Istanbul, the First Time

Before we ever set foot in South Africa, we had a 30+ - hour layover in Istanbul, and that was the first culture shock of the trip (for my teens). We took the kids through the Hagia Sophia — built by the emperor Justinian, who put down a riot over famine and inflation by slaughtering thirty thousand people at a rally he’d called under the banner of peace, then finished his church and declared it greater than Solomon’s temple. We stood there marveling at sixteen hundred years of craftsmanship and grandeur, while also pondering how briefly any human plan, monument, or empire actually lasts—the building has changed hands and meanings so many times since Justinian that it’s a mosque now, and the girls were made to cover their heads before entering.

Why We Came

Before we ever boarded a plane for this trip, I told Judah—my faithful assistant—that one of my ambitions before the end of the year was to finish three kits of teaching material for the fellowships I endeavor to serve. Here’s the need those three kits are meant to meet.

In eighteen years, we’ve grown from two congregations to sixteen, scattered around the world. That’s a real answer to prayer, and it’s exactly what Christ asks of us—families flourishing in church families, all growing into a design for life that is fruitful and enduring. But growth like that carries its own dangers. Most successful ventures fail as they tend to outgrow their initial resources and the boundaries of what first enabled their success.

The men who mentored and apprenticed me—and many others—spent their ministries actively working themselves out of a job. They intentionally handed over, piece by piece, what was once vital to them, to those ready to carry it forward. This act of relinquishment carries its own risks, but it’s a risk rooted in love and trust—trust in each other’s commitment to serve Christ, not ourselves, and ultimately, trust in God as the true builder and creator of His church. That’s the only model I trust.

So, at the beginning of this year, I told our leadership that I believed I needed to invest in three key types of materials—resources that would, in part, replace some of the direct involvement of a few of us in teaching and formational ministry. I envisioned three comprehensive kits, which we could hand over directly to ministry teams worldwide. The goal was to ensure our growth was sustainable and scalable through these clear, instructional kits—perhaps more enduring than the presence of just a few in ministry.

The first is a Foundational Truth kit — the essential doctrines of the faith, the kind Hebrews 6 calls elementary: the nature of God, baptisms, repentance and faith, etc. The second is a Discipleship kit — simple, practical guides for recovering biblical patterns of family, fatherhood, motherhood, kingdom finances, and how we relate to one another. The third is a Cultural Distinctives kit, addressing what’s genuinely unique about the intentional life we’re trying to rediscover — making clear that what sets us apart is intentionality and greater personal responsibility, not strangeness for its own sake. ;-)

None of this rests on work I did myself. My father and our first generation already laid the foundation, at a depth few new believers could enter on their own — and that’s an irreplaceable gift. Our job is simpler: to distill that depth into something small enough for every believer, every teacher, every local pastor to actually grasp and use.

Of the three kits, two are mostly finished. The Discipleship kit is the one most incomplete—and it’s the one I aimed to advance the most while in South Africa.

While Here in Africa

I told Judah I hoped to tackle discipleship here for two reasons. First, it’s what this small fellowship expressed they most needed. Second — and this is just how I’m wired — my writing workflow only really works face to face. I need to sit across from real people, hear their actual questions, feel what they’re afraid of or longing for, and minister straight to that. Something happens in that setting that I can never manufacture staring at a blank page: the Holy Spirit anoints the flow. In practice, my process goes like this: teach it live, transcribe the recording, edit the transcript, and hopefully what’s left is a pamphlet.

So I told our team I hoped to come home with a large portion of the Discipleship kit finished — or at minimum, a stack of transcriptions ready to edit.

By God’s grace, the teaching part of the trip was successful as planned. Although I would have preferred to hear Brother Rowan’s much more engaging South African accent, I was grateful to accept their invitation to preach the two Sunday services, as well as three additional midweek teachings each week on topics such as: What Is the Family, What Is a Father, What Is a Mother, The Sovereign Household, Kingdom Economics, and the Family Table. This was in addition to leadership team meetings, women’s meetings led by my mother, small coffees and conversations with individuals, and supper with families most evenings—all contributing to a busy and fruitful season. (If you have discipleship topics in mind that you wish I would develop, please mention it in the comments.)

I’m coming home having felt like I served and strengthened this fellowship. But I’m also coming home better equipped to serve every fellowship I love around the world with material that—in the near future—will hopefully require much less of me to deliver it.

A Story Worth Filming

The other project running underneath every single day we were here was a documentary. Rory is producing it, and it will tell the story of how this community got here: from a conventional Baptist church elsewhere in South Africa, to a people now pursuing an intentional, shared culture of life together. Fourteen hours by road from where they started. A million miles from who they used to be.

The team recorded roughly ten hours of interviews. They’re sitting on terabytes of footage. Between the writing, the storyboarding, and the sheer volume of material, what we’re hoping to produce is a real witness—proof of the culture of life God’s grace and love can create, springing from about as unlikely a place as you could name: the far southern tip of the African Cape.

Growing the Table

We also guided the expansion of the leadership team from two local brothers to five, bringing on board three younger men with evangelistic, administrative, and youth-ministry gifts into the circle where this fellowship’s future gets shaped. None of this amounted to ordination—these were provisional appointments, filling critical roles even if only for a season. But a team stretched thin for too long just got stronger, and the whole body will benefit.

Connie Turns Sixteen

Connie turned sixteen while we were there. We snuck away for a morning together — her family and others from TX and SA — out into the kind of nature you don’t get back home. But the gift that landed for her with just as much impact came from people she’d known less than three weeks: small birthday gestures from families in the fellowship who barely knew her yet. She was blessed to tears—(and not just by the numerous birthday songs ;-).

Every Night, Someone’s Kitchen

Every night we were there, our group of about eighteen split up across different homes, gathering around someone’s kitchen table or living room — breaking bread, telling stories, laughing, sharing whatever grace we had for each other, making the most of the time.

Our times of corporate worship were, without exaggeration, beautiful — and every one of them was followed by a real meal, served outside, where the grace we felt in worship kept passing back and forth across the table.

Keeping up with the normal rhythms of ministry from a different time zone made for its own kind of comedy — conference calls at strange hours, daily Bible studies squeezed in wherever we could find them. But if anything, it turned into a special season. I’ve been walking the kids through the New Testament chapter by chapter since January 1st, and in South Africa we reached the last book: Revelation. We’ll finish it in the next couple of weeks, in September. If you’d like to follow along, the daily Bible study I record for my kids is open to anyone who wants to join us.

I End Up in the Kitchen

I love to cook, and people are kind enough to tell me I’m fairly decent at it. For whatever reason, no matter where in the world I travel, I tend to end up in the kitchen at some point — and this trip was no exception. Some nights it was fried rice thrown together at midnight out of whatever ingredients we could scrounge, feeding a crew of teenagers who’d caught the late-night munchies. Other days it was fried chicken experiments, solely for Aviva’s capstone cookbook project, Cooking with Dad. Judging by the reactions in the kitchen, that recipe won’t disappoint.

But the big kitchen event was our family teaming up to cook one big meal for the whole fellowship, as I have often done on such visits. This time, we went with an Indian menu: chicken tikka masala, beef biryani, chutneys and sauces (mango-lime-chili, a coriander sauce, curried red onions), garlic-herb naan, and something cold and sweet to wash it all down.

A Song Out of Fragments

The occasion was worth the effort. August marked eleven years since Rowan and Gaylin — the pastor and his wife — were baptized in the Spirit and set out on this journey in earnest, and it also marked eight years since this fellowship put down roots on this particular piece of land. Two anniversaries, one long table.

We ate outside around a beautiful spread, finished with local ice cream, and then all of us squeezed into the bakery for a night of singing and sharing.

I’ve been teaching my girls something in the kitchen for years now: that food, like music, has no real one-note-wonders. You need complementarity: richness against brightness. You need something smooth set against something that snaps. You need sweet and spicy and salty and sour all doing their separate jobs at once — because it’s only when those textures and flavors and colors combine and complement that individual notes become chords, and chords make a kind of “song.”

I know how that sounds, over-the-top, said about food. But it’s a valid principle. Yet, sitting in that bakery the other night, listening to voice after voice — every one of them completely different, every one of them loved exactly as much as the last — I realized I needed to stretch the metaphor even a bit further. I stood up and told the room: the bright, aromatic chutney — mint, cilantro, fresh jalapeño — only works because it’s set against the rich, dark gravy of the masala. The body of Christ works the same way: it’s a kaleidoscope of backgrounds and faces and ethnicities and histories, each one necessary, none of them extra.

That night proved it. It started with a brother named Gift, singing “Blessed Assurance, Jesus Is Mine” in a rich Zimbabwean baritone that filled every heart in the room. Then my daughters, voices blended tight and lilting: “We don’t need to be related to relate — we don’t need to share genes or a surname. You are my chosen family.” Then a cowboy from Tennessee — Rory Feek — singing “Don’t let the chain of love end with you.” Then Didi, an Israeli Jew follower of Jesus, belting out “I Will Sing of the Goodness of God” with tears running down her face while the rest of us got swept up right along with her. And Andrew closed it out: “I see the glory, but the only way to get there is together.”

Together. Every different note, every different story and face and history and voice, folding into one design — the kind that turns lost notes into harmony, lost people into a song, and fragments into something whole.

Home

So we’re wrapping up this trip with full hearts. People here keep telling us they were changed and strengthened through the visit. Truth is—we’re not emptier for anything we poured out here; somehow the more we gave, the more we ended up carrying home. We felt loved. Honored. Ministered to, as much as we ever ministered to anyone. Even the teenagers had tears in their eyes as we waved goodbye and bumped down the dirt track from the new church building, back out onto the road that would eventually lead us home. Thank you for your love and prayers—we felt it; your South African brothers and sisters felt it.

Before we actually left Cape Town, we made one more stop: a craft market full of artistry and workmanship that looks nothing like what we’re used to at home, and earns every bit of its own praise regardless. Coming out of the exhibit hall, we passed a white-bearded guy in sandals selling electric guitars built out of repurposed oil cans — yes, oil cans. Rory struck up a conversation and had one in his hands within minutes. The man asked if he’d heard the story of the famous singer who’d recently come to faith, and whether the kids knew the song he’d said was pivotal to him: “One Day at a Time, Sweet Jesus.”

Right there on the wharf, fishing boats behind us and strangers ambling past, the kids started singing while Rory picked it out on the oil-can guitar — “Give me the strength to do every day what I have to do, show me the stairway I have to climb.” We turned the corner afterward and ran straight into a South African band in full swing, dancing and belting out their own tunes, faces lit up with effervescent cheer. Two songs, about as different as songs can be, both beautiful. I was glad the kids got to encounter both of them in the same afternoon.

Then we drove to the airport, and the road did what it does outside Cape Town: it ran for miles past “informal settlements” — tin and wood and scrap metal shacks stacked on top of each other, no real streets, outhouses lining the edges. The van went quiet. The questions came out tense and whispered: How long have they lived like this? Can they find work? Do they have running water? Even the most beautiful, prosperous corner of Africa has a way of rearranging your sense of scale, and sobering you up fast on whatever problem you’d been complaining about the week before.

We made it through the ten-plus-hour flight from Cape Town and landed in Istanbul for the layover home. Somewhere in the airport we discovered that a burger meal for two runs about seventy-eight dollars — no joke — which is how a family that had never once taken its kids to McDonald’s for breakfast ended up doing exactly that. The fries were thin and crisp, and the coffee was better than it had any right to be. I sat there with my three teenagers and one of their friends, and we spent the next half hour talking through multiculturalism, Islam, tolerance, and what it means to hold Christian conviction in the middle of all of it.

