A while back I had to sit through an eye exam to renew my contacts. If you’ve been through one, you know a few things make it uncomfortable. For one, you spend an unreasonable amount of time inches from a stranger’s face. A regular doctor pokes and prods from arm’s length, but the eye doctor is right there, close enough that you can taste what they last ate. Then there’s the “puff” test for glaucoma, which is in quotes because that is what they call it, but what it actually feels like is someone trying to blind you with a can of compressed air.

The worst part, though, is the Phoroptor. That’s the machine they swing in front of your face that makes you look some kind of demon, robot owl. Then there’s a quiz. The doctor flips between two lenses while you stare at a chart on the wall and asks, “Is number one more clear, or number two?” I have never been more indecisive in my life. You would think my future hung on the answer. But that is the whole point of the test. It is not really about the chart. It is about finding the lens that lets you see clearly.

Here is the thing. While you may, or may not wear glasses, we all move through life looking through some kind of lens. It might be our past. It might be words someone spoke over us years ago that we never quite put down. It might be an idea we absorbed so early we forgot we ever picked it up. Whatever it is, that lens shapes what we see. Two people can walk through the exact same circumstances and come out with completely different stories, because they were never really looking at the same thing. They were looking through different lenses.

Which brings me to a strange, honest, uncomfortable little book called Ecclesiastes.

An Uncomfortable Kind of Honesty

The book takes its name from its main character, the Teacher, sometimes called Qohelet. Most scholars believe it was written well after Israel’s exile, likely in the third century BC, by someone (or a group of someones) writing in the voice of a figure like Solomon: wealthy, wise, and powerful. Whoever wrote it clearly knew what it was to have everything and still feel the ache of not enough.

Ecclesiastes is not a comfortable book. It is uncomfortable because it says out loud what most of us think but rarely admit in church. It does not tie a bow on faith. It sits in the mess. Martin Luther once said we should read this “noble little book” every day [1], and I think that is because it refuses to let us fake our way through belief.

Reading it, I keep noticing three things it teaches us about what I’d call messy faith.

First, questions are welcome. The Teacher asks huge, uncomfortable questions in this book, and nobody strikes it from the record. Neither did the Psalmists. Neither did the people who walked up to Jesus with their doubts fully intact. If it is in Scripture, it is welcome in your prayers too.

Second, life is complex. At least thirty-eight times in this short book, the Teacher says some version of “everything is meaningless.” And yet, more than fifty times, he also points to the goodness of life. Both are true at once. That is not a contradiction to be solved. That is just what it feels like to be a person most days.

Third, struggle is normal. We tend to want faith to feel like a warm bath, something we slip into while our worries dissolve. In reality, it is closer to a wrestling match. Ecclesiastes reminds us that it always has been.

The Word for the Ache

The Teacher’s opening line sets the tone for the whole book: everything is futile. The Hebrew word is “hebel.” It shows up nearly forty times in Ecclesiastes and gets translated a dozen different ways: meaningless, vanity, smoke, breath. A few verses in, the Teacher gives us the picture behind the word himself. He calls it “a pursuit of the wind.”

I live in a place where I understand that image in my bones. Most winter mornings, before the sun is up, I step onto my back porch to check the weather (because apparently I’m a full blown old man at this point). From late November on, it’s usually cold and quiet, with the mountains dusted white in the dark. I take a breath of that air and exhale, and I can watch it hang there, visible for a second in the cold. If I tried to grab it, to close my hand around that little cloud, I would come up with nothing. You cannot catch your own breath in your fist. You cannot catch the wind either.

That is hebel. Not just sadness, but futility. The sense that you are spending real effort chasing something that was never catchable to begin with.

The Teacher applies this to nearly everything: wealth, work, achievement, legacy. His question, over and over, is some version of what do we really gain from all our effort? He keeps circling back to a phrase, “under the sun,” which shows up close to thirty times in the book. It is his shorthand for life lived without God, life as if what we can see and touch and measure is all there is. Generations rise and fall. The sun comes up and goes down and hurries back to do it again. Rivers run to the sea and the sea is never full. Nothing is new. Everyone eventually dies, and eventually no one remembers why it mattered. That is life “under the sun,” the human lens, working at full capacity and still coming up empty.

Here is what strikes me every time I sit with this. The Teacher is not wrong. Not from where he is standing. If this life really is all there is, then his math checks out. Effort without eternity is just a very sophisticated way of chasing wind.

A Different Lens

But the Teacher’s mistake, if we can call it that, is assuming the human lens is the only lens available.

Jesus said something remarkable to a crowd that thought they understood the rules of the world: “You are from below. I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world” [2]. That is a claim that changes everything, because it means Jesus was never bound by “under the sun” logic to begin with. He speaks a word that promises freedom to people trapped in old patterns [3]. He offers new birth into an entirely different kind of life [4]. He establishes a new covenant built on grace instead of performance [5]. He walks out of a grave and proves that even death, the great equalizer the Teacher kept bumping into, does not get the last word [6]. And he points ahead to a day when everything gets made new, no exceptions [7].

Because of all that, the apostle Paul, who had every reason to feel like his own labor was futile, wrote something that reads almost like a direct answer to the Teacher: “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” [8].

Not in vain. Not wind. Not smoke that disappears the moment you try to hold it.

That is the big idea I keep coming back to: Jesus infuses every effort with meaning. With him, our labor is not futile. Our work matters. What we do in the ordinary, forgettable middle of a Tuesday holds weight that outlasts the Tuesday. Even the small things, the things nobody will remember or thank us for, can carry eternal weight. Jesus does not eliminate the ache the Teacher names. He answers it.

So How Do We Actually Change Lenses

Knowing this is one thing. Living like it is another. If Jesus really does see differently than we naturally do, the real question becomes how we learn to see the way he sees. I don’t think there is a shortcut, but I do think there are three honest steps.

First, immerse yourself in his lens. Scripture will not answer every question you have, but it will show you how God sees the world and how God sees you. Left alone, we default to the human lens. It costs us nothing to slip into it. Seeing the way Jesus sees takes intention.

Second, process your experience with him. Remember, questions are welcome, life is complex, and struggle is normal. Not once in the Gospels does Jesus shame someone for asking a hard question or admitting they were struggling. So do not sit on it. Talk to him about what you are actually feeling, not the sanitized version.

Third, choose to trust his lens. This is close to the center of what faith actually is: trusting Jesus even when something does not make sense, even when you cannot fully understand it, even when part of you disagrees. You are not meant to do this in isolation. Find a person or a small community who will remind you of what is true when your own feelings are the loudest thing in the room.

Your feelings and your reasoning are genuine gifts. They are also, on their own, a misleading lens. So this week, I want to invite you into something practical.

A Few Ways to Sit With This

Pick one area of life where you have been quietly wondering, what is the point of all this effort? Name it honestly, even if it feels petty or too small to bring to God.

Read Isaiah 55:8-9 slowly, twice. Ask yourself where you have been assuming your own reasoning is the final word on a situation, rather than one lens among others.

Set a timer for five minutes and simply tell Jesus what you would normally keep to yourself: your doubts, your exhaustion, the parts of your effort that feel wasted. Do not clean it up first.

Before this week ends, tell one trusted person one true thing you are wrestling with. Let someone else help you hold what you have been carrying alone.

None of this makes the questions disappear. But I have found, again and again, that the lens really does change what I am able to see. The wind is still the wind. I still cannot catch it with my bare hands. But I am not out here chasing it alone, and it turns out that changes almost everything.

If this resonates with you, I would love for you to subscribe to The Lighthouse so these land in your inbox each week. And if you know someone who has been asking whether any of this effort actually means anything, consider sending this one their way.

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[1] Martin Luther is widely quoted as calling Ecclesiastes a “noble little book” worth daily reading.

[2] John 8:23

[3] John 8:21-32

[4] John 3:3

[5] Luke 22:20

[6] Matthew 28:5-6

[7] Revelation 21:1, 5

[8] 1 Corinthians 15:58

I want to tell you about the most counter-cultural thing I know how to do.

It doesn’t involve protesting anything. It doesn’t require a platform or a following or a hot take. In fact, it requires the opposite of all those things. It’s the practice of solitude, and I’m convinced it might be the most essential spiritual habit we have.

I also know that for many of us, the very word makes something tighten in our chest.

Why This Is Uncomfortable

Let me name a few reasons this subject can feel hard before we go any further.

For some of us, our mental and emotional health realities make even the idea of solitude unpleasant. Being alone with our thoughts is not a neutral experience. If that’s you, I want you to know I’m not dismissing that, and nothing in this piece is meant to shame you.

For others of us, life moves at such a hurried pace that the thought of carving out space for stillness feels overwhelming, and then we feel guilty on top of overwhelmed for not doing it. That’s a miserable loop.

And honestly, most of us are living such dopamine-saturated lives at this point that quiet sounds nice in theory but lands somewhere between boredom and low-grade anxiety in practice. We reach for our phones before our feet hit the floor. We fill every commute, every wait in line, every quiet moment with news, noise, information, and endless content.

We live in an anti-solitude culture. Which means there are very few things we can do that are more counter-cultural than actively creating space for it.

There’s one more problem, and it’s a big one: solitude is deeply misunderstood. We tend to associate solitude with simply not being around other people. So if you live alone or work alone, you might assume solitude is automatically built into your life. But conflating solitude with merely being alone misses the point entirely.

Here’s what I actually mean by solitude, and it’s the idea I want to anchor everything else to:

Solitude is the space in which we sit with God.

Not empty space. Occupied space. Not the absence of people, but the presence of Someone. And I’d go so far as to say none of the other spiritual habits really work without this one in place.

So here’s where we’re headed. First, I want to show you what a priority this habit was for Jesus. Second, I want to look at some specific reasons he practiced it. And third, I want to close with practical steps for actually moving toward solitude yourself.

Jesus Made a Habit of This

Early in Jesus’ public ministry, he had already gained significant recognition as both a healer and teacher. Luke records him healing a man with leprosy, which as you can imagine, would have been mind-blowing to witness. His fame spread. The crowds grew massive.

And then Luke gives us this fascinating detail:

“Yet he often withdrew to deserted places and prayed.” (Luke 5:16, CSB)

Here’s what I think is critical to understand: this habit of withdrawal was not chiefly about escaping the pressures of ministry. It was a deliberate act of cultivating relationship with the Father.

The Greek verb we translate as “withdrew” is in the imperfect tense, which tells us this was an ongoing, habitual practice. That’s why the CSB renders this single Greek word as the phrase “often withdrew.” Solitude wasn’t an occasional retreat for Jesus. It was his MO.

That phrase “deserted places” matters too. It describes isolated wilderness areas, places removed from the crowds and away from distraction, and places often associated with divine encounter. It echoes key moments in biblical history where God met people in the wilderness: Moses at the burning bush, Elijah at Horeb, John the Baptist in the Judean desert.

So we see a key rhythm in Jesus’ life: engagement followed by retreat, action followed by rest, service followed by solitude. Even in the face of overwhelming need and demand, Jesus chose to create space to sit with the Father.

The question is why. There are at least nine distinct passages that explicitly mention Jesus withdrawing into solitude for prayer. Let’s look at three from Luke’s Gospel, because I think they give us three reasons we need this habit too.

1. Preparation for Big Events

Luke 4:42 says, “When it was day, he went out and made his way to a deserted place.” This comes right on the heels of Jesus’ baptism, his wilderness testing, and the launch of his public ministry. Before stepping into the main thrust of his calling, Jesus stepped away into solitude. It was preparation for what was to come.

Here’s a small, humbling picture of preparation from my own life. I’ve long dealt with a shoulder injury, and according to my doctor, my shoulder is “a real mess.” At some point I’m going to need a full replacement. Hopefully that’s a ways off, but recently I had to get a steroid shot in the joint.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t just show up and get stabbed in the arm. It took two visits just to get to that point. At the first visit, I met with a nurse, then got an x-ray, then received a full exam while they walked me through all my options. At the second visit, before the main injection, they gave me a local anesthetic to decrease the pain of the shot. Because, frankly, I’m a baby about needles.

My point is, there was an immense amount of preparation for one simple shot.

If all that preparation goes into a shot, how much more should we seek God’s preparing presence before making major moves in our lives? I sometimes wonder if one reason we see such spectacular failures among spiritual leaders is that so many have spent more time building platforms than allowing God to prepare their hearts.

Before any of us steps into a new job, moves to a new city, enters a relationship, ends a relationship, has kids, or takes on a new calling, wouldn’t we benefit from seeking solitude to sit with God in preparation?

Solitude is the space in which that happens.

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2. Wisdom for Major Decisions

Before choosing the twelve apostles, Luke tells us Jesus “went out to the mountain to pray and spent all night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12).

I find this description deeply humbling. Even Jesus, the Son of God, sought the Father for wisdom before making a big decision. He didn’t rush it. He spent an entire night in prayer.

Think about it like this. Have you ever tried to change lanes without checking your blind spot? Maybe you got complacent, did a quick mirror check, but didn’t take that extra second to look over your shoulder. I’ve made that mistake, started drifting over, and had another car rightfully blare its horn at me, informing me I was about to hit them.

Seeking wisdom from God in solitude is like checking your blind spot. There are things you simply cannot see from where you’re sitting.

Yet so often we rush blindly into decisions that can massively impact our futures. James 1 promises that God longs to give wisdom generously to those who ask. So before your next big decision, pause and ask yourself, “Have I given God enough space to speak before I decide?”

Solitude is the space in which that happens.

3. Strength in Times of Crisis

Outside of the crucifixion itself, the Garden of Gethsemane was inarguably Jesus’ most agonizing moment. And once again, we see him withdraw to pray, wrestling with the Father under the weight of what was coming (Luke 22:39-46).

A strong argument can be made that this lifelong habit of solitude was the very reason Jesus had the strength to endure the cross. His intimacy with the Father was the armor he needed.

I think back to the wildfires that tore through Los Angeles, or the one’s that have been ravaging my own state of Utah. It was tragic on a scale that’s hard to comprehend: thousands of homes destroyed, staggering economic loss, and lives taken. But it was also inspiring to watch firefighters put their lives on the line in such heroic fashion. And here’s something I noticed: none of those firefighters rushed into the flames in street clothes. They wore specially engineered gear designed to keep them as safe as possible.

Navigating crisis without sitting with God is like fighting fires in street clothes. You’re going in unprotected. This is why Paul told the church at Ephesus to “put on the full armor of God” (Ephesians 6). We need the strength and protection that only God provides.

