May you put the heavy books down today, and let your mind finally come to a full, unhurried stop.

If your chest has felt tight this week from trying to think your way through a shifting faith. If you have felt the exhausting vertigo of trying to believe all the “right things” perfectly. May you give your brain permission to step off the hook.

May you look past the stained-glass caricatures and the corporate church machinery, and remember the Rabbi who spent His days walking in sandals through the dirt.

The One who fell asleep from pure exhaustion in the back of a fishing boat.

The One who consistently chose a messy person over a pristine policy.

You do not have to arrive at a perfect systematic theology by tomorrow morning.

You do not have to perform certainty to be safe.

Realize you can finally put your guard down—because Jesus isn’t looking for your flawless doctrinal compliance;He just wants to know you in the middle of your real, messy life.

May you breathe deeply in your actual room today.

May you enjoy the taste of your food, the warmth of the sun, and the company of the people who love you just as you are.

Grace in the dirt to you this weekend.

Welcome to the crew.

This Friday Lab is designed to give you a completely non-triggering, safe, and protective way to re-approach the Gospels.

We are trading doctrinal extraction for simple character observation. This isn’t a traditional bible study. You do not need a theology degree, a commentary, or a pastor’s permission slip. You are just a quiet observer looking at a historical biography.

Grab your journal, pour a fresh cup of coffee, and let’s practice The Red Letter Reset.

Part 1: Choose Your Story

Pick one short, narrative story from the Gospels where Jesus is interacting with people. Do not pick a long theological sermon (like the Olivet Discourse). Pick a scene where things are happening.

Here are three highly recommended, low-trigger options to use today:

• Mark 1:40–45: Jesus and the man with leprosy.

• John 4:4–26: Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman.

• Mark 10:46–52: Jesus and blind Bartimaeus on the side of the road.

Read more

I missed the spiritual connection, but I flatly refused to deal with the baggage.

If you are currently experiencing that same kind of text-induced vertigo, I want to invite you to take a long, slow breath. You don’t hate the Bible and you don’t hate the truth. But it may feel triggering because institutional religion trained us to fall in love with an intricate system of ideas rather than the actual character of a person. We were pushed into intellectual assent; that we had to believe the ‘right things’ to be a Christian. We were taught to view the Gospels as a giant puzzle where we had to extract code-words for salvation, rather than a biography of a muddy first-century rabbi who walked in sandals through dirt.

We have been taught what the Bible is supposed to say according to church tradition, rather than being taught how to read it.

But if we are going to sort the seeds of deconstruction this month, we have to learn how to bypass the theological clutter and look directly at Jesus. And to see just how human—and beautifully disruptive—He really was, we need to crash a very tense dinner party in the Gospel of Luke.

The Uninvited Guest

In Luke chapter 7, Jesus is invited to have dinner at the home of Simon, a wealthy and highly respected religious elite. This isn’t a casual hangout; it’s a high-stakes cultural performance. Everyone is on their best behavior, watching their manners, and ensuring the religious boundaries are strictly maintained.

But mid-meal, something startling happens.

A woman from the streets, someone the town had already labeled, judged, and discarded as a “sinner,” walks straight into the dining room. She doesn’t say a word. She just falls to the floor at the edge of Jesus’s dining couch, completely unraveled. Her tears start splashing onto His dusty feet. Realizing she has made a scene, she wipes the tears away with her hair, kisses His feet, and pours a jar of expensive perfume over them.

The room goes dead silent. You can practically hear the ice clicking in the cups.

Simon, the religious host, looks at this messy, emotional spectacle and immediately starts running his internal system-analysis. He thinks to himself: “If this man were a real prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him. He would know she is dirty.”

Notice how Simon sees her. He doesn’t see a grieving woman who is desperate for safety. He sees a theological category: Sinner. And because his system is built on maintaining boundaries, his immediate instinct is to evict the clutter to protect the clean space.

