Smuggling Grace

When we click on a YouTube video, no one enjoys watching the advertisements that come before it. Most of the time, I simply treat them as an inconvenience.

Lately, though, I’ve been getting advertisements from a company called Patriot Mobile. The ad talks about how important it is to find companies that promote your values.

What values? I wondered. I think the algorithm probably pegged the wrong person.

When I visited their website, I found this description: “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider. Reliable nationwide coverage on your choice of three major networks, all while supporting our mission.”

And what is their mission? They describe four pillars: the First Amendment; the Second Amendment; the sanctity of life; and military, veterans, and first responders. They use the existing cell towers of the major wireless carriers. But by switching your service to Patriot Mobile, you’re also supporting organizations connected to those four pillars.

Let me just say that I personally find it a little dystopian to hear the phrase, “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider.”

Is Christianity a brand now?

And if it is, who gets included? Who gets excluded? What are we promoting? The website also features well-known conservative commentators and political strategists, making it clear that this is about much more than cell phone service.

It’s one thing to say you care about religious freedom, but for whom? What about people who aren’t conservative Christians? What about people who practice other religions? Or no religion at all?

And for the record, I don’t think any faith community should have its own… wireless provider.

What an age we are living in.

I also wish corporations weren’t pouring money into politics. (And that certainly isn’t limited to conservatives.)

One final confession: when I visited the Patriot Mobile website to write this post, I opened it in an incognito window. I don’t need to encourage the algorithm any more.

—Renee Roederer

–Photos by Renee Roederer

A little being is so complex.

It’s amazing what we take for granted. When we lose something that’s important to our daily lives, including things that have typically gone rather unnoticed, we have a newfound appreciation for them when they return.

To give an example, this time last week, we had two days with horrific smoke from Canadian wildfires. It was completely surreal to have to stay inside during that time, and it felt unsettling not to have clean air. We’ve had days since then when the AQI was moderate or unhealthy for sensitive groups, but over the last few days we’ve been back in the category called Good, and it feels absolutely amazing. I don’t want to take clean air for granted.

At the same time, there’s something I’ve been lacking that I haven’t received back quite yet.

Two weeks ago, I injured my hamstring, and it’s still a struggle. Walking is totally fine, but sitting is extremely painful at times, especially for prolonged periods. Driving is the worst. I can manage short distances and short amounts of time, but otherwise I’m in quite a bit of pain.

So I’ve spent a lot of time lately standing or sitting sideways on the couch instead of sitting with both feet on the floor. I just can’t quite do that yet.

I miss my bike, and that’s obvious to me. But I never thought I’d miss sitting in chairs.

Right now, I do.

I have some appointments to help with this, and I hope it doesn’t persist for too long. But when it does improve, I think I’ll take seriously the gift of being able to sit comfortably.

Do you have anything like this lately in your own life?

—Renee Roederer

Dr. Izaskun Jiménez-Serra, the lead radio astronomer on a recent study, and additional scientists on her team have definitively discovered a sugar in interstellar space. This is so exciting, and it unlocks new questions as well.

Jiménez-Serra and her team found erythrulose, a type of sugar made of four carbon atoms, eight hydrogen atoms, and four oxygen atoms. More specifically, this is the same sugar that is found in raspberries.

Now, you might wonder how someone could find a sugar in space?

Dr. Jiménez-Serra and her team used radio telescopes to detect characteristic radio signals from molecules in the interstellar medium — the enormous clouds of gas and dust between solar systems in the Milky Way. As molecules rotate, they emit or absorb radio waves at specific frequencies. After collecting those signals, the team compared them with laboratory measurements of known molecules right here on earth. It turned out there was a clear match — erythrulose.

Sugars are among the essential building blocks of life. Scientists have previously discovered sugars on asteroids, and some have wondered whether certain sugars became part of our own planet when asteroids collided with Earth. But that still leaves a question: How did those asteroids acquire sugars in the first place?

This is the first time erythrulose has been detected in the interstellar medium itself.

Could this be a nursery for some of life’s building blocks? It invites all kinds of wonder.

—Renee Roederer

I was driving up onto the highway yesterday, coming up one of those sharply curving entrance ramps that climbs uphill before merging into traffic.

As I reached the top, I suddenly slowed down. No one was behind me. And I wasn’t on the highway quite yet.

But before me, a mama duck and four tiny ducklings were crossing the lane. I think they actually walked underneath my car after I stopped.

