Lent is not something that simply happens to us. It is something we enter.

And this year, I want to enter it with intention. Not just giving something up. Not just checking the boxes of a religious season. I want a genuine encounter with the living God. And I can think of no better guide for that journey than the Gospel of John.

Starting Thursday after Ash Wednesday, I will be walking through the Gospel of John in 32 posts, Monday through Friday, all the way through to Good Friday. One passage at a time. One day at a time.

Today's first Mass reading presents us with one of the strangest and most unsettling passages in Scripture: 1 Kings 12:26–32; 13:33–34. At first glance, it seems almost absurd. Jeroboam, the newly crowned king of the northern kingdom of Israel, does something that appears utterly irrational. But when we look closer, his actions reveal something profound about the human heart and the nature of true worship.

"Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity, but for you alone." - Thomas Merton

Christianity seems have a pattern.

We build societies on Christian principles. We work hard to create communities that reflect our values. And because we're human, we develop blind spots, places where we fail to live up to what we profess. That's not surprising. What's troubling is what happens next: instead of examining those failures honestly, we either ignore them completely or worse, we defend them.

And here's where it gets really confusing: we often double down on our criticisms of the secular world around us at the exact moment we should be looking inward.

Now Available: In the Silence – When God Doesn’t Speak

I’ve been in a season of silence from God for more years than I can count. At first, I assumed He had stopped speaking. But over time, I’ve started to wonder—maybe it wasn’t that He went quiet. Maybe I just stopped listening. Maybe I never really knew how to recognize His voice in the first place.

This isn’t a teaching post. It’s not filled with clever turns of phrase or bullet-point answers. It’s a question. And not a light one.

I was thumbing through an old notebook the other day—the kind filled with sermon notes that rarely get revisited. You know the type. Like a blurry fireworks video from the Fourth of July or a photo of the neighborhood’s Christmas lights. Captured in the moment, but rarely replayed. This particular notebook was from 2019, and I had taken it with me to The Gospel Coalition Conference that year.

In America today, many of us are quick to form strong opinions—about everything. And worse, we’re quick to form strong opinions about each other. Politics have become so polarizing that friendships, families, and entire communities are being torn apart over issues that often have very little effect on our actual day-to-day lives.

Warning: This is an extremely honest post.