On chasing rabbits, rabbit stew, and why the detours were the good part.
August 11, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung
So … I have a confession to make, and anyone who has sat through my preaching over the last thirty odd years already knows it.
I chase rabbits.
Not literally. Well occasionally literally and we’ll get to that. But mostly I mean the other kind. I’ll be going along fine, making my point, everyone tracking with me, and then some small shiny thing will dart across the path of my mind, a memory, a joke, a completely unrelated fact I read in a waiting room in 1994 and off I go. Into the trees. After the rabbit.
Some of those holes I climb out of gracefully. Some of them I do not. I have, on more than one Sunday, gone down after a rabbit and come up somewhere so far from where I started that I had to more or less invent a bridge back to the sermon. I’d like to tell you I’ve grown out of this with age. I have not. I’ve only gotten better at pretending the detour was intentional.
I used to apologize for it. Now I mostly just warn people in advance. I’ll try to stay on the path today. I can’t guarantee it.
The literal rabbit came a few years ago.
I was out on my usual running trail, minding my own business, and a rabbit, a genuinely charming one, sitting there in the grass looking at me bolted off into a thick stand of trees.
And I want you to understand: I turned. Mid-run, at my age, I actually turned to follow it. Some ancient instinct came awake in me. There goes something interesting, let’s see where it lives. I was three or four strides off the path and into the underbrush before the sensible part of my brain caught up and asked what exactly I imagined I was going to do if I caught it.
I stopped. I looked around at the trees. I went back to the trail.
But I have thought about that rabbit ever since. Me, sixty-some years old, a grown minister with a schedule, sprinting off a perfectly good path after an animal that wanted nothing to do with me.
Me and my rabbits.
Now, while we’re on the subject. Has anyone here ever eaten rabbit stew?
I did, once, years ago in Kelowna. One of the saints of that congregation, and she genuinely was one, invited Sue and me to her home for dinner, and she’d made rabbit stew. She was very proud of it.
I sat down, looked at the bowl, and asked what I thought was a perfectly reasonable question: “Where did you get the rabbit? I saw some running around your backyard.”
She said, a little sharply, “No. It’s from Nova Scotia.”
Which raised more questions than it settled. They eat rabbit in Nova Scotia? Is that a Canadian thing? I had heard the Vikings were through there at some point, perhaps it goes back to them. I was, I confess, several rabbit holes deep before the bowl had even cooled.
So we ate it. And I’ll be honest with you, because we’re friends by now: it was fine. Perfectly fine. But it looked considerably better than it tasted.
Which, come to think of it, is true of a great many things.
Here’s the thing I’ve made peace with, somewhere in the last decade.
I am never going to stop chasing rabbits. It’s how I’m built. My mind goes sideways. It always has. In a world of people who move in tidy straight lines from A to B, I am a man who leaves the trail because something moved in the grass.
For years I treated that as a flaw to be managed, apologized for in sermons, corrected in meetings, something a more disciplined man would have licked by now.
But I’ve noticed something, looking back. Almost everything I know that’s worth knowing, I found down a rabbit hole. Not on the main path. Not in the outline. The conversations that changed me happened when someone said something offhand and I went after it instead of staying on schedule. The stories I still tell were things I noticed sideways. The best parts of my life were, almost without exception, detours.
The path gets you where you were already going. The rabbit takes you somewhere you didn’t know existed.
So I’ve stopped apologizing. If you’re one of those people whose mind bolts into the trees, who can’t get from one end of a story to the other without three digressions, I’d gently suggest you stop apologizing too. That wandering is not a defect in your attention. It might be the most alive thing about you.
I’ll still warn people in advance. I’ll still try to stay on the path.
But if something moves in the grass, I make no promises.
Richard
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Prior Newsletters from Slow Wisdom :
The City That Forgot Me … August 4th
The Day Jesus Was Rude … July 28th
My Fifty Dollar Titanic … July 21st
I Shouted At The Prime Minister … July 15th
I Told My Church I Ate Grasshoppers … July 7th
Thankful For The Hospital Food … July 1st
My Goal Was To Finish and Not Die … June 24th
The Wedding Afro … June 17th