260823 – Every Man His Own Trench: Triangulation Tested in the Fellowship
A fellowship essay – Fellowship meeting of Sunday, August 23, 2026
Participants: Thomas Abshier, Charlie Gutierrez, Susan Gutierrez, Leonard Hofheins, Michael Sherman, Armond Boulware
Introduction: The Essay Meets Its Examiners
Last week I sent out “Triangulating Truth,” the essay drawn from my long conversation with John — my friend of fifty years, the honest empiricist who lives uprightly without belief. I invited John to join us; I let him know we had written about him, and I hoped the subject of the essay might sit among us. He did not come — perhaps it was too personal — but something better than a book review happened in his absence. The fellowship did not merely discuss the essay; it reenacted it. Michael took up John’s part and pressed it harder than John did. Leonard flipped the script and gave us the opposite pole — not too little revelation but too much. Susan gave us her own three triangulation points, lived rather than argued. Armond, calling in from under a shade tree in a city two weeks without power, gave us the theology of adversity in one sentence. And Charlie, as he does, gave us the meta-view: that the whole morning was itself the method — revelation by conversation.
What follows is the record of that morning, because the fellowship proved something the essay could only claim: that truth is found where independent witnesses converge, and that every soul has its own narrow trench to the target.
I. Michael Takes Up John’s Part: Is Faith the Enemy of Science?
I opened by describing John to the group — a man whose parents were abusive to each other, who lived in fear, who thinks in words rather than pictures, and for whom the world is concrete, solid, and complete, with nothing unseen behind it. I asked Michael whether that description resonated with his own way of seeing. His first answer was already a small sermon: John “is misleading himself, because he can feel cold and hot without seeing it… Light itself, the thing that helps us see, is invisible. Sound is invisible. You can’t hit the force that lifts a paper clip to a magnet — you see only its effects… Do not deny what you clearly see merely because it’s invisible. Surely he has had love, and love is not strictly visible.”
Then Michael made his stand, and it was a worthy one. The great advances of science, he argued, were made by men who refused faith — Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein — men who would not believe the obvious, who overthrew four centuries of settled physics because they stayed open. “Faith is defiant of, in fact antithetical to, the scientific principle.” His preferred word is not materialism but reproducibility: propose a thing, test it under every condition, and assign it “a percent likelihood based on how often it holds true.” The scientist he admires is a seeker, not a believer — “I search” rather than “I believe” — and a true scientist would never even be an atheist, since one cannot prove a negative: “the scientist I’m defining would remain open, one hundred percent.”
I answered as I answered John: what Michael described is how science should be done, and I have no argument with it whatsoever. My quarrel is with the culture — Michael, tongue in cheek, offered the better word: the cult — of science. And I gave the fellowship my third-point evidence: every AI I have ever consulted, and I have consulted many, tells me the same thing about my physics papers — that any mention of God, even by implication, even the mere name “Conscious Point Physics,” will have the work rejected by arXiv, by Nature, by Physical Review Letters; that I will be considered a quack. Yet the same journals will publish, without irony, that mass arose from nothing by quantum fluctuation, evolved by itself, and became giraffes, poodles, and kangaroos. Those are the beliefs of a faith — the religion of materialism. The question is never faith versus no faith; it is only what the faith is in.
Michael’s rejoinders were delightful and instructive. The AIs, he said, are not science — “garbage in, garbage out”; they merely mirror the predilections of the culture that wrote them. (He is exactly right, and that is exactly my point: they are the distilled mind-gestalt of the culture, which is why their testimony about that culture is reliable.) And against my claim that even slapping the couch is an act of faith, he told two stories worth preserving. The ranger on the nature hike who pointed thirty children to “the red bat” in a tree, had them shout to make it flap — ninety percent saw it move — and then revealed it was a red baseball bat: “I just wanted to see if you’d agree when I said it happened.” And the night in the all-night coffee shop when, too tired to study, he kept catching a familiar man across the room looking up whenever he looked up, walked over to greet him, and collided with a mirror. “The certainty broken by new data is fun,” he said. “Even the couch — I give it 99.9999 percent, and I love thinking: but maybe not.”
