Some women I love talked about abandoning a you-pick strawberry patch now owned by a gay couple. They felt themselves in a moral quandary, though they would not have considered boycotting the patch of a divorced and remarried or a live-in couple — though those couples would also be living in sin according to the Plain Mennonite understanding of Scripture. 

I buried a saint named Grace. Her insistence that I do her funeral brought me out of retirement for a few hours. 

Grace was known for saying, -“Conrad can do no wrong.” Every -pastor needs a Grace in their corner. 

In the business of daily life, it is hard to remember what is important.

We try to remind each other. At -crucial times of life and death — when my child was born, when my -mother died — I was able to hold what is important to me, to feel how precious and fragile life is.