Get ready to let go of conformity for the renewing of your mind.

cf. Romans 12:2

Have you ever wondered why, when we talk about Christian meditation, and we are told what it is and how to do it, it somehow never quite lands? At least it never landed for me, and it still doesn’t.

You want to know why? Well, here is my confession: I find it difficult to sit still! And right now, I can almost hear people who know me saying — noooo!

You tell me to meditate by being quiet before the Lord and thinking on a verse, and within minutes my mind is wandering up and down every corridor of thought that it can find, including my grocery list. My fingers start to fidget. I am thinking about getting up, about the ten things I could be doing instead. Going through these motions, I would sit there and think, “Mettabel, what is wrong with you? Everyone else seems to do the being quiet thing so easily. Why can’t you?”

It was very frustrating, and I always felt meditation was something I would probably not excel at doing. But recently I had to do a word study on the word meditation, and what I found puzzled me, then surprised me, and at the same time liberated me.

You see, the word for meditate in Hebrew is hagah. And that word is as far away from silence as chaos is from order. Hagah means to growl. To mutter. To murmur. To moan the way a dove does. Hagah gives meditation sound and motion. It gives it intensity. It gives it a sending forth, a going-over and a going-over again unto complete immersion.

Joshua 1:8 suddenly made sense to me in a way it never had: “This Book of the Law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night…” Meditation was never meant to be silent. It was meant to be expressed on the breath: God’s Word sent forth to create.

So when the Psalmist says the blessed man meditates in the law day and night, what he is describing is a moving mouth. Someone muttering the Word under his breath, chewing on it, saying it and saying it until it works its way within, or is sent forth to do its work.

Scripture hands us the picture. Jeremiah said, “Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and Thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart.” That is meditation. He found the words and he ate them. He chewed. It was not a chore he had to grit his teeth through. It was joy. It was a meal. Ezekiel too was told to eat the scroll before he spoke its message. The Word first became part of him.

And I thought, well, this I can do.

But that opened a door to a second question, and this is where it gets good. If the muttering is meditation, what then is the quiet? What about that stillness in God’s presence, the sitting-with that I could never seem to hold onto?

Well, this is what I discovered. The quietness of spirit is not meditation. It is a valid discipline, but it is not meditation. The ancient mystics had a word for it, and that word is contemplation: a continual beholding. And though the word contemplation is rooted in Latin, the posture it names, beholding, is found and embraced throughout the Old Testament.

David wanted only one thing: “to behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in His temple.” The word for behold there is chazah, to gaze upon, standing in God’s temple.

The beholding. The standing. This is contemplation.

This does not come out of thin air. It is intimately bound to the discipline of meditation. It is the meditation in the Word that gives rise to contemplation, of the Word itself, and of the beauty and wonder of the Lord.

So contemplation is the beholding. The sitting-with. This is the understanding that transformed me.

We have long been taught to consider stillness as a state we must strain toward, wondering what on earth God is trying to show us and how it will happen. But not so. Contemplation, in contrast, is what we are drawn to sit with after we have meditated on the Word. We chew first. The Word goes in, gets worked over, gets swallowed. And then we sit, not trying to squeeze something out of the silence, but waiting to be met by the Holy Spirit. This is the brooding. He is who inspires the beholding. And it is this, the brooding of the Spirit of God, that stops the quiet from being a struggle, that lets contemplation become an opening. A door left ajar for God to walk through, instead of us straining to force it open by ourselves.

This is the mystery: we exist in the chaos. Our hearts begin formless and void, like the earth in the beginning. And the Spirit of God broods over the waters of the heart, igniting, stilling, or quickening it as our hearts yearn and as He wills, while we meditate upon the Word. And then the Word comes from God, bringing illumination and order out of the chaos.

“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

And that Scripture, “In returning and rest shall ye be saved: in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength,” shows us that it is when we contemplate that we are able to absorb the strength that comes through meditation on the Word.

While sitting with all of this, Holy Spirit showed me how these disciplines are woven into our breath, the very rhythm of our existence. This is the part I still cannot get over.

Meditation is done on the exhale. Think about it. Hagah, the muttering, is breath pushed out and shaped into words. To mutter the Word is to spend your breath over the matter. You are giving yourself out.

And contemplation? Contemplation is the inhale. Look at the word we already use for it: inspiration. It means, quite literally, to breathe in. So meditation goes out with exhalation, spending itself in the Word. And contemplation comes back with inspiration, receiving what we did not make. And it is stunning that this one word, inspiration, holds both meanings at once: the breath drawn in and the Spirit given. God’s gift, our receiving.

This does not mean we mutter over the Word without ceasing. Sometimes we sit and read the whole of it, taking in the wide and wondrous terrain of the Word, until something catches us, something arrests our attention. And then we stay there. We sit with that, and we meditate on it.

Even more stunning is that we cannot cut the inhale from the exhale. We cannot keep muttering without drawing breath. And we have nothing to draw breath for unless we first exhale the Word. Meditation invests. Contemplation is the return on what meditation invests. No wonder the quiet felt like nothing when I kept trying to start there. I was trying to inhale without ever having exhaled.

Perhaps this is why Paul could say, “The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart.” The mouth and the heart. The speaking and the receiving. The exhale and the inhale.

The body already knows this rhythm. Long before we named it, the breath was teaching it, the slow exhale settling us, the drawn breath receiving. Meditation and contemplation are not techniques we impose on ourselves. They are the pattern we were built to breathe.

It is the truth that we do not initiate our own breath. And so it is with meditation: we cannot begin it out of nothing. The first breath comes from God. This is why there are two inhales, not one. The first is pure gift, the original breath God breathed into us, our first inspiration, the inhale we never had to earn. The second is the rest that follows the work, the breath we draw once we have spent ourselves in the Word. The first we cannot manufacture. The second we can only receive. He breathed first. And we have been answering on the exhale ever since. Receive, then spend, then receive. Even our stillness is resting on a breath we did not begin.

The Bible says the Word is the seed. Meditation is the planting, the pressing of it into the soil. And contemplation is the growing we cannot see and did not cause, the seed springing up, we do not know how, until there is fruit to be gathered. For as we behold the Glory, we are changed.

If you are like me and sitting still does not come naturally to you, you can still meditate. Contemplation then has a door to enter by. You do not force the door, because that usually results in futility and frustration. You chew, and as you do, your soul settles, and you are then able to hear Him knocking.

“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock.” The rumination is what opens the door for Him to come in.

One more thing. Quietness comes easily to some, and that is a gift. But when you see someone sitting in stillness, you may be watching contemplation, not the start of something. The muttering may have happened that morning, or years before. The Word went in long ago and is only now being beheld. We dwell in an eternal kingdom that is not bound by the passage of time.

I watched a YouTube short, coincidentally, as I was writing this article. It featured the British evangelist J.John, a minister who teaches Scripture with wit and wisdom, expressing the very conundrum I told of at the beginning: his total inability to be still. He narrated how, during his ministry training, his class was taken to a monastery to observe the monastic way of life, and a monk instructed them to sit and think about Jesus for three hours. And he simply could not do it. Restless, distracted, unable to still his mind on command. I almost fell off my chair. I was not alone! But what changed for him was not more effort at stillness. He began returning, one day a month for seventeen years, with his Bible, reading, praying, worshiping through the day, and the stillness came, and stayed. Meditation, and then the contemplation it opens into. He had found the divine rhythm.

And this is not new. The monastic tradition preserved this movement, later naming its dimensions: lectio, the reading of the Word; meditatio, its prayerful rumination; and contemplatio, the beholding that follows. The Reformers and the Puritans, though they used different words, likewise pressed deep into a spoken meditation on the Word until it filled the heart. The muttering before the resting. And the beauty of it is that the muttering need not be loud. A whisper is breath just as a growl is breath. It is the movement of the breath, joined to the engagement of the mind upon the Word, that is the key.

Now this does not mean we build some mechanical routine, meditation and then contemplation, one step and the next. Because one flows into the other, and one flows out of the other, just as our breathing is not choppy when we draw in and let out. Inspiration leads into exhalation, which triggers the next breath. This is the ebb and flow of the Spirit. Not choppy waters. Ebb and flow.

Here is another wonder of meditation. The same root that gives us hagah, the muttering, also gives us higgayon, a word that can name meditation and musical sound. Meditation and melody, born of one root. So when we sing the Word, make melody and worship through it, we are meditating on Scripture. And that meditation breathes out into contemplation, which draws the next breath, and the cycle begins again.

This is the word David reaches for when he prays, “Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O LORD.” The mouth and the heart.

No wonder the psalmist’s meditation sings. We hear it in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves, in the way the psalmists and prophets move with God. Their chant rises and falls into silence, then returns as wailing, then settles into remembering, then silence again. Hearing, seeing, waiting, remembering, crying out, singing, all woven together into one living breath. That is the same cadence. Meditation and contemplation, going out and coming back.

So go ahead, say the Word out loud. Meditate. Then wait to see what the Lord will say to you, and how you will answer when you are questioned.

Word out. Spirit in. Word out again.

That is the whole breath of the life of faith.

Amen.

This essay is part of The L.I.F.E. Series at Ink & Utterance.

Ink & Utterance introduces The L.I.F.E. Series

Lived Experience • Integration • Faith • Exegesis

A sanctuary where lived experience, careful integration, faith, and the exegesis of the Word are woven into one.

Each L.I.F.E. essay moves among four lenses. Not every essay carries all four, and none is forced to. Like life, the pattern is a cluster, not a checklist.

L — Lived Experience
The witnessed and the real, where every idea begins.

I — Integration
Theology, medicine, and science read as one fabric.

F — Faith
The anchor that turns knowledge toward God.

E — Exegesis
The close reading of Scripture, and of the world it speaks into.

We begin with a new concept, and a word that speaks for hope: Dysparalysis.

I was reading a book on the mind when I came across a passage on alien hand syndrome. The author was describing how neuroscience interprets this condition. When a stroke damages the corpus callosum, the bridging mass of neurons that connects the two hemispheres, the reasoning goes, one hand begins to move on its own because the neural circuitry driving it is now operating independently of conscious control. Two hemispheres, two minds, two competing wills. The assumption underneath it is that all things come from the brain, that consciousness itself is manufactured there.

This was not the author’s own viewpoint, but he was using it to illustrate a point. But as I read it, I recognized a dissonance in what I was taking in. Having done my own study on the mind and the brain as being separate entities, I understood something the materialist framing of the account did not. On this view, the concept of alien hand arises from a divided brain, and is therefore taken to demonstrate that the brain is the origin of consciousness.

And everything I understood about the relationship between the mind and the brain immediately kicked in. It was almost as if the definition of what was actually happening presented itself to me, fully formed. I was able to name it on the spot.

Within a materialist framework, alien hand syndrome is often taken to support the view that consciousness emerges entirely from neural activity. I interpret the evidence differently. If the brain is an instrument rather than the source of consciousness, then alien hand syndrome is not evidence of multiple minds. It is evidence of a single mind attempting to express itself through damaged neural circuitry.

In that moment, I named it as I understood it. Dysparalysis.

Movement severed from intention: the channel between mind and body is corrupted, and what results is purposeful-looking motion that no longer matches the will of the mind behind it.

Think of a pianist at a broken piano. The music is not gone. The pianist doesn’t become unskilled. The instrument just can no longer render it.

The Hospital Room

Years ago, I had a patient I will name Jude. She was what we call, in medicine, a vasculopath: a woman whose body had endured multiple heart attacks and multiple strokes. Then one day, in the parking lot of the hospital, she had another stroke. This one took her dominant side: right upper extremity paralysis and weakness of her right lower extremity.

I went to see her. She was tearful, devastated, already grieving the life she believed she had lost.

Her neurologist, Doctor R, had already given the verdict. She repeated it to me through tears.

“Doctor Okulaja,” she said, “Doctor R told me I will never use my right hand again. I am going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life.”

And then something happened that has occurred only a handful of times in my medical career. Words came out of my mouth almost of their own volition, almost as if someone was speaking for me.

“Rubbish, Jude. You can do anything you want to do. You just need to put your mind to it.”

I did not fully understand in that moment what I had set in motion. But Jude did. Without my knowing, those words set her on a path. She decided, from that day, that she was going to conquer this paralysis.

The Work

She did not just sit down and will her hands to move. That is not what happened, and I want to be clear about it, because this is not a story about wishful thinking.

Jude worked. She went through physical therapy with discipline. She visualized herself walking. She visualized herself performing tasks with both hands. She made herself eat right. She committed to every dimension of her recovery.

The switches had to be flipped. Not only mentally, but physically. Not only physically, but psychologically. And not only psychologically, but spiritually. All of it, working together, aligned toward one outcome.

The first breakthrough came in the bathroom. She was able to clean herself, to toilet independently. When she told me, her voice carried something beyond relief. It carried dignity reclaimed. “Doctor O, I can wipe my own butt,” she said. Plain words. Revolutionary meaning.

She kept working. Month after month of sustained effort. The rewiring was not automatic. It was chosen. It was fought for.

When I eventually left that practice, and the city, Jude took me to dinner. On that evening she used her utensils with both hands, and she signed the check with her right hand. She had taken me out as a gesture of goodwill, but she also wanted to show me something. She wanted me to see that she had conquered her body through the rewiring of her brain, and through the power of her mind to heal her body.

Her recovery reflects something modern neuroscience already affirms: plasticity is not passive. As Michael Merzenich’s work shows, the brain reorganizes in response to focused attention and repetitive, meaningful activity (Merzenich, Soft-Wired, 2013). Jude’s mind did not override her brain. It directed it.

Understanding the Mechanism

Most people understand paralysis. It is the absence of movement, the limb that will not respond, the will that cannot reach the flesh.

