These sorts of things you’re told as a child really stick with you in ways that escape your own awareness. It’s the baked-in part of spirituality—the foundation below the surface on which the spiritual life is built.

Now, as an almost 40 year-old adult, I’ve come to the pleasant and enlivening realization that asking Jesus into one’s heart is only half the picture. The other half is now so obvious to me that I can’t believe I never thought about it before:

Becoming a Christian is just as much about Jesus inviting us into his heart as it is about us inviting him into ours.

This precious video really sums up the version of the gospel I was given as a child:

Name It, Claim It

Don’t misunderstand me: I think that teaching people that becoming a Christian is about inviting Jesus into one’s heart is a good thing. It comes from the revivalist roots of my Pentecostal tradition. Revivalism was always just as much about encouraging longtime Christians to make their faith real and personal as it was about converting non-Christians.

Revivalism is always concerned with the person that treats their Christianity like they might treat where they grew up or who their parents are—not as something that they chose, but as something that recedes into the background. It’s indeed true, but bears little relevance in day to day life.

Revivalism is to Christianity what patriotic movements are to the nation-state. Both are about owning one’s citizenship and letting it be the explicit reason for everything.

In other words, revivalism is always against nominal Christianity. Asking Jesus into your heart makes your faith your own, not something you default to by accident of culture and family and historical circumstance.

The Soap of Revival

The problem that has taken root in free church revivalist traditions like Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism is that it often reduces the Christian life to conversion itself. Sin, as God said to Cain, is always crouching at the door. And revivalism suggests that more often than not we open wide the door despite hearing sin’s growl. The lion pounces and gobbles us up.

The solution, then, is to re-convert. Or, as it was often put to me, one must “re-dedicate” as often as there is sin and failure.

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When I was an adolescent, retaining my salvation became to me like trying to hold onto a bar of soap on a summertime slip-and-slide. Or like trying to wrestle a greased-up pig. Both are possible. But for all except the lucky or adept few, it inevitably slips out of the grasp. Like the soap, I always felt the harder I tried to hold onto my salvation, the more easily it would slip out.

Not By Might

So, the challenge was to get Jesus to abide in me with all my might. Spend a lot of time in prayer. Put in the effort. Jesus himself said it in the imperative, and that meant that abiding was a matter of obedience to divine law (John 15:7).

But that’s only the first half of Jesus’s “law.” Jesus also promises that it’s a two way street. Even as we ask Jesus to abide in us, he's also inviting us to abide in him. Which really changes the tone of the whole thing to be less of a commandment and more of an invitation.

A gift.

The Sacred Heart

Nowhere does the Bible say that we should let Jesus “invite us into his heart.” Equally, neither does it say in Evangelical fashion that to become a Christian is to pray a “Jesus-come-into-my-heart” prayer. But both are still important.

Throughout Jesus’s ministry the human heart is repeatedly referenced.

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.

Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart.

So it’s obvious where the impulse to talk about the heart comes from. But what we miss all too easily is that Jesus had a heart. And he still does. He became incarnate, and so had a beating fleshy heart full of blood and passion. And he became incarnate precisely to show us the heart of God, the fount of divine love.

All of which is to say that we need to read all the stuff about our hearts as the two-way street Jesus promises that it is:

Jesus loves us with all of his heart (and mind and strength).

We’re Jesus’s treasure. And that’s where his heart is also.

Jesus speaks out of the abundance of his heart.

What he speaks is an invitation. Not a command, but a kind and welcome request:

Joseph Lear, come into my heart.

Hear him say it to you, too:

[insert your name here], Come into my heart.

👉Share this with someone who needs to know they’re the treasure in Jesus’s heart.

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This is a post about slow burn lament.

My wife is a nurse with a PhD, which means she’s really legit in the medical world. She loves her vocation, and feels about it the way I do about my calling as a pastor. God wanted her to be a nurse, and she knows that he takes great joy in watching her be one.

When you really love your vocation, you often entertain yourself with your discipline. I listen to theology podcasts; Holly listens to medical podcasts.

That’s why she suggested that we give The Pitt a shot—a show about life in an underfunded and understaffed emergency room in Pittsburgh.

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The episode begins with a mystery: everyone is wondering why the main character (played by Noah Wyle, the former star of NBC’s E.R.) is at work. Something had happened on that particular date—it apparently includes the death of a friend, and the doctor (at least in part) blames himself.

The episode ends with an abrupt and horrific reveal. It’s a flashback to the early days of COVID. Everyone’s in PPE with faces and mouths covered, sweating. The waiting room is overcrowded.

Panic.

These are the scenes Holly lived when she was the Director of Nursing at a nursing home through the pandemic. The first elderly man to get infected coughed right into her face before he tested positive, so Holly contracted it too. She laid in bed for ten days, telling me I might need to go get her an oxygen tank to survive.

The moment she could stand on her own two feet, she had to go back to work. The nursing home was understaffed, and they needed Holly’s leadership to keep up with state and federal guidelines on quarantine.

Because she already had COVID, she self-selected to work the COVID unit, which looked like a zombie apocalypse. The organization was in the middle of a building project, so the only place they had to quarantine the infected was on an unfinished hall that still had make-shift lighting, construction materials laying about, and the guts of the building exposed.

She watched 26 people die in two weeks. Through her face mask she sang old Christian hymns with what little breath she had in her own lungs to provide a modicum of comfort.

That’s why she cried at the end of the first episode of The Pitt (and why we never watched episode two).

I started crying when she did, because I lived it all with her.

Slow Burn Lament

I’m grateful that Evangelicals, Pentecostals, and free church traditions have come in recent years to talk more intentionally about the role of lament in the Christian life. I remember a local Evangelical church here in Iowa City hosting an outdoor event during COVID to lament and pray together about the horrific death of George Floyd. That was a good (and the right) thing to do.

The thing that I still grieve is that the practice of lament is often left to single events, rather than an ongoing, routine practice in the life of the church.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not asking for a wintry Christianity where all we do is moan about the state of the world. What I think we’re missing is recognizing that lament and joy often happen at the same time. Like when a baby is born the spitting image of his recently-deceased grandfather.

Still another piece that’s missing is recognizing that lament is more often than not a slow burn. It lurks, flavors things like a pinch of salt, and sneaks up on us in moments of profound happiness.

COVID is like that, and worse, for many more people than Holly. The political points pundits continue to score on their opponents about the legitimacy of the measures taken by authorities during the outbreak means that it’s dangerous to lament out loud, even in the supposed safety of friends and family.

Last I checked, most people are still confused if the federal and state governments made the right decisions for the public. And we, the people, still don’t know if we made all the right decisions to keep our loved ones safe.

