Liberty UMC- Bealeton

09/12/2026

Ezekiel 19 is one of those chapters where you can read the whole thing in a couple minutes, close your Bible, and wonder what exactly just happened to all the lions.

Because suddenly Ezekiel is not acting out a siege, shaving his head, packing luggage through a wall, or giving us another vision that requires several diagrams and possibly a flowchart. God tells him, “And you, take up a lamentation for the princes of Israel.” A lamentation is a funeral song. Which is interesting because some of the people Ezekiel is lamenting are not technically dead yet. God is basically telling Ezekiel to sing the funeral song for Judah’s leadership because the kingdom they have trusted in is already dying.

Then comes the lioness.

“What was your mother? A lioness! Among lions she crouched; in the midst of young lions she reared her cubs.” The lioness represents Judah, and the cubs are her kings. Judah came from the royal line of David. These were not insignificant rulers from some insignificant kingdom. Genesis had already connected Judah with the image of a lion, and God had promised David a continuing royal line. There was history here. There was power here. There was a calling here.

But having a great heritage does not guarantee that the people who inherit it will actually live faithfully within it.

The first young lion grows strong, learns to catch prey, and then gets captured and taken to Egypt. This likely points to Jehoahaz, who became king after his father Josiah died. His reign lasted only about three months before Pharaoh Neco removed him and carried him off to Egypt. Three months. Imagine growing up in the royal family, becoming king of Judah, probably assuming an entire future is opening in front of you, and ninety-ish days later you are a prisoner in another country.

Then Judah raises another lion.

And essentially the same thing happens again.

The second lion becomes powerful, but eventually the nations come against him, trap him, put him in a cage, and carry him away. This likely points toward another of Judah’s final kings, with the imagery ultimately fitting the collapse of the monarchy under Babylon. The point is not really that we need to turn Ezekiel 19 into a detective game and identify every whisker on every lion. The point is that Judah keeps putting hope in another ruler.

Maybe this king will fix it.

Maybe this one will make us strong again.

Maybe this leader will restore what we are losing.

And one after another, the lions disappear.

That part feels surprisingly current because human beings have not changed much. We are remarkably good at convincing ourselves that if we could just get the right person, the right leader, the right pastor, the right government, the right boss, the right relationship, the right whatever, then everything would finally be secure. We take something God may genuinely use and quietly ask it to do something it was never capable of doing.

Then halfway through the chapter, Ezekiel changes pictures completely.

Now Judah is not a lioness. She is a vine.

“Your mother was like a vine in a vineyard planted by the water, fruitful and full of branches by reason of abundant water.”

This is not a picture of something that began weak. The vine had water. It had strong branches. It had everything necessary to flourish. Some of those branches became rulers’ scepters, another picture of Judah’s kings and authority. God had given Judah an incredible history, a land, a covenant, the temple, the law, prophets, kings, and generation after generation of opportunities to turn back to Him.

But then the vine is uprooted.

“And fire has gone out from the stem of its shoots, has consumed its fruit, so that there remains in it no strong stem, no scepter for ruling.”

And then Ezekiel ends with one of the saddest little sentences in the chapter:

“This is a lamentation and has become a lamentation.”

Not will become.

Has become.

The song Ezekiel was told to sing about Judah’s collapse was becoming reality.

But there is something important we know because we are reading Ezekiel from the other side of history.

The royal line did not actually disappear.

Judah lost her kings. Jerusalem fell. The temple was destroyed. The people went into exile. From where Ezekiel stood, it could have looked like the whole story of David’s throne was being ripped out by the roots.

But God had made a promise.

Centuries later, another descendant of David would come from the tribe of Judah. Not another temporary king who would reign for a few months or a few years before somebody stronger arrived. Not another lion who could be trapped by Egypt or Babylon.

Jesus.

And Revelation gives Him a title that makes Ezekiel 19 hit differently once you know where the story eventually goes:

“The Lion of the tribe of Judah.”

Judah’s lions failed.

The Lion of Judah did not.

That does not erase the sadness of Ezekiel 19. It actually helps us understand it. Human strength fails. Kingdoms fall. Leaders disappoint. Things that once looked permanent can disappear incredibly quickly. Sometimes God even allows the things we have leaned on too heavily to be stripped away.

