Dear friends,

The stories in this issue challenge us to look beyond what we can see and ask, “Is something greater holding us together?” In “Out of Left Field,” an overlooked boy encounters a love that knows his name. In “The Letter,” C. David Baker shares the moment six years of spiritual struggle give way to a surprising desire to trust. And in one mother’s story, a prayer on a mountain finds its answer beneath an oak tree.

My latest installment of The Song of the Universe takes that question into the cosmos, where dark matter and dark energy invite us to wonder about realities beyond our sight—and the Christ in whom all things hold together.

These pieces leave room for mystery, pain, and questions still unanswered. They also invite us to look again.

We are more deeply held than we know.

Grace and peace,

Nick Padovani
Publisher, Elisha’s Riddle

Contents:

The Song of the Universe: The Mystery Holding Everything Together

The Walking Stick Journal: The Letter

Between You and Me: Out of Left Field

The Music of a Faithful Life: The Hands of God

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Coach watched from the end of the bench, along with the rest of his little league team, as the batter hit it square. Out in left field, an 8 year old in an oversized neon green tee shirt turned and ran directly backwards. For the first time that practice, or any practice, left field mattered. Coach had put number 16 out there because the kids never hit hard enough to reach it. Having mercy on him and the team, he gave him a spot where he would never have to catch anything. But not today.

Coach watched the 16 on the back of that neon-green shirt grow smaller and smaller. As the ball became barely visible, he squinted to track it. It cleared the fence. Some of the boys were jealous, but some had enough sense to be happy for Jackson. They had never liked him before, but he was now the first little league member to ever hit a home run on this lot in the 6-8 age bracket.

The boys rushed the field after Jackson made his lap around the bases, slapping his helmet and making all sorts of noises and comments that would become inside jokes for the rest of the season. Coach joined in the celebration, and at the end of practice, he met Jackson’s parents in the parking lot when they came to pick him up.

“You ought to be prouda Jackson, y’know? Boy hit a home run at 8 years old on this holy ground yer standing on here! First one I e’er seen in all my time as a little-league coach!”

Jackson’s parents listened for a few more minutes with proud and loving smiles, looking from Coach to Jackson and back. The pride of a coach and the pride of parents passed back and forth between them, and Jackson remembers that moment to this day as what love sounds like. After some high fives, they drove off in their Range Rover. Everyone went home satisfied, some in awe, some dreaming of their own grand slams.

Whether it was the excitement of the game, or just how forgettable he was, no one seemed to notice that 16 was gone.

What happened was, as best as I can remember it, 16 un-athletically climbed the fence headfirst, bruising his chest, and flopped onto the other side. Then he wandered into the trees to find someone else’s trophy.

He was consumed with finding it. The whole team had watched him climb that fence, and he figured the only way to undo the embarrassment was to bring back something valuable to them. It occurred to him that if he never found it, his position on the field wouldn’t just be useless. It would be less than useless. He mumbled to himself and anxiously kicked through leaves. As branches poked at him and mosquitos and gnats swarmed his legs, he grew more resentful than anxious.

He hated everything about this team. He was only here because his father thought it would be good for him, and because he was forced to be. He couldn’t even catch a ball. The team picked on him and made jokes about him, and the only thing he could do was try to appease them. Even at 8 years old, he was well versed in self-deprecation, a flat honesty about his lack of abilities paired with a vicious self-hatred. He hated how freely the others talked to each other and how much they liked being around each other. It was painfully clear that he was excluded from that group. Adults can at least fake that they accept other people, he thought. Children can’t.

And then he thought about how this was exactly like his home, where he knew he wasn’t in the in-group either. It was even worse there, because no one was. Not Mom, not his brother. He was bullied by his own father, and being on this field was just an extension of his father’s control, masquerading as love for his son. His father said he wanted the best for him, but even at his age, he knew what his father really wanted. He wanted him gone.

If his father wanted him there, he would have shown up to watch the games. He would have picked him up himself before five hours of an October night chilled him to the bone in a forest he was now lost in. Turns out, there was a miscommunication between Mom and Dad. Mom thought Dad was picking him up, and Dad got drunk and forgot. These days, Mom doesn’t call Dad anymore.

16 fell asleep shivering around 2am on a mossy patch under a tree. He knew the time because of the cheap Walmart watch on his wrist. He could hardly read the analog face, but out of necessity, he took a moment to work out what he was looking at.

The outdoors was big and mysterious, and he knew almost nothing about it. Even though it was unruly and dangerous, it was somehow safer than his own home. Though he was unprotected and utterly neglected, he felt free. Outside of that fence, he had finally found somewhere he wasn’t controlled.

16 woke up only four hours later to rodents crunching through the leaves around him. His clothes were damp with morning dew from the moss. Since he had no sense of direction, he figured he would just walk straight until he heard cars, and take it from there.

But as he traveled, he couldn’t tell if he was going straight or walking in circles. It quickly turned into a frantic panic. The further he walked, the less he knew where he was. He ran at times, then walked to regain his composure. He hadn’t realized that all this fear had suppressed his appetite, but now the pangs of hunger set in. At eight years old, 16 had despaired of life itself. He hid from an October wind among a few rocks overlooking a surprisingly well-kept field of something.

He looked down at his watch and it was 1:23pm. A minute later it was 1:40pm. He marveled at the Great Value of Walmart. For the first time, he decided to pray. It was something he had heard his parents do, though it obviously hadn’t worked for them, and he only tried it because there was nothing else left to try.

Hey God, it’s uh, Gideon here. Please help because I’m lost in the woods and if you don’t I’ll probably die.

There was no response. So Gideon asked something different this time.

Hey God, when I die here, can you make my death pleasant? Like can you just make it like I’m going to sleep?

There was no response. Hungry and exhausted, Gideon had nothing left to do but admire the field.

The field sat in the middle of four hills. The hill he was on was the tallest, and from it he could watch the sun travel from east to west. The ground was so even it looked like a farmer kept it. He checked his watch again. It was 3pm, though he had only been there five minutes or so. The watch was laughably unreliable.

Then the sun started setting over the east hill, fast, which he was pretty sure it wasn’t supposed to do. It careened across the sky, straight down from where he sat, faster than he had ever seen it move in his 8 years on earth. A moment later it was already sinking behind the east hill. He was undone. Another night was coming, the last of God’s cruelties he would ever see. Perhaps God was mercifully hastening his last sleep.

But he couldn’t help taking in the beauty of this last sunset. The sky was pink and gold, and the clouds were like paint strokes across the Creator’s landscape. A group of bald eagles flew in V formation in front of the sun. Wait, is that something they even do?

And then the sun began to do something that, even now as I recount this story, I have a hard time believing I saw. I guess you’ll have to take my word for it. The sun hurled horizontally around the sky, orbiting the four hills and throwing shadows across the field from every side. It moved disturbingly fast, blasting light everywhere, until over the course of half an hour it gradually slowed to a gentler pace. Was it the sun moving or the earth? To this day I do not know.

Terrified, Gideon did the only thing he could think to do. He climbed down to the field and, in a never-ending sunset, walked to the center.

As sun and birds circled him, he looked down and found a single baseball. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, then looked across the field to the north hill. The sun had stopped there, perfectly still.

On top of that hill stood the silhouette of a man. In an instant, gracefully, the man was in front of him.

“Hey Gideon, don’t be afraid. You won’t die here. And you have lots of life in front of you. Life that I will walk with you in and through. Here, you are hungry. Eat.”

I will never forget how that meal tasted. Believe it or not, Jesus didn’t give me an MRE or some instant noodles. It was the best steak, mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh corn, and pasta I’ve ever had. I think He prepared it for me because He knew it was my favorite.

Satisfied, Gideon wiped his mouth with his arm and listened to this voice of love. Somehow he wasn’t afraid at all, even though everything surrounding His appearance should have terrified him.

“I don’t have much to tell you yet, because right now I’m here to get you home. But I want you to understand some things about your father. He is very sick, and he is going through a lot of pain. He is taking that pain out on you by trying to control you. But he cannot control you. You are not your father, and you will never be like him, because you were created as a different person. And I love your father very much, as I know you do.

“For now, you are a child, and you will live in your father’s house. It’s going to be very hard. But I will be with you in all of it. Every single time he yells at Mom, I want you to know that I am there, with you, with your Mom, with your brother, and yes, with him. Because you are a child, you cannot leave. That is beyond your control. The only thing you can do is trust in Me and My love. I will protect you. Life is not about entering or avoiding pain. It is about My Presence in it. And I will always have My full love and compassion aimed at you. Always!”

Gideon felt like he should respond. But in that moment, with Love Himself fully embracing him, he had nothing to say.

“Oh, and one last thing. Drop the baseball.”

And Gideon dropped the baseball.

Suddenly, Gideon was in a hospital. Coach had found him that morning, passed out in the leaves just past the left field fence. His chest was more than bruised. Turns out a rib he broke on the fence had punctured his lung, and they needed pretty intensive surgery to fix it. The doctors were happy to see him come out of the anesthesia and were warm and kind to him. He healed in a few months with no lasting complications.

Not a moment after the doctors brought him some juice and left, his parents started yelling at each other again. The part of him that felt neglected and hopeless, that couldn’t believe their fighting mattered more than his own life, came and went. And, exhausted by the surgery, by everything he had been through, and by the Love of Jesus, he fell into a deep and restful sleep until the next morning.

Welcome to Between You and Me. It’s called that because I ask that we keep this between us two. A lot of these things are quite personal, y’know? Wouldn’t want these things floating around on the internet where Christians can whip my words with the Bible, would we?

But it’s also called Between You and Me because there is a lot between me and God. There’s a lot between God and me and all of us, isn’t there? This book is an attempt to name those things so they can be healed. One chapter at a time.

Waylon Woody is a writer and minister living in West Milford, NJ.

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Stepping Stones of Transformation

An Unfolding Manuscript

by

C. D. Baker

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Letter

I sent the following letter to three concerned friends. It seems like a good place to pause and offer it as a (hopefully) helpful recap, one that also marks a major moment along the Way.

***

July 2024

Dear Mark, Alan, and Rock,

Hope all’s well with you three! And many thanks for your continued interest in my life and your support of my doctoral work. It’s been a little while, so I thought I’d bring you up to date:

My deep journey has just entered its official seventh year. Suffice it to say that I continue to deal with a great deal of spiritual and psychological turmoil as well as its physical effects.

As you may recall, this struggle has centered on the deconstruction of my ‘entangled self’— my protective, compensating, false identity. Over these recent years I’ve discovered that historic religious toxicity and some family systems have been key contributors to defensive adaptations. I’m sure you’ve witnessed this in others, since little about my story is particularly unique.

Anyway, the result was an investment of trust in my own competence that was/is grounded in a misplaced confidence in my own perception of reality. But as age and circumstances have worn at my self-reliance, I now face the added anxiety of reluctantly recognizing all of this as illusion, perhaps even deception.

The doctorate has added weight, as did this past springtime filled with other stressors. I found myself recently unable to process information easily, constantly exhausted, regularly anxious, waking with night sweats, and straining for resolution to this mystery of trust.

There have been moments when I thought I might lose my mind. How can I trust God given the misery so rampant all around? Does he even exist? What sort of Father is he? Then again, what sort of son am I? And exactly who is supposed to emerge from the debris?

Burned out, I went to my blessed Havenwood (my getaway in the Virginia mountains) this past week only to be confronted by the Spirit once again. On Thursday, she took me by the hair and lifted my face to see the glory and generosity of God’s goodness. She awakened me to see the beauty of Havenwood as God’s gift. A rush of so many other blessings then filled me to overflowing. What a life I have been given! Blessings and kindness and beauty at every turn. Like King David, ‘goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life.’ Have I really been this blind? I fell face forward on my deck and wept.

The next morning I walked down the mountain on my winding dirt lane. However, the tears of gratitude had not yet finished their work. I paused at the spring-filled cistern that was overflowing clear water into the deep ravine at my feet. Spirit-spent, I sat down and wondered who I was and what God expected from me. What was I to do?

I continued downhill until reaching the cindered road leading toward town. Taking a breath, I turned around and abruptly began the 1k ascent home. Trudging upward, my mind filled with memories of these past six years, this time highlighted by the trauma of that late night call informing me that Will would likely die. I stopped walking to shudder at how I had faithlessly railed against God on the shoulder of that dark North Carolina two-lane. And how faithful God remained as he later held me in his Presence. More goodness: more grace. I choked in regret and in broken gratitude.

I reached the cistern again and sat to catch my breath. Listening to the water, I stared into the shadowed ravine below and the steep green slopes on all sides. It was then when I realized that this God whom I have tried to figure out (control) and have tried to appease (obligate) has only ever responded with kindness. He has never demanded anything from me. He has always loved me as me...fears, resistance, rage, and all. There is wonder in that.

Now here he was, once again, gently sitting alongside me. It was then when I felt a simple—even childlike—invitation to just turn away from my self and trust him.

That was it? Six years of inward combat to be quietly asked to simply turn from one side to the other?

Something foundational then suddenly shifted. Right then and there I suddenly WANTED to trust Him. I could feel it. The wanting had changed and it really did happen just like that. The Spirit had elbowed my ego to one side and she touched my will.

I sat there, dumbstruck.

You might pray for me now, that this simple not-so-simple experience might continue to heal my heart so that the power of my desperately anxious old self begins to fade. I hope the Spirit will continue to work within my ‘want to’s;’ that she will continue to grace me with sacred gratitude so that I may take a step beyond the wanting.

I’d very much like to be rid of this terrible struggle, though I confess that I am thankful for what I am learning through it. I long to enter the ‘peace that passes all understanding.’ Pray that the moment by my mountain spring might be a beginning of a turn toward something more.

May Romans 2:4 continue to hold true for me: “God’s lovingkindness leads us to repentance.”

Grace in Abundance,

David

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Sometimes the end of one chapter in life arrives long before we recognize that the story is changing. What we believe to be an ending may be where God begins writing something we could never have imagined for ourselves.

Now that our time in Crewe was coming to an end, a new opportunity opened eight miles down the road in a town called Blackstone.

My mother recalled Miss Moore, the kind lady who had helped with the connections for new employment, telling her, “Eight miles down the road, it’ll be different.” And when she recounted those words to me years later, she added something that made us both smile.

“And she was right.”

But before Blackstone could become our place for a new beginning, a controversy was brewing at the church where my father worked in Crewe.

My father was a gifted musician. There was no denying that. He had an extraordinary ability to draw people to him, both through his unparalleled talent and his personality. People admired him, trusted him, and often seemed willing to overlook the very things that caused my mother so much pain.

But talent and character are not the same thing.

By the time our years in Crewe were drawing to a close, accusations had surfaced that my father had embezzled from the church. The controversy, led by the Pastor’s wife, eventually led to a formal proceeding held in the church sanctuary.

According to my mother’s recollection, the church voted not to bring formal charges against my father. Instead, his employment was terminated.

This was public humiliation in a marriage already filled with private disappointments.

Crewe took a lot out of my mother, so they decided my father would go ahead of us to Blackstone, set up the house, and settle into his new job at the church.

My mother took Christopher and me to her parents’ home in Georgia.

Of course, returning to her parents’ home carried its own difficulties, but she needed time. Time to think, pray, and consider whether the life she had been trying to preserve was a life she could continue living.

My mother had discovered that my father was involved in an affair with a man, leaving her once again devastated. Once again, the secrecy and broken trust in their marriage became intolerable. Once again, the betrayal and broken promises screamed so loudly that she literally couldn’t hear him make yet another claim that medication and a new beginning would change everything.

For the first time in what must have felt like an eternity, she had the chance to separate herself from the marriage’s immediate demands and consider what she wanted her future to look like.

The final decision could wait.

The Mountain

That summer at my grandparents’, my mother began doing something she rarely had time to do. She began taking time for herself to get stronger physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

For years, her life had revolved around the needs and wants of everyone around her. There were parents to please, students to teach, a household to manage, children to care for, and a husband whose unpredictable behavior seemed to consume whatever spare energy she had left. She stepped away from the turmoil of her marriage and, for the first time in a long while, let herself focus on her well-being.

Every day, she climbed on her bicycle and rode for miles through the Georgia countryside. It became her daily ritual. Her destination was the mountaintop.

There, away from the noise and obligations of everyday life, she sat, meditated, and talked to God.

She then descended to the base of the mountain and returned home.

One morning, something happened that threatened to end those rides altogether.

As she was riding down the mountain, a dog suddenly ran in front of her bicycle, causing her to crash and bang herself up pretty good. The fall left her scraped up, bruised, and terribly sore. She recounted how painful the accident had been and how for a while she couldn’t ride.

But my mother was never one to give up easily.

As soon as she had healed enough, she was back to riding those roads to the top of the mountain. Something about that determination captures so much of who my mother was.

