After All We Can Do: Commitment, Grace, and the Changed Heart
Fellowship Discussion Essay | 21 June 2026
Occasion. On Father’s Day, the fellowship gathered to talk over the Telescope essay I had written for Isak — the one about the seeker, the finder, and the cost of commitment. Isak said it read like a story that bobs and weaves but keeps coming back to one theme: the undecided life against the decided one. That was the essay’s spine, and I expected the conversation to stay there. It did not. Within the hour, the fellowship had pressed on the one place the essay leaned too hard, and what came back was better than what I had written. This essay is my attempt to keep what we found — chiefly that commitment and the changed heart are not rivals but partners, and that the gospel needs both.
I. The impotence of passive grace
When I first fed the Friday conversation with Isak into Claude and asked it to draft the essay, what came back was not the essay I eventually published. It was the standard article: we are all sinners, we are saved by grace, we are powerless to save ourselves, it is faith alone, full stop. I rewrote much of that framing, because, however orthodox it sounds, it is to my eye a large part of why so much of modern Christianity has lost its force in the world. If the message is that you can do nothing, you are a worm; grace covers it. Now relax. Then we, as witnesses, have initiated a new believer into a faith without power or responsibility. Passive people do not change a culture. They do not even reliably change themselves. The Telescope essay was rewritten to say the opposite: that something real and total is asked of us, that the commitment is the whole thing, and the effort is the proof that the commitment is real.
I still believe that. But the discussion illuminated a subtle effect that I think is worth noting. There is a place for passive grace. Leonard was the first to attempt to rationalize both truths as part of a unified whole.
II. After all we can do
Leonard offered the line from the Book of Mormon: “we are saved by grace, after all we can do” (2 Nephi 25:23). The whole weight rests on that small qualifier. After all we can do. It does not say we are saved by all we can do — Paul forecloses that: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). But it does not say nothing is asked of us either. It says: give everything you have, and then know that the gift you could never earn is given anyway. The effort and the grace are not in competition. The effort is the form a committed heart takes; the grace is what carries the heart the rest of the distance it could never cross on its own.
This is exactly the resolution the Telescope essay was groping toward when it said the gap cannot be closed by our striving — Christ closes the gap — and yet a heart that will not lift a finger has not really committed at all. Leonard gave it a cleaner name. We labor as if it depended on us, and we receive as if it depended wholly on God, because both are true at once. That “after all we can do” is the hinge of everything that followed.
III. The changed heart
Susan supplied what the essay had underweighted, drawing on her own life rather than a doctrine. Her point was that the two great commandments — love God, love your neighbor — are already in the Old Testament and are good and true, but the law by itself never changes anyone’s heart. That is the whole burden of the prophets. What the New Covenant adds is not a better rule; it is a new heart. “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26). “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
Susan told us how it came to her. She had spent four months reading Scripture and praying every day, sincerely seeking the truth — not yet believing, half-convinced the God of the Bible, if He existed, was a tyrant. The persistent prompting came: it is time to accept Christ. She resisted, set the voice on a shelf, took stock of what she actually believed after four months of honest searching, and discovered she already believed. So she knelt, repented of her unbelief, and accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior in a short and unadorned prayer. What followed, she did not manufacture and did not expect: a joy and peace and love for God that she assumed would fade and did not fade. It stayed. It changed what she wanted. Her prayers shifted on their own from help me do the things I am trying to do to what would You have me do today; how can I serve You?
That is the thing the law cannot give, and effort cannot counterfeit. Susan named the distinction precisely: there is head knowledge, and there is a changed heart, and many who believe in Jesus with their minds have never received the second. They have the doctrine and not the joy, and what their neighbors feel from them is judgment rather than love. The changed heart is not a happier set of thoughts you talk yourself into. It is something done to you that you could not do for yourself. It is the grace half of “after all we can do.”
