Last week, the top of the Empire State Building in my old hometown turned pink.

So did the antennas of the Willis Tower in Chicago and the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which displayed a large pink heart. The Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee, Reunion Tower in Dallas, five bridges in Boston, the Superdome in New Orleans, and Nashville’s Korean Veterans Boulevard Bridge and old Metro Courthouse all joined in. At Buckingham Palace, the band played “9 to 5.” At my favorite sporting event, the U.S. Open, Arthur Ashe Stadium played “Jolene” over the P.A.

These and other tributes honored a woman who had been born in a one-room cabin in the hills of Sevier County, Tennessee, with no electricity or running water. Dolly Parton was the fourth of twelve children, raised by a sharecropper father who could not read. She died in Nashville on August 25 at the age of eighty.

Of all the stories being told about her, my personal favorite is a simple one. It is the story of a coat in the cold.

Winter was coming for young Dolly’s family, and there was no money to buy her a coat to keep her from freezing. Someone gave the family a box of rags, and Dolly’s mother, Avie Lee, stitched the scraps together into something her young daughter could wear. As she sewed, she told Dolly about the biblical story of Joseph, whose father, Jacob, had given him a “coat of many colors” as a sign of his love. Dolly’s coat, her mother explained, meant the same thing. It had been made specifically and uniquely for her, with the warmth of her mother’s love behind it.

Dolly believed and received her mother’s life-giving words. She wore the coat to school with her head held high, convinced that she was wearing something precious and priceless. Then the other children laughed at her.

Her mother had taught her that the coat was a treasure, while her classmates saw only rags.

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We want our lives to matter.

We want to know that our years have added up to something, that our work has made a difference, and that the people we love are better off because we were here.

There is nothing wrong with wanting this. The trouble begins when we try to satisfy the desire by pursuing recognition, achievement, or control over how we will be remembered. These things can tell us that our lives are visible. They cannot tell us whether our lives are meaningful.

Johann Sebastian Bach understood the difference.

When Bach died in Leipzig in 1750, he was buried in St. John’s Cemetery. No lasting monument was erected, and the location of his grave was eventually forgotten. The man now regarded as one of history’s greatest composers was put in the ground without any of the recognition that we assume greatness deserves.

For decades after his death, much of Bach’s music received little public attention. Some manuscripts were scattered, neglected, or lost. Almost eighty years passed before Felix Mendelssohn’s celebrated 1829 performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion helped renew widespread interest in his work. By then, Bach was long gone. He never got to see even the beginnings of what his music would become across the globe and across generations.

But the markings he left on many of his manuscripts suggest that he had already settled the question of why his work still mattered.

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At the beginning of a score, he would write the letters “JJ,” an abbreviation of the Latin Jesu juva: “Jesus, help.” At the end, he would write “SDG,” for Soli Deo gloria: “To God alone be the glory.”

Jesus, help.
To God alone be the glory.

Between those two prayers, Bach gave himself to his work.

A Life Larger Than Recognition

Bach’s practice reflected something the first disciples of Jesus had discovered under far harsher circumstances. They learned that the meaning of a life cannot finally be measured by its comfort, its recognition, or its length.

James, the brother of John, was killed by the sword under the vicious king Herod. Jesus told Peter that he would one day stretch out his hands and be carried where he did not want to go, and Scripture tells us that Jesus said this to show the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God. Clement of Rome, writing near the end of the first century in one of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament, remembers both Peter and Paul enduring persecution and remaining faithful to the point of death.

Tradition tells us that eleven of the twelve disciples died as martyrs, though those details cannot all be confirmed. But the central picture is clear: the people closest to Christ did not build their lives around survival, applause, or the preservation of their reputations or even of their own lives.

John’s ending was different. Rather than dying young as a martyr, he wrote from exile on the island of Patmos. He described himself there as a “brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus.” He was on that island, he said, “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 1:9). He is also the one who, in the Gospel that goes by his name, called himself the disciple whom Jesus loved.

By the ordinary measurements of success, all of these lives ended badly. James was executed. Peter and Paul suffered and died. John was removed from his community and confined to an island. None of them lived to see Christianity spread across continents. None of them saw the reach of the work God had begun through them, which is still going on across the globe today.

But with their own eyes, they had seen the risen Jesus.

That changed the way they measured everything.

The resurrection told them that death was no longer the final word on a person’s life. It told them that faithfulness could appear defeated without actually being defeated. It told them that what is offered to Christ can be hidden, opposed, or buried in the ground and still not be lost.

Their lives mattered, not because the world recognized their importance, but because their seemingly small stories had been gathered up into the larger story of Jesus, the story in which suffering is always redeemed, death is always undone, and every hidden act of faithfulness will always, one day, be brought into the light.

Between Help and Glory

This is what makes Bach’s two inscriptions, JJ and SDG, so compelling.

Jesu juva came before the work. Bach began from a place of dependence: Jesus, help me. Give me what I do not have. Sustain my attention. Strengthen my hands. Keep me faithful to the work I have been entrusted with. Soli Deo gloria came afterward. Whatever beauty had emerged, whatever excellence he had achieved, and whatever influence the music might have now or later, all of it belonged finally to God.

