His yoke of forgiveness is so much easier, and His burden of reconciliation is so much lighter than the righteous indignation, the resentments, the anger, and the old hurts He asks us to let go of in exchange.

“The practice of love offers no place of safety,” but safety was never the promise on offer anyway. The promise was and is still finding life, finding our lives in this precarious world with all these risky people. The promise was and is still love rung out and quite unsafe.

*the quotation is from bell hooks

"Friends, if you ask about the grace that's on offer in the sacraments of baptism and our Holy Eucharist, it's that in them we present ourselves, our souls and bodies, to the same divine life-giving energies that those faithful human midwives lived by."

"Can we stay long enough in the encounter to listen, long enough to be challenged, long enough to entertain the possibility that the person we have already decided is wrong might have something to teach us about God?"

I am convinced that there has never been a better time to be the Church. Never. Because our mission has never been clearer. Not to imitate the culture, not to withdraw from the culture, but to transfigure the culture, to become a community where the light of Christ is so visible that other people begin to recognize themselves as beloved, too.

"We can assume what God wants and what other Christians want is some holier or wiser or just more put-together life than ours. But what we celebrate at this altar every single week is the thoroughly spent life of Jesus. The body and the blood of a life that even at that terrible extreme of human experience could still be blessed and used by God for the healing of this world. The body stripped of everything that still blesses, still heals."

"Once you begin to see Christ in another human being, you cannot unsee him."

A weed is not bad in and of itself. A weed is just something that is unexpected or unintended, and that means that, of course, at some point in our lives, we are all weeds.

"You’re enough. Your life, your story, as it is, is enough."

Freedom begins the moment we stop pretending we are in control.