by Kevin Tillman | Jun 25, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
This week I was going through some old photo albums. There were photos of me, my brother, and my sister as children. Pictures of my grandparents in the prime of their lives. A photo of my mom and dad sitting on a couch as two young teens that were dating. It’s funny the things that catch my attention now.
When I was younger, I noticed the big moments … the birthdays and vacations. But now, I find myself staring at the ordinary moments. Someone is laughing over the kitchen table that I remember sitting at for countless meals. Seeing that cluttered kitchen in the background, because no one thought to clean it up before snapping the photo. I find myself pausing on those photos that wouldn’t have meant too much to me twenty years ago. The ones that aren’t posed. No one is even looking at the camera. People are talking in the background. Someone is washing the car. There was another photo of my grandfather laying on the grass exhausted from work. Though they weren’t in the photo, I can picture his work boots. I can almost smell his sweat. At the time this was PaPa taking a break, but today it feels like a picture of a man that loved his family enough to wear himself out for them. Nothing about these photos stands out. There is no moment or action that is trying to be memorable. It is just snapshots of a life from a long time ago.
The older I get the more I’m convinced that the moments we treasure most rarely announce themselves. They arrive looking like every other day. It’s just another day. We assume there will be another dinner around that table, another conversation, another basic day with the people we love.
Most of the time we don’t even know what we’re holding until we’re holding a photograph instead.
I wonder why we’re like that? Why is it so hard to recognize a moment while we’re living in it? I’m not talking about the obvious milestones. We all know weddings matter, and graduations matter. We fully document the birth of a new child entering the world. These times are locked in and unforgettable.
What I’m talking about are the vanilla days. Those days that don’t seem important enough to remember. It’s just another day. I don’t know if you’re like me, but I’m often surprised at the random memories that find their way back to me. A conversation I haven’t though about in years. Or, riding shotgun in the truck with my PaPa. Or, playing catch in the backyard. All of these basic random days. At the time, I wasn’t thinking, “I’ll remember this someday.” Nope … it was just another day. I obviously don’t remember everything. None of us do. So why these moments? Why are these the ones that have made their way back to me? What is it about an ordinary Monday night that quietly settled somewhere deep inside of me. That thought that comes back years later as thought it had never left.
The photos I saw this week that moved me weren’t the spectacular ones, they were the basic ones. The kitchen table, the backyard, the family pet, the living room with that big old TV. At the time I was likely wanting to rush through them because they felt so normal, so boring. But, now, they are cherished memories that I’d give almost anything to experience again.
Why? Not because it was a fun moment. Not because there was excitement in the air. These days were as routine as it gets. So why would I give anything to go back there? Because what felt so ordinary then was quietly wrapped in love.
I wonder if familiarity has something to do with this. Maybe we become so accustomed to the people we love that we slowly stop noticing the gift that they really are. We stop being amazed by what once caused wonder. And then life changes … a chair is now empty, the phone stops ringing, the house gets quieter. Suddenly that ordinary Monday night doesn’t seem so ordinary anymore.
We don’t lose our appreciation for the important things because they become less important. We lose it because they become too familiar.
Maybe this is true in more areas than we care to admit. Could it be that familiarity slips into every area of our lives? The people we love, that home that we prayed for. Our health that we don’t think about until it’s interrupted. All of these ordinary gifts become so woven into our everyday life that we stop seeing them as gifts at all.
The more I think about it, the more I realize this isn’t just something we do with old photographs. It’s something we do with life. The things that once took our breath away slowly become part of the background of our life. Not because they are less beautiful, but because they’ve become too familiar.
Our relationship with God isn’t immune either. I think this is why the Bible consistently reminds us to “remember”. The nation of Israel was repeatedly instructed to remember the covenant, to set up altars as reminders. Jesus told us to remember Him with the Lords supper. Interestingly, the Bible usually doesn’t treat forgetting as an intellectual problem. Rather, it’s a relational problem. Maybe this is why God keeps asking His people to remember. He’s not afraid we’ll lose the information, He’s protecting us from something much more dangerous … familiarity.
We don’t wake up one morning and intend to love God less, we simply stop noticing the wonder and awe of being loved by Him. It reminds me of Jesus’s words to the church at Ephesus.
