Christianity: The Point is to Become Human

The Diagnosis is Simple, the Medicine is Ancient

I am going to tell you something that took me decades to understand. Something that scrambled my intellectual faith, exposed my quiet cowardice, and eventually led my whole family into the ancient stream of Christianity most Western men have never touched.

The point of Christianity is not to become an angel, go to heaven, and float around on clouds.

It is to become human. Fully human. As God intended.

The world says we should be spiritual, moral, and nice.

The Ancient Faith teaches we should be human, healed, whole, and alive in Christ.

If that does not shake you, you have not yet felt the weight of how badly our humanity is broken.

True Faith is Lived Faith

For years I built arguments. I studied scripture, history, the Church Fathers, and stacked true ideas one on top of the other like a man who thinks a tower of bricks is a house.

I was a successful CFO. A husband. A father of four. I could argue apologetics, hold massive spreadsheets together in my mind, and plan globe spanning family trips in the background. But inside the walls of my faith, something was hollow.

I had intellectual assent. I did not have a life.

My family needed a man who was being changed, not just informed. And I could not deliver what I did not have.

Have you ever felt this type of hunger? The answer for it will surprise you:

“The glory of God is a living man; and the life of man is the vision of God.” — St. Irenaeus

This sentence cracks something open in a man.

Your theology does not glorify God.

Your life glorifies Him.

A man standing upright. A woman loving fiercely. A child learning to see God in the bread on the table. These glorify God.

Theology is performing, and performances do not feed families.

Let the Prodigal Son be our example. He "arose and came" (Luke 15:20).

What Went Wrong: Faith Without a Body

Here is the diagnosis. I couldn’t do faith without the Body. It requires the Body of Christ, the Church. It requires my body, surrendered and schooled.

I treated worship like a talk with background music.

Communion like a memory exercise.

Baptism like a photo opportunity.

I studied the Bible, argued for it, and still went home the same man who left.

That is what cowardly agnosticism does. It lets you hover above commitment. It lets you be spiritual without ever being sick enough to need a doctor.

Then the Ancient Faith cornered me. If the Son of God truly assumed our humanity, what He assumes, He heals. If He rose in a body, ascended in a body, then His Body on earth must be embodied too. A people you can find, join, obey, and in community be healed.

The people in Acts were a living organism with a table, with fathers, with suffering, with oil and water and bread and wine. These people still exist. I am part of them.

I had to stop explaining away the plain words of Jesus: “My flesh is true food. My blood is true drink. Unless you eat, you have no life in you” (John 6).

Either it is medicine, or it is theater.

I knew I was sick. And I knew theater was not going to save me.

We Came. We Confessed. We Were Baptized.

My wife and I came to the Orthodox Church during Lent. The same season we entered, Fr. Samuel gave a lecture series on Becoming Human. He taught that the entire project of Christianity is to become what God made us to be.

Sadly, modern forms of religion (modern Christianities, included) teach us about escaping our humanity. But we and this world are created good, and very good. Then sin entered, and we now need to be healed, to rediscover our divine image, and to fully participate with God as He intended.

St. Athanasius said it plainly: “The Son of God became man so that we might become partakers of divine life” (cf. 2 Pet. 1:4). This is diagnosis and treatment in one sentence.

We paid attention, felt the diagnosis, and wanted to be healed.

We were baptized into the Kingdom. We approached the Chalice together as beggars who found true bread. And for the first time in my adult life, I began to meet the man God actually made. A son, learning how to live.

My daughters were with me. My wife was beside me. And the Church, ancient and unmoved, received us like she had been waiting.

The Liturgy is a school for the soul, a hospital for sinners, a gymnasium for love.

Five Keys to Becoming Human

The following Lent of 2025 our priest asked me to give a talk about what my heart had learned in my journey. A talk about how I was learning to live. The hard-won battles. The keys I was finding to become human. Here is what I shared:

1. Be Humble

Pride builds a costume. Humility meets the Physician.

Fr. Stephen Freeman wrote, “Humility alone will stand before the judgment seat of God unashamed.” Adam’s fall was an anti-human project of trying to be like God without God. That project is still running in every boardroom, smartphone, man who thinks he can optimize his way into flourishing.

Repentance is the only action that actually restores life to the soul.

We must bring our weaknesses, soul sickness, and dying body before the throne of Christ and plead for mercy.

The prayer written on my heart is, “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me the sinner.”

Brothers, write it on yours.

2. Pay Attention

Nepsis. The Greek word for watchfulness, sobriety, guarding the heart.

