Hope Blog

▶ 1:20:09

The church has been working through the Gospel of John, so Joe opened by saying he
half wanted the Monty Python sting — and now for something completely different — because
he had come to preach Jeremiah. The connection would be clear by the end, the Lord willing. It
was.

A prophet for a time when everything was coming apart

▶ 1:20:50

Jeremiah ministered about six centuries before Christ, and three deportations to Babylon
happened inside his lifetime. His first vision was a pot boiling over, tipped from the north
(Jeremiah 1:13),
and it came true — which is why a Jeremiah became the name for the man nobody wants to
believe. Churchill wore the label for years while he warned about a war.

Under Josiah the scroll of Deuteronomy turned up in the temple
(2 Kings 22:8–11).
Nobody had read it. They tore their robes, and reforms followed — but so did hedging. We will
worship the Lord, and Baal too. We will make an alliance with Egypt. We will consider rebelling
against Nebuchadnezzar. It ended with Jerusalem destroyed. And underneath the whole period ran one
question, asked the way people still ask it: what is wrong with our world, what is wrong with us,
what is wrong with them.

1. Sin puts us in denial

▶ 1:22:40

The indictment is graphic and specific, and the answer that comes back is “I am not defiled.”
That is the first mark. “Everybody sins. That’s not what’s fatal,” Joe said. “What’s fatal is to
deny that you are in sin.” It is not fatal to be an alcoholic — people function, they work the
steps, God rebuilds them. It is fatal to deny you are one.

2. Sin is powerfully addictive

▶ 1:24:28

The next verses pile up images of an animal in heat — a restless young camel, a wild donkey
sniffing the wind, so driven that pursuers need not tire themselves
(Jeremiah 2:23–25).
Then the line Joe wanted heard: keep your feet from going unshod and your throat from thirst —
and the reply, “It is hopeless, for I have loved foreigners, and after them I will go.” This is not
someone failing to resist. This is someone running until their feet are bare. It enslaves us, Joe
said, and we are hardly aware of it: I am just doing my life, doing what feels right.

3. Idols are good things asked to be God

▶ 1:26:47

Jeremiah watches a whole nation say to wood, “You are my father,” and to stone, “You gave me
birth” — and then, in trouble, turn around and cry, “Arise and save us.” The Lord’s answer is
withering: let them come, if they can save you; you have as many gods as you have towns
(Jeremiah 2:26–28).
Joe noted that wood and stone are good things. That is exactly the problem.

He worked this out through Augustine, who taught that everyone seeks happiness and attaches
themselves to whatever they think will supply it — and that our trouble is disordered love. We
love what we ought not to love, or fail to love what we ought, or love more what we should love
less. A man who loves money more than justice will exploit his workers. A man who loves his career
more than his children will lose the family. “If you love anything more than God, you will crush
it beneath the weight of your expectations of it.” Which is why Joe admits to cringing when a new
parent tells a newborn, you’re my life. Say instead: I am so thankful.

▶ 1:28:58

There are three moments, he said, when an idol is guaranteed to fail you: serious sickness,
bereavement, and personal failure. If you make your living with what your body can do and then you
get long COVID and have to think about whether you can make it past breakfast, and that was your
god, you will be devastated. He was careful here: “Bad things are bad. We don’t call bad things
good.” And then the quiet one — barring a very strange coincidence in Austin traffic, one spouse
outlives the other. If you meant it literally when you said you are my everything, your
life ends when theirs does.

The intervention

▶ 1:30:44

God does not need to arrange a punishment; he lets people live the consequences of their own
choices. And the verbs that follow — know, see, consider — are the
language of an intervention. Don’t you get it? Look at what this is doing to you. Joe put the
diagnosis in one sentence: “It’s not me, it’s you. It’s because you have no awe of me. You are
more awed by and fearful of things other than me.”

The same voice, making a promise

▶ 1:33:27

The God who says you tore off your yoke and said I will not serve is the God who says
this:

And then, immediately, the credentials: the one who gives the sun for light by day and stirs up
the sea so its waves roar
(Jeremiah 31:35).
“By the way, that God — I’m that God. I’m that awesome God.”

