Deliverance in the And

A few weeks ago, I was invited to be a small part of something really beautiful called No Prisoner Be: Songs of Redemption & Deliverance—an interfaith musical experience that brought together a full choir, orchestra, and an incredible collection of local artists to explore the idea of deliverance: what it means to be rescued, released, carried, changed, healed, or simply given enough strength to keep going.

And somehow, they asked me to speak as part of it.

I was given just a few minutes to share some thoughts about deliverance and what I've come to believe it can look like in real life—particularly when the thing we're praying to be delivered from doesn't actually go away.

If I'm being completely transparent, the whole thing scared me more than I expected it to. The subject felt incredibly personal. The room felt sacred. And standing there alongside this extraordinary choir and orchestra, entrusted with a few minutes inside something so many people had poured so much of themselves into, I felt the weight of wanting to get it right.

But something happened afterward that I didn't expect. People began coming up to me and asking if they could have a copy of what I'd said, and I've found myself thinking about why.

I don't think it's because I said anything particularly revolutionary. I think maybe it's because so many of us know what it feels like to pray for the prison door to open—and then have to figure out how to keep living when it doesn't. We know what it's like to ask for healing and continue hurting. To ask for answers and continue waiting. To ask for rescue and discover that, at least for now, we're still standing in the middle of the thing we desperately wanted to escape.

I've spent a lot of the last few years trying to understand what faith means there. Not on the other side. Not after everything works out. Not once the miracle arrives.

There. In the middle. In the waiting. In the and.

So, for those who asked—and perhaps for someone who wasn't in that room but needs these words today—here is what I shared…

When I first learned the theme of the evening was deliverance, my mind immediately went where I think most of ours probably does. Deliverance means escape. It means rescue. It means the prison doors swing open. The illness is healed. The relationship is restored. The burden is lifted.

The miracle happens.

And sometimes, it does.

But what do we do when it doesn't? What do we do when we pray…and the diagnosis stays the same? When the grief doesn't leave? When the relationship isn't restored? When the answer we've been pleading for seems to be met with silence?

Does that mean deliverance never came? Or could it be that deliverance sometimes looks different than we expected?

A few years ago, I started noticing a little word showing up everywhere in my life. The word was…and.

I could be grieving and grateful. Heartbroken and hopeful. Scared and faithful. Hurting and healing.

I kept waiting for the "and" to become an "instead." I wanted joy instead of pain. Peace instead of anxiety. Answers instead of questions. Healing instead of waiting.

Maybe that's because we have this idea that healing means one thing has to disappear before the other can arrive. That I can't be okay until I'm no longer hurting. That I can't have peace until I have answers. That I can't experience joy while I'm still grieving.

But maybe healing isn't always replacing one thing with another. Maybe healing is discovering that sorrow and joy can occupy the same heart at the same time—and neither one makes the other less real.

Maybe the "and" isn't the place we wait for deliverance.

Maybe the "and" is where deliverance has already begun.

Because life with God rarely seems to be either/or. More often than not…it's both.

It's living in the and.

For a long time, I thought faith meant believing God would fix everything. If I trusted enough, prayed enough, believed enough…then eventually everything would make sense. Everything would work out. Everything would be fixed.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something that completely changed how I understand faith:

Faith isn't believing God will always remove the struggle. Faith is believing He'll never leave us inside it.

And maybe that's the harder kind of faith.

It's relatively easy to call something a miracle once we're standing on the other side of it. It's harder to believe we're still inside a miracle when nothing around us has changed—when the prayer hasn't been answered, when the thorn is still there, when all we have is enough strength for the next step.

Over the last few years, I've experienced seasons where I desperately wanted God to change my circumstances: losing my mom, losing a job I loved, living with chronic pain after an accident, walking through anxiety and depression. I've tried to understand why some prayers seemed to receive miraculous answers while others were met with what felt like silence.

If I'm honest, I wanted out. I wanted the prison door to open.

Instead, God met me there.

And while not every circumstance changed…I did.

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I discovered something I never expected. Peace isn't found only after the prison doors open. Sometimes it's found because Christ walks into the prison with us.

Maybe that's what deliverance often looks like: not the absence of hardship, but the presence of God.

I realize not everyone [reading this] shares my faith, and that's okay. You may not use the word "grace," or even the word "God." Maybe, for you, deliverance has come through the love of family, the support of a friend, a counselor who refused to give up on you, or simply the quiet realization that you were stronger than you thought.

Whatever language you use, I think we've all experienced moments when something deeper than our circumstances helped carry us through them. Not freedom from every trial, but freedom within it.

Because maybe our greatest prison isn't pain. Maybe it's believing that pain means we've been abandoned. Maybe it's believing we have to wait until everything is fixed before we can have peace, before we can have joy, before we can trust.

The Apostle Paul understood that kind of waiting. In 2 Corinthians, he describes what he calls a "thorn in the flesh"—something painful, persistent, something he desperately wanted God to take away. Three times he pleaded with the Lord to remove it. Three times he asked for the fix.

But instead of taking it away, God answered him with these words: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

Paul asked God to change what was happening to him. God answered by changing what was happening within him.

And perhaps that's one of the great paradoxes of deliverance: sometimes the thing we most desperately want God to take away becomes the very place where we discover a strength, a grace, a courage—or a capacity for hope—we never knew we had.

Not, "I'll remove it."

But, "I'll be enough."

I don't know what thorn you may be carrying right now. Maybe it's grief. Maybe it's fear. Maybe it's shame. Maybe it's loneliness. Maybe it's an unanswered prayer you've been carrying for years.

I truly hope God brings the miracle you've been praying for. I really do.

But until He does, don't miss the miracle He's already offering: His presence. His peace. His grace.

Paul later writes these incredible words in Romans: "Neither death nor life... nor things present, nor things to come... nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

For me, that's not just a promise of rescue. It's a promise of presence.

And maybe that's where deliverance begins.

Not when the prison doors finally open, but when we discover we've never been alone inside them.

So if your miracle comes, rejoice. But if it hasn't yet, don't lose hope. God's faithfulness has never depended on whether He immediately changes our circumstances.

Sometimes the greatest miracle isn't that our circumstances change.

Sometimes the greatest miracle is discovering that God's grace really is sufficient… even for today.