“Every Moment Holy” with Doug McKelvey

Show Notes:

Every moment--as mundane as doing laundry or as overwhelming as losing a loved one--can connect us back to God’s great story. But finding the words for those moments can be hard. Today’s guest has words to share. Doug McKelvey is author of the Every Moment Holy books, three volumes of prayers for the ordinary moments in our lives. 

Doug is an author, song lyricist, scriptwriter, and video director. His life journey, which he calls “meandering” has made him grateful for the steadfast nature of God, and for the moments in his life that brought him down to the bare foundation of faith: That God exists and Jesus is his Son.

Resources:

Every Moment Holy website, Instagram, Facebook

Buy Volume I and Volume II, and preorder Volume III

Transcript:

Eddie Rester 00:00 I'm Eddie Rester.

Chris McAlilly 00:01
I'm Chris McAlilly. Welcome to The Weight.

Eddie Rester 00:03

Today, our guest is Doug McKelvey. Doug has written a set of books called "Every Moment Holy." He's a writer. In the past, he's been a songwriter, script writer. But all of life seems to have brought him to this moment, where he writes liturgies for us to use in the ordinary moments of life.

Chris McAlilly 00:24

"Liturgy" may be a word that you know, or that you don't know. It simply means, in the history of the church, "worship," or it's come to mean kind of "written prayers." And Doug grew up in a tradition where, you know, spontaneous prayer was what was kind of acceptable and good. But over the course... And valued. And valued. Over the course of time, he realized that people need language for times in their life when they don't have language. And then he's also pushing the envelope of the idea that every moment can be holy, so that the prayers that he writes are for hanging Christmas lights, or particular moments right before someone is in the stages of death. Or he'll write moments where you're cooking artisanal bread. All kinds of moments are given sacredness within his volume, just by writing written prayers that are offered up for our spiritual lives.

Eddie Rester 01:27

And we get to hear about his story, and kind of how his story led him to the ability to begin to put words into prayer for us in these moments. So I think you're going to enjoy his story, who he is, and how God has led his life to this place of offering of prayers for us. So enjoy the episode, like it, share it, leave us review. And help us spread the word with what we're doing with The Weight.

Chris McAlilly 01:59
[INTRO] Like can be heavy. So heavy, in fact, that the weight we carry can sometimes cause us to lose hope.

Eddie Rester 02:07
But we've all come across those people in life who seem to be experiencing the same world we live in, except they maintain a great depth of joy and hope.

Chris McAlilly 02:16
A former generation called this gravitas. It was their description of a soul that had gained enough weightiness to be attractive, like all things with a gravitational pull.

Eddie Rester 02:27
Those are the people we want to talk to. On this podcast, we talk to pastors, entrepreneurs, artists, mental health experts, and many others.

Chris McAlilly 02:37
We'll create space for heavy topics, but we'll be listening for a quality of soul that could be called gravitas.

Eddie Rester 02:44
Welcome to The Weight. [END INTRO] Well, again, we're here today with Doug McKelvey. He is the author of "Every Moment Holy." Doug, thanks for being with us today.

Doug McKelvey 02:55
Glad to be here, Eddie and Chris. Thank you.

Eddie Rester 02:58

Tell us a little bit just about you. I want to talk about the work and the liturgies that you've put together. But give us just a thumbnail sketch of who you are, your life, the things that you've been about.

Doug McKelvey 03:10

Sure. I am a husband of... Goodness. So what are we headed toward here, our 32nd anniversary? And have three adult daughters, all married, two grandkids, another on the way. And I have spent most all of the decades of my adult life just doing all sorts of writing work, content creation, brainstorming, and just, you know, various. A lot of years of just hustling to try to pay the bills month to month on, you know, income that was not coming from steady sources. But during that time, I've done a lot of songwriting as a lyricist with a lot of different artists. I've done some script writing, published various books here and there throughout the years. And, yeah, I've taken a very meandering path to get to the place that I currently am in terms of what my vocational focus is.

