This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 74-77.
“The Church exists to tell anyone and everyone who knocks on her door wondering what’s inside: Come and see” (pg. 58). Such reminders make The Church a worthwhile read.
The way of the cross is the actual way of victory. Jesus absorbs the worst of what humanity and even the devil can do to him, and he spurns the shame of it all.

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The reason is much simpler than that: to learn to pray, you must first die. The language of prayer is taught in the school of death.
Like the patriarch, Jacob, who after his wedding night, awoke to the wrong wife in his bed, I too one day opened my eyes to find that the Rachel with whom I had fallen in love, for whom I'd labored long years, was not the one beside me as the sun rose.
What is most remarkable about this tale is not how clever it is, but that the original storyteller was just as greedy as the three fictional young men were.
Yes, He knows all—not only the sins you remember and are ashamed of, but also those you have forgotten and even those you never knew you committed.
For out of the mouths of these opposition forces, gathered on enemy turf, comes the defiant declaration of death’s undoing: “Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!” An audacious act it is, to march smack dab into the middle of a place that screams, “Dead!” and to sing, “Alive!”
Here is the truth: we have gained more in Jesus than we lost in Adam. We lost human perfection in the first man's fall. We gained perfect flesh-and-blood unity with God in his Son's incarnation.
On that day the mourners were shocked to discover that behind the veneer of her bright smile lurked a fathomless darkness, whose depths she made manifest only when she despaired of life in this world.
I was full of pain and empty of speech, babbling like a baby who knows he hurts but can’t explain where or why or what he needs to assuage the anguish. Here was the sheer helplessness of being unable to communicate with God in this moment of deepest desperation.
I don’t need to watch a blood-soaked story on CNN or visit someone of death row to familiarize myself with the beast of depravity crouched within the human heart. I just need to look in the mirror, to stare deeply into the eyes that are a window to a soul that has journeyed down dark paths whose only illumination comes from the fires of hell.
I lack the wisdom, and the experience, to counsel those who have been hurt so deeply. There is no pain like the pain of being mistreated by those who, above all others, you expect to love you unconditionally.
Like me, like most Americans, the equation of wealth with happiness is so firmly rooted in her psyche that only a divine surgeon could dig it out.
What kind of fool does what David did? What kind of fool ignores the riches spilling out of his pockets to steal the only penny a poor man has?