Living your Faith

Some of the most grounded people of faith I know went through a period of serious doubt.

Most people just never say it out loud. They show up, go through the motions, and assume everyone else in the pew has it figured out.

They don’t.

Doubt isn’t the opposite of faith. In my years as a priest, I find that it is the precursor to a deeper one. The person who has never questioned what they believe probably hasn’t needed to yet. The person who has come out the other side of real uncertainty is someone whose faith has some weight to it.

What I find so fascinating about Thomas is that he stayed. He kept showing up, even empty. He didn’t have answers and he didn’t pretend to. Most of us know that feeling (even me), sitting in a pew, going through the motions, not sure we believe anymore. Thomas did too. And what he was looking for found him.

It can find you too.

This week’s invitation: If you’re carrying a doubt or a question you’ve never said out loud, write it down. Just getting it out of your head and onto paper is sometimes enough to start working through it honestly.

God Bless.

FF

I’ve sat with a lot of people in the hours after something has changed, whether it’s being laid off, getting a diagnosis, or watching a relationship go sideways.

These people are floating. The facts are right in front of them, but they just can’t read them yet, but the hardest part isn’t the uncertainty itself–it’s not knowing whether what they’re looking at is an ending or a beginning.

That moment of not-yet-understanding is not a failure of faith. I am suggesting it might actually be where faith starts.

Most of us want the full picture before we take a step. But some of the most significant moments in a person’s life begin with staying present to what’s in front of you, even when you can’t explain it, and trusting that something is happening.

You don’t have to understand it to let it change you. History’s greatest surprise looked, at first, like a loss.

This week, think of one situation where you’re sitting with unease or uncertainty. Instead of running through everything you don’t know, write down two or three things you can see. Sometimes that’s exactly how new life begins.

God Bless.

FF

When a friend was going through something hard, I meant to call him to be a good friend.

I had his number in my hand.

I put the phone down and told myself I’d call tomorrow.

Tomorrow came and went. A week or two passed and then it felt like it was too late.

I never made the call.

Most of us have made those small choices, like a silence when we could have spoken, closing a door instead of walking through it. This weight leads to suffering through years of carrying it steadily, the way you carry something you’ve stopped noticing but never actually put down.

And we are carrying a lot right now–the news, the bills, the relationships that have frayed. Most of us are holding more than we let on to anyone, including ourselves. We tell ourselves we’ll deal with it when the time is right, when we have the words, when things settle down a little.

But we both know things don’t settle down. We just get better at carrying.

Holy Week is a special time in our religion and especially meaningful for people who are tired of managing, tired of waiting for the right time, tired of pretending the weight isn’t there. Whatever you’ve been postponing, whether it’s a conversation, an apology, an honest reckoning with yourself, you were never meant to figure it out alone.

I invite you to join us this week/- and every week. The door is open and you are welcome.

Easter is coming. You don’t have it all your burdens resolved by then. You just have to be willing to put it down.

God Bless.
FF

A parishioner shared with me her story about the two years she and her husband spent trying to have a baby. Through the treatments, monthly disappointment, and baby showers she smiled through, she said she prayed every night, the same prayer, and when nothing changed she started to wonder if God thought she wouldn’t be a good mother.

She has a daughter now, adopted, but she said she still confused (angry?) about why God didn’t grant her a child. She’s grateful for how things turned out, but the pain was intense. “It still hurts,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ll ever understand why.”

This conversation comes to mind when I talk about this gospel. Martha was also angry that Jesus took his time coming to help. “If you had been here, my brother would not have died.” She’s saying what she feels: you could have helped, and you didn’t.

Jesus doesn’t correct her or explain himself. He weeps with her! Then he calls her dead brother out of the tomb and he comes.

This week, someone in your life is probably in the middle of their own impossible wait. They may not be handling it gracefully–maybe they’re angry, short-tempered, or hard to be around.

Resist the urge to explain God’s timing to them or remind them it will all work out. What if you just stayed and “wept with them.” Let them be where they are. When Jesus did that on the road with Martha, it was the thing she needed most before the miracle.

