When Faith Gets Put on Trial

September 8, 2026September 8, 2026Leave a comment

There is something I have been noticing. It tends to surface after the prayers have been prayed, faith has been exercised, people have contended—and the ending still isn’t the one everyone asked for.

Eventually, someone starts looking for the variable. Maybe there wasn’t enough faith. Maybe doubt got in the way. Maybe someone didn’t believe hard enough.

I have heard enough variations of that idea to think it is worth naming. Somewhere along the way, some corners of the Church created an equation Scripture itself never gave us:

Desired outcome = sufficient faith.
Undesired outcome = insufficient faith.

To be fair, the equation did not appear from nowhere. Jesus tells us to believe when we pray. James warns about asking while doubting. Hebrews tells us that without faith it is impossible to please God. The Gospels even contain moments when Jesus directly confronts unbelief. Those passages matter. Faith matters. Unbelief matters.

I believe God hears us when we pray. I believe He draws near. I believe He heals, restores, delivers and intervenes. I believe we should ask boldly, contend earnestly and invite God to expose unbelief wherever it has taken root in us. But Scripture does not permit us to turn those truths into a formula.

There is a garden just outside Jerusalem where that formula falls apart.

The Cup Didn’t Pass

Jesus entered Gethsemane in anguish and prayed, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me.”

Then He prayed again. And again. Luke tells us that His anguish intensified and that He prayed even more earnestly.

The cup did not pass.

Was the problem Jesus’ faith? Of course not. Jesus’ faith was perfect. And somehow, perfect faith looked like weakness that night. It looked like anguish, persistence, dependence and surrender:

“Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.”

The unanswered request was not evidence of deficient faith. His persistence was faith. His surrender was faith. His trust in the Father while standing inside unbearable anguish was faith. That distinction matters.

Sometimes we treat surrender as the fine print beneath believing prayer—as though “Your will be done” is what we say when we are afraid to expect too much. Gethsemane suggests something very different.

Surrender itself is an expression of faith.

Prayer is worship because prayer acknowledges something fundamental: God is God, and I am not. He invites our participation. He teaches us, encourages us and empowers us. He tells us to ask. But partnership is not parity. God did not surrender His sovereignty when He invited us to pray.

When Faith Becomes About Us

This is where an inflated theology of faith can subtly shift the center of gravity. Faith stops being trust in God and begins becoming confidence in our ability to produce an outcome: my faith, my declaration, my certainty, my ability to receive.

Eventually, God begins looking less like Father and more like a mechanism: apply sufficient belief and receive the requested result.

But faith is not currency. God is not a genie. Grace is not wages for believing correctly.

Paul learned this when he repeatedly asked God to remove his thorn. The thorn remained. Christ answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Apparently grace can be sufficient even when the thorn remains.

Romans 8 tells us something similar. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, even when we do not know how to pray as we ought. Notice where grace enters the story—not after we overcome helplessness, but inside it.

Even the desperate father who cried, “I believe; help my unbelief!” discovered that Jesus was willing to meet a man whose faith and doubt somehow occupied the same sentence. Helplessness is not a disqualification from grace.

That should make us extraordinarily careful about placing additional weight on people who are already suffering. There is enough vulnerability in asking God for something we cannot fix ourselves. When the answer does not resemble what was prayed for, the Church should be very cautious before adding an indictment to the grief.

Same Faith. Different Outcomes.

Hebrews 11 makes that caution unavoidable. Some people, through faith, conquered kingdoms, escaped the sword and received back their dead. Others, through faith, were imprisoned, tortured, afflicted and killed.

Scripture commends them all. Same faith. Different endings.

Faith was never intended to function as a mechanism through which we control God. It is trust in God.

That is why the words of the three Hebrew exiles in Daniel remain so powerful. They believed God was able to deliver them from the furnace. And then came the words that kept faith from becoming entitlement:

“But if not…”

God is able. But if not, He is still God.

That is not unbelief. Sometimes it is one of the bravest expressions of faith available to us.

