An essay
faith4future
I want to tell you the truth before I tell you anything else, because the whole thing falls apart if I don't.
I'm a screwup.
Not in the cute, self-deprecating way people say it on a stage to seem humble before they list their accomplishments. I mean the real way. I fall short of the things I believe. I say things I can't fully live. I start strong and drift. If you measured my life by the gap between what I point at and what I actually reach, you'd find a wide one, and you'd be right to.
So here is the question that almost stopped me from writing any of this:
Who am I to point anyone toward anything?
If I can't get there myself — if I'm still a mess, still wandering, still failing at the very thing I want to call others toward — then isn't it hypocrisy to open my mouth at all? Isn't the honest move to stay quiet until I've earned the right? To arrive first, and then point?
I sat in that for a long time. It's a heavy place to sit. And I think a lot of people are sitting in it right now — people with something true to say who've been convinced they have to become flawless before they're allowed to say it. So they say nothing. The light stays unmentioned. The drowning go unpointed-to. All because the only people who could point are honest enough to know they haven't arrived.
Here's what finally got me up off the floor.
A signpost doesn't have to reach the city.
Think about what a signpost actually is. It stands at the crossroads, and it says: the city is that way. It points true. And it does this without ever taking a single step toward the city itself. It will never arrive. It's not supposed to. Its whole job is to point, not to travel.
Nobody looks at a signpost and calls it a hypocrite for not being in the city it points to. That would be absurd. The signpost isn't claiming to be the destination. It's claiming to know the direction. And those are completely different claims.
I had confused them. I thought that to point toward the source — toward God, toward meaning, toward the thing worth wanting — I had to first be a person who had arrived there. But that was never the assignment. I was never asked to be the source. I was only asked to point toward it. And you don't have to be the light to point at the light. You just have to be honest about which way it is.
In fact — and this is the part that turned the whole thing over for me — the honest pointer is the one still walking.
Picture two guides. The first stands at the front of the room, polished and arrived, and says: follow me, I have made it, be like me. The second stands in the middle of the same dark road as everyone else, mud on his knees, and says: I haven't made it either, but I can see the light from here, and it's that way — come on, let's go together.
Which one do you trust? Which one reaches you when you're actually lost?
The first one is the hypocrite. The hypocrite isn't the mess who says "the light's that way, I'm still walking toward it too, come on." The hypocrite is the one who pretends he's already arrived. My honesty about still walking isn't the thing that disqualifies me. It's the thing that makes me believable.
The screwups were always the ones who got sent.
I used to read the old stories and assume the people God used were the qualified ones. The clean ones. The ones who had it together.
Then I actually read them.
A murderer with a stutter, hiding in the desert. A coward threshing wheat in a winepress because he was too afraid to be seen. A man who said, the moment he glimpsed the holy, "I am a man of unclean lips." A liar. A doubter. A denier who wept. A persecutor. Over and over, the pattern is the same, and it is not subtle: God reaches for the ones who know they don't measure up.
I used to think that was strange. Now I think it's the whole point. The person who knows he's a screwup is the only person who can point at grace honestly — because he's not secretly pointing at himself. The polished man is always, quietly, a little bit the message. Look how I did it. The broken man can't pull that off. He has nothing to point at but the light, because he knows better than anyone that he isn't it.
So my failure — the very thing I thought disqualified me — might be the qualification. It's the thing that guarantees I'll never put myself on the altar where only God belongs. I'm too aware of my own cracks to mistake myself for the source. That's not my weakness as a witness. It's my credential.
Toward, not to.
There's a small word I kept tripping over, and it turned out to hold the whole thing.
I kept asking whether my life was supposed to be pointed to the source, or toward it. It felt like grammar. It wasn't.
To is arrival. To is a finish line you cross, a destination you possess, a box you check. If the assignment is to get to the source — to fully arrive, to embody it, to be done — then I have already failed, and so has every person who ever lived, and the whole project is hopeless.
But it was never to. It was always toward.
Toward is a direction. Toward is a heading you keep correcting back to every time you drift. It doesn't require arrival. It requires facing. You can be miles off the path and still be oriented toward home — still turning back, still leaning that way, still correcting. A compass needle doesn't have to reach north to point north. It just has to keep swinging back.
Which means the question at the end of a life was never did you arrive. You won't. None of us do. The question was always: which way were you facing?
And that changes everything about what it means to have lived well. You can fall a thousand times. You can drift, fail, screw up by nature, feel like a fraud at 1 a.m. with the work undone — and still, still, have lived a life pointed toward the source. The drift doesn't break it. The only thing that breaks it is ceasing to turn back. And the name for the force that lets a wandering man, who keeps turning back, count in the end as pointed toward — that name is grace.
So: point anyway.
Here's where I landed, after all of it.
The fear said: you're a screwup, so don't point at all. Stay quiet. You'd be a hypocrite. And for a while the fear sounded like humility. It sounded like the honest, modest thing to do.
But it had it exactly backwards. Refusing to point because you're unworthy isn't humility — it's the last hiding place of pride, still secretly believing the message depends on the messenger being clean. The message was never about me. It was always about grace. And the most powerful sermon a screwup can preach is the one his polished competitors can't: I'm a mess. The light is still that way. Grace is real. Come on.
That reaches the drowning person. The arrived saint, pointing down from the shore, can't touch the one in the water the way the fellow-swimmer can — the one who's choking on the same waves and still has a hand free to point and say that way, kick that way, I've got you, let's go.
So I'm done waiting to be worthy. I'll be a mess who points true. I'll be a signpost that knows it's also a traveler. I'll point from inside the struggle, toward and not to, a screwup aiming at grace instead of at himself, turning back every time I drift — and trusting that the turning-back is enough, because Someone made it enough.
If you've been waiting to arrive before you point — waiting to be clean, to be finished, to be qualified, to have earned the right — hear this from one screwup to another:
You don't have to arrive to point. You just have to be honest about which way it is.
Point anyway.
Grace.
— faith4future
This essay was written during a real night of the author's own wrestling. It is not a report from someone who figured it out. It's a note from inside the struggle, which is the only place any of it was ever worth saying from.
Originally published at point-anyway.pages.dev.