Faithful anyway - 2 Timothy 2:13

Paul writes it almost like an aside, in the middle of a passage about enduring hardship: if we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself. Reading it today, it struck me first as a sweet kind of message, the kind meant to make you feel secure and loved by God, which it should. But it struck me as something more than that too, once I thought about exactly who has been faithful to me while I was not faithful to them, twice over, in ways I am only now able to see clearly.

A quick aside on why He cannot deny Himself

Paul's reason for God's faithfulness is specific, not just a general claim about His character. Once someone belongs to Jesus, they are described in Scripture as part of His own body, adopted into His family, so turning on them would mean God turning on His own Son, not just on a person He happens to be disappointed in. His faithfulness is not a reaction to how anyone behaves, it is Him being consistent with who He already is, which is what makes it something we get carried along inside of rather than something we keep having to earn.

The father who kept calling

My parents divorced when I was young, and my mom moved us to Arizona when I was about eleven, which meant seeing my dad on school breaks instead of every day. As teenagers, my siblings and I hated it, and we made sure he knew it. We ignored him, pleaded not to go when it was his turn for custody, got angry when he disciplined us, and told him outright that we hated him. We never wanted his advice and never wanted to be around him, and we shunned him about as completely as a kid can shun a parent. I would guess a lot of people reading this had some version of this too, maybe not as dramatic as mine, but a parent or mentor who stayed when they had every reason to walk away.

He stayed faithful to us anyway. Every time we showed up, he welcomed us like nothing had happened, found something fun for us to do and made us come along even when we did not want to, taught us discipline, showed us what hard work looked like by actually doing it in front of us, and kept pushing us to be our best even while we resented him for it. I remember he had a calendar reminder set to call us, and he called on schedule whether we picked up or not. He never stopped putting in the effort, year after year, long after most people would have given up on kids who made it clear they did not want him around.

I am grown now, and looking back, I am grateful in a way I could not have understood as a teenager. He is a large part of the reason I am the man I am today, and we have a genuinely good relationship now, personally and professionally, running Black Box VR together. He never stopped loving us or pushing us toward our best, and I doubt I would be the man I am today if he had given up on me the way we gave him every reason to.

The faithfulness I could not see while I was running from it

I grew up Christian, went to Christian school, and still never had an actual relationship with Jesus, just the label. After I moved out on my own, I stopped practicing the faith almost entirely. What was left of it shrank down to knowing Jesus was God and that God was real, nothing beyond that, and I genuinely did not think about God for long stretches of that season.

Shunning Him for years the way I did no doubt hurt Him the same way it hurt my dad, and I believe that is exactly the kind of faithlessness Paul is talking about in that verse. But He stayed faithful to me through it, the same way my father did, showing up for me long before I ever thought to look for Him.

Two things I almost took credit for

Two specific things make this impossible for me to explain away now, and I did not see either one clearly until much later.

About three years ago, Maddy and I were living in an apartment in a rough, overpriced part of Boise with a one year old boxer puppy who had more energy than the space could handle. Our lease was ending, we had no savings for a house, and it was one of the worst possible times to be looking for a rental in Boise. The only real option we found was a narrow three story townhouse next to a Fred Meyer, no yard, still a little too expensive, and we applied and heard nothing back.

Out of nowhere, my grandma Cyndi reached out and said she had heard our lease was almost up, that one of her rental houses had unexpectedly come open, and asked if we wanted to come see it, warning me it was an older style I might not love. It is the house we still live in. Two car garage, fenced yard, a safe neighborhood, four bedrooms and two bathrooms, room for a home office each for me and Maddy, and a guest room that has hosted some of our best memories with friends and family. We pay what the old tenant paid, minus what it actually costs Cyndi to keep it running, which is fair to both of us. I had genuinely forgotten she even owned rental properties until she called.

The part that convinces me this was the Lord and not luck is why the house was available at all. A longtime tenant had abruptly stopped paying and effectively had to be evicted, with no warning and no explanation, leaving holes in the walls and a full house of belongings that had to be hauled to the dump before Cyndi could even repaint. That collapse, which had nothing to do with us, happened to clear out exactly the house we needed at exactly the moment we needed it.

The same pattern showed up again not long after, when my truck started leaking and needed repairs that cost more than it was worth. Maddy and I looked for weeks and found nothing, until she suggested, almost as an afterthought, that we just go look at CarMax even though nothing promising was listed online. I only agreed after she pushed for it. We found a 2016 Honda CRV Touring there, specced out about as well as that trim gets, priced just past our budget, and then Carvana offered us three thousand dollars more for the truck than any other quote we had gotten, which closed the gap almost exactly. I still drive that CRV today, no major issues since.

Both of those happened while we were, by any honest measure, basically unbelievers. I doubt we are the only ones who can look back at a season like that and find provision we never thanked anyone for. God was exactly as faithful to us then as He is now, whether or not we were paying enough attention to notice.

What I would ask someone who does not believe

I think about this every time I hear someone say they have what they have because they worked for it, or got lucky, or made the smart call, because I said versions of the same thing about that house and that car for a long time before I could see what had actually happened underneath it. If you do not believe in God, I am not asking you to pretend you do. I am asking you to actually look, honestly, at what you are calling luck, or coincidence, or your own hard work, and ask how much of it you can really account for.

Most of life is ordinary, and I am not claiming every good thing that happens to anyone is a direct sign from heaven. But the pattern in my own life stopped being deniable once I started looking for it, and I would bet if you looked at your own life the same way, you would find provision you assumed you earned or stumbled into, coming from a God who never once stopped being faithful to you, even on the days you told Him, one way or another, that you wanted nothing to do with Him. We are nothing without Him whether we admit it or not, and the sooner that stops being an uncomfortable thought and starts being an honest one, the better.