Don’t Put Their Faith on Trial

So ask. Believe. Contend. Keep praying when the answer has not come. Ask God to expose unbelief and deepen your trust. Believe that He can intervene in ways only He can.

But when someone else’s cup does not pass, resist the temptation to put their faith on trial.

Sometimes grace removes the thorn. Sometimes grace becomes sufficient while it remains. Sometimes what God is doing becomes clearer years later. And some answers may require eternity.

Romans 8 does not promise that we will understand everything that happens to us. It promises something larger: that God is at work even while creation groans.

Our faith is ultimately in the Lord—not our ability to secure the outcome we prayed for.

God is able. And even if not, He is still God.

Gethsemane led to a cross. And for a little while, the cross looked like the end of the story.

It wasn’t.

When Grace Clocks In: Grief, Disability, and the Workplace

September 3, 2026September 3, 2026Leave a comment

There are phrases you forget. Others hang around.

This one came from a leader two gigs ago. Years later, it still hasn’t left:

“An above-average series of unfortunate events.”

Interesting way to put it. Especially when you know what the “events” were.

My daughter had died.

Jubilee spent 393 days in the NICU. For more than a year, our family learned to live somewhere between home, work, church and a hospital room. Then she was gone, and we had to figure out how to live in a world that kept moving without her.

Money was tight. Really tight. I kept working. Kept functioning. I donated plasma on my lunch breaks for extra money until one day I nearly passed out afterward. Something inside me was running out of road, and I didn’t understand why.

I know more now.

Earlier this year, my spectrum results came in. Suddenly, parts of my life that had never quite made sense started talking to each other. The masking. The exhaustion. The mental real estate consumed by unresolved conflict. The invisible cost of navigating environments that seemed to cost other people almost nothing.

Then I looked back at that season: bereavement, financial pressure, neurodivergent burnout. All stacked on top of each other before I even had the language to understand why my own wiring made some of that weight so costly to carry.

So, sure. “Unfortunate events.” Might as well call a hurricane an above-average amount of wind and rain.

I don’t believe that leader was trying to be cruel. I can’t know everything behind the words. But intent isn’t really why the phrase stayed with me. It stayed because language can be technically defensible and still be painfully inadequate for the human being standing underneath it.

That’s where I’ve landed on something I wish more leaders understood:

Context isn’t the enemy of accountability.

I haven’t always communicated as clearly as I could have, and I certainly haven’t navigated every professional situation perfectly. Being neurodivergent doesn’t absolve me of responsibility. Neither does grief. But context isn’t an escape hatch from accountability. Understanding someone more fully makes accountability more accurate.

If somebody who was once engaged suddenly isn’t, get curious. If performance changes after catastrophic loss, get curious. If someone trusts you enough to disclose a disability, get curious.

Not “What’s wrong with this person?” but “What’s happening to this person?”

I’ve started calling that holy curiosity.

There was real kindness during Jubilee’s 393 days. Coworkers gave their time. People helped me get to the NICU. My employer gave our family flexibility during an impossible season. Distance has helped me appreciate those things more, not less.

I’m also a words-of-affirmation person. Looking back, I can see times when I was waiting for care to arrive in the language I understood best while missing some of the ways people were already speaking it. That’s mine to own.

But kindness and understanding aren’t necessarily the same thing. The fairest way I know to say it is this: I received more kindness than I knew how to appreciate at the time, but less intentional understanding than I needed.

We also understand neurodivergence differently than we did when I was growing up. People like me can make it through school, relationships and entire careers without understanding why seemingly ordinary environments exact such an extraordinary internal cost.

We know more now. That should make us more curious now.

We talk about grace. Truth. Mercy. Restoration. Bearing burdens. Eventually those words have to clock in. They have to survive somebody’s grief affecting performance, somebody’s disability complicating communication, somebody making a mistake, somebody becoming inconvenient.

Jesus had a way of refusing to reduce complicated people to the most immediately visible thing about them. He noticed. He asked. He moved toward suffering.