Revelation 2:4-5
“But I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place – unless you repent.”
I find it interesting that before Jesus tells the church to repent, He tells them to remember. That’s likely not the order I would have chosen. Jesus understood something about the human heart that we often forget. Sometimes what we need isn’t another reminder of what we’re doing wrong. We need a reminder of what it felt like when our hearts were captured by Him in the first place.
Love has a way of growing familiar if we’re not careful. It’s not less real, just less noticed. Maybe remembering isn’t about living in yesterday. Maybe it’s God’s way of helping us see today’s gifts with yesterday’s gratitude.
As I closed those photo albums this week I was all in my emotions. But, I had a new and different appreciation. These weren’t just old pictures, they were reminders. They reminded me that some of the greatest joys in life don’t arrive with trumpets blasting and huge fanfare. Often, they show up while riding shotgun in the pickup truck. They show up on a normal Monday night at the dinner table. And, maybe that’s true of God’s presence as well. Maybe today isn’t quite as ordinary as it feels. Maybe years from now I’ll look back and see how much grace was sitting in front of me all along.
by Kevin Tillman | Jun 18, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
“I will rest when…” I’ve said some form of that sentence for years now. Once I get this next project done, then I can rest. Once things settle down, once we get than loan, once I finish this degree. The thing is, there is never a finish line. Life doesn’t happen like that. New demands are put on top of an already filled to-do list. Unexpected distractions enter the equation. The truth is we’re never caught up.
Wouldn’t it be great if you hit send on an email and you got a reply back that stated, “congratulations you have now completed absolutely everything”? Instead, most of us are always on a project. I mean, that’s not a bad thing. We need a purpose, and we are designed to work. But, we are also designed to rest.
Why? Because, we are designed to get tired. This can be a definitive physical tiredness, but not always. Often it is a soul-level tired. Our minds, our emotions, and our spirit are worn out. Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that rest is that thing that we get to do when the things in life are handled. Work hard, play hard is the mantra. We have created rest to be the reward. But, God doesn’t see it this way. Rest isn’t a reward for hard work, rest is a command from God. Rest is a necessity.
I’ve even found myself not enjoying rest when I take it. My body may be sitting still, but my mind never got the memo. I’m thinking about the things I forgot to do. The conversations I need to have. That thing that is due next week. That project that is still hanging out there. This isn’t healthy, and I’m not just talking about physical health. It’s not healthy spiritually. If’s funny how we spend all of our time looking forward to a break, then when we get one we realize we’ve forgotten how to slow down.
Exhaustion isn’t always a lack of rest, it’s more of a lack of proper rhythm. God didn’t design us to sprint through life and then collapse at the finish line. His plan is for ongoing rest during the whole journey. Rest isn’t the thing we stumble into when everything is finished, it’s something we are supposed to do along the way.
We all need rest! The rest (of the stuff) can wait, because the rest can’t wait.
Have you ever sat in a rocking chair for an extended period of time? Not for thirty seconds, but for long enough that you quit looking at your watch (or the modern day phone)? That old chair doesn’t accomplish much. You’re not getting anything done while sitting in it. Bills aren’t being paid, emails aren’t being answered, the projects aren’t moving forward. All it does is just rock back and forth, back and forth. The crazy thing is many people will sit in one and say “I needed this”. It’s not that something is getting done, it’s that things are slowing down. Not everything valuable can be measured by what got finished.
“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.” – Dallas Willard
Hurry is the greatest enemy. Not culture, not temptations, not the things of this world. No, Willard says, “hurry is the great enemy”. He goes on to say:
“You must ruthlessy eliminate hurry from your life.” – Dallas Willard
What that means to me is that we have to be intentional. For most of us if we aren’t intentional we won’t stop, we won’t slow down. Deadline after deadline. Project after project. All the things that aren’t done just keep piling up. Our job is to walk away from it and spend some time in the rocking chair!
The great thing is, because this is all God’s plan, rest actually leads to productivity. It sounds counterintuitive. It doesn’t make sense on the surface. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I was hung up on a project. Maybe it was something I couldn’t figure out. Maybe it was writer’s block. I just felt stuck. But, instead of banging my head on the desk over and over, I walked away from it, took some time, came back, and suddenly it all just flowed. Rest is essential, rest is beneficial, and rest leads to better productivity.
