Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 16: Toward What Lies Ahead

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Read Philippians 3:12–14

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Meanwhile, Saul was uttering threats with every breath and was eager to kill the Lord’s followers. So he went to the high priest. He requested letters addressed to the synagogues in Damascus, asking for their cooperation in the arrest of any followers of the Way he found there. He wanted to bring them—both men and women—back to Jerusalem in chains.” (Acts 9:1–2 NLT)

An imprisoned Paul gestures as he dictates a letter to a scribe seated across from him at a rough wooden table. Scrolls, parchment, an oil lamp, and visible chains surround them inside the stone room, while sunrise pours through a barred window overlooking an ancient city. The image suggests Paul faithfully working in the present despite confinement, even as his words reach toward what lies ahead.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Toward What Lies Ahead” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I have always had an affinity for Paul.

Not the Paul polished by centuries of Christianity into a nearly untouchable saint. Nor the Paul some would rather reduce to a sinner, remembered primarily for the violence and persecution of his past. I am drawn to Paul the man—the complicated human being who somehow embodied both.

Because before Paul became one of Christianity’s most profound voices for the radical love and grace of Jesus Christ, he was Saul of Tarsus.

And Saul could be terrifying.

He was a Diaspora Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, a Pharisee, educated in Jerusalem under Gamaliel, and fiercely committed to what he believed faithfulness to God required. He also moved within the wider Greco-Roman world and possessed Roman citizenship. Paul belonged to overlapping worlds, and those worlds would later profoundly shape his ministry.

But Saul wasn’t wandering around searching for meaning or wondering what he should do with his life. He believed he already knew. He was so certain of his righteousness that he participated in the persecution of people he believed were dangerously wrong.

Acts introduces him approving of Stephen’s execution. Soon afterward, Saul is entering homes and dragging followers of Jesus away to prison. Eventually, he heads toward Damascus carrying authority to arrest followers of the Way and bring them back to Jerusalem.

Then Christ meets him on the road, and everything changes.

But Saul does not simply disappear and some pristine Saint Paul take his place.

The man who becomes one of Christianity’s most profound voices for grace remains the same man who once participated in violent religious persecution. Paul carries that history with him. He remembers it. He writes about it. He knows both the terrifying damage religious certainty can cause and the astonishing grace of discovering that even the person who caused that damage is not beyond redemption.

That is the Paul who fascinates me. Not sinner or saint, but sinner and saint—a human being capable of terrible harm and extraordinary faithfulness. A violent persecutor transformed into a passionate proponent of the very Christ—and the very people—he once persecuted.

And Paul keeps moving.

The man who once traveled from place to place trying to stop the Jesus movement eventually travels throughout the Roman world proclaiming Christ, forming communities of faith, enduring opposition, suffering beatings and imprisonment, and continuing forward anyway.

By the time Paul writes to the Philippians, there is quite a lot behind him. He is writing from prison, although scholars continue to debate exactly which imprisonment. Rome has traditionally been the leading possibility, while Caesarea and Ephesus have also been proposed. What matters for Philippians is that Paul is confined, his future uncertain, and the possibility of death very real.

If ever there were a moment to look backward and declare the journey complete, this was it.

Paul could remember Damascus, churches planted, lives changed, miles traveled, friendships formed, some other friendships ended, suffering endured, and a life radically transformed by Christ. Yet Paul says he hasn’t arrived.

Instead, he writes: “I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead…”

Paul is not telling us to erase our histories. He spends plenty of time remembering his own. In this very chapter, he recounts who he was, what he once valued, and how encountering Christ changed his understanding of it all.

Paul remembers the past. He simply refuses to live there.

The past can teach us, shape us, wound us, humble us, and remind us of God’s faithfulness. It can show us how far we have come and warn us against becoming who we once were. But yesterday cannot be the place where faithfulness happens today.

Neither can tomorrow.

That can be easy to miss when Paul speaks so passionately about pressing toward what lies ahead. We can become so fixated on the future that we treat the present as little more than a waiting room. Someday I will serve. Someday I will forgive. Someday I will speak. Someday the church will change. Someday I will finally become who God wants me to be.

But Paul is not sitting in prison waiting for someday. He is writing, encouraging, teaching, praying, witnessing, and loving people now.

That may be the paradox at the heart of moving forward with God: we reach toward what lies ahead by living faithfully in the present.

Yesterday is beyond our reach. Tomorrow has not arrived. God has given us today.

That has been the movement beneath every God beginning we have explored in this series. God calls, accompanies, opens doors, closes others, creates something new, gathers unlikely people into one Body, and asks us to leave some things on the shore. But none of those beginnings was ever meant to become a place where we could settle permanently and announce that the work was finished.

Paul refuses to make that claim even after everything he has experienced. He has not arrived.

Neither have we.

That is not failure. It is discipleship.

A God beginning is not a finish line disguised as a starting point. It is an invitation into a life continually being transformed by Christ, and that transformation happens in the present. It happens in the conversation we choose to have, the person we decide to notice, the injustice we refuse to ignore, the forgiveness we offer, the truth we finally speak, the tradition we are willing to reconsider, the neighbor we welcome, and the work immediately before us.

We can honor yesterday without living there. We can hope for tomorrow without escaping into it. And we can live faithfully today while trusting that God is already preparing what lies ahead.

Sixteen devotions ago, we began talking about God beginnings. Now we have reached the end.

Except, of course, we haven’t.

Every ending eventually becomes part of what lies behind us, and every new beginning eventually becomes the present in which we are called to live.

Remember what God has done. Look toward what God may yet do. But live faithfully where God has placed you today, and from here, keep following Christ toward what lies ahead.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Faith remembers yesterday, hopes for tomorrow, and follows Christ today.

PRAYER
God of every beginning, keep me from becoming trapped in yesterday or lost in tomorrow. Teach me to live faithfully today, trusting you with whatever lies ahead. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 15: What We Leave on the Shore

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Read Luke 5:1–11

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.” (Matthew 10:37–39 NLT)

A weathered wooden fishing boat rests along a sandy shoreline at sunrise. Nets overflow with a large catch of silver fish in the foreground while three disciples walk away along the water behind Jesus. The abundant catch remains on the shore as the figures move toward the bright horizon.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “What We Leave on the Shore” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

It is funny how easily a single chapter of someone’s life can come to define the whole story.

We meet someone after they have already become who we know them to be, and it can be difficult to imagine them as anything else. The teacher was once a student. The grandparent was once somebody’s child. Even the people closest to us had whole lives unfolding before we ever entered the picture.

Scripture can have the same effect on us.

We know Peter as Peter, the disciple and apostle. James and John become the Sons of Thunder. Matthew becomes the Gospel writer. Thomas becomes the doubter.

But none of them began there.

Before there were disciples, there were fishermen and tax collectors, brothers and sons, husbands and friends. There were families, livelihoods, obligations, loyalties, disappointments, expectations, and histories.

Every disciple had a before. And then Jesus called.

Peter did not meet Jesus while waiting for his real life to begin. He already had one. He had a wife, a mother-in-law Jesus had recently healed, a brother named Andrew, fishing partners, boats, nets, responsibilities, successes, and failures. James and John had their father Zebedee and a family business.

