Ryan Shinn – Welcome

Mourning – Job 2:11-13

We Christians don’t always do this as well. It is common for people to quote one verse or another about how God has a purpose, even in a great tragedy. You likely can even think of one of those verses in your head.

“So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, with no one speaking a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great.” — Job 2:13 (HCSB)

Before you look at what Job’s friends got wrong (and they got a lot wrong) this passage catches them at their best. They heard what happened to their friend. When they arrived and saw him, they barely recognized him. The man they knew had been so completely undone by suffering that he looked like a different person. Their response was to tear their clothes and put dust on their heads, dramatic gestures by our standards, but in that culture they were the most powerful way a person could say “this is beyond anything I know how to handle.” Then they sat down on the ground next to him. For seven days, nobody said a word.

That’s actually extraordinary. Seven days of silence. No advice of theological explanation. No trying to fix it, but just showing up and staying. It’s worth noting that this is exactly the picture that the Jewish practice of sitting shiva is modeled after, community gathered around someone in grief, not rushing them through it, not filling the silence with noise. Just being there. There’s a reason that tradition has lasted thousands of years. It works because it’s human, and it’s honest.

But the person dealing with that loss, probably just needs someone to sit down next to them. There is a time for celebrating what awaits believers on the other side of death. There is also a time for mourning, and the Bible is pretty clear that both are legitimate. The Bible is also clear about the tenderness of God when we need that, too.

I have a hard time doing that sometimes, myself. I am naturally a “get up, dust yourself off, and get back to work” kind of person. That has served me well in a lot of situations. But it also means I sometimes move past pain (my own and other people’s) faster than I probably should. I don’t always give myself or others permission to just sit in the hard thing for a while. Job’s friends, whatever their many failures later in this story, got this part right. Sometimes, the words from our mouths are less important that our presence. Job’s friends got that.

My own needs, my own hurt, my own losses are not insignificant to God either. I am a small figure in the grand scale of human history. Thousands of years of people have lived and died before me and thousands will after. But that doesn’t mean what I carry doesn’t matter to him. It does. and the Church, at its best, reflects that same care. Sometimes the most important thing I can do for someone is to not say anything at all, and just sit with them in it.

Center – Psalm 138

What stands out in this particular Psalm is something David says almost in passing. He’s a king, with power and authority that most people in his world could not imagine. Yet he talks about the humbling of kings before God as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“Though the Lord is exalted, He takes note of the humble; but He knows the haughty from a distance.” — Psalm 138:6 (HCSB)

David writes this Psalm from a familiar place. If you’ve spent any time in the Psalms, you know the rhythm – danger on one side, gratitude on the other. Enemies surrounding him, yet an unshakeable confidence that God sees him and will come through. It’s this constant back and forth between what his eyes are telling him and what his spirit knows to be true. That tension runs through almost everything David wrote, and it’s part of what makes his writing feel so honest and so human.

What stands out in this particular Psalm is something David says almost in passing. He’s a king. He has power, status, and authority that most people in his world could not truly imagine. And yet he talks about the humbling of kings before God as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. A lot of powerful people throughout history have spent their energy thinking about their own greatness. David spends his thinking about God’s.

I had a conversation recently with someone I care about, where I shared something very personal. It was all leading to a significant and positive decision in my life. The first response out of that person’s mouth was about how it might affect them. It felt like the things I was sharing were only really about that other person, and not me. But as I thought about it, I do a version of that same thing more than I’d like to admit. Not always in such an obvious way, at least I hope that I never respond to someone in that way. But I naturally tend to filter everything through the lens of how it relates to me. I put myself at the center without even trying. It just happens.

That’s exactly what verse 6 is pushing back against. Following God means placing proper perspective on things, not thinking of myself more highly than I ought to, and not making myself the main character of every situation. It means shifting the focus to where it actually belongs, which is on God and what he is doing in the middle of all of it.

The antidote is gratitude, and not just the surface level kind where I count my blessings and feel good about my circumstances. The deepest gratitude I can have is actually about something much bigger than any of that. The God who created the universe, the one who breathed life into humanity and specifically into me, the same God who sits above all of human history and knows all billions of people on this planet, from kings to slaves, that same God actually loves me. That is not a small thing. His glory is incomprehensible, and yet he takes note of me. When I actually sit with that, everything else finds its right place pretty quickly. My needs feel smaller. My pride feels sillier. And the humility that David is describing in this Psalm starts to feel less like some religious discipline and more like the only reasonable response.

