Thoughts About "Absence of Malice" (pt. 2 of 3)

 

A person can be sincere, principled, courageous, consistent—and wrong.

That possibility troubles me more than hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is relatively easy to understand. Someone professes one standard while knowingly living by another, and once the contradiction is exposed, we know where the failure occurred. Integrity presents a more difficult problem because the person may actually believe what he says, live according to what he believes, accept the consequences of those convictions and still arrive at a judgment that is unjust.

I have been thinking about this since watching Absence of Malice, which prompted an earlier reflection on the difference between intending no harm and bearing responsibility for harm nevertheless caused. 

But the question has followed me into another work I have returned to many times over the years, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. The connection between the two initially seemed unlikely. One is a twentieth-century film about journalism and prosecutorial power; the other is a nineteenth-century novella set aboard a British warship. Yet both place decent people inside systems of law and responsibility and then ask those systems to handle circumstances more complicated than their categories.

The central event in Billy Budd is brutally simple when reduced to fact. Billy, a young sailor, is falsely accused of mutiny by John Claggart, the ship’s master-at-arms. Billy has a speech impediment that becomes pronounced under emotional pressure, and when Captain Vere orders him to answer the accusation, Billy cannot get the words out. In frustration he strikes Claggart. The blow kills him.

The facts are not especially difficult. Their meaning is.

Billy has killed a superior officer aboard a British warship during wartime, when mutiny is not an abstract concern and discipline is considered essential to the survival of the ship. Captain Vere understands the legal implications immediately. He also understands Billy. He has witnessed the accusation, Billy’s inability to respond and the spontaneous blow. He knows this is not a calculated murder. In one of the great tensions of the story, Vere possesses enough knowledge to recognize Billy’s moral innocence while simultaneously possessing enough knowledge of military law to recognize his legal guilt.

And then he has to decide. (now you know where part 3 will go- back to "Invidious").

This is where I have become increasingly reluctant to make Vere either hero or villain. He is much more interesting than either designation allows. He does not casually sacrifice Billy to an impersonal rule, nor does Melville allow him the comfort of pretending the circumstances are uncomplicated. Vere wrestles because several genuine obligations have collided. He has a responsibility to Billy, but he also has a responsibility to the sailors under his command. He has obligations to military law, to the preservation of order aboard the ship and to his own conscience. Relaxing discipline in wartime may carry consequences well beyond one sympathetic sailor; enforcing it may require condemning a man Vere knows did not act with murderous intent.

Integrity does not solve that problem.

In fact, integrity may make it more painful.

We often speak of integrity as though it were the final measure of moral character, and certainly I would rather deal with a person of integrity than one without it. But integrity describes the relationship between conviction and conduct. A person of integrity attempts to act consistently with what he believes to be true and right. What integrity cannot guarantee is that his beliefs are correct, that his information is complete, or that the principles he is applying adequately account for the situation in front of him.

I wish life was black and white- but we are often struggling to live in a vast sea of gray.

A compass can point faithfully in the direction it has been designed to indicate. That does not guarantee that the traveler has correctly identified the destination.

This is where Billy Budd begins to expose something about the limitations of law itself. Law has to generalize. It cannot be rewritten from the beginning for every person who stands before it. Rules exist precisely because societies, institutions and organizations cannot survive if every judgment depends entirely upon the sympathies of whoever happens to possess authority at the moment.

There is wisdom in that. History provides plenty of reasons to distrust a system in which powerful people simply decide which rules should apply to whom.

But human beings are stubbornly particular - The law sees an act: a sailor struck and killed a superior officer.

Vere sees Billy. Both are true, and yet they are not identical truths.

That distinction reminded me again of the line that first caught my attention in Absence of Malice: something can be accurate without being true. A description can correctly identify every relevant external fact and still fail to capture the reality of the person involved. “Billy Budd killed John Claggart” is accurate. If that sentence becomes the whole account of Billy Budd, however, something essential has disappeared.

Law inevitably performs some version of this reduction. It must translate complicated human events into categories that can be administered: intentional or accidental, guilty or innocent, permitted or prohibited, mitigating or aggravating. Good law attempts to make those categories increasingly sensitive to circumstance, motive and degree, but no category can contain the entirety of a human story.

Perhaps that is one reason judgment ought to produce some degree of trepidation in the person entrusted with it.

I have spent much of my adult life in roles that required decisions affecting other people, and I have never found the most consequential ones to resemble the clean scenarios presented in policy manuals. Usually the policy is the easy part. The difficulty lies in determining what actually happened, weighing accounts that do not completely agree, distinguishing explanation from excuse, considering precedent, anticipating consequences and remembering that the person standing in front of you will continue living with the decision after you have moved on to the next item on the calendar.

There are times when leadership requires decisiveness. Endless hesitation can become its own form of irresponsibility. But I have become increasingly suspicious of judgment that comes too easily.

Trepidation is not necessarily evidence of weakness. Sometimes it may be evidence that a person understands what judgment requires. To make a consequential decision about another human being while remaining conscious of how much one does not know seems healthier to me than the confidence that comes from believing the title, position, policy or law has somehow eliminated uncertainty.

Captain Vere wrestles with it- but you can't detach yourself in the situation- you are in the moment AND your perception of yourself and the consequences live there as well.

He has authority, but authority has not given him omniscience. He knows a great deal about what occurred in that cabin, perhaps more than almost anyone could reasonably expect a judge to know, and still he is forced to make a decision whose moral dimensions exceed the facts available to him.

That may be the deeper limitation we sometimes attribute to law when the limitation actually belongs to us. Laws are written by human beings, interpreted by human beings and applied to human beings. Every stage of the process passes through limited knowledge, experience, judgment and perspective. We try to compensate for those limitations with evidence, testimony, precedent, deliberation, appeals and multiple levels of review. Those safeguards are sometimes criticized as cumbersome, but perhaps they are better understood as institutional acknowledgments of something we are reluctant to admit individually: a sincere person can be sincerely mistaken.

And sincerity combined with conviction can actually increase the consequences of the mistake.

Consider a person whose reasoning is internally consistent. He believes a certain set of facts to be true. He applies a moral principle to those facts. He reaches the conclusion demanded by that principle and then, because he possesses integrity, has the courage to act upon it despite pressure to do otherwise.

We normally admire almost every part of that description. But what if one of the facts is wrong? What if an important fact is missing?

What if the principle is sound but has been applied to a circumstance the decision-maker does not completely understand?

The moral reasoning may remain coherent from beginning to end while the judgment itself has been contaminated somewhere upstream.

That possibility is considerably more unsettling than discovering hypocrisy because there may be no villain to expose and no corrupt motive to uncover. The person making the decision may be trying earnestly to do what is right. He may lose sleep over it. He may accept criticism for it. He may refuse the easier course because he believes principle demands otherwise.

And he may still be wrong.

This is where I find myself returning to Captain Vere. I am less interested these days in deciding whether I would convict or acquit Billy Budd than I am in watching Vere confront the terrible inadequacy of his own position. He has been given the authority to judge, and therefore he must judge. Yet nothing about receiving that authority has made him capable of seeing the whole truth.

Perhaps the danger begins when we forget that distinction.

The most frightening person entrusted with judgment may not be the openly corrupt one. We generally know to guard ourselves against him. It may be the person of unquestioned integrity who has become completely certain that his integrity guarantees the correctness of his judgment.

Quite a pickle.

Integrity is indispensable, but integrity needs truth. And human beings possess truth imperfectly.

That leaves me with a question more uncomfortable than the one I started with. If I can act without malice and still cause harm, and if I can act with integrity and still be wrong, how confident should I be about the one thing I usually claim to know better than anyone else—my own motives?

I am not sure we know ourselves as well as we think we do.

Stew on this one for a few days and then let me present a part 3..... later.

Thoughts About "Absence of Malice" (pt 1 of 3)

A few nights ago I watched the 1981 film Absence of Malice, starring Paul Newman and Sally Field. I had somehow missed it over the years, which is surprising considering my affection for movies from that era and the fact that Paul Newman is, well, Paul Newman. 

I expected to enjoy it as a good newspaper/legal drama, and I did, but somewhere along the way I became less interested in the plot than in the phrase that gives the movie its title. By the next morning, I was still turning it over in my mind.

