🌿 Gospel & Grass Stains Weekly Recap

First, sorry for the late update! We were out of town this weekend and the start of this week has been a little busier than usual. But I didn’t want to miss sharing what we experienced together at Gospel & Grass Stains this past Saturday.

Some of our words this week were patience, kindness, acceptance, and appreciative.

Patience is something we all wrestle with — waiting for answers, waiting for healing, waiting for peace. Kindness is something the world is starving for — not just polite gestures, but genuine, Spirit-filled compassion. And acceptance… this week we named it for what it truly is: the acceptance of all people, no matter how different they are.

Acceptance means the table of Christ is wide enough for everyone — for the ones who feel at home in church and for the ones who’ve been told they don’t belong.

We read Romans 10:4–15, and verse 9 especially stood out:

“If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

This verse cuts through all the barriers humans try to build. It doesn’t add fine print. It doesn’t say if you’re straight enough, religious enough, good enough, or from the right background.

It says simply: if you believe in your heart and confess with your lips, you belong. That means gay or straight, Baptist or Presbyterian, Black or white — we all have a place in heaven. That’s not me stretching Scripture. That’s Scripture itself, plain and bold.

“If you’re in the fire, I’m there too.”

We also carried away the powerful reminder: “If you’re in the fire, I’m there too.”

That phrase pulls us straight into the promise of Daniel 3, when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown into the furnace. God didn’t put the fire out. Instead, He stepped into it with them.

And that’s what Christ still does. He doesn’t avoid our struggles, our identities, or our differences. He joins us in the heat of it — in the pain of rejection, in the battle for freedom, in the longing to be fully seen. If you are in the fire, He is too.

This week reminded us that faith is both beautifully simple and radically inclusive. It’s not about drawing tighter circles. It’s about opening them wide, the way Christ does.

So may we walk into this week with patience in the waiting, kindness in the living, and acceptance that truly mirrors the heart of God — a God who says to each of us: “You belong. You are mine. And nothing can take that away.”