I am a solutions person. It’s almost embarrassing how much this is true.

Give me a problem and my brain is already three steps ahead trying to figure out a solution before you even finish the sentence. It’s just how I’m wired, which is exactly why prayer and I have a complicated relationship because prayer asks you to do the one thing I genuinely cannot stand doing: hand it over and wait for someone else to take care of it.

This post is about what to actually do with your brain when you sit down to pray and your body just won’t shut off. I figured out a process and I still work on it every single day because I’m not claiming to be a perfect person. I’m a hot mess just like everyone else. It’s not complicated, but it genuinely changed the way I show up, even in seasons where nothing is moving the way I need it to.

In 2018, a whole group of (people who I thought were my) friends dropped me faster than a speeding bullet (thanks internet for reminding me of this idiom 😂). We went out one night for a friend’s birthday, a situation involving a close friend of mine happened a week later without their knowledge and I let them know about it, and after that all communication just ended. No conversation was ever had and I never got an explanation. They kept hanging out together and I just wasn’t included anymore. We still have not had a conversation about why to this day.

I thought I had finally found my people. I was so sure that I had finally found a group of girlfriends that I had so yearned for since my last friend breakup in high school.

I prayed for those friends so hard every day in the hopes they’d reach back out. I prayed for understanding and discernment which was the spiritual way of saying “God, please make them like me again.” Silly, I know, but that’s how I really felt. Every time I sat down to pray, I felt like my words were like a boomerang, like the words were going up and coming back with nothing useful attached to them.

I became hardened and I stopped feeling bad for myself. I put my head down, focused on the grind, and figured I’d just outwork the loneliness and friends just weren’t in the cards for me.

It was probably a month ago when it all hit me while looking at posts from those same “friends” still hanging out on social media that I FINALLY have what I prayed for with my 2 close friends. It’s the real thing and the answer had been getting built while I was convinced nothing was happening.

I’m also walking through something right now where the answer isn’t visible yet and I mean that literally. I’m sitting in my grandparent’s house as I write this.

My grandmother is very sick and has been sick for a few months now. Her heart is functioning at only 10% (this isn’t a total surprise because it’s been functioning at 15% for the last 6 years), the defibrillator they put in to shock her heart back to life is completely drained of its battery power, and her DNR (Do Not Resuscitate Order) is on the fridge for easy access for the moment something happens. She’s exhausted all the time, nauseous, she won’t eat, and every time someone tries to offer her a path forward or a solution she’s just not interested.

I pray for her every single day and every day it seems to look exactly the same. After being here for nearly two weeks I have yet to see any improvement. I don’t have a tidy resolution to offer here and as a solutions person with zero solutions available, that is genuinely one of the hardest places I’ve ever had to sit.

Here’s what I do know: there IS a way to actually pray when your brain won’t stop, when nothing is moving, and when you feel like you’re just reciting your anxiety out loud and calling it faith AND I know that there is a God that can do miracles, so I’m not giving up hope!

Throw that perfectly curated prayer routine out the window because I’m talking about three things I actually do, that take less than ten minutes, and that work whether I feel spiritually on fire or spiritually flatlined.

Upgrade to read the full 3 step process I use including what I do when each step still feels impossible, and the exact format I pray through when my brain is at its worst

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I stopped believing you have to sit in a pew to be close to God. My pastor grandfather would probably disagree.

My entire life (yes, literally. I’m a pastor’s grandkid) I was led to believe that I needed to go to church 7 days a week multiple times a day. Basically, live in the church to be able to be close to God and get his favor but slowly I realized that I was experiencing and feeling God in the most unlikely of places.

Growing up it was almost a chore that we needed to accomplish. I even had to go to church the very next morning after prom which felt inhumane to my teenage brain. It wasn’t just that I had to go to church service it was that my mom liked to go to the 9:00 AM service which meant we had to be up super early to go. Every week I would ask her why we couldn’t just watch it online or even go to a later service and she always said it was a requirement for us to go to church every week. I would push back and say that not once in the bible did it mention anything about going to a physical building to feel or even experience God.

Now, I’m not saying that going to church is bad. I experienced the best of memories at church, but being forced to go to church isn’t necessary.

I don’t think you need a church building to really experience God. Especially when some churches are corrupted from the inside.

The other thing that put a damper on the views of going to church was finding out everything I did about mega church pastors over the last 6 years. The lies, the money laundering, the sexual abuse, the people they were ultimately connected with just poisoned the water for me and left a sour taste in my mouth about church.

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People like Joel Osteen, TD Jakes, and even Steve Furtick (whom I actually got to see preach live in my church before) really gave me the ick. How can somebody be profiting off of bringing people to Jesus?? My grandfather was in ministry since before I was born and he’s never been a millionaire. It just truly never made any sense to me. If the people running the building can fake it, the building itself was never the proof of closeness to God.

It wasn’t until my mom gave us a glimpse behind the scenes when she volunteered to be part of the security team for our pastor, Clint Brown. He, by no means, is a mega church pastor. He’s just a white boy from Louisiana that wanted to worship God with his music. He was kind, always making sure his family and friends were taken care of. He has his flaws, but he truly shows through the way he interacts and pours into his congregation that he truly cares and there are still great, Godly men out there.

There have been times where I have felt God’s presence so strongly and they just so happened to be in the most unlikely of places. It can be as a simple walk around the neighborhood and catching the bees doing what they’re made to do and it just reminds of me God’s perfect design. I’ve felt God in the middle of a parking lot walking by a car that is full of satanic imagery and immediately just feel God’s presence surrounding and protecting me. I don’t often have these feelings in a church.

Even the Israelites knew this. They spent forty years wandering, no building, no permanent address, and He never once stopped showing up. He provided them with manna every day and led the way for them by cloud during the day and by pillar of fire at night. Never once leaving them.

So if you’re afraid that God is not with you because you’re not in a physical church building, don’t be afraid, because He sees you and will never forget you. Just ask Sarah, Hannah, or Elizabeth if God forgot them. (Spoiler: He didn’t and actually blessed them with children right when they about to give up hope) So take a second and ask yourself: when have you felt Him closest? Chances are, it wasn’t inside four walls.

Where has your unlikely place been? Let me know in the comments.

We just closed the book on Judges. Twenty one chapters, a handful of judges, a whole lot of chaos. Before we move into the next book, I want to sit with what we just walked through, because I don’t think you can fully feel the weight of Judges by reading it one chapter at a time. You have to zoom out.

If you remember our Joshua recap, that whole book was about learning what it takes to actually belong somewhere. Judges is the uncomfortable sequel to that. It's what happens when a people who finally belonged somewhere start forgetting who they belong to.

So let’s zoom out.

The verse that explains everything

If you remember one thing from this whole book, remember this line, tucked into the final chapter like a mic drop:

That’s not just a random closing thought. That’s the thesis statement for the entire book. Every judge, every disaster, every weird detour we took, it all traces back to that one sentence. Judges isn’t really the story of twelve heroes saving the day. It’s the story of a nation that kept doing whatever felt right to them in the moment, and what that actually costs.

The shape of the whole book

Here’s the pattern you probably noticed by chapter three and then watched play out again and again: Israel sins, usually by chasing after other gods. God allows an oppressor to move in. Israel cries out. God raises up a judge. There’s deliverance. There’s peace for a while. And then it starts all over again.

Except here’s the part that’s easy to miss if you’re only reading one cycle at a time: it doesn’t stay the same. It gets worse. The years of peace get shorter. The judges get messier. By the time we hit Samson, the judge himself is more of a walking metaphor for Israel’s problem than a solution to it. And by the time we hit chapters 17 through 21, there’s no judge at all. Just five chapters of “in those days there was no king in Israel” and total unraveling.

(And yes, for those of you who caught it live: don’t trust the baals. You know why 😉)

That line was a joke on stream, but it’s really not much of an exaggeration. The idol worship wasn’t a side plot in Judges. It was the root of every single cycle. Israel kept reaching for Canaanite gods like Baal instead of staying tethered to the God who actually delivered them, and every disaster in this book traces back to that reach.

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Samson: Israel in one man

If you want to understand what Judges is actually trying to tell you, look at Samson. Not because he’s the most important judge. Because he’s the clearest picture of the whole nation, wrapped up in one guy’s life.

Think about how Samson starts. Set apart before he was even born. A Nazirite, marked out for God’s purposes from the womb. That’s Israel’s story too. A people set apart, chosen, given a purpose before they ever did anything to earn it.

Now think about how Samson actually lives. He’s drawn, over and over, to exactly what he was told to stay away from. A Philistine wife. Delilah. Compromise after compromise with the very culture he was supposed to stand apart from. Sound familiar? That’s Israel’s whole pattern in Judges. Set apart, then constantly reaching for the culture around them instead of staying tethered to the God who set them apart in the first place.

Samson has all this strength and none of the faithfulness to go with it. He’s gifted, he’s called, he’s capable of incredible things, and he squanders it chasing the wrong things one relationship at a time. That’s not just a character flaw. That’s the whole nation’s arc compressed into one life. Strength without obedience. Calling without commitment.

And then there’s the blindness. The Philistines literally gouge out his eyes, but by that point in the story he’s already been spiritually blind for a while. He couldn’t see what his choices were costing him until it was far too late. Israel couldn’t either. That’s the whole book.

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I don’t plan themes for this show. I want to make that very clear up front. Nobody sends me a memo, nobody votes on a genre ahead of time, there is no production meeting. And yet somehow, without a single announcement, last night’s show slowly turned into an 80s hair band tribute. The chat did that. Not me.

