The worst night of the anxiety came without a reason.

Nothing had happened. No phone call, no diagnosis, no confrontation. Karen was asleep beside me. The house was quiet in the way houses are quiet at two in the morning, which is not silence other than a fan turning and blood moving in your own ears. And my body decided I was in danger.

Chest tight. Heart going like I had just sprinted up a hill. I had been to the ER twice by then, so I knew the script. I knew the tests would come back clean. I knew what the doctor would say before he said it. Knowing did not help. That is the part nobody warns you about — you can hold the truth in your hand and your body will still call you a liar.

I got up. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my feet flat on the floor. Grounding, it is called. You give the body one fact it can verify — the floor is solid, you are here — and sometimes that is enough to interrupt the alarm.

And what I wanted, what I would have traded almost anything for, was for it to stop.

That is not what the psalm offers.

Face to Face

David has just come through the valley. He has declared the hardest sentence in the poem — I will fear no evil, for you are with me — and I do not know what you would expect next. I expected a reprieve. Daylight. The threat behind him and an accounting of what he learned.

Instead:

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

A victory feast is one possible way to see it: battle over, enemies routed, the winner eating while the defeated watch. But the language itself does not require the enemies to be gone. The Hebrew neged means before, in front of, opposite — in their presence. Whatever else has happened, they are still part of the scene.

Which makes this something other than a table of triumph. It is a table of defiance.

And the Shepherd sets a table anyway.

A table? That is the answer to enemies?

He could do other things. He could clear the field. He could end it. The psalm never explains why He doesn’t. It simply reports what He does instead.

The verb is ta’arokh — to arrange, to set in order. It is the word used for laying out the showbread in the tabernacle, for arranging wood on an altar, for a commander drawing up a battle line. There is nothing hurried in it. It is deliberate work, done with attention, done slowly. A table set carelessly is not set. And David watches the Shepherd take that kind of care with him while the enemies watch too.

The Whip and the Cords

But my resistance to the table went deeper than wanting the suffering to end. If I am honest, some of what I felt was resentment. Sitting down felt like agreement. It felt like being handed a plate and told the situation was now acceptable — that the enemies could stay, that this was the arrangement, that I should be grateful for the food and let the rest go.

I did not want to be fed in that room. I wanted out of the room.

And there is a particular kind of counsel that arrives in seasons like that, usually from people who love you. You have to move on. Holding onto this is only hurting you. Give it to God. None of it is false. Most of it is even kind. But it lands like a schedule you did not agree to (like I asked for this situation), and underneath the words is a request that you stop making everyone uncomfortable with a wound that has not closed on time.

Sometimes there is no apology coming. Sometimes the person who did the damage has an entirely different account of what happened and always will. Sometimes the conversation you have rehearsed for two years never occurs, and you understand that it is not going to, and you are expected to carry that quietly while people who were not in the room tell you what forgiveness requires.

That is the room where the table gets set. That is what I did not want.

Because I knew what the rod was for. A shepherd’s rod was not decorative. It was a club. It was the instrument that met the lion and the bear, and David had used one, and he says two verses earlier that the rod comforts him. So when I read that line I was not thinking about comfort. I was thinking about what it could do if He would only use it on my behalf.

I did not want the table. I wanted the temple.

I wanted the Jesus who braided cords into a whip and walked into the court and drove out what did not belong there. Who did not schedule a meeting or open a dialogue or wait for the money changers to come around on their own. Who turned the tables over.

Both are Him. That is what makes it hard. The same authority that arranges a meal in front of my enemies is the authority that cleared a courtyard with a whip, and I knew it, and I could not understand why He would spend it one way and not the other.

The temple was public. Everyone saw who was in the wrong. The room was emptied of what should not have been in it, and nobody had to explain afterward what had happened or why.

That is what I was asking for. Not vengeance — I would not have used that word, I would have called it justice, and some of it was. I wanted the court cleared. I wanted their table turned over first. Then He could set mine.

He did not do it that way.

What He did instead was arrange a meal, slowly, in front of them, while I sat there with my hands still shaking and my case still unheard.

And there is a version of faith that reads that as consolation. Second prize. He did not do the thing you asked, so here is a meal, and you should be grateful because at least He noticed.

I never would have said it out loud. But it was there in my prayers — in the way I would thank Him for something and feel the resentment sitting underneath the thanks like a stone under a rug.

A Sheep That Will Not Eat

Phillip Keller, who ran sheep before he wrote about this psalm, points out something obvious once you hear it: a frightened sheep will not eat. Not won’t — can’t. The animal that senses a predator does not lower its head. It cannot. Eating requires the head to go down, the eyes to come off the horizon, the body to commit to a position it cannot instantly abandon. A grazing sheep is a sheep that has concluded, somewhere below thought, that it is not about to be killed.

Which means a sheep eating in the open, with threat in view, is not a sheep that has grown braver.

It is a sheep whose shepherd is standing close enough to be trusted.

The eating is not the point of the scene. It is the evidence. It is what the sheep’s body does when it believes the man with the rod is going to handle what needs handling. David is not reporting a menu. He is reporting a relationship that has become physically credible.

Why We Eat Together

There is a second thing about meals I did not know until recently.

Robin Dunbar, the evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, has spent years studying why humans eat together. His finding, put simply, is that shared eating is not primarily about calories. It is one of the most reliable bonding mechanisms our species has. People who eat with others more often report stronger friendships, more trust, a deeper sense of belonging — and the effect shows up across cultures that share almost nothing else. The meal does something to the relationship that the same food eaten alone does not do.

Which reframes the whole verse for me.

If the table were about supply, it could be delivered. Left at the mouth of the valley. Handed over and withdrawn from. But a table is not a delivery. A table is a place someone sits down with you. The Shepherd is not solving a nutrition problem. He is establishing something in front of witnesses.

He is not saying here is what you need.

He is saying this one is mine.

Whose Sheep It Is

The table is not compensation for a rescue that did not come. The table is the Shepherd making His care visible at the exact moment when it would be easiest to doubt it. Everything about the setting argues against love — the enemies are still there, nothing has been resolved, the sheep is exposed. And into that setting He brings out a meal and arranges it slowly and stands there while it is eaten.

Every enemy present has to watch the care of the Shepherd.

Shame has to watch it. Fear has to watch it. Whatever has been telling you for months that you are on your own has to stand there and watch, in detail, that you are not.

The provision is real. But the provision is carrying a message, and the message is the more valuable thing. He is not merely keeping the sheep alive. He is declaring, in the presence of everything that would claim otherwise, whose sheep it is.

Walking, Then Sitting

In verse four David is walking. Though I walk through the valley. Motion. Forward pressure. The whole grammar of getting through something.

In verse five he is sitting.

That is not a change of scenery. It is a change of posture, and posture is the honest register of what a body believes. You do not sit in a room you think you may need to run from. Sitting says the exits can wait.

David does not report deciding to feel safe. He reports being served.

Somewhere in that season I stopped asking God to make it stop. Not enlightenment — exhaustion. I had run out of ways to ask. What I started saying instead, sitting on the edge of the bed at two in the morning with my hands shaking enough that I noticed, was much smaller.

Stay.

Not fix. Not remove. Just stay.

He did. I cannot prove that; it is not the kind of thing that survives being turned into evidence. The chest stayed tight. The thoughts kept circling. And underneath the noise there was a floor I had not put there.

The enemies did not leave that night. Some of them have not left yet.

I ate anyway.

The Upper Room Perspective

There was another table, set a thousand years later, on the night of a betrayal.

It was Passover — a covenant meal, the meal that remembered a rescue. They recline at it, the posture of free men, though the room is anything but safe. Judas is there. Peter is there, hours from the fire and the third denial. Every man at that table will scatter before the night is over, and John tells us Jesus knew it.

He kneels and washes their feet first, the work of the lowest servant in the house. He washes Judas’s feet too.

Then He breaks the bread.

He does not wait for their loyalty to firm up. He does not delay the meal until the threat resolves. Psalm 23 gives us a table in the presence of enemies. In the Upper Room, betrayal itself is already sitting at the table.

And still Jesus serves.

He gives us somewhere to look when our own table is set in a room we would never have chosen.

The Tables I Missed

I still wake up some nights. Less often. Not never.

What has changed is what I do with the daylight. I have started counting the tables I did not recognize at the time.

Karen sitting up with me at two in the morning when she had to be somewhere at seven. The friend who called during the week I had told almost no one what was happening. A doctor who took the time to explain to me what my body was actually doing and why it was not lying to me, exactly, just wrong. None of it removed anything. All of it was set down in front of me while the enemies were still in the room, and I ate it without once asking who had arranged it.

The resentment has not vanished. It surfaces when I am tired, when something reminds me of what was never resolved, when I hear someone tell a person in pain that it is time to move on. But it does not run the room anymore. Somewhere along the way I stopped measuring His love by what He removed and started noticing what He had set down.

That is the part I would want you to see. Not that the enemies leave — they may not. But that the table in front of you was arranged by someone who counted them and served you anyway. He did not miss what happened to you. He set the plate in full view of it.

There is more grace in that than in the rescue I kept asking for.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. — Psalm 23:4, ESV

I wrote a short book called HELD — Scripture and soul care for sleepless, anxious nights. It opens in an emergency room, because that is where some of what I thought I understood about faith came apart.

I had lost my job, but before that I had made promises. We had moved our family before, and I had told them we were done. No more boxes. No more new schools. This was the place we were going to stay. I meant every word of it when I said it, it was not mine to promise.

I wanted to finish well, so I worked through my last day and tried to leave it better than I found it. The plan was simple: finish Friday, take the weekend, start looking Monday for whatever God had next. I had complete confidence in God’s provision, even though I could not yet see what it would look like.

My body did not wait until Monday (excerpt from HELD).

Not long ago, I was admitted to the emergency room—twice—with what I thought were heart attacks or even strokes. The symptoms were real: chest pain, numbness, racing thoughts, shortness of breath. But after tests and an overnight stay, the diagnosis was clear… it wasn’t my heart. It was anxiety.

And here’s the hard part: I trusted God through it all. I quoted Scripture. I prayed. I believed. I knew the truth of God’s promises. But my brain and body were sounding alarms I didn’t fully understand. That cognitive dissonance—that tension between faith and physical response—was disorienting.

I had not abandoned faith, and I could have told you what I believed at any point during those months and meant it. But my body and mind no longer seemed able to rest inside those beliefs. I would lie down, my heart would begin to race, my mind would start looking for danger, and what I knew to be true could not reach the part of me that was afraid.

That became its own kind of deconstruction, not because I walked away from God but because the structures I relied on to make sense of God, safety, and my own future could no longer hold the weight of what I was carrying. Losing my job was an event. It had a date attached to it, and eventually that date moved farther into the past. What followed did not work that way.

David does not describe the valley as an event that happened to him. He describes it as terrain he has to walk through.

The valley is still the path

David has just said that the Shepherd leads him in paths of righteousness, and then almost immediately he finds himself walking through the darkest valley.

There is no wrong turn recorded between those two verses.

The sheep does not wander off and accidentally end up here. David does not say the Shepherd stopped leading, or that he ignored the Shepherd’s voice and got lost. The path of verse three simply becomes the valley of verse four.

David does not name a hard season or a disappointing stretch. He names the valley of the shadow of death. A great deal of what I have called a valley was really just a difficult year, and the difference matters.

What made those months qualify was not the job ending. It was lying in an emergency room twice, convinced my body was killing me, then living a long while afterward in a body that would not accept the diagnosis. Ground like that invites a particular kind of accounting. I heard God wrong. I made the wrong decision. I trusted the wrong person, stayed too long, left too soon, or wandered outside the life God intended.

Sometimes I have made wrong turns, and I do not want to baptize every painful consequence as divine guidance. But Psalm 23 will not let me assume that darkness itself is proof that the Shepherd stopped leading.

That does not make the valley good, and it does not mean suffering has to be renamed blessing before it is allowed into our theology. It means painful terrain and faithful guidance are not mutually exclusive.

The Shepherd can still be leading when I cannot understand where the path goes.

Fear is not failure

For a long time, I heard I will fear no evil as though David were describing emotional control. The spiritually mature person reaches the valley and manages not to be afraid, which meant that when fear showed up in me, I assumed something had gone wrong with my faith.

That was a difficult way to read the verse during months when my body would not cooperate with what I believed. I trusted God, and I woke up afraid. I prayed, and my heart still raced. There were mornings when I woke before sunrise with dread already sitting on my chest.

Both things were true.

If I will fear no evil means that a faithful person never experiences fear, then I failed that verse repeatedly. I no longer think that is what David is saying.

The valley is dangerous enough that David names evil. He is not pretending there is nothing there that could hurt him, and he does not tell us whether his pulse is steady. He simply refuses to let fear become the final interpreter of what is happening.

A nervous system can sound an alarm while a soul is still trusting God. A heart can race while a person is held. Someone can be frightened and faithful at exactly the same time.

The words themselves

David describes the place as gei tsalmavet. Translators have long argued over whether tsalmavet is a compound of the words for shadow and death or a single term for deep darkness. Either reading lands in the same place. This is not dim light. It is the kind of darkness where you cannot see far ahead, and the next step becomes the only step that matters.

The verb may matter just as much as the darkness.

David says he walks through the valley. He does not say he understands it, and he does not tell us that he can see the way out. He simply remains in motion.

Something I have discovered about myself is that the hardest part of anxiety was the pressure to know what came next. Clarity does not always precede movement. Sometimes the next step becomes visible only after you have taken the one in front of you.

That should be easier for me than it is. The Lord has moved our family more times than I can count, and every one of those moves asked us to go before we could see what was waiting. I have a long record of His provision and almost no access to it when I am actually afraid.

David does not wait at the entrance of the valley until the Shepherd explains the route. He walks because the Shepherd is still walking.

Reason comes later

Regulate, relate, reason. I used Bruce Perry’s sequence at the start of this series to describe how a frightened brain comes back online. Reason comes last, because reasoning is not always available when the body’s alarm system believes we are under threat.

That explained something about those nights. I kept trying to think my way back to peace, and I could make a compelling case for God’s faithfulness at two in the morning as easily as at two in the afternoon.

My body was simply not listening.

David does not construct an argument in the valley either. He does not explain why God is trustworthy or tell himself how all of this will eventually work together for good.

Researchers writing recently in the Journal of Religion and Health compared the shepherding movements of Psalm 23 with psychological first aid. Much of what the Shepherd does resembles what responders are trained to offer first: safety, reduced distress, connection, and support before explanation and meaning-making.

There were nights when I wanted God to explain what He was doing, because explanations would have given me something I could manage. What I encountered instead was proximity.

Two pieces of wood

David names the rod and the staff next. The shevet was the shorter implement, associated with protection and also with the shepherd’s authority over and accounting for the flock. The mish’enet was the staff, something to lean on, guide with, and use to keep the sheep close to the path.

Neither object is comforting by itself. A rod lying in the dirt is wood, and a staff left leaning against a tree cannot protect anything. Their comfort comes from what their presence means.

Someone is close enough to use them.

My instinct in the valley is to take them. If I held the rod I could decide what counted as a threat. If I held the staff I could pick the route. A great deal of what I called faith during those months was really an attempt to get both hands on the equipment.

The comfort is that they are not mine.

The rod and the staff say something powerful about resilience. The people who endure are often not the ones with the greatest internal capacity. They are people connected to someone safe enough to carry what they cannot carry alone.

Resilience is not merely a property of the creature. It is a property of relationship.

The sheep survives the valley because it belongs to a Shepherd.

A high priest and a great shepherd

Psalm 23 tells us the Shepherd is with us in the valley. Psalm 22 shows us that Jesus knows what the valley feels like from the inside.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Those are the words Jesus takes onto His own lips from the cross. He does not reach for “The Lord is my shepherd.” He reaches backward into the psalm of abandonment, into the prayer of someone who cannot feel the nearness of God at all.

Before that, in Gethsemane, He tells three friends His soul is overwhelmed to the point of death and asks them to stay awake with Him. They cannot. Luke describes His anguish physically, and the prayer He offers does not turn the path away from suffering.

I do not want to say more than Scripture says about the mystery of what happens between Father and Son on the cross, but I do want to take Jesus’ experience seriously. He does not float above the experience of abandonment because He has better theology. He enters the darkness fully enough to give the darkness words.

He went farther into the dark than I ever will.

Hebrews makes this argument at length. We have a high priest who can sympathize with our weakness because he has been tested in every way we are, and the letter describes him praying with cries and tears to the One able to save him from death, which is Gethsemane seen from the other side. Then Hebrews closes by calling him something other than a priest. That great shepherd of the sheep.

That is why I can say I will fear no evil. Not because the valley is safe, but because I am not being asked to trust a Shepherd who has only watched valleys from higher ground. This Shepherd is also the Great High Priest.

If you are reading this from a valley

Your valley may look nothing like mine. Perhaps your body will not settle, someone you love is gone, or the diagnosis came. Maybe it is quieter than that, and you are functioning, showing up, making dinner, going to church, while underneath it you feel numb and the presence of God is more something you remember than something you experience.

I will not tell you the valley is almost over, because I do not know that. I will not tell you everything happening there has a reason you will eventually understand, because I do not know that either.

Psalm 23 makes what can sound like a smaller promise, and I have come to believe it is the larger one.

You are with me.

You do not have to become unafraid before that is true, or get your body under control, or manufacture enough faith to make Him come close.

If all you can manage tonight is the next breath, take the next breath. If all you can manage tomorrow is the next step, take the next step.

The Shepherd is not standing at the far end of the valley waiting for the stronger version of you to arrive.

He is walking it with you.

The sheep in the dark cannot see the Shepherd, and cannot see where the path goes. It may only feel the staff against its side, hear footsteps somewhere ahead, and know it has not been abandoned in terrain it cannot read.

Maybe that is what comfort finally is. Not knowing where the valley ends, or being able to explain why the path went there.

It is discovering that the valley did not interrupt the Shepherd’s leading.

The valley is still the path.

And He is still here.

He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. — Psalm 23:3b

I drove the larger of the two trucks.

Nick (my son) had the smaller one. He had never driven anything like it, and for fifteen hours from Nebraska to South Carolina he followed me with everything we owned divided between us. I watched for him in the mirror constantly. We stopped when he needed to stop, ate at truck stops, and stayed on the phone through long stretches of Missouri and Kentucky, sometimes talking about something and sometimes talking about nothing at all. We made it into Tennessee before calling it for the night and finished the drive the next morning.

Karen and the girls stayed behind to finish cleaning out the house (and some dear friends). The lease was ending and there was no version of that week where all five of us left together. What that cost them is theirs to tell…and it cost them. I only know that I pulled out of Nebraska while they were still inside the place we had called home, and I have never entirely made peace with the order of those events.

I knew the route. I had the address.

I knew almost nothing else.

Paths of righteousness

Paths of righteousness. The path righteous people walk, or maybe the path that eventually makes them righteous if they stay on it long enough. It fit the way I tend to think about almost everything. That it is about performance, and that I am the one performing.

What I missed is where the emphasis falls. Not on David walking. On David being led.

Yanchéni. He leads me.

David is not describing something he is doing well. He is describing something being done for him. I thought most of the responsibility sat with the sheep. Find the path. Stay on it. Walk it faithfully. Somewhere along the way I turned the Shepherd’s leading into my navigation.

Then there is the word translated paths. Ma'gal carries the idea of a track or a groove, the kind of path made because something has already traveled that ground before. Wagon wheels pass over the same place often enough and the earth holds the shape. There are stretches of the Oregon Trail where you can still see the ruts. Nothing about it was laid out in advance. It became a path by being traveled. You can only recognize it from behind.

So much of life does not look like a path while I am standing in it. It looks like one decision followed by another.

Since 2009, Karen and I have moved from Pennsylvania to Colorado, Colorado to New Hampshire, New Hampshire to Nebraska, and Nebraska to South Carolina. Every one of those moves was a yes, and not one of them came with an explanation of where that yes would take us.

I used to think following God would get easier with practice. It has not. The yeses have gotten heavier, because by the fourth or fifth move I knew what moving costs. Friendships become phone calls. Familiar places become places we used to live. There are parts of a life that cannot be packed into boxes.

So when God leads again, I am not saying yes innocently anymore. I know there will be a cost, even if I do not yet know what it is.

The tracks that look right

The longer I have lived, the less confident I am in my ability to tell a good path from a bad one simply by looking at it.

Some of the wrong turns in my life looked remarkably right at the beginning. Opportunities I was convinced would last that did not. Things I gave years to because I thought I could see what God was building. Dreams that never collapsed dramatically enough to give me a moment to grieve them, that just became less possible a little at a time until I looked around and realized I was no longer headed where I thought I was going.

For a long time, experiences like that made me question my ability to hear God at all. Maybe I missed something. Maybe I confused what I wanted with what He was actually doing.

To be completely transparent, sometimes I probably did.

I do not trust every spiritual impression I have ever had simply because I had it.

But Psalm 23 is hitting me differently. What if David’s confidence is not in the sheep’s ability to read the terrain correctly? What if it is in the Shepherd’s ability to lead?