Chris McAlilly 03:13

I was talking to a friend of mine, who I think is around the age of 50, and he was talking about a mentor of his whose daughter was graduating college and it was one of these conversations where people are talking about kind of the trajectory of life and what you hope for your child and that kind of thing. And this particular individual who I think was an attorney was asked, you know, "What do you hope for your daughter?" And what he said was, "God bless her with a non- linear path." And I found that to be really... When you describe your path as "meandering," you know, I think that it... I don't know. There are a lot of folks that think of a linear path and direction of success or whatever is the one that would lead to the most meaning or joy. But a meandering path, that's also, you know, a nonlinear path, I think brings all kinds of surprises and joy along the way. How's that been true for you?

Doug McKelvey 05:32

Well, I see it in terms of story, right? That our lives are these stories that our Creator is telling. And, you know, all of us have the tendency, to a greater or lesser degree, to want to control our own stories and to want to... We want the story to play out in the way that we envision as being the most comfortable, the most pleasurable. And we don't... You know, if we were the authors of our own stories, there probably wouldn't be a whole lot of drama in them. There wouldn't be much crisis. There wouldn't be these things that compel us to step outside of ourselves and to consider that there's a larger story going on, this story of redemption that God is telling across history, and that he's constantly weaving each of our stories into that larger tapestry. And sometimes we get glimpses of that. And I think that, you know, I say that my path was meandering. But I don't mean by that, that it was random. Right? Because what I'm doing now, I can see how so many of these twists and turns and detours and dead ends where I had to go a different direction, actually did shape me and prepare me for the work that I'm doing now, and in ways that I couldn't have anticipated. Because I never. I mean, what I'm doing now was never on my radar. Right? I didn't know I was headed toward that. But once I reached it, looking back, it seemed inevitable, because it's like, yeah, it is the unexpected culmination of all of these little elements and twists and turns and moments of discouragement and soul searching and reaching the end of myself and my own ambitions at various times, and, you know, feeling like a failure and all of the fears and insecurities of you know, just feeling like nothing that I'm trying is working out or going anywhere. You know, a lot of dreams had to die for me along the way. And I'm sure that process will continue because our Heavenly Father is faithful to continue to reorient our hearts toward what they most need, and toward their greatest treasures in Christ. And our hearts always have this natural bent, this tendency to be attracted to whatever the shiny, sparkling thing is that we think is right in front of us that we might attain, and we so easily drift. But God is faithful to continue to draw us back into the story that matters, into this yearning for the eternal kingdom and the renewal of all things and the wedding supper of the Lamb and the person of Christ in whom is the fulfillment of all of our deepest hopes and yearnings. And you know, I'm thankful that God doesn't just leave his children to their own devices, because we so quickly wander and are drawn to other things and lose our way. We lose the main storyline. We lose the main plot pretty quickly. Right? And so we have to be drawn back to it again and again. And that is a work of grace, even though it's painful, sometimes.

Eddie Rester 10:06

So many things she just said in that, it just has sparked different thoughts. One of the phrases used is "a lot of dreams had to die." And I think people think that our dreams are these things that will always carry us. But it's often the moments when the dream dissolves or shatters into a thousand little pieces, that in the resurrection of a new dream that that's where life begins to take shape. And I think sometimes we spend so much time trying to patch up the old dream that we don't allow that new dream to emerge. And then I started thinking, the old hymn, "Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, as, yeah, we're drawn to those shiny things. Tell us a little bit about your faith story before we get into the liturgies. Just how has that been woven through your life story?

