LILIES AND LANTERNS BENEATH THE MIDNIGHT SKY

Aug 4

All photos captured by the brilliant Mitchell Royel under the glowing allure of the Fashion District—every frame a masterpiece steeped in urban poetry. We rise to our feet in a standing ovation for the incomparable Tessa Odden, her essence illuminating the scene as we press play on *Wish You Could Love Me*, feeling every note resonate in the depths of our soul.

The phrase "Lilies and Lanterns Beneath the Midnight Sky" can hold deep biblical symbolism. Lilies are often mentioned in the Bible as symbols of purity, beauty, and God’s provision, such as in Matthew 6:28-29, where Jesus speaks of the lilies of the field and their effortless splendor. Lanterns, representing light, could signify guidance, divine truth, or the presence of God as seen in Psalms 119:105—"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." The midnight sky, vast and mysterious, may illustrate the setting of God’s infinite creation and His watchful presence even during life’s darkest moments. Together, these symbols evoke a powerful image of God’s grace, guidance, and eternal beauty shining through even in the most shadowed hours.

Beloved, I want to tell you a story today. Not a fancy story. Not a polished-up, gift-wrapped-with-a-bow kind of story. I want to tell you a real story. The kind that still has dirt on it. The kind that smells like river water and tears and late-night prayers that didn't have words — just groaning. Because sometimes the Spirit intercedes with groanings that cannot be uttered, and sometimes we are the ones doing the groaning. Can I talk to somebody real today?

Let me tell you about a woman named Jane.

She was ordinary in all the ways that matter and extraordinary in the way God had His hand upon her. Jane didn't stand out in a crowd. She wasn't the loudest voice in the room. But there was something settled about her — something anchored, something that made you feel like she'd been through weather and come out still standing. Jane loved the Lord with the kind of love that doesn't require a microphone. It was in the way she showed up. It was in the way she served. It was in the way she stayed, year after year, planted in the same house of worship, watering the same garden of relationship, growing deeper roots in the same soil of community.

Jane had a pew. She had a place. She had people who knew her name, knew her story, knew which battles she had already fought and won. She had elders who had watched her grow up in the faith, mothers in Zion who had laid hands on her and called forth her destiny, friends who could finish her sentences in prayer because they had been praying alongside her for so long. That is not a small thing. That is a holy thing. That is the kind of belonging that takes years and tears and shared seasons to build. And Jane had it. She was planted, she was rooted, she was home.

And then God did what God so often does. He disturbed the still waters of her comfortable life. Somebody say — the Lord is not afraid to move us.

Jane met a man.

Now I want to stay here for a moment, because this part of the story deserves its own reverence. It is easy to rush past the miracle in the meeting. But beloved, when God brings two people together, there is weight to it. There is intention to it. There is the fingerprint of heaven all over it. Jane met a man, and she knew. Not because of butterflies and fireworks — though those are nice — but because of something deeper, something quieter, something that bore witness in her spirit. A peace that surpassed her understanding. A confirmation that came in the still small voice. She knew this was not coincidence. This was covenant.

He was a good man. A man whose heart beat for God and whose hands were made for building — building a home, building a family, building something that would outlast both of them. He was the kind of man who led not with volume but with steadiness. He didn't just talk about the Word; he lived inside it. He had his own community, his own church body, his own family of faith — people who had poured into him, people who knew his name and his calling. And when Jane and this man stood before God and pledged their lives to one another, they didn't just join hands. They joined worlds.

Jane didn't just gain a husband. She gained a whole new church body. She gained new faces and new voices and new songs she had never sung before. She gained new traditions and new rhythms of worship and new ways of moving in the presence of the same God she had always loved. And church, this is where the water started to shift. This is where the current began to pull. This is where the story gets complicated, and honest, and holy — because this is where most of us stop telling the truth about what transition actually feels like.

The waters got muddy.

Because leaving is never clean. Let me say that again so it can settle. Leaving is never clean.

