“I want to watch you coach.”

God was working on me in the blind again…

About a year ago, I felt God putting something on my heart…

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Thoughts from the blind…

I have been thinking a lot since Sunday about how much of life is understood backward, but lived forward. That thought has stayed with me.

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Have you ever stood in front of one of those giant maps at a mall, hospital, or amusement park?

There are roads, hallways, buildings, arrows going everywhere… and honestly, none of it means much until you find those three little words:

YOU ARE HERE.
That little dot changes the entire map.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

We spend so much of our lives trying to figure out where we’re going. What’s next? What is God doing? When will this season change? When will that prayer finally be answered? When will I get to wherever it is I thought I would be by now?

We’re always looking somewhere else on the map.

But maybe one of the most important things we can do is stop for a minute and recognize:

YOU ARE HERE.

Maybe “here” isn’t where you thought you would be.

Maybe you thought life would look different by now. Maybe the marriage would be different. The kids would be different. The career would be further along. The dream would have happened. The grief wouldn’t still hurt. The prayer would have been answered.

Maybe if you could have drawn the map yourself, you would have put that little red dot somewhere completely different.

But here’s what has been hitting me…

God is not surprised by where you are.

Acts 17 says that God determined the times and places in which people would live.

Think about that for a minute.

Of all the generations you could have been born into… you are here now.

Of all the places your life could have unfolded… you are here.

That doesn’t mean everything that has happened to us was God’s desire. We live in a broken world. People make choices. We make choices. Life hurts sometimes.

But it DOES mean that your life isn’t an accident, and your purpose isn’t waiting somewhere else on the map.

Maybe we need to stop asking only:

“God, where are You taking me?”

And start asking:

“God, what do You want to do through me RIGHT HERE?”

Because there are people to love here. There are people who need encouragement here. There are relationships that need healing here.

There are neighbors here.
Coworkers here.
Kids here.
Friends here.
People who desperately need the hope of Jesus… here.

Ephesians 2:10 says that we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works that He prepared beforehand for us to walk in.

I love that.

Maybe we’ve made “calling” way more complicated than it needs to be.

We keep waiting for some giant moment when God reveals THE PLAN, while He keeps putting people right in front of us.

Sometimes we want the burning bush.
God gives us the person across the table.

We want a giant sign.
God gives us a small opportunity to love somebody.

We want to see the entire map.
And sometimes God simply says…

Look around.
You are here.
So love here.
Serve here.
Give here.
Forgive here.
Notice people here.
Tell someone about Jesus here.
Be faithful here.

And when God moves the dot someday, follow Him there too.

Maybe that’s part of what it really means to be SENT.

It doesn’t always mean going somewhere else.

Sometimes it means finally realizing that God has already sent you HERE.

Your life isn’t on hold.

This season isn’t just something to get through until the “real” part begins. This is your life. This is your moment.

You may not be able to see the whole map from where you’re standing.

That’s okay. Find the dot.
YOU ARE HERE.

God has you here, in this moment in history, for a reason.

Your Life. His Timing.

Twenty-five years ago today, the world changed.

September 11, 2001 began like an ordinary Tuesday. People went to work. Parents kissed their kids goodbye. Flights took off. Coffee was poured. Meetings were scheduled. Families made plans for that evening and for the days ahead.

And then, in a matter of moments, everything changed.

Most of us who were old enough to remember can still picture where we were when we heard the news. We watched images that did not seem real. Smoke pouring from the towers. People running through the streets. Sirens everywhere. Then another plane. Another building. Another report. The terrible realization that this was not an accident.

We watched the towers fall.
We watched thousands of ordinary lives suddenly become part of history.

But that day also revealed something about people.

While so many were running away from danger, others were running directly toward it. Firefighters climbed stairways knowing that everyone else was trying desperately to get down. Police officers, paramedics, first responders, coworkers, and complete strangers helped people they had never met. Men and women stepped into smoke, fire, rubble, and unimaginable danger because someone needed them.

Some of them never came back out.

There are stories from that day that still stop me in my tracks. Courage that was not planned. Sacrifice that was not rehearsed. People who simply saw someone in need and decided that their own safety would not be the most important thing in that moment.

Heroes were revealed that day.
And then something else happened.
For a little while, we came together.

Flags appeared everywhere. Churches filled. Strangers talked to one another. People prayed openly. Differences that had seemed so important the week before suddenly did not seem quite as important anymore.

We remembered that life is fragile.
We remembered that we need one another.
We remembered that there are moments when the things that divide us become incredibly small compared to the things that unite us.

Twenty-five years have now passed.

For many of us, September 11 has become a memory. A photograph. A documentary. A chapter in a history book. But for thousands of families, it never became history.

There are sons and daughters who grew up without a parent. Husbands and wives who never got another ordinary morning together. Parents who buried children. Families who have now carried an empty seat through twenty-five Thanksgivings, twenty-five Christmases, birthdays, graduations, weddings, births of grandchildren, and countless moments when they would have given anything for one more conversation.

There is now an entire generation of children and grandchildren living inside the story of a person they may barely remember, or perhaps never had the chance to meet.

So today, I hope we do more than post a picture and say, “Never forget.”

I hope we PRAY.

Pray specifically for the families whose lives were forever divided into “before September 11” and “after September 11.”

Pray for the firefighters, police officers, first responders, survivors, military families, and countless others who carried the weight of that day long after the smoke disappeared from the skyline.

Pray for those who still carry grief that twenty-five years cannot erase.

And maybe today should cause us to think about our own lives as well.

One of the hardest truths September 11 taught us is that tomorrow is never promised. James writes that our lives are “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” That is not meant to make us live afraid. I think it is meant to make us live awake.

Our lives are short. Which means they matter. You are here right now, in this moment in history, for a reason.

There are people you are supposed to love. There is forgiveness you may need to give. There are words you need to say. There are people who need your encouragement. There is good you can do that someone else may never be able to do in quite the same way.

And above everything else, there is a God who loves you and a Savior who stepped into our broken world so that death would not have the final word.