Which reorganizes more of my life than I would like to admit, because most of it has been arranged around getting the route right.

Maybe David is not primarily describing righteous sheep. Maybe he is describing right paths, paths that go where the Shepherd intends them to go.

Righteousness in Hebrew is not only a moral quality. Tsedeq can mean true in the sense a scale is true, or a measure is accurate. It is also used of faithfulness to what someone is bound to. A shepherd is righteous when he does what he owes the flock.

Which means the phrase may not be certifying the sheep at all. The path is right the way a scale is right. It measures true because of who set it.

That does not mean every painful thing was chosen by God as part of some secret itinerary. But I no longer believe confusion means I have fallen outside His care.

David does not sound like a man holding a map.

He sounds like a man following someone.

For his name’s sake

Then comes the phrase Lema’an shemo. For his name’s sake.

God is leading me somewhere because there is something He wants to produce through my life. Sometimes that may be true. But it is not what David says. The reason he gives sits entirely with the Shepherd.

In that world, a shepherd’s name was attached to the condition of his flock. Scattered or starving or injured sheep said something about the man leading them. David takes that and puts his own life inside it.

The Lord is my Shepherd. His name is tied to His care of me.

I find that super comforting, because it means none of this rests on my ability to navigate well. It also leaves me without answers I would still like to have. Why this move. Why that ending. Why a season that looked so clearly like a beginning became something else entirely.

I have asked God versions of those questions for most of my life. Sometimes I think He answered. Sometimes I think I supplied the answer because unanswered questions make me uncomfortable. And some things have simply remained unexplained.

Psalm 23 does not seem especially interested in solving that for me. It keeps bringing me back to the Shepherd.

The voice, not the map

Jesus picks up the shepherd image in John 10 and says that the shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. Then he says the sheep follow because they know his voice.

In that world, several flocks were often penned together overnight. One enclosure, one entrance, animals from different owners mixed together in the dark. In the morning each shepherd stood and called, and his own sheep came out of the crowd and went to him. Nobody sorted them. The sheep sorted themselves, out of a herd of animals that looked exactly alike, by a sound.

Jesus adds something else. They will not follow a stranger. They actually run from a voice they do not know.

That is the part I had not considered. The sheep’s discernment is not in its eyes. It cannot read terrain or tell a good track from one that ends at a cliff. What it can do is identify a person.

Which may be the only kind of discernment I have ever actually had.

I have been wrong about routes constantly. Wrong about what a season meant. Wrong about opportunities I was certain of. But recognition is a different faculty than evaluation, and it does not fail in the same way.

And a voice works where sight does not. Light can be taken away. Sound cannot. Which may be why this is the last thing David establishes before the ground drops out from under him.

I have taught resilience for years, and I have never accepted the dictionary version of it. Recovery of original shape. The band goes back to what it was. That is not what happens. The band comes back different, either diminished or grown. You survive or you thrive, and those are not the same thing.

The whole time, I was still describing the band. Thinner or thicker, I was talking about what the band was made of. I did the same thing with righteousness. I made it something a person builds up and then has. Neither one works that way. What predicts whether a person comes back is not what is inside them. It is who they are attached to.

Knowing the route was never going to help me. The routes have all been different. What carried from one to the next was the voice.

There is one more thing about that voice, and it is the reason I can still say yes.

The shepherd in John 10 does not only call. A few verses later Jesus says that the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The voice belongs to someone who already counted what the leading would cost him.

I do not know what my yes will cost. I have never known that in advance and I have stopped expecting to. But the one asking is not asking blind. He went first, all the way, and when he came back the marks were still in his hands.

That is how they knew him.

Where the path goes

Psalm 23 does not move from right paths into the valley because the sheep wandered off.

There is no wrong turn between verse three and verse four. David is still being led.

I have spent a lot of my life treating difficult terrain as evidence that something went wrong. Sometimes it was. But the psalm will not let me assume that a dark place means failed guidance.

Sometimes the path goes through a valley.

Not because the Shepherd lost the route, and not because the valley is good. Nothing in the psalm suggests David wants what is coming. Only that the ground ahead of him does not change who is walking in front of him.

Which is why the question in the dark is never whether I have been handed the wrong path.

It is whether I still know the voice.

A couple questions to sit with:

Whose voice am I actually listening to right now? Not the one I would name if someone asked, but the one I move toward when a decision comes.

Am I thriving or surviving? I have been able to call it resilience either way, and I am not always sure which one I am doing.

Stay with me on this one (the picture above is pretty provocative). I think the author is right about the problem. The question I want to wrestle with is whether the solution he offers is big enough for what we are asking it to solve.

An article came across my feed this week from ChurchLeaders, reporting on a study of a thousand pastors commissioned by Jared Fabac for a book releasing next month called Leading Lazarus. Eighty-two percent had seriously considered leaving vocational ministry in the past five years. Of those, nearly three-quarters said the reason was not pay. It was culture.

Why did they consider leaving? According to the pastors themselves, nobody ever taught them how to lead a broken staff, run a hard meeting, or model a healthy culture.

I love the image Jared has built the book around. A church culture that looks dead, he says, is usually only dormant, waiting for someone who knows how to call it back to life.

I should say here that I have not read the book—it has not been released yet—so I do not know how fully he develops that idea. But I am not sure dormant is quite the right word.

Edgar Schein argued that culture is the framework a group uses to solve problems. Which means a broken culture is often not dormant at all. It is working—just solving for the wrong things: keep the peace, protect the leader (formal or informal), do not say the thing.

Lazarus did not resist the voice at the mouth of the tomb. Cultures do.

That is why I think Jared is on firmer ground with what comes next. Most of the people on your staff, he says, are not bad people. They are good people stuck in a broken system. The pastor pouring himself out past empty and the congregation that never learned how to tend him are not conspiring against each other. They are good people, formed by the same half-truth, holding a broken system in place with both hands and calling it faithfulness.

One honest note, in case you haven’t read the article: the study was commissioned by the author as the foundation for his own book.

Sixty-three percent of those pastors said they had never been trained in a repeatable framework for giving hard feedback.

Two out of three. Pastors who stand up every week and say the hardest things in the world about sin and death and grace, yet say they were never given a repeatable way to sit across a table from someone they love and say something true that is going to hurt.

Our instinct is to solve that with a framework.

“A church that cannot say “I am hurting” will eventually become a church that cannot say “we did harm.””

But maybe the deeper challenge is not simply learning how to give feedback. It is building the kind of culture where hard things can be said without immediately threatening the relationship.

I am hurting.

I need to tell you something hard.

We did harm.

Healthy cultures have to make room for all three.

It Was Never the Words

Seminary trains the sermon, Fabac says, and rarely trains the system. True. I just think it stops one layer too high.

If this were a curriculum gap, it would be the easiest problem in the American church to fix. There are workshops. There are scripts. There is an entire industry of crucial-conversation frameworks.

Hard feedback is not just a skill you deploy. It happens inside a culture that has already taught people what truth-telling will cost them.

In some rooms, people learn that honesty leads to repair. In others, they learn that it leads to distance, defensiveness, or being quietly labeled difficult.

That is why a framework can help, but it cannot fix this by itself. Because the deeper question is not simply whether someone knows how to give hard feedback. It is whether the culture has made it safe enough to try.

Edgar Schein put the organizational version of that plainly. If a change threatens my whole self, he wrote, I will deny the data and deny the need for it. Only when I can feel that I will keep my identity through the learning can I begin to consider it. Felt safety is not the soft part of this work. It is the precondition.

Your nervous system does not ask your theology for permission. Not at 2:18 in the morning, and not at two in the afternoon with the door closed and a hard conversation on the calendar.

So the honest version of the finding is not nobody taught me how. It is closer to this: somewhere along the way I learned that saying the true thing costs more than I have.

Culture is the nervous system of an organization. Not the values on the wall. What the body has learned to expect in the room. You can install any framework you like on top of a system that punishes need, and it will be obeyed in form and abandoned the moment it costs somebody something.

Paul Said The Hard Things

Paul was not afraid of conflict. His letters are full of it. What concerned him was what unresolved, mishandled, or destructive conflict could do to the body.

Romans 14 — Some differences do not deserve the weight we give them.
The dispute was food and calendars — real convictions, sincerely held on both sides. Paul refuses to resolve it. He moves the question upstream instead: who is this person accountable to, and is it you? The strong were not wrong about meat. They were wrong about what winning was worth.

Galatians 2 — Some behavior harms others and must be named.
Peter ate with Gentile believers until men from James arrived, then withdrew because he was afraid. And it spread — even Barnabas was carried along. What started as one leader’s fear was beginning to shape the behavior of the whole community. So Paul confronted Peter publicly because the damage was public.

Philippians 4 — Some conflicts need a third person.
Euodia and Syntyche had contended at Paul’s side for the gospel, and now they were stuck. He assigns no fault. He simply asks someone to step in and help them — not to adjudicate. Two people in a locked cycle cannot see the cycle. Someone outside it can.

2 Corinthians 2 — Some discipline has gone far enough.
The man was punished, and it worked. Now Paul writes with urgency: forgive him, comfort him, reaffirm your love, so he isn’t “overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” — and so “Satan might not outwit us.”

A church can be destroyed as easily by its righteousness as by its sin.

Titus 3 — Some patterns eventually require protection.
Warn once. Warn twice. Then have nothing to do with them. Two warnings, not one — and the diagnosis is divisiveness, a pattern, not a single hard conversation. Sometimes the most loving thing a body can do is stop letting one part injure the whole.

Paul never confused unity with the absence of conflict.

He seemed far more concerned that the church learn how to move through conflict without destroying one another.

Maybe that is the culture we should be trying to build.

Not a church without conflict.

A church where truth can be told, correction can be received, repair can happen, and silence is no longer mistaken for peace.

“He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.”

Everybody wants this part of the verse to be true.

Green pastures. Quiet waters. Of all the images in Scripture this may be the one we long for most — a life that has finally stopped, somewhere green, near water that is not moving. There is a peace in that picture you can feel deeply.

I want that. I have wanted it for most of my adult life, and I have wanted it for people I love who were in far worse seasons than mine. I am not going to treat the wanting as naive. I have asked for it. Out loud, by name, at the moments I was most sure I needed it.

But I have also wanted the benefits of following the Shepherd without actually knowing Him. I wrote about that in the last piece. I want the pasture. I want the still water. I am considerably less interested in the relationship that produces them.

And when I try to have the one without the other, I build my own. My own pastures. My own still waters. They are simply mirages that appear to offer the same thing as the shepherd...except the Shepherd isn’t there.

That is not a new failure. It is most of the Old Testament. Israel wanted the land more than the One giving it, wanted rescue more than the Rescuer, and every time the provision arrived without the relationship deepening, they drifted. Not because they stopped believing God existed. Because they had what they came for.

Nobody Is Told To Do Anything

Read the psalm verb by verb. He makes. He leads. He restores. He guides. You are with me. Your rod and your staff comfort me. You prepare. You anoint. Goodness and mercy pursue.

The verbs pile up on one side of the relationship. His.

The only verbs that belong to the man speaking are I shall not want, I will fear no evil, and I will dwell. And even those are not instructions. They are what he has come to expect because of the One doing all the other verbs.

There is no command in Psalm 23. That feels almost strange when you notice it. No try harder. No calm down. No trust more. No stop being afraid. No get yourself together.

The psalm is not primarily a description of what good sheep do. It is a description of what a good Shepherd does.

And that should change the way I read all of Psalm 23 but especially the next line. In Hebrew the word behind “He makes me lie down” is causative. He causes it. Not He invites me to lie down. Not He provides a nice field and leaves the decision with me. He makes me lie down.

You do not make something lie down that was already going to lie down on its own. The Shepherd is working from something He already knows about the sheep.

He does not lead her to a better version of the field she built for herself. He puts her down in the real one.

He Does Not Begin by Correcting the Sheep

Nowhere in this psalm does the Shepherd begin by telling the sheep what is wrong with her.

That may sound small, but it is becoming important to me. Because I know what it is like to be told, and to tell myself: try harder, want the right things, take the thought captive, give it to God, trust Him more.

And I have tried. Then there was a second problem, which was that I had now failed at the thing I was supposed to be doing about the first problem, and that went on the pile with everything else.

But Psalm 23 does not put the burden there. The Shepherd does not begin by correcting the sheep. He begins by caring for her.

He does three other things, and every one of them tells me something about His character.

He Makes Me Lie Down

The wanting was never the first problem. The position was. She can want whatever she wants once she is down, and the Shepherd knows that — apparently better than the sheep does.

There is something in that I have overlooked most of my life. He knows what His sheep need even when they cannot produce it for themselves. I tend to imagine God standing over my restlessness asking me to become less restless. Psalm 23 gives me a Shepherd who sees the restless animal and does something about the conditions around her.

He lays her down.

There is tenderness in that. But there is also authority. The Shepherd is not passive. He intervenes. He knows there are times when the sheep will keep going simply because she can keep going.

I know something about that. You can be exhausted and still be productive. You can be depleted and still be responsible. You can be fraying internally while people continue to compliment you for how much you are carrying. Some of us can remain upright for a very long time, and be praised for it.

The Shepherd is apparently less impressed.

He makes me lie down. Not because I am useless. Because He knows me.

He Leads Me Beside Quiet Waters

Then He leads. The Hebrew word is nahal — a gentle leading, a guiding that accommodates the one being led. It is not the language of driving an animal forward.

And the waters are mei menuchot, waters of rest, waters of quietness. The text does not tell us they are deep. It does not tell us they are plentiful. It does not even tell us they are beautiful. It tells us they are still.

That matters because the Shepherd apparently understands that exhausted sheep do not need to be hurried. He does not march the weary. He leads them.

There is patience in the character of this Shepherd. He is not irritated by weakness. He is not threatened by slowness. He does not confuse urgency with faithfulness. He knows the pace of the sheep in His care, and He adjusts His leading accordingly.

I have spent much of my life assuming that maturity meant becoming the kind of person who needed less of that. Less rest. Less reassurance. Less help. Less leading.

Maybe maturity is learning to stop being embarrassed that I am a sheep.

He Restores My Soul

The Hebrew is yeshovev nafshi. The verb comes from shuv — to turn back, return, bring back. It is the ordinary language of going home. And once again God is the subject. He does the restoring.

That may be my favorite thing in these verses. Because I can go over something indefinitely. I can analyze it, rehearse it, reframe it, explain it, understand exactly why it happened.

But there are places I cannot bring myself back from by understanding them better.

The Shepherd can.

“He restores my soul” can sound vaguely spiritual in English, almost like God gives me a better attitude. But nefesh is bigger and earthier than that. It is the living person. Breath. Appetite. Life. The whole creature.

He is not simply making me feel better spiritually. He is bringing the person back. The person who got scattered. The person who became exhausted. The person who is fragmented. The person who kept settling for the field he built himself.

He brings that person back. And again, notice the character of the Shepherd. He does not stand at a distance and shout directions home. He restores.

The Shepherd Knows What the Sheep Cannot Do

Maybe that is what I have missed in this verse.

I have spent years looking at the pasture. Of course I have. It is beautiful. Green grass, quiet water, rest. Who would not want it?

But perhaps those are not the most important things in the sentence. The verbs are. He makes. He leads. He restores.

The pasture tells me something about His provision. The verbs tell me something about Him. And I have spent a long time trying to secure the first without the second, which is precisely how the mirages get built. He knows what His sheep need. He accommodates their weakness. He provides what they cannot manufacture. He brings back what has been depleted. He does not demand peace from the sheep and then become disappointed when they cannot produce it. He shepherds them toward it.

There is an enormous difference.

Paul says grace is not a reward, lest anyone boast. I am not sure the pasture is either. (Ephesians 2:9)

And maybe that is why Psalm 23 feels different to me now. It is less a picture of the life I wish I had. It is a description of the Shepherd I actually have.

Before the Dark

And then comes the valley.

That order has always interested me. Green pastures, quiet waters, restoration — and then, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…”

It is easy to read the psalm as a sequence. First God rests you. Then He fills you. Then He sends you into difficulty. I used to like that reading. It sounded orderly.

It just has not been my experience. I have asked for still water at the exact moment I needed it and not been led to any. I have walked through valleys that did not end on schedule. I have waited for the green pasture on the other side and discovered that the landscape stayed difficult longer than I thought it should. If Psalm 23 is a timeline, I have never been able to make my life fit it very well.

But I do not think it is a timeline. I think David is establishing character.

Before he tells us about the valley, he tells us what he knows about the Shepherd. This is the One who lays me down. This is the One who leads me. This is the One who brings me back. Then David walks into the dark carrying what he knows about Him.

And notice what he says there. “I will fear no evil.” Why? Not because there is a pasture waiting. Not because the water is still. Not because the valley will be short. “For You are with me.”

The whole weight of that verse rests on a person, not on a provision.

That may be the real gift of verses two and three. David knows the habits of his Shepherd. He has been laid down before. He has been led before. He has been brought back before. He knows Him the way you know the habits of someone you have lived with for years.

Which means the knowledge is portable. He can carry it into a place where none of the previous conditions are visible. The pasture may disappear. The water may disappear. The sense of restoration may disappear. The Shepherd does not.

And perhaps that is where resilience actually begins. Not with some extraordinary strength inside the sheep. Not with the sheep developing the ability to need less care. But with the growing knowledge of the One whose care has proven trustworthy.

Resilience may form in us. But it does not originate with us. It grows out of knowing who is holding the staff.

So I go back to the picture everybody wants. Green grass. Water that has stopped moving. An animal lying down in the middle of it.

I have prayed for that field. I have not always been put in it. I have built a few of my own in the meantime, and none of them held.

And I still want it. But I think I am beginning to understand that the sentence was never really about the field. It was about the Shepherd.

He makes. He leads. He brings me back.

Three things about a Person, said out loud by a man who was about to need to remember exactly who that Person was.

Sitting With This

Two questions I have not finished answering.

What have I built that looks enough like a pasture to keep me from asking for the real one?

and

If someone asked me what I know about the Shepherd — not what I know about the psalm, not what I believe about God generally, but what I know about His habits, the way you know someone you have lived with — what could I actually say?

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The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

Did you know that in 2025, more people looked up “The Lord is my shepherd” than almost any other verse in the Bible? Number two, according to Bible Gateway. It’s a verse many of us are familiar with. It was probably one of the first things I could recite from memory, and for a long time reciting it and believing it were the same thing.

Lately I have been asking a question I am not sure I ever really asked before, and the Lord has been doing some deep work in my life over it: do I really know the Lord as my shepherd?

I know Him as Savior. I know Him as Father, though that one took much longer for me to grasp. I know He desires to have a relationship with me. I know Him as the one I pray to when something has gone wrong, which is more often than I would like to admit. But shepherd is a different kind of claim. A shepherd is not someone you call. A shepherd is someone whose movement determines yours.

When I sat with that question and looked backward across my life, what I saw was movement. A great deal of it, actually. Different homes — over twenty. Different states — seven. Different jobs, different ministries, different assignments, different people. I have followed God into places I never expected to live and into work I could not have predicted doing. Some of those pastures were green and some were not. Some I loved and did not want to leave. Some I was relieved to be out of. A few made sense while I was standing in them. Most only made sense years later, if they made sense at all.

For most of that walking, the question I was asking was where. Where is this going. What is it for. How much longer. I asked it the way you ask for a map — as though knowing the destination was what would make the distance bearable.

Oswald Chambers has a line I love: what we call the process, God calls the end. I have quoted it before. I am not sure I had let it cost me anything until recently. Because I thought it meant the Shepherd was being vague about where He was taking me. He is not vague at all. He knows precisely where this goes. It simply was never the address. I kept asking Him where, and the whole time He was answering a different question.

People have asked me some version of that question my whole life (you probably have too). What do you want to be when you grow up? I am in my late 50’s now and I still tell people I don’t know. I have always said it as a joke, and it has always been a more than little bit true. But every answer I ever reached for was a what. A role. A title. Another place to move to.

And somewhere in the middle of that inventory I noticed something almost embarrassing in its obviousness. I have spent years asking God where He was leading me. I am not sure I have spent much time at all thanking Him for being the one who led.

Shepherds move sheep.

The Underlying Confession

In Hebrew this is barely a sentence. Two words: YHWH ro’i. The covenant name, and then a participle with a possessive ending hanging off it. The Lord, my shepherding one. There is no verb between them. David does not build an argument or offer a comparison. He sets two things beside each other and lets the adjacency do the work.

Spurgeon said the sweetness of the whole line sits in that small possessive. Not a shepherd. Not the shepherd of Israel, which David could have written and which would have been true. My. He is not stating a doctrine about God’s character. He is testifying about a relationship he is inside of.

David knew exactly what he was claiming.

He had done the job. Before the crown, before the harp in Saul’s throne room, before any of it, he was the youngest son sent out to the flock. And when he stood in front of Saul making the case that he could face Goliath, the evidence he offered was not courage or anointing. It was work history. “Your servant has been keeping his father’s sheep. And when a lion or a bear came and took a lamb from the flock, I went after it and struck it and rescued the lamb from its mouth.”

