While I’ve more than once googled “Ozempic cancer complications” in the past year, no, it doesn’t look like my body is going to be improved much anytime soon. Steadily regulating my diet helps, but the toll of increased physical movement and work and parenting seems to be cancelling out any motivation to actually intentionally exercise.

So while the war with my flesh continues (and, sadly, after some disappointing bloodwork recently, will indeed continue in ebbs and flows of more attention and less attention), the war with my mind is slowly reaching an armistice. During my recovery during the past calendar year, I have been grateful that for a large part—excepting the “senior moments” that come from poisoning my body with chemo, like occasionally forgetting a word—my brain seems to be working again. I’ve been writing and delivering homilies every two-to-three weeks since the summer. I’ve been slowly plodding away at my book. I’ve been able to have deep and meaningful conversations with students and parishioners.

The most frightening part of any life-threatening illness, and then recovery from the same, as I’ve said in other posts, is figuring out your self along the way (or, in the midst, while you’re drowning). The brain craves predictable normalcy, and with predictable normalcy you then return to ways of thinking and emoting that I deem “Not the Main Point of Living, Man”. Like getting frustrated with my (as of today!) three-year-old when he doesn’t do something I’ve asked him to do. The most healthy, regulated, well-slept human can approach a situation like that and say placidly, “Well, the small person clearly doesn’t have a developed prefrontal cortex yet. Let’s get on with it.” The normal, average human dealing with X, Y, Z in the background will get frustrated. And the person who is surviving after nearly dying will…also get frustrated. But we will feel guilty about it! I will feel guilty about it. I will feel shame because in that moment I forgot that I nearly disappeared, and I must make every moment holy.

But I can’t. I didn’t become a winged seraph when I got new T-cells from that lab in California.

And so, in 2026 I’m just trying to remember the Main Point of Living. But it’s so hard. So, so, so hard. Because my spouse and I are exhausted. And I’m worried about a hundred things, all the time.

I’m preparing for a homily for February, and the Old Testament reading is going to be Micah 6:1-8. I’ve really turned a page in the last few years of loving the prophets. I think realizing the whole world is falling apart has helped with that; the prophets, over a couple hundred years, were continually trying to remind people of the Main Point of Living. And Micah just puts it so bluntly and beautifully. The people are scrambling around, surprised that all the Bad Things are really starting to get bad, thinking up elaborate methods for trying to garner God’s good pleasure, and Micah comes out with a baseball bat to the brain: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

It’s been the same since the beginning, since the giving of the Law on Sinai to Moses, really. Sure, there’s been change in emphasis over the years, and some clarifications, and some “agile pivoting” (if the OT were written in a LinkedIn post). But the gist is the same: God has entered into a covenant with you, has rescued you time and time again, and the only thing he asks in return is the bare minimum. Be people who walk away from the temptation to corruption, but who call it out when they see it. Be people known for their loyalty in relationships, who prize gentleness and the setting aside of egos for the sake of making bonds stronger. Take care and know who you are—especially the you who is in relationship to the God of the Cosmos.

And there’s theoretically no room for arguing with God, here. Except we do argue with God. All the time. Just like my son argues with me. I taught a guest lecture in a Systematic Theology course last week on the topic of Providence that ended up being a good reminder for me that being in a covenant with someone (THE someone) doesn’t mean you can’t complain and argue about things; it just means that at the end of the day, as frustrating as it is, you have to know who you are in the argument. There’s something quite comfortable about that (and I wager that’s why people tend to like monotheism). I sometimes joke with people that if I had to be anything other than a Christian I’d probably be a Buddhist…but you and I both know I’d be Jewish, like my mother and her whole family before her. There’s something within me that wants to argue even when I’ve been told what’s best for me and know it to be true. So why do I get annoyed when my kid asks “why?” for the hundredth time to a simple request? All he’s doing is fulfilling his birthright to argue with someone trying to guide him for the best.

Of course, the main difference between God and myself as a parent is that I think I know what’s best for my son, but ultimately my spouse and I are doing interminable calculus to figure that out. But at least I know myself better from this past year, and I think that helps me know more about the world around me. And about my child. Hmm…check back with me in 15 years.

But really, I’m more like my toddler than I am like God. I look down at my sweet boy and think, “You’ve got so much to learn about this world and the way it works, and about what you mean to your mother and I.” And I think God does something of the same. Despite echoes we hear throughout Scripture about God’s grandeur, especially in books like Job, at times in other prophets, often guided by the refrain of “I rescued you from Egypt” in a tone that we know is no small thing—despite this, I don’t think we’re meant to think of ourselves like ants compared to God standing above us with a boot ready to playfully smash us on the sidewalk.

The Incarnation of the Son is a reality that cannot be separated in time from God’s own internal existence, I think, and because of that, God was looking on as a parent the entire time Israel forgot they were the child.¹ Or maybe this isn’t even technically “forgetting”—my son doesn’t simply “forget” that I asked him four times already to please put his shoes on. It just…doesn’t register in his little developing noggin. So too, Israel, and so too, us.

Here’s to 2026: to knowing myself more, which means knowing God more. Not because I am God, but precisely because I am not.

1. I’m sorry. This is heavy theology. And it’s debated theology, even now. I’ve been influenced by theologian Robert Jenson, who wrote quite a bit about how some strains of theology have unwittingly (and wittingly, in some cases) done some light heresy in the way they think about God Jesus and Man Jesus. Happy to leave it at that, unless you want to hear more. ↩︎