Every year, the week of Opening Day , I watch the movie, Field of Dreams . It's a ritual and it is pretty non-negotiable. And because I am going to cry, I watch it alone. When I say cry, I am not talking about some polite tear or two. I am talking about the kind of crying that sneaks up on you even though you know exactly what's coming — because you've seen it more times than you can count and it wrecks you every single time. You probably know the ending. Ray Kinsella, standing in a cornfield in Iowa, realizes the young ballplayer who has walked out of the corn is his father — his father as a young man, before life got complicated, before things went wrong. And after everything — after all the wondering and the waiting and the not knowing — Ray looks at him and says, voice barely holding together: "Hey Dad... wanna have a catch?" I lose it every time -- I mean every single time. Because I know that question. I have carried it my whole life. I just never had anywhere to put it. My father's name was Larry. He left when I was very young — so young that I have no memory of him. I don’t remember his voice or his face or the smell of him or his laugh. I mean he was there (I guess), and then he wasn't, like a foul ball that disappears into the stands and doesn't come back. You can't grieve what you don't understand. And for a long time I didn't understand what was missing. I just knew something was. Baseball found me somewhere in that emptiness. I can't explain it exactly — the game just had a steadiness to it that nothing else did. Maybe it was the long season; the fact there was always another game the next day. Or maybe it is the way failure is built right into the game's DNA, and you're considered great if you succeed three times out of ten. There was grace in that. There was room in that for a kid who was still figuring out what he was made of without a father around to tell him. You know, I never had a catch with Larry. Not once. He was gone before that could happen, and there was no cornfield waiting for us, no magic that could bring him back across the years to stand in my backyard on a summer evening and throw me the ball. For a long time I thought that was simply the wound I would carry. The unanswered question. The catch that never happened. And maybe it is. Some absences don't fill — they just become something you learn to live alongside, like a room in your house you don't go into very often but never quite forget is there. I've written about THE glove before — Larry’s glove . ( Some of you know this story. ) But Opening Day has me reaching for it again, the way you reach for certain things when the season turns. It’s a worn left-handed glove that I found years ago in a box among papers and old certificates — the only thing he left behind besides the questions. It sits in my office now. I see it every single day. It never fit right. It never could — he was a southpaw and I never knew that about him until I slipped my hand inside and felt the wrongness of it. A left-handed glove for a right-handed boy whose father never stayed long enough to find out which hand he threw with. That glove is my Unlikely Altar . The one I didn't choose and can't seem to put away. The one that sits there quietly every morning when I come in to write, or get on the phones, holding all the questions I never got to ask, reminding me of the catch that never happened. But then one afternoon, not so long ago, something happened. I was in the backyard with one of my adult sons. We grabbed gloves and I tossed him a ball. He threw it back. And just like that, without any ceremony or swelling music or ghosts emerging from the corn, we were having a catch. No soundtrack. No magic. Just a dad and his kid, the ball moving back and forth between them in the late afternoon light. That backyard didn't give me my dad. It didn't fix the absence or answer the question I've been carrying since before I knew I was carrying it. But it did something else. It rewrote the ending. It said the story that started with a father who left doesn't have to end there. That I get to choose something different. The catch I never had with Larry became the catch I get to have with my boys. And somewhere in that exchange — the ball leaving my hand, crossing the space between us, landing safe in his glove — I felt something I can only call grace. Grace found in reconciliation. Not with the man I never knew, but with the story itself. With the fact that it didn't break me. With the fact that I'm here, throwing the ball, showing up. Maybe that is why I love Opening Day so much. It is like the Resurrection itself. It gives us the chance to rewrite our story . You see, on Opening Day every single team is in first place. There are no losers yet and no broken hearts. No October collapses to recover from. Just thirty ball clubs and thirty sets of fans walking back in through the gates believing — fully, without reservation — that this is the year. The slate is wiped clean, the thing you were sure was finished turning out to not be finished at all. Hope springs eternal, they say — and they've been saying it for years because it keeps being true. Every Opening Day, the whole beautiful impossible season begins again. It is all about grace and second chances. But more than that, it is like a right-handed boy who spent a lifetime reaching for a catch he thought he'd never have — and then one ordinary afternoon, in a backyard with his son, discovered he already had everything he'd been looking for. Happy Opening Day. Go find someone to have a catch with. I have a feeling somebody out there needs it as much as you do.

