This poem emerged from a reflection on Franz Schubert—his ability to blend structure and lyricism, sorrow and light, all within the patient spaciousness of his music. In listening to his piano and violin sonatas, especially the A minor, I began to sense not just musical beauty but a kind of invitation: to sit in the seam between resolution and rest, between form and feeling.

Schubert, in his youth, gave voice to a musical posture that feels almost Christ-like—not overpowering, but companionate. His melodies do not force, they converse. And in that gentle blend of order and openness, he becomes a signpost to the One who truly listens while He composes: Christ, the eternal Master Blender, whose cup of grace holds every sorrow, every sweetness, and all the life of the world.

Christ Listens While He Composes

Christ listens,
while He composes
in the timeless forms of the Father.

Franz Schubert—
lyricized structure,
a light-footed hinge in history.

Eternal,
not rushing resolution.
Mark, immediately this: in urgency, we too must pause—

and sit in the seam,
in the space among notes,
and turn gently to our Lord in the light—

who meets—converses—where we are,
in form and feeling,
in sorrow and sweetness,
in minor and major,
in death—
and in the spacious bloodstream of all life.

We live in an age of infinite playback. At any given moment, we can summon the Berlin Philharmonic, or a hundred interpretations of Beethoven’s Fifth from the glass rectangle in our pocket. Miraculous—but also, perhaps, numbing. In our saturation, something essential may be slipping away: the slow and sacred process of inhabiting beauty.

When I listen to Franz Schubert, particularly his A minor Sonata for piano and violin, I don’t just hear a gifted composer—I sense a young man sitting at a piano, surrounded by hand-copied scores, listening with his fingers. His originality was not a rebellion against tradition, but a reverent dwelling within it. In that, I find an unexpected echo of Jesus Christ, who did not force revelation, but revealed Himself quietly through Scripture. Both teach us something we’ve nearly forgotten: that absence can be a form of grace—not through lack, but through the space it makes for presence.

Schubert and the Sound of Presence
Franz Schubert composed in an age of silence. Not the silence of absence, but of expectant presence—a silence that required patience, attention, and participation. To experience music, Schubert had to play it. To hear Beethoven’s work, he had to live with scores, decipher their architecture, and imagine sound into being. Music was not a stream to dip into — it was a space to inhabit. This tactile engagement shaped him. As he sat at the piano, perhaps with a page from Beethoven on the stand and another from his own draft nearby, the air was filled not with playback but with possibility. His originality emerged not from novelty but from resonance — from hearing what came before and letting it breathe through him in new ways.

In this, Schubert becomes something more than a composer; he becomes a listener-creator, a vessel of structured lyricism. His music doesn’t overpower — it invites. And this quiet generativity gives his work a spiritual quality. The lack of instant access didn’t restrict his creativity — it refined it, channeling it into music that feels both timeless and tenderly temporal.

Christ and the Silence of Revelation
This same pattern—of listening as creating, of self-limitation as generativity—is magnified in the life of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not wield spectacle to establish His authority. He rarely shouted. He wrote no books. His signs were quiet, often cloaked in secrecy, and His miracles ended with a warning: tell no one. His mastery was not in controlling the crowd but in inhabiting the Word. Every response, every rebuke, every parable — these were not spontaneous flashes, but revelations drawn from a lifetime of dwelling in Scripture.

As explored in the video Another Messianic Secret, Christ’s public reticence was not evasive; it was purposeful. He prostrated Himself before the Father’s will, expressed through the Scriptures He had come not to abolish, but to fulfill. His originality—His utterly new teaching—came not from asserting a fresh voice over against the tradition, but by inhabiting it so deeply that it could not remain unchanged. He aligned with Scripture not merely in knowledge but in embodiment. And in doing so, He revealed the eternal.

What We’ve Gained—and What We’ve Forgotten
We live surrounded by numbing abundance: recordings of every symphony, every sermon, every interpretation of Scripture are only seconds away. We do not lack content; we lack traction. And in the absence of traction, we lose formation. Art becomes background. Scripture becomes reference. The very things meant to shape us become things we scroll past.

Schubert did not compose out of boredom or distraction. He composed out of need—out of a lived musical world where to know was to touch, to read was to play, to understand was to stay. And Christ, even more profoundly, did not proclaim truth through dominance or immediacy. He lived within the limitations of a quiet life in a small town. He aligned His voice not with noise, but with Scripture—scarce, sacred, slowly memorized. And that alignment changed the world.

We do not need less access—but we do need more inhabiting. We need to dwell with music, with words, with the Word, long enough that it reshapes us. Not just to hear, but to hear again. To sit at the piano. To open the page. To let silence be the beginning of sound.

Conclusion: A Call to Inhabit
If Christ is the eternal Word, and if Schubert gave us echoes of that Word in sound, then we are invited into the same posture—not of passive listening, but of faithful inhabiting.

To live within Scripture, not just around it.
To enter music not as escape, but as encounter.
And maybe the greatest abundance still begins
in silence.

Author’s Note:
This reflection on absence, scarcity, limitation, and access is not a commentary on material systems or economic ideology. The ideas explored here are not about withholding resources or promoting austerity as an external virtue. Rather, it is a spiritual and creative posture—a voluntary quieting of noise in order to hear more clearly. It is an interior discipline, not an imposed lack. In this sense, it’s an austerity not of access, but of attention: a deliberate return to what truly forms us. Whether in music, Scripture, or the inner life of Christ, such scarcity becomes a place of resonance, alignment, and abiding presence—not a void, but a vessel.

In Isaiah 44–45, the Lord names Cyrus the Great—king of Persia—as His chosen instrument to liberate Israel. Though a Gentile, Cyrus is called “my shepherd” and “my anointed,” not for his own sake, but to fulfill God's covenant—ultimately for the sake of all peoples and all nations. This poem reflects the paradox and power of that calling: a foreign king led by the hand of Israel’s God, unknowingly participating in divine redemption for all, pointing forward to the fullness of salvation in Christ.

Of Cyrus the Great, King of Persia

Not for price,
nor for reward,
O Lord—

I hear the remnant cry
through You.

You have grasped
my right hand.
Thus says—

And thus says:
Your right hand
is the Lord.

Isaiah 45
There are moments in Scripture where the voice of God is thunderous—mountain-shaking, sea-splitting, world-forming. And there are moments where that same voice lowers, not into silence, but into something quieter still: a parenthesis.

In Isaiah 45, God names Cyrus—a Gentile king—as His anointed instrument. The passage is filled with declarations of power and providence: “I will go before you… I will break in pieces the doors of bronze… I call you by your name.”

But then, almost suddenly, the tone shifts. The prophet exclaims:

“Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior.” (Isaiah 45:15, ESV)

The God who hides himself. It is one of the most sublime declarations in all of Scripture — a cry of awe, not doubt. God is hidden not because He is absent, but because His purposes transcend the surface. His glory is veiled by mercy, His acts clothed in paradox.

And it is precisely at this moment that Isaiah begins to speak in parentheses:

“(he is God!)” (v.18)
“(he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!)”

Partitioned in parentheticals, these are not editorial clarifications or narrative asides. They are the Spirit's murmurings within the text—groanings that match our own inner stammer. They speak with the urgency and intimacy of a voice overheard—a praise breaking through thought itself.

Paul echoes this dynamic in 1 Corinthians 2:10–12, where he writes:

“These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.”

And again in Romans 8:26:

“The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.”

The parentheticals of Isaiah 45 are not interruptions. They are resonances—brief flashes of glory leaking out from the hidden God. They are what it sounds like when the veil lifts slightly, not fully, and the awe is too deep for declarative speech alone.

To pray with Isaiah 45 is not just to hear what God says aloud.
It is to feel what the Spirit breathes between the lines.

God speaks thunderously.
But He also speaks parenthetically.

The Psalms
And the parentheticals in Isaiah 45 are not isolated. They belong to a larger scriptural pattern—one where God meets us not only in thunderous speech but in the pauses that follow.

In the Book of Psalms, this divine pause has a name: selah.

Repeated throughout the Psalter, selah offers no direct translation, yet its presence is unmistakable. It appears where truth requires reverence, where praise needs time to settle, where a soul must breathe. It functions like a wordless bracket—an invitation to stop, to reflect, to let meaning echo.

If Isaiah gives us divine whispers in parentheses, the Psalms give us divine breath in rest.

Both are movements of the Spirit.
Both are invitations into resonance.

To read Scripture faithfully is not only to follow the line, but to dwell in the space around it.
To listen for the voice that speaks — in thunder, in whisper, and in silence.

Selah.

Invocation
I have learnt to love Schubert,
in shared hope,
hence Christ.

There are few pieces of music more arresting, more intimate, more tremulous with meaning than Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Written in 1824 while Schubert was gravely ill, the quartet trembles on the edge of mortality—not only his own, but all of ours. The title and thematic anchor come from a song he composed years earlier, a lied (the German word for song) in which Death gently invites a young woman to rest in his arms. The quartet’s second movement—a set of variations—is based on that haunting melody.

And yet, as much as we admire this masterpiece—and we do—it must be said: Death and the Maiden, like the culture that so often celebrates it, stands poised between truth and illusion. It gets very close to something real. But it stops short of the resurrection.

The Story Schubert Tells
In the original lied, the maiden pleads with Death to pass her by. She is young, beautiful, and afraid. But Death responds not with threat, but with gentleness. His voice is slow, calm, inevitable. And so the quartet unfolds: a fierce, stormy first movement; a slow second movement where the voice of death is varied and echoed; a restless scherzo; and a final movement that presses forward with unrelenting energy, like time itself.

There is resistance. There is mourning. There is, finally, acceptance.

This is where the cultural misreading often begins: the interpretation of death as a noble release, a shadowy friend. The aesthetic of the quartet tempts us toward a melancholic surrender, toward a Romantic stoicism—noble, tragic, beautiful.

But here’s the question: Is that the whole story?

Between Stoicism and Epicureanism
The philosophical ghosts in the room are ancient and powerful—Stoicism and Epicureanism. Most people don’t name them anymore, but they live on in cultural instinct:

• Stoicism teaches us to master our emotions, to meet death with courage and internal peace. It can sound virtuous — almost Christian. But it has no resurrection. No Christ.

• Epicureanism teaches us to detach, to enjoy life and not fear death, because death is the end of sensation. No judgment. No afterlife. No meaning beyond the moment.

In modern culture, Schubert’s Death and the Maiden often becomes a vessel for these views. We are told to accept death calmly, or to romanticize it as the final chord in nature’s symphony. We are taught to “make peace” with the end, or to dissolve beautifully into the cosmos.

But these are not Gospel truths.

They are philosophical sleights of hand—resignation dressed as peace, and annihilation disguised as transcendence.

Death in the Light of Christ
Scripture is more honest—and more hopeful.

• Death is not neutral. It is the wages of sin (Romans 6:23).

• Death is not a friend. It is the last enemy to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15:26).

• And yet, death is not ultimate. It is a defeated foe, one whose sting has been pulled out by the crucified and risen Christ.

When Jesus stands before Lazarus’s tomb, He doesn’t merely comfort the grieving. He doesn’t quote philosophy. He doesn’t advise them to make peace with the cycle of life.

He weeps.

He is deeply moved, even angry—not at Lazarus, not at the mourners, but at death itself.

And then, He calls forth life: “Lazarus, come out.”

This is what Stoicism can never do.
This is what Epicureanism never dares to imagine.

The Christian Counterpoint
If we return to Schubert with this in mind, the quartet becomes something else.

• The maiden’s resistance becomes valid, not something to overcome, but something to redeem.

• Death’s calm voice becomes unmasked — not as tender, but as powerless, once it stands before the One who said, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

• The final movement’s desperate momentum is not the sound of succumbing, but the sound of a cosmos straining toward the renewal of all things.

In that light, Schubert’s quartet doesn’t need to be rejected. It needs to be drawn through the veil—through Good Friday and into Easter Sunday.

The Gospel does not flatten the emotional depth of Schubert’s work. It transfigures it. It honors the ache, the longing, the fear—and then answers them.

With a name spoken at a tomb.
With a stone rolled away.
With the mocking cry:

“O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55 ESV)

Letting It Breathe
We let Schubert’s music breathe—not as resignation, but as pre-resurrection breath. We admire it deeply, but we do not canonize it as final truth. We let it carry us to the edge, and then we listen for a voice louder and gentler than death.

The voice of Christ.

He weeps with the maiden.
He meets her fear.
And then He takes her hand and says:

“Talitha cumi.” (Aramaic, Mark 5:41)
“Little girl, arise.”

There’s a kind of music that seems always on the verge of falling apart—too many ideas, too much feeling, not quite classical, not yet romantic. It stumbles forward, clutches at the hem of transcendence, and somehow—somehow—never collapses.

I heard that music recently in Schubert’s Symphony No. 2. There’s a sophisticated sloppiness to it—an almost clumsy boldness—that refuses to obey classical symmetry and yet reveals, in its very deviation, a deeper kind of grace. It’s the sound of a composer still young, still reaching, and still unwilling to tighten his soul for the sake of polish. And because of that, something remarkable happens: the symphony begins to feel… godlike. Not in the way of omnipotence or control, but in the way God seems to move through history—detouring through the margins, arriving in weakness, never missing the mark.

As I listened to Schubert’s Symphony No. 2, the story of the Gospel came to mind—not just as a theological category, but as a movement of grace: the saving story of Jesus, fulfilling the long arc of Israel’s hope. The symphony’s restless turns, its surging momentum, its refusal to stay predictable—all of it seemed to echo that singular Gospel. But then something strange happened. As I followed the flow of the music, the word Gospel in my mind quietly morphed into the word Psalms.

And that transformation felt right.

Because if the Gospel is the story that completes Israel’s longing, the Psalms are the very breath of that longing. They lurch and leap with emotion — grief, praise, trust, rage, awe—and in doing so, they teach us how to inhabit the story before we can fully understand it. They are the soundtrack of a people who walk by faith and not by sight. And in Schubert’s symphony, I heard that same spirit: bold, vulnerable, seemingly unstable, yet always held.

And perhaps that’s what this music revealed to me—something I’ve long felt but can rarely explain…

There is a clarity that comes in dreams, but which cannot be remembered upon waking. And yet, somehow, that clarity re-emerges—not through reason, but through moments of interaction. Not merely interaction with ideas, or with words on a page, but with Scripture as a generative environment—a place where God’s fire still flickers, where the Spirit still broods, where the Midrashic imagination is not a relic but a rhythm.

The Midrashic mode isn’t a genre or a doctrine. It’s more like a way of walking through Scripture—with your eyes open, your ears attuned, and your imagination baptized.

Rooted in Second Temple Judaism and richly developed by rabbis in the generations surrounding Jesus, Midrash is what happens when faithful people meet sacred text not as a closed system, but as a living world. It asks not just what does this passage say, but what else is it whispering? What happens if we tilt it in the light? What stories echo behind the silence?

In Midrash, nothing is “just filler.” A missing name, a strange repetition, a surprising verb tense—all of it becomes a door. And behind that door is often a question, a reversal, a paradox, or a poetic retelling.

But it does not end there.

That same interaction—if we are willing—extends into all of creation. Into a clumsy symphony. Into a bent psalm. Into a sunrise, a stumble, a silence. And suddenly, we see it:

The Gospel has not fallen.
The Gospel cannot fall.

It moves through all things like music—not because it avoids misstep, but because it transfigures every misstep into grace.

This is what Schubert, in a way, does—and not as fully as Scripture. Schubert does not allow me to move more than an inch without being arrested by the Spirit. It is more true of the Psalms. It is even more true of Isaiah.

And someday, when all of it is peeled away, that arrest will be complete.

“Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”
— Dr. Amelia Brand, Interstellar

In a universe defined by entropy, distance, and unknowable scale, what holds?

This is the question pulsing at the heart of Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar. More than a film about space travel, it is a meditation on time, trust, and the enduring power of abiding love—a power not merely emotional but relational, sacrificial, and redemptive.

And it’s here—in the longing between parent and child, in the silence between worlds, in the signal sent across black holes—that Interstellar becomes more than speculative fiction. It becomes, quietly but unmistakably, a Christocentric story. Not just a tale pointing toward Christ (Christotelic), but one that, in its very structure and heart, centers on the kind of love only found in the gospel.

And perhaps even more unexpectedly, it resonates deeply with three prophetic chapters from Isaiah—three theological bodies orbiting a center they do not name, but toward which they also unmistakably bend.

The Three Bodies: Isaiah’s Theological Orbit
In Isaiah 41, 49, and 55, we find Israel not triumphant, but exiled. Not certain, but waiting. Not solved, but sustained. These chapters speak not of human achievement, but of divine presence—of a God who does not shout over the chaos, but enters it.

Isaiah 41—God Who Enters the Orbit
“He pursues them and passes on safely, by paths his feet have not trod.” (v.3)

God does not remain distant from the chaos of history. He moves within it, treading unfamiliar paths. He calls the coastlands to silence first, not speech—a call to listen, to draw near, to stop striving after predictive control.

This is the narrative condition of Interstellar: the systems we understand no longer hold. The gravitational pull is off. The familiar paths no longer work. Yet even here, something—or Someone—still moves.

Isaiah 49—The Covenant Kept in the Silence
“Can a woman forget her nursing child? …Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” (vv.15–16)

To the exiled, it seems God has forgotten. But Isaiah offers a deeper truth: the covenant holds, even when the voice goes silent. God’s remembrance is not based on feeling, but on fidelity—on the engraved promise.

In Interstellar, the silence between Cooper and Murph becomes unbearable. It feels like abandonment. But it is precisely in that silence that love abides. Not passively—but covenantally, waiting to break through.

Isaiah 55—Love That Transcends Return
“My word… shall not return to me empty…” (v.11)

The arc of Isaiah’s prophecy resolves not in collapse, but in fruitfulness. What God sends forth—His word, His promise, His love—will return. Not void. Not lost. But fulfilled.

In the film’s final act, Cooper enters a space where communication is impossible—and yet, a word is sent. A signal. A truth. Not to the world, but to one person. And that message—like God’s Word—does not return empty. It saves.

Moments That Matter
In Interstellar, time is not linear. It folds, circles, recurs. But every moment is not the same. There are moments that matter—when the silence must be broken, when love must act, when the signal must be sent.

In Isaiah, in the gospel, and in our lives, there are moments that are weighted with divine presence. They are not random. They are covenantal. And they become inflection points in both narrative and theology.

From Christotelic to Christocentric
Much of modern biblical theology embraces a Christotelic reading: that the Hebrew Scriptures reach their fulfillment in Christ. This is faithful and true—the story of Israel does indeed find its goal in Him.

But Interstellar invites us to go further. It asks: what if Christ is not merely the telos? What if He is the center—the one already inhabiting the story, already present in the silence, already sustaining the moments that matter?

To consider Interstellar theologically is not just to see a pattern that reminds us of Christ. It is to witness, in cinematic metaphor, a world that cries out for a mediator, and for a love that acts from within.

The Mediated Center: Christ in the Tesseract
In the film, the Tesseract is not a place of power. It is a place of mediation.

Constructed by unknown beings (perhaps future humans), it exists for one reason: so that Cooper can see across time, find the moment that matters, and send the message that saves. He does not control time—he enters it, navigates it through love, and sends his word not through force, but through gravitational resonance—a message bound to the one he loves.

In the Gospel, it is in Peter that we first encounter a profound epistemic transformation. One that does not deny science or history, but—like Cooper—integrates them into a new paradigm: a new creation, where love (and faith, and hope) become not merely virtues, but ways of knowing.

Science and history, on their own, can only carry us so far—epistemologically, ontologically. But rarely in cinema has a braver traveler been portrayed. Cooper does not remain fixed within the limits of what he already knows, or how he knows it. He crosses a boundary, impassable to reason alone.

Like Peter stepping onto water, Cooper enters a new epistemology—not anti-science, but transfigured. A dialectic done rightly: not either/or, but both/and—transcending and including.

In this light, faith, hope, and above all, love become not retreats from knowledge, but its fulfillment.

“Do you love me?” This becomes the question that shifts the cosmos. Cooper succeeds not through detachment or data alone, but because agape abounds—a love so enduring, it bends gravity itself.

And through this love—through Cooper’s meticulous stewardship, his attention to detail, his faithful presence in the Tesseract—we glimpse not Christ Himself, but the kind of space Christ creates through the New Covenant:

A space where time and eternity intersect,
Where the impossible becomes communicable,
Where a message is sent not by force, but by love.

Abiding Love and the Gospel of Time
In the end, Interstellar is a film about abiding love. A love that waits, that remembers, that sacrifices, and that returns. It is a love that transcends dimensions not because it ignores reality, but because it inhabits it more fully than fear, power, or data ever could.

This is the love of the New Covenant—not a force of feeling, but a force of Christic action:

A love that descends,
A love that mediates,
A love that abides across time, not just as memory, but as Word made flesh.

The story of Interstellar, when placed in conversation with Isaiah’s prophetic imagination and the Gospel’s redemptive center, becomes more than science fiction. It becomes a parable of the Christ at the center of time.

And through Him, the orbit holds.

“Listen to me in silence, O coastlands; let the peoples renew their strength; let them approach, then let them speak; let us together draw near for judgment.” — Isaiah 41:1

The three-body problem, in physics, is deceptively simple: place three celestial bodies in space and try to predict their motion under the pull of gravity. If you only have two, the dance is elegant and solvable— ellipses, parabolas, predictable precision. Add a third, and the dance turns wild. Unpredictable. No general equation can describe it. What begins as clarity collapses into mathematical chaos—deterministic unpredictability.

And yet, this isn't just a problem of the stars. It's also a parable of human relationship, of moral systems, of historical forces. Of brothers.

In Genesis, we meet the first three-brother system: Cain, Abel, and Seth. Cain, the restless striver; Abel, the beloved and silenced; Seth, the remnant—a third orbit into which God pours a future. Their interactions destabilize more than a family. They inaugurate a pattern: that when three forces—or persons—or wills—begin to pull on each other, we can no longer predict what comes next.

So too in The Three-Body Problem, the science fiction novel by Liu Cixin, where an alien civilization, trapped in a three-sun system, lives through endless cycles of collapse and rebirth. No stability. No predictability. Even their scientific progress is stalled by a world that won’t hold still. Human characters, too, are caught in the wake of this chaos, seeking clarity in technology, survival in control—but always missing the deeper thread.

And then we come to Isaiah 41, a transitional text so easily overlooked, but which—once listened to—holds the gravitational center of all this chaos.

The Call to Silence in a Swirling World
“Listen to me in silence, O coastlands…” — Isaiah 41:1

The coastlands—scattered peoples at the edge of the known world—are not summoned to action. Not to war. Not even to belief. First, they are called to silence. To cease their calculations. To stop trying to stabilize their own systems.

Only then: let them speak. “….let them approach, then let them speak…”

This order matters. In a world ruled by striving and noise, silence is not absence—it is space for revelation. Silence is the pause between gravitational pulls. It is what allows for a voice not our own to be heard.

God’s Motion Through Chaos
Then comes the striking image:

“He pursues them and passes on safely, by paths his feet have not trod.” (v.3)

Even God moves through unfamiliar paths. Not because He is lost, but because He chooses to enter the system. He steps into the swirling, unstable reality of human motion—and walks where no foot has walked.

This is the God of covenant: not distant, not immobile, but willing to move through the unpredictable, to enter the chaos, to inhabit the orbit.

Just as Christ would later enter time, and womb, and cross, the God of Isaiah 41 walks paths He had not yet trod—not because He had to, but because love moves.

Three Brothers, Three Bodies, No Solution?
In Genesis 4–5, the story of Cain, Abel, and Seth introduces more than family drama. It presents a moral three-body problem:

• Cain strives toward dominance,

• Abel is taken before his life fulfills,

• Seth is the unexpected continuation.

What begins as a two-body crisis (Cain and Abel) becomes something more complex—and from that complexity, God does not offer a formula, but a promise. The line of Seth is not predictable, but it is faithful. It carries the possibility of restoration, the hidden gravitational pull of covenant.

In Isaiah 41, we see echoes of this:

• The nations strive like Cain.

• Israel mourns like Abel — called a “worm,” seemingly forgotten.

• But then God says: “You are my servant… I have chosen you and not cast you off.” (v.9)

This is the Seth-moment: when in the middle of chaos, God chooses to bind Himself again to the broken orbit.

Idols Collapse, But Love Remains
The latter part of Isaiah 41 stages a courtroom drama. God calls on the idols to speak—to predict, to explain, to stabilize history.

They fail.

“Behold, you are nothing, and your work is less than nothing…” (v.24)

The three-body system of human striving—political, philosophical, technological—cannot stabilize itself. It collapses into violence, despair, betrayal.

Only one force remains: the steadfast love of the covenant God.

And this is where Isaiah 41 reveals its true brilliance: it doesn’t explain the chaos. It doesn’t fix the equations. Instead, it shows us a God who enters the orbit, and loves us within it. A God who says, “Fear not, for I am with you” (v.10), not because the orbit is now clean, but because presence is greater than prediction.

The Quiet Arrival of Love
Faith moves. Hope reaches. But love abides. It is the only force that does not decay under complexity. It is not disturbed by unpredictability, because it is volitional—not reactive.

And it is not abstract.

This abiding love takes on form—not only in Isaiah’s assurance to the exiles, but in the arrival of the Servant who will come in the very next chapter of Isaiah: the one in whom God’s soul delights, the one who will bring forth justice not by crushing, but by faithfulness. This Servant moves through history not as a distant answer but as a present embodiment.

He is the one who, in the fullness of time, steps into the orbit—not to hover above, but to be drawn into its gravity, its violence, its suffering. And yet He is not overcome. The Christ, crucified and risen, becomes the gravitational center of a new cosmos: the fulfillment, the resolution of the three-brother orbit, and the firstfruits of new creation.

Through Him, the already-chaotic world begins to shift into the already-and-not-yet of the New Kingdom—where love is not merely what remains, but what reigns.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.
That which was to be demonstrated has been shown.

Not through calculation, but through covenant.
Not through prediction, but through presence.
Not through dominance, but through a crucified and risen Christ.

This is not a God who explains the equations from afar.
This is the God who enters the orbit, walks unfamiliar paths, and redeems the system from within.

This is love, and this is what remains.
Christ is risen—the orbit holds.

A Christ-Centered Judaic Embrace

For many, the thought of embracing Christianity raises a quiet, difficult question—especially for those with Jewish ancestry. Does following Christ mean turning away from the heritage of Israel? Is Christianity a break from Judaism, or could it be its deepest fulfillment?

This tension isn’t always spoken aloud. It lingers in quiet questions, internal hesitations, or even subtle comments from others. But behind the question lies a story—a story that begins with promise, continues through exile, and finds its fulfillment in a crucified and risen Messiah.

Fulfillment, Not Rejection
Christianity is often misunderstood as a rejection of Judaism. But if one reads the Scriptures through the lens of fulfillment rather than replacement, a different picture emerges. The story that begins with Abraham—the covenant, the promises, the prophetic anticipation—is not discarded in Christ. It is fulfilled.

Jesus was not an outsider to Israel’s story. He was born into it, shaped by its Scriptures, steeped in its worship. As he said in Matthew 5:17:

“I have not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them.”

In him, the Law is embodied, the temple is reimagined, the covenant is kept. This is not a rupture in the narrative. It is its resolution.

A Midrashic Reading of Fulfillment
Approaching Scripture as a unified, unfolding witness to God’s self-revelation invites a posture not of severance, but of synthesis. One might call this a Midrashic imagination—not in the strict rabbinic sense, but as a reverent, reflective mode of reading. It allows the old and the new to echo across time, for symbols to stretch, for paradox to resolve in a Person.

This mode of reading, deeply rooted in both Jewish and early Christian traditions, welcomes patterns, fulfillment, and the quiet whisper of continuity. It allows the Torah, the Psalms, and the Prophets to speak forward—not just to Christ as a doctrinal endpoint, but to Christ as the living thread who runs through it all.

This way of reading also helps us understand something essential:

Jesus was not launching a new religion.

As N.T. Wright has carefully emphasized—especially in The Day the Revolution Began—Jesus was not offering a break with Israel’s story, but its long-promised renewal. His parables, in particular, reflect this. They are steeped in the oral and literary traditions of Second Temple Judaism, shaped by Aramaic idioms, folk wisdom, and storytelling forms passed across generations. His teaching does not reject the Jewish tradition—it awakens it. His voice resounds with the tone of the prophets, the rhythm of the Psalms, and the clarity of covenantal wisdom.

In Christ’s parables, we hear the natural language of a King and Messiah rooted in his people’s story, even as he draws that story to its promised fulfillment.

Theology That Holds Paradox
Many who come to Christianity from Jewish backgrounds—or even from other faith traditions—may find themselves working between tension and integration: distinguishing where necessary, but also drawing connections where faith invites synthesis. This is not a weakness of mind; it is a strength of vision.

Certain streams of Christian theology, particularly in the Lutheran tradition, model this well. The paradoxes at the heart of the faith—law and gospel, sinner and saint, already and not yet—form a theological rhythm that mirrors the scriptural one. Far from flattening the differences between Judaism and Christianity, this perspective gives space to appreciate their dynamic relationship, while recognizing Christ as the telos—the fulfillment—of the covenant.

A Covenant Completed, Not Cast Aside
In the person of Christ, the promises to Abraham are extended to the world—not by canceling the covenant, but by fulfilling its deepest intent: that through Abraham’s seed, all nations would be blessed.

The Psalms become the prayers of the Messiah.

The prophets become the foreshadowing of his mission.

The covenant becomes the vessel of God’s global embrace.

This is not a rejection of heritage. It is a homecoming.

The Invitation of Fulfillment
For anyone who has ever wondered whether following Jesus means walking away from their ancestral story, the answer may be more surprising—and more beautiful—than expected. It does not require abandonment, but recognition. Recognition that the same God who called Abraham, who spoke through Isaiah, and who sang through David has now spoken definitively in Christ.

To embrace him is not to discard the story, but to realize it. Not to leave behind one's roots, but to let them grow into what they were always meant to be: a tree grafted and flourishing, rooted in covenant, and reaching toward the renewal of all things.

Prelude: On Mirth, Means, and the Messiah
The following piece is offered in a spirit of lightheartedness and imaginative joy, in recognition of Jesus Christ—our Lord and Messiah, the Word made flesh, who—as Scripture attests—carried within His incarnate life not only divine wisdom, compassion, and authority, but also a holy and knowing sense of humor.

For the One who turned water into wine at a wedding, told stories of camels and needles, and paid taxes with a coin from a fish's mouth—He who healed a man’s blindness using spit and dirt—was not without laughter. Nor was He without irony, delight, or surprise.

And so, what follows rolls forth in His wake.

The Forgiveness Bike Shop
And it came to pass that a man, bearded with years and bearing the quiet confidence of someone who once owned BMX pegs, entered a bike shop filled with anodized potential.

He walked between the displays of oversized 29ers and featherlight race frames…
and spoke to the staff, saying:

“Your sins are forgiven.”

The staff froze. The assistant manager looked up from adjusting a derailleur. A young mechanic with grease on his nose dropped a torque wrench in disbelief.

“Who is this man who speaks such things?” they muttered among themselves.

“Who does he think he is—to forgive sins in a retail environment?”

But the man, perceiving their thoughts—perhaps by intuition, or perhaps from having worked in customer service himself—said to them:

“Why do you question in your hearts? Which is easier—to say ‘your sins are forgiven’ or to place an order for a Haro Master 24 with full chromoly frame, front and rear U-brakes, gyro detangler, and tires treaded with grace?”

And he stepped forward to the register, laid a hand upon it as one might an altar, and said:

“But so that you may know about the Son of Man, who has His Father’s authority to forgive so that we may ride…”

He gestured toward the backroom and declared:

“Bring forth the Haro.”

And lo! The shop bell chimed, and a courier entered with a box glowing faintly. The staff looked on, astonished.

“We have never seen anything like this,” one whispered, “not since the freestyle prophets of the ‘80s walked the earth.”

And the man opened the box, cradled the frame like a long-lost relic, and smiled.

“Rise,” he said to the bike. “And roll.”

And it did.

Postlude: Grace Through Chrome, Mercy Through Means
This story, though spoken in mirth, follows the deeper pattern of Scripture:that our God delights to work through means—through water and word, through bread and wine, through spit and dirt, through fish and coins, and yes, even through chrome and childhood dreams remembered.

Jesus does not need tools. But He uses them anyway.

Not for efficiency, but for intimacy.

Not for spectacle, but to remind us that grace often comes wrapped in the ordinary—a coin, a touch, a muddy eye, a bicycle.

That, through the means of our vocations, we can channel the image of God, in and through Christ, in service of one another.

And in that, we are healed.

And in that, we ride.

At a recent high school track meet concession stand, I paid $5 for what I believed might be a hipster-style street food experience—a “walking taco,” no less. Sounds inviting. At $5, it already sounds hip! I like things that move—I’m at a track meet after all, where hopes, and a casting about of faith, abound. My imagination—under the cooling sky and within my springtime, pollen-fogged brain—began, itself, to walk!

What I received was a fun-sized taco travesty with a forked tombstone—a vague, multi-textured gruel in a chip bag with a plastic utensil already standing vigil.

This is not a food review. It is a monologue of disillusionment. A cautionary tale about misplaced trust, and the subtle ways even our smallest cultural rituals can carry the scent of something much larger—and much hollower. Inspired by nothing more than Dorito dust and the slow death of optimism, I offer this as a dramatic reckoning with the taco that walked straight into my lungs.

In a world shaped by flash and filler, sometimes you only need two bites to taste Babylon.

Two Bites from Babylon: A Dramatic Monologue
[Spotlight fades in on a lone folding chair beside a trash can. Enter

TEACHER, clutching a chip bag, fork protruding like a weary mast. The aroma of ground beef lingers with menacing resolve.]

TEACHER (gazing outward, solemnly):
I came in peace.
Five dollars folded tenderly in my palm—
not for sustenance,
but for a glimmer of something artisanal,
a whisper of cumin-scented grace.

They called it the “Walking Taco.”
And I, foolish in my faith,
thought perhaps it would walk—
hand-in-hand
with dignity.

[He pauses. Looks at the bag.]

Instead—
Taco barf.
Soggy despair ladled
into the cadaver of a Doritos bag,
its foil skin crinkled like the hopes I once held.
A 14-year-old stood nearby,
silent, solemn,
holding a plastic fork upright
like a tombstone.

I did not yet know
that fork was for me.

[He sits slowly.]

First bite:
confusion.
Second bite:
rebuke.
A wayward puff of Dorito dust
slipped into my bronchioles,
a subatomic orange shard of shame
detonating
deep in the cathedral of my chest.

And so I stopped.

Not at five bites,
not at four—
but at two.
Because when the taco fights back,
you don’t press on.
You repent.

[He gently places the chip bag in the trash. The fork remains upright.]

They say
faith is the evidence of things not seen.
But this I have seen.
And I believe no more.

