love

Beyond relentless positivity – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 30 June 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Sara Cox on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

I’m embarrassed to confess that I’m a sucker for those twee internet personality quizzes. From  “Harry Potter’s Hogwarts-House-Sorter” to “Which Friends Character Are You?” to “Discover Your Inner Canine” – it’s fun to consider, from a playful angle, how we show up in the world.

Apparently, I am Gryffindor for my determination, Ross for my studiousness, and a crossbreed dog for my adaptability and enigmatic mystery. Sure.

These quizzes – and more serious personality tests – usually offer a list of our strengths: empathy, for example, creativity, focus, intelligence. It’s nothing new, really. The Bible has its own ancient list of virtues: joy, peace, patience, gentleness.

I believe we human beings are miracles. But sometimes I get weary of the relentless positivity through which we see ourselves. Americans are famous for this – “you’re awesome, you’re amazing!” But Brits do it, too: “Darling, you’re perfect.” This endless affirmation… it’s exhausting.

I mean, it’s great to celebrate our strengths, but in my opinion, that’s not the whole truth of us.

I went to a funeral once where someone I knew as loving but very difficult was eulogized as a flawless saint. I whispered to my husband: “At my funeral, please tell the preacher to say: ‘Trey was a lovely guy, and he could be a control freak and jackass sometimes. Can I get an Amen?’” And the people who love me would laugh out-loud and shout: “Amen, preacher!”

Christianity, in addition to its list of virtues, also has a list of deadly sins: arrogance, for example, envy, wrath, greed. This list has sometimes been misused to shame people, but I’ve come to experience it as a way into freedom. It helps me look honestly at myself – to admit: “yeah, I really struggle with arrogance; God I find envy really tricky”. When I name that, with the help of friends, and a God who loves me through and through, I feel an inner acceptance. The joy not of being perfect, but of being human. And I feel an invitation to see others that way, too.

That process – fpr me, in Church and in Alcoholics Anonymous – continues to be a transforming gift.

My friend Kimberly says life would be better, families would be healthier, global politics would be more peaceful, if we could all admit, in detail, what we actually struggle with. To tell the fuller truth about ourselves – the beautiful parts, and the busted ones, too — in search of a life together that’s not perfect but vulnerably free and lovingly real.

A Time for Every Purpose – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 9 June 2025 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

I was at a baseball game one summer evening in 2006 when I got the call that my sister had given birth. My then-boyfriend and I were watching the Chicago Cubs play at Wrigley Field, alongside his parents, who were visiting from England.

I answered my mobile, and my dad yelled down the phone-line: Trey, you’ve got a niece and her name is Kenley!

I then yelled to my boyfriend, his parents, and all the folks around us we didn’t even know: I’ve got a niece! Her name is Kenley!

My boyfriend’s mom cried out: You’re an uncle!

And everybody cheered. The Cubs lost that night, but there was joy in the stands for a new life.

That baby niece is now 18-years-old. Kenley graduated high-school in May, she’s off to uni this autumn, and this week, she’s visiting me and my then-boyfriend-and-now-husband in London, before we travel to Rome for her graduation present. Kenley’s life is at the beginning, full of promise.

My then-boyfriend’s-mom who declared me an uncle at the Cubs game: she became my mother-in-law, Joy. And sadly, on Easter Sunday this year she received the unexpected diagnosis of advanced cancer. And last Bank Holiday, she died.

Kenley’s life is on the brink of opening into adulthood; Joy’s mortal life has ended, and opened, I believe, into the mystery of eternity.

There’s a line from the Bible, which was made into a famous song by the Byrds:

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven:

a time to be born, a time to die,

a time to weep, a time to laugh,

a time to mourn, a time to dance.

What’s weird about this season for our family is that so many of those times and purposes are jumbled together in this moment: we’re packing holiday suitcases at same time as we’re ordering flowers for a funeral. We’re launching Kenley’s young adult life into the world now, at the same time as we’re offering Joy’s life to the world to come.

It’s really hard, and really bewildering. But also there’s so much beauty in this rise and fall of living and dying. Because I trust, as a Christian, that God somehow holds it all together – our young selves and old selves, our births and deaths, and everything in between.

I believe God knows us and loves us forever – and none of my seasons, or Joy’s or Kenley’s,  or yours, Scott – none of our seasons will ever be forgotten by God,

Searching the rubble for life – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 16 September 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

In our thirties, my friend Kimberly and I went on a Costa-Rican-holiday – beaches, rainforests, volcanos. Absolutely-stunning. A few days into our trip, though, Kimberly’s mom called and said: “Honey, I don’t know how to tell you this: your house burned down last night. Can you get home?”