He knew what shepherding actually costs. He knew the hours, the exposure, the stupidity of sheep, the way a flock will wander toward danger while you are looking somewhere else. He knew what it takes to go into the mouth of a predator after one animal that will never understand it was rescued.

So when David writes the Lord is my shepherd, this is not a man reaching for a pretty pastoral image because he does not know any better. It is a man who has stood in that role saying: I know precisely what that job requires, and I am not the one doing it for myself.

That is not a smaller confession because he was an expert. It is a larger one. The people most qualified to do the work are usually the last to admit they need it done for them.

Before I Lead, I Am Led

I think that is why this verse has been convicting something in me.

I have spent most of my adult life caring for people. Children, families, teams, staff, other leaders, my own household. I have built a life around noticing what needs to be done and then doing it. I see the gap and I move toward it. I carry things. I want the people in my care to be okay, and I have organized a great deal of my energy around making sure they are.

Those can be gifts. They can also make it very easy to miss what Psalm 23 assumes in its opening breath.

I am not the shepherd in this Psalm. I am the sheep.

I do not entirely know why that is harder to admit than it should be. Maybe because sheep are dependent in a way I have spent years arranging my life to avoid. They have limits. They cannot see very far. They need guidance and protection and someone to notice when they have wandered. They cannot provide what they need for themselves, and no amount of competence changes that, because competence is not the category they exist in.

I would rather be competent. David gives me no such option.

Which means that before I am responsible for anyone, I am cared for. Before I lead, I am led. Before I provide, I receive. Before I keep watch over anyone else, someone is keeping watch over me.

That is not a demotion. I am increasingly convinced it is the foundation of everything else the Psalm is about to say. Resilience, as I wrote at the start of this series, is not primarily a measure of how much pressure a person can absorb. It is what happens when pressure lands inside a secure relationship. And Psalm 23 begins exactly there — before the valley, before the table, before the rod and the staff. First there is a relationship. Everything after verse one is what that relationship does under load.

What the Sheep Does Not Get

Jesus takes this image later and makes it more personal than David left it. The shepherd calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. He goes ahead of them, and they follow because they know his voice.

Not because they know the route. Because they know the voice. Recognition comes first, before the instruction makes any sense, and sometimes it never does make sense — you simply know who is speaking and you move.

I like clarity. Most of us do. We want to understand why one door opened and another closed, why a relationship changed, why a season lasted as long as it did, why God would lead someone somewhere only to lead them away from it again. I have asked those questions more times than I can count, and I think I believed that the answers would eventually add up to something like security.

Psalm 23 does not offer a map. It offers a shepherd. That is harder than it sounds, because a map would leave me in control of the walking. A shepherd asks me to trust a person.

Looking back, I cannot honestly say I always knew what God was doing. I didn’t. There were seasons when I was certain I understood the plan and discovered later that I had understood almost none of it. There were other stretches where I had nothing to go on but a sense that it was time to take one more step.

My wife and I still talk about the year we became houseparents at a residential school. We had been married two and a half years. The call was not ambiguous — we were sure of it, sure enough to leave what we knew and take a step neither of us could have justified on paper. We thought we understood the assignment. We were going to matter to those girls, and I think we did.

What we did not know was that we would inherit a home with ten of them in it, have our first child, move our entire life, and come to the end of that second year with our marriage in pieces on the floor. I could not make it fit. God had been clearer with us about that pasture than He had been about anything, and standing in it we were losing everything we had brought with us. We got help. We sat in a counselor’s office and said things out loud that we had not been saying to each other. Nobody told us that was part of the leading.

I thought He had sent us there for the girls. He had. He had also sent us there for us.

It has started to change the way I tell my own story. I thought I was changing jobs; I think now I was being shepherded. I thought we were moving; I was being shepherded. I thought an opportunity had ended, when the shepherd simply knew that pasture was finished. I thought I was waiting for my life to start again, when He was keeping me somewhere I needed to stay.

I want to be careful here, because this is where this kind of perspective can go off the rails. I am not saying every event was arranged for my benefit. People make harmful choices. Bodies break. Organizations fail. Marriages fracture. Children suffer things no explanation covers. I do not believe faith requires me to look at everything that has happened and call it good.

But I have become convinced of something narrower and, I think, sturdier: nothing that happened to me put me outside the care of my shepherd. Nothing.

Those are not the same claim. The first one asks me to lie. The second one only asks me to trust.

I Shall Not Want

There is a second half to this verse that we can treat it as an echo of the first (at least I did).

I shall not want. In Hebrew, lo echsar — I will not lack. The verb shows up again in Exodus, in the wilderness, when the manna came. They gathered it every morning, and the ones who gathered a lot had nothing left over, and the ones who gathered a little had no lack. Everyone ended the day with enough. Nobody ended the day with a surplus.

And when they tried to store it — when someone decided that tomorrow’s supply should be secured today — it bred worms and spoiled by morning.

I have read that story as a lesson about control. I am no longer sure that is what it is about entirely. I think it is about what God was building in a people who had spent four hundred years unable to count on anything. He gave them exactly enough, every single day, for forty years, until dependence stopped feeling like exposure and started feeling like relationship.

I shall not want has never meant that I get what I want. It does not mean the pantry is full or the account is padded or the next season is secured. It means there will be enough, and it will arrive in the form of a person who has not stopped showing up.

That is a harder promise to live inside than abundance would be. Abundance you can store. Enough has to be received again tomorrow.

I know what it costs me to live that way, because I have spent a good portion of my life doing the opposite. I have learned enough about my own nervous system in recent years to recognize what it looks like when a body decides it has to secure its own supply. You scan. You anticipate. You keep a little in reserve. You stay slightly ahead of a threat that may not be in the room anymore. It is exhausting, and it wears the mask of responsibility so convincingly that you can carry it for decades and call it wisdom.

David’s line offers something else. Not a guarantee that I will never be in need. A claim that I am not the one responsible for making sure the need gets met.

What I Have Not Thanked Him For

This is the part that turned confessional on me while I was writing it.

I have thanked God for a great many things. For provision, for jobs, for my family, for answered prayer, for protection, for carrying me through seasons I did not think I would come out of.

I do not remember many times when I simply said: thank You for being my shepherd.

Thank You for leading when I could not see ahead of me. Thank You for moving me when I wanted to stay. Thank You for keeping me when I wanted to run. Thank You for the doors that opened, and for the ones that didn’t. Thank You for the people who met me in one pasture and somehow prepared me for the next. Thank You for not leaving when I wandered inside my own fear. Thank You for being patient with me while I mistook hypervigilance for wisdom.

There is a difference between thanking God for what He has done and thanking Him for who He has been while He was doing it. I think that second thing is what I have been missing, and I do not think it is a small omission. One of them keeps a ledger. The other one knows a person.

The Pasture Was Never the Promise

I have spent a lot of years evaluating seasons by what came out of them. What did we build. Who did we help. What was accomplished. What did it lead to.

Those are not bad questions. But I wonder now whether I have been so focused on what God was doing through me that I missed most of what the shepherd was doing in me.

Maybe a pasture is not only where the sheep eats. Maybe it is where the sheep learns the shepherd.

Some of those places existed in my story because there was something I needed there. A relationship. A disappointment. A failure that took a decade to stop stinging. A wound. A healing I did not ask for. Some part of myself I could not have noticed anywhere else. And maybe I did not move through all of them because God had another assignment waiting. Maybe He was forming a sheep who would slowly learn to recognize a voice.

That thought has taken pressure off the pasture in a way I did not expect. The job does not have to be permanent. The city does not have to be permanent. The season does not have to resolve the way I imagined it would. If the shepherd is the point, then no pasture has to carry more weight than it was built to hold.

That year at the residential school I mentioned earlier was one of the hardest years of our marriage and it is one of the main reasons we are still married.

So this is where I am beginning, and it is not an explanation. It is a confession.

The Lord is my shepherd. I have spent most of my life trying to follow Him, and only now am I starting to see how thoroughly He has been shepherding me the whole time. The landscape kept changing. He didn’t. There were pastures I loved and He was there. There were valleys I feared and He was there. There were seasons I could hear Him clearly, and seasons when I could barely hear anything over the noise inside my own head, and He was there for those too.

I do not know what the next pasture looks like. I am not sure that is the faith this Psalm is asking for.

The pasture was never the promise. He was.

Resilience is what we call it afterward because we need it (challenge, trial, suffering, hardship) to have meant something.

After the diagnosis. After the “storm.” After the phone call or difficult conversation. After the “valley.”

Nobody feels resilient in the middle of it. In the middle you feel like you’re barely holding on, and you assume everyone else is doing it better. The word only shows up later once you’ve come out far enough that the whole thing can be looked at as a story. But it was being built the whole time you couldn’t see it — while you were navigating what you’d never faced before, while the pain was still unfamiliar and the fear hadn’t found a name yet. What often isn’t available in the middle is the reassurance. You don’t get to feel it forming. Something else has to hold you while it does. Survival is all you can muster…but your faith was never meant to be survived.

What We Usually Mean By It

Resilience got popular about a decade ago. Books, trainings, conference talks. Whole programs built for schools, aimed at raising kids who could handle hard things. The version most of us probably picked up is simple: hard things happen, strong people bounce back. Which quietly means that if you didn't, something is wrong with you.

Resilience has often been described like a rubber band. Merriam-Webster defines resilience as the capability of a body to recover its size and shape after deformation.

That’s the rubber band. Stretch it, release it, watch it return to what it was.

It’s a decent picture of steel and springs. It’s a poor picture of people. Nobody walks out of a valley the same size they walked in. Grief resizes you. So does fear, and isolation, and doubt, and the long stretch where nothing at all changes.

Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun spent years studying what happens to people after the worst thing that ever happened to them, and they ended up naming it post-traumatic growth. Not because suffering is good. Because a meaningful number of people came out the other side reorganized rather than repaired — different priorities, different relationships, a different sense of what they were for. They didn’t bounce back. They came out a shape they hadn’t been before.

But not everyone does. That’s the part the illustration leaves out. The same pressure that thickens one person thins another. Some people come out of a valley bitter, smaller, more afraid than when they went in.

So the pressure itself isn’t what does the forming. Something else has to be present, or pressure is only pressure.

What Scripture Means By It

Romans 5 doesn’t describe a return either. Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope (Romans 5:3-4). Nothing in that chain goes back to what it was. Each stage is thicker than the one before it. The band that comes out of the stretch is meant to be stronger than the band that went in.

And in Christ’s hands, it doesn’t come back the same size. It’s still the same band — same history, same marks, same thin places where it nearly gave — and it isn’t the same band at all.

That’s not a metaphor I invented. It’s what resurrection looks like. The wounds stay. Thomas is invited to touch them. And nobody mistakes that body for the one that went into the tomb (John20:27).

Which raises the question the rubber band could never answer. What makes the difference? Why does the same pressure grow one person and shrink another?

Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child spent years asking a version of that question — why some children come through serious adversity intact. The most consistent answer wasn’t temperament or grit or how well someone reframed what happened to them. It was whether they had at least one stable, committed relationship with someone. The word they use for what that relationship does is buffer — it absorbs what would otherwise land at full force. Resilience, in their research, isn’t something a person generates. It’s something a relationship makes possible.

Bruce Perry’s work says something similar in its own language. His sequence for helping a distressed child is regulate, relate, reason — in that order. You cannot think your way back to calm. The body settles first, and it settles in the presence of someone already settled.

So the question underneath resilience was never how much can you take. It was who is with you while you’re taking it.

A Psalm That Has Been Saying This All Along

Psalm 23 is so familiar that most of us memorized it before we had any real use for it.

I thought I already knew it. But a few months into a season I felt I had no control over, it opened up in a way I wasn’t ready for. I noticed I was reading it differently — not reciting it… reading it, the way you read something for the first time.

The valley stopped being theoretical. I felt it in my body: a fear that shows up without knocking, an exhaustion that doesn’t lift even when nothing on the surface is wrong. Some shadows aren’t circumstantial. They live inside the nervous system, shaping how we listen and how we trust.

And David never once answers that by describing what he survived.

The Lord is my shepherd.

Not an achievement. A confession. Present tense, from inside it.

Read slowly, the whole psalm works this way. The sheep doesn’t organize the pasture or scout the danger ahead or earn the stillness of the water. Green pastures and still waters aren’t the reward for a soul that finally settled down — they’re the precondition for a soul that’s able to. The valley isn’t survived by clarity; it’s survived by you are with me. The rod and staff aren’t ideas about God’s nearness. They’re instruments in a hand, close enough to use.

And then the psalmist describes a table…You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.

Not after. Before. I thought this psalm was going to walk me through the valley and out the other side. Instead it walked me to a table — and if I’m honest… I didn’t want one. I wanted rescue. I wanted the enemies gone and the fear resolved and the story finished before I had to sit down inside it. Instead, the Shepherd asked me to eat while they were still standing there.

I’ve spent months with that verse and it’s .the biggest reason this series exists.

Pursued, Not Just Led

There’s one more line - Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.

For years I heard that as comfort waiting at the finish line — walk faithfully enough, long enough, and eventually goodness catches up. But the Hebrew word behind “follow” is radaph. It isn’t gentle. It’s the word for pursuit, the same word used for enemies chasing Israel across open ground. David takes the language of being hunted and hands it to mercy.

He is not making his way toward goodness. Goodness is coming after him.

That’s the psalm I want to walk through over the next several posts — slowly, one movement at a time, as a map of what it actually feels like to move from a dysregulated place toward a Shepherd who does not leave.

I don’t think David wrote it from the far side of anything. I think he wrote it still walking… still uncertain… still trusting a Shepherd he couldn’t see the whole path from.

That’s the resilience I’m interested in now. Not the kind that requires the valley to end first.

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

Not because I’ve mastered anything.

Because He hasn’t stopped coming after me.

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There is a way to honor something to death.

You take the most valuable thing you own, and because it is valuable, you protect it. You put it somewhere clean. Somewhere safe. Somewhere it cannot be chipped or stained or lost. You build a case worthy of it — brass and glass, a velvet rope, a small light angled just so — and you step back and admire what you have preserved.

And you never touch it again.

We have done this to the gospel. We took the most precious thing we were ever handed and gave it the highest compliment we know how to give: we made it an exhibit. Revered. Protected. Behind glass. We put the living Word in a display case and called that reverence — and a whole generation has walked the quiet halls, read the little placard, admired it from behind the rope, and left unchanged.

Understand me: I am not saying the gospel is unsafe. I have spent years insisting on the opposite — that it is the safest place you will ever stand, the one room where you can be fully known and not be left. But it was never safe to the self that has to die to get there. We didn’t put it behind glass because it might hurt us. We put it behind glass because it might change us.

If you’ve spent any time in church, you know the word. Gospel. Good news — the death and resurrection of Christ, the redeeming love that adopts us into an eternal family and an eternal life. It’s the center of everything we believe, and it should be. But most of us keep a smaller, private version of the same case — the good china. Kept clean. Kept for special occasions. Kept away from the parts of our lives that might chip it.

We had good reasons. We wanted it clear enough to hand to a stranger, or to train others to share with others — so we built roads through it, drew out the steps, printed the tract. A diagram you could walk someone through in a hallway, or have a conversation over in a grocery line. None of it was wrong, exactly. But somewhere in the packaging, the good news quietly became a tool — something we use on someone else, rather than a mercy we are still standing under ourselves. What we can shrink into a tool, we can also shrink into an identity — something to wear rather than something to obey. We can hang even a towel on the wall instead of kneeling with it.

The gospel was never meant to be put behind glass.

It’s messy:

It says the way up is down. (Matthew 23:12)

It tells me to lose my life to find it. (Matthew 16:25)

It demands everything — my life, my goals, my time, my dreams, the things I’d rather keep for myself. (Luke 14:33)

It asks me to grab a cross and hoist it onto my shoulder. (Luke 9:23)

It asks me to bless the person who wishes my demise. (Luke 6:27–28)

It tells me to forgive a debt I’ve been holding onto for years. (Matthew 18:21–22)

It won’t let me love the crowd and ignore the person in front of me. (Luke 10:33–34)

It sends me to speak up for the ones who cannot speak for themselves — to seek justice for the crushed and mercy for those who don’t deserve it. (Proverbs 31:8–9)

It prunes the branches in me that are bearing fruit, not only the dead ones. (John 15:2)

It lets me be fully known — even the part I hide — and promises I won’t be left. (Psalm 139:1–7)

Then it kneels down with water and a cloth and washes feet that are not clean. (John 13:4–5)

That is a gospel that asks for everything. Which raises the honest question: if all of that is true, why did we ever call it good news?

Here’s why.

It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5:31–32)

The good news was never that we cleaned ourselves up in time. It’s that the doctor came for the sick, and died for them, and beat the very sickness they could never beat themselves. And then — instead of sending them home cured, the way a doctor would — he had the audacity to take them home with him and make them his children.

For years I led a Christian year-round camp ministry with a sign on our main building that read Welcome Home. During some of our teen and adult camps, I wanted to swap it for one that read Triage. The brokenness was real, and it was not only in the guests we served. The closer I got to the cross, the more of my own brokenness I could see — how far short of him I fall, and how much it cost him to come and get me anyway.

The camp, at the time, also ran a child sponsorship and did short-term missions trips to Haiti. On one of those first trips for me, that stopped being a metaphor. I had spent years working with at-risk families here at home, close enough to poverty to think I understood it. Haiti took that from me in an afternoon.

Two girls, along with other kids, were surviving on a street where our Haitian leader often visited. I noticed them because they were the same ages as my own daughters — the ages that were, at that moment, asleep in their own beds a couple thousand miles away. Their dresses belonged to someone bigger. There was dirt worked into their faces, the kind that doesn’t come from one hard day but from many.

What impacted me was not the dirt or the borrowed dresses. It was that I kept seeing my own daughters in their faces — the same age, near enough the same size — and knowing that the only thing between my girls, asleep in their beds at home, and these two with nowhere to go, was where each of them happened to be born.

Later our leader told me that some of the girls just brought into the orphanage had been used in ways I won't describe here. I did the math no father should ever have to do. Tonight these two would sleep with no walls, no lock, no one keeping the watch. No family. No father.

I have never been able to make that clean. I don’t want to.

Here is what I’ve slowly come to believe about our tidy version of the gospel: we didn’t sanitize it to protect God. We did it to protect ourselves.

Because if the gospel is really for the sick, then to receive it I have to be willing to be seen as sick. And being seen is the thing we are most afraid of.

We are wired to hide the mess — the shame, the failure, the parts of the story we’ve never said out loud. And for most of us that wiring got laid down early. Somewhere back there we learned that being fully known was not safe — that when people saw the worst of us, they used it, or they left. Maybe it was one moment. Maybe it was a slow accumulation of them. Either way, the body remembered. It filed the lesson under survival: don’t let them all the way in. So now, years later — grown, capable, sitting in a pew — we still run the old program without ever deciding to. We manage the impression. We offer the handshake and the warm face and keep the hard week to ourselves. We would rather be admired at a distance than known up close.

And the gospel walks straight past all of it and says: come as you are. Actually as you are.

He meets you in the dirt of the story you are most ashamed of, and he does not flinch, and he does not leave.

So here is the question I can’t get out from under: if the gospel isn’t changing how I see the broken people around me — and the broken places in me — did I ever really receive it? Good news I am unwilling to share may be news I never actually let land.

Paul said it better than I can:

Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. … Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave … he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. (Philippians 2:3, 6–8, NLT)

He did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.

Sit with that one a moment, because we read past it too fast. He had equality with God — not a title he was reaching for, but the thing itself, his by right from before there was time. And he did not clutch it. He opened his hand and let it go, and then he kept going down. Down into a body, with its hunger and its exhaustion and its nerve endings. Down to the low place of a servant, kneeling at other people’s feet. Down under the weight of a cross that was never his to carry. Down, finally, into the dark of a borrowed grave. The whole motion of God — in the one situation where we would have grasped and climbed — was downward, toward us, into the mess, all the way to the bottom of it.

He chose your mess.

He isn’t afraid of it — he never was — and he did not leave it in the grave. On the third morning the whole motion reversed: the God who had gone all the way down came back up, and he brought the mess up with him and brought it into the light still bearing its marks, and then called it his own.

So if your life feels like a triage unit right now, you are not disqualified. That admission may be the truest thing you could ever give Him. He never asked for a clean life to move into. He asked for an honest one.

You don’t wield the gospel. You kneel under it…or you’ve never really known it.

But hear the beauty in that. When you kneel under it, you are not crushed. You are redeemed…adopted.

This is the good news the tidy version could never hold: the mess was never what kept you from him. The mess is the very place he came looking. The dirt on those girls’ faces, the brokenness under my Welcome Home sign, the part of your story you have never said out loud…that is not the obstacle to the gospel. That is the address it was sent to. Grace does not wait at the edge of the mess for you to clean up and walk out. It walks in.

And it does not leave you where it found you. The God who went all the way down and came all the way back up is in the business of making beautiful things out of buried ones — of taking the very thing you were sure disqualified you and calling it, of all things, his. Your mess is not the end of your usefulness to him. In his hands it becomes the place other people finally see what he can do.

