This is week 2 of a series where we are looking at how Jesus himself read and engaged with the Scriptures. If you missed Part 1 you can go back and get caught up here:

As someone who grew up in the church, I was handed a set of load bearing verses. These were the verses that the rest of my faith was built upon. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. The wage of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life. If you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart. I had these memorized and heard them quoted to me in sermons over and over again.

I was handed a load bearing structure. Out of the thousands of verses in the Bible my faith tradition had chosen 5 or 6 of those verses and built the entire house on them. Every time I thought about my faith or talked about my faith one of those verses came to mind. Now, nobody would ever say that out loud. Nobody said that those were the verses that mattered the most, but it had become pretty obvious.

Everybody has them

Now, here is the thing though. Every tradition does this. The reformed folks build on the sovereignty passages. Prosperity preachers build on Jeremiah 29:11 or ask and you shall receive. Fundamentalists build on all Scripture is God breathed (which is a verse about Scripture doing the load-bearing work for every other verse). Progressives do it as well. They lean hard on Micah 6:8 or Matthew 25. For me, it’s the beatitudes or Luke 4:16-21. Again, everybody has them. It’s impossible to read a book this large, and this diverse and not have a few verses holding up your house. Whether you inherited them or built them yourself they are there.

And all I want to do is help people understand that having load bearing verses is okay. It’s normal. And healthy. As far as I know, I don’t think anybody else is talking about this idea but it’s a big theme in one of the chapters of the book I am writing. I wasn’t taught this idea in bible college or anything this was just a realization I had a few years ago that slowly over time my house began to rest on some different beams. And with that shift I now felt more at home than I ever had.

The verses Jesus built on

Which brings me back to the question this series is asking. If we want to read the Bible the way Jesus read it, we should investigate which verses were load bearing for Him. And the cool thing is, he told us. Out loud. On the record. More than once.

When a scribe came to him and asked which commandment is the greatest, Jesus answered with something called the Shema. Hear O Israel, love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind, and then reached over to Leviticus 19 and added love your neighbor as yourself. Then he said something that gives this whole essay its name…

Did you catch that? Hang on a minute. That is a structural phrase. Jesus is literally describing which words hold up the house.

But he doesn’t stop there. Twice in Matthew’s gospel Jesus reaches for a single line from the prophet Hosea. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. He quotes it when he is being criticized for eating with tax collectors and when his disciples pluck grain on the sabbath. Go and learn what this means he tells the religious experts. When the situation at hand put the surface of one text against the mercy of God, the mercy bores the load.

So, according to Jesus, love of God, love of neighbor, and mercy over sacrifice are the things the rest of the book rests on.

Opening up your own walls

So here is the invitation I have for you today. Stop pretending you don’t have load bearing verses. Take your cues from Jesus and embrace them. Share them. Talk about them. Write them down. Or start opening up some walls to figure out what your load bearing verses might be.

The good news of this whole series is that Jesus shows us that renovation is possible. He inherited a sprawling, gorgeous, and complicated set of Scriptures, but he read them with Love of God and neighbor bearing the weight. We can learn to do the same.

Next week we will wrap up the series by looking at what happens when we read the Bible less like a rulebook and more like a story that is going somewhere.

I don’t ask very often, but if you find my work helpful would you consider supporting it with a few bucks a month? I write this stuff in the margins of family, work, and other projects. Your support helps me keep going. You can upgrade to a paid subscription here:

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Have you ever heard of bible journaling? It’s a practice that combines Scripture reading with writing, drawing, or reflection in order to deepen your relationship with God. If you love to draw or be creative, you may give this practice a shot. We used to have a bible journaling small group at one of the churches I worked at.

Here are some examples of this practice below.

Instead of a book recommendation this week, I am offering up a podcast recommendation. It’s called The Bible For Normal People and it’s a podcast by Pete Enns () and Jared Byas that provides biblical scholarship for everyday folks.

With scholarly guest interviews, guided tours through biblical books, and the occasional existential crisis, you'll walk away with the tools to engage scripture critically, ask better questions, and realize that maybe—just maybe—the Bible is a lot weirder (and more interesting) than you were told in Sunday school.

You can subscribe to the podcast wherever you get yours, but the image below will take you to their website.

It had been years since my wife and I were able to get away on a trip by ourselves without kids, and we made that happen last weekend. We went glamping in the Ozark Mountains and then swung by Silver Dollar City. We had a great time. Here are some photos from last weekend:

See you next week, friend.

We model almost everything on Jesus. We pray the way he taught us to pray. We try to forgive the way he forgave, or welcome the way he welcomed, or serve the way he served. In fact, entire traditions have built their ethics, politics, and their posture toward enemies on his example. And then, strangely, when it comes to how we read the Bible, a lot of us set his example down and pick up some method he never used.

So that is the question this series wants to sit with.

If Jesus is worth imitating in the rest of life, why not in how he handled the scriptures too?

Bible Drill

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church where we had this thing called Bible Drill. If you’ve never heard of it (I think other denominations might call it something else), a teacher would call out a scripture reference, and then we would flip as fast as we could to find the verse. And it was a legit organized competition. I was never great at it (my brain doesn’t connect with body fast enough.) It’s the same reason I am terrible at the card game Dutch Blitz.

I HATE that game.

Anyway, the lesson underneath Bible Drill was that every verse weighed the same. Even if it was never said out loud, I grew up believing that a line from Leviticus carried the exact same authority as a line from the Sermon on the Mount. And the faithful thing was to find the verse, read it plainly, and do what it said. Yet, that approach looks nothing like how Jesus or his neighbors read the Scriptures.

How a first-century Jew read the Bible

First, you need to know that Jesus didn’t own a modern day, Bible. It’s ridiculous that I have to even say that, but many folks don’t think about it. The Bible Jesus knew was the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, that were read aloud in synagogue and memorized from childhood. And the people reading it alongside him did not read it flat. Jewish interpretation in that era was alive, argumentative, and wildly creative. Teachers debated each other in public. We have record of it. Famous rabbis disagreed about hundreds of questions, and those disagreements were written down and preserved with honor. Reading scripture meant wrestling with it, and the wrestling was the point.

What Jesus actually did with the text

We can read in Luke 4 when Jesus gets up and reads from the scroll of Isaiah in his hometown synagogue and he proclaims good news to the poor and release to captives, and then all the sudden stops mid-sentence. If he would have kept reading, the next line in Isaiah was about God’s vengeance, but he rolled the scroll up before he got there.

Then, in the Sermon on the Mount he says, you have heard it said, quotes scripture, and then says, but I say to you, and gives a different direction. An eye for an eye becomes turn the other cheek. Hate your enemy becomes love your enemy. Something unique is happening there.

Finally, there’s another time when someone asks him which commandment is greatest, he does not say they are all equal. He names two, love God and love your neighbor, and says everything else hangs on those.

Reading with a center

It’s pretty clear—Jesus did not read scripture flat. He read it with a center. Some verses were load-bearing for him and others were not, and he trusted that God the Father was more merciful than the vengeance line in Isaiah and more interested in people than being precise. And that is okay!

