Nobody hands you meaning. You excavate it.
I used to think meaning was something you found the way you find a coin on the pavement a lucky, sudden thing, waiting in plain sight for whoever happened to look down at the right moment. It took me most of my adult life to understand it works the other way. Meaning is buried under the years, not sitting on top of them. You have to dig, and the digging is the whole of the work and Hallelujah, the digging is worth it.
The Journey Is Not a Straight Line
If you had shown me, at twenty, a map of the forty-some years ahead of me, I would not have recognized the woman at the end of it. There were seasons I would have called ruin at the time that I now understand were construction. There were rooms I sat in for years, waiting for something to change, not realizing I was the thing being changed.
That is the part nobody tells you about a life: it does not move in a straight line toward a destination. It spirals. You pass the same lesson three, four, five times, at a slightly different altitude each time, until one day you recognize it instead of just surviving it.
“Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth” Ecclesiastes 12:1 (KJV) — used to
sound to me like a warning about time running out. I read it differently now: as an invitation to start the digging early, Lord, because the digging takes decades either way, and we may as well begin. And if we didn’t begin early if we’re only starting the digging now, at whatever age we’ve found ourselves that verse still has room for us. It was never really about being too late. It was about starting.
That, right there, is the bridge between a life and a scripture: the verse doesn’t just describe the journey from the outside. It meets you inside it, at whatever mile marker you’re actually standing
on.
Scripture Was Never Meant to Stay on the Page
For the longest time, I could quote scripture beautifully and still not feel it move. I knew the verses the way you know a song you’ve heard a thousand times “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2, NIV). I could recite it in my sleep. I could not always feel it doing anything to the actual 2 a.m. thought spinning in my head.
And then Hallelujah something shifted. I stopped asking scripture to comfort me in general, and I started bringing it my actual Tuesday. Not “is God faithful,” but Lord, where is that faithfulness today, in this meeting, in this marriage, in this body that doesn’t always feel like mine anymore?
“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” 2 Corinthians 3:18 (NKJV). Not by gritting my teeth. Not by trying harder. By beholding. I had spent years working to fix myself from the outside in: manage the behavior, control the outcome, tighten the discipline. Scripture kept gently insisting on the opposite order identity first, daughter, and then the fruit of it. You do not become who you are by working harder at it. You become who you are by beholding who you already are in Him, until it is simply true of you the way your own face in the mirror is true of you.
Experience Is Where Doctrine Becomes Yours
I could always recite “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” Psalm
139:14 (NIV). It took a season of real disorientation of not recognizing my own body or my own mind, of feeling like a stranger in my own life before that verse stopped being a nice sentiment on a wall and became something I needed to be true in order to keep going.
That is what I mean by experiencing scripture rather than simply reading it. Doctrine is what the page says. Experience is what happens when the page meets the actual texture of your Tuesday
your grief, your body’s changes, your marriage’s hard seasons, your children’s questions you don’t feel ready to answer. Scripture experienced is scripture that has survived contact with your real life and come out the other side still true only now it’s written in your own handwriting instead of someone else’s.
I think of Jabez, tucked into a genealogy nobody was paying attention to in 1 Chronicles 4:9-10
(NKJV): “Now Jabez was more honorable than his brothers… and Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, ‘Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!’ So God granted him what he requested.” His own mother named him for the pain of his birth, and he did not let that name write the rest of his story. He took what he had been handed and asked God, plainly, to make something larger of it than the label suggested. That, to me, is the entire project of meaning-making folded into one small prayer: refusing to let the worst sentence ever written over your life be the last one.
The Meaning Was Never Separate From the Mess
Here is what I would tell the woman I used to be, if I could: the meaning is not waiting for you after the hard chapters are over. It is being assembled, quietly, inside them, while you are still living them. You do not get the sense of it in the moment you rarely do but you are not required to. You are only required to stay long enough, awake enough, honest enough, for the pattern to eventually show itself.
Every season that felt like it was breaking me was, more accurately, converting me stepping me down, the way a transformer takes a current too high for ordinary use and makes it into something a house can actually run on. I am not the woman that current would have destroyed. I am the woman it built: one hard season at a time, one verse actually lived rather than merely recited, one moment of choosing to believe what was true over what merely felt true.
If you are in the middle of a chapter that does not make sense yet, hear this the way I wish someone had said it to me sooner: you are not lost inside your story. You are being written by it, on your way to becoming someone who will one day look back and call all of it every unglamorous, unfinished, ordinary Tuesday of it meaning. Hallelujah, and Amen.
Sacred, but Fully Known launches October 3rd. Subscribe below to find out which one wins.
— Funke
Sacred, but Fully Known: A Faith-Rooted Companion to Intimacy in Marriage launches October 3rd, 2026. Subscribe above to follow the story, and to be first in line on launch day.
