Jeremiah 20:9 (ESV)
A man I know spoke up at work about something he saw that wasn’t right. Not loudly. Not publicly at first. Just to the right people, quietly. What followed was professional isolation. Conversations that stopped when he entered a room. Opportunities that somehow went to others. The message was clear: keep your mouth shut, and this stops.
Continue reading “The Fire in His Bones”
Jeremiah 17:9, ESV
Most of us have heard these words so many times we could finish the sentence before Jeremiah does. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9, ESV). It’s been preached so many times we almost don’t listen anymore. But here’s a fair question: do we actually understand what Jeremiah was saying?
Continue reading “The Heart You Can’t Trust”
Jeremiah 13:23
There is a question tucked inside the book of Jeremiah that is easy to read past. It sounds almost like a riddle. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). Jeremiah was speaking to a people who had drifted so far from God that their rebellion had become second nature. They weren’t just breaking rules; they had broken their covenant, the deep, binding promise they had made with the Lord Himself. And the honest answer to the question was no. You can’t change what you’ve become.
Continue reading “Can a Leopard Change Its Spots?”
Jeremiah 7:23, ESV
Most of us have spent a good portion of our lives looking for something. Not always sure what it is, exactly, but something that would make us feel like we had finally arrived. The next job, the bigger house, the right car — maybe then we would be content. Maybe then we could breathe.
Continue reading “The Secret Nobody Wants to Hear”
Jeremiah 5:28, ESV
We are pretty good at keeping up appearances. Most of us have learned how to look put-together even when things are falling apart inside. We smile at the right moments, say the right things, show up when we’re supposed to. And the world rewards that. A polished image opens doors that a messy, honest one sometimes doesn’t.
Continue reading “The Danger of Looking Good”
John 20:19–29
Every scar has a story. The one on my finger is from a knife I was told to leave alone. I didn’t listen. The one on my leg is from a bicycle crash I’d rather forget. And the one on my stomach is from a piece of metal that chipped off a steel chisel at exactly the wrong moment.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 10”
John 20:11–18
A man I read about was adopted at birth and grew up with no knowledge of his biological family. In his forties, a DNA service connected him with a half-sister he had never known. They exchanged careful, tentative messages for weeks. Then one afternoon she called him, and the moment he heard her voice, something unexpected happened. She said his name, and he wept.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 9”
1 Corinthians 15:12–24
A historian I read about spent two years trying to disprove the resurrection. He was not a believer, he was a skeptic, and he approached the accounts of Easter the way a detective approaches a crime scene: looking for inconsistencies, alternate explanations, reasons to dismiss. He catalogued the evidence on both sides. He interviewed scholars. He traced the manuscript traditions.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 8”
Psalm 2
A photojournalist who covered conflict zones for twenty years described what she called the hardest moment of her career. Not the violence she’d witnessed, but a single night in a city under siege when she genuinely believed darkness was going to win. The brutality seemed total, the cruelty organized, the hope of liberation absurd.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 7”
Exodus 2:23–25
For eighteen months, a woman I know wrote weekly letters to her estranged adult daughter who refused all contact. She never knew if the letters were read, returned, or thrown away. The silence was total. She kept writing anyway, because the love didn’t stop just because the replies did.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 6”
John 14:1–10
Maybe you’ve been there. You’re hiking a trail, the fog rolls in thick, and suddenly you can barely see five feet ahead. Your map is useless, all the landmarks you’d been following have disappeared. You’re standing at a fork in the trail, genuinely unsure which way leads back to the trailhead and which leads deeper into the backcountry.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 5”
John 13:6–20
A master woodworker once described the most discouraging phase of any project: the middle. “The beginning is exciting,” he said. “You have vision, you have energy. The end is satisfying, you can see the finished piece. But the middle? The middle just looks like a mess of sawdust and mistakes. That’s when most people quit.”
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 4”
Romans 8:18–27
A cellist I once heard interviewed said something that has stayed with me for years. She was asked which pieces she found most moving to perform. Without hesitation, she said the slow, mournful ones, the adagios, the elegies, the laments. “There’s something in sadness,” she explained, “that reaches for what beauty is supposed to be. Joy tells you it exists. Longing tells you where to look.”
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 3”
Romans 5:1–11
I read about a woman who spent three years training for a marathon she never ran. A stress fracture sidelined her two weeks before race day. She said later that the hardest part wasn’t the physical pain, it was the quiet, creeping question that followed her for months: What’s the point of all this effort if it can be taken away so easily?
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 2”
Luke 19:1–10
When my son was five, he slipped away from me at a local county fair. One moment his hand was in mine; the next, he was gone. I pushed through the crowd, heart hammering, calling his name above the noise. Four long minutes later, I found him near the funnel cake booth, perfectly calm, watching a pig race. He had no idea I’d been searching frantically. But I had come for him, because he was mine, and I was not leaving without him.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 1”
Central Haywood Church of Christ 