Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Weekly sermons from our Central Lutheran Church preaching team plus quick reflections from Pastor Ryan Braley.
Real talk, ancient wisdom, and honest questions — all designed to help you learn, grow, and find encouragement when you need it most.
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Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
#108 - Rituals That Shape Us {Reflections}
A river, three rocks, and a kiss—sometimes the smallest acts carry the most weight. We mark twenty-five years of marriage at Minnehaha Falls with a simple, handmade ritual and open a wider conversation about how ordinary people can create sacred time on purpose. From choosing stones to naming a trait, a memory, and a love, we show how tangible actions can honor the past, shape the present, and gently bend the future.
We also tell the story of a coach who lost his role overnight and needed closure he never got. So we met on the same field with friends, a notebook, and a fire. We shared stories, wrote truth, burned pain, and stood together in the dark. It wasn’t grand, but it was grounding—and it worked. You’ll hear why rituals often feel mysterious in the moment and make sense later, how embodiment helps the brain release what talk alone can’t, and why elements like water, fire, stone, and shared words can turn vague emotion into something we can actually move through.
If you’re carrying stress you can’t control, we offer a five-minute practice: write it down, tear it out, crumple it, trash it, and say out loud, I can’t control this. It’s not my business. If you’re honoring love, grief, or change, you’ll get practical ideas—pour water at a tree to mark loss, light a candle to close the day, keep a pocket stone to cue honesty, or walk a weekly path to reflect and reset. No mystique required, no perfect script—just presence, intention, and a willingness to step out of ordinary time.
If this resonates, share it with a friend who needs a gentle push toward closure or celebration. Subscribe for more reflections, leave a review to help others find the show, and tell us: what ritual will you create this week?
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What is up everybody? Hey, Ryan here. Welcome to our Reflections podcast. And hey, yesterday no, Tuesday was my uh my and Katie's 25th anniversary. I mean, look at that. 25 years. And I'm just telling you, it was all because of her. She put up with all my shenanigans and idiotic behavior for 25 years. And so uh grateful. But man, 25 years. I'm like, what that's crazy. A long time. I'm hoping we got married. I was 19 when we got married, so and I turned 20. No, I was 20, sorry. So I'm 45. So I'm hoping that we can make it to like 75 years at least. I want to live to be 105, something like that. And uh anyway, so that's my plan. I'd love to hit 75, so we're a third of the way there. But here's what we did. I'm like, man, we got to do something like unique and special. And we have plans this upcoming weekend. That's kind of like bigger plans. And then we have my my birthday is coming up a week later, so we kind of got things already in the in the hopper for plans. So we're like, we so here's what we did. We went to Minne Haha Falls, this great location in Minneapolis, and there's a river and this beautiful falls that come down. And and Katie wanted to go there, and she didn't really know why. She's like, I had some like she just wanted to go down there. I'm like, let's go down there and just see what we find and see. And then we did a whole bunch of other things and went to lunch at the seesaw cafe. But but here's one thing we did that I was like, I I want to do this. I'm like, hey, I would love to somehow create impromptu or like a ritual while we're down at the river, you know, to kind of celebrate, to mark time, to look back on the first 25 years of our marriage and hopefully it'll like do something in us and shape us, inform us, even in this little tiny way as we go forward. And so here's what we did. Because this is kind of like I love this kind of thing. I'm writing a big thesis paper on rituals and how they shape us and and um and we've done them for our kids with rites of passages that they've grown older, just but like low bar kinds of. We don't spend a lot of time or a lot of energy, although they grow into, they kind of morph into that. But when we first began, like, let's just do something easy and quick and and we love them. And so, and I think here's the here's kind of the peak behind the curtain. I think that rituals are partly what it means to be human and they shape us. So I love doing them. So here, okay, we went down to the river. I go, hey, let's just, as we're walking around, look down on the ground for three rocks. And so we did, and I go, just like look for whatever ones that look appealing for whatever reason, like no rules, just find them. And then we did, and like, okay, let's go to the three spots in the river. And I go, every time we're at one spot, we'll just take a minute and the first so let's the first one, let's just name one character trait from our past 25 years in yourself, the other person, or in the marriage itself, whatever in general, that has helped us make it this far. And so we did. We like both named something and then threw our rock in the river, and then we we and then we kind of laughed and had this moment. Then we walked down a ways over this bridge, a really cool spot on the bridge, and said, Hey, what's one story we remember from this past 25 years that was like meaningful for us, it was impactful, that we loved, or that was just very, I don't know, it was just very vivid. And we shared that and had a fun time remembering and just told some stories and then threw our rock in the river. And then went down a ways and then the third one I said, let's what's one thing that you just love about the other person? And we shared that and then we threw our rock in the river. And then we uh said we have to seal it with a kiss because I can't get out of here without getting a kiss, you know. And so we did that. And I don't know, it's just really cool. I just I loved it because I love rituals. And here's the thing about rituals when you do these things, you don't you don't always know what they mean or why we do them. And sometimes we get obsessed, we're like, what does this mean? And I have to know right now. And sometimes you don't know what things were until years down the road. Uh like you might go on a retreat or have an experience, you're like, what was that? You don't know. And it's okay to let it simmer for a day or a week or a month or even a year, like, oh, and looking back, like that shaped me in all kinds of ways. And then no, and rituals, they do that, they do things to