I was sitting under Patrick Detken’s teaching at The Crossing about twenty years ago when something about the nature of God and the vastness of his love landed on me differently than it ever had before. Not new information — I’d heard the theology a thousand times. But something underneath it finally clicked, and what came out of my mouth, quietly, to myself, was: that’s ridiculous. Not ridiculous like unbelievable. Ridiculous like the math doesn’t work, and it’s true anyway. I saw, for a second, how surrounded and embraced and protected my life had actually been. Not managed by me. Not earned by me. Just — held.
I’ve said “ridiculous” that same way ever since — mostly in small groups, sitting with a pastor and a handful of guys exploring who God is, whenever something true lands too big to hold any other way. I never fully understood what I was naming when I said it. I just knew the word fit.
This week I finally connected it. And I think the answer is: that was fear of God. Not dread. Awe so large it had nowhere to go but out of my mouth as a kind of protest.
I was talking with Richard yesterday, and he asked me the question he always asks — where are you at, what’s going on. I told him I was embarking on something new, trying to actually understand what fear of God means, that I’d only just started. He asked the question that stopped both of us: how do you love someone you fear? We sat with it. He offered the obvious answer — love casts out fear — and I could tell it wasn’t landing all the way for either of us. I said, before I’d fully connected it myself, that maybe fear of God is love. He didn’t get it yet, not in a way he could have explained back to me. He will. This is just the naming exercise — putting a word to something I’ve been practicing, badly and well, for thirty-one years without knowing what to call it.
Here’s what I keep noticing, now that I’m looking for it — those moments aren’t rare. They’re everywhere, and they’re chained together, maybe ordained, in a way I spent decades not letting myself see. The wedding. Madeline saying yes for reasons I still don’t fully understand. The births of my kids. A business built and still standing because customers keep choosing to trust me with something as personal as their motorcycle. Looking out a plane window at pockets of city lights at night and knowing each one represents a thousand lives I’ll never know anything about. The pull of the tide. Standing under the Milky Way somewhere dark enough to actually see it. Watching a two-mile freight train and doing the math on how a couple of locomotives are pulling all of that. The rush of hitting 180 miles an hour on something with two wheels. Solving a problem in the shop that had no obvious answer. Fabricating a tool because the one you needed doesn’t exist yet. Taking a risk on faith with no proof it would work, and it working out anyway.
And underneath all of that — the ordinary miracle nobody clocks as one. A heart that has not stopped beating since before I could form a memory. A stomach turning food into the actual material of being alive. A brain the approximate size of a fist, running on directions I will never see, coordinating a body I mostly ignore until it hurts. None of that is background noise. That’s the same thing as the freight train and the Milky Way, just closer than I usually look.
Thirty-one years sober. I know the numbers on that — how many people don’t make it through what I made it through, how many don’t get the years I’ve gotten. I didn’t engineer that. Somewhere in there, someone crossed my path and became a person I trusted for reasons I still can’t fully account for, and it mattered more than I understood at the time. None of that was mine to claim credit for. That’s the part I get wrong the most — taking the win, quietly, in the privacy of my own head, instead of naming where it actually came from. Pride does that. It reaches for the trophy before humility even gets a vote.
So here’s where I’ve landed, at least for today: fear of God isn’t a separate category of religious feeling I need to go looking for. It’s what’s underneath every one of those moments, if I let it be. It’s the fear of squandering grace this obvious. The fear of putting my eyes and attention and affection on the wrong things when I’ve been shown, over and over, what the right thing looks like. It’s the fear of pursuing something false when I already have words for what’s true. Not fearing God isn’t neutral — it’s not just carelessness. Scripture calls it adultery, and it means that literally, not as a figure of speech. It’s affection drifting somewhere else and calling it nothing.
What fear of God has actually produced in me, on the days I’ve let it, isn’t paralysis. It’s obedience — imperfect, but real, practiced longer than I usually give myself credit for. It’s ridiculous faith. Ruthless trust. The courage to do the right thing regardless of how I feel about it in the moment.
I’m afraid to forget this. I know myself well enough to know I will, at least partly, by next week — the ordinary weight of the shop and the phone and everyone’s expectations will close back over it like water. So I’m writing it down. Not as a lesson I’ve mastered. As a marker, so that when the wonder fades — and it will — I’ll have a trail back to the place where I stood at The Crossing and heard myself say that’s ridiculous, and meant it as praise.
