Before I had kids, I had theories. Consistent bedtimes. Calm, reasoned discipline. A regulated nervous system and a parenting philosophy I had genuinely thought through. And then the child arrived — and I discovered that children are famously, stubbornly unaware of your systems. My son once refused to eat something because it was “too round.” He prayed with complete sincerity that God would give us a brown house when we moved to Alaska — not safety, not peace, just a brown house, specifically brown — and God gave him a brown house. I stood in the driveway realizing my three-year-old apparently has a more direct line than I do, and I should probably start taking notes. Parenting has a way of exposing everything in you — the best parts, the worst parts, the parts you were sure you’d dealt with in your mid-twenties after that really good season of journaling. The parts you didn’t know existed until a small human looked at you with complete trust and you heard yourself say something in exactly the tone you swore you would never use. And that moment — uncomfortable as it is — is the beginning of something real.

The same lesson arrived from a completely different direction this past year. When I started this podcast, everyone became an expert. Not in a cruel way — mostly in a genuinely well-meaning, I-care-about-you kind of way. Suggestions about format, length, delivery, topics I was overdoing, angles I was missing. Some of it was extraordinary and I treasured it. Some of it arrived with the full confidence of someone who had never sat down, written a script, hit record, listened back to the sound of their own voice saying something vulnerable, and decided to publish it anyway. And I get it — because before I had a podcast, I probably had opinions about podcasting too. Before I had kids, I definitely had opinions about parenting. The theme, as they say, was emerging. There is a texture to being inside a thing that changes what you know about it, and caring about something from the outside and actually living inside it are two genuinely different experiences.

Scripture is almost aggressively unimpressed by credentials. Moses couldn’t speak well, had been hiding in the desert for forty years, and responded to God’s call with five separate objections — not a reverent bow, a full negotiation, ending with “please send someone else.” God’s response wasn’t “fair point, let me find someone more qualified.” It was simply: I will be with you. The disciples were fishermen, tax collectors, political radicals — people whose resumes contained nothing that qualified them for rewriting the course of human history. They misunderstood nearly everything Jesus said in the moment He said it. They fell asleep in the garden. Peter denied knowing Jesus three times in a single night. And God used them anyway — not because they finally got qualified, but because they were in it. Present. Being shaped by the process of following, even when they were getting it wrong. The qualification was never in them. It was in the One who did the calling.

The version of you that shows up in the genuinely hard moment is not the version you rehearsed on a calm afternoon. It’s the one still being made. I think about a specific night when my son was overtired, I was overtired, and all of my parenting philosophy — the calm responses, the measured approach — none of it was accessible. What was accessible was just me. The unfinished version. And that was humbling in the best possible way, because it wasn’t failure. It was information. It told me where the growth actually needed to happen. You don’t get that from a book. You get it from being inside the thing. The people who know the most tend to speak in provisionals — in our experience, what worked for us, I don’t know, every kid is different. The loudest voices in any room are usually the ones who haven’t been humbled by the reality of it yet.

The parable of the Prodigal Son is, at its core, a story about expertise and its limits. The younger son looked at the situation from the outside, built his theories, drew his conclusions — and then reality arrived the way it always arrives for people who’ve only managed something from a distance. He ended up in a pigpen. And there, the text says, he came to himself. Not a theological breakthrough. Just a return to reality. He turned toward home rehearsing a speech — make me like one of your hired servants — still trying to negotiate his way back in, still reaching for credentials. And the father, who had been watching the road, ran. He didn’t wait for the speech. He didn’t set up conditions. He ran and threw his arms around his son before the boy could finish his first sentence. That’s not someone running an evaluation. That’s someone who just got their kid back. And I think that’s the thing this year has kept teaching me — in parenting, in podcasting, in faith — that we are all still in the middle of being formed. None of us have it figured out yet. The formation happens inside the mess, not before you enter it. Show up. Stay humble. You are not disqualified. You’re just in it. And that is exactly where you’re supposed to be. Small ripples make a big impact. Go make yours.