Loved First

I saw a post on X where somebody expressed her frustration with the changing world around us. She put in twenty years of practice in Photoshop, two decades doing careful, incredibly precise work. She had built a rare skill set, scrimped to get by, and even gotten a case of carpal tunnel syndrome to show for it. She was well-paid for what she learned.

And then, she watched artificial intelligence reproduce her work in eleven seconds. What she described afterward was how much her world was turned upside down. It went way beyond frustration. Frustration is when a project fails or you miss a deadline. This was different. She was describing what happens when the ground is shaking in an earthquake. I don't know what to do with the fact that what I committed to as my life's work can now be done very, very easily by almost anyone.

If she sacrificed to learn something that is now available for free, what was the sacrifice really about? In the end, her question was about what supported her professional identity, and whether she was still special or unique when validation disappeared.

The term circulating for this experience in late 2025 was skill deflation shock. And the related vocabulary that ironically popped up outside of church walls was the liturgy of pain. The liturgy of pain is this deeply held belief that our endurance has value. It’s the idea that there's an identity we carry because we put in the painful time, the work, and the sacrifice. Suffering toward an achievement becomes a form of significant social standing. Sacrifice proves that we matter.

But when AI devalues your achievement in eleven seconds, that evaporates. We discover our identity was built on the idea that our sacrifice proved we were worth loving, of being valued. If those eleven seconds were just about her expertise, it wouldn't be as big a deal. But they also took her proof of value away.

Underneath this modern professional crisis is one that we've all seen. Have you ever had times in your life when things did not turn out the way you expected or when the sacrifice didn't yield the reward?

John the Baptist also understood skill deflation shock. Here is a man who put in the time. He was out in the wilderness wearing the crazy clothes, eating the locusts and wild honey, preaching repentance, preparing the way for the Lord. He did everything right. He followed the ultimate calling.

And where does he end up? Sitting in a dark prison cell, waiting to have his head chopped off. He sends his disciples to Jesus to ask, "Did this actually work? Jesus, are you actually the one?" He is sitting there wondering what the point of his entire life's sacrifice was, because it doesn't make sense that he’s in prison. He put in the work, he did what God wanted, and now he’s in a cell.

Jesus gives an interesting answer. He tells John’s disciples to go back and report what they hear and see: "the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the deaf hear." And then Jesus adds a very specific phrase: "Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me." The Greek word used there for stumble is skandalon. It means a stumbling block, a rock in the path. Jesus is saying that when our expectations are shattered, when our "liturgy of pain" doesn't pay out the way we thought it should, that rock in our path creates cognitive dissonance. It's an offense. You can either trip over that rock and fall, or you can step up onto it to gain a higher perspective.

The difference is the focus of our attention. That rock in our path is what exposes whether we had the order right. The right order invites us to step up on the rock. It lets us abandon the tape that runs through the mind of almost everyone: I produce, therefore I matter. I matter, therefore I am safe. This tape starts in childhood. It runs through marriage and career. And it runs through the church. After all, religion often has the most developed vocabulary for naming love as the reward for our performance.

So I have to ask you: Do you behave so that you're loved, or are you loved and then you behave?

That question is the key. Where does it start for you? It’s a choice that makes one thing more foundational than the other. Most of us, if we sit with the question rather than jumping to the first reflexive answer, will find we can’t get past it. We believe in grace and know it’s at the center of our faith. But our hands will grip the edge of our seat anyway. We still wake up every morning with a gnawing question: What must I do today to prove that I deserve to exist? This is a failure of how the house is built, not a failure of character.

A friend of mine learned this the hard way when he was in his twenties. His friends got married and asked him to be the master of ceremonies at their wedding reception. He really wanted to do a good job for his friends, so he worked hard. He put the script together. He was prepared. He got to the wedding, and people kept coming up to him with last-minute requests—can you add this part, can you make this announcement? He wrote it all down and got it in place.

He got up to the microphone and he nailed it. He got all the announcements right, introduced the attendants coming in. The atmosphere was incredible. He made it work. He finished, sat down, and felt this massive sense of satisfaction.

