When the Years Feel Heavy and the Father’s Shadow Is Long There is a song that has followed me for a long time—Simply Red’s “Holding Back the Years.” It is not a gospel song. Mick Hucknall wrote it as a teenager about a childhood marked by an absent mother and a stern father. Two lines…
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Four-Fold Blessings: Clear, Kind, Loving, and Bountiful Deuteronomy 10:12–22 and 11:1–17 show us a God who does not leave His people guessing, abandoned, or empty-handed. In these words Moses holds up four expressions of the Lord’s blessing. They are not abstract ideas; they are the way God relates to the people He has chosen. Even…
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There are two sentences a man can hear from God, and they do not cancel each other. Nathan the prophet looked at a king who had taken a woman and arranged a death, and he said, “The Lord also has put away your sin.” In the same breath he said the sword would not leave…
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A church can keep quiet and call the quiet peace. We will not. This is not a word about a party. It is not a forecast with a year written on it. It is a warning. Canada has made a way to end a life on purpose, with a form, a second signature, and a…
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A feeling is not a covenant. A word for the husband or wife waiting to feel like staying — and for anyone who learned that love is weather. I know this house when the lamps are low. That is where a marriage actually lives. Not in the photograph from the day you said the words.…
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God closed the case. The second judge is often you A word for the recent convert who can finally see who they were — and cannot sit still under the pardon. The first clean morning after you come to Christ is not always peace. Sometimes it is sight. You wake up and the old life…
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When Faith Costs the Room Faith may empty a table. It does not empty the covenant. A word for the new believer whose group chat went quiet, and for the older saint who still checks the chair that used to be filled. There is a table most people do not put in a testimony. The…
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A picture can make you think of the Cross. Only He can finish the work. Creation is not thin. It is older than your questions and stranger than most sermons. Oaks hold on. Scarlet comes from small lives people once crushed for holy cloth. A hillside takes the weather and does not explain itself. If…
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How you get to the altar can change. What a thin yes costs does not. A word for anyone who grew up in a quiet, unhappy house and is being asked to marry before they have healed — and for a church that knows how to decorate a wedding better than it knows how to…
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A holy life can point. It cannot pay. Honour the witnesses. Kneel to the Son. A word for anyone who keeps Jesus on a shelf of good names, and uses other holy lives to keep from needing the only Name that saves. There is a generous room in a lot of houses. Photographs on the…
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