Why “Personal Relationship With Jesus” Meant the Wrong Thing to Me for Years

In my first year writing on Substack, I divided my essays into thirds,

• One third was about church history, which I teach professionally.

• One third was related to the spiritual journey.

• And one third was made up of reflections on growing up in Christian Americana during the 1980s and 1990s, what I often refer to as Evangelical Americana.

Since Lent began this year, however, I have noticed something rather surprising as I look back over the essays I have written; almost all of them have centered on the spiritual journey.

And occasionally, when I do briefly mention the Evangelical world I grew up in, readership spikes dramatically. Yet at the very same time, so do unfollows and unsubscribes.

It is a rather interesting phenomenon. If I write about misconceptions I carried with me from my upbringing, I gain a great many new readers and even new paid subscribers, which has been a profound blessing to my family. Yet I also lose some people who have been reading for quite a long while and do not appreciate my observations.

First of all, as some longtime readers have pointed out in the comments, I truly do not have a bone to pick with Evangelicalism or Protestantism. I have said ad nauseam over the years that I remain deeply indebted to the tradition that first exposed me to Christ, and which gave me my first spiritual father when I was a teenager, a man who helped set me on the trajectory toward the ancient Church.

Still, I have found it curious how little I have written about church history since the beginning of Lent, especially considering that so much of my weekly life revolves around teaching it, both professionally and in lectures at church.

But honestly, there was something about this past Lent that touched me differently than in years gone by,

• Perhaps it was the extended illness and the back problems that left me bedridden for days at a time.

• Perhaps it was simply the special new cohort of catechumens whom God allowed me to help teach and prepare for baptism.

Nonetheless, whatever the reason, something stirred me more deeply than usual in my daily meditation on what it means to seek God and to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

You see, for much of my younger life, I viewed a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as being primarily intellectual. I unconsciously assumed that reading books, studying theology, memorizing facts, or analyzing Scripture was itself the spiritual life. No one ever said this directly to me. Yet the American Christian experience I grew up in during the 1980s and 1990s often left the impression that spiritual reading was an end in itself.

But this is simply not true. As Metropolitan Tikhon has said, we should

“use spiritual reading as an encouragement to prayer, not as an end to itself.”

That distinction has blessed me in the best possible way in this post-Lenten season.

Whether we are translating the Greek New Testament into English, studying a book about prayer by an ancient saint, learning about church history, or listening to podcasts and YouTube lectures about God, none of those things are actually the end goal. At best, they are signposts. They are meant to encourage prayer. They are meant to lead us toward communion with God Himself. And if these activities are not deepening our prayer life, then perhaps they are quietly becoming obstacles rather than aids.

In The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Saint John Climacus writes:

“Let your prayer be completely simple. For both the publican and the prodigal son were reconciled to God by a single phrase.”

This is why, in Orthodox Christianity, which is really just a very old way of saying Christianity, the most common prayer is also one of the shortest prayers found in Scripture: “Lord, have mercy.”

It is the prayer of the publican. It comes directly from the Gospels. Christ points out that the Pharisee stands and offers a long and elaborate prayer filled with spiritual performance, while the publican simply beats his breast and cries out for mercy.

To be quite honest, much of my life was spent praying more like the Pharisee than the publican. Not intentionally, of course. Yet I was shaped by a religious culture where long and polished prayers often seemed to function almost as a sign of spiritual maturity.

Many of us probably remember the family member who prayed before Thanksgiving dinner or a holiday feast, with such majestic length and theological thoroughness that the children at the table began slowly drifting into despair while staring at the cooling mashed potatoes.

The prayer would begin with thanksgiving for the pilgrims, move into a brief retelling of redemptive history, wander through several missionary updates, mention at least three unnamed “unspoken prayer requests,” and eventually circle back to the turkey, now lukewarm and quietly suffering for our sanctification. Meanwhile, the younger cousins had already entered the fifth stage of grief.

Yet Christ praises the simple cry for mercy.

And the older I get, the more I realize how desperately I need that mercy. As I become more aware of my own sins, my own pride, my own lack of repentance, and the degree to which I still avoid true confession before God, the prayer “Lord, have mercy” has slowly become the prayer that is helping reorder and realign my life in Christ.

These essays that I write several days a week will, I am sure, return to a more balanced rhythm of history, reflection, and spiritual journey. Yet this morning I simply wanted to thank my readers for being patient with me during this strange post-Lenten season in which I have felt a little overwhelmed by the holiness and mercy of God.

A great deal has happened in the past two years. And as Paul Harvey used to say, perhaps this is “the rest of the story.”

This Lent and Holy Week coincided almost exactly with the one-year anniversary of my leaving behind the career I had worked in for twenty-six years. It was a career that not only provided for my family, but also allowed me to finish graduate school, volunteer in jail ministry, work evenings as a therapist at a rehabilitation clinic, and eventually begin a small coffee shop ministry in our community.

That business, handed down to me by my father shortly before he died, carried our family through thick and thin for decades. Walking away from it was far more unnerving than I expected.

And so much of this past year has carried with it a lingering question in the back of my mind: “Well... what now?”

I suspect many readers have experienced something similar. You spend years, perhaps decades, striving toward a particular summit. And then one day you finally arrive there, look out over the landscape below, and quietly ask yourself, “Alright... now what?”

When I worked in that career, life was so overwhelmingly busy that every spare moment was immediately filled with family, church, ministry work, teaching, or service to others. Life was a blur of constant motion for decades.

And while I remain busy today through teaching, catechism classes, conversations with inquirers, and writing here on Substack several times a week, there has still remained that persistent little question lingering somewhere beneath the noise: “What now?”

For a time, the question was largely financial. Leaving that career produced the greatest financial upheaval our family has experienced in nearly thirty years of marriage. Yet, quite unexpectedly, readers of this Substack appeared almost out of nowhere and began supporting us in ways that still humble me deeply. Without those readers, I simply would not be able to spend my mornings sitting over coffee with inquirers, catechumens, and struggling souls who reach out daily looking for guidance, conversation, or simply someone willing to listen.

And recently, as we continue praying in the simplest way we know how, “Lord, have mercy,” another thought has quietly begun to grow. It is still small enough that I hesitate to speak too clearly about it yet. But it has to do with gratitude. It has to do with hospitality. And it has to do with finding meaningful ways to give something back to the readers who have carried us through this strange and unexpected season of life.

I suspect I will say more about that soon enough, so be on the lookout for a rather big announcement in the coming month or two.

But for now, I find myself returning again to the words of Saint John Climacus. “Let your prayer be completely simple.”

There is something deeply freeing in finally realizing that God does not need my eloquence. He does not need my theological vocabulary, my historical knowledge, or my carefully crafted words. The publican was justified not because he understood everything, but because he understood one thing clearly: his need for mercy.

And perhaps that is the beginning of the spiritual life. Not mastery. Not expertise. Not the endless accumulation of religious information. But the slow and painful recognition that without Christ we are utterly helpless, and that all we can finally do is stand before Him honestly and say, “Lord, have mercy.”

The older I become, the more convinced I am that nearly everything else in life is a distraction from that central truth. Careers rise and fall. Ministries grow and shrink. Plans succeed and collapse. Bodies weaken. Dreams change shape. Entire chapters of life quietly close behind us before we even realize they are ending. Yet the mercy of Christ remains.

And perhaps that is why the prayer has endured for two thousand years. Because somewhere beneath all our noise, accomplishments, fears, ambitions, and religious performances, the deepest cry of the human soul remains astonishingly simple:

Lord, have mercy.

~ Kenneth