That’s the thing about this show that I don’t think people understand until they’ve actually sat in the chat with us. It’s not really a playlist. It’s a room full of people who somehow end up on the same wavelength without ever discussing it.

Before I get into the fun chaos, I want to talk about the moment that actually mattered.

There was a woman in the chat last night who is in the middle of one of the hardest weeks of her life, the anniversary of her husband passing, and she was getting God wink after God wink through the songs coming through. I’m not going to pretend I have the words for that. What I can tell you is that our chat showed up for her. That’s the whole reason I do this show. The people.

Enter: the chaos agents

Now for the fun part. Two shows in, and I already know who my chaos agents are. Keith O’Higgins and ElfBoy. If a song request makes me stop mid-show and question my entire life, I already know it’s coming from one of those two.

Last week ElfBoy sent in “Sex Dwarf” by Soft Cell. I watched the video live, on air, and the only thing I could say afterward was, “I mean this with all the love in the world, but what the f**k?!”

This is why I added the message feature to the request form. Not just so I know who’s sending the chaos, but so I actually understand why someone picked a song. It’s not just “here’s a track,” it’s “here’s why this matters to me right now.” That context changes everything. It’s the difference between playing a song and actually understanding it.

And then the hair bands took over…

Nobody announced a theme. Nobody said “let’s do an 80s hair band night.” It just happened, request by request, until we landed on Jamie’s Cryin’, straight into Love Bites, straight into Kyrie Eleison, and that’s when it really hit.

Somewhere in the middle of Love Bites, the chat started reading the lyrics up on the screen and collectively realized the song is actually kind of terrifying. Like, vampire-esque terrifying. Nobody warned us. We all just sort of arrived there together, laughing about how unsettling an 80s hair band song can be when you actually pay attention to the words.

I didn’t steer that. I just let it ride. That’s my job 🫡

What this show actually is

Someone in the chat last night said something that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “Every show seems like a CIA psyop except this show.”

Look, I can’t top that. I’m not going to try.

What I want people to know, if you haven’t caught us live yet, is that this isn’t a show where you sit back and listen to me talk at you for two hours. This is a show where you get to be seen. Where you send in a song because it means something, and someone actually asks why, and then a whole chat full of strangers makes room for that story right alongside the ridiculous ones, the vampire hair band realizations, and whatever ElfBoy is going to hit us with next.

Someone cares enough to listen. Come let loose with us.

Watch the replay for last night’s show here

Last Night’s Playlist — The Midnight Something Special

1. Nights in White Satin — Moody Blues (req. Marsi Cerv)

2. Gypsy — Fleetwood Mac (req. Marsi Cerv)

3. Love Song — Tesla (req. Mud)

4. Siboney — Los Super Seven (req. BayTheaterDave)

5. Rolling Back — Young Gun Silver Fox (req. EstherG13)

6. Hard Fought Hallelujah (feat. Jelly Roll) — Brandon Lake (req. Salbish/SWgirl)

7. The Gambler — Kenny Rogers (req. Salbish/SWgirl)

8. Rebirthing — Skillet (req. ZBM)

9. Sway — Pussycat Dolls (req. ZBM)

10. La Cienega Just Smiled — Ryan Adams (req. Tamarac Flats)

11. Scarlett Johansson Farts — The Toilet Bowl Cleaners (req. Keith O’Higgins)

12. Truth Will Set You Free — Forrest Frank (req. Bruce LeRoy)

13. Across 110th Street — Bobby Womack (req. MrsReaFreedomFighter)

14. Good Morning Heartache — Billie Holiday (req. ZBM)

15. You Want It Darker — Leonard Cohen (req. Keith O’Higgins)

16. Lord Give Me A Sign — DMX (req. Salbish)

17. Jamie’s Cryin’ — Van Halen (req. MrsReaFreedomFighter)

18. Tennessee Mountain Top — Kid Rock (req. The Boomdiggity)

19. Never Tear Us Apart (Live) — INXS (req. BayTheaterDave)

20. Love Bites — Def Leppard (req. Clairecat367)

21. Kyrie Eleison — Mister Mister (req. Clairecat367)

22. A Real Mother For Ya — Johnny “Guitar” Watson (req. LoveWarns)

23. Never You Mind — Semisonic (req. BayTheaterDave)

24. Couldn’t Get It Right — Climax Blues Band (req. Mud)

25. 18 and Life — Skid Row (req. ElfBoy)

26. Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun — Julie Brown (req. ElfBoy)

27. Redemption Song — Bob Marley (req. Bruce LeRoy)

The Midnight Something Special airs every Wednesday night / Thursday morning at 12:30 AM ET/9:30 PM PT.

I have spent no less than a year thinking of this concept and it’s time I finally let the cat out of the bag as to what I’ve been stirring up: a late-night show called The Midnight Something Special, and it goes live this Thursday at 12:30AM ET on my Rumble channel.

Remember when late night radio actually meant something? When you stayed up wayyyyyy too late to see if you could call in and get on the radio? I wanted that back. Not the perfectly curated feed. The real thing.

So that’s exactly what I created. Part talk show, part dance party, and even a curve ball thrown in there every now and then. You are in charge of the playlist so I’m super intrigued what direction you all will take us!

A few things you should know before Thursday:

It’s at 12:30AM ET, on purpose. This isn’t a show that happens despite the hour. The hour is kind of the whole point. Late night is when things get a little looser, a little weirder, a little more fun. Bring snacks. Bring your questionable life decisions. We’ll fit right in.

You get to pick the music. I built an actual request system for this (yes, I did that myself, no I did not know how build a website a month ago, yes there were several emotional moments along the way). You scan a QR code on screen, type in your song, and it drops into the queue. I run the show off a little DJ panel behind the scenes, so when I say “up next,” I mean it. Check out the website for yourself and also request a song or two now if you’d like.

You can also skip the line. If patience isn’t really your thing, there’s a tip option that bumps your song ahead of everyone else’s. First tipped, first served. Very fair, very chaotic, very fun to watch play out live.

The whole thing looks like it fell out of 1977. Neon, disco balls, a genuinely alarming amount of gold trim. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t spend an unreasonable number of hours getting a TV graphic to look exactly right. That’s a me problem, not a you problem.

I’m not going to oversell this as some polished, professional production, because it’s not. It’s a scrappy little late-night show built by someone who missed the feeling of radio being a little unpredictable, and who thinks Thursdays at 12:30AM is exactly the right time to bring that back. If it’s a little rough around the edges some weeks, that’s kind of the charm. Wolfman Jack didn’t have a teleprompter either.

So here’s what I need from you:

1. Follow my Rumble channel so you don’t miss it

2. Show up Thursday at 12:30AM ET — set an alarm, stay up late, whatever gets you there

3. Bring a song request — or five (you can start submitting requests now if you can’t make it live)

4. Tip if you want your pick to jump the line — no pressure, but also, absolutely feel the pressure

That’s the whole thing. No grand production plan, no five-year strategy. Just a show I wanted to exist, that now exists, that I’d love for you to be a part of.

See you Thursday. Bring snacks. 🤗💜

I have to be honest with you. When I started this Joshua series, I thought I was going to breeze through it chapter by chapter. Then real life happened. We were prepping for Deadwood for GART and my birthday, then I turned around and headed to South Florida for the Fourth of July, and somewhere in there the chapter-by-chapter plan quietly fell apart. So instead of finishing it the way I started, I’m giving you the whole book in one sitting. Consider this the “if you only read one thing about Joshua” article.

I think this is the better way to read Joshua anyway. Because when you zoom out, this whole book is about the same thing a lot of us are quietly working through in our own lives: what does it actually take to belong somewhere. Not just to show up somewhere but to actually belong there. To stay and be claimed by a place and a people after wandering for so long you almost forgot what solid ground felt like.

Let’s walk through it.

Called Forward When You’re Still Grieving (Chapters 1-4)

Joshua opens with Moses dead and Joshua standing there holding a job he never asked for. God’s first words to him are basically “get up.” Not because the grief isn’t real, but because staying frozen won’t bring Moses back and it won’t get anyone into the land either. “Be strong and courageous” gets said to Joshua like four times in chapter 1 alone, which tells you exactly how scared he actually was.

Then we get to Rahab in chapter 2, and I love her so much. She’s a Canaanite, she’s a prostitute, she has zero business being anywhere near this story by the world’s standards, and she becomes one of the bravest people in the whole book. She hides two Israelite spies, she lies to protect them (we can talk about that ethical tension another time), and she says something wild: she’s heard about this God, and she believes He’s real, and she wants in.

Rahab didn’t grow up belonging to this story. She wrote her way in with one decision. That’s chapter 2 in a nutshell, and it’s honestly a theme that runs the whole book. Belonging isn’t always inherited. Sometimes it’s chosen, on both sides.

By chapter 4, Israel crosses the Jordan on dry ground, just like their parents crossed the Red Sea a generation earlier. They pile up twelve stones as a memorial so their kids will ask “what do these stones mean” later. That detail gets me every time. God wanted this moment remembered on purpose, not just experienced and forgotten.

When We Sabotage Our Own Promise (Chapters 5-8)

Jericho falls in chapter 6 and it’s dramatic, trumpets and shouting and walls falling down, all of it. But chapter 7 is where things get uncomfortable, because Achan takes some of the devoted things from Jericho for himself, hides them in his tent, and it costs Israel a battle at Ai they should have easily won.