Doug McKelvey 11:11

That is also something that I experienced as a very meandering path. But in hindsight, I can see at key moments that certain things were providential. I'm trying to think of how I can most shorthand, this part of my bio, but when I was a kid, when I was five, six years old, this would have been the early 70s, maybe '71, somewhere around there, my parents both had unexpected experiences of God in supernatural ways that they weren't seeking that. You know, they had them independently. And so at that point, the trajectory of our family, the spiritual trajectory was changed, right. Because my parents suddenly came alive to this notion that there is a real and personal God who is still active in the world today, and how do we become a part of that? Right. So on the one hand, for me, growing up in a family that now had that orientation, was very shaping, fundamentally. At the same time, my parents, you know, with the best of intentions, but without any sort of foundation, in terms of the depth of theological understanding, went to the place that they could find that seemed to be most in line with what they had experienced. But it ended up being kind of a personality cult. I don't remember learning much about Jesus, in that church--lot about demons and possession. And it ended up being a situation where, after about 10 years of being there, my parents had become increasingly concerned. And it reached the point where the pastor was wanting people to sign over their homes to him because he was the spiritual authority and the shepherd and the one who, you know, they needed to submit to his authority. And so it reached a point where my parents recognized, you know, something's wrong here. And so, we left that church. But then, a few years later, I went to a Christian university that had a lot of theological error. And there wasn't one consistent theology, but there was just a lot of... It was very based in health, wealth, prosperity, kind of teaching, and there was just all kinds of other wackiness added to that. You know, there wasn't a whole lot of discernment exercised that I could tell by the leadership. Speakers would come in to speak at Chapel and would just have all sorts of unbiblical ideas that they would put forward as the new revelation from God that, you know, God's doing a new thing here. But I was... While I didn't have any kind of coherent, holistic, scriptural worldview or framework, theologically to work from, I just had, you know, at that point in my life, just all kinds of weird ideas piled on top of each other that I had absorbed. But I did recognize pretty quickly, within a few months of being in college, that something here is wrong. This just, you know... This isn't right. I don't know what is right. But it's not this. So that was a significant turning point for me. I responded probably by becoming somewhat cynical, and also kind of shutting down because I felt like I couldn't wrestle with these ideas in that context. And I didn't even know where to start. And it was probably a couple years after college, when I moved to Nashville, at the invitation of Charlie Peacock, artist and producer. He and his wife were just starting this nonprofit organization, the Art House Foundation. It was intended to be a shared exploration of the intersection of faith and the arts. And I was invited to come and be a part of that. And it was only on arriving in Nashville, and immediately getting plugged into a church that other people I knew here were attending, that the gospel began to make sense. That for the first time, it's like I felt like someone was consistently preaching the gospel and a theology that was drawn, not from cherry picked scriptures that then were turned into these odd doctrines that didn't even mesh with one another, but looking at the whole of scripture, and building this framework. And it was just, that was just life to me, that season of a decade. Well, actually, I was at that church for 13 years, as well as so many wise and discerning teachers within the Art House community that I was privileged to be able to learn from during that time. And so, you know, in looking back, I can see that even though my college years were a difficult time and kind of this dark, foggy valley that I was walking through, that it was necessary because it leveled all of those errors, all of those bad theologies that I had absorbed growing up. And it took me just down to the bare foundation: that God exists and that Jesus is his Son. And beyond that I wasn't sure what was true. But God was faithful in that process, that having levelled all of those unworkable ideas that were not true about God and about human beings and about creation, that then he led me to a place where more stable and true ideas could be built upon that bare foundation.

Chris McAlilly 19:30

Yeah, man, that... I feel like your story... I mean, I guess what I see in my mind is like a map of so many different stories, so many different lives of people who I'm sure can relate to being in an environment where they felt like what was being communicated may or may not line up with their sense of what was true, or good or beautiful, and going through a period where they didn't know how to work through those questions, didn't know how to work through that confusion, finding a community where there's life, where there's beauty, goodness, and truth communicated both through ideas, and then also through relationships, that kind of issue forth into a larger vision and one that is worthy of your best efforts and your deepest convictions. And I wonder, I mean, you said you felt like the gospel began to make sense. I think sometimes preachers try to communicate what the gospel is. I guess for you, how would you very simply communicate what is the gospel? Just, if you don't mind just speaking to that.

