Below are the words I shared before being baptized. I share this in hope that it might continue to open the imagination of my friends and community to the creative possibilities of faith in an age of cynicism.

This summer I embarked on a search to rediscover the joy of running. I entered the space that had become charged with weird energy in search of the simple freedom I felt as a kid.

We’re not here to prove ourselves faithful or acceptable. Rather, we’re here to discover that God is faithful, and we’ve already been accepted.

Real or imagined, I can’t explain it, but I felt in moments, particularly at night, that I was being completely stripped of everything that brought me a sense of security. This gave way to a profoundly spiritual experience, one that I’m still reckoning with.

Jesus pushes back repeatedly against the world’s hierarchy. The economy of the world just doesn’t work for Jesus and his Kingdom.

Is it possible that simply feeling tired and owning it in the moment could be a subversive and redemptive practice for us as people who live under weird expectations to be “high-energy”?

The season of Lent is as good a time as I know to get curious and a little more aware of how we experience the lure to prove ourselves. In following Jesus into the wild, we’re bound to face questions like: Who do you think you are? What have you done? How do you compare with others?

Put bluntly, the mystery is this: by facing death, we receive life. While this pattern is simple, it isn’t easy. Translating our experiences into wisdom takes time and a willingness to welcome harrowing questions and vulnerability.

I believe this text contains incredible power to help us imagine a new way forward, to help us see how the life we always wanted is on offer in ways we’ve previously missed or were perhaps not ready to see. I believe the Spirit has important gifts in store for our community as we reflect and pray together, so I’m inviting everyone to gather around this common text. Will you join me?

I want to engage in politics by following Jesus, who constantly rejected the misuse of power and persistently sought the good of the sick, poor, and outcast. Often, this has meant voting for policies that benefit people other than myself.

We don’t learn what love is by reading a text book. We don’t learn compassion and empathy from a multiple choice test. We learn them by first experiencing them. When we were scared, someone held our hand.

We all have a choice; to use our power, to use our rights to perpetuate trauma stories that recycle the traumatic experience. Or we have an opportunity to use our power and freedom to work toward writing a different story.

The problem isn’t our humanity, as some suggest, but rather the rejection of what it means to be human. The God given potential of humanity is never more on display than when we allow ourselves to be moved and changed by an event or realization.

Spiritual direction has been a wellspring of life for me as I’ve journeyed through various seasons of life. Seasons of grief and loss. Seasons of confusion and transition. Seasons of joy and creativity.

God could have stayed aloof. He could have chosen to remain a being who dispensed wisdom

and judgement from on high. But by choosing to enter into our experience—our small pleasures and

joys, our twisted ankles and scabs, our feeling of a good night’s sleep and need of friendship, our deep

sadness when we lose someone we care about—he chose Love.

Making sure we look good is a way of life that eventually becomes exhausting and brutal. This is a difficult, ugly thing to face but it’s real so let’s not pretend. We live in a world that values and celebrates people when they keep things looking good. We also live in a world that discards people when they don’t.

Humility is what enables us to say ‘yes’ to the local life we’ve been given, to the struggles and invitations right in front of us as ordinary or crazy as they may seem. When humility blossoms, we no longer want another life, we become at home with ourselves.

Before we get to a story about the world changing, we’re given stories about overlooked people who are invited into moments of frightening vulnerability and change.

Perhaps learning to welcome and allow the way I’m being shaped would be an act of faith carrying me into a future where, like the seed, I eventually grow and blossom into something completely beyond my imagination, something more like Jesus than I’m prepared to envision for myself.