I bought a new truck last week. For the last thirteen years, I’ve driven a Honda Accord. Tiffani’s dad bought her that car before we got married. Not long after, we purchased a more family-friendly vehicle, and just like that, the Honda Accord became my primary mode of transport. 

It was a great car for a long time. I loved that car. In its final days, though, the thing began to fall apart. The writing was on the wall, and had been for some time, but I refused to let go. I didn’t want a new car. The raggedy old metal box was part of my identity. It fit me, you know? Not flashy, but gets the job done. Doesn’t pass the eye test, but reliable. Flies under the radar, but always gets from point A to point B. 

The tide turned, however, when Tiffani was forced to use the Accord for a work trip to south Alabama. When you drive a raggedy vehicle everyday, you don’t consider its legion of problems. You know they exist. You know the air conditioner says, “Nah, I’m good” when temps rise above 85. You know the tires are dry-rotted and the headliner has detached from the ceiling and the car pulls hard to the left. But those things exist in your sub-conscious. You have an unspoken bond with your “little engine that could.” You just assume you will always get where you’re going. 

But when someone you love assumes the wheel, it’s like a spotlight shines bright on every single problem. You see problems you didn’t know existed before. My mind rehearsed all the ways Tiffani’s commute could go bad. It was a dark, stressful day for me. I prayed a lot and paced a lot, and by the grace of God, she returned safely. 

That night, we both decided it was time to say good-bye to Alfred (that’s right, my Accord has a name. Don’t you dare judge me.) 

Car buying has changed, guys. In a short time, too. We bought a swagger wagon three years, and I stayed at the dealership for the better part of a day. By the time I crossed the final t’s and dotted the final I’s, I despaired of life, and couldn’t care less if we bought the darn van or walked home on foot. 

I decided I wanted to buy my truck at 2:30 p.m. Tiffani rode up there to take a look. They got the paperwork together, I left work at 5:00. Arrived at 5:30. By 5:50, I left the lot, with a new vehicle. It shouldn’t be that easy. 

WHAT WE PAY ATTENTION TO MATTERS

When I left the lot, I was on a high. The first time I’ve updated my primary mode of transportation in a decade-plus. Immediately, my perspective changed. I never noticed the plethora of trucks burning tread on the roads. There are so many trucks. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? 

And I realized that what we pay attention to shapes our worldview. Our brains can’t process all the stimuli around us. It must choose what gets our attention, and what gets our attention shapes who we become. 

So, what gets your attention? What are you paying attention to? If you look for a world of fear and mistrust, you will find it. If you look for a world of love and peace, you will find it. You choose your reality, in other words. And you choose it by what you give your attention to. When you see people who live differently, who live with love and hope and joy – Do you know people like that? If you don’t, you should find some – it’s not an accident. God didn’t give these people something you don’t have. No, they’ve chosen to see a hopeful world. 

This seems too simple, doesn’t it? 

But here’s a hard and fast rule: spiritual growth will always be simple, but never easy. 

If someone tells you spiritual growth requires a master’s degree to understand, it’s probably not from God. Likewise, if someone sells you a simple three-step process that ensures overnight success, that’s probably not from God either. 

Spiritual growth is for everyone, except those who want a quick fix. 

So, yes, this stuff about awareness and paying attention to the right things is simple. But it’s not easy. Go ahead. Try it. You’ll see. 

For example, I have critical eye. One that borders on cynicism, especially when I’m unhealthy. This isn’t from God, and I know it. So, I try to practice seeing everything through a lens of optimism, and my goodness is it hard. It’s so hard. But every time I do it, I feel closer to God. 

So, this is a huge challenge. But an essential one. To pay attention. To focus on the things of God. 

COMPARISON INCREASES WITH UPWARD MOBILITY

I already talked about how I began to notice how many trucks filled the roads after I bought one. But here’s something else that happened, something I didn’t expect. 

Even though I had a nice, new truck, I began to compare my trucks to others. I became hyper-focused on all the things my truck didn’t have. I saw a GMC that had Denali slapped on the side and thought, that truck’s better than mine. Rather than enjoying what I had, I became trapped in what I didn’t. 

I never did this with my Accord. Not once. Why would I? Every vehicle was nicer than mine. But here lies the danger of chasing the Joneses. It breeds comparison. So much of the shame and anxiety and restlessness that plagues middle-to-upper class society comes from comparison. I’m convinced of it.

