Finding Abundance in the In-between

Let me add my welcome and gratitude to everyone gathered here today. Class of 2026, as l have been praying for you by name every morning the past few weeks, I marvel at just how very dear so many of you are to me. Thank you for inviting me to speak into your life one more time.

I want to begin today in one of my favorite places: a church known as Santa Prassede in Rome. The entire space is organized around the apse, the half dome at the front of the church, where a glimmering mosaic depicts Christ’s triumphant return on sunrise clouds. The church was built in the early ninth century, when Rome was vulnerable and in disrepair after several centuries of successive invasions. Still, the arches framing the apse depict men and women streaming into a city surrounded by jewel-studded walls: the New Jerusalem descending from on high. 

It’s marvelous. 

But, I don’t want to talk about the apse mosaic today, or even the mosaics on the arches themselves. I want to tell you, instead, about the intrados. This is probably a word you’ve never heard before, but it simply means “the underside of the arch.”

Why do I want to talk about that? Well, the arch, and even more specifically the intrados, is a transitional space. It is in between the nave—the large open area where the worshippers gather—and the raised platform where the sacrament is instituted. The intrados frames an opening to something else. It’s also a space we often don’t pay attention to because we are more focused on where we’re heading, not where we are presently.

But as you, Class of 2026, graduate from Covenant College, you are entering your own in-between. You are moving from one literal space to another, and making a transition to a new season of life. What does this ninth-century archway suggest you can expect to find there?

Here’s the good news: the underside of these arches, these utilitarian, thick spans of masonry are also covered with beautiful, shimmering mosaics. On each side of the arch a fantastic tree sprouts from a giant striped pot, flush with starlike white flowers, thornless roses, laurel leaves, and what I think are perhaps giant golden olives. It’s just unbelievable abundance for a space we usually overlook. 

It’s also a space that is virtually impossible to photograph. So, I painted it for you, and made you your own little cards as a tangible reminder of this day. And as I say on the back of those cards, these intrados mosaics remind me that, because we are beloved, we can anticipate abundance in the in-between.

Living Beneath the Arch; Transitional Space

Before I explain that, let’s sit here for a moment with this reality of the arch as a transitional space. I have never taken an engineering class, but I do know that the massive arches in Santa Prassede are under a tremendous amount of strain. They are the ribs of the structure, and their thickness correlates to the amount of load they bear. This is true of all architectural openings that allow movement from one space to another; even a regular, old doorway is a precise intervention in a solid wall. These transition points are significant and complex, even though we often take them for granted. 

That's why I'm opposed to the architectural analogy of a "threshold" to describe your current position as newly minted college graduates, or even as new holders of a master's degree. People will say things like, "Congratulations, graduate. You're standing at the threshold for the rest of your life." The language seems to suggest that crossing into this new stage will be done as easily as stepping through a doorway.

Except, transitions rarely go that way. Transitions—even really good ones—can often feel like an unraveling. Unmoored from the familiar, from the physical locations and rhythms and people that have structured so much of your life for the preceding season, all of this uncomfortable junk may suddenly swell to the surface. 

If our expectation is that a transition will be a quick, seamless move, we may be utterly disoriented when that doesn’t happen. When applications sit unanswered; when the expected thing falls through; when the thing we’ve longed for doesn’t happen; or when we’re not even sure what we want anymore; we might feel shame that everyone else seems to have found the love of their life, or a stable job with retirement benefits, or an apartment with a washer and dryer. Meanwhile, buying your groceries for the week seems almost as insurmountable a fiscal challenge as the dream of owning a home. 

Like the arches in Santa Prassede, these points of transition are, in fact, load bearing. And not all our strategies for displacing the weight of these anxieties are helpful. We might look for quick fixes, for betting markets or viral moments that we think will speed us through the discomfort of transition and land us quickly in the good life. We might seek solace in addictions that provide dopamine hits or numb our shame. Or we might do the seemingly responsible thing and buckle down and just grind, looking out for only me and mine.

But remember the intrados. The underside of the arch in Santa Prassede, that functional, load-bearing element, could have been a place to save money. If we were to paint it a dark color it would virtually disappear, allowing us to just focus on the apse mosaic of Christ’s return. Instead, we find thousands and thousands of tesserae—tiny pieces of colored glass and glass gilt with actual gold—each one painstakingly laid by hand to create impossibly tall trees laden with fruit and flowers that seem to multiply before our eyes. There is abundance in the in-between. 

Love as Presence

Now, the existence of a fantasy plant on the underside of a ninth-century church arch is hardly a sufficient reason to believe that your time in transition will be born up by beauty. But the intrados are not proposing something new. It is instead a materialization of the patterns and promises we find in Scripture. We can expect garlands of grace in the in-between both because of who God is and because of who we are to him.

Throughout Scripture, God's character is described in terms of overflow. The psalmists praise God for his abundant compassion and faithful love (Ps. 51:1; Ps. 69:13, 19). They find abundant joy in his presence (Ps. 16:11). Even in lament they ask God to act according to his great love, recounting his provision in moments of scarcity (Ps. 106:43-45). He is a God who sets wilderness tables for his wandering children, who keeps widows' oil jars from running dry, and who cares even for the sparrows.

