Scripture: 2 Peter 3:3–9 | Habakkuk 2:3 | Hebrews 11:1 | Revelation 22:20

I live with five women. My wife and four daughters. And if you want to know what it feels like to have your credibility questioned on a daily basis, try being the only man in a house full of Gen Z and Gen Alpha girls who have a word for everything.

The word lately is delulu.

Short for delusional. It means you are holding onto something the rest of the room has already decided is not going to happen. You believe it anyway. You talk about it anyway. And the people around you exchange a look and say it. Delulu.

Here is what I did not expect. The longer I sit with that word, the more I realize it is not just something my daughters say about boys who text back too slow. It is what the world says about us. About the Church. About every believer who wakes up on a Tuesday morning and still genuinely expects Jesus to come back.

And I want to be honest with you. There are days when the world makes a convincing case. The news cycles keep cycling. Leaders keep disappointing. Wars keep starting. And the promise that seemed so urgent two thousand years ago starts to feel, if we are not careful, like something we inherited from people who were a little too optimistic.

I have stood in that feeling. And I want to tell you what I found when I did not run from it

Peter saw this coming. Not the slang, but the sentiment underneath it. He wrote that in the last days, mockers would arrive with a very specific argument: "Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all continues just as it was from the beginning of creation." (2 Peter 3:4)

Read that slowly. They are not arguing that God does not exist. They are arguing that nothing ever actually changes. That the world just keeps going. That history is a flat line with no destination. That the people who believe something is coming are, well, delulu.

Peter called this willful ignorance. Not confusion. Not honest skepticism. A choice to forget. Because the evidence was always there. God spoke the world into existence out of nothing. He judged it with a flood. He raised His Son from the dead. These are not the actions of a God who lets things drift without a destination. These are the actions of a God who moves deliberately and arrives exactly when He intends to.

The Prophet Habakkuk wrestled with the same feeling long before Peter put it into words. He looked at his world and saw violence, injustice, and a silence from God that felt unbearable. And God answered him with one of the most important sentences in all of Scripture: "Though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay." (Habakkuk 2:3)

That is not the language of wishful thinking. That is the language of an appointment. A train that has not pulled into the station yet is not a train that does not exist. It is a train that is still on its way.
The ancient Jewish teacher Maimonides understood this so deeply that he built it into his daily confession of faith: "I believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah. Though He may tarry, I await Him every day." Every day. Not every decade when the prophecy conferences happen. Every single day.

Now here is what the world gets wrong about the disciples who carried this expectation. They were not naive. They were not people who had run out of other options and decided to cope with religion. These were people who had watched Jesus walk out of a tomb. They had touched the scars. They had eaten fish on the beach with a man who three days earlier had been publicly executed. Their hope was not built on a feeling. It was built on the most verifiable event in the ancient world.

Paul put it plainly. If the resurrection did not happen, he said, we are of all people most to be pitied. (1 Corinthians 15:19) He was not asking anyone to believe without evidence. He was saying the evidence is the resurrection, and the resurrection demands a conclusion: if He came back once, He is coming back again.

That is not delulu. That is logic with a tomb at the center of it.
Peter also gives us the reason behind the wait. "The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9) The delay is not doubt. The delay is mercy. Every day the return has not happened is another day someone who was far from God had a chance to find their way home.

The wait is not a malfunction. It is the heartbeat of a God who is not willing to close the door while there is still someone running toward it.
Hebrews calls faith the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1) Substance. Evidence. These are not soft words. They are legal words. Words that mean there is a case being built. A verdict that is coming. And the people who have been holding that hope are not holding air. They are holding the most reliable promise ever made by the most reliable source in the universe.

The last words in the Bible are not complicated. Jesus says: "Yes, I am coming quickly." (Revelation 22:20) And the Church answers: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus."

That has been the prayer for two thousand years. Every generation that has prayed it has been called something. Naive. Fanatic. Outdated. Delulu.

Every generation has kept praying it anyway.

The world is going to keep telling you that the hope is unrealistic. That nothing is coming. That everything just keeps going the way it always has. And some days that argument is going to sound more reasonable than you are comfortable admitting.

On those days, go back to the tomb. Not metaphorically. Actually think about it. A man who was dead was not dead anymore. If that happened, everything He said about what comes next is worth taking seriously. All of it. Including the return.

You are not holding onto a fantasy. You are holding onto a promise made by someone with a track record that no one in history has matched.

My daughters can call it whatever they want.

The Lord is still coming. And that is the most grounded thing I know.

Alive | Monday Reflection | Week 4

"Jesus said to him a third time, 'Simon, son of John, do you love me?' ... Jesus said to him, 'Feed my sheep.'" — John 21:17

There is a spring not far from the Dead Sea. The water that feeds it travels a long way before it gets there, and when it arrives, everything around it changes. What was dry becomes green. What was dead starts moving again. Fish appear where there were no fish.