Good grief .... is this such a relevant topic today!

Absence of malice.

There is something reassuring about the phrase. It sounds almost exonerating. Whatever happened, there was no hatred behind it, no calculated attempt to injure someone, no sinister motive lurking beneath the surface. In ordinary life we make this defense all the time, usually in less formal language. I didn't mean it that way. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I was only doing my job. I acted on what I knew at the time.

Those explanations matter. Motive matters. Surely there is a moral distinction between deliberately harming another person and causing harm that was neither intended nor anticipated. Our legal system recognizes that distinction, and so do most reasonable people. But Absence of Malice left me wondering whether we sometimes ask intention to carry more moral weight than it can bear.

One of the central tensions in the movie is the difference between something being accurate and something being true. A newspaper can print facts that are individually accurate and still create an impression that is substantially false. No quotation necessarily has to be invented and no fact deliberately fabricated. Selection, emphasis, placement, context and omission can do plenty of work on their own. The resulting story may survive a technical examination of its individual claims while failing to convey the truth of the person or event it supposedly describes.

That idea reaches well beyond journalism. Anyone who has lived long enough to accumulate a history could probably be portrayed rather convincingly as either admirable or contemptible by someone allowed to select the evidence. Both accounts might contain nothing but facts. Neither would necessarily be true.

This is where the title of the movie began to bother me.

Suppose the person constructing that incomplete picture genuinely means no harm. Suppose there is no personal vendetta, no hatred and no conscious desire to damage anyone. Suppose, further, that the person is operating within accepted professional standards and has every legal right to do what he or she is doing. At what point does the absence of a bad motive cease to answer the larger question of responsibility?

I have spent enough years in positions where decisions affect other people to know how complicated that question becomes in practice. 

(In fact- my recent blogpost on Invidious has gone viral- picked up and re-posted by the Council of Educational Standards and Accountability (CESA). I was blown away from the emails from California, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina.... thanks again for the encouragement!)

Parents, teachers, coaches, pastors, employers, administrators and judges routinely make decisions with incomplete information. Often there is no luxury of waiting until every fact is known. Competing obligations have to be weighed, credibility has to be assessed, policies have to be interpreted, and consequences have to be considered even though many of those consequences cannot possibly be foreseen.

That is simply part of exercising authority. Refusing to decide is itself sometimes a decision with consequences.

Still, there is a temptation after a difficult outcome to retreat into intention: I meant well. I followed the procedure. I acted on the information available to me. I did not intend for this to happen. All of those statements may be completely sincere, and sometimes they may be the best explanation anyone can give. What they cannot do is make the consequences disappear.

Perhaps that is the distinction I have been trying to identify since watching the movie. The absence of malice tells us something important about the actor, but it does not necessarily tell us enough about the act. It may reduce culpability without eliminating responsibility. It may explain how something happened without settling whether what happened was right.

There is another difficulty with the phrase, particularly when I consider it from a Christian perspective. Absence of malice describes morality almost entirely by what is missing. I did not hate. I did not deceive intentionally. I did not seek another person's injury. That is certainly preferable to hatred, deception and cruelty, but Christianity sets a considerably more demanding standard than merely avoiding the deliberate infliction of harm.

The command is not simply to refrain from hating my neighbor but to love him. Truthfulness requires more than avoiding technically false statements. Mercy asks more of us than the absence of cruelty. The moral life described in Scripture is not primarily an empty space where the worst impulses have been successfully removed; it is supposed to be occupied by something positive—love, truth, justice, patience, mercy and concern for the good of another.

That makes absence an interesting word.

Maybe that is why the title has stayed with me. When the movie began, Absence of Malice sounded like a legal phrase, almost a defense. By the time it ended, I wasn't nearly as comfortable with it. The movie never required me to believe that everyone involved was evil or even badly motivated. In some ways that would have made the story much easier. What interested me was the possibility that people could operate inside legitimate institutions, follow defensible procedures, possess no conscious desire to injure anyone, and nevertheless participate in something terribly damaging.

That is a much more uncomfortable problem because it removes the villain.

And once the villain disappears, I can no longer keep the question safely at a distance.

I am left instead to consider my own decisions, my own confidence in what I think I know, the consequences I did not anticipate, and all those occasions when I meant no harm seemed like a sufficient defense.

Perhaps sometimes it is.

I am increasingly convinced, however, that the absence of malice and innocence are not quite the same thing.

SO if you will be patient and permit me a few posts about this, I want to mull on it together... ask some tough questions, bring in Billy Budd of all things... and then get your feedback.

But the theme will not change I suspect....

A person can be sincere, principled, courageous, consistent—and wrong.

Of course you knew there would be a song attached- it is on SoundCloud now, but will go live on Spotify on Oct. 23.

We All Alibi

Behind the Song: Three-Quarters Empty

Hear this song now of Spotify: 3/4 Empty

BTW- This song has over 10,000 listens on SoundCloud.

Well.... might as well do them all LOL!

Some songs take a few hours to write. This one took about forty-four years.

The first version of Three-Quarters Empty wasn’t a song at all. It was a poem I started in a notebook in 1982, when I was a student at the University of Alabama taking a creative writing class. I was eighteen years old, which makes some of the existential weariness in the poem a little amusing to me now. I apparently had already grown tired of life before I had done very much of it.

But the image stayed with me.

Quarter-filled cups of coffee.

I’ve always been a coffee drinker. Black. And I have also apparently always possessed the peculiar ability to pour a cup of coffee, drink most of it, become distracted by something else, and discover the remainder much later after it has gone completely cold.

Some habits survive every technological advance. My coffee cups have improved considerably since 1982. They are stainless steel now and engineered to preserve heat for what seems like several geological periods. I can still defeat them.

There is almost always some abandoned coffee sitting somewhere on my desk.

Over time, that became more than an observation. The cup started looking like something else.

There were the projects started but never finished. The proposals written and abandoned. Ideas scribbled into notebooks. Plans that seemed important for a season and then quietly disappeared. Dreams I pursued. Dreams I postponed. Dreams I simply outgrew. A life leaves quite a bit of debris behind it.

That is what the poem was trying to describe.

The Literature Behind It

The original poem carried three literary shadows with it: T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ecclesiastes.

Eliot supplied the most obvious one:

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

I loved Prufrock long before I was old enough to understand much of what Eliot was doing with him. There is something haunting about reducing a human life to tiny repeated measurements—coffee spoons, conversations, rooms, routines. A life can be enormously important and strangely mundane at exactly the same time.

Poe supplied another image:

“A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.”

And then there was Ecclesiastes:

“Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.”

Those three voices somehow met in that coffee cup.

The poem kept returning to the tension between activity and accomplishment. We can be tremendously busy without knowing whether we are actually getting anywhere. Calendars fill. Papers pile up. Projects multiply. Years pass.

And somewhere in the middle of all that motion comes an uncomfortable question:

What exactly did all of this amount to?

That question sounded philosophical when I was eighteen.

It sounds different in my sixties.

From Quarter-Filled Cups to Cold Coffee

I kept rewriting the poem over the years. I have handwritten versions scattered through old notebooks, folders, Bible margins, and boxes. The version I eventually considered “finished” probably dates to around 1994, although finished is obviously a dangerous word to use with this particular piece.

When I began turning some of my older writing into songs, I naturally came back to it.

The first attempt became Cold Coffee.

It wasn't terrible. But I never really connected with it.

Part of the problem was musical. The genre didn't carry the emotional weight I heard in the original poem. More importantly, though, I had tried too hard to preserve the old language.

Words and phrases like epochs wasted, unrequited desire’s depth, and watched time belonged to the poem—or perhaps belonged to the young man trying very hard to write a serious poem—but they didn't sound natural coming out of a singer's mouth.

I had preserved too much of the artifact and lost some of the feeling.

So I went back to work on it.

Three-Quarters Empty

The breakthrough was realizing that the title had been sitting inside the poem all along.

Not Cold Coffee.

Three-Quarters Empty.

That changed the center of gravity.

The coffee is still there, but now it is the object through which the larger idea can be seen:

Quarter-filled cups of coffee,
Ring-stains bleeding through the grain.
Cold as all the half-formed thoughts
That gather in my brain.

