It is hard to believe that we’re not even through the first chapter of the book yet and with a warning that feels almost abrupt he writes…”Do not be deceived, my beloved brothers.” There is tenderness in that. He is not throwing a rebuke at strangers, he is speaking to people he loves enough to tell the truth to, and the truth is that suffering can make us strange theologians.

We can begin reading God through whatever happened to us that morning. A prayer goes unanswered and suddenly He feels distant. Something breaks and we decide He must have changed. The room gets dark and, almost without realizing it, we begin assigning the darkness to Him.

James, well, he will not let us do that.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” I love that name, Father of lights. There is no hidden version of God waiting behind the one we trusted. No shadow in His character. No moment when goodness leaves Him. James has just spoken about temptation and desire and sin, and now he reaches back toward the character of God as if to say, do not take what is broken in you and place it at His feet. He is good. He remains good. He does not shift with the weather of your life.

He says something that almost disappears because we are so quick to move on. “Of his own will he brought us forth by the word of truth.” Of His own will. He wanted to. There is something in that phrase that gives me pause…God was not reluctant to save, not persuaded into grace, not standing far off waiting for us to make the first move. James reminds us that this began with Him, with His will, His Word, His goodness, and then immediately turns toward what that should begin to look like in us.

“Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” James does not leave faith in the clouds for very long. He brings it right down into the middle of a conversation, into that tiny moment when someone says something we do not like and our answer is already forming before they finish. Quick to hear means I have to believe there may be something I have not understood yet. Slow to speak means I have to resist the little rush of making sure my opinion lands first. Slow to anger means I have to stop pretending every flare of irritation is holy simply because I can explain why I am upset.

That one gets under my skin because James is very clear that “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” I can dress anger up in all kinds of beautiful language. I can call it conviction or discernment or righteous outrage, and sometimes there may be something real underneath it, but James keeps forcing me back to the fruit. What is this producing in me? Is it making me more like Christ, or just louder? Is it making me more truthful and more merciful, or simply more certain that I am right?

Then comes the phrase I keep circling. “Receive with meekness the implanted word.” Implanted. I do not think James could have chosen a better word. Something implanted is meant to take root, to work its way beneath the surface, to grow where no one can see it yet and then, eventually, become visible. The Word was never meant to sit beside my life as something I admire. It was meant to get inside it. Into my reactions, habits and my private thoughts… the parts of me that do not look particularly spiritual at all.

Which is why James says, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” That word deceiving is what catches me. He does not say hearing is useless. He says hearing without doing can fool us. We can become so familiar with Scripture that familiarity begins to feel like obedience. We know the verses, we know the stories, we know where to nod and where to underline, and James quietly asks what happened after we heard it.

That is where faith has to become visible, not in some dramatic performance of holiness, but in the ordinary places where no one is clapping. In the way I listen when I would rather interrupt, the way I speak when anger is already rising and whether I let the Word correct me before I use it to correct someone else. In whether the truth I say I believe has enough weight to change the way I actually live once the Bible is closed and the rest of the day begins.

James gives us the mirror because he knows exactly how easy it is to look and walk away. A mirror tells the truth without arguing with us. Scripture does that too. It shows the impatience I keep calling personality, the pride I have renamed conviction, the resentment I have dressed up as discernment, and the little ways I have become very fluent in grace for myself while becoming strangely stingy with it toward everyone else. The question is not whether I saw it. The question is whether I stayed there long enough to let the truth do something.

Then, James goes after the tongue, because of course he does. “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.” There is no soft way around that. He is not interested in how spiritual we sound while we are calm. He is interested in what comes out of us when we are tired, irritated, challenged, overlooked, interrupted, inconvenienced. The mouth has a way of revealing what the heart has been trying to hide, and James will spend even more time on that later because apparently one warning was not enough for any of us.

And finally he wraps the chapter up but speaking to us about widows and orphans, to people with no social leverage, no power, no ability to repay the kindness. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” James does not point us toward a more impressive gathering or a deeper vocabulary. He points us toward people. Real faith notices the ones everyone else has learned to overlook and then actually moves toward them. It does not admire compassion from across the room or talk beautifully about mercy while staying comfortable. It gets close enough to carry something.

That is what I love and dislike about James at the same time. He will not let faith stay where it is easiest to keep it. He keeps dragging it into speech and anger and mercy and action and all the places where belief begins to cost us something. He does not confuse grace with passivity. He has already reminded us that every good and perfect gift comes from above, that salvation begins with God, but grace does not land in a life and leave everything exactly as it found it.

That is the thread running through all of these verses…God gives, the Word is planted, we receive it, and eventually something begins to show. Faith has to become visible somewhere.

So the question I am carrying out of the margins today is not whether I have read the Word, and not even whether I understand it. James is asking something a little more uncomfortable than that.

Have I only looked into the mirror of His Word, or have I lingered there long enough to let Him lovingly show me what needs to change, and trusted Him enough to let it?

So I invite you to pull your chair a little closer today as we open his letter once again.

“James, thank you for coming back.”

He settles into the chair across from me and glances at the open letter between us.

“We still have a great deal to talk about.”

I smile.

“Yes, we do.”

I look down at the page. “All right, let’s jump right in. Chapter one, verses nine through fifteen. But before we do, there is something different about this part of your letter.”

He glances down at the page, then back at me.

“Different how?”

I pause. “It sounds almost like Proverbs. Or the Psalms. There is wisdom in it, but there is beautiful poetry too. The flower of the grass. The scorching sun. Desire conceiving and giving birth. Sin growing until it brings forth death. You could have said all of this plainly, but you didn’t.”

A small smile pulls at the corner of his mouth.

“Would you have remembered it if I had?”

I laugh because he already knows the answer.

“Probably not.”

“No,” he says, “you probably would not.”

He rests his hand on the open letter between us.

“Truth must sometimes be placed inside an image before the heart is willing to carry it. You can tell a man his wealth will not last, and he may nod politely before returning to the counting of it. But show him a wildflower beneath the heat of the sun, blooming in the morning and withered before evening, and perhaps he will remember that everything he has built can disappear just as quickly.”

I look back at the verse. “Let the lowly brother boast in his exaltation, and the rich in his humiliation. That feels upside down.”

“It is.” He says it without hesitation. “The kingdom of God has always looked upside down to those measuring life by what can be seen.”

I wait, and he continues.

“The lowly brother has spent his life being told where he belongs. Beneath. Behind. Forgotten. The world has measured him by what he owns, by who notices him, by whether his name carries any weight when he enters a room.”

“So what is he boasting in?”

“Not in being poor,” James says. “And not in suffering, as though pain itself makes a person holy. He boasts because in Christ, the world’s measure has lost its authority over him. He has been made a son. An heir. A citizen of a kingdom that cannot be taken from him.”

He leans closer. “His pockets may still be empty. His circumstances may not change by morning. But he is no longer defined by what he lacks. He is defined by whom he belongs to.”

“And the rich man?”

“He must learn the same truth from the other side.”

James glances down at the page. “The rich man has been told that what he possesses gives him stature. That his abundance proves his importance. But before God, wealth cannot lift him higher, just as poverty cannot press the lowly brother lower. Both must come to Christ without title, without status, without anything in their hands that can purchase favor.”

His voice softens. “That is the humiliation of the rich man. Not that wealth is evil, but that it cannot tell him who he is. It cannot keep him from becoming dust. It cannot make him more beloved by God than the brother beside him.”

He traces the line about the flower with one finger. “The grass does not ask who admired it before the sun rose. The flower does not survive because someone called it beautiful. So it is with every earthly distinction. It passes.”

I look at him. “So the lowly brother is lifted, and the rich brother is brought low.”

“Yes,” he says. “And there, at the feet of Christ, they finally stand on equal ground.”

I must still look unconvinced because he leans forward.

“To be reminded that your life is brief is not cruelty. It is an invitation to stop building your identity on what cannot survive you.”

The room goes quiet for a moment.

Then I move my finger farther down the page.

“You return to steadfastness here….Blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial.”

“Yes.”

“And now there is a crown.”

He gazes upward “The crown of life.”

I sit back. “Is that a reward for surviving life well?”

James studies me for a moment before answering. “It is the promise given to those who love God enough to remain with Him.”

“Even when the trial does not end?”

“Especially then.”

That answer settles more heavily than I expect.

He continues before I can ask another question.

“Steadfastness is not the absence of weariness. It is not smiling while everything hurts. It is the quiet decision, made again and again, that suffering will not persuade you to loosen your grip on Christ.”

I swallow.

“So the blessing is not in the pain.”

“No.”

“Or in pretending the pain does not matter.”

“No.”

“The blessing is in remaining.”

“Yes.”

He says it so gently that I almost miss how powerful it is.

“Remaining when the answer does not come quickly. Remaining when obedience costs more than you expected. Remaining when the life you trusted God to protect begins to look nothing like the life you imagined.”

He glances down at the page again. “That kind of faith has been tested. Not destroyed. Revealed.”

I let the silence sit between us, but the next line is waiting. “Then you move from trial to temptation.”

James nods.

“And I need to ask this carefully because I think we confuse the two.”

“We do.”

“Trial and temptation are not the same thing?”

“No. A trial may test your faith. Temptation invites you to abandon it.”

I repeat the sentence softly.

“A trial may test your faith. Temptation invites you to abandon it.”

“Yes.”

“And God may allow the trial?”

“Yes.”

“But He does not tempt us.”

It comes out a little more challenging than I intended. “Never?”

His voice changes there. Not louder, but firmer.“Do not place the blame for your desire on God. Do not accuse Him of placing evil in your path and then waiting to see whether you will take it. God is not standing at the edge of your weakness, baiting the hook.”

“So where does temptation come from?”

James taps the line with one finger. “Each person is lured and enticed by his own desire.”

I sit back. “That is harder to hear.”

“Of course it is. It is much easier to blame the weather than admit you walked toward the storm.”

He says it kindly, but there is no place to hide inside the kindness.

“Temptation begins somewhere within us?”

He nods. “It finds something within you willing to answer.”

“And then desire conceives.”

“Yes.”

The image suddenly feels less poetic and more unsettling.

“You describe desire almost like a hidden pregnancy.”

“Because sin rarely appears fully grown.”

He pauses.

“It begins quietly. A thought entertained. A hunger excused. A resentment fed in private. Something small enough to keep hidden and familiar enough to defend.”

“And then?”

“Then it grows.”

His eyes do not leave mine. “You begin by believing you are carrying it.” He looks back down at the letter. “But eventually, it carries you.”

I feel that sentence somewhere deep. “Then desire gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.”

“Yes.”

“There is no softness in that ending.”

“There should not be.”

James folds his hands. “You live in a world that has become very skilled at renaming desire. You call it authenticity when you do not want to resist it. You call it freedom when you do not want to question where it is leading. You call it harmless when the consequences have not yet become visible.”

I wince slightly.

He notices. “I am not saying this to shame you.”

“I know,” I answer flatly, my mind reeling.

“I am saying it because sin grows best when no one is willing to name it.”

The room is quiet again, but this time it feels different. Not heavy exactly. Honest.

“So what do we do with all of this?”

James looks almost amused. “You want the conclusion before you have finished listening.”

“That is fair.”

He smiles. “Begin by remembering what lasts.” He points first to the fading flower. “Not wealth.”

Then to the crown. “Life in God.”

Then to the final warning. “And remember what desire becomes when it is permitted to grow without resistance.”

I close my eyes for a moment. “This part of your letter is beautiful, James.”

“It is meant to be true.”

“And perhaps that is why it is beautiful.”

This time his smile reaches his eyes.

“Perhaps.”

I look again at the page and realize that James has been asking the same question all along, only from different directions.

What are you trusting? What are you enduring? What are you feeding, and where is it all leading?

James does not leave much room for a faith that lives only in the mind. He keeps bringing it into the body, into our choices, our desires, our money, our endurance, and the hidden places where a life is quietly becoming something.

So perhaps that is where we leave the conversation today. Not with an answer tied neatly at the end, but with the uncomfortable mercy of a question.

