There are days when I feel full from living the truth of my faith. And there are days when I don’t feel like I’m living from it at all. Not because I stopped believing or turned away. But because life, as it meets me in the moment, still feels unfinished.
Somewhere between what I know and what I experience, questions come. The kind that aren’t loud or demanding—but steady enough that they cannot be ignored. Questions that ultimately reduce themselves to the ones that hold them all.
“If it is finished… why doesn’t it always look like it? If the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in me… why do I still feel the weight of my humanity? If I am in Christ… why are there moments I feel distant, as though I have stepped outside of something I know is true?“
The View From Revelation
When I read the book of Revelation, I began to see beyond the questions. I feel the worry that I may be too late to understand fade away. Revelation is no longer a mystical mystery or a timeline to decode. It is an unveiling—a lifting of the veil that allows us to see from where Christ has already finished all things.
John was not simply shown events to come. He was carried into a reality where the work of Christ stood complete. The Lamb was already slain. The victory was already established. The kingdom was already His.
What he witnessed was not potential. It was fulfillment. What he wrote was completed reality described through the language of people still living within time, revealing what has always been true in Christ.
Living Between What Is True and What Is Seen
That realization does not stay in the pages of Revelation. It reaches directly into our own lives. In Christ, it is finished, not waiting on us. In Christ, nothing is lacking or waiting to be added. Nothing is unfinished or missing in Him, and still, not everything is visible in us.
And yet, in our lived experience, we are sometimes left to feel as if we exist in two realities. We carry fullness while still discovering it. We are whole while still learning how to live from that wholeness. There is a tension we feel because something that feels unfinished is, in fact, complete, being revealed within a world that experiences things in time.
Why Doesn’t It All Appear At Once?
And perhaps all of those questions eventually return to the same one: If it is finished… then why does so much of life still feel unfinished? If all of this is true, why does it not appear instantly? Why is there not immediate healing? Why do prayers sometimes feel quiet? Why does the body not always reflect what the Spirit already holds?
There is a truth that steadies me when I allow myself to sit with it long enough. Consider that if everything were instantly expressed at the physical level, we would not be living in faith—we would be living in sight. Faith is not striving to make something true, nor is it an effort to make something happen. It is the steady resting in what is already true, even when it has not yet become visible.
Scripture itself is filled with people who carried this same tension between what was already true in God’s heart and what was still unfolding in human experience.
Abraham—called a friend of God—lived through moments of doubt and self-protection. His story was not one of perfect trust, but of a man who continued in relationship even when his understanding wavered.
David—called a man after God’s own heart—made decisions that cannot be softened or explained away. And yet, his life is remembered not for perfection, but for a heart that remained turned toward God.
Their lives were not remembered this way because they were flawless. These things were said of them because they lived with Him. From God’s perspective, the story was not being written around their failures. It was being written through their participation.
God Sees What We Live
There have been days when I thought I had stepped out of that reality. Days when I did not feel connected, when even words or prayers would not come. Times when I felt myself ruled by my humanity, with my spiritual understanding left behind. For a long time, I believed I was continually drifting away and then finding my way back. That is not what was happening. I did not leave. I became unaware.
Then I realized that what felt like returning was not a journey back to God, but a remembering of the One who never left me. His presence does not come and go. My awareness does. Even the desire to return is evidence that I am already held within Him.
This is where my understanding begins to shift. I see my inconsistency. I see my moments of retreat into my own thoughts, emotions, and limitations. But God is not standing at a distance, waiting for perfection. He is present within the life I am living, not outside of it.
What I call falling short, He meets as a place of continued presence. What I call losing awareness, He holds as a moment where I will remember again. And what I call not doing well enough, He sees through the lens of union already established in Him. This does not remove growth, only reframes it. I am not working toward acceptance. I am learning to live from it.
There are moments when this awareness becomes deeply personal. When I think about what has been given, what has been done, what has been secured in Christ, it does not always lead to words. Sometimes it leads to tears. Not from sorrow, but from recognition.
I feel the weight of being His creation, and for a moment, I find myself thinking that I do not deserve any of it. But that thought becomes less weighty when I look more closely. In truth, I did not earn this. I never could. And in spite of it, I know without a doubt I am deeply wanted. That is where the truth settles: His love will never be removed from me.
As a mother, I think I understand this kind of love more now. There is little I would not do for my children. I do not pause to evaluate their worth in the moment of need. I move toward them because they are mine. That depth of love did not begin with me. It came from Him. What I feel as a mother is not separate from God’s love—it is a reflection of it, a participation in it. And if my heart responds that way, imperfect as it is, then His love is not less. It is greater, deeper, and without hesitation.
When Awareness Returns
Even writing this, I confess that there are still times when my humanity crowds out everything else. But I no longer fear that I have stepped outside of Him. I pause, and I remember that we are not learning how to get back to God. We are learning to recognize that we were never apart. Life does not contradict what Christ has finished. It becomes the place where we gradually come to recognize what has always been true—not all at once, but honestly, deeply, and over time.
This is what it means to live from finished work. Not that everything instantly looks complete, but that we slowly begin to recognize what Christ has already secured. We live from a truth that does not fluctuate, even when our awareness does. We trust that nothing is missing in Christ, even as our lives unfold into that fullness over time.
What is already true in Him continues to become known in us. Not all at once, but faithfully, steadily, and in ways that reach deeper than immediate understanding. And as that truth settles more deeply within us, we come to see, again and again, that we are, and always will be, known, loved, and held.
