The week comes to rest.

Sunday, June 14, 2026 · The Third Sunday after Pentecost

What Goes With You

There is a small town in western Kenya called Iten. It sits at the edge of the Great Rift Valley, eight thousand feet above sea level. There is an arch over the road as you come into town. The arch reads, “Home of Champions.”

Every morning around dawn, before the sun is full up, two hundred or so runners gather on the dirt roads outside Iten and begin to run. Most of them are unknowns. Most of them have come from villages around the Rift Valley with one dream and one path, to become a runner who can earn a living for a family. Most of them will not become world champions. Some of them will. All of them are running in air that holds only about three-quarters of the oxygen they would breathe at sea level. All of them are running on dirt roads stained the color of rust. Many of them spent their childhoods walking many miles to school and back. They did not choose any of it. The country they were born in did not give them many other paths. The land they were born on is a high, thin, hard country.

And yet that land is what makes them.

Last year alone, more Kenyan men ran a marathon faster than two hours and eight minutes than the entire history of American marathoners. The reasons most often given are the altitude, the dirt roads, the discipline of the camps in Iten and Kaptagat, and the long daily walks to school in childhood. The Kalenjin runners of the Rift Valley have taken the very terrain that was hardest and made it the terrain that built their lungs. They did not choose the hill. GOD used the hill, and through it HE formed them.

This morning I want to talk about the terrain you did not choose.

Most of us spend a lot of time wishing we had been handed a different terrain. A different family, a different upbringing, a different country, a different body. A different season of grief or hardship or waiting. We did not choose any of it. And when the terrain is hard, the temptation is to wait. To wait for things to ease, for the loss to pass, for the day we feel ready, for the hill to soften.

The Word of GOD this morning says something else. It says you have already been sent into the terrain. You did not pick it. You were sent into it. And what goes with you matters more than what you carry. That truth runs through four readings this morning. They do not look related. A disciple-making plan. A letter from a man in chains. A hunting story. A teaching on healing. By the end they say one thing.

Start with the disciple-making plan. Peyton Jones and Kris Langham, in Discipology, teach that Jesus formed HIS disciples through three rhythms over three years. Year One was time. The disciples simply spent time with HIM. They watched HIM, they ate with HIM, they walked with HIM. They learned what HE was like by being near HIM.

Year Two was teaching. They watched HIM heal, and HE taught them what the healing meant. They saw HIM forgive, and HE showed them what the forgiveness was for. They saw HIM serve, and HE opened to them what the service made possible. They learned what was in HIS hands by watching what HIS hands did.

Then came Year Three. The tactics. The sending.

Mark 3:14 holds both halves of HIS strategy in one sentence. Jesus appointed twelve “that they might be with him, and that he might send them out to preach.” The being-with and the being-sent are bound together. The disciples were formed in HIS presence so that they could be sent into terrain they did not choose. In Matthew 10 HE gave them authority and sent them out, with these words. “Heal the sick. Raise the dead. Cleanse those who have leprosy. Drive out demons. Freely you have received. Freely give.”

The disciples did not feel ready. They were fishermen. They were tax collectors. Some of them were zealots. They had no training in healing or in preaching. And now HE was sending them into Galilee with this commission.

Peyton and Kris write the line that holds the whole movement together. Readiness does not come first. Obedience comes first. We are not waiting to feel qualified before we go. We are going because HE said go. And the going itself is the qualifying.

There is an image they use that has stayed with me. Christianity is like a swimming class that never lets you into the pool. You cannot learn buoyancy from the bleachers. You can watch other people swim every Sunday for thirty years. You can take notes. You can pass quizzes. But until you are in the water, you do not know what water is.

The disciples in Matthew 10 went into the water. Most of them came back amazed. Even the demons listened, they said. People were healed. People were saved. The pool was the place of the formation. The going was the qualifying. The runners of Iten learn the same way. They do not learn altitude from a lecture. They learn it by breathing thin air at dawn. You were sent into terrain you did not choose. The terrain is the pool. You learn buoyancy by being in it.

That sending required something the disciples did not yet have. They had authority. They did not have meekness. Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters to early churches on his way to Rome and execution, names what the sending actually carries. He was already in chains. He was already being escorted to Rome to be killed for his faith. He had every reason to write with apostolic confidence, with a strong voice, with the weight of his coming martyrdom behind every word.

Instead, he writes this. “I have great knowledge in God, but I restrain myself, lest I should perish through boasting.”

Sit with that sentence for a moment. A man in chains, on his way to be killed, writing to churches who already read him as a saint, says he has great knowledge in God, and then immediately restrains himself, lest he perish through boasting. He goes further. He says that when people praise him, the praise scourges him. He says he longs to suffer for Christ but is not sure he is worthy. He says he himself, even bound for the sake of Christ, is not yet worthy of Christ.

And then the line that holds everything else. “I therefore have need of meekness, by which the prince of this world is brought to nought.”

Meekness. That is the weapon. That is what defeats the prince of this world.

This is what goes with the one who is sent. You have been sent into terrain you did not choose, and the temptation in hard terrain is to gather strength. To stiffen the spine. To prepare to fight. To say, I will be stronger than this place, tougher than this loss, smarter than this attack. Ignatius says no. The kingdom does not arm its sent ones with strength they can generate. It arms them with meekness that brings the prince of this world to nothing.

Jesus said it on the mountain in Matthew 5. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” HE did not say blessed are the strong. The earth is inherited by humility, not by force. The prince of this world is defeated by quieter voices, not louder ones. The champions of the Rift Valley know this in their bodies. They do not conquer the thin air by fighting it. They submit to it. They let the altitude reshape lung and leg. The submission is the strength.

Christ HIMSELF was the meek one. Isaiah 53 says HE was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so HE did not open HIS mouth. The cross was meekness in its purest form. The Son of GOD, with all power, chose not to use it. HE let HIMSELF be sent into the most unchosen terrain of all. And out of that meekness came the resurrection. When you are sent into terrain you did not choose, the weapon you carry is not strength. It is meekness.

Then there is the compass. The ten-day plan from ResLife Church tells a story from the author’s teen years. He was hunting caribou in the Canadian wilderness with his father. He had killed his caribou and had to carry the meat down the mountain. He talked his father into letting him take two trips so he could sleep in the next morning. He loaded sixty pounds of meat into his backpack. He left his coat and his gun at the camp. From the top of the mountain he spotted a pond he was meant to pass on his right once he re-entered the forest. He checked his compass and started down.

When he reached the trees, he came to a pond. But it was on his right, far off, not on his left where it should have been. He reached for his compass and found it gone. It had fallen out of his pocket. So he trusted the landmark instead. He changed his course.

He walked another mile or two and knew he was in trouble. He climbed a hill to look around. In every direction stood mountains and lakes and bald hills, all of them the same. He was carrying sixty pounds of raw meat in bear country. He had no coat. He had no gun. He had no compass.

He prayed.

Then he saw an island in one of the lakes. He knew his lake had an island. He hiked back. He survived. And he learned later that there had been two ponds, not one. The first, the one he could not see from the top, was the right one. The second, the one he trusted, was the wrong one. He had been on course. He took directions from a landmark that lied, and the lie looked exactly like the truth.

The Word of GOD is the compass. The world hands you landmarks and then moves them. It hands you what looks like the right pond and is the wrong one. The lying landmark is the dangerous one, because you do not know you are off course. You think you are right. Jesus in HIS wilderness temptation, in Matthew 4, faced three lying landmarks in a row. The enemy showed HIM bread when HE was hungry, the kingdoms of the world when HE had none, a way to prove HIS identity by leaping from the temple. Each time, Jesus answered with the Word. It is written. It is written. It is written. Psalm 119:9 asks how a young person keeps his way pure, and answers, by guarding it according to your word. When you are sent into terrain you did not choose, the compass is the Word. Not the feeling. Not the crowd. Not the cultural landmark shifting under your feet. The Word.