But neuroscience describes something stranger. In alien hand syndrome, the limb moves, yet not in response to conscious intention. It grasps. It reaches. Sometimes it undoes what the other hand has just done. The movement looks purposeful, and it often runs directly opposite to what the intact mind is trying to command. It looks as though a separate agent has taken hold of the hand.

The materialist reads this as two minds in conflict. I read it differently.

What if the alien hand is not autonomous at all? What if it is faithfully executing a corrupted signal?

Imagine pressing the C key, intending the letter C. But the pathway between the keystroke and the screen is damaged. The signal arrives distorted, and a D appears on the monitor instead. The keyboard did not rebel. The computer did not form its own intention. The corruption in the channel changed the message in transit.

This, I propose, is what happens in alien hand. The mind generates a clear intention. The brain attempts to carry it out. But the pathways, damaged by the stroke, garble the signal along the way. The hand receives a distorted command and executes it faithfully, exactly as it was delivered. From the hand’s point of view, it is doing precisely what it was told. From the outside, it looks alien, autonomous, wrong.

And here is the room we’re walking into: The mind is not generated by the brain. The brain is the instrument. When the instrument is damaged, what is produced is corrupted output, not corrupted consciousness. The intention remains whole. The translation is what fails. The mind has not changed. The hardware has.

Why Dysparalysis Matters

I propose the term dysparalysis to name a phenomenon existing vocabulary does not quite capture. Dysparalysis: a state in which intention is intact and movement is present, but the two no longer align, because the transmission between mind and body has been corrupted. Not the absence of movement, as in paralysis, but the divergence of movement from will.

Set beside ordinary paralysis, the distinction is sharp. Paralysis is intention present, movement absent. Dysparalysis is intention present, movement present, but no longer obedient to the will behind it.

Understood this way, dysparalysis does not just name one phenomenon but a cluster of conditions encompassing alien hand, apraxia, utilization behavior, and other cases where action diverges from will. These conditions differ in mechanism, alien hand arising from the corpus callosum, apraxia from disruption to the networks of learned movement, utilization behavior from the frontal lobe. I group them not by cause but by what the person undergoes: a will intact, a body that will not carry it faithfully. Rather than reading these as proof of a fractured self, we can understand them as failures of integration, breakdowns in the brain’s ability to translate a unified intention into coherent action.

This is not a smaller claim. It is a truer one. It affirms the patient’s agency. It invites active participation in recovery. And it opens room for spiritual resilience without denying biological constraint.

Neuroplasticity as Mind Directing Brain

This is the part most explanations miss. Neuroplasticity is usually described as the brain rewiring itself, as though the brain were doing this on its own through some passive biological process.

That is not what happened with Jude. And it is not what resolves alien hand when it resolves.

Within this framework, the alien hand persists while the mind has not yet reasserted its governance through newly organized neural pathways. It fades when the mind actively directs the brain to build new pathways around the damage. That is not the brain healing itself. It is consciousness at full throttle, instructing matter to reorganize.

Not magic. A living consciousness governing the material it has been given, and directing it to heal.

If dysparalysis is a failure of communication, then rehabilitation is the restoration of communication. That is what Jude was doing. She visualized herself walking. She visualized herself using both hands. She drove her body through therapy. She ate to fuel the work. She aligned every resource she had, mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual, toward a single goal: reopening the line between mind and body, insisting on being heard until the pathway carried her intention again.

When Human Effort Meets Divine Power

Here is where Jude’s story becomes more than a story about neurology or willpower. Here is where it becomes redemptive.

Jude did not do this work in isolation, and she did not do it in her own strength alone. As a believer, she directed all of it, the mind, the body, the discipline, the visualization, toward the ultimate Healer, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Jesus Himself.

This is the question Jesus asked of those who came to Him. “What do you want me to do for you?” He met their intention with His power. He met their will with His grace.

The woman who reached for the hem of His garment did not merely brush against Him. She reached with intention. There was a will to act, her whole being leaning into that reach, and when it met the Source of healing, something happened. She touched the hem.

Water turned to wine. The paralyzed walked. The blind saw. Lazarus came out of the grave.

Some of these were sovereign acts, worked upon those who could not lift a finger toward them; Lazarus was four days dead and reached for nothing. Others met a reaching soul and answered it. Jude’s healing was of the second kind, the Spirit working through her striving, not instead of it.

This is the principle. The whole person, aligned and directed toward Christ, meets a power that human effort alone cannot generate. Jude worked, and Jude disciplined herself across every dimension of her being, but she was working toward wholeness as an image-bearer of God, reaching toward the One who made her. That is where her striving met something greater than striving.

When Bad News Arrives

I tell Jude’s story because bad news arrives. It arrives in hospital rooms and in parking lots. It arrives as a prognosis, a diagnosis, a verdict of permanent loss.

I am not promising that miracles will follow a certain formula. I cannot make that promise, and I will not.

But I can say with certainty that the mindset matters, and it matters a great deal, especially with what touches the brain and the body, and even with what is less mechanical than that.

Jude recovered. But some do not. And for them, dysparalysis still offers something powerful yet humbling: when the body does not answer, it is not a verdict on the sufferer’s faith, or effort, or the sincerity of their reaching. Some align everything they have, mental, physical, psychological, and spiritual, and the instrument still does not respond. Their story is not a lesser version of Jude’s. It is a different story, steered by a different purpose but no less dignified.

I think of Nick Vujicic, born without arms or legs. For years he prayed that God would restore his limbs. But he came to realize that the miracle was not the limbs God might give him. The miracle was that through an imperfect, physical body, God revealed a purpose, sending him across the world with a message of faith, of God’s love and sovereignty, the intangible imprinted upon the absence of the tangible. He still keeps a pair of shoes in his closet, waiting for the day his limbs might come. But if they never do, he knows his limbs were never the miracle. He is the miracle.

If the mind is not the brain, if the self is intact behind a broken instrument, then the person whose body never answers again has not thereby been diminished. The will remains. The image of God remains. And from within that limited place, a person can still behold, still love, still be. Recovery, as in Jude’s case, was one outcome. Living with a new normal is another. The deeper truth is that the one who is trapped is still wholly present, still wholly seen, still wholly God’s, whether the instrument is mended or not.

The mind matters. Not because thinking positively is magic, but because the mind, when it is anchored in God, working through a disciplined body, aligned psychologically and spiritually toward wholeness, reaches a power that isolation can never touch.

Renew your mind. Guard what enters it. Do not let garbage come in and garbage go out. Connect your mind with God, and let the deep things of God be revealed in and through you by His Spirit.

This is how a vasculopath with multiple strokes, told she would never move again, signed a dinner check with her right hand, and took her doctor to dinner to prove it.

Dysparalysis is the doorway. What it opens onto, that the mind is more than the instrument it plays, is a room we are only beginning to enter.

⸻

A note on the series: The L.I.F.E. Series explores the meeting place of lived experience, faith, science, and Scripture. Some essays introduce original concepts, offered to encourage thoughtful discussion and further exploration rather than to establish new clinical diagnoses or standards.

13 “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

14 “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.

Part of that quiet, I’ve come to understand, is a season between where I’d been and where God is taking me.

This is part of my journey…

IF YOU WANT YOUR LIFE TO CHANGE… CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

Don’t sit complaining, moaning, and groaning.

Do something.

Do something new.

Do something you’ve never done before.

Do something you normally wouldn’t even think of doing.

Develop some new, good habits, and this time, stick with them.

Then watch your life change in ways you never imagined possible.

— Dr. Adepero Mettabel

…At least that’s what I told myself.

But making a life change often begins with a hunger.

One that grows and grows until it becomes the doorway through which God begins His transformative work.

This brings to mind the story of the four hungry men — lepers who sat outside the gate of Samaria during the siege by the Syrian army.

Rejected because of their disease, they were not permitted to live among the people. They had no future to look forward to. They could not enter the city because of their condition, and even if they could, the city itself was gripped by a famine so severe that death seemed inevitable.

Then one day, almost dead from hunger, they asked themselves a question that would change their lives forever:

“Why sit we here until we die?” (2 Kings 7:3)

Today, that question speaks to me differently.

Why sit here and continue complaining about what we don’t have?

Why remain where we are when we can move forward?

The four lepers decided to go to the Syrian camp.

Their reasoning was simple.

Perhaps the Syrians would spare their lives and give them something to eat.

If they were killed, that would not be a different outcome from the one they were facing anyway.

So they got up.

When they arrived at the enemy’s camp, an astonishing sight awaited them.

The Lord had gone before them.

He had caused the Syrians to hear the sound of chariots, horses, and a great army, and in their fear they fled, leaving behind their tents, their food, their clothing, their silver, their gold. Everything.

Those four men who had been rejected, discarded, and without hope suddenly found themselves surrounded by abundance.

To my mind, the treasure was good. Life changing.

But perhaps, even that was not the greater miracle. The greater miracle I believe was the change in their mindset, which reveals a principle:

We have to change our orientation before God can change our condition.

When we turn our hearts toward Him, He renews our minds by His truth, and redirects our steps by His Spirit. The veil is taken away and we are changed.

The four lepers refused to sit still and die. They did not say we are diseased and doomed anyway. They changed their minds and they lived.

The Bible also records the story of some other people, some who decided to go with God for change and others yet who, because of their unwillingness to change, ended up dying:

Israel, at a place called Kadesh Barnea, were also going through hard times, but instead of trusting God and moving with Him, they grumbled and complained and murmured their way to death. All except for two men, Joshua and Caleb, who looked at the same situation: the same giants, the same walled cities, the same impossibility, and said, “We are well able to overcome it.” (Numbers 13:30)

The ten spies saw what stood against them and led a nation to the grave. The two saw who stood with them and crossed over into life.

God gave me my own Syrian army experience at my Kadesh Barnea.

How? Stay with me.

KADESH BARNEA

One night, as I slept, one phrase kept recurring.

Kadesh Barnea.

Again and again.

It was so strange. The words came in my dreams and also in the times of awakenings in between.

I had no idea what the words signified. But I knew they must mean something significant, because over the years, God has often spoken to me this way, bringing to my mind biblical words I had never consciously learned, and even words from foreign languages that later proved to have significance in Scripture.

So I knew Kadesh Barnea meant something.

I just didn’t know what.

The moment I woke up, I grabbed my iPad and I looked it up, typing what and where is Kadesh Barnea?

And the answer?

Kadesh Barnea was the place in the wilderness that stood between Egypt and the Promised Land. The place where the Israelites wandered for 40 years instead of traversing it in days.

Like many believers, I had always known about Israel’s wilderness journey, but I had never paid attention to the name of the place where they wandered.

And because I also know that in the Bible, words carry identification, I looked up the meaning of Kadesh Barnea.

And the meaning broke me.

Kadesh means holy. Set apart. Consecrated.

And Barnea, the scholars wrestle over, but the meaning they keep returning to is wandering.

Holy. And wandering.

A holy place of wandering.

Where nothing physical was settled, and everything else was settled.

I sat with my iPad on my chest, heart pounding, staring at the ceiling, wondering if God had shown me my grave.

I began to pray, asking God to help me because I wanted to live and live a life that glorified Him.

I was sitting in the place where the four lepers sat.

I continued to pray…

And God did not leave me in the pit.

A few months later, the second part of the lesson came.

He spoke quietly to my heart.

“Adepero, between now and the end of the year, I don’t want you to grumble, complain, or murmur.”

I got it! God was telling me that if I continued the way I was, I was in danger of losing the promise that He had given me.

I answered soberly,

“Lord, I will try.”

I thought it was going to be easy. But then came one of the most humbling realizations of my life.

I discovered that, far from being the faith-filled person I imagined myself to be, I was the greatest complainer I knew.

Not only over major issues — that would smack too much of blaming God. But it was over everything else. Every little thing. And I could not even see it.

It humbled me.

It still does.

And what it revealed was this:

I cannot do this on my own.

This is not merely a matter of self-control.

It had to be the work of the Holy Spirit, helping me to see God as being my all in all, and bigger than every single little disturbing, irritating, distressing thing that was happening in my life. He had to be the Promised Land of my focus rather than the complaints of my memory of Egypt.

My prayer has changed.

My prayer is that God will help me to focus my mind on the Promise rather than the past or the present.

I am so grateful that God does not reveal things to His children to destroy them. He reveals to build palaces from ruins but we must be willing to be built.

“For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have.” (2 Corinthians 8:12)

I am willing.

And by God’s grace, when this year comes to an end, I will not be longing for the garlic and onions of Egypt.

I will be drinking the milk and honey of the Promised Land.

I will be eating its grapes and pomegranates.

I will no longer wander in the wilderness. I will not sit here grumbling, complaining and murmuring. I will not die. I will live to declare the works of God in the land of the living.

Words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

— Dr. Mettabel | Ink & Utterance

Black, white, Asian, Polynesian, or Hispanic, you were made to live your life to the fullest. Steward it well. Keep it!

There was a time when prostate cancer was considered an old man’s disease. A man in his seventies would be diagnosed, and his doctor would tell him gently that something else would take him first. Watch and wait. It will not kill you.

It was never supposed to show up in your life at all. It was supposed to be buddies with your coffin.

That is no longer the story I am seeing.

Vince Flynn, the bestselling author who lived right here in Edina, was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in November 2010. He was 44. He had gone to his doctors in pain and was told at first that it might be a bacterial infection of the prostate. He died in 2013 at the age of 47, leaving behind a wife and three children. A man in the prime of his life.

I want to tell you about two of my own patients. These cases broke my heart, and they are the reason I will not be quiet about this.

