The greatest obstacle to friendship in middle age isn't that nobody wants friends. It's that everyone is waiting for someone else to go first. But here's the good news: Christ has already gone first for you. And because He has, you are free to go first for someone else.
Ecclesiastes tells us that there is a time for everything under heaven. But God has also placed eternity in our hearts, and that makes us strange creatures: able to rejoice in this life yet always aching for a life that only Christ can give.
What does it take to draw near to God? It takes a perfect priest, a finished work, and a broken body to open the way. In short, it takes everything, which is exactly what Christ has given for you.

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Jesus comes to you. He binds your wounds, and he pours out his body and his blood for the forgiveness of your sins.
Everyone is living as a naked sufferer who’s been duped into believing that the nakedness of suffering has to be covered up.
Here is someone to love; they’re not a Christian. They’re not very clean and don’t seem to care. Love them. Let your life become intertwined with theirs. Let it cost you something.
The law is good and holy but so often when we are “shoulding” on one another, we actually are just going to end up “burning” each other’s fields.
The Holy Spirit is sent, not to talk about himself, but to point us to Jesus.
The world’s history and Jewish history was like a story in search of an ending; and when Jesus rose from the dead the ending was now revealed.
Pentecost reminds us of not only what happened on that day described in Acts 2 but what is happening every day: the Spirit of God working in and through God’s people, according to his word.
By his initiative alone, he remakes our hearts to love him and others unselfishly.
Pentecost is the event which jolts the world into taking note that something entirely new is taking place.
What is it, though, that makes bedtime so fraught with anxiety?
In Christ, we live beneath an open heaven having the definitive proof in the cross of Christ that God is outrageously for us, not against us.
"Ragged" written by Gretchen Ronnevik is now available for purchase from 1517 Publishing