That feels much closer to what I had been trying to say.

And I particularly like where the song goes from there:

Foam collapses into nothing—
Like the hours I try to save.
Little deaths of small ambitions
Settling in their grave.

The older poem was concerned with wasted potential. The newer song feels more concerned with time.

That may be the difference between writing it at eighteen and rewriting it at sixty-two.

At eighteen, unfinished dreams seem tragic because there is so much you intend to accomplish.

Forty-four years later, you understand something the younger writer couldn't possibly have understood: every life will contain unfinished things.

There will always be another project. Another idea. Another road you might have taken. Another version of yourself you never quite became.

And I'm not sure all of those things qualify as regrets.

Some are simply the cost of having lived one life instead of every possible life.

That is why one of my favorite images in the new version is:

I keep walking, though I’m sinking,
Ash and mud in both my hands.

There is resignation in that line, but there is also something else.

I keep walking.

That matters.

The song is dark. I don't want to pretend otherwise. There is Ecclesiastes in it, and Eliot, and probably more than a little Prufrock. There is the suspicion that much of what we chase eventually turns gray and that some of our grandest ambitions wind up as nothing more than old papers in a box.

But the person in the song hasn't stopped.

Maybe that is something I couldn't have written into it in 1982 because I hadn't lived long enough to know it yet.

The cup may be three-quarters empty.

But it isn't empty.

There is still something left.

And apparently I'm still working on the poem.

Which, considering what the poem is about, seems just about right.

Maybe I'm finally finished with it.

For now.

Behind the Song: Weight of the Absurd

The new version of this song will debut on Spotify on Oct. 2, 2026

The Weight of the Absurd was originally released in October 2024 as an alternative rock song. At the time, I simply described it as “inspired by Camus.”

That was true, but it was hardly the whole story.

In the early 2000's I read  Albert Camus’ The Stranger, a book I found fascinating, disturbing, and more personally uncomfortable than I expected. Camus gets placed under the broad umbrella of existentialism, though he resisted that label and developed his own philosophy of the absurd. Whatever category we put him in, he was wrestling with a question that has followed human beings for a very long time: What do you do when you desperately want life to mean something, but the universe appears unwilling to provide an answer?

Meursault, the central character of The Stranger, seems almost frighteningly detached from the world around him. His mother dies, and he barely grieves. He enters a relationship without much conviction. He drifts into friendships without much consideration of their consequences. Eventually, almost inexplicably, he kills a man.

He doesn't so much choose a life as allow life to happen to him. That was the part that bothered me.

Because beneath the murder, the trial, the famous Algerian heat, and all the philosophical machinery of the novel, I recognized something in Meursault that I didn't particularly enjoy recognizing.

Passivity.

Left to myself, I can drift. I can become mechanical. I can perform responsibilities, complete tasks, solve problems, and move through a day efficiently while remaining strangely detached from the emotional life taking place around me. There is a part of me that can sit back and watch life rather than enter it.

Reading Meursault was like seeing that tendency carried to its horrifying conclusion.

Without Christ, where does my own tendency toward detachment eventually lead?

That question stayed with me long after I finished the novel.

Later I began reading Howard Mumma's Albert Camus and the Minister, in which Mumma recounts conversations he says he had with Camus while serving at the American Church in Paris. The book presents a Camus who is searching, questioning, and increasingly dissatisfied with the answers available to him.

I found that Camus even more interesting than the novelist I had encountered in The Stranger.

Whether every detail of Mumma's recollection can bear the historical weight sometimes placed upon it is another question. What captivated me was the intellectual and spiritual tension: a man who had spent his career articulating the absurdity of existence continuing to ask whether there might nevertheless be something beyond it.

And that is where The Weight of the Absurd really began.

I admire something about Camus. His honesty.

He refused cheap answers. He had witnessed the brutality of his century—war, fascism, suffering, death—and he wasn't interested in pretending that existence made sense simply because we wanted it to. If the universe was silent, Camus intended to stare into that silence without blinking.

And yet he refused surrender.

That is one of the paradoxes I find so compelling in him. If life is absurd, you still live. You resist. You confront injustice. You love. You create. You push the stone back up the hill even though you know perfectly well it will roll down again.

There is something almost heroic about that.

And something terribly sad.

That tension became the heart of the song:

Can I carry it alone?
Is my heart enough to hold
All the questions, all the pain,
When the answers slip away?

Those aren't theoretical questions for me.

I know my own capacity for rebellion. I know my ability to construct walls with arguments, explanations, work, busyness, and self-sufficiency. I also know that eventually those walls crumble.

So the song doesn't attempt to defeat Camus in an argument.

It walks with him for a while.

It acknowledges the darkness. It allows the questions to remain questions. It admits the attraction of standing alone in the rain with your fists clenched against a universe that refuses to explain itself.

But eventually my road diverges from his.

I see a cross in the distance now,
A place where hope can bend but not bow.
Maybe strength ain't in what we bear,
But in the One who meets us there.

That is the turn.

Christianity doesn't require me to pretend that suffering isn't real or that the world isn't bewildering. Scripture itself is filled with people asking God why. Job does it. David does it. Habakkuk does it. Ecclesiastes sometimes sounds close enough to existentialism to make respectable church people nervous.

The difference is not the absence of absurdity - The difference is that absurdity does not get the final word.

And strangely enough, Camus has challenged me as a Christian because of that.

Camus could envision fighting when there was no ultimate victory coming. He could advocate resistance against injustice without believing history was moving toward some final divine restoration. There is a kind of ferocious courage in that position: fight anyway. Love anyway. Create anyway. Push the rock anyway.

Then what excuse do I have?

If I actually believe what I say I believe—that history has a destination, that death has been defeated, that Christ is risen, that justice ultimately belongs to God, and that our labor in the Lord is not in vain—shouldn't there be more urgency in me rather than less?

Shouldn't I love harder? Shouldn't I fight injustice more fiercely?

Shouldn't I create, teach, serve, forgive, risk, and live with considerably more energy than someone who believes the stone eventually rolls back down the hill for good?

That question still convicts me.

I once wrote that if heaven is rest, we ought to live in such a way that we actually need it. Too often, including in my own life, the American church seems to have about as much need of eternal rest as a narcoleptic needs a sleep aid.

Camus reminds me how embarrassing comfortable Christianity can be. But he also reminds me why I need Christ.

Because ultimately I cannot carry the weight of the absurd alone. My heart isn't large enough. My intellect isn't strong enough. My defiance isn't permanent enough. Eventually my fists unclench.

And for me, that isn't defeat - It is grace.

That is why the song begins with a man standing alone, demanding meaning from the rain, and ends with something very different:

And I hope listeners will stay with the song long enough to hear this part.....

I'm still walking, but now I know.......
I'm not alone... no, I'm not alone!

Maybe that is the real story behind The Weight of the Absurd.

Camus helped me understand the nobility of the struggle.

Christ gave me a reason to believe the struggle is going somewhere.

The Story Behind “Withstood the Wind”

Thanks for the question- and note: The Song was originally titled 'Hemingway' but responses from others suggesting it complicated  the message- but he was complicated......

You can hear the song on Spotify here:

Withstood the Wind

I taught Hemingway for seven years as part of an American Literature course, and I never quite knew what to do with him.

That probably sounds strange coming from someone who kept teaching him, but maybe that was part of the attraction. I respected Hemingway more consistently than I enjoyed him. I understood why he mattered. I could teach the iceberg theory, the sparse prose, the dialogue, the code hero, “grace under pressure,” and the enormous influence he had on American writing. But I never particularly loved the cadence of his prose. Sometimes the simplicity felt almost too deliberate to me—an impersonation of simplicity rather than simplicity itself.

Still, Hemingway stayed with me.

Really, that whole Modernist period did. It was one of my favorite stretches of American literature to teach because it was fascinating, dark, occasionally maddening, and unusually honest. The writers who emerged from World War I and lived through the upheavals that followed had good reason to be suspicious of easy optimism. The expatriates were especially interesting to me. They seemed to be looking back at America from a distance, questioning assumptions about progress, prosperity, heroism and the good life that an earlier generation had been more willing to trust.