But His promises are not hanging by the strength of the people carrying them.

Ezekiel was watching Judah’s royal tree being cut down and could probably see nothing but a stump.

God could already see the Lion.
girl

09/11/2026

Great food and fellowship

09/11/2026

09/10/2026

Ezekiel 17 is one of those chapters where you start reading and immediately realize we are very much still in Ezekiel, because God begins telling a riddle involving two enormous eagles, the top of a cedar tree, seeds, a vine, Lebanon, merchants, roots and branches, and for the first few verses you're basically standing there looking at the biblical landscaping wondering what exactly is happening. Thankfully, God actually explains this one. The strange story is intentional, and underneath all the eagles and agricultural imagery is a very real story about Judah trying to save itself when God had already told them what faithfulness looked like.

The first great eagle represents Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar had conquered Jerusalem, carried King Jehoiachin and other leaders away to Babylon, and eventually put Zedekiah on the throne. Judah was still allowed to exist, but it wasn't the powerful independent kingdom it had once been. In the riddle, it becomes this low-growing vine planted in good soil with plenty of water. It isn't tall. It isn't impressive. Nobody is walking past saying, “Now that is a magnificent vine.” But it can live there. It can grow there. It has what it needs. And that matters, because sometimes we assume that if our circumstances aren't impressive, comfortable or what we hoped for, then surely God must expect us to escape them immediately. Judah didn't like being the low vine, and to be fair, nobody really wants to be the low vine. We'd all prefer to be the enormous cedar on the mountain with a nice view and perhaps a tasteful plaque explaining our significance.

Then another eagle appears, representing Egypt, and the vine starts stretching its roots toward it. Zedekiah had made an agreement with Babylon, but then decided Egypt looked like a better option and sent there for military help. Egypt had horses. Egypt had soldiers. Egypt looked powerful. Surely Egypt could solve the Babylon problem. And from a purely human perspective, you can see how Zedekiah got there. If I am stuck in a situation I don't like and somebody shows up with horses and an army, I too might briefly wonder whether this is perhaps the answer to prayer. Except God had already told Judah what faithfulness looked like, and Zedekiah had sworn an oath that he was now breaking. God asks, “Shall he break the covenant and yet escape?” (Ezekiel 17:15). The answer is no. Zedekiah wasn't trusting God. He was trying to manufacture his own rescue.

And that is where this chapter gets uncomfortable, because I would love to say reaching toward Egypt was a uniquely Zedekiah problem that humanity successfully eliminated sometime around 590 BC. Unfortunately, we are still extremely talented at it. We ask God what to do, and sometimes He leads us somewhere that doesn't look particularly impressive. Maybe it's slower than we wanted. Maybe it feels limiting. Maybe we don't understand why He hasn't changed something yet. So we start looking around for Egypt. Surely there is another option. Surely there is something bigger, faster and more powerful that can fix this. Surely if I pull hard enough on the circumstances, rearrange enough pieces and worry about it continuously for the next six hours, I can assist the Creator of the universe with project management.

Zedekiah's problem wasn't simply that he made a bad political decision. He had given his word and then decided his word didn't matter anymore because keeping it had become inconvenient. And God took that seriously, even though the agreement had been made with Babylon, a pagan empire. God describes Zedekiah as having despised the oath and broken the covenant, which is a detail I don't think we're supposed to skip over. Integrity doesn't depend on whether the other person deserves our integrity. Faithfulness doesn't become optional because another choice suddenly looks more beneficial. Zedekiah wanted God's protection while ignoring what God had told him to do, and then expected Egypt to provide enough horses and soldiers to make the consequences disappear. Egypt couldn't.

But Ezekiel 17 doesn't end with a failed king, a broken covenant and a dried-up vine, because after describing everything Zedekiah is trying to do, God suddenly tells us what He is going to do: “I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out” (Ezekiel 17:22). And those two words, “I myself,” change the whole chapter. Zedekiah has been reaching, plotting, negotiating and trying to preserve the kingdom through his own plans, while God essentially says, You don't preserve My promises. I do.