Here’s what gets me about the Achan story. It’s not really about a guy stealing some silver. It’s about how one person’s hidden compromise can quietly stall out a whole community’s forward motion. Achan wanted something he wasn’t supposed to keep, and instead of dealing with it honestly, he buried it. Literally.

I think about this every time I catch myself holding onto something I know isn’t good for me and just hoping nobody notices. The consequences in chapter 7 are severe, and this isn’t the place to unpack all of that theology. But the deeper point stands: what we hide doesn’t stay contained. It leaks into everything else.

By chapter 8, Ai falls the second time, once Israel deals honestly with what was buried. Sometimes moving forward requires going backward first and cleaning something up.

When We Get Fooled Into a Bad Deal (Chapters 9-10)

Chapter 9 is almost funny if it wasn’t so relatable. The Gibeonites show up looking ragged and worn out, claiming they’ve traveled from far away, and Israel makes a peace treaty with them without checking with God first. Turns out the Gibeonites live right next door and completely played them.

I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely made decisions because something looked convincing on the surface and I skipped the step of actually asking if it was true. Israel gets stuck honoring that treaty anyway, because a promise is a promise even when you got tricked into making it. Chapter 10 gives us the famous “sun stood still” moment as Israel defends the very people who deceived them. Loyalty gets complicated fast when you’ve already given your word.

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Here’s who it made me:

1. I matter to people more than I ever let myself believe. For most of my life I felt like the outcast, and just when I’d think I finally fit somewhere, I’d get quietly pushed back out. So it still catches me off guard when someone tells me I’ve made a difference in their life.

2. Real connection was never about fitting in. It’s about being met. There’s a difference, and I spent a long time confusing the two. I wrote more about that shift here:

3. An email can carry more weight than a paycheck. Someone told me they hadn’t felt connected enough to take communion, and after listening to my Bible study podcasts, something clicked, and she finally did. I think about that email more than I think about most things that happen to me directly.

4. Community can show up in the last place you expect it. I did not see a Bible study podcast becoming a lifeline for people. I definitely didn’t see it becoming one for me. If you want to see what that looks like, Bible Study for Overthinkers is on Rumble and YouTube.

5. Fake friends reveal themselves eventually. It just takes the right test.

6. Ghosting says more about the person doing it than it does about you.

7. A friendship worth keeping doesn’t require you to perform. If you feel pressure to be someone else around a person, that’s information, not a personality flaw of yours to fix.

8. Sisterhood can find you later than you expected, in a form you didn’t plan for. Mine came through a podcast. and Christy became actual sisters this year, not just cohosts.

9. You’re allowed to be your weird self out loud. The right people won’t just tolerate it. They’ll match it.

10. God doesn’t leave. I spent this year in Joshua and Deuteronomy watching Israel test that over and over in the wilderness, and He never once walked away. That’s not a Sunday school fact anymore. That’s something I believe now.

11. Every rule in the Old Testament had intention behind it. None of it was arbitrary. I was raised in church, I’m a pastor’s grandkid, and I still didn’t fully get that until I sat with the text myself this year.

12. Growing up in church doesn’t mean you’ve already learned everything church has to teach you.

13. Discovering your faith fresh, as an adult choosing to dig in rather than being told to, hits completely different than growing up inside it.

14. Financial hardship can be exactly the pressure that pushes you into what you’re actually supposed to be doing.

15. Losing income doesn’t mean losing provision. Those are two different things and I had to learn that the hard way, going from four tutoring students a week to one, right after winter break.

16. Content that glorifies God feels different to make than content built around chasing money. I used to make the second kind. I don’t miss it.

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17. Years of feeling like your work is falling on deaf ears doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong path. Sometimes it just means it isn’t time yet.

18. The breakthrough idea is often born out of scarcity, not abundance. Bible Study for Overthinkers didn’t come from a comfortable place. It came from the leanest month I’d had in years.

19. Small, boring habits can change more than the big dramatic ones. Putting my legs up the wall before bed sounds like nothing. My sleep and my digestion both say otherwise.

20. Hope for the next generation can show up somewhere you’d never expect it, like a rap verse challenge on social media.

21. We’re going to be okay. Watching how many young people threw themselves into that Forrest Frank collab told me the next generation is on fire for Jesus in a way that should put a lot of our fear to rest.

22. Doubt doesn’t disqualify you. My brain tries to tell me I’m not good enough or smart enough about once a week, and it hasn’t stopped me from building anything yet.

23. A public mistake doesn’t get the final word on who you are, even when it feels like it will for a few days.

24. There’s a real difference between a bad day and a genuinely dark stretch, and both deserve grace, from other people, and from yourself.

25. “Enough is enough” can be its own turning point. Not a breakdown, a decision.

26. My intuition is worth listening to, especially about my own body.

27. Tuning into your body instead of overriding it is its own form of self-respect.

28. Family isn’t only who you’re related to. It’s who actually shows up and actually cares. I wrote more about what that looked like this year here:

29. Boundaries don’t destroy relationships. They just stop protecting relationships that were already broken.

30. Going no-contact isn’t failure. Sometimes it’s the most self-respecting decision available.

31. Being unashamed of your faith online is terrifying right up until the moment it isn’t. I had no idea how it would be received. It’s been one of the best decisions I made all year.

32. Looking forward to something, a cruise to Alaska, maybe Europe, my first trip to Vegas, is its own quiet form of hope. It says: I expect to still be here, still growing, still going. And I do.

Thirty-two years in, and I’m not the same person I was at the start of this one. I lost people I thought were permanent and gained people I didn’t know I needed. I got financially humbled and creatively rebuilt in the same breath. I got louder about my faith right as I got quieter about everything that used to drown it out.

If 31 was the year I found out who I actually am, I’m bringing all of her into 32.

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Joshua 6–10 is a lot.

We go from one of the most famous miracles in the entire Bible to one of the most convicting moments in the entire Bible to God literally stopping the sun in the sky like that’s a normal thing that happens.

It is not a normal thing that happens.

But before we get to any of that, I need to talk about Jericho. Because if you grew up in church you’ve heard this story a hundred times and I think that familiarity has made it a little too easy to gloss over how genuinely bizarre God’s battle plan actually was.

The Most Unhinged Military Strategy in History (Chapter 6)

Jericho is a fortified city. I’m talking walls, gates, and professional soldiers. The whole thing. And God gives Joshua the battle plan.

March around the city once a day for six days. Seven priests carry seven trumpets in front of the ark. On the seventh day march around seven times. The priests blow the trumpets, everyone shouts, and the walls fall.

That’s it. That’s the plan.

No siege equipment. No attack strategy. No military formation. Just walk in circles and then yell.

I genuinely think we underestimate how much faith it took to follow those instructions without asking a single question. Because if Joshua had gone back to the people and said “okay so here’s what God told us to do.” I feel like there would have been some reasonable follow up question ones. Like, “And then what? What do you mean the walls just fall? Have you ever seen a wall? They don’t just fall because people yell at them.”

And yet. Seven days. Seven priests. Seven trumpets. Seven laps on the last day. One massive shout. The walls fell flat. The text says the walls collapsed and every man charged straight in. No climbing. No breach point. The walls are gone, now go.

God didn’t need a military strategy. He needed obedience. And when He got it, He handled the rest in the most dramatic way possible.

One person was protected in all of it. Rahab. The scarlet cord was still in her window. Her house was built into the wall and when everything else came down, her household was spared. The spies went and got her exactly like they promised.

God remembered the cord. God remembered her. He really doesn’t forget.

Achan (Chapter 7)

Okay. This is the one.

After Jericho, Israel moves on to Ai. Ai is a smaller city so this should be an easy win. Joshua sends a smaller force because why send everyone for this? The spies come back and say, “Don’t even bother sending the whole army. This is nothing.”

They go up. And they get absolutely rekt. Thirty six men die, the rest flee, and the text says the hearts of the people melted like water.

Joshua falls on his face before God. Essentially says, “What is happening? Why did you bring us all the way here just to let us lose? What are the nations going to think?”

And God’s response is direct.

Israel has sinned. Someone took things from Jericho that were supposed to be devoted to destruction. Somebody kept what they were told not to keep. And until that’s dealt with God is not going with them into battle.

So Joshua works through the process. Tribe by tribe. Clan by clan. Family by family. Person by person.

And it lands on a man named Achan.

Joshua asks him directly, “Tell me what you did. Don’t hide it.”

Achan confesses. He saw a beautiful robe from Babylon. Two hundred shekels of silver. A bar of gold. He wanted them, he took them, and he hid them in the ground under his tent.

They go to his tent, dig it up, and it’s all there. Exactly where he said and then things get very serious very fast.

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If you’ve been with us through Deuteronomy — first of all, respect. That was a journey.

We sat through forty years of wilderness. Moses’s very long speeches. Laws about property lines and wages and things I promised I’d never repeat but definitely came up on the podcast. And then Moses climbed a mountain, saw everything he’d spent his life working toward, and died there without ever crossing over.

Heavy stuff.

But now we’re in a brand new book. And honestly? The energy is completely different.

Deuteronomy felt like standing at the edge of something. Joshua feels like the door finally opening. Moses is gone. Joshua is in charge. The Jordan River is right there. And God is basically saying, “Okay. Let’s go.”

But before Israel takes a single step into that water, a woman in Jericho is already making a decision that changes everything.

We’ll get to her. But first — the new guy.

God Wastes No Time (Chapter 1)

Moses is barely buried before God speaks to Joshua.

