“The sun is shouting today,” said the local pastor as we were digging a foundation for a Sunday School extension for a church in Zimbabwe with volunteers from southern California. As we carted wheelbarrows and shoveled dirt, we were on the lookout because there were rumors of tensions between the sugar cane farmers and outsiders. So, when a worker in a blue jumpsuit pulled near the church in his tractor, I went from mildly exhausted construction worker to panicked group leader in about one second. He marched straight toward Larry, who was using a pickaxe to break up some tough ground. Right as the worker got close, Larry finally saw him and froze. We were all just staring, the way you stare at a car accident happening too fast for anyone to stop it. The worker stood in the glaring sun, hands held out, gesturing for the pickaxe. He gestured for the pickaxe, pointed to his lower back and winced at Larry’s sideways swing, then showed how solid you stand when you bring it straight overhead.

So here’s the thing. We were certain we knew what this worker was thinking. We waited with bated breath to hear him shout, “Who are these foreigners, and what are they doing in my town?” Except we were dead wrong. That look on his face wasn’t anger, it was the nervousness of someone who wants to help. And he didn’t wait for us to figure him out. He walked over and closed the gap.

How often have we walked away angry from a conversation saying, “I can’t believe they are laying this on me right now when I’ve had such a rough day,” only to have the other person say, “Umm, I didn’t know you were having a bad day”? We are quick to roll our eyes and think, Oh come on, it was obvious. Sometimes it goes beyond one grumpy evening. Spread out over time, a teen may come to believe: My parents don’t really care about me. They never support me. The teen assumes that because their parents live in the same house, it is probably obvious what they’re going through.

Psychologists call this the illusion of transparency. Paul puts it this way in Ephesians 4:25: “Therefore each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to your neighbor, for we are all members of one body.” Paul is saying that because we are tightly linked, it only makes sense that we’d speak truth. Your hand doesn’t make your foot guess. Part of the way we live out the gift of relationships is to proactively tell those closest to us what’s really going on. It was never just about not lying.

What would it look like if you stopped assuming the people around you were mind readers? It might be the husband who stops thinking, “Oh, they know I’m grateful,” and starts making it a habit to say, “Hey, just so you know, I really appreciate that you brought me coffee this morning.” It’s the teen who says to their parent, “I’m pretty worried about that test on Friday. Would you be able to pray for me?”

Of course, saying these things out loud is harder than it sounds. Most of us need a little practice, and maybe a little company. That’s part of what makes things like Rooted and Re|engage so powerful. Getting in a circle and naming, out loud, what we’re thinking and wrestling through gives others the chance to encourage, correct, and journey with us (to find out more: Rooted & Re|engage)

But whether you join a group or not, consider how you might finish this sentence, and who needs to hear it: “Umm, I know this might be obvious, but I just want you to know…”

One of the first youth group series I remember on dating opened with an assignment. They had us write down a list of what we were looking for in a future spouse. I don’t remember everything I put on mine, but I’m fairly confident “good cook” made the cut.

The idea seemed reasonable enough. Write the job description. Set the standards high. Then go out into the world and interview candidates until you find the one who checks the boxes.

We’ve gotten more sophisticated since then. Now we have personality compatibility tests and dating apps with algorithms, all built on the same architecture as my list, just with better fonts and perhaps a tad more maturity.

But here’s the thing that model misses. The list assumes the person writing it knows himself.

Fifteen-year-old me was confidently drafting specifications for a life I could not yet see, written by a heart I did not yet understand. And that’s not a teenager problem. That’s a human problem.

One of our friends in Zimbabwe we’ll call Andrew (names changed to protect the mostly innocent). Music was his whole life. He mixed sound for our band, organized musicians, drove hours to help lead worship at church conferences, stayed up for late-night practices. Music was the air he breathed.

So when he started dating someone, he told us, “I don’t really care if she’s that into music.” And when he explained why it made sense. After a full day of mixing soundboards and coaching other muscians, seeing her felt like a needed break from it all.

Then, slowly, it dawned on him. Music wasn’t a job he clocked out of. It was the thing that made him come alive. And he didn’t want to spend his life beside someone who only tolerated the thing he loved most.

Here’s what I want you to notice: he didn’t know that until the relationship showed him. If Andrew had made a list, he might have gotten this one exactly wrong. “Musical: optional.” No test, no algorithm, no amount of journaling would have surfaced it. It took another person.

Proverbs puts it this way:

“As water reflects the face, so one’s life reflects the heart.” (Proverbs 27:19)

You cannot see your own face. You never have. Everything you know about it came from a reflection, and in the ancient world that often meant finding still water.

Solomon says your heart works the same way. You can’t easily examine it directly. It shows up in your life, in what you do and choose and chase, the way a face shows up in water.

And your life does not happen in a vacuum. It happens next to people. Which means relationships are the still water. What flares up in you when a friend cancels again. What you find yourself defending. What you miss the moment someone is gone. The heart you could never quite see straight is showing up on the surface, if you’re willing to lean over and look.

This is bigger than dating. Marriage does this. Friendship does this. A community group does this. Even the coworker who gets under your skin is telling you something, and not only about the coworker.

None of what the water shows will surprise God. He has known your heart the whole time. He’s the one who set the mirror in front of you. The people in your life aren’t obstacles to becoming who you’re meant to be. They’re one of the ways God shows you who you already are, so he can keep making you into who you will be.

So here’s something to try this week, and I’ll warn you, it costs a little. Ask someone who knows you well one question: “What do you see me caring about that I never say out loud?”

Then don’t defend. Don’t explain. Just lean over the water and look.

You were never meant to read your own heart alone. That was never the design.

(P.S. Join us this weekend as we continue our series on the Courage and Craft of Real Relationships!)

We rushed the stage before the show even began.

It was Thursday night at CIY, the night of the talent show (it is actually called The Alternative, perhaps because talent is not strictly a prerequisite). When students from Northside volunteered to perform, our group did not wait to find out whether they were any good. The moment their names were announced, Tyler started the Northside chant and everyone rushed toward the stage and began cheering.

