THE FRACTURE IN THE MIRROR

I stand before the mirror now, and for perhaps the first time in my life, I do not turn away.

How strange that a man can spend a lifetime looking into mirrors and never once see himself.

We become such accomplished curators of our own reflection. We arrange the lighting. We remember the injuries and misplace the injuries we have caused. We polish our virtues until they shine and hide our contradictions in those private chambers of the soul where we imagine even God will be too polite to enter. We become prosecutors in the trial of others and defense counsel in the trial of ourselves.

But there comes a moment, perhaps age brings it, perhaps grief, perhaps suffering, perhaps simply the exhaustion of carrying so many versions of oneself, when the mirror refuses to flatter us any longer.

And there I am.

Not the man I hoped I was.

Not the man others accused me of being.

Not the man I defended.

Not the man I condemned.

Simply the man.

And strangely, terribly, beautifully, the moment I finally see myself clearly, I begin to see everyone else clearly too.

There is a fracture running through the human soul.

I see it now as one sees a crack running through an ancient cathedral window: not destroying the beauty, but passing directly through it. Light still enters. Indeed, sometimes the fracture itself catches the light and scatters it into colors we could never have seen otherwise.

We are good, and we are not good.

We are generous and selfish, courageous and frightened, tender and cruel. We love sincerely and wound carelessly. We speak truth while protecting our illusions. We forgive one person and secretly prosecute another. We kneel before God, carrying stones in our pockets for our neighbor.

And somehow all of these contradictions inhabit the same small kingdom of flesh.

This realization awakens something in me, and yet it saddens me beyond words.

Because once you see the fracture in yourself, you can no longer hate another person quite so easily.

You recognize the architecture.

Their darkness has rooms resembling your own.

Their fear speaks a dialect you have heard whispered somewhere inside yourself.

Their pride wears clothing you once owned.

Their wounds resemble scars you keep hidden beneath your own garments.

And suddenly judgment becomes more difficult.

Not impossible.

But heavier.

You begin to understand why Christ stooped to write in the dust while everyone else stood clutching stones.

Perhaps he was waiting for them to look into the only mirror that matters.

I find myself now strangely capable of forgiving things I once believed unforgivable. Not because they have become less wrong, but because I have become less interested in keeping the courtroom open.

There are cases I no longer wish to prosecute.

Debts I no longer wish to collect.

Arguments I no longer need to win.

Graves, I no longer wish to exhume merely to prove who buried whom.

The past has become a country I once lived in but no longer wish to govern.

I can visit it.

I can remember its streets.

I can point to the houses where sorrow lived.

But I do not have to move back there.

And yet there is another sorrow in this awakening, one quieter and perhaps more painful: I have discovered that the grace I am learning to give does not guarantee grace will be returned to me.

Some will continue remembering an older version of me because that version serves the story they need to tell.

Some will accept forgiveness without offering it.

Those who will gladly lay down the burden of what they did to me while continuing to carry the ledger of what I did to them.

Some will receive mercy as though it were owed and withhold it as though it were treasure.

This once made me angry.

Now it mostly makes me sad.

Because I understand something I did not understand before:

Grace cannot be grace if it requires repayment.

If I forgive only those who forgive me, I have merely entered into another transaction.

If I love only where love is returned, I have constructed a marketplace and called it a sanctuary.

No.

Grace must walk barefoot.

It must travel without luggage.

It must leave without demanding a receipt.

And so I stand before the mirror and confess the most difficult truth of all:

I am guilty.

And I am innocent.

So are they.

I have wounded and been wounded.

Misunderstood and been misunderstood.

Failed to love and suffered from the failures of love in others.

I have sometimes been Judas, sometimes Peter, sometimes the wounded traveler beside the road, and sometimes, God forgive me, one of the respectable men who crossed to the other side, and tried to teach Jesus my theology when Jesus says “follow me.”

There is no pedestal left for me to stand upon.

And perhaps that is salvation.

Perhaps humility begins precisely there, not in thinking less of ourselves, but in finally abandoning the exhausting fiction that human beings can be divided neatly into saints and villains.

The line between good and evil does not run between my enemies and me.

It runs through my own heart.

And through theirs.

Through every heart.

So I no longer wish to be better than those who wounded me.

What a small ambition that would be.

I want instead to become truthful enough to see them without hatred and myself without disguise.

To stand naked before truth and discover that truth, when it is finally purified of ego, does not lead us toward cruelty.

It leads toward love.

Not sentimental love.

Not the weak love that pretends wounds never happened.

But the fierce and terrible love that looks directly at the wound, names it, touches it, and refuses to become it.

Perhaps this is what the mirror has been trying to teach me all along.

I thought I was standing before it to discover who I am.

Instead, I discovered what we are.

Fractured creatures carrying fragments of eternity.

Dust breathing the breath of God.

Beggar and king.

Accuser and accused.

Guilty and innocent.

Beautiful and broken.

Each of us walking through this brief corridor of existence carrying wounds we did not choose, inflicting wounds we did not fully understand, desperately wanting to be loved while often being too frightened to love without conditions.

And now, when I look in the mirror, I no longer ask whether I am better than anyone.

I ask something far more frightening:

Can I love what I now see clearly?

The man in the glass.

The people who loved him.

The people who wounded him.

The people he wounded.

The ones who forgave.

The ones who never will.

Can I look upon this whole tragic procession of human contradiction and still choose love?

I believe I can.

Or perhaps more truthfully:

I am learning.

And maybe that is enough.

The mirror no longer feels like a courtroom.

It has become a window.

And through the fracture in the glass, somehow, impossibly, light is coming in. I stand before the mirror now with nowhere left to hide.

For most of my life, I thought a mirror was something that returned a face. I know better now. There comes an hour when the glass becomes a confessional, when the silver behind it dissolves, and what stares back is not the man we have introduced to the world, nor even the man we have introduced to ourselves, but the strange and divided creature who has been there all along.

And I see him.

Do you really see yourself?

And I see him.

I see the good in him, and I see what lives beneath the good. I see kindness tangled with pride, generosity brushing against vanity, courage sharing a room with fear. I see wounds I once mistook for virtues and virtues I nearly abandoned because they were born from wounds. The human soul, I have discovered, is not a clean cathedral of stained glass and morning light. It is an ancient sanctuary after an earthquake, beautiful still, perhaps more beautiful because it has survived, but fractured everywhere. Light enters through places never intended to become windows.

And strangely, the clearer I see myself, the clearer I see everyone else.

Perhaps that is the terrible mercy of awakening.

We are all fractured.

There is so much good in us, almost unbearably so, and yet beneath it run contradictions like underground rivers. We love and wound with the same hands. We pray for mercy while secretly keeping ledgers. We forgive until forgiveness costs us something. We condemn in another what we have merely learned to disguise in ourselves. We carry our innocence in one pocket and our guilt in the other and spend our lives pretending we possess only one of them.

This realization awakens something sacred in me, and at the same time, it fills me with an indescribable sadness.

Because I find myself increasingly able to forgive.

Not because what happened did not matter. Not because truth should be softened until it becomes a lie polite enough for everyone to live with. And certainly not because I have become morally superior to those who wounded me.

Quite the opposite.

I forgive because the mirror has destroyed my right to stand above anyone.

I have seen too much of myself.

My ego does not want to kneel at the foot of the Cross, because the Cross is the one place the ego cannot survive.

The ego will gladly speak of surrender. It will sing hymns about grace, recite the language of forgiveness, and even convince me that I have laid everything down—while secretly keeping its ledger of wounds, grievances, innocence, and blame hidden beneath its robes.

But the soul knows better.

The forgiven soul eventually grows weary of defending itself. It comes empty-handed to the Cross, where truth and love meet without contradiction, and finally surrenders—not because the past was harmless, not because every wound was just, but because grace has made revenge unnecessary.

And there, beneath the terrible beauty of the Cross, I discover the truth my ego has resisted all along:

I cannot receive forgiveness with clenched fists.

The soul that finally understands it has been forgiven begins, however painfully, to forgive.

Not because others deserve grace more than I do, but because none of us ever did.

That is why it is called grace.

J.S. Bruner

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I’ve been looking forward to sharing this with you.

The Hidden Scripture of the Dawns is more than a book. It is an invitation to see Scripture, your own story, and the journey of the soul through a different lens. My hope is that somewhere within these pages, something awakens in you, something that has perhaps been there all along, quietly waiting to be remembered and discovered.

The book is now available in hardcover and as an audiobook through The Soulprint Project.

And while I have always loved the written word, I have to tell you: I recommend listening to the audiobook.

There is a rhythm to this book that becomes something different when it is heard. The pauses matter. The words breathe. The journey unfolds almost like a meditation, inviting you not simply to understand the story, but to enter it.

The Hidden Scripture of the Dawns was written as a journey.

The audiobook allows you to walk it.

Here’s how I imagined The Hidden Scripture of the Dawns before I wrote it.

There is an old story I sometimes tell myself. Imagine being here with me.

It begins somewhere beyond the maps, where the limestone cliffs of Judea rise above the desert's silence. You have wandered for days through narrow wadis where the wind has polished the stones smooth with centuries of prayer. The crowds have disappeared. Even history seems to have grown quiet.

You notice the opening of a small cave.

A thin thread of smoke drifts into the evening sky.

Curiosity draws you inside.

There, beside a small fire, sits an old traveler. His beard has turned the color of winter ash. His hands are rough, weathered by mountains, monasteries, forests, and seas. His eyes carry the peculiar peace of someone who has spent more time listening than speaking.

He is not a monk.

He belongs to no order.

He wears no title.

Yet you sense immediately that he has spent his entire life searching.

He has walked the pilgrim roads of Ireland, where the Celtic saints spoke of thin places. He has crossed deserts where the Desert Fathers discovered that silence can teach what words cannot. He has sat beneath Himalayan skies, wandered forgotten monasteries, studied the philosophers of Athens, listened to the wisdom of the East, and returned again and again to the Scriptures until they ceased being merely words upon a page and became a mirror for the soul.

He speaks easily of Augustine and Aquinas, of Socrates and Plato, of Aristotle and Seneca, of Kierkegaard wrestling with faith, of Thomas Merton seeking silence, of Francis Schaeffer searching for truth, of Brennan Manning discovering grace, of Richard Rohr reminding us that the deepest vision often comes after we have surrendered certainty.

Yet just as naturally, he speaks of the discoveries of neuroscience, psychology, and the astonishing ways modern science has begun to illuminate patterns that Scripture quietly described thousands of years ago.

He smiles.

“It is remarkable,” he says, “how often the newest discoveries become old truths remembered.”

For a long while, neither of you speaks.

The fire crackles.

The stars slowly appear.

The silence itself seems to be saying something.

Finally, you ask the question that has followed you your entire life.

“What have you learned?”

The old traveler does not answer immediately.

Instead, he reaches into his satchel and removes a worn manuscript.

Its pages are stained from years of travel.

He places it gently between you.

Across the first page are written the words:

The Hidden Scripture of the Dawns.

“It is not hidden because God concealed it,” he says softly.

“It is hidden because we spend our lives looking somewhere else.”

Then he begins to speak.

Not in lectures.

Not in arguments.

But in stories.

Stories that somehow know your own.

Stories that uncover the places where fear quietly became identity, where achievement replaced belonging, where religion sometimes eclipsed God Himself, where the ego learned to survive while the soul waited patiently beneath it all.

As he speaks, you begin to recognize something unsettling.

He is not describing strangers.

He is describing you.

Not with judgment.

With compassion.

Page after page, the stories become less about ancient history than about your own life. Creation is no longer simply the beginning of the universe. It becomes the beginning of your own becoming. The Beatitudes are no longer impossible ideals but the contours of what a truly human life looks like. Even your failures begin to appear differently, not as interruptions to your story, but as the places where grace has quietly been waiting.

The old traveler closes the manuscript.

“There are no shortcuts,” he says.

“There never have been.”

“The journey has always been the same.”

“The longest pilgrimage any of us will ever take is the distance between the person we pretend to be and the person God created us to become.”

The fire burns low.

Morning begins to gather beyond the mouth of the cave.

The first light touches the hills where generations before others searched for forgotten scrolls hidden inside earthen jars.

You realize that perhaps the greatest hidden scripture was never lying inside a cave at all.

Perhaps it has always been written quietly within the human soul.

Waiting.

Patiently.

For someone willing to awaken.

That is the invitation of The Hidden Scripture of the Dawns.

Not to discover something new.

But to remember something eternal.

To begin the long journey home.

And perhaps, along the way, to discover that the person you have been searching for has been waiting for you since the very first dawn.

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And sometimes, in experiencing them, the explanation comes on its own.

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Dolly Parton may have accidentally given us one of the finest definitions of Soulprint ever spoken.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” — Dolly Parton

Well, Dolly, you pretty much summed up The Soulprint Project in eleven words.

I could have saved myself a few books.

Maybe an Enneagram assessment or two.

Possibly several thousand hours of meditation.

Although, in fairness, I probably couldn’t have pulled off the rhinestones.

Dolly Parton died this week, and the world immediately began doing what we do when someone extraordinary leaves it: telling stories.

And with Dolly, there are plenty.

The songs.

The wigs.

The rhinestones.

The Tennessee mountains.

The movies.

Dollywood.

The extraordinary generosity.

The Imagination Library.

And that unmistakable voice that could somehow sing about heartbreak and make you believe everything was eventually going to be all right.

But underneath all that sparkle was something much deeper.

Dolly knew who Dolly was.

And that may be one of the rarest accomplishments in the human experience.

Most of Us Spend Our Lives Becoming Someone Else

Think about it.

We arrive in this world bearing something mysterious and original.

Scripture describes it with astonishing language:

We are created in the image of God.

Before the résumé.

Before the reputation.

Before the expectations.

Before someone told you what success looked like.

Before, religion sometimes told you what you were supposed to look like.

Before your wounds taught you how to protect yourself.

Before your ego constructed an identity capable of surviving the world.

There was you.

Not the personality you eventually developed.

Not the image you learned to project.

Not the person everyone else needed you to become.

You.

Your Soulprint.

And then life happens.

We learn very quickly what earns applause.

What gets rejected?

What makes people love us?

What disappoints our parents?

What gets us promoted.

What makes us attractive?

What makes us important?

What makes us safe?

So slowly, almost imperceptibly, we begin constructing a person.

The Enneagram gives us a remarkable map of this construction. Psychology calls parts of it personality and adaptation. Neuroscience helps explain how these patterns become wired into us.

Jesus used a much simpler word.

Self.

And then He said something rather shocking:

Deny it.

Not because you are worthless.

Quite the opposite.

Because underneath the constructed self is something infinitely more valuable.

The person God created.

Dolly Apparently Got the Memo

Dolly Parton grew up poor in the mountains of East Tennessee and became one of the most recognizable human beings on earth.

And somehow she never stopped sounding like a woman from the mountains of East Tennessee.

That matters.

She didn’t arrive in Hollywood and suddenly develop an accent from Connecticut.

She didn’t become sophisticated enough to become embarrassed by where she came from. And she helped thousands of people from the same poverty be lifted out of it. She was extraordinarily generous to a fault, and she is loved by almost everyone. When you walk around Dollywood, you hear the countless stories of Dolly’s generosity. She didn’t tell us. People tell her story.

She didn’t hide the poverty.

She wrote about it.

She didn’t hide the coat her mother made.

She turned it into a song.

She didn’t tone down Dolly.

She turned Dolly up.

Way up.

Hair included.

And there is something wonderfully Soulprint about that.

Because discovering who you are does not mean becoming blandly spiritual.

God apparently has very little interest in uniformity.

Look at creation.

God could have made one kind of flower.

He made thousands.

One kind of bird would have worked perfectly well.

Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

He made peacocks.

Which, when you think about it, may be the Dolly Parton of birds.

Completely unnecessary.

Absolutely fabulous.

The Great Spiritual Mistake

Religion sometimes teaches people—usually unintentionally—that spiritual maturity means becoming less themselves.

Be quieter.

Be more respectable.

Fit in.

Don’t ask difficult questions.

Don’t be too emotional.

Don’t be too intellectual.

Don’t laugh too loudly.

Don’t wear that.

Don’t think that.

Don’t say that.

Eventually, everybody begins looking spiritually beige.

But Jesus never seemed particularly interested in producing beige human beings.

Peter remained Peter.

John remained John.

Thomas remained Thomas.

Mary Magdalene remained Mary Magdalene.

Paul certainly remained Paul.

Grace didn’t erase their personalities.

Grace redeemed them.

This distinction sits at the heart of The Soulprint Project.

The spiritual journey isn’t about becoming somebody else.

It is about recovering the person buried beneath everything that isn’t really you.

And then becoming that person completely.

Find Out Who You Are

Dolly’s first instruction may be the hardest:

Find out who you are.

Most people never do.

We find out what we do.

We find out what we’re good at.

We discover our political opinions.

Our theological positions.

Our social identities.

Our careers.

Our personality types.

Our preferences.

Our tribes.

And then we confuse all of that with identity.

But there is a deeper question:

Who are you when all of those things are removed?

That is the question underneath The Soulprint Project.

Who were you before fear began editing you?

Who were you before ambition started directing you?

Who were you before shame started hiding you?

Who were you before your wounds started protecting you?

Who were you before the world handed you a script and said:

Play this character.

The contemplative life begins when we become quiet enough to hear another voice.

The voice beneath the noise.

The voice beneath the ego.

The voice that has been calling us from the beginning.

The voice of God saying:

I know who you are.

Because I imagined you.

I created you.

I breathed life into you.

And Then Do It on Purpose

This may be the part of Dolly’s wisdom I love most.

She didn’t merely say:

Find out who you are.

She added:

Do it on purpose.

That’s the difference between awakening and becoming.

Awareness isn’t enough.

You can understand your Enneagram number and remain completely trapped inside it.

You can meditate every morning and still be impossible to live with by breakfast.

You can read Scripture every day and never allow Scripture to read you.

You can understand your childhood wounds and continue allowing them to run your life.

You can talk endlessly about consciousness without becoming conscious.

Eventually, truth has to become flesh.

Eventually, what we discover has to become how we live.

That is praxis.

Truth embodied.

Love practiced.

Grace extended.

Courage exercised.

Forgiveness given.

Compassion lived.

The Soulprint isn’t merely something you discover.

It is something you become.

On purpose.

Dolly’s Kind of Purpose

And here’s where Dolly’s life becomes more interesting than the rhinestones.

She didn’t merely build a career.

She gave.

She invested deeply in children’s literacy through her Imagination Library. She supported communities. She helped fund medical research. She created opportunities. Her generosity became nearly as recognizable as her music.

That’s important.

Because discovering your Soulprint isn’t narcissism.

Quite the opposite.

The deeper you discover who you really are, the less obsessed you become with yourself.

Jesus gave us the paradox:

Lose yourself, and you find yourself.

The false self says:

Look at me.

The awakened soul begins asking:

Who can I love?

And perhaps that is why Dolly could wear enough rhinestones to interfere with satellite communications and somehow never seem consumed by herself.

She understood the joke.

The hair was exaggerated.

The clothes were exaggerated.

The personality was exaggerated.

But underneath the performance seemed to be a woman remarkably comfortable in her own skin.

Or at least underneath the makeup covering the skin.

Dolly would appreciate that joke.

Maybe Heaven Has Rhinestones

Dolly once embodied an almost theological contradiction:

She could look completely artificial while somehow seeming completely authentic.

Maybe that’s because authenticity isn’t about appearance.

It’s about congruence.

When the person inside and the person outside stop fighting each other, something beautiful happens.

Peace.

You no longer need everyone to approve.

You no longer need to imitate.

You no longer need to compete.

You don’t need someone else’s Soulprint because you’ve finally discovered your own.

And that brings us back to Dolly’s wonderful sentence:

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

I might add only one thing.

Find out who God created you to be—and become that person on purpose.

That is awakening.

That is transformation.

