The Prayer Porch

Tag: christianity

  • Lessons in The Changing Seasons

    There is a morning every year when I step outside and something has shifted. Nothing dramatic. Just a coolness in the air that wasn’t there the day before, a certain slant of light through the kitchen window. Summer doesn’t end with an announcement. It simply loosens its grip, quietly, while we’re busy with something else, and one day we look up and realize we’re already somewhere new.

    I have started to notice how much my own life follows the same pattern. The seasons of a life don’t usually end with a clear before and after either. A friendship fades so slowly you can’t name the day it changed. A stage of parenting closes without fanfare, and suddenly you’re in a different one. A dream you held for years quietly becomes something you used to want. We keep waiting for life to announce its transitions the way a calendar does, and it almost never obliges.

    For a long time, that unpredictability unsettled me. I wanted seasons, in my life and in my faith, to behave the way the calendar promises they will. Steady. Predictable. Arriving right on schedule. But that isn’t how growth works, and it isn’t really how the seasons work either, not exactly. Some years autumn lingers and some years winter arrives early and stays too long. The natural world doesn’t move in perfect uniformity, and neither do we.

    Scripture doesn’t shy away from this truth. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). Notice it doesn’t say every season will be welcome, or that we’ll get advance notice. It simply says there is a time, a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what was planted. A time to keep, and a time to cast away. Both halves of every pair matter. We tend to want the planting without the plucking up, the keeping without ever the casting away. But a life lived only in one season isn’t actually a life, it’s a stall.

    What I find myself needing most in seasons of change isn’t more control over the timing. It’s trust in the One who set the seasons in motion to begin with. The tree losing its leaves in October has no say over when spring will come, and yet it doesn’t panic. It rests. It trusts something it cannot see or rush, that has been faithful every year before this one.

    “He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Not beautiful despite the changing, but beautiful because change is woven into the whole design. The winter isn’t a mistake in the story. It’s part of how the story keeps unfolding.

    I think of the seasons of my own life this way now, the ones behind me and the ones I can feel approaching, even if I can’t name them yet. A job that shaped me for years and then didn’t fit anymore. Relationships that were exactly right for a season and then quietly became something else. Even this blog, this porch, is a season I didn’t see coming a few years ago. None of it happened on a schedule I chose. All of it, looking back, happened in its time.

    So today I’m trying to hold my own life the way I try to hold the calendar, loosely, honestly, and with the trust that whatever season I’m standing in right now is not a wrong turn. It’s simply where I am. And there is another season coming after this one, the way there always is.

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, thank You for setting the seasons in motion, both the ones outside my window and the ones inside my own life. When change comes quietly, without warning or explanation, help me trust that You are still writing the story. Give me the grace to let go of what a season has finished teaching me, and the patience to wait for what comes next without rushing it. Remind me that You have made everything beautiful in its time, even the seasons I wouldn’t have chosen. Amen.

  • The Significance of Mary’s Assumption in Faith

    A reflection on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary – August 15

    There are moments in the liturgical year that stop you in your tracks.

    Not because they are complicated or hard to understand. But because they are so luminous, so full of hope, that you have to sit with them slowly, the way you would sit with a letter that arrived on exactly the right day.

    Today is one of those moments.

    The Assumption of Mary into heaven, her body and soul is not simply a doctrine to be believed. It is a promise to be held onto. A light set at the end of a very long road, reminding us that this is not all there is. That what God begins in us, He intends to complete. That the body we carry through every season of joy and grief and waiting and wondering is not forgotten by the One who made it.

    Mary’s body, the body that carried the Word made flesh was not left behind.

    And neither will ours.

    My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked with favor on His lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed. – Luke 1:46-48

    Think about who Mary was when she first spoke those words.

    She was young and uncertain. She had just said yes to something so far beyond her understanding that no human being could have fully grasped what it meant and yet she sang. The road ahead was not clear but because she trusted the One who had called her and that trust became a song.

    From that first yes to her last breath, Mary’s entire life was a continuous act of surrender. She said yes at the Annunciation. She said yes at the foot of the Cross. She said yes through the silence of Holy Saturday when the tomb was sealed and hope seemed buried with her Son.

    And at the end of her earthly life God said yes back to her, in the most complete and breathtaking way imaginable. He carried her home. Body and soul into glory.

