Tentang Natasha, cinta yang dinyatakan terbuka, dan apa yang selama ini dikibarkan Tuhan kepada kita.
Truk itu sudah bergerak.
Borechka berdiri di bagian belakang bersama prajurit-prajurit lain, melaju menuju garis depan — membawa semua yang dibawa seorang pemuda ketika ia tahu bahwa minggu-minggu ke depan mungkin adalah yang terakhir dalam hidupnya. Malam sebelumnya berakhir dengan buruk. Natasha datang kepadanya dalam kegelapan, dengan ketakutan, merindukan kedekatan — dan ia justru mundur. Bukan karena ia tidak mencintainya — ia tahu ia mencintainya. Hanya saja ia tidak bisa mengatakannya. Ada sebuah garis dalam dirinya, membentang antara perasaan dan pernyataan, dan ia tidak sanggup melangkahinya.
Maka ia kembali ke kamarnya. Ia memberitahu Borechka bahwa ia tidak akan melepasnya pergi keesokan harinya.
Ia berbohong.
Karena ketika konvoi itu melewati tepi ladang, di sanalah ia berdiri. Seorang diri. Menggenggam dua bendera. Mengibarkannya dengan seluruh tenaganya, membentuk busur lebar di udara terbuka, mengeja di hadapan siang bolong apa yang tidak mau ia ucapkan dalam kegelapan:
Borechka, aku mencintaimu.
Tiga truk penuh prajurit melihatnya. Mereka mulai bersorak — hei, ada perempuan melambaikan tangan kepada kekasihnya! — Borechka menoleh, dan untuk sesaat rasanya seluruh dunia berhenti. Lalu sesuatu dalam dirinya jebol. Ia meraih dua bendera dan berdiri, mengibarkannya. Bukan berbisik. Bukan isyarat samar. Tapi mengibarkan bendera. Di hadapan semua orang.
Natasha, aku juga mencintaimu.
Ia melihatnya. Air mata mengalir di pipinya. Ia mengibarkan bendera: Aku akan menunggumu kembali.
Ia membalas: Aku berjanji, aku akan kembali.
Kira-kira di episode kedua puluh inilah adegan itu muncul. Saya telah mengikuti dua orang ini melewati semua keragu-raguan, semua keheningan, semua beban budaya yang dipanggul Borechka — beban itulah yang menghalanginya melakukan sesuatu yang sederhana dan manusiawi: mengatakan aku mencintaimu kepada seseorang yang sangat membutuhkan mendengarnya. Dan kemudian, inilah yang terjadi. Di ladang. Dengan bendera. Di hadapan penonton yang tidak pernah ia minta.
Saya menangis. Saya tidak malu mengakuinya. Saya menangis karena adegan itu indah, karena ia nyata, dan karena sesuatu di dalam diri saya mengenali apa yang sedang saya saksikan.
Lelaki yang Tak Sanggup Mengucapkannya
Lelaki Tionghoa yang bergumul untuk mengungkapkan perasaan hatinya — saya memahaminya. Budaya bisa mengubur banyak hal. Kesopanan membangun tembok yang tinggi. Saya sendiri berasal dari latar belakang budaya Tionghoa, dan saya mengenal keheningan itu. Keheningan yang diajarkan, yang meresap ke dalam tulang sebelum kamu cukup dewasa untuk mempertanyakannya. Isi hati — terutama cinta, terutama kepada seorang perempuan, terutama di depan umum — terkunci di dalam. Bukan karena perasaan itu tidak ada, melainkan karena pintunya telah tersegel oleh sesuatu yang lebih berat dari kehendak pribadi.
Lalu mengapa seorang perempuan jatuh cinta pada lelaki seperti itu? Lelaki yang tidak pernah sekali pun berkata aku mencintaimu, yang paling banyak membiarkanmu menebak dari tatapan matanya, dari kehadirannya, dari cara ia tetap tinggal?
Saya sungguh tidak tahu. Saya rasa cinta kadang bergerak pada frekuensi yang sama sekali melewati nalar. Natasha melihat sesuatu dalam diri Borechka yang tidak bisa disembunyikan oleh keheningan. Ia lebih percaya pada apa yang ia rasakan daripada tergoda oleh kekecewaan atas apa yang tidak mau ia katakan. Dan kemudian ia pergi ke ladang, mengangkat dua bendera, dan mengucapkan kata-kata itu pertama kali.
Saya ingin berlama-lama di sini sejenak. Bukan pada keheningannya. Tapi pada keberaniannya.
Ia tidak menunggu Borechka menjadi berani. Ia terlebih dahulu menjadi berani, membuka ruang agar ia bisa mengikuti. Ia mengambil risiko dipermalukan — mengibarkan hatinya di sebuah ladang kepada lelaki yang malam sebelumnya baru saja menolak bertemu dengannya dalam kegelapan — dan justru risiko itulah yang membebaskan Borechka. Ia meraih dua bendera dan berdiri di hadapan seluruh prajurit dalam konvoi itu, lalu mengucapkannya.
Begitulah cinta. Ia tidak hanya merasakan. Ia bertindak. Dan ketika ia bertindak secara terbuka, ketika ia menancapkan bendera di tanah lapang dan berkata: inilah yang aku percaya — ia mengundang orang lain masuk ke dalam keberanian mereka sendiri.
Saya terus memikirkan ladang itu. Saya terus memikirkan apa yang harus dibayar Natasha untuk berdiri di sana.
Apa yang Sebenarnya Dirindukan Generasi Z
Ada sesuatu yang terus saya perhatikan di Union Square pada pagi-pagi ketika saya berdiri di sana.
Anak-anak muda berlalu lalang — kebanyakan Generasi Z, usia dua puluhan, sebagian lebih muda — dan jika kamu menatap wajah mereka cukup lama, kamu akan menembus ponsel, earphone, dan ketidakpedulian yang mereka bangun dengan hati-hati. Yang kamu lihat di baliknya adalah sesuatu yang jauh lebih tua dan lebih mendesak dari sekadar label generasi.
Mereka sedang mencari seseorang yang mencintai mereka.
Tidak harus dalam arti romantis, atau tidak hanya itu. Tapi secara mendalam. Tanpa syarat. Tanpa cetakan kecil di bawah kontrak. Mereka ingin menjadi bagian dari sesuatu yang tidak akan melepaskan mereka pada akhirnya. Mereka ingin dikenal, bukan dibuang. Ini juga berlaku bagi kaum Milenial. Pada intinya, ini berlaku bagi setiap generasi — kerinduan akan cinta, identitas, dan rasa memiliki mengalir menembus semua orang. Namun zaman ini terasa lebih telanjang, lebih terbuka. Perancah budaya yang dulu menjaga kerinduan-kerinduan ini pada jarak yang aman telah runtuh. Yang tersisa adalah kerinduannya sendiri, berkedip-kedip di ruang terbuka, besar dan tak terjawab.
Kerinduan horizontal ini — yang oleh orang Yunani disebut phileo, cinta antar sesama manusia — adalah nyata dan penting. Komunitas, persahabatan, diakui keberadaannya: hal-hal ini tidak sepele. Tuhan menenun kebutuhan-kebutuhan ini ke dalam diri kita.
Namun saya ingin pergi lebih dalam. Karena di inti terdalam dari kerinduan manusia — di bawah hasrat untuk memiliki, di bawah rasa lapar akan keintiman, bahkan di bawah kebutuhan untuk mencintai dan dicintai — ada sesuatu yang tidak bisa dipenuhi oleh cinta manusia, seindah apa pun itu.
Ada sebuah bentuk dalam diri kita, dan bentuk itu persis berbentuk Tuhan.
Allah yang Menyatakan Cinta-Nya di Depan Umum
Ada satu hal tentang kekristenan yang terus saya kembali lagi dan lagi:
Injil bukan transaksi yang dilakukan dalam kerahasiaan.
Allah tidak menyelipkan catatan kecil dari bawah pintu. Ia tidak membisikkan sesuatu dalam kegelapan lalu mundur di pagi hari. Ia tampil ke depan umum. Ia tampil begitu terang-terangan sehingga dua ribu tahun kemudian kita masih membicarakannya, masih menuliskannya, masih berusaha memahami besarnya pernyataan itu.
Karena begitu besar kasih Allah akan dunia ini.
Salib adalah bendera di ladang. Ia adalah pernyataan publik paling telanjang, paling merendahkan diri, dan paling mahal harganya dalam seluruh sejarah manusia. Allah berdiri di hadapan setiap konvoi yang pernah melintas, dengan kedua tangan terentang — bukan mengibarkan bendera, tapi dipaku di sana, yang jauh lebih ekstrem dari mengibarkan bendera, yang merupakan isyarat cinta paling ekstrem yang pernah disaksikan alam semesta ini. Ada seorang pengkhotbah yang pernah berkata bahwa gambaran Kristus di kayu salib, dengan tangan terentang lebar, mengalirkan darah, adalah pernyataan visual paling kuat yang pernah ada. Tangan terbuka seolah berkata: sebesar inilah. Sejauh ini. Selebar ini. Semahal ini.
Aku mencintaimu.
Bukan kepada suatu kategori. Bukan kepada umat manusia secara abstrak. Tapi kepadamu. Kepada anak muda Generasi Z yang menggulir layar ponsel di tengah malam, tidak tahu apakah ada yang melihatnya. Kepada orang yang pernah diberitahu bahwa ia tidak layak berada di sini. Kepada orang yang memainkan peran memiliki begitu sempurna sehingga tidak ada yang tahu ia sedang mati di dalam. Kepada kaum Milenial yang berjuang dalam kelelahan, tidak yakin apa yang sedang ia bangun atau apakah itu berarti. Kepada setiap hati yang pernah merindukan dicintai seperti cara Natasha merindukan dicintai — sepenuhnya, terbuka, tanpa syarat.
Cinta itu tidak bergantung pada kemampuan kita untuk menerimanya. Allah menyatakannya sebelum kita tahu bahwa kita membutuhkannya. Salib itu sudah tertancap di tanah sebelum salah satu dari kita tiba.
Lebar, Panjang, Tinggi, dan Dalamnya Kasih Itu
Paulus berdoa dalam Efesus untuk sesuatu yang hampir mustahil — agar kita dapat memahami lebar, panjang, tinggi, dan dalamnya kasih Kristus. Ia tidak berdoa agar kita memahami doktrin. Ia berdoa untuk kapasitas yang adikodrati, karena apa yang Allah rasakan kepada kita melampaui bandwidth alami hati manusia. Kamu membutuhkan roh hikmat dan wahyu bahkan hanya untuk mulai menerimanya. Sebesar itulah kasih-Nya.
Saya membaca doa itu dan merasakan sesuatu di dalam diri saya berdenyut perih. Karena sebagian besar hari-hari saya, saya hidup seolah kasih Allah adalah kategori teologis, bukan kekuatan yang hidup. Saya mengetahuinya seperti saya mengetahui titik didih air — akurat, berguna, namun dengan jarak tertentu.
Tapi Natasha tidak hanya tahu bahwa Borechka mencintainya. Ia ditawan oleh cinta itu. Ditawan begitu dalam sehingga ia meraih dua bendera dan berlari menuju ladang.
Ketika saya muda dan jatuh cinta pada perempuan yang kemudian menjadi istri saya, setiap akhir pekan saya berkendara dua jam untuk menemuinya. Dua jam pergi, dengan bunga mawar, dua jam pulang. Saya tidak merasakan itu sebagai beban. Saya hampir tidak memperhatikan perjalanannya. Cinta mengkalibrasi ulang biaya dari segala sesuatu. Apa yang dari luar tampak seperti pengorbanan, dari dalam terasa seperti keharusan yang sudah jelas.
Tentu saja saya berkendara empat jam. Saya mencintainya.
Begitulah tampaknya salib dari dalam kasih Allah. Bukan pengorbanan yang terpaksa. Bukan kewajiban ilahi yang dilakukan dengan gigi terkatup. Tentu saja Aku pergi. Aku mencintaimu.
Agustinus pernah berkata: Engkau telah menciptakan kami untuk diri-Mu sendiri, ya Tuhan, dan hati kami gelisah sampai ia beristirahat di dalam-Mu. Ia tidak berkata teologi kami gelisah. Ia berkata hati kami. Karena kerinduan yang mendorong kita menuju Allah bukan masalah intelektual yang perlu dipecahkan. Ini adalah kisah cinta yang sudah kita ada di tengah-tengahnya, mau kita sadari atau tidak.
Sang Kekasih dan Yang Dikasihi
Ada sebuah kitab dalam Alkitab yang selalu membuat para pembaca yang berhati-hati merasa tidak nyaman. Kidung Agung — puisi cinta kuno yang penuh dengan wewangian, kerinduan, tubuh, dan hasrat — duduk di tengah-tengah kitab suci Ibrani seperti bara api yang menyala. Kerinduan perempuan itu kepada kekasihnya hampir tidak tertahankan untuk dibaca. Ia mencarinya di malam hari, mengulurkan tangan namun tidak menemukan. Ia mencarinya di seluruh kota. Ia tersiksa ketika ia tidak ada, dan dipulihkan ketika ia hadir.
Dari Origenes hingga Bernardus dari Clairvaux, para penafsir Kristen membaca itu dan berkata: inilah kita. Inilah kerinduan setiap jiwa manusia kepada Dia yang menciptakannya, Dia yang untuknya ia diciptakan. Sang pria sebagai kekasih adalah Allah. Sang perempuan sebagai yang dikasihi adalah gereja. Lihatlah seberapa jauh Allah telah melangkah dalam mengungkapkan kasih sayang-Nya secara terbuka. Ia tidak hanya menulis teologi tentang cinta. Ia menulis sebuah puisi tentang kerinduan.