Maybe that’s where better leadership begins too.

There is another place where this conversation matters just as deeply: the church. Faith communities can be remarkably good at showing up when tragedy arrives. But what happens when the meals stop, the crisis passes, and grief or special needs simply become part of a family’s everyday life? That’s where I want to go next—in Part Two, When the Church Moves On.

Six Career Lessons I’ve Learned in 16 Years

August 23, 2026Leave a comment

Sixteen years into my career, I’ve learned enough to know how much I still don’t know. That may be one of the first lessons experience teaches us.

When I entered the workforce, I naturally thought about a career largely in terms of destinations: find the right opportunity, become good at what you do, earn more responsibility, advance and build something. There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of those ambitions. I still have plenty of them. But 16 years have given me a different appreciation for the journey.

I’ve succeeded and failed. I’ve led people and been led by others. I’ve been promoted, changed directions, started over and watched some professional ambitions turn out differently than I imagined. Through all of it, I’ve also learned that reflection is most useful when I keep my own hands on the plow. It would be easy to write about what someone else should have done differently along the way. There are lessons there, certainly, but these are lessons I am responsible for practicing myself.

Looking back, six stand out.

1. Your Career Will Make More Sense in Retrospect

We put tremendous pressure on ourselves to make every career move look like progress. Upward is good. Sideways is questionable. Backward must mean something went wrong. Real careers are rarely that tidy.

Sometimes a position gives you experience you won’t understand the value of until years later. Sometimes the job you thought was preparing you for one destination is actually preparing you for something completely different. My own career has moved through accounting, management, customer-facing work, compliance, administration and other responsibilities that don’t always form an obvious straight line on paper. In practice, those experiences overlap constantly.

I’ve learned to stop demanding that every season explain itself while I’m still living it. Learn what you can, develop transferable skills and pay attention to what a particular season is producing in you. Today’s detour may become tomorrow’s preparation.

2. Understand the Work—Don’t Just Complete It

Early in a career, completing the assigned task feels like competence. Eventually, I learned to ask more questions: Why are we doing this? What happens before it reaches me? Where does it go afterward? Who depends on it? What happens if it’s wrong?

There’s a significant difference between knowing a process and understanding a system. The person who understands the system can troubleshoot when the normal process breaks, recognize connections that aren’t immediately obvious and understand how seemingly small decisions affect people farther downstream.

That distinction will probably become even more important as artificial intelligence and automation handle more mechanical tasks. Knowing which button to push may become less valuable; understanding why the button exists will become more valuable. Don’t become indispensable because you’re the only person who knows how to perform a task. Become valuable because you understand what the organization is trying to accomplish and how your work contributes to it.

3. Become Really Good at Learning

I’ve spent portions of my career walking into situations where I didn’t know nearly as much as I wanted to know. That can be uncomfortable, particularly as you progress professionally and begin feeling as though your experience should mean you already have the answers.

But I’ve learned there is a massive difference between inexperience and incuriosity. You don’t have to enter every room knowing everything. You do need enough humility to ask questions and enough confidence to say, “I don’t understand this yet.” Investigate discrepancies instead of working around them. Receive correction without allowing embarrassment to stop the learning process. Be willing to discover that the way you’ve always done something may not be the best way to do it now.

Some of my greatest professional growth has happened when I stopped worrying about whether I should already know something and simply started learning it. You don’t have to know everything. Become someone who knows how to learn.

4. Don’t Ask Your Career to Tell You Who You Are

This one has taken me longer to learn. There’s nothing wrong with ambition. Work can be meaningful, accomplishment can be satisfying, and promotions and professional milestones are worth celebrating. I believe we should take our work seriously and pursue excellence in whatever has been entrusted to us.

But a career makes a terrible identity.

Jobs change. Companies change. Leaders change. Priorities change. Doors we expect to open sometimes don’t, while doors we thought would remain open sometimes close. And sometimes the professional future we imagined simply doesn’t happen.

