A Question I Can't Stop Asking
Last week we talked about strings — six of them. Faith, family, your partner, your ambition, your community, and you. And the idea that tending them, not just in the breaking but when you're whole, is what keeps the chord of your life resonant and true.
But here's the question that kept surfacing after I finished recording: what if the string that's gone most out of tune isn't one of the six? What if it's your understanding of who God actually is?
Not whether you believe in God. Not whether you pray or go to church or know the right words. Something underneath all of that — the actual image of God you're carrying around. The one you reach for when the bottom drops out. The one you imagine is listening when you speak.
Because I think a lot of us are playing to a God we constructed somewhere in childhood, or in grief, or in the worst version of religion we encountered — and we've never stopped to ask: is that actually who this is?
Psalm 68 and John 17 want to answer that question. And the answer is stranger and better than most of us have been told.
The God Who Shakes Mountains
Psalm 68 opens like a thunderclap. Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let them vanish like smoke when the wind drives it away.
This is not a gentle psalm. This is the God of Sinai — the God who marches through the wilderness, at whose presence the earth shook and the skies poured down rain. The God whose voice is mighty, whose strength is in the skies.
If you grew up with a soft, therapeutic image of God — a kind grandfather, a cosmic cheerleader — Psalm 68 is a corrective. There is power here. Real power. The kind that scattered armies and brought water from rock.
But here's where the psalm turns, and where I want you to stay with me.
Right in the middle of all that thunder — right between the scattering of enemies and the shaking of mountains — the psalmist says this: Father of orphans, defender of widows, God in his holy habitation. God gives the solitary a home and brings forth prisoners into freedom.
The same God who shakes the earth gives the lonely a place to belong. The same God whose voice is mighty refreshes the weary land with gracious rain. The same God who rides on the ancient heavens bends down to make provision for the poor.
This is not a contradiction. This is the whole point. Real power — the kind that doesn't need to perform or impress — is the only kind that can afford to be tender. The God who can scatter every enemy is the God who chooses to notice the orphan.
What's the God you've been carrying around? Is it big enough to be both?
Eternal Life Is Not What You Think
If Psalm 68 gives us God from the outside — through history, through power, through what God does in the world — John 17 gives us God from the inside. And what we find there should stop us cold.
Jesus, hours before the cross, lifts his eyes to heaven and prays. Not for himself first — for the people in the room with him who don't yet understand what's about to happen.
And then he defines eternal life. Not heaven. Not the afterlife. Not a reward waiting at the end of a good life. He says: this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
Knowing. That's the destination. Not arrival — relationship. Not a place — a person.
This is the most compressed definition of the entire Christian life I've ever encountered. Because if eternal life is knowing God — really knowing, the way you know someone you've lived alongside — then the spiritual life isn't primarily about behavior. It's about intimacy. It's about letting the image of God you're carrying get corrected.
The God Who Is Already Looking for You
Here's what strikes me when I hold Psalm 68 and John 17 together.
The psalmist says God gives the solitary a home. Jesus says eternal life is knowing God. Put those two together and what you get is this: the God who notices the forgotten people — the orphan, the widow, the prisoner, the lonely — is the same God who calls knowing him the highest possible destination.
Which means knowing God isn't reserved for the impressive. It isn't a reward for the spiritually advanced. It is precisely the solitary, the overlooked, the person who has never had anyone in their corner — that person is the one God is most oriented toward.
God knows your name. Not the version of yourself you present on good days. Not the cleaned-up, got-it-together version. The actual you — the solitary moments, the 3am thoughts, the strings that have drifted so far you've stopped mentioning them to anyone.
That's the one being known.
The God Worth Tuning Toward
I'll be honest about something. I spent a long time carrying around an image of God that was efficient. God as cosmic manager. Here are the rules, here are the consequences, do your part and things will generally go okay. It wasn't hostile. It was just cold.
What I've been learning — slowly, stubbornly — is that the God of Psalm 68 and John 17 is not efficient. He's not a manager. He rides on ancient heavens and bends down to notice an orphan. He prays — actually prays — for the people he loves. He defines the entire point of existence as knowing and being known.
That's not efficient. That's scandalous.
So here's where I want to leave you. Last week the question was: what string has drifted? This week it goes one level deeper: who is it, exactly, that you think is listening?
The God of scripture isn't the God of our childhood anxieties or our religious wounds. The God of Psalm 68 is enormous — earth-shaking, enemy-scattering, heaven-riding enormous — and also intimate enough to give one solitary person a home. The God of John 17 defines eternal life not as a destination you earn but as a knowing that has already begun. And he is not neutral about whether it happens. He prays for it.
That God — the big, tender, thundering, intimate, orphan-noticing, name-knowing God — that's the one worth tuning your strings toward.
Not because you've figured it all out. But because he already knows you. And he's already moved toward you.
Everything else grows from there.
Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. And if this is your first time here, go back and listen to Episode 11 first — this one picks up where that one left off.