Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Once we begin thinking of all the deceptions the enemy is about with regard to our lives, we have a tendency to become obsessed with him, fearful of what he is going to do next. Once we take him seriously, he switches from his tactic of “I’m not here...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Satan uses the Arrows that strike all of us this side of the Fall and weaves them into a story line to convince us that we cannot live without the disguise of our false self, the role we are playing out in what John and I have been calling our “small...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Satan continues to use the evil that he himself creates to tell us a very different story. In his version, good is gained through our own understanding, not through a relationship with God. Life is gained by appropriating what we can see with our own...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
God and Satan each have a design, a battle plan, to capture our heart’s devotion.The intimacy, beauty, and adventure of the Sacred Romance are placed and nurtured in the deepest longings of our heart by God himself. God’s grand strategy, birthed in h...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Being unable to defeat God through raw power, Satan’s legions decide to wound God as deeply as possible by stealing the love of his Beloved through seduction. And having “seduced them to his party,” to ravish them body and soul; and having ravished t...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
And there was war in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called ...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Our souls were made to live in the Larger Story, but as Chesterton discovered, we have forgotten our part:We have all read in scientific books, and indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the str...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
The gospel says that we are God’s Beloved, his Intimate Allies, and we created a cosmic crisis. It says we, too, were stolen from our True Love and that he launched the greatest campaign in the history of the world to get us back. God created us for ...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Consider just two essential realities that flow from this fact. First, we are created in the image of God, or more precisely, as a reflection of the Trinity. If we really understood this wonderful truth deep in our hearts, it would probably bring rev...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
I am my beloved’s and his desire is for me.—Song of SongsWhatever else she felt, Helen of Troy must have felt wanted.Two kingdoms went to war over her; thousands of men gave up their lives so that one might have her. Hers was “the face that launched ...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
God begins our courtship with a surprise. Taking the blindfold off, he turns us around and reveals his handmade wedding present. “Here,” he says. “It’s yours. Enjoy yourselves. Do you like it? Take it for a spin.” A lavish gift indeed. It speaks to t...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
We’re after God’s story, the drama from his perspective, so we would do better to start with the opening lines from the gospel of John, which take us back even farther to the once upon a time before time: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word ...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
So long as we imagine it is we who have to look for God, we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about—He is looking for us. —Simon TugwelCan it possibly get any more uncertain than this? We so long for life to be better than it is. We wish...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
What is this drama God has dropped us into the middle of? What act of the play are we in and what do our scenes have to do with the larger story being told? Is our well-being even a consideration in the story line?There is a stirring scene in Shakesp...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
When the living God of the Old Testament came along, he seemed to fit right in with this way of thinking, describing himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He gave Moses a regimen of laws, rituals, and ceremonies to be followed if the Israe...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Indeed, the things that have happened to us often suggest that the real script of the play we’re all living in is “God is indifferent” rather than “God is love.” Deep down in our heart, in the place where the story is formed, this experience of God a...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
“Do you care for me, God?”What’s under that question?“The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of,” Pascal said. What’s under that question is our personal stories, often punctuated by the Message of the Arrows: parents who were emotionally ab...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
In centuries past, the church viewed the gospel as a Romance, a cosmic drama that permeates our own stories and draws together our fragmented stories into a redemptive whole.Too many expressions of Christianity today have lost that truth. Their gospe...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
The deepest convictions of our heart are formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of story. Advances in neuroscience reveal that the human brain organizes information in the form of narrative, using the structure of story to make...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
The Arrows strike at the most vital places in our hearts, the things we care most about. The deepest questions we ever ask are directly related to our heart’s greatest needs, and the answers life gives us shape our images of ourselves, of life, and o...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
For what shall we do when we wake one day to find we have lost touch with our heart and with it the very refuge where God’s presence resides?Starting very early, life has taught all of us to ignore and distrust the deepest yearnings of our heart. Lif...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
The truth of the gospel of Jesus is intended to free us to love God and others with our whole heart and to find a life worth living. When we ignore this heart aspect of our faith and try to live out our religion solely as correct doctrine or the purs...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
In all of our hearts lies a longing for a Sacred Romance.It will not go away in spite of our efforts over the years to anesthetize or ignore its song, or attach it to a single person or endeavor. It is a Romance couched in mystery and set deeply with...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
“There are only two things that pierce the human heart,” wrote Simone Weil. One is beauty. The other is affliction. And while we wish there were only beauty in the world, each of us has known enough pain to raise serious doubts about the universe we ...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
At some point we all face the same decision—what will we do with the Arrows we’ve known? Maybe a better way to say it is, what have they tempted us to do? However they come to us, whether through a loss we experience as abandonment or some deep viola...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
Eventually this division of head and heart culminates in one of two directions. We can either deaden our heart or divide our life into two parts, where our outer story becomes the theater of the should and our inner story the theater of needs, the pl...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
When the young prophet Samuel heard the voice of God calling to him in the night, he had the counsel from his priestly mentor, Eli, to tell him how to respond. Even so, it took them three times to realize it was God calling. Rather than ignoring the ...
Daily Reading
January 5, 2025
The life of the heart is a place of great mystery. Yet we have many expressions to help us express this flame of the human soul. We describe a person without compassion as “heartless,” and we urge him or her to “have a heart.” Our deepest hurts we ca...
Daily Reading
April 4, 2023
Stasi Eldredge's book "Free to Be Me" helps teen girls become the young women God created them to be. Your beauty is under siege. It is being harassed and taunted and mocked because it matters. You matter. The Enemy of your soul attacks the core of ...
Daily Reading
March 27, 2023
God is coming. He has not abandoned us, and he never will. Yes, the pain of life is sometimes too intense to be borne. But when from that place we cry out to Jesus to save us, the heavens rejoice, the demons tremble in defeat, and the Holy Spirit who...