“I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God.”

~ Psalm 69:3 ~

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I don’t normally mind a blank page. It never seems daunting or menacing. To me, it seems to smile. To nod with humility as if to say, “The stage is yours. I trust you.” Yes, I’ve heard of writer’s block, but whether it’s a gift or something else altogether, I’ve always had something to say. As a child, it was a curse. As an adult, it’s the same.

We just talk too much. As a society. As Christians.

Some time back, a student sat in my office distraught. Visibly agitated. For over twenty minutes, the student poured his heart out with story after story attached to complaint after criticism. Which is fine. I actually don’t mind nor do I judge such a moment. We all need safe spaces where we can unleash, unfetter even the most vile thoughts with the full trust and belief it won’t be held against us. And in this moment, I was grateful. Honored, really, to be invited into this sacred space of bitterness and frustration.

A consistent theme, though, unfurled, “I just feel like God doesn’t care. It’s just, like, why won’t he talk back to me? Why won’t he at least answer me?”

I nodded my head, registering for at least the fourth time this specific complaint. To let them know I heard them but also, almost involuntarily, because I, too, know what it’s like to feel as if God isn’t listening. Just ignoring me regardless of how many words I might use to garner his response.

I haven’t cut my hair now in over three years. Not out of neglect, although I’m sure that’s what many assume. Typically when someone comments on my hair it falls under three H’s: Hippie, Homeless, or Heretic. It’s not often that someone asks why. Assumptions are typically enough to satisfy.

However, if you know me at all, I typically have reason or strategy for virtually everything I do. And quite often, it’s theological.

The last time I got my hair cut short was September 10, 2009. I remember the specific date because it was the day before I flew to Edinburgh, Scotland to start my Ph.D. And I remember what day I flew because, in my lifetime, the numbers 9/11 took on significant meaning, if not just simple terror. At least in regards to aviation.

I knew this would be my last short haircut for some time, because I knew I was stepping into a venture that was beyond me. Beyond my ability. Beyond my capacity. Beyond what I thought I could accomplish. At least on my own. And I wanted something to remind me of my reliance on God throughout the entire process.

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In Acts 18, Paul stood on the dock of Cenchrea about to set sail from Corinth after an extended stay. In verse 18, a strange detail is registered: “Before he sailed, he had his hair cut off.” Now, Paul isn’t the first one to get his hair cut in sacred Scripture. Job shaves his head in mourning (Job 1:20); Ezekiel does the same to embody divine judgment (Ezek. 5:1); Absalom does so once a year (2 Sam 14:26), foreshadowing his “hair-centric” demise (2 Sam 18:9-15); and Samson infamously loses his locks to Delilah’s razor (Judg 16:19). In each instance that a haircut is mentioned before Acts 18:18, tragedy is the context. Demise is sure to follow. Disobedience resonates with embarrassing clarity.

Yet for Paul, this haircut wasn’t connected to rebellion but “to a vow he had taken” (Acts 18:18b). Probably a modified Nazarite vow connected to his desire to preach in Ephesus. Or at least Asia Minor.

In Acts 16:6, the Holy Spirit prevented Paul “from preaching the word in the province of Asia.” When Paul, instead, tried to push north to Bithynia, “the Spirit of Jesus wouldn’t allow it” (16:17). Frustrated, Paul journeyed to Troas where God directed him to Macedonia in a dream (16:19).

Paul’s haircut happens about three years later in Acts 18. Standing on the dock to Cenchrea, the razor symbolized more than a mere haircut but the denouement of a vow. A vow embraced before God, in service to God, even if a plea for God to respond. To free Paul from his previous prohibitions, and to allow Paul to enter Asia Minor at long last.

With strands of hair peppering the dock, Acts 18:19 announces that Paul’s wait is finally at an end, “They arrived at Ephesus.”

It’s been three years since my last haircut. Three long years of praying. Pleading. Petitioning God to move. To act. To respond to a prayer that predated my last hair cut by at least another year or two.

Trust me: my hair-length is no fashion statement. First of all, I have no fashion sense, and second of all, the unwieldy length of my hair is hardly a “sight for sore eyes.” In fact, I find it plain annoying.

And yet, my hair is a daily reminder in my mirror that I am waiting. Sometimes more patiently than other times. Nevertheless, still waiting. Waiting for God to move. For God to answer a prayer I’ve been shrieking for over half a decade. After a while, though, I find that words clutter more than clarify; belabor more than bless; curse more than carve out an answer.

Sometimes, what our prayers need is less words. Less speaking. More blank pages.

As the student’s face turned red with anger toward God’s silence, words finally waned. Faded from the table between us. He looked up at me with tears in his eyes and with teeth clenched, “I just don’t know why he won’t talk back!”

I nodded. Re-tied my hair. And with a whisper to match his own, I asked, “When you pray, how often do you sit in silence?”

He shook is head. Maybe in confusion or maybe as an honest “No.”

“Why I ask,” I steadied, “is because sometimes I wonder, even in my own prayer life, if the reason we can’t hear God speak is because he can’t get a word in edgewise.”

I paused. Allowing silence to settle the Spirit within us. After more than a moment, he lowered his head as if in defeat. Or maybe just disappointment. So I continued.

“I’ve been praying to God for something almost five years. About two years in, though, I decided I’d had enough with words. He knew what I wanted. He could probably recite my complaints and pleas for me.”

He reengaged me with his eyes, albeit a bit squinted as if trying to see my point just beyond his blurry vision.

“So,” I revealed, “I decided to take a modified Nazarite vow, allowing the length of my hair to speak on my behalf. To register my prayers for me. And for the last three years, he hasn’t responded to the blank page I put before him.”

You can always feel when the air leaves a room. But it’s not always clear why. Maybe fear. Maybe relief. Maybe a loss of hope altogether. But when air leaves the room, how you respond matters most.

“Listen,” I reached across the table, “silence isn’t the absence of an answer. If you know him, if you trust him, silence can be a gift. A pledge that he’s responding to my words just not with words. With action. Action that may be subtle to detect. But action that can change the course of history.”

In Acts 16:10, right after Paul’s dream of a Macedonian man and shortly after the Spirit and Christ’s joint rejection of Paul’s missionary vision, there’s a shift in the text. Almost indiscernible. For many, undetectable. Yet a shift so essential the entire book of Acts depends on it. “After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.”

In the forgotten city of Troas, a destination only graced due to frustrated plans and unanswered prayers, Paul met a doctor named Luke who not only became a companion in his gospel journey but a man who put pen to paper to unveil how God birthed his church through the movements of the Spirit who at times flickered with tongues of fire and at others simply offered silence.

Blank pages offer God room to speak. Silence invites God to move not at our direction but something more like the wind. An ebb and flow that doesn’t ask permission but still orchestrates clouds and rain to meet the needs of a creation drowning in thirst. Droplets to remind that God’s faithfulness is undefeated. His provision resilient even in the face of our complaints. His patience as merciful and majestic as the satisfaction felt when the razor slashes hair that’s grown for three long years.

No words needed. Just the subtle shift from they to we will suffice. And in the end, such a shift will provide an answer far more powerful than I was complaining for to begin with.

If he can just get a word in edgewise.

“…the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’”

~ Romans 8:15b ~

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I felt like I failed as a father. I know he didn’t mean it, but when my son said it, I crumbled.

We’d been dealing with an issue for about two hours that night. This doesn’t happen hardly at all anymore, but for a time, a couple of times a week, my youngest would spiral into a web of survival and self-preservation, transforming those he loves into a threat.

Adoption is a humbling process. Regardless of parenting practice or how often you display your love in both word and deed, there’s a wall that, at times, feels impenetrable.

Most of us don’t remember our first breath or our first touch or our first tears. And yet, so much of our identity is formed in this first few moments after we emerge from the womb. My youngest was taken by nurses from his biological mother’s womb and put straight into a tube to counteract the fluid in his lungs. Sure, that’s somewhat primitive in the Western world, but he was born into something more akin to poverty. His extreme athleticism today would suggest his lungs were unharmed, but it’s the wounds to the heart and the soul that concern me most.

After a day or two in the tube, he was first held by his foster mom. His biological mom had returned home without her newborn son, just as her father had instructed her to do. Somehow, in the mystery of memories undetectable by the conscious mind, my son was first imprinted by loss. Not love.

The loss of the heartbeat he heard for nine moths just above his head. The loss of the flesh from whence he came and to which he longs to return. The loss of living with a biological mother he dreams about to this day that never was fully realized.

Loss haunts all of us. Overlooking our age or maturity, our theology or preparedness. Over the last seven months, my family has lost five people close to us. An aunt, two grandparents, a step-mother, and a thirty-nine-year-old best friend. The last four spaced out perfectly so we could say, “This year we’ve lost someone we’ve loved every single month.”

This month my wife was unceremoniously fired from her job at our home church. A loss that feels like the fifth death in as many months.

I’m still recovering from the loss of my best friend. Not even two days ago, my wife and I were driving toward a stop sign discussing how we were going to lead our family through another round of church hurt, when out of nowhere, tears welled up and like a reflex I whispered, “I miss Justin.”

Yes, healing takes time. Sure, grief is a process. Without question, we’ve made progress as a family and as individuals. And yet there’s something about loss that lodges in our flesh, melding with our melanin, surfacing with rapidity and without warning because it simply isn’t far beneath the skin. Surfacing with such a force that it can send you spiraling into survival and self-preservation for hours on end.

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I don’t remember what sparked the loss in my son’s heart that night, but I remember how it ended. He moved in and out of shouting fits, covering his head, saying he’s sorry, and crying through deep repentance. He has such an amazing heart. He loves so fiercely, in fact, that at times I’ve said, “This kid is either gonna to save the entire world or burn it to the ground. Nothing in between.”

Towards the end, out of nowhere, from the pain of loss deep within his soul, he asked about his birth mom. I love these moments. These windows of grace where the Spirit within him grants him enough courage to peer through the lattice of the past where nothing but mystery and “what could’ve been” cloud his vision and prod his pain.

“Did you meet her?” he sniffled.

“Yeah.” I nodded. “We actually got to sit with her and talk for a couple of hours at the court house on the day we adopted you.”

He quickly looked away, down, to the left, anywhere but in my face. Eyes do that, at times. They reveal the agitation within simply by where they focus or their inability to do so. To ease his loss, I placed my hand on his leg.

“Hey,” I said, “do you want to see the picture?”

He’d seen it before, but for whatever reason, he couldn’t remember. So, this time, for whatever reason, was like a first time.

We pulled open my computer, sifted through several files, and then it filled the screen. He was transfixed. Her vibrant yellow shirt decorated with an artistic depiction of a woman’s face affixed with glasses and red lipstick. Her purse draped over her shoulder with arms stiff to her side as she stood between two strangers who promised to take care of her baby boy. She courageously holds a subtle smile that masks the pain of another loss in a life littered with many more.

He started crying without warning. Burying his head in my lap. I could feel the pain coursing through his little body. And then relief set in. Or was it exhaustion? His body went limp. His tears dried up. And he just lay there. Staring blankly as I stroked his cheek.

No words.

They usually don’t help much in these moments anyway.

No fighting.

That storm had passed.

Just presence. Just connection. Just a dad holding his baby boy after a long night of struggle.

After several minutes, he sat up, eyes droopy, clearly ready for slumber to prepare him for a new day. Yet all of a sudden, his tears erupted once more.

“I don’t,” he sobbed, “I just,” he shrieked, “I just don’t deserve to be your son!” he wailed.

I was crushed.

By the weight of each word.

Wounded.

By the precious heart of my tender son.

As a father, I felt like a failure.

“Hey,” I lowered myself to his eye-level, “Hey, I don’t ever want to hear you say that again.” It came out a bit too harsh, so I softened the next bit, “No, what I mean is, I love you. You’re my son. That will never change. No matter what you do or where you go, you are my son. Period. And I love you. More than anything in this entire world.”

We hugged. A long time. So long he started to snore a little. I picked him up, laid him in his bed, and as his head pressed the pillow, a subtle smile rested on his sweet little face.

As I was leaving the room, a thought hit me with uncharacteristic force. Or maybe it was just the Spirit.

“When we say the same thing to God, I wonder how it makes him feel?”

Almost every Sunday, at least in the Protestant churches, at least in the majority of evangelical services I sit in, this same sentiment will surface. The words may vary a bit, but the message is generally the same. Sometimes it’s through the words of a worship leader trying to bridge one song to the next or through the words of the communion meditation trying to explain the magnitude of the moment or sometimes in a random prayer meant to encourage those with closed eyes of how much God loves them: “God, I know how terrible we are, how we’re covered with so much disgust and sin, but thank you so much for your love, even though we don’t deserve it.”

It’s strange to me that somewhere in the alchemy of our loss we’ve distorted love to such an extent that we believe if we tell God how much we suck and that we don’t deserve his love then our relationship will improve. That then, maybe, he’ll love us even more.

As a father, I don’t cherish words of my children that assail their value or worth. I don’t love them more when they speak down about themselves or when they say something akin to “I don’t deserve your love.” As a father, it pains me. Hurts me. Tempts me to believe not that our love is strong but that I’ve failed them as a father. For the greatest gift a parent can give their children is the ability to see themselves the way I see them. All their gifts, all their value, all their worth distorted by sin and shrouded by satanic lies that tell them “You’re not enough.”

As a father, success is measured not by my children’s ability to speak down or hurt themselves, but by their ability to embrace love, mine and others, unconditionally. At this point, I think it makes some sense to bring up God, remember he’s a good, good Father, and end with a simple, “how much more.”

“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…”

~ Galatians 3:13a ~

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I’m a protector. That’s my gift. Some even call it my “superpower.” Regardless of how depressed or burnt out I may be, when occasions arise that require someone to protect another, I find an energy deposited deep within me. A treasure trove of zeal and fury motivated by love for the victim and passion for the victimizer.

I learned in therapy this comes from my childhood. For, quite often, what we didn’t have as a kiddo is exaggerated as an adult. And as a child, protection proved quite elusive for me.

I was sexually assaulted by a baby-sitter at the age of six and then off-and-on for the next five years in different locations by different people. I used to say “molested,” but after hearing my story, my therapist sternly corrected my mistake: “No, that’s sexual assault.”

I’m not quite sure changing the label altered much in my heart or soul, but on some level accuracy matters, I suppose. So “sexual assault” it is.

There’s something disorienting about being entrusted to an authority figure that uses their power to serve something in themselves. Instead of protecting you from harm, they use you to satisfy their greed. Or, in this case, their lust.

My parents trusted my babysitter, but my babysitter exchanged that sacred gift for sexual gratification. I didn’t know it at the age of six and I’m only now starting to grasp it at forty-four, but in that moment, much within me was altered. Cemented through this assault. My anxiety. Anger. Self-hate. Even my superpower.

I will say, even after many years and countless hours of counseling, it’s still hard for me to read James 1:2: “Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds.” Sure, I believe the Bible is God-breathed, but applying certain texts to particular portions of my pain tempts me to modify my definition of inspiration altogether. Yes, I know that “in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28), but when “all things” is applied to the stealing of my innocence, I can’t help but simply shake my head and shrug my shoulders with a hint an eyeroll.

To be honest, I don’t often quote these texts from James or Romans. I don’t entertain the idea that God harnesses evil to accomplish his good, as if God were dependent on evil to accomplish his will. I bristle even when someone recasts a flat tire as “God will turn even this into something good,” because too often we blame evil on God or excuse evil actions through this James/Romans alchemy.

For the record, I hate evil. In all its forms. No, I’m not saying people who recite the James/Romans explanation don’t, but before we paper over the evil and the pain that comes with it, I think it important to name evil for what it is: something that deserves our hate. If, indeed, Christians are permitted to hate anything at all, evil seems to be a good candidate.

Typically, I confront evil whenever I sense its stench in those I love and in those that ought to know better—myself included. Evil dominates too many news cycles for my taste, in the papers and in the pulpit. We celebrate evil in movies, recast evil as “just wars” or “collateral damage,” and make its presence more palatable with idioms like “necessary evil.”

No. From my vantage, no evil is necessary. All evil is an imposter. An intruder into this creation once labelled “good”—even very good.

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Yet, my aversion to the James/Romans thinking is motivated more by my superpower than by my exegesis, more by my desire to protect than by my ability to interpret. Strangely, and possibly with a tinge of arrogance, I rebuff the “evil into good” alchemy as a way of protecting God. Protecting him from theologies that interweave evil with his goodness. Protecting him from Christian comments that mean well and possibly sound good but result in a God unworthy of worship. Like when my wife and I had a miscarriage and a friend refashioned the James/Romans explanation by proclaiming, “Well, you know what this means, right?”

“No,” I intoned, “What?”