When you pull a plant up by the roots, dirt comes with it. When you cross a river, the bottom stirs and the water clouds. There is no sanitized version of departure, no elegant way to peel yourself away from the community that has shaped the very texture of your faith. Jane looked back at the fellowship she had left, and grief rose up in her chest like floodwater — sudden, heavy, uninvited. Those were her people. Not acquaintances. Not Sunday smiles and handshakes. Her people. They had prayed over her during the season when she almost lost everything. They had wept with her at the graveside of her dreams. They had carried her through the valley on their shoulders when she had no strength left to walk. They had celebrated her victories and held her accountable in her failures. That kind of community is not easily replaced. It is not quickly reproduced. And the grief of leaving it — even when God is the one who called you to go — is real, and it is valid, and it deserves to be honored.

And now the current of God's will was carrying Jane somewhere new, and she could not see the bottom. The water was too cloudy. The path was too unfamiliar. And for a woman who had always known exactly where she stood in the Body of Christ, this feeling of spiritual displacement was disorienting in ways she hadn't expected.

Have you ever been there? Have you ever stood in the muddy middle, where the old thing is behind you and the new thing hasn't taken shape yet? Where the bridge is gone but the other shore is still too far to see? That place is holy — I promise you, it is holy — but it does not feel holy. It feels like loss. It feels like you are mourning something that isn't dead, grieving something you chose, and that confusion is its own particular kind of pain. It feels like the Lord took you out of the boat and left you standing in the deep, and you are not sure if you are walking on water or going under.

And I came to tell somebody today — that muddy water is not your grave. It is your passageway.

Look at Israel at the Jordan River. Do you know this passage? They had wandered forty years in the wilderness. Forty years of circling, forty years of manna, forty years of learning that God was their source and their sufficiency. And now the Promised Land was right there — close enough to see, close enough to smell the fruit, close enough to feel the hunger of almost. But between them and the promise was the Jordan, flooded at harvest season, swollen and wide and wild.

And God told the priests — the ones carrying the ark of the covenant, the very presence of God — to walk into the river. Not to wait for the parting. Not to wait for the sign. Not to wait until the water receded and the crossing looked safe. He told them to step in first, and then the waters would roll back. Joshua chapter three, verse thirteen. And it shall come to pass, as soon as the soles of the feet of the priests who bear the ark of the Lord, the Lord of all the earth, shall rest in the waters of the Jordan, that the waters of the Jordan shall be cut off.

The miracle was on the other side of the step. The parting was contingent on the movement. The promise was accessed through obedience, not observation.

Jane had to step. She had to put one trembling foot into the cold uncertainty of her new season before she could see what God was about to do. And so do you. So do I. Faith is not standing on the dry bank waiting for clarity. Faith is not holding out until the conditions are comfortable and the path is visible and the outcome is guaranteed. Faith — real, biblical, costly faith — is wet feet.

Take the step. The waters will make room.

Now hear me carefully here, because this is the part of the journey where the enemy loves to do his most subtle and most destructive work.

When we disconnect from our fellow believers — even when God Himself ordained the moving, even when the transition was clearly His hand and His leading — grief, if it is left unattended and unsurrendered, can curdle into something dangerous. Grief can curdle into bitterness. And bitterness is a root that, once it takes hold, defiles everything it touches. Hebrews twelve, verse fifteen. Looking carefully lest anyone fall short of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble, and by this many become defiled. The word says many. Not just you. Bitterness spreads. It poisons your perception of the new community before they even have a chance. It makes you compare every new relationship to the old ones and find them lacking. It makes you hold your heart closed when God is asking you to open it.

And loneliness — that slow, quiet companion of transition — has a way of lying to us in the dark. It tells us we have been forgotten. It tells us we are invisible in this new place, that no one sees us, that we don't belong here, that we were foolish to come. Jane wrestled with this. Oh, she wrestled hard. Some nights she sat in the parking lot of her new church long after everyone else had gone home, because going inside meant being a stranger, and she was so tired of being a stranger. Some nights she lay awake next to her husband and felt a loneliness she couldn't explain to him, because how do you explain to the man who is your home that you still feel homeless? Some nights she missed her old church so fiercely it felt like a physical ache, like a missing limb, like something had been amputated from her spiritual life and the phantom pain just wouldn't quit.

And the enemy leaned in close and whispered, You don't belong here. You made a mistake. These people will never know you the way the others did. You will always be an outsider. Give up.