“Rest time is not waste time. It is the economy to gather fresh strength.” – Charles Spurgeon
Rest is such a tricky subject, because productivity is so glamourized. Go, go, go … this is the way to success. But, once again, we are commanded to rest. We are designed for rest. Not only is it disobedient to not rest, it is causing us to be less effective.
“It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late, to eat the bread of painful labors; for He gives to His beloved even in his sleep.”
Psalm 127:2
Did you catch that? God gives to us while we sleep. And, it’s vain for us to rise early and go to bed late. What I gather is that we should allow the work of God in our lives rather than depend on our efforts so much. Sure, it’s a cooperation with Him. We have our role, we have our purpose. But, for most of us, we are likely overworked and under rested.
Maybe it’s time fo take a break. Maybe it’s time to spend a little time in the rocking chair!
We all need rest! The rest (of the stuff) can wait, because the rest can’t wait.
by Kevin Tillman | Jun 11, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
Several years ago I walked through an old church building that had been mostly abandoned, and thoughts flooded my mind. The sanctuary and pews were still there. There was a piano near the platform that looked like nobody had touched it in years. Hymnals were in all of the racks. Dust covered almost everything. It was a strange feeling because all the pieces were still present. The building hadn’t disappeared, but the life that had once filled the place was gone.
I remember wondering how many prayers had been prayed there and how many people had come to Christ. I thought about how many funerals, weddings, baptisms, and ordinary Sundays had happened within those walls. The room itself was full of reminders that something had once happened there, but it was obvious that not much was happening there now.
I’ve thought about that moment more than once over the years, and for some reason it came back to me recently when I ran across this quote from A.W. Tozer.
“If the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from the church today, 95 percent of what we do would go on and nobody would know the difference.”
I don’t know if Tozer’s percentage is right, and honestly, I don’t think that’s the part that matters. What keeps nagging at me is the image of that empty church building, because it occurs to me that it’s possible for the evidence of life to remain long after life itself has left. That sounds dramatic, I know. Maybe I’m being too dramatic. But I’ve seen enough in life to know it can happen quietly. I’ve been in multiple church facilities over the years. That image from years ago, is not too uncommon.
Think about this… A person can keep a house exactly the way someone left it. The same pictures on the walls, and the same chair in the corner. That same old Bible on the nightstand. Everything in place, and yet the room feels painfully empty because presence is not the same thing as the arrangement of furniture. The room still looks the same, but the loved one’s presence is no longer there. It’s just not the same. At all!
I wonder sometimes if churches can learn to arrange things so well that we stop noticing what is absent. That is a hard sentence for me to write because I love the church. I love gathering with God’s people. I love preaching. I love seeing volunteers show up early and stay late. I love the ordinary faithfulness that nobody claps for. So this is not me standing outside the church taking shots at it. I’m standing inside it, in the trenches of ministry every single week.
And maybe that’s why Tozer’s words bother me.
There is a kind of church life that can keep moving by force of habit. The announcements still get made and the songs still begin on time. The sermon still gets preached. Somebody still knows where the offering plates are, or the QR code, depending on how modern the church is trying to be that week. The potlucks continue. The friendships are still there. Every week the doors are opened, the lights come on, and everyone smiles at each other. We are doing church, and most of that is good. But somewhere underneath all of it, there is this question I don’t really know how to escape: are we depending on the Lord, or have we just gotten familiar with the routines?
I don’t think that question can be answered just by looking at the room. A full room can be spiritually empty, while an empty room can be full of prayer. For the most part, we usually don’t know as much as we think we know.
As I’ve been studying the book of Acts, what I do know is that the early church seemed almost painfully aware that they could not produce spiritual life on their own. When they were threatened, they prayed. When they were confused, they waited. When the doors were opened, they still needed direction. Their confidence was never in their ability to keep the movement going. It was in the God who had started it.
That’s the part I keep circling back to. It was all started by God, and now it’s sustained by God. But, unfortunately it becomes too easy to try to manage without God once things become familiar. We don’t say that out loud. We aren’t processing the thought of “we got it from here God”. Nobody puts that in the mission statement, it just happens in the hidden places of the heart. Our prayers slowly become shorter because our experience has made us efficient, and our dependence gets replaced by whatever worked last time.