It had actually started on our first layover here, weeks earlier, when the kids first realized they were the minority — surrounded by a language they didn’t speak, a faith they didn’t practice, women covered head to toe in black with nothing showing but their eyes, that severity standing shoulder to shoulder with Western fashion as loud and exposed as anything back home. The airports themselves told their own story: gleaming corridors, vaulted ceilings, a Prada window here and a Gucci window there, sitting in almost exact inverse proportion to the poverty just outside the terminal walls.

We talked, this time around, about the fears you hear back home — “Muslims taking over, that kind of language” — and about why it’s actually healthy to stand in a crowd that doesn’t share your history, your values, your view of God, and still recognize they share your humanity. Rejecting a culture just because it’s different from yours is wrong. The real battleground has to be truth, and history, and love, and fruit — not simply, I don’t like you because you’re not like me. I told them that framework is exactly what’s broken in the cultures we’re often quickest to criticize, and that the danger, even in the criticizing, is sliding into that same posture ourselves.

We’re boarding that final flight now — twelve hours into Dallas — with hearts that ache for the three younger kids we left at home, grateful for FaceTime keeping us close across an ocean and a string of time zones. But we’re boarding with full hearts and changed perspectives all the same. My older teens will have plenty to write about, and I suspect the conversation that started over a McDonald’s breakfast this morning isn’t finished. Their worlds have expanded on this trip, and I’m hoping their hearts have too: more compassion, more understanding, more humility, more care for a world that is fragmented and hurting and often angry, but also unbelievably beautiful, and ready for hope. A great, big, dazzling planet of tragedy and love, of darkness and light, of filth and hatred and debauchery, and faith and goodness.

It’s a good thing that in all that vastness, we know exactly who our family is. Seasons like this are how we invest in the life, light, and unity of a small fellowship on the other side of the world, where real change has already begun and is spreading—father to son, pastor to the next seeker who walks through the door. My dad used to say it feels like dropping a small pebble into a great ocean, but the ripples from one stone can travel farther than you’d think. We are the ripples of other people’s lives, laid down before us. May ours keep going out too — rings of hope, pointing toward the One in whom alone is life, and that more abundantly.

It will be wonderful to be home. But in the truest sense, we already were home. Home in the will of God. Home with people we love and trust. Home where He makes everything beautiful in its time and place.

Two and a half years. That’s how long it’s been since I stood among our brothers and sisters in South Africa, and this first week of August, I’m going back. But this trip carries two firsts that make it unlike any before it.

The first: I’m taking my mother. Two years ago, when we last went, mom was buried in the daily care of her elderly parents, both of whom have since finished their race. That door is open now, and I get to watch her meet, for the first time, the hearts of gold that make up that fellowship.

The second: I’m taking three of my own children. Aviva. Connie. Sean. Teenagers, all of them, and none of them has ever left this continent. I’ll say—just writing their names next to the word overseas puts something like a butterfly in my chest. Not dread. Anticipation. I know what happens when a young heart that has only read about the wideness of the world suddenly gets to stand in it. Something expands that never shrinks back down.

But what I didn’t expect going in was that the real mission trip would start two months before we ever boarded a plane, right here in our kitchen.

Two Questions

It’s been a full year already. Three teenagers deep into an expanding high school curriculum. A flock of sheep to tend. Sean gentling Lyric, his Mustang colt.

Aaron working with his donkey. A batch of meat birds, a standing flock of laying hens, a breeder line of heritage turkeys. Our monthly booth at the farmers market. Our table open—often more nights than not—to guests from around the world, their stories weaving into ours until you can’t always tell where one thread ends and the next begins.

Add to that the daily Bible study I record for The Upward Way, the meetings, the preaching and teaching, the endless one-on-ones with various leaders and their wives that Beck and I separately engage in. Then writing the discipleship packets we’re developing, the high-school curriculum work, the conferences and challenges—wow, exhausting just to name some of it.

So when Beck and I sat down to talk about a possible trip to South Africa, I told her plainly: I did not want my ministry to argue with my family. I wanted, if it was possible at all, for this trip to be the rare place where the two stopped competing and became the same thing—where serving the church overseas and shepherding my own teens through the most pivotal stretch of their lives occurred at once.

The math, though, was daunting. Five tickets, not two. About $1,500 a head. We could not simply write a check for five. So we sat the kids down and put it to them clearly—the opportunity and cost they would have to embrace together, if they felt it was worth it. There were two questions we needed the kids to answer and commit to.

One: If you go, are you ready to let God stretch you—to sing and serve and share in front of people you’ve never met, past whatever comfort zone you’ve been living inside?

Two: Can you raise roughly $1,500 apiece—$4,500 total—in the next two months?

We watched their faces. This was a door they’d been waiting years to walk through, and they knew they wanted to do it. Aviva graduates this fall and still has a full course load. Sean and Connie would have to keep up with their own schoolwork remotely. We made a plan straightaway: lemonade stands, part-time jobs, and—because these are my children and because food is a big part of our family’s craft—we would be doing a great deal of great cooking.

The Hundred-Dollar Cup

The first fundraiser was the simplest one. Sean bought the cups, borrowed the coolers, packed the ice, and set up outside on a Saturday hot enough to make the whole idea seem inevitable. He came home that evening without much of a smile.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

“We covered expenses,” he said.

“Anything else?”

He hesitated. “A brother—one who’s actually coming with us on the trip—he handed me a 100-dollar bill for a single cup. I tried to give it back. Tried three or four times. I was afraid I’d offend him if I kept pushing, so I finally just took it.”

“You did the right thing,” I told him. “But that’s not exactly proof of concept for the lemonade stand.”

“No, sir,” he agreed. “We’re going to need something else.”

He was right. And the something else, it turned out, was already simmering—quite literally—in Aviva’s capstone project.

Learning the Margins

Aviva is not only finishing high school this year; she’s building a cookbook, Cooking with Dad, out of everything I’ve taught her about seasoning and method over the years. We’d set a goal of eight finished chapters before we left for Africa. The trip, the fundraiser, and the cookbook wouldn’t stay three separate projects. They were one.

So the second fundraiser was Salisbury steak—one of the recipes bound for that cookbook, tested now under real pressure, for real money. Aviva posted it to Mom’s WhatsApp status and had six large family orders before the potatoes were even peeled. All day that Saturday: patties mixed, potatoes soaked and mashed, Connie working the mixer, Tina and Sean running back and forth, and me browning steaks in batches on the flat top to take some pressure (and heat) off the kitchen stove.

I improvised a rich brown gravy on that same flat top—first time ever that way—using the fond left behind from the meat, damming the back edge of the three-foot griddle with foil so it wouldn’t run off into the drip pan. It worked. But more than once that afternoon, the pressure in that kitchen climbed high enough that tempers started running as hot as the flat top. We stopped. More than once. Because there is no version of this story where we’ll tolerate becoming sour and ugly with each other in the name of doing something noble “for the Lord.” Nope! Either grace was going to hold us all together, or the whole thing wasn’t worth doing.

Grace held. The steaks went out. The families were fed. And somewhere in that chaos, the kids started learning what I’d hoped they would: that food, like almost everything else, comes down to margins. Overbuy your ingredients, and you’ll eat your own profit before you ever see it.

Five Gallons

Then, the next Sunday came the meal idea that nearly burst our limits: Daddy’s tikka masala curry, thirteen family orders, twelve servings each.

We wrestled back and forth on the pricing. Aviva wanted to charge no more than $65—already, in her mind, too much to ask. “Honey, you cannot do this without a profit,” I told her. “There’s no point in serving at a loss. It won’t get you to Africa.” We landed on $85—still a fair price for a meal of this scale, serving twelve, and enough, we hoped, to actually add to the tally.

Aviva and I spent an entire Saturday in that kitchen, after my leadership meeting ran long. Whole spices bloomed in smoking ghee until they went dark and fragrant—chili, anise, cardamom, cumin, black peppercorn, clove, cinnamon—strained out, onions dropped into that infused oil and cooked down slow until they became the rich flavor foundation for the whole curry—and wow, how the house became redolent with Indian spices! Mango-onion-mint chutney. A jalapeño-cilantro-yogurt sauce sharp enough to cut through the richness. A vegetarian biryani with vegetables marinated in masala yogurt. Sean grilling chicken breasts to exactly 155 degrees and pulling it early, trusting the carryover heat to finish the job above the safe line. Connie chopping it all down. Aviva folding it into the sauce I’d built.

Thirteen orders. Twelve servings each. A ten-gallon pot on the stove, and somewhere past the halfway mark, we started doing math out loud, in a panic, because we weren’t certain the pot really held ten gallons at all. Beck got Sister Grace on the phone: “Are you sure this pot is really ten gallons?” Soon, we were dangerously sliding the heavy pot out over the edge of the counter, barely holding on by one edge, with Beck beneath it, shining her phone light into the obscured bottom, desperately hunting for a stamped number we could trust.

We had five gallons of curry and twenty-six quart containers waiting to be filled, and no margin left to be wrong.

We filled them anyway—one after another, sauce ladled to the very lip of every quart, until the pot scraped clean and the last container sealed with not half an inch of headroom to spare. Twenty-six quarts. Exact. Every one of us standing there flushed and sweating, staring at a picnic table covered in curry and biryani and two kinds of chutney, wondering how we’d landed so precisely on enough.

We’d told my mother—Grandmama—we’d bring and share supper with her that night from what we thought was one extra meal set aside. Then Beck found a missing text on her iMessage, not her WhatsApp where most of the orders had come, and we realized we were a meal short, not a meal ahead. We had to walk over and tell Grandmama and her guests we had nothing to share after all—that we’d have to scramble something else together.

What we didn’t know yet: Aunt Toni had shown up at the last minute having booked that thirteenth meal herself, then insisted we bring it to Grandmama’s and eat it together at one table. We tried to hand her money back. She refused every time. “This is for the kids,” she said, “and their trip.” So we sat around Grandma’s living room—all of us, the meal we thought we didn’t have—laughing over a curry that had come down to a soot-covered pot and a scraped-clean spoon.

What They Were Actually Learning

The next Sunday dinner would be the most loved but the lowest profits yet. Daddy’s kafta with almond rice pilaf, tzatziki, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh—that one seemed to come together more smoothly. We began to feel like we were getting this down. But by 11 P.M. on Saturday night, I descended into the kitchen and found Aviva still at the island, a massive three-foot-diameter bowl before her, filled with kofta meat mixture as she meticulously shaped each one.

“Daddy, we’ve got this. Please let us do it! You have to preach in the morning,” she protested, trying to herd me back upstairs, but I already had my gloves on. Soon, my playful teasing and boisterous melodies had Connie and Aviva both laughing. We had created a makeshift assembly line: I was shaping the outlines and throwing each kofta across the island, which they had to catch and finish forming before I could send the next one flying. Crazy, yes—crazy fun and utterly wonderful.

So, the tally after the Kofta Sunday showed we’d offered our best flavors and blessed a bunch of families but netted less than expected. Still, it was success!

Finally, weeks into the effort, by this past Thursday, we were two-thirds of the way to $4,500, further than any of us, including the kids, had imagined possible eight weeks earlier.

That same day, Brother Gary called Beck. He was hosting a gathering Friday for about 115 seniors and wondered if Aviva could cater the whole meal—entrée, drink, dessert. The first response around the family was that Friday was needed for market prep before Saturday. I told them: learn to pivot. This was a better opportunity than the market. We told Brother Gary yes, and asked him to name a fair price. He landed on $25 a plate, and we built the meal to fit it.

In the middle of my busy Thursday, I looked at my schedule and saw Beck had booked a meeting with my 17-year-old Aviva. She sat across from me. “I need ideas for this meal, Daddy,” she said.

