🙌It's the Friday Call to Worship!🙌

I love to listen to people's stories and understand why they tell them the way they do. We all have a timeline, speckled with highs and lows. But it's the narrator, not the timeline, that tells the story.

I recently updated our family's website, and found surprising joy in adding 10 years of context since I wrote our story originally. If I'm honest, the timeline notches from the last decade have been dramatic - extreme highs and seemingly more extreme lows. It's not the events that make it a story, though. It's the decision we made upfront to be thankful, and then continuously re-deciding when the going got tough. Our story is sweet with thanksgiving, resounding in the goodness of God. I've told the same one before with a bitter taste in my mouth and felt like a victim.

More than once, I've wonderd, "Is this really worth it?" I've wondered and wrestled to the bottom of my own story's barrel more than once. Every time I get to the same place: If there's no sovereign God bigger than me... If there's nothing better than what this world has to offer... then what is there? I choose to belive in God and what He says. What is the alternative? It's not sexy faith. It's desperate. It's rootwork. And it builds faith that lasts.

When you find yourself in that same wrestling place, borrow from my experience and Rend Collective's lyrics in "Hallelujah Anyway".

"​​I'll find a way to praise You From the bottom of my broken heart,

'Cause I think I'd rather strike a match than curse the dark..

I'll find a way to thank You, though bitterness is real and hard

'Cause I'd rather take a chance on hope than fall apart..."

Listen to the rest of Rend Collective's “Hallelujah Anyway” below.