Life shows up uninvited and refuses to leave.

That is not just geography. That is a picture of what God intends to do with every person who carries resurrection life inside them.

The question is whether the river is flowing or whether it stopped at you.

The prophet Ezekiel had a vision that stopped him in his tracks. He saw water trickling out from beneath the threshold of the Temple in Jerusalem. Just a trickle at first. But as the water moved east, it got deeper. Ankle deep. Knee deep. Waist deep. Then deep enough to swim in. A river where there had been no river.

And everywhere that river went, things came back to life.

"Their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing." (Ezekiel 47:12)

The Dead Sea, one of the saltiest and most inhospitable bodies of water on earth, became fresh. Fish filled it. Trees lined its banks. Everything the river touched was transformed. And the source of all of it was not rain. It was not a spring from underground. It was the presence of God flowing outward from His dwelling place into a thirsty world.
Now watch what Jesus does with that image.

It is the Festival of Sukkot in Jerusalem. The priests have just performed the water-drawing ceremony at the Temple, pouring water on the altar as a symbolic prayer for rain and a future outpouring of God's Spirit. The whole crowd is watching. And Jesus stands up in the middle of it all and says, "If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, 'From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.'" (John 7:37-38)

He is standing at the Temple during the water ceremony and saying: I am the source Ezekiel saw. And everyone who comes to Me becomes part of that river.

Not a pond. Not a reservoir. A river. Something that moves. Something that goes somewhere. Something that brings life to everything along its banks.

This is the part we often miss about resurrection power. We treat it like a personal possession, something that happened to us and lives inside us and benefits us. But Scripture treats it like a current. Paul writes that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives inside every believer. (Romans 8:11) That is not a private deposit. That is the most powerful force in the universe taking up residence in ordinary people for the purpose of flowing outward into the world around them.

Watch how Jesus demonstrated this during His own ministry. He healed people. Not just to prove He was the Messiah, though that was true. He healed people because healing was the evidence that the future kingdom had drawn near. Every blind eye opened, every leper cleansed, every dead person raised was the river of Ezekiel arriving early. Jesus was, in a sense, borrowing from the healing power of the age to come and releasing it into the suffering of the age at hand.

Then He sent His disciples to do the same thing. "The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons." (Matthew 10:7-8) He did not say go and feel the power. He said go and release it. Outward. Toward people who are sick and forgotten and unclean and oppressed.

The river does not stay at the source.

This is what love that serves does. It is not sentiment. It is not a warm feeling toward humanity in general. It is resurrection power in motion, specifically directed at the suffering person in front of you. The coworker who is not okay. The neighbor who stopped talking. The family member who is slowly disappearing into something that has a grip on them. The stranger whose name you do not yet know but whose pain you can see from across the room.

That is where the river is supposed to go.

The trees along the banks of Ezekiel's river did not hold their fruit. They gave it away every month without running dry because the source never stopped flowing. That is the promise underneath the resurrection. You cannot give away more than God can replenish. The river runs deeper the farther it goes.

Here is the honest question: where is the river in your life currently going?

Because resurrection power that stays contained is not a blessing. It is a symptom. It means somewhere between receiving the life of God and living your actual week, something dammed up the current. Comfort maybe. Or fear. Or the very reasonable feeling that you have enough going on already without adding someone else's pain to the load.

But the disciples went out two by two into villages they did not know to serve people they had never met, carrying power they did not generate themselves. They were not the source. They were the riverbed. And the water found its way to places that were dying and brought things back to life.

You are not the source either. You are the riverbed.

Let the water move.

There is a character in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew named Uncle Andrew.
He is present at the creation of Narnia. He is standing there when Aslan, the great lion who represents Christ, opens his mouth and sings the world into existence. Stars appear. Mountains rise. Animals are called out of the ground. It is, by every measure, the most magnificent moment in the history of that world.

And Uncle Andrew misses the whole thing.

Not because he wasn't there. Because he decided not to hear it.

Lewis writes that when Aslan's song first began, Uncle Andrew recognized it was a song. But it made him uncomfortable. It made him think and feel things he didn't want to think and feel. So he told himself it wasn't really singing, just a lion roaring. The longer Aslan sang, the harder Uncle Andrew worked to convince himself there was nothing to hear.
And here is the terrifying part.

It worked.

Eventually, Uncle Andrew could no longer hear the song even if he wanted to. What began as a choice became a condition. He had trained himself out of the ability to perceive what was right in front of him. When Aslan finally spoke, Uncle Andrew didn't hear words. He heard only a snarl.