She had all but decided to leave my father. She kept praying for guidance and clarity.

On that mountain, surrounded by the countryside’s quiet, she sought God’s guidance through meditation and prayer.

During one of those meditations, something extraordinary happened.

The Lord spoke to her, telling her that she would meet a man. She was also given a vision of a man’s outstretched hands.

And then came this message:

“He is my servant.”

She had come to God seeking an answer to her marriage, and instead received a message about a perfect stranger.

Beautiful hands.

A servant of God.

What could this possibly mean?

No instruction to return to my father. No promise that their marriage would survive. No explanation of what this unknown man might have to do with her future. Only the reassurance that she would recognize him when the time came.

She carried those words and vision down the mountain and into the uncertainty of a future she had not yet decided upon. Her marriage was still in trouble, but now there was something else—something she could neither explain nor forget.

Somewhere, there was a man she had never met.

A man whose hands would be beautiful enough for her to recognize him.

She had no name to search for, no face to look for, no reason to expect that she would ever find him. Only a promise, spoken in the stillness of a mountain, waiting for the moment when a pair of hands would reveal the man who had already entered her future.

Beneath the Tree

We left Georgia near the end of the summer and arrived at our new home in Blackstone. We arrived days before a large gathering and picnic on the church grounds where my father had been hired as the director of music.

She remembered the setting vividly, even decades later. Magnificent oak trees stood there, their branches stretching outward to create a quiet refuge beneath them.

It was at this gathering that my mother met the pastor of the church where my father had been hired for the first time.

Reverend Bob Hawkins knew about the struggles in my parents’ marriage and, at my father’s request, asked to speak with my mother privately.

They walked away from the crowd and found a quiet place beneath one of the trees.

Reverend Hawkins explained that he had counseled my father over the summer and would like to hear her feelings about where the marriage stood in her mind.

He listened as she shared the difficulties she had experienced, the infidelity and the heartbreak. He knew that my father wanted to reconcile, but he also understood that my mother had reached the limits of what she felt she could endure.

He explained that my father was deeply repentant for the damage he had caused to the marriage and truly wanted to reconcile.

And then, as they stood beneath the tree, Reverend Hawkins extended his hands toward my mother, and said:

“Bob wants nothing more than to reconcile. Would you please consider doing so?”

My mother looked down at his outstretched hands, and in that instant, she knew.

They were the most beautiful hands she had ever seen on a man.

The very hands from her vision.

The hands God told her would belong to his servant.

There she stood, with a man she had met that very day, listening as he asked her to reconsider the decision she had spent an entire summer struggling to make.

And suddenly she understood.

This was the man.

The man God had told her she would meet.

The man whose hands would be the sign.

My mother knew in that moment that she was looking at the answer to her prayers.

She believed God had prepared her to recognize this man before she ever met him. And because she recognized his hands, she believed she could trust his counsel.

She had climbed that mountain seeking an answer, never imagining it would come through the outstretched hands of a stranger.

But there, beneath an oak tree in Blackstone, the mountain’s mystery was finally revealed.

She chose to stay.

That decision would shape the course of all our lives.

And although none of us could have known what lay ahead, my mother believed one thing with absolute certainty.

God had heard her on the mountain. And He had answered her beneath the tree.

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With all the constellations and nebulae we’ve discussed thus far, there is something invisible in the midst of it that continues to baffle the scientific community.

Throughout The Song of the Universe, we have been looking at what can be seen. We’ve watched stars being scattered like seed across the Carina Nebula, followed the light that led the Magi toward Bethlehem, contemplated Jesus as the Bright and Morning Star, listened for the ancient “music of the spheres,” and traced the Gospel through the constellations.

But all of those beautiful things—stars, planets, galaxies, you and me—appear to make up only a small fraction of what actually exists.

According to our best current cosmological models, the ordinary matter from which stars, planets, trees, oceans, and human bodies are made accounts for only about five percent of the universe. The rest appears to consist of two things we have given rather mysterious names: dark matter and dark energy.

And these names are more revealing of our ignorance than our understanding. “Dark” does not mean evil, sinister, or even necessarily dark in color. It essentially means that whatever these things are, we cannot see them. Instead, we know them primarily through what they appear to be doing.

In other words, much of the universe seems to be shaped by realities that remain invisible to us.

Something Is Holding the Galaxies Together

In the 1930s, Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky studied the movements of galaxies in a place called the Coma Cluster and concluded that the visible matter did not appear sufficient to account for what he was observing. Thus, he proposed the presence of unseen matter.

Decades later, astronomer Vera Rubin and her collaborators found another clue while measuring how stars orbit within spiral galaxies. If the visible matter were all that was there, stars far from the center should have been moving considerably slower. Instead, the outer stars were moving surprisingly fast.

Something appeared to be providing additional gravitational influence.

Other observations, including gravitational lensing—the bending of light by mass—have strengthened the case considerably. Dark matter is now part of our standard cosmological model, although we still do not know what it actually is. We infer its presence largely through the gravitational fingerprints it leaves throughout the cosmos.

So, we look at a galaxy and see its brilliant stars spiraling through space, while the visible galaxy appears to be embedded within something much larger that we cannot see. It’s incredibly fascinating.

But then things get even stranger.

While dark matter appears to help pull things together, another invisible mystery appears to be doing the opposite.

Something Is Pushing the Universe Apart

By the twentieth century, astronomers knew that the universe was expanding, and the natural expectation was that gravity should gradually slow that expansion. In the late 1990s, two independent teams studied extremely distant supernovae in an attempt to measure that slowing.

Instead, they discovered that the expansion of the universe was speeding up.

The discovery transformed modern cosmology and eventually earned three men the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics (Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess).

Something appears to be driving the accelerated expansion of the universe, and this is what we have come to call dark energy.

But once again, giving something a name should not be confused with explaining it. Dark energy could come from a number of factors. It could involve the energy of empty space, an unknown field, or some feature of gravity we do not yet understand. Whatever it is, our current estimates attribute roughly two-thirds of the universe to it.

So here is the remarkable picture modern cosmology has handed us: everything we see—all those magnificent stars and galaxies—is only a thin slice of the cosmic pie. The visible universe exists within an overwhelmingly invisible reality.

And for someone who knows the Scriptures, it’s pretty difficult not to feel some resonance here . . .

Filling All Things

The book of Hebrews begins with one of the most extraordinary descriptions of Christ anywhere in the New Testament:

“He is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power.”

Creation is not something God constructed in the distant past and then left to run on its own. According to this passage, our universe is being upheld every moment by a word of power. Jesus is speaking, sustaining, and releasing something.

There is another intriguing biblical image that appears repeatedly in the Old Testament. Isaiah speaks of God as the One “who stretches out the heavens like a curtain” (Isaiah 40:22). Elsewhere God declares, “I, the LORD, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by Myself” (Isaiah 44:24).

Modern astronomy tells us that the universe is being held together by far more than what we can see, while at the same time it is stretching outward at an accelerating rate. Dark matter and dark energy—two unseen and yet very real factors—appear to participate in these processes, even though we still cannot directly identify what either one actually is.

It’s hard to miss the biblical connection here.

Now, I am not saying that dark energy is the Holy Spirit. There are some apologists out in the wild, wild west of the internet who make bold assertions like that. Again, there could very well be a physical explanation we simply haven’t figured out yet because of the limitations of our current instruments. Nonetheless, the message behind this discovery is remarkable.

We’ve been saying all along that creation is heralding a message—a message confirmed and expounded upon in Scripture. And Scripture itself is always pointing beyond the created sign toward something bigger than itself.

Or, more accurately, toward Someone.

For many people, God exists somewhere vaguely outside the universe, occasionally reaching into it to perform miracles. But the biblical picture is far more intimate. Creation exists at every moment within the sustaining presence and activity of its Creator.

When Paul stood before the philosophers in Athens, he described God as the One who “is not far from each one of us,”adding the remarkable words, “for in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28).

The God who fills all things is not simply somewhere beyond the outermost galaxy. Every breath we take, every thought we think, every movement of our bodies takes place within a creation that exists continuously in Him!

Now doesn’t mean that God is the universe. That’s something called pantheism. I prefer an idea closer to what some theologians call panentheism—literally, “all in God.” Creation is creation and the Creator is the Creator; however, that distinction does not require distance. The One who transcends creation is also intimately present to it, sustaining it from moment to moment.

Creation is testifying to this.

But beyond God’s sustaining presence, there is another powerful insight to draw from all of this. To go there, we have to look at an interesting line from one of the Psalms . . .

The Mystery of Christ

“I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old…”
(Psalm 78:2 KJV)

These words open a retelling of the story of Israel—which suggests that there is a deeper message hidden within the stories of Scripture.

This is partly because the word “dark” here does not mean sinister. It simply means something hidden—much like the description given to the invisible matter and energy filling the universe.

The hidden message within the stories of the Old Testament is what Paul calls a mystery in the New Testament. He says this mystery was hidden from previous generations but has now been made known to us (Colossians 1:26).

In this sense, the Gospel is a kind of dark message.

It is a reality that fills all things, yet remains hidden from our eyes. Like dark matter and energy, we see its effects, but it takes faith to trust in the reality itself.

And here is the mystery more fully articulated:

Christ crucified.

But the mystery is not merely a message about something that happened to Jesus.

The mystery is what happened to all of creation.

The One in whom we “live and move and have our being” is the One who died at the cross. Therefore, Paul makes the astonishing claim that “one died for all, therefore all died” (2 Corinthians 5:14).

The cross is not something God did over there, separate from us. Christ died for us, with us, and as us. This is because the One who sustains and fills the universe with His power is the same One who was crucified.

All the cosmic language of Scripture begins to make more sense with this in mind. Elsewhere, we are told that Christ is “before all things, and in Him all things hold together.” Yet only a few verses later, we’re told that this same Christ reconciles “all things to Himself” through “the blood of His cross” (Colossians 1:17, 20).

The One who holds all things is the One who reconciles all things. Those two statements are in the same paragraph.

Did you catch that?

Whatever happened in the death and resurrection of Jesus, Scripture presents this as something larger than a private religious transaction between God and a few people who believe correctly. The One hanging on the cross is the One through whom the cosmos exists in the first place. His death enters the death of Adam, and His resurrection opens humanity into a new creation.

The church has spent centuries trying to reduce the Gospel to mechanisms we can diagram and transactions we can explain. But the cross and resurrection are stranger, deeper, and more cosmic than our systems have allowed.

And the universe itself is a parable that points to this whole reality!

Like the hidden power at work in the universe, the Gospel is a mystery working beneath the surface of all things. Indeed, it is the hidden song of all creation—the reality that holds it all together in the first place and pushes it forward toward a glorious and expansive destiny.

And this mystery—hidden for ages—has now been revealed.

His name is Christ.

Lord, open our eyes more and more to the wondrous glory of this Mystery.

Amen.

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A constellation. A shot of whiskey. A haunted house. And the strange vulnerability of being truly known.

Welcome to the October edition of Elisha’s Riddle.

Four new pieces take us into very different territory, but each, in its own way, asks us to pay attention to what might be present beneath the surface.

Look up at Orion. Sit with another person long enough to be known. Drink grace without reaching for the chaser… And, if you’re brave enough, step inside a house in Crewe, Virginia.

There are riddles here. I’ll leave you to discover the connections for yourself.

Enjoy the issue,

Nick Padovani
Publisher, Elisha’s Riddle

And P.S. - I did a deep dive this month on the controversy surrounding The Passion Translation and the bigger discussion of biblical interpretation. Make sure to check out “Which Bible is the Word of God?”

Contents:

The Song of the Universe: Orion: The Redeemer in the Stars

Between You and Me: Grace, No Chaser

The Walking Stick Journal: Bearing With-ness

The Music of a Faithful Life: A House is Not a Home

Which Bible is the Word of God?

Latest Podcast:

Make sure to check out the latest episodes here

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The Heavens Declare

Last time we looked at the ancient zodiac and the very real possibility that this was one of God’s first presentations of the Gospel, written in bright lights and celestial signposts, which lines up beautifully Genesis 1 where the lights of the heavens are appointed “for signs.” Psalm 19 witnesses to the same mystery when it describes the heavens as pouring forth speech without words to every part of the earth.

That speech, it seems, possesses a storyline.

The constellations that the human visual cortex (combined with the powers of a metaphoric and narrative-loving mind) has naturally put together are not merely twelve disconnected pictures, but twelve windows within the same celestial cathedral. Each illuminates another movement in the drama of redemption: promise, conflict, sacrifice, outpouring, union, restoration, and triumph.

If this is true, then Scripture gives us the interpretive lens through which we can better understand what creation has been saying all along.

And what is even more beautiful is that the heavens do not proclaim “another gospel,” which Paul warned us to reject. Rather, they herald the same Gospel in another language. One is written with ink; the other is written with electromagnetism. Long before apostles carried the Gospel throughout the earth, its outlines may already have been shining above them.

And both direct our gaze toward the promised Seed, the slain Lamb, the heavenly Bridegroom, and the victorious Lion.

The heavens were never intended to tell us who we are according to the month of our birth. They exist to declare who He is. Even the month of our birth can be understood differently—not as a cosmic force determining our nature, but simply as part of the beautifully timed circumstances through which the Creator chose to give our unique lives substance and form.

With this in mind, I want to zero in on one of the most recognizable figures in the entire night sky. He is connected to the zodiac, though he is not technically one of its twelve signs.

His name is Orion.

The Redeemer

You probably know Orion even if you know very little about astronomy. On a clear winter night, the three stars of his belt are among the easiest patterns in the sky to recognize. Above and below them are four brighter stars that give shape to what generations of human beings have imagined as the shoulders and feet of an enormous man striding across the heavens.

Orion is ancient enough to be mentioned explicitly in Scripture. Job speaks of God as the One who made “the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades,” and later God asks Job whether he can “loose the cords of Orion.” Amos likewise tells Israel to seek the One who made “the Pleiades and Orion.”

The constellation was already known since the image was so recognizable. Human beings had been looking up and seeing this enormous figure in the heavens for a very long time.

Bullinger believed Orion belonged to the larger Gospel story written through the zodiac. In his arrangement, each of the twelve primary signs is accompanied by three additional constellations that enlarge and develop its meaning. Orion belongs to the group surrounding Taurus, the great bull that Bullinger understood as an image of the Messiah coming forth in strength and glory. Orion gives that strength a face.

Bullinger called him “The Coming Prince” and described his central meaning as “Light breaking forth in the Redeemer.” I find that phrase particularly striking, because what we find in Orion is not merely the image of a warrior. We find the image of a victorious figure whose coming is associated with light.

And that immediately takes us into the Gospel of John.

“In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.”

Before John tells us about miracles, teachings, disciples, crosses, or empty tombs, he begins with Light. The eternal Word enters creation and the darkness cannot overcome Him. The victory of Christ is presented from the beginning not merely as the defeat of an enemy, but as darkness being invaded by Light.

This gives us a better way of reading the conquering imagery that surrounds Orion. Christ does not conquer because God has suddenly become better at violence than the powers of darkness. Darkness is defeated simply because the Light has arrived on the scene. Come on now, read it again!

Jesus says, “I am the Light of the world.” His coming exposes what has been hidden, heals what has been broken, reveals what is true, and restores creation to its proper order. The Redeemer comes forth as Light.

The Wounded Conqueror

There is another dimension to Orion that makes the picture even more fascinating. Although the constellation has historically been imagined as a mighty hunter or warrior, the Gospel gives us a very particular kind of warrior—a wounded one.

This pattern has already appeared in our journey through the zodiac. The first promise of redemption in Genesis does not describe a Messiah who remains untouched by conflict. The serpent strikes His heel even as He crushes the serpent’s head.

That paradox runs through the entire Gospel. Jesus conquers through suffering. He defeats death by entering it. He exposes the weakness of violence by absorbing its full force without becoming its servant.

Even after the resurrection, He does not hide His wounds. Thomas is invited to touch the marks of crucifixion. The scars remain, but they no longer testify to defeat. They have become the marks of victory.

This changes the meaning of power. The true Conqueror is not the one who escapes suffering, but the One who passes through it without allowing suffering to determine the final word.

This is one reason the image of a great warrior in the heavens can be so easily misunderstood if we begin with ideas of conquest rather than with Christ Himself. Jesus gives us the definition of victory. His kingdom does not advance according to the logic of empire, but through self-giving love, reconciliation, truth, sacrifice, and life overcoming death from the inside out.

Beneath Orion’s foot lies another constellation. Today we know it as Lepus, the Hare. Bullinger believed the image beneath Orion may have represented something more sinister in earlier traditions—a serpent or enemy lying beneath the feet of the victorious figure. Whatever the original representation may have been, the position itself is striking.