And there the convergence came, almost by accident. I said: that likelihood, that belief held at high confidence without certainty — that is what I call faith. And Michael answered: “Now you’ve crossed a line that causes me to find easier agreement. If it’s likelihood instead of certainty…” Likelihood is his word; faith is mine; they name the same posture. John’s provisionalism, Michael’s percent-likelihood, and the believer’s faith are one epistemic species. The dispute was never over the structure of our knowing. It is only over what the evidence, honestly weighed, points to.
II. What Is Real? The Puzzle, the Piece, and the Branch Cut Off
Michael then asked the question that governed the next hour: “What is a really good piece of evidence that God exists?” My answer was the essay’s answer: “I don’t know that there’s any actual evidence that God exists. I think it’s all inference. I think it’s all triangulation… Everything I see, everywhere I go, it all points back at the same source. That’s the best evidence I have.” God is the unifying concept — physics seeks a theory of everything, and my answer is that the everything is God’s: “There is nothing that is not of God, in God, from God, about God.”
Michael, doing what Michael does, made it concrete: the jigsaw puzzle. God is the whole puzzle; each of us is a piece — not the puzzle, but of it, distinguishable but not separate. “My skin is not my border,” he added, “or I’d be dead — I need the oxygen outside my skin on a constant basis.” I accepted the analogy as about as good as an analogy can get. We pressed further into definitions — real as existent independent of any human observer, God as the Observer upon whom all existence depends, the arbiter of realness; the child a couple intends is not yet real in manifestation but real in commitment, desire, and action, a progressive manifestation whose degree God alone adjudicates. And when Michael asked the sharp question — “How are you privy to God’s perspective?” — I gave him the honest answer: we cannot be. There is a point in everything where faith is required. There is no place in our entire experience of life where faith is not required. That was the thesis of the essay, and the morning kept proving it.
Then Susan supplied the correction that the puzzle analogy needed, and it was the theological hinge of the whole meeting. Yes, everything is in God — but “part of the condition of mankind is that he’s been cut off from God, and that can happen while still being within God.” The unbeliever is a piece of the puzzle that has lost the picture. And she gave the fellowship her great image, which deserves to be carried out of this meeting and used everywhere: the branch cut from the tree. “When a tree limb is cut off, it looks just the same as when it was connected. You might say, oh, it’s still alive. But if it’s cut off, it’s cut off from its life source, and it is in the process of death.” Adam was told “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:17) — and he lived 930 years. He died that day: spiritually, as the cut branch dies — green for a season, dead in fact. “This,” Susan said, “is what we call life: the process of death.” The aches, the fading energy, the heart problems — not life winding down but death working forward, unless we are grafted again into the tree through Christ.
I added the mechanism as I see it: there is a capacity within God to allow parts of His own awareness to be disconnected from His own awareness, even while He remains the whole. And Susan completed the structure biblically: God has put all things under the authority of Christ; Christ is in the Father, we are in Christ who is in the Father — the creation gated in its perception through the Son. That is precisely the architecture we have discussed before: the Father created the Son; the Son created the creation; and our access runs through Him. “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6) is not a gate slammed; it is the description of how the circuit is wired.
From there Susan and I walked the path of salvation together in real time: the commitment of the heart that counts as “well done, thou good and faithful servant” even in a life that stumbles — “the good that I would I do not” (Romans 7:19), yet “as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:12); then sanctification, Christ leading the committed soul “in the paths of righteousness” (Psalm 23:3), little by little, “in chunks that they can manage,” until He can “present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle” (Ephesians 5:27). And the warning she attached: the one who says “I’m saved, I don’t need to change anything” has misunderstood the transaction — commitment without willingness to be led is the seed on stony ground (Matthew 13), and the connection gained for a little while can be lost. Yet even then, she testified, God does not let go: He recognizes the decision once made, and He engineers the circumstances — as He did with her — until the wanderer says, “I’m done living like this. I want to try God again.”