I will call the first one Ryan. He came to me from another primary care physician. His wife had been after him for years to bring the whole family over to me. He finally did, almost by accident: he was a little late to an appointment at his old office and was told he could not be seen, and his wife seized the moment. We need to go over to Dr. O’s office. He came, and we worked on his health and got him into a better place. Then, a few months later, at his annual physical, I discovered to my surprise that his PSA had not been checked in over ten years. I checked it. It was elevated. He was later diagnosed with prostate cancer. Ryan is no longer with us. Prostate cancer was not the thing written as the final cause, but it had already weakened his body long before, and it left him with less to fight with than he should have had.

The second was an elderly man, beloved to me, who came to see me only because his children persuaded him to. After we had settled the acute symptoms that brought him in, I checked his PSA. It was in the 400s. It had not been checked in over twenty years. It is the highest PSA I have seen in my life. I am grateful to say he is still alive and doing well, but it has been a journey, a struggle, a long stretch of pain for him and for his family that did not have to happen. This is dear to my heart precisely because so much of it was preventable.

I am in my mid-fifties.

A man dying at 47 is not old. That is a man cut down in the prime of his life.

That was one man. The list is only getting longer. A friend recently sent me his own running count. Between last year and now he has lost about eight colleagues, most of them to prostate cancer. In his words, the list of dead colleagues is getting uncomfortably long. That black man’s disease, he wrote, is on the rampage like never before. Over the past six months alone I have heard of at least five deaths myself.

I am tired of watching our men, Black, White, Asian, Polynesian, Hispanic, any man, die from something we can so often catch in time.

So let me tell you where the establishment stands, and then let me tell you what I recommend, because after more than 35 years of practice I am no longer willing to wait quietly while men die.

What the guidelines say. Major bodies have stepped back from recommending automatic annual PSA testing for every man. Their reasoning is that screening catches many slow-growing cancers that might never have killed the man, and that chasing them leads to biopsies, surgery, and radiation with real harms. This is not unreasonable. The current official position is shared decision-making, generally beginning around 45 to 50, and earlier, around 40 to 45, for higher-risk men, which explicitly includes Black men and men with a strong family history.

What I recommend. Have your doctor check your PSA every year. If you are a Black man, in my view this is not optional. You carry both a higher risk of developing prostate cancer and roughly double the risk of dying from it, and you are developing it younger and in more aggressive forms. You should be tested earlier and tracked closely. I have heard the argument about overdiagnosis, and I understand it. I do not find it persuasive enough to tell men to wait while this disease moves through them faster and younger than the guidelines were written to expect.

More important than any single number, know your own body and report what it is telling you. Tell your physician about difficulty urinating, pain when you urinate, blood in your urine, or any discomfort low in your pelvis. Do not sit on these symptoms. Vince Flynn was told it was probably an infection.

Then…

Take care of the body you have been given.

Do not spend your whole life seated, pressing down on a sensitive part of your body. Get up. Walk. Move. Carry less weight around your middle, because obesity is tied specifically to the aggressive, advanced forms of this disease. Eat as though your prostate depended on it, because it does: more vegetables, fruit, and whole grains, less saturated fat, less red and processed meat.

And get your vitamin D right. Get outdoors, especially in the early morning, and let your skin meet the sun. Have your level checked and do not ignore it if it is low. In my own practice I aim to keep my patients’ vitamin D between 70 and 80 ng/mL. I have kept my patient population on vitamin D since 2008, and what I have watched in my own practice over those years is not something I am willing to dismiss because a guideline committee is cautious. The science is moving in this direction, not away from it. The large NIH-funded VITAL trial found a suggestive reduction in cancer deaths, around 25 percent once the early years were set aside, and among African American participants a suggestive reduction in cancer risk of about 23 percent. A growing body of research now ties vitamin D deficiency directly to the lethal forms of prostate cancer. And here is the double disparity that should stop every one of us cold: Black men carry both the highest rates of vitamin D deficiency and the highest rates of aggressive, deadly prostate cancer, at the same time.

There is a detail from the research that I cannot get out of my head. Men who work outdoors appear to develop prostate cancer later than men who work indoors; one Finnish study found outdoor workers had roughly a three-year delay before the disease appeared. Across many studies, the men with the least sun exposure carry a higher risk of prostate cancer and of the more aggressive forms. I believe a large part of the reason is simple: men who work outside are out in the light all day, and they are far less likely to be vitamin D deficient. The body was made to live in the sun.

I have watched institutions sit at the old vitamin D thresholds for years and then quietly move upward as the evidence caught up with what some of us were already seeing. The guidance moves slowly. I am not willing to let men die during the lag.

This is my charge to the men reading this, and to the women who love them and who will so often be the ones to push them toward the doctor’s office. A disease we once expected to bury quietly alongside old men is now taking men in their forties and fifties, in the middle of their work and their fathering and their lives.

So here is what I am asking you to do:

• Get your vitamin D level checked and keep it where it belongs.

• Get your PSA checked every year, and earlier and more closely if you are a Black man or have a family history.

• Do not sit on your backside all day. Get up and move.

• Exercise, and keep the weight off your middle.

• Get out into the early morning sun.

• Eat well: more vegetables, fruit, and whole grains; less saturated fat and red and processed meat.

Do not let prostate cancer take your life.

Take control, and live!

*This article is for education, not medical advice, and is no substitute for your own physician. Do not begin vitamin D or any supplement on your own—it can be harmful without testing and supervision; have your level checked and talk to your doctor first.

The work of spiritual cleansing is a messy thing. In the physical it is blood and dirt and noise; in the spirit it is wholly, gloriously sanctifying, and it brought salvation and deliverance.

But to understand what this salvation cost, we have to be willing to stand for a moment in the mess.

Imagine the sacrifices God once required. To bring about the forgiveness of sin, everything had to be sprinkled with blood. Picture it — not in one place, but everywhere. Dried blood and fresh blood and blood still drying. Animals already killed, animals being killed, animals waiting to be killed, innocent animals waiting to be sent off into the desert to die. For every sin. For every transgression. Day after day, a forgiveness you could smell on your own hands.

And God looked at it, and it grieved Him. He said it was not good.

Not good because He had failed — He Himself had given it. But not good as a place to live. It was a shadow, provisional, a teacher meant to point past itself. He never meant His people to live forever in the slaughterhouse. The stench was designed to make them ache for exactly what was coming: the one sacrifice that ends every sacrifice.

For His people were kept constantly, physically aware of their guilt — in a dirty, smelly, unsavory way that yielded, and would only ever yield, condemnation over the messy chaos of their own lives. It was a place He allowed so that longing could be born — a longing for a better way, a longing for a closer walk, a longing for true cleansing; a longing, too, for love, for continued and perpetual communion with the One who so deeply loves our souls; a longing for peace, stillness, and satisfaction. A way that, thankfully, Elohim Himself had already prepared from before the foundation of the world.

Jesus came. And every dirty, smelly, unsavory, blood-shedding, agony-filled method of cleansing — every cry of the sacrificed — was placed on Him. Laid on His body. He became the reeking, bloodied altar, so that we could be made spiritually clean.

But that wasn’t where it ended. He went further.

Every other sacrifice stayed dead. The lamb was consumed. The bull was burned to ash. The goat was driven out and lost in the wilderness. They were offered, and they were gone. But this sacrifice rose. From the bloody, gory, horrible mass of torn flesh, the Holy Spirit raised a glorious body — healed, transformed, robed in power and glory. The offering got up and walked out of the place of death.

This is why we never have to return to the dead altar, but to the place of the Living Sacrifice: the Lamb is no longer on the dead altar. He is, gloriously, alive forevermore on the throne — inviting us to come and obtain eternal cleansing and salvation and mercy, and to find grace to help in our time of need.

The proof of God’s compassion, written on a woman’s body. The one who had bled twelve years. Twelve years of her own blood — and under the law, every drop making her untouchable. The blood of bulls and rams was poured out all around her, and not one drop could reach her; her uncleanness barred her from the very altar that was meant to make her clean. Everything she touched, she defiled. So she had learned to keep her distance.

But she pressed through the crowd anyway and touched the hem of His garment — and the law ran backward. Instead of her defilement flowing into Him, His wholeness flowed into her. And He turned: “Who touched me?” — not in condemnation of the unclean woman who dared, but with pleasure at the faith that instinctively knew the eternal plan of God, and what no priest had ever told her: that by touching Him she would be cleansed in a way the blood of bulls and rams could never accomplish. “Daughter,” He said — not “unclean.” Daughter. Your faith has made you well.

And here is the wonder — even the sense that once condemned us has been turned. The old sacrifices were a pleasing aroma, reah nihoah, and still they required the killing. But now we ourselves are called the aroma of Christ, the fragrance of life. No longer the reek of dying flesh, but the perfume of a dead life, redeemed unto life.

So this is where God invites us. Not to a place of condemnation, where we are forever confronted with the stench of our sins — but into the resurrected power of the risen Christ.

What a wonderful God we have. A God who loved us so much that He stepped into the blood and the smell and the horror, took it onto Himself, and rose — carrying us up with Him.

Lord, I’m so grateful.

I am so grateful.

If it moved you, it was meant to. Forward it to someone who needs to know the door is open.

Grace and peace,

Dr. Mettabel

Ink & Utterance — words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

The Stench of the Cleanse — Washed by the Blood of the Lamb | Ink & Utterance

Before there was cleansing, there was the stench. Blood on the hands. Day after day. A forgiveness you could smell.

But…

God never meant His people to live in the slaughterhouse.

The Stench of the Cleanse — a meditation in pictures.

The full words arrive tomorrow.

From stench to salvation,

Dr. Mettabel

I’m off to a conference at the end of the week to listen to the world-renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, former Bishop of Durham and one of the leading voices on the apostle Paul. Excited to go to my first grown-up Bible conference by myself, so please keep me in your prayers and I’ll keep you in mine.

I’ll tell you all about it when I’m back!

Love all around. ♥️

God speaks to me.

He has spoken to me in many ways at various times, and He continues to speak to me every day. It is one of the things I value most in my life and is a lot of the time the glue that holds me together.

Perhaps some of you will remember how I got into this habit of thinking that God speaks to me.

It started when I was in college, shortly after I became a Christian. I became an active member of the campus fellowship, which was very interactive and relational. At various times we would meet the leaders of the fellowship around campus, and invariably one of the first words they would say to you is my sister, what is God saying to you today?

It was amazing. It was great. It was terrifying.

At the time I would get tongue-tied and not be able to speak, because God had not said anything to me. But over time I got to the point where, just to be able to tell them that God spoke to me, I would spend some time in contemplation. And God did speak. God does speak. And thereafter, when one of them would lovingly accost me, I would say, well, God said…

Over the years, God has spoken to me in so many ways. It has come sometimes as a direct witness, sometimes as words spoken into my ear, sometimes through His written Word coming alive in a way that is unmistakably for me. There are many ways He speaks. And I love that He speaks to me.

In the past, in my excitement, I have told others. God said. God told me. God has been speaking to me. And sometimes the reaction has been acceptance, discussion, or alignment. But at other times, I have received intense pushback.

A friend once told me, once you tell me God has spoken, then what can I say? I just have to agree with you, or take it as you have said.

I did not understand her stance at that time, but now I do. Now I understand that she was speaking not from my conversational space, but from spaces she had occupied in the past. My friend made an absolute statement: that when a person says God has spoken, it cannot be argued with.

But I disagree. Because even in Scripture, when God said, His people still turned to Him and asked again. They argued. They sought clarification. Moses negotiated. Abraham bargained for Sodom. Habakkuk demanded an answer. Mary asked the angel, how shall this be? God has not been the one to slam the door on the questioner. He has never said, you dare ask Me, you’re gone. He invites the wrestle. He honors the search.

He said in His own words, come, let us reason together…

My friend did not understand me then, and I dare say she probably still will not. That is her prerogative to hold, which is very valid. But I have sat with my words and tried to reason out what happened in the rooms I spoke them into. When I said God told me or God said, certain paradigms emerged. These are the conclusions I have come to.

One. Are you the only one God speaks to? If hearing from God is a frequent part of your speech — and it is, for me — others begin to wonder why it is not part of theirs. The phrase, repeated, can start to sound like a claim of access nobody else has. It could start to have the screeching edge of perceived superiority, which in my case was not the intent.

Two. God does not speak to me this way, so why should He speak to you and not to me? This is the question underneath the question. Sometimes it is asked in pride. More often it is asked in grief. There is real pain in believing God has spoken to someone else and gone quiet on you.

Three. You are using “God said” to push your own agenda. This accusation pierces hardest, because the suspicion is not unreasonable. Plenty of people have used the phrase exactly that way.

Four. Sometimes the pushback is a reaction to past trauma. Some who flinch at “God said” are not flinching at God. They are flinching at the memory of who last weaponized His name in their ear.

I sit with all of this. I really do. Because the people pushing back are not always wrong, and the people they are pushing back against are not always right, and in between is a wound that has gone unnamed too long.

So let me, in my opinion, name where the resistance comes from. To my observation, the pushback tends to come from one of three places.

The first and most catastrophic is religious trauma. Believers carrying scars from leaders, pastors, teachers, family members who weaponized the phrase. Someone declared God said and what followed was control, manipulation, shame, silencing. The wound is real. The flinch is reasonable. When such a hearer says don’t say God said it, what they are really saying is please do not hurt me the way I was hurt before.

The second is misaligned belief and doctrine. Sincere Christians who hold a theology that has functionally walled off the voice of God — through strict cessationism, fear of anything that smells like mysticism, or a frame that treats anything outside the written page as suspect. Their hesitation is sincere. But it is also profoundly limiting, because the same Bible they hold so rigorously is the one that records God speaking on nearly every page. And by taking that stance, they may be depriving themselves of the greatest riches that God has decided to bestow on them.