Solitude is the space in which that happens.

How to Actually Begin

So we’ve seen that solitude was a habit in Jesus’ life, and we’ve looked at why he practiced it. But how do we start? Richard Foster puts it bluntly:

“We are dealing with actions, not merely states of mind. It is not enough to say, ‘Well, I am most certainly in possession of inner solitude and silence; there is nothing that I need to do.’ All those who have come into the living silences have done certain things, have ordered their lives in a particular way so as to receive this ‘peace that passes all understanding.’” [1]

In other words, solitude won’t happen to you. You have to order your life to receive it. Here are three simple movements to begin with.

Choose a physical place. Find a spot that feels comfortable and safe, where you won’t worry about constant interruption. If you have little kids, just do your best and don’t get frustrated with yourself (or them). Consider making it a recurring place: a particular chair, a corner of a room, even a closet. There’s power in a place your body learns to associate with meeting God.

Notice what wants to be tended. Think of your inner world like a garden. Gardens don’t need to be solved. They need to be tended. So we ask the question, “What is within me right now that needs tending?” It might be an area of hurt or pain. It could be confusion or doubt. It might be weariness. It might be anger. The Scriptures show us how deeply Jesus wants to meet us in those places, but first we have to notice them. This step is simply about becoming aware of what’s happening inside you.

Allow God to be with you. This is the part we most want to rush, and most need not to. Ruth Haley Barton offers this guidance:

“Sit with what comes into your awareness, becoming conscious of God’s presence with you in that awareness. Don’t try to do anything with what you are knowing except be with it. (In other words, don’t scare it away.) Feel the difference between trying to fix it and just being with it. Feel the difference between doing something with it and resting with it. Feel the difference between trying to fight it and letting God fight for you.” [2]

Ask God, “How do you want to tend to this today?” Often what’s within us just needs acknowledgment. It needs to be seen. Maybe there’s a word he wants to speak into it. Maybe he wants to give you an image of holding you, helping you, or nurturing you in some specific way. Maybe he just wants to sit with you like a good friend.

What matters is allowing God to be with you and tend to you.

A Simple Practice for This Week

If you want to put this into motion, here’s an exercise to try before the week is out:

1. Pick your place. Decide right now where it will be, and put fifteen minutes on your calendar.

2. Leave your phone in another room. Not face down. Not on silent. In another room.

3. Sit, breathe, and ask one question: “What is within me right now that needs tending?” Don’t force an answer. Just notice what surfaces.

4. Whatever comes up, resist the urge to fix it. Instead, simply say, “God, how do you want to tend to this today?” And then be with him in it.

That’s it. No performance. No pressure to feel something profound. Just space.

Because solitude is the space in which we sit with God. We create our place, we invite out what’s within us, and then we simply invite God to be with us in it.

That’s what solitude is all about.

If this stirred something in you, I’d love for you to subscribe. Each week I write about spiritual formation and what it looks like to cultivate a deeper, more honest relationship with God in the middle of real life. It’s free, and it would be a joy to have you along.

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Notes

[1] Richard J. Foster, *Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth* (New York: HarperCollins), from the chapter “The Discipline of Solitude.”

[2] Ruth Haley Barton, *Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation* (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), from her guidance on the practice of solitude.

A while back, during one of the harder seasons of my life, someone called to check on me. They asked how I was doing, and I said the thing we all say: “I’m doing good.”

I wasn’t.

I’ve thought about that phone call a lot, because I don’t think my problem was dishonesty exactly. It was fear. Somewhere underneath the polite answer was a question I didn’t want to look at directly: if I actually told God the truth, if I asked Him plainly for what I wanted, what would happen if the answer was still no?

I think that question is sitting underneath a lot of stalled-out prayer lives. Maybe yours. So I want to name the myth it grows from, and then I want to take you to the one place in Scripture where we get to watch what happens when the most honest prayer in human history meets the most devastating no.

The myth: If God says no, my prayer failed.

Somewhere along the way, many of us picked up the idea that real faith gets a yes. Which means a no can only be a verdict: we didn’t pray hard enough, or right enough, or with enough faith. So when the silence comes, we don’t just grieve the loss. We quietly conclude that prayer doesn’t work, or worse, that we don’t work. And as a result, we go quiet.

If that’s you, I want to show you a night when Jesus prayed the most honest, most specific, maybe the most desperate prayer ever prayed, and still heard no.

A garden called Oil Press

It’s the last night before the cross. Jesus has just finished the Passover meal with His disciples, and Matthew tells us He takes them to a garden called Gethsemane:

Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he told the disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.” Taking along Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. He said to them, “My soul is swallowed up in sorrow to the point of death. Remain here and stay awake with me.” — Matthew 26:36-38 (CSB)

Two small details are worth sitting with before we go further.

First, Gethsemane means “oil press” in Hebrew.[1] It was a working olive grove at the base of the Mount of Olives, named for the stone presses that crushed olives under weight to yield oil. History handed us a small but fitting detail: on the last night of His life, Jesus went to pray in a place literally named for being crushed.

Second, posture mattered in Jewish prayer. Ordinary prayer in Jesus’s day was offered standing. The central daily prayer of Israel is even called the Amidah, which simply means “the standing prayer.”[2] Falling face-down was reserved for moments of extraordinary urgency or grief. So when Matthew tells us Jesus fell facedown to pray, that’s not His normal posture. This wasn’t His regular quiet time. This was an emergency.

And under the weight of the world’s sin and suffering bearing down on Him all at once, Jesus does the same thing He’d done His whole life whenever the load got heavy. He prays.

Here’s what that night teaches us about dependence:

The scope of your dependence isn’t tested by what God gives you. It’s tested by what you do when He doesn’t.

Watch three marks of dependent prayer unfold in this garden.

1. Dependent prayer tells God the truth.

Matthew says Jesus “began to be sorrowful and troubled.” The word behind “sorrowful” is perilypos: grief closed in from every side. And the literal Greek underneath the next phrase is even more stark. Jesus says, “My soul is swallowed up in sorrow.” That’s the same language the Psalms use for soul-distress: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?” (Psalm 42:5). Jesus, in His last hours, is praying the way the Psalms taught Him to pray.

The word translated “troubled” is even more rare. It appears only three times in the whole New Testament, and the only other person described this way is Epaphroditus in Philippians 2:26, distressed nearly past composure.[3] This is not composed sorrow. This is the Son of God, hours from the cross, telling His closest friends the plain truth about what’s happening inside Him, and telling His Father that He does not like the plan.

He doesn’t do what I did on that phone call. He doesn’t edit. He doesn’t pretend to have a peace He doesn’t feel. He says, in effect: I am not okay. And He asks His friends to pray with Him.

As a pastor, I’ve had the privilege of sitting with many people in their own garden moments, seasons when they were being crushed by grief, anxiety, or despair. And while I hate the pain of those moments, I’ve come to love the honesty. Pain has a way of stripping away all the pretense and projecting we do. The masks come off, and you get to see a person’s true heart, even as it’s breaking. That is a rare privilege. And I believe God loves the honesty of those moments too, because honesty is what opens us up to actually be cared for.

So whatever you’ve been editing out of your prayers, the fear, the anger, the apathy, the grief you haven’t let yourself name yet, notice that Jesus goes first. If the Son of God can tell the truth about His pain, so can you.

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2. Dependent prayer asks specifically, and keeps asking.

Going a little farther, he fell facedown and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” — Matthew 26:39

Notice what Jesus doesn’t do. He doesn’t skip straight to resignation. He doesn’t open with “your will be done” and stop there, as if real faith means we’re not allowed to want a different outcome. He asks. Specifically. Let this cup pass from me. And He asks three separate times.

The “cup” is not a vague figure of speech. All through the Hebrew Scriptures, it’s a fixed image for judgment, for drinking down, to the point of staggering, the full weight of what evil deserves. Isaiah speaks of Jerusalem drinking “the cup of his wrath” (Isaiah 51:17). Jeremiah is told to make the nations drink “this cup of the wine of wrath” (Jeremiah 25:15). The psalmist pictures the wicked of the earth drinking a cup of judgment down to the dregs (Psalm 75:8). That is the cup Jesus is looking into. He knows exactly what’s in it.

We need to be careful here, though, because it’s easy to hear “cup of wrath” and picture an angry God pouring something out on an innocent bystander. That’s not what’s happening. N.T. Wright puts it well: the cup Jesus faced was the darkness of one who, though he was the very Son of God, would drink the cup which symbolized God’s wrath against all that is evil.[4] God the Son, not a third party but God Himself, chose to step into the very worst of what sin and death had done to the world. Not to satisfy anger, but to absorb evil’s full effect and defeat it from the inside, so we would never have to drink it ourselves. That is rescue.

He knew what was in the cup. He asked, truly asked, if there was another way. Three times. And the answer was no.

I don’t think we give this the attention it deserves. The most honest, most dependent prayer in human history, offered by God’s own Son, and heaven’s answer was silence, followed by a cross.

If you have ever asked God for something specific, with everything in you, and heard nothing back but the sound of your own voice in an empty room, you are not failing at prayer. You are in the company of Jesus.

And how we carry that weight matters more than we realize. A two-year study of hospitalized patients found that those who felt punished or abandoned by God, what researchers call negative religious struggle, had a measurably higher risk of dying over the following two years, even after accounting for their physical health.[5] Unanswered prayer doesn’t just shape our theology. It shapes our bodies. Which is exactly why a tidy answer won’t do. We have to be handed Jesus.

Maybe it’s a spouse or a loved one you prayed would turn around. Maybe it’s a mental health reality you live with and prayed would change. Maybe it’s an unborn child you’ve been praying for by name for years. I can’t promise the cup will pass. I can’t tell you why some prayers get a yes and others get a no; none of us can, this side of eternity. But I can tell you this: the no doesn’t mean you asked wrong, or believed wrong, or weren’t enough. Jesus asked as well as it is possible to ask, and still heard no.

Dependent prayer keeps asking anyway. Not because asking guarantees the answer we want, but because asking is how we stay close to the Father, whatever He says.

3. Dependent prayer keeps caring for others, even in its own pain.

Here’s what gets me about this moment. Jesus is hours from the most excruciating death imaginable. He has just poured out the rawest prayer of His life. And His next move isn’t to demand comfort for Himself. It’s to turn back toward Peter, James, and John, and worry about them.

Notice exactly why He tells them to pray: “so that you won’t enter into temptation” (Matthew 26:41). That word, temptation, is the exact same word, in the exact same grammatical form, as the request Jesus taught them to pray in Matthew 6: “lead us not into temptation.” His own hour has come, and in the middle of His own agony, Jesus is concerned about their well-being, calling them back to the very prayer He taught them.

And they don’t pray it. They sleep. Three separate times. And three times, instead of shaming them, Jesus names what’s happening with something close to tenderness: the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. He’s not scolding. He’s still instructing.

Let’s cut the disciples some slack, too. I read recently about a study in which sleep-deprived people were shown distressing images, and their brain scans revealed dramatically heightened activity in the amygdala, the brain’s alarm center, because its connection to the region that regulates emotion had measurably weakened.[6] After enough sleep loss, your brain becomes less able to tend to what it’s feeling. Not because you’ve stopped caring, but because the part of you that manages caring under pressure runs out of fuel. It’s the middle of the night, after a full Passover meal, after the most exhausting week of their lives. They’re exhausted, afraid, and human.

And Jesus, who apparently understood something about the flesh being weak, meets their failure with compassion instead of shame.

Maybe you’ve carried a quiet shame about your prayer life for years. The loved one you stopped praying for. The doubt that infests your asking. The season you went numb and prayed for no one, not even yourself. Notice what Jesus doesn’t say to His sleeping, failing friends: “You don’t deserve to be here.” He wakes them gently, and when the moment finally comes, He says one more thing: “Get up; let’s go” (Matthew 26:46).

Not you failed me. Not I’m disappointed in you. Get up. Let’s go.

Brennan Manning used to say his deepest awareness of himself was that he was deeply loved by Jesus, and had done nothing to earn or deserve it.[7] That’s the posture Jesus takes toward His exhausted, failing friends in that garden. His response to human weakness was never shame. It was always an invitation to keep moving, together.

Eden, reversed

Do you see what happened in that garden? In the space of one hour, Jesus told the truth about His pain. He asked, specifically, for what He wanted. He kept caring for the people around Him while carrying more than any of us will ever carry. And heaven still said no.

The very first human failure happened in a garden, too. In Eden, a man and a woman looked at the one thing God asked them to trust Him with, and reached for control instead. Not your will, but mine. That’s the oldest instinct we carry. When we’re afraid, or in pain, or unsure God is good, we grab for control.

Gethsemane is Eden reversed. In another garden, another human being knelt down wanting a different outcome, and prayed the opposite prayer: not my will, but yours.

Prayer, in the end, isn’t a technique. It’s the daily practice of letting go of what Eden taught us to hold. And Gethsemane shows us Someone who prayed perfectly and still suffered, who asked honestly and still bled, who depended on the Father completely and still walked to a cross. Dependence isn’t about getting the answer we want. It’s about staying close to the Father when we don’t.

A practice for this week

Before you close this article, I want to invite you into a few minutes of stillness.

1. Name your cup. Find a quiet moment and identify the thing you’re asking God to let pass right now. The diagnosis. The relationship. The fear. The thing you’ve been begging Him to change. Say it plainly, out loud or on paper. Don’t edit.

2. Ask specifically. Jesus didn’t open with resignation, and you don’t have to either. Tell the Father exactly what you want. Real dependence includes real desire.

3. Pray the nine words. If you’re able, pray the same nine words Jesus prayed: Yet not as I will, but as you will. You don’t have to believe them perfectly today. Some of you aren’t anywhere close to ready, and that’s okay. Jesus prayed them three times, which tells me dependence was a process even for Him. But even the first time you say them, something in you starts leaning toward the Father instead of away from Him.

4. Bring Him someone else. Jesus interceded even in His agony. Before you finish, pray for one person you love, by name.

Hebrews 4 tells us that because Jesus was tempted in every way we are, He is able both to sympathize with us and to help us. Because He prayed honestly, asked specifically, and loved the people around Him even in His own suffering, we have a High Priest who knows exactly what we’re carrying.

So bring Him the truth. Bring Him your specific ask. Bring Him the people you love. And whatever His answer is, bring Him your dependence.

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Notes

[1] Gethsemane derives from the Aramaic and Hebrew gat shemanim, “oil press,” reflecting the olive presses that operated in the groves at the base of the Mount of Olives.

