The Question in the Classroom

The idea for this book came to me while I was sitting in Bible class.

That sentence is true. What it means is harder to say.

I could tell the story as if the meaning were obvious. I was in church. We were studying Scripture. The lesson met questions I had already been asking, and something in it landed with enough force that I began imagining the kind of man I wanted to become.

God was speaking to me.

Maybe He was.

I do not say that dismissively. I believe God works in people's lives. I believe Scripture can confront us, church can form us, and a lesson can reach into a part of us that we had managed to avoid. What gives me pause is not the possibility that God was working. It is how quickly I can move from that possibility to confidence about what He was doing.

Two weeks earlier, the class had talked about belonging. I had been writing about belonging. The next week, we talked about being present and what presence looks like in the church. That subject had been following me too. Then came beholding, transformation, and humility.

By then, it felt like the class and my life were having the same conversation.

You may know the feeling. Something occupies your thoughts throughout the week, and then a sermon, a class, or a conversation seems to answer it. Nobody in the room knows what you have been carrying, but the words find it anyway. The timing feels too precise to ignore.

What are we supposed to do with that?

Is it coincidence? Is it the mind recognizing what already has its attention? Is it God working through an ordinary situation?

I do not know.

I am not sure anybody knows as often as we pretend to know.

There is an easy skeptical answer. I had already been thinking about belonging, presence, and the kind of man I wanted to become. Of course I noticed those themes when they appeared. A mind occupied with belonging hears the word belonging more loudly. A man already examining himself feels a lesson on humility more personally.

That may explain something real.

There is also an easy spiritual answer. God arranged the sequence. God was telling me what to write. God was showing me the path.

That may contain something real too.

The problem is that neither explanation gives me permission to say more than I know.

If I call it coincidence too quickly, I may be using skepticism to close myself to God. If I call it God too quickly, I may be using faith to close the experience to examination. In one direction, I risk refusing to see. In the other, I risk seeing myself and attaching God's name to the image.

That tension is where this book begins.

But there is another question beneath it.

Why do I want to know that the moment came from God?

Part of the answer is faithful. If God is trying to form me, I do not want to miss it. I do not want cynicism to make me deaf. I do not want every experience to be flattened into psychology or chance simply because those explanations feel safer.

There is another part of the answer that is harder to admit.

If God gave me the idea, then the idea arrives with authority. The book matters before I have written it. The path has been confirmed before I have walked it. I am not only a man sitting in a classroom asking difficult questions. I am a man with a purpose God has placed in front of him.

I like that version of the story.

That does not make it false. It does mean I have something to gain from believing it.

The discussion of humility made that difficult to ignore. I did not hear the word and think first about an abstract Christian virtue. I thought about someone who could stand to be more humble.

Me.

I have often been drawn to questions of right and wrong. I tend to see matters in black and white. That can be useful. Some things should be named clearly. Some lines should not be blurred merely because clarity makes people uncomfortable. Public office has given me plenty of reasons to value conviction.

It has also given me places to hide inside it.

There are times when I am right about the issue and wrong in the way I carry it. There are times when the truth of my position becomes an excuse not to consider another person's perspective. I can listen for the weakness in what someone is saying instead of listening for what they may know that I do not. I can approach a conversation as if there are only two possible endings: I win, or truth loses.

That is not much of a conversation.

It is a verdict waiting for its turn to speak.

Humility presses on me because it asks whether being right has become part of who I think I am. If I change my mind, have I betrayed the truth, or have I simply learned something? If another person adds a fact I did not know, can I receive it as help, or will I experience it as defeat? If I admit that my tone was wrong, will I fear that I have weakened the position itself?

Those questions are uncomfortable because I know how quickly a good conviction can become a shelter for pride.

As the class talked about humility, I began imagining the man I wanted to be at the city dais. I pictured someone who could lead with God's wisdom. I pictured a man who could be respected without constantly performing for respect. I pictured someone Misha could look at with pride and someone through whom something better might be built for his family and community.

The image was hopeful.

It also revealed something about me.

When I imagined becoming a better man, my mind went quickly to a public room. I saw leadership, influence, respect, and consequence. I did not first imagine an ordinary conversation in which nobody knew that I had chosen patience. I did not imagine listening when there was no audience to reward me for it. I imagined the dais.

Why?

Maybe public life is simply where this struggle has become easiest for me to see. My mistakes there can affect other people, and sometimes they become part of the public record. That gives the question real weight.

But maybe I also like the image of becoming the kind of man through whom important things happen.

Even the desire to be used by God can curve back toward the self.