And Peter wasn’t unusual.

Matthew had his tax booth and everything that came with being a tax collector. Simon carried the designation “the Zealot.” Thomas and Bartholomew had stories mostly lost to us. Even Judas Iscariot had a life before his name became forever associated with betrayal.

Every one of them came to Jesus carrying a history.

That is what makes Luke’s final sentence so striking. After the miraculous catch, after the nets begin tearing and the boats nearly sink beneath more fish than these fishermen could have imagined, Luke tells us that they brought the boats to shore, left everything, and followed Jesus.

Everything. Not simply the fish.

Peter leaves the nets and boat, but those belonged to a whole life: a wife, family, livelihood, partners, and responsibilities. James and John were not merely walking away from equipment. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Zebedee is right there when they leave the family business behind.

The call of Jesus reaches into whole lives.

That does not mean Peter suddenly ceases to be a husband. In fact, Paul later refers to Peter’s right to take his wife along with him in ministry. James and John do not stop being Zebedee’s sons. Andrew does not stop being Peter’s brother. Following Jesus does not erase the people we love or make our histories meaningless.

But it does reorder them.

Jesus makes that painfully clear when he tells his followers that anyone who loves father or mother, son or daughter more than him is not worthy of him. Jesus reaches toward some of our deepest and most legitimate attachments and says that even these cannot have the final claim upon where Christ may lead us.

That is what the disciples leave on the shore: the assumption that the life they already understand gets to determine the boundaries of the life Christ is calling them into.

And sometimes that means leaving something painful. But sometimes it means leaving something good.

Peter has just experienced the greatest professional success of his life. By every ordinary measure, this is the moment to stay, expand the business, and build a future around what just happened.

Instead, Peter walks away from the fish.

The miracle is not the destination. It is the threshold.

The miracle revealed something about Jesus and called Peter somewhere he had never been.

Yet Peter does not leave everything about fishing behind. Jesus tells him that from now on he will be fishing for people.

The fisherman comes with him.

Peter’s history is not erased. It is transformed.

That may be one of the hardest parts of following Christ. We understand leaving behind habits, prejudices, fears, sins, and ways of living that destroy us.

But what about the things that were good?

A career that mattered. A relationship that shaped us. A role we once filled. A place where we belonged. A tradition that carried us. A ministry through which God genuinely worked.

Good things can still become anchors when we insist they must remain forever.

Churches struggle with this too. Something worked once, so we assume faithfulness means preserving it. God met us through a particular ministry, building, tradition, structure, or season, so we begin protecting the place where God moved rather than watching for where God is moving.

Peter could have built a shrine around those fish. Instead, he followed Jesus.

Following Christ does not require having no past. It requires refusing to let the past determine where Christ may lead us next.

So perhaps the deeper question is this: What still has such a claim on me that I would refuse to follow Christ without it?

The shore will look different for each of us. But eventually, every disciple has to decide what gets the final word: the life we already know, or the Christ who says, Follow me.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Following Christ does not erase our past, but it does reorder what gets the final claim on our future.

PRAYER
Jesus, thank you for all that has shaped my life. Give me wisdom to know what to carry, courage to release what I cannot keep, and trust to follow wherever you lead. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 14: The Door No One Can Shut

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Read Revelation 3:7–13

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“I will give him the key to the house of David—the highest position in the royal court. When he opens doors, no one will be able to close them; when he closes doors, no one will be able to open them.” (Isaiah 22:22 NLT)

Massive ancient city gates stand fully open beneath a bright blue daytime sky. Beyond them, a radiant city glows with a light even brighter than the surrounding daylight, illuminating towers, domes, streets, and pale stone buildings. The open gates suggest security rooted not in exclusion or fortification, but in the presence and glory of God.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Door No One Can Shut” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Philadelphia is known as the City of Brotherly Love, which is a lovely title until sports enter the conversation. Ask a visiting Giants fan how much brotherly love they expect to experience walking into Lincoln Financial Field wearing blue. Philadelphia sports culture has built an almost affectionate reputation for being loud, relentless, fiercely loyal, and not especially interested in making opposing fans feel at home. Yet another Philadelphia icon tells a slightly different story. Rocky Balboa is the little guy, the underdog nobody expects to win, who keeps getting back up after everyone else thinks he should stay down. Rocky endures. Rocky fights. Rocky survives because there is more strength in him than anyone realized.

There is another Philadelphia in Scripture, though, and its story turns our usual underdog narrative almost completely around.

In Revelation 3, Christ addresses the church in Philadelphia, one of seven churches receiving messages through John. This congregation is not described as impressive, influential, wealthy, or powerful. In fact, Christ says plainly that they have “little strength” (Revelation 3:8).

That does not sound much like Rocky.

There is no inspirational speech telling Philadelphia to dig deeper, discover the champion within, and prove everybody wrong. Christ does not tell them they are secretly stronger than their opponents. Instead, Christ points to something entirely outside their own strength: an open door.

“I have opened a door for you that no one can close” (Revelation 3:8).

The security of the open door does not come from their strength. It comes from Christ’s authority.

That authority is established immediately in the previous verse. Revelation draws upon the imagery of Isaiah 22:22 and describes Christ as holding the key of David—opening what no one can close and closing what no one can open (Revelation 3:7). The church does not possess ultimate control of the hinges. Neither do its opponents. Christ does.

That matters because we often imagine an open door as an opportunity we must somehow protect through our own strength. If God has called us somewhere, then perhaps we assume it is our responsibility to make sure nobody interferes. We fight harder, defend ourselves more aggressively, prove our worth, and try to demonstrate that we deserve to remain where we have been placed.

Philadelphia receives a different assurance.

You have little strength.

And the door is still open.

That is not permission for passivity. The church is praised for obeying Christ’s word and refusing to deny Christ even under pressure (Revelation 3:8). Faithfulness still matters. Perseverance still matters. But their future does not depend upon becoming powerful enough to overpower everyone standing against them.

Nor should we turn this promise into triumphalism. “No one can shut the door” does not mean every opportunity we desire has been guaranteed by God. It does not mean opposition proves we are right, or that every obstacle is merely an enemy we are entitled to bulldoze. Part 13 reminded us that discernment matters because not every closed door was closed by God.

The reverse requires discernment too. Not every door we want open was opened by God.

But when Christ genuinely opens a way toward faithfulness, human gatekeepers do not possess ultimate authority over it.

That is where this passage becomes uncomfortable for institutions, including the Church. Human communities need doors. We establish boundaries, qualifications, processes, expectations, and responsibilities. Some of those are necessary. But institutions can begin behaving as though possessing authority means possessing ultimate authority.

We can forget who actually owns the keys.

A committee can close a door. A leader can close a door. A denomination can close a door. A congregation can close a door. A government can close a door. A culture can decide who belongs and who does not. Those decisions can have very real consequences for very real people.

But Revelation places every human claim to authority beneath Christ’s.

Sometimes religious institutions behave as though they own the hinges.

They do not.

And then, near the end of Revelation, John gives us an even larger image.