Jesus said something that should disturb every one of us: "He who has ears, let him hear." That's not a description. That's a warning. Because apparently, it is possible to have ears and still not hear. It is possible to be standing in the presence of something glorious and train yourself, slowly, choice by choice, into an inability to perceive it.

The disciples on the road to Emmaus didn't get there overnight. They had spent three years watching Jesus heal the sick, raise the dead, and feed thousands with nothing. But somewhere along the way, the disappointment of the cross created a filter. And by the time the Risen Christ fell into step beside them, their ears heard a stranger's voice and their eyes saw someone else's face.

This is not a first-century problem.

Every time you dismiss a prompting and tell yourself it wasn't real, that's a choice. Every time grief convinces you that God has gone silent and you stop listening, that's a filter being installed. Every time you protect yourself from hope because hope has let you down before, something in your spiritual perception narrows a little more.

Uncle Andrew didn't become deaf in a moment. He became deaf in increments, one small refusal at a time. Until the song that was changing everything around him sounded like nothing but noise.

R.C. Sproul, reflecting on this same passage from Luke 24, said the disciples had two thousand years of prophecy available to them, and they were still "slow of heart to believe." Not slow of intellect. Slow of heart. The barrier wasn't information. It was the willingness to receive it.

The good news, and this is the part I didn't get to say Sunday, is that Uncle Andrew's story is not your only option. The disciples' story ended differently. Their eyes opened. Their hearts burned. And they ran.

The song is still being sung.

The question is whether you are still willing to hear it.

Want to go deeper? This blog expands on the message preached on April 19 at GracePointe. Watch the full message at https://gpnaz.church/media.

"He told them, 'The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.'"
Mark 4:11–12 (NIV)

I opened this Sunday's message with something I've never told a congregation before.
I am colorblind.

Not completely. I have what's called red-weak colorblindness. Most colors I process just fine. But certain shades; light pink, dark red; my brain literally cannot distinguish them correctly. I'm not guessing wrong. I'm seeing wrong. There is a difference, and that difference matters more than I realized until I was eighteen years old standing in front of a mirror nodding at what I was absolutely certain was a white t-shirt.

It was pink.

Not a subtle pink. A pink.

I walked through an entire day; an entire workday at a summer camp full of kids who could not stop laughing; completely convinced I was wearing something I was not. The camp director told me I was brave for expressing myself. My buddy on his way to the gym barely looked up before he said it. I looked down and still couldn't tell.
I had to take someone else's word for it.

Here is what stayed with me long after that day was over: I was not careless. I was not distracted. I was not refusing to look. I looked directly at that shirt in the mirror that morning and my brain processed the information it received and returned a confident answer.

The answer was wrong.

And I had no idea.

I opened with that story on Sunday because of a tension I found in two passages of Scripture sitting side by side in my preparation this week.

In Mark 4:11–12, Jesus says something that is deeply unsettling if you sit with it long enough. He tells His disciples that the secret of the Kingdom has been given to them; but to those on the outside, everything comes in parables, so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, ever hearing but never understanding.
Ever seeing. But never perceiving.

That is not a description of people who aren't looking. That is a description of people who are looking directly at something; and still cannot see it correctly.

Then you get to Luke 24, and something extraordinary happens. Two disciples; people who were on the inside, people who had walked with Jesus, eaten with Jesus, watched Him heal the sick and raise the dead; are walking away from Jerusalem. And the Risen Christ falls into step right beside them.

And they do not recognize Him.

In that moment, the insiders are acting like outsiders. They have the facts. They have the history. They have three years of front-row access to the Son of God. And they look directly at Him and see a stranger.

Ever seeing. Never perceiving.

But here is where Luke 24 does something Mark 4 leaves open. Luke shows us the reversal. The moment the condition is corrected. The moment someone who was seeing wrong — genuinely, completely, confidently wrong; has their eyes opened and sees clearly for the first time.

It doesn't happen because they tried harder. It doesn't happen because they gathered more information or reviewed what they already knew. It happens at a table. Over broken bread. In the most ordinary moment of the evening. And something in their chest said; I know those hands.

Their eyes were opened.

This is what I could not stop thinking about all week.

Colorblindness is not a focus problem. You cannot fix it by paying closer attention. You cannot will your way into seeing colors your eyes were not designed to process. The correction has to come from outside of you. Someone hands you the right lenses, or someone tells you what they see, and you have to decide whether you are willing to trust them.

I had to take my buddy's word for it that the shirt was pink. I could not get there on my own.
The disciples had to take Jesus at His word that the suffering was not the end of the story; that everything they had watched fall apart was actually the thing being built. They could not get there on their own either. Their grief had narrowed what they were able to see. Their shattered expectations had reorganized their perception in ways they were not even aware of.
That is not a character flaw. That is a human condition.