    That is not just Mary’s story.

    That is our story too if we are willing to keep saying yes.

    We live in a world that is very good at telling us this is all there is.

    That the body is something to be optimized and feared and ultimately lost. That the struggles we carry -the grief, the uncertainty, the seasons of waiting that feel endless . They are simply the human condition with no larger meaning attached.

    The Assumption says something entirely different.

    It says the body is sacred and will be glorified. It says the yes we offer in the dark matters, even when we cannot see what it is building. It says that the God who carried Mary home has not forgotten where we are or what we are carrying.

    He sees every act of faithfulness that no one else notices. Every prayer offered in an empty room. Every morning we chose to trust Him when trusting felt impossibly hard.

    None of it is lost.

    Mary’s Assumption is the Church’s way of showing us what the end of the story looks like for those who say yes and keep saying it – through the uncertainty, through the grief, through the long ordinary seasons that make up most of a faithful life.

    It looks like being carried home.

    It looks like glory.

    And on the hard days, the days when the road feels long and the answer feels far and the waiting feels like it might never end. This feast is God’s quiet reminder that He has never once dropped what He is holding.

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, on this feast of your Mother’s Assumption we ask for the grace to keep saying yes. Yes in the uncertainty. Yes in the waiting. Yes when we cannot see the road ahead. Remind us today that what you begin in us you intend to complete. That these bodies, these lives, these small and faithful acts of surrender are held in hands that do not let go. Carry us, Lord, as you carried her. Bring us home. Amen.

    Today the Church celebrates the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a holy day of obligation and one of the crown jewels of the Marian calendar. If you have never prayed the Magnificat slowly and out loud, today is a beautiful day to try.

  • The Practice of Waiting with Purpose

    There is something quietly countercultural about committing to the same prayer, the same intention, nine days in a row.

    No instant answer or shortcut. Just showing up morning after morning, candle lit or coffee in hand and laying the same thing before God again.

    This is a novena.

    The word comes from the Latin novem – nine. Rooted in the nine days the disciples spent in the upper room between the Ascension and Pentecost, waiting, praying, not knowing exactly what was coming but trusting it would come. Nine days of holy uncertainty. Nine days of intentional presence.

    For centuries, Catholics have prayed novenas, the nine consecutive days of focused prayer for a specific intention. A feast day approaching on the calendar. The practice is ancient, simple, and surprisingly powerful.

    But here is what I want you to consider. Whatever your faith tradition, whatever your background:

    What would change in your life if you devoted nine days of focused, intentional thought and prayer to one thing?

    Not scattered worry or anxious scrolling with a half-hearted hoping.

    Nine days with one intention just showing up every single day.

    There is something about repetition that does something to us. It moves a thing from the surface of our minds down into the deeper places, the places where real transformation happens. Whether you are Catholic or Protestant, spiritual but not religious, or simply someone who believes that focused intention matters, the rhythm of a novena speaks to something universal in the human soul.

    We were made to practice and we were made to return. We were made to wait with purpose rather than drift with anxiety.

    This week I am in the middle of one myself. Nine days of intentions laid quietly before God, ending on a day that holds deep personal meaning. I cannot tell you yet what He will do with them. But I can tell you that the act of returning to the same prayer, day after day, has already done something in me.

    It has made me pay attention.

    And sometimes, that is the whole point.

    What intention have you been carrying that deserves nine days of your full, undivided focus?

    A Porch Prayer

    Lord, teach us to wait well. Teach us to return – not because we have not been heard, but because the practice of returning forms us into people who trust You more deeply. May our intentions find their rest in Your hands, and may these nine days of prayer open us to whatever You have been waiting to give us. Amen.

    Friend, have you ever prayed a novena or practiced intentional focused prayer over several days? We would love to hear about it in the comments. The porch is always open. 🌿

  • Carrying Faith Like a Scapular in Daily Life

    Carrying Faith Like a Scapular in Daily Life

    Today is the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and I keep thinking about the scapular. Not the theology of it exactly, but the simple, practical image behind it. A small piece of cloth worn close to the body, a quiet reminder tucked under everyday clothes that someone is watching over you.