But what Holly does know (and so many people like her) is that there were 26 precious and beloved people who died under her care, and that’s devastating. Survivor’s guilt (which is real) and the financial crisis that nursing homes continue to find themselves in compounds the grief by orders of magnitude, precisely because people like Holly are called by God.

We need to let ourselves and others lament without judgment. People can have made wrong decisions and have wrong opinions, but their grief is still real and worthy of compassion.

Let others lament like you would like them to let you lament.

A Prayer of Lament

I wrote this prayer early in the outbreak, which is a lament of its own. The prayer works even when there’s no global pandemic, so feel free to pray it in private and in church, and share it freely.

After that, maybe you can try your hand at writing a prayer of lament yourself.

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You need to know that before you read the rest of this.

Jesus was raised bodily. By that I mean: the tomb was empty. There was no pile of bones, no rotting flesh, no skin or sinews left behind.

We humans are embodied creatures, which is why Jesus didn’t leave his body in the grave. On Easter, Jesus met his disciples in person—which is to say— in his resurrected body.

Jesus still wants to meet us in person. And the way to do that is through our bodily senses.

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See, Hear, Touch, Smell, Taste.

See: See Jesus like the Apostles did. See him like the 500 brothers Paul tells us about saw him. And see him like Saul himself did on the road to Damascus. You might not recognize him at first, like Mary Magdalene in the garden or like the two on the road to Emmaus. Like Saul, you’ll likely be blinded at first. But just as Jesus did for all of them, he’ll make sure to open your eyes.

Hear: Mary Magdalene didn’t recognize Jesus until he said her name. So, hear Jesus say your name. Hear him ask you like he asked Peter, “Do you love me?” Your answer will be “yes.”

Touch: Jesus told Mary not to cling to him in the garden, probably because, upon recognizing him, she hugged his neck. She was never going to let go (would you?). Hug Jesus. Touch him with the crowds hoping for healing. Like Thomas, you don’t need to wash your hands before touching his wounds—he’s immune to infection. Quite the contrary, the residue of his body and blood will disinfect you of death.

Smell: I’m pretty sure Mary Magdalene breathed deeply when she embraced Jesus in the garden. Maybe she was hyperventilating (wouldn’t you?). Either way, she got a whiff. Jesus had been embalmed: 75 pounds of myrrh and aloes. So, meet Jesus olfactorily. He opens his arms from the Promised Land, which means he probably smells like milk and honey.

Taste: Jesus ate and drank with his disciples after he was raised, and they found that to be particularly remarkable. I imagine they thought of him every time they ate grilled fish, drank wine, or broke bread.

Taste Jesus now. Of course in the Supper, but also with the kisses of your mouth. Kiss the Son! Fall prostrate, kiss his resurrected feet. The blood of his wounds is dryly crusted, so it will flake into your mouth. Mmmhmm—the Lord is good.

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Your Spirit Baptized Body

Jesus is not far from you. You don’t need to ascend to heaven to bring him down, or go to the abyss to bring him up. He is in your mouth and in your heart.

The Holy Spirit makes Jesus present.

He (Jesus) baptizes your body in him (the Holy Spirit).

Which is why and how we can meet Jesus in person.

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Gross, I know.

I was 8 or 9 years old, and my parents didn’t know about it.

It happened in my hometown of Dedougou, Burkina Faso. A neighbor one block down from our backyard had decided it was time to empty his outhouse. I don’t know who was “volun-told” to do it (I can’t imagine anyone offering). It’s unlikely that there was a paid service. Anyway, it was hand-shoveled right into the dirt street.

When one squats over a hole-in-the-ground toilet, it’s not uncommon to lose pocket change. That’s what my friends and I dug for, and that's what we found. With sticks, shards of plastic we’d collected from the dump another block from my house, and our bare hands, we pulled one coin out after another. Some of the treasures were new, and others old. Circulating coinage was for morning onion-filled donuts and afternoon sessions of fussball and shingome (chewing gum) at the local boutique.

The old coins we found were mostly from the early days of French colonization. They were worthless for everything except my budding coin collection. I kept them in an old cardboard Bible box from the States. Not long after starting the hobby, I found out I could go to the colonial-era section of the marché in Bobo-Dioulasso, which we visited a few times a year, to acquire other strange monies. I collected coins from all over the world and from political regimes past. To this day, I mourn the loss of my precious collection. It got left behind when the Ivorian war broke out in 2002.

Scribes were the religious professionals of Jesus’s day who knew how to handle the Scriptures because they were tasked with safeguarding them. Careful copying of the Law and the Prophets led to them being experts in all of its delightful jots and tittles. Jesus said that Scribes prepared for the kingdom were the one’s who knew how to bring out treasures new and old.

I wonder if digging through feces for old and new treasures was the beginning of my vocation as a theologian.

I think that my outhouse archeology could be allegorized in a number of ways. Perhaps it shows the ways in which this crappy world has a lot of good left in it. Maybe it’s about how trauma can still have a silver lining. Or maybe it’s the tale of social media: one has to scroll with a bare thumb through the excrement of opinions to find something that’s valuable and so worth pocketing.

If any of those things resonate with you, have at it.

If, on the other hand, you find all that to be a load of crap, I won’t be offended.

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The point I want to make is this: To be a disciple of Jesus is to believe an old faith, one that many lived have before us. Its oldness is worthy of somber reverence.

But it’s also new. The Spirit of the Living God is always doing novel things, and we’re promised that he will make all things new on the Last Day.

As one reads the history of the church, one will inevitably find a lot of things that turn one’s nose up in disgust. And, similarly, anywhere there seems to be a new move of the Holy Spirit in our day, there’s almost always a putrid streak of malpractice. It’s off-putting, and one can despair that the church is worth it. Perhaps the church has sullied you against your will when you were most eager to be clean.

The prophets were not reticent to call God’s people repulsive in various ways:

Ezekiel was told to cook bread over human feces as a sign against Israel.

Hosea called God’s people a willful whore.

Jeremiah called the remnant in Jerusalem a basket of rotten (and smelly) figs.

Perhaps calling the church an inside-out latrine like the one of my childhood is something the prophets would resonate with. Maybe that resonates with you. I know it has with me.

Even still, I’m selling all I have to buy the outhouse, the pile of feces, and the entire property. Because I know there’s treasure old and new worth pocketing. I’ve found treasures untold in the lives and writings of Christians long gone, and I’ve seen the Spirit of God do something new in our day, crap notwithstanding.

I invite you to keep digging with me.

And in between—donuts, chewing gum, and a good game of fussball are always on me.

