A Reflection on the Peh Decade – Insights from 5780 to 2026

Listen to the audio version

In the fall of 2019, we entered the Hebrew year 5780 and the beginning of a new decade marked by the Hebrew letter Peh. At the time, I spent quite a bit of time listening, studying, and writing about what I believed the Lord was saying as we crossed that threshold. What I understood from what God was showing me then had to do with the mouth, with what we allow entrance into our lives, with the voices that influence us, and with learning to recognize what God is saying.

Seven years have passed since then, and I have found myself returning to some of those words. We have lived through years none of us could have anticipated in 2019, and I have lived through things that have changed the way I understand those words now.

I am not attempting to look back and decide whether a prophetic word came to pass. My looking back is much more personal than that. I wanted to return to what I heard at the beginning of the Peh decade and look at it from where I am standing now, after seven years of walking with the One who spoke it, and listen again.

Returning

When we return to something God spoke years ago, we do not return as the same people who first received it. We’ve changed. We’ve lived through some things. Time has given dimensions to those words that only by living long enough with God could the dimensions of those words become recognized in our lives. The beauty is that we were already acknowledging that we received something from God. Living with what has been received is not the same. Prior to the living it out part there is no way that we could have possibly understood what those words were actually pointing to, or attempting to define for us. Without the living out dimension of receiving God’s word, it’s still only theory. It remains in the realm of the prophetic. But once it is lived reality it is no longer prophetic. And once it is lived experience we can wrap it with definition that we didn’t have at the front end. 

During the process of walking it out, we are changing; circumstances are changing; our experience is accumulating; our paradigms are being altered; our capacity to recognize what He is doing may expand or contract. But none of those fluctuations require God to revise what He said. The continuity belongs to Him. 

Looking back changes our perspective. It isn’t just ‘this was what I saw then’. It is what I can now see within it – not because what God said has changed, but because I have lived another seven years in relationship with the One who said it.

We can look backward from 2026 and notice God’s faithfulness, consistency, patience, and grace running through years in which those things were not always perceptible from inside our daily experience. That does not require us to eliminate the importance of those years. In fact, the great diminishing many of us have experienced becomes even more important because there were times when His faithfulness did not necessarily feel like faithfulness. There were moments when grace didn’t feel like grace. The fact that you may not presently recognize what God is doing does not mean God has ceased to be faithful.

I keep coming back to the image of  the lost sheep at the end of Psalm 119. After everything the psalmist has said about loving God’s Word, he ends by saying, ‘I have wandered about like a lost sheep; search for Your servant, for I do not forget Your commandments’ (Psalm 119:176). He remembers. He has not forgotten God’s Word. And yet somewhere along the way he has lost his bearings. He needs to be found.

The sheep’s perception has changed. The landscape has changed. Its strength has changed. Its ability to find the path has changed. The Shepherd has not.

So when we ask what has changed since 2019 and the onset of the Peh decade? 

What has changed? We have.

What has remained? He has.

The Great Diminishing

For many of us grace was already a lived reality. We had already experienced God’s strengthening, sustaining, providing, and carrying us. What these years have done is something more severe than take us from theological theory to experiential living. They have been more penetrating.  They have demolished remaining places where His supply and our capacity could still be confused with one another. You knew you were sustained before. I would venture to say you know something more about how completely you are sustained.

The disciplines that had helped carry life forward became unavailable. Emotional reserves did not simply run low; they disappeared. Physical and intellectual capacities could no longer be drawn from. What had previously been available when you reached inside yourself for another measure of resolve was no longer accessible. And from inside the great diminishing, the response to “Yes, but you’re still here;” may be, ‘barely’. There is no heroic sense of resilience. When you are that depleted, grace does not necessarily become unmistakable. Sometimes nothing is unmistakable. You may not recognize yourself as being sustained. You may simply know that you have somehow made it through another day- barely. 

You were trying to survive something that had taken away capacities you had always assumed would be available. Looking back does not change what happened or give it a tidy spiritual explanation. It allows you to recognize something that was true while you could not necessarily perceive it:

He was sustaining me even when I could not recognize myself as being sustained.

