mama3girls-phnig

Reclaiming the Rhythm: The Hidden Hope inside Matthew 10:28

Good morning church! Today’s message will be a little on the darker side so…just a heads up. 

We’re talking today about the flattening of scripture—you know. Where the beauty and teeth are stripped out of something because it’s not super palatable (or marketable for that matter.) 

Have you ever noticed that? How easily a beautiful message can get flattened?

Take a verse like Matthew 10:28. In our English translations, it sounds incredibly heavy: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Hmmmmm. I see some nuance going on. 

Those with ears to hear, let him hear. 

For years, standard religious commentary has intentionally, or I pray unintentionally, used this text as a tool of condemnation. 

Some of us may have even heard these words preached AT US as a global accusation— if we’re struggling, if we feel broken, or if we are walking through the heavy valleys of depression, it must be because our “self-reliance” and “faith” weren’t strong enough. 

Uh. Well hell no my faith wasn’t “strong enough”. Have you ever been depressed? Clinical depression? No? Then maybe sit the hell down. Or better yet, shut the “flock” up.

Speaking of flocks who should stay silent…

I am about to show you why this whole scripture might make a little more sense. I’m betting I will be working through this scripture for the rest of my known life, but here is a stab.

When Jimmy runs to grab his pellet gun, I run inside.

I’m not out here trying to piss any entity off.

Especially not this One.

I know you may be confused.

It’s okay.

So am I, and I’m the one trying to explain this to you.

At first glance, Matthew 10:28 sounds like Jesus is saying, “Don’t be afraid of the people who can kill you. Be afraid of God instead.”

Which feels… not comforting.

Especially if you believe, as I do, that salvation in Christ is secure. One and done. Sealed. Held. Covered. Finished. No take-backsies from heaven. Not today, Satan. Not tomorrow either.

I don’t think Jesus is telling his disciples to live terrified of their Father.

I think he is reorienting them.

“Do not give temporary powers ultimate authority.”

People may have power. Real power. They may be able to slander you, reject you, exclude you, wound you, misunderstand you, or even harm your body. Ask Jesus. He really understands.

But they do not get the final word.

They are not the throne. They are not the judge. They are not the author of your soul. Ask Jesus, He is.

Then—because Jesus is Jesus—He immediately starts talking about sparrows after this scripture in Matthew 10.

SPARROWS.

Drama nuggets with feathers.

If you live where I do, this gets even weirder.

In south Texas, house sparrows are considered an invasive species. Which means when they swarm the bird feeder, my husband grabs his pellet gun and starts solving problems. Let me explain why.

The thing about the sparrows is that they aren’t normal sparrows. At least, not anymore.

Part of it is what they do to everything else.

We had a chickadee nest one spring that the whole family got invested in. Every day we’d check on it. We watched the parents come and go. We counted heads whenever the babies peeked up over the edge. It became one of those little backyard stories everyone was following.

Then the sparrows found it.

They didn’t just chase the chickadees away from the feeder or bully them off a branch. They went after the nest itself.

I watched them kill the chicks one by one.

Every time it looked like another baby might make it, another sparrow showed up. By the end of it, the nest was silent and my whole family (all the girls) were beside themselves with grief. This was COVID. There was plenty of grief to go around. My husband showed his grief differently. Enter the pellet gun. He wasn’t sad. He was “really angry”.

Maybe I’m being hyperbolic in my memory about these freaking birds. Maybe some bird expert can explain exactly why they do it.

All I know is that our family spent weeks watching those chickadees grow, and the sparrows wiped them out.

And somehow that wasn’t even the part that bothered me most.

The part that bothered me was how many sparrows there were.

The first time I noticed it, I thought I was imagining things. One bird landed on the fence post and just stared at me. Not pecking. Not hopping around. Just staring. Then another landed beside it. Then another. By the end of the week there were dozens of them, all showing up at the same times, all watching.

Maybe that still sounds normal. @deankoontz

It stopped sounding normal when they started appearing wherever the One appeared.

