Every once in a while, a guest comes along who does more than share expertise. He reminds you what expertise looks like when it has been purified by love.

That was my experience talking with Michael Ward.

I invited him onto Created in the Image of God because he is one of the leading scholars of C.S. Lewis and because his work on Planet Narnia has become, by now, too significant to ignore. But I did not expect to be as struck as I was by the quality of the man’s mind—not merely its range, but its patience, its discipline, its delight, its refusal to be casual where depth was possible.

There are people who accumulate information, and there are people who pursue meaning. Michael Ward is very clearly of the second kind.

What stayed with me after our conversation was not only the brilliance of his central claim—that Lewis built the Narnia chronicles on a hidden imaginative structure tied to the seven heavens—but the way Ward himself came to that realization. Not by cleverness alone. Not by trying to force a theory onto the text. And certainly not by playing the modern game of novelty for novelty’s sake. He came to it through years of immersion, reverence, literary attentiveness, and the kind of diligence that only makes sense if one really believes reality yields more of itself to those willing to keep looking.

That, to me, is a deeply spiritual thing.

We are told in the faith chapter that the one who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. I have often reflected on that phrase, because it places something profoundly important at the heart of the religious life: not passivity, not mere assent, but seeking. Diligently. Not anxiously, not performatively, but with a real expectancy that the universe is not closed, that meaning is not exhausted, that what appears flat at first may reveal depth to those who stay with it.

That is the posture I saw in Michael Ward.

He described growing up in the south of England, in a medieval village, in a devout Anglican home, with parents who read the Narnia books aloud to him and his brothers. Even that scene has a kind of Lewisian charm to it: the old village, the old church, the old stories, the child being drawn not only into narrative but into the realization that stories may have more than one level. His parents told him just enough to make him aware that Aslan was “a bit like Jesus” and that there was biblical depth beneath the fairy tale surface. Not enough to flatten the mystery. Just enough to awaken it.

That detail mattered to me.

Because that is often how the deepest things begin. Not with a full explanation, but with a hint. Not with mastery, but with invitation. A hand extended. A door opened just a little. A child noticing that there is more in the room than he first understood.

In a way, that is also what I have always loved about the cover of my first book, The People of the Sign. There is the clouded light. There is the small hand of the child. There is the father’s hand guiding. I have long understood that image not simply as protection, but as pedagogy. Guidance without coercion. Nearness without the abolition of mystery. A journey in which the child is not given the whole map, but is given enough light, enough touch, enough trust to keep walking.

And perhaps that is what all real discovery looks like, whether in theology, literature, or life.

Michael Ward did not simply admire Lewis from afar. He studied him. He lived, for a time, in Lewis’s former home. He slept in Lewis’s old bedroom. He used Lewis’s study as his own. He immersed himself not only in the popular Lewis but in the full range of Lewis’s literary, theological, and medieval imagination. Then, midway through his PhD work, he stumbled upon what became the key insight of Planet Narnia: that the Narnia chronicles were not a charming but chaotic jumble of myths, fairy tale elements, Christian symbolism, Father Christmas, talking animals, witches, and children, all somehow thrown together by instinct. They were ordered. Hiddenly ordered.

That is what impressed me so much.

Not simply that he found a pattern, but that he found it because he had cared long enough and looked closely enough not to settle for the assumption of randomness.

That is a lesson far bigger than literary criticism.

We live in an age that is impatient with hidden order. If something cannot be quickly explained, monetized, diagrammed, weaponized, or reduced to a slogan, many people lose interest. We have developed enormous capacities for analysis while simultaneously weakening our powers of contemplation. We know how to scan; we do not always know how to behold. We know how to classify; we do not always know how to wonder. We know how to pull things apart; we are less practiced in asking what living whole they belonged to before we dissected them.

Ward’s work stands against that tendency.

And Lewis, through Ward’s eyes, stands against another modern habit as well: the disenchantment of the cosmos.

One of the richest parts of our conversation concerned the distinction between astronomy and astrology—not astrology in the cheap magazine-horoscope sense, but in the older sense of regarding the heavens as meaningful, as bound up with human life not merely quantitatively but qualitatively. Lewis, Michael explained, had no desire to reject the scientific advances of modern astronomy. He was not trying to turn the clock back before Copernicus. But he did think something had been lost when the heavens became only objects of measurement and ceased to be read as signs.

That hit me with force.

Because Psalm 19 has always stirred me: The heavens declare the glory of God; the firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day pours forth speech, and night unto night shows knowledge. Not literal speech. Not language you hear with the outer ear. But still speech. Still knowledge. Still declaration.

What Michael Ward helped recover for me is that our ancestors may not have known all the mechanics we know, but they were not therefore fools. They were asking additional questions, not merely inferior ones. Not only what is it? and how far away is it? but what does it mean? Why does it move us? What relation exists between the world above us and the world within us? Who made this? For whom? To what end?

Science has given us many precious answers. But it has also, in the hands of a reductive materialism, tempted us to ask fewer ultimate questions.

Lewis resisted that reduction. And Ward, by taking Lewis seriously on his own terms, resisted it too.

I found myself reflecting during the interview on how often children understand this better than adults. My son, when he was two, used to ask “why” over and over again, not as a game but as a vocation. Whatever answer you gave him, he wanted to know what lay behind it. Why? Why that? Why that? Children are trying, in their own wild and often fantastical way, to discern not just mechanism but meaning. They are not content with surfaces for long. It takes education—sometimes miseducation—to train that instinct out of them.

And perhaps that is why Lewis continues to matter.

He did not write down to children. He did not assume that fantasy was an escape from truth. He assumed, rightly I think, that story can carry truth where abstraction cannot, and that symbols can preserve depth where propositions alone may flatten it. Michael Ward’s discovery of the hidden planetary architecture of Narnia only intensifies that point. It shows that Lewis was not being careless but lavish. Not random but musical. Not esoteric for esotericism’s sake, but artful in the old sense: crafting a world whose deepest harmonies are felt before they are named.

That too has theological implications.

For Christians, and indeed for anyone open to revelation, the idea that reality might be layered should not be surprising. Scripture itself works this way. So does memory. So does history. So does suffering. So does grace. We are forever discovering that events we thought were singular had antecedents, resonances, archetypes, and echoes. The visible thing is rarely only the visible thing.

Or to put it another way: the journey never ends.

That is one reason I found Michael Ward’s own search so moving. He had already studied Lewis formally. He had already been immersed in the material. He already knew more than most people ever will. And still there was more to uncover. Still there was another level. Still there was a hidden coherence waiting to be seen.

That is a beautiful thing to remember when one is tempted toward either cynicism or exhaustion.

The serious searcher is not embarrassed by the possibility of more meaning. He is strengthened by it.

And this, I think, is one of the larger gifts of the interview for me. It reminded me why we need to recover the older conviction that the heavens—all of them—are still pouring forth knowledge, night after night. Not because we must abandon reason, but because reason itself becomes impoverished when cut off from symbol, wonder, and praise. Not because we should become superstitious, but because we should become attentive again. Not because every ancient cosmology was literally correct, but because literal correctness is not the only category under which truth arrives.

Sometimes truth arrives as pattern.
Sometimes as music.
Sometimes as sign.
Sometimes as hidden structure.
Sometimes as a lion in a wardrobe, a winter under enchantment, and a deeper magic from before the dawn of time.

And sometimes truth arrives through the example of a scholar whose curiosity remained humble enough to keep seeking.

That, above all, is what I learned from Michael Ward.

I also want to say a practical word to my readers. I have fallen a bit behind in the writing rhythm I intended to keep, and over the next few weeks I need first to publish the remaining essays in my “7 Deadly Virtues” series. Those are still coming, and they matter to the architecture of what I am building here.

But this conversation with Michael opened a larger door for me.

So after I complete the remaining “7 Deadly Virtues” pieces, I plan to begin something more ambitious for premium subscribers: a five-part spiritual novella / mini-series, to be published serially on Saturdays over five weeks, beginning in November, before Thanksgiving, and concluding before Christmas—something of an Advent journey in its own right.

It will be inspired by this conversation with Michael Ward, by C.S. Lewis, by the hidden architecture of story, and by the deeper mystery hinted at in the words, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” It will not be a recap of the interview, but a layered work of reflection, theology, symbolism, and search—an exploration of meaning, hiddenness, revelation, and the long guidance of the Father’s hand.

For now, though, this week’s lesson is simple enough and deep enough: keep seeking. The light is often clouded, but it is not absent. The child’s hand is still small, but it is still being guided. And those who believe that God is, and that He rewards those who diligently seek Him, may yet find that the universe contains more music than modernity taught us to hear.

Here is a polished Sneak Peek announcement in the same general voice, but tightened for use at the end of the Substack piece or as a standalone show promo:

Sneak Peek: What’s Coming Next on Created in the Image of God

Because these conversations are never really isolated, but part of a larger search for truth, meaning, and the recovery of our shared humanity, I want to give you a quick look at what’s coming next on Created in the Image of God.

On Sunday, September 6 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be joined by Jared Byas—writer, speaker, and co-founder of The Bible for Normal People. We’ll explore how faith and scripture can be approached with curiosity, making room for honest questions without relying on rigid answers or easy certainties. From doubt and belonging to the possibility of a deeper, more thoughtful, and more connected life with God, this promises to be a timely and searching conversation.

Then on Tuesday, September 8 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be speaking with Amy Peeler—New Testament scholar, pastor, and author. We’ll look at scripture through questions of gender, holiness, and the family of God, and consider what it means for men and women alike to understand themselves as God’s children. From the book of Hebrews and biblical interpretation to identity, belonging, and life in the family of God, it should be a rich and important discussion.

If this week’s conversation with Michael Ward stirred something in you—about hidden meaning, the life of the imagination, the language of the heavens, or the deeper patterns woven into story—I think these next two conversations will carry that search forward in fruitful ways.

I hope you’ll join me.

One of the most clarifying moments in my conversation with Paul Dafydd Jones came when he did something both simple and, in its way, revolutionary. He flipped the script on patience.

We ordinarily think of patience as a human virtue. We tell children to be patient. We commend patients, patients with difficult people, patience in suffering, patience in traffic, patience in marriage, patience in church committees, patience in politics if we have any left to spare. In common usage, patience is what one person exercises toward another person who is proving inconvenient.

But Paul insisted that this is not the right starting point.

Before patience is something we ask of human beings, it is something we must ask about God. Before patience is a moral achievement, it is a theological reality. Before we decide what it means for us to endure, forebear, wait, or persevere, we have to ask what it means to say that God is patient.

That is not just an adjustment of emphasis. It is a change in orientation.

It means patience is not first about temperament. It is about the character of ultimate reality.

That struck me because it moves patience out of the realm of mere manners and into the heart of theology. It also rescues the subject from sentimentality. If patience begins with God, then patience is not merely “being nice,” not merely suppressing irritation, not merely gritting one’s teeth while pretending to be virtuous. It is bound up with creation, providence, judgment, mercy, time, freedom, and the strange fact that God does not seem to move at the speed we would prefer.

Paul pointed to Exodus 34, where God is described as merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. That phrase—slow to anger—contains more than we often hear in it. It means God does not fly off the handle. It means God forbears. It means God gives time and space for repentance, for recognition, for return, for transformation. It means that divine power is not impulsive power. It means that judgment is not absent, but delayed, held, suspended within mercy.