But church, I need you to know — and I need you to know it deep, in the marrow of your faith — the enemy is a liar. He has always been a liar. He was a liar in the garden, he was a liar in the wilderness when he tempted Jesus, and he is a liar today in whatever wilderness you are walking through. His voice sounds like reason. It sounds like common sense. It sounds sometimes like your own thoughts. But if it contradicts the character and the Word of God, it is a lie wrapped in logic, and you must not receive it.

You belong wherever God has planted you. Period. Full stop. His planting is your belonging.

Belonging, church, is not built in a day. I know we live in a world of instant everything — instant connection, instant communication, instant access — but there is no microwave version of covenant community. Belonging is built in a decision. The daily, unglamorous, sometimes painful decision to show up even when it is hard. To open your heart even when it is tender. To learn someone's name even when you are tired of being the new face. To plant yourself in unfamiliar soil and trust — really trust, with your whole surrendered heart — that God knows how to grow you there. He knows the soil. He prepared it before you arrived. He knows what nutrients your roots need and He has provided them in this new place, even if you cannot see them yet.

Jane decided. And that decision was not dramatic. It was not a mountaintop moment with rushing wind and holy fire. It was a Tuesday morning when she chose to say yes to helping with the food pantry even though she didn't know anyone on the team. It was a Wednesday evening when she stayed after Bible study and asked someone a question instead of slipping out the back. It was a Sunday when she sang a song she didn't know, and instead of feeling lost in the unfamiliarity, she let the unfamiliarity be an offering — Lord, I am here. I don't know this song yet, but I know You, and I will learn.

She decided to stop mourning the garden she had left and start watering the garden she had been given. And slowly — not overnight, not even over a month, but slowly and tenderly and surely — roots went down. Connections formed. A coffee turned into a friendship. A prayer request turned into a prayer partner. A shared meal turned into a shared story. And the soil that had felt foreign began to feel like ground.

Now I need to address something that is perhaps the most important theological truth in this entire story, and I do not want you to miss it. Are you with me?

Disconnecting from one church body is not the same as disconnecting from Christ.

Say that again until it settles. When God moves you from one congregation to another, when He redirects your membership, when He calls you to cross over into new spiritual territory, you do not lose your place in the vine. You do not lose your standing in the Body. The Head — Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords — never let Jane go. Not for a single moment. Not in the parking lot at midnight. Not in the muddy water of transition. Not in the lonely Sunday mornings when she felt invisible. The vine held her fast even when the branches around her changed. The Shepherd knew her name even when the flock looked different.

Jesus said, Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. John fifteen, verse four. He did not say abide in the building. He did not say abide in the worship style or the church culture or the familiar liturgy or the faces you have known for twenty years. He said abide in Me. The structure may change. The expression may change. The community around you may look entirely different. But the Source does not change. The Vine does not move. And as long as you hold to Him — as long as your roots are deep in the Word, your heart is surrendered in worship, your spirit is open in prayer — you are connected to everything that matters.

This is the gospel truth for every soul in transition tonight. Your zip code may change. Your congregation may change. The people who say amen beside you every Sunday may change. But the Anchor holds. He is the same yesterday, today, and forever — Hebrews thirteen, verse eight — and that sameness is your stability in the middle of every season of change. When the waters are too muddy to see through, you don't need to see the bottom. You need to hold the hand of the One who made the river, named the river, and can still the river with a single word.

He is still saying Peace, be still. Even now. Even here. Even in the muddiest season you have ever walked through.

And now I want to speak directly to our brothers in Christ, because this word is for the whole Body, and men of God — you are not exempt from the muddy water. You are not exempt from grief, from transition, from the disorientation of new seasons. And in some ways, you carry a weight that is uniquely yours in these moments, and I believe the Spirit wants to speak to it.

Brothers, if God has called you into a new church body, into a new expression of community, into a new spiritual home — whether through marriage like Jane's husband, or through God's direct leading, or through circumstances that were entirely out of your hands — know this: your strength is not measured by how quickly you stop missing the old. Your faith is not proven by pretending the transition is easy. Real strength — the strength of a man who leads with integrity — includes the willingness to say, I am in the middle of something hard, and I need the Lord, and I am pressing forward anyway. That is not weakness. That is the posture of every man of God who ever accomplished anything in the Kingdom.