▶ 1:34:32

Which is a word we have ruined. Coming back to the States from the mission field, Joe would
find the vocabulary had moved on without him. One furlough it was awesome — awesome that
he knew his own address, awesome that he could give a phone number. By 2014 it was perfect.
“They’ve seriously lowered the bar.”

How awe is actually learned

▶ 1:35:39

Joe was honest that this is slippery for him, because it is experiential before it is
intellectual: knowing about God is not knowing God. The comparison he used is family. There is
knowing, in the abstract, that your parents would not like what you are about to do — and there is
watching their face after you do it. The people we love best are the easiest to take for granted;
he claims expert status on that. Positive experiences teach it too. Since his cataract surgery he
still reaches up at bedtime to take off glasses he has not worn since the third grade, and finds
nothing there, and it is glorious — until the day he stops being amazed.

▶ 1:37:16

Hence the old English root of the word: worthship. “You have ultimate worth and value
in my eyes. You have ultimate beauty in my eyes. I worship you. I see you as my greatest love.”
That, he said, is what transforms us.

▶ 1:38:25

He took the obvious objection from C. S. Lewis, who admitted in Reflections on the
Psalms that he had trouble with a God who seems to demand constant praise — we rightly
despise a man who requires continual assurance of his own virtue. Lewis’s way through was to ask
what we mean when we call something admirable. We mean that if you fail to admire it, you are the
one missing out. You saw the film; you tell your friends. You read the book; you press it on
people. Not recommending it diminishes it. Joe added Tim Keller’s joke about God being like a date
who says, “That’s enough about you, let’s talk about how perfect I am” — except that he actually
is. So the flags and the dancing at Hope are not primarily for the emotional payoff. “It’s for the
fact that God deserves that.” Refusing him that is not neutrality; it is failing to see the world
as it is.

Cosmic ingratitude

▶ 1:40:37

Joe used to read that and think the charge was thin — no glory, no thanks, small potatoes
compared to real sin. He now takes it as a measure of how little he understood. “Cosmic
ingratitude is deadly. That’s the illusion that you are spiritually self-sufficient.” It is taking
credit for your own life: anything good in it, I deserved, it was owed to me. He confessed that
when he sees someone doing that, he finds it hard not to want lightning — which is itself worth
noticing, given how patient God has been with him.

Start with praise

▶ 1:42:28

So the pathway into awe is authentic praise and thanksgiving, and the Lord’s Prayer already
shows the order — hallowed first, daily bread after
(Matthew 6:9).
The more you see of God’s holiness, justice and love in Jesus, the more astonishing it is that he
is like this toward us. And when God dominates the landscape the way a mountain does, Joe said,
you can finally look at your own flaws without flinching, forgive the people who trespass against
you, and be safe in your neediness. No cowering, no wondering whether today is the day he pushes
the smite button.

He passed on a story from another pastor whose congregant took the advice seriously and
reported back weeks later that it had changed her life. Praying needs-first only piles the weight
on — the mortgage, the car, everything she is powerless over — until she is crushed. Praise-first
is walking in holding your father’s hand. It is the shape of the Psalter itself, which ends in
five psalms of nothing but praise
(Psalm 150);
Eugene Peterson noted you have to persevere to get there.

Cranmer’s five moves

▶ 1:45:35

The second discipline he offered came from Thomas Cranmer, who wrote the greater part of the
Book of Common Prayer. Every collect has the same five moves: the address, a name for God; the
doctrine, a truth about his nature that the prayer stands on; the petition; the aspiration, the
good that would come if it were granted; and then through Jesus Christ our Lord. His
example was the collect for Holy Communion — “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all
desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the
inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee and worthily magnify thy holy
name.”

That last phrase is not a way of signaling you have finished. “It’s like saying, I have my
Father God’s credit card. In Jesus’ name — Jesus is paying, Jesus is doing this.” Which is a long
way from the grace he grew up racing through at dinner, where whoever got to amen first
won the drumstick.

If God seems too high, look at Jesus

▶ 1:48:45

Joe closed where the morning had already been. The service had been given over to
thanksgiving — a plane that never should have flown, a C-5 boarded too late to die on, a marriage
no one could arrange, a daughter still alive, a baby who made it to thirty-six weeks — and the
refrain running under all of it was the one from
Psalm 107:
then they cried to the Lord in their trouble.

