Lent 2024 – Surprising Hope
Transcript of Jarrod McKenna’s Lent reflection on Isaiah 42:1-4 for Common Grace’s 2024 Lent Series
Bible Verse - Isaiah 42:1-4
Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will p...
On Thanksgiving: An Honest Home in the Uncomfortable ‘Both’
But this little plot of land, where my son swings from oak branches beside the bayou . . . where we make mashed potatoes for three instead of twenty-three . . . where I call home . . . is much more than just a settler's trophy. We live in Caddo territory, or so it was before the Treaty of Cession of 1835.
Walk With Me
Rev Otis Moss III, founder of Unashamed Media Group, asked Common Hymnal to contribute music for "Otis' Dream," the Get Out The Vote film he wrote and produced for the 2020 election. More specifically, he asked them to produce a new arrangement of the old spiritual 'I Want Jesus To Walk With Me' for the final credits.
On Thanksgiving: An Honest Home in the Uncomfortable ‘Both’
But this little plot of land, where my son swings from oak branches beside the bayou . . . where we make mashed potatoes for three instead of twenty-three . . . where I call home . . . is much more than just a settler's trophy. We live in Caddo territory, or so it was before the Treaty of Cession of 1835.
Julius Jones was spared by a governor who prayed. Let’s all now pray to end the death penalty.
The irony cannot be missed. Christians all over the world were praying that a Christian governor would not execute a fellow Christian brother who is almost assuredly innocent.
What I Learned About God by Praying for Osama bin Laden
Like every other college student and most Americans, I didn’t know the name Osama bin Laden. I also didn’t know God.
The Morning After Ida Makes Landfall, a Prayer
Some days I wake in the morning disoriented, my mind mixing up my dreamscape with the reality of what transpires in life. In my dreamscape, my arms reach for a cerulean sky, a perfect sky. This image becomes th...
The Practice of Prayer vs. the Prayer of Practice
Even though I don’t do much planned-praying these days, the action of following Jesus does sometimes draw desperate prayers out of me.
Blessing a Cultural Threshold
A threshold is a place of letting go of an old identity and waiting on a new identity to emerge. It is a liminal moment when the sacred is being born in us, a time of unravelling and slowly reknitting back together.
Struggle is Faithfulness: Thoughts from Inside Chronic Illness
However, is God directly responsible for one person’s healing while another suffers or dies? When God gets credit for the first outcome but not the second, it leaves the second person (and/or their loved ones) invisible, insignificant, and clearly excluded from God’s circle of care.