Sunday Morning with St. Francis…

I’ve been sitting with this morning’s news and a cup of coffee, and I keep thinking about Francis of Assisi.

Not the statue in the garden. The real one — the young man who walked unarmed into a sultan’s war camp in the middle of the Crusades, just to have a conversation. No army. No conditions. Just a willing heart and the audacity to believe that talking was better than killing.

This morning’s headlines have nations rattling swords over a narrow stretch of water, a French peacekeeper dead in Lebanon, six souls gunned down on a street in Kyiv, and an 89 year old man in Minnesota whose house a tornado took last night.

I think Francis would set the paper down slowly.
He wouldn’t have a hot take. He wouldn’t be winning arguments on the internet.

He’d want to know if that old man in Minnesota had a warm place to sleep.

He’d be thinking about the two Lebanese women sitting in a vacant Beirut apartment, displaced from the olive groves they grew up in.

He’d be saying a quiet word for those six souls in Kyiv — not a statistic, not a talking point. Six universes, extinguished on a Saturday morning.

And then — I really believe this — he’d walk outside, notice a sparrow on a fence post, and spend ten minutes just watching it.

Francis didn’t change his world by being the loudest voice in the room. He changed it by being the most present. The most human. The stubbornly, inconveniently kind one.
We could use a few more Francis’s right now. Happy Sunday, friends.