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I need to be careful because I don’t want anyone to doubt that God is love and God is good. But at the heart of the Christian faith is an impossible contradiction: How can a good God allow evil? The word we use for this is “theodicy.”

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The Bible never resolves the issue. And theologians have found it philosophically intractable. Some people forget that it’s not a uniquely Christian problem. I mean: Can anyone, theist or atheist, really explain how evil came to be? But the question is particularly concentrated for the Christian because we claim that God is indeed love and God is indeed good.

The Bible doesn’t shy away from the problem of evil even as it doesn’t resolve it.

The way the Scriptures deal with it is by facing God head on, raising a fist to his face, and saying, “Why?”

This quote is from a formerly Christian musician named David Bazan in his song, “When We Fell.” I quote him not to endorse blaming God for the Fall, but to wonder out loud if he realized that, though he’d lost his faith, he was still praying—and praying like a Psalmist.

In Psalm 102:10 the Psalmist accuses God of have having indignation and anger, and of picking him up and throwing him down. There’s apparently no sin that makes the Psalmist deserve this. Just bad fortune, the mockery of enemies, and the ill fortune of our collective wretched existence. But, by the Psalmist’s estimation, God is doing all of it because he’s not preventing it.

So the Psalmist raises his fist.

We don’t normally pray this way, but maybe we should.

Don’t let God off the hook.

The Bible doesn’t.

And God doesn’t let himself off the hook.

Christ on the cross is God raising a fist to God saying, “Why?”

His response is proof that he is love and he is good.

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For those of you who might not know, “deconstruction” is a word used by people who find the (generally American Evangelical) faith they were given insufficient, and it refers to a process of questioning everything. At least that’s as best as I’ve understood it. I once asked an Exvangelical influencer on Instagram what “deconstruction” meant. He told me it means different things to different people. Which isn’t really helpful. One cannot have a movement without a common understanding of the defining features of the movement.

Anyway, I accidentally hit a nerve on Facebook.

I didn’t know these terms had welcome currency to people with whom I’m Facebook “friends” and to whom the algorithm fed my cheeky post. I was told in the comments that I was insensitive and un-pastoral, and that I was rage baiting.

In my last Slow Burn Christianity post, I talked about how Christian anger at least in part fueled my own theological and ecclesiological journey. But that my anger at the Christian leaders who failed to bequeath to me a genuine faith motivated me to love God, the church, and the world more deeply.

What I’ll give to those who still cherish the word “deconstruction” is that we’ve all learned things in the church that we definitely need to unlearn. Tradition isn’t always deserving of a capital “T” in the theological sense. There are well-intentioned leaders who out of ignorance or neglect teach bad faith and practice. And there’ll always be wolves and Judases in the church who gnaw at the sheep of God’s fold and betray them to the work of the devil. Jesus condemned those people to have a millstone tied around their necks.

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One of the ways that I’ve learned to unlearn the bad stuff is by relearning the good stuff.

For example, with each passing year, my baptism has become something that I’ve cherished more deeply. And rightly so because baptism is the central initiation rite of the church. Until someone is baptized, we can’t say with any level of certainty that someone is a Christian in a New Testament sense. And for Paul baptism is central to his pastoral theology:

Should we go on sinning? No, because we’re baptized (Romans 6).

Should we be racist, classist sexists? No, because we’re baptized (Galatians 3).

Should we worship idols? No, because we’re baptized (1 Corinthians 10).

But even more importantly, baptism is what reminds us that we are children of God. The promise we have is that what happened for Jesus in his baptism is also what happens for us. God the Father said, “this is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased” as the Spirit came down on him in the form of a dove.

When we get baptized, God once again says, “this is my beloved daughter/son with whom I am well please,” the Spirit descends on us, and so we are united with Christ.

It’s a wonderful thought that should guard us from all the false teachings of the devil. In all three synoptic Gospels, it was immediately after Jesus was baptized and called the Son of God that the devil tempted him in the wilderness precisely to question whether Jesus indeed was the Son of God. Which is a warning to us that questioning our membership in the family of God is the devil’s number one priority.

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All of the false teaching we need to unlearn in the church might be boiled down to unlearning that which throws doubt on our baptized status. As I write that, I wonder if it’s an overstatement. I welcome your comments if you think it is.

But either way, I invite you to remember your baptism.

Remember that you are the Spirit-anointed child of the Father with and in and through Jesus.

Remember that it’s the proof of your future resurrection.

Remember it in every church service, and spit out anything that doesn’t align with it.

Remember your baptism.

And remember it again. And again. And again.

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The mission of this Substack remains what it was at the beginning, to revive your Christian walk one step at a time.

I chose the word “revive” on purpose because I really do think that the Christian life is one of constant revival. The grave is relentlessly pulling us downward to sin and death, but Jesus is even more relentlessly breathing his breath into our lungs afresh so we can wake up to-and-with-and-in his life-giving Spirit.

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The origins of this Substack are profoundly personal to me. I remember feeling angry when I started studying theology at the university level. Not rage, but zeal—the kind of anger that Paul recommends when he says we should be angry and not sin (Eph 4:26). I was angry because I felt like the churches I grew up in, and the people tasked with my discipleship, had failed me.

I’d had an odd mix of Pentecostal, charismatic, Baptist, and reformed evangelical catechesis. Most of what I’d learned was that Jesus was a threat to me and that the Christian life was more about avoiding Jesus’s ire than getting close to his love.

Part of the reason I became convinced in that first year that I was called to ordained ministry was because I just kept thinking to myself how I didn’t want anyone in the generation after me to miss out on the joyful profundities I was learning in class.

I remember the first time I translated John 1 from the original Greek—“In the beginning was the Word…”. I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. I had to stand up from my desk and move a bit because I felt so viscerally inspired.

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My father had told me about the first time he prayed in tongues being like a watery outpouring of heaven on his head. I wanted that experience. I’d prayed in the tongues of men and angels but it had never been that ecstatic. Yet, I felt something like what I imagine my father felt when I read the Greek version of John 1. My Christian walk was revived, like I’d breathed again for the first time.

Biblical Greek isn’t for everyone. But revival is.

As you walk your Christian walk, I pray Jesus meets you in your own unique and special way. He’s still making post-resurrection appearances to his disciples (that’s you!) even though, like the on road to Emmaus, we don’t always recognize him. And he’s always breathing his life-giving Spirit, the Spirit of Joy, into our mouths.

Receive him.

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That’s what a close friend told me when we were talking on the phone last week. I told him, “next time you have anxiety, just don’t.”

“That’s what I do,” I said—

“I just stuff it down, crush it, and it disappears.”