That is becoming.

That is the journey from ego to soul.

And perhaps that’s one reason Dolly Parton mattered to so many people.

She didn’t merely tell people to be themselves.

She demonstrated what it looked like.

From a tiny cabin in the mountains of Tennessee came a little girl with a huge imagination who apparently decided somewhere along the way:

I’m going to be Dolly.

And then she spent eighty years doing it on purpose.

Maybe that’s the lesson she leaves us.

God has already created the masterpiece.

Our task isn’t to invent it.

Our task is to uncover it.

To remove what fear added.

To surrender what ego constructed.

To heal what life wounded.

To rediscover what God intended.

And then—with whatever combination of faith, courage, grace, laughter, cowboy boots, wigs, or rhinestones God happened to give you—

go be it.

On purpose.

Because there has already been a Dolly Parton.

And there has already been everyone else.

There has never been another you.

And there never will be.

Discover your Soulprint.

Then live it on purpose.

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

There are words in Scripture we admire because they are beautiful.

And then there are words that terrify us because, if we actually believe them, they demand something from us.

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

I wonder if we have heard those words so many times that we have forgotten where Jesus said them and why…

He was not sitting beside the Sea of Galilee teaching a lesson on forgiveness.

He was not speaking from the safety of a synagogue.

He was hanging from a cross.

He had been betrayed by someone He loved. Abandoned by friends who had sworn they would never leave Him. Falsely accused. Mocked. Spat upon. Beaten. Scourged. Humiliated. Stripped of His clothing. A crown of thorns had been pressed into His head. Nails had been driven through His flesh.

And people stood beneath Him watching Him die.

Some mocked Him.

Some gambled for His clothes.

Some were simply doing their jobs.

And Jesus looked down upon all of it, the cruelty, the ignorance, the cowardice, the religious hypocrisy, the political expediency, the mob mentality, the human ego in all its terrifying forms, and He said:

Father, forgive them.

Not someday.

Not after they apologized.

Not after they understood what they had done.

Not after they admitted they were wrong.

Not after they made restitution.

Now.

Father, forgive them.

And then He says something I find almost as extraordinary:

“For they know not what they do.”

They Know Not What They Do

Those words have begun to haunt me.

Because what if Jesus was revealing something profound about the human condition?

What if much of the evil we inflict upon one another comes from our unconsciousness?

We think we know what we are doing.

We justify ourselves.

We construct narratives in which we are the reasonable one, the righteous one, the wounded one, the one who had no choice.

The ego is extraordinarily talented at writing autobiographies in which it is always the hero.

And perhaps that is precisely why Jesus’ words are so devastating:

They know not what they do.

The Roman soldiers knew they were driving nails.

But did they understand what they were doing?

The religious authorities knew they were making accusations.

But did they understand what they were doing?

Pilate knew an innocent man stood before him.

But did he understand what his cowardice would mean?

The crowd knew they were shouting, “Crucify Him.”

But did they understand what had possessed them?

Judas knew he was accepting thirty pieces of silver.

But did he really understand the transaction he was making with his own soul?

And then comes the uncomfortable question.

Do we?

Do I?

The Mirror at Calvary

The cross is not merely something Christians are supposed to look at.

It is something we are supposed to look into.

It is a mirror.

Because every character surrounding that cross still lives within the human heart.

There is a little Judas in us when self-interest becomes more important than love.

There is a little Pilate in us when we know what is right but wash our hands because doing what is right might cost too much.

There is something of the crowd in us when we allow culture, family, politics, religion, wealth, fear, resentment, or tribal loyalty to do our thinking for us.

There is something of the religious establishment in us whenever protecting our righteousness becomes more important than discovering truth.

There is something of Peter in us when courage disappears the moment discipleship becomes costly.

And yes, there is something of those soldiers in us when we simply do what everyone around us is doing without stopping long enough to ask:

What am I becoming?

That may be one of the great questions of the Soulprint journey.

Not merely:

What am I doing?

But:

What is what I am doing doing to me?

Because every act of resentment shapes us.

Every act of mercy shapes us.

Every lie shapes us.

Every truth shapes us.

Every judgment shapes us.

Every act of forgiveness shapes us.

We are always becoming.

Forgiveness Is Not Pretending

This is where grace becomes difficult.

Forgiveness does not mean pretending something did not happen.

Jesus did not say:

Father, it doesn’t matter.

It mattered enormously.

He did not say:

They really aren’t doing anything wrong.

They were crucifying an innocent man.

Grace does not require us to call evil good.

Grace does not require us to surrender truth.

Grace does not erase consequences, boundaries, justice, or accountability.

Grace simply refuses to allow another person’s darkness to become our darkness.

That is different.

And that may be one of the hardest spiritual disciplines we will ever practice.

Because when someone wounds us, something primitive awakens inside us.

We want them to understand.

We want them to admit it.

We want them to feel what we felt.

Sometimes we simply want justice.

And justice matters.

But there is a subtle point at which the desire for justice can become the desire for revenge, and revenge slowly binds us to the very person who wounded us.

We begin carrying them everywhere.

Into breakfast.

Into conversations.

Into prayer.

Into bed.

Into tomorrow.

We rehearse the courtroom in our heads, presenting evidence to an imaginary jury over and over again.

And eventually we discover something terrible:

The person who hurt us may have moved on, while we are still standing at the scene of the crime.

Grace says:

I will tell the truth about what happened.

I will establish whatever boundaries wisdom requires.

I will pursue justice when justice is necessary.

But I will not surrender my soul to what you did to me.

Father, forgive them.

Grace in the Grocery Store

The problem with writing about Calvary is that we can make grace so enormous that it becomes impractical.

Most of us will never face Roman soldiers.

But we will face traffic.

Family.

Marriage.

Money.

Business.

Inheritance.

Church.

Politics.

Disappointment.

Gossip.

The insensitive remark.

The sibling who remembers childhood differently.

The friend who disappears when we need them.

The employee who betrays our trust.

The person who misunderstands our intentions.

The relative who says something at precisely the wrong moment.

The stranger who cuts us off in traffic.

The cashier moving painfully slowly when we are already late.

The person who sends the email that makes our blood pressure rise before breakfast.

This is where grace actually lives.

Grace is not primarily a theological idea.

Grace is Tuesday afternoon.

Grace is the conversation you do not want to have.

Grace is refusing to send the text you have already written three times.

Grace is choosing curiosity before accusation.

Grace is asking, “What might I not understand?”

Grace is remembering that the person standing across from you has an entire interior world you cannot see.

Grace is realizing that wounded people sometimes wound people without understanding why.

Grace is refusing to humiliate someone simply because you possess the information necessary to do it.

Grace has the power to retaliate but chooses not to.

Grace tells the truth without using it as a weapon.

Grace is leaving judgment to God when the ego desperately wants the job.

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

But What If They Never Apologize?

There it is.

The question underneath the question.

What if they never understand?

What if they never admit it?

What if they never apologize?

What if they go to their grave convinced they were right?

Look again at the cross.

No one beneath Jesus was asking for forgiveness when He offered it.

That changes everything.

We often think forgiveness is a transaction:

You apologize.

I evaluate the sincerity of your apology.

You demonstrate sufficient remorse.

I decide whether you deserve forgiveness.

But that is not grace.

That is accounting.

And the cross is God’s great declaration that the Kingdom of Heaven does not operate according to the bookkeeping system of the ego.

Grace is not given because someone deserves it.

Grace is grace precisely because they don’t.

Neither do we.

That is the part we conveniently forget.

We stand beneath the same cross.

All of us.

What Grace Does to History

And then something extraordinary happened.

Jesus died.

The empire continued.

Rome still had its armies.

Caesar still had his palaces.

The religious authorities still had their positions.

From the perspective of power, Jesus had lost.

Except He hadn’t.

The empire that crucified Him eventually disappeared.

The men who condemned Him became footnotes.

And those words spoken by a dying man on a cross traveled across continents, civilizations, languages, centuries, wars, revolutions, kingdoms, and generations:

Father, forgive them.

Grace outlived Rome.

Think about that.

The soldiers possessed the nails.

Jesus possessed forgiveness.

Which proved more powerful?

That is the strange mathematics of the Kingdom of God.

Love looks weak until history finishes counting.

Grace looks foolish until we see what hatred produces.

Forgiveness looks like surrender until we discover that the person who forgives is often the person who is finally free.

The Ultimate Grace

Perhaps the ultimate grace is not merely that Christ forgave those who crucified Him.

Perhaps the ultimate grace is that He showed us what a human being completely surrendered to God looks like.

No ego left to defend.

No reputation left to protect.

No score left to settle.

No enemy left to destroy.

Only love.

Only truth.

Only grace.

And suddenly the Beatitudes stop sounding like beautiful poetry.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

Love your enemies.

Pray for those who persecute you.

These were never sentimental sayings.

They were a description of the cross before Jesus climbed onto it.

He lived what He taught.

And then, at the moment when every human instinct would have screamed for vengeance, He demonstrated the Kingdom of God.

Father, forgive them.

And Now the Mirror Turns Toward Us

This is where I would rather stop writing.

Because theology is comfortable until it becomes personal.

Who do I need to forgive?

Whose name still changes my breathing when someone mentions it?

What argument am I still rehearsing?

Whose apology am I waiting for before I allow myself to live again?

Who have I reduced to the worst thing they ever did?

Where have I convinced myself that resentment is righteousness?

And perhaps most painfully:

Who might need to forgive me?

Because “they know not what they do” includes me.

There are things I have said without understanding their effect.

Things I have done while believing I was right.

People I have misunderstood.

Moments when my ego disguised itself as principle.

Times when fear looked like wisdom.

Times when pride masqueraded as truth.

Times when greed hides behind righteousness.

We all have blind spots.

That is why grace must travel in both directions.

I need to give it because I need to receive it.

The Soulprint of Grace

This is what awakening eventually reveals:

The goal is not simply to become better behaved.

The goal is to become more conscious.

To awaken from the ego’s endless defense of itself.

To see ourselves honestly.

To see others compassionately.

To tell the truth courageously.

To love extravagantly.

To forgive repeatedly.

Because underneath all the identities we manufacture, all the wounds we protect, all the arguments we rehearse, and all the masks we wear, there remains something sacred:

the image of God.

Sometimes buried.

Sometimes distorted.

Sometimes almost impossible to see.

But there.

And perhaps grace is the ability to look at another human being at their worst and still refuse to believe that their worst moment contains the whole truth about them.

Jesus looked down from the cross at humanity behaving in ways almost unimaginable.

And He saw something deeper.

They know not what they do.

What compassion.

What insight into the human unconscious soul?

What terrifying love.

And then:

Forgive them.

That may be the most revolutionary sentence ever spoken.

Because hatred perpetuates itself.

Violence reproduces itself.

Humiliation creates more humiliation.

Resentment creates more resentment.

Someone has to stop it.

Someone has to absorb the wound without passing it forward.

Someone has to say:

It ends here.

That is the cross.

That is grace.

And that is the mirror Christ leaves before every one of us.

The question is not whether we admire what Jesus did.

The question is whether, little by little, encounter by encounter, wound by wound, we are becoming capable of doing the same.

Perhaps today it begins with one person.

One resentment.

One old wound.

One name.

One story we have told ourselves a thousand times.

Hold that person before God.

Tell the truth about what happened.

Do not minimize it.

Do not excuse it.

Do not pretend it did not hurt.

And then, perhaps trembling, pray the most difficult prayer imaginable:

Father, forgive them.

They may not know what they do.

And then add the prayer that completes the mirror:

Father, forgive me.

Because sometimes I don’t know what I am doing either.

There is the ultimate grace.

Not weakness.

Not surrender to evil.

Not sentimental religion.

But the astonishing freedom of a soul that refuses to become what wounded it.

And perhaps that is what it finally means to awaken to our Soulprint:

to discover that we were created in the image of a God whose final answer to the worst humanity could do was still—

Grace.

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Part One

Grace Requires Self-Awareness

If you have already decided that you understand grace, that you get it, have it, give it, and perhaps even model it for others, then you may be the person most desperately in need of reading what follows.

And so may I.

That is the danger of writing the way I write.

There is something almost prophetic about putting words on a page that asks another human being to look more deeply into the soul's hidden places. But the prophet must first stand before the mirror himself. Before I can ask you to examine your ego, I have to examine mine. Before I expose hypocrisy, I have to search for it in myself. Before I write about greed, pride, judgment, self-righteousness, forgiveness, or grace, I have to ask the uncomfortable question:

Where does this live in me?

Otherwise, I am not writing prophetically.

I am simply throwing stones.

And perhaps there is an even greater danger.

The writer can begin believing the words belong to him.

I have often described writing from a meditative posture, listening for something beneath my own thoughts. When the words come from that place, I sometimes wonder who is asking the questions at all. Is it me asking you to look into the mirror? Or am I simply another person standing before the same mirror, trying to describe what I see?

That distinction matters.

Because the moment I imagine myself standing on the other side of these words, exploring grace rather than desperately needing it, I have contradicted everything I am about to say.

The prophet first has to see himself in the mirror before he can ever ask you to look into yours.

That makes this kind of writing dangerous.

Not primarily because it may offend someone else.

Because it may expose me.

And if it doesn’t, perhaps I have no business writing it.

My father died recently at ninety-three years old, and I suspect when the stories of his life are finally distilled down through the generations of the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who saw his unique light, one word will remain:

Grace.

As I mourn his passing and move through all the strange and necessary stages of healthy grief, I keep returning to the Beatitude that has always spoken so deeply to me:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

I am beginning to understand that comfort does not necessarily mean having our sadness removed.

Sometimes comfort arrives as awareness- self-awareness.

You remember.

You notice things you somehow missed while the person was standing beside you.

And I am remembering something about my father.

Dad had a peculiar way of lining up his stars.

He understood that the blessings of his life did not originate with him. He worked hard. He accomplished things. He traveled the world. He built relationships. He lived an extraordinary ninety-three years.

But he rarely confused blessing with ownership.

He did not need to take credit for what was never his to take.

And in his own quiet way, he tried to teach those of us closest to him the same thing.

Some of us are still trying to learn the lesson.

Some of us may actually be learning it.

And some of us learned how to cheat on the test.

That may be the most dangerous possibility of all.

Because we can learn the vocabulary of grace without becoming gracious.

We can learn generosity without surrender.

Humility without becoming humble.

Religion without transformation.

We can learn how to appear self-aware while remaining profoundly unconscious.

We can even learn how to arrange the evidence of our lives so that everyone, including ourselves, believes the story we have constructed.

That is the ego’s great counterfeit of grace.

And eventually the question is not whether we know the right answers.

The question is whether we have become awake enough to recognize what is actually happening inside us.

My father’s death is making me look again.

At him.

At myself.

At my family.

At the strange ways human beings deal with love, money, loss, recognition, resentment, generosity, inheritance, mortality, and God.

And I am discovering that grief can become a mirror if we allow it.

Perhaps that is part of the mysterious promise hidden within "Blessed are those who mourn."

Mourning strips things away.

The titles disappear.

The possessions remain behind.

The accomplishments become stories.

The arguments suddenly seem smaller.

The balance sheets eventually close.

And we are left standing before the questions that were there all along:

Who is God?

Who am I?

And perhaps one more:

Have I actually learned grace, or have I simply learned how to look gracious?

That question is too important for one essay.

So I am going to make this exploration of grace and self-awareness a multi-part series.

Because before we can talk about giving grace to anyone else, we have to talk about the person standing in the mirror.

And that person is me.

We speak about grace as though it were something we simply receive.

And it is.

But I have begun to believe there is another dimension of grace we rarely discuss:

To live graciously, you must first become self-aware, and then learn to practice grace without needing recognition. Grace follows the way of Christ, who taught us that its truest expression is often found not in grand gestures, but in the quiet, unnoticed acts of love, mercy, generosity, and kindness woven into everyday life.

Otherwise, what we call grace can become little more than religious sentimentality, beautiful words spoken by people who remain largely unconscious of the forces driving their own lives.

Grace does not eliminate self-awareness.

Grace makes self-awareness possible.

Because once I know I am loved by God, I no longer have to be terrified of discovering the truth about myself.

And that may be one of the most important discoveries of The Soulprint Project.

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The Woman at the Crossroads

Judah, Tamar, and the Strange Genealogy of Grace

The Soulprint Project: Stories from the Un-Sanitized Scriptures

There is a woman sitting beside the road.

She has covered her face.

Men passing through will assume they know what kind of woman she is.

They do not.

And neither do we.

Not yet.

Somewhere down that dusty road comes Judah, son of Jacob, great-grandson of Abraham, ancestor of kings, patriarch of Israel, future ancestor of Jesus Christ.

He does not know that history is waiting for him at the crossroads.

He only sees a woman.

And he wants her.

That is how one of the strangest stories in the Bible begins.

Not in a temple.

Not with angels.

Not with a prophet hearing the voice of God.

But with sex, grief, deception, hypocrisy, desperation, a dead husband, a broken promise, a signet ring, and a woman who refuses to disappear.

And somehow…God is in this story.

That may be the most disturbing part of all.

Because if we are going to ask the questions at the heart of The Soulprint Project:

Who is God?

Who am I?

Then how shall I live?

Then we must eventually confront the possibility that God is not merely found in the stories we would have chosen to tell.

Sometimes God reveals Himself in the stories we would have preferred to leave out.

And Genesis 38 is one of them.

And I suspect there are hidden stories too many of us might be hiding because God was not in them, because when God is in them, we tell them.

The Brother Who Walked Away

Judah already has blood on his hands when our story begins.

Not literally.

That would have been easier.

His younger brother Joseph had been the irritating favorite of their father Jacob, the dreamer in the beautiful coat, the boy who somehow always seemed to stand in the sunlight while his brothers lived in the shadow.

The brothers hated him.

Eventually, hatred became a conspiracy. It always does.

They threw Joseph into a pit.

Some wanted him dead.

Judah had another idea.

Why kill him when they could sell him?

There is a particular kind of evil that learns to make a profit.

So Joseph disappeared toward Egypt in a caravan, and the brothers dipped his coat in goat’s blood.

They carried it home to their father.

Jacob recognized it.

His beloved son was dead.

Or so he believed.

And something broke inside the old man.

Perhaps something broke inside Judah, too.

Genesis tells us that Judah then went down from his brothers.

That sentence feels geographical.

I suspect it is spiritual.

Judah leaves.

He builds another life.

He marries.

He has sons.

Perhaps he is doing what human beings have always done after something terrible.

Move.

Work.

Marry.

Build.

Stay busy.

Make yourself look good even though your heart is broken, possibly evil.

Do anything except return to the pit.

We imagine guilt as something that screams.

Sometimes guilt simply relocates.

Tamar

Judah’s firstborn son was named Er.

And Er married a woman named Tamar.

We know almost nothing about her before she enters Judah’s family.

That is often the way ancient stories introduce women.

She enters history through the name of a man.

But before this story is finished, the men will be remembered partly because of her.

Er dies.

Scripture says he was wicked before the Lord. Sons born into good families can choose to do the wrong things rather than the right things, and cosmic justice begins.

Suddenly Tamar is a widow.

In our world, widowhood is grief.

In hers, it could also mean economic catastrophe, social disappearance, and the loss of a future.

There was no life insurance.

No career to return to.

No retirement account.

No modern legal system is waiting to protect her independence.

Her future was tied to family, children, inheritance, and name.

According to the customs that would later be reflected in Israel’s law, responsibility passed to Er’s brother, Onan.

He was expected to provide Tamar with offspring so that his dead brother’s family line would continue. Children were responsible for their parents, so without children, she was homeless.

Onan understood the arrangement perfectly.

He also understood something else.

A child born through Tamar would not primarily advance his interests. He was given a choice. Do the right thing or scheme.

So he used Tamar sexually while deliberately denying her the very future their union was meant to provide. Each time they slept together, Onan deliberately withdrew before climax, ensuring that Tamar would not conceive and that his brother’s family line would end with him. Greed!

