Pursued: Ransomed Into Romance (Part 2)

What if the thing that nearly broke you was never punishment?

I did not forget what Christianity is. That would require having truly known it in the first place.

I grew up surrounded by it. Enveloped in it. Christianity was the water I swam in, the air I breathed, the grammar of my entire childhood. I knew the vocabulary. I knew the stories. I knew the arguments well enough to win them. I had the architecture of belief memorized from the outside, every doctrine in its proper place, every answer to every question and objection ready.

What I did not have was the thing itself.

It was not until I pulled out the love letters God had written to me and actually read them, not to win a debate or defend a position, but to find out what they said, that I discovered something that stopped me cold.

Christianity is not what I thought it was.

It is not what most people think it is.

It is something far more scandalous. Something orders of magnitude more enthralling than the version I had been handed before I was old enough to question it. Something so staggering that saying it plainly still feels either delusional or like the truest sentence I have ever spoken.

Christianity is about one thing: intimacy with the God who made me.

As a Person. As a Presence to encounter. God giving Himself to be known. I do not mean known like information. I mean the ancient, dangerous, biblical knowing. The kind that undoes your defenses. The kind that pulls a man out from behind his fig leaves and makes hiding impossible. The kind of knowing that comes from wrestling with God through the long night of the soul, refusing to let go until the blessing comes, walking away with a limp and a new name.

Jesus said: ask, and you will receive. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened. Then He said something that has always undone me:

“If you, being imperfect, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?”
— Matthew 7:11

The answer was never hidden. It was written down and handed to me. I just had to open it. I just had to ask.

I did not learn this in a library.

I learned it in the olive press.

✠✠✠

The Press

The word Gethsemane, the garden where Jesus sweat blood the night before the Cross, means oil press. The place where the olive is crushed until it yields what is hidden inside. If I have come to know anything, it is this: it is not a metaphor. It is a description of how God does His deepest work in a human soul.

Two days before Brielle, my second daughter, was born, I lost my job. Wholly unexpected. The way I was providing for my family, gone without warning. Then Brielle entered this world through terror. Placental abruption. Emergency. Chaos. I stood there, staring through an incubator at a fragile, perfect body fighting to breathe. Intubated. Fed by tubes. Her life on the edge of a cliff, second by second. A child I would have traded my life for without hesitation, connected to wires I did not understand in a room that smelled of antiseptic and dread.

For a month she lived in a NICU. For a month I lived on my knees.

No philosophy helps in a NICU. No argument steadies a father watching machines do what his own hands cannot. In that room I did not need intellectual triumph. I did not need a well-reasoned theodicy. I needed mercy. I needed God to be near. I needed the kind of Presence that can hold a man together when his illusion of control has burned completely to ash.

He was just that. Not loud or theatrical, but near. The way a father sits beside a sick child through the night without speaking. His presence doing what words cannot.

A year later the press found me in a hospital bed of my own. Emergency room by ambulance. ICU. My heart stopped. Emergency surgery to stay alive. I came home from that hospital to a marriage already fracturing at every seam, and within weeks I no longer lived under the same roof as my children. The separation was official.

What followed over the next years was not a single event but a slow, grinding demolition of everything I had built my sense of self around. The family. The home. The future I thought I was living toward. All of it came apart.

The years that followed were the narrowest of my life. A single father, working whatever flexible job would let me stay present with my daughters rather than hand them to a stranger. Surviving on less than enough in every direction. The kind of years that strip a man down to what he actually believes when there is nothing left to perform for.

I will not assign blame here. The press does not require a villain. It only requires weight, and there was weight enough to last a lifetime.

What that season did to me, I did not fully understand until years later. It did not merely break my heart. It reconfigured something in my nervous system. It convinced me, at a level deeper than conscious thought, that intimacy and closeness with another human was perilous. That love was the name of the wound. That openness was the mistake. That the only safe heart was the closed one.

That to love again was to risk annihilation.

I built walls. Not metaphorical ones. Fortress upon fortress. Concentric circles of concrete and steel and razor wire, each one built beyond the ruins of the last. These structures did not feel like choices. They felt permanent. Immortal scars that could never be healed back to unwounded flesh. I was convinced, with the serene certainty of a man who has learned something the hard way, that they would stand forever.

2020 brought a different kind of press. The entire edifice of my theological framework, the one I had built my identity on as a sincere, devout, believing Mormon for the whole of my life, came down. Because I loved truth more than I loved the institution. The deeper I pursued God with genuine sincerity, the larger He became. What I discovered was that the Jesus of Mormonism had become too small to contain the God I was actually encountering.

I want to be straightforward with you. Some will hear that and think: apostasy. I understand the instinct. However, I did not leave God. I left a container that had become too small to hold the God I was actually finding. That is not apostasy. That is the story of nearly every serious Christian mystic and seeker throughout history. The willingness to let go of a smaller thing in pursuit of a truer one. My faith did not shrink when I left. It expanded. I pursued God more honestly, not less.

I know what the default assumptions are when someone leaves. That is not my story. I left from the inside of sincere belief, not from the outside of it.

Which meant that by 2020 the theological ground and the relational ground had both shifted beneath me, and the question that remained was not one I could answer from a library. It was rawer than theology. It lived in the body, in the chest, in the particular exhaustion of a man who has been through what I had been through and still, somehow, has kept his heart open.

Is any of this worth staying open for?

It is.

But I did not find that cheaply.

Then something happened in a winter cabin that I still do not have full words for.

Stillness. In the stillness, a Presence.

