the christian calendar on Uncertainty

There are so many things we do not understand⁠ So many ways we long for change and closure⁠ Help us to trust you⁠ even when the situation is desperate and out of control⁠ Help us to follow you⁠ even...

Spirit of the Living God—Fall afresh on us this day. Spirit of God present and powerful, Spirit of God fruitful and faithful, Spirit of God filling and fulfilling us as children of the Father and foll...

One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already a...

Judgment is at hand, promise of judgment and threat of judgment.... It is the same sort of ambivalence which Christians have been taught to recognize in the season of Advent.

Faith is a voluntary anticipation.

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

God's movement is often abrupt and unsettling rather than predictable and settling.

Heavenly Father, we confess that we come to this day of resurrection as imperfect people. Although we may have faith, we also carry doubts and apprehensions. Just as Jesus’s disciples were unsure of h...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

Waiting is a period of learning. The longer we wait, the more we hear about him for whom we are waiting.

Our lives are eschatologically stretched between the sneak preview of the new world being born among us in the church, and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. ...

None climbs so high as he who knows not whither he is going.

In this season of Lent, O God, unsettle us. Increase in us that sense of gnawing that arises from the incongruity between our lives and the life to which you call us, and transform us in newness. Amen...

For those who first went out into the early dawn, when the sky was grey, taking spices to the tomb, there was terror, and surprise. For us, resisting the impulse to sleep in as part of a long weekend,...

In a very real sense, the Christian community lives in Advent all the time. It can well be called the Time Between, because the people of God live in the time between the first coming of Christ, incog...

In our secret yearnings we wait for your coming, and in our grinding despair we doubt that you will. And in this privileged place we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we and by those ...

To be sure, it was not Easter Sunday but Holy Saturday, but, the more I reflect on it, the more this seems to be fitting for the nature of our human life: we are still awaiting Easter; we are not yet ...

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and eve...

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before… .What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you. And you ...

There are two moments that matter. One is when you know that your one and only life is absolutely valuable and alive. The other is when you know your life, as presently lived, is entirely pointless an...

Advent is a season of expectant waiting, tapping into the sense we have that all is not well, the longing for the world to be made right again. It’s a season for restless hearts and people weary of a ...

Good Friday, and again we are reminded to never lose hope — or at least give it the weekend.

Most of us are under pressure, external and internal, to do everything, be good at everything, be accountable to everyone for everything! It is not so. In the divine economy each of us has a particula...

Is Easter a Lamont Butler kind of day or a Bubba Watson sort of day? On April 1, 2023, Lamont Butler buried the miracle buzzer-beater that advanced San Diego State to the NCAA national championship g...

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion ...

Anticipation lifts the heart. Desire is created to be fulfilled – perhaps not all at once, more likely in slow stages. Isaiah uttered his prophetic words about the renewal of the natural Creation into...

Ash Wednesday is full of joy...The source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust.

In his book, Scary Close , Donald Miller acknowledges that over time he developed a mask, or a persona that kept even those closest to him from experiencing with him. As he began to peel back layers ...