John the Baptist is having his best week ever. Crowds are coming from Jerusalem to hear him preach. People are getting baptized. Religious leaders are paying attention. He's the biggest thing happening in Israel.

And then Jesus shows up.

Watch what John does. He doesn't compete. He doesn't compare. He doesn't try to hold onto his moment. He points. "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."

In that moment, John the Baptist teaches us the most important lesson in Christian discipleship: it's not about you. Your job is not to be the light. Your job is to point to the light.

This is going to be a theme throughout John's Gospel. Real faith always deflects attention away from itself and toward Christ. Real witness always makes much of Jesus and little of ourselves.

Yesterday we stood in eternity, gazing at the Word who created everything. Today, John asks us to believe something that sounds impossible: that same eternal God became a human baby in Bethlehem.

"The Word became flesh."

Four words in English. And with those words, John makes the most audacious claim in human history.

Not "the Word appeared to be human." Not "the Word looked like a man." Became. The eternal God entered time. The Creator became a creature. The Word who made the stars took on a human body that got tired, hungry, and thirsty.

This isn't poetry or metaphor. This is the heart of Christian faith: God became one of us.

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.