And the resurrection of Jesus is, among everything else that it is, the moment God reaches into that human condition and opens eyes that could not open themselves.

The question I want to leave you with this week is not whether you believe that happened two thousand years ago on a road outside Jerusalem.

The question is whether you are willing to let it happen to you right now.
Because some of us have been seeing wrong for a long time. Confident. Certain. Looking directly at our lives and our circumstances and our relationships and our faith — and processing it all through a lens that grief or disappointment or unmet expectation quietly installed without us noticing.

And Jesus has been walking right beside us the whole time.

You don't need a new life. You need new eyes to see the life God is already in.

The lenses are available. But like my buddy at the gym, somebody has to be willing to say what they see. And you have to be willing to take their word for it.

Want to go deeper? This blog expands on the message preached on April 19 at GracePointe. Watch the full message at https://gpnaz.church/media.

I want to ask you a question I didn't have time to ask Sunday.

Who in your life is currently walking away from Jerusalem?

Because that is what the road to Emmaus actually is. It's not a scenic route. It's a retreat. Two people who had given everything to a hope that collapsed, quietly putting distance between themselves and the place where it all fell apart. They weren't looking for a fight. They were just done.

And Jesus didn't send them a letter. He didn't leave a note at the tomb. He walked with them.
Father Fred Cabras, a Franciscan priest and mental health counselor — writes something I haven't been able to stop thinking about since I read it. He points out that the text doesn't say Jesus led the disciples to Emmaus. It doesn't say they followed Jesus. It says He walked with them. Side by side. Same pace. Same road.

That is a different posture than most of us take with people who are struggling.
Most of us want to fix. We want to explain why it happened. We want to get them back to Jerusalem as fast as possible because watching someone we love walk in the wrong direction is deeply uncomfortable. So we talk at them. We quote Scripture at them. We remind them of what they already know.

But that's not what Jesus did.

He asked questions. He listened. He let them tell the whole story, including the part where they admitted they had stopped hoping. He didn't rush them past their grief to get to the good news. He walked the road with them until they were ready to see.

There are people in your life right now who are on a seven-mile walk away from God. Some of them are in your family. Some of them are sitting in this church. Some of them used to sit in this church and don't anymore. They are not looking for a sermon. They have heard the sermon. They are looking for someone willing to walk beside them in the part that comes before the revelation, the long, dusty, confusing miles in between.

Father Cabras calls this becoming an Emmaus walker. Not a guide. Not a teacher. A companion. Someone who loves people enough to listen. Someone who makes space for the full story, the grief, the confusion, the "we had hoped", without flinching or rushing.
This is what the Resurrection looks like in your ordinary week.

It looks like a conversation at lunch where you don't try to fix your coworker but you also don't pretend not to notice they are not okay. It looks like calling the friend who has pulled away from the church instead of assuming they'll come back on their own. It looks like sitting with your teenager through the part of their story that makes you uncomfortable, instead of jumping straight to the lesson.

Jesus is still walking roads. He is walking them through you.

The disciples said later, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked with us on the road?" That burning wasn't just theological insight. It was what happens when someone finally feels truly accompanied, truly heard, for the first time in a long time.

Somebody in your life needs their heart to burn again.

You might be the one who walks with them until it does.

For over a century, the Hatfield and McCoy families turned the Appalachian hills into a war zone.

They fought over hogs. Over land. Over a love that crossed the wrong bloodline. They buried children and brothers and kept the ledger running. The feud didn't end because one side won. It ended because both sides grew exhausted from burying people they loved.

On June 14, 2003, more than 100 years after the worst of the violence, descendants of both families gathered and signed a formal truce. Two sides that had defined themselves by hatred of each other chose to share a history instead.

They sat down at the same table.

Jesus said something that should stop us cold: "Many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 8:11)

Not a metaphor. A meal. A real table with real seats, and people from every nation, every background, every history of conflict, seated together. Ancient Jewish teaching describes this as the great Messianic Banquet, a lavish feast prepared by God for all peoples. Isaiah saw it coming: "The Lord of hosts will prepare a lavish banquet for all peoples on this mountain." (Isaiah 25:6)

The Hatfields and McCoys got there by exhaustion. God is preparing something better. A table where the wolf and the lamb don't just tolerate each other. They feast together.
And here is what that means for your Monday.

Our salvation isn't just for us. You are not just a recipient of peace. You are an ambassador of the kingdom that is coming. Every act of integrity at work, every moment you extend grace to someone who doesn't deserve it, every Monday you show up carrying something the world can't produce on its own, you are announcing that table. You are sending an invitation.