If God still feels too high and impersonal, he said, look at Jesus. Look at the cross. Look at
the empty tomb, because an empty tomb means yours will be empty too, and we will be at the banquet
table with no more sorrow and no more tears. That is the aspiration that carries a person through
the dark night of the soul. Maybe right now it is a dark place, or a dry and barren land, or the
middle of a long cold winter. Either way — look at Jesus. It will thaw out your soul. He offered
the prayer team, and for anyone too shy to come forward, the person in the next seat: “Just turn to
them, and if they avoid eye contact, don’t ask them to pray for you.” Then he prayed the sermon
back as a request — “God, be more awesome for us all, please” — and the room was sent out to be in
awe of the Lord.

▶ 1:11:50

The service had already been full — Jolene Michelle installed as women’s ministry director with the board laying hands on her, the launch of the Mentor Project, candles still in the windows from the Kristallnacht anniversary in solidarity with Hope’s Jewish neighbors. Matt had the room stand and pray for those neighbors and for the nation in the week after the election. Then he turned the attention back inward.

Back from the nation to yourself

▶ 1:13:47

There is nothing wrong with Christians involved in local or statewide politics, Matt said — but the election is over, and there remains a sphere of influence you have much more control over than the country: yourself. He picked up the thread from the two previous weeks in John. Nicodemus wrestled with Jesus’ identity, timidly asked his colleagues to at least hear the man out, and finally handled the body of Christ in broad daylight — bravery, from what Matt could tell, and a man who had settled where his loyalties lay. The challenge that came out of it: where can we walk in the light where we have been walking in darkness, even if it puts a target on our back?

▶ 1:16:14

The week before, the Samaritan woman at the well, where Jesus provoked her on a sensitive subject. He does not only confront religious hypocrisy; he confronts people wherever they need it — the rich young ruler on his wealth, the disciples on arguing about who was greatest, Zacchaeus over lunch about dishonest gain, the woman at the well on her many husbands. So: where would Jesus challenge us? A hard question to ask sincerely, but Matt argued it ought to be a joyful one, “because when Jesus pinpoints the sin struggle it is with the purpose, the intention, to set us free.”

A quick tour of glory in the Old Testament

▶ 1:19:00

Glory is a central theme in John — and to hear it properly you have to know what the word carried before John used it. Start at Sinai, with the people consecrating themselves and washing their clothes, because the Lord who holds all creation together is going to come down.

They were brought out to meet God and took their stand at the foot of the mountain — so close, and told on pain of death not to touch it.

▶ 1:24:25

Matt kept pressing one word: sight. This glory is visible — a lordly, majestic spectacle. And it does two things at once. It conveys God’s presence and it conceals it. That is why the second commandment lands where it does. The ban on idols was not a redundant restatement of the first; it was Moses telling a people who had just met God that they had not actually seen him, so they must not fill in the blank. “Don’t make Yahweh look like a cow because cows are strong,” as Matt put it. Guessing at his appearance would condescend to his majesty.

The same pattern follows the presence around. When Moses finished the tabernacle, the cloud covered the tent of meeting and Moses could not enter. When Solomon finished praying, fire came down, the glory filled the house, the priests could not go in, and the people who saw it fell on the pavement. Sacred space, designated for the meeting of God and his people — is God everywhere? Yes. Can you talk to him anywhere? Yes. This was still a particular place.

The word tabernacled among us

▶ 1:25:22

Carry that into John, where glory and glorification are everywhere. “I glorified you on earth… now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” Trinitarian, eternal, hard to comprehend — and yet also something Jesus did on the ground, in a ministry, in a body. A few verses later he asks that those given to him “may be with me where I am, to see my glory.” Not only reputation and honor. Something with spectacle in it. Something you see.

▶ 1:27:21

“Dwelt” is, in the Greek, tabernacled. The meeting place between God and his people is now a person. And what did they see? Water into wine at Cana — “the first of his signs… manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him.” Matt put the seven signs back on the screen: water to wine, a dying boy healed, a disabled man healed, bread multiplied, another disabled man healed, a dead man raised, and then the crucifixion. They pair off around a center — Jesus the bread of life, his own body given so that mortals live and do not die like the ancestors in the wilderness.