God says He will take that tender little sprig and plant it on a high mountain in Israel, where it will grow into a great cedar, produce branches and fruit, and become a place where birds can shelter beneath it. The royal line of David is about to look chopped down. Jerusalem will fall. Zedekiah will lose the throne. From the human perspective, it will look very much like the whole thing has failed. But God had made promises concerning David's line, and Babylon couldn't cut deeply enough to reach the promises of God. Ultimately that little sprig points us forward to Jesus, the King from David's line, whose kingdom didn't come because Judah finally developed a successful political strategy. It came because God keeps His promises.

And then God ends the chapter by reminding everyone who is actually in control. He can bring down the high tree and raise the low one. He can dry up what looks green and thriving and make the dry tree flourish. Human beings look at the enormous tree and assume it is secure, then look at the tiny sprig and assume it doesn't stand a chance. God isn't particularly limited by either assessment. Babylon can look unstoppable. David's royal line can look finished. A tiny sprig can look insignificant. None of those appearances determine what God can do.

The chapter ends with God saying, “I have spoken, and I will do it” (Ezekiel 17:24). And maybe that is the part I need to remember most. Sometimes being the low vine feels like failure. Sometimes where God has planted us doesn't look impressive, comfortable or remotely like the plan we would have chosen. Everything in us wants to stretch toward something else and say, “Maybe that will fix this.” We want the second eagle. We want Egypt. We want the horses. We want something we can see and measure and control, preferably accompanied by a detailed explanation from God about how all of this is going to work out.

But Ezekiel 17 reminds us that God doesn't need us to manufacture the ending.

He asks us to be faithful where He has planted us, to trust Him when we cannot see what He's growing, and to remember that what looks like a chopped-down cedar to us may already have a tender sprig in the hand of God.

Because when God says He will do something, the size of the tree was never the deciding factor.
girl

09/10/2026

Ever been invited to a wedding and you have to RSVP. Before you know it the wedding date is here and you forgot. You figure I’ll just go and surely, they’ll let me in. After all, I was invited. So, you clean yourself up and put on your best clothes. You look in the mirror and think, I look so good, there’s no way I’m not getting in. The wedding is at a beautiful gated private estate. You can’t wait to see what’s on the inside. This is going to be a special night and it costs you nothing. Then, there’s a problem. At the gate, they ask your name and tell you that you’re not on the list. You tell them, but I was invited. No matter how much you argue, they send you away, telling you that it was your responsibility to accept the invitation. That’s Heaven. God wants you there. He sent you the invitation. All you have to do is accept it. Not after you clean yourself up. Not when you “look” presentable, the way you think you’re expected to look. No, you have to accept before it’s too late. Otherwise, you’re not getting in. Don’t wait until it’s too late to respond.

Copy and paste: let's see if we can get this to go viral!

09/09/2026

Ezekiel 16 is one of those chapters where you start reading and somewhere around verse 15 you realize God is not going to soften the analogy for anybody. This is not a chapter you casually slap on a coffee mug. There is no peaceful mountain background with “Ezekiel 16:25” written across it in cursive. Probably for the best. Because God tells Jerusalem her story, and He tells the whole thing. He describes her as an abandoned baby, unwanted from birth, thrown into an open field with no one even willing to do the basic things necessary to keep her alive. “No eye pitied you, to do any of these things to you out of compassion for you, but you were cast out on the open field, for you were abhorred, on the day that you were born” (Ezekiel 16:5, ESV). And then God passes by. He sees her lying there helpless and says, “Live!” Not because she earned it. Not because she had cleaned herself up. Not because she had demonstrated tremendous potential and God thought she might be a good investment. She had absolutely nothing to offer Him. She was lying in a field dying. And God said, “Live.”

Then God describes what He did for her. He caused her to grow. He covered her. He entered into covenant with her. He washed her, clothed her, adorned her, fed her, and made her beautiful. “I made my vow to you and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Lord GOD, and you became mine” (verse 😎. Notice how many times God is the one doing the action. I washed you. I anointed you. I clothed you. I wrapped you. I adorned you. I fed you. Your beauty became perfect “through the splendor that I had bestowed on you” (verse 14). Jerusalem's entire story was grace. Everything she had came from God. Her beauty was His gift. Her position was His gift. Her life itself was His gift. She was basically standing there wearing an outfit God bought, eating food God provided, covered in jewelry God gave her, enjoying a life God rescued, and then somehow concluded, “You know who deserves the credit for all this? Me.”

