Reflections on Avoidance, Self-Made Righteousness, and the Grace That Remains Table of Contents Movement One — The Sin of Avoidance — “I Was Not There” Movement Two — The Weight We Inherit and the Story Scripture Tells Movement Three — What Happens When Sin Is Removed From Our Thinking Movement Four — When a Nation …
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 …
There is something deeply familiar about returning to broken cisterns. It rarely feels like a deliberate turning away. More often, it feels like muscle memory, the quiet return to patterns that once sustained us just enough to get by. Broken cisterns are not usually chosen out of defiance but out of weariness. They are places …
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 …
AGING REFLECTIONS On Becoming, Endurance, and the Dignity of Finishing Well By Ron Randle Dedication For my sister, Cheryl, and my brother, Gary. We have arrived together in this later season of life, each of us carrying our own stories, losses, endurance, and grace. What has emerged between us now is not nostalgia, but something …