Long Sunday sermons provided six-year-old me with plenty of time to memorize every detail of my dad’s hands. I do not recall sermon points, but I can still vividly see and feel his rough and calloused hands holding mine. His fingers were pure muscle, and I was amazed to find his thumb wider than several of my fingers. Calluses and cuts changed the weekly character of his hands, silent witnesses of the hard physical labor from the previous week.

Whether rain or sunshine, snow or heat, in sickness and in health, my dad used every ounce of his physical strength to provide for our needs.

His hands represented security. They represented provision. And they were early object lessons of servant leadership. His entire life seemed to be lived for my mom and us kids—six in all. At the core of his identity was usefulness, particularly with his hands, in building homes to meet people’s needs and dreams, and through that putting food on our table, keeping a roof over our heads, and allowing for the occasional travel adventure.

Decades later, he is still working hard. But the pace has slowed. Aging and years of work have taken a toll on his body. Several years ago, he fell through a roof and had a long recovery process. Then came a major heart surgery. Today he is in the midst of cancer treatments. “I can hardly do things,” he admits, frustrated and feeling helpless. He doesn’t see that the kind of strength he offers, and that our families need, has changed. We no longer need him to provide physically for us. We have our own homes and callings. The type of strength that his life offers is different now, and perhaps even more formative.

Last week, the family gathered; he thumbed through his Bible and shared a passage that God had brought to mind that morning on the radiation table. It is one thing to read James 1:2–4 with our kids and another to witness together the testing, endurance, and maturity of faith happening in real time. God is allowing us to see a different strength and provision through fatherhood in this season, and the blessings extend to our own children.

When I was little, seeing my dad’s strength gave me comfort. But now, seeing Christ’s strength displayed in his present weakness gives me immeasurably more comfort. Last week, after a dinner with my parents, I walked into the living room to find Dad lying on our couch and under a blanket with our youngest daughter sitting close by. Here, I witness strength—not of his own, but the perfect strength of Christ, as my dad looks to Him through all the discomfort, fear, and experience of weakness.

The greatest gift that we can give our children transcends the strength of our own hands, however mighty they may be. Instead, it’s letting our lives reflect the strength of another—the One whose hands were pierced and bloodied so that ours might be sustained until they are finally lifted in worship and joy before the Lamb.

Isaiah describes God as “the high and lofty one who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy.” And then, in the same breath, God says something we would never dare invent: “I dwell in the high and holy place, and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit” (Isaiah 57:15). He dwells on high, higher than any spacecraft will ever climb, and yet he wants us to know him. He stoops to dwell with the lowly.

Two chapters later, the prophet shows us how far that stooping goes. God looked down on mankind, “and he saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no intercessor: therefore his arm brought salvation” (Isaiah 59:16). Human language to describe God’s response to human need. He looked. He saw our condition. He wondered that no one could save us. And so he gave himself. He sent his only Son, Jesus, for people who could not lift themselves an inch, and even worse, actively reject him at every turn. And still, he is calling out to the world to turn to him and live. There are too many ways to count, but a few examples have stood out to me.

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A window on the way to the moon

In April, the Artemis II crew flew farther from Earth than any humans in history. One astronaut, Victor Glover, a Christian, was asked on the way out whether he had anything to say. Looking back at the Earth through that small window, he talked about reading the Bible and seeing what was done for us who were created: that we live on a kind of spaceship too, one made to give us a place to exist in the cosmos. He called Earth an oasis in all that emptiness. He alluded to the reality that there is purpose for our existence in a world that feels random. That we are known and called to know Christ.

Days later, just as they slipped behind the moon and lost contact with Earth for forty minutes, Glover used his last words on the broadcast to quote Christ on the greatest commandment: love God with all that you are, and love your neighbor as yourself. But more powerful than the alluding words was the astonishing view that we got to see of our home. Tucked away in the massive cosmos created by a God more powerful than we can imagine and more good than we can conceive. The crew traveled a quarter-million miles and came no closer to where he dwells. And yet the One who inhabits eternity was nearer to them, and to us, than that window glass.

When the crew came home, Glover said the gratitude he felt for God was too big for one body to hold. I think it’s worship bursting forth. When we catch a glimpse of the glory of God in the created world and universe, it takes our breath away. But even more, when we catch a glimpse of the Son, it makes us actually begin to live and breathe as we have our being in him. And our whole life wants to burst out in praise to him.

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Two men at a table

This week I watched Stephen Bartlett of The Diary of a CEO interview John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician. On one side of the table: a young entrepreneur, agnostic, visibly hungering after truth, asking questions about God, suffering, heaven, and wrestling with whether any of it is true. On the other: an 82-year-old man who has interrogated his faith for seventy years and found Christ at the bottom of every question, the source of truth and salvation.

