Sacred Reading: A Pathway to Connectivity

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

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Clare of Assisi provides spiritual counsel to Bohemian princess Agnes of Prague. She recommends praying before images of the cross: 

Gaze upon, examine, contemplate, most noble queen, desiring to follow your spouse…. If you suffer with him, you will reign with him. Grieving with him, you will rejoice with him. Dying with him on the cross of tribulation, you will possess mansions in heaven with him among the splendors of the saints, and your name will be recorded in the book of life. [1]
 
Franciscan friar and author Dan Riley (1943–2024) reflects on Clare’s second letter to Agnes and describes this experiential form of prayer as “Franciscan Lectio”: 

For Clare, Francis, and their followers, what we call “Lectio” always moves toward actio—the loving and healing action, the merciful movement toward justice. This is spherical in nature, out from the Crucified One in Christ, before whom you and I sit. She brings us into this sphere of love, around the axle—the primal tree.…
 
St. Bonaventure points to us a certain way of prioritizing “coming to know,” which involves placing ourselves in a place where we might learn more than to know…. In other words, this kind of knowing causes wonder to rise up from our hearts instead of dualism or certainty from our minds. To learn is to enter activity, even if it is dark or unclear or veiled or obscured. You and I journey in trust before the crucifix, a mirror for our lives. We come with our questions. We can be honest and real.
 
Riley notes that anything good, true, or beautiful can attract our gaze and invite sacred reading. In this form of prayer, wonder, gratitude, and connectivity can arise within our consciousness:

When Clare asks us to gaze upon the crucified Christ, the one whom she had long sat before, she is inviting us into an experience that will unfold differently for each of us. She is inviting us to gaze upon the Christ who has already risen, who has gone on before us into Galilee, … and entered the world wholly and fully alive. What emerges in her letters to Agnes is an invitation into the core of a beautiful, terrible mystery that is at the heart of all that is created: freedom in the Cosmic Christ. When she says “gaze upon,” I believe she is inviting us to open the focal point of our gaze. Clare was not caught up in her sinfulness while looking at the crucifix. She was rejoining the deep call of the suffering, dying, and resurrection of Christ. (She was doing Lectio with the crucifix.) She was looking at becoming one with the axis of the cosmos, the love-pole of life’s compass, and in this experience she was able to be a large enough “tent” for Agnes and others…. Again, we see in St. Clare the heart of Franciscanism: a deep, personal integrated journey within and through Christ and out into the world

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Matthew 14:22-33

Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. 

When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” 

When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

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This Sunday, the reading is one of the most dramatic in the New Testament. Jesus has sent his disciples out on a boat when a storm welled up on the sea. They can’t make the journey, the boat is caught in rough waves, and Jesus walks across the water to meet them. 

Peter saw Jesus but can’t quite believe his eyes. So, he challenged Jesus to help him walk across the water as well. Jesus did so. Peter walked, and then sank. Jesus nevertheless saved him, and then said, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” 

No one answered. It doesn’t entirely seem as if they understood. Because they “worshiped him.” I think they considered him a kind of magician, a miracle worker (there were more of them than you might think running around the ancient world). 

This isn’t one of my favorite New Testament stories. But today, one sentence stood out to me: 

“…the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them.”

Maybe this story isn’t really about Jesus. Maybe it is about his followers!

What happens to those who follow Jesus when they face headwinds, and they can’t make it to land?

And then I remembered: I’ve actually written about headwinds in Grateful. In that book, I learned how headwinds and tailwinds are foundational to practicing gratitude. When we recognize headwinds and tailwinds, our entire attitude shifts — and transforms us from ingrates to people who appreciate all the gifts of our lives.

I went back and read the section from Grateful, chapter 4.

One of the most interesting studies related to gratitude explores “headwinds” and “tailwinds” in our lives. Headwinds are exactly that: the resistance one encounters in a race, when “the wind is literally in the athlete’s face.” Tailwinds are the opposite, the “wind at one’s back.” Researchers Shai Davidai and Thomas Gilovich discovered that people tend to pay more attention to life’s headwinds because they are harder to overcome. We ignore tailwinds because we adjust to the advantages they give us. Tailwind benefits tend to be invisible. But headwinds? We boast of fighting them.

As in a race, headwinds and tailwinds work the same way in life. We remember difficult challenges more than what came easily to us. Because we pay more attention to what is hard, what we feel we have worked for, each one of us tends to believe that our own life is more difficult than pretty much everyone else’s, and that our path has been full of “barriers and challenges . . . more severe than those experienced by others.” 

This belief, in turn, causes envy. As the researchers note, “When people (falsely) believe that their road has been especially difficult, they can easily become resentful of those they (falsely) believe have had an easier path” resulting in feelings of thwarted entitlement. “The flip side of this toxic stew of resentment, envy, and entitlement,” claim Davidai and Gilovich, “is gratitude.” 

While we value the struggle and challenge of headwinds, we literally cannot see the gifts, the “tailwinds” that assist us. “An understanding of how easy it is for people to get in touch with their headwinds,” suggest the authors, “and how hard it is to fully appreciate their tailwinds can help explain why a consistent connection to gratitude can be so elusive.”^[1]

Sometimes, we might think of “blessings” as nice things, a kind of pious way of talking about material comfort or personal privilege. But what if “blessings” are, at least in part, the “tailwinds,” of our lives? 

The invisible benefits conferred on us – everything from political policies to economic advantages to social relationships – that we receive unnoticed are, indeed, blessings. In this framework, blessings emerge as the contributions others have made to our lives, either as personal gifts or gifts of a larger community (things such as a good public school paid for from tax money). 

Blessings are not pious rewards for good behavior. Blessings are the boost bestowed on us by systems, structures, families, and other benefactors who assist us on our way.

Headwinds: barriers. Tailwinds: blessings. Headwinds make us say, “I earned this.” Tailwinds should not be invisible. Instead, they should call forth, “I am so grateful.”

When I read the miracle story with this in mind, I realize how we often get stuck because of headwinds. 

Peter sank because he expected a particular sort of miracle from Jesus. Indeed, he insisted on a transaction. “Hey, Jesus, if it is really you, call me from this boat,” he dared, “and I’ll walk on the water, too!” 

It’s a strange request. “Jesus, I want to do it, too!” sounds a little a four-year old would say. But Jesus obliged. Maybe not because he wanted Peter to match his own feat — something that would surely prove his power. (Honestly, did Jesus really need to prove anything to these guys?) He wanted to teach them something winds and storms. Or, perhaps it was a larger lesson about God’s generosity and the sacred intention to provide and care for God’s people. 

There wasn’t much need for a second miracle. Jesus had done that. And he’d already assured him that everything would be fine. “It is I; don’t be afraid” 

That was their tailwind. Jesus was present. His gave his assurance. He loved them. He would protect them.

They should have turned their boat in that direction — so Jesus’ wind was behind them.

But they ignored it and wanted proof (at least Peter did!). Or, they wanted to face the whole situation head-on — to conquer it themselves. 

And so, the demand to defy the headwinds. “Make the wind and waves irrelevant,” Peter insisted. “I want to walk, too. I can do what you did!”

But the headwinds and the waves weren’t just some metaphor. They were real. And Peter’s transactional faith wasn’t up to the continuing storm. He started to sink. Headwinds are hard. Really hard.

Jesus is, however, still who Jesus was: “It is I; don’t be afraid.” That tailwind. The truth that had been at their backs — and sides. The very embodiment of God’s ancient promises of gifts and grace. 

So Jesus saved him. 

And they worshiped him; they gave him thanks. Not because they finally realized the tailwinds — or maybe they recognized them for just a moment. But they appear to worship him because of the miracle against the headwinds. 

