When I opened my laptop to write this morning, my software alerted me to an update that was ready to be installed for the app that I use for my writing. When I clicked the alert, it opened a different app that handles the updates, and then that app told me that I wasn’t registered and needed to buy a plan that would allow me to proceed.

It’s confusing, I know, but hang in there a bit longer — I’m going somewhere.

The problem is that I already have a plan, and when I entered my account information, it still didn’t recognize it in the app even though it did on the website for that app.

All of this work to get into an app that I already have access to has left me a little frustrated. And yet, what a beautiful reminder of the access that we’ve been given in Christ! Eugene Peterson worded it beautifully in his paraphrase, The Message:

Continue reading

Michael Phelps stands 6 feet, 4 inches tall.

Simone Biles stands 4 feet, 8 inches tall.

If you’re decent at math, you’ve already figured out that there is almost a two-foot difference between them, but that doesn’t tell the whole story, even though that’s the part of the story that most people would notice first.

There may be a difference in their size, but there’s a similarity in their health.

Sure, Phelps is tall and Biles is, ummm, less tall, but both of them are world-class athletes who spent considerable time at the pinnacle of their respective careers, and between them, they have 30 gold medals (23 for the swimmer and 7 for the gymnast).

So to make a snap judgement about them based on their size would be premature and, more than likely, inaccurate. The same could be said for linemen in the NFL who, at first glance, look like men who just like to sit around and eat donuts. But if you made that assumption on a football field, you’d get hurt when all that weight ran through you at top speed. They may be big, but they can move!

We even have expressions to remind us of this truth:

“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Continue reading

To be human is to not be enough.

We don’t like that, of course. After all, who wants to feel those not-enough feelings?

As a result, we seek pastors, therapists, self-help books and anything else available to us that will tell us that we are, in fact, enough, rather than bringing those feeling to the God who would tell us that he is.

He is the enoughness that we need.

He is the void-filler.

The Great I Am is all that I, tragically, am not.

He can when I can’t.

He will when I won’t.

Continue reading