The Dark-Mirror, Language Virality, & How “AI slop” Resonates

Language works virally. You know the drill. Someone coughs. Little tiny bad guys travel across the room, just as your friend inhales. Those viral particles set up shop in your friend’s body.

Unfortunately, the way viruses spread is something that we’ve all become quite aware of after having faced a pandemic that controlled all of our lives for a while. You know the drill. Someone coughs. Little tiny bad guys travel across the room, just as your friend inhales. Those viral particles set up shop in your friend’s body. Their business plan is very good and they start pumping out new models using their converted factories. Pretty soon, your friend also coughs. The cycle goes on.

But have you noticed that the same situation repeats with many other things too? A song will worm its way into the ears of everyone you know. Memes make people laugh and go from cell phone to cell phone. We even say that something like a popular video on YouTube has gone viral.

That also happens with words too, and not just new slang (like bro and 6-7) but even ordinary words. In High School, my best friend instead of calling something a thingamajig when his brain was buffering, he would say puppy-dog, as in “Please hand me that…a…that puppy-dog.” Because of him, I say that too, even though he has long since abandoned the habit.

I’ve since heard other people say that, because I do. They’ve never even met my HS friend. Possibly, long after my death, some kid in Australia will say that, after the term moved on, just like a virus does.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the last few years. I’ve kind of been obsessed with this viral nature of language. As a writer, I’ve studied how words and phrases move through the world. As an avid user of AI tools now, I have to also be aware of how that writing is being perceived, the very words that I’m using, and how people are reading my very words through the filer of “is that human?” This is even harder as words and phrases are carried along person to AI to person, just like viruses.

A lot of us are less aware of how this happens in the more sinister corners of the internet. But rest assured, this affects you, even if you aren’t using the Dark Web.

The Dark-Mirror

Have you ever gotten one of those scam Nigerian prince emails? The first thing that you may have noticed was the improper grammar or spelling. You’d laugh at the stupidity of the scammers. But, did you know that was more of a feature than a bug in the message?

See, the scammers knew that if you are the type of person that would instantly notice that and scoff, then you wouldn’t fall for the scam anyway. But maybe you would read the email as someone desperate for help, with English as their second language, and miraculously they were reaching out to you for help.[1] The scam was meant to trick the uninitiated and those whose hearts were inclined to intercede when someone needed their help.

The arms-race between the vast public (mostly consisting of Westerners, who much of the rest of the world has deemed to have much more in dollars than sense) and the shadowy villains who want to scam them has gone up a level in recent days. Now, the scammers are using better technology tools in their efforts.

Today, I got a text. It said in summary that their investors had noticed me from my work with The Marketing Cowboy, then quoted something I’d said on LinkedIn, and said they might be interested in talking with me about how I might help with their project.[2]

I responded, “OK, tell me about your project.” I was pretty sure that this was a scam, but I was game to play along.

They responded with an even longer message about the project, responding quite clearly to what I’d asked. At the end was something like, “My bosses would love to discuss it with you. Do you have another messaging tool, like WhatsApp?”[3]

First of all, I don’t have a WhatsApp. I don’t want to have that. Finally, they somehow (and no, my cell isn’t listed on LinkedIn) found me on my cell, so just keep talking to me on my cell.

I responded, “No. We can keep messaging here. I don’t need to talk on WhatsApp. There are too many scammers who use that.” A subtle dig, and I knew that I probably wasn’t talking to a human. I just hope that I made someone laugh. I couldn’t help myself.

They didn’t respond.

I also don’t care. It was a scam. I can’t stop it from happening. The scammers don’t call me personally from call centers in Kolkata any more than Sam Altman is asking for my advice about Chat GPT. I’m a nobody in the AI circle of life.

But that’s ok. I’m fine with that. What I’m not fine with is the increasing amounts of sophistication that they are using to try and separate me from my money.[4]

They are using legitimate AI Engagement tools under false pretenses. They claim to represent real businesses and those running the tools don’t know any better. They are also not really motivated to find out, when that investigation could result in the loss of a paying customer, no matter how bad they may be.

