On abiding, lenses, and playing through
John 15:4 · WEB
Remain in me, and I in you. As the branch can’t bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you, unless you remain in me.
It started with Romans 8:18 — “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed toward us” — and the familiar ache underneath it: I know what’s important, and I keep getting pulled away from it. Work is loud. The day has gravity. The morning quiet resets the scale, and by mid-morning the scale has tipped again.
My first instinct was the old one: try harder not to get distracted. But that’s not a strategy, it’s a wish. The distraction isn’t an enemy that sneaks up — it’s just the default weight of the day. So the better version seemed to be: keep coming back. Don’t expect to never drift; build the habit of returning.
But then I noticed something about the returning itself.
Every return has a cost. I know this from work — switching tasks isn’t free. When I jump from one thing to another, part of my mind stays behind, and it takes minutes to fully arrive. Attention residue. I never switch cleanly; I always pay a toll.
And “coming back to God” has the exact same cost structure. If being with Him is a place — the quiet morning, the closed door — then every workday is a series of departures and re-arrivals, and I pay the residue toll on every trip. Commute out, commute home, lose half the energy in transit. If that’s the model, I lose, because the day is nothing but switches. The math is against me.
The whole model has a hidden assumption: that He’s somewhere I’m not.
He isn’t.
The word Jesus uses is not visit. “Remain in me, and I in you… apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:4–5). “Remain in my love” (John 15:9). The older translations render it abide — a dwelling word either way, the same one as “he who dwells in the secret place of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty” (Psalm 91:1). A place you remain, not a destination you reach and leave.
Brother Lawrence found it in a monastery kitchen: washing dishes became prayer, not because he stopped working to pray, but because the awareness ran underneath the work. Continuous, low-grade, unbroken. He called it practicing the presence of God.
Less commuting. More abiding. “Abide” was never a word for a visit.
My responsibility in this is real, but it’s smaller than I make it. “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) — not pray intensely, three scheduled times — never fully let go of the thread. David’s version: “I have set Yahweh always before me. Because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved” (Psalm 16:8). Notice: he set it. Paul’s: “Set your mind on the things that are above” (Colossians 3:2).
I don’t build the connection. It’s already built. My job is to keep a finger on the thread while my hands do everything else. The thread frays; I touch it again. A frayed thread you keep touching is a completely different thing from a door you keep walking through.
This is the hinge of the whole thing. “Where could I go from your Spirit? Or where could I flee from your presence?… If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there!” (Psalm 139:7–8). “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). “He is not far from each one of us. For in him we live, move, and have our being” (Acts 17:27–28).
His presence is not the variable. Mine is. The morning didn’t bring me closer to God, and the workday doesn’t carry me further away. The only thing oscillating is my awareness of a nearness that never changed. There is no distance to cross. There never was. The commute was imaginary — I was burning energy traveling to a place I never left.
Here’s the mercy in it: abiding is not one more discipline to grind at. “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavily burdened, and I will give you rest… my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30). “You will keep whoever’s mind is steadfast in perfect peace, because he trusts in you” (Isaiah 26:3) — You keep him. The branch doesn’t strain to stay on the vine. It just doesn’t leave.
Striving would put me right back in commuter mode — working hard to get somewhere I already am. The invitation is rest, not effort.
So if there’s no commute to make, what does the alternative actually look like, moment to moment?
Not switching to God — seeing through Him. A lens isn’t a task. You never toggle to your glasses; they aren’t an object of attention at all. They just quietly change how everything else appears. That’s the move: God stops being one more tab I switch to and becomes the medium the other tabs are seen through. No switch, no residue, no toll.
Jesus puts the whole thing in seeing terms: “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22). Fix the lens and the whole body fills with light — it’s a seeing problem, not a scheduling problem. “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2) — not interrupt the mind; renew it, so it runs differently underneath. “We don’t look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen” (2 Corinthians 4:18) — same scene, truer sight. “Whether therefore you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31) — whatever you do. The work isn’t a departure from Him; it’s one more thing done through the lens.
And I already know how to live this way, because I have lenses I never switch out of. I don’t commute to being a father. I don’t toggle into loving my wife. Those aren’t tasks competing with my other tasks — they’re the frame the tasks happen inside. The invitation is to let God be that kind of present.
One more picture, and it’s the one that sealed it. In Ted Lasso, the star player tells the team to stop treating him as the pinnacle and start playing through him. The difference is everything. A pinnacle is where the play ends — you work the ball up, deliver it, and the movement stops. Playing through him makes him the hub: still central, more central — but now the ball touches him and keeps moving. He’s involved in every pass precisely because nothing terminates at him. And when the star stops being the endpoint, the whole team gets better. The system opens up.
That’s the commute problem in football form. God-as-pinnacle means every spiritual moment is a ceremonial delivery — arrive, present, restart from the back. Exhausting, and the game keeps stopping. God-as-hub means He’s in every touch. The email, the proposal, the hard conversation, the kids’ bedtime — every pass moves through Him and keeps moving. The play never stops, because it never has to leave the flow to acknowledge Him. The flow is the acknowledgment.
For of him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory for ever! Amen. Romans 11:36 · WEB
Paul got there two thousand years before the show did. And Jesus named Himself the same way: “I am the way” (John 14:6). A way is something you travel through. Not a monument you visit.
The whole arc, compressed:
The sufferings and the noise of this present time lose the comparison (Romans 8:18) not only because glory is coming, but because the One the glory belongs to is already here — in the kitchen, in the inbox, in every touch of the ball.
Less commuting. Total abiding.