[Blackout.]

"The fruit for which your soul longed has gone from you, and all your delicacies and your splendors are lost to you, never to be found again." — Revelation 18:14

In the unfolding drama of divine revelation, the question of who belongs — and how the story continues — has often turned on a single tension: supersession. It is a term burdened with pain, rooted in the idea that one people, or one revelation, replaces another. For centuries, this has complicated the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. And more recently, it has become a contested lens through which broader interfaith engagement must be navigated.

Yet perhaps the better question is not whether one tradition replaces another, but whether fulfillment must always mean erasure.

The Gospel of Christ does not cancel the story of Israel — it completes it. The crucified and risen Jesus does not sidestep the covenant, but embodies it. In Him, the promises made to Abraham, the law given through Moses, and the prophetic cries of justice and mercy find their long-awaited resonance. This is not a narrative of replacement, but of transfiguration. Christ does not uproot the tree of Israel; He is its firstfruits.

Still, it must be acknowledged that even within Christianity, the temptation toward a hard-edged supersessionism has existed — one that forgets Paul’s stern warning in Romans 11: “Do not be arrogant toward the branches.” This arrogance often results not only in theological pride, but in cultural and historical harm. Judaism, the root and trunk of our shared covenantal story, has been subjected to both neglect and caricature. Yet Scripture insists: “The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

Today, that distortion takes on new forms. Some modern ideologies, even those wrapped in the language of reverence or tradition, frame earlier revelations as fundamentally corrupted or invalid. They position themselves not as the next verse in the melody, but as a new score entirely. Whether explicit or implicit, these perspectives deepen the displacement of Judaism and obscure the covenantal arc that runs from creation through Israel to Christ and, ultimately, to the renewal of all things.

In light of this, the Christian calling must be reframed not as conquest or correction, but as vocation and reflection.

We are invited to reflect God’s wisdom into the world and return the world’s praise to God — just as ancient Israel was called to be a light to the nations. The resurrection of Christ is not the end of that light, but its radiant center. Through Him, the covenant expands, not collapses.

This is why defending the dignity and ongoing vocation of ancient Israel and Judah is not merely an ethical task — it is a theological necessity. It is also a form of doxology. In honoring the covenantal history through which God has chosen to act, we offer praise to the faithfulness of God. And in bearing witness to Christ as its fulfillment, not its negation, we allow the whole story to sing.

To move beyond supersessionism, then, is not to water down the claims of Christ. It is to deepen them. It is to proclaim that in Him, the story of Israel does not end—it flowers. And in that flowering, we are called—not to dominate or displace — but to serve, to reflect, and to praise.

There is, perhaps, something worth pondering in the structural fact that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam form a triad — three faiths bound by a common claim to Abraham, a shared reverence for divine revelation, and a profound entanglement in one another’s histories. Like the threefold cords spoken of in Ecclesiastes, this triadic structure suggests not only tension but potential strength. Each tradition, in its own way, reaches back to a singular root and stretches forward with distinct vision.

That shared root does not imply identical fruit. Nor does it collapse difference into bland unity. Rather, it invites the deeper work of interfaith reflection — not as competition for theological ground, but as cultivation of soil already sown with covenantal intent.

This structural triad offers a symbolic frame for mutual engagement: not to relativize Christ, nor to deny difference, but to acknowledge a shared framework through which theological, historical, and moral resonance can be explored. It is within this resonance — not erasure — that a meaningful witness to truth can emerge.

Of course, significant theological divergences remain. One such divergence is eschatological: while Judaism and Christianity share a vision of embodied resurrection and the renewal of creation, other traditions envision a more sharply divided cosmology — heaven, earth, and judgment held at greater remove. These differences matter. But they need not prevent us from recognizing a shared impulse toward justice, reverence, and covenantal response.

Indeed, this triadic structure may offer not only a metaphor for mutual recognition, but a form of resilience — resilience against the great unravelings of the human condition: evil, injustice, violence, and sin. Though each tradition names and addresses these realities differently, they all seek to bear witness against them.

And in a cultural moment where consequences for wrongdoing are increasingly downplayed or unevenly applied, this shared moral witness becomes vital — not only as theological conviction, but as civic necessity. A society that grows lax toward crime and disorder does not become freer; it becomes more vulnerable to the rise of harsher, ideologically rigid alternatives.

For Christians, Christ’s atoning work does not remove the call to righteousness; it deepens it. Grace is not an exemption from the covenantal life, but the ground on which it is now walked — toward the restoration of all things.

Such a reflection does not preclude dialogue with other traditions, religious or otherwise. The world is vast, and the Spirit moves where it will.

But for those drawn into the long story of Abraham and its branches, the triadic structure can serve not only as a map of past divergences, but as a kind of architectural metaphor: a structure that, at its best, holds tension, reveals strength, and invites habitation.

Postscript
This essay offers no resolution — nor should it. The questions it raises are not problems to be solved but tensions to be inhabited, with reverence, humility, and hope. What it does offer is a path: one shaped by covenantal memory, Christic fulfillment, and the vocational call to reflect God's wisdom into the world.

Yet even that path can be distorted when we forget who we are and who we are not.

Across centuries, the temptation to claim divine authority has recurred — sometimes in the form of supersessionist pride, sometimes in the rigidity of ideology, and sometimes in the quiet erosion of moral clarity under the guise of neutrality. Whether theological or political, religious or secular, the impulse is the same: to stand in the place of God rather than before Him.

But we — all of us — are not the Author. We are image-bearers, not originators. The story of covenant, fulfillment, and justice is not ours to redefine but to receive — and in receiving it, to be shaped.

Christ fulfills the story not by replacing what came before, but by transfiguring it. In Him, the glory of God does not bypass creation; it passes through it. The call is not to possess that glory, but to reflect it.

And in that reflection, we find not resolution — but the beginning of wisdom.

Post-Postscript
If this essay resists resolution, it also resists naivety. The call to covenantal clarity and interfaith witness must include vigilance — not only against theological pride, but against the cultural conditions in which justice is softened into irrelevance, and power becomes the only remaining truth.

When societies lose the will — or the coherence—to apply consequence, they do not remain empty. Into that vacuum, ideologies rush. And not all ideologies are content with conversation.

Some, in their most extreme forms, bring with them codes of law that are likewise extreme — claiming divine mandate while silencing dissent by fear. While such expressions often emerge from within specific theological frameworks, the broader danger transcends any single tradition. These are not anomalies. In some systems of belief, they are the execution of a script — one written with absolute certainty and enforced without mercy.

This is not a call to paranoia. It is a call to discernment: to uphold moral order not as an imposition of power, but as a safeguard of peace. Lawlessness — whether in the name of tolerance or revolution — does not birth freedom. It births chaos. And chaos, unresisted, invites domination.

Justice, rightly applied, is not cruelty. It is covenantal stewardship. It is part of what it means to bear God’s image in the ordering of creation. And if we do not bear it well, others will bear it for us — in ways we did not choose.

The world, we are told—rightly—is round. And for centuries now, we have taught this truth as a triumph of scientific knowledge over myth and superstition. The idea of a flat earth has become a shorthand for error, backwardness, and ignorance. It is mocked with a kind of reflexive superiority, the symbol of a mind unwilling to accept progress.

And yet, what if the old belief—wrong though it may be in physical terms—carried within it a symbolic longing we have too quickly dismissed? What if it gestured, in its limited understanding, toward something Christic, something fulfilled rather than corrected?

The flat earth of the ancients was not simply a misunderstanding of physical shape. It was a worldview—a sense of horizon, of place, of direction, of coherence. People stood within a world that felt spread before them: where North, South, East, and West extended like the corners of a great tent, a covenantal expanse. In that worldview, one could imagine walking from one end to the other—not escaping the world, but inhabiting it fully.

Perhaps that was never meant to be replaced, only transfigured.

The Geometry of Fulfillment
Christ does not discard the old; He fulfills it. The Law is not abolished, but transfigured. The Temple is not preserved, but replaced with something better—not by erasure, but by elevation. Likewise, the geometry of the cosmos may itself be caught up in this process of transfiguration.

In the vision of New Creation, Isaiah tells us:

“Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” (Isaiah 40:4)

This is not a flattening in the pejorative sense. It is a leveling for glory—the kind of “flatness” that makes way for doxology. The topography of strife and separation is made smooth for the coming of the Lord. In this sense, the idea of a “flat earth” becomes a symbol—not of ignorance, but of hope.

What if, in New Creation, geography itself is made permeable to praise? What if the four cardinal directions no longer pull us outward into isolation, but draw us inward into universal communion? A redeemed horizon where the edges do not divide but echo the voice of God?

Resonance in the Physics of Strings
This redemptive geometry does not oppose science—it opens space for it. In fact, within string theory—the leading theoretical framework in modern physics—there is profound harmony with this vision.

String theory imagines that the most fundamental units of reality are not particles, but vibrating strings. These strings trace out two-dimensional surfaces—called worldsheets—as they move through spacetime. And these worldsheets, often modeled as flat surfaces, hold within them the mathematics of resonance, tension, and song.

Many string theory models begin in flat ten-dimensional space. These "flat" spacetimes are not simplistic—they are elegant. They form a canvas for deeper laws to unfold. Vibrational patterns, encoded in the hidden dimensions of creation, become the building blocks of reality. In that sense, the universe is not only built but played—sung into being.

So while the Earth is physically round, the fundamental reality, as modern physics describes it, is one of woven, vibrating unity—a cosmic music stretched across flat dimensional frameworks. Not unlike the flat expanse of covenantal prophecy, preparing the way of the Lord.

This doesn’t resolve cosmology into eschatology, but it does reveal how science, when properly framed, can echo doxology. For the God who incarnates in Christ is not threatened by knowledge; He is the Logos in whom all knowledge coheres. The elegant mathematics of strings, the leveling poetry of Isaiah, and the square-shaped city of Revelation all whisper the same promise: a cosmos brought into resonance.

Against the Mockery of Small Knowledge
To be quite clear: the earth is not flat. Yet the mockery against so-called “flat-earthers” grates—not because the science is in doubt, but because the dismissal itself is shallow. It reveals a kind of reductionist thinking that not only misunderstands others, but also flattens the complexity of human belief, with a reflexive disdain that resists deeper reflection. Mockery always reveals a kind of smallness—the inability to see symbolic meaning in imperfect understanding. The early flat earth models were wrong in shape, but maybe they were right in intuition—right in their hunger for a world that made sense, where space stretched meaningfully from one covenantal end to the other.

In our modern “spherical” knowledge, we’ve gained precision, but perhaps lost a kind of sacred shape. We see curvature, but miss coherence. The round earth orbits through space, yet we drift through meaning.

But the Gospel is not curved. It is radiant and radiant outward. Christ is not a globe, but a cornerstone.

And the City of God, in Revelation, is not a sphere. It is foursquare—length and width and height in harmony (Revelation 21:16). Not a planet, but a temple. Not a globe, but a mosaic.

The Shape of Hope
We will never go back to believing the earth is flat. Nor should we. But perhaps we can go forward into seeing that the old longing—flattened landscapes, reachable ends, unified space—was not simply wrong, but incomplete. Like the Law before Christ, it awaited its fulfillment in glory.

The flat earth, in all its supposed foolishness, now becomes a symbol of that final geography—a redeemed, radiant cosmos where every place is connected, where distance no longer divides, and where the horizon is not a boundary, but a song.

And in that New Creation, we will not fall off the edge.

We will walk—together—across the flat and shining expanse of God’s everlasting praise.

Schubert’s Eighth threads even among the blood that pulses through one’s ear.

There are few works in Western music that inhabit the listener so gently, yet so irrevocably, as Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. It begins not with assertion, but with a murmur—a tremble in the low strings that feels less like the start of a performance and more like the surfacing of something long hidden, already alive inside you. It’s not a piece that asks to be heard, but one that reveals itself as having always been there, softly echoing in the chambers of the soul.

This is not the music of arrival, or conquest, or triumph. It is the music of presence. Of ache. Of grace so delicate it must be received rather than seized.

And there is something like this of the indwelling of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, as described in Scripture, rarely announces itself with fanfare. It moves like breath, like whisper, like thread. It abides within, often unnoticed—until one day you are still enough to hear it, and you realize it had been accompanying you all along. This is the kind of presence that Schubert somehow intuits and transmits—not through doctrine, but through tone; not through proclamation, but through patience.

When Schubert writes, he does not impose. He abides. His melodies do not carry you forward so much as sit beside you. They do not orchestrate your catharsis but offer a space where sorrow and wonder can be companions. Like the Spirit, his music weaves into your being, from without, but also from within.

To say that Schubert’s Eighth Symphony threads among the blood is not metaphor alone—it is a kind of confession. A recognition that what we often call “art” can also engage in revelation. And that what we often hear as music is sometimes a whisper from the Spirit, softly reminding us: I am with you, even here.

Preface
This short essay is purely speculative. It is an exercise in imagination—yet one rooted in scriptural truths and theological reflection. I do not claim certainty regarding the existence of extraterrestrial visitors, and in fact, I remain highly doubtful of many of the popular claims. However, if we allow for the possibility that such beings are real, and if their behavior aligns with the general pattern reported in credible accounts—marked by advanced capability and conspicuous aloofness—then this essay offers one potential explanation.

It is not a scientific hypothesis, nor a defense of faith. Rather, it is a theological thought experiment.

Creation Waits
Let us suppose, just for a moment, that the stories are true. That the grainy footage, the whispered disclosures, the now-official declassifications—all of it—are not mere misinterpretation. Suppose we really are being visited by extraterrestrials: beings from beyond our solar system, bearing technologies far beyond our own, arriving quietly and vanishing just as mysteriously.

Suppose it is true.

The most striking aspect, then, is not their existence—but their restraint. Their aloofness. Their refusal to engage in any open or enduring way. Why would a civilization capable of crossing interstellar distances—an inconceivable feat even by our most optimistic projections—choose to remain, for the most part, invisible?

To some, the answer might lie in fear, disinterest, or the classic "zoo hypothesis": that they watch us as one watches a walled garden, out of anthropological curiosity or ethical hesitation. But this essay offers another possibility—one drawn not from science fiction, but from the pages of Scripture.

What if they are not aloof out of disdain, but awe?

According to the biblical witness, humanity is not merely a biological species but a covenantal creature—formed in the image of the Creator, destined (in Christ) for a resurrection unto incorruptibility, glory, and renewed stewardship over all creation. The Apostle Paul writes that “the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). Not just Earth, but the entire cosmos, holds its breath.

In this framework, the human story is not merely tribal nor terrestrial—it is cosmic. In Christ, humanity is to be raised (in the “life after life after death”), transformed, and sent forth as incorruptible image-bearers into the fullness of a renewed creation. And in that moment, we are to become what we were always meant to be: not dominators, not manipulators, but stewards, priests, and co-regents.

So what if these extraterrestrials—assuming they are real—somehow know this?

What if they, too, have encountered the strange gravitational pull of biblical revelation? What if they, through observation or spiritual intuition, have come to sense that something decisive has happened—or is about to happen—through this bruised and battered species on Earth?

Some will object, of course. Isn’t this just another form of species-chauvinism, cloaked in religious language? But the objection misunderstands the nature of the claim. This is not triumphalism—it is teleology. It is not humanity declaring itself supreme, but Scripture declaring that God will one day raise His children to be what Adam never fully became: caretakers of a cosmos made whole.

And if so, then the restraint of alien visitors might not be indifference at all. It might be reverence. A kind of cosmic deference.

They may wait because they believe.

Or they may wait because they’re not sure—but they are cautious, discerning that something about this human story, though marred by violence and chaos, carries the scent of sacred unfolding.

And so they remain aloof.

Watching.
Waiting.
Perhaps, even, hoping.

Not to conquer.
But to partner.

When the sons and daughters of God are revealed, and creation—every far-flung star, every hidden watcher—is gathered into the new creation.

And here we can reflect on Revelation 22:1-2
Out from the heart of the New Jerusalem, a river flows. Along its banks grow trees of life, not one but many, bearing fruit in abundance and in season. Their leaves carry healing, not just for a people, but for all nations and all creation—offering renewal, restoration, and peace to a creation long fractured.

I’ve returned from a journey across the sea—Italy, a cruise, winding canals, stone alleys. Now I’m home again. And yet… not entirely.

Each morning I wake early, hours before dawn, still tethered to another time zone. My body, no longer sure where it belongs, drifts somewhere between continents. And last night, in that strange space between dreams and waking, I felt it: the sensation of being rocked—not violently, but gently, as if stirred awake by invisible hands. A presence, almost. Not frightening. Just… there.

Later, I felt a subtle vibration through the bed—an echo of ship engines, or perhaps memory itself pulsing through my nerves. I wondered for a moment if we’d had an earthquake. But no. The earth was still. It was only me who wasn’t.

And yet, I woke not disoriented, but sharpened.

Yesterday, while cutting the grass—tired and eager to be done—I noticed something unexpected. I began weaving between trees with unpracticed agility. Reversing downhill along a fence with precision I didn’t know I had. Maneuvers I’ve never tried before came easily. It felt natural, almost trained.

And I realized: my body still remembered the balance it needed on boats. The small adjustments, the internal calibration, the way you must move with the rocking rather than fight it. The sea had rewired me, at least for a while. And somehow, that tuning translated to everything else.

There’s a kind of wisdom hidden in this.

We often think of transitions as disruptions. But sometimes, disruption is a teacher. The rocking of the sea—the loss of equilibrium—can awaken new kinds of equilibrium. Sometimes being unsteady for a time is what trains you to move more freely.

Maybe that’s how the Spirit works too.

God doesn’t always anchor us where we are. Sometimes, He puts us to sea—not to disorient us, but to recalibrate us. To teach our inner ear to hear again. To train our footing not just for where we’ve been, but for where we’re going next.

And when we return, we’re different. Still ourselves, but slightly more agile. More alert. More tuned to presence. We carry the memory of the sea not as dizziness, but as a quiet skill.

I wonder if that’s what grace feels like sometimes.

The Spirit rocks us gently, unsettles us slightly, not to scare us—
but to wake us.
To make us move differently when we return to ordinary ground.

I think I’m still rocking.
And I think I’m grateful for it.

This poem offers a quiet reflection on how resurrection may sometimes appear—not in thunder or spectacle, but in the stillness of the everyday. It is a meditation on presence, memory, and the subtle ways grace reveals itself along the way. Written following the death of a friend, it seeks to glimpse resurrection not only as a future promise, but as a present whisper—something already stirring beneath the surface, in the fragile bloom of a yellow flower, or in the hush that follows a long-held gesture of love.

The Resurrection
The resurrection
is also a present whisper—
an aged woman,
in reverence with a yellow flower,
memory both swift and motionless.

No trumpet, no stone rolled with thunder,
just the stillness of a gesture held
beneath the bloom—of something golden.

The wind of the already
glimpsing the
not yet.

And hearts formed
to an eternal resonance
received.

The Devil Cites Scripture
False Christianity, Fanaticism, and the Witness of the Real

“If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written…”
—Satan, quoting Psalm 91 (Matthew 4:6, ESV)

Not All Who Claim Christ Know Him
One of the stranger accusations you hear in moments of cultural unrest—sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted—is that Hitler was a Christian. The implication, of course, is that Christianity itself is guilty: of authoritarianism, of cruelty, of genocidal violence. And since it’s true that Hitler used the word “God” in speeches and invoked Christian language, isn’t the whole tradition tainted?

Let’s begin here, plainly:

To name Christ is not to know Him.
To quote Scripture is not to be shaped by it.
And to invoke God is not to bear His image.

The devil himself quotes Scripture, after all.

Satanic Fluency: Quoting Psalm 91
In the wilderness, Satan tempts Jesus not by denying God—but by misusing His Word. “It is written,” he says, before twisting Psalm 91 into a dare, urging Christ to weaponize divine promise into spectacle. But Christ—rooted in the Spirit, faithful to the Father—refuses to fracture the Word from its Source. He replies not with raw power, but with obedient clarity: “It is also written…”

This is how evil works: not always by erasing the Word, but by detaching it from love. By citing Scripture with a lie in the heart. By turning a psalm into a slogan, or a covenant into a cudgel.

And that is what Hitler did.
That is what every false Christ-claimer has done.
That is what continues in distorted corners of political and digital culture today.

Fanaticism in Christian Garb
Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer, made a sharp observation: fanatical movements are not born from deep conviction, but from deep emptiness. People, too often, do not give themselves to truth, but to cause—to identity, control, and absolution. They join mass movements not because they believe in the good, but because they long to escape the burden of self.

Hoffer noted that such movements thrive in periods of dislocation—economic, cultural, spiritual. In those moments, the craving for certainty grows desperate. And the most seductive certainty of all is moral superiority: the belief that one's group, party, or faith holds exclusive truth, and all opposition is evil.

Into that hunger, Hitler spoke.
Into that void, fascism surged.
And tragically, some churches—instead of resisting the tide—rode it.

But that was not Christianity.
It was a counterfeit, draped in crosses.

What Is a Christian?
In a time when many invoke Christianity—often as a tribal marker, a cultural banner, or a political claim—it is necessary to ask: What, actually, is a Christian?

The answer is not complicated, but it is profound:

A Christian is one who trusts in the person and work of Jesus Christ, loves God, and loves their neighbor.
A Christian is one who follows Christ not merely with words, but with the shape of their life—bearing the cross, not wielding it.

Lutheran theology has long held the paradox of the Christian life: simul iustus et peccator—at once righteous and a sinner. This doesn’t dilute the call to holiness; it intensifies it. It reminds us that being in Christ is not about declaring our own purity, but about clinging to the mercy of God, living under grace, and being transformed by it.

A true Christian reflects Christ—not just in name, but in form.
This means cruciformity: humility, mercy, truth, and sacrificial love.

The Rabshakeh and the Twisted Word
This distortion of the divine word is not new. We see it chillingly embodied in the Rabshakeh, the Assyrian emissary sent to threaten Jerusalem in Isaiah 36.

He does not mock God outright. Instead, he mimics God’s voice—misquoting, reinterpreting, and casting doubt on the very promises that had sustained Judah. He says, in effect:

“Don’t let Hezekiah deceive you with his talk of trust in the Lord. Haven’t other nations trusted their gods—and fallen? The Lord Himself told me to come and destroy you.”

It’s theological gaslighting.

The Rabshakeh uses Judah’s own language of covenant and trust—but strips it of context, twists it toward despair, and wields it on behalf of the empire. He weaponizes sacred language to crush the very people it was meant to sustain.

It is not unlike what Satan does in the wilderness.
It is not unlike what Hitler did in Germany.
It is not unlike what modern voices do when they cherry-pick Scripture to justify power, exclusion, or domination.

And it stands in stark contrast to the vocation of a true image-bearer of God.

True Image-Bearing
To bear God’s image is to reflect His wisdom into the world—and to return the world’s glory and praise back to God. This is humanity’s priestly role, fulfilled ultimately in Christ and extended through His body, the Church.

When Scripture is used not to illuminate but to dominate, not to convict but to control, it ceases to be light. It becomes shadow. And the people who wield it that way are not bearing the image of God—they are distorting it.

A false Christian is not merely someone who sins. We all do.
A false Christian is someone who invokes Christ’s name but rejects His way.
Who quotes His words but denies His form.
Who wears His title but would never walk to Calvary.

This Cultural Moment: Discernment and Witness
We live in a time when Scripture is frequently cited—but rarely obeyed. Verses are isolated, slogans are elevated, and the name of Christ is invoked for causes that bear no resemblance to His heart.

In this cultural moment, the temptation is not to burn the Bible, but to bend it. To use holy words for unholy aims. To claim Christ without following Him. And so, like the Rabshakeh outside Jerusalem’s gates, like the tempter in the wilderness, like false prophets throughout history—many now shout in the language of faith while acting in the spirit of domination.

But the Church must discern.
The Christian must witness.
Not all who say “Lord, Lord” know Him.

We are not called to be loud. We are called to be faithful.
We are not called to win. We are called to love God and neighbor.
We are not called to rule by fear. We are called to serve by grace.

The Word Rightly Spoken
The devil cites Scripture. So do tyrants. So do those who long to cloak their cruelty in credibility. But the true Word—the Word made flesh—cannot be twisted without cost.

Christ does not merely speak the Word. He is the Word. And to follow Him is to be shaped by that Word—down to our very form.

The Scriptures are not ammunition for argument. They are revelation for transformation. They are not the private property of partisans. They are the voice of a covenant God calling us back to Himself.

And so we bear witness—not as proof-wielders, but as image-bearers. Not as those who seek to win debates, but as those shaped by the cross.

To quote Scripture is easy.
To live it—by the Spirit, in Christ—is the real mark of a Christian.

Let those who have ears, hear.
And let the Word be rightly spoken.

Introduction
The Kingdom of God, Jesus said, is like a mustard seed—small, overlooked, tucked into soil. But what grows from it is nothing less than a rooted and reaching life, sheltering others, spreading through unseen channels. It doesn't arrive with spectacle or domination. It travels instead in the hidden pockets of the faithful—through ordinary lives shaped by an extraordinary love.

This Kingdom is a society, but not of status or power. It is made of those who love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength—and who, in response to that love, love their neighbors as themselves. Not as a performance, but as a way of being re-formed by the one who came not to be served, but to serve. That’s how the Kingdom moves: not by force, but by presence; not by conquest, but by communion.

If it came today, it might not land in a capital or on a stage. It might begin in a place like Kermit.

Poem: The Kingdom in Kermit
Kermit,
Not the frog,
just a nowhere town in Texas.

If Jesus were born today—
Incarnate God—
yeah, in Kermit.

A mustard seed,
tucked in a pocket,
place-rooted, person-shaped.

Let it grow,
let it leap,
from pocket to pocket.

Postscript
I remember, many years ago, driving in Texas and passing a road sign for a town called Kermit. There was little to see from the nondescript intersection—just a name, a population number, and the wide flat fields stretching to the edge of sky. In my imagination, shaped by the bigness of Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin, Kermit felt like a glitch in the map.

But now, decades later, I find it again—alive in imagination, speaking into Christic poetry. What seemed inconsequential has become a signpost. That’s how the Kingdom moves: quietly, persistently, sometimes buried for years, until the time is ripe. And then suddenly, what felt like mundane memory flares with meaning. A seed you forgot you carried begins to grow.

Even now, the Kingdom stirs—not only in what is visible, but in what waits.
From pocket to pocket.

Karl Marx famously called religion the opiate of the people, a phrase that has echoed through generations as a rallying cry against what he saw as the narcotic effects of spiritual belief. But what Marx critiqued was not Christianity as it truly is—it was a shadow of it, a distortion. What he condemned was not the Gospel proclaimed by Christ, but a Platonized or Gnostic caricature: a belief system that sees the world as disposable, the body as irrelevant, and salvation as escape into a disembodied beyond.

That is not the Christian faith.

The Gospel, as preached by Christ Himself—fully divine, fully human, and rooted in the story of ancient Israel and Judah—is not a doctrine of retreat, but of covenantal fulfillment. It is the culminating moment in the long covenantal narrative of God's people, a story transfigured rather than discarded. In Christ, the promises made to Abraham, the cries of the prophets, and the longings of exile converge and take on flesh. Christianity, in this light, is not a brand-new religion but the revelation of what the story of Israel always pointed toward: the resurrection of the dead, the renewal of creation, and the reign of God on earth as in heaven.

This eschatology—the Christian hope—is not about drifting off into the clouds. As Paul proclaims in Romans, especially in chapters 5 through 8, the resurrection is bodily, the future is embodied, and the Spirit is at work even now renewing creation from within. N.T. Wright refers to this as a collaborative eschatology: God’s ultimate victory has been secured in Christ, but we are drawn into the story, empowered by the Spirit to anticipate that final renewal in our lives and vocations. This is not works-righteousness, as is sometimes mistakenly alleged. Rather, it is the gift of freedom: to serve, to create, to heal, to build—in short, to love with purpose.

Scot McKnight has similarly emphasized that the Gospel is not a mere transaction but a story: the story of Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s hope and the Lord of the world. And this Lord does not call us to passivity. He calls us to live into our vocations—not to earn salvation, but to participate in the work of God, to reflect His image, and to bear witness to a coming kingdom that has already broken in.

And here lies a modern irony: many who today espouse a quasi- or fully Marxist worldview—often quite openly—end up reinforcing the very caricature Marx himself perpetuated. Whether knowingly or unconsciously, they describe Christianity not as it actually is, but through the distorted lens of Marxist critique. In doing so, they construct a convenient straw-man: a Christianity of passive piety, private comfort, and escapist fantasy.

But this straw-man is not drawn from Scripture. It is a reflection of Marxism’s own project—one that must distort in order to replace. It critiques a Christianity of its own making and declares victory over a phantom.

Yet Christians themselves have not been immune to promoting this distortion. The widespread belief in a rapture—a sudden evacuation of the faithful from the earth—represents a theological error both in metaphor and in literal reading. Though rooted in isolated interpretations of 1 Thessalonians, the concept collapses when viewed in light of the full scriptural witness. Through intertextual reading—from the Hebrew prophets to the Gospels, from Paul’s letters to the apocalyptic vision of Revelation—the picture is not of escape from the world, but of God’s faithful return to it.

The Christian hope is resurrection, not removal. Restoration, not rapture.

Marx, though intelligent and historically aware, misunderstood not only Christianity but arguably his own religious inheritance. Raised within a Jewish cultural framework, he nonetheless missed the central drama of that story: that the arc of Israel’s history finds its meaning not in negation or revolution, but in Christ. This is not a sweeping claim about Judaism or those who faithfully live within its tradition—entirely to the contrary. It is a specific critique of Marx himself, whose reductive analysis—so common to postmodernist thinking—flattened religion into mere sociopolitical utility. In doing so, he overlooked the richness of his own heritage and failed to see how the Gospel fulfills, rather than erases, the story of ancient Israel and Judah. The Gospel is not an opiate; it is an awakening—not to fantasy, but to the world as it truly is and will be. As C.S. Lewis rightly asserted: the lion will not be tamed.

But ask most people today—even many Christians—what happens when they die, and the answer often drifts into vague spirituality. However, the earliest Christian confession is far more tangible: He is risen—and so too shall we be. In that light, we do not wait passively.

We rise each day to participate—vocationally, communally, and doxologically—in the renewal God has begun.

In an age crowded with distortions—some ancient, some modern, some disguised as intelligence or activism—the Gospel calls us to remain rooted, not in abstraction or escapism, but in the living, resurrected Christ. He is not merely a symbol or an idea, nor a projection of our needs, nor a myth to be deconstructed. He is the fullness of God dwelling bodily, and the fulfillment of the story. To lose sight of that is to lose the thread—not just of theology, but of truth itself.

"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily." — Colossians 2:8–9, ESV

Introduction
In the long arc of modern thought, few figures have held such lasting sway as the one who claimed that meaning hides in repression, that freedom lies in analysis, and that the soul—if it exists at all—must be measured in drives and dreams.

He taught us to mistrust what is sacred, to decode love as pathology, and to speak endlessly of the self without ever learning how to live. And though he claimed to liberate, he more often bound—leaving a trail not of healing, but of sanctioned despair.

He and those who followed him cast long shadows.
They promised new frameworks, new emancipations, new truths that would liberate us from illusion.
But often, these new truths proved to be cages—elegant, articulate, self-contained, but closed, and cleverly accusatory.

And we? We’ve reaped what was sown:

• not freedom, but fragmentation,

• not peace, but endless commentary,

• not healing, but hollow self-reference.

We have inherited systems that explain everything but resolve nothing.
They stare into the absurd and declare it final.
They disassemble the sacred and wonder why we cannot feel joy.

But there is another way.
Not a system. Not an abstraction. Not an ideology dressed in pastoral tones.
But a person. A presence. A pierced hand extended in mercy.

The Christic path does not deny suffering, absurdity, or the complexity of the human heart.
It simply insists they are not the final word.

It offers no disembodied theory of meaning, but meaning itself, embodied.
It does not explain away the ache; it meets us in it.
It does not chart escape from the world, but instead speaks, walks, abides—here, in the world.

This poem is written from that intersection—between the ruins of psychological prophecy and the slow, radiant dawning of grace.
It names the voices that promised healing and gave us hell.
And it points, however quietly, to the one who still calls us home.

Poem: Freud and Other False Prophets
Freud, icon
Of everywhere dime-store
Psychologo-bully,
And the post-modern nowhere
That is always somewhere—here.

And reaping what
He sowed—the key:
To disbelief,
To self-hate.
Or even self-love.

The hell of all things—
An all-ishness, all for none.
And yet another self-fulfilled prophecy.
(Aren’t they all?) And the Accuser?

Not to freedom.
Not to cure—
No—not really.
Not for most.
And the sacred?

Yes, yes—
In the all-in,
Relational,
Like the bud to branch.

Free.
Light.
And just—right here.

Selah.

Nietzsche’s Power and Error
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote with a flame-tipped pen. He did not merely argue—he declared. He summoned. And in doing so, he ignited the imagination of many who felt, and still feel, disillusioned by the church, by cultural hypocrisy, by the hollowed-out rituals of a world once sacred.

In my twenties, I devoured his work. I read nearly all of it—not as an opponent, but as a captivated reader. His voice rang out with clarity and conviction. His style was electric. And much of what he observed about the sickness of institutions, the dead forms of faith, and the creeping mediocrity of modern life struck me as devastatingly true.

But even then, I sensed something else at work.

Nietzsche, in his most furious passages—especially in The Anti-Christ—is not critiquing Christ, as many—maybe even himself—imagined. He is critiquing the collapse of witness, the decay of institutional Christianity, and the weaponization of religion. These critiques are not without merit. They still echo today.

But what Nietzsche does next is where the rot sets in:

He takes aim at the distortion, and declares the original corrupt.
He mistakes the abuses of men for the way of Christ.
He holds up a mirror and calls it a gospel.

Paul Misread, the Gospel Misnamed
Central to Nietzsche’s argument is his disdain for Paul. In The Anti-Christ, he paints Paul not as the apostle of grace, but as the architect of a new form of control—a man who twisted the message of Jesus into a theology of guilt and obedience. Nietzsche pits the supposed purity of Jesus’ life against what he calls Paul’s invention: Christianity.

This is not just misreading. It is a fundamental failure to see the arc—the covenantal, prophetic, Jewish arc of Scripture that Paul is completing, not corrupting. N.T. Wright and other theologians have made this case clearly.

Paul does not preach weakness. He preaches strength in Christ—the kind that does not puff itself up but pours itself out. Romans is not a manifesto of submission, but a declaration of God's righteousness made manifest for the world, not against it. The Gospel is not an ethic of domination nor a system of shame—it is a summons to become fully human in Christ, through love, faith, and the Spirit, as God intended, as his image-bearers.

Nietzsche sees only chains, where Paul actually offers a vocation of freedom.

