Author: George Burgin

Not Found at This Address

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A screenshot of a 404 Not Found error page displaying 'nginx'.

I was searching online for collectible wines when I arrived at wineloversonline.com.

With a name like that, I expected the site to contain something. Wine lovers, after all, are not generally known for having no opinion.

Instead, I received a blunt response:

404 Not Found

There was no explanation, no helpful link and no polite suggestion about where I might look next. Just three words surrounded by enough white space to make the absence feel official.

The internet, which can ordinarily produce several million answers to questions I never asked, had suddenly become unusually concise.

I used the back button and tried again. The page remained unavailable. Then I began removing pieces of the address until only wineloversonline.com remained.

That did not help.

A darker page appeared with most of its message written in Chinese. Near the bottom was a more recognizable line:

DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN

The individual page was not the only thing missing. The browser could no longer find the domain itself. It appeared that the entire website had been evicted from the World Wide Web.

I do not know whether the domain expired, the site was abandoned or something had simply broken. I knew only that the address no longer led anywhere.

There was a certain irony in the discovery. I had been searching for collectible wines—bottles valued, at least in part, because they had survived. Time can make a wine more interesting and, occasionally, more valuable.

Websites are apparently less romantic about aging.

What caught my attention was how naturally I responded to the failure. I went back. I tried again. I shortened the address. Each action was reasonable. A link can be broken. A word can be misspelled. Sometimes the destination still exists, and we simply need to find another way to reach it.

But eventually the error message told me something I needed to accept:

This address could not take me where I wanted to go.

Life does not usually deliver that information so clearly.

Some endings announce themselves. A business closes. A job ends. A decision is made, and everyone involved understands that something has changed.

Other endings are discovered only when we return.

We call a number that no longer belongs to the person we remember. We revisit a place and realize that whatever once made it important is no longer there. We return to a role, relationship, habit or expectation that once gave us something meaningful and discover that it can no longer provide what we have come looking for.

So we refresh.

I have refreshed more than webpages. I have returned to conversations, expectations and earlier versions of life hoping repetition might restore something that had already changed.

Persistence can be a virtue. Some relationships and promises deserve patient repair. But there is a point when refreshing the same page stops being faithfulness and becomes our reluctance to receive new information.

What am I still trying to retrieve from an address that no longer holds it?

That is not an easy question. An unavailable address does not tell us what happened to the thing we sought. It may have moved. It may have changed. It may no longer exist in the form we remember.

The uncertainty can keep us returning. If we try one more time, perhaps the familiar page will reappear and assure us that nothing has really changed.

The book of Acts describes Paul and his companions being kept from entering the province of Asia. When they tried to enter Bithynia, that route closed too. Only afterward, at Troas, did Paul receive a vision calling them toward Macedonia.

Their calling had not ended. The route had changed. (Acts 16:6–10)

Faith does not require me to pretend an old address still works. It asks me to trust that God is not limited to the routes that worked before—and that a closed route does not mean he has stopped leading.

That trust does not turn every loss into redirection. Some losses are real and should not be disguised as something better. But a failed address is not a verdict on the entire search.

I never found what I was looking for at wineloversonline.com. The browser could tell me only that it was not available there.

Sometimes that is useful information.

Not found at this address is not the same as nothing left to find.

Until next time,

George

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The Farmer Goes to Bed

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A winery production facility featuring stainless steel fermentation tanks, a processing machine, and bins filled with crushed grapes, set in a clean, organized space.

My music studio is twenty-six steps above ground level. Yesterday, before leading worship for two services at church, I had to pack my equipment and haul it down those steps. My keyboard alone weighs over a hundred pounds, which makes twenty-six a number you develop a personal relationship with.

After the services, everything had to be packed again, loaded into the truck, driven home, and carried back up to the studio. Those same twenty-six steps were still there, waiting for me like a faithful dog.