We worked backward from what a room full of senior citizens would actually want—nothing too rich, nothing too spicy—through six different menus, before landing on a taco bowl: cilantro-lime rice, charro beans, fajita chicken, street corn, a bright lime dressing, warm tortillas, and a sparkling mint lemonade to make it feel like summer. For dessert, I told her: raspberry panna cotta. Simple, yummy, and—this mattered as much as the flavor—much of it could be made ahead, so the pressure wouldn’t all land at once on the night itself.

A hundred and fifteen people turned into more than that by the time service started. I didn’t even make it up to the commercial kitchen. This one belonged to the kids—Aviva, Connie, and Sean, with Tina, Cousin Christine and Aaron pitching in, though they aren’t part of this trip. Dinner service went smoothly. Though they ran ten short on panna cotta and covered the gap with ice cream, because that’s the other half of the lesson: you plan meticulously, and then you pivot without panicking when the plan runs out after more customers show than booked.

What Actually Got Raised

We tallied it up this past Sunday morning, and the total told its own story—it ran well past what a $25-a-plate meal should have brought in. Leafing through the basket of contributions, the bills said what the seniors hadn’t: an extra twenty folded in behind another bill, a check written for twice the ask, more than one plate simply paid for twice over. We all felt grateful . . . And more than a little humbled.

Between the lemonade stand’s 100-dollar cup, the Salisbury steak dinners, the Fourth of July sloppy joes and watermelon slush, the tikka masala, the kafta night, and 100-plus taco bowls for Brother Gary’s seniors—plus part-time job checks Sean and Connie kept steadily handing over—we reached and passed our $4,500 benchmark.

We haven’t left the driveway for the airport yet, but it already feels like we’ve traveled a great distance. Aviva knows something now about margins and portions, labor, and which menus generate buzz and which do not. The three of them know better how to keep their hands moving, and they’re learning how to prevent their tempers from flaring when a deadline and a hot stove close in on them in the same room. Every family powwow and huddle—and there have been more than usual—has left us more humbled, more committed, more respectful of each other, and determined to become what God wants us to be to serve, to love, and to bring Him honor.

We added it up last night and figured that more than 650 individual portions have been served. And the kids know—more personally than ever—what a privilege it is to serve so many dear souls whose encouragement and love make the food and effort seem paltry and light by comparison. Business is only as good as the relationships it honors: all the families who supported the effort and paid more than asked, never knowing how tight our margins were. They’re grateful for a single aunt who bought a family meal only to share it with us that same busy night, an elderly minister who handed a 17 year old her first catering job, a Papaw who bought the Salisbury steak meal and also gave twice the amount at the senior supper.

Most of the best things didn’t make it onto our spreadsheet.

So on this Tuesday morning, before a single mile of the actual journey, I’m grateful—not in the generic, general way, but specifically: for a wife who drafted WhatsApp announcements and rode herd on the chaos of teenage food production; for three teenagers who tied on some aprons and picked up grill tongs and did not once quit when the numbers seemed impossible; for a community of people who showed up with interest, jobs, and trust exactly when it was needed.

We are departing for South Africa this very evening. Our family forms just a small part of the team traveling there—quite a crew of individuals talented in music, teaching, and storytelling (to help the small church get its message of hope). Indeed, our family will engage heavily in teaching and discipleship as well. Yet, earlier this summer, we all found ourselves together in a kitchen infused with the aroma of cardamom and clove—an experience that, I suspect, will leave us changed, no longer quite the same people who embarked on this journey.

Thank you all for your love and continued prayers—we’ll be carrying your grace and greeting to your brothers and sisters on the Western Cape, across the pond!

Asi

Yesterday evening, our supper table was full.

Beck and I were there with our six children, along with her brother Mark, his wife Bessie, and their four daughters. Somewhere between passing plates and laughing over the day’s events, we heard a story that gave us fresh insight into the mysterious workings of a four-year-old mind.

Aunt Bessie had taken our little Ella to water flowers at a family cemetery. They trudged across a green pasture toward the small fenced enclosure, each carrying a watering can, trying not to spill too much before they arrived. Ella wriggled beneath the horizontal wooden rails of the fence, carefully protecting what little water remained.

Once inside, Aunt Bessie quietly reminded her, “We need to whisper here. This is a place where we show respect to the memory of those who are no longer with us.”

“Those who died?” Ella asked, making sure she understood.

“Yes,” Bessie answered. “Those who have died and are now with Jesus.”

They watered the petunias and the rosebush beside the grave. Then, without speaking, they slipped back under the fence and started the walk toward the farmhouse. As soon as they were far enough away that conversation felt appropriate again, Ella piped up.

“Aunt Bessie, when my daddy dies, we’re gonna plant him in the front yard like that, and you can come see him.”

She stated it as though she understood—but hidden inside the statement was a question. Am I getting this right? Is this what all of you are doing? Is this mysterious ritual what death means?

Bessie laughed. “Oh my . . . I’m afraid I may die before your daddy does.”

Without missing a beat, Ella reassured her. “Oh, then I’ll come see where you are planted!”

While they had been at the grave, Ella had also noticed the simple wooden cross marking the place. She asked several questions, making certain this really was where her little friend’s mother was buried.

“Yes,” Aunt Bessie explained. “That’s where she is.”

The next day, while playing together, Ella turned to her friend and innocently asked, “So . . . did your mommy die on a cross?” To Indie’s great confusion and protest.

To Ella, the cross wasn’t a symbol of what Someone else had done for her friend’s mother. It wasn’t a testimony pointing beyond itself. It was simply the instrument of death. If there’s a cross there, surely that’s how she died.

Oh, the wonder of raising children. Every parent eventually discovers that children have an astonishing gift for asking the questions the rest of us have long since stopped asking. They force us to explain the difference between metaphor and reality, symbol and substance, ritual and relationship.

But from her father’s perspective, there is something remarkably true about both of Ella’s misunderstandings. Because, in a very real sense, she was right. A life faithfully lived is not merely buried. It is planted.

Even her assumption that they were watering the person instead of the flowers isn’t entirely wrong. There is a sense in which faithful lives continue to be watered. Their memory, their sacrifice, their love, their obedience—all of it continues to nourish those who come afterward. In time, buds appear. Flowers bloom. Fruit grows.

I find a lump rising in my throat when I realize that Ella herself is already flowering from lives she has never known. She is standing beneath the shade of trees planted by people whose names she may never hear. Grains of wheat that fell into the ground . . . and did not remain alone.

Of course, Jesus is the great fulfillment of those words. But the pattern belongs to all who belong to Him. Those who choose not to preserve themselves, but to pour themselves into the soil. Those who lay not only their strengths, but also their weaknesses, not only their victories, but also their wounds, not only their joys, but also their losses into the furrows of God’s kingdom. Not into the cold permanence of a concrete mausoleum, but into living soil—where even our disappointments, our sufferings, our departures, and our deaths become seeds that God Himself waters until they bear fruit long after we are gone.

* * *

This week I happened upon a recording of my father’s preaching from the fall of 2018. By then, cancer had greatly weakened him. It was less a sermon than a father speaking to his family.

He reflected on how Christ came as Life itself—the incarnate Word of God, the Word made flesh. John says that “in Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Then my father reminded us that Peter says the Day Star is to rise in our own hearts, and Paul says we are to shine as lights in the midst of a dark world. Through a frail, aging voice, he pleaded with us not to betray life by surrendering to defeat or hopelessness when God had entrusted us with such a mission.

Then he said something that stuck with me.

“I still have life to give, and I’m going to give it to whoever will listen. If one more message can help someone, I’m going to preach it. If one more writing can strengthen the church, I’m going to write it. Because I still have life to give as long as I have breath.”

Those are the words of someone who understood that life is measured by what is given away. Not by what is preserved.

Later I thought of the writer of Hebrews, speaking of Abel:

“Though he is dead, yet he still speaks.” (Heb. 11:4)

What remarkable words. Death did not get the final sentence. Life did. That is not extinction. That is planting.

* * *

Then I thought again about Ella’s second question. “Did your mommy die on a cross?”

No. Her friend’s mother died the same way my father did. Cancer. But in another—and infinitely deeper—sense, they both did die on a cross. Not literally. Daily. They took up their cross and followed Christ. They spent their lives allowing suffering, disappointment, sacrifice, unanswered questions, and costly obedience to become part of the story God was writing.

And perhaps that’s where the two little misunderstandings come together. A departure from this world only becomes a planting if the life preceding it was lived on a cross. Only when the pain is fastened to Christ. Only when ambitions, pride, control, impatience, self-preservation, and self-rule have already died there. Only then does death become sowing instead of losing. Only then does the grave become a garden. Only then can what appears to be an ending become a beginning.

“If we have died with Him, we . . . shall also live with Him.” (Rom. 6:8)

I do not get to choose the length of my days. I do not get to choose the strength of my body. I do not get to choose whether those I love will leave sooner than I wish. But I do get to choose what my life is about.

I can spend it protecting myself until, at last, I simply disappear into six feet of earth. Or I can become part of a Life that has already conquered death. A Life that walked out of the grave. A Life that made a public spectacle of every power of darkness. A Life that offers a peace that cannot be stolen, a joy the grave cannot extinguish, and a love that “many waters cannot quench.”

I want my life to be a planting—one that keeps bearing fruit long after I am gone.

So perhaps we should take our theology from a four-year-old. Die on a cross. And let it be a planting. Become, in the beautiful language of Scripture,

“the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.” (Isa. 61:3)

Follow Along

Join me each and every day on The Upward Way, a daily chapter-by-chapter Bible reading and discussion series — fresh scriptural insight and deeper spiritual understanding through consistent, verse-by-verse engagement.

The Upward Way on Apple Podcasts

A. Z. Adams on Facebook

We’ve come a long way since then.

Sean and Aaron have been filling every available evening with their uncle Zain — hands-on, unhurried, working to train the boys to perceive and understand and gentle their animals, while training the horses to trust and accept the age-old cooperation between man and a beast many times his size.

It’s been the highlight at the supper table, and often the last thing discussed when the kids come to tell me good night:

Lyric is lunging in the round pen perfectly now… Lyric is taking the saddle blanket… Lyric is now accepting the saddle… I got to put the saddle on myself… Daddy, guess what — I did it today. I sat on Lyric in the saddle for the first time, and she did great.

Zain sends us regular videos via a shared photostream, documenting the progress and keeping us informed of each development as Lyric moves from the mustang arena to our family homestead.

Beck and I sat on our porch swing last night after our guests left, after a very full few days. We listened to the gentle patter of Texas rain on the tin roof and marveled at how cool the weather has been. Out there in the dark, swaying on the swing, we watched for the first time together the latest video of Sean with his Lyric.

Zain filmed with one hand on his phone and his full attention on my son and the mustang in the round pen. You see Sean and the horse — all their movements — like a slow-motion blossoming of trust and coordination. You never see Zain. But you hear his voice the whole time — patient, unhurried, precise — calling out direction after direction, the voice of a man who understands that this kind of moment cannot be rushed.

As Beck and I watched, suppressing the familiar lump in the throat, we weren’t only pleased at Lyric’s real progress. We weren’t only proud of our boy, so yielded and effective under Zain’s guidance. Mostly, we were grateful — for the time, the love, the effort shaping him the way men have guided boys for ages: the unseen voice in the background, behind the boy in the arena who gets all the glory.

“Sean’s gonna saddle his horse on his own for the first time,” Zain said quietly into the camera.

Each time I watch the clip, I find myself watching Sean more than Lyric.

There is a kind of instruction that is itself a form of poetry — spare, precise, rhythmically timed to the moment. That is Zain’s gift. He doesn’t lecture. He doesn’t explain. He speaks only to what is happening right now, in this step, with this animal, in this breath.

“Now pull the saddle down, knowing that she needs a second to acclimate to it coming from above her eye level. Just put it on your hip and walk — so she’s following you now.”