The God Who Notices Tears

But look at Jesus. He doesn’t pull His feet back. He doesn’t ask for her background check or demand a confession of doctrine. Instead, He turns to His host and drops a question that cuts through the religious pretense:

“Simon, do you see this woman?” (Luke 7:44)

It sounds like a simple question, but it’s a massive indictment. Jesus is saying, “Simon, you see a rule violation. You see a theological problem. But you don’t actually see her at all.”

Jesus then goes on to point out the raw, physical, human details that Simon ignored. He notes that while the religious elite gave Him no water for His feet, this woman washed them with her tears. While the institution gave Him no welcome, she hadn’t stopped kissing His feet.

In a world obsessed with maintaining the pristine, manicured lawn of religious purity, Jesus completely rewrote the rules of engagement. He didn’t see people through the lens of institutional metrics or moral categories. He met them in the actual, messy soil of their lived experience.

Freeing the Human Jesus

When you begin to reclaim the “Red Letters”—the literal words and actions of Christ—you start to realize that the version of Jesus presented by the institutional machinery is often a stained-glass caricature. The corporate church needs a corporate Jesus—one who fits neatly into building campaigns, political agendas, and dogmatic checklists.

But the Jesus of the dirt is entirely unmanageable.

• He got tired and fell asleep in the back of a fishing boat.

• He loved a good dinner party so much that the religious critics literally accused Him of being a glutton and a drunkard.

• He consistently ignored religious protocol to touch the people the system deemed untouchable.

If you are trying to figure out how to navigate a shifting faith without losing your heart, your assignment this week is remarkably simple: Stop trying to force yourself to understand systematic theology, and just look at how Jesus treated people.

You don’t need a commentary for this, and you don’t need another lecture. You just need to look at the dinner table, watch Him defend the broken person over the pristine policy, and realize that you are finally safe to put your guard down.

The Garden Notes

📚 On the Nightstand

If you want to dive deeper into stripping away the institutional layers from your faith, pick up a copy of “Freeing Jesus” by Diana Butler Bass. In it, she beautifully explores how we can move past the rigid, standardized dogmas of corporate religion to rediscover Jesus as a friend, teacher, savior, and a real presence met in the ordinary chapters of our lived experience.

🌿 From the Shop

If you want to take this week’s reflection deeper into your own life, I designed the Cultivating the Word specifically for this

Shop the Garden here.

Quote of the Week

We were pushed into intellectual assent; that we had to believe the ‘right things’ to be a Christian. We were taught to view the Gospels as a giant puzzle where we had to extract code-words for salvation, rather than a biography of a muddy first-century rabbi who walked in sandals through dirt.

We have been taught what the Bible is supposed to say according to church tradition, rather than being taught how to read it.

The Greenhouse Preview

This Friday in The Weed-Puller’s Lab, we are practicing The Red Letter Reset. I’m giving you a minimalist, 3-step contemplative reading worksheet designed specifically to help you read the Gospels without your old church trauma triggering a fight-or-flight response. We are trading doctrinal extraction for simple character observation.

Upgrade your subscription to get your copy.

Subscribe now

The Closing Question

If you temporarily stopped treating the Gospels like a theological puzzle to solve, and just looked at how Jesus interacted with people, what is the first thing you think He would say to you in your tiredness right now?

Leave a comment

P.S. If you are in between churches or just don’t feel comfortable attending a physical building, but you are looking for something more, join us at Streams of Grace. You are welcome here!

Join us here!

Sign up here!

May you wrap your hands around your mug today, and let the steam carry away the weight of everyone else’s expectations.

May you give yourself permission to step off the performance treadmill, to put down the checklists, and to leave the man-made fine print exactly where it belongs: in the dirt.

If you are tired, may you find real, defiant rest. If you are full of honest doubts, may you find them met with a spacious grace. And if you are angry at the machinery of a broken system, may you remember that your heartbreak is not a failure of faith— it is the accurate alignment of your heart with the One who always chooses the person over the policy.

You don’t have to save the system today. You don’t have to look unbreakable. You just have to breathe.

May you trust the ground beneath your feet, and know that the Master Gardener is doing Her best work in the slow, the hidden, and the quiet spaces of your life.

