The heavens are neither geocentric, nor even heliocentric, but Christocentric. It is the cross and the crucified and risen Jesus who has the whole world, and each of us, in his nail scarred hands.
Humanity, despite our best efforts, cannot answer the question as to why God allows evil to occur.
This is an excerpt from the Chapter 7 of Being Family by Scott Keith (1517 Publishing, 2026), pgs 72-74.

All Articles

The thing is, not only is fixing our past impossible; who’s to say we wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes? In fact, who’s to say we wouldn’t make matters even worse?
Waits wants to pen the songs with beautiful melodies and lyrics dark as sin. Whatever his church background, he sings “the big print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
In this particular church, all sins are forgiven, but some sins are more forgiven than others.
Why is it that we are so afraid to give the message of grace to our little ones? We bombard their ears with law on a constant basis.
One of the strongest elements in the evangelicalism of my youth has a place in Lutheranism that might be surprising to many. This is what our confessions call “The Mutual Conversation and Consolation of the Brethren."
I think the chief reason that a faction within me welcomes the disintegration of the American ethos is this: it makes me feel so much better about myself. The smut makes me quite smug.
Why, given all the things we wish God had told us, but didn’t, does he “waste our time” by stating the patently obvious? Was there, in Moses’ day, an outbreak of violence against the disabled?
Sinner: I see. I see for the first time. It’s clear to me. You died for me and for my sin. You took my verdict. God: I did.
It shows the extent to which an environment of iniquity can seep into the souls of believers, transforming them from the inside out, so that even when they “flee to the mountains,” like Lot and his girls, they take Sodom with them.
If I had hated him even while a child, in his late teens I grew to loathe him as the very antithesis of the man I wanted to be.
“Let’s face it,” my mom once told me, while delivering a lecture on making the right moral decisions in high school, “sinning is fun.”
But when I let my mind go there, in truth all I’m doing is this: bellying up to the bar of sentimentality to drink my fill of falsehoods that leave me intoxicated with feelings of saintly superiority.