Don’t miss this, friends…

Those are very different things, and when those two things get pulled apart, we find that Jesus went with God every time.

Next week, we are going to talk about load-bearing verses, or the passages Jesus built everything else on. We are just getting started.

I want to encourage you to do something a little wild this week. Write a thank-you note to someone who has no idea they helped you. An actual hand-written note on paper if you can swing it. This could be a teacher from 20 years ago, a co-worker that brings you joy, or maybe a neighbor who waves every morning. Keep it to 3 or 4 sentences and then mail it or hand it to them. It sounds simple, but this practice can be so powerful.

I may have recommended this book before, but it’s worth mentioning again as Dr Amy Jill Levine has been under attack online this week after being elected as the first Jewish president of Catholic Biblical Association. Dr Levine is a brilliant scholar, funny, generous, and she will change how you hear almost every story Jesus is in. Click the cover below to order it.

It has been a little bit since I mentioned my garden. It has gone so well, and we just finished making our third big batch of homemade salsa. We have more peppers than we know what to do with, and our tomatoes have been so delicious. We have learned so much this year and we are already making plans for next spring.

Let me know if you have any fun ideas for serrano peppers!

Yall are the best. Truly. Have a great week! Until next time…

Dave Ramsey has been trending over on Threads this week and it’s not because he helped someone get out of debt. It’s because he was absolutely hateful when a caller asked him a question about her inheritance.

If you haven’t seen the clip that is making its way around the internet right now, you can watch it here:

A caller named Monique told Dave and Dr. John Delony that she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave her inheritance to her daughters anymore because they had become “socialists.” To my surprise Ramsey then walked her through how he had structured his own estate to guard against this very thing. His kids get access to what he calls “God’s money” on one condition.

“If they’re not walking with God, they don’t get to manage God’s money”.

The Phrase That Does All the Work

When you stop to think about that phrase long enough, you begin to realize there is a whole theology wrapped up inside of it. And the big question I have for Dave and Dr Delony is who gets to decide what walking with God actually means? Because if I were to guess, I bet it would mean agreeing with the person holding the money. Or voting a certain way. Holding a specific political label or fitting inside a shape that someone decided for you a long time ago.

Dave is saying something out loud that a lot of us were taught to believe (especially if you grew up evangelical.) Somewhere along the way many of absorbed a view of God that runs on that exact same logic. We need to prove our alignment first. Get our politics correct. Or get our behavior in line, and then the inheritance becomes available. But if you fall short, then the door closes.

Inheritance Was Never Supposed to Work Like This

But that approach goes against everything we read about inheritance in Scripture. The prodigal son literally gets his portion of the estate before he’s proven anything at all, spends it recklessly, and the father is still scanning the road in anticipation of him coming home. Paul then tells a fractured church in Galatia that they’re heirs not because of anything they had done to deserve it, but because they had been adopted. Period. Something that had nothing to do with merit or worthiness but everything to do with a father’s choice. In the Kingdom of God, the inheritance comes first. Always.

What Gets Lost When Love Has to Be Earned

I grew up being told that belonging was technically available to me, but it was also quietly at risk. I could feel the floor beginning to shift the moment I began to ask too many questions, or my politics drifted, or my doubts got loud enough to where people started to notice. While nobody would ever use the word disinherit, the framework was definitely there.

Ronald Rolheiser talks about grace as something that comes looking for us before we have cleaned ourselves up for it. That’s exactly it. And once you have actually felt that kind of love land on you, the conditional version starts to look extremely small by comparison.

A Different Kind of Walking

Walking with God was never supposed to feel like completing all the things on the checklist before the money moves. I think it’s closer to wandering companionship that is ongoing, unglamorous, and full of wrong turns and slow returns. I think it’s similar to the story Jesus shared about the father standing on the edge of his property scanning the road. There is no waiting to prove yourself worthy of love.

Now, I don’t know Monique or her daughters, and I won’t pretend that I do. But what I do know is that a lot of us grew up being taught to hold love the way Ramsey holds a trust fund. Carefully, contingently, and with an exit clause tucked into the fine print. I don’t believe in that kind of God anymore. The God I believe in doesn’t have an exit clause, or criteria I have to meet before I am blessed. The God I believe in is waiting patiently for me at the end of the road.

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I have mentioned these tags before, but I love praying this prayer every morning during my shower.

What if you prayed that same prayer every morning as you got ready for your day?

Lord,

As I enter the water to bathe, I remember my baptism…wash me by your grace, fill me with your Spirit, and renew my soul.

I pray that I might live as your child today and honor you in all that I do.

I read this book in college, and it totally changed the way I think about the Prodigal Son story. I see it on the shelves of my local thrift stores all the time. Keep an eye out for it. It’s worth a read.

Last weekend, Resurrection hosted a workshop called Standing Together: A Guide to Queer Allyship and I was blessed to be able to talk about the theology of inclusion and affirmation of our LGBTQ siblings. It was a special morning and left feeling so grateful to be part of a church that stands with a community that has been so hurt by the church.

See you next Tuesday.

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Over the past couple of weeks, so many of my friends have spent 3 hours in the dark watching Matt Damon get chased by a Cyclops and cursed by a Sea God. While I haven’t seen the movie yet, it’s definitely on my list. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been out for a few weeks now and I have talked about it with probably a dozen people. And here is the thing—not one of them demanded proof that Poseidon is real before they’d let themselves enjoy the movie. They just watched the movie, felt the weight of it, and that was that.

I get a very different conversation almost every week doing the work I do online. Somebody will list the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the command to wipe out Canaan, or the firstborn sons of Egypt, and ask how I could still believe in a God who did all of those things. While I understand the heart behind the question, I think Nolan’s movie gives us one of the clearest ways to explain why.

We already know how to read this

Did you know there were other flood stories in the ancient world besides Genesis? The Epic of Gilgamesh has one, and the older Atrahasis Epic has one too. Ancient writers shared a toolkit of images for telling stories about a broken world starting over, and Genesis uses that same toolkit while pointing it somewhere different. Genesis points it toward a God who grieves before he judges and hangs a rainbow as a promise. Nobody sitting around a campfire in the ancient world heard that story and mistook it for a weather report.

We still know how to read that way. We just seem to forget it the second the book in question is the Bible. And every ancient author suddenly has to pass as a modern journalist, or it gets dismissed.

Now, part of why we do this to the Bible is because we use the phrase “God’s word.” People hear that assume it can only mean one thing. Every sentence has to function like a court transcript or the whole book stops counting as inspired. But that assumption is younger than it feels. Origen was already reading Genesis for meaning rather than mechanics back in the 3rd century. Augustine spent pages warning Christians not to embarrass themselves by claiming Scripture teaches bad science, and he didn’t even read the 6 days of creation as 6 literal days. Again, this is a fairly new issue.