And here is where Paul’s view of divine patience becomes especially distinctive. He did not describe God’s patience as mere passivity, as though God were simply sitting back, uninvolved, watching history roll by. Nor did he reduce it to a pious way of restating the problem of evil. Rather, he described a God who is both active and permissive, sovereign and forbearing. God guides history, yet does not constantly swoop in to interrupt every human act of rebellion, cruelty, stupidity, or self-destruction. God “lets be,” to use Paul’s phrase, without ceasing to be God.

That is unsettling. It should be.

Because once you say that God is patient, you are also saying that God is willing, for a time, to allow realities to unfold that He does not endorse. He allows sin to gather momentum. He allows generations to feel the consequences of what prior generations have set in motion. He gives room—not because evil is good, but because coercive interruption is not the only mode of divine rule.

That is a harder doctrine than many of us want. We would prefer either constant intervention or total distance. But divine patience, at least as Paul opened it up, is something more demanding. God is near, yet not controlling history like a puppet master. God is sovereign, yet not frantic. God is opposed to evil, yet not panicked by time.

And perhaps that is what is hardest for us to bear: not simply that God judges, but that He waits.

1. Mature faith does not fear bewilderment

From that starting point, another thread in our conversation took on greater clarity. Paul spoke of theology in the old phrase: faith seeking understanding. That phrase matters because it stands against both sterile rationalism and blind religiosity.

Paul did not come to theology through a conventional religious upbringing. In fact, he emphasized that he had an entirely secular background and, in retrospect, was grateful for it. He suggested that skepticism and questioning were not enemies of mature faith, but part of the path by which faith can expand rather than calcify.

I found that significant.

Too often, Christians treat questions as threats, confusion as failure, and complexity as compromise. But if patience begins with God, then perhaps one implication is that faith itself must become patient enough to endure bewilderment. Not all understanding arrives at once. Not every doctrine can be handled in childhood form forever. At some point, milk must give way to stronger food.

Paul even said he wants his students to leave a course a little bewildered, a little confused, a little disturbed. That is not pedagogical cruelty. It is respect for reality. It is an acknowledgment that maturation often feels less like triumph and more like the loss of easy certainties.

This resonated with my own long wrestling with scripture, doctrine, and the difference between inherited formulations and lived understanding. A faith that cannot survive questions is not faith. It is dependency masquerading as conviction.

2. Grace has a tempo

One of the most beautiful turns in the conversation came through Paul’s discussion of Julian of Norwich. Her insight, as he described it, is that God accommodates divine action to human frailty. God’s grace does not simply steamroll us. It meets us at a pace we can bear.

That is a profound refinement of what patience means.

It means divine patience is not indifference and not delay for delay’s sake. It is care. It is God’s willingness to move at the speed of actual human development rather than at the speed of abstract perfection. Individuals, cultures, and societies can only learn at certain tempos. One part of grace is that God condescends, gently, to that pace.

I find this extraordinarily illuminating.

It helps explain why transformation is so often slower than we want—personally, relationally, culturally, historically. It helps explain why the kingdom does not arrive on our timetable, why healing may come by inches, why social progress can lurch, why repentance can be uneven, and why the educational process of the soul often feels less like a sprint than like an agonizing walk through fog.

We live in a world of acceleration, optimization, notifications, and reaction. We have built systems that train us to expect immediacy and to resent delay. So divine patience can feel, to modern people especially, like negligence. But if Julian and Paul are right, what feels to us like slowness may in fact be mercy. God is not late. He is patient with creatures who break under too much too fast.

3. Polarization is failed pluralism

This theological account of patience has public consequences, and Paul was especially strong here.

He made the point that the world is not going to become less pluralistic. Religious diversity will not disappear. Political diversity will not disappear. Cultural and social forms of difference will not disappear. If anything, they will intensify. The problem, then, is not pluralism itself. The problem is our inability to live with it.

That is a crucial distinction.

Polarization, on this account, is what happens when we do not know how to handle pluralism. When otherness is viewed first as threat rather than as part of the givenness of creation, we retreat into a defensive crouch. We tighten around our tribe, our ideology, our litmus tests, our preferred language, our own little golden calf. Then, predictably, everyone else begins to behave like an enemy because we have already cast them in that role.

Paul was careful not to collapse pluralism into relativism. He did not say we surrender judgment. On the contrary, he explicitly said that one may still identify lies, dehumanization, and moral wrong. But one can do so without treating every person who differs from us as irredeemable.

That distinction requires patience.

It requires the patience to remain in relation without immediate demonization. The patience to hear before reacting. The patience to distinguish actual evil from mere difference. The patience to allow “complicated forms of joy,” as Paul put it, to emerge from difference held together rather than annihilated.

In that sense, patience is not merely private virtue. It is civic equipment.

4. There is such a thing as holy impatience

Yet one of the wisest things Paul said was that patience is not always the whole answer.

There are times when impatience is right.

Impatience with inequity.
Impatience with injustice.
Impatience with dehumanization.
Impatience with systems that grind people down while congratulating themselves for efficiency.

That matters because patience can be abused. It can be preached downward. It can become a weapon used by the comfortable against the afflicted: wait your turn, endure quietly, don’t make trouble, be patient while we continue benefiting from the arrangement. Paul clearly understands this danger. Divine patience is not a sanctification of oppression. It is not a command to the wounded to become infinitely accommodating to what destroys them.

And yet even here, he made a subtle but important point: to express impatience well requires patience too. One must discern timing, method, proportion, and form. Resistance itself must be thoughtful if it is to be fruitful. Otherwise impatience collapses into mere reactivity, and reaction rarely heals what it opposes.

That tension seems right to me. We need enough patience not to become hysterical, and enough impatience not to become complacent.

5. Patience may be one of the deepest forms of responsible adulthood

Late in the conversation, Paul said something that stayed with me. He suggested that religious studies and theology, at their best, are training grounds for responsible adulthood. That may sound utilitarian at first, but I think he meant something deeper. Learning to navigate profound differences without collapsing into caricature, panic, or hostility is part of what it means to become fully human.

That is not only an academic point. It is spiritual formation.

To inhabit ambiguity without surrendering truth.
To remain in conversation without forfeiting conviction.
To move slowly enough to think.
To resist what must be resisted without becoming consumed by rage.
To let faith seek understanding rather than settle for slogans.
To endure a future whose details remain hidden.

All of that belongs to patience.

And if patience begins with God, then our task is not simply to imitate an abstract quality. It is to become, however partially, creatures capable of living inside God’s tempo.

That may be one of the hardest disciplines in the modern world.

Because we are being trained every day in the opposite direction: toward immediacy, outrage, notification, acceleration, suspicion, tribalism, and perpetual reaction. We are becoming short-fused, collectively, without even noticing it. We do not know how to pause. We do not know how to wait. We do not know how to think slowly enough to judge wisely. We do not know how to stay in relation long enough for truth to ripen.

So perhaps Paul’s reversal is exactly what we need.

Patience is not first what we demand of ourselves or others. It is something we discern in the being and action of God. And only then, under that light, can we begin to ask what patience might mean for us.

Not passivity.
Not cowardice.
Not surrender.
But a deeper strength: the capacity to endure time truthfully, to bear complexity without panic, to remain open without becoming formless, and to know when love requires waiting and when justice requires refusing to wait any longer.

That seems to me no small theological achievement.

And because these conversations belong to a larger unfolding inquiry, I want to invite you to stay with me for what is coming next on Created in the Image of God.

On Sunday, August 30 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Michael Ward—theologian, literary scholar, and one of the leading experts on C.S. Lewis. We’ll explore the imagination, theology, and hidden depths of Lewis’s work, and why his stories continue to resonate with readers today. From The Chronicles of Narnia to the larger cosmos of Lewis’s thought, it promises to be a rich conversation about how literature can illuminate faith in unexpected ways.

Then on Tuesday, September 1 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Kelly Edmiston—pastor, author, and speaker—for a conversation about how Christians can move beyond shame and silence and create more honest conversations around faith, identity, and sexuality. We’ll talk about long-held expectations, the burdens they create, and the greater freedom, healing, and wholeness that grace makes possible.

If this conversation with Paul stirred something in you—about time, patience, pluralism, judgment, maturity, or the possibility that God’s slowness may be something other than absence—I think these next two conversations will continue that same journey from different angles. One turns toward imagination and the literary life of faith. The other toward honesty, grace, and the difficult work of freedom.

Both belong to the same long road.

Here’s what stayed with me from my conversation with Sarah E. Frazer after the recording ended. It was not flashy, not dramatic in the worldly sense, not the sort of thing that trends. It was something quieter and, for that reason, perhaps more important.

She described what it was like to be awake in the night, struggling with anxiety and depression, unable to sleep, and to have her husband turn on the light and begin reading a psalm aloud.

Not offering a technique.
Not trying to win an argument.
Not delivering a pep talk.
Just reading the words of scripture into the darkness.

From that experience came not only deepened faith, but actual work: Sarah’s podcast, Psalms to Help You Sleep, and now her forthcoming devotional book, He Is With Me Through the Night, which grows naturally out of the same terrain. Her earlier book, I Didn’t Sign Up for This: How to Rest in God’s Goodness When Your Story Shifts, provides the broader frame: the life we thought we were entering gives way to another life, one we did not plan, one we would not have selected from the catalog, and yet one in which God must somehow still be found.

That struck me because it gets at something many modern believers, for all our resources and sophistication, still resist admitting: there are times when the soul is too tired for analysis. There are times when the best theology in the room is not the most intricate, but the most inhabitable. A psalm in the night. A voice reading truth when your own mind will not cooperate. A reminder that God is not absent simply because darkness feels thick.

Sarah made the point beautifully that the Psalms do not shy away from darkness. They are not embarrassed by fear, delay, confusion, or the repeated human cry of How long? They are full of night language. They are full of the uneasy middle. And because they are, they remain usable.

That, to me, is more than a comforting devotional insight. It is a clue to reality itself. We are not sustained merely by explanations. We are sustained by speech that comes from within - in response to the condition we find ourselves in.

From there, several other takeaways from my interview with Sarah came into focus.

1. Faith becomes real when it becomes chosen

One of the most important parts of Sarah’s story was not the crisis itself, but what preceded it.

She grew up in a Christian home in Appalachia, homeschooled, formed from an early age by scripture, church, and a stable devotional environment. Then she went to a secular college and had to confront what many people eventually confront in one form or another: not merely What have I been taught? but What do I myself believe?

I appreciated her honesty here. She did not dramatize the process unnecessarily. She did not describe it as a total collapse or a rebellious rejection. It was more subtle than that, and therefore perhaps more universal. She came to see that she had a choice. Her parents could not choose for her. Her church could not choose for her. She had to decide whether faith would become her own.

That is a vital transition in any serious spiritual life.

There is a difference between being carried along by a current and holding fast to our conviction. The former may be a gift; the latter is a responsibility. And yet I was especially struck by the way she described her parents and church as making room for questions without shaming her for asking them. That is no small thing. Too often religious communities confuse inquiry with betrayal and create the very brittle faith they later lament.

What emerged in Sarah’s case was not the abandonment of belief, but its deepening. The faith that would later sustain her in suffering had already passed through the test of choice.

2. Sometimes we say yes to God in principle and then discover the actual assignment was much harder

Sarah’s adoption story is where this becomes concrete.

