The Mask

Not far from where Jesus sat down to teach, there were theaters. The region of Galilee in the first century lived inside a broader Greco-Roman world, and that world loved spectacle. Open-air theaters with stone seats carved into hillsides and stages wide enough to hold a crowd’s attention were scattered throughout the landscape around the very places Jesus walked and taught. The people who followed Him up that hillside didn’t have to imagine what a theater looked like because they had seen the performances for themselves. They understood the craft of it all.

And they understood the masks.

In the ancient world, actors wore them. Large, exaggerated masks that told the audience who the character was before a single line had even been spoken. The hero wore one face, while the villain wore another. And the audience? Well, they never saw what was underneath the mask. The actor himself could be exhausted, grieving, uncertain, or afraid, but none of that mattered once the mask was in place. What the crowd saw was the performance, and what the crowd got was the carefully constructed version presented to them under the lights.

Those actors were called hypokrites.

Now, here is something most people never hear in church. In the first century, that word was not originally an insult. A hypokrite was simply a performer, someone trained and respected for the ability to step into a role convincingly enough that the audience believed every word. The problem was not the theater. The problem came later, when Jesus looked at the religious leaders of His day and realized they had started doing the same thing with faith.

He wasn’t calling them names as much as He was making a diagnosis.

“You have become performers,” He was saying. “You have learned how to wear the right face in public. You know the right prayers, the right language, the right gestures, the right places to stand so people can see you. You have become so skilled at performing holiness that somewhere along the way you may have forgotten the difference between the mask and the man underneath it.”

That crowd on the hillside would have heard those words differently than we do now. They would not have heard a simple moral scolding. They would have heard a surgeon naming the wound out loud.

So when Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart,” He never actually stops to define what that means. There is no checklist attached. No seven habits of the spiritually successful. No formula for finally becoming impressive enough for God. He simply says the words and lets them settle over the crowd like a question hanging in the air.

Because honestly, who among us is pure in heart? Who among us has nothing hidden, nothing managed, nothing rehearsed? Who among us has never worn a face that looked calmer, kinder, stronger, or more faithful than what was really happening underneath?

But if you keep following Jesus through the Gospels, something begins to come into focus. Again and again, His sharpest words are aimed not at broken people, but at performative ones. He tells the Pharisees they are polishing the outside of the cup while the inside remains untouched. He watches one man stand in the temple, praying a polished, carefully constructed prayer about all the ways he is better than everyone else around him. Then Jesus notices another man standing at a distance, unable even to lift his eyes toward heaven, simply whispering, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” And Jesus says, “That one. That one went home justified.”

Augustine once said that the real contrast in this Beatitude is not between purity and impurity, but between purity and hypocrisy. I think he was right, because a pure heart is not a perfect heart. It is not a heart that has finally climbed high enough to escape the mess of being human. It is not a heart that has figured out how to impress the room. A pure heart is simply an honest one. It is the person who finally grows too tired to keep performing and instead comes to God carrying what is actually true.

And I think that is what the people on the hillside found so startling.

Most of them could never keep up with the religious performance expected of them anyway. They were fishermen and laborers and tax collectors and women who had spent years being quietly reminded that they were falling short. The distance between who they were and who they were supposed to be felt enormous. They had been taught, directly and indirectly, that holiness belonged to people who performed better.

Then Jesus sat down, looked directly at the people who could never quite keep the mask in place, and said, “Blessed.”

I imagine some of them exhaled for the first time in years.

I think about this often when I sit with families in grief. There is a version of grief that knows exactly how to behave in public. The right words get spoken. The right face gets worn. Everything is managed with quiet dignity, and I understand why. Some pain feels too personal to spill open in front of a room full of people.

But every now and then, somebody stops performing.

A daughter who held herself together through the visitation and funeral quietly breaks down at the graveside. A son who has not cried in decades suddenly reaches for his mother’s hand and cannot let go. A widow finally stops answering the question, “How are you doing?” with polite reflexes and simply says, “I honestly don’t know.”

And those moments always feel holy to me.

Not because composure is wrong. But because in those moments, there is no performance left. People let their masks slip, and suddenly something true stands in the open air between everybody who is present.

I think that is what Jesus meant.

Not that God only meets us when we fall apart, but that God has never needed our performance in order to love us in the first place. He meets us most deeply in the places where we stop pretending long enough to be known.

The Unlikely Altar for this Beatitude is difficult to photograph because it is not really a place. It is the quiet moment, often unexpected and sometimes a little uncomfortable, when you finally grow weary of carrying the mask.