In Revelation 21, John sees the New Jerusalem descending into the renewed creation. The city shines with the glory of God. Nations walk in its light. And its gates are never closed during the day—because there is no night there (Revelation 21:23–25).

Notice where the vision has taken us.

In Revelation 3, Christ places an open door before a little church and promises that no one can shut it. By Revelation 21, John sees an entire city whose gates never close.

And once again, its security does not come from strength.

Ancient cities closed their gates because darkness brought danger. Gates protected those inside from whatever might approach from outside. But John’s holy city does not survive because its defenses have finally become impenetrable. The gates remain open because God’s renewed creation has changed the conditions that made fearful closure necessary.

God is the security.

That does not mean Revelation abandons judgment or holiness. Chapter 21 certainly does not. But the final image of God’s dwelling with humanity is strikingly different from an anxious fortress desperately trying to keep outsiders away.

The gates stand open. Perhaps the Church should pay attention to that.

We live in a world where strength is often measured by our ability to control access: who gets admitted, who gets excluded, who receives authority, who is considered legitimate, who possesses the keys. Yet Scripture’s final vision points toward a kingdom whose security rests so completely in God that its gates do not need to close.

Philadelphia had little strength. That was never the problem.

Their hope was not that eventually they would become strong enough to keep the door open themselves. Their hope was that Christ had already opened it.

There will always be people who believe they possess the authority to determine which doors should remain open and which people should be allowed to walk through them.

Revelation reminds us that their authority has limits. Christ holds the key; and what Christ opens, no one can finally shut.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
The security of an open door does not come from our strength, but from the authority of Christ who opens it.

PRAYER
Christ of the open door, free us from believing that everything depends upon our strength. Give us faithfulness when we feel small, humility when we hold authority, and discernment about the doors before us. Teach us to trust your power more than our own and to become a people whose openness reflects the kingdom you are bringing. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 13: The Door God Closes

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Read Acts 16:6–10

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“We can make our plans,but the Lord determines our steps.” (Proverbs 16:9 NLT)

Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Door God Closes” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Some phrases sound incredibly wise when we first hear them. Some even sound biblical—so biblical, in fact, that we may repeat them for years without ever stopping to ask whether the Bible actually says them. “God helps those who help themselves.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “God will never give you more than you can handle.” That last one, for instance, is often attributed to 1 Corinthians 10:13, though Paul is speaking there specifically about temptation, not promising that faithful people will never encounter circumstances beyond their ability to bear. Each saying contains enough familiarity, common sense, or religious language to sound like something Scripture must surely teach. But, if we’d actually weigh any saying against Scripture, we’d discover that things are usually more complicated.

One such phrase is, “When God closes a door, God opens a window.”

I understand what it is trying to say. God is not limited by the path we expected to take. An ending does not necessarily mean there is nothing ahead. But, honestly, life—and Scripture—are rarely quite as tidy as the saying makes them sound.

Sometimes a door closes and, for a while, there is no window. There is simply a closed door. A relationship ends. An opportunity disappears. A plan falls apart. A ministry changes. Something we were certain would happen does not happen. We stand there wondering whether we failed, misunderstood God, or somehow missed the path we were supposed to take.

Paul knew something about closed doors. In Acts 16, Paul and his companions are traveling through Asia Minor doing exactly what we would expect missionaries to do: preaching the gospel. Yet Luke tells us that the Holy Spirit prevented them from preaching in the province of Asia. They then tried to enter Bithynia, and again the Spirit did not allow them to go.

That is worth noticing because Paul was not trying to do something obviously selfish, foolish, or sinful. He was trying to do something good, faithful, and entirely consistent with his calling. And still, the door closed.

Only later, after arriving in Troas, does Paul receive the vision calling him toward Macedonia. The routes that had closed eventually redirected the journey. We can therefore say, at least in this story, that God really did close doors.

But we need to be careful here, because this passage can become spiritually dangerous if we turn it into a formula. Acts specifically tells us that the Spirit prevented Paul from taking those routes. Scripture identifies these particular closed doors as divine redirection.

Not every closed door comes with that explanation.

People close doors. Institutions close doors. Fear closes doors. Prejudice closes doors. Injustice closes doors. Sometimes we close doors ourselves through choices we have made. And sometimes we simply do not know why a door closed.

Friends, that distinction matters. If someone is rejected because of racism, sexism, ableism, poverty, identity, prejudice, or another person’s misuse of power, we should be very cautious about telling them, “God closed that door.”

Sometimes human beings slam doors God never asked them to touch.

Calling every painful outcome “God’s will” can become a convenient way of baptizing injustice and relieving people or institutions of responsibility for the harm they cause. Something happened, therefore God wanted it to happen, is not a theology Scripture requires us to believe. In fact, Jesus directly challenges that kind of thinking. When the disciples encounter a man who had been blind from birth, they immediately search for a spiritual cause: Who sinned, this man or his parents? Jesus rejects the premise that the man’s condition can simply be explained as punishment for somebody’s sin (John 9:1–3). Likewise, when people tell Jesus about Galileans killed by Pilate, and Jesus recalls eighteen people killed when the tower of Siloam fell, he refuses the assumption that those who suffered must somehow have deserved their fate more than others (Luke 13:1–5).

So perhaps the spiritual question is not simply, “Why did God close this door?” Perhaps we need to ask, “What kind of closure am I facing, and what does faithfulness require of me now?”

The answer will not always be the same. Sometimes faithfulness means releasing the door. Sometimes it means waiting. Sometimes it means admitting that our own choices helped close it and seeking repentance or repair. Sometimes it means respecting a boundary another person has every right to establish. And sometimes faithfulness means refusing to accept that a door closed by prejudice, fear, or injustice somehow carries God’s approval.

Discernment matters.

There is another uncomfortable possibility too. Sometimes we keep pushing against a closed door because we have already decided what faithfulness is supposed to look like. We knock harder, explain ourselves again, work harder, and try another angle. Perseverance can be holy. Scripture certainly teaches persistence (Luke 18:1–8; Galatians 6:9). But persistence and faithfulness are not always the same thing.

At some point we may have to ask whether we are persevering because God is calling us forward, or forcing a door because we cannot imagine God leading us somewhere else.

Paul keeps moving. Asia does not open, so the journey continues. Bithynia does not open, so the journey continues. Eventually Paul reaches Troas, and then comes Macedonia. Paul is not given an explanation for every route that failed. He is given enough direction for the next step.

Perhaps that is often how God works. We would prefer a map explaining every closure, every detour, every disappointment, and every ending. Sometimes we receive only another step.

Churches face this too. Congregations can spend enormous energy trying to reopen doors belonging to another season: ministries that no longer serve the community, structures that cannot be sustained, traditions that have become ends in themselves, or assumptions about what church is supposed to look like because that is what it looked like before. Ecclesiastes reminds us that there are seasons for both keeping and letting go (Ecclesiastes 3:1–8). There are times when faithfulness means grieving what was and allowing something to end.

But churches and other institutions should carry equal humility about the doors they themselves close. No committee, leader, institution, denomination, or majority should confuse its own decision automatically with God’s decision.

We are not God simply because we possess the keys.