There is one more reading, and it answers the hardest question. Pastor Daniel Vander Klok of ResLife Church, who writes on the healing ministry of Jesus and the believer’s part in carrying it forward, asks where pain comes from. His answer is careful. GOD is not the source of all pain. Some pain is the work of the enemy. John 10:10. The thief comes to steal, kill, and destroy. Some pain is the natural consequence of our own choices. Vander Klok tells his own story of falling twenty-five feet at a climbing gym after ignoring the safety rule, and needing sixteen screws and two metal plates to put his heel back together. That was not GOD’s punishment. That was finding out what obedience would have spared him. And some pain is the cost of living in a fallen world. Romans 8 says creation itself is in bondage, waiting to be set free.

But then the move that holds the whole chapter. GOD does not have to be the source of something to use it for our good. GOD is the master of the reverse. It is a wrestling image. A reverse is when you take your opponent’s own strength and momentum and turn them against him. The example Vander Klok gives is Acts 8. A great persecution rose against the church in Jerusalem. The enemy wanted to crush it before it could grow. The believers were scattered. They fled. They were chased. They lost their homes. The terrain they were sent into was the terrain of persecution, and they did not choose it. And then verse 4. “Those who were scattered went about preaching the Word.” The very scattering that was meant to destroy the church became the way the church went into all the world. The attack became the fuel. GOD did not author the persecution. GOD turned it into the engine of the gospel.

This is what GOD does in the unchosen terrain. HE reverses it. HE takes what was meant to destroy you and makes it the ground of HIS purpose for you.

The Kalenjin runners of Iten did not choose the altitude. GOD used the altitude, and it became the ground of their making. You did not choose your terrain either. You did not choose where you were born, or who raised you, or the hour the loss arrived. You did not choose the chains, the scattering, the wilderness. But you were sent into all of it. And what goes with you is not strength. What goes with you is the meekness that brought the prince of this world to nothing, the Word that held Jesus when every landmark shifted, the authority HE gave the twelve, and the GOD who has spent two thousand years turning attacks into fuel.

The hill is not the gift. The reversal is the gift. But the hill is the ground where the reversal finds you. The very terrain that costs you is the terrain where HE is forming you into something you could not have become on flatter ground, because flatter ground never required the meekness, or the Word, or the trust that reversal demands.

The runners of Iten will gather again tomorrow before dawn on the same rust-colored roads. Most of them will not become world champions. The running itself is the making. The faithfulness is the making. The hill is high. The sun comes up. They run.

Your terrain is high. The sun has come up. You are still on the road. You are not alone.

I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.

And so we trust. Grace and Peace. Amen.

The music

Three contemporary songs that ground What Goes With You. Each one carries a different facet of the terrain you did not choose, and what goes with you into it.

Same God — Elevation Worship
This song calls on the God of Jacob, of Moses, of Mary, of David, and lands on the line that fits this message exactly. “I may not face Goliath, but I’ve got my own giants.” It is the same GOD who used hard ground to make shepherds into kings and fishermen into apostles, standing now with the one sent into terrain they did not choose. The giants you did not pick become the ground where HIS faithfulness shows. HE is unchanged. HE is the master of the reverse, yesterday and today. Listen on YouTube →

Yet Not I But Through Christ In Me — CityAlight
This is the Ignatius heart of the message set to music. “I labour on in weakness and rejoicing, for in my need HIS power is displayed.” It is not the strength of the self-sufficient. It is the meekness that knows it carries Christ. “Through the deepest valley HE will lead.” The one sent into unchosen terrain does not carry his own force as the weapon. He carries Christ in him, and the carrying is the strength. Listen on YouTube →

Build My Life — Pat Barrett and Chris Tomlin
This is the lost compass answered. “I will build my life upon Your love, it is a firm foundation. I will put my trust in You alone, and I will not be shaken.” When the wrong landmark looks exactly like the right one, when every other ground shifts under your feet, the Word is the foundation that holds. The hunter trusted the wrong pond. The believer trusts what is written. The house on the rock stands when the storm comes, because of what it was built on. Listen on YouTube →

Sunday, June 7, 2026 · The Second Sunday after Pentecost

The Rest He Promised

The newest Marc My Sabbath. Approximately fourteen to fifteen minutes spoken. Anchored in Psalm 46:10 and Matthew 11:28-29. The companion to this morning’s daily word, While We Sleep. Audio recording forthcoming and will be added to this page.

The world is tired in a way it cannot fully name. We measure productivity in hours and outputs, but we have not figured out how to measure what has been lost. Sleep has become a luxury. Stillness has become suspicious. Rest has become a thing many of us feel guilty for needing.

More than a third of adults regularly experience poor sleep, with measurable consequences for the body. But the deeper exhaustion in our lives is not just about sleep. We are also soul-tired in a way the body cannot fix on its own. The Sabbath morning is the day GOD has set aside to remind us that there is another kind of rest on offer, a rest that goes beneath what any pillow can give.

So this morning, on this Sabbath, let us spend some time with the rest HE promised. What it is. What it is not. Why so many of us miss it. And how, on this seventh day of the week, we might finally begin to receive it.

What Rest Is Not

Before we can speak about what rest is, we need to clear the ground about what rest is not.

Rest is not laziness. Rest is not idleness. Rest is not retirement, and it is not the absence of work. Many of us were taught, somewhere along the way, that stopping is a moral failure. That the person who pauses is the person who slacks. We carry that lesson into our adult lives without examining it, and then we wonder why we cannot rest even when our schedules briefly allow it.

Rest is also not vacation. Vacation is a season. Rest is a rhythm. It is not the absence of activity. It is the presence of trust.

The rest GOD promised in Scripture is not the rest of an empty calendar. It is the rest of a settled soul. It is the rest of knowing that someone else is holding what we have been straining to hold. It is the rest of a child who has fallen asleep in a parent’s arms, not because the room is quiet, but because the arms are trustworthy.

That is the kind of rest we are after this morning.

The Generation That Missed It

There was a generation of Israelites who never entered the rest GOD had prepared for them. They came out of Egypt with great power and provision. The Red Sea opened in front of them. Manna fell in the wilderness. Water came from rocks. They saw the hand of GOD with their own eyes more times than most of us can imagine.

And still they did not enter the rest.

Exodus 33:14 records the promise clearly. GOD says to Israel, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” Hebrews tells us later, looking back, that this generation refused to receive what was being offered. They did not believe. They did not obey. They grumbled. They doubted. They wanted to manage outcomes that were not theirs to manage.

Katie Hauck, a Bible teacher who writes on the life of faith, writes about this generation today. She names the heart of the failure with painful precision. They had character defects. A grip on control. A demand for justice. A need to understand. They had their own ideas about what should happen, how it should happen, and when. And when things did not go their way, they questioned GOD and took matters into their own hands.

The result was forty years of wandering. Not because GOD abandoned them. Because they could not put down the loads they were never asked to carry. They wanted to be the gods of their own story. And so they spent four decades circling the same desert, because the rest on offer was on the other side of releasing what they could not let go.

This is the pastoral mirror the reading places in front of us. The exhaustion we carry, the spinning in circles, the strange feeling of moving without ever arriving, sometimes these are not the consequences of how hard life is. Sometimes they are the consequences of how tightly we are holding on.

