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Steven is an entrepreneur, musician, and thinker—which makes him a great conversation partner on this podcast. In 2024, he lost his home and more when Hurricane Helene tore through the mountains of North Carolina, leaving mounds of destruction in its wake. Yet, he has continued to grow in his career and maintain his guitar store, The Guitar Trader, in West Asheville.

A couple of weeks ago, he messaged me and said, “I had a moment of what I believe was clarity and I have decided to re-embrace Christianity… on a 90-day free trial basis… I think it would probably make a good podcast episode.” We did not talk again until this recording. Here, Steven tells his story of faith, psychedelics, leaving church, ketamine treatments, and finding God.

In Front of Me

A Poem by Ryan Logan

In front of me on the desk,
a coffee cup, a printed list.
In front of me, people to visit,
patients and families to whom I want to listen
and be present.
In front of me,
a patient’s room.
I knock, introduce myself as the chaplain,
enter, and sense a heavy gloom.
In front of me,
a stranger sits.
“How are you doing today?” I ask.
“Not good,” he admits.
In front of me,
I listen to a story unfold —
a fall, crowded ED, brain scans, IV pain meds.
He laments,
“I just hate getting old.”
In front of me,
his voice hoarse, breaking between frustration and despair:
“My doctors say I may die
and you talk about spiritual care.
I’m a good man,” he says,
“this just isn’t fair.
Is God punishing me?”
he wonders.
It doesn’t feel like
He is there.”

In front of me,
spiritual distress —
fear, grief, anger,
and maybe some guilt, I assess.
How do I go deeper, not wanting to press?
I’ll slow down, build trust —
perhaps in time he’ll feel safe enough
to unburden himself
and confess.
In front of me,
the patient wrestles
with so much unknown.
“Surgery or hospice?
What do I tell my family?
This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
I’m not ready to go.”
A future suddenly postponed.
“It sounds like these results
hit you
like a cyclone.”
In front of me,
his concerned wife,
hoping the doctors
can save the love of her life.
“What’s it been like
watching your husband
go through this?”
“We’re taking it
one day at a time,” she sighs deeply.
“Whatever happens,
we’re trusting God will renew us.”

In front of me,
a frightened man
facing a crisis
no one foresaw.
In front of him,
a chaplain
with no easy answers at all.

In front of me,
a problem I can’t fix —
compounding losses,
anticipatory grief, and self-doubt,
a scary mix.
In front of me,
long stretches of silence.
I let the moment breathe,
depending on Divine guidance.
“What do you need today?”
I gently entone.
“Please pray for me,” he requests.
“Lord, help him know he’s not suffering alone.”
In front of us,
a thin place opens
where God seems present
after sharing honest thoughts and emotions.
“Thank you, Chaplain.”
He exhales, shoulders dropping.
“You’re welcome.
Is there anything you need before I go?”
He replies,
“Any chance you can come back tomorrow?”

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In the Exodus story, Israel is guided by a cloud by day and a fire by night. When the cloud moves, the people move. When it settles, they stop. They pitch their tents. They stay. Faithfulness is not measured by constant motion, but by attentiveness. Knowing when to wander matters. Knowing when to settle matters just as much (Exodus 13:21–22; Numbers 9:17–23).

I have been thinking about that distinction a lot lately. Not because I have lost my appetite for truth, but because I am increasingly aware of how restless we have become in our pursuit of it. We live in a moment where an infinite catalog of information sits at our fingertips. Knowledge no longer asks for a set time or a chosen place. It travels with us. We listen while we drive, absorb while we exercise, and process information in the spaces that once belonged to silence. There is always something else to understand, another voice explaining what we have not yet considered, another layer inviting us to keep clicking, keep learning. The dissemination of information has become ambient, almost compulsory, and we rarely stop long enough to ask what this constant exposure is actually doing to our souls.

Part of what makes this moment difficult to name is that we inherited a way of thinking about knowledge long before we ever chose it. The Enlightenment trained us to trust information as a moral good, to believe that more knowledge naturally produces better people, healthier societies, and wiser faith. Learning came to be seen as neutral at worst and virtuous at best. Questions became signs of humility. Certainty became suspect. Over time, even faith was quietly reshaped around this assumption. Jesus’ command to love God with heart, soul, and mind was rightly reclaimed by intellectuals emphasizing worship via mental ascent as a corrective to forms of faith that had drifted toward feeling alone (Matthew 22:37). But what began as balance slowly became an overcorrection. The mind was elevated, and the heart and soul were diminished. Biblical faith never made that separation. When faith is reorganized primarily around cognition, we lose contact with the mystical heart where trust, intuition, and discernment are formed.

Biblical wisdom tells a different story. In Proverbs, wisdom is not treated as raw information to be accumulated, but as something that calls out, dwells with the faithful, and must be received inwardly (Proverbs 1:20–23; Proverbs 2:1–5). The invitation is not simply to understand, but to trust. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,” we are told, rather than leaning solely on accumulated understanding (Proverbs 3:5). The Psalms repeatedly link wisdom to waiting, silence, and patient attentiveness to God’s presence, suggesting that knowing often emerges from stillness rather than activity (Psalm 37:7; Psalm 46:10).

Ecclesiastes presses the question even further. It does not dismiss learning outright, but it does refuse to romanticize it. The Teacher observes that “in much wisdom is much grief,” and that increasing knowledge often increases sorrow rather than peace (Ecclesiastes 1:18). Near the end of the book, we are warned that “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

These are not anti-intellectual claims. They are sober assessments of excess. They name what happens when the pursuit of knowledge loses contact with the limits of the human soul. Even Job, who demands answers, is finally led not into explanation but into silence and trust before the presence of God (Job 38–42). Wisdom in Scripture is relational, intuitive, and formed over time. It is carried in the heart, shaped by obedience, prayer, and lived attentiveness. When life is reduced to learning alone, we lose contact with that mystical center where discernment, communion, and peace are actually formed.

What we are living inside now feels like the natural outcome of a long habit of mind that equates growth with knowledge. Learning has become synonymous with progress. Curiosity has become a moral posture. Technology has removed natural limits, and engagement no longer knows when to stop. Everything can remain open, provisional, and under review. For certain personalities, especially those who find safety in understanding, this environment feels endlessly compelling. It also exacts a quiet cost. The soul grows tired of permanent transit.

You cannot always stay on the go. You cannot keep roaming, wandering, and deconstructing without end. Eventually, the soul begins to desire something else. Not certainty, and not closure, but rest. A place to stop for a while. A place to settle, even briefly. An outpost rather than a destination. A waypoint that others might recognize and return to.

There is something quietly countercultural about saying you are settled. In a world that prizes openness, revision, and perpetual learning, non-negotiability is often treated as moral failure. To stop examining can sound like refusal. To hold fast can sound like fear. And yet every life, if it is going to be lived with integrity, eventually arranges itself around what will not be renegotiated.

Non-negotiable beliefs, convictions, and values are not a sign that growth has ended. They are often the sign that formation has begun.

In practice, this kind of settling often shows up as a boundary. The decision not to engage every challenge. The freedom to say that something is not up for discussion. Not out of fear or fragility, but out of clarity. Boundaries like these are not a rejection of others, and they are not a refusal to learn. They are simply an acknowledgment that not every belief needs to remain publicly negotiable in order to remain alive.

