I didn’t get called on last night. I sat there most of the meeting half-praying, half-rehearsing, wondering how I’d make five minutes land if my number came up. It didn’t. And somewhere in that waiting I caught myself — the wanting to land it, the wanting to be seen doing the surrendering well. That’s a subtler thing to die to than money or reputation ever was. Wanting the testimony to work is not the same as being willing to give it.
Jesus came up six or seven times in that room. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that many people name Him in one meeting. A couple of people pushed back, too. My first instinct was to call that rebellion, something trying to push Him off the throne. But I think it’s simpler than that, and harder. He was named specifically enough last night to be argued with. Nobody argues with a wallpaper Jesus.
I keep coming back to two moments in the Gospels. A rich young ruler runs up to Jesus, kneels, and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. He’s not a con man. He’s kept the commandments since he was a boy — he says so, and Jesus doesn’t correct him. Jesus loves him, Mark says, and then tells him to sell everything and follow. And the man walks away sad, because he had great wealth. Later, after Jesus lays out the hardest teaching he’s given yet, most of the crowd of five thousand leaves too. Not because they misunderstood him. Because they understood him perfectly. “This is a hard saying; who can bear it?”
That’s the question I actually want to sit inside, more than any label I could put on myself. Not “what’s wrong with me that I buried what I buried for so long.” Everybody’s managing something. Everybody’s got a survival instinct wired for ego and self-preservation before it’s wired for anything else — that’s not a diagnosis, that’s just what it costs to be human and afraid. The real question the ruler and the crowd put in front of me is: when the cost gets named specifically, do I stay or do I walk?
I have a testimony I haven’t given yet, about my brother, about twenty years it took me to feel what happened, about the rule I lived by without ever being taught it in words: don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel. That rule kept the appearance of a life running smoothly on top of one that wasn’t. I don’t think that makes me stranger than the room. I think it makes me an example of how far a person can build a life around managing fear instead of bringing it to God, and still look, from the outside, like he’s fine.
Here’s the hope in it, though, and I don’t want to bury this part the way I’ve buried everything else: it changes. Thirty-one years of trusting hasn’t made life easier, but it’s remade what I bring the hard parts to. There’s a kind of rewiring that happens slowly, almost without you noticing, until one day you catch yourself letting someone close instead of guarding the door. I’m watching it happen in real time and I still don’t fully trust it’s real.
I saw what it looks like fully grown last night. I stayed after the meeting with Patrick and Marc. Marc’s thirty-four years married, decades sober, walking with his wife straight into a double mastectomy and everything a major cancer recovery demands of a couple — and there’s a steadiness in him I don’t have yet but can see the shape of. I prayed with him. We shared our faith. When we parted he said, “I’m glad I got to know you better.” Six words. I felt something I haven’t let myself feel around men like that before: that I belong in that room, not because I’ve earned it, but because I’m finally letting myself be known in it.
That’s what I want now — not just relief in a single moment, but the kind of unshakable serenity Pat and Marc seem to carry as a way of life. I want to trust God with my marriage the way Marc is having to. With money. With the people I’m afraid I’ll disappoint. With the people who are different than me, the ones I’ve kept at arm’s length because different used to mean dangerous. I want to stop treating the way I’m made as a problem to manage and start treating it as something to actually participate with God in loving — the whole of it, the fear included, not just the parts I’ve learned to present well.
God has to be bigger than the fear, or none of this works. I think that’s the whole of what I’m trying to say. Not that the fear isn’t real — it’s the most real thing some nights. But that it isn’t the biggest thing in the room anymore, even when it’s loud.
God, remove the gravity of self. Help me to recognize You in every circumstance. Thank you for the opportunities to love and value others. Please, continue to guide me in Your ways. Remove fear from me and build trust in You. Thank you for showing me who You are, and who I am.