Where the Present Meets the Promise

If Eden was the beginning of our story and Jesus is the beginning of its restoration, then the question that naturally rises is how we live in the long stretch of time between those two beginnings. We’re not in the garden anymore, and we’re not yet in the world where all things are made new. We live in the middle — a place where beauty and brokenness mingle, where joy and sorrow sit side by side, where we catch glimpses of God’s goodness but still feel the ache of what’s unfinished. And in that space, I’ve found myself drawn to a simple way of thinking about life: survival, no harm, and enjoyment. It’s not a slogan or a system. It’s more like a posture, a way of moving through the world with honesty about its wounds and hope for its healing.

Survive may sound like a low bar, but in a world that can be harsh and unpredictable, survival is not a small thing. It’s an act of trust. It’s a way of saying, “My life is worth tending, even when it’s difficult.” In Eden, survival was effortless; in the world to come, it will be irrelevant. But here, in this in‑between place, survival is a kind of faithfulness. It’s caring for the body and soul God gave you. It’s allowing yourself to rest, to breathe, to keep going. It’s recognizing that life is a gift, even when it feels fragile. And maybe it’s also recognizing that helping others survive — through kindness, generosity, presence — is part of what it means to bear God’s image in a world that still groans.

No harm grows naturally out of that. If fear distorted our vision in Eden, then harm is what fear produces when it spills outward. But Jesus shows us another way — a way of gentleness, mercy, and nonviolence. Not the passive kind that ignores injustice, but the active kind that refuses to let fear dictate our actions. To live with a “no harm” posture is to move through the world with open hands instead of clenched fists. It’s choosing compassion over suspicion, forgiveness over retaliation, patience over judgment. It’s recognizing that every person you meet is carrying their own wounds, their own fears, their own unfinished story. And it’s deciding, as far as it depends on you, not to add to their burden. In a world still healing from the wound of Eden, “no harm” becomes a quiet form of love.

And then there is enjoy — the part that feels like a whisper from the world to come. Enjoyment is not escapism or denial. It’s not pretending everything is fine. It’s the simple, sacred act of receiving goodness wherever it appears. A warm meal. A conversation that lingers. A sunrise that catches you off guard. Laughter that loosens something inside you. These moments don’t erase the brokenness of the world, but they remind us that brokenness is not the whole story. Enjoyment is a way of practicing for heaven, of letting joy seep into the cracks of our days. It’s a way of saying, “Even here, even now, life is still a gift.” And maybe it’s also a way of letting God heal us, little by little, through beauty and delight.

When I hold these three together — survival, no harm, enjoyment — they start to feel like a way of living that honors both the world we inhabit and the world we hope for. They acknowledge the reality of suffering without surrendering to it. They make space for joy without ignoring pain. They invite us to live gently, to live gratefully, to live with a kind of quiet courage. And woven through all of it is the anticipation of heaven — not as an escape from this world, but as the fulfillment of everything we were made for. A place where survival is no longer necessary, where harm is no longer possible, and where enjoyment is simply the air we breathe.

I don’t pretend to know exactly what heaven will be like, or how God will bring all things to completion. But I do believe that the life we live now can be shaped by the life we’re moving toward. And maybe this simple posture is one small way of aligning ourselves with that future. A way of living that reflects the God who walked with us in the garden, who walked among us in Jesus, and who will one day walk with us again in a world made whole. Until then, we live in the middle, doing our best to tend the life we’ve been given, to do no harm, to receive joy wherever it appears, and to trust that the One who began this story will bring it to a beautiful end.

What Do You Do When the Bad Guy Really Is Bad?

There are seasons in life when the world feels darker than you expected it to be. For a long time, I've held onto the belief that every cruel person must have been shaped by pain, that if you traced their story back far enough you would find a wounded child who never learned another way to live. And sometimes that’s true. Sometimes brokenness begins so early that a person spends their whole life reacting to wounds they can’t name. I’ve written about that before — about the tragedy of the child who never received the tenderness they needed, the one whose small spark of goodness was crushed before it had a chance to grow. That kind of reflection still matters to me. It still feels true.