If the shadow moved through the trees, the sparrows gathered in the branches above it. If the air got cold and that pressure settled over the yard, they lined the roof and fence like an audience waiting for a show. Sometimes they would all turn their heads at once toward a spot that looked completely empty to me.

A few minutes later, it wouldn’t be empty anymore.

Jimmy says they’re scouts.

I asked him who they were scouting for. He was puzzled by my fear.

He looked at me for a second and said, “What do you mean.”

That answer did not help. It sounded like a question but landed like a statement. For once I was glad it was a statement. Usually, I get angry that he makes statements like this because he truly doesn’t want me to explain more. But, I don’t want to digress.

Y’all, Jimmy has shot at many sparrows–but every sparrow body ever shot at has vanished. My husband isn’t that bad of a shot…

No body. No feathers. Nothing.

Just gone.

Which, unfortunately, keeps dragging my brain back to Jesus. Not because I think the sparrows are holy. Just because Jesus once said not a single sparrow falls to the ground outside the Father’s care. Every time I have read that verse, prior to this horrifying experience, I have pictured sweet little songbirds hopping around a garden. Or chickadees. 

Not tiny feathered psychopaths.

Not the chickadee murder squad.

Not whatever these things are.

But Jesus was being a little hyperbolic there, wasn’t He? Please tell me, yes. But here’s the thing…I don’t think so. Maybe the point for you and me edges more toward the hyperbolic regarding if or whether God cares, and how much, but in my lived experience? ummmm.

The point wasn’t that God loves only the pleasant parts of creation.

The point was that His attention extends all the way down to the smallest, most forgettable, most annoying creatures imaginable.

Which means, unfortunately for my argument, that includes creepy things.

Rude things.

Murderous things.

Apparently even sparrows that act like they’re receiving instructions from Lord Voldemort or even Melkor from #lordoftherings . I’m not using any other names.

Y’all, I think I may have just bridged this concept in real time. Thanks for being with me! Scary stuff, right? Back to the point of this whole Matthew 10:28 reflection: if Jesus loves creepy and rude and murderous things too, then who exactly am I to judge a sparrow?

That realization has not made me like them any better.

But it has made me slightly less confident that shooting one is a great idea and I no longer have “cute little birdhouses” in my backyard. I was supposed to be grounding my self in nature–not watching a horror show in my freaking sanctuary.

So now, when Jimmy reaches for the pellet gun and starts talking about thinning the flock, I suddenly remember chores inside the house.

Because I don’t know what those birds are.

I don’t know what the One is.

And I definitely don’t want to find out what happens when you start killing things that seem to be working together.

To be clear: Jimmy is not God.

That is exactly the point. I may even tell him this occasionally.

Jimmy sees a nuisance bird. An invasive bird. A bird disrupting the ecosystem and about to have a very bad afternoon. Jesus sees a creature that does not fall outside the Father’s notice. And now I am really uncomfortable as Jimmy’s wife. To be fair, this is the same man who brought me coffee in bed that morning.

The same man who didn’t like watching his daughters cry over dead chickadees.

Anger just happened to be the language his grief spoke that day. And still multiple things can be true. The scripture:

Not even one sparrow, Jimmy. (But Jimmy gets grace, y’all. I still struggle. He’s cute. He always says my “faith” is so much stronger than his. I think this story points out how that may not be the case.)

It seems like this scripture may be telling us that Jesus likes and loves the sparrows nobody likes. Not even the sparrows classified as pests. Not even the sparrows wandering into the line of fire.

Because not one sparrow falls outside the care of the Father.

Not one.

Not the anxious sparrow. Not the weird sparrow. Not the sparrow making poor life choices near moving vehicles. Not the sparrow with a complicated attachment history and a blog. If God sees even them, surely He sees His children.

Maybe Matthew 10:28 is not meant to terrify the saved.

Maybe it is meant to unseat every false authority that ever made us feel disposable.

