September, 2026 -

What the Locusts Ate, God Can Restore

There’s a strange thing certain pine trees do that looks, at first glance, like a design flaw. Their cones — called serotinous cones — stay sealed shut with a thick layer of resin for years, sometimes decades, refusing to release a single seed under normal conditions. Only intense heat, the kind produced by a genuine forest fire, melts that resin enough to finally crack the cones open. This means the very fire that appears to destroy the forest — blackening trunks, reducing years of growth to ash — is simultaneously the one event capable of triggering the next generation of trees.

The Cost of Cheap Grace vs. Costly Grace

Deep in the earth, under conditions of extraordinary heat and pressure sustained for over a billion years, ordinary carbon slowly becomes a diamond — dense, nearly indestructible, capable of cutting glass without dulling. A cheap glass imitation can be manufactured in a factory in minutes, polished to sparkle under the same shop lighting, indistinguishable to an untrained eye. But drop both on a hard floor, and only one of them survives the fall.

The God Who Meets You in the Ordinary

A shepherd does not expect anything remarkable to happen on a Tuesday afternoon in the back pasture. There is no ceremony to counting sheep, no significance attached to another ordinary walk behind the flock along the same worn path he has walked a hundred times before. And yet it was on exactly that kind of unremarkable afternoon, tending someone else’s sheep on the far side of a wilderness, that Moses looked over and saw a bush that would not stop burning.

Why Gratitude Is a Discipline, Not a Feeling

A farmer does not wait to feel like watering his crops before he does it. The rains may be late, the soil may be cracked, and his own strength may be running thin, but he still walks to the well every morning and carries water to the field, because he knows the harvest does not wait on his mood. What he does daily, whether he feels like it or not, is what eventually determines whether there is anything to be thankful for at all.