[2] The Amidah (Hebrew for “standing”), also called the Shemoneh Esrei, is the central prayer of Jewish liturgy and is recited standing, the ordinary posture for Jewish prayer in the Second Temple period. Prostration was reserved for moments of extraordinary petition or distress (see, for example, Numbers 16:22 and 1 Kings 18:39).

[3] The Greek ademonein (”troubled,” “deeply distressed”) appears in the New Testament only in Matthew 26:37, its parallel in Mark 14:33, and Philippians 2:26.

[4] N.T. Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 16-28 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), commentary on Matthew 26:36-46.

[5] Kenneth I. Pargament, Harold G. Koenig, Nalini Tarakeshwar, and June Hahn, “Religious Struggle as a Predictor of Mortality Among Medically Ill Elderly Patients: A 2-Year Longitudinal Study,” Archives of Internal Medicine 161, no. 15 (2001): 1881-1885. The study followed 596 hospitalized patients aged 55 and older; those who reported feelings such as wondering whether God had abandoned them showed increased mortality risk even after controlling for baseline physical health, mental health, and demographic factors.

[6] Seung-Schik Yoo, Ninad Gujar, Peter Hu, Ferenc A. Jolesz, and Matthew P. Walker, “The Human Emotional Brain Without Sleep: A Prefrontal Amygdala Disconnect,” Current Biology 17, no. 20 (2007): R877-R878. Sleep-deprived participants showed roughly 60 percent greater amygdala reactivity to negative images, along with weakened connectivity to the medial prefrontal cortex, the region that provides top-down emotional regulation.

[7] Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 1990).

For years, I could talk about God the Father with some confidence. I could talk about Jesus all day. But if you had asked me to describe my relationship with the Holy Spirit, I would have gotten more…vague.

I suspect I’m not alone. Francis Chan titled his whole book on the Spirit The Forgotten God, and honestly, that resonates. Most of us have a framework for the Father. We’re usually most comfortable with the Son. But the Spirit? Many of us aren’t sure what to think, so we quietly think about something else.

Here’s the problem with leaving that blank space unfilled: behavior is born of belief.

Consider worship. Worship is far more than singing at Jesus once a week. To worship Jesus means we look to Him for how to live. We pattern our lives after His. We seek to know Him, love Him, obey Him. We wrap our lives around His. And we do that because we believe something very specific about Him: that He is God, that He created us, that He gave His life for us, that He rose again to reign over our lives for our good. If we didn’t believe those things, our behavior would look very different. It probably should.

Which means our beliefs can’t be accidental. We can’t just absorb whatever ideas happen to be floating in the air around us and hope our lives turn out well. Belief shapes behavior, so belief deserves care.

So let’s give the Spirit some care. The ancient church summarized His identity this way:

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

That single sentence is dense with meaning. Four truths sit inside it, and each one changes how we relate to Him.

The Holy Spirit is God with us, giving us His life, presence, and voice.

1. The Spirit is fully God, not a force or a feeling

The confession begins by calling the Spirit “the Lord” and says He proceeds from the Father and the Son. That isn’t filler language. It places the Spirit squarely inside the life of the Triune God. He is not an add-on. He is not an accessory to the Trinity. He is fully and eternally God.

Scripture says the same. In Acts 5, a couple named Ananias and Sapphira sell a piece of land, present part of the money as though it were the whole amount, and try to deceive the church. Peter confronts them and equates lying to the Spirit with lying to God. That’s not poetry. That’s theological precision.

When my son Ryder was about to turn sixteen, we were deep into driving hours. Overall he did great, but I had to keep reminding him not to hug the right shoulder where the guardrail runs. As a result, he’s started returning the favor, letting me know when I drift too close myself. But here’s the thing about guardrails: they aren’t there to restrict you. They’re there to keep you from going somewhere dangerous.

Calling the Spirit “the Lord” works like a guardrail. It guards us from shrinking Him into something less than He is.

The Spirit is not an impersonal energy field connecting the universe. I love Star Wars, but the Holy Spirit is not the Force. He is not the goosebumps you feel during a worship song. He is not a vibe. He is not an atmosphere we manufacture with the right lighting and the right playlist.

He knows you. He searches hearts. He can be grieved. He can be trusted. He can be obeyed.

We don’t manipulate Him. We relate to Him.

2. The Spirit gives life we can’t produce ourselves

The confession also calls Him “the Giver of Life.” That means more than encouragement. More than inspiration. More than helping us feel a little better about ourselves.

From the very beginning, Genesis shows the Spirit present at creation, hovering over the waters, bringing order out of chaos. He is not merely supportive. He is creative. Jesus calls Him “the Helper” in John 14, not because He assists us in self-improvement, but because He brings the very life of God to us.

Paul puts it like this in Romans 8:11:

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

Sit with that. The same Spirit who raised Jesus out of a tomb now lives in you.

That is not personality enhancement. That is not religious motivation. That is resurrection life.

And here’s the part we tend to miss: this life is received, not produced.

Some things in life you do have to produce. The older I get, the more aware I am that if I want to feel healthy, I have to work at it. If I don’t stretch and exercise and take care of myself, standing up from a chair feels like every joint is negotiating its own contract.

But resurrection life doesn’t work that way. You don’t strain hard enough to create it. You don’t discipline yourself into spiritual vitality. The Spirit gives it. Our job isn’t to produce it but to position ourselves to receive it.

That means surrendering the illusion that we can fix ourselves. It means learning to listen. Learning to pray. Learning to respond when He convicts, comforts, or leads.

If you try to manufacture this life on your own, you will be endlessly frustrated. Not because you aren’t trying hard enough, but because it was never yours to manufacture.

3. The Spirit is not at our disposal; we are at His

The confession continues: the Spirit, with the Father and the Son together, is worshiped and glorified. That’s why Jesus tells us in Matthew 28:19 to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One name. One God. The Spirit is not secondary. He is worthy of the same honor, the same glory, the same worship.

And worship, by definition, is not about us. Worship is our response to who God is and what He has done. Singing counts. When we sing with gratitude, trust, sorrow, or praise, that is worship. But worship is much bigger than music. In Romans 12:1, Paul says worship looks like offering our whole lives as living sacrifices in response to the mercy of God. Worship is surrender. Worship is alignment. Worship is saying, “My life belongs to You.”

Here’s where we drift.

I’ve often said we can treat God like a divine waiter. When you go to a restaurant, the server is there to serve you. They take your order. They bring what you request. They check in to make sure your needs are met. That’s the job. Now imagine your server walks up and you say, “Actually, have a seat. I’m here to serve you tonight.” That would be awkward at best, because that’s not how the relationship works.

Sometimes that’s exactly how we treat the Spirit. As though His primary function is delivering what we requested in prayer. As though He exists to carry out our agenda.

Don’t misunderstand me. Asking God for what we need is right and good. Petition is part of prayer, and God invites it. But if our prayers are only lists of what we want God to do for us, we may be drifting toward putting the Spirit at our disposal rather than placing ourselves at His.

What would it look like to move through your day listening for His direction? To pause before decisions and ask, “Spirit, what are You doing here?” To actually respond when He convicts, when He nudges, when He opens a door?

He is our Helper. But He helps us live as living sacrifices. He helps us follow Jesus. He helps us offer our lives back to God.

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4. The Spirit is the living voice of God speaking through Scripture

The confession ends by saying the Spirit “spoke by the prophets.” That points to the prophets of old and to the authors of Scripture. The Spirit is not silent. He has spoken.

The writer of Hebrews quotes Psalm 95 and introduces it this way: “as the Holy Spirit says.” Not said. Says. Peter tells us the authors of Scripture “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” The Bible is not a record of religious thoughts. It is living and active, and through it the Spirit still speaks. Right now.

When we read Scripture, we see a variety of ways the Spirit has spoken. Visions and dreams. A burning bush. A donkey. Internal promptings. An audible voice. But notice something: those moments are recorded precisely because they were extraordinary.

Think about a thirty-second highlight reel from an NBA game. You know that reel represents hours of ordinary possessions, missed shots, defensive rotations, and steady unglamorous execution. Nobody watches a highlight reel and concludes every possession looked like that. Highlights are highlights because they’re rare.

When we read about burning bushes and talking donkeys and dramatic visions, we’re reading the highlight reel of redemptive history. Those moments were decisive. They were powerful. They were unusual. They show us what God can do. They don’t promise what God must do every Tuesday.

The Spirit can still speak in extraordinary ways. He is God. But the normal, steady, promised way He speaks is through Scripture, meeting us in the ordinary rhythms of an ordinary week.

If you want to hear the Spirit’s voice, open the Bible.

Because far too often we want a word from God while leaving the Word of God closed on the nightstand.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

The Holy Spirit is God. Not an impersonal force. Not a spiritual atmosphere. Not a rush of emotion we try to recreate on demand.

He is God Himself, with us.

The same God who brought light into darkness. The same God who raised Jesus from the grave. The same God who has been faithful through every generation. He is not distant. He is present. And He is present for you.

If we will position ourselves for it, if we will surrender our need to control and manufacture and self-repair, He longs to give us His life. Real life. Resurrection life. Life that strengthens what is weak, softens what is hard, and awakens what has gone numb.

You don’t produce that life. You receive it.

And if we will quiet ourselves long enough to listen, He will speak. Not always in spectacle. Not always in drama. But faithfully. Through His Word. Through truth that meets you exactly where you are and gently calls you toward Christ.

The Spirit is not something to chase. He is Someone to trust.

Practices for This Week

1. The Receiving Prayer (daily, 3 minutes)
Before you ask God for anything, sit in silence and pray only this: Spirit, I am not here to produce. I am here to receive.Then wait. Don’t fill the silence. You are practicing the posture of point two.

2. The Waiter Audit (once, 10 minutes)
Write out everything you’ve asked God for in the last month. Look at the list honestly. How much of it is you handing Him an order? Then write one sentence underneath: Spirit, what are You doing here? Sit with that question longer than feels comfortable.

3. Open the Word Before the Feed (daily)
Pick one chapter of Scripture. Read it before you open a single app. Read slowly enough to notice one sentence that stops you. Write it down. That’s it. You’re not looking for a burning bush. You’re showing up where He has promised to speak.

4. The Nudge Journal (all week)
Keep a note on your phone. Any time you sense a prompting toward kindness, honesty, confession, or courage, write it down and note whether you obeyed. At the end of the week, read the list. You’ll learn a great deal about how you actually relate to Him.

If this stirred something in you, I’d love to have you along. The Lighthouse goes out weekly, and it’s for anyone trying to design a life that makes room for God. Subscribe below, and forward this to someone who needs it.

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I want to talk about something I can only describe as the anguish of being misunderstood.

There’s a unique kind of pain that comes with being misunderstood by others. It’s frustrating. There’s an underlying sense of injustice that settles in when people think one thing about you while something very different is actually true.

We’ve all experienced it. Maybe you’ve tried to say or do something with good intentions, only to watch it land in a way you never meant. Maybe you struggle to put words to your thoughts or feelings, and over time, people have formed a picture of you that doesn’t match how you know yourself to be. Maybe you’ve tried, really tried, to explain yourself, but your parents, siblings, spouse, friends, or coworkers just don’t seem to get you.

If any of that resonates, then you know this feeling. The anguish of being misunderstood: of being seen one way, while living another reality.

That feeling takes me back to my high school years.

The Black Sheep

I went to a small Christian private school, and for most of those four years, I felt like a black sheep. Now, to be fair, that wasn’t entirely true, but it felt true. It seemed like everyone else knew how to fit in, do what they were told, and succeed. I didn’t.

I struggled academically. I graduated dead last in my class. People are quick to remind me there were only 18 of us. And sure, that’s fair. But I’ve got to tell you, dumbest of 18 still doesn’t feel awesome.

The one place I did find success was sports. But even there, I struggled. I had a hard time controlling my emotions. I was intense. Mouthy with referees. I may or may not still hold the school record for technical fouls in a basketball season. I think I was the only player ever ejected from a summer league game. And I got into more than one altercation on the football field.

Because of all that, I developed a reputation: lazy academically, angry in general. And that reputation only made everything worse, because it was rooted in misunderstanding.

The truth is, I wasn’t just lazy and angry. I was depressed. By the time I was 14 or 15, I had experienced the abandonment of my biological dad, the suicide of my grandfather, the death of a close friend, the complexity of a blended family with severe mental illness, and moving between five different states. I was overwhelmed. I was carrying feelings I didn’t even know how to name.

So yes, I struggled in school, but not because I didn’t care about my life. And yes, I got angry, but that anger was really grief and sadness I didn’t know what to do with.

Thankfully, there was one person who did understand me. His name was Mr. Rombeau. He taught my Bible class. He came alongside me and told me I reminded him of Peter in the Gospels: passionate, impulsive, needing guidance and care. In the middle of feeling so deeply misunderstood, Mr. Rombeau became a lifeline for me.

I share all of that because while many of us have experienced being misunderstood by the people around us, the good news of the Christian faith is this: Jesus understands us. And not in a distant, theoretical, or general way, but deeply. Personally. Experientially.

That understanding isn’t incidental. It flows directly out of one of the oldest declarations of the Christian faith, the Nicene Creed:

“Jesus, for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He will come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.”

That’s a sweeping summary of Jesus’ entire mission. But at its heart, when you distill what the creed is drawing from Scripture, it’s making one profound central claim:

Jesus is fully human.

That simple phrase is jam-packed with implications for our lives. So here’s what I want to do: briefly walk through the story of Jesus’ rescue mission present in the words of the creed, and then highlight the two implications I think matter most for us day to day.

The Story of Rescue

What the creed does is beautiful. It doesn’t argue. It doesn’t defend. It tells a story. And it’s a rescue story.

First, Jesus came down from heaven and was made human. This echoes John 1:14: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That’s what we call incarnation. Jesus took on flesh. God didn’t shout instructions from a distance. He didn’t send a lesser version of Himself as a substitute. He came Himself. Jesus entered our world the same way we all do: through vulnerability, dependence, and limitation. He took on a real body, a real mind, real emotions, a real human life. This is where the rescue begins: God with us.

Then the creed moves to the crucifixion. It names the cost of this rescue. Jesus wasn’t misunderstood in theory. He was rejected in reality. He was betrayed, condemned, and executed under a real Roman governor, in real history. The creed reminds us that Jesus doesn’t just understand suffering. He experienced it.