Alkitab berkata Kristus adalah mempelai pria, dan gereja adalah mempelai wanita. Kita sedang menantikan kedatangan-Nya kembali. Perumpamaan tentang sepuluh gadis berbicara tepat tentang hal ini — komunitas mempelai wanita yang berjaga, menunggu, menjaga pelita mereka tetap menyala untuk Dia yang akan datang.
Natasha menunggu Borechka dalam keheningan selama bertahun-tahun. Berpuluh-puluh tahun. Tanpa tahu apakah ia telah mati, dipenjara, atau sekadar pergi begitu saja. Dalam sebuah tulisan sebelumnya saya menulis tentang kekejaman khusus dari keheningan itu — tidak tahu, dalam arti tertentu, lebih berat dari kehilangan, karena duka cita tanpa objek yang jelas tidak punya tempat untuk jatuh. Ia bertahan, bukan karena ada bukti, melainkan karena ia percaya pada cinta itu. Cinta yang pernah ia saksikan sendiri, rasakan dalam hatinya, terima dalam kibar bendera-bendera di ladang itu.
Ia mempercayai pernyataan itu.
Saya memikirkan orang-orang percaya yang menggigit bibir melewati keheningan — doa-doa yang seolah membentur langit-langit, menunggu sesuatu yang akhirnya pecah, sudah bertahun-tahun menunggu. Dan saya ingin berkata: kamu tidak gila karena tetap bertahan. Kamu adalah Natasha di tahun-tahun yang tidak kamu ketahui. Dan lelaki di dalam truk itu telah mengibarkan benderanya. Ia mengibarkannya dengan cara yang paling tidak bisa dibantah. Ia berjanji bahwa ia akan kembali.
Ia akan kembali.
Tapi lebih dari itu: ia mencintaimu sekarang. Dalam keheningan. Dalam penantian. Dalam tahun-tahun ketika kamu tidak merasakannya secara nyata. Kasih-Nya bukan cinta manusia yang naik turun mengikuti suasana hati dan keadaan. Ia lebih tinggi dari itu, lebih ajaib dari itu, lebih dapat diandalkan dari apapun yang pernah kamu rasakan dari siapapun.
Apa yang Terjadi Ketika Kasih Itu Benar-Benar Turun
Saya menemukan satu hal yang benar: ketika kamu benar-benar berjumpa dengan kasih Kristus — bukan hanya mendengar tentangnya, tapi sungguh-sungguh berjumpa — kamu tidak bisa lagi duduk diam.
Sesuatu jebol. Sama seperti sesuatu dalam diri Borechka jebol ketika ia melihat Natasha mengibarkan benderanya di ladang itu. Semua keheningan budaya, semua pengendalian diri, semua manajemen hati-hati atas keterbukaan diri — semuanya tidak bisa bertahan di hadapan apa yang ia saksikan. Ia meraih dua bendera dan berdiri di hadapan seluruh prajurit dalam konvoi itu, lalu mengatakannya.
Begitulah kasih Kristus ketika ia benar-benar turun menimpamu. Ia membuatmu gelisah. Bukan gelisah dalam arti cemas, tapi gelisah seperti Natasha — dipenuhi oleh sesuatu yang tidak bisa kamu simpan sendiri. Ia membuatmu ingin keluar dan memberitahu orang. Bukan sebagai kewajiban yang dilakukan tanpa keyakinan, bukan sebagai bahasa yang terlepas dari pengalaman, tapi sebagai seseorang yang telah ditemukan oleh sesuatu yang nyata dan tidak bisa lagi berdiam diri.
Paulus tidak hanya berdoa agar jemaat di Efesus memiliki doktrin yang baik tentang kasih. Ia berdoa agar mereka dipenuhi — dibanjiri — dengan roh hikmat dan wahyu, sehingga mereka dapat mengenal. Mengenal seperti Natasha mengenalnya di ladang itu. Mengenal seperti saya mengenalnya ketika berkendara empat jam dengan bunga mawar. Mengenal dengan seluruh tubuh, dengan dada, dengan bagian-bagian diri yang melampaui perdebatan.
Pengenalan seperti itulah yang mengubah orang. Kita tidak butuh lebih banyak akomodasi budaya, tidak butuh lebih banyak pertunjukan agama, tidak butuh keakraban yang dangkal dengan Allah. Kita butuh kasih-Nya menghantam kita seperti ledakan — menyerbu masuk — lebar dan tinggi dan dalamnya menembus kulit keras kehidupan sehari-hari kita dan mendarat di suatu tempat yang nyata.
Karena cinta seperti itulah yang mengatasi segala rintangan. Rintangan budaya. Rintangan rohani. Keheningan bertahun-tahun. Ketakutan akan keterbukaan publik. Beratnya ketidaktahuan. Ia mengatasi semuanya bagi Natasha. Ia mengatasi semuanya di atas salib.
Mari, Berdirilah di Ladang Itu
Di Union Square Park, saya berdiri di hadapan orang-orang asing dan berbicara tentang Yesus. Kadang-kadang saya memikirkan seperti apa itu dari luar — seorang pria berdiri di taman dengan Alkitab, yang mungkin adalah hal paling tidak modis yang bisa dilakukan di lower Manhattan pada tahun 2025. Saya merasakan sesuatu yang pasti juga dirasakan Natasha di ladang itu. Rasa terpapar. Risiko terlihat konyol.
Tapi ia tetap mengangkat benderanya.
Karena alternatifnya — tetap tinggal di kamarnya, menjaga harga dirinya, membiarkan konvoi berlalu tanpa sepatah kata — tidak bisa ia tanggung. Ia terlalu mencintainya untuk bermain aman.
Saya terlalu mencintai-Nya untuk bermain aman.
Maka saya berdiri di taman itu. Dan saya mengibarkan bendera.
Ia mencintaimu. Saya telah menyaksikan pernyataan itu. Ia bersifat publik, permanen, dan tidak pernah dicabut. Ia dibuat di atas sebuah salib dengan tangan yang dipakukan, dan telah bergema selama dua ribu tahun sejarah manusia, menyentuh kerinduan terdalam setiap generasi, menjawab seruan di balik seruan. Anak muda Generasi Z yang menggulir layar di tengah malam, merindukan akhirnya ada seseorang yang melihatnya — Ia melihatmu. Kaum Milenial yang menanggung kelelahan bagaikan kulit kedua, bertanya-tanya apakah semua ini bermakna — ini bermakna segalanya. Setiap orang yang pernah merindukan untuk dicintai seperti cara Natasha merindukan dicintai — sepenuhnya, terbuka, tanpa syarat:
Kamulah yang dikasihi. Ia adalah mempelai pria. Pernyataan itu telah dibuat.
Saya sedang memulai sebuah komunitas di Union Square Park yang bernama Hearts Burn NYC. Kami berkumpul di ruang terbuka — Generasi Z, Milenial, mereka yang telah meninggalkan iman dan mereka yang belum pernah menyentuhnya, orang-orang yang kesepian, orang-orang yang sedang mencari, orang-orang yang belum menemukan kata-kata untuk apa yang mereka cari. Kami berdiri di ladang yang sama, di mana seandainya ini adalah cerita itu, bendera-bendera itu akan dikibarkan di sini.
Saya percaya kita sedang ada di dalam cerita itu.
Saya percaya Allah masih berdiri di ladang itu, dengan tangan terentang lebar, mengeja pesan yang sama yang Ia eja di atas salib.
Aku mencintaimu. Aku akan kembali. Tunggulah Aku.
Mari, berdirilah di ladang itu bersama kami.
Masih banyak yang akan datang. Saya belum berhenti mengibarkan bendera.
— Pendeta Al Ngu
Hearts Burn NYC | Union Square Park | heartsburnnyc.com
On Natasha, public love, and what God has been waving at us all along.
Screenshot
Al Ngu
The truck was already moving.
Borechka stood in the back with the other soldiers, headed toward the front lines, carrying whatever a young man carries when he knows the next weeks could be his last. The night before had ended badly. Natasha had come to him in the dark, afraid and wanting closeness, and he had pulled away. Not because he didn’t love her — she knew he did. He just couldn’t say it. Couldn’t cross whatever line lived inside him between feeling and declaring.
So she had gone back to her room. She told him she wouldn’t see him off.
She lied.
Because when the convoy rolled past the edge of the field, there she was. Standing alone. Holding two flags. Waving them in wide arcs with everything she had, spelling out in the open air what he had refused to say in the dark of a quiet room:
I love you, Borechka.
Three trucks full of soldiers saw it. They started hollering — hey, someone’s got a girl — and Borechka looked, and for a moment I think the whole world stopped. Then something broke open in him. He grabbed two flags of his own and started waving back. Not whispering. Not hinting. Waving. In front of everyone.
Natasha. I love you too.
She saw it. Her tears came down. She waved: I will wait for you.
He waved back: I promise I will return.
I was somewhere around episode twenty when this happened. I had followed these two people through all their hesitations, all their silences, all the cultural weight Borechka carried that kept him from doing the simple human thing of saying I love you to someone who needed to hear it. And then this. In a field. With flags. In front of an audience he never asked for.
I wept. I’m not ashamed to say it. I wept because it was beautiful, and because it was true, and because something in me recognized what I was watching.
The Man Who Couldn’t Say It
The Chinese man struggling to say what he felt — I understand that. Culture buries things. Propriety builds walls. Coming from a Chinese background myself, I recognize it. There is a silence that is taught, absorbed into the bones before you are old enough to question it. Expression of the heart, especially love, especially to a woman, especially in public — it stays locked inside. Not because the feeling isn’t there. Because the door has been sealed by something heavier than individual will.
So why would a woman fall for a man like that? A man who never once said I love you, who showed signs of affection — you could gather enough from his eyes, his presence, the way he stayed — but who would not cross the line into declaration?
I genuinely don’t know. I think love sometimes moves on a frequency that bypasses the rational mind entirely. Natasha saw something in Borechka that the silence couldn’t hide. She believed in what she felt more than she was discouraged by what he wouldn’t say. And then she went to a field with two flags and said it first.
That is what I want to stay with for a moment. Not his silence. Her courage.
She didn’t wait for him to become brave. She became brave herself and made space for him to follow. She took the risk of humiliation — of waving her heart across a field at a man who had already refused to meet her in the dark — and somehow that risk unlocked him. He grabbed two flags and stood up in front of every soldier in that convoy and he said it.
Love does that. It doesn’t just feel. It acts. And when it acts publicly, when it plants a flag in open ground and says this is what I believe, it invites others into their own courage.
I keep thinking about that field. I keep thinking about what it cost her to stand there.
What Gen Z Is Actually Crying Out For
There is something I keep noticing in Union Square on the mornings I stand there with my Bible.
The young people pass — Gen Z, mostly, twenties, some younger — and if you watch their faces long enough you stop seeing the phones and the headphones and the carefully constructed indifference. What you see underneath is something older and more urgent than any generational label.
They are looking for someone to love them.
Not romantically, necessarily. Or not only. But deeply. Unconditionally. Without the fine print. They want to belong somewhere that won’t eventually let them go. They want to be known and not discarded. This is true of Millennials too. It is true, at the core, of every generation that has ever lived — the longing for love and identity and belonging runs through all of us. But something about this moment feels more exposed, more raw. The cultural scaffolding that used to hold these longings at a manageable distance has come down. What’s left is the need itself, blinking in the open, enormous and unanswered.
This horizontal longing — what the Greeks called phileo, the love between persons — is real and it matters. Community, friendship, being seen: these things are not trivial. God wired us for them.
But I want to go deeper than the horizontal. Because at the very core of human longing — beneath the desire for belonging, beneath the hunger for intimacy, beneath even the need to love and be loved by another person — there is something that human love, however beautiful, cannot finally satisfy.
There is a shape of longing in us that is the exact shape of God.
The Love That Goes Public
Here is the thing about Christianity that I find myself returning to again and again:
The gospel is not a private transaction.
God did not slip a note under the door. He did not whisper something in the dark and then pull back in the morning. He went public. He went so public that two thousand years later we are still talking about it, still writing about it, still trying to comprehend the scale of the declaration.
For God so loved the world.
The cross is a flag in a field. It is the most exposed, most humiliating, most costly public declaration in all of human history. It is God standing in front of every soldier in every convoy that has ever passed, with both arms stretched wide — not waving flags, but nailed there, which is more extreme than flags, which is the most extreme gesture of love this universe has ever witnessed. Somebody preached once that the image of Christ on the cross, arms spread wide, bleeding, is the most potent visual declaration that has ever existed. Arms open as if to say: this is how much. This far. This wide. This costly.
I love you.
Not to a category. Not to humanity in the abstract. To you. To the Gen Z kid scrolling at midnight who doesn’t know if anyone sees them. To the one who has been told they don’t belong. To the one who is performing belonging so well that no one knows they’re dying inside. To the Millennial grinding through exhaustion, not sure what they’re building toward or whether it matters. To every human heart that has ever wanted to be loved the way Natasha wanted to be loved — fully, publicly, without reservation.
That love was declared before any of us arrived. The cross was planted in the ground before you knew you needed it.
The Width and Height and Depth
Paul prays in Ephesians for something that sounds almost impossible — that we would be able to comprehend the width and length and height and depth of the love of Christ. He doesn’t pray that we would understand the doctrine. He prays for supernatural capacity, because what God feels toward us exceeds the natural bandwidth of a human heart. You need the Spirit of wisdom and revelation even to begin to register it. It is that large.
I read that prayer and I feel something in me ache. Because most days I live as though the love of God is a theological category rather than a living force. I know it the way I know the boiling point of water — accurately, usefully, and at a certain remove.
But Natasha didn’t just know Borechka loved her. She was captivated by it. So captivated that she grabbed two flags and ran to a field.
When I was young and falling in love with the woman who became my wife, I drove two hours each way to see her on weekends. Two hours there. Roses. Two hours back. I did not experience this as a burden. I barely noticed it. Love recalibrates the cost of everything. What looks like sacrifice from the outside looks like obvious necessity from the inside.
