I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree —Joyce Kilmer

We have romantic notions about trees. They are stately, proud, beautiful, majestic, enduring, a meeting place for lovers, playthings for children, ancient and quiet observers of history—and in Tolkien’s mythology, there were once trees who were sentient just as we are.

Yet, not all trees are beautiful. Not all trees are photogenic. Over the years, our Tucson storms have broken off dozens of branches from the Palo Verde tree behind our house, leaving it with limbs that meander here and there in a chaotic series of twists and turns.

But birds still nest there. Even a gnarly, misshapen tree can be a comfort to someone who needs a bit of shade.

I wandered the Outer Banks of North Carolina when I was young. I still remember the trees on those islands, stunted and bent by the relentless salt-laden winds blowing in from the ocean. Yet, on those same islands generations of wild horses have sheltered and raised their young beneath those battered trees.

Trees in the Bible often serve as metaphors for a life well-lived, or at least a life that could be better than it is, a life blessed by God. Take Psalm 1, for example:

Oh, the joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or stand around with sinners, or join in with mockers. But they delight in the law of the LORD, meditating on it day and night.

They are like trees planted along the riverbank, bearing fruit each season. Their leaves never wither, and they prosper in all they do. —Psalm 1:1-3 (NLT)

I’ve seen trees like that along the rivers where I’ve canoed. Lush, beautiful, and ancient trees overhanging the shoreline, their heavy branches creating shaded pools where fish like to hide, trees that have thrived for scores of years on the fertile alluvial soils beside refreshing waters.

We’re invited to be like those trees. Psalm 1 is a promise that faithfulness to God will yield a life of bounty and flourishing. We’re told to sink our roots deep into the life-giving Word where we will thrive.

Yet, when I look at myself, when I look back on my life, this is how I picture the tree I’ve become. This is a tree that began well but… something happened, something that caused its trunk to twist and turn, something that made its crown lopsided and misshapen. It carries in its body the after-effects of the storms of life, the insults and difficulties of growing older.

I can tell you that there have been times when I’ve become disenchanted with God, angry with God, times when I turned my back on the God who had come to me with so much mercy and grace and love. I’ve been through storms; life is not one sunshiny day after another.

I have also blown up storms on otherwise peaceful days. Despite knowing better, I’ve often acted selfishly, foolishly, arrogantly, spitefully, not extending the same mercy or grace or love to others that has been lavished on me.

Perhaps right now you’re in the midst of difficulties and disappointments that have broken your limbs and twisted your trunk. Perhaps you’ve even been the cause of pain for others, broken faith with others, been petty and self-serving and uncaring where you could have been kind and generous.

We know that trees planted along a riverbank are sometimes uprooted and swept away by floods. Not all of them, though. There are trees whose roots go so deep into the rocky foundations of the earth that even great floods don’t harm them. They may be bent and battered, but when the waters subside and the land dries out, they live on, they grow, they thrive, they shelter the traveler and provide food and comfort for God’s creatures.

We would not need God’s grace if we were perfect specimens of arboreal magnificence. We are not invited to come into God’s presence because of our competencies; God invites us into his presence because of our need, his skillful healing touch, and his unconditional love.

Yes, I’m a mess at times. Yes, I have many regrets. But I have also been forgiven. I have been planted by my Savior along a fertile riverbank, and have sunk roots deep into the rich soil of God’s renewing Word. Here and there I see buds forming and new growth sprouting from dead branches.

This is God’s promise to all of us. Not that we will be sheltered from storms, but that we will be blessed by this merciful and loving God, and that we in turn will become a blessing to others.

This is the foundational premise of the Gospel of grace. God comes to us not because we are shining examples of human dignity and goodness, but because we are broken people in need of correction and healing and, most of all, forgiveness.

All this we discover in a life lived before the cross of Jesus Christ.

Even a gnarly, misshapen tree can be a comfort to someone who needs a bit of shade.

I walked up to the front desk, presented my credentials, and was told by the somewhat shady-looking man behind the desk that they had no reservation in my name. I pulled up the confirmation on my phone, but the manager just shrugged and said there had been a mistake.

Meanwhile, I was being pawed over by a pick-pocket, who succeeded in taking my driver’s license while I was arguing with the manager.

Tired of dealing with me, the manager relented and led me on a long, winding journey down dimly-lit corridors, up stairs, past construction workers to a room with no door or windows, with bare sheet-rock walls, a single cot, and no bathroom—for $250 a night.

And with that, I knew this trip was only going go downhill from there.

I was reading the beginning of Joshua yesterday, and perhaps my dream was harking back to what I’d been reading. The people of God had been led by Moses out of Egypt, only to wander somewhat aimlessly in the desert for 40 years. Moses finally dies and appoints Joshua to lead the people into the Promised Land™, “a land flowing with milk and honey,” the permanent home God promised to Israel.

It almost sounds like a trip to Disneyland. The VeggieTales song “Promised Land” captures what I imagine the mood might have been like:

We didn't have a lot of fun in the desert
We didn't have a lot of fun in the sand
But saddle up your cow
It's all behind us now
Because we're going to the promised land

And in the promised land, it's gonna be so grand
We'll have our fill from the grill as much as we can stand
It'll be so great
Oh, we can hardly wait
Cause we're going to the promised land

But then, as they are about to start this new adventure, God says this to Joshua:

“This is my command—be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” —Joshua 1:9 (NLT

This is where the musical score would turn dark if we were watching a movie. Do you hear that tone? Do you catch the foreshadowing? God anticipates trouble. The land is already inhabited and the Israelites work of occupation will be met with strong opposition. There will be challenges they’ve never faced before, difficulties they’ve never imagined. There will be blood, sweat, and tears as they conquer and rebuild this territory, and as they struggle to live faithfully to God’s laws in the process.

Three times he tells Joshua to be strong and courageous. Then, in this last word, he tells him to tell the people “do not be afraid or discouraged.”

He says this as if these are simply choices, options, flips of some internal switch. Afraid or courageous. Strong or discouraged. Choose which it will be, God says. Get ready for some hard days, some long days, some puzzling days marked by opposition and doubt and trouble and sadness.

And, remember that God is always with you, wherever you go.

I’m confident you’ve had this experience. You’ve had courage robbed by dis-couragement, and then, you’ve found it difficult, maybe impossible, to be en-couraged again. Whatever your particular situation, you may be in (or have been in) a place where life feels as if it has become too hard. The hardships and difficulties wear you down. You simply can’t sugar-coat the realities you’re living with. You’re in pain, maybe physical, maybe emotional. You’re lost. You’re alone. You’re in the midst of something that is beyond your powers to fix, and God doesn’t appear to be answering your prayers for deliverance.

Or, you’re afraid of what might be coming next. Your circumstances are deteriorating, your bank account is dwindling, your health is declining, maybe you’re even facing death. The future looks bleak and it’s certainly not what you had hoped for, prayed for, dreamed about.

And God’s response?

“The Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

Is that enough? Is “God with us” enough? Is “God with us” an adequate answer to these things that weigh so heavily on us?

Remember that when the world was torn by war and disease and poverty and brutality and hopelessness and discouragement and fear, when the land of “milk and honey” was occupied by a brutal military power, Christ entered our world and was declared to be Immanuel, “God with us.”

Before Jesus was born, Mary’s betrothed had a dream. An angel assured him that her pregnancy was from God and that her son would “save his people from their sins.” Then the Gospel of Matthew declares:

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”). —Matthew 1:22-23 (NIV)

God with us was and is God’s answer to all of the sin-terribleness in the world. Grasping the reality of God-with-us was God’s antidote to the fears and discouragements that would confront the people of Israel as they took possession of the promised land.

When I was a teenager, it became popular in certain situations to say to a good friend, “Bro, I’m with you.” It was an expression of solidarity, a way of renewing a commitment between friends, a pledge to come alongside a friend if and when there was some need.

God with us is that, but much more. When the phrase “God is with you” comes up in the Old Testament, it’s a promise that God will not only be present, but will participate. It says, God will fight alongside you. It says, God will provide for you. It says, God will watch over you. It says, God will hear you and answer you.

Most significant of all, it says: The Spirit of the Lord will rest on you, will inhabit your heart and walk with you in whatever circumstances you find yourself.

The God-with-us submission of Jesus to the cross made possible the God-with-us indwelling of the Holy Spirit, in which we have union with the Holy God of eternity, the God who calls us his beloved children.

What I think all of this means, for those of us who are deep in the midst of hard things, is that we have been given the ultimate source of courage and strength through the reality that God is truly with us, standing with us, walking with us, wherever we are. The infinite God comes to us to share our burdens (Matthew 11:28-30). The loving Father invites us to ask him for help (Matthew 7:7-8). Our good God invites us to trust him (John 8:26). Jesus, our brother, speaks to the Father on our behalf (1 John 2:1).

We are not promised a life free from hardship or sorrow or pain. We are promised a life in which the living, eternal God walks with us through whatever we are experiencing, gives us courage to bear whatever might come, and gives us assurances that can alleviate our fears.

We worship a God who is not distant and disinterested, not asleep or distracted, but a God who loves us, sees us, and is with us. Let that reality give you courage and peace today.

So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone—especially to those in the family of faith. —Galatians 6:9-10 (NLT)

My sister just had major heart surgery, so I flew out to visit and help her with whatever she’ll need—whatever I’m capable of doing—as she recovers. Yesterday, while I was spending time with her in the ICU, we were talking about life and getting older and memories of growing up together and she said, “You show your love by doing things.”

Guilty as charged. Gary Chapman wrote a well-known book called The Five Love Languages, which describes how he observed people expressing love and their preferences for receiving love. Chapman’s five modes of love are:

• words of affirmation;

• quality time and attention;

• giving and receiving gifts;

• acts of service;

• physical touch.

We may express our love to the people we love in all of these ways at one time or another, but (as givers and receivers of love) we tend to have our default comfort zones and preferences. Some people are huggers, some are not. Some people are effusive with their words of affection, others are more demonstrative than verbal.

Serving and helping and doing are how I most frequently and comfortably express my love for the people in my life.

However you express your love to others, it can be hard work, sometimes even unnoticed, unappreciated, perhaps misinterpreted and thankless work.

Doing good can be exhausting. You would think it might be energizing, refreshing, rewarding, fulfilling, and on some level it can be all of these things. But Paul recognizes that it can wear us down.

Why is it so hard? Because sometimes what we do doesn’t work out the way we had hoped. When you’re dealing with other people who have freedom and agency and “issues,” our small efforts at doing good can seem puny in comparison with the mountain of need their circumstances demand. It’s easy to throw up our hands and say, what’s the point?

Sometimes the good we do is unappreciated or unnoticed, maybe even denigrated, and we had honestly been hoping for at least a little credit, a small pat on the back, a little recognition for our efforts and sacrifices.

There’s a famous incident where Jesus heals ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19). After realizing he had been healed, one of the ten returned to thank Jesus and praise God. The other nine apparently just went on their way. Very often whatever good things we do will go unseen or unappreciated. Are we ok with that, or are we looking for praise?

Paul prefaces this “don’t get tired” instruction by talking about coming alongside believers who have sinned, who have somehow broken faith, harmed themselves and others in some way that is antithetical to the teachings of Christ. He doesn’t command the easier thing, which might be something like “send such people away and wash your hands of them.”

Instead, he asks the Galatian Christians to come around such a person and “gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path.” From experience I can tell you that doing that sort of loving, forgiving, redemptive work is messy, heartbreaking, frustrating, and it doesn’t always end well because our human arrogance and pride and self-destructiveness is very deeply rooted in the fetid heart-places that the Spirit of God wishes to power wash, if only we are willing to unlock the gate.