No long dramatic pause. No extended grieving period before figuring out what’s next. God had already been preparing Joshua before Moses was gone. The next chapter was already written before the last one closed.

I think about that a lot. Because transitions feel chaotic to us. Like everything is on hold. Like God is somewhere scrambling for a plan B. But God had already prepared the next leader. The commission was already spoken.

Transitions feel uncertain to us. They rarely are to God.

And what does God tell Joshua? He says the same thing three times in just a few verses.

Be strong and courageous. Be strong and courageous. Be strong and courageous.

When someone repeats themselves three times it usually means one of two things. It’s really important. Or they already know you’re going to need the reminder. Honestly probably both.

Joshua gets a clear assignment. A clear promise. A clear instruction. And he gets to work immediately. The people respond with basically the same energy Israel gave Moses — we’ll go wherever you send us. Different leader. Same God. Same mission.

The story picks up right where it left off.

Rahab (Chapter 2)

Okay. Here she is.

Joshua sends two spies into Jericho. They end up at the house of a woman named Rahab. And the text is pretty upfront about who she is — she’s a prostitute. Which means she was at the bottom of pretty much every social ladder that existed in Jericho. Not powerful or connected. Not even the person you’d expect the story to stop and focus on.

And yet. The king of Jericho finds out the spies are at her house and sends men to her door demanding she hand them over. Rahab has a choice. Turn them in. Protect herself. Keep her head down.

Instead she hides them under stalks of flax on her roof. Tells the king’s men they already left. Sends them off in the wrong direction. And then she goes up to the roof and tells the spies exactly why she did it. She’d heard what God did. The Red Sea. The kings He defeated on the other side of the Jordan. The stories had traveled. And Rahab — a Canaanite woman with no covenant, no history with Israel, no religious background — heard those stories and landed on something that Israel kept struggling to hold onto:

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. She didn’t have the law. She didn’t have forty years of miracles. She had secondhand stories. And she bet her entire life on them being true. And she was right.

Honestly Rahab quietly dismantles every excuse I’ve ever heard about not having enough to believe. She had less than almost anyone in this story. Less history. Less access. Less everything. And she was the one who said out loud what Israel kept forgetting — God is God and I’m choosing the winning side.

The spies make a deal with her. Hang a scarlet cord from your window. Keep your family inside when we come through. Anyone in this house will be safe. She agrees. Lowers them out the window. Hangs the cord. And then she waits.

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This is my relationship with Tamarac Garden’s Buzz Off Herbal Infused Tick & Mosquito Spray. I am its most devoted fan and its most negligent user. I sing its praises to anyone who will listen, and then I leave it sitting inside while I walk directly into a cloud of mosquitoes.

The Problem Is Me, Not the Spray

I want to be extremely clear about something before I go any further: Buzz Off works. Like, really works. My habit of forgetting to use it before I need it is entirely my own failure, and I refuse to let it reflect on the product.

The spray smells incredible — herbal and fresh in a way that makes you feel like you’re being misted with something from an apothecary garden, not doused in chemicals. It doesn’t leave that greasy, suffocating film that every DEET-based spray I’ve ever used coats you with. I actually want to put it on. I just... forget that I need to until something has already bitten me.

I always forget to use it until after I’ve been bit. Every single time. I am a cautionary tale in khakis.

The Time I Finally Got It Right

But then came the moment of redemption. I had been bitten earlier in the afternoon — a little welt forming on my forearm, my reminder that the bugs were out and I, once again, had failed to prepare. This time, though, I decided to actually do something about it.

I grabbed the Buzz Off. I went back outside. I immediately sprayed it on.

Within minutes, a mosquito found me. I watched it. It flew toward my leg. It hovered — just sort of floated there, close to my skin, like it was deeply confused. And then it just... didn’t land.

It stayed airborne, baffled. I stayed unbothered. And then I killed it, because absolutely not, we are not doing a catch-and-release situation here.

I cannot stress enough what a religious experience this was. A mosquito — a creature with one biological purpose when it finds you — decided my skin wasn’t worth it. The spray created some kind of invisible force field of herbal “nope.” I was giddy.

Why I Keep Recommending It Anyway

Here’s the thing: even when I forget to use it, I still tell everyone I know about Buzz Off. Because when I do use it, it is genuinely impressive. No harsh chemicals, no overpowering synthetic smell, no residue. Just effective, plant-based protection that actually lets you enjoy being outside instead of just surviving it.

Tamarac Garden makes something that feels thoughtfully crafted — not like a mass-market product slapped together, but like something made by people who actually spend time outside and want a better option. I respect that. I just need to work on my habit of, you know, using it.

I’m working on it. I’ve started leaving a bottle by the back door. Baby steps.

This post contains affiliate links. I only share products I genuinely use and love — even when I forget to use them. Use code JACKIEESPADA at checkout for 10% off your order at Tamarac Garden.

Bonus Discovery: The Bite Relief I Didn’t Know I Had

One more thing I have to share. After I got those earlier bites — the ones that finally motivated me to actually grab the Buzz Off — I reached for Tamarac Garden’s Sunny Days Sunscreen Salve that I also have on hand. I put it on the bites, and the itchiness went away almost immediately.

Turns out, that’s not a coincidence. I did a little digging and discovered that zinc oxide — one of the active ingredients in the Sunny Days Salve — is also the active ingredient in calamine lotion. You know, the classic pink stuff people have been dabbing on bug bites for generations. It’s been soothing itchy skin forever, and here it is doing the same thing in a sunscreen salve I already owned.

So not only did Tamarac Garden save me from future bites, they accidentally gave me the remedy for the ones I’d already gotten. At this point I’m basically a one-brand outdoor survival kit — I just need to remember to use everything before the mosquitoes find me.

We made it.

Five books into the Torah. Hundreds of years of wilderness wandering, covenant making, law giving, and Moses talking — and we have arrived at the final chapters of Deuteronomy.

And I have to be honest with you. I did not expect this book to hit the way it did.

I thought Deuteronomy was going to feel like a recap. Like that episode of a TV show that’s mostly clips from previous episodes while the writers figure out what to do next. I expected it to feel repetitive and slow and a little hard to get through.

Instead it felt like sitting with someone who knew they were running out of time. Someone trying to pour everything they had left into the people they loved before they couldn’t anymore.

That’s Moses. That’s what this whole book has been.

And chapters 30–34 are where we finally watch him finish.

The Offer Is Still on the Table (Chapter 30)

After everything in chapter 28 — all those curses, all that weight, all that honesty about what disobedience costs — you might expect chapter 30 to feel like a verdict. Like the door is closing.

Instead it opens with something that sounds almost impossible given everything that came before it.

The offer is still on the table.

Moses tells Israel that even if all the curses come. Even if they end up scattered to the farthest nations under heaven. Even then, if they return to God and obey Him with all their heart and soul, God will restore them. He will bring them back. He will make them more prosperous than their ancestors.

That’s not a small thing. That’s God essentiallly saying: I already know what’s coming. I already know what you’re going to do. And I’m building the way back before you’ve even made the mistake.

There’s something about that which is almost too generous to fully absorb. God isn’t waiting to see if they fail and then deciding what to do. He’s already writing the restoration into the covenant before the exile even happens. Before the wandering. Before the consequences play out.

The door back was built before the door was ever walked out of.

And then chapter 30 verse 19 arrives. Which might be the most direct thing God says in the entire book:

Choose life.

Not “try your best.” Not “do what feels right.” Not “figure it out as you go.”

Choose. Life.

God laid out every possible outcome across the last several chapters with exhausting clarity. He showed them the blessings. He showed them the curses. He showed them the way back when they inevitably mess it up. And then He looked at them and said: the choice is yours. I’m not making it for you. But I am telling you which one to pick.

That kind of clarity is actually a gift. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Especially when it’s uncomfortable.

Because a lot of people spend their lives feeling like they don’t know what God wants from them. And then you read a verse like this and realize sometimes God is remarkably direct. The issue isn’t always that we don’t know. Sometimes the issue is that we know and we’re still hesitating.

Choose life. It was that clear then. It’s still that clear now.

Moses Commissions Joshua and Then Writes a Song (Chapters 31–32)

Chapter 31 is where Moses officially passes the baton.

He calls Joshua forward in front of all of Israel and commissions him publicly. He tells the people: I am a hundred and twenty years old. I can no longer lead you. But God will go before you. And Joshua will lead you in.

And then Moses says something to Joshua that I think deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Moses is essentially handing Joshua the same word God has been giving Israel throughout the entire wilderness journey. Be strong. Do not fear. God goes with you.

The message doesn’t change just because the leader does. The faithfulness doesn’t transfer from Moses to Joshua — it was never in Moses to begin with. It was always in God. Moses was just the one carrying it for a season.

That’s an important distinction. Because sometimes people build their faith around a person — a pastor, a teacher, a leader — and then when that person is gone or fails or moves on, the faith wobbles. Moses was making sure Israel understood: what you’ve been walking with this whole time is bigger than me. I’m leaving. God isn’t.

Then Moses writes a song.

Which is not what I would have done with my last days of leadership but Moses was built differently.

Chapter 32 is the song of Moses and it is long and it is poetic and it is essentially a musical recap of everything God has done for Israel and everything Israel has done in response. Which is to say: God was faithful. Israel was not. God was patient. Israel was not. God was consistent. Israel absolutely was not.

But underneath the song is this thread of God’s character that keeps showing up no matter what Israel does. Steadfast. Faithful. Just. Present.

