Different people might need different approaches at different seasons in their lives. One thing they all need is patience.

Patience is grace applied over time.
We all need that.

I read somewhere recently that true friendship is like a sacrament of sorts, and I think I agree with that. Friendship, well practiced, is a spiritually formative reminder of the love and grace of Christ manifested in and through the loving presence, patience, and pursuit of His image bearers. One can’t help but feel the presence of Christ when a friends shows you grace at your least lovable. It is a very Christ-like thing to do. It has happened to me many times and continues to happen to me in the life of the church that I get to be part of today.  

How can we take back our lives from a reactive world of chaos? How do we skillfully sail amidst the raging waves of our daily schedule and demands? How do we summon the strength to keep going when so many of us are on the edge of burnout?

What a wonderfully confounding thing it is to be a person. We are all a complex mix of image-bearing potential for good and serpent-believing potential for wickedness, and our recognition of this tension ought to make us the most humble and yet most hopeful of all creatures.

Welcome to The Resident Aliens! A place of content creation and collation from a pastor who isn’t from around here.

How many of us know this story as the story of the immoral woman? I did too for many years, and there is some reasoning for that, but as I have studied it afresh, I really think we have flattened out the woman and inserted her into our context and largely ignored her own. We paint her as a flirtatious, immoral woman who refuses to settle down. She has chewed through five marriages and is now shacking up with her new boyfriend. That is how many have portrayed her, but I don’t think it is possible.

It is very difficult for the wealthy to enter the Kingdom. Very. But, it is possible with God.

We need good shepherds to do the hard and slow work of pressing some camels toward some very small openings, and we need to trust God to make them fit. That’s our only hope.