It made for quite a classroom: Fitzgerald and the beautiful corruption of Gatsby; Faulkner digging through memory, guilt and the past; Steinbeck finding dignity among people who had almost nothing; Pound, brilliant and deeply troubling; and Hemingway, determined to strip away anything that sounded too easy.

They were fun to teach precisely because they weren't particularly fun. They were truthful.

And Hemingway may have been the most complicated of them for me.

There is a lot about the Hemingway persona that invites admiration. He was adventurous, physically courageous and seemingly determined to experience life at full volume. War, hunting, fishing, bullfighting, boxing, travel—there is almost a cult of difficulty surrounding him. If life wasn't hard enough on its own, Hemingway seemed willing to go looking for places where it could become harder.

But I was always a little suspicious of that, too.

How much was Hemingway, and how much was Hemingway playing Hemingway?

The public figure became almost as famous as the writer: Papa Hemingway, the tough guy, the drinker, the sportsman, the war correspondent, the man who had been there and done that. Was the mythology simply an extension of the man, or did the man eventually become trapped inside the mythology? Did readers love the writing, or did some of them love the sensational life surrounding the writer? I don't know. I'm not sure anyone can completely know.

There was an evasiveness about Hemingway that bothered me as much as it fascinated me. He could be emotionally manipulative while appearing emotionally detached. He could leave enormous things unsaid and somehow make the silence carry more weight than an explanation would have.

Jake Barnes's final response to Brett in The Sun Also Rises has always haunted me: “Isn't it pretty to think so?”

There is an entire life inside that sentence—a life that will never happen.

That is Hemingway at his best for me. I may resist the style, but I can't dismiss what is underneath it.

And that tension eventually found its way into “Withstood the Wind.”

The obvious Hemingway reference in the song comes from A Farewell to Arms: “The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”

It is one of those Hemingway lines that has escaped the novel and become almost inspirational. Put by itself, it is beautiful. I believe there is truth in it. Life breaks us, and sometimes healing creates a kind of strength that wasn't there before. The scar isn't merely evidence of the wound; it can also be evidence of healing.

But Hemingway doesn't stop there.

The rest of that passage is considerably darker. Life also kills the very good, the very gentle and the very brave. And if you are none of those things, Hemingway says, you can be sure it will kill you too; there simply won't be any special hurry.

That isn't exactly something you put on a motivational poster.

And yet I appreciate the honesty of it.

The world does break people. Being brave doesn't exempt you. Neither does being good. Sometimes we heal beautifully at the broken places, and sometimes we don't. Sometimes the next wind comes before the last wound has completely healed.

That is where the Hemingway hero becomes fascinating to me.

He stands.

He maintains the code. He does the job. His hands may tremble, but he behaves with courage anyway. He accepts that he cannot control the world, so he controls the manner in which he meets it. Hemingway called that kind of courage “grace under pressure,” and there is something undeniably admirable about it.

But after years of teaching those characters, I was left with a question I never completely resolved:

Is standing enough?

Is the Hemingway hero actually a hero, or is he simply an existential man who stands because standing is the only meaningful act left to him? If there is no larger purpose to the suffering, no redemption beyond endurance, then what has he accomplished when he withstands the wind?

I don't ask that as a criticism so much as an honest question. Hemingway himself makes it harder because the mythology of toughness eventually collides with a life that ended sadly. I don't want to use the end of his life to explain the man or judge him. Human beings are more complicated than that. But neither can I read all that language about courage, breaking, endurance and standing without feeling the weight of what we know came later.

That tension became the man in the song.

At first we see the Hemingway hero almost exactly as we expect him:

Through the dusk, the hero stands,
Grace under pressure, trembling hands.

But I didn't want to leave him there.

I wanted to meet him after everyone else had gone home.

So later we find him in a room at two in the morning:

Medals rest beside the bed,
But ghosts still speak of things unsaid.

For me, that is where “Withstood the Wind” really begins.

The medal tells the public story. The room tells the private one.

He stood when he was supposed to stand. He did something difficult. People may even have called him courageous. But now there is no crowd, no battle and no one watching. The medal still shines, but the scar still aches.

Scars don't shine in silver light—
They ache the most when it's this quiet.

So what now?

I don't think the answer is pretending that strong people don't break. In fact, the chorus deliberately admits the opposite:

Let the wind come—we won't bow.
It may break us—not us now.

That phrase matters to me: it may break us.

This isn't a song about invincibility. I don't believe in that kind of strength anymore, if I ever did. The scar itself proves we were vulnerable. We were hurt. Something happened that left a mark.

But we're here.

And that brings me to the bridge:

I almost laid my purpose down,
Almost let the silence drown.
But something in me still won't bend—
A quiet voice that says, “Stand.”

Maybe the most important word there isn't stand.

Maybe it's purpose.

That's where I think I finally part company with the Hemingway hero—or at least where my questions about him become my own. I admire the man who can stand in the wind. I admire grace under pressure. I admire courage that doesn't need an audience.

I'm just not convinced that standing, by itself, is enough.

I need there to be a reason to stand.

And perhaps that is why, after seven years of teaching Hemingway, after admiring him and distrusting him, enjoying him and arguing with him, he somehow ended up in one of my songs.

I still haven't settled the argument.

Maybe I don't need to.

The wind comes. The world breaks all of us eventually. Some wounds heal stronger. Some continue to ache at two in the morning. Courage doesn't mean pretending otherwise.

Sometimes courage is considerably less dramatic.

Sometimes there is no safari, no battlefield, no great fish on the line, no one watching to see what you will do.

Sometimes there is only a quiet room, a scar, a reason you haven't completely surrendered, and a voice barely loud enough to hear.

Stand.

And for tonight, maybe that's enough.

The Story Behind "Ask Me Dangerous"

“Ask Me Dangerous” is now on Spotify, and this one has had an interesting journey.

You can listen to it here:

ASK ME DANGEROUS

The original idea came from something I had been thinking about for a while. We live in a world of shallow talk. We scroll, nod, say “I’m good,” and move on. We know how to have entire conversations without really saying anything, and most of us have gotten pretty good at knowing which questions to ask and, maybe more importantly, which ones not to ask.

I’ve always liked the old Lynyrd Skynyrd line, “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies.” It’s a great line, but there is probably more truth in it than we would like to admit. There seems to be an unspoken agreement we make with each other: don’t dig too deeply into my life, and I won’t dig too deeply into yours. Mutual Assured Destruction applied to relationships.

But when I read the Bible, God doesn’t seem to honor that agreement.

God asks questions. Not because He doesn’t know the answers, but because we often don’t.

He asks Adam, “Where are you?” He asks Elijah, “What are you doing here?” Jesus asks the woman at the well about her husband. He asks Peter, “Do you love me?” These aren’t requests for information. They are questions designed to make someone confront something they might rather avoid.

They are dangerous questions.

That was the idea behind the first version of “Ask Me Dangerous.” It was actually a pretty fun song. It had a good tempo and almost a Brad Paisley kind of country feel. I liked it. I especially liked a couple of the lines:

I’m the duke of polished lies,
A thousand faces, none are mine.

And:

Pull that question like a knife,
Cut beneath what you can see.

So I put it out there for my usual test audience and waited.

Not much happened.

People didn’t hate it. That might have been easier. It just didn’t seem to connect with anybody. I still liked the idea, but the song wasn’t resonating.

That is not exactly an unusual problem for me. I can get fascinated with an idea and forget that everyone else hasn’t been living with it inside my head for the last several weeks. Maybe the song was too cerebral. Maybe it was a little obtuse. Maybe I understood what “Ask Me Dangerous” meant because I already knew what I was trying to say.

So I went back to it.

The first change was musical. I slowed everything down and moved it into more of a Southern Gothic sound. That helped. The response was better, and the darker sound seemed to fit the subject better. But the more I listened, the more I thought the problem wasn’t really the music.

For a song called “Ask Me Dangerous,” I wasn’t actually asking many dangerous questions.

I was writing about vulnerability without being particularly vulnerable.

That realization changed the song.

Instead of talking generally about masks and truth and hiding, I started trying to write the questions I might actually prefer that someone not ask me.

Ask me why I need the room,
Why I need to come through.
Ask me who I am when no one
Needs the things I do.

That felt different.