I wasn't expecting it, but then again the best moments rarely announce themselves. I posted something on Facebook and, Atticus, one of my favorite young people from my years doing youth ministry in College Station left a comment that made me think. He called his generation the Sandwich Generation — squeezed from both ends, caring for aging parents while still raising their own families — and something that stayed with me long after I put my phone down. I've known this kid since he was a teenager, back in those College Station days when youth ministry meant late nights, bad pizza, and conversations that somehow managed to be both ridiculous and surprisingly deep all at the same time. He was one of those guys you just knew was going to turn out well. And now here he is, grown, living in the middle of exactly the kind of season that doesn't show up on anyone's life plan. Caring for parents who need more than they used to. Raising his own family while trying to hold both ends of the rope without letting either one slip. I looked at his comment for a long time. Not because it surprised me that life had brought him here, but because it reminded me that the hard seasons find everyone eventually. The S andwich Generation doesn't get talked about enough, and when it does it usually gets reduced to logistics. The doctor's appointments and the school pickups. The phone calls from a parent that come at inconvenient times and the homework that still needs checking after a long day. The calendar that never quite has enough room for everything that needs to fit inside it. But the logistics are actually the easier part. So what is the hard part? It's the emotional weight of standing in the middle of two kinds of love at the same time. The love that looks backward toward the people who raised you, watching them need you in ways that feel unfamiliar and perhaps a bit frightening. And the love that looks forward toward the people you are raising, trying to give them enough of you when you are not always sure how much you have left. Both of those loves are real and they are both sometimes demanding. Most days you are doing your best to honor both of them without dropping either one, which is its own kind of exhausting that is very hard to explain to someone who has never stood exactly where you are standing. And here is what I have learned from watching people carry this particular weight. The squeezing feeling — that sense of being needed from both directions at once — is not a sign that something has gone wrong in your life. It is actually a sign of something that has gone very right. You are exhausted because you love people who are worth being exhausted for. The parent who needs more of you than they used to is the same person who showed up for you before you knew enough to be grateful for it. The kids who need more of you than you sometimes feel like you have are the same people who will one day carry your story forward into a world you will never see. The sandwich is not a burden that landed on you by accident. It is the shape that love takes in the middle of a life well lived. And maybe that is the Unlikely Altar hiding in plain sight. Not in a sanctuary or a quiet moment of prayer, though those matter too. But right there in the middle of the calendar that has too much in it. Right there in the phone call from your parent that came at an inconvenient time. Right there in the homework that still needs checking at the end of a long day. Grace has a way of showing up exactly where love is working hardest . And you, standing in the middle of all of it, are standing on holy ground whether it feels that way or not.

Most of us don't see it coming. You're sitting across from your mom or dad at the kitchen table, or riding somewhere together with the radio doing most of the talking, or just watching them move through a room they've lived in for years — and something catches you. Maybe it's the way they reached for the counter without thinking about it. Maybe it's a name that took a little longer to find than it used to. Maybe it's nothing you could even point to, just a quiet feeling that settles in your chest somewhere between dinner and dessert. And most of us do the same thing with that feeling. We set it aside. We let the moment pass. We tell ourselves there's still time, that today is a good day, that bringing it up would just make things heavy when they don't need to be. But that feeling doesn't really go away, does it. It just waits. And somewhere underneath the waiting, love is already asking the question you haven't figured out how to say yet. Most of us keep putting it off for reasons that make complete sense when you're living inside them. We don't want to seem like we're rushing anything, or that we've already started thinking about what comes after. So we stay quiet because quiet feels kinder, even when it isn't. We tell ourselves they've earned the right to not have to think about hard things, that they're doing fine and we should just let them be fine. But here's something I've learned from years of sitting with families in the middle of their hardest moments. Most parents have already thought about it. Many of them have been