If our identity is anchored to our career, those experiences become more than disappointments. They can begin to feel like verdicts about our worth. I want to care deeply about what I do without requiring my work to tell me who I am. I want to remain ambitious without making achievement responsible for answering questions it was never capable of answering.

Build an identity sturdy enough to survive professional disappointment.

5. If You Lead People, Know Them

I’ve become increasingly convinced that getting to know the people you lead isn’t an optional component of leadership. It’s part of the job.

Metrics matter. Performance matters. Professional development matters. Accountability matters. But none of those things completely describes a human being. Good leadership also notices behavior, confidence, collaboration, well-being and maturation. What motivates this person? What discourages them? How have they grown? How do they respond under pressure? What environment allows them to do their best work? Are you evaluating only what they produce, or are you paying attention to the person they are becoming?

Knowing people doesn’t eliminate accountability; it gives accountability context. There are still expectations to meet and difficult conversations to have. But the more a leader understands the person behind the performance, the better equipped that leader is to distinguish between a pattern that needs correction, a person who needs development and a human being who may simply be navigating a difficult season.

And responsibility runs both ways. If I’m being led, I have some responsibility to allow myself to be known—to communicate, receive feedback, explain how I work and not expect someone else to decipher me entirely on their own. Healthy organizations don’t merely develop better employees. They develop people.

6. How You Work With People Will Outlast Much of the Work

Sixteen years have introduced me to plenty of projects that once felt incredibly important. Deadlines felt enormous. Problems demanded immediate attention. There were assignments that consumed hours of thought and projects that seemed, at the time, as though they would define an entire season of my career.

Many of them barely cross my mind anymore. But I remember people.

I remember those who taught me something, encouraged me, showed patience and made room for me to grow. I also remember moments when I should have listened better, communicated better, extended more grace or handled something differently. Time has a way of shrinking the urgency of yesterday’s project while clarifying the significance of how we treated the people who worked on it with us.

Someday, the spreadsheet will be replaced. The project will end. The organizational chart will change. Someone else will sit in your chair. The work matters, but so does the effect we have on the people sharing that stretch of road with us.

Sixteen years in, perhaps that’s what has changed most about how I define a successful career. I still want to build something worthwhile. I want to become excellent at my craft, stay curious and keep growing. I hope I’m still doing all of those things 16 years from now.

But don’t become so focused on building a career that you forget you’re also building a life. And don’t become so good at the work that you forget the people doing it beside you.

Graphic creds: ChatGPT

When the Church Looks Less Like Jesus

August 12, 2026August 14, 2026Leave a comment

A call to remember who the Church belongs to—and what the world should see in us.

The Church Belongs to Jesus

What should people encounter when they encounter the Church?

Should they leave impressed by our excellence? Inspired by our music? Encouraged by our preaching? Or should they leave saying, “I caught a glimpse of Jesus.”

That question matters because the Church belongs to Him. She is not ours to redefine, market, or mold according to the preferences of any generation. Scripture describes her as the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27), the household of God (Ephesians 2:19), and the Bride for whom Christ willingly laid down His life (Ephesians 5:25–27).

If she belongs to Christ, every generation must ask one simple question: Are we becoming more like Jesus? Not more successful. Not more influential. Not more visible. More like Jesus.

To look like Him is to love what He loves, serve as He served, welcome as He welcomed, and make disciples as He commanded. Everything else flows from that.

A Shared Life, Not a Weekly Event

The New Testament presents a compelling vision of the Church. Believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer (Acts 2:42). They shared with those in need (Acts 2:44–45), bore one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), rejected favoritism (James 2:1–9), practiced hospitality (1 Peter 4:9), and became known by their love (John 13:34–35).

This was not simply a worship service. It was a shared life. They did not merely attend together. They belonged to one another.

The early Church was not perfect. Acts and the New Testament letters reveal conflict, sin, and correction. Yet they also reveal a people willing to repent and reorder their lives around Christ. That picture should challenge us: Have we unintentionally settled for something smaller than what Scripture describes?

