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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Every child builds. Some build castles out of wooden blocks handed down from an older sibling. Some construct forts out of blankets, chairs, and miscellaneous living room artifacts.
Dead men don’t get taught. Dead men don’t get un-lost. Dead men don’t heal.
Your primary purpose in life is having something done to you. God created you in order that He might have someone to give to, to bless, to love, to nurture, to save, to give Himself to.
As with so many things, regret can begin as something natural, even beneficial, as you struggle to recover from a wound in your past. But over time, regret can devolve from a sadness to a sickness.
Over time, any inclination the cupbearer might have to speak a good word to Pharaoh on Joseph’s behalf will seem less and less of a moral necessity.
In some ways, though, it seems that scientism may increasingly be the greater of the two dangers in American higher education. Not only has Helen Rittelmeyer, for example, made a case for relativism (at least in the ethical realm) being effectively dead and buried.
Anti-intellectualism goes straight out the window when a topic truly matters to us. I can’t recall how many times I’ve noticed the same folks who disdain academic jargon start using bigger, more technical words than I in one of three circumstances.
Being thrown in the pit was but one of the many smoking guns that the prosecutor could bring forth as evidence.
One gets science or religion, but not both. Today’s model swings to the other end of the pendulum, flirting with an extreme inclusivity. One gets science and religion, as long as they are properly understood.
Have you ever found yourself looking back on a time in your life when you were thoroughly enmeshed in something wrong, and now you hardly recognize the person you were then?
God wired us to be storytellers. God made man in his own image and that image includes a rational mind that communicates in large part through stories.
That all being said, come to think of it, I’ve never gone 24 seconds without sinning.