“It means God has something better for you in store.”

No. Absolutely not. I reject that God. I reject the God who curries evil and employs it for measurements of “good,” who weighs the life of my unborn child with something “better.” This is not the God revealed in Bethlehem. The God who humanized the leper with a touch, who healed the paralytic overlooked and ignored by religious socialites, who hung on a cross teaching us what love truly is.

Yet, as I protect God from being blended with evil, I can’t insulate him from it. They do collide. They do confront each other with their chosen weapons of war. For if I protect God from evil, I rob him and myself of the very antidote he offers to heal the brokenness within me: redemption.

In the past month, three people dear to me and my family have died. Each one a reminder that my superpower has limits.

I still cry without warning over the most recent. My friend was thirty-six when he was diagnosed with stage-four cancer. We met for lunch every other week for the next four years, talking about family, life, crypto, real estate, weight-lifting, basketball, evil, and any other avenue our thoughts might wander.

Our final conversations were filled with many tears. Not so much because of the unrelenting death spreading to his liver and lungs, but mostly about the death of his marriage. Six months before he died, his wife announced she wanted a divorce. I guess, for some, “in sickness and in health” has limits.

He was shattered. Or in his words, “This hurts way more than the cancer.”

He talked often of his daughter. His little flower on the cusp of becoming a teenager. She was his light. His world. His reason for living. His fear of dying.

Our last time together, I sat on the side of his bed as he struggled to breathe, his oxygen tube stubbornly refusing to stay in his nostril. Machines exhaled all around him, wrapping the room with white noise. Entombing our silence and struggle.

He mumbled while I wept, murmuring maybe twenty intelligible words, most of which were his daughter’s name and the name of Jesus. He reached for the invisible, at times sipping from a cup I couldn’t see or knocking on a door only he could perceive. For over an hour, we shared space together, acknowledging evil’s presence in this sacred moment and God’s goodness shrouding his frail body with grace upon grace.

Selfishly, I was overwhelmed, because I couldn’t protect him. I couldn’t keep him from this evil hour. I couldn’t take on his pain, heal his cancer, or say anything to transform this evil into a semblance of a James/Romans triviality. He was dying. And there was nothing I could do.

But sometimes, protection isn’t as powerful as presence. Which is hard for me to believe. To embrace. To accept.

For years, I raged at God, “Why didn’t you protect me?!?! When he was attacking me, when I was trying to get free, why didn’t you fight for me? Where were you? What were you doing? I was only six, for God’s sake.” The anguish in each word still twists my stomach and pierces my heart. Yet his name “Immanuel” whispers a wisdom easy to overlook: he didn’t prevent my pain but he was and is present with me in it. A presence that bears a power strong enough to remain patient throughout the entire process of my healing. Regardless of how often I rage, reject, or resist the temptation to “consider it pure joy,” Immanuel remains with me.

So now what?

I don’t know. Maybe there is wisdom in the James/Romans distortion that I undervalue. Glory inherent in these sacred texts that only can be tasted when the pain that broke us is unearthed so that it can be made whole. For pain is only half the story. A cut on the arm only half the narrative. For without request, the air and our antibodies begin the process of healing immediately, transforming the wound into a scar or erasing it completely from our skin’s memory.

In the end, my desire to protect from pain is the same desire foundational for redemption. The same desire that compelled Christ to embrace pain, to drink from the cup of suffering, to cry out from the cross, “Father forgive them.” For redemption, in theory and in the incarnation, confronts evil with an inconvenient truth, “While you, evil, attempt to thwart my goodness, I will honor your presence and patiently redeem you all the same.”

“Is there anything of which one can say, ‘Look! This is something new’? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.”

~ Ecclesiastes 1:10 ~

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I hate hiccups. They heave and cleave to my chest, jolting my insides with a force unmatched. No cough, however deep or productive, matches the vomit-like surge of each hiccup, ripping invisible rocks across the esophagus time and again. Yes, a sneeze rivals the full-body seizure of a hiccup, yet there’s an incarceration in a fit of hiccups that arrests your attention, disrupts your conversation, and ends not with a tingling delight but with a fear that what unfolded may erupt again if you breath too quickly. Or too slow. Or even at all.

I’m sitting in a Panera in downtown Boston at the intersection of Stuart and Tremont reading Plato’s Symposium. My seat is perched by a corner of windows. People pass by trying to navigate the befuddling traffic patterns, their steps hiccupping between the sidewalk and the intersection. The crosswalks are illuminated with a red hand that persists even as cars idle in all direction. A man pulls his wife deeper into the intersection looking in every direction except the way the cars start to come. She pulls him back. He’s frustrated, that is, until the bus careens just feet in front of him.

Moments pass. A new set of pedestrians approach. And variations of the same pattern unfold.

Behind me, a large group of young adults cackle, barely able to fit in the four tables they’ve awkwardly pieced together. Those at the end lean in trying to be part of the fun, only to lean back in frustration, unable to garner much attention at the table. The ebb and the flow of the conversation ignores the predictable pattern of “lean-in-hopeful; lean-out-frustrated; rinse-and-repeat.”

The woman to my left leans forward into her phone with piercing intensity as two faces stare back from her screen, “Yes, that’s what I…oh sorry, Larry. You go!” she shrieks. Uproarious laughter erupts from the young adults behind her. She glares in their direction. Back to the screen. Unable to hold her own attention. Even after she aggressively gets up from her chair, whose metal loudly screeches across the tile floor, she relocates to a table across the room in search of more privacy, but the pattern simply unfolds anew.

I feel like I’ve seen this before. Not a de ja vu or anything, but the pattern. The push and pull for attention, for space, for silence, for belonging, for isolation, for safety, for progress. A repeating hiccup in society as long as human memory can recollect.

In Plato’s Symposium, a group has gathered. Food served. Some late. Some only partially invited. Some clubbing for positions of prominence. Others unsure if they ought to even be in the room at all. Even though Plato’s scene takes place over four hundred years before Christ, I find it oddly familiar, as if it could happen in this Panera right now.

The guests take their seats. Dinner is served. A topic surfaces: what is love?

Like a diamond, the guests of the symposium take their turn exposing different rays of light to this rare gem, exploring what is acceptable in love, what is typical, what is noble, what is effective. Each guest trying to contribute to this collective ode to that which Parmenides envisioned as birthed “before all other gods”—Love.1

After Phaedrus and Pausanias offer their eloquence in honor of Love, Aristophanes is next in line. An award-winning playwright flush with satirical wit, everyone swells with anticipation for his soliloquy to honor Love. However, Aristophanes is suddenly stricken “with a hiccup, which prevented him from speaking” (Sym. 185 D). Consumed by this unruly bodily disruptor, he asks the doctor next to him to either “stop my hiccup or to speak in my stead until I can stop it.” The physician kindly offers to do both, also advising the hiccup-riddled Aristophanes:

“During my speech, if on your holding your breath a good while the hiccup chooses to stop, well and good; otherwise you must gargle with some water. If, however, it is a very stubborn one, take something that will tickle your nostrils, and sneeze: do this once or twice, and though it be of the stubbornest, it will stop.” (Plato, Sym. 185 E)

I set my book down a bit surprised. “I’ve not heard all those remedies,” I thought. Typically, I confront my hiccups with a concentrated stare. I find an un-busy surface on a table or a wall, I soften my gaze, and with concentrated effort, I move into a relaxed state. If interrupted in any way, be it from within or someone beside, the hiccups will lurch victoriously. Yet if successful, after thirty-seconds or so, the pattern is broken. My breathing rhythm returns. My attention restores. And the hiccups don’t encore.

As ridiculous as it feels to sit here and muse on hiccups, a deeper insight calls to me: even over 2,500 years ago, humans were pretty much the same.

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Sure, in the name of progress, a god we honor even more than love itself, we presume much has changed. We cling to our technological advances as evidence of chronological superiority, of a modern sophistication that dwarfs the archaic, and yet, we still pattern our politics on the Roman Republic, our mathematics on Pythagorean theorems, and the arts on Greek tragedies and comedies. We can’t replicate the durability of the Coliseum’s concrete; we can’t fathom the construction of the pyramids; we can’t mirror the religious and electromagnetic precision of Stone Henge. Even still, we walk across our concrete jungles with an arrogance of progress, as if Louis Vuitton outperforms the Laodicean purple or Radio City Music Hall outshines the Ephesian Amphitheater.

Sure, we’ve harnessed electricity with unparalleled precision, but have we cured the cancer of lust? Okay, we’ve employed science to explore the oceans below and the celestial bodies that dance in the sky, but have we bested the bully within each of us that tells us we’re all alone, that no one cares, and that we’re left out because we’re unloved?

Reading history, philosophical or otherwise, reveals the haunting truth: the soul of the human is just as belabored today as it was when Socrates stood in Athens and Christ was crucified on Calvary.

I was thirty-one years old when I finished my Ph.D., missing my goal by one year. I remember the day I received my diploma. I tore open the insulated cardboard adorned with the iconic Edinburgh logo to find a single piece of thick A4 paper with my government name written in cursive font. My wife sat next to me and placed her head on my shoulder as we both stared intently, softening our gaze a bit as we silently reflected on the sacrifice it took to bring us to this moment.

Softly, she asked, “What’re you thinking?”

I paused uncomfortably. Unsure of what to say. Or maybe how to say it.

I began to speak unsure of what words would come, “I’m thinking,” I hiccupped, “I’m thinking, ‘I thought this was going to feel different.’”

We all try to outrun our pain. Especially wounds from our past. Sure, it looks different for each person, but the patterns are the same. We cling to whatever we think will give us rest or some semblance of healing—money, power, sex, drugs, alcohol, parties—but in the end, the pain remains and threatens to devour more with each passing day.

And I’m no different. It’s just my pattern was more socially acceptable than others.

I was addicted to work. To accomplishing more and more with increasing rapidity. And with each degree came accolades and words of affirmation spurring me ever further into my brokenness in the name of progress. Since all of it was related to the Bible, it was easy to overlook how fractured and fragile I really was.

Only later, through much therapy and even more prayer, I realized that deep down, without knowing it, I thought the Ph.D. would heal me. Would mend what was broken in me. And when it didn’t, I was confused. Devastated, really.

In the pages of Plato and even in the present, I look around and find the same sickness in others. The same “progress” shrouding patterns of brokenness like garments of skin constructed to cover our shameful nakedness.

Leaders today still sell their soul for power, believing it can satisfy all that longs within. Celebrities today still believe that accolades and attention will make them whole, will heal what is broken within. Children still deceive, adults still drown in greed, and humans still long to belong.

I wish it were different. Especially for Christians. Especially for those of us who believe that, in Jesus Christ, Love became flesh and dwelled among us. That truth incarnated in Bethlehem, curing the evils within.

But in the church and in the hearts of Christ-followers, patterns emerge that look embarrassingly similar to Phaedrus, Pausanius, and even Aristophanes. Hiccups of the soul that, regardless of every trick we’ve employed, simply won’t leave. Won’t relent. Consistently remind us that after all our efforts there’s still more to overcome.

“I believe; but help my unbelief.”

~ Mark 9:24 ~

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To believe that doubt is essential to the Christian journey is to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I don’t always mean to start essays with provocative sentences, but I tend to. Not because I’m beholden to the “hook-look-book-took” teaching method—which I find quite boring, to be honest, and oddly annoyed that courses in strategies of teaching still harness this worn-out approach—but because that’s how I think. Something in me rises like tides responding to the moon’s cycle, pulled and pushed with predictable yet temperamental undercurrents, demanding attention even as they recede into the vast undersurface, depositing, on occasion, an oceanic wonder on the shoreline in the form of a startling sentence. A thesis, of sorts. That piques my curiosity to draw closer, inspect, prod, examine, digest.

This morning the nautical treasure contained shades of doubt, yet as I drew near, I could see gospel residue hidden under ordinary wet sand. I’ve peered into doubt’s pelt before. Quite often, actually. But for some reason, this time seemed different.

For better or worse, doubt has been my close companion for much of my spiritual walk. In high school and college, doubt kept me company in my prayer closet and even at lunch as I sat in a booth eating my food and devouring a book, be it fiction or otherwise. Even in large crowds or in the basement with a small group of friends, doubt was a devoted escort. Never elbowing others for space at the table, always content to just be in the room.

Like all companions, though, doubt demanded conversation from time to time. Not in a needy, self-centered way, but in an ever-present “we-are-friends-aren’t-we?” sort of way. Doubt’s voice is raspy, so shouting over the din, external or internal, wasn’t typical. Often, I’d be sitting in my pew, waiting to receive the communion tray, when doubt would start a quiet conversation.

“Are you sure this is real?” An innocent, fleeting thought that would yoke me to the labor of exploration for maybe a moment or, at times, for weeks on end.

Early in my journey, I thought this was a defect in me, a spiritual malformation created and sustained by my disobedience and rebellion. So I hid it. Tried to sort it out on my own, rendering results far from encouraging.

Yet it didn’t topple my faith; it compelled it further.

At Bible college, while studying the evidences of apologetics and biblical reliability, my doubt grew. Taunted me with jeers like, “That’s it?” or “How can you be so sure?” or “Are you willing to risk everything for something so feebly supported, something so unsophisticated and archaic?”

At a particular point of despair, I shared my secret friendship with doubt with a professor. Not so much because I trusted him, but because I was drowning and survivalistic-desperation took over, compelling me to grab the closest driftwood with the hope that I could gain just enough buoyance to catch a breath free from saltwater.

My confession surprised me—“I struggle with doubt”—but it was his response that transformed me—“That’s normal.”

“Normal?!?!”

“Yep,” he smiled, nodding his head and revealing with a smirk his own friendship with doubt, “for many, doubt is a pretty normal part of life.”

Tears welled in my eyes. I’d lived my whole life in the church, wrestling with doubt and its second-cousin “What’s-wrong-with-you?”, and I’d never been told that doubt is common. That others struggled with the same questions.

Today, I’d take it even one step further: doubt isn’t just normal, it’s useful. Valuable in the Christian journey. That is, if the Spirit grants you the gift of doubt.

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For a time, my life verse was Mark 9:24, the honest plea of a desperate dad to an uncommon Christ, “I believe,” he wailed, “help my unbelief,” he added. Its insight is illuminating. Like a full moon on a clear night, this verse reveals doubt to be a collision of commitment and insecurity, certainty and myth, belief and its opposite. Which reminds me a lot of the definition of faith.

Years ago, my younger brother quipped in passing, “What most people don’t get is: the opposite of faith is not doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty.”

He’s right.

We often think that with enough evidence and argumentation our faith can be strengthened, our doubt can be exiled to an island like Patmos. But faith, by definition, doesn’t know all things. At least not with certainty. Faith admits portions of the “unknown” present in our “belief.” Elements of “unbelief” in our confident confessions.

Certainty does not. Certainty parades proudly chanting “all has been uncovered and is now known.” Certainty haughtily enters the room, nose pointed heavenward, arrogantly espousing that, though we are limited beings, we can know everything there is to know about the one who was, and is, and is to come. Certainty chides the doubter and mocks the feebleness of a faith that defies evidence or simply doesn’t need any—that is, if the Spirit grants you the gift of faith.

Churches fear doubt and champion certainty. Heralding the latter as “faith in Jesus Christ” and deriding the former as “dangerous” or the ever-perilous “deconstruction.” Yet it is just this last label that offers hope. That invites the gospel story into the narrative of doubt.

To “deconstruct” is to tear down but, in the best settings and with the right guidance, not with the goal of devastation, but with the goal of restoration. A remodeling must begin with, on some level, tearing down what is old and, possibly, even moldy. A dilapidated 1957 Ford Mustang, riddled with rust and torn upholstery, must be stripped down before it can be restored. Not completely, mind you, but a surgical unearthing where parts are pulled off, paint is sanded, and newness reclaims portions of what death once owned.

Doubt does the same. In the Spirit, doubt does deconstruct, but with the goal to make new. To remodel the soul sullied by sin and trauma. To resurrect the disciple bold enough to step into the barren tomb believing that, with different eyes, it’s actually a womb. The god-ordained path that leads to life.

It’s why I no longer fear doubt, in myself or in others. In fact, on some level, all that doubt suggests is that I care. I care about what is true and what is not. I care enough to pair answers with the questions that clothe them with skin. That enflesh the truth with sinews and ligaments, with muscle and fat, with a skeletal structure and a soul equipped to confront all that is broken in me and in this world collapsing under the weight of certainty.

Doubt, then, isn’t an imposter, but a tool for growth. A weapon the enemy fears. A scalpel for the soul that comes with pain from the incision but new life post-surgery.