It is an ancient story.

It is also painfully modern.

Human beings have always possessed the remarkable ability to embrace the pleasures of responsibility while avoiding its obligations. We keep our own moral scorecards, reassuring ourselves of our goodness because we did this or accomplished that, while completely missing what God may actually be asking of us. Perhaps that is the ancient temptation of Eden still alive within us: we would rather decide for ourselves what is good than risk trusting God enough to do what He asks.

Onan dies too. Sometimes greed has its own justice.

Now Judah has lost two sons.

And grief begins whispering its primitive arithmetic.

Two sons.

One woman.

Tamar.

Judah becomes afraid.

He still has another son, Shelah.

The customary obligation should eventually fall to him.

But Judah sends Tamar back to her father’s house. To modern ears, that may sound almost compassionate, perhaps even responsible. It was not. Within the covenantal and cultural world Tamar inhabited, it was a profound failure of familial obligation. And beneath Judah’s seemingly reasonable decision were two ancient forces that still disguise themselves remarkably well: fear and self-interest. Fear and greed have a peculiar way of dressing themselves in the clothing of prudence. But God’s way keeps pulling us toward grace, generosity, responsibility, and care for the vulnerable. And if grace cannot survive inside our own families, among the people whose lives have been entrusted to us, we should be very careful about calling what remains the way of God.

Wait, he tells her.

Wait until Shelah grows up.

It sounds temporary.

It becomes permanent.

Shelah grows.

Tamar waits.

Judah does nothing.

And this may be where the real story begins.

Because Tamar realizes something.

No one is coming to rescue her.

The Dangerous Word: Wait

We romanticize waiting.

We embroider it on pillows.

We preach sermons about it.

Wait upon the Lord.

Be patient.

Trust.

And sometimes that is exactly what faith requires.

But sometimes, influential people tell powerless people to wait because waiting costs the powerful nothing.

Tamar had waited.

She had obeyed.

She had grieved.

She had remained within the boundaries Judah established for her.

And the boundaries had become a prison.

Judah had made a promise.

Judah had broken it.

And Tamar knew it.

Then she heard that Judah was traveling to Timnah to shear his sheep.

So Tamar removed the widow's clothing.

She covered herself with a veil. Tamar must have been a beautiful woman, and by now, a widow three times.

And she sat beside the road.

At a crossroads.

Of course she did.

Where else could this story happen?

The Crossroads

Judah sees her.

He assumes she is a prostitute.

He approaches.

There is no great seduction scene.

No romance.

No music.

No candlelight.

Just a transaction.

Judah asks for sex.

Tamar asks what he will pay.

A young goat, he promises.

But he doesn’t have the goat with him.

Tamar wants collateral.

And here the story becomes almost cinematic.

Your seal.

Your cord.

Your staff.

These were not meaningless objects.

However, they identified Judah.

The seal was his signature.

The staff represented his household and standing.

We might imagine Tamar asking for his driver’s license, credit card, and password.

Judah hands them over.

Desire has a peculiar ability to make intelligent people careless.

They sleep together.

Judah continues on his journey.

Tamar returns home.

And soon she discovers that she is pregnant.

Burn Her

Three months later, someone brings Judah the scandalous news.

Your daughter-in-law Tamar has prostituted herself.

She is pregnant.

Judah’s response is immediate.

Bring her out and burn her.

There it is.

Human hypocrisy compressed into a single sentence.

The man who hired a prostitute demands judgment upon the woman he believes became one.

We are extraordinarily talented at constructing moral systems that prosecute other people’s sins while negotiating settlements with our own.

Judah sees Tamar’s pregnancy.

He does not see himself.

Perhaps that is the essence of the false self.

We become prosecutors of everyone except the person in the mirror.

Tamar does not scream.

She does not publicly accuse him.

She sends him three objects.

A seal.

A cord.

A staff.

And with them, essentially, a question:

Do you recognize these?

I wonder how long Judah stared at them.

Perhaps the world became very quiet.

Because years earlier Judah and his brothers had carried another object to their father.

Joseph’s bloodstained coat.

And they had asked Jacob to recognize it.

Do you recognize this?

Now Judah stands on the other side of recognition.

The deceiver has been confronted by evidence.

The man who once used an object to conceal the truth is confronted by objects that reveal it.

Scripture has a long memory.

Sometimes our sins return not as punishment, but as mirrors.

Judah looks into his.

And then something astonishing happens.

He does not make excuses.

He does not blame Tamar.

He does not hire someone to manage the scandal.

He says:

“She is more righteous than I.”

And perhaps Judah begins to become Judah, which would become the most powerful of the 12 tribes.

The God Behind the Curtain

This is where we usually want the Bible to become easier.

Surely God will explain Himself.

He does not.

There is no divine speech in Genesis 38.

No burning bush.

No thunder.

No angel saying, Here is what all this means.

God appears almost absent.

And yet God is everywhere.

That is one of Scripture’s great mysteries.

Providence often becomes visible only backward.

Tamar gives birth to twins.

Perez and Zerah.

Perez becomes the ancestor of Boaz.

Boaz fathers Obed.

Obed fathers Jesse.

Jesse fathers David.

David becomes king.

And generations later, a Jewish tax collector named Matthew sits down to write the story of Jesus.

Ancient genealogies could be selective.

Matthew could have simply written the respectable names.

Abraham.

Isaac.

Jacob.

Judah.

Perez.

David.

And eventually Joseph.

Jesus.

Clean.

Royal.

Presentable.

But Matthew does something extraordinary.

He writes:

“Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar.”

Tamar.

He says her name.

The woman beside the road has entered the genealogy of Christ.

The woman Judah nearly condemned becomes part of the bloodline through which the Messiah enters history.

Think about that.

God could have written a cleaner genealogy.

He didn’t.

We Keep Trying to Clean Up God’s Family

We do this constantly.

We sanitize Scripture because we are uncomfortable with what it reveals.

We turn Noah into a children’s nursery mural with smiling giraffes and forget the floating bodies outside the ark.

We make David, the boy with the slingshot, the focus and forget Bathsheba.

Although, interestingly, Matthew does not call her Bathsheba.

He calls her “the wife of Uriah.”

That matters.

David was king. He had power, armies, palaces, wives, servants, and nearly anything a man in the ancient world could desire. Uriah the Hittite was one of his soldiers, a foreigner by ancestry, yet a man loyal enough to fight and possibly die for Israel and for David.

Then one evening David saw Uriah’s wife bathing.

He wanted her.

And kings were accustomed to getting what they wanted.

David sent for Bathsheba. They slept together. She became pregnant.

Now desire had become a problem that needed managing.

David summoned Uriah home from the battlefield, assuming he would sleep with his wife and provide a convenient explanation for the pregnancy. But Uriah refused the comforts of home while his fellow soldiers remained exposed to danger.

The irony is almost unbearable.

The Hittite behaves honorably while Israel’s anointed king behaves treacherously.

When David cannot manipulate Uriah into unknowingly covering his sin, he sends him back to battle carrying instructions for his own death.

Put Uriah where the fighting is fiercest.

Then withdraw.

And Uriah dies.

David takes Bathsheba as his wife.

Problem solved.

Except Scripture refuses to solve it.

Generations later, when Matthew writes the genealogy of Jesus, he could simply have written:

David fathered Solomon by Bathsheba.

He does not.

He writes that David fathered Solomon “by the wife of Uriah.”

Matthew leaves the dead man’s name standing in the genealogy of the Messiah.

Uriah. A foreigner.

It is as though Scripture refuses to allow the greatness of David to erase the man David destroyed.

We remember David as shepherd, psalmist, giant-killer, warrior, and king, a man after God’s own heart.

And all of that is true.

But another truth is true too.

David committed adultery.

David abused power.

David arranged the death of an innocent man.

And God refuses to airbrush any of it from the family portrait.

That is why Tamar belongs in this same strange genealogy.

Tamar. Rahab. Ruth. The wife of Uriah.

Matthew seems almost determined to remind us that Jesus did not descend through a sanitized human story.

He descended through our story.

Through saints and sinners.

Through victims and perpetrators.

Through courage and cowardice.

Through faithfulness and betrayal.

Through bedrooms, battlefields, foreign lands, broken promises, and family secrets nobody would voluntarily include in the official biography.

And perhaps that is precisely the point.

God does not redeem an imaginary humanity.

He redeems this one.

Ours.

God does not wait outside the embarrassing chapters until respectable people finally appear.

He enters the genealogy.

He enters the scandal.

He enters the consequences.

He enters the places we would rather remove from the story.

And somehow, without ever calling evil good, God keeps bending the human story toward redemption.

That is grace.

Not the denial of what happened.

Not the sanitizing of sin.

Not pretending Uriah never existed.

Grace remembers his name.

And then writes another chapter.

We celebrate Solomon’s wisdom and whisper about his appetites. And Solomon himself says he tried everything. Everything! I am not sure we can even imagine that.

We turn Peter into stained glass and forget the fisherman cursing in the courtyard, who never knew Jesus.

And we put a glowing halo around the genealogy of Christ.

But Matthew will not allow it.

He puts Tamar in it.

Rahab too.

Ruth.

Bathsheba, whom he provocatively identifies through Uriah.

God apparently has little interest in protecting the reputation of His family tree.

Perhaps because God is telling us something about Himself.

Who Is God?

God is the One who enters human history without being contaminated by its brokenness.

He does not stand outside our mess shouting instructions.

He enters it.

That will eventually become the central claim of Christianity.

The Word became flesh.

Not theory.

Not philosophy.

Not religious abstraction.

Flesh.

Jesus enters a genealogy containing betrayal, prostitution, adultery, murder, foreigners, kings, failures, saints, schemers, victims, and survivors.

He comes through the human family exactly as it is.

That tells us something staggering about God.

God does not require a perfect story before He enters it.

He enters stories and redeems them.

Grace is not God’s reward for finally becoming respectable.

Grace is God walking into the places where respectability has collapsed.

Perhaps we have misunderstood redemption because we imagine God standing at the finish line applauding the people who successfully made themselves presentable.

Genesis tells another story.

God is already at the crossroads.

Who Am I?

This question becomes more uncomfortable.

Because I am Judah.

And I am Tamar.

I am the person capable of enormous blindness.

And I am the person who has been wounded by somebody else’s blindness.

I am the hypocrite holding stones.

And sometimes I am the person standing beneath them.

I am the one who promises.

The one who waits.

The one who fails.

The one who survives.

The one who hides.

The one who finally recognizes the seal in his own hand.

We desperately want human beings divided into heroes and villains.

Scripture refuses.

The dividing line between good and evil does not simply run between people.

It runs through us.

This is why the great spiritual journey is not primarily about becoming someone else.

It is about becoming honest enough to discover who we already are beneath the disguises.

The ego says:

Protect the image.

The soul says:

Tell the truth.

Judah’s transformation begins with recognition.

These belong to me.

Perhaps ours does too.

Then How Shall I Live?

Pay attention to the crossroads.

Especially the ones you would rather avoid.

Pay attention to the person your culture has taught you not to see.

Pay attention to your certainty when you are most eager to condemn someone.

Pay attention to promises you have made to people who possess less power than you.

Pay attention to the objects life keeps returning to you, the memories, failures, relationships, disappointments, wounds, and strange coincidences that seem to whisper:

Do you recognize this?

And when recognition comes, resist the ancient temptation to defend yourself.

Judah could have doubled down.

Instead he confessed.

She is more righteous than I.

Five words changed the trajectory of a man.

Maybe repentance is not primarily humiliation.

Maybe repentance is the moment illusion collapses.

The moment the false self runs out of explanations.

The moment we finally see what has always been there.

And strangely enough, that is often where grace begins.

The Woman Is Still Sitting There

I keep returning to Tamar beside the road.

A veiled woman.

A grieving woman.

A powerless woman who refuses to become invisible.

Judah walks toward her believing he knows exactly what he sees.

He doesn’t.

Neither do we.

Because behind Tamar stands Perez.

Behind Perez stands Boaz.

Behind Boaz stands David.

And somewhere far beyond David stands a young woman named Mary, holding a child in Bethlehem.

And there it is again.

Another scandal.

We have sanitized this story too.

We see children dressed in bathrobes standing beneath cardboard stars in Christmas pageants. We hear Silent Nightplaying softly behind a manger surrounded by shepherds, angels, and peacefully kneeling animals. Everything glows.

But Mary and Joseph did not experience a Christmas card.

They experienced scandal.

An unmarried young woman was pregnant.

Joseph knew the child was not his.

People could count months then just as easily as they can now. There would have been whispers, suspicious glances, questions without comfortable answers. Joseph considered quietly ending the betrothal. Mary had surrendered herself to a calling she could scarcely explain to anyone.

Before there was a manger, there was humiliation.

Before there were angels singing, there were probably neighbors whispering.

Before wise men brought gifts, there was a young couple carrying the unbearable weight of obedience to something neither of them could fully understand.

And before Mary ever held the body of Jesus against her breast in Bethlehem, somewhere in the distance waited another terrible image:

Mary holding that same body beneath a Roman cross.

This was not sentimental faith.

This was costly surrender.

Mary and Joseph discovered what Tamar, Judah, David, Bathsheba, and Uriah had already revealed:

God’s redemptive story rarely arrives looking respectable.

Sometimes grace enters history through the very doorway religious people would have been quickest to condemn.

And perhaps that is why we must stop sanitizing these stories.

Because when we remove the scandal, uncertainty, humiliation, blood, fear, and human cost, we do not make Scripture more beautiful. We make grace less astonishing.

Back to Judah.

Judah cannot see any of this.

Tamar cannot see it either.

They are simply living inside one terrible, complicated moment.

Just like us.

We rarely know what God is doing while God is doing it.

We see the crossroads.

God sees generations.

We see scandal.

God sees redemption.

We see broken pieces.

God sees a genealogy.

We see a woman beside the road.

God sees the road eventually leading to Bethlehem.

And perhaps this is why the story of Judah and Tamar belongs beside the great epics of Scripture.

Because most of our lives do not feel like Moses standing before the Red Sea.

They feel like Genesis 38.

Complicated.

Morally ambiguous.

Painful.

Unresolved.

Filled with decisions we wish we could make again and circumstances we never would have chosen.

Kings rise and kings fall. The rich accumulate and eventually leave everything behind. The powerful build monuments to themselves, only to become names in history books—or names forgotten altogether. They always have.

And still God works.

Sometimes within those stories. Perhaps even more often in the margins—through the Tamar sitting beside the road, the Uriah abandoned on a battlefield, the Mary carrying a child no one understands.

Not because everything that happens is easily divided into good and bad.

Not because evil is secretly virtue wearing a disguise.

Not because betrayal becomes anything other than betrayal, or because suffering somehow ceases to hurt.

But because human brokenness has never been powerful enough to make God abandon His redemptive purposes.

Perhaps that is the hidden scripture running beneath all Scripture:

God is still writing when we think the story has gone terribly wrong.

And perhaps that hidden scripture runs beneath our lives as well.

There is a God behind the story.

There is a soul beneath the disguise.

There is grace beneath the wreckage.

And there is a life waiting on the other side of recognition.

Who is God?

The One who redeems stories we would have discarded. The One who reminds us that when we listen, we too have a story if we have the courage to live it. To see beyond ourselves.

Who am I?

Someone far more complicated, and far more beloved, than the identity I have constructed.

Then how shall I live?

With my eyes open.

With fewer stones in my hands.

With courage enough to recognize what belongs to me.

With faith enough to surrender that which has become an idol.

And with enough faith to believe that even here,

at this strange crossroads,

in this chapter I cannot yet understand,

among these broken pieces I cannot possibly imagine fitting together,

God may already be writing the genealogy of something I cannot yet see.

The unconscious life drifts. The conscious life awakens.

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There Is a Time

The Life You Cannot Control and the Eternity You Cannot Forget

An exploration from The Soulprint Project

There is a time to be born.

And there is a time to die.

Everything else happens between those two sentences.

We build houses. We lose people. We fall in love. We get angry. We forgive. We make money. We lose money. We raise children who eventually leave us. We stare into mirrors and wonder where the years went. We sit beside hospital beds. We bury parents. We celebrate weddings. We watch grandchildren being born. We make plans that never happen and stumble into moments of grace we could never have planned.

We laugh.

We weep.

We hold on.

We let go.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, usually when life refuses to cooperate with the story we had written for ourselves, we ask the ancient questions:

Who are You, God?

Who am I?

And perhaps the most difficult question of all:

How am I supposed to live when I cannot control what happens next?

Three thousand years ago, a mysterious biblical writer called Qoheleth looked directly into that question.

He did not offer an explanation.

He gave us a poem.

And perhaps that is because some truths are too large for explanations.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Then the rhythm begins.

A time to be born.

A time to die.

A time to plant.

A time to uproot.

A time to weep.

A time to laugh.

A time to mourn.

A time to dance.

A time to embrace.

A time to refrain from embracing.

A time to keep.

A time to throw away.

A time to be silent.

A time to speak.

A time to love.

A time to hate.

A time for war.

A time for peace.

We have heard Ecclesiastes 3 so often that we may no longer hear it.

It has become comfortable.

It isn’t.

It is existential dynamite.

Because Qoheleth is dismantling one of the most powerful illusions of the human ego:

that we are in control of our lives.

The Ego Wants the Map

I have spent much of my life solving problems.

Maybe you have too.

We learn early that life rewards competence. Make good decisions. Work hard. Save money. Take care of yourself. Build something. Protect your family. Think ahead.

There is wisdom in all of that.

But hidden inside our competence can grow a dangerous illusion:

If I do everything correctly, life should turn out correctly.

And then life happens.

The diagnosis comes.

Someone you love leaves.

The business fails.

Your child makes a decision you cannot fix.

Your body begins doing things you did not authorize.

Someone dies too soon.

Or perhaps nothing catastrophic happens at all.

You simply wake up one morning and realize that twenty years disappeared while you were busy making plans for the next twenty.

Suddenly Ecclesiastes doesn’t sound pessimistic.

It sounds true.

There is a time to be born.

And there is a time to die.

And you chose neither.

That realization can be terrifying.

But it can also be the beginning of freedom.

Because perhaps the greatest burden human beings carry is trying to do God’s job.

The ego wants the map. The soul learns to trust the Guide.

What Time Is It For?

The opening line of Ecclesiastes contains an extraordinary idea.

There is a time for everything.

Not merely clock time.

Not 4:17 Tuesday afternoon.

There is an appropriate moment. A season. An occasion.

And suddenly the question changes.

We spend our lives asking:

What time is it?

Wisdom asks:

What time is it for?

That may be one of the great forgotten questions of the spiritual life.

What season am I actually in?

Not the season I wish I were in.

Not the season I used to be in.

Not the season everyone else thinks I should be in.

What season am I in now?

Because there is a time to hold on.

And there is a time to let go.

There is a time to speak.

And there is a time when the most loving thing you can possibly do is remain silent.

There is a time to fight for something.

And there is a time to surrender something.

There is a time to build.

And, painful as it may be, there is a time when something we spent years building must come down.

The action itself isn’t always wisdom.

Wisdom is discerning the season.

Jesus understood this.

At times He withdrew.

At times He engaged.

Sometimes He answered His critics.

Sometimes He refused.

Sometimes He healed.

Sometimes He disappeared into the mountains to pray.

Early in John’s Gospel, Jesus says His hour has not yet come.

Later:

“The hour has come.”

Jesus did not merely know what to do.

He knew when.

That is wisdom.

The Sentence That Explains Something About Us

Then Ecclesiastes gives us one of the strangest and most beautiful sentences in Scripture:

“He has also set eternity in the human heart.”

Sit with that.

You are a creature trapped inside time who somehow possesses an awareness of eternity.

That is strange.

Your dog experiences life.

You experience life and ask:

What does life mean?

We don’t merely suffer.

