Smuggling Grace

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.

I live in Michigan, and right now, I can’t eat bagged lettuce or breathe clean air outside.

As you likely know, there is currently a parasite outbreak connected to produce in Michigan. Although it has now spread to more than 30 states, Michigan is the epicenter. And because of the wildfires in Canada, intense smoke has blown into our state. Today felt pretty strange.

When it comes to the parasite in particular, people are rightly concerned about how many people have been let go from federal agencies, particularly the CDC and FDA, including some of the people who monitor our food.

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to attend a public health meeting in Michigan, and I found myself thinking about the ways that public health workers are unsung heroes.

You don’t really know what public health professionals have been preventing until they’re gone. Most of the time, we have no idea how many disasters have been averted simply because people have the expertise, conduct the research, and practice the monitoring that keeps us safe.

I think, in this situation and in many others, we’re likely to find out the hard way.

So I want to thank the people who work in public health, who don’t often receive the recognition they deserve. We also know that funding doesn’t always follow protections people can’t see they’re receiving. But public health is a vital need and a social benefit for us all. We should fund the workers. We should fund the research. We should fund the monitoring.

—Renee Roederer

I went to the beach three times last weekend – not the same beach three times, but three different beaches. I was on the west side of the state for a work event, and I decided to savor Lake Michigan as much as I could. So I visited a different beach on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

At the last beach I visited, there were a lot of children at the water’s edge, playing.

And of course they were. It’s wonderful to feel the waves at your feet or, as some children were doing, run away from them and make a game of it.

I was at the water’s edge, too, taking a walk and enjoying the cool water moving back and forth over my feet. As I walked, I kept weaving in and out among the children. Yes, some were running from the waves. But most were doing something nearly universal.

They were digging. They were building in the sand.

We encounter this at nearly every beach we visit.

When I watched them, I smiled. My first thought was that most children are not obsessed with perfectionism. They’re building and playing for the sheer joy of it. We could learn from that.

But then I found myself thinking about other children.

In another place on the globe, children also build and play in the sand along the shore in Gaza. Som families live in tents by the sea. Children still play as they can. But many no longer have schools. If they are injured, many no longer have hospitals available to care for them. Many have lost parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, and uncles.

These children matter, too.

They build. And they know what it is like to watch what they make disappear – not only because of the waves, but because of the bombs.

—Renee Roederer

Lately, I’ve become quite enamored with golden hour.

Once a day (once a dusk?), thanks to the earth’s rotation, artistry happens in the sky. Colors morph and swirl. Reflections on the water take on fiery hues. And it’s not just a fleeting moment. There’s a progression that unfolds over time. Because our atmosphere and our clouds are different each day, no two sunsets are ever quite the same.

As we move from day to night, there is this liminal experience – a transition from one to the other.

This happens every day of our lives. We can simply step outside, or look out a window, and experience it.

Maybe I’m newly enamored with all of this because I, too, feel liminal these days. So many transitions are underway – some personal and some collective. Some are gorgeous. Some are excruciating. And some are simply… unknown.

Do you feel that?

Maybe, in the midst of so much change, we can take some comfort in the fact that sunsets are consistent – even if they’re consistently different.

Every single day.

Every single dusk.

—Renee Roederer

I first fell in love with writing when I was fourteen years old.

I had a wonderful freshman English teacher. I’ve been thinking about that class again because the film adaptation of The Odyssey is premiering in theaters. That year, we read portions of Homer’s Odyssey, and I absolutely fell in love with the story and the genre.

Then we had the opportunity to try writing in that genre ourselves. Our teacher invited us to write our own epic poems. I don’t remember a single detail of mine. But I do remember how much I loved the process. What I remember most is that she didn’t just compliment what I had written. She told me I was a really good writer. I didn’t know that.

It’s a great gift when people see something in us and then choose to tell us. And when we do that for young people, we have no idea how long those words might stay with them.

So here I am, no longer writing epic poetry, but writing every single day. It’s become part of the architecture of my life.

I’m so grateful for that. And perhaps I’ll go see the film and think about that, too.

—Renee Roederer

It felt so good to stand up. It was such a relief.

I had pulled one of my hamstring muscles, and sitting in the car was pretty painful. This wasn’t to the point that I couldn’t drive safely, but definitely enough that I was quite uncomfortable. The challenge was that I was three hours from home, and I had to keep sitting in the very position that was aggravating the pain.

In the midst of all of this, I kept thinking about how exhausting pain can be. Or maybe I should say that I wasn’t just thinking about it – I was feeling it. I found myself getting very tired.

So I was in this strange position of wanting to get home as quickly as possible because I hurt, while also recognizing that I needed to stop because I was getting tired. I took a lot of breaks on the drive home.

I’m aware that this experience is temporary for me. But I found myself thinking about people I know who live with spastic muscles, or friends who keep getting denied pain medication by their insurance. There are people who live with physical pain every day, and it must be profoundly exhausting.

I also remembered reading that emotional pain and physical pain share many of the same neural pathways. There are people carrying emotional and mental pain who are just as exhausted as if they were carrying physical pain.

All of this made me think that we should probably be pretty gentle with one another – and with ourselves. We never fully know what someone is carrying.

When I finally arrived, I stood up for good, and it felt amazing.

Tonight, I’m resting, and I’m grateful to be home.

—Renee Roederer

One of the best sunsets of my life! — in Grand Haven, Michigan.

–Photos by Renee Roederer