When doubt surfaces, I see the Spirit. The good physician standing nearby calmly yet resolutely saying to me, “It’s time. Time to tear away the old and make room for the new. Time to cut away the tumor and purge the cancer. Time to confront death with doubt so you can resurrect to a new life.”

Is doubt scary? Indeed. Pain always is. Death always will be. Even Jesus doubted the wisdom of death in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Yet with eyes to see and ears to hear, doubt becomes essential for the Christian journey. A necessary path to transformation first trodden by Christ ascending Calvary with his cross in tow. A gift given by the Spirit who tenderly guides each soul deeper into faith, further into the mystery of the infinite God. An invitation into the ineffable story of Jesus who remodels the world in his image through his death and his resurrection, through his deconstruction and his transformation, through his doubt and his confidence that through all this, everything will be made new.

“[The redeemed] follow the Lamb wherever he goes.”

~ Revelation 14:4b ~

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NOTE: This post first appeared on Nijay K. Gupta’s incredible substack entitled Engaging Scripture (with Dr. Nijay K. Gupta) as a part of series called “The One True Gospel.”

Resurrection requires death. And I hate that. So passionately that I wrote that last sentence with an expletive, but someone close to me recently requested I refrain from cussing in my writings. I promised nothing, but maybe the restraint I just showed is witness to some form of resurrection.

It’s just that sometimes something is so frustrating, so deplorable, so evil that the only word that captures the intensity of my protest contains only four letters and is frowned upon by civil society and run-of-the-mill legalists—even the more tame and flexible words like “hell” or “damn.”

The truth is: the one true gospel requires resurrection. But since resurrection, by definition, must be preceded by a tomb, must include death, I’m tempted to let the words fit for such an evil fly free. I mean, I hate death with a passionate rage hard to quell with Christian truisms and trivialities.

For death doesn’t play fair with the elderly or the barely alive, with the addict or the faithful follower, with the six-week-old baby or the thirty-seven-year-old man whose wife left him in the middle of his struggle with stage four cancer. Death lashes its forked tongue with torturous delight as it whispers crassness and cackles coarseness, paying tribute to injustice as another life is suffocated by an enemy so profoundly twisted that a child’s last breath is met with jubilation comparable to angelic celebration at the conversion of a sinful scoundrel. Death delights when innocence is stolen and families are ravaged, when power molests and preachers abuse, when racism erupts and politicians deceive, when love is paraded and jeered, maligned and mocked: “Prophesy, oh King, which one us hit you?”

Sure, church-donors delight in sacrosanct purity, but death deserves some measure of rage. Some defiant posture represented not just in theory but in action. Not just in pity but in the intensity of our words that clearly unveil death for what it is: something along the lines of excrement and a male cow.

To my shame, though, I must confess: I seek the one true gospel just without death. I want the resurrection without the tomb. The empty grave without the cross. I pursue transformation without patience, without pruning, without welts of discipline or the desolation of the life I once lived. I seek resurrection without death.

But that’s not the way the one true gospel works, dangit.

The apostle Paul taught me this. When he was Saul, death was his native tongue. He was baptized in violence. He breathed out murderous vengeance, embodying a Cain-like spirit (Acts 9:1). His zeal for the Lord was fashioned in the image of gods more fit for the Iliad than Golgotha.

Yet Saul becomes Paul. The persecutor caterpillars into the preacher, emerging from his cocoon of grace with new life that proclaims tenderness over tenacity, mercy over anger, love over resentment, peace over hate, death-of-self instead of death-of-our-enemy.

The myth claims “Paul-went-soft.” But that summary sidesteps the nature of the one true gospel. Sidesteps the strength needed to truly become someone different. To truly experience a transformation where what was is no longer. Where who I used to be is only recounted in a fading memory. Where what is now is a life summarized by the terrifying designation: resurrection.

Or as Paul remembers, “I have been crucified with Christ. I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

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The one true gospel requires resurrection. And resurrection requires death.

Which is probably why so many of us settle for a Christianity that merely gets us into heaven but does little to transform us on earth. We’re content to overlook the evils of this world with hymns of “pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by,” a subtext shrouded in privilege and a callousness of heart that creates space in societal systems and in our very selves for evils Jesus refused to tolerate, for evils Christ confronted with ferocity and flipped-over-tables. To avoid the death inherent in the one true gospel, our sermons and Sunday school lessons cling to the evangelistic banner of “Come as you are,” but refuse to finish the Gospel message, “But you don’t get to stay as you are.”

The Lord’s prayer taught me this (Matt. 6:9-13). Taught me that resurrection is not merely about “going to heaven one day,” but about bringing heaven to earth today (Matt. 6:10). Not through force or legislation or by lording our power over others as the Gentiles do (Mk. 10:42-45). But through sacrifice and self-denial, through service and a willingness to carry a cross, through transformation wrought by death.

We invite people into waters of baptism meant to represent the tender womb of our mothers, the agony and intensity of our first birth that unfolded with blood and violence. We invite them to a new life in Christ, to follow Jesus as not just a Savior but as the Lord, the Commander-and-Chief of all we are and all we do. We invite them to be “born-again,” but we fail to properly educate and embrace that since Genesis 3, all birth is now enmeshed with death. New life is now wed with pain. The empty tomb only exists because someone was bold enough to carry their cross and die.

And I hate this. Passionately. My prayers reflect it. My soul rages against it. And my grammar longs to cuss about it.

Yet there’s no way around it: the one true gospel requires resurrection. Requires transformation. Of ourselves. From our sin and greed. From our anger and malice. From our addiction to power and pride. The one true gospel bids us come and die, so that in Christ and as Christ, we may live.

John taught me this. Taught me that as the body of Christ, as those who claim to live in Jesus, we must “live as Jesus lived” (1 Jn. 2:6). We must love how Jesus loved. We must be willing to “follow the Lamb wherever he goes” (Rev. 14:4b)—onto the cross, into the tomb, within the womb of death.

Otherwise, we claim new life but preserve our dead-ness in the royal robes of our King. Otherwise, we sing songs of redemption and transformation but never experience the one true gospel that requires resurrection. That requires death. That bids us come and die.

Too often in our churches, resurrection is underestimated and overlooked, clichéd and tucked like easter eggs into the one true gospel. Yet resurrection’s subtlety isn’t soft, but subversive. Revolutionary in its transformation of both a society and a self that’s lost its way. That is, if Christians are courageous enough, one-by-one, to enter the tomb truly believing that the rolling stone doesn’t signal the story’s end. For in the one true gospel, Good Friday bleeds into Resurrection Sunday; the cross leads to an empty tomb; death leads to life anew.

In the end, I guess I’m thankful for death. Which is odd because, from time to time, I still find myself crying out, “Father, please let this cup pass from me.” But for now, I’ll raise a glass to death, celebrating a life once lived that now is not. For resurrection deserves a toast from time to time. Even if the teetotalers doth protest.

The following is an interview with author Frank Viola regarding his book: The Untold Story of the New Testament Church, Revised and Expanded

NOTE: My questions are in bold. Frank’s answers are not.

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Shane J. Wood (SJW): You describe your book as “a cross between a narrative commentary and a Bible handbook.” How does studying the New Testament as a “story” inform the curious in a way not found in a traditional Bible reference work?

Frank Viola: Traditional Bible guides don’t give you the whole narrative in chronological order. Even chronological Bibles don’t give you the narrative. All they do is rearrange the books of the Bible (and they disagree with each other on the timeline).

By contrast, my book gives you the entire story in chronological order, but with all the details filled in. Let me expand that statement by way of illustration.

Luke gives us around the first 32 years of the early church’s life. But he doesn’t give us the whole story because:

• He compresses his entire narrative and leaves a great deal out. However, we have a lot of the information concerning what Luke left out in Paul’s epistles and in the book of James.

• Luke ends with Paul on house arrest in Rome. Paul wrote a number of his epistles after that time. The same is true for the letters of Jude, Hebrews, Peter, John, and the book of Revelation. They all came after the events recorded in Acts 28.

Consequently, my book puts the reader in the story, allowing them to watch it unfold chronologically. All the details that Luke leaves out of his narrative are filled in through the most up-to-date scholarship on first-century history as well as from the epistles.

The result is one high-octane, cohesive story that’s supported by the best scholarship in the world, with over 2,400 citations. It’s also been endorsed by 20 of the best scholars in the world, including the greatest New Testament scholar of our time—Craig Keener, who wrote the Foreword.

Some of the scholars who have endorsed the book are Darrell Bock, Joel B. Green, Michael Licona, Mark Strauss, Richard Horsley, David deSilva, Constantine Campbell, Paul Barnett, Clinton Arnold, Eckhard Schnabel, Jeffrey A. D. Weima, along with many others.

N.T. Wright was also helpful in reconstructing some of the events, and I cite some of our conversations in the notes.

The perspective the book provides to readers is far beyond what they will get in traditional Bible reference books. Those don’t give us The Story. They fail to provide the narrative. That’s precisely why I took on the Everest-like challenge to write the book.

SJW: What is the most illuminating period of time (or event) for understanding the New Testament and God’s plan?

Frank Viola: I don’t think there is any single period of time that we can isolate as the “most illuminating.” That really depends on what part of the New Testament narrative a particular person is interested in.

For instance, if it’s the foundations of the Christian faith, it would be A.D. 30 to A.D. 34 which are covered in the early part of the book of Acts up to the dramatic conversion of Saul of Tarsus.

For me personally, I think the most fascinating period is from A.D. 49 to A.D. 63. That covers the time that Saul (Paul) of Tarsus is sent out with Barnabas from the church in Antioch to the Lord’s work of raising up kingdom communities.

They plant four churches in South Galatia. Paul’s long-standing enemy emerges, and Paul writes the letter to the Galatians to address his influence in the new churches he and Barnabas planted.

The Jerusalem council takes place and Paul and Silas head out to Greece and plant four new churches there.

Following that period, Paul writes 1 and 2 Thessalonians followed by 1 and 2 Corinthians. Then Paul heads to Ephesus to plant a church there that will influence the Roman province of Asia.

In Ephesus, he will train apostolic workers (church planters) to take his place (just as Jesus trained apostolic workers to take His place).

In short, Paul trained Christian workers the same way Jesus trained workers. Paul trained 9 while Jesus trained 12. And the training lasted about the same amount of time (around 3 years).

We see all of their names when the story is pieced together as I do in the book.

It’s all high drama. And The Story throws tremendous light on the epistles, including Paul’s. It also gives us insight into the unchanging ways of God, some of which are little known to many Christian leaders today.

SJW: New editions can be just as difficult to construct as the first. What was your approach to revising and expanding your first edition of this book? What are the major differences between the editions?

Frank Viola: The new book is much more than a revised edition. It’s actually a brand new book. The reason why we put “revised and expanded” in the title is because I didn’t want to change the main title since it appears in some of my older works.

I’ve been researching for this book since 1998. I wanted to find out what really happened in Century One, and how the epistles fit together with the book of Acts in the timeline.

The questions I was asking were, “Where in Acts did Paul write his epistles?” “Who were the Galatians, how did they live, how many were there, who were their enemies, where was Paul when he wrote to them, what was he feeling and thinking, what provoked the letter?”

I brought those same questions to all 21 epistles of the New Testament.

The answers I discovered opened up an entire new world of reading and understanding the Bible. One that ignited my heart and caused me to understand virtually every word of each letter.

It also brought the names Paul mentions at the end of his epistles to life. I no longer saw them as “throw away greetings,” as many Christians do. Instead, they became major plot points in an unfolding drama.

Way back in 2005, I wrote my first draft from my research at the time. It was poorly written, incomplete, and most of the research wasn’t even in print yet. (We’re talking two decades ago!)

That was the first edition, which is extremely flawed. I consider it on a par with a high school research paper. Consequently, I tell people if they come across the old edition (with the ugly orange cover) to ignore it. And if they have a copy, throw it out.

Again, the new edition is a brand new work, five times larger than the old flawed version with the best research available to create a powerful and plausible reconstruction. One that has changed the game for many Bible teachers and pastors as well as Christians who love the word of God.

That’s been the testimonial of hundreds of people since the book released last year.

With respect to the differences, they are too numerous to delineate. The old version is like a tricycle where the new version is like a Rolls Royce. They don’t even share the same universe.

SJW: In the process of writing your new book, what struck you? Was there an issue you changed your mind on since the first edition? Or maybe a new vantage that inspired you this time around?

Frank Viola: There are many, but what stood out the most was the identity of Paul’s thorn in the flesh. The new book has broken new ground on this much-debated issue.

For centuries, theologians, scholars, and bible interpreters have tried to explain what the thorn was.

Theories range from an eye disease, malaria, epilepsy, migraine headaches, to an ongoing temptation with lust.

If you read the New Testament like most Christians do, without The Story, without the chronological background, it’s not clear what the thorn is.

But if you read the narrative chronologically with all the details filled in, which my book does, it become profoundly clear what the thorn was—or more accurately—WHO the thorn was.

The book even has a gray box excursus that brings all the evidence together. It has once and for all solved the mystery. I’ve had the best scholars in the world review it. And their response was unanimous. “It’s the most plausible and likely reconstruction ever produced.”

Here’s an excerpt from Craig Keener’s Foreword.

“In The Untold Story of the New Testament Church, Frank Viola brings context and background together, inviting us on a captivating journey through the birth and growth of the first-century church. With a reputation for captivating prose and heartfelt storytelling, Viola brings his unique perspective to reconstruct the events from Matthew to Revelation.”

SJW: Your book includes the story found in Luke’s Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. What value do these works possess in reconstructing the historical account of the early church? What details must be supplemented with other New Testament texts?

Frank Viola: Luke’s works provide the main outline for The Story. The epistles fill in the details.

The New Testament letters don’t provide us with chronology. The letters of Paul, for instance, were not arranged sequentially, but by length. So my book brings it all together chronologically.

Without doing this kind of work of sequential reconstruction, we don’t have The Story. So we default to the “cut-and-paste” method of Bible reading and Bible study.
The “cut-and-paste” method finds its origins in the Protestant scholastics of the 16^th to 18^th centuries.

They practiced what is called systematic or topical theology (theologia systematica). The basic idea is that you can cut and paste verses from the Bible together on the same topic to create a doctrine or theology.

But that approach has created an approach to Scripture that ignores context and background. You can prove anything by taking verses out of context and lashing them together.

As the T shirt says, I can do all things through a verse taken out of context. That’s why we have over 40,000 denominations in the Protestant Christian world today, many of which are at war with each other.

Let me finish my rant by giving a short riff on New Testament 3.0.

My book is a contribution to what I call New Testament 3.0. This is a framework I created last year.

New Testament 1.0 was when the original Greek was translated into the language of the people.

First you had Jerome with his Latin Vulgate. Then you had Martin Luther with his German translation. Then you had Tyndale with his English translation.

Then New Testament 2.0 came along later. This is when Christians took the tools that classical historians use to analyze ancient documents and applied them to the New Testament.

So you had textual criticism, source criticism, redaction criticism, literary criticism, etc. It also identified the original meaning of Greek words.

That’s all good, but it’s not enough to unlock the New Testament. You can memorize the New Testament in Greek from Matthew to Revelation and still not understand what you’re reading.

That brings us to New Testament 3.0.

New Testament 3.0 builds on New Testament 1.0 and New Testament 2.0. But it puts the entire New Testament into a chronological narrative with all of the details filled in. That’s precisely what my book does.

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SJW: Your chapters are oriented not only in time but also in location, many containing a map of the area in which the events occurred. Why is it important to treat the geographical locations as an essential detail in the stories of the New Testament?

Frank Viola: I’ll use Paul of Tarsus as an example along with his travels (with Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, Titus, and the other workers Paul trained).

Understanding Paul’s geographical locations are essential for shedding light on The Story for several important reasons:

Historical and Cultural Context: The specific cities Paul visited weren’t just backdrops. Each had distinct cultures, religions, economic systems, and social structures that shaped how people received his message. Understanding whether Paul was writing to the Corinthians or the Ephesians explains the differently style and language he used in his epistles.

Verification and Credibility: The geographical specificity provides checkpoints for historical reliability. Luke’s detailed itineraries in Acts include verifiable details about local officials, travel routes, and city layouts that align with archaeological and historical evidence.

Understanding Paul’s Strategy: The locations reveal Paul’s apostolic approach. He targeted major urban centers along trade routes (Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica) where the gospel could spread naturally through existing networks of commerce and travel.

Interpreting His Letters: Knowing where communities were located helps us understand Paul’s specific advice in his epistles. His instructions weren’t abstract theology but responses to real situations in real places.

Corinth is an example. When Paul writes to the Corinthians about sexual immorality, food sacrificed to idols, and social divisions, these issues make much more sense when you know Corinth’s geography and culture:

Without knowing Paul was writing to believers living in Corinth specifically, his teachings might seem random. But with that geographical context, we see he’s addressing the particular moral challenges Christians faced in that seaport environment, challenges quite different from what believers faced in smaller towns like Berea.