If you find yourself tired in this moment, worn down by the constant flow of information, explanations, and invitations to reconsider everything, there is nothing wrong with you. You may not be closed. You may be full. Sometimes the exhaustion is not a signal that you need more input, but that you have already received enough. And sometimes wisdom looks like honoring that limit, staying where you are for a while, and letting what you already believe do its quiet work.

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On paper, it is the clinical training program required for professional chaplains. In practice, it is far more personal. I entered CPE already working as a healthcare chaplain, sitting with people in moments when words matter and often fail; yet, I knew something was unfinished within me. I did not come to CPE primarily for the credentials, although I cannot say I am not incentivized by them. I came because I wanted to be formed. I wanted supervision, accountability, and the chance to examine my work in real time. More than that, I wanted to become a better version of myself, because who I am shapes the kind of presence I can offer others. I suspected it would require vulnerability. I did not yet understand how personally it would ask me to tell the truth.

This unit of CPE is focused on loss and grief. I expected the challenges and vulnerability of presenting verbatims of encounters, of placing my work and inner responses before peers and supervisors. What I did not expect was what would surface when I was asked to reflect on how my family grieves. As I traced the losses of my life and how I experienced them across different stages of my life, something surprising happened. What emerged was not simply grief, but unrecognized losses along with delayed grief and disenfranchised grief. These were losses that had never been named as losses, only absorbed, spiritualized, and carried forward as normal.

I had come into CPE expecting my father’s death to be the central grief story I would explore. It was significant, painful, and formative, but I discovered that I had actually grieved that loss more fully, and healthily than others. What rose to the surface instead were quieter losses. As a child, my older sisters moving out. The way I was forced to leave my church in the mountains as a young adult. Then, the loss of my ministerial ordination. These were losses wrapped in calling language, obedience language, and faith language, losses that were never permitted to be grieved. CPE did not allow me to talk about them in the abstract. It asked me to sit with them, to notice how they shaped my relationship to authority, accountability, and community, and to see how they followed me into the rooms where I sit with patients.

Naming these losses is changing the way I offer presence. I hear stories now that often intersect with my own, stories of church hurt, job loss, and complicated family dynamics. These are the kinds of stories that can easily pull a chaplain into fixing, theologizing, or reassuring. Instead, I am learning to stay. I am learning to let shared humanity do its quiet work and to trust that presence itself is not passive.

In this way, CPE has become a place of healing for me, and that healing is not a detour from chaplaincy. It is part of the work. Unlike many professions, chaplaincy does not ask you to transcend your wounds or weaknesses. It invites you to acknowledge them and lean into them. Henri Nouwen names this tension in The Wounded Healer, reminding us that the caregiver is not healed first and then sent out, but is always being healed while caring for others.

CPE is reshaping me more than it is teaching me. It is teaching me how grief has shaped my relationship to authority and evaluation, how community can feel dangerous when loss has gone unnamed, and how sharing suffering and what I perceive as weakness can invite real feedback, even when that feedback is hard to hear. It is also teaching me how to be present with myself.

When people think of CPE as merely clinical training or a box to check, I want them to understand the human element that makes it something else entirely. Each cohort defines the experience through their shared stories, work, and lives. The particular lives and stories in the room shape the formation that happens. Our lives intersect with others who are also seeking spiritual development in real time, and that shared humanity is not incidental. It is the curriculum.

In that sense, CPE is deeply spiritual. Not because it provides easy answers or spiritual experiences on demand, but because it refuses to let us bypass what is unfinished in us. It teaches us how to stay with loss without rushing to meaning, how to offer presence without fixing, and how to become, slowly and honestly, someone who can sit with suffering because they have learned to sit with their own. This is a waypoint for me, not an arrival or a conclusion, but a place where I am learning how to stay.

But, I’ve been carrying a lot of complexity in my faith for a long time I’ve spent years holding tension in conversations about faith, trying to honor every angle, aware of every nuance, and careful about how I say what I mean. It takes work to live that way. It pulls on something inside of you, even when you’re glad to do it.

There are days when I find myself wanting something simpler. I think about times when faith felt easier, when I belonged to a community that spoke the same language. We shared assumptions, rhythms, and a way of reading the Bible that didn’t need constant explanation. There was a comfort in that kind of familiarity, and I notice myself remembering it more often.

Life has moved on, and so have I. My faith has changed, and I’ve changed with it. Even so, the longing underneath those memories is real. I feel a desire for steadiness, or some kind of rootedness. A way of being that doesn’t require constant rethinking or reexplaining. A place where I can rest for a moment without feeling like everything depends on my ability to hold the tension together.

Serendipitously, I recently fell down an internet rabbit hole learning about roots. As it turns out, not all roots are the same, not even roots that are planted by the water, as a Psalm declares.

I learned a lot about how roots work. How they hold. How they adapt. I used to imagine rootedness as something simple, like one taproot driven deep into the ground. Something fixed. Something certain. But nature shows us something very different. Roots behave in all kinds of ways, depending on the environment they inhabit.

Some dig straight down into the earth.
Some spread out wide beneath the surface.
Some send up little breathing roots to take in oxygen.
Some run sideways.
Some travel underground for great distances.
Some hold on.
Some release.
Some die so new ones can take their place.

Rootedness isn’t one thing.

Consider the mangrove tree. Mangroves grow in places where land and water meet, the shifting edges where the shoreline is never quite the same from one season to the next. They live in tides and storms, in brackish water and soft soil, in the constant give-and-take between erosion and new ground forming. If they had only one kind of root, they wouldn’t survive. They would topple as soon as the shoreline changed.

Instead, they do something remarkable.

A mangrove sends out long stilt-like roots that brace it where it stands.
But it doesn’t assume that the ground will stay put.
It pays attention to the tides, to the soil, to the subtle shifts beneath it.
And as the shoreline moves, the mangrove grows new roots in the direction the world is changing. These new roots reach toward the places where life can still support them. Meanwhile, some of the older roots—ones that once held the tree—begin to rot or settle deeper into the water. The tree doesn’t cling to them. It simply grows in a new direction, staying rooted by staying responsive.

Over time, a mangrove becomes a portrait of stability and flexibility at the same time.
Anchored, but not fixed.
Present, but not frozen.
Rooted, but always growing.

I think that’s the kind of rootedness I’m longing for now.

Not the kind that depends on everything staying the same.
Not the kind that needs familiar answers to feel secure.
Not the kind that resists the tides.

A rootedness that grows with me.
A rootedness that pays attention to where life is shifting.
A rootedness that allows new growth and lets old roots rest.
A rootedness that doesn’t lose itself, even as it adapts.

That’s its own kind of peace. Not the peace of certainty, or of going back to how things used to be, but the peace of being connected enough to stand and flexible enough to grow.

And maybe this kind of rootedness also shapes how I think about community. I’m realizing I may never belong to a group that shares every value or reads Scripture exactly the way I do. But shared rootedness doesn’t always look like shared beliefs. Sometimes it looks like growing alongside people who are also just doing all they can to remain connected to the ground beneath them while the shoreline shifts.

I don’t have everything figured out.
I don’t know exactly what this longing will become.
But I’m starting to trust that I don’t need a faith that never moves.
I need a faith that knows how to root itself right at the edge—
where the tides keep changing—
and still remains a living tree.

It wasn’t an impulsive decision or a frustrated break. It felt like closure; as if I was finishing a conversation that had been happening quietly inside me for years. I’d sensed it for a long time, but this time it wasn’t burnout. It was revelation. I saw what it was doing to us, and what it was doing to me. I left because I could no long deny the insistent nudge that usually precedes something sacred: it’s time to move on.