Faith does not mean pretending tragedy does not hurt. Faith means believing that even in the darkest places, God is still present.

September 11 showed us the worst of what human beings are capable of.

It also showed us some of the very best.

Courage.
Sacrifice.
Compassion.
Unity.
Love for a neighbor.

People willing to give everything so that someone else might live.

Twenty-five years later, may we remember them. May we honor the families who still carry their absence.

May we PRAY.

May we love people while we still have the opportunity. May we refuse to waste the days we have been given. And may we live with the kind of faith, courage, compassion, and purpose that remembers this life is short… but it is never meaningless.

September 11, 2001.
Twenty-five years later.
We will never forget.

Today, we PRAY.

The Recipe…

There are some recipes that are worth more than the paper they are written on.

You know the kind. The card is stained. The handwriting is fading. Maybe there are ingredients crossed out or something written in the margin. And sometimes the instructions aren’t really instructions at all because Grandma just knew when it was right.

We have some of those recipes in our family.

Sandy and her grandma had a really special relationship, and a lot of their memories together were made in the kitchen. Even now, so much of what Thanksgiving tastes like in our family goes back to her.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced something like that, but food has a strange way of carrying memories.

Someone can be gone for years, and then you walk into a kitchen and smell something familiar.

For just a second, you’re back there.

You remember the kitchen. The table. The laughter. Maybe even the sound of their voice.

They’re not there.
But something they gave you still is.

I’ve been thinking about that lately.
Because recipes can disappear too.

If nobody watches. If nobody asks. If nobody writes it down. Eventually, something everybody once knew how to make becomes something everybody only remembers.

That’s what popped in my mind last week when I read this verse last week…

By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit ENTRUSTED to you.
2 Timothy 1:14

That word entrusted has stayed with me.

I didn’t come up with this story about Jesus.
Neither did you.

Somewhere along the way, it reached us.

Maybe somebody took you to church when you were little. Maybe it was your mom or dad. Maybe it was a grandparent. Maybe it was a complete stranger or someone on your TV. Maybe you were much older before someone finally helped you understand who Jesus really is.

BUT… Somebody knew the story before you did.

And they handed it to you.

I think that’s why those old recipes have been on my mind.

Sandy’s grandma isn’t here anymore, but there are still moments when something she made finds its way onto our table.

Her hands are gone, but what she handed down isn’t.

There’s something about that that gets me.

TRUTH… Someday our hands will be gone too. I find myself wondering less about what people will remember about us and more about what will still be in their hands because we were here…

Someone handed us the Gospel…
Who are we going to hand it to?

Since yesterday, I can’t stop thinking about old receipts.

Not the paper ones. The other kind. The ones we keep on people.

I think most of us have at least one. Maybe we would never call it that, but there is somebody whose name can come up and almost instantly we remember the balance. What they said. What they did. What they took from us. What they never apologized for. Maybe it was years ago, but somewhere inside there is still a quiet thought that says, you owe me.

An apology. An explanation. An admission that you were wrong. Maybe trust. Maybe time. Maybe years you cannot get back.

Some receipts represent something that really did cost us. I do not want to minimize that, because sometimes Christians can talk about forgiveness as if pain disappears the moment we decide to forgive. It does not. Some things leave scars. Some relationships are never the same. Some things were simply wrong.

That is actually what struck me again in the little book of Philemon. Paul never tells Philemon that nothing happened. He says, “If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account.”

In other words, the debt was real.

But the debt did not have to own the future.

I think that is where this has been sitting with me.

We can carry a receipt long after the relationship is gone. We can move away. Stop talking. Build a new life. Say we are over it. But then a name comes up, a memory surfaces, or something brushes against that old wound, and suddenly we discover we still know exactly what they owe us.

And if I am not careful, what somebody did behind me can begin deciding how I live in front of me.

It can decide how much I trust. How close I let people get. Whether I love freely or cautiously. Whether I walk into the next thing Jesus has for me with hope or already expecting somebody to hurt me again.

That is too much power to give someone who wounded me.

And this is where forgiveness matters.

Forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. I think we need to say that clearly. Reconciliation takes two people. Forgiveness does not.

Sometimes relationships can be rebuilt. Sometimes repentance happens, trust grows again, and something beautiful comes out of something that was broken. But sometimes that is not possible. Sometimes the other person will never own what they did. Sometimes boundaries are necessary. Sometimes reconnecting would not be wise or safe.

You can forgive someone and still have boundaries.

You can forgive someone and never trust them the same way again.

You can forgive someone you may never speak to again.

Forgiveness is not saying, “Nothing happened.”

It is saying, “Something happened, and it cost me something, but I am not going to spend the rest of my life trying to collect the debt.”

Because if my peace depends on your apology, you still have some control over my peace. If my healing depends on you finally admitting what you did, then part of my future is still sitting in your hands.

And I do not want that.

I do not want what somebody did behind me to rob me of what Jesus has in front of me.

Colossians says that Jesus canceled “the record of debt that stood against us.” I cannot read that without realizing that I have had a receipt too. I have needed forgiveness. I have needed grace. I have hurt people. I have failed. I still need Jesus every bit as much today as I ever have.

Jesus did not pretend my debt was not real.

He paid it.

Remembering the grace we have received is what finally helps our fingers loosen around the receipts we have been carrying on everybody else.

Maybe reconciliation will happen. I hope it does whenever it can. But even if it never does, freedom still can.

We can stop replaying what happened. We can stop making the next person pay for what the last person did. We can stop allowing someone else’s worst decision to become the narrator of the rest of our lives.

The receipt may be real. The cost may have been real. The wound may still be real. But we do not have to carry it forever.

Freedom begins when we finally decide that what they did gets to be part of our story… but it does not get to write the rest of it.

There’s something terrifying about a rip current because it doesn’t necessarily feel dangerous at first.

You can be standing waist-deep in the water on a beautiful summer day. Kids are playing nearby. Somebody’s sitting on the beach with a cooler open. Nothing feels threatening.

Then you look up and realize you’re farther from shore than you meant to be.