The feud ends. The table is coming. And right now, in the in-between, you are one of the people holding the invitation out to someone who doesn't yet know they have a seat.
Walk in like you know it.

Monday mornings at the alternative school didn't start with groggy yawns.

They started with armor being buckled on.

Boys who left on Friday afternoons, soft-spoken, helpful, seemingly at peace, came back Monday as different people. They walked through the metal detectors with eyes like flint. The Case of the Mondays for these kids wasn't about needing caffeine. It was a survival reflex.

Over the weekend, the school's controlled sanctuary disappeared. For 48 hours, they navigated home environments where the stakes were higher than any grade. By Monday, the adrenaline hadn't drained. They walked in still vibrating from the conflict, ready for a fight because in their world, being open and caring was a vulnerability they couldn't afford until they knew the perimeter was safe.

Every day I walked into that classroom as a person of peace.

Not because I had it together. Because I understood that peace is not passive. Peace is a presence you carry into a room. It is a decision you make before the door opens.

Isaiah said something that sounds impossible: "The wolf will live with the lamb." (Isaiah 11:6) 

Every nature documentary fan knows what that means in today's world. The lamb is not having a good afternoon. The wolf doesn't negotiate. So when Isaiah says they live together, he is not describing a minor adjustment to the ecosystem. He is describing a peace so complete it rewrites the nature of things themselves.

That is what's coming. But here is what I learned from those kids: the in-between matters.
Jesus did not rise on Sunday and tell His disciples to wait behind the locked door until everything was fixed. He breathed on them, gave them His peace, and said: "As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." (John 20:21)

The wolf and the lamb aren't lying down yet. But you are living in the in-between. And the in-between is not empty. It is full of people being sent into rooms where Monday feels like armor, carrying a peace the world cannot manufacture and cannot take away.

Those kids didn't need a better program. They needed someone to walk in first.

That is still the assignment.

I used to be a sneakerhead.

Not casually. Seriously. I would drive to FootAction, not Foot Locker, FootAction, and stand in line for the latest Jordans. And if I'm being honest, half the time the only thing that made them "new" was the colorway. Same shoe. Different box. And I had to have them.
Michael Jordan's brand now generates $7.3 billion a year. He earns a reported $250 to $350 million annually just in royalties. The shoes became an empire. And for a season of my life, that empire had a small outpost in my closet.

But then I learned something that changed everything.

In 1989, a 15-year-old named Michael Eugene Thomas was strangled by his basketball buddy for a pair of two-week-old Air Jordans. Left barefoot in the woods in Maryland. That same year, a 16-year-old named Johnny Bates was shot and killed at a Houston bus stop for his sneakers.

Someone died for the shoes on my feet.

That was the moment I started asking a different question. Not "what do I want?" but "what is this actually worth?"

Paul wrote from a prison cell; not a platform, not a green room, a prison cell, and said this: "And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 4:7)

He wasn't describing a feeling. He was describing a reorientation. A moment when the things you used to chase stop looking like treasure and start looking like weight.
Fame fades. Fortune fades. The shoes you stood in line for end up at a garage sale. But what is eternal will not fade.

Here is what I want you to sit with. The gift of the Holy Spirit that lives inside every believer right now is described in Scripture as a down payment. A pledge. A deposit guaranteeing something greater to come. Paul says God "sealed us and gave us the Spirit in our hearts as a pledge" (2 Corinthians 1:22). Not the full amount yet. A guarantee of it.

Which means every act of integrity at work, every moment you choose peace over panic, every Monday you show up sent instead of afraid, you are not just surviving the week. You are investing in something that will outlast it.

The shoes weren't worth it. But this is.

Most of us have "that drawer" in our house. You know the one, the junk drawer. It’s full of stuff you don’t actually use but can’t quite bring yourself to toss. An old iPhone charger for a phone you haven’t owned since 2016. An expired coupon for a store that went out of business. A random key that doesn’t fit a single lock in the house.

Every few months, you open it, look at the mess, and then just... close it again. You keep it because, on some level, those scraps still feel like they belong to you.
We do the exact same thing with our lives.

We go back to seasons that ended years ago. We return to the last place we felt "okay"—the old relationship, the version of ourselves that felt more alive, or the career path that finally made sense—and we keep showing up there, hoping the outcome will be different this time. We replay old wounds like a movie on a loop, wondering why we can’t seem to move forward.

The thing about that first Easter morning is that the women didn’t show up at the tomb expecting a miracle. They weren’t there in faith; they were there with burial spices. They were coming to perform a final chore for a dead man. They went to the tomb because it was the last place they saw Him.

That’s what grief and pain do to us—they route us back to the familiar. Even when the "familiar" is a cold, dark tomb. We stay there because the pain has a shape we recognize. Freedom is actually much scarier than familiar grief because freedom requires us to step into the unknown.