Next, He suffered and was buried. That might sound like a small detail, but it matters deeply. Jesus didn’t just appear to die. He didn’t escape at the last moment. He truly died, and He was truly laid in the ground. In 1 Corinthians 15:4, Paul specifically says, “He was buried.” Which means Jesus knows not only pain, but loss. Not only fear, but finality. He knows the silence of grief.

Then comes the turning point.

On the third day, He rose again, according to the Scriptures. Death did not get the final word. The grave could not hold Him. Jesus’ resurrection isn’t just a miracle. It’s a declaration that sin, suffering, and death do not define the future. Life does.

From there, He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father (Acts 1:9–11). That doesn’t mean Jesus left us behind. It means He was enthroned on our behalf. The One who was born, who suffered, who died, who rose, that same Jesus now reigns. Right now. He didn’t rise and retire. He rose and reigns. Over all things.

And finally, the creed looks forward. He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end. This is the language of Revelation 21. History is not aimless. Evil is not eternal. Injustice will not win. Jesus will restore all things. And when He does, everything broken will be named, healed, and set right.

This is the story the creed tells. From incarnation to resurrection. From suffering to reign. From humility to glory.

And here’s what’s stunning: every single part of that story is tied to one central truth. Jesus is fully human. That’s where I want us to slow down, because two parts of this story matter especially for our everyday lives.

1. Jesus Added Humanity to His Divinity

Scripture claims that Jesus has existed eternally as God. Not God-like. Not God-lite. Jesus is, and always has been, fully God.

Then, at a particular moment in real history, Jesus entered into humanity as a human being. And here’s what’s crucial to understand: in doing so, He did not stop being God. The incarnation was not Jesus losing something of Himself. It was Jesus adding something to Himself. He did not lay aside His divinity. He took on humanity.

Let me try to illustrate it, albeit imperfectly.

On the morning of July 2, 2005, I woke up in my apartment in Lake Zurich, Illinois, a man. But around 4 p.m. that same afternoon, I was standing in a tux at the front of a church with a few of my friends. Damien Rice’s song “The Blower’s Daughter” came over the speakers, the back doors opened, and Tami came walking down the aisle in a stunning white wedding dress. I cried uncontrollably. We said our vows. Our pastor almost caught on fire while praying too close to our unity candle. We kissed and were declared husband and wife.

Here’s the point: I woke up that morning a man. And I went to bed that night... still a man. But something had been added. I hadn’t lost anything. I had gained something. I was still fully who I had always been, but now, I was also a husband.

In a similar way, though far more profound, Jesus did not lose His divinity in His incarnation. The apostle Paul tells us that He “took on the likeness of humanity” (Philippians 2:7). He’s saying that Jesus added humanity to His divinity. He became fully human without ceasing to be fully God.

And we need that truth for more than theological precision. It’s the foundation for everything that comes next.

2. Jesus Understands Our Experience

The author of Hebrews puts it this way:

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” — Hebrews 4:15

We can rest assured that Jesus truly understands us, not just in theory or from a distance, but because He has shared our experience. Think about it.

Jesus knew family conflict. He knew abandonment and betrayal. He got hungry. He got tired. He experienced joy and sorrow, anger and anxiety. Jesus knew what it was to dread what was coming. He knew what it was to long for a different path than the one in front of Him. He lived under the weight of a corrupt empire. He knew what it was to be misunderstood.

We never have to wonder whether Jesus understands. He does, because He has been where we are.

Now, think for just a moment about how frustrating the opposite feels. We all know the hurt of someone claiming to understand an experience of ours that they’ve never actually lived. I can think of some deeply painful examples, but let’s stick with one that’s more annoying than traumatic.

It has always driven me bonkers when someone says they understand what it’s like to be a parent... because they own a pet. Now listen: I love pets. We have one. Our dog, Wicket, is a beloved part of our family. So I know firsthand that raising a dog absolutely comes with challenges. And raising a dog is not even remotely the same thing as raising a child. When I see a car that says, “My kid has four paws,” I want to blow it off the road. I’m not saying that response is righteous. I’m just being honest that it’s there.

The reason that kind of thing bothers us is actually pretty simple: true understanding is born out of shared experience. And here’s the incredible truth of our faith. Jesus has shared ours.

This is important, though. Jesus did not need to become human in order to understand us. He created us. He knows us completely. He understands us better than we understand ourselves. So Hebrews isn’t saying Jesus became human so He could finally figure us out. It’s saying He became human so that we would draw near to Him in the middle of our experience.

That’s why the author immediately follows with this:

“Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” — Hebrews 4:16

The Invitation

The point isn’t just that Jesus understands. The point is that His understanding invites us closer.

Jesus knows you. He knows what you feel. He knows where you struggle. He knows how you hurt. He knows what you long for, even when you don’t fully understand it yourself. And in those moments, Jesus says, “I know. I understand.” His desire is not to keep His distance, but to offer mercy and grace: exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

The question is not whether Jesus understands.

The question is: Will you draw near to Him?

Practices for the Week

1. Name what you’re carrying. Set aside 15 minutes this week. Write down the feelings, struggles, or griefs you’ve had a hard time putting words to. Then read Hebrews 4:15–16 over that list. Remember: Jesus has felt these things too.

2. Pray honestly, not politely. Because Jesus shares your experience, you don’t have to clean up your prayers. This week, try praying the way you’d talk to the one person who truly gets you. No performance. Just honesty.

3. Draw near before you fix. The next time you feel misunderstood by a spouse, a coworker, or a friend, pause before defending yourself. Take 60 seconds to draw near to Jesus first. Tell Him how it feels. Let His understanding steady you before you respond.

4. Be a Mr. Rombeau. Ask God to show you one person in your life who is likely feeling misunderstood. Reach out this week. You don’t need answers; you just need to come alongside them.

If you made it this far (and I really hope you did), will you do me a favor? Will you click the little ❤️ at the top, or consider sharing this article? It helps my writing reach as many people as possible. And if you’d like to receive weekly articles like this directly to your email, just subscribe below. Thank you so much for reading and for helping me spread the word!

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There’s a particular kind of pain that doesn’t get talked about much. It’s the anguish of being misunderstood.

You know the one. You say something with the best of intentions and watch it land in a way you never meant. You try, really try, to explain what you’re feeling, and the people closest to you just don’t seem to get you. Over time, they form a picture of who you are, and it doesn’t match the person you know yourself to be. There’s a quiet injustice in that. People see you one way while you’re living an entirely different reality on the inside.

I felt that for most of my teenage years.

I went to a small school, and for four years I felt like the black sheep. To be fair, that wasn’t entirely true, but it sure felt true. Everyone else seemed to know how to fit in, do what they were told, and succeed. I didn’t. I struggled academically. I’ll just tell you plainly: I graduated dead last in my class. People are always quick to point out there were only eighteen of us. And sure, that’s fair. But I have to be honest, dumbest of eighteen still doesn’t feel great.

The one place I found any success was sports, and even there I struggled. I was intense. Mouthy with referees. I may or may not still hold a school record for technical fouls in a single basketball season. I think I was the only player ever ejected from a summer league game. So I developed a reputation: lazy in the classroom, angry on the field.

And that reputation made everything worse, because it was built on a misunderstanding.

The truth is, I wasn’t just lazy and angry. I was depressed. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, I had lived through the abandonment of my biological father, the suicide of my grandfather, the death of a close friend, the instability of a blended family marked by it’s fair share of mental illness, and five moves across five different states. I was overwhelmed. I was carrying feelings I didn’t even have names for yet. So no, I didn’t struggle in school because I didn’t care about my life. And yes, I got angry, but the anger was really grief and sadness I had no idea what to do with.

Thankfully, there was one person who understood. His name was Mr. Rombeau, and he taught my Bible class. He came alongside me and told me I reminded him of Peter in the Gospels—passionate, impulsive, in need of guidance and care. In the middle of feeling so deeply misunderstood, he became a lifeline.

I tell you all of that because most of us know what it is to be misunderstood by the people around us. And the good news at the very center of the Christian faith is this: Jesus understands you. Not in a distant, theoretical, general way. Deeply. Personally. From experience.

The Whole Story in One Breath

There’s an ancient summary of the Christian faith that puts it like this:

“Jesus, for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate... and was made man; and was crucified also for us... He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father; and He will come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.”

That’s a sweeping summary of Jesus’ entire mission. And what’s beautiful is that it doesn’t argue. It doesn’t defend. It simply tells a story. A rescue story.

It begins with Jesus coming down from heaven and being made human. This is what the Christian faith calls incarnation. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). God didn’t shout instructions from a safe distance. He didn’t send a lesser version of Himself as a stand-in. He came Himself, entering our world the same way we all do: through vulnerability, dependence, and limitation. A real body. A real mind. Real emotions. A real human life. This is where rescue starts: God with us.

Then it names the cost. Jesus wasn’t misunderstood in theory; He was rejected in reality. He was betrayed, condemned, and executed under a real governor in real history. He doesn’t merely understand suffering. He experienced it.

He suffered and was buried. That small phrase matters more than it seems. It means Jesus didn’t just appear to die, didn’t slip away at the last moment. He truly died and was truly laid in the ground. Paul says it flatly: “He was buried” (1 Corinthians 15:4). Which means Jesus knows not only pain but loss. Not only fear but finality. He knows the silence of grief.

And then the turn. On the third day, He rose again. Death didn’t get the last word. The grave couldn’t hold Him. His resurrection isn’t just a miracle. It’s a declaration that sin, suffering, and death do not define the future. Life does.

From there He ascended and was enthroned. He is not gone, but reigning on our behalf, right now, over all things. And one day He will come again to set everything right. History isn’t aimless. Evil isn’t eternal. Injustice will not win. Everything broken will one day be named, healed, and restored.

From incarnation to resurrection. From suffering to reign. From humility to glory. And every part of it rests on one stunning truth: Jesus is fully human. Two pieces of that truth touch our ordinary days more than the rest.

He Added Humanity Without Subtracting Anything

Jesus has existed eternally as God. Not God-like. Not God-lite. Fully God, always. And then, at a particular moment in real history, He entered humanity as a human being. Here’s the crucial part: in doing so, He didn’t stop being God. The incarnation wasn’t Jesus losing something of Himself. It was Jesus adding something to Himself.

Let me try to illustrate it, however imperfectly.

On the morning of my wedding day, I woke up in my apartment a man. That afternoon I stood at the front of a church in a tux, watching the back doors open as my bride walked down the aisle. (I cried, uncontrollably. Our pastor nearly caught fire praying too close to the unity candle. It was a whole thing.) We said our vows, we kissed, we were declared husband and wife. And here’s the point: I woke up that morning a man, and I went to bed that night still a man. But something had been added. I hadn’t lost anything. I’d gained something. I was fully who I’d always been, and now I was also a husband.

In a far more profound way, Jesus didn’t lose His divinity in the incarnation. Paul says He “took on the likeness of humanity” (Philippians 2:6-8). He became fully human without ever ceasing to be fully God. And that’s not just theological precision for its own sake. It’s the foundation for everything that comes next.

He Understands—Because He’s Been Here

“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

We never have to wonder whether Jesus understands. He does, because He shared our experience. Think about it. Jesus knew family conflict. He knew abandonment and betrayal. He got hungry. He got tired. He felt joy and sorrow, anger and anxiety. He knew the dread of what was coming. He knew the longing for a different path than the one in front of Him. He lived under the weight of a corrupt empire. He knew what it was to be misunderstood.

Think about how frustrating the opposite feels—someone claiming to understand an experience they’ve never lived. I’ll keep my example more annoying than tragic: it has always driven me a little crazy when someone insists they know what it’s like to be a parent because they own… a pet. Now, I love pets. We have one, and our dog is a beloved part of the family. Raising a dog absolutely has its challenges. But it is not remotely the same thing as raising a child. So when I see a bumper sticker that says “My kid has four paws,” something in me wants to gently nudge that car off the road. I’m not saying the impulse is righteous. I’m just being honest that it’s there.

The reason that bothers us is simple: true understanding is born out of shared experience. And here’s the incredible truth of our faith: Jesus has shared ours.

Now, here’s a nuance worth catching. Jesus didn’t need to become human in order to understand us. He created us. He knows us completely, better than we know ourselves. So Hebrews isn’t saying He became human to finally figure us out. It’s saying He became human so that we would feel free to draw near to Him in the middle of our actual experience. That’s exactly why the very next verse says:

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

The point isn’t only that Jesus understands. The point is that His understanding is an invitation to come closer.

A Few Ways to Draw Near This Week

If Jesus truly understands—and He does—then the question isn’t really about information. It’s about nearness. Here are three small practices to help you move toward Him instead of away:

• Name one thing you’ve felt misunderstood about. Write it down plainly, as if explaining it to someone who already gets it. Then read it back slowly as a prayer, remembering that Jesus already understands the part no one else does.

• Sit with verse 16 for five minutes. “Approach with confidence.” Notice where you tend to keep your distance from God. Maybe it’s out of shame, fear, or the assumption He doesn’t understand. Ask what it would look like to come close instead.

• Practice “He knows.” This week, when a hard emotion surfaces—grief, anxiety, anger, loneliness—pause and say quietly, “Jesus, You know this. You’ve been here.” Make it less of a performance and more an act of coming home.

Jesus knows you. He knows what you feel, where you struggle, how you hurt, what you long for. He knows these things even when you can’t name them yourself. And in those moments He doesn’t say, “Figure it out.” He says, “I know. I understand.” And His desire isn’t to keep His distance, but to offer you mercy and grace, exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.

The question was never whether Jesus understands. The question is: will you draw near to Him?

If this resonated with you, consider subscribing to The Lighthouse. Each week I write about designing a life of deeper relationship with God—honest about doubt, anchored in grace, and always pointing toward the One who understands. I’d love to have you along.

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A few months ago I had the privilege of holding a two-year-old member of our church in my lap. We were at another organizations event and there were small plastic poker chips sitting on the table for reasons I still don’t understand. To keep my little friend occupied, I handed him two of the chips. You would have thought I’d given him the keys to Disneyland. His eyes went wide. For several minutes, those two cheap plastic chips had his complete and undivided attention.

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since—because it revealed something I’ve slowly been losing without realizing it.

Everything feels magical when you’re young. A stick. A rock. A handful of dirt. Clouds shaped like animals. Wonder comes naturally to children because everything is new, and it doesn’t take much to stop them in their tracks.

But the older we get, the more that sense of wonder fades.