I will not dress it up into something more impressive than it was. No thunder. No blinding light. But something entered the room, or perhaps I became aware of what had always been there, and it was not soft. It was the kind of strength that does not need to raise its voice. A Lion, fierce and sovereign, yet unthreatening. Authority without intimidation. Power that did not reach for your throat but for your hand.

What this Presence did not do was spare me from further suffering. What it did was far harder and far better.

It began to open what I had permanently sealed. That was the miracle.

Let me be precise about what made that miraculous. Not the visitation itself. What was miraculous was the out-working. Because a heart that has been through what mine had been through does not simply reopen. Every natural law of the human soul says it stays closed. The scar tissue alone should have been enough. Yet over the months and years that followed, something began to happen inside me that I knew with absolute certainty was beyond my own capacity. God had worked a mighty wonder. Truly. He had taken my heart of stone and given me back a heart of flesh. Walls came down. Not all at once. Not without resistance. But they came down.

I began to trust again. To hope again. To love again, without reservation, without keeping one hand on the exit. I experienced beauty and connection with someone I had risked giving myself to again in a way I never thought possible.

Which is precisely why what came next cut so deep.

It ended through a text message. More than six years of shared life, dissolved in a sentence on a screen.

The kind of ending that does not just hurt. It feels like death, except the body is still living. It reaches back through everything and retroactively makes you doubt what was real.

The thing that made it devastating was not just the loss. It was that the heart being broken was the one God had spent years miraculously rebuilding. The heart that should have been permanently sealed. The one that had no natural business being open again in the first place. A heart that began to dream with child-like wonder and hope again.

If you have ever watched something you knew was a miracle get broken, you understand the particular quality of that grief.

I am writing this from inside the aftermath, sometimes asking whether the miracle was real, and still choosing to believe it was. Which is perhaps why I can say with more conviction than I could have said otherwise:

The press is not punishment.

It is the place where the oil comes from.

✠✠✠

The Oil and the Lamps

Gethsemane.

Most of us know it as the garden where Jesus sweat blood. The place of anguish. The place where He prayed not my will but Yours and the disciples fell asleep.

But Gethsemane is a Hebrew word. Gat shemanim. Oil press.

The olive, one of the most ancient fruits in the world, does not yield its oil willingly. It must be crushed. Pressed under unimaginable weight, until what was always hidden inside is finally released. The oil does not come from the outside. It was always there, sealed within the flesh of the fruit. The press does not create it.

The press reveals it.

Jesus chose to pray the night before His death in a garden named for the crushing. He did not stumble into Gethsemane. He walked there. Deliberately. Knowing what it meant. Knowing what was coming. In that press, the full weight of human sin, the abandonment of His closest friends, betrayal that came with an intimate kiss, the horror of what awaited at dawn, He yielded. Willingly. For love.

What flowed from that crushing lit the world.

Now consider the parable He told.

“At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.”

— Matthew 25:1–4

The detail that most of us read past, the detail that carries the whole weight of the story, is the oil.

The wise virgins had it. The foolish ones had none.

Notice what they did have. Lamps. They came with lamps, which means they came with the outward form of readiness. They knew the bridegroom was coming. They showed up. They were, by every visible measure, part of the wedding party.

What they had not done was obtain what only comes from the press.

“The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep.”
— Matthew 25:5

It was not until midnight, the hour every Jewish listener knew, when God had always chosen to act. Not the darkest hour, but the most suspended one. The exact midpoint between the last light and the first. The hour of maximum uncertainty, when you cannot see what is behind you and cannot yet see what is coming. That is when the cry went out: “Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!”

The bridegroom was not running behind. Midnight was always the hour.

The darkness was the season the oil was for. The lamps and the light-generating oil were never meant for daylight. The wise ones had understood this. The foolish ones had assumed that lamps were enough, that showing up was enough, that the outward form of readiness was the same as the interior reality of it.

It was not.

Where did the oil for those lamps come from? From a press. The oil of gat shemanim. The oil released only under the crushing. The oil that cannot be summoned at the last second, stored up by good intentions, or borrowed from another soul.

The wise virgins were not being selfish or stingy when they firmly said no, when asked to give some of their oil.

What the press produces in you belongs to you alone. The intimacy God forges in the crushing cannot be transferred, outsourced, or performed. No one can be close to God on your behalf. Intimacy by its very nature cannot be proxy. It must be received in the dark, under the weight, in the garden named for exactly this.

This is not a contradiction of the gospel. The oil of Gethsemane, what flowed from Christ’s own crushing, is offered to every soul without exception. It costs you nothing to receive because it cost Him everything to produce. That offer is as open as the arms He spread on Calvary.

The wise virgins had oil because they knew the lamp was never the point. The oil was.

When the cry rang out at midnight, the foolish ones discovered what religion without encounter always produces: The lamp is not the light. The lamp is only ever the vessel. A vessel with no oil is a beautiful, empty thing. No divine life in it, no substance capable of producing illumination, nothing that can push back the dark.

The lamp was always meant to be the vessel. The oil was always meant to be His presence within it.

Jesus told His followers: you are the light of the world. Not you have light. You are it. Each lamp a fractal of the Source, each flame drawing from the same oil pressed in the same garden, each one commissioned to carry into the dark around them something of the Light that entered the world and refused to be extinguished. But only if the oil is there. Only if the press has done its work.

The lamp without oil cannot fulfill the one purpose it was made for.

In the same parable, they came saying, “Lord, Lord, open the door for us!” Jesus said something that must have stopped everyone in the room: “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.”

The same words from Matthew 7. Spoken twice. The natural consequence of arriving with the form of devotion and none of its substance. With the lamp and none of the oil.