Maybe it happens in your car after you have held yourself together all day. Maybe it happens in the middle of a conversation where something inside you simply quits trying to sound okay. Maybe it happens late at night when the performance becomes too heavy to keep carrying for another hour.

That moment, strange as it sounds, may be holy ground.

Not because you finally got your life together, but because you finally stopped pretending that you had.

May we know, may we remember, may we never forget: God has never loved the mask more than the person underneath it.

Take off the mask. That is all. Just take it off.

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1,370 Pounds of Fear

By On the Derby and the Unexpected Chance • May 5, 2026

I could write about Cherie DeVaux, and honestly, I probably should. She made history Saturday at Churchill Downs — the first woman ever to train a Kentucky Derby winner in 152 years of trying. Golden Tempo came from dead last with 23-1 odds and crossed the finish line while Cherie stood in the winner's circle holding her nephew and crying the kind of tears you simply cannot manufacture. That's a real story, a genuinely good one, and it deserves its own altar. But I keep thinking about something else entirely. Every year, the Kentucky Derby does something to me that has nothing to do with the race itself. It's the pageantry. The hats that took three weeks to find. The mint juleps, the singing of My Old Kentucky Home , the roses, the trumpet call, the way a hundred thousand people dress up and gather and hold their breath together for exactly two minutes. There is something deeply human about all of that — something that looks, if you squint a little, like worship. I have come to believe that we need ritual; we always have and probably always will. We mark things with ceremony because some moments are simply too large to let pass without acknowledgment, and Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in May is one of the last places in America where everybody agrees, without argument, without explanation, to stop, dress up, and pay attention together. And then on Saturday, just before the gates opened, a horse named Great White reared up, fell backward, and flipped. He wasn't even supposed to be there. Great White got into the Derby field on Wednesday, just three days before the race, as a late entry after another horse was injured. A door opened that wasn't supposed to open. An unexpected chance, the kind that doesn't come looking for you twice. His trainer had him ready, and his jockey was up. The roses were on the table, the crowd was holding its breath, and the pageantry was in full, glorious swing. And right there at the threshold of the gate, not inside it, not pointed toward the finish line, but right there at the edge of the only moment his entire life had been building toward - - something spooked him. His body said no. He weighs 1,370 pounds. And fear? Fear stopped him cold. The chance of a lifetime was gone before it ever began. “It’s the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance.” One chance. One Saturday. One gate. And just like that, it was over before it ever began. I’ve loved that line from Dan Fogelberg for years, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt it quite like I did on Saturday evening. The jockey walked away unhurt, which matters more than the race ever could. And Great White was reported to be perfectly fine afterward, unaware of what the moment had cost him, which is either mercy or heartbreak, depending on how you look at it. He will never know what he missed. He will never carry the weight of that threshold. He just is, somewhere in a stall right now, exactly the horse he was on Friday - - ready, capable, and unaware. I couldn't stop thinking about him. Not because it's a clean tragedy with a tidy moral, but because I have stood at enough gravesides to recognize that story. I officiate funerals, and I have sat with enough families to have lost count of the ones where fear made the call at the gate. It wasn't made by a failure or by lack of preparation. It wasn’t even bad luck, not exactly. Just fear, arriving at the worst possible moment, at the threshold of the thing they'd been pointed toward their whole life. The conversation they kept meaning to have. The relationship they almost repaired. The door that opened unexpectedly on a Wednesday and closed forever by Saturday. The pageantry of the world rolled on without them, the way it always does, and they never got their two minutes. Here is what I want to say to you today, and I want to say it as someone who has stood in those rooms and felt that grief: some of you still have your gate in front of you. The unexpected door is still open. The chance you didn't see coming is still there, waiting for you to stop letting fear make the call. Because fear will always find something to spook at. It will find a reason why this isn't the right moment, why you aren't quite ready, why it would be better to wait for a Saturday with better conditions, calmer nerves, and more certainty. Fear is patient and persuasive , and it knows exactly where to find you — right there at the threshold, when the gate is finally close enough to touch. But the roses don't wait. The trumpet doesn't play twice. And I have sat with too many people in too much grief over unlived moments to let this Derby pass without saying it plainly. Whatever is waiting on the other side of your gate — run toward it. Not because the fear goes away. It probably won't. But because the chance of a lifetime doesn't come back around, and somewhere on the other side of that threshold is the thing you were made for. God meets you there, at the gate, in the fear, in the unexpected chance you didn't see coming. That's where He does some of His best work — not in the winner's circle, not in the pageantry, but right there in the trembling, terrifying, holy threshold moment. That's an Unlikely Altar if I've ever seen one. Not the winner's circle. Not the roses. Not the pageantry. Just a trembling creature at a threshold, and a God who showed up anyway. If that's where you are today, standing at the gate, heart pounding, door open, fear loud - - May you know, may you remember, may you never forget: you were made for this moment. And you are not alone in it.