After a quick piece of toast, in what felt like a complete violation of the Sabbath, I rushed to the winery. My son and I pressed and transferred nearly three thousand gallons of wine. Three thousand gallons is considerably easier to report than to move.

By the time I came inside at ten last night, I was exhausted and needed a shower. Selena was finishing her own day of canning. We finally went to bed around eleven.

Lying there, I could feel my body throbbing with the beat of my heart, right in the middle of all the aches and pains. The workday was over, but my body was still delivering its report.

This morning, I woke up feeling about eighty-five percent recovered.

Something had happened during those hours that another round of effort could not have accomplished. I had stopped hauling, lifting, pressing, and transferring. I had gone to sleep. And I woke with much of my strength restored.

I did not have to supervise it.

There is a small parable in Mark’s Gospel that feels particularly close to the ground this morning. Jesus describes a man scattering seed. Night comes, and the man sleeps. Morning comes, and he gets up. Meanwhile, the seed sprouts and grows.

“Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how.”

—Mark 4:27, NIV

The farmer has work to do. He plants, and when the grain is ready, he harvests. Between those acts, growth happens beyond his understanding and control.

Jesus is describing the kingdom of God. Our effort has a place within something much larger than anything we can accomplish. The farmer participates faithfully, and the life unfolding in his field continues while he sleeps.

Some of us would like a daily progress report from the seed.

Physical work has a certain clarity. Yesterday’s equipment eventually made it back into the studio. The wine was pressed and transferred. I could point to what had been done, and my body supplied supporting documentation.

Other kinds of work are harder to set down.

A conversation can follow us home long after the words have ended. Concern for someone we love can occupy every unclaimed moment. We can carry a problem to bed and pick it up again at three in the morning. By breakfast, we have worked another shift, although very little has benefited from our attendance.

I wonder how often I treat that continued mental labor as evidence that I care. As though setting a concern down for the night might amount to abandoning the person or responsibility attached to it.

Where have I started treating worry as part of my job description?

There are things that require my attention. Promises to keep. Difficult conversations to enter honestly. Work to finish, mistakes to acknowledge, changes to make. I want to give those things the care they deserve.

I also want to recognize where my part ends.

Trust takes time to grow. People need room to consider what they have heard. An apology can be offered sincerely while the work of repair continues slowly. We may contribute to something whose full shape we will never get to see.

That leaves room for humility. It leaves room for God.

Sleep makes this impossible to keep theoretical. Every night, I reach the limits of what I can keep doing. I have to lie down and receive something I cannot produce through another hour of effort. The day may still contain unfinished work. My understanding may be incomplete. A question may remain unanswered when I turn out the light.

I am learning to ask what faithfulness requires of me today, and to let that be a question I can actually answer. There is usually something within reach: a task, a conversation, a small act of care. I can give myself to it and ask God to use it.

Then, when it is time to rest, I can receive that gift without requiring everything to be finished first.

Last night, I went to bed aching. This morning, I woke with strength I could not have recovered by carrying one more thing.

The farmer goes to bed. There is still life at work.

Until next time,

George

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Before the Stone Moved

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A person with a backpack stands in front of an ancient stone structure, taking a photo of a cave-like entrance surrounded by rocks and greenery.

A rock-cut burial cave at Horvat Midras in Israel. Although not the tomb of Lazarus, it illustrates the kind of burial setting described in John 11. Photo by Bukvoed, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

The community center was packed.

My neighbors, Jim and Debbie, had asked me to share a few thoughts at the celebration of life for their son, Chris. The room was filled with people who had known and loved him as a son, brother, father, companion and friend.

His death was the loss that brought us together.

As I prepared my remarks, I kept returning to the danger of allowing the way a life ends to fill our whole field of vision. We revisit the final chapter, trying to understand what happened and wishing something could have been different.

But there was a whole life before this loss.

There was Chris.

Grief has a way of drawing our attention toward the end of a story. Love remembers the whole story.

Remembering someone fully does not require us to ignore the difficult parts. Love can bear the truth about a person and continue loving them. We do not have to settle every question before we can speak someone’s name with affection, remember what was good or remain grateful that they were here.