The lens that actually holds

None of this makes every hard story dissolve into a metaphor. That’s not what I am saying. Canaan is still Canaan, and I won’t pretend a tidy paragraph fixes that. But what holds it together for me is a lens that I didn’t invent. Scholars and authors I love have been arguing for years that Jesus is the fullest picture of what God is actually like, and everything written before him gets read through him, not the other way around. Hebrews opens with almost the same idea, that God once spoke in pieces through the prophets and has now spoken completely through a Son. The clearest picture of God is a man who touched lepers, forgave the people killing him, and said the last would be first. That picture gets to shape how I read everything that came before it. It doesn’t erase the hard chapters, but it does tell me which direction to read them in.

Where that leaves you

You don’t have to defend every line of the Old Testament like a lawyer stuck with a bad case. You don’t have to throw the whole library out either. You get to read these ancient texts the same way you already read ancient texts. You get to read them with curiosity and not a magnifying glass looking for a lie. Let Jesus be the lens instead of making every verse carry equal weight on its own.

Next time somebody stacks up the list and asks how you can still believe, you can tell them that you are reading an ancient library the way ancient libraries are meant to be read.

Take a twenty minute walk this week with no phone, no podcast, and no music. Just you and the boredom.

I heard Arthur Brooks talk about this at the Global Leadership Summit last week and it really stuck with me. His point was that we’ve basically solved the boredom problem with our phones, and that solving it came at a real cost. The parts of your brain responsible for big picture thinking, meaning, imagination, and the future, only switch on when you let yourself get bored enough to need them.

So, take a walk without the noise. Let your mind get restless and a little uncomfortable.

If you want a lighter companion to Nolan's The Odyssey, go watch O Brother, Where Art Thou. It’s such a good movie.

The Coen brothers put "Based Upon 'The Odyssey' by Homer" right in the opening credits, and George Clooney spends the whole movie as a man named Ulysses trying to get home to a town called Ithaca. There's a cyclops played by John Goodman and a trio of sirens singing men into trouble by a riverbank. The best part is that the Coens have joked for years they never actually read the poem going in, and leaned on Tim Blake Nelson, the one cast member who had, to help them line the story up with Homer as they went. It is hilarious and I also love the soundtrack.

Last weekend was Student Ministry Sunday at Resurrection Downtown and my daughter read Scripture at one of the services. I got to share the stage with her while she did it. I am so grateful for a church that cares deeply about the next generation.

See you next week.

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17 years ago, I stood in front of a room full of people who loved us and promised my wife, Abigail, that would spend the rest of my life with her. Now, to be fair I had no idea what I was promising. I was a kid. 20 years old. I am sure I thought love was a feeling that I needed to protect, but what I have learned since then is that love is closer to a craft. It’s something you get better at by showing up and practicing badly for a long time until one day you look over at the person you married and realize you like her more than you did when you were 20 years old had no idea what you were doing.

Now, we are not a model couple. We have had some rough years, some hard conversations, and times where we felt like roommates managing a household instead of two people who chose each other. But what I can tell you is that we love each other more now than we did on our wedding day and when I think about why, three things keep surfacing.

1. We have a ton of fun.

This is the one people underestimate. Abigail and I do almost everything together. We cook together, do laundry together, we go to the grocery store together (most of the time), we clean the kitchen together, we go on walks together, we read books together (different books at the same time), and we genuinely just enjoy being around each other. None of that is romantic on paper, but it has become the substance of our marriage and here is why.

We make each other laugh constantly. We are ridiculous with each other in a way that I hope our kids find embarrassing for the rest of their lives. But it takes intentionality. Fun does not happen to married people by accident after a certain number of years. You have to keep reaching for it. Keep making the joke. Keep suggesting the thing that sounds mildly inconvenient.

2. We say the hard thing.

Nothing gets to fester in our house. Now, it took years to get there, but nothing gets to fester. Early on in our marriage I used to beg Abigail to fight with me. She didn’t want to tell me when I hurt her. She didn’t want to fight. She wanted to avoid conflict at all costs and would carry it around quietly and I would have no idea anything was wrong. 17 years later, she has ZERO problem walking into the room and letting me know exactly where I messed up. Seriously. It sounds like I am joking, but I am actually grateful for it.

My growth went a different direction. I have always overshared. Feelings come out of me whether I plan them to or not which has spared us a lot of silent resentment even though it hasn’t always been graceful. For a lot of men, this is the harder work.

Pew research found last year that only 21% of men had gotten emotional support from a friend in the past week, and 41% of women said the same.

That tells me that men reach for people less. And a lot of that comes from a culture that tells men that their inner life needs to be managed privately, and then we act surprised when marriages quietly starve.

3. We protect each other.

Everything in our lives is competing for our attention. There is work, and phones, and kids, and church, and the endless list of things that feel urgent. Marriage is one of the few relationships that will never demand your time loudly enough to win that fight on its own. It just waits patiently while you give yourself to everything else, and then one day you notice you have become strangers who share a mortgage.

So, we decided years ago to make time for each other on purpose. Over and over again. For 17 years. Date nights we couldn’t really afford. Conversations that went well beyond bedtime. Weekends where the answer to a really cool opportunity was no.

17 years in, and that is what I have. Have fun with the person you married. Tell them the truth quickly. And guard the hours. None of it is super complicated, it just takes being intentional and making it a priority.

Try the examen this week. This practice comes out of the Ignatian tradition and it takes about 5 minutes at the end of the day. You sit down somewhere quiet and walk back through the last 16 hours of so. While doing this you look for 2 things:

Where did you feel most alive, most connected, and most like yourself?

Where did you feel drained, small, or far away?

This isn’t you grading yourself or anything, it’s just you paying attention and then handing both of those moments to God before you go to sleep. I have found that most of us move through our days at a speed that makes reflection impossible, and so this is a way of slowing down enough to notice what our own lives have been doing to us.

Do it for 7 straight days and see if a pattern shows up.

I preached this past weekend on how the Spirit grows us in community. Many of you asked if it would be recorded so I thought I would share it here. I don’t want to make it a habit of recommending my own stuff, but the sermon is linked below if you would like to watch it this week.

I got this message from a reader recently and it brought me so much joy. It means so much that they find my writing relatable. Messages like these are a great reminder that there are actual people on the other side of this. I am so grateful for all of you and your support.

Have a great week, yall.

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This Sunday, August 2nd, I will be preaching my first sermon at Resurrection Downtown. The preaching itself isn’t new to me (I spent several years as the Senior Pastor of a non-denominational church and preached weekly) but my role now as Adult Discipleship Director means I primarily teach classes, lead small group ministry, and help people find their place, which is amazing. But standing up in front of this particular congregation for the first time is going to be so special. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity.

With that being said, I have spent the last week or so prepping for this sermon and we are going to be camping out in John 11. The story of Jesus and his friend Lazarus. I’m not going to tell you the whole thing today, but I want to give you a nugget to think about this week.

A Detail I Can’t Get Away From

If you haven’t read the story, Jesus already knew how this was going to end. Before he ever showed up, he told his disciples that Lazarus’s death wasn’t going to be the end of the story and that something bigger was coming. He knew that in a short amount of time he was going to call his friend out of a tomb and watch him walk out alive.

When Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, he sees the sister crying and the crowd is grieving and the tomb is sealed shut. And then the scriptures tell us that Jesus wept. It’s the shortest verse in all of scripture, but I find it one of the most interesting. Why cry? He knew what was coming. He knew that this whole scene was going to flip into the best possible outcome. If anyone was going to skip the tears to get straight to the miracle, it was him.

But he didn’t skip the tears.

Something to Sit With

What I keep coming back to is this:

Jesus didn’t treat the ending as a reason to rush past the grief that was right in front of him. He stood at that tomb with the people he loved, in a moment that was genuinely awful, and he let it be awful before he did anything about it.

I don’t know what you are carrying right now but I would bet that some of you are holding something you already have a good amount of faith will work out, and yet you still feel completely wrecked by it in the meantime. I feel that. And I think that is what it looks like to be human in the middle of a story that isn’t finished yet.

While this isn’t the main idea of my sermon, it’s something that really stood out to me and I felt led to share. Maybe it will be a blessing to you.

If you are in the Kansas City area, I want to extend a personal invitation for you to join us at Resurrection Downtown at 8am, 9:30, or 11:00 this Sunday 8/2 (or any Sunday).

Join us, say hi afterwards, and wherever you land this week, I hope you know that it’s alright to let it be hard before it gets better.

Speaking of grief, here are some practical tips to save for later.

Instead of saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”

Try, “I am so sorry, this is awful.”

—

Instead of saying, “I know exactly how you feel.”

Try, “I don’t know what to say, but I’m here.”

—

Instead of saying, “Stay strong” or “Just stay positive.”

Try, “This really sucks and I hate that you are going through it.”

—

None of those second statements fix anything and that is kind of the point. Jesus didn’t skip the tears, and neither should we (even though we mean well).

Kate Bowler’s book is one of the best ones I have read on grief and how to think about hard things in life. She writes about being diagnosed with stage four cancer at thirty-five, and the things people kept saying to her once she got sick. She is funny, honest, and doesn’t wrap things up in a neat little bow. I can’t recommend this book enough.

My wife and I got away for a little date night in Downtown KC last week. We had such a wonderful time. We enjoyed some good drinks, ate some delicious sushi, and then stopped for some ice cream on the way home. My wife is my rock. Whenever we get alone time (just the two of us) it’s worth celebrating.

Have a great week, y’all.

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Most scholars believe that before Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John ever got written down, before Romans, before Revelation, before any of it, Paul sat down around the year 50 and wrote a letter to a small struggling church in Thessalonica. Tucked inside that letter is an instruction the church has spent the last two thousand years finding creative ways to ignore.

The Frontliners

When I was a teenager, a group called Frontliners came to my Southern Baptist church for a week. Every morning there was a rally, loud music and testimonies and prayers that felt like pep talks before a game, and then they loaded us into vans and sent us out in groups to knock on the doors of strangers. We had one question memorized.

If you died tonight, do you know for certain you would go to heaven?

I hated every minute of it. I can still feel the specific dread of standing on a stranger’s porch in the summer heat, a kid asking grown adults about their death like I was taking a survey. The word I have used for years to describe that feeling is icky, and I have stopped apologizing for how unspiritual that word sounds, because icky is what your conscience says before you have the theology to back it up. The adults in my life told me the discomfort was the cost of boldness. It took me a long time to understand that the discomfort was actually the truth, arriving early, waiting patiently for the rest of me to catch up.

The Oldest Instruction

Here is what Paul writes in that first letter, widely considered the earliest piece of Christian scripture we have.

He tells the Thessalonians to “make it your ambition to lead a quiet life,” to mind their own affairs, and to work with their hands, so that their daily lives might win the respect of outsiders.

What About the Great Commission

Every time I bring this verse up, someone asks the question you might be asking right now. What about the Great Commission? Jesus said go and make disciples of all nations, and that sounds like a mandate to start knocking on doors. I want to take that question seriously because it deserves it. Making disciples in Matthew’s gospel means teaching people to obey everything Jesus commanded, and everything Jesus commanded includes some very specific things.

Give in secret.

Pray behind a closed door.

Take the lowest seat at the table.

Love the people who oppose you.

The way of life Jesus asks his followers to pass on is a hidden, humble, quiet way of life, which means you cannot make disciples of a way you are not walking. The quiet life is the curriculum. A disciple is an apprentice, and an apprentice learns by watching someone do the work. Nobody ever apprenticed themselves to a memorized question shouted through a screen door.

An Apology

I want to pause the essay here and say something I have needed to say for a long time, and I want to say it plainly.

The church has a long history of confusing conquest with love. Centuries ago that confusion sailed on actual ships, blessed by official church documents that treated whole peoples and their lands as territory to be claimed for Christ. My own denomination has formally renounced that history, and I renounce the smaller version of it that I carried up strangers’ porch steps as a teenager, one memorized question about death at a time. I need to say this part too. Some of us doing the pressing were kids who had been pressed ourselves, handed a script by adults we trusted and told that our nausea was the price of faithfulness. If that was you, the apology reaches you from the other direction. You were somebody’s project before you were ever somebody’s recruiter.

Forced faith is not faith. It never was. Anything pressed on you against your will tells you about the presser, and it tells you nothing true about God.

A Quieter Witness

So what do we actually do? I think we start small and stay small. Learn your neighbor’s name before you ever learn their religious background. Show up with a casserole when the ambulance leaves their driveway. Do your job so honestly that people wonder where that comes from. Keep your promises. Coach the team. Fix the fence. Let people watch your life for ten years before they ever hear your testimony, and when someone finally asks you about your hope, answer them gently and then let it breathe. No follow-up appointment, no tract left on the table. The witness Paul imagined was slow and local and mostly silent, a life that wins respect before it ever opens its mouth. The people behind those doors never needed my question about dying tonight. They needed a neighbor, and we came as a survey team instead of showing up as friends.

My conscience knew it back then, on those porches, before I had a single word of theology to explain the ache. I am trying, all these years later, to make quietness my ambition. It may well be the oldest advice in the book.

This week, learn one thing about a neighbor you do not already know. Their name, their work, the thing they grow in their yard. No agenda, no follow-up strategy. Just knowledge held with care.

Order a copy of this book. Willie James Jenning’s, The Christian Imagination.

It is a demanding read and worth every page. Jennings traces how the colonial era shaped the way Western Christians learned to see people and place, and I have not read scripture the same way since. You won’t regret it.

We made our first batch of salsa this week from the garden, tomatoes and peppers we actually grew ourselves, and I could not stop grinning the whole time we were dipping the chips in it. There is something about eating a thing you watched come up out of the dirt that undoes me a little. Fitting, I think, for an essay about the quiet life.

It helps when you have your mom’s incredible salsa recipe. I have included a recipe card below for paid subscribers. Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Have a great week, friends.

Hey friends,

One of the hardest parts of walking away from evangelicalism is figuring out what to do with the Bible itself. So many people I talk with (people right here reading this) have zero interest in opening scripture again. And I get it completely. The Bible got used on them like a weapon, and nobody wants to pick up the thing that hurt them.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of sitting with this. The Bible was never supposed to be a weapon. It was supposed to be bread. Something that feeds you instead of something that cuts you.

