Month: May 2025

Last Sunday afternoon I was frantic to find Charlie’s backpack. If you didn’t know, Charlie has been playing Flag Football with a local League and they practice and play every Sunday afternoon at Lake Howell High School. The week before, Ryan had brough him home from the game and left his backpack and water bottle at the school track and field,  and after several calls and emails, I didn’t get any answer. Our son Charlie has LOVED Flag Football and he is on Team Thunder, which is perfect, because if you don’t know, Charlie is the kind of kid that you hear before you see. And so Team Thunder is so very appropriate for his loud voice. He wears cleats to play in and in the backpack was his pair of school shoes that are his favorite. All week long we limped by with different shoes, which to a seven-year-old is a travesty, but we made it work. And so, on this Sunday afternoon, I was determined to find this backpack, so help me God. And God helped me, that is for sure.

All game long I looked for it. I asked the coaches and the volunteers if they had seen it. No luck. I tried to find the groundskeeper, but again, no luck. And then this incredibly energetic woman on a golfcart wheels up as we are packing the car and is smiling at me. Her name is K. Johnson, and she said, “I heard you were looking for a backpack…” I shouted, “Yes, thank you so much!” I then did the happy dance. And then she said these words. “I have been driving around this field all afternoon long asking each person I saw, if this was their backpack, but I had no luck. I knew I would find the owner, but I just had to keep looking.”

And in that moment, I felt a profound sense that Jesus was there with us, not because of a stupid backpack or a pair of shoes, but because lost things, always have a way of being found.

I want to be like K. Johnson who tenaciously works to reconnect a lost thing back to where it belongs. I don’t know how long she went person by person in the heat that day, but isn’t that a picture of Christ? Taking each one of us who is lost and tenaciously asking around until they are home again? The Bible says it like this:

¹⁰ “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.^[11] 

¹² “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? ¹³ And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. ¹⁴ In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.”

In the Parable of the Wandering Sheep from Matthew 18, Jesus never gives up looking for us and in fact prioritizes the lost one over the 99 already found sheep. This sometimes makes those in the “IN” crowd of Church a bit frustrated because we want attention and care too. But what stood out to me that day as K. Johnson shared how much she cared was her determination to find us, the owners. And I thought about how the church could be a little bit more like K. Johnson that became bold enough and tenacious enough to go person by person, space by space and help those who were lost to find their way back to God. If you have ever been lost, you know how important it is to be found again. And so this is a small example of my first world problem, but it reminded me of the joy that is shared when something lost has been found. And the joy it brings God’s heart when a wandering sheep finds her home.

Do you have a child, or a spouse, or a sibling, or a friend or a parent that feels lost to you? We all know someone, maybe God has laid them on your heart as you read this. If you do, this is your encouragement to never stop trying to show them Jesus. Don’t give up, don’t lose hope. The journey of faith is a marathon, not a sprint and we are in this together. May we be people, who with Joy get to know and share the love of Jesus with all people and are open to being used by the Holy Spirit to reconnect that which is lost, back to God.

AMEN

The Gift of Lament: Embracing Vulnerability and Honesty with God 
By Rev. Philip Allred

We all love the moments in life when things are going well—when faith feels easy and everything makes sense. But let’s be honest, there are also those seasons when nothing makes sense, when the floor falls out from under you, and you’re left wondering where God is in the mess. That’s where lament comes in. 

Lament is this honest, vulnerable space where we can come before God and say, “This hurts. I don’t understand. I’m scared.” It’s all over Scripture—from the cries of the Psalms to the groans of the prophets to Jesus Himself crying out on the cross. It reminds us that God can handle our rawest prayers. 

When the pandemic hit, our family found ourselves in one of those seasons. The consulting business we’d built from the ground up collapsed overnight when churches shut their doors. We had no clue how we were going to pay the bills. It felt like the world we had built was slipping through our fingers, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. 

In that season, all we could do was cry out to God. I remember walking for hours, pouring out every fear, every doubt, every frustration. I told God, “I don’t know where this is going. I’m scared. I’m angry. I don’t even know what to pray right now.” But in those moments, something holy happened. I wasn’t given all the answers, but I did sense God’s presence walking alongside us in the unknown. 

