*Today, “Jesus Will Meet You There” releases into the world. And I couldn’t be more grateful to finally be able to share it with you. In celebration, I am giving you an inside peek, sharing the introduction of the book with those of you who follow Deep Well of Hope. As this book releases, I pray it will meet you in a way that comforts your ache, encourages you to endure, challenges you in all the right ways, and causes you to walk away with a greater awareness of Jesus’s nearness to you in every aspect of your life. To God be the glory.
Introduction
Let’s drop the façade for a moment, shall we? You know the one—how we all strive to convince ourselves (and one another) that we have it all together when, deep down, we’re painfully aware we don’t.
Underneath that veneer, we have far more in common than we realize.
We all long to be known and loved. Even more—to feel worthy of love. We exhaust ourselves trying to prove that we are, in fact, deserving of such adoration. So what do we do? We despise the weaknesses that reveal the cracks in our strength, we loathe the failures that eat away at our confidence, and we’re afraid of being exposed for who we really are: limited and flawed humans.
But why? Why are we so ashamed to admit such an obvious, undeniable reality?
The answer is simple but hardly simplistic. It’s hard to be human. Finite, imperfect, sinful human beings living in a world of unknowns, disappointments, pain, highs and lows, twists and turns. And that is far from easy.
We know this, but still we wonder, Is it just me? Does anyone really understand the struggles inside me and the challenges coming at me from all sides?
More importantly—does God?
Maybe you’ve heard the truth about Jesus or even walked faithfully with him for years, but still you wonder, Is Jesus really present and invested in every aspect of my life? The Christian answer, of course, is yes. But what does that look like in real life—in the trenches, past the clichés—in moments of desperation when God feels distant? If God cares for us but our circumstances don’t change, what then? Does Jesus personally draw near and empathize with me, even in the messy, undesirable, broken parts of my story?These questions matter because we will trust God only to the extent that we believe he truly knows and loves us.
But if Jesus really does understand us and meet us in the seen and unseen places, the joyful and sorrowful ones, and the nitty-gritty corners of our humanity—this makes all the difference. We’re here to tell you the answer is yes, Jesus is right beside you as one who’s lived it himself. But first, we have to face reality.
Fragile as Dust
We are as fragile and passing as dust (Genesis 3:19). But to our core, we despise this fact. We’re here one moment, gone the next—something we desperately try to ignore. Yet we’re painfully aware of it. We do everything we can to mask it. We try to control the uncontrollable. We try to protect our stoic independence. And avoid anything that exposes our vulnerability.
Throughout our lives, we find ourselves in a race against time. We strive to leave our mark on this temporary world, abhorring our limitations and, underneath it all, longing for a place to belong. All the while, we work hard to distract ourselves from anything that might bear evidence to our fragility. But try as we might, the reality of our humanness confronts us around every corner.
This, in part, is what drew Kristen and me (Sarah) together ten years ago. After we connected through our church in the Chicagoland area, we discovered we were both struggling with chronic health issues, which eventually led to a diagnosis of Lyme disease for each of us. At the same time, I discovered that all my children carried the same disease, which I’d unknowingly passed on through gestation. As Kristen and I bonded over the limitations of our illness, along with countless other struggles—financial, special needs, and disability, to name a few—the Lord provided the opportunity to co-write our first book, Hope When It Hurts: Biblical Reflections to Help You Grasp God’s Purpose in Your Suffering. It wasn’t an easy endeavor with the challenges at hand, but our faithful God grew a passion within each of us to share how the hope of Jesus meets us in every aspect of life—especially in the difficulties.
Since those early days, the Lord has kept us dependent on him. I have since moved across the country, and Kristen has added kids to her family, and while much has changed, much has stayed the same. As we talked recently, we realized the Lord, once again, was placing on both our hearts a desire to grapple with our limitations. What is God doing in our weakness and pain? Does faith mean trusting what I can understand or trusting God with what I can’t?
The burden of this book became clear to us both as we continued to wrestle through our endless questions and the struggles of living in a human frame.
Can you relate? Ask yourself . . .
• Do I despise my failures, frustrated by all the ways I fall short?
• Am I weighed down by doubt, pain, grief, or loneliness?
• Do I wonder, Does anyone really care about me?
• Do I fear letting go of control?
• Am I always striving for the elusive promise of happiness in the world around me?
• Does my sense of worth ebb and flow with my performance and the opinions of others?
• Do I struggle to believe God cares about the details—the overwhelming to-do list, the strained relationship, or the day’s disappointments?
• Am I frustrated by the limitations of my humanity?
