I was running Sunday morning before work. I heard Kate Bowler telling a story about walking out of a faculty meeting. “I don’t have time for this,” she said.

She was in her cancer treatments. She was acutely aware of the unprojectability of time. And the endless discussions that happen, even at distinguished places like Duke Divinity School, are sometimes not worth the time.

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When people talk to me about working as an administrative pastor in a church in contrast to working as a hospital chaplain, I often say, “At least I’m not listening to arguments about where the coffee maker should go.” People get upset, of course, in the hospital. Most often it’s about whether their mom will live through the weekend, not about colors of walls and numbers of songs and yes, coffee maker locations or contents.

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In the Kate Bowler conversation I mentioned earlier, she was talking with Thomas Lynch, an undertaker and poet. In his poem, “Local Heroes”, Lynch contrasts all the big stories about big conflicts with the work of a local undertaker:

“Some days all that can be done
is to salvage one sadness from the mass
of sadnesses, to bear one body home,
to lay the dead out among their people,
organize the flowers and casseroles,
write the obits, meet the mourners at the door,
drive the dark procession down through town,
toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre.
It’s what we do.”

He ends the poem with this: “Like politics, all funerals are local.”

That’s true of loving others as well. The invitation from Jesus is to love the each other that we see each day. The ones we like. And the others, too.

We don’t have time to read about all the chaos, I’m guessing, if we’re committed to loving local. We can stand up and walk out, perhaps.