“And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.” I keep circling back to that verse from 2 John because of how it’s built. Obedience to God’s commands is love. And the command itself is to walk in love. It’s almost circular, and I think that’s the point — it isn’t handing me a checklist of new content. It’s naming a single, repeated way of life: love God completely, love one another concretely, love my neighbor as myself, love even the people who oppose me. None of it is arbitrary. It flows out of who God is. I love because He first loved me, and the commands just describe what it looks like to reflect that back into the world.

But walking implies something embodied. Habitual. Lived from the inside out, not just affirmed from the outside in. And that’s where Oswald Chambers has been sitting with me lately — his observation that we begin the Christian life by believing what we’re told to believe, and then have to go on to actually assimilate those beliefs until they redound to God’s glory, rather than multiplying beliefs we never make our own. Assimilation is a biological word. Food eaten but not digested passes through you without nourishing anything. I can affirm every correct doctrine about love and still be cold underneath it, because the belief was accepted but never absorbed. That’s the danger — knowing the right answers as a substitute for living the right life.

I wrote something in a journal entry back in February that I think names my version of this problem better than anything else I’ve written:

This is how I understand God. To lay all that I have at His feet. To abandon self. To unlearn survival. Then I float. Free. Free of the nucleus. I escape the self that suffocates, the stranglehold, the self that murders, the self that hides, the self that fears, the false self. The position, it’s upside down. The posture, the attitude, the economy. Give up to get. Lose to win. Love costs something now. And I am in the way.

And I am in the way. That’s not an external obstacle I’m describing. That’s me naming myself as the obstacle. I call it my “attitude problem,” and the phrase “unlearn survival” is doing precise work there — my survival instincts weren’t evil, they kept me alive. But they run on scarcity, self-protection, accumulation. The kingdom economy is the exact inversion of that: give up to get, lose to win. I can’t run both systems at once. And “free of the nucleus” is the image that’s stayed with me — the self as the thing everything else orbits around. Surrender isn’t destruction. It’s decentering. I still exist. I’m just no longer the gravity.

The gravity of the disease, as I put it elsewhere, is the core nucleus of the human condition: selfishness, self-centeredness, fear, emotions, lust, self-will, self-pity, entitlement, pride, anger. I include emotions on that list deliberately, not just the obviously sinful items. Not emotion itself, but the tyranny of being ruled by feeling — you feel, therefore you react, therefore everything becomes about your interior weather. That’s the organizing principle the gospel has to reach all the way down to.

For me, emotions have been the biggest struggle of all, because I learned, seemingly from birth, to don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel. That’s a survival code out of a dysfunctional, addictive family system. I didn’t choose it. I absorbed it because it kept me safe when I was small and had no other options. But the mechanisms that protected me as a child became the walls that isolate me as an adult. What was once shelter became a prison. And intimacy — with God, with anyone — requires the three things that code forbids. You have to talk honestly, trust beyond what you can control, feel what’s actually happening instead of managing it from a distance. That’s why “unlearn survival” was never poetry. It’s an actual rewiring, a retraining of how I move through the world.

The clearest place this has played out is my marriage. Saving it last year came down to one pivotal moment — an epiphany that it wasn’t her, it was me. I had to lean into and be honest about the underlying fear that runs through all of my relationships, not just this one. And once I saw that, a new question took over: how do I not make it about me? That question has deepened my spiritual practices and forced me to learn how to actually manage my emotions like an adult instead of just reacting to them.

That epiphany is the same movement my journal entry describes. The self that was in the way stepped aside long enough to see clearly. What I saw wasn’t only a marriage problem — it was the underlying fear itself, the nucleus becoming visible. And I didn’t just feel bad about it and move on. I did something with it. That’s the difference between guilt and repentance. Guilt circles back to the self. Repentance moves outward.

Madeline and I agree now that marriage is about sanctification. There isn’t a time in twenty-seven years we’d go back to. It keeps getting better — and that’s not an accident, it’s the fruit of two people willing to do the hard work, and specifically of a husband willing to take his eyes off his wife long enough to look honestly at himself. Marriage was never primarily about happiness or compatibility. It’s a crucible. It’s designed to surface exactly what’s on that second list — the selfishness, the fear, the pride, the self-pity — not to punish me with it, but to give it somewhere to go.

I asked her directly whether she agreed the marriage is solid. She said she doesn’t feel safe answering that.

That’s honest. It probably means she’s still healing, still watching to see if the changes hold. Trust that broke over years doesn’t fully return after one epiphany, no matter how genuine the epiphany was. And I think that’s its own form of sanctification for me now — learning to be okay with the uncertainty of her process. Not rushing her to a verdict. Not needing her affirmation to keep doing the work. Doing it because it’s right, not because it’s being recognized.

There’s something in the fact that I asked at all. The man shaped by don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel, asking his wife a vulnerable question about himself — and then sitting with an uncomfortable answer without collapsing or deflecting. That’s real movement, even if it doesn’t look like the ending I wanted. Her not feeling safe to answer is information, not rejection. It tells me where the ongoing work is. The wall didn’t come down in a year. It won’t. But she’s still there, after everything.

That’s the deepest test of whether love has become something I walk in rather than something I merely believe: loving her well when I can’t measure whether it’s landing. Giving up the need for the feedback loop. Give up to get, lose to win, in its most intimate and daily form.