Chris Scott serves as Mennonite Mission Network’s Facilitator for Emerging Faith Communities and pastor at the exchange church. He works to build new faith communities and equips others to build churches where peace matters more than power.
He publishes a weekly blog, Missio Menno, covering everything from his Sunday sermons to current events. In this piece, originally published on Mission Mennoon May 1, Scott explores how faith in Jesus isn’t always clean or easy.Instead of grand solutions, he reminds us it’s more about the next small thing.
There is a way people talk about life like it is supposed to resolve itself if you are faithful enough, or disciplined enough, or emotionally intelligent enough. Like if you can just get the right habits in place, the right prayers said, the right systems running, everything will finally stop hurting in random places.
That is just not how it works.
Most people are not living a story. They are carrying fragments. A voicemail they still have not deleted. A hospital waiting room chair that still feels too hard when they remember it. The receipt in a coat pocket from a grocery store trip where they had exactly 18 dollars left and pretended it was fine. A text they should not have sent at 1:47 a.m. and the silence that came after it.
You can sit in a church on Sunday and still be holding all of that in your hands like it is normal. People get good at it. We learn how to sing while our insides are elsewhere. We learn how to say “I am doing okay” with the right amount of eye contact so nobody asks a second time.
There are people riding the train in Chicago at 6:18 p.m. who are not thinking about theology. They are thinking about rent. Or custody. Or whether they should have stayed longer in a conversation that already felt like it was slipping away from them. A man counts coins in his palm like that will change the outcome of anything. A woman stares at her reflection in the window and practices looking like she is not tired.
And still, life keeps insisting on being a mix of everything at once.
There is laughter in one room and a breakup in another. A newborn baby in one house and a diagnosis in the next. Someone is packing a suitcase because they finally decided to leave. Someone else is unpacking one because they had no choice but to come back.
Church language sometimes tries to smooth that out. To make it line up into something clean. But most of the time faith is not clean. It is just people showing up again after they said they would not. It is a tired parent whispering a prayer in the dark that does not sound impressive or holy, just honest. It is someone sitting in the parking lot outside the church, engine still running, trying to decide if they have enough left to walk inside the building to see the people.
There is a kind of grief that does not really announce itself. It just becomes part of the way a person moves through a room. Shoulders slightly tighter. Smile slightly faster. Exit slightly earlier than they used to.
And still, something keeps pulling people forward.
Not clarity. Not certainty. Not resolution.
Just the next small thing. A shared meal. A phone call returned. A morning where we get out of bed without negotiating too hard for it.
Nobody gets a single story. Nobody gets a clean line through it all. It is more like carrying a handful of moments that refuse to agree with each other and still somehow belong to the same life.
Somewhere in that mess, people keep living anyway.