Grab a journal, make a fresh cup of coffee, and let’s pull some weeds.

Part 1: The Dig (3 Questions)

Pick one rule you grew up with that still lingers in your head as a “should” or a source of guilt (e.g., “I have to have a quiet time for 30 minutes every morning,” “I am failing if I don’t belong to a traditional church building,” “Doubt is a sin,” etc.).

Write that rule at the top of a page. Then, look at it through these three lenses:

Read more

But I want to hand us both a massive, definitive permission slip today: We are not mad at God. We are just suffocating under the clutter of a system.

We aren’t walking away because we are lazy; we are walking away because we are heartbroken. We are upset because we were promised a sanctuary of radical love, but we found a country club obsessed with its own preservation. It is deeply disorienting to watch communities claim the name of Jesus while actively funding political power plays, building higher fences to keep out the marginalized, and treating victims of church trauma like disposable collateral damage. We are tired of the bait-and-switch. We are exhausted by a theology that cares more about protecting a pastor’s reputation or a building campaign than it does about the quiet suffering of the human beings sitting in the back pews.

And if you want to know how Jesus feels about that exact suffocating feeling, we need to take a walk through a dusty grainfield in first-century Palestine.

The Trap in the Wheat

In the Gospel of Mark, chapter 2, we find Jesus and his disciples walking through a field on the Sabbath. The disciples are tired, they’ve been traveling, and their stomachs are empty. So, as they walk, they do the most natural, human thing possible: they reach out, pluck a few heads of grain, rub them between their palms, and eat them.

It’s a tiny, insignificant moment of human survival. But lurking in the weeds are the Pharisees—the self-appointed gatekeepers of the religious status quo.

They don’t see tired human beings. They don’t see hunger. They only see the rulebook.

Technically, according to the hyper-vetted, endlessly layered religious clutter of their day, plucking a head of grain counted as “reaping.” Rubbing it in your hands counted as “threshing.” And doing either of those things on the Sabbath was a direct violation of the fine print.

They turn to Jesus, pointing their fingers at the muddy, hungry disciples, and demand: “Why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?”

Notice what just happened here. The Sabbath was originally given to humanity by God as a radical, beautiful gift of protest against imperial burnout. It was a mandatory boundary line ensuring that slaves, animals, and tired workers could stop producing and just breathe. It was made for human flourishing.

But over centuries, the religious institution had done what institutions always do: they manicured the gift into a cage. They turned a day of mandatory rest into a high-stakes obstacle course of spiritual anxiety.

The Mutation of the Container

Jesus looks at these gatekeepers and drops a line that should shatter every corporate religious framework we’ve ever been handed:

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)

With one sentence, Jesus exposes the dark magic of all human religious systems. Systems almost always start as helpful containers—tools, rhythms, and spaces designed to serve human beings and help them connect with the Divine.

But over time, systems mutate. They become self-protective. The leadership gets obsessed with efficiency, control, and keeping the manicured lawn looking pristine. Eventually, the script flips completely: the system stops serving the people, and starts demanding that the people sacrifice their well-being to keep the system alive.

• The simple community mutated into a corporate machine that requires your unpaid labor and financial compliance to survive.

• The beautiful, ancient library of scripture mutated into a weaponized policy manual used to vet who is “in” and who is “out.”

• The safety of corporate worship mutated into a high-performance stage where you are forced to perform certainty even when your heart is breaking.

Unfair religious control is what happens when we value the preservation of the fence line over the health of the flowers inside it. It is the human obsession with management, masquerading as divine authority.

Your Anger is Aligned

If you are currently sitting in the confusion of a shifting faith, looking at the institutional church and feeling a deep, burning irritation, hear this clearly: You aren’t backsliding. You are actually participating in the exact same holy indignation Jesus felt in that grainfield.

Jesus didn’t defend the system. He didn’t tell his disciples to swallow their hunger for the sake of institutional unity. He bypassed the gatekeepers entirely, reached into the dirt, and fed the people.