Doug McKelvey 20:57

Well, I think one of the core elements for me in that time of my life was awakening to the idea of God's grace. Right? That this... I was just reading in the beginning of Galatians, this morning, and thinking about how in Galatians, Paul is addressing this church or churches in Galatia that had begun with this understanding of grace, right. But now these elements have come in that are saying, well, yeah, but in order to be acceptable to God, you have to follow all these Jewish laws of circumcision, and, you know, the laws related to food and all sorts of other things. And Paul is calling them back to a gospel sanity, right. And he's saying, no. You're returning to these things that are useless, that you're failing to understand that Christ has done the work for you, that God himself has done the work. Right? And that the way we live as followers of Jesus is not to be this frightened looking over our shoulder, oh, did I just mess up? You know, am I no longer saved? I mean, and I came from that kind of... You know, that was part of my thinking, when I was younger, that oh, you know, whether you make it to heaven or not, depends on at what point you die, you know? Have you done something, have you have you committed some sin and then not had time to repent? And then...

Eddie Rester 23:41 A very insecure faith.

Doug McKelvey 23:43

Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to recognizing that, no, actually, my condition is worse than that, in that sin isn't just something that I occasionally do. But it's this whole organic network of my desires, my impulses, that there's nothing I can do of my own accord that is absolutely pure and free from the taint of my own will. But the good news is better than I could have imagined, because it is Christ who has done that work on my behalf. He's been righteous for me, you know. There's that exchange, that he takes my guilt upon himself and pays the price for it. And I am robed in his righteousness in the eyes of God.

Eddie Rester 24:56 Yeah.

Doug McKelvey 24:59

And even beyond that, that what he calls me to, the good works that he is prepared in advance for me to do, he has also been faithful to prepare me for the doing of those things. And it is the work of Christ through me. You know, it's the Spirit of God laboring within me. So it's all of God from beginning to end. You know, Christ has... In the foreword of the new volume of "Every Moment Holy Volume III," I talk about the word that we derive the word liturgy from, the Greek word that I think the pronunciation is, "leitourgia." And there's some debate as to whether that's most accurately translated as "the work of the people" or "the work for the people." And I've subtitled the book "The Work of the People." But I don't have any problem interpreting it as both-and, because there is the work for the people that Christ has done for us-- the work that he did on the cross, the work that he did living a life of perfect obedience and righteousness, the work that he did paying the price for our transgressions, that we might receive his righteousness. But then the work of the people, the good works that we are called to in the times and places in which we live, is also the work of Christ, through his body, through his people, and for the sake of his people and his creation. So I mean, you asked me probably, for a shorter, succincter answer as to what the gospel is, but I think it's all of that.

Chris McAlilly 27:27

No, no that's beautiful. Yeah. And you tied it, I think you tied it, you help connect the dots between your own story, the gospel, and your current work, in, I think, a very beautiful way. I guess, as I read your work, and it came to us through a young woman on our team named Rachel, who is a beautiful worship leader, and she's training to be a licensed clinical counselor. And she absolutely loves "Every Moment Holy." The first volume, she brought it to us, and we began, you know, incorporating it into some of the work we were doing with college students. And, you know, I think so much of what gets communicated in the Gospel is kind of the first half of what you describe, this beautiful work of Christ on our behalf that allows us to kind of move from a place where we're in captivity or bondage to our will, into something more, into a life that could be called holy. But the way in which you enter into that life and work, it really is the work of Christ through the body. And then ultimately, by beginning to capture every desire, every inclination, and every moment into this story that allows Christ to be at work in us to both heal, and rehabilitate our lives, and also all of creation. There's this sense that we're moving forward towards a time when God would make all things new, and there's a marriage feast of the Lamb. And God is kind of reconciling all things through Christ, and moving us in the direction of something more than we could ever ask or imagine. And every once in a while, you get this glimpse of it within the context of a Christian community, or an art house, or just a small group of friends. But you know, I guess for me, as you were describing your story, I was remembering moments when the gospel was coming alive for me, in community with other people. And, you know, I mean, frankly, working as a pastor, any given day, the moments don't feel holy. They feel very ordinary. They feel overwhelmed by all of the different ways in which human beings kind of hurt one another or are bumping up against one another. And yet, it's those moments where I've seen the gospel in community that really allow me to say yes to it. I guess the thing that I see in your work is your work helps sustain those in the body who are moving beyond that initial glimpse of the gospel and into a life that's increasingly beautiful, bood, true, and holy. What about you, Eddie? I guess, what do you hear?