The song ends with a call to worship. To recognize who God actually is. And Moses delivers it with the energy of someone who has spent a hundred and twenty years watching God show up over and over again despite every reason not to.

That’s not a man who is bitter about not crossing over.

That’s a man who is still fully convinced of who God is even at the very end.

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If chapters 18–23 felt like Moses getting into the specifics, chapters 24–29 feel like Moses arriving at the finish line and deciding to sprint.

He’s covered the big laws. He’s retold the wilderness stories. He’s warned them about fear and false prophets and moving their neighbor’s property lines when nobody’s looking.

And now? Now Moses is getting into the details that reveal what kind of society God actually wanted Israel to become. Not just a nation that followed rules. A nation that noticed people. That protected the overlooked. That remembered where it came from.

And then chapter 28 shows up and changes the entire atmosphere of the room.

We’ll get there. But first — let’s talk about the people Moses was paying attention to that everyone else probably wasn’t.

God Keeps Noticing the People Nobody Else Notices (Chapter 24)

Chapter 24 is one of those chapters that could feel like a random list of laws if you read it too fast. Divorce regulations. Loan collateral rules. Kidnapping laws. Wages. Gleaning fields.

But when you slow down, a theme starts to emerge underneath all of it.

God keeps protecting the people with the least power in the room.

The widow. The orphan. The foreigner. The hired worker waiting on their paycheck. The person who had to give up their cloak as collateral on a loan. Over and over again, the law keeps circling back to the same kinds of people — the ones ancient society would have had no problem ignoring entirely.

One that hit me was the law about wages. Deuteronomy 24:15 says to pay your hired worker their wages the same day, before sunset. Don’t make them wait. Because they are poor and counting on it. And if you withhold it, they will cry out to God against you.

That’s not abstract theology. That’s God saying: the person who worked for you today needs to eat tonight. Do not make your financial convenience their emergency.

That still feels relevant. People in power have always had the ability to make other people wait. To delay. To make someone else absorb the cost of their slowness. And God looked at that dynamic and said — no. Not in my covenant community.

The gleaning law also shows up here, which I love every single time. God tells Israel not to go back through their fields and vineyards a second time to collect everything they missed on the first pass. Leave it. Leave it for the widow. Leave it for the orphan. Leave it for the foreigner.

Harvest your field. But don’t harvest it to the bone.

God was essentially building a social safety net into the agricultural economy. The leftovers weren’t an accident. They were intentional. There was supposed to be something remaining for the people who had nothing. And the people with abundance were supposed to leave it on purpose.

I keep thinking about what that would look like now. Not just financially. But in every area of abundance. What are we harvesting to the bone? And what are we supposed to be leaving behind for someone else?

Restoration and Dignity (Chapters 25–26)

Chapter 25 opens with something that might surprise you — limits on punishment.

If someone was found guilty and sentenced to flogging, the law said a maximum of forty lashes. Not one more. Because — and this is the part that stopped me — “then your brother will be degraded in your eyes.”

God capped the punishment because He was concerned about the dignity of the person being punished.

Even in consequences, there was a ceiling. Even in justice, there was a limit designed to protect the humanity of the person on the receiving end. Which is a more nuanced view of justice than a lot of people give the Old Testament credit for.

Chapter 25 also has the levirate marriage law — where a man was supposed to marry his deceased brother’s widow to carry on the family line and protect her — and honestly the whole section requires a lot of historical context to engage with fairly. What I’ll say is that underneath the cultural specifics, there is again this consistent thread of: What happens to the vulnerable person when the system fails them? God kept building answers to that question into the law.

Then chapter 26 arrives and it’s genuinely beautiful. Moses instructs Israel to bring their firstfruits — the very first of what the land produces — to God. And as they present it, they’re supposed to recite their history out loud.

My father was a wandering Aramean. We went down to Egypt. We were enslaved. We cried out. God heard us. God brought us out. God brought us here.

It’s a liturgy of remembrance built right into the worship practice. Before you enjoy the harvest, you tell the story of where you came from. Before you celebrate the abundance, you remember the suffering. Before you settle into the blessing, you rehearse the faithfulness.

Because people who forget where they came from tend to stop being grateful for where they are.

That practice wasn’t just religious ritual. It was a guardrail against entitlement.

And honestly? That’s still good practice. Before you enjoy what you have — say it out loud. Remember what it cost. Remember Who brought you through. Gratitude doesn’t survive amnesia.

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There’s a season of my faith I don’t usually talk about. Not because it’s too painful to revisit. More because I’m still turning it over, still finding new layers in it, still not totally sure I have the language for what happened — or what God was doing in the middle of it.

But I think that might be exactly why I need to write it down.

I had friends I genuinely trusted. People I had opened up to, invested in, shown the real, messy, unpolished version of myself to. I loved them the way you love people when you’ve finally stopped performing and started actually letting someone in.

And when things got hard — not catastrophically hard, not some impossible ask — they left. Quietly. Without explanation. Like none of it had meant what I thought it meant.

The grief of that was its own thing. But what I wasn’t prepared for was what came underneath the grief. Because once the initial hurt settled, I found a question sitting there that I didn’t know what to do with:

Did God even send them to me?

And if He did — why would He?

That’s the part that made it a faith crisis, not just a friendship loss.

Because I had prayed about those relationships. I had felt — genuinely felt — that those people were placed in my life with intention. I had been grateful for them, out loud, to God. I had pointed to them as evidence of His goodness.

So what did it mean that they were gone?

I kept showing up to all the things that looked like faith from the outside. I was reading my Bible. I was praying. I was still serving, still showing up for other people, still going through every motion I knew how to go through. But on the inside I was quietly unraveling, pulling at the thread of every time I thought I had heard from God and wondering if I had just been making it up the whole time.

It’s a disorienting place to be — doing all the right things and feeling none of them.

I talked to my mom about it eventually. Not a dramatic, everything-poured-out kind of conversation. Just one of those phone calls where you’re trying to hold it together and something in your voice gives you away.

She said something I’ve heard before. Something I probably would have nodded at in a different season without really absorbing it.

God sends people into your life for a reason, and some for a season. We just have to trust His timing and His plan.

I know. I know you’ve heard that too. It almost sounds like a bumper sticker.

But here’s what happened when she said it to me in that moment: something cracked open. Not because the words were new. Because I finally heard what was underneath them.

Questioning whether God sent those people — really sitting with that doubt, letting myself feel how destabilizing it was — that wasn’t actually a question about them. It was a question about whether God had been present at all. Whether I could trust what I thought I’d felt. Whether my whole framework for hearing from Him was broken.

And what my mom’s words did was separate those two things for me.

God being in something doesn’t guarantee how it ends. His presence in a season isn’t a promise that the season lasts forever. The fact that He sent them doesn’t mean He was wrong. It might mean He always knew it was temporary — and that temporary things can still be real, and good, and exactly what they were supposed to be.

I’ve been sitting with that ever since.

I don’t think questioning whether God sent someone means He wasn’t there. I think sometimes the questioning is where He shows up. In the unraveling, in the hard look at what you actually believe versus what you’ve just been saying you believe.

Those friendships were real. The loss was real. The grief was real.

And God was in all of it. Even the leaving.

I’m not going to pretend that thought arrived and everything was fine. It didn’t work like that. But something in me settled — not into an answer, exactly, but into enough trust to keep going. To stop demanding that God explain the timeline and start asking what He wanted me to learn inside of it.

That felt like faith. Maybe more than anything I’d done while I was still going through the motions.

If you’re in a season right now where someone has left — someone you thought was placed in your life with intention — I’m not going to tell you it doesn’t hurt. It does. And I’m not going to tell you the question of why is easy to sit with.

But I want to offer you what my mom offered me:

God’s presence in something isn’t canceled by how it ends. His plan doesn’t require the people to stay for you to still be held.

You were not abandoned by Him. Even when it felt like everyone else left.

I write one of these every week — a longer, slower version of what I’m actually thinking about in my faith life. If this resonated, subscribe below. It’s free!

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Okay so by the time we get to Deuteronomy 18, Moses has already covered the big stuff. The Promised Land. The warnings. The history lessons nobody asked for. The “please for the love of everything do not forget God once you’re comfortable” speech.

And now? Now we’re getting into the specifics.

Like, the very specific specifics.

Some of these laws are genuinely moving. Some of them are practical in ways that still feel relevant thousands of years later. And some of them are going to make you put your Bible down and say, “I’m sorry. What did He just say?”

We’re going to cover all of it. Because Scripture doesn’t skip the weird parts and neither are we.

The Prophet Nobody Was Ready For (Chapter 18)

Before we get into the laws, chapter 18 drops something quietly massive that I don’t think gets enough attention.

Moses is talking about the dangers of following false prophets and sorcerers and mediums and people who claim to hear from God when they absolutely do not. He’s basically warning Israel, “The nations around you consult fortune tellers and dead spirits. You are not supposed to do that. God has something different for you.”

And then he says this:

God will raise up a prophet like Moses. From among their own people. And that prophet will speak God’s words directly.

That’s it. That’s a big deal sitting quietly in the middle of a chapter about divination laws.

Because the rest of the Old Testament is essentially Israel waiting for that prophet. And then the New Testament opens with one showing up. That one little promise tucked into chapter 18 echoes all the way through Scripture. Moses is literally pointing forward to something he himself will never see, and he says it with such confidence that it barely even gets a dramatic pause.

That’s faith. Declaring what’s coming even when you won’t be here to see it land.