The third is harder to say. But sometimes the resistance is simply an unwillingness to hear. Paul warned of a season when people will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears (2 Timothy 4:3). Some hearers do not want to be pierced. They do not want the discomfort of a word — particularly one that calls them higher. Don’t say God said it becomes a shield against accountability. This one deserves discernment, not appeasement.

These overlap. Sometimes one wears the costume of another. But naming them matters, because the response is not the same for each.

So here is what I have learned — and what I would invite you into, whichever side of this you sit on.

If you are the sayer

And I count myself among you. God said is not a phrase to throw lightly. I have learned this the long and hard way. Before any word leaves your mouth, run it through every guardrail.

Does it measure against Scripture? Not only in word, but in principle. If your word is not on the page directly, can you find its spirit there — the pattern, the heart of God already revealed? Anything that contradicts His revealed character cannot come from Him.

Have you checked your motives? Is this for the listener, or is it for you? For their building up, or is it to puff yourself up? For God’s purpose, or for your point? The motive behind the word matters as much as the word itself.

Does it carry a scriptural purpose? All true prophecy carries one — encouragement, rebuke, edification, correction, clarity, comfort. Paul said it plainly: he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort (1 Corinthians 14:3). Even a rebuke is given to build. If your word moves toward none of these ends, it is not from the One who is building His Bride.

Does it actually pertain to them? This is the hardest lesson I have learned. If a word is for me — for my walk, my season, my conviction — I do not need to tell anyone God said. I need to obey. The urge to broadcast every personal whisper is not always faithfulness. Sometimes it is performance. Sometimes it is a need for approval and affirmation. With this, I still struggle. I am learning the discipline of holding what was given to me in trust, and releasing only what was given for others, and only if God said to do so, because sometimes God says not for you to proclaim, but for you to intercede. For you to pray.

Personal conviction most of the time needs to remain personal. Some words are meant for your prayer closet and your closest circle, not a platform. Wisdom and discernment know the difference. And that difference is the gold in the mine. And when you do speak, read the ground. If the hearer cannot receive it, do not press it back into their space. Respect that. There may be a time. It may not be now.

If you are the hearer

If you have been wounded, you have permission to be careful. You have permission to grieve. You have permission to take your time. But please hear me. Do not let the abuse of the gift convince you the gift is the abuse. Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21).

That word is for you.

Do not despise. Do test. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world (1 John 4:1). The burden of discernment belongs to the hearer. You are not obligated to receive every word. But you are also not free to dismiss every word.

Run it through the same guardrails the speaker should have run it through. Does it align with Scripture, in word or in principle? Does it carry a scriptural end — edification, exhortation, comfort, correction, clarity? Do the speaker’s motives appear ordered toward your building up, or toward their own elevation? Test it against the fruit. Test it against the character of God you have come to know. Then hold fast to what is good.

Healing is not in closing the ear. It is in training it.

So be open — and, as they say, “believe but verify.”

If you are the leader

This is the heaviest charge. Because the resistance against God said did not begin in the pews. It began in the pulpits.

Peter wrote to elders with surgical clarity: neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being examples to the flock (1 Peter 5:3). The heritage is God’s, not yours. The people were purchased by a Blood that was not your own. You are an example, not an owner. A steward, not a sovereign.

James adds the weight: not many of you should become teachers, my brethren, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation (James 3:1). Greater. The mouth that claims God’s voice answers to God by a stricter measure.

And the Shepherd Himself — gentle in every other way — did not soften this: whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea (Matthew 18:6).

A millstone. The sea.

Jesus is fierce about His flock.

If you have used God said to silence questions, enforce conformity, elevate yourself above accountability, or wound where God meant to heal — repent. Return to the posture of an example. Run every word you carry through the same guardrails the gift requires — Scripture, principle, motive, purpose. Speak only what you can verify. And when you cannot, say so. I think. I sense. I perceive.Be truthful. Bring more honey than vinegar to the table.

And if God truly said, please say it with conviction, with power, and with love: “God told me to tell you,” or “God said,” or “God spoke to me.” But in saying so, let it bear responsibility — tried by the furnace of the Word and wrapped up with love. Because that is the way Jesus Himself, the ultimate Leader, did it. Because there is also a price to be paid when the leader does not declare what God said.

To the wounded

You are the difference between the skeptic and the scarred.

You are not reading this piece by accident. You are here because God sees you. He sees where you’ve been and the disappointments. He sees how careless words have ravaged you in the past. He sees the scars that you carry.

Remember that Jesus is your Lord, God is your Father, and the Holy Spirit is your teacher. Hold the Word close to you and let Him speak to your heart. Measure everything through the lens of the Word and put on the whole armor of God, because this is what will protect you.

The door is still open. God is still speaking. And when you are ready — even if ready means one tentative, barely believing step — He will meet you there.

One more word

The phrase God said is not the enemy. The misuse of it has been its nemesis, and healing can only come when we untangle the two.

God is still speaking. He has not stopped. He spoke through prophets, through dreams, through visions, through a still small voice on a mountain. He spoke through a Son. He speaks now. He speaks to me. And I believe He longs to speak to you.

Today, if you will hear His voice, harden not your hearts.

God’s voice still deserves the holy fear it has always deserved.

Do not despise prophesying. But do not receive without testing. And make sure your motives and your heart are right.

And to those of us who say God said — let us speak it as ones who carry fire in our hands. Carefully. Reverently. Only when we must. Only to the ones that it is meant for. Without drama, without grandstanding, with sincerity and in obedience. Only when it builds.

If God said, say it carefully.

If God did not say, do not say.

And if God said it only for you — keep it between you and Him.

The wounded have been wounded enough.

Words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

She did not ask for permission. She did not knock.

She came in carrying an alabaster box of spikenard, a fragrance that spoke of royalty, not carnal revelry. The fragrance of that which cost the labor of a year did not erase the stench of her reputation. A stench their nostrils refused to let the fragrance dispel. Everyone in the room knew her name, or at least the version of it the streets had given her. She was the one who did not matter. She was the one who carried the dirt of sin. She was not, in their eyes, a candidate for redemption. But she did not care. She made her way to His feet. She did not speak. She wept. She took off her veil. She loosed her hair. What was she doing? Had she forgotten where she was? No respectable woman did this in public. No woman did so near the Rabbi.

She broke the jar.

The fragrance filled the room.

She poured. The oil soaked His feet and the ground beneath, and now we know — transformed it to holy ground. She wiped His feet with her hair, worshipping with the same abandon that once fell upon David before the Ark. A heart that longed after Him as David’s did after God. Casting off the garments of her dignity just as his fell away, lost in the abandonment of worship — undignified in the eyes of those who watched, undignified still before scornful, faithless eyes.

The room watched. Some watched with horror, some with judgment, others with indignation, and almost all without understanding.

Here is the question I must face.

A question He will not let me avoid.

If I had seen her, would I have worshipped at her faith, or sneered at her audacity?

Would I have seen, or walked blind?

Had I been in that room, would I have perceived what she was doing? Or would I have been one of the ones murmuring? Would I have recognized faith in motion, or would I have been counting the cost of the perfume, calculating what could have been given to the poor, measuring her past against the room she had no business being in?

Would I have pointed, or would I have lifted up my hands in surrender as I understood what she was doing?

I do not know. And that not-knowing hits me in a deep place.

That not knowing is what I write about

Simon watched silently. He said nothing aloud. But the Lord heard him. If this Man were a prophet, He would know what manner of woman this is. Simon read by sight. By what he knew of her. But one must ask the question: how did he know her? How did he know who she was? Was it by word-of-mouth, or was it by clandestine pilgrimage? A walk in the park of iniquity. He read Jesus by His proximity to her. He never spoke a word. But the Lord knew his thoughts and answered him anyway.

He knows my thoughts.

Judas too read by sight — but with his eye on the loot, and a louder mouth. Why was this fragrance not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor? Religious-sounding. Scripture-impersonating. A reasoning that could win a debate at any table. And underneath it, a heart as far from the truth as the east is from the west.

He knows my motives.

The other disciples may not have understood, but they trusted their leader. They trusted the Son of God. All, but the one.

Would I have trusted, or lusted after morality?

I would not have known either.

That is what catapults me from my measly throne of judgment to the hard ground of reality.

Here is what the folks in the room did not know. And how do I know this? Because of Jesus’s own words.

Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much.

He did not say will be forgiven. He said are forgiven.

Past tense.

Settled business.

Whatever had passed between her and the Lord had already passed. The room was watching the aftermath of an encounter they had not witnessed.

And so would I have been watching, as they did.

She had encountered Him before. Somewhere off the page. In a moment Scripture does not record but her tears testify to. She was not performing repentance for an audience. She was responding to a forgiveness that she valued above all. She had been given eyes that saw into the Spirit, into what was to come. She had been given the privilege of mourning Him and anointing His body, even before the crucifixion. All this by grace and by faith. A journey unseen by judging eyes.

The flesh-readers in the room saw only the present scandal. The woman. The hair. The perfume. The impropriety. They did not know her the way the Lord knew her.

They that did not know judged as if they knew. But if I had been in the room, would that have been me also?

That is the question to ask. That is the deepest cut. We judge people by what we see in the flesh, with no knowledge of what God has already done in them. We accuse what He has already accepted. We murmur over what He has already received.

I have done so too. And for this, I repent, am repenting, and will repent.

If I had seen her, would I have walked by faith? Or would I have been ruled by what I saw?

Would you?

So let us together, you and I, make a pact. Therefore, from now on, we regard no one according to the flesh.

Trusting that the God who did not judge that woman will not judge us. That He will open the eyes of our understanding. He will teach us if we are willing to learn. Every day, someone walks into our rooms carrying alabaster and a reputation. Every day, we have to decide whether to read what we see, or read what God sees.

The question is not whether the woman was worthy of the room.

The question is are we?

Dr. Mettabel writes at Ink & Utterance — Words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

⸻

May we not die in chapter 37.

Some of us are reading this title and wondering, what the heck is this woman talking about?

Well. Let me tell you…

This piece comes with a multi-voice narrated audio version. Press play before you read, or let the words carry you as you read.

There was a man called Job in the land of Uz in the far east. God was very proud of him, and God regarded him as the greatest of all His servants. Then came a day when the sons of God came into God’s court, and God said, have you considered My servant Job?This was the voice of a proud Father, and this is the Voice that undergirds everything that happens to Job afterwards. We must not forget that voice as we read.

Then Satan answered and said:

He does not serve You in vain. I would serve You also if You had blessed me as You have blessed Job.

And God said, really? Well, you do your worst. But I tell you, he will not deny Me. Only do not violate My one boundary. Do not touch a hair on his head. Which paradoxically, when we look at it, included his wife also, because the two are one. But everything else was given over in one day.

Let us imagine that. Let us actually imagine it. To lose everything in the space of twenty-four hours. And not just anyone who had a few dollars in his account, but a plutocrat. A very, very rich man. Job, in the terms of his world, was comparable to the men who today sit at the very top of every list of the wealthiest people on earth, the names we all know without being told. Imagine one of them losing everything they had in a single day. The empire, the holdings, the staff, the houses, and then on top of all that, every one of their children, in the same afternoon. If you and I were Job, what would be our response? How would we react?

It is actually a scenario too terrifying for us even to imagine, not to talk of actually inhabiting this dilemma. And yet that is what happened to this man. That is the man we are talking about when we open the book of Job.

Do you see where I am going now?

But losing everything was only the beginning.

Because then his body was broken. He was struck with an illness that no one could name and no one could treat, an illness that became a daily torment in every moment of his life. From the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, he was covered in sores that he could only scrape with broken pottery as he sat in ashes. He could not lie down without pain. He could not sit without pain. He could not be touched without pain. And nobody, not his physicians, not his friends, not the wisest men of his region, could tell him what was wrong with him or how to make it stop.

And his wife. We are quick to judge his wife, but I want us to pause and look at her again. This is a woman who has seen her husband, a great man, reduced to less than nothing. A woman who, alongside him, commanded households of servants. Who raised ten children with him and then lost all ten of them on the same afternoon, because remember, those were her children too. And now she is watching the only person left in her life, the man she loves, sitting in ashes and scraping his sores with broken pottery, and there is no end in sight. The Bible does not tell us in so many words what was in her heart, but to my mind, when she said curse God and die, she was not tempting him. She was begging him. She was saying, I cannot watch you suffer like this any longer. I know the only way you will be released is if God strikes you down. So please, curse God and die. At least the suffering would be over. That is not the voice of a wicked woman. That is the voice of a woman whose grief had reached a place where mercy and despair had become indistinguishable.

And his friends. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. They came from far away. They saw him and did not even recognize him. They sat with him in silence for seven days because his suffering was too great for words. And these were not foolish men. These were not enemies. These were the wisest men in his life. But they could not understand what they were seeing, because from the lens they had inherited, the lens they had built their lives on, anyone who went through what Job was going through must have wronged God in a profound way. Their framework had no other category for it. So when they finally spoke, they spoke as men trying to defend their understanding of God against the impossible thing in front of them. And in defending, they wounded the friend they had come to comfort.

It was an inexplicable, horrific, nightmarish sight to behold. A man, once great, sitting in ashes. A grieving wife begging her husband to die. Three friends who came to comfort him and ended up accusing him. And in the middle of it all, a man who had done nothing wrong.

If you and I were Job, what would we do?

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And so the long conversation begins.

For thirty-five chapters, from chapter 3 all the way to chapter 37, Job and his friends speak. Back and forth, round after round, like a wrestling match that no one is winning. And we who have read the book a hundred times sometimes skim those chapters because we know how they end. But I want us to slow down and notice what is actually happening in them. Because what is happening in them is the slow unfolding of what I want to call Job’s folly.

