Something Felt Familiar

Paul was a book to me.

Something written.
Quoted.
Referenced.

And then one day, I heard our pastor use a line in a sermon—
Epistle to the Galatians-

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

And something shifted.

Paul was no longer a book.
He became… human.

Not someone to study.
Someone I could relate to.

That was all I knew about Paul.

But I understood the meaning of his words.

Not because I had studied them—
but because I had lived something that felt like them.

When I chose my agency over survival.
When I survived my prognosis, but something in me refused to live just to survive.

Now, sitting in seminary—
at the end of an Intro to the New Testament course—

I’m encountering Paul again.

Not through a single line this time,
but through letters.

Different communities.
Different tensions.
Different moments.

At first, it just felt like context.
Background.
History I hadn’t paid attention to before.

But after a while, something started to feel… familiar.

Not the places.
Not the people.

The pattern.

In Corinth, something feels alive.
Expressive.
Almost overflowing.

And then, slowly—
almost quietly—

it starts to turn.

People begin to align themselves.
Compare.
Differentiate.

What was once shared
starts to feel… performed.

In Galatia, something opens.
There’s a sense of freedom—
like something has been released.

And then, not long after,
something else moves in.

Structure.
Expectation.
A need to define what just happened.

As if what was free
couldn’t quite be trusted to remain that way.

I kept reading.

And at some point,
I stopped seeing them as their communities.

I started recognizing something else.

This wasn’t just happening there.

I’ve seen this before.

Not in churches.
In systems.

At scale.

Where something starts out alive—
close, human, connected—

and then, over time,
begins to organize itself.

And as it organizes,
it slowly moves away
from the very thing that made it alive in the first place.

I don’t think I was trying to fix that.

But I can see now
how often I’ve been drawn toward it.

Toward bringing things
back into proximity.

Back into something that feels… real.

And maybe that’s why Paul feels different now.

Not because I understand more.

But because I can see
what he keeps stepping into.

Not problems to solve—
but something that keeps happening.

Something alive…
becoming something else.

I don’t think he’s just teaching.

I think he’s interrupting.

And I’m starting to wonder—

how often something alive in us
quietly becomes something we manage instead.

Me too.