Do-overs Becoming Autobiography

The world is louder than it is accurate, and the truest things are often the most quiet.

Brad Montague wrote that in his Manifesto for Stubborn Optimists, and I can't stop thinking about it. Because right now, injustice screams. Fear accuses. The desperate stampede shouts a single message: save yourself. But underneath all that noise, there's this whisper—the world we know as normal is not the one God intended.

We know mea culpa—my fault, my confession. But what about felix culpa? Happy fault. Fortunate fall. It's the idea that our brokenness can lead us somewhere we'd never otherwise go: into the depths of grace, into the mystery of redemption, into the shocking reality that God can resurrect what we thought was only wreckage.

This isn't cosmic lottery-ticket spirituality, scratching off silver panels hoping the odds swing our way. It's relational. God doesn't just tolerate our pain from a distance—He grieves it. Cancer, loss, the fractures we carry—He never meant for any of it. But here's the quiet truth: He's in it anyway, redeeming what was stolen, making something new from what we thought was only ruins.

Daniel Kahneman discovered we don't remember duration—we remember peaks and endings. Maybe that's why looking back, we can sometimes trace God's fingerprints through seasons we swore were only darkness. Redeemer. Comforter. Healer. Not because we learned a lesson, but because we encountered a presence.

Biblical knowledge isn't cognitive—it's autobiographical. It's the intimacy of experience, like knowing someone's character because you've walked through fire together.

So I won't tell you God is present or good or has a plan. Instead, I'll ask: What do you know? Not from a classroom, but from the an incarnational encounter with truth God keeps whispering?

Don't take my word for it. Take His.