Acts 16 gives us no easy formula for determining which doors to push against and which to release. It gives us something harder: discernment. Paul did not spend the rest of his journey standing outside Bithynia demanding that the door reopen. He kept listening. He kept moving. Eventually another direction appeared.

A closed door does not always mean we failed. It may not even tell us who closed it. But when the way ahead changes, faithfulness asks us to listen carefully before forcing the handle—and to trust that God’s ability to begin something new is not limited to the path we expected to take.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
A closed door calls for discernment before we decide what—or who—closed it.

PRAYER
God of wisdom, give us discernment when the way ahead closes. Keep us from calling injustice your will, from forcing doors you are asking us to release, and from confusing our own authority with yours. Give us courage to resist what must be resisted, humility to release what must be released, and faith to follow wherever you lead next. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

God Beginnings, Part 12: When One Part Suffers

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Read 1 Corinthians 12:23–27

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15 NLT)

A diverse group of people stands closely connected in a circle. At the center, one person bows his head while another embraces and comforts him. Nearby, others share laughter and joyful embraces, visually expressing how suffering and celebration ripple through a connected community.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “When One Part Suffers” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Ministry can certainly have its ups and its downs. There have been seasons when I have experienced tremendous joy, moments when I have wondered how I could possibly be blessed enough to do what I do, and others that have hurt more deeply than I expected.

I imagine you could say something similar about your own life.

Over the years, I have experienced what it feels like to be genuinely welcomed. I have walked into communities where people made room for me, trusted me, encouraged me, accepted me for who I am, celebrated with me, and allowed me to become part of their lives. I have also experienced rejection…harsh and hurtful rejection. I know what it feels like when welcome disappears, relationships fracture, or you discover that a place where you thought you belonged no longer feels like home.

But here is something I have learned from both experiences: neither welcome nor rejection stops with the person who receives it.

When I have been welcomed, my family has felt that welcome too. They have watched me come home energized and grateful. And when I have experienced rejection or pain, they have felt that too. They have listened, sat beside me, carried some of the weight, and even physically shared my journey as ministry has moved us from place to place. People who were never directly involved in what happened still experienced its effects because they were connected to someone who was.

Suffering rarely belongs to one person alone.

Perhaps that is why Paul’s words to the Corinthians strike me differently now: “If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it, and if one part is honored, all the parts are glad.”

Paul is describing more than sympathy. He is describing connection.

Corinth desperately needed to understand that. The church was fractured by wealth, status, spiritual gifts, personalities, and competing claims of importance. Even around the Lord’s Table, some ate well while others went hungry. Their common life in Christ was being contradicted by the way they treated one another.

So Paul is not describing what Christian community automatically looks like. He is describing what the Body of Christ is called to become.

Think about what happens when you injure part of your own body. Stub your toe badly enough and your entire body reacts. Your other leg shifts your weight. Your hands instinctively reach toward the injury. Your face contorts. Your brain suddenly has difficulty thinking about anything besides that throbbing toe.

Your body does not respond, “Well, that’s really the toe’s problem.”

The suffering of one part changes the behavior of the whole.

That is what makes Paul’s image so challenging. It is easy to know another person is hurting. Suffering with them asks more. It asks us to allow someone else’s pain to affect us.

And suffering with someone does not require agreeing with them about everything.

We sometimes behave as though compassion is a verdict. If I acknowledge your pain, perhaps that means I have decided you were right. If I sit beside you, perhaps someone will assume I have chosen your side. But we can disagree with someone and still suffer with them. Several people can even be wounded by the same situation without compassion having to be rationed to whichever person we decide deserves it most.

The Body does not have to settle every disagreement before it can recognize a wound.

That truth extends beyond individual relationships. Churches, workplaces, families, governments, and other institutions can become much better at managing suffering than entering it. Complaints can be investigated. Policies can be followed. Cases can eventually be marked resolved.

But wounded people cannot.

Procedures may be necessary. Accountability, facts, and justice matter. But none of them relieves us of the responsibility to recognize the human beings standing inside the process.

People are not problems to be resolved.

Paul then turns the image around: “If one part is honored, all the parts are glad.”

That may be just as challenging. We live in a culture that teaches us to compare. Someone else’s success can feel like evidence of our failure. Even churches compare attendance, finances, ministries, and growth as though another community’s flourishing somehow diminishes our own.

Paul imagines something different.

In the Body of Christ, your joy does not threaten me. Your flourishing does not diminish me. Your gifts do not make mine less valuable. Something good happened to part of the Body, and I belong to that Body too.

In Part 11, we considered Paul’s insistence that there are no disposable parts. Now Paul takes us further. If no member is disposable, then neither is that member’s suffering irrelevant nor their joy inconsequential.

We belong to one another.

Someone is grieving. Someone has been rejected. Someone is exhausted. Someone is celebrating. Someone is healing. Someone has discovered something beautiful about themselves. Someone is becoming more fully alive.

When one part suffers, we suffer with them.

When one part is honored, we celebrate with them.

God is creating a Body—many parts, different parts, indispensable parts—learning to share one another’s burdens and one another’s joy.

Because in the Body of Christ, none of us belongs alone.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
To belong to the Body of Christ is to let another person’s suffering and joy matter to us.

PRAYER
God of compassion, teach us to suffer with those who suffer and celebrate with those who rejoice. Give us hearts that listen without judgment, remain present in pain, and rejoice without comparison. Form us into one Body, bound together in your love. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 11: No Disposable Parts

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Read 1 Corinthians 12:12–22

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“For there is one body and one Spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future” (Ephesians 4:4 NLT).

A grimy human hand reaches upward from a dumpster filled with discarded mannequin heads, arms, legs, an ear, and an eye as two living hands reach down to help. The contrast between the human hand and discarded body parts evokes the truth that no person is disposable.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “No Disposable Parts” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I love music. I mean, I really love music. Heavy metal, industrial, rock and roll, goth—get me going and I am there! My musical tastes are actually far more eclectic than those categories might suggest. I can move quite happily from Beethoven to Bon Jovi to Jewel to Stryper to, well, yes, Marilyn Manson.

At least I’m balanced!

To be honest, people are often shocked that I would listen to—or, worse yet, attend—a Marilyn Manson concert. My reaction is: Why? Would Jesus not find himself at such a concert too? Jesus was called “a glutton and a drunkard” and “a friend of tax collectors and other sinners” because of the company he kept (Matthew 11:19). He repeatedly went where respectable religious people thought respectable religious people should not go. Besides, I’ve been listening to Marilyn Manson since I was, well, a teenager—and here I grew up to become a Christian pastor. Who knew, right?!

Over the years, I’ve had several opportunities to see the band live. The last time I saw Marilyn Manson in concert, he stopped at one point and talked about something that has followed him throughout his career: people trying to dispose of him. Most recently, that story has included serious allegations of sexual abuse and the enormous public and professional fallout surrounding them. After a four-year criminal investigation, however, prosecutors ultimately declined to bring charges, determining that the domestic-violence allegations fell outside the statute of limitations and that the sexual-assault allegations could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Some of the civil claims against him were also dismissed, withdrawn, or settled.