The False Charge of Resentment
Perhaps Nietzsche’s most famous (and most quoted) critique is his claim that Christianity is born out of ressentiment—a spiritualized envy of the strong by the weak. In this reading, love is disguise, humility is cowardice, and forgiveness is a covert weapon of the oppressed. Nietzsche saw this not just as unfortunate, but as decadent. Rotting. A rebellion against life itself.

This is, again, powerful. And again, it is wrong. Genius is not immune from distortion.

To claim that Christianity is rooted in resentment is to have never truly heard the Psalms. It is to misread the prophets. It is to miss the broken hallelujah of Job, the radiant joy of Mary’s Magnificat, the covenantal passion of Jesus at table, in the garden, on the cross.

Christianity is not the elevation of weakness. It is the transfiguration of it. Not resentment, but reconciliation. Not passive pity, but active love.

Nietzsche’s rejection of “pity” as corrosive betrays a tragic misapprehension. Christianity does not teach pity—it teaches compassion, which is not superiority but kinship. Love of God and love of neighbor is not rooted in condescension—it is self-giving, mutual, joyful, and unearned.

It is not the weak masking their failure. It is the living God choosing the cross to reveal His glory.

The Mirror and the Christ Who Steps Through
What, then, is Nietzsche doing?

He is not building a philosophy. He is not systematizing a worldview. He is doing something far more ancient and far more personal:

He is crying out.

His writing, especially in The Anti-Christ, sounds like the Psalms—but inverted. It is psalmody without trust, lament without direction, fire without altar.

He does not destroy Scripture—he parses it without love, and so misreads it. As with Marx and Freud, the text is not erased—it is distorted.

And perhaps the most tragic irony is this:
The very ground from which Nietzsche wrote—intellectually, morally, culturally—was made fertile by Christ Himself.

The Western emphasis on human dignity, on interiority, on vocation, on the conscience of the individual—all of it grows from the deep roots of the Gospel. Nietzsche exercised a profound kind of vocational freedom: to critique, to create, to serve culture—as he thought—through piercing thought. But this very freedom was bought and cultivated by the Christian imagination—a moral and theological legacy that preached the dignity of all, the servant-heartedness of power, and the binding of truth to love.

But his despair was not born of Christ, but of distortion. And, as I believe, Nietzsche’s distortion was not born of deliberate malice, but—almost certainly—of an honest misunderstanding of Scripture, of Paul, of Christ Himself. That honesty and absence of malice is not necessarily true of many post-modernists.

Still, Nietzsche mistook the failures of those who bore the name of Jesus for the person of Jesus.
He confused the apostles’ bold witness and hard-won development of doctrine with a mere institutional power play.

As with Marx and Freud, Nietzsche’s critique does not touch the real Christ. It touches the wreckage of human sin dressed in religious language—and in that confusion, he exiles himself from the only love that could answer him.

In the end, Nietzsche’s project is not the death of God. It is the projection of a Godless wound. His “God is dead” is not triumph—it is mourning. And perhaps, at some level, he knew it. This is why I still admire Nietzsche.

Where he went astray: he saw the Church’s failures, but instead of returning to Christ, he held up a fun-house mirror and called it Christianity. Then he shattered the mirror—and imagined himself free.

But Christ cannot be contained in the mirror of human rage.
He does not flinch at Nietzsche’s critiques.
He does not argue.
He simply steps through the glass, bearing wounds not of weakness, but of voluntary love.

Conclusion: Beyond Pity, Toward Glory
Nietzsche is right to hate falseness, pettiness, and decay.
He is right to long for strength that is real, for life that is unafraid, for meaning that transcends.
But he never saw that the Gospel is not the denial of those things—it is their homecoming.

He saw decadence where there was actually death and resurrection.
He mistook pity for love.
He mistook resentment for the seedbed of grace.
He mistook the Accuser’s distortions for the voice of Christ.

But the true Gospel?
It is not a morality tale for the weak.
It is a Song of Songs for the broken,
a Psalm for the God-haunted,
a light for those who groan not because they are cowards—
but because they have heard a call from beyond the grave.

Nietzsche’s cry still echoes.
But it is not the final voice.

The final voice is Christ’s:
not the cry of pity, but the call of love.

Selah.

Coda: The Silence and the Sacred
In the final estimate, Nietzsche—regardless of neurological deterioration or tertiary syphilis—did not merely die a broken man.
He became a broken man.
Spiritually. Existentially. Humanly.

His final years were not defiant, but collapsed.
The one who warned us against pity became wholly dependent.
The one who called God dead fell into a silence so total, it echoes louder than his aphorisms.

And yet, the final irony is this:

In his brokenness, Nietzsche once again depended on the sacred.

He became, in a profound way, what he could never quite see—
sacred: set apart, dependent, wounded, in need of healing, tethered by grace whether he believed in it or not.

We do not know how the final moment passed.
We only know that Christ does not despise the broken—even the brilliant, bitter, blazing ones.
He steps through the shattered glass,
into the hospital room,
into the silence,
into the exile—
and He calls the prodigal by name.

The Nietzsche who could not see Christ,
was still seen by Christ.

And that is the end of all philosophy,
and the beginning of all healing.

Benediction
God is not dead.
And neither is Nietzsche.
He is loved—still.
He will rise—still.
And when he stands again, it will not be before the thunder of the God he misunderstood—
but before the eyes of mercy,
the One he never stopped searching for.

This is the Gospel.
Not resentment.
But resurrection.

This piece began as a lighthearted reflection on the loss of a backyard chicken, and—like most things in life—spiraled quickly into a meditation on absurdity, scripture, and the unexpected dignity of daily vocation. It is part Beckett, part Luther, part Birkenstock. All of it, I believe, is true.

The Problem with Existentialism: A Parable in Three Acts

CAST
YOU – weary poultry steward, philosopher of the mundane
DOG ONE – the barking bard, speaks in simple declarations
DOG TWO – the silent mystic, communicates via bodily signs
CHICKENS (Moe & Tiny) – jittery survivors, non-verbal but ever-present
THE VOICE – offstage presence
EVERYMAN, SECONDMAN, THIRD – individuals waiting in Act III
POWERWASHER – silent, working presence

ACT I: The Coop at Twilight
(The Absurdist Premise)

Scene: Late afternoon. A scruffy backyard. A coop tilts slightly off-plumb. Two chickens pace at a distance. YOU stands center, brow furrowed, arms crossed. DOG ONE lies at feet, alert. DOG TWO nearby, still as a monk.

YOU (to no one, and everyone)
Once I had fifteen.
Now I have two.
And Beauty Queen, she’s gone—
no feathers, no fight.
Just... vanished.
I suppose she died how she lived:
Too delicate for the world.
Probably dropped dead at the sight of teeth,
and was quietly ferried away
by a fox surprised by his own luck.

(Pause.)
Moe and Tiny endure.
Skittish, unsociable, paranoid—
but alive.
Maybe that’s the secret:
Don’t trust. Don’t engage.
Just flinch and flee and make it
to the final frame.

(Looks toward coop.)
I’m saddened...
But not overly saddened.
I think—
I’m quite ready to be done with tending chickens.

DOG ONE (with noble timing)
Ruff. Ruff.

(Deep silence. Time holds its breath.)

DOG TWO
(without prelude, without emotion, VOMITS beside the coop)

(Long pause. YOU looks down. Then out.)

YOU
...And so it is written.

DOG ONE (quietly, with reverence)
Ruff.

(The chickens cluck nervously offstage. A breeze moves a single feather across the ground. Sunset begins. Lights slowly dim.)

BLACKOUT.

ACT II: The Soft Fall of Destiny
(The Height of the Absurd)

Scene: The same backyard, now dusk. Moe and Tiny perch in silhouette. The coop stands solemn, silent. The dogs are asleep. YOU steps back outside, holding a broom, perhaps to tidy… or perhaps out of muscle memory.

YOU (to himself, softly)
Well, this is it, isn’t it?
The chickens are winding down.
The fox has eaten his fill.
And I—
I am strangely at peace.

(He tilts his head upward. The sky blushes orange. A sense of grace descends.)

YOU (almost smiling)
I wonder—
when all the tending is done,
when the feathers have flown,
what waits for the keeper of birds?

(A shift in the wind. A SMALL SHAPE ARCS DOWNWARD FROM ABOVE—graceful, deliberate, croc-like in motion but unmistakably…)

SOUND EFFECT: THUD.
A single, well-worn Birkenstock sandal strikes YOU squarely on the head. He freezes. Eyes widen. Knees buckle.

YOU (collapsing slowly, softly)
…It was the left one.

(He falls. Silence.)

DOG ONE (sits upright. Whisper bark.)
...Ruff?

DOG TWO (sniffs the sandal. Sighs.)

MOE and TINY (in unison, at last)
Bok.

BLACKOUT.

EPILOGUE: The Scriptural Turn
(The Revelation Beyond the Absurd)

Scene: The stage is dark, save for a small light over an open Bible. The dogs sleep beside the body. The chickens perch, still. From offstage, a voice is heard—not booming, but gentle. Timeless.

THE VOICE (offstage, calm)

“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”

“Consider the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap, yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”

“Even the very hairs on your head are all numbered.”

DOG TWO (lifts head slightly)
...Ruff?

THE VOICE
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

YOU (slowly sits up, dazed, sandal still resting on his head)
I thought this was all nonsense.
I thought the absurd was final.
But maybe...
maybe even the absurd has an Author.

FADE TO LIGHT.

ACT III: The Bus Stop
(The Quiet Call of the Ordinary, to a Quiet Redemption Through Vocation)

Scene: Around the corner from the coop. A modest bus stop. A wooden bench. Faded paint. Late morning sun.

Three individuals sit waiting. No names are given. Perhaps they are EVERYMAN, SECONDMAN, and THIRD. Perhaps just people like you and me. They are dressed plainly. Each holds something vocational—gloves, a clipboard, a stethoscope, a spade. Their callings are unknown but present.

Near the shelter, a man is powerwashing a storefront window. He wears headphones. He works with care.

EVERYMAN (shielding eyes, watching the water arc)
He’s been at it all morning. That same set of windows. Back and forth.
It gleams now.

SECONDMAN
I think he’s doing more than washing glass.
I think he’s polishing a little corner of the world.

THIRD (leaning forward)
Do you think he’ll invite us?
Say, “Come—help me with the frame,” or “Hold the hose”?
Something?

EVERYMAN(shrugs)
He may not.
Or maybe he already has.
By doing it this well, this quietly.

SECONDMAN
I heard the bus is late.
Someone said it might not come today.

THIRD
Maybe it won’t come at all.
Maybe we’re not meant to ride.
Maybe we’re meant to start walking.

(Silence. The sound of the powerwasher. The rhythmic hiss. A hymn of water and work.)

EVERYMAN (softly)
Luther said we’re called to our neighbor.
That our work is God's mask.
That washing a window can be holy.

SECONDMAN (nodding)
And waiting can be faithful—if it’s waiting to serve.

THIRD (sits up straighter, squints at the man)
He just looked over.

EVERYMAN
Did he nod?

THIRD
I don’t know.
But I’m going to stand anyway.

(He stands. The others hesitate. The powerwasher turns off the machine. He unwinds a coil of hose. He does not speak—but he gestures, open-handed, toward the glass.)

SECONDMAN(rising)
Is that an invitation?

EVERYMAN (rising last)
Or a test?

(All three step forward, toward the window. Toward the work. The bus stop remains behind them—empty now, but not forgotten.)

FADE TO LIGHT.

CODA
We waited for the bus.
But the call came from the man with the hose.
In the world of Godot, we wait in futility.
In the world of God, we wait with purpose—
and sometimes, we rise.

Because vocation does not always come with a trumpet.
Sometimes, it comes with the sound of running water
and a quiet gesture
toward a window that needs cleaning.

EASTER EPILOGUE: Beauty Queen Returns
(The Previously Unwritten Scene That Happened Anyway and Transfigures the Rest)

Scene: Early morning. A window above the driveway. A child’s face pressed against the glass. The coop, out of sight. The burial has already taken place—in the mind, in the story, in the solemnity of the script.

And yet—

CHILD’S VOICE(from offstage, astonished)
She’s here!
Daddy—she’s back!
It’s Beauty Queen!

(Lights rise on the driveway. Beauty Queen mills quietly, preening one wing. No sound but the soft breeze and the rhythm of a child’s footsteps rushing down stairs.)

THE VOICE (offstage)
We had already mourned her.
Already written the scene.
Assigned her a cause of death—
dignified, poetic, absurd.
We said she had fainted.
We said the fox had come.
We said she was too delicate for the world.
And then—
She reappeared.

YOU (stepping into the scene, quietly)
There is no way out of the run.
Not really.
Except for one impossible gap—
One unseen door in the roof of things.
But even that...
Even that doesn’t explain it.

(YOU kneels beside her. Beauty Queen looks up—no drama, no resurrection glow. Just the same feathers, the same eyes. And yet—everything has changed.)

YOU(softly)
You’re not supposed to be here.
But you are.
And I don’t need to understand why.

THE VOICE (offstage)
We don’t write the ending.
We don’t always see the escape hatch.
But sometimes, grace slips through anyway—
Not in thunder,
but in feathers.
She was seen
by the eyes of a child—
watching when no one else was.

She did not return with answers.
She did not proclaim the absurd defeated.
She simply returned.

CHILD(gently, lifting Beauty Queen)
Come home.

(Light swells. The coop reappears in the background. Moe and Tiny look on. Not startled. Not afraid. Just—ready.)

FADE TO WHITE.

FINAL PROGRAM NOTE:

Existentialism tells us that absurdity reigns, that death is final, and that meaning must be carved by the will alone.

But Scripture tells us something stranger: that the world is not closed. That the dead are not always dead. That the child—from a hidden grace—may see what the adult has written off. And that grace does not wait for permission. That grace humbles the absurd.

“…unless you turn and become like children…” — Matthew 18:3 (ESV)

We do not explain resurrection.
We witness it.
And sometimes, it returns with feathers in a driveway.
He is risen.
And so, apparently, is Beauty Queen.

Let the world have its Godot.
We have Beauty Queen.
We have the Gospel.
We have Christ.

A Reflection on Indirectness, Limitation, and Christlike Clarity

There is a kind of relational ache that doesn’t arrive through open conflict, but through persistent indirection.

It is the silence after a reasonable question. The detour after a genuine offer. The moment when truth is not spoken plainly but rerouted through sideways logic, thin justifications, or—perhaps hardest of all—through someone else entirely.

These patterns are more common than we often name. They emerge especially in people who learned early in life that directness could be risky. For some, it was through growing up too fast, shouldering burdens too soon. For others, it was the formation of clever emotional maneuvers that "worked"—that allowed them to manage relationships without vulnerability. But what once passed for quasi-maturity calcified into avoidance. Over time, a person’s ability to speak openly was replaced by a kind of brittle cleverness, a theater of implications and deferrals.

And for those on the receiving end—especially those who have grown into a clearer emotional language—it can feel like being ghosted in slow motion. Not with malice, but with a slow corrosion of mutual trust. The one who sidesteps may believe they’re preserving peace. But what they’re preserving, more often, is power—or at least the illusion of control.

Yet even in this ache, there is an invitation.

Christ calls His followers not only to receive grace but to extend it. And one of the most powerful ways to extend grace is not by excusing another’s evasiveness, but by refusing to replicate it. Grace can take the form of clarity. A clarity that names what is real without bitterness. That opens space for honesty, even if the other cannot—or will not—step into it.

In the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly encounters indirectness—both passive avoidance and subtle manipulation. Whether it's Pilate’s evasive questions or the Pharisees’ disingenuous traps, Jesus responds not with flattery or fury, but with piercing clarity wrapped in invitation. "Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil" (Matthew 5:37, ESV).

His words don’t collapse the person—they reveal them, and in doing so, offer them back to themselves.

We are called to something similar: to bless others' limitations—not by justifying them, but by graciously unveiling them. Not with condescension,but with Christ-shaped courage.

This kind of grace doesn't always yield recognition. Often, it’s met with silence. Sometimes it’s misunderstood. But that’s not failure. It’s faithfulness.

To speak gently and truly, to offer space without coercion, to leave room for growth without demanding it—that is the work of someone who has been formed not by fear, but by love. It is the fruit of abiding in the One who said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32, ESV).

And in this freedom, we discover that even when others cannot meet us directly, we are not diminished. We can bless what is—without bowing to it. We can love what is broken—without becoming it.

For grace, after all, is the most faithful delivery system for truth.

A Reflection on Hardship, Vocation, and the Dawning Kingdom

In our attempts to make sense of the world’s sorrow, we often confuse suffering with evil. But while they are certainly intertwined in the tapestry of the fall, they are not always the same thread.

Evil is rebellion. It is the willful distortion of the good, the defacing of God’s creation. Suffering, on the other hand, is not always chosen or inflicted. It often simply is. A shadow cast by the brokenness of a world out of joint. And yet, in the mystery of God's providence, it is precisely there, in that shadowed soil, that something deeply redemptive begins to grow.

God, in Scripture, does not often eliminate hardship. Instead, He works through means and through the mysterious symmetry and better dialectic afforded by the Word. He works through people. Through stories. Through history. Through hardship itself. The ancient Israelites, chosen not for their strength but for God’s promise, were not spared suffering. In fact, it was through the furnace of Egypt, the wilderness of Sinai, and the exile of Babylon that their identity as a covenant people was forged—and through which the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, was ultimately born.

This is not to say God authors suffering. Lutheran theology is clear: God is not the author of sin, nor does He take delight in suffering. But He does not waste it. As the reformers often reminded us, God hides His work under its opposite. Sub contrario—under the cross, not the crown; in weakness, not strength; in apparent defeat, not triumph. Christ is crucified, not enthroned. And yet through that crucifixion comes the very life of the world.

The parables of Jesus reflect this deep truth. They do not flinch from the presence of suffering. The prodigal son starves in a foreign land. The good Samaritan finds a man beaten on the side of the road. Workers sweat in fields, debtors plead for mercy, brides wait in the dark of night. These are not sanitized stories. They are drenched in the dust of real human life. And yet, in every case, the Kingdom of God is breaking in—not despite the suffering, but often through it.

In this, we begin to see the deeper purpose of hardship—not as punitive, but as vocational.

We are called not only to endure, but to participate, in this way: Christ has inaugurated the new creation, but He invites us into the already-and-not-yet of that unfolding work. We are not passive observers. We are image-bearers, re-formed in Christ, called to serve our neighbor in love—even, and often especially, through our wounds. As Paul writes, we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.” (2 Corinthians 4:10, ESV).

As is so often misconstrued, this is not a justification of hardship or suffering. It is a sanctification of it—a vocational invitation into the redemptive work of Christ. For though God does not need us to bring about the new creation, He loves us—and in that love, He calls us to participate. Our suffering does not earn us a place in the kingdom, but it becomes, in Christ, a vessel of service and love. As we pass through the seasons of hardship in this already-and-not-yet world, we are not left empty-handed. We are given faith to trust, hope to endure, and love to act. And as Paul reminds us: “So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13, ESV). Faith will one day give way to sight, hope to fulfillment—but love will remain. Because love is not only the commandment of the present—it is the language of the age to come. To love God as He has first loved us, and to love our neighbor in Christ, is not just the path through hardship. It is the very shape of the kingdom we await.

And so we do not glory in suffering. But neither do we dismiss it as meaningless. Instead, we see in it the strange and tender work of a God who does not stand apart from our pain, but who enters it—who works through it—and who promises that one day, it will be fully redeemed.

This is the mystery of the cross: that what appears to be the absence of God is, in fact, the deepest revelation of His love. And that through such weakness, new creation dawns. Christ in his own ministry often gave sight—not just to correct vision but to restore the truly human, even as He reordered how we all see. Indeed, in and through Christ, all paradoxes resolve by transfiguration. For you.

We live in a world where food so often dominates us — by craving, by marketing, by shame, by trend. But food was never meant to rule. From the beginning, it was given as gift — seed-bearing plants, fruit from trees, daily bread in the wilderness, fish roasting by morning fire.

Food is not a master. It is a servant.

And like all good servants in the kingdom of God, food serves best when it points beyond itself — when it nourishes the body without stealing the soul, when it strengthens the bones without dulling the heart. There is wisdom in asking not, “Is this clean?” or “Is this allowed?” but rather:
“Does this serve?”

Does it serve vitality, strength, clarity of mind, gentleness of gut?
Does it serve long days of movement and stillness alike?
Does it serve the freedom to forget your body — because it is working well?
Does it serve your neighbor — or is it built on harm?

This is not a legalistic question. It is a liberating one. To take in what serves, and to leave what doesn’t, is not to diet — it is to discern. And discernment is the quiet art of the Spirit-filled life.

Jesus knew hunger. He fasted. He feasted. He broke bread. He multiplied it. He was accused of eating too freely, and He was known for whom He ate with. But nowhere do we find Him ruled by food. And when He gave us His body and blood, it was in the form of a meal — humble bread, shared cup — a food that serves eternally.

To eat with attention, to drink without domination, is to receive with gratitude. It is to live Eucharistically — taking, blessing, breaking, and giving, even in the smallest breakfast.

And if you, at age 52 or 72 or 92, find your joints strong and your step still light — perhaps it is not just what you’ve avoided, but what you have welcomed: food that serves.

Let it be said, then:
We eat not for image, but for service.
We eat not for control, but for strength.
We eat to move, to laugh, to tend, to love.

Let our food be humble and whole.
Let it be simple, but sustaining.
Let it prepare us not for indulgence, but for offering.

And above all, let it serve.

"Enough" Is a Holy Word
A RubinRed Reflection

Not everything.
Not more.
Just enough.

“Enough” is the hush after a psalm,
the warmth of one glass in one hand,
the rustle of carpenter ants in sacred procession.

It is not the banquet.
It is the table set quietly,
for two—maybe three—
maybe a winged guest
who lands without invitation
and is swallowed without offense.

“Enough” is how Christ comes.
Not as spectacle,
but as presence.
Not as empire,
but as Emmanuel.

Manna did not overflow.
It arrived with the dawn
and melted with the sun.
But it was enough.

The widow’s flour did not multiply in heaps.
It simply did not run out.

The wine at Cana was more than expected,
but still it came
when the cup was empty,
when Mary let go.

And so tonight—
with a RubinRed in hand,
Schubert playing like grace,
and ants weaving their unseen liturgy
at the edge of my vision—

I say:
This is enough.
Because “enough” means
Presence.
He is here.

The Savior who drinks the cup I could not.
The Son who bore the name Reuben never fulfilled.
The Carpenter greater than Jacob
watching over even these little builders
as they dance in dust and mystery.

A drink not made for many,
but for the one who shows up.
A bug, a tune, a prayer needlessly corrected.
A moment not manufactured—
received.

So no, I do not need everything.
Not a jubilation,
Not a totalizing.
Not now.
Not in the new creation.
Not even then.

Because “enough” is a holy word.
And He is enough.
He is present.

And present,
He is not diminished—
It is to serve,
It is to receive.

Love comes closest
In “enough”.

And I am here.
And so are you.
And the glass is not empty.

Not yet.

Jesus Christ is enough.
His yoke is light.

A reflection on how spiritual intake can become delay, how study can interrupt love, and how Christ still calls us to walk with Him, not just learn about Him.

At some point in the journey, more input isn’t growth—it’s delay.
More books, more voices, more theological arguments, more five-step strategies for spiritual maturity.
There’s a season for seeking, for learning, for deep digging.
But then there comes a moment when it’s time to walk it out.

Not in haste. Not in pride.
But in faith.

In trust that what’s been planted—through Scripture, through the Spirit, through suffering, through prayer, and through hard-won clarity—is already enough to begin living out the gospel.

Because if we’re honest, perpetual intake eventually becomes spiritual procrastination.

A refusal to trust that the living God is already at work—in us, through us, and before us.
Even the best theology can become noise when it crowds out the still small, but true, voice.

We tell ourselves we’re preparing. But often we’re postponing.
Waiting for one more confirmation, one more book, one more voice—when the One we follow has already spoken, and continuously speaks.

We are limited repositories, and that’s no accident. God made each of us finite. We’re not designed to endlessly fill ourselves with commodity-Christianity, as if spiritual maturity were a race to consume more than we can ever hold.

We are not cisterns. We are sieves.
And the point of a sieve isn’t to hoard—but to pour through.
We’re meant to be poured out, shaped by the Word, formed by grace, guided by love.

But let’s speak plainly: much of the modern theological landscape is structured like a quiet competition.
A kind of spiritual arms race built on who’s read the most, who can name the most authors and thinkers, who traces the most nuanced frameworks.
Beneath it lies a subtle hierarchy, often unspoken but deeply felt.

And in that climb toward credibility, the actual Christ—the risen One—is often rendered functionally dead.

Commodified, footnoted, absorbed into systems and structures that draw our gaze past Him, rather than to Him.

This is not formation. It is inversion.
And it dulls the heart, even as it claims to enlighten the mind.

And let’s be clear: the author-driven books we buy, on our bookshelves, and on our night stands, are commodity-Christianity. All of them.

They become part of the fallen network of idols.

Here’s a simple but serious litmus test:
If, while reading books in this genre—books on discipleship, formation, theology, Christlikeness—you find yourself thinking, let alone telling, a friend, a family member, or someone in need:
“I can’t talk right now.”
Or, “I can’t help right now—I’m in the middle of reading this,”
then it’s time to stop. Immediately.

Because what may feel like formation has become something else.

The very books meant to point us toward Christ have become an interruption—an obstacle—between us and the ones we’re called to love.

And the irony cuts deep: we resist being interrupted by others while reading about how to love them better.

But in truth, these books, themselves, are often the interruption—the delay, the detour, the buffer between us and Christ, between us and neighbor.

The Word made flesh is not disturbed by the knock at the door.
He is already on His way to answer it.

The pith of Christ
is already present,
ever surfaced,
ever revealed.

And walking it out is NOT walking alone.
We walk with Christ, and in Him, we walk with Scripture. With the essential tools we've come to trust—not just the Bible, but a good study Bible. Whether it’s the ESV Study Bible, the NIV Study Bible, the Lutheran Study Bible—what matters is that they help anchor us in truth, not distraction.

And along the way, we bring with us those few trusted voices from the crowded room—those rare authors, friends, or teachers who don’t clamor for attention but companion us well.

They don’t replace the Word; they help us hear it more clearly.
They don’t crowd the Spirit; they make space for His breath to move.

You don’t need to walk it a cappella.
But you also don’t need a choir of noise.

What you need is already near: the Word, the Spirit, and the sacred work of loving God and neighbor.

This is what “walking it out” means.
Not merely knowing Christ—but following Him.
Not merely studying grace—but extending it.
Not merely observing the road—but walking it—step by faithful step.

So gather your tools.
Hold fast to what is true.
And listen for the Three-in-One voice that matters most—
God, in and through Christ, given to us in the Spirit.

And walk.

It happened in the mouth.
A green grape, cold and taut with tartness.
An apricot, soft and sun-warmed, its flavor more rounded—fuzzy, even, in both texture and tone.

I bit them in the same moment, expecting some blend.
But they would not blend.

Even after chewing, the two flavors held.
Not in opposition. Not in conflict.
But each in its own flavor pocket, distinct—refusing absorption.

Side by side, but never confused.
Together, but not entangled.
A harmony of nearness without fusion.

And it made me think—this is no failed pairing.
This is a parable.

Because there are things in this world that are meant to coexist without merging.
Meant to be together but not diluted.

Like marriage—where two become one flesh, but never one flavor.
Where true love doesn’t erase difference, but makes room for it.

Like Christian unity—not as sameness, not a dulling of voices,
but a body with distinct parts, each offering its own fruit.
The eye is not the hand. The grape is not the apricot.
And yet, they belong together in one mouth, one meal, one purpose.

Like Scripture itself—where paradoxes share space.
Where command and promise, law and gospel, justice and mercy—
each retain their edge, and yet point to the same God.
They don’t merge.
They resonate.

And most profoundly—like the Trinity.
Father. Son. Spirit.
Not three flavors blended into bland abstraction,
but three Persons—each wholly God, wholly distinct, wholly one.

This is the eternal harmony of oneness without flattening.
This is the divine mystery tasted in a bowl of fruit.

So maybe next time you reach for the green grapes and apricots,
you’ll notice it too:

A small theology in the mouth.
A reminder that difference isn’t always meant to be resolved—
Sometimes, it’s meant to be revered.

And tasted.

A reflection on strange loves, passing meaning, and the grace of letting go

There it stood, framed like a museum piece: a solitary, bulbous root—red, veined, and ambiguously beet-like—hovering in darkness as if painted by a Rembrandt with a nutritional agenda. Sprouting upward from its crown, not leaves, but several solemn stalks of golden wheat, as though the artist couldn’t decide if it was dinner or a divine offering.

The composition was stark, solemn and reverent even. No background scene, no context. Just the root. Floating. Eternal. A beatified beet.

And… my wife bought it.

At an estate sale, no less. Which means somewhere out there, someone once chose this image not only to be painted—but to be kept. Perhaps proudly. Perhaps in a kitchen. Perhaps, and here I confess this is now canon in my heart, as the result of a conversation something like this:

“Hey Mom,”
a college student says over the phone,
“I’m taking an art class this semester. Want me to paint something for the house?”

“Oh! Sure,” she replies, delighted.
“Maybe something for the kitchen?”

The son nods, hanging up, thoughtful. He sits at a dorm desk strewn with snack wrappers and coffee stains, flipping through a borrowed textbook:
Genre: Still life. Subject: organic. Medium: oil. Lighting: dramatic. Emotional resonance: sacred, contemplative.

Still flipping. A pear? Too obvious. A cheese wedge? No gravitas.
And then—something strikes. A beet.
Humble. Red. Rooted.
Like family.
Like home.
Like Mom.

So he paints. With care, even reverence. He adds stalks of wheat, maybe inspired by a Renaissance still life in the back of the book, or maybe just from the granola bar he was holding. He signs the back with Roman numerals—MMVII—because that’s what artists do. And he frames it, solemnly.

And she hangs it.
In the kitchen.
Next to the bread box.
Where it remains for years—silent, sacred, loved.

And now, here it is again. In my house. Because years later, at an estate sale, my wife—perhaps moved by some deep intuition or cultural memory of roots and maximized nourishment—chose it. And it came home with us. And it stayed.

For a while.

Now it rests in a quiet corner, part of the to-be-taken-to-the-thrift-store pile. Whatever it once stirred in her has faded.

But I can’t help feeling there’s is something holy in this strange object.

Because we all bring home things that don’t make sense later.

Ideas we thought were profound. Beliefs we clung to without weight. Symbols we mistook for substance. Relationships, projects, ambitions—root-like things we held as sacred, only to find they no longer feed us.

And still, that doesn’t make them meaningless.
It just makes them passing.

Not all fruit nourishes forever.
Not all roots are meant to stay planted.
Some are signs—brief, strange signposts—of where we were, or who we hoped to be.

Christ told stories about seeds and soil, about what grows and what doesn’t. He made bread from grain and fed thousands. He called Himself the vine and us the branches.

Now, granted He never painted a close-up of a beet floating in the darkness of space—but He knew what it meant to take something earthy and offer it with love.

Even the strange things.
Even the things we outgrow.
Even the gifts we no longer need, but still choose to release kindly.

Because meaning doesn’t always come from mastery.
Sometimes it comes from heart.
From intention.
From a son trying to bless his mother’s kitchen in oil and pigment.

So we’ll send this one on. To a thrift store shelf. To its next brief chapter. And perhaps someone will see it—not as a joke or a mistake—but as provision, in their own strange season.

Because the sacred isn’t always beautiful.
And beauty isn’t always sacred.
But love—love can make a root float amid darkness.

And maybe—just maybe—
I will go ahead and hold on to this one after all.

An invitation to a moment and a way of seeing.

The Flattening of Thomas (and Ourselves)
We’ve all heard it: “Don’t be a Doubting Thomas.” The phrase has become shorthand in sermons, Sunday schools, and devotionals as a symbol of failed faith – someone who needed proof, who hesitated, who stumbled where others believed. It’s meant as a cautionary tale, a theological elbow-nudge toward a more ideal form of trust.

Even in more generous renderings, where Thomas is treated with compassion rather than criticism, he often remains a symbol rather than a person. A device. An archetype for the struggling believer. In such framings, Jesus becomes the gentle corrector, Thomas the reluctant follower – and we, the readers, are meant to find ourselves somewhere along the same spectrum, ideally on the “more blessed” end: believing without seeing.

But something vital is lost in this approach.

When we reduce Thomas to a trope – when we enlist him as an object lesson rather than encounter him as a disciple – we begin to flatten not only him, but ourselves. And perhaps even worse, we risk catching only a partial glimpse of the full heart of Christ.

Because the moment between Jesus and Thomas in John 20 is not, at its deepest level, a lesson about belief vs. doubt. It is a moment of encounter – of grief, longing, and love. A moment charged with presence. If we let it breathe, we may find in it a richer truth: that doubt is not always a sign of faith’s failure.

Thomas in Context
Before he was a trope, Thomas was a man.

He was one of the Twelve – called by name, chosen by Christ, shaped by the road they walked together. When news came of Lazarus’s death, and the other disciples hesitated to return to Judea for fear of violence, it was Thomas who said, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11:16, ESV). That’s not the voice of a weak-hearted skeptic. That’s the voice of a fiercely loyal disciple, one who understood the cost of following Jesus and was ready to pay it.

Thomas was not afraid of dying with Jesus.

But he was unprepared to live without him.

So, when the others claimed to have seen the risen Christ, and Thomas had not, his response was not some abstract resistance to belief. It was the wounded voice of someone who, in friendship and reverence, loved deeply and lost deeply – and who could not bear a secondhand resurrection. He needed to see – not because he lacked faith, but because he ached for presence. He needed to touch the wounds, not to test Christ, but to be reunited with the One he had followed into danger, and into devotion.

To reduce this moment to “doubt” is to miss its heartbeat. Thomas wasn’t demanding proof to satisfy an intellectual argument. He was longing for the One his soul had known. His cry –“Unless I see…” – is not the voice of a cynic. It’s the voice of a disciple reaching toward a promise.

Thomas’s doubt, then, is not the opposite of faith. It is faith unbound and drawn into the fullness of our Lord, our Messiah.

A Faith That Waits
Yet, we often speak of doubt as if it were the shadow side of belief – as if its presence automatically dims the light of faith.

But what if doubt, in certain forms, doesn’t threaten faith at all?

What if it awakens it?

What if doubt is the very space where faith continually rekindles?

There’s a kind of doubt that doesn't arise from hostility or hardness of heart, but from the deep tension between love and loss. It emerges in the silence after God’s voice seems to fall away. It surfaces in the space where presence once was – where Christ once walked beside us, tangibly, but now feels just out of reach. That kind of doubt doesn't try to undo faith. It quickens it. It compels us to reach, to wrestle, to long. And sometimes, in that very longing, faith takes on new weight, new shape, new fire.

