This is the first of three excerpts from admissions essays submitted for my masters program at Fuller, starting September 2025.

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Before the rescue, the world revolved around me.

Even as I speak those words, the old-younger me protests. “I saw the needs of others. I cared. I believed in Jesus.” True. I speak now not of intentions or sincerity but of perspective. Before the rescue, I simply had no eyes to see God’s unfolding drama, neither its grand sweep nor its terrifying beauty. I was author and protagonist of a small story I called my own. God numbered among the others, all supporting cast.

And then Jesus blew into the dusty mess like a zephyr of timeless zeitgeist, eternally now, forcefully free, and carried me up in a tornado of furious grace to a place where the deafening roar of his quiet sureness absorbed every word and shout and lament into its swirling stream and washed it with holy wind and made it new.

The divine rescue, that rescue from self-rule, changes everything.

Since the rescue, my story is not mine. This life is the small part of God’s story that happens to have me in it. And that not-about-me quality makes the story more precious, not less. To find one’s life in losing it, to become nothing and receive everything, is the glory of grace. It is an unlikely glory, like a good thing from Nazareth, a poppy in a crack of concrete, or the warm sun breaking into a prison cell. The experience of rescue reveals hidden in the heart of God an exuberant, indomitable goodness that cares not a fig how hopeless the case might be. He relishes showering gifts on the least of these.

The least of these, yes. Jesus meant me, it seems, my privileged circumstances notwithstanding. And my privilege now is greater by far: to seek others in need of rescue and show them the same love I was shown.

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