You didn’t decide to go there. You didn’t swim out there. The water was moving while you were paying attention to something else. And once you realize what’s happening, instinct takes over. Get back to shore. So you turn toward it and swim hard.

The problem is, that’s exactly what you shouldn’t do.

You can’t overpower a rip current by swimming straight against it. You’ll wear yourself out trying. The way out is to swim parallel to the shoreline until you escape the current, then make your way back in. Which feels completely wrong when you’re the one in the water. Everything inside you is screaming, Shore is that way.

And sometimes I wonder how much of life we spend doing exactly that.

We know something isn’t right. We see what anger is doing to us. We know where that temptation leads. We recognize the pattern in our marriage. We hate what our bitterness has turned into. We know we’re drinking too much, scrolling too much, hiding too much, spending too much, working too much, or carrying something we should have put down years ago.

So we fight harder. I’m going to do better. I’m not going to do that again. Tomorrow will be different. I just need more discipline.

And sometimes it works. For a while.

Then somehow we find ourselves right back in the same water, only now we’re more exhausted than we were before.

I know that feeling. There have been things in my own life I genuinely wanted to change. I wasn’t pretending. I meant the promises I made to myself. I meant the prayers I prayed to God. And still, somehow, I found myself fighting the same current.

That can do something to you after a while, because eventually you stop questioning your strategy and start questioning yourself. Maybe I’m just weak. Maybe I’ll always be this way. Maybe God is tired of hearing me say I’m sorry. Maybe everybody else has figured this out and I’m the only one still out here.

But what if the answer isn’t fighting harder?

What if the greatest lie we’ve believed is that Jesus came to stand on the shoreline and yell better instructions? Try harder. Be better. Clean yourself up. Get your act together. Swim harder and maybe you’ll make it back.

That isn’t the Jesus I see in Scripture.

I see a Jesus who comes after people. A Jesus who touches people everyone else avoids. A Jesus who sits at tables with people religious folks had already written off. A Jesus who moves toward the ashamed, the broken, the addicted, the angry, the grieving, the confused and the exhausted. A Jesus who ultimately went to a cross because we could not rescue ourselves.

Maybe you need to hear that today.

Jesus did not come to give drowning people better swimming instructions. He came to rescue them.

There’s a difference.

Grace begins when I finally admit that I cannot save myself. That doesn’t mean I stop growing. It doesn’t mean choices don’t matter or obedience doesn’t matter. Following Jesus will change the way we live. It should. But transformation is different when it starts from rescue instead of fear.

I’m no longer desperately swimming toward God hoping that if I work hard enough He’ll finally reach for me. I’m learning to live because He already has.

Maybe that’s where you are right now. You’re tired. You know the current. You’ve fought it before. You’ve promised this would be the last time before. And maybe you’re ashamed that you’re still struggling with something you thought you would have beaten by now.

I don’t know what your current is. But I know this: you were never meant to save yourself.

There is a Savior for that. And His name is Jesus.

The beautiful thing about Jesus is that He doesn’t wait on the shore until we’ve demonstrated enough effort. He comes toward us while we’re still exhausted, still scared, still coughing up water, still wondering how we ended up this far out.

Love is why He came into the water.

But rescue isn’t the end of the story. Eventually, we go back into the water. Only now, we don’t swim the same way.

We stop fighting like everything depends on our strength. We learn to trust the One who rescued us. We follow Him. We learn His movements, His ways, His heart. Little by little, we begin to swim like Him. Not because we’re trying to earn the rescue, but because we already have it.

Maybe the freedom you need today isn’t found in finally becoming strong enough to beat the current. Maybe it begins when you stop believing you were ever supposed to.

You have a Savior.

And after you’ve been rescued, you don’t have to spend the rest of your life proving you could have made it on your own.

You just learn to follow the One who came for you.

SENT: Mission Trip Journal Day 4 - The Time You Have Left

Today started with an adopt a highway project. Camp Michiana takes care of a two mile stretch with the camp road right in the middle of it, and it was our job today. We split the group and worked both sides, cleaning our way toward each other until we met in the middle. I’ll be honest, I was a little stunned by what people throw out their windows. Somebody’s entire family sized meal, trash and all, just tossed out into the ditch. And yes, a few students got the honor of picking up a skunk that didn’t make it across the road. Not exactly a highlight of the week for them, but they did it without complaining.

In the afternoon we gathered wood and split a good amount of it for the camp.

Neither job sounds like much on paper. Picking up litter. Stacking firewood. But perspective changes everything. The staff here just came off an incredible but exhausting summer of camps, and every task we knocked out today is one less thing standing between them and being ready for retreat season. Sometimes serving well has nothing to do with how big the job looks and everything to do with who it’s actually for.

Tonight’s devo hit different than the last few nights. We didn’t ease into it. We asked the students straight up how short life actually is. Somebody built a chart once, just dots, one for every month of an average life if you live to ninety. Once you subtract sleep, school, work, driving, eating, chores, getting ready, what’s actually left for a person to choose what to do with is 334 months. That’s it. That’s the whole window for the things that matter most. And the average eighteen year old today is on pace to spend 93 percent of that window looking at a screen. Not 93 percent of the day. 93 percent of the only part of life that was ever really theirs.

We weren’t trying to make anyone feel guilty about their phone. What’s underneath it matters more. We reach for it to fill the quiet, and the quiet is usually where the harder, realer things live, including God. It’s tough to hear from Him when you never give Him five uninterrupted minutes.

Psalm 90 says teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. On our own we don’t number them, we just assume there will always be more. James 4 is a quick reminder though that... Life is a mist, here for a moment and then gone.

So we asked the real question. If that mist vanished tonight, are you certain you’d be with Jesus. We didn’t want anyone in that room walking away without an honest answer to that. Romans reminds us all of us have fallen short, no exceptions, and that death is what sin earns but eternal life is a gift, not something anyone could work for. God didn’t wait for us to clean ourselves up first. While we were still in it, Christ died for us. That’s the whole gospel in one line.

