This week holds more than one story for me.
It marks two years since Neal’s death.
And it marks nearly one year since you called me to be your pastor. I boarded the plane for call weekend just after marking the one year mark. There was a moment of “Well, you said no major decisions for a year…”
Those two realities sit side by side—grief and gratitude, loss and new life. And if I’m honest, they don’t resolve neatly. They don’t cancel each other out. They simply… coexist.
Which, in many ways, feels like Lent.
Lent is a season of wondering.
Of noticing what is unfinished, unresolved, or still tender.
Of asking questions we cannot quickly answer.
These past two years have been wilderness for me—full of wondering.
Grief has a way of reshaping everything—time, identity, even the way you understand God. There is no map for it, no clear path through. Only the daily invitation to keep walking, even when you are not sure where the path is leading.
And yet, at the same time, this past year has also been filled with a different kind of wondering.
Wondering what it means to begin again.
Wondering what God is forming in and through this community.
Wondering how something new takes root, slowly and often quietly.
We know and say that grief changes us. It REALLY changes us if we are honest with it, don’t fight it, let it come and sit with us.
Two things can be true at the same time. As Kate Bowler said recently, this is a paradox, not an emotional pass. So we have to live in the two, see the reality of the two, and accept that we are confronting a mystery.
I didn’t expect those two kinds of wondering to overlap.
But they have.
And maybe that is the quiet truth Lent teaches us:
that life is rarely one thing at a time.
We can carry sorrow and joy.
We can hold endings and beginnings.
We can be in the wilderness and still be becoming.
I am grateful—for the ways you have welcomed me, for the ways you have allowed me to lead and to learn, and for the grace you have extended as I continue to navigate both grief and calling.
As we continue through this Lenten season, I wonder if we might all make space for the “both/and” places in our own lives. The places that feel unresolved. The places where something has ended, and something else is quietly beginning.
Because the story of our faith does not rush to Easter.
It wonders in the wilderness.
It lingers at the cross.
And it trusts—slowly, sometimes hesitantly—that resurrection is still possible.
Grace and peace,
Pastor Carrie
Senior Pastor | Second Baptist Church