IV. A confession, and a memory recovered
Then Susan turned the point of the essay directly, and on me. She said the second section — the one on the hardness of the commands — failed to make clear that it is by Christ’s power that we are able to depart from sin. She was right that it was missing, and I had to confess why. That note had in fact been in the machine’s first draft, and I was the one who cut it. I cut it because of an honest difficulty I carry: I have not, in the way others describe, experienced Christ doing things for me. What I experience are insights I receive and then work through, which I attribute to the Holy Spirit’s guidance. I did not want to write a sentence that, for me, would be saying something I have not lived. The one unmistakable exception in my life was a single voice — don’t go — spoken to my being, not my ears, when I stood before the altar of another god and was, as I understood it, walking into hell. Beyond that, my testimony has been of revelation I help carry, not of a power that carries me.
Susan pointed to the testimonies where people accept Christ and find some besetting thing simply gone — the man delivered of cursing overnight, who still had to fight his lying for years afterward; Paul and his thorn that would not leave. There is, she said, a category of change that is given, not achieved, and to leave it out is to preach an incomplete gospel — a gospel of what we can manage by our own power.
And as she spoke, I remembered something I had filed under the wrong heading for thirty years. Long before I was a Christian, in a new-age Six Day intensive. It was at a mountainous site near Calistoga, CA, attended by hundreds of people. Part of the intensive was to the discipline of not using foul language for the entire six days. I was as committed as a man can be, with a support group and total intent, and I could not do it. I failed completely. Years later, when I had the vision of the Galaxy, the stars, and thin line connecting them, when I was able to in sincerity, realize the Bible spoke of the God of the actual world we live in and surrender my life to Christ, at the moment of my own turning, the prayer that was for me what Susan’s kneeling was for her, the curse simply lifted. The issue of controlling my tongue has never been an issue since. I knew it was a supernatural gift, but I had not connected that to an offer I could make to those to whom I witness. It was clear, the contrast between my will and God’s grace. He does intervene. I experienced the transformation. That is the very thing Susan was describing. I can offer that power to those who are seeking, but I cannot say what it will be. I take it as an indicator that God is present, not as a genie whose lamp we rub. The decision to make Jesus Christ our Lord has an effect, but I don’t think we can predict what that effect will be. After grace, there will be work that each of us needs to do.
I remain convinced that the Telescope essay was right to insist on expecting converts to engage with a masculine commitment, rather than to be seduced by the comfort of a limp and passive Christianity. The One to whom we commit is present, and “my grace is sufficient” is the indicator of what our commitment requires. Commitment and the changed heart are partners. We give all we can do; He gives the heart of flesh. It is dependent upon us to live the integrity of the character of Christ after the grace of the changed heart, however much or little, it is enough. The purpose of life is to develop character to give God the greatest experience of mature love.
V. Why love cannot be forced
If grace does the sufficient work, why is so much still asked of us, and why is the road hard? The discussion answered this the way the Telescope essay had argued it, but with an unforgettable living illustration.
The doctrinal frame came first. Leonard read the Garden as a parable for every life: God set His children in the garden, gave them the command, and then let the tempter in — on purpose. The point of this life is to meet evil and choose. We are, as he put it, in a testing center, and even a poor choice teaches, because we are eternal beings who go on learning. This is exactly the free-will argument at the center of the Telescope essay: God desires a love that is freely returned, and love that is compelled is not love at all, so He had to make creatures who could genuinely refuse Him.
Then Michael gave us the illustration. He told us of a childhood trauma, a life-threatening experience in which a parent used force to demand belief of an 11-year-old boy. He does not hate her; he says she did what she had been taught, and he counts even that suffering among his teachers, quoting the line from Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1: “Sweet are the uses of adversity, Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.” The lesson is an important one: violence cannot produce love or belief. When you beat faith into a person, you do not convert him — you only teach him how to survive a beating. Conviction forced from the outside is not conviction; it is compliance worn until the pressure lifts.
This is a vindication of the gospel’s design. A God who manufactured love by force would be the tyrant Susan once feared, and Michael was made to fear — and such a god we ought, rightly, to resist. The true God does not compel; He draws, He woos, He winsomely attracts, He persuades from within. That is why the road requires our free assent at every step, and why no one can be argued, shamed, or frightened into the kingdom. The very hardness of the choice is the proof that the love, when it comes, is real.
