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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But there’s more to this movie than excellent Lego graphics and artistic; in other words, imaginative storytelling.
An understanding and appreciation of the goodness (and given-ness) of place and family, and the vocations attending each, can of course be taught and learned in a classroom or by means of a book.
Waits wants to pen the songs with beautiful melodies and lyrics dark as sin. Whatever his church background, he sings “the big print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
The concept of Theology as science is foreign to our ‘enlightened’ century where the subject has been removed to the Liberal Arts category.
I hoped like mad they’d spit in my face and laugh me all the way out of town. I wouldn’t have even cared if a mob of them had beat me to death in a back alley. But heavens no, I couldn’t be that lucky.
But this dying world is still the world of our living God, who graces us with tokens of a final renewal. As leaf subsides to leaf, and frost to snow, and snow to ice, there comes a day when the gold of nature sprouts anew.
What I will tell you is that, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite what you think and feel and imagine, God is indeed in that dark place. You don’t know it, but he’s licking your wounds, too. And he’s keeping the deeper, blacker darkness at bay.
The prophets had foretold, His coming Incarnation; The Word would make our flesh, His only habitation.
In Mary’s womb, Christ and His Church were wed; United as one Body and one Head.
Some men work like a horse for they’re greedy as a pig Some are drunk as a skunk for many beers they swig.