Adaptation from Beauty and Resistance by Jonathan Walton.
In early 2023, I wept in the car from anxiety one Friday afternoon. I was afraid of losing my job. This isn’t supposed to happen to me, I thought. As an employee of a Christian ministry responsible for raising my own salary and benefits, I thought, Seriously, how is this happening to me? I’m a good employee and my last performance review had no hangups. I was confused, sad, and disappointed.
I was stressed, anxious, and not doing well. The challenges seemed to come all at once. My wife, Priscilla, ruptured her Achilles tendon, leaving her bedridden for forty-two days, save for assisted showers and physical therapy. I responded the only respectable way I knew how: suck it up and keep going. Activate Super Jonathan! Pickup and drop-off for both kids, meal prep for each week, all the laundry, garbage, and compost, doctors’ appointments and late nights, tax prep and budgeting—all of this I would handle perfectly.
The problem is, I’m not superhuman and no one was asking me to be. But I convinced myself otherwise. Anything less and I would be a failure.
The Scaffolding
In construction, scaffolding is a temporary structure to support a building while it is being built or repaired. These metal poles, wooden planks, and steel nuts and bolts are as essential as the people and materials they hold up. Scaffolding is also a term used in education referring to a teaching method that provides supportive structures for students as they learn new concepts and master new skills. Just like with a building, when the supports are removed, a student should stand on their own and demonstrate proficiency. In both contexts, the primary goal of scaffolding is to provide necessary support until the person or building can stand and succeed independently.
I needed a structure to support and sustain me as God worked in me to become the person he’d called me to be. I required a system that ensured I had the inner strength, courage, and wisdom to face both joys and challenges. It was not just about learning new information or mastering new skills. I needed to be transformed and continually renewed. Ephesians 2:10 says, “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”
I needed rhythms that helped me stay attuned to the voice of our Maker, because there was an abundance of riches from heaven that the apostle Paul prayed I would receive. Paul said:
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14-19)
If God is truly sovereign, Christ is the Messiah, and the Spirit created order from chaos, then the Master Teacher and Master Builder have to provide the scaffolding I need on this side of eternity.
After this reckoning and realization, I could begin the walk toward becoming fully present to the beauty God provides and the resistance he calls me to. Jesus called me to a rule of life organized not just around lamenting or rejoicing but around both in full measure, along with rest and work. He called me to four practices: rest, restoration, resistance, and repetition. And I believe he is calling you too. Not just because we live in a particularly difficult time where special practices and disciplines are needed, but because abundant reception of and involvement in beauty and resistance are marks of a life lived with God.
We must take ownership over care for ourselves and those we love, as well as the vulnerable we care for with whatever abundance we are blessed to have. We must also choose vulnerability, asking for and receiving care for ourselves. This is life in good tension, and it is not a dismissal of responsibility or sign of weakness. Understanding what is actually happening and taking responsibility is a crucial part of living out the Great Commission and the Great Commandments. When this faith becomes profound action, it leads to flourishing and fruitfulness that is accessible to us every day and should be evident to the world around us.
When I hear about governors exploiting immigrants’ vulnerability and dropping them off in cities of political rivals, I don’t have to be consumed by rage and disbelief and scroll and share incessantly. I don’t have to check out, disengage from current events, or diminish the suffering of people nearby and worldwide. I can learn about what’s happening, lament the tragedy, and confess my ignorance and my complicity. Then I can listen for how God would want me to partner with him and others to follow the Jesus of love and justice into discerned, deliberate action.
The same is true of every mass shooting, natural disaster, genocide, and population displacement. I can pray to the God who made everything, holds it all together, and is making all things new. I can assess my gifts and limits and collaborate as faithfully as I am able with God in light of his absolute power, abundant provision, infinite knowledge, and presence everywhere. All of this and more I will never do perfectly. But if I allow God to perfect me, then I will avail myself of the beauty available to me and be able to resist the individual, intimate, interpersonal, institutional, and ideological ways his shalom is disrupted. My actions will flow from my identity and I can truly be a human being, not a human doing.
Adapted from Beauty and Resistance by Jonathan P. Walton. ©2025 by Jonathan P. Walton. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
