I am the person behind every reading on this site. I am fifty, married a second time, and I serve as an elder at a non-denominational church, where I have counseled people without charge for fifteen years.
I am not a scholar and I have never called myself one. What I have is training in biblical counseling, a church that holds me to account, and a great many hours spent sitting with people on the worst week of their lives. I write because scripture keeps saying something to me on ordinary mornings, and because I spent a long stretch of my life hearing nothing at all. I know what both sound like.
Why this exists
I grew up Christian the way you inherit the color of your eyes. My father went to church every Sunday, my mother sang in the choir, and the Bible sat on the nightstand rather than the shelf. By ten I had Psalm 23 memorized. By twelve I had read the Gospels twice. I could answer every question in Sunday school, and I believed I had faith because I had the words in the right order.
Then I went to college, and kept going to church, and kept praying quickly, and let the whole thing become furniture. It stayed in the room for years without my ever really looking at it. I married Sarah at twenty-seven and we built a good life, and our faith was there when we needed it and unnoticed in between.
Sarah got sick when we had been married eleven years. I will not put the details here, out of respect rather than shame. We had three more years. In those three years I learned what it means to sit with someone and hold a hand without having anything useful to say, and to pray without asking for an outcome because you have nothing else to offer and cannot sit with empty hands.
I tried to negotiate. God did not negotiate. There were stretches where prayer felt like the most useless gesture available to a person, and I stopped, and I was angry, and the anger was the honest part.
One night, sitting beside her while she slept, unable to put together a single sentence of prayer, something happened that I did not understand then and cannot fully explain now. What arrived was a certainty that I was not alone in that room. There was no voice and no answer, and nothing I could have repeated to anyone the next morning.
Sarah died two years later. I was beside her.
What I had believed came apart in those three years and came back in a different shape, less sure about answers and far more sure about Presence. It took another two years after she died before I could say that out loud, and it came out in the middle of a conversation with a man I was counseling, an atheist who had lost someone too and was trying to understand. I explained my faith to him, and while I was talking I heard what I was saying, and I understood that this time I actually believed it.
I chose it on purpose at forty-three. I started writing these that same year, in June, and I have not stopped.
What you will find here
Two kinds of reading, one of each for every day of the year.
Verse of the Day is a verse and a few lines about what it asks of you today. Short enough to read before the day starts, and written so that the verse stays with you rather than the commentary.
Today’s Truth is one thing worth holding on to, said plainly enough that you can still remember it by evening. Some days that is comfort. Some days it is the sentence you did not want to hear.
There is also a growing set of longer pieces, from the days when a thought needed more room than a paragraph. And there is a daily email, which is how most people read these, because a verse that arrives before the day gets loud has a better chance of being heard.
What I believe
I am not a theologian and I will not pretend to be one. I am a man who has read a great deal and gotten a great deal wrong. These are the few things I hold without hedging.
Scripture is where I go first, and where I keep going back
Not because it settles every question, and it does not, but because it has said something true to me in every season I have been through, including the ones where I was not listening.
Faith is chosen, and then chosen again
Mine was inherited for forty-three years and it did not hold. What holds is the decision you make on an ordinary morning, and then make again the next morning. That is the whole reason this site is daily.
God is present even when he is silent
This is the one I learned in a hospital room and would not have believed from a pulpit. His silence is not his absence. I have no way to prove that to you. I only know it.
Nobody has to have it sorted out to be here
Doubt usually means someone is taking the thing seriously enough to argue with it. If you are in the middle of that, you are exactly who I am writing for.
How I read the Bible
I quote scripture to illuminate something, not to win something. A verse used as a proof is an argument, and arguments close a question. A verse used as a mirror stays open, and the reader finds themselves in it. That is the difference I aim for every morning, and the one I miss most often.
I am not a strict literalist and I am not theologically liberal. I read the passage and ask two things: what does this show about God, and what does it show about people. Where the church has argued about a text for centuries, I say so rather than pretending the matter is settled.
I go to the Psalms for honesty toward God, to the Gospels for the stories and the people in them, to Paul for doctrine, and to Job for anything to do with suffering and silence.
The writers who taught me to read this way are Philip Yancey, who asks the hard question without handing over a cheap answer, C. S. Lewis, who settled for me that intelligence and faith belong together, and Max Lucado, who writes about ordinary life without ever talking down to anyone.
How these are written
I read the passage first, in the morning, before I write anything. Then I write down what it said, in the plainest words I can find, and I take out whatever was there to sound impressive. A reading that a teenager can get through without stopping, and that a theologian would still find worth thinking about, is the one I was aiming for.
Where a tool has helped me draft or tidy a sentence, the reading of scripture, the thinking, and the final words are still mine, and nothing goes up that I have not read and approved.
If I get something wrong
I will, and I have. A verse cited from the wrong chapter, a claim about a passage that does not hold, a sentence that read as certainty when I meant something softer.
Write to me and I will look at it. If you are right, I will change the text and put a line at the foot of the reading saying what changed and when. Corrections stay visible. A site that quietly edits its mistakes is asking you to trust it more than it has earned.
What this is not
This is not professional theological counsel, and it is not pastoral care. It is also not medical or psychological advice, and it is no substitute for care from someone trained to give it.
My counseling is done through the church, without charge, and it is pastoral rather than clinical. Fifteen years of it have taught me exactly where the line sits between what a devotional can carry and what a person in crisis needs. If you are struggling, please talk to a doctor or a licensed counselor. If you are in danger, or thinking about harming yourself, call your local emergency number or a crisis line before you read another word here.
Who pays for it
Nothing here is behind a paywall and nothing ever will be. Every reading that has gone up since June of 2019 was free from the morning it appeared, and you can read the whole archive right now without giving me anything. The hosting and the email are paid for by modest advertising and by readers who choose to give something. That is the whole arrangement.
If you give, your name goes on the supporters wall with a line written for you, unless you would rather it did not. The wall does not say who gave what. It says who was here.
You are welcome here
Wherever you are with all of this, and whether you arrived certain, curious, or worn out, you are welcome. I was in each of those places for years at a time.
Write to me at [email protected]. I read everything that comes in, and I answer what I can.