Some of us, from the moment of our first real encounter with Christ, carry within us a kind of spark – a touch, however mysterious, from the Spirit. We may not always feel it clearly, but we know it was real. And when doubt stirs in the soul, it often doesn’t extinguish that spark. It fans it. It calls us to live more fully into what we have already received – to reawaken the memory of Christ’s touch, and to reach again.

This reaching is not mere reaction. It is relational. It is covenantal. It is the aching act of one who still believes in the presence of the One who first called him.

It’s not unlike the woman in the Gospels – the one who reached out to touch the hem of His garment. Her act was desperate, yes – but it was full of faith. She reached, and in reaching, she believed. And Jesus – God in flesh, perfectly aligned with the heart of the Father – responded not just with power, but with presence. With recognition. With love.

“Who was it that touched me?”

Christ knew. It is surely the same already-knowing presence in the Garden: “Where are you?” Adam only needed to reach out – even if unsure, even in doubt.

Faith, in that light, is not always serene assurance. Sometimes it’s an aching reach through the fog. Sometimes it’s the silent prayer that doesn’t resolve but still persists. And Thomas lived there. Not as the new Adam who is Jesus, but as a healed echo – a man who, when called, did not flee, but witnessed.

Wounds and the Word
When Jesus appears to Thomas, it is not with rebuke, nor with a lecture about believing without seeing.

It is with wounds.

He doesn’t say, “Why did you doubt?” He says, “Put your finger here… reach out your hand… stop doubting and believe.” And though translations often frame that final line as a command, the moment is soaked in invitation, not reprimand. Jesus meets Thomas exactly where he is – within his ache, within his longing, within the very conditions of his uncertainty. He does not stand at a distance and demand faith.

He draws close and offers Himself.

The body of the risen Christ still bears the marks of crucifixion. He is not polished or sanitized. He is risen, yes – but still wounded. And those wounds become the very place where Thomas’s faith is renewed. His confession – “My Lord and my God!” – is not a grudging acceptance, nor merely a relieved affirmation.

No.

It is the highest and clearest confession in all four Gospels.

It is the eruption of covenantal love rekindled, of hope reawakened, of presence restored.

In that moment, we are not witnessing the end of doubt. We are witnessing what happens when doubt, held in tension with longing, is met by grace.

Jesus then says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” But this, too, is not a contrast meant to shame Thomas. It is an expansion. A blessing spoken forward to those who would later believe without, for now, the gift of touching His side or seeing His face. And even then, that future faith is not summoned by argument or syllogistic certainty, but by the witness of wounds – the Word made flesh, still scarred, still reaching.

Toward a Fuller Christ: When Doubt Becomes an Opening
Yet, so often we’re offered a binary: faith or doubt. Belief or unbelief. But Scripture rarely speaks in such clean divisions. It moves in layers, tensions, paradoxes.

And so does the soul.

Many of us do not live in the crisp light of unshaken belief, nor in the shadow of hardened doubt. We live somewhere in between – waiting, wondering, reaching. We remember past encounters with Christ, but ache for His presence again. We’re not faithless – we’re wounded, weathered, waiting. Like Thomas.

But if Christ’s response to Thomas tells us anything, it’s this: He does not shame the doubt and longing. He honors it. He steps into it. He meets us not at the polished edges of belief, but in the middle of our fear, our silence, our sentences suddenly broken.

This is not a lesser version of Jesus. This is the full heart of Christ. The One who does not wait for perfect faith before showing Himself. The One who offers His wounds not as proof for the head alone, but as healing for the heart. The One who receives even faltering hands, and lets them rest in the place where death has been defeated.

Because doubt, for many of us, is not an enemy. It is a companion on the road. It walks beside faith – not to mock it, but to press it deeper. To clear away the brittle imitations of certainty. To make space for something truer, something tested, something… alive.

When held in covenant – when carried honestly toward Christ – doubt does not destroy faith. It deepens it. It opens the very space Christ longs to fill, again and again. In this light, doubt becomes a kind of midwife: attending the birth of a faith that is not naïve, but witnessed. Not inherited, but encountered. Not clean… but Christ-centered.

When we flatten Thomas into a cautionary tale, we risk flattening Jesus too.

We risk imagining a God who stands apart from our struggles, rather than One who steps inside them. But the Christ who met Thomas is the Christ who still meets us – not with disapproval, but with presence. Not with cold instruction, but with the warmth of a hand extended and a voice that knows our name.

The journey of faith is not a clean ascent. It is a movement marked by returning, remembering, relinquishing. It is not always confident. But it is covenantal. And Christ is faithful in that covenant, even when we’re gasping for air.

Thomas was never meant to be a trope. He was a disciple – a man who had walked the roads with Jesus, who had tasted hope and then lost it. His cry was not one of arrogance but of absence. His reach was not a rejection of faith, but its aching expression.

And Christ came.

The Hermeneutic of Presence
The story of Thomas does more than restore the dignity of one disciple – it offers us a way of seeing the whole biblical narrative. In his longing, in his reach, and in his response, Thomas invites us into a hermeneutic of presence – a way of reading Scripture not as a flat moral map, but as a living, relational drama where God calls, waits, reveals, and draws near.

From the garden where God walks and asks “Where are you?”, to the Gospels where Christ asks “Who was it that touched me?”, to the upper room where He shows His wounds, the thread is the same: God comes close. And He comes not with coercion, but with invitation – calling image-bearers into recognition, restoration, and witness.

This lens reshapes how we approach all of Scripture. We begin to look not merely for lessons and episodic narratives, but for the One who speaks through silence, who reveals Himself not only in declarations but in questions, in wounds, in presence. We come to see that the truest mark of faith may not be perfect belief, but a willingness to be met.

And in this, Thomas is no longer a warning or a weak point in the narrative. He becomes a guide – for how to reach, how to wait, how to be found.

My Lord and my God!

The Misuse of Thomas
Thomas’s narrative presence in the New Testament is restrained. He appears when needed, speaks when it matters, and then falls into silence after bearing witness to the risen Christ. That silence is not erasure. It is a kind of narrative humility – a space where presence is allowed to resonate long after the words have ceased.

But in the centuries that followed, that restraint was not always honored. Gnostic and Gnostic-influenced texts exploited the quiet around Thomas, filling it with secret dialogues, mystical cosmologies, and speculative teachings. Where the Gospel of John offers Thomas as a witness to Christ’s wounds, these later writings recast him as a revealer of hidden knowledge – detached from history, from incarnation, and from the body that bled.

Such texts do more than misrepresent Thomas; they violate the very restraint that made his confession possible. This is because Gnosticism resists humility. It seeks to collapse true mystery into mechanism, to turn presence into secret. And in doing so, it misses the deepest truth: that God reveals Himself not in hidden sayings, but in a wounded body offered in love.

The Church’s canon preserves the dignity of Thomas’s moment – “My Lord and my God” – by letting it stand unadorned, without commentary, without overreach. It leaves room for the reader to enter the upper room and be drawn into the same confession.

In a world eager to explain and embellish, such restraint is itself a form of faith – and a way of reading Scripture. A hermeneutic of restraint complements that of presence. It trusts that presence speaks louder than speculation, and that some wounds are not meant to be decoded, only touched.

Always and forever – glory to God.

A reflection on a quiet departure from performance toward truth—and the deeper orbit of Christ.

There are moments when the truest confession and witness comes not in grand declarations but in understated refusal. A simple phrase, spoken without hostility or apology:

“I’ve kind of moved away from all of that.”

It may not sound like much. But in certain rooms, in certain climates, it closes doors more decisively than a shout. And it opens others—though often not right away.

For years, I walked among thinkers—like Nietzsche and the later postmodernists—and frameworks that prized suspicion, irony, and the performance of depth.

For those interested, I suggest my essay Nietzsche and the Mirror. I admired their seeming brilliance for a time. I studied them earnestly. I even wore their language for a time. But something in me shifted—slowly, imperceptibly at first. A deeper hunger awakened. Not for cleverness. Not for systems. But for truth. For wholeness. For Christ.

And so, when someone recently offered me an invitation back into those old halls—framed in the shared code of “high intellect” and cultural critique—I answered honestly, and with a strange peace:

“I’ve kind of moved away from all of that.”

It was not a rejection of the person. It was not even a debate.
It was just a marker.
A quiet, resolute sign that I no longer orbit the same center.

And here is the thing:

To move toward Christ often means moving away from something else.

Not with scorn. Not with drama. Just… away.

This movement can be lonely. You may feel others subtly reassessing you, or withdrawing their unspoken approval. But let it be.

The center you now orbit doesn’t demand performance. It asks for truth.

It welcomes the whole person—not just the sharpest part.

So if you too have found yourself quietly distancing from circles you once called home, know this:

You are not lost.
You are not alone.
You are being realigned.

Sometimes the holiest moments come not in what we run toward, but in what we no longer need to defend.

Christ is enough.
And we—imperfect, discerning, still becoming—move toward Him.

To live in faith is not merely to receive truth, but to inhabit and integrate it within the actual entanglements of life.

It began with a flicker. The engine light blinked on in my Ford—a small symbol, orange and opaque, neither alarming nor benign. It was the sort of warning that demands attention without giving detail. A vague signal in a highly technological system. And like many signals in life, it came not with clarity, but with tension: is this serious or ignorable? Is this real or misfire?

What followed was a multi-week journey across shops and systems, codes and converters, logic trees, and a vehicle recall notice received midway. A catalytic converter was replaced. A code reappeared. Ford performed a reprogramming fix tied to a little-known recall—false code alerts. And in the midst of all of it, the question loomed: was the converter ever faulty? Was the repair necessary? Or was this entire episode a drama of misdiagnosis, false thresholds, and institutional silence?

The experience became more than an inconvenience. It became a kind of parable.

We live surrounded by systems—informational, mechanical, ecclesial, political. They alert us. They manage risk. But they also obscure. In most of these systems, the problem isn’t malice. It’s fragmentation. One technician reprograms a module without asking why it matters. Another replaces a part because the software said so. A third shrugs and hands back the keys. Each person acts in partial knowledge.

No one narrates the whole.

This is not so different from the Church, or theology, or even our own spiritual lives. We get signals: moments of conviction, discomfort, loss, or strange reassurance. And we often react like the technician. We “clear the code,” or we replace a part.

We do something. But we don’t always ask, narratively, what it means.
We don’t step back to build the bridge between insight and interpretation, cause and covenant.

But faith is not a code reader. Faith is a builder of meaning. It is the trust that embraces Christ—so that, in the words of Frederick Buechner, we might listen to our lives.

To love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength means—to use the diagnostic metaphor—engaging with life not as consumers of interpretive outputs, but as co-creators of meaning in Christ.

Christ does not simply decode us. He enters the very system, walks the circuitry, bears the misfires, and speaks a fuller logic. He is the divine recalibration—not just of thresholds, but of how we perceive truth. And in Him, we are called to become narrators. Not passive recipients of doctrine, but active storytellers. Builders of meaning. Image-bearers who listen not only to Scripture, but to life itself—and ask, gently and faithfully, what it is revealing.

And so, the check engine light becomes a Christic reflection. A sign not just of mechanical error, but of the ongoing invitation:

Will you read the signs of life narratively?
Will you follow the threads, seek coherence, and refuse to settle for the first output?
Will you co-labor with Christ in the patient re-narration of reality?

The catalytic converter may or may not have needed replacing. That’s almost beside the point. What matters more is that even there, in that tedious, procedural, bureaucratic incident, Christ was present—not as an interruption, but as the very thread running through it.

And I, as I walked through the days of calls, codes, and recalibrations, was given the chance to narrate. To turn scattered data into testimony. To step beyond the technician’s shrug and into the builder’s story.

That is the calling of the disciple in a diagnostic age: not to bypass the systems, but to dwell in them with a Christic posture—attuned, integrative, patient, and alive to meaning.

Even when all you get is a light.
Because Christ walks even in the diagnostic fog.

Broken Handles, Pipettes, and the Grace of Letting Be

It began with the broken-off handle of a stainless steel one-quarter measuring cup, which I found delicately placed in the upper tray of our dishwasher. Assumed, I think, by my wife—whose sensibilities are simultaneously practical and exquisite, wrapped in a piquant, if occasionally stringent, leaf of fairness—to be some kind of avant-garde kitchen tool. Perhaps a minimalist dough scraper. Something Scandinavian, with a name like Scræpa, wrapped in linen and etched with branding that whispers form is function.

I imagine she found it while tidying one of our kitchen drawers—those sedimentary layers where rubber bands sleep beside antique garlic presses and loose coins now with no nation. She is rarely mistaken. But this time, I knew it at once: not a tool of rising design, but entropy—remnant of a measuring cup set gifted in the early years of our marriage, now worn down by time, gravity, and the sacred chaos of a well-used kitchen. We’d misplaced the third-cup, bent the half, and now the quarter had given way at the weld. And yet even severed from its body, the piece bore itself with purpose. Its stamp remained clear: ¼. Its edge was smooth, even artful. It felt almost... meant.

It reminded me of something I’d done two decades earlier—bringing home a disposable lab pipette to water my houseplants. I had tried teacups, soda bottle caps, even an empty soy sauce vessel—but they always sloshed, splashed, spilled. Then came the pipette: deliberate, focused, merciful. A single drop at a time. The soil drank rather than choked. What was designed for titration became a tool of life. And in that simple gesture I learned more than I expected—about control and surrender, about design and grace, about how tools, like people, often outlive their categories.

Both the pipette and the measuring handle were rescued not by repair, but by recognition. Someone looked again—and saw not what was missing, but what remained.

And isn’t that what grace does?

It doesn't rewind us back to our factory settings. It names us where we are, and gives us to the world as we’ve become—sometimes cracked, sometimes re-formed, always repurposed. In Christ, nothing is wasted. The broken handle becomes the Scræpa. The pipette, a quiet steward of growth. The scars, even His own, become the invitation.

And so it is that Christ calls us: not merely to return to what was, but to sing something new.

Sing to the Lord a new song.
Not because the old song was wrong, but because the music is still unfolding—composed through our lives, broken pieces and all.

The world hands us tools and categories. Some break. Some never quite fit. But in the hands of the Carpenter, even fragments become instruments. Even drops become rivers. Even silence becomes song.

Of course… not everything needs to be reused or repurposed. Some things, and some people, simply need to be.

In fact, just this morning, my older daughter—sun-kissed and full of summer defiance—scolded me gently: “Let me be.” She was right. I had been nudging, correcting, worrying. Trying to shield her from a little too much sun, and perhaps from the longer arc of my own parental uncertainty. But children have a strange way of knowing the wisdom of the moment before we do. Let me be.

And isn’t that also the whisper beneath grace?

Before repurposing, before reframing, before renewal—there is permission. There is presence. There is being.
Not as escape, but as trust.

It was Mary, after all, who said, Let it be to me according to your word (Luke 1:38, ESV). Not passivity, but faith. Not resignation, but readiness. And from that letting-be came the greatest becoming the world has ever known.

So yes—sometimes Christ is in the reclaiming.
Sometimes Christ is in the reimagining.
But often, quietly, Christ is in the letting-be.

In the odd happenings of a household.
In a quarter-cup handle mistaken for design.
In a pipette cradling water like mercy.
In a daughter beneath the sun, becoming who she already is.

And now, the Scræpa is known—and redeemed—too.

Somewhere between recklessness and avoidance lies a space where grace can breathe. I call it the Goldilocks Principle of Risk—not too much, not too little, but just enough courage to leave the door ajar for what God might do.

Professionally, relationally, spiritually, we know what closed doors feel like. Sometimes they are locked out of necessity, discernment, or simple human limitation. But often, the risk-avoidant instinct shuts them tighter than they need to be, pulling the air of grace out of the room. It feels unfair. The Psalms know this ache well: “How long, O Lord? Will you hide yourself forever?” (Psalm 89:46, ESV). It is the cry of a heart seeking not certainty, but the chance for covenantal connection.

Yet this middle ground is not boundaryless. Grace does not demand reckless exposure or unguarded availability. As Henry Cloud reminds us, boundaries are essential—they are the healthy gates and fences that define where our responsibility begins and ends. Courageous risk does not mean saying “yes” to all; it means discerning when to open the door and when, in love and wisdom, to keep it closed.

Still, the pathway to grace often begins with a small, brave risk: the risk of listening, the risk of answering, the risk of being wrong yet remaining open. The Psalms teach us that God honors the risk of the open heart, even when people do not. And in that middle space—bounded but not barricaded—we glimpse something closer to the kingdom.

In our careers, a continual “yes” is the currency that buys goodwill, exposure, and—if you’re fortunate—advancement. Every invitation, every committee, every initiative promises some vague share in a future benefit. And yet, often what’s traded away in those moments isn’t just time—it’s the very heart of vocation.

The psalmist prays, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12, ESV). To steward our calling faithfully means remembering that our days are not endless. They are a gift, to be invested where God has truly sent us. To scatter ourselves thin across another’s platform, another’s showcase, may look productive, but it risks spending the currency of our calling on a cause not fully ours to carry.

To say no can feel like failure. It can feel like forfeiting opportunity, or worse, stepping out of line with those who hold the institutional keys. But “Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21, ESV). True faithfulness is not measured by how many initiatives bear our name, but whether we are tending the field entrusted to us by God.

Saying no—and saying it plainly, without bitterness, without apology—is a form of vigilance over the wellspring of our work: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life” (Proverbs 4:23, ESV). It keeps space for those before us, the words we are to write, the care we are to offer. And sometimes, a no itself—whether by what it frees in us or what it quietly redirects in others—becomes one of the greater gifts we give, a blessing only revealed in God’s time.

Even Jesus faced relentless expectations. “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed... And he said to them, ‘Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out’” (Mark 1:35, 38, ESV). He did not meet every demand placed on Him. He said no to good things in order to say yes to the Father’s will.

So it is for us. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1, ESV). The One we report to is not impressed by how many projects we join, or how many titles we accumulate. He looks instead at whether we have been faithful with the work He has given us, in His timing, for His glory.

Sometimes that faithfulness sounds like yes.
Sometimes—and perhaps more courageously—it sounds like no.

And sometimes, in the mystery of grace, that no will bear fruit far beyond what we can see today.

For Jesus Himself lived free of every fear of missing out (FOMO) except one: the longing never to miss the Father’s love, never to step outside His being as the beloved Son (John 5:19; John 15:9–10). Our no finds its courage there—in the greater yes to abiding in Him.

True courage to say no is only possible when our deepest FOMO is to not abide in the Father’s love and calling. Every “no” Jesus spoke flowed out of that singular yes to His Father’s will

Tide and Kingdom
In the liminal film of tide on sand,
Spirit soaked,
the beat of psalms,
in overlap,
drenched,
and neither in the
surf nor sand,
but in the actual of shimmer,
feet sink—
embrace,
anchored where
patterns swell and fade—
and swell,
into a word
finally felt,
a vibration in the feet,
as keys,
to an ungarische
melodie.

Postscript:
The shimmer we glimpse is not imagined.
It once had weight and breath—
it was God stepping into dust and tide, it was heaven touching earth in actual history.

And though the world is not yet whole,
the tide keeps returning,
each swell a signpost of the new creation,
each step a call to follow.
Resurrection is not far off,
but already moving beneath our feet,
the promise that one day
the tide will not recede.

Because our Lord and Messiah rose to walk again, eat again, laugh again, dance again—and to invite us not into abstraction but into a heaven and earth being made new.

Psalm 1 says, blessed is the man whose “delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he mediates day and night.”

That’s a tall order for blessedness. Day and night?!

But in the already-and-not-yet new kingdom, we often we reduce law to a list of dangers to avoid—like warning signs about riptides and undertow, placed in moralistic eddies. These warnings are important to notice, yes—but they mark only the smallest edge of what Torah means. The law of the Lord is more than fences; it is God’s way, His living order—spoken in Scripture and echoed in the patterns of creation itself. Even a cursory glance at biochemistry reveals just how much law—more widely understood—is woven into our being.

And so, psalm 19 continues: “The heavens declare the glory of God… day to day pours out speech.” Meaning, even through warnings of riptide and undertow, and through moralistic eddies, we can delight in the tide’s rhythm, the sweep of horizon, the shimmer of light on water. These too are words in God’s language, revealing His wisdom and goodness—and revealing His law.

In the fullest sense, Psalm 1 points to Jesus Christ Himself—the one truly Blessed, who walks perfectly in the Father’s way—in his living law. By grace, He draws us into that blessedness.

And here is the Christ key: to meditate on His law is to join His story, the story of all of creation. Not only reading His Word but listening to the whole of creation as it sings back to its Maker. This is how we learn to bear His image well—as stewards and worshippers, participants in His renewing kingdom. Through the variety of individual vocation, and through the Shema—now renewed with bursting meaning in and through Christ—we step into our calling.

Too, part of bearing God’s image is our capacity for narrative thinking—this uniquely human gift to see time not just as moments, but as story. We weigh evidence, trace causes, imagine futures, discern meaning from the fragments of life. It is this gift that lets us participate in what some theologians call collaborative eschatology—living in the already and not yet, helping the world lean toward its promised renewal in Christ, as builders of meaning, as narrative thinkers. All the more energizing that the resurrection will be on Earth.

Because here is how we extend—as God intended—into and through the law: we are not just processors of data, but participants in a divine story. We reflect on His law not to remain on the shore counting dangers, but to step into the tide of His creation, listening for His story, walking in the way of Christ, and joining Him in making all things new.

And this is not limited to the soft edge of metaphor. For even the first making—the origin of all things—speaks in story. Of that first making, outside of which He stands but into which He makes Himself known? The Big Bang as science tells us—absolutely. And of His covenant? That is Genesis. Are the Big Bang and Genesis interwoven? In God’s time, yes, of course.

For us, the march of science—biochemistry, cosmology, ecology—helps us behold the intricacy of creation. But not only science, so laden with its limitations. The more we see, the more we realize: to reflect on God’s law is to live in wonder, not just to measure—but to mean.

As one poet once said, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”
Perhaps that’s not literally true. But spiritually, vocationally—it rings with the deeper truth.

Because to be human is to be called not only to understand, but to interpret, to create, to build toward meaning. This is the narrative gift we’ve been given—not in place of God’s Word, but as a way of bearing His image in the world He so loves. To join the psalm of creation, as it sings back to its Maker. To walk in the Word, as it walks among us. To build toward the new creation, one story at a time.

On the Occasional Dead-End Pathways in Our Walk with the Spirit

Some time ago, I reflected on simplicity, sufficiency, and the quiet power of settling into what is “enough.” That piece was titled “Enough” Is a Holy Word, and in it, I invoked—though did not describe in detail—a drink of my own making: the RubinRed.

The RubinRed is nothing elaborate. Just gin and cranberry juice, stirred in such proportions that clarity and bite meet in a sort of covenantal balance. The gin sharpens, the cranberry deepens. It is a drink that, like the Psalms, holds together tension and brightness, petition and praise. Simple. Sharp. Honest. Like a psalm with a twist.

But in the spirit of improvisation—and possibly hubris—I recently attempted a variation: gin, cranberry juice, and beet juice. Let the record show: I will not attempt this again. Remarkably.

Because beet juice, noble though it may be in nutritional circles, has that uncanny way of turning everything it touches into something that tastes like the earth remembering its own roots a little too vividly. Mixed with gin and cranberry, it produced what can only be called an agricultural cocktail—more garden confession than refreshment.

And yet: isn’t that how the walk with the Spirit often unfolds?

We try things. We test. We reach. We infuse the simple with a little ambition, sometimes led by curiosity, sometimes by compulsion. And occasionally, we find ourselves sipping something that—while well-intentioned—was never meant to be consumed.

This is the strange grace of dead-end paths in spiritual formation. Not every attempt to deepen or enrich leads to fruit. Some lead to bitterness, or confusion, or simply a strange, mineral aftertaste of “no.” But even in these moments, the Spirit is present—not to shame, but to guide. These missteps, these over-mixed concoctions of our hopes and efforts, are part of how we learn the shape of sufficiency.

Sometimes, returning to the original is not regression, but maturity. To recognize that the RubinRed needed nothing more. That what had already been given—was, in fact, enough.

So here’s to the RubinRed. To the things that hold. And here’s also to the misfires, the beet-laced detours that remind us how sensitive the palate of discernment really is.

Because the walk with the Spirit is not always forward. It is not always upward. It is often lateral and looping, punctuated by strange drinks and stranger lessons. But it is always accompanied. And grace is often found not just in the perfect mix, but in the quiet recognition of when it’s time to set the glass down—and start again.

We often hear that our closest five friends shape who we become. But what if there’s more to it?

“Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.”
— John 15:4 (ESV)

There’s a saying in the self-help world that we become the average of our five closest friends. It’s a maxim that seems plausible enough—after all, the habits, attitudes, and expectations of those around us shape us more than we realize. But if we stop there, we remain in a purely secular calculus, as though the highest hope for our lives is simply to rise to the level of our chosen companions.

For those in Christ, the true five closest are not primarily human peers but covenantal presences, forming us not by mere expectation but by grace, communion, and divine faithfulness.

1. Father — We are children of God, adopted through Christ’s work (Romans 8:15–16). His presence defines our identity before anyone else can speak a word of accusation or approval.

2. Son — Jesus calls us not servants but friends (John 15:15), shaping our life through His teaching, His cross, His resurrection power. We become like Him by being with Him, not merely trying to emulate Him from a distance.

3. Spirit — The Spirit convicts (John 16:8), yet never accuses. Conviction leads to repentance and life; accusation binds us to shame. The Spirit forms Christ in us (Galatians 4:19), reshaping our hearts from the inside out.

4. Home — In marriage and family, love abides in daily rhythms. Paul calls marriage a reflection of Christ’s own love for His church (Ephesians 5:25–32), and even imperfect family life is meant to echo God’s faithfulness.

5. Church — The body of Christ exhorts and restores one another in gentleness (Galatians 6:1), stirring up love and good works (Hebrews 10:24–25). Healthy fellowship lifts burdens rather than adds them, creating space to return to grace.

From these fantastic five, an ecological unfolding of other relationships flows—friendships, communities, workplaces. But discernment begins here: who truly holds the closest, most formative space in our hearts? If we place that space in human hands alone, we risk living under shifting expectations, often veering toward accusation. If we dwell first with Father, Son, Spirit, Home, and Church, expectation is transformed into grace, conviction into hope, and influence into sanctification.

The secular saying invites self-optimization through better company. The Gospel invites abiding in Christ, so that life—our humanity—is not averaged, but made new.

"For God is not a God of confusion but of peace." – 1 Corinthians 14:33 (ESV)

Loki: The Ambiguity of a Trickster God
In the old Norse sagas, Loki is the god of the in-between—a shapeshifter, schemer, and stirrer of chaos. He dwells among the gods but never truly belongs, weaving mischief and calamity with equal delight. Sometimes his tricks help, more often they harm, but in either case, they blur truth and trust. Loki is not a god of promises kept; he thrives in tension, subversion, and uncertainty.

In this mythic world, truth is fragile, always under threat of deceit, always precarious amid shifting forms. Loki reminds us of the peril that comes when divine power is imagined as capricious, cunning, or self-serving.

The Gnostic “Gospel” of Thomas: A Trickster Christology
Centuries later, some early heterodox writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas, would present another ambiguous figure, a Jesus who feels strangely Loki-like. In these Gnostic or near-Gnostic texts, salvation is not proclaimed openly to the world but hidden in cryptic sayings:

• Truth is reserved for insiders who can crack the code.

• The physical and tangible—the goodness of creation, the joy of embodiment—are often diminished or dismissed.

• Jesus appears as a cosmic riddler, withholding clarity, destabilizing ordinary faith, and inviting speculation rather than trust.

Yet here we glimpse an important distinction. Across many mythic traditions, the trickster archetype plays a necessary role: to disrupt, to unsettle, to break false orders wide open. In that sense, a parallel with Jesus is valid:

• He too is a disruptor, overturning tables (Matthew 21:12–13), upending false religiosity, and declaring a kingdom that inverts human hierarchies of power and greatness.

• But where Loki and the Gnostic “Christ” destabilize without a center, Jesus’ disruption is redemptive and covenantal, tearing down illusions to rebuild creation in truth and love.

• His “upside-down kingdom” is not chaos, nor secret wisdom for elites—it is God’s intended order, revealed openly in Him, turning the world right-side up under His lordship.

This becomes the decisive break between the false trickster Christology of Gnostic imagination and the true Christ of the Gospel. Jesus does not leave seekers lost in riddles. His mystery is promise, not puzzle; His disruption is healing, not harm, a holy overturning that brings the true kingdom near.

Marvel’s Loki: A Mythic Signpost to True Redemption
And yet, in the modern mythos of Marvel Studios, Loki undergoes a different journey. The series begins true to form: self-serving, cunning, untrustworthy, a being of lies and illusion. But across its episodes, a transformation unfolds:

• From chaos to calling: Loki begins to shoulder a cosmic burden, willing to lay down ambition for the sake of others.

• From deception to truth: Once a master of falsehoods, he embraces honesty and loyalty, even at personal cost.

• From trickster to stabilizer: In the series’ climax, Loki becomes the anchor of reality itself, binding broken timelines in his own sacrifice, holding the universe together.

Marvel’s tale is not the Gospel. Its redeemer is still flawed, driven by necessity more than holy love, grasping at redemption rather than bestowing it. Yet this mythic arc serves as a signpost, however faint, to a deeper truth:

There is One who truly gathers all threads of time and existence—not with guile, but with grace; not to preserve power, but to pour out his life for the world.

In Loki’s fictional transformation, we glimpse a shadow of the Redeemer who is not a trickster, not a puzzle, but the Logos, the faithful and eternal Word.

From Loki to Loci: Clarity in the True Word
The Lutheran Loci Communes, first shaped by Philip Melanchthon in 1521, arose precisely to anchor theology in clarity and promise. Amid confusion and distortion—whether from medieval speculation or later Gnostic-style mysticism—the Loci drew directly from Scripture to name the central truths of salvation:

• Law and Gospel: God’s Word convicts of sin and delivers grace.

• Faith and Justification: Salvation comes by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone—not by secret wisdom or riddled sayings.

• Good Works: Flow from faith as fruits, not currency for divine favor.

• Sacraments: Tangible words of promise, not hidden mysteries for elites.

Where Loki revels in deception, and the Gnostic Christ leaves seekers uncertain, the true Christ speaks plainly, even when his sayings are hard, because they are words of life and light. He does not toy with souls but saves them. The Loci serve as a theological witness to this reality: the Gospel is not a shifting riddle but a sure foundation, the Word made flesh who dwells among us full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

The Final Transformation: From Chaos to Covenant
If we linger on Marvel’s final image of Loki—seated at the center of time’s vast web, threads of existence held in his scarred hands—we can almost sense a longing for something more, a yearning that fiction cannot fully deliver. His arc brushes against the truths the Loci proclaim:

• Law and Gospel: His lies judged, yet he offers mercy to others.

• Faith and Justification: Trusting something greater than himself, laying down power for life beyond his reach.

• Good Works: Freed from ambition, his final act is pure gift, not self-preservation.

The series imagines a trickster made almost Christic, transformed by love and sacrifice. Yet it is only a shadow, a mythic approximation. The true Christ does not almost redeem—He fully redeems. He is the Son who makes the Father known, the Logos who brings light into confusion, grace into guilt, and covenant order into cosmic chaos.

In Him, the Loci are not just doctrines—they are living truth: promises given, faith awakened, good works flowing, sacraments sealing. From Loki’s shifting illusions to covenant clarity, the Word gathers what the world scatters, and holds it forever in faithful hands.

Postscript: Algorithms and the Flattening of Truth
Even the digital age cannot escape the confusion of counterfeit words. On platforms like Kindle, books by faithful witnesses are often displayed side by side with the so-called Gnostic Gospels, including the Gospel of Thomas. The algorithm does not discern truth from distortion; it simply clusters what others have clicked.

This creates a deeper irony: in an age where we know the earth is not flat, the algorithmic marketplace flattens truth itself—treating all “gospels,” all testimonies, as having equal weight in history or faith, blurring authority and catering to curiosity over discernment.

But the Gospel does not flatten reality—it restores its true depth, breadth, and height in Christ. The Loci help us see this dimension clearly, guiding us past counterfeit horizons to the Christotelic center where the Word speaks faithfully, not as one option among many, but as the light of the world (John 8:12).

“Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other.”
—Psalm 85:10

We often speak of forgiveness and justice as though they must be balanced—as though they sit on opposite ends of a divine scale, each needing to be measured just right. But the truth is more profound than that. In God’s economy, these are not rival systems in need of compromise. They are distinct, holy dimensions of His character—truth and mercy, righteousness and grace, not pitted against each other, but destined to converge.

And that convergence is not theoretical. It is a person.

Christ is the thin space.

Not just between heaven and earth, but between God’s justice and God’s forgiveness. He does not flatten the difference between them; He inhabits the seam. On the cross, He does not cancel justice to offer grace, nor does He suspend grace to satisfy justice. Instead, He holds both fully in Himself—the wrath and the mercy, the consequence and the pardon—and in doing so, He establishes something entirely new.

This is not a third option or a clever synthesis. This is the new and living way (Hebrews 10:20). A way that flows from the eternal love of the Father, enacted through the body of the Son, and made known by the Spirit—not by erasing justice or softening forgiveness, but by transfiguring both through presence.

I. Christ in the Thin Spaces
Christ does not merely pass through thin spaces—He dwells within them. He is their center and their tension, their boundary and their breakthrough.

He is born of a woman, yet begotten of the Father.
He walks on earth, yet holds all things together in heaven.
He weeps at Lazarus’s tomb, and then calls him out.
He dies, and yet through His death, life begins again.

At every crucial seam in Scripture—between time and eternity, flesh and spirit, sorrow and glory—we find Christ already there, holding the edges. He is not the midpoint between opposites, nor the abstraction that resolves them. He is the incarnate presence where opposites are fulfilled without contradiction, where paradox is not erased but revealed as purposeful.

We might call these thin spaces:

• The seam between divine justice and divine mercy

• The space between knowing and not-yet-knowing

• The aching moment between crucifixion and resurrection

• The tension between God’s hiddenness and His self-revelation

And Christ inhabits them—not as an intruder, but as the Word who speaks from within. He is the one who sings the psalm and is the psalm, the one who fulfills the law and becomes its living rhythm. He does not offer distance, but dwelling. Not observation, but participation.

To say that Christ is the thin space is to confess that God’s most decisive action is not separation but convergence. The Incarnation is not a visit—it is a joining.

II. The Seam Between Justice and Forgiveness
Nowhere is Christ’s role as the thin space more urgent than in the matter of justice and forgiveness.

For many, forgiveness is imagined as the erasure of wrongs—an act of emotional detachment, or worse, a denial of harm. But Christian forgiveness is not amnesia. It is not permissiveness. And it is not soft. It is, at its core, an act of divine presence.

Forgiveness, in Christ, does not sidestep justice. It passes through it.