I didn’t leave to make a statement. I wasn’t angry or afraid. I just knew that my time there had run its course, and to keep pretending otherwise would be a kind of dishonesty. So I stepped away. I left my account active as an archive, and I still post through other apps now and then. But I rarely engage. I check in occasionally on family and favorite friends, but I rarely engage. And with each passing week, I find myself caring less about the noise I’ve left behind.

I wasn’t sure what to expect after leaving. I thought maybe I’d feel lonely or disconnected. Instead, I felt relief. Not the kind of relief that comes after finishing a hard task, but something deeper — like my soul exhaled.

The impulse to check notifications or scroll for updates began to fade. I realized how much of my attention had been quietly tethered to the platform. It wasn’t addiction as much as habit. It was a constant low hum of curiosity, the sense that I might be missing something important. Acute FOMO.

Without that hum, the world feels different. More alive. More real.

The matter isn’t entirely settled in my soul. I haven’t disappeared from the digital world entirely. I’m still on other platforms. I still post to Facebook through secondary apps, and I check in occasionally on friends and family. I’m about two degrees away from it all. I remain close enough to sense the pull, far enough to breathe. Every day I rethink that balance, wondering whether it’s sustainable long term. I keep adjusting, changing my mind about what distance looks like. For now, it’s where I am.

A Change in Affections

John Wesley once described the Christian life as being marked by “a change of affections.” He used that phrase in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, where he wrote that salvation doesn’t just adjust our behavior, it reorders our loves. In Methodist thought, this idea became central: sanctification isn’t about sin management; it’s about the redirection of desire. The Spirit doesn’t make us less passionate, but rather makes us rightly passionate, turning our attention away from noise toward love.

That’s the best language I have for what’s happening in me. For years, I prayed to be free from the compulsion to stay on top of the news cycle, to weigh in on every issue, to keep up with every controversy, and I think that is finally happening. I used to see a kind of inner peace in others that I couldn’t find in myself. But I knew it existed. I felt drawn toward it from deep within the Spirit, even when I stumbled around its edges.

Now, little by little, that peace seems to be emerging from the shadows.

Last Sunday morning my wife and I were driving to church. The air was bright and sharp with autumn, and strong breezes sent leaves tumbling across the road and raining down on top of us. It was glorious!

The world looked like it was in high definition. No filters. No edits. Just beauty that didn’t need me to frame it. I remember thinking: so this is what attention feels like when it’s not divided.

I’ve seen leaves fall every year of my life. But this time, it felt like seeing them for the first time.

That’s the best way I can describe life after Facebook. It’s not that the world got quieter; it’s that I finally did.

A few nights later, I found myself lying on the couch in the quiet, talking to God and talking to myself. No background noise. No screens. Just stillness. I felt peace settle over me, and not the shallow kind that comes when everything’s going right, but the deeper kind that feels like permission. Permission to be.

And yet, right behind that peace came guilt. That old, pastoral instinct whispering, You should be doing something. You should be contributing. You should be visible.

Even rest felt suspicious. I had to sit with that for a while. This long-invisible tension between being and doing, presence and performance, was coming into focus.

I think that’s when it hit me: the guilt wasn’t coming from God. It was coming from a version of myself I had built for other people: the pastor, the content creator, the one who always had something meaningful to say. That self isn’t gone entirely, but it’s quieter now. And I’m not sure I miss him.

A Moment of Zeal

A few weeks ago, I broke my own rule and engaged in a divisive political post made by one of my friends. I know the man who made the post to be intelligent and thoughtful. I believe him to be a man of integrity. That’s probably why it bothered me. I really felt this divisive post was beneath him.

I felt compelled to say something — to challenge it, to call him higher. I told myself it was about truth. But if I’m honest, it was zeal. That same old zeal that thinks correction is a form of care.

I’ve had time to reflect on it since. At first, I felt like I let myself down. Then I let God down. But now, I don’t think God was angry. I think He was reminding me how easily I’m drawn back into the cycle of outrage and rivalry. It’s not that the conversation was wrong; it’s that my heart wasn’t quiet enough for it to be redemptive.

This is how mimesis, the imitation of desire that René Girard wrote about, works. We mirror each other’s passions, even our indignation, until our identities get wrapped up in the contest itself. I didn’t leave Facebook to be better than anyone else. I left because I no longer want to live inside that pattern.

Attention, Affection, and Vocational Guilt

Something in me is healing. My attention feels different. It’s not that I’m learning to focus harder — it’s that I’m learning what deserves focus.

I used to think attention was about discipline. Now I see it as a form of love.

When I sit with someone now, I listen without pretense. I don’t mentally compose a response. I don’t half-listen while imagining what I might post later. I just listen. And in that listening, I feel present; not as a chaplain or writer or minister, but as a person.

That’s the thing social media was stealing: not time, but presence. The ability to simply be in the world without trying to narrate it.

Still, I wrestle with vocational guilt. There’s a part of me that measures worth by output. Such as sermons preached, blogs written, posts shared. It’s the part that confuses faithfulness with productivity.

When that voice grows loud, I have to remind myself what kind of work I was actually called to. The work of presence. The slow, unmeasured work of care.

I’m beginning to see that the ministry of Christ was not about omnipresence, but about embodiment. God didn’t choose to broadcast from the heavens. He chose to dwell in a solitary body on earth.

Falling Away from Noise

I don’t want to make a hero out of disengagement. This isn’t about moral superiority or romanticizing silence. It’s about honesty.

The truth is, my relationship with social media has always mirrored my relationship with noise. I told myself I needed it to stay informed, to stay relevant. But deep down, I was feeding an old fear… the fear of being forgotten.

Stepping away hasn’t erased that fear, but it’s exposed it for what it is: a counterfeit calling. I don’t think we’re made to keep up with everything. I think we’re made to attend to what’s been entrusted to us— the people in our care, the place where we are, the work in front of us.

The old affections still knock sometimes. The feed still calls like a familiar rhythm in the distance. But I’m not drawn to it the way I once was.

When I log in now, it feels like visiting a place I used to live. The walls are the same, but the light has changed. The noise doesn’t tempt me anymore; it tires me.

Wesley’s language lingers in my mind: a change of affections. Maybe that’s what this season really is. It is not withdrawal, not resignation, but conversion. The slow work of the Spirit turning my loves in a new direction.

I think this is what sanctification looks like for me right now:
to stop trying to know everything,
to stop trying to be everywhere,
to finally let go of the illusion of being needed by everyone.

The leaves are still falling outside my window as I write this. They’ve been falling for weeks. The trees will stand bare for a while before anything new appears. I think I’m okay with that.

For the first time in a long time, I’m not restless.
I’m not trying to prove that I’m here.
I just am. And that feels like peace.

I notice a parallel in my daily life. When my schedule is packed from morning to night, I find it hard to listen deeply or to notice the beauty around me. There’s no room for pauses, for prayer that wells up unplanned, for gratitude or silence. Without margin, life becomes a block of dense text. It is hard to navigate, impossible to savor.

The Cluttered Life

Just like spaces in our home, battling clutter is an ongoing effort. Life easily spills into the very edges with work commitments, family obligations, and a calendar without a sliver of white space. In recent years, I’ve realized that it isn’t just work and obligations that threaten my margins. The internet, with its constant stream of information, and social media, with its endless scroll of updates and opinions, can easily bleed into the white space of my life. What was once a quiet moment between tasks—a walk from the car to the house, or a few minutes waiting in line—now risks being filled by checking notifications or reading headlines. It’s easy to reach for my phone in every spare moment, turning what could be a pause for reflection or prayer into another opportunity for distraction.