Then, in chapter 6 verse 2, Paul says we should “share each other’s burdens.” By definition that could include a great many things that are physically, emotionally, mentally, and financially exhausting.

Some good friends recently took a man into their home whose life had collapsed around him, trying to help him get back on his feet. He accepted their help, but was unable or unwilling to do the things himself that would create meaningful change in his life. Helping him was like pushing on a rope. Time will only tell whether their efforts and expressions of love make a difference or not. At the moment it doesn’t look good, and I could understand if they vowed never to get involved in such a mess again.

Yet, we’re told here, don’t grow tired of doing good. Don’t let the difficulties of helping, caring, sharing burdens, praying, comforting, etc. etc. persuade us to give up and throw in the towel. Because, Jesus.

In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. —Philippians 2:5-7 (NIV)

The takeaway of this famous declaration about Jesus is that he was ready to get down and dirty in the muck of human existence because, ultimately, love persuaded him that he must, love made him ready and willing and able.

We grow exhausted at times from whatever is required of us to “do good” because we’re human. But the greatest fruit created in us by the Holy Spirit is love, and love renews us, reinvigorates us, pushes back against our cynicism and fatalism and physical/mental exhaustion to convince us to do whatever good things might be within our power to do.

And very often, doing good for and to each other makes a huge difference, both for them and for us. A life-altering difference.

George and Johnny invited me to a Bible study that altered the course of the rest of my life. To this day I don’t know why they did that, but I thank God that they did.

Dan came alongside me at a point in my life when I was offending a lot of people and pointed it out to me. I didn’t want to hear it and I didn’t accept it at first, but he started a process that led me to change things that needed to be changed.

Judy spent long hours listening to me when I was on a path of self-destructiveness, and helped me find healing.

Imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children. Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. —Ephesians 5:1-2a (NLT)

Doing good is complicated. We have lots of questions. How do we define “good”? Shouldn’t we be good to ourselves first before we’re good to others? What’s reasonable? What’s prudent? When is it just too much? When is it time to quit?

Imitate God; follow the example of Christ. Take on the nature of a servant of God, just as Jesus did. Talk to God and depend on the guidance of the Holy Spirit to answer the questions of who, what, when, where, and how.

But do good Be consistent and persistent in doing good. Look for opportunities to do good. Enrich this self-centered society we live in by doing good. Be a blessing to your church by doing good. Be a hero to strangers in need by doing good.

Most of all, demonstrate with your actions that Jesus is truly the light of your life by not giving up, not tiring, not becoming complacent.

And remember this bold promise: At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. A harvest, not a few meager kernels of grain. Doing good will reap a harvest of blessing, perhaps for us, certainly for those we reach out to.

Look around today and ask yourself, where might I do some good?

At least, this is how we tend to think in the U.S. and much of the West; but even the Lone Ranger depended on Tonto, who rescued the masked man from life-threatening jams in almost every episode.

I’m an introvert, so I have this (often unhealthy) preference for being alone, for doing things on my own. I also grew up in circumstances that encouraged me to solve my problems myself.

I once had a girlfriend who attended a different college. On weekends I would make the two-hour drive to spend Sundays with her. We’d read and discuss the newspaper together in her dorm room (she was a journalism major), go for long walks around campus, talk, eat, laugh, and just enjoy the things friends enjoy.

In the summer, I made a similar trek in the other direction to her family home. We’d hang out in the city park until well after dark, then I’d drive back home in my VW Beetle over deserted country roads, barely awake but happy.

On one particular night, roaring down the narrow two-lane at 2am, I passed a self-service gas station and realized that I was getting dangerously low. (Self-service in those days meant an unattended gas pump that you fed with dollar bills.) So I slowed down, found a likely spot to turn around, did a quick U-turn… and backed right into a deep drainage ditch. I hit the brakes fast, but not before the front of the Beetle pointed skyward, my headlights illuminating the trees overhead.

I tried easing forward very carefully, but the wheels just spun. I was high-centered and stuck fast.

After a thorough examination and some head-scratching, I carefully released the brake, put the shifter in neutral, jumped down into the muddy ditch, got under the bumper and lifted and pushed with all my might.

I could almost do it. I strained and pushed and managed to inch the car upwards and forward, little by little, until the rear tires were back on solid ground. It took the full extension of my 6’3” frame and every ounce of my strength to get it there.

But what then? As soon as I relaxed, the car would roll backwards again and tilt skyward. The crown of the road was fighting me. I was doomed like a modern Sisyphus. If I had had someone’s help, I could have pushed the car forward while they set the emergency brake. As it was, I could think of no way to get back on the road.

This was long before cellphones. The road was empty of homes for miles and no sensible man or woman would be out driving this time of night. I resigned myself to abandoning the car, hiking the 8 miles back into town and hoping to find a 24-hour towing service.

Just then, there was a light. Two lights, actually. A car approached and slowed to a stop; a man climbed out and asked if I needed help. Together we pushed the stricken bug back up onto solid ground. I was rescued, saved by a kind stranger, and before I could even thank him properly he just waved and drove away.

And you know what? I berated myself all the way home, not for getting stuck, but for not being able to solve my problem myself. I felt like a failure.

I’ve always heard that I should “pull myself up by my bootstraps.” I took that to heart. Many of us think it’s a heroic sentiment, not realizing that the original phrase was meant to represent an absurdity, an impossibility.

At the point in my life when I began to consider the claims of Jesus, it was my commitment to self-reliance that made me keep God at arm’s-length. What would it mean to surrender myself to God? Could I trust him? Convinced that I didn’t need anyone’s help, how could I honestly say that I needed God in my life?

My dear children, I am writing this to you so that you will not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate who pleads our case before the Father. He is Jesus Christ, the one who is truly righteous. He himself is the sacrifice that atones for our sins—and not only our sins but the sins of all the world. —1 John 2:1-2 (NLT)

The Apostle John’s legal metaphor suggests that Jesus Christ stands beside us in God’s court of law and pleads our case before the Father. And having pleaded our case—a hopeless task, after all—Jesus, our advocate, agrees to pay our fine, he volunteers to serve our jail sentence, he permits himself to be executed so that we may be fully pardoned, fully redeemed.

I finally had to admit to myself that if I needed any God at all, it was a God like the one described in the Bible, a holy God who establishes moral boundaries for all of us, and yet a merciful, loving God who was ready to forgive us whenever we freely admit to our transgressions.

I also came to realize that I actually need other people. We need lifeguards to swim out to us and pull us to shore when the riptide grabs us. We need doctors and EMTs to save us when we’re stricken by some life-threatening illness. But even when there’s no crisis, the truth is that we need people—I need people—to walk with us through the everyday challenges and hardships and banalities of our lives.

The Christian faith of the early church was not individualistic but communal. It was not a faith to be internalized and kept secret, but a faith to be worn publicly and shared generously. The Christian faith is intended to be lived out with others who join themselves together with us as a community of faith, as a body unified around devotion to and love for God.

This thing we call the church, or sometimes the body of Christ, is designed to have an interdependence that is modeled after the way Jesus lived out life and ministry with his disciples. This living, unifying interdependence was demonstrated clearly in Jesus’ final Passover teachings before he was crucified. He begins in John 13 by taking on the menial job of washing the feet of each disciple, something no traditional rabbi would ever do. He then instructs them to do the same for each other after he is gone. This isn’t a hygienic instruction, but rather a call to group humility and service. Later the same evening Jesus commands these people to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 13:34,35).

In Acts and the Epistles, this communal interdependence of the faith is fleshed out further:

• be devoted to one another; honor one another (Romans 12:10);

• live in harmony with one another (Romans 12:16);

• accept one another (Romans 15:7);

• teach and admonish one another (Romans 15:14; Colossians 3:16);

• agree with one another (1 Corinthians 1:10);

• encourage one another (2 Corinthians 13:11; Hebrews 3:13);

• serve one another humbly (Galatians 5:13; 1 Peter 5:5);

• bear with one another in love (Ephesians 4:2);

• be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other (Ephesians 4:32; 1 Peter 3:8);

• submit to one another (Ephesians 5:21);

• spur one another on to love and good deeds (Hebrews 10:24);

• meet together and have fellowship with one another (Hebrews 10:25; 1 John 1:7);

• offer hospitality to one another (1 Peter 4:9).

These instructions describe a community of people who are fully engaged with each other, reliant on one another, and committed to serving each other in love.

From God’s calling together of his chosen people, Israel, to Jesus’ calling together the twelve, to the modern community of faith that is called the church, we see God revealing himself to and through communities that are designed to be interdependent, supportive, caring, missional, and unified by each individual’s commitment to the Lord as head, as well as to the group identity as the collective family of God.

Many have documented the fracturing of community in our society. We are becoming more and more isolated, forced (by choice or circumstances) into an unhealthy self-reliance which is sometimes accompanied by an intense feeling of distrust towards anyone who would get too close.

God designed us for community. God invites us to become members of a family. God wants us to experience life as part of a body that is mutually supportive, interdependent, life-giving and love-driven.

There is no such thing as go-it-alone Christianity.

We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord…. —Colossians 1:9b-10a (NIV)

I knew I shouldn’t punch my friend. Mom had told me many, many times: no hitting, no fighting. Knowing the rule wasn’t the issue. I knew the rule. I understood the rule. But Billy had made me mad, so I punched him and gave him a bloody nose.

We boys knew we weren’t supposed to play with fire. That’s why we dug a tunnel in the woods so the three of us could go under the earth, out of sight, and light some wood on fire where none of our parents would see us. It was only unfortunate that there was more smoke than we anticipated. We knew the rule; we were punished because we knew the rule and lit a fire anyway.

I’m not sure why the Apostle Paul is talking to the Colossians in this way, though I imagine that as men and women who were coming to faith out of a pantheistic and pagan society, their conception of how to “live a life worthy of the Lord” was not as informed as that of the Jews, who had a very long history of moral instruction by God since the time of the exodus from Egypt.

So Paul tells the Colossians to be filled with the “wisdom and understanding that the [Holy] Spirit gives.”

Good advice. But speaking for myself, the problem isn’t knowing, but doing. I look in the mirror and see a person who constantly fails to “live a life worthy of the Lord.”

Living in a manner worthy of the Lord is a very high bar to reach. I would go so far as to say that it’s a standard that’s completely unattainable. So what’s the point here?

Paul gives a few hints about what a worthy life might entail. He says:

bear fruit in every good work (v10)

So sure, watching for and taking opportunities to do good works is certainly something I can do, at least if I’m paying attention to the people around me each day. This idea about bearing fruit in every good work suggests to me that these good things we do will result in God doing something beneficial and tangible through us in the people we help and love and pray for and encourage.

Doing good things won’t make me worthy before God, but it at least makes me a somewhat more decent human being.

Paul continues with a short list of the things that arise from, or perhaps are foundational too, this living of a worthy life:

• growing in the knowledge of God (Col. 1:10);

• being strengthened to live with endurance and patience (Col. 1:11);

• being joyfully thankful to God the Father (Col 1:12).

All good things, I grant you, but how do any of these make me worthy? How does anything I do, anything I accomplish, no matter how good and pure and selfless, create within me a means of living in a manner that is worthy of the Lord?

Just a few weeks back, in a moment of frustration, I made a careless and hurtful comment to a friend, one that I instantly regretted and immediately apologized for, but the words were out, the damage was done, the hurt truly hurt.

