One of my all time favorite bands is Relient K, a Christian punk-pop band that got its start in the late 90s and is still around today. My favorite song of theirs, "Be My Escape" (released in 2004), is about how God wants to set us free when we feel trapped, often in prisons of our own making. There's a line in the second verse that has shaped my faith more than almost any other song I know. And this life sentence that I'm serving I admit that I'm every bit deserving But the

based on the sermon preached by Lucas Johnson as part of our Plot Twist Series. The main text is Matthew 20:1-16 You ever build something with a hundred little parts, the kind of thing that comes with three types of screws and each one only fits in a certain spot? Up close it looks right. Then you step back and something's off. That's what this parable did to me for years. On first read, it seems simple enough. But the more I sat with it, compared it to other passages, and th

Fifteen years ago, Kathryn Schulz gave one of the most quietly devastating TED Talks I've ever watched. It's called "On Being Wrong," and the whole talk hinges on one question: what does it feel like to be wrong? Her answer: it feels like being right. That idea has stuck with me for years, and I've come back to it again and again, including when I studied the Parables of Lost Things in Luke 15 (being lost can feel like you're on the right path). But I think it applies just as

Back in high school, my friends and I discovered a website called despair.com. If you've never seen it, they make "demotivational" posters, the opposite of those cheesy office posters with a mountain range and a word like PERSEVERANCE underneath it. Despair.com's version of that, under a picture of a struggling penguin, reads: "Until you spread your wings, you'll have no idea how far you can walk." Another one of my favorites is called 'Mistakes.' It says, "It could be that t