She and her husband felt called to adopt internationally from China. They said yes. They moved forward in obedience. And then, after bringing home their daughter, they found themselves in a reality they had not fully anticipated, especially regarding the severity and complexity of the child’s special needs.

This is where the title I Didn’t Sign Up for This lands with such force.

Of course, at one level, she did sign up for adoption. That is precisely the point. She signed up for what she understood. What she did not sign up for was the unchosen excess, the overflow, the version of the story that arrived with dimensions she could neither predict nor manage in advance.

That is true far beyond adoption.

People say yes to marriage, but not to betrayal.
Yes to parenthood, but not to diagnosis.
Yes to vocation, but not to collapse.
Yes to mission, but not to pandemic isolation in a foreign country two months after arrival.

One of the strengths of Sarah’s witness is that she does not flatten any of this into cliché. She does not pretend difficulty means God was not in it. Nor does she suggest that calling exempts us from disorientation. Rather, she bears witness to the fact that obedience may lead directly into conditions that force faith to grow roots.

That, as I heard it, was one of her great themes: there may not be much visible fruit in winter, but something is happening under the surface.

3. Peace is not a destination but a daily provision

This was perhaps Sarah’s most quotable insight, but it is more than a quotable line. It is a corrective to a profound spiritual error.

She said that for much of her life, especially as a planner, she wanted a plan. She wanted to know how things would go, how to prepare, how to solve, how to move forward. But in the crucible of caring for her daughter, and later in other upheavals, she came to see that what God was giving her was not a plan in the sense she wanted.

What He was giving was peace for today.

Not five years of peace.
Not a map of the entire journey.
Not a warranty against future pain.
Enough peace for this day.

Her image of a “coffee cup of peace” was simple and memorable. You have enough for this morning. Tomorrow’s cup will come tomorrow.

That is difficult teaching for people like me, and perhaps for many of my readers, because we confuse understanding with security. We would like to believe that if we can interpret the pattern correctly, we can finally rest. But Sarah’s testimony points in another direction. Peace is not the reward for having deciphered the whole plot. It is a provision that arrives while the plot is still unresolved.

There is deep biblical resonance in that. Daily bread, not annual stockpiles. Manna, not hoarding. Light for the step at hand, not floodlighting for the entire wilderness.

4. God’s goodness and God’s sovereignty must be held together

This was, in my view, one of the strongest theological formulations in our conversation.

Sarah said that God’s sovereignty by itself is only partly comforting. If God is in control but not good, then His power offers little consolation. On the other hand, the goodness of God by itself is also only partly comforting. If He is kind but not truly governing events, then we are left with sentiment but not security.

Both must be held together.

This matters because suffering distorts instinct. In pain, we often swing toward one error or the other. Either we imagine God as powerful but remote, ordaining things without tenderness, or we imagine Him as loving but somehow standing helplessly on the sidelines while events overtake us.

Sarah’s point was that Christian faith refuses both reductions.

The God who meets us in the dark is not merely sympathetic. He is sovereign.
And the God who rules is not merely efficient. He is good.

That is not an easy doctrine. It does not dissolve mystery. But it does preserve relationship. It gives us grounds not only to submit, but to trust.

5. The Psalms remain because they tell the truth about the life we are actually living

Let me return where I began, because in some ways all the other takeaways converge here.

Sarah’s work around the Psalms matters because it is grounded in lived necessity. She did not arrive at this by branding strategy. She arrived there because, in the middle of the night, the Psalms proved inhabitable. They could carry fear, insomnia, sadness, uncertainty, and longing without lying about any of them.

That is what scripture does at its best. It does not merely describe ideal states. It speaks into actual conditions.

And the Psalms, perhaps more than any other portion of scripture, grant language for the in-between:
when the answer has not come,
when the story has shifted,
when the future is hidden,
when the body will not rest,
when the questions keep circling,
when faith itself is less like triumph and more like breathing through the night.

Sarah’s life and work are a reminder that there is no shame in needing such language. There is wisdom in it.

If you have not encountered her work, I would encourage you to explore it: I Didn’t Sign Up for This, her podcast Psalms to Help You Sleep, and the forthcoming devotional He Is With Me Through the Night. Each arises from the same core conviction: God’s presence is not canceled by disappointment, and His word remains alive even when we are too weary to do much more than listen.

That, in the end, may be one of the deepest truths of the Christian life.

Sometimes we do not need a grand solution. We need a light turned on in the dark. We need a voice reading a psalm. We need enough peace for today. We need to remember that faith becomes our own not when it is never tested, but when it is chosen. And we need to know that the God who governs the story is also good enough to be trusted within it.

And because these conversations are never really about one guest alone, but about the larger search for truth, healing, faith, and what it means to live as those created in the image of God, I want to invite you to stay with me for what is coming next on Created in the Image of God.

On Sunday, August 30 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Michael Ward—theologian, literary scholar, and one of the leading experts on C.S. Lewis. We’ll explore the imagination, theology, and hidden depths of Lewis’s work, and why his stories continue to resonate so powerfully with readers today. From The Chronicles of Narnia to the larger cosmos of Lewis’s thought, it promises to be a rich conversation about the ways literature can illuminate faith in unexpected ways.

Then on Tuesday, September 1 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Kelly Edmonston—pastor, author, and speaker—for a conversation about how Christians can move beyond shame and silence into more honest engagement around faith, identity, and sexuality. We’ll talk about the long-held expectations that often bind people unnecessarily, and about the greater freedom, healing, and wholeness that grace makes possible.

If this conversation with Sarah stirred something in you—about darkness, waiting, scripture, peace, or the slow work of learning to trust God when life goes off script—I think these next two conversations will extend that journey in meaningful ways. One turns toward imagination and literary vision. The other toward honesty, grace, and the difficult work of freedom. Both, in their own way, belong to the same road.

Not an obstacle to love. Not a complication. Not one more unfortunate feature of the human condition. The enemy.

That is a stronger claim than many Christians are prepared to make. We are often more comfortable speaking about guilt than shame, more comfortable speaking about sin than humiliation, more comfortable speaking about what we have done than about what we have come to believe we are. Guilt can be processed in a moral grammar. Shame goes deeper. Shame is not merely, I did wrong. Shame is, something about me is wrong, contemptible, disqualifying, unworthy of delight.

That distinction matters. It matters because guilt can, at least in principle, be forgiven while shame still sits in the soul like a squatter. It matters because a human being can confess and still hide. It matters because shame does not merely accuse; it sabotages the very capacities by which love becomes possible.

Dan put it in terms I found clarifying: faith and hope are the servants of love. Faith is that grounding trust by which we can stand somewhere. Hope is that movement toward what is not yet, that imaginative willingness to enter the future. Love is where both are meant to go: the giving and receiving of goodness, pleasure, honor, delight. Shame, then, does not simply make us feel bad. It works to shatter faith, poison hope, and make love feel dangerous, false, or inaccessible.

I have seen this not only in theory but in memory.

One of the defining scenes of my childhood is trying, and failing, to reach my mother while alcohol had taken her somewhere I could not go. What I remember is not merely addiction in the abstract, but atmosphere. A room. A distance. Carole King’s Tapestry playing. And me, somewhere nearby, unable to bridge the gap between the woman who loved me and the woman who had become inaccessible to me. That distinction is important. My mother did love us. Children know such things with a kind of stubborn and irrational loyalty. That love is part of what makes the injury harder to name. If there had been no love, the case would have been simpler. But simplicity is rarely granted in the human story.

What I could not understand then, but can at least partially understand now, is that shame thrives in precisely those ambiguities. It does not require overt brutality to do its work. Neglect will do. Inaccessibility will do. Confusion will do. A child trying to make emotional contact with a parent who is present but absent, near but unreachable, learns something terrible without ever being formally taught it. He begins to suspect that reality itself cannot be trusted. He begins to imagine, because children nearly always do, that somehow he is implicated in the break. He begins to devise strategies—for being good, or clever, or useful, or invisible, or precocious, or indispensable—not simply to obtain love but to survive the possibility that love is unstable.

That is one of shame’s great powers: it can enter long before language catches up. It can become architecture.

This is why I found Dan’s appeal to Eden so piercing. “They were naked and knew no shame.” We read that line too quickly. We tend to hear only innocence there. But what is being described is also unguardedness without humiliation, exposure without contempt, embodiment without self-rejection. Then comes the terrible question: Who told you that you were naked? Not, as Dan rightly noted, who informed you of an amusing fact about anatomy, but who introduced the idea that what I made is now grounds for hiding?

That is the human crisis in miniature.

And yet there is another side to this, one that matters just as much: we are never reducible to our damage.

This too Dan said beautifully. Human beings are always some terrible, glorious mixture. Brokenness and beauty are entangled. We are not one thing and then the other. We are not beautiful until brokenness is removed, nor only broken until beauty is earned back. We are both, now, always, in ways that confound moral bookkeeping and sentimental narratives alike.

I have spent much of my writing life circling that truth. Not because I solved it, but because I could not get around it. The world is full of people who want cleaner categories than reality provides. Villain and victim. innocence and guilt. nobility and corruption. But actual lives resist such sorting. The same mother whose alcoholism rendered her unreachable could also be loved, defended, remembered tenderly. The same son who suffered neglect could become proud, manipulative, self-protective, even while sincerely longing for truth and goodness. The same self can contain hunger for God and rebellion against Him, tenderness and vanity, courage and evasion.

This is not moral relativism. It is realism.

One of the decisive moments of my own life came not while I was being exemplary, but while I was very much not being a good boy. In Alaska, in the context of a high-speed chase that could easily have ended very differently, I came later to the conclusion that God had saved me. Not because I deserved it. Not because I had reached some admirable spiritual state. Not because I had finally become the sort of person a holy God would naturally wish to reward. He saved me while I was in the wrong. He saved me in motion, in danger, in defiance, in foolishness. And something about that fact rearranged me.

Had God intervened only once I had become morally presentable, I might have concluded that heaven operates on the same conditional logic that governs so much human affection. Improve yourself. Clean yourself up. Perform sincerity convincingly enough. Become worthy of rescue. But that is not what happened. What happened, as I came to understand it, was much more scandalous. Mercy arrived first.

Or to use Paul’s phrase, which Dan brought into sharp focus: it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance.

That verse is often cited, but rarely allowed to explode the emotional economy of religion. We say we believe in grace, but we often structure our spirituality as though repentance is chiefly the result of disgust, fear, or exhaustion. Feel bad enough and maybe you are on your way back to God. Become sufficiently ashamed of yourself and perhaps heaven will take notice.

But what if that is backwards?

What if repentance, in its deepest sense, is not fundamentally groveling but coming to oneself in the presence of undeserved kindness? What if the prodigal son’s real difficulty was not merely the pigsty but the party? What if the hardest thing is not admitting we have wandered, but consenting to be celebrated when we return?

I think that is right. In fact, I think it explains why so many of us resist grace more fiercely than we resist condemnation.

Condemnation, at least, feels familiar. It fits the old equations. It confirms what shame has been whispering all along. Of course you are unworthy. Of course goodness must be rationed around you. Of course delight is for others, not for you. But kindness—real kindness—poses a far more destabilizing threat. It suggests that the deepest thing about God is not His reluctance but His generosity. It suggests that His movement toward us is not merely juridical but affectionate. It suggests that the Father we have been avoiding may actually wish to welcome us with more joy than our self-contempt knows how to bear.