Some of that is healthy. If you’re forty-seven and still believe thunder is the sound of angels bowling, it might be time to make peace with science. But life erodes wonder in more painful ways too. After enough suffering. After trauma. After becoming more aware of how broken the world really is. After years of constant noise and distraction and overstimulation. Our capacity for awe quietly wears down.

The Irish songwriter Dermot Kennedy has a lyric that captures it better than I can. He sings, “My sense of wonder is just a little bit tired.”

That’s exactly what life can feel like the longer we live.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, though: faith invites us back into wonder. The more deeply we explore who God actually is, the more honestly we sit with the mystery of it all, the more room we make for awe to return. And few things have reawakened wonder in me lately like sitting with one ancient, audacious claim Christians have been making for over sixteen hundred years.

One Mouthful of a Sentence

For most of Christian history, believers have used short summaries to say together, this is what we believe. One of the oldest reads like this:

“We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all things; God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God; begotten, not made, being of one essence with the Father, by whom all things were made.”

I’ll admit it: that’s a mouthful. The words feel dense, even a little foreign. But underneath all the careful phrasing, it’s making one simple, staggering claim.

Jesus is fully God.

That’s the heart of it. Not God-like. Not similar to God. Not a glorious creation standing closer to God than the rest of us. Fully God.

This wasn’t always settled. In the early 300s, a respected teacher named Arius began arguing that Jesus was exalted and magnificent—the highest of all created beings—but not actually God. His famous line was, “There was a time when the Son was not.” It raised a question the church couldn’t avoid: Is Jesus on the Creator side of reality, or the created side?

Everything in that ancient confession is answering that one question. And I think four convictions are bundled inside it—four threads worth pulling on slowly.

1. Jesus Is God

The claim is bold: Jesus is “God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God.” Whatever the word *God* means when we apply it to the Father, it means the same thing when applied to the Son.

Scripture is remarkably consistent here. John opens his Gospel with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Paul calls Jesus “our great God and Savior.” Hebrews describes him as “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact expression of his nature.” Paul writes that “the entire fullness of God’s nature dwells bodily in Christ.”

This matters because all of us can be *God-like* in fleeting moments. Picture a firefighter running into a burning building to save a stranger. We’d call that Christ-like. We might even say godly. But no one walks out of that moment thinking the firefighter is God.

Why not? Because courage doesn’t make you the Creator. Empathy doesn’t make you eternal. And love—however sacrificial—doesn’t make you the source of life itself.

Being God-like means you reflect something true about God. Being God means you are the source of that goodness.

So when you look at Jesus, you’re not seeing a softer, more approachable version of God. You’re seeing the true God, made visible.

2. Jesus Is Eternal

The confession says Jesus is “begotten of the Father before all worlds… begotten, not made.”

That word begotten trips people up. We usually use it to talk about a child coming into existence. But here it describes relationship, not origin in time. The point is that Jesus doesn’t belong to the category of “things God made.” There was never a time when the Son did not exist.

That’s why John starts where he does—”In the beginning was the Word.” Paul writes, “He is before all things.” Jesus says of himself, “I am the First and the Last.” Scripture never describes Jesus coming into existence. It describes him as already there when the beginning begins.

This is exactly where Arius went wrong. At first his idea sounds harmless—he still honored Jesus, still spoke highly of him. But follow the logic. If Jesus is created, even the highest created being, then he doesn’t fully share God’s life. And if he doesn’t fully share God’s life, he can’t fully reveal God. And if he can’t fully reveal God, then our worship and our hope are resting on something less than God himself.

That’s why this wasn’t a few theologians splitting hairs. They were protecting the heart of the faith. Because if Jesus is not fully God, then God has not truly come near. But if he is, then to encounter Jesus is to encounter the eternal God of the universe.

3. Jesus Is Distinct From the Father, Yet One With Him

Here’s where it gets mysterious. The confession says Jesus is “the only-begotten Son… of one essence with the Father.” Two truths are packed into that phrase: real distinction and real unity.

There is distinction—the Father is not the Son, and the Son is not the Father. But there is also unity—they share the same divine life, the same essence. John holds both in a single breath: “The Word was with God” (distinction), “and the Word was God” (unity). Later Jesus puts it simply: “I and the Father are one.”

I find it helpful to picture a narrow road with a deep ditch on either side. I live near an older part of town where the roads were built exactly like this—drift too far in either direction and you’re not bumping a curb, you’re in the ditch. (I learned this the hard way during a snowstorm a few years back, and my SUV’s bent axle can confirm it.)

The road is the biblical teaching: Jesus is not the Father, but he is not separate from the Father. Distinction and unity, held together.

The first ditch is imagining three separate gods—a Father god, a Son god, a Spirit god. That drives right off the road, because Scripture insists there is only one God.

The other ditch says God is one person who simply changes costumes—Father in creation, Son in the Gospels, Spirit in the church. But Scripture doesn’t describe God swapping masks. It describes relationship. Jesus prays to the Father. The Father sends the Son. At Jesus’s baptism, the Spirit descends while the Father speaks from heaven—all three present at once. Flatten that into one person changing roles, and you’ve made God someone talking to himself.

This isn’t abstract. If the Father and the Son aren’t truly distinct, then love within God isn’t real, and prayer becomes performance rather than relationship. The better, deeper mystery is this: one God, eternally existing in loving relationship—Father, Son, and Spirit. Distinct, yet one.

4. Jesus Is the Source of Creation

Finally, Jesus is the one “by whom all things were made.” John writes, “All things were created through him.” Paul echoes it: “For everything was created by him.” That language draws a hard line—everything that exists is either Creator or created.

Think of a city powered by a single massive plant. Homes light up. Hospitals run. Phones charge. Life hums along because electricity is moving everywhere. But none of those buildings generate the power. They can receive it, distribute it, even waste it. But they are not the source.

Jesus isn’t one more building in the city—just brighter, just more important. He’s the power plant. He stands on the source side of reality.

Letting the Wonder Back In

When this truth finally finds a home in your heart, it does something to you. It reawakens wonder. And it cultivates humility.

Sit with this for a moment:

The same hands that held little children. The same hands that helped the broken to their feet. The same hands that touched lepers and made them whole. Those are the very hands that flung galaxies into existence.

That is not ordinary. That is wonder itself.

So here’s my question for you this week: Will you let that wonder in? Will you live in awe of this Jesus—fully God, Creator, Savior, and Sustainer of all things?

And will you let that wonder make you humble? The kind of person who can honestly say:

I am not God. I am not in control. I am not the source of all things. But I am loved, and protected, and held by the One who is.

---

A few ways to let this settle in this week:

- Practice noticing. Once a day, stop at something ordinary—steam off your coffee, light through a window, your child’s laugh—and let yourself be amazed for ten seconds. Wonder is a muscle. It grows when you use it.

- Pray as relationship, not performance. This week, talk to God the way you’d talk to someone who genuinely loves you and is genuinely present. Not a script. A relationship.

- Name what you’re not. When anxiety rises or control slips, try saying out loud: “I am not the source of all things—but I am held by the One who is.” See what it loosens.

___________

If these reflections stir something in you, I’d love for you to walk with me each week. Subscribe to The Lighthouse and let’s keep recovering our sense of wonder together.

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There’s a moment in childhood that most of us have experienced but rarely talk about — the moment you realize the world is bigger and stranger and scarier than you thought.

For me, that moment came courtesy of a 1985 movie called Return to Oz.

If you’ve seen it, you know. If you haven’t — trust me, it was not what the marketing promised. There were these creatures called the Wheelers, half-human and half-machine, and they haunted my dreams for weeks. That night, I did what any sensible child does when the darkness gets too loud: I dragged my blanket down the hall and made a bed on the floor of my parents’ room.

I didn’t need them to do anything. I just needed to be near them.

Their presence was enough.

I’ve been thinking about that memory as I’ve been sitting with a question that sounds simple but runs surprisingly deep: What do Christians actually believe about God?

Not what modern culture says. Not the default image we’ve inherited from childhood or painful experience. But what the church has actually confessed — together, across centuries — about who God is.

For the last 1,600 years, Christians have turned to two ancient summaries of that confession: the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed. And both begin in the same place. Not with rules. Not with expectations. But with a description of God Himself.

The Nicene Creed opens like this:

Fourteen words. And inside them, three convictions that have anchored followers of Jesus for millennia — convictions that are not just theologically precise, but personally transforming.

Let’s look at each one.

There is one God — and reality is not at war with itself.

In the ancient world, the idea that there was one God wasn’t comforting. It was scandalous. Most people assumed the universe was governed by competing divine powers, different gods pulling in different directions, and your life was caught somewhere in the crossfire.

To confess one God was to say: No. Reality is not divided. There is no cosmic tug-of-war. There is no divine instability. The universe is not chaos held loosely together. It is the creation of one unified, faithful, relational God.

Now, this raises an honest question for Christians: what about Jesus? What about the Holy Spirit? Doesn’t that sound like three?

Here’s where Christians have always planted their flag, even while admitting it strains our categories: there is one God who has eternally existed as three persons — Father, Son, and Spirit. Not three gods. Not one God wearing different masks. One God. Three persons. A unity that is, somehow, also a relationship.

Theologians call it the Trinity. And yes, it is mysterious. No illustration does it full justice. But one image that’s helped me: think about a chord in music. A chord is one sound made up of multiple distinct notes. Each note is real. None cancels the others out. Together, they form a single harmony — richer than any note could be alone.

The Trinity is something like that (yes, I know the illustration has gaps). Not three gods trying to cooperate, but one divine harmony.

And here’s why this matters for a Tuesday morning or a hard Thursday or a season when the world feels loud and chaotic: we are not at the mercy of competing, unpredictable powers. We live under the care of one God who is unified, faithful, and consistent. The ground beneath our feet doesn’t shift depending on which deity is winning today.

That is not a small comfort.

God is not a force. God is a Father.

The creed doesn’t just tell us there is one God. It tells us this God has a name — Father.

Jesus made this personal in Matthew 6 when he taught his disciples to pray: “Our Father in heaven...” And this wasn’t an isolated moment. It was the posture Jesus kept returning to — God as Abba, the intimate Hebrew word for Father. The word a child uses when they run to a parent without thinking twice.

Psalm 103 says God has compassion on his children the way a father does. Isaiah stretches even further, comparing God’s comfort to a mother’s. Romans 8 tells us that through Jesus, we haven’t just been tolerated or managed by God — we’ve been adopted. Welcomed as sons and daughters into a family.

Now, I want to pause here, because I know this is a place where things can get complicated.

For many of us, the word father doesn’t bring warmth. It brings a specific face, a specific set of memories — and not all of them are safe. If your relationship with your earthly father was painful or absent or harmful, it makes complete sense that calling God “Father” makes you tense up rather than relax.

I’m not going to try to undo that with a paragraph.

But I want to offer one gentle reframe, borrowed from pastor Louie Giglio: “God is not a picture of our earthly parents. He’s the perfection of them.”

In other words, we make a mistake when we let our earthly parents define what God is like. Healing begins when we let God define what parents were always meant to be.

That’s the direction. We move toward God to understand what we were always longing for — not away from Him because the word carries wounds.

If calling God Father is genuinely hard for you right now, here’s a starting place: don’t force affection. Start with honesty. Tell God you’re struggling. Tell Him where it hurts. Tell Him you’re not sure you trust this. He is not threatened by your struggle. He is not offended by your hesitation. He understands.

And the Father’s door stays open.

The God who made everything is still at work in everything.

The third confession in the creed is about power — but not the kind that makes you feel small.

“Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”

God is the source of everything that exists. Not just the mountains and the galaxies, but the invisible realities we can’t see — spiritual dimensions, unseen structures, all of it. Nothing exists apart from Him.

And here’s what matters: God didn’t create because He was lonely. He didn’t create because He lacked something. He created freely, as an overflow of love. Everything that exists comes from Him, is sustained through Him, and is moving toward His purposes.

An image that helps me: think of a novelist and their story. The author isn’t trapped inside the plot, but the plot exists because of the author. The author knows where the story is going, even when the characters don’t. And the author can step into the story — which, of course, is exactly what Christians believe God did in Jesus (yes, another imperfect illustration…).

This matters, practically, because so many of us live as though everything depends on us. We carry the weight of outcomes we were never meant to carry. We feel anxious because the world is outside our control — and it is. But it is not outside His.

Believing in God as the almighty source of all things does three things at once: it humbles us, reminding us we are created beings and not in charge; it gives us courage, reminding us we are not alone; and it gives us hope, because the God who creates also completes. He finishes what He starts.

A compass, not a cage.

Theologian Luke Timothy Johnson writes that the creeds “speak truly, but not fully.” They don’t say everything there is to say about God. They can’t. God is bigger than our language and larger than our categories.

But they function like a compass — they orient us. They point us toward the essential truths Scripture keeps returning to about who God is. And those truths aren’t abstract. They are daily reality.

You are not alone. God is present. His nurturing care is accessible. And even when life feels confusing or overwhelming, you are not without hope — because your God is the almighty source who is always, always at work.

Maybe this week, what God is gently inviting you to do is name one place where you’ve quietly assumed He is uninterested, or uninvolved, or unable to reach. And then let that place be where you bring what you actually feel — not a performance, not a tidy prayer, but honest need.

That’s the prayer of someone who believes in a Father.

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There’s a moment in most people’s lives when the question stops being what they believe and starts being whether belief itself is worth anything at all.

Maybe it came after a painful experience with a church. Maybe it arrived quietly, during a season when the faith that once felt solid started feeling thin. Or maybe it’s just the ambient noise of living in a culture that has grown deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to believe anything with conviction.

We haven’t stopped believing, exactly. We’ve stopped agreeing on what’s even worth believing in.

And if you’re honest, you may have wondered: Why does belief matter at all?

That’s the question I want to sit with here. Because I think it’s one of the most important questions any of us can ask — and one of the most neglected.

Three Stories We Keep Telling Ourselves

Before we can talk about why belief matters, we need to name the cultural narratives that make the question feel so fraught.

The first is that belief is dangerous. Religious conviction, we’re told, produces certainty. And certainty produces exclusion, harm, and violence. The implication: the world would be a better place if we could move beyond religious belief altogether.

But that’s not quite right. Belief itself isn’t the problem. The problem is how belief is held. What people are actually reacting to, is religious extremism. That’s when beliefs are used to dehumanize, to justify harm, to resist accountability. That kind of faith is a distortion, not a definition. The way of Jesus stands in direct opposition to every form of it.