    That feels like exactly what most of our days are made of. We rarely get the dramatic, obvious moments of faith. We get laundry and errands and long drives and difficult phone calls. We get the ordinary weight of just getting through a day. Our Lady of Mount Carmel does not ask us to leave that ordinary life behind. She asks us to wear our faith into it, quietly, close to the skin, the way the scapular works. Not a performance for anyone else to see. Just something we carry with us into whatever the day holds.

    I think about the Carmelite hermits who first climbed that mountain looking for God in silence and simplicity, and I think about how far that is from most of our lives today. We are loud, busy, distracted, and pulled in a dozen directions before breakfast is even finished. But Mary meets us there too. She does not require a mountain or a monastery. She meets mothers folding towels, coaches on their tenth phone call of the day, and anyone standing in a kitchen wondering if any of it matters.

    It does matter. The scapular is a promise that Mary walks with us through the small, unremarkable moments, not just the big ones. Maybe today is a good day to notice where God has been quietly present in your own routine, the parts of your day you might normally rush past without a second thought.

    Our Lady of Mount Carmel, help us carry our faith into the ordinary corners of our day. Remind us that You are near even in the smallest, most unnoticed moments, and help us slow down enough to notice Your presence there.

    Where do you feel God’s presence most in your ordinary, everyday routine?

  • Cuba’s Water Crisis: A Call to Action

    He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Matthew 5:45

    Nearly three million people on that island of Cuba are living without reliable access to water right now. Not inconvenienced by water and not asked to conserve water. Living without it. In Santiago de Cuba, some residents receive water only once every fifteen days. Some communities in the eastern part of the island have gone as long as five months without regular service. Power outages stretching up to twenty hours a day mean that even when water exists in the system, the pumps cannot move it. People line up in the street with jugs to fill from tanker trucks, and some days the trucks do not come either.

    The practical response from those paying attention has been clear and loving: we should be more prepared. Store water. Think ahead. Don’t assume that what we have today will simply always be there.

    For many of us, though, the response is almost reflexive. God supplies our needs, we say. There is no need to worry.

    And then, if we sit with that long enough, the question arrives quietly but with real weight.

    If God supplies our needs, why is He not supplying theirs?

    The Question We Don’t Want to Ask

    There are questions we tend to smooth over quickly in faith communities because they feel dangerous. They feel like the kind of questions that erode trust rather than build it. We rush past them toward the reassuring answer before we have actually let the question breathe.

    This is one of those questions.

    The Bible is full of promises about God’s provision. He fed Israel manna in the wilderness. He multiplied loaves and fish on a hillside. He told us to consider the lilies, the ravens, the sparrows. Our heavenly Father knows what we need before we even ask. These are not minor footnotes in Scripture. They are load-bearing promises that generations of believers have staked their lives on.

    And yet on the island of Cuba today, children are thirsty. Elderly people are going without. Families are doing the math of survival in ways that most of us will never have to do. The crisis is real, documented, and worsening. Infrastructure has been crumbling for decades, fuel has been cut off, and the people caught in the middle of political and economic forces far beyond their control are the ones paying the price with their bodies and their daily lives.

    So where is God in that?

    What Provision Actually Means

    We sometimes carry a quietly transactional understanding of God’s provision without realizing it. We receive something we needed and we say God provided. Then when someone else does not receive what they need we find ways to explain the gap that protect our theology and, if we are honest, protect our comfort too.

    We say it must be spiritual warfare. We say their government failed them. We say God is working in ways we cannot see. All of those things may carry truth. None of them, though, fully answers the child who is thirsty.

    What many of us have come to believe, slowly and with some struggle, is that God’s provision almost never moves in a straight line from heaven to the person in need. More often, it moves through human hands, through the Church, and the neighbor who notices. Through the person who stores an extra supply and shares it. Through the aid organization, the missionary, the donor who responds when the news reaches them.

    God does not ignore Cuba. Through the lens of Scripture, He grieves what is happening there in ways that should make the rest of us grieve too. The question He tends to ask back in moments like this is not why am I not providing, but rather: where are My people, and what are their hands doing?

    Faith and Preparedness Are Not Opposites

    Here is where practical wisdom and deep faith actually need each other.