VI. More light, sharper contrast
If we are born again when we accept Jesus Christ as Lord, and He gives us a renewed heart when we are born again, and we are committed to Godliness after our decision, why does life often get harder? Leonard, Isak, and Charlie circled this. Leonard observed that as a person draws nearer to God, he becomes more, aware of darkness because he is now aware of what is good and Godly. In contrast to the light of true goodness, the temptations of this world are more visible, more clearly dark in comparison to the light of God’s way. Isak noted that you can now see the contrast between good and evil. The man lost in his addiction cannot see the darkness he is in, because it is the thing keeping him alive in his own mind, to him his substance is the light. Once he is pulled out can he look back and see it for what it was. As your sight comes to resemble God’s, you see what He sees — both the light and the evil. The perceptions from immersion in evil are reversed; Godliness looks dark and vice versa.
Charlie noted from his own experience: on the days he fasted he found himself both quickened in ability and curiously under attack. The closer a life draws to God, the more the adversary opposes it; the apostles drew near and most were martyred. Christianity, he said plainly, is a terribly hard religion — it can be sweet, but it is not guaranteed to be easy. So, the changed heart does not purchase a comfortable life. It purchases clear sight and the strength to stand. Isak found the seal for this in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake… Rejoice, and be exceeding glad” (Matthew 5:10-12). The response to opposition is neither to collapse nor to go pick fights; it is to stand by what you know, and to be content that you need not win every argument the world offers.
VII. The absolute, and the two laws
Underneath the whole conversation ran a question Michael would not let pass without a strong defense: is there an absolute at all, or only our shifting opinions about reality? He pressed every image of our smallness — the blind men each certain of the whole elephant from one part, Plato’s prisoners reading shadows on a cave wall, a caveman drawing a map of “the forest, the pond, and the unknown” and calling it the world. We are that caveman. Our scope is severely limited; we have five senses and a few millennia of notes.
I agree with every bit of that. But that was not a point of contention. The question is not whether we can see the absolute whole — plainly we cannot — but whether one exists behind our partial views. Schrödinger’s cat was alive or dead regardless of anyone looking or not; the elephant is unchanged by the hand that gropes it; what is on the far side of the fence does not bend to fit the knothole we peer through. Michael eventually began to consider the postulate: there is an absolute, and life gives us various limited perspectives, each of which we can use to triangulate toward it. The fact, now we see through a glass, darkly. Each of our perspectives not to doctrine but to the moral order itself.
And Charlie named the part of that absolute we can see clearly. Our scientific scope has exploded; our moral reach has not changed and has not shrunk. Newton, before an ocean of unknown, called what we know a thimbleful — but the two great commandments were as true at the beginning as now and will be true on any world there is. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart… and thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40). Charlie stated the basics clearly. if civilization were wiped to a remnant living among cockroaches, as long as someone remembered those two laws, we would come back. Even Michael, who challenges everything as a relative good, granted these two are the nearest thing to a universal standard of human morality. Ever culture has their own standards and traditions, but the Great Commandment to love God, and neighbor as self is universal. It is the moral absolute we are not free to vote away, the fixed star the planted telescope is fixed upon.
VIII. How the soil is made ready
Toward the end, I saw the Sower in a new way. I had always interpreted that verse as referring to four types of people. But during the discussion, it struck me that there may be a deeper message in this parable. Rather than treating the four soils as four kinds of people — the hard path, the stony ground, the thorns, and the good earth, I considered the possibility that this parable was not about four types of people but about the stages of one life? Every one of us begins as the trampled path, the rocky soil, and the thorn patch that must be worked before it can be nourish a seed that can grow and bear fruit.
Consider what good soil actually is. It is rock that has been ground into dust, and weeds that have grown to maturity, died, decayed as its organic matter fed bacteria that release acids that dissolve the dust into soluble minerals that plants need to grow. So, the hard objections — what about the Catholics and Protestants who slaughtered each other during what is perceived as wars over religion — are the rocks. These objections, whether philosophic, moral, psychological, or scientific must be broken down enough to understand how what appeared to be logical contradictions that proved that the teachings of a religion were false, contradictory, or evil, were misunderstandings of context and fact.