To me, that is a much stronger statement of grace. There was fortitude, because somehow I endured. But I cannot claim its source. Fortitude received becomes radically different from fortitude generated. I don’t know about you, but I can’t generate anything out of my own supply of ability. I don’t have any anymore. If I don’t receive it from Him, I don’t have it. That is what the great diminishing has done. It has made me more dependent upon the God of all grace. Not just the God of grace. But the God of all grace. Before this I could recognize His grace. But recognizing it and being utterly dependent upon it is entirely different. 

I could say: “My grace is sufficient for you” and if you were like me your response might be: Yes, Paul could say that. Paul experienced the power of Christ resting upon him. But I am not Paul. I don’t feel powerful. I don’t feel strengthened. I don’t feel sufficient grace. I’m barely functioning.

But Paul’s extraordinary apostleship does not make grace sufficient. Paul’s eventual testimony about weakness does not cause the grace to become available. What makes the grace accessible is God, because He is the God of all grace. He is the source of grace. 

No. You’re not Paul, and neither am I. And we don’t have to be. The promise was never about Paul’s sufficiency. It was about Christ’s. The exhausted person receives strength. Not necessarily enough strength to feel strong. Grace does not always show up by restoring the sensation of strength. Sometimes the evidence of sustaining grace may be almost offensively small to someone who remembers what strength used to feel like. Yes. It may have been by the skin of your teeth. And even there, you were held.

And this has left most of us simply homesick. 

After all these years, how can I be here? Why am I so easily unsettled? Why can’t I think clearly? Why can’t I pray the way I used to? Why does everything penetrate so deeply? Why can’t I get my bearings? Why am I so vulnerable?

We remember having access to capacities that are no longer available to us. We remember opening Scripture without having to fight our way through mental exhaustion. We remember being able to pray, think, discern, serve, respond, recover. And perhaps most painfully, we remember ourselves differently.

Sometimes we aren’t merely homesick for an experience of God. We are homesick for the person we remember being with God.

Perhaps we have been measuring God’s provision by whether it restores the sensation we associate with the opposite of our need. If I am weak and God gives grace, I expect to feel strong. 

Being depleted has revealed that strength cannot be manufactured from depletion. And vulnerability exposes that clarity cannot be manufactured out of our vulnerability.

If I am open, susceptible, uncertain, vulnerable—and God gives light—I expect to feel certain, confident, discerning, secure. But perhaps light does not always show up by restoring the sensation of certainty any more than grace always shows up by restoring the sensation of strength.

The Light Given to the Peta’im

This is where a word I had not previously associated with the Peh decade has begun to give language to something I understand differently now. 

In Psalm 119:130 the psalmist writes, “The opening of Your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” The Hebrew word translated “simple” is peta’im, the plural of peti. Simple is not necessarily wrong, but for those of us reading the word in English, it can carry connotations that immediately sound accusatory. Foolish. Naive. Gullible. Someone who should have known better.

And when you have walked with God for a long time, “you should have known better” can find a particularly tender place as those words hit close to home.

After all these years, I should not be this vulnerable. I should not be this easily unsettled. I should be able to tell what is happening. I should know what God is saying. I should recognize His voice. I should have enough Scripture in me to navigate this. I should know how to get my bearings. I should know how to find my way home. Listening to this through that lens peta’im can begin to sound like accusation. But accusation is not what Psalm 119:130 is doing.

The peta’im is open. Susceptible. Influenceable. Vulnerable precisely because there is an openness through which something can enter. That openness certainly creates the possibility of being influenced by what is false. We cannot ignore that. In fact, at the beginning of the Peh decade I wrote something prophetically in reference to precisely that problem—about what we allow entrance, about the porousness of the soul, about discernment, influence, and the need to recognize whose voice we are hearing.

What I see at this stage of the journey is the person inside that openness.

I know what vulnerability feels like now in ways I had not in 2019. I know what it is to distrust capacities I once relied upon without thinking about them. I know what it is to wonder whether I am seeing clearly. I know what it is to feel too depleted to sort through all the voices, all the information, all the possibilities, all the questions. And I know what happens when vulnerability becomes frightening enough that closing off begins to feel safer than remaining open.