The Silent March

When the next generation finally got their opportunity, GOD gave them a strange instruction. They were to march around the city of Jericho. Six days, once around the city, in complete silence. On the seventh day, seven times around, still silent. And then the priests would blow the trumpets, the people would let out a single great shout, and the walls would come down.

That was the battle plan.

No siege. No tunnels. No catapults. No swords drawn. Just feet on the ground, around a wall, in silence, for a week.

You can almost hear the questions the soldiers must have wanted to ask. Why this? Why nothing? They wanted to fight. They wanted to be angry. They wanted to control how the battle went. GOD asked them to close their mouths and trust.

And the walls fell.

There is a teaching here that the world has trouble sitting with. The most decisive moment in Israel’s entry into the promised land was a moment of disciplined silence. The shout came at the end, after the walking and the waiting and the not knowing. The walls did not fall because the people willed them down. The walls fell because the people walked in the rhythm GOD set, and trusted what they could not see.

Most of us are loud around our Jerichos. We argue. We strategize. We rehearse. We push. And the walls do not fall. They might even seem taller after we have spent our energy.

This morning is an invitation to consider what walls in our own lives we have been trying to push down with strength, when the rhythm GOD is asking for is silence and trust. The march is not nothing. The march is faith in motion. But the march is not striving, either. It is the discipline of letting GOD do GOD’s work while we do our small, faithful, repeating part.

Be Still, and Know

Psalm 46:10 contains one of the most familiar verses in all of Scripture. “Be still, and know that I am God.”

It is on coffee mugs. It is on posts and screens. It is on the walls of countless homes. And yet the verse is harder than it looks.

The stillness is not just a physical posture. The stillness is the cessation of striving. The release of the grip. The end of the inner argument with GOD about how things ought to be going. And the knowing is not just intellectual assent. The knowing is the deep recognition that HE is GOD, sovereign and just and all-knowing, and that we are not.

That knowing releases the grip. Not because the hard things have stopped being hard. They have not. But because the One who holds all things is with us in the middle of them.

Ignatius of Antioch writes this morning from a Roman prison, on his way to martyrdom, about exactly this kind of settled smallness. He calls it the modesty of spirit. He says he is not worthy to be compared to those who are at liberty. He chains together a remarkable list of Scripture passages where the most respected figures declared their own smallness before GOD.

Abraham and Job called themselves “dust and ashes.” Moses said, “I am of a feeble voice, and of a slow tongue.” The publican in Luke’s gospel prayed, “GOD be merciful to me a sinner.” Ignatius’s point is that the saints of Scripture, the ones whose lives bore lasting fruit, were the ones who never inflated themselves to GOD-size. They stayed small enough to be carried. And in that smallness, they received the rest the puffed-up cannot find.

We carry exhaustion because we keep trying to be GOD-sized. We carry the world we cannot hold. We carry the outcomes we cannot control. We carry the justice we are not equipped to administer. And we wonder why we are so tired.

The rest lives at human-size with GOD-size company. That is the architecture of the gospel.

The Yoke That Is Easy

Jesus puts this invitation in its clearest form in Matthew 11. “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

There is a craft detail here that we miss when we move quickly. A yoke was not an instrument of leisure. A yoke was an instrument of work. The animal under the yoke was pulling a plow or a cart. Jesus is not offering a hammock. HE is offering a different kind of work, harnessed to HIM, walking in HIS pace, learning HIS way.

The yokes we make for ourselves chafe because they are not fitted to who we actually are. The yoke Jesus offers fits because the One who made us is the One who shaped it.

And notice the phrase HE uses. “Rest unto your souls.” Not just rest from work. Soul-rest. The deeper rest. The kind that does not require a different schedule, because it goes down beneath the schedule into the place where the schedule cannot reach.

This is the rest the Israelites missed. The rest the next generation found by walking quietly around Jericho. The rest the Psalmist named in three short words. The rest Christ holds out to anyone willing to come.

The Body Teaches the Soul

Every night of our lives, we have been receiving a quiet education in this rest. While we sleep, the brain consolidates short-term memories into long-term storage. It prepares neurons for learning the following day. It repairs tissues throughout the body. It boosts the immune system. The most essential work the body does, it does while we are still.

This is not coincidence. This is the architecture GOD wrote into bodies long before any of us were born. The healing, the memory, the cellular repair, the immune renewal, all of it happens after we have stopped. None of it happens while we are striving for it.

The Sabbath is the soul’s version of the same architecture. We stop. HE works. The consolidation, the healing, the preparation, the renewal happen at the level of the soul exactly the way they happen at the level of the body. Because GOD made the body and the soul, and GOD wrote rest into both.

The body has been teaching the lesson for as long as we have had bodies. The Sabbath is the day we finally take the lesson seriously.

Sent From Rest

There is one more piece. The Sabbath is not retreat from the world. The Sabbath is the source from which we are sent back into it.

In John 20, after the resurrection, Jesus stood among HIS disciples in a locked room. They were terrified. They were hiding. They had every reason to be exhausted in body and soul. HIS first words to them were “Peace be with you.” Then HE said, “As the Father has sent Me, so I am sending you.”

Notice the order. Peace first. Sending second. Rest before mission. The settled soul before the work in the world.

Pastor Segun Oduyebo, a pastor who writes on living sent into the world, writes this morning that every believer is on a divine assignment, and that the assignment does not have to be dramatic to be real. A single act of kindness. A prayer for a colleague. A word of encouragement at the right moment. These are the small sent acts that shift atmospheres. They flow from a soul that has been resting in the One who sends, rather than from a soul that is performing for the world that watches.

The well that is full pours out. The well that is empty performs.

This is why the Sabbath matters not only for our own sake, but for everyone whose life we are about to touch in the week ahead. The world does not need more striving Christians. The world needs more resting ones. People who know whose they are. People who have been with GOD long enough this morning that they will not need to prove themselves all week.

Today Is the Day

Today is the Sabbath. The rest GOD promised is on offer. It is not earned. It is not manufactured. It is received by those who are small enough to receive it and still enough to know what is coming.

The world will not stop being loud. The pressures will not vanish. The Jerichos in front of us will still be there tomorrow morning. But for these few hours, on this seventh day, the invitation is simple. Stop trying to be GOD. Let HIM be GOD. Trust what is happening in the silence. Walk the slow circle around the wall and let the trumpets sound when GOD says they sound.

The body has been showing us the way every night of our lives. Scripture has been showing us the way for thousands of years. Jesus walked into history, lived a real life, suffered a real death, rose to a real life again, and stood among HIS frightened disciples to say, “Peace be with you.” That peace is the rest we are after.

Receive it this morning. Then walk back into the week from a settled place, rather than a striving one.

I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.

And so we trust. Grace and Peace. Amen.

Music to carry the weight

Three contemporary songs that ground The Rest He Promised. Each one carries a different facet of the rest HE offers.

Lord I Need You — Matt Maher
Matt Maher wrote this song with the Passion team, and it opens with a line that could be the whole sermon in miniature: “Lord I come, I confess, bowing here I find my rest.” Hymnals that catalog it list Matthew 11 and the theme of rest among its subjects. It is the human-size confession that Ignatius preaches. Not the strength of the self-sufficient, but the smallness that knows it needs GOD every hour. The rest begins where the striving to be GOD-sized ends. Listen on YouTube →

Rest On Us — Maverick City Music and UPPERROOM
Released in 2021, this song is almost nothing but a repeated plea for the Spirit to come and rest on the room. There is no striving in it. No performance. It builds slowly and then simply waits, which is the hardest thing a song can do and the exact thing this Sabbath asks of us. It is Be still and know turned into a held breath. The walls at Jericho came down in silence like this, after the people stopped trying to manage the battle. Listen on YouTube →

Come to Me — Bethel Music
This song takes its words straight from the anchor text of the whole message. Come to me, all who are weary. It is the invitation of Matthew 11 set to music, gentle and unhurried, asking the listener to lay the burden down and receive what cannot be earned. It does not tell you to try harder. It tells you to come. That is the yoke that is easy, the burden that is light, the rest unto the soul. Listen on YouTube →

Sunday, May 31, 2026 · The First Sunday after Pentecost

Find the Eye

A Marc My Sabbath homily. Approximately fifteen to sixteen minutes spoken. Anchored in Philippians 4:6–7. Set against the opening of the Atlantic hurricane season on June 1. The companion to this morning’s daily word, The Eye at the Center. Audio recording forthcoming and will be added to this page.