I find myself constantly failing—in more ways than I really want to think about—to live in a way that is consistent with my claim to be a disciple of Jesus.

The life of faith is not merely an assent to certain beliefs, it is the reordering of our selves around those beliefs in such a way that our thoughts and actions and values are all changed by this intimate relationship with the holy God.

As James writes: Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense? (James 2:17 The Message)

But Paul concludes his exhortation to worthiness with a crucial bit of context:

[The Father] has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. —Colossians 1:12b-14 (NIV)

There it is. To the extent that I am able to live a life worthy of the Lord, it is all because I have been worthiness pre-qualified by the death and resurrection of Christ, I have been rescued from my unworthy sinfulness by the blood of Christ, and I have been brought into worthiness by my faith in the redeeming, life-changing, sin-forgiving mercy of God in Christ.

My meager acts of goodness are not negated by my many failures. I am grieved by them, but I must not allow myself to despair because of them. My willful turning away from what I fully know to be right in any given moment cannot make me unworthy; it merely testifies to how much more I need the goodness of God in my life.

My attempts to live in a manner worthy of the Lord are made worthy and will bear fruit because God has rescued me from the worst of myself and has made me worthy by proclamation, even as I have so far to go in the realities of my daily life.

Which is why, I suppose, Paul makes his opening request a prayer for the Colossians. It should be my prayer, too, and yours.

May God fill us with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives so that we may live a life worthy of the Lord.

Amen. Lord, help me to understand, help me to see, help me to live rightly.

One of the teachers of religious law was standing there listening to the debate. He realized that Jesus had answered well, so he asked, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

Jesus replied, “The most important commandment is this: ‘Listen, O Israel! The LORD our God is the one and only LORD. And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’ —Mark 12:28-30 (NLT)

I was once a singer in a rock and roll band. I had occasional fantasies about making it big, but my talent was much smaller than my imagination. And, importantly, I sang in a Christian rock band—a very niche musical playground. This was during the Jesus movement around 1970. Young people like myself were abandoning the staid harmonies of Pat Boone and the Imperials for the more edgy music of Larry Norman, Barry McGuire, Keith Green, Phil Keaggy, and the Second Chapter of Acts.

This new music was controversial. Rock and Roll as a musical genre was being blamed by some Christian leaders for the decline of western civilization. They claimed that rock music was satanic, that heavy drum rhythms and loud guitars called out deeply buried pagan impulses that were incompatible with Christianity. I was once invited on a radio program to defend the claim that this new music could worship God, and was (naively) surprised to discover hostility rather than openness to these new sounds.

The debate about music as an expression of worship continues to this day. The shorthand is often hymns vs. praise songs, tradition vs. modern. I continue to sing with a church worship band that’s solidly on the contemporary side of things. Some like our music; others not so much. It’s my opinion that Christian music down through the centuries has always been sometimes glorious and at other times disappointing, whatever the musical genre. The self-educated country parson might write simplistic music that nevertheless served a spiritual need, while the professional musician might compose music that soared with beautiful sophistication while exalting the author more than the Lord God.

Many Christians seem to conflate worship itself with the music that might accompany a worship service. I’ve come to believe that worship is much more. Worship, properly understood and lived out, is not singing to God or praying to God or hearing a message that makes us ponder God. Worship is an orientation of our hearts—really, the totality of our lives—that places us in a right relationship with God, our Lord.

What is worship?

Worship as a concept or practice really makes no sense outside of a religious context. Perhaps the only way we ever refer to it in everyday life is when we hear someone say “he worships the ground she stands on,” an expression which itself may (ironically) be a corruption of Exodus 3:1-5.

Worship in the Old and New Testaments is a posture or attitude that acknowledges that God is my Lord and I am his servant. Therefore, worship begins with humility. It cannot happen without surrender, without pausing before God and adopting Mary’s attitude when she responded to the angel in Luke 1:38: “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” Worship is not so much an experience—though many believers talk about it that way—as it is an attitude that permeates our lives, as expressed in this Psalm:

Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker; for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. —Psalm 95:6-7a (NIV)

This posture of humility is not something reserved for the Sabbath; God intends us to live out an attitude of worship with each breath we take, because there’s yet another piece to worship.

As we humble ourselves we also state our readiness to serve God. We worship by giving ourselves to God with the expectation that he has work for us to do, and work to do in us.

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. —Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)

Worship focuses our attention on the presence of God so that we’re ready and able to hear and respond to God’s calling on our lives.

In a gathering of believers, such as in a Sabbath church service, worship occurs as we each take on this same humble posture before God while standing beside our fellow believers. As the entire community experiences our individual postures of surrender and gratitude to God, something happens that glorifies him. From Jesus’ prayer in John 17:

“I have given them the glory you gave me, so they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me. —John 17:22-23 (NLT)

Community worship produces community unity as the Spirit of God joins us together in the realization that God is our collective Father and we are his many and varied children, his family. As the entire church humbles itself and shifts its gaze above, something special happens.

In worship we have our neighbors to right and left, before and behind, yet the Eternal Presence is over all and beneath all. Worship does not consist in achieving a mental state of concentrated isolation from one’s fellows. But in depth of common worship it is as if we found our separate lives were all one life, within whom we live and move and have our being. —Thomas R Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (1941)

When we humble ourselves before God in the presence of others, we experience a familial unity that orients our collective hearts towards the heart of God himself. Gathering together invites us to take our eyes briefly off of ourselves to see the vast work of God in the lives of people sitting next to us, across from us, in other churches, in other communities and countries. A worship service is, or ought to be a reorientation of our hearts and minds as we glimpse the vast project God has undertaken to redeem and restore the world. Worship is not the act of performing the rituals of church, but it’s having our eyes opened to what God sees and our hearts opened to what God desires.

Worship is life; life is worship

We are commanded to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love in this sense refers to a way of living, as well as a path to walk. To love God is to humbly seek him above all others (Matthew 6:31-34). To love God is to serve him by living out our particular calling, with the awareness that as we care for and serve each other, we are caring for and serving God himself (Matthew 25:31-40).

This has led me to think that our daily lives are, or can be, demonstrations of our worship, or perhaps, acts of worship.

I don’t mean to say that as we’re going about whatever we do each day we are in continual prayer before God, or we are somehow lifting up words or demonstrations of praise to God. Yes, it’s quite possible to speak with God in the quieter moments of the day, but when I’m driving down the road, my focus is mainly on the traffic around me, my speed, upcoming dangers, and where I’m going. When I’m deep in the midst of cutting a piece of wood on my table saw or editing a video or building a piece of computer code, I need to be entirely focused on the task.

And yet, at those very same moments, who am I? What is my core identity? Am I a builder of things? Yes. Am I creator? Yes. A father and husband? Yes. Am I an elderly southern man who loves sweet tea and barbecued pork? Definitely.

All of these and more describe some of the many identities that are me. But at the deepest levels of my being, I am a disciple of Jesus Christ and a redeemed son of God. These two claims by the Apostle Paul are huge:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. —Galatians 2:20 (NIV)

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. —2 Corinthians 5:17 (NIV)

If my most fundamental identity is in Christ, and if I am being changed by this relationship to something new and different than what I was before, that creates the possibility that my daily life in both its most mundane and glorious moments speaks to the reality that God is expressing himself through me and my life. I am his servant, and in living out that reality, I myself become a living and breathing vessel of worship.

Yes, we worship God with language and song, because he has made us creative, intelligent, and expressive creatures. We worship as we recite the historic creeds that summarize the salvific work of God through history. We worship as we hear the Scriptures read and recognize the voice of God himself in those ancient words. We worship as we hear the instruction of pastors and allow those words to guide us into deeper fellowship with God.

And music, too, when it’s at its best, becomes a poetic expression of what it is to be a human being living in communion with the eternal God. Music shines a light on God’s faithfulness and our joys and sorrows, successes and failures. Music gives us words of gratitude, hope, and lament, and reminds us of important things we may have forgotten as we’ve gone through the rough and tumble of our everyday lives.

But I think we make a mistake if we come to a Sabbath service of worship with the thought that a balanced life needs a little of this, a little of that, and a sprinkling of worship for an hour or two on a special day.

Rather, we were intended to worship moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, by living in such a way that we silently but actively testify that God has made us new creations in Christ and that we are daily the recipients of his grace, favor, and love.

We worship God by the lives we live. We worship God through the songs we sing. We worship God in the solitary and quiet moments of our days as well as the hectic, crazy, exhausting ones.

And then, on the Sabbath, we join our worship with an entire community of others who are themselves attempting to know God and live out life as his new creation in this very broken and God-needy world. As we gather as his church and look around, we should be humbled and moved by the living testimonies to God’s redemptive work in humanity, his redemptive work in us.

Worship isn’t a response to beautiful music, but music can certainly be a beautiful expression of our worship. Worship comes from the realization that the Holy God has come near to us and is at work in us, around us, and through us. Worship is an attitude of humility and a posture of praise. It’s a response of humble and sincere gratitude to the God who chooses to love us and call us his own.

Life on earth is burdensome; outer space leaves you weightless. As you float far above our beautiful blue marble seeing sights few human beings have ever seen, you may find it easy to believe that you’ve left the tragedies of life are far below, far, far away. The reality is quite different: space is cold, inhospitable, deadly. Ryan’s harrowing experiences in space lead her to realize that she’s tired of drifting, that she misses the warmth of the sun, fresh air, and the weight of her body on the soles of her feet. Life on Earth is full of struggle and hardship, true, but Earth is where life thrives, under the relentless pull of gravity.

Since the beginning of the exploration of space, only 553 men and women from 36 nations have experienced weightlessness in space flight; the rest of us have never known what it’s like to be free from gravity. Military and acrobatic pilots can briefly experience negative G’s, roller-coaster enthusiasts may experience the sensation for a few seconds at an amusement park. But even in those circumstances gravity is still pulling us down, always down. We feel its power when we push ourselves up out of bed in the morning, joints creaking and muscles rebelling; we feel the relentless burden in our bones as we lay back down to sleep at night.

At this moment, four astronauts are flying home in a tiny spacecraft that has just circled behind the moon. Their mission is one of leaving and returning, escaping gravity and then falling back through Earth’s atmosphere to be reunited with family, colleagues, homes, and the weight of life on solid ground.

Gravity the film is an allegory which contrasts the heaviness of life’s many burdens with the great beauty and wonder of life, beauty that is able to help us bear up under so much weight.

Think for a moment about the complexities that make up our everyday existence. What if the sorrows and uncertainties and fears that press down on us are the very things that cause us to seek a connection to God? In nature, gravity warps space, causing light itself to seem to bend, to curve. Starlight behaves like a pitcher’s curve ball because of gravity.

Which makes me wonder: If gravity is able to curve a beam of light, perhaps the “light” of our Creator God moves close to us as we suffer, as we grieve, as we hurt, as we are weighed down heavily by so many troubles. Perhaps the human gravitational burdens that threaten to crush us may also give us reason to invite the light of God to come into our circumstances.

I can think of a number of problems with that analogy, and yet, standing up under the force of gravity and withstanding the burden of life’s troubles, disappointments, hardships, etc. have certain similarities.

Jesus spoke often of the “kingdom of heaven” and “the kingdom of God.” He was describing something hard to understand, something that’s simultaneously a place, a state of mind, a way of life, and a force that pulls us steadily towards God. Over and over again he taught that the kingdom of heaven has come near to us, like some dark moon that’s been captured in the Earth’s orbit and is invisibly shifting the tides and warping the seas without our noticing its presence.

