Always Growing

Faith, Growth 0

This is the heart of what it should mean to be a Christian of any designation: the desire to continue to move and grow and learn and change, even if those things place us in opposition to the person we once were or the beliefs we once held firmly or the testimony we once gave. As we move through space and time, our faith should be in continual evolution. We should always look back at the previous version of ourselves and realize how much we didn’t know then. We should be able to see how far we’ve come in matters of spirituality.

— John Pavlovitz, Worth Fighting For, p. 75

Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026

Lament and Hope

Hope, Prayer 0

Too often I have heard people’s pain met with a Christia consolation which essentially communicates that the person in pain should learn to cling to hope, to trust in God. More often than not, I’ve found this unhelpful, and at worst a form of spiritual abuse that uses language of hope to manipulate the hurting into a feigned happiness.

This is also a foundational misrendering of lament. Lament is not anti-hope. It’s not even a stepping-stone to hope. Lament itself is a form of hope. It’s an innate awareness that what is should not be. As if something is written on our hearts that tells us exactly what we are meant for, and whenever confronted with something contrary to this, we experience a crumbling. And in the rubble, we say, God, you promised. We ask, Why? And how could we experience such a devastation if we were not on some mysterious plane, hoping for something different. Our hope can only be as deep as our lament is. And our lament as deep as our hope.

— Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh, p. 101

Photo: Abbaye de Royaumont, France, June 24, 2026

Keep Blooming

God, Joy, Life, Love, Redemption 0

I still believe in heaven, but I am compelled by the breath of God permeating this love-crafted world and by the whole lot of us who are knocking around, messing up, and grateful for do-overs, mercy, and gentle human contact along the way. Anyone paying attention is painfully aware of the stark injustices that plague our land. I, regrettably, have no easy answers for this. It is not my task to explain or defend God.

My job (and yours) is to keep blooming, with an eye for making the garden as lush as we are able. As we do this slow, daily work, God’s kingdom is made known, right here, right now, to all who live. Escaping earth’s pain and confusion by being beamed into heaven was never God’s holy endgame. The Good News is not that God will save us from reality but that God will redeem it, healing everything bruised and broken – even us.

— Shannan Martin, Counterweights, p. 24-25

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

Rejecting the Demand for Perfection

Growth, Jesus 0

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That might just be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it.

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A so-called perfect person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

It becomes sort of obvious once we say it out loud. In fact, I would say that the demand for the perfect is the greatest enemy of the good, Perfection is a mathematical or divine concept; goodness is a beautiful human concept that includes us all. People whom we call “good” are always people who have learned how to include contradictions and others, even at the risk of their own proper self-image or their social standing. This is quite obvious in Jesus.

— Richard Rohr, Yes, And…: Daily Meditations, p. 317

Photo: South Riding, Virginia, August 25, 2026

Love What God Loves

God, Life, Love 0

What we get most wrong about God is that God can be pleased or displeased. I was directing a group retreat on Zoom during the pandemic, and one of the retreatants asked, “Well, isn’t God pleased with some things and displeased with other things?”

I said: “We smile and frown, ‘cuz we’re human beings. God doesn’t smile at us … God adores us. And God doesn’t frown, either, ‘cuz God’s too busy adoring us.” God’s whole being says, “There is nothing you can do to make me stop loving you.” We want to be rooted in this loving presence. Find the pony. Feel God’s adoration. Julian of Norwich called it “Oneing.” Gregory of Nyssa described it as “intimacy with God,” where we are granted a taste of our oneness with God, and when we don’t feel it, the taste only serves to galvanize our longing for more. Kabir said, ” When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.” We are invited to love what God loves, which is quite different from doing things that please God. The prayer of our life is to lean toward the God of love and say, “Give me your eyes. Then all we’ll see is glorious.”

— Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging, p. 24

Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026

God is Bigger than Gender.

God 0

And also? In the Bible itself God does not exclusively refer to Godself in masculine imagery or pronouns. Sometimes God refers to Himself as “She,” and sometimes She refers to Herself as “They,” and sometimes They do not use any kind of gendered, human-bound imagery at all to describe Themself. This is not some newfangled idea, either. Our spiritual ancestors – from Clement of Alexandria, to Augustine of Hippo, to John Chrysostom, to Anselm of Canterbury, and many others – have often articulated an understanding of God as containing many gendered aspects. It is actually quite an old-fashioned thing to think that God is bigger than gender.

— Lizzie McManus-Dail, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, p. 2

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

On the Side of Liberation

Compassion, Jesus 0

Jesus is on the side of liberation for the poor, the suffering, and the downtrodden. If we are on that side, he is there with us. If we are not, he beckons us to join him there. If we are reading the Bible in ways that lead to oppression rather than liberation, we are sabotaging the work of God and subverting the message of Christ.

— Zach W. Lambert, Better Ways to Read the Bible, p. 152

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

The Enchantment of the World

Delight, Joy, Love 0

Love is the enchantment of the world. When we love the world, every grain of it, it shines like transfiguration. Love, as Tolkien said, helps us recover the world, turns everything into a fairy tale. Every leaf, every ray of light. Animals and plants. Mead and good music. The kiss of rain on your skin. The face of a friend and loved one. It all becomes magical. Even the eels.

— Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels, p. 233

Photo: Tide coming in, Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026

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