III. Susan’s Three Stars: A Testimony in the Form of a Sextant
I had asked in the invitation: where in your own life has truth arrived by triangulation? Susan came with her answer prepared by the week’s assignment — she had spent the week consumed with how to explain the Gospel of Jesus Christ — and she gave us her own three sightings, the three points by which God fixed her position before she could accept Christ. I record them here because they are the essay’s thesis made flesh.
The first star: the hard teaching. Reading John 6 — “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” — and watching the disciples walk away, she closed the book annoyed and told God so: Jesus didn’t have to teach it that grossly; people walked away unnecessarily. And in a split second God gave her an understanding which, put into words, was: “I don’t mind losing shallow followers in an effort to push people into a deeper relationship with me.” He showed her His perspective, and it made sense — not yet enough to believe, but a line on the chart.
The second star: the lion and the witch. Walking through the hall while the children watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — a scene she had seen tons of times — she arrived exactly at the moment Aslan negotiates with the witch to die in place of the traitor boy. And the new thought came: maybe that’s why Christ died — to release us from Satan’s grip. She had always thought God could simply forgive if He wanted; here was the first live possibility of why a death was required. A second line, crossing the first. (It did not escape the fellowship that Charlie had, days before, urged me to watch The Most Reluctant Convert — C.S. Lewis’s own journey from atheism. The Oxford don’s fiction was one of the stars God used to navigate Susan home. Myth, as John himself insisted in last week’s essay, can be more true than fact.)
The third star: the prayer about sex. This one she almost kept private, and we are richer that she did not. For years her strongest argument against the atonement was that people abuse it — “God will forgive me,” and off they sin — and her mantra was the Hippocratic oath: first, do no harm. Christ’s teaching, she reasoned, did harm. Then one day, still not believing in Christ but believing in God, she was praying — thanking God for sex, for its beauty between a man and a woman. And God spoke: “People abuse sex. Should I have withheld that?” It hit her, she said, so hard — because in one second her own logic collapsed. She would never say the gift of sex should have been withheld because it is abused; then how could she say the gift of atonement should have been withheld because it is abused? “A big brick wall… just crumbled, because I realized my own logic was faulty, and I was holding God to a standard I didn’t believe in.”
Three sightings, taken years apart, from utterly different quadrants of her life — a Bible annoyance, a children’s movie, a prayer of thanksgiving — and where the lines crossed, there she stood on the day she was told it was time, and decided: I guess I do believe in Christ. “So there’s your triangulation, in my experience.”
I observed what must be observed: these stories will never be repeated by anyone. No apologist would have chosen those three points; no tract contains them. And when I asked how she knew the voice was God and not her own thought — or worse — she gave the biblical test without naming it: at first she assumed, but the fruit made it obvious (Matthew 7:16). The word led to brightness, growth, harmony; and when she accepted Christ she was filled with a love, peace, and joy beyond anything she had experienced, which she expected to fade and which has not — and which, when it occasionally withdraws, functions as God’s summons: “You’ve got my attention. What do you want to say to me?” Charlie added the observation that ices the story: even at her most anti-Christ, she was having detailed exchanges with God — spending hours writing her ideas of how people could be good to one another, seeking with no reference to God the very answer that turned out to be Him. “God,” Charlie said, “is really loving and patient.”