Job opens his mouth in chapter 3 and curses the day he was born. He does not curse God. But he curses the womb that bore him, the night that conceived him, the dawn that ever let him see the light. And who can blame him? After everything we have walked through together, who would not have spoken that way? But notice already that something has shifted. The man who in chapter 1 said the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord is now speaking as one who wishes the Lord had never given in the first place. The grief is real, and the grief is permitted. But underneath the grief, something else is beginning to move.

Then his friends start to speak. Eliphaz first, gently. Bildad next, more pointed. Zophar third, blunt to the point of cruelty. Their argument is the same argument in three different keys. God is just. The just God does not punish the innocent. Therefore, Job, you must not be innocent. Confess. Repent. Set your house in order. And it does not matter how kindly Eliphaz says it or how harshly Zophar says it. The message underneath is the same message, and the message is wrong. They are speaking with confidence about a God they have not yet been silenced by. They are administering a framework they have never seen tested. And they are doing it to a man who is sitting in ashes.

And you and I, yes, you, the person reading this article right now, can you see yourself in this role?

Imagine seeing a great man fall from grace. Imagine seeing a woman from whom the oil of anointing once seemed to drip from every fingertip now becoming a wretched caricature of who she used to be. What would we say? How would we judge? Would we sit with them in silence for seven days, or would we, at the first opportunity, begin to construct the explanation that protects what we believe at the cost of the sufferer in front of us? Would we whisper to one another, must have been some sin, must have been some pride, must have been something we could not see? Or would we have the courage to admit that we do not know, and that not knowing is the only honest place to stand at the foot of someone else’s catastrophe?

His friends were not strangers. They were not enemies. They came from far away because they loved him. And still they wounded him, because they could not bear to let their understanding of God be made smaller than what was in front of them.

But Job’s friends are not the only ones we need to look at. Because Job himself begins to speak.

And here I need you to hear me well, because what I am about to say I do not say lightly, and I do not say it to dishonor a man God Himself has called His servant. But I say it because it is in the Bible, and the Bible would not have given us thirty-five chapters of his words if it did not want us to read them.

As the chapters wear on, his friends sharpen their accusations and Job sharpens his defense. And at first his defense is right. He really had not done what they were accusing him of. He really was innocent of the sins they were laying at his feet. God Himself will say so in chapter 42, so we know Job was not lying. But somewhere in the long defense of his innocence, something subtle begins to happen. Watch chapter 13:

Behold now, I have ordered my cause; I know that I shall be justified. Watch chapter 23. Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seat. I would order my cause before Him, and fill my mouth with arguments.

Watch chapter 31. Verse after verse of self-vindication, ending with the demand that the Almighty would answer me.

Do you see it? Job has stopped speaking as a man who knows his Maker and started speaking as a man who has standing to summon his Maker. He is not cursing. He is insisting. He wants a courtroom. He wants God to come down and explain Himself. He wants an audience in which he can lay out his case and be vindicated. He is righteous, and he knows he is righteous, and somewhere along the way the righteousness has become the platform from which he is now demanding answers from God.

And this, beloved, this is the folly. This is the thing I want us to see. It is not the folly of the wicked man who denies God. The wicked man’s folly is loud and obvious. This is the folly of the righteous man who, in his very righteousness, under the weight of suffering he cannot understand, begins to assume that he sees as God sees. That his innocence has earned him a seat at the table where the verdicts are decided. That the framework he has built on years of faithful service is sturdy enough to summon the One who built him.

And it is so subtle that even the man inside it cannot see it. Job did not know he was doing it. He thought he was just defending the truth. But truth defended from the wrong seat is still folly.

I want us to pause and feel the weight of this, because I think this folly is closer to us than we want to admit. Have you ever, in the middle of a season of suffering, found yourself building a case before God? Not denying Him, not turning from Him, but laying out the facts of your faithfulness and asking Him, almost demanding of Him, an explanation? Lord, I have served You. Lord, I have given. Lord, I have prayed. Lord, I have not done what they say I have done. Why this? Why now? Why me? That is Job in chapter 23. That is Job in chapter 31. And if we are honest, that has been us, too.

The folly does not begin with rebellion. It begins with righteousness that has forgotten its place. It begins with a faithful servant who, under enough pressure, starts to speak as if his faithfulness has earned him standing he was never given. And the most dangerous thing about it is that from the inside, it feels like courage. It feels like honesty. It feels like the kind of bold prayer the saints of old prayed. But it is not. The saints of old laid their hands on their mouths. The saints of old said I am vile, what shall I answer Thee?The saints of old, when they actually saw God, stopped talking.

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Then comes Elihu.

Elihu (He is my God) is the youngest one in the room. He has been listening the whole time, growing more and more frustrated, and finally in chapter 32 he speaks. He does not join Job’s three friends. He stood apart from the fray. He rebukes Job for justifying himself rather than God. He speaks of God’s greatness, His power, His governance over creation, and he attributes the words he speaks to the Spirit of God within him. He is the one who stands as a preface to what is about to come, speaking of the storm and the lightning and the thunder. What his relationship to Job was, the text does not fully say. But one thing is definite. He was the lone herald of God’s sovereignty within the noise.

The room was full of words, but understanding had not yet arrived, because the One who is the ground of all understanding had not yet spoken.

And Job’s self-righteousness was still alive and well.

May we not die in chapter 37.

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Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind.

Just like that. No introduction. No preview. No warning.

God came with terrible and terrifying presence. He came with every magnification of His glory. He came ready.

I can imagine the lightning and the thunder and the sheer massiveness of that encounter. And inasmuch as it would seem that God was rebuking Job to the point of severity, this is the paradox that cannot be resolved: He, the Almighty God, revealed Himself to Job. He showed Job His glory. He spoke to Job face to face.

Have you commanded the morning since your days began? Have you walked in the search of the depth? Have you entered into the springs of the sea? Where is the way where light dwells? Can you bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Have you given the horse strength? Have you clothed his neck with thunder? Will the unicorn be willing to serve you?

Where wast thou, Job. Hast thou, Job. Canst thou. Dost thou.

Job had been meddling in God’s territory. God was now fully in Job’s. And He was not playing.

Some will ask, why did God not apologize for all Job had been through? Why did God not explain Himself? Why did He not give Job the courtroom Job had asked for?

Because God answers to no one. Because His name, in my mother tongue, is Kábíyèsí, which breaks down to Kábí ọ́ ò sí. The One of whom the option to question does not exist.

For four chapters, God was relentless in His cross-examination. Objection after objection. Revelation after revelation. Unveiling after unveiling. Terror after terror. Chapter 38. Chapter 39. Chapter 40. Chapter 41. Question after question after question, each one larger than the last, each one carrying Job into a vastness that no human mouth could answer, a profundity that no soul could articulate. The God who was speaking was the God who set the stars in their courses and told the sea where to stop. The God who feeds the lions and clothes the ostrich and laughs at the wild horse. The God who made Behemoth and Leviathan, creatures so terrible and so magnificent that the description of them takes up two whole chapters by itself, because the One describing them is the only One who can.

Job’s flesh was covered in sores, but God’s indescribable glory unskinned him from his insides to the point of utter nakedness. Naked from the outside. Naked from the inside. Wholly exposed, completely seen by Adonai, the Lord and master of the universe. The same God who put skins on Adam and Eve was now ripping them off Job, so that he could see his own iniquitous nakedness as clear as day with the eyes of his understanding, propped wide open.

Job experienced what no one had ever experienced: witnessing death itself while being resurrected to stand witness. No wonder the man who walked all the way with God, Enoch, never came back to speak about it.

Oh, my God. To be in this place.

Mere dust. Molded clay.

Beyond the agony, beyond the pain, it was honor beyond honor. Indescribable grace.

Job could finally see. Could finally understand. All the suffering, every loss, every wound, every accusation, every hour of unspeakable pain, and he despised himself. Not because the suffering had not been real. Not because his innocence had not been true. But because in God’s light, his complaints tumbled to scale, his self-defense became indefensible, his demand for a courtroom transformed into a plea for release from imprisonment. And now that he had seen, his anguish, real as it had been, terrible as it had been, could not but collapse before the majesty of the One who stood before him.

Had God not shown up, Job would have died a self-righteous man with his self-righteousness as his tombstone, standing in accusation against God.

Job would have died in chapter 37.

But because God in His infinite love and mercy stepped in, Job saw God, beheld His glory, and died an undone man full of God.

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And God. Oh, God.

How God loved this man, this being of flesh and blood. How much, how much, how much He loved him. To draw near to him in the whirlwind. To answer him out of the storm. To stoop down from the height of heaven into a small encampment in the land of Uz to speak to one broken servant sitting in ashes. The God who set the foundations of the earth, who tells the morning where to rise, who holds Leviathan in His hand, this God came down for Job. Not because Job had earned it. Not because Job’s righteousness had compelled it. But because Job was beloved. Because Job was His. And so are we.

And how much, then, does God love us. He gave us an entrance: the gallery view. He lifted the curtain on the courtroom of heaven. He showed us the wager, kept nothing from us. Made an open show of the enemy of our souls and silenced the enemy of Job’s. He let us witness and tremble at His glory.

This is mercy. This is staggering mercy.

He does not turn from our fingers pointing at Him, the puzzlement of our souls, the anger that we bear when our souls are overwhelmed, when we can’t see the way out for despair, when we like Job wonder what we did wrong as we receive grief from Him who we presume loves us.

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The prayers unanswered, clamor. The seasons that have gone on too long, chafe. The wounds we have carried in silence, fester.

And we forget. We who have been given the gallery view. We who have watched Job stripped of every standing he had. We rise up in our smaller anguishes and we presume the chair we never had. As if our righteousness has earned us a seat at the table. As if the courtroom Job was disabused of is one we somehow still hold. As if we, of all people, have standing.

We do not. We never did.

The only reason we can stand at all is the blood.

Job cried I am vile, what shall I answer Thee, I will lay mine hand upon my mouth. Blameless Job. The one God Himself had boasted of. Vile, before the living God. If Job, what then are we?

Not made fit by our suffering. Not made fit by our righteousness. Made fit by the blood that covered us, so that the glory which drew near to Job might draw near to us, and not consume.

The gospel breathed through the book of Job, before the gospel was preached in plain words. The blood that would one day be shed at Calvary made it possible for a man in the land of Uz to stand face to face with God. And the same blood makes it possible for us, on this side of the cross, to read the book at all, much less to bring our incomparable anguishes before the same God and live.

Many of us have experienced one or two or three of what Job knew. Livelihood destroyed. The loss of a child. The breaking of a body. The friend who turned. The spouse who could not hold. We have known these in pieces. But none of us, since the world began until now, has known them all at once. Job alone bore the full concentration. The wealth, the children, the body, the marriage, the friendship, the standing, every one of them, decimated in a single day. There is no other Job. There never was, and there never will be. He stands alone in human history.

And while we wait, we pray, we hope, we love. Until God comes. And like Job, we reach out to Him and surrender. We see. And in the seeing, we are undone.

For when Job suffered, God suffered. When Job mourned, God mourned. And when Job was restored, the whole of heaven rejoiced.

And so it is with us. So it is.

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And so Job opens his mouth. And what comes out of his mouth this time is not a defense. It is not a demand. It is not a courtroom plea or an oath of self-vindication. It is the voice of a man who has been brought through.

I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

This is what comes out of a man on the other side of the whirlwind. Not new arguments. Not a sharper case. Not better theology. The only sentence a soul can speak in the presence of the living God. Now mine eye seeth Thee. And every word that follows in the rest of his life flows from that one sentence. Everything Job becomes after this verse is the fruit of the seeing.

But the seeing is only the beginning. The eye that has now seen is an eye that will spend the rest of its life walking with Him, beholding Him, worshiping Him, and seeing God as all in all. In Him we live, and move, and have our being. The whirlwind was the doorway. What lies beyond it is not a single moment of vision but a whole life of communion. Job’s hundred and forty more years were not a hundred and forty years of repeating the moment of the storm. They were a hundred and forty years of walking the days under the eye that had now seen, beholding the One who had come down for him, worshiping the God whose vastness had eclipsed all his anguish, and seeing that God as all in all in every morning and every harvest and every grandchild’s face.

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The LORD said to Eliphaz, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends, for ye have not spoken of Me the thing that is right, as My servant Job hath.

My servant Job. My servant Job. My servant Job. Three times in two verses. The same title God used in chapter 1, before any of the suffering began. Job was God’s servant when he was rich, and God’s servant when he was ruined. God’s servant when he was righteous, and God’s servant when he was undone. The folly was real, but it could not undo the sonship. He was kept all the way through.

Job’s folly was real, and very human. But it could not undo the sonship. And this is the ultimate. Because the God who loved him knew his frailty, He came. In time He came. And because He came, Job was saved.

His soul was brought through the whirlwind. Job no longer argued. He finally understood.

Now mine eye seeth Thee.

And this was God’s ultimate plan brought to fruition. That His son, His friend, the one in whom His soul was well pleased, could finally see the One whom he pleased.

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Satan was defeated.

This was the preview of the One to come. He who was bruised. He who was broken. He who was chastised by his friends, mocked by his friends, now becoming the source of blessing for those very friends. Even as our Christ would do.

Job from Uz, to Jesus in Gethsemane and Golgotha, and Job and you and I in Christ resurrected.

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And now I want us to pause, and look at someone we may have forgotten.

His wife.

The wife who, in the depth of her own grief, told him to curse God and die. The wife whose ten children had also been taken. The wife who watched her husband annihilated in front of her. We are quick to read her words and stop reading her there, as if she had served her narrative purpose and could now be set aside. But Scripture does not set her aside, because God does not set her aside. The text never mentions Job taking another wife. The seven sons and three daughters who fill the house in chapter 42 are her children too. The same womb that bore the ten who died bore the ten who came. The same woman who said curse God and die in chapter 2 was the same woman who comforted Job in his old age, who sat at his table for a hundred and forty more years, who watched four generations come up under their hands together, who tasted the deep things and the hidden riches alongside the husband she had once begged to die.