SJW: Chapter 5 is titled “The Hinge Pin of the Drama: Calvary.” How does the New Testament story “hinge” on the death and resurrection of Christ?

Frank Viola: The First Testament, what we call the “Old Testament,” all points to the climactic event of the death and resurrection of the Messiah. After the Gospels, the rest of the Second Testament (the “New Testament”) points back to it and explains it’s massive implications.

It’s the great hinge of the Bible and The Story. What happened on the cross was more than simply the forgiveness of sins. When we read the Gospels, we see the historical side of what Jesus endured in His death. He predicted His suffering and murder before it happened. And He promised it would be for the remission of sins.

The Gospels show us the horrendous brutality of the crucifixion. We meet all the players involved in the crucifixion. But when you look at Paul’s letters, which are based on the revelation that he received from the Holy Spirit, the apostle brings out the cosmic dimensions of the cross and the resurrection.

Through His death and resurrection, Jesus destroyed principalities and powers, He nullified the kingdom of darkness, He rendered Satan powerless over all who trust in Him (Christ), He gave His followers authority over the enemy and the kingdom of darkness.

By His cross, Jesus nuked the sin nature (the old man). He also torched the world system. In short, the cross and resurrection of Jesus undid all of the effects of the fall of humanity.

My book puts all of it together from the Gospels combined with the epistles, creating a full narrative. The resurrection of Jesus, which is the other side of the cross, is the birth of the new creation. And it dominates the New Testament story.

SJW: Your final two chapters situate the end times along the same timeline that encompasses the historical events from A.D. 30—70. What is the benefit of understanding the events “yet to come” in light of those that have “already” happened?

Frank Viola: Because that’s where we all live today. We live in the “already” awaiting the fullness of the “not yet.” And we cannot understand what God is doing in the present and what He ultimately intends to do in the future without understanding The Story.

For this reason, the latter chapters deal with the big takeaways and practical implications of knowing the New Testament narrative. They also explain that we have before us a blank page. It’s the next chapter in church history that all of us are called to write.

If we learn The Story, what we’ll write upon that page will be very different than if we never learned it and we only understand the Bible in its current non-sequential arrangement through the lens of chapters and verses.

Learning The Story changes everything. And that’s why I took the time to write the book, which was a super heavy lift.

SJW: If I were a pastor wanting to know more about the story of God, how can this book be used in sermon preparation? What is the benefit for a congregation when a New Testament passage is placed on a timeline of history?

Frank Viola: The benefit is transformation for yourself, which is critical for aiding transformation in those who listen to you speak.

Many pastors and Bible teachers are using the book. They are testifying that their congregations are being ignited to read the New Testament regularly. And they are being transformed by it, as their minds are being renewed to the full truth and understanding of God’s word in a fresh way.

Again, we can only be transformed by the word of God if you accurately understand it.

There are also bulk discounts for churches, fellowship, Bible studies, etc. on the book landing page.

SJW: Despite most authors’ wishes, a book can only be so comprehensive. What portion or theme from this book would you like to develop further in the future?

Frank Viola: I have been developing and expanding the themes in the book for sometime now.

Here are two messages that I recently delivered at Restoration Movement conferences. Since you share that heritage (the Restoration Movement), your readers may be interested in listening to them:

A Collision of Temples: God’s Restoration Work Continues – delivered in Michigan

Encountering the Risen Christ: Then and Now – delivered in Mississippi

I’ve also been creating Master Classes on each of Paul’s epistles. They are made up of conferences messages I’ve delivered over the years in different places.

The Master Classes are deep dives into each Pauline letter, presenting it to the right brain as well as the left brain, hence the title “3D.”

The Master Classes that have been completed so far are:

Galatians in 3D: 20 conference messages.

1 Thessalonians in 3D: 36 conference messages.

2 Thessalonians in 3D: 15 conference messages.

1 Corinthians in 3D: over 20 conference messages

Ephesians in 3D: 36 conference messages

God willing, I plan to release a new Master Class for Paul’s other epistles in the future.

All the Master Classes are on The Deeper Christian Life Network.

In addition, some of my books expand certain parts of the story. For example:

Insurgence: Reclaiming the Gospel of the Kingdom focuses on the gospel of the kingdom throughout the biblical narrative.

God’s Favorite Place on Earth is the story of Jesus and His relationship to the little village of Bethany and its profound application to Christians today.

From Eternity to Here explores and expands the grand narrative of the Bible, which is God’s Eternal Purpose.

These books can be test-driven and accessed at frankviola.org/discography.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

~ Genesis 1:1-2 ~

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I still believe in “good.” Or at least I still want to. Each day, though, seems to challenge my fortitude. Personal and national, professional and in the church, news spreads like wildfire threatening to extinguish my hope. My hope that evil doesn’t win. My hope that good prevails. My hope in the ancient wisdom that coos, “In the end, the just and the righteous win out.”

But today, I just don’t know.

A couple of nights ago I was grappling with the same struggle. The same phantoms flitting about cackling canticles of despair. I awoke around 3:30am, immediately aware I wouldn’t be able to reset my slumber by simply flipping my pillow to the colder side. Begrudgingly, I went out to the living room, sat in my new favorite chair, and opened my old trusty prayer journal.

Without much thought, I scrawled these five words, “God, do you see me?” Tears flooded as each witness was called as evidence to the contrary. And at the end of each paragraph, without thought and seemingly without control, I scribbled the same, “God, do you see me? Really see me?”

I’m not sure such a query is normal for humans. The desperation and despondency, yes, but the question, “God, do you see me?” isn’t typical for sinners, even those saved by grace through faith.

Ever since Eden, humanity has craved coverings, fig leaves to barrier us from God. Foliage to conceal us, especially when we hear him walking in the cool of the day. We cling to secrets fashioned and formed under the cloak of night as if they contain power, as if they nourish our spiritual bodies. We are betrothed, then, to “not being seen,” believing lies like “everybody has skeletons in the closet.”

But what if we didn’t? What if Christians committed to emptying every chamber of their hearts, clinging to vulnerability and grace, trusting in mercy and the childish belief that goodness triumphs over evil? That truth is more powerful than secrets? That the light of the world came into our darkness to heal us. To unite us. To set every wrong right.

I mean, what if confession were treasured? Truly treasured. Truly sought as the key to unlock our bondage. What if we actually believed that when we usher our sin out from darkness and into the light that new creation is possible. That through confession, a new existence could come. What if we truly believed that words create worlds.

In the beginning, God spoke and the cosmos unfolded, the chaos corralled, the darkness dispelled. With divine tenderness, God wooed creation into existence with four simple words: “Let there be light.”

The first invitation was for light to emerge. At its own pace. However shy it may be staring into darkness without end.

I emphasize “invitation” because this wasn’t a calloused command relying on force to overpower any semblance of choice. No, when God spoke the subjunctive “Let there be…” he was communicating a wish. A desire. His desire. His invitation to partner with what may emerge if enough courage could be uncovered.

In the beginning, as the first day unfolds, I can almost hear God saying to light, “Do you see me? Can you find your way to me? Do you want to draw near to me?”

Maybe that’s what I was really saying at 3:30 in the morning. Sure, my question siren-ed, “God, do you see me?” But, like most questions, there’s a deeper one hiding just behind the first, almost like a shadow, connected to it even though it truly isn’t it. A deeper question within me that still lingers even after forty-three years of seeking God’s face and sparring with sin’s barbs and barriers: “God, do you want to draw near me?”

I struggle to be near to me. To truly sit with myself. My true self. Not the one others expect of me or assume about me. But the true me void of fig leaves and fully exposed by divine light. “I’m repulsive,” I quip as God incessantly cries, “My son, where are you?” (Gen. 3:9). I cower if his gaze drifts in my direction, and even attempt to scurry if I think the coast is clear.

Yet at the edge of the sea of myself, I fear the beasts that lurk within the wake. I’ve seen their power when vengeance rips me into its undertow, when self-preservation sweeps me out to sea with currents only aimed away from the shore and toward the vast open ocean.

So, I guess I’m hemmed in. The chaos of evil’s ocean on one end and the torture of God’s light on the other. The pain of both too much to bear.

“God, do you see me?”

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Maybe there’s more courage in those five words than I first thought. An uncommon resilience in such a question. A commitment to be seen even if I feel unworthy of anyone drawing near to me.

In some sense, to ask “do you see me?” is to simultaneously state, “I want to be seen.” Which seems so foreign and far from the truth I imprison within my darkness.

Confession: I hate stages. Even the ones I preach on. I know, I know: I’m supposed to love and cherish the honor of preaching God’s word. But I don’t. I don’t crave the pulpit. I didn’t sign up in service to our King to set foot on a stage. And no, this isn’t some rhetorical trick to repulse something everyone craves in order to receive something no one gives easily: admiration. No, this is something more like, “everyone has deserts—they just don’t all look the same.” And I never feel more lonely than when I’m on a stage.

Yes, the lights are bright and everyone is staring, but I feel like from up there no one can really see me. Truly see me. That I’m creating and committing to an illusion. A caricature of who I am, crafted by words and rhetorical strategies intended to draw people closer to God even though a lot of people simply feel closer to me. Or at least the “stage” version of me.

I’m grateful the Lord uses my deserts for kingdom fruit, but what I truly crave is to be seen. Truly seen. As I am. Not as the stage presumes.

Much of life is this way, I’m afraid. A mixture of cravings and illusions, stages and shadows. Sin attempts to create, to construct illusions that distort the real and the true, because, at its core, sin is a cheap imitation of God himself—the Creator who used words to create worlds.

In the dead of night, sin stirs us with delusion. With worlds fabricated from darkness, resistant to any light, refusing any partnership or negotiation, for our fear will ignore any plea and persist with its own agenda regardless of what we crave or clamor for.

“You are alone,” sin snakes, “so cling to the darkness,” sin coils, “for no one will draw near to your disgust,” sin venoms, “no one will love you through this night,” sin strikes, “for there is no good, all is lost, all heroes are liars, everyone clings to their secrets, and power belongs to those strong enough to destroy others with it—even themselves.”

I look over to my front door as the first rays of day tickle the outline of the owl on the window.

“God, do you see me?” I whisper.

In this collision of the dark of night and the dawn of a new day, I hear God smile back, “My son, let there be light.”

“[Hagar] gave this name to the LORD who spoke to her: ‘You are the God who sees me,’ for she said, ‘I have now seen the One who sees me.’”

~ Genesis 16:13 ~

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The person I struggle to love the most is me. Not enemies. Not family. Me.

A couple of years ago, I sat down in my counselor’s chair determined. Focused. My agenda was clear. At least to me.

It was the first time I’d been to this particular counselor, although not the first time I’d been to counseling. Two to three other stints over the past decade, in fact. Every time before I didn’t know why I was there. I just knew I needed to be.

This time was different. I knew why I was there and what I was looking for.

The session began in predictable fashion: soft lighting; comfortable couch; common question: “So what brings you in today?”

He was a younger counselor than I was used to. But he had an energy to him. A restrained excitement that incited hope. Invited honesty.

“Well, here’s the thing.” I crossed my legs, holding up a finger for each point that follows, “[1] I’m convinced something’s wrong with me, [2] I believe everyone around me knows what it is, but [3] no one will tell me what it is. So, [4] I want you to tell me what they won’t. I want you to tell me what’s wrong with me.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d felt this. Or maybe I’d always felt this way, to some extent, since the first time.

It was a Sunday morning. I was eight years old, minding my own business, dozing off in the fourth pew at my home church. The minister was at least half a century older than me, but I liked him. Maybe because I didn’t know him very well.

It was the late eighties bleeding into the early nineties. The Reagan-era had ended. Desert Storm was impending but not fully present. Michael Jackson dominated Halloween costumes, while Ghost Busters, Smurfs, and He-Man dominated our hearts. I was infatuated with Legos, Karate Kid, and any and all sports.

But, at only eight years old, I was living a secret. One I knew I needed to keep, even if I didn’t totally know why.

Off and on, since at least the age of six, by different people in different locations, I was sexually molested. Or abused. Or assaulted. A different word offered by different counselors throughout my adulthood. But all describing the same story. The same events. The secret I kept throughout my childhood. A secret about to birth anxiety and self-hate through the midwifery of a sermon.

That Sunday morning’s service followed the typical pattern: opening song, awkward announcements, more songs, a clumsy communion meditation, and then the feature presentation: the sermon.

The preacher climbed the pair of stairs, increasing his platform by less than two feet. But he did so a bit labored, hampered by some sort of knee injury in a past life. After his ascent, he braced himself by gripping the oversized, wooden pulpit, leaning, from time to time, a bit too close to the built-in mic, causing it to distort, startling some of us out of our slumber.

I always found it strange how his voice would change when he preached. In the lobby he talked fairly normal, but when the sermon started a cartoonish character took over creating a comical cadence. At least to an eight-year-old.

I don’t remember that particular Sunday’s scripture or his opening line or any of his illustrations or even much about anything that happened after the service. What I remember is the car ride home.

From the backseat, as naïve as ever, I innocently asked, “Mom, what’s a homosexual?”

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If you don’t remember, a portion of the eighties was gripped by the AIDS epidemic. And certain preachers seized the suffering as an opportunity to pronounce God’s judgment on the homosexual community. This Sunday’s sermon in my home church was one of them. The only problem was: at eight years old, I didn’t know what a homosexual was.

In the car, my mom was uncomfortable. Or maybe just plain furious. Not with me, she assured me, but annoyed nonetheless. She offered her age-appropriate definition, and in my eight-year-old internal translation I concluded: I have AIDS.

Molested exclusively by males, I took what I could remember of the sermon and what I discerned of the definition to this terrifying conclusion: I’m dying of AIDS because God is punishing me.

It’s hard to love yourself when you’re convinced your damned. That God is so disgusted with you that he’d rather live the rest of eternity away from you than near you. Anywhere but with you.

This didn’t, though, repel me from God as it does others; it propelled me further toward him. In desperate pursuit of him. Tempted to believe he loves me, even if I don’t love or even like myself.

“I know that’s not fair,” I confessed to my counselor, “but that’s why I’m here. I believe, at my core, something’s wrong with me, but no one has the courage to tell me. Everyone sees the flaw but no one will reveal it to me. So, I want you to tell me. Please. I beg you. Tell me.”

I’m not always this direct. But sometimes my craving for truth grips me, desperately compels me to cast convention aside in pursuit of something more precious. An insight that had eluded me for close to thirty years.

And yet, over the coming weeks, it became clear that my counselor had no interest in answering my impossible request. Not out of stubbornness or ignorance. He simply saw what I didn’t. My question communicated a craving but also clouded the real issue.

In one of our last sessions, he asked me a question. One I wrestled with for two years before my prayers produced an answer.

“Shane, if you could give God a name, what would it be?”

“I don’t understand.” I responded. “What do you mean?”

“Well, do you remember the story of Hagar?”

“Sure,” I lied.

He smiled.

“Well, after Hagar became pregnant with Ishmael, Sarai treated her horribly. So, Hagar run away. As she was on the run, an angel appeared to her and comforted her.”

I nodded, now actually recalling the events.

“At the end of the story,” he continued, “after the angel left, Hagar said, ‘Now I know, you are the God who sees me.’ She gave God a name. So,” he paused. “If you could give God a name, what would it be?”

Weeks turned into months and then years, and I still had no answer. Almost every single day, whether in passing or in times of prayer, the question surfaced. Crept into my consciousness. Reminded me of yet another unresolved query.

Recently, I texted my counselor. We haven’t had a session in over two years, but we talk on occasion, however brief or trivial it may be. So texting him wasn’t odd or out of place. And yet, as in our first session, the text was simple and straight to the point: “I finally have an answer to your question.”

He responded with two words and an emoji: “I’m listening 😊”

Even over text, this felt sacred. Exposing. A bit too vulnerable.

With trembling hands, I pecked each character as an offering to a God I’m still getting familiar with: “If I could give God a name, it would be: You are the God who is more tender with me than I am with myself.”

Over the years, I’ve learned (and I am learning) that love isn’t limited. It expands. Infinitely. Never threatened by scarcity. It creates ever more space to receive another. To include more. To embrace everyone. Maybe even someone like me.

“And Jesus asked his disciples, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ.’ Jesus strictly charged his disciples to tell no one about him.”

~ Mark 8:29-30 ~

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Sometimes I don’t want to speak. Yes, I know: I’m paid to speak. To lecture almost daily. To sermon incessantly. Just talking upon talking. Droning without end.