Perhaps that is one of the ways many of us have survived the great diminishing. We have closed things down. We have narrowed the opening. We have stopped expecting. We have become cautious about hope. We have pulled back from things that once felt natural because we cannot endure another disappointment. Sometimes even opening Scripture can expose the distance between what we remember and what we presently experience. Sometimes prayer reminds us how little we have to say. Sometimes reaching toward God makes us conscious of how far away home feels.

Closing can feel like protection because openness has become painful.

I understand that differently now too.

But we cannot solve the danger of being peta’im by becoming closed.

The thought of that is what arrested me in Psalm 119:130. The answer God provides to the peta’im is not invulnerability. He does not tell the open person to become impermeable. He does not demand that the vulnerable person develop sufficient intellectual strength to eliminate uncertainty. He does not tell the peta’im to manufacture clarity.

He gives understanding.

“The opening of Your words gives light; it gives understanding to the peta’im.”

There is something profoundly gracious living in that verse. The peta’im do not generate understanding. Understanding is given. The person who cannot manufacture clarity out of vulnerability is met by the God who gives light.

And maybe that is what some of us need to hear when all we have been able to say is, “I just don’t understand.”

I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand why this has lasted so long. I don’t understand why things that once seemed clear have become so difficult to see. I don’t understand why I cannot seem to hear the way I once did. I don’t understand why I am struggling with things I thought had long ago been settled. I don’t understand what God is doing. Sometimes I don’t even understand myself anymore.

There can be tremendous accusation hidden inside those words when we have walked with God for a long time. We think we should understand. We have years of Scripture behind us. Years of prayer. Years of hearing His voice, recognizing His presence, learning His ways. Surely all of that should have made us less vulnerable to uncertainty rather than more vulnerable to it.

Yet Psalm 119:130 does not rebuke the peta’im for lacking understanding. The opening of God’s words gives light, and the peta’im receives what is needed: understanding.

Maybe we have expected understanding to mean that all the questions would finally be answered. The circumstances would make sense. We would understand what God has been doing and why He allowed things to unfold as they did. We would once again feel confident in our ability to see, hear, discern, and interpret what is happening around us.

But light does not have to answer every question in order to be light.

There are things I still do not understand. There are things about these years that I may never be able to explain. Looking back has not given me an interpretation for everything I have lived through. I don’t know if I can even say with complete confidence that what I can see more clearly is God. There are still places where I cannot see clearly at all.

Even the faith with which I reach toward Him is not something I want to claim as another resource originating in me. Paul says that we are saved by grace through faith, “and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8). However we deconstruct every element of that sentence, Paul leaves no room for boasting. The whole reality of our salvation rests upon what God has done and what God has given.

That has begun to change the way I think about faith in a season of diminishing. We can speak about faith as though it were the one thing we still have to produce after everything else has failed. We say: ‘God supplies the grace, but I need to come up with enough faith to access it’. And if I cannot seem to do that, then I have found one more way to measure my failure.

But that would put us right back where we started.

If I cannot manufacture strength out of weakening, why would I imagine that I can manufacture faith out of depletion?

If my emotional, physical, and intellectual reserves have been exhausted, why would my spiritual response somehow remain untouched—as though somewhere beneath everything that has been diminished there must still be one independent reservoir called faith that I am responsible to draw from?

I don’t think faith was ever intended to carry that burden.

Faith itself lives in response to God. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). Hebrews calls Jesus “the author and perfecter of faith” (Hebrews 12:2). Paul says that God has “allotted to each a measure of faith” (Romans 12:3). Whatever distinctions we need to make among those passages in their contexts, none of them leaves me with a picture of faith as something I manufacture independently and then bring to God as my contribution.

And that brings me back again to the peta’im.

“The opening of Your words gives light; it gives understanding to the peta’im.”