This is who our God is. He does not see as we see. He does not abandon a woman because of words spoken in a moment when grief had erased her ability to imagine any other end.

He restored her alongside her husband, and the children of that restored marriage are the children Scripture names by their beauty.

And if you were Job, would you have kept her? Would you have still loved her after she had told you to curse God and die? That is the question that lays bare what kind of man Job had become on the other side of the whirlwind. He kept her. He loved her. He built the house with her again. He filled it with children with her again. He did it because he had been brought into the presence of a God who does not see as we see, and once you have been brought there, you stop seeing as you used to see, even about the people closest to you who failed you the worst.

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And this would be the ending. The last sentence in Job chapter 42. And Job died at a very old age, full of years.

Job died at the end of chapter 42. He died after God had spoken. He died after seeing the glory of the Lord. He died knowing he was loved. He died fully restored. He died with the wife of his youth. And most of all, he died having defeated his foe. He died fully redeemed.

May we not die in chapter 37.

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Ink and Utterance

There is a moment that happens before a decision. Before the yes or the no. Before the effort or the retreat — a whole world undiscovered. There is a moment when a possibility is first presented to a person — when an idea lands, when a door appears, when life, something, or someone presents a future to you that you have not thought of as a possibility for yourself. And by the way, that someone may be you to yourself.

What happens in that moment matters more than most of us realize.

I have been thinking about this. About what the mind does in that instant of first contact with a possibility. And what I have found is that there are three reflex responses that kick in at that moment of presentation. Only three. And they tell us almost everything about where that person is living — not physically, but paradigmatically. Not where they are standing, but where their mind has made its home.

The three possible mindframes are these:

The paradigm of indifference.

The paradigm of impossibility.

The paradigm of possibilities.

And the realm one occupies determines the trajectory and ultimately the outcome.

This sounds simple. But walk with me a little.

When considering these options, one would think that the worst of them would be the paradigm of impossibility — because it is the most negative. But one would be wrong.

After all, indifference is not hostility. It is not resistance. It is simply the absence of response. And we tend to reserve our concern for things that make noise.

But indifference is the most dangerous of the three.

The paradigm of impossibility, as we will see, is at least an engaged response. Something in the person is still processing, still reacting, still present to the possibility even if only to reject it. The mind is moving, even if it is moving in the wrong direction.

Indifference is not moving at all. Indifference is paralysis.

It is not that the person is uninterested in good outcomes. It is not that they lack desire. The problem runs deeper than desire. It lives in a distorted sense of self — not a distorted view of the situation in front of them, but a distorted view of their own position in life, their own standing, their own right to occupy the space where possibilities live. They have, somewhere along the way, come to believe that possibilities are for other people. That the invitation does not include them. That the door, if it exists, does not open from where they are standing.

This is what makes indifference so devastating. It is not laziness. It is entombment.

The person who lives in the paradigm of indifference is like one who has been buried alive. They are present. They are breathing. But they are enclosed on every side by the weight of fear, diminished self-worth, and an altered vision — not of the world, but of themselves in it. And because they cannot conceive of themselves as someone who could rise, they do not reach for the surface. They do not call out. They simply remain.

Scripture calls us to something entirely different. We are not buried. We are planted.

But is indifference the end? Is the person buried alive simply waiting for burial?

No. There is a solution. And the solution is situational.

Scripture speaks to this directly: Awake, you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light. The awakening from indifference is most often not internal — it is external. It comes from outside the tomb. And that means the person entombed in indifference has one primary assignment: change your position. Place yourself where there is life. Where there is motion. Where things are moving in a positive direction.

This does not produce immediate transformation. But it does not need to. Because the principle at work here is ancient and biological and biblical all at once — life begets life. Proximity to motion produces motion. The seed planted in living soil does not remain dormant forever.

The most biblical thing a person locked in the paradigm of indifference can do is to place themselves in a milieu of positive motion. That repositioning — that one decision to change one’s environment — is itself the paradigm shift. And that shift may result in freedom.

The paradigm of impossibility is louder. It has a voice. And that voice says: it cannot be done. It is too hard. I am not the one for this.

What makes this paradigm particularly deceptive is that it often presents itself as reason. As wisdom. As the mature assessment of a person who has simply done the math and arrived at an honest conclusion. The mind, which is capable of extraordinary things, turns here toward an extraordinary task — the construction of a convincing case against itself.

And the case is rarely about the possibility. It is about the person.

When someone says to you, I see you owning your business one day, and something in you immediately recoils — not because you are uninterested, but because you cannot locate yourself in that picture — that is not a rational response to evidence. That is a roadblock. And roadblocks are not conclusions. They are obstructions. There is a difference.

The paradigm of impossibility is almost always rooted in what a person has encountered, absorbed, and never fully examined. It is the accumulation of closed doors mistaken for permanent walls. Of delayed seasons mistaken for denied destinies. Of one person’s ceiling mistaken for everyone’s sky.

But here is what separates the paradigm of impossibility from indifference: the person in impossibility is still in the arena. They are reacting. They are engaged. The signal that something matters to them is present — it is simply being routed through fear rather than faith. And that means there is something to work with.

The mind that says I cannot is still a working mind. It simply needs new instructions.

The paradigm of possibilities does not begin with ability. This is the part that surprises people.

It does not begin with a résumé or a resource pool or a roadmap. It does not wait for conditions to align or for permission to be granted. It begins in a place that is prior to all of those things. It begins in the mind.

And the mind is not the brain. The relationship between the two is a conversation for another day — and a longer one. What matters here is this: the mind leads and the brain follows.

The brain is the apparatus — the extraordinary, complex, God-designed biological instrument through which thought travels and takes form. But the mind is the seat of perspective. The mind is where paradigms are built and where they can be broken. The mind is where a person decides, consciously or otherwise, which world they are living in — the world of limitations or the world of solutions.

One of the solutions is not to go against the grain — because that produces struggle, frustration, and a sense of impotence. The answer is not resistance. It is retraining. Retraining the mind to reflex respond in a way that produces possibilities rather than paralysis.

And the ultimate brain retraining hack is not what you do. It is what you say.

The Word of God is precise about this: this Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night. Notice what that verse does not say. It does not say it shall not depart from your actions. It says your mouth. Before behavior. Before discipline. Before strategy. The starting point is what you are speaking into yourself.

Because saying produces assimilation. Assimilation produces meditation. Meditation changes the will. The will transfers its new instruction to the brain. And the brain — that extraordinary, process-driven, God-designed apparatus — begins to deploy the full arsenal available to it. It starts searching. Connecting. Constructing pathways toward what the mouth has declared and the mind has absorbed.

And the outcome? Thou shalt have good success. Not produce good success. Not manufacture good success through sheer effort and grinding will. Have it. Receive it. As the natural result of a mind retrained toward possibilities and aligned with the Word of the God who makes all things possible.

Now, someone reading this might say — yes, say it and it will happen. Name it and claim it. But that is not what I am saying.

I am saying something more precise than that. Find your possibility first — anchor it in the Word of God or in one of the principles God has already established. Let the saying be rooted in something God has already declared true. And then begin to meditate on it. Turn it over. Speak it again. Let it move from the mouth into the mind, from the mind into the will, from the will into the brain. And the brain, now armed with a God-anchored declaration, begins to produce a road map. A road map that leads to the land of POSSIBILITIES.

This is not wishful thinking. This is the mechanism God designed.

This is precisely what Paul means in Romans 12:2 when he writes: do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. He does not say the renewing of your brain. He does not say the renewing of your circumstances or your connections or your credentials. He says your mind. Because transformation does not begin in the external. It begins in the paradigm.

The world will always offer you a ceiling. The renewed mind looks up and sees a door.

The paradigm of possibilities is not a modern discovery. It is ancient. And Scripture is full of people who lived inside it long before the word paradigm existed.

Caleb was eighty-five years old when he stood before Joshua and said, Give me this mountain. Forty-five years earlier, he had seen the same land and believed it was possible. The intervening decades — the wilderness, the waiting, the death of an entire generation — did not shift his paradigm. Everyone else saw giants and fortified cities. Caleb saw an inheritance. Same facts. Different mindframe. And he received what he had been promised, not because his circumstances were easier, but because his mind had never left the realm of possibilities.

Look around you. You will find these people in your life — the ones who hear an idea and say immediately, almost involuntarily, I can do this. They are not always the most credentialed. They are not always the most resourced. What they have is a mind that has been positioned toward possibilities. And that positioning makes all the difference.

I know this not only in theory but in the marrow of a recent morning.

There was a project I wanted to pursue. When the idea first came to me, I did not step toward it. I stepped back. Not because I did not want it. I wanted it. But I kept my eyes on the limitations — the time I did not have, the resources I had not arranged, the competing demands that would need tending in my absence. And those limitations built walls. And those walls built a prison. And I sat in it, looking at a door I had already decided was locked.

Then I did one thing. I took one small step toward it.

That is all. One step. One small, almost embarrassed movement toward possibilities. It did not solve my other problems. It did not clear my schedule or fill my account. But something shifted. The door cracked open. My mind, which had been assigned the task of cataloguing limitations, received new instructions. And it began — quietly, almost without my permission — to look for solutions instead.

I may or may not complete that project. But if I do, it will not be because my limitations disappeared. It will be because one morning I woke up and took one step, and the realm of possibilities opened its door.

This is what God has been trying to tell us all along.

Jesus said: if you say to this mountain, be removed and cast into the sea, and do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, you will have whatever you say. The obstruction in that passage is not the mountain. The mountain is just a mountain. The obstruction is doubt. Doubt is the paradigm of impossibility wearing a spiritual disguise. And faith — active, directive, mountain-addressing faith — is the paradigm of possibilities in its fullest expression.

Paul says it from another angle: with God, all things are possible. Not most things. Not the reasonable things. Not the things that make sense given your current resources and timeline. All things. The limitation is not on God’s side. The limitation is in the paradigm.

When the mind — that seat of perspective, that place where paradigms are built and broken — is renewed and aligned with the God who knows all things, who is in all things, who can do all things, possibilities are no longer something you reach for. They become the ground you stand on. The impossible does not disappear. It simply changes categories.

So here is the question I am sitting with this morning. And I am extending it to you.

When you look at your life — at the situation in front of you, at the dream that has been quietly waiting, at the invitation you have not yet accepted — where are you standing? Are you standing in the paradigm of indifference, enclosed and unmoving, breathing but not reaching? Are you standing in the paradigm of impossibility, cataloguing every limitation with the thoroughness of someone who has already decided the verdict? Or are you standing — even tentatively, even with shaking hands — in the paradigm of possibilities?

Most people want to stand in possibilities. But when the solution is not immediately visible, the pull toward limitation is strong. It feels like realism. It feels like wisdom. It is neither. It is just fear with better vocabulary.

The paradigm of possibilities does not require that you have all the answers before you move. It requires one step. One door. One question asked that you have been avoiding. One small movement toward something you have been circling. The mind does not need a complete map. It needs a direction. Give it a direction and it will begin to build the road.

You may have noticed that I have used the word possibilities many times in this article. That is not an accident. It is not a stylistic tic. It is a deliberate attempt at mind hacking — my own and yours. My hope is that by the time you reach the end of this piece, the word that remains resonating in your mind, the word that will not leave, is this one: POSSIBILITIES. Because with God, all things are possible. That is not a motivational slogan. That is the operating principle of the universe as God designed it.

You were not designed for indifference. You were not designed for the prison of impossibility. You were designed by a God for whom all things are possible, and you carry that inheritance in the very mind He gave you.

The realm of possibilities is not a distant country. It is one step away.

Take the step.

With God all things are possible.

Ink & Utterance—Words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

One night, in my little university room, I found myself floating near the ceiling, looking down at my own body on the bed.

I did not know whether I was awake or asleep. All I know is that a fear like no other filled my mind. I woke up shaking — a fear I cannot fully articulate to this day. I turned on every light and sat up until morning. I could not wait to get out of that room.

I was sixteen years old. And I was terrified of my own existence.

But let me go back to the beginning.

I don’t exactly remember when I started being afraid of my own shadow, but I know it was from a very young age. And yet I was bold, adventurous, vivacious. Just a happy child. I had a great childhood. The discipline was heavy, but overall it wasn’t bad. We had lots of happy moments, and my parents did the best they could to give us a good life. Our house was always filled with people, laughter, and love.

The pre-knowing started early. A pre-knowing here, a pre-knowing there. I would say things, and they would come to pass almost immediately. My parents told me from a very young age that I had to be careful about what I said, because my mouth and my words were like an oracle.

I remember very vividly that in my last few years of high school, I would have dreams that showed me which questions would be presented in our exams, or I would simply and instinctively know. This reputation so followed me that my friends and students I didn’t even know that well would come up and ask if I knew what was going to be on forthcoming exams.

One of the events that particularly stood out to me was in my last few months of high school. We were all in the physics laboratory, and one of the seniors came by and started mocking us for filling out university entrance exam forms. I was so upset, paradoxically not on my own behalf, but on behalf of my friends. I turned to her and said, “You are mocking us now, but you will see who will have the last laugh. Look around. Every one of us here will get an entrance into the university before you ever dream of getting admitted, and even then not even for a course of substance.”

We are a very superstitious people in Nigeria, and immediately, even though what she said was horrible, my friends cautioned me against placing a curse on her. I refused to take the words back and let me tell you, what I said came to pass. It was scary.

