The inclination to want to tidy things up and put a bow on them at the end is something

that I shed decades ago.

Because at a certain point, life no longer allows us to feel like that is an authentic

expression. Grace is real, and God's mercy is real and his love is real, but those are not feel-good platitudes.

Those are hard-won truths that required incarnation and sweat and blood and tears.

Music and sweat and blood and tears.

Welcome to the Good Faith podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang. And the Good Faith podcast is where friends who follow Jesus help each other make sense of the world. Now, in the Christian world,

we often use what is called liturgy to make sense of what is happening within the church walls, within a given service.

In fact, this is especially true in Easter. If you are a church attender, you probably will

experience more liturgy than you do on most Sunday mornings. But what if liturgy was meant

for more than just what happens on Sunday, for more than just

what happens within the church walls?

What if liturgy was also God's gift for our life in the rest of the world from Monday to

Saturday?

That's the expansive vision for our guest today, Doug McElvey.

Doug has been seeking to advance just such an expansive vision of liturgy, and he's done so

through a variety of ways.

Certainly, he's been a songwriter.

He's penned more than 350 lyrics recorded by artists such as Switchfoot, Kenny Rogers, Sanctus Real, and Jason Gray.

But it's really as an author that I've really come across Doug's work because he's published a series of groundbreaking books about liturgy.

They all come under the title every moment holy. And he's published three

volumes of that, making sense of different parts of our world outside the church walls. So Doug,

...