Cities of Refuge and the God Who Cares About Intent (Chapter 19)

Chapter 19 introduces something called cities of refuge, and honestly this is one of those laws that makes you realize how thoughtful God’s legal system actually was.

Here’s the setup. In ancient Israel, if someone killed another person, the victim’s family had the right to pursue justice — including pursuing the person who did it. But God makes a distinction that matters enormously: Was it an accident or was it intentional?

If someone accidentally killed their neighbor — Moses gives the example of two people chopping wood and the ax head flies off and hits someone — that person could flee to a designated city of refuge.. They would be safe there. Protected. Given a fair hearing before being handed over to anyone.

But if someone planned it? Premeditated it? Acted out of hatred? The city of refuge wasn’t a loophole for them.

That distinction — intention matters — is deeply human in the best way. God isn’t running a system where outcomes are all that counts and circumstances are irrelevant. He sees the heart behind the action. He built mercy for tragedy and accountability for malice into the same legal framework.

That should reshape how we think about justice in general. Because a lot of human justice systems still struggle with that balance thousands of years later. We either go too hard or too soft. God built both into the same law.

Chapter 19 also drops a reminder about property boundaries. Basically: don’t move your neighbor’s landmark to steal their land. Which sounds simple. But the principle underneath it — don’t quietly shift things in your favor when nobody’s watching — is still incredibly relevant. Integrity isn’t just about the big obvious moments. It’s also about whether you slowly inch the line when you think you can get away with it.

Okay But Can We Talk About Chapter 20 For a Second

This is the one that got me.

Chapter 20 lays out the rules of warfare for Israel, and I expected it to feel militaristic and distant and kind of hard to connect to. Instead it ended up being one of the most psychologically insightful passages in the whole book.

Here’s what happens. Before Israel goes into battle, the priest speaks to the army. And what does he say? Essentially: Do not be afraid. God is with you.

Which sounds like a standard pre-battle pep talk. Fine. Normal. We get it.

But THEN the officers speak. And this is where it gets interesting.

They give the people an exemption list. Who gets to go home before the battle even starts?

• Anyone who just built a new house and hasn’t dedicated it yet.

• Anyone who just planted a vineyard and hasn’t enjoyed it yet.

• Anyone who just got engaged and hasn’t married yet.

• And anyone who is afraid.

Wait. Back up.

God is literally telling scared soldiers to go home before the battle. Not because He’s being harsh. Not because fear is shameful. But because of what comes next:

“Let him leave and return home, so that his brothers won’t lose heart as he did.”

Deuteronomy 20:8

Fear is contagious.

God understood something about human psychology that we’re still studying today. When one person spirals, it doesn’t just affect them. It spreads. One panicked voice in a group changes the atmosphere of the whole room. One person catastrophizing out loud plants seeds of doubt in everyone around them. One person who has already mentally given up can pull other people into that same posture without even trying.

God wasn’t dismissing the scared soldier. He was protecting the mission and the community from what unaddressed fear does when it’s allowed to stay in the room.

And I sat with that for a long tiime because that hits different when you apply it beyond a battlefield.

Think about the environments you’ve been in where one person’s anxiety became everyone’s anxiety. One coworker convinced the whole team the project was doomed before it started. One family member who turned every holiday into a countdown to disaster. One friend group where one person’s worst-case-scenario thinking slowly became the group’s dominant frequency.

Fear is contagious. God knew that before we had the research to prove it.

But here’s the other side of it that I think matters just as much. God didn’t punish the afraid soldier. He didn’t shame him. He didn’t give him a lecture about faith. He just said, “You can go.” The system made room for human fear while also being honest about what fear does to a community.

That’s not weakness being coddled. That’s wisdom. There’s a difference between honoring someone’s humanity and letting their humanity become a weapon against everybody else.

The afraid soldier got to go home. The battle still moved forward. Both things were true at the same time.

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The deeper I get into Deuteronomy, the more it feels like Moses understands human nature uncomfortably well. The first several chapters focused a lot on remembering. Remember what God did. Remember the wilderness. Remember where your blessings came from. Remember not to drift once life becomes uncomfortable. But somewhere around chapters 12-17, the tone shifts a little.

Now Moses starts sounding deeply concerned about influence. Specifically, what happens when people slowly start looking around at the cultures surrounding them and thinking, “Maybe we should do thing more like them.”

That tension is all over these chapters. Reading it now feels painfully familiar because people still do this constantly. Human beings have always struggled with wanting to blend in with whatever culture surrounds them, even when they know it’s pulling them away from what’s actually good for them.

The Israelites are preparing to enter the Promised Land, and Moses keeps warning them not to absorb the worship practices, values, and spiritual habits of the nations around them. Over and over again he’s basically saying, “Do not copy them just because they’re doing it.”

At first some of these warnings can feel intense while reading them. But the deeper I got into these chapters, the more I realized Moses understands how compromise usually happens.

Slowly.

People rarely wake up one morning planning to abandon what they believe completely. Most of the time compromise starts much smaller than that. People normalize things gradually. They start excusing things they once questioned. They absorb the values of whatever constantly surrounds them until eventually they don’t even realize how much they’ve drifted.

That feels especially relevant now because modern culture disciples people constantly whether they realize it or not. Through social media. Through influencers. Through politics. Through outrage. Through whatever people consume every single day. Something is always shaping people’s thinking.

And I think Moses understands something really important in these chapters:
people become surprisingly similar to whatever they continually surround themselves with.

The “Everybody Else Is Doing It” Problem

One thing that stood out to me while reading these chapters is how often the Israelites seem tempted by what the surrounding nations are doing. Not because those practices are actually good. Usually because they’re visible.

That part really stuck with me because human beings are incredibly influenced by what appears successful, normal, or culturally accepted around them. Even now, people constantly feel pressure to adjust their values in order to fit in socially, professionally, culturally, or politically. Nobody wants to feel isolated. Nobody wants to feel weird. Nobody wants to feel like the only person doing something differently. I think that desire to blend in drives way more decision-making than most people realize.

The deeper I got into these chapters, the more I realized Moses isn’t just warning Israel about pagan worship specifically. He’s warning them about imitation. About slowly becoming indistinguishable from the culture around them. That still happens now too. Just in more socially acceptable ways.

People slowly absorb the priorities of whatever constantly surrounds them. Success starts getting defined the same way culture defines it. Morality becomes flexiible depending on what’s popular. Attention becomes more important than wisdom. Feelings become more important than truth. Convenience becomes more important than obedience. And most of that drift happens quietly enough that people barely notice it while it’s happening.

📖 Want to go deeper?

This article pairs with this week’s Bible Study for Overthinkers discussion on Deuteronomy 12–17:

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I never thought I’d become the kind of person who talks passionately about soap on the internet and yet here we are.

But to be fair, when you’ve spent most of your life with skin that behaves like it’s personally offended by almost every product on the shelf, finding something that actually helps feels a little life changing.

My boyfriend, Cam, originally found Health y Sol at our local Sprouts here in Georgia and brought it home for us to try.

At first, I was cautiously optimistic.

And by “cautiously optimistic,” I mean I fully expected my eczema to stage a dramatic protest within 24 hours because that’s usually how these things go.

I’ve had extremely sensitive, eczema-prone skin since I was a child. Most soaps either dried my skin out completely or made my eczema flare up even worse. There were periods of time where using anything other than water felt risky.

My skin was dry, irritated, itchy, and constantly angry at me for reasons still unknown.

So when I picked up the soap and saw that it only had three ingredients (not including essential oils in the scented varieties), I was immediately intrigued.

No mystery chemicals. No ingredient list that looks like a science fair project. Just simple ingredients I could actually pronounce.

And after about a week of using it, I realized something shocking:

My skin wasn’t reacting badly.

At all.

In fact, it was doing the opposite.

My skin started feeling softer and more moisturized. The constant dryness started calming down. I wasn’t reaching for lotion nearly as much anymore, and the eczema spots that had been hanging around forever slowly started disappearing.

At this point, my eczema is almost nonexistent.

That may not sound dramatic to someone who hasn’t dealt with chronic skin irritation, but if you have dealt with it, you know how huge that is.

People with sensitive skin become accidental detectives. We spend our lives reading labels, avoiding products, trying random “miracle cures,” and mentally preparing ourselves for disappointment every time we try something new.

So when something actually works without destroying your skin barrier in the process, you notice.

What made the experience even more special to me was learning that Health y Sol is a Christian family business based in Sanford, Florida, which is right near my hometown area of Altamonte Springs and Longwood.

Even though I live in Georgia now, there’s still something really meaningful about seeing good things come out of the place you grew up. Now that I’m in my 30s and growing closer to my faith, supporting smaller faith-based businesses feels more important to me than ever before.

A few weeks ago, I actually got to visit their store in Winter Park, Florida with my mom, brother, and my brother’s dog Brady. First of all, the store itself was BEAUTIFUL. Bright, vibrant, welcoming, and somehow not overwhelming at all, which is impressive because I’m one candle away from becoming overstimulated in most stores these days.

Everything felt intentional. The staff was incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, and you could genuinely tell they cared about the people walking through the door. It didn’t feel corporate or salesy. It felt personal.

They even threw in some freebies for us after we bought a bunch of soap, which immediately activated the “small business customer for life” part of my brain.

My personal favorites started with the fragrance-free soap and the Suet soap for eczema and face care, but I’ve also fallen in love with scents like Tropical Smoothie, Mojito, Vanilla Milkshake, and their spring seasonal soaps Mediterranean Sol and Golden Orchard.