Sean walks. The saddle on his hip. The mare watching.

“She did great with it coming off the rail. It’s beautiful.”

Then: “Don’t bump. Just touch.”

Four words. I’ve been turning them over ever since. There is an entire philosophy of relationship in them — with horses, with strangers, with anyone you are trying to reach. The difference between a bump and a touch is the difference between a flinch and a lean-in. Zain knows this about horses. Watching him with Sean, I’m certain he knows it about boys, too.

The saddling took a while. There were adjustments — the pad too far back, the cinch not yet centered, the latigo needing to be tied in what Zain calls the Texas T knot. Zain stepped in, showed him once, stepped back out. “You’re doing great.” Sean’s hands moved carefully. Lyric stood. She didn’t bolt, didn’t shy, didn’t protest. She licked her lips — a horse’s signal of processing, of releasing tension — and Zain noticed immediately. “She’s already licked her lips. Very nice.”

A man who teaches a boy to pay that kind of attention to a creature — to notice when she licks her lips — is teaching him to see others in ways he’ll spend the rest of his life drawing on.

After the saddling, Zain sent Sean to lunge her — just the walk, circles in both directions, nothing more. “All we want is the walk,” he said. I wrote that down. There is something almost like self-denial in it — the discipline of wanting only what the moment calls for, not more. Sean kept wanting to push; Lyric kept wanting to drift back toward the other horses. Zain held them both steady with his voice alone.

“She thought, she paused, and then she responded. Very nice.”

Then came the moment that made me set the phone down.

Sean stood in the stirrup — not yet mounting, just letting Lyric feel his weight from above — and Zain walked him through everything that came next: how to pat her down, how to pull her head around if she spooked, where to grab the cantle, what his heels needed to say, what his warm calf could communicate against her side without a single word.

“She doesn’t know what your heels feel like — she doesn’t know any of that. So start with pointing your hands where you want her to go, then the kissing sound, then a little squeeze. And if she can feel a fly on her back, she can feel your warm calf right there.”

Then Zain paused and said:

“All of this is so that we don’t push her into a bad experience, we then have to correct. If everything’s a good experience, she won’t have anything bad to reference — and she’ll have no reason to react. Only to trust.”

He was talking about Lyric.

But so, so much more.

Lyric accepted Sean in the saddle for his first ride. It wasn’t long. It wasn’t dramatic. A few slow circles — heels forward, hands steady, Lyric walking, just walking, all we want is the walk — around the pen. When Sean came off, his uncle said simply: “That was beautiful.”

On the drive home this evening, Sean and I were quiet for a while, the way you go quiet after something real. Then he said, almost to himself:

“Dad, my brain has never expanded so much and so fast — trying to train this horse and learning how to handle her, and starting all these high school classes at the same time.”

I made sure he knew how proud I was. How confident I was that his diligence would bring every breakthrough he was reaching for. But mostly I just listened.

Because what I keep seeing, every time I watch that video, is a wild thing learning to trust — learning that pressure does not always mean harm, that something coming from above her eye level is not a threat, that this strange two-legged creature is actually her friend.

And a boy — fourteen years old, red-faced with effort, earnest in the way only boys who are genuinely trying can be — learning the very same things. Learning patience that doesn’t come naturally to him. Learning to read something that doesn’t speak his language. Learning to want only what the moment calls for. Learning, above all, from a man whose instruction is itself a form of love: specific, unhurried, full of grace.

Lyric is coming along beautifully.

But it is the boy who is being trained

.

I pulled away from my desk late afternoon—too many files open on the iMac: ten essays in progress, a theology textbook review, a high school history curriculum half-drafted, emails, messages—and crossed the hallway into the kitchen. The effort to clear my head became instantly successful.

Rebekah was pulling a pan of cranberry-studded biscuits from the oven. Connie was finishing the green beans on the stovetop, sizzling with bits of beef bacon. Tina was setting glasses on the table—real glasses, filled with ice—and filling pitchers with water. Someone else was working the potato masher in a pot with a satisfying rhythm: bink, bink, bink—soft potatoes with fresh parsley from the garden, garlic, and plenty of butter.

Beck turned back to a deep roasting dish full of pheasant breasts that had been brined the day before and just gently poached on a rack over water, covered in foil.

“Honey, taste this.” She held out the glaze—blackberry, apricot, mustard. “What does it need?”

“It tastes perfect to me,” I admitted.

She came back from the laundry room with my food-ready blowtorch. I lined the pheasant breasts up on a rack, skin side up, and went to work—burnishing them until the skins blistered and sizzled, then painting on the glaze, letting it set, blistering again, painting on more. As everything made its way to the table—pickled quail eggs, pickled green beans, mashed potatoes, pheasant, fresh green beans with bacon—the biscuits came out with a golden brown burnish across the top, and Rebekah swizzled glaze over them in long strokes.

Our neighbors, Rory, Rebecca, and Indy, had been invited to join us for supper a few hours beforehand. Nobody’s birthday. No special occasion. Just a family dinner around the table . . . with neighbors.

We took hands, and I asked our Heavenly Father to help us all relax—to let go of the stress and the hurry and the worry of the day, and to fully appreciate this moment: each other’s company, God’s love and joy, and the fabulous food before us.

Rory and Rebecca had never had pheasant, which made it a double treat that they happened to share this particular evening. I explained that the meat had actually been given to us when it passed its use-by date at the grocery store and had been sitting in our freezer for over a year. You wouldn’t have known. It was as juicy and succulent as you could ask for. The sharpness of mustard and vinegar against the sweetness of blackberry and apricot in the glaze was something you simply don’t find at most restaurants in town. And the fire-kissed skin was the crowning touch.

We laughed and talked and exchanged stories and sat around the table the way we do every single night. The way we did the night before, with our family and another family visiting for the first time. The way we did the night before that, with my wife’s extended family. And the night before that, with a table three times that size for someone’s birthday. Five nights out of seven, we’re breaking bread and sharing our food with at least a couple of people beyond our own kids and the regulars who stop in—including Grandmama, who lives next door.

It happens so often, and there’s such a rhythm to it, that it’s easy to miss how special it really is: all of this cooking and hospitality and fellowship flourishing in a house where writing and publishing and ministry and phone calls and the home schooling of six kids and gardening and the care of 120 sheep and 20-some chickens is also happening all the time.

After supper, we moved to the living room. Connie—16 years old — read her vivid, captivating, creative writing crafted for her English lit class. We talked through the upcoming conference, beautiful songs we’d recently heard, poems that had moved our hearts. Grandma at 74, Connie at 16, Rebecca and I, our guests, Ella at 4 playing on the floor by the coffee table, Aaron and Sean at 9 and 14, Tina at 12—all of us in one room, in one conversation, well past nine o’clock.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to write in my newsletter,” I confessed.

Rory looked at me. “Maybe you should write about what makes y’all cook the way you do.”

I smiled and laughed. But he was serious.

“There’s something about what we encounter here that is truly unique,” he said. “People could live their whole lives and almost never sit down to a shared meal where someone put real intention and pride into even a single dish. And yet that describes almost every night and each dish at your house. And it doesn’t feel like a strain or an ordeal—it seems like it’s actually a grace and a joy for you all. Why is that?”

My mother piped up with the story of the cheesecakes I invented at 11 years old and my early interest in mindful presentation—the kind of motherly bragging that makes you want to change the subject quickly.

But Rory’s question deserved a real answer.

I thought of what we used to tell our catering team before the big banquets: “Remember, folks—you’re not in the business of making food. You’re in the business of making smiles and laughter and a wonderful time for people we care about.”

So we set the table with real plates, real forks and knives, and a napkin in a napkin holder—every day. And we get genuinely excited about how we prepare a bird that was given to us for free—because it’s hard to make people happy. But if you can put a smile on someone’s face the moment they see the food—or smell it—you’ve already said something. You’ve told someone, without a word, that they have value. That this time together means something to you.

And if the first bite puts a broader smile still, that’s a double win.

We can break bread in a way that is pure utility—a function to be completed as quickly and cheaply as possible, with as little mess as possible. When it’s only that, it curdles into drudgery, something we half-resent. But if the point is the people—the love we want to share and the laughter we want to have—then the food becomes the canvas. The context that signals the love. It becomes the language of flavor, carrying a simple but profound truth: God gave us a beautiful life, and He did not give it for our utility. He gave it for our enjoyment.

And we might as well get started on the right foot. Or, you might say, with the right bite.

At some point in the evening, Rebekah read aloud a stanza from a song she’d been turning over in her mind. It landed quietly in the room the way the right words sometimes do:

That’s it, really. That’s the whole point.

There is a somewhat infamous story about Betty Crocker bake mixes. The Betty Crocker cookbooks had been a phenomenal success. But when they introduced the mixes, sales were abysmal. Women in that era felt that they had cheated their guests if they served a cake prepared from a box—and they wouldn’t do it. The behavioral psychologist Edward Bernays eventually diagnosed the problem and prescribed the solution: have the housewife add one egg to the mix instead of just water. Sales shot through the roof.

There is something wretchedly sinister in that: the calculated exploitation of a genuine human instinct, weaponized to sell a product. But there is also something honest and revealing in the story. Those women wanted to give something of themselves. They cared about convenience, yes, but they cared more about being able to say that what they brought to the table was their craft, their creation—something from them. If they couldn’t say that, they wouldn’t bring it. A single egg changed everything, because a little participation made it feel like a little part of themselves went into it.

I think most of us still feel this, even if we’ve largely stopped acting on it. We want to give to the people we love. We’d like it to be easy and fast, but something inside us wants it to be a challenge we actually met, a thing we shaped with our own hands. We want to give more than a mix with an egg in it. We want to give gifts of joy. We want to give respect. We want to put smiles on the faces of the people we care about. We want to take hands around the table and feel —in our bones—that this moment matters.

I pointed out to the room that the kind of evening we were having—three generations in one conversation, from Ella on the floor to Grandma on the sofa—would not have been possible if we’d accepted the default culture of mass-produced entertainment. If Rory and I had been watching a game on a screen, we would not have ranged across the topics or drawn out the voices we shared that night. The screen would have spoken for us. It always does.

This is what it means to build an intentional culture. To understand that something as simple as setting the table is setting the context for the relationships you want to have. That something as simple as not having a television closes one cheap option—one convincing counterfeit—and opens space for something that actually satisfies. That spending time on real food made from scratch is longer and messier and more demanding, but it is an expression of yourself—a participation in life that communicates a value you cannot purchase from another’s labor, no matter how convenient the packaging.

We have been sold disconnection in the name of expediency and affordability, and most of us bought it without noticing the cost. Recapturing a different kind of life takes intention. A few deliberate choices, made again and again, slowly build a culture in a home and eventually in a community. The garden doesn’t grow itself. It never has. But what it yields is real and belongs to everyone who helped tend it, and on the right evening, with the right people around a table that someone set with care, you can feel it in the room.

So, God bless your cooking. Your mashed potatoes and your roasted meats, and your biscuits from scratch. God bless your setting of the table and your commitment to keeping conversation the point of the time spent, honoring it with food worth savoring, and letting it continue into the living room long after the dishes are cleared.

Plant the seed. Let the roots run deep.

And try the reward of giving more than a mix with an egg in it.

P.S. This is the 95th issue of this newsletter, published every week without interruption since July 5, 2024. I’m grateful for every reader who has made that rhythm feel worthwhile.

But I want to be clear: my ministerial schedule is full, my writing workload is substantial, and my daily Bible study demands more of my time than ever before. So, beginning in May, I intend to scale back to roughly twice a month, or whenever genuine inspiration presents itself.

I trust you’ll understand—and I hope you’ll stay with me. In the meantime, you can find me every morning on The Upward Way, my daily Bible study podcast— follow along on Apple Podcasts.

