Insufficient and Still Held
Living the Unfinished Life as Participation
The beginning of a new year carries its own quiet demands.
Even before anything has changed, there is an expectation to know where we are headed: to name a direction, a plan, a vision for the months ahead. The calendar turns, and with it comes a subtle pressure to organise our hopes, to give shape to what we want this year to be for.
But not all seasons cooperate with that kind of clarity.
Some questions do not resolve simply because the year has changed. Some longings remain open. Some journeys continue without offering a clear map forward. And in those moments, the insistence on certainty can feel less like wisdom and more like noise.
As this year begins, I find myself not rushing toward answers, but returning to questions I have carried for some time now. Not as a failure to move on, but as an honest place to begin.
Because I keep circling the same questions.
God calls us to follow Him.
God has a will and a purpose for our lives.
We are meant to live faithfully, here and now, until we are finally with Him, awaiting the renewal of all things.
On paper, the story is coherent. On paper, it even sounds hopeful.
But somewhere in the middle, the coherence begins to strain.
If the end is communion with God, why the long road?
Why not bring people into paradise the moment they come to know Him?
Why faith that must be tested, refined, and stretched across years that remain unresolved?
At first, the simplest answer is that God is doing something we cannot see, that His purposes extend beyond our understanding and our timelines.
That may be true.
But it does not quite settle the question.
Because even as we are being transformed now, it is still insufficient.
The Uneasy Realization
No amount of faithfulness completes the work.
No obedience finishes it.
No spiritual discipline carries us all the way.
Scripture does not pretend otherwise. We are not perfected. We see dimly. We groan. We wait. Even the most faithful lives in the biblical story end unfinished.
God Himself must complete what He has begun.
And when that finally lands, it exposes something difficult to hold.
It means that this life — this long obedience, this waiting, this half-formed hope — is not about reaching completion. It is not about becoming spiritually adequate. It is not even about arriving at clarity.
It is about participation.
Participation, Not as Metaphor but as Reality
Participation is easy to misunderstand.
It can sound like contribution — doing our part.
Or involvement — being active in God’s work.
Or effort — showing up faithfully until the end.
But Christian participation is something deeper and more demanding.
It is not about what we add.
It is about the life we are drawn into.
The claim of Christian faith is not that we slowly become complete on our own, but that our lives are joined — hidden within a life that is not originally ours. Our story is being woven into something larger, something whose meaning does not depend on our ability to make it add up.
Participation means that even now — unfinished, unresolved, insufficient — we are living within the life of God.
Not as spectators.
Not as performers.
But as creatures learning how to remain.
Not a Test, Not a Holding Pattern
This reframes everything.
Life is not a test we must pass so that God can finally take us home.
It is not probation.
It is not leverage.
If it were, the delay would feel cruel.
Participation suggests something else entirely.
This life is not about proving that we are worthy of the end. It is about learning how to live in communion before everything is resolved.
Remaining faithful without clarity.
Remaining prayerful when prayers go unanswered.
Remaining open-handed when outcomes refuse to settle.
Participation does not eliminate longing.
It dignifies it.
It does not rush resolution.
It sustains presence.
Why Transformation Is Real and Still Insufficient
This is why transformation in this life is real but incomplete.
We are not being filled up with holiness until we reach a threshold. We are learning how to live in relationship with God, with others, with our own limits as finite creatures.
That learning cannot be completed within time.
There are wounds that cannot be healed here.
Longings that will not be fulfilled here.
Questions that will remain unanswered here.
And yet, what happens now is not wasted.
The person God will one day complete is not an abstract redeemed self. It is this person shaped by waiting and grief, obedience and desire, faith and fragility. The incompleteness does not disqualify the life. It gives it continuity.
God does not discard the unfinished.
He completes it.
The Deeper Tension
Still, this is not comforting in an easy way.
What presses most sharply is not that God must finish the work,
but that I cannot.
That I must live dependent — trusting a future I cannot secure. That meaning is not something I manufacture, but something I receive. That faith is not about control, progress, or visible coherence.
Participation removes the illusion of mastery.
It asks me to stay rather than to succeed.
To be faithful rather than effective.
To consent to being held rather than to insist on being finished.
And that is a costly invitation.
Hope, Reimagined
Perhaps this is what hope actually looks like.
Not confidence in progress.
Not assurance that things will resolve neatly.
Not certainty that the story will soon make sense.
But trust that the God who has joined my life to His own will not abandon what He has begun.
Even when the middle stretches longer than expected.
Even when the transformation feels slow and insufficient.
Even when the ending remains out of reach.
Even here.
Especially here.
A Question to Carry
As this year begins, what might it look like to live this season? Not as delay or failure, but as participation: a life held by God even before it is complete?