That Which Is Sacred

Do not treat that which is set-apart
as if it were common.
That includes your grief,
your father’s absentee theology,
and the prayer list that feels like
God’s voicemail menu.

It includes the kid
who cracks suicide jokes with surgical precision
tight timing, killer punchlines,
and everyone chuckles
because the alternative is a group cry
and nobody brought tissues.

Someone said,
“Trauma builds character.”
Yeah? So does radiation.
Doesn’t mean we hand out microwaves
to every orphan with a sob story.
He laughed.
The room laughed.
I mentally filed my emotional state
under “inventory shrinkage.”

They buried my friend in clothes
that still had ashes from the night he said,
“If I vanish, tell them I finally finished something.”
The pastor called it a tragedy.
I called it predictable.
Psalm 23 again.
As if “the valley of the shadow of death”
wasn’t a subdivision we all rent apartments in.

Do not treat what is set-apart
like a TED Talk with a fog machine.
Don’t slap a serif font on your trauma
and call it ministry.
And for the love of everything holy,
stop selling “blessed” T-shirts
when you haven’t cried with anyone since 2014.

Still – 
do not muzzle the laughter.

I’ve told jokes in hospice halls
because the beeping machines
weren’t syncing with the awkward silence.
I laughed at my dad’s funeral
because he once told me
“heaven better be warmer than your house, 
or I’m coming back.”

This, too, is reverence:
To name the pain,
offer it communion,
then heckle it until it flinches.

Holiness wears sackcloth and ashes –
but sometimes it also wears Crocs
and makes inappropriate jokes
about the baptistry
just to see who’s still awake in the pews.

Remember:
Jesus was homeless,
Paul had anxiety,
and Job?
He filed an HR complaint against the Almighty
and still gets quoted at funerals.

So laugh.
Curse.
Sob into your communion cup.
But bow when you do it.

There’s blood on this floor.
And it’s not all yours.
Some of it was spilled
so you could laugh clean again.