A Word Before

I want to tell you something before I tell you anything else, because the order matters.

You are not what you think you are.

I do not mean that you have overestimated yourself. I mean the opposite. What God has made you and is making you — what you already are in Christ, what He intends to complete in you — is so much higher than the story most of us have been given, that when we first hear it plainly we are not sure we are allowed to believe it. It sounds too large. It sounds like something for other people, for the especially spiritual, for the ones who have it figured out.

It is for you. It has your name on it. It was decided before the world was made.

I have tried to write what follows in the register John uses — that unhurried, close, circling voice that says the enormous things quietly and trusts you to hold them. I cannot write the way John writes. But I would rather reach for the right thing and fall short than hand you a careful explanation of something that can only be known by entering it. So I have tried to bring you into the rooms where these things happen, and let you see them, and trust the rest to the One who does the actual work from the inside — because a book can point, and only He can pour.

Read this slowly. It is not a program. It is not a method. It is a description of what God is already doing in you, and a word about how to stay near enough to Him that He can finish it.

— Michael Winslow