A clarification is important here. The legal history surrounding these allegations is complicated, and some civil litigation remains ongoing. I am not attempting to adjudicate those allegations, declare Manson innocent, defend his conduct, or suggest that anyone should escape accountability for harm they may have caused. Nor does the inability of a court to hear or resolve an allegation make a survivor’s suffering untrue, let alone disposable. And, to make matters more complicated, if any of those allegations are true, then he has participated in making other people feel disposable.

Still, the point here is narrower, and deliberately uncomfortable: accountability and human dignity are not opposites. No human being is disposable.

Still, something Manson said that night struck me. People had tried to dispose of him, he said, but he had never been disposable.

That word caught my attention because Manson had been using it long before his most recent controversies. In 2000, he released a song called “The Disposable Teens.” The song gives voice to the alienation and anger of young people pushing against systems of authority and social expectations that seem to have little place for them unless they become what those systems expect.

The title itself is unsettling: disposable teens.

People young enough to still be discovering who they are, yet already receiving the message that if they do not fit, behave, believe, achieve, produce, or conform correctly, society can simply move on without them. More than two decades later, I heard the person who sang about disposable teens standing onstage insisting that he himself had never been disposable.

Sitting there listening, I found myself agreeing with him on this:

No human being is disposable.

That does not mean our actions do not matter. Human dignity does not eliminate accountability, consequences, repentance, justice, or the responsibility to repair harm. Christianity does not teach that because every person bears sacred worth, everything every person does must therefore be accepted. There is a profound difference between holding someone accountable and declaring that person expendable.

Paul makes an even more radical claim about the Christian community in 1 Corinthians 12. The church in Corinth was a mess. Its members competed over status, spiritual gifts, leadership, knowledge, wealth, and importance. Some considered themselves more significant than others. Into that fractured community, Paul introduces an image they could hardly misunderstand: a body.

One body, composed of many parts.

But Paul does something fascinating with the image. He addresses disposability from both directions. First comes the person who feels disposable. The foot looks at the hand and essentially says, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body.” The ear compares itself with the eye and reaches the same conclusion.

I know that voice. Perhaps you do too.

Because I am not like you, I do not belong. Because I cannot do what you do. Because I do not look like you. Because my gifts are different. Because my body works differently. Because my mind works differently. Because I am too old, too young, too wounded, too strange, too uncertain, too much, or somehow not enough.

Paul’s response is wonderfully straightforward: saying you do not belong does not make you stop belonging. The foot remains part of the body. The ear remains part of the body. Difference does not disqualify belonging.

Then Paul turns the argument around. Now it is no longer the foot saying, “I do not belong.” It is the eye saying to the hand, “I don’t need you.”

That is the voice of superiority rather than insecurity. It is what happens when one part of the body decides it possesses enough importance, power, ability, resources, knowledge, or status to determine whether another part is necessary. Paul rejects that sentence too. In fact, Paul says that the parts of the body that seem weakest are actually indispensable.

Notice what Paul does not say. Paul does not say the weaker parts should be tolerated because perhaps someday they will become stronger. Paul does not say everyone deserves a place because everyone can eventually be made useful. Paul does not tell the apparently weaker members to discover their hidden productivity so the rest of the body can justify keeping them around.

They are indispensable.

That distinction matters because even churches can begin measuring human worth according to usefulness. We may never say it aloud, but our questions can reveal the calculation: Can you serve? Can you teach? Can you sing? Can you give? Can you sit on a committee? Can you volunteer? Can you help us grow? Can you still do what you used to do?

There is nothing wrong with discovering and using our gifts. Paul spends considerable time talking about them. But the Body of Christ is not a machine whose parts earn their place by remaining productive.

A person lying in a nursing-home bed is not less part of Christ’s Body because they can no longer serve on a committee. A person with a disability does not need to demonstrate some inspirational hidden talent before becoming indispensable. A teenager sitting silently in the back of the sanctuary does not have to become “the future of the church” before being valued as part of the church now. And notice how often, when we speak about that future, we attach expectations about how they should look, talk, believe, behave, and belong when they get there. The exhausted person who presently needs more from the community than they can give back is not a drain on the Body. And the person whose gifts, personality, questions, identity, or way of moving through the world does not fit neatly into our existing structures is not spare equipment waiting to be discarded.

Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

This is where Paul’s metaphor becomes particularly uncomfortable for institutions, because institutions inevitably make calculations. Budgets must balance. Programs must be evaluated. Buildings must be maintained. Organizations have to make decisions about what is sustainable and what is not. 

But people are not programs. People are not buildings. People are not line items.

The Church may sometimes have to let structures die. We may have to close programs, change traditions, merge ministries, relinquish buildings, or admit that something which once served the mission no longer does. None of those decisions makes the people connected to those structures disposable. The Body of Christ has no surplus members.

That means neither of the false conclusions Paul sets up is available to us. We cannot look at ourselves and say, “Because I am not like you, I do not belong.” And we cannot look at another person and say, “Because you are not like me, I do not need you.” The first denies the place God has given us. The second denies the place God has given someone else.

Perhaps that is why the phrase I heard at that concert stayed with me: I was never disposable.

Neither were you. Neither is the person you find difficult. Neither is the person who can no longer produce what they once produced. Neither is the person whose presence complicates the community rather than making it more efficient. Neither is the person the world has decided would be easier to ignore.

God is creating something new, and according to Paul, that new creation looks remarkably like a body: different parts, different gifts, different functions, joined into a life none possesses alone.

There are no disposable teens. There are no disposable adults. There are no disposable people.

And in the Body of Christ, there are no disposable parts.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Belonging to the Body is not something we earn by proving our usefulness.

PRAYER
God of every member, free us from believing that our differences make us unnecessary and from treating the differences of others as reasons we do not need them. Teach us to honor the dignity of every person, use our gifts without measuring our worth by them, and become a Body in which no one is treated as disposable. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 10: Rivers in the Wasteland

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Read Isaiah 43:19–21

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4 NLT)

A clear river winds through a volcanic wasteland beneath a scarred mountain. Elk drink from the water as birds fly overhead and fresh vegetation emerges among ash, fallen trees, and mineral-rich soil.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Rivers in the Wasteland” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I have loved volcanoes since I was a boy. I had a book about them that I returned to repeatedly, studying the pictures and learning about the devastation—and transformation—they could produce. Two volcanoes especially captured my imagination: Mount Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens.

Vesuvius possessed the mystery of the ancient world. Its eruption in 79 CE buried entire communities beneath ash and volcanic debris, capturing human fear and imagination for nearly two millennia. As a boy, I was fascinated by the pictures and by the story of a thriving world suddenly entombed beneath the earth.

Mount St. Helens felt different because its eruption was not ancient history. It happened in 1980, during my lifetime. The blast leveled forests, displaced wildlife, and left hundreds of square miles looking barren. The photographs showed a landscape so thoroughly devastated that it seemed impossible for life ever to flourish there again.

Perhaps that was what fascinated me most. Volcanoes reveal both the terrifying power of destruction and creation’s astonishing capacity for renewal.

There is nothing romantic about the devastation they cause. Landscapes disappear. Habitats collapse. Lives are lost. What once sustained life becomes difficult to recognize.