For the ones who already know Jesus, we pushed further. Freedom in Christ was never meant to look identical to everyone else’s life, spent the same way on the same noise, chasing whatever’s loudest with no idea where it’s headed.

We ended by sending them off alone, no phones, just Scripture and quiet, to sit with two questions honestly. If my life ended tonight, would I be with Jesus, or have I just been near Him without ever actually giving Him mine. Second, If I have been saved by Jesus what I am doing with the gift of life He has given me?

(I’ll add more pics soon to this one as the group was split)

Sent Day 3: Tires, Tiny Boxes, and the Question We’re All Avoiding

We started this morning with team building, pulling a tire off a twelve foot post as a group, and figuring out how to get everyone standing on one small box at the same time. Both only worked by leaning on each other. That set the tone for everything else today.

From there we headed over to HOPE, an organization that pours into moms and kids who need somewhere to land. We played games. We built a homemade slip and slide out of nothing but a tarp and a hose and pure joy. I can’t show you pictures of the kids we were with, but what our students did out there was beautiful to watch. On Friday we go back to learn how HOPE actually pulls off everything they do, not just the fun stuff but the real work, the resources, the skills, the steady presence they offer to families who need somewhere to turn. What they do is the kind of ministry that never makes headlines but changes the whole trajectory of a family’s life.

Tonight in devotions we talked about being called, and it circled right back to that tire and that tiny box.

We looked at Moses, standing in front of a burning bush, telling God he wasn’t the right guy for the job. We looked at Jeremiah, insisting he was too young. We looked at Gideon, calling himself the weakest man in the weakest family in Israel. Every one of them stood face to face with God Himself, and every one of them tried to talk their way out of what He was asking.

We like to think we’d be different, that if a bush lit up on fire in front of us we’d say yes immediately, no hesitation, no excuses. I’m not so sure. I think most of us would do exactly what Moses did and start listing reasons we’re not good enough, not qualified, too messed up, too ordinary for anything God could use.

I don’t believe calling is a special category reserved for a handful of Christians who happen to be gifted or bold or put together. I believe every single one of us is called. We’ve just gotten comfortable cheering from the sidelines for the people who say yes, while quietly convincing ourselves we’re not the ones God had in mind. And in doing that, we risk missing what God actually had for us.

Ephesians tells us God prepared good works in advance for us to walk in. In advance. Before we did anything, before our first mistake or our best decision, God already knew every single thing we would ever do, and He still prepared work for us to walk into. Not work for the cleaned up version of us He hoped we’d become. Work for us, exactly as we are.

This morning none of us got that tire off the post alone. Nobody stood on that box by refusing to lean on the people across from them. Our calling was never meant to be a solo project either. Part of walking into what God prepared for you is learning to lean into the people around you, and letting them lean into you, instead of trying to prove you can carry it by yourself.

We sent the students out tonight with one challenge. Ask God the same question Moses asked. Who am I. Keep asking until you remember the answer. You are the one He said He would be with. Whatever He asks of you, He is not sending you out alone to figure it out. More often than not, He surrounds you with people to walk through it with you too.

You may not feel qualified. You may not feel smart enough, good enough, or like you’ve done enough right to earn a seat at the table. But God. His strength is made perfect in weakness. He is with you. That was never conditional on you having it together first.

Be willing to follow the call. And be willing to hold onto the people He puts next to you while you do.

SENT DAY 2 Mission Trip Journal

Today was our first full work day, and these kids showed up.

We spent the morning weeding an entire playground area, on our knees in the dirt for hours. Then we headed to one of the residences on the camp property and built a rock bed around the landscaping. That meant hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of river rock and spreading it by hand until our backs and shoulders felt it. It was hot, it was heavy, and it was one of those jobs where you don’t see how much you’ve done until you stand back and look.

For the most part, nobody complained. When someone started dragging a little, somebody else would jump in and pick up the slack, crack a joke, or just start working harder next to them until the tired one caught a second wind. When we finally did stand back, that playground was clean and that rock bed looked awesome.

But the work wasn’t the part of today I can’t stop thinking about.

Tonight in our devo, we opened up Psalm 139. I asked the students to just sit with it for a minute. God knows when we sit down and when we get up. He knows our thoughts before we even think them. He knows the words on our tongue before we say them out loud. There is nowhere we can go, nothing we can hide, no version of ourselves we can keep in the dark, because He is already there. Every thought. Every action. Every regret. Every failure we’ve buried so deep we thought no one would ever find it. He sees all of it. He’s always seen all of it.

And knowing all of that about us, He still wants us. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the version we perform for other people. All of it, laid bare, and He still moved toward us. That’s the whole reason Jesus came. John 3:17 says He didn’t come into the world to condemn it, He came to save it. He didn’t come to catalog our failures. He came to carry them.

So tonight we asked the students something hard. We asked them to think about the one thing. The thing nobody else knows about. The thing that keeps them up at night, or the thing they’re still carrying shame over, or the thing they’ve been quietly wrestling with and hiding from everyone around them. And then we told them the truth. Whatever that thing is, Jesus already took care of it at the cross. It’s finished. It’s paid for.

The real question isn’t whether Jesus did enough. He did. The real question is whether we actually believe it.

SENT Journal

Day 1 | I Think God Picked This Team

Today was the day.

We met at the church around 9:30 this morning, and I still have no idea how fourteen people fit everything they need for an entire week into one church van. Before the trip, I kept reminding everyone to pack light. Of course, I heard every reason why that wasn’t going to happen.

“But I need this.”

“What if I need that?”

Somehow, they actually pulled it off. One backpack-sized bag, one sleeping bag, and one pillow. After stuffing bags under seats, filling every little space we could find, and convincing ourselves there really was room for one more thing, we finally pulled out of the parking lot.

Somewhere along the drive today, I found myself just looking around the van.

I wasn’t really thinking about anything in particular. Everyone was just being themselves. Some were talking. Some were laughing. Some had music playing through their headphones. A couple conversations started between students who really didn’t know each other very well before today.

And then a thought came back that I haven’t been able to shake.

“I think God picked this team.”