    Trust in God’s provision is not the same thing as passivity. Joseph stored grain for seven years in Egypt before the famine came, and when it did, the provision was there because someone had been faithful and prepared. The wise virgins in Jesus’s parable had oil in their lamps. Preparation is not the opposite of trust. Preparation can itself be an act of stewardship, of faithfulness, of loving the people around us well enough to be ready when they need something we have.

    The instinct to say we are not worried is not wrong. Anxiety is not required of us and God does not ask for it. At the same time, the instinct to pay attention and prepare is also a form of faithfulness. Together, those two impulses make a more complete response than either one alone.

    Where Peace Lives in All of This

    The theological answer that brings the most peace is not a tidy one, but it is a true one.

    God is sovereign over all of it, including the parts we cannot explain. He is present in Cuba in ways we cannot fully see from here. He is working through every Cuban believer who shares what little they have, every church that opens its doors, every act of human kindness that moves water from one pair of hands to another. His provision does not always arrive on our timeline or in the form we expect, but His character does not change because a government failed or an infrastructure collapsed.

    At the same time, the suffering in Cuba is not invisible to Him and it must not be invisible to us. The prophets were relentless on this point: the measure of a community’s faithfulness was how it treated the most vulnerable among them. To look away from Cuba, or from any place of genuine human suffering, and simply say God will handle it is not faith. It is distance dressed up as trust.

    True faith looks, grieves, prays, prepares, and acts. It stores water and gives generously. It trusts God with what it cannot control and takes responsibility for what it can.

    That is the both-and worth sitting with today.

    Lord, we bring Cuba to You today, and every place where people are thirsty and the water does not come. We confess that we do not always understand Your ways, and we ask You to hold what we cannot hold. Give us grieving hearts that will not look away. Give us generous hands that move provision toward those who need it. And give us the wisdom to know the difference between the peace You offer and the comfort we sometimes mistake for it. Amen.

    Filter of Hope wants to give clean water to families – the physical health benefits are countless. They go beyond the physical benefits and help people spiritually by explaining how they can know God personally.

    Do you find it hard to hold faith in God’s provision alongside the reality of suffering in the world? How do you sit with that tension? I would love to hear your honest thoughts in the comments.

  • Compassion: The Heart of Jesus’ Teachings

    Compassion: The Heart of Jesus’ Teachings

    He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little from the land. And He sat down and taught the multitudes from the boat.” Luke 5:3

    I don’t always understand the words spoken at Polish Mass. The rhythm of the language washes over me like water – familiar in sound, foreign in meaning and yet something still arrives. Something settles in the heart that doesn’t need a perfect translation.

    This past Sunday, I sat with my notebook open and caught what I could. One phrase came through clearly enough to write down: Jezus uczynił wszystko z litości. Jesus did everything out of compassion.

    The priest was speaking about Luke 5, the scene at the Lake of Gennesaret where the crowd pressed so close that Jesus stepped into Simon’s boat and pushed out from shore. He sat down – teachers sat in those days when they were about to say something important and He taught the people from the water.

    Out of compassion.

    I find myself turning that phrase over slowly, the way you might turn a stone in your palm. Not Jesus taught because it was His duty. Not Jesus taught because the crowd demanded it. But because something moved in Him when He looked out at those people gathered at the water’s edge, hungry and leaning in. Compassion isn’t a policy. It isn’t a method. It’s a movement of the heart.

    And here is what strikes me: He didn’t wait for a more suitable moment. There was no pulpit, no prepared room, no ideal setting. There was a borrowed boat, a tired fisherman, and a crowd that needed something He had to give. So He used what was available. He taught from where He was.

    I wonder sometimes if we wait too long for the right conditions before we offer what we have. Before we speak what we know to be true, before we reach toward someone, before we let my faith do something visible in the world. I tell myself the moment isn’t quite right and we need to be more prepared.

    But compassion doesn’t wait for the right conditions. Compassion sees the crowd and gets in the boat.

    I couldn’t follow every word of that homily. But somehow, in the gap between languages, this is what I heard: Jesus did everything out of compassion. Even this, the teaching, the reaching. All of it was moved by love, not obligation.

    Maybe that’s the quietest and most revolutionary thing about Him.

    Lord, move me the way You moved. Not out of duty or performance, but out of something genuine and tender. When I see someone leaning in – hungry, waiting, hoping – let compassion be what gets me in the boat. Amen.