But if they’d recognized headwinds and tailwinds from the beginning, they wouldn’t have needed to get bailed out by a miracle. They only needed to turn the boat in the right direction.

Would they ever recognize the tailwinds of their lives? Could they understand, at a profound level, how their very lives were gifts? That God loved and treasured and provided for them? And that God wanted the kingdom to come fully among them? For them to live in sabbath provision and genuine peace under their own vines and fig trees? 

Or would they stop focusing on the headwinds they faced? Because when we see headwinds for what they are — barriers to be overcome — and the tailwinds that are present — the blessings that we take for granted — everything changes. Especially us. 

For a moment, maybe the disciples changed. They did say “thank you.” But I wonder: how much did the lesson of the storm stick? Or did the lesson fade when they arrived at the far shore?

How often do we thank God when a headwind is stilled, a barrier is overcome? An emergency, a health scare, a tragedy — only to get off the boat and go back to exactly as we were? 

Most of time. At least that’s true for me.

We need to remember the real lesson of the storm. Not a transaction of salvation, not a magic lesson to reveal Jesus’ identity. Rather, this lesson shows us how hard it is to remember the tailwind of grace always present, even in the storm — “It is I; don’t be afraid.”

And maybe just turn your boat around. Set your sail aright.

You’ll be grateful you did.

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

Feast Day of Clare of Assisi

Sister Margaret Carney tells of the radical trajectory of Clare of Assisi’s life, who left behind wealth and social standing under cover of night in exchange for a simple life devoted to God:

The year was 1212. On Palm Sunday morning she attended the Mass in the cathedral…. Late that same night, Clare left her home on the piazza of San Rufino…. The gate by which she could leave the city after curfew was in a section owned by the bishop—the palm branch [he went out of his way to give to her that morning at Mass] might also have served as an “all clear” relative to the route she must take…. Once on the other side of this gate and Assisi’s protective walls, she would become a citizen of another “commune” of Gospel striving….

Finally, she arrived at the tiny church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. Once there, she was formally received by Francis in a carefully orchestrated ritual. Her beautiful clothing was exchanged for a penitent’s robe. Francis himself cut her hair—the time-honored tradition for women seeking to leave the world to live by religious vows…. In the presence of the brothers, Clare professed her dedication to Jesus, and, like them, to poverty and their simple rule. All that she once claimed as a member of a noble family was put aside. [1]
 
In one of Clare’s letters, we sense the depth of her contemplative life: 

Place your mind before the mirror of eternity! Place your soul in the brilliance of glory! Place your heart in the figure of the divine substance, and through contemplation, allow your entire being to be transformed into the image of the Godhead itself, so that you may feel what friends feel, and taste the hidden sweetness that God has reserved for His lovers. [2]

Richard Rohr reflects: 

This profound quote, that could only emerge as a fruit of contemplation, along with her very frequent use of the mirror metaphor in her writings, communicates to me that Clare experientially understood prayer as an actual transformation of the self, a reflected glory, even daring to speak of “allowing your entire being to be transformed into the image of the Godhead itself.” This was surely not common Catholic language in the Western Church at that time and would have seemed presumptuous or even heretical to many (as it may even seem today).

Clare directly expresses what the Eastern Church held onto under the name of divinization (theosis). Theosis was understood as a true, objective sharing and growing in our divine nature, which was then reflected and received in humans as in a mirror. All we can really do is polish our own mirror to reflect the gift of this Godself more perfectly. Thus the objectively given “image” at our conception becomes subjective “likeness” over time, building on the foundational metaphors that we were created in both the image and the likeness of God

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The Man Who Ran

Back to Maturity, Part Two

JASON TWOMBLY AUG 10

It was Mother’s Day.

I’d taken the kids to Walmart after church to grab a tablecloth for David’s sixth-grade project. Simple errand. Twenty minutes, in and out.

But church had already been its own weight. Mother’s Day as a widowed single dad is a particular kind of hard. You sit in the pew, you sing the songs, you watch other families move through it intact, and you carry something nobody in the room can quite see. By the time we walked out into that parking lot, I was already running on fumes (not the tired kind, the grief kind). The kind that sits just below the surface and waits for something small to tip it.

Someone had left the stereo running while we were inside Walmart. By the time we came back out to the parking lot, the battery was dead.

I want to be honest about what happened next.

When that battery died, something in me flipped. And instead of staying with my kids and solving the problem from where we stood, I ran. Five miles home, in my church shoes, to get another car and jumper cables. Leaving my three kids alone in that Walmart parking lot.

Here’s the thing: I was training for a marathon at the time. Five miles was nothing. My body didn’t even register it as a decision. And I told myself the kids would be fine, which they were. But that’s exactly what makes overwhelm so disorienting, it doesn’t feel like panic. It feels like logic. It feels like you’re handling something. What I couldn’t see, sprinting down the road in my dress shoes, was the image I was leaving behind. And what my kids were watching their dad do instead of stay.

In the moment it felt like decisive action.

Looking back, my overwhelm had taken the wheel. And my children paid the fare.

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Years later I came across a short video by Dr. Dan Siegel, the neuropsychiatrist and author who developed the concept he calls “flipping your lid.” In it, he uses his hand as a model of the brain to explain what happens when the prefrontal cortex (the part responsible for judgment, empathy, and regulated response) goes offline under stress. The lid flips. The rational brain disconnects. And what takes over isn’t evil or weak. It’s just the oldest part of your brain doing what it was built to do: survive.

I watched that video and I could smell that parking lot again.

For the first time, I understood what had actually happened that day. Not an excuse. Not a pass. But an explanation that quietly removed the shame and replaced it with something more useful: understanding. Because you can’t grow what you can’t see clearly, and shame makes everything blurry.

(I’ve linked the video below. If you’ve ever wondered why you said what you said, did what you did, or left when you should have stayed, watch it. It might do for you what it did for me.)

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That story surfaced in a men’s gathering I lead called MANCAVE. We were practicing something in this month’s coaching practice called “Back to Maturity Stories” (moments that quietly reveal where we stopped growing, usually in the most ordinary-looking scenes of our lives). When I told that Walmart story out loud, to a room full of men, something shifted in the telling. Not because it was dramatic. Because it was true.

And because the men in that room recognized it.

Not that exact story. But the shape of it, the man who, under pressure, disappears. Who mistakes movement for leadership. Who handles his own overwhelm by leaving the people who needed him to stay.

That shape has a name. And it lives inside a framework I’ve been training in MANCAVE, drawn from decades of maturity research and practice, the work of Dr. Jim Wilder in relational neuroscience, the Life Model carried forward by the team at LK10, and Marcus Warner’s work in Rare Leadership. These voices don’t all say exactly the same thing, but they’re mapping the same territory.

That territory looks like this. Human maturity moves across five stages, each with a core task:

Infant — the task is learning to receive. Not earning, not performing. Simply letting someone give you what you need before you know how to ask.

Child — the task is learning to ask for what you need. To do hard things on purpose. To discover what actually satisfies, not just what distracts.

Adult — the task is learning to take care of two people at once. Yourself and another, simultaneously. Taking responsibility for how your actions land on the people around you (including protecting them from your own unregulated self).

Parent — the task is giving without keeping score. Pouring into others without needing it returned.

Elder — the task is carrying the whole community. Staying yourself under fire. Being steady when everyone around you needs someone to hold the room.

Here’s what matters: your body doesn’t graduate a stage just because you had a birthday. Most of us are a mix (solid in one area of life, still working through something unfinished in another). That’s not a flaw. That’s just where growth still has room to go.

The Walmart parking lot? That was an Adult-stage task I hadn’t finished. I failed at the precise thing the Adult stage asks of us: taking responsibility for how my actions land on the people I love, and protecting them from my own overwhelm rather than leaving them to weather it alone.

