I'm wary of telling a story about myself unless it has potential resonance and carries some possible hope to a listener. Here I am giving a short witness of a counter-intuitive Word received in church the other day; and an even more counter-intuitive "Word" from the world of pop music, which came crashing through my windshield on the way home from church.

The initial Word related to chain-breaking and the possibility of a life-cycle completed rather than repeating. Moreover, this first Word came during the minister's Offertory Sentences! (I had come to hear a sermon, but the Word came via an Offertory Sentence.)

The second Word gave me an instrument through which the first Word could become real, a concrete thing. And that second Word was a rather pale-sounding Christmas perennial entitled "The Bell That Couldn't Jingle". So, much to one's surprise...

God's Word confounds one's most established and convinced narratives. He has a narrative -- or rather, is a narrative. But any narrative I'm trying to project on my life soon stands in tatters on that "hill I chose to die on".

Oh, and listen to Kim Walker Smith at the end of the cast. For me, she was a complete discovery! What do you do when you think you know a lot, and it turns out you know more or less nothing, or at least nothing about a very big something. LUV U.