This morning I found Martha again.
Not as a character in a story I’ve heard a hundred times, but as a woman who had reached the edge of everything she understood. She wasn’t faithless. She believed Jesus. She believed the promises. She believed in the resurrection. She simply believed it belonged to another day.
I know that place.
I’ve lived there most of my life.
Life was always just beyond the horizon. Healing was later. Freedom was later. Peace was later. Resurrection was later. We survive this world, we do our best, and one day, after death, God finally makes everything right.
Then Jesus says something I can no longer read the way I once did.
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
Not I will be.
Not Wait.
Not Someday.
I am.
If He meant what He said, then He wasn’t simply correcting Martha’s timeline. He was revealing something about reality itself. She was looking for an event. He was standing there as a Person. Before the conversation was over, Lazarus was breathing again, not on some distant last day, but while the dust was still hanging in the air outside his tomb.
That story has become impossible for me to put back where I found it.
Because once I saw it, it started asking questions of me instead of me asking questions of it.
This morning those questions found me sitting at my kitchen table with unpaid bills spread across it. Six months behind on the mortgage. Five months behind on the truck. A body that seems to have forgotten how to carry the weight it once carried without thinking. A psychiatrist appointment later today. Counseling after that. Another morning of looking at the practical realities of life and feeling the old machinery begin to turn: Figure it out. Take control. Work harder. Find the answer before everything falls apart.
I know that voice.
I’ve obeyed it for years.
It has never once given me life.
What struck me this morning wasn’t that my circumstances suddenly became smaller. They didn’t. The mortgage didn’t disappear because I opened John 11. My body didn’t suddenly wake up whole. I didn’t receive a phone call telling me the disability claim had been approved.
Nothing outside of me changed.
But something inside me refused to bow.
That’s the only way I know how to describe it.
It felt as though Jesus wasn’t speaking to Martha anymore. He was speaking into my kitchen.
“Sean… do you still believe life begins after you solve everything?”
That question exposed something in me I hadn’t noticed before. I have been waiting for permission to live. Waiting for enough money. Waiting for enough health. Waiting for enough certainty. Waiting for enough answers. Waiting, in a thousand different ways, for resurrection to arrive so I could finally begin living.
And yet standing in front of Martha is the One who refuses to postpone life.
I can’t unsee that.
People ask me why I seem to have become an outlaw to the systems of this world. It’s because I stumbled into another Kingdom. Not after I died. Here. In the middle of panic attacks. In the middle of sickness. In the middle of horses, storms, prison cells, broken relationships, quiet mornings, and Scriptures I thought I already understood. Something kept happening that I could neither manufacture nor explain away. The Christ I had been taught to wait for kept meeting me in the present tense.
I don’t know what else to do with that except bear witness.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood everything.
But I can’t honestly say that anymore.
Not after what I’ve seen.
So today I will still go to the psychiatrist. I’ll still sit in counseling. I’ll still look at numbers that don’t make sense. I’ll still make difficult decisions with my wife. None of that is beneath the Kingdom. None of it is outside the reach of Christ. But I refuse to walk into those rooms as though death is still setting the terms of my life.
If Jesus is telling the truth—and I believe He is—then resurrection isn’t merely what waits for me beyond my last breath. Resurrection is the life of Christ breaking into every place death has claimed as its own.
Maybe that’s what judgment has become for me.
Not God waiting to condemn me someday.
But every morning being brought face to face with a simple question.
Which world is actually real?
The one demanding my fear?
Or the One standing before Martha saying, “I am.”
I know which One I’m following today.
Not because I have answers.
Because I’ve met Him there.
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