IV. Mercy Implies a Sentence: Why the Cross Was Necessary
Out of Susan’s testimony I raised the question that has driven my Twelve Postulates: the Muslim names God “the Merciful” — but mercy for what? Mercy implies a consequence that was due and foregone, a punishment lawful, appropriate, necessary — and then not executed. What is the necessity of punishment that makes mercy possible? Susan’s answer was her cut-branch theology extended to its roots: the warning to Adam was real; the sentence is separation; and each of us recapitulates Adam personally. She brought a verse I had never once considered in this light: “Thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Her reading: Christ covers every infant in the womb — every child begins in relationship with the Father — and each of us, at three or four or five, sinning knowing it was wrong, is cut off by our own act, exactly as Adam was. We are not victims of Adam, over whom we had no control; we are, as I put it in the moment, victims of our own seduction. Christ alone remained uncovered by that fate through sinlessness — until, at the cross, He was cut off not for His sin but for ours: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). And the terror we cannot grasp, Susan said, is that to die cut off is to spend eternity without God — and God is love (1 John 4:8) — an eternity without love, which the unbeliever cannot imagine precisely because, even now, he still enjoys so much of Christ’s light without crediting it.
Later in the morning the same question returned from the other side, and I gave the fellowship my axiomatic frame: God is the wholeness of everything, desiring fellowship with every part of Himself — “be fruitful and multiply” was a call for children, not rocks — and He made us with real free will, able to be His child or to reject Him. He wants no one lost; but His nature precludes embracing injustice, cruelty, and non-love, and so a soul that has chosen that polarity cannot be brought into His presence. It is not that He will not; His essence cannot. He grieves — it is God rejecting a piece of Himself, sadly, wanting it — but His nature will not allow it to be otherwise. Susan added the pedagogical purpose: God maintains the separation partly for the contrast — the principle of contrast from this very essay, polarity as the precondition of perception — so that the returning soul tastes the difference. She cited God sending disobedient Israel to serve a foreign king “that they may know my service, and the service of the kingdoms of the countries” (2 Chronicles 12:8). “There’s nothing in life without God that I want. The contrast is too amazing.” And Charlie sealed the section with the phrase he keeps finding in the opening of Isaiah, five times over: “For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still” (Isaiah 9:12, 17, 21; 10:4). Very angry — and still reaching. He desires obedience, not sacrifice; mercy was never Plan B.
V. Leonard Flips the Script: The Counter-Witness
Then Leonard, who had listened long, announced: “I am going to flip the script.” And he did, magnificently. Where John and Michael doubt the unseen, Leonard doubts the seen: “Everything we see in this world is an illusion… It’ll pass away. But we won’t.” What is real is what is eternal — the energy within us, the spirit, given or borrowed from our spiritual parents, “God the Father and his cohort.” We have existed forever; he knew his Debbie before this world; this earth is a school where spirits come to learn, usually by sad experience; and the one way to know any of it is not physical investigation but revelation: “The only way I can find out for sure is if it’s revealed to me by the Source… God can reveal that to me if I desire it, if He feels it’s something I need to know.” The physical search, he said, is a dead-end search; he tries to place spiritual things in priority; and he gave us the morning’s most vivid picture of Christ: the disciples tossed in the boat, seeing a figure walking on the waves — “It’s a ghost! No — it was him. He had control over all these things, because he knew how they all work.” (Even the Wachowskis, he offered, were really close in The Matrix. Which pill are we going to take?)
I engaged Leonard as I engage everyone — by asking what stands beneath the declarations. When he invoked the conservation of energy as proof that we are eternal, I answered that energy is a secondary concept, a feature of the creation; there was a precursor to energy, and the precursor is consciousness. When he countered “maybe they coexist — maybe energy is consciousness,” I named what had happened: he had made a postulate. And postulates are welcome — my whole physics is built on postulates — but a postulate declared is not a postulate grounded. What is incumbent on the one who declares axioms is to derive the world from them, to extrapolate from the initial state to the manifest creation, so the claim connects to something beyond itself. “You’ve stated it as truth, but it’s a belief… it isn’t grounded yet.” Leonard’s answer was honest and complete: “That’s what I believe. If my belief is errant, then it’s errant. But I believe it’s true. You can’t prove me wrong; I can’t prove it right.” And when I said there is a way of determining which is true, he anticipated me: “It’s not physical. It’s not of this world” — revelation.