Maybe I have been looking for the light to appear primarily as my ability to see. Maybe I have been expecting understanding to arrive as restored intellectual confidence, and grace to arrive as restored strength, and faith to arrive as restored certainty.

But faith does not require me to see clearly before I can rest my weight upon what God has said.

There are things I cannot see. There are things I do not understand. There are places where I cannot look backward and confidently identify what God was doing. I cannot tell someone else who is living through their own great diminishing that eventually everything will become clear. I don’t know that it will.

What I can say is that our inability to see does not alter what God has said.

He has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever abandon you” (Hebrews 13:5).

He has said, “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Peter calls Him “the God of all grace” and says that He “will Himself restore, secure, strengthen and establish you” (1 Peter 5:10).

When I cannot see Him clearly, His Word still tells me who He is.

When I cannot understand, His Word still gives light.

When I cannot manufacture strength, the God of all grace remains its source.

When I cannot find my way home, the Shepherd has not lost track of the sheep.

And when even my faith feels too small to carry the weight of what I am living through, perhaps I have been asking faith to carry something it was never intended to carry.

Faith does not sustain God’s faithfulness. God’s faithfulness sustains faith.

Because every possible source of boasting or self-sufficiency has been progressively getting removed from the person who finds themselves depleted. First it was fortitude. Then clarity. Now even faith. I don’t mean to make it sound like these things are being taken away. But their source is not found in the one who is exhausted and depleted. 

I am beginning to wonder how much of what we call strength has always been received. How much of what we call endurance has been grace. How much of what we call understanding began with His Word giving light. How much of what we call faith has been sustained by the faithfulness of God. I don’t know that I would have asked those questions this way seven years ago. 

I knew all of these things were from Him. I knew His grace. I knew I was dependent upon Him. But I also had capacities available to me that made it much harder to distinguish between what He supplied and what I was able to do with what He supplied.

Some of those capacities are no longer available to me. And I don’t want to make that sound beautiful. There are things I would very much like to have back. There are losses I still grieve. There are things I still hope will be restored. But I cannot deny what has become visible in their absence. When I reach for strength and cannot find it, I can trust more in what it means for Him to be the God of all grace. When I reach for understanding and cannot find it, I hear Psalm 119:130 differently. When I cannot find my own way back to what I remember as home, I understand the lost sheep differently.

The Shepherd Searches

And I find myself again with the lost sheep at the end of Psalm 119. After 175 verses of loving God’s Word, longing for His commandments, asking for understanding, remembering His judgments, and declaring His faithfulness, the psalmist ends here: “I have wandered about like a lost sheep; search for Your servant, for I do not forget Your commandments” (Psalm 119:176).

I don’t know that I ever heard the homesickness in that verse before.

He has not forgotten God’s commandments. He remembers. And yet he cannot seem to find his way. Apparently remembering and being lost can exist in the same person. Loving His Word and needing to be searched for can exist in the same person. Knowing where home is and not knowing how to get there can exist in the same person.

“Search for Your servant.”

Come and get me.

There are days when even that feels like more prayer than some of us have available. Maybe all that remains is the ache. We remember what it was like to open Scripture and become lost in it. We remember prayer when words came easily. We remember the delight of recognizing something we had never seen before. We remember the nearness of His presence. We remember ourselves with Him. And now we are tired, uncertain, easily overwhelmed, and sometimes too depleted even to know what we are asking for.

But the sheep does not have to find the Shepherd.

God said through Ezekiel, “I will seek the lost, bring back the scattered, bind up the broken and strengthen the sick” (Ezekiel 34:16). Jesus tells us about the shepherd who discovers one sheep is missing and “goes after the one which is lost until he finds it” (Luke 15:4).

Maybe “search for Your servant” is not a desperate attempt to persuade God to come looking. Maybe it is the prayer of someone who knows something about the Shepherd.

He searches.

And suddenly homesickness does not have to become another assignment. I don’t have to turn it into enough longing, enough prayer, enough repentance, enough faith, enough anything to make my way back. Even if all I have is the awareness that I cannot find my way, I belong to a Shepherd who searches for sheep.