The second narrative is that belief is obsolete. Science and technology, the argument goes, have explained enough of reality that faith in God is no longer necessary. Faith is seen as a relic of a pre-modern, less-informed age. But I’ll speak only for myself here: I have yet to encounter any science that makes faith in God unreasonable. Mystery hasn’t shrunk. If anything, the more we learn, the larger the questions become.

The third narrative is perhaps the most seductive: belief is customizable. More and more, we treat belief like a personal playlist. We keep what resonates, skip what doesn’t, and curate a spiritual life that suits our preferences. And while that sounds liberating, it tends to produce a kind of freedom with no foundation. No shared center. No lasting anchor.

The cumulative effect of all three? A generation that feels increasingly unmoored. Not godless, exactly. Just unanchored.

What Paul Knew About Belief

Nearly two thousand years ago, a man named Paul wrote a letter to a church in Corinth, a city that was, in many ways, remarkably similar to our own cultural today. Pluralistic, competitive, shaped by status. Truth was fluid, determined more by influence than by shared conviction. And the church there had begun to reflect its culture. Spiritually passionate, but unstable. Divided. Confused about what they actually believed.

By the time Paul reaches what we now call 1 Corinthians 15, that confusion had touched the very center of Christian faith. Some in the church were beginning to question the resurrection. And rather than introduce something new, Paul does something more important: he re-anchors them.

“I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you...”

Before he tells them what to believe, he tells them why belief matters. And he gives three reasons that feel just as urgent now as they did then.

Belief saves. Paul says the gospel is something through which they “are being saved” — present tense, ongoing. Not a one-time transaction. Not a ticket punched for some distant destination. Salvation, in the way Scripture describes it, is the continuing, healing work of Jesus — rescuing, forming, and restoring us over time. It’s not just something that happened to you. It’s something still happening in you.

Belief secures. Paul describes their belief as something they have taken a “stand” on. That’s stability language. Footing. Orientation. Researchers who study human psychology have noted that we are, at our core, meaning-makers. We need a framework that tells us who we are, what matters, and how the world holds together. When that framework is stable, we feel grounded. When it fractures — when suffering or loss or confusion outpaces our ability to make sense of things — anxiety rises and disorientation sets in. Paul isn’t offering belief as a feeling or an opinion. He’s describing it as the ground beneath your feet when grief shows up, when dreams collapse, when the world stops making sense.

Belief sustains. Paul adds a condition: “if you hold to the message I preached to you.” He’s not threatening. He’s warning, the way a parent warns a child they love. Faith, he’s saying, isn’t sustained by willpower or rule-keeping. It’s sustained by continuing to receive — by remaining connected to the good news at the center. Faith that drifts from its anchor doesn’t just become different. It becomes fragile. And fragile faith can’t carry us when life presses in.

What Christians Are Actually Asked to Believe

If belief matters this much — if it saves, secures, and sustains — then what we place our belief in matters enormously.

Paul answers that question with striking economy. Using language that scholars widely recognize as among the earliest creedal summaries in all of Christian history, he distills the heart of the faith into four statements:

Christ died for our sins. He was buried. He was raised on the third day. He appeared.

That’s it. Not everything Christians can believe, just what they must believe. The irreducible center. To remove these is not to simplify Christianity. It’s to unravel it.

The burial matters because it confirms the death was real. The resurrection matters because the Greek Paul uses — he has been raised — isn’t past tense. It means He was raised and He still lives. And the appearances matter because Paul lists hundreds of witnesses, many still alive at the time of his writing. This was a claim that could be challenged, investigated, disputed. Christianity didn’t begin as a private vision. It was proclaimed in the presence of eyewitnesses.

Christ died. Christ was buried. Christ rose. Christ appeared.

What Happens When Belief Erodes

Paul uses a haunting phrase: believing “in vain.” This is belief that no longer does anything. He’s not demanding perfect certainty. He’s not requiring that we have every question resolved. But he is saying that belief must remain connected to the true gospel. Because when it doesn’t — when we slowly customize it, dilute it, or quietly detach it from its center — it loses its power.

Usually not all at once. Usually quietly. Like erosion. The ground doesn’t disappear in a moment. It wears away over time. And one day, what once felt solid can no longer hold weight.

Two Invitations

Paul doesn’t end his argument with pressure. He ends with an invitation to re-anchor. I want to do the same.

If you’re exploring faith — curious, skeptical, uncertain — this is simply an open-handed invitation to honestly consider what Christians believe, and why those beliefs have mattered for two thousand years. No pressure. Just space to examine whether this story might be true, and whether it might be good.

And if you already believe, this is an invitation to allow that belief to deepen. Not to become louder or harsher — but steadier. More rooted. More resilient. Because belief at its best isn’t about certainty or control. It’s about trust.

And when that trust is anchored in the risen Christ, it saves us. It secures us. It sustains us.

That’s why belief matters.

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Earlier this week, I wrote a bit about a painful experience many people quietly carry.

You believed God had promised something.

• A restored relationship.

• A door opening.

• A healing coming.

• A future unfolding in a particular way.

But what you believed God had said and what actually happened were very different things.

When that happens, the emotional fallout can be intense. We often feel anger, confusion, doubt, and sadness all at once. In those moments, many people instinctively move toward blame. We blame God for failing us. We blame the church for misleading us. We blame faith for promising more than it delivers.

But there is another path available.

Instead of blaming God, we can grieve the loss of what we hoped would be true.

Grief allows us to stay in relationship with God even when we don’t understand Him. Blame pushes God away. Grief keeps the conversation open.

But for many people, grief is unfamiliar territory. We know we’re hurting, but we don’t know how to process that pain with God in a healthy way.

So I want to offer a simple process that can help you move through disappointment with honesty and openness before God.

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1. Name the Disappointment

Grief begins with honesty.

Many of us try to move past disappointment too quickly. We spiritualize it. We explain it away. We tell ourselves things like, “God must have had a different plan,” or “Everything happens for a reason.”

Those statements may contain truth, but when they are used too quickly they can bypass the real pain we’re carrying.

Before anything else, we need to name what was lost.

• What were you hoping would happen?

• What future did you believe God was leading you toward?

• What outcome did you pray for and expect?

• What did you believe God said?

Be as specific as possible. The clearer you can name the disappointment, the easier it becomes to bring it honestly before God.

You might even try writing it down in a single sentence:

“I believed God was going to… but that didn’t happen.”

Naming the disappointment doesn’t mean you’ve lost faith. It simply means you’re telling the truth about your experience.

And truth is always the starting place for healing.

2. Acknowledge the Feelings

Once the disappointment is named, the next step is allowing yourself to feel what that loss has stirred up inside you.

Disappointment rarely travels alone. It usually brings a whole group of emotions with it.

• Sadness.

• Anger.

• Confusion.

• Fear.

• Embarrassment.

• Doubt.

Many people feel pressure to suppress these emotions because they assume strong feelings somehow dishonor God. But the Bible paints a very different picture.

The Psalms are filled with people bringing their full emotional experience into God’s presence. They don’t filter their feelings. They don’t pretend everything is fine.

They tell the truth.

That honesty is not a failure of faith. In reality, it is an act of faith.

You might try naming your feelings in a simple prayer:

• “God, I feel angry about this.”

• “I feel confused.”

• “I feel deeply disappointed.”

• “I feel embarrassed that I believed this would happen.”

There is no need to tidy up your emotions before bringing them to God. He already knows what is in your heart.

Acknowledging your feelings allows your grief to move instead of becoming buried and hardened.

3. Invite God’s Comfort

Once the disappointment is named and the emotions are acknowledged, the final step is inviting God to draw near in the middle of it.

Grief is not meant to be carried alone.

One of the most beautiful promises in Scripture is found in Psalm 34:18:

“The Lord is near the brokenhearted.”

Notice what the verse does not say. It doesn’t say God is near when we have everything figured out. It doesn’t say He draws close once we’ve resolved our questions.

It says He is near to the brokenhearted.

In other words, God’s comfort often meets us in the very place we are tempted to hide.

You might pray something simple like this:

“God, I don’t understand what happened. But I invite you to come close to me in this disappointment. Meet me in this grief. Help heal the parts of my heart that feel broken.”

You may not receive immediate clarity about what happened. But something deeper often begins to take place.

Instead of being alone with your disappointment, you begin to experience God’s presence within it.

And that presence is where healing begins.

A Final Thought

Disappointment has a way of making us feel like something in our faith has failed.

But learning to grieve honestly with God is not a step away from faith. It is often a deeper step into it.

Because when we allow our hearts to break in God’s presence, we discover something many people never experience:

God does not withdraw from our pain.

He draws near to it.

The question is, will you open yourself to receive Him?

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When I was 25 years old, I heard God speak to me in the most direct, clear, and personal way to date. He said three things:

1. “Your journey will not be easy.”

2. “I haven’t called you to follow men.”

3. “I’ve called you to plant a church.”

I’ll spare you the context of all that, but those three points have shaped a large part of the past 20 years of my vocational life.

I share that because it’s important to establish my deep conviction and personal experience with God’s voice. In short, I believe God speaks—directly, specifically, and personally.

Which is exactly why the moments when things don’t unfold the way we thought He said they would can feel so destabilizing.

Lately I’ve been spending time with more and more people who are in this place.

They are convinced they heard God speak.

They believed God had promised something—a specific outcome, a relationship that will be restored, a door opening, some sort of healing that will come. But what they believed God had said and what has actually happened are wildly different.

I’ll never forget the courage of one person in particular who looked me right in the eyes and said, “I feel like God lied to me.”

If you’ve ever lived through that kind of moment, you know how disorienting it can be.

Your whole system floods with emotion.

Anger.

Confusion.

Doubt.

Sadness.

It’s not a neat and tidy emotional experience. It’s overwhelming. It can leave you feeling disillusioned and suspicious—of God, of yourself, and oftentimes even of faith itself.

Recently I’ve sat with several people who expressed all of this and more through what I can only describe as furious tears. Not a quiet sadness, but the kind that comes from feeling deeply and profoundly let down. The kind that asks, What happened? The kind that wonders if trusting God was a mistake.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about what we do when what we think we heard from God and what actually unfolds in our lives are very different things.

I’ve noticed that most of us, myself included, move quickly toward BLAME.

• We blame God for failing us.

• We blame the church for misleading us.

• We blame faith for over-promising and under-delivering.

And those reactions are understandable. Pain demands an explanation.

But just because blame is understandable doesn’t mean it’s beneficial.

The truth is, human beings are not perfect interpreters of God’s voice.

We are emotional creatures.

Hopeful creatures.

Fearful creatures.

Sometimes we hear God clearly.

Sometimes we hear what we desperately want to be true.

And sometimes the two get tangled together in ways that are hard to separate.

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Admitting that possibility is uncomfortable. It requires humility. It means acknowledging that we might have misunderstood something deeply important.

And that can feel threatening.

So instead, it’s often easier to get angry at God than it is to admit our own fallibility.

But here’s the thing I wish more people knew:

Grief is a much more beneficial response than blame.

When what we hoped for doesn’t happen…

When the future we believed God promised doesn’t unfold…

When we were so certain we heard one thing… and something entirely different happened…

There is real loss there.

Loss deserves to be grieved.

The Psalms are full of this kind of honesty. The writers pour out their disappointment, confusion, and pain directly to God. They don’t pretend everything makes sense. They don’t rush to spiritual explanations.

They grieve.

And in doing so, they stay in relationship with the very God they don’t understand.

Blame closes the heart. Grief opens it.

Blame pushes God away. Grief pulls Him close.

So if you’re in that painful space where what you thought God said and what has actually happened don’t line up, you don’t have to rush to conclusions about God’s character.

You may need to mourn what you hoped would be true.

The good news is, this difficult choice comes with a promise.

Psalm 34:18 says, “The Lord is near the brokenhearted…”

So maybe God is inviting you to make the brave choice to let your heart break, so that He can draw near and heal.

Where have you experienced the painful gap between what you believed God promised and what actually happened?

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Earlier this week, I wrote a bit about the reality that joy can feel risky.

Grief makes us guarded.

Anxiety keeps us scanning.

Noise drowns out beauty.

And sometimes, even when joy knocks, we hesitate to open the door.

I want to return to that ancient promise from Zephaniah and linger there a little longer. Let these words soak in…

“The Lord your God is with you, a mighty warrior who saves.

He will rejoice over you with gladness.

He will quiet you with His love.

He will delight in you with singing.”

Before you rush past those words, pause.

Imagine the original hearers. They were not spiritually impressive people. Their history was messy. Their leadership was corrupt. Their future felt uncertain. They carried collective guilt and personal fear.

And into that exact condition, God does not say, “Try harder.”

He says, “I am with you.”

“I’m the one who saves you.”

“I rejoice over you.”

“I quiet you.”

“I sing.”

There is something deeply disarming about that.

Many of us can tolerate a God who forgives.

We can conceptualize a God who commands.

We can even accept a God who rescues.

But a God who delights?

A God who sings because of you?

That is harder to receive.

Sit with that image for a moment.

Not a distant deity evaluating you.

Not a reluctant savior tolerating you.

But a God who looks at you—the actual you, with your inconsistencies and fatigue and half-formed prayers—and feels glad.

This is where true joy begins.

Not as emotional hype.

Not as denial of pain.

But as a slow, embodied awareness that you are not merely endured—you are enjoyed.

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Notice the tenderness in the language: “He will quiet you with His love.”

The Hebrew imagery carries the sense of calming, of settling. Like a parent placing a hand on a restless child’s back. Not scolding. Not lecturing. Simply present. Steady.

For those of us whose nervous systems have been living on high alert, that matters.

Joy doesn’t grow in an atmosphere of threat. It grows in safety.

And this text suggests that safety is not first found in changed circumstances—but in a changed understanding of God’s heart toward us.

I think about how easily we project our own self-criticism onto God. If we are disappointed in ourselves, we assume He must be. If we feel weary of our inconsistencies, we imagine He is too.

But Zephaniah rejects that script.

He describes a God who rejoices with gladness. Who delights with singing.

So what might it look like to sit quietly and experience this?

Not in abstraction. Not as a theological concept. But personally.

You, in the middle of your ordinary week.

God, attentive.

Not frowning. Not distant.

But glad.

If that feels difficult to believe, you’re not alone. It felt implausible to them too.

Yet history unfolded in ways that confirmed the promise: exile did not have the final word. Judgment did not erase mercy. Presence returned. Restoration began—slowly, imperfectly, but truly.

And in the Christian story, that trajectory culminates in something even more intimate: God not just with us, but within us. Not merely restoring a city, but inhabiting human hearts.

