But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn't offer a cure. It doesn't offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation.

Faith isn't about having everything figured out ahead of time; faith is about following the quiet voice of God without having everything figured out ahead of time.

It wasn't shared social status or ethnicity that brought Jesus' followers together either, nor was it total agreement on exactly who this Jesus character was - a prophet? The Messiah? The Son of God? No, there is one thing that connected all these dissimilar people together it was a shared sense of need: a hunger, a thirst, a longing. It was the certainty that, when Jesus said He came for the sick, this meant Jesus came for me.

I’m ready to stop waging war and start washing feet.

The woman described in Proverbs 31 is not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor

No step taken in faith is wasted, not by a God who makes all things new.

We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.