Chapter 1 The Blank Chapter

My eldest son, Johnmarc, was headed off to college, and I wanted to give him something.

That is as close as I can get to what I felt at the time. Something. I could not have named its shape then, and I am not certain I can now. Not more advice — he had plenty of mine, eighteen years of it, and could probably deliver most of it in my voice. Not a verse on a card. Something he could keep and come back to. Something that would still hold at two in the morning, in a room I will not be standing in, when a friend asks him what he actually believes and why. I still want that for him. I want it for you.

It was for him. It was also, if I am honest, for everyone — including me. I wanted to answer those questions for myself, and I had decided going in that if I could not answer them for myself, that in and of itself was the finding.

Johnmarc, that is where this started — with you at the door, and me wanting to hand you something. Jiovanni, you are a senior now, and you graduate in the spring of 2027, and you are standing at that same door. So this time I am telling it to the both of you. And I need to hear this as much as either of you does. Others need to hear it too — and if you are one of them, come stand where my sons are standing. There is room.

So I did what I do with the people I love. I built him something.

That is less a boast than a confession. When something matters to me I go looking for its architecture — how it fits together, what holds what up, what has to be true first. Hand me a thing I am afraid of losing and I will hand you back a diagram of it. It is how I have loved people for as long as I can remember, and it is what happened to that something the moment I sat down.

It started as one page. The one page became a slide deck — seventy-two slides of it — and the slide deck became a book. I did not sit down to write a book. I sat down to write a page.

I tried to hit all the bases: What you need to know. What is the difference between your spirit, soul, body, and heart. What is in need of saving. Is salvation a one-time thing, or is it then, now, and forever. What is salvation. Is repentance a dirty word. What is the difference between faith and trust. Do you know your new identity. What is your current position — I had a whole grammar for where a person stands. Nine chapters, a table of contents, a verse under every claim.

I had given myself two rules when I started: number one, it had to be clear enough for a fifth grader, and number two, short enough that a person could take it in over an hour or two. The second rule did not survive. Thirty-five pages.

Looking at it now, I can say plainly what I had built. I had taken the whole thing apart and named every working part. How a person is assembled. What in him needs saving, and why. How the saving happens, and in what tense. Where faith ends and trust begins. Who he is now, and where he stands now. The mechanics of it, part by part, every part labeled and every label true.

And every one of those parts is a question about God before it is a question about us — what He made and what He made it out of, what He does about what went wrong in it and why He bothered, who He says a person is once He has. The Father was in all nine of those chapters. I had left Him in the third person the whole way through.

And the reality was Johnmarc had already heard all of it.

That is the part I did not want to look at while I was typing. Most of what was in those chapters was what my son and I had talked about for years — out loud, in the ordinary course of my being his father. I was not telling him anything new. I was collecting what we had already said to each other and was just putting it in order.

What I wanted was to send him out with something that was not a set of rules. He had rules. Everyone hands an eighteen-year-old rules. I wanted to hand him purpose.

And then I came to the last chapter.

Six months on one page

Chapter 10: What then, is the Purpose of life?

I typed the heading. I know I typed it, because it is still there.

I worked on that chapter for six months.

I am not rounding up. The other nine had been cobbled together in about a week. This one took half a year. I prayed and asked, wrote and updated, re-ordered and added and came back at it, month after month — and all it ever did was lead me in a circular path that never fully answered the question I had set out to answer for my son. Every pass returned me to the place I had started, with the page still empty and the leaving date still coming.

I did not write it. So the page stayed white.

The heading sits at the bottom of the last page with nothing underneath it. Then the document just continues into the notes that follow, the way a road runs on past the place you meant to stop and does not mark it in any way.

It was not that I had nothing to say. I had just spent nine chapters demonstrating that I have plenty to say. I have been walking with God since I was three years old. I could have filled that page in twenty minutes with sentences that are true — every one of them true, every one with a verse under it.

But across those six months the paper had been close and not right, and I knew it. When I try to say what was wrong, I land on the same sentence every time: it still seemed to miss the simplicity of the gospel — the part that is supposed to be simple enough to say to a child. I had needed every page.

And underneath that, the harder thing. He had heard all of it, and it still felt like head knowledge. In the middle of all those mechanics, where was the relationship?

If Christianity stands unique among everything a person could believe, it stands there. Not in a better ethic. Not in a cleaner account of how a human being is put together. In this: it is about an eternal relationship with our Creator. And I had written thirty-five true pages and left the relationship to be inferred.

My precious son would have trusted it. That is the weight of being somebody's father: he would have trusted it. This amazing young man would have carried those true things out the door with him and lived by them, faithfully, for years.

And a set of true things, lived by, is a set of rules. The world brings rules. Religion brings rules. The LORD brings relationship — and six months at that page had taught me that I could not manufacture a relationship out of a well-built document.

A long history of asking the wrong question

I should tell you that I have a long history of asking God the wrong question.

For years the question I was sure of — the adult one, the one a serious man asks — was Lord, what do You want me to do for You? More than a decade ago it got corrected, and the correction was not mine — it came out of a workshop of Donna and Jamie Winship's called Knowing Rediscovered, and Jamie put it plainly: the question is not what do You want me to do, it is Lord, what do You want me to know? That correction kept working on me for years, until another question came up underneath it, a prerequisite to it, and it became the one I had learned to pray:

Father, what do You want me to know about You?

And still. A man can spend thirty years having his questions corrected and still leave the last page of a paper blank. Knowing which question to ask is not the same as holding the answer in your hands.

Two days before he left

Two days before Johnmarc left, I had an experience with the Father.

