We Interrupt This Program…

It was early on a Sunday morning, and I had already survived the workout that is my “getting dressed for church” routine – a ritual involving a suit, a tie, and roughly 300 buttons. It’s not something I can quite pull off in less than half a day without help anymore, and I’m grateful beyond words for the patience of my compassionate spouse, who fastens me together each week in more ways than one. (Thanks, compassionate spouse.)

We took the exit off the freeway, rushing a little because of stubborn traffic lights and the 300 stubborn buttons, when I noticed the spot on the UVU campus where flowers and candles had been gathered. A visible grief. A reminder of the violence of the past week.

We walked into a chapel – not our usual one, but the one where our middle daughter, Katie, had been asked to speak. The local leader, in his opening announcements, spoke gently about professional counseling being available for anyone shaken by recent events. And in that moment it landed for me: this congregation lived inside the shelter-in-place radius during the shooting. Their already heavy loads had been made heavier still.

Katie stepped to the pulpit. “This is not the talk I planned to give today,” she said. She is a sensitive soul, my Katie, and she admitted that the chaos of the past week had pulled her into hours of doomscrolling. (I know that gene. She inherited it from me.) And it hit me hard that in my own anxious scrolling, I hadn’t thought to call my daughters to check in. They are capable and bright (thankfully, they got that gene from their mother). But we still may need to hear: Are you okay?

In reworking her talk, Katie had gone back to the words of our church’s president after 9/11, when Katie was just 11:

“Let us reach out to help men and women of goodwill, whatever their religious persuasion and wherever they live.” (1)

She paired that with counsel from today’s church president, who recently said:

“Charity is the antidote to contention… Charity propels us ‘to bear one another’s burdens’ rather than heap burdens upon each other… The best is yet to come for those who spend their lives building up others.” (2)

Listening to Katie speak, I thought back to 9/11, when tragedy brought people of this country together as one people like I had never seen before. This past week, by contrast, felt like the opposite – like gasoline tossed onto our divisions. The attacks are coming from within. There’s much burden heaping going around.

I went to church to support my daughter, but it turned out she was the one who supported me. Her words asked me, without accusation, to wonder: What could I do, in my present weakened state, to offer charity?

And then I remembered: I had a post ready to publish last week before all this arose. I’d held it back because it didn’t feel right. But perhaps my small act of charity could be this: to send a few words into the world that might lift someone, or soften someone, or remind someone to check on the people they love. Not much, but this is what I’ve got at the moment, folks.

It seems like the scale of the thing offered isn’t as important as that it was offered. It brings grace to the giver and the givee.

The Mr. Rogers Addendum (2025)

Mr. Rogers’ mother once told him, when scary things were in the news: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Sometimes, though, in 2025 the task is not only to look. Sometimes it may be to be one of the helpers. Even in small ways. Even when all you have to give is a buttoned-up story from a Sunday morning.

Katie gave me that gift this week – her words, her honesty, her tenderness.

Let our best days be yet to come.