Here is what must be said with love, because Leonard is beloved: his epistemology is the one the essay diagnosed. A fact received by declaration — from an angel, a prophet, a feeling of eternity within — validated by more declarations, is the structure we examined in the Snuffer series. His claim that we are co-eternal with God he sought in Paul; we searched together and found “joint-heirs with Christ” (Romans 8:17) — heirs together, not existers-together; coexistence from eternity is not a biblical concept. Susan identified its actual source — the LDS doctrine of pre-existent intelligences, and behind “the Father and his cohort,” the Mother in Heaven — and she stated the standard with her characteristic cleanness: “If God doesn’t see fit to mention a mother in heaven, then I don’t see why I should bring mother in heaven into anything… I just want to stick to what’s in the Bible.” (Charlie, honest as ever, allowed the “us” of “let us make man in our image” its mystery — and I noted that John 1:1 tells us who the Us was: the Father and the Word. Adding to the word, Charlie warned, would be a mistake; “the word is mysterious enough.”)
Yet let the record show two more things. First, Leonard’s counter-witness served the morning exactly as he intended — “I just wanted to give a counterpoint” — and it completed our map: John and Michael at one pole, demanding evidence for the unseen; Leonard at the other, dismissing the seen; and the biblical position between them, where the seen is real because God speaks it and the unseen is known because God reveals it, each confirmed by triangulation rather than declaration. Second — and this outweighs every doctrinal correction — there is Leonard’s life. Debbie, whose aphasia slowly steals her words, who “sees it in her mind and can’t get it out,” whom the whole fellowship wept over in the wedding video from two weeks before her illness: Leonard said, “She could be healed by Christ if it was in his heart… I don’t think she needs that. I need her to be who she is, because she’s proving how I relate to her, to help her and be with her and endure this… It really comes down to enduring to the end.” Whatever we make of his cosmology, his cross-bearing is orthodox. By their fruits ye shall know them — and this fruit is good.
VI. The Canon Question: What May Be Added to the Word?
Leonard’s departure left the question he embodies: is there further revelation? Should there be more books? I put it to the fellowship directly: do we have any justification for telling Leonard that Denver Snuffer’s revelations, or Joseph Smith’s, do not belong on the level of the Bible?
We did the Berean work in real time. The “add not unto his words” passages — Deuteronomy 4:2 and Revelation 22:18–19 — we examined and, I argued, must handle honestly: they are the seals of those books, those revelation-events, not a padlock on the whole future canon; and using the Bible to prove that nothing may follow the Bible is the very self-validation the essay warned against. The Bible’s actual authority stands on other ground. We researched the history together, live: no council created the canon — Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) recognized what the churches had already been using for centuries; the four Gospels universal by Irenaeus’s day; Paul’s letters treated as Scripture from the beginning; Athanasius’s festal letter of 367 listing our 27 books exactly. And the Old Testament: no single moment, no real “Council of Jamnia,” but centuries of usage — Torah fixed by Ezra’s era, the Prophets by 200 BC, the Writings last — a canon recognized, not invented, formed by the long testimony of a worshiping people. The criterion that emerged in the early church was proximity to the Lord: apostolic connection, first-person witness, contemporaries of Christ who lived it, heard it, wrote it. That is why I accept Paul and do not accept Denver Snuffer — not because a verse forbids new prophets, but because the credentials are not the same, and an angelic visitation proves nothing by itself: an angel might be an angel, or might be “an angel of light” (2 Corinthians 11:14). We don’t know who the angel was. That is not evidence; that is declaration.
Charlie then gave the fellowship his view of Scripture, and it deserves preservation whole. He glued a new revelation into his Doctrine and Covenants once, as a Mormon; he has earned his caution. The canon debates, he noted, contain no claim that “an angel appeared and said this one, this one, this one” — just faithful men putting their heads together, rational and spiritual, making their best case, coming to a vote. “We’re doing that today.” Life, he said, is gumbo — everything but the kitchen sink, wildly chancy — and Apollo 13 simulations, problem after problem thrown at you; the Bible is Rashomon, one story of God’s dealings told through many witnesses, “all the errors of perception included,” and the combined effect “so deeply moving and poetic and just beautiful.” Jacob’s sons were wild, even monstrous people — and Jacob, parenting them, “probably got a realization that this is what God goes through every day.” Charlie sees contradictions in Scripture — of outlook, of flavor, Paul and Jesus — and it does not make him curse God; it makes him vigilant: “Ultimately we’re just individuals trying to have a relationship with God… If nothing else, we can always fall back on: love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself. It’s very reliable. Everything else — stay awake.”