The first prayer released Bach from self-sufficiency.
The second released him from ownership of the result.

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This is the Christian way to live. We begin by receiving grace from God, and we end by returning glory to God. Between the two, we offer our work as faithfully as we can.

Most of us will never compose a St. Matthew Passion. We may never create something people remember centuries from now. But we all face the same question Bach faced every time he sat before a blank page: Can I do the work in front of me without depending on it to prove my worth?

That question reaches far beyond the work that we do. It touches the mother caring for a child who does not yet understand or appreciate her sacrifice. It touches the friend who keeps showing up through another person’s long season of grief. It touches the leader who tells the truth when concealing it would be easier and more profitable. It touches the person who prays daily, gives generously, forgives freely, encourages gently, and serves sacrificially without any assurance of or need for being noticed.

These things may not look important enough to build our lives around. But the life of Jesus himself teaches us to be suspicious of appearances. His greatest victory looked, for a time, like humiliation and defeat. The salvation of the world was accomplished through a man who was despised and rejected and erased, with a body that was bruised, beaten, and broken before being placed in a borrowed grave.

Then came resurrection.

The cross and resurrection free us from having to manufacture our own significance. Jesus has already secured our place in the story of God through his finished work. We do not work for a verdict of love; in Christ, we work from one. We do not have to make ourselves notable and memorable. We are already fully known and will forever be remembered by the One whose memory does not fail. He calls us by name, reminds us that we are his, never leaves or forsakes us, and promises to be with us always, even to the end of the age.

What Will Make Your Life Meaningful?

A meaningful life is not necessarily a prominent life. It is a life received as a gift, lived in dependence, offered in love, and entrusted humbly to God. A line often attributed to Luther says that the humblest sweeping maid, sweeping for the glory of God, is filled with as much dignity as the greatest preacher in the world.

The disciples could give themselves away because the risen Jesus had promised that resurrection was ahead of them too. Bach could leave the reception of his music to God because the glory was God’s to receive and not his. The circumstances of the disciples and of Bach were very different. The freedom was the same. Neither needed visible success to establish the meaning of his life.

We need that freedom too.

The world we live in teaches us to measure nearly everything: income, influence, followers, sales, advancement, and impact. Some of these measurements are useful to a point. But none is capable of telling us what our lives are worth.

Perhaps, then, the question is not, “How can I make my life significant?” Perhaps it is, “What has God placed in front of me, and what would love and faithfulness require of me here?”

Maybe it is the work that needs doing, even though someone else will receive the credit. Maybe it is the relationship that needs patient, careful (full of care) attention. Maybe it is the apology you have been putting off, the person from whom you have been withholding forgiveness, or the act of courage no one else will ever see.

We cannot know what God will do through such things. Bach could not hear the orchestras that would play his music centuries after his unmarked burial. The apostles could not see the nations and generations that would receive the gospel through their witness.

They did not have to see the outcome in order to remain faithful, and neither do we.

At the beginning of the day:
Jesus, help.

At the end of the day:
To God alone be the glory.

And between those two prayers, a meaningful life takes shape.

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“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”
– C.S. Lewis

Two days after nine people were murdered during a Wednesday night Bible study in Charleston, their killer appeared on a video screen at a bond hearing.

His name was Dylann Roof.

He was twenty-one. He had walked into Emanuel AME Church, been welcomed into its fellowship, and warmly included in its Bible study. He stayed for nearly an hour. Then, as the group prayed, he pulled out a concealed handgun and opened fire.

At the hearing, Roof said almost nothing. No explanation, and no remorse. Then the judge invited the families to speak.

Nadine Collier, whose seventy-year-old mother had been killed, told Roof through tears that she would never speak to or hold her mother again. Then she said, “I forgive you, and have mercy on your soul.” Felicia Sanders had survived by hiding with her granddaughter and playing dead while her son lay nearby. She reminded Roof that they had welcomed him and said every fiber of her body hurt. Anthony Thompson, whose wife had led the Bible study, said, “I forgive you, and my family forgives you,” then urged Roof to repent and give his life to Christ.

Roof stared right past them. He was not sorry and has never indicated otherwise.

They forgave him anyway.

Most of us will never carry the burden of a courtroom like that one. But nearly all of us know a smaller version of the wound. Someone hurt us badly, then went on with their lives as though nothing had happened. The apology we are owed will likely never come.

What are we supposed to do with that?

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When Forgiveness Becomes Pressure

When the Charleston families forgave Roof, the media moved quickly to turn it into an inspiring story. But not everyone was willing to go along.

Roxane Gay published a New York Times essay titled “Why I Can’t Forgive Dylann Roof.” She respected the families, but she objected to how quickly others converted the murder of nine Black Christians into a story that allowed the nation to feel morally settled. Some crimes, she argued, are beyond forgiveness.

She was pointing at something many of us carry, but very few of us speak openly about.

When forgiveness is demanded from wounded people on a timeline that suits the onlookers, it stops being compassion and becomes pressure. It becomes a form of real life theater, and one more crushing weight placed on the shoulders of people who are already carrying more than they are able to lift. But God never asks the injured to minimize what happened so everyone else can feel better and go about their lives.

