The Recurring Question
For more than a decade, as Jesus and I have built what I call My Jesus-Greg WORLD, a recurring pattern has emerged.
Every week—or at least it often seems that way—I find myself stepping back from whatever I have been building. It is as though Jesus gently interrupts my thoughts and asks a question from thirty thousand feet above the landscape.
What is this all about?
Why are you doing this?
The question rarely feels like a request for information. It feels more like an invitation.
An invitation to see more.
An invitation to climb higher.
An invitation to discover that all of the individual projects, essays, symbols, songs, routines, experiments, and conversations belong to something larger than I had previously understood.
Over the years I have come to recognize this as one of the recurring rhythms of my discipleship.
The answer is never final.
Instead, the question returns.
Again.
And again.
Each time I answer it from a slightly higher mountain.
Reflection 2
The Human Work of Meaning
Human beings seem naturally wired for this process.
We do not simply gather facts. We organize them into meaning.
Scientists do this.
Authors do this.
Filmmakers do this.
Teachers do this.
Parents do this.
Civilizations do this.
Every field eventually arrives at the same question.
Physics explains electrons.
Biology explains living cells.
Psychology explains minds.
Sociology explains societies.
What is it all about?
The deepest discoveries often come not from collecting one more fact, but from discovering a larger pattern that allows thousands of facts to fit together.
Meaning emerges.
The picture becomes clearer.
Reflection 3
Names for the Pattern
Philosophers have given names to this process.
Some call it sense-making.
Others speak of hermeneutics—the continual interpretation of meaning.
Psychologists describe narrative identity, our lifelong effort to understand the story we are living.
Still others describe a hermeneutic spiral: we revisit the same questions repeatedly, but because we ourselves have changed, every return reveals something new.
It is not a circle.
It is a spiral.
Each revolution carries us a little higher.
Reflection 4
The Question Returns
That is how this project has unfolded for me.
Many times I have believed I finally understood what Jesus was building.
Then the question returns.
What is it all about?
The previous answer is rarely discarded.
Instead, it becomes one piece of a larger answer.
Like climbing a mountain, every new overlook allows me to see why the previous overlook mattered.
It was not wrong.
It simply was not high enough.
Reflection 5
A Different Game
One of the most recent answers to that recurring question has become especially important.
Jesus has been inviting me to understand discipleship itself as learning to play an entirely different game.
Not a game in the sense of pretending.
A game in the sense of entering a world with a new scoreboard.
New rules.
New objectives.
New victories.
New ways of measuring success.
The Scriptures are filled with moments when God invited people to stop keeping score according to the world's rules and begin seeing reality according to heaven's.
That insight eventually became the foundation of another essay.
For now, it stands at the entrance to My Jesus-Greg WORLD because it has become one of the clearest answers I have yet received to Jesus' recurring question:
What is it all about?
At least for now.
Until He asks me again.