But lately I’ve been confronted with another truth, one I didn’t want to see: some people choose cruelty. Not out of desperation. Not out of trauma. Not because they were cornered or confused. Some people harm because they enjoy the power it gives them. Some people take pleasure in domination. Some people cultivate cruelty the way others cultivate kindness. And facing that reality has shaken me more than I expected. It’s one thing to grieve the wounds that shape a soul; it’s another to acknowledge the existence of people who seem to have no desire for healing at all.

Stories have been the catalyst for this shift — films that portray violence as a system rather than an accident, documentaries that reveal a kind of coldness that defies explanation, novels that refuse to soften the truth about human nature. These encounters have forced me to see that innocence is not the default state of the world. They’ve made me realize that some hearts harden not by accident but by choice. And once you see that, you can’t pretend otherwise.

This raises painful questions about how we respond to evil in this life. History is full of examples that resist easy categorization. The Nuremberg trials were an attempt to draw a moral boundary after unimaginable atrocities. Were the executions themselves a perpetuation of violence, or were they a necessary acknowledgment that some acts cannot be allowed to stand? The French Revolution, on the other hand, shows how justice can twist into terror when it loses its restraint. These examples remind me that justice in this world is always imperfect, yet the absence of justice is worse. We cannot allow cruelty to run unchecked, but we must also guard our own hearts so that we do not become cruel in the name of stopping it. That tension is exhausting, but it’s real.

And then there are the "quieter" evils — greed, exploitation, systems that grind people down. These are hard to confront because they are woven into the fabric of society. You can feel helpless in the face of them. You can feel small. You can feel like the world is shaped by forces you cannot influence. And in those moments, the idea that “everyone is good deep down” feels not just naïve but dangerous. It blinds you to the reality that some people will take advantage of your softness if you let them.

Yet even as I acknowledge all of this, something in me still reaches for hope. Not a naïve hope that denies the existence of cruelty, but a deeper hope rooted in the belief that God does not stand far off from the darkness we fear. The heart of the Christian story is not that God saves us from a safe distance, but that He enters the depths with us. Jesus does not avoid the places where cruelty reigns; He walks straight into them. He is betrayed, mocked, tortured, and killed by the very kind of malice that unsettles me now. He suffers not only for us but with us, taking on the full weight of human evil — not to excuse it, but to break its power from the inside.

This is what steadies me when the world feels too dark: Jesus does not flinch from the cruelty we can barely look at. He does not turn away from the people we cannot imagine redeeming. He descends into the deepest places — the places where innocence is shattered, where violence is normalized, where hearts grow cold — and He carries light into them. I don’t pretend to understand how God deals with the truly cruel. I don’t pretend to know what justice looks like in eternity. But I do believe that His reach extends further than mine. I believe He sees the whole story, including the parts we cannot fathom. And I believe that no darkness is deeper than the One who entered it.

So I live in the tension. I acknowledge the reality of cruelty without letting it harden me. I recognize that some people choose darkness, yet I hold onto the hope that God can reach places I cannot. I don’t have to decide who is redeemable. I don’t have to solve the mystery of justice. I don’t have to carry the burden of fixing the world. I only have to walk through it with open eyes and an open heart, trusting that the One who descended into our deepest darkness has not abandoned us to it.

From Brutality to Mercy: Imagining a Different Future

I’ve been thinking lately about how cultures change, and how rarely that change happens all at once. It came to mind while reading Game of Thrones, of all things, because the Dothraki are such an exaggerated picture of a culture built on violence, domination, and taking what you can by force. They’re almost a caricature of brutality, and yet even there, you can imagine what the very first steps of reform might look like. Daenerys doesn’t transform them into peaceful citizens overnight. She barely changes anything at all. But she plants a seed—a refusal to accept certain practices, a different way of leading, a small shift in what is considered honorable. It’s not a revolution. It’s barely a ripple. But it’s something.