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When a task at any stage doesn’t get finished, the researchers and practitioners in this space are consistent: the gap doesn’t stay invisible. It surfaces. It shows up as:

Avoidance — the world quietly gets smaller. We fill it with noise, or with work, anything to avoid what’s waiting at home.

Addiction — almost always a sign something is unfinished underneath. Not a moral failure. A developmental gap looking for relief.

Anxiety — a lower capacity means it takes less to overwhelm us. And overwhelm, over time, turns into fear about everything ahead.

Anger — a short fuse is one of the clearest signs of an unfinished task. Returning to calm from anger is a skill. If nobody taught it to you, of course you don’t have it yet.

None of these mean something is wrong with you as a man. They mean there’s work still to be done. And that work can be done.

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Here’s what I’ve learned to do with a moment like the Walmart battery: the redo.

Not to shame the man who ran. He was doing the best his nervous system could do that day. The grief was real. The overwhelm was real. But naming what I’d do differently is how I actually build the muscle for next time.

If I could walk back into that parking lot today, I’d stay. I’d ask the nearest person walking by for jumper cables, or I’d walk back into the store with my kids and ask an associate for help. My children would watch their dad handle a hard moment without disappearing (solving the problem while staying present with the people it most affected).

That’s the redo. Not just fixing the car. Staying with my children while I fixed it. Protecting them from my own flipped lid instead of leaving them to weather it alone.

The man who ran was doing his best. The man learning to stay is doing the work.

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This is what Back to Maturity stories are built for, not to catalog your failures, but to find the ordinary moments that are still quietly shaping you, name what task they’re pointing to, and practice what it would look like to finish what wasn’t finished.

We do this work inside MANCAVE every session. If you’re a man who recognizes the shape of that parking lot (the moment where you moved instead of stayed, handled instead of held) you’re not alone. And it’s not too late to learn what you were never shown.

You can’t go back. But you can grow forward into someone who stays. What you practice now shapes who shows up next time.

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Grace and Connectivity

Sunday, August 9, 2026

Father Richard Rohr describes how grace and connectivity are foundational to Franciscan mysticism: 

Before talking specifically about Franciscan mysticism, the meaning of the word mysticism needs to be clarified. As its Greek root form mu (closed eyes or lips) implies, mysticism is pointing to something that is somehow hidden and cannot be easily seen or talked about. A mystic reveals that which is hidden to most of us, yet it is also invariably what we also hope and imagine to be true! True mystics seldom if ever bring bad news. It seems Reality, at its hidden and deepest levels, is always very good—better than most of us can imagine!
 
I use the word mysticism in a very traditional and classic sense. It is not pointing to something esoteric and unavailable to the masses, but it does point to something that is only available to those who go beyond the surface and exterior, those who experience the inner grace and connectivity of all things. I emphasize connectivity because that unteachable gift is what I always see in true mystics. Mystics know and enjoy the connected core of reality. They look out from a different pair of eyes that see the grace in all things and the deep connection between all things.
 
Franciscan mysticism is a subset of mysticism. Though it overlaps with aspects of non-Christian mysticism—such as nature mysticism, Islamic Sufi mysticism (ecstasy and joy), Hindu mysticism (unitive consciousness itself and asceticism), and Buddhism (nonviolence and simplicity)—Franciscan mysticism has a unique place in the world through its Christocentric lens. 

It was the unique person of Jesus that Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) fell in love with, precisely in his incarnate and humble state, identifying with the excluded and little ones, whom Jesus calls “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40). The bias toward the edge and the bottom has always been at the heart of Franciscan mysticism, explaining its perennial identification with poverty and suffering.

The cosmic vision, personalized in Jesus, was an intuition that Francis and many of his followers lived and experienced, but most of them did not formulate it in theological words or academic concepts as much as in lifestyles. Usually they picked it up by osmosis, through the gospel and the Franciscan lineage. Followers of Francis bore “fruit that remained” and invariably believed in original blessing much more than original sin.

Franciscan mysticism is therefore not really about Francis, but about a universal notion of Christ and therefore all reality. Francis pushes all of our seeing to the absolute edge by always including those whom other systems might too easily exclude—lepers, non-Christians, poor people, hated outsiders. When it loses that “edgy” position, it might be mini-mysticism, or even church mysticism, but it is never Franciscan mysticism. Francis knew that only love is big enough to handle and hold truth. Truth which is not loving, joyful, and inclusive is never the Great Truth.

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The Infinite in the Finite

Monday, August 10, 2026

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Father Richard explores how Franciscan mysticism invites us to encounter divine presence in our concrete, specific lives: 

Francis of Assisi knew that if we could accept that the finite manifests the infinite, and that the physical is the doorway to the spiritual (which is the foundational principle we call “incarnation”), then all we need is right here and right now—in this world. This is the way to that! Heaven includes earth. Time opens us up to the timeless, space opens us up to spacelessness, if only we take them for the clear doorways that they are. There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our willful blindness and lack of reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it. We really cannot get any better or more simple than that in terms of a spiritual vision.

The realization that the concrete opens us up to the universal might be the only fully trustworthy or possible path anyway, because that is how sensate humans normally operate. Abstract ideology will not get us very far, and much common religion is ideology more than any real encounter with Presence. But we all must start with our anecdotal experience and then build from there. People all over the world are rejecting the ideological (top-down) form of religion—and they should, because this is not the path of Christ himself.

By taking the mystery of the Incarnation absolutely seriously and gradually extending it to its logical conclusions, the seeming limitations of space and time are once and for all overcome in Francis. The Christ Mystery refuses to be vague or abstract and is always concrete and specific. When we stay with these daily apparitions, we see that everything is a revelation of the divine—from rocks to rocket ships. There are henceforth no blind spots in the divine disclosure, in our own eyes, or in our rearview mirrors. The only hindrance to our seeing is our own lack of fascination, humility, curiosity, awe, and willingness to be allured forward.

Franciscan spirituality emphasizes a real equivalence and mutuality between the one who sees and what can be seen. There is a symbiosis between the mind and heart of the seer—and to what they will then pay attention. Francis had a unique ability to call others—animals, planets, and elements —“brother” and “sister” because he himself was a little brother. He granted other beings and things mutuality, subjectivity, “personhood,” and dignity because he first honored his own dignity as a son of God. The world was a transparent two-way mirror for him, which some of us would call a fully “sacramental” universe.”

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Individual Reflection

What’s one ordinary, physical thing in your life right now that you’ve stopped seeing as sacred?

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Group Discussion — choose one:

1. Rohr says there’s no such thing as sacred and profane places — only sacred and desecrated ones, and “we alone” do the desecrating. Where have you desecrated something by not paying attention to it?
2. Francis called elements and animals “brother” and “sister.” What would it mean to grant that kind of mutuality and dignity to something you currently just use?
3. “Abstract ideology will not get us very far… we all must start with our anecdotal experience.” What’s one concrete, specific moment that taught you more about God than any idea did?

From Suffering to Sacred Wounds

Friday, August 7, 2026

Father Richard reflects on Job’s story as a source of wisdom about the path of transformation:

No piece of religious literature teaches the way of “descent” more daringly and effectively than the book of Job. The story cries out against a darkness that refuses to reveal itself—and a path that does not feel at first like life at all. This makes it a challenging but important text for those of us in the West who tend to resist the archetypal and necessary journey of “descent.” We have been able to manufacture a kind of “ascent” unlike that of our ancestors. Reason, medicine, technology, and speed have allowed us to avoid the ordinary “path of the fall.” Now we are unpracticed and afraid of all kinds of suffering—big and small.