Eddie Rester 30:28

Well, what I hear is that as you, Doug, as you encountered the gospel, you talked about meandering earlier, it's the gospel that takes all these threads of our lives here the good grace of Jesus and weaves these threads together, not into what necessarily we would create our lives to be, but into what God is creating our lives to be. And it takes a lot of releasing sometimes of my own desire and wants. And even, we were talking earlier about dreams, sometimes it takes me saying, "Now I've got to set that dream aside, even though I've pursued it, because it's not what God is birthing in me." It might be a good, worthy, holy something that I've pursued, but it's not what God is birthing, as we are woven into this new thing. Which for me leads us to your work, because the work that God has brought you to right now, because "Every Moment Holy"-- I want you to talk, just for you share a little bit about the project, how you got there in just a second. But it reminds us that all these moments that we think are lost, or broken, or don't matter, that God is working in them somehow to bring life and beauty. So tell us a little bit about the project, that "Every Moment Holy" project. What led you there? And for those who may not be familiar with it, what is it?

Doug McKelvey 32:04

Well, Volume One, the unofficial subtitle was "new liturgies for daily life." The idea was to create a resource for the body of Christ that... Well, let me back up just to say that, you know, historically, there are a lot of very rich, liturgical resources within the church. Things like the Book of Common Prayer, right, that has been crafted over hundreds of years, and that generations of believers have borne witness to the notion that, yes, these expressions are in line with the truths of scripture. And many church traditions have these liturgical resources for moments like, you know, the Lord's Supper, or a baptism, or a marriage ceremony. And we tend to look at these sacramental kind of moments as, as these holy kind of moments that we that we recognize instead of part, and they are. But the "Every Moment Holy" project was about saying, but we also believe that God is the God over every sphere of life, that he is the Lord and King over every moment. And that all that we are engaged in, is to be part of the ongoing act of worship that our lives are. So the ways that we engage with our spouses and our kids, the kind of employee that we are at work, the ways that we interact with other people, the way we engage with our hobbies, with the things that we're stewards of on a daily basis, you know, doing maintenance on our house or mowing the yard. That these aren't somehow outside of the sphere of our lives as an ongoing act of worship. That there's not this divide between sacred and secular in that sense, right? That it's all one seamless, integrated whole. So if we believe that to be true, and believe that that's what Scripture is revealing, and we begin to unpack some of these everyday moments--like changing a diaper, or mowing a yard or lighting the first hearthfire of the season or having friends over for a meal--and we move past just this abstract notion that, well, somehow this is all part of it, and actually begin to connect some of those dots and unpack how this activity, this moment might sit within the context of the way that our lives and God's shaping of history is moving toward that culmination, toward the renewal of all creation, toward the dwelling place of God again being in the midst of his people. So "Every Moment Holy," it was about looking at these little moments of life that we don't recognize so instinctively as sacramental, and saying, how might God be using this activity? How might I welcome the movement of God's Spirit, even in my heart, and through me, as I seek to serve this child, as I'm changing this diaper? You know, what are the eternal implications of this? So then it's about helping people as they voice these prayers, you know, in the midst of or before, specific moments, activities in the midst of certain struggles or emotions. It's about helping to reorient the heart and the mind to the truer story. Right? So that we're not just overwhelmed by the circumstances, by the thing that has to be done. Or even, you know, there are prayers for things like camping. There's one for those who sleep in tents, or for...

Eddie Rester 37:49 Arriving at the ocean.

Doug McKelvey 37:50

Chris McAlilly 37:51
Or setting up a Christmas tree. Yeah.

