(Read Ephesians 2)
Long-time friends can reconnect at any time. After months or years apart, you sit down together and the awkwardness that might be there simply isn’t. Real, heartfelt conversation springs up almost immediately, rising right through the surface pleasantries like water finding its level. Our good friend (KP) and his daughter (C) stopped by on their way home from a meaningful father-daughter trip. They kept thanking us. But we are the ones who feel honored. We’ve known him for almost 30 years. We’ve seen our kids grow up together, played softball, and vacationed together. And we’ve cried together.
Neither (KP) nor his wife have active faith. They both grew up with some degree of a religious background, but have drifted away from believing. Their daughter (C) is something different. She’s a caring, generous soul — and her faith runs just as deep, worn with a comfortable humility that’s rare at any age, let alone hers.
On my run the next morning, a thought crept into my mind — the kind that doesn’t feel entirely like your own. I wonder why (C) is a believer, and her parents and brother are not? Setting aside the obvious — that the Holy Spirit planted it there because it was already part of God’s plan — my curiosity continued.
The night before, we had all talked about how unfair life can be. In a conversation about (KP)’s sister — someone I knew and loved, someone I called “Pumpy,” one of my silly nicknames — (C) said quietly, “Especially when people like my Aunt are taken so young. It’s just hard.” (KP)’s sister didn’t share the faith that (C) carries, which only deepens the ache of that loss in its own particular way.
(KP) believes that when we die, it is the end. Like many people his age, he is pouring himself now into quality time — retirement on the horizon, more time with family, more time with friends, more time traveling. He doesn’t see anything beyond death.
Then I interrupted. I apologized and started to back up, but (KP) stopped me. “No,” he said, “now is the perfect time.” I thought — that was more accurate than he knew.
I told him that the very thing we were discussing — the loss of someone taken too soon, the ache that such a loss leaves behind — is exactly one reason I believe in God, in Heaven, in faith. I didn’t pour into the sovereignty of God. That felt like a conversation for another day. But I said it something like this:
If God — the Christian God, Creator and maker of all things — is capable of making millions of brilliant stars, that shimmering water, this sunshine, the entire earth, and all of this is just one tiny corner of the universe He spoke into being… why couldn’t He create a place where we reside in eternity?
You can never put yourself in someone else’s shoes and walk their path. Nor should you try. But I love what (C) said about her Aunt: “That’s why I believe. It gives me hope that I’m going somewhere.”
Later, I asked her directly — “Where do you think your faith comes from?”
She didn’t hesitate for long. “I think there is faith in community. As a young child, I went to church with a friend. Her parents made her go and she seemed to feel obligated — but I loved it. As I got older, I realized I still yearned to go. I love the music, the community, the teaching, the Word.”
She went on. “My family isn’t religious. I would go to church rarely as a child. But I remember once attending a service with my Mom in London that was incredible — the pipe organ, the bells, the stained glass. My Mom also attended an Easter service with me.”
Before they left that morning, she mentioned that another Aunt had given her a Bible to journal in. “It was very important to me,” she said.
I think that is what it looks like when, as disciples, our actions leave a forever impact. A Bible pressed into the hands of a young woman who still yearns to go to church — its margins waiting to be filled.
That star over the lake. The shimmering water. The brilliant morning light.
The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
Psalm 19:1–2
Think about what David was actually saying when he chose the word declare. In Hebrew it means to recount something — to tell it like a story worth telling. He wasn’t describing a passive sky hanging overhead with no particular agenda. He was describing a witness. The heavens, David says, are actively proclaiming God — the way a herald throws open his lungs to announce the arrival of a king. What they are announcing is glory — kābôd in Hebrew — a word that carries the sense of weight and brilliance and undeniable presence. You feel it when you stand under a sky full of stars and something in your chest goes quiet. That is not your imagination. That is creation doing exactly what David said it does.
And yet creation only takes you so far. It can silence you. It can bring you to wonder. But it cannot tell you about grace.
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
Ephesians 2:8–9
Paul leads with the source and the means. Grace — charis in Greek — is God’s free, unmerited favor, kindness extended to those who have no claim on it and no way to earn it. Faith is not the cause of our salvation. Grace is the cause. Faith is the open hand that receives what grace freely offers. And even the open hand, Paul suggests, was given to us. This is not your own doing. Not any of it.
(C) didn’t manufacture her faith in a home that didn’t nurture it. She didn’t reason her way into the pew. A friend’s parents brought her to church. Another Aunt pressed a Bible into her hands. A pipe organ in London moved something in a little girl that she couldn’t name yet. And underneath all of it, the Lord was opening her heart — the way He opened Lydia’s heart in Acts 16, quietly, without fanfare — so that she would receive what she was hearing.
That is grace. That is gift. That is a salvation that belongs entirely to God, which means it is a salvation she can rest in entirely.
“Some day you will read in the papers that D. L. Moody is dead. Don’t you believe a word of it. At that moment I shall be more alive than I am now. I shall have gone up higher, that is all — gone out of this old clay tenement into a house that is immortal, a body that death cannot touch, that sin cannot taint, a body like unto His own glorious body.”
D.L. Moody
(KP) sees nothing beyond death. (C) sees everything. The difference between them is not intelligence, not upbringing, not moral effort. The difference is grace — unearned, undeserved, and unstoppable — arriving through a friend’s parents, through a gifted Bible, through a London cathedral on an ordinary day, through a star hanging over a lake on a summer evening.
The heavens are still declaring. Grace is still arriving. And no one who receives it has any reason to boast — only to marvel.