We ask why suffering exists.

We don’t merely watch someone die.

We stand at the grave and feel something deep inside us protesting:

This cannot be the end.

We don’t merely grow older.

We are astonished by our aging because something inside us doesn’t seem to age at the same speed.

The face in the mirror changes.

But somewhere behind the face is the strange continuity of I.

I was the child.

I was the teenager.

I was the young parent.

I was the middle-aged person.

And somehow I am still here.

Who is this I watching all these versions of myself pass away?

Augustine wrestled with this mystery more than sixteen centuries ago.

He asked:

“What, then, is time?”

Think about it.

The past no longer exists.

The future does not yet exist.

And the present disappears almost as soon as we name it.

Yet somehow consciousness stretches across all three.

We remember yesterday.

We inhabit today.

We imagine tomorrow.

We are temporal creatures haunted by eternity.

Maybe that haunting isn’t an evolutionary accident.

Maybe it is a fingerprint.

A Soulprint.

We See the Thread. God Sees the Tapestry.

Ecclesiastes continues:

God has made everything beautiful in its time, yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

We need to be careful here.

Cancer isn’t beautiful.

War isn’t beautiful.

Betrayal isn’t beautiful.

The death of someone you love isn’t beautiful.

Ecclesiastes is not handing us a religious greeting card that says, “Everything happens for a reason.”

In fact, later in the same chapter Qoheleth looks directly at injustice and wickedness.

He refuses cheap spirituality.

The deeper claim is more mysterious.

There is a whole we cannot see.

God sees the tapestry.

We see a thread.

God sees the novel.

We are living somewhere in the middle of a page.

And we keep demanding:

Explain this page!

Why did this happen?

Why now?

Why me?

Why her?

Why didn’t You stop it?

Where are You?

And perhaps sometimes God’s silence isn’t absence.

Perhaps we are simply asking to understand a story while we are still standing inside the sentence.

Søren Kierkegaard captured the paradox brilliantly:

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

There it is.

The human condition.

We understand backward.

But we must live forward.

And the distance between those two things is called faith.

Maybe You Are Trying to Understand Your Life Too Soon

Think about your own story.

Has anything happened to you that made absolutely no sense when it occurred but looks different twenty years later?

Perhaps something you once called failure became liberation.

Perhaps a closed door redirected your entire life.

Perhaps suffering awakened something comfort never could.

Perhaps the person you desperately wanted to become had to die before the person you actually are could emerge.

But now comes the harder question:

What is happening in your life right now that you are trying to understand too soon?

That’s different.

We like retrospective faith.

Retrospective faith has evidence.

We can connect the dots.

We can tell the testimony.

“Now I understand why…”

But what about the chapter you’re living right now?

The diagnosis whose ending you don’t know.

The relationship that remains unresolved.

The prayer God hasn’t answered.

The child you’re worried about.

The financial problem.

The grief.

The loneliness.

The waiting.

The strange new season you didn’t ask for.

You cannot connect dots that haven’t been drawn yet.

And so the spiritual life eventually brings every one of us to the same terrifying threshold:

Will I trust God without understanding God?

And Then Ecclesiastes Says: Eat Lunch

This may be my favorite part.

After taking us to the edge of eternity, time, mortality, mystery and the incomprehensibility of God, Qoheleth gives us his answer.

Eat.

Drink.

Work.

Do good.

Enjoy your life.

It’s almost comical.

We want the secret architecture of the universe.

Qoheleth says:

Enjoy your lunch.

But this isn’t shallow.

It may be one of the deepest spiritual insights in Scripture.

You cannot possess life.

You can only receive it.

Control says:

This belongs to me.

Gratitude says:

This has been given to me.

And those are radically different ways of being human.

This cup of coffee is gift.

This conversation is gift.

This sunrise is gift.

This old dog sleeping beside me is gift.

This person sitting across the table is gift.

This body—even aging, hurting, changing—is gift.

This breath is gift.

This moment is gift.

And strangely, the fact that none of it lasts forever does not make it less valuable.

It makes it precious.

Perhaps we don’t learn to treasure things despite their impermanence.

We treasure them because they are impermanent.

There Is a Time to Weep

We should also stop trying to rush through the painful seasons.

Christianity can sometimes become terribly uncomfortable with grief.

We want mourning to become victory by Tuesday.

Pain needs a testimony.

Confusion needs an explanation.

Good Friday needs Easter immediately.

But Ecclesiastes says:

There is a time to weep.

Not merely permission to weep.

A time for it.

Jesus understood this.

Standing at Lazarus’s grave, knowing resurrection was minutes away:

Jesus wept.

Think about that.

He knew how the story ended.

And He still cried.

That means knowing resurrection does not make grief unnecessary.

Sometimes grief is the faithful response.

Sometimes weeping is prayer.

Sometimes sitting beside someone without explaining anything is theology in its purest form.

There are moments when the wisest thing a Christian can say is nothing at all.

After all:

There is a time to be silent.

The Season You’re Actually In

Much of our suffering comes from fighting the season we are actually living.

I should still be young.

My body shouldn’t be doing this.

My children shouldn’t have left.

My spouse shouldn’t have changed.

My career shouldn’t be ending.

My parents shouldn’t be dying.

My life wasn’t supposed to look like this.

Those feelings are deeply human.

But reality remains.

And Ecclesiastes asks an uncomfortable question:

Can you live faithfully in the season you are actually in rather than spending your life longing for the season that has passed or demanding the season that hasn’t arrived?

The ego is extraordinarily bad at this.

The ego lives almost everywhere except here.

It rehearses yesterday.

It negotiates with tomorrow.

It rewrites conversations.

It constructs alternate lives.

It fantasizes about different outcomes.

But God keeps meeting us in one maddeningly small location:

here.

Now.

Because now is the only place where life actually happens.

You cannot love someone yesterday.

You cannot love someone tomorrow.

You can remember yesterday’s love.

You can promise tomorrow’s love.

But you can only love now.

Perhaps that is why the present moment is sacred.

Agency Without Sovereignty

Ecclesiastes does not teach fatalism.

It teaches something far more difficult:

You have agency without sovereignty.

You have choices.

Your choices matter enormously.

But you are not God.

You cannot always choose your season.

But you can choose how you inhabit it.

You cannot prevent every loss.

But you can love.

You cannot stop aging.

But you can become wise.

You cannot control another person’s heart.

But you can keep yours open.

You cannot know tomorrow.

But you can receive today.

You cannot understand God’s entire story.

But you can trust the Author.

That may be what surrender actually means.

Not passivity.

Not giving up.

Not pretending pain doesn’t hurt.

Surrender is relinquishing the illusion that faithfulness requires control.

The Question Beneath the Question

This is what The Soulprint Project keeps returning to.

Not merely theology.

Not merely psychology.

Not merely philosophy, Scripture, neuroscience, contemplation or the Enneagram.

Those are tools.

They are ways of excavating something ancient hidden beneath our carefully constructed lives.

The real questions are much older.

Who are You, God?

And:

Who am I?

Ecclesiastes 3 offers a strange answer.

God is eternal.

I am temporal.

God sees the whole.

I see fragments.

God’s work endures.

Mine passes away.

God gives.

I receive.

God is God.

I am not.

And perhaps spiritual awakening begins when that final sentence stops frightening us.

I am not God.

I don’t have to know everything.

I don’t have to control everything.

I don’t have to understand every chapter while I’m living it.

I don’t have to make the people I love behave according to my script.

I don’t have to know how the story ends before I live today’s page.

I can simply be here.

Awake.

Present.

Faithful.

Alive.

Then How Shall I Live?

Maybe that’s the question Ecclesiastes has been leading toward all along.

If life is brief...

If control is illusion...

If eternity has somehow been planted within us...

If God sees what I cannot see...

Then how shall I live?

Receive.

Rejoice.

Do good.

Work.

Love.

Pay attention.

Hold tightly when it is time to hold tightly.

Release when it is time to release.

Speak when love requires courage.

Remain silent when words would only serve yourself.

Dance when it is time to dance.

And when the season comes—

mourn.

Mourn deeply.

Because you loved deeply.

And when you cannot understand what God is doing, resist the temptation to manufacture an explanation simply to make yourself feel safer.

Mystery is not the enemy of faith.

Mystery is where faith becomes necessary.

Perhaps wisdom is not knowing what happens next.

Perhaps wisdom is knowing how to live faithfully when you don’t.

The Psalmist eventually found words for it:

“My times are in your hand.”

Maybe that’s enough.

Not understanding the time.

Not controlling the time.

Not escaping time.

Just placing my time into the hands of the One who stands beyond it.

Because there is a time to be born.

And there is a time to die.

And somewhere between those two mysteries is this extraordinary, terrifying, heartbreaking, breathtaking thing we call a human life.

Don’t sleep through it.

Don’t spend all of it trying to control it.

Don’t wait until tomorrow to inhabit it.

You are here now.

And perhaps eternity has been whispering inside you all along.

The Soulprint Project

The unconscious life drifts. The conscious life awakens.

The Soulprint Project explores the questions beneath the questions—Who is God? Who am I? Then how shall I live?—through Scripture, contemplation, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, the Enneagram, literature, and the ancient wisdom that continues to reveal something profound about the human condition.

Not because ancient truth changes.

Because sometimes we finally become awake enough to see it.

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Today we celebrate my Dad’s life, and tomorrow we will bury him in the mountains he loved.

The obituary was left to me to write. Two nights ago, I wrestled with it for nearly the entire night. How do you capture 93 years of an extraordinary life in a few paragraphs? How do you write about a man like Dad, his faith, his adventures, his imperfections, his generosity, his love, and the quiet grace with which he lived?

I finally realized you really can’t.

You can only tell a few stories, offer a few glimpses, and hope that somewhere between the words, people can see the man you knew and loved.

So, this is the best I could do:

My Dad - Jim Bruner

Writing an obituary for the Rev. Dr. Jim Bruner is difficult because the facts of his life, remarkable as they are, do not adequately explain the man.

Jim was extraordinarily well traveled, not simply in the places he lived and served, but in the lives he entered along the way. He had a rare ability to extend grace to people others sometimes found difficult to understand or accept. He practiced his faith not merely in words, from a pulpit, for recognition, or as an obligation. He lived it quietly.

He listened. He encouraged. He gave. He prayed. He showed up.

Before Jim was a theologian, pastor, minister, university vice president, or Baptist statesman, he was a friend. His presence had a way of bringing peace to people. His oldest son, Steve, a writer, said that if there were only one word to describe his father, it would be **Grace**.

Grace does not demand recognition. It simply acts. It gives because it has first received.

And that was Jim.

“If You Honor Me, I Will Honor You”

Jim was born in Miami, Florida, and spent his childhood and teenage years living in several places as his family moved, from Cleveland, Ohio, to Greenville, North Carolina, Jacksonville, Florida, and eventually Dothan, Alabama.

He was an athlete and a gifted high school quarterback. Nearly seven decades later, the family was attending a fireworks celebration in Highlands, North Carolina, when Jim happened to meet a family from Greenville. One of the men remembered Jim from the ninth grade and told the family, with remarkable certainty after all those years, that Jim was one of the best quarterbacks they had ever had.

That was Jim’s life. People remembered him.

At 17, Jim committed his life to Christ. At 19, he felt God’s call into the ministry. At 20, he married the love of his young life, **Ann**, beginning a marriage that would last 61 years.

Jim enrolled at Samford University with a plan that Ann would work while he attended school. Life quickly changed that plan when Ann became pregnant during their first year and their first son, Steve, was born.

So Jim did what Jim would do throughout his life: he went to work.

He attended classes, worked approximately 40+ hours a week, and preached in rural churches on weekends.

Years later, someone asked Jim whether he had ever actually heard the voice of God.

He remembered one particular Sunday night. He was exhausted after another long week of school, work, and preaching. Without a car, he had hitchhiked back toward Birmingham, at one point catching a ride in an 18-wheeler. Walking the final stretch home, tired and discouraged, he cried out to God:

” I’m not sure this preaching thing is for me.”*

Jim said the answer came simply:

**“Jim, if you honor Me, I will honor you.”**

In many ways, those few words became the story of his life.

**Jim honored God, and God honored Jim.**

A Life of Ministry

Jim graduated from **Samford University** and continued his theological education at **The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary** in Louisville, Kentucky. While attending seminary, he pastored a church in Indiana. By then, Jim and Ann were raising three children, Steve, Phil, and Sheryl.

Following seminary, Jim was called to serve **First Baptist Church of Shellman, Georgia**. His ministry would subsequently take him to **Britt David Baptist Church in Columbus, Georgia**, and then to **Briggs Memorial Baptist Church in Bethesda, Maryland**, only a few miles from the White House.

His years in the Washington area placed him in an unusual ministry setting. Jim spent time with judges, senators, members of Congress, government officials, and others whose public positions often concealed the same private struggles that everyone else carried.

Jim listened to them. He prayed with them. He became involved in their lives.

His family was privileged to attend significant national events, including presidential inaugurations and Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery. Yet proximity to power never seemed to impress Jim nearly as much as proximity to people.

Eventually, Jim was called to **Highland Hills Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia**, where he served as pastor for 17 years and became deeply woven into the life of the Macon community.

In his early 50s, Jim entered a new chapter of ministry through higher education. He joined Mercer’s administration, serving as a vice president and special assistant to the president. He became a vital member of the university’s executive leadership and played an especially important role in Mercer’s relationships with Baptists and the broader religious community. He also served as a Mercer Trustee.

His longtime friend and colleague, former Mercer President and Chancellor **Dr. R. Kirby Godsey**, will deliver the eulogy at Jim’s funeral.

Throughout his life, Jim was a Baptist statesman and pastor at heart. He was sometimes described as a **“preacher’s preacher”** and a **“man’s man.”** Both descriptions fit, but neither quite captures him.

He was a man who genuinely liked people.

Ann and Carolyn

For 61 years, Jim shared his life with his beloved wife, **Ann Bruner**. Together they raised their three children and built the family that would become one of the great joys of Jim’s life.

Ann died in 2014 following a courageous five-year battle with cancer. Her life, their marriage, and the family they created together remained an inseparable part of Jim’s story.

In 2018, Jim found companionship and love again when he married **Carolyn Townsend McAfee Bruner**, a longtime Mercer University trustee whose family name is carried by Mercer’s Townsend School of Music.

Carolyn shared the final chapter of Jim’s extraordinary journey, and together they continued a life deeply connected to Mercer, faith, family, and friends.

The Killing Preacher

For all the titles Jim accumulated during his life, one of his more colorful ones had nothing to do with theology or higher education.

Jim loved quail and dove hunting and was an exceptional shot.

At dove shoots, his ability eventually earned him the nickname **“the killing preacher.”** He was so good that the standing joke was that Jim could practically shoot the limit for everybody.

It is an image his family and friends will remember fondly: the distinguished pastor, theologian, university vice president, and Baptist statesman standing in a dove field with a shotgun, and taking the competition entirely too seriously. He taught his sons to never kill anything they would not eat.

Jim knew that a faithful life could also be a joyful one.

His Family

Jim is survived by his wife, **Carolyn Bruner**.

He was preceded in death by his beloved wife of 61 years, **Ann Bruner**, with whom he raised their three children and built the family that became one of the defining blessings of his life.

He is survived by his son **Steve Bruner and his wife, Sherry**, and their children, **Stephen Bruner and his wife, Sarah**, and their five children, **Brooks, Reese, Truitt, Winnie, and Cherish Bruner**; and **Shelli Morrow and her husband, Mike**, and their children, **Graham, Ellie, and Harper Kate Morrow**.

He is also survived by his son **Dr. Phil Bruner and his wife, Amy**, and their daughters, **Kiki Bruner** and **Michelle Gray and her husband, Rev. Jonathan Gray**, and their children, **Brayden, Karis, and Kasen Gray**.

He is further survived by his daughter, **Sheryl Shepard**, and her sons, **Mitch Shepard**, and his daughter, **Adison Shepard**; and **Ben Shepard and his wife, Amanda**, and their children, **Remi Tharpe and Skylar Shepard**.

Jim’s family also grew through his marriage to Carolyn. He is survived by his stepson, **Tom McAfee and his wife, Julie**, and their children, **Zoe and Malin McAfee**.

The family that grew around Jim—his children, stepchildren, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—was an enduring source of pride and one of the great joys of his extraordinary life.

A Life of Travel and Discovery

Jim’s curiosity about people and the world extended far beyond the places where he lived and served. He loved history, and travel became another way for him to experience the people, places, and stories he had spent a lifetime studying. Jim and Ann led groups on numerous journeys throughout Europe and Asia and on trips that literally took them around the world. For them, travel was never simply about seeing another place; it was about understanding its history, culture, faith, and people.

After marrying Carolyn in 2018, Jim’s love of travel continued. During their eight years together, Jim and Carolyn traveled extensively, including trips to Europe, Alaska, and multiple riverboat cruises primarily in Europe, and enjoyed spending their winters at Carolyn’s condominium in Hawaii. Even well into his later years, Jim remained curious about the world, eager to experience another place, learn another story, and enjoy the remarkable life he had been given.

A Life of Grace

Jim often reminded his children that what we invest in other people does not always come back to us in the ways we expect. God’s ways, he would say, are not our ways, and learning the difference makes all the difference.

Perhaps that is why his life cannot finally be measured by churches served, sermons preached, degrees earned, university positions held, important people known, or titles placed before or after his name.

The measure of Jim Bruner’s life is found in people.

People he encouraged.

People he prayed with.

People he forgave.

People he listened to.

People he helped when nobody else knew he was helping.

People who walked away from an encounter with him feeling a little more hopeful, a little more valued, and perhaps a little closer to God.

Jim did not merely preach what he believed.

**He lived it.**

At 93, near the end of his life, Jim told his family something that now seems like the fitting conclusion to his story:

**“I have lived an extraordinary life, and I am ready to meet the Lord.”**

He had.

And he was.

Nearly three-quarters of a century earlier, an exhausted young preacher walking home after hitchhiking from another Sunday of preaching believed he heard God say:

**“Jim, if you honor Me, I will honor you.”**

Jim spent the rest of his life doing just that.

And perhaps the greatest evidence that God honored Jim is not found in everything Jim accomplished, but in the extraordinary number of people who are better because he lived.

**He will be deeply loved, profoundly missed, and long remembered.**

Contemplation was never meant to help us escape life. It was meant to return us to life awake.

I get it.

There is something wonderfully romantic about seeing an ancient monastery in the distance, tucked into the side of a mountain, almost disappearing into the mist.

Stone walls. Bells marking the hours. Monks walking quietly through cloisters worn smooth by centuries of footsteps. Prayer before dawn. Work with the hands. Bread. Gardens. Books. Silence.

Part of me looks at that and thinks:

Now that would be the life.

And perhaps that tells us something important about the enduring appeal of contemplation.

Historically, monasteries became some of Christianity’s great laboratories of the interior life. Men and women withdrew from the noise of civilization to pray, work, study, listen, and seek God in silence.

There is something extraordinarily beautiful about that.

But there is also a temptation hidden in the mist.

Because when family relationships become complicated, work becomes overwhelming, money becomes tight, someone we love becomes sick, a marriage struggles, our plans fall apart, or death suddenly enters the room, the monastery on the distant hillside begins to look especially attractive.

Sometimes it seems easier to escape life than engage it.

And engagement can take everything we have.

Thomas Merton, one of the great contemplatives of the twentieth century, understood the danger of imagining contemplation as withdrawal from humanity. He wrote:

“Love is our true destiny.”

Not escape.

Not isolation.

Love.

And love, unfortunately for those of us who would occasionally prefer the monastery, requires other people.

Then I Look at Jesus

Whenever I become confused about Christianity, I find myself returning to Jesus.

What did he actually do?

Jesus certainly withdrew.

Again and again.