We had a long chuckle.

What makes it really funny is that it’s true—not that one can just stop having anxiety, but that some people actually say stuff like that and think it’ll be helpful.

We have a mental health crisis in the United States. I recently read Abigail Shrier’s recent book, Bad Therapy, in which she makes the compelling point that mental health resources have exploded in the West in the last two decades, and yet the mental health crisis has consistently and relentlessly kept ballooning. She asks why our solutions don’t seem to be working. Shrier is a somewhat controversial figure, and I don’t agree with everything in the book, but she definitely gives some food for thought. But neither she nor any mental health professionals are saying “just stop.”

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Jesus might be interpreted as having said, “just stop.” In Luke 10, he says quite directly, “do not be anxious.” He says a lot more than this in the passage, which is the first clue that he’s not pretending it’s that simple.

Equally, it’s also important to remember that Jesus’s words are different from our own in their potency. God spoke creation into existence, and the Word he spoke was Jesus, which is why we say all things were created through him (Col 1:15-20). So when Jesus says something it happens. Not necessarily so with us.

As a Pentecostal and Bible-believing Christian, I definitely believe that we humans can also make things happen with our words. But a miracle that takes place by our words will only happen when the words are said in the name of Jesus. And we can only speak in the name of Jesus if we are one with Jesus by the anointing of the Holy Spirit. When we say words that heal, Jesus is saying them with us and through us.

There was a moment when I was in high school that I felt like the sky was falling on me. By the grace of God, I’d had enough Christian discipleship and the example of my believing parents to know that when I felt that way I should pray. I asked God for help, and I remember hearing him—almost audibly—say “stop.” And I stopped. The anxiety dissipated, like the ropes that had tied me down were suddenly burst with the snip of extra-sharp scissors.

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Nevertheless, there’s been many more times in my life when I’ve felt the crushing force of anxiety and there doesn’t seem to be any halting command from my Lord.

Anxiety is an entirely natural and important emotion, necessary for human flourishing. Which is important to say, because sometimes the conversation around mental health seems to imply that anxiety is intrinsically bad. The real problem is runaway anxiety, the kind of anxiety that’s like an addiction, a disease, an abuser.

I don’t have answers for how to solve the mental health crisis, but I do think that Jesus offers even the most anxiously oppressed person a path to healing. He may dispel it with a command. Or he may offer a long term recipe that combines all sorts of resources, from exercise and diet, to friends and family, to therapy and SSRIs, and, of course, long relaxing prayer in his loving presence.

I think we will always want the simple command. We may resent him offering us a long-term recipe instead. But even that is a gracious gift and a manifestation of his love because Jesus isn’t so naive as to think that anxiety is our only problem. It might be most pressing thing to us (when is anxiety not?), but he’s not willing to let us escape one demon only to remain enslaved to several others.

If you have runaway anxiety, I really, really, really believe God has a word or a recipe for you—maybe both. For my part, one of the necessary ingredients has been learning the love of God all over again. My spiritual director, Dale Gish, wrote the prayer below. I invite you to pray it with me.

And remember: perfect love casts out anxiety.

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In this vid, I give some of my thoughts on recent political talking points—but only for the sake of trying to get us outside of the terms of the debate and to think Christianly.

Here’s the book with my article entitled, Doing Liturgy with Ruth: Immigration and the Threat of Anti-Eucharist:

• Click here to buy on Amazon

• Click here to buy on Bookshop.org

• Click here to buy from the publisher, Wipf & Stock

Don’t forget to share 🤲 🤗

And don’t forget to give me your thoughts in the comments ⬇️⬇️⬇️

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In West Africa where I grew up every pastor could sing because they had to sing. New church plants on the edge of the Sahara weren’t guaranteed to have resident musicians. And not singing was simply not an option, so the pastor was the lead singer one way or another.

I’ve now sung a lot in my pastorate and in my Christian walk, which confirms that I am now a stereotype. One Sunday every other singer who could lead songs in the service was either traveling or was ill. It fell to me to lead some songs a cappella. My voice was shaky and off pitch, but I just kept imagining I was on the edge of the Sahara desert in the presence of God.

I’ve sung the doxology with the bodies of recently deceased congregants. I've sung with kids at church more times than I can count. I’ve sung under my breath as I’ve prayed in my home office before dawn in the cold winters of Iowa. And I’ve sung “Jesus loves me” in hospital psych wards with people who really needed to hear it. Like with Paul and Silas in the Philippi, the other “prisoners”—so to speak—listened in.

Pastor Abby Anderson at Resurrection Assembly recently preached on Paul and Silas singing in the darkness of prison in Acts 16. She not only has a word I want you to listen to, but has lived that word. She shares how singing in the Spirit was what got her through her kidnapping as a little girl.

You might cry listening to it. You should sing at the end of it.

And next time the darkness gets you, sing! If you can’t, I’m praying God will send someone to sing for you.

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But I’m also really concerned that policing how we talk about things supplants a deeper radicalism about how we’re supposed to treat those who live in the United States without documentation. That, and quibbles about terminology often elicit disdain from those who have genuine and earnest concerns about immigration policies in the United States.

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about immigration and Christianity since well before Donald Trump came onto the political scene. So I’m not going to write anything lengthy here. I don’t want to offer an argument per se. Rather, I want to present some grounding biblical affirmations that can help ordinary Christians think christianly.

Below are six theses, each of which I unpack in a few sentences. I’ve said all of this stuff from the pulpit over and over, so some of you may already be familiar with these biblical commitments. My hope is that this will show how I think there’s a lot more at stake for the church than American jurisprudence and rightwing (or leftwing) politics. And definitely a lot more at stake than being politically correct.

1. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof (Ps 24:1). Every time we utter this Spirit-inspired phrase from King David we’re doing what the liberals call a “land acknowledgement.” The earth has been divided up and fought for by worldly powers. But it all actually belongs to God.

2. We’re all illegal on the Lord’s earth. Death is proof that we’re all (at best) temporary residents. Citizenship can only come through resurrection.

3. We’re all illegal in the Kingdom of God. We got kicked out of the garden of Eden. Legally, we’re not allowed back in. But Jesus lets us in anyway, and he can because the New Heavens and the New Earth are the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.

4. Illegal immigrants might be angels. Hebrews 13:2 warns Christians not to neglect showing hospitality to strangers because they might be angels. Kind of like when they showed up at Sodom in Genesis 19. And we all know what happened there (if you don’t, go read it with fear and trembling).

5. All angels are illegal immigrants. This is an elaboration of the previous point, but is worth stating on its own. Angels are God’s heavenly messengers who have no regard for the bureaucracies of human governments. So if you meet one, you can be sure they don’t have the government’s permission to be here.