If they move you to WhatsApp, then the AI Engagement tool has no ability to monitor what happens after that.

The other option is to use in-house AI. That is expensive, but will at some point become the norm. At that point, my guess is that they will cease trying to get you to move to WhatsApp. That just involves another layer that is out of the scammer’s control, and in some way opens them up to getting caught.

Why am I bringing this up in a conversation about language? Good question. The increasing use of details and good grammar will lead to more distrust of these details, and well-formed sentences. When I see increasing levels of personal data and precise language, my distrust grows in proportion.

This is the leading edge, not the AI posts on LinkedIn. I don’t know about you, but I’m already starting to ignore those detailed LinkedIn posts. If you aren’t yet, you will. I’ll bet on it.

AI Slop

A lot of hay is being made right now about “AI Slop.”

“It’s over-polished” someone says.

“I ignore all em dashes.”

You might hear someone say, “It just doesn’t resonate with me.”

That last one, I’ve actually heard. It made me laugh out loud (a real LOL). Nothing perks up my ears more than when I see the word “resonate.”

Google has a tool call Google Ngrams. It tracks the usage of a word in printed literature over time. It is hard to use in this instance, because it doesn’t track things as recent as AI is, but I’ve also used other tools in addition for this too.

Basically, though, the word resonate used to be almost completely restricted to its use as a musical term, as in, “The tuning-fork resonates” In writing, people would seldom use it in any other way. There was no law people were following, of course. They just didn’t use it in a metaphorical sense.

But a few years ago, some clever writer thought that it would be a great idea to use it as something applied to a person (i.e. “That resonates with me.”). Much like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, it would make sweeping changes in the landscape. It caught on.

Mind you, people were not using it a ton, but it was in common usage. You probably saw it. That’s why when you read it from AI you thought nothing of it.

See AI loves that word, because it is versatile. It lacks both positive and negative judgement.[5] When I say “That resonates with me,” you aren’t sure from that sentence alone whether I like the thing, or I hate it. It just means that the stimulus is reactive. It’s a word that a junior-higher would love. It requires a whole other sentence or phrase just to determine the goodness or badness of a thing. It pads your word-count.

“Bud Light really resonates with me. When I see that label, everything in me says get away, and fast.” As a phrase, it might taste great, but it also is much more filling. It really fills up the page. It is a pretty thought, making a big impression on you, but it doesn’t actually tell the reader much. But no matter it’s origins, people like the word.

So, when LLM’s found it, they latched on. It has become a huge hallmark of AI writing, but no one noticed. Don’t use it for AI detection, either. You will fail at that task, because of what happened next. That is a great case of the virality of language.

As people began reading AI and copy-pasting, then reading what others had copy-paste posted, we began to incorporate that into our everyday writing. Now I see it all the time. Congratulations. Now you will too.

And boy is it everywhere. Now, resonates is used far more metaphorically than in musical use. If you said, “The tuning-fork resonates,” someone might say, “Yeah. It resonates with me too.” Every time you see it, know that this word is an instance of how AI actually virally affected the words humanswe use.

Em dashes and chiasms

The case that you often hear about the em dash[6] is related, although because we humans decided to universally loathe it so much, you won’t see it make the jump from AI to humans. It did jump from humans to AI, though.

Don’t believe me? I’ll prove it. Your word processor will often change the double-dash into an em dash automatically. See—I just did it! The reason that your Microsoft Word does that, is because you like it. You used that a lot. LLM’s didn’t create that on their own. You used to do that. You don’t anymore. Now, like a bad light beer, it resonates[7] deep in your cerebellum.

But the reason that AI likes it is basically the same reason that it likes resonate. It is both versatile and devoid of judgement. It can function as a comma. It can set apart independent clauses and lacks the weirdness that we’ve decided semi-colons carry. It can also function like a parenthesis, but seems to be less…well…parenthetical.

The em dash is like grammatical duct-tape. It does almost anything. AI loves it. We hate it. For us, it’s the COVID mask of the grammar world. It stops the spread cold, and using it makes all witnesses snicker.

Another known format of AI writing is the “It’s not X, but Y.” Usually, you will see it in some LinkedIn post trying to be way more clever than it really is.

“You might think that your struggling sales is the economy, but it’s actually your sales staff training.”

