Hello, Dear Friends!

I want to thank you for helping me to create and share reflection pieces, storytelling, and poetry on my personal website Smuggling Grace (www.reneeroederer.com), Facebook, and Instagram. It gives me great joy to share these pieces, and I hope they add encouragement to you. I'm also grateful for the ways people continue to add their own words and experiences to the conversations these pieces cultivate. Thank you!

Your financial support at any level ($2, $5, $10, $15, $25, or $50 a month) supports my writing and my opportunities to support others in community as well. In my work as a Community Chaplain, this Patreon writing account additionally aids me in bringing more coffee into my life (you know I love that), taking students out for meals and conversation, facilitating conversation among Michigan Nones and Dones and other communities I love, visiting alumni I have mentored, and perhaps putting a bit more money toward health and retirement benefits too.

I thank you!

To close, here's a bit more about my vision. I hope we can all find ways to discover more grace and possibility in our world and smuggle it along with us, bringing encouragement and hope.

Smuggling Grace
Grace. It is with us and among us.
Grace. It is love, gift, worth, and favor for us.
Grace. It is above us, behind us, and around us.
Grace. It is right here alongside us.
Grace. It precedes us.
Grace. It surpasses us.
Grace. It is apart from us,
God’s Good Gift.

Yet remarkably,
This Grace —
This with,
This among,
This above,
This behind,
This around,
This Grace,
This Very Grace!
God’s Good Gift,
It passes through us.

Day by day,
Minute by sacred minute,
We breathe it,
We carry it,
We shoulder it.
We smuggle it.

God, breathing life into the world,
breathes through us.
So with joy
let’s smuggle grace this very instant —
into ourselves,
into each other,
into this God-breathed world. . .

Thank you,
Renee