the inside of us that we don't even recognize or know. And I think I I mean I just argue, I think we are people of ritual, and we need rituals. And I think I would encourage us to just make some up and do that. So there's this guy, his name is Mircia Eliad, he's an anthropologist, and he says that humans are deeply ritualistic people, and that this is how we step out of what he calls ordinary time into sacred time. So when you engage in a ritual, me and Katie on the river, we said, hey, we're gonna show up in this kind of goofy thing way, look for rocks, be together, intentionally have our eyes and ears open, and declare some things out loud and throw rocks in the river. But somehow we like entered into this different kind of space together, into this time together, and it became what you might call like a sacred time. And time didn't just fly by, we stopped and slowed down, and and this, I think, kind of shaped us in some ways. I don't know what it was, what ways it shaped us, but uh, but it was really impactful for both of us. And uh, I have another friend who was a longtime uh coach of this team, a dear friend of mine. And his time there as this coach came to an abrupt end. Didn't expect it, it ended, and that was it. And he called me and we talked, and he was just he was deeply saddened and heartbroken about this ending. And it sort of was a bummer because there was no closure. He didn't know it was gonna be the end. He had no time to say goodbye, to even process it. So I go, let's do a ritual, dude. So let's go to the field where you coach, and I go, invite five of your friends, six of your friends. And so he invited like five or six other people, and I go, have one of them bring a fire pit and bring a notebook, and I'll and I'll meet you guys down there. So we go down to the field, and that night it got dark, and I and we just did a couple, I said, Hey, let's go around the circle, and a couple of us had had him as our kids' coach. I go, let's just share stories about this guy and how he impacted our kid and our lives, and maybe your favorite moment. And I had him share his favorite moment, and then we shared a couple other things. We wrote down some encouragement, and I said, and I told him, I go, why don't you write down something that like your pain and like how you feel and your emotions and the sorrow? And he wrote that down, and then he and then we burned these things in a fire. And then we all had a we all hung around for a little bit longer and talked some more, and we hugged and I prayed over him, and it provided some sense of closure. I I thought it was a wonderful thing that we did, and his buddies came down, it was super cool. And if I were to ask him, okay, what did this mean? How did it share? He wouldn't know in that moment, but down the road, I can tell this provided closure and a way for him to deal with his emotions. And because rituals are that. Rituals can help us uh flesh out these things inside of us in the unconscious, or that are things that are ideal, like things that are kind of ethereal, we can put them into flesh and bones and blood and paper and pen and fires and rocks and rivers, and you it becomes no longer some ethereal or cloud-like thing. It becomes a tangible thing. And when we embody these things, even better sometimes, we can because sometimes as humans, we just want to do something, you know what I mean? And so, okay, here, do this. And it actually can release something in the unconscious or in the uh in the in the brain, like in the mind that you just like you. So for another example, a friend of mine was kind of having a hard time, and this person was telling me some stories, things that that they were struggling with, and they kept saying things that were stressing them out. And I said, Oh, you know what? I've I'm noticing those things that you keep telling me are things that you shouldn't be picking up. Those are things that like you have nothing to do with. Uh, you can't impact those in any way. So you should let those go. Well, that's easy for me to say, but I think she needed like something kind of concrete in a ritual is like a concretization of the ideal. The ideal here is let it go. Well, okay, what does that mean always? I don't know what that means, you know. Uh celebrate your 25 years of marriage. Okay, how? I don't what do you mean? Well, throw some rocks in the river, you know. So I told her, I go, hey, whenever a thing comes up in your daily life at work and you're stressed out about it, but you know you can't impact it or affect it, write that thing down in a piece of paper, like get it from your head into your body on a piece of paper, then tear it out, crumple it up, and throw it in the garbage and say out loud something like, I can't control this. I don't, it's not my business, and throw it in the garbage, you know? And she's doing that because sometimes you just have to embody these things that kind of live in our heads or in the unconscious, and it really helps. So uh today, hey, what small ritual might you create? One that you can, you know, do every day or every week? Or maybe it's just one thing that you're like, hey, I need to do this to celebrate this one, celebrate this one moment, or to let go of that one person, or to grieve that uh that one uh that one relationship that ended. Maybe you need to like take a bottle of water and go out to a tree and and to release some grief or sadness, just dump this water out over a tree and like pour one out, you know, on this tree, and uh, and or maybe you need to like go and graffiti a piece of canvas that you have and just get it out, you know, or maybe you need to write a poem or a letter to yourself to encourage yourself and um or light a candle and just but somehow when you show up, or maybe you invite others to do it with you, and when you all show up and you're like, hey, we're all gonna do this thing, or we're gonna throw a rock or dump this out and say a few words, and uh it it it somehow takes you out of ordinary space and ordinary time into sacred space and sacred time. And it's deeply human. And I just wonder if it might help you in some way. But know that you won't know it right away because rituals are kind of hard to explain and they they're kind of like they're they're not, yeah. I don't know. It's so it takes some time to like, but it does something to the inside of us because rituals indeed shape who we are. All right, if you try it, let me know. All right, love you guys, peace. Hey, if you enjoy this show, I'd love to have you share it with some friends. And don't forget you are always welcome to join us in person at Central in Elk River at 8 30, which is our liturgical gathering, or at 10 o'clock, our modern gathering. Or you can check us out online at clcelkriver.org. Peace.
