🌸 My Pastor Gave Me One Word That Changed Everything
I wanted to call it worse. He told me not to.
From Chula Vista – Just West of Otay Lakes
Hey – It’s Luis.
Most of us spend our hardest seasons trying to get back to happy. What if the word you were looking for was not better — but different?
The Huddle
It was a Sunday morning. 8:30 AM all-team huddle before first service. One of our pastors had just returned from Japan with her family and shared five minutes on what it felt like to be there. The food was different. The way people welcomed you was different. And the toilets were different — heated seats. The kind of small welcome you did not know you needed until you felt it. Like getting into a warm car on a cold morning.
Her main point was simple: travel pulls you out of your routine. It drops you into different. And different wakes something up in you that comfortable never can.
The huddle broke. I was walking out when one of the volunteers turned toward the First Impressions team meeting area and said something out loud that I do not think she meant for anyone to hear.
What does different look like?
She did not know I caught it. It was probably a thought that slipped out. I typed it into my iPhone before I even knew why.
The Question Underneath
Maybe you are standing at the edge of a season you did not choose. The road changed without your permission. Underneath all the weight of it — underneath the adjusting and the showing up and the keeping it together — there is still a question you carry quietly: Is it possible to actually be happy in this? Not when it is over. Not on the other side. Right now, in the middle of it.
That question is the one I want to stay with today.
Summer 2018
My kids’ mom had just filed for divorce. I was in more pain than I knew how to carry. A pastor who had been walking with me for a year sat across from me and said something I was not ready to hear.
This next season will be without your wife. Resist the urge to label it better or worse. Accept that it will be different.
Every instinct in me wanted to call it worse. Every morning, the house felt different. Every school drop-off felt different. The weight of the gap between what I had and what I had now felt like a verdict — like I had to decide whether I was losing or just changing. But grace was not asking me to grade the season. It was asking me to enter it. THEREFORE, I had a choice: hold the old season over the new one, or release the comparison and walk forward.
I kept the word. Different.
The Whisper
Back at the huddle, I sat with the volunteer’s question during prayer.
What does different look like?
The answer that came back was quiet.
Jesus was different.
He came on a donkey when they expected a war horse. The people expected a conquering king — a Messiah who would overthrow Rome and set them free. He came to do something different. Not to free them from an empire, but to free them from something no army could touch. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10) They rejected Him because He did not match the picture they had already built in their minds. Different is what grace looks like when it refuses to perform on our terms.
What I Did With the Fear
One of my greatest fears in that season was transition day. The day Henri and Gemma would pack their bags and go with their mom. Be around her new boyfriend. I could not control any of it. But I could choose what I did with that fear. Instead of letting it pull me toward resentment, I started praying. For my kids’ mom. For her boyfriend. For God to protect Henri and Gemma’s hearts and minds from the mess we had made. It was the serenity prayer in practice — releasing what I could not change and trusting God with what I could not see. That prayer grew my faith in ways I did not expect. If you want the full story of where those seven years of prayer led, I wrote about it here.
Choosing different did not just change my attitude. It changed what I did with my fear.
The Bison
When a storm approaches, a cow turns and runs. It stays inside the storm longer because it keeps moving with it. The American bison does something different. It turns and walks directly into the storm. By facing the wind head-on, the bison passes through faster — because moving toward it is the only way out.
Welcoming different is that turn.
It is not pretending the storm is fine. It is releasing the need to judge what you are walking through — better, worse, fair, earned — and trusting that grace is already in the middle of it, ahead of you, waiting. Resentment feeds on the gap between what you expected and what you got. It will eat you from the inside and separate you from a loving relationship with Christ. Gratitude lives in what is actually here. Different is the word that moves you from one to the other. And the fastest way through is to stop running and walk straight in.
Be a Tourist in Your Own City
Not everyone can book a flight to Japan. But you do not have to cross an ocean to practice different. You can start in your own city. Slow down. Be a tourist where you already live.
Here in San Diego that might mean trading your usual supermarket for Northgate Market or Mitsuwa. A local market where the smells are different, the labels are different, the people are different. You are not going far. But you are paying a different kind of attention. And that is where different begins — not in the destination, but in the willingness to notice what you have been walking past.
Maybe it is not a store at all. Maybe it looks like a morning that no longer matches the one you planned. Maybe it looks like you — still here, still showing up, still reaching for grace in a season that surprised you.
That is what different looks like. And that is enough.
Before the Week Is Out
Be a tourist in your own city. Pick one thing you do the same way every week and do it different. A different market. A different route. A different chair for your morning prayer. Then sit with one word to describe the season you are in right now. Not better. Not worse. Ask God what He would call it — and write it down somewhere you will see it tomorrow.
What is the seed you have been planting that you haven’t seen break ground yet? Reply or leave a comment and tell me. I read every one.
🌸 Happy Grace, Luis
P.S. — Is there a season in your life right now that you have been quietly labeling as worse? What would change if you called it different instead?