The foolish virgins were not evil. That is the most unsettling thing about them. They were simply unintentional. They knew the bridegroom was coming and treated that knowledge casually, as though knowing were the same as being ready. As though the lamp were the same as the light.

This is the mistake of the age. Not outright rejection of God, but the slow, comfortable, even mindless business, of fitting a little of Him into a life organized around everything else. A Sunday service here. A prayer in crisis there. The lamp carried out of habit, the oil never sought.

The invitation of the parable is not complicated. It is not to more religious activity. It is to re-orientation. To stop trying to fit God into your life and begin building your life around Him.

The invitation is this: to make union with the Lover of your soul the very epi-center of your life. To make that divine relationship the source from which everything else flows and to which every other plan yields.

The oil is His presence within you. The lamp is everything you bring to the world. One without the other is just something beautiful to carry.

What is being pressed out of you, right now, is oil.

The Bridegroom is coming, and it is not yet midnight.

✠✠✠

Your Press

I do not know what your press looks like. I only know it has a name.

It may be a hospital room. A marriage that went silent before it ended. A faith that once felt alive and now feels like going through the motions in an empty building. It may be the 2am sleeplessness when the performance has finally run out and something underneath it is asking, quietly but insistently, to be found.

It may be the wound you have never named to another living soul, the one so deep you have started to wonder if it is simply who you are.

For the reader who hears that and feels the fear underneath it: what if I don’t have enough? The oil is not your accomplishment. It is not something you manufacture through sufficient devotion. The press belongs to the Gardener. He tends it. He sets the weight. He promises that what is pressed out of you in His hands will be exactly what is needed for the lamp He has prepared for you to carry.

This is not about your performance. It never was. It is about your willingness to yield, as He did.

“Not my will, but yours.”

His presence is not withheld. It flows the way sap flows from vine to branch, not by striving, not by earning, but by remaining in the vine.

Whatever it is, the press is doing something, and what it is doing cannot be accomplished any other way.

The oil was always there. The press only reveals it.

✠✠✠

This Is Not Punishment

There is a question so old it has calcified into instinct.

When the press comes down, when the thing you most feared finally happens, the question rises before you can stop it. You may not say it out loud, but somewhere underneath the theology, underneath the composure, it is there:

“Who is to blame?”

Maybe you blame yourself. If only I had done this differently. If only I had been stronger, wiser, more faithful. If only I had seen it coming.

Maybe you blame your parents. The wounds they carried that became wounds they handed down. The silence that shaped you. The absence that defined you. The theology they gave you before you were old enough to question it.

Maybe you blame the one who hurt you.

Maybe you blame God, and maybe you have never said that out loud either.

This reflex is not new. It may be the oldest theological instinct in the human story.

Job knew it firsthand.

Job was, by every account, a righteous man. Scripture itself says so. Yet catastrophe arrived on his doorstep without warning or reason. His children died. His wealth was gone. His health collapsed. Then his friends came.

They sat with him in silence for seven days, which is the last time they were helpful. Then they opened their mouths, and what they said, in various sophisticated ways, was this: you must have done something to deserve this. A good God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Therefore your suffering is evidence of guilt.

It sounded like theology. It was a lie.

God Himself called it a lie. At the end of the book, He turned to those friends and said plainly: you have not spoken of Me what is right. Their theology of retribution, their clipboard God tallying the ledger of human behavior, was a distortion of who He actually is.

Job, who had argued with God, wept before God, demanded answers from God, and refused to pretend the suffering was his fault? God called him My servant, and gave him back everything.

The reflex to assign blame to suffering is ancient and universal, and it is wrong.

The disciples standing in front of a man born blind asked the same question. They dressed it in religious language, but the human reflex underneath was identical:

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

— John 9:2

Someone must be responsible. The clipboard God demands an explanation for every suffering, and the human heart, trained by that false god, searches frantically for the name to put on the ledger.

Jesus dismantled thousands of years of human instinct in a single sentence.

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned. This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

— John 9:3

Neither.

Stop blaming your parents. Stop blaming yourself. Stop searching the ledger for the line that explains why the press came down how and when it did.

When you are tempted to think that two thousand years of human progress have moved us past that question, look honestly at your own interior life the next time suffering arrives. The reflex is still there. It has simply learned to whisper instead of shout.

What did I do to deserve this?

Is this because of what they did to me?

If only...

Joseph knows something about this.

His brothers conspired to murder him. Thought better of it and sold him into slavery instead. Human trafficked by his own family into an ancient world where brutality we barely have the vocabulary for was commonplace. He spent years in a foreign land, falsely accused, unjustly imprisoned, forgotten. If anyone had the right to spend their life searching for someone to blame, it was Joseph. His suffering had actual names attached to it.

Yet when the moment of reckoning came, when his brothers stood before him trembling, Joseph said something that has echoed like a clarion call down through four thousand years of human history:

“You intended it for evil. God intended it for good.”

— Genesis 50:20

He did not minimize what they did. He did not pretend the years in the prison were painless. He simply told the truth about what he had come to understand in the press: the crushing was not the final word.

Paul knew something about the press as well. Before his conversion he had stood watching followers of Jesus be executed, holding the coats of the men who threw the stones. After his encounter with the risen Christ, he was shipwrecked three times, beaten with rods, flogged within an inch of his life, imprisoned in chains, stoned and left for dead. He was not writing Romans 8 from a comfortable chair. He wrote it from inside a prison cell. From inside the crushing.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”

— Romans 8:28

Not some things. Not the easy things. Not the things that make theological sense from a comfortable distance.

