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 Joyous Yes

Acceptance, Joy 0

Saying No to the self does not necessarily please God or please anybody. There is too much resentment and self-pity involved. When God, by love and freedom, can create a joyous Yes inside of you — so much so that you can absorb the usual noes — then it is God’s full work. The first might be resentful dieting; the second is a spiritual banquet.

— Richard Rohr, Yes . . . And: Daily Meditations, p. 309

Photo: Sailboat off the coast of Étretat, France, June 23, 2026

The Heart of It All

Community, Faith, Love 0

The way you treat other people is the only meaningful expression of your belief system anyway; it is the space where your values are on full display. Theologians and seminary students call this orthopraxy (your actions) as opposed to orthodoxy (your beliefs). Jesus called it the “fruit” of a life: the tangible, visible, feel-able part of human beings that reflects whatever has taken root in their hearts. Most people call it being a person of your word. When it comes to the heart of it all, your religion isn’t what you believe, your religion is how you treat people. The only real theology that’s of worth is relational theology. It exists in no other way that is meaningful to another human being. Whatever you have floating around inside your head or might preach about regarding a God of love is ultimately inconsequential. Your beliefs take the infinite, stratospheric, wonder-filled things of the cosmos and shrink them down into something you can hold in your hand. As we live alongside people, the theoretical and the abstract become tangible, personal realities. Our theological stance is revealed in the small places where our lives rub shoulders with someone else’s. It’s really easy to parrot back that you “love your neighbor” but a far greater challenge to love your actual neighbor when your neighbor is an abject jackass.

— John Pavlovitz, Worth Fighting For, p. 62-63

Photo: Abbaye de Royaumont, France, June 24, 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