waiting for someone to open the door. They just didn't want to be the one to bring it up and worry you, so they've been carrying it quietly the same way you have, each of you waiting for the other one to go first. And then there's the reason most of us admit last, if we admit it at all. We don't want to have the conversation because having it means we have to look directly at something we've been keeping in the corner of the room. Starting the conversation makes it real in a way that the quiet feeling in your chest at the kitchen table does not. So the conversation waits. And if we're honest, we're not entirely sure which one is doing the waiting — the love or the fear. Most of the time they're sitting in the same chair. I've been in rooms on both sides of this conversation. Rooms where it happened in time, and rooms where it didn't. When it didn't, grief arrives with a companion nobody invited. The casseroles come, the flowers arrive, the people fill the house — and somewhere in the middle of all of it someone has to start asking questions that feel impossibly practical for a moment that is so deeply human. Is there anything in place? Where is the paperwork? What did they want? Those questions don't come from greed or impatience. They come from love trying to keep moving when it doesn't know what to do with itself. But they are heavy questions to carry in an already heavy room. When it did happen in time, something is different. Grief is still there — love always makes it heavy, and nothing changes that. But there is a little more breathing room. A little more space to just be sad without also having to be frantic. I have watched families in those rooms too, and what I notice is not the absence of pain but the absence of panic. Someone thought ahead. Someone had the conversation. And now, in the hardest moment, that quiet act of love is still speaking. The difference between those two rooms is almost always that hard conversations either happened or they didn't. The conversation that wasn't easy to begin actually was begun, and decisions, desires, and wishes were shared. So if you've been carrying that quiet feeling around, the one that showed up at the kitchen table or in the car or just watching your parent move through a room — maybe it's time to stop waiting for the perfect moment, because the perfect moment is not coming. What is coming, eventually, is the moment when the conversation can no longer happen at all. You don't have to have all the answers before you begin. You don't need a folder full of documents or a checklist or a plan already in place. You just need a way in. And sometimes the simplest way in is also the most honest one. Something like: I've been thinking about you, and I want to make sure we've talked about some things while we have the chance. Not because I'm worried, but because I love you and I want to get this right. That's enough to open the door. The rest of the conversation will find its own way. And if somewhere along the way you'd like some help thinking through the practical side of things — the financial piece that love sometimes needs in order to do its job — I'm always here for that conversation too. No pressure. No script. Just two people talking about taking care of the ones we love while we still can. Because here's what I know after years of standing with families in their hardest moments. The conversation you're afraid to start is very often the one your parent has been hoping someone would begin. Love just needed one of you to go first.

I told you about the nights, but nobody really warns you about the mornings. And the more I think about it, the more I suspect the morning might actually be the harder of the two. At night, at least, you know what is coming. You learn that the dark has teeth, that the quiet begins to grow loud somewhere around two in the morning, and that the other side of the bed will be cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. Night is difficult, but in a strange way it is also predictable. After a while you begin to recognize its rhythms, and you can brace yourself for it. Morning is different. Morning sneaks up on you. It arrives in that fragile space between sleep and waking, that thin moment when your mind has not quite caught up with your life yet. For just a moment, maybe half a moment, you forget. And then you remember. That remembering, every single morning, carries its own kind of loss. It is a small grief inside the larger one, like being told the news again, quietly and without ceremony, just long enough to knock the wind out of you before the day has even properly begun. Nobody warns you about that moment, the brief forgetting followed by the sudden remembering. It might last only ten seconds, but it can feel like the loneliest ten seconds of the whole day. Eventually you get up anyway, because what else is there to do. And once you do, you begin to notice that morning has its own geography of grief. The coffee pot is usually the first place it appears. If you spent years sharing life with someone, the coffee pot seems to know the story before you do. It is still set for two. You may find yourself reaching automatically for two mugs before