Luke tells us:

“Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.”
— Luke 5:16

Mark tells us:

“Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.”
— Mark 1:35

Before choosing the twelve apostles:

“Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God.”
— Luke 6:12

Jesus had his mountaintop experiences.

Silence was not an occasional spiritual luxury for him.

It appears to have been a way of life.

But here is what interests me.

Jesus always came back down the mountain.

He returned to people.

To sickness.

To arguments.

To children.

To religious controversy.

To hungry crowds.

To grieving families.

To prostitutes and tax collectors.

To Pharisees.

To friends who disappointed him.

To disciples who misunderstood him.

To people who wanted something from him.

To people who rejected him.

Jesus got his fingernails dirty with the human condition.

Eventually, he returned to Jerusalem knowing exactly what awaited him.

Jesus withdrew into silence, but he never used silence to escape life.

He used silence to prepare himself to enter life more completely.

That distinction may be the difference between contemplation and escapism.

Jesus Engaged

We sometimes turn Jesus into such a serene religious figure that we forget how thoroughly engaged he was with the messiness of human existence.

Jesus attended weddings.

He ate dinner with people considered morally questionable.

He touched lepers.

He spoke with women society ignored.

He welcomed children when his own disciples wanted them removed.

He cried at the grave of his friend Lazarus.

He fed hungry people.

He restored dignity to people whose dignity had been taken from them.

He debated theologians.

He confronted political and religious power.

He overturned tables.

He forgave sinners.

He challenged the wealthy.

He defended the vulnerable.

He washed feet.

He told stories.

He asked questions.

He listened.

And he repeatedly confronted religious leaders whose traditions had become more important than the human beings those traditions were supposed to serve.

That should make all religious people, including me, a little uncomfortable.

Jesus said:

“You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”
— Mark 7:8

That is a frightening sentence.

Because religious traditions can become so familiar that we stop recognizing them as traditions.

They simply become:

the way God wants things done.

And once that happens, we can spend enormous amounts of energy defending things Jesus never asked us to defend.

I Learned Something About This in a New Members Class

For years, I led a new members class at a dynamic, growing church.

The class lasted four weeks.

And something beautiful almost always happened.

People bonded.

Not because everyone believed the same thing.

Not because everyone came from the same background.

Not because everyone understood Scripture the same way.

We bonded because we talked about things that actually mattered.

We told our stories.

Where did you come from?

What has happened to you?

Where is your faith?

Where have you struggled?

What brought you here?

What are you searching for?

What has God done in your life?

Suddenly, people who had been strangers were no longer strangers.

Their stories had made them human to one another.

C. S. Lewis wrote:

“Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: What! You too?”

That is exactly what happened.

You too?

You struggled?

You doubted?

You lost someone?

Did you make mistakes?

You have questions?

Are you trying to figure this out, too?

There is something sacred about discovering that another human being carries many of the same questions we carry.

For a few weeks, we stopped being categorized and became people.

And then inevitably we would get to music.

And Then We Started Talking About the Organ

This was almost always where trouble appeared.

Some wanted traditional hymns.

Others wanted contemporary praise music.

Some were convinced that a church simply wasn’t a church without an organ.

Others thought the piano was too informal.

And, listening to some of the conversations, you could almost imagine Moses descending from Mount Sinai carrying stone tablets engraved with instructions for pipe organs and hymnals.

Of course, none of that is in the Bible.

And there is something wonderfully ironic about how quickly yesterday’s innovation becomes today’s sacred tradition.

The point isn’t whether hymns are better than contemporary music.

I love many of the old hymns. I grew up with them. They are part of my spiritual DNA.

The point is how easily the small things become the big things.

We had just spent weeks talking about grace, forgiveness, suffering, family, doubt, redemption, Jesus, and the mystery of God.

We had shared our lives.

And suddenly we were capable of becoming divided over musical instruments.

I sometimes wonder how often Christianity still does this.

Jesus said:

“You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”
— Matthew 23:24

That may be one of the most humorous and devastating things Jesus ever said.

We are remarkably talented at gnats.

Culturally Curated Christianity

Every generation inherits a version of Christianity.

Some of it is beautiful.

Some of it is ancient wisdom handed faithfully from one generation to another.

Some of it is simply cultural; we learn to wear religious clothing.

And distinguishing between the two requires discernment.

Søren Kierkegaard spent much of his life attacking what he saw as comfortable cultural Christianity. He believed Christianity had become something people inherited rather than something they actually lived.

He wrote:

“Christ did not appoint professors, but followers.”

That sentence still stings. Kiergegaard of all people, was pure genius at every level.

Because it is possible to know a great deal about Christianity without actually following Christ.

It is possible to defend Jesus without becoming like Jesus.

It is possible to memorize Scripture while ignoring the person standing directly in front of us.

It is possible to worship the Prince of Peace while enjoying conflict.

It is possible to preach grace while withholding it.

It is possible to sing about love while refusing to love someone who thinks differently from us.

Paul understood the danger:

“Knowledge puffs up while love builds up.”
— 1 Corinthians 8:1

And then, of course:

“If I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”
— 1 Corinthians 13:2

Nothing.

That is an astonishing word.

Not less spiritual.

Not slightly misguided.

Nothing.

The Monastery Is Not the Destination

This is where contemplation becomes essential.

Because contemplation keeps bringing us back to the center.

Silence removes many of the places we hide.

In silence, there is no audience to impress.

No argument to win.

No social media post to answer.

No reputation to manage.

No sermon to give.

No theological position to defend.

Eventually, there is simply:

you, God, and reality.

The Psalmist says:

“Be still, and know that I am God.”
— Psalm 46:10

Elijah discovered God not in the wind, earthquake, or fire, but in what Scripture describes as:

“a gentle whisper.”
— 1 Kings 19:12

Pascal famously observed:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

That may be an exaggeration.

But not by much.

Because silence eventually introduces us to the person we spend much of our lives avoiding.

Ourselves.

Carl Jung wrote:

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Contemplation turns us inward, not so that we remain inward, but so that we can return outward awake.

That is the pattern I see in Jesus.

Withdraw.
Listen.
Return.
Engage.
Love.
Withdraw again.

Silence and engagement.

Contemplation and action.

Mountain and marketplace.

The Great Temptation of Spirituality

The temptation is to use spirituality to avoid reality.

Sometimes we can even use God to avoid God.

We read another book.

Attend another conference.

Listen to another sermon.

Study another theological question.

Learn another spiritual practice.

Go on another retreat.

And all of those things can be wonderful.

But eventually, Jesus brings us back down the mountain.

There is still someone we need to forgive.

There is still an apology we need to make.

There is still a lonely person who needs companionship.

There is still injustice that requires courage.

There is still a marriage that requires patience.

There is still a child who needs our attention.

There is still a neighbor we don’t particularly like.

There is still grief we have not faced.

There is still a truth we don’t want to admit.

There is still someone lying beside the road.

And Jesus asks the same uncomfortable question he asked through the story of the Good Samaritan:

Will you stop?

The priest had religion.

The Levite had religion.

The Samaritan engaged.

Jesus concluded:

“Go and do likewise.”
— Luke 10:37

Not:

Go and think likewise.

Do.

That is praxis.

Contemplation Without Love Is Just Another Form of Ego

The contemplative life can become another identity.

I meditate.

I understand mysticism.

I read Merton.

I practice silence.

I have transcended all those noisy religious people.

And suddenly, the ego has simply put on a monk’s robe.

Thomas à Kempis warned centuries ago:

“At the Day of Judgment we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done.”

The test of contemplation is not how peaceful I feel while sitting alone.

The test is who I become when someone interrupts my peace.

Can I remain present?

Can I listen?

Can I forgive?

Can I see?

Can I love?

Because Jesus gave us an extraordinarily simple measure:

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
— John 13:35

Not our music.

Not our buildings.

Not our denominations.

Not our politics.

Not our theological sophistication.

Not our ability to win arguments.

Love.

Presence

Perhaps this is what we are actually seeking when the monastery in the mist captures our imagination.

Not escape.

Presence.

We were created for Presence.

Presence with God.

Presence with ourselves.

Presence with creation.

Presence with one another.

The tragedy is that we spend so much of our lives somewhere else.

We are physically here, but mentally yesterday or tomorrow.

Replaying.

Planning.

Regretting.

Worrying.

Defending.

Imagining.

Judging.

Jesus keeps returning us to now.

“Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”
— Matthew 6:34

The kingdom of God is not merely somewhere we go when we die.

Jesus said:

“The kingdom of God is in your midst.”
— Luke 17:21

Here.

Now.

This person.

This moment.

This breath.

This conversation.

This opportunity to love.

The Soulprint Rhythm

Perhaps the monastery still has something essential to teach us.

But we don’t all need to move into one.

We need to discover its rhythm.

Silence and engagement.
Solitude and community.
Contemplation and action.
Withdrawal and return.
Being and doing.

Jesus went to the mountain.

And Jesus came back down.

Maybe that is the rhythm.

Go into silence long enough to remember who you are.

Sit before God long enough for the masks to become uncomfortable.

Listen long enough to distinguish God’s whisper from the noise of your own ego.

Become still enough to recognize the image of God within yourself.

And then—

Come back down the mountain.

People are waiting.

There is work to do.

There are wounds to heal.

There are tables where someone needs a seat.

Some tables need to be overturned.

There are religious assumptions worth questioning.

There are stories worth hearing.

Some enemies somehow must become neighbors.

Some people need mercy.

There is bread to break.

There are feet to wash.

There is a world desperately hungry for people who have spent enough time in silence that they no longer need to make everything about themselves.

Frederick Buechner wrote:

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

I love that.

Because our spiritual journey eventually must meet the world’s hunger.

Otherwise, it remains incomplete.

The monastery is beautiful.

The silence is necessary.

The mountain is sacred.

But Jesus always came back down.

And so must we.

Perhaps the purpose of contemplation was never to escape the world.

Perhaps it is to become quiet enough to hear God whisper:

Now go back into it.

And love.

The Cross Is a Battlefield of Human Souls

Who Is God? Who Am I?

There are two questions beneath nearly every question I have spent my life asking, and as it turns out, they are the same question Saint Francis asks in his prayer life, particularly as he was sick and dying.

Who are You, God?

And:

Who am I?

The older I get, the more convinced I become that almost everything else is commentary.

Theology asks the first question. Psychology asks the second. Philosophy wanders between them. Neuroscience examines the mysterious machinery through which we experience them. The Enneagram exposes the masks we construct while trying to avoid them. Contemplation quiets us long enough to hear them.

And Scripture tells one enormous story in which the two questions finally meet.

They meet at the Cross.

I have often thought of the Cross as the place of forgiveness. And, of course, it is.

But increasingly I see something more.

The Cross is a battlefield.

Not merely a battlefield somewhere between heaven and hell.

It is the battlefield of the human soul.

The Cross reveals the struggle between the person we have constructed and the person God created us to be. Between ego and surrender. Fear and love. domination and communion. Self-preservation and self-giving. The false self desperately trying to survive and the true self discovering that life begins precisely where surrender occurs.

And hanging in the middle of that battlefield is Jesus.

Not simply telling us who God is.

Showing us.

And, astonishingly, showing us who we are meant to become.

The Cross Was Not Just Forgiveness

Christianity sometimes reduces the Cross to a transaction.

Humanity sinned. A debt existed. Christ paid the debt. We are forgiven.

There is profound truth there.

But the New Testament gives us a much larger picture.

Paul writes that at the Cross Christ:

“disarmed the powers and authorities” and “made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

— Colossians 2:15

That is battlefield language.

Something cosmic happened at Calvary.

Something was exposed.

Something was defeated.

Something lost its claim upon humanity.

The Cross did not merely deal with what we had done.

It confronted what had enslaved us.

Paul speaks repeatedly of rulers, authorities, powers, and dominions. Revelation gives those realities dramatic images: dragons, beasts, Babylon, death.

But perhaps we make a mistake when we imagine all these powers as existing only somewhere out there.

Because their fingerprints are also found in here.

Fear.

Pride.

Shame.

Greed.

Resentment.

Violence.

The need to control.

The need to be right.

The need to possess.

The desperate construction of identities designed to convince ourselves and everyone around us that we are enough.

This is why spiritual warfare cannot simply be about demons.

The deepest battlefield may be the human heart.

Who Is God?

Look at Jesus on the Cross.

If Christianity makes its most extraordinary claim, that somehow in Christ we encounter God, then Calvary gives us a startling answer to our first question.

Who are You, God?

God is not the one driving the nails.

God is the one receiving them.

God is not standing above human suffering untouched by it.

God enters it.

God is not responding to violence with greater violence.

Jesus says:

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

— Luke 23:34

Think about that.

Humanity throws everything it possesses at Jesus.

Political power.

Religious power.

Fear.

Betrayal.

Abandonment.

Mockery.

Tribalism.

Violence.

Ego.

Death itself.

And Jesus absorbs it without becoming it.

That may be one of the deepest revelations of God in all of Scripture.

The powers say:

Destroy your enemies.

Jesus says:

Love them.

The powers say:

Protect yourself.

Jesus gives himself.

The powers say:

Dominate.

Jesus serves.

The powers say:

Win.

Jesus surrenders.

And somehow surrender becomes victory.

The Lamb conquers by being the Lamb.

That is the strange mathematics of the Kingdom of God.

The Lamb Who Wins by Losing

Revelation contains dragons, armies, beasts, empires, and cosmic conflict.

Yet at the center of John’s vision stands something completely unexpected:

“Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain.”

— Revelation 5:6

A Lamb.

Not a more terrifying beast.

Not a larger dragon.

Not Caesar with a Christian flag.

A slain Lamb.

The imagery is profoundly important.

God does not defeat the beast by becoming a greater beast.

God defeats the beast by remaining Love.

That changes how I understand spiritual warfare.

The battle is not ultimately about becoming powerful enough to destroy our enemies.

It is about refusing to allow the powers to transform us into their image.

Hatred wants to make us hateful.

Fear wants to make us fearful.

Violence wants to make us violent.

Contempt wants to make us contemptuous.

The ego wants to convince us that our survival depends upon protecting the identity we have constructed.

And Christ stands in the middle of history, saying:

There is another way.

Who Am I?

And suddenly the second question appears.

If the Cross reveals who God is, what does it reveal about me?

Perhaps more than I want to know.

Because before the Cross becomes comforting, it is revealing.

It exposes the human condition.

At Calvary, almost every form of the false self gathers in one place.

Pilate protects his position.

The religious authorities protect their institution.

The crowd protects its tribal certainty.

The soldiers obey the machinery of empire.

Judas acts from whatever mixture of disappointment, ideology, and self-interest drives him.

Peter protects himself.

The disciples disappear.

Everyone is trying, in one form or another, to preserve something.

And Jesus lets go.

That is why Jesus’ earlier words become so unsettling:

“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

— Matthew 16:24

We have sometimes turned “taking up your cross” into enduring inconvenience.

It is much more radical.

Jesus is inviting us onto the battlefield.

The battlefield where the false self dies.

The Ego Does Not Want Resurrection

We love resurrection.

The ego does not mind resurrection either, as long as it can avoid crucifixion.

We want a new life without surrendering the old identity.

We want transformation without relinquishment.

We want Christ to improve the person we have constructed rather than resurrect the person God originally imagined.

But Jesus says:

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”

— Matthew 16:25

There is a paradox.

The self I desperately try to save may be the very self I must surrender to discover who I actually am.

That is the battlefield of the soul.

The Enneagram gives us remarkably useful language for observing some of this. We construct personalities around strategies for obtaining love, security, significance, and control. Those strategies are not necessarily evil. Many began as intelligent ways of navigating the world.

But eventually, the strategy becomes identity.

The mask becomes the face.

We forget who is underneath it.

Then Christ asks the terrifying question:

Who are you without the mask?

Put On Christ

This is why Paul’s description of the armor of God in Ephesians 6 is so fascinating.

We often read it as if Paul were giving Christians supernatural military equipment.

The belt of truth.

The breastplate of righteousness.

The gospel of peace.

The shield of faith.

The helmet of salvation.

The sword of the Spirit.

But look more closely.

These are not merely weapons Christ gives us.

They describe Christ himself.

Christ is truth.

Christ is our righteousness.

Christ is our peace.

Christ is our salvation.

The Word becomes flesh in Christ.

So elsewhere, Paul simply says:

“Clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.”

— Romans 13:14

Perhaps spiritual warfare is far less about becoming obsessed with evil and far more about becoming like Christ.

That is a radically different spirituality.

I don’t defeat darkness by studying darkness endlessly.

I become light.

I don’t overcome hatred by becoming better at fighting hateful people.

I learn love.

I don’t defeat deception merely by identifying everyone else’s lies.

I become truthful.

I don’t defeat the ego by constructing a more impressive spiritual ego.

I surrender it.

I put on Christ.

The Battlefield Continues

The Cross was decisive.

The Resurrection announced that death itself could not hold Christ.

The Ascension was not merely Jesus leaving earth; it was enthronement.

Paul writes that God seated Christ:

“far above all rule and authority, power and dominion.”

— Ephesians 1:21

And Jesus declares:

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

— Matthew 28:18

Yet we look around the world and clearly see that everything has not been restored.

Violence remains.

Greed remains.

War remains.

Exploitation remains.

Fear remains.

Death remains.

And inside me?

The old powers still whisper.

Protect yourself.

Prove yourself.

Defend yourself.

Compare yourself.

Control the outcome.

Make sure people recognize you.

Make sure you win.

Make sure you are right.

And perhaps this is the strange time in which we live.

The victory has been announced, but the battlefield remains.

The enemy has been defeated, yet pockets of resistance remain.

Including within me.

The Cross Stands Inside Us

This is where the Christian story becomes intensely personal.

The Cross is not simply something I believe happened to Jesus two thousand years ago.

Eventually, the Cross becomes something I must allow to happen within me.

Not physically.

Spiritually.

Psychologically.

Existentially.

The identities that no longer serve love must die.

The resentments I protect must die.

The illusions I defend must die.

The compulsions that tell me who I must become so that others will love me must die.

The need to control everything must die.

The carefully constructed false self must eventually hear the words Christ spoke from the Cross:

“It is finished.”

And only then do we begin to understand resurrection.

Christianity is not fundamentally about becoming a slightly improved version of ourselves.

Paul describes something far more dramatic:

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.”

— Galatians 2:20

That is transformation.

Not self-improvement.

Not image management.

Not a religious performance.

Transformation.

The Battlefield Is Love

And here is what I find increasingly profound.

If Christ has already won, then I do not have to live as though everything depends upon my winning.

I can loosen my grip.

I can stop defending every wound.

I can stop needing every person to understand me.

I can stop turning disagreements into threats to my identity.

I can forgive.

I can serve.

I can listen.

I can tell the truth.

I can become vulnerable.

I can love without controlling the outcome.

Because the Kingdom does not advance through the ego’s weapons.

The Lamb conquers differently.

Revelation says:

“They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony.”

— Revelation 12:11

The Cross tells us something extraordinary:

Love is not God’s alternative to power.

Love is God’s power.

Who Are You, God?

Perhaps that is why these two questions refuse to leave me.

Who are You, God?

Look at the Cross.

Self-giving Love.

Truth without coercion.

Power without domination.

Justice without hatred.

Mercy without denial.

A God willing to enter suffering rather than remain safely removed from it.

And then:

Who am I?

That question cannot be answered merely by looking into a mirror.

I must look at Christ.

Because Christianity makes the breathtaking claim that humanity was created in the Imago Dei, the image of God.

And if Christ reveals God, then Christ also reveals something about what fully restored humanity looks like.

This is why the Cross is both revelation and invitation.

It says:

This is who God is.

And then Christ whispers:

Follow me.

The Soulprint Beneath the Armor

This is ultimately what I mean when I speak of the Soulprint.

Beneath everything culture told you to become…

beneath everything, fear forced you to construct…

beneath your accomplishments and failures…

beneath personality…

beneath reputation…

beneath shame…

beneath the ego’s endless project of proving that you deserve to exist…

There remains something sacred.