Afterward, during the meal, several conversations made it clear that something in those thoughts had resonated. I do not know what other losses people carried into the community center. We had not gathered to compare sorrows or turn Chris’s death into a lesson about ourselves. We were there to remember Chris.

Still, a loss of that magnitude reaches places in people that ordinary conversation seldom touches.

By adulthood, nearly everyone has stood before something that cannot be undone. A person dies. A marriage ends. A diagnosis divides life into before and after. A future we expected quietly disappears.

These losses are not equal, and it would be dishonest to treat them as though they were. But many of them leave us asking a similar question:

What are we supposed to do with something we cannot fix?

A difficult loss can arrive carrying more than sorrow. It brings questions, regret and an almost irresistible need to return to what happened. The mind revisits conversations, choices and ordinary days, searching for the place where a different word or action might have produced a different ending.

Grief can become a relentless investigator.

Some regrets reveal something true and deserve our honesty. But hindsight can also put us on trial using evidence we acquired only after the loss.

Love is not omniscience. Caring deeply for someone does not give us the power to foresee or prevent everything that may happen to them.

At the service, I spoke about Jesus and Lazarus.

The Gospel of John tells us that Lazarus had died. By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, he had been in the tomb four days.

Both of Lazarus’s sisters met Jesus with the same painful sentence. Martha said it first. Later, Mary came to him, fell at his feet and spoke the same words: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Jesus saw Mary weeping. He saw the people who had come with her weeping. John tells us that he was deeply moved and troubled.

“Where have you laid him?” Jesus asked.

Then Jesus wept.

He knew what he was about to do. The stone would move, and Lazarus would walk out. Jesus knew the end of that story before anyone else standing there did.

His own death was also drawing near. In fact, John moves from Lazarus leaving the tomb to the religious leaders making plans to put Jesus to death. Jesus was approaching suffering of his own, yet he did not step around the sorrow of his friends to attend only to what awaited him.

He entered their grief.

Jesus did not use what he knew about the future to diminish what Mary and Martha were experiencing in the present. He did not correct their tears with a theological explanation or call them toward a response that looked more faithful.

Jesus wept before the stone moved.

We are often less patient with grief. We offer explanations, search for lessons and reach for words that might make an unbearable thing feel manageable.

Usually, we mean well. Silence makes us uncomfortable, and another person’s pain reminds us how little control any of us actually has.

But some stones do not move.

The person remains gone. The relationship does not return to what it was. The medical report does not change. The apology never comes. No sentence can reverse those things.

Faith does not require us to pretend otherwise. Jesus knew resurrection was coming, and still he permitted sorrow to be sorrow. His tears did not reveal a shortage of faith. They revealed the depth of his love.

Maybe coping begins with that same permission. We can miss someone without a deadline, speak their name, admit that the loss still hurts and receive a good day without feeling that we have betrayed what was taken from us.

No one in the community center resolved the grief surrounding Chris’s death. People did something more human. They entered it. They spoke his name, remembered his whole story and stood beside those who loved him.

Jesus knew the stone would move. He still stood before it and wept.

Most of us will never be able to move another person’s stone.

But we can stay beside them before it.

Until next time,

George

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I Think It’s Coming From You

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Breakfast bar featuring waffle makers, coffee machines, and a variety of food options in a warmly decorated setting.

Best Western Bronco Inn, Ritzville Washington

I was in the breakfast area of a hotel preparing an English muffin, fully intending to accompany it with a cup of decaf, when I heard music.

I also heard someone reading the Bible.

That was not what I expected to hear at a hotel breakfast, especially before coffee.

I was surprised—and pleased. As a Christ-follower, I like it when someone is willing to take their relationship with God public. I assumed someone was playing a recording through the hotel speaker system, sending Scripture throughout the breakfast area.

The attendant came out of the back room. We caught each other’s eye, and she said good morning. I returned the greeting and then asked, “So, who’s playing the Bible?”