It’s a beautiful spring evening. The golden light is glorious.

We ambled down the caliche driveway past Uncle Mark and Aunt Bessie’s, then Pappaw and Mamaw’s new place, commenting on the straight line of fence Pappaw is having installed. We talked about the sheep and how nice it will be to have another paddock for their consumption. It’s remarkable how animals change your view of the landscape—how you begin to see every patch of grass as feed. I sometimes tell Sean to bring the sheep up to the garden and chicken yard to convert the poison ivy into lamb chops—and they do. They devour it, choosing poison ivy over premium Bermuda every time. I guess it’s true what the old song says, “Little lambs eat ivy.”

As we made our way past Uncle Abraham and Aunt Hannah’s, the sunset cast its golden rays toward us, backlighting the verdant peach trees we paused to inspect—their green fruit belying the luscious succulence they promise.

Next, we passed the Linzer place, beautifully framed behind an undulating sea of oats already catching and refracting the light, though still green. I couldn’t resist taking a picture. Then we found ourselves marveling at another orchard, answering questions about pomegranates and peaches, discussing how old the trees must be before they can safely tolerate the undergrazing of the sheep flock.

Just then, as we passed the mulberry tree, nine-year-old Aaron dashed forward—his red bangs bouncing—leaping to snatch a branch and pull it down to eye level, inspecting whether the red, blistered berries were turning black yet. He knows these trees. He and his cousins have spent hours in their branches, painting their faces blue and filling their stomachs with something far more entertaining than cobbler—though they’re pretty fine in a cobbler on a Sunday afternoon in May. These are the same mulberry trees I was climbing when I was nine.

“Oh, Daddy, look over there at that wagon—I like that one,” Aaron said as we turned the corner toward the old stack yards.

“Look—look,” Sean said, and we stopped to watch a spectacle unfolding in the sky above the hayfield. Scissor-tailed flycatchers, their seven-inch coattails streaming behind them, darted and dove—half a dozen of them—like tiny angels waging war against mosquitoes in the heavens. “Look at that, boys.” The birds’ peach-colored breasts caught the evening sun at that height, the sun already beyond our view.

The smell of horses drew us the rest of the way into the long corridors of pens and stalls in the Heritage Mustangs barn.

The smell was just as it was in my earliest memories on Rehoboth Ranch—the blended fragrance of hay and horses, leather and saddle oil. And then there is that other scent the nose cannot detect, but the spirit inhales like oxygen: excitement, adventure, dreams on horseback.

“I wonder if your horse will come up to you,” Aaron said to his big brother as we moved closer to the pen where Sean’s mustang waited.

Through mornings and evenings of faithful training and gentling—of slow trust-building over the past week—the mare had learned to lunge and turn and now welcomed a good pat, even an embrace around the neck. It was almost hard to believe this was a wild mustang that once had to travel twenty miles for a daily drink.

Aaron and I stayed back and watched, our hearts quietly leaning in—hoping, but not wanting to build expectations too high. Sean walked gently, averting his eyes to avoid direct confrontation, easing her anxiety. He stood beside the corral panel, and without hesitation, the horse gave a slight shudder—almost a shrug that said, “Oh well, here’s my new buddy”—and sauntered right up to him, lowering her head for a pat.

She already appeared in better flesh than when we purchased her just a week ago, and her spirit seemed calm, peaceful—even a little trusting.

We walked over to check on Aaron’s donkey, Bridie.

She looked back with quizzical speculation—almost indifference—like a professor eyeing a new pupil, reminding all of us that, unlike horses, she does not depend on maudlin affection.

We laughed and moved on, looking over the horses in their various stages of development.

We headed back home, talking about the Muscovy ducks roosting in the trees—and therefore reproducing, since they keep their nests off the ground—and the geese that had not yet managed to preserve their eggs from predators long enough for a successful hatch. We turned left by the wheat field and made our way back up the lane.

“Look at the bluff, Daddy,” Sean said. “Isn’t it pretty? I don’t remember it ever being this pretty.”

Though the sun had set, iridescent clouds cast hues of salmon and magenta and peach and gold across the bluff.

“What shall I name her?” Sean asked.

“Well, we’ve read through all the suggestions—there were some good ones,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “A lot of good ones. Did any of them click for you?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe not.”

“Well, let’s talk about our favorites—the ones we’ve been discussing since the ride home.” We narrowed it down to three: Chica, Doro, and Lyric. Lyric was one I had just thrown out that evening.

“What does that mean?” Aaron asked.

“A lyric is the words of a song,” I told him.

“Yeah,” Sean said quietly. “And our life is supposed to be like a song. So she’s a part of that song.”

The three of us grew quiet as we walked on.

All at once, Aaron burst out, “Daddy, look—look! Do you see them? The lightning bugs are out! That’s the first I’ve seen!”—and he darted off ahead of us.

“I think I like that,” Sean said.

“What?”

“Lyric. I think that’s what we should call her.”

“ Try it,” I tell him, “Say it out loud: I’m gonna run down to the barn and saddle up Lyric.”

We both smiled at each other. It felt right to me, too.

“It feels real good, actually, Sean,” I admitted.

Aaron came bounding back. “I’ve got one! I’ve got one!”

I pulled out my camera and started snapping, and every time I thought I’d missed the glow, I’d look back and find I had caught it at just the right moment. Oh, these moments—these flashes of inspiration, these small glows of light in a world so often dimmed with gray. I tousled Aaron’s red hair.

“You’d better let it go, buddy. It’s gonna get too hot in your cupped hands.”

“But I want to put it in a jar when I get home,” he said.

“There are plenty more up at the house,” I told him. He opened his hand, and for a moment the firefly lingered against his palm. Then he gave a small shake, and it flitted into the night—flickering with the glow of spring, and inspiration, and beauty, and farm life, and family.

“Well, boys,” I said, “you run on into the house. I’m gonna sit out here in this beautiful air and work on my newsletter.”

They skipped ahead and met up with four-year-old Ella on her bike. Her two older brothers ran on either side of her as she pedaled hard to keep up—all the way into the warm glow of our front porch.

It’s a beautiful spring evening.

The golden light is just glorious.

We’d love to hear from you—if you like the name Lyric, drop a comment below.

5:15 A.M. The car doors closed quietly, so as not to wake the house. Sean, Tina, and Aaron settled in, and we pulled out onto Gholson Road in the dark, eventually joining the mad rush of I-35 north toward Oklahoma. We needed to reach Paul’s Valley by 9:00 to meet Uncle Zain at the Mustang headquarters, where we were considering adopting a three-year-old mare for Sean to train, and a jenny donkey for Aaron to gentle.

To say spirits were high would be a vast understatement. The boys were positively ecstatic, even at that hour.

Uncle Zain had been telling them since December that they might have a chance to participate in a program where youth 8 and up can train one of the wild mustangs being pulled from the great herds across the American West. It’s an important project. When the herds grow too large, disease spreads, grasslands are depleted, and catastrophe can wipe out entire populations of wild horses still roving the open country of Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, West Texas, and beyond. For decades, the Bureau of Land Management has worked to reduce herd pressure through careful management—trying to get people to adopt these horses, integrate them into working life, and spare them from being culled or simply swallowed by the hard arithmetic of an overstrained range.

Under the Heritage Mustangs program that Zain leads, scores of these horses have been gentled, trained, and woven back into rural American life. It is, at its heart, a story of redemption—and an extraordinary education, especially for the young men involved.

So when Zain said Aaron could work to gentle a donkey through October, and Sean could compete to train a mare for the same event, it seemed like an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. Not only for the discipline, the patience, and the character that this kind of intentional stewardship demands—but for the chance to learn it alongside men who had made something real of it, including their own uncle.

After some harrowing near-misses in the churn of Fort Worth traffic, and a GPS that couldn’t decide how late we’d be based on the wrecks and slowdowns along the way, we arrived 25 minutes early.

It was a beautiful drive, especially toward the end—the landscape opening south of Paul’s Valley into undulating hills, scattered rock outcroppings, and a topography that felt like it was reaching for something. Our spirits seemed to rise with it.

We pulled in behind a growing line of trucks and trailers parked unceremoniously along the road, out near a set of working pens in the middle of nowhere. Uncle Zain and his partner in the program, Joel Beckworth, were already there with their kids. Other boys had come with their dads and uncles.

When Aaron and Sean climbed out of the car, they remarked to each other that they couldn’t understand why they were shivering—it was warm outside. They concluded it was excitement, not cold.

I couldn’t help smiling.

I watched the three of them—Sean, Tina, and Aaron—race toward their uncle and cousins and those five pens full of horses and donkeys that represented so many dreams for young hearts. And I marveled, as I always do, at that mysterious blend in the young: the thirst to see and honor wild things, and the deeper yearning to earn their trust. To feed them. To care for them. To hold them. To prove, somehow, that we don’t have to be afraid of each other.

I thought back to my own childhood. Trying to gentle a cardinal caught in chicken-wire. Getting bitten hard on the finger for the effort. The rabbits we caught, the squirrels that lasted a little while in our domestic schemes, the raccoons. I even remember catching some wild coyote pups with my brothers—one of us holding one by the scruff in the back of the truck, deciding it had finally calmed down enough to pet normally. The moment he let go, that thing turned into a wild banshee—snarling, snapping, biting every leg and hand in reach—until it bit its way clean out of the truck, leaped over the side, and hit the ground running without breaking stride, headed back to the wild where it belonged.

But horses were different. Even these wild mustangs, never raised on a farm or fed by hand, some of them from lineages stretching back to the horses the Spaniards brought to the New World five hundred years ago—even still, something lived in them. As we stood at the fence and went quiet, the occasional horse would peel away from the group, curiosity overcoming fear, and edge toward us. Sometimes close enough to almost let you touch its nose.

It moved me more than I expected. There was a latent genetic memory in them—a promise, ancient and unbroken, of partnership between our two kinds. They felt almost ready for a new life.

Sean and I began working through the pens, writing down numbers. 2212. 1357. Before long, we had a list of ten, which we narrowed to four, then two. These would be our horses to bid on, the opening price a mere $25.

Immediately, Sean wanted to know what Uncle Zain thought. What did Joel think?

“I’m not going to make this decision for you,” Zain said. “You tell me first which ones get your attention and why. Then we’ll talk.”

There it was. The chance to step out. To articulate what you feel. To think critically, to trust instinct alongside a trained eye, to say what you see and have someone wiser tell you whether you’re looking at the right things. I watched something begin to form in my 14-year-old boy, and I liked what I saw.

We looked at hooves—whether a horse stood balanced or too straight over a clubbed foot. We examined the hindquarters, looking for rounded flesh rather than sunken hollows. We checked chest width, body length—avoiding what the horsemen call the “limousine look,” favoring something tighter and more compact. We wanted small heads and alert eyes. We watched their movement, noted every scar, confirmed no wound. We talked through every detail.

Sean beamed when Uncle Zain revealed that the horse his nephew had ranked first was also the one he himself had quietly flagged as the best option.

Then it came down to two. “Daddy, which one do you think?”

The tension mounted pleasantly. As we worked through the paperwork—the questionnaires, the promises to the government about fencing heights and feed and care—the program director explained that turnout today was light, so there likely wouldn’t be much competitive bidding.

Almost before we knew it, the director was calling out:

“Does anybody want anything from pen one?”

I looked at Sean and nodded.

“Yes sir,” he said. “We want 1228.”

“Does anybody else want to bid on that horse?”

Silence.

“Sold. Twenty-five dollars.”

Sean was beaming so hard it was hard to look at him without your own face doing something.

By the time we reached the last pen, Aaron was the one holding the bidding card.

“I do,” he said, “4696.”

The attendant wrote it down. Aaron held up the green card. And just like that, we had adopted two animals.

