Before we can serve like Jesus, we have to notice the servants already around us. 🙏 The clearest picture most of us have of service comes from something as simple as a server at a restaurant, and starting there can help us understand what it means to embrace our own role of service in God's Kingdom, as Kingdom greatness looks less like being served and more like serving others.

We have no trouble asking God to forgive us. It is forgiving the person who hurt us — or wronged us, or disappointed us, or maybe just got under our skin — where things get complicated. This week, we land on the final lines of the Lord's Prayer and wrestle with what it really means to pray them honestly. Because a posture of grace toward others is not just a nice idea. According to Jesus, it is inseparable from the grace we ourselves have received.

We ask for daily bread — but if we are honest, most of us are living like we ordered the buffet. Somewhere between the original prayer and our modern lives, "enough" got replaced by "more." This week, we sit with one of the simplest lines in the Lord's Prayer and let it ask us a surprisingly uncomfortable question: what would it look like to truly want only what we need — and to make sure our neighbors have the same?

Every Sunday we say it together: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done." But what if we stopped and asked ourselves — do we actually want that? Praying for God's kingdom to come means releasing our grip on our own kingdoms, our own agendas, our own definitions of what the world should look like. This week, we discover that the Lord's Prayer is not just a devotional exercise — it is a declaration of whose side we are on and what we are willing to do about it.

As with many traditions, we look back through the lens of nostalgia and celebrations of the past to form our expectations of the future.  This year, however, let's encounter Palm Sunday together with fresh eyes —as if we're hearing the hosannas for the very first time. Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war-horse, while crowds praise him as King. The expectations of the people and of the disciples in that moment differ greatly from the story that is about to unfold.  Two thousand years later, how often do our own expectations of Jesus the Christ in our lives differ from the outcomes? This Palm Sunday, we're challenged to release our grip on what we think we know and allow God to speak in and through us as the Body of Christ.