"Who is the person behind the mask...?" She looked up from the table of food she was so artfully arranging, her beautiful and piercing blue eyes catching my attention. Noticing her half-dyed, vibrant blue hair and the faint mustache growing, I asked her name while introducing myself. Unsure if “Georgie” was a girl transitioning to a guy or a guy transitioning to a girl, I determined just to be Jesus’s heart in that moment. I asked simple questions about her life, genuinely in

"The bright red coat caught my eye first..." A flash of red caught the corner of my eye from my chair on the screened-in porch. Looking up from my book, I watched a pair of cardinals flitter from tree branches to the pond and back again. “Did the vibrant male cardinal and its duller-coated female have a nest nearby? Or was this a courting dance for the pair?” I wondered. Now intrigued, I raised my eyes to the distant garden bed and gasped with delight as several iridescent

"We can cry out to God too..." In one of today’s devotional readings, I was struck by a spiritual truth about blindness. In reality, we are all blind beggars until we truly see and encounter Jesus. In the gospel passage in Mark chapter 10, Jesus is ministering in the city of Jericho. Scripture says that Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, ha