So you don’t have to make it clean first. You were never going to anyway.

Hand him the mess. He has done his most beautiful work with less.

I have been trying to understand my own grief — not only the grief of losing my dad this spring, but the quieter kind that comes from all the other endings a life accumulates — and I will not pretend I fully grasp it.

My dad's death, when it finally came, brought something I can only call closure. It did not come easily. Dementia and Parkinson's had been taking him from us for the past year, and by the end he could no longer care for himself — I spent his last months helping to carry a man who had once carried me. But we had that time. We told the old stories while he could still tell them, and when he died we gathered in a room full of people who loved him and said goodbye out loud. His death broke my heart. It did not leave me undone. And that has puzzled me, because there are losses in my life far smaller than losing my father that I still cannot seem to set down.

To understand why, I have to go back to a house that was not entirely ours, and to children who were.

For nine years, Karen and I were houseparents at a residential school. Which means for nine years, children we did not give birth to lived in our home, ate at our table, and became ours in every ordinary way that matters. We learned their laughs and their fears, what settled them at night, what a certain look meant before they said a word.

And then, one by one, they left. Some of those goodbyes were good ones — we knew they were coming, we knew where the child was going, we got to send them off. Others simply happened. A child pulled back to family almost overnight. Some who aged out and moved on. One whose story in our house ended mid-sentence, the bed stripped and remade before we had caught our breath. There were always more children coming. So we kept going.

Karen and I have worked through a lot of different levels of closure from those years. And what I have slowly come to see is that the goodbyes that still sit unfinished in me are not the hard ones. They are the unmarked ones — the ones where a child who had become ours was simply gone, and there was no funeral, no casserole, no gathering where anyone said aloud what those years had cost us. There rarely is, for that kind of loss.

The endings no one marks

Once you have felt one of those, you start to see them everywhere. The friendship that thins to silence. The season you gave years to and then, one ordinary morning, were no longer part of. The ministry that carries on, competently, without you. The door that closes before you knew you were having your last conversation through it. The years of faithful service that ended with no one ever stopping to say it mattered. No one stands and says this is over. No one names what was shared, or what was lost.

And we who follow Jesus can be dangerously good at hurrying past those endings before we have felt them. God closed that door. It was only for a season. All things work together for good. I have said every one of those, and I believe some of them still. But the truth is meant to walk us through grief, not around it. Jesus knew Lazarus would walk out of the tomb. He wept anyway.

Years later, I worked in foster care, supporting families being asked to do the same impossible thing we had done — attach fully, and then let go. Love this child as your own, we told them; a child cannot heal without safe attachment. And then, almost in the same breath: but hold him with open hands; he may go home. We were asking them to give their whole hearts to a goodbye. And I watched what it did to them when the goodbye came — a child who had become theirs in every way but the legal one, simply gone, and the system moving them on to the next placement before anyone stopped to say the last one had mattered. They needed someone to witness it. Someone almost never did.

What we are actually waiting for

The people who study this for a living have mostly given up on the word closure. For losses like these, they will tell you, there is no closure to reach — only the long, unglamorous work of learning to carry what will not resolve. They even have names for what I am describing: ambiguous loss, for the goodbye with no ceremony; disenfranchised grief, for the sorrow no one around you agrees is a sorrow.

And I think they are right about the word. I also think they stop one step short. Because underneath my hunger for closure was never really a hunger for resolution.

It was a longing to be truly seen.

That is what we are actually waiting for. Not the explanation. Not the apology. Not the conversation where everyone is finally honest and I walk out light. Underneath all of it, a quieter and more childlike need — for someone to say: Yes. That happened. It mattered. You gave something there. You lost something there. Of course it hurt.

If this is you…there is a woman in Scripture who can relate…

The one who was thrown away

Her name is Hagar, and when we meet her she is running. A slave in someone else’s story — used, and then resented for it — she has fled into the desert with nothing but the one home she had left behind and no idea what waits there. A child in her body and a whole life behind her that ended badly and that no one else ever stopped to mourn. No one gave her a goodbye. No one marked her leaving. She had simply become too painful to keep, and so she was gone.

And there, in the one place no one goes on purpose, by a spring of water in the middle of nowhere, God finds her.

He does not begin by fixing it. He asks her a question — perhaps the question for anyone standing in the rubble of an ending: Where have you come from, and where are you going? She can only answer the first half. She knows what she is fleeing. She has no idea what comes next. That is the honest posture of most grief.

God does not hand her an explanation. He does not undo what was done to her, or make the people who discarded her come back and account for it. He sees her. And she — a slave, a foreigner, a woman the story had thrown away — does something no one else in all of Scripture does before her.

She gives God a name.

El Roi, she calls him. You are the God who sees me.

And then she names the well. Beer-lahai-roi — the well of the Living One who sees me. She marks the ground. In the exact place where her life came apart with no one watching, she builds the only monument available to her: a name. She gives the unmarked place a marker. She holds a ceremony in the desert, and the only mourner in attendance is God.

What she found that I had been waiting for

That is the closest thing to closure I have found for the endings that never got one.

The researchers were right: some griefs will not be closed. But being seen is not the same as being resolved — and it turns out to be the thing I was actually after. Because the witness I kept waiting for, the one the friend never became, the one the system could not spare, the one I could not always be for the families I served, was never actually missing.

He saw the years. He saw what we gave and what it cost. He saw the children leave our home, the beds stripped and remade. He saw the families I could not stop long enough to comfort. He saw the friendship thin to silence, and the door close. Nothing has to be exaggerated for him to take it seriously, and nothing has to be minimized either. He was the one witness who never looked away.

Being seen did not lift Hagar out of her wilderness. She still had a long and difficult road. But it changed what the wilderness was. It did not become less lonely. It became named — ground where God had stood. And you cannot un-know that a place is holy once you have learned it.

If you are still in the middle of it

Maybe you are reading this from inside an ending nobody marked. A goodbye you never got to say. A room you were quietly shown out of. A grief you have carried alone precisely because no one else ever agreed it was a grief.

Hear the oldest thing in this story: you were seen the whole time. Before you did anything but run, you were seen. The wilderness you are in has a well in it, and the well has a name.

So maybe closure was never the explanation I was owed. Maybe it is only this — to look back honestly and finally say it happened, it mattered, I mattered, and it is over, and to know that even when no one else was there to say it, I was not unwitnessed.

Grief needs no committee to approve it. If you loved, you are allowed to mourn. But you do not have to wait for the people who were part of the ending to come back and finish the story with you. You can name the well yourself. You can call the ground what it was — the place where the Living One saw me — and then, like Hagar, rise from the spring and go. Not because the wilderness is behind you, but because you are no longer alone in it.

Where have you come from, and where are you going?

You may only be able to answer the first half. That has always been enough for the God who sees.

Verses to sit with

• Genesis 16:13 — “You are the God who sees me.”

• Psalm 56:8 — You keep track of all my sorrows; you have collected my tears in your bottle and recorded each one in your book.

• Exodus 3:7 — “I have surely seen the affliction of my people… I know their sufferings.”

• Psalm 139:1–3 — You have searched me and known me… you are acquainted with all my ways.

• Luke 12:6–7 — Not one sparrow is forgotten before God… even the hairs of your head are all numbered.

• Hebrews 4:13 — No creature is hidden from his sight.

I just finished a five-part series called It’s Not About Us — Until It Is. Five posts, and one argument underneath all of them: the church has learned to keep the holy-looking form and quietly lose the living thing inside it. We venerate the towel instead of taking it up (John 13:1-17). We order our lives around Jesus and leave the actual person — the fear, the body, the history — untouched. We fill a room with community and never quite know a soul in it. And all the while we keep the machinery running, on our way to something important, certain it is not about us.

I thought I was finished. Honestly, I am not sure I ever could be — these are the kinds of subjects you circle for years and still leave something unsaid, and I will not pretend I covered all of it. I was never after the last word. I only hoped to offer a perspective that might help someone process what they were already carrying.

There is a moment in Mark’s Gospel — twelve verses, easy to read past, a familiar story — that does in a single afternoon what I spent five posts reaching for. A woman. A crowd. A question no one else thought worth asking. Not another argument — a snapshot, the whole thing pulled together and walking around in Galilee. And it ends where I wanted to arrive all along. With a name.

Twelve Years

Twelve years she bled.

She lost far more than blood. Under the law her condition made her unclean, and in her world that word did not describe her body so much as empty her life. She could not worship in the Temple. She could not share a meal, a bed, an ordinary embrace. Anyone she touched became unclean too, so people learned to keep their distance — and over twelve years, distance became the only thing she knew.

Notice what did that to her. It was not only the illness. It was the system — the clean and the unclean, the in and the out, the careful machinery built to guard what was holy. That machinery was not evil. It was religion doing exactly what it was designed to do. And it was slowly killing her, keeping the one person who most needed God’s presence outside the doors of God’s house. Her body had been telling the truth the whole time — twelve years of it — and the system had a category for her body and no room at all for her.

She had tried everything. Every doctor, every treatment, every last coin. Mark says the plain, brutal thing: she had spent all she had, and only grew worse.

I know something about that sentence…and I am assuming you do too.

There was a season I had to help close something holy — a place that had been sacred ground to thousands of families, a place I loved. The decision was not mine alone, but the weight of carrying it came to rest on me. I did not sleep. My chest stayed tight for weeks. I was the leader; I was supposed to be the one holding it together, and privately I was strong and broken in the same body, certain I had failed, certain I had tried everything and it had not been enough. I know what it is to spend all you have and only grow worse.

That is where she was when she heard he was passing through.

The Crowd

She had one thing left. Not confidence. Not a plan. A thin, stubborn thread: If I can just touch the edge of his cloak, I will be healed.

So she went into the crowd.

After twelve years of being untouchable, she would have felt every body in that street — shoulders, elbows, the warmth of strangers pressed against her on every side. It was more human contact than she had been allowed in over a decade, and it meant nothing, because not one of them knew she was there. Not one of them knew she was dying. She was as unknown in that crowd as she had been in her empty house. Proximity is not the same as being seen. She had never been more surrounded, or more alone.

She reached — through the shame, through the fear, through every voice that had taught her she was worth avoiding — and her fingers found the hem of his cloak.

The bleeding stopped.

She could have slipped away right there, healed and unseen. That would have been enough for most of us: take the mercy, keep the anonymity, never risk the face-to-face. It nearly was enough. But he stopped.

Who Touched Me?

“Who touched me?”

And here is the moment the whole series had been circling, though I did not see it until now. Look at the disciples.

They are incredulous. You see this crowd pressing in on you, and you ask, “Who touched me?” They cannot believe he has stopped. There are people everywhere — everyone is touching him — and they are on their way to somewhere that matters. They are headed to the house of Jairus: a synagogue ruler, an important man, a dying daughter, a name worth knowing. There is a mission. There is a schedule. And this — an anonymous touch from someone in the mob — is friction. An interruption to the real work.

I have been those disciples far more than I have ever been that woman.

They are not villains. They are the ones who have it right. Jesus is unmistakably at their center; they have left everything to follow him; their lives are reordered around him in exactly the way we are all told to reorder ours. And they still cannot stop. They see the crowd and miss the person. They feel the press of a hundred bodies and cannot imagine that one of them is different. Their theology is sound and their bodies are already moving — already annoyed, already three steps toward the important appointment. Right Lord. Reordered life. And a person inside it too hurried and too activated to notice a daughter dying at his elbow.

That is the thing I most needed to see: you can have Jesus at the center and still be the kind of person who steps over the bleeding woman on the way to something that matters more.

He did not step over her.

He stopped the whole procession. He let the important man wait. And he began to look — not for a culprit, but for a face.

Daughter

She could not stay hidden. Trembling, she fell at his feet and told him everything — the bleeding, the years, the fear, the shame, the last coin spent, the threadbare hope. The whole story she had spent twelve years hiding, spoken out loud, in front of everyone, to the one person she was most sure would recoil.

She let herself be fully known — the very thing she had organized twelve years around never allowing — and he did not step back.

He looked at her. Not at her condition, not at the interruption, not at the schedule she had wrecked. At her. And he said one word.

“Daughter.”

Not unclean. Not problem. Not you again.

Daughter.

It is not a name, exactly. It is better than a name. It is a family word — one that reaches under twelve years of exile and sets her back inside belonging. And notice where it came from. He did not name her to repair the interruption or to look merciful in front of the crowd. He named her out of a fullness that was never in question — the same settled belovedness he served from his entire life. He did not touch the untouchable in order to become someone. He was already the Beloved; he had it to give, so he gave it. That is the difference between his service and most of mine. I have so often served in order to be loved. He served because he already was.

And this is where the name of the whole series finally means what I meant by it. It’s not about us — until it is. The disciples wanted it to be about the mission, the crowd, the important man. The woman was sure it was not about her at all — she would take her healing and disappear. And Jesus stopped everything, for the one person everyone else was stepping around, and made it entirely, unhurriedly about her. Not the crowd. Her. Not the schedule. Her. The one the system had spent twelve years telling that she did not count.

And she was not the only one who heard it. “Unclean” had never been only a rule that kept her out — it had become a name she wore, a verdict about what she was. Everyone in that crowd carried some version of it: the label the system had handed them and told them was the truth about themselves. When Jesus called her Daughter, he did not merely open a door she had been standing outside of. He overturned the name. He told her, and every soul listening who had been branded and had come to believe the branding, that their identity was never the system’s to assign — and that the seat he was offering was not a spot in the room but a place at his own table, as family.

Not a Verdict but a Family

When I had spent everything and it had not been enough — when I was strong and broken in the same body, braced for the verdict I was sure was coming — the word waiting on the other side of being known was not the one I expected. Not failure. Not you should have done more. Something closer to Son — the word I had, if I am honest, mostly stopped expecting to hear.

And notice what the word actually was. Not forgiven — that would have cleared the debt and left her standing outside, pardoned but still alone. He said Daughter. That is not the language of a courtroom; it is the language of a home. This is the mercy we brace against the light to avoid and almost never expect: he does not only wipe the record clean, he hands us a name and calls himself our Father. Shame keeps us in the dark, certain the light has come to expose us. It came to adopt us.

That is what this whole series was reaching for, and I could not quite say it until now: to be fully known is what we most want and most fear, and the gospel turn — the entire turn — is that complete knowing does not end in abandonment. She handed him all of it. He gave her back her name.

Maybe you have never bled for twelve years. But maybe you have bled in the other ways — the anxiety that drains you, the failure you are sure defines you, the wound you have built your whole life around keeping hidden. And underneath it, the oldest fear of all: if they really saw me, would they stay?

Here is what her story answers, as plainly as I know how to say it. He does not wait for you to be clean before he will call you close. He calls you close, and the closeness is what makes you clean. He does not need you to stop bleeding, stop failing, stop being afraid, before he will turn toward you. He turns toward you first — and what he turns toward you with is not a verdict but a family.

And if you are not at the end of your twelve years (as if we know) — if you are somewhere in the middle of them, having tried everything, and nothing has worked yet — hear this especially. Being seen is not the same as being finished. The man born blind could not explain what had happened to him. He could not win the argument the religious leaders dragged him into. All he had was one true thing: once I was blind, and now I see. Sometimes that is all you get for today — not the whole healing, not every answer, just one thing that is truer than it was yesterday, enough light to take one more step. You do not have to see the end of this. You only have to be seen in the middle of it.

So if your faith feels too thin to be worth much, reach anyway. If you are too tired to stand, crawl. If you can do nothing else, reach for the hem. He will stop the whole procession. He will let the important thing wait. And when you have finally told him the truth you were most afraid to say, he will not step back.

He will say your name.

Lord, you have seen every place I have bled and every place I have hidden. Thank you for stopping. Thank you for a name that shame cannot take. Help me trust you enough to reach — even when I have spent everything and it was not enough — and to believe that being fully known by you was never the thing to fear. Amen.

A quick word for anyone arriving here first. In the first half, I made the hard case: the church is full of community and strangely short on connection, and the two are not the same thing. Community is the room; connection is being known inside it. The research says churchgoers are as lonely as everyone else, and our bodies, it turns out, settle not to a crowd but to a single trusted person. I ended where it aches — with believers standing inside all that belonging and naming friendship as the thing still missing.

That was the honest look at what is wrong. This half is where the hope comes in. Because if we were made for connection — if being known is the design and not a luxury — then the real question is not just what is broken, but what meets it. And Scripture, it turns out, has been answering that all along.

Look at the Birds

There is a passage many of us are familiar with that I now think is secretly about all of this.

“Look at the birds of the air,” Jesus says. “Consider the lilies of the field.” For years I read it as an argument against worry — God feeds the birds, therefore trust him — and that is part of it. But anxiety has a way of shrinking the world until the thing I fear fills the whole field of vision. At three in the morning there is no bird, no lily, no long history of faithfulness. There is only the sensation in my chest and the story my body is already writing about it.

So Jesus says, in effect, Look again. Not inside yourself this time. Look at a world receiving what it never earned and cannot lose. Then Jesus turns to those listening and says, “Your heavenly Father knows that you need them.”

Knows. Not merely provides. Knows.

The birds are not the point. The point is the character of the One feeding them — a Father whose care is not a policy but an attention, who is not running a program but keeping watch over a particular life. Before connection is ever something we owe each other, it is something we are held inside. We were made to be known, because we come from One who has always known us. Every human hand in the dark is an echo of that first, sleepless attention.

I am not claiming Jesus is teaching nervous-system theory on a hillside. But he does not treat anxiety as a thought problem to be corrected with better information. He turns the anxious person toward relationship — toward a Father who already knows. The deepest form of this was never merely horizontal. Before we ever learned steadiness from another human being, we were made to live under the attentive care of a God who knows us — and the steadiness we borrow from one another was always meant to carry that same knowing.

Sometimes God Sends Titus

We tend to assume that being known by God is a private transaction — just him and me, vertical, sealed off. But here is the part we keep missing: God almost never hands us that knowing straight down from heaven. He nearly always sends it through a person.

Paul describes a season in 2 Corinthians when he was worn through — “conflicts on the outside, fears within.” He does not clean himself up before he tells us. Then he writes: “God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus.”

Notice what God did not do. He did not comfort Paul with a crowd. He did not comfort him with the church at Corinth as an institution, or a program, or a principle. He comforted him by the arrival of one specific person walking through a door. The provision of God for a lonely apostle was not community. It was connection — singular, embodied, named.

Elijah’s story under the broom tree carries the same tenderness. He is exhausted, afraid, ready to die. God does eventually speak and correct and send him back. But that is not the first thing. First an angel touches him. He sleeps. He eats. He sleeps again. God does not shame an exhausted man for being exhausted. He does not send him a better argument. He sends him rest, and food, and a hand — and only later, a whisper.

There is something profoundly incarnational in this. We are embodied people, and God so often reaches us through embodied means. A meal. A touch. A voice. A person who sits down and does not seem hurried to leave. Sometimes the provision of God is a bird. Sometimes it is a lily. And sometimes it is Titus, walking through the door of a room where you had begun to believe you were the only one awake.

Why We Settle for the Room

If connection is what we were made for, and the church is full of people who need it, why do we so reliably build community instead?

I think it is because community is safe and connection is not.

Earlier in this series I wrote about co-dependency, and I still think the warning matters. Care can become control. Being needed can become the only place a person feels real. But somewhere along the way I assumed the cure for unhealthy dependence was independence — need less, manage yourself, carry your own weight, become mature enough that you no longer require anyone to steady you.

I am not sure that is maturity. It may just be another form of self-protection.

And it is not only individuals who do this. Institutions do it too, often in their most well-meaning moments. We can build a pastoral care team — and we should; there is nothing wrong with it, I actually think it is good. But if we are not careful, the very thing meant to strengthen care can quietly excuse the rest of us from it. Connection becomes a department. Knowing one another becomes someone’s job description. And a whole congregation can breathe easier, believing the need is covered — when what we have really done is hire out the one thing we were all called to give each other.

Because connection asks something of us that community does not. Community lets me belong without being known. I can sit in the row, serve on the team, lead the group, and never once let anyone close enough to see what I am actually carrying. Connection removes that cover. It requires need — the admission that I do not have everything I need inside myself — and need is the very thing most of us learned, somewhere, was unsafe. So we choose the fuller room and the thinner bond. We take the belonging that costs us nothing and call it enough.

I have spent much of my life in roles where being useful was rewarded — the person who enters the room, sees what needs to happen, absorbs the pressure, and keeps moving. Some of that is gifting. And some of it has been a very sophisticated way of staying in the community while making sure no one gets near enough to become my connection. Receiving is harder than giving, because receiving means I am no longer controlling the exchange. It means letting someone see what I would rather manage privately. I have confused self-sufficiency with strength more often than I would like to admit.

The people who never let themselves be known are not the mature ones. They are often the loneliest people in the room.

The Rooms We Create

None of this stays personal, though. Bodies learn connection — or fail to learn it — inside the rooms we build. And we have built rooms that are rich in community while quietly punishing connection.