But the Charleston victims minimized nothing. One said her body hurt. Another openly called Roof to repentance. Nobody asked that the charges against him be dropped. A federal jury later convicted Roof on all thirty-three counts and sentenced him to death. He also received nine consecutive state life sentences.

Forgiveness and justice stood in the same courtroom, and neither one canceled out the other.

What Forgiveness Is – and Is Not

Forgiveness is not forgetting, calling evil good, minimizing the hurt, or restoring trust to someone who has given no reason to trust them. It neither removes consequences nor requires returning a relationship to what it once was.

It is also not the same thing as reconciliation.

Forgiveness can begin in the head and heart of one person without the other’s participation. Reconciliation cannot. Reconciliation requires acknowledgment, repentance, and evidence of change. Without those things, setting firm boundaries may be wise and trust may remain unwarranted. The relationship may never be restored, but that doesn’t mean your forgiveness wasn’t complete.

So why forgive when the person refuses to own what they did?

Where the Debt Goes

Paul writes in Romans 12:

“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’”

On the surface, this lands as a restriction: Do not take revenge. But it also carries a promise.

The wrong done to you matters enough to be placed into the hands of a Divine Judge who sees it clearly and weighs it justly. You do not have to keep your heart locked in a mental and emotional courtroom, rehearsing the case day after day, to preserve moral clarity. God already has the record, and because he is just, he will set it right in his own good way and in his own good time.

A grudge is the heart’s attempt to keep an unpaid account open. It says, I will remember and rehearse this until somebody makes it right and gives me what I am due. Underneath the grudge is a haunting fear:

If I let this go, will anyone account for what was done to me? Will anyone remember the harm this has caused me?

Romans 12 answers that fear. You do not have to carry the burden of being the final judge of what was done to you. Someone whose motives are purer, whose perspective is wiser, and whose ways are higher than yours... is.

Lewis Smedes wrote in his book, Forgive and Forget:

“When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”

First, then, you tell the truth about what happened. Then you decide what must be done with the debt that remains.

The cross of Christ is our prototype. God, in Christ, neither minimizes evil nor pretends it is harmless. He absorbs it into himself. Christ died for us while we were still sinners, not after we became worthy. It is not our repentance that leads God to be kind, but rather God’s kindness in Christ that leads us to repent.

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While being crucified, Jesus prayed for his perpetrators, none of whom had repented of anything: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” The nails were still piercing through his body, and the soldiers still mocking him while flippantly gambling for his clothes. Jesus refused to be triggered by their evil posture toward him. He would not let hatred take root in his heart and have the last word.

As with Jesus, so with us: when we choose to forgive, the debt does not just evaporate. It has to go somewhere in the same way water does when the water balloon gets punctured. For the injuring party who repents, the final judgment has been carried by Christ. For the one who refuses to repent, injured parties can entrust the matter to God, who always judges justly and who will balance the scales of justice, if not in this life, then in the world to come.

In either case, it is not our place to make the offender pay.

This is why a Christian can forgive without minimizing the hurt. We are not saying the wrong was insignificant. We are, to the contrary, saying it was significant enough to place the matter in God’s hands.

How Forgiveness Actually Happens

Forgiveness almost never happens in one decisive moment.

You forgive someone, then their name comes up in conversation, and before you know it, the tightening returns to your chest. So you make the choice to forgive again.

This doesn’t mean your first act of forgiveness was insufficient or that it failed. Relational pain does not disappear all at once. A wound that took years to inflict is rarely healed in an afternoon, especially when there has been no remorse, no repentance, and no repair. Forgiveness is the practice of entrusting the debt to God each time you are tempted to demand payment yourself. This is more for your sake than it is for your offender’s sake. As Lewis Smedes has written, “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”

Often, forgiveness looks ordinary. You tell one trusted friend, pastor, or counselor the truth about what happened. Little by little, you stop rehearsing the argument as you lie awake, because every rehearsal keeps the case open. You pass up opportunities to damage the person’s reputation. You pray for them, badly and reluctantly – which is still prayer and, over time, makes it harder to keep seeing them as a monster. And you give more of your mindshare and attention to the people who are for you and not against you.

Then the memory returns, the anger rises, or you imagine the apology that never came. Each time, you release the debt to God again.

But releasing the debt does not mean giving the person access to your life. If the person is dangerous, keep your distance, seek help, and take whatever practical or legal steps are needed to protect yourself. Forgiveness never requires you to remain in the path of further harm.

Nearly two years after the bond hearing, at Roof’s state sentencing, Nadine Collier came to court in a white suit – a color she chose because a chapter of her life was closing. She told him she would not open that book again. Then she said once more, “Have mercy on your soul.”

She died this past April, at fifty-eight. Her mother’s killer had offered her nothing.

You may never receive the apology you are owed. That is a real loss, and it deserves to be grieved. The person may stay defensive, rewrite the story with themselves at the center, or die without ever telling the truth about what they did to you.

But if your freedom depends on their apology, they still have their hurtful hands around your life.

Their apology may never come. Their repentance may never happen. The relationship may never be restored. Even so, the debt can be entrusted to the One who judges justly, forgives freely, and knows what it is to be wounded by people who may never be sorry.

Their refusal to repent may close the door to reconciliation.