When life is too cluttered, prayers become hurried, my relationships are more shallow, and my ability to delight in God’s presence diminished. The absence of margin breeds chaos and anxiety; it dulls my senses to what matters most. When every spare moment is captured by digital engagement, busyness, or distraction, true rest and reflection can feel further away than ever.

Spiritual Margin: The Invitation to Rest

There are ancient rhythms woven into creation and into faith: the call to weekly rest on the Sabbath, the wisdom of stepping away from work and noise, the invitation to avoid constant debates and conflict. Even God rests after creation is complete; Jesus escapes the crowds for solitary prayer (Mark 1:35, Luke 5:15-16, Matthew 14:23); and Paul admonishes his young mentor Timothy to shut his mind off of popular controversies (2 Timothy 2:23-26). Jesus often separated himself from the crowds and from his disciples. When I honor these patterns, I sense a restoration in my soul that can’t be manufactured by sheer accomplishments or constant connectivity.

Creating Margins: A Spiritual Discipline

Learning to create margin isn’t a once-for-all achievement but a daily choice. Sometimes it means declining another invitation, leaving an evening unscheduled, or simply lingering in silence instead of racing on to the next task. Lately, it also means making conscious decisions about my digital habits. I have taken steps away from social media platforms that once took a lot of time and energy away from my daily life.

I am choosing not to reach for my phone first thing in the morning, reclaiming quiet moments for prayer instead of scrolling, and being attentive to how technology fills the spaces meant for rest. I notice that the most meaningful conversations, the moments of laughter or insight, often arise in those unhurried stretches of time that I might otherwise have dismissed as unproductive.

Practical Ways to Build Margins

Travleling in the wilderness means traveling light. In fact, traveling light could be the difference in life and death. So what can we do? I offer The following practical steps as guidance for building intentional space, both inwardly and outwardly, so that moments of silence, reflection, and connection with God and others can flourish. By adopting these habits, I have been able to invite balance and peace into the busy rhythms of modern life, reclaiming the margins I need to nurture my soul.

• Setting aside regular time for prayer and scripture reading, even if it’s brief.

• Embracing Sabbath rest, allowing one day each week to be free from work and obligations.

• Practicing simplicity by limiting unnecessary commitments or taking on extra work just to feel “accomplished.”

• Creating physical spaces in my home for quiet and reflection. This did not require renovations. Instead, I changed the use of spaces. For instance, I rest the urge to turn the TV on in rooms once designed for viewing.

• Intentionally leaving parts of my calendar open, trusting God with the unknown.

• Leaving social media platforms that once demanded too much of my attention.

Margins on a page reveal what is essential; they allow words to breathe and meaning to unfold. In the same way, living with margin creates room to sense God’s presence, to pay attention, to rest and be restored. Technology can be a gift, but left unchecked, it fills the spaces where grace and reflection might otherwise dwell. When I honor boundaries and intentionally create margin—both from busyness and digital noise—I discover a freedom and peace that cannot be found in a life lived edge to edge.

A few weeks ago, during a conversation with a friend, we read the tower of Babel account in Genesis 11. Within the narrative flow of Genesis, this story is an account of the generations repopulating the earth after the flood. They attempt to build a tower that leads to heaven as a way of establishing their own progress. But things do not go as planned. In the end, God caused their languages to be confused so they could not complete the project. This left them divided into people groups by language.

My friend is new to the Bible and is just learning some of its foundational stories. After we finished, he asked a question I had never been asked before: “Why does it matter that they used bricks and tar?” I had never taken the time to consider that this detail might be more than just a footnote to the story (v. 3).

As soon as my friend asked about bricks and tar, I thought of another place where the Bible takes time to mention a piece of technology: the story of Deborah in Judges 4–5. There we meet Sisera, commander of the Canaanite army, who had nine hundred iron chariots (Judges 4:3). It might read like a military statistic, but iron chariots were the cutting edge of warfare. They outclassed the wooden wagons of the Israelites. The iron was a technological leap forward that made Sisera’s forces seem unstoppable. [God’s Women and God’s Peasants: The Song of Deborah as Heroic Poetry for Marginalized Peoples, by Daniel Rushing]

But then God calls Deborah to lead and Barak to fight. When the battle comes, the sky opens and a storm turns the dry Kishon River into a torrent. The heavy chariots bog down in the mud and become useless. Sisera’s technological superiority is undone by rain and by the courage of a people trusting in God rather than iron. Just as bricks did not guarantee a stairway to heaven, iron wheels did not secure victory. The mention of new technology in scripture is a clue: human progress matters, but it does not lead to the Kingdom of Heaven. Both stories are little reminders that what we create has power, but it cannot save us from the beauty and tragedy of the world, nor can it deliver the transcendence we so desire.

Bricks and Tar

“They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar” (Genesis 11:3, NKJV). The people at Babel had discovered they could bake clay into uniform blocks and glue them together with tar. At first glance, it appears to be an aside about building materials. But my friend’s question invited me to linger. Bricks are not stones. Stones are taken from the earth as they are; they bear the marks of geologic time. Bricks, on the other hand, are fabricated. They are dried and fired, identical, repeatable, scalable. Asphalt mortar is not the mud of the riverbank but a sticky petroleum compound.

In the narrative, bricks and tar appear immediately after the flood, in a world that is starting over. The people have a blank slate. They discover a new process, and they realize it could change everything. Bricks can stack straighter and higher than stones. Asphalt sticks firmer than mud. All of a sudden, a tower that reaches the heavens feels possible. And the new technology fuels a new desire: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). This is more than architecture. It is theology. It is the belief that human ingenuity will lead to transcendence. Progress becomes a pathway to the divine, to human prospering, and to leaving a lasting legacy.

The Myth of Progress

But the story tells us that their progress did not lead to communion. It led to confusion. Their words turned to noise. Their unity shattered into factions. The very technology that promised to bring them together as a city and as a people became a wedge that drove them apart. Progress invited pride, and pride birthed division.

This theme runs like a thread through Scripture. When Israel demanded a king, it was as much about wanting what other nations had – horses and chariots and armies – as it was about trusting God. Prophets warned against trusting in “chariots and horses” rather than in the Lord (Psalm 20:7). Jeremiah lamented those who “trust in man and make flesh their strength, whose heart departs from the Lord” (Jeremiah 17:5). The pattern is always the same: human tools inspire human confidence; confidence slides into self‑sufficiency; self‑sufficiency calcifies into idolatry. And the result is not the flourishing we hoped for. It is distance from God and from one another.

Our Digital Bricks

This is why my generation’s technological story feels so relevant. We live in an era of bricks and tar on steroids. We carry in our pockets slabs of silicon and glass that can access libraries, markets, and parasocial relationships at a tap. We can send our words to the ends of the earth instantly. We can build platforms with billions of users. Every new app or device comes with the same promise: this will connect you. This will make you safer. This will bring you closer to the truth and to each other. But many of us have begun to realize that these digital bricks are not doing what they promised.

Take social media. It was supposed to let us share our lives and find community. Instead, it often drives us into echo chambers where we are reinforced in what we already believe. The algorithms that promised to connect us deliver addiction, outrage, and envy. Our posts become performances. Our relationships become parasocial. We follow influencers and call it friendship. We block and unfollow rather than reconcile. We scroll and consume rather than converse and contemplate. Our words accumulate like bricks, but they do not create a tower of communion. They build walls.