The dangerous thing about finding soaps you love this much is suddenly wanting your entire life to smell like them. But beyond just soap, this whole experience honestly pushed me deeper into wanting to make healthier, more non-toxic swaps in other areas of my life too.

It made me start paying more attention to ingredients. To food. To home products. To what I’m constantly surrounding myself with every day. Because once you realize your body can feel better, it changes the way you look at everything.

And if you’re someone reading this who feels skeptical because you’ve “tried everything,” trust me I get it.

I know how exhausting it is to spend money on products that promise relief and then leave your skin worse than before.

But this is one of the few products I’ve used that genuinely feels trustworthy. No BS ingredients. No pretending. No fake “clean” marketing. Just simple ingredients that are actually good for your skin.

So yes, I officially became an affiliate for Health y Sol because I genuinely love what they’re doing and wanted to share it with more people. If you’ve been wanting to try them for yourself, you can use my code JACKIE10 at checkout.

And if your skin has also been personally victimized by random soap ingredients, I truly hope this helps you the way it helped me.

The deeper I get into Deuteronomy, the more emotional Moses feels to me. Not dramatic exactly, just aware. Like somebody who already knows how this story tends to go because he’s watched human nature play out long enough to recognize the patterns before they happen again.

That feeling is all over chapters 6 through 11. The Israelites are finally getting ready to step into the Promised Land after forty years in the wilderness, and instead of Moses celebrating nonstop, he keeps warning them. Repeating things. Reminding them not to forget God once life finally becomes stable.

At first, I kept thinking, “Okay, we get it. Remember God. Don’t worship idols. Teach your children. Stay faithful.” But the more I sat with these chapters, the more I realized Moses isn’t repeating himself because he has nothing else to say. He’s repeating himself because human beings are unbelievably forgetful once survival mode ends.

That part hit me harder than I expected it to.

Because people are usually very good at seeking God when life feels uncertain. When prayers feel urgent. When money is tight. When relationships are falling apart. When anxiety is high and people feel desperate for direction. But comfort introduces a completely different kind of spiritual danger because slowly, quietly, people start convincing themselves they’re sustaining their own lives.

And I think Moses already knows that’s exactly what’s coming. The Israelites are about to live in homes they didn’t build, eat from vineyards they didn’t plant, and experience blessings they spent generations longing for. Moses knows how easy it’s going to be for them to settle into comfort and slowly stop remembering how dependent they once were.

Honestly, I don’t even think most people drift from God intentionally. I think life just gets loud. That’s what kept coming to mind while reading these chapters because modern life is basically engineered to scatter people’s attention in a thousand different directions all day long. People wake up and immediately grab their phones before they even fully open their eyes. Notifications, emails, texts, news, algorithms, endless scrolling. There’s barely any silence left anymore.

And while reading Deuteronomy, I kept thinking about how many people slowly become spiritually numb not because they stopped believing in God, but because their attention belongs to everything else all the time.

That’s part of why Deuteronomy 6 stood out to me so much. Moses keeps telling the people to build remembrance into everyday life. Talk about these things at home. Talk about them while traveling. Teach your children. Keep these reminders constantly in front of you. Basically, don’t let your relationship with God become something occasional or convenient.

That feels incredibly relevant now because people consume massive amounts of content every single day, but consumption and formation are not the same thing. Somebody can listen to worship music, podcasts, sermons, and Christian TikToks constantly while still feeling spiritually disconnected because hearing truth occasionally isn’t the same thing as building your life around it.

And honestly, I think that’s what Moses is getting at here. Not perfection. Not performance. Attention. Because eventually people become whatever consistently shapes their attention.

What’s Actually Happening Here?

These chapters feel very different from the first part of Deuteronomy because the conversation has shifted a little. Earlier, Moses was mostly looking backward. Recounting the wilderness, reminding the Israelites what happened, trying to make sure they understood how fear and disobedience kept an entire generation from entering the Promised Land. But in chapters 6–11, it feels like Moses has started looking forward more than backward.

The Israelites are finally preparing to step into the land after forty years of wandering, and Moses seems deeply aware that their biggest spiritual danger is about to change. In the wilderness, dependence on God was obvious. They woke up every morning needing Him to provide manna. They needed direction constantly. Survival itself forced them to rely on Him daily. But settled life changes people.

That’s the tension underneath these chapters that kept standing out to me while reading them. Moses keeps warning the people not to forget God once life becomes comfortable because comfort has a way of creating the illusion that people are sustaining themselves.

And honestly, I don’t even think most people realize when that shift starts happening.

At first people pray desperately for something. Stability. Provision. A relationship. A new opportunity. Healing. Direction. Then eventually those prayers get answered and slowly the thing they once cried out to God for just becomes part of normal life.

The house becomes “just the house.” The marriage becomes routine. The job becomes stressful instead of appreciated. The answered prayer becomes background noise. Human beings adapt to blessings incredibly fast.

I kept thinking while reading this section that Moses already knows exactly what’s about to happen. The Israelites are about to move into homes they didn’t build, eat from vineyards they didn’t plant, and experience blessings they spent generations longing for. And Moses knows how easy it will be for them to slowly stop seeing those things as gifts.

That’s why these chapters feel so repetitive at first. Moses keeps saying remember, obey, teach your children, stay faithful, don’t chase other gods, don’t forget where everythiing came from. But the repetition started making more sense the longer I sat with it because humans are unbelievably forgetful once survival mode ends.

Fear makes people cling tightly to God sometimes. Comfort makes people drift quietly.

That feels like one of the biggest themes underneath this entire section.

The Remember Chapters

One thing that really stood out to me while reading Deuteronomy 6 is how much faith is tied to ordinary daily life. Not huge spiritual performances. Not constant emotional highs. Not giant mountaintop moments.

Moses keeps bringing everything back to everyday rhythms instead. Talk about these things at home. Teach your children. Think about them when you wake up and when you go to sleep. Build these reminders into ordinary life.

The more I read this section, the more it stopped feeling like “religious instructions” and started sounding like somebody trying desperately to keep people grounded before life starts pulling their attention in a hundred different directions.

That’s probably why this section feels so relevant now.

Modern life is unbelievably distracting. People are constantly consuming something. Music, podcasts, videos, scrolling, notifications, emails, opinions, headlines. There’s barely any silence left anymore. I caught myself thinking while reading these chapters how difficult it actually is now for people to sit quietly long enough to even think deeply about anything.

The second things get quiet, most people immediately reach for stimulation.

I don’t even say that judgmentally because I do it too. But reading this section made me realize how much modern life trains people toward distraction instead of reflection.

That’s probably why Moses keeps repeating himself. Because eventually people become whatever consistently shapes their attention. And I think Moses understands something really important here: remembering God was never supposed to be something people squeezed into life occasionally. He’s describing something woven into daily routines, conversations, family life, and ordinary moments.

That part hit me harder than I expected it to because I think a lot of people consume Christian content constantly while still feeling spiritually disconnected. Sermons, worship music, podcasts, devotionals, TikToks. But consuming spiritual content isn’t always the same thing as building your actual life around God. Those are two very different things.

I kept thinking about how easy it is for people to know truth intellectually while slowly drifting from it practically. Not because they stopped believing it, but because their attention slowly became scattered across everything else instead. That kind of drift usually happens quietly. Most people don’t wake up one morning deciding they’re going to drift spiritually. Life just gets loud. People get tired. Distractions pile up. Habits shift. And eventually God becomes something people think about occasionally instead of Someone they intentionally remain connected to throughout daily life.

The more I read Deuteronomy 6, the more I realized Moses isn’t just warning the Israelites about idols made of gold and stone. He’s warning them about forgetting.

📖 Want to go deeper?

This article pairs with this week’s Bible Study for Overthinkers discussion on Deuteronomy 6-11:

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📺 Rumble
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Imagine leading people through miracle after miracle. Like actual miracles.

You watched God split an entire sea in half. You saw bread literally fall from heaven every morning. You had a cloud guiding you during the day and fire at night.

And somehow the people are still waking up every morning like, “Okay but are we sure God knows what He’s doing?”

That’s Deuteronomy. And honestly? Moses sounds tired. Not “I need a nap” tired either. I mean emotionally exhausted in the way someone sounds when they’ve spent forty years repeating the same lesson and are slowly realizing the group still may not fully get it.

That’s the energy all over these opening chapters.

Before reading Deuteronomy, I expected it to feel repetitive. Maybe a little dry if I’m being honest. Instead, it feels emotional. Personal. Almost like sitting down with someone who desperately needs you to understand the lesson before they leave. Because this isn’t Moses randomly retelling history for fun. This is Moses standing before a new generation saying, “Please learn from what happened out there.”

And the more I read these chapters, the more Moses started reminding me of my grandpa telling the same family story for the 25th time. You know the one. Everybody already knows how it ends. Half the room could probably tell the story themselves at this point, but Grandpa still tells it like it happened yesterday because to him, the lesson still matters.

That’s exactly what Deuteronomy feels like. Moses keeps revisiting these wilderness moments not because he forgot they already lived through them, but because people are incredibly good at repeating mistakes once they stop remembering why the lesson mattered in the first place. And honestly, that’s probably one of the biggest themes in Deuteronomy already: Humans forget. Especially when fear enters the chat.

What’s Actually Happening Here?

So before we get into the drama, let’s set the scene. The Israelites are finally standing on the edge of the Promised Land after forty years in the wilderness.

