BrendaL

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

"Will I be okay?" is a request for a forecast. What the Spirit of God usually returns is a question about our allegiance. We expect, and at times even “demand” a prognosis. He, instead, wants to know from our own heart and lips who we belong to. That exchange is not a dodge. Rather, it is the authentic conversation.

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@ShaneClaiborne gross

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

The old monks kept the memory of death close, not because they were morbid but because they had discovered something we keep avoiding. Nothing concentrates attention like the knowledge that this hour, this conversation, this face in front of you, will not come again. When death is forgotten, everything becomes interchangeable and nothing matters very much. When death is remembered with faith, the most ordinary moment becomes luminous. This is why old people who have learned to live well are often the most attentive people in the room. They have stopped wasting time pretending they have unlimited amounts of it.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

Mockery is the cheapest form of social bonding. It welds a group together by giving them someone to laugh at, and it costs the one being laughed at something real. We have learned to do this without flinching, in comment threads and at dinner tables and from our pulpits. The laughter feels like fellowship, but it is built on a small humiliation, and the soul of the one mocked is paying for it whether we know it or not.

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@renewtoconserve @travismsnow And you know what? A lot of us were ranting about that then. Call a foul a foul.

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@MikeWingerii Please… Stop defending his nonsense

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@lancewallnau This complete garbage

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@conservmillen Spin, spin, spin

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@Joel7Richardson Not to mention blasphemous.

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@Scaramucci So bizarre

[BrendaL @Brenda58501]

@DavidAFrench He is risen indeed!

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

Almighty God, we confess that we do not know how to wait; that we are a people addicted to resolution, to outcome, to the managed experience of faith, and that Holy Saturday offends us because it gives us nothing to do. Remind us that the Church does not exist to solve the problem of death but to be the community that has been placed inside the answer. We are the people of the third day, and we are not there yet, and that is exactly where we belong today. Keep us from mistaking busyness for faithfulness and noise for prayer. Make us a people formed by this silence.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

There’s a reason the early Pentecostals wept at the altar.

Not performance.

Not manipulation.

They had found, or been found, by a Friend unlike any other.

One who didn’t require them to be composed.

One who received the unraveling.

The Spirit is still that Friend.

You don’t have to have it together to come.

[Justin Giboney @JustinEGiboney]

Don’t trust your algorithm to help you develop an informed and faithful opinion.

It feeds your worst impulses.

It makes everyone who disagrees with you look like a buffoon or a demon.

It hides the best arguments on the other side.

It will lure you into hating your neighbor.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

There is a great deal being touted as truth right now.
And I get it. The geopolitical realities we are watching unfold are painful and disorienting, and when things feel that unstable, the human mind goes looking for an explanation. That is not weakness. That is how we are wired.

But here is where it gets dangerous.

When the ground shifts, there is always a voice ready to tell you it is not chaos. It is a conspiracy. Someone planned this. Someone is pulling strings. And if you follow the right account, read the right thread, listen to the right prophet, you will see what is really happening behind the curtain.

That is a powerful offer. Especially when you are afraid.

But there is a profound difference between genuine prophetic discernment and fear-driven speculation dressed up as insider knowledge.

Churchill's warning about Hitler was not a conspiracy theory. Bonhoeffer, naming the demonic character of the Nazi regime, was not paranoia. They were seeing clearly, at enormous personal cost, what comfortable majorities refused to face. And what marked their seeing was this: it was rooted in evidence, it was morally serious, and it cost them something to say it.

That is very different from what gets passed around today as revelation.

What history does not vindicate is the unfalsifiable claim. The unnamed shadowy network. The timetable that keeps shifting. The prophet who is never wrong because the theory always adjusts. That kind of certainty-for-sale has followed every war, every economic crisis, every season of mass fear. The predictions collapse. The people who sold the map move on to the next theory. The people who bought it are left with the wreckage.

The question is not whether darkness is real. It is. The question is whether the voice you are listening to is helping you see clearly, or profiting from the fact that you are afraid.

Discernment costs something. Fear-mongering pays well.

So stay rooted. Think carefully. Hold your sources accountable. And if you are a person of faith, return to the confession that has outlasted every empire and every theory ever devised to explain one:

Christ is Lord.

Not as a slogan. As a settled place to stand while you learn to see clearly.

The darkness is real. That is exactly why your discernment matters. Do not outsource it.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

The One who neither slumbers nor sleeps once slept in a manger, slept in a boat, slept in a tomb. The eternal Keeper of Israel submitted Himself to the full vulnerability of being kept. He who holds all things together allowed Himself to be held in Mary’s arms, carried into Egypt, hidden from Herod. This is the Christological mystery at the heart of Psalm 121: the Guardian became the guarded, not as theater, but as ontological participation in our condition. He became as we are so that our being kept would no longer be external protection but internal transformation.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

When the Psalmist says “the Lord is your Keeper,” we must read this through the lens of Incarnation. Jesus did not keep us from a distance. He entered the terrain where feet slip, where the sun strikes by day and the moon by night. He walked the hills we lift our eyes toward. He knew the exposure, the weariness, the threat. His keeping is not the detachment of a watchman on a wall but the intimacy of One who has personally navigated every danger He shields us from. The integrity of the Great Keeper is rooted in Him as Mary's Boy experiencing what it meant to be kept.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

If the Christ we worship took on full humanity, then every assault on human dignity is an assault on something He chose to wear forever. That should change how we respond when people made in His image are treated as less than who and what they are.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

Power does not give anyone the right to strip another person of their dignity. It actually increases the obligation to protect it. The greater the platform, the greater the responsibility. Scripture is relentless on this point. To whom much is given, much is required. And what is required begins with how we see one another.

[Mark Chironna @markchironna]

Gratitude steadies our inner world. It slows the rush of our anxious thinking and clears space for renewed awareness. When we name what is good, even in small measure, our soul stops scrambling for control and settles into the present. Thankfulness isn't denial, it's attention.