Scripture

Why is Good Friday, well . . . good? Even a casual acquaintance with Good Friday observance suggests it ought to be called Sad Friday, Bad Friday, or God Is Really, Really Mad Friday. (Sorry—I couldn’t resist the Dr. Seuss allusion.) The question remains, however: why call it Good Friday when the events are so horrifyingly bad? 

There I was, almost 25 years old, hugging a toilet bowl in the middle of the day

Why am I here? I want to be on campus, ministering to my students. I want to be seeing people come to Jesus! Healing! Miracles! Life transformation!

Instead, I was scrubbing a toilet in an assisted living home.

In this crucial moment, kneeling on the bathroom floor, resentment swelled in my throat and stung like bile.

I distinctly remember one visit to a church youth event in my teens. 

As I sat down with a student I was discipling, she boldly said, “It’s okay; I don’t need to worry about my job, because God knows the plans he has for me, and they’re for me to prosper and what not.”

A Pharisee and a tax collector walk into the temple.

For the last five years, I’ve been a part of a religious community that prays the Magnificat—Mary’s song of praise upon finding herself pregnant with Jesus—twice a day. 

Among the recurring stress dreams commonly reported by people, perhaps this is the most familiar: you show up at school only to realize that you’ve forgotten about a quiz or final exam.

The goal of disciplined piano practice is not to master the piano.

If I, a woman, were to write the gospel of the entry of God into the world as one of us, I’m pretty sure I would not start with his human genealogy, as Matthew does. 

Advent is a season of anticipation. Anticipation for a Savior to bring light into a dark world. But it has a melancholy tenor to it. It’s the time before the joyous celebration of Jesus’ birth that we remember at Christmas. A time of uncertainty.