 My grandson has a custom-painted parking spot at La Porte High School. Student parking is a massive deal there — the seniors get to paint their own spaces before the year begins, and the spot isn’t handed out for nothing. Getting that parking spot ready was no small project.
Before he could paint his own design, he had to cover last year's artwork with fresh primer, measure and tape out his layout, and then carefully paint each section. There were multiple trips to Home Depot for primer, brushes, rollers, tape, and just the right shade of paint. There were conversations with the paint department about what would hold up on sun-baked asphalt. There were sections that had to be repainted because the lines weren't straight enough or the color coverage wasn't right. And there were long hours under the relentless Texas sun, kneeling on hot pavement while sweat dripped into his eyes. By the time he was finished, he had invested real money, real effort, and a good deal of perseverance into a parking space that, for the moment, sits empty. But he finally got it done. The spot looks terrific. That reserved, paid-for space is teaching me something about grace I didn’t expect — and it starts with the very word painted across it: “NOT FREE” in plain letters, secured and paid for. Watching him sit on a spot he can’t even use yet got me thinking about a phrase theologians love: costly grace. Grace is free to us. It was never free, period. And that distinction is at the heart of two things Scripture keeps separate: the gift, and the growth. Justification: The Gift of the License Imagine a teenager walking into the DMV, nervous about the written test and the road exam. You’ve studied hard and practiced driving, hoping you’re good enough to pass. But when you step up to the counter, the worker smiles, hands you a brand-new license with your picture on it, and says, “Congratulations. You’re a licensed driver in the state of Texas.” You’re confused: “Wait, I haven’t taken the tests yet. I haven’t proven anything. How can I be a driver?” The worker replies, “You don’t have to. This license is yours — not because you earned it, but because it’s been given to you. You are a driver, right now.” That moment at the counter is justification. God declares you righteous, not because of anything you’ve done, but because of what Jesus has done for you. Like my grandson’s spot, marked NOT FREE and yet already his, the cost is real — it’s just not paid by you. The spot is secured before you even bring a car to the lot. It is a gift, freely given, and it was expensive. Sanctification: Learning to Drive the Car The DMV worker doesn’t stop there, though. They hand you a driver’s manual and say: “This will guide you for the rest of your life. Study it. Take care of your car — it’s how you’ll make the journey.” That’s sanctification. You’ve already been given the status of a driver, but now you’re called to grow into what that means. You don’t study the manual to keep your license — it’s already legally yours. These practices help you live out the freedom and responsibility that come with the gift. The first time you merge onto the highway, you white-knuckle the wheel, miss your exit, and nearly sideswipe a minivan. The manual says “signal before you turn,” but in the moment you forget. That white-knuckle terror is sanctification — learning to live into a reality you already possess, badly at first, but persistently. You don’t lose your license over a bad merge; you just get better with practice. This is the classic Lutheran distinction between Law and Gospel. The Gospel is the license — pure gift, no conditions. The Law is the manual and, later, the rearview mirror: not a threat to your status, but a guide that shows you where you’ve been and orients you forward. Confusing the two is where most of our theological trouble starts, whether we collapse grace into a reward for good driving or treat the manual as optional once we’ve got the card in our wallet. The Mirror and the Cop Once you’re on the highway, reality sets in. Sometimes you follow the rules perfectly. Other times you speed, run a light, or forget your turn signal. The Law meets you on that highway in more than one way. Most days, it’s the rearview mirror — showing you exactly where you went wrong, what’s coming up behind you, helping you correct your course. The glance isn’t always comfortable; a mirror doesn’t flatter you, it just tells you the truth of what happened back there. But some days the Law is the cop in your rearview, lights on, pulling you over. The ticket stings on purpose. It names the violation plainly and won’t let you talk your way around it. And the Law is also the posted speed limit and the lane markings — the guide that was there all along, telling you how the road is meant to be driven even when you’re doing everything right. Mirror, cop, and guide are the same Law doing three different jobs: showing you, checking you, and directing you. Here’s the vital distinction: none of it — not the mirror, not the ticket — touches your license itself. The DMV worker doesn’t come back to take it away. You remain a licensed driver because your status never depended on your daily performance. Even so, the Law does real work in all three forms — it curbs, it convicts, and it points you back toward the road you’re actually meant to be driving on. (Sure, you CAN lose your driver's license for cause, but that's another blog for another day.) Roadside Assistance The road isn’t a solo track. As licensed drivers, we’re not just cruising past the stranded. That’s roadside assistance — not waiting for the broken-down to find a tow truck, but pulling over to hand them a full tank. The DMV worker puts it this way: “Don’t forget about others out there. Some are stuck, out of gas, or lost without a map. When you see them, don’t just drive by.” That’s the calling of evangelism and mission. We go meet people where they are rather than waiting for them to find their way to us. The Ultimate Not-Free Parking Like a custom-painted space marked NOT FREE and waiting anyway, God’s grace secures our spot long before we have the wheels to drive into it. The price was paid — just not by us. We are justified by a gift we didn’t earn, and we spend the rest of the journey learning to drive in a way that honors the One who gave us the keys. So here’s the question for this week: where are you still trying to earn your parking spot? You already have the license. Now all my grandson needs is the car to park in it. That’s a heavier lift. I don’t think he’ll have it before school starts. Maybe not even by graduation day. But the space — not free, paid for, and entirely his — is waiting anyway. Sometimes God prepares the place long before we're ready to occupy it. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]
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 There is a kind of faith the church doesn't know how to talk about.
