Think back to a sixth-grade lesson: memorizing the prepositions in alphabetical order until they stuck, and learning that a preposition is everything a squirrel can do to a log. Around it, through it, under it. It sounds like a small grammar lesson, but the little words matter. They describe where you stand in relation to power, and whether that power is working with you or over you.
Picture a three-year-old in the grocery store, red cowboy boots planted firmly on the floor while her mother tries to hurry her along. Her mother turns, sees the crooked pigtails and the boots on the wrong feet, and melts. She picks her daughter up and holds her close.
That is soft power: authority that moves through trust, love, and persuasion. Hold it next to the other kind: the leader who rewrites a constitution to remove term limits, the government that bans its opposition. Both are on display in the world you live in, and scripture asks you to notice the difference.
In the temple, the religious leaders corner Jesus and demand to know who gave him permission to do these things. He answers with a question of his own: did John’s baptism come from heaven, or from human beings? John stood outside established religious power, so the real question is whether you can recognize God’s work when it happens outside your control. The leaders can’t answer without exposing themselves, so they say, “We don’t know.” If you’re honest, that answer can sound a lot like your own.
“When our worth is called into question, may we trust a power beyond us to take hold and claim us as beloved. Because God’s work is not yet finished. God’s time is not our time. And God’s authority takes hold without power grabs.”
Sometimes your worth gets called into question, the way it did for a boy in Tennessee who grew up dreading the question of whose child he was. When a preacher finally turned and asked, the answer he gave was one the boy never expected: you are a child of God; now go claim your inheritance. That boy, Ben Hooper, went on to be elected governor twice. God’s authority doesn’t grab. It claims you, and then it sends you out.