My first thought was, How did you all get up here? Had they somehow crossed the highway’s three lanes of traffic? They had come from that direction. Had they wandered all this way and simply ended up on the entrance ramp? I have no idea.

What I do know is that they were precious. And what I do know is that they were in a precarious position.

I wish I’d been able to get a photo, though that’s certainly not a good idea on an entrance ramp. But I hope they quacked all about it later, telling their buddies over dinner.

—Renee Roederer

When I left the house today, I didn’t intend to take myself on a nearly all-day, treat-yourself date. But that’s what I did. And it was unbelievably refreshing.

If you’ve read my blog for a little while, it’s probably no surprise that I like adventure, whether that’s taking trips or simply snapping photos of beautiful things that I find.

But right alongside that trait, I’m also outrageously disciplined.

I have a list of tasks that I do every single day, and I’m very motivated by streaks where there are no days missing. To give you the most extreme example, I have a streak on Duolingo that is 1,295 days long. I haven’t missed a single day in that span of time.

I also write or edit a portion of my book every single day, and I haven’t missed a day since January 1, 2025. It might only be a tiny bit each day, but it adds up over time.

I write a blog post every single day, too, and this year I haven’t repeated any posts from the past. Every one has been new.

So, as you can see, I’m very dedicated to goals when I set out to accomplish them.

I remember being a teenager, and in a church context, people would sometimes do an exercise with a jar, rocks, and sand. If you filled the jar with sand first, the rocks wouldn’t fit. But if you put the rocks in first, the sand would settle around them, and somehow everything fit. It was an object lesson about priorities.

Sometimes I hyper-prioritize my task lists, especially when you add in the professional work that I do. I love my job, but it can be demanding sometimes.

Today, though, I put some creature comforts first.

And just like the sand in that illustration, all my work and all the tasks on my list still fit around them.

I took a couple of walks. I went down to an area on the Huron River where there are gentle rapids and put my feet in the water. I took myself out for a late-afternoon happy hour. I spent much of the day outside. I turned on my hotspot and did my work from there.

It was so satisfying.

I knew we don’t have this level of flexibility every day. I didn’t have any meetings today, and that made it possible. But there are times when it might be worth shifting things around and prioritizing people, places, or simple joys.

The rest can still fit.

—Renee Roederer

I first visited the Strasbourg Cathedral in 2010. I’ve had the chance to see it one more time since then, in 2023. And after all these years, I still find myself thinking about it.

It’s difficult to describe the feeling of walking inside. The Strasbourg Cathedral is a masterpiece of Gothic architecture. Construction began in the 1100s and wasn’t completed until the 1400s. For three hundred years, at least eight generations of people created a sacred monument more intricate than anything I’ve ever seen. Everywhere you look, there’s a carving here, a statue there, stained-glass windows towering overhead. It’s as if everything has significance. Every detail seems to point in a unified direction toward what was most ultimate in their lives.

I’m enough of a realist to know that when a city spends three hundred years building a cathedral, part of the reasoning is to flex a muscle toward other cities. But that being said, the vision for this cathedral seemed much larger than that. The structure is built in the shape of a cross, and signs inside explained that it was designed to represent a ship carrying all of humanity toward God. All humanity. There’s nothing small about that vision.

But what has stayed with me the most isn’t the architecture. It’s the trust.

It must have taken extraordinary faith in one another to build something that would take three centuries to complete. Imagine putting your wealth, your time, your talent, and your sweat into such an endeavor, knowing with certainty that you would never see it finished. At least eight generations of lives created this beautiful cathedral.

I wonder whether the innumerable people who contributed to its construction felt that their part – no matter how small, no matter how detailed – was much larger than themselves. I wonder if they knew they were participating in something they would never fully see. I wonder if they trusted that future generations would continue the work they had begun.

More than nine hundred years later, people from around the world still walk through those doors. They stand beneath the vaulted ceilings, stare into the stained glass, and wonder at what human beings can create together. A structure begun in a very different age continues to bear witness to beauty, community, and what is most ultimate.

We live in a culture that celebrates quick results and immediate impact. But some of the most meaningful things human beings create require us to trust one another across generations. We plant trees whose shade we’ll never sit under. We teach children we’ll never know as adults. We begin work that others will finish.

Maybe that’s part of faith, too.

—Renee Roederer

–Photos by Renee Roederer

And sometimes cute.