Grace and peace to you.

Wherever you are reading this, whatever you have walked through this week, there is space at this table for you. If today is calm for you, welcome. If today is the eye of something, welcome. If the rainbands are hitting you right now and you cannot remember the last time you felt still, welcome. The word this morning is for all of those rooms.

Some of you have been in a hurricane. Not a metaphor. The wind. The water. The waiting. This word is not for you as an illustration. It is for you as a witness. The storm had an eye. You know this. That is the fact we start from.

Tomorrow is June 1. The Atlantic hurricane season opens. So let me start with what the storm actually is.

A hurricane is one of the largest things that happens on the surface of the planet. It can grow more than a thousand miles across, and the rain falls not in inches but in feet. The energy is almost impossible to hold in your mind. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says a single average hurricane releases the heat equivalent of two hundred times the entire world’s electrical generating capacity. NASA says the same storm releases as much energy in its life cycle as ten thousand nuclear bombs. That is not a storm you out-muscle. That is a storm you survive.

That is the outside of a hurricane.

Now look at the inside. Because at the very center of that monster, there is a circle. Twenty to forty miles across. Inside that circle the wind drops. The clouds break apart. The sky, in the middle of the worst storm on earth, often goes blue. Birds get trapped inside it and ride along, because it is the only calm they can find.

That circle is called the eye.

And here is the thing I need you to hear. The eye is not the absence of the storm. The hurricane is still happening. The eyewall is still standing like a wall of water and wind. The rainbands are still spinning for hundreds of miles. Nothing about the storm has stopped. But inside the eye, for a few miles in every direction, there is peace.

Hold that image, because that is the whole sermon.

Now, I want to say something before I go one step further.

This is not a try-harder sermon.

I have heard too many sermons in my life that landed on the listener like a weight. Be calmer. Pray more. Worry less. Show greater faith. And the thing underneath all of them was always the same lie. The lie was that GOD’s peace is a wage you earn by believing hard enough, praying long enough, white-knuckling your faith strong enough. As if the eye were something you build with your own two hands.

That is not the Gospel. The eye is not earned. The eye is given.

Let me show you that from a man who wrote about peace from the worst place a person can write from.

Paul writes from a prison in Rome. He is in chains. He does not know if he will walk out alive. And from inside that cell, he writes a letter to a small church in a town called Philippi, and at the heart of it he writes this.

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to GOD. And the peace of GOD, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

Now, that verse has been used as a weapon. It has been quoted at people who were drowning in real anxiety, real grief, real fear, and used to tell them to stop, as if their worry were a sin they should be ashamed of. I have watched it done. Maybe it has been done to you. That is not what Paul is doing. And the Greek shows us why.

The word Paul uses for anxious worry is merimnaō. Hold onto that word. Because Paul uses that exact same word earlier in the same letter, and there he uses it as a compliment. He says his young friend Timothy is the one person he can send who will genuinely care for the Philippians. The phrase translated “genuinely care” is merimnaō. The same word. Worry over here. Loving care over there. Same letter. Same writer. Same Greek.

Sit with that, because it changes everything.

The capacity to be anxious and the capacity to care deeply are not two different things. They are the same thing, bending in two different directions. Anxiety is concern that has curved back in on itself, spinning around your own fear like a storm around its own low pressure. The very same energy, turned outward, becomes love. Becomes intercession. Becomes the prayer that lifts somebody else up.

So Paul is not telling the Philippians to feel less, or that their concern is a defect. He is telling them to turn it. To take the same force that wants to spiral inward and aim it outward, at GOD in prayer, at the person next to them in love.

The eye, in Paul’s letter, is the moment the concern turns outward.

I know that turn. I have sat in chairs where the rainbands were louder than any promise I could remember. Where the worry was real and the fear about people I love was real, and the peace was nowhere I could find it by trying. And I will tell you plainly, the eye never once showed up because I tried harder. It came when I stopped clawing at my own fear, named the storm out loud, and turned the whole churning mess of it toward HIM and toward somebody else who needed me. The concern did not get smaller. It changed direction. That is the eye.

Maybe you have sat in that chair too.

And here is what Scripture does. Scripture knows the human heart bends, so it keeps teaching us in pairs.

Listen to another prisoner. Ignatius of Antioch is being marched in chains across the Roman Empire to be killed in the arena, and on that death march he writes letters to little churches to strengthen them. To the church in Magnesia he writes that every human being carries one of two stamps, the way a coin is stamped with an image. One stamp is from GOD. The other is from the world. The same blank metal. Two possible faces.

And then Ignatius says the thing that should stop you cold. He says it is not your nature that decides which stamp you carry. It is your choice. You are not fated to bear the world’s image. You are not stuck with the face that fear pressed onto you. A man in chains, days from the lions, is telling you that even there, even then, the stamp is a choice. If Ignatius could choose his stamp on the way to the arena, then the storm you are in does not get to choose yours.

There is a third pair this morning. The prophet Hosea cries out that GOD’s people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. And Jeremiah promises that under a new covenant, GOD will write HIS law not on stone tablets locked in a temple, but on the human heart, on every heart, from the least to the greatest. The Word carried inside you where no storm can reach it, or the Word left outside in the rain. Two postures.

And there is a fourth pair, and this is the one I want to leave you sitting in.

In the first book of Kings, there is a widow in a town called Zarephath. There is a famine in the land. She has reached the end of her flour. She has reached the end of her oil. She has measured out the very last handful, enough for one final small meal for herself and her son, and she has gone out to gather a few sticks to build the fire to cook it. Read her own words. She is gathering sticks so that she and her boy can eat their last meal and then die. She has done the math. She has accepted the ending.

And GOD interrupts her math.

GOD sends the prophet Elijah to her door before she has even lit the fire. And Elijah asks her, of all things, for water, and then for bread. He asks the starving woman to feed him first. And then he tells her what GOD has said. The jar of flour will not run out, and the jug of oil will not run dry, until the day GOD sends rain on the land again.

And she trusts. That is the miracle before the miracle. With the last of everything in her hands, she bakes the bread, and she feeds the prophet first. And the flour holds. The oil holds. And the text says she and her household ate for many days.

Many days.

I need to stop on those two words, because they are for somebody who is not in the eye and is not in the rainbands. You are in the eyewall. You are in the loudest part, where the wind is screaming and you cannot see one inch of calm in any direction. Hear me. The widow’s flour held for many days, and the storm was not over. The provision was real and the danger was still real at the same time. The eye held in her kitchen for a long, long time, day after day, without the rescue ever arriving the way she wanted it to arrive. The waiting was not a sign that GOD had left. The waiting was where she lived, inside the provision, while the famine still raged outside the door.

And then the worst thing happened anyway.

Her son got sick. And her son died.

And the widow turned on Elijah and said the words that anyone who has buried someone has wanted to scream at GOD. She said, have you come here just to remind me of my sin and to kill my son? She thought the whole thing had been a setup. She thought the flour and the oil and the many days had been a cruel trick, something to love right before it was ripped away. She thought the eye had been a lie.