I went through school very fast, and by the time I was fourteen and a half, I was in university, living by myself and going to lectures on my own. I had a lot of friends, one in particular who till this day is one of the best friends I have ever had, even though he and I do not speak very often. And though everything seemed great on the surface, it was a very different story when I was alone and by myself.

One night something happened that till today I cannot fully explain. I had gone to bed a little late after a long day of lectures. It was a night like any other night — the sounds of the night had lulled me to sleep. And then all of a sudden I found myself looking down at my body on the bed, floating just shy of the ceiling, watching myself from above as though I were a stranger. I could see my form, but not clearly. I could see the rise and fall of my own chest. I did not know whether I was awake or asleep. All I know is that a fear like no other filled my mind — not the fear of something outside me, but the terror of being separated from myself. I woke up quickly, shaking with a fear that till this day I cannot fully articulate. I turned on all the lights and sat up in bed till the morning. I could not wait to get out of my room.

Another night I was asleep. I had just finished reading a book by Jeffrey Archer. I remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday. All of a sudden I felt my face begin to turn to stone, and it hardened and hardened and hardened until it started cracking. I knew it was a dream, but I was so frightened that I woke myself up, and thus began my battle with insomnia. Every night I would go to bed, and every night at 2 AM I would wake up, unable to go back to sleep. Needless to say, it began to take a toll on my body. Fatigue, irritability, and the creeping weight of depression. I became withdrawn. My mother, who I swear could see through every pore of my skin, would ask me what was wrong. But I did not have an answer for her. I could not have an answer for her.

The pre-knowing was intensifying too. I had had a premonition of my cousin dying a few years earlier. That was scary. But the one that broke the camel’s back for me was one night when I was walking with my friends through that little university town. We were going downhill, and we could see the whole town with lights flickering everywhere, and all of a sudden out of nowhere, I said, “I wonder what would happen if all the lights went out.” I kid you not, the very next moment the whole town went dark. My friends were aghast. I was frightened, scared out of my guts.

By that time, even though I had a vibrant outward life, my life in my little room was anything but. I was about sixteen years old, and I was scared of my own shadow. I was scared of being alone. I was scared of sleeping alone. I was scared of the dark. Not because I was a timid person, but because I was scared of what I would begin to see once I closed my eyes, and the things I had experienced in little and not so little ways. It was so bad that I would leave my room and sleep on my neighbor’s floor on a pair of cushions, just because I did not want to sleep in my own room by myself. She was so kind. Whenever she did not have company, she would let me sleep on her floor. When she did, I would call my friend, and he would come over and walk me to the girls’ hostel where most of my friends lived.

It was a miserable existence. Yet I had some great friends. I went to parties. I had good grades mostly. But I was tired. I did not sleep most nights, and even when I did, my sleep was tormented. I knew things were building to a climax where I would have to make a decision about whether to commit to one world or the other in terms of spiritual allegiance. And of course, I did not want to join the fascinating terror of the world that came to visit me once in a while, neither did I want or relish the responsibility of being able to say and do things that would affect someone else’s destiny, even though once in a while, that sense of power would bring a sense of vindication and gratification.

Then something strange happened. My neighbor, the same one whose floor I slept on, became a born again Christian. Her life underwent a radical change. She was a few years older than me, and had been living the life of an adolescent who had a bit of freedom. She was so changed. She would pray all the time and sing, and we could all see the difference in her. It intrigued me. One day I got up, knocked on her door, and said to her, “Can you take me to that place you go to, the night vigil? I think I am a witch and I have demons and I don’t want them anymore.”

I cannot even imagine what must have been going through her mind, but she agreed, and we went to night vigil together.

At this point I have to acknowledge all the people who did not cease telling me about Jesus, one of whom is still one of my best friends today. I would tell them I was a good witch, that they did not need to concentrate their efforts on me, that they should go speak to the bad witches. I thought I was half joking. But in the spiritual realm, I spoke the truth.

The things that happened during that night vigil are another story for another day. But suffice to say, my life was forever changed.

We left before the sun had fully risen. Everything around me looked exactly as it had the night before. But I was not the same person who had walked in.

All of a sudden I felt free. All of a sudden I was no longer bound. All of a sudden my soul felt light. There are many things that happened in my life after that, much evidence that I had been delivered from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son. But one thing stood out then, and still stands out today:

I am no longer afraid.

I am not afraid to live by myself. I am not afraid of the dark. As a matter of fact, I sleep best when everything is pitch black.

And why is this?

Because I know that Jesus holds me. I know that I was delivered from the powers of darkness. I know that every spirit that tormented me was cast out by the Spirit of God.

I am a child of God.

I do not know what my life would have been like if I had not given my life to the Lord. But I know, without a shadow of doubt, that it would have been a life filled with fear and torment and darkness.

But that is not my story.

This is my story.

I am no longer afraid.

This morning, I perceive that someone out there is still wearing a mask. Still hiding. Still afraid.

You don’t have to be.

God sees you. God knows you. God loves you. There is a Savior waiting for you to come home — waiting to keep you safe, not only in this world, but in the world to come.

I am no longer afraid.

And neither do you have to be.

Words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

— Dr. Mettabel​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

And at midnight, Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises to God, and as they prayed there was a great noise and everyone’s bands were loosed.

Hallelujah, praise God, deliverance has come!

But if this was the Hallelujah Chorus, why didn’t Paul and Silas leave when the chains fell off?

The question came during a time of contemplation, and through it God unraveled everything I thought I knew about this popular story.

The midnight deliverance.

Conferences have been built on this narration, prayer meetings have been assembled, talks have been delivered, and I dare say most of them have been from the wrong perspective. The focus of Paul’s ministry was not personal. It was Kingdom, Kingdom, Kingdom, all the way, and his words must always be interpreted in this light. Otherwise they risk becoming personal idols in a story God never intended to tell.

I have read Acts 16 dozens of times. Preached from it. Claimed it. Prayed it as a deliverance prayer at midnight, no less—positioning myself as Paul and Silas, claiming midnight breakthrough, declaring that my chains would fall and my prison doors would open.

For years, this was my posture: I was the one singing at midnight. I was the one whose worship shook the foundations of the prison. I am the one God sends earthquakes for.

But oh, how wrong I was.

That morning, the Spirit of God pressed that question into my chest and it wouldn’t release: If personal deliverance was the point, why did they stay?

The chains were off. The doors were open. Every human instinct—and plenty of theological justification—said run.

They didn’t.

There was pandemonium and chaos.

Paul shouted through the darkness to a man he couldn’t see, a man with a sword already drawn toward his own throat: “Do not harm yourself. We are all here.”

The guard was ready to kill himself to spare himself the torture of a public and shameful death because by Roman law the jailer would have been executed for losing prisoners.

Now, I was puzzled. If their own deliverance was not the purpose of their singing at midnight, then why did they sing and pray at midnight? And where did it all start? Why did it all start?

As I meditated on these scriptures, suddenly I realized I had been reading the story from the wrong chair.

⸻

Here’s what I missed for years:

Paul and Silas didn’t pray because they were in prison. They prayed because it was their custom to pray and sing praises to God. This was what they did. This was how they lived.

Whether in a palace or a pit, these men had a rhythm—a habitual communion with God that circumstance couldn’t interrupt. The stocks on their feet didn’t change the posture of their hearts. The wounds on their backs didn’t silence the worship in their mouths.

They weren’t crying out for their own rescue. They were worshiping the God who sent them to the prison.

And I believe they knew exactly why they were there.

IT WAS NOT TO BE SET FREE FROM PRISON. IT WAS TO SET THE CAPTIVES FREE.

The earthquake wasn’t their liberation. It was their assignment. They were already free—had been free since before the shackles clicked shut. Their spirits were unbound long before the ground started shaking.

The earthquake was for everyone else.

Their presence was an echo of what Jesus had said when He walked the streets of Galilee: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, for He has anointed Me to proclaim liberty to the captives and to set at liberty those who are oppressed.”

⸻

So as I sat there, the realization dawned: maybe I wasn’t meant to read this as the one being delivered but the one sent to deliver.

Because before the prison, before the jailer, before any of it—there was a cry.

Paul had tried to go to Asia. The Spirit said no. He tried Bithynia. The Spirit blocked him again. Two closed doors. Two divine redirections. And then, in the night, a vision: a man from Macedonia, standing and pleading.

“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

That cry—desperate, specific, directed—changed the course of apostolic history. It pulled Paul away from his plans and toward a place he hadn’t chosen. Macedonia didn’t generate its own deliverance. It cried out. It asked. It positioned itself to receive.

Sometimes our Macedonia moment comes only after God redirects us from our own plans. The closed doors weren’t slammed in Paul’s face—they were redirection toward the place that was crying out for help.

And when Paul arrived, I believe he and Silas realized what they had to do. This was not just one man calling for deliverance. It was strategic, apostolic, economic, exorcistic and of seismic proportions — liberation across every dimension of Macedonian life.

⸻

First, there was Lydia.

A dealer in purple cloth—luxury goods, Roman networks, economic influence. She wasn’t poor or marginalized. She was positioned. And when she heard Paul by the riverside, the Lord opened her heart.

God was setting up operation Macedonia and it started with one woman who had a heart for God, who had a big house, a phenomenal established network, and capital for ministry. Her conversion wasn’t just personal salvation. It was strategic. Her home became the first church in Europe. Her resources became the economic foundation for sustained gospel work. He was not just saving a woman. He was establishing a Kingdom base in Macedonia.

Then there was the girl.

She had a pythōn spirit—demonic divination dressed as religious service. Her owners exploited her gift for profit. She was enslaved twice over: spiritually bound and economically trafficked.

And when Paul cast out the spirit that inhabited her, he wasn’t just performing an exorcism. He was disrupting a demonic revenue stream and setting this imprisoned girl free. Her owners dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates not because they cared about her soul, but because they’d lost their source of income.

Then came the prison.

The innermost cell. The lowest of the low. Criminals. Violent offenders. People no open-air sermon would ever reach.

And there—in the place designed for punishment and a prelude to execution—God sent an earthquake. Not to rescue His apostles, but to reach the unreachable. The chains fell off everyone. The doors opened for all the prisoners.

And the jailer—the one responsible for keeping them bound—saw the open doors and drew his sword. He was ready to kill himself rather than face the shame of a Roman execution for losing his prisoners.

Paul’s shout—“Do not harm yourself, we are all here”—was the altar call. It was the man’s deliverance from a sure death before he ever asked a single question.

The jailer called for a light, ran in, and fell trembling before Paul and Silas.

“What must I do to be saved?”

The help had reached him too.

⸻

The story doesn’t end with the jailer’s baptism. Every man’s bands were loosened. Who are these men? Probably hardened criminals — murderers, thieves, the lowest of the low. They were all saved. No one left out. That must have been a glorious moment — better than simply praying to be released from prison.

The next morning, the magistrates sent word to release Paul and Silas quietly. Just let them go. Pretend it never happened.

But Paul refused.

“They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.”

This wasn’t pride. This was a declaration.

A declaration that they served the living God who was not only able to break their chains, but to deliver everyone held captive in that jail — not in body, but in spirit and in truth.

And this was the understanding that Paul and Silas carried: if they slipped away like condemned criminals, what would happen to Lydia? To the jailer’s household? To the new believers who had just risked everything to follow this Jesus?

They would be associated with men the city had officially shamed. Their faith would carry the stain of criminality.

Paul’s insistence on public vindication was Kingdom strategy. God’s help included establishing divine authority, legal credibility and unquestionable dignity for the future church. The magistrates came. They apologized. They escorted the apostles out with honor.

The help was complete.

Macedonia was saved. The prayer of one man, a man whose name we will never know, saved a whole city. That’s the Kingdom, that’s the gospel, that was the reason for the midnight deliverance.

Not prayers for personal breakthroughs, riches, healing, marriage, or any other personal agenda — which is not to say that God does not have room for those in another room. But not in this room. Not in this jail room.

⸻

Before Paul and Silas left Macedonia, something significant happened: they returned to Lydia’s house to encourage the believers.

They didn’t just plant and leave. They integrated. They connected the prison converts with the riverside converts. They ensured no work was left orphaned, no new believer abandoned.

I sat stunned at what the Lord had just taught me — how He had just turned me from the selfish believer I was, thinking that every scripture was meant for me, me, me. Me to be delivered, me to grow rich, me to be healed. Many of us have sung that beloved Fred Hammond song about the midnight hour — God turning it around, working it in your favor. And it’s a great song. But this was not that midnight hour. And yes, sometimes it is about us. But sometimes, like in this case, it’s about something much, much bigger than us.

⸻

On that day God showed me that those passages were to show me that I was to be like Paul and Silas. The one who He can depend upon to go when the Macedonian cry comes. And now Paul and Silas pass the baton — to me, to you, to every believer who has sat in the midnight hour singing praises not for their own rescue but for the captives who need to be set free.

The cry is still going out across many waters:

“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

You are who you are — I am who I am — and God may be calling us to go over to our own Macedonia. To help. To be the ones Christ will use to preach good news to Kingdom builders like Lydia, to bring deliverance to the exploited like that girl, to reach those in the lowest places — the prison cells of soul and body where no open-air sermon would ever reach.

And in this, there is more freedom than in a thousand misappropriated midnight earthquakes.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon you and upon me — the commission passes now.

Macedonia was crying out and Paul and Silas were the answer.

The world is crying out and you and I are the answer.

Can God depend on us?

I pray so. I sincerely pray so.

⸻

Dr. Mettabel writes at Ink & Utterance, where words from the Word wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

IT IS FINISHED

Jesus is risen.

And because He is,

you can rise too.

Because He died, you can have eternal life —

and hope, and peace, and joy.

Hallelujah.

Let these words spoken in the first-person voice of Christ take you from the garden, to the cross, to the grave, to the resurrection morning.

