The Bible is clear about martyrs and the fact that many will suffer for the gospel. Hebrews 11 famously talks about believers that were tortured, stoned, mistreated, and viciously killed for spreading the word of God. We know that this kind of persecution for faith in God continues today, especially in countries that have no freedom to practice Christianity like China or the Middle East.

But a lot of the time, we don’t share stories of those martyrs and the truths they died for. And why? Because in the end, they are stories that could help to strengthen and fortify our own faith. The truth is, we’re deeply blessed. We live in a country where it’s still widely condoned to go to church and practice our faith, but what if that weren’t the case?

In John 2, Jesus attends a wedding in which the wine runs out. In those days, it was a party foul to host a wedding and not have enough wine for the whole party. When the wine runs out, Jesus’ mother, Mary, asks Him to intervene and sends a few servants to help Him rectify the situation. Jesus tells the servants to fill up the waterpots that were being used for the purification ritual for the wedding ceremony. The servants fill up these six stone jars that each hold about twenty to thirty gallons.

On July 11, 2024, Lily Anne Wente was born at 11:29 a.m. She weighed 8 lbs 2 oz and measures 21.5 inches long.

Exactly one year ago, my little family found itself in a moment of crisis. Sam’s job came to an end at the church in North Carolina. For months, he was scouring job boards looking for a new pastoral job while delivering pizzas to help supplement our income. Church job searches are a long, drawn out process, and most require you to appear at the church and guest preach so the congregation can meet you, your family, and get an idea of how you would shepherd the church.

I was baptized somewhere in my early teens. If I had to guess, I was somewhere in between 12 and 14. If you ask my mom, she probably remembers for sure. I don’t know if it’s the pregnancy brain, or that it happened so long ago, but there aren’t too many details I remember of that day. I remember I was baptized with two of my childhood church friends. I remember the water was warm. I remember that I didn’t want to say anything into the microphone to the congregation watching. When I emerged, my dad was on the other side of the baptismal with a towel and one of the biggest smiles on his face.

When I was pregnant with Piper, the craziest idea to wrap my head around was that she felt so far away and yet she was literally right with me all the time. It’s hard to reconcile those feelings: that your child, being grown inside your body, feels so far away because it take nine months to grow them. You can’t hold them. You can’t see them. You can’t track their progress outside of your own growing belly and the occasional scheduled sonogram. Sure, you feel your baby kick and move around inside you, and you talk to them constantly, but for some reason, in my brain, it always felt like my daughter was a million miles away. Until she was born, then POP! All of a sudden, she was real and there and bigger than I could imagine being stuffed up inside my belly.

It took Israel three months from their exodus of Egypt until they took up residence around Mount Sinai. In those three months, they saw the end of their slavery, deliverance from Egypt, they walked across the Red Sea, witnessed God’s miraculous provision of food and water, and won a war in God’s name. They saw evidence upon evidence of God’s love and care for them; His strength and power over their enemies and yet His protection over this chosen nation. Israel would go on to spend a long time in the wilderness of Sinai and a lot of their societal structure would be established there. Nevertheless, God wanted to meet His people at Mount Sinai the way He met Moses from within the burning bush.

It seriously boggles my mind how quickly Israel could forget God’s goodness, mercy, and provision towards them. The Jews left Egypt and began their journey in the wilderness in Exodus 15, and here we are in chapter 17 and already we’ve seen 3 different iterations of them having a need, shaking their fists and Moses and God about it, not trusting in God to fill it, and God supernaturally proving Himself by fulfilling their need with a miracle. And what’s worse is that those are just a couple of chapters at the beginning of a 40 year-long journey! We know that there are still many, many more times that Israel repeated that same pattern.

But we are the same way. And just think: If Israel found it hard to rely on God and constantly fell into habits of questioning Him despite the miracles and wonders they witnessed, how much more so is it for us?

Who read today’s key verse and made a double-take when Peter said, “For it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household?” Maybe that’s something that catches us off guard– that God would commence His judgment starting in His household, that is the family of God. But how many times do we pray a prayer that sounds like this: “Lord, let your move start with me. Let your change start with me. Let your kingdom come through me.” The truth is, a lot of the time, we ask God to start with us. If His kingdom is to be built on this earth, we want to be in on the ground floor. If He is going to shake things up and let His Holy Spirit move on earth, we want to ride that wave and experience it.