And that “something” has been sitting with me, because it mirrors a pattern I see in Scripture far more than the instant, dramatic transformations we sometimes expect. When I look at the Old Testament, I don’t see God dropping a fully formed ethical system onto a people who are ready to live it out. I see Him meeting a community shaped by slavery, tribal warfare, and deeply ingrained cultural norms, and then nudging them—slowly, patiently—toward justice, mercy, and covenant faithfulness. The laws often look like steps forward rather than final ideals, not because God changes, but because people do. It’s a long arc, not a single moment.

Sometimes I think we forget that. We read a command and assume it represents the end of the journey rather than the next step. But if you trace the story from Genesis to the prophets to Jesus, you can see the movement: from vengeance to restraint, from hierarchy to dignity, from rivalry to faithfulness, from “do not do this” to “love one another.” It’s not that the early commands were wrong; it’s that they were part of a process. God was working with people where they were, not where they would eventually be.

And this is where Jesus becomes the center of the whole story for me. In His life, death, and resurrection, I see the clearest picture of who God is and what God has been moving humanity toward all along. Jesus doesn’t just teach a higher ethic; He embodies it. He shows what love looks like in a human life, what mercy looks like in action, what it means to treat every person with dignity. If the Old Testament is the long, slow shaping of a people, then Jesus is the moment where the shape finally comes into focus. He is the revelation that all those small steps were pointing toward. He is God in flesh.

That’s why the Dothraki example stuck with me. Not because I expect George R. R. Martin to write a sweeping cultural transformation—he probably won’t—but because it reminded me how reform actually works. It’s slow. It’s resisted. It’s generational. It starts with someone saying, “This one thing needs to change,” even if everything else stays the same for a long time. And over time, those small shifts accumulate into something that looks like a new way of being.

It makes me wonder how often we expect instant change in our own world, or in our churches, or even in ourselves, when the biblical pattern is almost always gradual. Maybe the question isn’t “Why isn’t everything fixed yet?” but “What seeds are being planted now that might bear fruit later?” And maybe part of faith is trusting that God is patient enough to work with us step by step, even when the steps feel painfully small.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear how this registers with you and how you’ve seen slow change—whether in your own life, your church experience, or the “thou‑shalt‑nots” you grew up with—and how Jesus has shaped the way you understand transformation over time.

The Surprising Weight of Goodness in a Dark World

I finally read Game of Thrones this year, and what surprised me wasn’t the story itself but how strange it felt to cross a line I’d been taught not to cross. For years the series lived in that mental category of “things Christians shouldn’t touch,” but when I finally picked it up, the reality was so different from the warnings that I’ve been trying to understand what exactly I was afraid of.

The world of Westeros is undeniably violent, and some cultures in it—like the Dothraki—are built on practices I find deeply wrong. I don’t want to soften that. But even in the middle of all that brutality, I kept finding something I didn’t expect: a sense of humanity. Not the polished kind where everyone behaves well, but the kind that wrestles with loyalty, honor, fear, and the desire to do what is right in a broken world. I disagreed with plenty of choices the characters made, and I skipped a few paragraphs here and there, yet the story wasn’t the moral void I had been warned about. If anything, the weight of the darkness made the moments of goodness stand out more clearly.

It made me wonder what actually makes a story “good” in the deeper sense. I’ve started to think that a good story needs some echo of the longing we all carry for something higher—truth, justice, mercy, restoration. Christians believe that longing ultimately points toward Jesus, even if a story never names Him. And sometimes, even in a harsh fictional world, you can see characters reaching for something better than what surrounds them. That reaching matters. It’s part of what keeps a story from collapsing into emptiness.

What surprised me most wasn’t the book but the fear that kept me from reading it. That fear wasn't malicious; it was meant to protect. But fear can flatten things, turning a complex work of art into a simple warning label. And when everything ends up in the “dangerous” box, it becomes harder to know which warnings actually matter. I don’t want to swing to the opposite extreme and read things out of defiance. What I want is discernment—an honest sense of what is good for me and what isn’t—without fear or rebellion steering the decision.