Brothers, you were not created to carry this alone. God placed you in community precisely because isolation is not strength — it is vulnerability. The Scripture says in Ecclesiastes four, Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up. The lone wolf does not thrive in the Kingdom of God. The lone ranger is not a biblical model of faith. God designed you for brothers, for accountability, for the kind of iron-sharpening-iron relationship that requires vulnerability and commitment and showing up even when it is inconvenient.

So brothers — I am speaking to you directly now — let the new church body in. Don't stand on the edges with your arms folded, protecting your heart from the risk of new relationship. Don't let pride disguise itself as independence. Don't let past wounds in the Body convince you that all communities are the same or that all disappointments are inevitable. They are not. God has people in your new place who were made to be your brothers. Seek them. Open your hand. Open your heart. And lead the way in vulnerability, because the man who leads in openness gives permission to everyone around him to do the same.

And to the man who feels called to lead his family through a season of church transition — to the husband who, like Jane's husband, brings a wife into a new spiritual family — I want to say this with all the tenderness I have: be patient with her process. Her grief is not disloyalty. Her longing for the old community is not a rejection of you or of the new one. It is love — love for relationships that shaped her, love for the community where she grew. Honor that. Pray over it. Hold her hand in the muddy water and remind her, by the steadiness of your own faith, that God is in this. That He brought you both here. That He will not waste a single tear she has cried in the transition.

That is what it means to love your wife as Christ loves the church. You don't just lead her to the destination. You carry her through the crossing.

So Jane pressed on. Not because it was easy. Not because the grief evaporated overnight. Not because the new church suddenly felt like the old one — it never did, and it wasn't supposed to. Every community has its own fingerprint, its own culture, its own particular expression of the love of God. Jane wasn't looking for a replica. She was looking for a home. And homes are built, not found. They are built one brick of relationship at a time, one act of service at a time, one vulnerable conversation at a time.

She learned new names. She wrote them in her journal so she wouldn't forget them. She served in new ways — not the ways that had made her comfortable and known in her old church, but the ways that made her a beginner again, a learner, a servant without a title or a reputation or a track record. She let that humility be holy. She let the newness of it be a gift — because there is something spiritually renovating about being the person who doesn't know yet. It resets your dependence on God. It strips away the quiet pride that can sneak in when you are the one who always knows what to do. Jane became a student again in the best possible way.

And she let the new believers become brothers and sisters. Slowly. Imperfectly. With awkward coffee dates and slightly stilted conversations and moments of miscommunication that had to be talked through. Real relationship is never smooth at the start. It is messy and sometimes misread and occasionally clumsy. But Jane leaned in. And they leaned toward her. And grace covered the gap.

And one morning — it was an ordinary morning, no different on the outside from a hundred mornings before it — Jane woke up and realized the ache had softened. Not disappeared. But softened into something she recognized. She recognized it as gratitude. The grief had done its work and given way to something deeper — a richer appreciation for the faithfulness of God, who had not taken her family from her but had multiplied it. What had felt like subtraction, those long months of loss and disorientation, had been addition all along. More people to love. More stories to carry. More of the Body of Christ wrapped around her life. A wider family than she had ever imagined when she was sitting safe in her original pew.

That is how our God works. He wounds only to widen us. He empties only to increase our capacity. He takes us apart only to put us back together larger than we were before. He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him. Psalm one twenty-six, verse six. The weeping is real. And so is the harvest.

I want to say something now to the one who is still standing in the mud. Not past it. Not through it. Still in it. If that is you, I need you to hear me.

Growth is not the absence of pain. We have lied to ourselves about this for too long — told ourselves that if we are hurting, something must be wrong, that suffering means we missed a turn, that pain is a sign of God's absence rather than a sign of His active work in our lives. But the Scripture tells a different story. Romans five says we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. The pain is in the production. You are not falling apart. You are being built.