    Have you ever received something meaningful in an unexpected setting – a place or a moment where you didn’t expect to hear from God? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

  • Finding Hope in Suffering: A Gentle Conversation

    Finding Hope in Suffering: A Gentle Conversation

    We need to talk about something hard today on the porch.

    Not with a pointed finger. Not with a raised voice. But with the kind of honesty that only comes when we trust each other enough to sit in the uncomfortable places together.

    Because some of you reading this are suffering in ways that most people around you cannot see. Physical pain that does not stop. Emotional pain that has gone on so long you have forgotten what it felt like before it was there. And somewhere in the quiet of your hardest moments the thought has crossed your mind that maybe ending it on your own terms is the most merciful choice left.

    We are not here to shame that thought. We are here to sit with you in it.

    Assisted suicide is becoming more widely accepted in our culture and more legally available in many places. And we understand why. When someone we love is suffering without relief, when the body is failing and the pain is relentless, the desire to end that suffering feels like an act of compassion. The heart behind it is not wicked. It is human.

    But we believe something different about suffering. And we want to share it gently.

    Psalm 139:16 tells us that every day of our lives was written in God’s book before one of them came to be. Not just the good days. All of them. The hard ones. The ones that feel impossibly long. The ones where we are holding on by a thread we cannot even see anymore. Those days were known by God before we lived them and He has not abandoned us in them.

    Job knew suffering that most of us will never touch. He lost everything – his children, his health, his livelihood, his dignity. He sat in ashes and scraped his wounds with broken pottery. And he said things to God that would make a lot of Sunday morning congregations uncomfortable. He was raw and angry and desperate. But he did not let go of God nor did God let go of him.

    The sanctity of life is not a rule God made to make our suffering longer. It is a reflection of something profound – that our lives belong to Him. That we are not accidents. That even in the valley of the shadow of death He is there. Psalm 23 does not say He removes the valley. It says He walks through it with us.

    We also want to speak to the one whose suffering is not physical. The one whose pain lives in the mind and the soul. Depression lies. It tells you that you are a burden, that things will never change, that the people around you would be better off. None of that is true. Not one word of it. And the fact that you are still here, still reading, still breathing means the story is not over.

    Romans 8:38-39 says that nothing -not death, not life, not things present, not things to come -can separate us from the love of God. Nothing you are feeling right now has moved you outside the reach of that love. Not your darkest thought or your longest night. Not the pain that has no name.

    We do not have easy answers for suffering. The porch has never been a place for easy answers. But we do have a God who entered human flesh specifically so He could know what it felt like to hurt. Jesus wept and Jesus bled. Jesus cried out from the cross asking why God had forsaken Him. He is not unfamiliar with your pain. He wore it.

    If you are in a dark place today please do not navigate it alone. Tell someone. Reach out. There are people whose whole purpose is to sit with you in this.

    988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

    You are not a burden. You are not beyond hope. And this porch will always be a place where you are welcome exactly as you are, in whatever you are carrying today.

    We see you. God sees you and we are so glad you are here.

    Lord, we bring You the ones who are suffering today in ways we cannot fully see or understand. The ones whose bodies are failing them and the ones whose minds will not give them rest. The ones who are so tired of hurting that they are considering options that break our hearts. Meet them right there and let them feel You closer than their next breath. Give them one reason to hold on today. And tomorrow give them one more. Remind them that their life is written in Your hand and You are not finished with their story. Surround them with people who will sit with them in the dark and not run from it. In the precious name of Jesus, Amen.

    If someone you love is struggling today, will you share this post with them? And if you are the one struggling, we are here. You are not alone.

  • Honoring All Mothers: A Careful Look at Grief and Joy

    Honoring All Mothers: A Careful Look at Grief and Joy

    Mother’s Day is coming.

    The stores know it. The commercials know it. The flower shops and the brunch menus and the greeting card aisles all know it. And for some of us that is a beautiful thing. A reason to celebrate, to gather, to say out loud what we sometimes forget to say the other 364 days of the year.

    But we want to sit on the porch today with the mothers the commercials forget.

    We want to sit with the woman who is scrolling through her phone this weekend seeing everyone else’s celebrations while her arms still remember the weight of the baby she never got to bring home. The one who painted a nursery and chose a name and loved with her whole heart before the world ever had a chance to know. You are a mother. Your grief is real. And God has not forgotten the child He knew before you did.

