3 Things Friday: 3 Scripture Rabbit Trails

Here are some biblical ideas I can't stop thinking about.

I love a new theme.
I love a new series.
I can’t help it.

So… introducing 3 Things Friday. Some Fridays, it’ll be three things I’m learning about the Lord. Some Fridays, three things I’m quitting. Some Fridays, three skincare products I’m obsessed with. No promises about what kind of Friday you’re getting! That’s the fun of it.

For round one: three recent Biblical rabbit trails.

I love a good rabbit trail. Something sticks out to me mid-read, I start pulling the thread, and I genuinely cannot stop until I’ve gone way too deep for a Tuesday morning. I’m currently reading through the whole Bible, hoping to land on the last page by December 31st - but I keep getting derailed by these little detours, and every single one has left me more in awe of God and more in love with His Word. So this week, instead of finishing my reading plan on schedule, I want to take you down three trails with me.

1. There’s a whole pattern hiding in the word “naked.”

Genesis 2:25 says Adam and Eve “were both naked, and felt no shame.” I used to read right past that verse. But it’s the only place in the whole book that shows us what it looks like to hold real authority with nothing to hide: full exposure, no performance, nothing hidden from God or from each other.

Then one chapter later, everything snaps. Genesis 3:10: “I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” The people who were made to govern creation are now hiding in the bushes from the God who gave them that job. Shame doesn’t just make you feel guilty - it makes you run. And running is basically the abandonment of everything you were entrusted with.

Authority is given early in Genesis, and shame keeps Adam and Eve from feeling their freedom. What would it look like for us to have an Edenic return to kingdom authority without shame?

2. Why did Moses have to take off his shoes?

I always read the burning bush as “respect the holy ground, take off your shoes.” Great, true! But then I fell down a hole on the Hebrew word for holy, qodesh, and it doesn’t primarily mean “morally clean.” It means set apart, other, different from the ordinary. The ground wasn’t special because Moses was behaving well. It was special because God was standing on it.

Then I found this line from Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth-century theologian, and it stopped me cold: “Sandaled feet cannot ascend that height where the light of truth is seen.” His point was that our sandals, the things between us and the ground, represent the way we let our fallen senses decide what’s real, instead of letting God decide. Taking them off wasn’t just a physical gesture. It was Moses being asked to stop filtering reality through what feels safe or comfortable, and just stand there.

I don’t need the full fourth-century cosmology to feel the weight of that. A shepherd on the run, at the back of the desert, gets asked by the living God to strip off the thing between him and holy ground and simply be there. That might be the whole posture of prayer, honestly. Amen?

3. “Remember” shows up more than “faith” or “trust” - and it changed how I read the Last Supper.

A friend shared this fact with me and I had to go on the deep dive: the command to remember appears exponentially more often in Scripture than the words faith or trust. And once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop seeing it.

In Exodus 12, God gives Israel the whole Passover meal: the lamb, the blood on the doorframe, the instructions for celebrating it every year, before the actual rescue happens. He institutes the memorial in advance of the miracle. The Hebrew word is zikkaron, a memorial, and when the Old Testament got translated into Greek, they reached for the word anamnesis.

Here’s what floored me: in that framework, anamnesis doesn’t mean “think back on something.” It means make it present again. The old Jewish teaching says it outright: in every generation, a person is required to see themselves as if they personally walked out of Egypt. They’re not remembering an old story - reliving it.

Jesus does the exact same thing at the Last Supper. He takes a meal that had always looked backward to Egypt and pivots it forward: “until the kingdom of God comes.” He institutes it the night before the cross, before the rescue is even finished. God apparently has a completely different relationship to time than I do. He memorializes before the moment, because to Him, it’s already real. Both meals are an invitation to eat as if the rescue is already done: because in His economy, it is.

I don’t know what to do with all three of these except sit in them a while longer. Maybe that’s the whole point of a rabbit trail: it’s not really about finishing the chase. It’s about slowing down long enough to notice you’re standing on holy ground, being pursued by a God who remembers you before you’ve even remembered Him.

If you’ve got a rabbit trail of your own lately, hit reply and tell me. I want to go down it with you.

See you Tuesday.
— Jess