Why do I need to be needed? How much of what I do for other people is service, and how much of it has become tangled up with my identity? Who am I when nobody needs an answer, a decision, a solution or anything else from me?

Then came:

Ask me who I’ve hurt while thinking
I was helping all along.

I don’t particularly enjoy that question either.

Neither do I especially like:

Ask me who I’d be tomorrow
If the cheering disappeared.

But that became the point. If I could answer every question in the song easily, they weren’t dangerous enough.

One line from the original survived all the rewrites: “I’m the duke of polished lies.” I still love that line, probably because I think there is a kind of dishonesty that doesn’t require saying anything factually untrue.

You can tell the truth and still hide.

I can give you an honest answer that reveals exactly as much as I want you to know. I can tell a story about a failure that makes me appear humble. I can confess something while carefully avoiding the thing underneath it. As the newer lyric says, “I can make confession sound sincere and never let you get too near.”

That was getting much closer to what I had wanted the song to say in the first place. Sometimes we don’t need someone to catch us lying. We need someone who won’t let us hide inside the truth.

There was one other idea from the original song that I knew I wanted to keep: “Don’t let me put God in the gaps.”

That one gets complicated for me because faith is supposed to take me toward truth, not protect me from it. But religious language can become another defense mechanism if I let it. There is a difference between trusting God in something I don’t understand and invoking God because I don’t want to examine something I might understand all too well.

The final version says:

And when I reach for something holy
Just to make the questions stop—
Don’t let me put God in the gaps.

Then comes the line I added afterward:

Let God be God.

I like where that landed. I don’t need God as the explanation that ends the uncomfortable conversation. I need Him to be God, even when the conversation gets more uncomfortable.

Once I finally felt good about the lyrics, the song took another strange turn.

I completely remade it as a hip-hop song.

I’m not entirely sure why, other than the fact that this whole music experiment has given me permission to try things I never would have tried before. But something happened in that version. The rhythm changed the way some of the words landed. It gave the song an edge that hadn't been there before.

Then, because apparently I can't leave anything alone, I took what I liked about that version and remixed it again as a country song.

So “Ask Me Dangerous” started as an up-tempo country song, became a slower Southern Gothic song, wandered off and became hip-hop, and eventually came back home to country carrying a few things it picked up along the way.

That may actually be my favorite part of the whole process.

The various versions have now gotten around 6,000 listens on SoundCloud, which is far more than I expected when I started playing around with this song. Friday, the final version makes the move to Spotify, and I’m curious to see what happens with it there.

But whether it connects with a larger audience or not, I think I finally found the song I was originally trying to write.

The first version essentially said, “We should ask each other deeper questions.”

The final version makes me answer them.

That is a much more uncomfortable proposition.

I still think we have an unspoken agreement with one another that keeps most relationships relatively safe: I won’t look too closely at the things you have learned to hide if you extend me the same courtesy. We can know a lot about one another without ever allowing ourselves to be truly known.

Maybe breaking that agreement requires giving a few trusted people permission to ask something dangerous.

Not everybody. But somebody.

So as “Ask Me Dangerous” comes out Friday, that is probably the question I’m left with:

Who in my life has permission to ask me the question I don’t want to answer?

And if they actually did, would I answer it?

Or would the duke of polished lies find another way out?

You can find my Spotify page here:  Jayopsis on Spotify

You can find my SoundCloud page here: Jayopsis on SoundCloud

What He Said Comes Next

 

Basic Foundations for Understanding a Difficult Scripture

Matthew 24 / Mark 13 / Luke 21

Update: I made this into a song:

 “What He Said Comes Next.”

There may be no section of the Gospels that has generated more speculation than what is commonly called the Olivet Discourse, recorded in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. Jesus speaks about the destruction of the temple, wars, persecution, false prophets, tribulation, cosmic signs, His coming, judgment, and the end of the age. It is not difficult to understand why Christians have spent centuries trying to determine exactly how these events fit together.

I have participated in that discussion myself.

I have read and studied these passages for more than thirty-five years. During that time, I have been exposed to most of the major approaches to biblical eschatology. I grew up hearing the popular premillennialism associated with teachers such as Hal Lindsey. I remember A Thief in the Night. Later I read and listened to teachers representing premillennial, amillennial, postmillennial, partial-preterist, and other approaches.

I have benefited from people with whom I disagree. I have also changed my mind about some things.

That experience has made me increasingly cautious about highly detailed systems that claim to explain precisely how every prophetic passage will be fulfilled. The scholars of Jesus' day knew the Old Testament exceptionally well, yet many failed to understand what the prophets had said about His first coming. That should produce some humility in those of us attempting to explain His second coming.

Humility, however, does not mean that we cannot know anything.

Jesus gave His disciples substantial information about what was coming. More importantly, He gave them very clear instructions about how they were to live in light of it.

I have become convinced that we sometimes spend so much time debating the information that we neglect the instructions.

Begin With the Setting

Matthew tells us:

Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

The disciples then ask the obvious questions:

“Tell us, when will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Mark adds an important geographical detail. Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple when Peter, James, John, and Andrew questioned Him privately.

That context matters.

Jesus was not conducting a seminar on speculative end-times chronology. He had just made a remarkable prediction about a real building that His disciples could see from where they were sitting. The temple represented the religious and national center of Jewish life. Jesus told them it was going to be destroyed.

Approximately forty years later, Jerusalem was devastated by the Romans and the temple was destroyed in AD 70.

Any responsible interpretation of the Olivet Discourse must take that historical event seriously. Jesus was speaking to first-century disciples about circumstances that had meaning for them.

One interpretive principle has helped me considerably over the years:

A biblical text cannot mean to us something that it could never have meant to its original audience.

That does not mean every prophecy must have been completely fulfilled during the lifetime of the original hearers. Biblical prophecy frequently contains patterns, types, and fulfillments that extend beyond the immediate historical situation. It does mean that we should resist the temptation to read our newspaper, political circumstances, technology, or international crises back into a first-century conversation without first asking what Jesus' words meant to the people sitting in front of Him.

Prophetic Language Requires Care

Another difficulty is the nature of apocalyptic language itself.

Scripture contains different literary genres. Historical narrative does not communicate exactly like poetry. Proverbs function differently from epistles. Apocalyptic and prophetic passages regularly use images, symbols, numbers, cosmic language, and Old Testament references that would have been familiar to their original readers.

This does not diminish the truthfulness or authority of Scripture.

Figurative language can communicate literal truth.

Jesus Himself said that not one stone of the temple would be left upon another. The temple was indeed destroyed, even though stones associated with the larger temple complex remain. We understand the statement because ordinary human communication allows emphatic and figurative descriptions of real events.

The same care is necessary when interpreting language about stars falling, the heavens being shaken, beasts, dragons, numbers, horns, trumpets, and other prophetic imagery.

The question should not be, “Do I interpret the Bible literally?”

The better question is, “What kind of language is the biblical writer using, and what truth is that language intended to communicate?”

Taking Scripture seriously requires us to take its genre seriously.

AD 70 and the Future

I believe a significant portion of the Olivet Discourse concerns the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Several statements make good sense in that setting. Jesus tells people in Judea to flee to the mountains. He speaks about circumstances in which someone should not return home for a cloak. He tells them to pray that their flight will not occur in winter or on a Sabbath. He describes extraordinary tribulation. Most significantly, He says:

“Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.”

Those statements deserve to be interpreted in their historical context rather than immediately transferred thousands of years into the future.

At the same time, I am not convinced that AD 70 exhausts everything Jesus is teaching.

Matthew 24:14 says:

“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

The discourse also moves toward the unmistakable coming of the Son of Man, final judgment, and the necessity of being prepared for an hour that no one knows.

For that reason, I am comfortable recognizing both historical fulfillment and continuing or ultimate fulfillment. The destruction of Jerusalem can be a real fulfillment of Jesus' prophecy while also participating in a larger biblical pattern that culminates in the final Day of the Lord.

This should not surprise us. Scripture frequently presents historical acts of judgment and deliverance that anticipate greater acts of judgment and deliverance.

The important point is that we do not have to resolve every disputed chronological question before we can understand the primary application of Jesus' teaching.

Jesus repeatedly tells us what to do.