Doug McKelvey 37:53

Yeah, these are our recreational or celebratory kinds of things, that maybe on some instinctive level, we sense. oh, there's something about God's transcendence that kind of arriving at the ocean and just seeing that infinite expanse of water might tap into, but our hope with these prayers was that they would give people, that they would name those things. That they would give voice, they would articulate the things that in the moment, when we're experiencing something, feeling something, we don't have the luxury of spending hours parsing through what's going on in our heart. But if someone else has done that work, then we can pray that prayer and realize, oh, this is naming exactly what's going on inside me in the context of speaking it to my Creator. And I didn't have the words. I didn't know, but when it's named, I recognize it.

Chris McAlilly 39:11

Yeah, I think one of the ways I've read your work is as creating liturgy for people that didn't grow up with liturgy, you know. So if you think about it, you know, you've got the Orthodox or Catholic or Episcopal, Anglican traditions that have these beautiful prayer books. Oftentimes, they feel inaccessible. You know, they're talking about somebody else's life, not mine. And then you have this other kind of more Pentecostal or charismatic stream of the church that's growing explosively in the global context, that really does see the Holy Spirit being manifest in every dimension of life, but it's often not associated with the written down prayers. And in some ways, you know, I'm just curious and fascinated by that. Well, I grew up in churches that would have been very suspicious of a pre-written prayer. Right? Because... I mean, did you grow up in a tradition where written down common prayer was a thing, or is that something you've discovered? Or, you know, I guess, how do you think of your work? You know, would that be an accurate, creating liturgy for people that don't don't do liturgy? How do you think about kind of where it sits within the whole Christian conversation?

Eddie Rester 40:06
Yeah, some people are, yeah.

Doug McKelvey 40:28

How could it be... How could it be of the Holy Spirit? How could it, if it's not spontaneous? But I do find it interesting. And, you know, so that's where I would have been as a teenager and young adult. But I do find it interesting, in relation to that, to think that, oh, but those churches I was in, we weren't singing spontaneous worship songs. We were singing songs, joining our hearts into this articulation of worship and praise of God, that someone else had spent hours laboring over and carefully crafting the expression of those words. And, you know, for some reason, that wasn't considered in the same way as a pre-written prayer that, you know, we would think, well, God's Spirit could have inspired someone to write this song. But why would the Spirit be limited only to working in that way, if there's music involved? And, you know, then we have in Scripture, where the disciples come to Jesus and ask him to teach them how to pray. And he gives them this amazing what we call the Lord's Prayer. Right? And so I think it's a very narrow and unhelpful view, in that sense, to say that we're going to limit the Holy Spirit's ability to create resources for his people that, you know, I mean, if you're really going to go down that path, then pastors should not prepare sermons.

Chris McAlilly 42:39
Just do it all in the moment. Yeah.

Doug McKelvey 42:41 Yeah.

Eddie Rester 42:42
I think there are some that probably don't.

Chris McAlilly 42:44

But I do... You know, and then even Jesus, he teaches us to pray the Lord's Prayer. But he quotes the Psalms more than any other Old Testament book. And I'm doing a sermon series on the Psalms right now. And I've never really spent a lot of time there. We recently interviewed a guy named David Taylor, who you may know David, about his work on the Psalms. And I've just been blown away by how powerful these ancient prayer poems have been in creating a conversation for our congregation around anger, pain, anxiety, fear. And these are prayers that were written down 2600 years ago. And they they kind of give us a map for navigating these difficult journeys and leading forward towards God, you know, drawing our hearts forward towards thanksgiving and praise. And, you know, in a lot of ways, I guess I see... And then Jesus at the very end of his days when the words that come to mind to say, are "My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?" which are a written down prayer from Psalm 22, for the moment of deep grief, grievous and painful crucifixion, moments within the life of Christ. So I don't know. I think all of those point towards written prayers, inspired by the Spirit and then used in different contexts. What I appreciate about what you're doing is that you're pushing that idea into the most quotidian, the most ordinary, the most seemingly unrecognizably holy of moments, and trying to create a language. And I think of it as--you know, I'm 40. So I'm thinking of it for people that are 30 or 20, or younger, who are really, for the first time kind of getting a sense that maybe I want to go this direction. I want to live this kind of life. But I don't have the words. I don't have the language. I don't even know how to connect my story to the story. And the beauty of it, and I just think the genius of it, is it's the way that you connect your whole story to God's story is through little bitty moments, you know.