At the same time, no book is less an answer book than the book of Job. It fixes nothing, explains nothing, and dismisses those who even try to explain, yet the story of Job realigns and regenerates the soul in ways that few books can.

If the postmodern crisis is above all else a crisis of the self, and I think it is, then the story of Job realigns the “self”—correctly, humbly, and truthfully. What both Job and Jesus seem to say is that truth is finally a person and an encounter—much more than a concept that can be argued. It is not quick or easy to encounter the true self or the true God. Both encounters require a gradual unveiling that is both sacred and full of suffering. Every movement toward union with God will feel like a loss of self-importance and self-control. We are realigned with truth when the real person meets the real God—which is exactly the stuff of spirituality, good theology, and transformation.

The book of Job ultimately assures us that faith can forever be found, like the hill of Calvary, “outside the walls.” In fact, that is where it finds its most ready soil—at the bottom, the broken, the edges of things.

If no meaning can be given to human suffering, if our wounds are not capable of becoming sacred wounds, the human project is surely doomed to a blaming war of all against all. The future, like the past, will be full of scapegoats and victims. This is no peripheral question the book of Job pursues.

Without the response from God in the whirlwind—what we might call today the sacred or transcendent dimension—life will surely be “nasty, brutish, and short” for most people in the twenty-first century. There will be no place to go to make our wounds sacred, but they will still be wounds, sore and bleeding. If there is no voice from the whirlwind, no calming eyes in the heart of the tempest, humanity can only “sit on its dung heap picking at its sores.” But in Job and in Jesus, we have heard a story that is always true, a story that makes all our wounds sacred.

Reference:
Adapted from Richard Rohr, Job and the Mystery of Suffering: Spiritual Reflections (Crossroad Publishing, 1996), 185–187.

1.

“Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.”

– Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy

Well, I guess according to Dante Alighieri, it is brutish to follow vices and foolishness.

I think that as an itinerant rabbi, Jesus would agree with that.

2.

“The closer one approaches to God, the simpler one becomes.”

– St. Therese of the Child Jesus

This one has stood out to me since I read Therese’s autobiography, The Story of a Soul.

I think I was simple in my youth.  I do not mean this in any pejorative way, just that I did not have any extravagant ideas or things that made me really stand out.

Then, in my teenage years and college years (and perhaps even in my young adult years), I wanted to be seen as complex, interesting, with deep thoughts that were unique and adventurous.

But now….

Not so much.

Now, I realize the value and the beauty of the simple life.  I enjoy a simple morning, beautiful music, etc.  Gone are the days when I wanted to watch shows or movies with intense adventure or high stakes.  I’ve seen enough of the world’s complexity and violence that I would truly choose the quiet, simple life every day if I could.

Perhaps that is one marker of knowing that you have entered the “second half of life,” in that we then begin to prefer the quiet, simple, and small life.

3.

“One who really loves another is not merely moved by the desire to see him contented and healthy and prosperous in this world. Love cannot be satisfied with anything so incomplete. If I am to love my brother, I must somehow enter deep into the mystery of God’s love for him.”

– Thomas Merton in No Man is an Island

The first chapter of No Man is an Island is called “Love Can Only Be Kept By Being Given Away.”  Thus far, it is still the best chapter I have ever read on godly love.

The world has a relatively low bar for love, in that it might just be happy with us being content, healthy, and prosperous.

What is interesting is that godly love is different because it seeks the deep, mysterious good of God’s love for another person.

And, let’s be honest…  Being content, healthy, and prosperous can actually become hindrances to the Good happening in our lives.

What if we are content with things that we ought to fight against?
What if, being healthy, we fail to recognize our interdependence with one another?
What if being prosperous leads us to be stingy with our money, or impulsive with what we choose to buy, and then regret it?

To love at all means that we must want the Good for one another, and that includes wanting the mystery of the love of God.  As Merton says, we must enter deeply into the mystery of God’s love for other people.

4.

“Lukewarm people don’t really want to be saved from their sin; they want only to be saved from the penalty of their sin.”

– George MacDonald in Unspoken Sermons

Two or three years ago, I bought a hardcover copy of all of George MacDonald’s sermons.  I read half of them, and then life got in the way.

One thing that fascinates me is how, even though MacDonald was a Scottish preacher in the late 1800s, he read very much like the early Patristics of Church history.  There is something about his theology and way with words that is refreshing, precise, holy, integrated, and joyful.

MacDonald is the first theologian I know of to articulate how mercy and judgment can coexist in God.  These two things, mercy and judgment, are not mutually exclusive.  There can be mercy even as there is judgment, and there can be judgment even as there is mercy.

Modern Western Christianity, however, wants to hold these two things apart.

We either want full judgment without any mercy for some (usually for others) or full mercy without any judgment for others (usually for ourselves or those close to us).

MacDonald helped me understand that, in the justice of God, our vices do not disqualify us from God, yet that does not mean we will not experience the repercussions, consequences, or the need to make amends.

5.

“The trouble is that we live far from ourselves and have but little wish to get any nearer to ourselves. Indeed, we are running away all the time to avoid coming face to face with our real selves, and we barter the truth for trifles.”

– The Way of a Pilgrim (Russian Spiritual Classic)

Is it just a human thing to want to run from ourselves?

Dogs don’t do it.  Cats don’t do it.  Neither do horses.

Why is it that we are so uncomfortable with ourselves?

Perhaps it is because we each have an archetypal understanding of what it means to be a human being, a mental image to which we are constantly inspired by as well as judged by.

Cats, dogs, and horses don’t have an “ideal” version of themselves.  They simply are what they are.

For some of us, our image of what it means to be human might inspire us to go to the gym, do helpful work in the world, and be creative in ways unique to us.  For others, their image of what it means to be human is so far removed from who we are that we probably run from or avoid confronting the gap between our ideals and ourselves.

It is not an easy thing to drink reality straight and look at all the ways we fail to live up to our ideals.

I say all this because I think Jesus is interesting as the archetypal human.  He is our image of what it means to be a “perfect human,” and as such, he inspires us and causes us to “aim higher.”  And, in the same breath, he “judges” us for all the ways that we do not live up to that ideal and forgives us anyway.  As our archetype of what it means to be human, Jesus inspires, judges, and forgives.

Job And The Mystery Of Suffering

Unjust Suffering Continues

Thursday, August 6, 2026

Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembrance Day

Studying the book of Job with Christians in Central Africa, the theologian Jason Carter witnessed their deep solidarity with the text. In this excerpt, a theology student, part of the indigenous Fang community in Equatorial Guinea, writes a letter to Job, sharing his own experiences of suffering:

Brother Job,

Each time that I read the Scriptures and meditate on your afflictions and the complaints and accusations that your friends made against you, I ask myself if you have been reincarnated in me….

The truth is that the world is unjust. Just like you, I passed through three horrible years in which I lost two of my children. One died through an illness. After his death, people from the outside, including my own relatives, said that it was through the witchcraft of my wife’s family. We almost separated. The other child (six years old) died in a fire in which there was not a chance to remove even one single belonging from the house…. The people attributed the fire to my wife being irresponsible, others affirmed that it was a punishment of God against us because we had done something bad—that God had paid us back with … just judgment…. My own heart told me: “Where is the God that you serve and how is it that [God] allowed you to pass through all of this?”

My country is being devastated with all types of epidemics, sicknesses whose origins are still undiscovered, and horrible deaths. But every time that a person suffers from these things, the idea of others is always that the victims have to confess what they have done…. I can almost say that the reasoning of your three friends is typical in my culture. All suffering here is linked to witchcraft or to a sin for which God is judging the person or all the family…. I have listened to people lament and cry, saying: “If God exists, why has [God] permitted this? I don’t deserve it, it’s not fair!” Others have even taken their lives to prevent further suffering.