Of course I drove four hours. I love her.
That is what the cross looks like from inside the love of God. Not reluctant sacrifice. Not divine duty performed with gritted teeth. Of course I went. I love you.
Augustine said it: our heart is restless until it rests in you. He didn’t say our theology is restless. He said our heart. Because the longing that drives us toward God is not an intellectual problem to solve. It is a love story we are already in the middle of, whether we know it or not.
The Lover and the Beloved
There is a book in the Bible that has always made cautious readers nervous. Song of Solomon — this ancient love poem full of perfume and longing and bodies and desire — sits in the middle of the Hebrew scriptures like a burning coal. The beloved longs for her lover with a hunger that is almost unbearable to read. She wakes up in the night reaching for him. She searches the city for him. She is undone by his absence and restored by his presence.
Christian interpreters from Origen to Bernard of Clairvaux read that and said: this is us. This is the longing of every human soul for the one who made it, the one it was made for. The man as lover is God. The beloved, the woman, is the church. You see how far God has gone in the public expression of his affection. He didn’t just write a theology of love. He wrote a poem about longing.
The Bible says Christ is the bridegroom and the church is the bride. We are waiting for his return. The parable of the ten virgins is about exactly this — the bride community watching, waiting, keeping their lamps lit for the one who is coming back.
Natasha waited for Borechka in silence for years. Decades. Not knowing if he was dead or imprisoned or simply gone. I wrote in an earlier essay about the particular cruelty of that silence — how not knowing is in some ways harder than loss, because grief without a clear object has nowhere to land. She hung on not because she had evidence but because she believed in the love. The love she had seen with her own eyes, felt in her own chest, received in those waving flags in that open field.
She trusted the declaration.
I think about the Christians I know who are white-knuckling their faith through silence — through prayers that seem to hit the ceiling, through years of waiting for something to break. And I want to say: you are not crazy for hanging on. You are Natasha in the years of not knowing. And the man in the truck waved. He waved in the most unmistakable way possible. He promised he would return.
He will return.
But more than that: he loves you now. In the silence. In the waiting. In the years when you don’t feel it tangibly. His love is not a human love that fluctuates with mood and circumstance. It is higher than that, stranger than that, more reliable than anything you have felt from another person.
What Happens When Love Actually Lands
Here is what I have found to be true: when you actually encounter the love of Christ — not just hear about it but encounter it — you cannot sit still anymore.
Something breaks open. The same way something broke open in Borechka when he saw Natasha in that field waving her flags. All the cultural silence, the restraint, the careful management of exposure — it couldn’t hold against what he saw. He grabbed two flags and stood up in front of every soldier in that convoy and he said it.
That is what the love of Christ does when it actually lands on you. It makes you restless. Not restless in the anxious way, but restless in the Natasha way — restless with something you cannot keep to yourself. It makes you want to go out and tell people. Not as a duty performed without conviction, not as language detached from experience, but as someone who has been found by something real and cannot keep quiet about it.
Paul didn’t pray merely that the Ephesians would have good doctrine about love. He prayed that they would be filled — flooded — with the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that they could know. Know it the way Natasha knew it in that field. Know it the way I knew it driving four hours with roses. Know it in the body, in the chest, in the parts of you that are beyond argument.
That knowing transforms. We need not more cultural accommodation or religious performance or superficial familiarity with God. We need an explosion of his love hitting us — invading us — the width and height and depth of it breaking through the crust of our routine and landing somewhere real.
Because love like that overcomes every barrier. Cultural barriers. Spiritual barriers. The silence of years. The fear of public exposure. The weight of not knowing. It overcame all of it for Natasha. It overcame all of it on the cross.
Come and Stand in the Field
In Union Square Park, I stand in front of strangers and I talk about Jesus. I think sometimes about what that looks like from the outside — a man in a park with a Bible, which is maybe the least fashionable thing possible in lower Manhattan. And I feel something of what Natasha must have felt in that field. The exposure of it. The risk of looking ridiculous.
But she grabbed the flags anyway.
Because the alternative — staying in her room, preserving her dignity, letting the trucks roll past without a word — was unbearable. She loved him too much to play it safe.
I love him too much to play it safe.
And so I stand in the park. And I wave.
He loves you. I have seen the declaration. It is public and permanent and it has not been revoked. It was made on a cross with nailed hands and it has been echoing across two thousand years of human history, reaching into every generation’s longing, answering the cry underneath the cry. The Gen Z young person scrolling at midnight, looking for someone to finally see them — he sees them. The Millennial carrying exhaustion like a second skin, wondering if any of this means anything — it means everything. The person from any generation who has ever wanted to be loved the way Natasha wanted to be loved: fully, publicly, without reservation.
You are the beloved. He is the bridegroom. The declaration has already been made.
I’m starting a community in Union Square Park called Hearts Burn NYC. We gather in the open — Gen Z, Millennials, people who have walked away from faith and people who have never touched it, people who are lonely, people who are searching, people who don’t yet have language for what they’re looking for. We stand in the same kind of field where the flags would have been waving if this were that story.
I believe we are in that story.
I believe God is still in the field, arms wide, spelling out the same message he spelled out on the cross.
I love you. I will return. Wait for me.
Come and stand in the field with us.
More is coming. I’m not done waving.
— Al Ngu
Hearts Burn NYC | Union Square Park | heartsburnnyc.com
What 2 Corinthians 3 Actually Says About Freedom, Hardened Hearts, and the Crisis of Our Generation
Al Ngu
Part One of Three
I. A Sermon That Troubled Me
Once I sat under a sermon drawn from 2 Corinthians 3:17 — “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” — connected to Galatians 5:1: “For freedom Christ has set us free.” The preacher was earnest. The congregation was moved. And the message ranged across a familiar landscape of contemporary concerns: freedom from depression, from loneliness, from anxiety, from the gravitational pull of self-destructive habits. Real struggles. Real pain. And a real text.
But something did not sit right with me, and it took some time to name what it was. The sermon was not wrong to speak of freedom. The text does speak of freedom. But it had imported a meaning of freedom that the passage itself does not supply — and in doing so, it had bypassed the specific and more searching freedom that Paul actually has in mind. The freedom in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is not, in its first and controlling sense, freedom from depression or loneliness. It is freedom from something far more foundational, far more spiritually catastrophic, and far more precisely addressed by the new covenant: freedom from a hardened heart.
To miss this is not a minor exegetical slip. It changes the entire trajectory of what the gospel is being asked to do. A gospel that offers relief from circumstantial suffering without addressing the hardened heart that underlies it is a gospel that cannot sustain what it promises. It gives people something to feel without giving them something to become. And that, I will argue, is not the freedom the Spirit of God brings.
My burden in this article is pastoral and urgent. I am thinking specifically of people I know and love — young people and older ones alike — who once confessed Christ and now have walked away. Some have drifted quietly. Others have reconstructed a faith on their own terms, keeping a version of Jesus that never costs them anything. Others have deconstructed publicly and openly. I want to understand what is happening to them theologically. What does Scripture call this? Where does it come from? And is there any genuine hope for the heart that has gone to stone?
The answer begins in 2 Corinthians 3. And it is more searching, more specific, and more hopeful than most sermons on this text have led us to believe.
II. What the Passage Actually Says: The Veil and the Hardened Heart
Paul’s argument in 2 Corinthians 3 begins with Moses descending from Sinai with the glory of God radiating from his face — a glory so intense that Israel could not bear to look at him, and he was compelled to veil his face (Exodus 34:29–35). Paul’s interpretive move is audacious: he takes this familiar story and reinterprets the veil not merely as a physical covering over Moses’ face, but as a symbol of something that persists into his own present day.
“But their minds were hardened,” he writes in verse 14, “for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted.” And then, more devastatingly: “Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts” (verse 15). The veil, in Paul’s rereading, is not over Moses’ face. It is over the heart of the reader.
And what does this veil produce? He names it in verse 14: hardness. The Greek word is pōrō — to petrify, to turn to stone, to make callous. The law of Moses, read without Christ and without the Spirit of the new covenant, does not soften the heart toward God. It petrifies it. Not because the law is defective — Paul insists elsewhere that the law is holy and righteous and good (Romans 7:12). But because the law comes to a faculty that is broken. It commands what the unrenewed heart cannot do, and the result is not reformation but calcification. The heart that cannot obey grows harder in its inability. The veil thickens.
This is the specific bondage that verse 17 addresses. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Freedom from what? Freedom from this. Freedom from the veil over the heart. Freedom from the petrified, stone-cold, unresponsive inner life that hears the Word of God and remains unmoved — not because it lacks information, but because the very faculty of reception has been shut down. This is the deepest slavery a human being can experience — not the slavery of circumstance, but the slavery of a will turned to stone. And it is from this slavery, specifically and precisely, that the Spirit of the new covenant sets us free.
The old covenant could diagnose this condition. It could not cure it. But the prophets had already heard God announce that he intended something more. Jeremiah heard it: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel heard it in even more visceral terms: “I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:26–27). The promise is not merely forensic. It is surgical. God reaches into the chest and replaces the stone with something that can beat, feel, and respond.
And in Luke 4:18, Jesus stands in the synagogue at Nazareth and announces that this promise has arrived in him: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim liberty to the captives.” The liberty he proclaims is precisely this liberty — not first the liberation of the prisoner from his cell, but the liberation of the captive heart from its own petrification. This is what the new covenant brings. This is what the cross purchased. And this is why freedom in 2 Corinthians 3:17 is such a weighty and specific word.
III. What Hardness Looks Like in Our Generation
The hardening of the heart is not a first-century Jewish problem. It is a perennial human condition, and it takes recognizable forms in every generation. In ours, it presents most acutely in three overlapping patterns.
The first is simple drift. A person who once read Scripture regularly, prayed with some intentionality, and gathered with the body of Christ begins to withdraw — slowly, almost imperceptibly. Nothing dramatic has happened. The Bible is read less frequently. Prayer becomes occasional and then absent. Worship becomes something attended rather than something inhabited. The heart has simply been starved of the beholding that keeps it soft, and it has begun, by degrees, to harden. This is the quiet pastoral emergency that rarely makes headlines but accounts for the majority of spiritual casualties in any congregation.
The second is the backsliding pattern — a moral failure or a season of deliberate sin that, rather than driving a person to repentance, drives them to theological reconstruction. Because the heart cannot simultaneously pursue sin and submit to the God who forbids it, it begins to quietly renegotiate its theology. Passages that were once received as authoritative begin to feel culturally conditioned or misinterpreted. The Jesus who commands becomes the Jesus who affirms. The cross that demands death to self becomes a symbol of self-actualization. This is not intellectual honesty. It is the hardened heart generating the theology that the hardened heart requires.
Paul had a name for all three patterns. He called it the veil remaining over the heart. The person may be reading the text — perhaps reading it seriously and at great length — but the veil is there. The glory of Christ in the Word does not penetrate. The text is processed but not received. The words are analyzed but not inhabited. And the result, in every case, is a heart that grows progressively harder toward the actual Christ of the actual Scripture.
This is one of the most urgent fronts of spiritual warfare in our age. Not because the attacks are new, but because the cultural conditions have made them uniquely pervasive and unusually difficult to name. When the hardening presents as enlightenment, when petrification wears the face of intellectual maturity, it is very hard to call it what it is. But we must.
IV. The Mechanism of Transformation: Beholding the Glory of Christ
How does the Spirit soften what has been hardened? This is the question the passage moves toward answering. And Paul answers it in the verse immediately following his declaration of freedom — 2 Corinthians 3:18:
“And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.”
This verse contains the mechanism. Let us work through it carefully.
The key verb is katoptrizomenoi — beholding as in a mirror. It is a rare word, appearing nowhere else in the New Testament, derived from the Greek word for mirror. It carries a double sense: gazing into a reflective surface and, in that gazing, reflecting back what you see. The ESV renders it “beholding”; the NIV renders it “contemplating.” Both are right, and the tension between them is theologically productive: the believer gazes upon the glory of Christ, and in gazing, begins to mirror it. Beholding comes first. Reflecting follows as its necessary consequence.
The verb is in the present tense — indicating continuous, ongoing action. Transformation is not the result of a single powerful encounter, one mountaintop experience, one revival night. It is the cumulative fruit of sustained, habitual, returning attention to the glory of Christ. You become what you consistently behold.
The word translated “are being transformed” is metamorphoumetha — from the same root as our English word metamorphosis, and the same word used for Jesus’ Transfiguration on the mountain in Matthew 17:2. Paul is not describing a gradual self-improvement program. He is describing a structural remaking of the person, as radical as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. And it is a passive verb. You are not transforming yourself. You are being transformed — by the Spirit, acting upon you, using the beholding as the instrument through which he does his work. The believer contributes the gaze. The Spirit produces the change.
The phrase “from glory to glory” — apo doxes eis doxan — signals progressive, cumulative, unceasing growth. A Semitic expression of intensification, comparable to Psalm 84:7’s “from strength to strength.” And crucially: unlike Moses’ glory, which faded because it was external and borrowed, the glory the Spirit produces in the new covenant believer increases. Its source is not a temporary encounter but the permanent indwelling of the Spirit of Christ himself.
What does beholding actually look like in practice? Paul himself answers this in the next chapter: the glory of God is seen “in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6), mediated through the gospel — which is the Scripture. Jesus is the Word made flesh (John 1:14). When you gaze into the written Word, you are gazing into the incarnate Word. They are not two different objects. Scripture is the Spirit-given lens through which the risen Christ becomes visible to the unveiled heart.