You thought that it was someone being clever. Nope. Most of it is AI now.

This one is harder to pin down. People have always tried to cleverly point out the genius behind their unique take on things. It justifies their writing. You might think that I’m doing the same here. Maybe so, but to be fair, I’m not offering any unique take. I’m just following the research.[8] And in case you are wondering, I used no AI at all in writing this.

The Greeks used to call this structure a chiasm, or at least half of one. An actual chiasm was a bit more clever and complex. This is really nothing new. It is people using AI to try and do what they used to have to do real intellectual labor to achieve.

I guess my point in all of this is that much of what we consider as AI slop is nothing new at all. It’s just language doing what language has always done, transmit person-to-person and evolve all along the way. Your grandchildren will be skibidy-ing because AI told them to skibildy. Their AI will skibidy because people skibidied a lot.[9] Meanwhile, we will talk about how anyone using that word is just copy-pasting AI.

Maybe we are not that much different than the LLM’s, anyway. I hope that thought resonates with you.

[1] I actually knew a kid in a church youth group years ago, who asked me for guidance. He was “about to come into a lot of money.” He told me that he’d been contacted by a Nigerian prince…and you know the drill. I tried to let him down easy, but I also wanted him to avoid falling for what I knew was obvious.

[2] Strikes #1 and 2— overly long and TED talk-type formal language is a giveaway, and I don’t know why scammer AI always loves the word “project.”

[3] Strike 3—You’re out. A scam will always try to get you to another less secure app like Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp (the most commonly suggested).

[4] If you are a scammer, please be aware that I don’t have much of that anyway.

[5] According to my research, this is one of the keys to AI writing. It will come up later.

[6] If you don’t know, it is the double dash, that your computer word processor puts into a long dash automatically

[7] See what I did there?

[8] Well, and also like a good boy, what Claude tells me to do.

[9] If you are very confused, ask a 13 year old.

Lend – Luke 6:32-36

Predatory lending (particularly toward the poor) was a significant problem in that time and place, despite the Old Testament’s repeated prohibitions against it. People found creative workarounds.

“But love your enemies, do what is good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High. For He is gracious to the ungrateful and evil.” — Luke 6:35 (HCSB)

Jesus is still on the same thread he started in verse 27. He’s been laying out this radical alternative way of living, and now he’s even expanding on what he said previously. If you only love people who love you back, he says, what’s the big deal? Even people with no interest in God do that. There’s nothing distinctly different about that. Jesus is after something much harder than basic reciprocity.

The lending piece is worth slowing down on because the cultural background matters here. Predatory lending (particularly toward the poor) was a significant problem in that time and place, despite the Old Testament’s repeated prohibitions against it. People found creative workarounds. They charged interest anyway. They took farms, homes, and even children as collateral. Sometimes they simply refused to lend at all if they doubted the person’s ability to repay. It was a system designed to protect the lender at the expense of the borrower. And Jesus addresses it head on. He says to lend anyway, even when you’re not sure you’ll see it back.

This one hits me personally. When someone asks to borrow money and uses the word “borrow” in a very loose sense of the word, I feel it. There’s a frustration that builds when generosity gets taken for granted, when someone seems more interested in what they can get than in any genuine relationship. It feels like being used. And honestly, sometimes it is. But Jesus doesn’t seem to carve out an exception for those situations. He addresses them directly and says to give anyway.

The thing that helps me with this is remembering where the money came from in the first place, or the coat, or even the love and patience I’m being asked to extend. None of it originated with me. It all came from God. So when I give it back out, even to someone ungrateful, even to someone who won’t repay it, even to someone who doesn’t deserve it, I’m really just returning to God what was his to begin with and letting him use it how he sees fit. That reframes the whole thing.

And then there’s the character issue. Jesus ends this passage by pointing to the character of God himself. He’s gracious to the ungrateful and evil. Sometimes, I’m ungrateful and evil. If I’m trying to pattern my life after him, that’s the standard I’m working toward. Not gracious only when it’s easy or when it’s appreciated. Gracious because that’s who he is, and who I’m supposed to be becoming. That’s harder to do than it is to say. But nobody promised that following Jesus was going to be easy.