She looked confused.

“What do you mean?”

“The Bible,” I said again, pointing toward the speaker above my head. “Who’s playing it?”

She said she didn’t know and began apologizing for what we were hearing.

I assured her I was not requesting any action. I certainly wasn’t looking for an apology.

Another woman eating breakfast said she liked it.

“I do, too,” I said.

The attendant kept looking toward the speaker and then around the room, trying to locate the source. Finally, she pointed at me.

“I think it’s coming from you.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my phone.

She was right.

The Bible had been playing from my phone the entire time. I had listened to it during my drive the day before, and somehow it had started playing again. I do not know how. Apparently, my phone had decided to take my relationship with God public without consulting me.

The hotel was not broadcasting the Bible.

I was.

Her words reminded me of something a man named Grant had said a few weeks earlier.

I pick up grapes from two vineyards in the Prosser, Washington, area a few times a week. Grant owns one of them. We have had only a few interactions, but he has always struck me as a genuinely nice man.

Grant knows I travel from Montana and that I am in his area frequently to collect grapes. Once, he asked, “Do you ever sleep?”

I laughed and implied, not much. The laughter probably answered his question more honestly than words would have.

A few weeks ago, I sent Grant something I had written about rest (link here). When I saw him the following week, he told me he had read it and enjoyed it. He said he could tell I was a religious person. He wasn’t sure whether I was a Christian or a Mormon, but there was something about me he liked.

“You can just tell,” he said.

The breakfast attendant had identified something coming from my pocket. Grant had noticed something coming from my life.

Most of what we broadcast does not come through a speaker. It comes through our words, our expressions, our responses, and the way we treat people who can do nothing for us. It can be heard in what receives our attention, what tests our patience, what makes us generous, and what happens when we are interrupted.

People often receive these signals before we realize we are sending them.

I was grateful for what Grant said. I am also aware that what comes from me is not always something I would choose to turn up. There are parts of me I would prefer others not hear. A hurried response can become a broadcast. So can impatience, fear, resentment, or the need to be right.

Jesus said the mouth speaks from the overflow of the heart. I have usually thought of that as a warning about words. Now I wonder whether much of our living is overflow.

What we repeatedly listen to, rehearse, love, fear, and practice begins to make a home within us. Over time, it comes through—not as proof of our virtue, but as evidence of our formation.

The attendant was trying to solve a small acoustic mystery, but she left me with a question much larger than the sound coming from my pocket:

What is coming from me?

Sooner or later, what we carry within us finds a way to be heard—often before we realize we are broadcasting.

Until next time,

George

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Beneath the Tarp

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A scenic view of a highway surrounded by dense pine trees, with dark clouds looming over distant mountains.

Every time I stopped between Prosser and Joliet, I walked around the trailer looking for a bungee that had given up.

I carry several replacements. On a trip that long, one or two usually snap after spending hundreds of miles convincing me they have no intention of doing so. Optimism has many virtues, but it is not an adequate tie-down.

Beneath the tarp were grapes destined for our winery. The weather side of the tarp is white by design. Eastern Washington during harvest can be hot—hot enough that protecting the grapes from direct sunlight matters. White reflects more of the sun’s heat than a darker surface, which helps protect the fruit during the first part of the journey.

The design has a complication.

A tarp can protect the grapes from heat coming from outside while trapping heat beneath it. Covering the load solves one problem but introduces another that must be watched. Protection cannot be evaluated entirely from the weather-facing side.

I left Prosser in the heat of the Yakima River valley and began making my way north and east. By the time I reached Post Falls, I was more than fifteen hundred feet higher than where I had started, and the higher mountain passes were still ahead.

At Post Falls, the weather changed its mind.

The rain began, the air cooled and the wind came with it. The tarp that had begun the journey as shade was now functioning as a roof. The same covering chosen to reflect sunlight was being asked to keep water from reaching the grapes.