We get that new job, with the nice salary, so we go buy a house. And we love that starter home, because it’s our first abode. But we’re not content, are we? So, we purchase another home, a bigger one. And now the game has begun. 

Purchase a home. Notice the Smith’s nicer residence, with its multiple floors and two-car garage. Become discontent with our current home. Start looking for one with multiple floors and a two-car garage. But that new house costs more money, so we have to ask for a raise or find a job that makes more money. But with more money, comes more responsibility and less free time. You see the cycle? With every new and larger purchase, we decrease our margins, and as margins decreases, so does the voice of God.

And look, some of us don’t care about houses. Some people don’t care about cars. But comparison can manifest in a myriad of ways. Job titles. Clothes. 

Oh, and here’s one that’s rampant where I live and probably where you live too: kids. 

So many parents use their kids to feed their addiction to comparison. Our children become pawns for own game, and I know this because I do it. And because I see the parents on social media who only post when their kid wins an award at school or a baseball tournament or something like that. 

The caption goes on about how proud and blessed the parent is about Timmy’s award or trophy and proceeds to give all the reasons he deserves the award. 

And maybe these parents are blessed, but underneath it all I sense a need to prove to the world that they have great kids. These parents want everyone to know they did a great job – they need everyone to know – and they do this by turning their children into show ponies. They’re trapped in the same game, and maybe in a worse way, because rather than using stuff to feed their addiction, they use people. Their own flesh and blood. 

Because I struggle with the temptation to use my children to prove my worth to the world, I’ve made a conscious decision not to advertise their accolades. I’m not perfect, of course. For all have sinned and fallen short. Before I post something about my kids, however, I look hard in the mirror and ask if I’m doing this to validate myself or to uplift my child? Since my children don’t have social media and therefore don’t read what I write, the answer is almost always the former. 

Comparison is a dangerous game, one that has no end and no winners. Because even if you somehow succeed in having the nicest and largest and most immaculate house or car in all the land, you sit down on your leopard-skinned couch and realize you chased a mirage.

You spent so much time and energy running this race and now you have your prize, and it’s filled with poo. It smells, wreaks of shame and loneliness and so on. That’s what comparison does. Comparison retards growth of all kinds, especially spiritual growth. 

YOU CAN’T FOLLOW GOD AND UPWARD MOBILITY

I want to say this as clearly as I know how: you can’t chase upward mobility and follow God. 

The cost of upward mobility is the loss of freedom, the inability to take risks and follow God’s promptings. Most of us, myself included, don’t think God calls us to make radical decisions because we have two car payments and a house payment and we pay for private school and day care and private lessons for piano or guitar or baseball. 

Is it that God doesn’t call us to make radical decisions. Or – and hear me out – is it that God can’t call us to make radical decisions because we’re shackled to our upward mobility? We don’t have enough margin in our lives to hear from God. So, we settle for a watered-down version, a God who praises us for attending church and tithing and not cheating on our spouse. 

We read the stories in the Bible, the ones about Abraham abandoning his family and Noah building an ark and Moses rising up against Pharaoh, and we think “Wow, that’s unreal” and we never consider that God still wants to speak to us that way. But we don’t listen. We can’t. We’re enslaved to our standard of living. 

So, we settle. 

And the grace of God is that he remains present in our lives and continues blessing us, even though we neuter his presence. 

Over and over in the gospels, Jesus tells us that the poor and outcasts are better off than the rich and privileged. And now I know why. The poor have unfiltered access to the voice of God. They have nothing, so nothing can keep them from hearing God. 

I’m just as guilty as anyone. I’m enslaved to upward mobility. I have a nice home and two cars and kids who play multiple competitive sports. It’s hard, nay impossible, for me to discern the voice of God. And I don’t know what to do about it.

These are all things I pondered since buying a new vehicle. Welcome to the interior workings of my brain. Always wear a seat belt.

Sometimes I write things with a clear “this is the application” type endings. Most times I do that.

This isn’t one of those posts. I wish I didn’t feel the need to compare myself, to keep up with the Joneses, to live a marginless life. But I do. And I don’t know the answer. 

