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

Made for Joy

Delight, God, Joy 0

I am deeply convicted that God’s heart for us is and always has been to live with us. God made us for and out of joy. As my best friend Nora said the day my daughter was baptized: being naked in the Garden was the original plan. This is a key that unlocks so much bad theology, but even more important, knowing that God made us for joy unclenches the chokehold that cynicism and despair have on us.

If God made us – all of us, with tummies and wrinkles and libido and hearts that break and burst with life – for joy, then imagine how joyful life with God could be. If we fully accept this godly delight, who might we become? Who are we already if we let ourselves meet ourselves without malice or intent to harm? What freedom is already here? And what might be even more beautiful than it already is?

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

Photo: Water lily from Monet’s Garden, France, June 22, 2026

Flourishing

God, Grace, Love 0

I firmly believe that God wants us to leave sin behind, but not because he is some malicious legalist holding every human to an impossible moral standard or because he flies off the handle in anger anytime we do something wrong. God hates sin because sin hurts us. And God hates to see us get hurt.

— Zach W. Lambert, Better Ways to Read the Bible, p. 92

Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, France, June 18, 2026

The Image of God

Community, Core Value, God, Love 0

First, the church needs to stand as a counter-witness to all dehumanizing and nauseating propaganda. Jesus spoke powerfully and directly to this calling as his central message in the Sermon on the Mount: we are taught to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. The vocation of every Christian and of the church as a whole is to stand always against the dehumanization of any person or group. Even when we rightly understand a group or person to be a legitimate threat or to be engaging in active harm, we are tasked with never losing sight of their humanity, their possession of the imago Dei, and the unconditional and undying love that God has for them. Beyond that, the church has been taught to embrace an “upside down” view of the social order wherein those that our community deems least worthy of honor and dignity – the oppressed, poor, and marginalized – are understood to be the very people whom we are most honored to count as members of our body.

— Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard, Eucontamination, p. 192-193

Photo: Cloister, Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 18, 2026.

Enchantment

Acceptance, God 0

Peter’s “strange sight” challenges him to face his prejudices. And not just his, but the prejudices of the entire church. Little has changed since Acts 10. We still consider people unclean and unworthy of association. Peter’s “strange sight” calls the church, then and now, to the hard work of facing and dismantling what Paul calls the “wall of hostility” that exists between peoples. If we want to “discern the spirits,” to sort out if a prompting or calling is coming from God, let’s pay attention to Peter. When your enchantment causes you to embrace people you have treated as unclean, that looks a whole lot like the work of the Holy Spirit.

— Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels, p. 222-223

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

Arguing with God

God, Growth, Love 0

There are a lot of things I cannot be certain of, but I am certain that God is not fragile. Nor is God in the business of creating subjugated people with no liberty to question or to wonder. Arguing not only with God but also with God’s sacred text is a path toward our liberation, a way of pushing back against the forces of injustice that plague us.

Humans are thinking and feeling creatures, passionate at times, and the Spirit of God invites all of that – all the critical thinking, all the deep engagement, all the reasoning together – into the relationship we have together. This intimacy, this authenticity, goes to the very heart of what it is to know and be known by Spirit.

If you can bare your angst, your frustrations, your disagreements, and your dread to someone, yet they are unshaken, what sort of healing and liberation might be found with this person? How much more so should this be true with the divine? To argue with God is to belong to God; it is to embrace a love that surpasses all understanding – and be transformed by it.

— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 62

Photo: Giverny, France, June 16, 2026

The Very Heart of God

God, Love, Redemption, Universalism 0

But this story of ultimate reconciliation is not just a stack of Bible verses. It is a key theme of the whole Bible, and it is essential to how we relate to God. We connect to God and love God because God first loves us. God is not a punisher; God is a healer. We fail, but God’s steadfast love “endures forever” – Psalms 136 repeats this truth twenty-six times! The redundant message doesn’t make for the most subtle poetry, but some truths need to be drilled into thick skulls. Despite the way that Christian history shows how we are experts at missing the point, those who know God best have always known that at the very heart of God is unfailing love.

— Brian Recker, Hell Bent, p. 104-105

Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, June 17, 2026

God’s Surprises

Acceptance, Community, God, Grace, Growth 0

I thought God wanted to use me to show gay people how to be straight. Instead God used gay people to show me how to be Christian.

I thought the world needed my answers, but as it turns out, I needed the world’s questions. I needed to learn how to doubt well, listen better, and be humbled by how little I know. I needed to discover that evangelicalism is just one table in Christ’s banquet hall, the Great Cloud of Witnesses far more sprawling and diverse than I’d ever imagined.

— Rachel Held Evans, Braving the Truth, p. 61

Photo: Dipladenia flowers, June 13, 2026