your hand stops in midair. Or you make a full pot because that is what you have always done, and now half of it goes cold on the counter. The bathroom carries its own quiet ambush. His razor still rests on the shelf. Her robe still hangs on the hook. You have not moved them yet, partly because moving them feels like a decision you are not ready to make, and partly because leaving them there allows you to pretend, just for another day, that nothing has changed. The problem, of course, is that leaving them there means you see them every single morning. There is no good option, only the one you can manage today. The chair at the kitchen table that nobody sits in anymore. The second toothbrush. The voicemail you have not deleted because it still carries her voice, and you are not ready for that silence yet. Morning is full of objects that used to mean nothing and now mean everything. Over time they begin to feel like something else entirely. Monuments, maybe. Small ones. Quiet ones. Devastating ones. Here is something else about morning that takes a while to notice. The world does not pause for it. At first that can feel almost cruel. The birds outside the window continue singing as if nothing has changed. The neighbor pulls out of the driveway at the same time he always does. The mail still arrives in the afternoon. Someone down the street is mowing the lawn, and for a moment you want to step outside and ask how it is possible that ordinary life is still happening. Life just keeps moving. The audacity of it can feel almost offensive. And yet, after standing at enough gravesides and sitting with enough families during the early days of their loss, I have begun to notice something about mornings. Morning is often where the story quietly begins to turn. Not because the grief has disappeared. It has not. Not because the pain suddenly lifts with the rising sun. It does not, at least not for a long time. But morning carries a kind of stubbornness that night does not have. A quiet persistence that shows up whether you invited it or not. There is a story in the Gospel of John that has always stayed with me. Mary goes to the tomb at dawn. Not midday when the sun is high, and not later in the afternoon when the world might feel a little less fragile. She goes at dawn, in that earliest and most uncertain light, when it would have been easier and perhaps more sensible to stay home. But she goes anyway, carrying her grief like something she cannot set down. And it is there, in that dim morning light, that she discovers the story is not finished. That moment did not erase any of it — the tomb was real, the death was real, the grief was real — but morning held something she could not have imagined while the night was still heavy around her. I am not going to paper over anyone’s grief with a resurrection metaphor. Your loss is real. The empty chair is real. The cold coffee is real. But I do believe that morning carries something within it. It carries a stubbornness and with that, a quiet insistence that the story is still being written. Maybe that is what grace looks like in the early days of loss. Not comfort exactly and not answers. Certainly not the feeling that everything is suddenly okay, because everything is not okay and pretending otherwise helps no one. Sometimes grace simply looks like morning. Morning arriving again, uninvited and persistent, refusing to not show up. The coffee pot still working. The birds outside the window completely unaware of your pain. The light coming through the same window it always has, landing on the floor in the same place as yesterday, as if it has not yet heard the news. At first that can feel like cruelty. But maybe it is not. Maybe it is the world quietly insisting that there is still a day here. And that day, however fragile it feels, still belongs to you. You do not have to be okay in the morning. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. You are allowed to sit with the second mug still resting on the counter. You are allowed to let the coffee grow cold. You are allowed to stay in the chair by the window longer than is practical, watching the neighbor mow his lawn and feeling the strange distance between his world and yours. You are allowed to let morning be hard. But here is something I have learned from watching people carry this weight. Morning keeps coming back. Every single day it arrives without asking permission and without checking whether you feel ready for it. It simply appears again, faithful in a way that almost feels stubborn. And somewhere inside that stubborn return there is a kind of grace. Not the grace that fixes things, but the grace that stays. The grace that quietly says, I know you did not sleep well. I know you forgot for a moment and then remembered. I know the coffee pot broke your heart again this morning. Here is a little more light anyway. The Unlikely Altar this time might simply be the window, the same window the light comes through every morning, landing in the same place on the floor. It does not know your grief. It cannot fix your grief. But it shows up anyway. And maybe, just for today, that small and stubborn light is enough to help you begin again.