I remember saying that to Sandy before I left this morning. At the time, I couldn’t really explain why I said it. Honestly, I still can’t. It was just one of those thoughts that settled into my heart and has stayed there all day.

As I looked around, I realized every one of these students has a completely different story. Different families. Different personalities. Different gifts. Different experiences. Different reasons for saying yes to this trip.

Yet here we are.

Fourteen people whose paths all crossed for one week.

It made me wonder how many times God does that without us even realizing it.

Have you ever thought about the people God has brought into your life?

Maybe it’s someone you work with every day. Maybe it’s a friend you almost never met. Maybe it’s your spouse. Maybe it’s the people sitting around you every Sunday at church.

Every one of those people has a story that is completely different from yours. Different victories. Different hurts. Different prayers. Different roads that somehow led to the same place as yours.

I don’t think about that nearly enough.

When Jesus called His disciples, He didn’t just invite people to follow Him. He brought together people who probably never would have spent time together otherwise. Over time, they became more than a group. They became family.

I don’t know exactly what God has planned for this week. Maybe some lifelong friendships will begin. Maybe someone will finally ask the question they’ve been carrying around for months. Maybe one conversation will change the direction of someone’s life.

Or maybe God has something He wants to teach me.

I really don’t know.

But I do know this.

I don’t believe any of us are here by accident.

So tonight, that’s my prayer.

I’m praying that somewhere over the next few days, every one of us begins to understand a little more clearly why God brought us here.

And years from now, when this week is just a memory, I hope we’ll all be able to look back and smile because we’ll finally see what today couldn’t yet show us.

After all…

Today was only Day 1.

Fight for Them

Father’s Day…

When I was a kid, my favorite part of Rudolph was never the part everyone remembers. It wasn’t the shiny nose. It wasn’t the foggy Christmas Eve or the big rescue at the end.

It was the island.

That quiet, faraway place where the broken toys lived. The ones nobody wanted. A train with square wheels. A cowboy riding an ostrich. A water pistol that shot jelly instead of water. A doll who didn’t even know what was wrong with her, only that she’d been set aside. Only that no one had picked her.

They weren’t bad toys. They weren’t useless. They were just different. And different, it turned out, was enough to get them left behind.

And then Rudolph made a promise. He said he would come back for them. He said he would find them homes.

I knew that island. I lived on it when I was a kid. I think a lot of us did, and a lot of us still do. We just got better at hiding it.

Nine years ago God broke something in me.

For years I had been climbing. Chasing metrics. Counting the things I thought a pastor was supposed to count. Seats filled. Numbers up. The right speakers, the right music, the right show. I had convinced myself that bigger meant better and busier meant blessed. And one day all of that abruptly died in me. It just went dark.

I don’t know how else to describe it. The thing I had been building my whole sense of worth around simply stopped breathing. And in that silence, with nothing left to perform, I went back to the Scriptures. Not to prepare a sermon. Not to find a point. Just to look. And I watched how Jesus actually lived.

I’m nowhere close to being exactly like Jesus. Let me say that plainly. But I saw something I had missed for a long time, something that had been sitting right there on the page the whole time.

Jesus didn’t build a social club.

He didn’t protect a history or guard a tradition. He didn’t worry about who would be impressed. He went straight to the people the religious had already written off. The tax collector everyone despised. The woman everyone whispered about. The leper no one would touch. The ones left out. The ones left behind. The misfits.

He didn’t wait for them to clean themselves up first. He didn’t make them earn a seat. He just went to them, sat with them, ate with them, loved them right where they were.

And somewhere along the way the church stopped doing that.

It got good at putting on a service and forgot how to be of service. It learned how to fill a room but forgot how to find the one person standing alone in it. It polished the stage and tuned the lights while the people who needed Jesus most stood outside on the steps, certain they would never be welcome through the door. Certain there was no room for someone like them.

That breaks my heart. Because that was never the church. That was a building. That was a show. The church was always supposed to be the island that goes looking for the toys nobody else wanted.

So when God started Wellspring, He brought all of this back to my heart. Rudolph and the island and that promise. He reminded me what I had felt as a kid, watching those toys wait for someone to come back for them. And He let me carry it into who we would become.

We’re the island of misfit toys. We know we’re not for everyone, and we have made our peace with that. We are not trying to be the biggest or the shiniest or the most impressive room in town. But we are for every single misfit who ever wondered if there was a home for them.

So let me say it to you the way I wish someone had said it to me.

If you’ve ever stood outside the door wondering if there was room. If you’ve ever felt like the toy that got passed over again and again, set back on the shelf while everyone else got chosen. If you’ve ever been certain you were too broken, too different, too far gone to ever belong anywhere.

You’re not too far gone. You never were.

There’s an island for that. There’s a home. And the One who runs it has never once left a misfit behind. He came looking for you long before you ever thought to look for Him.

We’re still in the struggle. We don’t have it all figured out, and we’re not pretending to. But I would not trade who we are for anything in this world.

The misfits have a home with someone…

And His name is Jesus.

That is where this starts. The one who ate cereal in the morning and left their shoes by the door and laughed too loud at things that were not that funny. Their mother knew the sound of their footsteps. Their father knew the shape of their shoulders. They were somebody’s everything before they were ever anybody’s soldier.

They grew up and the world got complicated… the way it always does, and somewhere in that complication a country called and they answered.

Maybe they walked into the recruiter’s office with their jaw set and their mind made up. Maybe they wrestled with it for months. Maybe the draft came and they had no choice on paper, but here is the thing about them. They could have run. People did. They could have found a way out, buried themselves in deferments, made themselves small enough to disappear. They did not.

They made a decision that most of us have never had to make, and they made it in the quiet before anyone was watching.

The night before they shipped out, or the night before the operation, or the night before the ridge or the beach or the tree line, they were alone with it. Just them and the dark and the knowledge of what tomorrow might ask of them. They prayed, or they stared at the ceiling, or they wrote a letter they hoped they would never have to send. Something settled in them. Something older and harder than peace. A resolve. A willingness.

They decided.