And that is where Ezekiel 16 gets painfully familiar.

“But you trusted in your beauty” (verse 15). There it is. The turn. Jerusalem took the gifts of God and forgot the God who gave them. She took the gold and silver He gave her and used them for idols. She took the food He provided and offered it to false gods. She took the very blessings that should have reminded her of His faithfulness and used them to become unfaithful to Him. And before we get too comfortable pointing at ancient Jerusalem like, “Wow. Embarrassing,” we might want to inventory our own lives. Because humans are remarkably talented at praying desperately for something, receiving it, thanking God enthusiastically for approximately seventeen minutes, and then slowly beginning to act like we acquired it through our own brilliance. We ask God for the job, the relationship, the opportunity, the ability, the platform, the money, the home, the answered prayer, and then sometimes the blessing itself becomes the thing that crowds Him out. We can turn almost anything into an idol. Even something God Himself gave us.

God's language through the rest of the chapter is intentionally shocking because He wants Israel to understand what idolatry actually is. It isn't merely breaking an obscure religious regulation. It is adultery against a covenant relationship. God had loved them, rescued them, provided for them, and called them His own, and they repeatedly ran after other gods. And somehow they managed to be spectacularly bad even at being unfaithful. Verse 34 basically says they were the reverse of the usual arrangement because instead of receiving payment, they were paying others. That's roughly the biblical equivalent of God saying, “I don't even know how you managed to make this worse, but congratulations, apparently you found a way.” Sin promises us something better than God and then frequently leaves us poorer, emptier, and wondering why we handed it everything we had.

And God does judge them. We shouldn't skip that because judgment is a major part of Ezekiel. God is patient, but His patience should never be confused with indifference. He sees what His people are doing. He knows what has been hidden. He names their sin plainly. There are consequences. Ezekiel 16 does not give us a God who shrugs at evil and says it doesn't really matter because He loves everybody. His love is precisely why covenant betrayal matters so much. A God who truly loves also cares deeply when the people He loves destroy themselves and others. Grace does not mean sin was never serious. Grace means sin was serious enough that forgiveness would eventually cost more than we can comprehend.

But then, after one of the harshest chapters you can imagine, God does something astonishing. He remembers His covenant.

“Yet I will remember my covenant with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish for you an everlasting covenant” (verse 60).

She forgot.

God remembered.

That might be the sentence I carry away from Ezekiel 16 more than anything else. Jerusalem forgot who rescued her. Forgot who clothed her. Forgot who fed her. Forgot where her beauty came from. Forgot the covenant. Forgot God. But God says, “I will remember.” Not because Jerusalem finally produced a flawless record. Quite the opposite. God has just spent most of the chapter laying out exactly how spectacularly she failed. Yet His faithfulness is not built on hers.

And the chapter ends with atonement: “when I atone for you for all that you have done, declares the Lord GOD” (verse 63).

Not when you atone for yourself.

When I atone for you.

That changes everything.

Because maybe you read Ezekiel 16 and see more of yourself in the middle than you would like. Maybe God has been good to you and you have forgotten Him anyway. Maybe you've taken His gifts for granted. Maybe you've chased things that promised satisfaction and discovered they were incredibly expensive ways to become emptier. Maybe there are parts of your story you would strongly prefer God not narrate with Ezekiel-level specificity. The answer isn't to somehow crawl backward through your life and make yourself worthy of the God who found you.

You weren't worthy when He found you.

That was the point from the beginning.

You were helpless, and He said, “Live.”

And centuries later, the God who promised, “I will atone for you,” would provide that atonement Himself. Jesus would take the judgment sinners could never undo, pay the debt sinners could never repay, and establish the new covenant in His blood. We don't rescue ourselves and then approach God looking presentable. Christianity begins with admitting that spiritually speaking, we were the baby in the field. No impressive résumé. No bargaining position. No emergency backup plan tucked somewhere nearby. Just completely dependent on mercy.

