Pastor Eve Mercie

A brother is one of the first relationships a man is placed into before he has any say in the matter. He did not choose his brother. He was given him. And in that givenness is both the gift and the friction. No one knows how to get under your skin the way a brother … Read more

Being mistreated by another person is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can go through, especially when the mistreatment comes from someone who should have known better. It is not only the action that causes damage. It is the gap between what the person represented themselves to be and what they actually did. … Read more

There is a moment in the Gospel of John that most people skim past: Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down beside a well. That sentence is doing more than setting a scene. It is establishing something essential about the incarnation: the Son of God experienced physical fatigue. He sat because he needed to rest. … Read more

Manipulation is the use of deception, emotional pressure, or distorted truth to control another person for personal advantage. It is one of the most sophisticated forms of sin because it rarely identifies itself. The manipulator does not say: I am going to pressure you into doing what I want by exploiting your desire to be … Read more

The goodness of God is not a theological abstraction. It is a lived experience that has surprised people in every generation. It arrives in the moment when the door opens that should have stayed closed. It shows up in the conversation that changed the direction of a life. It is found in the provision that … Read more

The anxiety that keeps people awake at night is almost always about provision: whether there will be enough, whether the situation will resolve, whether they will make it through the season they are in. This is not a new human experience. It is ancient. The Israelites worried about food in the wilderness, and God sent … Read more

The Bible does not use the word procrastination. But it has a great deal to say about the behaviors and postures that define it. Procrastination is the habitual delay of what should be done now, usually in favor of something more comfortable or less demanding. It is the perpetual deferral of the important in favor … Read more

The ranking of sins is one of humanity’s oldest and most persistent self-deceptions. It works like this: the sins I do not struggle with are the serious ones. The sins I do struggle with are understandable, contextual, excusable, or at minimum not as bad as what that person is doing. This ranking system feels intuitive … Read more

Loving people who are easy to love is not a virtue. It is simply a preference. The love that Scripture describes, the genuinely transformative love, the love that is countercultural in every generation, is the love extended to the person who has not earned it, who has not returned it, and who may actively resist … Read more

Distraction is one of the enemy’s most effective strategies, and it rarely announces itself as an attack. It does not arrive with obvious malice. It arrives as something interesting, something urgent, something that feels like the reasonable next thing to attend to. The notification that pulls you off the task. The conversation that extends past … Read more