‘Peace’ means “I have forgiven all those sins against me.”
This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 6-9.
Paradoxes hold everything together, not just in Inception’s plot, but in your life and mine.

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Bonhoeffer was in the unenviable position of trying to break a spell. The spell was the Nazi crisis, where the totalitarian state threatened the church, and yet to many, seemed to be saving the culture and nation from mortal dangers.
Our anxiety about the future is a consequence of our old self’s attempts to achieve freedom for himself apart from Christ Jesus.
So, what do we pray? What do we say? In times of fear, in times of chaos, in unprecedented times, we pray and say the words that have been written on our hearts.
Trusting in Christ’s promise of new life and deliverance pours the ability to abandon fixing our eyes only inwardly and lets us see ourselves as others see us.
And because Jesus on the cross was sin in its entirety, God cannot look at him. He turns his face away, causing Jesus to cry out in utmost agony, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
From the womb to the tomb, from the cradle to the grave, Jesus’ name defines and describes who he is and what he is all about.
As a parent listens for the cry of a hurting child, our heavenly Father waits for our cry of weal and woe.
Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking God's love is like the love we experience in human relationships. But human love is a derivative of God's love. It is lesser.
For God to shine his face upon us is the same as saying, “Christ Jesus is with us.”
Has the modern world taken too strong a dose of the gospel as its inheritance from the Reformation?
As human beings, we usually think that mercy should have limits; that it should never exceed its confines. This attitude is rooted deeply in the human heart.
In our transactional view of our faith - “If I don’t… then God won’t.” “I need to, so God can” - we are seriously underestimating who we are dealing with.