I am not a negative person. I am not motivated by criticism. And I think I’m not alone in wanting to focus on the positive. It is easy to think about how God made us and gifted us for unique contributions to the world around us. It’s really pretty amazing. When we develop these God-given gifts properly, those around us can benefit with time. We could possibly even become known for our skills and gifts. Give it our best and we might succeed beyond our wildest dreams.

But there are limits to all this positivity.

“To deny that life has its share of disappointments, frustrations, losses, hurts, setbacks, and sadness would be unrealistic and untenable,” writes Robert Emmons in an article published in The Atlantic during the COVID pandemic. “Life is suffering. No amount of positive thinking exercises will change this truth.”

So, no matter how much we develop the gifts God uniquely gave us, those things are not going to save our souls. God, who gave us these good gifts, loves those aspects of who we are, but they aren’t salvific. They cannot keep us from hard things.

Actually, it was the hardest things in their lives that brought nameless people to God in the gospels. They were desperate. Maybe we should consider being a little more desperate ourselves.

In the Bible, people often appear in their weakest, most troubled, imperfect states—the paralytic, the woman with the issue of blood, the man blind since birth, the beggar by the pool, the centurion with the dying son, the demon-possessed man, the dead little girl. We know them not by their names, but by their troubles.

And there are other people who were reviled just because of who they were—the Samaritan, tax collector, the prostitute, the Sadducee in the eyes of the Pharisee and the other way around, the people Jesus had dinner with that were not the right people. Others are identified by proximity to something else—the woman at the well, the man named Saul who held cloaks when the others murdered Stephen.

If people knew us by the weakest links in our chains, how would we be described?

The covetous woman.

The pornography-addicted man.

The man with the inoperable tumor.

The executive who can’t stop working.

The person suffering with something for which modern medicine has no cure.

The child abused for years.

The student with no friends.

The student ruled by his group of friends.

The person whose best friend is a chatbot.

The old people with no family to care for them.

The one who just lost a week’s wage betting away his earning.

The dad who has lost his way.

The mom who stopped caring.

The student who hates his life.

The single who longs for a spouse.

The newly married people who think they’ve just made the biggest mistake of their lives.

The list can go on and on. Each one of us has some sin or failure that we think might be about to swallow us whole. Fill in your blank. We all have at least one.

When we come face-to-face with our weakest links, we try hard to atone for our shortcomings. A person could spend a lifetime trying to overcome them. But nothing of eternal impact is to be done but to cry out, “Jesus of Nazareth have mercy on us.”

Jesus’ miracles lasted. They weren’t just to demonstrate that he was extraordinarily God. The woman with the issue of blood did not start bleeding again the next day. The demons that went into the pigs did not come back. But the people did not become sinless. They were never people without sin. He changes us for real. Holy hope has lasting power well beyond the messes we make, even the ones we keep making.

After Jesus ascended to heaven, I wonder if the people he healed were part of the early church. Did they tell firsthand stories of being healed by him? Surely Lazarus must have recounted his own resurrection, but what about the other nameless ones?

How can we bear witness to the miracles and the rescuing power of Jesus where zero percent of the credit for the good in us gets applied to us and all is given to him? Instead of being known for the weakest link in life, we can be known for the eternal link of grace between us and the Savior.

All for Jesus, all for Jesus!
All my being’s ransomed pow’rs:
All my thoughts and words and doings,
All my days and all my hours.