And the way back to that starts with a framework that isn’t very common in evangelical spaces.

I call this idea load bearing verses, and it’s become one of the most important frameworks in my own faith and in the book I’ve been writing.

Below, in the paid section, I'm sharing the actual excerpt from the chapter where I lay the whole thing out.

Write down the three or four verses currently holding up your faith. Not your favorites, but the ones that if removed would actually change what you believe.

I’ve been using the Lectio 365 app for months now and it has genuinely changed the rhythm of my days. It’s a free devotional from the 24-7 Prayer movement, built around morning, midday, and night prayers that walk you through scripture, silence, and the Lord’s Prayer. What I love most is that it doesn’t ask me to figure out what to read or how to pray on my own, it just gently hands me the next thing, whether that’s a psalm, a moment of stillness, or a question that sits with me longer than I expect. Some mornings I listen while I make coffee. Other mornings I actually sit still and read it. If you’re someone who wants a daily prayer practice but doesn’t know where to start, or if your old quiet time routines got tangled up with everything else you left behind, this one might be worth trying. It’s on the App Store and Google Play, and it costs nothing.

Our almost 14-year-old daughter was gone for two whole weeks this summer and came home this past weekend. What got me wasn’t just having her back in the house, it was watching her actually miss us. At almost 14 that is not something you can count on. Kids that age are supposed to be pulling away, and most days ours is too, that’s just how it works. But she came through the door and hugged us longer than she needed to and kept finding reasons to hang around the kitchen instead of disappearing into her room, and it hit me how special it is to know your kid genuinely missed you. Not needed you. Missed you. There’s a difference, and I felt all of it this weekend. So special.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

The rest of this one is for paid subscribers. If you've been getting something out of these letters, this is a good place to jump in, and you'll get early looks at the book as it comes together.

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Hey friends,

Last week I spent an entire day producing absolutely nothing, and it might have been the holiest thing I did all summer. My family went to the Kansas City Zoo and Aquarium.

We walked in enormous circles. We stood in line for drinks and food. My son leaned over the stingray touch tank with his arm in the water, waiting for one of those silky creatures to glide under his hand, and when it finally happened his whole face lit up like a stadium. My daughter took a million photos and videos. It was such a special day.

We watched the penguins do their little penguin business. We took a photo in front of a zebra-striped truck. We got tired and sunburned and happy, and then we drove home with nothing to show for any of it. No output. No deliverables. Nothing crossed off a list. Just a camera roll full of joy and four tired people who enjoyed each other’s company.

Nothing Got Done

Somewhere on the drive home it hit me how rare that kind of day has become in my life. I am a person with a book manuscript and a newsletter, a church family, an ordination process, a social media presence, and if I’m honest, most of my days get measured by what they produce. I suspect most of yours do too. We live inside a culture that has trained us to justify our existence through output. Even our rest gets conscripted into the machine. We recover so we can perform. We take vacations to come back sharper. We optimize our sleep. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us picked up the idea that a day is only as good as what it accomplishes, and we dragged that idea straight into our spiritual lives as well.

I know I did. For years my faith ran on the same fuel as my calendar. Quiet times were measured. Ministry was counted. Growth had metrics. I could tell you exactly what my walk with God produced in any given quarter, and I mistook that output for intimacy. What a shame.

The Day God Blessed

Here’s the thing that undoes all of that, and it’s sitting right there on the first page of the Bible. When God finishes creating, God rests. Genesis says God blessed the seventh day and made it holy. Read that again slowly.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote a little book called The Sabbath that I return to constantly, and in it he describes the Sabbath as a palace in time. He argues that Judaism’s great cathedrals were never built out of stone. They were built out of hours. One day in seven, wholly set apart, gloriously unproductive on purpose. Heschel saw menuha, the Hebrew word for the rest God created on the seventh day, as a positive thing in its own right. Not the absence of work. A presence. Tranquility, delight, and peace as actual created things that God spoke into existence the same way God spoke light.

Ronald Rolheiser says something similar when he writes about the spirituality of enjoyment. He suggests that delighting in a created thing honors the One who made it, and that many of us are far better at duty than we are at delight. That really hits home for me. I know how to be dutiful in my sleep. Delight takes practice.

And honestly, the zoo itself preaches this. The psalmist looks at the sea in Psalm 104 and marvels that God formed Leviathan just to play in it. God made something enormous and wild for the sheer fun of it. Play is stitched into creation on purpose. The otters at the zoo seem to know this in their bones. They spend their whole day doing loops in the water for no reason anyone can identify. Nobody has ever asked an otter what it accomplished this week.

Practice Being Useless

So, here’s what I want to gently suggest to you.

A day spent walking in circles with people you love, drinking a soda, and watching penguins, is not a wasted day. It might be the most holy thing you do all month. It’s a body-level declaration that the world can run without you for an afternoon, that God’s delight in you was never tied to your output, and that grace has no metrics.

Some of you left churches that measured you constantly. Attendance, giving, serving, and converting. You know what it feels like to be a line item.

Friend, the God I keep meeting on the other side of all that is a God who blessed the unproductive day first, who builds palaces out of hours, who makes sea monsters for fun. Go be gloriously useless in that God’s good world. It counts for more than you know.

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Put one useless block of time on your calendar this week. Two hours minimum. No errands, no self-improvement, and no catching up on anything. Wander a park, sit on a porch, or watch some animals do their thing. When the guilt shows up, and it will, just name it and let it pass.

I love to cook, and few things have shaped my cooking ability more than ’s book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. It’s brilliant.

There's a Netflix series by the same name and her joy on screen is downright contagious. She treats cooking as play rather than performance, which is maybe why it belongs in this letter.

On June 25, tens of thousands of Netherlands fans flooded downtown Kansas City ahead of their World Cup match at Arrowhead Stadium, marching in a sea of orange right past Resurrection Downtown. Someone caught an aerial photo, and I’ve circled our building in it.

All those strangers singing in the street together, accomplishing nothing, radiating joy. Such a fun time to be in KC.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

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Hey friends,

My home state just voted to put the Bible in front of millions of public-school kids, and I have been chewing on it all week.

As many of you know, I grew up in Texas and most of my family is still there. There are kids I love that are going to walk into these exact classrooms and get handed these exact lessons. So, this is not some far-off “culture war” headline for me. This effects my people, my hometown, and the book I love most.

And I will tell you where my gut went first, before I had any of the details. It went straight to suspicion. I love this book enough to get nervous the second I hear the government wants to be the one teaching it. I spent over a decade in evangelical ministry, which means I know the difference between handing somebody the Bible and handing them an argument about the Bible dressed up to look like the Bible. I know that difference because for years I was the one doing the dressing. I can say that honestly.

So, I went looking to see if my gut was right, and that is where my boy comes in.

Go watch Dan McClellan first

If you do nothing else with this email, go watch this video. I will link it right here. It’s over 18 minutes but it is well worth your time.

