Beloved and brilliant Birmingham pastor, Gary Furr, recounts the year of the pandemic, teaching us how to grieve and reflect through each of his poems and prayers, haikus and song. Through his psalm-like collection of writings, he captures the melancholy and mourning of the year of 2020, while simultaneously holding a lantern for a way forward, for today and years to come.

– Jenny Eaton Dyer, PhD, The 2030 Collaborative

Gary Furr is a creative pastor and an effective Christian leader, and he has come up with an original idea for a book. He has created a record of things that he said to his congregation in Birmingham during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic which happens to have been the last year before his retirement. He organized the book according to the ancient Christian calendar. Each of the eight liturgical seasons begins with a paragraph of explanation about the season, two haiku, and a short list of developments in the pandemic during that period. These are followed by selected sermons, meditations, prayers, poetry, and original songs that Gary presented during that season. The result is a colorful mosaic of Christian wisdom and encouragement written in language that is unfailingly fresh. A major thread running through his ministry during that dark year is Christian hope which, like rain, “finds every leaf and gives it a drink.”

—Fisher Humphreys, Professor of Divinity, Emeritus, Samford University

Dr. Gary Furr claims his “mind is like an entire cage full of monkeys on steroids.” Don’t take the joke. Here is authentic, pandemic-produced piety that stills the soul. It is a reminder of the spiritual gifts imposed by the virus: silence and solitude, a lighter load, new visions and innovations, and our aching, throbbing need for each other. Read it slowly. You will stop often, sometimes lingering long, to ponder your existence, to confront your moral shortfall, to pray for a nurse, or to remember the wall-to-wall pain in our world. They should have taught us to pray like this in seminary.

—Walter B. Shurden, Minister-at-Large at Mercer University