And they kept cheering.

They cheered as Addison and Kaysen sang. They cheered as Shiloh performed some mind-blowing beatboxing and Lincoln delivered a surprisingly committed Napoleon Dynamite impression and dance. They cheered for Jonah in the finals of the Mario Kart tournament. When he did not win first place, they lifted him onto their shoulders and carried him out as if he had.

The celebration came before the performance. Nobody auditioned for it. Nobody earned it. Our students were cheered before a single note was sung, and Jonah was carried like a champion after he lost.

That is not just sweet, it is the gospel’s order of operations. One of our key verses that week was Ephesians 2:8. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is the gift of God.” Sometimes we worry about that if we lead with grace, won’t students stop trying? But watch what actually happened on Thursday night. The cheering did not make anyone hold back. It made them feel free enough to sign up. In the same way, God rushes the stage before we have performed anything. In Ephesians, verse 10 goes on to say we are created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us. The good works are real. But they grow out of the cheering. They don’t produce it.

That kind of atmosphere is exactly where gifts come out of hiding. A student who knows the room is already on their side is free to risk. Free to beatbox in front of strangers. Free to attempt an impression that could have gone very badly. What God placed in each of them came into the open precisely because nothing was riding on it.

So the question that night leaves with us is not whether our students are talented, though they are. It is whether we have learned what they already seem to know. Somewhere near each of us is a person with a hand hovering over the sign-up sheet, waiting to find out whether anyone will cheer before they have proven anything.

I’ll admit it. While I was excited for my two ten-year-olds, Moses and Boaz, to head off to Camp Rudolph, I was not excited about driving a couple hours each way to drop them off. That is four hours as a cab driver. Nobody warned me as a young man just how much of parenting would be best described as an Uber driver, but with a much messier car.

Then, at the last minute, we decided all the parents and kids would ride together. Eight adults, five campers, and one really big van.

Now, on paper, that math looks bad. We tend to assume adding people to a task only makes it harder. Instead of listening to the music you like, there is now a rotating DJ with some very opinionated passengers. Instead of sneaking in a work call, your phone goes on Do Not Disturb.

But you can probably guess what actually happened. It was a blast. The adults were channeling memories of their own trips to church camp. We played Imposter. We all gazed at a Dairy Queen that is apparently the stop on the way back from Rudolph, as if we were passing a national landmark.

And something else happened in that van, something better than the Dairy Queen.

Two of our campers were leaving home for a whole week for the first time. They were nervous. Their parents were nervous that they were nervous. One family almost skipped the van altogether, wondering if a child struggling with fear about being away from home should just ride quietly with them instead. But within one minute of pulling out of Northside’s parking lot, everyone knew the right call had been made. Instead of sitting alone in a backseat with anxious thoughts, that camper was surrounded by friends, laughing, playing games, talking about what to try first at camp.

It is the same reason a walk home in the dark is way less scary with friends. Fear shrinks in a crowded van.

Here’s the thing. Nothing about the drive changed. Same road, same hours, same Dairy Queen. The only thing we added was each other. And that changed everything.

Israel knew this long before we did. “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the LORD.’” (Psalm 122:1)

That verse comes from one of the Psalms of Ascent, the songs God’s people sang while traveling to Jerusalem for the great feasts. And they did not make that trip alone. They went in caravans: families, neighbors, whole villages walking together for days. (It is why, centuries later, Mary and Joseph could travel a full day before realizing twelve-year-old Jesus was not with them. Of course he was. He was somewhere in the caravan. Everyone was.)

Which means the psalmist is not just rejoicing about the destination. He is rejoicing about the invitation. I rejoiced with those who said to me, let us go. The joy started the moment somebody else got in the van. The trip to meet God began miles from the temple, on a dusty road, in the middle of a crowd that was singing.

I think we get this backwards. We treat the journey as the cost and the destination as the payoff, so we optimize the journey: fastest route, fewest stops, fewest people. But God built his people’s pilgrimage the other way around. He gave them each other for the road, and the road itself became part of the worship. Our kids’ week at camp did not start at Rudolph. It started in the Northside parking lot, the moment we decided not to drive alone.

So here is a small experiment for this week. Pick one thing on your calendar that you are currently planning to endure by yourself. The errand. The drive. The task you would normally grind through with your headphones in. And invite someone else into it. Not because the task will change. It won’t. But you might.

Because some roads were never meant to be driven alone. Ask anyone who has ever passed the Dairy Queen.

Grace & Peace,

Nathan

We recently moved into the Coventry neighborhood, and around our house, no move is officially complete until the Lawson Fort has been constructed.

Boxes can still be half-unpacked. Pictures can still be leaning against the wall. Nobody has any idea where the scissors are. But at some point, Moses and Boaz drag every blanket in the house into one room, pull the chairs into formation, and conscript a table as structural support. An entire section of our home gets annexed by a newly formed civilization. I don’t remember approving the building permit. I definitely don’t remember being asked about zoning.

And I’ll just note, for those keeping track, that during a summer when our whole church is reading Exodus, my house contains a boy named Moses overseeing the construction of a tent. I don’t know what to do with that either.

The construction phase never lasts long. Because the moment the imaginary cement dries, held in place by dumbells and someone’s backpack, the fort sends out its ambassador. Athena is five, and Athena is the one they send, because Athena is very hard to turn down. She appears at my elbow, looks up, and delivers the official invitation:

“Dad, do you want to come in our fort?”

Now, there is no graceful way for a grown man to enter a blanket fort. You don’t walk in. You fold in. My head scrapes the ceiling. My knees file a formal complaint. There is not, strictly speaking, enough oxygen in there for four people.

But then somebody passes around the pretzels. And here’s the thing I can’t quite explain: pretzels are still pretzels. Raisins are still raisins. I have eaten both of these snacks hundreds of times at a normal table with adequate legroom. But crowded under a sagging blanket, shoulder to shoulder with three kids in a space built for closeness, ordinary snacks taste like a feast. The fort was never about the blankets. It was their way of saying *come be with us.*

And somewhere between the pretzels and the oxygen shortage, it occurred to me that my kids had accidentally reenacted Exodus 25.

