Jesus is not a deity who makes impossible demands of his people from on high, distant and removed from the realities of worry and hardship. He is the Good Shepherd. I don’t know a ton about shepherds, but I do know that their job requires them to be with their sheep—walking the same terrain, battling the same elements, fending off the same enemies. The day-to-day life of the shepherd is intimately tied to that of the sheep. Indeed, the sheep cannot follow the shepherd if the shepherd doesn’t go there first! To me, that is a beautiful image of guidance and leadership that we get from Jesus’s role as our Good Shepherd.   Read More

As I read the Collect this week, I noticed our petition, “give us grace thankfully to receive his inestimable benefits” and realized that in the Easter season we enjoy that His celebrating heart and enduring joy do not run out like mine. His benefits cannot be contained even inside the biggest party– even if the whole world was one resounding ALLELUIA, His benefits would surpass it! So, we ask for grace to receive the benefits– to be filled up by His glory and beauty and steadfastness and grace and joy! And for what? We are filled up with His benefits so that we can “daily follow His footsteps.”  Read More

I want to be a person who has the soul training to give thanks in the face of hardship; because giving thanks to God in this way is an act of defiance against the narrative that death wins. It is refusing to be won over by the lie that grief, pain, and wrongness get to define our story because we know that Jesus is risen. We are not “uninformed about those who sleep in death” and therefore “do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14).  Read More

As we pray the collect this week, we focus on the promises that Jesus earned for us… “opened to us the gate of everlasting life, “delivered us from sin,” and the promise to be “raised from the dead.” Hallelujah!   Read More

Now, we come to the Collect for this week and I hear us all praying “mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering” and I feel my heart ache with the dissonance of it. In order to pray honestly that God would in His mercy grant that I may walk in his suffering footsteps, I must become the type of person who seeks to love and obey God above all other things. I must be formed in the image of the Son and be re-formed out of habits and rhythms and desires that are centered on my comfort.   Read More

Anglicanism presented a paradigm that allowed me to embrace all the traditions that had shaped me. It provided a framework for building and maintaining healthy relationships with Christians who held different secondary and tertiary theological beliefs. The Anglican way allows me to live in a spirit of charitable fellowship with those who practice Christianity differently than I do. In my opinion, this is the kind of unity that Christ desires within His incredibly diverse body.  Read More

The Collect, shares a big problem: How to bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners? I cannot solve the problem of my own unruly will much less the unruly wills of my brothers and sisters. Faced with such a big problem, I feel powerless.   Read More

When Jesus speaks of Himself as the bread of life, He means that He is offering to sustain us, fill us up, support and nourish who we are and who God has made us to be.   Read More

If things around me are disordered, I am unable to rest. Something I've never considered prior to reading the collect for this week, is that the same is true of my heart. The request that our Heavenly Father will purify our disordered affections comes on the heels of acknowledging that our hearts are restless.  Read More

Christian living is a collaborative effort between God and His redeemed people. This isn’t a secret since every Christian experiences this daily. This isn’t a secret since every Christian experiences this daily.  Read More

When Jesus was tempted three times in the wilderness by Satan, his temptations were universal: to give in to his appetites, to take unnecessary chances, and to shortcut God’s plan for immediate satisfaction. These temptations assault each of us, but they show up in different ways according to each of our weaknesses. My appetites may be different from yours, but we’re each tempted to satisfy them in ways that are sinful.  Read More

During Lent, many Christians choose to fast as a way to acknowledge their limitations and dependence on the Lord in this fallen world. It is important to note that as Anglicans who affirm the doctrine of the five solas, we do not view Lenten fasting as a means of penance or earning forgiveness. Instead, we engage in this spiritual discipline to experience our own frailty and our need for the Savior in light of His ultimate victory.   Read More