When you deconstruct, the terrifying lie whispered by the system is that if you leave the institution, you are leaving Christ. But Month 3 is about sorting the seeds. It’s about realizing that the heavy, suffocating weight that broke your spirit didn’t come from the heart of God—it came from the human need for control.

You don’t have to save the machinery. You don’t have to pretend the bindweed is a flower just to keep the peace.

Let the corporate structures crumble if they must. Let the forced certainties fly away in the wind. You aren’t losing your faith. You are just stepping out of the temple walls to follow the One who is already out in the mud, walking through the ruts, and offering you something real to eat.

The Garden Notes

📚 On the Nightstand

This month, I’m looking to read The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues by Dan McClellan. In The Bible Says So, biblical scholar Dan McClellan uses his popular "data over dogma" approach to dismantle common misconceptions and reveal what the text actually says versus what modern religious gatekeepers claim it says about today's most controversial social issues.

🌿 From the Shop

If you want to take this week’s reflection deeper into your own life, I designed the Cultivating the Word specifically for this

Shop the Garden here.

Quote of the Week

Unfair religious control is what happens when we value the preservation of the fence line over the health of the flowers inside it.

The Greenhouse Preview

This Friday, we are moving from theory to practice in The Weed-Puller’s Lab. We are doing a Religious Clutter Archaeological Dig—a practical, step-by-step tool to help you take one religious expectation that still triggers shame in your body and trace it back to its actual historical and cultural context so you can finally leave it in the dirt. Plus, I’m sharing my personal list of "Clutter Filters" for reading the text without the institutional baggage. Upgrade today to get your hands dirty with us!

Subscribe now

The Closing Question

What is one religious "rule" or expectation you’re carrying right now that feels like it’s choking your growth instead of helping you breathe?

Leave a comment

P.S. Welcome to Streams of Grace

Are there obstacles that prevent you from attending church in person? Hey there, I’m Amanda. I’m a mom to a gaggle of kids and a pastor at heart. I know there are a lot of things that make it challenging - if not impossible - to feel comfortable going to a church building. Streams of Grace is here to help! Streams is a trauma-informed, completely virtual church designed to make church accessible. Every Sunday we drop a short message reflecting on a theme from the Bible. You can watch it any time, listen to it as a podcast, or download and read the transcript. We are open and inclusive. So if you are in a season where you just don’t feel at home in a church but you want to grow closer to God, please swing over to streamsofgrace.life and join us.

Visit Streams of Grace!

To help you move from theory to the dirt, I’ve compiled our last month of “Field Work” into a brand new resource: The Garden of Justice Field Guide.

Consider this your survival kit for the long haul. Inside, you’ll find the tools we’ve developed to connect your personal peace to a better world:

• The Mishpat Map: A visual exercise to help you locate the “fences” and “escaped mint” in your own zip code.

• The “Draft & Fuel” Audit: A tactical worksheet to help you build your “crew” and find the boundaries that protect your soft heart.

• The Kitchen Counter Liturgies: 3-minute services for the “Weary Weed-Puller” and the “One in the Ditch.”

• The Garden Exam: Deep-dive reflection prompts to help you audit your activism and ensure it’s sustainable.

This guide is currently for sale in my shop for $19, but as a thank you for being the heartbeat of this community, it is a free gift to all of my paid subscribers in the Greenhouse (see below).

If you’ve been waiting for a sign to join us behind the scenes, this is it. When you upgrade to a paid subscription, you’ll unlock this guide immediately, gain access to our private Friday Greenhouse sessions, receive continued monthly workbooks, and directly support the work I do here and at Streams of Grace Church.

Read more

This week, we finally stopped pretending that “faithful” means “unbreakable.” We admitted that the hills are steep, the “hurt locker” is real, and that sometimes the most radical thing we can do for social justice is to get in the boat and head for the other side of the lake.

Read more

In Tuesday’s article, we talked about the “Hurt Locker”—that deep, dark internal cave where the work of social justice becomes so grueling that our peripheral vision disappears and our compassion flips like a circuit breaker.

