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It is always the transformation of the smallest part that leads to the transformation of the whole. 
We groan and cry out in this painful life experience together. 
The cold, hard fact is that there are prayers that God does not answer.
Who can stand before this cosmically-sized love without being completely transformed?
Either way, you will ultimately face then refiner’s fire.
The problem is that Hell is never once mentioned in the Bible.
The word wrath isn’t an unloading of God’s fury and rage on the unrepentant.
You may not trust these words now, but there is hope in your pain and suffering.
Joy is an ever-present reality to which we open wide our souls to receive, but it is also a remembering and a longing.
God, I am done with you.
Throughout the Ages, God has absorbed the insults of his accusers and endured the mischaracterizations of his followers.
I'm not sure how to describe the feelings that go beyond heartbroken and devastated. Honest to God, I don't.
Our house church lost a beautiful young man, Abbott Forrester Garn, this week. His family has been an intimate part of our lives for the last decade. I offered these words at the funeral in the midst of the tragedy.
In my experience, the only place where the superficial veneer is stripped away, where pretense is obliterated, where cosmetic application fails, and where vulnerability is unmasked and triumphantly exposed... is in the presence of a loving, non-judgmental, other-centered group of trusted friends.
Our heads told us that this was the right decision, but nothing told our hearts to prepare for being wrecked.
I can't overstate how important it is for each of us to have people in our lives that we allow to speak truth to us.
Living constantly in the burden and pain of our suffering can either become an end destination or a passageway for each of us.
In private, I struggled with intense guilt, shame, and depression. I never talked about my abortion to anyone. Ever.
For even in the face of death, our own blood will cry out and give testimony.
Will we ever find joy? Will love ever prevail instead of hate and violence? Will the longings of hope ever be realized into something?
Our communities are in desperate need of people who love each other and seek out Truth in love and who can hear it without egos and attitudes.
The truth is that I was afraid that they might perceive me as a salesman or as having some sort of an agenda, even though neither of those are true of me.
“Oh my goodness. I thought you were some homeless guy and I wasn’t even going to pay attention to you.”
We have a tendency toward prolonging or avoiding pain because we believe it is too painful to deal with, but by avoiding it we prolong the inevitable.
When did we get so thin-skinned and so easily offended by everything that people say or do to us as Christians?
When a loved-one in your life passes unexpectedly, everything else in the world seems to completely stop and to have very little significance.
while the world continues to over-promise and under-deliver an abundant life, we foolishly continue to pursue it with great strength and resolve…but when the one who can be trusted, Jesus, promises to give those who believe in him an abundant life if we follow him…his ways are left untried and viewed as burdensome and enslaving rather than full of blessing and liberation.
The truth of the matter is that there is nothing wrong with recognizing the fact that there are times when God does not answer prayer the way that I would like. And sometimes that means the unanswered prayer will make my life hard…sometimes unbearable…but it doesn’t mean that God is not there suffering with me or that God has turned against me and does not love me.
The Christian is confronted by the paradox of the Holy Scriptures when told to consider it pure joy when faced with all kinds of trials.
Through worship, the Spirit of God breaks out into the world in prayer, in praise, in service putting broken pieces back together.