We talk about the action when we talk about heroes. The charge. The medal. The moment someone else saw. We skip the interior of it, the place inside a person where they look at their own life, everything they have and hope for and love, and they open their hands and say, if it comes to it, take it. For them. For this. It is enough reason to lay it down.

They were afraid. The fear was real and it was physical and it did not leave them. Courage is a person who is shaking and moves forward anyway.

They moved forward. Through the mud and the noise and the confusion and the moments where everything in their body was screaming at them to stop, they kept moving forward.

They held the line so you could hold your life. So you could hold your children. So you could hold anything at all.

Some of them came home. They carried it differently after. They sat at tables that felt too quiet and watched their families eat and were grateful and haunted in equal measure. They did not talk about it much. It mattered too much for words and the words were never enough anyway.

Some of them did not come home. Somewhere there is a photograph on a mantle or in a box or folded inside a Bible. Somewhere there is a name on stone. Somewhere a mother still thinks about them every single morning, even now, even decades later, because that is what love does. It does not stop just because someone is gone.

Today you will grill something. You will sit in the sun. You will laugh with people you love. That is good. But somewhere underneath this day, underneath the long weekend and the first real heat of summer, is a debt so large we will spend our whole lives unable to pay it. The least we can do is know it is there. Stop for a moment and feel the weight of what was spent so we could be here, easy and fed and free, in the afternoon light.

Their names deserve to be said. Their decisions deserve to be honored. With the honest acknowledgment that the life you are living, the freedom underneath your feet right now, was purchased. The price was a human being who loved their life as much as you love yours, who chose to risk it anyway, who in the end gave everything.

Remember them today. Them. The ones who left their shoes by the door. The ones who lay in the dark and decided. The soldiers who moved forward when everything in them wanted to stop.

They gave us today… May we remember.

“Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13

Mother’s Day means something different to almost everyone.

For some people, today is one of the best days of the year. Breakfast made by small hands, maybe burned a little. A phone that hasn’t stopped. A feeling of fullness that is hard to describe and easy to receive.

For others, today is complicated. The relationship with your mom was hard, or it was good and then it wasn’t. She is gone now, and the absence doesn’t get as easy as people say it does.

For some, today is genuinely painful. You wanted to be a mother and it hasn’t happened. You have been carrying that quietly, and today has a way of making quiet grief loud. And for some reading this, you are a mother who has buried a child. No one talks enough about what a day like today does to you.

Whatever today feels like for you, you are not invisible. This is a day worth celebrating, and it is also a day worth being honest about. Those two things can be true at the same time.

There is something women carry that is difficult to put into words, but most of us have seen it up close. A particular kind of presence. An attentiveness to people that changes the rooms they walk into. The ability to hold someone’s pain without trying to fix it immediately or move past it too quickly. I have seen it in my wife Sandy for years. The way she notices things I walk right past. The way she holds space for our kids when they are hurting, in a way that I genuinely have to work at and she simply does.

Mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers. Women who stayed up at night with sick kids. Who said the right thing at the right moment even when they were running on empty. Who prayed for their children when they couldn’t sleep and kept showing up when showing up cost them something. That work will never make a headline, but it echoes for generations. It is some of the most important work being done on this earth.

Mother’s Day can also feel like a day with a category for some women and not others, and that is worth pushing back on. If you never had children, by choice or by circumstance or by a grief you are still carrying, you are not less.

The world is full of people who are alive differently because of a woman who was not their biological mother but showed up like one. A teacher. An aunt. A mentor. A woman at a church who saw something in a kid that no one else was seeing and refused to look away. That is mothering. It does not require biology. It requires love, presence, and the willingness to give yourself to someone else’s becoming. Every woman has done that for someone. Maybe you know exactly who. Maybe you won’t know until much later. But it happened, and it counted.

If you lost your mom, grief does not follow a calendar. Missing her today is not weakness. It is love with nowhere to go right now, and that love was real. If you longed to become a mother and it didn’t happen the way you hoped, your longing was not wrong and it was not a failure. It was something beautiful in you, and the fact that it hasn’t been filled the way you imagined does not diminish you. God sees that ache. It has not gone unnoticed. And if you are a mother who has lost a child, there are no words that are enough. But this is worth saying: you are still their mother. That does not end. The God who sees every sparrow that falls has not looked away from you for a single moment.

Proverbs 31 says that a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised, that her works will speak for her, and that the people whose lives she has touched will rise up and call her blessed. To every woman who has loved people at cost to herself, who has given when she was empty, who has shown up in ordinary ways that were anything but ordinary: thank you.

You are seen. And what you have given to the people around you matters more than you probably know.

I almost didn't say yes.

That's the honest truth. I was sixteen years old, a few weeks from turning seventeen, and my youth pastor Mike had invited me to church camp.

I had been carrying some things I'm not going to go into here. Heavy things. And Mike knew.
I had poured all of it out to him.

He knew exactly where I was and exactly how far I was from Jesus. So when he invited me to camp, it wasn't the gospel that got me there.

It was pretty girls. That's the truth. I said yes for the wrong reasons.

When we got there, they divided everyone into small groups and selected some upperclassmen to serve as leaders. Leaders were recommended by their churches. When they started calling names, I was not paying attention. And then I heard mine and let’s just say I was mortified.

There were a few hundred of us there. I pulled Mike aside and told him, You must have given them the wrong name. You got the wrong dude.

Mike looked at me and said something I have never forgotten.

"I see something in you that you do not yet see in yourself. Trust me."

What was I going to do? Say no in front of everyone? So I walked up and grabbed my packet…

Early in the week they had a salvation night where the gospel was shared. And afterward I had to lead my small group. I had to ask if anyone wanted to put their faith in Jesus. I wasn't even sure I had done that myself. But I was reading from the paper they handed me.

I didn't expect anyone to respond.
But… one boy did. My heart went numb.

I said, "Let's pray and I read the words from the prayer written out on the paper, words that helped that boy say out loud what he had been feeling, words about placing his faith in Jesus.

And I watched him do it. My eyes were open; he was praying so intently. A boy giving his life to Jesus. And I was technically the one leading him there.