But it does not get to close the door to your freedom.

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In the spring of 1935 a man stood in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Ohio, a few steps from the bar, and felt a hauntingly familiar pull.

His name was Bill Wilson. He was a stockbroker from New York, sober about six months, and he had come to Akron to close a business deal that had just fallen apart. He was broke, embarrassed, and alone in a strange city, and the lobby bar was open. He knew exactly how the next few hours would go if he walked toward that bar. Some part of him wanted to anyway.

What Bill Wilson did instead is the reason a worldwide movement exists.

He did not pray harder. He did not grit his teeth and promise himself he would finally beat the drink this time. By his own later account, Wilson had already learned that sheer willpower was not enough and never had been. So instead he walked away from the bar, found a telephone, and started making calls, because he had discovered something curious about himself: the only thing that reliably kept him sober was finding another alcoholic and trying to help him.

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Bill Wilson did not keep sober from a position of strength. He had no position of strength to speak of. He needed the other drunk as much as the other drunk needed him. Those phone calls eventually led him to a hungover Akron surgeon named Bob Smith, and out of that conversation came Alcoholics Anonymous, which has since carried millions of men and women to sobriety.

In the moment of his greatest weakness, the thing Wilson reached for was not the strongest part of himself. It was the weakest. He went looking for someone as broken and scared as he was, because he had discovered that his own brokenness, honestly faced and openly talked about, was somehow the very thing God could use to keep him sober and to help someone else stay sober too.

Most of us spend our lives believing the opposite.

The competent help the struggling. The strong lift up the weak. The people who have figured life out are the ones qualified to guide everyone else. So we work very hard to become strong enough, disciplined enough, healthy enough, and mature enough to occupy the helping position.

As we do this, we also hide.

The pastor hides his doubt. The parent hides her exhaustion and her resentment. The executive hides the panic that wakes him before dawn most nights. The friend everyone leans on hides that he himself feels insecure, under-encouraged, and overwhelmed most of the time.

We assume the wound is what disqualifies us, so we bind it tightly, keep it out of sight, and offer people our competence instead. But the Bible keeps steering us in the opposite direction. Nowhere more directly than in Paul’s famous affliction. He says he pleaded with God three times to take it away. Whatever it was, a physical ailment, a humiliation, or some persistent torment that followed him through life, he wanted it gone the way any of us would. But the answer Paul received from God was not the answer he had hoped for:

“But [the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:9-10).

Notice what God does not do. He does not remove the thorn. He does not explain it. Instead, he reframes it. The very thing Paul experiences as limitation becomes, somehow, the place where the grace of God becomes visible.

Not around the weakness.
Through it.

The thorn is not the obstacle to Paul’s usefulness. It is part of the means by which God ends up making him useful.

This runs against everything we assume, because we think our usefulness begins where our weakness ends. But God seems to work the other way around. On the one hand, Scripture never romanticizes suffering. Paul does not call the thorn good, and Bill Wilson never suggested that alcoholism or any other addiction was a good thing. But on the other hand, God has always shown a strange tendency to work through the very places we spend our energy trying to conceal.

Henri Nouwen spent much of his life trying to help people, especially ministers and leaders, understand this. In The Wounded Healer he writes:

“Nobody escapes being wounded. We all are wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’ When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”

When our wounds cease to be a source of shame.

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Everything turns on that, because shame is what convinces us that our wounds disqualify us from being useful or fruitful. Shame whispers loudly that if people saw and understood the whole truth about us, they would no longer trust us, or respect us, or want to have anything to do with us.

But the strange testimony of Christianity is that the people most able to help others are usually the ones who know firsthand what it means to need help from others.

Most of us already know this from the receiving end. Think honestly about who has actually helped you in the hardest stretches and circumstances of your life. It is rarely the person who stayed above the trouble and spoke into your life from a safe, sanitary distance. It is usually the person who looked straight at and into your pain without flinching because they had known a similar pain from their own experience.

It’s the parent who lay awake over a child who had wandered off. It’s the fellow addict in your recovery program. It’s the widow who knows what the stages of grief and the first year living alone is actually like.

There is a kind of credibility that only comes out of having been there, and it cannot be manufactured by someone who hasn’t.

Which means the thing you are most tempted to hide may not disqualify you from being helpful and fruitful after all. The weakness you keep trying to outgrow or cover up may be the very place through which his grace becomes believable to somebody else. Why is this so? Because a person who has stopped pretending becomes a safer place for other people to stop pretending too.

Bill Wilson carried alcoholism to his grave.

And Paul carried the thorn.

Neither man became strong in the way the world talks about strength. But both became instruments of healing, because they finally stopped hiding.

That is still how grace gets transferred from one soul to another.

The hand that reaches out to a drowning man is usually the hand of one who was once in similar trouble. Maybe that is why God has grown so accustomed to doing his best work through busted up and broken down people. And maybe that’s why the likes of Bill Wilson, Henri Nouwen, and the Apostle Paul came not to despise, but to glory in, the mighty gift of weakness.

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Where does hope come from when the life you’ve built is ripped away from you and you’re likely to never get it back?

Maybe for you it is a job, or your health, or a ministry, or a relationship, or a reputation. Most of us carry grief over some version of the question.