Dan McClellan is a biblical scholar, the real deal, the kind of guy who reads this stuff in the original languages and has spent his entire career in the actual text. He is way smarter than I am, and he put out a video breaking down these new Texas reading requirements that articulated the exact thing I had been feeling in my chest but could not have laid out half as cleanly.

The problem is they are not teaching the Bible, they are preaching their evangelical version of it, and he shows the receipts, from a watered-down translation chosen to smooth over the Bible's own tensions to a butchering of Job and Lamentations that keeps the tidy verses about bowing low and throws out all the grief and the arguing.

I have spent years sitting with people in the actual ash heap, and that sanded-down version of suffering is the exact theology that has quietly wrecked the faith of half the people who read these letters.

So here is where I land

So go watch Dan’s video, because he proves the case better than I ever could. And then do the thing the state will not do for your kids. Read them the whole book of Job, the furious chapters included. Read them a Lamentations that gets to grieve before it hopes. The Bible can survive being studied, sure. It cannot survive being used. And your kitchen table is a safer home for that book than the Texas State Board of Education is ever going to be.

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Pray a psalm of lament this week. We are so trained to clean up our prayers before we hand them to God that we forget the Bible gives us language for the unedited version. Open to Psalm 13 and pray it slowly, out loud if you can, and do not rush to the hopeful part.

Bring God the actual complaint you have been carrying. The thing about your job or your body or your marriage or that person you cannot stop being angry at. You do not have to tidy it first. The whole witness of the psalms is that honest grief is already a form of prayer, and the God of Job can clearly handle being yelled at.

Dan McClellan's book The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues.

I don’t talk about Dan and his scholarship near enough. In his book, he works through the claims people love to end arguments with, the “it-says-so-right-here” verses on women and sexuality and slavery and the rest, and he shows you what the text actually does and does not say once you read it on its own terms. It is rigorous and it is also funny, which for a book about the Bible is no small thing.

You may not agree with every landing, and that is sort of the point. And what I love about Dan is that he wants you reading more carefully, not just taking his word for it.

A few weeks ago, a man showed up at Resurrection Downtown who was raised Catholic and was clearly still finding his footing with us. He asked one of our worship staff if there was any way he could help out (since he arrived almost 1 hour early), and she told him we needed a communion server for the 8:00 service. He said yes. And during the part where they walk you through how to do it, tear the bread this way, say these words, she looked over and his hands were shaking. He could not believe he was being asked to serve communion to other people. He could not believe he was being trusted with it.

I keep thinking about those shaking hands.

So many of us spent years being told we were on the outside of the table, and then one ordinary Sunday somebody hands us the bread and asks us to feed the people next to us. That is the whole thing. That is what coming home feels like.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

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Hey friends,

Someone on Threads this week asked a question that I think a whole lot of people wrestle with, and my response to it got quite the reaction. I received several of comments from people expressing that “they had never heard it put that way”.

Here was the question:

I love this question. Partly because I asked some version of it myself for a whole lot of years, and partly because the most common answer I grew up with always felt a little off to me, like a shoe that is technically your size and you can feel the seam every single time you walk. I preached a version of that answer myself back when I was an evangelical pastor, which makes sitting with it now a little more tender for me.

The version I absorbed went something like this. God is so holy and so worked up about sin that somebody had to bleed for it, and Jesus stepped in and took the hit so the rest of us could walk free. And I get why it lands for people. It is tidy and there’s a courtroom and a gavel and everybody goes home satisfied.

I just have a real hard time picturing God standing around tapping his foot with his arms crossed, waiting on a blood payment before he would be willing to love us back. Anyone else?

Think about how Jesus actually talked about forgiveness while he was walking around alive. The prodigal kid comes stumbling home smelling like pigs, and the dad does not make him fill out any paperwork or settle up a debt first. The old man is already sprinting down the road before the kid even finishes his sad little rehearsed speech. Forgiveness was just… there. The whole time. No transaction required, no invoice, no nothing.

And it is not only the parables. While Jesus was hanging on the cross, in the middle of the very worst thing people could do to him, he looked down at the ones doing it and said forgive them. Not once the debt gets settled. Not after enough blood has been spilled to balance the books. Right there in the thick of it with the nails still in. That is not a God waiting on a transaction.

The same guy who told us to love our enemies and turn the other cheek was not exactly moonlighting as a God who needed paying off before he would soften toward us. And the more time I spend with it the more I think the courtroom was never the right room to be standing in.

So here is where I have landed, at least for today. Ask me again next week and who knows.

Here is the thing I want you to be able to carry around this week. Forgiveness was never something God was holding back and dangling over your head and waiting on you to pay up. It is just who God is, and who God has always been.

The cross and the empty tomb showed us in the most dramatic way imaginable how far that kind of love is willing to go, and how little death actually gets to keep.

If you grew up flinching every time someone painted God as furious and itching to punish, you have my permission to set that picture down. The God who hikes up his robe and sprints down the road toward the kid who wrecked everything is the truer one. Let that be the one you carry.

When you think it, say it.

When you think something kind about someone, say it right away. Do not let it sit in your head where it does nobody any good. If a friend comes to mind, tell them why. If somebody’s work moved you, let them know before the moment passes. I started doing this a few years back and it has quietly blessed more people than almost anything else I do. The encouragement you are sitting on is probably the exact thing somebody needs to hear today.

When you think it, say it.

I recently got to sit down for a podcast conversation with Dr. , who was my pastor when I was a kid. It meant the world to share a mic with the man who shaped so much of my early faith. He has a new book on the way, and he also puts out content here on Substack that is well worth your time, so I would encourage you to subscribe and follow along with what he is doing. And if you have a spare bit of time this week, give the podcast episode a listen, and share it with a friend.

We pulled in our very first garden harvest a couple of days ago. Eeeek!

Aren’t they cute? We were absolutely thrilled. There is something about a first harvest that rearranges your expectations in the best possible way. You walk out bracing for a letdown and you come back holding proof that small things grow when you tend them patiently. I think faith works a lot like that. The early fruit is rarely impressive to anyone watching, and it is still worth celebrating like crazy.

Before you go, this Saturday I am hosting a live Q&A right here on Substack, and it is a true ask me anything. Personal stuff, book stuff, church stuff, life stuff, whatever you have been curious about. Nothing is off the table.

I will go live Saturday, June 27, at 1pm Central. Click here to get it on your calendar.

This is one of the perks I set aside for paid subscribers, and it is one small way of thanking the folks who help make all of this possible. If you have been thinking about joining that circle, this would be a fun week to do it. Just $2.50/month annually (the lowest Substack allows) or $5/monthly.

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And if the timing is not right for that, no worries at all, you are still family here and these letters keep landing in your inbox every week.

I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Hey friends,

I spent a good chunk of last weekend at a UMC Candidacy Summit. This is a weekend long virtual gathering where the conference staff helps pastoral candidates explore and discern their call to pastoral ministry. Now, I have been a pastor for a long time. I have preached hundreds of sermons, and officiated dozens of funerals and weddings. And there I was sitting on a zoom call sharing my call to ministry story (which began 19 years ago).