All things.

The NICU. The ICU. The marriage that came apart. The betrayal that arrived with an intimate kiss. The text message that ended years without the dignity of a conversation. The silence of a father. The wound so deep you have started to wonder if it is simply who you are.

All things.

This is not a promise that none of it will hurt. It already has. This is a promise about what the Gardener is doing with the crushing.

What God takes you through is far more an indication of what He intends to do through you than it is a measure of your worth, or adequacy.

The blindness was not a verdict. It was a canvas.

The Anointed One knelt in the dirt, made mud with His own hands, and pressed it into the man’s eyes.

Go and wash, He said. The man went, and he came back seeing.

The hands that shaped Adam from the ground shaped clay from the same earth and touched eyes that had never seen light. The first time those hands worked with dust, they made a man. This time they restored one. The Cosmic Potter has not changed His methods. Only His material.

Dear Reader, the same hands are available to you. Will you let Him kneel in the dirt of your life and restore what you have never been able to see?

Stop blaming. Stop searching the ledger for who is responsible for your press. The question the disciples asked has already been answered. It was answered in a garden named for crushing, by The One who chose it willingly, who took the full weight of every evil ever intended against you, and declared:

God intends it for good.

The canvas is not finished.

The Anointed One is already kneeling in the dirt.

✠✠✠

Name It

There is a practice I have come back to again and again in the years since the cabin. A simple and terrifying one.

We have made confession into something it was never meant to be. A criminal admission behind closed doors. A reckoning before priestly authority. A transaction that leaves you feeling managed rather than loved.

That is performance wearing the costume of confession. True confession is something far older and far more intimate. It is truth-telling before the One who already knows. It is Adam hearing the voice in the garden calling Where are you? and finally answering honestly instead of hiding deeper in the leaves. Do you really think God didn’t know where Adam was? That question was a summons back to intimacy.

God was not asking with the stern voice of a judge about to deliver a sentence. He was asking with the voice of a Father who missed His child. Come close. Tell me what you are carrying, so you can be free.

“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

— 1 John 1:9

“Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed.”

— James 5:16

“Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
— Romans 8:1

True confession is the beloved speaking to the Father.

Picture her for a moment. Dragged in. Exposed. Humiliated. Every failure made public before she could compose herself or construct a defense. Thrown at His feet before the crowd, before the accusers, and before the one person whose opinion of her actually mattered.

Without her saying a word, He already knew everything.

He knelt in the dirt beside her and wrote something no one recorded. Then He looked up at the crowd. Then He looked at her.

“Neither do I condemn you.”

His feet. That is where you bring what you cannot carry anymore. The fear. The failure. The thing you have never said out loud to another living soul. You do not have to compose yourself first. You do not have to have the words. You only have to come.

Name your fears to God. Not the sanitized version. Not the acceptable spiritual request. The actual thing. The thing underneath the thing. The lie you did not know you believed. The fear behind all other fears. Name it. Out loud if you can bear it. To the One who already sees it and is still here.

I will go first.

• I am afraid that every relationship that ends confirms the lie I have been carrying since before I had words for it: that I am the one thing in the room that cannot be kept.

• I am afraid that God sees exactly what the people who left could not stay for.

• I am afraid that if I stop performing, there will be nothing left worth loving.

• I am afraid that the silence of a father says something permanent about my worth.

• I am afraid the wound goes deeper than any healing can reach.

• I am afraid I don’t have what it takes, and I’ll never be enough.

• I am afraid I have failed my daughters by bringing them into a fractured family.

Name it. Whatever yours is. Because the thing you cannot name has power over you. The thing you name to God loses its grip.

This is not a technique. It is the oldest act of trust in the human story. It is what Adam refused to do when he hid instead of speaking. God was not looking for a geo-location, or information when He called out Where are you? He was inviting Adam to stop hiding and come close. To be known.

That invitation has never been revoked.

Stop hiding. Come close. Name the fear. Let the One who already knows it lavishly love you anyway.

✠✠✠

Why Are You Hiding?

Why do I perform? Why do I curate the version of myself I present to the world, to my family, my co-workers, my friends, and worse, the version I present to God, as if I could hand Him a resumé polished enough to finally be safe?

Everything is already before Him. He is not a cosmic surveillance camera tallying your failures. My friend, He is the One before whom all reality is, as the writer to the Hebrews says, naked and open. He sees. He knows. Every wound you have never named. Every failure you have hidden under competence. Every place where you have told yourself what so many of us were told, in one form or another:

That sentence has been dressed as wisdom. It has been dressed as strength and independence and maturity. It is none of those things. It is a wound wearing a mask.

Above all it is a lie.

Its author has been speaking it since the first garden.

That lie is one of the most consequential in the modern world. It is meant to isolate, to separate, to convince you, you are alone. Which in turn leaves the door to despair and hopelessness wide open, for the enemy to come in and wreak havoc.

The truth, the story of all of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, is precisely the opposite: Someone did come. Someone came from further away than distance has a name for. He crossed eternity. He descended into death itself. He defeated an enemy far greater than any empire, any army, any darkness you are currently standing in front of. He did it not to leave you to fend for yourself afterward, but to be near. To dwell inside the very chest that has been carrying all of this alone.

“This is the secret: Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

— Colossians 1:27

Instead of recoiling He comes closer.

We can make our peace with a God who is theoretical, useful, philosophical. A God kept at the safe distance of doctrine and Sunday attendance. But a God who actually wants you? Who pursues not your compliance but your heart? That is the thing that undoes us. Because it means there is nowhere left to hide.

That is exactly where healing begins.