In the summer of 1636, a Scottish pastor named Samuel Rutherford was put on trial by a church court that answered to the king. His crime was refusing to obey the crown’s rules for how Scottish churches should worship and what their ministers could teach. On July 27, the court delivered his sentence. At age thirty-six, he was stripped of his ministry and banished to Aberdeen, a city on the far side of Scotland from everyone and everything he knew. He had spent the previous nine years pastoring a small farming parish called Anwoth. And now he was forbidden to preach anywhere in the country. His ministry and his community were taken from him by powerful people who belonged to neither.

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The silence of exile nearly broke him. He called his silenced Sundays his “dumb Sabbaths,” and he did not pretend he was okay with being forbidden to preach, which was his first and truest calling. He wrote once to a friend that his dumb Sabbaths burden his heart, and make it bleed. To another he said they were “like a stone tied to a bird’s foot.”

Rutherford worried aloud that God himself had set him aside, that his ministry was finished, that the enemy had “charmed and blasted” his usefulness once and for all. If you have ever been in your prime, yet have been thrust into circumstances that made you feel like your best and most fruitful days were a thing of the past, you know the burden that Rutherford carried.

“Christ’s Palace” in Aberdeen

And yet over time, something new and unexpected began to appear at the top of the letters Rutherford wrote from exile.

He took to writing from what he called “Christ’s palace in Aberdeen.” His place of exile was no longer his prison. Somehow it had become his palace. Over seventeen months of exile he wrote 220 of the 365 letters that survive him. Never intended for publication, they became one of the classics of Christian literature. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, often called the prince of preachers, said they were the nearest thing to divine inspiration to be found in the writings of mere men.

On December 30, 1636, Rutherford wrote hopeful lines including: “I see that grace grows best in winter” and “When I am in the cellar of affliction, I look for the Lord’s choicest wines” and “We may sing beforehand, even in our winter storm, in the expectation of a summer sun at the turn of the year; no created powers can mar our Lord Jesus’ music, nor spill our song of joy.”

Standing In the Eye

Brandi Carlile has a song called "The Eye" that gets at what Rutherford was doing.

She sings that you can dance in a hurricane, but only if you are standing in the eye. The eye is the still center around which the whole storm revolves. Everything related to survival and flourishing depends on standing there in the dead center.

That was Rutherford. He did not “sing in a winter storm” because the storm of his circumstances had passed. He sang from within the storm, because the eye of Rutherford’s proverbial hurricane was the Person and work of Christ himself.

Rutherford did not practice the so-called power of positive thinking. Positive thinking does not result in words like “my dumb Sabbaths.” Rutherford was living in between two events, one past and one future, and letting both tell him the truth about his life at the same time.

Theologians call it the space between the “already” and the “not yet.”

The first event, the one that was already behind him, was the cross.

Most Christians follow the logic of cause and effect: that God loved us, and therefore Jesus died for us. The New Testament reasons in the opposite direction: Jesus’ death is how we know God already loves us. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The cross of Christ means God is not observing our suffering from a safe and secure and aloof distance. He has entered into it. In Rutherford’s Aberdeen, the cross answered the question beneath all the exiled minister’s other questions, “Does God love me?”, with an answer that held strong even for a man who felt like a bruised reed and a smoldering wick.

The second event, the one that guaranteed his future, was the resurrection.

The resurrection is about more than Jesus surviving death, as wonderful and miraculous as that is. It is the announcement that God’s future has already begun. Paul calls Christ rising up to life from the grave “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20), the first element of the new creation breaking into the old one. The appetizer before the never-ending feast.

And what does the risen Jesus carry with him? Scars.

He invites Thomas to put a finger in the nail marks themselves (John 20:27). Though Christ has risen and will never again taste the sting of death, his scars remain with Thomas, Rutherford, and us, no longer as a wound but as a witness that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.

Easter did not erase Good Friday. The wounds of Christ remain, yet are transformed. God does not pretend our cruel winters never happened. But he does redeem them.

This is where Christians actually live, between Friday and Sunday, which is why Paul can call believers “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10) without so much as a shred of contradiction.

The cross validates the sorrow.
The resurrection guarantees the joy.

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The writer of Hebrews says our hope is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone” (Hebrews 6:19-20).

Every other anchor we reach for drops downward, into finite and fickle things like savings accounts and health reports and reputations. But the sure and steady anchor of Christ drops upward, into the glories of heaven itself, and it holds fast because it is fastened to Christ, who is now seated at the right hand of God the Father. The eye of the hurricane and the anchor behind the curtain are one and the same. The anchor of Christ is not the absence of the storm, but the presence and power of Christ inside it.

Heaven Works Backwards

Three centuries after Rutherford, C.S. Lewis gave us language for all of this. In The Great Divorce, Lewis’s guide through heaven is a glorified George MacDonald (even C.S. Lewis had a C.S. Lewis, and his name was George MacDonald), who explains why no earthly suffering will look the same once our glorified future in Christ arrives:

“That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory... The good [and redeemed] man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven.”

The process begins even before death. That is what Rutherford’s letters show. He was not waiting for heaven to reinterpret his exile someday. Heaven was already working backwards into his exile. The banishment was still banishment, the dumb Sabbaths still felt lonely and terribly unfair, and yet the same holding rooms that held his grief were, even then, becoming an eternal palace.