“Stop living as though anyone else has the power to define your final story.” I like this quote. I think it’s mine. “If they don’t like me, screw them.” Also mine. Maybe I am closer to Jimmy’s belief state than I am aware. And now I am more than uncomfortable. Because–

Your Father sees.

Your Father knows.

Your Father numbers hairs and notices birds.

Which is either wildly inefficient or wildly tender.

I’m going with tender. I’m also going inside when Jimmy grabs a pellet gun. Both those things are true. YOLO.

But, yeah. Where was I? Covid was a bad, bad, bad, baaaaaaaad season in my faith journey. I had to digress a little to un-confuse myself. Woah. Love this quote too. Y’all, I’m actually not this annoying in real life. I’m just always shocked when wisdom comes out of my mouth. Seeing it in black and white is kind of cool.

If you have ever read this message in a way that maybe God wasn’t intending or a translation of this message that may have confused you like me, or if you have ever had it preached AT YOU and you left the room feeling weighted down, as if the burden of fixing your entire inner life rests completely on your own exhausted shoulders? Man. I am so sorry. I understand. When this happened in my life story, no one around me, at the time, knew how to ask, “Hey girl? What’s going on?”

(Well, my spirit baby asked, but I’ll save that for a different writing assignment. She’s 14. She didn’t get the full answer. One day, maybe she won’t. Maybe she will. And now that I quoted that and YOLO, I have a very specific and unfortunate rap song playing in the back of my mind.)

We have an eerily good way of describing faith as a floating, pie-in-the-sky ideal—completely missing the beautiful, concrete reality of what Jesus was actually doing with these words. To be fair, this scripture is confusing.

Deep breath, Jenn. Breathe. 

I know words can be scary. If God has chosen me, redeemed me, adopted me, and promised never to lose me, why would Jesus warn me about destruction?

Come on inside the text with me. We’re in it together! (Is this just me, blogosphere?) If you look past the flattened English and dig into the original Greek text, you discover something brilliant. 

Jesus didn’t use the word Theos (God) here in the context of “the one”. If he wanted to say God, he would have. Instead, he deployed a dynamic phrase of action: τὸν δυνάμενον(ton dynamenon). It translates to “the one being able” or “the power that moves.”

Can God destroy body and soul?

Yes.

Will He destroy those united to Christ?

No. To understand why Jesus chose this phrase, we have to look directly at his original audience: the twelve disciples. 

When Jesus gave this speech, he wasn’t talking to comfortable theologians. He was talking to regular, working-class people who were about to face intense, real-world hardship. 

History shows us exactly what happened to them—they were hunted, slandered, put on trial, and physically persecuted by the very religious systems that were supposed to guide them.

Jesus knew that their earthly security was going to be completely shaken. Some may even say broken. 

If you have ears to hear me church. Listen. 

He knew they were going to walk through seasons of deep isolation, fear, and profound exhaustion. By using ton dynamenon, Jesus was handing his disciples a shield of validation and hope. He was acknowledging a profound reality: Yes, there are heavy things in this world that can temporarily disrupt your ψυχὴν (psychēn / your mind and soul) and your σῶμα (sōma / your physical body). 

He didn’t deny that their trauma and struggle would be real. The disciples were famous for asking if they were going to heaven (or in some cases, they demanded Jesus pick a favorite among them.) For us, we may be asking, “can I lose my salvation?” I believe this scripture about murderous sparrows is saying…no, girl. You watched the show. I think Jesus may be deploying some very graphic examples for me to get grace eventually. I think Jesus may be saying (paraphrase of course), “death is not the highest court, I AM.”

Jesus is a man. He doesn’t need the disciples to “hold the space” until they “got it all figured out.” Jesus wasn’t and isn’t planning on going anywhere—despite our seasons of struggle. Even when there are also solid times that He needed to leave the group to center Himself in prayer to the Father. Jesus always came back to his friends. Friend who had a scary (to me) penchant of not trusting that He was who He said He was. But that’s Jesus. He gets unconditional love. And for us who are struggling, Jesus ain’t going anywhere–like it or not. 