When Activity Replaces Faithfulness

The modern Church has become remarkably effective at gathering people. We organize ministries, communicate vision, create excellent environments, and steward resources wisely. Those things can honor God. But excellence must never replace obedience.

Programs cannot replace people.
Production cannot replace presence.
Attendance cannot replace discipleship.

Methods are servants. They must never become masters.

One temptation facing the Western Church is to mistake activity for faithfulness. The question is whether our methods have quietly become our measurements of success. Jesus did not commission His followers to build impressive institutions; He commanded them to make disciples (Matthew 28:19–20). Paul wrote, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6).

Faithfulness belongs to us. Growth belongs to God.
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Christ gave leaders to the Church “to equip the saints for the work of ministry” until the whole body matures in Him (Ephesians 4:11–16). Healthy ministry is measured by whether God’s people are becoming more like Jesus together.

The earliest believers did not simply invite people to a gathering. They carried the life of Christ wherever they went. Their worship overflowed into hospitality, their teaching into discipleship, their fellowship into generosity, and their prayers into courageous witness.

Returning to Our First Love

Churches do not drift overnight. Neither do believers. Even the church in Ephesus—commended for perseverance and discernment—heard these sobering words from Jesus: “You have abandoned the love you had at first” (Revelation 2:4). Their greatest problem was not incompetence. It was misplaced affection.

That warning still echoes. We can become more competent while becoming less dependent upon God, more organized while becoming less compassionate, and more influential while becoming less Christlike.

The greatest threat to the Church has rarely been opposition from the outside. More often, it has been gradual drift from the inside.

Sent Belong the Walls

Outreach has not disappeared from the Church. Countless congregations faithfully serve their communities in ways that honor Christ. Yet we should ask whether outreach has slowly moved from being part of the Church’s identity to becoming one ministry among many.

The ministries hardest to promote are often the ministries Scripture emphasizes most: visiting the sick, welcoming the stranger, caring for widows and orphans, bearing burdens, opening our homes, and serving without recognition (James 1:27; Matthew 25:34–40; Galatians 6:2). These acts rarely generate headlines, fill auditoriums, or build anyone’s platform. But they look remarkably like Jesus.

The Church was never called merely to invite people into a building. She was called to carry the presence of Christ into the world.

More Than Consumers

Perhaps nowhere is self-examination more necessary than in the way we approach gathering together. We ask: Did I enjoy the worship? Did the sermon encourage me? Did I feel fed today?

Those are not wrong questions. They are incomplete.

The New Testament invites us to ask another set of questions: Whom did I encourage? Whose burden did I help carry? Who experienced the love of Christ through me? Who did I welcome, forgive, or serve?

Church was never intended to function like a spiritual gas station where we stop once a week to refill before returning to life unchanged. If we leave our gatherings knowing more about Christ but looking no more like Him, we have misunderstood the purpose of gathering.

Worship that truly encounters God does not terminate on itself. It overflows into love, service, mercy, justice, humility, forgiveness, generosity, and sacrificial care.

Hungry Without Agenda

The same examination applies to every gift within the Church. Whether someone teaches, preaches, writes, leads worship, or serves behind the scenes, every ability entrusted by God exists to make much of Christ. Whenever a gift begins drawing attention primarily to the person using it, we have drifted from its purpose.

The platform has never been the center of worship. Christ is.

I believe believers across the world are quietly praying for communities simply hungry for Christ—without agenda, without platform-building, without chasing influence for its own sake. Communities whose greatest ambition is to know Christ and make Him known. Where people serve because they love, give because they have received grace, worship because God is worthy, and gather because they genuinely belong to one another.

Those communities may never become famous. But heaven has never measured faithfulness by fame. The Church has never needed more influence than faithfulness. She has only ever needed more of Christ.

Call Back to Christ

The prophet Micah summarized God’s desire with remarkable simplicity:

“He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

Perhaps the Church today needs that reminder as much as any generation before us. This is not a call to abandon Christ’s Bride. It is a call to love her enough to invite her continually back to her first love.