This, I suspect, is one of the reasons I eventually chose to claim God as my Father. I say chose deliberately. There was thought in it, and gratitude, and surrender, but there was also something like recognition. If I had been preserved in that Alaskan moment while not being good, then my relation to God could not be founded on being the good boy. It would have to be founded on something prior. Something more like election, or mercy, or love.

And if that is so, then shame’s reign is broken not by denial of sin but by a deeper belonging than sin can cancel.

This does not make repentance unnecessary. On the contrary, it makes it possible. The person most capable of repentance is not the one most terrified of punishment, but the one most disarmed by love. Not because love minimizes evil, but because love finally tells the truth about both evil and the self. It tells the truth about what has been done to us. It tells the truth about what we have done. It tells the truth about the strange entanglement of beauty and wreckage that constitutes an actual human life. And then, somehow, it does not turn away.

That is what shame cannot tolerate.

Shame wants us hidden, simplified, and contemptuous. Hidden from others, hidden from God, hidden even from ourselves. Simplified into a single accusation. Contemptuous toward our enemies, contemptuous toward our bodies, contemptuous toward our stories, contemptuous toward the needy child in us who still longs to be reached through the haze of music and alcohol and absence.

Love does something else. Love opens the door to a harsher and kinder honesty. It allows us to say that our wounds are real without enthroning them. It allows us to name sin without converting the self into refuse. It allows us to see that brokenness and beauty are not alternating chapters but concurrent realities. And it allows us, finally, to imagine that God’s movement toward us may be more celebratory than suspicious.

That is no small thing. For some of us, it may be the hardest thing of all.

To believe that God sees the whole tangled canvas—the neglect, the pride, the longing, the rebellion, the fear, the tenderness, the false starts, the near disasters, the desperate attempts to reach a mother who cannot be reached, the miles of road traveled badly and yet survived—and still says: Come in. Sit down. Eat. Be glad. You are mine.

If that is true, then repentance is not the payment we make to reenter the house. It is the turning by which we stop running from the feast.

And shame, for all its ancient power, does not get the final word.

And because none of these reflections stand alone, I would encourage you to stay with the larger conversation unfolding on Created in the Image of God.

On my recent family trip to Sweden I fell a bit behind on my Substack articles. So the sneak peek of next week’s shows, are now not that anymore. But I call them out here for how they naturally they extend what Dan Allender helped illuminate here. On Sunday, August 23 I spoke with Sarah E. Frazer—author, Bible teacher, and speaker—about trusting God’s goodness when life does not unfold the way we expected. From fear and uncertainty to hope, peace, and rest in the middle of life’s unexpected turns, hers is a conversation that belongs very much to this same terrain. If repentance begins not in self-condemnation but in the kindness of God, then learning to trust that kindness when life disappoints us is no small matter.

Then last night, on Tuesday, August 25, I was joined by Paul Dafydd Jones—theologian, professor, and author—to explore the theology of patience and why waiting can become one of the deepest expressions of Christian faith. From Christology and public theology to the wisdom, freedom, and hope found in patient faith, this too touches the nerve we have been tracing here. Shame urges us toward contempt, urgency, and despair. Love, by contrast, often asks us to endure time differently.

So if this conversation with Dan stirred something in you—if it touched a nerve around shame, brokenness, beauty, repentance, or the possibility that God may be kinder than we know—I hope you’ll check those shows out, or at least return here to read my reflections on what I learned. These are not separate subjects. They are part of the same long and winding road.

What Steve is naming is something many of us have sensed for a long time, even if we have not always said it clearly. A great many Christians in America are not being formed primarily by Jesus. They are being formed by culture. More specifically, by media, ideology, political tribalism, social resentment, and the constant pressure to interpret everything through the categories of power, fear, and outrage.

That is the problem.

And if that is the problem, then the answer is not better marketing, cooler music, stronger branding, or a more updated performance of relevance.

The answer is that the church must learn to be different again.

That was, in effect, the heart of my conversation with Steve.

He spoke very plainly about what led him to write the book. He looked at churches, including churches he knew well, and asked a very important question: what is actually discipling these people? What is really shaping how they think, react, judge, fear, and treat one another? His answer, stated simply, was that for many of them it was not the teachings of Jesus. It was social media and cable news. That may be a slight oversimplification, but only a slight one.

And if that is true, then we should not be surprised by the results.

People who are constantly discipled by outrage will become outraged people.

People who are constantly discipled by fear will become fearful people.

People who are constantly discipled by grievance will begin to interpret the world through grievance.

And people who are constantly discipled by power will begin to assume that power is the highest good.

At that point, “Jesus” remains in the vocabulary, but he no longer governs the imagination.

He becomes a mascot for instincts formed somewhere else.

That is what it means, in practice, for Jesus to become too American. Not that America has no good in it. Not that there is no place for gratitude for one’s country. Not that political life is irrelevant. But when the surrounding culture begins to exert more authority over the Christian imagination than the Gospels do, then we have not simply contextualized the faith. We have distorted it.

This is not a new danger.

Every age remakes Jesus in its own image if left unchecked. In the first century, many expected a Messiah in a Maccabean mold: a figure of force, national restoration, visible triumph, and political reversal. And Jesus was a disappointment to those expectations. He did speak truth to power, but not in the way people wanted. He did confront the order of the world, but not by becoming what they expected. He laid down power. He refused the script. He conquered by sacrifice. He redefined kingship through service.

That is still offensive.

It is especially offensive in a culture obsessed with victory, image, control, and force.

And this is where Steve’s second point becomes so important. If the problem is that the church is being overformed by American culture, then the answer is not for the church to become even more culturally fluent in a shallow sense. It is for the church to become more visibly and concretely Christian.

In other words, different.

Steve made the point well. The early church did not change the world because it was stylish, entertaining, or cleverly branded. It changed the world because it was distinct. It cared for the poor. It cared for abandoned children. It cared for the sick, the elderly, and the vulnerable. It developed social instincts that did not simply mirror the empire around it. It did not become persuasive because it was impressive on the empire’s terms. It became persuasive because it embodied a different kingdom.

That should not be controversial. It should be common sense.

Yet we continue to act as though the church will become effective by appearing less strange to the culture, when in fact one of the great historical strengths of Christianity was that it taught people how to live in ways the surrounding culture did not naturally produce.

I do not mean eccentricity for its own sake.

I do not mean cultivating weirdness.

I mean actual difference where it counts.

If wealth is idolized, Christians should be conspicuously generous.

If power is worshiped, Christians should be conspicuously servant-hearted.

If public life is fueled by contempt, Christians should be conspicuously capable of enemy-love.

If loneliness is rampant, Christians should be conspicuously hospitable.

If everything is turned into branding and performance, Christians should be conspicuously sincere.

This is not a strategy. It is discipleship.

One of the things I appreciated in Steve’s account was his refusal to confuse cultural relevance with cosmetic adaptation. A fog machine is not a theology. Better coffee is not a witness. Dressing down is not a kingdom ethic. None of those things is necessarily bad, but none of them addresses the actual crisis.

The crisis is moral and spiritual formation.

What are Christians being taught to admire?

What are they being trained to fear?

What are they learning to love?

What are they learning to despise?

And whose voice is carrying the most weight in that process?

These are not peripheral questions. They are central.

Steve’s answer, and I think it is a good one, is that the New Testament must have more sway than America does. Not because America is uniquely evil, but because no nation can occupy the place of the kingdom of God without corrupting the church that permits it. The church does not exist to ratify the emotional life of a civilization. It exists to testify to another king.

That does not mean withdrawal from society. Quite the opposite. It means engaging society from a different center.

This is why I think Steve’s emphasis on the poor was so important. Jesus’ statement that “the poor you always have with you” has often been used as though it were a permission slip for resignation. Steve did not read it that way, and neither do I. The point is not that poverty can be solved once and for all through policy or goodwill. The point is that the existence of the poor does not relieve us of responsibility. It establishes the field in which responsibility must be exercised.

The early church understood this. It did not eradicate suffering. It did not eliminate social need. But it did create communities in which people were less abandoned. It made visible the rule of God by how it treated those who would otherwise be forgotten.

Again, this is what difference looks like.

Not superiority. Not self-congratulation. Not culture war theater.

Difference.

A church that cares for people in ways the surrounding culture finds inconvenient or irrational is a church that becomes legible as church again.

And that legibility matters.

Because right now many people who are outside the church, and not a few inside it, do not know what the church is for. They see noise, positioning, and reaction. They see Christians mirroring the same tribal instincts as everyone else, only with more Bible verses attached. And then Christians wonder why their witness has weakened.

It has weakened because it has become less distinct.

The answer is not to shout louder.

The answer is to become harder to confuse with the surrounding world.

That is what I found most useful in Steve’s framework. He is not merely criticizing America. He is calling the church back to its own center. If Jesus is too American in our imaginations, then we need to return to the Jesus who cannot be comfortably contained by American categories at all. The Jesus who lays down power. The Jesus who blesses enemies. The Jesus who notices the poor. The Jesus who builds communities of reconciliation rather than communities of resentment. The Jesus whose kingdom does not arrive by domination, yet eventually judges all domination.

And if we return to that Jesus, the church may once again learn how to be different in the only ways that really matter.

Not cooler.

Not trendier.

Not more aggressive.

More Christian.

That would be a start.

Sneak Peek

Next week on Created in the Image of God, I’ll be speaking with Sarah E. Frazer about trusting God’s goodness when life does not unfold the way we expected. That should open into a needed conversation about fear, uncertainty, hope, peace, and rest in the middle of life’s unwanted turns.

Then I’ll be speaking with Paul Dafydd Jones about the theology of patience and why waiting can become one of the deepest expressions of Christian faith. That conversation will move into Christology, public theology, and the wisdom and freedom that can emerge from patient faith.

As always, thank you for reading. And remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.

A more concrete way to put it is that I once found myself in a high-speed chase with the Alaska State Troopers, driving recklessly, trying to outrun consequences I had no business trying to outrun. I was young, confused, proud, and, in more ways than one, lost. I had enough religion in me to use the language of God. I had enough instability in me to behave as though I had no father at all.

That tension has stayed with me for many years.

What does it mean to call God “Father” when your life does not look at all like the life of a faithful son? What does it mean to speak in the language of belonging while acting out a rebellion you can barely explain to yourself? And perhaps most importantly, at what point does God come near? Does he wait until we have improved our behavior, arranged our theology, and cleaned up our mess? Or does he come precisely in the middle of it?

My conversation with Derek Vreeland brought that question back to the surface.

Derek’s work on God in the Neighborhood, built around Eugene Peterson’s rendering of John 1:14 in The Message, turns on one line: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”

That is one of those translations that, whether or not one would want it as the sole rendering of the verse, does something important to the imagination. It takes a majestic theological claim and places it where we actually live.

Neighborhood.

Not merely temple. Not merely heaven. Not merely doctrine. Neighborhood.

There is a great deal packed into that.

Christians say easily enough that God became man. We say it so often that we can forget how strange it is. Derek was right to emphasize how unexpected the incarnation really was. People were waiting for many things, but not for this. They were waiting for victory, deliverance, restoration, vindication, perhaps even for power granted from above. But the claim that God would come near in flesh and blood, in humility, in obscurity, in vulnerability, in proximity to ordinary people — that was harder to receive.