In short, this is what we live with every day. With the death of innocent children, … people who have studied but live poor without jobs, people that suffer sicknesses without knowing where it comes from. Nevertheless many criminals appear increasingly successful in life.

Job, I admire your courage and your mature attitude in responding to your wife and your integrity. Despite everything, you didn’t blaspheme against God in all of that (2:9–10). I admire your humble response to God. It’s true that the way in which many can demonstrate wisdom is to be silent when the cause is unknown—and not open one’s mouth to speak foolishness or falsely accuse the victims….

Your story truly gives me hope. It gives me the feeling that while man lives on the earth, there is no guarantee that he will not suffer, however innocent or righteous he may be.

I wish that everyone could learn from you.

Sincerely,
Your brother Gregorio Nsomboro

Reference:
Jason A. Carter, Inside the Whirlwind: The Book of Job Through African Eyes (Pickwick Publications, 2017), 166–167.

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Bradley Jersak

“Living Presence” 

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Anxiety

AUG 01, 2026

In his profoundly helpful forthcoming book, Ancient Wisdom for Modern Anxiety: Finding Relief through Curiosity and Wonder (Whitaker House, 2027 – preorders available now), Paul E. Ralph (hereafter PER or Paul) uses the personified language of “Living Presence” as a divine name or title. I like that for reasons I’ll mention below. 

Paul isn’t the first to use the phrase—a few earlier examples are notable:

J.A. Motyer (OT scholar and former Principal of Trinity College, Bristol) once wrote,

Over and over again in the Old Testament you come across the familiar phrase, “The word of the LORD came to …” Now in Hebrew that is: ‘The word of the LORD was to …’ The verb used is the verb ‘to be’, not a verb of motion but a verb of realistic experience. ‘The word of God became a living reality to …’ The verb ‘to be’ in Hebrew means living reality, living presence, not just some bare abstract idea of existence as compared with non-existence. When God focusses attention upon this divine name, ‘I am Yahweh’, he is saying, ‘I am the God of living presence with my people…’ 

J.A. Motyer, “The Normative Covenant,” Evangel (April, 1983), 4.

A decade later, Kabir Edmund Helminski wrote a book that draws on the wisdom of Sufism to address contemporary life. He titled it Living Presence: A Sufi Way to Mindfulness & the Essential Self (Tarcher, 1992). 

Rounding out the Abrahamic religions, PER cites Nahum Ward-Lev’s book on the Hebrew prophets as one of his sources to using the phrase as a proper name: 

Seeking an alternative to “the Lord,” I have chosen to translate God’s Name as “the Living Presence.” … The four letters of God’s Name seem to refer to “being” itself, to “Being” or “Being-ness” that transcends time. My use of “the Living Presence” is also guided by God’s interaction with Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks for God’s Name, God replies, “I will be what I will be” (Exodus 3:14). With this response, God both informs Moses that God’s nature cannot be defined by any limiting quality, such as a name, and God assures Moses that God will be with him throughout time. Looking for a term that reflects this sense of “Being” or “Being-ness” accompanying human beings and creation throughout time, I chose the term “the Living Presence.”

Nahum Ward-Lev. The Liberating Path of the Hebrew Prophets Then and Now (Orbis Books, 2019).

All of these uses of “living presence” are descriptions or translations, but in Paul’s book and in our prayers together, he often uses that term as a proper name: 

“Living Presence, help me stay curious.”

I find this especially helpful on several fronts. To begin with, it is inclusive. Paul’s intentional use of the phrase welcomes all. It allows space for those who are suspicious of terms like “God”—a placeholder both too vague and too narrow to those who don’t identify with a faith tradition. 

Unlike “Ground of Being,” “Ultimate Reality,” or “Sacred Presence,” Living Presence is deeply biblical in resonance (“the living God,” but so far, unburdened by centuries of doctrinal or philosophical baggage.

For me personally, as I work in interfaith spaces, terms like “universe” or “the divine” seem too impersonal. I have no objection to those who use them (as I do if it helps them), but “Living Presence” includes the immanence (radical nearness) and intimacy that pairs well with our experiences of infinite Love. 

In that sense, Living Presence is a descriptor vast enough for anyone whose concept of a “higher power” is also open to the Mystery of Something or Someone that is at least as relational, responsive, and caring as the mother archetype. 

Further, even religious notions of “God” can become a non-experience of “dead absence.” “Living Presence” acknowledges an immersion (“in whom we live and move and have our being”) and an indwelling (infinite Love encountered within us). Yet even the agnostic is welcome to experience and experiment with the transforming aspects of a more impersonal living presence apart from the imaginary “old man in the sky” imagery of God. Paul’s meditations on the Living Presence require no prior faith commitment—all he asks for is openness to be met and held in our anxiety. 

I love Paul and I love this book. Well worth the pre-order while you remember.

Wednesday, August 5, 2026

READ ON CAC.ORG

There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people?
—Rabbi Harold Kushner

Through his classic exploration of the book of Job, Rabbi Harold Kushner (1935–2023) questions the common belief that God is all-powerful:

The author of the Book of Job … believes in God’s goodness and in Job’s goodness, and is prepared to give up his belief … that God is all-powerful. Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it….

There may be a sense of loss at coming to this conclusion. In a way, it was comforting to believe in an all-wise, all-powerful God who guaranteed fair treatment and happy endings, who reassured us that everything happened for a reason…. But it was comforting the way the religion of Job’s friends was comforting: it worked only as long as we did not take the problems of innocent victims seriously. When we have met Job, when we have been Job, we cannot believe in that sort of God any longer without giving up our own right to feel angry, to feel that we have been treated badly by life.

From that perspective, there ought to be a sense of relief in coming to the conclusion that God is not doing this to us. If God is a God of justice and not of power, then He can still be on our side when bad things happen to us. He can know that we are good and honest people who deserve better. Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help. Our question will not be Job’s question “God, why are You doing this to me?” but rather “God, see what is happening to me. Can You help me?” We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.

Kushner describes the divine intimacy we can experience when we are released from the belief that God is responsible for our suffering: 

We will be able to turn to God for things He can do to help us, instead of holding on to unrealistic expectations of Him which will never come about….

We can maintain our own self-respect and sense of goodness without having to feel that God has judged us and condemned us. We can be angry at what has happened to us, without feeling that we are angry at God. More than that, we can recognize our anger at life’s unfairness, our instinctive compassion at seeing people suffer, as coming from God who teaches us to be angry at injustice and to feel compassion for the afflicted. Instead of feeling that we are opposed to God, we can feel that our indignation is God’s anger at unfairness working through us, that when we cry out, we are still on God’s side, and He is still on ours.

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Haiti 1992 – Loosing the Chains of Injustice 

Ode to Lilut, the Bluntchlis, and Justice Bradley 

BRADLEY JERSAK AUG 4

THE SOLDIER PLAYED with the safety of his M-16 assault rifle, and I thought I was going to be sick. It seemed like an awful nightmare, but I was awake—more fully awake than at any previous moment of my life.

It was November 1992. Desarmes, Haiti. After a coup d’etat, the paramilitary Macoutes no longer merely terrorized the countryside; they were actually running it. And they wielded an iron fist in this village in the Haitian outback. Groups larger than three could not meet without a permit. Youth groups and farmers’ co-ops were forbidden, their leaders arrested. Checkpoints monitored traffic on the dirt roads.

Lares, a Haitian national serving the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) as an agricultural trainer, had been arrested for allegedly distributing a disparaging letter against the local military chief. The soldiers had hog-tied him and beaten him with clubs about the head, ears, back, and thighs. We tried to bribe them but now they also declared their true intentions: “Tonight, we will get drunk and beat him to death. By morning, he will be dead. No bribes.”

