Small Steps with God

Would you have eaten the fruit? Most of us like to think we wouldn't have, but if we're honest, we're not so sure. In this episode of the Mirror series, we look at Eve, the first woman, the first mother, and the first mirror any of us has ever been handed, walking through her story letter by letter using the M-I-R-R-O-R-S framework. **Moment: Setting the Stage** Eve's story unfolds in Genesis 2 th...

# Adam's Silence: The Sin Before the Sin Have you ever stood next to someone while something was going terribly wrong and said nothing at all? That's where Adam's story met me this week, closer to home than I expected. **Eden Was a Real Place** Genesis names actual rivers, the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates, placing Eden somewhere in the region we now call Mesopotamia. This wasn't a floating...

Flag before publishing: the raw transcript cites "Exodus 28" for the Ten Commandments passage, that's actually Exodus 20. I've corrected it in the cleaned transcript and the notes below, but worth double-checking your script. I grew up with a rules-heavy version of Sabbath, the kind where you couldn't turn a light switch on or even turn the pages of a book. This episode is me tracing how Sabbath a...

I've been sitting with an uncomfortable question this week: if I really believe every person carries the image of God, does that change who I'm willing to be patient with? This episode doesn't tie up neatly, and I don't think it's supposed to. **The King's Statue, Reimagined** In the ancient world, a king would set up a statue of himself in places he ruled but couldn't personally live in. That sta...

We just closed the entire New Testament with the last word of Revelation, and now we’re doing something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: starting the Old Testament. But we’re not doing it the same way. Instead of walking chapter by chapter the way we did through the Gospels and the epistles, we’re going story by story, because that’s how the Old Testament is actually built. Here’s wha...

Thirty-nine books, more than thirty authors, a thousand years of history, and somehow it’s one story. If you handed that pile of material to anyone cold, you’d expect a mess. Instead you get the Old Testament: one God, one promise made early and kept slowly across kings, shepherds, prophets, and exiles who mostly never knew each other. Before we start Genesis in September, I wanted to step back an...

Twenty-seven books, written by eight different men, fishermen, a doctor, a tax collector, a rabbi-turned-church-planter, and the half brother of Jesus who didn’t even believe in him until after the resurrection, across fifty years and three continents, without any of them meeting to compare notes. If I told you that somehow adds up to one unified story, you’d think I was exaggerating. I’m not. As...

What if God’s first action wasn’t creation out of nothing, but organizing something that was already a mess? In my twenties, I loved chaos — it felt interesting, like things being shaken up. I’ve since learned two things: I don’t actually love chaos, and God’s original work in Genesis was to get rid of it and put things in order. This episode traces that pattern — order versus chaos — from Genesis...

Have you ever known — actually known — that you were on the wrong road, but kept walking anyway? I've done that literally, driving lost and just deciding to see where it goes. But I've done it with my life too: moving forward, making real progress by every visible measure, while some part of me sensed I wasn't heading in the right direction at all. This episode is about that particular kind of fai...

Strip every work Christian faith ever inspired out of Europe, and the skyline changes completely — no cathedrals, no Bach, no Michelangelo, no illuminated manuscripts, no universities that grew out of monastery schools. In this episode, I ask a question most Christians don’t spend much time on: not what we should avoid in culture, but what we should be creating. Pope Leo’s Challenge to Writers A r...

“How are you?” “Fine. Busy, but good.” We’ve rehearsed that answer so well we barely notice we’re doing it — and here’s the uncomfortable part: we do the exact same thing with God. We walk into prayer already polishing the message before we hand it over. This week I want to talk about why we do that, why it’s not what God actually expects from us, and why realizing that is one of the most freeing...

Before we open Revelation itself, we need the background: who wrote it, when, and why it took so long to earn its place in the canon. Revelation has a reputation as confusing or frightening — my own first encounter was a terrifying ’70s movie as a 12-year-old — but understanding where it came from achanges how we read it. Who Wrote It? Church tradition tr aaces authorship to John the Apostle, thro...