That is difficult to say because I do want to be useful. I want to become a mature Christian. I want my faith to be visible in how I carry myself, how I speak, how I interact with people, and how I exercise discernment. I do not want to have to announce that I am a Christian or that I am trying to live like Christ. People will still see my faults and failures, but I hope they will also see what governs me.

Still, wanting to be seen as a good man is not the same as becoming one.

Wanting God to work through me is not the same as submitting myself to God.

If I imagine God's work only in influence, leadership, recognition, or public consequence, I may be imagining a larger and more spiritual version of myself. I may be asking God to strengthen the man I already know how to be rather than transform him.

That brings me back to the passages from class.

The class moved through 2 Corinthians 3 and Philippians 2, where we talked about the mind of Christ and Christ humbling himself. We also read and discussed Philippians 3.

When I return to 2 Corinthians 3, the passage does not allow me to make the moment only about me. Paul is writing about sufficiency from God, the new covenant, Moses and the veil, turning to the Lord, the Spirit, and freedom. Then he speaks about beholding the Lord's glory and being transformed into the same image.

It is easy for me to take that final image and place it directly over my classroom experience: behold, transform, humble yourself, keep walking.

But Paul was not explaining why a lesson might feel personally timed. He was describing God's people being transformed into the Lord's likeness by the Spirit.

The passage reaches me personally, but it is not only about what happened to me in one classroom.

That matters. If I make the verse only about my moment, I can use it to confirm that something important is happening to me. But if I keep reading it inside Paul's larger argument, it turns my attention away from how significant the experience felt and toward the likeness of Christ.

That question is a lot less flattering.

Am I becoming like the One I claim to behold?

Philippians does not make the question easier.

The language about the mind of Christ in chapter 2 comes inside an appeal about love, unity, selfish ambition, conceit, humility, and the interests of other people. Christ's humility is not confusion about who He is. It is not weakness. It is expressed through service and obedience.

I can admire that passage and still avoid it.

I can talk about humility while keeping myself at the center. I can lower my voice without loosening my grip on the conversation. I can say that I am open to correction while making correction so costly that nobody wants to offer it. I can ask for another perspective after I have already decided that it will not matter.

That is one reason humility cannot simply mean sounding uncertain. Performed uncertainty can serve pride as easily as performed confidence. The question is not whether I can make myself appear teachable. It is whether another person can actually reach me.

At the same time, humility cannot mean that I stop believing anything strongly. It cannot mean that every disagreement ends with me surrendering my judgment. There are decisions I am responsible for making. There are principles I should not abandon simply because somebody dislikes them. If I am sitting in an elected seat, there are moments when the vote is mine.

So what does humility change if it does not always change the conclusion?

Maybe it changes what I believe another person is allowed to contribute.

Maybe it changes whether I enter the conversation to understand or merely to answer.

Maybe it changes what I am willing to learn about the cost of my decision, especially when someone else will carry part of it.

Maybe it changes what happens after I discover that I was wrong.

Philippians 3 adds another pressure. Paul names the grounds he once had for confidence. He speaks about gain and loss, knowing Christ, and pressing forward. He also refuses to present himself as a man who has arrived.

That may be the part I most need.

I am not writing this book because I have become the man I want to be. I am writing because the distance between that man and the man I am has become harder to ignore.

The classroom did not give me evidence that I had arrived.

It gave me language for the distance.

Belonging. Presence. Beholding. Transformation. Humility.

Those words had been accumulating around me. They connected my faith to my writing, my writing to public life, public life to my relationship with Misha, and all of it to the person I was becoming. The convergence mattered. I still do not know exactly what to call its cause.

I wonder if my need to name the cause is keeping me from receiving the question.

Suppose the teacher prepared an ordinary lesson.

Suppose I arrived with these concerns already alive in me.

Suppose my attention recognized the overlap because I had spent weeks writing, talking, and thinking about the same things.

Would any of that mean God was absent?

I do not think it has to.

I keep wanting to make this an either-or question. Either there is an ordinary explanation for what happened, or God was in it.

But why would an ordinary explanation mean God was absent?

The teacher prepared a lesson. I arrived already thinking about these things. Scripture, church, conversations, and timing all came together in a way that caught my attention. I can believe God may work through those ordinary things without pretending that their convergence proves He arranged them specifically for me.

That leaves the possibility open.

It also leaves me without the certainty I sometimes want.

Maybe the distinction I am reaching for is between receiving a message and being formed.

When I think of a message, I think of something direct. It tells me what to do. I either receive it or reject it. It gives me a next step, and if I am not careful, it can also give me a sense that whatever I do next has already been authorized.