And God passed by.

He saw.

He loved.

He said, “Live.”

Ezekiel 16 is uncomfortable because it forces us to look directly at the ugliness of human unfaithfulness. But underneath the entire chapter is something even bigger: the almost unbelievable faithfulness of God. We forget. He remembers. We wander. He pursues. We misuse what He gives. He still offers mercy. We accumulate a history we cannot erase, and He says, “I will atone for you.”

The gospel was never the story of good people getting rewarded for keeping themselves clean.

It has always been the story of a God who walks past people who cannot save themselves, looks directly at the mess without pretending it isn't there, and says the one thing they desperately need to hear.

“Live.”
girl

09/09/2026

I tried to “Jonah” my way out of social media.

You know, run in the opposite direction. Hide. Pretend it’s not happening. Sink into the sea of anonymity.

I’m an introvert. I hate speaking up. I didn’t think I was “smart enough” to explain dairy science. I definitely didn’t think I was “good enough” to be a Christian witness.

So naturally, my first instinct was: NOPE. Absolutely no way.

But here’s the thing: God didn’t buy it.

He grabbed me, the person saying “yeah, find someone better,” and said, “You’re doing this.” And slowly, very slowly, I realized He wasn’t asking me to be perfect. He was asking me to be willing.

Through posts about calves and cows and faith, He’s speaking through me. He’s forcing me to learn. To get better. To explain complicated science in ways people actually understand. To grow, not just in knowledge, but in faith.

And you know what? It’s working. People are learning (and so am I). People are encouraged. People are seeing God in ways I never thought I could communicate.

God used my “no way” and turned it into “yes, through Him.” He does that. With the introverts. The unsure. The people who feel small or unworthy. He takes our hesitations and our fear and He turns them into something bigger than we could imagine.

So yes, it’s scary. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, you will feel like you’re sinking sometimes.

But if God can do it with me, He can do it with you. Say yes. Show up. Let Him use your “no way.” You might just find it’s bigger, better, and braver than you ever imagined.
girl

09/07/2026

Ezekiel 15 is only eight verses long, which sounds encouraging until you realize God apparently decided He did not need an entire chapter to make this particular point. Eight verses. That’s it. You can read the whole thing before your coffee gets cold, although depending on how personally you take it, you may need the coffee afterward. Because God asks Ezekiel, “How does the wood of the vine surpass any wood, the vine branch that is among the trees of the forest?” And the answer is basically...it doesn’t. You don't build a table out of vine branches. You don't frame a house with them. Nobody walks into the lumberyard and says, “I'd like twelve good straight vine branches, please. Load them in the truck.” God even asks whether its wood can be used to make a peg to hang a vessel on. Nope. The vine has a purpose, and its value isn't that its wood is particularly impressive.

And that matters because throughout Scripture, Israel is pictured as a vine. That sounds lovely when you picture vineyards and fruit and sunshine and one of those peaceful Bible illustrations where everybody's clothing is suspiciously clean. But Ezekiel 15 takes the picture somewhere much less decorative. God asks what happens when the wood of the vine is given to the fire for fuel, and then takes it one step further. If the fire has consumed both ends and charred the middle, was it useful before? No. Is it somehow more useful now? Also no. Somehow this chapter manages to become increasingly uncomfortable while discussing what is essentially a burnt stick.

That's the point God is making about Jerusalem. They had the city. They had the temple. They had the history. They were God's covenant people. Surely all of that meant Jerusalem itself was untouchable. Except God had not chosen His people simply so they could exist while ignoring the One who chose them. Their identity wasn't supposed to be a religious participation trophy they could hold up while living however they wanted. They were supposed to belong to Him, obey Him, and live in a way that showed the nations who their God was. Being the vine wasn't something to brag about while refusing the purpose for which the vine existed.

And that's where Ezekiel 15 gets a little too close to home, because we can do exactly the same thing. We can have the church attendance, the Bible app, the Christian music, the verse hanging on the wall, the correct answers, the Christian family history, and perhaps even the impressive ability to locate Habakkuk without quietly checking the table of contents first. We can become very good at being around Christianity while slowly assuming that proximity to the things of God is the same thing as actually walking with God. Israel had the temple right there. They had prophets. They had Scripture. They had generations of stories about what God had done. And none of those things could substitute for actually belonging to Him in faith and obedience.