I have stood with people in that exact place. Maybe you have stood there yourself. The place where the provision and the loss sit in the same house, and you cannot tell anymore whether GOD has been kind or cruel.

And here is what Elijah does. He does not argue with her. He does not correct her theology. He takes the boy. He carries him upstairs. And he cries out to GOD, stretched out over that child, begging. And the text says GOD listened to the voice of Elijah, and the life of the child came back into him, and the boy lived.

The eye holds even when death walks into the house.

That is the witness of the widow. Not that the storm never reaches you. It reached all the way to her son’s last breath. The witness is that the eye is bigger than the eyewall. The calm at the center is not a weather pattern that passes over and leaves you exposed on the far side. The calm at the center is a Person, and HE was still there when the worst thing happened, and HE was still there after.

Two coins. Two directions of merimnaō. Two postures toward the Word. Two states inside the same empty cupboard. Four pairs across this morning’s readings, and one question underneath every one of them.

Where do you turn when the storm is real?

Now I have to be careful, because the hurricane picture can mislead you, and I will not let it. On the satellite image, the eye looks like peace because the clouds are gone. But any meteorologist will tell you the truth about that eye. It is temporary. The eyewall comes back around from the other side, and the wind that was at your back is suddenly in your face, and the danger returns from the opposite direction. The eye of a real hurricane is a cruel mercy. It tricks you into walking outside right before the second half hits.

The eye this sermon is preaching is not that eye.

GOD does not cause every storm. Hear that. GOD does not send the cancer, the flood, the funeral. But GOD is in every storm. And the eye is not a gap in the weather that leaves you to face the back half alone. The eye is a Person. The eye is Christ. The eye does not pass over you and move on. HE goes with you through the front eyewall, and through the long center, and through the back eyewall, and through every mile, until you come out the other side. And when death walks into the house anyway, HE is the One stretched out over the child, calling life back.

The eye is HIM.

All week long, the daily word has been walking toward this morning. The Strong Life Force taught us surrender. Magnificent Humanity taught us what a single human being is worth in GOD’s sight. The Truth Contains the Poetry taught us to face what is real instead of hiding from it. There Are People Here to Help Now taught us that rescue is not a story that only happens to other people. Held, Not Alone taught us that the battle was never ours to win alone. The Chair Where You Sit taught us that the deepest care often gets handed across an ordinary room with no brand on it. And this morning, The Eye at the Center named the place all six of them have been pointing to the whole time.

Six words. Seven days. One teaching.

The still center inside the storm is Christ. And the only move HE asks of you is not to try harder, not to feel less, not to build your own calm. The only move is to turn. To take the storm of concern spinning inside you and aim it at HIM before fear becomes the only voice in the room.

The hurricane season starts tomorrow. The Atlantic is warming right now. The first names on the list are already chosen. Some of those storms will come ashore, and some of you will sit through one with the windows taped and the radio on. And some of you are already in a storm that has nothing to do with the weather, and you have been in it for years.

You do not have to find your way out of the storm to find HIM. You do not have to wait for the wind to die. You only have to turn toward HIM right where you already are, in the loudest part. And HE is already there.

The eye is HIM.

I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.

And so we trust.

Grace and Peace.

Amen.

Music to carry the weight

Three songs that anchor Find the Eye. Each one carries the message in its own register.

Praise You In This Storm — Casting Crowns
The song came out of the band’s relationship with a young girl named Erin, who was dying of cancer, and her mother, who kept writing to them about her daughter’s faith through the whole ordeal. The family prayed for healing. Erin died on November 1, 2004. The song refuses the easy resolution. There is one line at the heart of it. After everything the singer expected GOD to do, after the prayers that were not answered the way the singer wanted, comes the simple admission: “it is still raining.” That is not despair. That is faith with the rain still falling on it. The song does not promise the storm has ended. The song teaches praise inside the storm that is still happening. Listen on YouTube →

It Is Well With My Soul — Audrey Assad
Horatio Spafford wrote the words to this hymn in 1873 after the loss of his four daughters at sea. The ship was the Ville du Havre. It went down in the Atlantic. His wife, Anna, sent him a two-word telegram from England that read “Saved alone.” Spafford boarded the next ship east. When the captain showed him the place in the ocean where his daughters had died, Spafford went back to his cabin and began to write. Philip Bliss composed the music for it and named his tune Ville du Havre. The hymn carries the name of the shipwreck inside its melody. Audrey Assad recorded this version for her 2016 album Inheritance. Her arrangement is sparse, piano and voice, letting the words do the work. The eye is the place where a grieving father can sit on the deck of a ship and write the words “It is well with my soul” while the water that killed his daughters moves underneath him. Listen on YouTube →

Bridge Over Troubled Water — Simon and Garfunkel
Paul Simon wrote this song in 1969. He has said in interviews that the inspiration came from a gospel record. The song was Mary, Don’t You Weep by The Swan Silvertones, and the line that caught him was Claude Jeter singing “I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name.” Simon took that line and built a song around it that reached every listener. The song does not require you to share Simon’s faith or Jeter’s faith. The song offers itself. The image of a bridge that lays itself down across the troubled water is the eye made into a song that anyone can hear. Art Garfunkel sang the lead vocal. The world has not stopped playing it since. Listen on YouTube →

Sunday, May 24, 2026 · The Day of Pentecost · Memorial Day Weekend

You Have Been Sent for a Long Time

The third Marc My Sabbath. Approximately sixteen minutes spoken. Preached on Sunday, May 24, 2026, the Day of Pentecost, at two small Lutheran congregations in the Driftless region of western Wisconsin, where the Mississippi River runs past river towns that have kept their doors open through long seasons of waiting. Opens with a Memorial Day reflection that was also posted to LinkedIn this weekend. Anchored in Acts 2, John 20:19-23, and 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13.

Grace and peace to you.

Memorial Day weekend has begun.

It is not “Happy Memorial Day.” It never was.

This weekend marks the men and women who did not come home. The ones whose names sit on stones in small-town cemeteries and on walls in big-city memorials. The ones whose families are still missing them this morning. The ones who chose service knowing what the cost might be, and paid it.

We owe them the gravity of remembering.

We also owe them this. They did not lay down their lives so we could be solemn this weekend. They laid them down so we could be free. Free to sit by a pool at sunset. Free to call our kids. Free to grill with neighbors. Free to rest. Free to be with the people we love. Free to enjoy what they no longer can.

The greatest honor we give them is not just the silence at a ceremony. It is also our presence with the people in front of us. The laughter at the table. The quiet on the porch. The hand we hold. The friend we call who has been on our mind. The simple goodness of a life lived freely and loved well.

That is what they fought for.

So this weekend, remember them. And then live in the freedom they gave you. Nothing would make them happier.

It is the day of Pentecost.

In the church year, this is the day we remember the wind. The fire. The Spirit poured out on all flesh. The disciples gathered in one room, doors locked, hearts unsure, and then suddenly something arrived that changed everything.

That is the Pentecost we read about. Acts chapter two. A house filled with the sound of a violent wind. Tongues like fire resting on every head. People from every nation hearing the wonders of GOD in their own language. Peter standing up and preaching the first sermon of the new church.

It is a story of arrival.

But here is what I want to say to you this morning, plainly, before we go any further.

The Spirit did not arrive in the Driftless region on a single Sunday in May.

The Spirit has been moving in these river towns for generations.

In fields and firehouses. In courthouses and cemeteries. In the quiet of small congregations that have kept their doors open even when no one was watching.