After God rescues Israel from Egypt, parts the sea, feeds them in the wilderness, and brings them to Sinai, he gives Moses (the original one) instructions for a tent. And in Exodus 25:8 he explains why: “Have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.”

God did not need shelter. The God who made the universe was not short on square footage. The tabernacle was never about God needing a place to stay, it was God asking to come into the fort. Not to remain far off on a mountain you visit, but to dwell in the middle of the camp, in the middle of daily life, close enough to share the snacks.

Which is worth sitting with, because most of us treat God like someone we visit. He gets the worship service, the study, the occasional crisis. But a visit was never what he asked for. He wants into the ordinary rooms, the kitchen, the commute, the tired evenings.

And the story goes one step further. Centuries later, John writes that “the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us,” literally, he tabernacled among us. Which means God didn’t just approve of the fort from a distance. In Jesus, he folded himself in. Knees and all. Head scraping the blankets. The infinite God crawling into our cramped, unstable, oxygen-poor little world because the whole point was always closeness.

Our garage is still full of boxes. The pictures are still leaning against the wall. And it turns out God doesn’t wait for any of that. He doesn’t need your life unpacked, organized, or presentable before he comes near. He moves in mid-mess. And the great news is that He still desires to draw close to His people; the invitation still stands open.

I hadn’t. But someone pretending to be me had.

You may have seen some recent emails yourself. It came from a stranger wearing my name, asking to join a community group and it was quickly followed by requests for money, gift cards, Zelle, Venmo. Our staff reached out to everyone who might have received it. So let me say it plainly: I will never ask you out of the blue to buy a gift card or send cash. If there is a real need in our church, it will not arrive rushed, in secret, demanding numbers scanned and sent right now.

These scams are getting good. An AI can search the internet for a church, pull the names of its staff, and send emails in their voice to the people who trust them. This one came from connect.churchcenter@gmail.com. That looks close. It is not us.

Here is what I keep thinking about, though. It was not a sharper eye for a doctored address that saved us.

It was Caroline, who before she did anything else, asked me in a direct message, “Does this look right?”

And it was Amber, our executive admin, who read the message and thought, “Wait. Nathan always signs his emails Grace and Peace. This doesn’t sound like him at all.”

She could not have told you the sending address was wrong. She did not need to. She knew the voice, and this was not it. The counterfeit gave itself away not to the person hunting for fraud, but to the person who simply knew me well enough to notice I was missing.

Jesus said something about this. “The sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but will flee from him, because they do not know the stranger’s voice” (John 10:4-5). Notice he does not tell the sheep to get better at analyzing strangers. He does not hand them a checklist for spotting wolves. He says they know his voice, and so a voice that is not his simply sounds wrong.

There are no shortage of voices willing to borrow his name. Some of them are loud. Some are gentle. They will tell us God wants something from us that he never asked, or that he is fine with something he never blessed. And they almost always work the way the scam worked. They isolate us. They rush us. They ask us to act before we can turn and check. They use his name without the relationship behind it.

We do not learn to recognize that by studying counterfeits. We learn it the slow way, the way Amber learned my sign-off, by spending unhurried time with the real voice until the false one lands wrong the moment we hear it. And we learn it together. Caroline checked. Amber noticed. Neither of them was alone. It is much harder to fool someone who is known.

So the better question is not really whether you could pick the fake me out of a lineup. Someone faked me this week, and someone will do it again. The question is whether we are close enough to the real Shepherd, and close enough to each other, that when a stranger calls in his name, our first instinct is to turn to someone and ask, “Does this sound like him to you?”

Grace & Peace,

Nathan (the real one)

To be fair, I wasn’t exactly thriving either. After a week of hiking and rock climbing, I was sore in muscles I didn’t know I had.

Naturally, everyone slept in. You’d expect that after a week of hiking, swimming, late nights, and whatever else they do that makes them come home smelling like sunscreen and smoke.

But after finally catching up on sleep, we somehow became more tired.

The same group that hiked mile after mile were now draped across the living room furniture like overcooked spaghetti. Blankets everywhere. Eyes half open. You’d ask a simple question and get the kind of response you’d expect from someone who’d been awake for 72 straight hours.

Then one afternoon, an unnamed member of our household explained they hadn’t done the dishes because they were just so tired.

And honestly I felt it too and they looked convincing. Curled up on the couch. Motionless. If I asked them to stand up, the look on their face seemed to say, “You’re asking a lot from someone in my condition. Can you squeeze blood from a stone?”

Then a text message.

“Hey, we’re all meeting at the gym.”

It was one of the greatest recoveries I’ve ever witnessed.

Their eyes lit up. The blanket flew off. They were upstairs grabbing gym shoes before I could finish saying, “I thought you were exhausted.”

Apparently, the cure for overwhelming fatigue was… friends.

There are two kinds of tired.

There’s physical tiredness. That’s real. God designed our bodies with limits. We need sleep, rest, and rhythms that remind us we’re human. Ignore those limits long enough, and your body will collect the debt.

But there’s another kind of tired that disguises itself as physical exhaustion.

It’s the tiredness of aimlessness. The fatigue that comes when you don’t know what to do next. When nothing in front of you feels meaningful. When your day lacks direction or purpose.

It feels exactly like physical exhaustion. But unlike physical exhaustion, it can disappear almost instantly the moment something meaningful calls your name.

I’m not suggesting every minute of every day should be optimized and scheduled. At the same time, sometimes what we call “being tired” isn’t really about needing more sleep.

Sometimes we’re not exhausted. We’re uninspired. We’re waiting for something worth getting off the couch for.

Maybe that’s why Solomon wrote:

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might…” (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

He’s not telling us to become workaholics. He’s pointing at the thing already in front of us. The dishes nobody did. The opportunity, the responsibility, the person right there. When we actually put our hands to what’s in front of us instead of stepping over it, something surprising happens. Our sense of purpose wakes up, and energy comes with it.

