Dare's Blog -

The Weight of Every Word

Termites do their most serious damage without ever showing themselves. A wooden beam can look flawless from the outside — solid, painted, structurally sound to anyone glancing at it — while inside, a colony has spent months hollowing it into little more than a shell held together by surface paint and habit.

The Loneliness of Leadership

In a rainforest, most trees grow together in a dense, connected canopy — branches touching, roots intertwined, wind broken and shared long before it reaches any single trunk. But scattered above that canopy stand a handful of “emergent” trees, giants that have pushed up past everyone else, standing fifty feet or more above the shelter the rest of the forest provides each other.

Why Jesus Wept at a Grave He Was About to Reopen

Villages near active volcanoes have always lived inside a strange contradiction. When the mountain finally erupts — fields buried, homes lost, sometimes lives taken — the grief in that moment is real and immediate, regardless of anyone’s knowledge of what comes after. And yet those same villagers, generations deep in that land, know something the ash cloud doesn’t announce: the very destruction burying their crops today is what will make the soil extraordinarily fertile for decades to come.

The Ultimate Dangers of Familiarity and Complacency

Wear the same perfume every day. Within a few weeks you stop smelling it on yourself. However, not because it faded, but because your nose has stopped registering what it expects to find there. Everyone else in the room still catches it the moment you walk in. You’re the only one who’s gone numb to it. Familiarity doesn’t make a thing weaker. It makes the person closest to it stop noticing it’s even there.

When Obedience Doesn’t Make Sense

Twice a year, without a single scout sent ahead to confirm the way, flocks of migratory birds lift off and fly thousands of kilometres toward a destination none of them have personally seen this season — some species crossing entire oceans on a route etched into them before they ever tested its accuracy for themselves.

The Danger of Outsourcing Your Faith to Your Pastor

A baby elephant is born with a trunk it doesn’t yet know how to use. For months, it nurses directly while that trunk hangs almost uselessly, sometimes even getting stepped on as it wobbles along behind its mother. Slowly, under her patient watch, it learns to coil that trunk around grass, to draw water toward its own mouth, to strip bark from a branch.

Grumbling: The Sin We Never Take Seriously

Rust never announces itself with an explosion. It doesn’t need to. Left alone on an iron gate, a bicycle chain, a corrugated roof, it works in complete silence — a faint discoloration nobody bothers to scrape off, then a rougher patch, then a hole where solid metal used to be. By the time anyone treats it as a real problem, it’s usually because something has already given way: a hinge that snaps, a roof that leaks, a chain that finally breaks mid-ride.

The Ministry of Staying When It’s Hard

Old lighthouses were once kept by a single family living in genuine isolation, month after month, with one unglamorous responsibility that never changed regardless of the weather: the light could not go dark. Storms that sent every sensible ship running for harbour were, in fact, the exact nights the keeper couldn’t leave — the worse the conditions, the more essential it was that someone stayed at the top of that tower, trimming the wick, keeping the lens turning, holding a light steady for vessels they’d likely never meet and would never thank them by name.

What Your Prayer List Says About Your Faith

Every market woman’s basket, examined at the end of a trading day, tells an honest story before she says a single word about it. What she filled it with reveals exactly what she went out looking for — and just as tellingly, what she walked straight past without a second glance, however good a bargain it might have been. Two women can walk through the exact same market, past the exact same stalls, and come home with entirely different baskets, because each basket was shaped less by what was available than by what each woman had already decided mattered.

The God Who Interrupts

There’s a particular sound every long-distance driver any expressway knows well — the sudden shudder of a tyre blowing out at speed, forcing an unplanned stop on a shoulder you never intended to see. Nobody schedules a breakdown. It always arrives exactly when you have somewhere else to be, disrupting a plan that felt, until that moment, perfectly reasonable.