Now Ron Bluntchli, our MCC host and guide, was standing face-to-face with an armed guard and speaking boldly in Creole: “God is your judge, and he is watching you! You will stand before him one day. He sees you now, and you will answer to him. He will hold you to account for this! God will not tolerate this injustice. Set this man free now!”

Questions began to race through my mind: Would they really kill Lares? Would they kill Ron? Would they dare? What about me? Could I escape with my wife, now six months pregnant? God? Where are you? What are you doing? What should we do?

As I listened, the Lord spoke to my heart:

“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?” (Isaiah 58:6–7)

I could longer spiritualize those verses away. This is very real, and in this context, it is exactly what Isaiah was talking about.”

But how?

How could we liberate this actual prisoner—bound in actual nylon cords—from an armed, flesh and-blood oppressor? To break this stalemate could easily escalate the crisis, right?

I watched and waited, focusing on keeping my head and my churning bowels together. Ron would not back down. He believed that without witnesses, the Macoutes would stir up the courage to kill Lares. A crowd began to gather. Mugginess and tension pressed in. We cried out to the Lord in prayer, but despair threatened to win the day.

I was beginning to see through the blindness of those Christians who accuse organizations like MCC and Christian Peace Maker Teams of being “too political.” I had heard it before and even wondered myself: “Shouldn’t they stick to relief work or channeling their energies into ‘soul-winning’? Why do they have to get so political?” In the Haitian context, where life and death stand in stark contrast every day, souls are people. And the people are naked, starving, and oppressed. There is no fence of ambiguity to straddle. The choice was as simple as it was hard: we could either walk away now in silent acquiescence to the misery and evil or we could speak out and act for justice and mercy, hoping to overcome evil with good. To follow Christ in the moment left us no choice, regardless of what the critics believe.

In North America, people in my demographic rarely understand this. Dom Helder Camara, the former Archbishop of Recife, Brazil once lamented, “When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”

Now I was getting a crash-course on kingdom justice and mercy. I was coming to realize these are not merely temporal matters of politics or philanthropy that can be isolated from one’s spiritual life. They are of eternal importance and will be addressed when Christ renders verdicts on Judgment Day. (cf. Matthew 25)

When the Day of Judgment comes, what we have done or neglected to do for the naked, the hungry, the prisoner, the sick, and the oppressed will be identified with what we did or did not do for the King. He will ask:

“Did you feed me and clothe me or did you not? Did you welcome me, visit me, comfort me, free me, or not? You either came to me or abandoned me. If you helped them, you helped me. If not, I don’t believe I know you.”

On that day, whether we were “left” or “right” in our earthly politics will matter little when the divine judge beckons us to his left or his right. Whether we were conservative or liberal in our theology will flee from our minds. Even whether we said “the magic prayer” will ring shallow in that moment. But whether or not we did justice, loved mercy, and walked humbly with God will be of paramount concern (Micah 6:8). The New Testament teaches that we are saved by faith in the grace of God and not by performative works (Ephesians 2:8–9). However, it also states that a truly living faith will not fail to reproduce the character of Christ in our lives, by which I mean our actions(James 2:26).

The ministries of Matthew 25 are not afterthoughts of Christian charity held in place with refrigerator magnets. They are the foundation of the very throne of God!

“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; love and faithfulness go before you. Blessed are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence, O LORD” (Psalm 89:14).

Once we have heard, we must follow through with action.

Back to Haiti. As I stood there trembling, a little boy with a bright white, perfectly ironed shirt approached me. The boy, Lilut, was eleven years old, with very dark skin and bright white teeth. In the middle of this moment of hell, he smiled comfort at me and began to rub my back. I saw Jesus looking at me through those big eyes. They said, “It’s going to be okay.”

Ron continued to lay his life on the line, demanding immediate release of the prisoner. The guard rebutted: “We cannot release him without a court order.” What an odd “justice” system. You could arrest, sentence, and punish a man without so much as a warrant or any shred of evidence, but to free him required a trial.

“Then let’s go to the judge,” Ron countered.

“The judge is in the next town,” the guard replied.

“Then we’ll go to the next town.”

“We have no truck.”

Ron pulled out his keys. “We’ll take my truck.”

Under the unrelenting pressure from Ron, foreign witnesses, and the entire village, the chief ran out of excuses. They loaded the prisoner and a handful of soldiers into the back of Ron’s pick-up and disappeared with Ron at the wheel down the riverbed road. Eden and I waited anxiously and prayed through the night. What would happen? What if they didn’t return? What would happen to Ron? What if the soldiers came for us next? How would I get Eden back to Port-au-Prince? What if…?

Eventually, God broke through my troubled thoughts with a measure of peace. I found some dry bread with avocado to settle my stomach and was finally able to get a little sleep.

The next morning, we heard the truck returning. Villagers poured out of their homes and lined the dusty road. The whole crew was returning, but now the ropes had been removed from Lares. He stood in the truck box smiling and waving at the crowds in this impromptu remake of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He was free! Men, women, and children began to chant in unison, “God is able! God is able!”

Apparently, the courthouse in the next town had put Lares in custody for the night (which likely saved his life) and the judge had thrown out the case for absence of evidence.

And there was Lilut, bright white eyes, teeth, and shirt, smiling at me through the dust—little Jesus in our midst.

P.S. Immediately after our Isaiah 58 encounter, I wrote in my journal, “If the child in Eden’s womb is a boy, name him “Justice.” Three months later, Justice Bradley Jersak was born.

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

Before Job’s friends launch into their lengthy speeches trying to justify Job’s suffering, Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis points out that their most compassionate action is to simply sit with him in his grief and suffering.

The most important thing about Job’s silence is that he does not remain alone in it. He is joined by three friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—who hear of Job’s affliction and come from far off to comfort him.

And they lifted up their eyes from a distance but could hardly recognize him. And they lifted up their voices and wept, and each one tore his robe and they threw dust over their heads into the air. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights without speaking a word to him, for they saw how great was his pain. (Job 2:12–13)

Those seven days of silence are surely one of the most influential acts of pastoral care ever performed. The Jewish practice of “sitting shiva” (literally “sitting seven,” when friends come to sit with mourners at home over the period of a week) memorializes the friends’ wise compassion in this long moment of shared grief. More than twenty-five hundred years after the book of Job was written, this one act of Job’s companions is imitated on a daily basis by comforters all over the world. Silence kept with others has a special quality. It is like a fine veil, preserving separateness, yet strangely heightening mutual awareness. Silence requires us to be present to the unexpressed needs of others, needs of which they may themselves not yet know. It is a powerful means of fostering mutual encouragement among us, whom God has entrusted to one another in this wilderness of pain and doubt.

That week of shared silence is a period of transition for Job. In it he finds the words to speak his whole mind, to admit the pain of all that he has suffered…. Silence allows pain to penetrate our heart, “deep calling to deep” (Psalm 42:8). Silence comes to us in grief as the comforter of whom we are afraid, for it invites us more deeply into ourselves, into the dark places in which doubts emerge and pain becomes fully perceptible, where loss can no longer be denied. Silence is the friend who challenges us to be healed when we wish simply to be soothed. It heals us first by making us more empty, carving a space within our hearts…. Silence pushes Job to challenge God. When Job finds words at last, he demands steadily that God enter the abyss of loss and be revealed to him there.

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I Didn’t Know How to Ask

Back to Maturity, Part One

JASON TWOMBLY

AUG 03, 2026

There’s a skill most men never learn, because nobody tells you it’s a skill. You just find out, one missed year at a time, that you never picked it up.

The skill is asking.