Golden – Luke 6:27-31

Sit with it for a minute and it gets uncomfortable fast. It’s easy to be kind to people who are kind to you. That’s not really following the rule, that’s just basic reciprocity.

“Treat others the same way you want them to treat you.” — Luke 6:31 (HCSB)

Jesus lays out a string of instructions in this passage that go against pretty much every natural instinct we have. Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. Give to everyone who asks, and don’t expect anything back. Jesus is describing a way of life that runs completely opposite to how the world operates, and he’s not being subtle about it.

It all ends in what is called the Golden Rule, treat others the way you want to be treated. That phrase has been repeated so many times it almost loses its weight. It sounds simple. It might be something you’d expect to see cross-stitched on a pillow.

Sit with it for a minute and it gets uncomfortable fast. It’s easy to be kind to people who are kind to you. That’s not really following the rule, that’s just basic reciprocity. I want my enemies to treat me well even if I’m treating them poorly. I want grace extended to me even when I haven’t earned it. The hard part is extending that same grace outward, especially to people who have actually wronged me.

This passage exposes something in me that I’d rather not look at directly. I want to be the kind of person who loves radically, who gives without keeping score, who prays genuinely for people who have hurt me. But everything in my natural instinct fights against that. I am selfish. I default to protecting myself and my own interests, even when I’m trying to look like I’m not. That gap between who I want to be and how I actually operate day to day is real, and this passage puts a spotlight directly on it.

Here’s something I noticed about myself recently. When I talk to someone who clearly only cares about their own opinions and can’t seem to consider anyone else’s perspective, it bothers me. It feels immature, almost childish. But then I do the exact same thing, just in a quieter way. I listen, I nod, I try to look sympathetic, and the whole time there’s a part of me that’s still circling back to my own thoughts and my own concerns. That’s not the radical love Jesus is describing. That’s a performance of it.

So, the prayer is for transformation, not effort. I can’t manufacture this kind of love through sheer willpower. It has to come from actually putting on the mind of Christ, asking him to change what I want, not just what I do. I want to genuinely get inside other people’s heads, to care about what they’re carrying, and to love people the way God has loved me without keeping score and without expecting it back.

Upside-Down – Matthew 18:1-6

That would’ve had very different implications in that culture than it does today. We tend to center everything around children now. But in the ancient world, children were not the focus.

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” — Matthew 18:3 (HCSB)

The disciples come to Jesus with what is honestly a pretty revealing question, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? They’re thinking about rank, about status, about who gets the best seat at the table. And Jesus’ response is to pull a small child into the middle of the group and say, ‘well, this. This is what greatness looks like in my kingdom.’

That would’ve had very different implications in that culture than it does today. We tend to center everything around children now. But in the ancient world, children were not the focus. They were dependent, they were small, they had no status, no trade, and no ability to provide for themselves. They knew they needed their parents for everything. Their very identities were shaped entirely by the adults around them. Jesus wasn’t pointing to a child because children are cute or innocent in some romanticized way. He was pointing to their total dependence. That’s the quality he’s after.

What Jesus is describing is a kingdom that runs completely opposite to the way the world measures greatness. The world rewards confidence, self-sufficiency, achievement, and status. God rewards humility and dependence on him. Those two value systems are not compatible, and the gap between them is something every Christian has to navigate every single day. It is a constant battle to not just absorb the values of the culture around us without even noticing it happening.

Then Jesus breaks the analogy and says something very direct about children themselves. The way we treat the vulnerable, be itchildren, the hungry, the imprisoned, or the hurting, it is a direct reflection of how we value God. This isn’t the only place Jesus makes that connection. He comes back to it over and over throughout the gospels. It seems pretty clear that God has a particular concern for the people the world tends to overlook or push to the margins, and he expects his people to share that concern.

So my takeaway here isn’t complicated, even if it isn’t always easy. I need to make a genuine effort to help “the least of these,” not as an occasional charitable impulse, but as a non-negotiable part of what it means to follow Jesus. The kingdom he’s describing is upside down from everything the world values. Greatness looks like a child. The important people are the ones nobody else is paying attention to. For me right now, that is making me re-look at almost everything I do.

