Encounter Church

05/25/2026

Minute Meditations | Scripture & Life

This verse does not shout, nor does it issue a command. It just lays out before us a gentle promise: the Lord will be your confidence. Not our willpower…Not our track record…Not how well we got it all together. But rather Him and only Him.

Brennan Manning wrote, “You will trust God to the degree you know you are loved by Him.” This gets to the heart of it all. Confidence in God isn’t something we manufacture through discipline or determination rather to grow naturally, almost inevitably, from deep settled knowing that we are loved. When that love becomes real to us, trust stops being a struggle and starts being a response.

The image of a foot being kept from a snare is so tender and so specific. Snares don’t announce themselves. They’re hidden in ordinary ground…in anxious Monday mornings…in the conversation we have been dreading…in the quiet fear that this week will ask more of us than we have to give. And yet the promise stands: He will keep you. Not because we are careful enough, but because He is faithful enough.

As this week begins, what if we carried just one question with us. Not “Can I handle this?” but “Am I loved by the One who holds this?”

We are. And that changes everything.

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05/23/2026

Minute Meditations | Scripture & Life

Jesus has issued a generous invitation, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” [Matthew 11.28].  He doesn’t say strive toward me or earn your way to me. He says come. Just come, as you are, weary and burdened, with the full weight of whatever you’re carrying.

The rest he offers isn’t merely a pause before the next round of effort. It’s a deep settling, the kind that happens when we finally stop straining and let ourselves be held.

Mark Buchanan wrote, “Most of the things we need to be most fully alive never come in busyness. They grow in rest.” The things that make life genuinely rich such as peace, presence, gratitude quietly wither under pressure. They need space. They need exactly the kind of rest Jesus is speaking of.

Wherever this day finds us, the invitation is open. We don’t have to earn our rest.  We just need to come and receive. May we rest well today.

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05/20/2026

Minute Meditations | Scripture & Life

Isaiah paints a vivid picture of a sun-scorched land. It is the kind of place where our own resources run dry, where the heat is relentless and the ground offers nothing. It’s an honest image. Life has those stretches. We all face the seasons where provision feels impossible and the way forward is unclear.

Walter Brueggemann captures it well: “’Wilderness’ is a place, in biblical rhetoric, where there are no viable life support systems.” That is precisely the terrain Isaiah has in mind. It is not metaphor for mild inconvenience, but a genuine landscape of exhaustion, where survival cannot be self-generated. And yet, into that very landscape, God speaks two commitments: GUIDANCE and SATISFACTION.

Guidance means we are not left to figure it out alone. The path may be unfamiliar, but the One leading it is not lost. There is comfort in being led rather than merely advised. It implies presence, not just direction.

Satisfaction in a scorched place is perhaps the greater miracle. It doesn’t say the land will change. It says our needs will be met within it. Brueggemann names this with precision, “’Grace’ is the occupying generosity of God that redefines the place.” Notice the word redefines…not relocates. The wilderness does not become a garden. It becomes, instead, a site of divine presence so real and so generous that its barrenness no longer has the final word.

This is the quiet wonder of God’s provision. It often doesn’t remove the difficulty rather it redefines it. What was once a place of no viable life support becomes, by grace, a place of sustenance.

This verse is an invitation to trust not in favorable circumstances, but in a faithful guide. When the ground beneath us offers nothing, the promise is that He will be enough- leading, staying, and satisfying in ways the landscape simply cannot. So let’s rest in the guide, not the geography.

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05/19/2026

🌿🌊 Adventure awaits at Rainforest Falls VBS! Kids K-5 are invited to dive into an unforgettable week discovering the nature of God and what it means to be rooted in Him!

📅 Monday, June 15 – Friday, June 19
 
⏰ 6:00PM – 8:30 PM 

📍 Encounter Church…8110 Corporate Blvd, Plain City, OH

Sign up your kids OR join us as a volunteer — link in bio! 🙌

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05/18/2026

Minute Meditations | Scripture & Life

“He will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. The Lord has spoken.” [Isaiah 25.8]

Tears are honest things. They fall when grief is too large for language, when loss carves out space inside us that nothing in this world can fill. But in their honesty, tears do something quietly profound — they lead us somewhere. The aching soul that weeps is a soul that knows it was made for more than this.