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe there is no answer. But instead an awareness and a willingness to wrestle. To live in the tension, to tug and pull on the dangers and beauties of our present circumstances. So, that’s where I’ll leave this. 

May you have the courage to see where comparison manifests itself, and take action. 

Grace and peace, friends. 

What you believe about God is the most important thing about you. More important than going to church, reading the Bible, or joining a small group. More important than what you do or don’t do.  You can commit to thirty days of prayer and fasting. Shoot, make it sixty or ninety. You can move overseas and spend two lifetimes helping the poor. But if you don’t purify your toxic and unhealthy thoughts about God, you will never change. 

A.W. Tozer said it this way: “Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question, ‘What comes into your mind when you think about God?’ we might predict with certainty the spiritual future of that man.”

This is why so many people who claim to love God look nothing like God. This explains why, for decades, white Christians continued to support laws that dehumanized black people. This explains why pastors sexually and verbally abuse people. This explains why good Christians, people like me and you, remain angry, cynical, greedy, fearful. It’s not because we don’t know the Scriptures. It’s not because we don’t go to church or serve the poor or tithe weekly. It’s because we have a distorted image of God. 

You can’t become a loving and kind person if you have a toxic, unhealthy image of God. Spiritual growth, then, is not about what you do. It’s about Who you see. 

There are so many toxic, unhealthy images of God. Too many to name. But I want to address a few that loom large in our world. Here are some distorted images of God that hinder us from spiritual growth.

1. A PUNITIVE GOD

This toxic image is the by-product of a wrathful God who had to kill Jesus on the cross. An angry, vengeful Father who killed his son so he wouldn’t have to kill us. When this God looks at us, he sees a dirty, sin-saturated human, and he prefers not to see that (I guess), so he hangs Jesus on a cross instead.

A punitive image of God creates punitive people. If God can kill his own son, I can kill as well. And maybe we don’t say it like that, but we don’t have to. Look at how flippantly we enter into war. Look at how many guns we own. Look at how we treat outsiders. 

Underneath the overt violence, though, is an unseen attitude of human carelessness. People with a punitive image of God struggle to care for people who don’t look like them. And you see this among so many Christians in America. They live with a seething anger, attacking any group who doesn’t think they do. Rage is their identity. They don’t care how their words and actions impact actual people. Where do you think this attitude comes from? You got it. From their image of God, the God of wrath, the God who fulfills his purpose through brutal violence. It worked for God, why wouldn’t it work for me, too?

It’s not working. Look around. Our world is disconnected, lonely, anxious, broken. Our punitive image of God isn’t healing the world. Christianity dominates the American landscape. But we’re not bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. 

So, maybe the answer isn’t more church services or Bible reading. Maybe we need to stop evangelizing people and start addressing our image of God. 

2. A DISTANT GOD

Where is God in my suffering? Why does an all-powerful being allow human atrocities? Why does he remain out there, perched on a mountain top, peering down on our plight, and do nothing? Why doesn’t God care? 

This image of God is so toxic because if God doesn’t care then why should you. Answer? You shouldn’t. And many people don’t. Apathy is a great disease in modern times. People don’t care about the things of God. People don’t care about much all, except how their football played last weekend. 

A distant God has a devastating effect on the human soul. It breeds indifference, which is the opposite of love. Indifference is the penultimate sin. Once you stop caring, you lose your humanity. Shoot, you lose your divinity, too, meaning you lose access to your Creator. You become a tin man, a hollow shell of skin and bones. Just look at Auschwitz if you want to see the end result of indifference. 

Is this who God is, though? When someone sees God as distant, what they really see is injustice. God is all-powerful. People are not, yet people inflict harm on others. God should step in and use his power to prevent human suffering. 

He doesn’t, though. Which means one of two things. Either God is apathetic and cruel, or we have a false image of God. The answer is the latter. 

The cross is God’s response to suffering. It’s not that he doesn’t care. The opposite, in fact. God cares so much, he’s willing to throw off the cloak of heaven and endure pain, so he might be able to walk with us through ours. 

The God we serve is not one who takes away pain, but one who dwells with us through it. God is not distant. He knows the depth of human pain. Where suffering exists, God is found. 

3. A DEMANDING GOD

Growing up, I heard this verse so many times I can’t count. “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” This was almost always used in the context of morality. You must work as hard as possible to sin less. This is the goal of the Christian life. 

