Growth exposes what we can't carry alone. The early church learned that fast. As it grew, a group of widows started getting overlooked. Rather than tighten their grip, the apostles made room for others to lead.

One of them was Stephen, handed the unglamorous job of getting meals to people in need. Yet the first time we meet Saul, the church's fiercest opponent and future greatest missionary, he's watching what Stephen's faithfulness cost him.

Stephen never saw what his small assignment would become. Most of us won't either.

This week's devotional asks whether we love our church because we're growing or because we're comfortable, and who might grow if we made room.

What are the “12 stones” that you use as a reminder and a testimony of what God has brought you through?

Someone who shares my faith told me I must be an enemy. I hadn't attacked their position. I'd offered a different one, and said this wasn't about being Christian — it was about being truthful.

That was the last time we spoke.

Days later, a message from someone who's never shared any of it. Their father had a frightening test in the morning. Would I pray? They joked that they weren't exactly the praying kind and needed to outsource this one.

No preamble. No credentials. No apology for how long it had been.

One conversation made belonging conditional on agreement. The other assumed no belonging at all, and asked anyway.

This week's devotional is about the ledgers we keep, and what actually gets received when we come with nothing but the truth.

God’s promises are true, and what He’s promised you, you can be courageous to possess. But once you’ve got your blessing, don’t forget the One who gave it to you!

Yesterday was World Letter Writing Day. 

When I was young, I wrote my then-girlfriend letters across whole summers apart. I thought it was silly. She kept every one. 

I still write — lately about the sermons I hear. So maybe I should not have been surprised when, this week, I wrote a letter to God. 

My mind was scattered. The room was quiet; I was not. But somewhere in the writing, the focus I had chased all day just arrived. 

Turns out I am in old company. Jesus stepped away from the noise on purpose. Paul poured out his heart one page at a time. Not techniques — just turning, deliberately, toward the One already turned toward them. 

This week's devotional is about the small ways we make room for God in a world built to keep us from ever being still. 

What is God trying to open up your heart and vision to do in accordance with His plan?

My mother turned ninety last weekend. She spent part of the evening dancing. Forty years ago she told me she didn't expect to see fifty. She had the medical history to back it up.

There was a season when she could have recited Footprints in the Sand the way you'd repeat one side of an argument. At ninety, that's a memory. She doesn't wonder anymore whose footprints those are.

Isaiah wrote to people convinced God had moved on — people hauling around gods they had to carry themselves. He drew the contrast plain. You carry yours. Mine has carried you since before you were born.

She isn't thankful for ninety years. She's thankful for Who was in every one of them.

This week's devotional is about what makes a life full — and why none of us need ninety years to learn it.

Legacy is not what you leave for the people you love, it’s what you leave in the people you love! Give them the best of your love…a relationship with God! It’s what Lois and Eunice gave to Timothy.

Half a day with my youngest daughter, and we didn't argue once. The last time that happened, she was in high school. Five years ago. I'd love to tell you what changed in her. Nothing changed in her.

Somewhere across twenty-two years I stopped seeing my daughter and started seeing a file — every closed door, every conversation that went sideways, all of it consulted before she opened her mouth. I called it acceptance. It was closer to giving up.

When Jesus was asked for the greatest commandment, He didn't give one. He gave two and said the second mattered just as much. I don't think that's two assignments. I think the second is what happens when the first one actually reaches us.

Today’s devotion is about the file you've been keeping on someone and what it costs to set it down.

There's a two-word parenthesis tucked into 1 Kings 18 that says more about a man named Obadiah than pages of narrative could. He wasn't a prophet. He wasn't the hero of the chapter. He was a palace manager working for a king who hated God — and in the middle of the story, almost as an aside, we're told exactly who he really was. If someone opened a parenthesis about your life today — not your title, not what you'd write about yourself, just what you actually do when no one's watching — would it say you represent Christ, or just that you meant to? This week's devotion sits with that question, and with what Jesus said the real evidence of following Him looks like.

Lord, give us an unwavering faith, like Stephen’s, that will endure to the end.

For a while, I thought I had to choose between serving God and serving my family. I'm a grandfather now, and so much of my time goes to my kids and grandkids. I told myself God had to come first and quietly treated every hour with my family as an hour taken from Him.

Then I realized I'd been asking the wrong question. The choice was never God or family. The real question was how to bring more of God into my family. That one shift changed everything.

Today’s devotion is about the mission field closest to us — the one that has our last name.

The criminal beside Jesus had nothing left to offer.  No time to fix his record, no good works to point to—just one honest request: "Jesus, remember me." And grace answered before he could earn a thing.

If you have ever fought the good fight and still quietly wondered whether you have been faithful enough, today’s devotion will help.  The hardest truth to sit with may be that we were never meant to earn what God has already given—and that our striving was always meant to be worship, not anxiety.

Most of us know how to find God in a crisis.  But what happens when His presence stops being something we chase in the hard moments and simply becomes normal — a nearness we live in on ordinary Tuesdays? 

Today’s devotion sits with Psalm 16:8-11 and a quiet realization: real confidence in God is not measured by the answers we receive, but by the steady certainty that He is right beside us.  When we stop letting His presence rise and fall with our circumstances, we stop being so easily shaken. 

If your faith has ever felt loudest in the emergencies and faint in the calm, this one is for you. 

Joshua stood outside Jericho and asked the man with the drawn sword the only question that seemed to matter: "Are you friend or foe?" The answer was "Neither." It wasn't a correction of his information but of his map — and Joshua hit the ground and asked a better one: what do you want your servant to do?  Where are you asking God to take your side, instead of asking what He wants?