We identified that burnout isn’t a moral failure; it’s a capacity failure. For my paid subscribers, today’s lab is about building the “Bike Club” infrastructure around your life so you can stay in the dirt for the long haul without becoming immune to the world (or yourself).

Read more

Some of the hills were short and sharp; others were just long, slow ascents. I attacked ‘the wall’ and made it, huffing …

Read more

The Saturday Blessing

A Blessing for Pu…

Read more

Become a paid subscriber to receive the rest of the Friday Greenhouse with a bonus gift!

Read more

There is a slow-motion magic in the garden that we almost always miss because we’re too busy scrolling our phones and checking our Instagrams. It is the miracle of the hard, tiny seed—a speck of potential so small it could get lost in the creases of your palm—deciding to break itself open. Every sprout is a tiny act of rebellio…

Read more

The Blessing

May you stop trying to be “garden-ready” and learn to embrace your own wild edges.

May you find the God of the Wild P…

Read more

We saw Jesus bypassing the “proper” channels to meet the Gerasene man in a graveyard, Hagar in a desert, and the woman with the issue of blood in a dusty street. He didn’t bring them into the temple to fix them; he met them in the “compost” of their lives and revealed that the Kingdom was already there.

Today, we’re going into the lab. If the “mint” of grace is found in the margins and the struggle, how do we actually train our senses to find it? How do we live as people who aren’t afraid of the mud?

Read more

Read more

Read more

The Recap: Beyond the Seed Packet

This Tuesday, we talked about the difference between Intellectual Assent (thinking right thoughts) and Fruit (living a right life). We realized that a faith kept exclusively in our heads is like a seed packet kept in a drawer—it’s full of potential, but it won’t feed anyone. To be a “Doer of the Word” means being willing to get our hands and our boots muddy.

The Deep Dive: The Logic of the Hedge

In the Old Testament, there was a law about “gleaning.” Farmers were told not to harvest the very edges of their fields. They were to leave the “corners” and the “hedges” for the poor, the widow, and the immigrant.

Justice, in its most basic biblical form, was about Proximity. It wasn’t a government program; it was a neighbor realizing that their surplus belonged to someone else’s survival.

For many of us, justice often feels like “one more thing” on an impossible to-do list. We think we have to go “out there” to find a cause. But the Kingdom of God suggests that justice starts at the edge of the field you are already working. It’s about who is standing next to you while you’re at the grocery store, who is living in the apartment below you, or who is sitting in the “wrong” side of the waiting room with you.

Read more

There is a comfortable lie that has taken root in our modern pews. It’s the idea that faith is primarily a mental state; a collection of “right” thoughts we keep tucked neatly inside our heads. We’ve been taught that if we agree with the right doctrines and offer up a vague “thoughts and prayers”…

Read more

But I don’t want to just give you a new theory; I want to give you a toolkit.

I’ve been building something specifically for the “un-pausable” life—for the people who are too tired, too overstimulated, or too far outside the traditional lines to find rest in a pew.

It’s called “The Sabbath in the Cracks: Daily Rhythms for Faith on the Move.”

This Field Guide is a collection of the last month of our “Field Work” here in the weeds. It’s designed to be a survival kit for the deconstructing soul. Inside, you’ll find:

• The S.I.G.H. Prayer Method: For when the prayers won’t come.

• The At-Home Liturgies: A 3-minute “Sanctuary Without Walls” service for your kitchen counter.

• The Presence Tracker: A way to notice grace without the pressure of perfection.

• Emergency Scripts: Scripted prayers for when you’re touched out or just plain done.

This guide is currently for sale in my shop for $19, but as a thank you for being the heartbeat of this community, it is a free gift to all of my paid subscribers in the Greenhouse. If you’ve been waiting for a sign to join us behind the scenes, this is it. When you upgrade to a paid subscription, you’ll unlock the guide immediately, gain access to our private Friday Greenhouse sessions, continued monthly guides, and help support the launch of Streams of Grace Church.

Read more