Do Not Be Led Astray

The first command deserves attention because it comes before the wars, earthquakes, famines, and persecution:

“See that no one leads you astray.”

Deception is one of Jesus' principal concerns.

He warns about false messiahs and false prophets. He even warns that impressive signs can accompany false claims. The existence of spiritual language, apparent supernatural activity, confidence, popularity, or influence does not establish that a teacher is telling the truth.

The Christian response is not paranoia. It is biblical discernment.

We should know the teaching of Christ and His apostles well enough to recognize teaching that contradicts it. That requires ordinary practices that are considerably less dramatic than end-times speculation: reading Scripture, participating in the church, learning sound doctrine, praying for wisdom, and remaining teachable.

This is particularly important when people claim to possess special knowledge about current events or the prophetic calendar.

Jesus' instruction is straightforward.

Do not be deceived.

Do Not Be Alarmed

Jesus then says:

“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed.”

This may be one of the most neglected commands in the passage.

War is real. Natural disaster is real. Persecution is real. Political instability is real. Human evil is real. Jesus does not minimize any of them.

He tells His disciples not to panic because of them.

Every generation of Christians has been able to produce a list of events that appeared unprecedented. Wars, disease, economic upheaval, natural disasters, political instability, cultural change, and technological development can make a particular historical moment feel uniquely apocalyptic.

Modern communication intensifies that feeling because we now learn about suffering throughout the world almost immediately. We can consume an uninterrupted stream of alarming information.

Christians should pay attention to the world. We should care about suffering. We should respond to injustice. We should pray, serve, give, vote, work, teach, protect, and help where God gives us responsibility.

But anxiety is not the same thing as vigilance.

Jesus specifically tells His followers not to be alarmed.

The existence of chaos does not indicate the absence of God's sovereignty.

Be on Guard

Mark records another command:

“But be on your guard.”

The context here includes persecution.

Jesus tells His disciples that they will be brought before councils, governors, and kings. Some will be betrayed by members of their own families. Some will be hated because of His name.

Christian faithfulness does not guarantee cultural acceptance or personal safety.

At the same time, “be on your guard” does not require Christians to seek persecution or behave recklessly. The Book of Acts provides examples of believers standing publicly when necessary and leaving dangerous situations when appropriate.

There is no virtue in unnecessary suffering.

There is virtue in refusing to abandon Christ when obedience becomes costly.

Wisdom may tell us to speak. Wisdom may tell us to leave. Wisdom may tell us to wait. What wisdom cannot tell us to do is deny Christ in order to protect ourselves.

Endure

Jesus repeatedly connects faithfulness with endurance:

“But the one who endures to the end will be saved.”

Christians have debated the timing and nature of the Great Tribulation for generations. Those discussions have value, but persecution is not merely a theoretical future possibility.

There have been Christians throughout history for whom following Jesus has involved imprisonment, displacement, poverty, violence, or death. There are Christians in the world today for whom those possibilities remain real.

The relevant question is therefore larger than whether Christians will experience a particular period labeled “The Great Tribulation.”

The question is whether we are developing the kind of faith that endures tribulation whenever it comes.

Endurance is rarely developed during the crisis itself. It grows through years of ordinary faithfulness: worship, prayer, repentance, Scripture, fellowship, obedience, and trust.

We ask God for grace now because we will need His grace then.

Stay Awake

Jesus repeatedly tells His disciples to stay awake.

This command is not primarily about sleeping. It is about spiritual attentiveness.

His comparison with the days of Noah is instructive. People were eating, drinking, marrying, and continuing ordinary life. Those activities were not inherently sinful. The problem was that ordinary life had become ultimate life. They were unaware of approaching judgment because the normal routines of existence had convinced them that tomorrow would always resemble today.

That remains a significant spiritual danger.

Careers matter. Families matter. Recreation has value. Houses need maintenance. Bills need paying. Games are played. Trips are taken. Meals are enjoyed.

Christianity does not require us to reject ordinary life.

It requires us to remember that ordinary life is temporary.

Worldliness does not always arrive as obvious wickedness. Sometimes it appears as complete absorption in good but temporary things.

Jesus says: stay awake.

Be Faithful to the Assignment

Jesus follows His teaching about His return with the illustration of a servant whose master has gone away.

The central question is simple: What will the servant be doing when the master returns?

The faithful servant continues doing the work assigned to him.

The unfaithful servant interprets the master's delay as permission to live as though the master will never return.

This illustration has increasingly shaped how I think about eschatology.

The purpose of studying the return of Christ is not merely to identify when the Master might return. It is to make sure He finds us faithfully doing what He assigned us to do.

That means feeding His sheep. Making disciples. Teaching His Word. Loving our neighbors. Caring for those entrusted to us. Proclaiming the gospel. Seeking justice. Practicing mercy. Raising our children. Serving the church. Doing our work faithfully. Repenting when we sin. Forgiving when we are wronged. Continuing until He comes.

A detailed prophetic system is no substitute for obedience.

Birth Pains

Jesus uses the image of birth pains to describe the events He has discussed.

I continue to find this image helpful for understanding the biblical presentation of history.

Birth pains repeat. They can increase in intensity. There can also be intervals between them. Most importantly, birth pains are not meaningless suffering. They are moving toward an appointed conclusion.

That keeps us from making two opposite errors.

The first error is assuming that every crisis means the end must occur immediately.

The second is assuming that because similar crises have happened before, nothing is moving toward an end.

Christianity teaches neither endless historical repetition nor constant date-setting.

History has a destination.

God may show remarkable patience between periods of judgment and upheaval. Scripture tells us not to interpret that patience as indifference. Peter explicitly connects the apparent delay of Christ's return with God's patience and salvation.

The delay is mercy.

It is also temporary.

The Fig Tree

Jesus also tells His disciples to learn from the fig tree.

Patterns tell us something.

When branches become tender and leaves appear, summer is approaching. We understand this principle in ordinary life. Certain conditions indicate what is likely to follow.

Jesus expects His followers to observe the world intelligently.

But observation is different from obsession.

The purpose of noticing the leaves on the fig tree is not to spend every day measuring them.

It is to live with an awareness that history is moving somewhere.

The Days of Noah

Jesus' reference to Noah adds another dimension.

Judgment arrived while people were conducting ordinary life.

The emphasis is not on their ability to calculate when the flood would begin. The emphasis is that they were unprepared when it came.

That helps explain Jesus' statement that no one knows the day or hour.

There is a deliberate tension in the passage.

Jesus tells us enough to know that He is coming.

He refuses to tell us enough to calculate when.

That tension appears intentional.

If we knew the exact date, sinful human beings would undoubtedly organize our lives around the deadline. Instead, Jesus requires continual readiness.

Where I Currently Stand

I still have opinions about the disputed questions.

I believe the “last days” began with the redemptive events surrounding Christ's death, resurrection, ascension, and the giving of the Spirit rather than referring exclusively to a short period immediately preceding His return.

I believe much of the Olivet Discourse has a genuine historical fulfillment connected with Jerusalem and AD 70 while also participating in patterns that ultimately culminate in Christ's return and final judgment.

I generally interpret apocalyptic numbers and images symbolically unless the context gives compelling reason to do otherwise.

I do not currently hold a pre-tribulation “Left Behind” understanding of the rapture. I expect the gathering of believers to Christ to occur in connection with His return.

My understanding of Revelation is closest to an amillennial framework, though I appreciate elements of postmillennial expectation and the confidence it places in the continuing advance of the gospel.

I believe the church should expect both gospel advance and serious opposition.

I believe Jesus will return bodily and visibly.

I believe there will be a resurrection of the dead and final judgment.

I believe evil will finally be defeated.

I believe God's people will be with Him.

Those last convictions matter much more to me than my ability to arrange every event between now and then.

Faithful Christians disagree about many of the other details. Those disagreements should produce careful study rather than unnecessary division.

Theology Should Lead Us to Christ

I remain strongly committed to theology.

The answer to bad theology is not less theology. Christians need doctrine because doctrine tells us who God is, who we are, what Christ has done, what God has promised, and how we should live.

But theology can become distorted when our system becomes more important to us than Scripture itself.

We can begin forcing passages to fit our framework rather than allowing Scripture to correct our framework.