It still is.

We tend to want a God who stays safely elevated until we are ready for him. Or a God who has power that we can invoke, only in spectacle, only in the approved places. But the New Testament insists on something more unsettling. God did not remain at a distance. He came among us. He came not simply to institutions, not simply to the strong, not simply to those with all the right answers. He came into the neighborhood.

That matters because neighborhoods are where real life happens.

Neighborhoods are where people carry shame, confusion, ego, habits, addictions, memories, griefs, and unfinished stories. Neighborhoods are where pipes burst on Christmas Eve, where marriages strain, where children grow up insecure, where people move in and out, where fathers fail and sons run, where religion can sit on the edge of life for years without becoming its center. Neighborhoods are not theoretical. They are where incarnation has to mean something or it means very little.

What struck me in Derek’s own story was how much of his life was shaped not by religious abstraction but by proximity. A family returning to church. A youth group not built on flash but on Jesus. A boy named Michael turning around in a folding chair and asking a shy newcomer, “Who are you?” No gimmick. No grand strategy. Just presence. Interest. Kindness. A lived expression of the gospel.

That too is neighborhood.

And that too is incarnation in derivative form. Not that Michael was Jesus, of course, but that he was embodying the way of Jesus. He was practicing the kind of ordinary welcome through which God often begins to reorder a life.

I think that is one reason Derek’s account resonated with me.

Many people imagine that transformation begins when someone wins an argument. Sometimes arguments matter. I care about ideas, theology, interpretation, and truth claims. But in actual life, transformation often begins because someone embodied the reality they professed. Someone made room. Someone noticed you. Someone did not treat you as a problem to solve or a threat to manage. Someone loved you in a way that made God more plausible.

That is not sentimental. It is deeply theological.

If the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood, then Christian witness must not remain merely conceptual. It must take flesh as well. It must become visible in hospitality, kindness, patience, courage, forgiveness, and the kind of attention that says to another person: you are not alone here.

This was part of what I was missing, or at least struggling to understand, in my younger years.

I knew enough to invoke God. I did not know enough to live as though his fatherhood actually reordered the whole structure of my life. I could claim belonging while acting in ways that contradicted it. That is not unusual. It may even be one of the most common spiritual conditions in the world. But what I did not understand clearly then is that God’s nearness is not the reward for having already become good. It is the means by which goodness begins to be restored.

That does not excuse rebellion. It does not romanticize dysfunction. It does not imply that a high-speed chase is somehow spiritually noble. It was stupid. It was dangerous. It was wrong. But the grace of God is precisely that he does not say, “Return once you have become presentable.” The Father in the Prodigal Son story comes near while we are still far off.

This is what makes the incarnation so central.

God does not save us by shouting instructions from a distance. He does not merely send a memo. He does not remain the hidden force behind the stars and seasons, though he is certainly that. He enters the human condition. He joins us in life, as Derek put it in speaking about the threefold rhythm of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. He joins us not only in joy and ordinariness, but in suffering and death and new life as well.

That is why “moved into the neighborhood” is more than a clever phrase. It is a corrective.

It corrects the idea that God is only found in centers of power. It corrects the idea that religion is mainly about escaping the ordinary. It corrects the idea that God’s work happens elsewhere and that our streets, homes, families, and local communities are spiritually secondary. They are not secondary. They are exactly where the life of God meets us.

And if that is true, then it has implications for how we live.

It means the neighborhood is not beneath theology. It is where theology must be lived. It means the person next door is not an interruption to spiritual life. He may be one of its tests. It means the local, ordinary, inconvenient, unglamorous work of love matters. It means Christian community should not need spectacle to become compelling. It should need the Divine to be present - through us. It means that if we want to know whether God is doing something among us, one thing to look for is whether people are becoming more capable of welcome, more capable of presence, more capable of love.

And yes, it means that some of us need to reckon honestly with the difference between claiming God as Father and living as sons.

That reckoning can be painful. It can expose hypocrisy, fear, insecurity, and pride. But it is also the beginning of healing. Because the point is not to prove we have always been good boys - or good girls. The point is to discover that the Father we invoke has in fact come near, and that his nearness is the thing that begins to make us whole.

Derek ended our conversation with a simple reminder: You are not alone. God has moved into your neighborhood.

That is simple enough for a child to understand.

It is also deep enough to spend a lifetime learning.

Sneak Peek

Next week on Created in the Image of God, I’ll be speaking with Steve Bezner about how culture shapes our understanding of faith and why following Jesus often means choosing kingdom values over cultural ones. That should open up an important discussion about discipleship, formation, and competing loyalties.

Then I’ll be speaking with Dan Allender about trauma, healing, and the Christian story — and about how God meets us in the deepest places of pain. That is a conversation I am especially looking forward to.

As always, thank you for reading. And remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.

He grew up inside the church. His father was a Baptist minister. Faith came to him early, naturally, almost with what he called his “mother’s milk.” Then, in his teenage years, that inherited faith stopped being enough. He saw hypocrisy. He saw people whose church life and ordinary life did not match. He judged that harshly, by his own later admission. He drifted into atheism. Then, over time, he found his way back.

That is not an unusual story in one sense. Many people inherit faith, reject it, and either return or do not return. But Graham’s account is useful because he was clear about what turned him away and what brought him back.

What turned him away was not first of all a philosophical argument. It was people.

And what brought him back was also people.

That matters.

In my own People of the Sign trilogy, I spent a great deal of time wrestling with the difference between inherited religion, lived conviction, and mature faith. One of the recurring problems in religious life is that we often confuse early formation with final understanding. We are given a faith as children that may be sufficient for childhood. But then the mind develops, the world intrudes, hypocrisy becomes visible, pain arrives, and the old formulations no longer carry the same weight.

That does not necessarily mean the faith was false.

It may only mean it was unfinished.

Graham made a distinction in our conversation that I think is essential. He spoke of rejecting a childish faith, not a childlike one. That is a very important distinction.

A childish faith is one that has never grown up. It depends on formulas it has not examined. It is content with slogans where reality demands substance. It cannot answer honest questions except by suppressing them. It wants certainty without depth.

A childlike faith is different. It is simpler, but not shallower. It trusts. It asks. It depends. It does not pretend to mastery. It is open, alive, and teachable.

This distinction matters because Jesus commends childlikeness, while Paul tells us to put away childish things. Those are not opposites. They are complementary. We are not meant to remain mentally or spiritually infantile. But neither are we meant to lose the capacity for trust.

Graham’s story turns on that point.

He did not return to faith because someone out-argued him. He returned because he encountered Christians whose lives had integrity. They were patient with him. They did not abandon him when he was dismissive of their beliefs. They had a steadiness and compassion he could not explain away. Their lives made the Christian claim plausible again.

That is a fact of enormous importance.

We often imagine that faith is lost and regained primarily through books. Books matter. Ideas matter. Graham himself went on to become a theologian, teacher, writer, and editor. He clearly values the life of the mind. So do I. But what he described, and what I have seen repeatedly in life, is that people are often driven from faith by embodied contradiction and drawn back by embodied coherence.

This is one reason John 13:35 remains so central: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”

That verse is often quoted sentimentally. It should not be. It is a hard test. It means the credibility of Christian witness is not finally measured only by doctrinal precision, but by whether the life of Christ is visible among his people.

That does not diminish doctrine. It places doctrine where it belongs. Truth must become flesh in human conduct or it begins to testify against itself.

Graham’s later reflections on Luther were also useful. He said that Luther’s “justification by faith” might better be rendered as justification by trust. I think that is exactly right, or at least very close to right.

Faith, in the biblical sense, is not merely assenting to a set of propositions. It is trust in the word and character of God. It is relational. It is personal. It is existential. It means that the theological search begins in trust, continues through many questions, and in the end returns to trust.

That too is a pattern I recognize.

One of the themes in People of the Sign is that there is a difference between signs that point beyond themselves and signs that become substitutes for the reality they signify. Religious systems often make that mistake. They turn formulations, institutions, or inherited habits into ends in themselves. But the sign is meant to lead you on. It is not meant to replace the journey.

That is why the “why” questions matter.

I appreciated Graham’s answer when I mentioned my son at age two, asking “why” over and over again. Graham said that was actually a good theological instinct. He was right. Theology should ask why. It should keep asking why. But it should also recognize that not every why is resolved in the same way.

Some are clarified intellectually.

Some are clarified morally.

Some are clarified only through suffering.

And some are clarified not by explanation, but by encounter.

His reference to Job and Aquinas was helpful here. Job’s questions are not answered by a neat argument. They are answered by the presence of God. Aquinas writes one of the greatest theological works in history and then, after a profound spiritual experience, says it is all straw compared to what he has seen.

That does not mean the thinking was useless. It means the thinking was always penultimate.

That is another recurring issue in my own work. I have often returned to the relationship between the divine curriculum and the laboratory of creation. We do need the curriculum. We need revelation, scripture, inherited wisdom, theological reflection. But all of that is meant to be lived and tested in the world as it actually is. If we go into the laboratory without the curriculum, we blow things up. But if we cling to the curriculum as though it were an excuse never to enter the laboratory, we also fail.

Adult faith has to live in both worlds.

That is part of what made Graham’s present work so interesting to me.

Seen & Unseen is not simply a publishing project. It is the fruit of his whole trajectory. A man who inherited faith, rejected a shallow version of it, returned through integrity and trust, deepened through theology, and then came to see that Christian faith is not a private compartment but a lens through which all of life can be read — that man is well positioned to help others do the same.

The name itself matters: Seen & Unseen.

The visible world is not all there is. But neither is the visible world unreal. The question is how to perceive it rightly.

Graham brought Pascal into our conversation at exactly the right point. Pascal understood something many moderns have forgotten: the methods by which we investigate matter are not the same methods by which we come to know God. Experimental science has its place. Historical inquiry has its place. Rational argument has its place. But God is not one more object inside the world to be measured, weighed, and subjected to laboratory conditions.

God is hidden.

Not absent. Hidden.

That distinction is crucial.

He is hidden even in the places where Christians say he is most revealed. Even in Jesus Christ, one could see and yet not see. One could hear and yet not hear. One could shake his hand and miss who he was entirely.

This is why the seen and unseen belong together. The question is not whether God can be reduced to the seen. He cannot. The question is whether the unseen changes how we see.

That is where Graham’s project becomes important in a fractured age.

Much of modern Christianity has either retreated from public life or entered it in a crude and slogan-driven way. On the one hand, faith is privatized. On the other, it becomes ideological. In both cases, something is lost. What is lost is the disciplined habit of looking at politics, economics, sport, literature, grief, technology, and ordinary life through a theological lens without becoming shrill, simplistic, or sectarian.

That kind of work requires maturity.

It requires the kind of person who has passed through inherited religion, doubt, reconstruction, discipline, and trust.

It requires someone who knows the difference between childish certainty and childlike dependence.

And perhaps that is why Graham Tomlin’s life struck me as worth attending to. His trajectory is not merely biographical. It is representative. It shows how faith can be tested without being destroyed, corrected without being abandoned, and deepened without becoming less accessible.

That is not a small thing.

Many people today are not rejecting Christianity itself so much as rejecting thin versions of it, hypocritical versions of it, or unexamined versions of it. Some may never come back. But some, like Graham, may discover that what they rejected was not the whole of the matter.