This is my witness. It is not an argument or a case I am building. It is what I lived: When my heart was shattered again, when intimacy betrayed me again, and I felt like I was bleeding from the inside out, I did not find God standing at a distance with His arms crossed, waiting for me to compose myself. I found Him as a place to weep. A chest to collapse into. A tourniquet for the kind of bleeding that has no visible wound.

Not a theory to master. Not a proposition to defend. A Presence to cling to.

That alone changed what I understood Christianity to be.

The purpose of my life is not to know about God. It is to know Him. To be known by Him. To return to Him with a whole heart and to call others out of hiding.

Lay down the performance. Leave the posturing behind. Come close.

God did not make you to perform your way to heaven. He did not make you to fit in. He made you to belong, to Him. He made you for something ancient and dangerous and alive.

The God who made you is not merely out there, sustaining galaxies with impersonal force. He is near. He is holy. He is Love, and Love, by its nature, cannot remain at a distance from the one it loves.

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.”

— Revelation 4:8

Day and night the throne guardians never stop crying out because they are undone by Him again, and again, and again. Every repetition a fresh rupture of wonder. As if holiness keeps revealing new depth every time they look. Holiness that cannot be exhausted.

I, dust, father, wounded man, add my small voice to their endless song.

✠✠✠

A witness, not an argument.

A surrender, not a performance.

An invitation, not a conclusion.

Stop hiding.

Come home.

Enter the Sacred Romance you were created for.

✠✠✠

Part 3 of Pursued is called From Garden to Feast.

The Bible is not an answer key. It is a love letter. Once you see the single thread running through every page of it, you will never read it the same way again. Come and see.

If this stirred your heart, consider supporting my publications so I can keep writing more. A small gift makes a big difference. Venmo Matt-Watts37

This is the first piece in a series called, Pursued: Ransomed Into Romance

Undying, perfect love.

Love that undoes.

and still.

kept.

coming.

To the one holding this now, having never quite felt at home in the world… You have always been the point.

My grandfather worked the earth. They called him Wild Horse. He rode out into Utah’s desert and canyons and brought back what others couldn’t touch. He took desolate earth, barren, forgotten, good for nothing, and made it yield abundantly. He tamed the untamable. My father worked fire, and spent his life making steel yield to his will. Taming raw horsepower into something that roared with purpose.

I grew up watching men shape wild things into something that would last.

I did not know then that I was watching my own calling.

I am the next in that line. But the wildness I was given to tame is found in neither wild canyons nor iron and fire. It lives here, in the place where God plants truth inside a human soul. I work at a different forge. I chisel away lies. My aim is to reveal the truth of what is already there.

And what you are holding, this series, these pages, is what happens when inherited wildness finally meets the page.

The thing I was made to say. The hill I was made to die on.

✠ The Question ✠

So before you read another word, I need to ask you something directly:

Do you actually know what Christianity is?

I mean the beating heart of it. The thing Jesus Himself said it was, in His own words, the night before they killed Him.

Because I got it wrong. And, if I’m honest, I was handed it wrong.

By faithful ones. By people who cared and passed on what they were given. By people who poured themselves out in loving devotion for something they genuinely believed. The community meant everything. The devotion was real.

But somewhere in the transmission, the living center got replaced with a system.

A checklist. A program. A set of steps to complete correctly. So that you might pass.

“This life is a test.” How many of us were handed that sentence before we were old enough to question it? God watching from a distance, clipboard in hand, tallying your failures. Follow the steps. Keep the commandments. Endure to the end.

I turned it into a syllogism to win arguments. A moral framework to order civilization. A set of propositions I could arm myself with. A system with all the right answers. And the deep, unexamined comfort of being certain I knew how to get to God, without ever truly asking if He was trying to get to me.

All of it sincere. None of it the point.

Because the God I was performing for, the one keeping score from a distance, assigning rewards for compliance, looks nothing like the One who knelt in a garden, sweating blood, whispering not My will but Yours.

He was never the examiner. He was always the Pursuer.

The point (and this will sound scandalous the moment I say it plainly) is: intimacy.

Intimacy. With God. The Almighty, eternal, all-knowing, all-good God who wove the cosmos into being. Something deeper than proximity. Something more dangerous than admiration from a safe distance. He wants you to know Him. To Know Him, the way Scripture means that word: ancient, unguarded, and alive.

That is the audacious claim I will stake everything on. That is the sword.

Let me show you what I mean.

✠ The Parable of the Craftsman ✠

There was once a master craftsman who lived at the edge of a great valley, where vineyards rolled like green rivers over the hills. His workshop stood behind his home. Doors wide, windows glowing late into the night.

He was known for his hands.

Hands that shaped wood until it seemed to breathe. Hands that smoothed grain until it shimmered in the light. Hands that lingered over details no one else would ever notice.

One day, he began to craft a gift. The finest timber, chosen with care. Every measurement deliberate, every carve patient and slow and full of love, until the imperfections were gone and what remained was something exceptionally beautiful.

Months passed. The gift grew strong and elegant. When light touched it, it seemed almost alive. Those who glimpsed it whispered in awe.

The craftsman refused to rush. He was preparing a moment, and the moment demanded everything he had.

When the gift was finished, he brought it to the one he loved most. They turned it slowly, marveling at the workmanship, the detail, the balance, the beauty. Anyone else might have said: Look at what I have made.

The craftsman chose silence instead.

He waited. The beauty did its quiet work without his help. Wonder moved through the room the way it does when something truly made stops being an object and becomes a presence. He watched the heart soften.

He let the gift prepare the moment.