Not the faith of the triumphant testimony — the dramatic conversion, the answered prayer, the healing that arrived on cue. Not the faith of the theologically confident, who can articulate what they believe and why. The Gospels not only make room for this kind of faith; they name it and celebrate it. But there is another type as well. The faith that has been worn down by twelve years of bleeding, silence, and shame until it's barely recognizable as faith anymore. The faith that cannot make it to the front of the room. The faith that reaches sideways, invisibly, for the hem. That faith is all over our congregations. We mostly do not see it because we are not looking for it in the right places. The Woman and the Number Twelve Matthew 9 places two healing stories in deliberate parallel. A woman who has been hemorrhaging for twelve years reaches for the hem of Jesus's robe in a crowd. A twelve-year-old girl — the daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus — is dying. One has lived her whole adult life in suffering. The other has barely had a chance to begin. The number is not accidental. Twelve is the number of the tribes of Israel. Twelve is the whole people of God. Matthew is making a structural argument: these two individuals represent everyone. The ones who have been sick longer than they can remember, and the ones cut off before they could begin. The exhausted and the barely-started. Both belong to the Twelve. Jesus goes to both of them. The woman's situation is specific and worth unpacking. Under the purity codes of her day, her condition made her ritually unclean. Anyone she touched became contaminated. She could not enter the Temple. She could not sit in community worship. She could not be held. For twelve years, the way the purity system was functionally applied in her context marked her as a problem to be managed from a distance. So she does not approach Jesus directly. She cannot. What she does is push through the crowd — invisibly, without permission — and reach for the kraspedon: the ritual fringe, the tzitzit (the blue-tasseled fringes commanded in Numbers 15 as a daily physical reminder of God's commandments). It is a theologically suggestive act of faith. A woman told for twelve years she was outside the covenant reaches out and grabs hold of a visible sign of that covenant. She is not reaching randomly. She is reaching for a sign that she still, somehow, belongs. What Jesus Does with What the World Calls Inadequate Faith Under the Law, contact with an unclean person should have made Jesus unclean. Instead, the logic of the Kingdom takes over: his cleanness spreads to her rather than her uncleanness spreading to him. This is the atonement in miniature. In Matthew 9, Jesus repeatedly crosses lines he was not supposed to cross — eating with tax collectors and sinners, allowing an unclean woman to touch him, taking the hand of a dead girl. Each time, the same thing happens: uncleanness does not transfer to him. His life transfers to them. Jesus stops. He turns. He does not ask how she ended up here. He does not make her explain the twelve years. He does not tell her to come back when she is cleaned up. He looks at whatever scraped-together, desperate, last-scrap faith she dragged to him — the faith that could not even make it to his face, the faith that reached sideways and invisible — and he calls it enough. Then he names her publicly. "Daughter." In front of everyone. He is not just healing her body. He is ending her exile. He is restoring her to the community that had classified her as a contaminant for twelve years. The word he uses — tharsei, "take heart," "take courage" — is a word of commissioning. She is not just healed. She is sent back in. Hesed Against the System This radical re-integration is the flesh-and-blood fulfillment of Israel's prophetic hope. What Hosea names, Jesus enacts in real time on a body the system had excluded. Seven hundred years before this moment, Hosea named the same tension. God's people had run through the cycle of faithlessness and consequence until the silence of God felt like abandonment. And into that silence Hosea speaks: "Come, let us return to the Lord. For it is he who has torn, and he will heal us. He has struck down, and he will bind us up." The God who tears also heals. The God who strikes also binds up. This is the shape of hesed — not a passing feeling, but a stubborn covenant loyalty that does not break. It is the love that holds fast regardless of the other party's condition. It is loyal love that goes all the way to the cross. Jesus brings this hesed into direct conflict with the religious metrics of his day. When the Pharisees object to his eating with sinners, he quotes Hosea: "I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." The system, as she experienced it, treated her as a contamination risk. God's hesed says otherwise. What This Means for Pastoral Care The people who approach God sideways are not doing it wrong. They are doing exactly what the hemorrhaging woman did. They cannot come boldly. Years of suffering, or shame, or silence have made boldness unavailable to them. What they can do is push through the crowd and reach — invisibly, without permission — for whatever part of the Word they can get their hands on. The pastor who knows this will build communities differently. Consider these practices:
The question is whether you can see it. If your ministry is calibrated to recognize visible, articulate, participatory faith, you will likely miss it. It often looks like a brief prayer at a food pantry table. A quiet presence in the back pew. A hospital room where someone can only whisper the name of Jesus. That is last-scrap faith — and it is met, again and again, by hesed with skin on. What Is Your Twelve Years? So, what is the thing that wakes up with you? The thing that drains you quietly, day after day. The thing you have stopped telling people about because nothing has changed and you are tired of looking disappointed. Twelve years of trying to stay sober. Twelve years of leading a congregation that will not turn. Twelve years of praying the same prayer against the same silent ceiling. He stopped for her. He went to that house. If all you can do is reach sideways, reach. If all you can reach is the hem, reach for the hem. He has already stopped. What is your twelve years? I'd love to hear where you're reaching for the hem these days — leave a comment below. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ELCA-rostered intentional interim minister and congregational consultant based in the greater Houston area, with fifteen years on the faculty of the FIND School for Spiritual Direction in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. He writes on congregational transition, spiritual formation, and the theology of the unseen at The Marginal Note on Substack. [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]  Image: Freepik.com Most people who come to spiritual direction are waiting—not for the session to begin, but for themselves to be ready.
They are waiting to feel like they believe what they say they believe. They are waiting for the fog to lift, the doubt to quiet, or the sense of God’s presence to return—or arrive for the first time—before they feel they can really begin. There is a version of the spiritual life that quietly trains people to clean themselves up before they speak. It treats prayer as something you earn access to by getting your interior house in order first. It suggests you must feel sufficiently sincere or resolve the outstanding business between you and God before you presume to show up at the door. I want to explore where that version comes from, and why it misses the radical nature of grace. The Breath in the Locked Room On the evening of the first Easter Sunday, Jesus walked through a locked door into a room full of people who had spent the weekend in hiding. He said peace—before they had explained themselves, before they had demonstrated remorse, and before they had shown any sign of having learned a single thing from the previous three days. And then he did something that John describes with a word that appears only one other time in Scripture. He breathed on them. The Greek word is emphysaō. The only other place it appears in the biblical text is Genesis 2:7, when God formed the first human being from dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. What Jesus did in that room was a new creation act. The same breath that animated a human being from dust was exhaled again into people who had not earned it or prepared for it. The Spirit is not the reward for readiness; the Spirit is what makes readiness possible. The Grace That Goes Before This is what the tradition calls prevenient grace—the grace that goes before. That same breath is not just a moment in a locked room; it is the pattern of how God deals with us. It is the grace that exists before your first conscious prayer, before your decision to take the spiritual life seriously, and before you sat across from a spiritual director for the first time. The breath had already been exhaled. In the waters of your baptism, the same Risen Jesus who stood in that upper room breathed the life of new creation into you—not because you were prepared or understood what was happening, but because that is what God does with dust. What this means for the interior life is more practical than it sounds: You do not begin to pray in order to establish contact with a God who is waiting at a distance. You begin to pray because the Spirit who was breathed into you is already praying. The Apostle Paul says in Romans 8 that the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. The prayer is already happening. You are not initiating it—you are joining it. Grace First, Comprehension Following This changes the posture of the whole interior life. You are not reaching for what has not yet arrived; you are learning to live from what was already given. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, writing in the fourth century, understood this deeply. He put candidates for baptism through the rites of initiation first—in the dark—before they fully understood what was being done to them. They went into the water before they could explain it. The body received the oil. Only afterward were they told what had happened. His point was not that understanding is unimportant, but that the Spirit was not waiting for understanding to arrive before showing up. The grace came first. The comprehension followed. It still works that way. The Honest Starting Place Spiritual direction, at its best, is simply the practice of helping someone notice what the Spirit has already been doing in them—often in the places they were least expecting it, and frequently in the experiences they most wanted to leave behind. If you have been waiting to feel ready—ready to pray, ready to trust, ready to believe that the forgiveness is actually for you—I want to suggest that the waiting itself, with its doubt, hesitation, and quiet fatigue, may be the very thing to bring to prayer. Not as evidence that something is wrong, but as the honest starting place it already is. You are not behind. You are not disqualified. You are dust that has already been breathed into—and the breath has not left you. That is where the interior life begins. Not with your readiness. With his. If you find yourself waiting like this, spiritual direction can be a place to begin—not once you are ready, but exactly where you are. You can learn more about how I work here. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack. |