This image appears everywhere in Scripture: the serpent beneath the heel, enemies beneath the feet of the King, and then Paul carrying the picture to its ultimate conclusion when he says that Christ “must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet,” and that “the last enemy that will be abolished is death.”

Did you catch that last line?

The final enemy is not humanity, but death itself.

This changes how we understand the victory and judgment of Christ. The Redeemer does not come to destroy the very humanity He came to save. He comes to overthrow everything that has kept humanity in bondage: sin, death, corruption, accusation, fear, alienation, and every force that distorts the image of God within us.

The enemies beneath His feet are the very enemies that once had us beneath theirs.

A Nursery in the Sword

There is another detail about Orion that Bullinger could not have fully appreciated because modern astronomy has allowed us to see much more deeply into the constellation than the ancient world ever could.

Just beneath Orion’s three-star belt hangs what appears to the naked eye as a short line of stars traditionally called his sword. Near the center of that sword is a faint cloudy patch. This is the Orion Nebula.

What appears to us as a small haze is actually an immense region of gas and dust where new stars are actively being born.

I see such a glorious parable here… Inside the sword of the celestial warrior is a place of birth.

The instrument of conquest contains a nursery.

Hello!

Of course, ancient observers didn’t understand this. They couldn’t have known that the hazy light beneath Orion’s belt was filled with baby stars. But creation is an ongoing discovery, and the Gospel is the drink that never runs dry, so I believe fresh scientific insight just deepens the original message. So let’s think about this some more…

The Gospel transforms our understanding of divine victory. Christ does not conquer and then leave behind a wasteland of destruction. His victory creates life! He enters death and produces resurrection. He enters alienation and produces reconciliation. He enters the grave and turns it into the birthplace of a new humanity. Yes, the sword becomes a nursery… 👏

Jesus Himself described this mystery through the image of a seed falling into the ground. Unless the grain dies, He says, it remains alone. But if it dies, it produces much fruit. Death becomes multiplication, and the grave becomes a womb. 👏👏

Or here’s another way to think about it… The Cross, the great instrument of Roman execution, becomes the Tree of Life.

So there is something wonderfully fitting about looking toward Orion’s sword and finding a region where stars are being born. What looks like an instrument of death turns out to be filled with birth. This is ultimately where all divine judgment is headed. God judges darkness by turning on the Light. He judges death through resurrection. He judges alienation through reconciliation. He judges the old creation by declaring:

“Behold, I make all things new.”

The One Who Made Orion

There is one final connection that brings us back to the biblical references to Orion itself. When God finally answers Job out of the whirlwind, He directs Job’s attention upward and asks, “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?”

The point is that Job cannot. He can recognize Orion, name it, and contemplate whatever meaning might be contained in its image, but he cannot reach into the heavens and rearrange its stars. The great figure towering above him is itself held within the infinitely greater wisdom and power of its Creator.

This is an important safeguard for everything we have been exploring in The Song of the Universe. There is a profound difference between believing that creation speaks and believing that creation rules. Scripture invites us to do the first while warning us against the second.

The stars have no authority over our lives. Orion does not determine our future, and the zodiac does not dictate our personality. These heavenly lights are themselves creatures, dependent upon the One who placed them in the heavens and continues to uphold them.

This is why every biblical mention of Orion ultimately directs our attention beyond Orion. Job says that God made Orion. Amos calls Israel to seek the One who made Orion. God Himself points toward Orion to remind Job that even this immense and glorious structure exists within a creation that He alone fully knows and sustains.

So the Christian response to the heavens is neither fear nor worship. We do not bow before the signs. We look through them.

And when Orion is viewed through the lens of the Gospel, a stunning portrait emerges: a great figure associated with strength and light, wounded yet victorious, with the enemy beneath his feet and, hidden within his sword, a nursery where new stars are being born.

Bullinger called him the Coming Prince and saw in him “Light breaking forth in the Redeemer.” Whatever conclusions we reach about the origins of every ancient constellation, the image becomes a powerful parable.

For the Gospel tells us of another Man who stepped into the darkness carrying the Light from which all things were first created. He entered the great conflict, received the wound, passed through death, and emerged victorious—gathering humanity into His own resurrected life.

This what the heavens have been doing all along. Not giving us another Gospel or supplying secret knowledge unavailable in Scripture—but taking the same eternal mystery and casting its reflections throughout creation.

The heavens declare and Scripture interprets.

And at the center of both stands Christ, the living Word. He is the One through whom the stars were made, the One in whom they continue to hold together, and the One toward whom their light continues to point.

Stepping Stones of Transformation

An Unfolding Manuscript

by

C. D. Baker

Chapter Twenty-Four: Bearing With-ness

Experiencing life ‘with’ usually involves a sharing of space, a sharing of purpose, a commitment to togetherness. Being with is knowing and being known. True with-ness relies on an authenticity of trusting relationship and therefore summons vulnerability.

With-ness feels a little different than belonging. There is a quality of sojourning that prompts an awareness of mutuality and even solidarity of movement. With-ness is a mystery of union awakened within the essential nature of our humanness. It is a profound capacity shared with God. With-ness is a way toward wholeness, which is to say salvation.

And yet a surprising question remains: Are we able to bear it?

And why not?

***

Late Winter 2024

I glance through the window to see snowflakes falling hard, open my notepad, and click my pen.

Bill smiles. “And?”

“Yeah, I can’t explain it. I was just watching TV and out of nowhere I decided that I’d rather trust God than myself. It was this huge shift and without any drama or heavy thoughts. It was a wonderful, deep, connecting feeling.”

“Notice that this happened while you were watching television. It was given to you. This has nothing to do with you and yet everything to do with you.”

“Well, I’m afraid of messing it up.”

Bill laughs. “Like I said, it had nothing to do with you.”

I look out the side window for just a second, thinking. “The feeling was like being with, like somehow attached. I never really felt connected to very many things. It’s like there’s always been some kind of veil between me and the rest of life. I’m working on trusting others, but I’ve always felt safer at arm’s-length, especially toward God, and...”

“Your veil was more like a fortress! And you built it to feel safe.”

I pause. “I’m still holding on to something, but that TV moment...”

“Felt real,” says Bill. “Because it was real. This whole process is an awakening that you can feel. Your soul recognizes that you remaining behind the walls has been absurd...and NOT real.”

I look past Bill and through the other window where the snow is covering rooftops. My mind drifts to the 40-minute ride north.

I shift gears and tell Bill that I decided my upcoming Easter sunrise service meditation will be on ‘with-ness.’ “I’m studying Romans 5 where Paul reminds us that we are one ‘with’ Christ.”

Bill waits.

“But the more I study, the more I realized that the idea troubles me. I asked myself what I was afraid of. What came up was that I might not be wanted. Maybe I’m not ‘with-worthy.’” I force a chuckle.

“That’s habitual thinking. You grew up fearing you would always fail to be approved and therefore, rejected.”

My shoulders tense. “Well, a few days later I marched to my rock and told God that I was ready to belong to him...to finally surrender. If I’m honest, I thought I was pretty brave.” I shake my head. “But you know what I got? Silence...and a real feeling of unwelcome.”

Bill crosses his ankles and taps his fingers together. “You seem frustrated about that.”

I grumble, remembering.

“You felt good...even noble...about making that ‘brave move,’ didn’t you?”

His comment feels like a barb and I don’t like it. “I did what he’s been after me to do...”

“Did you?”

I squirm.

Bill folds his arms. “Your supposed surrender was a move of your ego. You thought you had earned God’s approval but got snubbed.” He sets his face. “But what was rejected was that false ego of yours, not the actual you.”

My face flushes.

“Your wounded self still believes you must do some brave, noble gesture to earn acceptance.”

I’m listening, stone-faced.

“You can’t imagine being loved AS you, so you assume the worst...like not being wanted unless you pull off some magic.” He’s now rapid fire. “On one hand, you exhaust yourself trying to hyper-achieve your way into acceptance. On the other, you secretly believe the worst about yourself so no one can hurt you...even God.” Bill takes a breath. “Either way, the whole idea of walking with others, let alone God, feels like a trap so your false ego kicks into high gear.”

I look into my notepad.

“God will always reject your false ego.” He lets that sink in, then leans far forward. “He wants to share life with YOU...the real David, period.” His tone softens. “Who you are is not what you do or how you do it.”

My jaw feels tight.

“Your fortress is gone and you are safe.” Bill settles back. “You...the true YOU...are already loved. God is already with you.” He pauses, then drops a bomb. “Actually, God is not just with you, he lives within you.”

That throws me. Too much.

Bill closes his eyes for a moment, thinking. “Remember the name you heard God give you those years ago on your rock?”

My mind is racing elsewhere.

“It was ‘Beloved.’ You are a man beloved by God just because you are.”

God actually indwells me? The concept has become an unexpected reality and I feel myself wanting to run.

This is suddenly too much to bear...and I’m not sure why.

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The cycle of my parents separating and reuniting began shortly after I was born, with my father spending periods of time either hospitalized or in prison. Because we urgently needed shelter, we lived with my mother’s parents.

That arrangement came with its own set of challenges.

My mother’s father was an abusive man who never overcame his anger and rage. Instead, he took his internal conflicts out on those closest to him. Living with her parents gave us a roof over our heads, but it came at a great cost—emotionally and physically.

My father worked to assure my mother that things would be different once he was released from the psychiatric hospital. Now that he was medicated, he told her, the erratic behavior was behind him. The medication had addressed the problems that landed him in the hospital, and they could finally put it all behind them.

My father’s father, whom we called Dada, was also working to repair the damage. He used his resources and connections to find his son a new church home where he might have a fresh start and thrive as a musician.

His tenacity paid off.

By the time my father was released, Dada had secured him a job at a small church in Crewe, Virginia.

New Beginnings

Once my father had the church job, the next priority was finding us a place to live. We had very few financial resources until he began earning money, so one of the families at the church—the Crenshaws—offered us a trailer on the property where their trucking business was located.

It would give us somewhere to live until we could afford to rent a house.

My mother remembered paying only twenty-five dollars a month for the trailer.

She was in her third trimester of pregnancy with my brother, teaching voice and piano lessons, caring for me, and trying to help my father establish himself in a new community. In reality, she was caring for all of us, with very little time or energy left for herself.

The Crenshaws’ daughter, who was still in high school, would sometimes come in the afternoons to help. She would take me for walks, giving my mother a little time to rest.

After my brother Christopher was born, the search for a larger place became more urgent. The trailer had been an economical solution and an incredible kindness, but it was never meant to be a permanent home for a growing family.

Eventually, my parents found a house that seemed like the perfect fit.

There was only one problem.

It was undergoing a complete renovation.

After a lengthy wait, we finally moved into our newly renovated house.

It was an older, two-story home with all of the bedrooms upstairs. At the top of the staircase, a large bathroom sat immediately to the right. Beyond it was my parents’ bedroom, a spacious room with a small, unusual area attached. It had originally been a closet, but during the renovation the landlord had removed the door, opened the space, and added a window.

That little room became Christopher’s nursery.

It was just large enough for his crib.

Across the hallway were two more bedrooms. One became the guest room, and the other was mine.

I was three years old and, for the first time, had my own room. It had a window, room for my toys and clothes, and a closet with folding doors. It was close enough to my parents’ bedroom that my mother could cross the hallway quickly if I needed her during the night.

I have no memory of that house.

Which is probably a good thing.

Two O’Clock

My mother arranged our days around her teaching schedule. After lunch, she would put Christopher and me down for naps so she could rest before her afternoon students arrived.

She remembered being tired in every way possible—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Those afternoon rests were important to her well-being.

But she soon discovered that resting at two o’clock would not be easy.

One afternoon, a loud bang startled her awake.

It drove her straight out of bed and onto her feet.

Christopher and I were still sleeping.

Her first thought was that someone had fired a gun nearby. She stood listening.

Nothing.

No screaming. No commotion outside. No police sirens. Nothing to suggest that anything had happened at all.

She convinced herself she must have been dreaming.

Then it happened again.

And again.

Always in the afternoon.

Always around two o’clock.

Eventually, she told my father what had been happening.

He dismissed it.

“You were probably dreaming.”

It was the first indication that something was happening in that house.

Something’s Not Right

Then I began waking during the night.

I would stand in my bed screaming.

“There’s a man in my closet!”

My mother would come into my room, turn on the light, and show me there was no one there. She would close the folding closet doors and try to reassure me.

But it kept happening.

Some nights I became so frightened that she would take me into her bedroom, and I would sleep with my parents.

Then other strange things began happening.

The lights seemed to have a mind of their own.

One of our babysitters was a beautiful young girl from the church whom Christopher and I adored. She had been born with one arm shorter than the other, something my mother remembered only because other people sometimes saw it as an impediment to her caring for us.

My mother never did.

The babysitter began noticing the lights.

At first, she assumed she had forgotten to turn them off. Eventually, though, she became certain she hadn’t.

“Mrs. Sinclair, I know I turned those lights off, and they are back on.”

Seeing the fear in the young woman’s eyes, my mother tried to reassure her. The house had just been remodeled, she reasoned. Perhaps something had been wired incorrectly.

But the lights were only the beginning.

Coats that had been hung on the coat rack would later be found lying across the back of the couch.

Dirty dishes would somehow be washed and left to dry.

Objects deliberately placed in one location would turn up somewhere else.

By then, explanations were becoming harder to find.

To my mother, something was occupying that house with us.

Plain and simple.

Water with No Source

One night, water began dripping through the kitchen ceiling.

My mother called the landlord, who instructed her to poke a small hole in the ceiling where the water was collecting and place a pan beneath it until he could investigate.

But when they examined the leak, they found no source.

It wasn’t near any known water pipes. Nothing had leaked or overflowed on the second floor. Eventually, they patched the opening in the ceiling.

The next day, my mother found a black widow spider sitting on top of the washing machine.

Between the unexplained noises, the lights, the water, the spider, two small children, her teaching schedule, and everything already happening in her marriage, the house seemed determined not to give her a moment of peace.

But none of those things compared to what happened one Sunday night upstairs.

The Man in the Bedroom

My mother had taken Christopher and me upstairs for our baths.

After bathing us, she realized Christopher needed a diaper. She stepped into the adjoining bedroom for just a moment to retrieve one from the chest of drawers where they were kept.

When she turned around, a man was standing in the room.

At first, her mind registered him as my father.

She spoke to him naturally.

“What are you doing up here? I thought you were cleaning up the kitchen.”

The man didn’t answer.

She looked at him again.

Dark pants.

A belt.

A light blue denim shirt.

Black hair.

Something was wrong.

It wasn’t my father.

The moment her mind processed what she was seeing, she ran downstairs.

My father was standing in the kitchen washing dishes.

He had never left.

“Angharad, what’s wrong?” he asked.

He could see that all the color had drained from her face.

Then he realized something else.

“Where are the children?”

He raced upstairs, terrified something had happened to us.

He found Christopher and me sitting in the drained bathtub, waiting for our mother to come back and dress us.

For the first time, whatever my mother believed was occupying that house had materialized directly in front of her.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

One of my mother’s piano students was a young girl whose family had a connection to the house.

One day, during a casual conversation, the girl and her mother brought it up.

“This is where my grandfather lived.”

That simple statement opened the door for my mother to begin asking questions.

The girl’s grandfather, Mr. Chappell, had worked for the railroad. He had been badly injured while working and lost his leg. According to his family and people in the community, the loss changed him profoundly. He fell into a deep depression and eventually took his own life.

In the house.

My mother asked the girl to bring a photograph of her grandfather to her next lesson.

She did.

My mother looked at the picture.

It was him.

The man she had seen standing in the upstairs bedroom.

She recognized him immediately.

Everyone Knew

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the story was what my mother discovered afterward.

Everyone knew.

The neighbors knew.

People at the church knew.

The landlord knew.

The house had a reputation, and no one seemed to stay there very long.

Fortunately, my mother met a woman named Mrs. Moore.

Mrs. Moore’s husband had once been a pastor in Crewe, and she knew the community well. She knew its families, its churches, and apparently many of its secrets.

When she learned where we were living and heard what had been happening, she didn’t hesitate.

“That house is haunted, and we’ve got to get you out of there.”

Mrs. Moore helped open the door for our next move—to Blackstone, just a short distance up the road.

For my mother, those were good doors to open.

They offered the possibility of a fresh beginning—a chance to leave Crewe, and everything that had happened there, behind us.

But some doors are easier to close than others.

My mother came to believe that something more than a troubled house had touched our family during our time in Crewe. She believed spiritual doors had been opened there—doors connected to darkness, depression, and ultimately, suicide.

At the time, none of us could have known how significant that belief would become.

We packed our belongings and left the house behind, believing we were escaping whatever had occupied it.

Years later, our family would experience losses that made the story of Mr. Chappell—and the house in Crewe—feel far more haunting than it ever had before.