Isaiah lifts our gaze to a horizon almost too beautiful to hold. Death itself will be swallowed up — not managed or softened, but forever defeated. And then, tenderly, personally, God will wipe away the tears from all faces. Not in some distant, impersonal sweep, but face by face. Every tear that ever traced a path down a human cheek was witnessed, and not one will be forgotten.

This is where grief, if we let it, becomes a road. Every time we weep and find world unable to comfort us, we are being drawn toward the only One who truly can. The Holy Spirit does not wait for our tears to stop before He draws near — He meets us in them, the Comforter our souls are always reaching for in the dark.

So weep, if we must. But let our tears do their quiet work, pointing us to the God who made this unshakeable promise: The Lord has spoken. The last tear has already been numbered.

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05/18/2026

05/16/2026

Saving a seat says something simple but profound: I thought of you before I even arrived.

Most people who finally visit a church do so because a friend personally invited them — not a flyer, not a social media post. Just someone who cared enough to say, “Come with me.”

In fact, 80% of people in a recent survey said they would attend a church service if someone simply invited them. The willingness is already there. The seat is already saved. Will you make the call?

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05/15/2026

Minute Meditations | Scripture & Life

There is beautiful humility in this verse. The psalmist doesn’t ask God to bless his own plans or confirm the path he’s already chosen — he stops, turns, and asks simply to be shown and taught. It is the posture of a student before a wise teacher.

Eugene Peterson’s words resonate with that thought well, “The task is not to get God to do something we think needs done, but to become aware of what God is doing so we can participate in it.” This reframes prayer entirely. We are not architects presenting blueprints for divine approval — we are apprentices, learning to notice.

“Your ways” and “your paths” — repetition is not accidental. It slows us down, suggesting that God’s movement through the world requires attention and a willingness to keep asking. And the request carries relational weight. The psalmist isn’t consulting a map; he’s speaking to a Person — Lord. Guidance here is not information downloaded into a willing mind. It is intimacy. It’s walking with someone who knows the terrain far better than we do.

In a world that rewards confidence and certainty, this verse is quietly countercultural. To say show me, teach me is to acknowledge that on our own, our will wander — and to have the good sense to reach for a better guide. Not to drag God into our story, but to step, humbly, into his.

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05/14/2026

ENCOUNTER ACADEMY SEMINAR

What does it look like to share our faith in a modern society? How can I talk to people about Jesus without making it weird? How do I even know where to start?

Join us for Encounter Academy’s Saturday Seminar on Relational Evangelism: engaging people’s hearts like Jesus did. This seminar is based off Randy Newman’s book by the same title, so every participant will receive a copy of his book!

The seminar will run from 9am -12pm at the church on June 6th. Light breakfast and coffee will be provided along with a lunch if you chose to stay and join us for lunch. We look forward to it greatly!

Sign up link in bio

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05/13/2026

Minute Meditations | Scripture & Life

When it comes to Christian faith, patience and longing are not opposites— they coexist. The psalmist cried out and waited, holding trust and need in the same breath.

The word “inclined” is tender. It pictures someone leaning down to listen — God not distant or distracted, but bending close. The waiting was never void.

What is striking is the order: the psalmist waited before he was heard. Faith operated before the answer came. Henri Nouwen called this kind of waiting “an enormously radical attitude toward life” — choosing to hope that something is happening far beyond our own imaginings. The patience here isn’t relief looking back fondly — it’s discipline held in the silence, open-handed and open-ended.

This verse doesn’t offer quick resolution to those in a season of unanswered prayer. It offers something better: the assurance that the cry was never ignored, and that the waiting itself is not wasted — it is where trust is deepened.

The LORD heard. Past tense, settled, sure. The cry reached its destination.

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