It’s easy to think that the cross is for hard seasons and the resurrection is for hope about heaven, two doctrines for two separate problems. But neither Rutherford nor Scripture will let us maintain such a tidy division.

The cross of Christ steadies us in good seasons as much as in hard ones. It humbles us when everything is going well and reminds us that every blessing came to us by grace. The resurrection guards and protects us in the hard seasons. It keeps us from despair without making us glib or cynical. A Christian in a good season should be the most grateful person in the room. A Christian in a hard season should be the most hopeful. The cross and the resurrection give us both.

Rutherford’s story bears all of this out. In 1638 the tide turned in Scotland, and he was allowed to return home to his beloved Anwoth, then on to a professorship at St. Andrews and a seat among the Scottish commissioners at the Westminster Assembly, from whom we would receive the Westminster Confession of Faith itself.

Good days came once again for Rutherford, and the man from the cellar of affliction enjoyed renewed honor, position, and influence, but without letting any of it spoil him. Then, in 1661, the tide turned against him once more. The newly restored king, Charles II, whose throne Rutherford’s Lex Rex had argued was subject to the law like everyone else, ordered that the book be burned and summoned Rutherford with a charge of treason. Rutherford was on his deathbed when the summons arrived. He sent back word to the king that he had already received a prior summons from a far superior Judge, and that before his court date arrived he would be in the presence of the King of Kings himself. Among his last recorded words:

“I shall shine. I shall see Him as He is.”

Samuel Rutherford died on March 29, 1661, a free man in every way that ultimately mattered. The hurricane spun around him for twenty-five years, faithful ministry, then exile, then honor, then a treason charge. His heart danced through all of it because all along, he never stepped out of the hurricane’s eye.

The winters and storms of life are real. And yet, so is the grace that grows there, and so is the Christ who stands at the eye of it all, summoning you to join him there.

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The most famous conversion in modern Christian history did not begin with a man searching for God; it began with a man trying very hard to get away from him.

That man was C.S. Lewis.

He was thirty years old, a tutor in English literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, and a confirmed atheist of the kind who had written off Christianity as silly and naive. Lewis had set out to live an examined life on his own terms, and he was finding, to his irritation, that the terms kept being rearranged by someone other than himself. His friends had inconveniently turned out to be Christians. His favorite authors had also inconveniently turned out to be Christians. Even the books he picked up to confirm and bolster his unbelief were conspiring against him. As he later admitted, “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

By the spring of 1929, God’s pursuit of Clive Staples Lewis had closed in. He describes it himself in Surprised by Joy:

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.”

Notably here, Lewis is not the seeker; he is the one being sought. He is not the hunter; he is the hunted. The whole encounter has the texture of a tired mouse finally giving up his running and hiding, only to discover that the cat has come not to devour him but to carry him home.

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This is closer to the actual, biblical picture of conversion than the self-directed one we naturally assume. We are taught to think of faith as our project, our spiritual ascent. God is somewhere up there, we are down here, and the work of religion is to climb toward him with whatever rungs we can find on the ladder. Spiritual life becomes a search, a quest, and the question is always whether we are getting any closer. God is the goal at the top of the mountain, and we are the climbers, panting our way up.

The Bible tells a different story.

The first question in Scripture is not asked by a human being. It is asked by God. After Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit and felt the rush of shame and tried to cover themselves with leaves and slip behind the foliage, they hear the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. They do what we have all done since: they hide. And it is then that the voice of their Maker comes through the trees.

Painter, American, 1738 - 1820

“Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9).

It is one of the most tender questions in Scripture, and if we are going to understand both God and ourselves rightly, it is essential that we hear it correctly. God is not lost. He is not confused about geography. He knows exactly where Adam and Eve are. The question is not for his information; it is for theirs. He is the one who has come walking in the garden, looking for the people he loves, even though they are the ones who have run from him. The verb, the action, the first move, does not belong to Adam in this scene. It belongs to God. Before any conviction of sin happens in the human heart, before any altar has been built or any sacrifice offered, before any prayer has been uttered, God is already on his feet, moving toward us.

God is the first searcher.

That same posture runs through the whole canon of Scripture, all the way to the One who is its center. When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in John 4, he is the one who arrives first. He is the one who sits down and waits. He is the one who breaks every cultural script by speaking directly to her. And in the middle of their conversation, he tells her something that ought to take our breath away: “the Father is seeking such people to worship him” (John 4:23). The Greek verb here is zētei, which is the present active form of “to seek.” It is what a shepherd does when a sheep is missing. It is what a woman does when a coin is lost. It is what the father in the Luke 15 parable does when he scans the road, day after day, hoping his son might return home.

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The Father is seeking.
Not waiting. Not watching.
Seeking.

Which means, if Scripture is to be trusted, that your faith began long before you noticed it. It was activated and made real long before it ever crossed your mind. Whatever search you think you are conducting for God is the echo, the shadow, and the wake of his prior search for you.

