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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But on the mountain in Galilee, where we encounter a very different side of God, doubts overtake us. Why?
This story is all-too-common, and illustrates a key dynamic driving the youth out of church.
If you want to find God, he’s hiding in plain sight. Christ is in the very things that we would never select as a vessel befitting divinity.
If even your family has disowned and discarded you; yes, if every single person in this world regards you as a hopeless, embarrassing failure at life, the Father of all mercies does not.
“Why now,” I said to no one, or to myself, or to God. Whoever. I was drunk, strung out, mostly dead, hopeless in the darkness. I knew I’d done it all to myself. I didn’t need God to drive the point home.
For many, there are days when they’re as excited about going to work on Sunday morning as you are about going to work on Monday morning.
I looked up at the cross and saw what God had become to bring me home. He had become what I was.
Believe in God, belong to a church, and behave yourself isn’t the Gospel.
When you see a cross, you see the smile of your Father. He’s not mad at you. He’s overjoyed that you’re his daughter.
They may also be fellow sufferers who’ve hit their own bottom with you. Whoever they are, they wear the mask of Jesus the crucified. In them and through them the Lord is at work to love you.
Without getting into specifics, I have suffered a loss that seemed at times unbearable. I cried. I pleaded. I questioned. I prayed. I drank. Rinse. Repeat.
All other subjects—even Biblical subjects—were subservient to an accurate view of the Person and work of Jesus Christ for sinners.