Under the Fir Tree

“Cast all your anxieties on him.”   — 1 Peter 5:7 There’s a command hidden inside our anxiety. Peter doesn’t merely tell us that God understands it. He tells us what to do with it. Cast it. Something carried is to be thrown from one set of hands into another. Anxiety often feels like something happening to us, and sometimes it is. The body tightens before the mind knows why. We wake at three in the morning already halfway through an argument that hasn’t happened. Some forms of anxiety become deeply lodged in the body and imagination and require patience, wise counsel, perhaps professional care. But anxiety also raises a spiritual question: Who ’ s going to carry this? And beneath much of our worry, the answer is often: I am. Peter gives another answer. Give it to God. Even that can be misunderstood. We may picture God as someone stronger standing nearby, willing to take a load we can’t manage. There’s truth in that image, but Christianity makes a deeper claim. God isn’t anoth...

There’s a mercy in discovering some battles can be escaped. Close the door. Put down the phone. Stop answering texts. Let the voices go on without you for a while . . . The world, surprisingly, survives. Abba Antony knew what solitude does. It takes weapons out of other people’s hands. No accusation reaches you unless memory carries it in. No praise can intoxicate you unless you pour it yourself. There’s no face across the table to irritate you, no careless sentence to correct, no beautiful thing to possess with your eyes. Hearing grows quiet. Speaking stops. Seeing has less to feed upon. Three wars end. And then the fourth begins. This is the unpleasant gift of silence: eventually there’s no one left to blame for the noise. We imagine solitude will give us peace because we imagine other people are the principal authors of our unrest. If the office were quieter. If the children needed less. If the news weren’t so maddening. If that person would stop saying that thing. If someone final...

You know that hour at the end of the day when nothing has quite exploded, and yet something in you is already on its knees? The dishes are still in the sink, filmed with grease. The email lies unanswered like a small accusation. Your body is tired with a fatigue no pillow can absolve. The phone keeps shining in the dark, that little chapel of demands where no mercy is ever offered. Someone you love needs more from you than you think remains. And under it all, deeper than irritation, quieter than despair, there’s the ache. Not catastrophe. Not the grand collapse one could almost respect. Something poorer, more humiliating. A low humming in the soul, like pain behind a closed door. Saint Paul gives it a name: “We ourselves… groan inwardly” (Romans 8:23). Not creation only. Not the world out there, bleeding through its wars, its sickness, its rot, its injustices, its children frightened by adult madness. We ourselves. We who have tasted the Spirit. We who pray, or try to pray. We who be...

“ Blessed be the name of the LORD. ” That’s Job’s line. It’s the confession that God's still worthy when life is full, and when life is emptied. Most of us are fine saying God's good when the door opens. When the job comes through. When the scan is clear. When the relationship is healing. When the money stretches. When the future feels manageable. But what about when the door closes? What about delay? Disappointment? The email you didn’t want? The bill you didn’t expect? The body that won’t cooperate anymore? Can we still say, slowly and honestly, “Blessed be the name of the LORD”? Not because pain is good. It isn’t. But because God's still God. The deeper issue is this: we can’t love God only for what he gives. That isn’t steady faith yet. It’s understandable. It’s human. But it’s not yet surrender. We all confuse gifts with the Giver. We all do this. Something good comes into our life, and rightly so, we receive it with relief and gratitude. A friendship. A routine that ...

Most of us aren’t in a literal prison. But plenty of us know something of the feeling. A body that won’t cooperate. A job we can’t leave yet. A season of grief that narrows life down to the basics. A marriage under strain. A waiting room. A diagnosis. A failure. A closed door. Even a quiet kind of inner confinement — where your days are full, your phone is loud, and yet your soul feels like it’s been locked in a back room for years. That’s why Solzhenitsyn’s line lands with such force: “You should rejoice that you are in prison. Here you have time to think about your soul.” It sounds almost offensive at first. Rejoice? In confinement? In loss? In the place you never would’ve chosen? And yet beneath the shock there’s a strange mercy. Because one of the tragedies of modern life is that we can avoid our soul for a very long time. We can stay in motion. Stay entertained. Stay productive. Stay outraged. Stay scrolling. We can fill every quiet space with noise, and call it life. But eventu...

You can tell a lot about a person by the first few minutes of their morning. A text. An email. A reminder. A headline. And just like that, your body's awake but your soul's already bracing. A low-grade tension that settles in before anything has even happened. A lot of us live there. And what’s strange is that many of us say we believe the gospel. We say we trust Jesus. We say we’ve been forgiven. But functionally, we still move through the day like it all depends on us. Paul says, “We have peace with God.” Not we might. Not we could if we perform well enough. We have it. That isn’t a passing feeling. It’s a new reality. In Christ, God has received us. The war is over on his side. The ache is that we often keep fighting on ours. Because you live from whatever you think will save you. That’s true for all of us. If you think achievement will save you, you’ll never really rest. If you think approval will save you, you’ll keep checking faces. If you think control will save you, y...