Eddie Rester 44:59 Right.

Chris McAlilly 45:00
It's so beautiful man. Like, I'm so grateful that you're doing this work. It's awesome. I'm just so excited. Yeah. I mean, I wish I'd had that earlier. Go for it, Eddie. Sorry.

Eddie Rester 45:00

I was just thinking, I wish I'd had it. One of the most stressful things in our early marriage was paying bills. It was the worst day of the month. You know, I knew if we could survive that, that one day every month, we'd make it. But the prayer for when you're paying bills. I would... If I'd had that language just to center, and to remember that what I have is a part of something larger. Yesterday, one of my friends was sharing that young man in our community died. At his Episcopal Church, he had been a part of the grave diggers guild. I've never heard of that before. But this old Episcopal church owns their own cemetery, and they hand dig their own graves. But what they do is the guild gathers, and my friend was invited to this. They stand around the grave, and the priest gathers with those who have dug the grave. And there are specific prayers that are read every time, this rhythm of liturgy, in this moment of grief. And he was just blown away, that this is how the loving care of this difficult moment is carried out by the people of God. And when I think about, particularly your second volume, I think about that. And your second volume deals with grief and loss specifically. And I would encourage folks, not just when you're going, but go ahead, because it offers up, I think what Chris is saying, in these ordinary moments, how to begin to engage what your heart is going through.

Chris McAlilly 47:00

I do think for me as a pastor, especially when I was a student pastor, at the very beginning, death was the thing that I didn't have words for. I didn't. I didn't know what to say, when there was nothing to say in the words of one of Cody's favorite artists, Dave Ramirez. He's got this beautiful song, what do you say when there's nothing to say? And death is one of those moments where there is nothing to say. And in those moments, I've been so grateful that, to be part of a community of people who have for thousands of years said, "This is what you say in these moments." You know, this is the language that you use when nobody has any words. And when you say those words from the ancient books of worship, these words that have been passed down through the centuries, everybody's really grateful for them, because nobody knows what to say. And, you know, once again, I think that sometimes that the ancient language is helpful, but we need new language, new prayers, because the experience of grief today, while timeless, is also fresh and new every moment. And so there's, you know, it's kind of a beautiful... I'm grateful that you went in that direction. How did you decide that that's the next volume? That's kind of where I needed to go next.

Doug McKelvey 48:28

Well, so like you said, Volume I was topically broad, right? It was kind of a shotgun pattern approach to just all these different moments of life. Volume II is very focused on death, grief, and hope, in the midst of those things. And that one, I don't know that there was ever really a point of decision to say, oh, I'm going to write a book about this. What happened was with Volume I, I had a long list of potential topics. One of those was a prayer that would be for the morning of a funeral. Not that would be part of a funeral service, but for family, for close friends, who wake up this morning, and remember, oh, yeah, this person I loved has died. And today we actually have to go have the funeral service and bury them. So something, you know, a prayer that would help to reorient their heart that morning before they had to walk through the difficulties of the day. But as I was... It was a one year process to write the first book. And I knew there was no way I was going to get to the writing of every potential topic on the list. But that one seemed like an important one. But it was also... It was a difficult year, and there was this collective weight of wrestling through it. I mean, it was just a difficult season of life for me, and a lot of the prayers that I was writing, I was writing because I was very much inside those at that moment. You know, liturgy, for those fearing failure. A liturgy for those who have not done great things for God, you know. I was at a place in my life where I was approaching 50 years old. And it just seemed like everything I had pursued and tried that had, maybe for a little while, seemed to promise that it might go somewhere, that it might lead to some sort of success, where we wouldn't have to be wondering every month, how we were gonna pay the electric bill that month, and just the stress of that. And during the last... We got to the point where we were three months or so from the print deadline, when the manuscript had to go to the printer. And I just realized I did not have the emotional bandwidth to write that prayer, to start it and bring it to completion. It was just, it was just too much. So when that manuscript was completed for Volume I and went to the printer, I knew immediately, and I had known all along, that there's this gaping hole topically, that there's a prayer in it for the anniversary of a loss. But that's the closest to that topic... But I was driving drunk people around Nashville till three in the morning for Uber and Lyft. And I was doing the janitorial work and setup and teardown for my church, you know, for 100 bucks a week, or whatever, just anything I could do. But it just all, you know, put me in a... It was the season of life where I just felt like every path that I thought God was leading me down had come to nothing. And so it was difficult from that standpoint, because I was writing this book, in the midst of personally struggling with these significant questions and fears and insecurities and doubts.

