We’re coming to Durham! Join KaitlynSchiess and @sharonhmiller.bsky.social for An Evening with the Holy Post on October 4th! These events are a really special opportunity to connect with others & be encouraged and we hope to see you there.

🎟️ Tickets: holypost.com/events & bring a friend!

Wrestling is inherently intimate. You cannot wrestle a person without being close to them, & this truth has shaped how I relate to God.

We live in a culture that relies on materialism, comfort, & easy spiritual answers to avoid that wrestling. But we sacrifice depth as a result.

Scripture tells us that focus determines direction, which is why the self-esteem movement ultimately failed. Its focus--the self--was too small a purpose for the human soul.

The truth is: self-focus, even when it's positive, is a spiritual dead end. We were meant for more.

God knew social media was coming.

He knew we’d be inundated with more knowledge about the world than capacity to address it.

And with this foreknowledge, He commanded:

Love your NEIGHBOR.

Because we cannot control what’s happening in the world, but we can do this.

2 months ago, Ike & I penned a church-wide email with guidance for living faithfully in times of turmoil, & we counseled our people to do 3 things:

1. Limit your time on social media.
2. Remember your citizenship.
3. Pray

This is how we walk in wisdom, integrity, & true power.

Everything you are building right now--I mean everything: your family, career, reputation--sits on the cornerstone of your integrity.

When that piece is removed, your life might stand precariously like a Jenga tower for a bit, but it WILL fall eventually, and it will ALL fall.

“The accent of Acts 2 would seem to lie not on speaking, but on hearing." - Walter Brueggemann

Two “check engine lights” for leadership burnout:

1. Escapism. Numbing, distracting, self-medicating, procrastinating, avoidance of silence.

2. Self-righteousness. Entitlement, superiority, martyr complex, resenting the people you serve.

Asking for help is incredibly vulnerable. You risk imposing, or being a burden, or being told no.

But because vulnerability is an essential part of relationships, people will struggle to feel close to you if you never take this risk with them.

One of the greatest determiners of where you are headed and who you are becoming is

what you do with your pain.

We often resent the experiences and seasons of life that most require us to trust in God.

Motherhood is an incredible gift, a sacred responsibility, and a role of profound influence.

And also, motherhood is not a woman’s highest calling.

A woman’s highest calling is to follow Jesus.

You cannot pick up the sword of Jesus’s authority without the handle of his humility. It cannot be done. You might be parroting his words, but you will not be wielding his power.

Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbor and says, “I was only joking!” - Prov. 26:18-19

I remind my kids of this verse a lot, but it’s a good reminder for adults too. “It was a joke” is not a get out of jail free card for careless words.

Paul does not give a lot of time to dunking on the culture, or the government.

More often he pleads with Christians to maintain their spiritual integrity, and their distinctiveness from both.

Very often, the wound is not the spiritual warfare. It’s more a result of living in a broken world.

The spiritual warfare is what we do with that wound. What lies we believe about it. What meaning we make out of it: about us, about them, about everyone.

The Accuser works there.

Jesus performed miracles, healed the sick, preached history defining sermons, & led the best small group ever.

And none. of. it. was. enough.

to prevent people from rejecting him.

Leaders, we cannot do what Jesus himself could not. We cannot perform well enough to keep people.

The next time you see a flower poking out from a crack in the cement, remember: this is what the Kingdom of God is like.

This world cannot pave over the seeds of the Kingdom anymore than it could pave over Jesus’s crucified body.

The Jesus of Holy Monday is, for many people, their favorite Jesus. This is the Jesus who finally gets angry, confronts injustice, & overturns tables pro wrestling style.

We love this Jesus because we want to be this Jesus. But we are not Jesus in this story. We are the temple.

Holy Week is bookended by two displays of Jesus’s kingship: Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

Which is to say, Holy Week is a microcosm of the arc of human history. Life after the Garden is dark, uncertain, and full of loss.

But we know where this is going.

Discipleship is not about monthly coffee meetings. It’s about who gets access to your everyday life.

The people who will be most influenced by you are the people who spend the most time with you.

The first grasp for control came not in the form of power, but knowledge (Gen 3).

Anyone who offers special understanding, or insight, into what is happening in our world (“No one is talking about this!” “No one will tell you this!”) is just appealing to that temptation.

Storms inflict damage, but they also reveal what was already there: The shallow roots. The dead limbs that needed to be pruned. The house built on sand.

The storms of life are the same, which is why we must not categorize their impact simply in terms of harm, but revelation.

When Christian doctrines like love and grace are grounded not in our weakness, but in our strength, born not out of wrestling with sin or with God, but of intellectual study…that is when they present not as a holy limp, but as a weapon.

One takeaway from reading the Bible in a year is that you can't escape the relentlessness of humanity's missteps. It becomes tiresome to read again & again. Then irritating. Then revolting. Then numbing.

And this experience is the point. Human grace is exhaustible. God's is not.

Reminder:

Knowledge without agency creates anxiety.

This is the psychological warfare of social media in a nutshell.

Human default is to deny, deflect, and distract from our weakness and limitations.

Lent, however, is the season when we consciously choose to do the opposite. We don’t simply reflect on our weakness, but we provoke it.

You know, it’s always going to be imperfect. Our best efforts at serving & honoring God are going to be fraught with problems because we are fraught with problems.

So don’t get so distracted by how “they could be doing it better” that you forget: that’s the whole point of Jesus.

We are all too willing to follow voices we agree with intellectually/politically/theologically, despite the fact that their rhetoric and behavior defiles themselves.

“If you say the heart can be deceived, I will say the mind can also be deceived. A *pure* heart can be trusted. As Jesus said, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’” - Brian Zahnd