9 Words That Changed My Life

Sometimes, hope hurts.

It shouldn’t. The phrase, “hope hurts” should be an oxymoron like “Lady Gaga gospel album.” But I promise you, it’s not.

Sometimes when you’re so deep in a season of hurt, you get used to the bad. You start to think you deserve it. You start to expect it and get comfortable with it and get numb to it. And like a creature that lives so far down on the bottom of the sea, you adapt to it. You cobble together little survival mechanisms that help you get through. You get by.

But hope is tenacious …

Even in the darkest of my days, when I’d journal about suicide and despair, a fragment of hope still bounced about softly in the dryer of my head. (When you’re married with kids and have lots of laundry to do, 42% of your metaphors and analogies become housework flavored.)

There was a problem though, there was a painful obstacle between me and hope. You see, I was so far down the path of hopelessness, I was so lost and selfish and bent on destruction that I found myself in a terrible lose-lose situation. For example: If my wife was kind to me, I felt hurt because she didn’t know how hurtful I was secretly being to her with porn and a cadre of lies that would have killed her. If my wife was mean to me, I felt hurt because she had been mean to me. Any way I turned, simply resulted in more grossness.

And that is one of sin’s goals. Not simply to remove the good from your life, but to have it actually serve as a weapon of mass destruction.

Have you ever felt that way?

Have you ever felt completely unworthy when someone offers you love?

Have you ever been ashamed of the lies you’re living when someone offers you truth?

Have you ever felt undeserving of something good, because deep down, you believed that person wouldn’t really love you if they knew who you were?

It’s very possible that I’m the only one, and that’s OK. But I do need to tell you about the 9 words in the Bible that changed the way hope felt for me.

I’ve written about this before, but I’m a big fan of “edge verses.” I’m a big fan of looking on the periphery of a scene in the Bible and seeing all the deep truth that often gets hidden amidst a major scene. And in Luke 22 that certainly happens.

Jesus is on the threshold of getting crucified. He has the last supper with his disciples. He is sharing his thoughts on the father and the concept of serving and ruling. There is a sense of great importance heavy in the air. In the middle of that, he has a short conversation with Simon about how he is going to betray him.

It’s going to happen. Jesus knows this, but he wishes it wasn’t. He says to Simon in Luke 22:31-32:

Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail.

And then, in 9 words, he explains a big part of the reason I thought a mess-up like me could be a Christian.

Jesus tells Simon:

“And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.”

That’s it, those are 9 really simple words, but they demand a second look.

Do you see what Jesus is saying in that first half of the sentence, And when you have turned back? He’s saying:

And when you fail.

And when you sin.

And when you blow it and sell me out like a common thief.

And when you literally and physically turn your back on me.

And when you ruin it all.

When you turn back.

That concept is part of why our God is so different than everything we expect. We can turn back. There’s a return. There’s a comeback. There’s a loss and a brokenness and a state of falling, but you can turn back. That door is open. When I read the phrase “And when you have turned back,” I read a loud, wild picture of what grace really looks like.

Then you get to the part that is so easy to miss, the comma. Thank God for the comma, because that’s not how I would have written that sentence.

Mine would have looked more like:

“And when you have turned back, repent for three years before you try to get within a mile of my holiness.”

“And when you have turned back, don’t think for a second you’re qualified to tell other people about me.”

“And when you have turned back, here’s a long list of works you’ll need to do in order to clean yourself of the mistakes you’ve made and the consequences you’ve earned.”

But Christ doesn’t do that! He throws in a comma. He continues the sentence and simply says, “strengthen your brothers.”

Four years ago I ruined my life, but you know what?

God gave me the gift of the comma.

And that’s why I write Stuff Christians Like.

I have turned back. Not once, not twice, but a million times. And now it’s time to strengthen my brothers.

I don’t know what you’ll get this Christmas for a present, but please know this, God wants to give you the comma. He wants to give you grace. He wants you to know that when you have turned back, you can still strengthen your brothers.

It’s time to accept the comma of grace.

Katykc wrote:I saw this the other day and it left me in hysterics... it's crazy that it had that effect, but it fit very well into the life of my family right now.

meether369 wrote:

Katykc wrote:I saw this the other day and it left me in hysterics... it's crazy that it had that effect, but it fit very well into the life of my family right now.

Laughing? Or crying?

Katykc wrote:

meether369 wrote:

Katykc wrote:I saw this the other day and it left me in hysterics... it's crazy that it had that effect, but it fit very well into the life of my family right now.

Laughing? Or crying?

crying... it wasn't pretty

meether369 wrote:

Katykc wrote:

meether369 wrote:

Katykc wrote:I saw this the other day and it left me in hysterics... it's crazy that it had that effect, but it fit very well into the life of my family right now.

Laughing? Or crying?

crying... it wasn't pretty

Ahh, ok. I didn't know what form of hysterics you meant.