Eddie Rester 53:06 Right.

Doug McKelvey 53:06

That any of the prayers in Volume I landed. And so I knew, okay, there's something here I need to write. And at that point, there wasn't a plan for a second volume. You know, there was the possibility that, you know, well, maybe if people respond to the first one, maybe there'll be a second one, but there was no presumption that there would be. But I thought, well, I can write it. We can make it available as a free download on the Every Moment Holy website. So at least it's there. I mean, I just, I had a sense that this is something I need to do. But I was beaten up enough by the process of writing the first book, and just all the other things that were going on in my life through that year, that it was a year after I finished Volume I before I felt like I was ready to try writing another prayer. And that was the prayer that I knew I needed to write. So I started working on that one. I spent a few days working on it. And it expanded to 10 pages in an early draft. And I knew from working on Volume I that that was too long, that that was unworkable. And typically what that meant was that I had repeated the same ideas a number of times and I needed to go back in and identify where those were and rearrange and consolidate and eliminate parts of it. And I tried to do that and realized, well, the problem isn't that I've repeated myself here, but this is actually five different prayers that there are five different themes related to grief here. And so I did the rearranging, split it into five prayers, continued to work on each of those. But those kept expanding. Right? Where then I'm splitting those off into multiple prayers. And then I realized, well, so I'm writing these few prayers for people who are grieving the loss of someone they love. But what about someone who's dying? What about the person who gets the news that they have six months to live? As a follower of Jesus, what kind of prayers would serve them as they navigate that process, as part of their pursuit of Christ, as part of, as an inevitable part of their journey as a disciple, that each of us are going to walk through that valley of the shadow of death, following Jesus? And what does that mean? And what prayers would help to articulate what someone is going through in that season? And then what about caregivers? What about people who are walking with someone who's going through that season? And so within a couple of weeks, I started thinking, well, maybe this is its own book. But because it's topically focused, you know, it's probably a third the length of Volume I. It's probably 30, maybe 35 prayers. So I went to Rabbit Room press who had published Volume I, and I said, hey, I've been working on these prayers, and it keeps expanding. And I think we should do a small volume topically focused on death and grief. And they said, "Great, let's do it." And the more I worked on it, the more the project expanded, the more facets of those journeys of grief and of dying, in the context of being a follower of Jesus, just continued opening up. And it ended up being a two year process to write Volume II. And it ended up being, I think, 70 pages longer than Volume I. It's one of those things like Doctor Who's booth, right, that it's bigger on the inside once we get into that topic.

Eddie Rester 58:09

Well, the beauty of it is it really does offer avenues for hope and prayer in almost every stage of grieving, whether it's you've received bad news, or you're in the late stages of cancer. There's a way for people who often don't have a voice to pray, to be connected, to tie their story to God's story in Volume II. Doug, I want to thank you for your time with us today. For folks, it's "Every Moment Holy," Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III is coming out, I believe, November of this year. It's worth giving yourself an opportunity to pray with the words of someone who has deeply thought of how we can join our lives to God. So thank you for your time today.

Doug McKelvey 59:03 Thank you, Eddie.

Chris McAlilly 59:04
Thanks so much. Love the conversation. Thank you.

Eddie Rester 59:06
[OUTRO] Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed the podcast, the best way to help us is to like, subscribe, or leave a review.

Chris McAlilly 59:15

If you would like to support this work financially or if you have an idea for a future guest, you can go to theweightpodcast.com. [END OUTRO]