The answer to an imperfect Church has never been abandoning her. The answer has always been allowing Christ to continue sanctifying her—including us.

May we have the humility to examine ourselves before we examine others. May we have the courage to repent wherever we have drifted. May we become people hungry for Christ without agenda—content to decrease so that He might increase.

And until the day we finally see our Savior face to face, may the watching world first catch a glimpse of Him in us.

For that has always been the Church’s greatest witness.

Graphics created in ChatGPT

Making Room for New Creation: Do We Still Believe Christ Changes People?

July 17, 2026July 17, 20261 Comment

Lately I’ve found myself thinking about something I don’t hear discussed very often.

As a disclaimer, I’m genuinely grateful that the Church has become more willing to talk about healthy boundaries, emotional well-being, and protecting people from abusive or destructive situations. Those conversations matter, and Scripture certainly leaves room for wisdom when safety is at stake. There are circumstances where lasting distance is not only appropriate but necessary.

But I’ve also been asking myself another question: When genuine repentance is present and safety is no longer the issue, are we still making room for God’s ministry of reconciliation?

Sometimes I wonder if we’ve become so accustomed to protecting ourselves that we’ve quietly lost the expectation that Christ still transforms people. Either way, our responsibility remains an absolute as outlined in the Word.

In Acts 11:18, we see that God alone grants repentance—a gift of His grace that Paul echoes in 2 Timothy 2:25. This highlights an essential reality: The grace that forgives is also the grace that transforms.

Consider Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 18. While the passage is often remembered for confronting sin, His aim is ultimately restoration—winning back a brother or sister.

Paul paints the same picture in Corinth. He instructed the church to discipline a man living in open, unrepentant sin. But after that man repented, Paul’s instruction changed:

“You ought rather to forgive and comfort him… reaffirm your love for him.” (2 Corinthians 2:7–8)

Notice the progression: Accountability. Repentance. Restoration.

Repentance doesn’t erase consequences. It doesn’t instantly rebuild trust. It doesn’t obligate anyone to return to an unsafe relationship.

Reconciliation doesn’t always mean restoring a relationship to what it once was. Sometimes it simply means laying down bitterness, extending forgiveness, and remaining open to whatever measure of restoration wisdom permits.

Yet neither should we treat genuine repentance as though it changes nothing.

I’ve also found myself wondering whether our desire to protect our peace can slowly become something else. While boundaries can absolutely be an expression of wisdom, they can also become places where reconciliation quietly stops.

That’s worth examining—not to produce guilt, but to ensure our instinct is still moving toward the ministry Christ entrusted to us whenever wisdom allows.

Every Sunday we proclaim that Jesus makes people new. We celebrate that He removes hearts of stone and gives hearts of flesh. If we truly believe Christ transforms lives, shouldn’t we expect to recognize His work when genuine repentance appears?
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Paul writes: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” (Romans 12:18)

I appreciate those opening words: “If possible.” Paul recognizes that reconciliation isn’t always achievable because it doesn’t depend on one person alone. Some wounds require lasting distance. Some relationships remain unsafe. We cannot control another person’s response.

But we can control our own.

As far as it depends on us, we’re called to pursue peace, own our failures, confess our sin, forgive as we’ve been forgiven, and remain open to the restoring work of Christ whenever wisdom allows.

I don’t write this to minimize the importance of boundaries. I write it because I don’t want to miss the work of Christ when He begins changing someone’s heart.

The ministry of reconciliation isn’t only about God reconciling us to Himself. Through Christ, He also entrusts His people with becoming ambassadors of that same reconciliation in a broken world (2 Corinthians 5:18–20).

Perhaps one of the greatest evidences that we truly believe the gospel isn’t simply that we rejoice over God’s power to change us—but that we remain humble enough to recognize His transforming work in someone else.

If we proclaim that Jesus makes all things new, may we never become so guarded that we fail to recognize His new creation standing right in front of us.