Worse, we can become fascinated with the message while growing cold toward the Person the message reveals.

Jesus told the religious leaders of His own day that they searched the Scriptures because they believed that in them they had eternal life, yet those same Scriptures testified about Him.

That warning should apply to every theological system, including my own.

The goal is not to win the eschatology argument.

The goal is to know Christ, trust Christ, obey Christ, and be found faithful when Christ returns.

What He Said Comes Next

After all these years of reading Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, Daniel, Thessalonians, and Revelation, I am less confident that I can tell you exactly how every detail will unfold.

That does not bother me as much as it once might have.

I still study these things. I still have conclusions. I still think some interpretations fit the biblical evidence better than others. I also expect that continued study may require me to modify some of my conclusions.

What has become clearer is what Jesus expects from His people while we wait.

He told us not to be deceived, so we should know the truth.

He told us not to be alarmed, so we should trust His sovereignty.

He told us to be on guard, so we should develop discernment and courage.

He told us to endure, so we should build patterns of faithfulness before difficult days arrive.

He told us to stay awake, so we should refuse to allow temporary things to consume our attention.

He told us to be faithful, so we should continue doing the work He has given us.

These commands apply whether Christ returns during my lifetime or a thousand years from now.

That is one reason I find the Olivet Discourse more encouraging today than frightening.

Jesus does not pretend that history will be easy. He describes deception, conflict, natural disaster, persecution, apostasy, lawlessness, suffering, and judgment with remarkable directness.

But none of those things surprises Him.

He tells His disciples about them in advance precisely because they are not evidence that events have escaped His control.

The Christian hope has never been that history will gradually become predictable.

Our hope is that history belongs to Christ.

I do not know precisely what comes next.

I know that Christ will return.

I know that He will complete what He began.

And I know what He told His people to do in the meantime.

Perhaps that is the most useful way to study what comes next:

Pay attention to what He said comes next, and then pay even closer attention to what He said to do until it does.

BTW- I think the song is really cool! I hope you do too!

The Story Behind “Fri. Night Lights”

The song "Fri, Night Lights" hits Spotify tomorrow- it has been playing before games in our stadium for 2 years... here is the backstory.....

In the fall of 2024, we started the football season 0–5.

I had never been 0–5 in my life.

And it wasn't as if we were simply showing up every Friday night and getting run off the field. We lost 38–28 to Oak Mountain. Then 28–7 to Homewood, 23–14 to Ramsay, 20–7 to Carver, and 20–14 to Wenonah.

It felt like bad break after bad break. We were competing. We were fighting. We just weren't winning.

The Monday after the Wenonah loss, I went back to Wenonah for a JV game. I was pretty down. When you've coached as long as I have, you learn not to make too much of any one game or season, but 0–5 was unfamiliar territory for me.

The Wenonah varsity players were working the chains that night. I walked over toward the sideline, and one of their players—a really big guy who I believe was their starting offensive tackle—saw me.

He smiled.

“Coach, last Friday night, man... THAT WAS A GAME!”

Then he gave me a hug.

That stuck with me. Their kids were terrific. And I was reminded that beating Briarwood still meant something to them. Our record didn't matter. They knew what kind of fight they had just been in.

Then he said something else.

“Coach, it was a war! That big #90... I felt him.”

Number 90 was Garrett Witherington, one of our defensive linemen. Garrett is now a freshman defensive lineman at Virginia Tech. He has been playing a good number of snaps this season under James Franklin.

But that night, he was just #90.

“I felt him.”

For some reason, those three words hit me.

Here I was thinking about 0–5. Wins and losses. What had gone wrong. All the things coaches think about when the scoreboard isn't cooperating.

This kid wasn't thinking about any of that. He remembered the battle. He remembered the guy across from him. He remembered what it felt like to compete against somebody who gave him everything he had.

And suddenly I remembered something too.

That's part of what Friday night football is supposed to be about.

I went home that night and wrote a song.

I originally called it “You Felt Me.”

The chorus said:

Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight
We battled like soldiers under those lights
Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line
When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind.
'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see,
It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me.

I wrote it about two players walking away from a football game knowing something about each other that nobody sitting in the stands could completely understand.

And then something pretty crazy happened.

We didn't lose again that season.

The following Friday, September 27, we hosted Leeds. We were 0–5.

Before the game, our “Voice of the Lions” Scott Kellner, started playing a song over the stadium speakers. He hadn't told me he was going to do it.

It took me a second. Wait a minute. That's my song.

Then we went out and beat Leeds 31–14.

Afterward, people started asking about the song. One of our assistant coaches told me his daughter had actually tried to Shazam it during the game. When he told her it was Coach Mathews' song, apparently she gave him a somewhat bewildered look—which is probably the appropriate reaction.

Our offensive coordinator's wife, who teaches at the school, found me and said, “I loved the song.”

The next week we beat Corner 31–6. Then John Carroll, 21–17. Then Hayden, 50–16.

On November 1, we played our final game. We had missed the playoffs, and McAdory—a 6A playoff team—came to our place. We won 55–35 in one of those wonderfully fun Friday-night football games.

A few more people asked afterward:

“Was that your song they played before the game?”

And I just said yes... it really is no big deal... just fun!

Somewhere along the way, the song became part of our Friday-night routine. We still play it just before kickoff at home games.

And here's a completely meaningless statistic that I nevertheless enjoy: since we started playing it before home games, we're 10–3 at home.

I don't believe in superstition, so I'm not taking credit for those ten wins, but I do love what the song has come to represent.

Because the strange thing is that “Fri. Night Lights” wasn't written after a win.

It was written when we were 0–5.

It came from an opposing player. It came from a Monday night JV game when I was discouraged and a young man on the other team unknowingly reminded an old coach what was important.

The season eventually turned around. We finished with five straight wins.

But that's almost beside the point.

The kid from Wenonah had already given me the lesson before we won another game.

The cheers fade. The scoreboard gets turned off. Most people eventually forget who scored what.

That's the story behind “Fri. Night Lights.” 

The song officially releases on Spotify Thursday, September 17.

And every time I hear it playing in our stadium before kickoff, I still think about being 0–5, standing on the sideline at Wenonah on a Monday night, and one big offensive lineman with a huge smile saying:

“Coach... that big #90—I felt him.”

BTW- I hope other stadiums get to enjoy it, it is a fun pre-game song celebrating a good part of the American experience!

Here is the Soundcloud Link: Fri Night Lights

Verse 1: Friday night lights, the whole town’s here Band’s playin’ loud, you can feel the cheer Mud on my cleats, leather in my hand Drums pound the beat, I’m a warrior in the land. Whistles blowin', crowd on its feet Sweat in the air, it's time to compete But all that noise, it drifts away When it's just you and me in this 4-quarter fray. Chorus: Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight We battled like soldiers under those lights Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind. 'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see, It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me. Verse 2: Grass stains on my jersey, pain in my bones But you gave it back, every inch we owned Could hear the cheerleaders, fans in the stands But out here, it’s just me and this man. Helmet to helmet, down to the wire Pushin’ through mud, through the dirt and the fire When the game clock ticks down to none We’re both standin’ tall, knowin’ what we’ve done. Chorus: Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight We battled like soldiers under those lights Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind. 'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see, It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me. Bridge: All the cheers, they’ll fade away But that war we fought will always stay The glory ain’t in the crowd or the fame It’s in the respect we earned in the game. Chorus (repeat): Yeah, I know you felt me, in the heat of the fight We battled like soldiers under those lights Didn’t care 'bout the score, just the heart on the line When we shake hands, it’s more than the grind. 'Cause it’s not the win or the loss I see, It’s the respect, man, yeah, you felt me. Outro: Friday night lights, they’ll shine again But it’s that handshake, man, that says where we’ve been.

Come find me on Spotify- I have new songs coming out soon!

The Men of Ephraim — 15 Years Later

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a post on Judges 12 called “Ephraim’s Evil and Our Wicked Ways.” I recently went back and read it again, which is always an interesting exercise. There were parts that made me smile because I could hear my younger voice so clearly, and there were other parts where I found myself wanting to interrupt and say, “Yes, but there is more going on here than that.”