And for those people, the witness that matters most may still be what first mattered for him: lives of integrity, patient trust, and people who refuse to give up on them.

That is not the whole of theology.

But it may be where theology becomes believable.

Sneak Peek

Next up, on Sunday, is my conversation with Steve Bezner, reflecting on how culture shapes our understanding of faith and why following Jesus often means choosing kingdom values over cultural ones.

After that, on Tuesday, comes my conversation with Dan Allender, exploring trauma, healing, and the Christian story, and how God meets us in the deep places of pain.

So that is what lies ahead in writing, even though the interviews themselves are already available to watch.

And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.

We spoke only briefly while preparing for what was supposed to be a full interview on Created in the Image of God. He had a medical procedure coming up. From what I understood, it was not expected to be especially dangerous. We scheduled around it. Then he died.

That fact alone was enough to bring certain things back to the front of my mind.

The last few years have already forced me to think a great deal about grief, mortality, and the shortness of time. I have written elsewhere about the deaths in my own family. So when John died suddenly, before we could have the conversation we had planned, it sharpened something that has already been sharpening in me for some time: life is short, time is uncertain, and we had better learn to focus on what matters most.

That is why we went ahead with the memorial episode.

Not because I had some long personal friendship with John, but because his life’s work touched something important, and because death has a way of stripping away secondary concerns. It forces the question: what was worth giving a life to?

In John Esposito’s case, one answer is clear. He gave much of his life to helping Christians and Muslims understand one another.

That does not mean he believed all religious claims are identical. It does not mean he erased differences. It means he thought understanding mattered. And he thought it mattered enough to build institutions around it, teach it, write about it, and defend it in public, especially after 9/11, when fear and ignorance were feeding each other at scale.

That work matters because unity, harmony, and love matter.

I do not mean a shallow unity built on avoiding hard questions. I mean something simpler and more demanding. If we claim to love God, then we cannot treat other human beings as abstractions. We cannot reduce them to slogans, inherited hostilities, or caricatures. And if our spiritual calling includes loving even our enemies, then it certainly includes trying to understand our neighbors.

Understanding is not the same as agreement. But it does come before any serious disagreement.

You cannot love what you refuse to understand.

You also cannot correct what you do not first understand. Much of what passes for religious conviction is really just reaction. We inherit stories about the other side. We absorb habits of suspicion. We repeat things we have heard from our own camp. And before long we imagine ourselves defending truth when in fact we may simply be defending ignorance.

John’s work stood against that.

He founded the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown in the early 1990s, in part because there was already concern that Islam would be cast as the next global threat. After 9/11, that concern was obviously justified. Islamophobia did not emerge from nowhere, but it spread with new force. In that environment, John became one of the public voices insisting that Islam had to be understood on its own terms, not simply through inherited polemics or political fear.

That was not a small contribution. It was a necessary one.

In the memorial episode, Mekye Abdus Salaam and I talked about this from a number of angles. Mekye has his own interfaith work through the Interfaith Library. He has also had a near-death experience, including heart failure and a transplant, so the conversation naturally carried a certain gravity. But one theme became especially clear as we reflected on John’s remarks.

Religion has an ego problem.

John put it plainly in the brief material we had from our pre-interview. He referred to the ego of religious traditions. That phrase is worth sitting with.

By that he meant, at least in part, the tendency of every tradition to say: I have the truth, therefore the other does not really count. Or if the other does count, it must count only on my terms. That instinct is old. It is not unique to any one religion. It is a human problem that becomes especially dangerous when dressed in sacred language.

The ego of religion is what turns conviction into self-importance.

It is what makes traditions defensive rather than truthful. It is what makes argument more important than understanding. It is what makes people less interested in what God has actually said and more interested in proving that their camp is superior. It is what makes religion a badge of identity rather than a path of transformation.

And once that ego takes over, the center does not hold.

What should hold the center? Not vagueness. Not relativism. Not indifference to truth. The center that must hold is humility before God and love toward other human beings made by God.

Without that, religion hardens.

With it, religion can still have conviction without becoming idolatrous about itself.

This is where understanding before agreement becomes so important. If I must love even an enemy, then I must at least try to understand him. If I cannot do that, then my religion may still be full of words, but it is already losing its center.

This applies with particular force to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, because the rivalries here are not superficial. They are old. They are bound up with family, lineage, revelation, inheritance, and competing interpretations of sacred history.

In the memorial episode, I touched briefly on some of those disputes. Ishmael and Isaac. The children of Abraham. The persistence of sibling rivalry in religious memory. These are not minor matters. They have shaped civilizations. They still shape assumptions today.

But this is exactly why the ego of religion is so dangerous. Once those rivalries are absorbed into identity without humility, they become permanent fuel. Every side can tell a story in which it is the rightful heir and the other is the problem. Every side can nurse grievance. Every side can confuse chosenness with possession.

And yet the deeper truth is simpler.

We are all brothers.

That does not erase real differences. It does not solve doctrinal disputes by magic. It does not mean there are no hard questions about prophecy, scripture, history, or authority. It means that ancient rivalry is not the highest truth about us.

John understood that serious religious understanding had to include these hard matters, not avoid them. In the material we aired, he was quite willing to discuss Abrahamic lineage, Islam’s recognition of biblical prophets, the role of Mary in the Quran, and the way Jews and Christians often fail to grasp that Muslims see themselves as standing within, not outside of, a line of revelation. He was not afraid of complexity. But he did not use complexity as a weapon.

That is a rare discipline.

Too often, people use difficult religious questions as a means of exclusion. John used them as an invitation to deeper understanding.

That seems to me part of his legacy.

It also points toward the final issue. If we can learn to set aside the ego of religion, at least enough to seek understanding honestly, then we may be able to build communities that are not based on total agreement, but on something deeper.

This is very close to the stated purpose of my show: building vibrant communities.

A vibrant community is not one in which everyone is identical. It is one in which people can remain truthful about differences without turning those differences into permanent hostility. It is one in which the image of God in the other is not erased by disagreement. It is one in which understanding is treated as a duty, not a luxury.

I know from my own background how hard that is.

I came out of a religious world that had real zeal, real love within its own boundaries, and real seriousness about God. But it was also isolated. One of the great difficulties was welcoming others in without first requiring that they become exactly like us. That is not a new problem. The early church wrestled with versions of the same issue. How much must a person become like us before we can receive him as a brother? That question never fully goes away.

But if we begin with the ego of religion, we answer it badly.

If we begin with humility, understanding, and the recognition that we are all answerable to God, then perhaps we answer it better.

That does not mean all paths are the same in every respect. It does mean that any path toward God ought to make us less arrogant, not more. More honest, not less. More capable of recognizing a brother, not less.

That is one reason John’s death mattered to me, even though I did not know him well. It interrupted a planned conversation and turned it into a memorial. But in doing so, it also clarified the conversation.

Time is short.

The world has enough religious ego already. More than enough. What it needs are people who can hold conviction and humility together. People who can seek understanding before condemnation. People who can remember that unity and love are not sentimental extras, but central obligations.

John Esposito gave much of his life to that work.

That is worth remembering.

Sneak Peek

Because I am still behind in the written sequence, the sneak peek here refers to the next essays, not to upcoming broadcasts. The shows themselves have already aired, and you can find them on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series.

This past Sunday I had a conversation with Graham Tomlin, reflecting on the church’s role in today’s culture and on how Christians can engage the world with wisdom, imagination, and hope.

And in the Tuesday evening show my conversation was with Derek Vreeland, exploring what it means to keep Jesus at the center and how his way reshapes communities, relationships, and everyday life.

So that is what lies ahead in writing, even though the interviews themselves are already available to watch.

And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.

My interview with Mandy Smith helped me look back on my own life in ministry in a new light.

That does not happen to me every day.

I have reflected for many years on why I resigned from full-time ministry in 1995. At the time, I understood part of it clearly enough. I wanted to separate my faith from my paycheck. I had seen too much institutional confusion, too much spiritual overreach, too much of the strange distortion that happens when a person is placed in a role that invites others to confuse human leadership with divine authority.

But there was something deeper going on too, something I do not think I had fully named at the time.

I did not want people looking to me as though I were God.

That may sound overstated, but any minister who has lived in that space knows exactly what I mean. People rarely say it that way, of course. They do not come up and announce, “Please replace the Almighty for me.” But there is often an unspoken hope: answer this for me, decide this for me, resolve this for me, reassure me, carry me, make the uncertainty go away.

And if we are not careful, it feels delicious.

Mandy used that word, and I appreciated the honesty of it. She said there are moments in ministry when people look at you in a way that makes it clear they are mistaking you for God, and that ministers can fall into that trap because, especially when one does not feel particularly competent, that kind of gaze can be intoxicating. It can feel like confirmation. It can feel like relief. It can feel like finally being enough.

But it is a lie.

And it is one of the more dangerous lies in ministry.

One of the last sermons I gave before resigning questioned the familiar language about “doing the work of God.” I asked, more or less, what exactly we meant by that. Had we made God unemployed? If we are doing his work for him, what exactly is he doing? It was not a popular line of thought. It did not make me many friends among the ministry or among lay members who preferred a stronger, clearer, more final kind of pastoral authority.

But even then I was trying to get at something real: the minister is not there to replace God, but to point beyond himself. Not to become the answer, but to encourage people into relationship with the one who is.

Mandy helped me see that my discomfort with ministry was not only theological. It was also profoundly human.

Her whole framework in The Vulnerable Pastor is that our limitations do not disqualify ministry. They are often the very thing that keeps it honest. The pastor who feels the work is impossible is not necessarily failing. In fact, that sense of impossibility may be one of the few things saving him from spiritual delusion.

That struck me deeply.

Because ministry is impossible.

Not difficult. Not demanding. Not merely stressful. Impossible.

If you take the job seriously, you quickly realize that no amount of preparation, intelligence, discipline, or compassion will ever make you equal to it. There is always more pain than you can heal, more conflict than you can resolve, more need than you can meet, more confusion than you can clarify, more brokenness than you can hold.

And then, on top of all that, many ministers carry a second burden: the shame of not being enough.

That is where Mandy’s insight becomes so important. The problem is not merely that ministry is beyond us. The problem is that we often add a false “should” to that reality. I should be able to handle this. I should be able to fix this. I should know what to do. I should be stronger, clearer, wiser, calmer, more decisive, more fruitful.

But who said so?

Not God.

That extra layer of accusation usually comes from somewhere else: vanity, comparison, institutional culture, inherited expectations, fear, ego, or simply the world’s relentless demand that adults be in control. Mandy’s great gift in this conversation was to name that demand and reject it.

That connected very naturally to another theme she raised, one that may seem at first glance unrelated but is not: childlikeness.

Jesus said that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. That is one of those sayings people quote warmly and then usually leave unexplored. Mandy has clearly explored it. And what she said about it was, to my mind, one of the most illuminating parts of the interview.

She made an important distinction between childlikeness and childishness. Scripture itself makes that distinction. Paul says that when he became a man, he put away childish things. So Jesus is obviously not calling us to immaturity, irresponsibility, or foolishness. He is calling us back to something else: openness, honesty, dependence, wonder, availability, freedom from the shame of not being in control.

That last point is crucial.