    Psalm 34:18 says “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” He is not far from you this weekend. He is closest to you right where the ache is deepest.

    We want to sit with the woman who lost her mother this year. Or ten years ago. Or thirty years ago and still reaches for the phone on Mother’s Day before remembering. Grief does not follow a calendar and love does not have an expiration date. Missing her is not weakness. It is the evidence of something that mattered.

    We want to sit with the mother whose adult children are busy. Or distant. Or difficult. The one who raised them, poured herself into them, prayed over them in the dark, and now waits for a text that comes late or not at all. The one who would never say it out loud but carries a quiet wondering about whether any of it mattered.

    It mattered. Every sleepless night mattered. Every prayer mattered. Every sacrifice that no one saw and no one thanked you for mattered. Galatians 6:9 reminds us “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” Your harvest is coming. Do not give up on them.

    And we want to sit with the mother in the nursing home. The one in the chair by the window on Sunday afternoon watching the parking lot. The one whose hands still remember rocking babies even when her mind can no longer recall their names. The one whose children mean to visit and keep meaning to visit and somehow Sunday comes and goes and the chair by the window stays empty.

    She is still a mother. Her love did not diminish when her memory did. And if no one comes this Sunday we pray she feels the presence of the One who never leaves. Isaiah 46:4 promises “Even to your old age I am He, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made and I will bear. I will carry and will save.” He carries what we cannot carry. He remembers what the mind forgets. He sits in the chair beside her even when we do not.

    Mother’s Day is joyful and we do not want to take that from anyone. But joy and grief live in the same house sometimes. And the truest thing we can do on a day like this is make room for both.

    So if you are celebrating this weekend, celebrate fully. And if you are grieving this weekend, grieve honestly. And if you are somewhere in between, holding joy in one hand and sorrow in the other, you are in very good company on this porch.

    You are seen. You are known. You are loved by a God who called Himself a comforter, who compared His own love to that of a mother who cannot forget her nursing child, who said even if she forgets, I will not forget you.

    He has not forgotten you. Not today. Not ever.

    Happy Mother’s Day to every kind of mother. Every kind of daughter. Every woman carrying something tender this weekend.

    We see you.

    Lord, this weekend we bring You every mother who is hurting. The ones grieving babies they never got to hold. The ones missing mothers they can no longer call. The ones waiting by the phone for children who have grown distant. The ones sitting by windows in quiet rooms hoping someone remembers. Meet them where they are. Let them feel Your presence so close it feels like arms around them. Remind them that they are seen and known and deeply loved by You. And for every mother celebrating this weekend, multiply their joy. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

    Whatever this Mother’s Day holds for you, we are glad you are here on the porch. Will you share how we can pray for you this weekend in the comments?

  • Finding Strength in Weakness: The Beauty of Real Faith

    Finding Strength in Weakness: The Beauty of Real Faith

    Pablo Picasso once said, “Good taste is the enemy of great art.”

    He was talking about painting. But sit with that for a moment on the porch and see if it doesn’t say something true about faith too.

    Good taste is about refinement. About knowing what belongs and what doesn’t. About edges that are clean and surfaces that are smooth and nothing too raw or uncomfortable left showing. Good taste keeps everything presentable.

    But art is not about presentable. Art is about human. And human is messy.

    So is the gospel.

    We have spent a great deal of energy in the church making Christianity tasteful. Polished testimonies with tidy endings. Struggles that are always safely in the past tense. Prayers that sound composed. Faces that look like they have it together. We have refined the faith until it gleams and somewhere in all that polishing we have lost the thing that makes it real.

    Here is what we know to be true: you are not useless to God because you are broken. You are useless to God if you pretend you are not.

    The most powerful moment in all of Scripture may be the one that takes place in a garden before dawn, when a woman named Mary Magdalene stands outside an empty tomb and weeps. She is not composed. She is not refined. She has nothing left. The one she loved is gone and she doesn’t even know where they have put him. She is, by every measure, a mess.

    And into that mess, Jesus speaks her name.

    Not the cleaned-up version of her name. Not the Mary she was trying to become. Her name. As she was. Standing there undone in the early morning dark.