Formation feels different. It is slower and harder to isolate. It can happen through Scripture, church, conversation, love, failure, memory, responsibility, and repeated attention. It may not give me a sentence to obey. It may keep working on the person who wants the sentence.

Maybe I wanted a message because a message makes a cleaner story.

God spoke. I listened. The book followed.

But formation asks more of me.

Did anything change when the feeling from the classroom faded? Did humility survive the next disagreement? Did beholding Christ change what I did with authority, or only what I felt while reading about Him?

That is why formation feels like the more honest possibility here. It does not let me tell the cleaner story, but it gives me questions that can follow me out of the classroom.

I did not leave the class with a command. I did not know that God was directing me toward a particular decision. I did not receive a spiritual endorsement of my writing, my office, or the future I imagined.

I left with a question I could no longer avoid.

How do I become a man through whom God can work without confusing my ambition, fear, loyalty, pride, or certainty with God's voice?

The second half of that question is the part I would rather skip.

I like the thought of God working through me. I am less comfortable asking why I want to be the person He works through. I like imagining wisdom at the dais. I am less comfortable asking whether I would still want transformation if it made me less impressive and more correctable. I like the language of purpose. I am less comfortable with the possibility that obedience may look ordinary enough that nobody notices it.

Maybe that is what the classroom moment was asking of me.

Not, "Can you prove that God caused this?"

Not even, "What does God want you to do next?"

Maybe the first question was simpler.

"What are you willing to let this reveal?"

It revealed that my certainty can protect me from the vulnerability of listening. It revealed that my desire to lead can carry a desire to be seen leading. It revealed that wanting to become a better man does not remove the possibility of making myself the hero of the story.

None of that means the desire itself is corrupt. But wanting something good does not mean every motive attached to it is good. The desire still has to answer to something beyond me.

This is where I get nervous.

If every conviction must remain open, do I become a man who never decides? If humility requires me to keep questioning myself, will I eventually lose the courage to stand anywhere?

I do not think so.

There will be moments when I have listened, considered, prayed, and still have to make the call. In public office, the final vote may be mine. In my life, nobody else can assume responsibility for my conscience. Humility cannot become a way to make other people responsible for choices that belong to me.

But there is a difference between accepting responsibility for a decision and claiming divine certainty for it.

I can say, "This is what I believe faithfulness requires," and still allow the belief to be tested. I can make a decision without pretending that my action has become God's action simply because I prayed before taking it. I can hear another person without giving that person control over my conscience. I can revise my understanding without treating revision as failure.

That sounds simple until I am in the conversation.

What happens when I believe the other person is missing the point?

What happens when I know I have the votes?

What happens when listening feels like delay, and delay feels like weakness?

What happens when Misha sees a consequence that I would rather treat as secondary?

Those moments will tell me more than the feeling I had in Bible class.

If God is forming me, the evidence cannot remain inside the force of the original experience. It has to appear in whether another person can reach me before my decision is complete. It has to appear in my tone when I am challenged, in whether I need an audience to confirm that I was right, and in what I do when I realize I was not.

It has to appear in whether I become more humble and whether I show more grace.

Even if that fruit appeared, I still could not point back to one moment and say, "There. That proves what God was doing." But change would tell me more than the intensity of what I felt that day.

It would give me something I could look at over time.

Success would not prove that God endorsed me. Losing would not prove that I had misunderstood Him. Feeling certain would not prove that I had heard Him. Feeling unsure would not prove that I had not.

So I come back to a question I can actually live with: What kind of man is this conviction producing, and what am I willing to let test it?

Maybe that is the first distinction I can make honestly. My certainty often protects the man I already am. God's work, if I am reading these passages rightly, should be changing that man toward Christ.

One makes me harder to question.

The other should make me easier to reach.

I want to remain open to the possibility that God was working through those weeks of classes, through my writing, through conversations with Misha, and through questions that had begun following me from one part of life into another. I do not need to reduce the experience to coincidence in order to be honest.

I also do not need to turn it into a private message in order to take it seriously.

A lesson can expose me without endorsing every conclusion I draw from it. A passage can challenge me without making my next impulse divine. An experience can matter without becoming a mandate.

So I will not call what happened a Cedar Lane conviction. Cedar Lane is where I was. The event was a reflection.

What remains is a question.

The man I want to be is not a man without conviction. He is not afraid to decide, speak, lead, or stand when standing is required. But he is also not a man who uses certainty to escape humility or God's name to escape examination.

I cannot prove why the classroom and my life met when they did.

I can decide what I am willing to let that meeting ask of me.

And if God is forming me through it, the answer will not be found in how confidently I explain the moment.

It will be found, over time, in whether I become more like the Christ we were there to behold.