When I’m angry at someone, the last thing I want to hear is that I need to be the bigger person. I think that’s a normal response to being told to take the high road when you’d rather slum it on the low one. And there will be times when it almost pains you to take the high road. Because the person that’s hurt you has hit you so close to home that your heart breaks. Or because someone you love or trusted is the one who did the damage.

I remember being 20 years old at a Friday night worship service. It was an all-are-welcome event, so we brought the youth up from the church basement to be a part of it. In the middle of a song, I felt a little tap on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see my Pastor, David Knapp, standing next to me. With a little smile on his face, he leaned down so I could hear him and said, “Do you think the youth band has a song they’d like to share?” At this point, we had a small youth band comprised of a handful of teens who were mostly self-taught in their instruments. Still, I nodded and he said, “I’ll let the team on the altar know that the youth are going to lead after the next song.”

vWhen babies are born, no one has to teach them to suck. It’s a natural instinct so deeply embedded in them that they can even do it from inside the womb. Towards the end of a pregnancy, babies are known to drink in amniotic fluid using that sucking mechanism. This way, when they’re born, they can go right to drinking milk from the mother. They don’t starve or have to wait days and days to figure out how to eat. They are born doing it. I knew all this in a clinical sense before I was a mother, but once my daughter was born, I marveled at God’s design. It is nothing short of a wonder that a child is born and instinctively knows that their mother, who they have only known from the inside and is all of a sudden an external presence to them, has milk to drink. And it’s even more of a wonder that that child’s little tummy is so small that only a few drops is enough to not only satisfy their hunger, but also to slowly grow that baby into a nourished child. Because at first, that’s all the mother makes– a few drops. It takes days before her milk fully comes in and months before it establishes.

In my sophomore year of college, I took a pottery class. I liked to take at least one creative class per semester to help blow of some steam and provide some sort of therapeutic break from essay writing and book reading, but mostly I took that class because it included a unit on throwing pottery. In other words, there was a large part of the semester that involved sitting at a pottery wheel, and that seemed like it would be a fun experience. Except there’s a lot of technique that goes into that. You have to get a hang for the right amount of moisture in the clay. Make the clay too dry and the clay won’t submit to the shape you’re trying to mold; too wet and it will be a sloppy, muddy mess that will either take forever to dry out or prove itself utterly impossible to mold into anything. There’s a learning curve to actually throwing the clay: where to put it on the wheel, how much clay to use if you’re just starting out, the methods of making the clay workable, how much height, depth, or thickness to make a good ceramic piece.

This verse is probably one of my top 5 favorite verses, and very often, it’s a prayer in my heart. Lord, help me to be pure in heart so that I might see you better. Many times, when we talk about purity and the Bible, we think sexual purity. Preserving our bodies from sexual sin and saving them for our spouse. But when we’re talking about purity here, we’re talking about moral purity rather than ceremonial or physical purity. Instead of an obedient or honorable heart, we’re more so talking about an undivided heart. A heart so focused and unadulterated that it clarifies our vision.

Where is your treasure? Think about it. Take a pause and think about your life. Where is your time most spent? What are the things you absolutely cannot live without? What are your non-negotiables? Family? Friends? Career? Your home? Your lifestyle? Your politics? Jesus? Your list is completely valid, whatever it is you put on it. Your treasure is exactly that: yours. You may put value on something that I don’t, and that’s just the beauty of different perspectives.

When you were little, did your school do a grandparents day? Mine did, and I always loved it. It was always a special day where you got to have some of the most important people in your lives come to school, listen to you sing a song, have a snack, and show off your best art projects to. And I think I was probably more lucky than most kids, because I had more grandparents than the average kid. You see, both my parents’ parents are divorced and remarried before I was born, so I never knew the norm was to have only two sets of grandparents. Plus, I had two great-grandmas, so I had quite a pack to choose from.

CANCELLED. That’s never a word you want to see next to your flight number at the airport. This past weekend, my husband and I flew up to New York to watch our friends get engaged. We flew in Friday night, hung out this weekend, and the plan was to fly back home Sunday night to be back in time for work on Monday morning. But clearly, we were in store for other plans.