I put it this way in The Mercy King:

“It is easy to imagine God as distant, distracted, or too busy for us. But if we could see what God is really up to, we would know beyond any doubt that he is pursuing us also. David knew this when he wrote, ‘Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life’ (Psalm 23:6). That same mercy followed Adam and Eve. When they hid in shame among the trees, God came looking for them, called out to them, and met them in their fear, not to abandon them, but to begin the long work of redemption that would one day remake the human heart.”

If you have spent any portion of your life feeling like a poor seeker, like someone whose prayers limp and whose faith stutters and whose awareness of God comes and goes like a sneeze, this is for you. You have been operating, perhaps without knowing it, on the assumption that the spiritual life rises or falls on the strength of your own initiative and pursuit. It does not. Your initiative and pursuit, real as it is, is the smaller portion of the story. The larger and most prevailing portion is that the Holy Spirit, or the One some theologians have called the Hound of Heaven, has been on your trail since before you knew his name, and he is still on your trail now, patient and tireless and unembarrassed and undeterred by your reluctance.

The most reluctant convert in all of England did not climb his way up to God. God came down the corridors of Magdalen, night after night, until there was nowhere left for C.S. Lewis to hide. And the gifts we have received from Lewis since, the Narnia Chronicles and Mere Christianity, The Four Loves and The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain and Till We Have Faces and The Great Divorce, are not, finally and ultimately, gifts from Lewis at all. Lewis himself would object to that idea. Rather, they are gifts from the God who pursued him into a corner, so that generations of readers might be pursued through his pen.

Where, then, are you?

The question is there not so God can find you. He already has. He is asking because he loves the sound of your voice and the sight of your return, and because the cat has been at your heels for longer than you know, not to devour you, but to gather you up and carry you home.

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You hear it more than you used to.

From a friend over coffee, from a sibling who left the fellowship years ago, or from someone in the comments section of an essay about faith. The messages vary, but the sentiment is consistent.

I can’t do the institution anymore.
But Jesus? I’m not ready to let go of Jesus.

It would be easy to dismiss this as a kind of spiritual buffet, picking what you like and leaving the rest. Jesus and the church come together as a package deal, some will say. But a swift and decisive dismissal misses something important. For many people, backing away from the church is not a declaration of rebellion or stubborn independence. It is the sound of someone in real pain trying to hold on to what seems most true, while setting boundaries with what, and who, has hurt them most deeply.

Before we judge a person’s posture, we should try to understand the wound behind it.

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Prefer video? You can watch this essay’s companion teaching here.

The world-renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking, spent his life thinking about time, gravity, and the architecture of the universe. And yet, near the end, there remained a question he couldn’t answer.

“Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

If we live long enough, Hawking’s question finds us, too. It finds us in a delivery room, cradling a newborn. It finds us at a graveside, watching dirt fall over a coffin. It finds us on a commute, when the day’s distractions are on pause and we are left with the fact that we are here, and we don’t entirely know why.

The Question That Comes Looking For Us

Most of the time, we avoid Hawking’s question altogether. We have bills to pay, reputations to maintain, and futures to worry over. The urgent protects us from the ultimate. But only for so long. The ultimate returns in awe and wonder, in suffering and fatigue, and in the emptiness that follows the achievement we thought would finally complete us, but didn’t.

When Hawking’s question comes for us, most of us reach for one of two answers. The first is that we are here by accident. We are the lucky, or unlucky, products of a universe that did not plan for us, does not know or care about us, and will not remember us after we are gone. There is no design or designer behind us, no destiny before us, and no voice calling us by name. So we scramble to create whatever meaning we can before the lights go out.

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Albert Camus faced this with admirable honesty. He gave us Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever, only to watch it roll back down and begin again and again and again. For Camus, dignity was found not in escape, but in defiance. The world is absurd, and you keep living in it anyway.

Camus refused cheap answers, and there is integrity in that. But if the universe has no meaning given to it by its Creator, then every bit of meaning must be manufactured by us. We become our own authors, priests, absolvers, witnesses, and hope.

Our own lords and saviors.

That may sound liberating.
But eventually, it becomes exhausting and terrifying.

The second answer to Hawking’s question is less philosophical and more second nature, especially to those of us who’ve been formed by American ambition. It treats the world as raw material in the service of “Project Self.” People, places, and things become resources to exploit. Friendship becomes networking. Rest becomes recovery for more grinding and productivity and making a name for ourselves. Even our bodies and souls become “things” to manage, improve, and measure.

Beneath all of this is an anxiety that says:

“It’s up to me to justify my own existence. I must become successful enough, admired enough, needed enough, liked enough, and good enough to silence the fear that maybe I am not enough after all.”

One answer to Hawking’s question says your life has no predetermined meaning, so you must create your own. The other says your life has no anchored worth, so you must achieve it on your own. The first leaves you alone in a cold, indifferent universe. The second leaves you alone inside a never-finished performance review.

And it’s not good to be alone, for any reason.

The World as Gift

There is a third, more hopeful answer to Hawking’s question. It is neither sentimental nor easy. But if it is true, it is the only answer complete and durable enough to sustain and bring meaning to a human life:

“In the beginning, God created.”
“God said... and there was.”