What is growing in me now, and what will it become if I continue to feed it?

James… welcome back. Last week you told us about the people who first opened your letter. They had fled Jerusalem. They had buried friends. They had left homes, families, certainty. I think… I think I finally understand why “Count it all joy” landed the way it did.

But there’s something else I can’t quite put together. You don’t stay on joy very long. Almost immediately you begin talking about steadfastness… and then wisdom.

Why? What does wisdom have to do with suffering?

James smiles, almost as though he has been waiting for that question.

“Because that is exactly what suffering steals first.”

He lets the words settle before continuing.

“Not your strength, not your courage….Your perspective. You see, pail has a way of making everything feel immediate. Everything becomes about escape. ‘How do I make this stop? How do I fix this? How do I get back to the life I had before?’ Those are natural questions. I have asked them myself. But wisdom asks a different question…..What is God doing that I cannot yet see?”

I lean back in my chair.

“So when you tell us to ask for wisdom… you’re not talking about making smarter decisions?”

He laughs softly.

“Not first. You ask for wisdom because you cannot always trust what your eyes are telling you. A trial can convince you God has abandoned you. Wisdom reminds you He has not. A trial can convince you your life is falling apart….Wisdom reminds you that God is often building something while it feels as though everything is breaking.” A trial can convince you that waiting is wasted, but Wisdom… wisdom teaches you that waiting is often where steadfastness grows.”

I stop him there.

“Steadfastness. Can we talk about that word for a minute? You say the testing of faith produces steadfastness, and then you tell us to let steadfastness have its full effect. I don’t know if I’ve ever liked that sentence.”

He smiles again.

“Most people don’t, because everyone wants what steadfastness produces, very few people want the process that creates it.”

I laugh. “That… feels painfully accurate.”

James nods. “You admire the oak, but no one admires the years it spent standing through storms. You admire mature faith, yet few people ask for the circumstances that make it mature.”

I look back down at the page.

“So when you tell us to count it joy…you’re not asking us to enjoy suffering.”

He answers before I finish. “Never….I am asking you to recognize that God refuses to waste it.”

Then he grows quiet.

“You know…When I wrote, ‘let steadfastness have its full effect,’ I wasn’t asking them to become stronger so they could survive harder lives, I was inviting them to become the kind of people who looked more like Jesus. That has always been the goal. Not surviving. Becoming.

James leans back in his chair and smiles.

“I think that’s enough for today.”

I smile back because… he’s right. We’ll pick up the conversation again next week.

James knew who would open his letter. He knew the tears that had already been shed before a single sentence was read. He knew the names, the faces, the empty seats at tables, the homes left standing behind them.

So, before we read another line, we wanted to ask James about the people he couldn’t stop thinking about when he picked up the pen.

“James… thank you for coming back, last week was so great. But now we want to dive into who were these people? When you wrote, ‘To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion,’ who… who did you see? Who are the twelve tribes and what was the dispersion?”

James looks up quickly, a bemused smile curls on his lips: “Ahh. So you don’t want to begin with the joy? I am surprised by that. It is the sentence everyone remembers. The one that gets underlined and repeated,  stitched onto little pillows or offered to people when their lives are coming apart.

Count it all joy. It’s a nice thought isn’t it? But, no, that is not where I began…..”

I glance down “To the twelve tribes in the Dispersion. tell us who they are, and why this was important. And… I’m going to let you tell your story without interruption. Will pick it back up after you finish.”

He nods slowly, pauses, opens his mouth, pauses again..then begins:

“You read that now and perhaps it sounds like an address as you call it now, or perhaps a line to brush past before reaching the real letter.

But I….I…knew their names and their faces. I knew the streets they had walked a thousand times and the rooms where their lives had been interrupted mid-sentence. I knew there were tables still standing somewhere with one chair suddenly empty, doors they had closed without knowing if they would ever open them again, small things left behind because there had not been time to decide what mattered most.

They had been scattered. Even writing that word carried an ache older than any of us. Our people had lived inside that word before. Assyria. Babylon. Exile passed down through stories and prayers, the memory of what it meant to belong to God and still wake beneath a foreign sky. We knew how to keep promises alive in places that did not understand them. We knew how to pray toward a home we could not reach.

And now here we were again. Only this time they had not been driven away because they had forgotten God. They had been driven away because they believed His Son Jesus was the Christ.

You know Stephen’s story? But have you ever read it slowly enough to feel the stones as they hit his arms, his sides or his head? Have you ever really imagined his face as it lifted toward heaven while the crowd raged around him.

I did not have to imagine it. You see we remember the sound of that day. The echo of   grief that followed it and the fear that moved through Jerusalem when persecution rose against us.

We remember when Saul entered homes, before he was Paul, and then all those that came after him. Men and women dragged away as doors were forced open. Families were torn apart, but those who could flee, fled.

Some left meals unfinished. Some left tools on workbenches and oil still burning in lamps. Some carried children who were too young to understand why home was disappearing behind them. Some looked back knowing there were people they loved who could not come with them. They simply carried their faith with them, unwilling to leave Christ behind even when everything else had already been taken.

James pauses, his arms across his chest, his gaze far beyond the room… ”When I wrote “to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion,” I was not writing to an idea, I was writing to the uprooted. I was writing to the ones who had learned how quickly everything familiar could be taken. I needed them to remember who they were before I asked them to face what had happened to them.

You see, suffering has a way of stealing more than comfort. It reaches for your name. It tries to tell you that you are only what has been done to you, only what you have lost, only the ruin you are standing in. I would not allow persecution to name them, they were still the people of God and still held inside His promise…they were part of the story He began long before any of us were born. Perhaps they were scattered from Jerusalem, yes, but they were not scattered from His hand.

I wonder if people in your day understand persecution, or if they have mistaken opposition for it. Many of you have been mocked for your faith. Some have lost friendships, opportunities, or reputations because you follow Christ. Those wounds are real, and I would never ask you to pretend they are not.

The believers who first opened my letter were not imagining hardship. They were living inside it. That is why I began with who they were.

Please, please read my words through their eyes before you read them through your own. Do not hurry past their dust. Do not make their suffering poetic too quickly. Do not reach for the lesson before you have stood for a moment in what they lost.

He stops, picks up the glass of water in front of him and takes a drink then continues. “So when you read the next line, hear it the way they heard it. Not as a pleasant thought offered to comfortable people, or as a verse floating above real sorrow. Hear it as a pastor writing to people who had already paid dearly for believing. Hear it after the doors were broken.

After Stephen was buried and Jerusalem disappeared behind them. Hear it as they understood that following Jesus would cost them the life they thought they would have.

Then hear me say: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds.”

I did not write this because their suffering was small, I wrote this because Christ is greater.

I was inviting them to remember what they had received in Christ, and to measure every trial against that.

They lost houses, but were given a kingdom. They lost safety, but found salvation. They were scattered from everything familiar, but were gathered into the family of God.

This letter is a reminder that sorrow is no longer the deepest truth of their lives. Christ is. Grace is. Life is. And no road, no prison, no stone, no exile, and no power on earth could take that from them.”

James smiles and meets my eyes, He folds his hands, and the room grows quiet.

I look back at the opening of his letter. The words are exactly where they’ve always been, but somehow… they aren’t the same, they are a reminder to understand who first heard the words before we ask what they mean for us.

I’ll meet you back here next week.

As I sat down to begin studying James, I realized that’s exactly what I wanted. Not another commentary or outline. I wanted to meet the man before I studied the letter. So, just for today, imagine we’ve pulled up a chair across the table from James himself. The recorder is on. The coffee is warm. The questions are simple.

Let’s begin there.

Today, I am sitting down with James, author of The Book of James and the brother of Christ himself.

He grew up in the same home as Jesus, shared the same table, heard the same voice before the crowds ever gathered, and for a time, still did not believe Him. Then something happened that changed the entire direction of his life.

The skeptic became one of the most trusted leaders in the early church. The brother became the servant. The man who once questioned Jesus would go on to write one of the most direct, demanding, and practical letters in the New Testament.

But who was he before the title, before the leadership, before the letter?

What was it like to live beside Jesus and not yet understand who He was? What happened when the risen Christ appeared to him? And why, with every possible claim to authority, did James introduce himself with only one word? Servant.

This is not a conversation with a book. It is a conversation with the man holding the pen.

“James… thank you for sitting with us.”

He smiles, almost amused. “If my words help you know Him more, then I’m glad to be here.”

James, there is really only one place to begin, and I have a feeling you already know, it’s what everyone wants to know… What was it like,” I lean forward slightly, “to grow up with the Son of God?”

James looks down for a moment, and when he answers, there is no easy nostalgia in it.

“At the time, I did not know that was what I was doing.”

The words settle between us.

“I knew Him as my brother. I knew the sound of His voice before anyone called Him Rabbi. I knew the ordinary rhythms of our home, the meals, the work, the roads through Nazareth. But I did not understand who was sitting across from me. John tells you that plainly. Even His own brothers did not believe in Him” (John 7:5).

“Do you regret that?”

“I regret how easily familiarity can make the holy seem ordinary.” He pauses. “I was close enough to hear Him and still far enough away not to know Him.”

I hesitate for a moment before asking what feels like the obvious question. “So… given what you just said, can I call you the brother of Jesus?”

He is quiet for a moment. “You can.”

I wait, sensing there is more. “But you won’t find me introducing myself that way.”

I glance down at the first line of the letter.

“James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ…” (James 1:1)

“You could have written anything,” I say. “You could have reminded everyone who you were. You shared a home with Jesus. You watched Him grow up. You saw Him after the resurrection. The church in Jerusalem looked to you for leadership. Why leave all of that out?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, his fingers rest lightly on the parchment before him.

“Because none of those things are the most remarkable thing about me.”

The room grows still.

“The most remarkable thing is that I belong to Him.”

I think about John’s Gospel for a moment. “John says that even His own brothers didn’t believe in Him.” (John 7:5)

James nods. “He told the truth.”

“What changed?”

He looks at me with the kind of expression that belongs to someone who has spent a lifetime remembering one moment.

“He came back.”

There is nothing else for a moment. Paul only gives us one sentence.

“Then He appeared to James.” (1 Corinthians 15:7)

No conversation or description. Not an explanation. I cannot help myself. “What did He say?”

James smiles.

“The Scriptures tell you enough.”

I laugh quietly because somehow I knew that would be his answer.

“So why servant?”

This time he doesn’t hesitate.

“Because brother tells you how I met Him.”

His eyes drift once more to the opening line.

“Servant tells you who I became.”

I I think that’s where we’ll begin. Not with chapter one. Not even with verse one. We’ll begin with the man who picked up the pen, because I have a feeling that if we understand the journey God took James on, we’ll hear every word of this letter a little differently…and somewhere along the way, we’ll begin to hear our own lives a little differently too.

So pull up a chair and bring your Bible. Over the next few weeks, let’s meet James.

I imagine its voice would be slow, worn smooth by years of wind and salt. It would remember the smell of the sea worked deep into its weathered boards until there was no separating the wood from the water. It would remember ropes stretched tight, sails snapping overhead, the rhythmic groan that comes when timber leans against waves stronger than itself. It would remember mornings wrapped in mist, kissed by the morning sun and evenings where the sky caught fire just before the sun disappeared beneath the horizon.

It would remember the weight of people. Heavy feet climbing aboard before dawn. Calloused hands pulling at nets. Laughter on calm days. Silence on hard ones.

And it would remember fear. Not because storms were rare, but because storms changed people. The wind has a way of exposing what calm waters can keep hidden. Hands grip a little tighter. Eyes search the horizon with quiet desperation. Conversations fade into whispered prayers no one planned to pray. The sea has always been beautiful, but it has never pretended to be tame. A boat knows that better than anyone.

The boat spends its whole life carrying people across something they were never meant to control. Yet, they are never just part of the scenery in Scripture.

Noah’s boat carried him through the unmaking of the world. Every creak in the ark was a reminder that judgment raged outside while mercy floated beneath his feet. But eventually the rain stopped, the waters receded, and the door opened. The ark had carried him faithfully, but it was never meant to become his home.