We left Crewe.

But in my mother’s heart, the question of whether Crewe ever completely left us would remain.

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Grace is something you drink straight.

No ice, no orange juice to follow up. No Gatorade. Nothing.

Consider your last shot of whiskey. It starts in the nose, burning and clearing your sinuses. Then the nerves in your lips catch their first splash, readying your body for the oncoming wave of sensations. The tongue, with all its fires, snuffed out. And the taste of cinnamon adds its signature burn to your palette.

Maybe you roll it onto the roof of your mouth and…

Suddenly, in one motion, it goes straight down your body, gravity pulling it down to your stomach. You feel a certain unrest for a moment. You wonder for a second if it’s coming back out. But no. It settles. And from that inner place, the alcohol breaks down into your system, into your bloodstream.

You reach for your orange juice, because you aren’t in college anymore and you are employed now, perhaps married. Your tolerance isn’t what it used to be.

And then the funniest thing happens. Things become lighter around you. The voices that typically follow you all seem to sit on the park bench and have a cigarette.

And all of a sudden, joy emerges. An inexplicable careless, selfless love and gratefulness for the people around you creeps its way into your perceptions. So does the sentimental melancholy you felt in the background of your life emerge to the foreground. But with its seriousness and weight, a simple appreciation for life also does. You can’t shake it. Only time and black coffee can. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.

Meanwhile, your body is trying to break down poison. It literally cannot handle alcohol, so it breaks it down into joy.

Okay, so there’s my attempt at making alcohol sound as appealing as possible. Don’t invite me to the AA meeting, I’d be supremely unhelpful.

But why are people addicted to it? It’s not that alcohol is bad, but that it’s good, and it works very well. Alcohol is not the problem, it’s the solution to problems, however maladaptive. It takes those voices away, it brings levity to the heart, it shrugs off burdens like dead weight.

And we have a lot to learn from it. Jesus made wine, and He made it after everyone was drunk. Did He make it with the reservation that it was only for the people who hadn’t drunk that night, so they wouldn’t get drunk? Or did He make it for everyone? Oh, and it was the best wine no less. He didn’t dilute it; He literally strengthened its alcohol content. The Great Bartender.

I won’t go into how wine was stronger back then. It was diluted but it was strong. My point is that God isn’t up there shaking His fist at alcohol. He made that poison for us.

Why would God make something that our body cannot break down easily? Something with such a mind-altering effect? And then come down to earth in Jesus, and make more of it, for a party of drunk people? Did He make it so He can turn around and condemn us for drinking it? Makes no sense if you ask me.

I feel no need to put up all the caution tape necessary for this subject, we’re all adults here. If you have a drinking problem, it will destroy your life.

But what I am saying is that there is a reason God created alcohol. Because it’s the best analogy for His Grace that the world has.

Consider your last shot of Grace instead. Similar experience. Lights up all the senses. The nose is cleared with its glory. It enters the nerves of your lips, making its way to your tongue, extinguishing its many fires. Then gravity takes it to the core of your being. Not easily digested by the body, it sits there and enters your bloodstream. Your blood takes its effect everywhere else.

And then the funniest thing happens. Inexplicably, things become lighter around you. The voices that typically follow you all seem to sit on the park bench and have a cigarette, choking and dying on their inhalations.

And all of the sudden, a joy emerges. A careless, selfless love and gratefulness for the people around you creeps its way into your perceptions. So does the sentimental melancholy you felt in the background of your life emerge to the foreground. But with its seriousness and weight, a simple appreciation for life also does. You can’t shake it. You shed a tear, maybe the first one this year. You marvel at its power. How such a small amount of liquid can have such a tremendous effect on all of your being.

Perhaps you experienced this at salvation. Perhaps God wrecked your life this way like He wrecked mine. Or perhaps you felt it in the beauty of a newborn child. Some people have the tears of grace roll down their faces with the whispered sayings of loyal lovers.

And then you go to church. And then you read your Bible. And suddenly, the pastor, nay, even the Writer of the Good Book has taken all of that away. You are spiritually hungover. All at once, it feels like all that grace really was merely a poison, a momentary high that has terrible ramifications. You can’t shake it. Only time and black coffee can. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.

To speak in practical terms, you came to God drunk on Grace - out of excitement for His goodness, compassion, and forgiveness and four months later, you’re coming to God to cure your spiritual hangover.

Your prayers are just kneeling on a hardwood floor and asking Him to rid you of the guilt of your sin. They aren’t fun anymore. They have lost the lightheartedness. They have lost the spiritual drunkenness they once had. We convince ourselves that to drink more Grace at this point, at this level in your walk with Christ, would be to indulge in poison.

Another way to say this, is “cheap grace”, as many have called it. It’s the idea that God woos you in with His grace so that He can hit you with the terms and conditions later. I knew a pastor who would say that “salvation is the free gift that costs you everything”.

No fun. We used to party with the strong drink of God’s Grace, now all we have is chasers. The empty calories of some Walmart-brand cranberry juice.

How interesting. We now find ourselves in a position where our joy is taken by the least likely culprits – church, pastors, the Bible.

By this I mean that we are scared out of drinking Grace. I guess defining what I mean by grace is important at this point. I see it as God’s unmerited favor. The infinite, other-worldly compassion that He has for you every second of every day. The forgiveness available before your prayers leave your mouth.

But what happens when you read the Bible? How about all those people getting their heads chopped off for what they’ve done to upset God? How about the Second Coming? Is there not a part of God that open-secretly wants to kill humans?

How about those sermons? How about the one where you’re supposed to submit to your husband? How about where you’re supposed to die to yourself, die for your wife? Or crucify your flesh?

In other words, What about accountability? Can there be a relationship without terms and conditions? I certainly have some terms and conditions. For example, if you are actively trying to kill me, I’m not going to be one of your better friends. I also usually demand you treat me with respect. I very much prefer it if you like me too.

But speaking from experience, I don’t have a list. Like really. I never actually wrote down what it takes to be my friend anywhere. I know women who write down lists for what they need a man to be for them to consider them long-term. I don’t have one of those for women. But I digress.

But without terms and conditions, without a law, how is it possible for me to have friends? And further, if I don’t have my buddy’s list, how is it possible that he’s my friend? Now that I think about it, at times, my friends have disobeyed what would be on my list if I had one, and somehow, they’re still my friends.

How? We don’t have to read the terms and conditions. Because there is something that has a higher standing over our negotiated friendship. And that’s that I like some people. And the more potent my heart is with that substance – the substance that makes me like people - the more I start to like them.

It manifests in very odd ways. I take genuine interest in their lives. I listen to them when they are speaking. I actively position myself so that my life and my words can bless them, even when that is at a cost to myself. It flows freely. It makes me start to question if it’s even best described as a sacrifice anymore.

No. It’s not sacrifice.

It’s joy. It’s…

Intoxication.

It’s Grace, no chaser.

Why do people change? That change that happens when an alcoholic puts the bottle down for good? The change that happens when a husband stops hitting his wife? That change that happens when a man stops smoking cigarettes?

The man has changed because he started drinking something else. He’s drinking the spiritual moonshine of grace: love. The Surgeon General can slap a thousand labels on his bottle of whiskey, but the only thing that really moves him is watching his daughter hide from him when he gets home. Watching his wife enter terror when there is the slightest disagreement and wondering what Love would have to say about this. It’s love for those he loves that changed the man.

Meanwhile, as a church, we’re going around and trying to beat people into compliance. God and the Scriptures flatly disagree with this approach. And if it sounds like Scripture is teaching anything otherwise, it’s merely the terror we have of our abusers putting on shattered glasses for us to read with.

There’s a surprising through-line of Grace all the way through the Bible. If you read the Old Testament and think something different, you aren’t reading it right. All those people who got their heads chopped off were on the tail end of hundreds of years of a bender of Grace.

I can’t even begin to understand how people can read the Old Testament, about Baal, about Molech, about burning babies in hot oil and make Yahweh out to be the bad guy.

We should be unashamedly drunk on Grace all the time. No guilt in drinking deeply of love. A little trick to becoming an alcoholic is realizing that the hangover goes away instantly if you start drinking more the next morning. Accepting Grace and serving it to others is the only way people change anyways.

The truth is that God is a Bartender, preparing straight drinks of Grace, no ice, no cranberry juice. And somehow, He’s preparing the next one, sliding it over the counter, sitting next to us, and drinking it with us, all at the same time.

And we’re all feeling good.

Welcome to Between You and Me. It’s called that because I ask that we keep this between us two. A lot of these things are quite personal, y’know? Wouldn’t want these things floating around on the internet where Christians can whip my words with the Bible, would we?

But it’s also called Between You and Me because there is a lot between me and God. There’s a lot between God and me and all of us, isn’t there? This book is an attempt to name those things so they can be healed. One chapter at a time.

Waylon Woody is a writer and minister living in West Milford, NJ.

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This past month, Randy Clark, founder of Global Awakening, released a thoughtful communication explaining why he no longer recommends The Passion Translation. Though gracious in tone, some of the reasons he gave opened a much larger question for me—not simply about TPT, but about the nature of Scripture, translation, and what we actually mean when we call the Bible the Word of God.

Randy points to Psalm 81:10 as a particularly striking example. Most translations say something like this: “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.”

The Passion renders the thought: “Open your mouth with a mighty decree… The words that you speak, so shall it be!”

Randy’s objection is straightforward: the Hebrew doesn’t say “mighty decree.” The translator has taken a theological idea about declarations and placed it directly into the poetry of the Psalm. I understand his observation here. If our question is simply, Which English wording most directly represents the Hebrew words on the page?—“mighty decree” isn’t there.

But oh boy… this opens up a much bigger conversation. And it takes us somewhere I don’t think we always expect.

Translation Is Already Interpretation

First, understand something… Every translation interprets.

Consider a familiar example. For years, the NIV famously rendered the Greek word sarx—literally “flesh”—as “sinful nature” in numerous passages. Neither the Greek word for “sin” nor the Greek word for “nature” appears in sarx. The translators believed that, in those contexts, “sinful nature” communicated what Paul meant by “flesh.”

That is interpretation.

And it is not an insignificant interpretation. “Sinful nature” carries an entire theological framework into the English text. Other translations simply retain “flesh,” leaving open the wider range of what Paul might mean by the term.

That doesn’t make the NIV a bad Bible. I have benefited enormously from the NIV. It means translation is never the mechanical replacement of Greek and Hebrew words with English ones.

There is a spectrum. Some translations stay closer to the linguistic form of the source text. Others attempt to communicate what the translators believe the source text means. Paraphrases move farther still.

Without a doubt, TPT moves farther along that interpretive spectrum than the NASB or ESV. And for that reason, I don’t study just from TPT.

But I don’t study just from the NIV either.

The question, then, cannot simply be: Does this translation interpret? They all do.

The questions are: How much does it interpret? Is it transparent about doing so? Is the interpretation defensible within the larger biblical witness?

And does it preserve the fundamental architecture of Scripture?

The Bible Itself Makes This More Complicated

This is where things get particularly interesting.

The New Testament writers regularly quote the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that we call the Septuagint. And sometimes that Greek translation differs considerably from the Hebrew text behind most modern Old Testaments.

Hebrews 10 gives us a remarkable example. Psalm 40:6 in Hebrew says essentially: “You have dug/opened ears for me.”

But the ancient Greek translation says: “A body you prepared for me.”

Those aren’t the same words. So when the writer of Hebrews quotes the Psalm, which one does he use? … The Greek.

“A body you prepared for me.”

More than that, the book of Hebrews proceeds to develop the thought around the very language supplied by the Greek translation:

“We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

Apparently, the inspired New Testament writer was not troubled by a Greek rendering that moved beyond the literal meaning of the Hebrew image. He finds in that rendering language through which he illuminates Christ.

Then there is Psalm 68:18. This is a whole other level of interpretive conundrum.

The Hebrew speaks of God ascending and receiving gifts from humanity. The Septuagint likewise says he received gifts. But when Ephesians 4:8 cites the passage, it says:

“When he ascended on high… he gave gifts to men.”

Received becomes gave! And Paul immediately develops the passage around Christ giving apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers to his Body.

There are serious scholarly discussions about how Paul arrived at that reading, including possible connections to ancient Jewish interpretive traditions. But whatever explanation we choose, one thing is difficult to deny: The apostles’ relationship with the Old Testament was richer than simply reproducing its words as literally as possible.

They believed the Scriptures were alive with Christ.

This Doesn’t Mean “Anything Goes”

That does not mean we can make Scripture say whatever we want.

There is a profound difference between illuminating another dimension within the biblical witness and dismantling the architecture of that witness altogether.

Imagine Scripture as a great house. There are rooms to explore. Windows through which light enters differently. Floors we haven’t fully explored. There are poetic images capable of carrying more than one layer of meaning. But there are also load-bearing walls.

The identity of Jesus Christ. The revelation of the Father. The incarnation. The cross. Resurrection. The reconciliation of creation in Christ. The life of the Spirit.

Remove the load-bearing walls and eventually you have constructed another house.

This is why I don’t put TPT in the same category as translations deliberately shaped to deny foundational truths like the full deity of Christ. In fact, some of its interpretive expansions move in exactly the opposite direction. John 1:1–2, for instance, describes the Living Expression as “fully God” and eternally “face-to-face” with God.

On the other hand, Jehovah’s Witnesses famously render John 1:1 as “the Word was a god.” Joseph Smith’s revision takes another route, transforming John’s declaration that “the Word was God” into language saying that “the Son was of God.”

Those aren’t attempts to illuminate another dimension of beauty within John’s poetry. They alter something foundational to the Christian confession about who Jesus is. They start removing load-bearing walls.

God filling the mouth with “a mighty decree,” on the other hand, is an interpretive expansion of “open your mouth and I will fill it.” The language admittedly goes beyond the immediate Hebrew of Psalm 81, though the broader idea of a decree being established does appear elsewhere in Scripture—most explicitly in Job 22:28: “You will also decree a thing, and it will be established for you.”

So I understand the criticism. We should be able to distinguish between what the Hebrew of Psalm 81 actually says and the theological interpretation TPT has woven into it. But we are not talking about tearing down the house and constructing an entirely different one. We are debating what belongs in one of its rooms.

More importantly, it does not follow that every interpretive expansion represents a corruption of Scripture. If that becomes our standard, we may find ourselves having an uncomfortable conversation with the writer of Hebrews!

Let Scripture Be Bigger Than One Translation

Ironically, the translators of the King James Bible understood something about this. In their original preface, The Translators to the Reader, they approvingly cited Augustine’s observation that: “variety of translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures.”

Read that again.

The translators of the “Authorized Version” believed that multiple translations help us discover the meaning of Scripture.

They consulted Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and Latin sources, along with Spanish, French, Italian, and Dutch translations. They included alternate readings in their margins precisely because they recognized that sometimes the meaning wasn’t reducible to one unquestionable English rendering.

There is something beautifully humble about that, and I think we need more of it.

I don’t study from TPT alone. I wouldn’t recommend anyone else do so either. Put it beside the NASB. Put it beside the NIV. Put it beside the NRSV, ESV, NET, NKJV, or whatever translations help you see the text from different angles. Better still, learn to use the tools that let you look underneath all of them.

But don’t imagine that when you finally find the “right” English translation you have escaped interpretation. You haven’t. You have simply chosen someone else’s.

The Word Became Flesh, Not Paper

And this brings me to the real reason I’m writing this. This isn’t ultimately an article defending The Passion Translation. It is about something much deeper.

Five hundred years ago, Protestants rightly resisted the idea that the institutional Church or Pope possessed unquestionable authority over the conscience. Scripture became the great rallying cry of the Reformation.

But there is always a temptation to replace one unquestionable authority with another kind of unquestionable object—to trade what some have called the “Vatican Pope” for a “Paper Pope.”

And the irony is that Christians holding the same Bible then divide endlessly over what their final authority supposedly unquestionably says!

For example… I could probably find a hundred sincere followers of Jesus who would write letters criticizing Randy Clark’s ministry more severely than Randy has criticized TPT—and they would construct their arguments using the very translations he recommends!

The problem isn’t Scripture. It’s our assumption that possession of the text eliminates the need for interpretation, community, humility, and above all, the Holy Spirit.

There is only one perfect Word of God.

His name is Jesus Christ.

“In the beginning was the Word!”

The eternal Word didn’t become a book. It became flesh. And through the Spirit, this living Word is now being written upon human hearts.

In no way does this diminish Scripture. Rather, it helps us understand what Scripture is for.

“These are the very Scriptures that testify about me,” Jesus said.

The written Scriptures are an extraordinary, Spirit-breathed witness whose purpose is to reveal the Living Word.