And ps- what I found out? He doesn’t need me. 

He does want me—but that’s for a different writing assignment. 

Fast forward to 2026, and the human heart hasn’t changed. 

While we may not be facing the exact physical trials of the first-century disciples, we deal with the exact same spiritual and emotional exhaustion. 

We walk through seasons of depression, clinical depression, the heavy fallout of betrayal, and toxic environments that leave us feeling entirely flayed and helpless.

But here is the great, joyful news of the text: The dark seasons do not get the final say over you.

Just as he did for the disciples, I believe that Jesus is lifting the heavy weight of condemnation off our chests today with all of Matthew 10. Jesus is telling his disciples they are going to be opposed, they are going to be having a really, really, really, hard time, he understands they will be afraid, therefore, remember me when the time comes. Prophetic foretelling to His friends. He didn’t say here, and PS–I’m going to be crucified. He was saying here, “And when I rise again, you will cease asking these questions about who I AM. Use this knowledge of my unconditional love to be strengthened in ministry for me.” Or even more emotionally zoomed out,

“You do not have to rely on your own broken strength to survive this. Your value, your soul, and your future are completely safe in a higher hands. Rest. Breathe. Shalom. Find your inner peace.” 

You don’t hear most christian churches in the south use words like the ones Christ gave me when I was depressed. For a minute I thought I was a Buddhist. And then a Hindu. I always brought Jesus with me though. He was never upset when I had to…it got pretty interesting but I was never scared because I knew he was along for the ride. And He still is. Me and Jesus have been having a grand old time, y’all!

When I questioned my husband on whether or not I was even a Christian anymore, he stared at me for a long time. He knows I’m obsessed with Jesus. Flew myself half way around the globe to help missionaries in scary areas.

Which, in hindsight, explains why he was scared to answer my very unloaded question. It was a simple answer. “NO”. Geesh, men.

But maybe, he was scared to repeat that back at me. “Are you asking me if I think you stopped loving Jesus?” Because, yeah, even when I was depressed that would have pissed me off. “Jimmy, who said anything about Jesus???” My gawd. I can see the fight right now. Poor Jimmy. He would have gotten in trouble for answering my question. Men have it hard sometimes. (and that’s how you express repentance for judging 1/2 of the human population.) As it relates to Jimmy, the sparrow muderer, I can tell you even more stories. Don’t feel tooo sorry for him. He’s a king.

After a long time, My husband said, “Nope. I think we just need to leave some assholes in the church behind.” Actually, I think I said that and he agreed. He did say, “All that centering yourself? The breath work? The humming? It actually makes sense. Grounding yourself in nature is supposed to be really healing. Come take your shoes off and walk in the grass.” 

Have I mentioned my husband is a nerd? He knows a million little things and always whips them out when I need a revelation. 

Thanks, honey. 

(Also, my husband was more than enthusiastic to commune in nature for our Sunday mornings in lieu of dressing up for a pew sit session—maybe not important.) 

True faith is never about grit or pretending you have it all together. It is about resting in the truth that God promises He will never leave you, nor forsake you. Regardless of what’s happening inside of us. 

God is a concrete, practical counselor. He doesn’t just leave us with abstract theological concepts. He provides real, tangible, living rescue right here on earth—I hope you are able to find that in your local church. And if you are not? 

Run. 

Don’t walk. 

When our spirit is entirely weak, God provides people—look around you. Who is he providing for you? They may not be the Bible study guy or gal you’re expecting. 

For those with eyes, let them see. 

The disciples didn’t survive their trials alone; they survived because they leaned on each other, prayed for each other, and carried each other’s burdens. 

