Does It Have To Be This Way?
There’s a question I keep sitting with after turning 50 this year.
The older I get, the more I understand that life is mostly a series of parking lots.
I dropped my son Lucas off in a parking lot in Westerville to catch a bus to basic training. I stood there knowing that when that van pulled away and there would be a world of distance open up between us in the time it takes to walk back to your car. A few years ago, in an 18-month stretch, I lost three grandparents to Alzheimer’s and dementia, a disease that takes the person before it takes the body. I held my grandmother’s hand while a part of her was already somewhere else. This week I went to a worship conference in St. Louis with my daughter, watched her light up talking to people twice her age about worship leadership, and realized the school that trains for that calling is in Irvine, California. Another parking lot is coming.
Every single time, the same question surfaces: Does it have to be this way?
The Disciples Were Asking the Same Thing
In John 16, Jesus is in the upper room on the last night before his arrest. The Passover meal is finished. Judas has left. Peter’s denial has been predicted. The vine and the branches, the washing of feet all of it is behind them. And then Jesus says something that lands like a gut punch.
“It is to your advantage that I go away.”
Think about the weight of that line. It is to your advantage that I go away.
This is the same Jesus who walked on water. Who fed thousands from a few loaves and fish. Who raised Lazarus after three days in a tomb. The one they’d followed for three years. The one they’d left everything for. The one they were willing to die for. And he looks at them, with sorrow literally filling the room, and he says: you are better off without me.
It sounds almost cruel. But he means it. And he’s right.
The Limitation Nobody Talks About
The reality that we rarely talk about is that Jesus had limits. Jesus, as a man, had a zip code.
As God, no limitations. Omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. He was there at creation. He’ll be there at the end. Present everywhere, always. But at Christmas, the Son of God put on a body. Skin, hands, feet, voice. And when he did, the rules of incarnation applied. He could only be in one place at one time. When he was in the upper room, he couldn’t be by the Jordan. When he was at the well with the woman in Samaria, he couldn’t be with Jairus’s daughter. When he was in Lazarus’s hometown, he couldn’t be somewhere else.
His presence was localized. Incredible but localized.
So he says: if I go, I’ll send the Paraclete. The Helper. The Spirit. And the Spirit doesn’t have a zip code.
The Spirit that hovered over the face of the waters in Genesis 1, present across the whole surface of the earth from the very beginning, that Spirit now lives inside you.
Localized presence became globalized presence. One man in one room in one city became a Spirit available to every person in every place in every time. That’s not a loss. And that’s the entire point.
What Baptism Is Actually Doing
This is where Lutheran sacramental theology earns its voice and its power.
A sacrament is an earthly element combined with God’s Word that produces something infinitely larger than the sum of its parts. Water plus the Word equals the indwelling of the Spirit of God. The same Spirit that hovered over the waters in Genesis and now fills believers everywhere, that Spirit gets delivered through a very ordinary act involving a very ordinary substance.
We have a baby being baptized in a couple of weeks. And when that happens, I want the parents ready for screaming. Not because I enjoy embarrassing people, though I don’t mind it, but because when you take the whole presence of the omnipotent, omnipresent God and pour Him into a little human, there should be some reaction. The brokenness that’s present in that child from the moment of birth has to go somewhere.
But here’s the bigger point. You were baptized. Maybe you can’t remember the day. Maybe you don’t remember the water or the words or who was holding you. But something happened in that moment that the world has been trying to undo ever since. God looked at sin and death and fear and anxiety that had a hold on you, and said: not my kid. And rammed His Spirit so deep inside of you that the world has to work to bury it.
Remember your baptism. Not the event but the reality. You are claimed. The Spirit is in you. And it’s working even when you can’t feel it.
The Branch Pile in My Field
Every fall I trim my fruit trees. Five apple trees and a peach tree on my property. I cut the branches back and stack them in a pile in the field, where they’ll sit until after harvest when I can burn them.
Not once, not one single time, have I watched one of those cut branches produce a piece of fruit.
I’ve never heard an apple tree strain and grunt trying to grow apples. The tree doesn’t work at it. The fruit is just the natural output of a healthy, connected branch. But the pile of branches in my field? Those have never produced anything. Not because they’re bad branches. Not because there’s something wrong with them. Because they’re not in the tree anymore.
The Spirit produces fruit. We’ve likely heard of it: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. And the Spirit produces fruit the same way the apple tree does. Not through effort. Through connection. You don’t manufacture those things. They’re the output of a life that stays connected to the source.
So when Paul says “to live is Christ” before he says “to die is gain” he’s not talking about trying harder to be more Christian. He’s describing the natural result of a life where the Spirit has room to work. Everything about how you live, how you react, how you love people, all of it can reflect Jesus. Not because you’re disciplined enough. Because the Spirit is in you and you’re staying connected.
Does It Have to Be This Way?
My grandmother is gone, and sometimes I say something that sounds exactly like her. I carry her in me in a way I couldn’t if she were still here. My son is in the military now, building a life that doesn’t fit in my basement and he’s becoming something in the process that he couldn’t have become staying under my roof. My daughter might move to Irvine, California, and I’ll weep like a baby in that parking lot. And she’ll become who she’s supposed to be.
The advantage of them going is real. Even when it’s painful. Even when I’d choose differently if the choice were mine.
And Jesus going was the same kind of advantage just infinitely larger. Because what came in his place wasn’t just a memory or a legacy. It was the actual Spirit of God. Present everywhere. In every person who carries his name. Producing fruit that no one could manufacture on their own.
We find the advantage in the absence as much as we ever found it in the presence. Sometimes more.
Stay connected. Worship. Get into the Word. Find a group. Don’t let the branch sit in the pile and wonder why there’s no fruit.
The Spirit is already in you. Let it work.