A church can proclaim a God who knows what we need while creating a culture in which nobody feels permitted to need anything. It can preach grace and still reward the people who appear to require the least of it. It can teach dependence on God while forming leaders who believe everything depends on them. It can celebrate vulnerability from the stage while making actual vulnerability costly in the hallway.

Those contradictions matter because the body is always listening to more than the sermon. It notices what happens when someone finally tells the truth. It notices whether weakness draws people closer or pushes them away. It notices whether belonging still feels secure once usefulness drops. This is why loneliness does not lift when people simply attend more things. A busier calendar is more community, and more community was never the missing ingredient. What heals is the same few people, in the same room, over enough time to become safe — depth, not frequency.

I was in a service not long ago where we sang about Christ as our firm foundation — the rock that holds when everything else gives way. A good and true song. But standing there, I noticed how nearly every line was cast in the first person singular. “I’ve built my life on Jesus… I’m not held by my own strength.” My life. My strength. My footing, sure no matter what shakes. All of it true. All of it alone. A room full of people, each privately certain, and not one of us actually turned toward another.

Now imagine the same lines in the plural. We’ve built our lives on Jesus. We’re not held by our own strength. Nothing in the theology changes — but suddenly I am not merely testifying beside you; we are testifying together. The rock is the same rock. It is the we that makes it a foundation we are standing on together, which is what a foundation is for. Even our worship can be one more room where we stand near each other and remain, somehow, alone — or it can be the moment the body remembers how to be one.

Try it sometime. The next time you are singing one of those songs, quietly move the I to we and notice what happens — how a private declaration becomes a shared one, and how much less alone the same true words can feel.

So maybe the question the church most needs to ask is not Are we teaching people the truth? We are. But truth is not the same as being known. Paul said that in a real body, when one member suffers, all suffer with it — the body feels its own wound and turns toward it. So maybe the better question is the bodily one: when someone here falls apart, does the body feel it — or does it look away? (1 Corinthians 12:26)

Can a pastor say he is exhausted before he collapses? Can a mother say she is overwhelmed without feeling as though she has failed? Can a man admit his marriage is hurting without instantly becoming a problem to solve? Can someone say, “I am not okay,” and meet a person who does not rush to fix, correct, quote, or move on?

There is a kind of presence that does not excuse sin, abandon truth, or remove responsibility. It simply refuses to make another person’s humanity an emergency. I think Jesus was very good at that. He could stay. And that may be the single quality I most want the church to recover — not better answers, though we need truth; not safer systems, though systems matter; but people so settled in the love of God that they do not panic in the presence of someone else’s pain.

People who can stay awake with you without needing you to stop being afraid first.

No Longer the Only One Awake

Five posts ago, I started with a sentence that had been bothering: It’s not about you.

I still believe it. I am not the center of the story. I cannot hold the world together or rescue everyone I love. My comfort is not the highest good, and my needs do not set the terms of God’s faithfulness.

And yet none of that means I am unwanted in it. It’s not about me. Until, in the tenderness of a God who feeds birds and clothes fields and sends Titus through the door, somehow it is. The whole point of it’s not about you was never that you do not matter. It was that you were never meant to hold it all — which means you were never meant to hold it alone.

I still wake some nights. Some part of me still votes for danger before my mind has finished counting the evidence, and I doubt that will fully leave me this side of heaven. But I am learning to stop trying to fill the room around me and start letting one person into it instead — the friend who knows, the God who sends, the Father who has never once stopped keeping watch.

We have built a church full of community and wondered why so many of us are still awake at three in the morning.

The answer was never a bigger room.

It is someone turning toward you in the one you are already in, close enough to say the thing I have spent most of my life waiting to believe:

You can rest. I’ve got the next watch.

PS. “When Jesus Names You”

This was supposed to be the final post in this series. Or at least, I thought it was.

I sat down to write one last piece and realized, somewhere in the middle of it, that I was trying to force too much into a single post. It had already run past three thousand words. And the more I considered where this was heading — community, connection, this thing called co-regulation — the more I could feel myself leaving important things out. I did not want to do that. So I am going to do something I had not planned to do, and split the ending in two (release both at the same time).

This first part is the harder half. It is the honest look at what is missing — in the church and in me. The next half is where the hope comes in. But I have learned not to rush to the hope before I have been honest about the ache, so let me stay here first.

Post Four ended with my inability to listen to my own body — or, more honestly, to the watchman living inside me.

I wrote about the part of me that spends the small hours scanning the dark — taking inventory of everything that could go wrong before my feet hit the floor. I wrote about Psalm 121, and the strange comfort of a God who does not slumber or sleep. And I ended with a small, hard-won suspicion: that my rest does not begin when I am finally convinced nothing bad will ever happen. It begins when I start to believe I am no longer the only one awake.

The church, at its best, is supposed to be the place where no one keeps watch alone. It is a room full of people who have promised, in one way or another, to stay awake with each other. (Hebrews 10:24–25) We gather. We fellowship. We worship. We form groups and fill calendars. If belonging could be manufactured by proximity, the church would have cured loneliness a long time ago.

It hasn’t.

When the Barna Group went looking, they found that churchgoers report loneliness at essentially the same rate as everyone else — no meaningful gap between the people in the pews and the people who never come. One in five practicing Christians said they feel lonely at least once a day. And get this: when believers are lonely, they tend to describe it as more painful than their unchurched neighbors do — as if being unseen inside the very place that promised to see you cuts deeper than being unseen out in the open.

Let me be careful here, because this is easy to hear wrong. The church does not exist to cure our loneliness. Some of what we feel is simply the ache of being human — a longing meant for God that no gathering was ever going to fill. And for many of us, the church has been the nearest thing to family we have known. I am not indicting any of that. But God did not design his church as a crowd. He designed it as a body — members who belong to one another, told again and again to love one another, carry one another, bear one another's burdens. Being known is not a therapeutic add-on to that design. It is the design. So when people sit unknown inside the very place built out of all those "one anothers," the failure is not that we fell short of meeting emotional needs. It is that a body has forgotten how to be one.

I thought that if I could get enough people around me — enough meetings, enough belonging — I would finally be able to rest. But the number of people was never the question. The question was whether a single one of them actually knew me. A crowded lobby cannot answer that. Only one person, turning toward me, can.

Community fills the room. Connection is what lets me sleep.

Community Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Connection

We do not usually separate those two words community and connection. We use them almost interchangeably, as though gathering people and joining people were the same act. They are not, and the gap between them may be the most important thing the church has stopped noticing.

Community is a structure. It is belonging to a group — a name on a roster, a chair in a row, a small group that meets on Tuesdays. It gives us proximity, shared identity, a place to stand. It is good, and it is necessary, and it is not the thing itself. You can have all of it and still be a stranger. You can attend for a decade and be known by no one.

Most Sundays, at some point, many are asked to turn and greet the people around us — a handshake, a good morning, a smile, and then we turn back. It is a warm few seconds that asks nothing of us. We can do it every week for years beside someone whose name we half-remember and whose fears we will never know: real proximity, real warmth, and no requirement to be known.

I have done this myself — offered the handshake with a warm face and a hard week I had no intention of sharing, then turned back before anyone could ask.

I felt this most sharply at a men’s prayer breakfast a while back. The usual thing — eggs, a short message — and then they split us into small groups “to connect.” Ten or twelve of us at a table, told to be vulnerable, to share something real. The leader opened the floor.

It was excruciating, and not because vulnerability is bad. It was excruciating because I was being asked to hand my inner life to men I did not know, with no reason to think I would see most of them again. I opened up before many of the men had to share, I admitted that I was uncomfortable with this exercise. Be vulnerable — for what? I did not know these men. I did not know what they would do with the things I can barely say to myself, let alone to a table of strangers who happened to show up for the same breakfast.

I do not fault them. Everyone in that room meant well. But good intentions have built a lot of rooms that leave people lonelier than they walked in. We keep engineering moments of vulnerability without first building the thing that makes vulnerability safe — time, trust, the slow history of being known. We ask people to open before anyone has stayed long enough to be trusted with what falls out.

So much of this, I have come to think, is that we do not understand what we are trying to build.

Connection is what happens when the structure is inhabited. It is being known — the difference between sitting near someone and being seen by them. It is the moment another person turns toward you and something in you registers that you are no longer carrying the night by yourself. Community is the container. Connection is what the container was for. We have become experts at building them and strangely careless about whether anyone inside is actually known.

The 2023 Surgeon General’s advisory on loneliness names this without meaning to. It defines social connection as the structure, function, and quality of our relationships — and then warns that it is the quality, not the count, that we have most underappreciated. Half of American adults, the advisory reports, were lonely before the pandemic ever arrived, at a cost to the body it compares to smoking. We are not suffering from a shortage of gatherings. We are suffering from a shortage of being known inside them.

Paul knew the difference, and he named it in a single sentence. Writing to the Thessalonians, he says he was ready to share with them “not only the gospel of God but also our own selves.” Sit with the two halves of that. The gospel of God is the content — the truth, the teaching, the message the community exists to carry. Our own selves is the connection — his actual presence, his real person, handed over. Paul did not consider the first sufficient without the second. He gave them both.

We have gotten very good at the first half. We deliver the gospel of God with excellence — well-taught, well-produced, well-attended. It is the second half we have quietly made optional. We hand people the message and withhold ourselves, and then we wonder why the room is full and people are still alone in it.

A Hand in the Dark

For a long time I assumed this was a spiritual failure I could fix by trying harder to feel connected. Then I learned that my body had already voted, and it was not interested in my effort.

In 2006, a researcher named Jim Coan slid married women into an fMRI scanner and told them a mild electric shock might be coming. He watched the threat light up in their brains — the alarm regions firing, the body bracing. Then he let someone hold their hand. When a stranger held it, the alarm quieted a little. When their husband held it, the alarm quieted a great deal. And the finding I keep returning to: the effect grew stronger the better the marriage was. The brain was not responding to a hand. It was responding to a bond.

I cannot overstate what that means for everything we build.

A warm body in the room barely moved the needle. Proximity — the stranger’s hand, the crowd, the community — offered the nervous system almost nothing. What actually reached down into the threat centers of the brain and told them to stand down was being known by the particular person doing the holding. Same hand. Same shock. The only variable was the depth of the bond. The body itself distinguishes community from connection, and it is not fooled by a full room.

This is what those of us who study the nervous system call co-regulation — the quiet, involuntary way one settled person helps another person’s body settle. The term is modern. The reality it names is as old as creation. We have always been formed in relationship, steadied in relationship, wounded in relationship, and healed in relationship; the science is only now catching up to something our bodies have been doing since the beginning. We meet it before we have words for it. A baby does not reason herself out of distress; she is held. And we never fully outgrow it. There are people whose presence changes something in us before they have said very much at all. They do not fix the problem or remove the danger. They simply let our body borrow their steadiness until our own returns.

You cannot co-regulate with a program. You cannot borrow steadiness from an event. A calendar full of community will not touch the threat centers of a single lonely brain. Only a person will — and only a person who has come close enough to be known.

Which is exactly what people are asking for, if we would listen. When Barna asked practicing Christians between eighteen and thirty-five what was missing from their church experience, the answer was not better teaching or more worship or another group to join. The thing they most named as absent was friendship. They are standing inside the community, surrounded by belonging, quietly raising a hand to say the one thing the structure was never able to give them.

The ache is not the absence of an answer. It is the shape of one.

So let me stop naming the wound, and turn to what meets it.

PART B

It is 3:14 in the morning, and my body has decided something is wrong.

Nothing has happened. The house is quiet. Karen is asleep beside me. The doors are locked, the bills are paid—well, most of them—and there is no threat anywhere in this house that a reasonable person could name.

And still my chest has closed into a fist. My heart is keeping a rhythm I did not ask it to keep. Some old part of me is scanning the dark, listening for a sound that is not coming, braced for a blow that will not fall. A flutter behind my ribs becomes a symptom. My body trembles that I seem to not be able to control. Before I have decided there is anything to fear, my body has already finished the paperwork and reached its conclusion: something is wrong.

Karen has made this drive with me before. We have sat together under emergency-room lights while they attached the wires, watched the numbers, and tried to figure out what was happening. Part of me almost hoped they would find something, because a diagnosis would at least give the fear a name.

Then came the scans, the bloodwork, the waiting, and eventually the release with no conclusive evidence that anything was wrong. A week later, at the follow-up with my primary-care doctor, the answer was usually the same: It is stress. It is anxiety.

For most of my life, I heard that as an accusation.

But “nothing has happened” was only true about that particular night. A great deal had happened. I had lost my job. My family was living through another season of upheaval and uncertainty, and I was carrying questions about provision, identity, calling, and what would come next. If you had asked me, I would have told you we were walking by faith. I believed the Lord who had provided so many times before would provide again, and I meant it.

During those anxious, sleepless nights, I wrote much of HELD—a book about being carried by God while I was still trying to hold everything together myself. That tension is not lost on me. I was writing about being held while my own body remained unconvinced that it was safe to let go.

I am beginning to understand that my body was not inventing the turmoil. It was carrying what I had been trying so hard to manage.

I Promised You the Body

Three times now I have brought you to the edge of this room and stopped.

In Part One, I said your nervous system does not ask your theology for permission. In Part Two, I named some of the systems and distorted ideas of service that leave people depleted. In Part Three, I drew a picture of the whole person being formed in Christ. I named the hypervigilance, the 3:00 a.m. chest pains, and the ways I have medicated what I could not face—and then, again, I wrote, To be continued.

I did not keep putting this off simply to build suspense, and not only because I was afraid. I needed to name the larger dysfunctions first—the ways church culture and shallow models of discipleship can short-circuit the body of Christ.

When something inside us begins to break down, we are quick to blame ourselves. We assume we are weak, faithless, undisciplined, or failing at the Christian life. I did not want to rush into the body without first naming some of the environments that taught us to ignore it.

It is one thing to write about a theology of need. It is another to lie down in front of you and let you watch my body refuse to believe what I say I believe.

So here we are, in the room I kept promising and avoiding. This is how and where the crack has been showing itself.

In the last post, I introduced a third circle—not the self enthroned or erased, but the whole person being formed in Christ. I placed the body inside that picture because the body is not standing outside discipleship. It is one of the places where discipleship is actually taking place.

The Alarm Does Not Ask Permission

Here is what I have had to learn, slowly and much later than I should have: the part of me that comes awake at 3:00 a.m. is not the part of me that reads Scripture. It is older and faster, and it does not consult my convictions before it acts.

Deep within us is a survival system that scans rooms, faces, silences, and sensations, asking beneath many of our other questions: Am I safe here? When it decides the answer is no, rightly or wrongly, it does not wait for the reasoning, believing, sermon-preaching part of me to reply. It prepares the body first. The heart rate climbs. The breath goes shallow. The muscles brace. The theological part of me—the part that knows the promises—comes online a half-second too late, already downstream of a decision my body made without me.

Clinicians sometimes call these responses adaptive survival strategies. The body develops them because, at some point, they helped us endure something we did not know how to escape or carry. What the church gave me very little language for was the possibility that someone can sincerely love Jesus and still have a body trained by pressure, loss, loneliness, and too much responsibility to expect the next catastrophe.

It is the exhausting conviction that something is wrong, or about to be, even when you cannot say what. It listens for the other shoe to drop. It comes for me most often at night.

For years, I believed this was a sin or faith problem. Often, I could not even put words to it. I thought that if Jesus were truly at the center, I would not feel this way. So I tried to out-pray it, out-discipline it, and force my body into agreement with what my mind had already signed.

The fear did not leave. Shame simply joined the pile on.

A Thought That Feels Like Faith

The cruelest part is how holy survival strategies can sound.

When the body has been shaped by pain, it does not only brace. It begins to believe. It hands the mind a set of rules and dresses each one in the language of virtue and If I let my guard down, everything I am holding will fall.

That may sound like responsibility, but it can be a nervous system that once had to hold too much and never learned how to stop. That may sound like leadership, but it can be a body that learned somewhere that no one was coming.

And this is where it gets complicated for me, because these patterns have often served me well. They helped me lead, carry difficult things, make decisions under pressure, and keep moving when there was little room to fall apart. As a CEO and executive, some of what looked like strength really was strength. But some of it was also survival.

I am still trying to sort out the difference.

The need to stay in control can look like responsibility. The inability to rest can look like commitment. When those things are rewarded—and they often are—it becomes hard to see what they are costing us.

I could be very good at holding everything together and still be coming apart inside.

Just because a thought feels true does not mean it is true. And just because a thought feels faithful does not mean it came from faith. Some of the most spiritual-sounding sentences in my head were written years ago by a frightened body trying to survive, and I have spent decades obeying them as though they were the voice of God.

I once wrote about a vow I made in a grocery-store parking lot after a ministry disaster—a promise never to be that exposed again, a promise that held me for fifteen years. What I understand now is that the vow was not irrational. Given what my body had been through, it made sense. It was trying to keep me safe.

But a vow that makes sense to a wounded nervous system can still become a cage.

Understanding why I reached for control, comfort, or escape does not remove my responsibility for what I did with those impulses. The nervous system may explain something about my behavior, but it does not excuse everything my hands have done.

The body is not the enemy. Neither is it the final authority.

This Is the Crack

In Part Two, I said we cannot keep filling cisterns while ignoring the crack in the clay. We send exhausted pastors and hollowed-out caregivers away on sabbatical, and then wonder why they return and empty again within a year.

Rest matters. Sometimes it is where God begins. But rest alone cannot repair what rest did not break.

This is the crack: a body that has learned it is not safe, running a survival program the person cannot switch off by trying harder—and a theology that told him the program was a sin to conquer rather than a wound that also needed care.

That brings me back to the hardest question I asked in Part Two:

Do you believe God wants you well, or only useful?

I can answer it more honestly now because I can feel where I have not believed it.

For a long time, I would have told you God wanted me well, and I would have meant it. Still, I lived as though “well” meant “still functioning.” As long as the machine ran, I called it health.

But a body braced against a threat that is not there is not a well body, even when it is productive. It is a soldier who was never told the war ended, still standing watch over a field where nothing is coming.

God is not only interested in what he can accomplish through me. He is interested in the watchman in my chest who has not slept in years.

The Watchman Was Not the Enemy

I have spent years at war with the part of me that keeps watch in the dark. I treated it as the thing standing between me and the peace I thought I should have. I am beginning to see that I had the wrong picture.

The watchman was not the enemy. He was a frightened part of me who took a post long ago, when the world really was unsafe, and never learned that he did not have to keep watch alone. You do not heal a sentry by shouting at him. You help him begin to notice what is true now: you are not alone here. You do not have to carry this by yourself. You can begin to rest.

The watchman in my chest has not slept in years.

In Scripture, a watchman stood on the wall to notice danger, sound the alarm, and remain awake while others slept. It was necessary work—but it was never meant to be endless. My body seems to have taken up that post years ago and never learned when the shift was over.

There is a beautiful picture in Psalm 121: “He who keeps you will not slumber… he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” Maybe I need to let the watchman finally rest and allow the Keeper of Israel to take the post I have been trying to hold for years.

That is what I was trying to show in the third circle from the last post. It was not an attempt to place the self at the center again. It was an attempt to tell the truth about the person Christ is forming. And that person has a body—a body that remembers, braces, and sometimes sounds an alarm before the mind understands why.

For now, I only want to leave you with what took me forty years and too many middle-of-the-night fears to begin believing: the trembling was not the failure. My body was telling the truth about what it had been carrying, and the answer was never simply to try harder to need less.

Perhaps the beginning of rest is not convincing the watchman that nothing bad will ever happen. Perhaps it is helping him believe that he is no longer the only one awake.

The Keeper of Israel is still watching, which means I can begin to rest.

I have one more post to write. Thanks for staying with me.

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This past Sunday, a familiar image appeared on the screen at church during a sermon titled Counterfeit Faith, based on Matthew 7:21–23. It was a really good sermon.

To help make his point, the pastor showed two diagrams. Over the years, I have seen versions of these same diagrams in churches, ministry settings, and Christian leadership groups.

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On the left was a wheel with “Me” at the center. Family, work, finances, faith, hobbies, and everything else revolved around the self. It is an honest picture of life apart from Christ. I sit on the throne. My desires, fears, ambitions, preferences, and need for control begin to organize everything around me. Other people can become supporting characters in my story, and even God can become someone I ask to bless the life I have already decided to live.

On the right was the correction: Jesus at the center, with every part of life arranged around him. I agree with that picture too. Jesus is Lord. The Christian life begins with surrendering the illusion that I am the center of the story.

That is where this whole series began.

In Part One, I was not arguing against the truth that “it’s not about you.” I was asking what happens when that truth becomes separated from the rest of the gospel. A needed correction can become a crushing half-truth. “You are not the center” can slowly become “you do not matter.”

In Part Two, I tried to name how that distortion became respectable. We took service, sacrifice, surrender, and self-denial and sometimes used them to justify people disappearing inside their faithfulness. We kept the towel—the image of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet—but forgot that his service flowed from the settled knowledge that he came from the Father and was returning to the Father. Jesus did not serve in order to become beloved. He served because he knew that he was.

