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‘Each of the builders wore his sword at his side as he worked.’ (Neh.4:18) Fighting for wholeness is at once a personal and corporate battle. We help others refuse daily the lure of familiar gods while we strategize to stop the advance of enemy armies. Like the rebuilders of Jerusalem in Nehemiah’s time, we heal with one hand and lance demons with the other. Poland understands this well. The most powerful Catholic nation in Europe, she refuses to bow the knee to the LGBT+ jug

The Church’s authority to restore sexually broken people with the power that raised Jesus from the dead hinges on her repenting from abusing the most vulnerable. I just returned from what has become one of my favorite nations—Poland. Theologically, St. John Paul ll paved the way for my conversion and St. Faustina permeated his take on gendered humanity with Almighty Mercy. These two Polish patrons ushered me into relationship with perhaps the finest Christians I known in the

As I prepared to run the inaugural half-marathon in Kansas City for 2018, I reflected on the river of mercy Jesus released for us in Lithuania. We drove half the night from Latvia to Vilnius, Lithuania’s biggest city and source of the Divine Mercy devotion initiated by an uneducated nun in the 1930’s. God gave St. Faustina a vision of His mercy for the whole world, a world on the brink of WWII which would prove especially devastating to Lithuania, Poland, Latvia and the surro

While we as the Desert Stream staff prayed for our upcoming Living Waters European Leaders gathering in Poland, I received these words: ‘relationships that heal.’ They do indeed. For over 30 years, blessed Europe has been the site where deep bonds have been forged. And fractured. The pain of the latter can tend to overshadow my Euro-friendships that endure. Could my ‘bent’ perspective be a part of the problem? Perhaps splinters from broken relationships still sting and obscur

I ran along the river in old town Kaunas, Lithuania. As I considered the convergence of streams most dear to me, my heart overflowed and I ran with abandon. Surging in me were ‘currents’ of St. John Paul ll and St. Faustina, a European team of wounded healers who heal me, an American team par excellence, and a host of new friends from Poland who gathered to initiate Living Waters there. Heaven on earth until my foot caught a crack in the path and I dove like a senseless anima

St. John Paul ll said that we discover our true selves only by sincerely giving ourselves to others. We the fallen know also that we can offer ourselves badly; we grasp, we grope, we withhold. To bridge the gap between the original beauty of God’s purposes for our sexuality and the brokenness we behold today, we need divine mercy. How blessed am I to have served the saints in both Lithuania and Poland, two lands which have ‘housed’ and honored St. John Paul ll and St. Faustin

‘Human actions cannot help us but only the sufferings of Christ.’ Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) We begin by gazing on the Cross. Our sins invited Him there. And He was gracious: He suffered and died in our place. Put another way, we killed Him. Each time we bypass the stern and splendid way of love we mock and flog and string Him up afresh. He died once and for all to cancel out our sin. Yet we still do it. Our flailing about like a hooked fish requires that