Then he spoke a single sentence. The one the whole gift was prepared to deliver.

“My life was always meant to flow into yours.”

The gift had been crafted to make that sentence land. Beauty and wonder had done their work, and the soul was quiet enough to receive what had always been meant for it. The object was the gift. The beloved was the reason.

✠✠✠

✠ The Gift ✠

So it is with God.

Before the foundations of the earth were laid, before oceans found their shores, before mountains rose, before light pierced the first dawn, you were already in His mind.

“Long before He laid down earth’s foundations, God had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of His love, to be made whole and holy by His love.”

— Ephesians 1:4

Creation itself bears the marks of craftsmanship. Galaxies sweeping across distances the mind cannot hold. The mathematics of stars. Tides keeping rhythm with a faithfulness that shames every clock. And then closer in, the intricacy of a single leaf, and the human heart that beats without instruction.

“The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands.”

— Psalm 19:1

Nothing here is accidental. Every detail was measured before it was made, every sunrise finished like a craftsman finishing a surface no one will ever see but him. The world is a gift.

And yet the gift was never the final point.

The mountains are the wrapping. The oceans are the ribbon. The galaxies are the engraving on the box.

And then, at exactly the right moment, the Craftsman stepped into His own workshop.

“In the beginning was the Word… and the Word was God… and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

— John 1:1, 14

The Craftsman clothed Himself in flesh to deliver the sentence the whole gift had been preparing us to hear.

And delivering it cost Him everything.

He came Himself, and wrote it in flesh and blood. The Innocent of innocents stretched His arms open on a Roman cross, the tree of life reborn, and held them there.

Not in defeat.

In proposal.

This is what the cross is.

✠✠✠

✠ The Bridegroom: Five Witnesses ✠

Yes, a debt was settled there. A debt so staggering no human currency could have touched it. Every sin. Every fracture. Every broken covenant between heaven and earth across the full span of human history, nailed to that cross, and swallowed whole by the One who owed nothing and paid everything.

Yes, a verdict was rendered. The just condemnation that hung over every human soul was absorbed by the only One who could bear it without being destroyed by it, and was destroyed by it willingly.

The courtroom language is not wrong. It is gloriously, magnificently, eternally true.

It simply does not go far enough.

Because a man does not willingly suffer death on a Roman cross merely to settle an account. He does it because He could not bear the thought of eternity without the one He loves.

The debt was real. The love that drove Him to pay it is realer still.

A creditor pays a debt. A bridegroom lays down his life.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
— John 15:13

Because when the soldiers drove the nails, the women stayed. When empire did its worst and the men scattered into the dark, the ones who loved Him could not leave. They remained. They stood at the foot of it and watched. What kept them there is the same thing that kept Him there.

✠

Love so immovable that death could not make it flinch.

This is a wedding proposal written in blood.

✠

And before you resist that, ask yourself where this language actually comes from. Because it wasn’t me. Nor was it a poet or theologian reaching for a useful image.

Centuries before the incarnation, Isaiah recorded these words:

“As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.”

— Isaiah 62:5

Notice it’s not the language of obligation, but that of a man undone by love. Rejoicing, the way a groom looks at his bride and cannot believe his own joy. That is the word God chose for how He feels about you.

Before Jesus had barely begun His ministry, John the Baptist stood at the Jordan and declared:

“The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete.”

— John 3:29

The one sent to prepare the way named what was coming. Not a king arriving for tribute. A bridegroom arriving for his bride.

When the Pharisees challenged Jesus about fasting, He looked at them and said:

“Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn while the bridegroom is with them?”

— Matthew 9:15

He did not offer a parable. He identified Himself. Directly. To the faces of the men who would eventually kill Him for it.

And when Jesus chose a parable to describe His own return, He did not reach for a conquering king or a presiding judge. He told the story of ten virgins waiting through the night with their lamps. Waiting for a bridegroom.

“At midnight the cry rang out: Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!”

— Matthew 25:6

His return, in His own telling, is a wedding.

The last book of Scripture, the final word of the entire Story, does not end in a courtroom. It ends at a wedding feast.

“Hallelujah! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and His bride has made herself ready.” — Revelation 19:7

And then the angel turns to John and says, write this down:

“Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.”

— Revelation 19:9

And as if he knew someone would wonder, as if he could see every reader across every century who would hold these words and ask whether it was true, he adds:

“These are the true words of God.”

— Revelation 19:9

Dear Reader. You have been invited.

Consider what Jesus did at the last supper. He took the cup, filled it with wine, and said: “This is the new covenant in my blood…” To us, those words sound like theology. To the disciples, Jewish men who had grown up watching Jewish betrothals, those words sounded like something else entirely.

They sounded like a wedding proposal.

The full weight of what He was doing that night, what it meant in the language and tradition of His people, what He was offering and what He was asking, that has its own altar. It is waiting for you in Piece 4 of this series.

From Isaiah’s prophecy to John’s proclamation. From the confrontation with the Pharisees to the parable of the waiting virgins. From the Last Supper in the upper room to the final page of history.

The Bridegroom language does not belong to me.

It belongs to Him.

✠ Spoken Twice ✠

And notice, He makes this point not once but twice.

In Matthew 7, those who came to the door were not unbelievers. They had prophesied in His name. Cast out demons in His name. Done mighty works in His name. The seemingly devoted.

And He looked at them and said: “I never knew you.”

The performance was real. The relationship was not.

This is not a passage about sin, obvious failures, or moral collapse. It is about devotion, aimed at proving rather than receiving.

