Locking arms with a 200-pound black bear, I had grossly underestimated the challenge.

I was a scrawny, prepubescent 12-year-old attending a birthday party for a friend whose family had a knack for hosting zany shindigs. This year's attraction was a man who brought a full-grown black bear into their living room.

"He loves to wrestle," the owner told us, adding that his pet didn't have any teeth or claws. Surrounded by a group of "cool" guys a few years older than I, and out to impress, I volunteered.

The guys formed a circle, and here I was, pitted against a real bear. I ran at the hairy beast and tried as hard as I could to give it a shove. It was surreal.

In an instant, the bear shoved back. I flew backward several feet, and had I not been so young and wiry, my back certainly would have broken. I knew the bear would be strong—but not like that! The match was over; I was too terrified to continue.

In the Bible, Jacob also wrestled a tough adversary—only this one wasn't a hairy hibernator. Genesis 32:28 explains that Jacob actually wrestled God.

This historical account offers us a biblical model for engaging God directly. We need to be honest with God, for better or for worse, confessing all our emotions to Him. Maybe we're ashamed of the feelings, like anger or discontent. Sometimes we can't even name them. They hide like street thugs in the shadows. Still, God beckons us to engage with Him fully.

This idea of honesty is God's, not ours. He wants to have a relationship with us. He wants to know us, and for us to know Him. That means coming to Him boldly and honestly.

Like wrestling a black bear, we may grossly underestimate the invitation, but we'll learn to truly know Him. For real.

I never thought much about earthworms until they became the family business.

We'd never been a family of fishermen; I have one memory of fishing with my grandfather. But seven years ago my father bought a bait-and-tackle company, which included selling live bait.

Suddenly, what would have been weird or disgusting became, well, normal. In our family we love worms. I joke that worms put me through college. I even spent one summer working 10 hours a week for my dad, counting the creatures and putting them in cups, filling the cups with dirt and packing them for distribution.

Before then I wouldn't have been remotely interested. I didn't even know a business existed that sold live bait and tackle. But as my father's child, I cared what my father cared about. His business became my business.

From the beginning, Jesus, too, was about His Father's work. At age 12, His parents couldn't find Him. Jesus simply explained that He was hanging out at the Temple: "And He said to them, 'Why did you seek Me? Did you not know that I must be about My Father's business?'" (Luke 2:49, New King James Version).

In the same way, God's business must become normal to us. We have the privilege of being about the heavenly Father's work—giving Him praise, loving and forgiving others, telling the world about Him.

Truthfully, these things may not come naturally, but they matter to our Father. He invites us to make them our business too.

A dead body lay on display inside the little church in Mexico. I stared through the glass-covered casket at the tussled wig. Plastic hands and feet jutted out beneath a faded, white, blood-stained sheet.

I shuddered at this depiction of Jesus, trapping our triumphant Savior permanently between Good Friday and Easter. Zeroing in on this moment, Christ's life-giving sacrifice on the cross felt forgotten, His powerful resurrection still out of sight. By focusing attention between these two eternally significant moments, hope had been hideously reduced to a dead end.

Yes, Jesus died, and we dare not ignore His sacrificial love. His blood on those boards paid the price for our disobedience. Yet He proved His power when He rose again.

The power that raised Jesus from the dead is alive in me, but sometimes I forget. And when I doubt His power to change me, I leave Him in the casket. I deny His resurrection when I think my troubles are beyond His power.

Whenever I choose unbelief, I recreate the horror of that statue in the little church. But the casket is empty. Jesus lives.