Of course, there are plenty of times when we what we really need is rest, but not always. So the next time you catch yourself saying, “I’m just tired,” it might be worth pausing to ask the question:

Do I really need more rest, or do I need a reason to get up?

Next week I am taking a group of teenagers into the backcountry for Rudolph Camp’s Wilderness Adventure week, and primitive tent camping divides families the way few things can. Some people love it. Others cannot understand why you would pay money to pretend to be homeless.

So much of life is spent rehearsing yesterday’s mistakes or bracing for tomorrow’s. The wilderness has no patience for either; it drags you back to right now. At home you wake at two in the morning and lie there auditing every deadline that could collapse on you. In a tent you wake at two in the morning and your concerns narrow to a sharp and holy point: how long can I hold this, and is the walk to the bathroom worth the mosquito toll? The morning fills with the wonder of the getting things done in the present, those thoughts tend to crowd out the unnecessary ones.

Out there, the simplest things change. Water that tasted like nothing at the kitchen tap tastes like a rumor of Eden, and if you keep it cold, like mercy. None of this is because the water changed. It is because camping strips away the assumption that any of it was owed to you, or would last. Gratitude, it turns out, is a sojourner’s emotion. It comes easily to people who remember they are passing through.

God, it may surprise you, is a fan of camping. He built a week of it into the calendar of his people: everyone left their houses and lived in branch-roofed shelters for seven days. And notice what kind of festival it was: not a flight from the physical world but a harvest feast, with real fruit and branches and meals eaten under a roof loose enough to see stars through. The booth was never an escape from creation. It was a week of holding creation the way it was meant to be held, as gift rather than possession.

But the deepest picture of tent-dwelling in Scripture is not a festival. It is a way of life. The writer of Hebrews describes Abraham this way:

“By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents... For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” ~ Hebrews 11:9-10 (NIV)

It dismantles a misunderstanding. Abraham lived in the very land God had promised him, and he still lived there like a stranger. Not because the land was beneath him, or because dirt and harvest and home were too physical to matter. He lived in a tent because he was holding out for a city with foundations, and a tent has no foundations. His longing was not for something less solid than the world but for something more solid: a place that would finally hold. The tent did not say the world is bad. The tent said this good world is not yet what it will be, and I am not home yet.

This is where the metaphor can wander toward a cliff. It is easy to hear “we are just passing through” and conclude that the physical world is a waiting room to tolerate until the real thing arrives somewhere else. That is not the faith of Abraham. Consider what God says to his people when they are most clearly sojourners, exiled in Babylon: build houses. Plant gardens. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you. The most displaced people in the Old Testament are told not to detach but to dig in, to plant what they may never harvest. That is not escapism but the deepest investment, offered with open hands.

Knowing you are passing through does not make you love your home less; it frees you to love it without strangling it. You can hold your possessions and plans loosely, can serve and give and build, because your security was never riveted to the address. And the end of the story is not us evacuating the world. It is God moving into it: a city coming down, and God himself pitching his tent among his people on a renewed and solid earth. The whole trajectory runs toward more world, healed, not less.

We do not keep the old festival anymore, but its lesson stands. You do not need a national forest or the granite face of El Capitan. You can keep a Sabbath, put the phone in a drawer for a day, give away something you would rather keep. Anything that voluntarily reintroduces a little friction does quietly what the tent does loudly.

It teaches you to trust, because you are no longer pretending you are self-sufficient. It teaches you to pay attention, because the present has become a gift instead of a given. And it teaches you to follow, because a sojourner is, by definition, someone going somewhere, walking after the God who walks with us toward the home that finally holds.

Last year I took my kids to a museum of gold in Costa Rica. They loved it. The craftsmanship, the hunt for gold that was sometimes tragic but always fascinating, a vivid slice of Central and South American history. They admired every exhibit. But it didn’t spark a single conversation about how we live now. It wasn’t meant to.

There’s a way of reading the Bible that feels the same. Behind glass stand Abraham, Moses, David, and Ruth, each with a placard. We pause, admire the courage, shake our heads at the failures. “Remarkable faith,” we say. “Imagine living back then.” Then we drive home unchanged.

But Scripture was never meant to be a museum.

Consider instead a military academy. Cadets don’t study Gettysburg or Thermopylae for nostalgia. They study old campaigns to internalize patterns; how terrain shapes decisions, how morale falters under pressure. The past isn’t decoration; it’s curriculum. They learn what happened so they can recognize what is happening. The early Christians read Scripture the same way, not because the stories were myths, but precisely because they were real. Real history carries durable instruction.

Take Exodus. Israel truly groaned under forced labor. A king arose who did not remember Joseph; their fruitfulness stirred his fear. That fear hardened into policy, and policy into oppression. That happened, and then we ask what God wanted his people to see in it. Because the God who acted there is not confined there.

We say it easily enough: God saves us from our sins. We nod along. But the abstraction stays behind glass until Exodus shows us what slavery actually looks and feels like. Egypt names a land, but it also names a condition: what happens when fear becomes policy in the heart, when productivity is extracted at the cost of personhood. The museum visitor sees a labor dispute from the Bronze Age. Read the other way, and the question turns on you: Where is your Egypt?

For most of us, it’s the endless demand to produce. You wake and a metric greets you, messages waiting, tasks overdue. You measure your worth by whether someone still pays for your time. None of it feels like bondage. It feels responsible. But notice the posture it trains: head down, always making bricks. The hardest thing about this Egypt is that it rewards you for staying. Pharaoh doesn’t always crack the whip. Sometimes he hands you a promotion and calls it freedom.

And here’s the part you’ll feel later. The day you finally walk out, Egypt will start to look good. “At least we had food,” Israel said in the wilderness, forgetting the chains. Freedom is slower than slavery. Trust gets gathered like manna, one day at a time, and the old routines call you back precisely because they were predictable. That, too, is in the manual, if you’re reading it as a manual.

