A Beggar’s Bread Crumbs

The Journey So Far

Happy 2025. The Lord has given us a new year.

As I pondered the best way to introduce this year on this newsletter, it occurred to me that as of January 2025, I have been a Christian for 20 years. This is no longer new faith for me. As many are coming fresh into new faith or holding onto old faith, some story may be encouragement to all. Who knows, maybe this will give you eyes to see that you didn’t have before. We won’t know if I cover it up with a basket.

Here’s the version of the story that doesn’t require half an hour to tell it.

I grew up in a Christian home, both my parents were and are believers, and they leaned into a charismatic understanding of who God is. We went to church regularly. I had boundaries, which I pushed against in my own way. Even though I had this environment around me, none of it clicked and by the time I was a teenager, my view of the world was molded more by misanthropic music I was listening to than it was the Bible.

In 2005, I was working in a medical manufacturing plant as a technician helping two R&D engineers come up with processes for building carbon fiber tables and fixtures for cat scans. God got a hold of my heart when I wasn’t looking for Him, told me I could trust my way or His ways, and the latter was irresistible. I surrendered, turned in a different direction, and started learning what it meant to follow the Way. I’ve been on the long road to Zion now for 20 years.

When first started writing over 10 years ago, I started a blog on Blogger called The Long Road to Zion where I posted trip reports from hiking adventures. Eventually I began blurring in what I was learning as a Christian. Part of my plan for the coming year is to share some of those old posts from the archive here on Fightin’ Poseidon. They’ll be web only so don’t worry about them clogging your inbox. I’ll definitely link to them in the newsletter so you also won’t miss them.

The first of such posts from the archives is my reflections on 10 years as a Christian that I wrote in 2015. If you want to catch up on some of that backstory, you can tap here to visit the page.

In the span between 2015 and 2025, the world has changed on a micro and macro level. We were still young parents; now we have older teenagers. Chronic illness has invaded our lives. We’ve left churches. We’ve lost friends we thought were solid and regained friends we thought we’d lost. I’ve done a lot of studying and shifted on what I believe about eschatology (the study of last things). My career has shifted a focus while staying in the same industry. I hurt in more places than I did in 2015. That doesn’t even touch on what’s happened on the world stage. No need for me to rehash that.

I know myself a lot better than I did 10 years ago but in other ways I feel like I don’t know myself at all.

With all that’s happened, I could go a hundred directions with this.

I’m going to pick one.

This is one if the hardest hitting things God has shown me, and I’m taking it as further evidence that He loves me. As if His Son dying on the cross for my sins isn’t enough.

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This happened about a year ago. The message was one I wrestled with, doubted, and fought against. “Surely not, God. What about this, this and this?” I tried to justify and explain my way out of it. Nevertheless, I had this vivid and distinct impression.

I don’t think thoughts like this. It had to be from God.

He said, “You have no idea what it means to love.”

My Empire of Dirt

There’s a lot of things I try to get right.

If I had listened more attentively to C.S. Lewis, who I consider to be my closest dead friend, maybe I would have spared myself some heartache.

In his book Mere Christianity, Lewis channeled a bit of wisdom from his chest through his pen when he said, “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” If that causes you to scratch your head in puzzlement, I encourage you to tap that quote to read the full quote. It really is something.

Even after 20 years of trusting in Christ alone for my salvation, I’m still wandering into trying to do it on my own although the flavor has changed. Now, instead of earning my own salvation, I’m burdened by the weight of my own responsibility to make things happen. I’ve swallowed just enough stoic kool-aid from the manosphere to smuggle in the toxins of believing at some level I am sovereign over all I lay my hands to. Spending my career as a mechanic has further entrenched that it’s my job to fix things.