6. The church is God’s kingdom embassy. Which is to say that everyone is illegal in the church—regardless of national origin or location of the particular congregation—because of sin and death. And everyone is legal because they’re there by the death and resurrection of Jesus and participation in his body and blood. An angel stands at the entrance of every church, letting in the illegals to make them legal, and letting in the legals to make them illegal.

None of this solves the intractable problems of immigration in the United States. But it does begin to give all of us Christians the kingdom imagination we need to love our neighbors as ourselves.

But most importantly, the process of Christian discipleship might be summed up as seeing the world differently. We are all blind Bartimaeus crying out to our king to open our eyes to his reality. We’re all Paul waiting for the scales to fall. We’re all John of Patmos seeing horses and bowls and beasts that no one else can. Reality is not what our government or political philosophies tell us it is.

We can unlearn reality as it’s been presented to us, and see the world and all of its residents as God does: his.

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve been working with a spiritual director named Dale Gish to pray the Ignatian Exercises and practice Ignatian spirituality. I plan on writing more on my experience doing all of that another day. But suffice it to say that so much of what’s in this short podcast resonates deeply with what I’ve been learning about prayer through spiritual direction.

I’ve linked it below, so you should give it a listen. But here are three things that Bondi says that really resonated with my own journey:

1. There’s no right way to pray.

2. Prayer is about just showing up.

3. We all need to unlearn who we think God is.

There’s obviously a lot of nuance to those bald statements, so don’t just take them and run with them.

Hear what Bondi says.

Then let the Spirit of God, Who is the very Love of God, carry you into prayer.

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Mixed in with all of this was evidence of old-time African religion. I’d sometimes see men walking the streets in the nude, covered in dirt, and out of their minds. It was well understood that these men weren’t victims of an all but non-existent mental health system. Nor had they lost their faculties from drug abuse. These men were demonized, and seeing them struck fear into my little heart.

The basic building blocks of newbie Christian discipleship have traditionally fallen into three basic categories: beliefs, prayer, and morality. The Apostles’ and Nicene creeds are the foundation of belief (and, for the record, are astoundingly helpful summaries of the Bible). Prayer is taught through the Our Father. And morality through the Ten Commandments.

One of the things the nascent Christian will soon realize is that to follow Jesus is inevitably to face the oppression of the devil. The Ten Commandments warn that we are not to worship other gods. The Ten assume there are other gods, and we identify those other gods as the devil and his legion of demons. The Lord’s Prayer invites us to ask that God would deliver us from evil. And the creed confesses that Christ, who is Light from Light, defeated the darkness of death by his resurrection. All of these elements point to the cosmic battle between Jesus and the Beast.

New Christians will also learn that the oppression of the devil will be experienced on a personal level. Paul wanted the earliest Christians to understand this, which is why he counsels them to take up the armor of God, narrating one piece of armor at a time that he promises will enable Christians to stand against the devil’s schemes (Ephesians 6).

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A little over a week ago, I preached on Luke’s account of the Gerasene demoniac (Luke 8:26-39). Like the men I saw Bobo-Dioulasso, his demons had driven him to nakedness. The story tells us that the demonized man runs at Jesus screaming, but is submissive. He knows who Jesus is (v. 28). We’re also told that so incredible was his supernatural strength that the man could break through chains the community used to try to bind him. And all of this takes place on the edge of a grave yard which the man called home.

What a terrifying encounter. But—it is worth noting—he was more terrified of Jesus than anyone was of him. The demons inside of him beg Jesus not to cast them into the abyss (v. 31).

What the devil does is objectively scary. A naked man running at you from a grave yard is the stuff of modern zombie horror flicks. In the western world, we don’t see this kind of stuff as a matter of routine like I did in my childhood. Our secularized society has medicalized away demon possession and demonic oppression—no matter how little modern medicine can explain what’s happening.

The work of demons has receded into the invisible. But, as many modern philosophers have pointed out, invisible power is often more effective than visible power. We know this intuitively as we reckon with our burgeoning age of Artificial Intelligence. We can’t see it like we might be able to see the gestapo patrolling the streets, which is in part what makes it so scary.

The devil’s invisible work requires discernment. And the story of the graveyard demoniac suggests that fear is one of the best ways to sniff out the work of the enemy. Whenever we feel terror, there is the devil. He’s objectively scary. But like we teach our children about snakes, Satan is more afraid of Jesus than we are of him.

Perhaps we need to lean into Satan’s own fear, making a doxological ruckus to send him slithering back to the abyss from which he came.

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Very early one Sunday morning we were woken up by a ruckus in the stairwell outside our front door. I opened the door to see a woman standing one flight higher than me. She’d clearly been partying. I said, “it’s really early, could you all keep it down? We’re trying to sleep.” Without skipping a beat, she responded, “you better run; he’s coming for you.”

Just as I was processing the oddity of her response I saw a monster of a man barreling down the stairs at me. I jumped back into our apartment, but before I could latch the door, he’d thrown his body against it. With every drop of adrenaline I had, I pushed back. To and fro we swung the door as we gained and loss ground to each other in the push-o-war. He finally gave up (he was drunk) and we called the police.

I didn’t know how we were going to interact with our neighbors after that. It was an intolerable situation.

Jesus commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves. But how does you love a neighbor that wants to assault you?

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I’ve often seen churches use “love God, love people” as a slogan. To say that we’re to “love people” seems like a reasonable gloss of “love your neighbor.” All neighbors are people. And, as Christians with a missionary impulse, we generally think all people are neighbors—even the ones that live half way across the world.

But it’s important to remember that Jesus said “neighbor” not “people.” I think if we’re honest with ourselves, it’s easy to say we love “people”—the masses of the global population that we know, objectively, God also loves. However, it’s a different matter to love the drunk and violent neighbor making noise early in the morning while you’re trying to sleep. Humanity is so lovable, but individual humans are emphatically intolerable.

Jesus knew all of this, which is why I think he insisted on the word “neighbor.” He won’t let us off the hook when we have a toxic neighbor. We can’t be indifferent (however annoyed) with the loud music-playing party animal who smokes cigarettes right outside our bedroom window. We’re called to figure out what it means to love our actual neighbor. It’s not easy, but that’s the ask Jesus makes of us.

There’s no way of downplaying the enormity of this calling. But seen from a different angle, I think Jesus’s command is also freeing. When we reduce all of humanity to our collective neighbor, we can easily (and reasonably) get overwhelmed by the task of love. How are we supposed to meaningfully love people in a middle eastern or Congolese war zone? There might be a few things we can do. But the distance we endure from those crises can cripple us with anxiety.