I must confess. There are moments when I’m speaking that, even as the words are coming out of my mouth, I’m thinking, “My goodness—this is so boring! How can anyone listen to this? How are they staying awake? Gracious: I’m falling asleep.”

Now, I’m grateful—truly grateful—that, for whatever reason, by God’s good grace, people do want to listen to me and, for whatever reason, at times, even request I speak more. Which I’m told is a gift. For attention is difficult to gather but almost impossible to hold.

Yet there are moments—a lot more than not—that I don’t want to speak. That I don’t want to talk. That I just want to drift off into the sacredness of the silence. That I want the unspoken to blanket me in a warmth uncommon in this world filled with so much commentary. With so many opinions. So many words meant to explain what is, yet accomplish something more like confuse what might be understood if we simply didn’t say anything at all.

I remember the silence that swaddled the theater at the end of the movie The Passion of the Christ. No one moved. No one spoke. Everyone just caught in the space between the end of the movie and the beginning of a life forgotten for at least a couple hours.

In silence, I rose from my seat that smelled of death and walked out of the theater as cold as a tomb. But I knew what was coming. I even attempted to avoid it. The question. The invitation. The vindictive query, “So Shane, what’d ya think?”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to be rude. But I didn’t want to speak. I wanted to hold the sacredness of the unspoken for as long as possible. For I knew the moment words formed, intending to hold what was just beheld, that a cheapening would pervert the memory. Would taint the beauty of the sacred moment.

As I was writing that last sentence a worker at Starbucks came up to me mouthing words that my headphones cancelled, which for an introvert, such as myself, is quite terrifying. Overwhelming, really.

A bit annoyed, I pulled out my left earbud, “I’m sorry?”

“Oh, I’mmmmmm sorrrrrrry,” she said with a slow, elongated draw. She smiled and stammered out, “I diiiiiddddnnn’t see your ear thiiiiinnngggssss.”

Her special needs shined with a beautiful simplicity. Her crooked smile covered any embarrassment with a polite courage. Clichés peppered her speech along with eyerolls she clearly had seen others toss her way.

“Arrrree you rrrreeaaadddddyyy for Christmas?” she slurred.

“I am so excited for Christmas,” I smiled back. “How about you?”

“Well,” she sat down next to me, “leeeetttt meee telllll you…”

For the next fifteen minutes, we talked about my children, playing the trumpet, working the holidays, trying to avoid speeding tickets, her friend’s upcoming baby shower, the life of a pastor, being a maid of honor, and wishing we both could play the saxophone. It was delightful. A welcomed disruption to my silent isolation where I was pontificating about not wanting to use words. We talked. And I am better for it.

And yet, it’s what we didn’t say that meant the most. The exchange beyond the words that moved me deeply. That even now, as I write and reflect, it’s what wasn’t said that I selfishly treasure. Something whispered with each breath linking every word. Something laced in each banter and present in every half smile. Something at hand in every awkward silence—the beauty of the unspoken. The subtle announcement that “I see you” accompanied by the shy question “Do you see me?”

I actually don’t want to talk about that conversation anymore. I sense something is being lost with every word I write about it. Something I want to hide in the chambers of my heart accessible only to the Spirit and my inner critic. Not to any audience, however much I may love them.

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We just live in a world convinced that every event must have everyone’s opinions affixed and fashioned by words for any and all to hear. Every bump or fall of the Nasdaq or Dow Jones, every weather pattern feared or endured, every rise and fall of gasoline at the pump, every sporting event, every mass shooting, every political point, every single controversy—whether real or perceived or fabricated—words are expected. Comments venerated. Opinions abound, whether informed or something else altogether. Speaking fills our screens and spews from our lips. And with every word, however wise or asinine, we’re convinced we accomplished something simply because we spoke.

Which simply isn’t true.

Now, this isn’t a plea for mere silence. This is a plea for the unspoken. This is a love song for the truth that wilts at the thought of being dressed in robes of words. This is a desperate call to recover the profundity of the lull after lifechanging moments filled with only exasperated sighs seeking some sort of explanation for what just occurred. Yet not an explanation that can be shared. Only felt. Only experienced.

I think Jesus fought for these same moments. Begged for the unspoken to remain unmolested. Unarticulated. Unencumbered by words. Countless times he’d heal a victim of this broken world, share a sacred moment, and end the scene with, “Now go, be free, and tell no one about me.”

The amount of ink spilled by scholars trying to explicate this “messianic secret” is endless. Countless words attempting to explain why Jesus sought the unspoken. “Maybe he didn’t want to get too popular too quick for fear of Rome’s reprisal?” some suggest. “Maybe it was purely logistical,” some argue, “for the more popular he became the more difficult it would become for him to travel even short distances, limiting his ministry, muting his impact, competing with his goals to preach to the masses…” and on and on it goes.

But what if it was more simple, even if more profound? What if Jesus merely saw something more valuable in the unspoken than in what words could offer?

I know how sacrilege this may seem to some. I come from a tradition that idolizes the spoken word. The evangelical world is convinced, so it seems, that the mystery of God can only cascade on the waves of words. Sunday morning services displace worship and even the Lord’s supper for the sermon. A sermon that, according to every church growth template, should explain not only the text or the topic but be properly fit with at least three points of application that should, preferably, all start with the same letter.

The message is simple: “Leave nothing to the unspoken.” Or to say it differently: “Don’t entrust anything to the movement of the Spirit. Articulate all. Otherwise, the audience may miss the point.”

The spoken word is now central. The unspoken distrusted. Perhaps even held with disdain.

As a preacher and teacher, writer and author, I disagree. Yes, words matter. But maybe less words matter more. Enhance all. Offer a pathway forward for the preacher and the pauper, the introvert and the delightfully intrusive Starbucks employee. For in the unspoken, God speaks a language more fit for the soul than even the words that conjured light from darkness “in the beginning.”

Yes, God speaks, in both red letters and black. But at some point, we need to attune our hearts and minds to the words not spoken. To the words pulsing in the empty space of the white page holding every shade of ink.

Then again, maybe I’m just tired of my own voice. I do talk a lot.

“What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?”

~ Matthew 18:12 ~

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What am I searching for?

Well, I’m hungry. I know that’s true. As I sit on this bench, my stomach is rumbling rather nosily, begging for attention like a toddler who wants you to hold them only because you have an ice cream cone. But “dinner” isn’t what I’m searching for. Ultimately or immediately, I suppose. No, it’s something more. Something deeper.

I’ve been searching for much of my life. Looking for something. Always. Yet never with clear direction. Never quite certain of the target.

As a child, I remember trying to piece together whatever unseen puzzle I assumed was scattered throughout my small world. Always trying to reconstruct a disbanded mosaic containing a breathtaking portrait that, when beheld, would satisfy my insatiable craving.

I searched the faces of each adult, peering deep into their eyes, certain they knew what I sought, just didn’t know how to fully translate its divine wonder. I was convinced, though, that, one day, the grown-ups would uncover the Rosetta Stone essential to complete my search. Mainly because I believed in them. Their goodness. I believed adults weren’t as cruel as children. I was certain their kind had outgrown the struggles of sharing. Confident they were nothing like the arrogant and the arid encountered on the playground at recess. Convinced they could guide me to whatever treasure I was searching for.

In eighth grade, I wasn’t receiving much playing time on my school’s basketball team. A tragedy to thirteen-year-old me whose world was consumed with the minute, ensconced with self, and enslaved to the search.

I loved the challenge inherent in sports. The competition with myself and with others. I loved the pain after a physical game, be it basketball, soccer, or backyard football. There was something in the struggle, the tension between collective effort and individual prowess, that I craved. That I loved. That I obsessed over.

But sports betrayed me. My passion outpaced my body—my physical ability limited by a sub-five-foot frame.

One day after practice, I mustered the courage to march into my coach’s office with a confidence draped awkwardly on my slight shoulders.

“Coach?” I cracked.

“What?!” he squawked.

“Um, I was, uh, wondering…” I stammered.

“Yeah?!” he hurried.

“I, uh, I was wondering, um, what I, what I could work on to maybe, um, to work on to get, uh, some more, um, you know, some more playing time?”

I don’t remember seeing his eyes roll, but I do remember hearing them.

“Ha!” he started. “Well, for starters, you could grow six inches.”

The room seemed to shrink. The walls pressed in and the temperature rose, blossoming beads of sweat on my brow. I’m certain he said more. But all I can remember is littered laughter and a flippant comment about me hanging upside down by my toes to elongate my 4’11” frame.

With all my might, I blinked away the tears blurring my vision. I don’t even know if I responded, I just remember leaving the gym, arriving home, racing to my room, burying my face in my pillow, and weeping on my bed for what must’ve been the rest of my middle school basketball career.

I can still taste that pain. I can still feel her contours, her curves, her seductive suggestion to wallow, even if only a little longer, in the self-pity and self-loathing that seem more real than the phantoms of pleasure and victory I’d clutched before or anytime thereafter. After a while, though, feeling-sorry-for-myself wore off, and the search for whatever unfolded further.

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All throughout high school, theater, musicals and one-act plays filled the void left by my troll of a basketball coach. I memorized script after script in search of something.

For me, the stage offered an intoxication unlike any other extracurricular activity. On stage, I could be someone different. Different clothes, different accent, different gait. Just different. Altogether and all-consuming. On stage, I explored emotions that, far too often, cowered beneath my surface like a roach scurrying away at the slight movement of an unsuspecting patron. Emotions I didn’t know I had or wasn’t aware I was allowed to have unfurled with tantalizing freedom, inviting me on enchanting explorations.

Anger was my favorite. I found it comforting in a way. Maybe that’s twisted. But it was soothing all the same. A therapy beyond words to put on the mask of another whose emotions matched my own—at least those buried six feet beneath my smile.

At times, I felt like I needed to thank the character. Like I owed a debt to the script that allowed me to be more of me than most days afford. More like me than most can tolerate. To thank the character for allowing me to explore, to search, to find me amidst the fragments that most of my friends and family labelled “Shane.” The character encouraged my search by revealing the me beneath the accomplishments and accolades that conceal more than they celebrate.

I’m older now. But not much has changed. Or so it seems. Sure, the modes are different, but the motivation seems oddly familiar. Possibly even the same.

As an adult, I amass diplomas and degrees like I once collected baseball cards, gathering them and then forgetting them in a box in the attic. A collision of value and cheap reward. Accomplishment and “who-even-cares.” As an adult, I teach classes, preach sermons, and travel to cities to write books and posts for my substack, tirelessly articulating mysteries that elude words, that mock my attempts, that remind me of the portrait I crayoned with pride until my teacher gave me a low grade because I didn’t keep my color inside the lines.

Something stirs, I strive, and end where I began: still searching.

Desperately. For something. I just don’t know what.

Maybe I’m just angsty today. Or maybe it’s just this location that stirs something within me. I’m sitting on a bench outside the Quincy market in the heart of Boston mere paces away from the infamous massacre and the meeting place that birthed the timeless tea party. Protests that shaped history, testifying to their own search. Their own pursuit of freedom, liberty, or something they too couldn’t quite articulate.

Shoot, maybe it’s just the below freezing temperatures that keep causing me to put on and take off my gloves, wrestling between how much I want to keep writing and how much cold my fingers can truly tolerate. My index fingers are actually numb right now. Which might be more of an insight than an obstacle.

I mean, maybe I’m searching for ways to simply go numb. Ways to escape a pain no one prepared me for. Most pursue a form of paralysis, after all, so why not me?

But even as I finished that last line, I knew it wasn’t true. It just feels off. Somehow forced. Kind of like convincing myself I ought to say the answer is “God.” I’m searching for God. Which I’m sure, on some level, is always true. Is always the true source of my desire and longing, for he is Desire itself. But if I’m honest, even that bible-based answer doesn’t settle the stirring within.

Then again, maybe that’s the point.

Maybe what I’m searching for is searching itself. The journey “toward” always transforms the one brave enough to journey at all. The adventure “after” always unveils treasures of self and revelations of God unfit for those fettered to lounging and laziness. Epic tales intrigue each generation. From campfires to classrooms, from plays to pulpits, the perils of pursuit enshrine heroines into our collective memories and heroes into our wayward hearts. For every exploration offers some insight, some bounty, some discovery of God and of self. Maybe what I’m searching for, then, is searching itself.

Or maybe I’m just hungry. I did miss dinner.

“The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”

~ 2 Peter 3:9 ~

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I think hoarders get a bad rap.

There. I said it.

Not that anyone asked me for a defense or even agrees with my assessment.

Yes, the word “hoard” elicits images of disgust, and the phonetic resemblance to other mischievousness does little to redeem it. But I shan’t stand by any longer allowing this oppressed group to be berated anymore.

Or something like that. (Just maybe a bit less dramatic and without the British accent.)

It’s hard to envision, I know, but hoarders are more akin to heroes than villains. Regardless of their reputation, I don’t think collecting is bad. Or even misguided. On some level, I believe it’s holy. God-like. For even the Lord seems a bit fixated on collecting souls for heaven. Sacrificing himself for us even “while we were God’s enemies” (Rom. 5:10a). Even placing each person at precise moments in history and in exact locations on earth to give them the greatest opportunity to “seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:26-27).

Indeed, he’s remarkably close by. Why? Because God is a hoarder of humanity, collecting as many as he can, always finding room for one more.

But that’s not how hoarding is held. At least by most.

Reality shows spectacle hoarders as a “condition”—with HGTV filling screens with piles of mail and “collectibles” strewn about from wall to wall, columned from floor to ceiling. Halfway through the episode, the hoarder is coached like an alcoholic, cajoled into seeing “filth” where the deranged subject sees “treasure.” At times, a type of “intervention” is necessary, where the collector is cornered until they’re willing to admit “I have a problem.” But even when the words are recited, the disbelief can still be sensed in the tone: “I have problem?” Oh, I mean, “Yes, I have a problem.”

As the house is unpacked, scattered across the lawn for God and all the nosy neighbors to judge, emotion begins to surface. Buyer’s remorse sets in, and the hoarder begins to grieve. To lament what might be lost. Years of collecting ushered away in the name of “organization.” To cure them of the disease of hoarding, tears must wash away the connection so a new birth can commence. A new life can unfold, free from the need to collect. To amass. To hoard.

Yet we all do it. We all collect. And not just a little, but much. Not just reasonable portions, but ungodly loads. We just lather our collections with lipstick or a top hat, believing if it’s presented different, then, indeed, it must be.

I guess, at this point, I ought to admit: there is a danger inherent in hoarding. A hellish dimension present in the passion that must be confronted, or at least acknowledged. For oftentimes, what we thought we were collecting was, in the end, collecting us. Enslaving us. Hoarding all of us: body, soul, heart, and mind.

Some collect information. They poke and prod with subtlety, transforming each conversation into a garage sale filled with cast away treasures. They haggle for the lowest price, walking away unsure of its value or how it even works or if they even need it at all or will ever even use it. Yet they walk away proud, because a treasure was added to their collection. A tidbit of gossip that may be used against others at an opportune time to advance what matters most. At least to them: promotions or sympathy or just the boring downfall of someone they loathe for whatever reason, trivial or otherwise.

The youth labels this “collecting receipts;” adults call it “climbing the social ladder.” But to me it’s just another form of hoarding. Albeit more demonic than angelic.

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About an hour or so ago, I was walking down the street, when I was stalled by a busy intersection where traffic and tourists collide outside the Boston Public Library. Trinity church was just off in the distance, one of many gothic-styled steeples peppering the city streets. Many of these churches date back to the early 1800s, with several still in their adolescence, only founded in 1904 or so. To come upon them is breathtaking. They puncture the towering high rises with archaic beauty, disrupting the opulence of city life with monuments of faith. Faith not necessarily present, for most of them are now repurposed with a variety of shops and cafes. But a reminder of a faith that once populated a city rife with history and protests.

I stopped, peering up at one of them, when a person next to me rudely clipped my shoulder. Jolted, I looked at my assailant only to be disarmed by an embarrassed smile and a polite, “Oh, excuse me!” as they held their phone overhead taking a picture.

Looking around, I saw they weren’t the only one. The intersection was filled with arms akimbo, phones cupped like hot chocolate raised in libation to the heavens, snapping photos in every direction imaginable. Some raised their audacity to a fever pitch as they posed amidst the trafficked tourists, blocking entire portions of the sidewalk with the expectation that everyone would take whatever detour available so as not to disrupt their photo-op.

This isn’t a rare occurrence anymore, though. As a society, we hoard pictures, snapping enough to sag a cloud or at least fill the storage on our phone. We stockpile pictures that, often, insulate us from reality. Orchestrate what we wish was true even if we must deny significant portions of what’s real.

The light changed from red to white, signaling a green “Go” to pedestrians. But no one moved. Everyone hoarding what is through filters of what never was.