And so the three great instruments of beholding are these. First, the daily meditation of the Holy Scripture — not the casual reading of a verse for emotional reassurance, but the sustained, submissive, returning immersion in the whole counsel of God. Psalm 1 describes the blessed man as one who meditates on the law day and night, and the Hebrew word for meditate is hagah — to mutter, to murmur, to turn a thing over repeatedly in the mind the way a cow works its cud. The text is not consumed and moved past. It is inhabited. And in that inhabiting, the glory of Christ embedded in every page begins to do its work upon the heart.
Second, prayer — which is not merely the recitation of requests but an increasingly intimate conversation with the living person of Christ. If Scripture is gazing at Christ, prayer is speaking to him. The beholding becomes a relationship. And in that sustained relational encounter, the Spirit works the same transforming alchemy: you become, gradually and sometimes imperceptibly, more like the one you spend the most time with.
Third, worship — private and communal. In worship, the beholding becomes embodied and affective. The heart does not merely observe the glory of Christ; it responds to it, is moved by it, is broken open by it. The “we all” of verse 18 is a plural. Transformation is not merely an individual project. The community of worshippers, gathered around Word and sacrament and prayer, creates conditions in which the Spirit can ignite in a congregation what may be only a flicker in an individual.
And here is the upgrade the new covenant brings over everything that came before: under the old covenant, these same practices — reading the law, prayer, worship — could be performed with a veil over the heart. The Israelites sang the Psalms and heard the Torah and offered the sacrifices, and still the hardness persisted. The glory was there, embedded in the text, but inaccessible — like sunlight behind a thick curtain. Under the new covenant, the Spirit has removed the curtain. The same Scripture now radiates with Christ. The same prayer now reaches the Father through the Son. The same worship is offered in Spirit and in truth. Same practices. Entirely different encounter.
V. Why So Many Are Still Not Free
If the veil has been removed permanently — if the Spirit now dwells within every believer, making the glory of Christ accessible through Scripture, prayer, and worship — why does the church still contain so many people whose hearts appear functionally hard? Why does deconstruction continue? Why does backsliding persist?
The answer is not that the new covenant has failed. The answer is that the removal of the veil is not the same as the sustained direction of the gaze. The door has been opened. But many believers are standing with their backs to it.
Regeneration gives the heart a new capacity to behold. But the flesh, the old nature, remains and wars against the Spirit (Galatians 5:17) — and it does not war alone. What we call distraction is rarely a neutral phenomenon. It is the surface symptom of something more sinister operating beneath it: the active, coordinated work of the enemy whose primary weapon, Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 4:4, is deception. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers — and his strategy against believers is the same, only subtler. He does not need to re-hang the veil that Christ has removed. He simply needs to turn the face away from what the veil’s removal makes possible.
This turning is never a single clean movement. It is a process — overlapping, cumulative, and mutually reinforcing. The demonic works through deception, planting doubts about the goodness of God, the reliability of Scripture, the coherence of faith. The flesh cooperates eagerly, finding in those doubts a permission structure for the desires it has never stopped wanting. The heart, shaped by both, begins to experience a creeping disillusionment — not a sudden collapse of faith but a slow cooling, a gradual withdrawal of trust, a progressive loss of appetite for the things of God. And the carnal mind, which Paul says in Romans 8:7 is hostile to God by nature, provides the rationalization that makes the whole drift feel like growth rather than departure.
These forces do not operate in sequence. They operate simultaneously, each one amplifying the others. The deception makes the flesh bolder. The flesh makes the heart more susceptible to deception. The disillusionment makes both feel reasonable. And woven through all of it is the noise of contemporary life — the curated digital worlds, the endless horizontal stimulation, the thousand small redirections of attention — which are not the cause of the hardening but the medium through which the other forces most effectively do their work. The enemy has never had a more efficient delivery system for spiritual numbness than the one we carry in our pockets.
The result is a heart that is not beholding Christ. And a heart that is not beholding Christ is a heart that is not being transformed. And a heart that is not being transformed is a heart that is becoming harder — not by dramatic apostasy, but by the quiet, daily compounding of a gaze that has been turned away.
This produces a downward spiral: no beholding produces no transformation, which weakens the desire to behold, which produces less transformation, which hardens the heart further. The Christian who once read Scripture with hunger finds the Bible growing dry. Prayer feels like speaking to the ceiling. Worship becomes performance. And at some point, the gap between what the professed faith demands and what the hardened heart can sustain becomes unbearable — and deconstruction presents itself as the intellectually honest exit.
There is also a genuine paradox at work that honest pastoral observation cannot avoid. The hardened heart does not want to read Scripture. But Scripture is what softens the hardened heart. The heart that avoids the Word grows harder. The harder it grows, the less it wants the Word. This is not merely a theoretical spiral. It is the bondage of the will that Paul describes in Romans 7 and that Augustine recognized in himself centuries later: the man who wants to do good cannot. The problem is not information deficit. It is a captivity of the wanting itself.
This paradox raises a question that this article cannot fully answer but refuses to leave hanging: if the hardened heart cannot soften itself, and if the beholding that softens it requires a willingness the hardened heart does not possess — who breaks the cycle? How does anyone get out? And what can those of us who love the deconstructed, the backslidden, and the drifting actually do?
That is the question the second part of this essay takes up. But before we get there, sit for a moment with the weight of what Paul has diagnosed. The veil is real. The hardness is real. The spiral is real. And the people caught in it are not primarily intellectual skeptics who need better arguments. They are people with hearts of stone who need the one thing no human being can give them — and that the new covenant promises God will.
* * *
This is Part One of a two-part essay. Part Two — “Preaching to Dry Bones” — takes up the theological and pastoral response: the doctrine of regeneration, and what those who love the hardened-hearted can actually do.
—
Al Ngu (MDiv) is a pastor and church planter in New York City, where he leads Hearts Burn NYC, a faith community gathering in Union Square Park. He writes at the intersection of biblical theology, pastoral concern, and the life of the Spirit for a generation in crisis.
Terdapat satu babak yang saya tidak dapat lupakan.
Seorang wanita muda Rusia — saya akan panggil dia Natasha — berdiri di tebing Sungai Amur di tengah-tengah musim sejuk di utara. Suhunya di bawah paras beku. Sungai itu luas. Di seberang sana, China. Dia sedang melambai. Dia telah melambai melintasi sungai ini selama berminggu-minggu, dan entah bagaimana ia telah menjadi bahasa mereka — mereka berdua di tebing yang bertentangan, dipisahkan oleh air dan politik dan askar, berkomunikasi dengan satu-satunya cara yang mereka boleh: warna, gerakan, kehadiran. Anda melambai, saya melambai kembali. Saya di sini. Anda di sana. Sungai itu berada di antara kita tetapi kita tidak pergi.
Dan kemudian pada suatu hari dia datang ke tebing dan melambai.
Dan seberang sana diam.
Dia telah dibawa. Tentera China telah datang untuknya — seorang pemuda yang jatuh cinta dengan seorang wanita Rusia, melambai melintasi sempadan ketenteraan semasa perpecahan Sino-Soviet, yang di mata negara menjadikannya satu perkara: seorang perisik. Dia hilang. Tiada amaran, tiada penjelasan, tiada selamat tinggal. Pergi begitu sahaja. Dan Natasha berdiri di sana di tebing Rusia dalam kesejukan yang melampau, melambai tanpa apa-apa, air mata mengalir di wajahnya, menunggu.
Dia sedang hamil anaknya.
Saya menonton ini dalam sebuah dokumentari. Saya tidak tahu dengan pasti sama ada setiap butiran berlaku dengan cara ini — ia mungkin didramatikkan, dibina semula, seperti semua ingatan dan filem serta kisah cinta. Tetapi apa yang saya tahu ialah ia benar dalam cara perkara yang paling penting adalah benar: ia menamakan sesuatu yang nyata tentang keadaan manusia, tentang apa yang berharga cinta, tentang apa yang dilakukan oleh kesunyian kepada seseorang yang sedang menunggu.
Apa yang berlaku selepas itu adalah lebih daripada dua puluh tahun kesunyian.
Bukan lima tahun. Bukan sepuluh. Dua puluh tahun. Dua dekad di mana Natasha tidak tahu sama ada dia masih hidup atau mati, dipenjarakan atau dibebaskan, sama ada dia pernah memikirkannya, sama ada dia telah dipecahkan untuk melupakannya. Dua dekad di mana dia membesarkan seorang anak yang tidak pernah bertemu dengan bapanya. Dua dekad pergi ke tebing sungai, saya bayangkan, dan memandang ke seberang negara yang telah menelan orang yang dicintainya dan enggan mengembalikannya.
Bagaimanakah cinta dapat bertahan dalam keadaan itu?
Saya bertanya dengan serius. Saya tidak mempunyai jawapan yang jelas. Tetapi saya fikir soalan itu adalah salah satu soalan terpenting yang boleh difikirkan oleh manusia.
Sempadan yang dimaksudkan ialah Sungai Amur — dipanggil Heilongjiang, Sungai Naga Hitam, dalam bahasa Cina. Selama lebih seribu batu ia menjadi sempadan yang dipertikaikan antara China dan Kesatuan Soviet, dan menjelang tahun 1960-an sempadan itu telah menjadi salah satu kawasan tanah yang paling ketenteraan di bumi. Apa yang dahulunya merupakan pakatan komunis persaudaraan telah runtuh menjadi syak wasangka bersama dan peperangan ideologi. Kesatuan Soviet telah mengumpulkan enam belas divisyen, lebih seribu pesawat, dan lebih daripada seratus peluru berpandu jarak sederhana di sepanjang sempadan itu. China menggerakkan pasukannya sendiri sebagai tindak balas. Kedua-dua kerajaan sedang mempertimbangkan perkara yang tidak dapat difikirkan. Orang biasa yang tinggal di sepanjang sungai itu mendapati diri mereka tiba-tiba terkandas di pinggir konfrontasi nuklear yang berpotensi antara dua kuasa besar.
Dalam hal itu, dua orang muda jatuh cinta.
Mereka bertemu entah bagaimana — cara orang bertemu, dalam kehidupan sempadan yang biasa sebelum tindakan tegas sepenuhnya berlaku. Sesuatu yang tercetus. Mereka menemui cara untuk berada berdekatan antara satu sama lain. Dan apabila sempadan mengeras dan tentera datang dan lintasan fizikal menjadi mustahil, mereka mengimprovisasi satu-satunya perhubungan yang mereka boleh: mereka berdiri di tebing masing-masing dalam kesejukan utara dan mereka melambai. Perbualan keseluruhan dijalankan dengan warna dan gerak isyarat merentasi air beku yang luas. Berminggu-minggu begini. Sesuatu yang lembut dan tidak masuk akal dan benar-benar serius, cara cinta sentiasa ada apabila ia enggan menerima syarat-syarat yang ditawarkan oleh dunia.
Dan kemudian dia dibawa.
Dan sungai itu menjadi senyap.
Saya perlu mengatakan sesuatu tentang kesunyian. Bukan kesunyian yang selesa di dalam bilik yang damai, tetapi kesunyian yang menjawab panggilan anda apabila anda memanggil seseorang yang anda sayangi dan mereka tidak memberi respons. Kesunyian itu adalah jenis keganasannya sendiri. Ia melakukan sesuatu kepada seseorang. Ia menimbulkan persoalan yang tidak dapat dijawab dan oleh itu tidak dapat dihilangkan: Adakah anda di sana? Adakah sesuatu telah berlaku? Adakah saya telah melakukan sesuatu? Adakah anda masih wujud? Ketidaktahuan, dalam beberapa cara, adalah lebih buruk daripada berita terburuk, kerana sekurang-kurangnya berita terburuk adalah fakta yang boleh anda sesali. Kesunyian adalah luka yang kekal terbuka kerana tiada apa yang telah menutupnya.
Natasha menunggu melalui kesunyian itu selama lebih daripada dua puluh tahun. Saya terus memutar nombor itu. Dua puluh tahun bukanlah abstraksi — ia adalah tempoh masa tertentu yang dapat saya rasakan. Dua puluh tahun yang lalu dari hari ini, saya berada dalam bab yang sama sekali berbeza dalam hidup saya. Dua puluh tahun dari sekarang, jika Tuhan mengabulkannya, saya akan menjadi orang yang berbeza dalam musim yang berbeza. Dua puluh tahun sudah cukup lama untuk seorang anak dilahirkan dan membesar. Cukup lama untuk kepastian terhakis, untuk ingatan kabur di tepi, untuk dunia menegaskan — dengan lembut, berterusan, secara munasabah — bahawa sudah tiba masanya untuk terus maju. Untuk berhenti berdiri di tepi sungai. Untuk menerima bahawa sesetengah Cerita-cerita berakhir dengan teruk dan ini adalah salah satunya.
Dia tidak melupakannya.
Saya tidak faham sepenuhnya bagaimana. Saya mengesyaki dia juga tidak faham sepenuhnya bagaimana. Cinta pada kedalaman itu bukanlah keputusan yang anda buat setiap pagi — ia lebih seperti fakta tentang diri anda yang terus anda temui, walaupun anda ingin anda dapat melupakannya. Dia mencintainya. Sungai itu tidak menjawab. Dia tetap mencintainya.
Di sinilah saya harus jujur tentang mengapa cerita ini mengenai saya seperti itu — dan bukan kerana situasi saya menyerupai keadaannya dalam apa jua cara luaran. Saya mempunyai seorang isteri yang saya sayangi. Tuhan telah sangat baik kepada saya dalam perkahwinan, dan saya tidak menganggapnya remeh walau sehari pun. Kisah cinta yang saya jalani bukanlah kisah cinta yang penuh penderitaan.
Tetapi ada cinta lain dalam hidup saya. Satu panggilan. Satu keyakinan yang telah Tuhan letakkan kepada saya untuk membina sesuatu di bandar ini — sebuah komuniti iman untuk generasi yang sebahagian besarnya telah melupakan Gereja, yang membawa luka daripada institusi yang mengecewakan mereka, yang dahagakan makna tetapi tersentak dengan perkataan “gereja.” Saya berpindah ke New York. Saya menanam bendera. Saya berdiri di Union Square dengan meja lipat, injil, dan tangan terbuka.
