Christianity Today November 12, 2026 9 min signal 2026-11-12

How a conversation this week made me rethink how grace works

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

November 11, 2026

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This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

A few months ago, a younger Christian was talking to me about a really traumatic situation he had been through, and he worried because he expected his faith to make it easier to put it all behind him.

“Why can’t I just move on?” he said.

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I gave him all kinds of theological and spiritual formation answers, but I wish I could redo the talk. I wasn’t ready for it. Just this last week, another conversation—this time with an elderly woman—may have forever changed the way I think about the matter. And it all had to do with her stairs.

I had just finished speaking at an event about heaven, the new creation, and the resurrection life after death. One of the last people to come up to speak with me after was an impressive, dignified woman—one who seemed to have her life all put together. She said she was almost 80 years old, though I never would have guessed that because she looked at least 20 years younger. She said that she had lost her husband a couple of years ago, so I expected her questions to be—like many I hear from those who’ve lost a loved one—along the lines of “Will Harold recognize me in heaven?” or maybe even “Will we still be married?” They weren’t. She had no questions at all. She just wanted to tell me about her stairs.

This woman—I’ll call her “Ruth,” though that’s not her name—said that after her husband died, most people expected her to move. After all, the house she was in was there for a family full of children, as they had when they moved in. Now it was just her. She didn’t need a house that big, and probably would face the day when she couldn’t take care of it. More than that, though, some thought it would be bad for her to sit there, alone in her grief and memory, with reminders on every wall and in every doorway of the home they’d build together and all she had lost. She said, though, that she didn’t want to move. She said she couldn’t do without the stairs.

At first I thought I’d heard her wrong. After all, I’ve dealt often with people who, as they get older, have to move because they want to get to a place without stairs. I’d never heard someone say the opposite. She said, though, “I need those stairs. I need to remember how they changed my life.”

Ruth is a recovering alcoholic. She hid her drinking problem—and denied that she had one—for many years. No one at her church or in her friend group knew. One night, though, she was so intoxicated that she fell down the stairs, hitting her head at the bottom, losing consciousness, and nearly bleeding out. She woke up in a hospital on a ventilator and thought, What has happened to my life?

She told me that, without that kind of alarm, she would never have seen herself as someone who needed help, as someone who could do anything other than the next right thing.

Ruth is sober now, has been for many years. She teared up as she said how grateful she was that she could spend those last few years with full clarity, really present with her husband.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like if I had wasted that time,” she said. “If I couldn’t remember.”

She not only found help for herself. She was leaving, right after she talked to me, to a meeting where she would mentor addicted young women who are starting the process of recovery. She was going to help them hold on for one more day.

She couldn’t do it though, she said, without the stairs. Every time she looked at them, they reminded her of just how bad things had become. They were an ongoing warning of just how much she could hurt herself and other people. They were a constant signpost that she’s not as invincible and invulnerable as she often thinks she is.

But they were more than a warning too. Those stairs reminded her that she had survived all of that. Her life did not end. With the grace of God and the love of her friends, she stood back up. And, in fact, there was a whole room of women waiting for her that she could never have helped if she had not fallen down that staircase. Or if she had not gotten back up.

The stairs reminded her, every time she saw them, that she was carried along by grace. And that she could carry grace along to others. The stairs showed her what was possible about her life changing and seeing them

We tell people not to quote Romans 8:28—“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (KJV)—to people who are suffering. That’s good advice when the verse is used to imply that all things that happen are good or to make the point that “Everything works out in the end.” A suffering person (often rightly) hears that as dismissal, a way of rewording “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But once we come to feel the full context of Romans 8:28, in the midst of the rest of that amazing chapter, we need to both say it and hear it.

To see that grace is at work, even in the middle of awful things, is not to make those things one bit less awful.

The genealogy of Jesus, given to us in the Gospels, tells us a line full of horror. Jacob stealing his brother’s inheritance is there (Matt. 1:2). The brutal rape of Tamar is, too (v. 3). The sexual predation on Bathsheba is present also (v. 6). The pagan idolatry of Manasseh is there (v. 10), as is the covenant-breaking that led to the collapse of Jerusalem to Babylon, with God himself departing his temple (vv. 11–12). And on and on. The Scriptures in no way present the birth of Jesus as making any of these things in any sense good. They are all portrayed as horrors. The story shows, though, that these horrors were not the end of the story—that even in the face of unspeakable shame and terror, grace is often invisible, often imperceptible, but nonetheless at work.

A right view of this, then, leads you not to minimize the badness of what you’ve done or what’s been done to you. The fact that, at the cross, God was at work saving the world makes the human decision to crucify Jesus, if anything, morally even worse, not better (Acts 3:13–15). If someone asked Ruth, “How do I become, like you, a mentor who can change people’s lives?” I am quite sure Ruth would not pour that person a vodka soda and say, “Let’s start here.” She would describe, as she did with me, with grief and regret what she had lived through. But the very fact that she could do that—and do it that way—is itself another sign of grace.

Sometimes you can see retrospectively how God was at work conforming you to the image of Christ. This woman did, to some degree. So did the apostle Paul when he reflected on the fact that what he had gone through was necessary to enable him both to comfort those who will likewise suffer (2 Cor. 1:4) and to give him the hope that comes on the other side of self-reliance (vv. 9–10).

But most of the time you cannot track it. That’s why Paul wrote that the Spirit causes “groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26, ESV).

I wish I could redo the conversation with the man who wanted to know how to move on. I understand what he means, about thinking faith would make things easier, and I often think that too. There are some ways, though, that I think we try to “move on” too soon. We want to look at something and “learn the lesson” or “see the grace” as though that were a one-time thing. In reality, the message that “all things work together for good” is not about reading the things. It’s about trusting God even when the things don’t make sense. Or when they seem final. Or hopeless.

Moving on is a good thing, if we mean moving on from being trapped in something, or being hurt by something. But we can “move on” too much if we forget either that we walked through the valley of the shadow of death—or if we forget that the shepherd was there with us the whole time.

I can’t relate personally to Ruth’s struggle, in terms of the specifics. Maybe you can; maybe you can’t. But each of us has some set of metaphorical stairs in our lives—something that reminds us we are not as strong as we think we are, and that we are loved more than we think we could ever be. Those key moments happen that remind us that God is with us at the top of the stairs, at the bottom of the stairs, and on every step between the two. That’s grace. We get used to it sometimes. But it’s amazing all the same.

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.

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