The Cheer

By On Chesedh, a Football Game, and the Love that Gets Up and Moves • April 29, 2026

There is a word in the Hebrew Bible that appears more than 150 times, and we have never found an adequate way to translate it into English. The word is chesedh . We try. We use mercy, lovingkindness, steadfast love, and compassion. And every translation captures something true. But none of them capture everything. Because chesedh isn't just a feeling, an attitude, or even a virtue, it's the word the writers of Scripture used over and over again to describe the defining characteristic of God — the way God moves toward people, especially people who have no reason to expect it. And there is a related word, rahamim , which means something even more visceral. It comes from the Hebrew word for womb . It's the kind of love a mother has for the child she carried — not distant, or theoretical, but rather physical and active. It is a love that cannot stay still when the one it loves is suffering. That's what Jesus was talking about when He said, " Blessed are the merciful. " It’s not pity, and it’s more than just feeling sorry for someone from a safe distance. And it surely isn't just some kind thought sent in the general direction of someone's pain. Chesedh . Rahamim . It is a love that gets up and moves. Now imagine you are sitting on that hillside, the day Jesus said those words. You are not there because life is going well. You are there because you are out of other options, and something about this carpenter from Nazareth made you think — maybe. Just maybe He is the One. You are a fisherman with calloused hands who has been told your whole life that God is for the educated and the clean. You are a woman who has been publicly shamed and hasn't forgotten the faces of the people who did it. You are a tax collector who knows exactly what your neighbors think of you. You are a mother whose child is sick and who has been told, quietly and not so quietly, that this is what you deserve. You have heard religious teachers your whole life. You know how this usually goes. They tell you what God requires. But more than that, they like to remind you that you fall short. And they remind you again and again and again. So when Jesus says, " Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy, " what runs through your heart? Probably not faith; at least not yet. Probably something closer to — so what? Nobody has ever shown me that. Why would I believe it now? And yet you stay. Something keeps you on that hillside. Maybe it's hunger. The rahamim kind — deep, desperate, from somewhere in your core. The longing for someone to finally mean it. In November 2008, a high school football team from Gainesville, Texas, took the field for what should have been just another road game. Gainesville State had fourteen players, wore seven-year-old pads and hand-me-down helmets. And they were winless with a 0-8 record. When Gainesville State arrived at games, they were escorted by security guards who removed their handcuffs before kickoff. You see, Gainesville State is a juvenile correctional facility. Their players are there by court order — drugs, assaults, robberies. Many of their families have disowned them. They play every game on the road, so there are no home crowds and no one is cheering their names. Their opponent that night was Faith Christian School — seventy players, eleven coaches, the latest equipment, and hundreds of involved parents. Before the game, Faith's head coach, Kris Hogan, sent an email to his fans. He asked them to do something unusual. Half of them, he said, would sit on the visiting side. They would learn the names of the Gainesville players. And they would cheer for them. When the Gainesville Tornados took the field, they ran through a banner that read Go Tornados. Two hundred strangers cheered their names. Faith's own cheerleaders led cheers for the opposing team. One Gainesville player said, “ We can tell people are a little afraid of us when we come to games. But these people, they were yellin' for us. By our names. ” Faith won 33 to 14. It didn't matter. Because at the end of the game, when the teams gathered to pray, a Gainesville player named Isaiah asked to lead. And this is what he prayed: “ Lord, I don't know how this happened, so I don't know how to say thank You, but I never would've known there were so many people in the world that cared about us. ” That is chesedh. You see, it’s not just feeling sorry for kids in a hard situation. It’s not writing a check from a comfortable distance. But it is about a large group of people who chose to get into the skin of fourteen young men who had never been cheered for and cheered for them anyway. And it changed Isaiah. You can hear it in his prayer. Something broke open in him that night that had never been open before. That is what mercy does when it is real. Isaiah didn't just feel better that night. For maybe the first time in his life, he felt what grace actually feels like, with skin on it. And you don't walk away from that as the same person. They will receive mercy. That crowd on the hillside didn't know what to do with that promise yet. But maybe — just maybe — some of them had felt something like what that young man Isaiah felt. The shock of being cheered for by people who had no reason to cheer. The disorientation of being treated like you matter by people who didn't have to. And maybe that's what finally made them believe it was possible. Chesedh doesn't always look like 200 fans on the bleachers. Sometimes it looks like a cup of cold water handed to a stranger who is thirsty. Doesn't seem like much and is often barely worth mentioning. But to the one drinking it — standing there parched, overlooked, and not expecting anything from anyone — that cup is the whole character of God made visible in one ordinary moment. That's the Unlikely Altar for this one. It isn’t some grand gesture or a stadium full of people. It is the moment when someone who has never been shown mercy receives it — and something in them shifts permanently. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Not because mercy is a transaction. Not because you give it and get it back like change. But because when you live chesedh — when you get into someone's skin and choose to move toward them instead of away — you find yourself swimming in the same love that has been moving toward you your whole life. Even when you didn't know it. Even when you were the one on the visiting side, wondering if anyone would ever cheer your name. May we know, may we remember, may we never forget — there is a love that will not stay at a distance. It has a Hebrew name we cannot fully translate. It comes from the womb. It moves toward the ones everyone else has written off. And somewhere today, in the most ordinary and unexpected moment, it is looking for a way to show up through you. Blessed are the merciful. Go cheer somebody's name.