In Him, justice is not suspended, but fulfilled—not merely by punishment, but by the offering of a life so aligned with the Father’s will that He can absorb the consequence of sin without replicating its violence. In doing so, He opens space for forgiveness that is not injustice, but a new kind of righteousness—a righteousness that restores, reclaims, and re-creates.

This is what makes Christian forgiveness so radically different:

• It does not forget, but names.

• It does not flatten, but enters.

• It does not excuse, but transfigures.

To forgive as Christ forgives is to do so in Him, in the thin space where justice and mercy are not alternatives, but cohabitants. He does not offer forgiveness as an escape from justice, but as the only place justice can be made complete without annihilating the sinner.

This is why the cross is not only where debts are paid, but where God’s justice is revealed as restorative. The Lamb of God bears sin not to sidestep justice, but to fulfill it in love. And the Risen Christ breathes peace upon those who failed Him—not to minimize betrayal, but to establish a new creation where grace writes the final word.

To forgive in Christ is not to look away from the wound. It is to look through it, into the resurrection.

III. To Abide in the Seam
We are not called to resolve the tension between justice and forgiveness. We are called to follow the One who lives in that tension and makes it holy.

To forgive in Christ is not to cast aside justice. Nor is it to crush the offender beneath its weight. It is to trust that true justice and true mercy can hold hands in the body of Christ—that the cross does not offer us a system, but a person. A path. A presence.

And so, we learn not to walk around the thin spaces, but into them.

• Into the space where judgment would be easy, and mercy would feel naïve.

• Into the space where the wound is still visible, and yet peace is spoken.

• Into the space where the gospel is not theory, but lived paradox.

To follow Christ is to live near these seams—not to master them, but to be held by the one who does. And in doing so, we begin to forgive not because we are strong, but because we are surrendered. We begin to act justly not to prove ourselves righteous, but because we are drawn into the righteousness of Another.

Christ is not the gap-filler between two systems. He is the living seam.
And where He is, justice does not silence mercy, and mercy does not weaken justice.
In Him, both sing.
And in Him, we are invited to dwell.

In the Protestant tradition—especially among those shaped by Protestant sensibilities—the word Saint often comes with hesitation. We do not venerate the Saints—indeed, all followers of Christ are saints (while simultaneously sinners—simul justus et peccator), as Paul tells us.

Yet, there remains deep value in examining their lives.

The lives of the Saints are not distant portraits to be worshiped, but they do provide us with parables of formation—stories of faith, hope, and love centered on Christ. They show what it means to live in Christ, not perfectly, but faithfully.

We can ask:

What does it look like to lead in and through Christ? What does service in His name truly require? What does it mean to be part of the communion of saints—not merely in memory, but in the living body of Christ today?

Within the vision of the Stand Firm in the Word initiative, we call Christians to nurture communities in Christ—to be leaders marked by integrity, humility, and Spirit-filled courage. We long to embody faith, hope, and love as the shape of our vocation. And we believe, without pretension, that Christ may even write new parables through us for the good of others. To that end, the saints become examples—not as final authorities, but as fellow travelers who point toward the Author.

In curating examples of such saints, we have also taken care to avoid the common tendency to enlist historical figures into present-day ideological movements. Many saints are now held up as symbols of contemporary social activism—even when that was not their self-understanding. But to flatten Christ-centered formation into mere activism is to diminish the full scope of their witness. We do not reject engagement with justice—we embrace the Christic and Psalmic calls to right wrongs—but we resist interpretations that detach it from theological depth, ecclesial life, and the enduring shape of Christ’s love.

Below is a brief, curated list of saints whose lives offer resonance. Each comes from a distinct era, yet all reveal something of Christ’s formative work across the ages.

Patristic and Early Church Saints

• Augustine of Hippo (354–430)

• Perpetua (d. 203)

Monastic and Medieval Saints

• Benedict of Nursia (480–547)

• Julian of Norwich (1343–after 1416)

Saints of Reform and Conscience

• Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582)

• Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556)

Modern Saints and Witnesses

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945)

• John Henry Newman (1801–1890)

These can serve as mirrors—often cracked, often luminous—reflecting the many ways Christ forms His people through Scripture, suffering, vocation, and community. They may stir in us a renewed desire to be formed by the One true Gospel.

To learn from the saints is to remember that the story of the Church is not yet finished. We are not merely students of the past; we are participants in the present—called to let our own lives be written into the great parable of Christ’s redemptive work.

Let us then stand firm in the Word, learn from those who came before, and walk forward in the Spirit ready to become parables of formation for others.

There are dreams that drift away by morning—and there are dreams that disturb the morning. This was one of the latter.

I dreamt of a house with two massive columns—black, towering to 100 feet—anchoring the entrance like a portico. The house itself was human-sized, perhaps even modest in design. But those columns distorted everything. They stood impossibly tall and out of place, like pillars borrowed from a forgotten temple—something ancient but misapplied. They weren’t ominous exactly, but they didn’t belong. The whole structure rang with a quiet dissonance. It repelled presence.

And though the dream never turned to nightmare, I woke with the sense that I had seen something constructed with intention, even admiration, yet not meant to exist.

Then in the quiet dark of early morning, I wrote a poem. It came quickly, as though it had already been waiting for me.

A Benediction of Thresholds:

Wood,
glass—
we give it to impossible
heights,
while God’s
Word
already
blows
beautiful.
May our lines
settle within
the wind
in His cypress.

We build things. We raise columns. We use wood and glass—good materials, created by God—and stretch them upward in hopes of reaching something greater, or proving we’ve already arrived. But when the scale is wrong, when the weight is misaligned, even what is beautiful becomes disordered.

The poem answers with breath, with Word—God’s way of building.

We serve, not to be seen, but to settle within the wind in His cypress.

Let the world raise its darkened columns to impossible heights. Let us instead be carried on the breath of His Word, shaped by the rhythm of grace.

“Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.”
—Psalm 19:2, ESV

We Are Tidewater People
We are a tidewater
people,
an oscillatory people,
merging from
dust,

expanding to dust.

The heart, mind,
imagination—
fills and drains,
and in filling,
leaps

from people to person,

to floodwater, while
the Word
continually
sings, abides,
settles.

The even stream
of creation.

Christ—

the intervener,
the intruder,

the midst, the stable center

of tides,
of story,
of covenant.

Postscript
Psalm 19 reveals a world that speaks. Not always in sentences, not always in sound—but in rhythm, in incarnation.

Creation’s knowledge pours out not only in grandeur but in pattern: the rising of tides, the setting of stars, the faithful repetition of day and night. This rhythm is not random; it is covenantal. It is law—not as prohibition, but as structure, music, gift.

The poem above is an offering in that rhythm—a meditation on oscillation, rest, and renewal. It names the experience of being human in a world where we are not fixed, but formed and re-formed in relation to the Word. The Christic center is not static, but alive within the motion.

He is the one who renews, abides, and settles—not to still the tide, but to hold it together.

And so, we listen—not only with ears, but with attention.

With discernment.

With willingness to find a center in the midst.

This listening is difficult in our time. Many of us are like jugglers: not just managing motion, but improvising under pressure. A ball, a book, a torch, a grapefruit, a chainsaw—each one flying through mental space, each demanding attention. But even here, there is rhythm. And when the movement is surrendered to Christ, even the act of juggling becomes doxological.

There is a tradition of poetry that leans into these tensions—not to glorify fragmentation, not to critique down to bare atoms, but to trace its outlines until coherence and meaning returns. T.S. Eliot, a modernist who knew how to name dissonance without surrendering to it, remains a companion in this space. He did not stop at despair. He pressed through it toward the still point. His work reminds us that Christ does not erase our paradoxes—He inhabits them.

Christ—the one for whom and through whom all things hold together.
In scriptural writing, for and through are not merely prepositions.
They are incarnate words—alive with meaning—
and in Him, they oscillate with purpose and motion.
The draw of for, the push of through.

The longing and the arrival. The rhythm of Alpha and Omega, Aleph and Tav.

“All things were created through him and for him.” (Colossians 1:16, ESV)

The Crocus and the Arrow

In well-drained
soil,
we rejoice.

In well-drained
soil,
the mocker,
the hunter of wrong,
is drowned.

Crocus—
lift your cup
to the arrows
of the Lord.
Drink,
and give
to the bee.

You have trusted,
and trusting,
you blossom
with joy.

The Word Through It All
There is confession
in the wordless groan—
laid bare in covenant light.

There is renewal,
hidden in the shoot
of Jesse, rising to restore.

Arrows strike deep—
yet the branch grows health,
grows Spirit—resting, rising.

Still the stars speak.
Still the scroll sings.
Still the Son walks the arc.

Of Him—of Him—
the Word runs through it all.

Listening to C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, my first impulse was discomfort. His opening distinctions—storgē, philia, eros, agapē—seemed almost too neat, almost reductionist. But as I lingered, I realized the very opposite: these boundaries are not constraints, but mercies.

Scripture itself teaches us the importance of distinctions. Law and Gospel. Flesh and Spirit. Creation and Redemption. Each distinction guards against collapse, against confusion. Without such markers, even God’s good gifts can become twisted.

So too with love. Affection mistaken for eros can bind people in unhealthy bonds. Friendship blurred into passion can break trust. Even agapē, when collapsed into mere friendliness, is emptied of its costly depth. The problem is not that these loves touch or grow into one another—of course they do. The problem is when they masquerade, when one love claims to be what it is not.

Lewis reminds us that loves left to themselves tend toward idolatry. They demand ultimacy, even when they cannot bear the weight. Here, distinctions protect us. Not as hard walls, but as guideposts—signs that help us discern the shape of each gift.

And just as Law and Gospel are never enemies but interpret one another, so these loves are not rivals. Each finds its completion in agapē, the self-giving love of Christ, who orders without erasing, fulfills without flattening. In Him, the boundaries hold, not to limit love but to preserve its form, so that it may be given in freedom, in truth, and in joy.

The Stone Across the Waters
Creation,
then creation made new,
like a stone
skipping upon the deep.

Each meeting,
circles, outward arise—
distinctions
interpreting one another.

As from the lip
of a bell, from crown to cup,
the ripples
resound in covenant.

The hand is Love,
the stone is the Word,
the circles,
Spirit pressing every way.

The waters
remember who has spoken,
who has saved,
who makes all things new.

In love,
 in love,
  in love,
   in love.

This refrain of “in love” echoes the fourfold pattern Lewis traced—affection, friendship, eros, and charity—each a distinct skip across the waters of our lives. Yet as in the poem, the ripples interpret one another, and all are sustained by the hand that casts, the Word that moves, and the Spirit that carries. Lewis reminded us the distinctions; but Christ gives us their fulfillment.

The stone never sinks into nothingness but comes to rest in Him—in love, in love, in love, in love.

A quiet reflection from these first days of healing after oral surgery — on sensitivity, renewal, and how Christ grows into the smallest spaces, filling what feels broken. Like the Psalms, it invites a pause — a space to breathe and to listen.

Growing Into the Gap
I have no doubt
that Jesus was fully man—
for in my own sensitivities
I feel the sutured gum retract,
a micro gap revealed,
and into that quiet hollow
flesh returns, renewed.

I have no doubt
that Jesus was fully God—
the Living God
entering the smallest spaces,
renewing every absence,
growing as the Son of Man,
perfectly sensitive—

And perfectly blessed,
and — we —
blessed through the gap.

“Blessed is the one
whose delight is in the law of the LORD,
and who meditates on his law day and night.”
— Psalm 1:1–2

When we hear “law,” we often think of rules, of boundaries drawn and obligations imposed.

But in Christ, the law is revealed as something deeper, something far more expansive: the order of divine love that holds creation together. The “blessed man” of Psalm 1, read through the Christotelic lens, is Christ Himself — the One who delights perfectly in the Father’s will, who embodies and fulfills the law because He is the Love that breathed the law into being.

To meditate on this law, then, is to meditate on love. Not as abstraction, but as the living reality revealed in the Word made flesh — Jesus, who dwelt among His disciples and loved them in the fullness of every dimension of love, save eros.

John and the Fullness of Gift-Love
Among the disciples, John seems to have grasped — perhaps more deeply than any of the others — that the love of God is gift-love. C.S. Lewis calls it agapē: love that springs not from need or merit but from the sheer overflow of the Giver.

This is what John seems to receive, reclining close to Jesus at the table, unselfconscious and unafraid. He is not vying for position, not demanding proof, not hedging with conditions. His intimacy with Christ is not transactional but restful. And because of this, Jesus pours into John what John is able, in humility and receptivity, to receive:

The fullness of affection (storgē) friendship (philia) and the inexhaustible depth of agapē — the love that is both source and summit of all loves.

Hence, the beloved disciple John is not “more loved” than the others, as we might commonly understand; he is simply more open to the reality that all love flows from God as pure gift. And Jesus, perfectly attuned to the Father and to the heart of His disciple, reflects this fullness back to John.

Meditating on the Law Through Relationship
If Psalm 1 calls us to meditate on the law day and night, then part of that meditation is reflecting on the contours of Christ’s love as it manifests in His relationships. For example:

• To Thomas, patient love that welcomes doubt and invites the touch of faith.

• To Peter, restoring love that rebuilds after collapse: “Feed my sheep.”

• To John, abiding love that needs no proof, no striving, no performance — love received simply as love.

Each relationship refracts the one light of Christ’s love, showing us that the “law” we are to meditate on is not a ledger of right and wrong but the living way of divine gift-love that shapes, redeems, and restores.

The Freedom of Abiding
When love is received as gift, the soul becomes free — free of striving, free of fear, free of the need to earn. This is what John seems to have known: that God’s love is not the reward of the worthy but the gift of the Giver. And so John abides.

This abiding is not passive but active — a continual resting in the One who first loved us, a love that invites us deeper, that makes us bold enough to stand at the cross, to run to the empty tomb, to proclaim without fear:

“God is love.”

For Us Today
To meditate on God’s law as love is to reimagine our discipleship not as anxious obedience but as intimate communion. It is to let Psalm 1 become our story: rooted like a tree beside streams of living water, bearing fruit in season, leaves that do not wither, because our roots are sunk deep into the endless, inexhaustible love of God revealed in Christ.

Like John, we are invited to recline without fear, to rest our heads on the chest of the Savior, to receive the gift of love that contains every love. And as we do, we find that obedience — true obedience — ceases to be a burden and becomes, instead, the joyful response of one who abides in agapē.

Reframing What Counts as Evidence
In much of modern discourse, evidence is imagined in narrow and rigid terms.

For some, it is the positivist frame — that truth is only what can be measured, replicated, and verified; an epistemology of control built on reproducibility and falsifiability. For others, it is the legal-historical frame — a courtroom of probability where testimony, documents, and reasoned inference are marshaled to secure a verdict beyond reasonable doubt.

Both approaches have their merits. Both have their limits. Neither can fully contain the mystery of a God who enters history, bears wounds, and lives.

And here’s the thing. When someone says, “There is no evidence,” they may mean one of several things.
1. They may mistakenly assume that “no evidence” is itself evidence of absence — but that is not how science works.
2. They may actually be saying — without naming it — “I do not recognize, within my paradigm, what you are presenting as evidence.” In this case, the paradigm itself (whether positivistic, naturalistic, or biomedical) is too narrow to register what is there.
3. Or, on a more individual level, it may reflect an epistemic approach or tactic so constrained that it cannot perceive the fuller range of evidence available.

In each case, absence of evidence is not absence of reality. More often, it reveals the limitations of the framework or the narrowness of the lens through which one is looking.

Scripture does not share our modern anxiety about evidence. It does not flatten reality into data points, nor does it cede the mystery of knowing to a courtroom ledger. It speaks in the register of encounter: of signs and wonders, yes, but also of silences and whispers; of histories written in scars… and in love, in covenant.

The Seam Where Knowing Shifts
Thomas dwells at that seam.

For centuries, his story in John 20 has been caricatured into a parable of doubt. “Don’t be a Doubting Thomas,” we say, reducing a disciple to a trope, a moment to a slogan. But Thomas is not an archetype; he is a man — a follower who had walked the roads with Jesus, who had braced himself for danger and for death, and who now finds himself unmoored by absence.

His cry — “Unless I see… unless I touch…” — is not cynicism. It is longing. It is grief braided with devotion, an ache for the One who had once called him by name. Thomas does not want arguments. He wants presence.

And when the risen Christ stands before him, what He offers is not a syllogism or an abstraction. It is Himself.

"Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and place it in my side."

In that moment, the nature of evidence is transfigured. It is no longer an exercise in detached observation, but a participation — an epistemology of proximity and trust.

Wounds as Witness
The wounds matter. They are not tidied away in resurrection. They remain, glorified but un-erased — the enduring testimony that love is not an idea but an act, not a principle but a Person.

For Thomas, the wounds are the proof. They are where the ache meets its answer. His confession — “My Lord and my God!” — does not erupt from intellectual surrender but from relational recognition. Presence has returned, and with it the coherence of his world.

And so we find that in Christ, evidence is not about control. It is not the reduction of mystery to mechanism. It is invitation — to reach, to see, to touch, to know.

Love as a Mode of Knowing
The heart of the Gospel is that love is not only an ethic but an epistemology.

Faith, hope, and love are not lesser ways of knowing, awaiting the confirmation of “real” knowledge. They are the truer knowledge toward which all other forms — scientific, historical, logical — bend but cannot complete.

This is the seam that Thomas inhabits: where absence aches for presence, where reason stretches toward revelation, where longing becomes the soil of recognition. In that seam, knowing is no longer about possession or control. It is about abiding. It is about love that does not collapse when silence lingers, because it trusts the fidelity of the One who has spoken.

Beyond Binary Frames
This seam also exposes the inadequacy of our binaries — belief or unbelief, certainty or doubt, faith or reason, natural or supernatural. Scripture rarely moves in such clean divisions. It moves instead in layers and tensions, in paradox and poetry.

Thomas is not rebuked for his longing. He is met in it. His doubt is not treated as failure but as a gate. And in through that gate, revelation floods in.

"Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." This is not a rebuke of Thomas but an expansion of the blessing — a reaching forward to those who would come after, to those whose encounters would be mediated not by sight but by witness, not by touch but by Spirit. It is Christ Himself saying: the seam remains open.

Toward a Christic Epistemology
A Christic account of evidence does not abandon science or the disciplined rigor of historical inquiry. Quite the opposite: it embraces them as acts of love, grounded in the calling to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength — and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

And from the earliest days of the Church, Christians understood creation as a book of divine order — not a closed system of chaos but a coherent cosmos spoken into being by the Logos. Scientific discovery was never a betrayal of faith but its outworking: a reverent reading of God’s handiwork. To chart the stars, to explore the mind, to trace the intricacies of DNA, is to engage in a psalmic meditation on God’s wisdom: “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” (Psalm 111:2, ESV)

In this light, the progress of biomedical and health services research — every experiment, every incremental improvement in care — becomes a quiet act of collaborative hope. Each discovery is a signpost, pointing forward to the Kingdom where healing will be whole and tears wiped away. Science, rightly ordered, becomes a hymn: not the conquest of mystery, but its reverent exploration, with Christ as both telos and center.

Evidence as Worship
This posture reframes how we inhabit the seam. Evidence ceases to be about dominance or reduction; it becomes participation and praise. We attend to what is given — the text of creation, the testimony of Scripture, the Spirit’s quiet witness — with humility and awe.

Like the blessed one of Psalm 1, we meditate “day and night” not on a ledger of abstractions, but on the law of love — the living order that holds creation together and invites us deeper into communion. To meditate in this way is to remain rooted — like a tree planted by streams of water — in the One who upholds every quark and every quasar, every molecule and every melody.

Science, vocation, and worship intertwine here. The scientist mapping an unknown pathway, the teacher shaping young minds, the nurse tending the sick, the pastor proclaiming mercy — all become movements of praise when they are offered in love. The very act of attention, of stewarding creation with care, becomes an embodied confession that the cosmos is Christ’s, and in Him all things hold together.

Postscript: Vocation as Evidence, Worship as Witness
In the Lutheran imagination, vocation is not confined to the pulpit or the monastery. It is the quiet, steady work of being Christ’s hands and feet in the world — parenting, teaching, healing, repairing, governing, building — each calling carried out in the freedom of grace and the obedience of love.

Seen through this lens, our vocations themselves become evidence: living, breathing signs of the ongoing presence of Christ in His creation. Every act of care, every honest word, every moment of integrity in work or service, bears witness that the risen Christ is not a memory or an abstraction but Lord and Messiah, sustaining and renewing the world through those He has called.

This is the living heuristic of presence — a dynamic, Spirit-shaped knowing that does not reduce evidence to data points but discerns the movement of Christ in the fabric of ordinary life. The nurse adjusting an IV, the researcher analyzing patient outcomes, the parent reading bedtime psalms, the neighbor checking in on an elder — all of these are quiet annunciations of the Kingdom that is here and still coming.

Such evidence is not static. It is renewing. It reflects the rhythm of the already-and-not-yet Kingdom, where creation groans and heals, where Christ reigns and yet will return, where every act of faithful love anticipates the day when the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

And in this light, worship itself becomes evidence — not as argument, but as presence. When the gathered church confesses, “Jesus is Lord,” it does not merely recall a historical event; it proclaims an ongoing reality, echoing Thomas’s confession in the upper room. That proclamation is a kind of sacramental seeing — a recognition that the One who still bears wounds is also the One through whom all things hold together.

To live this way is to inhabit evidence as a form of praise: to let our vocations, our worship, and our daily acts of love become a steady, embodied witness that the Christ who came and died and rose is the Christ who abides, who renews, who will make all things new.

And so, like Thomas, we find ourselves drawn into confession — not as argument won, but as worship given:

“My Lord and my God.”

I recently watched the 2002 film The Count of Monte Cristo. I haven’t read the novel, but the film struck me as remarkably Christotelic — a story that bends toward the creed Jesus gave us: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.”

It is a story of betrayal, injustice, imprisonment, vengeance, and ultimately restoration. It shows how cruelly the fallen world can wound — and yet, within that brokenness, how God can still work toward redemption.

The Cave and the Creed
When Edmond Dantes is unjustly imprisoned, he clings to a message carved into the stone: “God will give me justice.” Those words become his anchor — the hope that his suffering and betrayal are not meaningless, that the world is not abandoned to corruption.

But what if those words were read Christotelically? What if we reframed them as: “God will give me love.”

Because justice in the Christian sense is never bare retribution. Justice, when fulfilled, is always love. It is love that restores what has been broken, love that heals what has been wounded, love that reconciles what has been lost.

The Temptation of Vengeance
When Edmond escapes and claims the treasure that transforms him into the Count of Monte Cristo, he sets his sights on vengeance. His betrayers will pay. Those who conspired against him will be brought low.

And yet, as compelling as those scenes are, vengeance never satisfies. The logic of “an eye for an eye” can punish, but it cannot redeem. It may level the scales for a moment, but it leaves the soul corroded. Vengeance cannot give back the years stolen in the dungeon. It cannot restore the innocence of love betrayed. It cannot make Edmond whole.

The Justice That Heals
What ultimately carries the story is not vengeance but love. The film’s center of gravity shifts from payback to restoration — the renewal of relationship with Mercedes, the joy of discovered fatherhood, the endurance of friendship. These are the spaces where real justice emerges: not as retribution, but as reconciliation.

And yet — and here the film’s brilliance shows — this love does not cancel justice. It transfigures it. Edmond’s enemies are indeed exposed and vanquished. But they fall not because he clung to vengeance alone, but because his story was held together by something greater:

a faith that God’s justice is revealed most fully in love.

In this sense, the enemies in the film bear a deeper echo: they mirror the Enemy of all souls — the accuser, the deceiver, Satan himself — who betrays, imprisons, and lashes out even in his defeat. The Count’s triumph offers us a parable of hope: that evil, though still active, cannot have the last word. It is undone not by vengeance alone, but by a justice born through love — a justice that restores the wronged even as it unmasks the corrupt.

Christotelic Justice
Read through a Christotelic lens, The Count of Monte Cristo becomes more than a tale of revenge. It becomes a parable of what true justice looks like when reframed by the cross:

• Justice is not achieved by cruelty answering cruelty, but by a love strong enough to expose and undo evil.

• Justice is not merely the enemy’s defeat, but the restoration of what betrayal sought to steal.

• Justice is not the triumph of vengeance, but the triumph of love — love that heals, restores, and renews.

The prison wall declared: “God will give me justice.” The Gospel declares something even greater: “God will give me love.”

And it is through that gift — through love that abides, heals, and redeems — that justice is fulfilled beyond what vengeance could ever accomplish.

For Us Today
We all know something of Edmond’s story, even if not at his scale. We know betrayal, loss, and wounds inflicted by others. We may long for “justice” in the form of vindication or payback. But the Christic pattern reframes our longing: the true answer is not vengeance but love.

And this is not sentimentality. It is the most demanding, most redemptive vision of justice possible. To forgive where vengeance would consume. To restore where betrayal has broken. To love in the face of wrong.

This is how we, in our vocations, begin to collaborate with Christ in His work of renewal — anticipating the final day when He will return and evil itself will be vanquished forever. In the already-and-not-yet Kingdom, justice is glimpsed whenever love restores what sin sought to destroy.

And so, we too confess and trust:

“God will give me love.”

I have an intense love–hate relationship with my yard trimmer. I love its efficiency — the way it slices through overgrowth, bringing instant order to chaos. But I hate the way it constantly demands attention: refeeding the trimmer line that somehow vanished, replacing the tiny eyelet guides that snap without warning, figuring out why the line suddenly disappears, as though swallowed by the spool. It is endless maintenance, a never-ending cycle of small frustrations.

All of this sits inside a deeper reality: I don’t just dislike yardwork — I despise it. I wish I could envy those who find peace in manicuring their lawns or joy in pruning hedges, but my disdain is such that even envy is out of reach.

And yet, somewhere between the hum of the trimmer and the sting of failure just as the groove begins, the ordinary frustration of yardwork becomes a metaphor. This is life in the fallen world — friction everywhere. The grass always grows back, in league with weeds. The trimmer always needs tending. And beneath these surface annoyances is a deeper truth: suffering in any form — whether in physical pain, chronic illness, or relational heartache — can create the aching sense that God’s presence has disappeared.

There are seasons when holding fast to Christ feels impossible — when the rope has slipped through your hands, and you’re left grasping at nothing.

The Disappearing Presence
Søren Kierkegaard, in The Sickness Unto Death, names this reality: despair — not the sickness of the body, but the sickness of the self. We are created as a synthesis of the finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, body and spirit, meant to rest in God. But suffering distorts that synthesis.

Even when we know, intellectually, that Christ is near — or felt it intensely hours beforehand — our experience tells another story. We pray, and silence answers. Or we forgo prayer, and the void fills with tangled overgrowth. We reach, and our hands close on air. Kierkegaard calls this the despair of weakness — that helpless, aching space where we want relief but cannot secure it.

Scripture has room for this ache; it meets us on the flat ground at the cross. The Psalms especially give us language for this:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? — Psalm 13:1, ESV

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — Psalm 22:1, ESV

These are not sanitized prayers. They are raw, desperate, and yet holy — not because they are tidy, but because they are honest. They are conduits for those who will abide. They teach us that absence is not abandonment, that even silence can be inhabited by God. The Psalms train us to pray our lives without pretense — to bring our confusion, anger, despair, and exhaustion into God’s presence.

Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. — Psalm 42:11, ESV

That turning — from despair to hope, even if muted and faint — is itself faith. It is the fragile but persistent cry that refuses to sever the sacred line of relation, even when we cannot feel its strength. It is even the manner of forgiveness, as we draw ourselves back to God’s creation, back to others.

Living Relationally
Kierkegaard reminds us that life is inherently relational — with God, with others, and with ourselves. Suffering is never sealed off; it echoes into every part of our being. And in suffering, the temptation is always toward isolation — toward the lie whispered by our own hearts — that we must carry everything alone. This, too, is the quiet work of the Antichrist: to convince us that solitude in suffering or despair is our only option.

But faith — even if it feels like nothing more than a whisper, veiled by the crashing of waves — calls us back into relationship, not only with God but with His people. As Psalm 42 reminds us:

Deep calls to deep at the roar of your waterfalls; all your breakers and your waves have gone over me. — Psalm 42:7, ESV

At the roar of His waterfalls, at His breakers, His waves.

This is where the church community becomes an essential vessel of grace: brothers and sisters who pray for us when we cannot pray for ourselves, who sit with us when silence seems deafening, and who bear witness to Christ’s presence when we feel only absence.

Acute or chronic illness, seasons of grief, or the quiet exhaustion of life in a fallen world — these are the places where we are most vulnerable to believe the lie of abandonment. And yet, in these very places, God so often works through the prayers, presence, and faithful, vocational love of others to remind us that we do not walk alone.

Christ Himself entered that seeming hiddenness. On the cross, He bore the silence of abandonment so that we might never be truly alone, and so that His presence could be mediated even now — through His Spirit, through His Word, and through the hands and prayers of His people.

A Cry in the Parking Lot
Recently, after another bout of wrestling with the trimmer and a bruise on my head from ducking too low under the deck, I dropped off my vehicle at an auto shop to address a stubborn check engine light. It’s an ongoing issue — frustrating, humbling — seeming victory followed by that light returning, glowing orange, a mangled grimace, a mechanical reminder that some problems don’t have quick fixes, and maybe never will.

As I waited outside for my wife to pick me up — my vague sense of hope mingled with persistent defeat — one of the workers came through the door, or tried to. The door caught him, his paperwork scattered, and in the flurry of frustration he cried out, “Oh, Jesus!”

And it gave me pause.

I would never condone the casual use of our Lord’s name — but this didn’t sound casual. There was something in the tone — frustration, yes, but also something rawer, almost like a plea.

As he gathered his papers, I stepped toward him and shared a quiet word about my own clumsiness the day before, still nursing that bruise. He gave a small laugh, said an “Oh, Jesus!” on my behalf, and in that moment, something broke through. Two people, in an ordinary parking lot, naming the friction of a fallen world and — however imperfectly, however likely to raise the eyebrow of the piously moralistic — acknowledging the One who holds it.

In his cry of our Lord’s name, I heard not profanity but prayer. The smallest thread of faith, the instinct to reach for the only name that can hold the weight of frustration, and more.

The Cure and the Call
Paul captures this paradox with clarity and comfort:

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come… will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. — Romans 8:38–39, ESV

And again:

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. — 2 Corinthians 12:9, ESV

The Antichrist is not some distant, apocalyptic figure lurking in the shadows. The Antichrist offers another continual presence. It is every whisper that tempts us toward autonomy, that tells us to carry it alone, that insists suffering is meaningless — drawing us into existential despair or into grasping at the dense undergrowth of idolatry.

But the Gospel speaks a truer word. It tells us that the places where despair wells up — even in parking lots, even behind a yard trimmer, even in the silence that feels like absence during illness — those places are where grace grafts itself most deeply.

And so, we hold fast, however clumsily or anguished, to the One who holds us first.

I recently re-read C.S. Lewis’s Miracles and found myself re-astonished by the remarkable nature of the work. It is at once theological, apologetic, and devotional — and almost miraculously generative in its own right. By virtue of its subject — though not exclusively of miracles — it continuously unfolds new ideas across its pages, at a pace rarely realized by more recent scholars, theologians, or devotionalists. Of all Lewis’s writings, it is perhaps one of the most challenging to read carefully, but it is also among the most rewarding, even on continued re-readings. Readers well-versed in theology may still find themselves startled by insights they did not anticipate, delivered through Lewis’s clarity of mind and gift of expression.

Early in the book, Lewis distinguishes between naturalism and supernaturalism. In this distinction — later interwoven throughout the work — naturalism envisions a closed system of causes and effects, self-referential and self-sustaining, where, if we had sufficient knowledge, we could in theory trace the entire chain. Supernaturalism, by contrast, insists that creation has a Source beyond itself, a Creator who stands outside of the system and yet acts within it.

While these two ideas appear mutually exclusive, Lewis removes the veil that separates them, while preserving the distinction — not by collapsing one into the other but by situating both within the Christ-shaped nature of reality, which is itself miraculous. For our purposes here, that early distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism can serve as a launching point into Scripture, and into one aspect of the new creation. For it gestures toward a deeper mystery: the way God’s providence runs hidden through creation, threading together events both wondrous and terrible, both great and small, until the whole fabric is revealed in the eternal Word, made manifest in the person and work of Christ.

Paul names this hope with crystalline clarity:

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” — 1 Corinthians 13:12, ESV

This is the horizon of hidden providence: what we now glimpse in fragments will one day be made whole, and what is now obscure will be unveiled as radiant, Christ-shaped truth.

Providence as Hidden Weaving
When we live our days in the here and now, the world can feel more like naturalism’s closed system than supernaturalism’s open creation. Events seem chained together by accident, necessity, or blind cause and effect. We experience suffering as meaningless, joy as fleeting, and history as chaotic.

Yet the promise of the resurrected life is not only renewal, but recognition — the unveiling of the tapestry God has been weaving all along. In the kingdom, we shall see how the threads of our lives, knotted and tangled as they now appear, have in fact been ordered toward beauty. The hidden patterns will be made plain, and we will recognize the hand of the Weaver.

This recognition is not naturalism fulfilled but supernaturalism revealed. Naturalism dreams of total comprehension through human reason; providence promises recognition through divine grace. The difference is not simply epistemological but theological: it is the difference between seeing a closed mechanism and beholding a creation alive with God’s sustaining presence.

Christ, the Revelation of Providence
This paradox is not new. The psalmists intuited this hiddenness long before its fulfillment. Their songs hold together both despair and trust, both bewilderment and hope:

“Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen.” — Psalm 77:19, ESV

God’s path is often hidden, His footprints unseen, and yet the psalmist insists the path is real. What seems chaotic is in fact guided. What appears abandoned is in fact sustained. The Psalms sing the paradox of providence: God both hidden and present, inscrutable and intimate, distant and near.

What the psalmists glimpsed dimly comes to full expression in Christ. The fullness of providence is revealed not in abstract explanation but in His person. On the cross, the worst threads of history — betrayal, injustice, violence, and death — were woven into the fabric of redemption. In His resurrection, the tapestry is turned, and what looked like defeat is revealed as victory.

Paul bears witness to this paradox when he writes:

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” — Romans 8:28, ESV

The “all things” includes not only the joys and triumphs but also the hidden griefs and apparent failures. Even despair is not wasted but taken up into the cruciform pattern of Christ.

The Tapestry and the Song
To live by faith, then, is to live within this hidden providence. We do not yet see the full tapestry, but we trust the Weaver. At times, the threads of our lives are plucked painfully, producing notes of sorrow. At other times, they are struck in joy. But in Christ, each thread — even when plucked in suffering — resounds with the music of the Psalms, singing the cruciform life.

This is the hidden providence, one revealed first in the central miracle of the incarnation, and given full chorus in the first fruit of Christ’s resurrection: a creation that appears, to naturalistic eyes, as a closed system of causes, but is in truth an open composition, ordered by the living God.

