I believe that the most healing experience a soul can traverse is to encounter the beauty of God within the beauty of their soul. Until this happens, a soul is stuck in duty, obligation, fear, and conformity. I know. I am a recovering Pharisee. That all changed on the journey of suffering. I lost my religion in a spiritual ice age, filled with cold anger toward God and shame within my soul. But there, I also found my faith.

When my second son died, shortly after our first son’s battle with medical complications due to a chromosome abnormality, I believed that God had abandoned my life to the unsafe universe. I was a functional deist. God wound up the clock of my life, let it run, and went off to do more important things. My only prayer was, “God, go ahead and run your universe and I’ll run mine. We can stay out of each other’s way.”

I was a pastor at the time. So a severe dichotomy was created within my soul. I wish that I knew pain was inevitable in this life, but suffering optional. Suffering is the result of grasping expectations and failure to manipulate life toward perpetual comfort and power.

I did not stay here. On a spiritual pilgrimage, a Jesuit priest asked me a question that saved my soul. “What would it look like for the resurrected Jesus to burst from the tomb of your heart?” I had no clue. But the Pentecostal pastor next to him prayed a powerful prayer over my life. Suffering had excavated a large gaping hole in my soul. My split soul’s anger, disappointment, and bitterness; teamed with the shame, guilt, and hiding which results from a dichotomy of soul, acted as road blocks to God’s grace flooding my soul with peace. But this prayer removed them all, and I encountered the beauty of God within the beauty of my soul.

Now I am a pastor, author, mentor, freelance theologian, wanna be poet prophet, who is on a mission to help people have the same encounter. I will be posting short, potent, mini-blog style devotionals here to help you on your journey.