Stay With Him
We come to know Christ by staying with what we do not understand about Him yet, until we can love it and want to become like Him.
When I was a junior in high school, I was on the swim team. I already had friends there. They were quieter, like me. They were exactly who I expected to be friends with.
Then there was McKay. McKay was loud. Outgoing. Pretty much everything I was not. But for some reason McKay got it into his head that we were going to be best friends. One day after swim practice he followed me home in his car and knocked on my front door. He told me we were hanging out. I thought he was crazy, but we started hanging out anyway.
At first it was awkward. Our personalities did not mesh. I wasn’t sure what to do with him. I already had friends. I didn’t think I needed another one, especially one who wasn’t like me.
But we spent more time together. Practice. School. Ordinary days. And the more I understood him, the more I started to appreciate the very traits that had made me uncomfortable. The loudness. The way he could make anyone feel welcomed. The things that were hard for me.
I didn’t get to know him by deciding, from a distance, that we were a match. I got to know him by staying long enough to understand him.
Today McKay is one of my best and oldest friends. Our kids are friends. We still get together all the time. And I almost missed that, because at first he made me uncomfortable.
I think we can do the same thing with Jesus Christ.
There are things about Him that come easily. His kindness. His peace. The way He took the children in His arms. We stay close to those, and that is good.
But there are things about Him we have a harder time understanding. A mercy that feels unfair. A commandment that costs us something. A teaching that doesn’t sit right. And it is tempting to keep those at a distance and stay with what we already love about Him. The things that already feel comfortable.
They are not a different Jesus. They are the same Person. And if we stay with Him long enough to really know Him, what we don’t understand about Him yet becomes easier to love. We start to want to be more like Him — not just in the ways that already feel comfortable.
The Savior prayed, “This is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”1 Not know about Him. Know Him.
The Savior’s own disciples ran into this. In John 6, He taught that He was the bread of life — that they had to come to Him, not just to the miracle. Many of them could not accept it. The scripture says they called it “an hard saying,” and then “many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.”2
Jesus turned to the Twelve and asked, “Will ye also go away?”
Peter didn’t say he understood it. He said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.”3
That is not a man who had it figured out. That is a man who stayed. And I think that is how we come to know Christ. Not by waiting until everything about Him feels easy. By staying long enough to understand Him.
Yours might be different from mine. A commandment that costs you something. A doctrine you don’t like. A season where His answers are slower than you wanted. The point is the same: what we don’t understand about Him yet is often where we get to know Him.
I am a rule follower. I always have been. I have tried to keep the commandments my whole life. So there are scriptures that have always nagged at me a little. Like this one, in the same chapter as the story I am about to tell: “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.”4
It wasn’t one big moment. It was more of a quiet question that kept coming back. If I have worked to keep the commandments my whole life, and someone else makes a mess of things and is welcomed home like that, how is that fair? Why even keep the commandments then?
The Savior told a story about this. We usually call it the parable of the prodigal son. But there are two sons in the story.
The younger son takes his share of the inheritance,5 leaves, and wastes all of it. When he finally comes home, his father runs to meet him and throws a party.
The older brother is out in the field. He hears the music, and he is angry. The scripture says he “would not go in.”6 He tells his father, “Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment.”7
That is my question. That is the rule follower’s question.
But notice something about the older brother. He never left. He lived in his father’s house his whole life. He kept every rule. And he still did not understand his father’s heart.
That one stops me. It means I can keep the commandments, show up every Sunday, and still not really know the Savior. Being near Him and knowing Him are not the same thing.
His father comes out and “intreated him.”6 He doesn’t argue. He says, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.”8
Nothing was taken from the older son. His place with his father was never threatened. But his anger kept him outside the joy his father wanted to share with him.
For a long time I treated that question like a problem to solve. Find the argument that makes it fair, and move on. That isn’t what helped.
What helped was staying with it. Reading that chapter again. Praying about it. Talking it through with my parents and with my wife, Sam.
The thing that finally shifted it for me was a detail I had skipped every other time I read it. The father doesn’t only run down the road for the son who left. After the older brother refuses to go in, the father leaves the party and comes out to the field for him too.
That is when the question stopped being about fairness and started being about Him. He was coming after both of them.
Jesus said, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”9 When He told this story, He was showing us His own heart.
That is who the Savior is. Mercy is not a glitch in His character. It is His heart. And no one is loved less because someone else came back.
If you are the older brother, He is in the field with you. If you are the one who left, He already ran down the road. Either way, He is still coming toward you.
I still have questions. But I know Him better than I did when I kept this at arm’s length. What I struggled with turned out to be something I could love, once I understood it. By staying with Him through the discomfort, I’ve come to know Him better.
What does this look like in practice?
Pick one thing about Christ you usually keep at a distance. A teaching that is hard. A mercy you don’t understand. A question you’ve set aside. Don’t walk away from it. Stay with it a little longer. Read it. Pray about it. Talk to someone you trust. And then ask Him, not just “help me agree with this,” but “what does this teach me about You?”
If we stay long enough to know Him, what we don’t understand about Him yet becomes easier to love. And we start to want to be more like Him.
The parable never tells us whether the older brother went inside. It ends with the father standing in the field, asking. I think that is on purpose. That part of the story is up to us.
I almost missed one of my best friends because he made me uncomfortable at first. I don’t want to miss the Savior for the same reason.
Jesus Christ can be known, not just learned about. He meets us in what we don’t understand about Him yet, and when we stay with Him there, we come to know His heart. He comes out to the field, or down the road, for every one of us, and He is waiting for us to come to Him.