Legalism, Grace, and the Difference That Matters Ensuring Grace Collection There is a difference between change that looks convincing and change that is real. I have spent enough years around faith, formation, and my own interior life to know how easily the two can be confused. Alchemy promises transmutation. It takes what is base and …
I had a dream last night that was not troubling. It did not arrive with urgency or demand interpretation. It simply offered a perspective and then waited. In the dream, I was at a Friday night Shabbat service. The room was full and alive with energy. Men wore yarmulkes. There was movement and sound and …
The Reflections on Grace Inspired by the theology of Karl Barth Preface Grace is often spoken of as something we understand, manage, or apply. But the moment grace becomes fully graspable, it quietly ceases to be grace. What follows is not an attempt to explain grace into clarity, but to remain faithful to its mystery. …
Prologue Reclaiming the Person Behind the Label I grew up in a neighborhood where differences were obvious but rarely named honestly. Skin tones, surnames, accents, and paychecks marked us long before we had language for them. As a young Black boy in the nineteen fifties, I felt those differences before I understood them. After difficult …
There is a richness of tradition that can be unique to every culture. That uniqueness often carries into worship because it is rooted in lived history rather than borrowed form. Far from diminishing worship, it can deepen it. In my lifetime, there was a time not so long ago when singing spirituals in worship connected …
Four Reflections on Righteousness, Trust, and the Courage to Let God Be God *The spacing is purposeful, allowing for rest and contemplation. Companion Lead: Recovery to Surrender This is God’s word to a people who grow impatient with Him. To those who seek to manage Him. To accelerate what they believe is His plan. To …
Two Companion Reflections When Faith Stops Performing “Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” —1 Samuel 16:7 There comes a moment when faith grows weary of performing, not because conviction has weakened, but because the heart of God has begun to matter more than the appearance of faithfulness. What …
For much of my life, I believed that faithfulness was measured by effort. I tried harder, stayed disciplined, and assumed that progress with God would follow the same logic as progress in every other area of life. Aging has quietly undone that assumption. Not through failure, but through grace. I notice it most in ordinary …
When Liessa and I were talking about prayer last night with an overnight guest, her desire to grow in prayer and her frustration with what felt like slow progress led us into a deeper conversation about grace. What became apparent was how easily effort, when left unchecked, tries to outrun God’s agency. The will begins …
I asked Liessa the other day if, given the chance, she could go back and do one thing differently in the liminal space she occupied for seventy years, what would it be? As I listened to my own question, I realized I had never answered it for myself. But the moment I spoke it inwardly, …