As I’ve read about this kingdom of God, I’ve come away with a picture of a reality that’s vastly different from this one, and vastly more attractive. It’s a reality soaked in justice and drenched in beauty, a reality in which kindness and mercy and generosity are commonplace. It’s a kingdom full of so many of the things we say we want for our world, for ourselves. God wants to bend people towards his kingdom, but we resist.

We feel the security of gravity in our toes and the warm sun on our faces, yet we also feel the shock of human depravity, the agony of rampant injustice, and the smell of decay in a world that was once a fragrant garden. We’ve grown used to gravity, we feel at home with the earth solidly beneath our feet, but sometimes we wish, I wish, to free myself from gravity and escape the weight of all this sorrow.

Sunday was Easter, a remembrance of the morning Christ defeated both gravity and death. He was killed by the weight of his body straining to the breaking point against the cross. He was raised by the power of the loving God who placed the planets in their orbits around the Sun. He lived as we live. He rose as God has promised we will rise.

But for now, there is the weight of life on our bones and in our hearts to struggle with. As I sang on an outdoor stage at our Easter sunrise service, I saw and remembered building parts of that stage with my son who is no longer here. We dug holes and shaped steel and poured concrete. We sweated together and laughed together and completed work together that we were both proud of, work that has lasted. Work that outlasted him.

Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.” —Matthew 11:28-30 (NLT)

The weight of gravity pulls us down. The Spirit of the living God promises to lift us up.

I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead! —Philippians 3:10-11 (NLT)

[Jesus] suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead and buried: He descended into hell: The third day he rose again from the dead: —excerpt from The Apostle’s Creed

I’ve been to a fair number of funerals and watched caskets holding the earthly remains of human beings lowered into the ground. I’ve walked through the American Cemetery in Normandy, France, where each beautiful cross or Star of David marks the final resting place of a soldier who died in battle. In the entire history of the world, death has been final and irreversible.

Until Jesus.

At least, that’s the Easter claim. It’s the New Testament’s claim. It’s the claim of the men and women who were his disciples, his friends and followers, who speak across history about something they witnessed and reported.

Prior to his death, some of those same witnesses claim Jesus himself brought three people back to life after they had died: the very sick young daughter of Jairus, a synagogue leader (Mark 5:22ff); the son of a poor widow in the town of Nain (Luke 7:11ff); and Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha (John 11:1ff). The last one became so controversial that, ironically, it stoked a plot to have Jesus and Lazarus murdered.

Jesus is claimed to have had the power to reverse death, and what is more important to the faith, Jesus claimed that he, himself, would rise from the grave bodily, whole, fully alive and well following his death by Roman crucifixion.

On this one audacious claim rests the validity of the Christian faith. Why? Shouldn’t it be possible to accept some of Jesus’ wisdom and moral goodness without buying into all that hocus-pocus about miracles and people becoming undead?

Not really, or at least not easily. He claimed many times throughout his ministry to be able to forgive sins. In other words, he claimed to have some sort of ultimate judicial authority, moral authority, to be able to wipe clean the slate of wrongs committed by other people. It’s an audacious and reckless claim. Perhaps it was just an empty boast?

The religious leaders didn’t think so.

Now some teachers of the law were sitting there, thinking to themselves, “Why does this [Jesus] talk like that? He’s blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” —Mark 2:6-7 (NIV)

By claiming he could forgive sins, he was making himself equal to the gods — or the one true God that Israel worshipped. So this claim, too, is problematic, and if we’re dealing with a fellow who thinks he’s equal to God, we’re justified in questioning his other claims, his wisdom, his sanity.

That’s for theologians to sort out. For us, maybe the more relevant question is to wonder if it is simply unscientific and anti-intellectual to believe Jesus rose from the dead?

My answer is no, not at all. Science can only tell us about what is and is not possible in the material and time-constrained universe. If there is a God of the sort described in the Bible, and if that God visited the earth in the guise of Jesus Christ, all scientific and intellectual analysis of what such a being would be capable of goes out the window. There is nothing unscientific about postulating a being who is not constrained by the material laws and realities we live with. There are already those in physics, serious thinkers, who believe there might be multiple parallel universes, each one independent of and unaware of the others. As wild and crazy ideas go, the idea that there might be a God who created all of this materiality and life seems tame by comparison.

The witnesses quoted in the New Testament claimed Jesus actually appeared in bodily form to them on multiple occasions following his death. He spoke. He taught. He ate. They touched him. They were astounded, dumb-founded, as any of us would be, which is why I love the way Caravaggio portrays the famous scene where the disciple Thomas, “doubting Thomas”, touches Jesus’ wounded but resurrected body and declares that he believes.

I’m right there with Thomas. The resurrection of the dead is not easy to accept.

Paul writes that we, too, are able to attain the resurrection from the dead, just like Christ. Jesus showed that death is not an immutable law. Taxes, yes, but not death. In overcoming death and offering us forgiveness, and by that forgiveness restoring our relationship with the holy God, Jesus also offers us a way through death, past death, beyond death.

On Easter we look back at the empty tomb and the resurrected Jesus and see it as God’s eternal covenant with humanity. God has given us a way forward, a way towards hope and light and life. We look backwards and remember. We look forward and believe that because Jesus was raised from death, we too, through God’s mercy and grace, are able to attain the very same resurrection from the dead.

Easter challenges us to confront the claims of the disciples and confront this very consequential question for ourselves: did Jesus actually rise from the dead? And if so, what am I going to do about it?

He was probably bipolar, though in truth the many specialists he saw over the decades of his mental health struggles could never quite agree, and never managed to find a pill or a therapy or a protocol that was able to give him something that felt like normalcy. He would get better for awhile, then he would crash, then he would become depressed and suicidal. The cycle repeated over and over again.

We prayed for him and with him. We loved him and loved on him in a multitude of ways, when he would accept it. We tried to give him hope and encouragement when he just wanted to give up and be done.

We prayed with great faith. We prayed with great hope. We prayed with the helpless realization that all we could really do is love and pray, watch and hope.

I wait for the LORD, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope. I wait for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning. —Psalm 130:5-6 (NIV)

So the question I have asked myself often is this: why didn’t God heal my son? And the much bigger question is: why does God seemingly say no to some of our most earnest and desperate requests?

If you’re not a believer, if you have doubts that the Christian God is real, you can’t be blamed for thinking that a God who sometimes answers prayers and sometimes doesn’t sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking. If you flip a coin enough times it’ll come up heads as often as tails, and the hand of God has nothing to do with it.

If you’re not a believer, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that I ought to be questioning this faith of mine. If God loves us, if God listens to our prayers, if God values our lives, wouldn’t he have done something to keep that gun out of my son’s hands?

Maybe I am delusional. Maybe I’m holding onto a belief in a heavenly Santa Claus long after I ought to know better.

As I’ve said often in these AnotherThink musings, it’s Jesus—his life, his words, the testimony of the people who were with him and witnessed all that he did—it’s this Jesus that has convinced me that the Christian faith is true and good, that it holds the answers to the ultimate questions of life, the universe, and everything (not, as Douglas Adams claimed, tongue in cheek, the number 42).

So for me, the faith question is settled. God is. God is present. God listens, hears, and is active in the unfolding of the story of the universe. The answer to the “why do bad things happen despite our prayers” question is, I really don’t know. However, I have a few thoughts.

A man recently took a gun and shot a bunch of people in Texas, killing at least two. No matter how often and fervently we might pray for peace, for an end to senseless violence, for protection for our loved ones, God has given each of us the freedom to choose between doing good and doing evil, between acting in love and acting carelessly, even maliciously. The God I believe in could easily stay the hand of the gunman, just as he could shut the mouth of a person about to spew hateful insults or the man about to strike his wife or a woman about to strike a child, but instead he has made us responsible for our own behavior, our own choices, along with the moral tools to choose what is good and right and just.

I also believe that prayer is not like rubbing a Genie’s magic lamp. As I wrote here, prayer is not like pushing the buttons on a vending machine. It’s a conversation with, and sometimes an appeal to the King of the universe. We are not commanding God when we pray, but in humility we are confessing our weakness and dependence on God’s help in situations that are out of our control.

“Give us today our daily bread,” a phrase found in the prayer Jesus taught to his disciples, is an acknowledgement of the limits of our self-sufficiency. It’s a recognition of the reality that God is in control of much that we depend on for survival. It’s a humbling admission that if God is the giver and sustainer of all life, then we are much more dependent on his blessings and goodness and love and provision than we might like to acknowledge.

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. —Philippians 4:6,7 (NIV)

Maybe prayer is mostly about seeking a connection with this being we call God. Maybe prayer is how God enters into our lives and gives us a more heavenly perspective on what we perceive as reality, on what we think is important, on what we value and care about. Paul says that our prayers and requests will be answered by a transcendent peace that will take away our anxieties.

And what does God say through that transcendent peace? Perhaps something like give me this burden, this concern, this crisis, this illness, this setback, this worry. Let it go. Just let it go. Trust me, trust my love, my goodness, and let it go.

I look back over my son’s life and see multiple occasions when God intervened and foiled his self-destructive impulses. I believe that it’s possible that God did answer our prayers, not by healing our son, but by giving us many more years with him than he intended. Good years and hard years. Years full of highs and lows. Precious years. Memorable years.

We had 43 years, 3 months, and 6 days. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Grandpa Murry took me to see the Baltimore Orioles play at Memorial Stadium sometime around 1960. Brooks Robinson was my hero. He bought me a program and a bag of peanuts and we sat in the bleachers along the right field foul line amongst a group of men who kept up a running commentary on each player’s performance, the umpire’s ridiculous calls, and the team’s prospects for a winning season.

When I was 10 or 11, I tried out for our town’s little league team and made the cut. It wasn’t too difficult. You had to hit 2 out of 3 slow-pitched balls sent right over the plate, and you had to shag some flies in the outfield. I was an extremely skinny kid, and the Pirates uniform I was issued for my first game was literally held up by safety pins.

My first at bat was a humiliating experience, with the pitches blazing past me before my brain could even process that I might take a swing. My right field demonstrations weren’t any better, and the coach had a quiet talk with my mom afterwards, suggesting I wait another year. I was sent down to the minors after a single game, my career hopes dissolving like cotton candy in a warm, summer rain.

(Boomer reference: MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark; all the sweet green icing flowing down!)

At various times in my life I’ve had to step out and do something that I wasn’t sure I could do, and sometimes I was proved right. Even worse, I’ve often stepped up to a challenge I was confident I could meet, only to fail. Failure hurts; to keep trying after multiple failures takes courageous toughness, resilience, and a (possibly) delusional level of self-confidence.

Some people seem to have that resilience. I often have not.

A baseball player steps up to the plate in a situation where his team is depending on a big hit. He hits a big, fat, pop fly to center field and the game is lost. The fans boo. The press goes on the attack. Rumors start circulating in the club house about a trade. And suddenly, his next at bat, if there is one, becomes a must-redeem-myself experience.

A very public failure is worse than one no one sees, at least for those of us whose self-worth depends on the approval of others. If you grew up feeling achievement was a necessary prerequisite to being loved, failure became not a momentary stumble but a total rejection. If you grew up believing perfection was the only acceptable level of achievement, failure could crush your spirit.

And, if you grew up believing that your value as a person is entirely dependent on your accomplishments, what happens when you simply don’t measure up to expectations?

I have always felt that my worth was being weighed on a scale, and that my accomplishments, however numerous, were always heavily outweighed by my failures.

And then, I heard about a God whose love was unconditional, whose forgiveness for failure was extravagant, who didn’t weigh our lives on a scale of good against bad, but who simply declared our scales balanced by the perfect absolution of his perfect Son.

