Common Problems - Week 3 | Matthew 11:25-30 The summer of 2014 was one of the most exhilarating summers of my life. Having gained a bit of independence and a little money from graduation, I went on a backpacking trip with two of my friends through the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, just outside of Gatlinburg. We backpacked for five days, had a lot of fun, made some questionable decisions, and came back in one piece with stories to tell. I learned something important from that

Common Problems — Week 2 | Matthew 6:1–18 The Noise Goes Deeper Than You Think It takes no great thought to understand that the world has always been a noisy place. For most of history, the environment of human life (markets, crowds, conflict, community) has contained the noise, or rather, relegated it to a certain part of the world. But something shifted over the centuries of human existence. The noise stopped being a byproduct of living and became a product, something engin

Common Problems • Week 1 • Cornerstone Youth Ministry • April 10, 2026 This is the first teaching in the Common Problems series, a four-week module for grades 7–12. The full series works through the digital world as a site of spiritual formation and challenge. This post captures the full teaching as delivered, adapted slightly for the written form, along with notes on the challenge we launched alongside it. The World Gets Louder The world has always been noisy in its ow