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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No matter how great our thirst is, God's abundance not only meets it but quenches it. When we are poor and in need, the Lord is always there to give us grace and mercy without end.
Solomon did not write Ecclesiastes to bum you out. He wrote it to set you free.
Maybe for the first time you can begin to receive creation as a gift, a sheer gift from God’s hands. And who knows what might happen in the power of this grace? All possibilities are open.
Viewing the Bible as literature is an essential and natural way of engaging the text. But there are also ways in which this practice can get lost.
Imagine a world where love is given to the least. That is what Jesus is inviting His disciples to do in His parable this morning.
It is the Word of the Lord and His Word accomplishes what it says. Our favorable or unfavorable circumstances neither help nor hinder the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
God seeks us so we might find Him, but He does so in ways that do not always make sense to us.
The wisdom of God became man, lived, died, and was raised for the justification of sinners, great and small.
One day at a time, God provides us with a heart of wisdom, and in this way, our Lord teaches us to number our days. 
Christians have the rare faculty, above all other people on earth, of knowing where to place their care, while others vex and torture themselves and at length must despair.
From the junkyard of my past, I assembled the scrap metal of self-preservation, self-righteousness, and unalloyed selfishness, to weld together a hollow divinity. In its core, I stuffed myself: a god without divinity, offering forgiveness with conditions, to sinners without love.
In this parable, notice how Jesus invites us to consider that forgiveness is something more than a moment. It is a way of grace that extends throughout an entire kingdom.