Pentecost is not asking us to start.

Pentecost is naming what we have already been doing.

I want to tell you a story.

There is a place in the mountains of Mexico called the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Millions of people visit every year. They walk on their knees up the long approach to the shrine, carrying candles and bringing children. They have been doing this for almost five hundred years.

And one hour from where we sit this morning, in La Crosse, there is a sister shrine. The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe sits on one hundred acres of bluff country overlooking the same Mississippi that runs past our doors. It was built because the people of this region wanted what the people of Mexico City have had for centuries. A place to gather, to pray, and to remember that GOD shows up where people keep showing up.

When you stand inside either shrine, you are not standing in a place where something happened once and ended.

You are standing in a place where the Spirit has been moving for centuries, in people who never made the news. It moves in prayers that never got recorded, and in faithfulness that just kept happening, generation after generation, because GOD kept showing up and the people kept gathering.

That is what Pentecost is.

It is not the wind on one morning.

It is what has been blowing here all along.

Look at the Gospel reading for today. John chapter twenty. Verse twenty-two.

Jesus comes to the disciples after the resurrection. They are hiding behind locked doors. They are afraid. And what does Jesus do?

He breathes on them.

He breathes on them and says, Receive the Holy Spirit.

That is the same Spirit hovering over the waters in Genesis. The same breath that filled Adam’s nostrils and gave him life. The same breath that came over the dry bones in Ezekiel and made them stand up and live. The same breath that came down at Pentecost in Acts chapter two.

It is one breath.

And it has been breathing on faithful people the whole time.

It breathed on the disciples in that locked room.

It breathed on Peter when he stood up at Pentecost and preached.

It breathed on the early church when they shared everything in common and broke bread house to house.

It breathed on Luther when he nailed his theses to the door at Wittenberg.

It has been breathing on this region for as long as there have been people here gathering in HIS name.

And it is still breathing.

Let me show you where.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. The VFW will conduct cemetery rounds at six sites across our region. People will gather at each one. They will stand in the grass. They will hear taps. They will read the names of those who did not come home.

That is the Spirit moving.

The Spirit was on them when they went. The Spirit is on us when we remember.

Listen.

Last week the volunteer fire and rescue crew in a river town near here stood at the community rummage sale and held out the boot. They grilled brats outside the corner gas station. The community fed them. They fed the community. The boot filled with bills and coins because that is what we do here. We take care of the people who take care of us. No fanfare. No ribbon cutting. Just neighbors filling the boot.

And the sister congregation near here raised over two thousand dollars at the same rummage sale, and they keep raising money quarterly because that is what this congregation does. They recently paid off their entire building debt and they are still giving back to the community from a position of strength.

That is the Spirit moving.

In June, two motorcycle runs will ride for the first responders of these towns. One for the village fire department, the other named for a fallen 911 dispatcher whose work outlives him. People will ride miles in formation, leather and chrome and the sound of engines moving in honor of small town heroes who run toward the emergency while the rest of us are still trying to figure out what happened.

A nearby American Legion post paid off the school lunch debt at a small district near here. They did not put their name on a banner. They did not call the paper. They saw that children were carrying a debt they did not create, and they covered it.

That is the Spirit moving.

The county fair near here will open this summer for the one hundred and sixty-seventh year. One hundred and sixty-seven years of farmers showing up to weigh cattle and judge pies and clap for children who raised animals from spring to August. That is not nostalgia. That is covenant kept across seven generations.

That is the Spirit moving.

This Wednesday a musician will play a Unity in the Community Concert at a riverside park near here. He is performing solely for tips. A local food truck will be there. People will bring lawn chairs. Neighbors will meet neighbors. A musician is giving his music to the village because the village needs the music and he has it to give.

The Spirit is not somewhere else.

The Spirit is here.

The Spirit is in farmers who get up before sunrise to check the fields. The Spirit is in volunteer firefighters who answer the pager at three in the morning without complaint. Retired teachers who still pack school supplies in August for kids they will never meet? That’s the Spirit too. Widows and widowers who keep showing up to worship in pews that are emptier than they used to be? Also the Spirit. The worship still matters even when the room is quieter.

You did not start this on Pentecost morning.

You have been doing this for a long time.

Paul writes to the Corinthians in our second reading. Chapter twelve. There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same GOD at work.

Hear that.

Different gifts. Different service. Different working. One Spirit.

That means the farmer and the firefighter and the funeral home and the kid driving home from college this weekend and the grandmother who has been a Lutheran since the Truman administration are all working from the same Spirit.

The Spirit who breathed on the disciples is the same Spirit breathing on this congregation right now.

The Spirit who lit fire on the heads of Galileans is the same Spirit who has been lighting fire under the work of small Driftless congregations for as long as there have been small Driftless congregations.

You are not auxiliary to Pentecost.

You are part of Pentecost still happening.

I want to address something honestly. Both of these congregations have lived without a settled pastor for a stretch now. There is a temptation in any season like that to wonder whether the Spirit has moved on. Whether GOD has gotten quieter because the structures are smaller. Whether the absence of a called pastor means the absence of the Spirit’s call.

Listen to me.

The Spirit does not require a building program to move. There is no need for a marketing budget or a strategic plan from synod headquarters. The Spirit needs people who keep showing up and trust that GOD is doing more than they can see.

That is you.

You have been doing it.

The Spirit has been moving here through farmers and volunteer firefighters and council chairs and quilters and ushers and people who bring food when somebody dies. The Spirit has been moving through the readers who stand up Sunday after Sunday and read the lessons. Through the people who came early today to unlock the doors and start the coffee. Through every name we will pray for in the prayers of intercession this morning, named and unnamed.

The book of Acts opens with the disciples gathered in one place. Acts chapter two, verse one. They were all together in one place. That is the first thing the Spirit found when the Spirit moved on Pentecost morning. A people who had stayed together.

You have stayed together.

That is not nothing.

That is everything.

We are in Mental Health Awareness Month. That matters too. The Spirit moves in counselors and in friends and in the courage it takes to ask for help. The Spirit moves in the work that walks alongside people who are carrying weights they cannot lay down by themselves. If you are carrying something heavy this morning, you are not outside the reach of Pentecost. You are exactly the place where the Spirit shows up.

The Spirit does not avoid pain. The Spirit moves through it.

So this is what I want to leave you with.

Pentecost is not somewhere else. Pentecost is here. The wind is not arriving for the first time this morning. The wind has been blowing in this region for generations.

You have been sent for a long time.

You did not get sent yesterday. You got sent on the day you were baptized. You got sent every time you came back to the table. You got sent every time you said yes to one more day of showing up. The Spirit has been with you the entire time.

The fire on the head is not waiting for somebody more important to receive it.

The Spirit has already marked you.

The breath in your lungs this morning is HIS breath.

The voice you use to sing this morning is HIS Spirit on your tongue.

The hand you will use to shake your neighbor’s hand at the Peace belongs to someone marked by GOD for service.

You are not waiting for Pentecost.

You are living inside the same Spirit.

The river is still moving.

The cemeteries are still tended.

The Spirit is still here.

And so we trust.

Amen.

Grace and Peace.

Sunday, May 17, 2026 · The Seventh Sunday of Easter

Take the Hard Right

The second Marc My Sabbath. Approximately thirteen minutes spoken. Anchored in Hebrews 12:1.

Grace and peace to you.

This morning the word is Take the Hard Right.

The anchor verse is Hebrews 12:1.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” (NIV)

I want to say something before anything else.

This is not a message about trying harder.

I have heard too many sermons in my life that landed on the listener like a weight. Try harder. Pray harder. Be better. Show up more. The implication underneath was always that GOD’s love and the Spirit’s presence were waiting on the other side of effort, like a wage we had not yet earned.

