Last Monday I flew from Boise to Portland, where a pastor and spouse picked me up on their way to the Byberg Preaching Conference in Seaside, OR. When I registered for this event months ago, I thought it would be great to be at a church event and not be in charge and catch up with friends (a pastor friend flew out for Byberg from Minnesota). I also have enjoyed hearing from the keynote speaker, Rev. Luke Powry, twice before. All of that rang true, but it was also a gift to be in a space with natural beauty, with each day grounded in worship, during a week when my heart couldn’t keep up with the heartbreak: a stop order for refugees entering the country, a cuts in funding for agencies serving refugees (which impacts refugees I know and friends who work at various agencies), then the email to government employees offering them buyouts (impacting more friends). And all this while daily heartbreak continues, the regular hard stuff of life: medical diagnosis and treatment for friends and co-workers, challenges of raising kids today, people losing jobs, deaths in families. Hearing the Word preached, praying and singing with others, hiking along the Oregon Coast, kept me buoyed.

I should mention that I’ve been reading, for discussion with a friend in the Midwest who I read books with, the Bonhoeffer biography A Spoke in the Wheel, which has provided an interesting and helpful lens for current events.

DEM Pastor Liv Larson Andrews (chaplain for Byberg) drove me to the Tri-cities where I stayed with retired Deacon Heidi and her husband.

On Thursday I joined the Global Refuge (formerly Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services) and ELCA AMMPARO webinar on what we all should know about helping refugees and immigrants now. Having worked for a Catholic Charities refugee resettlement office in Syracuse, NY during my Jesuit Volunteer Corps year, and welcoming Congolese refugees into our family at Trinity Lutheran Church, all of this is so sad.

Thursday evening, I joined several ELCA Lutherans from the Tri-cities at a Pasco Middle School for a community event put on by the League of United Latin American Citizens. Several immigration lawyers spoke and answered questions. The point when they told parents how to prepare their kids for their, the parents, possible deportation was the most sobering.

On Friday morning I had coffee with a classmate of mine from my D.Min. program at San Francisco Theological Seminary. One very rainy week in Marin County, Silvana and I had a class together. She was, for many years, a chaplain at the juvenile detention center in town. It was good to catch up. She knows many of the people who have been chaplains in the Tri-cities, including several Lutheans, and she came to the United States many years ago from Germany, so it was interesting to hear her talk about her home town and country.

Friday afternoon, Heidi and I made our way to to First Lutheran in Pasco for the installation of Pastor Kathleen Anderson. Kathleen’s husband Pastor Bob Lewis, Immanuel, Boise, preached and I presided.

The current administration seems to be deliberately dismantling the civil service, so I have been thinking a lot about the podcast episode Lillian Cunningham did on President Chester Arthur, the first person to reform the civil service from political rewarding to being merit based.