Who actually wrote the book of Jude — and why does it matter? Before diving into the text verse by verse, this episode lays out the full case for authorship: who tradition says wrote it, what the earliest church fathers believed, and why an obscure letter from “the brother of James” is more likely to be genuine than a forgery. This episode covers why Jude isn’t actually his name (it’s Judas, renam...

I’ll be honest — when I was a kid, a movie based on The Late Great Planet Earth (which is loosely about the book of Revelation) kept me up for a month. So when I decided to start a Revelation series in The Bible in Small Steps, my first thought was “this might be the scariest thing I’ve ever recorded.” This episode is the why-and-how before we dive in — not the first real chapter, but the posture...

Have you ever trusted someone completely, only to have them start picking apart the very foundation of what you believed? That’s the situation the original readers of 1 John were living in — and it’s why this letter was written. Before we get into the text itself, I wanted to slow down and answer the questions that shape everything else: who wrote this, who was it written to, and what was actually...

I’ve been obsessed with the story of Amadeus for about forty years. And I’ve been sitting with a question it raises for just as long. What do you do when the most gifted person in the room is also the messiest, most broken person in the room? And what does it mean when God seems to work through them anyway? This episode starts with the story of Salieri — a fictional treatment, not a history lesson...

I’ve been spending a lot of time in 1 Peter lately, and before we dive into the chapters, I wanted to take a step back and ask a question that kept nagging at me: can you actually hear Peter’s voice in these letters? Not just a theological voice, but the Peter — the impulsive, passionate, foot-in-mouth fisherman who denied Jesus three times and then preached at Pentecost. That’s what this episode...

What do you do when someone else gets what you expected to be yours? Not a stranger — someone you know, maybe someone you love. That's the question Jonathan's life puts in front of us, and it's one of the most searching questions in all of Scripture. Jonathan was Israel's crown prince — a proven warrior, a man of genuine faith and ability — and he watched God choose someone else for the throne he...

What if the most spiritual thing you could do today isn't a ritual, a reading plan, or a theological position — but something as ordinary as how you treat the person standing in front of you? That's the provocation that opens the letter of James, and it's what we're starting today. Who Was James? The letter opens simply: "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ." No title, no credenti...

If you’ve ever read through the Bible from beginning to end, you’ve probably noticed it: the arrangements keep changing. A garden. A flood. A promise to a wandering man. A law given at a mountain. A shepherd made king. And then a prophet speaking about something entirely new, written not on stone but on the heart. It can look, from the outside, like God is improvising — or worse, like one plan fai...

Have you ever said the right thing and watched it go nowhere? Warned someone, told the truth, gave the best counsel you had — and the person nodded and did exactly what they were going to do anyway? That feeling has a name in Scripture, and it belongs to one of the most faithfully obedient people in the entire Old Testament. This episode is about Samuel. The Moment He Lived In Samuel’s life spanne...

How to Use Bible Commentaries Without Losing Your Own Voice Every time I open Hebrews, there's a moment where the questions start stacking up. What did that mean to someone in Jerusalem in 60 AD? What is the "order of Melchizedek" anyway? Is that something I'm supposed to already know? Commentaries exist to help with exactly that — but there's a right way and a wrong way to use them. In this episo...

Before we dive into Hebrews chapter by chapter, there's a mystery to solve — and it's been unsolved for nearly two thousand years. We don't know who wrote this book. What we do know is why it was written, who it was written to, and why it still cuts so close to the bone. A Word of Exhortation Hebrews isn't a letter in the usual sense — it reads more like a carefully crafted sermon, written for a s...

It's only 25 verses. You can read it in four minutes. But Philemon may be the most concentrated picture of the gospel in the entire New Testament — and one of the most overlooked books in the Bible. In this episode, we take a flyover of the whole story: a runaway slave, a wealthy believer, an imprisoned apostle, and a letter that reshapes how grace works between people. 🔑 The Setup: Paul, Philemo...

Some letters in the New Testament feel written for a specific ancient crisis. Titus doesn't feel that way — it feels written for right now. A young, unstructured church, false teachers already at work, a surrounding culture known for instability and self-indulgence, and one trusted person left to sort it all out. That's not just first-century Crete. That's familiar territory. Who Was Titus? Titus...