I grew up in a town on Long Island called Massapequa, half Jewish, half Italian, the kind of place people jokingly nicknamed “Matzah Pizza.” We weren’t Italian. Didn’t matter. My dad made a spaghetti sauce that was, honestly, incredible, his own recipe, guarded like a secret, good enough that my friends would ask about it. That sauce was legendary in our house.

Years passed. I was in my late thirties, a single dad raising three kids after my wife passed away, and in the kitchen I felt like I was bumbling through it, figuring out dinner the way I’d figured out most things in my life: alone, by trial and error, telling no one I didn’t know what I was doing.

My dad lived a mile down the road. One day he was over, and I asked him: Dad, can you show me how you make that sauce?

His face lit up. “Yes.” We went to the store together. He was particular about every ingredient, this brand, not that one, this cut, not the other. He showed me the whole thing, start to finish. It was delicious. It was more than delicious.

Years later, I found myself back in that kitchen, not standing in it, but telling it, at a recent LK10 conference. I’m grateful for how that experience was built: no expert on a stage lecturing at us, just trained facilitators making space for something deeper than left-brain teaching could reach. We were practicing what we call “Back to Maturity” stories, going looking for a moment we didn’t know was formative until we looked back at it. When my turn came, I hadn’t planned what would surface. But there I was, back in that kitchen. I could smell the sauce. I could see his face when I asked, how much he’d wanted to pass this down, how long he’d been holding it, waiting for someone to reach for it.

And underneath the warmth of that memory was something else: a quiet grief. Because I realized how rarely I’d asked my dad for anything, growing up. He wasn’t naturally gifted at teaching, showing us how to do things before requiring we already know them. So somewhere along the way I stopped asking and started figuring everything out on my own. That became the whole shape of my life. Self-taught. Independent. Alone more than I ever needed to be.

That one afternoon with the sauce wasn’t just about sauce. It was one of the only times I let myself need something from my father and let him give it.

I didn’t know how to ask. Not with my dad. Not, later, with my wife, in the ways that mattered most. I’d built a whole identity out of not needing to.

Here’s what I’ve learned since: a man who never learns to ask doesn’t just miss out on sauce recipes. He spends the rest of his life either silently resenting people for not reading his mind, or white-knuckling everything alone and calling it independence. Both are the same wound wearing different clothes.

If any of that sounds familiar, the pride in figuring it out alone, the thing you’ve never asked for because asking doesn’t feel like something a man does, I’d gently say: that’s not strength holding you back. That’s just a skill nobody taught you, and it’s not too late to learn it.

This is the first in a short series I’m calling Back to Maturity stories, moments that quietly show us where we stopped growing, and what it looks like to pick it back up. More coming soon.

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The Story of Job

Sunday, August 2, 2026

Father Richard Rohr summarizes the plot of the book of Job: 

Although the story of Job is usually regarded as a study of the mystery of evil, I believe it also can be read as a story of conversion through the path of suffering. If we view Job’s story as a journey of ever-deepening encounter with God, we keep it from becoming an abstract theological debate. Quite frankly, we can’t observe the question of suffering from a distance. [1]

The opening and closing lines of the book of Job contain the seeds of an ancient folktale. We are introduced to Job, described at the outset as a good and just man: “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that man was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil” (Job 1:1). It’s almost like a fairy tale, with Job living righteously and at peace with his seven sons, three daughters, and flocks that number in the thousands. But soon, like any good story, things begin to happen to our “hero.” [2]

A character called “Satan” suggests that God test Job’s faith to see if it’s “real” by inflicting a series of devastating losses on him (see Job 1:6–12). Job loses his livelihood, his savings, his family, and ultimately even his health. But Satan is proven wrong in his prediction that Job will abandon his faith and curse God immediately. Throughout his trials, Job praises God (1:21–22), grieves in silence (2:13), pours out his lament to God (3:1–26), and insists on his own righteousness (6:24–30).

News of Job’s disasters come to the ears of three of his good friends and they go to him to speak what they are sure is God’s response to Job’s suffering. I believe their concern for him is genuine. They weep. They tear their garments and sit on the ground with him for seven days. Eventually, they offer their best explanations for Job’s sufferings, which turn out to be little more than pious platitudes. In fact, entire chapters of the book of Job, are filled with their misguided justifications for Job’s sufferings. [3]

Eventually, God arrives on the scene in a whirlwind (Job 38:1), and instead of giving Job answers as to why he is suffering, God asks Job innumerable questions. Job is so excited that God is speaking to him again that he no longer needs answers! The personal encounter with God lets Job know that God still cares about him and they are still in relationship. [4]

Ultimately, Job’s story reveals that God cannot really be known through theology, the law, or common sense. God can only be related to and known through relationship. Job’s religious friends and advisers have knowledge but no experience. They have thoughts about God but no love of God. They believe in their theology but Job believes in and loves the God of their theology. It is a big difference. [5]

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Feeling Deeply, Knowing Deeply

Monday, August 3, 2026

Father Richard points to Job’s suffering and grief as a model for our own: 

In the Hebrew Scriptures, we find Job suffering some of the most common emotions of grief, including denial and anger. The first seven days of Job’s time on the “dung heap” (Job 2:8) of pain are spent in silence, what we might call shock or denial. Then he taps into anger; in verse after verse Job shouts and curses. He says, in effect, “This so-called life I have is not really life, God, it’s death. So why should I be happy about being born?”  

Perhaps some of us have been there—so hurt and betrayed, so devastated by our losses that we echo Job’s cry about the day he was born, “May that day be darkness. May God on high have no thought for it, may no light shine on it. May murk and deep shadow claim it for their own” (Job 3:4–5). It’s beautiful, poetic imagery. He’s saying: “Uncreate that day. Make it not a day of light but darkness. Let clouds hang over it, eclipse swoop down on it.” Where God in Genesis speaks, “Let there be light,” Job insists “Let there be darkness.” A day of uncreation, of anti-creation. We probably have to have experienced true depression, betrayal, or injustice to understand such a feeling.

There’s a part of each of us that feels and speaks that sadness. Not every day, thank goodness. But if we’re willing to feel and participate in the pain of the world, part of us will suffer that kind of despair. If we want to walk with Job, with Jesus, and in solidarity with much of the world, we must allow grace to lead us there as the events of life show themselves. I believe this is exactly what we mean by conformity to Christ (see Romans 8:29).  

We must go through the stages of feeling, not only the last death but all the earlier little (and not-so-little) deaths. If we bypass these emotional stages by easy answers, all they do is take a deeper form of disguise and come out in another way. Many people learn that the hard way—through depression, addictions, irritability, and misdirected anger—because they refuse to let their emotions run their course or to find some appropriate place to share them. Job is unafraid to feel his feelings. He speaks them and acts them out. Emotions ought to be allowed to run their course. They are not right or wrong; they are merely indicators of what is happening.

I am convinced that people who do not feel deeply finally do not know deeply either. It is only because Job is willing to feel his emotions that he is able to come to grips with the mystery of suffering in his head and heart and gut. He understands holistically and therefore his experience of grief becomes both whole and holy.  

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Individual Reflection
Where in your own story did you stop needing answers because you felt God’s presence instead?

Group Discussion — choose one:
What does it cost you to sit in silence with someone’s pain instead of explaining it?

Which of Job’s stages — silence, anger, lament, insistence on his own righteousness — do you find hardest to let yourself feel?

Is there a “day” in your life you’ve wished, like Job, could be uncreated?

How Will We Use the Bible?