Jonah climbed into a boat hoping distance would be enough to silence the voice of God. I imagine he felt relief when the shoreline began to disappear behind him. Maybe he thought obedience could be left standing on the dock. But the storm found him anyway. It usually does. God has a remarkable way of meeting us in the very places we thought would help us escape Him.

Then there were the disciples. I don’t know how many nights they spent rocking on dark water, but I know enough to imagine they could read the wind before they could read the sky. Fishermen learn to respect the sea because they’ve watched it change its mind in a matter of minutes. They knew what storms could do.

Which is why, during the message at Destiny Worship Center today, I found myself wondering something I had never considered before.

Why didn’t Peter ask Jesus to calm the storm first? That would have been my prayer. “Lord, if it’s really You… calm the wind. Quiet the waves. Make this make sense. Then I’ll come.”

Isn’t that how we pray so much of the time? Lord, fix the marriage, then I’ll trust You. Heal the diagnosis, then I’ll have peace. Open the door, remove the obstacle, settle the uncertainty… then I’ll take the first step.

But Peter doesn’t ask for calmer water. He asks for Jesus. “Lord, if it’s You… tell me to come.”

And Jesus answers with one word. “Come.”

The wind doesn’t stop. The waves don’t bow. The storm doesn’t apologize for being a storm.

Jesus simply speaks. Yet somehow Peter decides that one word is more trustworthy than everything his eyes are telling him.

I wonder if that’s because, deep down, Peter knew something I so often forget.

The boat was never the miracle. It was the means. It carried him where he needed to be until the moment Jesus called him somewhere the boat could never take him.

Perhaps that’s what boats have always been. Jobs. Churches. Relationships. Dreams. Ministries. Even the versions of ourselves we’ve spent years building because they felt strong enough to survive the storm.

They are gifts. They carry us. They protect us. God, in His kindness, often provides them for exactly the season we need. But I wonder how often we mistake His provision for His destination.

How often we polish the boat, repair the sails, tighten the ropes, and anchor ourselves to something that was only ever meant to carry us until we heard His voice.

That’s the part I’ve missed. The boat is never something to despise. It’s God’s provision. It carries us through seasons we never could have crossed on our own. It shelters us while we learn to trust Him. There is grace in the boat.

But somewhere along the journey, it’s easy to forget that what carried us isn’t always where we’re meant to remain. We grow attached to what is familiar. We begin mistaking God’s provision for His destination.

Scripture is filled with people leaving. Noah eventually had to leave of the ark. Abram left his homeland. The disciples left their nets. Peter left the boat. Again and again, God seems to remind us that His gifts are meant to draw us closer to Him, never to replace our dependence on Him. The boat was always meant to carry us until we heard His voice. Then, when the time was right, He simply said, “Come.”

The safest place has never been a boat, no matter how sturdy the wood or how skilled the fisherman. The safest place has always been wherever Jesus is. Even if that means standing on water.

You know, Charles…I’m not sure I like what you’re saying.

I’ve read those words over and over again this week, and every time I get to the end of them I find myself wanting to argue, because I don’t want to kiss the wave. I want to outrun it, or better yet, I want God to stop it before it ever reaches me. I’ve never prayed to be thrown. I’ve prayed to be spared. I have asked God to calm the sea, to move the mountain, to close the door before I ever had to walk through it. I have never once knelt beside my bed and sincerely prayed, “Lord, whatever brings me closer to You.” My whatever doesn’t necessarily mean whatever. My prayers have almost always sounded more like, “Lord…please don’t let this hurt.”

I have always imagined faith looking like Peter stepping out of the boat. I want to believe I’ll keep my eyes fixed on Christ and somehow walk where I never thought possible. That’s the picture I’ve carried for years. Calm enough to hear His voice. Courageous enough to step out. Faithful enough not to sink. What I have never imagined is discovering that faith might also look like crying out while you’re going under. Or finding yourself on the other side of a storm wondering why Jesus didn’t calm the waves before they reached you.

We celebrate promotions and answered prayers and restored health as evidence that God is moving, and sometimes they are. But when the diagnosis comes instead, or the marriage falls apart, or the prayer goes unanswered for another year, something inside us quietly begins asking a different question. What did I do wrong? Why isn’t God fixing this? Has He stepped away?

The strange thing is, the Bible doesn’t seem to tell that story. Joseph was in the will of God when his brothers threw him into a pit. David was in the will of God when he hid in caves.

Jeremiah was in the will of God when nobody listened.  Paul was in the will of God sitting in a prison cell. Jesus was in the perfect will of His Father while carrying a cross. Too often I’ve confused comfort with blessing or mistaken ease for the nearness of God.

I told my husband a few days ago that most people probably only really like one out of every three or four psalms. We love the ones that remind us God is our refuge and our shepherd. We cling to the songs of victory, the promises of protection, the still waters and green pastures. Those are the verses we underline, the ones we write inside sympathy cards or whisper over hospital beds because somehow they know what to say when we don’t.

Then David starts crying. Not the kind of crying that resolves itself before the chapter ends. The kind that leaves mascara on the pillow and questions hanging in the silence. He asks God where He is. He wonders if He’s listening. He says things I think most of us would be uncomfortable admitting out loud, much less preserving for generations to read.

“How long, O Lord?”

“Why have You hidden Your face from me?”

“Darkness is my closest friend.”

I’ve never seen those verses framed on someone’s living room wall or neatly cross-stitched onto a pillow.

We skip over those psalms because they’re uncomfortable, but older I get, the more I wonder if it’s because they sound too much like us, or maybe too much like the version of ourselves we’ve worked very hard to hide. I wonder how many people opened their Bible this morning looking for Psalm 23 while secretly living inside Psalm 88.

That thought catches in my throat every time it crosses my mind because Psalm 88 never really gets better. It doesn’t suddenly climb its way back into hope before the final verse. There isn’t a miracle waiting on the last page or a reminder that everything will work out if we can just hang on a little longer. It simply ends in darkness, and somehow the God who could have written anything He wanted looked at that prayer and decided it belonged in His Word exactly as it was.

He didn’t edit David. He didn’t smooth over the rough edges or ask him to come back after he’d found a little perspective. He didn’t replace the questions with answers or the tears with praise. He breathed those words into Scripture exactly as they sounded in the middle of the pain, knowing that one day someone would sit on the floor of a dark room with a life they no longer recognized, searching for words to pray, only to discover that God had already written them down.

Lament becomes the evidence for a much deeper truth: we cannot use our circumstances as a thermometer for God’s affection.

The cross dismantles that idea, and the Psalms give us language to live in that reality. He wanted us to know it had a place in His presence. Out of everything He chose to preserve for us, He preserved the prayers that sounded more like gasping than singing.

This changes everything for me. It means the woman who can’t stop crying isn’t praying the wrong kind of prayer. It means the man who has whispered the same weary request for years without seeing an answer isn’t somehow failing at faith. It means the person who opens their Bible looking for hope but can only seem to find themselves in David’s questions hasn’t wandered outside the story of God at all, they wandered into it.

Job kept talking even when heaven seemed silent. Jeremiah kept weeping. Habakkuk kept asking. Paul could sing in prison and write about contentment while chained to a Roman guard. Their circumstances never became the measure of God’s love. They had already settled that question. And Jesus, in the darkest moments before His death, reached back into the Psalms and borrowed David’s words.

“My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?”

I’ve read those words countless times, but I found myself slowing down long enough to notice something I had somehow missed. The Son of God reached for a lament. Not because He lacked faith, or because the Father had abandoned Him, but because suffering has never been proof that God is absent. If it were, Calvary would tell us that the Father loved the Son least precisely when He loved Him most.

The cross settled that question forever. God has never proven His love by giving us an easy life. He proved it by giving us His Son. I still don’t necessarily want the wave, or be thrown against anything. But I’m can stand firm in the fact that every time the water pulls back, the Rock is still standing exactly where it was before the wave ever came.

© 2026 The Written Reverie. This writing is mine, please don’t copy or republish without asking first, but feel free to share the link.

I have woken up with this thought on repeat in my mind for a few days. I have spent so much of my life chasing a feeling. Like so many others, we wait for the rush that comes with answered prayers, the warmth that settles over us during a song, the unexpected joy that appears on an ordinary Thursday morning. When those moments come, we breathe a little easier. God must be near. But when they don’t, when the skies feel strangely silent and our hearts remain stubbornly unmoved, we quietly begin wondering if He has stepped back without telling us.

The strange thing is that God has never tied His faithfulness to our emotions. His presence has never depended on our awareness of it. He has never asked us to feel our way toward Him before He would draw near to us. He simply remains who He has always been.

Yet we often expect something from ourselves that Christ has never expected from us. We wait to feel worship before we worship. We wait to feel grateful before we praise. We wait for our hearts to catch up before we open our mouths, as though praise is meant to follow our emotions instead of leading them.

I think that’s why praise has always fascinated me. Faith is often invisible. It lives quietly beneath the surface, known only to God and the soul that clings to Him. Praise is different. Praise gives faith a voice. It declares what faith already believes long before circumstances have anything to say about it.

Hebrews 11 tells the stories of men and women who believed God, but all throughout Scripture belief seems to find its way into song. Moses steps onto the far side of the Red Sea, and before there is a promised land to possess, before there is water in the wilderness or bread from heaven, he sings. David writes more songs in caves than he ever does from a throne. Job falls into ashes, his world shattered beyond recognition, and his first instinct is not accusation but worship. Jehoshaphat places singers before soldiers, because somehow praise becomes the weapon before the battle is ever won. Mary receives news that would overturn every expectation she had for her life, and before she understands how any of it will unfold, she magnifies the Lord.

Then there is Paul…I wonder what those prison walls sounded like. Not what they looked like. We know enough about Roman prisons to imagine the damp stone, the smell of mildew clinging to the walls, the stale air, the blood drying on torn backs, the iron biting into swollen ankles. I wonder about the sound as they praised Jesus in the middle of the night.

Stone has a way of carrying a voice farther than the one singing ever realizes. Every note would have traveled those corridors. Every prisoner would have heard it. Every guard too. Can you imagine it? Not polished voices. Not a worship band. Not stained glass catching the morning light. Just two battered men whose bodies had every earthly reason to remain silent.

Yet somewhere in the darkness, praise began to echo. Not because the chains had fallen away, or because tomorrow looked hopeful. Not because the pain of the beatings had lessened. They sang because Christ was still Christ. The earthquake came later. I have become so accustomed to reading Scripture from the end of the story that too often I overlook, maybe even forget, where they were standing when they lifted their voices. They were still bleeding and imprisoned, uncertain of what the morning would bring.

Praise was never a response to their freedom. It was the evidence that Rome had never truly imprisoned them in the first place.

I wonder at what point in my faith journey that I began to confused praise with gratitude. Gratitude often waits for the gift. Praise remembers the Giver. Gratitude says, "Thank You for what You have done." Praise says, "Even if nothing changes by morning, You are still worthy." There is a freedom in that the unbeliever cannot understand.

Somewhere along the way we began watching one another more than we watched Him. We have become students of each other's worship instead of students of His worth; watching who raises their hands and who keeps them folded. We debate hymns and choruses, organs and guitars, choirs and drums. We quietly measure sincerity by tears, by volume, by posture, by personality, forgetting that Scripture refuses to give us only one picture of praise.

David danced. Miriam picked up a tambourine. Mary poured out perfume worth a year's wages. A widow quietly dropped two small coins into the treasury. John fell on his face. Paul sang in prison. Each one looked different. Every one of them was looking at the same God, but praise was never been about the position of our hands at all. It has always been about the posture of our hearts, the body simply follows wherever awe leads it.

These last few months, I have grown less interested in how praise appears and more captivated by what it reveals. We were never meant to praise the same way. A raised hand is not more sincere than folded ones, and silence is not less devoted than a shout. We have no business judging each other’s praise simply because it doesn’t look like our own.