I offered my resolution-of-paradox principle as the instrument for those contradictions: when two accounts, head to head, appear contradictory, find the underlying truth both were describing from their different vantages — the resolution of the paradox is the triangulated truth. Two witnesses, one reality (2 Corinthians 13:1). And Susan, pressing her Berean credentials — “the Bible says to prove all things” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) — gave the fellowship her two methods of proving the Bible, which I commend to everyone as this week’s homework: First, put it into practice. Take a concept — the woman who decided to love her enemy — do it in your real life, and watch what happens. Test it. Second, triangulate within it. Set verse beside verse beside verse until the concept emerges that all three were sighting. And she added a third method almost in passing, which I count the deepest: Christ Himself, incarnate, quoted the Old Testament — and every quotation is the Son of God validating a scripture as worthy. We are not trusting tradition’s telephone; we have the Word’s own citations. (Susan extended it beautifully: the Gospel, once known, unlocks verse after verse of the Old Testament — “oh, that’s what that verse is about” — the New hidden in the Old, the Old opened by the New.) Against all of this stands the cautionary tale Charlie supplied from his friend Jeff, after the family Bible-roulette landed on the warming of aged David: “That’s what happens when you turn the scriptures into a parlor trick.” Proving is not divination. The Bereans “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11) — daily, systematically, together.
VII. Armond Under the Shade Tree: The Theology of Adversity
Armond joined us late from Gary, Indiana — under a shade tree, because that is where the email could reach him. Two weeks ago a derecho — straight-line winds over a hundred miles an hour, a “linear tornado” twenty miles wide — went right over his city, and Gary’s great old trees came down on every block. Thirteen days without power; perhaps a week and a half more; a story that should be national news and isn’t. And from inside it, Armond gave the fellowship two gifts.
The first was the answer he’d been wrestling toward on the oldest question — why do bad things happen to good people? — “the never-ending variables of life… I came up with a really quick answer, and I don’t know if everybody can live with it: so that the followers of Christ can be an example of how we should handle adversity.” Charlie made him say it twice, and then: “That’s pretty good. It seems too simple — like, why didn’t I think of that?” Susan added the complement: if signing up with Christ guaranteed a rosy life, “everyone would want to do that” — Charlie: “a universal insurance company” — and the profession would prove nothing. It is precisely because Christ promised persecutions and His presence (John 16:33; Matthew 5:11–12) that adversity becomes the better test of our loyalties: when the rubber meets the road, who still acknowledges Him as Lord? Armond’s verdict on the pairing: “I don’t think you can have one without the other.”
The second gift was the lived demonstration, delivered as comedy. His wife, scrolling beside him, posted that “nine days without power has been so devastating — keep everybody in your prayers.” Armond leaned over: “Honey, can you turn the light on real quick? I just wanted some light while I read this post about being devastated.” Their generator had run since an hour after the storm; she had just cooked hibachi steak from the working refrigerator; she has never filled the generator and doesn’t know how to start it. “You’ve never seen the darkness except when you turn your lights off… We’ve got to be careful with the words we use. God’s watching. How do we say we’ve been devastated when we’ve been so blessed that we’re able to bless others with our abundance?” And then the pitman arm: the steering component on his truck that simply snapped — not on the freeway, where, as Charlie observed, its failure means the steering is gone and you could be dead — but in a driveway, at walking speed, with a friend nearby, the tools available, and the repair done in a couple of hours. “It couldn’t have happened at any better point in time… I read Proverbs every day” — the righteous delivered out of trouble (Proverbs 11:8) — “and I only attribute it to God’s blessings, and Him being true and honest: if we do our part, He’s going to keep His promises.” Here was Section VII of last week’s essay — the swarm of testimony — adding one more data point in real time, from under a shade tree, while the chainsaws worked down the block clearing the way for the linemen. Armond and his family, meanwhile, have hooked up a generator inlet for one neighbor and are cutting trees so the utility crews can reach everyone’s downlines: the followers of Christ, showing how to handle adversity. The children, for the record, are loving it — s’mores by the second night. “Kids love everything, honey.”