All of which is finally anchored in Christ, who passes through the waters, faces the tempter, and writes a new covenant on our hearts. Being saved from sin, it turns out, looks less like self-improvement and more like Exodus: a God who leads you out, and a transfer of allegiance from one master to the one you were made to follow.

It was the summer of 2015 when the book of Exodus stopped feeling ancient to me and started feeling personal.

For most of my life, the Old Testament felt like difficult terrain. Important, yes, but distant. Between the plagues, the ancient laws, and the unfamiliar world of Exodus, it often felt more like a problem to solve than a story to inhabit. If I’m being honest, I treated the first five books of the Bible like a prequel: necessary background before the real story begins in the New Testament.

What I discovered that summer is that the church has always read these stories differently than I had. I stumbled across a small fourth-century book by Gregory of Nyssa called The Life of Moses, and it introduced me to the way Christians have engaged the Old Testament for centuries. Early Christians did not see Jesus as replacing these stories, but revealing their deepest meaning. Christ illuminates Exodus rather than making it obsolete.

And when I stopped reading Exodus as backstory and started reading it as gospel, everything opened up.

At the center of Exodus is Moses, a fugitive hiding in the wilderness, convinced God has chosen the wrong person. He is hesitant, defensive, and painfully aware of his limitations. Yet over the course of this story, God patiently draws him out: confronting an empire through him, leading a nation through him, meeting him on a mountain, even remaining with him after profound failure.

By the end of the book, Moses has changed. The man who once begged God to send someone else now stands before him and asks, “Show me your glory” (Exodus 33:18).

That movement, from reluctance to audacity, from hiding to pursuing, is a picture of discipleship. It is what happens when God draws someone close and teaches them to want more of him.

Because Exodus is not ultimately about escaping Egypt. It is about God forming a people: people who are fearful, distracted, resistant, exhausted, compromised, and still learning how to trust him.

Which means Exodus is not just Moses’ story. It is an invitation extended to us.

Summer has a way of disrupting normal rhythms. My hope is that this season creates enough space for you to hear these ancient stories differently than you have before. And my hope is that, over the course of these weeks, Exodus becomes your story too.

To find out more or sign up for your copy click here.

I picture it like one of those Airbnb commericals where no one has jobs. Slow mornings. Coffee on the porch. My kids laughing on a tire swing for some reason. We don’t even have a tire swing. I don’t know where the tire swing came from. But it’s there, in my head, every May.

And then June shows up.

And by mid-June, I’m standing in my kitchen at 10:47 PM, holding a bowl of ice cream, wondering why my children are still awake. Bedtime is gone. Schedule is gone. I haven’t had a real conversation with my wife in nine days because one of us is always driving someone somewhere. Everyone’s home, but nobody’s together. We’re just ten people charging our devices in the same building.

That’s not summer. That’s a group project nobody signed up for.

I had a version of this realization years ago on a youth retreat in Virginia Beach. First time in my life I was in a beach house with unlimited junk food and basically zero adult supervision. Which, when you’re a kid, sounds incredible. Candy for breakfast. Chips for lunch. Soda just… all the time. Like water, but worse.

And for about a day and a half, it felt like the greatest thing that had ever happened to me.

Then on day three, somebody offered me actual food. Like a real dinner. And I couldn’t eat it. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t full either. I was just off. I had stuffed myself with stuff that didn’t actually feed me, and now the real thing didn’t even sound good anymore.

That’s what unstructured summers do to us spiritually.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about freedom: freedom without rhythm isn’t freedom. It’s drift. And drift only feels good for about 48 hours and terrible for the next eight weeks.

So here’s the question I want you to sit with: What if this summer was actually different, not because the schedule got easier, but because you got more intentional?

Because summer disruption can go two ways. It can scatter you. Or it can reset you. The same loose schedule that wrecks your bedtime can also open up a porch conversation with your teenager you couldn’t have had in March. The same long car ride can become the place your family actually talks about something that matters. The disruption isn’t the problem. The drift is.

That’s why we’re inviting you into a 9-week devotional journey through the book of Exodus this summer.

Exodus is the story of a guy named Moses whose very normal, very settled life got interrupted by God, through a bush that was on fire and somehow not burning up. And what followed was a story of fear, doubt, deliverance, wandering, and a God who kept showing up in the middle of all of it. It’s Moses’ story, but if you read it carefully, it starts to feel a lot like yours.

So starting on May 31 and for the next Nine weeks I want you to join us. One devotion at a time. Designed to fit into the summer you actually have; the ballfields, the road trips, the backyard grills, the I’m bored Tuesdays.

Don’t just survive this summer. Don’t trade the chance to grow for another season of busy-but-disconnected.

Sign up below. Bring your family in with you. And let’s see what God does in the next nine weeks.

This could be the summer you remember; not for where you went, but for how God met you there.

Click Here to Sign Up for Our Summer Exodus Series: Journey up the Mountain

We went anyway.

Here’s the thing about ten-year-old boys. They don’t know things are bad. You give a ten-year-old a marshmallow, and he sticks it in the fire, and it bursts into flames. Now, as an adult, I see that and think, “Well, that one’s ruined.” Ten-year-old looks at it and yells, “LOOK AT THAT! A FIREBALL ON A STICK!”

Same marshmallow. Different kid. Different life.

Walking to the beach? Not a walk. It’s an expedition. Every stick is a sword. Every puddle is a discovery. I’m just trying to get there. They’re trying to live.

Then Saturday morning happened. Somebody, I’m not naming names, brought a can of sardines. And the boys decided this was their Fear Factor moment. These kids ate sardines. Whole sardines. With faces. At home? Won’t eat broccoli. In the woods? “Pass me another fish, Dad.”

I’ve been thinking about a question I heard this week: What would it look like if this was fun?