Healing doesn’t happen in a sterile, lonely room of self-reflection. It happens in the beautiful, messy reality of community. It happens when you finally reach out to a true friend—someone who loves you, supports you, and has the fiercely protective loyalty to look at whatever has been dragging you down and say:

“They said WHAT to you?! Oh, absolutely not. Let’s fix this. And hell no you aren’t going back to that. Those people are bat shit crazy if no one told you that’s not okay…”  PS. Jimmy didn’t say these words to me at the time.

He thought I was “crazy”. Huh. We have now established “crazy” as a trigger word in marriage. Which now means I can’t say it either. Some days I hate this marital ceasefire.

That raw, honest, protective human connection isn’t unspiritual—I believe, it’s exactly how the divine power of rescue operates in the real world. 

It is the moment your psyche begins to breathe again and your soma begins to rest.

If you are someone who has love and energy to give, look around you. 

Find someone who is hurting. Ask them how they are feeling and offer practical support. 

If you are someone who is struggling, find someone who has care and compassion etched in the lines on their face and ask them if they will talk with you or pray with you. 

Tell someone you trust what is going on. Tip: Don’t be vague. Be specific. I like to tell my children (whomever they are) start at the beginning and don’t end until the end—let it all out. I offer this to you too. Allow God to show His love through another human soul. And if you don’t want to attribute up. Just find someone to love you. The religious belief isn’t the important part in seasons like this. Jesus is good. He’s not going anywhere. He may just want you to start taking care of yourself because He isn’t practically here right now (other than in your spirit). This is why I had to take a sabbatical from the church. I am letting Jesus work with me on scripures like this one to understand Him better. I can’t run from Him anymore. The more I learn about Him the more I am falling in love with Him. Also, trust me, a church building a preacher who preaches on grace every sunday, is far easier than the church room of my backyard in the spring. But either way, Jesus will have you listen to sermons. I have no doubt.

“Fall in love with Jesus.” I like that quote too. Man, I’m full of quotes today. LOL.

And also? You only live once. That’s the motto. @drake thanks for making me consider water guns as a sparrow solution.

If you’re a church where the hurting can find no eyes of compassion and compassion can not be found in the pews—even the smallest bit where you can turn around and ask someone if they are hurting? Provide practical support like a ride to the hospital or a hot dinner?

God promises to vomit you out of his mouth. (Revelation 3:16) 

He said it. Not me. Get mad at the text, not the messenger. It’s okay. He can handle it. I get mad at the text all the time but on deeper reflection, typically involving e-sword and a greek/hebrew translator, I end up saying, “sorry, Jesus.”

If you have ever attended a church where you couldn’t find practical support, even in a simple question like, “Hey girl. What’s going on? Can I take you to lunch?” I am sorry, friend. If you are still alive and kicking? I’m glad you made it out in one piece.

After a couple of years, I was able to stop blaming Jesus and now have real concerns about the frozen of us who are still chosen. But that’s okay. This group really gets grace better than I do, too.  

The dark night of the soul I experienced when worshipping with this flock, I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. It was terrifying, humbling, isolating and interestingly, though I wouldn’t have called it this at the time … an awakening. 

The rage I poured out on God, the absolute aloneness I felt and abandonment of everything I held dear, including my faith… 

man. 

It woke me up. 

Church, are you awake? Do you have ears to hear? 

Occasionally I have a good day, though. Those are the days where I pray for a revival in the American Church and no chickadees had to die in the making of the awareness! Hallelujah! 

For now, I pray God send me somewhere to the East, East, East of Eden. 

Just got my Quran. (And a panicked phone call from my daughter—moooooom, what’s going on? Did you just order a Quran? Damn. Shared Amazon accounts are a serious invasion of privacy. She’s lucky it wasn’t something else.)

…

I never know where or what this interesting adjacent faith I’ve picked up is going to tell me when I get woken up in the middle of the night. 

I do know the why. He has a name that exists above all other names. Hint: I’m obsessed with Him.

But also–Love of humanity. And a little give a shit about how they’re doing regardless of what they believe. 

Prayer circle for the church. Wake up!  We’re shooting our wounded and we’ve lost more than a few good men… and women.

Amen and amen.