And this stems from a hard, no-nonsense view of God. A God who isn’t satisfied with your current level of effort. He’s disgusted with it, in fact. You lie too much. You missed church twice in the past year. You were sick both times, but who cares. You weren’t there. You cursed three times yesterday. And so on.

You see the problem here, right? A demanding God breeds a life of shame. You can never measure up. You can never get it right. You carry this nagging feeling of brokenness, like you don’t have some divine willpower that the rest of the world has. You compare your morality to others. 

God doesn’t desire perfection. God desires intimacy. God desires wholeness. You can stop it with all the do-goodedness. You’re already loved and accepted. There’s nothing you can do to change that. Rest in God’s loving presence. Everything is okay. 

4. AN EXCLUSIVE GOD 

This image of God leads you to build walls and dehumanize anyone who doesn’t look like you. This is the God of win/lose. Believing the right things is most important. And if you don’t believe what I believe, you need evangelizing. You need me to show you the correct path. 

This is the God of Christian nationalism. The goal isn’t to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. The goal is to make Christian clones. The goal is to convert every human on earth to your worldview, which is often a worldview of patriarchy, power, racism, and – that’s right – violence. Christian nationalism is the anti-thesis of God. 

Walking with God has nothing to do with being right. It has to do with humility, with recognizing we’re limited. I can’t possibly have all the facts about God. What kind of God am I really serving if I do? 

5. A SUPERFICIAL GOD

This view of God dominates much of American Christianity. People who have this image of God allow external metrics to determine their righteousness. There’s no emphasis on the inner journey and self-care. It doesn’t matter if you’re an angry or bitter person if you read your Bible every day and tell other people about Jesus. 

We’ve seen the devastating consequences in our churches. Real people hurt and abused at the expense of church growth. Telling someone about Jesus is more important than becoming like Jesus. 

God is more concerned with who we become than what we do. You see this throughout the Bible, culminating in the life of Jesus. Let’s be honest, if Jesus’s goal was to evangelize the world, he failed miserably. His rhythm of rest and retreat would not go over well in most Christian communities today. We would label Jesus as unproductive, lazy, even irresponsible. 

It’s fair to ask, though. What has our obsession with busyness and productive cost us? Look around. Are we healthy right now? Conspiracy theories, anxiety, loneliness, disconnection run rampant. Megachurch pastors falling left and right, the by-product of a culture built on superficiality, not self-care. We’re busier than ever, mostly doing stuff that doesn’t matter, which leaves us empty and burnt-out. 

This doesn’t sound like a healthy image of God. 

_______

All these words flow from my own experience of a toxic God. For years, I wondered why I did all the “right” things but remained angry and cynical. Why didn’t I care for outsiders like Jesus? 

Then, I lost my health (and my almost my life) unexpectedly. I was bed-ridden with a mysterious illness. In the darkness of my pain, I was forced to look at my life. I discovered that I didn’t need to do more stuff. I needed to examine my own heart and mind. I needed to heal lifelong wounds, wounds I suffered from my father and a legalistic Christian upbringing, among others. As I addressed these, my image of God changed. 

This is how we become more like God. Not by doing spiritual things, but by purifying our thoughts about God. 

Grace and peace, friends.

This morrning I’m sitting outside a Starbucks not far from mi casa. It’s a beautiful summer’s morn. The sun is rising in front of me, the rays fighting their way through some a.m. clouds. 

I don’t see the sun rise often. It’s calming, centering. I should see the sun rise more often. As the fiery blob appears to ascend to the top of the sky, I think about how we used to believe the sun actually did ascend. For most of human history, we thought the earth was the center of the universe. Weird, right? And when Galileo tried to convince people otherwise, he was put on trial and forced to live the final years of his life on house arrest. Why would people cling with such vigor to something that isn’t true? 

I’m glad we don’t do that anymore. 

I’m being facetious, and you’ve probably gathered that. We do, in fact, cling to faulty and outdated ideas, even if they no longer serve us. 

I believe this is true of the cross. Our dominant view of the cross no longer serves us. More than that, it’s not healing the world. It’s not bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth. Look around. Look in the mirror. The penultimate moment in the history of Christianity, the death of God’s son on a tree. A moment so ridiculous, so radical. It should transform us. It should heal the world. But it hasn’t. 