But we had adopted so much more. We had adopted a surge of excitement threaded with challenge and mystery and promise that was going to vibrate in the car all the way home—and in the house, when we told and retold the story to Mom and then Grandmama, and then Uncle Rory, and pretty much anyone who walked through the door.

When we got back in the car, Aaron had already named his donkey.

Bridie.

Leafing through the paperwork to find out which wild herd she’d come from, we discovered she was from Black Mountain, Arizona—the same place the famous Bridie had come from, the donkey who’d been attacked by a mountain lion, later nursed back to health by Uncle Jim. A wild herd of burros had lived on Black Mountain for generations.

Aaron was elated.

We pulled out of the long driveway and onto the rural road, spirits flying, the boys echoing each other across the back seat, “Daddy, thank you for bringing us. Thank you for letting us do this.”

Sean looked over at me. “I don’t know how to say thanks,” he said.

“Yes, you do,” I told him. And then I added, “I know you want to win the prize in October. I know you’re going to work hard for it. But that’s not the prize for me. You care for that animal every day. You put the time into the training. You do exactly what Uncle Zain teaches you, and you show me you’re responsible with this—and come October, that will be more than a thank-you. It’ll be everything this was supposed to be.”

He nodded, his hat bobbing over blonde bangs, and the eyes that looked back at me were something more than a kid’s eyes. A young boy becoming a man.

“I won’t disappoint you,” he said.

“I know,” I answered.

We bumped down the rural road toward the Boomerang Café, where we talked horse names and plans with Uncle Zain and Joel and Misgana and the cousins over chicken-fried steak and eggs and hash browns and gravy.

We made it home before Uncle Zain and the big trailer, but the boys were already down at the working pens when the animals were unloaded.

At supper, everyone was trying to talk over everyone else. Ella told me with great solemnity that she had touched the horse’s nose and it had not bitten her or kicked her. Sean was explaining what Uncle Zain had shown him in the first training session—how to teach the horse that it was safe.

Later, Zain sent me some video from that first day. I watched my oldest son kneel down with a pail of water and extend it toward the wild horse—eyes wide, flinching—as she inched forward and drank from the bucket in his hands.

“Uncle Zain is teaching me,” he said to the camera, “how to help her understand that I am a provider and not a predator.”

I felt a catch in my throat.

I watched Sean reach up and barely graze the horse’s muzzle with his fingertips. She backed away. He lowered his hand and just held the bucket. She came again.

“You’re doing really well, Sean,” I told him later. “Don’t hurry it. Let her set the pace. Your objective every day isn’t to do something to the horse—it’s to finish having increased her trust in you. If that’s happening, you’re winning. If it stops, you’re losing.”

Aaron, meanwhile, had already begun brushing his donkey with a curry comb, her coat catching the light, her ears twitching but still.

There was almost more excitement at the supper table than we could hold.

And I sat there, heart full, turning it over slowly: God would allow my boys and girls to learn how to care for something that fears them and is stronger than them. To approach with grace. To bring food. To bring water.

“You see,” Sean had explained earlier, relaying what Zain told him, “this horse had to travel over 20 miles every day just to reach water in the wild. So water is almost more valuable to her than food. Just getting water from me—that’s what’s teaching her I’m not the enemy.”

I thought about that for a long time.

Isn’t that exactly what we’re all supposed to be learning? To use our strength and our gifts to carry water. To prove, by showing up every day with something life-giving, that we are a provider and not a predator.

After all, our Maker came in a form we could understand and knelt down to offer us the same thing: “If any man thirst, let him come to Me and drink.” He has unfolded His grace to us slowly, at a pace we could bear, gently working to undo the fears and defense mechanisms we learned out in the wild. Teaching us, day by day, that we can lay aside the biting and kicking and running and fearing—and come into something better. A relationship of trust. A cooperation shaped by His design. A grace and provision we never could have found in the privations of the open range.

Life can teach you more in 48 hours of real living—with real challenges and real dreams and real promises on the line—than all the academies in the world can teach in years of so-called education.

I’m grateful for a real life.

And for the real progress these real kids are making

What do you suggest Sean should name this beautiful mare? Leave your ideas in the Substack comments below the letter. Blessings

A meditation on resurrection, multiplication,
and the life of Christ revealed in His people

There is something in us that will never grow unless something burns.

There is a tree in the mountains, a lodgepole pine, that drops its cones each year. Inside those cones are seeds, full of life and potential, yet completely sealed.

The resin hardens around them. Protects them. Preserves them.

And in doing so, it imprisons them.

The very substance of the tree acts as a seal, holding the life inside. And so cones can rest there a long, long time—collecting in the needles, settling into the composting layers—with all that life still locked away. Everything needed for life is already inside the seed. But it cannot release itself.

Without something more, the seed does not live.

It dies . . . preserved.

And then comes the fire.

Heat presses in. Flames rise. Everything that seems destructive begins to strip away what was holding life captive.

The resin burns.

And when the fire passes, the seed lies in ash—the perfect environment for life.

And it breaks open.

What looked like destruction becomes multiplication.

One seed becomes a forest.

The Moment Everything Was About to Expand

In John 12, just after raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus stands at a turning point. You would think such a miracle would settle everything. But, instead, the chief priests decide from that day forward that Jesus must die. They are not looking for more of God. They are afraid of what He might cost them.

How tragic it is that our competition for our place and our nation can make us reject the very One weeping over our place and our nation.

But while the rulers are raging and plotting, the crowd is stirring. The nations begin to reach for Him.

Greeks come and say, “We want to see Jesus.”

The door is open.

And yet, instead of stepping forward, Jesus says something unexpected:

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone.”

This was His answer.

Not immediate visibility—but future multiplication.

He was not concerned with obscurity. He was not troubled by delay. He was not shaken by hiddenness. He was not even ultimately concerned about death.

He was concerned about remaining alone.

“I could show them one life,” He is saying. “One man. One moment.”

“But instead—I will become a field.”

The Greeks would see Him. But not as one.

They would see Him in many.

He did not come to be a shooting star—one bright wonder admired from a distance and then gone. He came for a harvest. He came for a forest. He came for a people who would carry His life so fully that those far away—yes, even as far as Greece, even as far as America—would look and say, “Where is Jesus?” and find the answer in the Body that bears His life.

We often reduce Easter to this:

“Jesus is alive again.”

But that was never the goal.

He did not rise merely to live again.

He rose to multiply.

He returned—not singular—but expressed through many.

“They will see Me . . . in you.”

Hidden Life Is Still Life

This time of year in Texas, the bluebonnets faithfully return.

Radiant. Predictable. Beautiful.

On the way to church this morning, my four-year-old daughter, Ella, heard her mom point out the bluebonnets along the roadside. Then she heard me say that, to me, the prettiest flowers were the beautiful people in the pickup around me, dressed in their Easter colors.

That was all she needed.

Ella began assigning each of us a flower. She was an Indian paintbrush. Tina was a bluebonnet. Connie, with her blue and white, became the sky with clouds. Her mother was a rose. On she went, turning the whole cab into a wildflower bouquet.

She saw beauty in every direction—and so did her dad. I heard it, and I saw it.

As Texans, we all know that flutter of excitement upon seeing those beautiful fields. We love them. We wait for them. We hope for a good year.

But sometimes, something rarer happens.

Out around El Paso—country that doesn’t naturally strike you as lush, but dust and sand and rock and hard sky—if the rains come just right and the season turns just so, Mexican poppies suddenly burst forth. Golden fields spread across places that had looked barren for years.

Fields of color where there was once only dust.

There is something about glory erupting where we had grown accustomed to barrenness that moves us more deeply than beauty appearing where we expected it all along.

What looked empty was full of hidden life.

Waiting.

Some of you are in that place.

Hidden. Buried. Unseen.

Are there dreams in you that seem dormant? Are there promises you have almost stopped expecting? You may feel like Mary must have sounded to the disciples upon returning from the tomb that Easter morning: impossible, irrational, too good to be true.

But hiddenness is not the end.

Burial is not the end.

Even fire is not the end.

It is preparation.

The moment before everything breaks open.

Why This Movement Could Not Be Stopped

Gamaliel recognized something early.

He had seen movements rise before. He had seen charismatic leaders gather crowds, and he had seen those movements end the moment the leader was taken. Kill the man, and the thing dies with him. That was the pattern.

“We’ve seen this before. Kill the leader, and it ends.”

But this one didn’t end.

“We killed Him . . . so why is it growing?”

Because death could not contain Him.

Because the seed did not remain alone.

They killed Stephen—and even in the ash of that martyrdom, his face shone like that of an angel. He prayed that God would not hold their sin against them.

They could not stop what was on his face.

Because it was not Stephen’s.

It was Jesus.

And when Saul set out to destroy the church, he encountered a blinding light on the road to Damascus and heard these words:

“I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”

He had been laying hands on believers. He had not touched Jesus of Nazareth in the flesh.

He was persecuting the “forest,” and Jesus said: “That is Me.”

Because Christ had multiplied. The grain had gone into the ground. And now it had risen and spread its life into a multitude—so fully that to strike them was to strike Him.

The Answer to the Greeks

Paul would later write to Corinth. To Thessalonica.

To churches in Greece.

The Greeks did see Jesus.

But not as one man.

As a people.

The empty tomb is a sign.

But the living Body is the proof.

We are meant to be that proof—not merely a community that talks about Jesus, but a people whose love, whose forgiveness, whose faithfulness across kitchen tables and hospital rooms and ordinary Tuesdays makes the watching world say, “By this we know. We see Him. We want to be part of this.”

Will they see Him in your face?

Will they see Him in your love?

Will they see Him in your home?

He does not have to stay alone.

He can enter our hearts. He can enter our impossibilities. He did not want to remain outside of us, watching while we built our own small lives and occasionally asked for a blessing. He wants to dwell in us. He wants fields, not a single flower. He wants a forest, not one lone tree.

All we can ever be is a reflection of Him—He is the sun; we are the mirrors. But when a thousand fragments of reflected glory come together, the world begins to see the mosaic of the risen Lord in the unveiled faces of his people.

So let us come to Him.

Let us follow Him.

Let us believe.

Let Him bring us out of our graves.

And then let us spread that news from sea to sea.

He rose.

And He did not rise to stay alone.

There was a moment of pause just now before I began writing . . . just long enough to realize I didn’t want to send a typical newsletter.

I thought instead I would let you into something more ordinary . . . and more sacred.

This week, we are preparing for Easter: concert practices for all the children in their choirs, time given to considering the message I will bring.

But there is also another kind of preparation underway—food preparation—and that is what I want to write about: our preparation for the Easter meal.

Not with an order from H-E-B. Not even with a phone call to a butcher.

But with a walk down to the paddock.

My fourteen-year-old son, Sean—who, in many ways, already carries the responsibility of a man—has been managing our flock of 130 sheep almost single-handedly. This evening, he went with me, along with his younger brother Aaron, to select the lamb that will be our Easter meal.

There is no casualness in that moment.

To take the life of an animal is always weighty. But it is especially so when the animal is not anonymous, when it has been watched, tended, protected . . . when its life has unfolded under your care.

And yet, if we are going to eat meat, then we ought to face what that means honestly.

Better an animal raised on green pasture, moving freely, feeding on diverse forage, living a life that is, by any measure, good, than a life spent in confinement, transported, processed, and abstracted beyond recognition.

No trucks. No feedlots. No fear-filled corridors.

Just one clean moment. One short crack of a .22.

As dignified an end as one can give.

We loaded the lamb onto the bed of the borrowed Ranger and brought it up to the house. Under the header of the garden gate, we hung the carcass. Beginning as I have been doing since I was Aaron’s age (mostly on deer), I began again.

The boys stood nearby. Holding the light. Asking questions.

