Love cannot fix everything, but it can keep us company.

Every time someone showed up for me, I learned that love is greater than skin deep.

I learned that love and support can be expressed in many different ways by different people.

Conflict resolution is in fact one of the greatest things that you can accomplish in your life and in your relationship. [W]hen I view people as not bringing conflict up, I think it’s being unfaithful to the relationship. I think it’s an abdication of your role in the relationship, and you are...

This reflection was part of Side With Love Sunday 2021.

This is a "love saves" story.

It’s important to honor the footprint others leave on our heart.

The harder things are to say, the more necessary they are to say.

Deep in the shadow of night, down near the crossroads and cemetery gates, with bitter liquor and cigar smoke wafting, I greet you. Clad in white, upon the floor before shrines, following the names of the Ancestors being uttered, I greet you. You are the sacred and righteous rage of my people.

A new disease, without any cure, is pushing us apart. And, yet, we cannot escape one another. We need one another. Whether I acknowledge it or not, the guarantee of safety does not exist.

In this community, we hold hope close. We don’t always know what comes next, but that cannot dissuade us. We don’t always know just what to do, but that will not mean that we are lost in the wilderness. We rely on the certainty beneath, the foundation of our values and ethics. —Rev. Theresa I.

A lot of us feel like our lives should have come with instructions. Or maybe they did, but we lost the only copy a long time ago.

We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen.

We have so many opportunities to bless each other in this world, but they don’t always announce themselves as moments of profound transformation.

One: To become is a life long process. Nothing is constant, not even the self. We evolve in the midst of narratives meant only for some and ways of being made narrow by fear and power. We must, then, have the courage to listen to the truth of our own lives, to the wisdom that comes from within—...

Love cannot be bought or sold; it does not make a profit. Love does not hide from truth. Love dives deep. Love takes on flesh. Love is queer. Love is platonic. Love is erotic. Love is asexual. Love confronts evil. Love delights in pleasure. Love touches and weeps and flirts and feeds and creates.

We light this chalice in honor of the animal realm, Furred and hoofed, two-legged, four-legged, many-legged, Fanged and clawed, gentle and fierce, wild and tame. May we remember that all animals are our relatives, Worthy of our care and respect.

• It takes a spark. • It takes fuel. • It takes air. • And it takes a container to hold them all. It is only with all of these things that we make fire. • It takes a call. • It takes learning and experience • It takes love. • And it takes a community to hold them all. It is only with...

When you’re the only black man in a sea of whiteness, purses still get clutched, and people still cross the street, and hellos still get lost in the void.

The first time I was told that I was too queer to be a congregation's minister, they asked, "What will the neighbors think?,” as if it were the most natural question in the world. It was then that I understood how grace works: it’s costly. It requires us to be uncomfortable, to get outside...