The seventh sign is a body

▶ 1:29:59

John roots this glorious spectacle in a real human body, and he will not let the reader look away from it. Mary anoints his feet and wipes them with her hair. His side is pierced and water and blood come out. Joseph of Arimathea takes the body; they wrap it in linen. And after the resurrection it is still that body:

Thomas answers, “My Lord and my God.” That is where the signs have been driving the whole time — glory displayed, belief given.

▶ 1:32:40

And here is the reversal of Sinai. There, power on display and person concealed, and do not touch the mountain. Here, the glory is on full display and you may draw near, look at it, put your hand in it. Moses said do not make an image of Yahweh because you have never seen him. Jesus says “whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come into the world as light, so that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness.” Light is a metaphor, but light also does a plain thing: it makes what is in front of you visible. So when Philip asks to be shown the Father, the answer is not a lecture. “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

Retraining what glory looks like

▶ 1:33:56

How did Jesus shine that glory? Matt suspected our senses need retraining. In the mind of a man, glory on full display would be conquering Rome — victorious, dominating, on a war horse in shining armor. What Jesus actually said was “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” — meaning his torture and death, in a humiliating fashion, on purpose. A gospel that uses the word glory constantly makes its final sign a broken and dead body. From heaven’s perspective, Matt said, that body is the perfect template for glory, majesty and honor: “his humiliation is exaltation.”

And we are invited into it

▶ 1:35:45

Then a run of passages, each one raising the stakes. “We are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” Matt asked whether the room was actually prepared to accept that sentence. Christ in you, the hope of glory — and no vain hope, since we will see him.

▶ 1:37:40

“Glory is not a secret menu item where only the elite Christians attain to any aspect of it,” Matt said. “You in Christ are called to glory.” “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” That is not his idea, he pointed out — it is the Lord’s, and the Lord is the one doing the transforming.

▶ 1:39:49

Matt read that one twice, because he doubted we would believe it if it were not in the Bible. We who are broken and sick and weak and at times quite twisted are called to his own glory and excellence. The only one who is immortal gives mortals eternal life; the righteous one gives wretches his own righteousness.

▶ 1:41:21

Twice Matt said it was no accident that suffering and glory keep arriving together. In our union with Christ we partake of his nature, and the invitation runs to both. Which makes suffering as a Christian a source of joy and esteem — with one caveat he was quick to add: “I don’t mean when you play stupid games you get stupid prizes. You robbed a convenience store and then you’re saying, oh, I’m suffering with Christ.”

So where would he challenge you?

▶ 1:44:15

Back to the challenge, now with the stakes visible. If Jesus sat down with you at a well, where would he poke? He surely made small talk about the weather from time to time, but he also had a way of getting under people’s skin — and he is the only person trustworthy with those places of bondage and confusion and pain. If he pokes at one, let him in. And expect that following through will involve some measure of suffering, which is the point: that is an invitation to glory, not a detour around it.

▶ 1:46:05

Matt offered one guess at what Hope Chapel might wrestle with together — offered as a guess, with a request that people ask the Lord for discernment themselves. Reject the fear of man as disgusting and vile, and obey Jesus in practical ways instead, particularly where we could witness. There are plenty of other candidates the saints have been challenged by: do not forget the poor, flee the love of money as idolatrous, walk in sexual purity. But the fear of man is bondage, and feeding it never makes anyone freer.

▶ 1:47:12

The second was a corporate habit: recalibrate how we see glory by showing honor and respect to those among us who serve Christ sacrificially. Practice heaven’s scoreboard until it feels like our own. Because we have not been left outside the mountain — we have been invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb, where his opinion on everything will be obviously the one that mattered. As with the woman at the well, the confrontation was never finger-wagging. It was an invitation to that feast, and to him.

▶ 1:21:09

Two weeks ago Matt traced Nicodemus through John’s gospel — a man who first came to Jesus at night unsure who he was, and last appears in broad daylight burying the body and putting a target on his own back. He ended that message by asking the room where they might walk in the light even if it cost them. This week he moved to the next conversation, and warned us up front that he was about to attempt something complicated: an argument that hinges on people remembering Hosea 2.

