I saw something recently that said I’m not making any resolutions for 2026: It’s the year’s turn to get better. So far that’s not happening, but there’s still time.
Have you ever had that situation where a single line from a song hit you and sent you reeling because it spoke some deep truth to you and so you fell in love with it? Maybe it was the words themselves, or maybe it was an unexpected chord progression, or just the way the singer’s voice trembled on an otherwise meaningless lyric. Like when Elton John sang, “Someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear.”
And maybe you’d heard the song a thousand times before and it hadn’t hit you that way. Maybe you needed to hear it that many times, or maybe the weather and the season and your heart were all just right for you to hear the truth of it in a way you hadn’t before. Maybe you even played the song for others and they were polite but somehow that deep truth just didn’t connect with them. And then you listened to the song again by yourself and you wondered if you had been crazy, if you had heard it at all in the first place?
This is what being Christian feels like to me quite often these days.
I remember when I was 13 and enduring my first crisis of faith and major period of spiritual questioning. I still went to my church camp as a counselor even though I didn’t think I believed any of that anymore, because I liked it at camp and because old habits die hard. And they handed me a worksheet with a Bible verse and told me I was leading a Bible study and I thought well gosh let’s see if I can pretend any of this makes sense.
So I sat down and read it to see what I could do. The verse was from Paul’s letter to the church in Phillipi. I will not quote the whole thing, but there was this part where Paul wrote, “Not that I have already obtained righteousness and resurrection, or have already been made perfect, but I press on and take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.”
Something washed over me, and I do not think I can describe it to you any better than I can describe to you the way Gillian Welch’s banjo sounded when I heard her play “Hard Times” for the first time at the High Sierra Music Festival in 2011, or express to you how it felt when I was in pressed against the stage at a Bob Dylan concert and he looked me right in the eye for two whole phrases of “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, or what happened in my heart upon visiting Jesus’ burial site, the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
I want to share this song with you and have no idea if it will make sense.
In that moment in the summer of 1993 I felt very clearly that Paul was telling me that Jesus had taken a hold of me long before I ever thought about taking a hold of him. Suddenly I was saturated with the sense that my belief or disbelief were somehow irrelevant. That God had me whether I believed in God or not. That the state of my faith could never dictate the grasp that Jesus had on me. Which is to say yet again that the question “Have you found Jesus?” is meaningless because Jesus has already found you. Our belonging to the one who made us is a foregone conclusion. It is true whether we believe it or not. I’m afraid this sounds ridiculous and somehow it will make you take me less seriously, but I have to tell you about it anyway.
Over the years my faith has ebbed and flowed, my desire to be close to God has sometimes been strong, and other times I have doubted the very existence of the God I worship and have dedicated my life to serve. And I am often frustrated or even horrified by Christianity as I see it being expressed around me – as a tool of judgment, ostracization, oppression, and violence.
At the age of 13, raised and immersed in church culture, I had read Paul’s words many times before. When this time it found me I was spiritually adrift and obsessed with the idea that I needed to figure it all out – that I needed to prove God’s existence and then reach that proven God on my own power, to find Jesus, to know exactly what I believed and to live it just right. And then I heard Paul say that before I had ever even thought about reaching out to God, God had already reached out and taken hold of me. And all I can tell you is in that moment I believed it.
And, God help me, I still believe it.
In this world that sometimes feels like it’s on fire, I have hope in my heart. I don’t feel like I put it there, but there it is. And I notice that Paul says that he’s trying to take hold of the thing for which Christ has taken hold of him. Which is to say, Paul’s act of devotion is a response – a decision to take seriously the hope that has already been placed in his heart, to live for that hope, to move towards the belonging that is already true.
I do not feel like I have any good words for the horror in Minneapolis – a city under siege by our federal government for purely political reasons. Renee Good, a law abiding citizen acting within her rights, gunned down in public – a legally sanctioned murder caught on camera with no apparent consequences. What can I say that you do not already know? Mere days after our country invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their head of state. It is an overwhelming time to have a conscience and to believe in love.
But for reasons I don’t always understand, I do believe in love, and I feel the grasp of the God who has not let go. Just this morning, a friend of mine told me a story about Archbishop Desmond Tutu preaching in a church in Apartheid South Africa. In the middle of his sermon, armed soldiers entered the sanctuary and lined the side aisles – both for the purposes of intimidation and to make note of who was in attendance. Tutu stopped his sermon, looked at the soldiers and said, “You are very powerful. But I serve a God who cannot be mocked. You have already lost. Come and join the winning side.”
The forces of hatred, division, bigotry, and nationalism – which are enforced by powerful violence – have not won, cannot win, will not win. In Christ’s name, they have already lost. They may not hear what we hear in the holy song that transforms our lives. But we serve a God who cannot be mocked. Our God is love. The victory of love is inevitable. When we reach out in hope, we are reaching for a future that has already been decided – a future built on love and mercy, and marked by justice and peace. Love wins. And when you hear the hope that is placed in your heart, that is God singing to you, “Come and join the winning side.”