I muttered something self-righteous under my breathe, something to the effect of, “Can’t we just enjoy what we see anymore? Must we dirty up the real with fake portraits and AI effects?” Only to have the Spirit interject with a whisper in my judgmental ears, “You do this too, you know.”

It’s true. I struggle with hoarding too. Mine is just cloaked a bit better than most.

I hoard experiences. Not interaction with people, so much. But with events. I love going to concerts, live-sporting events, musicals, landmarks, other countries, other cities. I’m okay living in a house that’s too small with furniture that’s well-worn and clothes thrifted or gifted just to save money for another experience.

In fact, after the pandemic, when all of the world was slowly emerging from hibernation, I planned a trip to serve my condition. We’d saved all our stimulus money, not spending a cent to stir the economy as the government intended. Instead, we set out to plan an epic adventure funded by Good Ol’ Uncle Biden.

I covered our kitchen wall with a cork board and a map of the United States, and I informed my family of their role, “I want everyone to come up with as many different landmarks or national parks or cool things you want to see, and then put a pushpin in the location on the map.”

Over the next few days, the map was punctured with dream after dream. My plan? I wanted to spend the entire summer visiting every single thumbtack.

Although, my ambition was tempered a bit by reality—and my wife. Even still, we devised a route for driving 6,000 miles in 11 days, beginning in Roswell, NM, hitting the redwoods of California, and ending at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, with the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, the Las Vegas strip, and a ferry out to Alcatraz in between.

The only rule for the trip was simple: if anyone got bored at any site, no matter how long or short we’d been there, we’d pile back into the van to head off to our next destination.

Truly, it was a trip shaped in the image of my condition, a journey that served my addiction to hoarding experiences. And I loved it. Every minute of it. The laughter, the inside jokes, the silliness spurred on by “traffic disease,” and the scenery. Not just God’s crafty creations, but the face of each child lighting up with each new encounter. Core memories forming with every passing Joshua tree, Hollywood star, and hotel room for the night. We weren’t just traveling, we were hoarding. Each other. God’s presence. And everything in between.

And I’m not sure I’m ready to repent of any of it just yet. Not even the hoarding.

“On each side of the river of life stood the tree of life…and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.”

~ Revelation 22:2b-3a ~

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Do trees weep? Do they wince in pain when a limb snaps under the weight of a child climber? Do they tense with anxiety as the wind upturns their leaves, whispering warnings of a storm fast approaching?

Sometimes I wish we lived in a fairytale. Some George MacDonald world where questions like this aren’t odd but assumed. Or maybe I just wish Christians could sense more life beyond the categories they’ve used to solve God’s grand mystery.

Too often questions like these are accused of some concoction of New Age or Pantheism. But the older I get and the deeper I dive into the vastness of God’s unveiling of himself to us, the more questions like these emerge, inviting me to venture beyond the looking glass into a world more real than the one I’ve settled for.

Do trees weep?

I know they breathe, or at least mimic a pattern similar to humans, just inverted: inhaling CO₂; exhaling oxygen. I know trees bleed, or at least mirror the scrape on my knee with their oozing sap. I know they have names, some Latin and others more simple like “oak” or “maple” for the laity like me.

But do they weep?

Do they spiral with regret when they realize exactly why the fluorescent orange band has been tied around their trunk? Do they grieve when chainsaws reduce groves to graves, loved ones reduced to limbs and sawdust? Or when the first chop of the ax announces their end, do tears seep out like dew, fearing death as humans do?

I was walking by a tree just moments ago. I don’t know its name, but it looked like a tall weeping willow, limbs lifted to the heavens with tangled branches cascading back to the earth. It was raining as I passed under her shade, and without thinking, I said, “Thank you, friend.”

I immediately felt foolish. Even questioned my orthodoxy.

But I was thankful. And I thought something ought to be said.

“How often has this tree been thanked?” I wondered aloud.

No one was near, so I lingered a bit longer. Unafraid of anyone ever finding out about my sacred conversation with a tree.

“How many people over the decades of your life have walked beneath your grace without even acknowledging your presence?” I whispered.

Guilt washed over me as I looked back down the sidewalk littered with other trees I’d passed by without a second thought. Without even noticing their existence. Like panhandlers on a street corner, passersby get used to simply ignoring and not acknowledging they’re in the presence of a life. In this case, though, the tree asked nothing of me, even as it umbrella-ed me from the pouring rain. The least I could do is say “thank you.”

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I glanced up higher to the limbs suspended between heaven and earth, to the top of its sprawling canopy. And then I saw it.

Camouflaged amidst the dreadlocked limbs was a rope. Tied. Noosed. Slightly swaying and, to my mind, a bit menacing.

“Do trees weep?” I wondered. “Weep when no ax is near but death is still humming its cryptic song.”

Abuse has many expressions, infinite forms. And humanity seems to discover its most lavish creativity when it comes to torture. The gallows are chief among them. A tree transformed from a partner in the cycle of life into an altar of hate. A tool of torture. Limbs employed in the evils of lynching.

Do trees weep?

When forced to support the suffering of another? When enslaved by hate? When gasps of air are not welcomed by the cycle of life but evidence that a life is coming to an end on the limbs of a tree planted for the opposite? Created by Good for good.

Do trees weep when a man’s blood mingles with the syrupy sap gushing from a wound of its own?

The rope seemed to smile with sinister delight. The tree seemed heavier, heaving a bit under the rain and the memory of its kin. I shook my head, disgusted and in pain at what creatures do to God’s beloved creation.

A tree’s rings, I’ve been told, tell stories. Hold histories of the land often not witnessed by woman or man. Droughts and wildfires and floods leave traces in the waves of each ring, marking each limbs heartbeat with a lyric only learned when the wood is split open. Trees, like humans, have memories. Stories. Tales of toil and persistence woven into its life-giving trunk as accurate as the most elaborate memoir. Yet memories only seen when pierced.

“Did the tree know?” I murmured. “Did the tree on Calvary know who it held?”

The Creator supported by its creation, suspended between heaven and earth by the hate of others.

“Did the tree weep?”

I mean, the sun turned dark, the earth quaked, the veil inexplicably tore from top to bottom. Creation mourning, rending its garments, for hate had reached new heights when “love-became-flesh” was sacrificed on the “altar-of-self-preservation.”

Did the tree weep when it felt the nails carry the blood of its maker into its splintered beam? Did it whisper profuse apologies: “Jesus, I’m sorry! I once sustained life but now I support your death. Lean on me, oh King, even though I don’t have oxygen to give.”

With each breath, did the tree feel the life of our Lord leave his human form? Did the tree try to sing soothing songs as hope was slipping away? Did the tree try to resist death’s gaze? To refuse its advance? To protect its Master from this oppressive evil?

“God, why did you create me with the power to take life?” the tree lamented. “What you ask of me is too much. I can’t add this to the story of my rings, for the weight of this storm is too immense.”

Did Jesus respond? Did he console his beloved creation?

As the tree labored under the weight of its creator, did Jesus comfort: “Oh, my beloved, I know I ask much of you, but I’m grateful. Grateful for you. For your willingness to be my closest companion in this journey that, I too, fear. Don’t weep. Don’t be ashamed. For in me, you are not my end, but a new beginning. You are the emblem of my victory. The instrument through which all creation will be freed, released from bondage, liberated from Death. You, my dear creation, will be a central part of my story. A chosen lyric in my song, for which I am eternally grateful.”

Sitting under this tree, I now realize I have much to learn from them. Oddly, I even find myself longing to be as faithful as a tree. Undeterred by God’s call on my life. Just grateful to bridge heaven to earth. Come what may.

“Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples…‘I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.’”

~ Matthew 26:36, 38 ~

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I like Jesus. Yes, I also love him. Yes, I know he’s God-incarnate, our God-in-the-flesh, and yes, I’m aware that saying something like “I like him” falls woefully short of who he is, verging, for some, on blaspheme. So, call me a heretic, if you will, but I refuse to recant: I like Jesus.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

I mean, I love it when my wife reminds me she doesn’t just love me but she likes me too. We said “I do” and, in our family, that means forever. But “I do” doesn’t always mean you like the person you profess you love.

Kids prove this point all the time. Especially as they approach adulthood. Yes, they love their parents who took their unresolved childhood issues out on them, but it doesn’t mean they like them. Like spending time with them. Like talking to them. Or sometimes even like just being near them.

Which is why I find it remarkable when my kids still want to hang out with me and watch Stranger Things or go to Tropical Smoothie or even just pop in my office because they were in the area. Even when I struggle to be with myself, my kids, for some reason, still want to be near me—because they like me.

And I like Jesus.

But I don’t just like him. I admire him. For a lot of things, actually. I’m stunned with admiration at John 13 when he washes the feet of his disciples, even Judas who, according to Luke’s gospel, had already been inhabited by Satan. I admire Jesus’ silence in the presence of his enemies, as the Sanhedrin bait and pander for a single response to the false accusations and the fabricated witnesses. I admire his rejection of the gall mixed with wine, refusing to deaden any of the pain the cross had to give, that death had to offer. I admire his conversation with the thief to his left, his cry on the cross on behalf of his enemies, and his boldness to sing a Psalm while hanging from the tree, even one that begins as drab as Psalm 22.

I don’t just like Jesus. I admire him. I marvel at his tenderness with the woman at the well. Chuckle at his wit pervading his endless encounters with the Pharisees. Simply shake my head in disbelief as I hear the stones drop one-by-one after Jesus’ clever response, “Whoever is without sin, go ahead and cast the first stone” (Jn. 8:7).

The list goes on, I assure you, easily flowing from one jarring event to another. But right now, my admiration is fixated, obsessed even, on a single event in the life of Jesus. As cliché as it sounds, I can’t stop thinking about his death. His end. Not simply because the event saves me from my sins, although, indeed, I do believe it does. No, I’m struck with admiration by this simple truth: Jesus finished strong.

And that’s not easy to do.

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The end of a race is rarely the easiest. Muscles tighten as the mind labors in limbo, believing one stride “I can do this” only to admit in the next “There’s no freaking way.” The end of the semester or the denouement of a high school career proves the same point. The strain of assignments and the promise of impending freedom transform the academic end into many different forms of “-itis,” Senior- or otherwise.

Finishing strong is hard. Treacherous. Rare. Takes tons of practice filled with failure and small victories, regardless of how big or small the finish line may be. Finishing strong is grueling. Severe. At times, almost unfair.

And I assume: life’s end will be no different.

My mentor died on April 28, 2011, with his funeral four days later on my birthday. Sitting in the pews of the packed chapel at Lincoln Christian University, I was overcome with admiration. Not because he passed through the veil from this life to the next without strain or struggle. But because of the opposite.

His cancer was incurable at the outset. A diagnosis void of hope and rife with impossibility. The months and years to follow ravaged his body. I have a picture in my office, hanging just above this computer screen, of one of the last times I saw him. He looks frail. His clothes hang off him. I guess losing 100 pounds in one year will alter all sorts of things. Yet his smile radiates a joy often only uncovered in the face of impending death.

One of my friends was at his bedside in the days just before his passing. He held his hand as both were weeping. My mentor shook his head, slightly displacing the oxygen tube draped around his sunken face.

“What is it?” my friend asked.

“I just can’t believe it,” he responded, still shaking his head. “After all these years of teaching the Bible, of preaching the hope of Jesus, of exegeting text after text on heaven…I’m still scared to die.”

He didn’t hide it. Or maybe he couldn’t. A life of integrity will do that to you. Produce truth at the most subtle of promptings.

He was ashamed. But I’m not.

Fearing death isn’t evidence of finishing poorly. It’s an acknowledgement of the sacredness inherent in the moment, present in the final passing. Even in Gethsemane, Jesus pleaded with God, sweat blood as he strained his voice growing ever more hoarse, “Father, please take this cup from me” (Matt. 26:39). Death’s mien is so menacing even the author of life feared descending into its depths. Finishing strong, then, doesn’t demand no fear of death; it simply requires being honest about it.

We weren’t meant to die. We weren’t created for it. It fits us awkwardly regardless of how thorough the tailor exacts his adjustments. We were created to live. We were made for life. For love. For admiration. We were made to finish strong.

I pray, on my deathbed, God will find me struggling. Honest in my lament even as I’m resilient in my resolve. Pressing my trust beyond what my body can endure or is prepared to embrace. Believing beyond hope that my admiration for my mentor and for Jesus Christ himself moves beyond words on a screen and bleeds into my being. So that as I pass through the veil I can cry, “Where oh Death is your victory,” even if moments prior I felt its sting.

Something in there, I’m sure, is akin to finishing strong. Or so I like to think.

““You study the Scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”

~ John 5:39-40 ~

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This past Sunday a preacher recited a familiar imperative from stage. And I was ashamed of my reaction.

I’d heard the command before. Quite often, in fact. Growing up in the church, there aren’t many axioms or formulas I’m unfamiliar with. At times I feel like a rolodex of Christian rules refashioned as pithy proverbs with rhythmic patterns and lyrical precision carefully crafted to roll off the tongue and lodge deep within the mind to be rehearsed and recalled with ease. And this command was no different.

The sermon was on Luke 10:25-37, where an “expert in the law” tested Jesus with a question, only to receive a question in return:

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Well, what is written in the Law?”

The expert’s reply was precise and kosher, a keen recitation of both Deuteronomy 6:5 (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart…”) and Leviticus 19:18 (“Love your neighbor as yourself”), all from memory without reference to any scroll. All answers accurate, as Jesus himself admits (“You have answered correctly.”).

At this point in the sermon, the preacher stopped for an aside. An interruption from the alliterated three points, offering an old adage in the form of a familiar command: “Church—Hide God’s word in your heart!” With persistent eloquence, the preacher pleaded, “Read God’s word; memorize God’s word; study God’s word; and it will transform you!”

Scattered voices throughout the pews muttered versions of “Amen!” with varying degrees of volume. Even the unspoken responses nodded in approval, for who could be so calloused as to disagree with such an obvious truth?

And yet, I found myself resisting. Recoiling from the call. Shaking my head in disapproval as if to retort, “But I’m not sure that’s what we need.” As a church. As the Church. As Christians in post-pandemic America.

Which is odd. Perhaps, even shameful. Especially coming from an ordained minister and biblical scholar. Someone saturated in Scripture their entire life.

My earliest memories are from Sunday school at Elm Street Church of Christ in St. Charles, MO. For all its quirks and quarrels, this church excelled at teaching Scripture. At the age of four, I was required to recite from memory my books of the Bible, the weekly memory verse, and, by age five, even deliver my first devotional on the story of Jonah.

I still remember the creaks from each step spiraling down into the basement, the rusty taste of the water fountain at the end of the darkened hall, the musty smell that permeated each classroom yet never found its way into the sanctuary. I can still feel the excitement when our Sunday school teacher would set the felt green board on an easel, reaching for the two-dimensional characters to reenact the ancient stories of our sacred books. I can still sing the songs that introduced me to Zacchaeus, Father Abraham, and discipled me with lyrics like “trust and obey, for theirs no other way to be happy in Jesus.”

Which is why, over the past several years, I’ve been so confused and disheartened. So unnerved and discouraged. For the same Sunday school teachers that taught me the courage of Moses, the purity of Mary, the faults of David, the faith of Ruth, and the Name of above all names fill their social media with vitriol and contempt, arguments and arrogance, hostility and Scripture quotes decorated with clipart.

I know many are as disoriented as I with every megachurch scandal and every mega-ministry abuse that populates newsfeeds with podcasts, documentaries, and journalistic features reminding us of the corrosion just beyond the veil. But my giants of the faith have always been youth volunteers who taught me to pray, d-group leaders who distracted me with Veggie Tales, and Sunday school teachers who quizzed me with “sword” drills. The ones who implored me to “Hide God’s word in your heart,” but who now seem more obsessed with politics and power than Jesus and loving your neighbor.

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Now, this isn’t just another complaint or another post filled with cheap accusations. This article is a question. An attempt at self-reflection. A conversation starter for the American church today populated with as many Bibles as believers: What good is it to read and memorize the word of God, if we don’t allow it to transform us into the Word of God himself?

I mean, Satan can quote scripture from memory (Matt. 4:1-11), but I would hardly suggest he’s holy. For memorization without sanctification can, apparently, lead to confrontation with Christ himself, where we weaponize the very words he inspired in order to fend off Christ’s advances to truly live in us.

At some point, self-reflection ought to inquire, “When I hide the Scripture in my heart, who am I hiding it from?” For even though I’ve been immersed in Scripture from birth, I’m humbled by the fact that the “expert of the law” in Luke 10 got all the questions right and quoted all the Scriptures correctly, and yet, his bigotry still wouldn’t allow him to say the simple answer, “The Samaritan.”