What moved me was not Lennox’s arguments, though they are good ones. It was watching his compassion in his interaction with Stephen Bartlett. There was no condescension, just an old man looking at a young man and seeing “someone of infinite value, made in the image of God.” His presence seemed to be an invitation to come and see the wonder of Christ, our Creator and Redeemer, who satisfies our every need.

I kept thinking of Jesus’ words: I am the way, the truth, and the life. Here was a seeker circling the truth, and a servant of the truth radiating it and pointing to the Truth. There is something uniquely compelling about a man who has stood for the faith his whole life and grown gentler doing it. That peace is itself an argument. Bartlett said as much: the most persuasive thing about Lennox wasn’t in his books, it was him. Stephen said he’s been noticing this phenomenon, a peace and contentment that has been a feature of the Christians on the show. He mentioned Wes Huff.

Cautiously curious about Christ

Huff. He’s Canadian, no wonder he’s great. ;) From being a sort of expert in European martial arts to being remarkably gifted at articulating the historical credibility of Scripture, he defends in a different register. This has brought him to the studios of secular podcasters, and to Joe Rogan, one of the largest (maybe the largest?) platforms in the podcast world. What strikes me is not the giftedness of Huff, but the rare combination of humility, confidence, and charity he brings. I’ve watched him in interviews with guests that are uncomfortable and crass, and he treats them with warmth and perseverance. Like he’s corralling them to look up and see; he wants fellow image-bearers to see the beauty of Christ and what he’s done.

That willingness to go into uncomfortable places is not a strategy. It is an imitation, I think. Jesus is still seeking and saving the lost, and the people he sends know something about themselves: we were not better people. Christians are not the moral upper tier. We are simply people who have found that Jesus Christ is the absolute best, and we want to spend our lives saying so.

Not abandoned

This is not coincidence. The Word of God is living and active. His Spirit is moving. His grace is available (astonishingly, offensively available, it seems). The high and holy One has not stayed distant. The God who looked down and wondered that there was no intercessor is still broadcasting his salvation, and he is putting his invitation in front of the world through every window he pleases, whether that be in a spacecraft, or from a podcast studio.

The news will give you plenty of reasons for despair if that is what you go looking for. Look again. One of my favorite verses in all the Bible is Psalm 34:8: “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one that trusts in him.”

Underneath the headlines, the Lord is calling people to him in Christ. He has been doing it since Isaiah’s day. He is doing it still.

My sister thought it was hilarious and circled them all on screenshots for me. Where would I be without her… Probably nowhere.

I will let you reap the benefits of her intervention: the edited version is below. I hope your sisters are as delightful and true as mine. ;)

-Kara

Last summer, my husband took our kids on a trip to Europe. Instead of sweeping views, Noah’s camera roll captured the elements of a city. The geometry of a doorway. The curve of a street that makes you want to keep walking. The proportion of a window to a facade that makes a building feel inviting rather than merely something to look through. He likes to study what makes cities interesting, and the subtle architecture that is inviting to people.

And yet, when he was choosing a direction for study, we advised and ultimately, he decided, to nurture his artistic gifts on the side and prioritize a skill that would end in a job. He’d like to save up money for his own home, and maybe a family some day. So he moved into cybersecurity, something he is interested in, and reads books like The Creative Imagination on the side and occasionally jumps into things like color theory (who knew! it’s actually fascinating).

I have sat with that advice long enough to wonder whether it was being wise or whether we were simply going with the assumption of the secular age: that the value of knowledge is simply what it creates in economic value. There are practicalities that are wise to consider. And yet.

We Have Accepted a Hierarchy That Is Not Ours

In almost every higher ed institution in America, including Christian ones, the disciplines are ranked by utility. STEM sits at the top: rigorous, fundable, the pathway to employment. The humanities occupy an uneasy middle, nice to know but assumed little use. And arts hover near the bottom: electives and usually the first line item cut when budgets tighten. Theology floats somewhere off to the side, required, nodded to, but not quite academic in the way physics is academic. Spiritual, perhaps, but not academically serious.

When we rank knowledge by what it earns, we’ve already decided what education is for. And when Christian schools go along with that, which most have because the pressure to survive is real, they haven’t built something different. They’ve built the same thing as the school down the street and added a chapel.

This isn’t just an institutional problem, it’s what we value as a society. What we reward, what we value. It lands in the lives of real kids whose particular way of seeing the world, whose gift, whose calling, whose particular imprint of the image of God, gets quietly redirected toward something more practical.