In Isaiah 43, God basically tells His people to stop staring in the rearview mirror: "Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!" He isn't saying the past didn't matter. He’s saying that if you’re constantly looking back at what was, you’re going to miss what’s springing up right in front of you.

Jeremiah 29:11 promises a "hope and a future." Notice it doesn’t say a "hope and a repeat."
When the women got to the tomb, they were met with a question that changed everything: "Why do you look for the living among the dead?" It wasn't a scolding; it was a redirection. God wasn't mad that they were at the tomb, but He wanted them to know He didn’t live there anymore.

He’s not in your past, either. He isn't in that old version of your story. He moved. And the same Spirit that pulled Jesus out of that grave lives in you right now (Romans 8:11). That’s not just a nice Sunday school sentiment—it’s "dunamis" power. It’s the energy meant to break the cycles you think you’re stuck in.

So, what "dead thing" are you still carrying spices for? An old identity? A mistake you can’t forgive yourself for?

The tomb doesn't have to be your permanent address. The stone has already been rolled away. You don't have to keep visiting the grave—He’s already out here, waiting for you to catch up.

Imagine the biggest moment of your life. The kind of moment that changes your entire trajectory. Now imagine that right in the middle of it, you stop everything just to check on one person who is crying.

That’s what Jesus did on Easter morning.

He had just defeated death. He had basically just rewritten the history of the universe. If anyone had an excuse to be "busy," it was the risen Christ. But the very first thing He did wasn't to go find the high priests or show off to Pilate. He walked toward a weeping woman and asked her why she was crying.

I can’t get over that.

Mary Magdalene was a wreck. She had watched her teacher die, and now she thought His body had been stolen. She was at her breaking point. When she saw Jesus, she didn't even recognize Him through the tears—she thought He was the gardener.

And Jesus asks her: "Woman, why are you weeping? Who is it you are looking for?"

He didn't tell her to "get it together" because the resurrection had happened. He didn't tell her she was being dramatic or that she should be celebrating. He entered her grief before He revealed His glory.

This tells us everything we need to know about God's character. Psalm 34:18 says He is "close to the brokenhearted." He isn't a God who watches your pain from a safe, theological distance. He’s the kind of God who walks right into the middle of the mess and stands there with you.

Then, He says one word: "Mary." Just her name. That was all it took. In John 10, Jesus says the Good Shepherd calls His sheep by name. Mary wasn't just a face in a crowd of five thousand; she was a specific person with a specific heartache, and He knew exactly who she was.

Whatever you’re carrying this week—the quiet ache, the anxiety you can’t quite name, the grief that feels too heavy—He isn't looking past you to get to someone "more important." He isn't waiting for you to stop crying before He shows up.

He stopped for Mary, and He stops for you.

Zephaniah 3:17 says He "rejoices over you with singing." Not because you’ve got it all figured out, but simply because you are His.

Mary showed up at the tomb looking for a corpse, but she left with a mission. Jesus turned her weeping into a message. He does the same for us. He doesn't just comfort us so we can feel better; He meets us in our tears so He can give us the strength to go and tell others that death doesn't have the final say.

If you’re feeling lost today, listen for your name. The one you’re looking for is already standing right there.

This is a companion blog to our Sunday message, “Deeper Through Sacrifice.” If you were with us on Sunday, consider this the bonus material. If you missed it, this will still meet you right where you are.

On Sunday, we explored a word that changed the way I understand everything about sacrifice. The Hebrew word korban, which we usually translate as “sacrifice”, doesn’t actually mean “something given up.” It means “something brought near.” A gift. An act of drawing close to the God who is already drawing close to you.

But there were two things I had to leave on the cutting room floor because of time. And they’ve been sitting with me all week. I think they’ll sit with you too.

Most of us grew up understanding sacrifice as a penalty. You sinned, you paid. God was angry, so you brought a lamb to calm Him down. Transaction complete.
But that’s not what Scripture actually describes.

The Hebrew word for sin is chata (pronounced haw-TAW). And here’s what’s fascinating, it’s not a religious term. It’s an archery term. It means “to miss the mark.” A sin is like an arrow that falls short of its intended target. Paul used this exact image when he wrote, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

But it gets even richer. The Hebrew word for God’s instruction, His law, His Scripture, also comes from an archery term. The root word yarah means “to take aim.” So Scripture is the target we’re aiming for. Sin is when the arrow falls short of that target.

Now here’s the part that should reframe how you think about the sacrificial system. The sin offering, called the chattat in Hebrew, almost identical to the word for sin itself, was not a penalty for falling short. It was a means of purification after sin had been dealt with, repented of, and forgiven. Think of it less like a fine you pay at the courthouse and more like an apology gift you bring to someone you’ve hurt.

