Curiosity

Beauty, Faith, God, Growth 0

Curiosity is suspect in many Christian circles where people are convinced our faith rests only on following rules. It’s a slippery slope, some of us have been told. When it came to my spirituality, I was taught to seek answers over and above the sacred discipline of asking questions, and this proved detrimental when I became afraid to wonder and dream about God for fear of “straying from the faith.” I’m still not sure what that means. Curiosity has since become a great companion, a trusted friend who meanders along with me in kinship – in both the familiar and the unknown. We both know, Curiosity and I, that so much of God’s beauty is waiting to be explored. These are the paths of discovery that take root in us and eventually become passions, callings, and vocations. In this way, curiosity sometimes even saves us, enlivening us with purpose.

“Questioning is just as vital to awareness as using all our senses,” notes Haines. Questions are a direct reflection of our curiosity, inviting us to keep paying attention and to live as active characters in our own story. Too many have stopped noticing the Spirit because they believe they already have the answers they need. But a holistic and robust faith is a faith that is engaged – a faith that remains curious.

— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 84-85

Photo: Field at Giverny, France, June 16, 2026

Unrelenting and Restorative

God, Grace, Love, Redemption, Universalism 0

Unlike the doctrine of hell, which is never clearly spelled out in the Bible, the unrelenting, restorative love of God – which does not count our sins against us but instead works all things together for good in order not only to redeem people from every tribe, tongue, and nation but also to liberate all of creation – is spelled out in the Bible time and time again. It is arguably the unifying theme of the whole book. Over and over, the people of the Bible are drawn into the unrelenting love of God on the other side of their failures.

— Brian Recker, Hell Bent, p. 106

Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, seen from across the bay, June 20, 2026

For Everybody

God, Love, Universalism 0

Something must break us out of the reward-punishment frame. It is too small and too self-serving. It makes the God of the ever-evolving and expanding universe seem equally small and petty, and it has already shown itself to create far too many small, petty, largely competitive, and happily vengeful humans. Yet, in spite of it all, the universe remains one giant self-revelation of the fabulous nature of God, not a small stage where one slice of the human species can show itself to be a winner or a loser.

Somehow, the loving people I have met all across the world seem to know that if it is love at all, it has to be love for everybody. As soon as you even begin to parcel it out, you are not in the great field of love.

— Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, p.159

Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026

Not About Being Right

Community, God, Grace, Growth 0

And lest you think I count myself finished, know this: When I was a Bible-thumping, church-going, know-it-all Republican, God used bleeding-heart, politically correct, question-everything liberals to teach me to be human, to challenge my notions of who the enemy is. But now that I’m a bleeding-heart, politically correct, question-everything liberal, God insists on using Bible-thumping, church-going, know-it-all Republicans to teach me to be human, to challenge my notions of who the enemy is.

God, it seems, is rather stubbornly committed to extracting me from the notion that this is all about being right.

— Rachel Held Evans, Braving the Truth, p. 62

Photo: Front walk to Château de Chantilly, France, June 25, 2026

Don’t Surrender Your Hope.

God, Hope, Love 0

Don’t surrender your hope just yet. Don’t let them take it from you. Bring it with you even as you travel. Tend it even as you leave behind the toxic beliefs and habits and spaces that do not bring flourishing to you or to the world. Your hope – your hope in the goodness and welcome and love of God, you wonderful, stubborn thing – will not disappoint you. You can take a risk on hope again. A longing fulfilled is a tree of life, and Revelation tells us about that tree of life, that its leaves are for the healing of the nations and the renewal of all things. We’re still walking toward Emmaus. Our hope is with us. And soon our eyes will be opened to who was walking us home all along.

— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 72

Photo: The Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, June 20, 2026

The Kin-dom of God

Community, Core Value, God 0

The Spirit of God does not ask us to contort ourselves into something we are not. There is no demand for assimilation, no hierarchy of languages or cultures. No single race, class, or status holds dominance in the kin-dom of God. Instead, the Spirit invites us to be the fullest expression of who we are, in all our particularity, in all our strangeness and beauty.

— Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire, p. 147

Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, June 19, 2026

A New Look at Love

Core Value, God, Love 0

The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for our Maker to love us. All through the great stories, heavenly love is lavished on visibly imperfect people. Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves. God did not love Jacob because he was a cheat, but because he was Jacob. God loves us in our complex isness, and when we get stuck on the image of the totally virtuous and morally perfect person we will never be, we are unable to accept this unqualified love, or to love other people in their rich complexity.

If God can love Jacob – or any single one of us – as we really are, then it is possible for us to turn in love to those who hurt or confuse us. Those we know and those we do not know. And that makes me take a new look at love.

— Madeleine L’Engle, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 194-195

Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026

All of Us Are Freely Forgiven.

Atonement, Forgiveness, God, Redemption, Universalism 0

It takes one to forgive and two to reconcile. Although God freely forgives all of us without condition, we can choose to enter fully into the equation in order for reconciliation with God to happen. And this reconciliation takes place as we turn back to God. God lifts us up into the life of God and we participate joyfully in the new life we have in Christ. We can interpret the cross of Jesus as at-one-ment that deconstructs notions of a violent God bent on retributive justice. We see that the justice of God is love and that love forgives, transforms, and seeks to create new and harmonious relationships. Through the forgiveness of God, a way is opened up for the transformation of all humanity (of creation, to be exact). Through the cross of Jesus, we are forgiven without condition, accepted as we are. Through repentance we are reconciled with God and transformed into those who live in the power of divine love.

Divine justice, therefore, is the act of loving and forgiving, a bottomless, endless, profoundly absurd forgiveness that reaches out in love to all humankind. Our response-ability is to receive it, to enter into the forgiveness of God, reconciled and restored. If, that is, we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

— Sharon L. Baker, Executing God, p. 161

Photo: The Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 20, 2026

God Is Not an Abusive Father.

Delight, God 0

I suspect we sometimes insist that “God is my co-pilot” so we don’t have to fly the plane. “Aqui mando yo” (I call the shots here) is what the stern father or strict husband says tirelessly. Clearly, we need to sidestep what Mirabai Starr calls the “Abusive Father God” and, indeed, replace it with the ceaselessly delighting and sustaining One. The prophet Hosea would say that God wounds us, then heals us. God strikes us, Hosea maintains, then binds our wounds. When God is the cause of everything, it allows for the abusive father who beats our ass, then wipes our tears. A reset is in order. For even when we find ourselves less than delightful, God does not delight in us less.

— Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging, p. 17-18

Photo: Monet’s Garden, Giverny, France, June 22, 2026