I’m not writing this to convince anyone to read Game of Thrones. If someone feels uneasy about it, that’s reason enough to stay away. And the show, from what I’ve heard, is a different animal altogether. My point isn’t that this particular story is harmless or universally appropriate. It’s simply that my own experience didn’t match the dire warnings I’d absorbed, and that mismatch has left me thinking about how we talk about art, danger, and conscience.

Maybe the real question isn’t “Should Christians read this?” but “What happens when fear becomes our primary filter for engaging with stories?” I don’t have a neat answer, but I’m grateful for the chance to ask it—and grateful, too, for the reminder that my faith isn’t as fragile as I once assumed.

Thanks for reading. I’d genuinely love to hear where you land on this, and what your own experiences have been with the “thou‑shalt‑nots” we sometimes inherit in church life.

The Child's Wound, The Man's Sin

Sometimes when I’m watching a story unfold — whether in a book, a show, or even in real life — I find myself wondering how a person becomes the way they are. Not in a way that excuses cruelty or minimizes the harm people cause, but in a way that tries to understand the long road that led them there. It’s easy to look at someone who does terrible things and say, “They’re just evil.” It’s much harder to imagine the child they once were, the one who needed love and never received it, the one who learned early that the world was not safe and that tenderness only led to pain. I don’t believe that trauma erases responsibility, but I do believe it shapes the soul in ways we don’t always see.

There’s a particular kind of tragedy in imagining a person who once had a small spark of goodness — a moment of connection, a fragile friendship, a glimpse of belonging — only to have it crushed before it had a chance to grow. When I picture that, I don’t feel sympathy for the harm they later cause, but I do feel grief for the child who never learned another way to live. It reminds me that brokenness often begins long before the choices we judge. Some wounds happen so early that the person doesn’t even remember them, yet they spend their whole lives reacting to the echo of that pain. They run from shame they can’t name, from fear they can’t articulate, from a sense of worthlessness that settled into their bones before they had words.

As a Christian, I hold this tension carefully. Scripture is clear that people are accountable for their actions and called to repentance. But Scripture is also clear that Jesus sees deeper than we do. He sees the wound behind the sin, the loneliness behind the anger, the fear behind the cruelty. When He said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” He wasn’t excusing evil. He was acknowledging the blindness and brokenness that often drive it. He was looking at the whole story, not just the moment of failure.

I’m not a theologian, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But I do believe that the heart of Christ is big enough to hold both justice and compassion. I believe He can condemn the wrong while still grieving the shattered places that helped shape it. And I believe that one day, in ways we can’t yet imagine, He will restore what was broken — not by erasing responsibility, but by healing the wounds that twisted the soul in the first place. That hope doesn’t make evil less evil, but it does remind me that no one is beyond the reach of the One who sees every hidden hurt.

Returning to High School With Adult Eyes

If you could go back to Grade 9 with your current mindset, would you actually have a better experience? I keep wondering about that. We like to imagine we’d walk in with thirty‑something clarity, make smarter choices, avoid the drama, and finally become the version of ourselves we wish we’d been. In my head, it feels a bit like Luke Skywalker staring at the twin suns — hopeful, overwhelmed, and not entirely sure what adventure you’re stepping into. But would it really play out that way?

I mean, would the environment suddenly feel different just because we are different? Or would high school still be high school — the same strange world it always was? Sometimes I picture it more like wandering the edges of Mordor than returning to anything familiar or comforting. Would adult wisdom help us rise above the insecurity and posturing, or would we still feel that old pressure to fit in, to look confident, to pretend we weren’t terrified? Would we actually handle it better, or would we just notice the chaos more clearly?

And then there’s the whole friendship thing. Would we really be mature enough to choose better people, or would we still get caught up in who’s cool, who’s confident, who everyone else gravitates toward? Would we actually use our adult insight, or would we end up right back in the same cafeteria energy — Peter Parker pre–spider bite, trying not to get hit by a flying lunch tray? Part of me thinks I’d still feel out of place, not because I failed at friendship, but because that world just wasn’t built for the kind of person I was becoming.

