My daughter and I met in Toronto back in November 2024. It was my second time seeing Taylor Swift in concert – I officially considered myself a “Swiftie.”
Toronto was all-Taylor, all the time. From the airport to the train into the city to every shop and restaurant, her music was everywhere. The day of the concert, we headed to the aquarium. Yes, even Toronto’s aquatic residents were being treated to the enchanting melodies of the Eras Tour. As we left to head back to our Airbnb to relax before the show, the carefree vibe of the day was interrupted by a well-meaning young man standing on the side of the walkway.
“Jesus died for your sins,” He offered. People groaned. My daughter was one of them.
People say His name all the time as an exclamation and don’t give it a second thought. Say it in the context of the biblical narrative outside of church? It feels disorienting.
Mention it in a way that makes people feel guilty? You’re going to get groans.
Up until the pandemic, I hadn’t spent any meaningful time reading the Bible. When I was younger, I made a half-hearted attempt to go cover-to-cover – I might have made it through the book of Genesis.
That’s a truth many people won’t say out loud – they own a Bible. They believe, more or less, that it matters. And they have never actually read it – not really. Not the way you read something you’re trying to understand. Too often, verses are dispensed like items from a menu.
They hear pieces of it at weddings and funerals or see references to it at sporting events. Maybe like me, they’ve absorbed a few stories in childhood or even gotten a running start at Genesis before the genealogies wore them down.
So as well-intentioned as the young man was, he was sharing a message with people who had no framework to receive it. The words arrived, but there was no story. It’s like walking into a film two hours in and being told the ending is the most important part. Of course it feels disorienting.
Nearly every great religion carries two things at once. The first is a robust and structured moral foundation – a way of ordering life, telling the truth, treating your neighbor with dignity. The second, particularly in Christianity’s case, is harder to name. It’s a spiritual core, an invitation into transformation, an encounter with something larger than yourself that changes who you are from the inside out.
Somewhere along the way, a great deal of Christianity got these two backwards.
The spiritual core quietly receded, and the stone tablets of morality moved to the forefront. The message of transformation was replaced into a transaction – sin, pay a price, learn to behave. When we strip away the larger story of transformation, the truth of what that young man offered is what’s left: a verdict without a relationship. People getting the bill without ever having been invited to the meal.
That’s what I experienced in the collective groan on that chilly Friday afternoon in November. When someone leads with your misses, your body knows it’s being handed a bill. What people were expressing had very little to do with Jesus, and everything to do with being made to feel guilty by a stranger who had skipped the entire story that gives what he said any meaning at all.
If the Bible has ever felt like a foreign country to you, that disorientation is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It’s a sign that you’ve been handed the conclusion without the narrative, the moral without the meaning. All husk, no seed.
Imagine trying to learn French by studying thirty minutes once a week. You’d pick up a few phrases. Maybe you can order coffee. But you’re not dreaming in it. You’re never catching a joke, and you’re definitely not feeling the language influence how you perceive the world. That is how most of us have approached the deepest book in human history – an hour on Sunday, a verse on a coffee mug, or a half-hearted attempt at Genesis. We have been amateur sippers of something that asks to be fully drunk.
I say this without an ounce of judgment, because I was the most amateur sipper of all. For most of my life I assessed Christianity the way you might glance at a painting to decide whether it was hanging straight – from across the room, arms crossed, never close enough to notice the details of the painting itself.
No one guilted me into believing. I closed the distance. I started reading – really reading – and the foreign country became a place I recognized. The story beneath the story began to surface. The spiritual core that all the moralizing had buried turned out to be alive and well, waiting to be found.
If you’ve ever felt that disorientation – that sense that the Bible is speaking a language no one ever taught you – you’re not doing it wrong. You’re standing too far from the painting. You’ve got a single sentence, and not the whole story.
In the weeks ahead, I’m going to invite you into a perspective on that story you’ve never considered.