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How to have a truly happy new year.

For the first time in years, I don’t remember my New Year’s resolution from January. Usually, I write it down in my journal or on a note I stick to my mirror. There’s been many of those dog-eared sticky notes from years past. The year of contentment. Speaking life. We passed pancakes across the breakfast table on January 1st this year. “What do you want from 2018?” I can’t remember my answer. I know what I didn’t want though. I didn’t want to walk into her office and share the parts of my life I’m inclined to hide. I didn’t want to Facetime her the day after she delivered her baby that never breathed. I didn’t want to spend four months wondering how I’d walk into her house on Christmas day and see her empty chair. I didn’t want to go on another first date that led nowhere. We sit across from each other in a little coffee shop in Colorado, picking at a charcuterie board. “When I think about all of the things I have left to go through,” her voice cracks....

The Marriage of Love and Justice

She tells me, as her voice chokes up, how her husband knows her at her worst and he still loves her with over-flowing grace.

This is what has me swallowing hard all weekend. My ankles have reached the shallow waters of understanding when it comes to this moment of the gospel, the moment of the cross, the marriage of God’s love and justice.

I remember my time in death row, banging against the bars of my prison. The weight of my label pinned me to the cold prison floor: ‘Rebel’. I would stick out my bottom lip and deliberately defy my Maker.

His response shatters my world every day. The Judge took my punishment. He died for me.

God is Just. God is Love. Jesus in the middle.

Expression dances away from my grasp as God clothes me “with the robe of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:10).

I am undone as I watch my sin sink down
            and down
                         and down
                                     into the bottomless sea. (Micah 7:19)

Grace laps around the edges. Still, God is perfectly holy.

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