We are called beyond the safety of loving those who are easy to love and who easily love us back and into the challenge of getting uncomfortable, risking reputation and rejection and ridicule, so that we may bring healing, liberation, and love to those who need it most.

We witness this baptism so that we can remind Stevie as she grows that she belongs, no matter what, just as God created her, and that Jesus’ love will always be there, no matter what. That’s our job as the Body of Christ.

For Christians, the spirit of the law is always love. When we prioritize certainty and order over love and liberation, then we’re no longer worshiping Jesus, we’re worshiping power.

Making space for everyone and how God created them, making space for yourself and how God created you, sometimes takes courage. It sometimes requires telling hard truths, to create friction, for the sake of love, to risk division.

Your faithful actions manifest the promises of God here and now, if only as one stone laid for the foundation for a cathedral.

Belief is the trust that love does not end, even in the midst of absence.

Sin happens. Destruction happens. Cruelty happens. But they do not have the last word.

Christian love is not a transaction; it is an outpouring. It is not measured in careful increments but in overflowing abundance.

We don’t earn God’s love, nor do we ever lose it. That’s what grace is.

God doesn’t call Moses beyond his gifts, God calls him INTO his gifts. And God doesn’t send Moses on his mission by himself.

I recently read that the term “fear not” is written in the Bible 365 times, which, ironically, is how many days there are in a year.

If we claim to trust God for our nourishment, our power, our security, that means we need to have a deep and abiding trust in community.

I invite us to consider how we tend to prioritize speed above most else when our faith calls us first and foremost to love.

What’s happening now is the wholesale sacrifice of relationship, of love, of people’s very lives for the sake of transaction.

This is a time of drought, my friends. A time to hold fast to the upside-down Kingdom of God that Jesus preaches.

What if hell isn’t in the afterlife? What if hell is right here in this world, the result of our sins against each other in this life?

I’ve come to the realization that there are three things I have to accept to stay on this pilgrim-way.

This practice of showing up together over and over again teaches our hearts, our minds, our bodies what hope feels like.

A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. But marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again.

The truth of our faith can only be realized when we allow ourselves to be open to all the different ways of believing.