It didn’t earn forgiveness. But it was an appropriate gesture of humility, the worshipper’s way of saying: “I fell short. I know I fell short. And I’m bringing this gift as close to You as I can get because I want to be near You again.”

That’s korban in action. Drawing near, even after failure.

And here’s what should wreck every casual “nobody’s perfect” theology: Leviticus 4 tells us that even unintentional sins required a sin offering. You didn’t have to know you sinned. You didn’t have to mean it. The arrow still fell short. The offering was still necessary. God takes the gap between who we are and who He created us to be seriously, not because He’s petty, but because He’s holy. And He wants us close.

God Built an Economic On-Ramp

This is one of my favorite details in all of Scripture, and I wish I’d had time to unpack it on Sunday.

The sin offering wasn’t one-size-fits-all. Scripture prescribed different offerings depending on who sinned:

• If the high priest sinned,  he brought a bull.
• If the whole community sinned, the elders brought a bull.
• If a leader sinned, he brought a male goat.
• If an ordinary Israelite sinned, a female goat or lamb.
• If you couldn’t afford the goat or lamb,  two doves.
• If you couldn’t afford the doves,  flour.

Read that again. Flour.

God built an economic on-ramp into the sacrificial system. Nobody — not the poorest person in Israel — was too broke to draw near to God. The offering met you where you were.

If that doesn’t sound like the gospel, I don’t know what does.

The book of Ecclesiastes puts it plainly: “There is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). Everyone needs the offering. The priest. The king. The elder. The person reading this blog right now.

And the beauty of the cross is this: Jesus became the final chattat. The sin offering for every arrow that ever fell short. He didn’t just meet us where we were, He came all the way down to where we were and said, “I’ll cover the distance your arrow couldn’t.”

You were never too far gone. You were never too broke. You were never too much of a mess. The offering always met you where you were. And it still does.

There’s a story I wanted to tell on Sunday that captures what korban looks like when it puts on skin and walks into an ordinary Tuesday.

Jermaine Washington was twenty-six years old, working a regular job at the D.C. Department of Employment Services. He had a coworker named Michelle Stevens. They grabbed lunch together, talked during breaks, nothing romantic. Just two people becoming friends.

One day, Michelle broke down crying on Jermaine’s shoulder. She’d been on the kidney donor waiting list for eleven months. Three days a week, three hours a day, she was hooked up to a dialysis machine. Chronic fatigue. Blackouts. Joint pain that wouldn’t quit. Her mother couldn’t donate because of hypertension. Her two brothers said they loved her, but they were too afraid.

Jermaine later recalled his thought in that moment: “What was I supposed to do? Sit back and watch her die?”

So he gave her his kidney.

Not his wife. Not his sister. His coworker. A woman he described as “just a friend.”
The procedure was brutal. A catheter inserted into an artery in his groin. A fifteen-inch incision from his navel to the middle of his back. Five days in the hospital. And when people questioned his sanity, when they asked where he found the courage to give away a kidney, Jermaine’s answer silenced the room:

“I prayed for it. I asked God for guidance and that’s what I got.”

Nobody made Jermaine do that. It wasn’t guilt. It wasn’t obligation. He saw someone in pain and decided that his comfort was worth less than her life.

That’s not insanity. That’s korban. That’s bringing your very body near to save another.
And isn’t that exactly what Jesus did? He saw humanity in pain, hooked up to the dialysis machine of sin, slowly dying, with no compatible donor in sight, and He said, “I’ll give them Mine.”

Not because He had to. Because He wanted to draw near.

What About You?

I’m not asking you for a kidney. But as we head toward Easter, I am asking you this: What would it look like for you to give something that actually costs you?

Not a religious performance. Not a check-the-box fast. A real korban, something brought near to God that requires you to open your hands and trust that He’ll fill them with something better than what you released.

Maybe it’s volunteering somewhere that’s inconvenient. Serving in a ministry that doesn’t come with applause. Showing up for someone when showing up is the last thing you want to do. Blessing someone financially when the math doesn’t make sense, because God told you to and you’re willing to trust His provision over your calculator.

The writer of Hebrews puts it simply: “Do not neglect doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is pleased” (Hebrews 13:16).

Not grand gestures. Doing good and sharing. The everyday, nobody-sees-it, this-costs-me-something stuff.

That’s what pleases God. That’s what brings Him delight. That’s the aroma that reaches heaven.

There's a profound difference between showing up and truly being present. We've all experienced it, going through the motions while our minds wander elsewhere, checking boxes on our spiritual to-do lists without our hearts fully engaged. But what if the moments we're sleepwalking through are actually divine appointments in disguise?