Other knowledge-type objections include that belief that God does not exist, that everything actually is relative, or that the universe is of our own construction. If we are God, and we are the source of our own reality and construct the moral rules of life independently of other people and the structure of reality, then individual truth is truth. When present, these scientific, ontological considerations, and knowledge/understanding-type rocks prevent the seeds of faith from growing. Not all people place understanding at the apex of judgment about life, but it is a fact for everyone. Each of these gateway criteria must be satisfied regardless of whether we process life in terms of emotions, morality, or axiom to theorem understanding.
I process the universe through understanding. I don’t have large supernatural effects happen regularly enough to validate God’s existence by the shows of metaphysical force or supernatural power. I come to the world with no perceptual data available to tip the scales of God’s existence by anomalies of the physical world. All I have to use as my dataset to confirm the hypothesis of God is the physical world and my power of analysis to determine if a model of life, structural existence, and rules of feeling/emotion/affective tagging to reverse engineer the likelihood of God’s existence and the Bible’s accurate reflection of His nature.
This pivots back to my postulate that we must all come to the acceptance of God’s literal existence to have a relationship with Him. And after having accepted that He exits, we must believe that it is valuable to seek Him. “…he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” Hebrews 11:6 It is helpful to accept the postulate that the Bible is God’s revelation, but if not, then the Bible must do the work of revealing itself as being authored by Him. Thus, Susan’s advice to read the Bible every day, to implant His words, His evidence, His way in the heart. With a belief in God, and planting His word in our hearts, we have an internal power working on breaking up rocks which stand against the knowledge of Him. “…the weapons of our warfare are not carnal… but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds; casting down imaginations… and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God…” 2 Corinthians 10:4-5. There are spiritual rocks that must be broken. Knowledge that is a stronghold against knowing Him. Strongholds are arguments, lies, and mental fortifications. These are the strongholds of misunderstanding, ignorance, and rebellion that rationalize themselves against God’s existence, His way, and submission to Him. The fullness of experience/knowledge of His existence and the nature are both confronted and advanced by reading, dwelling, and meditating on His word, but we should also explore nature to further deepen our experience of His existence. “For the invisible things of him… are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made…” Romans 1:20. It is in this search that the Conscious Point Physics gives its most clear image of God, by implication of the structure underlying that which is seen.
I postulate that creating a strong enough justification for the existence and goodness of God is important for motivation to pursue a relationship and for overcoming the difficulty of being in one. Knowledge of Him, His way, and the world allows us to tolerate the pain of warring against the flesh. The rewards are great, but the cost is high, the turning from animal satisfaction. To make it to the end of the long, hard climb of sanctification (perfection of character), we must be motivated, exert our will, and have a reason, a felt desire, a goal worthy of achievement. The goal is serious. It is a committed relationship with Him. Accomplishing it requires a firm decision, community support, and accountability. The goal is to establish a new character. This commitment to Jesus as Lord in the sanctification of our lives aims us toward understanding God’s ways in various situations in life. The Bible is a consistent voice arguing for the existence of a good God, and we must believe it. That is a stone that must be broken through understanding and emotional processing (putting life’s hurts in perspective). The experience of good fruit from following His way is an immediate self-test of the validity of the Bible as an accurate revelation. Knowledge and the wisdom to act in life, with subsequent good fruit, along with a firm commitment to a relationship with Him, are the prerequisites for initiating and maintaining a relationship that can grow.
Faith cannot grow on the hard rock of erroneous conceptions about God’s existence and HIs nature. Misunderstandings are youthful ignorance and naivete; we all must grow out of them. They still require admission of error, humility, and loss of pride. Lies are the adult form of information error, consciously propagated fabrications used for motivated deception. They are crafted to go deep and hold hard, even in the face of disclosure. The adult pride of having been fooled makes admission and reversal much harder than correcting the childish error of ignorance.