Jesus invites us to abandon anxiety for all of humanity and take up intentional love for the person who lives right next door to us.

That’s actually the easier yoke.

Unrelatedly:

If you haven’t already, get a copy of my Resurrecting Worship: A Pentecostal Liturgy for Slow Burn Revival.

Here’s what Dr. Mike Rakes, President of Evangel University says about it:

“Joseph’s commitment to scholarship and Pentecostal worship redefined is clear in his writing. Drawing from his work in Iowa, he masterfully weaves in the experiences there and offers considerations for the broader church. In our tradition, there is a broad spectrum of expressions, and he unpacks thoughtful insights that are sincere and reveal his dedication to leading an authentic Spirit-filled community at the grass roots. His treatment of Pentecostal worship is both insightful and gracious. By emphasizing the centrality of Scripture, the significance of prophetic preaching, and the role of communal worship, he offers a perspective on worship that will deepen the readers knowledge of ecclesiology—all intended to strengthen the local church.”

Buy it at your preferred online bookstore.

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The Christian life is like keeping a good beat. Sometimes it takes effort, but it always feels more natural to find rhythm and keep it. Like walking itself is a beat, and when our steps aren’t evenly paced, we can find ourselves ever-so-slightly irritated until we put the effort in to get one foot landing in the cadence with the other.

As a kid in Burkina Faso, I remember watching women pound grain in a giant wooden bowl. They had tree trunks fashioned into giant pestles. Sometimes I’d see a lone woman pounding out the raw material of that day’s meal. More often it was two or three women, each with their own pestles pounding grain in the same over-sized mortar. In perfect harmony, they’d hit the grain just as the previous woman’s tree trunk would rise skyward for its next turn. It always turned into a beat, and sometimes the women would release the pestles from their hands on the upward swing to perform a few syncopated claps as their implement hung suspended mid-air.

This video demonstrates what I’m talking about. Note that the two women on the right land their pestles on what percussionists call a “flam.”

Giving the hum-drum chores of the day a beat is what gives life an intrinsic joy, and it’s no different in the Christian walk.

Paul tells the Galatian church that they need to “walk by the Spirit” (Gal 5:16). We should understand the preposition “by” to mean that the Spirit is the One who enables us to walk in a Christian fashion. As Paul says in v. 25, we “live by the Spirit,” which is to say the Spirit is the One who gives us resurrected life. So to walk by him is to walk because he’s the only reason we can.

But Paul also tells us that to walk “by” the Spirit is to walk in proximity to him. Like the Israelites being led by the pillar of cloud and fire in the wilderness, we should be “led by the Spirit” (Gal 5:18).

I remember being led by my father’s steps when I was just a little boy. He didn’t always know it, but I'd try to make my right foot land just as his right foot did, and the same with the left. If I could catch up beside him and stretch my legs as far as they could reach, I could step in such way that, looking at us from the side, our legs created a doubly-aligned underpass. A delight, like this:

To walk by the Spirit is to keep the Spirit’s beat. In Gal 5:25, Paul restates the task of walking by the Spirit as keeping “in step” with the Spirit, which I imagined like synchronized walking.

So, keep the beat of the Spirit. It begins with synchronous walking. You might then try skip-skip-skipping-to-your-lou with him. Run, dance, jump. Stop—always on beat.

Then add the rhythm of the Spirit to all of life, like prepping dinner. You might gather two or three in Jesus’s name to prepare good works together, adding your own syncopated claps to the beat the Spirit gives. Just so, life by the Spirit is the life of intrinsic joy.

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The last thing I want to do is trivialize your suffering. If you’ve never felt the frustration of someone telling you that things really aren’t so bad when you’re in the pit of despair, there’s a good chance that you’re the person doing the frustrating.

Imagine telling Jesus, “Sure, crucifixion is bad, but know ahead of time that none of your bones will be broken.” I doubt that would have stemmed the flow of blood from his sweat pores.

Yet, John makes huge significance of Jesus’s bones remaining intact despite the brutality of his lynching. It’s in part because Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. John the Baptist had said it at the beginning of the story (Jn 1:29), and the passage John references about Jesus’s bones is from the instructions for the Passover in Exodus 12—the slaughtered lamb’s bones were to remain in tact.

However, I think there’s more to it than just the Passover connection.

As I meditated on this passage, it struck me that I have this small thing in common with my Lord. I’ve fallen from trees and walls, crashed my bicycle, and tumbled from a galloping donkey. I’ve had bricks and stones flung at me, guns fired on the building I’m hiding in, and late spring Atlantic surges hurl me onto the rocky beach. Soccer, basketball, volleyball, and innumerable other team sports haven’t done it either—and all of this just in my childhood. Through it all, not a single bone has been broken. It’s a good reminder that I’m still alive, still breathing, still held in the love of Christ no matter what I’ve been through, and no matter what I will go through.

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My suffering is trivial compared to Jesus’s, but that I’ve had all my bones always in tact in common with him strikes me as a spiritual lesson. And here it is: while we should never trivialize another’s suffering, we should strive to help one another see the foreshadowing of our glorification.

Jesus’s unbroken bones don’t just recall the Passover, they anticipate his resurrection. The trivial wholeness of his bones foreshadowed the profound glory of his risen body.

I’m not saying that if you’ve broken a bone your coming glory is more difficult to discern, nor am I saying that you have less in common with Jesus. But what I am saying is that it’s possible to find evidences of the coming glory Jesus has for you. He has it for you because it’s his glory that he will share with you.

You might say with the starving Jesus, “I can count all my bones” (Ps 22:17)—yes!

So count them in your starvation.

Count each one that isn’t broken,

and say, “not one is broken.”

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I knew James 1:5, which counsels anyone who lacks wisdom to ask for it. The scripture promises that anyone who asks will receive wisdom liberally and without reproach. So I started asking.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a few people who think not much has changed since my table waiting days. Maybe they’re right. Though, to be fair, Paul says that the message of the cross is itself foolishness to those who are perishing, which might mean there are people who think I’m a fool just for being a Christian.

I still wonder to myself, “am I a fool?” The funny thing about wisdom is that you never know when you have it. Really, you only know you had it, retrospectively. But even when you did have it, there’ll inevitably have been people who were calling you a fool when you were being wise. So to this day, wisdom seems ever elusive, out of my grasp, and when it’s in my grasp, I don’t know it.