The Autopilot Trap

Picture this: You're driving while texting. The car moves forward, you're technically on the road, but you're not really there. You react to brake lights and turn signals, but your attention is fractured, divided between what's in front of you and what's glowing in your hand.

This is exactly how many of us serve.

We volunteer, but our minds race through tomorrow's schedule. We help someone, but we're mentally calculating how long it will take. We give, but we're doing the math on what we're giving up. We're physically present but spiritually absent, running on autopilot while calling it service.

Even worse, some of us have stopped serving altogether. We've convinced ourselves that what we have to offer isn't significant enough to matter. We're not the most talented, not the most organized, don't have enough time. Someone else can do it better. So we sit on the sidelines and call it humility, when really it's just fear dressed up in modest clothing.

The Problem of Looking for Crowds

Here's the uncomfortable truth: We're always looking for the crowd. We want to serve when it's obvious, convenient, when the room is full and the energy is right and someone's going to notice. We want to help the person who looks like they need help, the one who raises their hand, the one who fits our idea of who deserves our time and energy.

But what about the person who doesn't look like a need? What about the one who just blends in?

In Matthew 25:40, Jesus delivers a truth that should permanently rewire how we think about service: "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."

Notice the response of the righteous: "When did we see you?" They didn't recognize the King because they weren't serving to rack up spiritual points. They served because that's who they were. And every single time they fully showed up for the overlooked, Jesus said, "That was Me."

Why We Miss Him

Isaiah 53:2 warned us seven hundred years before Jesus walked the earth: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him."

The Messiah wouldn't walk into a room and turn heads. No striking appearance. Nothing that made crowds stop and stare. He would look ordinary, unremarkable, easily overlooked.

If Jesus walked into our churches today, would we miss Him too? Would we walk right past Him? He didn't look like royalty. He looked like the person on the side of the road we don't make eye contact with. He looked like the one we're too busy to stop and speak to at the grocery store.

Jesus was hidden in "the least of these", not even the best of these, but the least, because that's exactly what Isaiah said He'd look like.

From Love to Compassion to Empathy

Understanding how to truly serve requires recognizing three distinct levels of engagement:

Love is broad. It's a deep, wide ocean of care and affection. We love people in general, love humanity, love our neighbors in the abstract. Love is essential, but it can stay at a distance. Love can send a check, say a prayer, feel something without doing something.

Compassion is focused. It's a sincere, specific response to someone's suffering. It's not just that people in general would be okay, it's that this person, right here, right now, would be free from pain. Compassion costs you something. It requires you to pick somebody. Mother Teresa said, "We cannot do great things. Only small things with great love." That's compassion, love that gets focused enough to get its hands dirty.

Empathy is incarnational. Sympathy looks down at someone's pain from a safe distance and says, "I feel sorry for you." Compassion steps closer and says, "I want to help you." But empathy climbs all the way down into it and says, "I feel it with you."

The Touch That Changed Everything

In Mark 1:41, we witness empathy in action. A man with leprosy, ceremonially unclean, socially untouchable, legally quarantined, approaches Jesus. In that culture, touching a leper meant contracting ritual impurity, disqualification from the temple, from society, from public life.

Jesus could have healed him with a word from across the room. Safe distance. Clean hands. Still miraculous.

But watch what happens: "Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!'"

He touched him.

Jesus didn't just heal a disease. He reached all the way down to the lowest of the low, a man who couldn't worship, couldn't work, couldn't be touched. Jesus stepped into that man's world and said: "I see you. I am with you. I am willing."

He didn't just feel sorry for the leper. He became what the leper was, so the leper could become what He is. That's incarnational compassion. That's empathy. And that's the model for how we serve.

Serving for an Audience of One

First Peter 4:10 doesn't say serve if you have a spectacular gift. It says, "Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms."

Your presence is a gift. Your time is a gift. Your showing up, even to the small, even to the broken, even to the twelve people in a room with a leaking roof, is a gift.

But showing up is the floor, not the ceiling. What transforms service from obligation to sacred encounter isn't just attendance, it's surrender. It's getting small enough for God to get big. "He must become greater; I must become less."

That's not a feeling. That's a decision. That's not a talent. That's a posture.

The One Who Needed You

Somewhere today, someone walked into a room and nobody noticed them. They didn't look like a moment, didn't look like a divine appointment. They looked like just another face in the crowd.

But the person you almost overlooked, that's exactly who Jesus hides in.

Stop serving for the crowd. Stop serving for recognition. Stop serving for the feeling. Serve because Jesus said whatever you do for the least of these, you do for Him.

He is still willing, willing to break through walls, overcome obstacles, do exceedingly and abundantly more than we can imagine. He's willing to get us off autopilot.

The question is: Are you willing to let Him take the wheel?