Not knowing if any of it was real to me yet.

The next few days I was wrestling. Near violently inside, with something I couldn't name. Thursday night the speaker was speaking and I still have no idea what he said.

Because I got up and walked out of the chapel.
Of course the college-aged staff came out after me because the last thing you do at church camp is get up while the speaker is speaking and walk out.

I turned around and said, "I just need Jesus." And I kept walking.

I went a little further and turned around, and they were in a circle praying. For me. And something broke open in my chest.

I fell to my knees at the playground by the swing set, and I told Jesus, "That's it." I'm done.

It wasn't about whether I believed. I can't remember not believing that there was a God. It was about whether I would surrender.

And I did.

I've thought about that night a thousand times since then.
All the things that had to happen to get me to that swingset.

The hard seasons. Mike's invitation. The pretty girls. My name being called. A boy in my small group raising his hand. And Mike's words echoing somewhere underneath all of it…

I see something in you that you do not yet see in yourself.

Here is what I know now that I didn't know then.

God's plan was already in motion long before I understood it. He was moving toward me before I turned toward him.

This is my story... but if you look in the mirror long enough, you are going to find that it's your story too. Different seasons, different reasons, different experiences... but the same Jesus who is walking towards you long before you turned towards Him.

Owned…

There is a feeling most people know but few can name. It sits somewhere between tired and empty. It shows up on Sunday evenings and three in the morning. It follows you home from the promotion you worked years for, stands next to you at the party you were so sure would feel different this time, waits for you at the finish line of every goal you’ve ever crossed. It is the quiet suspicion that no matter how hard you run, you are somehow still behind.

Most of us assume that feeling is our fault. That we just need to want better things, work smarter, get our minds right, be more grateful. So we adjust. We try harder. We aim higher or we aim differently. And the feeling stays.

What if it’s not your fault? What if that feeling is a symptom, not a character flaw? What if it’s trying to tell you something?

Here is what I think it’s telling you. You are owned. And everything you are chasing is the thing that owns you.

The world is remarkably patient and remarkably good at this. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t hand you a contract. It just finds the thing you want most, the thing that feels most like it would finally make life make sense, and it positions itself between you and it. Then it makes you an offer. Chase this and you’ll arrive. Earn this and you’ll be enough. Achieve this and you’ll finally be able to rest.

For some people the offer comes dressed as financial security. Just get stable. Just get ahead. Just get to a place where the numbers stop being terrifying. So they work. They sacrifice. They get close. And then something shifts. The cost of living rises. The goal expands. The version of enough that felt so clear five years ago is somehow not enough anymore. The finish line was never a finish line. It was a fishing line.

For others the offer comes dressed as success, status, the respect of people whose opinion feels like oxygen. And they chase it and they earn it and they stand inside it and they wait for it to feel the way they imagined it would. Some of the most hollow people alive have everything the world said would fix them. They will tell you quietly if they trust you that they are still waiting.

For others it’s approval. Or control. Or just the relief of finally feeling like enough in a room full of people who make you feel small. The offer changes its clothes depending on what you need. But underneath every version of it is the same transaction. Give me your energy, your years, your sense of self. And I will keep you just close enough to hope that you never stop.

That is what an owner does. It keeps you moving. It keeps you earning. It keeps you performing for an audience that is always about to be satisfied but never quite gets there. You work to make your owner proud. You make decisions based on what your owner will think. You lose sleep over whether your owner respects you. And the goalpost moves. It always moves. By design. Because an owner who lets you arrive is an owner who loses you.

This is why exhaustion is not just physical. This is why people who look like they have everything still feel like something is missing. This is why you can work your whole life toward something and feel, in the moment you finally touch it, an emptiness you weren’t expecting. The world was never going to deliver what it promised. It was trying to keep you chasing.

What you thought you were chasing has actually been chasing you.

Rest in that for a moment.

The anxiety that won’t leave. The restlessness after every achievement. The way satisfaction always seems to live just one more thing away. These are not signs that you need to want better things. They are evidence that you were made for something the world cannot give you. Your exhaustion is not weakness. It is proof that you were not built to be owned.

There is a God who has been watching all of this unfold. Not from a distance, and not with the slow burn of disappointment at how long it’s taken. With the steady, patient love of someone who has been standing in the doorway the whole time, waiting for you to come home. He is holding out no new offer, dangling no fresh finish line, demanding nothing from the version of you that finally shows up.
He is waiting for the tired one.

The one who has been running so long they’ve forgotten what it felt like to stop. The one who has given so much to so many owners and has so little left to show for it. The one who is starting to wonder, quietly and maybe for the first time, whether there is something more to life than the endless work of becoming someone worth keeping.
That person is exactly who Jesus came for.

He looked at the whole exhausting system and said, come to me. All of you who are weary and carrying heavy loads. I will give you rest. That is not a self-help promise or a mindset shift or a better morning routine dressed in religious language. That is an invitation to finally put it down. To live without the weight of an owner’s expectations pressing on every decision you make, every relationship you enter, every morning you open your eyes.
You were not made to be consumed. You were made to be carried.

And when you finally let that be true, something unexpected happens. You don’t stop. You don’t disappear into passivity or drift through life unbothered by anything that matters. You actually begin, maybe for the first time, to truly live. You love people without needing them to complete you. You work without needing it to define you. You give without keeping score. You pursue things not because you are desperate for what they might finally make you, but because you are already full and this is simply what full people do with their lives.

That is the shift the world never tells you about. Because a person living from freedom is a person the world can no longer reach. The hooks don’t hold the same way. The offers lose their pull. Not because life gets easier or the hard things disappear, but because you are no longer auditioning. You are no longer performing for an owner. You are simply, finally, free.

And from that place, everything changes. The same hands that used to chase can now be opened. The same energy that used to be spent proving can now be spent pouring into the people and the purpose right in front of you. You were never meant to arrive exhausted. You were meant to arrive carried, and then sent back out into the world not as someone trying to find their life, but as someone who has already found it.