And this is where my faith starts reshaping the whole thought experiment. If God works through seasons — not shortcuts — then would going back even help us? Would we actually rewrite anything, or would we just see the same moments with new eyes? Would we finally understand that those awkward years weren’t wasted, but simply chapters we didn’t yet know how to interpret? Could we look at our younger selves with gentleness instead of judgment?

Maybe that’s the real point. Maybe this whole hypothetical says more about who we are now than who we were then. Maybe you’d go back and thrive. Or maybe, like me, you’d realize that the past wasn’t the problem — it was simply the wrong season for the person you were becoming. And if we did step back through that wardrobe — into snow and past that familiar lamppost — would we even want to stay? Or would we recognize that we’ve outgrown the world we once wished we could redo?

I’m curious how this lands with you. If you stepped back into Grade 9 with today’s mind and today’s faith, would it feel like redemption, or would it simply remind you that some seasons weren’t meant to be repeated.

Wax Fruit and the Hunger for Something Real

I’ve been thinking a lot about how stories can make anything look good if the author wants them to. It’s strange how easily a narrative can wrap something in light, give it a soft glow, and suddenly it feels profound—even if, when you step back, it’s not actually true or good or wise. It’s like emotional lighting tricks. You can take a bowl of wax fruit, shine it just right, and for a moment your brain forgets it’s not edible. You almost reach for it.

And I guess what’s been unsettling me is realizing how often I’ve trusted that glow. Not in a gullible way, but in that instinctive “oh, this feels meaningful, so maybe it is” way. Especially when I’m reading with a biblical worldview, where I’m used to the idea that God can show up in unexpected places, in the cracks of a story, in the longings of a character, in the ache of a theme. That’s still true, I think. But I’m noticing that the author’s conclusions aren’t automatically transcendent just because they’re framed beautifully. They’re just… the author’s conclusions. A choice. A craft decision. Aesthetic persuasion, not revelation.

And that’s where the tension sits for me. Because I don’t want to become cynical, the kind of reader who refuses to be moved because “well, it’s all just technique.” But I also don’t want to be naïve, swallowing themes whole because they’re wrapped in emotional resonance. It’s weirdly humbling to admit that a story can make something look noble that isn’t, or make something destructive feel romantic, or make a worldview seem deep when it’s actually shallow. Not because the author is malicious—just because they’re good at arranging words.

So then I start wondering: what does it mean to “see Him in everything” if the “everything” is sometimes dressed up in illusions? Does that mean I’m projecting? Does it mean I’m reading too generously? Or does it mean I need to shift what I’m looking for?

I think the answer is somewhere in that shift. Maybe seeing God in a story doesn’t mean assuming the author has stumbled into cosmic truth. Maybe it means paying attention to the human heart behind the story—the longing, the fear, the hunger for meaning, the ache for redemption. Those things are real even when the conclusions are wax fruit. The longing is real even when the solution is counterfeit. And maybe that’s where the transcendent stuff actually lives: not in the author’s thesis, but in the cracks where their humanity leaks through.

It’s funny how freeing that feels. I don’t have to pretend every beautiful moment is spiritually valid. I don’t have to treat emotional resonance as proof. I can let myself be moved by the craft and still step back afterward and ask, “Okay, but is this actually true?” I can enjoy the glow without mistaking it for light.

And maybe that’s the whole point. Discernment isn’t shutting your heart down; it’s keeping your eyes open while your heart stays soft. It’s letting the story do what stories do—stir, provoke, comfort, unsettle—while remembering that not every shining thing is gold. Some of it is wax. Some of it is fruit. And some of it, occasionally, is something deeper breaking through.

I think I’m learning to live in that space. Not suspicious, not starry‑eyed. Just awake. And maybe that’s where I can see Him most clearly—not in the author’s conclusions, but in the deeper currents that run underneath them, the ones they didn’t invent and can’t quite hide, no matter how they frame the scene.