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I’ve recently been revisiting the book of Proverbs in my prayers, which seems to have been written under the assumption that one can never know one has wisdom, except perhaps in hindsight. Proverbs 4, for example, doesn’t set out any particular advice on how to behave in real-life situations. It instead just says over and over in diverse and compelling ways that one ought to pursue wisdom. The underlying conviction seems to be that the only way to be wise is to always seek wisdom, which means to always count oneself a fool.

To be wise, then, is to make wisdom the object of one’s affections. Proverbs personifies wisdom as a woman worthy of desire (Prov 3:15). Like a boy crushing on a girl way out of his league, the pursuit of wisdom is a romantic affair—a cute one because the poor guy is doomed to strike out. She’s out of his league because, as Proverbs 3:18 says, she’s a tree of life, and we all know the way into Eden is blocked by an angel with a flaming sword. Still yet, Proverbs 3:19 identifies wisdom as the one through whom the earth was founded, which means she’s out the boy’s league if for no other reason because she’s too old for him.

In the Gospel of John, we find out that this woman who—however out of reach—is worthy of romantic pursuit is actually the man Jesus. John says, “all things were made through him” (1:3), just like Proverbs says about wisdom. And, like wisdom, Jesus is the tree of life whose body and blood are the fruit we now hold in our hands, and the Word that is in our mouths (Romans 10:8).

I think that this is ultimately why the many exhortations to find wisdom in the Scriptures are so often bereft of concrete advice—because to be wise is to be in love with Jesus. Perhaps this is what “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” is ultimately getting at (Prov 1:7).

The truth is that Wisdom, by his very nature, is out of our reach. As Paul says, we can’t ascend to heaven to bring Christ down, nor can we descend into the abyss to bring Christ up from the dead. But, he comes down to us, and ascends from the grave for our sakes (Romans 10:7-8).

Maybe that eager little boy I was in college was a fool. But he was a fool seeking wisdom who’d already been found by Wisdom. Which is never a bad place to be.

All that is to say: the only way to have wisdom is for Wisdom to have us. Let him take you out, wine and dine you—you’ll never be a fool for saying “yes.”

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Unrelatedly,

I have a new book out. Here’s what Kevin Hargaden, the director of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice in Dublin, Ireland has to say about it:

Resurrecting Worship tells a story we need to hear—how congregations are revitalized in today’s culture. My approach to leadership in my own local church has been indelibly impacted by Joseph Lear’s reflections. Grounded in the Pentecostal tradition but applicable across Christian denominations, this book offers more than a roadmap for numerical renewal; it invites Christians into a deeper, theologically rich practice of worship. By returning to the essentials of Trinitarian, Eucharistic, and Spirit-led liturgy, the author demonstrates how authentic worship not only sustains faith communities but breathes new life into the mission of the church. This is a profound testimony of how faithful, intentional worship can reawaken the church’s call to justice, compassion, and discipleship, while pointing the way toward a kingdom-oriented future. Church leaders seeking both spiritual depth and practical guidance will find in these pages hope for a slow burning, yet powerful revival.

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The immediate context of Paul’s words isn’t about buying and selling humans for hard labor, but for sex. He reminds them that those who have sex with prostitutes become one flesh with her. We might be tempted to read the church as the sexually immoral man who is hiring the prostitute, and that this is what Paul is critical of. But Paul identifies the church not as the one who is buying, but as the one who is bought.

Paul never outright says it, but his words suggest that Jesus came to the brothel, found his church there, and bought her with a price. He then calls her body “the temple of the Holy Spirit,” and asks her to glorify God with it (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). He set her free.

God had called his bride a prostitute before Paul said what he said to the New Testament church. 1 Corinthians 6 reminds me of the prophet Hosea, who God tells to marry a whore (Hosea 1:2). This is a prophetic act that models for Israel what God has done for her. No matter how many times she cheats on her Lord, he always takes her back.

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As I have understood the nature of prostitution in our contemporary world and historically, the truth is that most women don’t choose to become prostitutes. Some probably do, but most don’t. We might be tempted to hear the story of Hosea and the words of Paul as misogynistic—that is, as deprecating of women and ignorant of the social forces that coerce women into the industry. But I think that misses the point. Paul is calling prostitution exactly what it is—slavery. And if it is slavery, how much worse it must be when there are people who actually choose it.

It’s right to criticize the church for her moral failures. Paul does in 1 Corinthians 6. And, by extension, it is right to criticize our fellow Christians even as we do ourselves. But as often as we do criticize the profound and proliferating failures of the holy worldwide church, let’s remember that we’re criticizing a prostitute. Again, that’s not necessarily wrong to do, but let’s not be misogynists about it. And let’s remember that it’s Jesus who says, “this is my beloved with whom I’m well pleased” about a venereal-diseased, enslaved whore whose body can and will glorify God.

Finally, meditate on the grace of God. There’s no caste system, money-making market, enslaver, or pimp that can make us unworthy of the love of God. I find that to be good news.

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Unrelatedly,

If you’re looking for a book to help you out during Lent, I heartily recommend this accessible resource from Plough:

It’s a collection of thoughtful devotionals written by, amongst others, Augustine, Bonhoeffer, and C.S Lewis. Click here to see more.

The first thing you need to know about wrestling with God is that you can’t predict when the match will start. In Genesis 32, Jacob was preparing for an encounter with Esau, the brother from whom he’d stolen the family birthright. Jacob crosses the river Jabbok and—without explanation—we’re told Jacob sent his family on ahead while he stayed behind. Alone in the dark, God sneaks up on him. How terrifying! Imagine nothing but the light of the moon. Jacob’s tired. It’s bedtime. That’s when the ding-ding-ding of the meet begins.

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The second thing you need to know is that you won’t realize it’s God you’re wrestling. At first Genesis only identifies Jacob’s opponent as a “man” (32:24). When I’ve preached this passage at my church, I’ve suggested that maybe Jacob thought it was Esau. Perhaps his brother had tracked him through the darkness ready to pounce with vengeance just when Jacob was finally alone. Either way, it’s the stuff of horror. Again, imagine fighting in the dark by a river. One wrong step and you’re waist deep. One wrong move and your head’s underwater.

Thirdly, God will cheat. For Jacob’s part, he got what he deserved. He’d been a cheater his whole life, beginning with cheating his brother out of a birthright for a bowl of red lentils (Genesis 25:29-34). To use Jesus’s words, the measure with which he measured was measured against him (Matthew 7:2). God always shows us a mirror when we square up with him.

The way God cheated was by disabling Jacob, which is the fourth thing you need to know about wrestling with God. He tapped Jacob’s hip socket—I imagine giving him a hairline fracture. So you should be warned: your body will not emerge unscathed, and maybe permanently so. Jacob limped away from the river bank ring, and in remembrance of that particular fight night, future generations of Israel never ate the hip-sinew (Genesis 32:31-32).

