Releasing & Letting Go Series Remembering the Lightness I remember it vividly. I was about eight years old, standing on our street and looking toward Lafayette Park, about a quarter mile away. I loved that park. But on that day, something else was happening. I felt an unmistakable lightness. It was the unburdened joy of …
These two reflections belong together. The first identifies what happens when I attempt to manufacture what can only be received. The second names the posture that allows reception to take place. They do not resolve tension so much as locate it. Together, they trace the movement from self-construction to surrender, from mastery to wonder. The …
Sometimes I borrow language from disciplines like science, music, mathematics, sound, and vibration, not to master them, but to notice how they echo aspects of God’s design. I have no deep knowledge of these fields, nor do I desire it. What draws me is how their practical workings quietly illuminate life, and how they occasionally …
Music is one of the earliest languages we learn. It speaks before words, and sometimes even after them. Before we know how to talk, we are already listening to the rhythm, tone, and cadence of voices that tell us whether we are safe or loved. That is the first melody written into us, long before …
Author’s Note This manuscript did not begin as an argument or a project. It emerged slowly, through lived moments, reflections, and recognitions that arrived without announcement. What follows is not an attempt to resolve life’s questions, but to notice what becomes possible when we stop resisting lessening and begin attending to what it opens. These …
In the film Eleanor the Great, we meet a Holocaust survivor, Bessie, and her close friend Eleanor, who carries Bessie’s story into the world after she passes away, as though it were her own. Eleanor does not do this out of malice or performance, but as a way of surviving her grief. She speaks the …
For many of us, imagination was treated with suspicion. We were taught, sometimes subtly and sometimes directly, that it was unreliable, that it drifted too easily toward fantasy, or that it could lead us away from truth rather than toward it. Faith, we were told, was safer when it stayed factual and restrained, anchored in …
The Spirit of God often works by calling people not to control, but to respond. To listen. To yield. To carry the gospel not only in words, but in lived faithfulness. Life holds lament and celebration, resistance and rejoicing. Faithfulness is not proved by volume or certainty, but by remaining attentive to the Spirit’s song …
Reflections on Trust, Participation, and the Life God Shares With Us Table of Contents Preface Reflection One: The Pause That Receives the Promise Reflection Two: Revelation That Moves Inward Reflection Three: Covenantal Depth and Willing Participation Reflection Four: God Is the Director Reflection Five: Life Is Not a Performance Reflection Six: A Moment to Pause …
Two-Part Reflection God Is the Director October 17, 2025 “True character development,” wrote theologian Kevin Vanhoozer, “is theodramatic, understanding oneself as caught up in God’s play of making all things new in and through Christ.” Abou, my gyro-eating Muslim friend, says it another way. “God is the director.” Both are right. Vanhoozer writes from the …