The night before the crucifixion, Jesus told His disciples: I am the vine, you are the branches, and My Father is the gardener. What follows is not a threat. It is a description of how a vineyard works, offered by someone who knew His listeners understood pruning – and what a skilled gardener does to keep something alive and fruitful. The word translated “cuts off” can also mean “lifts up.” The word translated “prunes” shares its root with the word for clean. Today we look at what this passage actually says about loss, preparation, and the Gardener who always knows what He is doing.
Tag Archives: Spiritual Growth
Science and Spirituality | Body and Mind: Let the Tide Come In
Most of us were only ever taught to manage things. To perform okay. To say “I’m fine” on autopilot until we actually believed it, or at least stopped questioning it. But the body keeps an honest record of everything our mouths agreed to leave behind…
The psychological and the spiritual aren’t competing systems. Together they create a full circuit, either feeding or starving us. The longest-process things on the list of human emotions aren’t longer because they’re more powerful. They’re longer because someone kept interrupting the process.
Eventually, we have to allow the tide to come in.
Prophecy Without the Panic: Before You Build the Bunker | Daily Bread
You can run to and fro through scripture and still go hungry. The motion itself doesn’t feed you. And that’s the thing about prophecy. It was never meant to produce the panicked running to and fro it often seems to. Prophecy is meant to produce people who stopped running long enough to wait, who waited long enough to receive, and who received enough to rise. The wise will understand, not because they were smarter or more studious, but because they asked. Because they stopped. Because they let the Word do what the Word does when you give it room.
Presence, Not Passage: The Hours We Don’t See | Daily Bread
Everyone I know has said it at least once this year: “Where is the time going?” But I’ve been sitting with a different question lately. Not “where is the time going,” but “when did we stop paying attention to it?” Because I don’t think time is actually disappearing. I think we are.
Verse and Vision | May 11, 2026
Verse and Vision is a daily series exploring the verse of the day — not just what it says, but what it means. Each post unpacks the biblical context, digs into the original language, and traces the historical and philosophical world behind the text. Where the Word echoes across history, we follow it. Where it lands in the present, we don’t look away.
Root → Rupture → Rest: What Striving Couldn’t Do | Daily Bread
I had nothing left to offer. No performance. No effort. Just the raw and quiet reality of a woman too tired to try anymore. And that is exactly where God met me. I thought I knew and loved stillness before that moment, but in that stillness, something began to change that all my years of striving and even meditation had never touched. I was not led away from my faith. I was led through the fog of it, until I could see it clearly for the first time.
What Hard Seasons and Scripture Taught Me About Feelings | Daily Bread
Your brain is constantly scanning, analyzing, and assigning meaning to your circumstances, and then producing a feeling based on that interpretation. The feeling is real, but the interpretation is not always accurate. In short, our brains often lie to us. Feelings are data, but they are not always reliable data. This is not just theology. It is neuroscience. And it matters enormously for the Christian.
Three Habits That Block God’s Voice | Daily Bread
There’s a particular kind of ache that comes when you feel like your prayers are hitting the ceiling. You’re not walking away from God. You’re calling out, but you can’t seem to hear Him.
The Bible doesn’t leave us without an answer to this experience. It tells us how to position ourselves to hear God, and if the problem is positioning, then the positioning can change.
The Double Portion: What Shame Is Really Pointing You Toward | Daily Bread
This morning someone very close to me said something that stopped me mid-morning and opened a conversation about one of the most misunderstood experiences in both human psychology and the Christian faith: shame. I considered what shame actually is, what it’s actually for, and why God never intended for us to make it our home.
If you are dealing with shame over your past behavior or choices, make no mistake. Shame is not meant to be wallowed in. It is meant to point us toward conviction and guide us forward into righteousness. It is a signal, not a sentence. A starting line, not a finish line.
God wants to restore you, just as He promises to do for Israel. The question is not whether He is willing. The question is whether you will allow Him to work in your life, or whether you will let shame block the blessing He is already holding out to you.
