CHRIS BERNSTORF
"I didn’t thank God when my worldview collapsed like a house in a flood, folding in upon itself as if it was all sugar bones and acquiescence, like a newspaper the universe had finished with. God is good, which means good is what God does. A single sentence burst through my world and left a crater of boards and bootstrap legends, Christian clichés peeling from the fractured drywall like cheap paint, leprous chunks lying like Styrofoam tombstones spilling out of a dumpster the day after Halloween. My particle board paradigm for existing dissolved back into the sawdust of the well-meaning humanism it came from. Purpose and meaning crumbled like sandcastles in a tide and left me bare and exposed. I didn’t thank God for the pain, for the embarrassment of losing what I’d built, for when I shivered through the nights, uncertain if I’d ever have a home here again. I didn’t thank God when the vultures circled like competing theologies or when the fear nested where the kitchen used to be and started gnawing on whatever I had left of my beliefs. I didn’t thank God when all of myself seemed to swirl around a cosmic shower drain, a black hole that piped to an oblivion I didn’t want to fathom. I didn’t thank God until the sun came out a few days later, like a proverb or a promise, until I realized what was left. Every hour I spent crying and writhing and gnashing and aching, groaning for resolution or shelter or something new to be built, some hope to manifest in the debris, every moment of it was on solid ground. Beneath the rubble of everything I’d once understood, the concrete slab it all stood upon remained, certain and unbroken, not a perfect understanding of predestination and free will, not a complete knowledge of the Scriptures or the suffering of man, but Christ the cornerstone, Christ and Christ crucified, simple and unapologetic and refusing the yoke of my reason and logic, Christ and Christ alone, in love, in spirit, in blood, beneath all of my efforts and grasping and failings, holding me up even when everything I’d built had crumbled."

JACOB PORTER
"I see the sun ahead Piercing through the dark I thought would be my end Just when I’d given in You’re standing on the shore with open hands Can you heal my heart again?"