Blessed Are The Peacemakers

  The Fire - Why God Rejects Lukewarm Neutrality Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul. Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn. From Shared Strain to Shared Testing If Part Four taught us how to carry weight together, this chapter explores what happens when that shared strain is tested. The yoke teaches alignment. Fire reveals integrity. Fire arrives to clarify. It exposes what can endure and what cannot. Fire Is Not the Enemy Fire is one of the most misunderstood images in scripture. We associate it with destruction. But God uses it for revelation. Fire doesn't create what is present. It reveals what already exists. Gold shows itself as gold. Straw shows itself as straw. Why “Lukewarm” Is Unsafe Revelation 1 (3 in KJV) is often misunderstood. God doesn't compare enthusiasm levels. He names a spiritual condition that resists change. Lukewarmness feels peaceful because it avoids...

  Remembering Who We Are There is a moment in Lauren Daigle’s Come Alive that really gets me every time. It’s the line where the enemy whispers lies and leads the prodigals off as slaves.... one by one. No one marches into chains with eyes wide open. People drift. They follow voices that promise relief, freedom, belonging, or safety. They wake up far from home, burdened by weights they never expected, their hearts hollowed out. When that line hits, I see Ezekiel’s valley. I see bones scattered across a barren field, bleached white by endless sun, with no trace of the lives they once held. These aren’t rebels shaking fists at God. They’re prodigals who have forgotten who they are  “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.” The words echo like a final breath, despair so deep it erases memory. I feel it in my chest, this ache for a people who once breathed as God’s people and now lie reduced to dust, their identity worn away by tim...

A Study in Spiritual Physics Covenant Identity and the Heart’s Capacity to See Before we move into Part Five, I’m pausing the series for one week to look at a foundational question underneath everything we’ve been exploring: how the heart responds when light arrives. There's a pattern in how souls meet light. Scripture speaks of it with disarming simplicity. Light reveals. Darkness hides. The moment light touches a soul, the reaction itself reveals us. Light doesn't accuse, it does expose. It shows what is true so healing can begin. Light never flatters the image we've built of ourselves. It interrogates it with honesty. Darkness isn't always wickedness. Often it's  simply the instinct to defend what's familiar. Over the past year, some of the clearest things I have learned about responding to light have come from covenant family whose insights stretch me beyond what is familiar and invite me into deeper humility. Responding p...

  This has been sitting in my drafts for months. I kept hesitating to share it, since prophecy carries weight and it’s easy to wonder whether you’ve missed something or stretched an idea to far. Last night in our fellowship meeting, Ezekiel 17 came up again and it brought this  back to mind. I reread it, prayed, and decided to post it. If I’ve gotten something wrong, it wouldn’t be the first time, and it certainly won’t be the last! The Lord corrects the humble and that feels like grace enough. So here it is, offered with an open hand and a seeking heart. Ezekiel 17 A Pattern  The words of Ezekiel 17 offer more than a rebuke to ancient Israel. They unfold a prophetic pattern that feels painfully familiar in our day. Read symbolically, Ezekiel becomes a type and shadow of Joseph Smith, and the Lord’s warning about shepherds reaches forward into modern institutional religion in our own day. In this chapter, the setting is already sobering. The city has fallen, the peopl...

  Part 4: The Yoke - Three Paradoxes That Rewire Us Where scripture becomes seed, paradox becomes doorway, and story becomes surgery for the soul. Seven weeks. Seven lessons. One nervous system reborn. From Pressure to Practice If Part Three showed us how contradiction cracks the shell, this chapter explores what happens when we stop trying to escape that pressure and instead learn to live inside it. Here paradox stops being theoretical and becomes formative . This is where discipleship moves from insight to embodiment. The Yoke A yoke is not a heavy burden placed on one animal alone. It is a shared harness, carefully fitted, designed so two creatures pull together and learn strength through relationship. Jesus doesn't remove all weight from our lives. He redistributes it. “My yoke is easy” doesn't mean there is no strain. It means strain that is rightly shared. Paradox is the yoke of discipleship. Shared Yoke vs Solitary Striving Solitary strivi...

  Choosing to Stay: Faith, Affliction, and the Space Between I was planning to share a post about Christmas. But this year, Christmas has felt….complicated. Illness has a way of tinting everything it touches, even the season that is supposed to feel bright. So instead of writing what I intended, I’m writing what is real. In one of my favorite books, the main character is lying on his deathbed and describes longing for the space between heartbeats, because every beat brings pain. Not death exactly, just the pause. The small mercy between moments. That image has lived with me for years, and lately it has come back with force. That is how my body feels now. Every heartbeat is work. Every breath is negotiated. I find myself longing for the spaces in between, not necessarily because I want to leave,but because those spaces do not hurt. When I first became sick, almost twenty years ago, I had a dream. I was standing in my kitchen, and the Lord was there. Then th...