And then, the mood in the room changed, and everything got uncomfortably quiet. He looked around, trying to figure out what went wrong, and realized: the bridal couple had just walked down the aisle without being introduced at their own reception.

He had done all the work, managed all the mechanics flawlessly, and completely missed the main thing.

That story describes something much bigger than wedding receptions. The church in America is running a highly efficient operating system of performance, and we've added a thin overlay of grace language that sits on top without actually changing the code. We are nailing the announcements but missing the Bridegroom.

The result is suffering without meaning. That’s the stark reality. We already sacrificed. We thought we were doing everything right. We believe the right things, we are actively engaged, but now everything feels different, and we don’t know why. We’re no longer sure why we matter.

If we want to understand why this performance trap is so hard to break, we have to look at how God actually wired us. In the last few years, neuroscience has taught us something fascinating about the brain.

When data comes into your brain, it hits your thalamus first. Your hypothalamus is already filtering through questions in quick succession: Am I loved? Do I belong? Am I under threat? What are my people like? As it filters through these questions, it sets your brain state that determines how your thalamus will direct that traffic. If you’re under threat, it shifts over to your amygdala and limbic system and primarily uses the left side to manage the threat. If you’re not under threat, it will route it to your right brain which helps you feel connected, open, and see the world panoramically. But here’s the catch: the left side of your brain is slower. It processes at about five actions per second, while the relational side operates at six.

Before your prefrontal cortex even wakes up to quote a Bible verse or analyze a situation, your hypothalamus has already decided if you are safe.

If your identity is not firmly rooted in being the beloved, your brain goes into what Dr. Jim Wilder calls "Enemy Mode." Sometimes it’s Passive Enemy Mode—you get corrected, shame washes over you, and every ounce of your being screams, I just want to get away and hide. You shut down your relational capacity and isolate. Other times, it’s Predatory Enemy Mode. You feel that shame, but instead of isolating, you go into "winning." You argue, you perform, you dominate. You put on a suit of armor to protect the frail, scared person inside.

The wrong order didn't originate in our modern era. It is much older. The biblical account of where it came from is clear: a garden, a tree, and a question about God's motives.

The serpent's opening move with Adam and Eve was not to deny God's existence. It was to introduce a hypothesis about God's bad intent: He is withholding something from you. The serpent offered knowledge and control as the alternative to trust. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the tree you eat from when you pick up the steering wheel and say, "I want to be in control. I need to manage the outcome." You eat from it when you can't stop needing to answer the question: Am I sufficient? Am I safe? Will I be found acceptable?

Afterward, the fig leaves became important. Adam and Eve were introduced to self-consciousness, and they began the immediate journey of protecting and promoting themselves. They discovered more than they expected, and they hid.

The instinct to hide has been so fundamentally normal since then that we no longer even recognize it. Sometimes we call it performing, or maintaining our image. It’s easy to dress it up with spiritual vocabulary: humbly serving or being busy for the Kingdom. None of these actions are wrong in themselves, but all of them become tools of hiding when our intent is management of other people's impressions.

This is what the Greek word translated "hypocrite" in the New Testament actually meant in its original context. Hypokrites is a theater term. It means an actor, someone who speaks from behind a mask. Jesus used it to describe people who had confused performance with truth, people who were so practiced at wearing the mask that they had forgotten there was a face underneath it.

The word describes exhaustion. The hypokrites is someone managing an impossible task: if the mask comes off, their social standing plummets.

A friend of mine, Amanda, has one of those giant, inflatable blow-up suits. Hers is a unicorn.

On April 1st, and she and her friend decided to pull an April Fool's prank. Her friend had young children, so she concocted a story about unicorn sightings in the neighborhood. Despite her best effort, she had a 10-year-old boy who was naturally a bit more skeptical. To get him to believe it, her friend had AI write a fake news article about a local unicorn sighting and read it to him. The setup was perfect.

Amanda, fully encased in her inflatable unicorn suit she called "Mr. Sprinkles," came galloping through the backyard. The kids were amazed. It was magical. She waltzed through, and circled around, finally disappearing from their sight by going back to the front and heading toward her car. But Amanda is tall, a little too tall for the viewing window in her suit. She missed seeing an object and tripped.