Every now and then I sit through a really good Final Expense training. The presenter is knowledgeable, the information is solid, and the systems being explained clearly work for the people who are using them successfully. Someone is talking about lead flow, objection handling, follow-up strategy, and how to guide a conversation toward a decision, and I find myself nodding along because I understand the importance of all of it. And then, somewhere about halfway through, usually when everyone else seems energized and ready to conquer the world, a quiet thought slips into my mind: What exactly am I doing here? It is not disagreement. I am not rolling my eyes or dismissing the training. In fact, most of the time I respect the people teaching it and appreciate what they are sharing. It's like suddenly realizing you are wearing someone else’s jacket. It fits well enough, but you are aware every few minutes that it was not originally tailored for you. For most of my adult life, people invited me into their lives as a pastor. I spent decades sitting in hospital rooms where time felt suspended, standing beside families at gravesides trying to find words when there really were none, and sharing conversations around kitchen tables where life’s hardest questions were asked without rehearsal. People asked me to listen, to pray, to help them make meaning, and sometimes simply to sit quietly so they would not feel alone. So when I hear training language about moving a client toward commitment or learning how to handle resistance, something inside me shifts just a little. Not because the ideas are wrong. They are practical and necessary in any business. But a small voice inside me starts asking uncomfortable questions. Am I becoming a salesman? Am I pretending to be someone I am not? Do I actually belong in this room? And that is usually the moment the word shows up. Fraud. It feels strange to admit that, because I believe deeply in the work of Final Expense planning. I have seen too many families living through grief while also trying to figure out how to pay for a funeral. I have watched spouses quietly panic over finances while still trying to hold themselves together emotionally. I have seen delayed services, difficult decisions, and the heavy burden that falls on families who never expected to be making financial choices at the same moment they are saying goodbye. I know preparation matters. I know this work helps people. And yet the language of the industry sometimes feels foreign to instincts shaped by ministry rather than sales. Pastors learn to listen longer than they speak and to walk at the pace of the person in front of them, while sales training naturally emphasizes direction and outcomes. Those approaches are not enemies, but learning to live in both worlds creates tension. I am beginning to understand that the discomfort may actually be a sign that something important is still intact within me. Many people enter this field learning empathy as a professional skill. I am coming from the opposite direction. Compassion has always been the starting point. The real challenge is learning how preparation fits inside that compassion without losing its heart. I am not trying to sell peace of mind as a slogan. I am trying to help families avoid unnecessary suffering later. When I look at it that way, the work begins to feel familiar again. I am still sitting at tables listening to stories. I am still helping people face realities they would rather postpone. I am still walking with families through conversations about mortality, love, responsibility, and legacy. The difference is that now the care I offer happens before the funeral instead of after it. Maybe the reason I sometimes feel like a fraud is not because I do not belong in this work, but because I will always remember that there are real human stories behind every application and policy number. The tension I feel may simply be the growing edge of learning a new language while holding onto an old calling. I suspect that feeling may never disappear completely, and honestly, I hope it doesn’t. The day this work becomes only about production numbers instead of people is probably the day I should step away. Until then, I will keep learning the business side of things while remaining grounded in the part of me that believes this is, at its heart, an act of love. I may never sound like a traditional insurance agent, and perhaps that is exactly as it should be. Maybe I am simply a pastor who now helps families prepare for the moment when love has to carry on without them. I am still learning this work. Some days I sit in training taking notes and wondering if I am behind everyone else. Other days I sit with someone who tells me about their children, their health, or their quiet worry about becoming a burden someday, and in those moments the purpose becomes clear again. T he titles have changed over the years. Pastor. Celebrant. Now Final Expense Specialist. But the calling underneath those titles feels remarkably familiar. It has always been about helping people face hard realities with a little more peace and a little less fear. So I will keep showing up. I will keep learning. I will keep listening for the stories behind the paperwork and remembering that this work is not ultimately about policies or premiums. It is about love planning ahead. And if someday a family is able to grieve without financial panic, if a spouse can focus on remembering instead of worrying about bills, if peace arrives just a little sooner because a conversation happened in time, then maybe this work does belong to me after all.

