John 13:6–20

A master woodworker once described the most discouraging phase of any project: the middle. “The beginning is exciting,” he said. “You have vision, you have energy. The end is satisfying, you can see the finished piece. But the middle? The middle just looks like a mess of sawdust and mistakes. That’s when most people quit.”

Life in the middle can feel exactly like that. We’re somewhere between where we started and where we believe we’re headed, and from where we’re standing, the only thing clearly visible is the mess. Mistakes we’ve made. Plans that didn’t unfold as we’d hoped. Seasons that were supposed to be temporary, now stretching longer than we imagined.

Peter experienced a version of this on the night of the Last Supper. Jesus knelt to wash his feet, and Peter recoiled. The scene didn’t make sense. Why would the Messiah perform the role of a servant? “You do not know what I am doing,” Jesus told him, “but later you will understand” (John 13:7, ESV).

And Peter didn’t understand, not then. What he couldn’t see was that Jesus was demonstrating the very shape of the mission that would carry the disciples through everything that came next: sacrificial love, humble service, willingness to go low on behalf of another. He also couldn’t see his own coming failure, “Before the rooster crows, you will have denied me three times” (John 13:38, ESV), or that God would use even that brokenness for something redemptive.

None of it made sense in the middle. But the middle wasn’t the whole story.

Easter is the revelation of what God was doing in what looked like catastrophe. The cross was not chaos. It was the turning point of all human history, hidden in plain sight. And if God was doing more than His disciples understood at Calvary, then perhaps He is doing more in our own middles than we can yet see.

We may not understand. But we know who He is. And that is enough to keep going.

What in your life right now are you struggling to understand? How does knowing the character of God, rather than the plan of God, help you trust Him in the mess?

Dear God, I cannot see what You are building. I can only see the sawdust and the splinters. Help me to trust Your hands, even when I can’t yet see the finished work.