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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One thing that makes John different than the other three Gospels is the absence of the Lord’s Supper.
Standing before Jesus is one of the cultural groups that the Lord sought fit to eradicate for their wickedness to preserve the line that would eventually birth Jesus.
An orphan girl lives a monotonous life filled with loneliness serving as a slave to her stepmother and stepsisters.
Our Lord has told us not to make these fine distinctions in grades of sin.
The accusations of the voices we hear on a daily basis are deafening. There is no shortage of voices that will remind us of our failures.
We get the exact opposite of what we deserve.
The conversation between four year-old Jackson and his mom in the car after dropping off his siblings at school was all-too-typical.
I walk in the local mall for exercise several times a week. I purposely avoid weekends and hours when the mall is likely to be crowded because, while I am not a racewalker, I do like to keep up a steady pace as opposed to stopping, starting and inching and this is difficult to achieve even when there are few people around.
Renowned Scottish philosopher, writer, and historian Thomas Carlyle once quipped, “The History of the World [is] the Biography of Great Men.”
One of my favorite things to do in the summer is read out under the shade of my backyard tree. There, I have a reclining chair and small little side table.
Abraham didn’t understand God very well (at least not early on). I don’t say that as a dig against the Patriarch. I don’t think any of us understand God very well either.
God in Jesus takes off your shirt of shame, your bitterness, your anger, your guilt, your hopelessness, and drapes these rags on himself.