Which means the invitation now is not to manufacture joy—but to receive it.

To experiment, even briefly, with the possibility that you are delighted in.

Not because you performed well this week.

Not because your faith was flawless.

Not because you feel spiritually vibrant.

But because delight is who God is.

If you’ve been protecting yourself from joy because disappointment hurts, that makes sense. Self-protection has likely served you before.

But what if, in this particular relationship, the risk is different?

What if lowering your defenses doesn’t expose you to harm—but to love?

I’m not asking you to feel something on command. Joy cannot be forced. It grows slowly, like trust.

I’m simply inviting you to create a small pocket of space—five quiet minutes, perhaps—and consider this:

If God truly rejoices over you, what might shift in your body?

In your breathing?

In the way you carry today?

You don’t have to answer out loud. You don’t have to resolve all your doubts.

Just sit with that question and the answers that come up.

And if you’re willing, you might try a simple prayer:

“God, if You delight in me, help me become brave enough to believe it.”

Let that be enough for now.

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There are seasons when joy feels almost irresponsible.

You wake up, scroll for a few minutes, and the world feels heavy before your feet even touch the floor. Headlines stack up. Deadlines loom. Your body carries a low-grade tension you can’t quite name. Even the “good” things—family gatherings, celebrations, the rituals that are supposed to feel warm—feel complicated.

You want to feel light. You want to feel glad. But something in you stays braced.

For many of us, the problem isn’t that we don’t value joy. It’s that we don’t trust it.

Because joy feels risky.

My favorite songwriter, Dermot Kennedy, has a lyric in his song “Funeral” that captures this. He writes,

“Grief is such a solid promise. Joy just leaves you in the rain. Sadness waits down in the lobby. Solace stood you up again.”

If you’ve lost something precious, your nervous system learns to stand guard. Grief doesn’t disappear just because the calendar says it’s time. It lingers beneath the surface—over people, over relationships, over versions of life you thought you’d have by now.

And when grief is still present, joy can feel like betrayal. If I let myself be happy, am I dishonoring what was lost?

Then there’s the steady hum of anxiety. Not always dramatic. Not always diagnosable. Just the constant background noise of what if.

What if something goes wrong?

What if this doesn’t last?

What if the worst thing I can imagine happens?

Anxiety keeps us scanning the horizon instead of inhabiting the moment. It tells us safety is fragile. And joy, real joy, requires a sense of safety.

Add to that the relentless noise of modern life. More information than any generation before us. More outrage. More comparison. More reasons to stay alert.

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Is it any wonder joy feels distant?

Sometimes, especially in spiritual spaces, this gets complicated further. We read words about rejoicing and giving thanks and celebrating—and quietly assume that if we can’t access those emotions, something must be wrong with us.

If my faith were stronger, I’d feel happier.

If I trusted God more, I wouldn’t feel this flat.

But what if difficulty with joy isn’t a sign of weak faith?

What if it’s a sign you’re human?

There’s a passage of Scripture that has been bouncing around my brain lately. It comes from a small prophetic book most of us rarely read—Zephaniah. It was written to people living under political instability, moral compromise, and the looming threat of loss. Sound familiar?! They were not a joyful people. They were anxious, weary, and ashamed.

And into that reality, these words were spoken:

“Sing for joy… Rejoice and exult with all your heart.”

“The Lord your God is with you… He will rejoice over you with gladness… He will quiet you with His love… He will delight in you with singing.”

I don’t know about you, but I find this almost jarring.

Not because the invitation to joy is so bold—but because of the reason given for it.

Joy, in this passage, doesn’t begin with us working up better emotions. It doesn’t begin with pretending circumstances aren’t hard. It doesn’t even begin with our rejoicing in God.

It begins with the claim that God rejoices over us.

That His posture is not disappointment—but delight.

And here’s where the tension deepens.

If that were true—if God’s disposition toward you was one of gladness, if He actually delighted in your existence—would you be open to it?

Or have grief, anxiety, and noise taught you to keep your guard up?

There’s a part of me that wonders whether some of our distance from joy isn’t because it’s unavailable—but because it feels unsafe. To believe that you are delighted in is to risk disappointment. To let your shoulders drop is to risk being caught off guard.

Maybe joy feels risky because hope feels risky.

So here’s an important question to sit with honestly:

Are you open to the possibility that joy doesn’t start with you trying harder—but with you receiving something?

Later this week, I want to look again at those words from Zephaniah. But until then, I want to invite you to imagine what it would mean to be rejoiced over by God Himself.

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There’s a difference between slowing down and finally being held.

Most of us are familiar with the first. We cancel plans. Step away from noise. Try to catch our breath. And for a moment, things might even feel a litter better.

But then life resumes, and the tension returns.

Which suggests the problem is never just pace.

It’s also support.

God’s promise of peace doesn’t begin with calm feelings or improved circumstances. It begins with weight. With the question of what—or who—is carrying you.

Think back to that verse in Isaiah 26. It says, “You will keep the mind that is dependent on you in perfect peace, for it is trusting in you.” (V3)

God promises to keep in peace those whose minds are dependent on Him. That word, and similar translations, carries the image of leaning. Of being propped up. Of resting against something sturdy enough to bear the load.

It assumes a truth we often resist: the human mind was never designed to hold everything by itself.

When we try, it shows.

We replay conversations. Anticipate outcomes. Rehearse worst-case scenarios. Our thoughts work overtime, not because we’re broken, but because they’re unsupported. We’re asking our inner world to function without a pillar beneath it.

Peace, in God’s plan, isn’t manufactured by effort. It’s stabilized by trust.

Not trust as optimism. Not toxic positivity. But trust formed through familiarity. Through relationship. Through discovering, slowly and often painfully, that the One you’re leaning on is both capable and kind.

That’s why this kind of peace can’t be rushed.

It grows as we risk honesty.

As we bring fear without filtering it.

As we let questions exist without forcing answers.

Peace deepens not when we think about God more, but when we entrust ourselves to the God we’re thinking about.

And even then, life remains unpredictable.

People disappoint. Bodies fail. Circumstances shift without warning. Which is why the promise goes one step further. It doesn’t say peace is something we maintain. It says peace is something God guards.

That word is active. Protective. Attentive.

It suggests that peace isn’t as fragile as we fear. That it isn’t undone by a bad day or a hard conversation. That it can exist even in unfinished situations because it’s being watched over by something larger than us.

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This reframes so much.

It means peace doesn’t depend on your emotional consistency.

Or your spiritual discipline.

Or your ability to stay centered.

It depends on where you’re leaning.

The ancient writers warn that the city built on self-sufficiency eventually collapses—not because striving is evil, but because it asks too much of us. It promises safety while quietly draining us of rest.

So, the alternative isn’t passivity. It’s humility.

A willingness to admit that some things are too heavy to carry alone.

That control is not the same as security.

That wholeness begins not with mastery, but with surrender.

If you’re tired, it may not be because you’re doing something wrong.

It may be because you’re doing it by yourself.

So perhaps the most honest prayer isn’t for peace at all, but for support.

For the courage to lean.

For the patience to trust.

For the openness to let yourself be held.

You might sit with this question for a while:

There’s no need to rush an answer.

Peace has a way of growing in the quiet spaces where we finally stop bracing—and start resting.

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There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much in a single day, but from carrying too much for too long.

It’s the weariness that lingers even after sleep.

The low-grade tension buzzing beneath otherwise ordinary moments.

The sense that your inner world is always braced—always anticipating the next thing that might go wrong.

Most of us wouldn’t call it fear. We just call it life.

If we’re honest, peace often feels like something reserved for people with simpler circumstances, fewer responsibilities, or better emotional wiring. Something nice. Something optional. Something we hope to achieve later.

But, not now.

Especially not now.

We live in a culture that rewards urgency. Urgency feels like importance. We move quickly, decide quickly, react quickly. Even rest is often scheduled, optimized, and justified. And somewhere along the way, peace quietly became a luxury item—nice if you can afford it, but unrealistic for people living in the real world.

I don’t think we consciously choose that. I think we absorb it.

Which means many of us are building our lives with a subtle assumption running in the background: I’ll feel settled once things calm down.

But what if they don’t?

What if the chaos isn’t a season, but a state?

That question exposes an ache beneath our anxiety.

It isn’t just that life feels overwhelming. It’s that we’re not sure where to find rest when it does.

This is where an ancient line from Scripture has brought me immense comfort:

“You will keep the peace, a perfect peace, for all who trust in You, for those who dedicate their hearts and minds to You.” (Isaiah 26:3 - The Voice Translation)

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It sounds beautiful. Almost too beautiful.

Because for many of us, “perfect peace” feels like a phrase meant for stained glass windows, not real people with real lives. We read words like that and quietly translate them into something more manageable. A calm moment. A good day. A few minutes without spiraling.

But the word behind “peace” in that passage is not fragile or fleeting. It carries the idea of wholeness. Of things being held together. Of nothing missing and nothing cracked.

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility.

What if peace isn’t the absence of pressure, but the presence of something strong enough to hold it?

The passage that line comes from imagines two cities.

One is impressive, elevated, self-made. The kind of place built by human effort, confidence, and control. The other is quieter. Strong in a different way. Its stability doesn’t come from height or power, but from what surrounds it.

These cities aren’t geographic. They’re internal. They’re two ways of organizing one’s life.

One is built on self-reliance—the belief that if you work hard enough, stay vigilant enough, and manage things carefully enough, you can keep yourself safe.

The other is built on dependence—a willingness to let something outside yourself carry weight you were never meant to hold.

Most of us live somewhere between the two, constantly drifting back toward the city we know how to build. The one where our value comes from competence. Where peace is earned through control. Where slowing down feels dangerous because it means letting go.

And yet… the city we keep trying to construct is the one that keeps collapsing.

Which might explain why so many of us are tired even when things are “fine.”

Maybe the ache beneath our anxiety isn’t that life is too hard.

Maybe it’s that we’re holding it alone.

The ancient writers don’t rush to resolve that tension. They simply name it. They place peace in front of us not as a technique, but as an invitation—one that requires us to reconsider where our weight is resting.

Sit with that and we’ll come back to it later this week.

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Waiting changes depending on how long it lasts.

At first, it feels temporary. Manageable. You tell yourself it won’t be this way forever.

But then time stretches. The unanswered questions linger. The situation doesn’t improve. And waiting stops feeling like a pause and starts feeling like a place you might have to live.

That’s when hope gets tested—not the loud, confident kind, but the quiet kind that has to learn how to stay.

There’s a line in that same ancient poem I mentioned Monday that keeps returning to me: “It is good to wait quietly” (Lamentations 3:26).

If I’m honest, that sentence stretches me.

Waiting quietly sounds like surrender. Maybe even passivity. Like giving up the fight. Everything in us wants to move, fix, resolve, control. Quiet waiting feels like doing nothing when something should be done.

And yet the writer isn’t describing resignation. He’s describing trust without timelines.

This kind of hope doesn’t deny the pain. It doesn’t minimize the loss. It doesn’t rush toward silver linings. It stays rooted in the belief that goodness can still be encountered—even here.

Not all at once.

Not in obvious ways.

But in daily, almost ordinary forms.

He speaks of mercy that meets us every morning—steady, faithful, unexhausted (Lamentations 3:22–23).

Not mercy that erases yesterday.

Not mercy that guarantees tomorrow.

But mercy sufficient for today.

That reframes the question we’re asking.

Instead of, “When will this change?”

The deeper question becomes, “What is being given to me now?”

Sometimes it’s small enough to miss: a moment of rest, a steady breath, a kind word, a sliver of beauty that interrupts the heaviness just long enough to remind you that life hasn’t disappeared.

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None of these things solve the deeper ache. But they keep it from consuming us.

The writer also names something even more surprising: that his true portion—his real inheritance—isn’t what he lost, but the Presence that remains (Lamentations 3:24).

That’s a hard truth when what you’ve lost mattered deeply.

But there’s a steadiness here that doesn’t depend on circumstances cooperating. A kind of hope that says, “Even if nothing around me feels secure, I am not abandoned.”

That doesn’t make waiting painless. But it makes it possible.

This is the difference between hope that rushes outcomes and hope that rests in faithfulness.

The first demands resolution.

The second learns how to breathe without it.

The first says, “I’ll trust when things improve.”

The second says, “I’ll trust because I am still being met.”

If you’re in a season where waiting feels unavoidable—where answers are slow and clarity feels distant—perhaps the invitation isn’t to endure harder, but to notice more carefully.

To ask not what must happen next, but where God’s goodness is faithfully holding you now.

You don’t need to force yourself into optimism. You don’t need to pretend this is easier than it is. Whispered hope counts. Especially when shouted hope would feel dishonest.

So here’s a question worth sitting with:

What might it look like this week to call something back to your heart?

Not a solution.

Not a guarantee.

Just a truth strong enough to hold you where you are…

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We’re living in a time that treats waiting like a problem to be solved.

If something takes too long, we assume something’s gone wrong. If an answer doesn’t come quickly, we wonder whether we asked the wrong question. If relief doesn’t arrive on schedule, we start to question the value of the thing we’re waiting for—or the goodness of the One we’re waiting on.

Most of us don’t name it this way, but we’ve been trained to believe that speed equals care. That immediacy equals love. That urgency is always wise.

And when those expectations aren’t met—when the delivery is delayed, the message goes unanswered, the outcome doesn’t materialize—we don’t just feel disappointed. We feel unsettled. Irritated. Anxious. Sometimes even ashamed, as though waiting itself is evidence of some kind of failure.

The ache beneath all of this isn’t really about impatience.

It’s about fear.

• Fear that the silence means neglect.

• Fear that the delay means denial.

• Fear that if nothing changes soon, nothing ever will.

We want hope—but we want it quickly. We want reassurance, but without the ache of uncertainty. We want clarity without the vulnerability of not knowing.

And yet, if we’re honest, some of the most important parts of our lives refuse to move at that pace.

Healing doesn’t hurry.

Grief doesn’t resolve on command.

Trust grows slowly, if it grows at all.

And sometimes we’re not waiting for small things, but for the kind of answers that would change everything. The kind of answers that would let us exhale. The kind that would finally make sense of the losses we didn’t choose.

Those are the seasons when waiting starts to feel less like patience and more like punishment.

It’s there—right in that tension—that an ancient voice quietly speaks from the wreckage.

In the middle of a long poem written out of devastation and loss, the writer pauses and says something unexpected: “Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope” (Lamentations 3:21).