There is a moment in almost every conversation when someone tilts their head and asks the question carefully, like they are not quite sure if they might accidentally offend me. “So… what do you do now? ” This used to be an easy answer. Depending on your faith background, I was a pastor, minister, preacher, or sometimes priest. Then I retired from the United Methodist Church and suddenly the answer got a little complicated. Now I have to think about it. I usually start by saying I am a celebrant, which means I then have to explain what a celebrant is. Yes, I officiate weddings and funerals, but it is different than being a minister. I even wrote a blog to explain that part of my life. It would probably be smarter if I just smiled and stopped talking, but I usually add that I also help families with final expense planning. That is often the moment their expression turns into polite confusion. People understand weddings and funerals. But final expense? That phrase floats in the air like a balloon nobody is quite sure who should grab until someone finally says it out loud. “So… are you a life insurance salesman? ” I smile and nod. Short answer: yes. Longer answer: yes, but not the version you are picturing. When many people hear “life insurance,” their brain pulls up the image of a pushy salesperson with a stack of forms ( think Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day ) and a conversation nobody wanted to have in the first place. I understand why that picture exists. I really do. But my version of this work did not start like that. It began in churches and funeral homes, in living rooms where families were exhausted, at kitchen tables covered with paperwork, and in quiet conversations that began with the sentence, “ We didn’t realize how expensive this would be. ” I officiated hundreds of funerals before I ever helped anyone buy a policy, and there was a pattern you could almost set your watch by. Some families were grieving and remembering, telling stories that somehow held both laughter and tears in the same breath. Other families were doing math. Hard math. The kind that sends people checking account balances and calculating what can wait and what cannot. Those are two very different kinds of grieving, and they lead to two very different funerals. I will never forget the first time that difference really hit me. A widow told me, very quietly, that she had managed to scrape together enough money to bury her husband. She said it like someone describing a marathon they had barely finished. Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “Now I’m not sure how I’m going to pay the rest of the bills.” That moment followed me home. It sat with me at my desk and rode shotgun in my car for a long time, because grief is already heavy. Watching families carry financial stress on top of it felt like watching someone try to carry groceries, luggage, and a piano all at once. Something in me kept thinking there has to be a way to move the piano ahead of time. Final expense planning is not really about death. It is about the people who will still be here. The spouse who should not have to start a GoFundMe while planning a funeral, and the adult children who should be able to focus on saying goodbye instead of opening credit cards. It is the quiet gift of leaving things a little easier than we found them. I sometimes call it the Last Love Letter. Not the poetic kind, the practical kind. The kind that says, “I thought about you. I prepared for you. I wanted to leave you one less burden.” These days I talk with people who requested information, sometimes months ago. I make a lot of phone calls, leave a lot of voicemails, and send a lot of texts that begin with, “Hey, this is Marty…” Often they do not answer. Sometimes they hang up. Sometimes they say no. Sometimes they say, “I’ve been meaning to take care of this.” And occasionally someone says, “I’m really glad you called.” Those moments matter more than the rest combined, because every once in a while a future funeral gets lighter, and that feels like a continuation of the same calling I have always had, just from a different angle. When I was a pastor, I walked with families after a loss. Now, sometimes, I get to help them before one. The tools look different, but the heart behind it does not. If you ever find yourself wondering whether this is something you should think about, I am always happy to have a conversation. No pressure, no scripts, just a human conversation about taking care of the people we love.

Jason, a good friend on the team, has a mantra he shares with me when I am hitting a point of frustration. He smiles and simply says, “ Manifest it Marty! ”. He hasn’t said it just once, and when he says it, it isn’t meant as a joke. It really might be his mantra. Sometimes I wonder if I visited him in his home in South Carolina if those words would be hanging in the kitchen, the living room, and his office. Nike has their slogan. Jason has his. Just Manifest it! I’ll be honest. The first few times I heard it, I didn’t know what to do with that sentence. My theological side thought it sounded too much like the prosperity gospel. You know, if you have enough faith blah blah blah. It seemed to treat God and the universe like a giant vending machine. Put your money in, press B7, and get the outcome you ordered. But I have sat with too many families in funeral homes, in hospital waiting rooms, or simply in my office as they share their grief, frustrations, and pain to believe God works that way. The life I know about is too messy. Too hard. And yet, this other part of me couldn’t just roll my eyes either. Because I have seen the power belief has to change people. It