This is an excerpt from the introduction of Stretched: A Study for Lent and the Entire Christian Life by Christopher Richmann (1517 Publishing, 2026).
We can bring our troubles, griefs, sorrows, and sins to Jesus, who meets us smack dab in the middle of our messy mob.
Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.

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Death is never natural. Death is abnormal. Death is not human. Death is the enemy.
This is why a Christian must keep learning to forget himself so long as he lives.
The only churches that live are churches that have died. That still die. And that rise to newness of life in Christ’s life alone.
These studies can expose some very disturbing truths about Christianity in America.
One thing that makes John different than the other three Gospels is the absence of the Lord’s Supper.
"Are you Republican or Democrat?” “Liberal or conservative?” “Yankees or Red Sox?” “Star Wars or Star Trek?”
The conversation between four year-old Jackson and his mom in the car after dropping off his siblings at school was all-too-typical.
For every child in a mother’s womb, the whole host of heaven and earth, indeed God himself, intercedes.
You can see it far off, looming on the horizon, a thick fog menacing off the coast and swirling in the distance. You know the signs.
In Christ we are already dead to sin and the eternal consequences of sin. “There is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus,” writes Paul (Romans 8:1).
As long as we hold tight to a life that was never ours to possess in the first place, so long as we refuse to lay down our life so others can live, Jesus can't do a thing for us.
The only recourse we have is to die before we die. To give up on a fake-life. To acknowledge that this stupid, selfish game we’re playing with our immortality projects has zero success.