Consider how pornography and sexualized media have given us the ability to simulate intimacy without presence. It has turned people into pixels. It promises satisfaction but isolates us from embodied love. Our pursuit of connection dissolves into disembodied consumption. We press a button and imagine we are free, but we become more enslaved to our appetites, more numb to real relationships.

Think about misinformation and conspiracy theories. We thought the Internet would democratize knowledge, that truth would rise to the top if everyone could publish. Instead, lies and ragebait proliferate because they are more profitable and more clickable. Truth becomes slippery. Our confidence in institutions erodes. We retreat into tribes that share our version of reality. Like the people at Babel, we find that language itself becomes a barrier. We can speak the same words but mean different things. We cannot even agree on the definition of “truth.”

Then there is the allure of transcendence through science. Gene editing whispers that we might eliminate disease. Artificial intelligence hints that we could solve our problems if only we had enough data. Silicon Valley prophets talk about defeating ageing, uploading consciousness, or building a “metaverse” where we can live beyond the body. The promise is, again, connection and transcending the human condition. But the reality is often further isolation and confusion. We run the risk of building towers that lead nowhere, investing in technologies that do not deliver on their promises, chasing after immortality through code and cells rather than through real community and relationships.

Observing From Here

I see a pattern: when humans discover a new tool, we are tempted to believe it will lift us beyond our limits. We imagine that bricks and tar, iron and silicon, will carry us higher than stones and speech can. We forget that no matter how high we stack, we cannot build our way into God’s presence or into true communion with each other.

I am struck by the fact that God did not destroy the tower of Babel with fire or flood. He simply confused the language. God scatters them, not to punish them but to prevent them from entrenching themselves in a lie. In Judges, God does not invent a bigger weapon to defeat the iron chariots. God sends rain. He uses creation itself to show that no amount of iron can outmatch God’s plans. Deborah and Barak’s victory is a reminder that trust in God, not technological prowess, is what saves.

I also notice that when the Spirit is poured out at Pentecost in Acts 2, the miracle is not a universal language imposed from above. It is the opposite of Babel. People from every nation hear the disciples speak in their own languages, and yet they understand the same message. God honors diversity and brings unity through human voices who speak love and truth, not through technological advancements. The early church did not build towers; it built tables. It gathered around bread and wine, not bricks and tar. It created community through shared life, not shared algorithms.

Reflections for Today

I am not indicating that we abstain from using technology. Rather, the invitation is to examine the technologies we adopt critically. What are our bricks and tar? Where have we assumed that progress alone will solve our deepest hungers? Are we mistaking connection for communion, access for intimacy, data for wisdom? Have we come to believe that something we invent will lift us into transcendence?

Bricks are useful. Iron can plough fields. Smartphones can call grandparents. A vaccine can save lives. But progress unmoored from presence, ungrounded from humility, will not make us more human. It will leave us with more options and fewer conversations; more knowledge and less understanding; more tools and fewer friends.

Maybe the story of bricks and tar is a gentle warning to slow down and remember what truly binds us together. Technology can be a servant, but it cannot be a savior. It can amplify our voices, but it cannot teach us to listen. It can give us new ways to speak, but it cannot give us a new heart. Only God can do that. Only love can do that. Only an embodied, Spirit‑filled community can do that.

So as we scroll and swipe, as we innovate and design, as we stand at this waypoint between past and future, the question is not whether to build but what to build and why. Are we building towers that make us feel powerful but leave us speechless in one another’s presence? Or are we building tables where we can sit and speak and be known?

Perhaps the small detail of bricks and tar is the Spirit’s whisper to us: be careful how you build, and remember that the best things in life are received, not engineered.

But this refrain deserves more scrutiny. What kind of Christ is actually heard in these spaces? And what kind of discipleship, if any, is being formed?

When Christ Is Preached

The Apostle Paul’s words in Philippians 1:15–18 speak directly into this tension. From his prison cell, Paul names the reality that some preach Christ from envy and rivalry, while others do so out of love. He does not hide the duplicity; he identifies it with precision. Yet his conclusion is startling: “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in that I rejoice” (NIV).

On the surface, Paul seems to shrug: “So what? As long as Jesus’ name is mentioned, I can celebrate.” This has become a convenient verse for those who believe all evangelism is good evangelism, regardless of method or motive. But the scholars most often quoted in the institutional church point out that Paul’s joy was never indiscriminate.

John Piper, a leading evangelical pastor, observes that Paul could rejoice because the content of the message itself remained faithful. If the gospel had been bent into another form, his response would have been fierce, as in Galatians: “Even if an angel from heaven should preach another gospel, let him be accursed” (Piper, Desiring God, 2011). Paul’s distinction was clear: he was harsher with a malformed gospel than with malformed preachers.

David Guzik, whose commentary is read widely across denominations, sharpens the point: “If you preach the true gospel, I don’t care what your motives are—God will deal with you. But if you preach a false gospel, I don’t care how good your motives are—you are dangerous and must stop” (Guzik, Enduring Word Commentary: Philippians 1).

Marg Mowczko, a respected New Testament scholar, emphasizes that Paul could never rejoice in a message that distorted Christ. The rivals in Philippi may have been selfish, but they were still presenting Christ in a way that was faithful to the apostolic witness (Mowczko, “Motives in Ministry – Philippians 1:12–18,” 2010; Ligonier, Tabletalk Devotional on Philippians 1:15–17, 2011).

But here we must pay close attention: Paul is not giving a pass to every possible motive. He names envy and selfish ambition, but those are only two of many ways the gospel has been co-opted. Elsewhere in the New Testament, Paul warns against those who “peddle the word of God for profit” (2 Cor. 2:17), condemns the exploitation of spiritual power for gain (Acts 8:18–23), and insists that ministry not be conducted “under pretext for greed” (1 Thess. 2:5). In every case, the danger is the same: the gospel bent into a tool for self-interest, whether for money, power, or prestige.

History has proven Paul right. The gospel has been conscripted to justify crusades and colonial expansion, prosperity schemes and political branding, cults of personality and quests for national greatness. Not all motives are benign, and not all uses of Christ’s name are formative for discipleship. Envy and rivalry in Philippi were serious enough; greed, manipulation, and domination are even more corrosive.

And this is where the institutional church’s own voices serve as a self-critique. Piper, Guzik, Mowczko, none of them fringe figures, remind us that Paul’s joy was narrow. He could rejoice only when Christ was proclaimed in a way that remained faithful, even if the preachers were not. His words cannot be used to baptize every motive, every stage, or every platform.

For those still inside the structures, this is a reminder from their own teachers that Philippians 1:17 is not a blank check for every form of evangelism. And for those on the outside, it is an intersection: evidence that even insiders recognize the danger of confusing mere proclamation with faithful witness.

Which leads us to the more pressing question in our time: if the words remain faithful but the medium itself reshapes how the gospel is heard, should we really rejoice in the same way Paul did?

The Medium Shapes the Message

If Paul could rejoice that Christ was proclaimed even from selfish motives, he was also clear that certain distortions could never be celebrated. The gospel, when bent toward profit, power, or prestige, became something else entirely. And here is where our own moment diverges most sharply from his. For today, the issue is not only why Christ is proclaimed, but how and where.