From there, the rain followed me east.

There was flash flooding around Missoula and Bozeman. After Livingston, the weather settled into a steady drizzle that continued toward Joliet. The tarp remained stretched over the same load, but the conditions surrounding it were no longer the ones I had prepared for in Prosser.

At every stop, I walked around the trailer.

I checked the tarp, the tension on the bungees and the condition of the load. A covering secured hundreds of miles earlier could not simply be assumed to remain secure. Wind works on loose edges. Rain collects wherever it is allowed to settle. Bungees stretch, shift and occasionally decide they have contributed enough to the journey.

The inspection did not take long, but it mattered.

Proverbs says, “Be sure you know the condition of your flocks, give careful attention to your herds.”

The instruction is agricultural, but its wisdom reaches well beyond livestock. Stewardship requires more than putting something in order at the beginning. It means continuing to know the condition of what has been entrusted to us.

That is more demanding than it sounds.

I prefer solutions that remain solved. I like the idea that once I have chosen the right tarp, secured it with enough bungees and started down the road, the matter should be settled. But the weather changes. Elevation changes. Fasteners weaken. Heat accumulates where we cannot see it.

The covering may still be in place while the conditions beneath it have changed entirely.

I can make the same mistake with people. Once I decide what care should look like, I can keep offering the same kind of protection without noticing that the weather has changed. I may provide advice when someone now needs to be heard. I may step in when trust would ask me to step back. I may preserve silence because it once kept the peace, without recognizing the heat gathering underneath it.

What once protected can eventually confine if no one continues paying attention.

That does not mean the covering was wrong. The tarp was necessary. It simply means that care cannot be reduced to the act of covering.

Jesus once prayed not that his followers would be removed from the world, but that they would be protected within it. It is a striking picture of protection. They would not be spared every difficult condition. They would be kept while moving through them.

Perhaps that is why real care requires such attentiveness. We cannot remove every person we love from every storm. We cannot guarantee an easy road or make the weather remain consistent. We can stay close enough to notice what has changed. We can inspect what we once secured. We can replace what has broken and remain willing to adjust the protection we were once certain would be enough.

The tarp could not know whether the grapes beneath it were all right. That responsibility remained mine. At every stop, I climbed out, walked around the trailer and looked again.

The tarp protected the grapes from the weather. Stopping to look again protected them from my assumptions.

Until next time,

George

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What is your relationship with rest?

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The Cushion

The waves were breaking into the boat, and Jesus was asleep in the stern. Beneath him lay a cushion. Around him, the vessel carried the movement of the sea, rising and falling under a wind that was driving water over its sides. What belonged beneath the boat was gathering inside it.

Earlier, the boat had served as a makeshift stage and pulpit. The crowd beside the sea had grown so large that Jesus sat offshore and taught while the people remained on land. His voice crossed the water toward them. He spoke about a sower scattering seed, a lamp brought into a house, a kingdom growing in ways the person who planted could not govern. The people listened from the shore.

When evening came, he told his disciples to cross to the other side. They left the crowd and took him with them just as he was, already aboard. Other boats accompanied them. Behind them lay the place where he had been teaching; ahead lay the crossing.

Then the wind rose.

The waves struck and came aboard. The vessel was filling, and each one brought more of the sea into the space they occupied. Shore lay behind and ahead, but either direction required remaining on the water. They could wake the man in the stern. They could not step out of the boat.

Jesus remained asleep.

The disciples woke him with a question that carried their fear directly into an accusation.

“Teacher, don’t you care that we are dying?”

He was close enough to wake, present in the same vessel and exposed to the same storm. Yet his sleep had become difficult to reconcile with their danger. Water was coming over the sides, and the one they had followed had to be roused.

Don’t you care?

Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind. Then he spoke to the sea.

“Peace! Be still!”

The wind ceased. The water that had been breaking into the boat became calm around it. The men who had awakened him remained there with him, carried now upon a sea that had obeyed his voice.

