Missteps and Joys

Faith, Life 0

One of the things we often deconstruct is the allure of a linear model of faith that says your life was always meant to be a strict progression from A to B, with requisite milestones, litmus tests, and boundary markers.

That was a nice fairy tale while it lasted, wasn’t it? By now you’ve learned the hard way that life is less about if-this-then-that certainties than it is a gorgeous and frustrating improvisation with missteps and joys as we grow up and into who we were meant to be all along. We all begin somewhere different, and your journey won’t be the same as mine (if you’re lucky).

Let your story be yours. Let your evolving faith be your own. Let God meet you in the particular goodness of you, not a printer copy of someone else’s best-case scenario for your life.

— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 36-37

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 29, 2026

Our Gifts of Love

Creativity, Love 0

It’s love that propels us to create, not cynicism.

After many years of wrestling with my own frustrations, I have concluded that our gifts are just that, they are gifts. We might possess the power to postpone their use, try and hide from them, but I suspect we only manage to shade ourselves for a time from the intensity of our passions. This love of ours still shines brightly all around, and waits for us with the focused attention of a beloved dog. When we finally step out from under the protection of our denial, our loves will leap and bark and joyously circle us, too long neglected, racing forward and dashing back to us, hurrying us along on our illuminated path.

— Margaret Dulaney, To Hear the Forest Sing, p. 47

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 28, 2026

The Sacred Dance

Faith, God, Guidance, Life 0

When we believe the divine wills something absolutely, we stop wrestling with the complexity of the world. It’s how dualism still thrives in religious spaces today. I’ve felt it in many church settings – the pressure to see my own will as something to be set aside, to understand my desires as inherently in conflict with God’s. What I wanted, thought, or felt was always considered at odds with the divine. It wasn’t a both/and but an either/or. Either God was at work or I was. This set up a relentless internal tension, not just with God but with myself.

But the more I immersed myself in Scripture, the more I saw that God isn’t at war with humanity. The stories we find there aren’t about a battle of wills but about a sacred dance – about God and humans moving together in harmony, creating something holy. This reframing shifted something deep within me, reminding me that the religious life isn’t a struggle for control but a movement of grace and love.

— Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire, p. 105-106

Photo: Icy lake, South Riding, Virginia, January 26, 2026

The Sin

Compassion, Truth 0

The sin warned against at the very beginning of the Bible is “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). It does not sound like that should be a sin at all, does it? But the moment I sit on my throne, where I know with certitude who the good guys and the bad guys are, then I’m capable of great evil — while not thinking of it as evil! I have eaten of a dangerous tree, according to the Bible. Don’t judge, don’t label, don’t rush to judgment. You don’t usually know other people’s real motives or intentions. You hardly know your own.

— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…, p. 222

Photo: Canada Geese on lake, South Riding, Virginia, January 20, 2026

Shame Removed

God, Grace, Healing 0

Eve is being suffocated by her shame, but God calls her out. And he doesn’t call her out to rub her face in it. He calls her out of the bushes, out of her shame, to offer his grace and remind her of his love. But it doesn’t stop there. To me, the most amazing thing about this whole story is what comes next. Not only does God call Adam and Eve out of their shame, he also removes it altogether.

— Elizabeth Garn, Freedom to Flourish, p. 136

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 19, 2026

Worth Embracing

Acceptance, Compassion, Love 0

I’m not asking you to embrace a violent white supremacist or to place yourself in the path of physical harm or to do anything that causes you emotional injury. But generally speaking, if our faith is going to overcome the ugliness around us, we’re all going to have to figure out how to do the difficult work of loving people we dislike. We’re going to have to stop creating false stories about people from a safe distance and get truer ones. We’re going to have to find a way to offer an open hand instead of a clenched fist. We’re going to need to slow down enough and get close enough to our supposed enemies that we can look in the whites of their eyes and find the goodness residing behind them. It may be buried in jagged layers of fear and grief and hopelessness – but it is almost always there. I don’t like to think about the humanity of people when they are acting inhumanely and find ironically that I have the greatest difficulty manufacturing compassion for people who seem to lack compassion, mostly because I don’t want them to get away with something. I don’t want to risk giving tacit consent to the terrible things they do, to the wounds they inflict, to the violence they manufacture – and the simplest way to do this seems to be to despise them. Hating people is always going to be the easier and more expedient path than loving them, because loving them means seeing them fully, hearing their story, stepping into their skin and shoes as best we can, and finding something worth embracing.