What Has Remained

And here I hear something Jesus said that I have known for most of my life: “I am the vine, you are the branches… apart from Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

I have always known that the branch receives its life from the Vine. But there is a difference between knowing that while you still feel capable and hearing it after so much of what made you feel capable has disappeared. The branch does not become dependent when it becomes weak. It was dependent when it was flourishing. It was dependent when it was fruitful. It was dependent when everything appeared healthy and strong. It never had life in itself.

Maybe that is what has become so stark for me. I did not become dependent upon Him during these years. I became less able to confuse His supply with my own.

That is different.

And I need to be careful here because I do not believe God had to diminish us in order to teach us dependence. I cannot look at illness, grief, loss, disappointment, exhaustion, or any of the other things people have lived through and reduce them to a lesson God arranged because we needed to learn something. I don’t know why some of these things happened. That belongs among the things I still do not understand.

What I do know is that He has not stopped being God in the middle of them.

The peta’im says, “I don’t understand,” and His Word gives light and understanding.

The weary says, “I don’t have the strength,” and Peter tells us about “the God of all grace” who Himself strengthens and establishes.

The lost sheep says, “I cannot find my way home,” and the Shepherd goes looking for the sheep.

The branch has no life in itself, and Jesus says, “I am the vine.”

Maybe I don’t need to make more of those Scriptures than they say. Maybe I need to let them say what they say.

God supplies what I do not possess in myself.

And when I go back now and read what I wrote at the beginning of the Peh decade, that is where I hear something I could not have heard in quite the same way in 2019.

I was writing about openness then. I was writing about what we allow entrance. I was concerned about influence, about the porousness of the soul, about discernment and the voices we allow to shape the way we think. I still believe what I wrote. If anything, the intervening years have demonstrated how important those things are.

But I cannot read about that openness now without seeing the person who has been living inside it. I see the person saying, “I just don’t understand.”

I see the person who no longer trusts their ability to discern as confidently as they once did. The person who is tired of being affected by everything. The person who has heard too many voices, absorbed too much pain, carried too much uncertainty. The person who has become afraid of their own susceptibility. The person who has begun closing things down because being open has hurt too much.

I know that person because I have been that person.

And now when I read peta’im, I don’t hear accusation in the word.

I hear need.

The peta’im needs understanding. The weary needs grace. The lost sheep needs to be found. The branch needs life.

And God has not positioned Himself on the other side of our need waiting for us to overcome it.

His Word gives light. He is the God of all grace. He searches for the sheep. He is the Vine.

What I most want to say to those of us who are homesick:

You do not have to pretend that you understand.

You do not have to pretend that you are strong.

You do not have to pretend that you know how to get back.

You do not have to pretend that your faith feels certain.

I don’t either.

There are still things I cannot see. There are still things I cannot explain. There are still questions for which I do not have answers. There are days when what I know by faith and what I experience seem painfully far apart.

But God has not asked me to become the source of what only He can supply.

His Word gives light.

His grace is sufficient.

The Shepherd searches.

The Vine supplies the life.

And somehow faith keeps resting its weight there.

That may be what I hear differently after seven years. Not a different word from God. Not a correction of what I heard in 2019. I have simply lived seven more years with the One who spoke it.

What has changed?

I have.

What has remained?

He has.

And maybe for those of us who are still homesick, still vulnerable, still saying “I don’t understand,” and still finding our way through the great diminishing, we do not need to see the whole road from here.

His Word gives light.

And the peta’im gets understanding.

May the God of all grace meet you in every place where your own supply has run out. May His Word give light where you cannot see, and understanding where you cannot make sense of what you have lived through. May you discover that you do not have to find your way back to Him, because the Shepherd is already searching for you.

May His faithfulness hold what your faith feels too weak to carry. May the Vine supply what you cannot produce, and may grace sustain you even when you cannot recognize yourself as being sustained. And in every place where you are still homesick, may you come to know—not merely as something you believe, but as something upon which you can rest your whole weight—that the One who has kept you this far has not changed.

May His light be enough for the road you can see today. And where you cannot see the road at all, may He Himself be enough.

Amen.