A prayer for God will open my eyes to what treasures he has hidden in plain sight.

A year after being on a head-on collision, I reflect on what God is showing me about his strength in my weakness.

It’s a strange thing to be told two months before your due date that you and your soon-to-be-born child would likely not survive if you go into labor. But for me, it’s the beginning of a story of God’s tenderness and power.

In the same way that he joined himself to our questions when he took on flesh, Jesus has joined us to his life by his own death and victorious rising.

A story of an old country church and the faithfulness of God

I’ve been anticipating this particular birthday since I was 6 years old. It’s not quite what 6-year-old me expected.

In Christ, we have a Companion who has plumbed the depths of disappointment, who can say to our raw hearts, “My child, I know.” | Lent 2023

Are we reaching for the peace of God or the God of Peace? | Lent 2023

In God’s mercy, some things, even with their inherent imperfections and difficulties, really are as truly good as they seem, as wonderful as you hope they’ll be.

I’ve found that the practice that has done the most to cultivate a heart of gratitude to God is not a mental list of things to be thankful for, but a physical posture that allows me to reach for God, right in the moment.

For much of my life in Christ, I believed that the purpose of relying on God’s strength in my weakness was to learn to be strong. It sounds almost right, doesn’t it? But God’s gentle correction to my self-sufficiency-loving heart has been this:

God invites me to rely on his strength not so that I can learn to be strong, but so that I can learn to be dependent.

Our wounds will not disappear, but they will be made new. The hands of our Healer are transforming our wounds into marks of love,

The love and life of Christ in our home bears witness to the truth that our family, our home, our street is caught up in something not just a century old, but something eternal.

Behind our home, there is a dirt-paved, trash can-lined alleyway with power and telephone lines arching overhead. And in that dusty, tumbledown alleyway, there is an unexpected gift—a row of the brightest flowers, growing tall and wild, along a neighbor’s chain link fence.

I ask his Spirit to bring life and joy and do a new thing, but I know life and joy and newness are so often born out hard things. And I feel myself bracing for impact rather than opening my hands. 

This Epiphany, as we’ve soaked up the stories of the visit of the wise men, Jesus’s presentation at the temple, his baptism, miraculous healings, and his transfiguration, I have been so struck by the tangibility, the physicality of God’s glory and light revealed in Christ. It means something that Jesus has a face with actual eyes that people could actually look into to know that they are loved, safe, valued. And that God-made-man could also receive love from the faces of those who loved him.

I really love exceeding (my self-imposed, often-unreasonably-high) expectations on the first try. Admitting to being a beginner is hard for me. But I’ve been a beginner enough times to know that God will meet me in this season where my weakness is not so easily hidden, that he is equally present as I figure things out by multiple trials and errors as he was in my fruitful rhythms and routines of the previous season.

Christ’s first and second comings enable a “third advent:” the many ways that we see Christ drawing near in the present, in the already-but-not-yet, ushering in his Kingdom and bringing light and life, often not in flashy ways, but rather coming to us, as Paula D’Arcy says, “disguised as our life.”

On this Thanksgiving week, there will likely be many messages meant to cheer you, saying “Yes, this year has been hard, but think of all you have to be thankful for!” Some of us will be able to receive that, but if those words just feel like a kick in the ribs in the middle of a hard season, take heart. In the midst of your sorrow, joy is not far from you.

My sister and I got together this morning to make my Grandma’s butterhorn rolls. I cannot accurately describe them—they can only be experienced.