VIII. The Death Star Trench: What the Morning Taught About Witnessing
Near the end, Charlie asked me directly: did I feel I got across the main lesson from the conversation with John? My answer surprised me as I gave it. The essay was titled “Triangulating Truth,” but the morning revealed that the deeper subject was witnessing — and the fellowship itself had just demonstrated the finding.
Consider what happened. Susan heard my triangulation concept and immediately produced her own three points — and they were points no apologist would ever have chosen: a gross-sounding teaching, a scene in a children’s movie, a prayer of thanksgiving for sex. “Everybody doesn’t go, ‘Wow, you triangulated that like that!'” — my triangulation points are odd to others, hers are odd to me, and that is the finding: everybody has their own triangulation. I put it to the group in the image that stuck: in Star Wars, the Death Star had one weakness, reachable only down one narrow trench, and the pilot had to fly it exactly. Every soul has its own Death Star trench — the one particular approach by which the message penetrates to the center. John is not resisting because he wants to sin; he doesn’t. He resists because nothing in it is yet real to him — “what’s the evidence?” is Michael’s question and Leonard’s too, each meaning something different by it — and no master argument exists that makes everybody go “shazam.” There is no assembly line to conversion. There is individual witnessing, and God drawing (John 6:44), and each person’s strange, unrepeatable stars.
Which is why Charlie’s closing summary was the right meta-view, and I record it as the essay’s conclusion in his words: “The important thing you’re illustrating is the general principle: you engaged John in deep, heart-to-heart, earnest conversation… People tell me near the end, ‘I’ve never told this to anybody’ — and it’s not that I’m special. I listen. I ask questions. I’m interested in people. This reminds me of the conversation Job had with his three friends and with God — that whole book is a conversation, so beautiful and real, all the errors of perception included. We talk in America much less than we used to, in spite of the advancement of the means of communication. In the old days people would sit on the porch and talk and talk. If nothing else, you illustrate the value of conversation. And this thing Susan and I keep talking about — revelation by conversation — it can only happen when people are talking.”
Amen. Maybe all of us should have more conversations. Maybe that’s really all it is.
Conclusion: The Fellowship as Instrument
I told the group near the end that the morning had been very grounding for me — and it was, in the navigational sense. The essay claimed that truth is found where independent lines converge. Then six independent witnesses spent three hours sighting the same reality from six different positions — Michael’s likelihood, Susan’s three stars and her cut branch, Leonard’s counter-witness and his cross, Charlie’s gumbo canon and his Isaiah refrain, Armond’s shade-tree providence, and my triangulation — and the lines crossed. Not on an argument. On a Person: the God who covers us in the womb, whose anger is not turned away but whose hand is stretched out still, who prunes and grafts the branches, who is the whole puzzle and grieves for every piece that cannot see the picture, who assigns each of His children their own trench, and who was, I am persuaded, present in the conversation — as Susan prayed at the close: “I feel like your spirit was with us as we spoke.”
Her closing prayer set the week’s assignment better than I can: that we might understand something more in the Scriptures; that we might understand better how to apply Christ’s gospel in our lives; that we might come back and share it and edify each other; and that God would help us better explain the gospel of Jesus Christ — for Leonard, for Michael, for John, and for everyone in the world who needs to understand it better. That is the work. Prove all things. Fly your trench. And have more conversations.
“For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand is stretched out still.” — Isaiah 9:12