So yes—study them carefully. Look into the Hebrew and Greek. Check out the work of scholars. Compare translations. Get to know Church history (from different traditions, though, because you’ll learn very different things).

But in the midst of all of that, come to Jesus. Because the destination of Scripture isn’t perfect information—but communion.

A Final Word

One final thought. I believe Randy Clark is an extraordinary gift to the Body of Christ. As I read his letter, though, I couldn’t help recalling the letters and warnings written by sincere Christian leaders about what was happening around Randy and the Vineyard in the 1990s.

Some of those people genuinely believed they were protecting the Church.

There is an old and unfortunate observation that one move of God often ends up resisting the next one.

I am not saying that’s what Randy is doing here. I’m saying the possibility should keep every one of us humble.

I want that humility for Randy, for those working on the Passion Translation—and certainly for myself! Because whatever God is doing in the days ahead, I don’t want my confidence in yesterday’s wineskin to keep me from recognizing today’s wine.

I want to stay in the River and remain teachable. I want to keep my heart open to grace. Pure, Christ-centered, Father-revealing, Spirit-filled grace.

And wherever a translation helps me see more clearly the face of Jesus Christ, I will receive the gift—without ever confusing the translation with the One to whom it points.

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To the glorious children of the Most High God,

Stories are written all around us.

Some are written in the stars. Some are handed down to us by our mothers. Some are embedded in the way we work, think, strive, and try to maintain control. And some are the stories we quietly tell ourselves about who we are.

This month’s issue of Elisha’s Riddle explores a few of those stories—and asks what happens when we learn to see them differently.

In The Gospel in the Zodiac, I continue our journey through the signs in the heavens with a provocative question: What if the zodiac was never meant to tell us something about ourselves? What if, instead, it was always telling a story about Christ?

We also continue C. David Baker’s Walking Stick Journal with Shift Work, following the path away from control and an overreliance on the intellect toward trust—moving beyond merely understanding something with the mind and learning to know it in the heart.

Andrea Sinclair’s A Mother’s Imprint turns our attention toward another kind of inheritance: the ways our mothers shape us. It is a tender reflection on love, truth, boundaries, and the sometimes difficult work of allowing God to transform what has been handed down to us.

Finally, Waylon Woody’s Starved Sin-Dog explores one of the stories Christians can carry about themselves: that somewhere inside us is a fundamentally sinful self that just needs to be properly starved to death. Through a very personal story of attention, burnout, loneliness, and grace, the article asks what might happen if God wants to do more than help us manage ourselves—what if He wants to reintroduce us to who we actually are?

With that, I see a beautiful thread running through these pieces. We both inherit and construct stories. Perhaps that is one thread running through this whole issue. We look to the heavens, our families, our experiences, our successes and failures, even our theology, trying to understand where we fit.

But every once in a while, something shifts. We see an old thing from a new angle. Something moves from the head to the heart. A story we have believed about ourselves begins to lose its power.

And perhaps, hidden underneath it all, we discover a better Story that has been there all along.

Welcome to the September issue.

Nick Padovani
Publisher, Elisha’s Riddle

Contents:

The Song of the Universe: The Gospel in the Zodiac

The Walking Stick Journal: Shift Work

The Music of a Faithful Life: A Mother’s Imprint

Between You and Me: Starved Sin-Dog

Latest Podcast:

Make sure to check out the latest episodes here

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Throughout this series, we’ve been exploring the universe as symbolic architecture bearing witness to Christ. Like an enchanted cathedral, creation is filled with signs that point beyond themselves to a greater reality. Thus, we’ve followed the image of the Sower through the Carina Nebula, watched the heavens herald the birth of Christ in Bethlehem, contemplated Jesus as the Bright and Morning Star, and listened for echoes of the Trinity in the ancient idea known as the Music of the Spheres.

There is, however, one part of the stars we cannot avoid…

The zodiac.

For many Christians, that single word immediately raises red flags—and understandably so. Today, the zodiac is most commonly associated with horoscopes, fortune-telling, personality types, and the attempt to interpret human destiny through the movements of the stars. Scripture gives a stark condemnation to astrology and every effort to seek guidance from the heavenly bodies rather than from God.

But astrology may not be the original meaning of the zodiac…

For the constellations were not first arranged to tell us about ourselves, but Christ…

The Witness of the Stars

This was the proposal of nineteenth-century biblical scholar E. W. Bullinger in his remarkable work The Witness of the Stars. Bullinger argued that the familiar twelve signs of the zodiac preserve the remnants of an ancient celestial revelation: a pictorial proclamation of the Gospel written across the heavens long before astrology turned the signs inward toward human fate and personality.

His work remains controversial in certain areas of historical reconstruction. Not every proposed ancient name, meaning, or connection can be established with equal certainty, and some of Bullinger’s conclusions reach beyond what surviving evidence can definitively prove. Nevertheless, the sweeping picture he uncovered is difficult to dismiss as mere coincidence.

Read in their traditional order—not beginning with Aries, as modern astrology commonly does, but with Virgo—the twelve signs form a surprisingly coherent movement. They begin with the promised Seed of the woman, pass through conflict, sacrifice, suffering, resurrection, and the gathering of a redeemed people—concluding with the victorious Lion triumphing over the enemy.

It is the Gospel, written not in sentences but in a way of communication the ancient world would understand: images.

The Beginning: The Promised Seed

Bullinger begins the celestial story with Virgo, the Virgin.

In her ancient representation, the woman holds a branch in one hand and an ear of grain (or seed) in the other. The biblical resonance is immediate. From the opening chapters of Genesis, redemption is attached to the promise of the woman’s Seed:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” (Genesis 3:15)

The Gospel begins with a woman and a promised Child. Isaiah later speaks of a virgin conceiving and bearing a Son. Jeremiah calls the Messiah the righteous Branch. Jesus identifies Himself as the grain of wheat that falls into the ground, dies, and produces an abundant harvest.

The first image in the ancient sequence is therefore not a warrior or a king, but a woman carrying the promise of life. The story begins with a seed.

The Price of Redemption

From Virgo, the signs move to Libra, the scales.

Modern astrology often interprets Libra in terms of balance, fairness, or personality. Bullinger saw something more ancient and far more significant: the scales represent a price weighed, a debt measured, and the need for redemption.

The message is that humanity has been weighed and found wanting. Things are out of balance and must somehow be restored.

This resonates beautifully with the biblical idea of righteousness. The Hebrew word behind righteousness was connected with ancient scales we see in Libra. Scales were used to weigh money, goods, and precious materials. A “righteous” balance was one that was true, accurate, and just.

Likewise, humanity was created to accurately reflect the image and likeness of God, living in harmony with His life and character. In this sense, “unrighteousness” is not about the breaking of religious rules, but the loss of this divine-human balance. Humanity is no longer reflecting its Creator as we were designed to.

The scales therefore raise a question that echoes throughout the rest of the story: How can what has fallen out of harmony be made whole again? The signs that follow answer this question reveal the sacrifice through which true righteousness would be restored.

The Conflict with the Serpent

The third sign is Scorpio, the scorpion.

Here the celestial story becomes openly violent. In the image, a scorpion reaches toward the heel of a coming conqueror. This immediately recalls the prophecy of Genesis—the serpent will bruise the heel of the woman’s Seed, but the Seed will crush the serpent’s head.

In traditional depictions surrounding Scorpio, a mighty figure struggles against the serpent while another figure presses his foot upon the enemy. The imagery is strikingly close to the Bible’s earliest prophecy of redemption.

The Messiah will be wounded, but the wound will not be the end of the story. The same heel that is struck will ultimately come down upon the enemy’s head.

The Conquering One

Next comes Sagittarius, the archer.

The figure is depicted as moving forward with bow drawn, an image of a conqueror going forth to victory. Bullinger connected this with the conquering Messiah: the One who enters the conflict not merely to survive the serpent’s attack, but to overthrow the powers of darkness.

Scripture repeatedly portrays the Lord as a divine warrior. His arrows strike the enemy. His truth goes forth. The Messiah appears not only as a suffering servant but as a victorious King. In other words, the promised Seed is no passive victim. He has entered the story of the heavens in order to conquer darkness.

Life Through Death

The fifth sign, Capricorn, is one of the strangest creatures in the zodiac: part goat and part fish.

Bullinger understood the goat as a figure of sacrificial death and the fish as a symbol of living multitudes emerging from that death. The image therefore presents a paradox at the very heart of the Gospel:

Life comes through sacrifice.

Jesus described this mystery through the image of a seed. We quoted it before:

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.” (John 12:24)

The Messiah gives His life, and through His death a multitude is born. What appears to be defeat becomes multiplication. The slain One becomes the source of an innumerable people.

The Outpouring of Living Water

Following Capricorn comes Aquarius, the water bearer.

A man pours an unending stream of water from a vessel, and the waters descend toward a waiting fish.

For Bullinger, the image spoke of blessing poured out upon the redeemed. The sacrifice has been made; now life flows from the victorious Redeemer to His people.

The Scriptures repeatedly use water as an image of divine life and the outpouring of the Spirit (Isaiah 44:3). When Jesus stood in the temple, he declared that rivers of living water would flow from those who believe in Him. John later explains that He was speaking of the Holy Spirit (John 7:37-39).

We see that the Gospel includes a promise not only to bring forgiveness, but to pour out true life upon the soil of humanity.

The Redeemed Multitude

The waters of Aquarius flow toward Pisces, the fishes.

In Bullinger’s reading, the two fish represent the people of God, bound together yet also restrained by a cord. One fish is directed upward while the other moves along the horizon, suggesting a people with both heavenly and earthly dimensions.

Whatever every detail may mean, the central image is clear: a multitude has emerged from the sacrifice and outpouring that preceded it.

Jesus called His disciples to become fishers of men. He compared the Kingdom to a net gathering fish of every kind. The earliest Christians even adopted the fish as a symbol of Christ and of their identity in Him.

The Seed has become a people and the solitary grain has produced a harvest.

The Lamb Who Was Slain

Next comes Aries, the ram.

Here the price suggested by Libra and the sacrifice pictured in Capricorn come into sharper focus. The ram recalls Abraham and Isaac, where a ram was provided in the place of the beloved son. It evokes the Passover lamb whose blood delivered Israel from destruction. Above all, it points toward Jesus Christ:

“Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

In Revelation, the Lamb appears as though slain, yet He stands alive in the center of the throne. His apparent weakness is revealed as the power of God and His sacrifice becomes His victory. The Gospel’s conquering King is also its slaughtered Lamb.

And He overcomes not by avoiding death, but by passing through the death and robbing it of its power.

The Returning Judge

The ninth sign is Taurus, the bull.

The bull is a figure of tremendous strength, charging forward with its horns lowered. Bullinger understood it as an image of the Messiah returning in power and judgment.

The One who first appeared as the promised Seed and sacrificial Lamb will not remain hidden forever. The Gospel announces not only what Christ has done, but the ultimate unveiling of what His work has accomplished.

Every opposing power will fall and every crooked thing will be made straight. The King will establish justice throughout His creation. The bull advances because redemption is ultimately about the restoration of all things under their rightful Creator.

The Bridegroom and His People

Gemini, the twins, follows Taurus.

Bullinger interpreted the paired figures not as two competing personalities but as a picture of union: the victorious Messiah joined to His redeemed people—His Bride.

This is one of the great mysteries of the Gospel. Christ does not merely rescue humanity from a distance. He joins us to Himself.

He is the Head, and we are His Body.

He is the Bridegroom, and we are His Bride.

He is the Firstborn among many brothers and sisters.

The two figures belong together, distinct yet united. What is His becomes ours through participation in His life. The Gospel in the heavens is therefore not simply the story of a solitary Hero. It is the story of a Hero who brings a people into His own victory.

The Possession Secured

The next sign, Cancer, presents a more difficult ancient image because its familiar modern form as a crab does not communicate its meaning as clearly as some of the others.

Bullinger believed the familiar crab was not the original image. He based his interpretation instead on older representations such as the Egyptian scarab, the ancient name klaria—“the cattle-folds”—and star names conveying sheltering, gathering, and holding fast.

Bullinger associated it with the gathering and securing of the Redeemer’s possession.

The movement of the whole celestial story supports this theme. The Seed has come. The price has been paid. The enemy has been defeated. The sacrifice has produced a people. The waters have been poured out, and the redeemed have been united to their Lord.

Now the inheritance is held secure.

Jesus speaks of gathering His own. He declares that no one can snatch His sheep from His hand. Paul writes that creation itself waits for the revealing of the sons of God. Revelation portrays the redeemed gathered around the throne from every tribe, language, people, and nation.

The Lion of Victory

The final sign is Leo, the lion.

The celestial story that began with the Virgin ends with the Lion. The promised Seed has become the conquering King.

Leo is depicted springing upon the serpent, bringing the ancient conflict to its conclusion. The enemy introduced near the beginning of the biblical story is finally crushed beneath the authority of the Messiah. The imagery reaches its fulfillment in Revelation:

“Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has prevailed.”

This is the culmination of the Gospel. The Lion triumphs and the deceptive serpent falls.

The story ends where all Scripture ends—not with evil endlessly opposing good, but with Christ victorious and creation restored beneath His reign.

A Story Written in Light

Taken together, the twelve signs present an extraordinary sequence:

The Virgin bears the promised Seed.

The scales reveal both the need and price of redemption.

The scorpion wounds the coming Conqueror.

The archer rides forth to victory.

The sacrificial goat gives rise to living multitudes.

The water bearer pours out blessing.

The fishes portray the redeemed people being brought in.

The ram reveals the slain Lamb.

The bull advances in restorative judgment.

The twins picture union with our Redeemer.

The gathered possession is held secure.

And the Lion crushes the serpent and reigns.

Was every element of this sequence perfectly preserved through history? Almost certainly not. Ancient images have shifted, names have changed, cultures have borrowed and corrupted symbols, and centuries of astrology have obscured whatever original testimony may once have been present.

But Bullinger’s central insight remains breathtaking.

The zodiac may once have been something entirely different from the horoscope.

Before it became a way of predicting human personalities and destinies, it may have been a celestial proclamation of the destiny God had prepared for creation in His Son.

So while astrology asks what the stars say about us, the ancient witness of the stars was instead pointing to our Savior and Redeemer.

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Even before I was born, I was learning how to handle disappointment, endure hard times, forgive, and look for the good in people, even when it wasn’t obvious.

She never had to explain it, but through me, she shaped my idea of love.

What She Taught Me about Love

My mother loved with her whole heart. She never held back—she gave everything she had and kept believing in people long after others gave up. She prayed, trusted God, hoped for the best, and forgave even when others couldn’t understand why.

She could do this because she didn’t just believe the Bible—she carried verses like I Corinthians 13 in her heart. Those words guided her every day.

“Love suffers long, and is kind” and “Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” These words mattered deeply to her, and they came to matter to me too.

Still, I think there were times when we both misunderstood what enduring love asked of us. That misunderstanding shaped what came next, and it shaped me too.

My mother showed me, again and again, how to stay. She taught me to give one more chance, to hope tomorrow could be better, and to forgive even before anyone took real responsibility.

Whether I realized it or not, I learned those lessons too. They stayed with me and shaped how I showed up in my own life.

I learned that a good woman stays, helps others, doesn’t give up, and tries to keep the peace.

All of this sounds beautiful until you realize how easy it is to lose yourself while trying to keep the peace for everyone else. That is where the pattern begins to emerge.

Inherited Patterns

I’ve done just that.

I’ve stayed too long in relationships, jobs, and friendships, always trying to keep the peace and wondering if I was the one at fault. I kept asking myself if I should call, explain, apologize, or try to be understood. The biggest question was always: Was I being too sensitive?

Maybe I should just let it go.

Thank God for scriptures like:

“The fear of man brings a snare.”

People-pleasing can look like kindness, and sometimes it really is. But other times it comes from fear of conflict, of being misunderstood, or of saying no and seeming selfish.

My mother knew these fears as well. She learned how to read people, ease tension, and keep things going, even though deep down, she sometimes felt hurt.

I learned that from her too—how to hurt without ever letting anyone know.

Burdens and Boundaries

Galatians says, “Bear one another’s burdens.”

I know how to do that. I know how to show up and help people through tough times. Being a helper comes naturally to me. I believe it’s a gift from God, and I’m grateful for it.

But it also says, “For every man shall bear his own burden.”

I misunderstood that for a very long time, and that misunderstanding changed what I carried. It blurred the line between helping and holding too much.

Certain burdens are meant to be shared, but others aren’t ours to carry.

I can love you without taking on your burdens. I can pray for you without feeling responsible for your choices. I can forgive you without letting you keep hurting me. I can care deeply and still say, “I can’t do this anymore.”

That doesn’t make my love any smaller. In fact, it makes it more truth-centered.