Hope? In that place?

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This isn’t hopeful language spoken from comfort or clarity. It isn’t optimism fueled by visible improvement. It’s a whispered defiance in the middle of ruins. A decision to remember something true when almost nothing feels true.

What stands out isn’t the confidence of the statement, but the effort behind it.

“I call this to mind.”

Not it comes naturally.

Not it suddenly makes sense.

But I choose to remember.

Hope, in this telling, isn’t an emotion you stumble into. It’s an act of attention. A return. A refusal to let pain have the final word—even when pain is still very much present.

This reframes our seasons of waiting entirely.

What if waiting isn’t empty time?

What if it isn’t wasted time?

What if it’s a space where something less impressive, but more sturdy, is being formed?

That question doesn’t make waiting easier. But it does make it more honest.

Because most of us aren’t asking for dramatic miracles. We’re asking for steadiness. For something reliable enough to lean on when our desires aren’t delivered at the pace we demand.

And maybe that’s where real hope begins—not in rushed outcomes, but in learning how to remain present in what is still unresolved.

Not all hope announces itself loudly. Sometimes it barely survives as a thought you have to keep calling back to your heart.

This Saturday, I want to return to this tension—the kind of hope that doesn’t fix everything, but somehow keeps you standing anyway.

If you’ve been reading The Lighthouse for a while, you may have noticed something:

I’ve been really quiet.

That hasn’t been accidental—and it hasn’t been because I have nothing to write.

Over the past six months, a lot of my energy has been given to helping our church, Formation, settle into a new home. And while I won’t go into all the details here, I will say this: it’s been good, meaningful, and deeply demanding work. The kind of work that asks for your whole heart, your full attention, and more margin than you realize until it’s gone.

In seasons like that, something always gives.

For me, that something was writing.

Not because it stopped mattering—but because I needed to be fully present to the people and responsibilities right in front of me.

Still, even while I wasn’t publishing, I was paying attention.

To the questions people were asking.

To the weariness many were carrying.

To the longing beneath so much of our spiritual language.

And in it all, I’ve been rethinking how I want to write here.

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A Shift in Rhythm

In the past, I’ve tended toward longer, more comprehensive pieces. And while I still value that kind of depth, I’m increasingly convinced that many of us don’t need more information—we need more companionship.

So I’m trying something new.

Rather than one long post a week (or long gaps between them), I’m moving toward two shorter, connected reflections each week.

Here’s the rhythm I’m experimenting with:

• Early in the week, I’ll identify a tension many of us are living with. A question. An ache. Something that feels unfinished.

• Later in the week, I’ll return to that same space—more slowly, more reflectively—inviting prayer, imagination, and honesty with God.

Rather than answers, my goal is presence with you in the midst of questions.

Why This Matters to Me

So many people I talk with aren’t looking for polished conclusions. They’re looking for language that helps them “stay in the room” (a phrase borrowed from a friend) with God when things feel unclear, painful, or unresolved.

That’s the kind of writing I want this space to hold.

Writing that:

• Names real human experience

• Treats Scripture as a place to hear God

• Makes room for doubt, grief, hope, and longing

• And reminds us we don’t always have to rush our way to resolution

My hope is that this new approach feels less like consuming content—and more like walking alongside one another.

An Invitation

So…

If you’ve been reading for a while, thank you for your patience.

If you’re new, I’m really glad you found your way here.

I don’t know exactly where this new rhythm will lead—but I do know the posture I want to keep: attentive, honest, and open to God’s presence in the middle of ordinary life.

I’m looking forward to writing again—and I’m grateful to do it with you.

______________

Coming Next Week: When Waiting Feels Like Failure

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The Hidden Cost of Hiding

To varying degrees, most of us have learned to hide.

We hide our emotions, suppressing anger, grief, or fear because we’ve been told they’re unspiritual. We hide our doubts, afraid our questions will be seen as weakness. And we hide our stories, the parts of our lives that feel too messy, too complicated, or too painful to bring into the light.

We learn this in all kinds of places, but often, we learn it most in church.

And it comes at a cost.

When we live divided — presenting only the tidy, acceptable parts of ourselves — it fractures us internally. Emotionally, it leaves us anxious and exhausted. Spiritually, it distorts our view of God, convincing us He only wants the polished version of us. Relationally, it keeps our connections shallow, because if no one ever sees our real selves, no one can ever truly love us there.

Hiding always harms.

That’s why the invitation of Jesus is so radical. He doesn’t demand we hide. He welcomes all parts of us — every emotion, every story, every struggle — into His presence.

A Meeting at the Well

John 4 tells the story of a woman who discovers this firsthand.

Jesus is traveling from Judea to Galilee and, John says, “He had to go through Samaria.” Geographically, He didn’t. In fact, most Jews took the long way around to avoid it. But Jesus is never careless with His steps. He’s on divine assignment to meet someone others would have written off.

At midday, weary and thirsty, He sits beside a well. That’s when she appears — an unnamed Samaritan woman carrying layers of shame and a complicated past. She’s not the person you’d expect a Jewish rabbi to notice, much less engage. Yet Jesus not only notices her, He welcomes her into a conversation that changes everything.

In their exchange, we see four ways Jesus welcomes all parts of us too.

1. Jesus Welcomes Our Social Shame

This woman carried the heavy weight of being unwanted.

She was a woman in a patriarchal culture, a Samaritan despised by Jews, and a social outcast drawing water alone at noon. Her gender, ethnicity, and reputation all screamed, unwelcome.

But Jesus steps across every barrier. He speaks to her with dignity and compassion. He sees her, not as a category to be avoided, but as a person to be loved.

So much of our shame thrives in silence. But the light of Jesus never shines brighter than when we dare to bring our darkest parts into His presence . And when we, in turn, make space for others to do the same.

2. Jesus Welcomes Our Honest Questions

The woman doesn’t hide her confusion. She pushes back:

“Why are you talking to me?” “Where do you get this living water?” “Who do you think you are?”

Her questions are raw and real…and Jesus doesn’t flinch.

He doesn’t scold her for not understanding. He welcomes her curiosity. He meets her in conversation, not condemnation.

I sometimes think Jesus wishes we’d all bring the curiosity of a toddler to our faith. If you’ve ever spent time with a toddler, you know what I mean. “Why is the sky blue? Where does the sun go at night? Can I have ice cream for breakfast?” It’s relentless. But their questions aren’t rebellion; they’re relationship. They trust the one they’re asking.

That’s the spirit Jesus welcomes. Honest questions aren’t a threat to faith; they’re the soil where deeper faith can grow.

3. Jesus Welcomes Our Broken Story

When Jesus tells her, “Go, call your husband,” He touches what might have been the most painful part of her life.

It’s often assumed her five marriages meant some scandal on her part, but the text never says that. In her world, women had little control over marriage or divorce. She may have been widowed, abandoned, or simply trying to survive. Whatever the reason, she carried a story of deep pain and loss.

And Jesus names it. Not to shame her, but to show her that He knows her fully and welcomes her still.

Our stories are rarely neat. Mine isn’t. But healing began when I stopped hiding and let God meet me in the truth of my story, rather than the edited version.

Jesus welcomes our broken stories. He doesn’t turn away from them; He turns them into places of encounter.

4. Jesus Welcomes Our Imperfect Understanding

When the conversation gets personal, the woman pivots to theology. She wants to debate worship locations and religious differences. Her understanding is incomplete and obviously shaped by Samaritan tradition and limited teaching.

But again, Jesus doesn’t dismiss her. He doesn’t say, “Come back when your doctrine’s straight.” He starts with where she is and leads her toward greater revelation.

That’s good news for anyone still figuring things out. In fact, we will always still be figuring things out.

I hold a few convictions tightly. I have convictions about who God is, who Jesus is, and the hope of resurrection. But so much else I hold with an open hand, because my understanding is always in process. Real faith isn’t static; it grows. And Jesus is patient with that growth. He welcomes imperfect understanding because He knows that love, not certainty, is what transforms us.

A Different Kind of Community

We live in an age that craves certainty. It’s why some people are drawn to churches or movements that have an answer for everything - where everything is neat, tidy, and defined. I understand the appeal. In a chaotic world, order feels safe.

But real life doesn’t fit in boxes. Not every question has a quick answer. Not every story is simple. And when we build communities obsessed with control, we risk squeezing Jesus right out of the picture.

Jesus is always moving toward messy people, complex stories, and imperfect faith.

That’s why, more and more, I value charity over certainty. Jesus never said, “You’ll know my disciples by their certainty.” He said, “You’ll know them by their love.”

As St. Augustine once wrote, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In everything, love.”

That’s the kind of life, and the kind of faith, Jesus invites us into.

Because the good news of the gospel is not that Jesus welcomes only the best parts of you.

It’s that He welcomes all parts of you - the strong and the scared, the faithful and the doubting, the hopeful and the hurting.

Nothing hidden.

Nothing off-limits.

Nothing unwelcome.

If you’ve spent years hiding parts of your story from God or others, maybe today is the day to start bringing them into the light.

You might be surprised to find that Jesus isn’t pushing you away.

He’s already sitting by the well, waiting to meet you there.

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We live in a world marked by harm and distrust. We all walk with wounds from family, faith communities, and friendships. As a result, many of us limp through life guarded, cautious, and unsure where it’s safe to be honest.

But then there’s Jesus.

As hard as it might be for us to trust, Jesus is safe, gentle, and personal. He doesn’t pressure or condemn. He invites. He meets us as we are and walks with us at the pace of His own grace. With Him, there’s room for your questions, your wounds, and the slow work of becoming whole.

With Jesus, the healing we long for doesn’t come through His pressure or or our own performance. It comes through presence. His presence with us, and our presence with one another.

One of my favorite places we see this in the Scriptures comes from the story of the bleeding woman in Mark 5:25–34.

When Shame Keeps You Hidden

By the time we meet this woman, Jesus has become famous. Crowds press in wherever He goes, drawn by His teaching and His power to heal. On His way to help a dying girl, another desperate soul, this unnamed woman, reaches out to touch the edge of His robe.

She’s been suffering for twelve long years from a condition that caused her to bleed continually. She’s exhausted, anemic, and poor from spending everything she had on doctors who couldn’t help her. But the deepest wound isn’t physical. It’s social and spiritual. Her bleeding made her “ceremonially unclean,” which meant she was seen as unfit for worship or community. In her world, she was considered untouchable.

Can you imagine twelve years of being shut out? Twelve years of hearing, You don’t belong here.

The truth is, even if we don’t have external voices shouting this at us, we all have an internal voice saying this very thing. That’s what shame does. It isolates and silences. It convinces us that we’re unworthy of relationship.

Shame tells you to shrink and stay silent.

Think of something you’ve carried that you hoped no one would find out about—something painful, embarrassing, or disqualifying. Shame whispers, If people really knew, they’d turn away.

This woman comes to Jesus in that very posture—small, quiet, and unseen—hoping to sneak a miracle and slip away unnoticed.

The God Who Stops

But Jesus won’t let her hide.

Mark writes that when she touched His robe, “immediately her bleeding stopped, and she knew she was healed.” But Jesus also knew. The text says, “He realized that power had gone out from Him.” He stopped, turned to the crowd, and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”

The disciples were incredulous. They were like, “Who touched your clothes? Everyone, Jesus. Literally everyone is touching your clothes!” But Jesus knew this touch was different. It was the touch of desperate faith.

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And in that moment, something extraordinary happens. Shame had told her to stay silent, but Jesus invites her to step forward and speak up. Trembling, she comes out of hiding and “told Him the whole truth.”

I love this detail Mark provides: the whole truth.

See, she could have hidden again. Instead, she raises her hand, steps forward and tells Jesus the whole story. Bound up in this brave response was all the pain, the rejection, the loneliness, and the longing.

And Jesus listened.

Jesus invites what shame demands we bury.

Everywhere in the Gospels we see this pattern: the woman caught in adultery, the sinner weeping at His feet, the Samaritan woman at the well. Each one came with a story of shame and each found in Jesus not condemnation, but welcome.

Healing Through Relationship

What happens next is truly stunning.

Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace, and be healed from your affliction.”

Notice what’s happening here. Physically, her body is restored. Spiritually, her faith is affirmed. Socially, Jesus calls her Daughter, pulling her back into belonging. He doesn’t just fix her problem, He restores her personhood.

This is more than a miracle story. It’s a story about what kind of relationship Jesus wants with us.

In the ancient world, people often treated healing like a transaction. You’d visit a temple, offer a ritual or sacrifice, touch a sacred object, and hope for relief. That’s how this woman approaches Jesus too. At first, He was a means to an end. “If I can just touch Him, I’ll get what I need.”

But Jesus wants more than transaction. He wants connection. He stops because He doesn’t want her to walk away healed but unseen. He wants to look her in the eye and call her Daughter.

Jesus isn’t looking for transactions—He’s longing for connection.

And I wonder how often we do the same thing? How often do we come to Jesus for what He gives rather than who He is.

We want peace, strength, joy, or direction. Those are good desires. But the goal of the Christian life isn’t to use Jesus to get what we need. The goal of the Christian life is to discover that Jesus is what we need.

Presence, Not Performance

We tend to treat faith like a checklist. If I read my Bible, pray, serve, and give, maybe I’ll feel closer to God. But Jesus isn’t asking for performance. He’s inviting presence.

It’s like the difference between chugging gas-station coffee just to survive the day and sitting down to savor a cup with a friend. One keeps you running; the other is an act of rest and relationship.

Friend, Jesus wants to be with you, not just used by you.

And that means healing often happens slowly, in relationship, as we learn to stay present with Him and open with one another. The parts of our lives that remain hidden can’t be healed. But when we risk being known, when we step into the open and tell the whole truth, we make space for grace to do its work.

What’s hidden can’t be healed. But what’s brought into the light can be made whole.

The Invitation

Maybe for you, healing starts by coming out of hiding before God. Maybe you need to name what’s real, not what’s polished. Maybe it means reaching out to a trusted friend or mentor and saying, “Here’s what’s really going on.”

Jesus isn’t after mere rule-keeping; He’s after relationship. That’s freeing, but it’s also hard. Rules feel safer because they let us stay in control. Relationship requires vulnerability.

But healing, the kind that truly restores us body and soul, only happens when we’re brave enough to be seen.

So here’s the invitation:

Come out of hiding.

Step forward.

Tell Jesus the whole truth.

You’ll find that His response is always the same: a gentle welcome, a loving word, and a healing touch.

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