Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

  •   Having to prove a white dude hates blacks to even charge racism is like having to prove a spree killer hated his specific victims to even charge him with murder.

  • Living with small children means your mornings are not your own. They are shared experiences that involve making breakfast and coaxing them through their regular morning routines. Breakfast, toothbrushing, getting dressed. My children have a set daily routine. I don’t. And I’m the one who wants one. I’ve often been encouraged to get up early,…

  • Bad News, Good News, and Life Itself As much as Jesus is rebuking the Pharisees for teaching harmful stuff to the people, Jesus is opening up the very nature of life and death to them: That, of course: what lies ahead is awful. Of course none of us wants to do this. And yes, I…

  • In the front load washer, I can see whites and darks and grays mixed together. The checked blue shirt, gym shorts with the single cinched drawstring, and the lacy number that may be a halter top. I look at your clothes like an alien species or as a xenophobe looks at their neighbor, considering him…

  • How Jesus’s time in the wilderness reminds us of our own journey. So this thing we call The Temptation of Jesus isn’t really about temptation, or about the Tempter or about GOD and the problem of evil at all. It’s about experience, creation, and GOD. It is about living in this world that GOD has…

  • What Ash Wednesday tells us about what Jesus really wants. It is a time of wrestling with weighty issues of faith and of community; of justice and of the nature of GOD. To wrestle and prepare one another for greater unity. To heal the broken, to care for the weak, to help flip over and…