You are a soul. Not an algorithm. Not a hashtag. A soul knit together by a God who does not mock, does not abandon, and does not lie.
What I was missing—what so many are missing—is a Church that doesn’t just speak about Christ, but delivers him.
Though several generations removed from Luther’s generation, Francke came of age right on time for a new wave of spirituality to collide with the Reformation in the movement known as Pietism.

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As with many teachings, the Lutheran teaching on Mutual Conversation and Consolation of the Brethren fits in with other teachings. The various teachings don’t stand alone, but they fit together as an organic whole.
I think the chief reason that a faction within me welcomes the disintegration of the American ethos is this: it makes me feel so much better about myself. The smut makes me quite smug.
God must kill me. He’s got to slay me, put me six feet under, and shovel dirt atop my corpse. Then, it’s like, “Hey, I finally understand! You’re God and I’m not.
Why, given all the things we wish God had told us, but didn’t, does he “waste our time” by stating the patently obvious? Was there, in Moses’ day, an outbreak of violence against the disabled?
Ever experience a congregation with the word "Grace" in its name that was nonetheless ironically ungracious and legalistic? I have.
Sinner: I see. I see for the first time. It’s clear to me. You died for me and for my sin. You took my verdict. God: I did.
One day I walked about that place I had tried to make home. I realized it was a prison cell of my own devising.
It shows the extent to which an environment of iniquity can seep into the souls of believers, transforming them from the inside out, so that even when they “flee to the mountains,” like Lot and his girls, they take Sodom with them.
A cemetery is a hard place to confess because the cemetery itself seems to confess, “You, O mortal, have lost.”
If I had hated him even while a child, in his late teens I grew to loathe him as the very antithesis of the man I wanted to be.
“Let’s face it,” my mom once told me, while delivering a lecture on making the right moral decisions in high school, “sinning is fun.”
But when I let my mind go there, in truth all I’m doing is this: bellying up to the bar of sentimentality to drink my fill of falsehoods that leave me intoxicated with feelings of saintly superiority.