— John Pavlovitz, Worth Fighting For, p. 44-45.

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 17, 2026

May God’s Stitches Hold

Compassion, Core Value, God 0

People say we are unworthy of salvation. I disagree. Perhaps we are very much worth saving. It seems to me that God is making miracles to free us from the shame that haunts us. Maybe the same hand that made garments for a trembling Adam and Eve is doing everything he can that we might come a little closer. I pray his stitches hold.

— Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 15

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, January 17, 2026.

Sheep and Goats

Forgiveness, God, Jesus, Universalism 0

Also, notice that the sheep to the right of the shepherd are considered praiseworthy precisely because they do not think of the world in a dualistic way. They are sheep not because they were born as sheep but because they have chosen to respond to their neighbors in a very specific way. What grants them their identity as sheep i that they are precisely the kind of people who do not split the world up into sheep and goats….

The sheep respond to need and otherness with hospitality and love. They are sheep precisely because they are capable of recognizing a common humanity in their neighbors and having empathy for those who might be different from them or marginalized by society. They choose to cross the boundaries and break through the walls that might otherwise divide people – even the walls of a prison cell. Their “sheepyness” is defined by their refusal to accept the divisions of social or immigration status, health, wealth, or even (most ironically) the consequences of punitive justice.

Notice that the King does not say, “I was innocent and you came to prison to visit me.” He does not seem to care about the particular guilt or innocence of the one who is incarcerated. He simply identifies himself with whoever might be in prison, saying, “I was in prison and you visited me.” As the last detail mentioned in a series, the fact that sheep go to visit prisoners carries the most emphasis in the text. Caring for those who are imprisoned actually epitomizes what it means to be a sheep. Yet, some will argue that we are to understand this passage to be saying that God imprisons souls in a torture dungeon and withdraws God’s presence from them for all eternity! Are we to believe that God is praising the sheep for their enduring presence with those who are in prison, and at the same time, God withdraws God’s own eternal presence from those whom God sends to prison? If that were true, then Christianity would simply be a terrible religion worthy of our rejection, because the Christian God would be the biggest hypocrite of all.

— Derek Ryan Kubilus, Holy Hell, p. 98-99

Photo: Gray winter sky, South Riding, Virginia, December 31, 2025

Metamorphosis

Growth, Healing, Life 0

I am still learning this new life, and in many ways it still feels strange to me. I’ve begun filling the space that loss created around me. I can color the space around me however I want — finally — because now there is room. What I’m discovering is as surprising to me as the caterpillar’s transformation: life on the other side of loss is not only livable but may be better, richer, more meaningful. I am more of myself for having gone through this strange and painful transformation, like entering the darkness and coming out with wings.

— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 173

Photo: Sunrise over lake, South Riding, Virginia, December 17, 2025

Prayer Takes Time

God, Healing, Prayer 0

I wonder if God needs us to persevere in prayer simply because most of what we pray for will take a long time to realize. We pray for healing for ourselves and those we love, knowing that in most cases the process is slow. We pray for peace within our families or in the human family, and we know that peace isn’t readily attained and often comes at a dreadfully high price. We pray for justice, knowing that it is always hard-won and takes generations to accomplish.

— Mariann Edgar Budde, How We Learn to Be Brave, p. 176

Photo: Snow on frozen lake, January 1, 2026