Read: Micah 7:1-10, 1 Corinthians 2:10-16
Pilgrim’s Progress Stage 1 Part 2

Relate: Christian does what anyone who has just been spiritually undone tends to do, he goes home and tells the people he loves most. He is desperate. He is terrified. He wants his family to feel what he feels, to see what he sees, to run with him toward safety before the destruction he is certain is coming falls on them all. But they look at him like he has completely lost his mind. His wife and children don’t pray with him. They don’t sit with his questions. They put him to bed early, convinced that sleep will sort out whatever fever of the mind has overtaken him. When sleep doesn’t fix it, they try mockery. When mockery doesn’t work, they try hardening their hearts altogether.

I think we often romanticize early conversion stories, as if everyone around the newly saved soul immediately perceives the glory of what is happening and joins the movement. That is almost never how it works. More often, the people closest to us are the most resistant, and for understandable reasons. They liked the old you. The old you was predictable. This new, weeping, book-clutching, burden-bearing version of you is unsettling. The family’s rejection of Christian is not simply a plot device, it is one of Bunyan’s most searingly accurate observations about the social cost of genuine conviction. Faith, when it’s real, tends to disturb the peace of the people around us before it transforms them.

React: What Christian’s family could not see, and what so many of our own loved ones cannot see, is that his burden was real even if they couldn’t feel it. The City of Destruction was doomed even if they refused to believe it. I can’t tell you the number of people who thought I was crazy for leaving behind a comfortable life to do who knows what in Turkiye. When I first started sharing about my burden for Kyiv, there were those thinking, “Oh great. Here we go again.” 

The urgency in Christian’s eyes was not madness; it was love. He was not trying to ruin his family’s comfortable life. He was trying to save them. There is a particular kind of loneliness reserved for people who have seen something true that the people they love most are not yet ready to see. If you have ever felt that loneliness, that grief of being unable to make someone you love feel what you feel, then you already understand Christian’s weeping better than my commentary could ever explain it.

Respond:

Dear God,
Break my heart for what breaks Yours. There will be those around me who do not understand the burden You have placed on me. Help me to realize that it is not my job to burden them. I can share, but the rest is up to You. God, I ask that You work on the hearts that I cannot touch. I ask that Your Holy Spirit do what only You can do. Give them Your heart. And give me the courage to faithfully follow You even if nobody around me understands.
Amen.