And in that unveiling, we shall see not simply how things fit, but how in Christ all things hold together.

Returning to Lewis
C.S. Lewis’s Miracles offers only one window into this mystery, but it is a window worth opening again and again. For those who have not read it, I encourage you to do so; for those who have, I encourage you to return to it. Alongside Scripture itself, and alongside our encounters with the living God, it is a work capable of quickening faith — not merely informing the mind but enlarging the heart.

Though written several decades ago, Lewis carefully addresses — and in many ways anticipates — the main modernist and postmodernist objections to the Christian faith. In answering these misunderstandings with clarity and depth, Miracles stands as one of the most preeminent apologetic works ever created.

Lewis closes with the reminder that the miraculous is not an intrusion upon reality but its fulfillment. The deepest truth of providence is that the veil will one day be lifted, and we shall see clearly what was hidden. Until then, we walk by faith — trusting the Weaver, singing the psalms, and remembering with Lewis that the miracles of God are not only possible but real.

And so we can say with Lewis: yes — miracles do occur.

A further meditation.

In earlier times as incarnate
we encounter, in the
stretch or contraction of days:
a Christ, risen,
who meets us wherever we are —

garrulous to Emmaus,
furtive — a thief of us —
yet present in our dimness:
a Christ, risen
to Babel to bedpost, to light,

and when, through others, through Christ,
life-giving to every:
a God of gift — of relational
miracle:
the unveiled,
the unveiling.

This poem moves in a cascade — gift opening into miracle, miracle into unveiling — and traces the rhythm of God’s providence in and through Christ.

We often hear the phrase, “the ground is level at the foot of the cross.” It has become a kind of shorthand in the Christian imagination: at Calvary there is no hierarchy, no privilege, no barrier to entry. Every human being – rich or poor, Jew or Gentile, male or female – comes before the cross on the same footing. It is a phrase that cuts across denominations and succinctly names the radical nature of grace.

But if we pause on it, “level ground” is more than a slogan. It is a living, theological picture. Level ground is where the footing is sure, where one can stand without stumbling. It is a place of stability, foundation, and openness. To speak of the cross as level ground is to speak of a space where Christ has removed every barrier, every unevenness that sin and the world’s hierarchies have introduced.

And it often resonates first – as the essential tone – through the women in our lives.

The Women at the Cross
The Gospels draw our attention to a striking detail: when nearly all of the disciples fled, it was the women who stood at the foot of the cross. Matthew names Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee (Matthew 27:55–56). Mark lists Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome (Mark 15:40–41). John is even more direct: “standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene” (John 19:25, ESV).

Together these witnesses form a small congregation on level ground. They do not clamor for greatness, nor do they scatter in fear. They remain, simply and steadfastly – a living chorus at Christ’s side. In their presence we glimpse something essential: the leveling work of the cross is first made visible in those who stand upon it. These women, overlooked in their society, are the ones who remain faithful when others falter. Their grounded presence reveals that the kingdom’s footing is different than the world’s.

In the women at the cross we see levelness embodied: not soaring ambition, not sinking despair, but steady, faithful presence.

We can hear this presence and grace in many of our cultural fruits.

Bach’s Passion and the Sound of Level Ground
Centuries later, Johann Sebastian Bach took up the story of Christ’s passion and gave it musical form. His St. Matthew Passion is explicitly Christological – Scripture set to music, devotion structured into sound. Yet even within this explicitly sacred work, there are resonances that extend the theological vision into the realm of music itself.

Listening recently to a remarkable performance by Ensemble Pygmalion, I was struck most by the opening chorus. The texture is famously complex: double choir, orchestra, voices interwoven while distinct and unique. And through this tapestry, one set of voices especially shone through – the female singers carrying the middle register. Not the soaring sopranos, not the grounding basses, but that level space around the middle of the keyboard, roughly the region of middle C.

Their voices came through with unusual clarity and rootedness, not dominating but steadying. They gave the music an open spaciousness, as though leveling grace itself were resonating through their line. It was as though the whole piece rested upon that register, a musical level ground upon which the higher and lower parts found their place.

In that sound, I could not help but hear an echo of the women at the cross. Just as they provided the grounded witness of faith, so these middle voices gave the Passion its sense of footing. They did not overwhelm, yet without them the music would collapse. They held the space open, inviting, clear. The level ground of the cross is not only an image – it can be heard.

Cultural Creations as Avenues of Witness
It is not only in explicitly sacred works like Bach’s Passion that we may find such resonances. With careful listening, Christians may discern in the cultural creations of humanity a kind of Christological openness. This does not mean baptizing every piece of art or music into the faith indiscriminately. Rather, it means recognizing that all creation, and by extension all human creativity, is taken up into Christ.

Paul reminds us that in Him all things hold together (Colossians 1:17). John declares that through Him all things were made (John 1:3). If this is true, then human creativity – even when not consciously devoted to God – can become an avenue by which the deeper truth of Christ is glimpsed. Sometimes this happens explicitly, as with Bach. Sometimes it happens indirectly – in a poem, a painting, or even the unlooked-for melodies and harmonies of everyday life.

The task is not to force Christ into cultural works, but to listen Christologically. That is, to hear in music, poetry, and art the echoes and prefigurations that the Spirit has sown into the world. To do so is to participate in what Paul calls taking “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5, ESV). It is to recognize that cultural creations can be tuned toward the gospel, resonating with the truth of the cross.

In this sense, the level ground at the cross is also cultural. Every human being, whatever their creative output, stands equally before Christ. And sometimes, by grace, those creations become windows through which the gospel’s levelness is glimpsed.

The Levelness of Grace
To return to the women at the cross: they remind us that the level ground is not abstract.

It is lived.

It is embodied in presence, in faithfulness, in simply standing where Christ is, even when all the world has turned away. To hear Bach’s women’s voices cutting through the texture of the Passion is to hear this levelness sung. They occupy that middle ground which makes space for all else. Without them, the piece would fracture. With them, it is whole.

We are thereby reminded: the level ground of the cross is not just an idea to affirm, but a sound to hear, a life to embody. It is found wherever faith holds steady, wherever Christ is lifted up, wherever human witness – however overlooked or forgotten – stands firm. At the foot of the cross, all humanity finds footing.

The ground is level, because the work is finished.

A Necessary Caveat
When Christians speak about forgiveness, the conversation may feel oversimplified. Some wrongs are small – careless words, forgotten commitments, the slings and arrows of ordinary life. Others are unspeakable – betrayals, abuse, even crimes that leave scars for generations. To speak of forgiveness in this reflection is not to flatten these harms into one category. Nor is it to make light of wounds that may never fully close this side of eternity.

This reflection does not seek to redefine forgiveness or obscure its meaning in the gospel. It seeks to look at forgiveness through the story of Adam and Eve – and through them, to Christ. It seeks to explore forgiveness not only as a proclamation given by God, but as something that unfolds within our hearts and lives. Always remembering: forgiveness in the biblical and Lutheran sense is never mere sentiment, never mere human willpower.

Forgiveness is God’s act.

Adam and Eve: Forgiveness at the Dawn
Adam is remembered as the man who hid.

When the serpent spoke, Adam stood silent. When Eve reached for the fruit, he did not intervene. When the Lord came walking in the garden, Adam slipped into the trees. And when confronted, he shifted blame onto his wife and even onto God Himself: “The woman whom you gave to be with me…” (Gen. 3:12).

Eve’s grief is harder to imagine, but no less real. She was deceived, yes – but she was also abandoned. Adam, her companion and protector, was absent. His blame deepened the wound.

What was it like for them after the garden? Did Adam ever seek forgiveness? Did Eve ever grant it? Scripture does not say. And yet, how else could their story have continued? They remained together. Adam named her “the mother of all living” – a word of hope in the ashes of Eden (Gen. 3:20). Through their union came children, generations, and eventually the covenant through which Christ would come.

Somewhere in the silence of Genesis, forgiveness began to stir. That is also Adam’s legacy.

This is not to excuse Adam. His failure is real. Humanity’s fall is traced through him. But there is an overlooked faithfulness here: Adam does not retreat into permanent hiding. He remains, however flawed, with his bride. That persistence – fragile, halting, imperfect – becomes a signpost toward the covenantal faithfulness of Christ, the second Adam, who will not abandon his bride, the Church.

We find in forgiveness layers of weight, which in God’s light are not hidden.

The Weight of Forgiveness
Forgiveness rarely feels easy. It is not a button to push, nor a transaction to check off. It is often something slower. Something not always heard at once as proclamation on the lips.

I once heard a mother speak on the radio. Her son had been killed, brutally, randomly. The sort of nightmare no parent can ponder. When asked about forgiveness, she said: “I don’t think I’ve forgiven him. I don’t know if I can.” And yet moments later, she described pouring her life into service, into something bigger than her grief. She spoke of peace that came through vocational loving of others, despair that returned only when she stopped.

And while she never used the word “forgiveness,” it seemed to me that forgiveness was already painted on her heart, growing like a vine. It did not spring up overnight. Forgiveness, like a vine, may grow slowly, from hidden roots – from grief, and from love and faith. Even through ashes tainted with anger, its growth may meander, like a vine; sometimes it wraps around old wounds, sometimes it extends outward, sometimes it bears fruit where we least expect.

Forgiveness – like the gospel itself, like the Lord himself – is alive.

Forgiveness, then, is not a flip of the switch. Yes, it is proclamation given once for all in Christ, but it is experienced as an unfolding process in our lives. It is the slow gospel; the gospel already declared by God, slowly bearing fruit in us.

But into the slow gospel of our lives, scripture also gives us warning, and by it we can reflect God’s wisdom. When Jesus warns, “if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matt. 6:15), his words carry a weight that stirs what Scripture calls the fear of the Lord. Psalm 111 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” That fear is not mere terror, but reverent awe before God’s holiness. It presses us into wisdom, and wisdom presses us – in and through Christ – into the living forgiveness.

To this, George MacDonald once wrote that God sees us not only as we are, but as we are becoming. He wrote that a thousand stages – each, in themselves, “all but valueless” – are of “inestimable worth” as part of our growth into His image [1]. Forgiveness works in this way. Each step – faltering, partial, even hesitant – is part of that divine progression with our living God, stretching us stage by stage toward the likeness of Christ Jesus.

And in Christ, fear, wisdom, and forgiveness converge:

·       He trembled in reverent submission (Heb. 5:7),

·       He embodied the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24), and

·       He proclaimed forgiveness from the cross (Luke 23:34).

Let the soil, then, of forgiveness be fear – rightly understood – of God. Anger, hatred, and resentment – when they become the object of cultivation – always poison the root of the vine.

And our own bootstraps strangle it. We divide the vine of forgiveness, to its death, by casting lots for our own works.

Proclamation and Bach’s Illumination
In Lutheran theology, forgiveness is never our work. It is proclamation. It is divine absolution spoken into the hiding places of our hearts. God does the verbs – as we learn from Erick Sorensen.

That is why Jesus’ hard words about forgiveness in Matthew are not a threat. They are a diagnosis of our souls – a diagnostic snapshot. And the disease progression is this: withholding forgiveness closes us off to mercy. It hardens our soul. It enthrones our pain.

To forgive is to proclaim what God has already declared: “In Christ, your sins are forgiven.” This is not a human negotiation. This is not a transaction of moral bookkeeping. This is proclamation echoing the Word made flesh. But how does this proclamation sound in human experience?

Here music can help.

In Bach’s minor works – and Bach was a devout Lutheran – something remarkable happens. Unlike composers who pivot abruptly from minor to major, Bach allows the light of the major key to shine within the minor itself. The sorrow remains real, but it is illuminated from within.

A living, growing forgiveness – whether glimpsed in the vine analogy or across the whole Judaic and Christic arc of scripture – works in the same way. The wound is not erased. The sin is not trivialized. But the light of Christ seeps in, weaving through the pain. It does not deny the hurt but suffuses it, illuminating it with mercy. Forgiveness, then, is not a dramatic escape from sorrow into joy. It is light shining through sorrow, transfiguring it without erasing it.

The Old Adam and Our Idols
Why, then, is forgiveness so hard? One reason is pride. Another is idolatry. Unforgiveness can become its own idol. We enthrone our pain. We become the judge. We say, “I will not let go – because I hold the power now.”

In that moment, we are trying to be God. Luther reminds us that the “old Adam” clings fiercely in each of us. The old Adam resists forgiveness – both giving and receiving it. And sometimes, what makes forgiveness hardest is not the other person, but ourselves.

Here the imagined words, “I forgive you, Adam,” must turn inward – into the very soil, the adamah from which we are made. Eve’s forgiveness of Adam becomes a mirror for our need to forgive the Adam within ourselves. To acknowledge the pride, the idolatry, the sin that clings – and to let it be drowned daily in repentance.

There is another obstacle: our tendency to inflate small slights into deep wounds. Paul speaks of the armor of God – helmet of salvation, shield of faith, breastplate of righteousness. This armor does more than protect us from evil. It also equips us with discernment, so that we don’t mistake every inconvenience for harm.

Without such discernment, we keep a tally sheet of wrongs – like the character in the film Rain Man who obsessively noted every perceived offense in a notebook. If we live that way, we will always feel wronged, always demand apology, always bind others to a debt.

That is not forgiveness. That is pride.

Through a Christ-centered life, we are freed from this tally-keeping. We learn to see which wounds are true sins requiring forgiveness, and which are simply the frictions of life to be carried with patience.

Forgiveness Through Vocation
And yet, forgiveness does not always come directly. Sometimes it emerges sideways – through vocation. The grieving mother who poured her life into service exemplifies this. Though she said she could not forgive, her very life testified otherwise. Forgiveness flowed through her vocation.

Paul writes: “God reconciled us to Himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18). Forgiveness is not just something we receive; it is something we carry. And sometimes, we carry it not by naming it, but by living it.

In my own life, forgiveness has not always come through analyzing the wound. It has come through presence: being a husband, being a father, teaching, writing. In Christ, small things become the soil where forgiveness quietly grows.

This is not works righteousness. It is Christ at work in us, forgiveness painted on our hearts before it finds its way to our lips. It is mere life – a resounding but wounded creation – threaded into the already-and-not-yet kingdom.

Memory, Justice… and the Hardest Forgiveness
God’s needle threads through scripture. The yearning for justice is woven across the psalter. And as of any tapestry, we may misperceive and build illusions. There is a myth: “forgive and forget.” But true forgiveness is not erasure. It is transformation.

Psalm 103 says: “As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us” (Ps. 103:12). In Isaiah, God says: “I will not remember your sins” (Isa. 43:25).

This is not amnesia. It is covenant. God always sees, but chooses to see us through mercy rather than condemnation. So too in our lives. Forgiveness does not mean we lose the memory of what happened. It means the memory loses its grip. The event is not erased but re-centered in the mercy of Christ.

But what about the unforgivable? History and personal life alike confront us with wounds so deep the word “forgiveness” feels offensive. Genocide. Tyranny. Abuse. The evils that never repent. Here we must be honest: forgiveness cannot be cheap. It does not mean forgetting, excusing, or silencing. Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. It does not erase the need for accountability.

A just society applies just punishment. But for our innermost hearts, Paul helps us in Romans: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God” (Rom. 12:19). Some wrongs will not be set right until the end of all things. Until then, forgiveness may look like release: “God, this is too heavy for me. You carry it.”

This is not shallow reconciliation. It is a refusal to let despair and hatred consume us. In Christ, forgiveness does not deny memory nor dissolve justice – it reshapes both. God alone can bear memory without distortion and enact justice without vengeance.

Christ the Forgiver
The story that begins with Adam’s hiding ends with Christ’s unveiling. Adam hid, Christ revealed. Adam abandoned, Christ endured. Adam shifted blame, Christ bore it.

On the cross, Christ proclaimed: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Forgiveness, then, is not ours to manufacture. It is ours to proclaim. It is ours to live into. It is ours to unfold – because Christ has already spoken it once for all.

Let’s return to Adam.

What might Eve have whispered to Adam in the long years outside the garden?

“I forgive you.”

What must we whisper to the old Adam within ourselves each day?

“I forgive you.”

What does Christ proclaim to all humanity in his death and resurrection?

“I forgive you.”

Forgiveness is proclamation. It is also an unfolding process. It is illumination within wounds, vocation lived, memory transformed, and burdens released to God. In the already-and-not-yet kingdom, forgiveness remains the Word. Spoken by God. Lived through us. Fulfilled in Christ.

Closing Devotional
A curving in
fosters the offense,
dashes self-made hopes down.

Forgiveness, when
in our Christ commenced,
takes flight and touches not ground.

It is love, then,
unconquerable sent—
God, for us, the old Adam drowned.

And reborn—
forgiven—
for creation, threaded through Christ’s sound.

[1] George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, Series I, “The Truth.” (Also quoted in: C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology).

Among the psalms, there are some that sing with a set order. Rare among the 150, a few are built as acrostics – each verse beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. From aleph to tav, they unfold like a supporting spine of prayer.

As in other poetic traditions, this ordered structure does not stifle. Instead, it channels into a form simultaneously disciplined and free. The psalmist’s voice does not strain against the alphabet; it resonates through it. A finite sequence of letters carries the infinite Word. Aleph to Tav in Hebrew stands in parallel with Alpha and Omega in Greek – the beginning and the end. Christ calls himself the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 22:13). In the acrostic psalms, we glimpse a reflection of his fullness: a hymn that begins and ends in God, echoing his eternal Word, our Lord and Savior.

But what happens when a letter is missing? What happens when the carefully constructed acrostic skips over a piece of its spine? What happens when the structure falters – and yet the song still holds?

What do we learn about Christ?

In several psalms, a verse is absent. Not just a word, not just a sound, but the entire verse that should be connected to a particular letter. Most often it is the letter vav. Of itself, vav is a small, connective letter that often means simply “and.” It joins what comes before with what comes after. But here, if we allow a poetic-theological resonance in the psalmic setting, vav can be seen as the hinge on which sections swing, the thread that binds a narrative together.

And yet in some psalms, the vav is gone.

Psalm 25, a prayer of confession and trust, lacks it. Psalm 34, a song of praise moving from fear into faith, also skips over it. Psalms 9 and 10, a fragmented acrostic stretched across two compositions, bear its absence as well. We do not know why. Was it lost in transmission, smudged on a scroll, or intentionally unwritten? Scripture and history give no explanation.

But what if the point is not to solve the absence, but to hear how God speaks into it?

Psalm 25: Between Guidance and Mercy
Take Psalm 25 as an example. If the acrostic were complete, the vav verse would fall between verse 5, “Lead me in your truth and teach me,” and verse 6, “Remember your mercy, O Lord.” Between the cry for guidance and the cry for compassion, a connective word should stand. And yet, there is silence. The very hinge is missing.

Still the psalm does not collapse. Because the absence is more than a literary anomaly; it is a proclamation. Even when our prayers falter, God’s promise does not. His Word receives our unfinished cries, and his Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words (Rom. 8:26). The psalm still sings because God still speaks. Grace holds through his action, not ours. What seems like fracture in the text becomes fullness in God’s hands, silence that makes room for something greater to be revealed.

And in that gap we meet Christ.

Christ is the eternal Vav. The true “And.” The And between God and humanity. The And between justice and mercy. The And between Spirit and flesh. In the missing verse, he stands as the connector we could not – and cannot – write for ourselves. The psalm holds together not because of flawless human craft, but because Christ binds it.

The fractured psalms mirror the life of faith. Our words falter, our songs break, our prayers remain unfinished; all of our works fall short and trail into silence. But Christ enters the silence. He makes whole what is broken, and in him even incomplete psalms sing a complete gospel.

And as we see, the gospel – the death and resurrection of Christ, his completed work – is embedded in a kind of resurrection in another psalm, Psalm 145. In that psalm, what was once missing is found – and in that restoration the gospel emerges with astonishing meaning.

Psalm 145: From Falling to Rising
Psalm 145, an acrostic radiant with praise. Each verse a letter, each letter a crown. But here too, a letter is missing – nun. Not a conjunction this time, but still an expected verse. For centuries the psalm bore this silence, until fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed the missing line. Most modern Bibles now restore it in brackets: “The Lord is faithful in all his words, and kind in all his works” (Ps. 145:13).

Faithful. Kind.

This restored verse reveals the very heart of Christ.

And what follows immediately in the next verse – already present before this restoration, and now burning with new light – cannot be coincidence: “The Lord upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down” (Ps. 145:14). Nun, in Judaic tradition, is associated with falling, frailty, and descent. Here the restored nun verse, proclaiming Christ’s faithfulness and kindness, meets the reality of our fall – and carries us straight into the promise of rising.

This is the rhythm of resurrection. A fall received by love, an absence answered by faithfulness, a descent answered by… restoration.

Christ is not only the Vav, the connector between. He is also the Nun, the restorer of the fallen. He is the one who lifts the bowed down, who fills what is empty, who – by virtue of his person and completed work – raises what is fallen.

Christ ensures the covenant.

Christ in Every Gap
The acrostic psalms do not hold because of their perfect structure. Nor do our lives.

They hold because God breathes into every silence, and Christ stands in every gap.

The psalms themselves bear missing letters so that we might see the fullness of Christ. He is the missing verse, the unspoken word, the silent line between “Lead me” and “Remember me.” He is the connector we could not compose, the resurrection we could not create, the grace we could not earn.

And in him, even fractured songs rise whole. Even broken alphabets are being made new. Through the church, these psalms are prayed aloud as God’s living Word, proclaiming that in Christ, every missing letter has been found.

There are moments—even vast expanses—when memory itself falters. When truth, once luminous, is veiled by history, betrayal, or time. Memory En-Mired names that condition: the soul’s recollection clouded, silted, awaiting renewal.

The image in this reflection arose from the dialogue between Prospero and Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Exiled by his brother’s deceit, Prospero recounts the twisting of truth that led to their ruin. “Dost thou hear?” he asks.

“Your tale, sir, would cure deafness,” Miranda replies.

In that line, Shakespeare hints at something miraculous: truth rightly spoken heals. The act of remembrance, freed from distortion, restores. It is rational. It is causal—it is law-bound.

This same dynamic stands at the heart of C.S. Lewis’s vision of miracles. In Miracles, Lewis reminds us that a miracle is not a violation of natural law but the entry of the supernatural into the natural. Once God’s action enters, nature carries it forward in lawful ripples. When we reflect on God’s law in this way (Ps. 1:2), every miracle becomes both lawful and remembrance—a re-telling of creation’s first truth.

Lewis calls the Incarnation the “Grand Miracle.” From that single descent of divine light into matter, all other miracles flow: water turned to wine, storms stilled, eyes opened, hearts restored. They are, as he says, “small beams of the same light which once for all shone in our darkness.”

The miraculous, then, is also memory renewed—the created remembering its faithful Maker.

The Poem: Memory En-Mired
What do you
see, and
by what do you gaze—
far beyond, upon that which even
science
has a handle?

What kindles a
gift from
memory en-mired:
scance an orphaned love:
reliance—
a boundless foot-candle.

Shine, shining, a
light to
memory re-newed:
sight and deafness healing,
alliance:
the covenant’s life-giving scandal.

About the Poem
“Scance” is a reimagined Old English variant of askance, here signifying movement rather than suspicion: the soul’s passage from estrangement into covenantal adoption.

The poem moves through three quiet motions: seeing, remembering, renewing.

In its opening question, “by what do you gaze,” perception itself becomes theological. Even science, Lewis might say, “has a handle” on creation only because the Logos makes it intelligible. The world is not a closed mechanism but a mirror of Mind.

The middle stanza enters the mire—and remembrance. Memory en-mired evokes both human history and Prospero’s lament: truth submerged beneath deceit. “Scance an orphaned love” voices the miracle of adoption, the return from false memory into the family of God. The foot-candle—a unit of illumination measurement—becomes the Incarnation itself: finite illumination bearing infinite radiance.

The closing movement widens into renewal: sight and deafness healed, covenant restored. Its final phrase, “the covenant’s life-giving scandal,” names grace in its paradox—foolishness to the world, yet the wisdom of God.

Placed in conversation with C.S. Lewis’s reflections on the miraculous, the poem widens into a meditation on creation’s remembering. Lewis helps us see that miracles are not the silencing of storms; they are a storm’s deeper meaning. The same Christ who commands, “Peace, be still,” is also the one who meets his disciples amid the tempest. Each storm, like Prospero’s, becomes both judgment and restoration.

Miracles ripple outward from the Grand Miracle as waves upon creation’s sea: disturbances that reveal divine order, tempests that thrust us onto the shores of grace—like the destination in Dylan’s When the Ship Comes In. Both, to the befuddlement of Hegel, are the world’s acts of remembering: signs that history’s distortion is being unwound and truth spoken anew.

And unlike the phantom banquet in The Tempest, our Lord provides—simply, fully, even if miraculously. Hegel’s system hungers for synthesis, for the mind to consume the world and call it progress. But the gospel feeds us not with dialectic, but with supper. Would Alonso have longed for something as humble as a bowl of Texas chili? Perhaps.

Chili is what one returns to, gladly, when one realizes that Hegelian progress yields—at best—just chili.

Let us sit at the table of the Lord, then, in fellowship. To witness a miracle is to behold creation recollecting itself under the Spirit’s breath. The miraculous does not suspend covenant; it fulfills it—it fills. It is memory set free to shine before a literal feast.

Memory Renewed
In Scripture, divine remembrance (zakar) is never passive recall but covenantal action. God remembers his promises and acts upon them (Genesis 9:15; Luke 1:72). In Christ Jesus, remembrance takes flesh. The Word enters our disordered histories and renews them from within.

Thus, the movement from memory en-mired to memory re-newed mirrors redemption itself. We, like Prospero, speak from exile, but through the incarnate Word, truth unwinds the spool of distortion and cures our deafness. The tempest’s tension resolves at the cross: the storm becomes sacrament, and every miracle becomes a sign that God’s remembering is stronger than our forgetting.

It is at the cross that the miraculous and the covenant converge: the unwinding of the spool of covenantal memory until it reaches its incarnate fulfillment—the Logos who restores. Through him, every tempest may yet carry us home; every memory, once en-mired, may shine again with the boundless light of covenantal grace.

We don’t usually imagine the apostle Paul as someone who tanned – certainly not in the way we talk about summer days at the beach. But if we think of tanning as the body’s natural responsiveness to light, its ability to register the environment quickly and adapt effectively, the metaphor becomes fitting. So, let’s suppose Paul tanned quickly, tanned well.

Paul, after all, was nothing if not responsive. His reflexes – mental, spiritual, and physical – were sharp. He perceived patterns in Scripture and in the early church faster than almost anyone around him. He crossed cultures, navigated hostile cities, and endured shipwrecks and beatings with an intensity that borders on the otherworldly. His letters carry this same urgency: quick to rise, quick to exhort, quick to clarify, quick to encourage.

And yet, this responsiveness wasn’t random. It was disciplined. Paul’s temperament, restless though it often was, became channeled through the Spirit into deep endurance and clarity of purpose. The same man who was once quick to persecute became quick to proclaim. The same man who could never sit still became one who pressed on “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14, ESV).

This makes Paul a kind of archetype for what we might call holy hyper-attunement – a readiness that, when untethered, can scatter like sparks, but when yoked to Christ, illuminates whole communities.

Paul isn’t alone in this.

Peter is the disciple of reflex. He steps out of the boat before his mind catches up to his feet, pulls the sword before he thinks of the consequences, and declares Christ the Son of God before the others have found their voice. Quick to rise, quick to stumble – and yet, by grace, quick to stand again.

David, too, is restless. His psalms are marked by a sensitivity that cuts both ways: deep awareness of God’s nearness and deep anguish when God feels distant. He is a man of action and contemplation, fighting giants and composing hymns with the same wild intensity.

Together, these figures remind us that God doesn’t erase intensity. He redeems it. He refines it. He channels it for His purposes.

The Epistle Lens
If we want to understand Paul – this man who “tans well,” who registers and adapts to the world with such speed and depth – one epistle stands out: Philippians.

Philippians carries both Paul’s restless energy and his Spirit-shaped endurance. It’s filled with movement – press on, rejoice, stand firm, do not be anxious, imitate – but also with deep grounding in Christ’s sufficiency. It’s where we hear the paradox of holy urgency and holy rest:

“I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.” –Philippians 3:12, ESV

Here is Paul at his most human and most Christ-shaped – alert, disciplined, joyful, and utterly focused. It’s a letter for anyone whose temperament burns bright and fast, for anyone who has learned, or longs to learn, how to channel that responsiveness toward the steady light of Christ.

And the Youth of Mark’s Euthys
If Paul shows us the man who “tans so well” – quick to register, adapt, and endure – Mark’s Gospel gives us the youthful rhythm of euthys: immediately, straightaway, without delay. Mark fills his early chapters with this word, giving his narrative a pulse of urgency:

“And immediately (euthys) they left their nets and followed him.” –Mark 1:18, ESV

“And immediately (euthys) he called them.” –Mark 1:20, ESV

The effect is striking. The kingdom has come near, and Jesus moves with decisive purpose. Yet we are invited not only to be swept up in the urgency but also to pause – to remember that behind the swift unfolding of the Gospel were long years of hidden formation, of patient obedience, of listening and waiting upon the Father.

So, we, too, may live in both movements: quick to answer Christ’s call, yet also willing to dwell, to rest, to let Him meet us in His time.

Christ Listens (a poem in closing)

Christ listens,
while He composes
in the timeless forms of the Father.

Eternal,
not rushing resolution.
Mark, immediately this: in urgency, we pause—

and sit in the space,
among notes,
and turn gently to our Lord in the light—

who meets us,
converses where we are,
in form and feeling, in sorrow and sweetness,

in silence and song—
and in the spacious bloodstream of all things,
where His light composes still.

In Psalm 8:3, the psalmist looks up and sees the heavens, the moon, and the stars. Here we take up our telescope — an act of exegetical literalism.

At the Heavens of the Psalter is not only about astronomy. As in Psalm 1, it is an invitation to reflect on the Law — meaning not only the written Torah, but the whole of what God has stitched into creation: causation and correlation, patterns and harmonies, the very structures of meaning that abide in and through Christ. To reflect on these is also to meditate on his handiwork, both near and far.

This is micro-vocation — the quiet dignity of everyday tasks of hand and eye. Lutheran vocational theology reminds us that God hides His work in ours, weaving the ordinary into His providence.

Here, an astronomical field notebook opens. The aim is contemplative yet unadorned: a record of doing as a way of seeing.

A record that is a kind of micro-psalter.

Entry 1
I was sitting outside in the early evening when my younger daughter mentioned an upcoming planetary convergence. I remembered our telescope — unused for nearly two years. I had splurged on it during the pandemic: a 9.25" Schmidt-Cassegrain with a range of eyepieces and filters.

Her interest in the celestial event was unexpectedly intense. She never mentioned the telescope, but I suspect it was already in her mind. Still, the thought of it stirred a flicker of guilt. “Let me see about getting our telescope set up,” I told her, shifting my inertia from the patio bench toward the basement.

What followed over the next two hours was pure preparatory stewardship: removing the protective shroud, inspecting the scope, taking inventory of accessories, plugging in the mount’s charger, learning about a needed firmware update, and refreshing my memory on the Wi-Fi-linked app that guides the telescope. I even ordered a red-light headlamp.

I was in the basement so long, and so late, that my family turned off the light on me twice. “I’m down here!” I called up. “I’m getting the telescope ready.”

And I reflected on a thought I had earlier in the day, or perhaps yesterday: that I should apologize to my younger daughter that we had not used the telescope in so long. The thought had come unbidden, arriving in the usual activity of the day like a seed planted without my knowing.

“O LORD, you have searched me and known me.” — Psalm 139:1 (ESV)

Entry 2
I am in a slight holding pattern, waiting for a mini USB type B to standard USB A cable for the firmware update. I vaguely recall a nest of such cords — three or four jumbled together — and, judging them clunky relics, I threw them out. Little did I know.

In the meantime, Valery Afanassiev’s performance of Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 18 measures out the kind of patience this moment requires, offering the same spaciousness I associate with celestial exploration.

My younger daughter, my soon-to-be astronomy companion, prepares a bagel — oversized for the undersized toaster — without disturbance or destruction to either. Her quiet resourcefulness assures me she will be the right partner for this renewed adventure.

“It’s already 9:30 this morning!” I say to my wife, who had planned to run errands by now.
“It’s only 8:30,” she replies, glancing at the clock, and then adds, “Keep your voice down,” reminding me that our older daughter is likely still asleep. I check my phone. She is right.

“Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!” — Psalm 27:14

Entry 3
Telescope firmware successfully updated — a process that, to my relief, turned out to be easier than expected, though still challenging enough to be enjoyable. There were multiple connections to coordinate: telescope to handset, handset to computer, downloads to acquire, files to transfer. Watching those lines of communication come alive was, in its own way, satisfying.

Fortunately, the USB cable arrived around 4:30 p.m., early enough to get the update done without rushing. That’s the good news.

The less-good news is that, at 8:53 p.m., the sky is still not fully dark. And the moon — our chosen first object to inaugurate this renewed adventure — is rising on the opposite side of the house from where my backyard setup would be. And by around 9 p.m., my habitual bedtime calls.

So, tonight’s story is one of tremendous progress in stewarding the scope to full readiness meeting the practical limits of the summer sky, the geometry of my backyard, and the rhythms of sleep. We will re-strategize in the coming days, watching for the convergence of a crystal-clear night and wide-eyed evening endurance.

Entry 4
A few minutes after my last entry, I went to my younger daughter’s room — my co-astronomer — to suggest that we hold off until the previously mentioned “convergence”. My older daughter, overhearing, burst from her room and fast-tracked the re-strategizing process with, “Go outside! and have some fun!,” in a tone that was half bemused, half sincerely annoyed.

We are headed outside.

Entry 5
The moon hovers beautifully in the early morning sky.

Coffee. I grab my binoculars. The “man in the moon” looks different than I remember — more Rorschach than man. This bodes well. Transfiguration. Possibility. Faithful originality. Witness. Praise.

“From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the LORD is to be praised!” — Psalm 113:3 (ESV)
And yet, “the sun knows its time for setting.” — Psalm 104:19 (ESV)

More coffee.

Entry 6
“Let’s go ahead outside, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to yet… oh wow!!”

There it was — already about twenty degrees above the horizon — the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus, less than my pinky’s width apart. Venus shone the larger of the two, both framed by clouds sketched in accent, as if the clouds themselves were radiating from the convergence. From a sort of celestial covenant—Jupiter much more massive than Venus, but smaller from our vantage point. Their places reversed to our eyes — the immense diminished, the lesser enlarged — as in the upside-down Kingdom itself.

I brought out my 10x50 binoculars, which I had set up on a tripod the night before, but the view was more or less the same as with the unaided eye. So we simply enjoyed the event without magnification, letting the sky speak for itself.

And I found myself asking: What do I make of this? Without any possibility of directly accessing these objects, beyond sight. In that moment, the objects became presence — shared with the person beside me. They gained significance in conversation, and thereby entered the heart.