This is a good aim. As the Pater Familias (father of the family), it is my responsibility. Another toxin that’s snuck in is being transactional. “I put X in and get Y out.” Now, as a Christian, I know better than this. I believe but cannot confirm it was R.C. Sproul who talked about “the debtor’s ethic.” Internet searches for this have come up dry and I can’t find the book that matches my visual memory of the contained quote. The debtor’s ethic is the quid pro quo that if I give you something, you owe me something in return. To live oppositely, which is what following the Way of Christ entails, is if I give something, no one’s in debt to it. We don’t have to keep the ledgers even on kindness and gestures and appreciation. As Christ freely gave, so I can freely give. He gave me salvation, I gave Him my sin. It’s not an even trade, but this is also the Way of the cross He calls us to follow. This is the Way of love. Covering debts, not collecting them.

The insidious sneak was that I began to believe if I was leading well enough, then the response would be in the direction I wanted. As it turns out, one of my skillsets is not being the active spearhead that commands the hearts of those in my charge and company to follow. I’m more of a subtle slow burn type of person that makes progress eventually, but in trying to embody a personality type that isn’t what I’ve been given, I end up more conflicted than useful. Then I don’t do anything. I end up discouraged. I end up fruitless, which is exactly how I had felt.

In all this focus on responsibility and leadership and being captain of the proverbial ship, I’d lost sight of the same thing the church in Ephesus (Revelation 2) had lost sight of: my first love.

Its amazing how off course one can get with good intentions.

We can build things. Even good things. We can make plans. Even good plans. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord (Job 1).

We are called to be faithful and bear good fruit but we do not command the fruitfulness. We are called to pray and we are called to plow. We are not called to bring forth the fruit out of the labor. In the order of creation, yes, this is what happens, but just because we are praying and plowing doesn’t mean our gardens will bloom.

We are more desperately dependent on the Lord than we realize.

We may be allowed to wallow around in seemingly good enterprises. There may even be times where we’re allowed to build towers that will only crumble and end in a heap of rubble. One of the songs I’d listened to in the last year was Hurricane by Jimmy Needham. He sings, “I need you like a hurricane, thunder crashing wind and waves, to tear my heart down. I’m only Yours now.” Having personally experience Hurricane Helene in September 2024, and not even at its most devastating level, these words carry more weight. Sometimes prosperity and getting what we want is not a blessing, but a curse. Maybe we need our hearts torn down. It’s better to have and know and be known by the Lord that than receive the fruit of lesser loves. Personally, I’m hearing Jimmy’s verse: “I am Yours and You are mine. You know far better than I. If destructions what I need then I’ll selective it Lord from thee.” Influencers aren’t going to sell you anything with that.

This all boils down to asking what really matters. What empires are we spending our efforts on? At what cost do our success and prosperity and wealth and met goals come? Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying don’t build. What I am saying is that it’s not better to gain the whole world and lose your soul (Mark 8:34-38). Destructive discipline from the Lord is better than prosperity without Him. Anything is better than His wrath, being given over to our sin.

May we all be able to evaluate the work of our hands. If we’re building an empire of dirt, it would be the best thing in the world to look at our ash heap and rubble and say, “You can have it all.”

Salvation is never an even trade.

A Beggar’s Bread Crumbs

One way we used to talk about sharing our faith is we’re merely a beggar who has found bread telling others we’ve found bread. My life and my experiences? There’s not much glory in that. Whatever good I have in life I can look and see it was the mercy of God, not the skill of my hands. Whatever pleasant inn I may be dwelling in comes from the blessing of God and not my savvy charisma, unshakable faith, dynamic leadership, unhinged creativity, mechanical skill, brilliant intelligence, untiring labor, perfect obedience, or how well I was able to wield the sword in the fight against a proverbial Poseidon.

So that’s what I’m sharing.

I hope none of us have anymore hurricanes, real or proverbial.

Thanks for walking this road with me. Thanks for reading. Here’s to what year two brings for this newsletter and even more importantly, where the Lord leads us. May we seek His face and continue to trust Him even if we don’t understand His hand.

Talk to y’all in two weeks.

~ J.P. Simons

P.S.: In another web only post, I recently published 2024: My Year With C.S. Lewis. If you know a little or a lot about him, you can tap here to read about the man I consider my best dead friend.