I met Jeff on a sidewalk.
He wasn't asking for anything. He was playing — back against a graffiti-covered wall, guitar held together with tape and intention, fingers moving like they remembered something the rest of him had forgotten.
I stopped. I don't always stop.
We talked for a while. Jeff didn't sugarcoat it. He told me what happened — not as a victim, not as someone fishing for sympathy, but with the flat clarity of a man who'd had a long time to sit with his own decisions. He chose himself over his family. Then he chose himself again. And again. Until there was nothing left to choose from.
"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." — Galatians 6:7
The Torah calls this middah k'neged middah (מִדָּה כְּנֶגֶד מִדָּה) — measure for measure. It's not punishment handed down from a distant throne. It's the architecture of reality. Sow to the flesh, reap corruption. Not because HaShem is vindictive. Because that's what flesh does when you feed it and call it king.
Jeff knew this. He wasn't asking me to argue with it.
Then he played "Amazing Grace."
Not as a performance. Not for money. He played it the way you sing something you've decided to believe again even when you're not sure you have the right to.
I stood there and didn't know what to do with myself.
Here's what I've turned over since that afternoon:
I walked up to that wall with a full life in my back pocket. Business. Family. A sense — carefully maintained — that I had made reasonably good decisions and that this had something to do with my character rather than my circumstances.
Jeff dismantled that quietly. Not by lecturing me. By just being honest about himself.
The Hebrew word chesed (חֶסֶד) — usually translated "lovingkindness" or "mercy" — carries the weight of covenant loyalty. It's what HaShem extends not because we've earned it, but because He bound Himself to us. That's the scandal at the center of grace. It doesn't wait for you to get your act together. It meets you at the wall.
Jeff played "Amazing Grace" like a man who was deciding, in real time, to let that be true.
I've been in rooms where people talk about grace as a theological category. Jeff was living inside the question of whether it was real. There's a difference, and most of us are on the wrong side of it.
I'm not drawing a neat lesson here. I don't have one.
What I know is this: I walked away from that conversation less certain about my own coherence than when I arrived. That's not a bad thing. The Psalms are full of men who walked toward HaShem because they ran out of other options — not because they had their theology sorted.
"He raises the poor from the dust, the needy from the ash heap" — Psalm 113:7 (CJB)
That's not a metaphor. That's a description of who He moves toward.
Selah.
Where have you explained someone else's situation using their character, and your own using your circumstances?
Who have you walked past that was living a question you've only ever debated?
What would it cost you to stop — not to fix anything, just to stop?
May the shalom of our Abba guard you — shalom v'shalvah.
Your brother in the Way,
Sergio
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