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.

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. 

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.

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.

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?

We tend to think spiritual growth always means changing something.  But some days God isn't asking you to change at all. He's asking you to loosen your grip and give thanks. And knowing the difference is the growth.

Take today's devotion.  David didn't pray, "Here's what's wrong with me." He prayed, "Search me, O God… point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me" (Psalm 139:23–24). He let God decide whether the day called for repentance or rest.

It turns out the old serenity prayer is a fair picture of walking with Him: the courage to change what He reveals, the serenity to trust Him with what we're clutching, and the wisdom to know which is which. 

Before Moses ever knew God, God already knew Moses.  Long before the burning bush, before the plagues, before the Red Sea — the rescue was already in motion. A baby marked for death, drawn from the Nile, raised in the very palace that wanted him gone.  My own return to God took four years longer than I wanted. But looking back, He was never distant. He was drawing the map. 

If you're in a season where God feels far off, this week's devotion is for you. His plan for you began long before you ever turned toward Him.

Someone asked me this weekend which faith makes a better person — and the question followed me home.

As believers, we're loved unconditionally by grace we haven't earned. So here's the honest tension underneath it: if I obey God because He loved me first, am I really in love with Him? Or has grace just made me passive?

Then I looked at the order Jesus actually uses. "If you love me, obey my commandments." Love first. Obedience second. And in the very next breath, He promises the Holy Spirit — the One who makes that obedience possible. He doesn't just ask us to live it. He moves in to help us live it.

Love is the root. Obedience is the fruit. The Spirit is the One who grows it.

We picture the flood, the animals, the sheer size of the task. But Noah's story didn't begin with the rain—it began with a man who walked closely with God when no one was watching and no flood was coming.

The greater responsibility came because the quiet faithfulness came first.

Today’s devotion, "Built Before the Rain," sits with a question I haven't been able to set down: What is God preparing to entrust to you because of your faithfulness?

We treat fellowship like a luxury we can't afford. But in Acts 2, the believers broke bread in homes, over ordinary meals, and the Lord added to their number daily. The growth was His work — the open door was theirs. Maybe your table is the door God is asking you to leave open. 

A pastor's daughter wrote that she was grateful social media couldn't define her — that she could embrace her difference "as God intended." A settled identity has nothing to defend. So why are we, as believers, so quick to draw the sword in God's name? Like Peter in the garden, we strike to protect a Lord who never asked for it, and then watch Jesus heal the very person we wounded. John 10 draws a hard line: the thief takes life, the Shepherd gives His. This week's devotion asks the uncomfortable question.  In how we treat the people we disagree with, do we look like the Shepherd, or the thief doing his work in God's name? 

I lashed out at my wife over something small. She had every right to walk away. She didn't. What she gave me wasn't what I deserved. It was grace. And it sounded a lot like 1 Samuel 7: a people who had wandered, who had no claim to make, crying out anyway and being answered. 

Grace does not wait for us to clean ourselves up. It meets us in the moment we know we were wrong, and then asks us to extend the same to someone else. 

God does not leave us with His holiness so that we fear Him. He leaves us with His grace so that we love and worship Him. 

The Philistines had just captured the Ark of God. By every visible measure, they had won. So they carried it into the temple of their god Dagon, set it beside the idol, and went home believing the matter was settled.

It was not.

Twice, Dagon fell face down before the Ark. The second time, broken.

This week’s devotion looks at what that moment is still asking of us:

→ Where have we quietly decided what God will and will not do?

→ Where have we prepared ourselves for defeat instead of trusting His power?

→ Where are we living by what we see instead of by what we believe?

God does not need us to defend Him, explain Him, or rescue the outcome. The One who topples idols in the dark is still the One who holds our story in the light.

There is a moment in 1 Samuel that I keep returning to. Eli, the old priest, hears a hard word from God through a young boy judgment on his own house, the end of his line's priestly role and his response is six words long: "It is the Lord's will." No bargaining. No deflection. No "yes, but." Just acceptance, because the One speaking is good even when the news is not. This week's devotion sits with that quiet, costly posture and asks what it looks like to receive God's correction without negotiating it down.

We've all done it.  Caught something off in someone else before catching what's off in ourselves.  Jesus had a word for that, and it was not gentle.

But here is what I keep coming back to.  He didn't tell us to ignore the speck.  He told us to deal with the log first. Not as a delay tactic.  As the only way our correction ever actually helps.  Self-accountability isn't the opposite of caring about others. It is the doorway.

The mirror always comes before the window.  Today's devotion is a refection on what it really means to be transformed by Christ.

It is 3:00 a.m. and my wife has started to cough.  Just a little dry mouth.  Nothing major.  I get up.  I bring the water. 

Service is easy when you feel like it.  Harder when you do not.  Hardest when the person you are serving is the same one who told you to get your own phone earlier that evening. 

This week's devotion sits with Mark 10:45 ("the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve") and the quiet truth that small obediences are what God uses to change us. 

It is 3:00 a.m.  My wife has started to cough.  She says she does not need water.  After forty years, I know that means she does.