A Bit of Earth is about the garden, but it’s also about us—as we are made from dirt.
This is an excerpt from Broken Bonds: A Novel of the Reformation by Amy Mantravadi (1517 Publishing, 2024), pgs. 24-27
Thanksgiving is never out of place for the Christian.

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The primary point of Joseph’s life (and every story in Scripture) is to point us to Christ. To tell us something about what God is like and how He interacts with His Creation.
What I have come to see is that while anyone can make a conscious decision to walk away from God or deny him, a person can’t accidentally lose his or her salvation.
Pastors represent many things to many people, but their true calling is to serve as God's instrument for proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ for you for the forgiveness of sin.
Christ has forgiven you, and all of your worship, all of your prayers, all of your offerings are accepted because they are built on the foundation of Christ’s forgiveness.
Christ teaches that we are not lost, but have eternal life. That God has so loved us that he allowed the ransom to cost him his only beloved child.
When talking about God’s ultimate destination for us, we’ve grown sloppy in our language, nearsighted in our gaze, and un-Easter in our hope. We act and speak as if dying and going to heaven is what the faith is all about. It is most emphatically not.
God and love are synonymous. Any talk about love that is not talk about Jesus is, at most, a half-truth.
There’s a delicious freedom to wrongdoing. It taps a primal desire within us for rebellion. We feel liberated, unshackled by demands to be this way, do this, avoid that. We become masters of our own destiny.
What the law is powerless to do, Jesus accomplishes for us. Jesus delivers what the law demands.
For what end does the Law exist? The Law exposes us so that we might find the remedy in the person and work of Jesus.
This misunderstood story is not a moralistic tale about bald prophets and child-eating bears, designed to teach youths to honor their elders and preachers. Rather, it's a brief glimpse into the age-old war that began in a garden and ended at an empty tomb.
Sometimes we have to strain hard to hear words deeper than our hearts. Words not from inside, but outside. Words from God, not our own self-spun narratives.