That’s the thing about lament—it’s not a quick fix or a tidy prayer that wraps everything up with a bow. It’s the long, honest work of trusting God with your pain, even when you don’t have a clue where the path leads. And in that vulnerability, we often find a strength we didn’t know we had. 

Lament isn’t weakness. It’s courage. It’s faith that’s been through the fire. It’s a way of saying, “God, I’m showing up with everything I’ve got, even if what I’ve got today is just tears.” 

Psalm 13 captures this so well. The psalmist cries out: 

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me? 

It’s as if the psalmist is giving us permission to ask the hard questions. But even in the same breath, they choose to lean into trust: 

But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. 

That’s the gift of lament—it lets us hold both. The pain and the trust. The questions and the hope. The tears and the stubborn belief that somehow, even here, God is with us. 

Yesterday afternoon, a group of clergy and lay leaders gathered at a Regional Gathering to hear from our Bishop, Tom Berlin. All this week and next he is meeting at a handful of churches to share his vision for the rebirth of the United Methodist Church in Florida. We met at First Church Melbourne and had worship and a time of listening and preparing for our upcoming Florida Annual Conference the first week of June.

The Bishop started with the image of how he had seen a video of a diver in a cage in open water surrounded by feeding sharks and then one actually got into the tank and everyone wondered if the diver survived. The diver did survive and the shark eventually got out, but there were some tense moments when that shark was in the cage with the diver and it felt like all hope is lost. And then he said, that we are living in times now, where there is a giant shark in our cages and the church needs to be ready to respond. The Bishop went on to explain that there are several areas in our current culture that feel like an angry shark is thrashing around. One place is in our economy, one place is in our constant stream of the news cycle and the other is in the way we respond to the divisiveness of politics as people who love Jesus.

The Bishop then asked the question I tried to ask this Sunday in my sermon: What do we do as Christians living in this divisive country? And his answer surprised me, it shouldn’t have, but it did. He said it is time for us to reclaim our unique identity under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and surrender to him as Lord. We all are pretty comfortablecalling Jesus Savior and asking to be saved from our sin, our broken circumstances and saved for eternity; but it is another thing entirely to surrender ALL of our lives to Jesus as Lord. Every great story in our tradition starts with Surrender. And we surrender not by engaging in the doom and gloom of our reality but in turning those divisive conversations into opportunities to share a witness both with our words and actions.

Then he invited us onto the rooftop with him and asked us to get onto the proverbial rooftops of our churches and to take a few minutes to look outside the walls of the church to see the homes, apartments, schools, communities and concerns that are right around us. The Bishop reminded us that Jesus came to set the oppressed free and to love and serve the vulnerable. In our current economic realities with the shark in the cage, we will have even more vulnerable and oppressed people closer to the zero margin of not knowing if they can pay for rent, feed their children or afford medicine. We are inching closer and closer to this and his advice for us, the people called United Methodists, is to allow that witness of our faith to take action as well. It is not helpful in these times to bury our heads in the sand or assume someone else will fix it. But his encouragement to all churches in the Florida United Methodist Conference is to prepare now for what is coming and to be ready to feed the hungry and speak for the vulnerable and lift up the oppressed when the time comes.

I share a picture with you of Bishop Berlin standing in front of a bunch of food items that he and one other person bought this week that they plan to donate to a church in their area. It was a challenge for us to think about how we can encourage our children and grandchildren and neighbors and friends to be more generous. For Mother’s Day this year, I have asked my kids not to buy me a gift, but to use that money to buy food and contribute to a food pantry or church that is meeting the needs of the most vulnerable and I invite you to join me.

As we ended our time together we prayed through these verses in Proverbs that most clearly articulate the heart Methodists have for personal and social holiness.

Proverbs 14:21 says:

21 It is a sin to despise one’s neighbor,
    but blessed is the one who is kind to the needy.”

I pray that this Scripture, these devotional words and the Holy Spirit will speak to you this week as you continue living into the person God has called you to be and that you may be strengthened to live out that call to feed and tend the sheep.

AMEN