A Final Word

I want to say one last thing before I let you go.

I hope this book has helped you.

I mean that as plainly as it can be said. I did not write it because I had nothing else to do. I wrote it because I have walked with the truth in these pages for years, and I have watched it do things — in my own life, and in the lives of people I care for — that I would not have believed if I had not seen them with my own eyes. People set free from things that had held them for decades. Marriages quietly restored. Leaders rebuilt from the inside out. Believers who had drifted into a low, grey kind of Christianity rediscovering the colour, the lightness, and the life of what Jesus actually came to offer.

I wrote it because I wanted you to have what they have.

If even one chapter — one paragraph, one sentence, one quiet moment of recognition on a page somewhere — has begun to do its work in you, then every hour that went into writing it has been worth it. And that thought, more than any other, has kept me at the keyboard on the mornings when the voices were loud.

But I want to be honest with you about one more thing before I go.

These are not really my ideas. They are truths I have discovered, leaned on, and been changed by — but I did not invent them, and I have not come close to exhausting them. I am only passing on what I have been given. Because in the end, everything I have written across these pages has been pointing you toward one verse, and one Person.

His name is Jesus.

And the promise that has carried this whole book, from the first page to the last, is His.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has gone, the new is here!” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

I cannot improve on that verse. I have spent sixteen chapters trying to unpack it, illustrate it, and live it out alongside you — but in the end it stands above everything I have written. If anyone is in Christ. Not the impressive ones. Not the qualified ones. Not the ones who have it all together. Anyone. If you are in Him, the new creation has already come. The old has gone. The new is here.

That is the promise. That is the gospel. That is the only foundation any of this was ever going to stand on.

So if you take nothing else away from this book, take this. Stay close to Jesus. Let Him do what only He can do. Bring Him the patterns you cannot break, the wounds you cannot heal, the future you cannot see. He is more committed to your renewal than you will ever be, and He has never once lost a soul who came to Him in earnest.

The renewing of your mind will not be finished by the time you close this book. It will not be finished a year from now. It will not, if I am honest with you, be finished this side of heaven. But it will progress — day by day, year by year, decade by decade — until the day you stand before the One who began it, and the work is at last complete.

So walk well, friend.

Stay in the Word. Speak truth to your soul. Forgive quickly and love generously. Pursue the calling He has placed in you. And when you fall — because you will — come home, and let grace lift you again.

Remember, every morning and every ordinary Tuesday, that you are loved by a God who is doing in you something far greater than you can presently imagine.

The old has gone.

The new is here.

And may the renewing of your mind, by His grace and for His glory, be the slow, the beautiful, the lifelong story of your life.

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With all my love, and all my prayers,

Courtney