Get Up and Walk · Week 5 · Friday

Into the Daylight

For twenty years his oldest friends have known him as one version of himself. The funny one. The one who could drink anyone under the table. The one who never took anything too seriously and could be counted on to keep the night going.

He is not that man anymore. He has been walking with God quietly for a few years now, and it has changed him at the root. But around these particular guys, the friends who knew him at nineteen, he has kept it carefully hidden. They would give him an unbelievable amount of grief. So at the reunions and on the group text, when faith comes up, he just goes quiet. When it gets mocked, he laughs along. He lets them go on assuming he is exactly who he has always been.

He let them assume he was who he always was.

He told himself it was wisdom. Picking his moment. But somewhere underneath, he knew what it actually was. It was Nicodemus keeping his distance in the daylight. It was the most important thing about him, kept off the table because of what it might cost him with the people whose opinion he had cared about the longest.

The Fire

This weekend they are all together, and one of them is in real trouble. His marriage is imploding. He is drinking in a way that scares the others. He has the hollow look of a man coming apart. Late at night, around the fire, after a couple of the guys have gone to bed, he stares into the flames and asks the group, half joking, mostly not, whether anybody even prays anymore.

There it is. The opening. And notice the shape of it: it is the night opening. Around a fire, in the dark, after the others have gone to bed, where a quiet word would be safe and deniable and could be laughed off in the morning. He could say something low and careful right now and risk almost nothing.

He does not take the night version. He sits with it overnight instead.

Biblical Backdrop

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night three years before. When he finally declared himself, he did not do it in the dark.

John deliberately reminds you, in the very moment Nicodemus steps into the light, that this is the man who used to come at night. The whole arc is in that one sentence. He came in the dark, and now here he is in the open, in daylight, claiming a condemned man’s body in front of the whole city, his reputation spent in a single irreversible act. No speech. No argument. Just devotion carried into the daylight where it would cost him everything.

Breakfast

The next morning, in the daylight, sober, at the breakfast table with all of them there, he says it plainly. Not a sermon. Just the truth, finally in the open.

“I do. I pray every day. It’s pretty much the only reason I’m still standing. And I should have told you guys years ago instead of sitting here letting you think I’m the same idiot I was at twenty. I’m here. I’ll pray with you. And I’m done pretending around you.”

The table goes quiet. Somebody makes a joke to break the tension, the way somebody always does. For a second he feels the old fear, that he has just torched twenty years of being the funny one. But the thing is done. The spices are carried. He is in the daylight now.

And later that day, two of them find him separately. One just to say he respects it. And the hardest one of the whole group, the one he was most afraid of, finds him by the cars, looks at the ground, and says, “Hey. Tell me how you started.”

He did not win an argument. He did not give a testimony with three points. He just stopped hiding, in the daylight, where it cost him something, and let the act preach the way Nicodemus let the spices preach. Live it in the open; God does the drawing.

Tomorrow · The Silent Soldier · The Series Finale