God makes us pure saints by planting us back in the earth we imagined we needed to escape.
Salvation is not merely to be put in “safety” but to be put into Christ.
Bringing your family to church to receive “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42) in Word and Sacrament honors and pleases God.

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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.
A cemetery is a hard place to confess because the cemetery itself seems to confess, “You, O mortal, have lost.”
But unlike fish, there was actual pleasure in the prolonged chewing of this food. For the longer it remained in my mouth, the better it tasted, the more pronounced became its flavor, the more nourishment I received from each bite. This food is the bread on which Jesus survived during his forty days of temptation in the wilderness.
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.
Today, and every day, he wears a crown and every angel in heaven knows him by name.
The details vary, of course, but we too struggle to repair the heart broken by the tragic death of someone we love. We're dazed, angry, speechless.
Eat, yes, but season your turkey with the ashes of repentance as it preaches just how little your faith is, just how little you trust God, just how little you believe the Father is good to you.
He may be a good sport about it, smile for the camera, congratulate the better man, but secretly he hates the loss and covets another chance at victory.