There is a beautiful metaphor in John Mark McMillan’s song How He Loves, where he writes: “If grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.” It suggests to me that I need to surrender my tragically and inescapably imperfect life to God, who will submerge me in his cleansing grace.

But some of us are determined to float, our chins held above the waves by the flotsam of stubborn self-reliance. Others of us are determined to swim, certain that we can find the endurance to avoid needing God’s help—or perhaps we’re just too proud to ever admit we might need something we can’t provide for ourselves.

Paul states the problem succinctly:

[A]ll have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. —Romans 3:23-24 (NIV)

Never mind what others think of me, if my accomplishments are to be measured against “the glory of God,” what hope is there? How delusional does one have to be to think that God may look at me one day and say, “Now there’s an impressive example of human excellence!”

But, I guess I’ve shifted somewhat, speaking now about the eternal worth of my accomplishments instead of the more immediate issue of my perceived reputation among the spectators who have come to watch and critique my life performance from the bleachers. If God’s grace washes away my failures—and I believe it does just that as I put my faith and trust and hope in Jesus Christ—I’m still left with the nagging worry that I must earn my way into the good graces of the people I care about, and that I’m falling well short of their expectations.

It’s a perspective I learned while growing up, and like so many wrong-headed beliefs and attitudes we pick up in life, it’s been sticky, like the pine-tree sap that used to cover my hands after a day climbing trees when I was young. It doesn’t scrape off or scrub off, it just has to wear off after a time.

Once you come to really believe that God loves you, that God has submerged you in his grace and made you good by the standards of his own glorious goodness, the next step is to absorb that truth and let it transform your heart and mind. The living God does not stand aloof from us, but walks beside us in life and speaks love and truth to us as we stumble along—if only we will hear what he has to say.

When the voices from the past speak words intended to bring us low, you can counter with the truth as God himself sees you: you are beloved, you are eternally valuable, you are God’s child, you are not measured by your performance, but by the endless swells of grace that have rolled out across history from the cross of Christ.

And over time, that sticky, dirt-encrusted tree sap of our many failures will be worn away by the relentless wave action of God’s powerful love, the unexplored depths of his mercy, and by the cleansing blessings of his grace.

A parable.

A woman decided to give a dinner party for her neighbors. Seeing that her husband was pleased with the chance to show off their very fine home—for he was proud of all he had accomplished—she broached the subject of the new renters down the street. Perhaps we should invite them as well? she asked.

A wonderful idea, her husband replied. But of course, there won’t be extra seating around the table once our other guests have arrived.

I thought of that, the woman said. We will seat the renters on the terrace.

A very good solution, said the husband. Bear in mind, we just spent a great deal of money to upholster the terrace furniture. It would be a shame if it was soiled.

I thought of that, the woman replied. We can cover the furniture with sheets. I’m sure the renters won’t mind sitting on the terrazzo. I hear they’re used to that.

An excellent solution, said the husband. But, I doubt there will be adequate food to serve any additional guests. I hear these people have a great many children.

I thought of that, the woman nodded. We will offer them left-overs after our more favored guests have eaten. Carmela will see to it.

Fine, but let’s not share the wine.

No! replied the woman in horror. I’ll have Carmela provide some bottled water.

Not the Evian, my love. I think we still have some of that Costco water in the basement.

And what will they do while we’re eating and laughing and enjoying the pleasurable company of our esteemed neighbors? inquired the husband.

I thought of that, said the woman brightly. I will provide them with tools and ask that they clean the terrace and tend to the garden while we eat and laugh and enjoy the pleasurable company of our very special and delightful neighbors. I’ve heard these people are especially good at such things.

You’ve thought of everything, my love. It will be a grand party, and a chance for us to show these renters the sort of hospitality we have become so famous for. You make me proud to be your husband, my dear.

The term “moral hazard” comes from economics, but it can apply to many of the actions we take in society, where things that I do or decisions I make benefit me while harming someone else.

Let’s say I have an insurance policy on my home that covers 100% on window breakage, and I have a son who loves throwing rocks at windows. I have little incentive to teach my son not to throw rocks when I know that my insurance will always cover the cost of any repairs.

A more controversial and real-life example is the decision by some cities not to prosecute shoplifting so long as the value of goods stolen is less than $1,000. Such policies certainly reduce burdens on the legal system, but they also incentivize theft and pass on the risks and costs of robberies to third parties, namely businesses and their insurers.

Open borders create similar moral hazards. They permit the mass immigration of low- or un-skilled laborers into the country, benefitting a host of service industries that thrive on cheap labor, thus keeping the costs of those services low for the American consumer, while the risks of living without legal, social, or physical protections are borne by those anonymous millions of men, women, and children who have made the costly and dangerous trek across our borders.

In a way, the affluent progressive lifestyle is also enabled by mass immigration precisely because it outsources features of the 1950s homemaker mom or weekend dad to immigrant labor. Landscaping, home-cleaning, remodeling, and nights at the restaurant are cheaper than they would have been because of the influx of labor that’s paid under-the-table. Lifestyle progressivism is therefore directly at odds with former egalitarian progressivism. —Michael Brendan Doughtery, National Review, “The Affluent Progressive Lifestyle Is Unsustainable”

Marcelino grew up in a tiny mountain village in Mexico where they speak Mixteco. His family grows coffee on mountainous slopes where trees sink their roots deep into the rain-drenched soil, and the roots of his family are as old as the forests. He works from before dawn until after sunset to supply a fix to caffeine-addicted Americans, whose wealth is so much beyond his imagining that the stories he hears from friends who have been to the North sound like the ravings of a drunkard.

But many of his people have made that journey. Marcelino has a family to support and coffee farming is not very lucrative. One chilly morning, he kisses his wife and children goodbye, promises to send them money when he finds a job, and catches a bus to the border.

There, he connects with a coyote who (for a handsome price) will guide him at night to a crossing point in the Arizona desert, where he will walk with dozens of others up rocky hillsides, through cactus-covered valleys, and down beneath the cover of dusty arroyos until somewhere, sometime, he will be loaded into a truck and taken to a place where there’s work.

He will need to purchase forged documents and a fake social security number. He will sleep on the ground until he finds a trailer home, where he will rent a mattress and cram in with thirty other migrants. He will be paid in cash, which he guards carefully because there are constant robberies. If his boss short-changes him, he will be silent, because going to the police will surely bring in La Migra. He will ignore the sobs of the younger women, who often have to trade their bodies for a meal or a place to sleep.

He will find a job as a carpenter or a lawn mower or a truck driver or a day laborer. Maria, his fellow-traveler and comforter in the lonely nights will find a job as a hotel maid or a daycare worker or a nanny or a cook. After paying the exorbitant prices for shelter and food and protection, Marcelino will line up at the local Western Union office to wire as much money as he can back to his family in Mexico.

He thinks he is enduring all of this to make life easier for his children, who will not see him again for years. What he isn’t aware of is the role he plays as a tiny cog in a tremendous machine that keeps prices low for American consumers, while inviting us to feel good about ourselves, because we are helping the Marcelinos and Marias of the world get a chance at the American dream.

Life for undocumented aliens can be pretty awful, and it’s not much better in so-called sanctuary cities, where public housing is maxed out and often dangerous, where social services agencies are overworked and underfunded, where schools are overcrowded and children who don’t speak English are merely warehoused, where medical care falls to understaffed hospital emergency rooms, where the cost of living is high and competition for jobs is higher.

And yet, we hear so much naive and idealistic talk about how good all of this is for these immigrants. We hear so much criticism of those who have concerns, especially Christians, because as we all know, we are called to welcome the stranger and foreigner. And that’s very true, at least to a point. Here are just a few of the biblical commands concerning the treatment of foreigners:

Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the LORD your God. —Leviticus 19:10 (NIV)

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. —Leviticus 19:33-34 (NIV)

The community is to have the same rules for you and for the foreigner residing among you; this is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. You and the foreigner shall be the same before the LORD…. —Numbers 15:15 (NIV)

Do not deprive the foreigner or the fatherless of justice…. —Deuteronomy 24:17a (NIV)

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ —Matthew 25:35-36 (NIV)

All well and good. Reality is very different. Our present way of welcoming these millions of undocumented human beings, who have come to our country with no legal rights is to say:

“Welcome to America! We’re glad you’ve come. Good luck, get to work, and don’t come knocking on our doors for a handout.”

We have invited these people into our home with no intention of offering them the smallest taste of gracious hospitality.

The biblical, Middle Eastern model of hospitality and welcoming is hinted at in this scripture passage in Luke, where Jesus sends his disciples out in pairs to spread his message:

“When you enter a house, first say, ‘Peace to this house.’ If someone who promotes peace is there, your peace will rest on them; if not, it will return to you. Stay there, eating and drinking whatever they give you, for the worker deserves his wages. Do not move around from house to house. —Luke 10:5-7 (NIV)

Jewish hospitality for strangers meant bringing them into your home, feeding them, housing them, protecting them, and sharing the comforts of home and hearth generously with them.

American “hospitality” for its undocumented migrants is the opposite: we use them, we leave them exposed and unprotected and hungry, and we then pat ourselves on the backs for being so gracious as to allow these retched poor to find a grimy corner someplace—far from our affluent neighborhoods.

If we’re going to embrace welcoming, open-border immigration policies, and if we’re going to make a serious attempt to treat these visitors as human beings created in the image of God, our state and federal governments, our churches, our school districts, our medical establishments, and our businesses must all commit to spend serious money, likely many billions of dollars, to create programs that provide good shelter, English education, jobs with benefits, legal protections, and equal justice.

We are simply not doing that on a scale commensurate with the need we’ve created by opening our borders to all comers.

In many cases, given the hardships most undocumented migrants face, it’s my opinion that deportation is an act of kindness, of mercy. At least in their own countries, in the communities where they have family support, legal rights, and government assistance, families can live in relative peace and security.

(Deportation should never be considered where there is a provable threat to the safety of an immigrant back home. But human nature being what it is, and considering the poor way asylum requests are prioritized and processed, it’s reasonable to assume that a great many such requests are filed as a way of gaming the system, not because of actual threats to life or safety.)

It’s completely impossible to remove all those who are living here illegally, and such a policy would do as much harm as we’ve already created by indiscriminately opening our borders. Here are a few things we can and must do:

• remove those who have broken criminal laws;

• create a just, fair, regulated, and workable immigration system;

• fund massive, practical, stop-gap help for those who are here now, while also giving them legal and conditional worker status;

• enforce real penalties on businesses and individuals who take unfair advantage of undocumented migrants;

• provide paths to citizenship with steps of accountability for the migrants, along with programs that reunite families, as an acknowledgment of the damage that years of bad policy has created in the lives of these people.

In the meantime, all those who wish to provide hospitality to the strangers among us must look for practical ways to make their lives better. Churches and civic organizations can create benevolence programs. Individuals can staff and/or support food and clothing banks, or ministries that help migrant and refugee families get a foothold in America. Businesses can treat their employees fairly.

I suppose it must feel noble to blow whistles at ICE and DHS agents, but the goal of these protests is to preserve a rotten and immoral status quo. Instead, we should be harassing senators, congressmen, state and local officials with letters and phone calls demanding more money for migrant assistance programs along with humane administrative policies. Vote for people who have answers, not for those who are committed to making a terrible situation even worse.

Finally, remind yourself as often as necessary that the overwhelming majority of these men and women and boys and girls are human beings who have come here looking for a better life. They may look different, they likely speak a different language, they will surely have different customs and vastly different life stories, but they are still, each and every one of them, seen by God, loved by God, and valued by God.

