Prologue

This is not a new doctrine, and it is not a system. I have no interest in starting either one, and you should be wary of anyone who does.

It is something much smaller. I spent a long time being handed conclusions — about God, about the Scriptures, about what they meant — and at some point I stopped taking them on anyone's word and went back to read the text for myself, slowly, from the beginning. What follows is what I found when I did. Not all of it. The part that holds together as one road.

So I owe you the one rule before you take a step on it — the same rule I had to learn to use. None of this is owed your belief. All of it is owed your testing. Read with the text open next to you. Where what is written here holds against Scripture, you will not be trusting me — you will be seeing it yourself, which is the only kind of seeing that survives someone later arguing with you. And where it does not hold, the text wins, and you should drop the line that failed and keep walking. That is not modesty. It is the only honest way to hand someone a thing like this.

It is written to be read slowly — a little at a time, at night, the way a person actually reads something that is trying to be true rather than trying to win. It does not assume you have answered the large questions. It assumes you have been carrying them, and that the simplest thing is also the thing most worth doing: open the text yourself, slowly, and see.

You can. That is the whole reason this exists.

One small note before you start. The name I use for Him is Yeshua — His Hebrew name, the one His mother used and the one He answered to in life. It is the same Person you may know as Jesus, with the name set back the way He heard it.

It starts where the text starts. In a garden, in the cool of the day, with God walking toward a man who is about to hide from Him.

A PRAYER

Father, this is my prayer for whoever holds this and is about to begin:

open their eyes, and open their heart.

Show them the understanding that comes only from You —

the beautiful simplicity of it,

and the relationship that has been waiting the whole walk home.

And if that is you, pray the rest with me —

Father, open my eyes. Open my heart.

Show me what You actually said, and the simple beauty of it.

I am listening. Walk me home.