The old theologians’ phrase for this is creatio ex nihilo, or creation of everything out of nothing, and of life out of no life. God did not make the world by rearranging scraps he found lying around the universe. There was no universe lying around. Before matter, energy, space, time, dust, water, earth, or sky, there was God. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Eternally glad, alive, loving, and sufficient.

Then, with love and creative energy in his heart, God spoke.

Genesis does not begin with violence, negotiation between good and evil, or some cosmic accident that somehow organizes itself into worlds and galaxies and fingerprints and eyeballs and kidneys. It begins with words.

“Let there be light.”
And there was light.

The origin of everything did not happen by chance or necessity. It did not happen because God was lonely, needy, bored, or under obligation. It happened because God is love, and because love wanted it to happen. The world is not a meaningless void. It is the generous gift of God’s creation, spoken into being and sustained even now by the will and word of the One who made it.

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Creation is not just the story of how things began. It is the truth about what things are and how they are meant to work. A tree is not merely lumber. A body is not merely a machine. A child is not merely a genetic event or a lump of cells. A neighbor is not merely an obstacle, threat, project, inconvenience, or resource, or opportunity.

And neither are you.

You are not an accident with appetites and thirsts. You are not a résumé with a pulse. You are not a brand, a burden, a diagnosis, or a problem to be solved. You are a creature who bears the Image of the Most High God.

This is humbling, because you are not God.
It is liberating, because you do not have to be.

The Hand That Made You

But the gospel does not leave us with reverence alone. The God who made the world has come near and declared himself to be with us and for us. He is holy, holy, holy. And above all, he is love. He is transcendent, and he is near. He is Other, and he took on human flesh and walked among us.

When Paul stood before the philosophers in Athens, he said that the God who made the world is not far from any one of us, “for in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). We are not merely under him, watched by him, or tolerated by him. Through Christ, we are in him. Our existence is borrowed breath. It is life sustained by Another. His mercy has been our lifeblood since our first cry.

Paul says similar things in Colossians. All things were made through the Son, and in him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). Not held together by luck, competence, or the fragile scaffolding and cracked foundation of our best laid plans. All things were, and are, held together by Christ alone. The hand that made the cosmos is also the hand that came looking for you at great cost to himself. The voice that said, “Let there be light,” is the voice that cried out from a cross:

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”

This means you do not have to prove that you deserve to occupy space. You do not have to earn your place or justify your own existence or make a name for yourself or create your own meaning. You were not put here because you were useful to God, impressive to God, necessary to God, or profitable to God. You are here because you were wanted and loved before time began. You are here because in him and by his finished work, you are declared forgiven, blameless, and beloved.

You are not your own, but have been bought with a price. As the catechism says, you belong, body and soul, to your faithful Savior Jesus Christ. You exist to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Glory and joy, not performative religion. Self-surrender, not self-invention.

Glory.
And joy.

You did not call yourself into being. You do not hold yourself together. And thank God, you do not have to. You are being held together right now by the One who made you, the One who came for you, and the One who will not let you go.

The only fitting response, once this settles into your heart, is to say thank you.

And to know exactly why you mean it, even though you can’t comprehend it.

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Prefer video? You can watch this essay’s companion teaching here.

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Prefer video? You can watch this essay’s companion teaching here.

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There’s a joke about Jesus I’d like to tell you.

Jesus performed many miracles. He turned water into wine, walked on water, healed the blind, and raised Lazarus from the dead. But the greatest miracle of all may be this one: He had twelve guy friends in His thirties.

It’s natural to laugh at that joke, but the laughter carries a note of recognition. Benea…

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Prefer video? You can watch this essay’s companion teaching here.

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The most disorienting moment in life is usually not the one we were warned about. It’s the one we were told would fix everything, and then it didn’t.

You get the promotion. The house closes. The ring is on the finger. The acceptance letter arrives. The bonus check is in your hands. And somewhere in the days that follow, an uninvited thought begins to hau…

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Prefer video? Scroll to the bottom for the companion video teaching.

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Prefer video? Scroll to the bottom of this essay for the companion video teaching.

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It was December 1873 when the ship captain pointed at the empty water and told Horatio Spafford, “This was the place.”

A few weeks earlier, Spafford’s wife Anna had boarded a steamboat in New York with their four daughters, ages two through twelve, planning a vacation in England. A last-minute business commitment kept Horatio in Chicago. On a November ni…

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A warm, sincere thank you to everyone who supported this week’s release of The Mercy King. I’m deeply grateful.

One simple way you can continue to help is by leaving a brief Amazon review. Even a few sentences can make a real difference in helping new readers discover the book.

And now for this week’s essay:

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For most of my life, going back to childhood, I operated as if winning meant working harder, striving more, and sacrificing sleep.

I used to say to people that sleep is something you do after you die. I cringe at that line now. I poured myself into achieving and producing, often at the cost of my own health and of some relationships, living as though my …

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A Note to My Readers:

My new book, The Mercy King, releases this Tuesday, June 2. The best ways to help are pre-ordering a copy, posting about it on your social channels, and putting it in the hands of anyone in your orbit who struggles to believe that God loves them (Isn’t that all of us?). Thanks v much – Scott

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If my writing here has helped you, my new book, The Mercy King, is out this week. I hope you'll grab copy and if you like it, help spread the word?

Thank you! 🙏 – Scott

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