A more concrete way to put it is that I once found myself in a high-speed chase with the Alaska State Troopers, driving recklessly, trying to outrun consequences I had no business trying to outrun. I was young, confused, proud, and, in more ways than one, lost. I had enough religion in me to use the language of God. I had enough instability in me to behave as though I had no father at all.
That tension has stayed with me for many years.
What does it mean to call God “Father” when your life does not look at all like the life of a faithful son? What does it mean to speak in the language of belonging while acting out a rebellion you can barely explain to yourself? And perhaps most importantly, at what point does God come near? Does he wait until we have improved our behavior, arranged our theology, and cleaned up our mess? Or does he come precisely in the middle of it?
My conversation with Derek Vreeland brought that question back to the surface.
Derek’s work on God in the Neighborhood, built around Eugene Peterson’s rendering of John 1:14 in The Message, turns on one line: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.”
That is one of those translations that, whether or not one would want it as the sole rendering of the verse, does something important to the imagination. It takes a majestic theological claim and places it where we actually live.
Neighborhood.
Not merely temple. Not merely heaven. Not merely doctrine. Neighborhood.
There is a great deal packed into that.
Christians say easily enough that God became man. We say it so often that we can forget how strange it is. Derek was right to emphasize how unexpected the incarnation really was. People were waiting for many things, but not for this. They were waiting for victory, deliverance, restoration, vindication, perhaps even for power granted from above. But the claim that God would come near in flesh and blood, in humility, in obscurity, in vulnerability, in proximity to ordinary people — that was harder to receive.
It still is.
We tend to want a God who stays safely elevated until we are ready for him. Or a God who has power that we can invoke, only in spectacle, only in the approved places. But the New Testament insists on something more unsettling. God did not remain at a distance. He came among us. He came not simply to institutions, not simply to the strong, not simply to those with all the right answers. He came into the neighborhood.
That matters because neighborhoods are where real life happens.
Neighborhoods are where people carry shame, confusion, ego, habits, addictions, memories, griefs, and unfinished stories. Neighborhoods are where pipes burst on Christmas Eve, where marriages strain, where children grow up insecure, where people move in and out, where fathers fail and sons run, where religion can sit on the edge of life for years without becoming its center. Neighborhoods are not theoretical. They are where incarnation has to mean something or it means very little.
What struck me in Derek’s own story was how much of his life was shaped not by religious abstraction but by proximity. A family returning to church. A youth group not built on flash but on Jesus. A boy named Michael turning around in a folding chair and asking a shy newcomer, “Who are you?” No gimmick. No grand strategy. Just presence. Interest. Kindness. A lived expression of the gospel.
That too is neighborhood.
And that too is incarnation in derivative form. Not that Michael was Jesus, of course, but that he was embodying the way of Jesus. He was practicing the kind of ordinary welcome through which God often begins to reorder a life.
I think that is one reason Derek’s account resonated with me.
Many people imagine that transformation begins when someone wins an argument. Sometimes arguments matter. I care about ideas, theology, interpretation, and truth claims. But in actual life, transformation often begins because someone embodied the reality they professed. Someone made room. Someone noticed you. Someone did not treat you as a problem to solve or a threat to manage. Someone loved you in a way that made God more plausible.
That is not sentimental. It is deeply theological.
If the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood, then Christian witness must not remain merely conceptual. It must take flesh as well. It must become visible in hospitality, kindness, patience, courage, forgiveness, and the kind of attention that says to another person: you are not alone here.
This was part of what I was missing, or at least struggling to understand, in my younger years.
I knew enough to invoke God. I did not know enough to live as though his fatherhood actually reordered the whole structure of my life. I could claim belonging while acting in ways that contradicted it. That is not unusual. It may even be one of the most common spiritual conditions in the world. But what I did not understand clearly then is that God’s nearness is not the reward for having already become good. It is the means by which goodness begins to be restored.
That does not excuse rebellion. It does not romanticize dysfunction. It does not imply that a high-speed chase is somehow spiritually noble. It was stupid. It was dangerous. It was wrong. But the grace of God is precisely that he does not say, “Return once you have become presentable.” The Father in the Prodigal Son story comes near while we are still far off.
This is what makes the incarnation so central.
God does not save us by shouting instructions from a distance. He does not merely send a memo. He does not remain the hidden force behind the stars and seasons, though he is certainly that. He enters the human condition. He joins us in life, as Derek put it in speaking about the threefold rhythm of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. He joins us not only in joy and ordinariness, but in suffering and death and new life as well.
That is why “moved into the neighborhood” is more than a clever phrase. It is a corrective.
It corrects the idea that God is only found in centers of power. It corrects the idea that religion is mainly about escaping the ordinary. It corrects the idea that God’s work happens elsewhere and that our streets, homes, families, and local communities are spiritually secondary. They are not secondary. They are exactly where the life of God meets us.
And if that is true, then it has implications for how we live.
It means the neighborhood is not beneath theology. It is where theology must be lived. It means the person next door is not an interruption to spiritual life. He may be one of its tests. It means the local, ordinary, inconvenient, unglamorous work of love matters. It means Christian community should not need spectacle to become compelling. It should need the Divine to be present - through us. It means that if we want to know whether God is doing something among us, one thing to look for is whether people are becoming more capable of welcome, more capable of presence, more capable of love.
And yes, it means that some of us need to reckon honestly with the difference between claiming God as Father and living as sons.
That reckoning can be painful. It can expose hypocrisy, fear, insecurity, and pride. But it is also the beginning of healing. Because the point is not to prove we have always been good boys - or good girls. The point is to discover that the Father we invoke has in fact come near, and that his nearness is the thing that begins to make us whole.
Derek ended our conversation with a simple reminder: You are not alone. God has moved into your neighborhood.
That is simple enough for a child to understand.
It is also deep enough to spend a lifetime learning.
Sneak Peek
Next week on Created in the Image of God, I’ll be speaking with Steve Bezner about how culture shapes our understanding of faith and why following Jesus often means choosing kingdom values over cultural ones. That should open up an important discussion about discipleship, formation, and competing loyalties.
Then I’ll be speaking with Dan Allender about trauma, healing, and the Christian story — and about how God meets us in the deepest places of pain. That is a conversation I am especially looking forward to.
As always, thank you for reading. And remember: you are created in the image of God, and God loves his creation.