As I looked at the image in church, I realized that the picture of Jesus in the center was true, but it still did not fully describe what had been happening in me or what I have seen in others.

It showed the categories of a life reordered around Jesus. It did not show the person living that life.

When Jesus Is at the Center, Yet…

That distinction matters to me because I can point to a life sincerely organized around Christ.

My family and I have lived in seven different states, often because we believed God was asking us to go somewhere new, enter something difficult, or carry a responsibility we would not have chosen for ourselves. I have taught Scripture, cared for people, led through painful seasons, and tried to make decisions in submission to Jesus.

But I do not want to tell that story in a way that makes me sound more faithful, mature, or whole than I am.

I am a deeply flawed man.

Obedience has come at a cost. Some of that cost was unavoidable. Following Christ does involve sacrifice, uncertainty, loss, and leaving behind people and places we have loved. But some of that cost also exposed what was happening inside me.

There have been ways I carried responsibility that were not healthy. There were times I confused being needed with being faithful. I could become driven by urgency, approval, fear, or the belief that everything depended upon me.

And when the pressure inside became difficult to hold, I found ways to medicate it.

I learned how to soothe myself, distract myself, escape myself, or quiet what I did not know how to face. Those ways of coping offered relief, but they did not bring peace. They helped me avoid the turmoil for a moment without healing what was underneath it.

So when I say that I have tried to organize my life around Christ, I am not claiming that every part of me has been surrendered, healed, or made whole. I am saying that genuine obedience and genuine brokenness have often lived beside one another in me. There have still been nights when my body has acted as though something terrible was about to happen.

My mind could rehearse the promises of God while my chest tightened. I could know that I was not alone while something within me remained on watch. A small sensation could become a warning. A quiet house could feel less like rest and more like exposure. Before I had even decided there was anything to fear, my body had already begun preparing for danger.

That experience has a name: hypervigilance.

It is the exhausting sense that something is wrong, or is about to go wrong, even when you cannot identify exactly what it is. It scans the room, the body, and the future. It listens for the other shoe to drop.

For me, it often comes at night. A fluttering in my chest becomes a warning. A muscle twitch becomes evidence that something is wrong. An unfamiliar sensation becomes the beginning of the worst possible outcome. My body prepares for an emergency while my mind tries to explain that there is no emergency. These occurrences have led me to multiple ER visits only to tell be told its stress or anxiety.

For a long time, I interpreted that inner alarm primarily as a spiritual or sin problem. I thought I needed to believe harder, pray harder, surrender more completely, or become less focused on myself. I assumed that if Jesus were truly at the center, I would not feel this way.

So I tried to out-pray the fear. I tried to out-discipline my nervous system. I tried to force my body into agreement with what my mind already believed.

The fear did not disappear and shame simply joined in on the piling on.

The problem was not that Jesus was absent from my life. If someone asked me about our situations I would sincerely say and trust, God has it. The problem was that my understanding of discipleship had given me very little language for the person Christ was forming.

Where were the thoughts that raced ahead of me? Where was the fear that rose before I could reason with it? Where were grief, fatigue, loneliness, bodily memory, relationships, limits, and the nervous system that had learned to remain alert?

The Limits of a Helpful Picture

The picture with Jesus at the center tells an essential truth.

Christ is Lord over every part of life. Family, work, money, church, relationships, and rest do not belong to separate kingdoms. They all belong to him. Life with Jesus is not simply my old life with a spiritual category added to it. Jesus does not belong in one section marked “faith.” He is Lord over the whole.

But the picture can leave the impression that Christian maturity is mainly a matter of arranging the visible categories correctly: put Jesus in the middle, submit the surrounding areas to him, and keep him first.

Again, that is not wrong. But it is not a complete picture.

A pastor can preach grace while living as though everything depends upon him. A caregiver can know that God loves her while feeling guilty whenever she needs care. A leader can place ministry under the lordship of Christ while still being driven by fear, approval, or the need to be indispensable.

A Christian can have sound theology, faithful habits, and an ordered life while remaining deeply divided inside. The categories may be properly named while the person living within them remains exhausted, anxious, ashamed, or afraid.

This is not an argument against Jesus at the center. It is an argument for a deeper understanding of what his lordship and grace actually mean.

Jesus does not merely reorder the areas of our lives. He forms the people who are living them.

The Whole Person Being Formed in Christ

Dallas Willard offers a framework that has helped me understand what I was missing.

More than a year ago, I worked through the book Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice that really ministered to me:

“The constant character of the will apart from God is duplicity—or, more accurately, fragmentation and multiplicity… thoughts and feelings fall into chaos. Then the human will moves irresistibly toward deception… Often the deception involved is self-deception, so that we cannot even understand ourselves and why we do what we do.”

At the time, I reflected a lot about that passage through the lens of trauma.

Willard was describing the divided life that comes when the will is separated from God. We become pulled in competing directions. Our thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions no longer move together with any real coherence.

But I had also begun to see how pain, loss, pressure, and trauma can deepen that fragmentation.

Life has a way of leaving us fragmented inside.

The mind can know one thing while the body expects another. We can believe that we are loved while remaining prepared for rejection. We can know that God is present while something within us still feels alone. We can sincerely want to rest while another part of us insists that letting down our guard is dangerous.

That is not always hypocrisy. Sometimes it is fragmentation…at least for me.

And fragmentation does not leave us morally neutral. The ways we protect ourselves can wound us and wound others. Fear can become control. Loneliness can become escape. The desire for relief can lead us toward habits that promise comfort while quietly deepening our division.

I do not want to explain away my choices by appealing to trauma, anxiety, or the nervous system. Understanding why I reached for certain forms of comfort does not remove my responsibility for reaching for them.

But shame alone never taught me how to become whole. It only taught me how to hide more carefully.

One part of me believes while another part braces. One part wants to rest while another remains on watch. One part knows that I am held by God while another still feels responsible for preventing whatever terrible thing may happen next.

The person can become splintered.

For a long time, I assumed spiritual maturity meant forcing those divided places into agreement—or hiding the ways they were not. I tried to overpower fear with correct theology, stronger choices, more surrender, and greater discipline. When that did not work, I sometimes reached for relief rather than truth.

I am not writing this as someone who has solved that struggle. I am writing as someone who is learning to recognize it sooner, name it more honestly, and bring it into the light.

Willard describes spiritual formation as the renovation of the whole person. He writes about the heart or will, our thoughts and feelings, the body, our relationships, and the soul. His concern is that discipleship can become focused on outward behavior and religious activity while much of the actual person remains untouched.

I do not think his framework should be treated as a precise map of biblical anthropology. Scripture uses words such as heart, soul, mind, spirit, body, and strength with considerable overlap. When Jesus tells us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, he is not necessarily giving us four separate compartments. He is calling us to love God with the whole of who we are.

Still, Willard helps us see something important: Christ does not merely rearrange the visible categories of life. He begins restoring integrity to the divided person who is living them.

Formation reaches our choices, thoughts, feelings, bodies, relationships, and the integrated life of the soul. It is not a picture of someone finally bringing every part of life under control.

It is a picture of grace patiently gathering a fragmented person into wholeness.

Humility Means Telling the Truth

When I first reflected on Willard’s words, I wrote that healing and spiritual integration involved grounding ourselves in humility. “By grounding ourselves in humility and turning toward God, He invites us into wholeness—guiding us to coherence and connection, even amidst our brokenness. What do I mean to 'ground ourselves in humility'? It means rooting our identity in an honest awareness of our limits and dependence on God. This keeps us open to growth and receptive to His guidance, allowing us to act with sincerity and resilience.”

I still believe that, but humility has become less theoretical for me. Humility is not thinking less of my humanity. It is telling the truth about it.

It means admitting that I am not God, that I have limits, and that I cannot hold myself together through competence, ministry, usefulness, or force of will.

It also means acknowledging not only the wounds I have received, but the ways I have responded to those wounds. Some of those responses have been faithful. Some have not.

There have been times when I served from love and times when I served because being needed helped me feel secure. There have been times when I obeyed at great personal cost and times when I used activity to avoid what was happening inside me. There have been times when I turned toward God and times when I reached for something else to quiet the turmoil.

I am not standing outside this problem explaining it. I am inside it. That honesty is not self-condemnation. Neither is it an excuse.

It is confession.

I cannot offer God a whole person by pretending the divided places do not exist. Nor can I move toward wholeness while refusing responsibility for what I have done in my attempts to protect or soothe myself. I can only bring him the person I actually am: beloved, responsible, wounded, sinful, needy, and dependent upon mercy.

That is the person Christ is forming.

Not the Self Enthroned—or Erased

The first picture shows the self on the throne, and the second rightly places Jesus at the center. I agree with both. One names the problem, and the other names the necessary surrender.

But as I kept thinking about those images, I realized I needed a third one—not because the second was wrong, but because it did not quite show what happens within the person whose life is being reordered around Christ.

When Jesus commands us to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, he is drawing from Deuteronomy 6: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” This is more than a call to arrange the visible parts of life around God. It is an invitation to bring the whole person into love and surrender—the thinking, feeling, choosing, embodied person we actually are.

So I began imagining another circle. At the center is the heart—the inner place of trust, intention, and surrender—learning to yield to Christ. Around it are our thoughts, emotions, body, and relationships, the places where fear, memory, desire, habit, love, and pain are actually lived. The soul is not simply another section of the diagram, but the life of the whole person being gathered and held together before God. Around that whole person are the visible parts of life: family, work, church, finances, community, and rest.

The first picture is the self enthroned. The second is a life reordered under the lordship of Christ. The third is the whole person being formed in Christ.

That formation is not quick or tidy, and it does not happen simply because I have arranged the visible parts of my life correctly. It reaches the places where obedience and fear can live beside one another. It reaches the body that remains on alert, the mind that scans for danger, the relationships that taught us what love and safety feel like, and the habits we formed to quiet what we did not know how to carry.

I do not have that process figured out. I am still learning how easily I can confuse control with responsibility, usefulness with faithfulness, and relief with healing. But I am beginning to believe that Christ does not become central by making the person disappear. His grace reaches the person who is actually there.

That is the picture I want to explore next, especially the part of it we have often treated as secondary, inconvenient, or even suspicious: the body. The body is not standing outside discipleship. It is one of the places where the slow work of formation is actually taking place.

TO BE CONTINUED….

Before I continue, I want to acknowledge the response to Part One.

I did not expect so many of you to share your perspective and your own stories. You wrote about pastors, volunteers, and leaders who had slowly disappeared inside their callings. Some of you wrote about people you love. Some of you recognized yourselves.

I have reflected on many of your comments, and they have helped me understand things more clearly.

I had intended to move next toward the body—to write about anxiety, exhaustion, the nervous system, and what happens when a person carries too much for too long (so much of what I have learned and still learning). I still intend to go there. But your responses have convinced me that there is something else we can process together.

We did not simply overwork people. We gave the overwork a theology.

We took beautiful words such as service, sacrifice, surrender, and self-denial, but separated them from belonging, belovedness, and the ordinary limits of being human. Over time, we began to treat a person’s ability to ignore their own needs as evidence of spiritual maturity.

The Leader Who Appears to Need Nothing

In Part One, I pushed back on the idea that the church’s unity around “it’s not about you” was an uncomplicated good. We may have agreed on something true and still used it in a way that harmed people.

The phrase did not create the problem. It gave spiritual language to something we already admired: strong people need less, faithful people keep going, and good leaders do not ask others to carry them.

We honored the person who seemed to need the least. We admired the leader who could carry more than everyone else. We treated the body, with its limits, hunger, fatigue, and need for rest, as something to overcome rather than something to care for.

The longer I sit with this, the less I believe it is a modern problem, an American problem, or something peculiar to the churches I have known. Paul was already contending with it in the first century.

The believers in Corinth had become impressed with leaders Paul calls, with some sadness and sarcasm, “super-apostles.” They spoke well. They projected strength and confidence. Beside them, Paul seemed unimpressive, and he knew what people were saying. His presence was weak, they said, and his speech amounted to little.

Here was a community learning to trust leaders who appeared untouched by ordinary weakness.

I love how Paul answers them. He does not simply refuse the comparison. He enters it and challenges everything they believe spiritual authority should look like. When the moment comes to list his credentials, he speaks of beatings, shipwrecks, danger, hunger, and sleepless nights. He even tells them about the humiliation of being lowered from a window in a basket to escape a city.

He tells them that Christ’s power is made perfect in weakness, and that he will therefore speak openly about the weakness they find so unimpressive.

In that same letter, Paul does something a modern leader would struggle doing when his credibility is already in question. He tells the Corinthians that he had been burdened beyond his strength, so deeply that he despaired of life itself.

He wrote that down and sent it to the very church that doubted him. This is unheard of in the modern church.

I don’t think Paul was practicing indiscriminate vulnerability. He did not make the congregation responsible for everything happening inside him. But neither did he believe that spiritual authority required him to hide his human weakness.

The reason he gives matters. He says this happened so that he would rely not on himself, but on the God who raises the dead. His honesty was not simply a form of self-expression. It revealed something he believed about God.

Paul allowed them to see how far down he had gone because that was where he learned, again, that he could not raise himself.

Only recently have I begun to hear them as an accusation against the way I have lived. When someone asks how I am doing, I know the acceptable answers. God is good. I am blessed. I am busy, but good. I am hanging in there.

Paul told them he did not think he would survive.

When Devotion Becomes an Excuse

What troubles me most is not the phrase “It’s not about you.” It is what we have built upon it.

A partial truth becomes a theology. That theology begins to shape a culture. Once it has shaped the culture, questioning it can sound like questioning Jesus himself.

That is how good things can become harmful. They do not arrive looking obviously false. They settle among truths we already love, and then quietly change the way we understand them.

Writing to the Colossians, Paul describes practices that looked holy: “Do not handle. Do not taste. Do not touch.” They appeared disciplined and devout, but he says they amounted to a self-made religion and a severity toward the body while lacking any real power to change what was happening within a person. (Colossians 2:20-23)

Paul is not condemning discipline, fasting, restraint, or costly obedience. He is warning about treating severity toward the body as though the severity itself were spiritually transforming.

It is possible to be very hard on yourself and call it holiness. It is also possible for that hardness to accomplish very little except teaching you to distrust your own humanity.

Jesus addressed a similar pattern. (Mark 7:9-13)

There was a practice in his day by which a person could declare money devoted to God. The act itself could be good and sincere. But it could also become a way to avoid using that money to care for aging parents.

Jesus was not condemning generosity toward God. He was condemning a religious tradition that allowed devotion to God to become an excuse for neglecting parents a person was responsible to honor and care for.

“You nullify the word of God by your tradition,” he said (Mark 7:13).

A religious act had become a way to avoid an ordinary obligation of love. Devotion to God was being used to excuse disobedience toward the very people God had commanded him to care for.

We Focused On The Towel

Consider what the church has done with servant leadership.

Christians did not need a modern theory of leadership to learn that authority should take the form of service. Jesus had already told his disciples that greatness in his kingdom would look unlike greatness among the rulers of the nations. The first would become last, and the greatest would become the servant of all.

When the language of servant leadership entered the modern church, we welcomed it because it sounded so much like Jesus. In many ways, it gave us a needed correction. It challenged leadership built around power, status, recognition, and personal ambition. It reminded us that Christian authority should bend low rather than stand above.

But somewhere along the way, service became more than the posture of a leader. It became an expectation that the leader would always give more, carry more, absorb more, and need less. There is a larger conversation to be had about what this model has produced in the church, both for good and for harm. That probably deserves its own reflection. For now, I want to stay with the image we return to most often: Jesus with a towel.

John tells us that Jesus knew the Father had given all things into his hands, that he had come from God, and that he was returning to God. Knowing this, he rose from supper, took a towel, and began washing the disciples’ feet (John 13:3–5).

His service came from a settled knowledge of who he was. He knew where he had come from. He knew where he was going. He knew what the Father had placed in his hands. Jesus did not serve in order to become loved. He served because he already knew that he was.

We kept the towel, but too often we left that assurance behind.

We taught people to pour themselves out without first helping them know that they belonged to the Father, that they were loved before they became useful, and that their worth was not measured by how much they could carry. Then we became puzzled when service left them anxious, resentful, exhausted, or afraid to stop.

A servant who does not know that he is first a beloved child may slowly begin serving as though he were working for his life. The problem is not service, sacrifice, obedience, or humility. Jesus calls us to all of them. The problem begins when service is separated from the love from which it is meant to flow.

We ask people to deny themselves, but we do not always remind them that the Father knows what they need. Biblical self-denial is not the denial that we are creatures. It is the surrender of self-rule, not the pretense that we have no bodies, grief, limits, or need for care.

Jesus does not call us to make ourselves the center of the world, but neither does he ask us to pretend that we are not human. He does not ask us to deny that we are tired, wounded, hungry, lonely, or afraid. He asks us to bring all of that into his presence and under his loving rule.

The New Testament never treats dependence upon God as independence from other people. Paul tells the Galatians to bear one another’s burdens, and only a few verses later says that each person must carry his own load. He does not seem troubled by the tension. Some responsibilities belong to us, and some burdens are too heavy to carry alone. Both are true. We are responsible for our lives, and we need one another.

This is also the Paul who learned to be content in every circumstance and still thanked the Philippians for sending him help. His contentment did not make him self-sufficient, and he did not treat receiving care as a failure of faith. He allowed himself to be helped and received their generosity with gratitude.

Somewhere along the way, many of us began to believe that this kind of need was beneath spiritual leadership. We confused dependence upon God with requiring very little from anyone else. But the body of Christ does not work that way. God often cares for us through other people, and receiving that care is not a lesser form of faithfulness.

The one who washes feet must also be willing, at times, to let someone else wash his. We made the towel holy, but in doing so we sometimes made receiving care feel unholy.

The Cistern Has a Crack

I do not have a remedy to offer, and I have become wary of anyone who offers one too quickly. This problem expresses itself differently in every church, ministry, family, and person. There is no simple program that will fix it. There is no Have a New Church by Friday, nor should there be. What took years to form in us will take time, honesty, and a different way of living to undo.

But I have come to believe that we cannot stop at telling tired people to rest.

Rest matters. Sometimes it is where God begins. Elijah slept and ate before God offered him explanation, correction, or direction. His exhaustion was not treated as a spiritual failure. God cared for his body before asking him to move forward.

Still, rest by itself is not enough when the beliefs that created the exhaustion remain untouched.

We continue to offer retreats and sabbaticals to men and women whose deepest trouble is not fatigue alone. Their trouble is that they have been given a way of following Jesus that leaves little room to receive anything from anyone. They may step away for a season, recover some energy, and then return to the same expectations, fears, and theology that emptied them in the first place.

The cistern has a crack in it. We can keep filling it, or we can begin attending to the crack.

I do not know that there is one answer, but I do believe there are better questions. These are not questions I am offering from a distance. They are questions I have had to sit with myself, usually later than I should have.

If you are a leader, who is permitted to see you tired—not hear about it afterward, once you have recovered and turned it into a story, but see it while it is happening?

What do you believe would happen if you said no? Follow that fear as far as you can. Is it truly a theological conviction, or might it be an old wound wearing theological clothing?

When you teach people to deny themselves, what are you teaching them to do with their bodies, their grief, and their limits?

Is there someone in your ministry whose faithfulness you admire, but whose exhaustion you have quietly accepted as the necessary cost of that faithfulness?

And this is the question I find hardest:

Do you actually believe God wants you well, or only useful?

That question hit me harder than I expected.

By well, I do not mean untouched by suffering, protected from grief, or spared every costly act of obedience. Scripture promises none of those things. I mean loved as a person and not merely valued as an instrument. I mean that God is concerned with what he is forming in us, not only with what he can accomplish through us.

I have spent much of my life believing that God loves me. I am less certain that I have always believed he cares what serving him costs me.

Somewhere beneath the language of calling, sacrifice, and surrender, I have sometimes believed that usefulness was the clearest evidence of faithfulness. If something in me broke along the way, perhaps that was simply the price of obedience.

I no longer think that question can be dismissed so easily.

There is a difference between suffering because we are following Jesus and suffering because we have accepted demands Jesus never made. There is a difference between laying down our lives in love and living as though our lives have no value apart from what they produce for others.

I do not always know where that line is. That is part of what makes this difficult. Some forms of faithfulness are costly. Some seasons genuinely require more of us than we think we can give. But not every burden is a cross, and not every demand placed upon us comes from God.

That is why I keep returning to the question.

Do I believe God cares for the person who serves, or only for the service that person provides?

And if I truly believe he cares for the person, then something about the way we lead, serve, rest, and receive care will have to change.

Before It Reaches the Body

Others have gone further down this road than I have. Peter Scazzero has spent decades teaching that emotional maturity cannot be separated from spiritual maturity. I believe he has been naming much of what I am trying to say here, though with clearer practices for living differently.

I confess that I am often tempted to resist practices. Insight is easier. I can understand something, write about it, and still avoid changing the way I live.

But a distorted theology is not corrected by insight alone. It requires another way of living—one in which we learn to tell the truth, accept our limits, receive care, and remain present to God and to one another.