Those are at least some of the things you need to know if you’re going to wrestle God. If you persevere, there’s two things you’ll gain after the meet.

First, God will bless you. Which, given the defeat of a permanent disability, is a real win. Jacob told God that he wouldn’t let him go until he blessed him, which once again recalls Jacob’s past. He’d deceitfully maneuvered his way into a securing a blessing from his father Isaac after he cheated his brother out of his birthright. He went as far to put goat skin on his arms so his blind father would think it was the hairy Esau he was blessing (Genesis 27). I find it compelling that God uses Jacob’s worst impulse—his desire to secure undeserved blessing—and uses it for good. You might be surprised at the ways God uses your own worst impulses to give you what he’s desperate to give to you.

Second, you’ll get a new name. Jacob’s name was changed to “Israel” (Genesis 32:28). So a nation was born. The prophet Isaiah says this is the destiny of all God’s people. Riffing on the riverside wrestling match, he says,

But now says the Lord,

He who created you, O Jacob,

He who formed you, O Israel,

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;

I have called you by name, you are mine.”

Isaiah 43:1 (ESV)

John of Patmos tells us that in the life of the world to come, the new name we will receive will come on white stone (Revelation 2:17). Probably taken from the bank of the river.

So you’ve been warned and promised from the Scriptures about what happens when you wrestle with God. But here’s the big question: should you fight in the first place? Or is it better to run?

The thing that I’ve left unsaid so far is that it seems to me that Jacob wins. He doesn’t die, as one might expect from getting attacked by a stranger in the darkness. On the contrary, he’s blessed as he goes on his way. What it means that humanity can beat God in a wrestling match is beyond me. But I think it’s worth pondering.

There’s also something of Christ to reflect on here. I’m prone two believe two things about this story: 1) that Jacob, being the father of the father of Jesus, is himself an image of Christ, and 2) that the figure who wrestles Jacob is the pre-incarnate Christ.

If we see Jacob’s wrestling as a foreshadowing of Christ, we might wonder: was Jesus humanity wrestling God? Or was he God wrestling humanity? Those of us who know Jesus know he’s both true God and true man, so there’s no either-or about it. But the fact of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection suggests to me that the only way to the kingdom is through a human-divine wrestling match. Having cheated death, Jesus emerged victorious, his stigmata (the post-resurrection wounds still on his hands, feet, and side) are a call-back to Jacob’s limp.

So, yes, I recommend wrestling. Strap on your head gear, square up, and interlock your fingers with Jesus’s. Christ wins by letting us win. He writes the name of God on each one of us (Revelation 3:12), and, just so, makes us one with him. In him, winners lose and losers win.

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I grew up in a part of the world where trees were rare. Burkina Faso is right on the edge of the Sahara desert, and deforestation has been a longstanding problem. As part of an effort to reverse years of environmental degradation, the national government implemented a policy of planting as many eucalyptus trees as quickly as possible. Random plots of land across the country had several hundred eucalyptus trees planted in perfect rows. So perfect, it looked wrong.

Eucalyptus trees are fast growing and can withstand the extreme temperatures, which is why they were chosen for the task. But even as a 9 year old kid, I remember feeling a sense of indifference if not disdain for the eucalyptus trees. The perfect rows seemed dystopian, and I wondered if they were really accomplishing their mission. They provided little to no shade because they were slender, however tall, with wispy leaves. Still worse, they provided nothing to forage. And foraging for hours in the hot wilderness was one my favorite activities.

To put it another way, the reason I had no love for the eucalyptus trees was because I loved mango trees. Where I grew up, mango trees were like ancient totems in the wilderness, recalling a time of abundance and wealth. Like the eucalyptus trees, they could survive the extreme climate. But they provided incredible amounts of shade. Deep, leafy branches could stretch far enough for neighborhood kids to play marbles in the dirt while the old men sat in their Adirondack-style chairs cherishing every puff of their 25-Frank cigarette (cigarettes were always individually sold). In places where there was no church building, we’d gather the newly-converted Christians under a mango tree to sing and celebrate the Supper with locally-grown bissap. The only fault of mango trees (if we want to call it one) is that they grow slowly.

Most importantly, mango trees bore fruit. Oh. My. Goodness, did they bear fruit. As my father used to say, it wasn’t a question of whether there would be famine that year in the country, it was a question of how bad the famine was going to be. But in the midst of food shortages, during mango harvesting season, there were so many mangoes, there’d be piles of them rotting on the side of the road. I remember one side street of a public market being unwalkable during mango season because the rotting fruit produced Egyptian-plague-level swarms of flies feasting on the leftovers. On my own neighborhood street, the kids and I would run the twilight dusk with sticky orange lips as we kicked a rubber soccer ball around, sugar-high and gleeful.

(To this day, it troubles me that the vast majority of neighborhood trees in America aren’t fruit-bearing. And I think it says something about us culturally).

Maybe my childhood is why I imagine the tree to which Psalm 1 compares the blessed man to be a mango tree. And fittingly so, because the Psalm says that the tree is planted by streams of water. It’s nice to know that there are trees that can bear fruit even if the stream they are planted by is in the Sahel of West Africa and so dries up from time to time.

Here’s what I’m getting at: Christians should to be like mango trees, not like eucalyptus trees. Christians should bear fruit, if nothing else, because that’s what it looks like to be blessed according to Psalm 1. Fruit need not only be edible. In a dry and parched world, shade is almost as worthy fruit to bear as fruit itself.

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Let me continue: Christians should also endure despite long droughts and extreme climates. The way to survive is to have a slow existence. Mango trees don’t grow quickly, which is what makes them all that they are.

As Psalm 1:2 says, the way to do be a mango tree is “to meditate on the law of the Lord day and night.” There’s no set time frame to it. It just needs to be a daily—and nightly—activity. Meditation isn’t quick. Just as Jesus opened the scripture on a slow walk with he two disciples on the road to Emmaus, so we can dig our roots deep into the soil of God’s word to grow slowly and with fruit in mind.

Jesus was a mango tree. And he still is. It’s for good reason that Psalm 1 is specific in its language. The author says blessed is the man. That singular man is Jesus who is the Tree of Life for us all. Christians eat the fruit of his body and blood that he bore in the due season of his death and resurrection. And he accomplished all of it by meditating on the law of God day and night.

So, be like Jesus.

Be a mango tree.

Be slow, and bear fruit for a hungry and parched world.

Be blessed.

For really encouraging information about reversing decades of deforestation through indigenous practices, watch this: