‘Peace’ means “I have forgiven all those sins against me.”
This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 6-9.
Paradoxes hold everything together, not just in Inception’s plot, but in your life and mine.

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I’m still piecing together fragments. I’ve spent my life collecting scraps of personal stories that will explain my father to me.
Behold the seemingly foolish ways of our wise God. He bids us embrace what appears impossible: that blood alone is our defense, that blood alone saves us from destruction, that the blood of a lamb is more than enough.
You know that person who keeps offending you in some way? They come to you all glossy-eyed and soft-spoken, stammering to get "please forgive me" out because it's the umpteenth time they've done this?
“God doesn’t care about the intentions of your heart!” I said a little too loudly and emphatically.
Jesus said it would have been better for this man not to have been born. Shocking words, sad words. But they are not the saddest words in Scripture.
Good people like fist-pounding on the pulpit about the bad things that bad people do in this bad world of ours. It makes them feel better about themselves.
One of my podcast addictions is Criminal. Their tagline is “Criminal is a podcast about crime. Stories of people who've done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle.”
What he meant is that man is searching for something, but he knows not what. All of us do the same in some way or another. We reach out to find something that we think just might fix us, something that will fill the void that sin has created within.
Some days, I stare at the computer screen, haphazardly pecking at my keyboard, wondering where the words will come from or even if the words will ever come again.
For the less we tell these stories of sin, the more it seems we are ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for the salvation of bad people.
When I was a kid, I roamed the alleys and nearby fields with a pocket full of pebbles and a slingshot in hand. My grandfather had carved me the slingshot from the fork of a mesquite tree, native to our New Mexico soil.
Sometimes I think transparency is the bastard child of Christianity. Everyone is willing to talk about transparency (and its cousin, accountability), but when it walks into the room and stays awhile, most people pretend it doesn’t exist.