Standing in line at Walmart. Folding laundry. Sitting in traffic on 64. What if instead of just enduring it, you asked, “How do I make this fun?” Not because the moment magically becomes a vacation, but because you stopped waiting for life to start somewhere else.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Solomon, the wisest guy in the Bible, wrote this in Ecclesiastes 3:12-13: “There is nothing better for people than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil — this is God’s gift to man.”

Pleasure in toil. Pleasure in work. That’s not how we usually think.

We tell ourselves: work hard now, enjoy life later. Get through Monday so you can enjoy Friday. Solomon says: that’s a trap. Joy isn’t the reward at the end of work. Joy is available in the work.

This week, try one thing. Pick the part of your day you usually just survive: the commute, the inbox, the dishes, the meeting. And before you start, ask the question: What would it look like if this was fun?

So go ahead, grab another sardine. You might be surprised how much life is hiding in your toil.

“What?!” she gasped, eyes wide.

John froze. Then she clarified: “I meant of the food.”

I’ve had my share of those moments. More than I’d like to admit. Like the time I cheerfully asked, “So when’s the baby due?”Only to discover she wasn’t pregnant. My foot, it seems, is perfectly shaped for my mouth.

We laugh at these stories because we’ve all been there. The cringe is universal. But James 3 invites us to look past the embarrassment and consider something far more sobering:

*”Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire... it corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire.”* (James 3:5-6)

A spark in dry timber. That’s the picture James paints of our words. One careless comment, one sarcastic jab, one bit of gossip whispered in confidence, and suddenly a wildfire is racing across the landscape of someone’s life, leaving scorched earth in its wake.

Here’s the convicting part: when I think about my words, I’m usually worried about embarrassing myself. Did I sound foolish? Did I look stupid? But James redirects my concern entirely. The real question isn’t whether my words made me look bad, it’s what my words did to someone else.

That offhand critique I made? She’s playing it on repeat in her head tonight. That comment about a coworker that somehow got back to him? He’s wondering who else heard it.

The selfie story is funny. The forest fire isn’t.

Today, before you speak, pause. Ask: *Will these words build a fire that warms, or one that destroys?* Choose carefully. Someone’s heart may be the kindling.

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“So… are you dating her?”

And without fail, I get the same answer:

“I mean… I don’t know.”

You don’t know? You’ve been texting for hours for a while now. Her mom knows your Chipotle order. You two shared a blanket at the football game in September. In Virginia. It was seventy-two degrees. You didn’t need a blanket.

But somehow, he’s not sure.

In rom-coms, there’s always a moment, somebody runs through an airport, somebody stands in the rain, and you just know. But in real life, you’re splitting fries at Chick-fil-A and you genuinely cannot tell if this is a date or if you’re just two hungry people. At some point, somebody has to sit down and have the dreaded DTR (Define the Relationship talk).

Here’s the thing: that same confusion shows up in church lobbies.

A lot of people’s relationship with God looks like my son’s “I don’t know.” They like the idea of grace. Forgiveness sounds great. Heaven? Big fan. They hover on the edges, close enough to feel the warmth, far enough to avoid commitment. It’s like being a Bears fan you inherited from your dad. You wear the hat sometimes. You’ll defend them at a cookout. But are you really a fan? I mean considering how they’ve done the past five years… I don’t know.

This is exactly where James walks in, and he doesn’t tiptoe. Two chapters in, he just looks across the table and says, Show me your faith.

Now, James isn’t saying you have to earn your way in. This isn’t a season of The Voice where we perform our best acts of generosity hoping a judge turns around. James is asking something more honest: Do you actually trust God in how you live?

Because belief and trust are not the same thing. Belief says, “I think that bridge will hold me.” Trust walks across it. You can hang around faith for decades, attend the services, sing the songs, and still be standing at the edge of the relationship.

James leans across the table and asks the question worth sitting with this week: When I look at your life, can I see that you’re moving toward God, or just nodding at Him from across the room?

It might be time to have the DTR.

And I just stopped. I said, “I’m sorry. What?”

They explained it to me. Apparently when someone “ate that,” it means they did something so well there’s nothing left to improve. And sometimes people say, “He ate that, no crumbs.” Which, I’m told, is even better. He did it so completely there’s nothing left behind.

I said, “In my day, if you ate something and left no crumbs, we called you rude. We called you the reason we don’t have leftovers.”

But language shifts like that aren’t new. Back when the King James Bible was translated, words like awful and terrible meant being full of awe and wonder. Those were compliments. “Your sermon was awful, pastor.” “Thank you so much.” Now if somebody tells me my message was awful, I’m pretty sure we’re not talking about reverence.

Sometimes noticing these shifts in language can teach us something important, not just about our culture, but about Scripture itself.

In James 1:26-27, the apostle uses a word twice that our English Bibles translate as religion. And when we hear that word today, we almost always think of it as something internal: a set of beliefs someone holds. “What’s your religion?” means “What do you believe?”

But that meaning is relatively recent. Before the 1800s, religion didn’t primarily refer to what you believed on the inside. It referred to the outward practices and devotion you carried out on the outside. Religion was something you did, not just something you thought.

Imagine someone fifty years from now saying, “I’m really musical.” And when you ask if they sing or play, they say, “No, I just have strong opinions about which music is good.” You’d say, “That’s not what that word means.” That’s roughly the gap between James’s word and ours.

So when we say we’re “religious,” we usually mean we believe certain things. But if James heard us say that, he might ask, “Okay… but what do you actually do?”

That shift matters, because when James says “pure and faultless religion” is caring for orphans and widows in their distress and keeping oneself from being polluted by the world, he isn’t tacking on a minor application point. He’s describing what the whole thing looks like when it’s real.

And notice what he chose: orphans and widows.

In the first century, these were people at the very bottom of the social ladder. They had no legal protection, no reliable income, no family to advocate for them, and no ability to ever pay you back. There was no social capital to be gained. No advantage to leverage. Helping them didn’t make sense in the economy of that world.

Which is exactly the point.

James is saying that the shape of true faith runs against the grain of how the world measures worth. The world says invest in people who can lift you up. The gospel says spend yourself on people who never can.