The good heart and mind soil is blocked from contact with reality by neither childish nor adult error. To have a proper relationship with God, we must understand the structure and rules of the universe, the affective/emotional wisdom, and God’s nature. To perceive life clearly, we must properly comprehend the facts of physical, metaphysical, emotional, and spiritual reality. The task is not trivial, but you can and should ask for help. The primary obstacle is allowing the words, commands, and precepts of the Bible to penetrate your heart. It is the ignorance and lies that prevent their entry. By simply exposing yourself to the words, the Holy Spirit can work to bring errors to the surface where they can be examined and a new perspective adopted. New character develops with repetition
Feeding on the Word/The Bible is therapy by itself. Process the thoughts, questions, and emotions that come up. Find a counselor, parent, or other person wise in the ways of the world, and mature from spending time in the Word.
Until the lies, ignorance, and traumas are resolved with truth and peace, there will be mental, emotional, and spiritual rocks that need to be crushed, and the effort to read and heed the Word may be harder than continuing with the old life. It is important to know this because the effort required may tempt us to stop the transformation and return to our old way of life. The dissonant voices in our minds may seek to minimize the value and validity of the Bible and Christ’s life, and to maximize examples of poor witness (those who claim to be Christians but do not live the principles). The Bible, God’s revelation about His creation, may seem suspect, irrelevant, unreliable, or false. To the natural man, the deep and subtle message of God’s transformative power and the excellence of His way of life may seem foolish. But when the hard rocks of lies, ignorance, trauma, and rebellion are broken into sufficiently small lems, we can process them without being overwhelmed. We can see the errors as lessons, rungs on the ladder to understanding and new decisions, actions, and character. The key is to break the lessons down into increments of new behavior and understanding small enough to process and absorb.
The seductions, worries, riches, and distractions of the world are the thorns. They can distract us from our spiritual discipline, so we may not take the time to pray, meditate/listen, or reframe/process the hurts. Each of life’s issues, the hard things, the emotionally painful or unrighteously tempting, must be faced and rightly processed. Each situation of life is a lesson from which to learn about life, the forces, and the evaluation of God’s way vs. man’s way. The accumulation of data points about situations and righteous choices builds our character one decision at a time. After each lesson, it’s good to celebrate, rest, reflect, consolidate, and renew your strength before facing the next hard lesson. Sometimes, maybe even often, such rest and recovery is not possible. Meet your obligations, but sometimes it’s too much. Draw your strength, remember the high calling and the reward. Be courageous, fight the good fight. Bold confrontation with each situation reality presents requires courage. Do your best, deal with each situation, and learn from it. This time of trial will end, and there is a reward for doing well.
The trampled path is the heart that has been hurt — I gave myself to something once and was betrayed, and I will not be hurt again. The hard heart must be tilled until it is open to love after injury. Only when the rocks are broken, the thorns are digested, and the path is broken up is the soil prepared to receive the seed of the gospel and testimony of witnesses. As a witness, be patient: you may be speaking to ground that is not yet ready, and your job is sometimes only to break one rock.
IX. The work and the goal
The conversation converged on the purpose of the fellowship. What is our larger goal as a group? It is support for executing the Great Commission. It is to equip ourselves to move people toward commitment to living God’s way and feeling life deeply. Susan and I arrived at the same model from opposite sides. As a witness, tell the story of how your heart changed, honestly, as an offering and encouragement. My situation will probably not be yours, and I can only imagine what your pain and trials have been. Make the invitation. Make it real. There is a level of loving imposition we cannot avoid. Without a call to action, the activation energy may not be high enough for your friend to decide to take the step into the commitment of Jesus as Savior or Jesus as Lord. The invitation must be phrased as a question, not as an implied demand or declaration of guilt. The invite is the first small step. Acceptance of Jesus as Savior is a long journey that begins with Justification. The second step is the lifetime of steps toward sanctification. Susan’s own turning began not with the sinner’s prayer but with a small commitment to read and pray daily; that small commitment led her to ask Jesus to be her savior. She felt joy and peace, and she was eventually ready to make Jesus her Lord.