Our priest says it before prayer, before blessing, before the most sacred moments of the Liturgy: “Pay attention.”

Watch the priest.

Watch the prayers.

Watch your thoughts.

Guard the heart from distraction, from the endless noise the world calls life.

In a culture engineered for distraction, attentiveness is rebellion. It is the first act of a man who refuses to be managed.

To become human, you must wake up to God’s presence in time, in bread, in breath, in the faces of your children, parents, neighbors, and yes, even your enemy.

3. Love One Another

You cannot practice humanity alone.

This is metaphysics, foundational before time, matter, and the creation of the world.

The Trinity is communion.

Salvation is communion.

The Church is communion.

God Himself is not a solitary being but a unity of Persons in love.

If He created us in His image, we are made for each other. Created to love one another!

Spiritual fatherhood, godparenthood, brotherhood in the faith are how God re-parents us into real personhood. These are tools of the Ancient Faith lived out in the modern world of today, teaching us how to love Christ and His Body.

I became a better father when I found fathers in the Church.

I became a better husband when I learned what it meant to lay down my life for my wife as Christ laid down His for the Church.

Legacy is built in unity and love.

4. Live a Life of Faith

We fast. We cross ourselves. We bow. We confess. We anoint. We receive.

Aristotle understood this long before the Church articulated it fully: the body tutors the soul. We become what we repeatedly do. Virtue is a habit worn into the flesh.

Do the disciplines long enough, and your appetites begin to learn the music of the Kingdom. Your hunger changes. Your attention changes. Your loves re-order themselves around what is true and good and beautiful.

This is the physical side of becoming human.

You cannot think your way into a new nature.

You must live your way into it.

5. Bring Your Best

God gives. We offer. He returns more than we gave.

“Thine own of Thine own, we offer unto Thee.”

This is the prayer in the Liturgy, and it is the economy of the entire Kingdom.

This is synergy. People complicate works and faith; God makes it simple.

“Faith without works is dead.” God works, and we work in Him. Plant. Water. Watch Him give the growth. Show up with your full self, not your performed self, and let the Holy Spirit do what only He can do.

The man who brings his best to the altar (his heart, mind, body, money, family) will not leave the same man who walked in.

Why Orthodoxy, Specifically

Because becoming human requires the Human One. And He locates Himself in His Body.

The Orthodox Church has not reinvented that Body every generation. It has remembered it. In prayer, in sacrament, in bishops in apostolic succession, in a common creed, in a visible table.

The Church that canonized the Scriptures still prays them whole. The Church that anointed martyrs still gives what the fathers called the medicine of immortality. The Church that sang “Holy, Holy, Holy” in the catacombs sings it today in the mountains of West Virginia.

This is continuity, a living body.

If you want faith to outlive your worst news cycle and make you fully human over time, you need a people who will carry you when you cannot carry yourself, feed you when you cannot feed yourself, and tell you the truth when you would rather hear something comfortable; like a mother, given by God. Come and see.

What Becoming Human Actually Looks Like

Here is what changes, slowly, like bones healing:

• Less performance, more presence. You stop auditioning for your own life and start abiding in the One who gave it.

• Less argument, more adoration. Your mind stays sharp, but it learns to kneel. Intellect becomes an offering.

• Less isolation, more belonging. You inherit fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, saints. You become someone’s spiritual son and someone else’s father.

• Less frenzy, more thanksgiving. Gratitude becomes the native air. You stop chasing and start receiving.

• Less fantasy, more flesh. Icons, water, oil, bread, wine. God using ordinary things to heal extraordinary wounds.

I used to think salvation was mostly ideas I affirmed. Now I know it is a Life I receive.

The point was never to become a spiritual spreadsheet. (As much as I love a good spreadsheet.) It was, and is, to become a real man, a real father, a real son of God, in Christ, by the Spirit, to the glory of the Father.

This is how you build something that outlives you. A life. A people. A lineage in Christ.

Awake, O Sleeper

This is my last word in this series. And it is also my invitation.

Lay down the costume.

Come to the hospital.

Be baptized into the Kingdom.

Confess your wounds.

Eat the Fire that does not consume.

Honor His Mother.

Keep company with His saints.

Learn to pray with the Church that never had to reinvent Christianity to remember it.

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I found this with my wife at my side, our daughters with us, under a priest who keeps saying “Pay attention,” at a table where the Living One feeds the dying and makes them alive.

I brought a small offering. He gave me Himself.

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The point of Christianity is to become human.

Come and see how beautiful that is.