I slipped the point of my knife beneath the skin at the hind legs and drew it upward—like unzipping a garment. Slowly, deliberately, we worked the hide down, peeling it away. Then the gutting. All contents are carefully placed into a plastic trailer positioned beneath to be carried straight to the community compost—nothing is wasted; everything returns.

The yearling lamb, now dressed, was washed from neck to tail, every stray hair removed.

Then Beck and Sean brought out a barrel of brine: water, kosher salt, and spices. The lamb went straight in, never touching a table, and from there into the cooler.

And there it will rest.

Through the slow process of osmosis, that salt will move inward—fiber by fiber—until by Sunday morning the meat is seasoned all the way through and ready for roasting.

When that day comes, I will fill the cavity with onion halves, whole garlic bulbs, rosemary, cinnamon sticks, and slices of lemon. Black pepper. Coriander. Layer upon layer of fragrance.

Then I will wrap it tightly in foil—completely enclosed—and place it in the oven directly on a rack with a pan beneath to catch drippings. It will barely fit.

Eight hours.

No rush. No shortcuts.

Just time and heat doing what they do best

By the end, the meat will be tender enough to fall apart at the touch of a fork. We will set it on a great platter over a mountain of saffron rice—golden, studded with almonds and dried fruit. Around it will be yogurt sauces, mint chutney, and chimichurri—bright, acidic accents to balance the richness.

And then folks will come.

More than eighty of us—family and a few friends gathered across generations—filling the porch with noise, laughter, stories, and gratitude. Eating food that was raised on the same ground beneath our feet.

This is work—farming, feeding, protecting, harvesting, cleaning, preparing, cooking.

It is tiring. It is not clean. It is not convenient.

But it is participation.

Participation in life, not the curated version, not the sanitized version, but life as it actually is. Including the parts that are tough, and heavy, and unpleasant.

And I do not want to outsource such living.

I don’t want my children to inherit a world where everything difficult has been handed off to someone else, where the cost of living is hidden behind packaging and badges and distance.

Because somewhere, someone still bears that cost.

Only likely, those doing the dirty work must bear it daily. Mechanically. Disconnected from meaning. A nine-to-five that deals in death without the context of gratitude or family or celebration.

So instead, we step into it—together.

The effort.
The discomfort.
The responsibility.
And the reward.

And this is why we live as we do—rurally, deliberately—why we home-school, why we often home-birth, why we link together in community.

We want more than a life kept behind glass and handed back to us in sanitized plastic packaging. We want the duty, the difficulty, the grit, and the grace. We choose the challenge . . . and the reward. We opt for the more weighty privilege of becoming heirs of real living.

Spring has come. And it’s calling us again into the rhythm of things—to the soil, to the work, to the table.

A time to take hold of what has been given.
To recognize the yield of our labor.
To count, not in abstraction, but in substance, the blessings of life’s great Giver.

And to share the bounty.

It is springtime.

And it is a time to be grateful for an abundant life.

It is impossible for me to step outside at this time of year without sensing a renewed wind of life and hope. There is something about spring—the indomitable persistence of life—rising again from the dry, drab doldrums of winter to reassert its unconquerable fruitfulness once more.

It is there in the chorus of birdsong. In the budding of oak trees. In the bluebonnets and peach blossoms. In the renewed vigor of bluebirds building their nests and the blue jays and cardinals flitting through the trees around the house. It is there in the peeping of the turkey in our mudroom that has just hatched, and in the clutch of eggs the hen has suddenly begun to brood outside.

One of my favorite sights this year was this past Sunday. As I was preparing my message for the service, I looked out my office window and saw my four-year-old Ella, dressed for church, come purposefully sauntering out, take a yellow bucket, set it on the ground, turn on the water, fill it halfway, and carefully carry it off to the chickens. She is more precious to me than all the flowers of spring.

There is something about spring.

Not Paradise

Of course, it is not all good. I will not romanticize excessively. This is not paradise, and Texas reminds us of that whenever we are tempted to forget.

Every time I walk the thick wooded path from my house to my sister’s, along the ridge that stretches between us, I am reminded that this is not paradise—not by a long measure. It was on that very path, in late November, that I killed the last snake of 2025. I was walking with all six of our children and Beck through the brush, and I insisted on going first with my light to watch for snakes. Yet I promptly became absorbed in my phone, while Connie strode faithfully just behind me. We had not gone very far when she said, “Daddy, Daddy, do you see that? Daddy?”

I stopped. Right in the pathway lay a large rattlesnake. I broke off a branch from a dead limb nearby and made short order of him with several decisive blows to the head. Diamondback rattlesnakes are nothing to trifle with. Many of you have seen that through friends who have suffered the misfortune of their bite.

So I find myself warning the children to watch for snakes, to be alert for poison ivy. My poor Tina got into a patch of poison ivy last week without realizing it, and her face swelled to nearly twice its size until her eyelids were reduced to narrow slits. She was miserable, though thankfully she returned to normal after about a week.

So it is not all paradise this springtime. That is how life is—full of promise and fruit and blossoms and renewal, yet also punctuated by serpents and poison ivy and thorns and pain and sorrow and betrayal. This beautiful ground we cultivate is damaged, cursed because of human sin, and we must receive the blessing along with the burden.

The Serpent’s Method

One of the most vivid encounters I have ever had with one of the less blessed inhabitants of our little corner of creation occurred a few years ago, when I set out to walk with my brother Nathaniel. We intended to take a good hike along the perimeter of the hay meadow down toward the river and back again, avoiding the roadways as much as possible.

Just before leaving, I picked up my .22 revolver and nearly strapped it to my belt, but then I second-guessed myself, securing it away before walking out the door—a decision I would regret only minutes later.

We ambled through the tall summer grasses, past the haystacks and the draft horses lazily chewing, and on toward the edge of the woods. We made our way near the compost piles, skirting the tree line that marked the Aquilla Creek draw, though we were still within the hay meadow.

Suddenly we stopped, our minds racing to comprehend what we were witnessing. I had never seen anything quite like it. Not more than five paces away lay a full-grown cottontail rabbit, crouched low in the grass, ears flattened, body trembling. Pressed against the rabbit was a very large rattlesnake—more than five feet long. The snake held its head poised just above the rabbit, and each time the rabbit began to stir or show alarm, the snake would gently rub its ear with its muzzle, and the rabbit would settle back down into a calmer posture.

The rabbit would then seem to remember its surroundings and grow agitated again, but once more the snake would nuzzle its ear, soothing it back into stillness.

It became immediately evident that the snake had already bitten the rabbit and was waiting for the venom to take full effect. Yet while the poison worked through the creature’s veins, the serpent was, in a chilling sense, comforting it into its own demise—soothing it toward death.

I could scarcely believe what I was seeing, and how I wished I had brought my .22. Looking around, however, I saw a large cow bone nearby, which, by a providential convergence of opportunity and indignation, soon landed upon the snake’s head. We then quickly put the rabbit out of its misery and walked on in silence for a time, processing what we had witnessed.

I found myself reflecting again on this world, which is not so much a paradise as we might wish, and on how everything went wrong when the enemy of our souls appeared as a serpent in a garden—injecting the poison of his ideas into the minds of men: toxins of suspicion, toxins of doubting God’s motives, toxins of division toward one another.

I thought of how subtly the enemy cultivates apathy, complacency, and distraction in those he has bitten with his lies, waiting for the venom to accomplish its work until the moment arrives when we can no longer move beyond him. The rabbit could have run far faster than that slithering serpent.

“But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3).

And, not to be overly graphic, but at times I look at our culture and think of that snake and that rabbit. The stratagems of the enemy are not only to terrify or to induce anxiety and dread. Often it is to soothe us to death—to pacify us, to mesmerize and lull us into apathy until we lack the resolve and courage to rise and move out of that state of mind and manner of living.

How often the grace of God comes as a word, a promise, a memory breaking through the malaise—the intoxicated normalcy of our clouded minds—and giving us an impetus to move, an impulse to spring free from the trap and make a change.

A Springtime of the Heart

And so, bringing it back to spring, I feel hope in the air. I pray that God would grant His people everywhere that impulse of promise—that inward summons that says, “I can do this.”

Like Abraham, gazing at the stars and receiving the impulse to leave his people, his country, and that decaying city of Ur.

Like Matthew, seeing the Savior pass by his tax collector’s booth and hearing the call, immediately rising and leaving everything to follow Him, as Peter and Andrew had likewise done.

“Now it is high time to awake out of sleep; for now our salvation is nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light”( Rom. 13:11–12).

I pray that 2026 would be a springtime of the heart—that we would not merely admire the blossoming of flowers, the budding trees, the newborn fawns, and the birds in their nests, but that we ourselves would spring free—from the spirit of this world, from apathy, from the poisoned mind—and that we would step, or even leap, toward the promise and voice of our Maker.

As He walks in the garden, may we not hide behind fig leaves or attempt to evade His voice, but rather hear His voice, know Him, and follow Him into life—life more abundant, life of purpose, life renewed beyond what we imagined possible.

That is my prayer for this springtime. My prayer for you and for me.

Watch for snakes.

As headlines cycle and the language of war fills our days, we are mindful of those who do not merely read about conflict—but who live inside it.

In recent days, many from our Texas congregation have returned home after tense exits from Israel—crossing by land into Egypt under strain and uncertainty, navigating delayed clearances, and then piecing together flights through Athens, Germany, Spain, and finally back to the United States.

Yet even as some have come out, many of our dear friends remain as permanent residents of Israel.

They live now to the sound of sirens—interrupted nights, hurried descents into bomb shelters, seconds to respond, families gathered in concrete rooms while the sky above them carries threats they cannot control. This is daily life now.

And to you—our brothers and sisters in Israel—you are not forgotten. You are carried in prayer, in thought, and in a real sense of shared burden. The Body is not divided by geography.

My brother-in-law, Dan, shared something striking upon his return. In the midst of the bombardments, when many assumed that emergency flights would be organized to evacuate people out of Israel, the opposite proved true. Israel’s “rescue flights” during that time were inbound—bringing tens of thousands of Israelis home from abroad. Not away from danger, but into it.

That instinct—to return, to belong, to stand with one’s people even in crisis—is not merely national and the kind of loyalty that binds a people together beyond comfort.

I read last night that not only are Israeli citizens coming home, but Jewish people are still immigrating to Israel during this crisis. Just this week, 50 Jewish individuals have chosen this time to move to Israel, to make their aliyah to their nation, coming from Britain and France.

There is something in that which speaks.

Someday, the community of Christ must feel the same pull—not away from difficulty, but toward one another in it. A people who do not scatter when pressure rises, but who press inward, bound by a shared life, a shared calling, and a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

And so my thoughts turn to the Kurutz family and the whole community there in Israel.

Norman and Esther—whose children’s wedding day was pierced by the outbreak of war. Celebration interrupted by grim reality. It is a stark reminder that no life is insulated from conflict. There is no discharge from the wars of life.

What matters is not the avoidance of trial, but the company we keep within it, and the covenant that holds when everything else wobbles and begins to shake.

To understand—and rightly honor—the strength of the Kurutz family, and in many ways the broader congregation there in Israel, it is fitting to recall the story of their patriarch, Alex, whom I first met in 2016 and whose life account I recorded in detail some years ago.

A Story That Still Speaks

Alex Kurutz was born in 1939 in Hungary, as Europe descended into the chaos of the Second World War.

His earliest memories were marked by scarcity, fear, and quiet acts of courage. As an infant, he was carried into prison with his mother—arrested for smuggling bread through barbed wire to those inside a concentration camp. Compassion cost her freedom, and yet she did not withhold it.