The institutional church often assumes that medium is neutral, that the message of Christ is unchanging no matter what platform carries it. But communication theory, pastoral experience, and even the church’s own teachers suggest otherwise. Marshall McLuhan once wrote that “the medium is the message.” His insight is simple but profound: the form of communication is not just a delivery system, it reshapes what is communicated. McLuhan argues that the form of a medium matters more than its content, because the medium itself reshapes human perception, behavior, and society. A newspaper, a TV broadcast, a political rally, or a TikTok video isn’t just a neutral container carrying information, as each medium changes the scale, pace, and pattern of human life in its own way.

Think of it this way: a political rally is not a blank stage. It is a theater designed to manufacture allegiance. A TikTok video is not just a container for ideas. It is part of a disembodied feed that trades in distraction and entertainment. A funeral is not merely a solemn occasion. It is a moment when grief and vulnerability can be manipulated and leveraged as coercion. In each of these contexts, even words that are faithful in content are bent by the medium into something else.

Here, again, even institutional voices agree. Gordon Fee, a Pentecostal scholar whose commentary on Philippians remains a standard, reminds us that Paul’s tolerance in prison was exceptional, not general. His “theological narrowness” meant he would never rejoice in Christ preached where the message itself was compromised by ideology or spectacle (Fee, Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, NICNT).

Jeremy Berg, reflecting on the rise of celebrity preachers, notes that their very platforms (the branded stage, the curated image) create followers who are more loyal to personalities than to Christ (Berg, “The Message & the Medium,” 2009). Bill Muehlenberg, writing from within evangelicalism, cautions that Philippians 1:18 cannot be a license for bad methods: the context in which Christ is preached inevitably shapes how he is received (Muehlenberg, “Difficult Bible Passages: Philippians 1:15–18,” 2019).

These critiques from inside the church echo what those outside often feel: that the gospel, when entangled with certain mediums, ceases to be formative. At a rally, the gospel sounds like a campaign slogan. Online, it becomes a clip of disposable inspiration. At a funeral, it can be heard as manipulation. Even when the words themselves are faithful, the medium bends their meaning in the ears of the hearers.

Which is why the Great Commission matters here. Jesus did not command the apostles to secure public faith claims; he sent them to make disciples (Matt. 28:19). Discipleship is not formed in crusades, soundbites, or spectacles, but in patient, embodied practices — the very thing most ill-suited to mass platforms and fleeting media.

So when the institutional church cheers that “at least Christ is being preached” in every new medium, it would do well to hear its own teachers: Paul’s joy was narrow, not indiscriminate. The content of the message matters, yes. But so too does the medium, for it is the medium that so often determines whether the message is received as truth, as entertainment, as propaganda, or as manipulation.

A Word from the Margins

From where I stand, it seems clear: the church’s scramble for cultural relevance has become its own gospel. New platforms are praised, new mediums are seized, new stages are celebrated, often with little thought to what is being formed in the process. The refrain “at least Christ is being preached” is not enough when the Christ being heard sounds like a politician, an entertainer, or a sales pitch.

For those still inside the structures, hear this from your own teachers: Paul’s joy in Philippians was narrow. It was tied to Christ being proclaimed faithfully, even if the preachers were compromised. It was never a blank check for every motive or every method. To rejoice in evangelism without asking whether it forms disciples is to rejoice in shadows.

And for those of us outside — for those who have grown weary of the spectacle and the applause — there is another path. It is slower. It is less visible. It may not trend or scale. But it is faithful. It looks like conversation around the table, like prayers whispered in hospital rooms, like lives given in service to neighbors. It looks like Christ himself, who chose the form of a servant rather than a stage (Phil. 2:5–7).

So let the church in its institutions do what it will. But for those in the wilderness, let us take up the quieter work: proclaiming Christ with sincerity, embodying him with humility, and walking with others long enough for discipleship to take root. In the shadow of an institution scrambling for relevance, we can bear witness to a gospel that does not need a stage, only a life.

Societies use scapegoats to avoid their deeper problems, which, Rene Girard says, stem from “mimetic contagion”—an escalating rivalry that spreads as people imitate one another’s desires. Instead of embracing true concern for victims “from the standpoint of the Christian faith,” which leads “the way into God’s new community of love and nonviolence,” Girard observed that pagan forms of “victimism” use victims to “gain political or economic or spiritual power.”

More to the point, by resorting to scapegoating, we wind up affirming that violence actually works as it is intended—a reality that Girard says stopped being true the moment Jesus gained victory over the power of death.

According to Girard’s anthropology, Jesus was the scapegoat to end all scapegoats—an innocent victim whom the political and religious establishment of the first century viewed as the culprit of their communal crisis, leading them to believe that killing him would restore the status quo. Yet because Jesus embodied true innocence—the only perfectly innocent person to walk this earth—he exposed the scapegoating mechanism for what it was, thereby defeating the devil and defanging death.

In Girard’s thinking, “the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) disarmed violence itself, uncovering a hidden mystery which “none of the rulers of this age understood, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Cor. 2:8).

Ever since Jesus, violence lost the cohesive force it once exerted to unite communities around the deaths of their victims and thus relieve their tensions. Now, any positive effects that result from acts of violence—like the national unity after 9/11—will always be temporary and ultimately self-defeating. This also explains why, according to Girard, violence has grown increasingly chaotic in its nature, decentralized in its manifestation, and ineffectual in its aims.

In short, to instrumentalize Kirk’s murder, whether by painting him as a martyr or a miscreant, sanctions his status as a scapegoat and so affirms the essential function of violence—which in turn denies the reality that Jesus conquered death’s demonic power.

The scapegoating mechanism, which is at work in all forms of brutality, plays right into the hands of the enemy of both God and humanity. That is because, Girard argued, it is the primary operating system of Satan himself. As the accuser, Satan supplies the core impulse behind scapegoating, which is assigning blame. Thus, whenever we blame each other for the violence of our times, we end up aligning ourselves with the accuser (Rev. 12:10).

Christians across the political spectrum should be disturbed by the increasing violence that seems to be taking over our country. Yet as followers of Jesus, we also have a unique opportunity to direct our anger in the right direction—for only then can ours be a righteous rage. When we target and attack one another as the enemy, it distracts us from our real enemies: sin, death, and the devil.

In Scripture, Satan is called “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44) and the one who “holds the power of death” (Heb. 2:14). While Jesus broke the power of death by defeating the devil, the reality of death still exists and is thus “the last enemy to be destroyed” (1 Cor. 15:26).

Too often, Christians aren’t mad enough at death, as my colleague Kate Shellnutt has pointed out. Perhaps that’s because we’re far too busy getting mad at one another. We forget the words of the apostle Paul, who writes that “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12).

As Christians, we are uniquely poised to combat the lie that violence still has its uses in our world. In fact, the more inevitable and inescapable violence seems to become in our culture, French theologian Jacques Ellul argued, the more important it is for Christ’s followers to prove otherwise: “The role of the Christian in society … is to shatter fatalities and necessities. And he cannot fulfill this role by using violent means.”

Not only is violence unnecessary, but it is also counterproductive—it creates a literal death loop that does nothing more than reinforce itself. This is why Girard said that the kingdom of darkness is a house divided against itself, for eradicating violence with violence is like Satan casting out Satan (Matt. 12:25).Instead, the Good News of the gospel is that Jesus now holds power over death, binding the work of the enemy and causing Satan to fall like lightning (Luke 10:18, John 12:31). As Christians, we have access to that same supernatural power through Christ’s sacrifice—who conquered not by being death’s instrument but by being its willing recipient for the sake of the world. That is, we overcome Satan’s schemes “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of [our] testimony” (Rev. 12:11).