The muddy season is the growing season. The disruption is the discipleship. The confusion is the curriculum. God is not ignoring you in the turbulence; He is teaching you things about His character and your own that fair weather could never reveal. He is building in you a trust that is not contingent on conditions — a faith that holds not because the path is clear but because the Shepherd is faithful. He is making you into someone who can testify. Someone who can stand before another person in transition one day and say with authority, I know this road. I walked it. And God was in every muddy step of it.

A seed must be buried in the dark before it ever breaks into the light. That is not poetry — that is biology, and it is also theology. John twelve, verse twenty-four. Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. The burial is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the harvest. And beloved, what God has buried in you in this season — the dreams, the identities, the old ways of being — He is not wasting. He is germinating. He is cultivating something in the hidden place that will break ground in due season, in His time, in a way that will leave you breathless with gratitude.

Don't you rush the process. Don't you try to dig it up before it's ready. Don't let impatience convince you that nothing is happening just because you cannot see it yet. The tree doesn't stop growing in winter. The roots don't stop reaching in the dark. Keep breathing. Keep praying. Keep showing up. The season will turn.

So don't you quit in the middle. Don't you let the confusion convince you that God has lost the map. He wrote the map. He is the map. I am the way, the truth, and the life — not I know the way, but I am the way. He is not navigating from the outside; He is the road itself beneath your feet. Every step you take in obedience is a step on holy ground, even when the ground is soft and uncertain and feels like it might give way beneath you. It will not give way. He is holding it.

Keep your feet moving. Keep your heart open, even when it is bruised and tired and slow to trust. Keep your eyes on Jesus — not on the people who disappointed you in the old place, not on the people who haven't yet understood you in the new place, not on your own reflection in the muddy water, but on Him who is the Author and the Finisher of your faith. He began this work in you. He will not abandon it halfway through.

The bride who kept walking is the bride who arrived.

Jane arrived. Not because the road was clear or the crossing was painless or the grief was brief or the process was clean. She arrived because her God was faithful. Because He held her when she couldn't hold herself. Because every time she took one step forward in faith, He was already there, already in the new place, already preparing the table, already working in the hearts of the people who would become her family. She arrived because grace is not a feeling — it is a force. And that force was carrying her even when she did not know she was being carried.

And I want to close by saying this — not as a tidy conclusion, because God's story in our lives is never tidy, but as a declaration, as a proclamation, as a word spoken over you right now by the Spirit of the living God.

The muddy waters will settle. I don't know when. God doesn't always give us the timeline. But He has never started a work that He did not finish, and He has never led anyone into the river without carrying them to the other shore. The clarity will come. The roots will hold — because roots that grow through difficulty grow deep, and deep roots hold against storms that shallow ones never could. The community will form around you in ways that will astonish you. The relationships that feel forced and unfamiliar now will, in time, feel like the kind of belonging that only God could have engineered.

And the Christ who called you out — the same Jesus who said follow Me and led people away from their nets and their tax booths and their comfort zones into something they could not have imagined — He will surely carry you through. He has not brought you this far to let the river take you. You are not a casualty of transition. You are a testimony in progress.

Press forward. Grow up into Him in all things — Ephesians four, verse fifteen — growing into the fullness of Christ, who is the head of the Body, into whom all things are being gathered, through whom all things hold together. Let Him be your center in every new environment. Let Him be the constant when everything else is variable. Let Him be the familiar face in every unfamiliar room.

And one day — maybe sooner than you think, maybe after a long season of patient, faithful pressing — you will look back across the water. You will see the crossing you made. You will see the muddy river that scared you, that disoriented you, that you were sure was going to swallow you whole. And you will not call it a tragedy. You will not call it a mistake. You will not call it the year everything went wrong. You will call it holy ground. You will call it the making of you. You will call it the mercy of a God who loved you too much to leave you comfortable when He had something greater on the other shore.

To Jane, and to every woman and man who finds themselves in a new place because God moved them there — you are not forgotten. You are not invisible. You are not alone. You are exactly where the hand of God has placed you, and that hand does not make mistakes.

Amen. And amen.

-Pastor Mitchell Royel

Mitchell Abbott

LILIES AND LANTERNS BENEATH THE MIDNIGHT SKY

HAUNTING STILLNESS OF FREEDOM