Praise reveals what we believe to be true when nothing around us agrees with it. It reminds our souls who God was before this trial arrived, and who He will still be long after it has passed. It steadies us when our emotions cannot. It lifts our eyes when sorrow bends our necks toward the ground. It is not denial. It is defiance. It is looking straight into the face of suffering and refusing to let it have the final word.

Think about the fact that Heaven never stops praising. Every eye there is fixed upon the One who never changes. The more clearly you see Him, the more naturally praise becomes the language of your soul. We can have this here, today, in our living rooms, in the car, or in the waiting room. So when your heart feels strangely quiet, or the song feels buried beneath grief or disappointment or simply the weight of another ordinary day, don’t wait until you feel like praising Him.

There’s a psalmist who understood this better than most of us ever will. Psalms 42:11, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.”

David caught himself downcast, disturbed, unraveling a little, and instead of waiting for the feeling to pass before he did anything about it, he turned and spoke to his own soul like a man giving an order he intended to keep. Hope in God, he told himself. I will praise Him again. Not once the ache lifted, or once he understood why. He commanded his own praise into existence before his circumstances gave him a single reason to offer it.

I often wonder if, years after that night in Philippi, the old jailer ever found himself awake in the middle of the night when everything was still. I wonder if he could still hear it. Not the earthquake or the chains falling, but I wonder if he could hear their song. Those two broken voices rising from a prison floor, echoing against cold stone, praising a Savior before a single circumstance had changed.

That is the whole of it, really. Christ has never required your feelings in order to remain faithful to you; so don’t require yours before you remain faithful to Him. Speak to your own soul tonight, the way David did, hope in God, and praise Him again, and again and again.

I thought, back then, that the uniform was the most honorable thing about him. I was wrong. Because the longer I live, the more I understand that while he served his country well, he served Jesus even better, and that's the thing about him that gets me now, not the rank, not the sacrifice, but the way his faith never stayed folded up in a Sunday suit. It followed him home. It sat down at our table. It showed up in how he loved my mother on the plainest, most unremarkable days of their marriage, in how he served his church and never once needed credit for it, in how he carried responsibility like it was something sacred instead of something heavy.

He never preached many sermons to me. He just lived one, in front of me, for as long as I can remember, until I had absorbed it without ever realizing that's what was happening.

I spent so many years of my life afraid of disappointing him. I don't know exactly when that fear took root, but I know it followed me a long time, into adulthood, into decisions I made just to earn some nod of approval I wasn't even sure he was withholding. And I am only now starting to understand what I couldn't have understood as a girl: that his love was never something I had to win. It wasn't sitting on the other side of some performance. It was simply there, underneath everything, steady, constant, faithful, never once contingent on me getting it right. Grace, before I had a word for it.

I think that's the closest I have ever come to understanding the Father's love. Not because mine is without fault. He'd tell you himself he isn't. But because in loving me so plainly, so completely, without condition, he kept pointing past himself to something bigger. He never asked to be the center of the story. He just kept living like there was a cross at the center of his, and somewhere along the way, without ever sitting me down to explain it, he taught me what unearned love actually looks like when a person decides to carry it around with them every day.

My own kids are grown now, both with families of their own, but there is nothing quite like watching my father's steadiness and his unhurried, unshakable love stretch out across another generation. I see pieces of him in both of my kids that they probably don't even realize they're carrying, the patience, the way they keep their word, the quiet way they show up instead of just saying they will. My father didn't just raise me. He started something that's still moving through this family, one generation reaching into the next, faith handed down less like a lecture and more like a habit, and now he gets to sit back and watch it happen.

So today, on Father's Day, I'm not thinking about the uniform, or the medals, or anything the world would call impressive. I'm thinking about a man who loved my mother faithfully for more years than I can count, who served his church without ever needing his name said out loud, who got up and showed up, over and over, in every ordinary season, who taught me what it looks like to trust a Father's love, not by telling me about it, but simply by being one to me, every single day of my life.

Dad, I spent so many years hoping I'd make you proud. I think what I really needed to know is that you already loved me before I did anything to deserve it.

That's the whole gospel, isn't it. Loved first. Loved before we earned it. Loved while we were still finding our way. You still do. And now the three generation know it too.

Happy Father's Day.

Still we ask “What’s in a name?” just as Juliet said it to herself on the balcony. She meant names are arbitrary. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. Romeo being a Montague doesn’t change who he is to her.

The irony of using that question for Jesus is that the answer is the complete opposite. Everything is in this name. The name is not arbitrary. It is not interchangeable. There is no other name.

I don’t know how to begin talking about this without first admitting that I am not sure I have ever said what I’m writing about with the weight it deserves. I have said it thousands of times, and heard it even more. In songs, in movies, in the margins of journals, in the middle of the night when there was nothing else to say. And still…still I think I am only just beginning to understand what it means. It’s just a name sitting there on the my screen, the cursor flashing at me, but already something in me wants to slow down.

We say in all the wrong ways much too often. We say it in traffic, His name, and labeled it as a curse word. We say it as punctuation. I have said it as punctuation. I am not saying that as condemnation, I am saying it as confession. I need to hold fast to the reality that it is not just another name, that is the thing. I keep coming back to the thought of there is something about that name… in the early hours when the house is quiet and the coffee is going cold and I am just sitting with it. It means something. It means everything, and suddenly we are having church in my galley kitchen.

Jesus, Yeshua…the Lord saves. Salvation packed into syllables. Which means every time it was spoken in those dusty Galilean streets, every time his mother called him in from playing, every time a neighbor greeted him in the morning, they were, without knowing it, or maybe some of them knowing it, feeling it, sensing that something was different about this boy from Nazareth, they were saying the entire reason he came. Compressed into a name. The whole mercy of God in two syllables. The Lord saves. He didn’t come to observe. He didn’t come to advise from a distance, to send instructions down like memos from heaven. He came to save. Active and personal and at great expense. The name itself carries the cost and the love folded together and you cannot separate them.

I find myself wondering what it sounded like in his mother’s mouth. Mary, who said yes before she understood what yes would mean. Who carried him and named him and whispered that name over him in the night, in the dark, in all the ordinary sacred moments of motherhood that no gospel writer thought to record but God was present for every single one. She knew his name before she knew the half of who he was. And then she stood at the foot of a cross and I cannot imagine what it meant to her then, this name, this name she had said so many thousands of times, what it meant to say it or to not be able to say it, to only weep.

This is where it my heart swells and I get that tug at the back of my throat as the sob choked me. The specificity of it. That God, who is beyond all names, who told Moses I am what I am and let that be enough, who is too large for language and too holy for casual description, that this God chose to become particular. Chose to become locatable. Chose a name, and a mother, a manger, a neighborhood, and a face. Think about that, God chose the very face he would be clothed in as man. He chose to become a man that could get tired, could get hungry, could sit beside a well in the heat of the day and ask a woman for a drink of water.

The Word became flesh. John says it so quietly in the first chapter of his account, The Word, the logic of the universe, the eternal self-expression of God, the one through whom everything that has ever existed was spoken into being, became flesh. Became particular. Became named. And the name they gave him was Jesus.

And then he lived. I think we skip past the living sometimes in our rush to get to the theology of it. But he lived. He walked on actual roads with actual dust on his feet. He sat at tables and ate. He laughed, probably, at things that were funny. And he touched people. That might sound ordinary until you realize who he was touching…lepers who had not been touched in years, maybe decades, and I want to know what that felt like to them, not the healing, though the healing, but the touch. The moment just before the miracle, when a hand that was the hand of God landed on skin that the whole world had decided was untouchable.

Jesus looked at people and they felt seen. Zacchaeus up a tree, ridiculous and desperate. The woman at the well with her long and complicated history. Peter after the resurrection, standing by another charcoal fire, the smell of it probably pulling him back to the worst night of his life. These are not just illustrations of being seen, they become the reason we believe the invitation is real. He saw them. He will see us.

Zacchaeus didn’t walk away from that encounter and never think of Jesus again. You don’t get seen like that and just move on. He learned to call upon him, and for us as believers today, we do that through prayer. Prayer becomes the natural response of someone who has been found. The name we pray in is the name that already knew ours.

We pray in the name of Jesus, just like he told us to. Ask anything in my name, John 16. And the context of that is the night before he dies, when he is telling his disciples things they don’t fully understand yet, trying to prepare them for what is coming and what will come after. He is giving them something to hold onto. A name. Use it. Come in it. It will be enough.

And underneath all of that is the audacity of prayer itself, that we, small and distracted and black-hearted as we often are, get to approach the throne of grace at all. That is not because of anything we carry. It is because of the name we come in. The name that has already done everything required for the door to be open. So when we say it we are really saying… I am not here on my own merits. I am here because of him. Because he died and rose and ascended and intercedes, even now, for people like me.

The name is not decorative. When we pray in the name of Jesus we are not adding a formula at the end like a signature that makes the letter official. Though it has become that for a lot of us. I know it has for me. The amen at the end of a prayer that was really just a monologue, and then in Jesus’ name almost as punctuation, almost as the thing that closes the tab. That is not a closing formula. That is the whole gospel, compressed into five words.

This is the name we carry. This is the name we are invited to call upon. This is the name, not a concept, not a tradition, not a set of beliefs we have organized ourselves around, but a person, living, reigning, returning, who knows our name the way he knew Mary’s. The way he knew Peter’s. The way he has always known and will always know the names of those he came to save.

I don’t know how to end this except to say that the name does not get smaller the longer you carry it. It gets larger. There is always more width to it than you have found. More mercy in it than you have needed yet. More of him than any one life could exhaust.

So keep coming back…in the quiet before the day gets loud. In the mess of the afternoon. In the long dark of nights when you have tried, again, to carry things alone. Come back because he found you once and the finding did not stop, because the name that spoke the world into existence is still speaking. Still saving. Still leaning toward the people who come to him with nothing to offer but trust his name.

Your name is enough, it has always been enough.

Jesus.

That sentence alone probably says more about the current state of technology than it does about me, but there I was, curled up on the couch, asking a machine to summarize my life.

I wasn't feeling particularly reflective. I wasn't staring into the abyss contemplating my mortality. It was late, and the question simply crossed my mind. This strange thing has spent months correcting my grammar and listening to me ramble about books and faith and real estate and chickens and my grandmother and all the other pieces that somehow make up a life. I wondered what story would emerge if all those conversations were gathered together and viewed from thirty thousand feet.

So I asked. And then I read.

At first, it felt a little creepy and almost surreal, as pieces of my life fell scattered throughout the words. The little girl who grew up moving from one military base to the next. The woman who somehow collected stories, books, animals, and people everywhere she went. The grandmother who still believed there is almost nothing a good book, a kitchen table, and an honest conversation can’t fix. The leader. The writer. The friend. The woman who had spent much of her life trying to understand why some places feel like home and why some people do too.

The strange thing about an obituary, even a fictional one written by artificial intelligence, is that it forces you to look at your life from the outside. We rarely do that. Most of us live from the inside out. We are so close to our own stories that we can barely see their shape.

But there it was, the entirety of a life reduced to a few paragraphs. Yet, as I sat there reading, something happened that I wasn't expecting….my eyes started looking for Jesus.

It was almost instinctive. Like looking for a familiar face in a crowd. I read a paragraph and then find myself wondering, yes, but can they see Him? Can they tell that He is the reason for any of this? The question surprised me because I hadn't seen it coming. What surprised me even more was how much it mattered.

I set my phone down and stared at the ceiling for a while, and somewhere in that quiet space I realized I wasn't actually concerned about an obituary, I was wrestling with something much deeper.

If my life were distilled into a handful of pages, would people see a woman who loved Jesus, or would they simply see a woman who loved things that happened to be connected to Jesus?

There is a difference. You can love theology and not love Christ. You can love Bible studies and not love Christ. You can love church culture and not love Christ. You can fill journals with Scripture and still somehow miss the Savior those Scriptures are pointing toward.

