Chaplain Steve Rekedal
Ordained chaplain · Grief care · Bilingual ministry
Steve Rekedal is an ordained, bilingual English–Spanish chaplain whose service has included prisons, hospitals, hospices and independent churches in the Austin area. In the 1980s he served the U.S. Navy League in Panama and later became an elder and board member of churches in Virginia, California and Texas. With his wife, Mary Jo, he has worked with couples preparing for marriage, families in crisis and couples rebuilding after infidelity.
His ministry followed a substantial business career. Rekedal studied at the University of Minnesota and worked internationally in life and health insurance across Latin America, Asia and Europe. He served as an insurance consultant, executive vice president and chief marketing officer, and chief executive. The combination is unusual: an executive accustomed to complex systems who, in grief care, begins by removing almost everything except another person’s presence.
His approach to a family that has just lost a child begins with silence. When he does speak, his first question is likely to be “How are you doing?” He rejects consolations such as “Your child is better off” or “God must have had a reason.” In the first minutes, those phrases deny the magnitude of the loss and the anger that may accompany it.
“If I’m gonna console somebody who’s just lost a little one, the first consolation approach I’m going to use is silence. And then I will, at some point — and just by being there, they’re aware that’s something, and I’m there, that’s fine — but they’re so caught up. And the next question — or the first question I would ask them — is, ‘How are you doing?’”
Drawing on C. S. Lewis, Rekedal describes love as a willingness to risk being hurt. He sees parents who have lost a child as people who took a profound risk for love. “The beginning ingredient has to be the human touch.” Questions about God and mortality may eventually matter, but immediately after loss, theological explanation can wait.
“C.S. Lewis would say that the ability to love is the ability to risk. And so a family that’s been bearing children and now lost one — they have tremendous risk that they put themselves in for a tremendous outpouring of love that comes with it. And so does God show up in this, I think, looking down from it.”
In his Police Chaplain Project interview The First Ten Minutes , Rekedal discusses silence after a child’s death, the harm of reflexive theological explanations, the courage built into parental love and the human presence that must come before answers.
Rekedal brought a life of executive decisions and international work to the place where no decision can undo what happened. There he chose silence, respect and the courage of ordinary presence, holding back every answer until grief had first been met by the human touch.