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A Framework That Questions It at the Root

I recently came across the work of Dr. Jim Spiegel through a chapel session he gave at Geneva College. He offers a framework that gets at what I’ve been trying to put my finger on.

Spiegel focuses on the idea that the world, including life as we know it, is an ongoing work of art and God is a literal artist. He connects it to the work of Augustine, Aquinas, and Jonathan Edwards. And it challenges the way we think about what education is even for.

I appreciated how he classified the disciplines within the framework:

• The sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, history, psychology) are the study of God’s handiwork. They’re how we examine what he made.

• The arts (literature, music, visual arts, design, architecture, urban design) are the study of humans mirroring God’s creativity. They’re where we most directly exercise our image-bearing capacity.

• Theology, both revealed and natural, is the study of the cosmic artist himself.

When you organize knowledge this way, the question isn’t what will this get me, rather, it’s what does this reveal. And that changes everything about how you rank the disciplines. For example:

Theology stops being a side note and becomes the foundation.

In fact, every subject depends on it for its deepest meaning. Think about what happens when a child picks up a shell on the beach and asks why it’s beautiful. A science class can explain many things about the shell, all true and worth knowing. But it can’t answer the question the child actually asked. Why is it beautiful? Why does it make you stop and look? That question belongs to theology. A student who never gets that answer has learned a lot of facts and missed the point entirely.

But here’s what’s also true. When science is taught with that question still on the table, it doesn’t just become more meaningful. It becomes a way of knowing God. Every subject does. The sciences show us how he works. The arts show us how he creates and what he values. Theology names him directly, and studied together, we grow in understanding and wisdom.

Science, taught this way, produces wonder.

This past week I was on a beach in Clearwater with Violet, actually turning shells over in the sand. There is something about getting that close to creation that does something to you. You stop analyzing and start wondering at its perfectness and beauty. That’s what good science is supposed to feel like. It makes us stand in awe.

The spiral of a shell follows the same mathematical pattern in other parts of nature, the hurricane, a sunflower, and the galaxy. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a signature. And a student who learns to see it that way isn’t just becoming a better scientist. She’s learning something about the God who made it. She’s learning that he is ordered, that he is creative, that he works with consistency and intention at every scale of reality.

The arts and humanities aren’t enrichment only. They’re crucial formation.

The student who learns to draw is learning to see. The student who learns music is learning a mathematical language Augustine traced back to the nature of God himself. The student who studies urban design is asking what human flourishing actually looks like in a place of brick and mortar and light. These aren’t soft questions. They’re some of the most serious questions a person can ask. And because they don’t show up on a salary survey, we’ve stopped taking them seriously.

Part of why we’ve abandoned the arts is the eye roll that comes naturally when you look at much of contemporary art. When art loses its anchor, when it’s no longer about the edification of your neighbor or the mirroring of divine beauty, it doesn’t go neutral, but haywire. Creativity cut off from God and neighbor has nothing to offer but the self and a distorted understanding. Which is why we sat scratching our heads looking at the modern art in Chicago museum - a literal bunch of trash glued to a wall. Complete with a security guard. But I digress.

These three things aren’t separate subjects. They’re three ways of seeing the same reality. And a student who gets through school without anyone connecting them comes out knowing a lot about isolated pieces of the world and very little about how any of it fits together. She’s been trained as a specialist but never really formed as a person.

What Spiegel is after is students who don’t just ask how does this work but what does this mean, is it beautiful, and what does it tell me about its maker. The same for humanities. What is the pattern of man, societies, and ideas? Those aren’t easier questions. They’re harder. But they’re the ones worth asking.

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What Would It Take to Get There?

We’ve absorbed without really noticing, a way of thinking about knowledge that puts salary and utility at the top.

It means high school isn’t just preparation to the career fair. Or college only about the salary it secures. Those conversations matter, but they aren’t the whole point. Parents that take this seriously form children who know how to engage the world not just as workers but as human beings, people who can notice beauty, ask hard questions, serve others in meaningful ways, and contribute something that doesn’t fit neatly on a resume.

If success means the highest salary or a 9-5 job, the model we have is working fine. But if success means forming people who bear the image of God, who perceive beauty, create meaning, and help their neighbors flourish, then we are losing. Quietly, practically, with the best of intentions, we are losing.

What do we lose when education gets this narrow? We produce graduates who are competent and have degrees but who have never really been asked what anything means or what it reveals about the God who made it. It produces people who are good at their jobs but haven’t been given the tools to be fully human. I wonder what we are missing out on.

