Would you get in a stranger's car for a coffee shop you'd never find on your own? Most of us would, without a second thought. So why is it so hard to do the same with the only One who actually knows the way home?

This week, Jamie and Crystal sit with the climax of every "I Am" statement so far — spoken hours before the cross, to a room full of grieving, confused disciples who'd just been told their Rabbi was leaving them. Thomas asks the question most of us are too afraid to ask out loud: "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?"

In this episode:

• The full context most people skip — this declaration happens during the Last Supper, right after Jesus washes their feet, predicts Peter's denial, and tells them He's leaving
• Why "the way" is the most controversial of all seven "I Am" statements — "Jesus is not claiming to be one of them. He is claiming to be the road."
• The Greek grammar detail that changes everything: unlike last week's declaration, this one does have the repeated "and" — "I am the way, and the truth, and the life" — placing equal weight on all three and revealing they're not separate claims, but one identity
• What truth actually is when it's not up for debate: objective, absolute, universal, and internally consistent — "There is not my truth and your truth and her truth... there is one truth"
• A genuinely striking exercise: writing down every attribute of God you've quietly stopped believing is true, and why "my heart has changed... because I identified the lies I was believing" — even when the circumstances never did
• Why preparing "a place for you" isn't about carpentry in heaven — it's about the cross, read with the same love and intention as preparing a nursery for a child
• The hardest, most honest question of the whole episode: "Do we want Jesus as our Savior, but resist Him as our way of life?"

A line to sit with:

"When we believe Jesus is the way, we don't have to know the whole road. We just have to keep following Him."

Scripture referenced: John 14:1–7 · John 8:32 · Matthew 7:13–14 · 2 Peter 2:21 · Hebrews 3:10 · 1 John · Isaiah 52–53

Next week: "I Am the True Vine" — John 15:1–17. If this episode challenged you, subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone still trying to find their own way there. New "I Am" episode every Tuesday.

Keep your mind rooted in truth and your heart anchored in Christ. Stay rooted.

Follow us on Instagram: HERE

Support our Podcast: HERE

Rooted in Ink · The "I Am" Series, Part 5

Jamie made the mistake of Googling what a body looks like after four days dead. ("Please don't anybody ever pull my search history.") It's relevant, we promise.

This week Jamie and Crystal sit with the moment Jesus asks the most personal question in all of Scripture — not to a crowd, to one grieving woman, standing in the road, four days after burying her brother. And He doesn't ask her to understand anything. He asks her one thing: do you believe this?

In this episode:

• Why "four days dead" wasn't just gross detail - four days meant everyone in that crowd knew: this is actually, unmistakably over
• The declaration itself, read side by side in ESV and NIV: "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live."
• The line that reframes the whole passage: "He did not claim to have resurrection and life... He claimed that he was it."
• Jamie's own testimony — meeting her husband at 35, after coming to Christ "right before I met my husband," and the joke that still runs in their marriage: "You would not have liked her... she stunk, man, she was not bueno."
• The question this episode keeps circling back to: "What in my life is as dead and smelly as Lazarus? Do I believe Jesus for this person, this situation — or even myself — even now?"
• The gut-check most people skip: believing something intellectually versus believing it "with your hands open" in the middle of actual grief — not after it's resolved
• Crystal's daughter's favorite verse, Habakkuk 3:17–19, and why a kid chose a passage about the fig tree failing and the flocks being cut off as her favorite
• A real, unscripted moment where both hosts end the episode in tears — again

A line to sit with:

"If I don't believe my own condition apart from Christ was as dead as Lazarus, then I underestimate what he actually saved me from. But if I do believe it, I hold the gift of being made alive in him with the weight it deserves."

Scripture referenced: John 11:25–27 · John 11:1–44 · Ephesians 2 · Habakkuk 3:17–19 · John 3:16 · John 20:31

Next week: "I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life" — John 14:1–7. If this one hit you the way it hit us recording it, subscribe, leave a review, and send it to someone who needs to hear that whatever feels too dead to save isn't too dead for Him.

Keep your mind rooted in truth and your heart anchored in Christ. Stay rooted.

Follow us on Instagram: HERE

Support our Podcast: HERE

Rooted in Ink · "I Am the Good Shepherd" · The "I Am" Series, Part 4

In 2005, one sheep in a Turkish village jumped off a cliff. The other 1,499 followed it. 450 died — the only survivors were saved because the pile of bodies beneath them became a cushion. Nothing was chasing them. No wolf, no danger. They just followed.

That's the animal Jesus compares you to in John 10. Not a lion. Not an eagle. A sheep — dumb, defenseless, with no sense of direction, prone to wander off a cliff in a perfect environment for no reason at all. This week, Jamie and Crystal pick up exactly where they left off with "I am the door," reading John 10:11–16 in full (ESV and NIV) and tracing the Good Shepherd back through Ezekiel 34's warning about false shepherds, Isaiah 40's tender prophecy of one who "gathers the lambs in his arms," and David's own testimony as a literal shepherd who killed a lion and a bear to protect his flock.

But this episode doesn't stay comfortable. Jesus draws a hard line between Himself and the "hired hand" — someone who's paid to watch the sheep but runs the moment a wolf shows up, because he doesn't actually love them. Jamie and Crystal apply that directly to teachers and leaders who tell people what they want to hear instead of the truth, and they ask a question most people avoid: are you actually following Jesus, or is Christianity just familiar to you?

They go straight at the objection almost everyone has asked at some point — "how could a good God send people to hell?" — and argue it's the wrong question entirely. They unpack the single most sobering line in the whole conversation, Matthew 7's "depart from me, I never knew you," and explain why that should unsettle you more than anything in Revelation. And they make a claim that will not sit quietly with everyone: that Christianity is the only faith where "the verdict comes before the trial" — where you're declared not guilty before you've done a single thing to earn it, while every other religious system asks you to do enough to outweigh your failures.

It's a conversation about sovereignty, surrender, and what it actually means to know a shepherd instead of just knowing about one — and it closes with a genuine, unhurried prayer for anyone listening who isn't sure which fold they belong to.

If this one challenges you, that's not an accident. Come sit with it.

Scripture referenced: John 10:11–19 · Ezekiel 34 · Isaiah 40:11 · Psalm 23 · 1 Samuel 17:34–35 · John 3:16 · Matthew 7:21–23 · Matthew 25:1–13 · John 19:30

Keep your mind rooted in truth and your heart anchored in Christ. Stay rooted.

Follow us on Instagram: HERE

Support our Podcast: HERE

Sheep jump over a cliff: HERE