That notion lingered with me. The next day it followed me into my morning coffee and my evening on the dock watching the sunset. It sat quietly beside me while I worked. It interrupted me while I was listening to an audio book. Every time I thought I had moved on, it returned. And then yesterday afternoon I started thinking about all the things I had been writing over the course of my life.

The tin cup, clotheslines, memories from the early side of my life. My beautiful grandchildren. The horse from the sermon about meekness (coming soon but don’t get distracted.. focus). Ruth and Esther. The thief on the cross. The old hymns I've been listening to on repeat. The journal. A book about home. My grandmother's library. The stories I keep telling over and over again.

For a while they all seemed interconnected yet, unrelated, like photographs scattered across a table, but the longer I looked at them, the more I realized how even through the quiet chapters, when I wasn’t writing much at all and felt utterly incomplete, He was there. The tin cup, the sunrise, the whimsy of the Farm, coffee, even my obsession with home has never really been about houses. Every story I've ever told has been an attempt to describe a longing I couldn't quite name.

A longing to belong and to rest. A longing that showed up in a hundred different forms throughout my life, wearing different names in different seasons. Home. Purpose. Success. Identity. Calling. Looking back now, I think I was searching for one thing all along, and Christ was gracious enough to let me keep searching until I realized He was the answer

The reality is, the older I get, the more everything else seems to move further down the list. The titles. The achievements… excessive Amazon boxes work the latest viral thingamabobs…all the things I once thought would define a life. What remains, standing quietly above all of it, is the simple fact that I belong to Him.

I set out to write about life, mystery, emotional struggles, to be the next NY Times best seller, but somehow, I end up every single time, back at Jesus. It seems so obvious now, why I keep writing about the same themes from different angles. Why Jesus keeps appearing in the margins of everything I write. Because He isn't simply part of my story.

He IS the story.

So, as I sat there, I eventually realized the thing bothering me wasn't whether my church attendance or community efforts were mentioned enough in the summation of my life. The thing bothering me was that I want Him to be absolutely unmistakably visible. I want the thread running through every chapter of my lift to be from the very hem of His garment so  that nobody can miss it.

I laughed out loud… what freedom there is in knowing that I do not need people to remember me. That changes, well, everything! The truth is, a hundred years from now most of us will be little more than names on a family tree and photographs tucked inside old albums. Our accomplishments will fade. Our possessions will belong to someone else. Even the stories that feel so important today will soften around the edges with time.

But there is one thing I desperately hope survives me; that my children know there is a God in heaven and that He is faithful…that my grandchildren know that Christ is not a story we only told at Christmas or a tradition we practiced on Sundays, but a living Savior who meets ordinary people in ordinary places and changes everything. That long after I am gone, when my great-grandchildren are telling stories to their children about the people who came before them, that they tell them that we belonged to Him. That we served Him. That we trusted Him. That we failed often and stumbled frequently and got more things wrong than we care to admit, but that through all of it there was a faithful God whose grip on us was stronger than our grip on Him.

Suddenly this randomly generated obituary isn’t about legacy in the way the world talks about legacy. It’s not about what I built or accomplished or accumulated. It’s Psalm 78 and Joshua 4. One generation telling the next generation the mighty works of God. It’s the older Israelites stacking stones beside the Jordan River so someday a child would ask, “What do these stones mean?” and someone would answer by telling the story of God’s faithfulness. Something future generations can point to and say, "God was here."

That is what I am really trying to preserve every time I write. Not my thoughts. Not my experiences, or even my story, but a testimony, I want to stack a pile of stones beside the river.

Because when I look back across my life, I don't see a woman who figured everything out. I see a God who remained faithful through every season, through my wandering and the wondering, the striving and the surrender. Through the chapters I would gladly relive and the ones I would never choose again.

So, I keep ending up back at Jesus, not because I have exhausted every other subject, but because I haven't exhausted Him. There is still more of His goodness to discover and more of His faithfulness to understand. There is more of His grace to marvel at, and more of His heart to know.

What changed for me as I sat reading an obituary that had never existed before that moment, is that realized I want the rest of my life to look like a pile of stones beside the river. One more story of His faithfulness. One more reminder of His goodness. One more marker pointing beyond myself and toward the God who has carried me every step of the way.

And if one day, at the end of my life, when you read some words on a page about me, I pray they do what every pile of stones beside the river was meant to do. Not point to me, but point to the faithfulness of God.

So, thank you, ChatGPT, for helping me see what I want the rest of my life to say in the space between the words.

When I was little, I genuinely believed my mother could create anything. And honestly, I still kind of do.   She would sew dresses, craft things by hand, and made gifts that carried pieces of herself in them. Even now, when I see handmade things, I don’t just see craftsmanship. I see love. I see my mother bent over a table bringing something to life because she believed beauty mattered.

But the thing I remember most was the times together reading. To say she “read” books would be wildly inaccurate. My mother performed books. Entirely. There were voices and accents, and if the story called for it, when, there was a dog, she barked. If there was a cat, well, you can tell, she was committed to the story. She made stories breathe. She made imagination feel like a living thing sitting beside you.

And yes, I am still bitter about that one night the phone rang right before it was time for a book. I waited for her to come back and read the story. She never did. Honestly, I blame Aunt Gail, I thrived on that magic.

I can still remember lying there as a child, maybe 6 or 7, completely spellbound while she read, watching her face change with every character, listening to her lower her voice during suspenseful parts until I felt physically inside the story itself. She made books feel alive to me. Like portals. Like magic. Like survival.

But now that I’m older, I understand something I didn’t then. While she was building magical worlds for us, she was also carrying the very real weight of adulting on her shoulders. TDY’s, being far from family, bills and stress and exhaustion and worry were all happening quietly behind the curtain while she still somehow found the energy to sing made-up songs in the kitchen and dance around the house like joy itself had taken human form.

That’s the part that gets me now.  As children, we think our mothers are simply superhuman. Then we grow up and realize they were magical while tired and sometimes worried. Magical while sacrificing and while starting over in new places and somehow making each unfamiliar house feel like home within days.

Military families learn quickly that home is not always a place. Sometimes it’s a person. Sometimes it’s the sound of your mother singing in the kitchen while boxes are still half unpacked. Sometimes it’s the familiar comfort of her voice reading a story in a bedroom that still doesn’t quite feel like yours yet. My mom gave us that kind of home.

And maybe when someone spends your entire childhood creating safety out of uncertainty and wonder out of ordinary life, you grow up believing there’s power in them that can’t quite be explained. Not magic exactly. Something holier than that.

Jesus? Oh yeah, she knows Him.

So I bring prayer requests to her, big and small, not because I think she can answer them. I bring them to her because when Connie prays, heaven stands to attention and the devil sighs, “Lord… not again.” That woman prays with authority.

Women like my mother spend their lives pouring love into everyone around them so naturally it becomes part of who they are. They pray with the same hands that baked birthday cakes, sewed dresses, wiped tears, packed boxes, and built entire worlds out of imagination for their children.

I I think, in many ways, mothers become our first glimpse of grace. Not perfect grace, because they are human too, but the kind that reflects the heart of God in everyday life. The kind that keeps showing up weary yet faithful. The kind that loves firmly and fiercely through every uncertain season. The kind that quietly lays down pieces of itself again and again for the people it loves. The kind that can turn ordinary moments holy, even when life is stretching every last ounce of strength from them.

So thank you, Mom, for the songs you made up out of thin air and the stories you made breathe. For every dress you sewed, every cake you baked, every piece of art you brought to life with your hands. Thank you for making ordinary days feel magical, even when life was heavy and money was tight and another move waited around the corner.

Thank you for making the world feel safe with nothing more than your laughter, your imagination, and your love. Thank you for reading stories like they mattered and for teaching me that creativity is not frivolous, it is survival. Thank you for showing me that beauty belongs everywhere, even in military housing kitchens and chaotic living rooms and tired seasons of life.

And thank you for praying. For the prayers I heard and the thousands I never did. For every time you stood between me and the hard things of this world and asked God to cover me anyway.

I have lived my whole life loved by a woman who creates beauty, carries faith fiercely, and somehow still makes people feel safe just by being near her. What a gift that has been.

I hope every son and daughter who reads this remembers something important: the things your mother thought were small were never small at all. Maybe you had something different than songs, the stories or prayers whispered late at night… but it’s those small unremarkable moments that became the architecture of our lives. It’s a reminder that long after childhood ends, we are all still living inside the worlds our mothers built for us

So…Happy Mother’s Day to the woman who built entire worlds for us and never once asked for credit.

It felt a little aggressive, if I’m being honest. One minute I’m doing normal, productive, responsible adult things… and the next thing I know I’m in the ER with a mild concussion, being told to rest like that’s something I know how to do. And apparently… I don’t.

Apparently, the thing about a concussion is it doesn’t really leave room for negotiation. The headaches show up, the fog settles in, and suddenly “pushing through” isn’t an option anymore. Everything slows down whether you agree to it or not.

The doctor kept asking me if I was sleeping well, and I didn’t really know how to answer that, because I never have. So technically the answer is no… but it’s also not new. It’s just how it’s always been.

Sleep comes in pieces for me, a few hours and then I’m awake again, and I notice the quiet becomes quite loud as I decide what to do with all the racing thoughts. I’ve had some of my best ideas at 2 o’clock in the morning…and some of my worst.

Lately, I haven’t been able to rush through them the same way. It’s forced me to pay attention to the quiet, sitting in it a little longer than I used to, and made to wonder… what if the very “thing” I’ve been trying to get through… is actually a “place” I’ve been given to linger at?

So in the spirit of late-night talk shows and reflections… here’s my completely unofficial, concussed and slightly sleep-deprived top 10 list.

Number 10… Extra hours no one else is asking anything from me. No emails or texts, no noise, no expectations. Just time that quietly exists… and finally learning I don’t have to fill it with anything but Him.

Number 9… A prayer life that doesn’t feel rushed. Turns out when you’re awake at 1:43am, you’re not exactly in a hurry to get anywhere. So I stay longer praying over every single person who comes to mind. I don’t wrap it up as quickly. So if things have been going better for you lately, you’re welcome 😂

Number 8… A very real awareness that I am not in control. Sleep, or the lack thereof, will humble you like that. You can do everything right and still find yourself wide awake. And honestly…the control freak that I am, probably needed that reminder more than I realized.

Number 7… Scripture I remember in the dark. Verses coming back to me, slow and steady, like they were always there… just waiting for me to be still enough to hear them again. Not something I reach for, but something already written into me.

Number 6… Conversations with God that are far less polished. Somewhere between tired and honest, I stopped trying to sound like I had it all together, and have poured out my soul in ways I never allowed before.

Number 5… The humbling realization that not every 3:18am thought is from God. Some of them are just me being wide awake, slightly dramatic, and suddenly remembering every awkward or unnecessary thing I’ve ever done.

Number 4… A rhythm of returning. Waking up again and again, and choosing, again and again, to turn toward Him instead of letting my mind run somewhere else. Not perfectly. Not every time. But more than I used to.

Number 3… Perspective. Because at 2am, the things that felt urgent at 2pm don’t always carry the same weight. The noise fades a little, and what’s left feels clearer. Simpler. More true. And when I question that perspective, see number 5.

Number 2… A deeper dependence on Him. Because when your body won’t do what it’s supposed to, you stop pretending you’re as self-sufficient as you thought. You learn to lean… because you don’t really have another option.

And Number 1…A relationship I didn’t know could be formed in the dark. Not structured or scheduled, not filtered… just Him and me, in the middle of the night, again and again. What started as a child, lying awake in the dark, the night feeling scarier than it should. changed, and now, those same hours have become something else entirely. He has met me there, in the middle of the night and now it is something I don’t want to miss.

I still want sleep, and I wouldn’t go asking for the relentless headaches either. But both have done something I didn’t expect. They’ve slowed me down in ways I never would have chosen… and in that slowing, they’ve made space for something I didn’t know I was missing.

So now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, or when I feel everything in me being told to pause… I hope I welcome it an invitation. And maybe the healing will come and the headaches will ease and sleep will return in ways I’ve been asking for. But I hope I never forget the stillness or the quiet.. or rush by the 2am moments where He feels closer than I ever expected Him to.