And if we’re honest, we do the same calculation the world does, we just do it more politely. We gravitate toward people at church who are interesting, or connected, or useful to know. We’re generous with people who can be generous back. We invest in relationships where something returns to us, even if what returns is just feeling good about ourselves.

But that’s not how God treated you.

You were the one with nothing to offer.

You were the one who couldn’t repay.

You were the one who couldn’t elevate Him in any way.

And He came for you anyway.

So James isn’t reducing faith to social action, and he isn’t dismissing belief. He’s saying that real faith, faith that has actually taken hold of the heart, inevitably reshapes your hands and your calendar and your wallet. It doesn’t stay contained. It shows up.

If our “religion” is only something we hold in our heads on Sunday mornings, James would gently suggest we may not have understood the word at all.

But if the gospel has truly landed, if we’ve seen who we were and what God has done, then caring for the overlooked isn’t an add-on to our faith.

That’s our faith, eating the whole plate. No crumbs.

Except that’s not what the message said.

What it actually said was, “To use this device with this phone, it needs to be formatted. Do you wish to format this drive?”

As in delete everything.

Years of sermons, photos, memories… gone.

When I got home, he was proud of himself. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m just moving some photos off my phone so I have more room.” Resourceful. Devastating.

I plugged the drive in. Blank. Just his selfies now living where my life’s work used to be.

I wanted to tell him it was no big deal. But it was a big deal. And that tension, wanting to forgive while knowing the loss is real, is closer to the heart of the gospel than most of us realize.

We have an almost allergic reaction to the language of sin. Wrongdoing becomes a “poor choice.” Cruelty becomes “toxic behavior.” Betrayal becomes a “boundary violation.” We therapize everything to remove the language of good and evil. We want a clean slate but refuse to name what broke it. And that matters, because if sin is reduced to dysfunction, forgiveness becomes unnecessary. Grace has been redefined. For many people, it no longer means mercy from another; it means permission to accept yourself.

But the alternative isn’t better. Honor-shame cultures take failure seriously; your actions ripple outward to family and community. That honesty is admirable. But where forgiveness has no category, failure becomes permanent. Without a path to restoration, the person becomes the failure. The weight is real. Grace is absent.

The gospel refuses both extremes. Scripture does not say you are merely flawed or a good person who occasionally falls short. It says you are a morally responsible agent who consistently chooses self over God and others: in your thoughts, your desires, your omissions, your participation in systems that harm. Nothing is hidden. Nothing is excused.

But it doesn’t stop at diagnosis. God does not forgive by waving his hand or saying it wasn’t that serious. Nor does he leave you permanently defined by your failure. Instead, forgiveness is grounded in substitution: God himself, in Christ, absorbing the full weight of human sin. Your sin is every bit as grave as Scripture says, *and* forgiveness is every bit as real as your heart has always longed for it to be.

If sin is trivial, grace costs nothing. If sin is final, grace is impossible. But if sin is both real and judged, yet forgiven at inconceivable cost, grace becomes the most staggering thing in the universe. It is not a denial of justice or an escape from responsibility. It is the fulfillment of both, held together in the span between Good Friday and Easter morning.

Not good advice. Good news.

I know exactly one phrase in Khmer, the language of Cambodia. I practiced it like I was preparing for a final exam: “Muoy na chba cheang?” It means, “Which one is clearer?”

That was it. I could not order food or ask for directions. If I got lost in Phnom Penh, my only strategy was to hold up two lenses and hope for the best.

But that one phrase was enough.

My friend Ken would hold up different lenses in front of someone’s face, one at a time. I would ask my question. They would squint, tilt their head, and hesitate. Then suddenly: “Chba!” (Clear).

And everything changed.

A smile would spread across their face. A poster on the far wall that had been a blur for years came into focus. They would grab the glasses, put them on, and look around like they were seeing the world for the first time. Some laughed. Some cried. Every one of them responded like they had just been given something priceless.

It was just a few pieces of glass in a plastic frame. Less than three dollars.

But it gave something back to them. Not just sight, clarity. The world had not changed. They could simply see it as it actually was.

Over the past ten weeks, something similar has been happening right here.

Through Rooted, lens after lens has been held up. Some weeks the picture sharpened just slightly. Other weeks, something snapped into focus that you had been squinting at for years. Over seventy people wrote out their testimonies on cardboard — not because the story was new, but because they could finally see it clearly enough to name it. Fifty-one people began giving for the first time, and hundreds more chose to give sacrificially. Eight people were baptized. And many who had wandered found their way back.

None of that happened because the world around you changed. It happened because you began to see it differently.

That is what Psalm 119:105 is describing: “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” Not a different path; a clearer one.

God’s Word does not remove what is in front of you. It reveals it.

The pressure you feel does not always disappear. But you stop carrying it as though you are alone. The pain from your past does not instantly vanish. But as you begin to see it through the lens of God’s forgiveness, it loosens its grip. Slowly. Gradually. Real change begins with clearer vision. You have been living proof of that these past ten weeks.

C.S. Lewis described it this way: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

That is the shift. Not just seeing truth — but seeing everything through it.

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And that brings us to this week. To Easter.

Because if Rooted has been about holding up lens after lens, Easter is the moment the prescription is complete. The resurrection is when everything the Bible has been pointing toward comes into focus.

The disciples did not understand it at first. Even after three years of walking with Jesus, the cross left them confused and devastated. But on that Sunday morning, when the tomb was empty and Jesus stood among them, Luke tells us “their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (Luke 24:31). Everything they had seen and heard and struggled to understand suddenly made sense.

The resurrection is not just an event to believe in. It is the lens through which everything else becomes clear; your suffering, your purpose, your future, your worth. Easter is where the full picture comes together.

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Every time we held up a new lens in Cambodia, we asked the same question: “Which one is clearer?”

For ten weeks, God’s Word has been asking many at our church that same question. And you have been answering: with your testimonies, your generosity, your baptisms, your returning.

But Rooted was never meant to be the destination. It was the fitting. The lenses are yours now.