What’s happening to the soul in emerging adulthood? Not simply unbelief. Not simply rebellion. More often, drift. Drift isn’t a decision. It’s what happens when strong currents meet a boat with no anchor. And Souls in Transition describes exactly such a sea: delayed adulthood, postponed commitments, moral experimentation, digital distraction, and a culture that tells young people to keep every option open as long as possible. In that world, religion doesn’t usually die with a shout. It fades by neglect. Practice slumps, attention scatters, and conviction thins into mood. The problem isn’t always that God is denied; it’s that God becomes unnecessary. Faith isn’t refuted. It’s reduced. That reduction matters. A religion reduced to comfort can’t carry the weight of a real life. If faith becomes merely therapeutic—something to soothe, affirm, and occasionally assist—then it will be used the way we use an app: opened when convenient, ignored when costly, deleted when demanding. But religi...

What are we really afraid of—God not liking us, or people not noticing us? Let’s name the thing. Performance : doing a true act for a false end—attention. Worship : giving God what’s due—love. Grace : God’s gift to the undeserving. Authenticity : surrender that holds when no one’s watching. Now the first tell: how fast we start managing the light. We learn the angles. The right outrage. The right tenderness. The right vocabulary—“burden,” “calling,” “season.” The right photo: bread, Bible, sunrise. None of it has to be fake to become a show. It only has to be aimed . Performative Christianity is faith used as evidence—evidence that I’m safe, pure, needed, correct. It promises a self you can keep coherent. It delivers a self you must keep propped up . That’s not adoration. That’s brand upkeep. But the gospel doesn’t arrive as a flattering spotlight. It arrives as mercy with a question mark: “Who do you say that I am?” and beneath it: “Who are you when you can’t win?” If grace is God’s l...

They’ve taught us a new chastity, and it’s not holy. It’s the chastity of the sealed heart—clean, efficient, disinfected of need. They call it “boundaries,” “self-possession,” “not getting attached,” as if love were a stain you can scrub out with the right product and a little discipline. But you can smell the lie on it, sharp as alcohol on a wound: it isn’t purity, it’s fear pretending to be wisdom. A man’ll say he wants peace, and what he means is he wants nobody to reach him. A woman’ll say she’s protecting her heart, and what she’s protecting is her loneliness—the last possession the world can’t take because she’s already handed it to herself. We live like tenants in our own souls, moving quietly so nothing creaks, keeping the lamps low, pretending we don’t hear the footsteps upstairs. We’ve made a virtue of not being claimed. But love claims. Love always claims. Even the smallest love—the dumb, faithful love of a dog, the stubborn love of a child who falls asleep with their fist a...

Listen, my children. God didn’t give me a program. He gave me days—ordinary, poorly lit days like the ones you’re living now. He laid them out in front of me like a poor man’s supper: chipped cup, stale bread, a knife that’s cut more onions than feast meat. And He said nothing. No grand speech about “vocation,” no trumpet announcing my mission. Just the weight of the hours and this stubborn heart, knocking on God’s door like a drunk who can’t remember where he lives. You’ll hear people talk as if God hands out destinies the way officials hand out diplomas—neat, framed, with signatures at the bottom. Don’t believe it. A life’s mission isn’t printed on linen paper. It comes like a bucket from a hidden well. You don’t see where the rope is tied. You pull, and sometimes what you draw up is cold, metallic, tasting of rust and disappointment. You drink it anyway and bless His Name. That’s the first thing I want you to learn: bless Him, even when the water tastes wrong. You're meant to be...

Funny thing—I never really explained what this blog was about when I began. I just started writing. But looking back, it’s been clear all along: this has always been a letter to you. Not one long speech, but a series of notes, thoughts, and stories—written quietly, but always with you in mind. Every post, every line, has been my way of saying something fathers don’t always put into words: I love you more than you know. And even more than that—I love the God who made that kind of love possible. These musings aren’t just mine. They're yours, too. So here’s what I should’ve said on day one: This is for you, my children. I’m not writing perfect essays here. I’m leaving breadcrumbs—snapshots of life, lessons I’m learning, prayers I’m still praying. Under it all, there's one steady message: you are loved—deeply, fiercely, always. And that love has a source. My love for the One God who loves you better than I can even imagine. It’s His love that teaches me how to love you, however po...