“Where’s Trump?” has been a theme of late.

Based on the obscenity-laced threat toward Iran that somehow passes as Presidential messaging, he’s still around somewhere, but nobody’s actually seen him for a few days. He’s getting up there in years, and the pressure must be relentless, so maybe it’s time we start anticipating the next-in-line hilarity (kidding) that would be J.D. Vance.

One might figure there’d be some infighting before Vance just gets the nod, but isn’t this the reason he was picked in the first place? Hasn’t he been angling for the top job all along? Scary to think about, but this is where we are. Frying pan to fire.

One might sense that things are bad when the private hope is that Trump in all his inflated ego and bombastic idiocy will soon emerge, ready to rejoin the fray, or whatever it is he thinks he’s doing.

Why does it seem like the war in Iran isn’t going to end anytime soon? Trump talks about it like it’s as easy as an ON/OFF switch. Pete Hegseth is talking big and strutting like a peacock and treating it as a pay-per-view WWF event. But these people must realize that, especially given the locale, it’s probably not going to be that straightforward…

Iran is proving to be a pesky foe, maybe because it’s getting help from Russia and China and other area sympathizers and proxies, or maybe because it’s had decades to chart a course and stockpile weaponry and prepare for this very scenario.

Trump got sucked into Bibi’s fight, and of course it’s a distraction from Epstein and everything else that’s always on the verge of going to shit at home. So our military is commanded to enter harm’s way and enter a fray that needed not be started.

Just another broken feather in Trump’s MAGA cap.

Good Friday. By this point in the annual Lenten slog, I was usually running on fumes, summoning the energy to handle one more service–the subdued Tenebrae that would end in darkness and silence– and then trying to leave the building before members of the Altar Guild ruined the mood and scurried about, prepping the nave for Easter morning.

Good Friday is not a misnomer or even a play on words. It’s a faith-filled reflection of how we came to feel about and understand what happened that day. It was, one might think, a bad Friday for Jesus. But it was a good day for those who believe, since Jesus carried the world’s sin on his shoulders all the way to the cross. As you might have heard, he died for us.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt the full impact of what that is supposed to mean. I’m not sure it ever happened. I so hope it did, but I have my doubts anymore.

For the faithful or the habitual attendee, one might think that one time through the church year would be enough to get the gist of the story. But we pastors had to always be taking closer looks, hoping for new slants and discoveries that took their time morphing into revelation that we could bend without breaking and turn into metaphors and allegories and timely stories that conveyed different ways of saying the same thing.

In other words, faithful churchgoers and even casual observers know how the story ends, but our lives tend to be a reflection of that passage from Mark 9: I do believe; help my unbelief.

The ritual doesn’t captivate the way it once did. It doesn’t even feel comfortably familiar anymore. Sadly, it feels more like a crutch, even a ruse. We’re always waiting, as the world burns and people suffer horribly. Adapting to God’s timetable– weathering the storms and striving toward peace until the Second Coming– feels more and more like a fool’s errand.

It’s only a TV show, but after watching the first episode in which the ER team and other hospital staff on The Pitt dealt with a mass shooting, I was moved to opine on the depravity of anyone who decides a viable option for expressing anger or making a name for themselves is by unleashing high-powered weaponry on unsuspecting victims and wreaking absolute carnage.

It was the part most of us never see—the victims brought in by ambulance and police cruiser and family vehicles; some trampled in the rush for cover, others hit by cars, but most with varying degrees of gunshot wound ranging from grazing to fatal shots that reduced a human body to a target for projectiles that rip through human flesh and bone with unimaginable force and horrific result.

Lives instantaneously ended or permanently changed; the purposeful chaos of triage and an urban ER that turns into a MASH unit, the focused attention and expertise of a hospital staff that has to compartmentalize their revulsion and anger so they can function and tend to the massive needs at hand.

It’s only a TV show, but one surely must sense that what unfolded on the screen was not excessively dramatized, not wildly different from real life. In fact, as bad as we might imagine these incidents to be, the reality has to be much worse.

But, well, thoughts and prayers, right?

For a few moments yesterday, the only focus was on Artemis II. Watching the coverage of the first moon launch in over 50 years provided echoes of the child-like wonder and amazement that prevailed when the Apollo program was in high gear back in the early 1970s.

I wasn’t thinking about current events, though I did momentarily succumb to imagining how Trump would try to make this achievement all about him. That thought was banished temporarily as we learned all systems were Go and a spectacular launch commenced.

It was a nice break from the avalanche of glaring incompetence that usually occupies so much of our time and attention.