Limitations are part of being human. They’re what make us creatures, not the Creator. More importantly, every one of the above questions (and more) are meant to lead us to the One who is—to the God who draws near to the very humanity we so often despise.
Better Than You Know Yourself
What if our humanity isn’t something to run from, though? Although we despise our weakness, what if being weak is the very thing that will lead us to experience a strength beyond our own? And what if being needy doesn’t make us repulsive to God but actually tugs on his heartstrings? Maybe the things that we believe make us unlovable are, in fact, the very things that draw Jesus toward us in the first place.
Friend, if we stop striving to be something we’re not, we’ll find the Someone we most need. And in finding him, we’ll find who we are meant to be. We’ll discover that every fragile, beautifully complex part of us is already fully known and loved by God—the One who not only created us but also became like us.
And that is where our hope is found. In Jesus.
As we’ll learn together in the pages ahead, God isn’t a distant, uncaring God. His death and resurrection saved us, but his heart for us didn’t end there. Jesus became like us in every way (other than sin), allowing him to now sympathize with us in every way.
He knows the frustrating limitations of your weakness.
He feels the torment of your fear and shame.
He bears the silent suffering of your loneliness.
He endures the weariness of relentless pain.
He gets the battle against doubt.
He suffers the agonies of profound grief.
Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves. And because he fully knows us, he is most able to care for us: “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Psalm 103:13–14).
He Will Meet You There
If we’re honest, though, it doesn’t always feel like God is near or compassionate, especially when life hits us square in the face or our prayers seem to go unanswered.
Like us, maybe you’ve struggled to make sense of the pain God has allowed, and right now you’re wondering if he’s stored up his compassion for everyone but you.
It’s okay to acknowledge your lingering questions, to remove the veneer of “acceptable Christianity.” We won’t be ready to trust God with everything if we haven’t actually brought him everything, including the parts that are confusing and messy. It’s not until we’re honest with ourselves, and with God, that we’ll be ready to receive the truth: We have a Father who not only remembers our frame and feels compassion for us but also came to do something about it.
That hope is why this book has been written.
And it’s what we’ll explore in the chapters ahead as we journey through the New Testament, holding up a magnifying glass to the life of Jesus as he meets people just like us. We’ll see how he experienced the depth of our humanity in his own body and how he was drawn personally and compassionately to the humanity of others.
Here you’ll find short, accessible chapters, which can be read in the order they appear or in whatever order seems most applicable to you right now. You can read the book alone or walk through it with a friend or group, and you can personally apply each chapter by engaging with the reflection questions at the end. However you read, our prayer is that you’ll close this book with a renewed sense of Jesus’s presence with you. And more than anything else, we pray that you’ll have a greater understanding of who Jesus is and how personal he really is.
That he really knows you and that you can really know him.
We don’t write from a place of theory; we write from the trenches of our daily realities. We’re not here to offer you motivational fluff or false hope. We’re here to walk alongside you, human to human, as we encounter the real, life-changing truth of who Jesus has shown himself to be in the Gospels. We’re here to dwell on rock-solid, substantial truth that brings tangible hope and draws us near to the very heartbeat of God through the life of his Son.
Friend, regardless of the strength of your faith, the burdens you carry, the pain you endure, the temptations you battle, the doubts you’re trying to push aside, or the grief that’s left a gaping hole in your heart, you aren’t alone. There’s a place for you here. So don’t leave your humanity at the door, but in the pages ahead let our Lord Jesus infuse comfort and strength into every ounce of your being.
Wherever you find yourself right now, rest assured, he will meet you there.
Home is around the corner,
Sarah
Jesus Will Meet You There Video Series
Episode 5
Katie Blackburn — On Weakness
I’m excited to share the fourth of six conversations in our “Jesus Will Meet You There” Video Series with men and women I greatly admire. Each video interview coincides with one section of the book, Jesus Will Meet You There. Other conversations include interviews with Laura Wifler, Tim Challies, Jared Wilson, Brad Hambrick, Vaneetha Risner (releasing next week), and a special surprise guest (in two weeks).
Today’s conversation is with Katie Blackburn, a mother of eight in a beautiful blended family, a writer, teacher, and learner. She is a contributing writer to the Coffee + Crumbs blog as well as one of the podcast’s co-host. She is also the author of Gluing the Cracks, The Very Best Baseball Game, and Grace Will Be There: Finding God in the Life We Aren’t Ready For.
You can watch or listen to this encouraging conversation HERE (latest video found at the bottom of the link).
Set Apart 