Horatio Spafford was a successful lawyer and a devoted man of faith, a man whose life reflected order and stability and purpose, until in a short span of time it didn’t. The Great Chicago Fire erased much of what he had built financially, a significant loss, yes, but one that could be measured, one that in time could be restored. What followed could not.

His four daughters, Annie, 12, Maggie, 7, Bessie, 4, and baby Tanetta, just 2, boarded a ship to Europe with their mother while he remained behind on business, planning to join them shortly after, and somewhere in the Atlantic that ship collided with another vessel and sank within minutes. His girls were gone, all four of them, and only his wife survived, sending a telegram with just two words, Saved alone.

There are moments that divide a life into before and after, and this was one of them.

Spafford immediately set out to cross the ocean to be with her, and during that journey the captain quietly approached him with a kind of reverence for the moment, pointing out the place where the ship had gone down, the very waters where his daughters had taken their last breath. No explanation, no resolution, just open sea stretching in every direction, endless and indifferent and quiet in a way that almost feels much too overwhelming and loud. It was there, suspended between unimaginable loss and whatever would come next, that Spafford wrote,

When peace like a river attendeth my way, When sorrows like sea billows roll…

and somehow in the same breath,

Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say, It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Those words were not written in comfort, they were written in the shadow of loss most of us cannot begin to comprehend, written by a father who had just stood over the very waters where his daughters had taken their last breaths, and somehow, in that place, found the strength to say it anyway.

That line holds more than poetry, it holds tension, the kind we all carry, peace and sorrow existing at the same time, faith and heartbreak sitting side by side, a life that once felt steady now rising and falling with waves that do not seem to settle, and for him, those waves were not metaphor, they were real, they had names, they had faces, they were the laughter and life of four little girls now gone.

And then he goes deeper, not away from the pain but straight through it,

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come, let this blest assurance control, that Christ has regarded my helpless estate, and hath shed His own blood for my soul.

Not because his life was well, not because anything had been made right, but because somewhere in the middle of all that loss, in the quiet after the unimaginable, he remembered what had already been done for him, that Christ saw him there, a father undone, standing in grief that could not be fixed, and still chose the cross, still chose to enter into suffering, still chose to hold him even there.

I may have written on this hymn before, but lately circumstances have brought me back to it again, back to these words, back to the weight of them, and I find myself sitting with a quieter, more personal question, not how beautifully it reads, not how powerfully it has comforted others, but whether I will be able to say it when it is my turn.

Because it is one thing to admire that kind of faith from a distance, to underline it, to share it, to let it move you in a moment, and it is something entirely different to stand in your own version of that ocean, where the horizon feels endless and the silence feels heavy, and choose to say it anyway.

Lately, many of us have found ourselves in places like that, standing in the middle of things we did not choose, holding questions that do not have answers yet, praying prayers that feel like they rise and fall back down without explanation, trying to reconcile what we believe about God with what we are actually living through, and if we are honest, wanting Him to explain Himself, to make it make sense.

That longing isn’t wrong, it’s the most human thing about us, to reach for understanding when everything in us feels undone, to look for something we can hold onto, some reason, some thread that will steady what feels like it’s coming apart. We want to know there is purpose here, that this is not random, that somehow this will reconcile with the God we trust. And yet even at our most honest, there are moments where answers don’t come, where explanations feel out of reach, where what we are facing cannot be softened or solved by words.

But the cross was never an explanation.

It was a contradiction, a Savior who did not save Himself, a victory that looked like loss, love that did not intervene in the way anyone expected, and if you had stood there that day you would not have said “it is well,” you would have said “this is wrong, this is not how it was supposed to go,” and still, somehow, that was the very place where God was doing His deepest and most irreversible work.

It is nearly impossible to remember “it is well” when you are in the middle of the unfathomable, when the story feels unfinished and the outcome feels off and the weight of it presses in on your chest in a way you cannot quite name. And maybe that is why we are gently drawn back, again and again, not to understanding, but to the cross… to cling to the only place where love was proven without condition, where suffering was not avoided but entered into, where God did not explain the pain but met us in it.

Because it is in that same sacred tension where faith stops being an idea and becomes something you have to hold onto with both hands, where trust is no longer easy or automatic but costly and chosen, where belief is no longer tied to what you can see but to who He has already shown Himself to be.

Spafford stood over the waters that held his deepest loss and said it is well with my soul, not because he understood, but because he trusted the Christ who had already proven His love, the Christ who regarded his helpless estate and shed His own blood long before this moment ever came, and here we are, somewhere between that cross and whatever resolution we are still waiting for, being asked to do the same.

So today we come to Him, not perfectly, not with polished faith or steady hands, but broken and honest…

Our good and gracious Heavenly Father, we do not understand what we are walking through, we do not see how this is good, and some days we are not even sure what to say at all, but You see us here, in this exact place, and You have already proven Your love for us in ways that cannot be undone, so teach us, slowly, gently, even through tears if that is what it takes, teach us to say, it is well… it is well with my soul, even if it isn’t, yet.

Not all at once, not in some moment I could name while it was happening, but slowly, quietly, over time I started to see her in me….in the way I move through a day now, in the way I think about people before they ever say they need something, in the way I can’t seem to let someone leave my house without placing something in their hands.

And the other day, I caught it.

I was standing in the kitchen, wrapping something up, already thinking ahead to what else was in the freezer that I could send with them, moving without really thinking about it, just knowing. It felt so familiar that it made me stop for a second and smile, not because it was new, but because it wasn’t, because I’ve seen this before, over and over, in the way she loves.

She doesn’t make a show of it. She just gives and notices and carries people in quiet, steady ways that don’t ask to be recognized. It’s in every quilt, every cake, every casserole, in the ride to the doctor, the quick trip to the grocery store, the way she shows up without needing to be asked. None of it has ever felt like something she was trying to prove. It has always just been who she is. And somewhere along the way, without trying, I stepped into that same rhythm.

I am know life has always been anchored in something she never needed to explain out loud, even though she is often loud about who she is anchored to. It is a kind of love that doesn’t keep track, doesn’t ask to be seen, doesn’t need to be called anything more than what it is. It looks small if you’re not paying attention, almost ordinary, until you realize it has been shaping everything around it the entire time.

“Whatever you did for one of the least of these… you did for me.” Matthew 25:40

She has lived that, not as something she set out to accomplish, but simply as something true.

For a large stretch of my life, I didn’t live this way though, I wasn’t my mother, and in some ways I wasn’t “me”, or at least not this me. Purpose felt like something entirely different, something I would eventually reach if I worked hard enough or figured enough out, something waiting somewhere ahead of me like an answer I hadn’t gotten to yet, something I could arrive at and finally feel settled inside. But when I slowed down enough to be honest, what I was really living under wasn’t purpose. It was obligation.

Everything felt like something I owed, an expectation I was trying to meet, a version of myself I was trying to become. The way I acted, the way I dressed, the way I spoke, even the way I tried to follow Christ, it all felt shaped by something outside of me, like I was constantly aware of myself, constantly adjusting, constantly measuring.

And there is a quiet exhaustion that comes with that, because no matter how much you do, it never settles into enough. It keeps you moving, but it never lets you rest, and over time it can make you resent the very things you thought were supposed to give your life meaning.

You can look like you’re doing everything right and still feel completely disconnected from the life you’re living. Because purpose was never meant to be built that way.

It was never something I could earn or arrive at or hold together long enough to finally feel like I belonged inside of it. It had already been established, already been secured, long before I ever started trying to define it for myself. At the cross.

“It is finished.” John 19:30

Those words don’t leave room for performance or striving to become worthy; they settle something deeper than that, because if it is finished, then I was never the one responsible for completing it.

“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand…” Ephesians 2:10

Prepared, already set in place, not waiting for me to build it but waiting for me to step into it. I didn’t understand that, not in a way that changed how I lived. Then something shifted.

I can trace it back to October, everything suddenly looked different, and something in me finally stopped holding Jesus at a distance where He could be part of my life without actually being the center of it. I turned back—not perfectly, not with clarity, but honestly enough to let Him move something in me. At first, nothing around me changed. The same days, the same responsibilities, the same life. But underneath it, something began to loosen.

The constant awareness of myself, the pressure to get it right, to measure up, to hold everything together…it started to fall away in a way I didn’t force and couldn’t have created on my own.

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Galatians 2:20

That used to feel distant, but now it feels like something I am slowly, quietly learning to live inside of.

What took its place wasn’t loud or dramatic. It was gentle and steady, like something in me finally exhaled, and I began to notice people differently, to respond without overthinking it, to give without quietly questioning whether it mattered. I didn’t arrive at it or figure it out, I just found myself inside of it, inside the quiet, steady way love continues to move through a life that is no longer trying to prove anything, but simply responding to what has already been given.

And the realization still catches in me, deeper than I expect, that purpose was never something out ahead of me, never something I had to chase or define or become enough to reach. For so long I had missed what was always here, always held, always rooted in Him. Because this was never about me building a life that mattered. It was about receiving the life He gave.

“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son…” 1 John 4:10

The cross settled it long before I tried to understand it, long before I tried to live up to it, long before I even knew how to name what I was looking for. Christ didn’t wait for me to become enough, He became everything I could not be, and in Him, purpose was no longer something I had to create, but something I was invited to live inside of.

And now, in the quiet, in the ordinary, in the giving that doesn’t ask to be seen, I am beginning to understand what that life looks like. Life isn’t a performance meant to impress the people around me, and purpose isn’t something I get to define on my own terms. It is something received, something yielded, something placed back into His hands again and again.

My purpose is whatever He wants for my life. Not what I can plan, not what I can control, not even what I can fully see yet, but what He is doing in me and through me as I stay open, as I stay surrendered, as I trust that His will is better than anything I could have built on my own.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths.” Proverbs 3:5–6

There is a freedom in that I didn’t know before, a loosening of the need to have it all figured out, a quiet confidence that I am not the one holding my life together anymore.

And so I follow, sometimes clearly, sometimes clumsily, but open…open to where He leads and to what He asks, open to becoming whatever He is shaping in me, trusting that wherever He leads in this life, I will go, no matter the cost.

Ruth 2 reminds us to let fall handfuls of purpose, a grace that looks ordinary, provision that feels small, but is actually placed there on purpose for someone else to glean or pick up. So I will follow, and let some fall. And if it looks small by the world’s measure, I will follow. If it looks like a casserole or a visit or something placed gently into someone’s hands, I will follow. Because a life surrendered to Him is never small; it is always carrying something far greater than I can see, something eternal, something already held in His hands.

We can all agree that Holy is what God is, but when we and created man, finally stop trying to measure Him by anything we know we can almost begin to understand. It is His utter otherness, an so much more than that, it is his flawlessness, the uncreated, untouched purity and goodness of all that He is, the blazing reality that He has never been shaped, softened, corrected, or made better by anything outside Himself. To say He is holy is to say He is God in a way nothing and no one else could ever be.

Yet even in all my wordsmlthing my trying to define holy, I fall so dreadfully short. It’s to great a word to describe our great God, he is holy. Literally. He IS holy. To describe Him is to describe holy and to define holy is to define Him.

Now that I feel utterly ill prepared to continue on with my rambling, let’s keep going….

There is a moment in Isaiah, and it doesn’t begin with him speaking. It begins with him seeing. (I think this is a hint for me to shut up and open my eyes more to see Him.)

“In the year that King Uzziah died…”

everything already feels unsteady, and into that quiet instability Isaiah is given a vision, not of comfort, but of what is actually true.

Isaiah sees the Lord, high and lifted up, seated on a throne that does not compete with anything else, and the train of His robe fills the temple, not part of it but all of it, as if even the space itself cannot contain Him without being overtaken.

And there are seraphim above Him, not still, not ornamental, but alive with awareness, each with six wings, covering their faces, covering their feet, moving as they serve, not because they are told to in that moment, but because this is what it means to be in His presence.