I still believe much of what I wrote. I have now spent even more years working in churches, schools, teams, and organizations, and nothing in those additional years has convinced me that gossip, dissension, bitterness, and the recruiting of people into factions are minor problems. If anything, I probably take those things more seriously now. What has changed is that I am less certain that Judges 12 gives us the simple division I once saw between troublesome people and the strong leader willing to confront them.

The story comes immediately after Jephthah’s victory over the Ammonites. Rather than celebrating what God has done, the men of Ephraim confront Jephthah and demand to know why they were not called to participate in the battle. Their complaint quickly becomes a threat: “We will burn your house over you with fire.”

What makes the incident particularly interesting is that we have seen this before. Back in Judges 8, after Gideon’s victory over Midian, the men of Ephraim approached him with essentially the same complaint. Why did you go into battle without us? Why weren’t we called?

There does seem to be a pattern here, and that was what caught my attention fifteen years ago. God had given Israel a victory, but Ephraim seemed less interested in the victory than in the fact that the victory had occurred without them at the center of it. There is something very human in that response. We can be surprisingly capable of taking something good and immediately filtering it through the question of how it affects us. Someone succeeds and, rather than celebrating, we wonder why we weren’t included. A decision works out well, but we remain bothered because no one asked our opinion. Before long, the perceived slight becomes more important than the original issue.

I have seen enough over the years to know that grievance can become a kind of culture. People repeat complaints to one another, interpretations harden, motives are assigned, and eventually something that began as a legitimate concern can become a settled narrative. The story gets told often enough that nobody remembers exactly where the facts end and the assumptions begin.

Scripture takes that kind of behavior seriously. Proverbs lists the one who “sows discord among brothers” among the things the Lord hates, and Paul includes dissensions, divisions, rivalries, jealousy, and fits of anger among the works of the flesh in Galatians 5. Churches have sometimes been very good at identifying certain obvious sins while being much more tolerant of sins that slowly poison relationships. Gossip, factions, whisper campaigns, half-truths, anonymous accusations, and the constant questioning of motives can do enormous damage while the people participating in them remain convinced they are simply defending what is right.

I still believe all of that.

What I see differently fifteen years later is Jephthah.

When Ephraim confronted Gideon in Judges 8, Gideon found a way to lower the temperature. He appealed to their pride, gave them credit for what they had accomplished, and the confrontation ended. When I wrote the original post, I was somewhat dismissive of Gideon’s response. I saw it as appeasement, perhaps even as the kind of response that encourages difficult people to keep behaving badly because they learn that confrontation works.

Jephthah certainly did not appease them.

He defended himself and apparently had good reason to do so. He reminded Ephraim that he had called for their help and they had not come. The Ammonite threat could not simply be placed on hold while everyone worked through their feelings, so Jephthah acted, risked his life, and God gave him the victory.

The argument could have ended there, but it didn’t.

The disagreement became a battle, and the battle became a slaughter. Jephthah’s Gileadites defeated Ephraim and captured the fords of the Jordan. As the surviving Ephraimites tried to cross, they were required to pronounce the word “Shibboleth.” Their dialect betrayed them because they pronounced it “Sibboleth,” and that single word became enough to identify them for execution. By the time the episode ends, 42,000 Ephraimites are dead.

Fifteen years ago, I read that primarily as the eventual consequence of Ephraim’s rebellion. Today I find it much harder to read past the 42,000 bodies.

This does not look like a leadership success story. It looks like another stage in the tragedy of Judges.

Israelites are killing Israelites. The people who should have been united against the enemies surrounding them have turned their weapons against one another. A disagreement that began with wounded pride has escalated until brothers are standing at a river identifying other brothers by their accents so they can kill them.

That makes Judges 12 considerably more uncomfortable for me now, because it is no longer a passage that allows me simply to identify the difficult people in an organization and warn against becoming like them. It forces me to look at both sides of the river.

There is certainly an Ephraim problem worth examining. I have to ask whether I carry grievances longer than I should, whether another person’s success bothers me when I was not involved, or whether I have ever discussed a problem with several people before discussing it with the person who could actually address it. I have to consider how easily I can believe a negative interpretation of someone once I have become frustrated with that person, and how tempting it is to assign motives that I cannot possibly know.

But there is also a Jephthah problem, and I probably understand that one better now after fifteen more years of leadership.

Anyone who leads for very long will eventually be criticized unfairly. Decisions will be questioned by people who do not know everything that went into making them. Motives will be assigned. Partial stories will circulate. There will even be times when a leader can demonstrate that the criticism is factually wrong.

The danger comes when being right begins to justify everything that follows. You can be so right that you are dead right- you can kill people with the truth.....

There is a subtle progression in conflict where defending the truth can become defending ourselves, and defending ourselves can eventually become defeating the people who oppose us. That progression can be especially difficult to recognize because it often begins with a legitimate grievance. Jephthah really had called Ephraim. They really had failed to come. He really had risked his life, and God really had given him victory. None of that prevented the situation from eventually becoming a catastrophe.

Years of leadership can make this more dangerous rather than less. Experience teaches us to recognize patterns, and that can be a tremendous gift. After enough years, you have seen certain behaviors before. You recognize how gossip moves, how factions form, how a small complaint can become an organized grievance, and how quickly inaccurate information can become accepted truth.

But experience has another edge. Wisdom can slowly harden into cynicism. We can become so skilled at recognizing the men of Ephraim that eventually we begin seeing Ephraimites everywhere. A leader who has been wounded enough times can begin preparing for battle before anyone has actually declared war.

That is one reason the scene at the Jordan strikes me differently now.

The Jordan River carried enormous meaning in Israel’s history. Their fathers had crossed that river together when God brought them into the Promised Land. It had been a place associated with God’s faithfulness and Israel’s identity as one people. Yet here, at those same waters, Israelites are using a word to determine which Israelites belong to the wrong group.

There is something hauntingly contemporary about that.

We have our own Shibboleths. Sometimes they are political words, theological expressions, institutional loyalties, leadership philosophies, social-media positions, or opinions about whatever controversy happens to be consuming us at the moment. We learn the vocabulary of our group, and sometimes a surprisingly small difference in language is enough for us to decide whether someone belongs with “us” or “them.”

Sadly, I can write someone off just because they don't say the Jesus words correctly- and I know God sits up there sometimes and says- "Who is the real man of faith? One with the right words, or one with the right heart?"

Once people become categories, it becomes easier to stop listening to them. Once they become opponents, it becomes easier to justify treating them in ways we would never treat a brother.

That does not mean disagreement is wrong, nor does it mean leaders should tolerate destructive behavior indefinitely. I still believe churches and organizations must confront gossip, persistent dissension, anonymous attacks, and efforts to undermine people through private campaigns. Matthew 18 remains a far healthier model than talking everywhere except to the person involved. Healthy organizations need honest disagreement, but healthy disagreement requires courage, specificity, charity, and accountability.

What I would add fifteen years later is that the person confronting discord must guard his heart every bit as carefully as the person creating it.

Ephraim needed repentance, but Jephthah needed restraint, and Israel needed something neither of them could ultimately provide. That is part of the larger tragedy of Judges. The book keeps showing us people doing what is right in their own eyes. Even its deliverers are deeply flawed. Victories are followed by failures, and eventually the external battles against Israel’s enemies give way to internal battles among Israelites themselves.

So if I were writing the old post again—and I suppose that is what I am doing—I would spend less time identifying “the Men of Ephraim” around me and more time asking what the passage exposes in me.

There are times when I have been Ephraim, too concerned with my place in the story, too willing to nurse a grievance or too quick to assume I understood another person’s motives. There are probably other times when I have been Jephthah, legitimately frustrated and perhaps even factually correct, but too ready to view the disagreement as a battle that needed to be won.

After fifteen more years, I am less interested in deciding which side of the Jordan I would have been standing on. I am more interested in why brothers were killing brothers at the river in the first place.

Perhaps that is the warning I missed the first time. The greatest danger in conflict is not always that we will lose. Sometimes the greater danger is that we will win, only to discover that somewhere along the way we began fighting the wrong people.

When I read these old posts, I am so tempted to hit delete- but that was who I was then... and that is OK. Maybe someone reading this will be encouraged to keep growing and allow time, Word, and Spirit to keep moving forward.....