Dan pelayanan, saya sedang belajar, mempunyai musim kesunyian.
Tidak selalunya kesunyian dramatik. Bukan askar, sempadan, dan kehilangan. Tetapi kesunyian yang tenang apabila sambutannya kecil, apabila orang ramai tidak datang, apabila anda telah mencurahkan diri anda ke dalam sesuatu dan sungai tidak berundur. Kesunyian kesetiaan tanpa buah yang kelihatan. Kesunyian memanggil tanpa pengesahan. Kesunyian yang membuat orang yang waras bertanya: adakah anda pasti ini yang sepatutnya anda lakukan? Bukankah sesuatu sepatutnya telah berlaku sekarang?
Saya melihat Natasha melambai melintasi sungai beku tanpa apa-apa, dan saya merasakan persoalan itu terbentuk di dalam diri saya dalam daftar yang berbeza — bukan tentang cinta manusia, tetapi tentang cinta ilahi. Tentang cinta antara jiwa dan Tuhan.
Bolehkah anda mengasihi Tuhan melalui dua puluh tahun kesunyian?
Ini, ternyata, bukan soalan baharu. Mazmur penuh dengannya. Tuhanku, Tuhanku, mengapa Engkau meninggalkan aku? Itu bukanlah pernyataan ketidakpercayaan — ia adalah jeritan daripada seseorang yang begitu teguh percaya sehingga mereka mencari Tuhan dan menemui sebuah tebing yang kosong. Para nabi mengetahuinya. Elia, yang baru sahaja keluar dari api Gunung Karmel, rebah di bawah sebatang pokok juniper dan memberitahu Tuhan bahawa dia telah selesai. Ayub memperjuangkan kesnya kepada syurga yang seolah-olah mengabaikannya selama beberapa bab. Para wali sepanjang abad telah menamakannya — malam gelap jiwa, musim yang panjang apabila doa terasa seperti melambai di sungai yang tidak berlambai kembali.
Apa yang menarik perhatian saya tentang setiap tokoh ini ialah mereka tidak menyelesaikan kesunyian dengan berpura-pura ia tidak ada. Mereka menamakannya. Mereka mengamuk menentangnya. Mereka duduk di dalamnya. Dan entah bagaimana — tidak selalu dengan penjelasan, tidak selalu dengan resolusi yang kemas — mereka keluar dari sisi lain masih mencintai Tuhan yang seolah-olah, untuk satu musim, menjadi diam.
Kebangkitan Yesus adalah jawapan muktamad kepada soalan ini, tetapi ia adalah jawapan yang tiba selepas tiga hari kesunyian yang paling mutlak yang dapat dibayangkan. Para pengikut pada Sabtu Suci tidak tahu kebangkitan akan datang. Mereka tahu sebuah makam. Mereka tahu kesunyian. Mereka tahu bahawa jalan yang telah mereka pertaruhkan semuanya telah hilang, dan sungai itu tidak bergoyang kembali. Jalan ke Emmaus adalah kisah dua orang yang berjalan meninggalkan Yerusalem dalam kesunyian itu — dan keajaibannya bukan hanya Yesus muncul, tetapi Dia berjalan bersama mereka ke arah yang telah mereka tuju, dalam kesedihan mereka, dalam kekeliruan mereka, dalam keputusasaan mereka yang telah berputus asa. Cinta datang kepada mereka. Cinta itu tidak menunggu mereka mendapatkan kembali harapan mereka sebelum ia muncul.
Tetapi saya ingin duduk sebentar lagi dalam kesunyian sebelum saya sampai ke kebangkitan, kerana saya rasa kita bergerak terlalu cepat melewati hari Sabtu. Persoalan yang diajukan Natasha dari tebing Sungai Amur adalah persoalan hari Sabtu: bolehkah cinta bertahan apabila ia tidak mempunyai bukti untuk dipertahankan? Bukan apabila keajaiban itu datang. Bukan apabila jawapannya tiba. Bukan apabila dia akhirnya muncul semula selepas dua puluh tahun dan dia mendapati dia masih hidup dan dia setia dan cinta itu nyata. Tetapi pada tahun-tahun pertengahan, tahun-tahun yang beku, tahun-tahun melambai pada ketiadaan — bolehkah cinta bertahan?
Saya percaya jawapannya adalah ya. Tetapi saya ingin jujur bahawa ia bukanlah satu ya yang selesa. Ia memerlukan kos yang tinggi.
Apa yang saya cuba bina di bandar ini sekarang adalah kecil. Perhimpunan pertama adalah sederhana. Halangannya nyata. Ada kalanya saya berdiri di tebing metafora dan melambai serta tertanya-tanya jika ada apa-apa di sana.
Dan saya fikir apa yang saya pelajari — apa yang diajarkan oleh kisah Natasha kepada saya, apa yang diajarkan oleh Mazmur kepada saya, apa yang diajarkan oleh seluruh tradisi penantian setia kepada saya — ialah cinta tidak disahkan oleh hasilnya. Ia disahkan oleh daya tahannya. Ukuran cinta bukanlah apa yang dihasilkannya pada musim kelimpahan tetapi apa yang dilakukannya dengan kesunyian. Adakah ia terus muncul? Adakah ia terus melambai? Adakah ia percaya, terhadap semua bukti yang kelihatan, bahawa Sebelah sungai yang lain tidak kosong — bahawa ada kehadiran di sana yang tidak melupakan, tidak meninggalkan, masih berorientasikan kepada anda walaupun pada tahun-tahun ketika anda tidak dapat melihat tanda-tandanya?
Natasha berdiri di tebing itu dan melambai selama dua puluh tahun kerana dia percaya — mungkin secara sedar, mungkin hanya dalam tulangnya — bahawa lelaki di seberang itu adalah nyata, dan bahawa dia telah mencintainya, dan cinta yang berkualiti itu tidak lenyap begitu sahaja kerana keadaan menjadikannya menyusahkan. Dia mempertaruhkan nyawanya pada realiti apa yang telah diketahuinya sebelum kesunyian datang.
Itulah rupa iman. Bukan iman kemenangan doa yang dijawab dan keajaiban yang kelihatan — walaupun itu nyata dan saya telah mengenalinya. Tetapi iman yang tenang, meletihkan, dan tidak munasabah daripada seseorang yang terus muncul di sungai kerana mereka tidak dapat mempercayai bahawa cinta yang pernah mereka kenali telah hilang.
Sungai itu tidak menjawab Natasha selama dua puluh tahun. Tetapi dia betul kerana terus melambai. Dia ada di sana.
Saya percaya Tuhan juga ada di sana. Saya percaya kesunyian bukanlah ketiadaan. Tetapi saya ingin pergi lebih jauh daripada itu — kerana kisah Natasha dan pemuda di seberang sungai, seindah dan sehancur dan seindah itu, bukanlah kisah cinta yang paling mendalam. Ia hanyalah bayangan cinta. Dan saya fikir kita perlu merasai sepenuhnya beban bayangan itu sebelum kita dapat mula memahami kemuliaan apa yang mendorongnya.
Fikirkan tentang apa yang menjadikan cinta mereka luar biasa. Dia mencintainya merentasi jurang yang mustahil. Dia mencintainya melalui dua puluh tahun kesunyian. Kedua-duanya tidak berputus asa, walaupun setiap kuasa di dunia berkata untuk berhenti. Kita melihatnya dan kita hancur, kerana kita menyedari secara naluri bahawa inilah sepatutnya rupa cinta — degil, mahal, tidak munasabah, mengharungi segala yang dilemparkan dunia kepadanya.
Sekarang pertimbangkan Yesus di kayu salib.
Natasha mencintai seorang lelaki yang mencintainya kembali. Kristus mencintai orang yang membunuhnya. Natasha melambai melintasi sungai beku kepada seseorang yang terdesak untuk melambai kembali. Yesus menghulurkan tangannya di kayu salib ke arah orang yang meletakkannya di sana, yang mengejeknya ketika dia berdarah, yang telah meninggalkannya ketika ia memerlukan sesuatu untuk tinggal. Natasha menanggung dua puluh tahun kesunyian tanpa mengetahui sama ada dia masih disayangi. Yesus berseru, “Ya Tuhanku, Tuhanku, mengapa Engkau meninggalkan Aku?” — menyerap ke dalam diri-Nya kesunyian pengabaian ilahi yang penuh dan menghancurkan, supaya orang yang layak menerima kesunyian itu tidak akan pernah mendengarnya.
Dan kemudian, dari kayu salib, sementara paku masih di tangan-Nya, sementara orang ramai masih mengejek, sementara darah masih mengalir — Dia membuka mulut-Nya dan berkata: “Ya Bapa, ampunilah mereka, kerana mereka tidak tahu apa yang mereka lakukan.”
Saya telah membaca baris itu ratusan kali. Saya telah berkhutbah berhampirannya. Tetapi melihat Natasha melambai di tebing sungai yang kosong, air mata mengalir di wajahnya dalam kesejukan yang membeku, sesuatu dalam baris itu akhirnya terbuka untuk saya dengan cara yang baharu. Kerana ini bukanlah kasih seseorang yang melambai melintasi sungai kepada orang yang mereka puja. Ini adalah kasih seseorang yang dibunuh oleh orang yang Dia ampuni dalam masa nyata. Ini adalah kasih tanpa asas yang munasabah sama sekali — kasih yang bukan tindak balas kepada disayangi, tetapi kasih yang memulakan, yang menyerap permusuhan, yang enggan menjadi apa yang diperlakukan. Inilah cinta yang tidak menunggu kesunyian berakhir sebelum ia bersuara. Ia bersuara dalam kesunyian yang paling teruk, dari tempat yang paling teruk, pada saat yang paling teruk, dan apa yang dikatakannya ialah: Aku memaafkanmu. Aku masih untukmu. Kamu tidak tahu apa yang kamu lakukan, tetapi Aku tahu, dan aku memilih ini.
Tiada cinta manusia yang pernah berbuat demikian. Bukan cinta Natasha. Bukan cinta sesiapa pun. Cinta antara wanita Rusia itu dan lelaki muda Cina di seberang Sungai Naga Hitam adalah salah satu perkara paling menyentuh hati yang pernah saya temui di skrin. Tetapi pada akhirnya, ia adalah dua orang yang terbatas yang saling mencintai di seberang sungai yang beku. Apa yang berlaku di Kalvari ialah cinta yang tidak terhingga kepada yang terbatas merentasi jurang muktamad — bukan walaupun bermusuhan, tetapi melaluinya, untuknya, dengan rela hati, mata terbuka, tangan terbuka luas.
Itulah cinta yang ingin saya ketahui. Bukan sekadar tahu tentang — tahu, cara anda mengenali seseorang, cara Natasha mengenali lelaki yang dilambaikannya, cara dia mengenali kehadirannya dengan cukup baik untuk merasakan penderitaan ketiadaannya sepanjang dua puluh tahun kesunyian. Aku ingin mengetahui kasih Kristus dengan kedalaman dan kepastian peribadi yang tidak dapat dikurangkan. Dan aku mahu pengetahuan itu begitu nyata dalam diriku, begitu hidup dalam tulangku, sehingga apabila aku berdiri di bandar ini dan membuka mulutku, sesuatu yang transenden keluar — bukan kefasihanku, bukan teologiku, bukan hujah terbaikku, tetapi limpahan kasih yang telah aku alami.
Itulah yang ingin aku sampaikan kepada penduduk New York. Bukan doktrin. Bukan program. Bukan institusi. Kasih yang berkata Bapa, ampunilah mereka ketika berdarah. Kasih yang lebih degil daripada dua puluh tahun diam, lebih rela daripada pengabdian manusia, lebih mahal daripada apa sahaja yang pernah dibayar oleh Natasha — dan ditawarkan secara bebas, tanpa syarat, kepada orang yang tidak membalas lambaian.
Jika tbahawa cinta itu nyata — dan saya percaya dengan segala yang saya miliki bahawa ia adalah — maka tiada seorang pun di bandar ini yang terlalu terluka, terlalu sinis, terlalu jauh, terlalu lama diam untuk menerimanya. Saya ingin mengetahuinya dengan begitu mendalam sehingga apabila saya membicarakannya, sesuatu dalam diri pendengar mengenalinya sebagai benar sebelum saya menghabiskan ayat itu. Kerana di suatu tempat di dalam setiap manusia, saya fikir, terdapat seorang Natasha yang berdiri di sungai yang beku, melambai ke dalam diam, berharap tanpa harapan bahawa cinta masih ada di seberang sana.
Ia benar. Dan ia lebih besar daripada yang dibayangkannya.
Itu patut diisytiharkan. Walaupun dalam kesejukan. Walaupun tebing yang lain kelihatan kosong. Walaupun sudah lama berlalu.
Al Ngu ialah pastor pengasas Hearts Burn NYC, sebuah komuniti iman di Bandar Raya New York.
Langgan Al Ngu Dilancarkan 10 hari lalu Ketuhanan utama dari RTS 2025. Berapi-api mencari dunia Tuhan kepada gereja reformasi yang berkarisma, menyebarkan kekayaan Kristus yang tidak sesuai. Dengan melanggan, anda bersetuju dengan Syarat Penggunaan Substack dan mengakui Notis Pengumpulan Maklumat serta Dasar Privasinya. 1 Suka ∙ 3 Susunan Semula
A young Russian woman — I’ll call her Natasha — stands on the bank of the Amur River in the dead of a northern winter. The temperature is subfreezing. The river is vast. On the other side, China. She is waving. She has been waving across this river for weeks, and somehow it has become their language — the two of them on opposite banks, separated by the water and the politics and the soldiers, communicating in the only way they can: color, motion, presence. You wave, I wave back. I am here. You are there. The river is between us but we are not gone.
