The Comfortable Words

Not far to fall.

Julia found an essay she started writing years ago and never finished, so she finished it now. "Let's just say my view from the front porch has changed quite a bit."

It begins with growth, the thing everything is supposed to do: babies, wealth, cities, followers, even faith. "Healthy things grow, but so do tumors and forest fires." From there she asks the question no one wants to ask: how do we let go of vitality gently and with grace? How do we embrace and allow for our own reduction?

She sits with a grain of wheat that must fall to the ground and die, with the psalmist's "I cling to you; your right hand upholds me," and with Martin Buber's I and Thou. Clinging, she writes, is not her real state. Being upheld is. And if that is true, then losing your grip is not a fall to your death. There is not far to fall.

Scripture: John 12:24-25, Psalm 63:8, and 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (NIV). More at https://pickerill.casa

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

Child, you are mine.

Julia writes about the small sounds of an early morning — coffee, a dog snoring, a phone buzzing with messages from people she loves — and how they witness that she is not alone. From there she sits with Isaiah's words, "I have summoned you by name. You're mine," and what it means to be summoned: not called to show up, but formed, named, and brought into being.

This week's reflection moves through Psalm 104's picture of a vast creation, where even dust is called a treasure, and into Romans 8, where all creation groans out, "Abba, Father." It ends with an invitation to let go of what isn't yours to hold, and to hear the same answer waiting there: Child, you are mine.

Scripture: Isaiah 43:1-5, Psalm 104 (excerpts), and Romans 8 (NIV). More at https://pickerill.casa

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

On Detergency — or, an ode to the humble power washer.

Julia power washed her house this week, and watched years of grime disappear in a single pass of soap and water. It got her thinking about detergency, the actual word for how soap works, and about Peter, washed by Jesus at the table the night before he died.

This week's reflection sits with John 13 and Luke 11: the difference between Peter, who lets Jesus see his grime, and the Pharisees, who can't see their own. It ends in Psalm 139, with an invitation to be searched, known, and cleaned.

Scripture: John 13:1-9, Luke 11:37-41, and Psalm 139 (NIV). More at https://pickerill.casa

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

Jesus arrives four days late to his friend's grave, and the first thing he feels isn't grief, but anger.

Julia sits with John 11 and the questions underneath it: what do you do when God doesn't show up on your timetable? Most of us have prayed Mary's prayer in some form. If only you had been here.

The comfortable words don't show up until the end of this reflection. Waiting is a part of the story.

Scripture: John 11, read from The Message. More at https://pickerill.casa

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

The Smithsonian holds 155 million objects. About one percent is ever on view. Eric has spent this year inside a folder like that: his mother-in-law's portfolio of passports, birth certificates, and a wartime escape from Lithuania that nobody in the family talked about, until a citizenship law made every page matter. Jesus said the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. But the parable ends with the treasure still in the ground, and it never says what the man did next. Two temptations wait for him, and for us: forget it, or flaunt it. An older man afraid of outliving his wife, an old china cabinet, and a word coined in 1899 all point to a third option, in a verse most of us read right past.

From Matthew 13:44-46, 52.

Includes brief quotations from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship and C. S. Lewis's The Weight of Glory.

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

Julia reflects on Jesus' parable of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30), sown together in the same field and left to grow until the harvest. Rather than reading the weeds as other people, she turns the parable inward: the roots of pride, discord, and fear are tangled with her own faithfulness, which is why the sorting isn't hers to do. She turns to the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" as a model for holding real trouble and real praise together without letting one erase the other, and to Paul's charge to a young, pressured church to make it their ambition to lead a quiet life (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12). She closes with the Aaronic blessing over anyone doing ordinary, faithful work in an unsettled season.

Includes brief quotations from C. S. Lewis's 1948 essay on living under threat of the atomic bomb, and from Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea (1955).

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

Julia reflects on Jesus' words to his disciples on the night before his death: "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love" (John 15:9). She distinguishes discomfort — the ache of a comfort once known and now lost — from ordinary unease, tracing it through loss, betrayal, and disillusionment. Drawing on George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin, she pictures Christ's love as a thread to hold onto, even when the way feels roundabout. She closes with a portion of Wendell Berry's poem "What We Need Is Here," offered as a prayer to be quiet and clear rather than searching for somewhere else.Closing prayer: excerpted from Wendell Berry's poem "What We Need Is Here."

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

Eric reflects on Jesus' cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46), and discovers it isn't a line Jesus composed himself, but the opening words of Psalm 22. Drawing on a UK pastor who leads prisoners in writing their own psalms, the viral footage of a dementia patient roused to song by music from his youth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's reflection that the Psalms are the words God gives us when we have none of our own, he asks why song reaches us in a way doctrine and story can't. He closes with an invitation: pray a psalm, or sing a song, right where you actually are, even in the mess, the anger, or the dark.

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

Julia turns to the Garden of Gethsemane and the most uncomfortable hours of Jesus' life, where comfort shows up in an entirely upside-down way. Drawing on Mark's Gospel and W. H. Vanstone's The Stature of Waiting, she traces how Jesus moves from actor to the one "handed over" — the God who need not suffer choosing to become "object," by his own initiative. The reflection sits with a hard question: what does it mean to lay down our right to ourselves, to pray "not my will, but yours," and to trust God's goodness from a place of weakness rather than strength? It closes with Julian of Norwich's words that Jesus could not yet say in the Garden — that all shall be well.

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill

Julia explores a phrase tucked into the Sermon on the Mount: "The eye is the lamp of the body... if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light" (Matthew 6:22). She traces the Greek word emblepō — to gaze, to look intently — through Jesus' invitation to "consider the birds of the air" and into the courtyard where "the Lord turned and looked straight at Peter" after his denial. Anxiety, she suggests, is a disease of vision: what we fix our attention on shapes what fills us. She invites listeners to consider what has held their attention this week. Closing prayer: "In the busyness of this day, grant me a stillness of seeing, O God..." — a prayer by J. Philip Newell, from Celtic Benediction: Morning and Night Prayer.

The Comfortable Words is written and recorded by Eric and Julia Pickerill.
More at pickerill.casa
© 2026 Eric and Julia Pickerill