In a way, deconstruction is about ideas, apologetics, and experiences (traumas in life, in church, and elsewhere) - our appraisal of what’s real. But underneath it all is the battle between good and evil. The way of Wisdom or Folly. God-thanking or God-cursing. Wheat or weeds.

It’s a war that splits us in two. Because the stakes are that meaningful. God wants to make a way into our hearts.

And, so, there is hope! Hold on, brother and sister, agonizing in the throes of deconstruction day after day, deep in mourning, pulling the covers over your head at daybreak. One day soon you’ll awake and suddenly sense you’re being restored!

Psalm 42:11 - Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

Psalm 30:4-5 - Sing praises to the Lord, O you his saints, and give thanks to his holy name. For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.

Most of us hope to avoid long, protracted deaths in old age. “Take me quickly in my sleep,” we say. Deconstruction is a kind of death. But deconstruction lays us out for months or years, long and protracted. It kills us in many ways. Some die permanently and some die but are born again - raised to walk in a trueness and vitality of life they’d never known.

Jesus himself prepares us for this hardship while we yet live but ensures us the difficulty pays off:

John 12:24-25 - Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Let us trust him with whatever tiny mustard seed of faith we have. It doesn’t take much, he told us. May God make us like John the Baptist, bringing people back to himself. Not because someone read us the Great Commission and told us that’s what good Christians do. But because our hearts - in their deepest place - the place where we ache during deconstruction - are compelled in happiness to genuinely, truly, really serve God because we’ve tasted and seen that he is good. O God, give us this experience of life and yourself! May he help us hold back those staggering to death even as we are helped.

May he see us through our seasons of deconstruction and death so we can join him as harvesters in his work. May we keep people alive the way Joseph did during that famine. Jesus is coming again. There’s still preparing to be done before he arrives. May we see and understand. May we be glad in him!

Isaiah 40:3 - A voice cries: In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”