 God Bless

FF

I was setting up chairs for a funeral reception last month when the deceased’s brother found me in the parish hall.

He’d flown in from Arizona but they hadn’t spoken in four years.

“Father, can I ask you something?” He was holding a coffee cup he hadn’t touched. “Did she ever mention me?”
I told him the truth. She had, and more than once.

He sat down on one of the folding chairs, the weight of this truth landing on him. “I kept waiting for the right time to call. I had this whole thing I was going to say.” He looked at the cup. “I thought I had more time.”

“The thing is, she knew me. She knew my worst parts, why I stayed away, what I was ashamed of, and I think she would have answered my call anyway.”

Being known, fully known, and realizing he would have been welcomed back was hard to deal with now that she was gone. The door had been open the whole time but he just never walked through it.

Four years of rehearsing the perfect apology, waiting until he was fixed enough to be worth calling.

Boy, did he regret it now.

Someone in your life might be doing the same thing right now–circling, rehearsing, convinced they need to be different before they can come back to you.

This week’s invitation: Send the message that says you don’t need the speech. You don’t need them fixed. You just need them. Let them know the door is open.

God Bless.
FF

A woman I know found out her husband had six months to live on the same day her youngest left for college. She told me she spent that first night sitting in her car in the driveway, just sitting there. “I couldn’t figure out how to walk into that house,” she said. “How do you start a road like that?”

One night 3 weeks later, she and her husband were sitting on the porch, not talking about anything important, the light hit his face a certain way, and she saw him the way she had when they were 23 and nothing was complicated yet. Just for a moment, then it passed, and they went inside and dealt with the insurance paperwork.

“That moment centered me,” she said later. “When things got bad—and they got bad—I’d go back to that porch in my mind to remember what was true.”

I think about her when Lent rolls around and we hear about the Transfiguration because the timing of that story is similar to when Jesus takes his closest friends up a mountain, and for one impossible moment, they see who he really is, and then they come back down, and he tells them: Don’t talk about this. Not yet. You’ll understand later.

He knows what’s coming, and he gives them a glimpse, something to hold onto when the road gets impossible.

We do this for each other all the time, when someone we love is about to start something hard—a deployment, a chemo regimen, a difficult undertaking—we try to fill their bucket up first. We’re packing provisions for their journey.

My father did this the weekend before I started a job I was terrified about. He drove four hours to take me to dinner and didn’t say anything profound. He just told me stories from his own career like the disasters, the near-misses, the times he’d felt completely out of his depth and by the end of the night, I wasn’t less scared per se but I felt less alone.

The glimpse is meant to be fuel. You still come back down from that mountain and walk into whatever’s waiting for you, but you’re carrying something now that you weren’t carrying before.

The good moments aren’t separate from the hard ones. They’re how you survive them and maybe that’s what this season is for–to receive whatever glimpse we’re given, whether in prayer, an unexpected kindness, or a moment of real presence with someone we love for the road ahead.

This week, maybe we could be that glimpse for someone else. Someone in your life is staring down a hard road. Show up and pack their provisions.

God Bless.

FF

A friend of mine got offered a promotion last month–more money, bigger title, the full package. He turned it down. When I asked him why, he got quiet for a second and said, “Because I’d never get to tuck my kids in at night again.”

I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since. My friend looked clearly at what was being offered and recognized what it would cost him, and he decided some things matter more.

We all face these moments, don’t we? Maybe not always about corner offices, but certainly small, daily negotiations we make with ourselves when no one’s watching. They seem like small compromises that don’t feel like much until we look up one day and wonder how we drifted so far from where we meant to be.

I sat with a woman after her husband’s funeral last year. After 48 years of marriage, I asked her what made it work, expecting something profound. She smiled and said, “We just kept showing up. Every day you choose it again. Some days you don’t feel like choosing. You choose anyway.” There was so much love in how she said it.

And so much truth.

Life has a way of presenting us with “easier” paths—they may look like relief, freedom, or finally getting what we deserve, but so often they lead somewhere we never intended to go.

They lead us off course.