She went down hard. She hit her head and got a concussion. Suddenly, the prank was over. She was in real, agonizing pain, and she needed help. But there was a glaring logistical problem: If she went inside with the suit, she would reveal the whole prank. She managed to get the suit off on her own, then went inside to ask for help. Here she was with blood on her face, she was no longer the magical Mr. Sprinkles. She was Amanda who just needed help from her friends.

But the truth is, we all wear suits. Some of us wear happy unicorn suits, projecting an image that everything is fun and magical and we have it all together. Some of us wear Darth Vader suits of anger and separation, keeping everyone at a safe distance with our intimidation and competence.

Some pastors wear suits of invulnerability, Superman in pastoral form. They never learn to receive care. They have given themselves away for decades. They know how to sit with someone in grief, how to carry a congregation through a difficult season without hesitation. But then their own crisis comes, the medical diagnosis, the marriage struggling under the sustained pressure of pastoral life. They don’t know how to be on the receiving end of what they have been giving. And the congregation doesn’t know how to provide it.

The suit fits so well that they can no longer find the zipper, and the congregations are afraid to see them without it. The liturgy of pain built pastors for output, and the congregation to receive. It never taught them to receive, and the congregation to give.

But for true love and care to be received, the suit must come off.

The right order interrupts all of this. It says: Love arrived before we started giving. Giving is the response, not a currency. Which means when giving stops, love is still there. That holds when depletion arrives, when skills are deflated, when carpal tunnel sets in, or even when you are sitting in a prison cell wondering if any of it mattered.

You are not negotiating for love nor are you at risk of losing it. You can be taken care of without the suit on, long before your recovery even starts.

I (John) grew up Beachy Amish—a branch of the Amish tradition that permitted more technology than Old Order Amish but kept many of the practices that made the community separate and distinct from the world. We sang together a lot. For us, that meant four-part harmony, with men and women sitting separately in worship, singing out loudly and clearly. The holy kiss was a regular greeting for baptized members. Foot-washing was a normal part of communion, and I wouldn't have thought of them as separate things. Youth group singing every other Sunday night was in somebody's cramped living room, rows of benches facing each other. This was belonging, but mostly because you were born in a family that belonged.

What I received, sitting shoulder to shoulder with people I had known my entire life, was something no sermon could give. Through breathing the same air and singing the same notes, my body was learning safety through proximity. My relational circuits were learning peace because the person next to me was at peace.

This community is with me in my space. There is enough food. There is enough time. God is generous. I didn't have a theological name for it then. It was just what we did. But looking back, I realize what it was: it was belonging before becoming. Seeker-sensitive training for churches tells us to start with belonging, and the way to cheat at it is stay more monolithic in your demographics. It’s easier to belong first if everyone thinks the same way before we start. But this training is still performing. It’s not resting, where the leaders themselves are wired to perform that belonging matters. So the underlying process keeps running anyway; "believe, behave, and then belong." We’ll say it’s different. But everybody knows it’s not. We truly need the opposite. True spiritual transformation requires belonging first. When you are immersed in a transformative community, it changes you before your intellectual beliefs are even fully formed.

The two of us, Sheila and John, have been in church our entire lives. Added together, that's more than one hundred sixteen years. We have led churches, planted churches, and simply participated as members with the people in them. And the breadth of that included churches of all sizes from house church to megachurch. We’ve worshipped in churches that are liturgical, liberal, conservative, Anabaptist, evangelical, charismatic, and more. Our commitment to the church is as strong as it's ever been. We are writing this book because the church is where we belong.

But we are writing because we keep driving after one question. What will bring true transformation? And the answer starts with recognizing there is an impostor running our spiritual formation system. It has been there since the Garden.

Identifying it correctly is the first move toward the sequence that actually works. We're not managing it, or arguing with it, or trying to perform our way around it. We want to step out of the liturgy of pain and take off the unicorn suits. We want to live out the right order, and being loved comes first.