Friday, July 31, 2026

CAC faculty member Brian McLaren highlights how reading the Bible through a lens of love has inspired many Christians to works of goodness and compassion in the world:

Biblical Christians have thrived when we’ve used the Bible with the goal of becoming good people who, because we follow Jesus, do good works in God’s good world. And we have languished and wandered when we have used the Bible as a weapon to threaten others, as a tool to intimidate others and prove them wrong…. Sadly, sometimes the very people who most love the Bible have been those who have used it for these other purposes, sometimes to the neglect of its essential purpose.

But again, think about what truly biblical Christians (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, liberal, conservative, charismatic, whatever) have done when they have understood the profitable purpose of Scripture. Instructed by Scripture, they have … built hospitals and schools to heal bodies and strengthen minds. They have given money to needy people around the globe…. They have crossed racial, ethnic, and class barriers, seeing all people as brothers and sisters. They have chosen to suffer rather than betray their faith or make others suffer…. They’ve done their work as teachers, farmers, bricklayers, nurses, scholars, mechanics, sellers, public servants, scientists, homemakers, cab drivers, and cooks with a special sense of purpose, love, and joy. Their “good works” included doing “good work” from day to day … as part of their holy, sacred vocation in God’s creation.

Why? Since they understood the real purpose of Scripture, they let Scripture equip them for good works in our needy world. Their words and deeds together have qualified them to be bearers of good news. Sure they have never been perfect, but they have often been wonderful.

McLaren invites us to read the Bible through a lens of love:

We also have a choice today: Will our readings betray the way of Christ in our day, or will they set our course toward God’s dreams? Will we let the story continue in and through us, along its intended trajectory, toward God’s undying, embracing dream called the kingdom of God?

This … approach does not lessen the agony one feels reading the conquest of Canaan with the eyes of one taught by Jesus to love all, including enemies. But it helps turn the Bible back into what it is, not a look-it-up encyclopedia of timeless moral truths, but the unfolding narrative of God at work in a violent, sinful world, calling people … into a new way of life…. This is the struggle of common people in the journey of faith, hope, and love. And it challenges us: To be truly biblical does not mean being preoccupied with some golden age in the ancient world and God’s word to people back then. It means learning from the past to let God’s story, God’s will, and God’s dream continue to come true in us and our children.

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Alistair Begg

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8

When John Newton, the eighteenth-century hymn writer and pastor, preached on this verse, he entitled his sermon “No Access to God but by the Gospel of Christ.” Why would he use a title that seems to lack any connection to the verse?! Newton himself commented, “There is hardly any one passage in the Bible more generally misunderstood.”[1] His sermon title, it seems, was aimed at correcting the common misunderstandings.

Newton’s title alerts us to the danger of reading the virtues described here and then attempting to live them out without the gospel, or proclaiming them in place of the gospel, as a means of access to God. Neither of these does justice to what the prophet—and the Lord—intended. The best way to understand Micah 6:8 is not as a list of things that contribute to our justification but as evidences of our justification. When we view it this way, with the proper motivation and goals established, we can understand what the Lord was calling Israel, and is calling us, to do.

The Lord, through Micah, tells us first to “do justice.” This means a commitment to act in accord with God’s will and purpose. For example, in Deuteronomy, Moses says that God “executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing” (Deuteronomy 10:18). We want to care about the things God cares about, which means taking such priorities seriously, seeking to “do good to everyone, and especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).

Reading for Justice, Mercy, and Love

Thursday, July 30, 2026

The Indigenous theologian Rev. Dr. Randy Woodley considers Jesus’s criticism of certain religious leaders in his day and how they interpreted Scripture:

We all can have our various ideas about what Creator wants from us. But when we claim to have God’s only true intentions for all humanity through any holy book, and especially when we reject and exclude others because they don’t agree with us, we are much like those of that particular cadre of Pharisees Jesus condemned. By our exclusiveness, we miss the very point of most sacred writings.

Consider Jesus’s words to a certain group of Pharisees recorded in Matthew 23:23–24:

What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith. You should tithe, yes, but do not neglect the more important things. Blind guides! You strain your water, so you won’t accidentally swallow a gnat, but you swallow a camel!

As I understand it, Jesus is not rejecting the scriptures themselves; rather, he is rejecting a certain interpretation and application of the scriptures that excluded all others. Anytime we use our sacred writings to justify acts of exclusion, rejection, and hegemony we are neglecting justice, mercy, and love. By doing so, we deploy our holy scriptures to do more harm than good, causing us to fall into the same hypocrisy that Jesus condemned….

I understand the dilemma well. Growing up evangelical, I was indoctrinated to accept every single word of the Bible as literal truth, no matter how troubling or contradictory it seemed…. What strikes me as deeply ironic is that most Jewish communities—the very people whose ancestors wrote much of these texts—don’t embrace this rigid fundamentalism that many Christians do. In Jewish tradition, questioning and wrestling with multiple interpretations through midrash isn’t just permitted—it’s essential. They understand what many Christians miss, that sacred texts demand thoughtful engagement, not naïve acceptance.

Woodley affirms the Bible’s stories as powerful teaching tools:

By “swallowing camels,” we miss the beauty and poetry of the whole story in our holy books. We often seek the easy way out rather than allow the story to speak to us, to settle in us for a while, unleashing our imaginations. We commit ourselves to our baser, egocentric instincts rather than allowing love to break through the story….

Stories remain one of our most powerful medicines, becoming the lifeblood of human connection. They heal our isolation, awaken our full humanity beyond cold facts, and weave us into communities that remember who we are and challenge us to become who we might be. They may come to us through novels, movies, plays, orality, or even holy Scripture. We love them because of the truths they teach. Best we allow our stories to teach us, inspire us, bond us, and entertain us, as they were meant to do.

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Sarah Young

Let My Love seep into the inner recesses of your being. Do not close off any part of yourself from Me. I know you inside and out, so do not try to present a “cleaned-up” self to Me. Wounds that you shut away from the Light of My Love will fester and become wormy. Secret sins that you “hide” from Me can split off and develop lives of their own, controlling you without your realizing it.
     Open yourself fully to My transforming Presence. Let My brilliant Love-Light search out and destroy hidden fears. This process requires time alone with Me, as My Love soaks into your innermost being. Enjoy My perfect Love, which expels every trace of fear.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Psalm 139:1-4 (NLT)
Psalm 139
For the choir director: A psalm of David.
1 O Lord, you have examined my heart
    and know everything about me.
2 You know when I sit down or stand up.
    You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.
3 You see me when I travel
    and when I rest at home.
    You know everything I do.
4 You know what I am going to say
    even before I say it, Lord.

Additional insight regarding Psalm 139:1-5: Sometimes we don’t let people get to know us completely because we are afraid they will discover something about us they won’t like. But God already knows everything about us, even the number of hairs on our head (Matthew 10:30), and still he accepts and loves us. God is with us through every situation, in every trial – protecting, loving, guiding. He knows and loves us completely.

Psalm 139:23-24 (NLT)
23 Search me, O God, and know my heart;
    test me and know my anxious thoughts.
24 Point out anything in me that offends you,
    and lead me along the path of everlasting life.

Additional insight regarding Psalm 139:23-24: David asked God to search for sin and point it out, even to the level of testing his thoughts. This is exploratory surgery for sin. How are we to recognize sin unless God points it out? Then, when God shows us, we can repent and be forgiven. Make this verse your prayer. If you ask the Lord to search your heart and your thoughts to reveal your sin, you will be continuing on “the path of everlasting life.”

1st John 4:18 (NLT)
18 Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.

Additional insight regarding 1st John 4:18: If we ever are afraid of the future, eternity, or God’s judgement, we can remind ourselves of God’s love. We know that he loves us perfectly (Romans 8:38,39 – “38 And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. 39 No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.”) We can resolve our fears first by focusing on his immeasurable love for us, and then by allowing him to love others through us. His love will quiet your fears and give you confidence.