My Mother’s Heart - And Mine

Compassion without boundaries empties you. Loyalty without discernment keeps you stuck. Forgiveness without accountability can become a permission slip. Sometimes what I call faith is really fear of change, even when I want to call it something else.

Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart…..and he shall direct thy paths”.

These verses were my Mother’s favorites. I can remember her telling me these verses throughout my life.

But I understand them differently now, and that difference has changed how I hear them. It has also changed how I live with them. That shift is why these verses now lead me somewhere new.

Trusting God doesn’t mean staying. Sometimes it means waiting. Sometimes it means rebuilding. And sometimes it means walking away, which takes wisdom.

Relearning Peace

Romans says, “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.”

For most of my life, I missed the first part of that scripture. I heard the command, but not the condition.

“If it be possible”. Sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes you do everything right, and peace still doesn’t come. Sometimes it requires distance, a boundary, or speaking a truth someone doesn’t want to hear. That is the part I had to learn slowly.

So much of this came through my mother—not because she taught me directly, but because she lived it. What she lived became part of me. That inheritance was both a blessing and a lesson.

She also carried things she learned to survive.

And I inherited some of them.

Things like the need to fix. The need to be needed. The tendency to stay too long. The habit of excusing what I shouldn’t. The fear of disappointing people. The belief that if I just tried harder, things would finally change.

It took me decades to learn that being needed is not the same as being loved.

Most importantly, she gave me the belief that God can redeem anything.

Love, Self, and Wholeness

Jesus said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

For a long time, I only focused on loving my neighbor. But that command has two parts, and I ignored one of them, the one that asked me to love myself.

Neighbor. And self.

God never asked me to disappear to prove my love.

I still carry my mother’s imprint, and I hope I always will. I hear her in my prayers. I see her in my compassion. I feel her in my persistence.

But an imprint is not a sentence, and that is where the change begins. What I inherited does not have to define what I become. From there, I can choose what to keep and what to release.

Romans says we are “transformed by the renewing of your mind”.

This means patterns can change. What has been handed down can be examined, and what we keep is separated from what we release. That is how I begin to live differently.

This I will keep. This I will give back to God. This ends with me.

I don’t think this dishonors my mother in any way. I think it honors her by telling the truth about all of it, including what I had to learn and why.

What I Am Still Learning

Maybe this is what daughters learn over time. We stop focusing just on the choices our mothers made and start trying to understand what led them to those decisions.

Now I see my mother in a new way. I see the young woman she used to be, her hope, her faith, and her fear. I see how much she wanted things to work and how strongly she believed people could change. Most of all, I feel compassion for all of it.

When I notice those same patterns in myself, I realize I have a choice she might not have known was possible.

I get to decide what happens next.

I am still learning as I go.

I am learning when to stay and when to leave, when to speak up and when to listen, when to help and when to step back. I am learning when to carry someone else’s burden and when to let them handle what is theirs.

But here is what I know now:

Love can last through hard times.

Love can endure.

Love can hope.

But love also finds joy in truth.

For a long time, I understood how to endure more than I understood the importance of truth.

Now I see that they go hand in hand.

Sometimes love means saying:

I love you.

I forgive you.

I will pray for you.

But I cannot keep living like this.

There was a time when I thought saying those words meant love had failed.

I do not believe that anymore.

Sometimes leaving is not a lack of love. Sometimes setting a boundary is not being bitter. Sometimes saying ‘no more’ does not mean you have not forgiven.

Sometimes it is just the moment when we finally stop mixing up suffering with being faithful.

My mother left a mark on me that I will carry forever. I carry her faith, her compassion, her perseverance, and her way of seeing something worth loving in people when others could not. I also carry her belief that God can redeem what seems beyond hope.

These are the parts of her influence that I treasure.

And the other parts, like fear, people-pleasing, staying too long, and believing that love means accepting what hurts us, I can give those to God.

This I will keep.

This I will give back to God.

This ends with me.

Maybe that is part of God’s redemption too.

It is not about erasing my mother’s influence, but letting God transform it.

In the end, I am learning that love and truth are not meant to be in conflict.

Real love makes space for both.

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Stepping Stones of Transformation

An Unfolding Manuscript

by

C. D. Baker

Chapter Twenty-Three: Shift Work

Sometimes the way we relate to life shifts in deep places. We experience movements of consciousness stirring within. Our awareness changes. We no longer experience life in exactly the same way.

We awaken to new things. We begin to understand, differently; we start to feel, differently. Our desires change.

This is the mystery of soul-shifting, and soul-shifts signal something. They are alerting us that transformation is underway.

Even if that transformation is one step at a time.

Even if it is experienced in fits and starts.

***

Fall 2023

Notes to self: I stopped for coffee near Bill’s office and sat in my truck for a bit. The Lyme Disease diagnosis was something of a relief; it gave me some reasons for how terrible I’ve been feeling. But I also know that this inner turmoil has contributed somatic stresses. Years of night sweats and chronic fatigue, dizziness and anxiety. Too much for too long.

I closed my eyes and I unexpectedly recalled the mission statement for my writing: ‘To share the mysteries of the Gospel so that the broken are comforted, the curious are piqued, and the strong are challenged.’

It then hit me that this is exactly what the Holy Spirit has been doing with me. Wild. But I had no idea that the process would be so terrible. I’m glad there’s been progress and I need to keep my eyes on that. Time to tell Bill about last week’s helpful shift.

*

“Come in, David.” Bill shakes my hand and we both sit.

I set my coffee to one side, open my notepad and we’re soon deep into it. “Well, a couple of days ago I suddenly shifted away from demanding a centering concept. You know, a key principle to ‘fix’ me.”

Bill crosses his leg. “You’ve been working for that forever.”

“Hard to explain why the sudden change.”

Bill laughs. “Good.”

“It was like I just knew I was off course. It was a huge relief to stop striving to figure everything out and simply accept life as a mysterious process.” I tap my pen. “Honestly, I’m not sure where it came from, but it was a deep shift and felt great.”

“What do you think you gave up when you let go of that demand?”

The answer comes quickly. “Control. I fixate on controlling through understanding.” A startling awareness rises and I blurt, “I’ve been looking for an idea to save me instead of God.” My own words trouble me.

Bill holds that for a moment, then offers some consolation. “Your relentless fear has driven you to control your world…even if that’s with ideas.”

I turn my head.

“We reach for what we are able, and you’ve been able to work effectively in the world of the intellect.”

I stare at my notepad. The word ‘arrogance’ comes to mind.

Bill pauses. “In the end, control strategies may feel safe, but they tend to isolate us and leave us lonely.”

I oblige a nod.

He adjusts his position. “Your trust was broken as a child. Early voices get inside our psyche before they can be contradicted, and that makes them very powerful. You learned to believe that you could only trust yourself. Hence, control.”

Old news.

Bill clears his throat. “Okay, so your shift was away from control. Now tell me what you shifted toward.”

I strain for a moment. “Trust?”

Bill feigns clapping his hands. “Exactly. Trust. And trust moves you beyond yourself; it moves you into a process directed by grace.”

“I’ve found that ‘trust’ works as a concept, but it’s hard to live out.”

“What if you try trusting other voices in this process?”

I breathe slowly for a few beats. That would be a big shift. For some reason I mention a lunch that I had with Will last week. “We talked about his injury. He said it was like he had died even though he had no memory of any of it. I told him that his inner soul had experienced a form of death and he now sees life differently…that he should be patient for all the good that is coming and learn to be available for what the Spirit is going to do.

“But I think he already knew all of that.” I laugh at myself, lightly. “He then told me about his experiences of waiting on God, his asking to see him, and then about how he looks at the stars in a new way.” A lump rises in my throat. “That injury prompted a huge move within him.”

It suddenly occurs to me that Will is a witness to truth—an outside voice that I can trust. I look at Bill. He’s been a voice to trust for years. Have I taken that for granted? Who else have I missed? Names rush forward.

I pause, staring at my notepad. My mind is beginning to run. I look up and change course. “Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to get somewhere that I’m already at. Other times I feel lost.”

Bill offers a settling tone. “These are beautiful, powerful experiences. Can you feel them? We know ourselves—and each other—through our hearts more than our minds. Our hearts are bigger than our minds. This is another shift for you.”

I jot that down.

He smiles. “By the way, what if we can’t actually be lost?”

I look up and stare, blankly.

“That felt true, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“We can feel truth.” Bill stands. “And it’s truth that is moving you.” He smiles. “Things are changing and it’s all going to be okay.”

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In college, I did a lot of ministry that was forward-facing and gave me a lot of attention. I love attention. Or at least, I thought I did, but by the end of college, I didn’t like the attention as much.

Let me tell you of the glory days. My major went from piano performance to communication, because I was alright at piano, but not good enough to make money doing it. Communication, on the other hand, was something I excelled in. In early high school, I had long debates with my friends about the Trump administration whilst keeping my cool; I could think on my feet, I was witty. I always had a good joke the teacher liked.

And doing college ministry, it multiplied tenfold. I was a ministry leader for over 30 incredible guys who led Bible study small groups in the dorms. Still think about them and how amazing it was that even though I was their leader on paper, they taught me far more than I ever taught them. Over the course of three years of doing this ministry, I was connected to pretty much everyone on our enormous campus. Further, I could come up with something that sounded spiritual for any problem, peddling profundities and sophistry like a budget modern-day Aquinas. I guess that nowadays, the part of me that wants to sound smart writes articles.

For lack of a humble term, I was famous. I would walk down the halls of our enormous campus; someone always knew my name, they asked me about the ministry. They were always laughing at my jokes. Toward the end of college, my coursework demanded three speeches a week. I got to a point where I would jot down my outline on a napkin five minutes prior to me going to the front. And I got great grades, because I knew how to capture attention.

Unfortunately, attention captured me. I was addicted. They say with addictions that you chase a dragon. The first time you hit a cigarette, you get that soothing and energizing hit of nicotine that you want again; but that same first hit never returns. I quickly became overly exhausted. There was just too much pressure I wasn’t good at handling. And I needed to do it all in a way that looked good and made everyone like me, which makes everything 10x harder. Plus, I had the aforementioned girlfriend who taught me all the stuff I didn’t want to know about myself.

By my senior year, as much as I loved what I did, I was totally checked out. The attention was never enough, and even if it was enough, it was never delivered right. I resented people who were on the worship team, because they got more attention than me. There was always someone who had a higher priority. (There’s a guy in the Bible who was consumed by his desire for attention and glory, though his name presently escapes me.) I left college unbelievably grateful for my opportunities, and terrified of what would come next.

And frankly, terrified is the correct emotion for what would happen next. The breakup launched me cleanly into a job where I spent a year of my life alone in a room for nine hours a day, taking calls from angry parents, back-to-back, all day, all workweek. I now have more respect for call center agents than I could ever have dreamed of having in my life.

I got into new hobbies, like drinking, staying up too late, and wondering if this is what adult life would be like forever. In the dead of winter, I started to seriously wonder if my life had any real value at all. I went to church during this time, but my time there was a haze of feeling like the promises, character, and goodness talked about in the front was real at all for the guy in the back switching the slides on the projector.

Were it not for that community, I don’t know where I would be now. I learned that sometimes, Christians are just drowning. Sometimes they have weights on their feet they choose not to take off which pull them under. But sometimes, they’re just drowning, and the best anyone can do is to just keep throwing them the life rafts of truth far enough and often enough that they might be able to hold onto one for five minutes. And sometimes, the worst thing you can do is reprimand them for drowning, because they’ll start to wonder if the bottom of the lake is better than the air.

Because God limits Himself to honoring our free will, He takes up the monotonous business of telling us things repeatedly until we believe they are true. How often is it the case that when you question spiritual hardships, you hear the answer (whether you like it or not) everywhere in your life? But those answers can sound so utterly ridiculous.

The process of coming to a heart-level understanding of truth looks less like conquering an enemy, and more like being a complete fool. The more lies you believe, the more foolish you feel when correcting them. Show me a person who hates themselves and wants to change it, and I’ll show you a person who is blasting Michael W. Smith in their car and belting truths to their air conditioner. Show me a person who is changing their view of their body, and I will show you a person who looks at themselves in the mirror, smiles slowly, and mutters “I am fearfully and wonderfully made” every time, even if they don’t believe it at all. I can go on about the crazies who are putting oil in the shape of a cross on their doorposts, reading positive affirmations before bed with their bifocals, and taking communion with a blueberry and milk. Growth looks ridiculous.

The process also invariably takes courage. Your lies protect you, and breaking agreement with them feels like breaking the rules. In fact, it usually feels like breaking God’s rules. Growth usually requires you to wade the temptation of shame for your new beliefs. People who have gone their whole life believing that God thinks they are worms feel like they are rejecting their civic duty of self-loathing and feel as though accepting their true identity — unconditionally loved regardless of performance — is arrogant, prideful, or distasteful in some morally corrupt way.

I mention all of this because it’s becoming clear to me that because of the current state of fear and shame-based Christianity, people who want to discover their true identities in Christ require an increasingly controversial set of beliefs and a spirit of holy rebellion against the more widely held beliefs in modern evangelicalism.

It’s also fair to say that the attacks on your identity as a child of God are more dangerous and troublesome in church than they are out of them. We find people deceived, not because of a widespread liberal political campaign, but because of subtle emphases in our local Bible studies, the counsel of a pastor, and the advice of a friend.

Truth feels like lies when you’re deceived. Our sin nature is not so much the truth of our identity as it is our propensity to believe and inherit lies. The Biblical idea of iniquity being the bending of something out of shape, assumes there is a shape that was correct prior to it.

I have seen many Christians run from the voice of God, many run to church. Some run to work. I have a friend who says he can’t take a day off, because it makes him too anxious. Why would relaxing make you anxious unless there’s something you’re avoiding addressing internally? Even if we work 18 hour days and crash onto our pillows, these specters show up in our dreams. They show up on our lunch break. They show up while we are shoveling the mulch. We are all acknowledging this funny quirk of life, that it never relents on you dealing with the tougher parts of your soul. You take you with you.

It’s a scary state of affairs. Think about it. My Christian college and church, both with concentrated, coordinated effort, could not get me to believe the truths of God. They couldn’t help my attention addiction. They couldn’t stop the drinking or get me to see who God made me to be.

Do we blame churches? Do we blame colleges? Do we blame the institutions? Friends maybe? Family?

I marveled that God would pull me from my fame and down into the pit of my call center job. Put an extraverted 23-year-old guy in a room for nine hours everyday and tell me how that fella comes out. He’ll come out hungover for work. He’ll bring White Claws in a thermos to his youth group.

I realized God was ripping me away from other people. Although it couldn’t have been everything, it felt like everything I had been neglecting from my past had finally passed the baton to my heart, short-winded and exhausted.

If I were a better writer, I would now cleanly tell you exactly why that was all a good thing. I do think it was a good thing, but that year was miserably difficult for me. Fortunately, God is a great writer. I sometimes wonder if I needed a year of being completely alone and miserable to detox me from the year of being surrounded by people, attention, and the need for approval eating away at my soul. I came out of that season of life with unconventional beliefs about God’s grace and perspectives on Christian living, most of which have been largely confirmed in this new season of life. I felt like God had reintroduced me to myself.

“Hey Waylon. Wanted to introduce you to Waylon.”

“Yeah, I already know this guy. He’s uh… me…”

“I know you think you know him, but did you realize that he’s 23 now?”

“Oh yeah, I guess we may have not been caught up to speed on that, huh?”

“No, you really haven’t. He still picks his nose, but honestly, most of him has changed.”

“Really? He just looks a little older.”

“Well, he’s learned a lot. He’s been through a lot more now.”

“Uh. Okay. . . great. . . so . . . why are you reintroducing me to him? I happen to be him so… it’s not all too helpful.”

“Oh. Simple really.”

“. . .”

“He needs your help. Right now, someone is trying to destroy his life. They want him to believe he’s worthless. There’s no easy way to put this but . . .

. . . they want him dead.”

“Oh. . . that sucks.”

“Yeah. You should care more about it. But you don’t . . .

. . . because you hate him.”

“No I don’t! How could I hate myself? Isn’t my desire for things to change evidence that I love myself?”

“. . . Who’s John?”

“Oh, John’s a good friend of mine. Love that guy. He’s always been there for me. He’s like a brother. Just helped him move.”

“Did you want to?”

“What?”

“Did you want to help him move?”

“Not particularly . . . but that’s just how it is . . . I was just glad I got to spend some time with him before he leaves to go overseas.”

“So, was it a sacrifice?”

“I mean, I guess you could put it that way. But I don’t really look at it like that. I just want to spend time with John. He’s a good friend of mine.” “I’m . . . going to miss him.”

“And miss him you will.”

“. . .what’s your point?”

“You spend time with your friend, you sacrifice for him. You do this because you love him. If you didn’t love him, you wouldn’t care he was moving at all. You wouldn’t put in any effort.”