1. A prophet’s marriage, and God’s

▶ 1:22:45

So rather than gamble on long-term memory, he read it. Hosea is told to marry a sexually immoral woman and live out a prophecy about the nation. Hosea 2:2–7 runs the metaphor hard — she chases lovers she believes are feeding her, when it was her husband giving her the grain and the wine and the oil the whole time. Then the turn:

▶ 1:25:53

Matt paused on the wordplay. Baal is not a proper name — it means master, and it can also mean husband. God is saying he will take that word out of her mouth along with the idolatry it carries. This is not really about a woman. It is a courageous and humble husband pursuing a wife who left him for many lovers, and the irony is that she credited them with everything he gave her.

2. Boy meets girl at a well

▶ 1:27:29

The second thread is a stock scene. In Genesis 24, Abraham’s servant goes to a well to find Isaac a wife and prays for a sign: he will ask for a drink, and the girl who offers water for the camels too is the one. That is Rebekah. Jacob goes to a well in Genesis 29, and Rachel arrives. Moses flees Egypt, sits down by a well in Exodus 2, and meets Zipporah. “Ancient Near Eastern romcom level,” Matt called it. Which means a Jewish reader who knows these stories hits John 4 and thinks: what on earth is going on here.

3. Noon, alone, and a Jew asking her for a drink

▶ 1:29:41

Jesus arrives at Jacob’s well in Samaria at the sixth hour — the middle of the day, not the evening when the women come as a group (John 4:1–9). Matt let the oddities stand as questions rather than answers. Is she avoiding the others? Is she ostracized? And why did Jesus send every single disciple into town for food? “I don’t think this is a chance encounter.” His opening line — give me a drink — is the exact request Abraham’s servant used as his test, and it doubles as a request for welcome, the way Elijah asked the widow for water in 1 Kings 17.

▶ 1:31:48

She does not answer yes or no. She asks how a Jew is speaking to her at all, and Jesus answers a question she has not asked yet, about the gift of God and living water. She is practical: you have no bucket, the well is deep, are you greater than our father Jacob? Matt loves this about John’s gospel — characters keep asking enormously important questions without knowing how important they are. Later Jesus will say plainly what the living water is: the Spirit given to those who come to him and drink.

4. Go call your husband

▶ 1:33:56

She asks for the water so she will not have to keep coming out here. And then the gears grind: “Go, call your husband, and come here.” She says she has none. Matt wondered aloud whether there was a dramatic pause or whether Jesus did not skip a beat before naming the five, and the man she has now who is not her husband.

▶ 1:34:31

“Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.” Well perceived. Here the two threads fuse. This is a well, with all the romantic freight a well carries, and the subject on the table is now husbands — false ones and true. Under Jewish practice three successive husbands would not have been permitted; how she got to five, the text does not say, and Matt refused to speculate past that. What matters is that the Hosea question has surfaced in a Samaritan woman’s life: who is your real husband, your real Lord?

5. Which mountain

▶ 1:36:28

Which is why her next line is not a change of subject or a dodge. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; you say Jerusalem. False husbands, false worship — in Hosea they are the same sentence.

She reaches for the one thing she is sure of — the Messiah will come and sort all this out. And Jesus says: I who speak to you am he.

6. She left her water jar

▶ 1:38:10

The disciples return, marvel that he is talking to a woman, and say nothing. Meanwhile she abandons her jar and goes into town: come see a man who told me all that I ever did. What was almost certainly her source of isolation and embarrassment is now the testimony she offers freely, without shame, to the whole town — and the town comes out.

▶ 1:40:18

Keep those people moving toward the well in the background, because the next conversation happens while they walk. The disciples urge him to eat. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” Then, with a crowd of Samaritans in view, lift up your eyes, the fields are white for harvest already.

▶ 1:42:06

Hosea 2 ends with exactly that promise: wheat, new wine and oil as the sign of a nation restored to her husband. Israel’s sowing finished by December and the harvest began in April — the four months Jesus names. Here sowing and reaping land on the same day. Which is, Matt noted, a little scandalous, because the abundance is being spent on Samaritans.