The pathway to pastoral ministry in the UMC is a long road. You must be a member of a UMC for at least a year and then then once you start the process (depending on which route you take) it could be another year until they make it official. If I am being honest, there is a version of me from a few years back who would have found the whole thing a little insulting. “I already know how to do this”, or “Now you want me to jump through hoops for a piece of paper that says I am allowed to do the thing I have already given my life to?” But the me who showed up last weekend felt something I did not expect, and it caught me off guard. I felt grateful. Truly grateful. I felt like I was being handed a gift.

The Zoom Call

I visited with people from all over the Midwest, some of them young and bright-eyed and a little terrified, others coming in from other careers, a few of us further down the road or transferring in from other denominations. We went around and told pieces of our stories. Many of us had gotten lost, gotten hurt, talked ourselves out of it and back into it, and somehow found our way to a tradition that had a door propped open for us. It really was beautiful.

I have written a lot about leaving. This newsletter mostly exists because of the two years I spent in the wilderness after a decade of evangelical ministry. Lately I have been sitting with the other half of that story, the arriving. The quiet, undramatic, paperwork-heavy work of actually planting yourself somewhere new and saying out loud that you want to belong to it.

The Process Is the Point

Here is the thing I sat with after I got off the Zoom call on Saturday. The candidacy process is slow on purpose. There are mentors and interviews and forms and committees, and it takes as long as it takes.

A tradition that makes you take your time before it hands you over to a congregation is a tradition that takes both you and the people seriously. Nobody is going to rush me into pastoral ministry on the strength of charisma and a good story. And that’s a good thing. That was pretty much the whole game in the world I came from, and I watched it wreck more than a few good people.

So, I sat in those sessions as a candidate, fully aware of how strange it looked, and I let it be good. I let myself be a beginner again. There is a real freedom in handing yourself over to a process you trust. I have spent so much of my life being the one with the answers, the one expected to have it all figured out. Sitting on a call with people who were carrying their own questions, none of us pretending to have it nailed down, felt like the way of Jesus. It felt like home.

I am a candidate. After all these years, I am just beginning. And I cannot tell you how at home that makes me feel.

I look forward to sharing more of that journey with you.

This week I want to put the Wesley Covenant Prayer in your hands. It is the prayer Methodists have prayed for generations when they want to hand their whole lives over to God. Try praying it first thing, before your feet hit the floor and the day starts making its demands.

I made a little card with it you can print and keep by your bed or tuck into whatever you carry around. You can download the .pdf below.

Wesley Covenant Prayer Card

17.7KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Richard Rohr has a talk on what he calls the Jesus Hermeneutic, and I am not exaggerating when I say it lines up with where I have landed on scripture better than anything I have come across in a long time. If you handed me a microphone and asked me to explain how I read the Bible now, I would just play you this.

The short version is that Rohr studies how Jesus himself read his own scriptures, and he notices that Jesus did not treat every verse as carrying the same weight. Jesus kept reaching for the texts that point where the whole story is heading, toward mercy and inclusion and justice, and he read everything else in that light.

If you have ever felt worn out trying to defend parts of the Bible that seem to cut against the heart of Jesus, this is going to feel like fresh air in your lungs.

Watch it, then save it and watch it again.

I got to meet the writer in person this week over coffee, and it was one of those conversations that sends you home lighter than you showed up. He has a book coming out next fall as well, and hearing about it, and about how he actually does the daily work of writing, was exactly the encouragement I did not know I needed in the middle of my own book season. There is something about meeting an internet person in real life and finding out they are even better in three dimensions. You can see what he is up to here.

Before I go, I want to say something I do not say nearly enough. A lot of you found your way here carrying wounds from places that demanded so much of you and left you running on empty, and the fact that you keep letting me into your inbox every week is not a small thing to me. You are the reason this exists. You are the people I picture when I sit down to write, the friends I am actually talking to (yes, even when I am rambling on about Methodist processes), and getting to walk this stretch of road with you while I learn how to be a pastor all over again is honestly one of the great gifts of my life right now.

For those of you who have the room and want to help carry the work forward, becoming a paid subscriber is the simplest way to do it, and it lets me keep showing up here. No pressure and no guilt, ever.

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I love you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Hey friends,

Parenting teenagers is an adventure. Some days it feels like we are sailing on smooth water, but most days it feels like we are hanging on for dear life in a paddle boat being tossed about in the open sea. Don’t get me wrong, I love the ocean. I love a good adventure. But navigating the waters of parenting can feel isolating and insurmountable at times. That is precisely why I felt led to share with you what’s been going on in our world.

My son Luke is 14 and he just completed the 8th grade. He’s got this way of asking questions about things that most people just accept, and he does it not to be difficult but because he actually wants to know. He’s been doing it since he could talk. He’s a lot like his dad in that way, which is probably why I wasn’t surprised when he told me he didn’t want to get confirmed this year.

For those of you who didn’t grow up Methodist, confirmation is basically the moment the church turns to a teenager and asks: so what do you think? It’s the church saying okay, you’re old enough now, do you want to claim this faith for yourself? Depending on your faith tradition there’s usually a yearlong class, some conversations with a pastor or mentor, and then a Sunday where the students stand up front and recite the apostle’s creed or read a faith statement and say yes in front of the whole congregation. It’s a meaningful thing when it’s real, but Luke didn’t feel like it was real for him yet. So he said so. And I think for a lot of people that would have been disappointing, but I have to tell you—I was so stinkin proud of him.

I have been there too. There have been seasons in my life that I didn’t really know what I believed or what I was doing or whether any of it was true anymore. I didn’t ever walk away from faith completely, but I had to find it again in a more honest form, and that process was uncomfortable and slow and I couldn’t have stood up in front of anyone during that time and made declarations with a straight face. I know what it feels like to need more time. I know what it feels like to have the questions be louder than the answers. So, when Luke said he wasn’t ready, I felt like I was looking at a younger version of myself.

What my wife and I told him is that our love for him has nothing to do with whether he gets confirmed or becomes a Christian or ends up in a church or something else entirely.

It just is. It doesn’t have conditions attached to it and it’s not going anywhere based on what he decides to do with God.

I think a lot of parents feel this pressure around their kids’ faith, like the kids are supposed to perform belief or at least look like they believe because it reflects on the family somehow. I’ve felt that. I know it’s real. But I’ve decided I just don’t care about it. I would rather him be honest than play pretend. He could have just gone along with it and smiled on a Sunday morning, and nobody would have known the difference. Instead, he told the truth about where he is. At fourteen. I know he is my kid, but I sincerely think that’s incredible.

I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that the God I believe in is not running a performance review on teenagers’ confirmation classes. The God who shows up all over scripture is the one who runs toward the returning son before the speech even starts, who searches the whole house for one lost coin, who leaves ninety-nine sheep to go find the one that wandered off. That is not the posture of someone waiting for you to have your theology sorted before they’ll sit with you.