Centuries later, Jesus uses the vine picture again, and suddenly Ezekiel 15 hits even harder. In John 15, Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches.” Then He says, “Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” A branch doesn't produce fruit by trying extremely hard to look more branch-like. It doesn't wake up Monday morning with a planner and a five-step fruit-production strategy. It bears fruit because it remains connected to the vine. The life isn't coming from the branch trying harder. The life is coming through the vine.

And I think that's an important distinction, because Ezekiel 15 isn't telling us to panic and start manufacturing enough good behavior to convince God we're useful. Scripture doesn't say salvation is awarded to whichever branch manages the highest annual fruit yield. The fruit comes because of where the life is coming from. God changes us. Sometimes quickly. Sometimes painfully slowly. Sometimes slowly enough that we'd appreciate a quarterly progress report just to confirm something is actually happening. But He changes us as we remain in Christ.

The uncomfortable question Ezekiel 15 leaves sitting there is whether we have confused being around the things of God with actually knowing and following God. Heritage isn't the same thing as faith. Church attendance isn't the same thing as surrender. Knowing Bible stories isn't the same thing as knowing the God who wrote the story. Israel had all the outward evidence that should have pointed them toward Him, yet they still wandered away. And apparently having an impressive religious résumé doesn't turn vine wood into cedar.

But there's something hopeful when we put Ezekiel's vine beside the words of Jesus. God doesn't tell us to somehow transform ourselves into mighty trees. Jesus tells us to abide in Him. Stay connected. Remain. Let His life produce in us what we could never manufacture ourselves.

Maybe the question was never whether you're impressive enough wood for God to build something spectacular out of.

Maybe the question is whether you're abiding in the Vine.

Because the branch was never supposed to be impressive on its own. It was supposed to stay connected and bear fruit.
girl

09/06/2026

Sometimes church feels…heavy. And I don’t mean the good kind of heavy where you walk through the doors carrying everything that happened that week and somehow leave remembering that God is still God and you were never actually expected to hold the entire universe together yourself. I mean the kind where following Jesus starts feeling suspiciously like there is a clipboard somewhere with your name on it. Did you attend enough? Serve enough? Read your Bible enough? Pray enough? Volunteer enough? Are you joyful enough while doing all of those things? And somewhere in there it can become really easy to feel like you also need to look like you have this whole Christianity thing reasonably under control. Struggles are allowed, obviously, but preferably the kind from five years ago that have already been resolved, taught you an important lesson, and can now be turned into a testimony with three points and an encouraging Bible verse. Walking into church and saying, “Actually, I’m struggling with God right now and I have absolutely no idea how this story ends,” is considerably more uncomfortable.

Because sometimes it feels like we aren’t supposed to say, “I’m having a hard time believing this.” Or, “I read that part of the Bible and I have questions.” Or, “I have prayed about this for years and nothing has changed, and I’m actually pretty angry about it.” We know what the correct Christian answer is supposed to sound like, so sometimes we give that answer even when it isn’t remotely what is happening inside us. We walk through the doors, smile, say we’re doing good, sing the songs, know when to stand and sit, and generally give the impression that Sunday morning began with peaceful prayer and reflection instead of whatever minor catastrophe actually occurred five minutes before we arrived.

And then somebody asks, “How are you?”

“Good.”

Because apparently that is the answer.

Meanwhile, if I answered that question completely truthfully on any given Sunday, it might be more along the lines of, “Well, I got five hours of sleep, one calf has diarrhea, another one is breathing in a way I don’t appreciate, I have manure somewhere on me but have decided not to investigate exactly where, I’m worried about six things I can’t control, I prayed about three of them while driving here, I’m currently having a theological disagreement with God about at least one of them, and I am running primarily on caffeine, stubbornness, and the sustaining grace of Jesus. But yeah. Good. How are you?”

Which is probably why we just say “good.”

