Seven Statements from the Cross • Week 7 • Wednesday

Statement VII • Luke 23:46 • Scott, 22, young adult

The Setup

Scott is 22 and has been in a relationship for two years that he cannot seem to leave and cannot seem to fully commit to. There is nothing catastrophic to point to. His girlfriend is not unkind. The relationship is not abusive. By the measures most people would apply it is reasonably functional. But Scott has been sitting with something in the quiet parts of his prayer life for the better part of a year, a stillness where there should be resonance, a consistent absence of peace when he tries to picture this person as his wife, and he has learned enough about himself and about God to understand what that kind of quiet usually means.

He knows what the right thing is. He has known for a while. What keeps him in the relationship is not love exactly, though there is genuine care there. What keeps him is the only-ness of it. This is the only future he can picture. If he lets go of this, the path ahead becomes entirely unknown, and the unknown is frightening in a way that familiar dissatisfaction is not. He is 22 and he is holding onto something that is not right because he cannot yet see what is on the other side of releasing it, and the inability to see it feels like evidence that there is nothing there.

The Crossroads Moment

The conversation Scott keeps not having is the one where he tells the truth. He has rehearsed it more times than he can count and found a reason each time not to have it. The reasons are real. It will hurt her. It will upend a life that has built up around the two of them. It will cost him the community that formed around the relationship. It will leave him alone at 22 without a clear picture of what comes next. Every one of those things is true. And every one of them is a reason to hold on that is actually a reason to stay in something he knows is wrong, which is a different thing entirely from a reason to stay.

What Jesus Did

Jesus committed his spirit into the Father’s hands without a detailed explanation of what the next three days would look like. The resurrection was not mapped out for him on the cross. He surrendered into the unknown and trusted completely the hands he was surrendering into. Jeremiah 29:11 was written to people in exile who could not see the good future God was describing from where they were standing. God did not say you will be able to see the plans. He said I know the plans. The plan does not require our visibility to be real. Scott cannot see from inside this relationship what God has on the other side of releasing it. He does not need to. He needs to trust the hands he is committing it into.

The Choice and Outcome

Scott has the conversation. It is honest and kind and it costs him exactly what he knew it would cost him. He walks out of it into an emptiness that is real and necessary and uncomfortable, the particular kind of loneliness that comes after doing the right thing when the right thing does not feel good yet. He sits in that emptiness for several months without rushing it or filling it with a replacement. He prays in a way he has not prayed in two years, without the static of a relationship that was not right sitting between him and God. Six months later his life looks different from the version he was holding onto inside the relationship. Not fixed and not fully formed yet, but truer. More open. More like something that was prepared for him rather than something he was maintaining out of fear. The future God had was not the one Scott was trying to keep. It was the one waiting on the other side of his open hands.

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