Speaking Truth Is Not the Same as Judging | Daily Bread
To say “don’t judge” sounds humble. It sounds gracious. But underneath it is a confusion that quietly does harm to the very people it wants to protect. Speaking truth is not, in and of itself, judgment. And the kindest thing anyone can do for someone caught in sin is not to make them comfortable in it — it is to point them toward the One who can wash it clean.
Sunday Sessions | One Gospel, Two Roads (Or, The Argument I Once Used Against My Own Faith)
Many years ago, I tried to use this exact argument to prove my father’s faith was built on sand. I was wrong. Thirty years later someone posted it online and asked anyone to disprove it with scripture. I hope this answers their invitation well, and helps whoever reads it.
What the Desert Kept: The Unbound Word | My Father’s Questions
Part 2 of What the Desert Kept: The Unbound Word traces the questions my father couldn’t put down — about canon, suppression, and the distance between institutional Christianity and the faith Scripture actually describes. It also traces what those questions cost him, what they planted in me without my knowing, and what it took for me to finally understand the inheritance he left behind. This one got personal. I think it needed to.
When Leaves Aren’t Enough: The Real Work of Spiritual Formation | Daily Bread
Spiritual appearance comes naturally. Showing up, saying the right things, checking the right boxes — from a distance, it all looks like faith. But Jesus wasn’t fooled by a leafy tree with nothing underneath, and He isn’t fooled by us either. In this promised deep dive from the Leaves but No Fruit post, we get honest about the gap between looking formed and actually being formed — what creates it, why it’s so easy to miss, and what real transformation actually looks like from the inside out. Spoiler: it’s slower, harder, and more honest than most of us expect.
Soul Over Ego: In the World, Not of It | Daily Bread
The church is witnessing a profound spiritual battle in 2026, where the struggle between ego and soul is reaching a fever pitch. This isn’t just a debate; it’s a dramatic confrontation, exposing deep-seated divisions rooted in our spiritual identity.
We’re observing an age-old contest between who we are in the flesh and who we’re called to be in Christ, amplified by current cultural and political pressures. This isn’t a comfortable reality, but it’s crucial that we confront it openly and honestly.
Authenticity Unveiled | When Winning Isn’t the Point
What’s the real reason I share anything I share? That question snuck up on me recently — not from someone else, but from myself. The honest answer turned out to matter more than I expected.
This post is about that question, and what it revealed when I started looking around at how faith gets performed online versus how Scripture actually models it. The Bible is full of people who questioned God, fact-checked apostles, wrestled all night, demanded evidence, and were honored for it. Truth doesn’t need a bodyguard. It thrives in the open.
So here’s my invitation: push back. Ask harder. Say “but what about ____?” That’s not a threat to what I believe. Growth is the point. Not winning.
Sunday Sessions | When You Actually Go Look | A Deeper Dive + Follow-Up
I used to take the Bible at face value, or dismiss it just as quickly. Then I started going and looking. Really looking.
What I found surprised me: forty-plus authors spread across three continents and fifteen centuries, writing in exile, dungeons, wildernesses, and royal courts. Most never met. Most never coordinated. And yet they produced one unbroken story.
Creation. Fall. Promise. Rescue. Restoration.
That’s the arc, and it’s held throughout fifteen centuries, three continents, and forty voices who never once compared notes
The promised seed in Genesis 3:15. The lamb provided by God in Genesis 22, echoed in the Passover, fulfilled in John’s cry: “Behold, the Lamb of God.” Prophecies specific enough to name the details centuries in advance: thirty pieces of silver, a donkey, pierced hands and feet, a birthplace called Bethlehem.
No committee could have engineered that.
The more I studied the geography, the manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the languages, the sheer improbability of the coherence, the harder it became to wave away.
Questions still remain. I expect they always will. But they don’t push me out anymore. They pull me deeper in.
This is what happens when you actually go look.
Twin Tree Project 