doesn’t change them instantly or magically, but the change is real and too hard to ignore. I have watched people who believed they were loved begin to live like they were loved. I have watched couples who believed their marriage could heal start doing the small, uncomfortable work of healing. I have watched grieving families who believed they would make it through the worst season of their lives take the next step. Belief didn’t remove the pain. Belief didn’t erase the struggle. But it did change how they moved through it. It changes posture. It changes tone. It changes attitude. And over time, those small decisions quietly change outcomes. I have discovered that belief changes behavior. It changes the choices we make when no one is watching. It changes what we try. It changes how long we keep trying. And over time, behavior has a way of changing outcomes. But I still needed to understand better. And as I was mulling over Jason’s mantra, it hit me. My brain started thinking about a movie. Not just any movie, but probably one of my top ten of all time: The Shawshank Redemption. When people talk about manifesting, they picture vision boards and affirmations. My brain pictured a Raquel Welch poster and a rock hammer. If you know the movie, you get the image. If you know the movie, you also know the tension between the two main characters. Red believes hope is dangerous. He says hope gets men hurt. Hope, according to Red, has no place in prison. But Andy sees it differently. Andy believes that, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” And because of that belief, Andy lives like a free man long before he becomes one. He writes letters asking for library money. Week after week. Month after month. Year after year. He helps the guards with their taxes and helps inmates get their GEDs. He plays opera over the loudspeakers because beauty still matters, even in prison. And at night, when no one is watching, he chips away at a wall. One tiny piece at a time. For decades. Andy doesn’t sit on his bunk visualizing freedom. He behaves like freedom is possible. As I thought about that movie, I finally could reconcile the idea of “ manifest it ” with my theological understanding. Maybe manifestation isn’t about magic or the prosperity gospel. Maybe it is about living like the story is not over yet. Because if we are honest, most of us have a wall somewhere. Maybe it is a situation that feels stuck. A time in our lives that feels heavy. A future we cannot quite see yet. Or maybe, like me, it is a phone call we are not sure anyone will answer. It would be easy to decide nothing will change. Close the book. Roll the credits. But Shawshank hope says keep showing up. Keep doing the small things that move life forward one inch at a time. Hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is action. It is the quiet refusal to believe the story is finished. Sometimes hope looks like prayer. Sometimes it looks like a phone call. And sometimes it looks like a man with a rock hammer, patiently chipping away at a wall. And maybe that is the Unlikely Altar hiding in plain sight.

When I made my 2026 Bingo Board , I tried to choose squares that were a mix of practical, playful, and quietly important. Most of them felt normal, a few felt ambitious, and one or two felt slightly ridiculous. And then there was this one: Monthly Video Call with the Boys. Not climb a mountain. Not write a book. Not even run a marathon. Just call your sons once a month. It sounds so simple that it almost feels embarrassing to put on a life goals board, and yet here we are. If you had told me years ago that one day I would need to schedule time to talk with my kids, I would have laughed. There was a season when silence in our house meant something had gone terribly wrong. Back then, connection was automatic and constant and frequently sticky. We had bedtime stories and car rides and baseball games and the nightly performance of “ Dad, watch this, ” followed by something that absolutely required watching immediately. Togetherness wasn’t something we planned. It was simply the background music of daily life. Now they are grown men with grown-up schedules, real responsibilities, and calendars that fill up faster than mine ever did at their age. Somewhere along the way, spontaneous togetherness quietly slipped out the back door without an announcement or farewell speech. It just left, and life kept moving. So when I made my Bingo Board this year, I added the square: Monthly Video Call with the Boys. Here is the honest part. We haven’t scheduled it yet. Not the first one, not the recurring calendar invitation that will make it real. At the moment, this square exists as a hopeful intention and a line of text sitting patiently inside a blue box. Which means this blog post might be the most public nudge in family history. Boys, if you are reading this, consider yourselves gently called out. In the first Grace Bingo post, I wrote that you don’t conquer a square, you encounter it . Right now I am standing at the edge of this one the way you stand at the edge of a treadmill before pressing Start. I am not intimidated. I am simply aware that once the button gets pushed, something begins. It would be easy to tell myself this is unnecessary. We talk. We text. We stay connected in the everyday ways families do. But there is a difference between catching up here and there and intentionally setting aside time when the three of us can simply be together in the same conversation, even if together now looks like three faces inside small glowing rectangles. I have a strong suspicion that this square is not really about technology at all. It is about intention. It is about choosing