You know the story.

In response to the question, “who is my neighbor?”, Jesus tells a now familiar tale of a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho who was robbed, beaten, and left for dead. Giants of the faith paraded along the same road—a priest intimate with God’s rituals and a Levite well-versed in God’s law. Yet both failed to see. Both failed to respond. Both discovered the man and discarded him, callously passing by clinging to excuses we probably employ today.

But then comes a Samaritan. An inter-bred disgrace to the people of YHWH, despised by all as a sacrilegious sore on the holy society of God’s people. A villain in sacred history. And yet, with great sacrifice and immense risk, the Samaritan is moved by pity to action, caring for the castaway as if he were his own. Loving him as he loves himself.

Jesus ends the story with a simple a question that has a simple answer: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man?”

Silence. A pregnant pause where the right answer confronts the reflection in the mirror.

“The one,” the expert in the law replied, gritting teeth, “who had mercy on him.”

He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t credit his enemy by name even in a hypothetical. For something else was hidden in his heart that choked out Scripture’s transformative power. A foreign enemy that allowed him to quote Scripture and answer correctly but refused transformation into the image of the God he claimed to serve.

I know this enemy. Intimately.

I know the callouses covering my own heart. They are thick and deep. They attempt to imprison all that ventures in, not allowing visitors or even light to shine much brighter than a dim. Yet they court the presence of bitterness and resentment, malice that matures into weaponry, strategic or otherwise, that I wield against my enemies, God or anyone else.

And even as the sword of Scripture penetrates this hardened shell, I still have a choice in what comes next. I still have to decide if I will allow the Spirit to transform my anger into seeds of grace, my poisonous tongue into a soothing song of mercy. For reading and memorizing Scripture, however much or however little, doesn’t abdicate my responsibility to choose, to respond to Christ’s command to “Go and do likewise.”

In the end, right answers or not, the choice to transform is still mine.

“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining the to the resurrection from the dead.”

~ Philippians 3:10-11 ~

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When Christ redeemed death on the cross, it created quite a quandary. An annoyance, really.

Yes, it proffered salvation, which I’m, indeed, quite grateful for. But it also transformed darkness, suffering, betrayal, and every flavor of evil into entry points for intimacy with God. Which, at times, is frustrating. Angering, really.

Sure, I’m aware of and frequently rehearse the Christian script for times of trial, where tragedy is Christmas wrapped with silver lining. But even still, there’s a large part of me that’s just frustrated by it all. By grace, I mean. By its powerful transformation that knows no bounds or barriers that can’t be overcome by its love and mercy.

This morning, I prayed a prayer more fit for saints than a sluggard. A prayer more confounding than comforting. A prayer birthed by grace and a faith chastened by the cross of Christ.

I came across the prayer while reading about a particular group of saints from the 12^th-16^th centuries. A unique strand of Christ-followers who befriended what St. John of the Cross (a 16^th century monk) described as the “dark night of the soul.”

One saint, in particular, Julian of Norwich (a 14^th century anchoress), encountered God during a time of panic and pandemic. A time beleaguered by the bubonic plague, which extinguished roughly one out of every two people in Britain. Suffering saturated every home; fear divided families and communities; death graced cribs and the elderly alike.

Julian, however, had the audacity to befriend suffering, even praying for God to permit her to suffer to the point of death. And, at the age of 30, she, indeed, almost died of an illness, even receiving last rites from a Catholic priest when all hope was lost and the night seemed too long for her to survive.

But she did. She did survive. Resurrect even, leaving the linens of the deathbed for a life laced with joy. Impenetrable joy that no pandemic could threaten. Unending peace nurtured by community with Christ unavailable for those of us who run from darkness, flee from pain, avoid by any measure even a pinch of discomfort.

Reading such a testimony tempted me to do more than merely ruminate, but challenged me to pray. To pray a prayer I shudder to recall.

“What can I learn from pain?”

It was accidental, I assure you. Even as the words fell from my lips, I tried desperately to retrieve them like a child straining for their balloon as the helium launched it heavenward. I panicked a bit, adding addendums and caveats to soften whatever divine blow may come.

“Well, not that I’m asking for pain, per se, because, you know, Christians aren’t sadists and should rebuff any Messiah-complex that may creep in, I mean, I know, God, we follow a crucified King, but, you know, you didn’t create evil, and therefore no Christian should glorify it or pine for it in anyway, so, you see, that’s not what I’m asking for, I just, you know…thought that…you know what? Just forget it.”

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t forget it. I said it, and I knew it was right to have said it. I knew that it was even scriptural, for in the moment, I remembered that somewhere Paul announced it as his desire, his craving to “know Christ” and koinonia “in his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10)—a word that can be translated “fellowship” or “participate” or even “commune.”

So, I repented. I released my panic and pressed deeper into the mystery of a saint’s prayer uttered with careless devotion.

Pain, though, was a bit too generic. Too vague. A haphazard label that can include a paper cut or a cancer diagnosis. So, I sharpened the petition while envisioning specific scenarios, both recent and past.

“What can I learn from betrayal?”

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I thought of Christ.

It’s hard not to when you think of any “double-cross” of any ilk. The movements of Judas are hard to overlook or even fathom. I mean, over three years, Jesus lived with, laughed with, cried with, taught, loved, walked, and sat with Judas. And this was the result? What more could Jesus have done? What more did Judas need to see? How could someone be so heartless? So self-serving? So calloused of heart and mind?

I thought of Gethsemane.

Jesus wrestling in the garden. Alone. Even the inner three spurned Christ’s request for another hour of sleep. I wonder if he could hear their “sleep-breathing” as he wrestled in prayer. I wonder if he could hear the Roman soldiers snaking their way to his side. I wonder if he could see torches dancing up and down, illuminating a face or two along the path—some familiar and others resolute. I wonder if he could taste the pain of betrayal mixed with his sweat and blood.

I thought of his prayer.

Jesus’ pleading. Christ calling out to God, longing for intimacy without suffering or pain, “Take this cup from me!” Crying out to his father not out of disobedience, but out of desperation to avoid the fruit of Eden’s garden.

Quietly, without warning, I whispered, “God, is there any other way? To be close to you. To be found by you. To know you more deeply. Is there not a path free from pain?”

I tilted my head, trying to stretch away the soreness in my neck that’s been lingering for a couple of days now. I pulled my right arm across my chest, extending it a bit further with my left arm to relieve some of the strain in my neck and shoulders.

“Goodness,” I thought, “the older I get the more my muscles seem to invent new ways to hurt.” Without hesitation, I added, “Gosh, I feel the same way about the soul, too.”

Ironically, even as I run from pain, avoid it and try to elude it, its pull is magnetic. Compulsory, really. At times more powerful than a compliment or an accomplishment, pain always finds a way to press its pulse into my present. Even if the source of the pain is in the distant past.

I mean, why is it that a comment from my eighth-grade basketball coach still stings after more than thirty years? And why do I remember every detail of that time with my mom but I mix up the specifics of the births of my children? Why do I forget vacations altogether until pictures remind me what happened, but I can remember exact phrases from every negative email I’ve received over the past fifteen years? Is my soul addicted to suffering? To pain? Does it seek out torment to feed its rapacious appetite? And why doesn’t grace erase the pain and keep the calm? Retain the peace? Accentuate the blessings?

“What can I learn from betrayal? What can I learn from pain?”

You know, if pain really could disciple me, the entry points would be endless.

Well, shoot. Is that the strategy of grace?

“Oh Lord, take this cup from me. Please, is there any other way?”

But I know. I know the answer. I know the answer because Christ asked the question first. In Gethsemane. And no, there wasn’t an audible response. But the events that followed revealed line-by-line, scene-by-scene God’s will. Not Christ’s. But his will was done.

And it included suffering. Betrayal. Pain. And death—even death on a cross.

Grace frustrates and redeems every avenue of suffering, transforming every pain into passageways of intimacy with our crucified King. And yet, even now, as I see the strategy, I still don’t like it. I still don’t enjoy it. It still frustrates and trepidates.

Even so, I just might follow the wisdom of saints gone by and try it anyway. Try praying the perilous prayer: “What can I learn from pain?”

A lot, I’m afraid.

“And this is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”

~ 1 John 3:16 ~

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Negotiation, when done in good faith, is about finding a way to meet the other in the middle. Granting some concessions while refusing to relent others, but always with the intent of finding a path forward—regardless of how difficult it may be—by meeting the other halfway.

Right?

I read a book several years back entitled, Never Split the Difference. Written by a terrorist negotiator, the book explained how to employ mirroring tactics, fabricated expressions of goodwill, and feigned evidence of empathy in order to get everything and share nothing in any negotiation. Quite often I’d finish a paragraph, flip to the cover, and reread the title just take make sure I read the first word right: Never?

In his case, given that people’s lives were at stake, meeting the other halfway was not the definition of “good faith.” At least not from the perspective of the hostage. But in my world, dealing primarily with my family and Christians, meeting halfway is the charitable thing to do. The right thing to do. The holy thing.

Right?

I like to think so. At least most of the time. And I’d like to think the other person felt the same way. That whatever the result of whatever negotiation, both sides walkaway victorious, bolstered by both grace and contentment.

Like most things in life, I want my negotiations to be an expression of who I want to be. And I want to be someone who’s willing to meet someone else halfway. Halfway between what I want and what they want, what I don’t and what they don’t either. At a midpoint, a sacred space, a cross-section of giving and receiving, serving and being served.

Although, to be quite honest, I can’t say I often feel like God meets me halfway.

Most of the time my prayers seem pretty one-sided. Talking to myself, negotiating with myself, typically berating myself into something completely other than what I wanted or what I was striving for. I enter my prayer closet with a set of demands only to emerge after a litany of “I’m sorry’s” and a list of things I need to do different.

I mean, truthfully, my heavenly Father seems a lot more like a terrorist negotiator than anything else. For I rarely feel like we split the difference. Which is frustrating. Especially when all I want to do is to meet halfway. To connect somewhere in the middle.

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When my daughter was young, maybe second or third grade, I was struggling to figure out how to connect with her. I just couldn’t find the entry point. Questions about school or things she liked were met with curt answers. Sure, not totally unlike other kids her age, but in a distinct way that kept me at arm’s length. On the outside looking in on the heart and life of my baby girl.

One day, I got really frustrated. She responded coldly when I was trying to celebrate her. She received an award at school, a district-wide one, that recognized her hard work and generosity to other students. I was elated. So, I screeched, “Baby girl!!!! That is amazing!!!! I am sooooo proud of you!!!!” Offering as many exclamation points as I could.

But nothing. No reaction. No real acknowledgment of my enthusiasm. No true connection.

The straw that broke my back, though, was when I stretched out my hand to give her a high-five. She looked up at my palm with her big brown eyes, then glanced at my hazel ones, and then back to my palm, making it clear she had no desire to reciprocate.

“Baby girl?!?!” I implored, shaking my hand to ensure she couldn’t overlook it.

But she hesitated. Looking back to my face, then back to my hand, she extended only her small pointer finger and poked my palm with one little digit.

I was annoyed. Defeated, really. Frustrated to the point where I met up with a counselor friend of mine the next day for coffee and space to “just vent.” I recounted every detail and every other example from days prior establishing my case and my fear: I don’t know how to connect with my daughter.

My friend sat patiently with the cliché counselor smile plastered on his face, some mixture of “poor little one” and “this is what it looks like to have it all figured out.” A smile I can’t tell if I resent or cling to for comfort and calm.

“She’s pushing me away,” I clamored. “She’s sealing me off,” I accused. “She’s befriending isolation like a hostage with Stockholm syndrome,” I exaggerated.

After I finished, he paused. Turned his head slightly toward the open window. And then, he shocked me with his response: “Shane, your daughter is telling you how to connect with her. You’re just not listening.”

I shook my head in disbelief. That can’t be true, I thought. Meet me halfway here, Doc.

Observing my angst, he continued, “Think about it. You respond to this exciting news with really big expressions and loud volume. But she responds with silence and a small finger in the palm of your hand.”

He paused as if his point was self-evident. Thankfully, for my sake, he continued on.

“To connect with her, you need to meet her halfway. You need to match her energy. Otherwise, you’re just serving yourself.”

I left the coffee shop and went straight to Wal-Mart. I scoured the craft section for just the right materials. At home, I spilled my shopping bag across the kitchen table and asked my wife for a glue gun.

“What’re ya doing with all that stuff?” she laughed.

“I’m meeting our daughter halfway,” I quipped cryptically.

After thirty minutes and several burns from the glue gun, I finished making two little mailboxes fit with a tiny flag system to raise when you’ve got mail. One mailbox for me and one for my daughter. And one small notebook where we could talk without having to use so much volume.

I explained the system to my daughter after she got home from school. Her small smile and a single nod signaled to me her approval. And so, I thought I’d push the negotiation one step further.

“Hey, instead of big, loud high-fives when we’re excited about something, how about we just do a small, special handshake. Something just between the two of us.”

She giggled a little and cautiously said, “Sure?”

I extended my pointer finger halfway between me and her. Without saying a word, she extended hers, and we met in the middle.

Looking back, to be honest, I actually didn’t meet her halfway at all. I went well beyond the mid-point. Sacrificing basically all I preferred in exchange for everything she needed. And, to be quite frank, I wouldn’t change it one bit.

I just wish God would do the same. Meet me here, in my loneliness and confusion. In my isolation and fear. Or at least meet me halfway, fingers touching in a way the Sistine chapel could never quite figure out.

Then again, there is the incarnation. And, in that instance, I guess he did go a little bit further than just halfway. He went all the way up to Calvary carrying a cross he never wanted and embraced a death he never chose.

Hmm.

On second thought, maybe I don’t want to meet him in the middle.

“‘Go out, and stand on the mountain before the LORD.’ And behold, the LORD passed by.”

~ 1 Kings 19:11a ~

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My Bible was loud this morning. It isn’t always, I’m afraid. Each word or phrase of sacrosanct text must compete, on occasion, with unfinished tasks or unreasonable worry. A sentence or two passes without much awareness. The will to listen is regathered only for the disjointed rumble of the garbage truck’s early morning route to disturb the scene that needs to be pristine in order for me to hear. In order for me to listen.

Which is infuriating. That I need total quiet to discern God’s Word. That I need stillness as sterile as a cemetery to receive God’s voice. On some level, I guess, I’m starting to accept that as long as my relationship with sound, internal or otherwise, persists in disrepair, God will always be hard to hear.

But this morning, my Bible was loud. Quite boorish, really. Rudely screaming eight silent words, “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).

Right now, I’m sitting in Bryant Park in the heart of New York City reading a book and sipping on a fruit smoothie with the delightful name “Pick me up.” To my left, a siren wheezes to life, echoing off buildings that rise out of sight beyond the treetop canopy. As its intensity increases, my mind begins to wander: “Every siren contains a story. An emergency. Something world-altering. A birth. A heart’s arrest. One last drive. Well, before a hearse I guess.”

On my way here, I saw a hearse on Fifth Avenue, just outside St. Patrick’s cathedral. The church is a gothic beauty adorned with competing steeples piercing the city skyline like mountainous peaks among pure opulence. I stood transfixed; statued by the sight. Not enamored by the architectural wonder but by the scene and the sounds unfolding.

Several priests, some young, some old, all ornately dressed, processed to the back of the hearse where the door was held ajar by a man who could pass as secret service. With wands in hand, each priest seeded this carriage of death with holy water, muttering what was undoubtedly some version of final rites.

Each move was meaningful. Each prayer powerful. And every sound of the city street blanketed the somber scene with chaos and beauty.

The siren shook me back to Bryant Park, dissolving this recent memory. Not due to its volume, but because of its peculiarity. Most sirens pulsate almost politely. Announcing their presence with urgency but without intent to deafen, disturb, or startle. This one, though, screeched like the child to my right as her mother collected her meal among the garbage, callously announcing, “You’ve had enough!”

The siren concentrated its force on a particularly high pitch, an operatic note that tremored the glass in the surrounding skyscrapers. Refusing to relent, the siren gripped the singular pitch with such vigor that even the busiest paused and turned their heads, or at least raised an eyebrow in marvel.

The man next to me removed his noise-canceling earbuds with a smile and a hint of disbelief. “My gracious!” he blazoned with a thick European accent, “that’s bloody loud!”

Without warning, he swiveled the screen of his laptop in my direction, “Look what I’m reading!”

Filling the display was a chart with jagged, EKG-like lines radiating up and down like compressed steeples. He fired off a stilted laugh, startling me a bit. The “Ha!” exploding like the uncontrollable sound I made as a child when a soccer ball slammed into my stomach forcing all air from my lungs.

“It’s a study,” he accented, “about how to manage noise in a city.”