Why? Could we have it wrong? Did Jesus really die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins?  Did Jesus really absorb the wrath of God? Is this who God really is? 

That’s what I was taught and probably what you were taught. It’s the dominant narrative of the cross, especially in American Christianity and has been for a long time. 

It’s time to change the narrative. 

JESUS DIDN’T DIE ON THE CROSS FOR OUR SINS

Jesus didn’t die on the cross to pay the penalty our sins, to balance the cosmic scales, to wipe the divine records clean. This view of the cross is hugely problematic, for a lot of reasons.  

First, it’s not in the Bible. That’s right. Sure, if your heart so desired, you could find verses that support your view. But the language of Jesus paying the price for our sins isn’t there. 

Second, and piggybacking on the first, this view of the cross is NOT – and I repeat, not – the historical view of the cross. For the first thousand or so years of Christianity, the death of Christ as payment for our sins was not the dominant view. Not until 1098, when St. Anselm penned the infamous “Why Did God Become Human?” did this idea begin to take hold. The payment for our sins view of the cross is not ancient Christianity. It’s not traditional Christianity. It’s less than a thousand years old.

Third, though, and most troubling, are the implications of this theory on our view of God. 

One of the most important questions you can ask is this: Who is God? I contend it’s the most important. Show me your image of God, I’ll show you your future. Your operating image of God shapes everything about you. Your thoughts, behaviors, everything.

You become what you behold.

 This is why what we think about the cross matters. The events at Golgotha lay the cornerstone for Christian faith, so what we think about the cross determines what we think about God.

OUR VIEW OF THE CROSS SHAPES WHAT WE THINK ABOUT GOD

So what does the Jesus-paid-the-price-for-our-sins view reveal about God? 

If Jesus had to die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins, then God is wrathful, angry, and quite frankly, petty. He’s a God who must kill his own son or else we’re going “down there,” to the eternal basement, where the door is locked and the key tossed away for all of eternity. That’s a long time. The penalty for sins view of the cross legitimizes violence. If God killed Jesus, then it’s okay for us to hurt or kill other people, especially if those people threaten us. And we have. Christians have killed people under the banner of progress or self-defense for centuries. Violence is more than okay. It’s godly. Virtuous. You’re protecting yourself. Your family. Your country. You become what you behold.

If this is your view of God – and it is for most Christians – fear will dominate your days. You will never draw near to a wrathful God. Does he even want you to draw near to him? I’m not sure. But even if he did, why would you? He killed his own son. That’s freaking scary, man. I don’t want to be near a God like that. Intimacy is impossible.

If this is your dominant view of God, you spend your life in a never-ending cycle of trying to prove yourself. When a price that great is paid for you, whether you realize it or not, you spend your days trying to pay it back. I was worth it, Jesus. See all the good things I’ve done. I’ve read my Bible…twice. I tithed last week. I haven’t lied today. You try to earn your salvation through your behavior. So your faith becomes more about what you do (or don’t do) than who you become. Have we not seen this in our churches, from sea to singing sea?

If this is your dominant view of God, you will always believe your identity is flawed. And most Christians do. I hear it all the time: I’m a wretched, sinner. I’m broken sinner. These are identity statements. And, as any good psychologist will tell you, if you believe your core is flawed, you will never change. You will ruminate in shame all of your days.

If this is your dominant view of God, you will elevate the death of Jesus over the life of Jesus. I mean, honestly, if the cross is where Jesus paid the penalty for our sin, does the rest of his life even matter? Who cares what happened before the cross? The cross is all that matters. You substitute worshiping Jesus for following him. 

To summarize, then, if the cross is where Jesus absorbed God’s eternal wrath, the dominant image of God is an angry, petty, punitive Presence who believes violence is necessary for healing, who’s distant and unconcerned about your daily life and who’s apathetic (at best) about allowing most of humanity to dwell in torment for all of eternity. 

It sounds bad to say it like that. I know. But if I’m honest, that’s the God I’ve served most of my life. I served God out of fear, not love. The God I described above is the God of the American church. We can change, though. We must change. Because, again, I sound like broken record, but you become what you behold.