And that’s funny until you realize how often we do the exact same thing with the things that aren’t funny. Sometimes “good” means I don’t know how to explain what’s happening. Sometimes it means I don’t know if this is a safe place to tell the truth. Sometimes it means if I actually start talking about this right now, there is a nonzero chance I’m going to cry in the church foyer and neither of us has budgeted enough time for that before the service starts. So we say good, they say good, everyone is apparently doing remarkably well, and we all proceed into the sanctuary carrying things nobody else knows about.

I know a little about what happens when church starts feeling like one more thing you are failing at, because there was a stretch when my attendance was…not exactly impressive. In my case, a lot of it was calves. Apparently nobody informed the calves that Sunday morning was the Sabbath, because they continued getting sick, needing fed, developing diarrhea, escaping, breathing suspiciously, and occasionally attempting to meet Jesus personally at exactly the same rate seven days a week. A Jersey calf does not care that church starts in forty-five minutes. She has never read Hebrews. If she decides 9:12 Sunday morning is the perfect time for a 105-degree fever while another one has somehow gotten her head somewhere anatomically unreasonable, congratulations, this is your Sunday morning now. Jesus talked about getting the ox out of the ditch on the Sabbath, and those of us who work with livestock understand that sometimes the ox is not only in the ditch, but has apparently invited three friends and somebody knocked over something on the way there.

So yes, I missed church. Sometimes quite a bit. And believe me, I knew. I was there for the part where I wasn’t there. Then eventually I got a letter from church about my attendance and what could happen if I didn’t start coming regularly again. Except it wasn’t just a letter. It came certified mail. It had to be signed for. And somehow that little detail made the whole thing hit differently, because certified mail has a certain level of seriousness to it. Certified mail is what you send when you want proof that somebody received something. It feels legal. Official. Important. And there is something rather surreal about certified mail from your church and then opening it to discover that, yes, they have noticed you haven’t been there enough.

And the thing is, they weren’t wrong. I hadn’t been there enough. I’m not going to rewrite history and pretend my attendance was wonderful and everyone else was completely unreasonable. Church matters. Being around other Christians matters. But I already knew I hadn’t been there. I already felt guilty about it. I already felt stretched thin and like I wasn’t doing enough in several different directions at once. I wasn’t trying to walk away from Jesus. I wasn’t sitting at home on Sunday mornings defiantly eating pancakes and announcing my rejection of organized religion. I was taking care of calves. I was working. I was tired. I was trying. And when that certified letter arrived, instead of feeling like somebody had noticed that I was missing, it felt like somebody had noticed that my attendance was missing.

That distinction has stuck with me, because what I needed probably wasn’t a certified letter telling me there could be consequences if I didn’t come back. I needed somebody to ask, “Hey, we haven’t seen you much lately. Are you doing okay?” And yeah, had I answered truthfully, they might have gotten the entire calf-health report, several unrelated thoughts, an explanation of why I was running on five hours of sleep, and possibly a theological question nobody was prepared to discuss in the church parking lot. But at least the question would have been about me not my attendance. I needed to feel missed, not monitored. Instead, I remember holding something from my church that was official enough to require a signature and wondering whether I even wanted to walk through those doors again.

And yeah, I switched my membership elsewhere. I didn’t leave Jesus. I didn’t decide church didn’t matter. I didn’t abandon Christianity. I just eventually realized that staying somewhere because I felt guilty about leaving probably wasn’t the same thing as belonging there, and there are times when finding another healthy church is not walking away from the body of Christ. Sometimes it is how you remain part of it.

Maybe your version has absolutely nothing to do with calves or certified mail. Maybe you missed because you were exhausted. Maybe you were caring for someone. Maybe getting yourself and a newborn out the door before church should qualify as a minor miracle and somebody should be documenting it for possible inclusion in Acts. Maybe you work Sundays. Maybe your marriage was struggling and sitting together pretending everything was fine felt worse than staying home. Maybe anxiety makes walking through those doors much harder than anyone realizes. Maybe somebody at church said something that hurt you and they probably don’t even remember saying it. Maybe you asked a question and quickly discovered that people were considerably more comfortable when you already knew the answer. Or maybe you never stopped attending at all. Maybe you have been sitting in the same pew every Sunday, answering “good” every time someone asks how you are because you’re not entirely sure what would happen if one Sunday you finally said, “Actually, I’m not.”

