Learning to Float
Reconstruction from Power Part 4: Application
If you have made it this far through my letters I can only assume that you have been carried along by
’s superior writing. This is the end I'm afraid and all that's left is the shouting—err that is, our response letters which will be forthcoming. For now, below is my application letter for Reconstruction from Power with Paul.
Dear Aaron,
We've come to the end of my exploration of Paul's reconstruction, and I find myself both hopeful and sobered by what we've discovered together. Having traced Paul's journey from persecutor to persecuted to martyr, having examined the qualitative nature of love, faith, and hope, and having explored the movement from individual to community in God's household, the question remains: How does one actually approach reconstruction personally?
The answer, I'm convinced, begins with a profound acceptance of what reconstruction is not, before we can embrace what it is.
What Reconstruction Is Not
First and foremost, reconstruction is not measurable. As I wrote in Am I the A**hole, we cannot have love, faith, and hope without having them entirely—they are qualitative realities that resist quantification. The moment we attempt to create a measurable framework for reconstruction, we've already missed the point. We cannot reverse-engineer spiritual maturity from a checklist, any more than Paul could have scheduled his Damascus road encounter or planned his three years in Arabia.
Reconstruction is also not renovation. As I noted in Reconstruction from Power, "Reconstruction is not a cosmetic re-skinning of the Christian life—not a fresh lick of paint or a new roll of paisley wallpaper in the prayer room. The work is necessary because of rot in the walls, gaps in the insulation and cracks in the foundation." The blueprint mentality—that assumption that "we know what we're doing"—stands as perhaps the greatest enemy of genuine transformation.
Most crucially, reconstruction cannot be rushed. If we rush to reconstruct, we build on the unsteady foundations of our own assumptions. That is the blueprint fallacy—exposing that we were never truly seeking truth, but only our own safety, legitimacy, and provision at any cost.
The Individual Nature of the Work
The hardest truth about this work is also the most liberating: that it is the sole task of individuals. Each person must walk this path themselves, and only then does it extend outward. This is not selfishness—it's necessity. As I noted in Service, Attachment & The Big 3, deconstruction moves from the macro to the micro, while reconstruction flows from the micro to the macro. By the time we reach the point of reconstruction, the macro institution no longer exists as part of our present identity.
This means that well-meaning friends, pastors, or communities cannot reconstruct for us. They cannot provide us with a roadmap that circumvents our own wrestling, our own wilderness, our own encounter with who we are when the scaffolding falls away. Like Paul in Arabia, we must walk with Christ alone before we can walk with others in Christ.
Practical Guidance for the Journey
So how does one approach this impossible, unmeasurable, deeply individual work? Paradoxically, by embracing the very impossibility of creating a system for it.
Begin by accepting the total depths of deconstruction. This process not only involves our habits, systems, and beliefs; it involves the whole Anthrohead—body, soul, and spirit—and even the Anthrohead itself must be deconstructed. It is my stern warning that we do not cherry-pick our deconstruction, but allow the truth to wash over us rather than cling to it as if all that is true relies on us to espouse it to remain true. Truth, in this way exists as the mountain we settle upon after a great turmoil, but for a time we must float amid chaos unable to touch. This is why the institutional church cannot abide true deconstruction, and must come up with some kind of deconstruction-lite™. When deconstruction is carried out without restraint, the result will not resemble the kind of institution we credit with our safety, legitimacy, and provision—and that is precisely what threatens institutions as they stand.
Die to self. When Paul speaks of dying to self, he doesn't mean becoming alive to community—he means becoming alive to Christ, in God. And because God is community, this life extends outward into communion with all others who are likewise alive in Him. But death comes first, and it cannot be measured, managed or mitigated and foremost death is intensely personal.
Embrace the movement from favourites to appreciation. As I explored in From Idolatry to Infinity, "A child is consumed with favourites: colours, tastes, sounds, and smells. An adult develops an appreciation for all things in their time and measure." Reconstruction involves growing beyond our need for spiritual favourites—our preferred doctrines, institutions, our comfortable communities, our familiar practices—into the capacity to see the value of all people, places, and things as they exist in God's infinite unity. This is an exploration of its own to which we may someday return.
Remember where you came from. We must yet remember where we have come from—our own personal Egypt—lest we ever return to it. Paul never forgot that he was the chief of sinners, a persecutor of the church. This wasn't self-flagellation—it was wisdom. Our personal Egypt serves as both a cautionary tale and a testament to God's mercy of which we and all the people of God are recipients by our very identity as the People of God who have received mercy. For just as Israel could not return to Egypt, neither can we return in spirit or in truth to who we once were.
The Hope That Sustains
Here's what fills me with hope, Aaron: reconstruction, when approached properly, leads to a profound discovery. As I've grown fond of writing, "this is not our household, but it is our home." The gathered people of God are not our household—we don't own them, control them, or derive our safety, legitimacy, and provision from them. But we are nevertheless home.
Home is not something we build or earn or measure our way into. Home is the gift of God who has already made His dwelling with us. When we stop trying to construct the perfect Christian life and start living the life we've been given in Christ, we discover we were home all along.
This is why, I'm convinced, that in the work of reconstruction, we are not building a house, but an ark. A house is built to stay put, to guard us in place, to convince us that permanence is safety. But an Ark is built to move through judgement, to endure the waters of repentance, to carry life into a future that looks nothing like the past. A house collapses when the flood comes; an Ark survives it. We are not securing the old world—we are preparing to emerge into the new one.
Consider the flood. Scripture says that God repented of making humanity (Gen 6:6); a passage we often tiptoe around saying something like "God was just sad and had enough". But it is always the case that what God calls us to (a life of repentance) God demonstrates for us. In God's repentance He did what we fear most: He deconstructed creation itself down to its foundations, reducing it to chaos, and then reconstructed it, beginning with Noah as a single seed from which the world would grow again. In this way the flood is not only judgement, but the clearest picture of what repentance truly is—the courage to let all that stands be undone, so that what is reborn may be true. And in this way, true deconstruction and reconstruction can be summed up in one word: repentance.
Living the Reconstructed Life
What does personal transformation look like in practice? It looks like Paul: writing letters from prison, rejoicing in suffering, seeing Christ in every circumstance. It looks like someone who has died to the need for safety, legitimacy, and provision from any source other than God—and who therefore can love freely, serve without condition, and hope beyond circumstances.
It looks like someone who has moved beyond the quantitative questions—How much faith do I have? How often do I pray? How well do I serve?—to the qualitative reality of simply being alive in Christ. Such a person naturally loves, naturally hopes, naturally serves—not as performance or duty, but as the overflow of their union with God.
Most beautifully, it looks like someone who can enter any community as both servant and free person—offering themselves fully while expecting nothing in return, because their identity is already secure in God's infinite household.
A Final Word
My dear friend, I offer these reflections not as a blueprint—God knows we've had enough of those—but as a witness to what I've seen in Paul's letters and in the lives of those who have truly been transformed from places of power. The work is hard, unmeasurable, and deeply individual. But it leads to a life that is genuinely free, authentically loving, and eternally secure.
The temptation will always be to find a shortcut, to create a system, to make this process useful and manageable. Resist this with everything in you. Trust instead in the process that brought Paul from zealous persecutor to willing martyr—a process that can only be described as the patient, mysterious work of God in a human life willing to be completely undone and remade.
We are building an Ark, not a house. We are learning to float, not to stand. And in that floating, that surrender, that complete trust in the God who calls us out of our Egypt and into His infinite household—there we find not only transformation, but resurrection itself.
Ever Your Friend,
Daniel
 | A guest post by
|