It’s that time again once again when American everywhere are all fired-up about football season! But this year’s fire is fueled by something a little different than the usual. Among the traditional social media posts with fans rooting for their teams, grieving losses and trash-talking rivals, news feeds everywhere are filling up with responses to NFL players protesting during the National Anthem. And in the true American fashion, the responses are intense and diverse.

I recently had a conversation about joy, kind of. I was at a Bible study where the topic of the day was authenticity, and how we go about living more authentic lives. When we broke up into small groups to go over the discussion questions, the last one read as follows:

One way we can be authentic with ourselves is to know what brings us joy. What delights you? What causes you to lose track of time? What brings you joy?

For Christians, prayer is an answer to virtually every possible question—right up there with Jesus and the Bible. (And Apostolic Tradition, of course, for those of us who have unchecked the "Protestant Reformation" box on our heavenly applications.) It’s almost as if the little prayer hands emoji was created just for us so we can let each other know we’re praying for each other without actually using words, which is just so deep.

This may come as a surprise, but having a good attitude does not always come naturally to me. In fact, there are days when—if I got there—it probably took a some work.

Sure, the Sun is always shining! I know that! But when I look around and see a world full of injustice, corruption, confusion, melting ice caps, and dying coral reefs, I tend feel the weight of these things a little more than any excitement over the Sun (which, they say, may actually burn us all up in a few years or so, according to the internet).

The word religion has been getting a pretty bad rap these days, often taking blame for most of society’s major problems. As a result, there are many well-meaning Christians trying to rebrand the faith by disassociating from that term altogether. You'll hear them say things like, “I love Jesus, but I hate religion.” Or “Christianity is not a religion; it’s a relationship.”

Eventually, most of us have to become very intentional about not taking Jesus’ love for granted. But this is not so in the beginning! When we first encounter that amazing grace, Jesus starts messing with everything that messes with us, and we are easily beside ourselves with gratitude and awe. I can remember a time when a simple bumper sticker that said, “Jesus loves you!” could make my heart leak out of my eyes. And I recall the bliss of singing a praise song and actually meaning it for the first time.

I’ve always had my impressions of what "Mr. Mastodon Farm" means, but recently got curious about whether or not my understanding was along the same lines of what the artist intended the song to be about. So, we're now 23 years out from the song’s release, and I just recently googled the it’s meaning.

A few years ago, when I first wrote the summary of how I became Catholic, I conveniently evaded a certain portion of the tale by saying that I would “save it for the book." I wasn’t seriously planning on writing a book at that point. There were just some things I wasn’t ready to talk about yet—still too fresh and, frankly, embarrassing. But I always knew I’d have to talk about it eventually. And recently, something I saw on Facebook reminded me that I left it out, and inspired me to go ahead and add that chapter.

On Christmas morning in 2012, I found myself weeping alone on the side of the highway due to a slight miscalculation...

Lin, thank you for what you and your crew have created. It blesses my heart. But unfortunately, this heart-blessing quality is also the reason why something else is breaking it right now.