But let’s be clear. God is not a wealthy man in the sky with a bank account full of love that he dispenses like fellowship grants. You have heard this before, but it is well worth repeating: God does not have love, which he then gives to us. The apostle John reminds us: God is Love (1 John 4).

So who are we in relationship to this love? Why should we anticipate love meeting us in the in-between? Well, friends, you, me, all of us, are created from the overflow—the abundance—of the Triune God’s shared, eternal, perfect love. On a molecular level, you are a testament to the love of God. Yet, like our first parents, Adam and Eve, we forget this reality, and attempt to secure our future with our own resources. It doesn’t go well; we bring harm to creation and each other. But Love does not acquiesce; it launches a rescue mission. Love—in the person of Jesus—gives himself so freely and completely that Death itself is defeated. “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy,” Jesus says. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). That is the promise to the beloved of God.

But abundance is not synonymous with prosperity or ease. The intrados is not promising you a clear career path, or big bank accounts, or immunity from cancer, or the picket fence life you dreamed of. No one knows this better than the apostle Paul. Abundant love chased him down on the road to Damascus, and he traded a stable career and the approval of those in power for a life of itinerant tentmaking, persecution, and imprisonment. 

No, the promise is not prosperity. It is presence. We can greet loss or discomfort or pain or grief differently when we know that we are resourced rightly. This is why Paul could be hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed (2 Cor. 4:8-9). Through it all, he understood that Love still held him, “that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, could separate him from the love of God,” who is Christ Jesus (Rom. 8:38-39).

We cannot skip past the intrados. But your experience of the in-between can change when you know that you remain wreathed in love. Love is sheltering you, persisting with you, and hemming you in. And believing our belovedness should change how we work, how we welcome, and how we wait. 

Our work is a gift, an invitation to stewardship, not a competition for resources. From the very beginning, God structures the rhythms of his people’s life around an expectation of abundance. He commands them to set aside one day each week as a Sabbath to the Lord, to not till the ground or plant seeds or trim vines every seven years, and to cancel debts, release indentured servants, and return land in the year of Jubilee. This is hardly a recipe for building personal, much less generational wealth. Instead of taking a break as a means of recharging for another week of ruthless grinding, God calls his beloveds to rest as an expression of trust. We work and we rest not in our flesh but in the God who liberates his people from enslavement by kings who have no claim on them. Class of 2026, I invite you into sabbath abundance.

And then, fully believing our belovedness should change our welcome. Fear tells us that other people are fundamentally threats to our security, scrambling to steal our limited resources. But perfect love casts out fear. Again, God sets an expectation of abundance in the laws he gives his people. In Leviticus 19, he commands the Israelites not to reap to the very edges of their fields, not to gather the gleanings, not to go over the vineyard a second time—but to leave the harvest's margins for the poor and the foreigner. This deliberate inefficiency reiterates the reality that when we are certain in God's love, we need not defend our scraps. We need not fear that we will be cut out, squeezed out, replaced, or be made irrelevant. 

This call to extend welcome appears in some other, surprising circumstances. In Jeremiah 29, Israel is in exile; they themselves have become strangers and foreigners. And yet God tells them to build houses, plant gardens, and grow families, seeking the good of the city where they dwell. Perhaps even more surprising is Psalm 84:5-6: “Happy are the people whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage. As they go through the Valley of Tears they make it a place of springs.” God's promise of persisting love for the in-between does not eliminate the valley of weeping. But love's presence allows us to become agents of abundance, extending grace to others through, not in spite of, our own sorrow. Class of 2026, I invite you to welcome courageously.

Waiting as Worship

Finally, our assurance of this abundant love changes how we wait. Again, this is not an excuse to move into a basement and play video games all day, passively expecting a job and community and goodness to materialize. But our time beneath the intrados also need not be something we dread or try to rush through blindly. We can be patient; there is still beauty for us there.

I think of the narrative in Mark 14, where a woman breaks open a container of costly perfume and pours it over Jesus’ feet, feet that will surely become soiled and smelly again within hours. The disciples condemn her sanctimoniously, “What a waste,” they say, “It could have been sold for a year’s wages, and the proceeds given to the poor.” In saying this, they fail to recognize what Jesus then calls, “a beautiful thing.” This woman, certain of Jesus’ love, is able in turn to love extravagantly as she waits for promises to be fulfilled. Judas Iscariot, on the other hand, cannot. Judas thinks that he wants to be part of the Messiah’s rescue. But he imagines wielding a weapon beside Jesus as he overthrows the Roman occupation, not sitting in a house in Bethany, watching and listening. Right after missing the beauty before him, Judas agrees to betray Jesus to the religious leaders. Disbelieving the promise of provision, he would rather have a bird in the hand than abide in abundant love. Class of 2026, how will you wait?

Sending Out

Now, perhaps because you are graduates of Covenant College, you may have picked up on the fact that none of the examples or patterns I gave from Scripture really have anything to do with college graduates or people who are heading into a new stage of life. 

But that’s because everyone here is, in fact, beneath an intrados. We are all in the in-between. The kingdom of God is already bursting forth into bloom, and—as you know full well from your own pain and from the violence that still convulses our world—it is not yet fully here. 

We all stand in a place of transition, beneath a great weight. But God’s banner over us is still love: multiplying, imagination-defying, load-bearing love. Because we are beloved, there is abundance in the in-between for our work, our welcome, and our waiting.