Something Made You Stop

By Leaving a Little More Peace Behind. • April 26, 2026

You weren't thinking about death. You were scrolling. Maybe it was late, and the TV was on in the background, but you were only half watching. Or maybe you were looking at pictures of the grandkids, or a video somebody shared, or just moving your thumb out of habit the way most of us do when the day gets quiet. And then the ad appeared. You could have kept scrolling. And to be honest, most people do. But there was something about the ad that made you stop. Maybe it was the word family or the word burden. Maybe it was a face that showed up uninvited in the back of your mind — someone you love, someone you'd do almost anything for — and for just a moment, you let yourself think about what you might be leaving them to carry. So you filled out the form. Now here's what I've learned after months of calling the names on that list: most people can't tell you exactly why they stopped. Some stopped out of fear. The fear of dying before things are in order, or the moment they realize what a funeral actually costs. Fear has a way of moving us before we fully understand what we're doing. Others stopped out of love. They see something like that and think of their spouse, or their kids, or a grandchild who would be left to figure things out on a day when thinking clearly isn't exactly easy. And some stopped because the form was there and it was simple, and maybe it passed a quiet moment without asking too much in return. I don't know which one you were. Maybe all, or perhaps none of the above. But I do know this: you typed your name, filled in the numbers, named someone you care about, and hit submit. And whatever was behind that — fear, love, or just a quiet Tuesday afternoon — something in you moved. And I want to be honest with you about something. I'm not calling because I need the commission to survive. I don't. I'm calling because I officiate funerals, and I stand with grieving families several times a week. I've seen what happens when nothing is in place. I've watched the frustration, the stress, the quiet panic behind the decisions that have to be made quickly and paid for just as fast. And once you've seen that up close, you don't really get to unsee it. Now, I might be wrong, but I don't think that form was just about information. I think somewhere along the way, you've seen a GoFundMe for a funeral. Maybe you shared it. Maybe you gave five or ten dollars because you knew the family and it felt like the least you could do. And somewhere in that moment, without even putting it into words, you thought: I don't want that to be my people. I don't want my kids passing the digital hat while they're still trying to figure out how to get through the week without me. I don't want my spouse choosing between burying me with dignity and keeping the lights on. I don't want the people I love most asking strangers for help on the worst day of their lives. Just so you know, that isn't fear talking. That's love — the kind of love that thinks ahead. And a love like that is quietly one of the most faithful things a person can do. So here's where I come in. I'm the guy who calls. You may have seen my number and let it go to voicemail. You may have read my text and meant to respond. You may have genuinely forgotten you ever filled out the form in the first place, because life got loud again the moment you put your phone down, and the stillness disappeared. I understand all of that. I really do. But I keep calling. Not to pressure you or hit some quota. I keep calling because I've stood at too many gravesides and sat with too many families trying to figure things out in real time. And there is a difference when things have been taken care of. Love will always make grief heavy — nothing changes that — but when the practical pieces are already in place, there's a little more room to breathe. And I wonder if part of you already knows that. Here's the question I keep coming back to, and I ask it with nothing but care and concern: when your loved ones are sitting in the funeral home, what will you have left them to carry? Not your furniture. I mean the practical weight of your absence. The bills that still arrive. The funeral that still has to happen. The decisions that still have to be made by people who are already carrying more than they know how to hold. You had a moment — maybe just thirty seconds on a Tuesday night — when you let yourself think about that. When love or fear or something that felt like both moved your hand and you filled out a form. That moment was worth something. It still is. The form was just the beginning. The conversation is where it becomes real. And whenever you're ready for that conversation — unhurried, no pressure, just honest — I'll be here.

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