That is not the Gospel.

This morning is about something else.

This is a message about trusting the GOD who gives strength when the hard right is the only road left.

The cloud matters. The race is set. But the center of the race is not the cloud. The center is Jesus, who is already faithful when we are not. The writer of Hebrews says the same thing in the very next verse. We fix our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. He is the One who began this. He is the One who finishes it.

That is the order. Grace first. Then everything else.

Today is May 17. Seventy-two years ago today, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education. Unanimously. The decision ended legal segregation in American public schools. I want to come back to that case later in this homily. For now I want you to hold the date in your mind. Something happened on May 17. Something that took decades to make happen. Something that no single person built alone.

A friend in my Bible study put it this way this week.

“In the Army we used to call it taking the hard right, doing what we know is right even when it is the more difficult decision.”

That stayed with me.

It is plain language for what scripture has always called faithfulness.

I want to acknowledge something before I go any further. Some of you reading or hearing this are tired. Not metaphorically tired. Actually tired. You have been doing the right thing for a long time and the world has not noticed. You have been praying for someone and they have not come home. You have been showing up at a job, a marriage, a friendship, a recovery, a long fight, and the finish line keeps moving.

I see you.

The hard right is hard. It has always been hard.

The cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11 and 12 is not a cloud of heroes who never struggled. Read Hebrews 11 sometime and look at who is actually in it. Abraham, who lied about his wife. Jacob, who cheated his brother. Moses, who killed a man. Rahab, who lived on the wrong side of every line. David, who broke commandments. None of them got it right the first time. None of them carried the work without doubt or failure or return.

The cloud is not a cloud of heroes.

It is a cloud of people who kept returning.

Now let me come back to Brown v. Board.

The legal strategy that became Brown v. Board began in earnest in 1936. Eighteen years before the ruling. The architect of that strategy was a man named Charles Hamilton Houston. He was the dean of Howard University Law School. He trained Thurgood Marshall, who would later become a Supreme Court Justice. He spent years driving across the segregated South in his own car, documenting the conditions of Black schools, building case after case against the legal foundation of segregation.

Houston died in 1950.

Four years before the ruling.

He never saw it.

The lawyers who finished the work were standing on his shoulders. The plaintiffs whose names were on the case were standing on the shoulders of every Black family who had fought this fight before them. The cloud surrounding Brown v. Board stretched back fifty-eight years to Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The cloud included people whose names we will never know. People who tried and failed. People who carried the work for a generation and then handed it off.

The work continued without Houston.

The work continued because of Houston.

That is what the cloud looks like.

In the book of Nehemiah, after the wall around Jerusalem is finally built, the people gather and pray a long prayer of remembrance.

It is one of the longest prayers in scripture. The whole community is there. They have been working on the wall for months. They have done what looked impossible. The wall stands. The city is defensible again. The work is done.

And what do they do?

They do not celebrate.

They gather. They fast. They put on sackcloth. They confess.

And they walk through their history.

GOD created the world. GOD chose Abraham. GOD made promises Abraham could not understand. GOD heard the cries of the people in Egypt. GOD parted the Red Sea. GOD gave the Law on Sinai. GOD fed the people with manna in the wilderness. GOD gave water from rock. GOD brought them into the land.

GOD was faithful.

The people were not.

They forgot. They returned. They forgot again. They returned again. The pattern went on for centuries. Idols and exile. Repentance and renewal. Forgetting and returning.

That is our story too.

When we forget what GOD has done, the walls we build will not hold us. The careers, the savings, the houses, the reputations, the platforms. None of them can carry the weight of a life. They were never meant to.

The wall is not the security.

The remembrance is.

Nehemiah tells us they remembered. They confessed. They turned back.

That is the communal hard right.

A whole people stopping to look at their history and tell the truth about it. Not to wallow. Not to shame themselves. To remember who GOD had been, so they could trust who GOD still is.

That is what the lawyers building Brown v. Board were doing in a different key. They were remembering. They were saying, this country has done evil to Black children, and we are going to tell the truth about it in a courtroom until the law changes. They were doing the communal hard right.

Yesterday’s daily word ended in Genesis 39.

There is one line from that chapter I want to hold for a minute.

“The Lord was with Joseph.”

Not after Egypt.

In Egypt.

Joseph was a teenager who had been betrayed by his own brothers. Sold into slavery. Carried south to a country whose language he did not speak. Bought by a man named Potiphar. Made to serve in a house that was not his. Far from his father. Far from his mother who was already dead. Far from any future he had once dreamed of.

He could have hardened.

He could have stolen from Potiphar’s house. He could have schemed. He could have used Potiphar’s wife when she offered herself to him. Any of those choices would have been understandable given what had been done to him.

He did none of them.

He chose how to live in Egypt.

He chose faithfulness when no one was watching.

He chose integrity in the private moments.

And GOD was with him there. Not in spite of Egypt. In Egypt.

That is the individual hard right. One person, in the dark, in a place he did not choose, choosing what is right when no one would have applauded the choice. No audience. No reward. Just the daily work of refusing to become the thing that had been done to him.

The cloud is full of Josephs.

The cloud is full of the mother who chose to be patient with a hard child when she was exhausted. The husband who told the truth to his wife when a lie would have been easier. The employee who refused to fudge the numbers when everyone else was. The neighbor who said the kind thing when the mean thing would have been quicker. The student who stayed in the long study when the shortcut was right there.

None of them made the news.

GOD was with them.

Ignatius of Antioch wrote a letter to a small church in Ephesus on his way to Rome.

He was a prisoner. He was being marched across the Roman Empire to be killed in the arena. He had every reason to be writing a tortured letter about his own suffering.

He did not.

He wrote about the church gathering.

He told them to gather more often. To meet together more frequently for thanksgiving to GOD. He said when the church gathers in concord, the powers of Satan are cast down.

That word concord is worth slowing down on. It does not mean uniformity. It does not mean everyone agreeing on everything. It means heart-together. It means showing up to the same room with the same Lord and being willing to do the work of staying together. Ignatius believed that pattern of gathering, alone, was a weapon against evil.

That gathering is available to anyone.

It is not a special circle. It is not a club. It is the simple pattern of two or three people coming together honestly in faith. A Bible study at a kitchen table. A small group meeting in a basement. A friend you call once a week to pray with. A spouse you read scripture with at night. A neighbor you bring coffee to and sit with for half an hour.

The disciples on the morning of Pentecost were doing exactly that. They were gathered together in one place. Not a cathedral. Not a campaign. A room with a door. Two or three or twelve people who had decided to keep showing up to each other in the absence of a clear plan.

That gathering is what the Spirit fell on.

Next Sunday is Pentecost.

The day the church remembers the wind and the fire. The day a small frightened group of disciples became a movement that spread across the known world. The day the Spirit was poured out on all flesh, as Joel had promised and Peter then quoted.

But Pentecost is not just a calendar date.

It is the shape of what GOD still does.

What I mean by that is simple. The same Spirit who fell on those disciples in that room in Jerusalem is the Spirit who falls on people still. The Spirit has not been rationed. The Spirit has not retired. The Spirit still moves through the church and through the world wherever there are returning, gathering, available people.

The text of Acts 2 is careful about what it says. It says they were gathered together in one place. Then the Spirit fell.

The Spirit fell on people who had been walking the hard right for years.

They had failed.

They had run when Jesus was arrested.

Peter had denied him three times in a single night. Thomas had refused to believe the resurrection until he could touch the wounds himself. The rest had hidden in a locked room afraid the same authorities would come for them.

They were not impressive.