Luke is somewhere in the middle of his own story. And honestly, most of us are.

John Wesley, the guy Methodism is actually named after, had his own famous heart-warming moment of assurance only after years of trying and failing and crossing an ocean and coming back more confused than when he left. The tradition has always had room for the person who needs more time because it was built by people who needed more time.

I don’t know where Luke will land, and he doesn’t either. And that’s okay.

This week I want to invite you to say maybe more often, especially about people.

Maybe your teenager isn’t being disrespectful. Maybe they’re carrying something you don’t know about yet. Maybe the friend who went quiet isn’t pulling away. Maybe the coworker who seems checked out is holding something heavy at home. Maybe the person who skipped church this week isn’t drifting, maybe they’re just tired. Maybe the neighbor who didn’t wave didn’t see you.

We spend so much energy building stories about people with almost no information, and those stories almost always assume the worst.

What if you just practiced assuming the most generous version instead?

So this week, when you’re about to land on a conclusion about someone, just pause. Say maybe. And see what that opens up.

This week I spent some time reflecting on which books had the most impact on me and one of those was The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard.

I read this book over 10 years ago, but I think about it almost every day. Willard’s argument that the Sermon on the Mount is an invitation into life available right now, and not some bar that is meant to crush you reoriented something fundamental for me. I can’t recommend Dallas Willard’s writings enough.

It’s Pride Month and I thought I would share with you a DM I received from someone recently that really touched my heart. Ryan said this:

Isn’t that the sweetest message? Gosh, that brought me so much joy. What a privilege it is to share God’s immense love.

Keep becoming,

-Beau

This newsletter is free to read and always will be, but if it's been worth something to you, a paid subscription is the best way to say so. You will get early book content, and everything that doesn't make it into the free essays. It's a few dollars a month and it directly funds this work.

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Hey friends,

I am in full-fledged book writing mode over here. While I am really excited about this project, I am also feeling a lot of other emotions as well. Is this going to be any good? Am I behind? Will anyone care about this? My writing sucks. The list goes on.

This is something I have experienced before. Although, most of the writing I have done in my career has been preparing sermons. And that is essentially how this newsletter started. I missed writing sermons.

I had a lot of these similar feelings over the past 15 years, but most of the time those sermons were shared with a congregation and went into a file. Never to be seen or heard again. The stakes are much bigger this time. This will stay in the world forever, and its potential reach is limitless.

I am realizing that book writing is different. Much different. It is going to take some time figuring out. My sermons were typically about 3000 words, and I am comfortable with that. I learned very quickly to say the most that you…

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The story in Acts 2 is one of the most fascinating passages in all of Scripture. The Spirit fell on all of them. Men and women both. People spoke and people heard. Then, Peter stood up and quoted the prophet Joel: In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Notice, Paul doesn’t say “daughters, except in official capacities” or “daughters, pending a constitutional amendment.” Just daughters.

This week, as churches across the world were preparing their Pentecost sermons, Al Mohler announced he will propose a new amendment to the SBC constitution at the annual meeting in Orlando next month. The motion would add language to Article 3, Paragraph 1 of the SBC constitution specifying that a cooperating Southern Baptist church “does not act to affirm, appoint, or endorse a woman serving in the office or function of a pastor/elder/overseer, such as preaching to…

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One of the most common things I hear from people in this space (people who have walked away from or are walking away from the faith traditions they grew up in) is that the Bible feels like a minefield now. They either avoid it completely because it’s too loaded, or they pick it up and immediately feel the old anxiety creeping back in. Or the guilt. Or the pressure to have the right interpretation. Or the fear that asking the wrong question means something is wrong with them.

I’ve been there. And I think a lot of you have too.

So I made something!

The How to Read the Bible Without Losing Your Mind Guide is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a short, practical, accessible guide to approaching Scripture in a way that is intellectually honest, spiritually alive, and a lot less anxious than what most of us were taught. It’s a starting point for people who want to re-engage with Scripture without all the baggage that used to come with it.

It covers things like why knowing the genre of a biblical text changes everything, how to let Jesus function as the interpretive lens for the whole library, how to give yourself permission to read slowly and selectively without feeling like you’re failing, and what to actually do when you hit something in the text that disturbs or confuses you.

I wrote this for people who are reconstructing—who haven’t thrown the whole thing out, but who need a different set of tools than the ones they were handed. If that’s you, I think this will be genuinely useful.

The guide is linked below. I hope it’s helpful. And as always, I’d love to hear what you think. I am really proud of it.

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I spent nearly a decade preaching the Bible and somewhere in there I was also, without fully realizing it, preaching a set of assumptions about the Bible that I had never actually examined. They came with the tradition. They were baked into my education. Nobody handed them to me as a package and said here is what you will believe about Scripture. They just accumulated over years of Sunday school and classes and sermons and small group discussions until they felt less like assumptions and more like the air I breathed.

Unlearning them has been one of the more disorienting and ultimately freeing experiences of my theological life. And it wasn’t because I love the Bible less than I used to. It was because I finally started taking it seriously on its own terms instead of the terms I was handed.

These are the five that did the most damage and took the longest to see clearly:

1. The Bible Wasn’t Written to You

This is the one that changes everything e…

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The tradition I was formed in had a very specific Jesus. He was personal, and spiritual, and focused almost entirely on where you go when you die and what you believe in your heart while you’re still alive. That Jesus was mostly unconcerned with saving souls.

It wasn’t until I read Marcus Borg’s The Last Week that a whole new world cracked open for me.

I don’t remember exactly when I read it. It was somewhere in the long stretch of years when I was pastoring and questioning and slowly becoming a different kind of Christian than I started out as, but I remember the feeling of reading the pages and thinking that I had been looking at something my whole life without actually seeing it.

The book is brilliant and illustrates an image I can’t shake.

On Palm Sunday morning, two processions entered Jerusalem from opposite sides of the city. From the west, Pontius Pilate rode in with the Roman cavalry with horses, armor, standards, the full machinery of impe…

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One year ago this week, I published my first essay on Substack. I had no idea if anyone would read it. I just knew the conversation needed to happen and I figured if even a handful of people found it useful, it would be worth it.

Over 5,000 subscribers later, I’m sitting here a little stunned.

So first—thank you. Genuinely. You didn’t have to show up, and you did. Week after week. That means more than I know how to say.

And now I have some exciting news. Drum roll please*

I signed a book deal.

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I had a different essay ready to go but I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened last Saturday night, and I’ve learned that when something won’t leave you alone, that’s usually the thing you’re supposed to write about.

A man named Cole Allen, a 31-year-old teacher and engineer from Torrance, California, charged a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and multiple knives, apparently targeting officials in the Trump administration. A Secret Service officer was struck by at least one round but was protected by a bulletproof vest and is expected to be okay. Nobody died, the suspect is in custody, and by every measurable standard, the security apparatus worked.

The Thought That Scares Me More Than the Shooting

But here’s the thing I keep circling back to. Within hours of the incident, people on social media (not fringe corners, but people I know, people whose judgment I generally trust) were already asking whether this was staged. T…

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