As citizens of Christ’s now-and-coming kingdom, we must refuse to sacralize murder and thus return to death its scepter. Now is the time for every Christian, regardless of our political affiliation, to beat our swords into plowshares and do the hard work of uprooting the false necessity of violence in our nation. We must demonstrate that the new operating principle of Christ’s kingdom is a divine love that is even stronger than death (Song 8:6).

Christ’s “resurrection is the guarantee that God can cure every wrong and every hurt,” writes Catholic priest Jacques Philippe. “Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil.”

Now is the time to prove to the world that death has, in fact, lost its sting—and that only the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ prevails against the violent forces of hell.

By Stefani McDade, Christianity Today, September 12 - 2025
[Article shared slightly abridged.]

Dear friends,

I want to share a small but meaningful update.

I’ve launched something new called The Intersections Mission. It’s a nonprofit rooted in the Christian tradition, committed to providing pastoral care, spiritual direction, and chaplaincy for those often rejected, overlooked, or forgotten by institutional churches. We believe healing happens in ordinary life, that spiritual growth doesn’t end at the church door, and that everyone deserves spaces where they can ask honest questions and receive real care.

This isn’t a church, and it isn’t a protest against the church. It’s another way of coming alongside people with grace and presence.

Because of this step, the Intersections blog is also shifting. From here on, my personal writing will live under a new name: Daniel Rushing’s Waypoints. The URL will stay the same—danielrushing.blog—and everything you’ve come to expect will remain. The only difference is that Waypoints will sometimes be a little more personal, more like a journal from the road. The new tagline sums it up:

“Marking sacred stops along the journey of faith, culture, and life.”

The Intersections Podcast, however, will stay just as it is for now, and you can continue listening from the this site. Eventually, The Intersections Mission will have its own blog, but for now, nothing changes for you—same posts, same feed, same place to find me.

Thank you for walking with me. Your presence here matters more than you know.

Grace and peace,

Daniel

If you have read my previous post on why I no longer believe in a secret rapture, you know that re-examining the timeline I grew up with has been both liberating and unsettling. When you pull that thread, you discover it is connected to more than the rapture. Other things start to unravel. Avoiding this unraveling, some people who have left dispensationalism still hold on to one big piece of that framework: the idea of a final, worst-ever, global Great Tribulation that will bring the world to the brink before Jesus returns to rescue the faithful.

I no longer believe in that final great tribulation, not as it is usually described, seven years long, ruled by a literal Antichrist, culminating in Armageddon, and positioned as either just before or just after Jesus swoops in to save Christians from the worst of it. And just like the rapture, the main proof text for this belief is usually the same: Jesus’ Olivet Discourse.

In what follows I want to offer seven reasons I no longer hold to that picture of a future great tribulation. Along the way I will point to the verses and to several scholars who have helped me see the texts more clearly.

1. Jesus was not answering, “When will you return?”
Matthew records: “Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, ‘Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?’” (Matt 24:3 NKJV). Notice they did not ask, “When will you come back after being gone?” They had just heard Him predict the Temple’s destruction (Matt 24:1–2), and they connected that event with the end of the age. The temple was destroyed circa 70 AD after a brutal Roman occupation of Jerusalem.

So what exactly were the disciples wanting a sign for? The Greek word used for “coming” is parousia, which in the Greco-Roman world meant the royal arrival or official visit of a king or dignitary. It did not mean a return or a coming back. It meant the formal, visible arrival of someone already in authority, often to a city already under their rule (Matt 24:3, 27, 37, 39). Even Jesus’ brothers once pressed Him to go to Judea and “show Yourself to the world” (John 7:3–4 NKJV), language of public manifestation. So here, on the Mount of Olives, the disciples too want a sign that will verify what they already believe: that the Messiah has come and is present. Now they wanted to see him rule. In their minds, that probably looked like a political uprising or a resurgence of Jewish nationalism as a reaction to Roman occupation. Instead, Jesus tells them that everything they want to fight for — the Temple, the city, Zion— will be destroyed. That, He says, is the sign of His coming. His instructions are pastoral and practical: “...then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let him who is on the housetop not go down to take anything out of his house. And let him who is in the field not go back to get his clothes” (Matt 24:15–18 NKJV; cf. Luke 21:20–21).

N.T. Wright and other scholars like R. T. France and Dale Allison emphasize that in Jesus’ context, the destruction of the Temple would be seen as the divine sign that Israel’s God had acted decisively, vindicating His Messiah. In prophetic symbolism, the collapse of Jerusalem’s central institution meant the transfer of authority from the old order to the reign of the Son of Man. This “coming” is not about leaving heaven to return to earth, but about being enthroned as King and Judge. It was The Parousia.

Three connections make this clear: First, in Jewish prophetic literature, the “day of the Lord” is often described in cosmic imagery when a city or empire falls (Isaiah 13; Amos 8). Second, Jesus directly ties the sign of the coming of Son of Man to the Temple’s downfall (Matt 24:29–31), echoing Daniel 7’s vision of one like a son of man receiving dominion after judgment on the beasts. Third, the early church, living through and after 70 AD, understood the Temple’s destruction as proof that Jesus’ warnings were true and His authority unmatched.

2. “Great tribulation” is hyperbolic first-century language for Jerusalem’s fall.
Jesus continues: “For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be” (Matt 24:21 NKJV). He is not speaking in isolation here. He is drawing from the rich prophetic tradition where hyperbolic language is used to shock hearers into action. Joel described a locust plague as “like nothing has ever happened, nor will be again” (Joel 2:2). Daniel spoke of “a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation” (Dan 12:1 NKJV). During the Maccabean period, 1 Maccabees 9:27 laments that “there had not been such great distress in Israel since the time prophets ceased to appear.”

The Dead Sea Scrolls’ War Scroll uses similar language: “a time of distress for all the people redeemed by God… nothing to equal it from its beginning until it end in final redemption” (1QM 1:11–12). This text comes from the Essene community at Qumran, a separatist Jewish sect that believed they were the true remnant of Israel. They anticipated a climactic, divinely orchestrated war between the “Sons of Light” (themselves) and the “Sons of Darkness” (both Roman occupiers and corrupt Jewish leaders). In their vision, this war would purge evil from the land, restore proper worship, and usher in God’s kingdom. Their use of “nothing to equal it” shows that hyperbolic “worst-ever” phrasing was already common in apocalyptic literature of the time. The Essenes’ expectation matters here because it shows that many first-century Jews assumed redemption would arrive through violent upheaval. By echoing this familiar language, Jesus was speaking in a way His listeners would recognize, but He applied it to a very different reality: the imminent Roman siege of Jerusalem, not a final cosmic battle. His urgent warning to flee was a direct reversal of the Essene impulse to gather for war.

But doesn't "great tribulation" distinguish this as the worst suffering ever? R. T. France explains, “These are stock expressions for unparalleled suffering, and are not to be pressed literally (e.g., by asking whether the Holocaust was worse than the Jewish War).” As LaPeau notes, “This is a way of emphasizing the magnitude of the trouble and is not intended literally… Rather, both phrases emphasize how severe the time of trouble and destruction are to be.” In other words, you can’t pit suffering against suffering. There is no scale for such comparisons, and for those who experience it, every season of destruction feels like the end of the world to those going through it.

