A Word

I heard the sermon that named my idol two or three years too late. By then I was already deep in it.

I got a job at Amazon out of school and it went well fast — promoted twice to Senior Product Manager inside three and a half years. I loved it. I thought I was building something that mattered. Then I quit to start my own company, and that one went nowhere. I spent the whole time on survival mode, working day and night, with nothing in my head but the work. When it moved, I was over the moon. When it stalled, I was depressed. That was the entire range of me.

The sermon was Tim Keller on idols. Before it, I read the Bible's warnings about idols and skimmed them — I pictured statues, other gods, people bowing to something. Not me. The sermon opened it. An idol is whatever you've made your meaning, the thing that decides whether you're worth anything, and mine was my career. I had been defining myself as a person who builds useful things. When the building went badly, so did I. I wasn't reading about someone else's problem. He was describing me, and I recognized it before he was done.

That was the start of a long walk back toward worshiping God instead. But the thing I keep returning to is the timing. I'd been sitting under sermons my whole life. Most Sundays I sat and waited for them to end. When one was good, I tried to take it in — and then found no place to put it, because I wasn't in that season, and I forgot it by the next week. This one reached me, but it reached me years into the trap. A word that had known where I was standing could have found me before I was in that deep.

A Word is a short teaching that arrives when the right passage meets the right moment in what a person has been carrying. It opens the Scripture on its own terms first — who wrote it, what was happening, what it shows about God — and then sets the person down inside it, so the passage isn't explained to them but opened. It uses this journey, this person, this thing they keep circling.

The shapes are ordinary. Someone has been circling a strained relationship with their father for weeks — the same hurt surfacing in entry after entry — and a teaching arrives on Joseph meeting the brothers who sold him, not as a lesson about forgiveness but as a door into where they're standing. Or a person keeps returning to a fear that they've wasted years on the wrong path, and the passage that finds them is Israel in the wilderness, the long way round that was never wasted. What arrives isn't a verse pulled to fit the feeling; it's the Scripture opened on its own terms, with the person set down inside it far enough to recognize themselves.