My younger daughter heads inside, my wife joins me, my eldest daughter still asleep.

Four in convergence.

“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?” — Psalm 8:3–4 (ESV)

Entry 7
The North Woods, Wisconsin
Perfect darkness. We are far afield, on a family trip.
The Milky Way gleams. Moses must have seen such a sky when he composed the prayer of Psalm 90, and in the Spirit:

Before all this, You are God. Eternal renewal — we fly away toward the convergence of Heaven and Earth, and the work of our hands is established in You.

Entry 8
Back in NW New Jersey. Clear skies, a cool evening. After all the preparatory work, tonight marked my first time bringing the telescope back under the stars in over a year. My hope was to turn toward Andromeda — well within the scope’s reach — and to see its bright core and surrounding halo of billions of stars.

But I was quickly reminded of the extra challenge that greets not only beginners but also those who return after a long pause: alignment of the telescope. A calibration step that must occur each and every time a telescope is used, if objects are to be efficiently found in the night sky.

Long story short, my alignment attempts failed. I was left with a powerful telescope pointed at the heavens, but without the calibration needed to find what the eye alone cannot. In my frustration and in a last-ditch effort before packing it in for the night, I tried to sweep the sky, searching in the dark for Andromeda without clear direction.

Not surprisingly, I came up short.

The experience pressed me into a spiritual parallel. Christ assures us that His yoke is light (Matthew 11:28–30). We are not justified by our ability to “get it right” but by His work alone.

Yet, in the walk of discipleship, we still face the slow, sometimes frustrating process of formation.

Spiritual growth also needs a sort of calibration. It involves persistence, patience, and often, failure. And just as the telescope without alignment struggles to find what lies beyond sight, so too does the Christian life falter without being continually realigned by Word and Spirit.

This is not works-righteousness. Rather, it is the lived reality of sanctification: the Spirit drawing us, through both stumbling and endurance, deeper into the shape of Christ. In the case of astronomy, these recent challenges become a vocational formation, and ultimately a relational sharing with my family, in love.

Paul reminds us:
“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” — Romans 5:3–5 (ESV)

And Peter echoes it:
“In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” — 1 Peter 1:6–7 (ESV)

And so last night, though I did not find Andromeda, I was reminded that the night sky and the life of faith are both navigated by grace: not by straining toward perfection, but by being aligned again and again with the One who is already faithful.

Entry 9
Coffee in hand, I glanced out the back window toward the patio. A bird alighted on the corner of the railing near the empty feeder. Sparrow-like, but touched with a bluish tone, it paused for a breath, as if surveying a familiar stop, or to remind me to fill the feeder. Then, in an instant, it dropped into the yard and out of sight, a meal spotted.

The moment carried me back to the evening before. The sky had been perfectly clear — exactly the kind of night to bring out the telescope. Three bright stars hung across different quadrants of the sky, ready to serve as guides for alignment. The draw was strong; the threshold of action stood open. But a day’s worth of yard work left me too spent. I let the stars pass, and rested.

Now in the morning light, that small bird and the chorus of others overhead gave me pause. Their presence reminded me of creation’s nearness — accessible, alive, resonant. The heavens declare God’s grandeur, yet the sparrow at the railing embodies His nearness. Both are needed: the vast testimony of the skies and the intimate witness of the creatures at our doorstep.

Together they remind me: God’s creation speaks in both registers — the far and the near. Stars for grandeur, sparrows for grace.

“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” — Matthew 6:26, ESV

Closing
In our lives, in our variable Christ-serving vocations, let us create micro-psalters that thread.

Let us reflect:

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” – 1 Corinthians 12:4-7(ESV)

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” – Ephesians 2:10(ESV)

“As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace.” – 1 Peter 4:10(ESV)

I know, I know. Suggesting one’s favorite psalm is inherently a bit superficial—sort of like declaring your favorite color. Except in this case, it’s a step further: offering your favorite color without anyone asking. Living in New Jersey, here’s how that might go down:

Me: “I like green.”
New Jerseyite: “Nice. Now shove it where the sun don’t shine.”

To which I might reply with a bracing reading of Psalm 19:4–6. After all, the sun will shine.

And in truth, as with the colors themselves, I can’t really choose my favorite psalm. Before the yoking of wokeness—back when color could simply be beautiful without ideological freight—I used to tell my buddies that all the colors were my favorite. So, it is with the psalms. All of them are my favorite; all shimmer in their own hue of covenantal light.

No interpreter or devotional guide needs to convince us of that—the psalms resound with their own Christic light when we listen. The whole arc of Scripture, both Old and New Testament, is mapped—often with startling intimacy—within the Psalter. I once heard someone remark that if he were stranded on a deserted island and could have only one part of the Bible, it would be the psalms. In so having, he would have the whole Bible—in the most vivid colors possible.

Another Gateway
Back to my favorite psalm.
Or psalms.

I know, I’m already cheating. For this reflection, I’ll choose a pair—two psalms that together form, for me, another sort of gateway into the Psalter: Psalms 3 and 4.

Let’s step back, though. The first gateway, Psalms 1 and 2, orients us toward a Christocentric and Christotelic reading. They reveal the Blessed Man who delights in the Torah of the Lord and the Anointed Son through whom all nations find refuge. In these two, the structure of the whole Psalter is quietly announced: wisdom and kingship, meditation and messiahship, rootedness and reign. At this first gateway, Melchizedek’s mystery opens toward Christ—the true priest and king in whom all things are made whole. On this our timeless and faithful God will not change his mind (Ps. 110:4).

Then, when we pass through that threshold and reach Psalms 3 and 4, something shifts. The psalmist moves from theological proclamation to existential encounter. These are the psalms in which we first see what it truly means to pray to a living, present, covenantal God—the God who not only reigns but listens at both bedside and bedlam, in seasons of felicity or friction.

Psalm 3: The God Who Lifts the Head
Psalm 3 opens in distress: “O Lord, how many are my foes!” (Ps. 3:1). It’s a morning psalm—a cry from the battlefield and from the bed of fear. The psalmist lies down in the midst of enemies and yet awakens, sustained by God. The covenant is not theoretical; God is not an idea but a shield—our Lord and lifeblood.

“You, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head” (Ps. 3:3). This line embodies the essence of covenantal faith: that God both surrounds and restores. He protects from without and lifts from within. The psalm begins with chaos and ends with composure—not because the world has changed overnight, but because faith has, by grace, been reawakened.

Psalm 4: The God Who Gives Rest
If Psalm 3 is the prayer of morning, Psalm 4 is the prayer of evening. Here the psalmist confronts not armies but anxieties. It is one thing to face external enemies; it is another to lie awake wondering about tomorrow’s bread or tomorrow’s betrayal.

And yet the psalm ends in quiet triumph: “In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety.” (Ps. 4:8). The word alone carries the whole weight of faith. It’s the psalmic heartbeat of the First Commandment—no other gods, no other securities. God alone is the ground of peace. Not the removal of threat, not the achievement of control, but the sheer presence of the Lord who answers when we call.

It is a corollary, perhaps, to the clearest confession in the whole of the Gospel: “My Lord and my God!” (Jn. 20:28). May we every day renew that same astonishment—that divine surprise which, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

The Gateway of Living Prayer
Together, Psalms 3 and 4 mark another threshold in the Psalter—not the theoretical threshold of theology, but the lived threshold of prayer. They teach us to pray to the God who hears, who lifts, who restores.

If Psalms 1 and 2 reveal the Christ who reigns, Psalms 3 and 4 reveal the Christ who remains. Through these two psalms, we learn that faith is not merely the acknowledgment of a distant truth but the resting of the soul upon a living Lord.

And perhaps that’s why, for me, they are the greatest of psalms.

I may even share this good news at a local New Jersey diner. Burger. Fries. Yes—to grace.

“Sing to the Lord a new song.”

The line appears twice—identically—in Psalms 96 and 98, near the middle of the Psalter. These twin psalms form a kind of mid-book gateway. Psalms 96 and 98 open the gates to worship renewed.

Within the architectural, chiastic trek of Psalms 95–100, these “gateway psalms” stand as radiant portals of praise. They remind us that scripture is not a museum of faith but a living sanctuary. The Word of God, breathed by the Spirit, continues to breathe through the Body of Christ, through creation, and through the hearts of those who return—again and again. Unlike the existential waiting of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, our living God is already present by the Spirit, in and through Christ Jesus. Our continual renewal is not a wait; it is ours, now, by grace. God sings us by the psalms, whose gateways invite and pluck upon us, annunciating both all-in-all and the joyful ever-new.

And before arriving at this gateway, we have already crossed earlier thresholds. The Psalter’s first gate—Psalms 1 and 2—sets before us the Blessed Man and the Anointed Son, establishing the Christological frame through which the psalms are read. After that first gate, another appears in Psalms 3 and 4, where theology bursts into encounter—where the God who reigns also listens, a gateway to the living God, and to living prayer.

Then, near the middle of the Psalter, Psalms 96 and 98 open yet another covenantal threshold of union—one that carries us from the personal to the cosmic, from the prayer that pleads to praise that proclaims. These gateway psalms of renewal draw the faithful reader and singer back into the living movement of scripture itself: into singing faithful renewal, by which we both proclaim new and by which each of us is sung anew, even according to our unique traits. The flute is not the trumpet. It is the movement into the inner chamber of the Abrahamic covenant, which paradoxically makes all of creation its inner chamber by the Spirit, according to the finished, saving work of Christ Jesus.

So, when the psalmist calls us to sing a new song, it is not a summons to novelty. It is a call to sing something new that is still true. True to the Creator who first sang the cosmos into being; true to the Redeemer who makes all things new; true to the Spirit who carries every note of worship.

Thus, a continual return to scripture is one essential means of continual renewal.

And yet, if I’m honest, I sometimes hesitate to return to scripture I’ve already read repeatedly. I assume I know their path. I forget that the same Spirit who once met me in those lines still moves within them. My reluctance, reverent as it remains, to reread exposes something deeper than simple inertia—it reveals a fear that the living Word might confront me again, might re-write in me what I thought I knew. We may become clawed back to a Beckettian stasis, waiting instead for some Godot, thinking we sit in a bounty—slowly boiled alive by the idols of the age, like a lobster in a pot. We are all subject to spiritual regression, and to that condition of the soul of which Paul writes: the good that I would, I do not (Rom. 7:15-25).

We become comfortable, not realizing our peril and the peril we become to those we are called to love, even as our living God loves us. The call to continual renewal in the Lord and Savior we proclaim—by re-encountering, in part, the unveiling force of scripture and its psalmic gateways—can be tough. It may be uncomfortable, in our still-fallen state, to continually be unto the Lord a new song, in and through the true New Song: Christ. It is never so tough—but loving—as when the Father continually kicks us off the couch.

That reluctance became the seed of this small poem—a confession of sorts:

Confessions of a Reluctant Re-Reader
Having troth’d a path once,
I am loth to re-enter
the printer,
but to encounter
I yearn.

Having packed light bundles
by memory’s obscuring,
abjuring
to our living Lord
I turn.

And stepping out, standing,
sitting with the Image,
in lineage:
the covenantal—
Imprinter.

Having turned once more,
to troth a path unwritten,
but written—
the Word ever breathes—
at Center—
     by the Son, we ever sing.

Each stanza traces the movement of faith itself: covenant, confession, turning, and renewal. The poem ends where it began—on the path of grace-given fidelity, but the landscape has changed. The same Word now breathes anew. A meaningful reading of the psalms unmasks the fashions of the age and awakens our gifts, unveiling and charging them before the living God who gave them. But of this naked amplitude—this unveiled image-bearing—we, fallen and still attuned to the l’esprit du jour, may grow reluctant, even fearful.

Because every rereading, I have come to see, is a small rebirth toward an Imago Dei restored in Christ. We open the same pages, but they breathe again because the same Spirit who inspired them now indwells us. The “new song” of Psalms 96 and 98 is not a call to replace the old covenantal song; it is the old made complete and living in Christ.

The gospel we proclaim is not only a message spoken but a song embodied. The Incarnate Word steps into our silence and tunes the world, in its chorus of parts, back to harmony with its Creator. When we sing the psalms, we echo his voice; when we reread them, we rediscover his breath. After all, we were created as Image-bearers, made to send God’s wisdom into the world and sing back its praises. Psalm 96 begins with a single vocal melody and ends with forests singing; Psalm 98 opens with a harmonized chorus of human song and concludes with rivers clapping and mountains shouting for joy.

Every time we reread with graced faith, we are taken up into that living music. The 19th-century writer George MacDonald, who profoundly shaped C.S. Lewis, wrote:

“The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding revelation of God. It is Christ in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge—not the Bible, save as leading to Him.”

That insight captures the heart of rereading the Psalms. We do not return to the text for its own sake, as if repetition itself were sanctifying, but because within the words we again encounter Christ—the living Word who still speaks and sings. The oft-hidden God is revealed in the Word, Christ the Lord and Savior, even in resonant counterpoint to scripture’s hardest sayings. Each return becomes an act of grace, drawing us into the rhythm the Psalms themselves proclaim: confession, praise, lament, anger, despair, hope, and doxology.

The movement is cyclical but never stagnant—like waves that return without repeating:

In the liminal film of tide on sand,
Spirit soaked,
the beat of psalms,
in overlap,
drenched,
and neither in the surf nor sand,
but in the actual of shimmer,
feet sink—
embrace,
anchored where
patterns swell and fade—
and swell, into the Word
finally felt,
a vibration in the feet,
as keys
to a rising melody.

The gospel is not a Hegelian progressivism but the transformation of creation within the gospel itself: Christ meeting us not only in the inaugurated New Creation but also in the old made new, in familiar pages now breathing with his life.

So, the summons resounds: “Sing to the Lord a new song.” Not because the old has faded but because it lives—renewed and resurrected, resounding in Christ.

If you, too, find occasional reluctance to come again to scripture, know that reluctance itself—overcome by gifted grace—can be an igniting fuel:

A reluctance to re-read also ignites:
and by both, the soul may ask forgiveness,
and—immersed—
be renewed.

Take comfort in the gateway of Psalms 96 and 98. Christ Jesus is the New Song, and in him we are continually reborn. Proclaim and make a joyful noise to the Lord—for he does marvelous things.

The person and finished work of Christ Jesus—the Gospel—stands not outside history but within it. He lived, even as he lives now: the firstfruit of resurrection, our Lord and Savior. On his early years, Matthew and Luke invite us to reflect—to be curious. As G.K. Chesterton contends, imagination, too, has its orthodoxy, becoming a path to wisdom.

Imagination therefore also takes patience—and presence. Christ is, after all, one who listens, who is present, even as he composes for the Father. Yet in an always-age of noise and speed, where surface impressions are often mistaken for substance, we are trained to move quickly—scrolling, reacting, consuming.

But wisdom is often not loud; imagination need not be garrulous. As the Gospel is deeply textured, truth itself requires slowness—even when punctuated by the cross, in a paradoxical, now-and-not-yet cruciform syncopation. Hope, too, has a living rhythm, if we learn to listen—by the Spirit and by scripture.

Still, it is easy to miss the deeper movements of grace when, in the present age, we look only for spectacle. Yet the most lasting changes—like the growth of a tree or the shaping of a soul—often happen in hiding. After all, doesn’t alignment take time? Doesn’t history… grow?

And what if, in that formation, there were someone whose mind was not merely brilliant but perfectly attuned even within the striated structure of reality—within a creation at once perfect and broken? Someone whose unique soul did not isolate but was resonance; who walked, then stood, then sat within the seam of God’s desired healing?

That is how we may also encounter Jesus: not only as Lord and Savior, but as the one whose humanity matured—the one inside living history who dissolves idolatry so that a cry, mingled with mirth, may transfigure. He is, by perfect alignment, the perfect image of God—his true Son.

We may therefore know: Jesus, in his humanity, also grew. He grew in real micro-movements, within the macro orchestration of scripture itself. Of his early history, the gospel writers give us glimpses—a birth in Bethlehem, a flight to Egypt, a boy in the temple. And then… silence until his ministry.

Yet silence is never emptiness, especially in the hands of our living God; it is formation. May we, therefore, direct our own faithful imaginations and find that this silence both conceals and reveals: the slow, faithful shaping of divine wisdom within living human flesh.

In His Humanity
Jesus possessed a kind of brilliance we can only begin to glimpse. At twelve, he astonished the teachers in the temple. Throughout his ministry, he spoke with unmatched clarity, brevity, and moral precision. His parables confound and reveal. His use of scripture is neither rigid nor reductive but alive, attuned to the means and substance of his historical day.

But Jesus didn’t just know scripture. He lived it. He moved within it as though it were his native space. And yet scripture tells us something even more astonishing: he grew. “And Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man” (Luke 2:52). His internal human architecture—his human resonance—developed.

This is what we mean by another Messianic Secret: a hidden dimension of Jesus’s life that reveals the depth of his humanity and the beauty of his formation; already fully divine, yet also fully human. But this isn’t about elevating Jesus as merely a “religious genius.” Jesus is not to be recast in our image. His story is not one model among many; it is the one Gospel fulfillment.

Moreover, as expressed by God to Abraham, the Gospel is for all peoples and all nations. It is the saving story of Jesus—who fulfills the Law, embodies the Psalms, and brings to fullness the promises of the prophets. It is no misappropriation to see hints and signposts to Christ—the universal Lord and Savior—hidden in the fruits of all cultures. Because our living God hides to the same extent that he reveals; if we but look, we find joy in the seeming contradiction.

And what, then, of Jesus’ hidden years? What of those “secrets”?

The Hidden Years: Another Kind of Secret
The traditional “messianic secret” refers to Jesus instructing others to remain silent about his miracles during his early ministry.

But there is another, quieter secret: his childhood and adolescence. For thirty years, God incarnate was growing, unnoticed—a boy. He studied scripture. He absorbed the Psalms. He watched the world with eyes that saw not only the surface but the Father. His mind—also truly human—was maturing.

Hence, the mystery wasn’t only the early secret of his identity once his ministry began; it was also his early human development. We know he wasn’t born speaking in parables or preaching from the manger. He grew. He learned. His resonance with scripture came not merely from divinity but from human immersion, prayer, and faithful formation.

This is the beauty of the incarnation: the eternal Word became flesh and, in that flesh, grew into the fullness of human maturity while remaining perfectly divine.

Macro-Momentum and Micro-Movement
The Gospel of Mark is propelled by the Greek word euthys— “immediately,” “straightaway.” That relentless motion is the macro-momentum of the Gospel: God’s saving work pressing toward the cross, resurrection, and ascension.

Yet beneath that urgency lies a quieter rhythm. The micro-movements of formation: the pauses, the prayers, the slow learning of language and labor. The Word incarnate had also to learn to speak in words. His mother also had to lift him when he fell: that fall always had a sound, and Mary heard it.

The Messianic Secret is not only about concealed identity at the start of ministry but about concealed formation within his humanity—concealed by the bustle of the world around him, and within the normal, tangled rhythms of God’s creation. Yet his humanity was not a mere vessel for divinity; it was the instrument through which divine purpose found expression, down to the most tender detail. The Word made flesh was made flesh in exquisite detail.

And the micro-movements of this flesh in growth were not delay; they were wondrous formation.

Therefore, may we also see beneath Mark’s incessant macro euthys the invitation to pause—to find, in the micro-movements, revelation in the everyday now. In that rest may we wonder at Christ who grew to hold law and mercy, time and eternity, justice and love all in the same sentence.

May we also know that Christ’s life before his resurrection and ascension was not performance but alignment—perfectly attuned to the will of the Father. Yes, bound to covenant; yes, bound to scripture; but also bound to far more: to the one living God, of whom we—still broken and ever renewing—can perceive only in tangled prepositional glimpses: in, through, by, for, with.

Yet, as image-bearers, may we also perceive that, in the unfolding euthys of time, Christ merged all prepositions at the cross—as they were merged before time, as they were variegated to distortion by the Fall, and as they so persist but for Christ in the already-and-not-yet new creation, our hearts bending to the very center of the cross.

That merging of prepositions is this: it is the love that surpasses knowledge, the peace that surpasses understanding, the grace that exceeds measure. Christ transfigures all seeing, all knowing—and gifts that knowing to us by the Spirit.

The Heart of Christ in Us
The same incarnational God who guided Jesus through his human growth now lives in us by the Spirit. The movements of his life—his learning, his listening, his waiting—are not distant history but a pattern for our own.

In a culture obsessed with acceleration, and false Hegelian “progressive” promises, the true radical invitation is to grow slowly—to be shaped not by quick success but by prayer, by scripture, by faithfulness. The Spirit forms the heart of Christ in us over years, through vocation, through ordinary obedience, through wonder and sorrow, through persistence and inevitable failing. None of these are throwaway moments; they are the micro-movements of grace, echoing the hidden rhythms of Jesus himself, as we come to know our Lord and Savior—and elder brother.

We are not Christ, but we can know that God loves his creation, and that he ever renews it in ways both revealed and—for a time yet—concealed. The Messianic Secret was not only about hidden identity; it was about hidden formation. Through that hiddenness grew the one who, in history, became the Lord and Savior who redeems creation.

In our discipleship and vocations, let us grow as Jesus’ humanity grew, and nurture a gospel culture shaped by his person and finished work. As C.S. Lewis said of Aslan: “Trust the lion, love the lion, live for the lion.” In so doing, let us watch the hidden micro-movements of creation come alive—with continual surprise that breathes, fully known, in the open air of the Gospel.

Transformation, like Jesus’s own human growth, will not happen all at once. But it will—by gift, by faith. In and through Christ Jesus, Lord and Savior of all.

At a former church I attended, the pastor—whom I love—would often remind us about Christ: “No one else is coming for you.”

Granted, we have already been saved, and the pastoral power of his words may lie in the flexible play of verb tenses—the congregation, already quiet, became quieter yet. Even those who seemed there for a touch of Sunday entertainment became noticeably more reflective. After all, a lived faith is a formational process. Maybe not always Springsteen’s One Step Up, but formation is rarely a straight line. And whereas my own Ford had someone else to attend to it, for our redemption and reconciliation, indeed, no one else is coming—or rather, has come.

Never mind the verbs: all was–is–will be done by God. As C. S. Lewis hints in chapter 9 of The Great Divorce, eternity gathers past and present into one living act. What has been done in Christ is not past to God but continually present to us; in him, the having-come is also a coming—even while finished. And perhaps that’s partly what makes Revelation such a mind-bender.

Alright. Setting aside the concerns of my fifth-grade grammar teacher, a simple question lingers from the pastor’s proclamation: Who saved us? What is His nature?

What of His mother—how shall we name her?

These seemingly simple questions draw us into a fifth-century conflict—one that still speaks to Lutheran theology today. The goal of this reflection is not to rival historians or theologians who can describe the controversy with greater precision, but to offer a brief reflection that seeks, as Luther often did, the devotional and pastoral heart of the matter. After all, any such attempted rivalry would make the best of times very much the worst of times for me—I’m no match.

Still, a brief account is needed first. At its root, it is a tale of two mothers—not two different women, but two different ways of naming one. Those names reveal what we believe about Christ himself.

So, here is what happened. In the early fifth century, Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius of Constantinople wrestled over how to speak of Christ’s person. Nestorius, eager to protect the fullness of Christ’s humanity (and not denying his divinity), taught that Mary should be called Christotokos—“Christ-bearer”—rather than Theotokos, “God-bearer.” Cyril objected, insisting that the language of Christotokos risked dividing Christ into two persons, one divine and one human, thereby undermining salvation itself as confessed in the early creeds.

Now, when I first learned of the conflict, my reaction was much the same as, perhaps, many: What’s wrong with the name “Christ-bearer”? It sounds pretty awesome! After all, “Christ” is not a surname but a confession—our Lord and Savior—and we are taught to approach scripture, signposts, and salvation Christologically. Though not the best of comparisons, were I brash enough I might have called my own mother Matthaios-tokos!

But as I learned, this was no semantic hard-scrabble; it was an essential dispute—unlike the later scholastic abstractions that so often obscured rather than illuminated the Gospel, and against which Luther himself reacted. Those medieval tangles are enough to make Springsteen’s bird on a wire stop singing. And as G. K. Chesterton observes in Orthodoxy, such tangles often lead not to holiness but to madness. Against this, we are grateful for the Reformation—helping the bird not only sing again, but take flight once more in the clear air of the Gospel.

Back to the squabble: not a mere quibble, like two sparrows skirmishing for seed. Subtle as the distinction seems, and earnest as both patriarchs were in affirming the full divinity and humanity of Jesus, the question lay in how those two realities—the divine and the human—are joined, and how they are spoken of. Are the two natures fully united in one hypostasis—a single person, as Cyril maintained—or merely co-present, as Nestorius’s language suggested?

The dispute culminated at the Council of Ephesus (431 AD), where the Church affirmed that the one born of Mary was truly God incarnate—the same Lord who saves. This was an important theological victory, because even with the best intentions, Christotokos tends toward a separation—a cooperation of natures—that could empty the incarnation of its saving depth. When rightly reflected upon, this ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.

Lutherans, while not liturgically accustomed to calling Mary Theotokos, do not reject the title. Properly understood, it aligns perfectly with our confession of the one person of Christ—true God and true man—who is born, who is crucified, who is risen. As Martin Luther stated, “Mary is rightly called the mother of God, for she gave birth to him who is God.” (Sermon on John 14:16, Luther’s Works 24:107; cited at CatholicBridge.com)

Coming back to the lights dimmed, the pastor, the congregation transfixed: I keep hearing the who of that sermon line—no one else is coming for you—and I realize how the fifth century still whispers it back. Of that ancient controversy, let us reflect on how scripture alone illuminates why Cyril was (and is—and will be) the victor, and what its Trinitarian implications may be. Simply:

I Am Who I Am (Ex. 3:14).
Before Abraham was, I am. (John 8:58).
I am he. (John 18:5-6)—egō eimi.

Let us also reflect on the relational nature of the Christian life. On Mary, who briefly bore two names in Christ—the Incarnate God, the One who is ever with us: “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt. 28:20)

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—in union. And the name of Christ: a confession of our God who comes.

“If we want to uproot inherent cruelties or lift up lost populations, we cannot do it with the scientific theory that matter precedes mind. We can do it with the supernatural theory that mind precedes matter.”
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. 9

Chesterton often wrote in the simplicity of a nursery rhyme with the force of an earthquake. His line in Orthodoxy’s final chapter is not merely a passing remark; it is the culmination of his entire argument—that Christianity alone restores both the dignity of man and the sanity of the cosmos. The modern world, by contrast, has inverted the order of being. It began with atoms and tried to work its way up to souls. Christianity begins with the Word (Logos) and works its way down to dust.

Before turning to the symbolic language that follows, it is worth clarifying its purpose. These equations are not mathematics in the computational sense but mathematics in the ancient sense—the language of proportion. Chesterton argued that Christianity restores the right order of reality by placing Mind before matter; the subsequent equations simply render that order visible. They provide a shorthand for the ratios that govern creation: dependence, relation, coherence. In this way, symbolic notation becomes another form of theological grammar, a way of glimpsing how the Logos holds all things together.

Thus, Chesterton’s argument can be expressed as a single equation:

M = f(ΨG)

In other words, matter (M) is a function (f) of the Mind of God (ΨG). The universe is not a mechanism that happens to host meaning; it is a meaning that happens to have mass. The Logos speaks, and things come to be—atoms follow grammar before gravity. Once this is grasped, creation is no longer a machine humming in the dark, but a poem pronounced in love.

And if this first equation reveals creation, the second that follows reveals dominion—not dominion of cruelty and domination, but of vocational image bearing, of stewardship within God’s creation, of love of God and love of others. Humanity, made in the image of God (imago Dei), participates in knowing and willing, intellect and love. Thus, the ancient maxim “mind over matter” (mens agitat molem) can be rendered Christian-theologically:

(K + W) = χ · (Ψ / M),

where K is human knowing, W is human willing, χ is a constant denoting grace in and through Christ; Ψ is the human mind; and M is matter. Knowing and willing are joined not for arithmetic reasons but for anthropological ones. In Christian thought, these two faculties form a single movement of the soul: what the mind perceives, the will pursues; what the will loves, the mind learns to see. Their “sum” represents the unity of human action—the imago Dei in motion—rather than a literal calculation. Grace, expressed as the constant χ, elevates this unity so that mind (Ψ) properly governs matter (M), restoring the proportion that materialism distorts. The equation therefore symbolizes a harmonized human life: intellect illuminated and will ordered, both lifted by Christ into their true vocation.

By contrast, where matter—philosophically and metaphysically—governs mind, knowledge curdles into cynicism and will into appetite. But where mind—illuminated by Christ—governs matter, creation becomes articulate again. The imago Dei speaks back to its Source.

The Reversal of Modern Materialism
Chesterton saw with prophetic clarity that modernity’s problem was not a lack of intelligence but a misdirection of it. So, when you begin with matter, you end with madness. And if the mind is merely an aftershock of molecular events, then reason itself becomes unreasonable—a self-negating echo. But for a thought to be true, there must first be something truer than thought; some rational source not produced by the chemistry of brains but mirrored by it. To assert that the cosmos is rational, Chesterton—and C.S. Lewis—suggested, is already to smuggle in a cosmic Reasoner.

Ironically, modern materialism collapses under the weight of its own arithmetic.

It tries to divide love by physics, meaning by mass, and justice by chance—and finds the quotient zero. Materialism therefore finds only a nothingness—nihilism. Try dividing beauty by velocity; this is the common absurdity of reductive analysis. Relatedly, when matter is made the numerator of reality, everything higher becomes reducible to the lower: beauty becomes biology, thought becomes neuron, spirit becomes cellular secretion. The world becomes, in Chesterton’s phrase, “a heap of broken images,” admirable perhaps for its complexity but emptied of a living syntax.

Christian orthodoxy reverses that equation, and thereby reverses a universe empty of meaning. It begins not with what is inert, but with what is intentional. It asserts, with both boldness and childlike sanity, that Mind precedes matter—that Word (Logos) is not a poetic abstraction but a living Person.

In this reversal, the entire cosmos regains proportion. It regains ratio. The equation M = f(ΨG) is not mysticism in disguise; it is reason restored to its supernatural foundation. To say that matter is a function of the Divine Mind is to say that everything which exists is intelligible because it has first been intended.

And from that foundation, even human action regains its coherence. Knowing and willing—the image of God impressed upon the soul—are not random emergences but rightful reflections. We do not invent ultimate meaning; we participate in it. We do not create the equation; we are invited to solve it.

As Psalm 8 teaches us to re-remember: we did not make the heavens; we did not map the stars; we did not set the moon in its place… and yet we are placed within that “equation”—given a role, given dominion, given mind and will to participate in his ordering grace. Psalm 19 reinforces this understanding; indeed, Psalm 19 is all equations in this reflection, set as Spirit-breathed song.

Thus, when mind is placed over matter, reason is reconciled with reverence, and the world once again makes sense. This is not anti-science. It is placing science in its rightful place, as vocation in view of a loving God, and in service to creation and to others.

Chesterton’s Paradox as Ratio
Chesterton loved paradox because he saw in it the shape of sanity. Truth, for him, was a proportion held between apparent opposites. He said in Orthodoxy, “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” That is the logic not of contradiction but of ratio: the art of holding two realities in right relation without collapsing either one. It is Hegel held at bay. Hegel seeks synthesis; orthodoxy keeps proportioned paradox.

Our two prior equations give mathematical form to that instinct. In the first,

M = f(ΨG),

the “denominator” of being is divine. Not a literal, mathematical denominator, but a conceptual denominator as a basis and underlying value. The divine foundation upon which all things rest—the Mind of God, made known through the Word (Logos).

In the second equation,

(K + W) = χ · (Ψ / M)

the human mind (Ψ) becomes the numerator lifted by grace (χ) above the matter it stewards. In Chesterton’s words, we have the “mad geometry of orthodoxy.” Because every paradox is really a ratio of eternity: humility over greatness, divinity over dust, life over death.

This brings us to the Gospel itself. The Gospel is the one “equation” in which division becomes multiplication.

Paradox, as Chesterton helps us understand, is not the failure of reason but its fulfillment. A world created by ratio must be understood by ratio, and the Cross itself becomes the great axis of proportion—the intersection where height meets depth, heaven meets earth, justice meets mercy, Law meets Gospel. At that junction the variables of knowing and willing find equilibrium, only because the constant χ—Christ—holds the ratio together. Without that constant, mind and matter fall out of proportion: intellect turns cold, will turns cruel. With it, they harmonize like numerator and denominator in a divine simplification.

In the same manner as this reflection, Chesterton’s imagination was mathematical in the oldest sense: he sought measure within mystery. To him, the confession of Christian creed was not a prison of propositions but a formula of freedom, keeping the universe from toppling into absurdity. “It is easy to be mad,” he wrote; “it is easy to be a heretic.” It is difficult to balance truths.

Yet that difficulty is the proof of coherence—and the reason why the orthogonal symbol of the Cross is the perfect geometry of grace. In everyday usage, coherence means little more than the absence of contradiction, the way various parts of a system happen to fit without conflict. But in Christic language, coherence is not merely compatibility; it is unity—the foundational harmony held together by the Word (Logos). It is coherence rooted not in the parts, but in the person.

This is the ontological harmony provided by the Christ Constant. Christ is the means by which all things are held together in the Word.

The Christ Constant
Chesterton saw that every true proportion requires a constant—some unchanging value that keeps the equation of reality from collapsing. The materialist and postmodernist cannot find one. Their universe expands but never resolves, or resolves but never expands; their values drift like decimals without a common denominator. The Christian, by contrast, confesses a constant not of quantity but of Personhood.

The Word (Logos) who spoke the world into being also incarnationally entered it to hold its ratios together. “He upholds the universe by the word of his power,” says the epistle to the Hebrews (Heb. 1:3); or in our symbolic shorthand,

χ = Logos

χ is the Christ Constant. Christ—both the Logos who creates and God’s incarnate grace who restores—is the invariant through which all variables cohere. In him, the division between mind and matter is reconciled without confusion, joined by grace. He is the common factor through whom the universe can be both rational and radiant, both ordered and alive. The one who restores our relationship with God, the one who holds the cosmos in ratio, and the one who enables the imago Dei to know and will rightly.

When Chesterton writes in The Everlasting Man that “the heart of humanity is older than its body,” he gestures toward this same mystery: that the cosmic equation is intelligible because its constant is love. Indeed—to link to a popular film—this insight undergirds Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar: love precedes the material and animates it. Here, love, in divine form, does not abolish matter; it perfects it. The Incarnation is therefore not an anomaly but the solution—the point at which the infinite and the finite balance into beauty. Mathematically speaking, we might say that every act of creation satisfies:

M = f(ΨG).

The Word (Logos) is the functional means (f as functional mapping)—the creative mapping by which the Divine Mind gives form to being. God, through the Word, speaks and things come to be.