And they are not speaking to Isaiah. They are speaking to one another, as if the truth is too full to be held alone.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.”

Stop and let this sink in. Those words fill everything. Not as repetition for effect, but as something continuous, something that does not begin or end, a sound that matches the weight of what is before them. And as they speak, the foundations of the thresholds shake, the room itself responding, the air thick with smoke, not to hide Him but to mark that this is not ordinary, this is not familiar, this is presence.

And Isaiah… he doesn’t move closer or try to understand it, he lets it wash over him as he feels it all the way to his core. And then he speaks.

“Woe is me,” he says, and it’s not rehearsed, not careful, it’s the only thing left in him when everything else falls away, “for I am lost… for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

And in that moment, you understand something about holiness that no definition can quite hold.

It is not just that God is set apart. It is that when He is seen, even for a moment, everything else is. Because this isn’t description. It’s response.

Not drawn from anything we know. Not built from the same material, just refined. Not something we could ever become by trying harder or reaching higher. None.

And yet… we are made in His image.

Which means there are echoes of Him in us. Glimpses. Reflections. The capacity to recognize Him, to respond to Him, something inherently in us that answers back when He speaks, that knows we belong to Him before we know we do. And maybe that’s the difference that matters most… He is holiness, we reflect holiness if we are close enough to the source.

This attempt at a definition lands deeper than language, because everything I know, everything I can point to in myself, has been touched by something. Shaped over time. Pressed, formed, influenced, carried through moments that left their mark whether I noticed or not. Even the best parts of me… they have a story marked by time.

But Him… there is no time behind Him. He is… and always has been… entirely Himself. And suddenly that question in Scripture doesn’t feel poetic, it feels inevitable—

“Who is like you, O Lord…?”

And the answer isn’t spoken, because it doesn’t need to be. No one. No one untouched like Him. No one unmoved like Him. No one who stands completely outside of everything that has ever altered anything else.

And I think that’s what finally settled, not as a grand conclusion, or something I figured out… that the One who is entirely other, entirely untouched, entirely beyond anything I could trace or shape or influence is also the One who does not move.

And instead of that creating distance, it began to feel like the only steady thing I had ever known, because everything else, even the things I thought were certain, have shifted at some point… but not Him.

I can’t seem to move away from that, throughout the Word of God it keeps returning to it, it doesn’t want me to forget. It carries it all the way through until I find myself standing in the book of Revelation, and it isn’t a new picture, its the same truth, just without anything in the way:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.”

This is the part that I can’t move past too quickly, because the One Isaiah saw… the One who filled the temple… is the same One who stepped was robed in flesh and came near enough to mankind to be held by a mother. To sit at a fire and speak to thousands and do a miracle as if you were the only one to be healed ever in the whole of everness. Yet He was still holy.

And as holiness was nailed to a cross, so that we too could even have the opportunity to fail at being holy, I come back again, to three simple words:

Holy, holy, holy.

I don’t feel the need to explain it anymore. It’s enough to know that this has always been what everything rests on… not my understanding, not my ability to hold it all together, but Him.

He alone is holy, and worthy to be praised. Can I get an amen?

Music is very much a part of my being. Piano, singing, playing, hearing, j don’t care. Music transforms a space, it’s powerful. And then there is worship. Lately for me, worship has been a declaration of the remarkable opportunity gifted to sit at the feet of the God of the universe and praise Him on this side of eternity.

And I love it when a song stops me in my tracks and garners my full attention. The hair on the back of my neck prickles and a chill runs down my arm and explodes out of my fingertips. The words hang in the space just outside of my reach, a the collide with my soul.

I wasn’t made to be tending a grave, I was called by name, Born and raised back to life again, I was made for more

I listen, then I listened again, and yes probably a third time…the words grappling my heart and soul in a moment of pure awe.

Then it ends, maybe I get a phone call or just life happens and it interrupts that moment. But the words linger and like a fussy milk cow I chew on them.

Born and raised back to life again, I was made for more

More. Most days don’t feel like more. They feel ordinary. Repetitive. A little unfinished around the edges. There are more moments than I’d like to admit where I don’t feel like I’m becoming anything at all… just circling the same places, trying again, aware of how often I fall short of even my own expectations. I feel like I should be doing…. Well, more!

And I know who I am, ’Cause I know who You are, The cross of salvation was only the start

Still chewing, I remind myself if I was made for more, and I keep running into the same limits, the same doubts, the same places I can’t seem to move past, it is because whatever that “more” is… it is come from me. The more this song speaks of has to come from somewhere else. Because I’ve tried to manufacture it. I’ve tried to discipline my way into it, think my way into it, hum my way into it. And it never quite holds.

And that’s when a simple verse found its way back into my memory, like it was answering the question I couldn’t quite say out loud.

Made for more of what?

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three… but the greatest of these is love.

At first, it felt obvious. Of course I need more faith. More hope. More love. Like that’s what I’ve been missing. Like the “more” I’m supposed to step into is just… becoming better at all of it. Stronger faith. Steadier hope. A fuller, more consistent kind of love.

But the longer I sit with that, the more I know how that story goes. I try to have more faith, and it still wavers. I try to hold onto hope, and it still feels thin some days. I try to love well, and I still fall short in the quiet places no one sees.

So if “more” is something I have to produce… I don’t think I can get there. And that’s when the verse shifts, just enough to change everything.

Faith, hope, and love abide. They remain.

If they are to abide, then I must abide with the one who provides them.

Faith, not as certainty, but as staying. Staying when I don’t understand, when I don’t feel strong, when all I really have is the quiet decision not to walk away. When belief feels less like confidence and more like returning, again and again, even when nothing feels resolved.

Hallelujah You called out my name, So I’ll sing out Your praise

Hope is quieter than I expected. Not bright or loud, but steady. Rooted in something beyond this moment—salvation already given, eternity already prepared, a promise that this life is not all there is. It’s the gentle reminder that what feels like an ending here… isn’t.

Hallelujah You buried my past, I’m not going back

And love… love is what holds both of those in place. Not fragile, not shifting with me, but steady. It doesn’t rise and fall with how I’m doing, it doesn’t pull back when I fall short or draw closer when I get it right. It stays. Rooted in something far deeper than my effort… in who He is, and what He’s already done.

So why would I make a bed in my shame, When a fountain of grace is running my way, I know I am Yours, And I was made for more

I realize that “more” was never about becoming more on my own, it has always  been about what remains when I can’t hold myself together the way I thought I should. It was never about arriving, but about being found in the middle of all the ways I don’t.

The song, the verse, they are both reminder that so great a love doesn’t just stay at a distance. It doesn’t just exist as an idea or a lyric I come back to when I need it. Love moves. Love comes looking. Love keeps going, even into the places I would rather not be seen. Love didn’t stop halfway.

Cause I wasn’t made to be tending a grave. I was called by name. Born and raised back to life again. I was made for more.

That’s where it all leads, whether I realize it at first or not. Not back into myself. Not into some better, more polished version of me.

To the cross.

Where faith was put on display, not as something distant or unreachable, but right there in front of anyone who knew they needed Him.  Where hope rose on the third day, when everything had gone quiet, when it felt like the story had already ended, and still… somehow it hadn’t. Like death didn’t get the final word. Like what looked finished was only just beginning.

And where love… I don’t even know how to say it without it feeling too small. Because it wasn’t careful, and it wasn’t measured, and it didn’t hold anything back. It stayed. It stretched out its hands and didn’t pull them back when it hurt. It didn’t change its mind when it saw exactly who it was dying for. It didn’t decide it was too much, or too far, or too late.

It just kept going, all the way, for me. And that’s why it’s the greatest of these. Because faith… I still struggle to hold it some days. And hope… some days it feels so thin I’m not even sure it’s there. But love… love gave more so we could be more. Not more by trying harder or by finally getting it right. Not more by becoming someone else. More because He didn’t stop. More because He finished it. More because even at the cross… love was still moving toward me.

So I’ll sing out Your praise ….because the greatest of these is love…

He spoke slow… not like the other rabbis. He wasn’t trying to remember what came next, or make sure he said it the right way. It just… came out of Him. Easy, like He wasn’t worried about time or what anyone thought about it.

And I didn’t even realize it at first, but I had stopped looking around. The noise, the people, all of it just… faded. I stopped thinking about anything else, except that I wished my imma had come to hear Him too. I think she would have liked the way He spoke.

Then, He just… started telling a story.

“There was a man who had a hundred sheep…”

When He said it, I could see it right away, the field, the way sheep move, slow and scattered, never really paying attention, just going wherever they feel like going, and then he said one was gone…

I felt that, it’s like when one of ours doesn’t come back and you get a little mad, I kicked a rock hard one day and hurt my toe, as I counted them. Then when He said,

“Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?”

Yes! We do! That day I kept looking longer than I wanted to. I remember I was so hungry but I just wanted my sheep back so I looked until I found her. Until. It could be a long time, that day it was. Until he finds it….

And when He said, “And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing,” I could see it, the sheep not knowing how to get back, probably not even knowing it was lost in the first place and still… the Shepherd, strong like my Aba, lifting it like it mattered, like it was worth the trouble, like it wasn’t a mistake to go back for it. I liked that part the most, like it didn’t have to know how to get back, and being found was all that mattered. Then He kept going…

“Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins and loses one…”

My head came up when he said that to lose one coin, even when you have ten more and a silver one at that. I thought about the floor in our house, the way things disappear if they fall in the wrong place, and I thought about my Imma… how fast she would move if something like that was gone.

“Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it?”

Of course she would. I didn’t even wait for Him to finish before I knew that. She would light the lamp right away, even if it was still light outside, and she’d get down low, right on her knees, using her hands, brushing the dirt, checking every corner, moving things that don’t get moved, looking again where she already looked. I could see it. I could see her not stopping. He used that word again … until…

“And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, ‘Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.’”

And I almost laughed a little when He said that… not because it was funny, but because I could see it so clearly, the way her whole face would change, the way she would hold it up like that, calling out before she even meant to. Because of course she would. It’s back. And I stayed leaning forward like that, waiting, because I wanted to know what He was going to say next…

“There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need.”

I didn’t move while He was saying it. Not even a little. I wondered how far he walked. Where did he go and what did he see? Who did he talk to along the way? Did he miss his Aba? I would miss mine, but I would like having all that money, I think.

Did he say he was sitting with pigs?  We don’t have pigs, I wonder how far away he was. I looked up for a moment towards my own home as He kept speaking.

“When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father”

And when He said he started talking to himself, practicing what he would say, I almost said it with him, just under my breath, like maybe if he got it right it would fix something. But I didn’t know if it would. I didn’t know if his father would even listen. I just sat there… waiting… to hear what would happen when he got back.

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him… he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”

And that part made me sit up a little, because fathers don’t do that. Not like that. Not in front of everyone. I thought the father would wait… or at least stand there and make him come all the way back first. But He said he saw him while he was still far off, and I could see that, the road stretching out, the father looking, like maybe he had been looking for a long time.

“The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you…’”

I remember waiting then, almost holding my breath without meaning to, because I thought this was where it would turn, where the father would answer him, where something would be decided, but he didn’t stop to answer him the way I thought he would, he didn’t stand there and think about it, didn’t make him prove anything first.

“But the father said, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him… put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.’”

And I blinked when He said that, because that wasn’t what I expected at all, the best robe, not something old or worn, not something to show he came back with nothing, but the best one, and a ring, and sandals, like he wasn’t being brought back as less, like he hadn’t lost his place even after all of it.

“Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate.”

And that part almost made me smile, not because it was funny but because it felt… big, like the kind of thing you do when something really matters, not quiet or careful, but loud enough for everyone to know.

“For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”

It followed me long after the crowd moved on, long after the voices picked back up, and as I walked back home. I  felt like all of it had come together in a way I couldn’t quite explain, like the sheep, and the coin, and the son, like they were all saying the same thing and I could almost understand it. Until. That word again, I would talk to Aba about it all, he would enjoy the stories.

