Hey everybody, 

Wherever you find yourself on your journey this week, we hope that you are being reminded that His mercies are new every morning, His kingdom is coming and has come, and we are certainly not alone or left wanting on our walk of faith. The Lord truly is our Shepherd and He will guide us through the chaos to green pastures, no matter how treacherous the wilderness may be.  

Someone deeply acquainted with the wilderness and the Jesus who leads us through it is Tamice Spencer-Helms. Tamice has been hard at work on her powerhouse debut, Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin and George Floyd. The book will be available for pre-order starting February 7, but we will also be sharing advance reader copies with anyone interested in joining her launch team. For more information on what that entails and how to sign up, CLICK HERE.  

And with that, on to our resources for this week...  

Jonathan’s recommendations: 

• Often when tragedies happen, the scale becomes so large so quickly that individuals, their families, and the total and permanent disruption of their everyday lives get lost in the shuffle. It is difficult to grasp the intimate and institutional implications of gun control, White Supremacy, colonization, immigration, and racism but, Erina Kim-Eubanks—co-minister at Bethel Community Church in San Leandro California—manages to do so with this poem. The violence of the past few weeks in Monterey Park, Half Moon Bay, Memphis, and more that are not in our newsfeeds is personal and collective, has individual and geopolitical implications, and to try to hold that in tension is a Herculean task. Fortunately, it is not our job to do so. Leaving colonized faith means leaving narratives that we have to know what to do, must continue to be productive, or must subdue our feelings to maintain composure and appear acceptable and fine. We can feel, grieve, shout, and shake knowing that the God who sees is near to the broken-hearted, accepts us, and calls us His own.