These people are our neighbors. We need to find ways to show them the hospitality and kindness they deserve as children of God.

No stops for gas, no stops for Buc-ee’s Beaver Nuggets, just go-go-go. When? I would pull in to the Sol Visitor’s Center for a bathroom break 106 years from now. 106 years!

A photon—the invisible particles that make light do its light thing—will make the same trip in 8 minutes, 20 seconds. It took longer for me to come up with these first three paragraphs than that. Light books! It moves at, you guessed it, light-speed, which is the universe’s absolute speed limit.

Flip the light switch in the darkest corner of your home and measure how quickly the scene turns from obscurity to clarity. Faster than a smile. Faster than a look of sympathetic understanding. Faster than a nod at a stranger and a quiet “hello.”

Another thing about light: it’s indefatigable. The most distant star yet detected and imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope is in a galaxy called the Sunrise Arc. That star is Earendel, and the light we can observe from this one star has been streaking towards us like a flaming arrow—not slowing or taking a break—for the past 12.9 billion years, all without fading, each photon just as energetic and full of light-stuff as when it was first launched into space from the blazing surface of that sun.

Light does its light-thing in the briefest speck of an instant, and its illumination is not dimmed by age or weariness or disappointment or hardship.

When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” —John 8:12 (NIV)

For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light! For this light within you produces only what is good and right and true. —Ephesians 5:8-9 (NLT)

In the first quote, we hear Jesus compare himself to the way light reveals and informs, the way it makes it possible to see what is real and what isn’t, what’s good and what is garbage. This Jesus-light is life-affirming, life-sustaining, life-transforming.

In the second quote, we hear Paul connect the transformative, inner light of God’s presence to the externals of how we live, how we think, what we value, what we believe.

The promise here is that this “light” of Christ will change us and alter the way we engage with society. This light of Christ is good stuff, even when we are not at all good, and produces good fruit in us that becomes a blessing to others.

This light of Christ is inexhaustible, fueled by the Spirit of God.

The light of Christ works in ways that are beyond our understanding, beyond our control, that may be as unremarkable as a smile or a kind word or a prolonged and kind gaze that says, “I see you” to someone who feels unseen. Or, it may lead us into a commitment to walk with someone for a billion miles over a trillion light-years of life’s joys and travails.

The light of Christ has the power to clean, renew, and transform us, as well as our families, our neighbors, our society.

Such is light. It strips away darkness. It illuminates without fear. It persists despite exhaustion. It shines with love, hope, mercy, forbearance, because it is energized by the power and authority of the God who first said: Let there be light.

God, help us live as people of this light.

Photo credit: NASA

Jesus sat down near the collection box in the Temple and watched as the crowds dropped in their money. Many rich people put in large amounts. Then a poor widow came and dropped in two small coins.

Jesus called his disciples to him and said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has given more than all the others who are making contributions. For they gave a tiny part of their surplus, but she, poor as she is, has given everything she had to live on.” —Mark 12:41-44 (NLT)

No one has ever become poor by giving. —Anne Frank, Give, March 26, 1944

I once accompanied a friend to a little Mexican village hidden deep in the mountains. This happened decades ago, so my recall of the details is a bit fuzzy. We had traveled by a succession of vehicles to get there, forded a river, and finally hiked the rest of the way, arriving well after dark. The community grew coffee on the mountain slopes and spoke a language that had not been well-studied, until my friend, a linguist, had arrived.

On maybe the third night of our visit we were invited to eat in the home of a widow and her son. She lived in a crude adobe house with a metal roof and two rooms, one of which was the kitchen, where she cooked over a wood fire burning inside an adobe oven. The window openings had no glass, just closely-spaced slats to keep the animals out. Her floor was hard-packed earth.

We sat around a rough wood table on the only two chairs she owned. She served us sweet, hot coffee and a meal of black beans with chicken cooked in a spicy, red sauce. She had no silverware, but she provided delicious, handmade tortillas that we tore into triangles and used to scoop up the hot food from our plates.

The chicken, I later learned, had probably been killed to honor my friend, who had been a help to her—chickens were far more valuable for their eggs than their meat.

As she served us, my friend and the woman chatted quietly in that strange-sounding language while we ate. Her face was heavily-lined with creases, her hair was graying and tied back in a bun, her dress was dark and plain, she wore thin, leather thongs on her feet, and she was somewhere between 40 and 150 years old.

This woman, I’ll call her Anita, spent her days foraging for firewood, sewing, and hauling water from the river—the same river where she and her neighbors washed themselves and their laundry. And, she tended the coffee trees in the community groves, picking the beans and drying them in the sun when they ripened.

Perhaps she also talked to God during the long days hiking hillside trails as she worked to provide for her family. She believed in God but had never read the Bible, primarily because no translation existed in her language, apart from the few chapters of one of the Gospels that my friend and others in the village were translating each evening, after the day’s chores had been completed.

And, of course, there was the fact that Anita was uneducated and illiterate.

Yet, she lived in a very simple state of gratitude to God, as well as a very immediate and critical state of dependence on God’s provision. She was incredibly generous to us with what little she had. She smiled often, which led me to suspect that she knew something of the peace and presence of the God we both worshipped.

Stop reading and look around. Can you imagine the astonishment Anita would feel if she were standing beside you or me right now, in all the luxury we in the first world take for granted?

I’m not going to lay down a guilt trip about about our western affluence. We have no control over the cultures and eras we were born into. God calls each of us to submit ourselves to him and to kneel at the cross in repentance and faith, whether we’re rich or poor, man or woman, eastern or western. I do wonder, though, how these comfortable circumstances in which we live our faith might color what we hear—or are willing to hear—from God.

Afanasy Ivanovich had been particularly unstinting of money for her; he was then still counting on her love and thought he could seduce her mainly by comfort and luxury, knowing how easily the habits of luxury take root and how hard it is to give them up later, when luxury has gradually turned into necessity. —The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky

I’m working through Dostoevsky’s great novel The Idiot (and, 175 pages in, I’m still not quite sure what it’s all about). Afanasy Ivanovich is a wealthy man who has adopted and raised a girl, Nastasya. As she grows up, he keeps her hidden from society, tries to win her affection by lavishing her with fine things, and ultimately takes her as his lover. He hopes to capture her heart through bribery; he believes the luxuries and finery he has surrounded her with will become chains that bind her to him.

You’ll be pleased to hear he has underestimated her.

He’s not wrong to believe in the captivating power of wealth, though. The “good things in life” do have a way of becoming the “necessities of life,” don’t they? We get used climate-controlled environments, secure and spacious housing, abundance at our grocery stores, the freedom to travel, entertainment to suit our every desire, and the convenience of carrying digital gateways to the world in our pockets.

It would be naive to think the affluence most of us take for granted does not influence how we think about and live out our faith. If we’re serious about following Jesus, I think we really must ask ourselves hard questions about how the all-in discipleship Jesus calls his followers to might be quite different from the Christianity practiced and preached in our modern western context.

Some things I’ve noticed about myself:

1. My affluence tempts me to credit myself rather than God with the good things I have and love, and to stake out claims on what’s mine vs. what’s God’s.

2. My affluence can make me adopt a play-it-safe mentality when God calls me into circumstances or situations that might put the things I want and need at risk; or worse, it can lead me to turn a deaf ear to God’s call because I’m comfortable right where I am.

3. My affluence sometimes leads me to hold tightly to what I have out of anxiety or fear that at the end of the day, I might not have enough.

As Dostoevsky observes, affluence and comfort have a way of becoming necessities. My observation is that they can become pre-conditions or bargaining chips to use in negotiating a more favorable deal with God. Yes, God, I’ll do X so long as I don’t have to give up Y.

What does Jesus require of us, if we’re to be his disciples?

If I’m following Jesus’ way, my affluence should become a blessed tool for giving comfort to people with needs that my resources and skills and time can help.

If I’m following Jesus’ way, my comforts must not lead me to resentfulness when suffering inevitably comes to me. Even the richest people on earth can’t cheat death.

Like the servant who was entrusted with ten talents by his master, following Jesus’ way means being a good steward of all that God has entrusted to me, and good stewardship, as the parable teaches, is not about burying and hoarding our treasures but putting them to work in God’s Kingdom for God’s purposes.

I can’t find any evidence in Scriptures that affluence is a sin. It certainly can become a chain that binds us to comfort rather than God’s Son. It certain has become something people worship instead of the gracious God who is the Giver of all good things.

Jesus ransomed us from death and hopelessness by giving his life for us. If the Spirit of Christ truly lives in us, we will be known by the way we express that same love through extravagant, selfless, and fearless generosity.

In you, LORD, I have taken refuge; let me never be put to shame. — Psalm 71:1 (NIV)

After my father committed suicide, after he was buried in a quiet service on a grassy Baltimore hillside — a service we children weren’t permitted to attend — after our tears began to dry and I returned to my third-grade classroom where a few kids made inquisitive comments that were quickly hushed up by my teacher, Mrs. Edwards, we just stopped talking about him. I could see that Dad’s death was too painful a subject for our mother, who was stunned by everything that had happened and the heavy responsibilities that were now hers alone. I also sensed a puzzling and barely-suppressed undercurrent of anger and shame from some of our relatives.

Dad gradually faded from my memory. What questions I managed to ask were treated as something of an embarrassment, so I stopped asking. I stopped remembering. I took the hint; Dad was not to be discussed either inside or outside of the family. End of story.

I internalized all of that mess as shame, and when adults inevitably asked what my dad did for a living, I invented a story that he was a salesman for some vague company, always on the road supporting our family from afar. I desperately wanted to be from a “normal” family, not one hiding a secret humiliation that must not be discussed.

Somehow, as time passed, what started as a sense of shame about my father became a sense of shame about myself; my father’s many failings and his suicide seemed like an indelible stain that had colored our entire family. I felt it in the perceived pitying looks of our neighbors and friends, and in the imagined furtive glances of complete strangers. No matter what I did or where I went, I knew I would never escape my father’s disgrace.

Disgrace is an interesting word, isn’t it? I believe in a God who generously bestows grace on sinful and broken people, but many people reject that idea, believing instead that some of us are so contemptible, so beyond redemption that we are dis-graced by society, even by God himself.

What I’ve described so far is a toxic variety of shame, a sense of unworthiness that somehow attaches itself to us merely by virtue of our associations. It’s one of those lies promoted by the father of lies to distance us from God. In the recent news we see that everyone who had even a tangential association with Jeffrey Epstein is being tarred with the same shamefulness that his sins justifiably had brought down on him.

Shame on those who enabled Epstein’s criminality, but mercy ought to be extended to those who were pulled into his orbit without knowing the horrors he was committing.

Shame can serve a holy purpose. It can act as a guardrail or a warning sign to keep us traveling within the moral straight and narrow. To be without shame is to be tempted to embrace transgressiveness and reject moral norms, which is the banner flown by so many of today’s “out and proud” movements.

We can tamp down shame and turn a deaf ear to its whispers, but doing so puts up a wall between ourselves and God. King David had managed to convince himself that murder and adultery were fine, until the prophet Nathan finally awakened his sense of shame and led him to repentance.

Shame is a mechanism intended by God to shake us awake from our moral stupor and push us towards confession and repentance. It’s not intended to make us into permanent social outcasts.

Hester Prynne was forced to wear the scarlet letter “A” not because she had committed adultery, but because she was declared to be an adulteress, a state of permanent ungrace that could never be washed away.