I see it in the young people I talk to, scrolling through everyone else’s highlight reels and wondering why their own life feels so ordinary. The pull to perform rather than simply become who they’re meant to be.

I see it in the couples who’ve hit the hard years, when the romance has faded and someone else suddenly seems to understand them better. The pull to escape rather than do the sacred work of repair.

I see it in the friends approaching retirement, wrestling with questions they’ve been too busy to ask: Who am I when the doing stops? What was it all for? The pull to fill the silence with noise rather than sit with what’s stirring underneath.

None of these struggles make us bad people.

They make us human.

And that’s precisely what makes them worth paying attention to.

I’d asked an older gentleman parishioner what he wished he’d understood earlier in life. He thought for a moment and said, “That the things I was chasing weren’t going to fill me, and the things that would, I kept putting off for later.”

This season invites us into something similar, where there’s a focus and honesty about what we’re really hungry for–to remember what matters.
So this week, maybe just notice when the shortcuts call. Get curious about what they’re promising and what the truer path might be.

You probably already know.

Sometimes we just need the quiet to hear it.

God Bless.
FF

There’s a part of your life no one else sees: the thoughts you carry while folding laundry, the weight you carry into a room even when you’re smiling, or a memory that still stings, even now.

It’s a quiet space that is private.

This is where Lent begins.

Not in the ashes on your forehead or in giving something up but in the moment you stop long enough to be honest, with yourself and with God.

This season isn’t a project.

Nor a performance.

It’s a slow turning of the heart.

Most of it will happen where no one else is looking.

Which, according to Jesus, is exactly the point.

Today’s invitation: Make time today for one prayer no one else will hear.

God Bless.
FF

There’s a woman I know—works full-time, three kids, never late with a casserole when someone’s in need. The kind of person people call “a saint,” mostly because she’s always smiling.

Last year, someone in her family hurt her deeply. I won’t go into the details. But it was the kind of thing you could reasonably hold a grudge over for the rest of your life.

She didn’t want to talk to him.

After what he said, how casually he said it, and who he said it to, it didn’t feel repairable. She stayed polite in group settings and was civil, but she kept her distance if possible.

For almost a year, it stayed that way. She tried to just carry on, be polite and stay above it—to keep the peace, at least on the outside.

Eventually, she realized it wasn’t enough to not lash out. She needed to have the uncomfortable, shaky-voiced conversation to allow her healing.

So one afternoon, driving home from work, she pulled over and called him.They both fumbled through the call with long pauses and some tears and in fact, nothing resolved, exactly.

But it was an honest conversation and that changed something in both of them. It made room for repair.

In this week’s Gospel, Jesus says faithfulness isn’t purely avoiding the wrong things but also going toward the right things, even when it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, uncertain.

Care less about what looks holy from the outside, and more about what is whole from the inside.

The real mark of a transformed heart is how it reconciles, not perfectly, just willingly.

Is there someone you’ve been avoiding? Maybe it’s time to pray honestly about why you haven’t. Either way, don’t rush past the tension. Let it be a place where grace can begin to do its work.

God Bless.
FF

Most days, you’re not trying to change the world.
You’re trying to get dinner on the table before 8 p.m.
Or find five minutes of quiet before the group chat wakes up again.

And yet, here comes Jesus:
“You are the salt of the earth.”
“You are the light of the world.”

He was talking to regular people. Fishermen. Mothers. Tradesmen.
People whose lives looked a lot like yours.

He didn’t hand them a spotlight or a platform.
He handed them a purpose.

To preserve what’s good and quietly light the way.

The world needs steady gestures of faith. It needs you to:

To keep showing up.
To speak with honesty, even when it’s easier not to.
To be gentle in a conversation that could tip either way.
To hold onto hope when others have let it go.

Your quiet faithfulness (your “flavor”) might be exactly what someone near you needs right now. So if you’re feeling small, or unsure, or tired of trying, this is your reminder:

You still carry light.
You still bring flavor.
And that is not nothing.

Sprinkle some hope. Shine with gentleness.

You’re not the whole solution.
But you’re part of what God is doing.

God Bless.
FF