“I think I see what you’re doing here. The difference is, John’s a good man! I’m… uh… nothing like John…”

“Who said John was good?”

“Well… he…”

“Who said you were bad?”

“God. God did.”

“Really?”

“Well, I guess not directly. But don’t I have a sin nature? Two dogs to feed?”

“Who said anything about dogs?”

“Well, the preacher man did. You know, the sin dog and the Holy one?”

“There’s Holy dogs now?”

“No, you’re not getting it. I’m saying I’m a sinful person. That’s my nature.”

“That’s a heavy weight to carry, isn’t it? Especially when John’s doing a better job starving his sin-dog. Just called his Holy dog over actually. We are concerned for his health.”

“What? Are you messing with me? I can’t tell if you’re being serious.”

“Yeah, John’s Holy Dog is obese.”

“. . . Hey God, I’m sort of going through a crisis here, can you . . . be serious?”

“I can try. Here’s a question for you…”

“. . .”

“Are you wearing clothes right now?”

“Yeah. Obviously.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to be naked.”

“Who told you that you were naked?”

Welcome to Between You and Me. It’s called that because I ask that we keep this between us two. A lot of these things are quite personal, y’know? Wouldn’t want these things floating around on the internet where Christians can whip my words with the Bible, would we?

But it’s also called Between You and Me because there is a lot between me and God. There’s a lot between God and me and all of us, isn’t there? This book is an attempt to name those things so they can be healed. One chapter at a time.

Waylon Woody is a writer and minister living in West Milford, NJ.

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Dear Readers,

In this August issue of Elisha’s Riddle, our cover article, “Music of the Spheres,” invites us to consider the harmonies that connect the seen and unseen—the patterns, rhythms, and mysteries that have stirred human imagination for centuries.

We are also delighted to welcome a new writer to our pages. Andrea Sinclair begins an original serialized work chronicling the extraordinary story of her mother. It will be called The Music of a Faithful Life: Lessons of Love, Faith, and Courage from My Mother. Its opening chapter, “The Weight She Carried,” introduces a deeply personal journey that will continue to unfold in future issues. We are honored that Andrea has chosen to share this story with the readers of Elisha’s Riddle, and we look forward to experiencing it alongside you.

Also featured is “The Promise of the Father,” the newest contribution to our Seven Spirits of God series. Personally, I believe this is one of the more important things I’ve written, and am praying about it turning into a book in and of itself. Woven with personal testimony and revelation, this piece speaks from lived experience while inviting us into a deeper understanding of the Spirit of God.

This issue also brings the next entry in Walking Stick Journal, titled “Spirals,” as well as Waylon’s latest installment of Between You and Me: “The Cerulean Palace.” Both familiar series continue in their own distinctive voices, adding new turns to the paths they have already begun.

Together, these pieces remind us that every life moves within larger patterns: through music and memory, burdens and discoveries, circles and conversations. We hope you find something in these pages that resonates long after you have finished reading.

Welcome to the August issue.

Warmly,

Nick Padovani
Publisher, Elisha’s Riddle

Contents:

The Song of the Universe: The Music of the Spheres

The Music of a Faithful Life: The Weight She Carried

The Seven Spirits of God: The Promise of the Father

The Walking Stick Journal: Spirals

Between You and Me: The Cerulean Palace

Latest Podcast:

Make sure to check out the latest episodes here

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We have been exploring the universe as a kind of symbolic architecture bearing witness to the beauty of its Creator. It is an enchanted cathedral of light whose stained glass is made of living, pulsing, orbiting images, each telling parables at multiple vantage points. Each parable pointing to the eternal mystery—the Great Riddle—of its Maker.

We began this series with the Carina Nebula, where a vast stellar nursery told of a sower scattering stars like seed. We then followed the “signs” of the heavens (Gen. 1:14) to their literal fulfillment in the light that pointed to Bethlehem, the birthplace of the Messiah. From there, we considered Jesus’ own declaration that He is the “Bright and Morning Star,” the herald of a new creation whose light is now rising within us.

But the heavens do more than shine.

According to an ancient idea that has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, and theologians for more than two thousand years, they also sing.

The Music of the Spheres

This idea is usually associated with the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his followers in the sixth century before Christ. The Pythagoreans discovered that musical harmony has a mathematical structure. When the length of a vibrating string is divided according to simple numerical ratios, recognizable musical intervals emerge. A string half the length of another, for example, produces the same note an octave higher. Other simple ratios produce other harmonious intervals.

This was an astonishing discovery. Something as mysterious and beautiful as music was not arbitrary. Hidden beneath what the ear experienced as harmony was an invisible mathematical order.

The Pythagoreans began to wonder whether this relationship between number and harmony extended beyond the strings of a musical instrument. Perhaps the cosmos itself was ordered according to similar proportions. The movements of the heavenly bodies, they imagined, participated in a vast harmony—a musica universalis . . . universal music.

The “music of the spheres” was not necessarily music in the ordinary sense of sound waves traveling through the air. It was the idea that the cosmos itself possessed an underlying harmony, that the movements of the heavens expressed an order analogous to music.

The Greek philosopher Plato developed the idea further, weaving music, mathematics, and the structure of the cosmos together in his vision of reality. Centuries later, the Roman philosopher Boethius distinguished between musica instrumentalis, the audible music produced by instruments; musica humana, the harmony of the human person; and musica mundana, the greater harmony of the cosmos itself.

The idea survived well into the Christian era and eventually captured the imagination of Johannes Kepler, one of the great architects of modern astronomy. Kepler was convinced that the mathematical relationships governing planetary motion reflected a deeper harmony established by the Creator. In 1619, he published Harmonices Mundi—The Harmony of the World—in which he attempted to describe the movements of the planets in musical terms.

Some of the ancient cosmology behind these ideas has, of course, been replaced. The planets are not attached to transparent crystalline spheres, and outer space does not carry ordinary sound in the way the atmosphere does.

Yet the deeper intuition has proven surprisingly difficult to kill.

The more deeply we investigate the universe, the more we discover a reality filled with oscillation, waves, frequencies, rhythms, and mathematical relationships.

A Universe of Waves

Music begins with vibration. A guitar string moves back and forth, disturbing the air around it. Those disturbances travel as waves until they reach the ear, where they are translated into the experience we call sound.

But vibration and wave behavior extend beyond music.

Light itself is electromagnetic radiation described in terms of waves. Radio waves, microwaves, visible light, UV light and X-rays all belong to the same electromagnetic spectrum, distinguished by their wavelengths and frequencies. What our eyes perceive as color is our experience of a narrow portion of that vast spectrum.

Matter itself becomes stranger the more deeply we look. At the quantum level, the simple picture of reality as tiny solid objects bouncing around like microscopic billiard balls gives way to something far more mysterious. Quantum entities exhibit wave-like behavior, and modern quantum field theory describes what we call particles as “excitations” of underlying fields.

This does not mean that atoms are literally playing songs, or that physics has somehow proven Pythagoras correct. Poetic analogy should not be mistaken for scientific claim. But the analogy is nevertheless difficult to ignore. (For a further dive into this, check out this capturing of “sound” emerging from the earliest light of the universe: NASA: Sounds of the Ancient Universe.)

At increasingly fundamental levels, we have found that the universe is far less static than it appears. Reality is dynamic. Fields are excited. Waves propagate. Frequencies interact. What appears solid to our senses emerges from an underlying world that is astonishingly rhythmic and energetic.

But it is difficult to contemplate such a wondrous universe without eventually asking the question Scripture has been answering all along:

What is holding all of this together?

The Word Behind Creation

The opening of Hebrews contains one of the most staggering descriptions of Christ in the New Testament:

“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.”

We often imagine creation as something God did a very long time ago. The idea is that God made the universe, set it in motion, and now observes it from somewhere outside. Yet Hebrews gives us a very different vision.

Christ is not merely the One who began creation—He is the One who presently upholds it.

Every star burning in a distant galaxy, every atom composing your body, every field, force, wave, and particle exists within a reality continually sustained by the “Word of God.” According to Scripture, creation does not exist independently. Rather, it is being upheld by a flow of energy that moves like breath continually filling an immeasurable flute whose countless openings become stars, planets, and people.

This vision brings us back to the astonishing opening of John’s Gospel:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

John deliberately begins by going back to the words of Genesis: “In the beginning…” He takes us behind the scenes of this great beginning. Much like the ever-deepening discoveries of science, there have also been deeper discoveries throughout Scripture. Just as Kepler took us further than Pythagoras, John takes us further than Moses. He shows us that before there was light, there was something else.

Before matter, energy, space, time, frequency, vibration, or wave, there was the Word.

And this Word was not alone. The Word was with God.

Christian theology has spent centuries contemplating the depth of that little term “with.” It is a key part of Scripture’s tapestry that showcases the mystery of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What this shows us is that before anything existed, there was communion. The Father loved the Son. The Son delighted in the Father. The Spirit was not an afterthought arriving later in the story, but eternally the Spirit of this divine dance.

A relationship was already at work before the universe had its song. And this is where the ancient dream of the “music of the spheres” finds its origin and fulfillment.

Before the First Note

Indeed, music itself requires relationship.

A note acquires much of its meaning in relation to another note. Rhythm requires relationship between moments. Harmony emerges when distinct tones exist together without losing their distinction.

Perhaps this is one reason music has always possessed such a mysterious ability to move us. Music is unity without sameness. Many notes become one song. And at the foundation of Christian revelation is a God who is One, yet not solitary. Father, Son, Spirit . . . Distinct without division. One without sameness. They are an eternal communion of love.

This is the deeper music all creation echoes.

The Pythagoreans heard mathematics in musical harmony and suspected that the same order extended into the heavens. Plato imagined a cosmos ordered according to harmony. Kepler studied the planets and searched for the music of their motions. Modern physics has revealed a universe permeated by waves, frequencies, fields, and oscillations. Each generation has listened differently.

Yet the deepest mystery is not that the universe contains harmony. It is that harmony itself has its origin in relationship. Before there was vibration, there was Voice. Before rhythm, there was delight. Before the universe possessed its structure, the Father loved the Son in the fellowship of the Spirit. Everything around us was born from a Song radiating from this already active movement—a force—of love.

Yes, the foundational reality of existence is not a lonely deity sitting in eternal isolation, ordering some complex science project called the universe and leaving it to tick away like a big clock (with an apocalyptic end-date for the ticking where he will unleash divine vengeance—though that’s for a different article).

At the heart of all things is the Divine Family: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, eternally giving and receiving love. It was a dance and a celebration of untold joyful light, and creation emerged from this abundance. And it is now sustained by it.

Or perhaps a better word would be enchanted…

Divine Enchantment

We used this word in the beginning, but as we wrap up these thoughts, it deserves a closer look.

Though this term has been associated with spells and magic (or captivating someone with beauty), its original meaning is something much different. The word is composed of two parts: In (“into” or “upon”) and Cantare (“to sing”). It means to sing over something, though some have translated as “to sing something into being.”

This captures what the eternal Trinity did in the work of creation. With a blast of breath, the Triune Creator “enchanted” the cosmos, setting waves of light into motion that were full of order and harmony.

Galaxies formed. Stars burned. Planets turned. Life awakened. And the great cathedral was built, the glorious and living flute sparkling with music.

The Composer

So we return to where we began.

Creation truly is symbolic architecture. Every galaxy, wave, rhythm, and harmony becomes another stained-glass window in this vast cathedral of light. It appears that the ancient philosophers heard more than they knew. They perceived echoes as they peered beyond mathematics into harmony. But deeper still was relationship. And deep within this relationship was Joy. Though the Greeks called it the music of the spheres, John revealed that it was the Word.

And one day, that Word stepped onto the stage of His own symphony. The Composer entered His own composition, and the Song became flesh.

From that moment on, the universe was no longer hinting at its Maker. The One to whom every star and every wave had always pointed was now walking among us.

And now He invites us into that same Song.

The Christian life is not merely learning about the Composer, nor simply admiring the beauty of His work from a distance. It is participation. It is your own “flesh” getting caught up in the Music.

For it is through Christ, we are welcomed into the eternal communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the very life from which every galaxy was born and by which every atom is still sustained.

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My mother did not become strong all at once. She became strong the way stone is shaped—under pressure, over time, with forces that would have broken something less determined.

“I wanted to be the best mother,” she once told me. Not casually, not as a passing thought, but as something rooted deep inside her—like a vow she made long before she understood the cost. “The best mother. The best wife.”

Those words had been poured into her early, taught as truth, as duty, as identity. To be a good woman meant staying. It meant enduring. It meant honoring biblical vows no matter what those vows demanded in return.

So she stayed.

She stayed in a marriage that was unraveling from the inside out. She stayed when things didn’t make sense, when love didn’t look like love, when truth was something hidden behind closed doors. She stayed because she believed that’s what good women did. Good God fearing women didn’t leave - no matter the cost.

Until the day everything collided.

Her father—my grandfather—saw what she could not yet allow herself to see. He had lived enough life to recognize the quiet kind of suffering that becomes permanent if you let it. And he told her plainly: You have to leave. The same man who had instilled the law behind “til death do us part”, was demanding she leave her marriage.

But leaving wasn’t simple. Leaving meant betraying everything she had been taught to believe about loyalty, about God, about marriage.

She resisted.

And in that resistance came one of the most defining moments of her life—violent, chaotic, unforgettable. A line was crossed in that room by her Father that could never be uncrossed. His temper unleashed on her the same way it had since she was a child.

Something in her shifted.

“I’ve been here before,” she said. “I’m not doing this again. I have a baby to take care of.”

That baby was me.

And just like that, survival became louder than obedience.

What followed was not a clean escape. It was messy, uncertain, and stripped down to the bare essentials of existence.

She left with almost nothing—just clothes, a car, and a child in her arms.

Everything else had to go.

Furniture sold. Stability gone. A life dismantled piece by piece. She has said before she doesn’t even remember how we got from one place to another. Trauma has a way of blurring the logistics while sharpening the feeling.

But she remembers the kindness.

“The people from the church,” she said, “they were like angels.”

In the middle of collapse, there were still hands reaching out. Still moments of grace.

My father was unraveling in his own way.

This was the first of many hospital stays. The first of many suicide attempts. The first occurrence of what would become routine financial collapse. The first secrets coming to the surface—truths that had been buried under expectation and fear.

When the doctors finally spoke plainly, it was both devastating and clarifying.

“He’s a broken human being,” one of them told her.

And then, quietly but firmly: “You need to take your baby and leave.”

This time, the message landed.

Not because it was easier to hear—but because something inside her had already begun to change.

Still, leaving didn’t mean the pain ended.

There were confrontations that shattered whatever illusion remained. One moment in particular stayed with her forever—sitting at a table, looking directly at the man she had built her life around, and asking a question that would change everything.

“Are you gay?”

“Yes,” he answered.

Truth, finally. But truth doesn’t come without consequence.

She reacted the only way her overwhelmed, shattered heart knew how—she struck him. Not out of cruelty, but out of the collision between betrayal, confusion, and a life that suddenly made no sense.

In that moment, everything she thought she understood about her marriage, her role, her future—it all fell apart.

What makes her story remarkable is not that these things happened.

It’s that she did not break under them.

She could have.

By every reasonable expectation, she should have.

She was young, alone, financially unstable, emotionally overwhelmed, and carrying the responsibility of a child while navigating circumstances most people never face all at once.

But she held it together.

Not perfectly. Not without scars. But she held it together.

“I don’t know how I didn’t break,” she once said.

But I do.

Because somewhere along the way, her definition of being “the best mother” changed.

It stopped being about being the perfect wife.
It stopped being about meeting expectations placed on her by others.

It became about survival.
About protection.
About choosing her child—even when it meant losing everything else.

Years later, when we sat together reflecting on all of it, I told her something she had never fully allowed herself to believe:

“You have been an incredible mother.”

Not because everything was easy.
Not because everything was ideal.

But because in the face of chaos, she chose to stay present. She chose to keep going. She chose to love.

And that kind of motherhood—the kind forged in fire, in uncertainty, in sacrifice—is not something you learn from a book or inherit from tradition.

It’s something you fight for.

My mother spent much of her life wondering if she had done enough, if she had done it right.

But what she didn’t always see—what she couldn’t always feel—was this:

She didn’t just survive her story.

She changed mine.

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We have been exploring and enjoying the reality of the Sevenfold Spirit of God: the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel and Might, and the Spirit of Knowledge and the Fear—or worship—of the Lord.

These seven dimensions of who God is in the Holy Spirit reveal the essence of what life is about. God’s Spirit is life itself, and each aspect of the Spirit carries us through a kind of progression—a spiraling stairway of life. We begin in the wisdom of God’s love, grow in understanding, learn to walk in his counsel and power, and are ultimately brought into intimate knowledge, awe, and worship.

