Douglas Vandergraph

There are moments in Scripture that don’t begin in palaces, temples, or places of power. They begin in silence. They begin where nothing impressive seems to be happening. Luke chapter 3 opens that way. Not with miracles. Not with crowds cheering. But with a voice crying out in the wilderness, a man clothed in camel’s hair, eating locusts and wild honey, calling people to repentance while the world’s most powerful names sit comfortably on their thrones. And that contrast is not accidental. Luke is doing something intentional here. He is teaching us how God moves, where God speaks, and who God tends to use when He wants to shake history. Luke 3 is not flashy, but it is seismic. It is the chapter where God draws a line in the sand between appearance and reality, between religious routine and true repentance, between inherited faith and personal transformation. It is the chapter that asks an uncomfortable question: are you ready for God to disrupt you, or are you only ready for Him to com...

 I used to believe faith was supposed to feel loud. Not loud in a performative way, but loud in the sense that it announced itself internally. I thought faith would come with clarity, direction, a sense of certainty that settled the nerves and answered questions before they fully formed. I assumed that if God was really present, I would feel it constantly, like a steady hum in the background of my life, reassuring and unmistakable. I thought that was what belief looked like when it was working correctly . For a long time, that expectation shaped how I evaluated myself. On good days, when motivation was high and hope felt accessible, I assumed I was doing something right. On harder days, when things felt dull or quiet or heavy, I wondered what I was doing wrong. I wondered if faith was slipping through my fingers, or if I had somehow failed to maintain it. The irony is that I never stopped believing. I never walked away. I never rejected God. I simply entered a season where the noi...

 Luke chapter 2 is often treated like a familiar melody that plays every December, so familiar that we stop listening to the words and only remember the tune. But when I slow down and read it carefully, what strikes me is not the beauty of the nativity scene but the tension inside it. This is not a peaceful world into which Jesus is born. It is a world of forced movement, fear, taxation, political pressure, and uncertainty. Mary is not resting in a quiet home. Joseph is not settled in stability. They are traveling because an empire demands it. They are moving because someone in power wants to count them. The Son of God enters history not at a moment of comfort, but at a moment when everything feels unsettled. That alone tells us something important about the way God works. He does not wait until life is tidy before He enters it. He steps into the mess while it is still a mess. The decree from Caesar Augustus does more than create a census. It creates disruption. It uproots people ...