The person God imagined.

The image that has been obscured but never completely erased.

The Soulprint.

And perhaps the Christian journey is not primarily about constructing a religious identity.

Perhaps it is about allowing Christ to dismantle everything false until what remains increasingly resembles the image in which we were created.

Paul calls it transformation:

“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

— Romans 12:2

And elsewhere:

“We all… are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.”

— 2 Corinthians 3:18

There it is.

The destination of the battlefield.

Image restored.

The Cross Between Two Questions

So I return again to the questions.

Who are You, God?

Who am I?

And between those questions stands a Cross.

A battlefield.

A revelation.

A mirror.

A doorway.

At the Cross, the powers of domination confront the power of love.

The false self confronts the true self.

Fear confronts trust.

Control confronts surrender.

Death confronts Life.

And the Lamb wins.

Not by becoming the dragon.

But by remaining the Lamb.

Perhaps that is the deepest spiritual warfare of all.

Not defeating everyone who stands against us.

Not obsessing over invisible enemies.

Not becoming warriors intoxicated with warfare.

But becoming people so deeply rooted in Christ that the powers can no longer tell us who we are.

Then the ancient questions begin to answer one another.

Who is God?

Look at Christ.

Who am I?

Look at Christ again.

And somewhere between those two gazes, the false self begins to loosen its grip, the image beneath it begins to emerge, and we slowly become what we were created to be.

The battlefield becomes a birthplace.

The Cross becomes resurrection.

And the soul begins to remember its name.

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Life Is an Art Project in the Making

The Art of Learning to Live Perfectly Imperfect Lives

There are certain things we say before we understand what we have said.

Sometimes we write them.

Sometimes we pray them.

Sometimes they arrive as an intuition, a phrase, a sentence that seems almost obvious at the time, only to return years later carrying an entirely different weight.

I think wisdom often works this way.

We imagine we have discovered an idea.

Years later, we realize the idea was waiting for us to become capable of understanding it.

That happened to me with a phrase I wrote years ago.

When I wrote my first book, The Beatitude Code, I gave it a subtitle:

The Art of Learning to Live Perfectly Imperfect Lives.

I liked it.

It sounded right.

It captured something I was trying to say.

And since then, I have placed essentially the same words beneath hundreds of writings.

But I am beginning to suspect that when I first wrote them, I didn’t understand how profound they were.

Perhaps I couldn’t.

Because I had not yet lived enough of the life necessary to understand my own sentence.

Now I see something in those words that I missed before.

Life is art.

Not metaphorically.

Not sentimentally.

Life itself is an art form.

And every one of us is standing before an unfinished canvas.

The Artist Doesn’t Completely Understand the Painting

I have dedicated these later years of my life to writing.

And the longer I write, the less I feel that wisdom belongs to me.

That is a strange confession for a writer.

We put our names on books.

Our photographs appear on covers.

We call ourselves authors.

But sometimes I finish writing something and wonder:

Where did that come from?

Certainly some of it came from books I have read.

Some from Scripture.

Some from philosophy.

Some from suffering.

Some from conversations.

Some from mistakes.

Some from people I have loved.

Some from people who have wounded me.

Some from sitting silently long enough for the noise inside me to become quiet.

But every once in a while something else happens.

A sentence arrives.

An insight appears.

Two ideas that have lived separately in my mind for decades suddenly find each other.

And I know enough about myself to know:

I am not wise enough to have invented all of this.

I have received far more wisdom than I deserve.

Perhaps every artist eventually discovers this.

The artist thinks he is creating the art until, somewhere in the process, he realizes the art is creating him.

And perhaps that is what has been happening to me.

Life Is Not a Ledger

We have been taught to think about life as though it were a ledger.

This begins almost immediately.

Grades.

Achievements.

Degrees.

Income.

Promotions.

Square footage.

Investments.

Followers.

Possessions.

Successes.

Failures.

Wins.

Losses.

Even relationships can become transactions.

I did this for you.

What have you done for me?

I gave this much.

You gave that much.

I deserved more.

The ego loves ledgers.

Because a ledger gives the illusion of control.

Numbers can be counted.

Possessions can be inventoried.

Achievements can be displayed.

Debts can be remembered.

Offenses can be recorded.

The ego says:

Keep score.

Because if I can keep score, perhaps I can make certain I am safe.

But the soul wants something entirely different.

The soul wants to soar.

The soul does not ask merely:

How much do I have?

It asks:

Who am I becoming?

That is an entirely different question.

And perhaps that is why Jesus continually frustrated people who wanted religion to function like accounting.

How many times must I forgive?

Who exactly is my neighbor?

What must I do to inherit eternal life?

Who sinned, this man or his parents?

Who is greatest in the kingdom?

Give us the rule.

Give us the number.

Give us the ledger.

Jesus keeps answering with stories.

A Samaritan.

A vineyard.

A pearl.

A seed.

A lost sheep.

A woman searching for a coin.

A father running toward a rebellious son.

Birds.

Lilies.

Bread.

Wine.

Jesus taught like an artist because the Kingdom of God cannot be reduced to an equation.

Perfectly Imperfect

And that brings me back to those words:

The Art of Learning to Live Perfectly Imperfect Lives.

For years I probably placed too much emphasis on the word perfectly.

Now I find myself fascinated by imperfectly.

Because perhaps the perfection is not found in producing a flawless life.

Perhaps the perfection is found in faithfully creating with the imperfect materials we have been given.

A great painter does not curse the canvas because it isn’t already a masterpiece.

He paints.

A sculptor does not reject the stone because it does not yet resemble David.

He removes what does not belong.

A writer does not stare at a blank page demanding that the first sentence be perfect.

He writes.

Then erases.

Then rewrites.

Then discovers that the sentence he originally loved was the sentence that needed to disappear.

Why would life be different?

We are works in progress.

There are erasures all over my canvas.

There are colors I wish I had never used.

There are entire sections I would paint differently if given another opportunity.

There are people I wish I had understood better.

Things I wish I had said.

Things I desperately wish I had not said.

Decisions I would change.

Moments I would relive.

Expectations I once thought were reasonable that I now recognize were inventions of my ego.

But here is the mystery:

God has not thrown away the canvas.

What Art Does With Suffering

Great art does something strange.

It takes what we cannot explain and gives it form.

Grief becomes music.

Loneliness becomes poetry.

Confusion becomes a novel.

Longing becomes a painting.

Suffering becomes prayer.

The artist takes something invisible and plants it in the visible world.

An image.

A sentence.

A melody.

A face.

A story.

Something deep inside us recognizes it and says:

Yes. That.

That is what I have been feeling.

I simply didn’t have words for it.

Isn’t life much the same?

We encounter tragedy.

Frustration.

Disappointment.

Illness.

Broken relationships.

Betrayal.

False expectations.

Aging.

Death.

And sooner or later the question arrives:

What am I supposed to do with this?

The ledger cannot answer.

The ledger can only tell us what was lost.

Art asks another question:

What can be made from what remains?

That may be one of the deepest spiritual questions we ever ask.

Cast Your Bread

Recently, watching my father suffer the indignities that accompany illness and aging, I found myself returning again and again to Ecclesiastes:

“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.”

The logic of the ledger says this is foolish.

Bread is valuable.

Keep it.

Protect it.

Store it.

But Scripture says:

Cast it.

Give it away.

Trust the water.

Trust the current.

Trust God.

And as I have looked back over my father’s life, I have begun seeing bread everywhere.

People he helped.

People he encouraged.

People he believed in.

People who remember some kindness he probably forgot.

Ripples moving outward from acts whose consequences he could never have calculated.

That is not accounting.

That is art.

A human life scattered across other human lives.

And perhaps the most beautiful lives are not those that accumulate the most but those that leave the most beautiful ripples behind.

God Is an Artist

The first image Scripture gives us of God is not God as accountant.

Not God as theologian.

Not even God as judge.

It is God as Creator.

“In the beginning God created…”

Light.

Darkness.

Water.

Sky.

Land.

Trees.

Seeds.

Stars.

Creatures.

Human beings.

Then Scripture makes the extraordinary claim that humanity is created in God’s image.

Imago Dei.

What if part of bearing the image of the Creator means that we too are called to create?

Not merely paintings or books or music.

But lives.

Relationships.

Families.

Communities.

Mercy.

Justice.

Beauty.

Meaning.

We are handed the raw materials of existence and invited to make something from them.

And the materials are rarely what we would have chosen.

There is the difficulty.

No artist chooses every pigment.

No sculptor chooses every flaw in the stone.

And none of us chooses everything that enters our lives.

Some colors arrive uninvited.

Grief.

Disease.

Failure.

Rejection.

Aging.

Loneliness.

Disappointment.

But the spiritual question is not merely:

Why did this happen?

Sometimes there is no satisfying answer.

The deeper question becomes:

What will I create with what I have been given?

The Masterpiece Is Not Perfection

This changes what transformation means.

Transformation is not becoming someone else.

It is becoming increasingly who God imagined when God imagined you.

That distinction lies at the heart of everything I have been trying to say through The Soulprint Project.

We spend enormous portions of our lives constructing identities.

Culture hands us brushes.

Family chooses colors.

Fear adds shadows.

Success paints over insecurity.

Failure paints over confidence.

Trauma leaves marks.

Religion sometimes adds layers that God never asked us to paint.

The ego keeps working furiously because the ego believes:

If I can make the painting impressive enough, perhaps I will finally be enough.

Then awakening begins.

And awakening is often less about adding something than removing something.

The false colors.

The borrowed identities.

The expectations.

The masks.

The stories we have mistaken for ourselves.

Like Michelangelo seeing the figure already hidden inside the marble, spiritual transformation becomes an excavation.

Remove what is not you.

And somewhere beneath everything the world has painted onto you waits the image God planted there from the beginning.

Your Soulprint.

Two Questions

This is why I continually return to St. Francis of Assisi.

Brother Leo reportedly overheard Francis praying through the night, returning to two questions:

Who are You, my God?

And who am I?

I increasingly believe almost everything else is commentary.

Who are You?

Who am I?

Scripture wrestles with those questions.

Philosophy wrestles with them.

Psychology wrestles with them.

Contemplation sits silently before them.

Neuroscience shows us something about the astonishing instrument through which we experience them.

Literature dramatizes them.

Art gives them shape.

And Jesus embodies their answer.

Who are You, God?

Look at Christ.

Who am I?

Look again.

Because somehow the closer we move toward God, the more clearly we begin seeing ourselves.

Not the inflated self.

Not the ashamed self.

Not the curated self.

Not the frightened self desperately keeping the ledger.

But the self beneath the self.

The person created in the image of God.

The Soul Wants to Soar

Maybe this is awakening.

We stop treating life like a problem to be solved and begin experiencing it as something to be created.

We loosen our grip on the ledger.

We stop insisting that everything balance.

We forgive debts that can never be repaid.

We cast bread upon waters whose currents we cannot control.

We create beauty in places where ugliness would be easier.

We love people who cannot always love us properly.

We accept that some chapters will never make complete sense.

We allow suffering to deepen rather than merely embitter us.

We keep painting.

Keep writing.

Keep forgiving.

Keep becoming.

And slowly something begins emerging on the canvas.

Not perfection.

Something better.

Truth.

A perfectly imperfect human life.

The Soulprint Project

I am beginning to understand The Soulprint Project differently because of this.

It is not merely a collection of books.

It is not a website.

It is not an Enneagram program.

It is not my writing.

It is not a theological system.

It is not something I have completed.

The Soulprint Project is itself art in the making.

Perhaps that is why I have struggled at times to define it.

Artists often cannot explain the painting while they are still painting it.

I am following something.

Exploring something.

Excavating something.

Scripture.

The Beatitudes.

The Enneagram.

Psychology.

Neuroscience.

Philosophy.

Literature.

Contemplation.

Suffering.

Love.

Loss.

Grace.

They are colors on the same palette.

And underneath all of them are Francis’s two questions:

Who are You, my God?

Who am I?

At this stage of my life, I have fewer answers than I once thought I had.

Strangely, that does not frighten me nearly as much as it once would have.

Mystery has become less threatening.

Wonder has become more important.

Awe has become a kind of knowledge.

I am learning that faith does not mean possessing all the answers.

Sometimes faith simply means continuing to paint when you cannot yet see the finished picture.

Continuing to write when you do not know the final sentence.

Continuing to cast bread when you cannot see where the current will carry it.

Continuing to love when the ledger says you are losing.

Because perhaps God never asked us to balance the books.

Perhaps He asked us to make something beautiful with the life we were given.

So paint.

Write.

Love.

Forgive.

Create.

Cast your bread.

Make mistakes.

Learn.

Awaken.

Become.

And leave some unfinished edges for grace.

Because your life is not a ledger waiting to be balanced.

Your life is an art project in the making.

And perhaps the masterpiece is not the life in which everything finally became perfect.

Perhaps the masterpiece is the person who finally discovered who God created them to be…

And dared to become it.

Perfectly imperfect.

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Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters

On my father, the indignity of suffering, and the strange arithmetic of God

“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.”
— Ecclesiastes 11:1

There are things about growing old that no young man can understand.

There are things about suffering that no healthy man can understand.

And there are things about watching your father suffer that no son can understand until he finds himself standing beside the bed.

My father has always been what an earlier generation would simply have called a man’s man.

Proud, independent, accomplished, strong-willed. A man accustomed to standing on his own two feet, making his own decisions, solving his own problems, and carrying his own burdens without asking the world to feel sorry for him.

And then sickness comes.

Sickness has no respect for the mythology we construct around ourselves.

It does not ask about your accomplishments.

It does not care what degrees hang on your wall, how much money is in your account, what position you once held, how many people respected you, or how fiercely independent you have been.

The body begins making demands.

And suddenly a proud man must allow strangers to do things for him that, not so many months or years before, would have been unimaginable.

Clothes disappear.

Privacy disappears.

Control disappears.

Someone measures this.

Someone records that.

Someone asks when you last went to the bathroom.

Someone decides whether you are strong enough to stand.

Someone else decides whether you qualify for another few days of care.

The great mysteries of a human life are somehow reduced to charts, medications, oxygen levels, insurance codes, reimbursement rules, therapy minutes, and somebody clicking boxes on a computer screen.

And standing there as a son, watching it happen to your father, something inside you wants to scream:

Is this really the best we can do?

Where are all the geniuses?

Where are all the brilliant people who built rockets, mapped the genome, created artificial intelligence, split atoms, transplanted hearts, and placed telescopes in space capable of looking billions of years into the past?

How can humanity be so astonishingly intelligent and yet sometimes seem so terribly confused about what to do with a fragile old man lying in a bed?

Perhaps Dostoevsky understood something we would rather not admit: civilization can become extraordinarily sophisticated without necessarily becoming wise.

We can learn how to extend life without ever answering the question of what makes a life worth living.

And suffering has a terrible way of exposing the difference.

The Strange Arithmetic of God

As I have watched my father, however, another thought keeps returning to me.

It comes from Ecclesiastes:

“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.”

What a ridiculous sentence.

Think about it literally.

Take something valuable, your bread, your sustenance, perhaps the very thing you need to survive, and throw it into the water.

What happens?

It becomes soaked.

It dissolves.

Fish eat it.

The current carries it away.

By every ordinary calculation, it is gone.

A man concerned only with keeping accounts would never do such a thing.

He would clutch the bread.

Protect the bread.

Store the bread.

Count the bread.

Insure the bread.

Invest the bread.

He would construct barns to hold the bread and perhaps larger barns when those became insufficient.

Jesus once told a story about such a man.

His crops had produced abundantly, so the man said to himself:

“I will pull down my barns, and build greater.”

Then he congratulated himself.

Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years.

And God answered:

“Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee.”

There is the arithmetic of the world.

And there is the arithmetic of God.

They are not the same mathematics.

The world says:

Keep.

God says:

Give.

The world says:

Accumulate.

God says:

Scatter.

The world says:

Protect yourself.

God says:

Love your neighbor.

The world says:

What will I get in return?

God says:

Cast your bread upon the waters.

And perhaps the greatest tragedy is that we can spend an entire lifetime balancing the wrong ledger.

My Father Cast His Bread

Looking back over my father’s life, I realize that this may be one of the best ways I know to describe him.

He cast his bread upon the waters.

Not perfectly.

I want to be very clear about that.

I am not canonizing my father.

He is a man.

He has faults.

He has made mistakes.

He has probably hurt people without intending to hurt them, misunderstood people, made poor decisions, and carried the contradictions that all of us carry.

There has only been one perfect life.

But perhaps holiness was never about becoming flawless.

Perhaps it is about something much deeper.

Perhaps holiness begins when a human being gradually yields himself to a reality greater than himself.

Some people do that.

I have known them.

You probably have too.

They are difficult to explain because they don’t necessarily look extraordinary.

They may never become famous.

Their names may never appear in history books.

But something about them seems to create ripples.

They encourage someone.

They educate someone.

They forgive someone.

They give someone another chance.

They trust a person everyone else has written off.

They quietly pay for something.

They introduce two people whose meeting changes both their lives.

They sit beside a hospital bed.

They give advice that isn’t remembered until twenty years later.

They love a child who grows up and loves another child.

They cast their bread.

And then they forget where they threw it.

That may be the secret.

Because the person who keeps looking downstream to see whether his bread has returned has not completely given it away.

The People Who Live by Another Measure

There are people who spend their lives inside the endless chatter of calculation.

What do I have?

What do you have?

What do I deserve?

What am I owed?

Who received more?

Who received less?

What does this cost me?

What will I get back?

Their internal books must always balance.

I understand this way of living because there is some of it in every one of us.

Fear keeps excellent records.

Ego is an obsessive accountant.

But occasionally you encounter another kind of human being.

They seem to have discovered another economy altogether.

Grace.

They give when giving makes little sense.

They trust when trust carries risk.

They forgive when resentment would be understandable.

They see possibilities in people others have already dismissed.

They somehow understand that the deepest things in life cannot be placed on a balance sheet.

Love cannot.

Mercy cannot.

Courage cannot.

Faithfulness cannot.

Beauty cannot.

Friendship cannot.

Grace cannot.

The soul cannot.

And God certainly cannot.

These people live what I can only call transcendent lives.

Not because they escape ordinary life.

Quite the opposite.

They enter it more deeply.

They discover something about who God created them to be, and slowly, often painfully, they become that person.

That is Soulprint.

And when it happens, even imperfectly, there is a glory about a human life that cannot be measured by anything this world possesses.

God’s People Have Always Looked Slightly Insane

Read Scripture carefully, and you discover that God seems strangely fond of people who make very poor sense on paper.

Abraham was seventy-five when God told him:

“Get yourself and your family out of thy country… unto a land that I will show you.”

Leave everything familiar.

Go somewhere I will show you later.

That is not a business plan.

That is faith.

Moses spent decades in the wilderness tending sheep after his life in Pharaoh’s world had collapsed.

Forty years.

Imagine the conversations Moses must have had with himself.

This is what became of me?

This is my life?

Sheep?

And then, when Moses was an old man, God appeared in a bush that burned without being consumed.

History changed.

Jacob was a deceiver.

His very name carried the scent of grasping and manipulation.

Then one night he wrestled with God until daybreak.

He walked away wounded.

Limping.

But carrying a new name:

Israel.

And somehow the wound and the blessing came together.

That seems to happen often with God.

Then there is Judah and Tamar.

Read that story sometime without sanitizing it.

It is uncomfortable.

Morally complicated.

Scandalous.

Hardly the genealogy one would invent for the Messiah, our Jesus.

And yet Matthew deliberately includes Tamar when he tells us the genealogy of Jesus.

Think about that.

God did not erase the scandal from the family tree.

He redeemed it.

Which brings us to one of the most important sentences in Scripture:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.” - Isaiah 55:8

We should probably write that over the door of every church.

And perhaps every hospital.