For this seventh and final chapter, I want to share a very personal revelation the Lord gave me before I began this series. He led me to a story in the Old Testament, and it blew my mind when I began to see how deeply it connected with the Seven Spirits of God.

You may not immediately see the connection, but I believe it will become clear as we move through the story . . .

The Son Who Was Sent Away

The story begins in Genesis 21:

“Now Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, mocking. Therefore she said to Abraham, ‘Drive out this maid and her son, for the son of this maid shall not be an heir with my son Isaac.’

“The matter distressed Abraham greatly because of his son. But God said to Abraham, ‘Do not be distressed because of the lad and your maid; whatever Sarah tells you, listen to her, for through Isaac your descendants shall be named. And of the son of the maid I will make a nation also, because he is your descendant.’

“So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave them to Hagar, putting them on her shoulder, and gave her the boy, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beersheba.

“When the water in the skin was used up, she left the boy under one of the bushes. Then she went and sat down opposite him, about a bowshot away, for she said, ‘Do not let me see the boy die.’ And she sat opposite him, and lifted up her voice and wept.

“God heard the lad crying; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, ‘What is the matter with you, Hagar? Do not fear, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is. Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him by the hand, for I will make a great nation of him.’

“Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water; and she went and filled the skin with water and gave the lad a drink. God was with the lad, and he grew; and he lived in the wilderness and became an archer.”

—Genesis 21:9–20

Abraham and Sarah had been promised a son by God. But as the years passed and the promise did not seem to be coming, Sarah suggested that Abraham have a child through her Egyptian maidservant, Hagar. In the ancient world, securing an heir was extraordinarily important. A child would carry on the family name, property, and inheritance. Without one, everything Abraham possessed could eventually pass into the hands of someone outside his family.

So Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands.

Hagar became pregnant and gave birth to Abraham’s son, Ishmael. Then, about thirteen years later, the promise finally came. Sarah conceived and gave birth to Isaac.

Conflict developed between the two households. Ishmael was found mocking his younger brother, and Sarah demanded that Abraham send Hagar and her son away. She did not want Ishmael sharing in Isaac’s inheritance.

This deeply distressed Abraham. Ishmael was not merely the consequence of a bad decision. He was Abraham’s son—his firstborn son—and Abraham loved him. He did not want to cast him out. Yet Sarah, the matriarch of the household, was insistent. God reassured Abraham that although Isaac was the child through whom the covenant promise would continue, he had not forgotten Ishmael. He would be with him and would also make a nation from him.

So Abraham sent Hagar and Ishmael away with bread and a skin of water.

At this point in their lives, Abraham had been their protector and provider. Yet the provision he sent with them did not last. The bread was consumed. The water skin ran dry. What Abraham gave them was not enough to sustain them through the wilderness.

And here the story begins to touch something deep within all of us.

When the Water Skin Runs Dry

How many of us have had people in our lives who were supposed to provide something necessary and life-giving, but what they gave us was not enough? The well ran dry. The water in the skin was used up.

Human beings need certain provisions in order to survive and thrive, and we do not live by physical bread alone. We need love. We need affection. We need honor, attention, affirmation, direction, protection, and guidance. Yet all of us, in one way or another, were not given enough. Some were barely given any of these things at all.

Abraham was supposed to be a father to Ishmael and, in some sense, a husband and protector to Hagar. But in this moment he abdicated that place. He attempted to provide something for their journey, but it ran out quickly. Their literal hunger and thirst led them into despair and brought them to the edge of death.

We live in a world filled with people whose protectors and providers have, for one reason or another, abdicated their roles. The result is another kind of thirst—a thirst for love, acceptance, affirmation, and guidance. When these needs go unmet, people often seek to satisfy them in unhealthy and destructive ways.

I know something about that thirst personally.

In 2020, during the height of the COVID pandemic, I got on a plane and traveled to Texas to see my mother. The Lord had been doing a deeper work in my heart, and I felt it was important to have a very honest conversation with her.

During the period from 2019 into 2020, my marriage was struggling. In a supernatural way, God revealed to my wife, Kelly, a struggle that had been growing in my heart and had developed into an emotional affair. Nothing physical had taken place, but it was still unhealthy, inappropriate, and wrong. The discovery caused tremendous pain for Kelly.

During that season, the Lord began exposing deeper struggles within me connected to rejection and abandonment. There were lies buried within my heart that had created a kind of thirst, causing me to seek certain things in the wrong places.

Some of this connected with my relationship with my mother and the rejection I had felt from a very young age. Kelly and I both believed I needed to speak openly with her about it. Because of the pandemic, a round-trip ticket to Austin cost about fifty dollars, so I got on the plane.

I love my mother, and we have a good relationship today. I am deeply grateful for that. But there were wounds connected to my parents’ divorce when I was two years old, particularly because I did not get to live with her. Even though I saw her every other weekend, a part of me felt as though I had been “sent away.”

The water skin of a mother’s affection, connection, and affirmation seemed to run dry. A thirst developed within me for female attention, connection, and beauty. That thirst consumed parts of my life as I was growing up. God delivered me powerfully from an addiction to pornography when I was eighteen, but some of the deeper lies remained hidden and eventually began creeping into my marriage.

One of the most powerful things about my conversation with my mother was that I began to understand her more. Among other things, the Lord showed me how much poverty and financial hardship had affected the choices surrounding custody. There were serious financial reasons she was unable to take on more responsibility for raising me.

As we talked, the Lord allowed me to see her heart. I began to understand that there had been circumstances beyond her control that affected her ability to mother me. God used that conversation to establish truth within me: I had not truly been rejected or abandoned in the way the enemy had suggested.

I know this is heavy, but there is a reason I am sharing it. Something powerful happened on the plane ride home, and it connects directly with Hagar, Ishmael, and the Sevenfold Spirit of God. I’ll come back to that shortly . . .

The Bread of Hope

Hagar ran out of the provision that had been given by the person who should have supplied more. She reached the point of giving up.

She placed her son under a bush and walked a distance away because she could not bear to watch him die. There was no store down the road. No QuickChek or gas station. In the desert, without food and water, death was truly inevitable. It was a hopeless situation through and through.

So Hagar broke down—and so did her son. Their physical thirst and hunger were mixed with the deeper pain of rejection. They had been cast out by Abraham, the man who should have protected them.

This is the heart of so much human struggle. Beneath many of our desires and destructive behaviors is a thirst for love and acceptance. When that love appears absent—or is perceived to be absent—the resulting pain can pollute our thinking and drive us toward despair.

But it was in that very moment that God appeared.

And the first thing God did was release a promise.

Before he showed Hagar the provision, he ministered to her hopelessness. Before her eyes could be opened to what was around her, she had to rise from the place of despair in which she had collapsed.

God said, “Arise.”

He told her that there was hope for her future. He would make a great nation from her son. In other words: You have no idea what lies ahead of you. Everything feels wrong right now, but I am with you. This is not the end of your story.

That is the true bread every human being needs to hear and receive (“eat”).

Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. There is bread that our fathers, mothers, teachers, pastors, spouses, and influencers cannot provide. It is the bread of promise. The bread of identity. The bread of hope spoken directly from the heart of God.

God first gave Hagar the bread of hope so she could begin to rise out of her hopelessness.

Then he opened her eyes.

The Well of the Sevenfold Promise

The wilderness in which Hagar wandered has a significant name. It is called the wilderness of Beersheba.

Beersheba is formed from two Hebrew words: be’er, meaning a well, and sheva, meaning seven. The word connected with seven also carries the idea of an oath or promise. In the ancient world, covenants and solemn guarantees were sometimes confirmed through groups of seven. People might repeat a declaration seven times or offer seven animals as witnesses to an oath.

Beersheba can therefore be understood as the well of seven, the well of the oath, or the well of the sevenfold promise.

Interestingly, the place did not yet bear that name when Hagar first arrived. The name was given later in the same chapter, after Abraham entered into an agreement with a Philistine king.

Water was more valuable than gold in that desert region. Abraham’s servants had dug wells and discovered a source of water, but conflict developed over who owned them. Abraham agreed to make peace with the Philistine king, but he required the king to acknowledge that the well belonged to him.

As part of the covenant, Abraham set aside seven lambs. These lambs served as a witness that he had dug the well and that the water belonged to him.

Genesis tells us:

“Therefore he called that place Beersheba, because there the two of them took an oath.”

—Genesis 21:31

The well was confirmed by a sevenfold witness and a covenant promise.

And this was the very land where Hagar was wandering around, dying of thirst.

The answer to her problem was already in front of her! The provision was present, but she could not perceive it.

Her problem was not simply provision. It was perception.

She was unable to see the goodness that was already there.

This is something the Lord showed me in my own marriage, but it applies to many areas of life. We can become convinced that something essential is missing. We begin lusting, craving, and reaching for things that can never satisfy us. Meanwhile, pain and disappointment blind us to the blessings that are already present.

We should also acknowledge that Hagar was probably not merely sad. She was likely angry.

Sarah had been the one who suggested that Abraham have a child with her. Now that Sarah finally had her own son, she was driving Hagar and Ishmael away. From Hagar’s perspective, this was a profound injustice.

Her tears were probably desperate tears, but they may have been bitter and angry tears as well. Those tears filled her eyes and clouded her vision. She could no longer see what was directly in front of her.

Then we read these beautiful words:

“Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water.”

—Genesis 21:19

God wants to perform that same healing work in our vision. He wants to deal with the pain, disappointment, anger, and bitterness that cloud our eyes and drive us into despair.

But we cannot miss the deeper message of the well of the sevenfold promise. This well points toward the ultimate provision that has been given to all of us.

It points toward the finished work of Jesus Christ . . .

It Is Finished

Seven is the number of completion. On the seventh day, God finished his work of creation. He looked at everything he had made and declared that it was very good.

When Jesus hung upon the cross and took the sin of humanity into himself, he eventually cried out, “It is finished.”

The work was complete.

And because that work was finished, God now looks upon those who are in Christ and declares, “Very good.”

You are very good.

That declaration speaks to needs and longings deeper than physical hunger. When Jesus said that man does not live by bread alone, he was responding to the devil’s attempt to make him doubt his identity.

Jesus had entered the wilderness (just like Hagar) and the tempter came and challenged him: “If you are the Son of God…”

But immediately before Jesus entered that wilderness, the Father had spoken:

“You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased.”

The Father gave Jesus a water skin that could never run dry. He gave him the bread that truly satisfies the human heart: the word of beloved identity.

The deepest issue beneath rejection and abandonment is often the lie that something is fundamentally wrong with us.

I am not good. I am broken. I am not wanted. I am not needed. Something about me makes me unworthy of love.

That is the lie.

It is the lie that drives so much pain and so many false attempts to satisfy our thirst, whether through substances, affairs, compulsive behaviors, or the mild but constant distractions that keep us from our destiny in God.

The finished work of the cross declares that you are not a rejected fragment of creation.

You were worth dying for.

Remember the seven lambs Abraham gave as a witness that the water belonged to him. In a much greater way, Jesus is the Lamb whose blood serves as the witness, oath, promise, and guarantee that you may come and drink freely from the Father’s love and presence!

The well belongs to you.

The Spirit of Promise

This brings us directly back to the Sevenfold Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the presence of the Father, and Scripture uses the title “the Spirit of Promise.” The Spirit brings everything we truly need for life: wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, intimacy, worship, awe, and wonder.

Jesus said that whoever believes in him—whoever comes and drinks—will have rivers of living water rise from within. John tells us that Jesus was speaking about the Holy Spirit.

The Father does not merely hand us another temporary water skin. He places the well within us.

The promise of the Father is the Holy Spirit.

This is the Spirit who reveals that we are the beloved. This is the Spirit who heals our vision. The Spirit who causes us to see that what we have been desperately seeking has already been given in Christ.

The Sons of Ishmael

After my time with my mother in Texas, I boarded a plane to return home. As I took my seat, I realized that I was surrounded by men who appeared to be Muslim.

Traditionally, Ishmael is regarded as a father of much of the Arab world, while the Jewish people trace their covenant lineage through Isaac, Sarah’s son. This ancient family conflict has therefore continued to echo through history.

The tension is about more than land, although land certainly matters. There are deeper wounds in the human heart beneath all the conflict.

Hagar and Ishmael experienced rejection, and for understandable reasons. Yet this story also reveals something I had been learning about my own parents. Abraham did not truly want to send Ishmael away. Life had become horribly messy through human fear, unbelief, barrenness, conflicting inheritance claims, and the tension between two sons.

A terrible situation developed through the brokenness of many people.

Hagar and Ishmael were rejected by human beings, but they were not rejected by God.

God was with them.

And he remains concerned with their descendants today.

As I sat on that plane, the Lord was dealing with perceived abandonment and rejection in my own life. Suddenly I felt a profound connection, deeper than ethnicity or culture, with people from a completely different part of the world. We shared the same human heart, thirsting for the same love, belonging, and acceptance.

Compassion began rising within me.

I saw more clearly how an orphan spirit has affected the entire world, leaving a particular mark upon the sons of Ishmael and upon many nations in Africa. There are other historical and biblical connections that could be explored, including the story of Noah and his sons, but in that moment I simply felt the Father’s heart for these peoples in a way I had never experienced before.

It was as though the Lord was telling me, “Your healing is bigger than you.”

Wake up, Nick. Be healed and move forward, because I am sending you to nations. I am sending you to those who feel abandoned, even though they are not abandoned. I am the true Father, and I am with them even now.

And God wants to bring healing truth into your own heart because you have a calling.

He desires to heal you simply because he loves you. That is true whether you ever travel to another nation or not. Healing is not something you have to earn through ministry.

But there is also a calling upon the church to bring lost sons and daughters home. There is a calling to participate in reconciliation between entire people groups. This is much larger than our individual lives.

We are talking about the healing of the nations.

The Spirit of Adoption

The Sevenfold Spirit is more than wise counsel and miraculous power. He certainly brings those things, but the Sevenfold Spirit is also the Spirit of Adoption—the Spirit of Sonship.

The Holy Spirit confirms that you are a beloved child of the King.

You are not abandoned.

You are not alone.

In fact, you were never alone, even when it felt as though you were. You may still feel alone now, but the feeling is not the deepest truth.

This is central to what the Holy Spirit reveals. Like a true mother, the Spirit brings comfort to the deepest places of the human heart—the places of need that, when left unhealed, can drive people toward addiction because their water skins ran dry so early in life.

The book of Ephesians begins by describing the spiritual blessings already surrounding us in Christ. Paul later speaks of the walls of division being broken down between peoples—Jew and Gentile, and ultimately every tribe, language, and nation.

But in the first chapter, Paul prays for something very similar to what Hagar experienced. He prays that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened.

He prays for our vision to be opened.

The tears of loneliness, bitterness, rejection, and disappointment can cloud our eyes. Yet when we release those things to God, he begins clearing our vision. We begin to see how blessed we are, how deeply we are loved, and how much hope remains for our future.

Forgiveness and Open Eyes

Part of opening our eyes involves forgiveness.

We begin coming out of blindness as we release the people who caused our pain—or who seemed to drive us into the wilderness in the first place.

Most people did not deliberately set out to destroy us. Even when their actions felt intentional, many were being driven by wounds, fears, lies, and their own unhealed places.

I traveled more than a thousand miles to have a conversation with my mother. Not everyone can or should do that. Some may be able to have a courageous conversation with the person who hurt them. Others must forgive someone who is no longer alive. In some circumstances, direct contact would be unwise or unsafe.

But whether or not a conversation can take place, the pain can always be brought to the Lord.

We can allow him to touch our hearts and help us release those who wounded us.

And as our vision clears, we can rise as true messengers of the gospel.

You may never travel to Africa or the Middle East, but people carrying an orphan spirit are all around you. They live in your neighborhood, work beside you, sit near you in church, and may even live within your own home.

And regarding the nations of Africa and the Middle East, I believe the church is called to remain engaged, even when our participation is expressed through prayer, generosity, and support for missions of reconciliation and healing.

There are sons and daughters in the wilderness who believe they have been abandoned.

There are wells they cannot yet see.

And the Spirit of the Father is still speaking:

“Do not fear. I have heard you. Arise. Lift up the child. There is a promise over your future!”

This is the promise of the Father.

The water skin may have run dry, but the well has not.

The people who were supposed to provide for you may have failed. Their love may have seemed insufficient. Their absence may have created a thirst that shaped much of your life.

But the Sevenfold Well of Promise is already near.

The blood of the Lamb is the witness that the water belongs to you.

The work is finished.

You are beloved.

You are not abandoned.

And the Spirit of Adoption has come to open your eyes, fill your heart, and cause rivers of living water to rise from within you—not only for your own healing, but for the healing of the nations.

Amen.

💎 🌾 💎

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