There is a difference between a bride who loves because the vow has been spoken, and a servant who performs because the master is watching. One is responding to love already given. The other is trying to manufacture the conditions for love to arrive.

They spent their lives performing for Someone they never actually knew.

His ransom was never for a religion. It was always for a romance.

“Jesus gave himself for us, that he might ransom us from all iniquity.”
— Titus 2:14

In Matthew 25, the foolish virgins came to the wedding door crying Lord, Lord, open up. And He said: “I don’t know you.”

Same cry. Same door. Same answer. Spoken twice so we could not miss it.

This life is not a test to pass. It is a courtship to receive.

And here is the lie underneath all of it. The one that keeps the performer tirelessly performing without end:

After all you can do, it will finally be enough. But frail, finite, fallen human beings know with a quiet dread that there will always be more that could have been done. Should have been done. The accusation walks back through the open door again and again. And that door, propped open by the lie, stays open.

The lie, I’m not good enough. Not yet. Not quite. Almost. That texture, not yet, keeps the performer performing indefinitely. Always one more work away from feeling safe enough to simply be loved.

The lie says: earn it. prove it. perform until you qualify.

Consider a child. A child doesn’t perform in order to be loved by a good father. They are loved first, and everything they become grows from that. This is not a lesser kind of love. It is the truest kind, and it is exactly what is on offer.

Perhaps you are reading this as the performer. The devoted one. The one whose calendar is full of service and whose record looks impeccable, and who still, in the quiet hours when the performance has run out, hears that whisper:

I’ll never be good enough. Not yet. Not quite. You know the one. The voice that has been running underneath everything for so long you’ve mistaken it for your own.

Perhaps you are reading this as the broken-hearted. The one who already knows something is fractured, who has never quite felt the warmth of a love they could trust.

Perhaps you are both. The same soul wearing different clothes on different days. Because the performer and the broken-hearted share one wound: a God they believe they must earn. A love they have never felt safe enough to receive.

The longing to finally feel like enough. The exhaustion of never quite arriving. The quiet grief of a love you’ve been working toward your whole life but never felt safe enough to receive.

Please hear me when I say this:

That ache is not a verdict on your inadequacy.

It is a holy summons to stop hiding behind performance and come as you are.

Religion is not the same as relationship. And no amount of mighty works can substitute for the one thing He was always asking for.

To be known. And to know Him.

The Bridegroom who would rather lay down His life than live without you, His Bride. The Craftsman who loved what He made so ferociously that no cost, not agony, not humiliation, not death, was too high to pay to say one sentence to your face:

“My life was always meant to flow into yours.”

“I am the vine; you are the branches.”

— John 15:5

✠✠✠

✠ The Blueprint ✠

He is not painting a picture. He is making a claim about the architecture of your soul. And He is the Architect. Let that land for a moment.

The One who engineered the cosmos, who designed the human heart and breathed life into it, who wove the laws of nature into existence before a single vine ever grew from the ground, when He speaks about how you were made to flourish, He is reading from the blueprint.

“I am the vine; you are the branches” is not poetry dressed up as theology.

It is bedrock.

The vineyard was always the Sunday school illustration. Union with God is the lesson it was made to teach.

This is reality.

You were made for this. For His life flowing into yours the way sap moves through a branch. Not as effort or performance, but as the answer to everything you have ever longed for.

Walk through a vineyard. Look closely.

You cannot see precisely where vine ends and branch begins. The life of one flows seamlessly into the other. They are distinct, yet inseparable. Two, yet one life. The branch draws everything from the vine. The vine expresses itself through the branch. From that union comes fruit, flowing freely from shared life, never forced, never performed.

This is what it means to be human. You were designed for indwelling. For shared life. For intimacy. Created for something deeper than distant admiration of God, and something more alive than obeying commands from a safe arm’s length.

Christianity is not a 5-step program. It was never a checklist handed down by human authority for you to perform your way to heaven. It isn’t the 7 habits of highly effective people with a steeple on the cover and a membership card tucked inside.

It is an invitation into a life you were always meant to share with Someone who has loved you longer than you have existed.

This is the thing that took me the longest to unlearn.

The branch does not strain to produce fruit out of fear of being cut off. It simply lives in the vine. The fruit is what love looks like when it has somewhere to go.

This is the difference between a servant who obeys because the master is watching and a bride who loves because the vow has already been spoken. Between a man performing for a God who might still reject him and a child running toward a Father who already ran first.

You were not saved into slavery. You were welcomed into a wedding.

The good works, the faithfulness, the daily yes, these are not the price of admission. They are what it looks like when someone has already said I do and means it with everything they have.

Fear says: I must, or else.

Love says: I get to, because He already has.

Listen to what Jesus defines as eternal life. In His own words, the night before Golgotha:

“This is eternal life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

— John 17:3

He does not say: eternal life is a place you go when you die.

He says: That they know You."

And here is where we must be careful, because we flatten that word until it means almost nothing. To know in the biblical sense is beyond information. When Scripture says Adam knew his wife, it carries the weight of the whole person given to another. That word is experiential. It is union.

Which is why the most sobering sentence Jesus ever spoke was this:

“Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not?’… And then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you.’”

— Matthew 7:22–23)

He does not say: I never approved of you, or I never observed you. He says something far more tender and far more devastating: I never knew you. The relationship was never there.

Eternal life is participation in divine intimacy.

And the God who offers it is nothing like the god you may have been handed.

God watching from a distance, clipboard in hand, tallying your failures, or noting your spiritual merit badges.

He has a cross.

✠ God Comes Down ✠

Every religion humanity has ever built, including more than a few that call themselves Christian, is constructed on the same architecture. Climb. Perform. Merit your way upward. Ascend the ladder until you are finally worthy of the divine.

