Below is an excerpt from the personal devotional included in this year’s 1517 Advent Resources.
The Lord’s provision doesn’t rest on the strength of our gratitude.
A Bit of Earth is about the garden, but it’s also about us—as we are made from dirt.

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Because salvation is by grace through faith, I believe that among the countless number of people standing in front of the throne and in front of the Lamb, dressed in white robes and holding palms in their hands, I shall see the prostitute from the Kit-Kat Ranch in Carson City, Nevada, who tearfully told me that she could find no other employment to support her two-year-old son.
The world doesn’t need dads who are more stressed than they already are. It needs fathers who care for their families, not in heroic ways, but in common, everyday ways.
I recently began seeing a chiropractor for what turned out to be a compressed disc. He took routine x-rays to facilitate his diagnosis, and on the day he was to go over the results with me, I was placed in a conference room to wait for our consultation.
Many, many people—including many church people—have this asinine idea that Jesus showed up on earth two thousand years ago and loosened everything up.
This rather unique human being is God grounded in our humanity. The man Jesus.
“It’s funny because it’s true.” —Homer Simpson. The Bible is full of ridiculous stories. Laughable stories. There, I said it. A Red Sea parting, a giant fish swallowing a man, a talking donkey, and the list goes on and on. It’s all a bit ridiculous.
It seems like the sky is falling every other day now. From politics to culture to religion to about anything else, there’s one purported cataclysm after another on the horizon.
This coming Sunday churches around the world will celebrate the big, splashy day of Pentecost. As well they should.
Have you ever heard of Spanx? Although they’ve only been around since 2010, their predecessors have been around for centuries.
People have often tended, quite wrongly, to view me as saintly. I attribute that undeserved reputation to the fact I have always had a very strong sense of the kind of person I should be.
The common knock against “grace people” (or to put it another way, “Christians”) is that preaching too much grace will encourage licentious living.
My experience as a Christian did not revolve around Christ. It revolved around asking, “What is God’s will for my life?” Hunting the answer to this question was my god, and I paid homage to it every day.