GOING BACK TO THE CROSS

We need to return to the cross, again, for the first time. We need to sit with the scandal of it, the injustice of it, the travesty of it. We need to see it for what it is: the murder of an innocent man at the hands of an angry mob. We assume Jesus had to die, had to go to the cross. He didn’t, though. He chose the cross. God chose to allow humans to nail him to a plank of wood. This, first and foremost, should disorient us. It should shock us. Who is this God? This crucified God. Who is this man that would allow such a thing? I sure wouldn’t. No chance. But God did. Why? 

Let’s start here: the cross reveals the nature of God. The cross is the supreme act of love in the face of heinous evil. The cross doesn’t reveal what God does. It reveals who God is. The cross reveals the pattern of God’s love, the depth to which he’s willing to go to dwell with humanity. He’s willing, even, to submit to our patterns of violence and injustice. 

WHY JESUS DIED ON THE CROSS?

So, if Jesus didn’t die on the cross to pay the price for our sins, what is the point of the cross?

THE CROSS SHOWS US THAT DEATH IS THE ONLY PATH TO HEALING. 

Jesus did die on the cross to save us from our sins. I don’t think there’s any doubt that. Jesus didn’t die, though, to take away our sins. Jesus died to show us the only path to healing sin: death. You must die. You must let go. The cross shines a light on all the silly and futile we go about purging sin from our life. We modify our behaviors. We try scapegoating. Blaming. Victimizing. But the only way to save yourself from sin is to die. What’s dying, you see, is your false self, the part of you that needs to be separate, special, set apart. We don’t like that, though, so we throw our energy somewhere else.

As Richard Rohr says, “The crucifixion of Christ was a devastating prophecy that humans would sooner kill God than change themselves.” 

The only way to experience True Life, a deeper feeling of joy and peace and love, is to stop demanding everyone else change and start changing yourself. 

THE CROSS IS THE FINAL WORD ON THE GREAT SINS OF HUMANITY – PRIDE, VIOLENCE, WAR, PROGRESS. THEY WON’T WIN OVER LOVE. 

Jesus’s death exposes all the ancient sins of humanity – pride, violence, greed, war, exclusion, and so on. They won’t win over love. Love is more powerful. You can’t bring peace into the world through coercion or power. Leaders throughout history have come and gone. In their prime, many of these leaders built large kingdoms and threatened to take over the world. Now, they’re all six feet under, and their kingdoms lay in rubble. Love is stronger than any form of earthly power. You can’t kill it or destroy it. Love WILL overcome all evil in the end.

The cross is a searing indictment on our love of empire, how we put our trust and faith in its false claims of security. How we continue to take up arms, fight violence with violence, and place self-sufficiency over self-sacrifice. Christians claim we want to bring the kingdom of heaven to earth, but we’re not willing to go the way of the cross. We’re not willing to walk the path of non-violent love. We’re not willing to divorce ourselves from empire. We place more faith in political systems than in Christ.

The way of the Cross, which is the way of Love, can and will heal the world.

The question for us is this: will we echo the cries of the mob – Crucify Him! – or will we take up our cross and die ourselves? Will we play a part in the kingdom coming to earth or we will cling to our comfort?

THE CROSS DESTROYS THE FINAL WALL SEPARATING GOD AND HUMANITY

As you move through the pages of the Old Testament, you see the many plights of God’s people. Starting with Noah and the wickedness of the people. Then Moses comes along and God uses him to free the Israelites from slavery, but the Israelites grumble and complain. Then you have the period of the judges, culminating in the people wanting a king, like their neighbors, a divine gut punch to their ultimate King. On and on I could go, but it’s a different chapter in the same story: there’s a large gap between God and humanity. God tries everything to fill the gap, but nothing works. 

God’s not content with disconnect, though. God desires complete solidarity with humanity, with you and me, so he fully immerses himself in the human experience. The Son of God puts on a coat of flesh. He doesn’t exempt himself from any part of the human experience, not even death. The cross, then, shows the depth to which God is willing to descend to unite us to him.

The implications of this love are legion. This one truth alone should cause you to stop and weep, to fall on your knees and worship God. What kind of God would do such a thing?

___________

So, there you have it. The cross. The point here isn’t to agree with me or disagree with me. The point is to look honestly at the cross and ask whether our dominant view of Good Friday is transforming us, healing humanity, bringing the kingdom of God to earth. 

I can’t make that decision for you. But I’ve made it for myself. 

Grace and peace, friends.