He asked why they were afraid. He asked about their faith.

A few moments earlier, they had feared what the water could do. Now the water was calm, and they were greatly afraid.

“Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

The question moved among men who knew his voice, could recognize him in a crowd and had already chosen to follow him. Yet here, with the shore still ahead and the storm silenced around them, they were asking who he was.

In the stern lay the cushion where he had been sleeping.

My son Jared and I talk every week. At 10:37 last Wednesday night, he sent me a question for our next phone call.

“What is your relationship with rest?”

My first impulse was to turn the question into an assignment. That may have answered more than I intended.

I told him I wanted to think about what actually leaves me rested, how comfortable I am allowing something to remain unfinished, and the things I enjoy doing that might look like work from the outside. Within a few sentences, I had organized rest into a small research project.

Then I asked what had prompted it.

Jared had been thinking about people who announce that they need a vacation in the middle of a demanding period at work. He could not imagine enjoying one while the work remained unfinished.

“Until the work is done, my mind cannot rest,” he wrote. “I’m always problem solving. And even after it’s finished, I’m thinking about how I could have done it better.” He said he could truly rest between projects. Once he committed to something, he intended to see it through.

I replied that he had my mind twirling and that I was considering writing about rest.

Jared asked about rest. I opened a project. You are reading the evidence.

There is something in his answer I want to honor. Someone who stays with difficult work gives others something solid to depend upon. A promise means more when the person making it intends to remain through the inconvenient parts. I would not want to talk about rest in a way that makes faithfulness sound like a defect. Nor am I certain that rest can always be recognized from the outside. Writing sometimes looks like work when it is restoring me. An occupied mind is not necessarily a burdened one. Some questions take energy from us. Others somehow return it.

Still, his description of what happens after a project is finished stayed with me. A task can be complete while the mind continues revising it. We remember the decision we would change, the detail we missed, or the better route that became visible only after taking the longer one. There is learning available in that review.

There may also be no obvious place to stop.

Jared’s wording made me realize that I had usually thought of rest as a condition rather than a relationship. I imagined it as something a person either had or needed, took or postponed.

A relationship develops through repeated choices. We establish expectations and decide the terms under which we will make ourselves available.

We can welcome rest when it arrives or ask it to come back later. We can treat it as necessary care or as compensation for completed work. We can receive it in the middle of responsibility or insist that it wait until nothing remains unfinished.

That last condition gives rest a very long wait.

Work has a remarkable ability to reproduce while no one is watching.

The terms we place on rest do more than organize our calendars. They gradually teach us when we are allowed to stop and what must be true before we can receive care.

Jesus slept before they reached the other side.

That detail has begun to reshape the way I answer Jared. Jesus’ sleep and his care for the disciples occupied the same boat.

Later, when the disciples returned from their own work and could scarcely find time to eat, Jesus invited them to come away and rest. People were still coming and going. The needs had not disappeared.

Jesus’ rest belonged to the crossing, not merely to what came after it. It did not cancel his care for the people in the boat or his purpose on the other side.

Rest is not always the reward for faithfulness. Sometimes it is part of how faithfulness continues.

When Jared and I talk again, I think I know what I will tell him.

I have spent much of my life believing rest belonged to the far shore.

Lately, I have been thinking about the cushion.

Until next time,

George

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Scripture: Mark 4 and Mark 6:30–34. Quotations are from the World English Bible.

The Second Storm

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At 5:20 this morning, two raccoons began fighting beneath my open bedroom window.

I had planned to sleep in.

The night before, I had stayed up later than usual, comforted by the thought that morning would allow me to remain curled beneath the warm blankets for a little longer. There were no alarms demanding an early start and no reason to exchange the warmth of the bed for the cool air coming through the window.

At least, that had been the plan.

The night had already awakened me once.

All day yesterday, we had been expecting a storm. The forecast included wind, rain and the possibility of hail, so earlier in the day I moved all our vehicles beneath cover.