    And she became the first witness to the resurrection. Not a theologian. Not a Pharisee with impressive credentials. A broken woman who showed up weeping and met the risen Christ in her mess.

    That is not an accident. That is the whole story.

    Paul understood this. He wrote from his own unresolved weakness in 2 Corinthians 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Not after the weakness is resolved. Not once you have worked through it. In it. The power of God shows up most clearly in the places we have stopped pretending are fine.

    God is not looking for refined. He is looking for real.

    He takes the jagged edges and the unfinished places and the parts of us we would never put on display and He makes something out of them that good taste never could. He is less interested in our polish than our surrender. Less moved by our composure than our honesty. He has always done His best work in the mess.

    The clay on the ground. The tears in the garden. The cross on the hill.

    None of it was tasteful. All of it was holy.

    So we lay down the performance this morning. We stop smoothing the edges long enough to let God work with what is actually there. We bring the unfinished, unresolved, unpolished version of ourselves to the porch and we let that be enough.

    Because it is. It always has been.

    Lord, forgive us for the energy we spend trying to look like we have it together. For the testimonies we rehearse and the struggles we hide and the prayers we dress up before we bring them to You. Today we come as we are. Messy and real and trusting that Your power shows up best in exactly this kind of weakness. Make something beautiful out of what we have been too ashamed to show You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

  • The Ragamuffin and The Holy Life

    The Ragamuffin and The Holy Life

    There is a moment in the film Ragamuffin where you stop watching a movie and start watching a mirror. Rich Mullins was barefoot, restless, brilliant, and broken and somehow more surrendered to God than most polished pews will ever produce. He did not fit the mold of the Christian celebrity he accidentally became. He gave away his royalties, moved to a Navajo reservation, and lived on little more than what a Navajo family might earn. He was, by every worldly measure, a non-conformist.

    And perhaps that is exactly what holiness looks like when it is the real thing.

    We have dressed holiness up for so long that we barely recognize it when it shows up barefoot. We expect it to be tidy and triumphant, well-spoken and well-funded. But the saints who have left the deepest marks on the kingdom tend to look more like Rich Mullins than a keynote speaker at a conference. They are people who got so close to Jesus that the world stopped making sense to them.

    Rich said it plainly: “I think I would rather live on the verge of falling, and let my security be in the all-sufficiency of the grace of God, than to live in some kind of pietistic illusion of moral excellence.”

    That is not a man chasing comfort. That is a man chasing God.

    He also said: “I take comfort in knowing that it was the shepherds to whom the angels appeared when they announced Christ’s birth. Invariably throughout the course of history, God has appeared to people on the fringes. It’s nice to find theological justification for your quirks.”

    We smile at that. But underneath the humor is something profound. God has always chosen the unlikely, the overlooked, the ones who do not quite fit. The ragamuffins. The barefoot ones. The ones sitting at rickety pianos in torn jeans when everyone else is dressed up and playing it safe.

    Romans 12:2 says it this way: “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Non-conformity is not a personality type. It is a posture of the soul. It is what happens when we are so filled with the Spirit that the things the world offers simply lose their appeal.

    Rich Mullins lost his appeal for fame, for affluence, for the polished version of Christian life long before he died on that Kansas highway in 1997. What he never lost was his appetite for God. And maybe that is the whole point.

    Holiness is not about being better than everyone else. It is about being so in love with Jesus that you are willing to be different for His sake. To give when the world hoards. To serve when the world climbs. To sit quietly with the poor when the world chases the platform.

    Rich left us this: “Be God’s.” Just two words. Written in autographs, spoken from stages, whispered in the quiet of a life that did not look like success but somehow smelled like the kingdom.

    We do not need more polished Christians. We need more ragamuffins. More barefoot believers who are too busy loving Jesus to worry about what anyone thinks of them.

    So today we ask ourselves the question Rich Mullins quietly asked with his whole life: what would it look like to stop conforming and start surrendering?

    Lord, make us brave enough to be ragamuffins for You. Loosen our grip on the things that do not matter. Remind us that holiness is not a performance but a surrender. And when the world looks at us sideways, let us remember that You have always shown up on the fringes, among the barefoot and the broken, with more grace than we deserve and more love than we can hold. In Jesus’ name, Amen.