Yet devastation is not the only thing volcanoes produce. As volcanic material weathers over time, it releases minerals into the earth. What initially buried the landscape can eventually contribute to remarkably fertile soil. New plants take root. Animals return. Entire ecosystems begin developing across ground that once appeared incapable of sustaining anything.

The landscape does not return unchanged. The forest growing around Mount St. Helens is not the same forest that stood there before the eruption. New life does not erase the devastation or restore everything that was lost. It emerges from altered ground.

Volcanoes remind us of a truth embedded within creation: destruction may radically change the landscape without gaining the authority to determine its final future.

The people receiving the words of Isaiah 43 understood what it meant for their world to erupt. Jerusalem had fallen. The Temple had been destroyed. Many had been carried into exile in Babylon. Their political, religious, and communal lives had been torn apart. They were not enduring a temporary inconvenience. They were living amid the collapse of the world they had known.

Into that devastation, a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition announces that God is making a road through the wilderness and creating rivers in the wasteland.

God does not deny that the wasteland exists. Scripture does not tell the exiles to rename devastation as blessing, pretend that displacement did not wound them, or become grateful for everything they had suffered. Babylonian exile was not good merely because God could bring life from it. Faith does not require us to call destruction holy before we are permitted to hope.

Instead, Isaiah announces that devastation does not exhaust God’s creative possibilities.

Psalm 23 offers a similar promise: “Even when I walk through the darkest valley…” The familiar language of the King James Version calls it “the valley of the shadow of death.” Either way, the psalm does not promise that faithful people will never enter death-shadowed terrain. It promises that we do not enter it alone.

The crucial word is through.

God’s presence does not always remove the valley or immediately return us to where we were before entering it. Sometimes the only faithful path leads directly through terrain we would rather avoid. Yet Isaiah adds something astonishing to that promise. God not only accompanies the people through the wasteland; God brings water into it.

God creates the conditions through which life can emerge in the very place that appeared incapable of sustaining it.

Isaiah says that even the wild animals will honor God because God provides water in the wilderness. On the surface, this is a beautiful picture of creation receiving God’s provision. Within prophetic language, however, wild animals often carried an additional meaning. Jackals, ostriches, and other wilderness creatures were associated with abandoned ruins. Their presence indicated that human settlements had collapsed and cultivated places had reverted to wilderness.

They were signs that civilization had left and desolation had taken over.

Isaiah reverses the image. The wild animals no longer testify only to abandonment. They become witnesses to renewal. The creatures most closely associated with the wasteland are among the first to recognize that water is flowing there.

There may even be some prophetic irony in that. God asks the people, “Do you not see it?” Meanwhile, the wild animals are already drinking.

Creation recognizes God’s provision while human beings are still deciding whether it counts.

Perhaps that is because we frequently expect renewal to look like restoration to a former condition. We want the same forest, the same structures, the same communities, the same bodies, the same relationships, or the same versions of ourselves we knew before everything erupted. We pray for new life while quietly defining it as the recovery of the old one.

But God does not promise the exiles a replica of their past. By the time the first exiles returned, nearly fifty years had passed since Jerusalem’s destruction—and about sixty since the first major deportation. Many returnees had been born in Babylon and knew Judah only through inherited stories. Meanwhile, Judah had not remained empty. Those who survived there had cultivated the land, raised families, and formed lives of their own. The return brought competing claims about land, belonging, and authority—not an uncomplicated homecoming. There was no road back to the world as it had been. God would have to make a new one.

The Church must hear this when looking at struggling congregations, neglected neighborhoods, wounded communities, and people whose lives no longer fit familiar expectations. Institutions often survey altered ground, calculate what has been lost, and conclude that nothing valuable can grow there. Resources are withdrawn. Communities are abandoned. People are treated as liabilities because they cannot reproduce what existed before.

God sees differently.

God sees the minerals hidden within the ash. God sees water beneath the wasteland. God sees ecosystems that do not yet resemble anything we recognize. And those dismissed as wild, unwanted, unrespectable, or out of place may be the first to drink from the river and recognize that God has not abandoned the terrain.

The same is true within us. Some experiences alter us permanently. We may never become the person we were before the eruption, and healing does not require us to do so. God’s new creation is not confined to reconstructing an earlier version of our lives. Grace can nourish something genuinely new—something shaped by what we have survived without being defined solely by it.

The ash remains part of the ground, but it does not prevent the ground from becoming fertile.

God leads us through the valley. God remains with us in the wasteland. Then, sometimes slowly and beyond the timetable we would choose, living water begins to flow through the devastation.

The wasteland is real.

But it does not get the final word.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God does not always restore the former landscape; sometimes God creates a new ecosystem within it.

PRAYER
Life-giving God, remain with us when the landscape of our lives is altered beyond recognition. Lead us through death-shadowed valleys, help us perceive the rivers you are creating, and give us courage to welcome life even when it does not resemble what came before. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 9: Can You See It?

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Read Isaiah 43:18–19

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“And the one sitting on the throne said, ‘Look, I am making everything new!’ And then he said to me, ‘Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.’” (Revelation 21:5 NLT)

Two groundhogs emerge from their burrow at dawn in a Pennsylvania landscape. Bare trees and lingering frost surround them, while tiny green shoots and warm sunlight quietly reveal that spring has already begun.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Can You See It?” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

During the last couple of years I lived in Pennsylvania, I knew spring had arrived when the groundhogs began appearing. First, I would see Mama and Papa Groundhog venturing out again. Then, later in the spring, their pups would emerge and begin exploring the world around them.

And no—they never appeared on Groundhog Day.

They followed no human calendar and waited for no ceremonial announcement. By the time I saw them, the changing season was already underway. Life had been stirring beneath the ground before any groundhog—or pastor—appeared above it.

That is the tension within God’s question through Isaiah: “I have already begun! Do you not see it?” God is not merely promising that something new will happen eventually. God declares that the new thing is already emerging, even while the wilderness still looks like a wilderness.

These words were not written by the eighth-century prophet Isaiah himself. They come from a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition, speaking to the people of Judah during the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem had fallen, the Temple had been destroyed, and the people were living far from home under foreign rule. They needed more than a comforting memory of what God had once done; they needed to recognize what God was beginning to do among them now.

The exiles knew what God had done before. Their ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt, trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the sea, with no visible road to freedom. Then God divided the waters and made a way where no way appeared possible. The Exodus became the defining testimony of Israel’s deliverance—a sacred memory passed from one generation to the next.

Yet Isaiah declares, “But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do.” God is not commanding the people to erase their history or diminish what God had done. In fact, the verses immediately preceding this passage deliberately invoke the Exodus. The past still testifies to God’s faithful character.

The warning concerns what happens when sacred memory becomes a boundary around what God may do next.

Before, God made a road through the sea. Now, God promises a road through the wilderness. Before, God divided the waters. Now, God promises to bring water into a wasteland. The landscape changes. The method changes. God’s faithfulness remains.

The people knew how to recognize the God who made a road through the sea. The question was whether they could recognize that same God making a road through unfamiliar terrain.