A child, at least in the healthy sense Mandy was describing, is not surprised by powerlessness. A child does not imagine that he runs the universe. The modern adult, by contrast, is often defined by “adultishness” — her useful phrase — the assumption that I ought to be able to manage, fix, control, and understand everything that matters. And when I cannot, I feel ashamed.

That is not maturity. It is rebellion dressed up as competence.

And it explains a great deal not only about ministry, but about our whole culture.

The vulnerable pastor is not a failed pastor. He may simply be the one who has finally begun to accept that he is a creature.

That is not a small realization.

It reaches beyond ministry into authority itself. One of the strongest parts of the conversation for me was Mandy’s refusal to react to abusive leadership by abandoning leadership altogether. We are living through a time when many people, understandably disgusted by clerical abuse, manipulation, and spiritual grandiosity, want to abolish authority in the church as such. Mandy rightly called that an overcorrection.

Authority is real.

But authority is not domination.

A pastor does have a unique role. Not because he is a priest in the sense of standing between the people and God, but because he has been given a particular task, a particular burden, a particular stewardship. He has spent time in prayer, in study, in conversation, in hidden service, in sleeplessness, in sacrifice. He sees things others do not see, not because he is superior, but because he is positioned differently.

That can be used abusively. Of course it can.

But it can also be used rightly, and when it is, it reflects something true about Christ. Mandy quoted the idea that the pastor is a parable of Jesus, and I think that is exactly right, so long as we emphasize the right part of the analogy. The pastor is not Jesus. He is a parable of Jesus. A signpost. A witness. A servant. A reminder. A fellow dependent creature.

In that sense, good ministry does not hide need. It reveals need in a disciplined and appropriate way. Not by making the congregation into one’s therapist, but by letting them see, from time to time, that their pastor too must trust God, wait on God, cry out to God, and walk by faith rather than sight.

That, oddly enough, strengthens people.

It also keeps the minister from becoming a little god.

This is part of why Mandy’s comments on men and women also mattered to me, though they arose in a different section of the conversation. I do not think the deepest issue there is modern culture war language, helpful though some of that may occasionally be. The deeper issue is whether we understand difference as rivalry or as gift.

Her image of intersecting lines forming a dove was beautiful for exactly that reason. In the meeting of two distinct realities, something else appeared: peace. That is what the union of man and woman is supposed to reveal, whether in marriage, in church life, or in the broader human calling to partnership. Not sameness. Not domination. Not scarcity. Not competition for who gets to be God. Peace.

That vision belongs not only to marriage but to ministry itself. The minister and the congregation are not in competition for authority. Nor should they be locked in dependency. They are to meet in a shared orientation toward God. “Let’s look for God together,” as Mandy put it in effect. That is healthy ministry.

And that, too, helped me reinterpret part of my own journey.

I resigned from ministry in part because I did not yet know how to inhabit that role without feeling either falsely elevated or falsely crushed. I saw too clearly what was wrong, but perhaps not yet clearly enough what a healthier form could look like. Mandy’s reflections gave me language for something I felt long before I could articulate it: that the answer to impossible ministry is not omnipotence, but partnership.

Not doing God’s work for him.

Doing with him what he has given you to do.

Her closing image made that point better than any abstract argument could. She spoke about Mary being asked to carry something that would stretch her, cost her, and change the world, and yet at the very same time Mary herself was being carried by God. That is the paradox of calling. We are asked to bear something real, but we bear it in One who is bearing us.

That is not only true of pastors.

It is true of parents, writers, teachers, spouses, artists, leaders, and anyone trying to answer a call that exceeds his own strength.

The thing entrusted to you grows in you. But you are also growing in God.

That is a better story than the one the world tells.

The world says: here is your burden; prove yourself.

God says: here is something to steward; stay near me.

The world says: if it feels impossible, you must not be enough.

God says: of course it is impossible without me.

The world says: take control.

God says: become childlike.

The world says: perform authority.

God says: surrender, serve, and speak from love.

So yes, my interview with Mandy Smith helped me revisit my own life in a new light.

Not to rewrite history. Not to pretend I would make all the same decisions again. But to see more clearly that some of what I experienced as failure or disqualification may also have been God’s mercy. To discover that limitation is not the opposite of calling. It may be one of its clearest signs.

The vulnerable pastor is not a failed pastor.

He may simply be the one who has finally stopped trying to be God.

Sneak Peek

I’m pretty much caught up now, so if the planned date of publishing this holds, the first sneak peek refers to yesterday’s show, already out on Youtube, and then tomorrow night’s Tuesday show.

So this past Sunday was my conversation with Graham Tomlin, theologian, author, and editor in chief of Seen & Unseen, reflecting on the church’s role in today’s culture and on how Christians can engage the world with wisdom, imagination, compassion, and hope. That should take us further into questions of public witness, theology, and what clarity looks like in a fractured age.

And Tuesday is my conversation with Derek Vreeland, pastor, author, and discipleship leader, exploring what it means to keep Jesus at the center and how his way transforms communities, relationships, and daily life. That reflection will turn toward spiritual formation, peacemaking, kindness, faithfulness, and the practical shape of discipleship.

And as always, thank you for reading and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.

My conversation with Mark Galli opened up several possible paths for reflection.

I could have written about what happens when conscience outgrows the tribe that formed it. I could have written about the strange way the search for truth sometimes circles back toward home. I could have written about why the center does not hold, and what happens when institutions drift while people cling to old names for new realities. I could have written about Mark’s closing turn toward truth, goodness, and beauty, and why beauty so often gets postponed until late in life, if it is recovered at all.

All of those are worth writing about, and perhaps I still will.

But the deepest seam in this conversation, to my mind, was something else: calling, mandate, and the danger of certainty.

That is not because calling is unreal. Quite the opposite. It is because calling is real, and precisely because it is real it can become one of the most difficult things to carry rightly.

Mark spoke several times about moments in his life when he simply knew what he was to do next. He knew he was to go to seminary. He knew he was to move into journalism. He knew, at key junctures, that some path had opened before him and that to refuse it would have been disobedience. I understand that language very well.

There are people for whom such talk sounds mystical or inflated. I do not fault them. If they have not had that experience, then they have not had it. But I have. And I know many others who have.

The problem is not that such callings are imaginary. The problem is that they are carried by human beings.

And human beings, even sincere ones, are capable of confusing obedience with self-certainty.

That is where things get dangerous.

One of the things that struck me in speaking with Mark was his honesty. He did not present his own life as a triumphal march from one clear instruction to another. He spoke, rather, as someone who had often felt led, sometimes strongly led, and who still looks back with a mixture of gratitude, puzzlement, and humility. At one point he all but said: perhaps I will meet the Lord and find out I was mistaken in some of what I took for divine leading.

That is a healthy sentence.

It is healthy because it leaves room for both providence and fallibility.

Too often, especially in strongly religious settings, people speak of calling as though it exempts them from self-examination. “God told me” becomes a kind of shield. A man may be perfectly sincere when he says it. In fact, the sincerity may be the problem. He believes so deeply that he has been chosen for a task that he loses the capacity to see what his certainty is doing to others.

I have seen this up close. I have lived it from the inside.

Anyone who knows my own story knows that I came out of a world shaped by mandate, chosenness, and divine commission. Not in a cynical way. Not in a manipulative way, at least not always consciously. Most of the people involved were earnest, sacrificial, serious, and deeply convinced that they were obeying God. And yet that did not prevent fracture. It did not prevent blindness. It did not prevent people from harming one another while believing themselves faithful. In some ways, it caused it.

That is one of the hardest truths to learn: good motives do not sanctify inaccurate interpretation or understanding. And certainly not ill-advised methods. A real sense of calling does not guarantee clarity in understanding or execution.

This is one reason I was struck by something Mark said about his time as a Presbyterian pastor. He had reached a point at which he no longer fully agreed with parts of what Calvin or the Presbyterian system taught. Yet when teaching new members, he did not decide that his task was to smuggle in his private revisions. He told them plainly: this is what Presbyterians believe; this is what Calvin taught. That, to him, was the thing to do with integrity.

There is a great deal of maturity in that.

Many people, once their conscience begins to diverge from the institution they serve, turn immediately into saboteurs or iconoclasts. Sometimes there is a place for prophetic confrontation. But there is also a place for restraint, honesty, and the recognition that one’s private certainty is not automatically a warrant to tear at every inherited fabric.

That distinction matters.

It matters because Christian history is littered with schisms, splinters, and mutually assured righteousness. Everyone thinks his understanding of the truth is the truth. Many believe they have a mandate. We all tend to have our proof texts, our story of prayer, our reasons, our wounds, our logic, our necessity. And if you talk to us individually, many of us sound entirely reasonable.

But step back, and the collective picture is often tragic.

This is why I brought into the conversation my own experience of schism and splintering. I have lived through a world in which people with sincere convictions, fervent prayer, and an unshakable belief in divine leading managed nonetheless to divide, wound, isolate, and confuse one another. Not because God was absent, but because human beings are capable of carrying even sacred things in destructive ways.

The Apostle Paul’s instruction remains as necessary as ever: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12).

Not with swagger. Not with ideological certainty. Not with the assumption that because one feels called, one is therefore incapable of self-deception. Fear and trembling is the right posture because the stakes are high and the human heart is not simple.

Mark’s story about Christianity Today also illustrates this.

He did not seek promotion after promotion. The path kept opening. Responsibility kept finding him. He stepped into those roles with a sense that this was what he was supposed to do. Then, near the end, came the Trump editorial that exploded far beyond the magazine’s own readership. He described writing it not as a theatrical swan song but as a responsibility. The magazine had spoken in earlier impeachment crises; to remain silent now felt cowardly. So he wrote.

And fallout followed.

Now, one can agree or disagree with the editorial. That is not my point here. My point is that this is often how calling works in public life. A person acts from conscience and perceived duty, and the act enters a world already overheated by faction, projection, and grievance. Suddenly the person becomes a symbol in other people’s dramas. Their act is interpreted, misinterpreted, celebrated, weaponized, and despised all at once.

This does not mean they should have remained silent. It does mean that obedience does not protect one from consequence.

Nor does consequence prove disobedience.

That, too, is hard for people to grasp.

We often want a cleaner moral arithmetic than life permits. If I am called and faithful, then things should go well. If the result is division, misunderstanding, backlash, or pain, then perhaps I must have erred. But scripture does not support so simple a formula. Nathan confronted David and spoke truly, yet prophetic truth often does not land in tidy ways. Jeremiah was faithful and suffered for it. The apostles obeyed and were scattered. Christ himself was rejected by those most certain they were defending God.

So yes, calling is real. But it does not spare us ambiguity.

In fact, real calling may require us to endure ambiguity without surrendering either humility or obedience.

That is the difficult middle.

On one side is paralysis: I might be wrong, therefore I should do nothing. On the other side is arrogance: I feel called, therefore I cannot be wrong. Neither is faithful. The first refuses responsibility. The second refuses creatureliness.

We are not God. We do not see the whole. We are not pure instruments passing divine intention into history without distortion. We are creatures, and fallen ones at that, trying to respond to grace, revelation, conscience, scripture, circumstance, and duty all at once.

That is why judgment must begin close to home.

Jesus warns repeatedly against hypocrisy, and not because rules do not matter, but because self-exemption is the deepest corruption of moral life. The Pharisees “say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). In Matthew 7, the warning against judgment is not a prohibition on moral discernment but a warning that the standard we apply outwardly will return inwardly. The beam in one’s own eye matters because certainty about others comes so easily to the unexamined soul.