Later, she hid a Jewish family in their home. Their valuables were concealed in jars of jam, lined up on the shelves of their family pantry. When the Gestapo discovered them, that family was taken, placed on a train bound for Auschwitz. Yet in one of those rare mercies that punctuate even the darkest histories, the war ended before the train arrived. They survived. And years later, they returned, finding young Alex and embracing him with tears of gratitude.

Then came the Soviets.

Hungary’s “liberation” brought a new wave of terror—looting, violence, and lawlessness. A Soviet tank once stopped in front of Alex’s home, its commander claiming the house as his headquarters. Yet in a paradox that can only be described as providential, that same officer became a shield for the family—turning his weapon against his own men to protect them, and asking, at times, to hear them sing Christian hymns.

At fourteen, Alex was sent to work in Budapest, far from home, living among hardened men in an environment saturated with vice. Yet he emerged preserved.

At seventeen, he joined the Hungarian Revolution of 1956—one of the 200,000 who rose up against Soviet control. For a brief moment, hope surged. Stalin’s statue was torn down. The regime faltered.

Then the tanks returned.

The revolution was crushed. Thousands were executed. Many more fled. Alex became one of them—a hunted young man navigating curfews, slipping through alleyways, crossing streets where Alex recalled that even a drifting scrap of paper could trigger the tat-tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire. Eventually, he escaped across the border into Austria, moving through minefields under searchlights, lying flat in mud to avoid detection.

From there, the journey continued.

Germany offered immigration, but at a cost: twelve months in underground coal mines, nearly 4,000 feet beneath the earth. Alex accepted. In that darkness—claustrophobic tunnels, collapsing shafts, constant danger—he began to hear something he had not known before: the voice of God.

It was there that his wrist was crushed. There that his collarbone was broken. There that he narrowly escaped death more than once. And yet it was also there that something deeper was formed.

“God, if You can speak to someone this far below the ground,” he prayed, “then I know You are real.”

Eventually, he made his way to Canada, where he built a life—work, family, stability. It would have been enough.

But the call did not leave him.

Through a chain of relationships—his uncle in Israel, a small struggling congregation, and a direct word that cut through his comfort—Alex was confronted with a choice. Stay settled. Or step forward again into uncertainty.

He chose pilgrimage.

He moved his family to Israel, joining a fledgling community that would become a context for hope to be preserved for decades.

The Same Spirit, A New Generation

What began in war and displacement did not end there.

That same thread of courage, sacrifice, and forward motion carried into the next generations.

And so, it is no wonder that when Alex’s children and grandchildren—in the Norman, Samuel, and Ephriam families—heard the call to a fuller life and reality in God, they too became pioneers.

Only this time, their frontier was different. They were setting out to restore family life and vibrant covenant Christian community in the 21st century. As a community, they chose to pioneer homeschooling in the land of Israel. Yes, along with scores of others, they stepped out in faith to pioneer a new model of covenant community altogether.

Their challenges have been different, but no less real.

They did not face the Third Reich, concentration camps, or revolution like Grandpa Alex. They were not driven into mines of physical darkness. And yet, the struggle before them was no less real— the struggle to give birth to a community culture of life.

They had to pull their families out of the grip of technology addiction and the inexorable erosion of a world culture consuming the faith of their children. They had to step away from the inertia of a state-shaped, predetermined life, and into the costly work of building—new businesses, new skills, new faith, new community—pressing a frontier in every sphere of life.

And now, the fruit is coming in.

Their children are maturing, forming marriages, raising families, and walking in the footprints of their parents. Their homeschooling efforts have been recognized and affirmed by the very authorities who initially opposed them. Their family education has been held up as a model for the state.

And in these present days, as a community shaped by service, sacrifice, and giving, they have gone out across Israel—especially since the October 7 attacks—carrying something tangible into places of strain and sorrow. Through gatherings in communities across the land, they bring music, craftsmanship, stories, and the bright presence of families whose lives speak. Children with beaming faces, hands that craft care, voices that sing of hope, life, and love.

Time and again, the same faith that once moved Alex’s mother to pass bread through barbed wire in the 1940s is still at work— offering not just crumbs, but a sustaining way of life. A visible testimony of joy, given to a nation that needs light at evening time.

So wherever you are, and whatever stands before you, remember this: our lives cannot be rightly measured within the narrow frame of our individual moment. Only when seen as a generational story do things come into focus. Nothing is wasted if it is advancing the pilgrimage of life against death, hope against despair, love against hate, light against the darkness of hard times.

My father described this kind of faithfulness as the fetch and the swell of a great oceanic wave—the long, uninterrupted reach, where prevailing winds can build energy across more than 3,000 miles of Atlantic water, and the deep, steady swell carries that power onward for days, even weeks, until at last it rises and breaks against the cliffs of Ireland.

The Through-Line

There is a thread that runs through all of this.
From a prison cell with an infant…
to a refugee crossing a mined border…
to a coal mine deep beneath the earth…
to a family choosing to pioneer community life in the 21st-century…
to sirens now sounding in the night—
It is the thread of faithfulness.
It’s not just a moment; it’s a movement.
That is what a life of covenant produces.

This is what families and communities become when they begin with small steps and refuse to stop: persevering, choosing love, choosing life. In time, that momentum gathers strength enough to carry not only a family, but perhaps a community…perhaps a nation…into a season of grace when it is needed most.

To Our Brothers and Sisters in Israel

Your labor is not unseen.

Your perseverance is not wasted.

Your steps—taken under pressure, under threat, under uncertainty—are sending out reverberations far beyond what you can measure.

You are part of something that cannot be shaken.

“He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed, Shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.”

Hold fast.

Stand together.

Our hearts are with you.

It was a fresh kindness to come home again from overseas—to the budding and leafing of new life everywhere. The pear trees in white blossom. The peaches not far behind. And especially my children, springing from the house in their own way, sprinting and leaping into our arms.

Spring is the season when God reminds us of new birth—of mercies new every morning, yet somehow more visible, more abundant, in the awakening of creation around us. After the night’s rain, stepping outside into the endless choir of birdsong lifts my spirit and steadies my heart with wonder, gratitude, and expectation. He makes all things new.

But one of the ways He makes all things new is not by replacing what is old. It is by renewing it—by refusing the entropy of a world where things fall apart and the center cannot hold, and instead restoring what has been, preserving it, and causing it to flourish again.

Home in an Age of Exile

In a world that commodifies everything—even love, even church—where people are treated as consumers and relationships as products for the passing appetites of distracted buyers, covenant durability has become a rare grace. And therefore a refuge.

This theme surfaced repeatedly during our recent days in the Netherlands with dear brothers and sisters there. Again and again, we heard the language of home: the end of wandering, the rest of belonging, the quiet trust found in God’s design for an enduring compact of faithfulness—the grace we call the Body of Christ.

One dear sister said, “I’ve always made friends easily. It always began so well. But they never stayed. And again and again, I found myself alone, asking, ‘Is this what it was meant to be?’”

Another spoke of decades poured into ministry—opening his home, preaching the gospel, laboring to build a culture of family where people might feel safe and loved. Yet again and again, he watched things fray. The house would empty. Relationships would sour. The center would not hold.

And then he described what he has now found: not merely a message that invites, but a life that anchors. Not merely the promise of belonging, but a culture of care and discipleship strong enough to confront what within us is hostile to our own aspirations for faithfulness.

“Thank you for accepting me into this family,” he said.

When he finished, there was not a dry eye in the room.

That same day, fourteen brothers and sisters from different backgrounds made the good confession before many witnesses and were baptized in the matchless name of Jesus. And afterward—oh, the joy. The embraces and laughter. The unfeigned affection. Worship swelling around us as brothers and sisters greeted one another with the pure language of the kingdom, “Welcome home. I’m so glad we’re together. Isn’t this wonderful?”

In that moment, an old song played as the soundtrack of the miracle unfolding—one I’ve heard long before I understood the language of covenant:

It seems we’ve been together forever.
Seems like we have the same heart.
We’ve got a bond that nothing can sever.
Nothing can tear us apart.
We’ll survive the stormy weather.
We’ll laugh and cry together.
Your love gives me the strength to stand,
side by side and hand in hand.
We are family—now I can clearly see;
We are family—that’s what we are.
Memories of the times we’ve had,
through all the good and bad.
Forever, we will always be—we are family.

I remember Sister Julie (now in glory) singing it when I was a child, before my mind knew the vocabulary of commitment or sacrifice. Yet even then, I sensed something deeper than words passing among the adults who sang it—a recognition that exile was ending, and they were coming home.

Now therefore you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household. (Eph. 2:19)

Isn’t that what the Body of Christ should be? A place where love remains. A place of such improbable affection among ordinary people that unbelievers must conclude that the Messiah has come, because only a visitation of that magnitude could explain the endurance and flourishing of such love.

The Shape of Faithfulness

It was a treasure to minister alongside brothers like Daniel, Brother Howard, and Judah, who traveled with us. Time with Brother Howard is always a gift—his humor, his indomitable faith, the breadth of his wisdom, and even his energy in this, his 80th year. And it moved me deeply to see him received with such warmth in the Netherlands, welcomed into homes and hearts by people who recognized in him the fruit they long for in their own lives and congregations.

As I drove him from place to place in our rented Ford Focus between gatherings, memories surfaced unbidden—moments as vivid as when they first unfolded.

I remembered Brother Howard joking with me as a boy after I suffered a bad allergic reaction to bee stings, telling me how he once reached into a honeysuckle bush after a Coke bottle and grabbed a hornet’s nest instead. I remembered 2004, when my father was rushed to the hospital in the night. There was no road to the back of our mobile home, but somehow Brother Howard brought the Expedition straight to the porch so Dad would not have to descend the steep front steps. I remembered decades of phone calls between him and Dad and Mom through decades of ministry—good reports and crises alike—and never once a trace of faithlessness or self-concern. Always present. Always giving.

In the final months before my father’s passing in 2021, he was largely confined to bed. My mother and father used text messages as a kind of intercom across the house. One early morning, before most were awake, Dad texted for help—thinking he was messaging Mom. Instead, he had texted Brother Howard.

Brother Howard, who lived a distance away and had never received such a request, replied without hesitation, “I’ll be right there.”

Five minutes later: “I’m in the driveway. Should I come in?”

Only then did Dad realize his mistake.

Every apology was brushed aside. Brother Howard insisted it was nothing and wished only he could have been more useful. Later that day, Dad told me the story from his bedside. When he spoke of Brother Howard arriving, he broke down in quiet tears. After a long silence, he looked up and said, “I pray you boys are blessed enough to have friends like Howard.” Then he added softly, “And so many others,” and began naming them one by one. (Brother Howard has been friends with my parents on this faith journey for 55 years this summer.)

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity. (Prov. 17:17)

And that is the point. I could just as easily be describing anyone—because it is the Body of Christ. Others could tell even more profound stories: of the care shown to Brother Dadi during his health battle; of the sacrifice and tenderness poured out for a young mother facing a difficult pregnancy; of the unbroken, round-the-clock presence kept beside every brother and sister who passes from this life—Brother Robert, Sister Darla, all of them. And all of it is one story: learning to become the kind of people, and to build the kind of culture, where friends stay—where steady, dependable faithfulness becomes both refuge and home amid the world’s storms and perturbations.

And everything we do—every sermon, every page written, every project undertaken, every resource spent—is empty if it is not in service of this.

But it is all worth it if this love still exists.

Look upon Zion . . . . your eyes will see Jerusalem, an undisturbed habitation, a tent which will not be folded. (Isa. 33:20)

As I look at my own friendships—the notes received this week, the calls, the letters, the small and selfless gestures—I find myself thinking of my father’s words.

Dad, I believe we have found what you prayed we might. Not the fortune of places or possessions or recognition, but the fortune of friends who stay.

God help us to be that for one another—and to prize it as the rarest gift in a world of fickle affections and fractured love.