The image of God in us is not just to be productive. It perceives. It creates. It wonders. It asks why something is beautiful and what that beauty is pointing to. We are people made to study the handiwork, to mirror the creativity, to know the artist himself. We have the Bible as the foundational humanities text, and many more to build from there. This is what has created some of the world’s greatest scientists and inventors, sculptors and artists, thinkers and writers.

As AI takes over more of what we once called knowledge work and technical problems become more easily solved, the question of what makes us distinctly human is becoming urgent in a new way. The answer was never our efficiency or memorization of information. It was always our capacity to perceive, to make, to wonder, and to worship. One could say: to know God and enjoy Him forever.

An education built around that capacity isn’t behind the times. It’s ahead of them.

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We’re living through a moment that demands careful thinking — about technology, culture, family, work, and what faithfulness actually looks like in the middle of it all. That’s what Think Twice is for. Training our thoughts and beginning to see our world and ourselves with the mind of Christ.

You already get access to t…

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Each winter, the vibrant flowers and lush landscape outside the back window transform into a sober, muted palette. Trees become stark sketches of brown against the white snow, while the deep greens of spruces and pines jut into the endless gray skies above. Even the sounds change. The cacophony of late-summer cicadas and tree frogs fades, replaced by stillness and quiet. Food becomes scarce for animals, their efforts focused on survival. Fields lie empty and still, as leaves and plants decompose and disappear beneath barren trees.

Wintering seasons are not confined to nature. We, too, experience personal winters ushered in by sickness, loss, difficult transitions, or failure. Regardless of the cause, these seasons share a common thread: something that once flourished has ended. A new set of circumstances redefines our days, filling them with uncertainty, waiting, and adjustments in rhythms, relationships, and responsibilities.

Wintering seasons seem like a contradiction in a world chasing perpetual summers. The pursuit of happiness, the race to relevance, and the demands of life keep us moving, scrolling, meeting, reading, consuming, and producing at a relentless pace. But when life grinds to a halt, it’s surprising how fast the world moves on. It is painful to feel set aside, disoriented by a new reality, slogging through grief, wondering how this season arrived and when—or if—it will end.

They say that the soil needs a good freeze now and then. Cold temperatures help trees grow stronger root systems, increasing their hardiness. Harmful insects, weeds, and fungi die off in the cold. The freeze gives the soil a rest period, improving its health and drainage. The cold breaks the dormancy of plants, generating new life in the spring. Even the decomposing of plants and leaves is purposeful, restoring nutrients to the soil. What seems like a season of inactivity is actually one of restoration for the earth, animals, and plants.

We’re tempted to view winter seasons as low points in our lives—seasons to avoid, skip over, bury in our memory, and keep hidden from others. But in God’s economy, they are vital to our formation and growth in Christ. In seasons when we have little to offer, we are most ready to receive. When the world becomes quiet, the voice of the Lord is more clear. Beneath the still blankets of sorrow, shame, or confusion is a call to active perseverance, repentance, and rest in Christ. This works life in us.

We often want to share mountaintop stories of faith, but Paul testifies that it’s when the outward man is painfully wasting away that the inward man is renewed and strengthened. If Christ died for us when we were without strength, He will not abandon us in our lowest points. Instead, He purifies us, prunes us, and works life in us even as we struggle, lament, and fret. Remember: even as the leaves fall and snow covers the ground, the promise of spring is present with buds already in place, waiting to burst with life again in the spring.

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avívance | uh-VEE-vəns | n.

the astonishment of watching your daughter become a mother; the memory of your own nurturing made vivid again as she cares for her baby — familiar yet unmistakably hers; instead of nostalgia for the past, startling fruitfulness reveals pathways entirely new.

[Latin avia (grandmother) + vivere (to live); French aviver (to rekind…

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The Myth of a Faith-Free Politics

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Last week, we visited to a small town and walked through a historic home from the early 1900s. In the master bedroom, a handmade quilt covered the bed, and above it hung the plain words: “The Lord Will Provide.”

A declaration to quiet the doubts inflamed by the troubles of life.

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“Whoa….Look what I found, Mom!!”

I turned to see Violet holding up our wedding photo. The silver frame is tarnished now, its edges a bit battered from years of being shuffled in moving boxes in and out of basements. But to her, it was treasure. With a grin on her face, she ran out of the storage room before I could say a word.

Hours later, when I crawled …

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We just arrived home from camping yesterday up near Silver Lake, a true northern Michigan vacation, complete with sunburn on the skin and sand in every crevice of the van. It was restful and fun. I kept phone use to a minimum, and “milling about” (as my nephew Nick accurately characterizes social camping activit…

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