Kimberly was in-shock, but somehow we packed, drove the jungle roads, and caught the only flight back that day. Around midnight we got to her house, which didn’t seem that damaged. The front-porch, the windows … covered-in-soot but intact. But then, we realised, the back-half of the house was almost-completely-gone. Like a volcano had erupted in the kitchen and consumed everything.

The next morning, friends and family gathered. We hugged, cried, and crawled through the rubble – searching for anything salvageable. Not much was. I remember her grandfather’s pottery collection in a heap of ruined shards.

We did find some valuables that Kimberly had desperately hoped to hold onto: her journals, picture-albums, and I’ll never forget when she opened a charred cupboard and yelled: “Yes! It’s a miracle! My Sex in the City DVDs are saved!”

Everyone burst into laughter.

Later we had a worship-service, in the garden: we moved bricks from the collapsed walls to build an altar. And people of different faiths and none crowded around it to pray and sing. Behind us, the burnt-out-shell of the house.

There’s a picture of some of us on that heart-breaking day, and in the picture we’re mostly smiling. Which seems ridiculous, but I remember it, and our smiles were real. We weren’t happy, of course, but we did feel an atmosphere of the goodness of friends – and the nearness of God. Which didn’t make the tragedy easy, especially for Kimberly. But that goodness, that nearness, that grace, did help her go into-the-pain-and-through-it instead of trying to shortcut-around-it.

A old Christian hymn says: O God, O Joy that seeks me through pain, I cannot close my heart to thee.

I don’t believe God sends us suffering. Some say “everything happens for a reason”. And I’m like: Yeah, but the reason’s not always God – sometimes it’s shoddy-wiring, a war-loving-dictator, or simply the fact that human-beings can be total muppets. Including me.

God doesn’t send tragedies, but God meets us in them, actually experiences our pain, and searches the heart-broken rubble with us for the life worth holding onto.

God’s great lineage of love – a BBC Pause for Thought

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Here’s the text for the 9 September 2024 “Pause for Thought” I offered on the Breakfast Show with Scott Mills on BBC Radio 2. Listen here.

Ten years ago I was living in Chicago and travelled to Memphis, my hometown, to visit my Grandma, who was dying. We sat on her sofa with a box of old photos ­– and picture by picture, we gossiped about our family tree.

There was an old-fashioned, sepia-toned photograph of a man, in a natty suit, on a street-corner. I asked: “Now who’s this handsome guy?” She said: “Well, that’s my grandfather, Frederick Schulz – so your great-great-grandfather, who immigrated from Germany in the 1800s.”

The photographer’s address was stamped on the picture-frame: it said 111 North Lasalle Street, Chicago, 1894. I said: “Grandma! That’s like a block from my flat – I walk by there every day! But I thought our family came from Kentucky, not Illinois?” “Eventually Kentucky,” she said, “but fresh off the boat, Frederick lived in Chicago.”

I honestly I hadn’t thought much about my great-great-grandpa until then, but that picture stoked a connection with him. Because of a common city: Chicago. And because of our common lineage: he’s been dead for more than a century now, but something of his blood ­­– his story, his life – makes me who I am.

I also feel connected to him because I’m a migrant, too. I’ve moved from Memphis to Chicago for work, and then across the ocean, to Britain, for love.

I saw a church banner once that said: The sign of God is that you’ll be led, where you did not expect to go. True for Frederick Schulz, and true for me.

The Bible contains some lengthy genealogies. So-and-so-begat-so-and-so-and-on-and-on-and-on. In my opinion, sort of boring … but when I think of my great-great-grandpa ­– or when I look at a picture of me and my beloved grandma, who’s been dead more than a decade now – those biblical family trees hit different.

I feel included in this great lineage of love. Included in generations of life-beyond-death. From God to Adam and Eve, as the story goes. To Isaac and Ishmael, to Mary, Joseph and Jesus – all the way to now, including ancestors whose names I’ll never know but who make me who I am.

For me, that ancient ancestry proclaims that before we human-beings had different religions and surnames and national borders, it was just us and God. I forget that sometimes – disconnected from modern migrants, people today, like Grandpa Schulz in 1894, boarding boats in search of a different life. But when I forget, the Bible reminds me: God has made us all one family, and will lead us, together, where we didn’t expect to go.