And then one day she comes to the bank and waves.
And the other side is silent.
He had been taken. Chinese soldiers had come for him — a young man in love with a Russian woman, waving across a militarized border during the Sino-Soviet split, which in the eyes of the state made him exactly one thing: a spy. He disappeared. No warning, no explanation, no goodbye. Just gone. And Natasha stood there on the Russian bank in the subfreezing cold, waving at nothing, tears pouring down her face, waiting. She was pregnant with his child.
I watched this on a documentary. I don’t know with certainty whether every detail happened exactly this way — it may be dramatized, reconstructed, the way all memory and film and love stories are. But what I know is that it is true in the way that the most important things are true: it names something real about the human condition, about what love costs, about what silence does to a person who is waiting.
What followed was more than twenty years of silence.
Not five years. Not ten. Twenty years. Two decades in which Natasha did not know if he was alive or dead, imprisoned or freed, if he ever thought of her, if he had been broken into forgetting her. Two decades in which she raised a child who had never met his father. Two decades of going to a river bank, I imagine, and looking across at a country that had swallowed the person she loved and refused to give him back.
How does love survive that?
I’m asking seriously. I don’t have a clean answer. But I think that question is one of the most important questions a human being can sit with.
The border in question is the Amur River — called the Heilongjiang, the Black Dragon River, in Chinese. For over a thousand miles it runs as the contested frontier between China and the Soviet Union, and by the 1960s that frontier had become one of the most militarized stretches of land on earth. What had been a fraternal communist alliance had collapsed into mutual suspicion and ideological warfare. The Soviet Union massed sixteen divisions, over a thousand aircraft, and more than a hundred medium-range missiles along that border. China mobilized its own forces in response. Both governments were contemplating the unthinkable. Ordinary people who lived along that river found themselves suddenly stranded at the edge of a potential nuclear confrontation between two superpowers.
Into that, two young people fell in love.
They met somehow — the way people meet, in the ordinary porousness of border life before the clampdown fully came. Something kindled. They found ways to be near each other. And when the border hardened and the armies came and physical crossing became impossible, they improvised the only communion they could: they stood on their respective banks in the northern cold and they waved. Whole conversations conducted in color and gesture across a width of freezing water. Weeks of this. Something tender and absurd and completely serious, the way love always is when it refuses to accept the terms that the world is offering.
And then he was taken.
And the river went silent.
I need to say something about silence. Not the comfortable silence of a peaceful room, but the silence that answers you when you have called out to someone you love and they do not respond. That silence is its own kind of violence. It does something to a person. It raises questions that cannot be answered and therefore cannot be put down: Are you there? Did something happen? Did I do something? Do you still exist? The not-knowing is, in some ways, worse than the worst news, because at least the worst news is a fact you can grieve. Silence is a wound that stays open because nothing has come to close it.
Natasha waited through that silence for more than twenty years. I keep turning that number over. Twenty years is not an abstraction — it is a specific length of time that I can feel. Twenty years ago from today, I was in a completely different chapter of my life. Twenty years from now, if God grants it, I will be a different person in a different season. Twenty years is long enough for a child to be born and grow up. Long enough for certainty to erode, for memory to blur at the edges, for the world to insist — gently, persistently, reasonably — that it is time to move on. To stop standing at the river. To accept that some stories end badly and this is one of them.
She did not move on.
I don’t fully understand how. I suspect she didn’t fully understand how either. Love at that depth is not really a decision you make every morning — it is more like a fact about you that you keep discovering, even when you wish you could undiscover it. She loved him. The river did not answer. She loved him anyway.
Here is where I have to be honest about why this story hit me the way it did — and it is not because my situation resembles hers in any external sense. I have a wife I adore. God has been remarkably kind to me in marriage, and I do not take that for granted for a single day. The love story I am living is not a love story of anguish.
But there is another love in my life. A calling. A conviction that God has placed on me to build something in this city — a faith community for a generation that has largely written the Church off, that carries wounds from institutions that failed them, that hungers for meaning but flinches at the word “church.” I moved to New York. I planted a flag. I stood in Union Square with a folding table and a gospel and an open hand.
And ministry, I am learning, has its seasons of silence.
Not always dramatic silence. Not soldiers and borders and disappearances. But the quiet that settles when the response is small, when the crowd doesn’t come, when you have poured yourself into something and the river doesn’t wave back. The silence of faithfulness without visible fruit. The silence of calling without confirmation. The silence that makes a reasonable person ask: are you sure this is what you’re supposed to be doing? Shouldn’t something have happened by now?
I watched Natasha wave across the frozen river at nothing, and I felt the question form inside me in a different register — not about human love, but about divine love. About the love between a soul and God.
Can you love God through twenty years of silence?
This is, it turns out, not a new question. The Psalms are full of it. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That is not a statement of unbelief — it is a cry from someone who believed so hard they went looking for God and found an empty bank. The prophets knew it. Elijah, fresh off the fire of Mount Carmel, collapsed under a juniper tree and told God he was done. Job argued his case to a heaven that seemed to be ignoring him for chapters upon chapters. The saints across the centuries have named it — the dark night of the soul, the long season when prayer feels like waving at a river that doesn’t wave back.
What strikes me about every one of these figures is that they did not resolve the silence by pretending it wasn’t there. They named it. They raged against it. They sat in it. And somehow — not always with explanation, not always with a tidy resolution — they came out the other side still in love with the God who had seemed, for a season, to go quiet.
The resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate answer to this question, but it is an answer that arrives after three days of the most absolute silence imaginable. The disciples on Holy Saturday did not know a resurrection was coming. They knew a tomb. They knew silence. They knew that the one they had staked everything on was gone, and the river wasn’t waving back. The road to Emmaus is a story of two people walking away from Jerusalem in that silence — and the miracle is not just that Jesus appears, but that he walks with them in the direction they are already going, in their grief, in their confusion, in their having-already-given-up. The love came to them. The love did not wait for them to get their hope back before it showed up.
But I want to sit a moment longer in the silence before I get to the resurrection, because I think we move too quickly past the Saturday. The question Natasha poses from the bank of the Amur River is the Saturday question: can love hold on when it has no evidence to hold on to? Not when the miracle comes. Not when the answer arrives. Not when he finally reappears after twenty years and she finds out he was alive and he was faithful and the love was real. But in the middle years, the frozen years, the years of waving at nothing — can love endure that?
I believe the answer is yes. But I want to be honest that it is not a comfortable yes. It is a costly one.
What I am trying to build in this city is small right now. The first gathering was modest. The obstacles are real. There are moments when I stand at the metaphorical bank and wave and wonder if anything is there.
And I think what I am learning — what Natasha’s story is teaching me, what the Psalms are teaching me, what the whole long tradition of faithful waiting is teaching me — is that love is not validated by its results. It is validated by its staying power. The measure of love is not what it produces in the seasons of abundance but what it does with the silence. Does it keep showing up? Does it keep waving? Does it believe, against all visible evidence, that the other side of the river is not empty — that there is a presence there that has not forgotten, has not abandoned, is still oriented toward you even in the years when you cannot see a sign of it?
Natasha stood on that bank and waved for twenty years because she believed — maybe consciously, maybe just in her bones — that the man on the other side was real, and that he had loved her, and that love of that quality does not simply dissolve because the state makes it inconvenient. She staked her life on the reality of what she had known before the silence came.
That is what faith looks like. Not the triumphant faith of answered prayers and visible miracles — though those are real and I have known them. But the quiet, exhausting, unreasonable faith of someone who keeps showing up at the river because they cannot bring themselves to believe that the love they once knew is gone. The river didn’t answer Natasha for twenty years. But she was right to keep waving. He was there.
I believe God is there too. I believe the silence is not absence. But I want to go further than that — because the story of Natasha and the young man across the river, as devastating and beautiful as it is, is not the deepest love story there is. It is a shadow of one. And I think we need to feel the full weight of the shadow before we can begin to grasp the glory of what casts it. Think about what made their love extraordinary. He loved her across an impossible divide. She loved him through twenty years of silence. Neither of them quit, even when every force in the world said to quit. We watch that and we are undone, because we recognize instinctively that this is what love is supposed to look like — stubborn, costly, unreasonable, surviving everything the world throws at it.
Now consider Jesus on the cross.
Natasha loved a man who loved her back. Christ loved people who were killing him. Natasha waved across a frozen river at someone who was desperate to wave back. Jesus stretched out his arms on a cross toward people who put him there, who mocked him while he bled, who had abandoned him when it cost something to stay. Natasha endured twenty years of silence not knowing if she was still loved. Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — absorbing into himself the full, crushing silence of divine abandonment, so that the people who deserved that silence would never have to hear it.
And then, from the cross, while the nails were still in his hands, while the crowd was still jeering, while the blood was still running — he opened his mouth and said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
I have read that line hundreds of times. I have preached near it. But watching Natasha wave at an empty riverbank, tears streaming down her face in the subfreezing cold, something in that line finally broke open for me in a new way. Because this is not the love of someone waving across a river at the person they adore. This is the love of someone being murdered by the people he is forgiving in real time. This is love with no reasonable basis whatsoever — love that is not a response to being loved, but love that initiates, that absorbs hostility, that refuses to become what it is being treated as. This is love that does not wait for the silence to end before it speaks. It speaks into the worst silence, from the worst place, at the worst moment, and what it says is: I forgive you. I am still for you. You do not know what you are doing, but I do, and I am choosing this.
No human love has ever done that. Not Natasha’s. Not anyone’s. The love between that Russian woman and that young Chinese man across the Black Dragon River is one of the most moving things I have ever encountered on a screen. But it is, in the end, two finite people loving each other across a frozen river. What happened on Calvary is the infinite loving the finite across the ultimate divide — not despite hostility, but through it, for it, willingly, eyes open, arms wide.
That is the love I want to know. Not just know about — know, the way you know a person, the way Natasha knew the man she waved to, the way she knew his presence well enough to feel the agony of his absence across twenty years of silence. I want to know the love of Christ with that kind of depth and that kind of personal, irreducible certainty. And I want that knowing to be so real in me, so alive in my bones, that when I stand in this city and open my mouth, something transcendent comes out — not my eloquence, not my theology, not my best argument, but the overflow of a love I have actually experienced. That is what I want to proclaim to the people of New York. Not a doctrine. Not a program. Not an institution. The love that said Father, forgive them while bleeding. The love that is more stubborn than twenty years of silence, more willing than any human devotion, more costly than anything Natasha ever paid — and offered freely, without condition, to people who were not waving back.
If that love is real — and I believe with everything I have that it is — then there is no one in this city too wounded, too cynical, too far gone, too long silent to receive it. I want to know it so deeply that when I speak of it, something in the listener recognizes it as true before I have finished the sentence. Because somewhere inside every human being, I think, is a Natasha standing at a frozen river, waving into silence, hoping against hope that love is still on the other side.
It is. And it is greater than she imagined.
That is worth proclaiming. Even in the cold. Even when the other bank looks empty. Even when it has been a very long time.
Al Ngu is the founding pastor of Hearts Burn NYC, a faith community in New York City.
A Call to Recover the Church’s Expectation of Signs, Wonders, and the Full Power of the Holy Spirit
by Al Ngu, MDiv
There is a question that sits uncomfortably at the intersection of theology, experience, and church culture — one that many congregations would rather not ask aloud: Are the signs and wonders of the New Testament still available to us today? The discomfort is telling. For a people who confess the living God, the very unease with this question reveals how thoroughly the assumptions of a rationalistic age have colonized the imagination of the modern Church.
Let me begin with what should be settled. Any attempt to strip the miraculous from the person of Jesus Christ is not a serious theological proposal — it is a kind of literary vandalism. The four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — are so saturated with signs and wonders that any effort to extract them would leave nothing recognizable in their wake. History has already given us a cautionary example: the so-called ‘Jefferson Bible,’ and more recently certain rationalist projects that have attempted to ‘humanize’ Jesus by excising his miracles and reassembling a sanitized, manageable figure. These efforts are not just theologically wrong. They are an exercise in intellectual embarrassment that does profound harm to the body of Christ. The evangelical world, by and large, agrees on this. The miraculous belongs to the person of Jesus the way light belongs to the sun — it is not incidental, it is constitutive.
But here is where honest conversation becomes harder. The question that genuinely divides us is not whether Jesus performed miracles. It is whether the miraculous power of God continues to operate in and through the Church today — and if so, to what degree, in what forms, and with what expectation. It is on this question that I want to press the conversation forward, not with polemics, but with pastoral urgency and biblical fidelity.
“The last words Jesus spoke before his ascension were not a historical footnote. They were a living commission — and they were addressed to us.”
The Promise That Changes Everything
Acts 1:8 (ESV)
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
These are the last recorded words of Jesus before his ascension into heaven. Consider the weight of that. When a person speaks for the final time before departing, those words carry a gravity that ordinary speech does not. Jesus had forty days after the resurrection to say whatever he wished. He chose, as his parting commission, to speak of power — the power of the Holy Spirit — and of witness that would extend to the ends of the earth.
If Acts 1:8 is not applicable to the Church today, it is difficult to understand why Jesus would have spoken it at all. Either his promise was for a specific historical moment now closed to us — a position that requires significant hermeneutical argument — or it is a living word addressed to every generation of the Church until he returns. I am firmly persuaded it is the latter. The Great Commission has not expired. Neither has the promise of power that undergirds it.
The question, then, is not whether this power is available. Acts 1:8 asserts that it is. The more difficult question is this: Why does so much of the Church in the modern West seem to operate as though it has never received this promise — or worse, as though it has quietly decided the promise no longer applies?