God declares, “I have already begun! Do you not see it?”

That question suggests something unsettling: God’s new work may already be emerging while God’s people remain unable—or unwilling—to perceive it. They may be staring toward the sea, waiting for familiar waters to divide, while life is already breaking through somewhere else.

This does not mean that everything new comes from God. Newness alone is not evidence of holiness. Not every innovation is faithful, every disruption is deliverance, or every promise of change is life-giving. Institutions can adopt new language, introduce new programs, and advertise new visions without confronting injustice, relinquishing control, or changing anything substantive.

God’s new work must be discerned according to God’s revealed character. Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit? Does it cultivate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Does it tell the truth, practice mercy, pursue justice, extend hospitality, loosen bonds, and restore life?

Discernment protects us from two equal dangers: worshiping novelty simply because it is new and rejecting God’s work simply because it is unfamiliar.

The second danger can be particularly difficult for churches and institutions to recognize. We may pray passionately for renewal while quietly prescribing what renewal must look like. It must use our familiar language, preserve our established structures, affirm our existing authority, and resemble a previous season when God’s presence seemed especially clear.

A testimony can become a template. A former movement can become a monument. Nostalgia can disguise itself as faithfulness.

Then, when new life begins emerging through unfamiliar people, overlooked communities, or places we had dismissed as barren, we may resist the very renewal for which we prayed. We may conclude that God is absent because God is not working through the people, practices, and patterns we expected.

The same temptation exists within us personally. We can become attached to the way God once met us, the work through which we once served, what once gave our lives meaning, or the person we once believed we had to be. Those memories may remain sacred, but they do not have to dictate our future. Honoring who we have been does not require us to remain there.

Sometimes the new thing God is revealing is not an opportunity appearing outside us, but a truer life already emerging within us. It may begin quietly—small enough to overlook, unfamiliar enough to mistrust, and alive before anyone else recognizes or approves it.

The past testifies that God makes ways where none appear possible. Faith trusts that God is not restricted to making the same way twice. Honestly, I praise Jesus for that!

Friends, the new thing may already be emerging.

Can you see it?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God’s faithfulness does not require God to repeat the past.

PRAYER
Faithful God, free us from confusing familiarity with faithfulness. Teach us to honor what you have done without restricting what you may do next. Give us wisdom to discern your character, courage to recognize your new work, and faith to follow the road you are creating. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

God Beginnings, Part 8: Known by Name

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Read Isaiah 43:1–7

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“’Mary!’ Jesus said. She turned to him and cried out, ‘Rabboni!’ (which is Hebrew for “Teacher”).” (John 20:16 NLT)

Mary Magdalene turns toward the risen Christ outside the empty tomb at dawn. Behind her, dark faces representing imposed identities and accusations shatter and dissolve, while Christ reaches toward her in warm resurrection light and calls her by name.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Known by Name” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Mary Magdalene had likely heard many things said about her. Troubled. Unclean. Possessed. Crazy. That woman. The one with the demons. Scripture tells us that Jesus had freed her from seven demons, and even after her healing, people may still have defined her by what had once afflicted her. Communities are often slow to release someone from an old reputation. A person can be restored to life while others continue calling them by the name of their former suffering.

Then, outside the empty tomb, Mary hears one word:

“Mary!”

Jesus does not call her by her history, her affliction, or her social category. Jesus calls her by name.

That moment changes everything. The tomb is still there. Mary’s grief has been real. The violence that killed Jesus has not been erased. Yet when the risen Christ speaks her name, Mary recognizes that death has not ended the story. She is personally known by the One who calls life out of death.

Through the prophet Isaiah, God spoke with that same intimacy to a people whose circumstances had made them feel forgotten. They had experienced judgment, displacement, and uncertainty. Their life together had been wounded, and the future before them remained unclear. Yet God began not with their failures or their captivity, but with a reminder of who formed them:

“I have called you by name; you are mine.”

God’s knowledge of Israel was not merely informational. God did not simply know facts about the people. God created, formed, redeemed, named, accompanied, and gathered them. They were known through relationship. They belonged to God, not because they had successfully earned recognition, but because God’s faithfulness reached them even within exile.

Friends, God knows us by name and calls us into new life.

Being known by God does not mean that deep waters, raging rivers, or consuming fires will never come. Isaiah promises no such exemption. God’s people will pass through dangerous places. What God promises is presence: the waters will not overwhelm them, the rivers will not sweep them away, and the fire will not consume them.

Those forces may affect their lives, but they do not get to define their identities. Exile does not erase their belonging. Suffering does not cancel their worth. Captivity does not become their name.

When God says, “You are mine,” this is not the possessive claim of someone trying to control another person. Human beings often use belonging as an excuse to dominate: You are mine, so I decide who you must be. You belong here, so you must conform. We accepted you, so you owe us the version of yourself we prefer.

God’s claim moves in the opposite direction. God refuses to surrender a person’s identity to captivity, shame, danger, or the judgments of others. God’s naming restores belonging; it does not remove personhood.

The world often names people in order to control them. God calls people by name in order to restore them.

Our world is skilled at assigning labels. People are called respectable or embarrassing, normal or deviant, faithful or troublesome, useful or disposable. A person may be reduced to what happened to them, something they once did, a condition with which they live, the body they inhabit, the person they love, or the ways they fail to meet someone else’s expectations.

Institutions assign names too. Sometimes they decide who is welcome, who may speak, who possesses authority, and whose testimony can be trusted. They may insist that people hide pieces of themselves, perform an approved identity, or answer to labels that make everyone else more comfortable.

Even the Church can become more invested in naming people than in knowing them. We may attach a category to someone and imagine that we have understood the whole person. We may speak about people without listening to them. We may demand that they answer to identities formed by our fear, prejudice, theology, or need for control—and then call that demand faithfulness.

The unsettling question is unavoidable:

Does the Church help people hear God calling their names, or demand that they answer to names God never gave them?

Mary stands before the risen Christ carrying grief, confusion, and a history others may have used against her. Jesus does not reduce her to any of it. Jesus calls her, “Mary.”

In hearing her name, Mary recognizes Christ. She also receives a new beginning. Jesus does not merely comfort her and send her back into silence. Mary is called into witness. The woman whose society might have questioned or dismissed her testimony becomes the one entrusted to announce resurrection to the disciples. What’s more, Jesus then sends her, “that woman”, to be the first preacher of the Gospel!

Christ’s recognition does not wait for institutional permission.

That does not mean God’s call invents an entirely different person or removes everything that came before. Mary remained Mary. Her history remained part of her story. But neither her suffering nor the labels attached to it could contain what she was becoming. The risen Christ called the person who had always been there into a life that death, shame, and social judgment could not prevent.

God knows who we are, friends—even when the world does not.

God knows us beneath the labels others have imposed, beneath the roles we have learned to perform, and beneath the false selves we have constructed to remain acceptable. God does not call us away from the person God created. God calls us out of whatever has prevented that person from living fully.

A God beginning may start with hearing our name spoken beyond all the noise that tried to rename us. It may begin when we discover that God has never confused us with our wounds, our failures, or the categories others used to contain us. It may begin when we finally trust that being fully known by God does not erase us—it restores us.

