Week 4 of the Good Lord, Deliver Us: The Great Litany as Survival Kit for the Via Media in Exile series, stretches us beyond our certainties. Intercession becomes exile’s discipline: praying for everyone, especially those we resist. Scripture reveals how God sees the heart, prepares a table in the presence of enemies, and opens the eyes of those the center overlooks. The Litany’s suffrages train us in humility, widening our prayer until it includes the whole world—those who wound us, those we blame, and those we fail to see. In praying for our enemies, our own hearts are changed, and we learn again to live as children of light.

Harriet Monsell’s life offers a countercultural freedom: the courage to love without needing results. A widowed woman who rebuilt her life at Clewer, she created sanctuary for those Victorian society discarded—not through programs or metrics, but through holy indifference, the spiritual practice of releasing outcomes to God. Her community loved without tiring, stayed without demanding transformation, and trusted God with what they could not fix. In an age obsessed with saving, measuring, and proving effectiveness, Monsell reminds us that faithfulness—not success—is the work. Love now; let God hold the rest.

When God chose to send His Son to die for our sins, He didn't send Him to live a nice, long, peaceful life and die of old age. He sent Him to suffer unimaginable physical, mental, and emotional pain after only 30 years on this earth. What make us think it is ok to hide the truth of what happened to Him, for us? In what reality is it "too much" for even a child to know? One that is serious trouble with their faith!

What began as an inherited gesture has become a quiet ache of reaching for water that isn’t there. The longing becomes prayer that resonates with Scripture and explores how holy water represents the blessing of what already exists rather than a demand for something new.

It helps us dig into religion and understand how to commit and dig into different way of religion in the world.

When we sin? What is there to do? Run from God? Or run to him? Don't let shamefulness turn you away from him.

Week 3 in the Good Lord Deliver Us series about the Great Litany as Survival Guide for the Via Media in Exile. Lent eventually stops being symbolic and becomes real. By Week Three, the wilderness strips away our illusions of control and leaves us facing the ancient question rising from every displaced people: Is the Lord among us or not? This week’s movement in the Great Litany—the obsecrations—teaches the via media how to survive exile by letting go of outcomes and grounding hope in what God has already done. Through water from the rock, the warning of Psalm 95, Paul’s stubborn logic of hope, and the Samaritan woman’s encounter with living water, we learn the discipline of holy indifference: releasing our grip on the future and trusting the One who meets us in the wilderness. Lent invites us to loosen our buckets, relinquish our strategies, and pray with honesty: Good Lord, deliver us.

Hello, I’d like to introduce myself, my name is Joshua James. I create spiritual and emotionally driven content rooted in faith and devotion to our Messiah. I transform real-life stories and personal experiences into faith-based writing, including poems, spoken pieces, message cards, and song concepts. To request a custom piece, I ask that you email me a brief overview including • The event or situation you want addressed • Your spiritual or religious beliefs • The tone you’d like the message to carry • Any additional insights that would help guide the devotional piece you are looking for. In the name of our Messiah, God bless.

Migration in America has always been a sacred act of survival — from the Great Migration to today’s border crossings to the quiet exodus of LGBTQ+ people fleeing hostile states. This piece traces how the Episcopal Church moved from standing over Black migrants to learning how to stand with those on the move today, including the Motahari sisters and others detained in the past year. It asks what memory demands of us now: whether we will let the stories of women who carried these movements become maps for justice, or whether we will confuse naming the damage with repairing it. Three migrations, one longing — to live, to be safe, to be welcomed. Tradition Remixed invites us to remember differently and move with the people still on the road.

We don't just invest our lives in media but in an ecosystem of unknown advances. Continue Reading...

The Great Litany asks us to look in the mirror before we look at the world. But the mirror doesn’t have to be theological. It can be as ordinary as the work you do every day — and what you notice when you’re honest about how you do it. Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night because the daylight is too bright for the questions he’s carrying. This piece starts there: in the dark, with the questions you haven’t said out loud yet, and the things you’ve been avoiding naming. Where in your own creative or spiritual life do you feel the tension between needing help and wanting to honor the people who help you? A companion to Good Lord, Deliver Us: The Great Litany as Exile Survival Kit on Functioning Faith.

The heart is searching for something. We mistake it for love. What we seek internally is purpose. Who am I? Has long been the question that every person has ever sought an answer for. Even children want to know who they are. You are actively asking, seeking who am I because it's natural to want to know.

The second installment in my Lenten series: Good Lord Deliver Us, The Great Litany as Exile Survival Kit. We have given voice to our grief. Now it’s time to look in the mirror and see how we came to be here. Based upon the Scripture readings for the Second Sunday in Lent (Year A)

A Theological Reflection on Grief, Formation and the Dignity We Lose Together When the Center is Pushed Out and Extremes Take Center Stage.

On this day (24 February) in 1570, Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth I of England. He was trying to make a political point and shore up the Roman Catholic Church in Great Britain. Instead his actions birthed the via media and allowed a tradition rooted not in uniformity but in common prayer to flourish. In pushing Elizabeth out, Rome gave Anglicanism room to breathe. For anyone who has been misunderstood, pressured to choose a side, or told they do not belong, the middle way offers another path. It invites us to honor what has been lost, to guard the sacred interior with gentleness, and to trust that clarity can emerge even without certainty. The middle is not weakness. Exile is not abandonment. It is the quiet space where courage takes root and where God still meets us.

The first in my Lenten series “Good Lord Deliver Us: The Great Litany as Exile Survival Kit.” In a moment when the center has collapsed and the church finds itself wandering in a wilderness not of its choosing, the Great Litany and the First Sunday in Lent meet us with the same invitation: honesty. This reflection explores what it means for the via media to live as a people in exile and to rediscover lament as the first act of faithfulness. hrough Scripture—Jesus in the wilderness, Adam and Eve hiding, the psalmist confessing, Paul proclaiming grace—we learn that deliverance begins not with solutions but with truth-telling. Lament is the language of exiles, the prayer that refuses to hide, the cry from the depths to the God who still hears.

Distractions show up unannounced on the door steps of our lives like undesirable house guests. They subtly intrude our lives out of the blue. If not careful they become your best friend in the time of vulnerability.

The Reverend Pauli Murray knew the wilderness long before Lent ever asked us to enter it. Her life—misnamed, delayed, resisted—mirrors the wilderness stories we hear on the First Sunday in Lent (Year A): eyes opened to the consequences of consciously choosing knowledge and making culture (Genesis 3:7), the ache of hiding and the relief of being seen (Psalm 32), the long arc from trespass to grace (Romans 5:12-19) and Jesus’ own clarity forged in the desert (Matthew 4:1-11). This Tradition Remixed reflection traces how Murray’s vocation, her delayed recognition, the stalled release of her commemorative quarter and the witness of My Name is Pauli Murray reveal a church still wandering in its own unfinished wilderness and the grace that persists anyway.

In Ephesians 6:11, the Apostle Paul urges believers to put on the whole armour of God to stand against the wiles of the devil. This call to spiritual warfare is not to be taken lightly, as the enemy's schemes are cunning and relentless. True readiness to stand firm requires a deep, personal relationship with Jesus Christ, not just religious rituals. Let's delve deeper into what it means to stand firm in the face of spiritual battles.

You kneel, whisper sins you'll repeat by sunset, and call it confession—but God heard the lie before your lips moved, so tell me: is the confession for His forgiveness, or just your subscription to sin without the guilt?