There is more to say, and what comes next is more personal, because before any of this becomes an argument about theology or leadership, it is a person lying awake in the dark.

It is a pastor, a mother, a caregiver, or a leader awake at three in the morning with a chest that will not loosen, wondering whether their faith has failed.

That person, if I am honest, has often been me.

This is where I want to go next, because I have learned something I did not expect: the body does not always wait for the mind to understand what is happening. It responds to fear, grief, pressure, exhaustion, and threat before we have found words for any of it.

The body is not the enemy, but neither is it the final authority. It is part of the person God made and part of the person Christ came to redeem.

It is also part of the person we have too often neglected in the name of faithfulness.

To be continued.

PART 3

A recent piece in RELEVANT Magazine stirred something deeper in me, something I have been wrestling with for a while now.

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I want to ask you to stick with me through this one. Parts of it may feel counterintuitive—that is exactly why I am still wrestling with it myself. But I think there is something here we need to look at honestly, even if it costs us a story we have loved.

The piece looked back on a period of time when Rick Warren got much of the American church reading the same book. Twelve thousand congregations, many of them from traditions that agreed on almost nothing, spent forty days wrestling with the same question: What on earth am I here for?

It grieves that we could not do it again today. We have fractured, sorted ourselves by politics, retreated into tribes, and lost the ability to share a spiritual conversation across the lines that divide us.

I read it twice, and I don’t want to argue with the grief being expressed—something has been lost.

But here is where it turned counterintuitive for me. I found myself wondering whether the unity we remember was actually as healthy as it felt. Just because a lot of people agree on something doesn’t mean everything underneath is okay. Sometimes an idea catches on because it speaks to a real problem or felt need. The Purpose Driven Life did that. But sometimes we forget that by solving one problem we create another.

The central message of the book—that life is not centered on our own desires or ambitions—confronted the self-centeredness of American Christianity. “It’s not about you.” It reminded us that God was not a supporting character in the story of our own fulfillment. We needed that correction, and many of us still do.

But that sentence also landed inside churches already filled with people who had been taught to disappear. Pastors believed their calling required them to be endlessly available. Mothers mistook having limits for being selfish. Leaders learned that the holiest person in the room was the one who needed the least. Volunteers could say yes to everyone except their own bodies.

So perhaps we were united, but some of us were united around a way of following Jesus that slowly made our humanity feel like an obstacle to holiness.

Let me be clear about this post. Rick Warren was right. The gospel does not revolve around you or me. Christianity dethrones the self and confronts the endless human impulse to make God, the church, and everyone around us serve the project of our own importance.

It’s not about you. True.

But the church has a habit of taking a needed correction and turning it into an entire theology. A true thing, asked to carry more than it was meant to carry, will eventually bend into something untrue.

“It’s not about you” was never supposed to mean your grief does not matter. It was never supposed to mean your body can be ignored. It was never supposed to mean faithful people have no limits, no wounds, no hunger, and no need to be cared for.

Yet in a church that had already learned to distrust the body and reward self-erasure, that is often what we heard: to be faithful is to need nothing.

And here is the contradiction we rarely name out loud.

The same church that calls us the body of Christ also quietly teaches us to need nothing. But Paul’s whole picture of that body runs on need. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” A body whose members need nothing from each other is not a body at all. It is a collection of parts performing wholeness at one another.

We were told we were made for community. Then we were formed to become the one person in the room who required none of it.

You Don’t Quite Believe Me, Do You?

I can feel the resistance, because I felt it too. Surely it isn’t that serious. Surely this is one man over-reading his own bad season.

I wish it were.

Here is what the research keeps finding. In one national study, pastors reporting excellent mental and emotional well-being had fallen from around forty percent a decade earlier to roughly one in seven. The number who said they had true friends had dropped to fewer than one in five. Read that again. The people we ask to shepherd our souls are, by their own account, among the loneliest people in the room.

And then the sentence I cannot get out of my head. In that same body of research, nearly one in five pastors said they had contemplated self-harm or suicide within the past year.

One in five.

These are not faithless people. These are the ones who showed up, who carried us, who preached the sermon on the morning their own marriage was quietly coming apart. We built a world where the shepherd is not allowed to be a sheep, and then we are surprised when the shepherds are dying in the dark.

But it does not stop at exhaustion. Because the same instinct that tells a tired pastor to hide his need also teaches an institution to hide its wounds. A church that cannot say I am hurting will eventually become a church that cannot say we did harm.

We have watched it happen. Denomination after denomination, ministry after ministry: reports of abuse buried, survivors disbelieved, reputations protected while people were sacrificed. One investigation into a single denomination documented hundreds of accused leaders and hundreds of victims across two decades—and the more recent chapter is not repentance but retreat, with leaders now calling the reckoning itself overblown.

I am not telling you this to pile on the church. I love the church. I have given my life to it.

I am telling you because the burnout and the scandals are not two separate problems. They grow from the same soil: a culture that cannot tolerate need, cannot admit wound, cannot bear to be seen as anything less than fine. The suppression that hollows out the faithful is the very same suppression that hides the predator. When no one is allowed to be broken, everyone learns to pretend—and pretending is exactly the cover that darkness needs.

That is why I cannot treat “it’s not about you” as a harmless sentence anymore.

How This Plays Out

The pastor, or ministry leader, stands up and pours themselves out. They have been formed to believe the call is death to self, so they give past empty, week after week. When someone asks how they are doing, they say blessed, because somewhere along the way they learned that a shepherd who needs tending is a shepherd who has failed.

Across from them sits the congregation, and the volunteers, formed by the same sentence. They have learned to receive from a leader who appears to need nothing, so they never learn to tend them. Why would you feed someone who never admits they are hungry?

Then they carry the lesson home into their own lives. The volunteer serves until she is hollow. The lay leader cannot say no. The faithful person mistakes exhaustion for obedience. It is not about you, so they do not stop, ask, or receive.

Two people, living under the same half-truth, both running on empty.

And here is the part we rarely say out loud: each one’s emptiness quietly requires the other’s.

Codependency Wearing a Cross

This is not merely a personality clash. It is not weak leadership or an ungrateful congregation. It is a system, and it runs on mutual self-erasure.

The pastor needs to be needed because it is how he knows he matters. The congregation needs him to be inexhaustible because if he is human, they may have to tend him, and no one ever taught them how.

So both sides collude, usually without realizing it. They keep the body exiled. They keep everyone pouring and no one being poured into. And instead of stopping, we add more services, more programs, more churches, until everyone is exhausted. The whole arrangement is held together by a sentence that was true but only one side of the same coin.

This is why the church is so good at burning people out on both ends of the room. We do not burn people out only by teaching them lies. Sometimes we burn them out by handing them a truth with its other half cut off.

Be a servant, with no way to receive. Deny yourself, with no self left to bring. It’s not about you, until there is nothing left of you and everyone calls it faithfulness.

And here is what should stop us cold: none of this came from Jesus.

The most poured-out life in history was also a life of constant withdrawal. He slipped away to lonely places to pray. He got away with his Father again and again, sometimes while the crowds were still calling his name. He let women provide for his ministry. He slept through the storm. He wept. He asked his closest friends to stay awake with him in the garden.

The Son of God did not model a self with nothing left. He modeled a self that kept returning to the Source.

We did not inherit the empty tank from him. We built it ourselves and hung his name on it.

The Other Half of This Truth

There is another sentence, and the church learned the first one so well that we forgot there was a second.

It’s not about you.

But God is wholehearted about you.

The gospel dethrones you without dehumanizing you. It tells you that you are not the center of the universe, but it never tells you that you are disposable.

The servant is fed at the table. Elijah is given bread before he is given an assignment. Jesus receives before he pours out. The one who serves is also, somewhere, being served. The one who carries is also, somewhere, being carried.

Otherwise, the pouring is only a slow way of dying.

This is the tension we have not held very well: decentering and dignity, surrender and sustaining grace, being emptied and being filled.

You cannot cut the second half off and keep the first half safe. Alone, the first half turns lethal.

I Ran the Machine

I did not learn this from a book.

For years, I led ministries whose entire reason to exist was care. First, a Christian camp and conference center, where whole summers were built around pouring into kids and young staff gave everything they had for weeks at a time. Then a Christian foster care agency, where we took in some of the most wounded children in the state and stood beside the foster parents, house parents, case workers, and social workers who opened their lives and homes to that wound.

My job was never only to care for the vulnerable. It was also to care for the ones doing the caring.

And I watched them burn.

Some of the most Christlike people I have ever known—counselors, house parents, foster moms, social workers, and leaders—gave until there was nothing left and called the emptiness faithfulness.

“It’s not about you.” They believed it. They lived it. And it hollowed them out.

I could see it happening, and I could not stop it, because I was running on the same fuel.

I was the one at the top of a machine built to pour out, quietly convinced that my own need to be tended was a weakness I could not afford. I was a CEO of care with nothing left in the tank, leading the pouring while burning where no one could see.

That is how I eventually found myself awake at 2:18 in the morning, theologically certain and physically undone, convinced that the trembling in my chest was proof that I had failed.

What if it was not failure?

What if it was simply my body telling the truth my theology would not let me say?

I cannot keep doing this.

That is where I want to take you next, because before this becomes a system, it is a person in the dark. A pastor. A mother. A leader. A caregiver. A faithful Christian whose body has finally stopped cooperating with the story they have been telling.

And it turns out your nervous system does not ask your theology for permission.

“Come to me, all who are weary and burdened.”

Jesus said that to the faithful, to the ones already carrying, to the servants.

He did not say, Try harder.

He did not say, Need less.

He said, Come.

To be continued.

PART 2

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of men signed a document built on a radical assumption about human nature: that people could govern themselves.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, it is worth asking not only what the founders built, but what they believed had to be true for it to endure.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (11 years later) are remarkable achievements. They created a framework for ordered liberty that has endured wars, economic hardship, political division, and profound cultural change.

What I find fascinating is that what they called “self-evident” (Declaration of Independence) had rarely, if ever, been attempted at that scale in the structure of government.

They were declaring as obvious something much of human history had never organized itself around: that all people possess dignity, that rights come from God rather than the state, and that government exists to protect those rights rather than create them.

But frameworks do not sustain themselves. They depend on something deeper.

John Adams wrote: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I do not believe Adams was arguing for a theocracy. And I am certainly not arguing that faith can be coerced by law, taught by mandate, or imposed by the state. I think Adams was making an observation about human nature.

The Constitution can restrain the power of government It cannot restrain the impulses of the human heart.
It can establish checks and balances. It cannot teach humility.
It can protect liberty. It cannot produce the kind of person who knows what to do with liberty once it has been given.

The less a people can govern themselves, the more they will demand to be governed by someone else.

Every system of government eventually answers the same question: Who governs the human person? A constitutional republic begins with a remarkable assumption. It assumes that ordinary men and women possess enough virtue to exercise freedom responsibly. The Founders were not naïve about sin. They understood ambition, pride, and the corrupting nature of power, which is precisely why they divided power so carefully. But beneath the architecture of the Constitution was another conviction: liberty cannot survive unless enough people possess the character to sustain it.

Our modern ears may find all of this surprising. We have grown accustomed to separating faith from public life and virtue from citizenship, as though they belong to different conversations.

But that would have seemed foreign to many in 1776.

Consider John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton and the only ordained minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. Just weeks before the Declaration was adopted, Witherspoon preached a sermon entitled The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men. He did not urge the colonies to trust merely in military strength or political resolve. He called them to humility before God, reminding them that the greatest battles are often fought within the human heart.

The question isn’t merely who governs a nation.

The deeper question is who governs the passions of the people who make up that nation.

A constitution can restrain the power of government, but it cannot restrain the passions of its citizens. It cannot teach humility to the proud, forgiveness to the wounded, patience to the angry, or self-control to the impulsive. Those virtues must be cultivated long before they are ever reflected in public life.

Which brings me back to one of the most overlooked statements Jesus ever made.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

If I’m honest, I don’t naturally associate meekness with flourishing. Our culture celebrates confidence, influence, certainty, and strength. Meekness sounds passive by comparison.

And maybe that is why some readers may already be skeptical of this argument.

But the longer I follow Christ, the more convinced I become that we have misunderstood the word.

Jesus was not weak. He was impossible to manipulate, impossible to intimidate, and impossible to provoke into abandoning His Father’s will. He confronted hypocrisy with remarkable courage while extending astonishing mercy to those who knew they needed it. He possessed authority unlike anyone who has ever lived, yet He never used it to exalt Himself.

That isn’t weakness.

It is strength willingly surrendered to the Father.

Perhaps that is what freedom has always required—not louder voices or stronger personalities, but men and women who have first learned to surrender themselves to God.

When I look at the barriers to meekness, I don’t see merely private struggles. I see the very things that fracture families, churches, organizations, and eventually nations: pride, fear, anger, insecurity, resentment, and the relentless need to control. Those battles are not fought first in legislatures. They are fought in the human heart.

The Apostle Paul describes a different kind of life. Love. Joy. Peace. Patience. Kindness. Goodness. Faithfulness. Gentleness. Self-control.

Those are not simply private virtues. They are the qualities that make self-government possible.

The Founders gave us a remarkable framework for ordered liberty. But no constitution, however brilliant, can create the kind of people it requires.

Only Christ can do that.

Perhaps that is why Adams’ words still matter. And perhaps that is why Jesus’ words matter even more.

As America celebrates 250 years of independence, I find myself praying a different prayer. Not simply that God would bless our nation, but that He would form us into people who tell the truth, forgive quickly, seek justice humbly, love mercy generously, and walk faithfully with Him.

Because republics do not flourish simply because they have good laws. They flourish because enough ordinary people quietly choose the narrow path of virtue.

John Adams reminded us that liberty requires a moral and religious people.
John Witherspoon reminded us that the deepest battle is over the passions of men.
Jesus showed us the kind of people who can be trusted with freedom.

“Blessed are the meek.”

Perhaps, 250 years after the birth of our nation, recovering that forgotten virtue may be one of the most patriotic acts a Christian can practice.

The Legacy Industry

My father is dying.

Not metaphorically. Not as a theological premise. He is, as I write this, somewhere in that quiet threshold between here and Heaven — and I am thinking about what he left behind.

Not his accomplishments. Not his resume. Not the measurable outputs of a life well-managed.

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I am thinking about the way he moved through a room. The thread of Jesus that ran through everything, even the mess. The people he served without anyone keeping score. The dysfunction he passed down without meaning to — and the grace that somehow ran alongside it like a second river.

I am not thinking about his legacy in the way the books tell you to think about it.

Somewhere along the way, legacy became a project to manage. A fulfillment on “Begin With The End In Mind’ (Stephen Covey)

A brand. A platform. A carefully constructed answer to the question every leadership book eventually asks: How do you want to be remembered?

Walk into any Christian bookstore — or scroll through any faith-adjacent corner of the internet — and you’ll find the genre fully formed. Build your legacy. Define it. Protect it. Leave something behind that outlasts you.

The framing is almost always the same: you are the architect. Legacy is the building. The question is whether you’ll be intentional enough to design it well before time runs out.

And there’s something in that framing that feels right. Faithful, even. We should think about what we’re leaving behind. We should care about the lives we’re shaping.

But there is an idol hiding in the shadows inside the architecture.

Because the assumption underneath all of it — underneath the eulogies we pre-write in our heads, the Instagram posts we curate, the ways we quietly hope people are watching — is that we are the authors.

That legacy is something we make.

That if we are intentional enough, disciplined enough, faithful enough, we will produce something that endures.

I don’t believe my father ever read a book about legacy. I don’t think he ever once sat down and asked himself how he wanted to be remembered.

But I think he asked — the way all of us ask, in the quiet underneath everything — whether his being here meant something. Whether his life had significance.

That is a different question than legacy. Legacy is forward-facing. It’s about what outlasts you. Significance is interior. It’s the question every human soul asks from the moment they’re old enough to wonder if they matter.

And the answer, I believe, was given to him not at the end but all along. In every person served. Every room made lighter. Every moment he chose the thread over the tangle.

Significance isn’t the fruit of legacy. It’s the soil it grows in.

He just kept showing up. Kept serving. Kept pointing — imperfectly, inconsistently, sometimes at great cost to the people closest to him — toward Jesus.

And here I am. Writing about faith. Writing about fathers. Writing about the nervous system and the soul and the long, slow work of becoming a whole person.

He had no idea he was doing that.

Neither did I — until now.

That’s the thing about legacy no one tells you.

The most enduring things you leave behind are almost never the things you were trying to leave.

The Woman Who Didn’t Know

There is a woman in the Gospel of Mark who never gets a name.

We don’t know where she came from. We don’t know her story. We don’t know if she was a follower of Jesus or simply someone who loved him from a distance, watching what was unfolding and feeling something that couldn’t be reasoned away.

What we know is this: she walked into a room where Jesus was reclining at the table, broke open an alabaster jar of expensive perfume, and poured it over his head.

That’s it. That’s the whole act.

No speech. No explanation. No platform. No ministry strategy. Just a woman, a broken jar, and something that smelled like grief and love and extravagance all at once.

The room erupted. Why this waste? The perfume could have been sold. The money could have gone to the poor. The math didn’t add up. The optics were terrible.

And Jesus said something that should stop every legacy-builder cold.

“Truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her.” — Mark 14:9

Wherever the gospel is preached.

In memory of her.

The most enduring legacy in the New Testament belongs to a woman who never knew she was leaving one.

She didn’t write a book. She didn’t build a ministry. She didn’t disciple twelve people who discipled twelve more. She didn’t have a framework or a platform or a carefully considered answer to the question how do you want to be remembered?

She just loved extravagantly in a moment that called for it.

And Jesus — not she — declared what it meant. Jesus — not she — decided it would last.

She didn’t author her legacy.

She was simply present, with her whole self, in a room where Jesus was.

And that was enough.

This is what the legacy industry gets backwards.

We spend enormous energy trying to control what outlasts us — crafting the message, building the platform, ensuring the impact is measurable and the story is told correctly. And underneath all of that effort is fear dressed up as intentionality:

What if I disappear without leaving a mark?

But the woman with the alabaster jar didn’t leave a mark. She left a fragrance.

And there is a difference.

A mark is something you make deliberately. You press down, you shape, you sign your name.

A fragrance is something that moves through a room without your permission. You can’t control where it goes. You can’t manage who breathes it in. You can’t retrieve it once it’s been released.

She broke the jar. The rest was never hers to hold.

I’ve been thinking about my father this way these past few days.

He didn’t manage his legacy. He wouldn’t have known how to begin. He was too busy showing up — too busy serving people who needed serving, pointing toward Jesus with the imperfect hands he had, loving in the ways he knew and failing in the ways he didn’t.

He is also, for the record, the funniest man I know. Think Clark Griswold — the situations, the chaos, the stories. You would be hard pressed to find a family photo in existence where his middle finger isn’t raised with the grin of a man who refuses to take himself too seriously. That got transmitted too. The laughter. The refusal to perform with dignity when absurdity is clearly the more honest response.

That’s legacy too. Maybe the best kind.

But something got released in all that living.

I can smell it still.

It’s in the way I can’t walk past a person in pain without stopping. It’s in the thread of Jesus I keep reaching for even when everything else feels tangled. It’s in this sentence, right now, written by a son who learned — without ever being taught — that the finish line is worth running toward.

He had no idea he was doing that.

Neither did she.

That’s the point.

The most important things you will ever leave behind are already leaving you.

They are moving through the people who sit at your table, who watch how you handle failure, who notice whether you’re present or not. They are being breathed in by your children before your children have words for what they’re receiving.

You are not the author of that.

You are the jar.

And the only question that really matters is whether you’re willing to be broken open.

What We Actually Transmit

There is a field of science called epigenetics that is quietly rewriting what we thought we knew about inheritance.

For most of human history, we assumed the transmission of traits was simple: genes passed from parent to child, fixed and deterministic, a biological hand of cards dealt at conception. What your parents gave you was what you got.

But epigenetics tells a stranger, more unsettling, more hopeful story.

It turns out that experience — particularly intense experience — can change the way genes are expressed. Not the genes themselves, but whether they speak or stay silent. Trauma, chronic stress, profound loss — these don’t just shape the person who lives through them. Under certain conditions, they shape the generations that follow.

Studies of Holocaust survivors and their children. Research on communities that endured famine. Work with families carrying generational patterns of anxiety, addiction, and attachment disruption — all of it pointing toward the same quiet conclusion:

What your parents carried in their bodies, you may be carrying in yours.

Without a conversation ever happening. Without a single intentional act of transmission.

Just presence. Just proximity. Just the slow, cellular work of living near someone whose nervous system was shaped by things that happened before you were born.

This is not a death sentence. It is an invitation.

Because it means that legacy is mostly what leaks out of us when we aren’t thinking about it — the emotional temperature we carry into a room. The way our body responds when things get hard. Whether the people closest to us feel safe in our presence or subtly braced for something. Whether love in our home feels like oxygen — just there, just available — or like something that has to be earned on difficult terms.

Your children are not primarily learning what you tell them.

They are learning what you are.

