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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We need pastors who carry that same concealed weapon in their mouths, who are outfitted with the same word the angels have: the word steeped in divine blood, shed for you. That is all we need, for the word does it all.
You became, for a time, ritually unclean. Not sinful. Not immoral. To be unclean meant you bore in your own body the effects of a creation in bondage to decay.
Fairy tales are but one chapter in the book we call storytelling. We may prefer reading other kinds of stories (mystery, science fiction, and so on).
Not long ago I was having a conversation with a friend. She was facing a big decision about her career with a deadline looming for a decision.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Richter scale, our friends over at Wikipedia define it as a 1930s invention that "is a base-10 logarithmic scale, which defines magnitude as the logarithm of the ratio of the amplitude of the seismic waves to an arbitrary, minor amplitude."
I love books. I love authors. I love the way putting words down on paper incarnates ideas that might otherwise remain ghosts of the mind, flitting here and there in our gray matter.
Music is an inherent part of our humanity as image-bearers of God. And like all gifts, it is meant for the good of the receiver.
If you know me in the least, then you know of my fondness for the 2010 film Inception.
Before long I was deeply involved in the trilogy (the reader is invariably "drawn into" the story in a unique way, and for a good reason as we shall see).
To forget ourselves is to remember another, that is, to act in such a way that benefits them. That’s the problem: we don’t.
Although I was too young to have mastered the skill of lying, I also knew that I couldn’t tell this woman the truth.
We want people to notice us, know us, like us, or even hate us. Just please don’t ignore us. Social media is the ego’s dream come true.