Pentecost and the Grammar of the Miraculous
Acts 2:1–4 (ESV)
When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Acts 2 arrives almost immediately on the heels of Christ’s ascension, and what it describes is not subtle. Tongues of fire. A sound like a mighty rushing wind. A company of believers suddenly speaking languages they had never learned. If the Church is honest with herself, she must acknowledge that this is extraordinary — not metaphorically extraordinary, but literally, categorically beyond the ordinary course of nature. This is a sign and a wonder by any definition of those terms.
The sign of tongues at Pentecost is particularly significant, and particularly contested. On the day the Church was born, the first gift given was the gift of tongues. Not administrative skill. Not theological acuity. Not eloquence. The first gift was a supernatural language — an utterance that bypassed the speaker’s natural comprehension and came directly from the Spirit of God. In Acts 2, these tongues were actual human languages, understood by the gathered diaspora crowd from across the known world, though the speakers themselves had never studied them. That is a miracle by any account.
I will speak plainly from my own experience here. When I was twenty-one years old, studying at university in England, I was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues. I had very little theological framework for what was happening — I had not yet studied the systematic theology I have since spent years in. What I had was a raw, undeniable encounter with the living God, expressed in a language that was not my own, that I could not manufacture, and that left me permanently changed. I am not building an entire doctrine on personal experience. But I am saying that personal experience, when it aligns with the testimony of Scripture and the practice of the early Church, cannot simply be set aside as emotionalism or cultural conditioning.
The tragedy is that the gift of tongues has become one of the most divisive issues in the body of Christ, when it was given as one of the most unifying signs of the Spirit’s arrival. Many in the Reformed tradition have moved to marginalize or dismiss this gift entirely. When a church begins to deny or diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to begin diminishing the broader expectation of supernatural gifts across the board. The slide is logical: if the most visible, verifiable gift of the Spirit at Pentecost is explained away or declared obsolete, the same hermeneutical logic will eventually be applied to prophecy, healing, and the rest.
I do not want to be unfair to those who hold cessationist convictions — they have thought carefully about their position, and they are brothers and sisters in Christ. But I do want to press them on one point: the pattern of Acts 2 is not restricted to the Twelve. The tongues of fire rested on each one who was present. The Spirit was poured out on all of them. This was not an apostolic privilege. It was the normative experience of the gathered community of Jesus.
“When a church begins to diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to diminish the broader expectation of the supernatural altogether.”
The Prophetic Promise of the Last Days
Acts 2:17 (ESV)
“And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”
Peter, addressing the bewildered crowd at Pentecost, quotes the prophet Joel. His interpretive move is decisive: what you are seeing right now, he says, is the fulfillment of what God promised for the last days. The outpouring of the Spirit — prophesied, awaited, now arriving — is not a temporary anomaly. It is the characteristic mark of the age between Christ’s ascension and his return. We are in the last days. Which means we are in the age of the Spirit’s outpouring.
The language of ‘pouring out’ is emphatic and generous. It is not a trickle. It is not a carefully rationed dispensation to a select few. God says he will pour out his Spirit on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, across lines of gender and generation. And what follows from this outpouring? Prophecy. Visions. Dreams.
This is precisely where many Reformed and cessationist churches grow quiet. The outpouring of the Spirit is, in some theological frameworks, reinterpreted as referring solely to the writing of the New Testament, or to the establishment of the apostolic office, now closed. But this interpretation strains against the plain reading of the text. Peter does not say the Spirit was poured out on the apostles. He says it was poured out on all who were present — and extends the promise further still to all whom the Lord our God will call (Acts 2:39).
The gift of prophecy, in particular, deserves recovery in the contemporary church. The Apostle Paul devotes an entire chapter — 1 Corinthians 14 — to its proper practice. He does not do so to describe a historical phenomenon safely in the past. He writes to a living congregation, offering pastoral instruction on how to administer this gift for the upbuilding, encouragement, and consolation of the body. He commands them — not suggests, commands — to eagerly desire the spiritual gifts, especially prophecy (1 Cor. 14:1).
1 Corinthians 14:1–3 (ESV)
Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.
Notice the framework Paul establishes. Love comes first — always. The gifts are never ends in themselves. They are servants of love. A congregation that pursues the gifts without love produces noise, confusion, and harm. But a congregation that loves without pursuing the gifts is not following Paul’s command. The two are not alternatives. They are partners.
How can a congregation eagerly desire a gift they have never been taught? How can they pursue something their pastors never model, never preach, never make space for? The silence of so many pulpits on the gift of prophecy is not theological neutrality. It is a form of deprivation. The sheep cannot receive what the shepherd never offers.
Let me speak from my own history again. There have been moments in my life when someone prayed over me and spoke something they could not have known — something that had been buried in the quiet of my heart for a long time. A word about my calling. A word about my children. A directional word that came to pass. I received a word once, spoken over me before a congregation of two hundred people: ‘Your heart will long for a land far away from this shore.’ That person said nothing more specific than that. But we were in Malaysia at the time, and the word eventually led us across twenty-one hours of ocean to America. That is the gift of prophecy operating in the framework of love — not for spectacle, not for control, but for the upbuilding of a servant of God who needed to hear his Father’s voice.
I am also keenly aware of the excesses. The prophetic culture of some Pentecostal and charismatic circles has produced manipulation, false predictions, and wounded people who built their lives on words that never came true. This is real, and it must be addressed — not by eliminating the gift, but by returning to the apostolic framework Paul provides: prophecy that edifies, encourages, and consoles; prophecy that is tested, weighed, and submitted to the community; prophecy that operates in the atmosphere of love.
Visions, Dreams, and the Suppressed Imagination
Acts 2:17 also promises that young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams. The evangelical world has largely spiritualized these categories into metaphor, or dismissed them as the province of more excitable Christians. But the New Testament treats visions and dreams with remarkable seriousness. It was in a vision that Ananias was sent to the blinded Saul of Tarsus. It was through a dream that Joseph was warned to flee to Egypt. It was in a trance that Peter received the vision of the clean and unclean animals, which dismantled his assumptions about Gentile inclusion.
I find that when I lean into worship, when I create space for quiet and attentiveness to God, things come into my mind’s eye that feel less like my own imagination and more like something being given to me. I have largely stopped sharing these things in my current context — the culture of the denominational congregation where we presently worship does not make space for it, and I do not want to cause disruption or confusion. But I am aware of a cost in that silence. Something is being withheld from the body that it was meant to receive.
This is the practical effect of a church culture that does not theologically sanction the experiential gifts: people who carry these gifts learn to suppress them, to privatize them, to wonder in silence whether what they are experiencing is real or simply self-generated. The doctrine of the church becomes a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit, rather than a framework that helps the Spirit’s gifts operate with wisdom and order.
Laying Hands on the Sick — A Command, Not a Suggestion
Mark 16:15–18 (ESV)
“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
This passage is part of Jesus’ commissioning of his disciples into the world. It is embedded in the Great Commission itself — the same text that evangelicals rightly treat as the Church’s marching orders for all generations. And Jesus says, without qualification, that signs will accompany those who believe. The casting out of demons. Speaking in new tongues. Healing the sick.
Most non-charismatic evangelical churches enthusiastically embrace the Great Commission. They send missionaries. They plant churches. They translate Scriptures. But the signs that Jesus says will accompany those who believe? Those are quietly set aside — explained as belonging to the apostolic age, or reinterpreted symbolically, or simply not discussed.
The healing of the sick is perhaps the most practically significant of these signs, because sickness is universal. Every congregation contains people who are suffering — cancer, depression, chronic pain, grief, addiction, anxiety, the slow attrition of bodies that are aging toward death. Jesus says: lay your hands on the sick, and they will recover. The Church should be doing this. Many do — there are healing prayer teams in churches across the denominational spectrum. But the frequency of visible healing is, in much of the Western church, remarkably low.
Someone once described this contrast to me with painful clarity. A healing team that had seen extraordinary results in Africa returned to New York City and found the atmosphere profoundly different. Healings that had seemed almost natural in one context became rare in another. The explanation Jesus himself offers, again and again, is faith: ‘Where is your faith?’ And faith, as Paul reminds us, comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. If the pulpit never speaks of healing, never models expectant prayer, never creates liturgical or pastoral space for the laying on of hands, the congregation will not carry a living expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of faith in the abstract. It is a failure of formation.
There is also a word to be said about spiritual warfare. Jesus says that those who believe will cast out demons. I recognize that this makes many Christians — especially those formed in rationalistic, cessationist, or mainline traditions — deeply uncomfortable. But consider the demographics of a congregation today: How many are struggling with suicidal ideation? How many wrestle with addictions that seem to have a will of their own, that resist every rational intervention? How many carry patterns of destruction that they themselves cannot explain? The New Testament would not necessarily pronounce a demonic verdict on every one of these struggles. But it would not dismiss the possibility either. Spiritual warfare is real. The deliverance ministry of Jesus was not incidental to his mission — it was central to his announcement of the Kingdom of God.
“What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. The doctrine of the church can become a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit.”
The Cultural Rationalism We Have Inherited
None of what I have described above happens in a vacuum. The modern Western church is formed by a broader cultural rationalism that has been accumulating for centuries — from the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason, through the rise of scientific materialism, to the pervasive assumption of our present moment that what cannot be verified empirically is not real, or at least not reliable. This cultural atmosphere shapes what we consider plausible, even before we open our Bibles.
When the majority of our waking hours are spent in a world that is resolutely materialist — where our senses are attuned to the tangible, the measurable, the reproducible — it becomes genuinely difficult to maintain an expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of sincerity. It is the predictable result of formation in a culture that treats the supernatural as the province of the credulous. The apparent diminishing of signs and wonders in the Western church is not primarily a theological conclusion. It is a perceptual one, shaped by the assumptions of our age.
But the assumptions of our age are not the last word. The Church in the Global South — in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America — is exploding with accounts of healing, deliverance, prophetic words, and miraculous provision. These reports are not the product of theological naivety. Many of the fastest-growing, most theologically serious movements in Christianity today operate with a completely natural expectation of the miraculous. They read Acts 2 and see a description of normal Christianity. The Western church’s skepticism is the anomaly, not the norm.
A Call to Theological and Practical Renewal
What I am calling for is not a collapse into undisciplined enthusiasm. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 stand: let all things be done decently and in order (v. 40). The gifts of the Spirit are given to the community, exercised within the community, and tested by the community. Prophecy is weighed. Tongues are interpreted. The spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet (v. 32). These are not restrictions designed to minimize the Spirit’s work. They are guardrails designed to protect it — to ensure that the supernatural gifts build up rather than destabilize.
But order without expectation is a form of unbelief. A church that has arranged its liturgy, its polity, and its theology to make no room for the miraculous has not achieved theological maturity. It has achieved a sophisticated form of practical cessationism — the functional belief that the extraordinary promises of God no longer apply, whatever doctrinal position it formally holds.
Renewal begins in the pulpit. Pastors must preach the full counsel of God — including Acts 1:8, Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, Mark 16, and every other text that speaks to the present reality of the Spirit’s power. They must preach these texts with the same expectant faith they would bring to texts about salvation or sanctification. They must create structures in congregational life — prayer teams, prophetic communities, healing services — that give these gifts space to operate with wisdom and accountability.
Renewal also requires humility. Those in cessationist traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their theological framework was shaped more by the Enlightenment than by exegesis. Those in charismatic traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their practice of the gifts has been ordered by love and truth, or by a culture of spectacle and individualism. Both streams have something to receive from the other. The goal is not to win a theological debate. The goal is to be the church that Jesus promised — filled with the Spirit, moving in power, witnessing to his resurrection to the ends of the earth.
The promise of Acts 1:8 has not expired. The last days Joel prophesied have not ended. The commission of Mark 16 has not been revoked. The gifts Paul described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 have not been quietly withdrawn. What has happened, in too many quarters of the Western church, is that we have allowed the plausibility structures of our culture to override the plain testimony of Scripture and the witness of two thousand years of Church history.
Signs and wonders should never be diminished. They should be pursued — soberly, lovingly, scripturally, expectantly. Not because we are chasing experiences. But because we are following a living Lord who is the same yesterday, today, and forever — and who promised that those who believe in him would do the works he did, and greater works than these (John 14:12). The Church owes the world nothing less than the full gospel: not a rationalized gospel with its power quietly excised, but the gospel of the Kingdom — announced in word, demonstrated in power, and driven by the love of the Spirit poured out on all flesh.
— — —
Pastor Al Ngu (MDiv) is a church planter in New York City and the founder of Hearts Burn NYC,
An outdoor faith community gathering in Union Square Park.
Do Not Diminish the Fire
A Call to Recover the Church’s Expectation of Signs, Wonders, and the Full Power of the Holy Spirit
by Al Ngu, MDiv
There is a question that sits uncomfortably at the intersection of theology, experience, and church culture — one that many congregations would rather not ask aloud: Are the signs and wonders of the New Testament still available to us today? The discomfort is telling. For a people who confess the living God, the very unease with this question reveals how thoroughly the assumptions of a rationalistic age have colonized the imagination of the modern Church.
Let me begin with what should be settled. Any attempt to strip the miraculous from the person of Jesus Christ is not a serious theological proposal — it is a kind of literary vandalism. The four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — are so saturated with signs and wonders that any effort to extract them would leave nothing recognizable in their wake. History has already given us a cautionary example: the so-called ‘Jefferson Bible,’ and more recently certain rationalist projects that have attempted to ‘humanize’ Jesus by excising his miracles and reassembling a sanitized, manageable figure. These efforts are not just theologically wrong. They are an exercise in intellectual embarrassment that does profound harm to the body of Christ. The evangelical world, by and large, agrees on this. The miraculous belongs to the person of Jesus the way light belongs to the sun — it is not incidental, it is constitutive.
But here is where honest conversation becomes harder. The question that genuinely divides us is not whether Jesus performed miracles. It is whether the miraculous power of God continues to operate in and through the Church today — and if so, to what degree, in what forms, and with what expectation. It is on this question that I want to press the conversation forward, not with polemics, but with pastoral urgency and biblical fidelity.