Mountains – Psalm 121:1-8

“The Lord will protect you from all harm; He will protect your life. The Lord will protect your coming and going both now and forever.” — Psalm 121:7-8 (HCSB)

In one of the Lord of the Rings movies there is a siege of the castle where the good guys are sheltered. They are completely surrounded. Outnumbered. The evil forces are increasingly forcing their way inside. All hope seems gone. And then, from the mountains above, a blinding light appears with an army that sweeps down and turns the whole battle around. It’s one of the most visually striking moments in the whole trilogy. And for some reason, that’s exactly the picture that comes to mind when I read the opening verse of Psalm 121, especially knowing the kind of situations David found himself in throughout his life.

But the thing David says next. It isn’t something from the mountains themselves that save him. There might be an army up there. But the help comes from God. The maker of heaven and earth. Not a general, or some great military strategy, or even a fortunate turn of events. It’s God himself. And then the Psalm goes on to pile up this extraordinary list of assurances. He doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t wander off, he is watching over you constantly, right now, and forever. You are not alone. I am not alone.

I’ll be honest though, this Psalm also raises a hard question that I can’t just skip over. Throughout history, there have been Christians who looked to the mountains and the army didn’t come. They were persecuted. They died. They suffered in ways that may seem completely at odds with the promises in these verses. I don’t have a great answer to that. It’s one of those things I hold with open hands and a lot of questions. I just know that I have to keep clinging to God even when the answers aren’t there, and trust that his protection operates on a scale that I can’t always see from where I’m standing.

I want to live like someone who can’t lose. Not in a naive or reckless way, but in the way that this Psalm describes. Putting myself in situations where I genuinely need God to come through, and then trusting that he will. It’s not thrill-seeking, but a different way to make decisions from how most people operate. It means leaning into the calling even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed from a human perspective, because the ultimate outcome already is.

God will protect our coming and going, the Psalm says. Both now and forever. That’s a big promise to stand on. I’m choosing to stand on it. How about you?

Transporters, AI Engagement, & the Future

A while back I was talking with a friend. He said that it would be really cool if we actually developed working transporters, like in Star Trek where we could beam from one place to another instantly.

I thought about it for a bit, and the more I thought about it the more that I realized that might solve the traffic jams on the freeway, but we’d be more harried than ever. You actually say stuff like, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. I have another meeting in 7 seconds.”

We’d be constantly watching the clock. Sure, you might get in more meetings each day, but you’d be more transactional than ever…less human.

Let’s face it, all these communication tools haven’t gotten us closer together at all, they’ve trained us like lab rats to treat each other as NPCs in our game of business.

I mean, I bet right now if I looked at your email inbox I’d see a large number of unopened emails. Now before you think I’m attacking you, I deal with that too. Or maybe you’ve achieved that magical Zero inbox…ah, the stuff of legend. But if you have, that means that you’ve deleted thousands of “do you have a quick 15 minutes” emails…or Unsubscribed to countless things that you never subscribed to in the first place.

So, congratulations everyone (and once again, I point the finger at me too), we’ve all absolutely ruined this great communication medium. Why, because we abandoned just treating people like we would want to be treated.

And now, we’re doing it with AI too. I’m not against AI at all, but I have to laugh as LinkedIn feels less and less personal as it fills up with more and more AI engagement bots asking ridiculously over-involved questions to people that we don’t care about, in order to expand our reach.

The future will belong to those who use AI, yes. But maybe not in the way we think. Maybe, just maybe in the middle of things moving in data streams at lightspeed, we can all slow down and treat each other like we all matter, even if that person isn’t the next big contract.

Winning – Mark 8:34-38

Throughout history, revolutionary leaders have rallied their followers with promises of glory, triumph, and victory. Jesus does the exact opposite. No rousing speech. No promise of earthly reward. Just a call to pick up the most shameful instrument of death in the Roman world and follow him.

“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?” — Mark 8:36 (HCSB)

When we read the word “cross” today, we don’t flinch. We even wear them around our necks as jewelry. But when Jesus told the crowd standing in front of him to take up their cross, the people listening to him would have reacted very differently to that word. In their world, crucifixion wasn’t a religious symbol. It was one of the most brutal and humiliating forms of execution ever devised. It was public, it was agonizing, and actually where the word “excruciating” comes from. It was reserved for people Rome wanted to make an example of. Wearing a cross as jewelry in that culture would have been like wearing a miniature gallows around your neck today. It would have been absurd and offensive.

