Pruning the Early Church
Paul, Barnabas, Apollos, Ananias, Priscilla and Aquilla
Paul, Barnabas, Apollos, Ananias, Priscilla and Aquilla
Esther read the decree. The words seemed impossible. Unreal. She felt her breath catch, her pulse quicken, her knees weaken. Her people. Her family. Her blood. Destroyed. Killed. Annihilated. She looked at Hathach, her voice barely holding. She turned over Mordecai’s request in her mind- Go to the king.
News traveled strangely inside the palace. It did not arrive as facts or proclamations, but as whispers carried by servants, fragments of conversation drifting through corridors, half‑heard laments from the outer courts. Esther sensed something was wrong long before she understood it. The palace felt unsettled. The eunuchs moved
Mordecai did not remember leaving the gate. One moment he was standing in the heat, the officials’ faces blurring into a colorless haze; the next, he was stumbling through the outer courtyard, the world tilting beneath him like a ship in rough water. He moved without direction, without breath, without
The king’s gate was already warm when the morning procession began, the stone beneath Mordecai’s feet radiating yesterday’s heat. He stood where he always stood- close enough to fulfill his duties, far enough to avoid notice. A bureaucrat among bureaucrats. A third‑generation exile who had learned
Does it have to be so bad?
Peace is not the absence of sorrow, but the presence of God within it.
Contemporary worship for the 19th century
We saw smoke, but it didn't occur to us that there was fire.
Battling the world for the affections of my son
Separated by 2,500 years, anchored in the same land, held by the same God.
Cork boards and red string at the ready.