And then the Good News arrives and does something no other story in history dares to do.

He descended.

"He who descended … ascended higher than all the heavens."
— Ephesians 4:10

He could not bear the distance. Your performance never had anything to do with it. Your position on the ladder never mattered to Him. While you were on the ladder, sincere, devoted, certain that one more rung would make you safe enough to be loved, He was already at the bottom.

Waiting.

Arms literally outstretched wide on a cross saying:

“I would rather descend into death itself than ascend to heaven without you.”

He is the Ageless Romancer who left His throne to find you.

If you still wonder whether this is truly what He wants for you, hear what He prayed the night before they killed Him. The longest recorded prayer in the Gospels. He prayed nothing about doctrine. Nothing about the survival of an institution. He prayed that you and I would be one in Him. That we would know Him. That the very union between the Father and the Son would somehow, impossibly, miraculously, become the union He shares with us.

That prayer has its own altar. It is waiting for you in Piece 3.

✠✠✠

✠ A Cascade of Union ✠

Scripture refuses to let us shrink this. Rather than one image of union, it gives us a cascade, as if God knows we will domesticate any single picture, so He floods us with them:

Vine and branch (John 15:5)

Bride and bridegroom (Ephesians 5:31–32)

Father and child (Romans 8:15)

Potter and clay (Isaiah 64:8)

Breath and lungs (Genesis 2:7)

Shepherd and sheep (John 10:14)

Head and body (Colossians 1:18)

Temple and indwelling Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16)

Bread and hunger (John 6:35)

Light and sight (John 8:12)

Cornerstone and living stones (1 Peter 2:4–5)

Seed and soil (Matthew 13:3–9)

Different pictures. One truth. Union.

And Scripture presses this truth through paradox, because union itself is paradox. The Lion conquers as a Lamb. The King reigns by serving. Strength is made perfect in weakness. The branch bears fruit through surrender, not striving. The vine supplies everything, and the branch truly lives.

Paradox is not a riddle to be solved. It is a doorway into reality.

The glory of the branch is found in responsiveness to the vine, never in independence from it. That is intimacy. That is Christianity.

✠✠✠

So here is my audacious claim. The one I stake my life on:

Christianity is more than a moral code, though it contains the most beautiful morality ever given. More than a philosophy, though it is the truest. More than an argument, though no argument can survive against it. And it is the finest civilizational vision humanity has ever been offered. But even that isn’t the point.

Christianity is the most astonishing romance in the history of existence.

At its sacred heart: the Ageless Romancer, the Cosmic Lover of your soul, stepping into His own creation to say, face to face, what the whole gift of creation had been preparing you to hear:

“Abide in Me, and I in you.”

— John 15:4

✠✠✠

✠ Home ✠

To the one holding this now… you made it.

Having never quite felt at home in the world, you just found it.

You were made to be in Him. And He in you.

“Abide in Me, and I in you.”
— John 15:4

“That they may all be one, just as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You — that they also may be in Us.”
— John 17:21

“Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
— Colossians 1:27

“Do you not know that you are the temple of the living God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
— 1 Corinthians 3:16

The God who once dwelt in a tent in the desert, who filled Solomon’s temple until the priests could not stand, declared something powerful the moment He split the temple veil from top to bottom when His Son died.

And lest anyone miss the weight of it, Matthew recorded it. Mark recorded it. Luke recorded it. Three witnesses. God made sure we could not look away. That veil of the temple was sixty feet tall and four inches thick. It served as the barrier that had separated every human soul from the presence of God since Moses. God tore it Himself. From top to bottom. Not from the bottom up, as a man would tear it. From the top down.

Not only of the veil. The entire sacrificial system. The lambs, the burnt offerings, the Day of Atonement, the priests, the rituals of approach, every drop of animal blood spilled across thousands of years of Israel’s history. All of it was a shadow pointing toward this moment. A rehearsal for what was coming. When Jesus said “It is finished” on the cross, He was not merely dying. He was declaring the rehearsal over.

Have you noticed? We no longer sacrifice animals. We no longer need a priest to stand between us and God. We no longer require a system of ritual access to approach the Holy.

Because the one thing all of it was pointing toward has arrived.

The way is open. The temple veil is gone. And the living God moved.

Into you.

Stephen said it before the council that would stone him for saying it:

“The Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands.”

— Acts 7:48–49

Paul said it to the philosophers of Athens:

“The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man.”

— Acts 17:24

These were not casual observers. Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit and died for this truth. Paul met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and staked his life on what he received from Him.

God will not be contained in a building.

God will not be accessed through a system.

God will not be reached through human intermediaries alone.

The veil is torn. The curtain is down. And the living God chose to make His dwelling place not in stone or cedar or gold, but in the holy of holies of your beating heart.

“Do you not know that you are the temple of the living God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”

— 1 Corinthians 3:16

The temple was never the destination.

Your heart was.

✠✠✠

Indwelling, where imitation alone falls short.

Union, where admiration ends.

Responsiveness, where performance exhausts itself.

This is the love your heart was made for. This is the Relentless Romance your soul has been searching for in every lesser story.

And now the Craftsman stands before you.

The whole universe was built toward this moment.

The moment He could finally say the sentence to your face.

“My life was always meant to flow into yours.”

Part 2 of Pursued is called The Olive Press.
What does the crushing produce and why does God allow it?

Also, if this stirred your heart, consider supporting my publications so I can keep writing more. A small gift makes a big difference. Venmo @Matt-Watts37

“I Am the vine; You are the branches”