It is a very powerful sentiment. Like I said, I don't think I have ever paid attention to that portion of scripture. I wonder if it is in a version I don't typically use, so the wording is different.

But, I am really grateful to him for pointing it out!

Bethany, do you know, what did he do four years ago that ruined his life, as he says?

!Cat Scraptacular!

That’s what I would have named the cat scrapbooking magazine that someone I worked with once printed off the color copiers at our office.

I don’t have any proof that they were actually running a feline focused publication from within our office, but based on how many kitten photos and full color scrapbooking pages I found on our work printer, I have to assume that’s what was going on.

That’s not a great thing to do at your place of employment, but before I judge that lady, I have to remember which one of us was asked to leave that company.

I was …


I had already quit. It wasn’t all that dramatic, but it was pretty gross. It was a Wednesday and I had two days left until I was done at the company. At about 10 in the morning, my boss pulled me into a side conference room and told me to just pack my stuff up and go home. I was surprised but started clearing out all my files and packing up my stuff.

I didn’t do it fast enough though because she stood up in her cube and said something like, “Don’t worry about any of that stuff, just go.” It’s been a few years, but even typing that story makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.

But you know what, she did the right thing.

I was a jerk. I was a horrible employee at the time. I was rude and lazy and belligerent.

And so she asked me to leave.

They didn’t have any security guards in the building so it didn’t get that crazy. I think I said bye to one person. Much to my chagrin, they didn’t stand on top of their cubicles in protest like the students at the end of the Robin Williams’ movie, “Dead Poet’s Society.”

How did I end up there? In that moment? Getting asked to leave the building? Pretty simple.

I let old sin creep back into my life. After having a really powerful come to Jesus moment in the summer of 2005, I had drifted back to my old ways. And after a slow regression of hope and an increase of darkness, I made the same mistake so many people are making right now with the Tiger Woods situation:

I pretended I had boxes.

I tricked myself into believing that sin can be placed neatly inside one part of my life. That it won’t trickle out of the box and spill into every area of my heart and mind. I pretended that I possessed the fortitude to compartmentalize. Surely what I do in my personal life won’t impact my professional life. I can act out in this sector of my mind, but keep things together in these other three.

But I couldn’t and neither can you and neither could Tiger Woods.

I don’t want to go into details of what’s been alleged about his extramarital affairs. There are far smarter people than me that have already covered it.

But what I do want to address is what my friends keep asking me about Tiger Woods:

“How could he have done that?”

“How could he have been so stupid to leave hundreds of text messages and voice mails?”

“Did he think he was going to be the first celebrity who didn’t get caught? Bill Clinton, David Letterman, Frank Gifford, Kobe Bryant, they all got caught. Was he expecting to break the mold and never get found out? What was he thinking?”

What kills me about those questions is the idea that in the middle of an affair you could make smart decisions. As if, in the middle of cheating on someone you would have the intelligence and rational to make wise decisions about how many text messages you should send. As if only part of you would be broken and wounded, but the rest of your life would continue moving along perfectly.

But sin doesn’t work that way.

There’s no such thing as a “smart affair.” Or a smart burglary or a smart lie. Every decision made in that moment is dumb on some level. I think it’s because sin is like a drop of poison in water. You wouldn’t put a little cyanide in a water bottle and then say, “Only the top is poisoned, I’ll drink from the bottom.” Not at all. You’d put the bottle down because the whole thing was poisoned.

I used to think I could hide. I used to think that I could keep secrets like my lies and my porn problems and my other issues in a box under my bed. And maybe if I kept the lid on tight enough, they’d never impact any other issue of my life. But that was a lie. Ask my family. Ask the people that told me to go home from work.

They’ll tell you.

But the good news, the wild truth that proves the point of how corrosive sin is, is also the same hope we can trust in. Simply put, God makes us new. This verse has been rocking me lately and I’ve already written about it, but it’s too big to just cover once or twice.

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! 2 Corinthians 5:17

I’m convinced that God doesn’t make us better, because better wouldn’t be enough. Improved wouldn’t cut it. There’s poison in the water. New is the only way to get fresh and that’s what he offers.

To me. To you. To Tiger Woods.

Because we can’t box up sin. And when we pretend we can, things get really messy, really quickly.

meether369 wrote:He's a great writer!

Bethany wrote:

meether369 wrote:He's a great writer!

Yeah, that's the thing I like the best about his site. It seems like it would just be satire and making fun of Christians, which sometimes it is. But mostly it's humor with a secret zinger that cuts right to your core

meether369 wrote:

Bethany wrote:

meether369 wrote:He's a great writer!

Yeah, that's the thing I like the best about his site. It seems like it would just be satire and making fun of Christians, which sometimes it is. But mostly it's humor with a secret zinger that cuts right to your core

I always avoided it because I thought it was just making fun of Christians and I think there is enough of that in mainstream media. We don't need to do it to ourselves too.

But, these posts make me want to add him to my reader!

meether369 wrote:Will do!