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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He has given you clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home—as well as grocery stores, carpenters, and farmers to provide those goods.
Your church is not healthy. If they were healthy, they wouldn’t need someone to heal them.
I'm always surprised to hear people say, “If I could do it all again, I wouldn’t change a thing.” But we’re all sinners and we all sin every day.
Even a sinner who is crushed by the weight of her offenses, who feels in her bones the weight of judgment, shame, and doubt can expect to receive God's good word.
You can talk to me about how Jesus is really forgiving and how you want me around, but what happens when things don’t change in a month?
We pray for God to deliver us from ourselves. To forgive us, for Jesus’s sake, when we do evil.
Have you ever wondered, of all the adjectives we could use to describe this day why in the world we chose the word “good?” Yeah, me too.
If he was not flesh, who was hung on the cross? And if he was not God, who shook the earth from its foundations?
Apart from bare, naked faith in Jesus' atoning work for us, no sinner is, or ever can be, holy.
The God whose Spirit hovered over the face of the dark, formless, void waters of the infant creation, now walks upon the waters of the sea like a boss.
They stood on their feet, the Father's host, Alive in the Son and Holy Ghost.
Paul’s letter to the Romans is arguably the most masterful piece of writing in the New Testament.