Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
I want to talk about a face I keep seeing.
Not one face. Dozens. And if you're honest with yourself, you may be wearing it right now.
You come in on Sunday morning. You take your seat. You look around and you count. Not on purpose. You can't help it. You notice the empty chairs. The ones that used to be filled. You remember who sat there. You wonder where they went.
There's a weight that comes with that. A grief. A quiet kind of grief that you don't know quite what to do with, because nobody told you that following Jesus would feel like this. Nobody told you that you'd spend your Sunday mornings doing a kind of spiritual math that never comes out right.
You've tried. That's what makes it hard. You've shown up. You've served. You've planned the community meals and the trunk-or-treat and the Easter services where people came once and didn't come back. You've done the outreach. You've opened the doors.
And somewhere in the back of your mind, a question has started forming. You haven't said it out loud. You'd feel bad saying it out loud. But it's there.
Has God moved on from this place?
Here's what we tell ourselves when we're in that place. We tell ourselves we just haven't tried hard enough. More programs. Better programs. The right pastor. The right Sunday. If we could just get the formula right, we could turn things around. We hold onto that belief because the alternative is worse. The alternative is letting go. And letting go feels like giving up.
So we keep spinning plates. More plates. We get up earlier. We work harder. We grip tighter. We put one more idea on the table because surely this one will be different.
I know something about spinning plates.
Four years ago I was living what looked like a good life. A farm in the country. Flowers growing. A ministry I believed in. A family I loved. From the outside, the picture looked right.
I was getting up at three, four in the morning. Not because something was wrong. Because I was convinced that if I just worked hard enough, I could hold it all together. There was the farm. The church work. The writing. The businesses I was trying to build. Guitar lessons I was going to sign my youngest up for. A training run I kept meaning to do with my son. A conversation I kept putting off with my daughter.
The plates were spinning. More plates every week.
And the harder I worked, the more I fell behind.
That's the thing about spinning plates. It's not a strategy. It's a symptom. The frantic energy underneath it is trying to tell you something. I wasn't listening.
My wife Heather kept watching me. She knew something I didn't know yet. And eventually I ended up in a psychiatrist's office. Diagnosed. Medicated. And for a while, I got better.
Then I got off the meds too fast.
I had written publicly about mental health. I believed in getting help. I had no business being ashamed of a diagnosis. But somewhere underneath all of that, I still was. And so I stopped too soon.
I remember a Tuesday morning. I was supposed to drive out to the farm for thirty minutes. Routine stop. Home for lunch.
I was gone for six hours.
In that six hours I drove all over creation. I handed out free mason jar flower arrangements to strangers. I passed out business cards. I had the energy of ten men and the judgment of none. I came home to Heather standing in the kitchen with a look on her face I will never forget. I had no explanation. I didn't really understand yet what had happened.
But the money was going out. The farm was going sideways. The writing was on the wall.
We had to sell.
That is not a sentence I wanted to say. Not then. Not now, if I'm honest.
The farm was not just a piece of property. It was a vision. It was everything I thought I was supposed to be building. And having to let it go felt like failure. Felt like death. In some ways it was.
I became very depressed. I was hospitalized.
When I came home, I lived in my parents' camper for a month.
Let that land for a second. The man preaching this sermon to you today spent a month in a camper in his parents' backyard.
And something happened in that camper that I could not have manufactured. When there was nothing left to hold onto, when the plates had all fallen and I was sitting in a borrowed space with no plan and no performance left to maintain, something opened up. I can't tell you exactly what it was. I can tell you it was grace. I can tell you I didn't earn it.
Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
John 12:24.
Jesus is not talking about church growth strategies. He is not talking about annual conference metrics. He is talking about something that has to happen inside a person, inside a congregation, before new life becomes possible.
The seed doesn't try harder. The seed falls. The seed breaks open. The seed lets the process happen to it.
And I want to be clear about this: God is the one who brings the life. Not us. Not the right strategy. Not the next thing we try. God brings the fruit. But God does it through death. Through letting go. Through the thing we've been gripping finally slipping out of our hands.
The path goes through, not around.
Now I know what you want abundance to mean. I know what we all want it to mean. Full pews. The families coming back. The church you remember.
I am not here to promise you that.
What I can tell you is what I've seen on the other side of the seed dying. People finding a place to belong that they couldn't find anywhere else. The single parent working a double shift who walks into a room and feels like a person for the first time in months. The one who got written off somewhere else. The one who was sure the church had nothing for her.
Those are real. Those are happening.
Maybe they're already happening here, and we're too busy counting the empty chairs to notice.
That's the fruit the seed bears when it lets go.
I am not standing here because I have it figured out. I want to be honest about that. These last two years have shaken my faith harder than anything I've experienced. I still have questions. I still have mornings where I'm not sure what I believe about the shape of things.
Walt Whitman put it this way: I am large. I contain multitudes.
That can be true of a person. It can be true of a congregation. You can hold the grief and the gratitude at the same time. You can hold the empty chairs and the woman who finally felt seen. You can hold years of exhaustion and the possibility that God is doing something you haven't been able to see yet because you've been so busy trying.
The Kairos circle doesn't end. Death and resurrection, repentance and belief, loss and new life. The wheel keeps turning. This is not a one-time event. It's the pattern. The seed dies, and God brings it back, and the cycle begins again.
So before I sit down, I want to ask you something.
What are you holding onto that needs to die?
Maybe you're a parent trying to figure it out alone, and you haven't been willing to ask for help. Maybe you're in a marriage that needs a real conversation, and you've been finding reasons to wait. Maybe you're struggling with your mental health and you haven't taken action yet.
As somebody who has been there, as somebody who is still in it, I want to say this as plainly as I know how: take action. Love yourself. Love your neighbor as yourself.
Because here's what Jesus said right after the grain of wheat:
Those who love their life will lose it. But those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
The seed must die.
And God brings it to life.