7. A people in the bride’s place

▶ 1:43:15

The chapter closes with the town believing on her testimony, asking Jesus to stay, and then telling her it is no longer her word they are standing on: we have heard for ourselves, and we know this is indeed the Savior of the world. He asked for a drink and got his welcome — two days of it. There is no marriage ceremony at the end of this well story because none is needed. Gomer did not need to be remarried to Hosea. What was needed was restoration, forgiveness, blessing. The woman’s role as returning bride is picked up by her people, and the Samaritans of all people are the first group in John’s gospel to name Jesus as Savior of the world.

8. Why he went straight for it

▶ 1:48:36

Then Matt took what he called a bunny trail, and it is where the message lands. Jesus confronted her sin fast, by any modern standard of conversation. Why? He does not work from a list of the nation’s failings, and he does not confront at random. Preachers like him often say all sins are the same to God, which Matt does not think holds — Jesus told Pilate the one who handed him over was guilty of a greater sin. What Jesus does is name the thing that has a strangle hold on the person in front of him. Religious hypocrisy with the rabbis. Sell what you have with the rich young ruler. Pride with the disciples arguing about greatness. Dishonest gain with Zacchaeus. Go and sin no more with the woman caught in adultery. Husbands with this woman.

▶ 1:49:57

“Why does he pinpoint stuff, the open nerve, the thing — why would you bring that up? To set her free. To set you free.” Every time the Lord confronts us in our sin, Matt said, it is an invitation into deeper relationship and greater trust. Which is why he can be trusted with it.

9. So what would he name here?

▶ 1:52:07

He asks the Lord that question about himself, and about Hope Chapel, and admits he does not always get an answer — which is part of why he preaches through so much scripture. Then he named the candidates. Sexual purity came up constantly in his summer tour of tiny texts:

▶ 1:54:41

“It’s not because we’re obsessed. This is important to the Lord.” But he was careful to distinguish what the American church at large might hear from what this room might. He is not convinced Jesus would confront Hope Chapel over affirming theology — no one in leadership is pushing for it, all of the church’s leaders have signed that they will not perform gay marriages, and some of them have paid dearly, socially, for that faithfulness. More likely for us, he said: boundaries around marriage, where the envelope gets pushed with the opposite sex, holding the line on premarital sex in a church raising this many kids, and what we are looking at online.

▶ 1:56:29

Underneath the affirming drift, though, he suspects fear of man more than defiance — and fear of man is not a temptation a non-affirming church is immune to. He named it in himself. Fifteen or twenty years ago he was “a devotee of niceness, the Church of Jehovah Sweet Pea,” working the fantasy that someone would wake up one morning and love Jesus because Matt had been so pleasant all week. When the Lord confronted him on it, it was not finger-wagging. It was release, and it is still in progress.

▶ 1:57:52

He still feels it. He goes out to preach and pray for the sick — Walmart for years, because there is privacy in the chaos, lately UT campus — and every time he is about to name the name of Jesus to a stranger, something rises up. “Every time I follow through and I obey Jesus instead of my fears, I feel like I get to stab that thing with prejudice.” Obedience instead of fear is liberating, not condemning.

▶ 1:59:02

Two more, quickly. Greed, which Paul flatly calls idolatry (Ephesians 5:5, Colossians 3:5) — and he cut off the obvious escape hatch: “You can be poor and greedy. It’s totally easy to do.” Our true husband takes care of us.

▶ 2:01:06

Then pride, which he called almost impossible to admit to — if anyone has ever confronted you on it, bless them, because that was hard to do. He tied it to spiritual warfare. Principalities and dark powers the Lord handles easily; there is exactly one opponent you will never overcome, and that is God himself. So when you feel throttled, step one is to ask whether he opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble. Sexual purity, greed, pride and fear versus faith are, not coincidentally, what Jesus raises with the seven churches in Revelation.

▶ 2:03:27

He ended where he ended the Nicodemus message: where is God challenging you to act? And he pointed back to the woman for what the fruit of repentance looks like. She dropped her jar. She ran. She acted immediately, and the harvest that came of it was a town. “There’s no one more trustworthy to deal with the secret deep places in your life.”