And certainly over the doorway of our own minds.

God’s ways are not our ways.

Francis Asked Two Questions

And somehow, whenever I follow these thoughts far enough, I come back to Francis.

St. Francis of Assisi has long been my patron saint.

Near the end of his life, Francis was no romantic garden statue surrounded by birds.

His body was failing.

He suffered terribly.

His eyesight deteriorated.

He bore wounds.

The man who sang of Brother Sun and Sister Moon eventually had to confront the same terrible mystery awaiting every one of us:

the surrender of the body.

Yet Brother Leo reportedly overheard Francis praying through the night, circling around two astonishingly simple questions:

Who are You, my God?

And:

Who am I?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, facing execution, wrote his famous poem Who Am I, this or another, just days before being hanged, but it ends with: Whoever I am, thou knowest, God; I am thine.

Perhaps those are the only two questions that finally matter.

Not:

How successful was I?

How much did I accumulate?

Did everyone understand me?

Did I win?

Was life fair?

Did I receive everything I deserved?

But:

Who are You, God?

And:

Who am I?

The two questions are inseparable.

Because I cannot finally know myself without knowing the One in whose image I was created.

And perhaps I cannot truly encounter God without eventually confronting the false person I have constructed to survive without Him.

Francis found his answer staring at Christ crucified.

There is something almost unbearable about that.

Because Christianity does not offer us a God safely removed from suffering.

It gives us a naked man hanging on a cross.

Humiliated.

Exposed.

Wounded.

Dependent.

Mocked.

His dignity seemingly stripped away.

And Christianity makes the outrageous claim:

There is God.

Which means that perhaps dignity cannot actually be taken from a human being.

Clothing can be taken.

Strength can be taken.

Independence can be taken.

Health can be taken.

Possessions can be taken.

Memory can be taken.

Eventually life itself can be taken.

But the Imago Dei remains.

The image of God is deeper than the body that carries it.

Watching My Father

And so I stand beside my father differently now.

Yes, I still become angry.

I still question systems.

I still wonder why things that should be simple become complicated and why people sometimes seem to serve procedures rather than persons.

I still want better.

But beneath all of that, something else is happening.

I am watching the tide come in.

And scattered across those waters is bread my father threw there years ago.

I see pieces of it returning in people.

In stories.

In gratitude.

In relationships.

In lives he touched and perhaps never realized he touched.

A kindness here.

An opportunity there.

A person he believed in.

A person he helped.

A conversation he probably forgot.

A door he opened.

A generosity no ledger adequately recorded.

Ripples.

More ripples.

And still more ripples.

Perhaps this is what Ecclesiastes meant.

Perhaps bread cast upon the waters does return.

Just rarely in the form we expected.

The Final Accounting

Someday every one of us will arrive at this place.

The titles will disappear.

The houses will belong to someone else.

Someone else will drive the automobile.

Someone else will sit behind the desk.

The investment accounts will be distributed.

The photographs will be divided among children.

Eventually even our names will become stories told by people who vaguely remember us.

And then what remains?

The bread.

The bread we cast upon the waters.

The mercy.

The courage.

The forgiveness.

The people we believed in.

The children we loved.

The strangers we helped.

The mistakes we admitted.

The enemies we forgave.

The beauty we created.

The truth we spoke.

The grace we received and then dared to give away.

Maybe that is why Jesus said:

“Lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.”

I used to hear that primarily as a command.

Increasingly I hear it as an explanation of reality.

Jesus was telling us what lasts.

Everything else is temporary.

And perhaps that is one of the strange gifts suffering gives us.

It destroys our illusions about permanence.

A hospital room can become a monastery if you are paying attention.

A sickbed can become an altar.

An old man’s weakened body can preach a sermon no cathedral could contain.

And a son standing beside his father can suddenly realize that the measure of a man’s life was never how tightly he held onto his bread.

It was how freely he cast it.

So I find myself returning to Francis’s questions.

Who are You, my God?

And who am I?

Those questions are at the heart of The Soulprint Project.

Because beneath all the noise, beneath the ego, beneath our accomplishments and failures, beneath our carefully constructed identities, there is a person God imagined before the world taught us who we were supposed to become.

And perhaps the great spiritual journey is simply this:

To discover that person.

To recover that person.

And, by grace, to become that person.

Then cast everything you have upon the waters.

Your love.

Your wisdom.

Your mercy.

Your gifts.

Your forgiveness.

Your life.

Cast the bread.

Do not worry so much about where it goes.

God knows the currents.

And after many days, perhaps long after we are gone, the bread returns.

Not necessarily to us.

But to the world.

And perhaps that was the point all along.

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Visit the website - lots of goodies: The Soulprint Project

Scripture Is Poetry Because Life Is Too Large for Prose

The cocoon, the acorn, the Beatitudes, and the mystery of becoming

Some of the most profound passages in Scripture are also some of the most beautiful.

The creation story.

Ecclesiastes 3.

The Psalms.

The prophets.

The Beatitudes.

We know many of these passages so well that their beauty can actually become a problem. We become comfortable with the poetry and fail to see the existential truth hiding inside it.

“In the beginning God created…”

“There is a time to be born, and a time to die…”

“Blessed are the poor in spirit…”

Beautiful words.

But they are not merely beautiful words.

They are attempting to tell us something about what it means to be human.

And sometimes truth has to become poetry because ordinary language isn’t large enough to contain it.

The Creation Story Is Also Our Story

Genesis begins with chaos.

Darkness.

Formlessness.

An abyss.

And then God speaks.

“Let there be light.”

Something begins emerging from nothing.

Chaos becomes order.

Darkness becomes light.

The waters separate.

Dry ground appears.

Seeds become plants.

The Earth begins producing life.

And finally:

“Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.”
— Genesis 1:26

We can spend enormous amounts of time arguing about the mechanics of creation and completely miss the existential beauty of the story.

God brings life from chaos.

And He is still doing it.

Including within us.

There are places inside every human being that remain tohu va-bohu - formless and empty.

Places where light has not yet penetrated.

Places waiting for God to say again:

Let there be light.

That is creation.

But it is also a transformation.

Perhaps creation never completely stopped.

Perhaps God is still creating us.

There Is a Season for Everything

Then we arrive at Ecclesiastes:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

A time to be born.

A time to die.

A time to plant.

A time to uproot.

A time to weep.

A time to laugh.

A time to mourn.

A time to dance.

Again, beautiful poetry.

We read it at weddings and funerals.

We put it on plaques.

But Qoheleth isn’t decorating our lives with pleasant words.

He is describing the existential reality of being alive.

You will gain things.

You will lose things.

You will love people.

You will lose people.

Your body will grow stronger.

Eventually, it will grow weaker.

You will build things that someone else may tear down someday.

You will experience moments when God seems extraordinarily close and moments when heaven seems strangely silent.

There will be dancing.

And there will be mourning.

The wisdom isn’t learning how to avoid half the poem.

The wisdom is in learning how to become fully human through all of it.

The Cocoon

I sometimes think we have misunderstood transformation, imagining it primarily as self-improvement.

Become nicer.

Become more religious.

Control our behavior.

Go to church more.

Read more Scripture.

Pray more.

All worthwhile things.

But Scripture uses a much more radical word.

Paul writes:

“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
— Romans 12:2

The Greek word is metamorphoō.

Metamorphosis.

The same idea from which we get our word describing what happens inside a cocoon.

A caterpillar doesn’t become a better caterpillar.

It becomes something it could barely have imagined.

A butterfly.

That may be closer to the Christian understanding of transformation.

God isn’t merely trying to improve the person we have constructed.

He is calling forth the person He created.

That is the journey I call Soulprint.

The Acorn Doesn’t Look Like an Oak

Consider an acorn.

Hold one in your hand.

Nothing about it looks particularly impressive.

Yet somehow encoded within that tiny seed is the possibility of an enormous oak tree.

Branches.

Leaves.

Shade.

Roots stretching through the earth.

Perhaps hundreds of years of life.

The oak is somehow already hidden inside the acorn.

But the acorn cannot become an oak sitting on a shelf.

It requires soil.

Water.

Sunlight.

Time.

And something else we don’t talk about nearly enough:

The acorn has to cease being an acorn.

Its shell must break.

The seed must open.

The form that protects it must eventually surrender, so that the life hidden within it can emerge.

Jesus understood this:

“Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”
— John 12:24

Nature has been preaching resurrection since the beginning.

Seeds disappear into darkness and emerge as life.

Caterpillars disappear into cocoons and emerge with wings.

Perhaps some things we call endings are actually beginnings we cannot yet recognize.

But What About the Soil?

This is where the metaphor becomes more complicated.

Because seeds don’t grow equally everywhere.

Jesus tells a story about a farmer scattering seed.

Some lands on a path.

Some among the rocks.

Some among the thorns.

Some are in good soil.

The same seed.

Different soil.

And dramatically different outcomes.

We have some ability to cultivate the soil of our souls.

We choose what we read.

What we watch.

Who influences us?

What voices we listen to.

Whether we cultivate resentment or gratitude.

Whether we practice contemplation or constant distraction.

Whether we forgive.

Whether we remain curious.

Whether we become hardened.

These choices matter.

Free will matters.

Spiritual practice matters.

But then life asks us a much harder question.

What about people who never received good soil?

The Unequal Soil of Human Existence

This is where simplistic spirituality begins to break down.

We are not all born into the same circumstances.

Some children are born into loving homes.

Others are born into violence.

Some receive excellent educations.

Others struggle simply to attend school.

Some inherit wealth.

Others inherit debt.

Some grow up surrounded by books, mentors, opportunity, safety, and encouragement.

Others begin life in poverty, where nearly every decision carries consequences that those of us with resources rarely have to consider.

It would be spiritually dishonest to pretend that every human being possesses exactly the same choices.

They don’t.

Poverty reduces choices.

Trauma reduces choices.

War reduces choices.

Disease reduces choices.

Social structures can reduce choices.

Where you are born can determine possibilities you never consciously chose.

And yet here is one of the great mysteries of the human soul:

People with remarkably few external choices sometimes discover an internal freedom that people with enormous wealth never find.

And people who possess nearly everything sometimes remain desperately unhappy.

Why?

Because there are things money can purchase and things it cannot.

Money can buy comfort.

It cannot guarantee peace.

Money can buy entertainment.

It cannot guarantee joy.

Money can buy a magnificent house.

It cannot make it a home.

Money can buy access.

It cannot buy belonging.

Money can buy the finest mattress in the world.

It cannot guarantee sleep.

And money can surround us with people, yet leave us without a single genuine friend.

Perhaps this is why Jesus says something that sounds almost absurd to modern ears.

Blessed Are…

Jesus climbs a hillside, sits down, and begins teaching:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit…”

“Blessed are those who mourn…”

“Blessed are the meek…”

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…”

Again:

Poetry.

Beautiful poetry.

But beneath the poetry is an explosive understanding of human existence.

Jesus is turning the world’s hierarchy upside down.

The world says:

Blessed are the powerful.

Blessed are the wealthy.

Blessed are the winners.

Blessed are the admired.

Blessed are those who never need anyone.

Jesus looks at the broken, grieving, humble, merciful, hungry, persecuted people sitting around Him and says:

Ashray.

Blessed.

Flourishing.

Walking the right path.

Not because poverty is good.

Not because suffering is good.

Not because mourning is pleasant.

But because circumstances the world calls failure do not determine the condition or ultimate value of the soul.

That is revolutionary.

Maybe Happiness Is the Wrong Word

We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to become happy.

Perhaps happiness is too small a goal.

Happiness often depends upon what happens.

The word itself hints at circumstance—hap, chance, happening.

Jesus seems to be talking about something deeper.

Flourishing.

Wholeness.

A life rooted deeply enough that circumstances cannot completely determine its meaning.

The oak survives storms because of what happened beneath the ground long before the storm arrived.

Roots.

The invisible life beneath the visible life.

And perhaps this is where much spiritual wisdom ultimately leads us.

Pay attention to your roots.

What Are You Allowing Into Your Soil?

Every day, something is being planted in us.

News.

Fear.

Advertising.

Anger.

Scripture.

Beauty.

Resentment.

Gratitude.

Social media.

Prayer.

Comparison.

Love.

Silence.

We become, in part, the soil we cultivate.

Jesus said:

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
— Matthew 6:21

Maybe we could say it another way:

Show me what you continually plant in your soul, and eventually I will show you what grows there.

That doesn’t mean we control everything that happens to us.

Ecclesiastes destroys that illusion.

There is a time to be born and a time to die.

There are seasons we choose.

And there are seasons that choose us.

The spiritual question is not:

How do I control every season?

It is:

What kind of person am I becoming within this season?

The Soulprint

That question lies near the center of The Soulprint Project.

I don’t believe the spiritual journey is primarily about constructing a new identity.

I think it is about discovering, recovering, and becoming the person God created us to be.

Imago Dei.

The image of God.

The Soulprint.

Like the oak hidden inside the acorn, there is something within us that precedes our résumé, our possessions, our failures, our successes, our wounds, and the identities the world has assigned us.

But becoming that person requires transformation.

And transformation sometimes requires the cocoon.

Darkness.

Waiting.

Uncertainty.

Surrender.

The breaking open of the seed.

Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a season for everything.

Genesis reminds us that God can bring order from chaos.

The Beatitudes remind us that flourishing is not determined by wealth, power, status, or circumstances.

Jesus reminds us that a seed sometimes has to fall into the earth before its hidden life can emerge.

And Paul reminds us:

Be transformed.

Metamorphosis.

How Then Shall I Live?

Maybe the great spiritual question isn’t:

How can I make my life turn out exactly the way I want?

Perhaps it is:

Given the life I have actually been given, how shall I live?

What soil will I cultivate?

What seeds will I plant?

What must I release?

What season am I in?

What darkness must I stop fearing?

What shell must finally break?

What false identity must I surrender?

And what might God already have planted inside me that is still waiting to become?

The caterpillar cannot imagine flight.

The acorn cannot comprehend the oak.

And perhaps we cannot yet imagine what we might become when we finally surrender ourselves to the transforming work of God.

Scripture calls it transformation.

Jesus called it an abundant life.

I call the journey Soulprint.

And perhaps the poetry has been trying to tell us this all along:

You are not merely here to survive the seasons of your life.

You are here to become.

Non-Dualism, Transformation, and the Road Less Traveled

There is a verse that Christians recite with a quiet confidence that sometimes borders on exclusion. “Enter through the narrow gate,” Jesus says in Matthew 7:13-14, “for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” We have read this passage, most of us, as a sorting mechanism, the saved on one side, the lost on the other. We have built theologies on it, denominations around it, and sometimes entire identities against it. But what if we have been reading it through the wrong eyes entirely?

The trouble with spiritual language is that it arrives in human minds, and human minds are extraordinarily skilled at turning a mystery into a map. We love categories. We love to know which side of the line we stand on, and more importantly, which side the other person stands on. This is the ego at its most religious, dressed in the vocabulary of grace but still performing the ancient work of division. Non-dualistic thinking does not deny that reality has structure, or that God operates by principle and moral order. It simply recognizes that the moment we weaponize those principles to judge and exclude rather than to transform ourselves, we have stepped off the narrow road entirely, even while congratulating ourselves for being on it.

Consider Jonah. Here is a man who had every conceivable spiritual advantage. He did not have to search for God or strain to hear a still small voice. God spoke to him directly, audibly, with unmistakable clarity: go to Nineveh, speak to the people there, call them to repentance. There is no ambiguity in Jonah’s story. He heard the word of God and he ran the other direction. This is instructive, because we often assume that the problem with people who stray from the narrow road is that they simply haven’t heard, haven’t believed, or haven’t been given the right information. Jonah explodes that assumption completely. He believed. He heard. And he fled.

Why? Because Jonah’s God was still a tribal God, or rather, Jonah’s understanding of God was still tribal, still filtered through the dualistic ego that divides the world into us and them, worthy and unworthy, chosen and forsaken. Nineveh was the enemy. They did not deserve mercy. If Jonah went and they repented, God would spare them, and Jonah did not want them spared. His theology was orthodox but his heart was dualistic, and it was precisely this dualism, this insistence that God’s grace must operate within the boundaries Jonah had drawn, that sent him to the bottom of the sea.

The whale, in this reading, is not punishment. It is transformation. God does not abandon Jonah, does not replace him with a more cooperative prophet, does not even argue with him on the dock at Joppa. Instead, the circumstances of Jonah’s own flight conspire to create a space in which Jonah has nowhere left to go but inward. Three days in the belly of a great fish is not theology; it is the lived experience of a man whose categories have failed him, whose certainties have run out, who is suspended in darkness with nothing between him and God. It is, in the most visceral sense imaginable, the narrow road.

Jesus said few find it. He did not say few are allowed on it. That distinction matters enormously. The narrowness of the gate is not a policy of divine exclusion, it is a description of how genuinely difficult inner transformation is. It is hard to release the ego’s need to be right, to be chosen, to be distinguishable from those who are wrong and unchosen. It is hard to stop filtering God’s reality through our own preferences and fears. The broad road is broad precisely because it accommodates all of that. You can walk it while remaining entirely yourself, your prejudices intact, your identities defended, your God conveniently aligned with your existing worldview. Billions do it. It is, in Jonah’s case, the road to Tarshish.

The narrow road asks something different. It asks not for correct belief as a ticket, but for the willingness to be changed, which is to say, to die to something. Isaiah tells us that God’s ways are not our ways, and God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. This is not an abstract theological concession. It is a living reality that confronts us every time we encounter grace extended in a direction we did not authorize, or justice that doesn’t match our expectations, or love that refuses to honor the borders we have drawn. God’s absoluteness, moral, spiritual, physical, is real. But our interpretation of that absoluteness is perpetually in danger of becoming a mirror in which we see only ourselves reflected back, dressed in divine clothing.

This is why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, speaks the words about the narrow gate not to the Pharisees, not to the crowd at large, but to his disciples, to those already following him. He is not issuing a warning about other people. He is speaking directly to the ones listening, to us, about the interior work that discipleship requires. The temptation to read this as a statement about who gets in and who doesn’t, to use it as a theological boundary marker, is precisely the broad road in theological disguise. It is Jonah booking passage to Tarshish while quoting scripture about the sovereignty of God.

Transformation is what the narrow road is. Not belief as a proposition to be held, not experience as a credential to be claimed, but the ongoing, costly, often unwilling process of having the ego’s framework dismantled and rebuilt around something larger than ourselves. Jonah’s transformation was not complete even by the end of his story, the book closes with him sitting outside Nineveh, furious that God showed the Ninevites mercy, arguing with a withered plant. And yet God’s final words to him are not condemnation but a question: “Should I not be concerned about that great city?” It is an invitation, not a verdict. Even there, at the end of his failures, the narrow road remains open.

This is the peace that the ego cannot manufacture and the dualistic mind cannot reach, the peace that passes understanding, that Paul writes about, that comes not from having the right answers but from releasing the need to be the one who decides who has them. God’s ways are genuinely not our ways. The moment we stop resisting that truth and start being reshaped by it is the moment we find ourselves, perhaps surprisingly, on the narrow road. Not because we were approved, but because we were transformed. The gate was never locked. It was only ever narrow.

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An Invitation to the Next Chapter: Welcome to The Soulprint Project

Welcome to The Soulprint Project. soulprintproject.com

For the past three years, many of you have walked this journey with me.

Together we’ve explored the mysteries of the soul, the teachings of Jesus, the Enneagram, the Beatitudes, contemplation, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and the timeless question that has echoed through every generation:

Who did God create me to become?

Those conversations have filled hundreds of pages, dozens of essays, countless hours of reflection, and, more importantly, they have shaped a growing community of people who believe that life is about far more than success, comfort, or simply surviving.

It has become clear to me that all of these writings were pointing toward something larger.

Today, I want to introduce you to that vision.

The Soulprint Project.

This isn’t simply a new name.