The storm waited until approximately 1:30 in the morning to make its entrance.

Lightning did not seem to come from any single direction. It flashed from every corner of the sky, with each second appearing to belong to another burst of light. Thunder followed. The wind moved through the trees and pressed against the house.

It was quite a spectacle.

Yet the storm brought no rain and none of the expected hail. It filled the sky with light and the night with noise, then passed without damaging anything.

Eventually, the lightning moved farther away, the thunder softened and I returned to sleep.

Then came 5:20.

The sound beneath my window was not thunder. It was hissing, snarling and the unmistakable disturbance of gravel. Two raccoons had chosen the landing at the end of our driveway as the site of what appeared to be an important territorial disagreement.

There is plenty of room around our place.

Of all the available Montana, both raccoons apparently wanted the same few square feet.

I lay there listening and wondering why either one cared so much about that particular patch of gravel. One could have moved several yards in any direction and found more unoccupied space than it could possibly use. Territorial jostling seemed unnecessary when there was so little territory worth defending and so much territory available.

I understand that raccoons are simply raccoons. They do not attend conflict-resolution seminars, submit themselves to pastoral counseling or pause to consider whether a disagreement is worth disturbing someone’s sleep.

Still, as I listened to them fight, my thoughts returned to the message I had preached the previous morning.

Judges 11 tells the story of Jephthah, a rejected man who became a mighty warrior. When the Ammonites threatened Israel, the people who had once driven him away invited him home because they needed someone who knew how to fight.

Jephthah defeated the enemy beyond Israel’s borders, but he carried another enemy home. His wounds, his need to secure what had once been denied to him and his mistaken belief that God’s favor could be negotiated through a bargain all followed him through his own front door.

His daughter paid the cost.

That was the warning of the message: we can win the battle everyone sees while losing the one that matters most. The enemy outside us may be defeated while the fear, grievance or false belief within us remains fully armed.

The raccoons made me think even more about the message our church will hear six mornings from now.

Judges 12 begins immediately after Israel’s victory over Ammon. The external threat has passed, but peace does not follow. The men of Ephraim arrive with a grievance. They accuse Jephthah of failing to include them in the battle and threaten to burn his house down over him.

The complaint was not entirely new. Earlier in Judges, Ephraim brought a similar grievance to Gideon. Gideon answered carefully, honored them and allowed their anger to subside.

Jephthah was not Gideon.

He responded with accusation and force. Words became weapons, resentment became warfare and Israelites began killing other Israelites. By the end of the conflict, forty-two thousand men of Ephraim were dead.

The same kind of complaint produced two very different endings.

The difference was not merely what was said. The difference was what those words encountered inside the person who heard them.

A humble answer found a way toward peace.

An old wound found another war.

With a little encouragement from Selena’s flashlight, the raccoons disappeared into the darkness and the gravel beneath my window grew quiet. But I remained awake, thinking about the two storms that had interrupted the night.

The first came from the sky. It announced itself in the forecast and illuminated the horizon when it arrived. We could not prevent the lightning or silence the thunder.

The second began much closer to the ground.

We are generally better at recognizing dangers on the horizon than the pressure gathering within us. Those storms seldom appear on radar.

They gather around an insult we keep rehearsing, a place we believe must be defended, an old rejection we have never surrendered or a fear that convinces us another person’s presence threatens our own. They may begin quietly, but once released, other people are forced to live beneath them.

Not every conflict is caused by a lack of room.

Sometimes there is plenty of room, but something within us has decided there cannot be room for both of us.

Peace requires more than the absence of opposition. It requires the humility to believe that another person does not have to lose for us to have a place. It asks us to surrender the need to make new people pay old debts and to let God heal the wounds that otherwise turn every disagreement into another battlefield.

At 5:20 this morning, I found myself asking a harder question:

Have I given the people nearest to me any reason to brace themselves for storms I have refused to surrender?

The world will send enough weather across their lives.

By the grace of God, I do not need to add my own.

Until next time,

George

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