They were available.

And the Spirit came as gift. Not as wage. Not as reward. As gift.

That is the pattern.

GOD fills returning people. GOD fills the available. GOD fills the cloud.

The Spirit is still falling on people who keep returning. On the addict who got up again this morning. On the parent who chose patience again at the dinner table. On the worker who refused the easy lie. On the church that gathered another Sunday in a half-empty room. On every person who carried the work without applause.

The Spirit is still falling on people who never expected to be called and who answered anyway.

All week the daily word has been pointing here.

Monday was Ambassador. Carrying Christ’s message through us, not from us.

Tuesday was Yielded Action. The Spirit fills available people, not impressive people.

Wednesday was Small Obedience, Spirit Power. Do not despise the day of small things.

Thursday was Carry It Clean. The fruit of the Spirit is how the gift is carried.

Friday was The Lord Is Near. Faithfulness is not measured by outcome. It is measured by nearness to the One who sent you.

Saturday was Anchored in Presence. The Lord was with Joseph in Egypt. Not after Egypt.

Six words building one truth.

GOD is faithful. The Spirit is gift. The hard right is the road. The cloud surrounds us.

The race is set. The cloud is real. The Spirit is given.

And so we trust.

Grace and Peace.

Amen.

Sunday, May 10, 2026 · Mother’s Day · The Sixth Sunday of Easter

Here Am I

The first Marc My Sabbath. Approximately eleven minutes spoken. Anchored in Isaiah 6:8. Listen on Marc My Words.

Grace and peace to you.

It is Mother’s Day morning. Some of you woke up to a phone call you have been waiting for. Some of you woke up to silence on a phone that will not ring again. For others, the day finds an old ache: a mother lost years ago, a child you hoped for but never held, or a relationship too complicated for a greeting card.

This Sabbath is for all of those rooms.

The text today is one of the most quoted sentences in scripture.

Here am I. Send me.

Isaiah 6:8.

People love that line. They put it on coffee mugs. They paint it on classroom walls. They use it in mission statements. They quote it like Isaiah was standing there confident, ready, eager.

But that is not what happened.

If you read the chapter from the beginning, the order is different than the slogan suggests. First Isaiah saw the Lord. High and lifted up. The room shook. Smoke filled the temple. Seraphim covered their faces with their wings. Then Isaiah saw himself. And what he said was not, “Send me.” What he said was, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” He felt undone. He saw what he was, and he was not impressed with himself.

Then grace touched him. A seraph came with a coal from the altar and touched his lips. “Your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.”

And only then did Isaiah hear the question. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”

Only then did the answer come.

Here am I. Send me.

That order matters more than the slogan does. Holiness. Honesty. Grace. Calling. Most of us want to skip to the calling. We want to be sent before we have been seen. We want the assignment without the altar. But Isaiah’s pattern is the opposite. For Isaiah, grace came before calling. Cleansing came before sending.

I have been preaching to myself this week.

I have been writing toward this question all week without knowing I was writing toward it.

And the week has landed here, on Mother’s Day, on Isaiah 6:8.

It has landed on a question that does not require me to be ready. It only requires me to be willing.

I want to talk about mothers for a moment, because today is the day to do it.

Yesterday morning I was reading 1440, the daily news digest I use as part of my morning grounding.

Yesterday’s 1440 paused its usual rhythm. In honor of Mother’s Day, the editors stepped back from the daily news and printed something different. They opened the page to readers and asked them to tell stories about their mothers. Three of those stories caught me.

One was from a woman named Ashley, in Canfield, Ohio. She wrote about her mother who watched her walk through fire more times than any parent should have to watch a child walk through fire. Through addiction. Through the long road to sobriety. Through a cancer diagnosis. Through raising two special needs boys while pursuing graduate school. Ashley wrote, “She never wavered. She never flinched. She just kept showing up, cheering louder than anyone in the room, loving me before I knew how to love myself.”

The second was from a man named Wendell, in Ventura, California. He wrote about his mother Bette. Five-foot-two. Fifth child of a traveling salesman. Survivor of the Great Depression. When Wendell was a small boy struggling to write with his right hand, Bette walked into the school and confronted his teacher and his principal, both men, and said, “If the boy wants to use his left hand, let him.” Decades later, when Wendell was a senior in high school, the same Bette told her last baby, “Go explore the world and love your life.”

The third was from a man named Stephen, in Provo, Utah. He wrote about a memory from his childhood. He had gotten angry with his mother. He threw every insult at her. He told her he would leave the family the moment he could. And his mother, calmly, without raising her voice, replied, “And I’ll love you anyways.” Stephen wrote that her answer stopped his argument so hard that he could not reply. He could not deny it was true.

Three witnesses. Three different shapes of mother-love. None of them called what they did ministry. But all of them were sent. They cooked. They prayed. They cheered. They confronted school officials. They held the line through addiction. They said “And I’ll love you anyways” when their own children threw fire at them. They lived as sent people who never needed the title to do the work.

That is Isaiah’s answer in plain clothes.

Here am I. Send me.

It does not always sound like a prophet in a smoke-filled temple. It can sound like a Depression-era woman walking into a principal’s office, a mother sitting beside a hospital bed, or four words spoken to an angry teenager who needed to hear them.

Mother’s Day is complicated for some of us. For some, it is pure joy. For others, it carries grief, distance, regret, or relationships that never were what they were supposed to be.

I will not pretend I do not know that.

What I want to say this morning is simpler than the complications. God forms us through people. Some of those people were beautiful. Some were broken. Some carried light into our lives without knowing they were carrying it. Some left wounds that still ache. God wastes none of it. HE shapes us through love, deepens us through loss, and renews us through gratitude. And then HE asks the question.

Whom shall I send?

You do not need to clean up the whole story before God can use it. You only need to bring it into the light.

So here is the word for this Mother’s Day Sabbath.

If you are a mother reading this, your faithful, ordinary work is seen by GOD. The cooking. The praying. The cheering. The confronting. The holding the line. The “And I’ll love you anyways.” You may never call it ministry. HE does.

If your mother gave you light, name her in your heart this morning and give thanks. Memory is witness.

If your mother gave you complications, you are allowed to bring that to GOD too. You do not have to pretend. HE can hold the truth of the relationship without losing track of you.

My own mother is in that complicated category. Her name was Doris. The relationship was hard. She died alone in 2016, and I learned about it after the fact. I have spent years trying to understand what to do with that, and I have not figured all of it out. But I have learned this much. GOD can hold what I cannot. The wound is real. The grace is also real. And on a Mother’s Day Sabbath, I am willing to name her in the light.

I am one of those men. The women in my life have been forming me for as long as I can remember. Jennifer, who has walked through every season I have walked through and held the line when I could not. Haley, who teaches me what steady love looks like in real time. Darcey, who chose to join this family and brings light into it. Joan, who was a surrogate mother to me when I needed one. Nancy, a professor who shaped how I think and has been a constant positive presence in my life. So many others whose names belong here too. None of them called what they did ministry. All of them lived as sent people.

And whoever you are, if you have been waiting for the conditions to be perfect before you answer GOD’s call, stop waiting. The slogan is wrong. The order is right. Grace before calling. Cleansing before sending. Honesty before assignment. GOD is not asking you to prove you are ready. HE is asking you to make yourself available.

The answer does not have to be loud. It does not have to be impressive. It only has to be honest.

Lord, here I am. I am not perfect, and I am not without fear. I am willing. Send me.

I am not here to prove myself.

I am here to make HIM visible.

And so we trust.

Grace and Peace.

Amen.

Music that anchored Here Am I

Three songs from the May 10 Mother’s Day Sabbath.