The destruction Jesus warned about was indeed severe. In 70 AD, Roman legions surrounded Jerusalem during Passover, trapping hundreds of thousands inside. Josephus, the first-century historian, records famine so extreme that some resorted to cannibalism. The siege ended with the Temple burned, the city razed, and survivors slaughtered or captured. For those living through it, there had never been anything like it, and Jesus’ urgent warning to “flee to the mountains” was literal survival advice.

His words, “great tribulation,” are not an encoded reference to a distant, end-of-the-world cataclysm. They are a pastoral alarm for His generation to take decisive action before it was too late. And “greatest” does not mean “final.” If someone objects that “nor ever shall be” implies history’s end, Luke’s account challenges that: “And Jerusalem will be trampled by Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled” (Luke 21:24 NKJV). That anticipates ongoing history after the catastrophe

3. The seven year timetable is dispensational math, not an explicit New Testament teaching.
The notion of a seven-year tribulation is built from a particular reading of Daniel’s seventy weeks (Dan 9:24–27). In that scheme the seventieth week is detached from the first sixty nine, placed at the end of history, and connected to Matthew 24. The New Testament never says that the great tribulation lasts seven years. The length is imported from an interpretive construction. Many non-dispensational scholars read Daniel 9 as culminating in Christ’s ministry, covenant, and the events surrounding the first century.

4. Antichrist, False Prophet, and Two Witnesses are symbolic, not future tribulation figures
If the “great tribulation” Jesus described was about events in the first century, then we should read the so-called characters of the apocalypse in that light. The term “antichrist” appears only in John’s letters (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 7), where it is already active in his own time, describing any denial of Christ and His teaching. The beasts and false prophet in Revelation draw on Daniel’s visions to portray oppressive empires and corrupt religious systems; all realities his first readers would have recognized in Rome’s political and cultic machinery. The two witnesses are patterned on Moses and Elijah, representing the Church’s prophetic witness in the face of persecution. By lifting these figures out of their historical and symbolic framework and turning them into a lineup of future end-time heroes and villains, we lose the rich, layered critique John is making of imperial power, idolatry, and the call for faithful witness in every age.

5. Armageddon is a gathering, not a battle
Revelation 16:16 says the kings of the earth are “gathered… to the place called in Hebrew, Armageddon.” The name refers to the ancient site of Megiddo, a real location in northern Israel overlooking the Jezreel Valley. Throughout history, Megiddo was a strategic choke point for armies traveling the Via Maris, the trade and military route linking Egypt with Mesopotamia. Many decisive battles were fought there, from Pharaoh Thutmose III’s victory in the 15th century BC, to Josiah’s death at the hands of Pharaoh Neco (2 Kings 23:29).

Because of this long association with climactic conflict, Megiddo became a symbol of decisive confrontation in Jewish memory. In Revelation, Armageddon functions as a symbolic “place” where the world’s powers gather for their final stand against God. But the text never describes an actual battle there. In fact, when the confrontation comes in Revelation 19, the opposition is defeated instantly “by the sword” from Christ’s mouth, a symbol of His word, not through drawn-out combat. The location’s history gives weight to the image, but the vision is theological, not a prediction that this exact patch of land will host a literal final world war.

6. Christians are called to endure, not escape
Following Jesus was never meant to be a strategy for avoiding pain. He told His disciples plainly, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me” (Luke 9:23 NKJV). This is the Via Dolorosa, “he way of the cross,” the shape of every true pursuit of God and justice. It is not the removal of hardship but the transformation of hardship into holy witness.

Jesus prepared His followers for this: “A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you” (John 15:20 NKJV). The early church lived this reality. Paul told believers in Lystra, “We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22 NKJV). He wrote to Timothy, “Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution” (2 Tim. 3:12 NKJV). To the church in Smyrna, the risen Christ said, “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life” (Rev. 2:10 NKJV).

The Christian life is not designed for escape from the world’s pain, but for faithful witness in the midst of it. Our calling is cruciform, It is shaped by the cross, which means we willingly stand in solidarity with those who suffer, bearing our own trials with patience, humility, and hope. The world’s powers may gather their armies and its systems may crumble, but the way of Jesus is to love, serve, and endure to the end.

7. Revelation’s vision is pastoral, not a disaster forecast
This cruciform calling brings us to the heart of Revelation. The book was not given to scare the church into hiding, but to strengthen it for witness. John identifies himself at the outset as “your brother and companion in the tribulation” (Rev. 1:9 NKJV). He writes not as a distant predictor of doom, but as a fellow sufferer, offering the church a vision of the Lamb who reigns. The Lion of Judah is revealed as “a Lamb as though it had been slain” (Rev. 5:6 NKJV), teaching us that the victory of God comes not by force, but through the apparent weakness of sacrificial love.

Early Christian tradition remembers John, in his old age, being carried into the assembly and saying only, “Little children, love one another.” In Revelation, that love takes the form of courageous faithfulness under pressure. It is a call to see through the illusions of empire and violence, and to recognize that the true power in the universe is the Lamb who conquers by laying down His life. The vision is not a timetable for escape, but a summons to live as people marked by the cross until the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ (Rev. 11:15 NKJV).

The Olivet Discourse and Revelation aren’t roadmaps to help us dodge some future cosmic catastrophe. They are calls to live faithfully in the face of whatever trials our generation meets. Jesus’ words about “great tribulation” were not about a day we might one day escape, but about a day His first followers had to face head-on, and a way of being that every disciple since has been called to embrace.

The cross-shaped life doesn’t ask how to get out of the fight, but how to love in the midst of it. It doesn’t measure one era’s suffering against another, because suffering cannot be measured against suffering. It looks to the Lamb, who walks with us through every ending and promises that one day, “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying” (Rev. 21:4 NKJV).

Until that day, we follow Him, not away from the world’s pain, but into it.

Special shout out to my friend J.M. Smith for his wonderful teachings on this subject which can be found on Youtube:

God whispers: travel light. Shake the dust from your feet. Guard the pearl from the trampling hoof. Pour the new wine only into skins that can stretch with it.

Jesus spoke in pictures like these, not as quaint metaphors for another time, but as instructions for a way of life. They are words for those who carry the kingdom, who must keep walking when the road changes beneath them, who must trust the Spirit’s timing even when the way forward feels uncertain.

These are not about building walls. They are not the self-help version of boundaries. They are invitations into a way of being that trusts the Spirit’s leading, knows when to offer and when to withhold, and can walk away without bitterness.

There is a sacred difference between leaving to protect yourself and leaving because the Spirit says go. Between cutting people off and releasing what they cannot carry. Between guarding your treasure out of fear and stewarding your pearl with care.

I used to think that faithfulness meant endurance… that if I just kept showing up, loving more, explaining better, bending further, the gap might close. Sometimes it did, but more often, I simply grew weary. And slowly I learned: some silences do not need to be filled, some rooms do not need to be reentered, and some burdens are not mine to lift.

Travel light, the Spirit keeps reminding me.

Not because I am better. Not because I am bitter. But because the Spirit keeps me moving. I am learning to be not only a believer, but also a be-leaver, trusting that leaving can be an act of faith as surely as staying (Out of the Embers, Bradley Jersak).

There is new wine fermenting, and it needs space to expand. Some pearls must be kept safe until the right hands are ready. There is dust that belongs to another season and should not be carried forward.

So I will travel light, and I will keep walking.

This is not separation for its own sake. It is the next step in the same journey Jesus began: reshaping how we live, the weight we carry, and where we go.