And they are learning it below the level of language, in the part of the brain that developed before words existed, in the nervous system that is always asking — always — one quiet question:

Am I safe here?

I know my preoccupied anxious attachment came from somewhere.

I didn’t manufacture it. I didn’t choose it. It arrived in me the way a river arrives in a valley — shaped by terrain that existed long before the water got there.

My parents loved me. I have no doubt of that. But love and attunement are not the same thing, and sometimes the most well-meaning people transmit patterns they never examined because no one ever helped them examine them.

This is what I have come to call secondhand souls.

Not damaged goods. Not broken beyond use. But souls carrying weight that was handed to them — fears, wounds, relational patterns, ways of reading danger into safety and safety into danger — that originated somewhere upstream.

You didn’t choose what came to you.

But you are choosing, right now, what you do with it.

And that choosing — the slow, often painful work of bringing what leaks in you into the light — is one of the most profound acts of legacy a person can undertake.

Not for your reputation.

For the people downstream.

Here is what the science and the Scripture agree on, which is remarkable given how rarely they agree on anything:

The most powerful thing you transmit is not your doctrine. It is not your work ethic. It is not even your faith, in the propositional sense.

It is your presence.

Whether the people in your life — your children, your team, your congregation, your friends — whether they experience you as a regulated, trustworthy, safe harbor. Whether they learn, through sustained exposure to you over time, that love is available and danger is not always around the corner.

Bruce Perry, the trauma researcher, puts it simply: the most important thing a person needs is to be around calm, present, connected people. Not perfect people. Not theologically sophisticated people.

Calm. Present. Connected.

That’s the inheritance that changes nervous systems. That’s the inheritance that interrupts generational patterns. That’s the inheritance that, downstream, produces people who can sit with others in their pain without flinching — because someone once sat with them.

My father is Clark Griswold. Chaos follows him like a second shadow.

But underneath the chaos — underneath the middle finger in photos and the absolute commitment to beingg the “class clown” — there was something steady.

Jesus was the thread.

And a thread, it turns out, is enough.

Because what I absorbed from my father — what leaked through all the mess and the laughter and the dysfunction — was this:

You keep going. You keep serving. You keep pointing toward something larger than yourself even when your own life is a beautiful disaster.

I didn’t learn that from a conversation.

I learned it the way you learn a language in the house where you grow up.

Without knowing you were learning it at all.

You Plant. You Don’t Control the Harvest.

Paul writes to a church that is arguing about who deserves the credit.

Some say they follow Paul. Some say Apollos. The factions have formed, the scorecards are out, and everyone is trying to assign legacy to the right leader.

Paul’s response is almost impatient:

“I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” — 1 Corinthians 3:6-7

Neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything.

That is not false modesty. That is a theological statement about how the kingdom actually works.

You plant in soil you didn’t make. You water with rain you didn’t summon. And then — this is the part that should simultaneously humble and free you — you walk away. Because the growing is not yours to control.

Jesus says it even more starkly in John 12.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

The grain does not get to watch the harvest.

The grain goes into the ground and disappears. What comes up from that disappearance — the fruit, the abundance, the life — belongs to another season entirely. A season the grain will not see.

This is the structure of kingdom legacy.

Hidden. Sacrificial. Oriented entirely toward a future you will not manage or witness or take credit for.

This is why the legacy industry feels slightly off even when its intentions are good.

It is built on visibility. On harvest you can measure and photograph and report back on. On fruit you can point to and say — I did that. That came from me.

But the grain doesn’t point to anything.

The grain just falls.

And trusts the Gardener.

My father is falling right now.

And I find myself less concerned with what he accomplished than with what he released — all those years of showing up, of serving without strategy, of keeping Jesus as the thread through a life that was never quite as tidy as he might have wished.

That’s already in the ground.

Already growing in places he will never see.

Already growing in me.

What If What I’ve Already Transmitted Is Broken?

This is the question underneath every other question in this piece.

You can nod along to the unnamed woman. You can appreciate the epigenetics. You can feel the weight of the grain falling into the ground.

And then the quieter, harder thought arrives:

But what about what I’ve already passed on?

The anxiety your child carries that looks uncomfortably familiar. The distance in a relationship that you can trace, if you’re honest, back to patterns you brought into it. The ways your own secondhand soul — the weight you received without asking — got transferred before you even knew you were carrying it.

What then?

This is where the legacy conversation almost always goes silent.

The books don’t have a chapter for it. The framework doesn’t account for it. The eulogy-writing exercise assumes you still have time to course-correct, to build something better, to leave on a higher note than you arrived.

But some of us are sitting with transmission that already happened.

Words that landed wrong. Years of emotional absence. Patterns of anxiety or anger or withdrawal that shaped small people during the years when small people are most shapeable.

And the weight of that is not small.

But here is what I keep returning to, sitting in this threshold moment with my father.

He was not a clean transmission either.

The dysfunction was real. The attachment wounds were real. The patterns that I have spent years — with God’s help, with good people, with honest prayer — trying to understand and interrupt, those were real.

And yet.

Grace was also moving.

Not around the mess. Not despite the mess, exactly. More like — through it. The way a river doesn’t go around rock but finds the way forward anyway, carrying sediment and smoothing edges and arriving somewhere it couldn’t have predicted when it started.

My father’s legacy is not the clean version. It is the whole version — the laughter and the wound and the middle finger and the stubborn thread of Jesus that refused to let go even when everything else was unraveling.

And somehow — somehow — that whole version is more life-giving than a sanitized one would have been.

Because it is true.

The God of Scripture is not in the business of clean legacies.

He is in the business of redemption.

Abraham lied. Jacob deceived. David murdered. Peter denied.

And the thread kept moving.

Not because the failures didn’t matter. They mattered enormously — to the people who bore the cost of them. But grace is not the erasure of what was broken. Grace is the insistence that broken things are not the final word.

Elijah collapsed under a tree and wanted to die. God didn’t lecture him about his legacy. God gave him food and sleep and the quiet company of an angel and said — get up. The journey is too much for you. But it is not over.

The journey is too much for you. But it is not over.

If you have passed something broken into someone you love — and most of us have, because most of us received something broken and didn’t know what to do with it — the work is not to rewrite what already happened.

The work is to become, today, someone who interrupts the pattern.

Not perfectly. Not all at once.

But honestly. Humbly. With the kind of presence that says — I see what has been. And I am not finished becoming.

That, too, is transmitted.

The willingness to keep growing is one of the most powerful things you can pass to another person. It tells them that the story is not fixed. That people can change. That grace is not just a theological concept but a lived reality — something that moves through actual human beings in actual human lives.

Your children — your people — need to see that.

Not your perfection.

Your repentance. Your resilience. Your refusal to let the broken thing be the last thing.

The Freedom of Faithful Obscurity

Here is what I know about my father’s legacy.

He didn’t plan it. He didn’t manage it. He didn’t sit down at any point in his remarkable, chaotic, finger-raising life and ask himself how he wanted to be remembered.

He just kept going.

Kept serving. Kept laughing. Kept pointing — imperfectly, stubbornly, with the full irreverent humanity of a man who never quite took himself as seriously as the moment seemed to require — toward Jesus.

And that was enough.

Not because it was tidy. Not because the transmission was clean or the patterns were healthy or the family photo album tells a straightforward story of godly faithfulness handed down through the generations.

But because the thread held.

And threads, it turns out, are enough.

The freedom I want to offer you — the freedom I am finding myself, sitting in these strange, sacred days of waiting — is this:

You are not the author of your legacy. You never were.

The most enduring things you will leave behind are already leaving you — moving through the people who watch how you handle failure, who notice whether you show up or disappear, who learn from the texture of your presence what love actually feels like in a human body.

You cannot fully control what gets transmitted.

You cannot retrieve what has already been released.

And you do not have to.

Because there is a Gardener.

And He is better at this than you are.

He is the one who takes the grain that falls into the ground and disappears — the moment of extravagant love that no one planned, the thread of Jesus through a beautifully dysfunctional life, the laughter at a table, the middle finger in the photograph, the stubborn refusal to let go of hope even when hope seemed unreasonable —

And He makes something grow from it.

Something you will not see. Something you could not have designed. Something that will be breathed in by people you will never meet, in rooms you will never enter, in generations that will carry what you carried without knowing where it came from.

That is not a small thing.

That is the kingdom.

So here is the only question that finally matters.

Not how do you want to be remembered?

But are you willing to be broken open?

Are you willing to be present — really present, not performing presence but inhabiting it — in the ordinary moments of ordinary days?

Are you willing to let Jesus be the thread, even when everything else is unraveling?

Are you willing to fall into the ground and trust the Gardener with the harvest?

Because if you are —

The fragrance is already leaving you.

And it is going exactly where it needs to go.

For my dad. Who never read a book about legacy.
Who didn’t need to.

What if I asked you what confession and repentance have actually felt like in your life?

Not what you know they are supposed to be. Not what you would say in a Bible study. Not the right answer. I mean your actual experience of them.

For a lot of us, they have not felt life-giving.

They have felt costly. Threatening. Exposing. Maybe even like a kind of death.

And I think there are reasons for that.

Why the heart drifts

Life has a way of numbing you. Not usually in dramatic ways, but through the slow wear of disappointment, stress, unprocessed grief, and changing circumstances. But hardship is not the only danger. Success can do its own kind of damage. Prosperity can make a person forgetful. It can dull dependence. It can convince you that fullness is the same thing as faithfulness. That is why Moses warned Israel in Deuteronomy 6 not to forget the Lord when they entered houses they did not build and enjoyed vineyards they did not plant. Success has a way of making the heart drift just as surely as sorrow does.

Over time, the heart can drift without you realizing it. It can harden in places that once felt tender. And before long, the very things that actually bring life begin to feel costly and exposing.

I am beginning to think confession and repentance are two of the very things that feel most threatening to a heart that has grown used to hiding.

Not because they are lifeless, but because they confront pride. They expose self-protection. They interrupt the private arrangements we make with ourselves so we do not have to deal honestly with what is true. And that can feel like death before it feels like freedom.

The older I get, the more I realize that my struggle with confession is not merely theological. It is deeply relational. It has to do with trust. It has to do with fear. It has to do with whether I believe that when I come into the light, I will be met there by mercy or by something harder.

By confession, I mean telling the truth about what is mine.

By repentance, I mean not only naming it, but turning from it. Leaving behind what cannot give life and returning again to God.

Simple words. Hard work.

Hiding isn’t harmless

These things matter because hiddenness is never harmless.

Scripture is blunt about that. John tells us that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. James tells us to confess our sins to one another and pray for one another that we may be healed. Proverbs says the one who conceals his sin does not prosper, but the one who confesses and forsakes it finds mercy. David says that when he kept silent, his bones wasted away.

That is not religious exaggeration. That is what hiddenness does.

What stays buried does not stay still. It leaks. It distorts. It hardens. It touches prayer, marriage, friendship, parenting, leadership—everything. Concealment may preserve your image for a while, but it will starve love over time.

A marriage cannot stay tender where nobody owns what is theirs. A family cannot grow healthy where self-protection always wins. Children know more than we think they know. They know whether humility lives in the room. They know whether truth is safe there. Those closest to us always feel the difference between sorrow and self-pity, between honesty and evasion, between being wrong and being unreachable.

Where truth cannot be spoken, distance grows.

It may be quiet distance. It may look respectable. It may even be dressed up as maturity.

It is still distance.

Why honesty feels dangerous

Still, even knowing all of that, confession can feel like a terrible idea.

Part of the reason is that we never come to confession with our sin alone. We come with our history. We come with fear. We come with all the places in us that have learned to survive by tightening, reaching, hiding, managing, withdrawing.

Some of us move quickly toward confession because distance feels unbearable and we want reassurance almost as much as forgiveness. Others hold back, soften what is true, or disappear behind careful language because exposure feels dangerous. Some over-explain. Some minimize. Some flood the room with words. Some go cold and quiet. We do not all hide the same way, but most of us know how to hide.

And it is not only attachment.

Sometimes what makes confession hard is not only pride. Sometimes it is what has happened to you. Past trauma can make exposure feel dangerous. Grief can leave you emotionally thin and easier to overwhelm. Loss can make honesty feel costly because you do not feel like you can survive one more hard thing. And if you have ever told the truth and been shamed, dismissed, preached at, or quietly treated differently afterward, that stays with you. It should not surprise us, then, that repentance can be deeply right and still feel deeply threatening.

That does not excuse our refusal to tell the truth. But it does explain why truth can feel dangerous to speak.

Scripture speaks to this so well. It speaks of broken hearts, crushed spirits, sorrow that overwhelms, and bodies worn down by silence. And it speaks of a God who does not despise the contrite heart, who is near to the brokenhearted, who does not break a bruised reed. Confession, then, is not merely about moral accuracy. It is about bringing what is hidden and fractured into the presence of the One who sees clearly and does not turn away.

Reassurance beneath confession

If I am honest, part of what I often want in confession is reassurance.

I do not just want to tell the truth. I want the distance to close. I want the room to soften. I want some sign that honesty will not cost me everything. I want to know that if I step into the light, I will not be left standing there alone.

That longing is not trivial. It is human.

But the gospel does something hard and good here. It puts that longing in its proper place.

The first reassurance of confession is not the immediate comfort of another person. It is the mercy of God. It is the promise that if we confess, He forgives. It is the promise that the light is not the place where belonging ends, but the place where belonging is restored in truth.

That matters, because when I need another person’s response in order to survive confession, then confession starts carrying too much weight. It becomes truth-telling, pleading, managing, grasping, and trying to quiet fear all at once. It becomes overloaded. And then the whole moment starts to bend under needs it was never meant to hold.

We are not meant to drag confession to the room like a hostage negotiation.

We are meant to bring it first under the mercy of God.

The kind of presence truth needs

But there is another side to this.

What kind of person am I when someone else is trying to tell the truth?

The older I get, the more I realize it is possible to care about truth and still be unsafe. It is possible to speak clearly about sin and still make honesty harder, not easier. It is possible to be theologically right and relationally untrustworthy.

I do not want to become that kind of man.

I want to be the kind of person who can still call sin what it is without losing tenderness. The kind of person who does not require sorrow to perform before taking it seriously. The kind of person who does not turn another person’s honesty into suspicion, gossip, or a permanent label.

Maybe that is one reason so many people stay hidden. Not because they do not know confession matters, but because they are not sure what will happen to them if they actually tell the truth.

Closer to home

And this does not begin somewhere far away.

It begins very near.

It begins in marriages. In friendships. In homes. In leadership. In small groups. In those ordinary moments when another person is trying, however clumsily, to tell the truth.

It begins with the kind of person I am when honesty enters the room.

I am learning that spiritual maturity is not only about knowing how to confess, but about becoming a person to whom confession can be brought without fear of being mishandled.

That does not mean becoming soft on sin. It does not mean blurring what is holy. It does mean refusing to use truth as a weapon. It means learning how to hold honesty with both gravity and gentleness. It means remembering that confession is often spoken by frightened people, ashamed people, grieving people, people whose voices shake while they are trying to step into the light.

The church should know how to receive such people, because the gospel does.

God does not bless our sin. But neither does He turn away from those who bring it to Him in sorrow. He forgives. He cleanses. He restores. Paul even says that a person brought low by sorrow must be comforted and loved, lest he be swallowed up by too much grief. That is not softness. That is Christian maturity. It means the community of Christ is called not only to confront, but also to console.

My own struggle

I think part of my own struggle is that I know how much courage confession asks of a person. I know how vulnerable it is to step into the light. And I know how easily that vulnerability can be mishandled—especially when sorrow is raw and words do not come cleanly. That is why I am coming to see that Christian maturity is not only about learning how to confess. It is also about learning how to receive confession in a way that reflects the heart of God.

Not with indulgence.
Not with harshness.
Not with carelessness.
Not with control.

But with a steadiness that can bear the weight of truth, and a mercy that does not turn away from the one who speaks it.

That is the kind of presence I want to offer more faithfully than I often have.

And, if I am honest, it is also the kind of presence I long for when I am trying to tell the truth myself.

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For a long time, if someone asked me what was on my bucket list, I didn’t have much of an answer.

I had one. Not a list. A bucket.

I wanted to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

That was enough for me. I didn’t need a list of destinations or accomplishments. I just didn’t want to waste my life. I wanted to stand before God someday and not feel like I had mishandled what He placed in my hands.

There’s nothing wrong with that desire.

But underneath it, if I’m honest, was something else.

A question that has followed me since I was young:

Am I Enough? Have I done enough?

Not enough to impress anyone.
Not enough to build something impressive.

Enough to stand before God.
Enough to feel secure.
Enough to finally stop scanning my life for gaps. (This was exhausting by the way).

That question has a way of disguising itself as wisdom. It can sound like commitment or clarity about my calling. It can even pass for humility.

But over time, I began to see that it wasn’t humility driving me.

It was fear.

At the time, none of this felt unhealthy. It felt strong. It felt disciplined. It felt like the kind of seriousness you’re supposed to bring to faith.

Only later did I begin to notice how little room I had for weakness — my own or anyone else’s. And that was harder to face than fatigue.

Failure felt heavier than it should have. Rest felt slightly irresponsible. Affirmation didn’t quite settle; it just raised the bar for the next day.

I had spiritual language for all of it. Stewardship. Faithfulness. Responsibility.

But underneath that language was something more fragile.

Somewhere along the way, I had come to believe — not doctrinally, not consciously — that grace may have brought me into the family, but faithfulness was what kept me there.

I would never have said that out loud.

But it is how I often lived.

The Orphaned Posture

The Church talks often about sacrifice. It should. The way of Christ is not casual. It involves dying to self, carrying burdens, loving when it costs.

What we don’t always talk about is how easily sacrifice can turn into proof. Especially in environments that quietly depend on people who don’t know how to stop.

The most responsible get more responsibility.
The most available get more requests.
The ones who rarely complain become the ones everyone leans on.

And if you’re wired to carry weight well, it can feel like purpose.

Until you realize you don’t know how to put it down without feeling guilty.

That’s when I began to recognize something I hadn’t named before.

Not rebellion. Not unbelief.

Something closer to survival.

An orphaned posture toward God.

When Scripture speaks about orphans, it does so with tenderness. An orphan is not condemned. He is vulnerable. He survives by reading the room. He learns quickly that security depends on staying valuable. Trust is cautious. Belonging feels fragile.

When that posture migrates into our spiritual life, it reshapes how we imagine God.

We may affirm adoption on paper.

But internally, we picture Him evaluating.

Watching.

Measuring.

We assume His approval fluctuates with our consistency. We hear passages about obedience and quietly translate them into performance reviews. We hear “well done” not as celebration but as the verdict we hope to secure.

And that subtle shift really does change everything.

Because if belonging is not settled, obedience becomes strategy. Holiness becomes risk management. Confession becomes damage control.

We may look faithful and still feel slightly outside.

Before Jesus ever does anything impressive, the Father speaks.

Not after the miracles.
Not after the crowds.
Not after obedience is tested publicly.

Before.

He steps into the water, largely unnoticed. And the voice comes:

“This is My beloved Son.”

It’s not a promotion. It’s not feedback.

It’s relationship.

Because most of us don’t struggle with believing that God forgives sinners. We struggle with believing He actually delights in His children.

The orphan spirit doesn’t deny salvation. It just keeps a little distance. It imagines God as committed but reserved. Loving but watchful. Patient but slightly disappointed.

So we keep performing.

Not because we hate Him. Because we aren’t sure He enjoys us.

Adoption language in Scripture isn’t sterile. It isn’t merely legal status. In the ancient world, adoption meant you were chosen intentionally. Publicly. Your old debts were canceled. Your old name was replaced. You were given full rights — not partial access, not probation.

But more than that, you were brought into a household.

You ate at the same table.
You carried the family name.
You shared the inheritance.

Paul says we receive the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry, “Abba.”

The cry we utter when we desperately need our father to respond to our hurt and need with his presence. Reassurance that everything is going to be ok.

The orphan spirit knows how to promise improvement.

It does not easily know how to collapse into a Father’s presence without explaining itself.

Reflex…Don’t Do It.

I can feel the reflex to prove myself when I disappoint someone. I can feel the tightening in my chest when I rest too long. I can hear the old calculation running in the background — have I done enough this week? Did I waste today? Did I steward that opportunity well enough?

The old wiring doesn’t disappear overnight.

There are still moments when “well done” feels like the finish line to belonging rather than the joy spoken over someone who already has it.

But Jesus says something that interrupts that instinct.

“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”
—John 14:18

And Paul reminds us that adoption was not an afterthought.

“He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ…”
—Ephesians 1:5

That language is not abstract. It is relational. It means we are not hovering at the edge of the household hoping to be retained. We are brought in.

Healing, I’m discovering, begins when we stop managing our image and start telling the truth. When the parts we tried to hide become places of grace instead of shame. When striving slowly gives way to trust.

Not because we have finally improved enough. But because we are already claimed.

So maybe the better question isn’t, “Have I done enough?”

Maybe it’s this:

Where have I been performing instead of resting?

What story am I still trying to outrun?

What would it look like to receive love — without proving anything?