Our penal systems are less effective at enacting justice than they are at shaming men and women, who are left with a deep sense of unworthiness long after they’ve served out their sentences.

I have felt ashamed when I shouldn’t have, and I have held shame at arm’s length when I should have recognized it as a tool of God’s restorative mercies. I have felt shame when I’ve confessed my sin, and I have experienced holy love when, like the prodigal son, I’ve been embraced again by my loving Father.

Shame isn’t meant to hold us captive; it’s meant to lead us to the cross.

If we take refuge in God’s restorative mercy and grace, if we embrace the love of Christ, if we accept the Father’s offer of adoption into his household, it only stands to reason that the Almighty God and judge of all hearts is unashamed to call us his sons and daughters. And if that’s true, then how can we continue to live in shame?

There are two famous fruit metaphors in the New Testament. In the first, Jesus compares himself to a grape vine and us to fruit-bearing branches. If we live connected to him, nourished by him, our lives will be a testimony to God’s goodness and a sweet blessing to those we live with.

The second metaphor is more specific about what our fruit “tastes” like. The Apostle Paul says that the work of the Holy Spirit within us causes us to exhibit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

A way to think about these things is that the process of being transformed by Christ should result in both inner and outer changes, testifying to the invisible fact that we have become children of God through faith in Christ. Our adoption by God is complete, but the transformative work of God in our hearts and minds takes a lifetime.

In the first years our lime tree produced very little fruit; now, some 10 years later, it blesses us with more fruit than we can use.

I recently ran across another reference to fruit while reading Paul’s letter to the Philippians. He writes:

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. — Philippians 1:9-11 (NIV)

What does it mean to be filled with the fruit of righteousness?

It’s possible Paul is simply using different language to describe what he has formerly called the fruit of the Spirit. But Paul seems very careful with his words, so it occurred to me that he may be writing about something different here.

He begins by saying the he prays for the Philippians, who seem to be bearing the fruit of love — a mark of the Holy Spirit. He asks God to give the Philippians smart love, love that is insightful, love that is wise and discerning. This is not the sort of love that comes from a tagger’s sputtering spray can, but from the deliberate and carefully-applied brush strokes of a gifted artist.

Paul looks into the future and says that he wants these believers to be “pure and blameless” when they meet Christ. There is something about living with discernment and leaning into the knowledge of God that keeps us on the side of the good and true.

Next, he brings up this fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ.

I look at myself in the mirror and I do not see a righteous man. It’s not that I’m a moral failure, at least I hope not. It’s just that I know I fall terribly short of the righteousness of God himself, the one who will judge me.

And yet, the miracle of the cross of Christ is this: by faith, my sinfulness has been exchanged for the righteousness of Jesus, the sinless Savior. This is no lease deal; it’s an outright hard cash purchase. I am a child of God because I have been given the righteousness of his Son. That transaction was instantaneous. That exchange of my sin for Christ’s holiness was completed on the day I prayed to put my faith in him.

So, my thought is this: perhaps this fruit of righteousness is not something that grows over time, but something that sprouted and flowered in me from the very first moment of my salvation, when I was ransomed by Christ and deemed righteous by God.

And what might that fruit of righteousness be? Perhaps the inner peace that comes from knowing that God loves us and walks beside us? Perhaps the confidence that invites us to come before his throne of grace with our cries and confessions and requests? Perhaps the sense of relief that we must no longer fear death? Perhaps the relief we feel when our sin is lifted from our shoulders? Perhaps the comfort that exists in knowing that God’s purposes and plans are trustworthy and good? Perhaps the assurance that our lives have meaning and God is the author of our story?

I think the point Paul is making is that something very sweet and beautiful — yet invisible — happens to us as we surrender ourselves to Christ and accept the bargain to exchange his life for ours. When we are grafted to the vine of Jesus, that eternal, living tree fills our dried up veins with the sweet sap of his grace, and good things happen.

I don’t love well. I’m often not joyful. I can get carried away with anger and impatience…. But there’s something true and right and good and holy about me, about all of us who are in Christ, because Christ is in us, which means we have been made righteous in God’s eyes. Which means, and this is important, something otherworldly is now growing in the gardens of our souls, something that is filling us up with the sweet aromas of eternity.

Let us live with the certainty that we are deeply loved by God and have been declared righteous by the gift of the cross.

It’s the question George Bailey finally comes to at a desperate moment on a snowy bridge in Bedford Falls. Why am I here? Is there a point to my life? Would anything in our crowded world change if I had never been born? Or, if that question is too harsh to consider, what about this one: have I left any lasting impression on the tiny circle of people I encounter each day? Has my life made a difference?

Among the many thousands of words in the Bible, I find I keep coming back to these, from the Apostle Paul:

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. —Ephesians 2:10 (NIV)

Are you an accident of nature? Are you the embarrassing result of a drunken New Year’s Eve hookup? Are you merely the product of a meaningless biochemical reaction that has filled the earth with crying babies since the beginning of time?

No, says Paul. You are God’s handiwork. Just pause for a moment to think about what that means, if it’s true. It would mean that we are the products of God’s very personal and very particular life-giving touch. It would mean that you are known to God and cherished by God. You may have your father’s nose and your mother’s eyes, but you have the fingerprints of the One who set the universe on fire in the soul-clays that God formed you with.

And given that fact, as sentient beings, thoughtful beings, observant beings, inquisitive beings, it means you and I have been granted agency by God to do what God might do if he were in our shoes.

Which brings us to the second clause in Paul’s claim: yes, you most certainly have a purpose, a purpose modeled by the incarnational life that God lived in Jesus Christ, and that purpose is to do “good things.”

The Boy Scouts have a thing they say, and the way I learned it was do a good turn daily. The well-known example was to help an old lady across the street, whether she wanted to cross the street or not.

We are created to do good works, writes Paul. What are good works? They are efforts and actions that create a benefit. Good works are labor and toil and energy expended toward the improvement or repair or maintenance or sustenance of people, communities, societies, and the world.

Just two verses earlier (Ephesians 2:8,9), Paul clarifies that we are not saved by our good works. We don’t labor to impress God or to gain favor with God. We are saved by the good work of Jesus Christ.

Rather, we do these “good works” out of the gratitude and love that should fill us up because of what God has done for us. It’s a pay-it-forward kind of thing.

In John 13:34-35, Jesus commands his disciples to love one another. The possibility for doing good in that very simple command is infinite. George Bailey’s acts of love put families in homes and extended grace when hard times made money tight. Look around and ask, where might I pass on the love and grace that Jesus has extended to me?

I was only half-listening to a friend’s story the other day when God said, Hey, pay attention! Put the phone down. Hit pause on that clock that’s always ticking in your head. Listen. Engage. Love by being present in this moment.

Which is what Jesus seems to have done, right? He saw a blind man beside a pool, stopped, engaged with him and healed him. He was touched by a woman in a crowd; he stopped, engaged with her and healed her.

Sometimes love is just that simple: pause for a moment, acknowledge God’s handiwork in the stranger beside you and engage them in love. Sure, build a new children’s wing on your local hospital if you can, but if you ignore the humanity of the Door Dash driver who just delivered your pizza, your vision for “good works” isn’t big enough.

Finally, the last part of Paul’s interesting little claim: these good works we do are things God has “ordained.” The NLT says they are things God “planned for us long ago.”

What if there are no “chance” encounters in life? What if there are no “accidental” friendships or “coincidental” meetings? What if that moment when I have a split-second to decide whether to engage with someone or move on with my busy life is a moment God had orchestrated long ago? And, what if I’m just too self-absorbed, too hurried to see it?

George Bailey saw the world as it would have been if he had never been born — it was a horror show. We who have been saved by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, we who have God’s Holy Spirit living in us are the living and breathing agents of God’s grace and love in a world choked by confusion and doubt.

I hope 2026 will be for each of us a year filled with the confidence and purpose and awareness that comes from believing in a God who sees us, who created us, who has given each one of us good work to do, work that has significance because it is built on a foundation of love, respect, justice, kindness, and an abundance of grace.

Happy New Year.

(Mom was a clock-punching Sears employee; her 15% discount guaranteed that whatever was beneath that tree had been ordered by phone and picked up by her at the local Sears Catalog Distribution Center.)

It was inevitable (and unfortunate) that there would be some practical gifts there: socks, underwear, a new dress shirt. (I can still hear her telling me “Try those pants on so I can return them if they don’t fit.”) Boring but necessary. Good manners demanded that I at least fake my appreciation for each package of Fruit-of-the-Loom briefs as I ripped away her carefully-chosen wrapping paper.

But the real Christmas treasures were hiding in the larger boxes. A stuffed animal or talking doll for my sister. A cowboy outfit complete with 6-shooter for my brother. And for me, a genuine Mattel toy (batteries not included) that had been the not-so-secret object of lust for me and my friends ever since we first saw the ads on TV.

Christmas was, for me, all about the joyful anticipation and discovery of what surprises waited beneath our tree—sometimes things I had hoped for, sometimes things beyond my imagining. All were hidden from view by brightly-colored paper; nothing would be revealed until early on Christmas morning.

It was a surprise to Mary when an angel appeared to announce that God had selected her for a precious mission: to carry and give birth to God’s own Son.

Gabriel appeared to [Mary] and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!” Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean.

“Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israel forever; his Kingdom will never end!” —Luke 1:28-33 (NLT)

Nothing could have been more surprising, more shocking, than those words. Nothing could have stimulated more questions, more wonder, more apprehension, than to assent to carrying “the Son of the Most High” in her body—and later, in her arms.

It was a fearsome and awe-filled surprise to certain shepherds when the cool, quiet Bethlehem night was split by the dazzling appearance of angels announcing the fulfillment of Isaiah’s ancient prophecy: a virgin would conceive a child to be called Immanuel—God with us. (Isaiah 7:14) It was an event so stunning, a gift so other-worldly, that the shepherds ran into town to see this child for themselves. Mary and Joseph were surprised yet again by the mysterious workings of God. (Luke 2:1-21)

I imagine all of Heaven was surprised to learn what God had done. I imagine the angels listened with stunned attention to the music of praise arising from Bethlehem that evening. I imagine the demons were shocked with surprise at God’s audacious and unsettling invasion of their earthly territory.

I am still frequently surprised by the gifts I unwrap on Christmas; but these days my heart longs not so much for what waits under the tree, but for the Gift who walked on our planet and unwrapped God the Father for us, revealing surprising love, surprising mercy, surprising reconciliation, and a surprising promise that death and sin and evil are doomed.

Christmas is the triumphant introit that opens the surprising chorale of God’s plan to draw the world back into his arms. As we open our gifts this year, some of them disappointing, some of them wonderful, take a moment to remember the Gift of gifts that God himself has given to you, and offer up a prayer of thanks.

Many on the political left are worried that President Trump is out to destroy American democracy, while some on the right worry that the left is orchestrating a revolution. Young adults are worried enough about the climate and job security that some have decided not to have children. The risks of commitment to another human being have left many afraid of marriage.

Are we living in a uniquely anxiety-filled era? History says no.

My parents and their friends worried about the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. I remember neighbors digging deep holes in their backyards where they built bomb shelters, while we children practiced duck and cover drills in school. Those anxieties turned to a national panic when, in 1962, we learned that the Soviet Union had constructed missile launchers in Cuba.

My grandparents and their friends worried about losing their jobs and homes in the Great Depression; later, they worried that their sons would not return from fighting the German and Japanese armies. My great-grandparents faced the Spanish flu, which killed upwards of 100 million people worldwide.