“The last words Jesus spoke before his ascension were not a historical footnote. They were a living commission — and they were addressed to us.”
The Promise That Changes Everything
Acts 1:8 (ESV)
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
These are the last recorded words of Jesus before his ascension into heaven. Consider the weight of that. When a person speaks for the final time before departing, those words carry a gravity that ordinary speech does not. Jesus had forty days after the resurrection to say whatever he wished. He chose, as his parting commission, to speak of power — the power of the Holy Spirit — and of witness that would extend to the ends of the earth.
If Acts 1:8 is not applicable to the Church today, it is difficult to understand why Jesus would have spoken it at all. Either his promise was for a specific historical moment now closed to us — a position that requires significant hermeneutical argument — or it is a living word addressed to every generation of the Church until he returns. I am firmly persuaded it is the latter. The Great Commission has not expired. Neither has the promise of power that undergirds it.
The question, then, is not whether this power is available. Acts 1:8 asserts that it is. The more difficult question is this: Why does so much of the Church in the modern West seem to operate as though it has never received this promise — or worse, as though it has quietly decided the promise no longer applies?
Pentecost and the Grammar of the Miraculous
Acts 2:1–4 (ESV)
When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Acts 2 arrives almost immediately on the heels of Christ’s ascension, and what it describes is not subtle. Tongues of fire. A sound like a mighty rushing wind. A company of believers suddenly speaking languages they had never learned. If the Church is honest with herself, she must acknowledge that this is extraordinary — not metaphorically extraordinary, but literally, categorically beyond the ordinary course of nature. This is a sign and a wonder by any definition of those terms.
The sign of tongues at Pentecost is particularly significant, and particularly contested. On the day the Church was born, the first gift given was the gift of tongues. Not administrative skill. Not theological acuity. Not eloquence. The first gift was a supernatural language — an utterance that bypassed the speaker’s natural comprehension and came directly from the Spirit of God. In Acts 2, these tongues were actual human languages, understood by the gathered diaspora crowd from across the known world, though the speakers themselves had never studied them. That is a miracle by any account.
I will speak plainly from my own experience here. When I was twenty-one years old, studying at university in England, I was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues. I had very little theological framework for what was happening — I had not yet studied the systematic theology I have since spent years in. What I had was a raw, undeniable encounter with the living God, expressed in a language that was not my own, that I could not manufacture, and that left me permanently changed. I am not building an entire doctrine on personal experience. But I am saying that personal experience, when it aligns with the testimony of Scripture and the practice of the early Church, cannot simply be set aside as emotionalism or cultural conditioning.
The tragedy is that the gift of tongues has become one of the most divisive issues in the body of Christ, when it was given as one of the most unifying signs of the Spirit’s arrival. Many in the Reformed tradition have moved to marginalize or dismiss this gift entirely. When a church begins to deny or diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to begin diminishing the broader expectation of supernatural gifts across the board. The slide is logical: if the most visible, verifiable gift of the Spirit at Pentecost is explained away or declared obsolete, the same hermeneutical logic will eventually be applied to prophecy, healing, and the rest.
I do not want to be unfair to those who hold cessationist convictions — they have thought carefully about their position, and they are brothers and sisters in Christ. But I do want to press them on one point: the pattern of Acts 2 is not restricted to the Twelve. The tongues of fire rested on each one who was present. The Spirit was poured out on all of them. This was not an apostolic privilege. It was the normative experience of the gathered community of Jesus.
“When a church begins to diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to diminish the broader expectation of the supernatural altogether.”
The Prophetic Promise of the Last Days
Acts 2:17 (ESV)
“And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”
Peter, addressing the bewildered crowd at Pentecost, quotes the prophet Joel. His interpretive move is decisive: what you are seeing right now, he says, is the fulfillment of what God promised for the last days. The outpouring of the Spirit — prophesied, awaited, now arriving — is not a temporary anomaly. It is the characteristic mark of the age between Christ’s ascension and his return. We are in the last days. Which means we are in the age of the Spirit’s outpouring.
The language of ‘pouring out’ is emphatic and generous. It is not a trickle. It is not a carefully rationed dispensation to a select few. God says he will pour out his Spirit on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, across lines of gender and generation. And what follows from this outpouring? Prophecy. Visions. Dreams.
This is precisely where many Reformed and cessationist churches grow quiet. The outpouring of the Spirit is, in some theological frameworks, reinterpreted as referring solely to the writing of the New Testament, or to the establishment of the apostolic office, now closed. But this interpretation strains against the plain reading of the text. Peter does not say the Spirit was poured out on the apostles. He says it was poured out on all who were present — and extends the promise further still to all whom the Lord our God will call (Acts 2:39).
The gift of prophecy, in particular, deserves recovery in the contemporary church. The Apostle Paul devotes an entire chapter — 1 Corinthians 14 — to its proper practice. He does not do so to describe a historical phenomenon safely in the past. He writes to a living congregation, offering pastoral instruction on how to administer this gift for the upbuilding, encouragement, and consolation of the body. He commands them — not suggests, commands — to eagerly desire the spiritual gifts, especially prophecy (1 Cor. 14:1).
1 Corinthians 14:1–3 (ESV)
Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.
Notice the framework Paul establishes. Love comes first — always. The gifts are never ends in themselves. They are servants of love. A congregation that pursues the gifts without love produces noise, confusion, and harm. But a congregation that loves without pursuing the gifts is not following Paul’s command. The two are not alternatives. They are partners.
How can a congregation eagerly desire a gift they have never been taught? How can they pursue something their pastors never model, never preach, never make space for? The silence of so many pulpits on the gift of prophecy is not theological neutrality. It is a form of deprivation. The sheep cannot receive what the shepherd never offers.
Let me speak from my own history again. There have been moments in my life when someone prayed over me and spoke something they could not have known — something that had been buried in the quiet of my heart for a long time. A word about my calling. A word about my children. A directional word that came to pass. I received a word once, spoken over me before a congregation of two hundred people: ‘Your heart will long for a land far away from this shore.’ That person said nothing more specific than that. But we was in Malaysia at the time, and the word eventually led us across twenty-one hours of ocean to America. That is the gift of prophecy operating in the framework of love — not for spectacle, not for control, but for the upbuilding of a servant of God who needed to hear his Father’s voice.
I am also keenly aware of the excesses. The prophetic culture of some Pentecostal and charismatic circles has produced manipulation, false predictions, and wounded people who built their lives on words that never came true. This is real, and it must be addressed — not by eliminating the gift, but by returning to the apostolic framework Paul provides: prophecy that edifies, encourages, and consoles; prophecy that is tested, weighed, and submitted to the community; prophecy that operates in the atmosphere of love.
Visions, Dreams, and the Suppressed Imagination
Acts 2:17 also promises that young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams. The evangelical world has largely spiritualized these categories into metaphor, or dismissed them as the province of more excitable Christians. But the New Testament treats visions and dreams with remarkable seriousness. It was in a vision that Ananias was sent to the blinded Saul of Tarsus. It was through a dream that Joseph was warned to flee to Egypt. It was in a trance that Peter received the vision of the clean and unclean animals, which dismantled his assumptions about Gentile inclusion.
I find that when I lean into worship, when I create space for quiet and attentiveness to God, things come into my mind’s eye that feel less like my own imagination and more like something being given to me. I have largely stopped sharing these things in my current context — the culture of the denominational congregation where we presently worship does not make space for it, and I do not want to cause disruption or confusion. But I am aware of a cost in that silence. Something is being withheld from the body that it was meant to receive.
This is the practical effect of a church culture that does not theologically sanction the experiential gifts: people who carry these gifts learn to suppress them, to privatize them, to wonder in silence whether what they are experiencing is real or simply self-generated. The doctrine of the church becomes a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit, rather than a framework that helps the Spirit’s gifts operate with wisdom and order.
Laying Hands on the Sick — A Command, Not a Suggestion
Mark 16:15–18 (ESV)
“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
This passage is part of Jesus’ commissioning of his disciples into the world. It is embedded in the Great Commission itself — the same text that evangelicals rightly treat as the Church’s marching orders for all generations. And Jesus says, without qualification, that signs will accompany those who believe. The casting out of demons. Speaking in new tongues. Healing the sick.
Most non-charismatic evangelical churches enthusiastically embrace the Great Commission. They send missionaries. They plant churches. They translate Scriptures. But the signs that Jesus says will accompany those who believe? Those are quietly set aside — explained as belonging to the apostolic age, or reinterpreted symbolically, or simply not discussed.
The healing of the sick is perhaps the most practically significant of these signs, because sickness is universal. Every congregation contains people who are suffering — cancer, depression, chronic pain, grief, addiction, anxiety, the slow attrition of bodies that are aging toward death. Jesus says: lay your hands on the sick, and they will recover. The Church should be doing this. Many do — there are healing prayer teams in churches across the denominational spectrum. But the frequency of visible healing is, in much of the Western church, remarkably low.
Someone once described this contrast to me with painful clarity. A healing team that had seen extraordinary results in Africa returned to New York City and found the atmosphere profoundly different. Healings that had seemed almost natural in one context became rare in another. The explanation Jesus himself offers, again and again, is faith: ‘Where is your faith?’ And faith, as Paul reminds us, comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. If the pulpit never speaks of healing, never models expectant prayer, never creates liturgical or pastoral space for the laying on of hands, the congregation will not carry a living expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of faith in the abstract. It is a failure of formation.
There is also a word to be said about spiritual warfare. Jesus says that those who believe will cast out demons. I recognize that this makes many Christians — especially those formed in rationalistic, cessationist, or mainline traditions — deeply uncomfortable. But consider the demographics of a congregation today: How many are struggling with suicidal ideation? How many wrestle with addictions that seem to have a will of their own, that resist every rational intervention? How many carry patterns of destruction that they themselves cannot explain? The New Testament would not necessarily pronounce a demonic verdict on every one of these struggles. But it would not dismiss the possibility either. Spiritual warfare is real. The deliverance ministry of Jesus was not incidental to his mission — it was central to his announcement of the Kingdom of God.
“What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. The doctrine of the church can become a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit.”
The Cultural Rationalism We Have Inherited
None of what I have described above happens in a vacuum. The modern Western church is formed by a broader cultural rationalism that has been accumulating for centuries — from the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason, through the rise of scientific materialism, to the pervasive assumption of our present moment that what cannot be verified empirically is not real, or at least not reliable. This cultural atmosphere shapes what we consider plausible, even before we open our Bibles.
When the majority of our waking hours are spent in a world that is resolutely materialist — where our senses are attuned to the tangible, the measurable, the reproducible — it becomes genuinely difficult to maintain an expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of sincerity. It is the predictable result of formation in a culture that treats the supernatural as the province of the credulous. The apparent diminishing of signs and wonders in the Western church is not primarily a theological conclusion. It is a perceptual one, shaped by the assumptions of our age.
But the assumptions of our age are not the last word. The Church in the Global South — in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America — is exploding with accounts of healing, deliverance, prophetic words, and miraculous provision. These reports are not the product of theological naivety. Many of the fastest-growing, most theologically serious movements in Christianity today operate with a completely natural expectation of the miraculous. They read Acts 2 and see a description of normal Christianity. The Western church’s skepticism is the anomaly, not the norm.
A Call to Theological and Practical Renewal
What I am calling for is not a collapse into undisciplined enthusiasm. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 stand: let all things be done decently and in order (v. 40). The gifts of the Spirit are given to the community, exercised within the community, and tested by the community. Prophecy is weighed. Tongues are interpreted. The spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet (v. 32). These are not restrictions designed to minimize the Spirit’s work. They are guardrails designed to protect it — to ensure that the supernatural gifts build up rather than destabilize.
But order without expectation is a form of unbelief. A church that has arranged its liturgy, its polity, and its theology to make no room for the miraculous has not achieved theological maturity. It has achieved a sophisticated form of practical cessationism — the functional belief that the extraordinary promises of God no longer apply, whatever doctrinal position it formally holds.
Renewal begins in the pulpit. Pastors must preach the full counsel of God — including Acts 1:8, Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, Mark 16, and every other text that speaks to the present reality of the Spirit’s power. They must preach these texts with the same expectant faith they would bring to texts about salvation or sanctification. They must create structures in congregational life — prayer teams, prophetic communities, healing services — that give these gifts space to operate with wisdom and accountability.
Renewal also requires humility. Those in cessationist traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their theological framework was shaped more by the Enlightenment than by exegesis. Those in charismatic traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their practice of the gifts has been ordered by love and truth, or by a culture of spectacle and individualism. Both streams have something to receive from the other. The goal is not to win a theological debate. The goal is to be the church that Jesus promised — filled with the Spirit, moving in power, witnessing to his resurrection to the ends of the earth.
The promise of Acts 1:8 has not expired. The last days Joel prophesied have not ended. The commission of Mark 16 has not been revoked. The gifts Paul described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 have not been quietly withdrawn. What has happened, in too many quarters of the Western church, is that we have allowed the plausibility structures of our culture to override the plain testimony of Scripture and the witness of two thousand years of Church history.
Signs and wonders should never be diminished. They should be pursued — soberly, lovingly, scripturally, expectantly. Not because we are chasing experiences. But because we are following a living Lord who is the same yesterday, today, and forever — and who promised that those who believe in him would do the works he did, and greater works than these (John 14:12). The Church owes the world nothing less than the full gospel: not a rationalized gospel with its power quietly excised, but the gospel of the Kingdom — announced in word, demonstrated in power, and driven by the love of the Spirit poured out on all flesh.
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Pastor Al Ngu (MDiv) is a church planter in New York City and the founder of Hearts Burn NYC,
An outdoor faith community gathering in Union Square Park.
Al Ngu sermons & devotion 