Because you can love Jesus and still have questions. You can trust God and still have days when you don’t understand Him at all. You can believe the Bible is the Word of God and still reach a passage and think, “Okay, Lord, we are going to need to discuss this one.” You can pray faithfully and wonder why God seems silent. You can sing “It Is Well With My Soul” while your soul would currently like to submit a formal objection. You can know that God is good and still be angry about something He allowed. Faith and struggle are not opposites, and Scripture would be considerably shorter if they were. David asked God where He was. Job questioned. Jeremiah complained. Elijah reached a point where he was simply done. Thomas wanted evidence. Peter confidently announced what he would absolutely never do and then proceeded to do exactly that three times before breakfast. God could have cleaned all of that up before putting these people in Scripture. He didn’t.

And maybe that is something churches need to remember, especially when we look at how many young adults eventually disappear. Barna has reported that 64% of young adults with a church background dropped out of regular church involvement at some point during young adulthood, and Lifeway Research found that 66% of young adults who regularly attended Protestant churches as teenagers stopped attending regularly for at least a year between ages 18 and 22. That doesn’t mean two-thirds stopped believing in God, and plenty eventually returned, but two out of three is still a number that should bother us. Maybe instead of only asking why young adults are leaving church, we also need to ask whether they felt like they could tell us they were struggling before they left. Could they ask the uncomfortable question without everyone panicking? Could they admit they were angry with God? Could they say, “I don’t know what I believe about this right now”? Could they admit that life was falling apart without suddenly feeling like they had become somebody’s spiritual repair project?

And no, this doesn’t mean accountability disappears. Church attendance matters. Christian community matters. Hebrews 10:25 remains inconveniently present in my Bible and I have checked. Sometimes loving someone really does mean telling them something they don’t want to hear. But accountability should make it safer to tell the truth, not more necessary to hide it. There is a difference between saying, “I see you struggling, let me walk beside you,” and, “I see you struggling, could you please struggle in a way that looks slightly more Christian?”

Because when I look at Jesus, I see Him moving toward people everyone else already had opinions about. The woman at the well had enough personal history to keep a church gossip chain occupied for the foreseeable future. Zacchaeus had some creative accounting practices. Thomas had questions. Peter was…Peter. And then there was the thief on the cross, who had absolutely no time left to get his act together. No improved attendance record. No Bible study. No volunteering. No opportunity to repair his reputation or spend six months proving that his conversion was genuine. He had nothing impressive to hand Jesus. All he could say was, essentially, “Remember me.”

And Jesus gave him paradise.

Church is made entirely out of humans, which explains quite a bit. Churches are going to get things wrong. Christians are going to get things wrong. I am absolutely going to get things wrong, and there is probably enough evidence already available for somebody to compile The Collected Things Erica Probably Should Have Thought About Five More Minutes. But the people who represent Jesus imperfectly are not Jesus Himself. Someone can misunderstand you without God misunderstanding you. Someone can be uncomfortable with your questions while God already knows every question you were afraid to say out loud. Someone can look at your empty seat and make assumptions without knowing what you were carrying while that seat was empty.

So maybe we need to make more room in church for people who don’t have it all together. Room for questions that don’t get neatly resolved by the end of Bible study. Room for someone to admit that they are angry with God and still sit beside us next Sunday. Room for the person who hasn’t been there in three months to walk back through the doors without feeling like they owe everyone a defense. Room for someone to answer “How are you?” with “Actually, not good,” and have us be willing to hear the answer. Room for faith that currently feels less like a mustard seed and more like you are reasonably certain there was a mustard seed around here somewhere, but it may have rolled under the couch.

Because Jesus didn’t say, “Come to Me once you look like you have this figured out.” He said, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

And I keep thinking about that one missing sheep. The Shepherd noticed it was gone. But He didn’t send the sheep certified mail telling it to improve its attendance.

He went looking for it.

Maybe sometimes the best way to bring somebody back isn’t to remind them that they should be there.

Maybe it’s to make sure they know somebody actually noticed that they were gone.
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