I did not see Him again then until weeks later. Not in the middle of a crowd, not sitting where everyone could lean in and listen, not telling stories that made you forget where you were for a little while. He was on a cross? What did they do to Him? The sign said King of the Jews.

I thought back to that day. To the way it felt sitting there, close enough to hear Him without trying, the dust on my feet, the sound of people shifting around me, and His voice… steady, unhurried, like nothing could rush Him. I kept going back to that, holding onto it in my mind like if I stayed there long enough it might make sense of what I was seeing now. Because this didn’t look like that day. This didn’t feel like that day. And I couldn’t understand how both could be true at the same time.

But the more I stood there, the more those stories wouldn’t leave me alone. They didn’t come back all at once, just pieces of them, like they had been waiting somewhere in me. The sheep… I could still see it, the way it didn’t come back on its own, the way it was lifted and carried like it mattered more than it knew. And the coin… how she kept looking, how she didn’t stop, not even when it would have been easier to give up. And then the father… the way he ran, the way he didn’t wait for everything to be said or made right before he closed the distance.

And I remember looking at Him then, really looking, and something in me shifted in a way I couldn’t explain, like those stories hadn’t been separate at all, like they had all been leading here the whole time.

“The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

I didn’t say anything after that. I don’t think I could. Because it felt like something had opened up inside me, something I didn’t have words for yet, something that made those stories feel different now, heavier and somehow clearer at the same time. And I think… I think that was the moment I started to understand, not all of it, but enough to know that it had never just been about sheep, or coins, or sons.

It had always been about meand about Him. And the way He came looking for me… Even knowing it would cost Him everything, not stopping, not turning back… until He found… me.

If Peter were standing with us today, he would probably tell you, with such love and devotion how he can still see the room if he closes his eyes long enough, the way everything felt perfect right up until it didn’t, the table was set, the closeness of the room, the sound of Jesus’ voice filling the space in a way that should have made them listen more carefully than they did. And then that moment, the one that didn’t land the way it should have, when Jesus looked at him and said what he couldn’t accept, that before the night was over he would deny Him, not once, but three times.

Three times? Deny Jesus? It didn’t make sense. He pushed it away almost as quickly as it came. He told Him He was wrong. Told Him he would go anywhere, do anything, even die if it came to that. And the thing is, he meant it. He completely believed himself when he said it. That’s the part that should make us pause.

Because we’ve said the same things, just in quieter ways. We’ve told God we trust Him, that we will follow wherever He leads, that we would choose Him over anything else, and in those moments we meant it too. We believed the version of ourselves speaking those words, just like Peter did, just like any of us do when nothing has tested it yet and love still feels strong because it hasn’t been asked to cost us anything.

But love that hasn’t been tested is easy to be confident in, and the dark of the night has a way of asking different questions.

By the time Peter found himself in that courtyard, everything had shifted. The cold had settled in deep enough to drive him toward the fire without thinking, the kind that works its way into your hands and makes you stay longer than you intended. The smoke clung to everything, to his clothes, to his skin, to the air itself, and people stood close together, voices low, tension sitting just beneath the surface.

And there Peter was, right in the middle of it, close enough to see what was happening, close enough to hear, but still trying to stay just far enough back to not be pulled into it.

That place feels closer than we like to admit. Close enough to Jesus to recognize Him, to know Him, to say we belong to Him, but far enough back that we don’t have to risk anything for Him. Close enough to feel the warmth, far enough to protect our lives. And then the question comes, simple and direct, the kind that doesn’t feel like a turning point until it already is.

You were with Him.

Peter didn’t think about it. He didn’t weigh it out. It just came out of him, almost instinctively, I don’t know Him. And I bet it didn’t feel as final as it sounds now, it felt small, almost temporary, like something he could say just to get through the moment and then come back from later.

I know that feeling too. The moment that doesn’t seem like it matters that much, the conversation where His name feels just a little too costly to speak, the choice where obedience feels inconvenient enough to delay. Maybe I don’t stand there and say what Peter said, not out loud, not like that. I just live it in quieter ways, in the small hesitations, in the silence, in the places I step back instead of stepping forward, refusing to claim Him completely for fear of what someone may say.

Another question comes, and something has already shifted, something inside has loosened, and it’s easier to step back again than it is to correct what’s already been said. Easier to create more distance than to close it. And that’s how it works for us too, one small denial softens the next one, a quiet compromise making the next feel almost natural, until we find ourselves further away than we ever intended to be.

By the time the third denial comes, the hesitation is seemingly gone. The words come sharper now, stronger, like if he says them hard enough they might make it true or because he feels he’s already failed so what’s the point now.

He bites back…I do not know the man. Even now, that line carries weight, it’s not just what he said, it’s how far he had moved from the one he loved. How quickly fear rewrote what he had once believed about himself. That’s the part that should settle into us too, because we may not say those words, but we have all lived them in ways we would rather not name, in the places we keep untouched, in the moments we choose ourselves, in the ways we quietly distance our lives from the One we claim to love.

A rooster somewhere in the distance, maybe more than one, their cries slipping through the night and settling into the moment in a way that feels too precise to ignore. The cry doesn’t pass by, it lingers. Like something has just been called out into the open.

I can’t help but wonder if his first instinct wasn’t something raw and human… stupid rooster. As if the sound were the problem. As if the rooster had betrayed him, not his own words still hanging in the air. Because that’s what we do. But that sound didn’t come to shame him.

I wonder how many mornings came after that one, when it found him again. At first like a wound reopening… but not forever. We know the end of the story, even when he didn’t - we know he saw Jesus again. He heard his name on that shoreline. Do you love me… do you love me… do you love me. And maybe, over time, the sound changed. The rooster crows: yes you denied Him, but He came back for you anyway.

But let’s get back to that moment, the crowing of the rooster, and almost too simply for what it carries, Scripture says:

The Lord turned and looked at Peter.

I have always moved past that too quickly, to get to what happens next. But I couldn’t write this without focusing on this moment. I don’t know how or why this is possible, Jesus been taken into custody, but this moment is palpable.

You can almost feel it before you see it. The smoke still clinging to him. The warmth of the fire still on his face. The words he just spoke still lingered in the air around him. I do not know the man. Maybe it’s the silence. Maybe it’s the weight finally catching up to him. Maybe it’s that quiet awareness we all know, the one that tells you something just broke and you can’t fix it. And he looks up, and there He is. Close enough that there is no space left to pretend or explain anything away. Jesus, standing there, already carrying the weight of what is coming. And He turns, and looks at Peter.

I don’t think it was anger. I don’t think it was even disappointment, not in the way we expect it. It feels like something deeper than that. It feels like…. knowing. The kind that had already seen this moment long before Peter ever stood by that fire. The kind that heard his promises in the upper room and still held this night without pulling back. It feels like love that was not surprised. Love that did not step away. Love that stayed. And I think that’s what broke Peter.

Not just the failure. Not just the realization of what he had said. But that he was fully seen in it and not turned away from. That nothing in that moment made Jesus leave him there. Then Peter wept. It’s a grief that comes when you see yourself clearly and wish, just for a moment, that you could go back and be the person you said you would be.But you can’t and somehow, even there… Jesus doesn’t look away.

That is where this stops being Peter’s story and starts being ours. We know that place. We know what it is to love Him and still choose something else when it matters, to stay silent when speaking would cost us, to build lives that orbit Him instead of center on Him and call it faith because it feels close enough.

We don’t stand by a fire and deny Him out loud. We just deny Him in ways that are easier to live with. Until something in us wakes up and realizes we have been standing near Him and living like we don’t belong to Him at all. And if the story ended there, it would crush us, because we would all be Peter with no way back.

But it doesn’t end there. It moves to a cross. And that is where everything changes, because Jesus does not turn away from Peter and walk in the other direction. He moves toward the cross knowing exactly what Peter has done, knowing every word, every failure, every quiet denial that would come after. And He goes anyway. Not because Peter held it together, but because Peter couldn’t, and because we couldn’t.

That is where grace meets us, not in the strength we promised, but in the places we broke, not in the version of ourselves we thought we were, but in the truth of who we actually are, and still, somehow, unbelievably, we are not cast aside.

I think that’s what we struggle to believe, not just that He forgives, but that He wants us still. That after the denial, after the silence, after the moment we knew better and chose otherwise… His heart doesn’t close.

The same eyes that met Peter in that moment are the same eyes that follow us into ours, not with distance, not with hesitation, but with a kind of love that feels almost too close, too personal, too undeserved to be real. And yet it is.

You are not the version of you that failed. You are the one He kept. The one He knew. The one He did not walk away from. The one He went to the cross for, already seeing it all, already deciding you were worth staying for anyway.

And that’s where it settles, not in what you said or didn’t say, not in how you held up or fell apart, but in this quiet, unshakable truth…He has not let you go, and He’s not going to.

Randy Travis sitting there, a whole lot quieter than he used to be, his body not doing what it once could, and someone else is singing the melodies he carried for so long. You can see it before anything else happens, that flicker in his eyes, the way his face softens like something familiar has just stepped into the room. And then that smile, slow and steady, not forced, not for show, just there.

If you watch him long enough, you can almost feel the song come alive with him, whisked back to 1987 when Forever and Ever came out… because you know, despite the stroke, he’s still singing. Not out loud, not the way he once did, but somewhere deeper than what the body can carry, every word still there, every line still alive.

And there’s something about that that stays with you, the way joy and ache seem to sit side by side without canceling each other out. It makes you think about what carries on, what doesn’t end even when it looks like it has. And that’s probably why one of his song keeps coming back around now in my ow mind, the one about the three wooden crosses on the side of the road.

The way he tells the story doesn’t rush you. He lets you ride along, lets you sit in it, four lives moving forward like any other day, none of them knowing how close they are to the moment that will change everything. A farmer, a teacher, a preacher, a woman the world had already decided things about, and then in a moment that no one could stop, everything breaks open and what’s left behind doesn’t make sense at first.

Three wooden crosses. Not four. And you want it to line up, you want it to feel fair, you want the story to end in a way that makes sense to you, but it doesn’t. It keeps going past the moment you thought was the end, carrying something forward no one expected, something that wasn’t finished at the side of the road. And that’s when it starts to feel familiar, because somewhere deeper than the song, there’s another hill, another set of crosses, and this time it isn’t a story someone wrote, it’s the one everything else has been pointing toward all along.

“And there they crucified Him, and the criminals, one on His right and one on His left.” (Luke 23:33)

Three crosses standing against the sky, and what hangs there is more than suffering, it is the human heart laid open in the presence of God. One man turns his head just enough to see Jesus and still rejects Him, even at the edge of death, even with nothing left to hold onto, his voice rises in defiance, asking to be saved without ever surrendering. And the other man, something in him shifts, not his circumstances, not the pain, but his understanding. He sees himself clearly, he sees Jesus clearly, and in that moment with nothing left to offer, no time to make anything right, he speaks the simplest, most honest thing he has, Jesus, remember me.

And somehow that is enough. Because Jesus answers him right there, not later, not after something has been proven, but in the middle of it all, today you will be with me in paradise. No delay, no conditions, just grace given to a man who had nothing left but the truth. And Jesus, in the center, carrying what none of them could see, bearing the weight of sin, absorbing what would have crushed anyone else, still speaks words that don’t make sense unless you understand what He is doing, Father forgive them.

This is not just death. This is rescue. Three crosses, close enough to touch, and yet eternity separates them. Same moment, same Savior, completely different outcomes, and the difference is not distance or time or effort, it is response. One turns away, one turns toward, and one is the reason either of them can be saved at all.

And that’s what won’t leave me, because it means the cross is not just something that happened once, it is something that still stands, still dividing, still inviting, still asking without forcing, still offering what cannot be earned. And maybe that’s why those videos linger the way they do, because even now something is still being carried forward, a voice that can’t rise the way it once did and yet the song is still alive, still reaching, still being sung through others.

And the cross is like that too. It has never stopped speaking. And every one of us, whether we realize it or not, is still standing somewhere in front of it, deciding what we will do with the man in the middle.