as a VA ICU nurse. Colleagues that knew his care and his talent gathered to light candles, stand in silence, pray and cry. 

Though so much has shocked and saddened me over the past few weeks, I found myself disheartened by the quick and false assessment of Alex Pretti. Hours after he was shot while protecting a woman from ICE, he was labelled a domestic terrorist. Truth has surfaced since the early assessment, but it makes me wonder how often we fall into the same trap of prematurely labeling, blaming, defending, and escaping truth.

There is a Kenyan prayer I have valued over the years:

From the cowardice that dares not face new truth,

from laziness that is content with half-truth,

from arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,

Good Lord, deliver me.

This year, we are reflecting on Welcoming Heart of God. In that God has welcomed us in grace and mercy, we have the chance to welcome one another, the stranger, the child... Since there is room enough at God’s table, we make sure all are welcome, protected, cared for.

Turns out the God who welcomes all, also welcomes our honest questions. We do not need to rush to quick assessment and resort to labeling, blaming, defending, escaping. We bring our honest questions to God and each other because we are looking for truth and want to go deeper in our faith seeking understanding. But this requires integrity and patience and courage to stay with what is unresolved.

Though young himself, Rainer Maria Rilke, in the early 1900s wrote to a young struggling poet:

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.  

May God bring healing and help us with all that is unresolved in our hearts and our world. May God give us courage together to make room for honest questions. May God grant us resilience enough to seek and speak the truth, which sets us all free.

Tom