It feels like just last week I was 25. I was a travel nurse living out of a camper in the bed of my truck, working psych units and exploring New Mexico. Before that, I was a 22-year-old newlywed getting ready to move to Tennessee to finish college. Not long before that, I was going to my senior prom. Now I’m 30, about to turn 31, and a Facebook memory just told me something happened ten years ago. I refused to believe it. It was true. I’m in a strange spot. Some of the folks at church still...

from a sermon by Lucas Johnson on September 20, 2026 For seven chapters, the Teacher of Ecclesiastes has hunted for meaning. Can we find it in our work? Our pleasures? Our wisdom? Every time, he comes back with the same word: hevel. Vapor. Smoke rising off a fire. You can grab at it all day, but it slips through your fingers. In chapter 8, the book shifts. Now the question is different. Even if you could find meaning in life, what do you do with the bad things in it? Why do bad things happen...

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 thought about how...