Forty years.

An entire generation has died in the wilderness because of rebellion, fear, complaining, disobedience, and refusing to trust God after He repeatedly proved Himself faithful. And Moses himself will not enter the land. That part hangs over these chapters like a cloud. You can feel the weight of it while reading.

This is essentially Moses’ farewell speech, but instead of giving some short inspirational movie-ending monologue, he starts unpacking EVERYTHING.

The mistakes. The fear. The rebellion. The moments where the Israelites completely lost the plot. And honestly? It makes complete sense.

Because if the people enter the Promised Land without learning from the wilderness, they’re just going to repeat the same patterns in a nicer location. That line alone might preach. Because a lot of us think changing our environment automatically fixes us. New city. New relationship. New planner. New church. New routine. Meanwhile God is like, “We still need to deal with the thing underneath all of that.”

That’s what Deuteronomy feels like to me so far. A heart check before transition.

Moses Starts Reading Receipts

One thing about Moses? This man came PREPARED with examples.

Deuteronomy opens with him recounting Israel’s journey through the wilderness, and the whole thing feels like someone trying to remind their friends about the disastrous road trip everyone conveniently rewrote in their heads. Because human beings LOVE selective memory. We remember the parts that make us feel justified.

We forget the parts where we panicked, spiraled, rebelled, complained, or acted ridiculous. And Israel did all of those things. Moses reminds them how God told them to go possess the land.

Simple enough. Except the people immediately turned it into a fear spiral. They sent spies into the land, the spies came back, and instead of focusing on the fact that God had literally promised them victory, they became consumed by how intimidating everything looked. That feels very modern.

God gives us direction and our first instinct is often, “Okay but let me research every possible reason this could fail.” We start measuring obstacles instead of remembering Who sent us. And the wildest part is the Israelites had already seen miracle after miracle.

That’s the part that gets me every time. Because it’s easy to read the Old Testament and think, “How could they possibly doubt after everything they saw?” But then one stressful week happens and suddenly we’re acting like God has never carried us through anything before. One bad phone call. One unexpected bill. One unanswered prayer. One moment of uncertainty. And suddenly all perspective leaves the building.

The Israelites are frustrating because they’re relatable. That’s the uncomfortable truth.

The Wilderness Did Something to Them

One thing I think we miss when reading these stories is how deeply the wilderness affected the Israelites psychologically. These were people coming out of generations of slavery.

That matters because slavery changes how people think. It changes trust, identity and even their confidence. Even after freedom physically arrives, fear often stays mentally. Knowing this explains a LOT. Because over and over again, Israel keeps wanting to go backward. Not because Egypt was good. Egypt was horrible, but Egypt was familiar. And people will cling to familiar misery before stepping into unfamiliar freedom.

That is still true today. Sometimes we romanticize old situations simply because uncertainty scares us. The Israeiltes literally wanted to return to slavery because at least slavery felt predictable. And that sounds insane until you realize how often people do the exact same thing emotionally and spiritually.

We go back to toxic relationships, destructive habits, unhealthy coping mechanisms, fear-based thinking, spiritual numbness, and constant distraction because uncertainty feels terrifying. Freedom requires trust. And trust is hard when God isn’t handing you the full five-year plan upfront.

📖 Want to go deeper?

This article pairs with this week’s Bible Study for Overthinkers discussion on Deuteronomy 1-5:

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There’s a strange feeling that happens when you hear a song you’ve known forever and suddenly realize it didn’t actually start there. An older track comes on, and within seconds your brain starts connecting dots you never noticed before. Maybe it’s the bassline, a melody, or some tiny musical detail that sounds oddly familiar until it finally clicks where you’ve heard it before.

I think that’s part of what makes music so fascinating to me. Songs don’t really disappear when their era ends. They evolve. They get sampled, reimagined, and introduced to entirely new generations of listeners who may not even realize they’re hearing pieces of music history hidden inside a modern hit.

One of my favorite parts of doing Hooks + Harmony is watching people connect those dots in real time. The live chat always explodes with people realizing that a song they’ve heard for years actually came from somewhere else entirely. Suddenly listeners from completely different generations are reacting to the exact same musical moment together.

That’s what inspired this week’s episode. Not just the songs themselves, but the stories hiding inside them. Because when sampling is done well, it feels less like copying and more like one artist reaching across decades and saying, “This mattered enough to bring back.”

And honestly, some songs never really die. They just keep finding new ways to be heard.

The First Time I Noticed Sampling

I honestly don’t even remember the first sample I recognized on purpose, but I DO remember the feeling. It completely changed the way I listened to music after that because suddenly every older song felt like a puzzle piece.

It almost turned music into a game after that. Every time I heard a song that sounded familiar, my brain immediately started digging through this giant mental library of songs I’d heard growing up trying to figure out where I recognized it from. Sometimes it was obvious right away, and other times it would bother me for HOURS until it finally clicked.

The more I started noticing samples, the more I realized music wasn’t really divided into neat little decades the way we sometimes think it is. Older artists were constantly influencing newer ones whether people realized it or not. A bassline from the 70s could suddenly become the foundation of a huge 90s rap song. A Michael Jackson rhythm could reappear years later in a pop hit that introduced that sound to an entirely new generation.

And once I started hearing those connections, I genuinely couldn’t listen to music the same way anymore. Songs stopped feeling isolated from each other and started feeling connected, almost like this giant ongoing conversation between artists across different eras. Instead of just listening to what was directly in front of me, I started paying attention to the layers underneath it and wondering where certain sounds, melodies, or ideas originally came from.

Once you start hearing samples, you can’t stop hearing them.

Woman to Woman → California Love

Some samples feel subtle, but California Love is not one of them. The second that piano riff starts, the entire atmosphere of the song arrives instantly. Before a single lyric is even spoken, you already know exactly what kind of energy you’re stepping into.

What makes it so interesting to me is that the sample already sounded huge before 2Pac ever touched it. There’s this dramatic, larger-than-life feeling built into it that makes California Love feel cinematic from the very beginning. It’s one of the best examples of how sampling can completely transform the context of a song while still preserving the emotional DNA of the original.

Even people who have never heard Woman to Woman can immediately recognize the feeling of the sample because California Love became so iconic on its own. But once you hear where it came from, it changes the way you experience both songs. Suddenly you can hear the thread connecting them across completely different genres and decades.

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But THIS recipe?

This is the one I keep coming back to.

It’s soft, sliceable, actually works for sandwiches, and doesn’t require you to babysit it like a full time job. Which, respectfully, we do not have time for.

I shared this on this week’s Alphas Make Sandwiches, and you can find the video I shared below. But if you’re like me and want something you can screenshot, save, and come back to without rewinding 17 times….I got you.

🍞 My Go-To Sourdough Sandwich Bread

Ingredients

• 100g active sourdough starter (100% hydration)

• 350g warm water (around 85°F)

• 500g bread flour

• 10g fine sea salt

• 20g unsalted butter, softened

• 15g honey or maple syrup

Tools That Make This Way Easier

• Chef iQ Sense Probe – this is what I use to nail the internal temp every time without babysitting the oven

• 9×5 loaf pan

• Kitchen scale (trust me, just use grams)

Affiliate Disclaimer:
Just a heads up, some of the links in this post are affiliate links. That means if you grab something through my link, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only share things I actually use in my own kitchen, so you’re getting the real deal over here.

Instructions

1. Mix the base
In a large bowl, combine the active starter, warm water, honey, and softened butter. Mix until everything is incorporated.

2. Add dry ingredients
Add the flour and salt. Mix by hand until no dry flour remains. The dough will look shaggy. That’s normal. Don’t panic.

3. Let it rest (autolyse)
Cover the bowl and let it sit for 30 minutes. This is where the dough starts doing its thing.

4. Stretch and folds
Do 4 sets of stretch and folds, spaced 30 minutes apart.
Gently pull the dough up and fold it over itself, rotating the bowl each time.

5. Bulk rest
After your final fold, cover and let the dough rest at room temp for 1 to 2 hours until it increases in volume by about 30 to 50 percent.

6. Shape it
Turn the dough onto a lightly floured surface and shape it into a tight log or oval for a standard 9×5 loaf pan.

7. Into the pan
Place it seam-side down into a lightly greased loaf pan.

8. Final proof
Cover loosely and let it rise for 3 to 5 hours, until it’s about 1 inch above the rim of the pan.

9. Bake
Preheat your oven to 375°F with the rack in the lower third.

Bake covered for 25 minutes.

Then remove the cover and insert your Chef iQ Sense Probe, setting it to an internal temperature of 205°F. This takes all the guesswork out and makes sure you don’t underbake or dry it out.

If the top starts getting too brown, loosely tent it with foil while it finishes baking.

10. Cool (the hardest part)
Remove from the pan immediately and let it cool on a wire rack for about 2 hours before slicing.

Yes, you have to wait. No, cutting it early is not worth it. Ask me how I know.

Real Talk

This is the kind of bread that makes you feel like one of those people.

You know the ones.

The ones who just casually say, “Oh yeah, I made this loaf this morning,” while you’re still figuring out if your starter is alive or plotting against you.

It’s simple enough to stick with, but impressive enough that people will ask you for the recipe.

And now… you have it.

💌From Me to You

If you’ve been wanting to get into sourdough but felt overwhelmed, start here.

You don’t need to be perfect.
You don’t need fancy tools.
You just need to start.

And if it turns out a little wonky the first time?

Congratulations. You’re officially in the club.

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