This makes what Jesus says here all the more powerful. Throughout history, revolutionary leaders have rallied their followers with promises of glory, triumph, and victory. Jesus does the exact opposite. No rousing speech. No promise of earthly reward. Just a call to pick up the most shameful instrument of death in the Roman world and follow him.

He uses a rhetorical device common in classical literature called a chiasm, named after the Greek letter chi, which looks like an X. If you try to save your life, you’ll lose it. If you lose your life, you’ll save it. The ideas cross each other and form that X shape. The next thing he says is a gut punch. What does it profit a man to gain everything the world has to offer, if he forfeits his soul in the process?

I was reading about John Chau lately. He was the young American missionary who died a few years ago trying to bring the Gospel to an isolated, uncontacted tribe on an island near India. The world has mocked him. People called him reckless, naive, even foolish or crazy. And maybe there are legitimate questions about his methodology. But his passion for the Gospel can’t be questioned. And according to this passage, Jesus would not have called him a failure. We don’t know yet what fruit, if any, came from his sacrifice. But that might not be the point.

When Jesus mentions eternal life, he’s talking about a quality of life available to us today, right now where you sit, not after death at all. Now, don’t think he’s negating a life that continues in heaven after we shuffle off the mortal coil. But, it’s something deeper and more real than anything this physical world can offer or take away.

I had a poster on my wall when I was a kid, a BMX biker mid-jump, totally airborne. I was never into that sport, but the words on it never left me. “God, grant that I am a winner first in your eyes, then in my own.” That’s really what Jesus is getting at here. If you are living for an audience of One, and that One has already secured the outcome, then you genuinely cannot lose. In that sense, John Chau couldn’t actually lose. He wasn’t playing a game where he could be a winner in the world’s eyes. The question is, what would you do differently if you knew you couldn’t lose?

Easy? – Ephesians 5:22-33

That’s the picture. And it is a genuinely beautiful one when it works the way it’s supposed to. The problem is that we are humans, and our sin nature has a way of mucking up even the most beautiful design.

“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word.” — Ephesians 5:25-26 (NKJV)

Paul spends eleven verses talking very specifically about husbands and wives. There is a tendency in some circles to grab the small phrase in verse 32, where he says he is talking about Christ and the church, and use it to reframe the entire passage as a metaphor as if Paul wasn’t really talking about marriage at all. That doesn’t hold up. If the whole thing were just a metaphor for Christ and the church, why would he spend that much space giving very specific instructions to husbands and wives? Paul uses that phrase to point out that the grand relationship is actually Christ and the church, and that human marriage is meant to be a reflection of that, not the other way around.

What he describes is a specific design. Wives are called to submit to their husbands’ leadership the way the church submits to Christ. Husbands are called to love and sacrifice for their wives the way Christ loved and gave himself for the church. That’s the picture. And it is a genuinely beautiful one when it works the way it’s supposed to. The problem is that we are humans, and our sin nature has a way of mucking up even the most beautiful design.

Here is where it gets complicated, and where I think a lot of honest conversation tends to stop. When the system breaks down, both sides tend to make their obedience contingent on the other person going first. The husband says he’ll sacrifice once she submits. The wife says she’ll submit once he leads and puts her first. And so both sides wait, and nothing moves. But Christ didn’t make going to the cross contingent on the Church doing the right thing. He sacrificed for people who were actively working against him. That’s the standard Paul is holding up for husbands. And wives aren’t called to submit only to husbands who are leading perfectly. If that were the condition, it wouldn’t be much of a calling at all.

I’ll be straight with you, I don’t have this figured out and I’m not going to pretend I do. I think that this is one of the hardest teachings in the New Testament to actually live out, for both sides. In my observation, it’s easy for a wife to follow a husband’s leadership when he’s heading exactly where she wanted to go anyway. That’s not really submission, that’s just walking in the same direction. It gets real when he points somewhere she doesn’t want to go. And on the other side, it’s easy for a man to lead and sacrifice when he’s being respected. The harder question is what he does when he isn’t.

I don’t have a tidy answer to what happens when one side consistently refuses to hold up their end. Paul doesn’t address the breakdown here. Other passages handle that. What I do know is that the calling on each side isn’t contingent. We are human, and we’re much more focused on how we are treated than how we treat others.