Two days. Nine chapters finished, the tenth still white, and no time left to write anything. Whatever that last chapter was going to be, it was not going to be written by me that week.

Let me say plainly how I mean that sentence, since it is the kind of sentence that makes some readers close a book. What follows is a sentence I believe I was given. I am blessed to be able to discern — for the most part — the unique and distinct voices of the Heavenly Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. For the most part. That qualifier is not modesty; it is accuracy, and I would rather hand you an accurate qualifier than a confident one. You are free to weigh it. I have.

One more thing belongs here first, because the sentence assumes it. Years ago I had read a book by Francis Chan called Forgotten God. His argument, as I have carried it goes something like this: no one in the American church denies the Holy Spirit — we affirm Him, and then we go on living as though almost nothing depended on Him. Chan puts the test as a question. If you woke tomorrow and found it was not true that the Spirit lives in you, how much of your life would actually look different? He is not accusing anyone of bad doctrine. He is pointing at the distance between the doctrine and the life. And because the Spirit is God, he says, when we forget about the Spirit we really are forgetting God.

Ok back to two days before my son left for college. I was out walking the dog, praying the question I had learned to pray. Father, what do You want me to know about You?

The answer came while I was still praying the question.

And the Father so gently said:

Jesse, if the Holy Spirit is the forgotten God... then I AM the Forgotten Purpose.

I want to be careful about what I am claiming and what I am not. There was no sound anyone else would have heard. What I received was a word, gently spoken, that I know to be my Heavenly Father's — and I saw the words in my mind's eye as He said them, and the I AM was capitalized.

Notice the grammar of it. He did not say that His purpose had been forgotten, as though the purpose were an item He owned and we had misfiled. He said, I AM the Forgotten Purpose. The purpose is not something He has. It is Someone He is.

Father — that sentence has never once gone flat on me. I had written nine chapters about You. You answered in the first person.

Then the Holy Spirit reminded me of a verse. I looked it up.

A verse I had read before.

It has taken me a long time to stop taking things apart as my first move, and this one deserves to be looked at whole before it is opened.

Here is what it did to me that day, and it is smaller than an exposition and much larger than a definition. My last chapter had asked what. The answer that came back was a Who.

Nine chapters of mechanics, and the tenth was never going to be another one. The page would not fill because I kept trying to finish a relationship with an explanation.

If you are tired, I want you to have that at the front of this book instead of after the last page, which is where it found me.

In life, from the time we are born we have been handed purpose as a project. “Find your passion”, “build the thing”, “become someone”, and if the thing you built does not hold, “build a better one, faster”. And somewhere along the way you were probably handed a second set on top of it — religion's rules, quieter than the world's and just as tiring. You do not have to have been in a church to get them. They are in the air. I built things too. I am still, as you have probably gathered, a man who reaches for a diagram when he is frightened. I am not going to stand over you and tell you the building is the problem. I built a careful thing for my own son.

I am telling you that I got all the way to the last page of my own best thinking and could not write the ending — and that the ending, when it came, was not a strategy at all. It was an introduction.

What I gave him instead

In the file, small book, paper - whatever you want to call it - that heading still has nothing under it. I have been back through the whole document since and made multiple versions of it — more pages, everything renumbered — and chapter ten is still a heading with nothing underneath. That page was never going to hold the answer.

I never gave him the paper. It stayed on my computer, and I do not count that a loss — he had been hearing it out loud for eighteen years. He did not need the document. He had the content, the head knowledge. What he did not have was the last chapter, and neither did I.

So I gave him a journal instead. A good one, leather-bound, with one sentence on it:

The purpose of life is to know the Father.

The rest of the pages were blank.

I told him that the best advice I had — out of everything I knew, out of my own relationship with the Father, out of who I know I am in Christ Jesus — was to pursue the Father with everything he had.

I walked into his room and sat down on his bed and gave it to him.

That was all it was. A father's goodbye.

It was simple. Because the answer is simple.

I had spent six months, countless hours and many sleepless nights, failing to be that simple. And the chapter I could not write went out the door as a journal I did not have to write — the answer on it, and the rest of the pages left open for his own knowing instead of closed over my unfinished one.

The question I was praying on that walk

I am not going to hand you those exact papers. Some of what was in them is coming, in its own place — how you are put together, some mechanics, some thoughts and stories. None of that is filler, and none of it is the answer. I have already tried leading with it once.

What I can hand you now costs nothing, and it is not a program. It is the question I was praying on that walk.

Father, what do You want me to know about You?

Pray that. Out loud in a car, or under your breath on the way somewhere, or in whatever room you are sitting in when you put this down. Not as a technique — the wording is not the point, and He is not grading the phrasing. Ask it the way you would ask somebody you had decided you actually wanted to know, and then stay quiet long enough to let Him answer. I cannot tell you what He will say to you. I can tell you that a gracious Heavenly Father was not reluctant with me, and that the answer came while I was still asking.

The sentence again, now that you know what I was doing when it came:

There is an answer to the question, and it is not a what. It is a Person.

Father,

Thank You for what You did with that blank page.

I would have handed my son a set of true things and called it the answer, and he would have trusted it, because he trusts me, and he would have gone looking for a purpose instead of looking for You.

And when You said it, You said it gently — which is the detail I keep coming back to, because there was nothing in me that had earned gentle.

I am not going to pretend I have arrived at the knowing. I am at the beginning of it. I would rather be at the beginning of You than the end of anything else.

So I choose to put the pen down long enough to look at You.

Keep my son. Give him the Person, not just the sentence.

Thank You, Father. I am here, and I am not in a hurry.