to show up on purpose. It is about making space on the calendar for something that already matters. I can already imagine how the first call will probably go. Someone will be late. Someone will talk while muted. Someone will say, “ Wait, can you hear me now? ” at least twice. It will not be polished or cinematic, and no music will swell in the background. It will be wonderfully ordinary, which is exactly where grace has a habit of sneaking in. This square is not finished. It has not even started. But the moment I put it on the board, something shifted. A small, quiet decision was made and a door cracked open. Sometimes grace shows up the moment we decide to make room for it, even if it arrives by ZOOM link . Boys… your move. Following the Squares This is one square on the Grace Bingo board, and the year is still young. I am not trying to complete the board so much as pay attention to what happens inside the squares, including the starts, the delays, the surprises, and the moments that turn out to matter more than expected. You do not need your own board to follow along. All you really need is a little curiosity about where the sacred might be hiding in your everyday life, because chances are you have already been standing on an Unlikely Altar. And if this idea ever nudges you to sketch your own version of a Bingo Board, I would love to hear about it. You can email me here: martyvershel@gmail.com

This question almost never comes right away. Usually I’ll tell someone what I do and they’ll nod politely, like they’re trying to be respectful while quietly deciding where to file that information. You can almost see the mental drawer opening and closing. Then, a few minutes later, they circle back. “ So… are you a minister? ” That’s when I know we’re really talking. The honest answer is yes. I am an ordained United Methodist pastor. That’s part of my life and part of my story. But here’s where it gets a little confusing. When I’m serving as a celebrant, I’m not standing there as a representative of a church or a denomination. And that distinction matters more than people realize. Most of us grew up with a very specific picture of how weddings and funerals are supposed to work. There’s a church, or at least a chapel. There’s a familiar order of service. There’s someone up front who represents a tradition and leads everyone through something we’ve seen before. So when people hear the word celebrant, what they’re really asking is, “ Where do you fit in all of that? ” I usually answer by telling a story. A couple once sat across from me at a coffee shop and said, “ We don’t really know what we’re supposed to be doing. ” They looked nervous saying it, like they were already behind somehow. I told them, “ You’re doing it right now. ” They laughed. They took a breath and relaxed. And that told me everything I needed to know. They weren’t asking for a perfect ceremony. They weren’t asking for the right music or the right words in the right order. What they wanted was a ceremony that felt like them. Something honest. Something that didn’t feel borrowed from someone else’s life. That’s usually the moment I explain what a celebrant actually does. A celebrant builds the ceremony around the people, instead of asking the people to squeeze themselves into a ceremony that was written for someone else. Once people hear that, things start to make sense. The same thing happens with families planning a funeral or a memorial service. They often start by saying, “ We’re not really sure what we’re supposed to do .” And again, I tell them the same thing. You’re already doing it. They’re telling stories. They’re remembering little things. They’re trying to figure out how to say goodbye in a way that feels real and meaningful and authentic. What they don’t need is someone who already knows the script. They need someone who’s willing to learn the person. Who were they really? What made them laugh? What will people miss when they leave today? That’s the work. Now somewhere around here, another question usually shows up. Sometimes it’s spoken. Sometimes it just hangs in the air. “So… what aren’t you?” A celebrant isn’t there to judge whether someone qualifies for a meaningful ceremony. Life has already done enough of that. A celebrant isn’t there to read a script that could belong to anyone. If the ceremony could be swapped out with someone else’s and no one would notice, it probably doesn’t fit. And a celebrant isn’t the center of attention. If things are going well, people barely remember what I was wearing or where I was standing. They remember how the moment felt. Also, just to make things slightly more confusing, the IRS doesn’t actually have a category for “celebrant” on tax forms. Even the government isn’t entirely sure what to do with us. Which feels strangely appropriate. When I’m working as a celebrant, my role isn’t tied to one religious tradition. It’s tied to the people in front of me. Sometimes that includes faith language. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it includes pieces from different traditions. Sometimes it’s beautifully simple and completely non-religious. The ceremony fits the people. Always. At the end of the day, the simplest way I know how to explain what a celebrant is goes like this. I help people mark moments that matter. Not in a rushed way.Not in a borrowed way. Not in a way that asks them to be anything other than who they are. Just honestly. Just authentically. Just meaningfully. And if you’re planning a wedding, a memorial, or a celebration of life and you’re wondering what that could look like for you, I’m always glad to sit down, listen, and hear your story. That’s usually where it all starts anyway.