And yet this does not mean we are excused from making judgments. In a democracy, as I said in the conversation, each of us casts a vote. In a church, each of us makes decisions. In families, institutions, and communities, we are constantly called to act. We cannot escape judgment. We can only try to make it under God, with humility, and with awareness of our own say-do ratio.

Did what I claimed to stand for actually govern how I acted?

That question is more searching than many doctrinal tests.

I think this is why the subject of calling needs to be handled so carefully. A sense of mandate can strengthen courage, stabilize sacrifice, and carry a person through years of difficulty. Mark spoke powerfully about staying in a role he had come to hate because he believed he had not yet been released from it. I understand that. Many faithful lives include such seasons.

But the same sense of mandate, mishandled, can harden into spiritual ego. It can become the invisible engine of division. It can produce the very opposite of what it imagines itself serving.

So what, then, are we to do?

We honor calling. We do not mock it. We do not reduce every strong conviction to psychology or tribal conditioning. God does call people. God does direct lives. God does place burdens, responsibilities, and tasks before particular people.

But we carry those callings under judgment, not above it.

We test them against scripture. We test them against fruit. We test them against whether love is actually being increased or merely invoked. We test them in community, imperfect though community is. And above all, we carry them with enough modesty to say: I believe this is what I am to do, but I remain a human being capable of error.

That is not weakness.

That is wisdom.

If anything has shattered the credibility of Christians in public and ecclesial life, it is not conviction as such. It is conviction without humility. Certainty without charity. Mandate without self-suspicion. Calling without fear and trembling.

Mark’s interview touched many themes, and some of them I may come back to. But this one seemed to me the richest mine to work because it cuts so close to the bone. Not just for him. Not just for me. For many of us.

We want to be faithful. We want to obey. We want to answer what we believe God has put before us.

Good.

But let us do so remembering that the one who calls us is God, and we are not.

Sneak Peek

Because I am still a bit behind in the written sequence, the sneak peek here refers to the next essays, not to upcoming broadcasts. The shows themselves have already aired, and you can find them on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series.

Next up is my conversation with Mandy Smith, pastor, author, and ministry leader, reflecting on human limitation, vulnerability, weakness, and the strange strength that can arise when we stop pretending to be self-sufficient. That is not a small theme. It goes very near the heart of discipleship, leadership, and what it means to live truthfully before God.

After that comes my tribute to John L. Esposito, whose life and work shaped modern understanding of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. That reflection will turn toward pluralism, public witness, scholarship, peace, and the difficult but necessary work of understanding those with whom we do not fully agree.

So that is what lies ahead in writing, even though the interviews themselves are already available to watch.

And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.

One of the more damaging lies modern people tell themselves is that their spiritual life happens somewhere else.

It happens at church. On retreat. In prayer. In silence. In the early morning with coffee and a Bible. It happens in those elevated moments when the world is quiet and the soul is receptive.

And then there is work.

Work, by contrast, is what interrupts the spiritual life. Work is the place of pressure, deadlines, politics, compromise, anxiety, ambition, performance reviews, layoffs, budgets, and emails sent by people who would never dare speak to another human being that way in person. Work is the place where the soul goes to get bruised.

But what if that is backwards?

What if, for many people, work is not what interrupts the spiritual life, but one of the main places where it is exposed?

That was the central insight in my recent conversation with Richard Strilowich on Created in the Image of God. Richard spent more than forty years in the corporate and IT world, including leadership at IBM, and now works as a coach helping professionals treat their careers as a spiritual path. That language will strike some people as unusual, but the underlying truth should not. It is really just another way of saying something scripture has been saying all along: you do not stop being a creature of God when you walk into the office.

Or, to put it more bluntly: your career is not separate from your spiritual path.

I can relate to that deeply.

When I resigned from ministry in the mid-1990s and entered the corporate world in order to better provide for my family, I did not see that move in spiritual terms. Quite the opposite. I wanted to separate my faith from my paycheck. I had had enough of one world and thought perhaps the other would at least be more straightforward. It was not. I sometimes say I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

The corporate world has its own liturgies, its own priesthood, its own sacrifices, its own moral language, and its own evasions. It also has its own rewards. But what it does not have is neutrality. No human system is neutral, because no human being is neutral. Wherever human beings gather, questions of truth, power, loyalty, fear, vanity, courage, and conscience will arise sooner or later.

Which is why I so often return to the same basic framework: God is the teacher, scripture is the curriculum, and creation is the laboratory.

That laboratory includes boardrooms, break rooms, budgets, code, spreadsheets, sales calls, restructurings, and all the rest of it.

Richard described his own journey in language I found both candid and illuminating. He did not begin by seeing his corporate life as sacred. He began, as many do, simply by trying to do good work. He was drawn to software development, then into leadership, then into the complicated human world that surrounds institutional life. Along the way he discovered what so many people discover: the external success does not resolve the internal tension.

It often intensifies it.

He spoke of an inner pain and discontent in the corporate environment, especially amid the politics and pressures of organizational life. He described feeling that there had to be a better way. That phrase matters. For many people, the spiritual path does not begin in serenity. It begins in dissonance. Something is off. Something is divided. Something does not fit. A man may be outwardly successful and inwardly starved.

Ecclesiastes knows this territory well. So does Jesus.

“What shall it profit a man,” Christ asks, “if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). That is not merely a warning against spectacular greed. It is also a warning against any form of success that hollows out the center. Likewise, when Jesus says, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33), he is not condemning material provision. He is establishing order. First things first. What is ultimate? What is subordinate? What governs what?

And this is where Richard’s phrase becomes so important: your corporate career is your spiritual path.

Not because every corporate structure is good. Not because every decision required of us in modern institutions is just. Not because the office is a monastery. It is not. But because the pressures of work reveal us. They show us what we fear, what we worship, what we will rationalize, what we will endure, and where we are still divided.

In school, I have often said, you get the lesson and then you take the test. In life, you get the test and then, if you are willing, you learn the lesson.

The workplace is one of the great testing grounds.

That is why I think Richard’s most important contribution in our conversation was not the pleasant language about integration, though that matters. It was the hard story. The moral crisis.

He described having to lay off numerous employees over a period of time. One case in particular stayed with him. He had given one man the highest possible performance rating, and then was required to deliver the legal fiction that the layoff was due to performance. He knew it was not true. The man was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the script was the script.

Now here is where many spiritual conversations become sentimental or evasive. They move too quickly to peace, to acceptance, to mystery. But conscience does not permit that. There are moments when “I was just following orders” is not enough. In fact, it is almost never enough.

I pressed on that point in our conversation because it matters. There is no amount of calm language about grace that turns falsehood into truth. There is no serenity that absolves a man from having participated in a lie simply because the lie was institutionalized. Institutions often normalize what individual conscience should resist.

And yet — and this is where the matter becomes difficult and human — the fact that a situation is morally compromising does not mean God is absent from it. Very often it is precisely there, in the place of moral strain, that the deeper spiritual struggle begins.

Richard connected that experience to a heart event, an emergency stent, and then depression. I do not pretend to draw a neat line between those things. Life is more mysterious than that. Jesus himself spoke of the tower of Siloam that fell and killed eighteen people and asked whether they were worse sinners than others. “I tell you, Nay” (Luke 13:4–5). Time and chance happen to all. Not every suffering is a coded message.

But neither is suffering meaningless.

Paul says in Romans 8:28 that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” He does not say all things are good. He says they work together for good. That is a very different claim. The layoff may not be good. The lie may not be good. The depression may not be good. The heart event may not be good. But God, who is not the author of confusion, is still able to work through the wreckage of human systems, human weakness, and human compromise to bring a person into deeper truth.

That seems to be what happened for Richard.

He went searching. Retreats, books, self-help, somatic work, spiritual direction, the long and winding path by which a man slowly discovers that what he thought was interruption was in fact invitation. He came to see that he had been splitting his life in two: spirituality over here, work over there. Recharging over here, pressure over there. God over here, corporate reality over there. But the split itself was part of the problem.

“The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). If that is true, then one does not leave God at the retreat center and pick Him back up on the weekend. One does not become a spiritual being only in private and a functional machine in public. If we are created in the image of God, then all of life belongs to Him. Not just worship. Not just prayer. Work too.

That does not make every work demand legitimate. It does not remove the need for courage. It does not mean conscience should be silenced in the name of productivity. Quite the opposite. It means the spiritual life is present precisely where those conflicts arise.

The office can be a laboratory of the soul.

That phrase may sound grandiose, but it is really quite concrete. It means that pressure reveals character. Delay reveals patience or the lack of it. Competition reveals envy or discipline. Ambition reveals whether it is rightly ordered or disordered. Conflict reveals whether we love truth more than approval. Success reveals whether we can receive material benefit without making it our god. Failure reveals whether our identity was ever rooted in titles to begin with.

And yes, sometimes the test is brutal.

I know something of that. My own body forced these questions on me in a different way. I have spoken elsewhere about the autoimmune diagnosis I received at twenty-eight and the prediction that I would be in a wheelchair by forty. Whatever else one says about these things, they can expose the contradictions we are trying to live with. They can force a reckoning. They can reveal that our categories are too narrow, our dualisms too rigid, our theology too abstract, and our lives too divided.

The answer is not to worship work, but rather work can be worship. It is not something to flee from it as though material reality were beneath God. The answer is perspective. The answer is integration. The answer is to understand that the material world is not outside divine concern. It is the very setting in which obedience, wisdom, truthfulness, endurance, and surrender must be learned.

Richard put it simply in effect, if not always in these words: grace has been guiding all along.

I think that is right, provided we say it carefully. Grace does not mean every event is pleasant. It does not mean every system is just. It does not mean every wound is immediately intelligible. It means that God has not abandoned His creation, and that even the painful tests of life can become occasions for transformation if we do not harden ourselves against what they are showing us.

So no, your career is not interrupting your spiritual life.

It may be the place where your spiritual life is most truly being tested.

And if that is so, then the real question is not how to escape that fact, but how to meet it faithfully: with conscience awake, with scripture in hand, with enough humility to learn the lesson after the test, and with enough faith to believe that even here — in the maze, in the pressure, in the moral strain — God has not ceased to teach.

If you missed my conversation with Richard Strilowich, you can find it on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series. And as always, remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.

Sneak Peek

Because I am a bit behind in the written sequence, the sneak peek items below are about the next essays drawn from conversations that have already aired and are available on YouTube.

Next up is my conversation with Mandy Smith, pastor, author, and ministry leader, reflecting on the strength found in human limitation and on how vulnerability can become one of a leader’s greatest gifts. That is a subject close to the heart of this entire series, because we do not image God by pretending to be self-sufficient. We image him, in part, by learning trust, dependence, and faithful presence within our limits.

After that, I will reflect on the special tribute to John L. Esposito, whose life and work helped shape modern understanding of Islam and Muslim-Christian relations. That conversation turns toward scholarship, pluralism, public witness, and the difficult but necessary work of pursuing understanding without surrendering conviction.

So that is what is ahead in writing, even though the shows themselves have already aired. In the meantime, you can watch both on YouTube as part of the Created in the Image of God series.

And as always, thank you for reading, thank you for your patience, and remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.