A feral smile invaded his face, “We hear you!” he shrieked over his shoulder toward the receding siren. “We bloody hear you!”

I laughed. Politely nodded. And settled back into my book, smoothie in hand.

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It didn’t take long, though, to realize I was reading but I wasn’t receiving the words. Paragraphs passed with little to no comprehension. Re-reading what I just read did little to help. It was the loud voice of my Bible piercing my present, haunting me with its simple command: “Be still and know…”

So, surrendering to the Psalms suggestion, I let the book close on my thumb as I became oddly attuned to the noise now baptizing me.

There’s always a subtle stirring in the city. A resilient murmur without repose. Like persistent white-noise composed from city soundscapes. A woman nearby inquires over the phone about a doctor specializing in TMJ. Just paces away a walkie-talkie affixed to a hip erupts on the sidewalk as a pigeon flaps desperately overhead to escape the angst of an impatient patron. Plates rattle in the distance, pinging this way and that, as dishes are stacked and unstacked in preparation for the fast-approaching lunch hour under the umbrellaed terrace. Wheels of a garbage can chatter back and forth between the grout and each brick paving the trafficked path. Puckered lips smack incessantly to garner the attention of the unleashed dog following the scent in their snout instead of the sound of their master. A nearby conversation ebbs and flows like lackluster waves at the base of a cliff speaking a language unfamiliar. And then. Another siren. Rising. And falling. Both in pitch. And in volume. Now swirling. Desperate for attention.

So much of sound is taken for granted. Endured; not appreciated. Like most art. At least these days. Efficiency doesn’t blend well with sound. A truth that lines the pockets of audio engineers creating the latest noise-cancelling contraption. Sound just requires too much attention. Demands too much energy. Disrupts what we deem important. What we find valuable.

Yet sound doesn’t seem as offended as I. Doesn’t ask for my defense. Even still, I feel compelled to write its apology. A reasoned exploration of its value. Its importance. Its beauty.

The sound of rushing water, science argues, has medicinal properties. The sound of a mother’s voice, babies attest, has soothing power. The sound of a well-crafted jingle, marketers prove, has siren-like qualities, drawing us closer and closer still, even if our credit card announces impending calamity. A sound in the night haunts our slumber. An alarm in the morning beckons a new day. A stove’s piercing beep signals a recipe’s transformation. A garage door’s jolt is a delightful declaration that “Mom’s home!” Doctors don’t relax until they hear the sound of a child’s first cry. Athletes don’t quit until they hear the sound of a game’s final buzzer. Audiences don’t applaud until they hear the sound of silence after a symphony’s masterful cantata.

Sound creates intrigue in cinematic scenes, invites contemplation in liturgical settings, adds ambience to select social gatherings, and even gives sight to sonar-dependent, winged terrors of the night. Sound guides, comforts, cautions, beckons, heals, steadies, soothes.

All of which is missed—disregarded if not discarded, ignored if not maligned—if we simply don’t know how to “Be still.”

To simply “be.”

In God’s presence.

In God’s Word.

In his beloved creation.

Saturated with sound that carries a cadence as predictable as a pulse and as whimsical as the wind itself.

To hear God’s voice, we must repair our relationship with sound by learning to “Be still and know.”

I agree, sound needs no defense. It gets by just fine without one. But I wonder if sound still deserves it.

At least from someone.

“And when I saw him, I fell to his feet as though dead. But he lay his right hand on me saying, ‘Do not fear. I am the First and the Last. The Living One. I was dead, but look! I am alive—for ever and ever. And I possess the keys of Death and of Hades.’”

~ Revelation 1:17-18 ~

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Two years ago, sitting down to write my new book, Thinning the Veil, I was overcome by two powerful forces: Jesus and loneliness. Even reflecting on that time sinks my stomach like the first plunge on a rickety roller coaster. Tension ignites as anticipation unfolds. Will it get worse? Will it be worth it? Are my cries rooted in delight or despair? How will this end? When will this end? God, are you there?

It’s quite a risk, so it seems, for a biblical scholar to write a book on the Revelation of St. John. Especially if prediction isn’t your goal, if red heifers aren’t your evidence, if your target is something less like a commentary and more like an unearthing. An unearthing of all twenty-two chapters, indeed, but also an unearthing of yourself. A mutual excavation. A reading of the text with a posture that invites the text to read you.

Too often, both in the academy and in the pews, we target a cerebral faith, one that values cognitive ascent over all else. Worship songs are critiqued for words or phrases that don’t match our theology, while sermons are littered with facts and maps to educate the inquiring mind. Even communion is relegated to a time of reflection, isolated mental exercises that rehearse the well-worn narrative of “I’m horrendous…but Jesus.”

Scholarly works, so I’m told, are most effective and of highest value when the exegete divorces themselves from the study, not allowing any of their faith or, God forbid, their emotions to pervert their conclusions. Just exegete; don’t insert any of you; just trust the tools.

In reading Revelation, however, I noticed the biblical authors never do this. Never divorce themselves from their writings. Never highlight only their mind but pour forth their heart, soul, mind, and strength into exploring the unfolding of God’s mystery. As they handle God’s word, mining the Old Testament for the visage of God in the face of Christ, the pursuit is quite personal. Quite revealing. A mutual unearthing of the text and the reader guided by grace.

And in Thinning the Veil, I sought to do the same.

Two years ago, I came to Revelation alone and lonely. And what I found was not rebuke or disregard, but a mirror. A reflection. My image not projected on to John of Patmos but embraced. Welcomed. Beheld as not an imposter but as a friend forged in the bonds of mutual loneliness. For Revelation 1 begins with John on Patmos alone and lonely. Separated from what was familiar. Not present at funerals for friends or birthday parties for family. Unable to worship with his community, walk with his congregants, or even frequent pubs and restaurants that know him by name. John was exiled on an island of loneliness. In desperate need of a Revelation. Not of the future. But of God incarnate. A Revelation of Jesus Christ.

The subtitle for Thinning the Veil attempts to honor (preserve, really)—or maybe even recover—the first five words of the book of Revelation. Five words often overlooked and underappreciated. Five words that carve each contour of every image that unfolds in the 404 verses of the Apocalypse, regardless of what the most recent “prophecy expert” claims. For the first five words not only guide what unfolds but heals all that’s broken on Patmos: “The Revelation of Jesus Christ” (Rev. 1:1a).

Not “the Revelation of the future” or “the Revelation of the rapture.” No, John, at the outset, sets the context for all that follows: Jesus Christ. The messages to each of the seven churches in chapters 2-3 are about Jesus Christ. The cosmic unfolding in each seal broken from the celestial scroll in chapters 6-8 is about Jesus Christ. Each blast of the trumpet from the heavenly halls in chapters 8-11, each libation poured from the plagues of the seven bowls in chapters 15-16, and even in the march of the beasts, the parade of the prostitute, and the demise of the great red dragon in chapters 13-20 is consumed by “the Revelation of Jesus Christ.” Each word, every phoneme, any and all Old Testament allusions coalesce in the Apocalypse of Patmos to reveal Jesus. To unveil Christ. To construct a picture of God’s Son so clear all rebellion would cease, every faith would strengthen, and all loneliness would dissolve in the sea of divine intimacy.

The Revelation of Jesus Christ reveals: the veil between heaven and earth is not as thick as we assume. It’s actually quite thin. Porous, really. Torn in two “from top to bottom” (Matt. 27:51) so that all outside the Holy of Holies can enter in because all that’s Holy entered the earth. Became flesh. Was, like Adam, born of virgin soil, yet, unlike Adam, embraced death not out of disobedience but fidelity. Faithfulness to a love that refuses to let sin speak creation’s final word. In Christ, God became flesh, uniting humanity and divinity in a person whose touch spans the chasm of death and loneliness (Rev. 1:17-18). Whose incarnation dispels any semblance of separation between the infinite and the mortal, the Creator and the boundaried, God and His beloved (Rev. 21:1-7).

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Empathy is under attack today. And if I was Satan, I would advance the same strategy. For empathy is a potent weapon that mends broken homes, shatters racial barriers, embraces unity amidst diversity, believing that, maybe, the eyes of the other hold more treasures than threats. More worth than weapons. More of me than I fear I can behold.

At its core, the Revelation of Jesus Christ is the origin story of empathy. Where the incorporeal dared to traverse creation in my flesh, tempted in every way yet without sin (Heb. 4:15). Unveiling not just the unfathomable depths of God’s love but also what it means to be human. Truly human. Human in a way that doesn’t war with the imago dei but is empowered by it. Surrendered to it. Animated in it, regardless of what my eyes may see or my ears may hear or what lies the dragon may use to deceive. The incarnation of Christ thins the veil between heaven and earth so that, yes, I can see God more clearly, but also myself. Or, better still, how He sees me.

And there’s something about being seen, truly seen, fully and completely known by another, that tempts me to set my loneliness aside to embrace intimacy beyond what I thought possible. An intimacy that invites me to “Come” and to feast, drinking deep from the “free gift of the water of life” (Rev. 22:17), walking hand-in-hand, steps-in-sync with a crucified King who allows me to inspect his wounds with every doubt I muster. Unafraid of my wrestling, undeterred by my wandering. A tender King who bids me come and die so that, in Him, I may come alive. So that, in Christ, I may begin to see that the veil between heaven and earth is, indeed, not as thick as my loneliness believed.

In the end, I pray Thinning the Veil: Encountering Jesus Christ in the Book of Revelation challenges the reader and the scholar, the lonely and the exegete to approach the text not just with fear and trembling but with a belief that they belong in the story. Not as one who hijacks the text, but as one invited into the banquet where Christ seats you at his side so you can rest your head on his chest and listen to the sound of his heart merge with the pulse of your own. A heartbeat producing a cadence that guides each step you take, each enemy you embrace, and each turn you navigate on this journey just beyond the veil.

To order my new book, Thinning the Veil: Encountering Jesus Christ in the Book of Revelation (IVP), click here or search wherever books are sold.

“At the sound of [seraphim] voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. ‘Woe to me!’ I cried. ‘I am ruined!’”

~ Isaiah 6:4-5a ~

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Standing at a threshold can be daunting. Metaphorically and actually.

Coat on, hat secure, shoes tied, wallet, phone, keys. Yet I stop, patting pockets and other places muttering to myself, “What am I forgetting?”

I turn my back to the door, perusing the kitchen with a mixture of thought and frustration creasing my forehead. I touch my pockets for the fourth time going through a mental checklist, occasionally verbalizing “check.”

Nothing’s missing.

But I can’t shake the feeling. I’m certain I’m forgetting something. Something important. So important that as soon as I get on the road, I’ll hit the steering wheel with an angry, “Dangit! I forgot [fill in the blank],” as I debate whether to turn around or simply do without.

But here. At the threshold. The item hides from both mind and eyes. I search a bit more, shake my head, suppress my angst, swivel toward my exit, and pass through the open door. Hoping for the best.

I’m standing at a threshold right now. Spiritually. For several years my world has systematically crumbled. For too long, I’ve searched for the guilty party, leaving no one unquestioned. Myself included. But recently, a more terrifying thought has surfaced: maybe there’s no one to blame.

Yes, there’s enough fault to satisfy every participant, but ultimately, standing at the threshold of upheaval and indecision, grief and fear, I search my pockets for the guilty and find nothing. I sift through stacks of disheveled papers on the counter and find nothing. No accusations. No culpability. No one to blame.

Which is horrifying. Bewildering, really. For, on some level, when there’s someone to condemn, for whatever was done or not done, I feel more in control. More centered. My energy justifiably focused on poignant arguments to secure the verdict I’m certain will soothe my soul.

But what now? Where do I focus my ire? Where do I point to explain this systematic upheaval of life, family, service, and faith?

Me?

This is my default setting: self-accusation. Where I typically toss and turn in prayers and pondering early in the morning at the threshold of the sun’s rising where night flees from the light searching for any trace, any modicum of self-guilt. Self-lashing is easy, especially when you’re raised in legalistic pews. But I know, this time, it simply doesn’t fit.

Without question, there are things I could’ve done different or better or with greater grace and more effort at overtures for peace. Missteps and mistakes flood my journals and pepper my prayer closet. But I now, know, that ultimately, I can’t take the blame. However heroic that may seem. To me or to others.

My counselor should be credited with this insight. Over two years, I sat in his cozy enclave, fit with cliché leather furniture and a Keurig for chamomile and lavender tea. Meticulously, we combed over every situation, unpacked each conversation without care for preserving the box or anyone’s feelings, especially my own. And the result wasn’t what I wanted or expected, “Shane, to be totally honest, blaming yourself for what’s happened simply doesn’t satisfy all the evidence. Your world falling apart just wasn’t your fault.”

I was appalled. Scared. Estranged at the threshold of belief, fully convinced this conclusion simply could not be.

Leaving the final session, I reached for the door’s knob and felt like I was forgetting something. Like maybe one more run through the last five years could uncover the keys I’m certain are here but we’ve just overlooked. But he was confident. Resolute. “Shane, it wasn’t your fault. You’re ready to step into what’s next.”

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Thresholds are unfair. They seem to smile with eyebrows raised, inviting everyone to adventures as flamboyant as Narnia. But rarely do they reveal the cost of passing through the wardrobe. For thresholds contain not just the “new you” but the “familiar you” that you must grieve. That you must leave. That you must exchange for all that’s unknown.

Thresholds demand a commitment to the unfamiliar. A courage to traverse terrain unexplored. Where what worked once before does so no longer.

I’m standing at a threshold, and self-lashing can’t help me. Doesn’t proffer the fruit it once promised. It must be left behind. Exchanged for something far less satisfying, like the love of self.

So, I look to others. Confident blame will certainly find a home there.

But I’m immediately repulsed. Sure, I’ve courted bitterness and vengeance a bit too promiscuously, but I’m certain, now, their promises are empty. Their cost doesn’t ever return much of a reward. Frankly, I’m tired of both as bedfellows. They disturb sleep, distort reality, and damn everyone involved to a sentence far more severe than any of the events require.

So, I search my past. My distant past. The ever-present pest to my present.

It’s hard to quantify how often wounds from my past are uncovered as a persistent offender in the here and now. Ignoring the pain doesn’t work, confronting it only seems to increase its strength, or at least its agitation, and regardless of how strenuous I run, I can’t ever outpace it. The past simply finds a way to control, or at least influence, almost every interaction and interpretation of now. The past molests my present, distorting what is with what should be. Or maybe “what should have been.”

I turn to the past, readied with weapons to exact my sentence for its devastation on my present circumstance. But it retreats. More like surrenders. Bows in submission, unwilling and unable to take the blame.

Standing at the threshold, I realize now what’s missing. Where the blame truly lies. But I fear the risk. I revisit my pockets once more, search the room for any other option, any other source. But I lower my head. Perhaps in prayer. Or maybe in defeat.

“God? Is this you?” I quiver. “This systematic unraveling. Is it you? Are you to blame?”

I heard somewhere along the way that a mother bird, at a certain point, will begin to intentionally make the nest uncomfortable for her children. In the days leading up to birth, the mother will meticulously collect and craft each limb of the nest in preparation for her eggs. Once delivered, the mother will fervently perch on her stick throne, providing the exact temperature for her children to mature. Once born, the mother feeds, protects, and provides everything for her beloved. But the one thing the mother can’t do for them is fly. And without flight, would a bird still be a bird?

The safety of the nest, then, becomes the greatest threat to the life of the birdling. The mother knows it, and loves her children enough to not let them stay. A threshold must be enforced.

When I think of God and thresholds, I think of the Passover. The horrific climax of the Exodus where death is unleashed on the firstborn of the unfaithful. Yet for his own, God lathers the threshold with lamb’s blood, covering his beloved like a mother hen protects her chicks under her wings, so that when danger comes, he secures them behind the threshold. Keeping evil out and his own within.

Which reminds me of Jesus when he declares, “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture” (Jn 10:9). It’s that last phrase, though, that concerns me. Sheep cannot merely cower in the pen. The shepherd knows this. Yes, the gate is essential to keep evil out, but the pasture can only provide for those brave enough to cross the threshold. To go through the door trusting the voice and vision of the Good Shepherd.

At the threshold, I feel my courage falter. Shutter as I stand by the open door. How do I step? How do I move beyond? Why is this happening at all?

I don’t believe God creates conflict or pain, as if he needs evil to accomplish his good. But I also believe God wastes nothing. He is efficient in his artistry. Intent on teaching me to fly.

Boldy, I turn. I stand at the threshold. Clutching forgiveness and grace, mercy and belief. I reach for the knob as fear and doubt unsettle my conflicted heart. Yet I hear him. Whispering beyond the door. “It’s time my child. Step through the veil, for every ending is a new beginning in me.”