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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If you’ve been in church long enough, you might have seen the worst of someone’s unrepentant sin get them kicked out, cast out, excommunicated or “handed over to Satan so their flesh might die and their soul might live.”
The first person who attempted to stop people from talking about Jesus was not a tyrant, a secular government, or a bully religious mob.
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.
Your sins do not exist because He who called heaven and earth into existence, has called your sins out of existence. He who made everything from nothing unmakes your sins into nothing.
“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.
We spend the first nine months of our lives in utter darkness. There are no tiny fluorescent bulbs beaming from the ceiling of the womb, no fetal flashlights, not even a pinprick of illumination.
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.
We hang on to our sins not despite the fact that they hurt, but precisely because they do hurt. We need to hurt, to fret over them, to cry over them, to make amends over them, because by doing so, we will grease the wheels of God’s forgiveness.
Grace is easier to tweet about than extend. When we are talking about my sin and the impact it has on others, I want grace.
If April 1 is April Fools’ Day, then March 25 is Divine Fool’s Day. Falling nine months before Christmas, it’s the day when God set in motion what appeared to be a foolish plan.
As it turned out, the novels in which I had sought escape, became part of the means whereby the Lord rescued me from my own death.
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.