I hate to admit it but I’ve done that more than I want to admit. There have been multiple times when I prepared more than I prayed. There’s no other way to say it than “I leaned on my own understanding”. Too often in sermon prep I have thought through what needed to be said but didn’t sit long enough with the One who needed to say it through me. That is uncomfortable to confess, but it’s true. I suspect it’s not just true in my life.
I think this is where true revival has to begin. In a place of honesty. It’s a place that is much smaller than a platform and much deeper than a church calendar. I truly believe it begins when a pastor, a church member, a worship leader, a Sunday School teacher, a tired believer sitting in the back row finally admits, “Lord, I know how to do the routine, but I don’t want to do this without You.” That kind of prayer probably won’t impress anybody, and it may not sound like much. But, I know God hears this prayer!
I still think of that old sanctuary from time to time. The settled dust, and the quiet strange sadness of seeing a place that still carried the shape of worship but no longer held the sound of it. I don’t want my life or the church to become that. I don’t think the answer is panic or guilt or trying to manufacture some emotional experience so we can reassure ourselves that God is present. The answer is probably much simpler. We return to our first love, by slowing down enough to notice what we’ve been missing. We ask God to make us hungry again. Maybe, before we start asking for revival in the church, we let Him ask what has grown cold in us. (Ouch that one stung!)
The scariest thing about Tozer’s quote is not that it might be true somewhere else, it’s that it might be true closer than we think. And, if that’s true, revival doesn’t begin with looking around… it begins with looking within.
I walked through that abandoned church years ago, my prayer is that I never become one!
by Shannon Tillman | Jun 4, 2026 | Blog, Thoughts
Someone attempted to show me an x-ray image on the phone of a pre-surgery condition. I quickly declined the offer. She explained it was only a picture. She was not about to remove the bandages to show me the actual wound. Once again, I declined. Picture or in-person, the impact on me would be the same: wooziness and nausea. I do not want to see the insides of anyone, no matter how “minor” the medical situation seems to be.
To see beyond the veil of skin is one matter, to see beyond the veil of the natural into the supernatural is an offer I would readily accept. Although, the actuality of doing so would make me faint just like Daniel and John did in the presence of the Divine. This offer is not just to a certain few. Any person can choose to see beyond the limits of this world if one is willing to meet certain conditions.
Matthew 5:8
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
I have read this verse many times, yet it struck me differently this week. Usually, I have considered that those who are uncorrupted by the world would have special revelations of God in this life and of course in the life to come. However, I think the verse speaks to even more. Could it be that the pure in heart choose to see God in every situation of life? They look past the circumstances, whether good or bad, and see the Lord who is behind it all, sovereignly reigning over every event.
I am not pure in heart. I look at the situations and often get angry at God for not “fixing” them. I do not see the Lord as orchestrating things for good, but standing by and doing nothing. I am not viewing the Lord for I am seeking after my own opinions or desires in the circumstances. Thus, I miss Him, and I miss the blessing promised.
If I am not seeing God, then I am not pure in heart. If I am not pure in heart, then somehow my heart is polluted. What is the problem? A spiritual x-ray would show a heart in trauma from past hurts, shell-shocked by the actions of others, wounded from mistreatment, torn apart from betrayal. Yet, I hold onto what I should let go, only harming myself in the process.
But if these leftover emotions stemming from circumstances were removed, what would I see? God allowed certain events in order to protect me from further harm. He knew I would not rescue myself so He forced a rescue of me. I would see the Lord wanted to teach me to stop enabling wrong behaviors, to stand on truth not approval, to let Him be the Savior and not me. I think I would see God’s comfort when I wanted a fix, God’s lessons over time when I sought for quick resolutions, God’s healing when I wanted answers, God’s patience when I had emotional temper tantrums.
The pure in heart see God. What are we seeing? People? Circumstances? Loss? Unresolved situations? Broken relationships? We must look past what attempts to pollute our hearts. A pure heart sees God behind every piece of life. When we see Him, truly see Him, the other pieces seem insignificant in light of who He is to us and for us. Look for God today.
Matthew 5:8
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