The risen Christ still stands near places we have mistaken for endings. Christ still calls people whom the world has mislabeled, underestimated, or dismissed. Christ still speaks our names—not to control who we may become, but to call us into resurrection life.

Listen.

God knows your name.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God knows us by name and calls us into new life.

PRAYER
God who creates, forms, and restores us, help us hear your voice beyond every label that has diminished or confined us. Teach us to recognize others as people you know by name, and give us courage to answer when you call us into new life. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

God Beginnings, part 7: There’s No “Without” in God

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Read Exodus 33:12–17

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:20 NLT)

A modern congregation sits in a warm wooden sanctuary as the center aisle opens into a wilderness road. Worshipers transition into the mixed multitude journeying toward Mount Sinai beneath radiant clouds, joining present-day worship with God’s covenant-forming presence in Exodus.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “There’s No ‘Without’ in God” at Life-Giving Water Devotions

When I sat down for worship on the first Sunday of my new appointment just a few short weeks ago, I did not yet have my bearings straight.

I did not fully know the order of worship or how everything moved. The people, patterns, and particulars were still unfamiliar to me. After spending time away from the regular rhythms of pastoral ministry during my renewal leave, I might have expected the experience to feel strange.

Instead, I felt at home.

The prayers, music, Scripture, sanctuary, and people gathered around me formed a rhythm I already knew. I did not need to understand every detail before I could enter into it. I still do not know exactly how I fit within these particular communities, but I recognize the life we are sharing.

So, in those first worship services that first Sunday, the unfamiliar was being held by something familiar…and it still is.

That experience does not give me a complete map of what lies ahead. It does not instantly answer every question or remove every uncertainty. But it reminds me that I am not beginning from nowhere. God’s presence is already here—in the worship, within the gathered community, throughout the surroundings, and within me.

Moses also knows what it means to face a new beginning without having his bearings straight.

The people of Israel have escaped Egypt, crossed the sea, and entered the wilderness. They have endured hunger, thirst, fear, conflict, and uncertainty. Then, while Moses is on Mount Sinai, they fashion a golden calf and worship it. The covenant has scarcely been established before it is violated.

Yet the journey must continue.

God tells Moses to lead the people forward, but Moses is not willing to settle for a destination. The promise of land is not enough. Survival is not enough. Even success is not enough.

“If you don’t personally go with us,” Moses says, “don’t make us leave this place.”

Moses understands that reaching the promised land without God’s presence would not be the fulfillment of God’s promise. It would only be arriving somewhere else.

A destination can be reached without faithfulness. A goal can be accomplished without love. An institution can survive without serving the purpose for which it was created. Something can succeed by every measurable standard and still bear little resemblance to the character of God.

The promised land without God’s presence would be only land.

So Moses refuses to go without God.

But how do people recognize the presence of a God who cannot be contained within any single place, person, feeling, or experience?

Sometimes God’s presence becomes tangible through another person—someone who stays, listens, carries, feeds, challenges, advocates, or walks beside us. Sometimes it surrounds us through a community whose shared life gives us somewhere to belong. At other times, it meets us through an unexpected opportunity, a timely interruption, a place of refuge, the natural world, music, art, memory, rest, resistance, or the sudden opening of a way we could not see before.

God’s presence takes more forms than we can name and often reaches us through instruments we were never taught to recognize.

That was already true of the people journeying with Moses. Exodus tells us that a “rabble of non-Israelites” also left Egypt with Israel. Other translations call them a “mixed multitude.” They were not merely outsiders traveling beside God’s covenant people. At Sinai, this varied multitude was gathered together and constituted as Israel—the covenant people of God. Israel had been Jacob’s name and the identity of his descendants; now God was forming a wider group of people, claiming them as God’s own, and leading them toward land promised to their ancestors.

That makes what follows even more startling. Before Moses descends from the mountain carrying the tablets of the covenant, the people fashion the golden calf. Almost immediately after being constituted as God’s covenant community, they violate that covenant. Yet even after this profound failure, Moses pleads for God’s presence to remain with the whole people.

And, as can be seen, God’s community was already larger and more complicated than a neatly guarded religious boundary.

That should matter to Christians.

We sometimes behave as though God’s presence can be found only among Christian people, inside Christian buildings, through Christian language, or within experiences carrying an approved Christian label. Yet God has never been limited by the boundaries we construct.

The person through whom grace reaches us may share our faith. That person may not. We may encounter God within a sanctuary, but we may also encounter God in a hospital room, a recovery meeting, a forest, a coffee shop, a concert, a protest, or around a kitchen table. God may speak through Scripture and prayer, but God may also reach us through people whom religious institutions have dismissed, distrusted, or excluded.

Grace does not wait for us to verify the religious credentials of its instruments before reaching us through them.

This does not mean that every voice, impulse, institution, or opportunity represents God. Discernment still matters. Moses gives us a way to begin that discernment: God’s presence cannot be separated from God’s character.

Where people are being driven back into bondage, we should hesitate before calling it God’s will. Where power is protected at the expense of vulnerable people, invoking God’s name does not make the work holy. Where conformity is demanded while compassion is withheld, religious language may be plentiful while the character of God is nowhere to be seen.

This is where Moses’ prayer becomes uncomfortable for the church.

Would we rather remain in the wilderness than reach a seemingly successful future without mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love?

Churches can pursue growth without discipleship, stability without faithfulness, unity without justice, tradition without living memory, and mission without love. We can become so determined to preserve an institution, complete a project, protect a reputation, or reach a destination that God’s presence becomes something we invoke only after our plans have been settled.

Moses refuses to use God as a ceremonial endorsement of the people’s journey. God must remain at its center.

For Christians, Jesus offers the same promise of presence at the end of Matthew’s Gospel. Jesus sends the disciples toward people, places, and circumstances they cannot yet imagine. They receive a mission, but not a detailed map. They are not promised ease, universal acceptance, institutional security, or visible success.

They are promised, “I am with you always.”

Jesus does not promise that they will never go without anything. They will sometimes go without certainty, comfort, approval, safety, and familiar landmarks. But they will not undertake the journey without Christ.

There may be plenty of “without” along the way, but there is no journey without God.

God’s presence may surround us before we have learned the order, found our bearings, or understood how everything moves. It may meet us through a familiar rhythm in an unfamiliar place. It may become visible in the companion beside us, the multitude surrounding us, the provision sustaining us, the beauty awakening us, the truth unsettling us, the resistance strengthening us, or the path opening before us.

The question is not merely whether God is present.

The question is whether we are paying attention to the many ways God may be present—and whether we are willing to refuse any destination that requires us to leave God’s character behind.

Moses would rather remain in the wilderness with God than reach the promised land without God.

Would we?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
No destination is truly promised land if reaching it requires us to leave the character of God behind.

PRAYER
Ever-present God, sharpen our vision so that we may recognize your presence in people, places, and forms we might otherwise overlook. Keep us from mistaking success for faithfulness or religious language for holiness. Wherever you lead, help us walk with the varied multitude you gather in mercy, truth, justice, hospitality, and love. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

A biweekly devotional