Stories do more than inform us. They form us. Abstract ideas tend to stay in the mind. Stories move into imagination, memory, identity, and action. God isn’t explaining life from a distance. He tells stories and invites us to find ourselves inside them.

May is Foster Care Awareness Month. For most people, that means a social media graphic, a statistic thrown out, or maybe a passing thought before moving on with the day. But for thousands of children, foster care is not a campaign or a hashtag. It’s a trash bag packed in a hurry. It’s learning new rules in a new house. It’s wondering if adults are temporary.

You won’t overcome the Ring by trying harder or tightening your grip. You’ll overcome it by loosening your grip, by refusing to play the game of power, and by extending mercy when it feels least deserved. And when your strength finally gives out, as it inevitably will, you may find that the mercy you carried with you all along is the very thing God uses to carry you home.

You know how to meditate. You do it most days. Meditation is simply what your mind already does. It loops. So the question is not whether you meditate, but what you meditate on. You don’t need to learn how to meditate. You need to change your diet.

The Bible is comprised of many different kinds of writing (genres) and individual books often contain more than one type. Understanding the features of the book we are reading or studying can add greatly to our understanding of that book and help protect us from misinterpreting or misapplying it.

You may never betray Jesus with a kiss. You may never exchange Him for thirty pieces of silver. But every time we choose our way over His, every time we try to force what only God can fulfill, every time we let unmet expectations turn into control, we step onto a road that looks more familiar than we’d like to admit.

The empty tomb is not just a celebration moment on a calendar. It is a declaration that the greatest fear that humanity has ever known, death itself, has been defeated. If death could not hold Jesus, then fear cannot hold those who belong to Him.

Just as the time of Advent prepares our hearts to honor Christ the Newborn King, Lent is a time that prepares our hearts to honor Christ the Crucified and Risen King. 

There’s something holy about learning to trust what you can’t see. The first disciples were blessed to walk with Jesus in person, to look into His eyes, and know. We’re blessed to walk by faith, to learn that even in what can feel like silence, He is closer than our breath.

As a good Father, God knows that rest is in our best interest. Not only that, but it also brings Him glory as it shifts our focus from our own strength to acknowledging our dependency upon Him. 

As 2026 nears, I hope you will lean in and get curious about how we might actually be transformed in Christ. Rather than a monumental change in our church practices, I hope this is a small, one-degree shift for our community. That by adjusting the ship one small degree – shifting how we talk about the Christian life, how we plan our gatherings, and what we expect of ourselves and one another – we end up massively changing where we wind up. 

The answer the Bible gives to the question, How do we change?, is not easily definable, and it is not a step-by-step process. But it is an invitation into a living, breathing, loving relationship with the Spirit of God. It is both an active work and an expectant surrender.