As I spoke the words, I felt Him moving.

I felt Him shifting everything that had been stuck.

I felt Him freeing the captives.

I felt Him giving joy to the mournful,

peace to the restless,

and life to the lifeless.

Let Him speak directly to every dead place, every fear, every thing that has thought it had the final word over your life.

He has declared the victory.

It. Is. Finished. With death, with sickness, with poverty, with abandonment, with every chain that binds.

And so are you..

🎙️ Watch: IT IS FINISHED | An Easter Spoken Word | Dr. Mettabel

Words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit.

— Dr. Mettabel

I give credence to the pain you’ve been through, 
But TODAY I stretch forth my hand 
And I say Come. 
For silver and gold had I not, 
But all that I now have, I give to you.

To see you leap for joy once more, 
To see you praise, and dance, and laugh. 
I have been in the dark with you. 
That impotent place I know so well — 
‘Land of despair, land of the dead’.

I lay in the silence, bound by chords of my love for you. 
Wrapped in linen, in cold stone sealed. 
When they thought that hope had been nailed and killed. 
Still, I lay, for the enemy to think that he won.

Still I lay, 
Waiting I lay, as I bore the weight Of every sin, 
Of every sorrow, Every pain, Every cry. 
Not watching from some distant sky.

I descended to hell, I went to Sheol. 
Loosing every power, every chain. 
Death thought it held the final answer. 
It did not know that I AM He.

I wrestled and won, fought and prevailed, 
With power today, I call you COME FORTH! 
The time of death is passed, 
And surely you shall live again.

For with the morning comes the turning. 
The Sun of Righteousness rising,
With great healing in His wings. 
To flood you with light and love and LIFE, 
My redeemed, for whom great price I paid.

You shall return — sorrow and sighing fleeing away. 
You shall arise; you shall alight. 
Beauty for your ashes, 
The oil of joy where mourning held its throne.

I have called you by your name — You. Are. Mine. 
Though you thought yourself forsaken,
With my “It is finished” in death, 
Your “life” gloriously begins.

So I lift you up and raise you high, 
Above death, 
Above sickness, 
Above poverty, 
Above danger, 
Above tribulation, 
Above trials, 
Above all that is named in the pit of hell.

So get up, arise, and shine — 
You, son of the promise, daughter of light, arise! 
Mount up — yes, mount up! 
Running and not weary, walking and not faint. 
Oh! Forever on eagles’ wings YOU FLY!!!

Your youth renewed, your strength restored — 
Though you were forsaken, 
Though you were abandoned, 
Though you were dead, 
Yet shall you LIVE!

Arise, arise, arise — 
For Christ, your light has come. 
HE is risen.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ AND… 

IT. IS. FINISHED

© Adepero Mettabel Okulaja, Revised 2026.

Happy Resurrection Sunday!

What happens on the fourth day?

Well, today we find out.

“Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.” John 11:3

Jesus received notice that His friend Lazarus was sick. The Bible records that He loved Lazarus — loved him deeply, loved his sisters, loved that household. And yet, when the news arrived, Jesus did not immediately move. He did not set off for Bethany. He waited. He waited until Lazarus was not just sick, but dead. He already knew — knew before the disciples did, knew before the messenger returned — that Lazarus had died. And when He finally arrived in Bethany, He was not met with desperate pleas to come and heal. He was met with grief. He was met with accusation. Martha came to Him and said, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.”

“My brother would not have died.”

This statement, so full of anguish and pain, again begs my quintessential question:

Why?

Why did Jesus wait? Why did the One who loved him most arrive after the worst had already happened? Why did He let it go all the way to death?

Why did Jesus raise Lazarus on the fourth day?

Why did He not heal him before he died?

Why on the fourth day?

Why not on the first, the second, or the third?

Why the fourth day?

I went to the Word, and again God spoke — and this is the answer He gave me:

God’s kingdom is timeless. The proof is written in Revelation 13:8 — and all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Read that again slowly. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world. Not at Calvary — Calvary was the earthly manifestation of what had already been established in eternity. And if He was slain from the foundation of the world, then He had also risen from the foundation of the world. The third day was not a moment in time — it was an eternal reality. Jesus Christ had already been crucified, and having risen on the third day, He had become the Resurrection and the Life since before time began. To have raised Lazarus on any day prior to the day on which He Himself had eternally risen would have been impossible. And because of this, Jesus had to wait. He had to wait until the fourth day. He had to wait until after The Resurrection and The Life had risen eternally.

The dead cannot raise the dead. Only the living can raise the dead.

Jesus had already declared it Himself — “I am the resurrection and the life” — John 11:25. And that is exactly what He demonstrated on the fourth day.

The Resurrection and the Life spoke life into being.

And when He got to the tomb, Jesus wept.

He wept because He loved Lazarus.

He wept because He felt their pain as His own. He wept because He knew how profound the agony could be.

When Jesus arrived at the tomb and commanded them to take away the stone, Martha in true form protested. “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.” Four days of death. Four days of darkness. Four days of decay and stench and sealed stone. Martha and everyone present could only see what was natural. But Jesus was operating on eternal principle. The stone was not a problem. The stench was not a problem.

The four days were not the problem. They were the point.

In the Jewish tradition of the day, the soul of the departed was understood to hover near the body for three days after death — lingering, hoping to return. But on the fourth day, when decay had set in and the body had changed, the soul departed to Sheol. Finally. Permanently. No coming back.

Which means that by the time Jesus arrived, Lazarus was not just dead — he was irretrievably dead. Raise him on day one, day two, or day three, and someone could say the soul simply returned on its own. But the fourth day? No one could say that. No one could call it coincidence. No one could call it resuscitation.

The fourth day demanded a word for what Jesus was about to do — and that word was RESURRECTION. And resurrection belonged to One person alone — the One who had already conquered death from before the foundation of the world.

“Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?”

This was Jesus, speaking to Martha. All the pain, all the suffering, all the waiting was not in vain. It was so that they would see the glory of God — the glory of the Resurrection.

And here is where it gets personal. Many of us can identify with Mary, with Martha, and even with Lazarus at this time — four days dead, situation irretrievable, circumstances impossible.

But do not be afraid. Only believe. Because if you believe, you will see the glory of God.

The resurrection of Lazarus was not only a foreshadowing of our resurrection that is to come; it also demonstrates that in Christ, we have life, and life abundant, no matter how dead a situation seems to be.

Which means whatever has been dead — whether for a day, a year, a decade, or what feels like a lifetime — is not outside the reach of the Resurrection.

You are not too far gone. You have not been in the tomb too long. You do not stink too much. He is right on time. Because whatever may be happening in your life, TODAY IS YOUR FOURTH DAY.

AND HE IS CALLING YOUR NAME… COME FORTH!

Jesus stood before that sealed tomb and cried with a loud voice —

Lazarus, come forth!

And he that was dead came forth. That same voice is calling you today. He says — say your name — Mettabel! Come forth!! And I arise.

I rise out of deadness, decay, out of filthiness, stench, disease, destruction, and every name that is named on earth, above the earth, and underneath the earth. Today is my fourth day, and at His command — I rise!

And so do you… ARISE!

For Christ, your light has come.

In Him was life, and that life was the light of men.

© Adepero Mettabel Okulaja, originally written 02.11.17, updated March 2026

I am one who always asks questions — and from my practice to my devotion, my favorite question is always the why. I like to get to the root cause of a problem, because once you get to the root, you understand how the tree grows.

This was the case with one of the most profound revelations I received about Resurrection, and about why Jesus needed to rise on the third day. It happened one day while reflecting at home. A profound question stirred within me — the kind that doesn’t feel like your own thought.

Why did Jesus Christ rise from the dead specifically on the third day? Why not the first? Why not the second? Why the third day?

Immediately, I heard a voice inside my heart, and I knew it was God speaking. He said to me, Go to the third day. And as if light flooded a dark room, I immediately understood what He meant!

I quickly opened my Bible to Genesis chapter one, and found the narrative of the third day — and what I read excited me so much, I couldn’t sit still!

Jesus Christ had to rise on the third day. God had determined it from before the foundation of the world.

Read with me and see if you see what I saw:

Genesis 1:11-13 — And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.

God gently revealed to me: On the first day, I illuminated the world with light. On the second, I fashioned the heavens, and on the third day I created the earth. The third day was when I made heavenly creations manifest on earthly soil. The third day was when I caused every plant on the earth to come up as grass, herb producing seed, and fruit, yielding fruit after its kind and whose seed is in itself!

Psalm 104:14 — He causes the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out of the earth.

And then it brought up also fruit after its kind, whose seed was in itself — and all this was on the third day!

Genesis 1:29 — And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

It didn’t end there. My search took me to the gospels, where Jesus said:

John 12:24 — Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone: but if it die, it brings forth much fruit.

Mark 4:26-27 — And he said, So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knows not how.

Ooooh ooh ooh, I got it!

Jesus was the Heavenly seed that God caused to come from the earth — much like a seed rises from the dead ground! On the third day, Jesus in the form of a seed — who, if He had not been planted, would have been the only Son of God — came up from the ground on the third day! As grass, providing our daily need for sustenance. As seed, available for sowing into the earth. As fruit, giving us LIFE — enabling us to reproduce after our kind, just as Jesus produced sons and daughters after God’s kind when He rose ON THE THIRD DAY!

He is the grass that feeds us: Psalm 23:2 — He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He went into the ground alone. He then came up as a seed — with us, the church, in Him. Seed, having the capacity to reproduce children of God after His own likeness, who in turn have the capacity to bring forth children after the likeness of our Heavenly Father — hallelujah!

ALL THIS HAPPENED ON THE THIRD DAY!

Resurrection means the act of rising from the dead, returning to life. So on the third day, the Seed — Jesus, who had died and been buried — came up from a dead state, brought to life by the Holy Ghost, from life unto life unto life!

And He said, I am come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly — life unto life unto life — ON THE THIRD DAY!

So my prayer for us all in this season of Resurrection, and for all time:

John 11:25 — I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.

May this be our third day.

May this be the day that everything that was dead and buried in the ground in our lives brings forth life:

for propagation after its kind —

by the power of God’s Word.

May we, like Him, be planted.

And may we, like Him, rise.

May this be our third day — and it was so.

What happened on the fourth day? Hmm. That is for a day soon to

© Adepero Mettabel Okulaja, originally written 09.26.13, updated March 2026

Donkeys! Donkeys!! Donkeys!!!

This is the issue on my mind today.

Donkeys are animals that feature very prominently in the Bible.

In Bible times, donkeys were a popular mode of transportation. Various kinds of people from ordinary men to kings rode on donkeys. Donkeys were also used as a way of estimating or depicting a person’s wealth. In the Old Testament, we read that Abraham and his son rode on the donkey on their way to the mountain of God when he was going to sacrifice Isaac. And of Samson who killed thousands of Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone, we also read of the famous talking donkey on which Balaam rode and who saved him from certain death. Also, King Saul had gone to look for his father’s donkeys, when he met Samuel who anointed him as king.

For many months I thought about the symbolism of donkeys in the Bible but try as I might, I was unable to come to a unifying cord that would tie the significance of donkeys together.

Well, and rightly so, some would say they are only animals, why go looking for principles? Yes, they are only animals, but as with everything in the Word of God, there is always some sort of significance inferred when certain objects or subjects are repeatedly referenced.

And then there is today. Today is Palm Sunday.

Palm Sunday. The city is loud. The crowds are waving branches and laying garments in the road. Hosanna. Hosanna in the highest. And making His way through all of it — not on a war horse, not in a chariot — the King of kings rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. One which had been saddled up waiting for Him. This is the day the prophet Zechariah described centuries before it happened:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion — your King comes to you, humble, lowly — riding upon a donkey.

Another donkey. Right at the center of it all. And yet not one Hosanna was for the donkey.

And one day it suddenly hit me while having lunch with friends (and no, we were not eating donkey meat)! Donkeys were beasts of burden, modes of transportation in Bible times and even at times weapons of war as in the case of Samson. From what I could understand, donkeys represented carriers, weapons, or tools that were used and had no claim to importance apart from helping to bring glory, honor, and salvation to whoever used them. They were major players in every situation in which they featured — and yet none of the glory was ever theirs. And in all of this, the question that came to me was: “do I want to be a donkey?” And my first answer was a resounding no! I do not want to be a donkey. I do not want to be the one who will bring about good, salvation, and riches without being a participant. And even though my answer sounded good to me, it felt wrong and did not really sit well with me.

Then as I thought about it more, the question came to me in another way. This time I heard The Lord say to my heart:

“Will you be MY donkey?

Will you be one whom I will use for My name, for My fame, and for My glory?

Would you be the one who will carry Me wherever I want you to — like the donkey I rode into Jerusalem?

Will you be a weapon of warfare in My hand, like the donkey’s jawbone in Samson’s hand?

Will you be the one who will see what no one else sees and who will declare My counsel to save men’s lives, like the donkey did for Balaam?

Will you be the one whom I will use as My herald in man’s search for the anointed king, as I did when Samuel anointed Saul as king?

Will you be My donkey? For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, till Life do us unite?”

“Will You Be My Donkey?”

I finally heard Him, I finally understood. And in my mind standing before Him I felt a surrender surround.

And my answer became a resounding “Yes! Yes!! Yes!!! I will be Your donkey!”

“Yes, I will be Your donkey. I will be any donkey that You want me to be in any form that You want me to be. From this day forward, I pledge my troth to You… I will be Your donkey!”

And we live victoriously, joyously, sacrificially, lovingly and committed — now and forever more. Amen.

Words from the Word that wrap around the soul and ignite the spirit

Ink & Utterance | Dr. Mettabel

© Adepero Mettabel Okulaja, 02.24.17 | Updated 03.29.26