Uncertainty drives anxiety. Death, pain, and privation lurk like muggers around every corner and we’re all too aware that we have almost nothing with which to defend ourselves, save perhaps vaccines and government safety nets.

Worry, anxiety, and uncertainty are universal enough that Jesus addressed them in his Sermon on the Mount:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?....

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” —Matthew 6:25-34 (NIV)

The Apostle Paul put it this way:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. —Philippians 4:6,7 (NIV)

The message seems to be “don’t worry, trust God.” Yet still I worry.

Sometime early in my life I became an anxious child. The reasons are unimportant. I felt insecure. I had a constant, low-grade fear-fever. In my imagination I saw disaster looming over our family. I coped by withdrawing. I created my own mental bomb shelter and tried to hide from the bad things I imagined were about to rain down from the skies.

Lots of people feel trapped in habits of worry. I’m certain the rising use of marijuana and harder drugs is a response to the deep anxieties people feel around uncertain careers, fracturing relationships, and dreams that seem to be slipping out of reach.

Jesus’ response is, firstly, to remind us that worry is unproductive. It changes nothing and poisons everything that’s good and beautiful. Trust God and set your mind on seeking God rather than worrying, he says.

He concedes that worrisome things are real enough when he says “each day has enough troubles of its own.” How we respond to those troubles is the big question.

The Apostle Paul writes that inner peace in tumultuous times comes from prayer and thankfulness. The Apostle Peter takes it even further:

Cast all your anxiety on [God] because he cares for you. —1 Peter 5:7 (NIV)

That word cast means to throw; throw your anxieties to God and trust him to catch them, hold them, and deal with them.

Of course, that’s all easier said than done.

To push my worries off on God I need to trust that he’ll take better care of them than I can. It means leaving them there in God’s hands—letting go.

To push my worries off on God means that I admit my limitations and my lack of control over those precious things I’m worried about. I admit to myself that I can only do so much, and my “so much” is generally inadequate. I can love people who need love. I can help people who need help. I can act responsibly, vote responsibly, live responsibly. I can pray.

But I can’t cure cancer. I can’t heal mental illness. I can’t prevent my company or my friends or my loved ones or my political party from making bad decisions. I can’t halt the destructiveness of sin and evil and hatred and selfishness and injustice and war and recklessness and apathy.

Returning again to what I recently wrote about limits, worry at times arises from my frustration with my human limitations. Acknowledging my limitations can push me closer to the God who sees all that we’re dealing with, and who invites us to rest in him.

I’m no longer bound up with anxiety as I once was. The Holy Spirit has deepened my trust in God. I’m learning to put my worries in his hands. I’m learning to admit my limitations and to let some things go. Some things, some of the time.

I don’t believe trusting God with the things that worry us should suggest passivity. More like balance. Our shoulders are not designed to carry the world’s troubles, or even the lighter burden of the things that most affect ourselves and our loved ones. Perhaps anxiety becomes toxic when we experience it alone, but less so when we share it with the God who cares for us.

I know this: when I cast my worries into God’s capable hands, I experience much-needed peace of mind. I’ll take that.

Jesus said to them, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” ... “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.” ... On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” — John 6:51,53-55,60 (NIV)

There are times when you can be forgiven for thinking Jesus was disturbed.

Just a day earlier, the witnesses claim that Jesus fed the assembled crowds a miraculous and filling dinner. Word spread quickly, and on the following day many more came to listen; I suspect they also hoped to eat. Suspecting they were more interested in food for their stomachs than their hearts, Jesus began teaching about both.

“I am the bread of life,” he said. So far, so good. He’s using a metaphor. Skilled teachers do that.

Then it got weird: Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, he tells them, you cannot have eternal life. The assembled crowd was shocked. His disciples were aghast. Many left in disgust, likely thinking he’d gone mad.

Ever heard a sermon on this passage? I don’t think I have. It’s understandable. Christianity is already pretty weird, what with Jesus’ virgin birth, miraculous healings, and resurrected dead people. But this passage would tend to make many modern pew-sitters stampede for the exits.

How do I describe my position with respect to God and faith? I’m a Christian, but that label is often misunderstood. There are people who call themselves Christian because their grandfather’s name is on the back of a church pew; there are people who call themselves Christian who have never read the Bible; there are people who think the label “Christian” has more to do with politics than faith.

I prefer to call myself a follower of Jesus, which makes me sound like a mystic, I guess, but it seems closer to the truth, or closer to what I want to be true. The disciples thought of themselves as Jesus-followers, too.

If I think hard about what Jesus might be getting at in this hard teaching, being a mere Christ-follower probably misses the mark as well.

To be a follower of Jesus, or a follower of Buddha or Muhammed or Karl Marx, is to have a commitment of some sort to the person and their teachings. It means I’ve read their books, I’ve internalized their words, their perspectives and values. But even when I have done all of that, I still stand apart from them.

Being a follower is an intellectual position, a commitment of the mind and, perhaps also, a commitment of the feet. To follow someone may even entail an emotional entanglement of some sort: followers of Taylor Swift seem to enter into an ecstatic euphoria while screaming along with a concert hall full of other adoring fans.

But if I literally eat Jesus’ body and drink his blood, he becomes part of me. That’s different, isn’t it? His body infuses itself into my very cells. His blood becomes my blood. My connection to him is not merely propositional; I am in some mystical way inhabited by this person.

Consider what odd phrasing Paul uses in his letter to the Galatians:

God wanted everyone, not just Jews, to know this rich and glorious secret inside and out, regardless of their background, regardless of their religious standing. The mystery in a nutshell is just this: Christ is in you, therefore you can look forward to sharing in God’s glory. It’s that simple. That is the substance of our Message. … Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life. — Galatians 1:27, 3:3 (The Message)

Christ is in you and Christ has swapped out your old life with something entirely new. That’s way, way beyond mere followership. That’s way, way beyond memorizing some aphorisms like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” That’s way, way beyond affirming a creed or becoming a member of a congregation.

What Jesus describes when he talks about his flesh and blood becoming our flesh and blood is a mystical transformation of our essential nature, not merely an exchange of priorities or values or approaches or beliefs.

Christ is in us. Our old lives are crucified and we are reborn as new creations. Jesus tells Nicodemus the Pharisee that he must be reborn, which is the origin of the much maligned “born-again Christian” appellation. Paul restates the transformational language in a letter to the Corinthian church:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. — 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)

I am “living bread,” says Jesus. My flesh is “real food” in some way that a juicy steak is not, in the same way that he claims to be “the way, the truth, and the life,” meaning that there’s something phony about the alternatives to himself and his teaching.

If somehow Jesus’ body and blood and Spirit were to become part of me, if his life was reborn in my life and his heart of unstinting love was reborn in my heart, what a different person I would become.

This is the hope and promise offered by this man, Jesus. This is the mystery, the treasure, as Paul writes to the Galatians: Christ in you. Not Christ with you, not Christ beside you, not Christ as one voice among many shouting for your attention. Not Christ as a label, not Christ as a mascot, but Christ giving us life—Christ actually mingling his life with ours in a beautiful and God-miraculous way. We are not merely persuaded, not merely committed; we become wholly new persons.

A hard teaching, indeed. A life-giving and transformative teaching. This is the teaching that sets Christianity and Christians apart from every other dogma and creed and belief. It’s hard because it demands everything we have to give, including our very lives. It requires us to be subsumed in the life and power of God. And here’s the thing: we don’t disappear; we become what we were meant to be.

“Real isn’t how you are made,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.’ — The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams Bianco

Christ in us—the good and true and merciful love of God in us—makes us real. Eating this living bread is the only way to find deep soul nourishment and a life that satisfies.

A tendency to see nature as raw material that can be engineered to meet our perceived needs or whims… suffuses most every aspect of social and political life. “Modernity is a machine for destroying limits,” [Kingsnorth] insists. — Tyler Austin Harper in a November 11, 2025 The Atlantic review of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine: The unmaking of humanity.

I grew up loving music because my mom and dad loved music. Mom played the piano; Dad played record albums on a gleaming walnut RCA hi-fi the size of a 50’s Austin Healey. These were vinyl recordings, LPs, with half a dozen or more songs per side. I’d listen for hours, and while reclining on the living room carpet soaking in the music, I’d read the album notes and learn about the artists, about the orchestra backing them up, about the stories behind the songs, the arrangements, the recording process.

When I was old enough to get my work permit, I started earning and saving some money. My first real purchase was a mail-order stereo system. I began collecting my own albums, spending Saturdays shopping at the local Record Shack where I would browse through long bins of vinyl arranged by genre or artist. They weren’t cheap. My limited funds meant I had to be choosy and certain about which album to invest in. And once purchased, I was committed to soaking that music into my soul.

These albums became my friends, and each time I played one it would stir up specific memories and emotions that only that recording could re-create.

The Who’s rock opera Tommy takes me back to my cramped and noisy freshman dorm room at NC State University, Welch Hall. When I hear Roundabout by Yes, I see myself sitting on the floor of my corner bedroom in Raleigh. When I hear Chicago’s horn section, I remember laboring through calculus problems at my desk in the dark of the night.

As I think about it now, I believe I had such strong emotional ties to the albums I collected because of their scarcity and the enforced limits my budget created. I couldn’t afford to buy everything that might sound interesting, nor did I have unlimited time for listening. Sure, there was curated music on the radio, but I could only really become immersed in those thirty or forty albums I’d carefully chosen for myself.

I suppose that’s why I find Spotify dissatisfying: no limits, just endless songs selected by a digital algorithm out of an infinite playlist so huge, chances are I will never hear any specific song again. I find I have very little emotional connection to what I’m listening to these days; indeed, I barely have any memory of the music I’ve heard at all.

When we consume something without limits, the experience becomes cheap. Without limits, pleasurable things can lose their specialness and die.

Limits make things precious. Scarcity creates yearning. You can only see the Mona Lisa by getting on a plane to Paris, which is why it’s one of the most popular exhibits in the Louvre.

And, there’s another aspect to limits that Paul Kingsnorth seems focused on in his book: without limits, we humans tend to tear ourselves and our planet apart. Thus, the well-known story of Adam and Eve and a single forbidden fruit tree, from which we are to understand that God created us as creatures who will only thrive when we respect certain limits.

A few of God’s limits:

• Keep a firm rein on your emotions; don’t allow anger to drive you to murder.

• Gather precious things, but don’t steal what is precious to your neighbor.

• Work hard, but set aside time to remember the God who is the ultimate source of all that we love and all that sustains us.

The addictive allure of Instagram and Tik-Tok and YouTube is a result of the infinite scroll: no matter how many times I sweep my finger on the screen, there will always be something new to grab just a few seconds or minutes (or hours!) of my attention, before I forget all about it and swipe once again.

The ultimate aim of technology is to dispense with limits. Can we eliminate death? Can we escape the troubles of Earth by colonizing Mars? Can we create a self-made moral system that maximizes our happiness and dispenses with ancient and self-limiting customs and rules?

The greed of Tolkien’s dwarves opened deep mines in Moria in pursuit of their precious mithril. Their avarice and lack of restraint pushed them to go so deep that they awoke Durin’s Bane, and were destroyed by the Balrog and his soldiers. The dwarves’ destruction was sealed when they refused to observe the limits passed down from their ancestors.

“Modernity is a machine for destroying limits,” writes Paul Kingsnorth.

Humanity was designed by a good and wise God to thrive within an immense playground where rules are posted on signs at the entrance and fences are erected here and there to keep us safe from moral hazards.

We’ve covered those signs in graffiti and taken chainsaws to the fences. Who needs limits?