It is the natural evolution of everything we’ve been discovering together.

For years, I’ve written about what I call our Soulprint, the unique person God imagined before we were born, created in His image, designed with purpose, and continually being transformed into the likeness of Christ. Along the way, we’ve discovered something remarkable. Modern neuroscience is beginning to confirm what Scripture has quietly proclaimed for thousands of years.

Scientists now tell us that our brains can be rewired. They call it neuroplasticity. Repeated thoughts shape the brain. Habits become pathways. The more we rehearse fear, anxiety, resentment, shame, or unhealthy patterns, the more natural they become.

But they have also discovered something profoundly hopeful.

Those pathways can change.

Long before neuroscience could place a brain under a scanner, the Apostle Paul wrote:

“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”

Long before psychologists described identity formation, Genesis declared that humanity was created in the image of God.

Long before anyone spoke about emotional regulation, Jesus invited ordinary people to become entirely new creations.

Science has begun to explain how transformation happens.

Jesus has always revealed why.

That intersection is where The Soulprint Project lives.

We believe the deepest transformation is not merely learning new behaviors. It is recovering the person God created us to be. It allows Christ to reshape not only our thinking but also our hearts, our relationships, our purpose, and ultimately our lives.

This is why The Soulprint Project is much more than a collection of books.

It is an ecosystem for transformation.

Through The Hidden Scripture of the Dawns, The Serpent and the Mirror, and Your Secret Name, we explore the journey from awakening to transformation to becoming.

Through the Enneagram, we expose the patterns of the false self.

Through contemplation, journaling, and spiritual practices, we learn to quiet the noise so we can hear the deeper voice of God.

Through neuroscience, we better understand how our minds change.

Through community, we encourage one another to keep walking the path.

And through Jesus, we discover that all of these streams ultimately lead to the same destination: becoming fully alive as the people we were created to be.

Everything we are building, from our books and articles to the Digital Sanctuary, interactive journals, assessments, coaching, courses, podcasts, and conversations—exists for one reason:

To help people discover, recover, and become the person God created them to be.

I don’t believe our world needs another movement built on fear, outrage, or endless arguments.

I believe it needs people whose minds are being renewed, whose hearts are being restored, whose souls are awakening, and whose lives increasingly reflect the love, peace, humility, courage, and compassion of Christ.

That is the vision of The Soulprint Project.

If you’ve been reading my Substack, you’ve already been part of this journey.

Now I’d like to invite you to take the next step.

Welcome to The Soulprint Project. soulprintproject.com

I truly believe our most important work is just beginning.

— J. Steve Bruner

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Recovering Awe, Beauty, and Wonder in a Disenchanted Age

Grant me the curiosity and awe so that I may honor the bottomless, limitless wonder, beauty, and mystery of this world.
—Brian McLaren, Do I Stay Christian?

There was a time when worship began not with explanations, not with announcements, not with instructions, but with silence. Or with thunder. Or with trembling. Or with a cry rising unbidden from the soul: Holy. Holy. Holy.

Today, worship often begins with a microphone check and a therapeutic tone. We are invited to “get our perspectives straight,” to feel better, to regulate our emotions, to leave encouraged and intact. None of this is wrong in itself, but something essential has quietly slipped away.

Awe.

Mystery.

Fear and trembling.

Wonder that disorients before it heals.

The question before us is not whether therapy is valuable, it is. The question is whether therapy has quietly replaced worship, and whether, in doing so, we have lost the capacity to encounter God as Other, as Holy, as the consuming fire who both comforts and undoes us.

Kathleen Norris names this loss with painful clarity:

“Modern believers tend to trust in therapy more than in mystery, a fact that tends to manifest itself in worship that employs the bland speech of pop psychology and self-help rather than language resonant with poetic meaning… Rather than express awe, let alone those negative feelings, fear and trembling, as we come into the presence of God, crying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy,’ we focus totally on ourselves.”

Worship, Norris suggests, has been domesticated. God has been softened. Mystery has been replaced with management.

And in the process, our imagination has failed.

The Failure of Imagination in a Therapeutic Age

We live in an age that mistrusts what cannot be measured, explained, or controlled. We are suspicious of tradition, wary of authority, uncomfortable with silence, and impatient with paradox. We want clarity, usefulness, and outcomes.

But worship is not useful.

Worship does not exist to fix us.

Worship does not begin with us at all.

“Worship,” the psalmist reminds us, “is entering the courts of Another” (Psalm 100). It is a response to presence, not a technique for improvement.

The therapeutic mindset asks: How do I feel? What do I need? What will help me cope? Or as I have often heard people say “I need a church that feeds me”, and one side of me gets it, but I wonder is that statement the ego or soul-centered?

The worshipful mindset asks: Who is God? Where am I standing? What is being revealed?

Therapy begins with the self and moves toward healing.
Worship begins with God and moves toward transformation.

And the difference matters.

In Soulprint language, therapy tends to work primarily at the mind and emotional level, helping us understand our patterns, wounds, narratives, and coping strategies. It’s one of the reasons I love the Enneagram. It helps us identify those ego patterns in each of us.

Worship, by contrast, addresses the spirit, the deepest core of our being, the place where awe, reverence, surrender, and union occur.

Both are important. But when worship becomes therapy, the Soulprint is flattened.

The Soulprint and the Loss of Awe

Your Soulprint is the unique integration of body, mind, and spirit, created in the image of God. When these three are aligned, we live fully human lives, present, grounded, and alive to reality.

But awe is not a mental concept.

Awe is a bodily experience.
Awe is a spiritual awakening.
Awe interrupts thought before it produces insight.

Scripture is filled with people who encounter God and lose their footing:

• Isaiah cries, “Woe is me!” (Isaiah 6:5)

• Moses hides his face (Exodus 3:6)

• Job places his hand over his mouth (Job 40:4)

• Peter falls to his knees and says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8)

None of these encounters were therapeutic.
All of them were transformative.

Awe destabilizes the ego. It reminds us we are not the center of reality. It re-orders the Soulprint around God rather than around self-management.

Modern worship, however, often works in the opposite direction. It reassures the ego. It centers comfort. It avoids anything that might unsettle or overwhelm. We have grown to want a worship experience not a revival.

And yet Scripture tells us:

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Proverbs 9:10)

Not anxiety. Not terror. But reverent awe, the recognition that God is God, and we are not.

Rubber Gloves on the Soul

Brian McLaren offers one of the most piercing metaphors of our age when he asks whether our comforts have “coated our souls like rubber gloves.”

“Could it be that our accumulation of possessions and protections coat our souls like rubber gloves, so that we touch, but do not feel?”

We attend worship. We sing songs. We listen to sermons. We touch the sacred, but we do not feel it.

Why?

Because awe requires vulnerability.

Awe requires exposure.

Awe cannot be scheduled, managed, or guaranteed.

Those who have the least, those without safety nets, without certainty, without insulation, often worship with abandon not because they are more spiritual, but because they are more exposed to reality.

I recently told the man at the dump where I take my trash my Dad was having life-saving surgery. It could go either way. He loves Jesus. He is broke. He has an addiction, but he cried. Sincere tears. Broken-hearted tears. He felt my pain. I drove aways and then I trun around and gave him some money, I felt his need, and spend a few moments comforting him.

Jesus understood this when he said:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

Poverty of spirit is not low self-esteem. It is unprotected openness to God.

In Soulprint terms, it is the willingness to stand before God without armor, without strategies, explanations, or demands.

Worship Is Not an Imperative Issued to God

Kathleen Norris’s critique stings because it is so accurate. We often speak to God as if we are the ones in charge:

“Use this hour, Lord.”
“Meet us here.”
“Show up.”
“Bless what we are doing.”

But worship is not a negotiation.

It is not a transaction.

It is not an appointment God must keep.

Worship is our response to a God who already is.

“Where were you,” God asks Job, “when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4)

This is not cruelty. It is clarity.

Worship restores scale. It re-situates the self within the vastness of God’s being. It awakens humility, gratitude, and wonder.

Therapy asks God to help us function better in the world as it is.
Worship asks God to reveal reality as it truly is.

God Is Joyful and Joy Is Dangerous

McLaren reminds us that God is not merely solemn or serene, but joyful, dangerously joyful.

“When we connect with God, it is as if we are plugging our souls into a pure current of high-voltage joy.”

This is not sentimentality. It is holy electricity.

Biblical joy is not mild happiness. It is disruptive, embodied, excessive:

• David dances until his dignity dissolves (2 Samuel 6:14)

• The psalmist shouts, claps, sings, and weeps (Psalm 47)

• Mary erupts in revolutionary praise (Luke 1:46–55)

True worship often looks foolish to the self-controlled mind. It bypasses respectability. It flows from the spirit outward into the body.

This is why worship cannot be reduced to therapy. Therapy seeks balance. Worship often produces excess.

And yet this excess heals us in ways therapy alone cannot.

Worship Reorders the Soulprint

When worship is genuine, something subtle but profound occurs:

• The body softens

• The mind quiets

• The spirit awakens

We stop performing. We stop managing. We stop fixing.

We receive.

In Soulprint language, worship restores the original order of the human being: spirit leading, mind serving, body participating.

This is why Paul urges:

“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice… Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:1–2)

Transformation does not begin with insight. It begins with surrender.

Awe as Spiritual Medicine

Ironically, awe may be the very medicine our anxious, exhausted, over-therapized culture needs most.

Not because awe solves problems, but because it relativizes them.

When Isaiah encounters God’s holiness, his anxiety is not soothed, it is absorbed into something infinitely larger.

When Job encounters God’s mystery, his questions are not answered, they are transcended.

Awe does what therapy often cannot: it de-centers the self without de-valuing it.

This is the genius of worship.

Recovering Worship Without Rejecting Healing

This is not a call to abandon therapy. It is a call to put worship back where it belongs.

Therapy helps us understand ourselves.
Worship helps us lose ourselves, and in doing so, find our true life (Matthew 16:25).

I have witnessed time and time again my gifted wife play the piano in true worship, loosing herself within the keyboard, only to become an instrument of God’s true worship for herself and touching people’s hearts so they too can get lost to be found.

The modern church does not need more techniques.
It needs more threshold moments.

Moments where silence is allowed to deepen.
Where beauty is not explained away.
Where language becomes poetic again.
Where fear and trembling are welcomed as signs of nearness.

The Invitation of Soulprint

Soulprint exists to help us recover this integration, to become fully human, fully present, fully alive to God.

Not by managing mystery, but by entering it.

Not by controlling worship, but by surrendering to it.

Not by asking God to use an hour, but by offering ourselves without condition.

The question is not whether worship will comfort you.

The question is whether worship will undo you enough to remake you.

Because when awe returns, so does joy.

And when joy returns, the soul remembers what it was made for.

“In your presence there is fullness of joy.”
—Psalm 16:11

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When we begin to live from our Soulprint, something subtle but profound happens. The world is no longer simply a place we pass through or consume; it becomes a sanctuary entrusted to our care. We begin to see with different eyes, hear with different ears, and feel with a different heart.

The birds are no longer background noise. They become the morning choir God composed to awaken our souls with wonder. The wind through the trees becomes a hymn. A mountain is no longer just rock, but a cathedral of creation. A quiet stream becomes a place of baptism for the weary spirit. Even silence is no longer empty; it becomes the language through which God often speaks.

When we live from our false self, we hurry through life searching for what we do not have. But when we live from our Soulprint, we awaken to the abundance of what has always been here. We stop trying to possess creation and begin to receive it as a gift. We no longer ask, “What can this world do for me?” but, “How can I honor and steward what God has entrusted to me?”

This is the vision of Eden before it was lost and the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it. Humanity was never meant to dominate creation as its owner, but to cultivate it as its caretaker. Every sunrise is an invitation. Every flower is a sermon. Every person bears the image of God. Every creature has its place in the symphony of creation.

The soul that has found its true home begins to recognize that all of life is holy. The ordinary becomes sacramental. The earth becomes a sanctuary. Our work becomes worship. Our relationships become opportunities to reveal the love of Christ. We discover that we are not simply living in God’s world, we are living within God’s living cathedral, called to tend it with gratitude, humility, and love.

Perhaps that is what Jesus saw every day. He looked at lilies and saw trust. He looked at sparrows and saw the Father’s care. He looked at vineyards, seeds, shepherds, storms, and children and saw the Kingdom of God shimmering beneath the surface of ordinary life. When Christ is formed within us, we begin to see the world the way He did—not as something to conquer, but as something to cherish, cultivate, and love.

That may be one of the clearest signs that we are returning to the person God created us to be: the whole world slowly becomes a sanctuary, and our lives become an act of worship within it.

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Part I - Part 2 is coming tomorrow

The Cathedral of Your Soul

“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you...?”
— 1 Corinthians 6:19

There was a time when entire generations devoted their lives to building cathedrals.

The men who quarried the stone would never live to see the finished sanctuary. The women who carried water, prepared meals, and stitched garments for the workers knew that the completed cathedral would belong to their grandchildren, not themselves. Yet they labored anyway, because they believed they were participating in something infinitely greater than their own lives.

To step inside one of those cathedrals today is to experience something difficult to explain. The soaring ceilings draw your eyes upward. The stained glass transforms ordinary sunlight into a thousand colors. Silence itself seems alive. Even those with no religious convictions often find themselves whispering.

A cathedral reminds us that some places are sacred because they were built to awaken the soul.

But perhaps we have misunderstood where God’s greatest cathedral truly stands.

Scripture tells us it is not constructed of granite or marble.

It is you.

Paul writes,

“Do you not know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?” (1 Corinthians 3:16)

Again he reminds us,

“Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 6:19)

This is one of the most astonishing claims in all of Scripture.

God did not simply create humanity.

He chose humanity as His dwelling place.

The Cathedral Within

When Genesis tells us we were created in the image of God, the Imago Dei, it is making a claim unlike any other religion of the ancient world.

Human beings were not merely servants of the gods.

We were created to reflect God’s very nature.

The image was never merely physical.

It was spiritual.

Moral.

Relational.

Creative.

Capable of love.

Able to know God because God had already placed something of Himself within us.

Every human soul was designed to become a living cathedral.

Not a museum.

Not a fortress.

Not a prison.

A sanctuary.

The purpose of Jesus was not merely to prepare us for heaven.

It was to restore what had been forgotten.

“The kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17:21)

Christ came to show humanity what a fully alive human being actually looks like.

For the first time, we saw the Image of God without distortion.

Not simply divine.

Perfectly human.

The Holiest Place on Earth

The most sacred place in Jerusalem was once called the Holy of Holies.

Only one person entered.

Only once each year.

Today, Scripture says that through Christ, the veil has been torn apart (Matthew 27:51; Hebrews 10:19–22).

Why?

Because God’s presence no longer lives behind curtains.

It lives within transformed people.

The holiest place on earth may not be inside a cathedral.

It may be the quiet heart of someone who has surrendered to love.

The Architecture of the Spirit

Every cathedral has pillars.

Arches.

Windows.

Foundations.

The cathedral of your soul also has architecture.

Paul calls it the fruit of the Spirit.

“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22–23)

Notice something remarkable.

These are not achievements.

They are evidence.

Fruit simply reveals the health of the tree.

Likewise, these qualities reveal the health of the soul.

They are not behaviors we manufacture.

They are signs that Christ is alive within us.

The Things That Deface the Cathedral

Every cathedral requires care.

Without attention, weeds grow.

Water leaks.

Stone cracks.

The same is true of the soul.

Paul contrasts the fruit of the Spirit with what he calls “the works of the flesh.”

He lists them plainly:

“Hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy...” (Galatians 5:19–21)

Elsewhere he writes,

“Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” (Ephesians 4:31)

James adds,

“Do not slander one another.” (James 4:11)

Jesus Himself says,

“Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” (Matthew 12:34)

Gossip.

Lies.

Pride.

Deceit.

Greed.

Unforgiveness.

Contempt.

These are more than moral failures.

They are acts of vandalism against the cathedral God is building within us.

Every lie fractures trust.

Every act of bitterness darkens another stained-glass window.

Every resentment blocks another beam of light.

The tragedy is not merely that these things hurt others.

They diminish the person we were created to become.

False Altars

Much of our suffering comes because we worship at the wrong altars.

We expect careers to give us identity.

Money to give us security.

Relationships to make us complete.

Recognition to tell us we matter.

Possessions to satisfy our longing.

Politics to save us.

Success to silence our fears.

Yet every one of these eventually disappoints.

Not because they are evil.

Because they were never designed to hold the weight of our souls.

Only God can occupy the sanctuary He created.

Anything else eventually becomes an idol.

Perhaps disappointment is God’s gentle invitation to stop worshipping outside ourselves and return to the cathedral within.

The Soulprint of Christ

The Soulprint is not merely who you are.

It is who you were created to become.

It is the restoration of the Image of God.

It is Christ being formed within you.

Paul writes,

“Until Christ is formed in you.” (Galatians 4:19)

Again,

“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Romans 12:2)

Transformation is not becoming someone else.

It is removing everything that keeps you from becoming the person God imagined before the foundation of the world.

The cathedral does not need to be rebuilt.

It needs to be restored.

The Master Architect is already at work.

A Quiet Prayer

Today, before you seek another answer, another achievement, another possession, another distraction, pause.

Walk slowly through the cathedral of your own soul.

Notice where light still enters.

Notice where dust has gathered.

Notice where old wounds remain.

Then remember this:

God has never abandoned His sanctuary.

He is still restoring it.

Stone by stone.

Thought by thought.

Grace upon grace.

And perhaps that is the greatest miracle of all.

The cathedral God cares about most is not the one humanity built for Him.

It is the one He built within you.

For there, in the deepest chamber of your soul, Christ still whispers,

“Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)

PRAISE THE LORD. PRAISE
GOD IN HIS SANCTUARY (YOU); LET EVERYTHING THAT
HAS BREATH PRAISE THE LORD. PRAISE THE LORD.
AMEN! ( PSALM 150:1, 6 ).

When we take on that, we begin to see the birds singing as the choir God created to give our souls refreshment throughout our days.

For many of us today, it is difficult to imagine what worship in the great medieval cathedrals meant to the ordinary person. Life was often marked by poverty, disease, war, and relentless labor. Most people worked from sunrise to sunset simply to survive. Their homes were small and dark, and their world was filled with uncertainty.

Then, on Sunday or a holy day, they stepped into a cathedral.

Suddenly everything changed.

The soaring arches seemed to reach toward heaven itself. Colored light poured through stained-glass windows, telling the stories of Scripture to those who could not read. The fragrance of incense filled the air. Candles flickered in quiet corners where worshipers knelt in prayer. Sacred music echoed through the vast space, reminding every soul that there was a reality greater than the hardships waiting outside those walls.

The cathedral was never intended merely to be a building. It was an experience of transcendence. Every stone, every window, every arch, every hymn, and every candle was designed to awaken awe and wonder before the presence of God.

For a few precious moments, weary laborers were reminded that they were more than workers, peasants, or subjects of earthly kingdoms. They were beloved children of the Creator. They left with renewed strength, quiet hope, and a peace that enabled them to return to difficult lives with courage.

Perhaps that is one of the great losses of our modern age. We have become remarkably efficient at constructing buildings, yet we often forget to create spaces that awaken the soul. Human beings still long for awe. We still need places that remind us there is a beauty beyond ourselves, a peace deeper than our circumstances, and a God whose presence can steady us for whatever awaits outside the door.

Yet the greatest cathedral has never been built with stone.

It has always been the human soul.

Its arches are formed through humility, its windows through truth, its light through contemplation, and its worship through a life being transformed into the image of Christ. This is the cathedral of transformation, the sacred place where God quietly shapes us into the people He created us to become.

You were created in the image of God - Imago Dei. In God's eyes, you are a cathedral: a living temple where His light longs to dwell, a stained-glass window through which your unique story reveals His beauty, and a sacred sanctuary where, in the silence, you discover the words, "Be still, and know that I am God."

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