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

The Opposite of Faith

Faith, Love 0

Please remember that certainty – not doubt – is the opposite of faith. The insistence on certainty reveals a need for control, not a need for love or understanding. Historians agree that much violence in human history has been religiously based, the predictable collision of two absolutely certain or dogmatic worldviews. Those views can be relied on to give us certitudes about our superiority, our judgments, and our actions, and they are also our most reliable justifications for scapegoating others. In light of such thinking, punishment becomes a moral mandate. If we are the loved ones and the “best,” then the ever-present other has to be punished or eliminated. These are the obstacles to love that must be shaved away in all of us.

— Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things, p. 154

Photo: Cliffs of Étretat, June 23, 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

The Good News

Atonement, God, Love, Universalism 0

In story after story, Jesus reveals all the ways we’ve misunderstood and misrepresented God. This is the good news: God loves us and is here to rescue us, not to condemn us. Cast away the old visions of bearded Zeus, of paternalistic punishers, of Bible verses as weapons, of faraway fear coming home to roost, of switches and beatings described as love. Such things aren’t love. They never were.

The love of God isn’t a far-off destination we are striving to arrive at. Nor is it a prize that will be given to us only if we earn it. It’s not for the winners or the ones with answered prayers. It’s not just for the ones clutching their pearls over you. It’s not just for one denomination or church or religion. Now, we are all loved now.

— Sarah Bessey, Field Notes for the Wilderness, p. 62.

Photo: Zweibrücken Rose Garden, Germany, June 18, 2024.

Surprise Me.

Acceptance, Prayer, Truth 0

My brother told me about an interview he had read with the Dalai Lama, where the interviewer had asked, “What if you get to the other side of death and discover that your theory of reincarnation was all wrong? What if you discover that the truth is that we do not return and return to the earth, and therefore you could not be the reincarnation of the original Dalai Lama?”

“Then I would let go of the idea and accept the truth” was the Dalai Lama’s simple answer.

Clearly he is very comfortable with being proved wrong.

This has me thinking that I might have discovered my next daily prayer. Dear God, please disabuse me of my calcified notions of how you work in this world. Surprise me, please.

Please don’t ever let me think that I am finished.

— Margaret Dulaney, To Hear the Forest Sing, p. 170

Photo: Bluebell Trail, Bull Run Regional Park, Fairfax County, Virginia, April 3, 2026.

Multitude of Stories

God, Story 0

[About the Tower of Babel:]
But God intervenes, not to punish them, but to disrupt their project of homogenization. God creates diversity where there was uniformity, scattering them with new languages, new cultures, and a plethora of voices. They wanted control, but God imposed chaos – a kind of holy chaos that prevents the concentration of power.

Walter Brueggemann speaks to this, noting that a human unity, when built outside God’s will, often ends in “oppressive conformity.” The people of Babel weren’t just unified; they were uniform. And in that uniformity was a desire to control what was different and unpredictable. But the Spirit of God is a Spirit of disruption, making space for the multitude of stories that refuse to stay silent.

— Kat Armas, Liturgies for Resisting Empire, p. 145

Photo: Burnside Farms, Nokesville, Virginia, April 7, 2026