So here is the question that Christ’s resurrection puts in front of you this Easter:

*Now that you can see clearly, what will you do with it?*

Will you open your Bible on your own this week, or wait for someone to hold the lens up for you? Will you keep showing up to the community that sharpened your vision, or quietly drift back into the blur? Will you be the one who holds up the lens for someone else, the way Ken did in Cambodia, the way your Rooted leaders did for you?

You have been given sight. That is an extraordinary gift.

Now go and help someone else see. Invite someone to join us this Easter!

Whenever we get near a birthday in our house, there’s a routine. We load up the younger kids and go on a pilgrimage to Walmart. Once inside that land of near-infinite opportunity, I hand each of them a budget. Ten dollars. And with that fortune in hand, they set off on their quest.

If you’ve never watched a five or ten-year-old shop with a budget, you’re missing out. One will hold up a water gun and ask, “Dad, do you think Mom needs this really awesome water gun?” You can see the gears turning; they want it, but they know this isn’t about them. So they put it back and keep circling. Pick something up, put it back, pick it up again. It’s like watching someone negotiate a peace treaty with themselves. Eventually they settle on a candle or a coffee mug that says “World’s Best Mom,” and they are beaming. Absolutely glowing. They march up to the register, pay with the money I gave them, and hand the gift to my wife like they built it from scratch.

And here’s the thing: she loves it. Every time. She doesn’t say, “You bought this with your dad’s money.” She lights up because it came from them; from their thought, their effort, their heart.

C. S. Lewis described something just like this: our giving to God is like a child asking his father for money so he can buy his father a birthday present. The father is pleased, Lewis observed, but he isn’t any richer for it. Everything we offer to God was already His. Our time, our abilities, our resources—none of it originated with us. And yet He delights in the offering.

That’s the tension at the heart of the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25. A master entrusts his wealth to three servants before leaving on a journey. Two invest what they’ve been given and produce a return. The third buries his portion in the ground. When the master comes back, his words to the faithful servants are striking: “Well done, good and faithful servant.” Not talented. Not successful. Faithful. He was looking for stewardship, not originality.

That reframes everything. If it all belongs to God anyway, the pressure is off to perform. But the invitation is still there to participate. God doesn’t need your money, your talent, or your time; He owns it all. What He’s looking for is your willingness to take what He’s placed in your hands and put it to work. Not to bury it out of fear. Not to hoard it out of insecurity. But to invest it with faith that He can multiply whatever you offer.

The servant who buried his talent didn’t lose anything. He just didn’t do anything. And that was the problem. God isn’t asking you to create something from nothing. He’s asking you to do something with what you’ve already been given.

So take an honest look at what’s in your hands today: your influence, your skills, your relationships, your resources. None of it started with you, and that’s okay. The question isn’t whether you earned it. The question is whether you’re using it. Because the Father who handed you the money is watching with delight, waiting to see what you’ll do with the gift.

So before we react, we pray.

We pray for those leading and serving in our armed forces.

We pray for the people of Iran, especially the church.

We pray for the President, Congress and for wise, restrained decisions in the days ahead.

And we pray for the world.

As we do, we need clarity and humility. Some believe that whatever this president does must be evil. Others believe whatever he does must be right. Neither reflex honors Christ. When war drums beat, disciples kneel.

The Iranian regime was brutal; thousands of protesters killed, Christians persecuted and martyred, violence exported beyond its borders. It is right to grieve injustice and to thank God when oppression is restrained. I am personally grateful at the removal of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and think the world and the church may be more peaceful at his removal.

And yet armed conflict always carries tragedy. Civilians die. Children die. There are reports of over 60 elementary girls were killed in Minab. If true, this is tragic.

That grief is real, too. Calling for accountability and caution is not faithlessness; it is moral seriousness.

So we refuse easy narratives. We refuse to demonize or to deify any political leader. We refuse prophetic sensationalism. Instead, we come as Christians, seeking justice, loving mercy, and asking God for wisdom beyond our own.

All of God’s people should be in faithful prayer as we navigate the days and weeks ahead.

And honestly? I remember it making things worse. I could actually type faster with the seek-and-find method than I could when I first tried “proper” typing. Those first few days, my pinkie was just wandering around the keyboard like it had never been asked to do anything in its life. Which, to be fair, it hadn’t. The pinkie has had a pretty easy run up to that point. Holding a cup of tea. That’s about it.

But you stick with it. And within a few weeks, once that pinkie and ring finger finally get their act together and decide to participate, something clicks. It gets easier. Then it gets fast. Then you can’t even imagine going back.

Here’s what I want you to sit with today:

Change is hard. That’s not news to anyone. But here’s what catches most people off guard: change doesn’t just feel hard, it often feels like it’s making things worse before it makes things better.

And that’s the moment most people quit.

Think about it. A marriage isn’t great, so a couple finally joins a group. They start having honest conversations, maybe for the first time in years. And after a few weeks, it actually feels like there’s more tension than before. That’s not because the group made things worse. It’s because honesty brings things to the surface that were already there. You didn’t create a new problem. You just stopped ignoring an old one.

Someone decides to set a boundary for the first time, and suddenly a relationship feels rockier than it did when they were just going along with everything. Someone starts reading Scripture and praying consistently, and the first thing they notice isn’t peace, it’s how distracted and restless their mind really is.

That discomfort is not a sign that you’re on the wrong path. More often than not, it’s a sign that freedom is breaking through.

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” ~ Galatians 6:9 (NIV)

So if you’ve been stepping out in some new ways lately, if you’ve been showing up to something that’s stretching you, having conversations that cost you something, or doing the slow and unglamorous work of becoming who God created you to be, my encouragement to you is simple:

Keep going.

For those of you going through our Rooted study, we are just past the halfway point. There have been some tough moments and some incredible experiences. Don’t mistake the difficulties as sign of a wrong turn. The fact that it’s hard might be the clearest evidence that something real is happening.

Your pinkie is learning to type. Give it a few more weeks.