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.

Nurture in me the things that will grow into eternity, that will have a home in the “city you will establish forever.”

Yet this day of ash and repentance and bread and wine speaks to my soul that though I am fatally limited, I am also infinitely loved. And so I bear the ashy cross on my head in humility and sorrow but also in hope, for it is not the dirt that will have the final word, but the precious blood of Christ.

Those of us who have set our hope fully on our King and his coming Kingdom are like February gardeners. We see the hard ground and hard hearts of Winter all around, yet we are also those who “rejoice, though we have considered all the facts.”

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

During the season of Epiphany, we remember that just as God revealed his glory, goodness, and light by a star to guide the Wise Men to the feet of Christ, our lives also shine his light, reflect his love, and hold out his hope to the weary in a dark world.

Or the alternate title: “How I Was Just Crazy Enough to Read 57 Books in One Year with Four Kids, Five-Years-Old and Under”

“If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.” 

I believe Jesus offers a better, deeper, fuller way to pay attention to what is happening in our world.

Imagination is not a triviality of childhood, afforded by immaturity and lives sheltered from the harsh realities of this world. On the contrary, imagination is essential to our life in Christ, giving us the eyes to see the things in this universe that are the Most Real, True, Good, and Beautiful.

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. 

The gospel is not complete without his ascension, because the ascension is the coronation of Christ our King. It is the Son’s enthronement at the right hand of the Father. It is the moment that the Lamb who was slain began his eternal rein, ushering in the Kingdom of God and enacting the new covenant of our great High Priest.

There are two approaches that have transformed my reading of Psalm 119, and made it one of my favorite books of the Bible.

What if we implored the Spirit to take these truths from merely something we recite from the creeds on a Sunday, or something for theologians to debate, and instead to empower us to consider with all seriousness how these truths transform our hearts by the Spirit to love the Lord and cause us to walk in the way of Jesus?

Worship of our glorious God and love for our neighbor would flow like a river from people of God.

By washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus demonstrated to his disciples the kind of King he would be.

One year ago this weekend, we gathered with our fellow IACers in the freezing cold at a park on the Westside. Used to cramming shoulder to shoulder in the pews, instead we sat spread out on blankets and folding chairs with new words in our vocabulary, like “social distancing,” “flatten the curve,” “masking,” and “pandemic.” We looked at each other with eyes wide, half laughing in unbelief, wondering aloud to each other if this would be over by Easter (ah, weren’t we cute…). Still, we came forward to the table—staggered, but still together—to receive the bread and the wine.  We had no idea it would be months before we would participate in communion in person again.

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.

I will not weaponize what God meant for healing. I dare not throw in the face of my co-heirs what he has given to us in love. I will not use for my own gain what is meant to renew all things, making every heart cry out, “Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit!”