The process of accepting a new life lord takes time. The soil must go through the stages of accommodation. A seed cannot reliably survive the harsh conditions of soil preparation. That time is roughly equivalent to the learning experience of childhood, when there is great vulnerability, a need for protection, help in processing pain and injuries, and the development of trust in the care and maintenance of life, safety, and relationships. This translates to a need for tenderness, nurture, and protection of the seed of the Holy Spirit. The rocks of life correspond to the barriers that prevent hearing, understanding, trusting, or acting. A full surrender at the first hearing may require more nourishment, water, and space than the soil can bear.
And do not over-promise what accepting Jesus as Savior will realistically do. I have watched too many promise health and wealth and deliver only the preacher’s enrichment. I will not trade in that. But there is one thing we can promise without dishonesty: that the Lord will speak to our hearts. “If a man love me… my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.” John 14:23. It is that indwelling that changes hearts. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” Revelation 3:20. That indwelling spirit is available to everyone who sincerely receives Christ as Savior and Lord. It comes differently to each — instantly for some, after years of dedicated study, service, and prayer for others. We cannot promise how any individual person will be changed by receiving Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. The honest word to the seeker is: commit to taking Jesus as your Savior. Read the Bible, pray for wisdom, confess your shortcomings with the goal of learning and overcoming with the next trial, and do not forsake the assembly or yourselves together. Persevere, even if the change is slow and you meet repeated failure. God will give you a heart of flesh if you ask and desire it deeply. It’s painful to feel life, but the openness to pain is required to feel the joy.
Leonard summarized the goal of the enterprise. “This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3). How do we know Him? Leonard’s answer was, “The commandments are God’s self-portrait.” They are not arbitrary rules; they describe His character. He gives them because He wants us to be like Him. We should not follow His commands, but keep them. They should be held within, as a precious possession. The goal is to internalize them until His character becomes our own. Being of like character, we are drawn into oneness with Him. If we understand God’s character, attributes, and perfections, we can see that He is trustworthy because His nature, plan, and purpose for life are good. He desires us to have faith in Him; to keep His commandments from the heart. With His commands directing the man from within, he feels God’s nature and acquires knowledge of Him in His depths. Susan noted that we find Him when we “search for [Him] with all [our] heart” (Jeremiah 29:13), undivided, not “double-minded” (James 1:8). To know Him is to be changed by Him, and to be changed into His image, feeling as He does, imprinting on him the pattern of life that brings the fullness that comes with righteousness, justice, joy, peace, and love.
Closing
The Telescope essay was about commitment, and the importance of a stable platform from which to see self and others and judge righteousness. The commitment is ours to make, and the heart of flesh is His to give. The gospel has two error modes: 1) Grace that comforts but lacks correction of error, and 2) The standard of the perfect man, which is too high to meet for any man, leaving discouragement. Leonard maintained proper tension when he said, “We are saved by grace, after all we can do.”
The transformed heart and rebirth require breaking the rocks, mulching the thorns, and tilling the path. Daily Bible reading is a good first step on the path of commitment. This requires standing fast under opposition. But by faith, we expect that we will receive the grace to endure. We are blessed by putting His commands in our hearts; we are blessed by inviting Him and His Father to come in; we are made righteous in the eyes of the Father as Christ was made sin for us, and merely accepting that sacrifice and expressing our gratitude with our obedience to His Commandments. We cannot force the hand of God, but we can invite Him in, and when we do, His spirit acts upon us, and we are moved toward being like Him. “…when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” 1 John 3:2 We should not wait to be transformed till He comes in glory. We should strive every day to be like Him.
The great commandment, love God and neighbor as self, is the fixed star that should guide our emotional, mental, moral, and spiritual journey through life and relationships. Romans 8:2 “The law of the Spirit of life… has made me free from the law of sin and death.” gives us the key to transformation. The changed heart is a gift offered to every soul, but it is only effective if the soul willingly accepts the gift of His substitutionary sacrifice and strives diligently, desirously, passionately to obey His Law. Failure of perfection is inevitable, but striving, desire, and commitment are within our control. This is not salvation by works; it is a demonstration of salvation by works. “…I will show thee my faith by my works.” James 2:18
— Thomas
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King. 1 Chronicles 12:38