And every act of redemption fulfills:

(K + W) = χ · (Ψ / M)

Here χ is the Christ Constant—the ratio of mercy and grace that restores proportion to a disordered world. Christ is both

·       the Logos who brings creation into being, and

·       the χ who brings creation back into harmony.

One person in two expressions of divine action: one functional, one proportional; one creative, one redemptive. To believe this, Chesterton insists, is not to retreat from reason but to restore it. For only a cosmos sustained by a constant can be called coherent; only a creation ordered by personal Mind can be called good. In the language of the Nicene Creed: “by whom all things were made,” and (Col. 1:16) “all things were created through him and for him”—the equation and the equilibrium alike.

Romance of the Ratio
For Chesterton, Christianity was not a theorem to be solved but a song whose harmony could be trusted. The miracle of Christian orthodoxy, he wrote Orthodoxy, is that it “has kept itself larger than the world, yet as fit for the world as the world itself.” That is precisely what every true equation does: it balances the finite within the infinite. The world is stable not because it is static, but because it is proportioned.

To confess that mind precedes matter, righted by the “Christ Constant”, is to re-enter that proportioned world. It is to see, as Chesterton did, that the cosmos is not a closed system but an open sentence—a phrase still spoken by its Author. In such a universe, reason and wonder are no longer enemies but coordinates, conjoined in the Cross. Knowing and willing, intellect and love, are brought into right ratio through the Christ Constant. Even our limitations become part of the equation’s beauty: the mind stretched toward the infinite, the will humbled by grace.

The Christian story, then, can be read as the romance of ratio. The divine Mind (ΨG) speaks, and matter (M) answers. The constant of grace (χ) holds, and the sum of creation coheres. And amid the great algebra of being, the Cross remains the central symbol: two lines intersecting in love, the ultimate balance of opposites—heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, God and man—kept forever in proportion by the Word (Logos) who became flesh.

The world is not an accident to be endured but a creation to be cherished and set right in Christ.

A Church Called Vav and Nun
Grace in the Gap, Resurrection in the Missing Line

As explored in the video, Grace in the Gap, a few Psalms are built like alphabets in motion—acrostics whose verses follow the Hebrew letters from Aleph to Tav. Like a spine of prayer, these psalms unfold with intention, their form echoing fullness.

But in several of them, a letter—and the verse it should carry—is missing. Most often it is Vav (ו)—a simple, connective letter often meaning “and.” Elsewhere, in Psalm 145, the letter Nun (נ) is absent—its poetic crown left blank.

And yet—the psalms still hold. The songs continue. The structure stutters, but the Spirit sings through the silence.

This is more than a literary quirk. It is a theological doorway.

If Tov is Goodness, Vav and Nun is Grace Through Fracture

We deeply value the vision behind A Church Called Tov—Scot McKnight’s call to cultivate goodness, empathy, and justice within Christian communities.

A Church Called Vav and Nun is not an alternative, but a companion vision: a church that names the absence, inhabits the fracture, and lets the Spirit fill what we cannot.

It’s a church for those living between “Lead me” and “Remember me,” for those who know the pain of missing words, missing justice, missing wholeness—and yet believe that grace holds anyway.

The Astonishing Restoration of Nun
In Psalm 145, the Nun verse was long missing. But in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it appears—a verse once lost, now restored:
“The LORD is faithful in all His words, and kind in all His works.”

And what follows?

“The LORD upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down.”

Nun, once a symbol of descent, becomes the signpost of resurrection. The lost verse becomes the hinge of restoration. The structure sings again—not through perfection, but through the Spirit’s return. This is no mere textual recovery. It is theological fire.

The Christ-shaped surprise at the heart of Scripture.

A Church of the Missing Verse
A Church Called Vav and Nun:

• Makes space for what’s unresolved.

• Listens for the silence between the lines.

• Refuses to hide the fracture or fabricate closure.

• Believes that Christ Himself is the Waw—the divine “And”—and that through Him, even the Nun will rise.

This section is only a beginning.
A whisper, not a promise.
A seed in the seam.

But even now, we believe:
The broken alphabet is not the end.
The psalm holds.
The Spirit breathes.
Christ fills the silence.
And from every missing verse,
new music will rise.

Stand Firm in the Word: Leadership In and Through Christ

“Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” — 1 Corinthians 15:58 (ESV)

“For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” — 2 Timothy 1:7 (ESV)

“Be strong, and let your heart take courage, all you who wait for the Lord!” — Psalm 31:24 (ESV)

Vision
Christians who continually nurture communities in Christ.

Goal
To be leaders in Christ—for our families, vocations, and communities—with a faith, hope, and love centered on Christ as revealed in Scripture and strengthened by like-minded Christians. Without pretension, to understand that Christ may write new parables through us for others.

Introduction
This reflection explores what it means to stand firm in the Word, cultivating leadership that is forged in Christ, formed by Scripture, and faithfully lived out through the Spirit. Leadership in Christ is not about titles or hierarchical authority but about a lifelong journey of nurture, ministry, and service. When we nurture communities in Christ, we minister; when we minister, we lead. And yet, it is always Christ who leads us.

The spiritual life requires courage, honesty, and humility. It also requires a deep and continuous return to the Word. Leadership in Christ unfolds not through domination, but through discipleship; not through control, but through confession; not through personal advancement, but through personal surrender. Therefore, leadership in Christ will often look unconventional—even paradoxical—defying typical markers of power or success.

Another essay, A Church Called Vav and Nun, explores how certain psalms, built as Hebrew acrostics, leave key letters—and their verses—missing. These structural absences, especially of the letters Vav (ו) and Nun (נ), become a theological metaphor: a sacred space where fracture is not failure, but invitation. In that vision, Christ Himself is the divine “And”—the Vav—who stands in the silence and fills what we cannot. It’s a vision of grace within brokenness, and of resurrection emerging from the missing line.

This present reflection does not fully develop that ecclesial image, but it is shaped by the same spirit. For even in leadership, we are not asked to be whole by our own strength. We are asked to be faithful—to trust that Christ fills the gaps, and that the Spirit leads even when the structure stutters. In this way, to lead in Christ is also to listen for the silence between the lines, and to believe that new music will rise.

We are invited to ask:

• Does this leadership increase mutual faith in Christ?

• Does it increase love of God and neighbor?

• Does it foster forgiveness, patience, and peace?

• Does it allow others to thrive as Christians in their families, vocations, and communities?

Let us, then, build ourselves into successful—and even unconventional—leaders, as we heed the encouragement from Hebrews: "And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near." (Hebrews 10:24–25, ESV)

A Communal Prayer
Jesus Christ is enough.
Let us continue to feed our own faith and the faith of others.
Let us understand it is not we who lead, but Christ.
In all levels of leading, in the future and now, let us boast only of Christ, and of His finished work, and of our salvation through Christ.
Let the Spirit teach us to lead ourselves and lead among others with a believing heart, and with continual forgiveness—
as we nurture the Spirit in others, abiding in Christ, into the Father’s embrace.

Leadership as Christ-Led Formation
Leadership in Christ depends upon a growth of personal characteristics—self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. These mirror both the fruits of the Spirit and the structure of emotional intelligence. But even these traits are not ends in themselves. They are signs of formation—formation by Christ, through Christ, and for the glory of God.

Indeed, Christ is not merely a model leader. He is the source and goal of all faithful leadership. He is the peace that transcends understanding (Phil. 4:7), the joy that is inexpressible (1 Peter 1:8), the love that surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:19). When we lead in Christ, our leadership reflects His life, death, and resurrection—and finds its root in His Spirit and its fruit in His Church.

Leadership in Christ often manifests through ordinary faithfulness. It may not be immediately visible or publicly acknowledged. It may not follow traditional patterns of influence. And yet, it can transform hearts, homes, and communities.

A Christ-Centered Reading of Scripture
Scripture must always be read through the lens of Christ. As Jesus taught, "You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me." (John 5:39, ESV)

From the first chapters of Genesis to the final vision of Revelation, Christ is the thread that weaves all of Scripture into a unified, redemptive story. He is the Word through whom all things were made (John 1:1–3), the promised seed who will crush the serpent (Gen. 3:15), and the wisdom by whom the cosmos was ordered (Prov. 8:22–31). He is both the suffering servant and the victorious King.

When we engage the Old Testament, we are not simply uncovering moral examples or disconnected fables. We are seeking Christ. We are asking:

• How does this passage point to Jesus?

• How does it deepen our understanding of the gospel?

• How does it invite us to abide more fully in Him?

This Christotelic approach—an understanding that all Scripture finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ—shapes our theological vision, nurtures our spiritual imagination, and forms the basis of all true Christian leadership.

Apologetics: With Gentleness and Reverence
Apologetics—the defense and articulation of Christian faith—must begin in the heart, as further described in the video, A Defense in the Wilderness. As Peter writes, "I…but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy..." (1 Peter 3:15). This inward reverence is the foundation for any outward explanation. It reminds us that before we can speak to others about Christ, we must first be continually reoriented toward Him ourselves.

Apologetics, when misused, can become combative or prideful. But faithful apologetics protects and nourishes faith—ours and others'—by pointing always to Christ, not to our own understanding. It encourages us to defend our faith not merely against external challenges, but also against the subtle doubts and temptations within our own hearts. Our witness must be marked by gentleness and respect, never as a weapon but always as an invitation.

Christ’s own defense against Satan in the wilderness was not with argument but with Scripture. Likewise, our defense is rooted not in cleverness, but in the Word. In our vocations, friendships, and communities, apologetics becomes a form of nurture and service—another way to lead in Christ.

The Measure of Leadership
Leadership in Christ does not measure success by visible achievement. Rather, it asks whether our actions—no matter how small—help others trust Christ more deeply, love God more wholly, and live more fruitfully. Even the smallest act of forgiveness or encouragement may echo eternally in the Spirit’s work.

We should always return to the core questions:

• Does this increase love of neighbor?

• Does this reflect Christ’s mercy and truth?

• Does it encourage someone to rest more deeply in the gospel?

Even when we stumble, even when we are uncertain, Christ abides. Leadership in Christ is not about having all the answers. It is about pointing to the One who does.

Continuing the Journey
This reflection is not an endpoint. It is a beginning—a call to abide more deeply in Scripture, to nurture others in Christ, and to lead in ways both humble and holy.

As you move forward in your faith, ask:

• How is Christ calling me to lead today?

• What might faithful leadership look like in this season?

• How can I stand firm in the Word, even amid the ordinary rhythms of life?

May we boast not in ourselves, but in the cross of Christ. May we nurture communities not through control, but through compassion. And may we lead not by striving for greatness, but by resting in grace.

Christ is still opening ways beyond the expected.

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.
For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
— Matthew 7:13–14, ESV

“So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.”
— Hebrews 13:12, ESV

“The sun also rises, and the sun goes down…”
— Ecclesiastes 1:5, ESV

Introduction
There are many today—quiet believers, hesitant seekers, faithful servants—who find themselves outside the familiar gates of Christian institutions and movements. Not for lack of faith. Not for lack of longing. But because the path they walk is not one paved, lit, or clearly marked by others.

This reflection is for them.

It is not a protest. It is not a call to abandon the church—indeed, we greatly support local church life as essential to a healthy community—or withdraw into private truth. It is a quiet affirmation: the gate may be narrow, but it also rises. In unexpected ways.

We begin with the words of Jesus in Matthew 7. The way to life is not wide or obvious. It rarely aligns with what is popular, or powerfully endorsed. But Scripture doesn’t say there is only one institutional gate. It says there is a narrow one—and many miss it. And while Christ is the gate (John 10:9), we are often poor at recognizing the real entrance. We fixate on signs and signatures. We trust credentials and categories. We assume that visibility equals validity.

And yet, Scripture tells another story. It tells of a Messiah who was dismissed by experts. Of prophets scorned in their hometowns. Of the Son of God crucified—outside the gate.

In our time, there is a flourishing marketplace of Christian voices. Books, conferences, podcasts, platforms—many of them sincere, and often helpful. But none of them are the gate. And when they begin to act as though they are—curating not just ideas but access—we lose something essential.

Because the gate is not a personality.
It is not a publisher.
It is not a platform.
The gate is Christ.

And Christ is not bound by institutional lanes or human-lit paths. He appears in deserts. He walks with the wounded. He meets us on unmarked roads, breaks bread, and vanishes just as we recognize Him.

He didn’t write books.
He didn’t wear credentials.
He didn’t win awards.
He is the gate.
And we are to live by His lee, not line it with billboards.

Edges in the Pathway
“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound,
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.
So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
— John 3:8, ESV

Not every path winds through institutions.
And not every faithful witness comes with recognition.

The pattern throughout Scripture is unmistakable:
some of the most profound movements of God begin at the edges.

They rise from wildernesses and caves, from unpolished voices and overlooked towns. Not because God favors obscurity, but because His Spirit moves freely—and often beyond the structures we build to contain it.

• Moses, in exile.

• David, singing in caves.

• Hagar, seen in the desert.

• Ruth, gleaning in foreign fields.

• Jeremiah, ridiculed and rejected.

• Mary, misunderstood and magnified.

• Paul, doubted by both outsiders and insiders.

• And Christ Himself—dismissed as “the village carpenter’s son,” and ultimately crucified outside the gate.

Scripture does not romanticize marginalization. But it does reveal that the center of God’s movement is often found at the margins of human expectation.

The narrow way, the true gate—it may not be where we were told to look.

And while many human structures act as if they control access, they do not.

Gatekeeping and Grace
To be clear: gatekeeping is not inherently wrong. There is wisdom in discernment. It is good for pastors to guard sound doctrine. It is good for elders, editors, and teachers to test what is said, to weigh it against Scripture, and to preserve what is true.

But when discernment hardens into dismissal—
when intelligence combined with humility is ignored simply because it arises from outside a known circle, outside a clique—
when the instinct to protect turns into a reflex to exclude—
then something shifts.

It is no longer stewardship. It becomes insulation.
It is no longer care. It becomes control.

And that is not the way of Christ.

Jesus never mistook visibility for validity.
He spoke truth in synagogues and from fishing boats.
He taught in temples and on hillsides.
He dined with religious leaders and with those they called sinners.

And when He died, He did so outside the gate—where the unclean were sent, where the condemned were cast off.
And it was there that He sanctified the people through His own blood.

If the Church is the Body of Christ, then it must move as He did:
with arms open, not folded.
with a posture of listening, not filtering.
with the humility to say: “God may be working here, too—beyond what I see.”

From Gatekeeping to Gardening
The solution is something quieter—and far more faithful.

It is gardening.

Rather than fighting for space at the gates others have built, we take up the trowel and begin to plant.

• We plant where the Spirit leads.

• We water ideas born of prayer, study, silence, and song.

• We tend to the life in front of us—with both patience and trust.

• And we sing what the Psalms and prophets call a new song—
  not for novelty’s sake,
  but as an echo of something eternal breaking through.

This is not rebellion. It is renewal.
It is not rejection of the past. It is its fulfillment.
True faithfulness does not always walk the center aisle. Sometimes it grows along the edge of the field—fruitful, fragrant, unnoticed by many, but seen by the One who planted the first garden.

The good news is this:
The narrow gate is not hidden in the hierarchy.
The Spirit still moves—over quiet soil, in unguarded voices, among those willing to remain rooted, even when unrecognized.

A Word to the Seeker at the Edge
If you find yourself outside the gates—
of institutions, of the paths others affirm—
hear this:

You are not lost.
You are not disqualified.
And you are not alone.

The Kingdom of God is not built on platforms or proximity to power.
It is not accessed through academic credentials, bestselling books, or curated networks.
It begins—always—with Christ.
And Christ is not bound by what others have built.

The Spirit blows where it will.
The Servant walks outside the camp.
And the gate, though narrow, rises where He stands.

So keep walking.
Keep praying.
Keep tending the soil entrusted to you.
And if you must sing, let it be a new song—one that is still true.

“Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise from the end of the earth!”
— Isaiah 42:10, ESV

This new song is not reserved for those at the center.
It rises from coastlands, deserts, and distant places.
It is the response to the Servant who brings justice with gentleness and covenant through mercy.
It is sung not by those who presume to own the gate,
but by those who have found it—rising elsewhere.

Let them sing.

Let you sing.

And let the Church listen.

Because even if you’ve been shut out of the familiar gates,
the Gate also rises elsewhere.
And like the sun in Ecclesiastes, it rises again.

It rises quietly.
It rises persistently.
And it rises true.

https://youtu.be/gC9GmnNukLk

https://youtu.be/8jo9-L2xeFk

https://youtu.be/UjPR7mup8wA

https://youtu.be/pY5-jgDTXqY

https://youtu.be/-YGdOvyaT08

https://youtu.be/vLYIN5RNiu4

https://youtu.be/v_SUzZxSMtM

https://youtu.be/y8J6LS6kL0g

https://youtu.be/gBm_AdSeV5w

https://youtu.be/6jOBIrd2Nz0

https://youtu.be/RbSel82oF_U

https://youtu.be/2jjBoRhnhb0

https://youtu.be/qhLfS26JXkM

https://youtu.be/j2gYzTLN71I

This is where The Fisher of Courts begins:

https://youtu.be/iEP6A3feqsg

This short film tells the story of a forgotten relic: the Wilson Sledgehammer 2.8 Stretch — a racket born in the age of aces, designed to serve up unanswerable power.

But the Slammer, once a symbol of domination, now finds itself at a crossroads — repurposed in a game that has shifted:
from violence to rally,
from bluntness to conversation,
from monologue to improvisational grace.

It is a perfect emblem of transition — not only in tennis, but in the deeper rhythm of the Christotelic arc:
where the law gives way to the Gospel,
where zeal gives way to mercy,
and where righteousness, rebuked, is reshaped in love.

Told through motion, scripture, and restraint, this parable serves as the threshold piece for The Fisher of Courts.

A gospel in motion.
Filtered through tennis.
And shaped by the quiet grace that meets us — sometimes — at the baseline.

There’s a group of men who gather at the courts in the early evening.
Sometimes a dozen or more.
Not a league. Not a tournament. Just a loose federation of the willing—playing doubles, even triples, laughing, cheering each other.

Some are strong players.
Some can barely hold a rally.
But all are playing. All are known to each other. All were invited by each other.

And one evening, they emptied a court for my family —
without being asked.
They made space.

That small gesture lingered.

Because if we’re honest, inclusion doesn’t always come easily.
Even with family.
Especially with friends.
We calculate:
Who’s easy to have around?
Who might slow things down?
Who feels awkward to invite?

But Jesus doesn’t calculate like we do.
He says:
“But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind.”
(Luke 14:13, ESV)

Not for the return — but for the reflection of God’s welcome.

And Paul, interpreting the mind of Christ, tells the church in Rome:
“Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”
(Romans 15:7, ESV)

It’s not always simple.
But when in doubt — include.
When unsure — make space.
Not just for fairness.
But for joy. For witness.

For the Kingdom is heard in the soft clatter of a triple match,
and in the awkward but holy love of opening the court a little wider.

A Reflection on Restraint, Discernment, and the Wisdom of Staying Put

There is a strange pressure in our age — not to be still, but to optimize.
To switch rackets. Change strings. Add lead tape. Try something new.
To revise what already works, simply because we could.

But some of the wisest players resist this.

Carlos Alcaraz — arguably one of the greatest players of this era —
uses an unmodified, off-the-shelf racket.
No custom specs. No fancy retooling.
Just a tool he trusts… and learns from, day after day.

In tennis — and in life — the barrage of options can be paralyzing.
Not just in gear, but in daily choices:
Which path? Which priority? Which pursuit?

As Jesus said,
“Let what you say be simply ‘Yes’ or ‘No’; anything more than this comes from evil.”
(Matthew 5:37, ESV)

But clarity isn’t always immediate.
We walk through paradox.
Grace doesn’t always feel like freedom at first.
Sometimes discernment means waiting —
not because we are passive,
but because God’s purposes are revealed slowly, faithfully, and often beyond the surface of things.

Jesus came not to uproot the old, but to fulfill it —
not to abolish the Law, but to draw it toward its telos in Himself.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets;
I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”
(Matthew 5:17, ESV)

This fulfillment is not a tightening of demands,
but a transfiguration of them —
Law through the lens of Gospel,
judgment giving way to mercy,
burden giving way to promise.

As Paul writes:
“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”
(Galatians 5:1, ESV)

A Lutheran sees this clearly:
The Christian is at once totally free and bound in love.
We are not justified by decisions, but by Christ.
And yet, in freedom, we are called to discern with care —
to resist the compulsion to change for its own sake.
To trust what we’ve been given.
To deepen, not diversify for its own sake.
To be still in grace, even when the world calls for motion.

And when Jesus critiques the restless dissatisfaction of His generation, He says — in imitation of the foolishness of the age:
“We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.”
(Luke 7:32, ESV)

Just because someone demands movement doesn’t mean it’s the Spirit’s cue.

And when the crowd still doesn’t understand, Jesus reminds them:
“Yet wisdom is justified by all her children.”
(Luke 7:35, ESV)

Even the fruit of discernment can take time to grow.
Even the right “no” might feel uncertain at first.

So when the disciples, caught in the urgency of the moment, tell Jesus to send the people away,
He answers with unexpected stillness:
“They need not go away; you give them something to eat.”
(Matthew 14:16, ESV)

There it is again:
Not everything of the moment must be included.
Not every option is a required invitation.
Sometimes the path of wisdom is narrow.
Sometimes the freedom of the Gospel looks like restraint, not reactivity.

In a world that spins and markets and updates and admonishes —
sometimes Christ invites us to stay rooted.
To return to the familiar tool.
To receive what’s already in our hands.
To trust the paradox that standing firm is itself movement under grace.

And so, I swing the same racket I acquired —
given gracefully by my mother when I was sixteen.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
— Ecclesiastes 3:1, ESV

Not every tool is for every moment. Even a cherished instrument can betray us if summoned out of season.

This week, I stood behind the baseline, hand wrapped around the Wilson Staff 6.5 Si—the Ancestral Sage, as I call it. Given to me in 1990, it has weight, memory, and a stern kind of honesty. On the right day, my one-handed backhand sings from it—fluid and full-bodied. But not this day. My timing was off. Every backhand missed the mark, each swing a wooden thud.

And I realized: the instrument hadn’t changed—I had. And in that moment, what I needed wasn’t discipline, but mercy. I needed The Cushion—my Volkl V-Sense 4. That forgiving frame, light and dampened, would have caught me. It wouldn’t correct me, but it would hold space for grace until rhythm returned.

I’ve come to see my racket rotation not just as gear, but as a kind of parable. Each frame carries a distinct spirit. And choosing which to wield becomes an act of discernment—of listening to the season, the task, the body, the spirit.

The Lore of the Frames
The Sculptor – Wilson Pro Staff 97 v14. The primary. Precision and discipline.

The Cushion – Volkl V-Sense 4. The fallback. Comfort and forgiveness.

The Cannon – Wilson Hyper Hammer 5.2. The blaster. Lightweight power. For when energy wanes but purpose remains.

The Ancestral Sage – Wilson Staff 6.5 Si. The teacher. Demanding and full of memory. It rewards presence and punishes haste.

“We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works,
which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
— Ephesians 2:10, ESV

God works through means. Christ healed with mud, with touch, with words. Paul wrote with parchment and pen, walked by foot, and relied on the hospitality of strangers. The instruments of vocation are not random—they are given, selected, chosen for a time.

Whether it’s tennis or calling, the question is not always “Which is best?”
But rather: “Which fits this moment, this task, this season?”

That is the discernment.
And discernment is never wasted.

“Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
— Philippians 2:4, ESV

There’s something gentle about a public tennis court.

The spaces are adjacent but not overlapping—four, or so, courts laid out in a grid of invisible boundaries. On each, a different story unfolds: a father and daughter sharing quiet joy; two retirees slicing soft volleys back and forth; a pair of teenagers hammering forehands like they’re playing for the French Open. And yet, across all this difference, there’s a common thread: a quiet curiosity, a shared decency, a kind of unspoken communion.

No one is watching each other, and yet everyone is aware.

A glance across the court isn’t competition—it’s acknowledgment. It’s the subtle, unspoken message: I see you. I’m here too. There is no striving against. No territorial resentment. Unlike sports where one group’s success intrudes upon another’s space, here the games unfold in parallel grace—not identical, but not antagonistic. Each court its own small kingdom. Each player a neighbor in rhythm.

And when a stray ball wanders across the lines—a humble intruder—it is not met with scorn, but with friendliness. A call of “yours” or “got it!” A quick toss back. A smile. The kind of moment where grace takes the form of an easy return.

There’s a generosity here, born not of effort but of posture. It’s not a cultivated virtue—it’s simply how things are when people share space with goodwill. The best players don’t dominate the atmosphere—they honor it. Even in their focus, they remain aware. This, too, is a kind of love: awareness without intrusion, confidence without comparison.

I find myself returning to these courts not just to play, but to witness. To observe how, in this unassuming grid of lines and nets, a model of neighbor-love unfolds. Not loudly. Not doctrinally. But truly.

And I wonder: what if the Church sometimes looked more like this?
Not a field of hierarchies or contests, or denominations, but a rhythm of adjacent courts—each player present in their game, aware of others, welcoming the occasional bounce that crosses the line.

“Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life… to work with your hands… so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders…”
— 1 Thessalonians 4:11–12, NIV

This is the witness of the public court:
That we can live side by side, not in rivalry, but in rhythm.
That difference need not mean division.
That a stray ball can be a gift.
That neighborliness is not flashy, but it is holy.

Even a ball can make disciples of us—pulling us along a psalmic-to-apostolic path.

“The ball doesn’t have feelings,” the coach says—a phrase meant to build intention,
to unstick the swing.
And there is wisdom in it.
Confidence sometimes begins in detachment from what we are working with—or, sometimes, from whom we’re working.

But vocation is not best built on detachment.
Ideally, it begins in wonder—
in the possibility that even the object before you has a part to play in the story of creation.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. —Ephesians 2:10, ESV

To pair this verse with Psalm 1 is to understand that, in God’s created order, we are not stuck, we are not pinned—rather, we reflect into true freedom. In all we do. Even a game of tennis, rule-bound but permissive of the infinite we see in the night sky of Psalm 19.

Let’s come back to the ball. While saying a ball has feelings is no more valid than the reverse, let’s look at it this way: even a ball has a purpose. Not a soul, but a telos.

So later, as I rallied with my daughter after her lesson, I offer her another way of seeing it: maybe the ball does have feelings. Or if not feelings, then at least a role to play—and our job is to help it fulfill that role.

Let’s rally this through Psalms 1, 19, and 90. Let’s let the ball pull a thread into the tapestry of the court of play—the court of vocation… or micro-vocation—the little activities that nevertheless serve, and can also be doxological: acts of praise to God.

Psalm 1
Psalm 1 does not begin with action but with posture.
The blessed one does not rush to win, but walks not in the counsel of the wicked.
He delights in the law of the Lord—
a law not of burden but of ordering,
a Torah that draws one into the deep structure of life.
Like a tree planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in season.

And so the swing becomes fruit-bearing.
The follow-through—from which the ball is sent by the centered pop of the racket—becomes a kind of rootedness.

Psalm 19
Psalm 19 opens the sky. The heavens declare the glory of God—without speech, without words, and yet nothing is hidden from their voice.

In that same joy, the tennis ball moves—intention incarnate—if struck in time, in form, with care. And we, too, rejoice in its movement. Not because it wins the point, but because it fulfills its design.

And the law, too, returns in Psalm 19, mid-poem:
The law of the Lord is perfect,
reviving the soul.
His precepts are right,
rejoicing the heart.

Here is doxological vocation:
to participate in the order that rejoices.
To help a thing move as it was meant to move.
Even a ball.
Even yourself.

Psalm 90
Psalm 90 speaks from the far side of strength: Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yes, establish the work of our hands.

For our time is fleeting, but not forgotten.
God’s favor is not in the magnitude of our labor,
but in its rootedness, its direction, its offering. Down the line, or cross-court.

Benediction
So let the court become a quiet liturgy.
Let the motion of your hand become the echo of the hand that formed you.

This is the mystery: not that the ball has feelings, or lacks feelings—but that in helping it fulfill its purpose, we are drawn into ours in and through Christ.

And so we play on the court of doxological vocation:

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace… in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. —1 Peter 4:10–11, ESV

There’s one tennis court my daughter and I sometimes play on that stands apart—not because the surface is different, but because it is fully enclosed. Four high fences, a gate latched shut.

A kind of nest. Or maybe a family-sized crib.

The sort of space where movement is both protected and echoed, where boundaries aren’t merely limits but walls that hold something tender.

Yesterday, that court was occupied by a couple and a presence beyond them. Not just the third adult, who would emerge later, but the child—tucked in the nearby car under someone’s careful care. The man had set up a ball machine—meticulously, methodically. I imagined him a lawyer, not by behavior but by bearing. Perhaps it was the precision. The refusal of improvisation. The choice of mechanical rhythm over the unpredictable dance of direct play.

His wife—perhaps an office manager, again just an intuition—stood across from the machine at first, then beside him. They didn’t rally. They received. Together, side by side, they struck balls in parallel, training their timing in quiet tandem. Every so often, he’d walk back to check on the baby and the caregiver in the car.

Presence across thresholds.

Eventually, a third woman, the caregiver, emerged—mid-to-late twenties, perhaps a sister or friend—and the baby was brought in, placed in the stroller. The court held them all then. The nest grew fuller.

The ball machine resumed.

It was the choreography that stayed with me. The subtle, familial unfolding of roles—caregiver, partner, companion, player—rotated not with announcement but with quiet accommodation. The baby was simultaneously at center and distanced—protected, but never forgotten. Fully present but protected. A parental breather, and yet never truly a breather. Love stretched itself across the court, adjusting constantly.

The court became a mirror of family life. The net not a divider but a gentle reminder of order. And the game—not a game at all, but a form of presence, of structured motion beneath the deeper stillness of care.

The way we play tennis often reflects the way we live: sometimes turned toward each other in play, sometimes standing side by side, receiving from the same source. That day, the ball machine replaced competition. And the sameness of its feed made space for something else—watchfulness, solidarity, grace.

I thought of Jesus' words over Jerusalem:
“How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings...” (Luke 13:34)

And of the Psalmist's assurance:
“God sets the lonely in families...” (Psalm 68:6)

Christ doesn’t only meet us in the spectacular. He enters the choreographies of our care—the borrowed courts, the plastic strollers, the unspoken handoffs, the small returns.

The enclosed court was not a retreat, but a sanctuary.

And love, that day, was both practiced and received.

It started with one boy. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Every time he won a point in the match, he’d loudly call out, “Come on!” or “Let’s go!” — or both together, in one sequence or another, reflecting his own variety of play.

At first, I thought it was odd. Maybe even a bit brash. Was he trying to needle his opponent? Draw attention? I glanced at the other parents… nothing. Not the faintest movement of a facial muscle. More odd. Had I stumbled into a French existentialist film?

Then, once the other boy began to rally back, I noticed something: he started doing it too. And before long, it wasn’t rivalry so much as rhythm — a way of putting a mark in the scorebook of the heart.

The parents and coach remained quietly courtside, almost somber, as if they were watching a match under library rules — or under the hard brow of Max von Sydow. No clapping, no cheers. Just the scrape of shoes, the thud of the ball, and these two young voices claiming their little victories.

It finally struck me: this wasn’t arrogance. It was survival. In the stillness of the court, they were finding a way to celebrate the moments that mattered.

The psalmist knew something of this:

May we shout for joy over your salvation, and in the name of our God set up our banners! May the Lord fulfill all your petitions! —Psalm 20:5, ESV

And again:

Be exalted, O Lord, in your strength! We will sing and praise your power. —Psalm 21:13, ESV

In both psalms, victory is celebrated — not as personal conquest, but as the work of God’s hand. The shout isn’t self-congratulation; it’s gratitude in motion.

That’s where the court and the kingdom meet. In the Christian life, we are called to meekness — but meekness isn’t silence in the face of grace. When God gives a victory, even a small one, it’s not pride to acknowledge it. It’s obedience. It’s joy.

As Paul writes:

But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. —1 Corinthians 15:57, ESV

So maybe on some days, standing firm in the Word looks like quiet faithfulness, steady and unseen. But on other days — maybe more days than we realize — it also sounds like a voice on the court, calling out, “Come on! Let’s go!”

Not to taunt, but to remind ourselves and each other: the point is won, the match is still going, and God’s hand is in it all.

In the summer of 1990, my mother asked me a simple question:
“What would you like to take up and do?”

I was sixteen. Recalling a handful of lessons my grandmother had arranged when I was around ten, I said, tennis.

We went to a local tennis shop. I had high expectations for a new activity, but no real expectations for, well… what to expect. We spoke with the salesperson—surely an Andre Agassi disciple—and he began orienting us to their inventory. At one point, he pointed out a racket in particular:

The Wilson Staff 6.5 Si.

A serious player’s racket—95-square-inch head, flexy, head-light, built for control and feel. Not the sort of frame you buy lightly. Not the sort of frame my mom could easily afford.

Agassi-haired tennis shop employee: “Now this one here, the Staff 6.5 Si—it’s a sort of hybrid! A transitional graphite frame with a slightly higher beam stiffness, blending control with emerging power needs, featuring Wilson’s PWS and a 95-square-inch head that maintains precision while giving you a touch more forgiveness for modern baseline play.”

Me: “Cool color.”

And it felt nice in my hand.

That day, my mother bought it for me—$120 in 1990 money, which was no small thing. It was a beautiful act of grace, love, and encouragement. That summer, it became my companion, my teacher, my way into the game. I had just moved back to Texas, caught in the simultaneous holding-pattern and freedom of summer. I didn’t yet know anyone, and so I found a nearby tennis court with a backboard. I spent hours each day refining a forehand and backhand technique that I still use today.

And now, decades later, I hold the racket again—with a fresh grip, new strings taut with microfilament, its voice fully restored. The pop off the strings is a thing of beauty: not sharp or hollow, but a deep, resonant thock that seems to dwell for a moment in the air just before the sound innervates… everything. It’s the sound and feel of the ball finding a home before it leaves again—a kind of elemental handshake between you, the frame, and creation itself.

When I grasp the frame, I feel as though I am shaking hands with that sixteen-year-old kid. The weight, the balance, the feel—none of it has changed. And in that continuity, I feel the gift my mother gave me all over again. Not just the frame, but the invitation, the belief, the quiet sacrifice.

It’s more than nostalgia. It’s the recognition that some gifts become part of who we are—so that when they are restored, we are restored a little too.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.”
— James 1:17

God works through means. Sometimes through people. Sometimes through objects. And sometimes, through both at once—in one sequence or another, the variety of match play mirroring the variety of the Christic life in God’s created order. Above all, it reflects how an ordinary thing, given at the right time, can carry the extraordinary weight of love.

This racket is the Ancestral Sage—not because it’s old, but because it has taught me over the years. It reminds me that the things given in grace can become instruments of grace themselves.

And that in Christ, what is given in love is never truly lost.