Not to Jesus. You may think you’re fooling others—maybe you are, and I’m not one to condemn that—but you’re not fooling Jesus. He is neither surprised nor disappointed. Turns out he’s a fan of the truth—all truth, even that truth about yourself that you’d rather not be true.

Your disbelief is not an eternal disqualifier. It’s not game over. The scriptures seem to say again and again, in thousands of different ways, that there is always hope. Always an opportunity for change. Always the wide open gates of God’s City.

Is the way they continue. A foundation is laid; a trajectory is set. The DNA of the future was already there at the start.

God brought the cosmos into existence by his words and his Spirit. By his communication and his breath. Everything began with a divine exhale.

All things continue to be sustained by his words and His Spirit. Learning to follow Jesus means learning to listen to his communication, to breathe in his breath as he quietly whispers to us.

He’s going to take things too far. He’s going to rub against your grain. He’s going to piss you off. He’s going to frustrate the hell out of you. He’s going to make you wonder if you made a seriously bad error in judgment in beginning to follow him in the first place.

This won’t happen every day, but it will likely happen a good handful of times during a lifetime of really following hard after Jesus. It’s all part of the package.

I believe in miracles. Or perhaps more truthfully, I believe in a God who does miracles. Not all the time. But sometimes. In some places. In some situations. For some people. The unpredictable and uncontrollable nature of miracles, I think, is meant to keep things interesting. It keeps us on our toes, longing and expectant.

Sometimes we can hold onto the miraculous ways of God from a previous generation, not realizing that it was the manna provided to get them through their desert. It was what they needed in their time and place. What we need in our time and place, to get through our desert, is likely to be something rather different.

What nutrition science knows is that what you consume stays within you. That it becomes a part of you. Food is not merely fuel. The overall health of your eating patterns affects every cell in your body because it all becomes your body. What you eat determines the quality and longevity of your life because what you eat literally becomes who you are.

In the same way that rhythms of healthy eating affect your body, so do rhythms of “consuming” Christ.

Jesus was lifeless in the tomb. Stone cold, stone-sealed.

His disciples were also lifeless. Their inner lives executed along with their rabbi, their physical lives under threat of the same kind of death.

The Eucharist is partly a remembrance of Christ’s death. “Whenever you eat this, remember me.” It is also a re-identification with his death. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

The old, “Is Jesus talking about cannibalism?” question. It’s crazy talk. It really is. So I find it rather disingenuous and judgy to come down hard on those who couldn’t really swallow what Jesus was saying. (Pun intended).

We have the benefit of hindsight. We have the story of the Last Supper. We have been handed down the practice of the Passover meal transformed into the Eucharist. We are mostly inoculated to the shock of the flesh-blood metaphor.

If you feed on Jesus, the Bread of Life. The promise is not that Jesus will satisfy you once and for all. As if one bite is all you will ever need…at least not just yet. Just like natural bread, you can fill your belly, you can get energy from those carbs, but eventually your body uses up those resources and you feel hungry again.

Still, nothing satisfies like Jesus.

You can’t experience everything. You can’t see or hear or taste or touch everything for yourself. Really, your own personal experience in the world is only a minute fraction of all that has actually taken place. For the other nearly 99.99999999999999% of everything else, what you need is an eyewitness. Someone else whose experience you can trust.

Trust is the key. An untrustworthy eyewitness is no help at all. Even if what they experienced was legit, if you find it hard or impossible to believe them, well, then they’re just witnessing to the wind. And you’re missing out on something, or at least wasting your time.

It is a response. Faith is not so much about making a lifestyle decision as it is accepting an invitation. Faith is not adherence to a creed but an exchange of love.

At least in my tradition, it’s common to use language like this when talking about someone first coming to faith, the moment of conversion, as if the invitation of God is only to conversion. But conversion is only the first response to invitations that have been going on for a lifetime, and will continue for a lifetime.