The world will keep making its offer. It is patient and it is practiced and it knows exactly what to say to you. It will dress the hook in whatever you find most beautiful and it will wait.

But you already know how that story ends.
Go live the other one.

It's Saturday.
Not just any Saturday. The Saturday. The one tucked between the darkness of Friday and the explosion of Sunday. And I keep thinking about what that day must have felt like for the people who were there.

Jesus was dead.

Let that settle for a moment, because for them, it wasn't theology. It was devastation. This was the man who had opened blind eyes. Who had laughed with them around fires and across tables. Who had walked into the darkest corners of human suffering and refused to look away. He had touched lepers. He had called dead men out of tombs. He had loved people that the rest of the world had written off and thrown away. For three years, He had been rewriting everything they thought they knew about God, about life, about what was possible.

And now He was in a tomb.

The betrayal. The arrest. The kangaroo court in the middle of the night. The scourging. The thorns pressed into his skull. The nails. The hours on the cross. The moment it was over. They had watched all of it. And now there was nothing left to watch. Nothing left to do. Just silence.

We know what's coming. We know Sunday is hours away. We know the stone gets rolled back, that the grave couldn't hold Him, that everything changes with the resurrection. We carry that knowledge into this weekend like a secret in our pocket. But they didn't have it. Saturday was just Saturday. The longest day of their lives. And somewhere in Jerusalem, the disciples were scattered, scared, grieving, and utterly lost. Even though Jesus had told them. Even though He had said it plainly. They didn't understand, and even if they had, I'm not sure understanding would have made the silence any quieter.

We know what those days feel like too.

Not the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, but the Saturday seasons of our own lives. The stretches where God feels distant, almost absent. Where we've prayed and nothing seems to move. Where something we loved or trusted or built has collapsed, and we're sitting in the rubble wondering where He is. Where the silence isn't peaceful, it's suffocating.

And in that silence, we do what scared people do. We panic. We make decisions we shouldn't. We rush toward anything that feels like relief. We get angry. We question. We start to wonder if He was ever really there at all, or if He is there, why He would let this happen. The silence has a way of making us forget everything we've seen Him do.

But here's what Saturday couldn't change, even though no one knew it yet: God was not finished.

The silence was not abandonment. The stillness was not absence. In the darkest, most hopeless moment in human history, something was happening that no one could see. God was not wringing His hands. He was not scrambling. He was not surprised. And He was not done.

He never wastes the darkness. Not theirs. Not yours.

He is the God who heals and restores. Who creates paths where there are none. Who opens eyes that have been shut for years. Who holds people together when everything around them is falling apart. Who takes what looks like an ending and makes it the beginning of something no one saw coming.

So where are you this Saturday?

Maybe you're sitting in a silence that has gone on too long. Maybe you're scared, or lost, or angry, or you've started to wonder if He's really there. Maybe you're staring at something that feels like a tomb, and you can't imagine what comes next.
Sunday is coming.

Not because everything always turns out the way we want it to, but because the God who walked out of that grave is the same God who is with you in the silence right now. He has not forgotten you. He has not looked away. And He is not finished with what He is doing in your life.

Hold on. Don't panic. Don't rush ahead.

Sunday is coming.

I lost my glasses in the ocean yesterday.

Not misplaced… not somewhere in a bag… I mean gone. Resting on the bottom of the ocean floor.

I was so excited to jump in with a snorkeling mask that I completely forgot I was still wearing them. The second I hit the water, the mask flew off my head. I caught it, got it back on, and in that moment I realized something was wrong. Everything was blurry. That sinking feeling hit instantly… my glasses were gone.

We were in deep water.

For a split second, I felt it rise in me… that surge of panic. How am I going to function? How am I going to drive when we get home? How is this not going to mess up the rest of the trip?

And then just as fast as it came, something steadied me. God wasn’t surprised by this.
Not even a little.

While I was treading water trying to process what I had just lost, He was already present in what I still had… breath in my lungs, my family around me, new friends, the beauty of the ocean stretching out in every direction.

And it’s been sitting with me ever since.
Because if I’m honest, we don’t just panic over lost glasses… we panic over the things we feel like we need to hold onto.

The habit you went back to again last night. The one you promised yourself you were done with. The one nobody knows about.

The conversation that plays on repeat at 2am. The thing you said. The way their face changed. The apology you gave that didn’t fix it.

The moment from years ago that still shows up uninvited. In a quiet car. In the middle of a good day. A whisper that says, “Don’t forget who you are. Don’t forget what you did.”

It’s exhausting. It clings. It follows.

And here’s the thing nobody talks about: part of us holds on to it on purpose. Like the weight is keeping us honest. Like if we let grace actually reach it, we’ll stop taking it seriously. Like we need to keep punishing ourselves so it counts.

But the truth is, when we bring that to Jesus… when we actually surrender it, not halfway, not just in words, but fully… it doesn’t sit on the surface anymore.

It sinks.

Not into forgetfulness like it didn’t matter… but into grace so deep it can’t be reached.

Scripture says, As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. Psalm 103:12

That’s not poetic exaggeration.
That’s reality.

Through the cross, Jesus didn’t just cover sin… He carried it all the way down. Deeper than we could ever swim. Further than we could ever retrieve.

And yet we still try.
We replay it.
We revisit it.
We go searching for things that are no longer ours to carry.

That’s what Holy Week confronts in us.

As we move toward Good Friday, we’re reminded that Jesus didn’t go to the cross to make us slightly better versions of ourselves.

He went to take the full weight of sin, shame, regret, and brokenness… and bury it in a place where it no longer has authority over us.

“It is finished.” John 19:30
Not “managed.”
Not “minimized.”
Finished.

So maybe the question isn’t, “Why did I lose this?”
Maybe the better question is, “Why do I keep reaching for something God has already taken from me?”

Meanwhile, you’re swimming in an ocean of grace, surrounded by beauty, invited into freedom… and missing it because you’re still staring at the bottom.

The enemy would love nothing more than to keep dragging you back to what God already cleared.
But he only wins if you keep diving.

Lift your head. There’s an entire ocean around you.