He Used Mud
The word for Friday, August 14, 2026 is He Used Mud.
The anchor verses are John 9:6 and Mark 9:24.
On the twenty fifth of July, at Seabright State Beach in Santa Cruz, California, a sixteen year old lifeguard named Ryder Williams went into the water after a ten year old boy.
Eight foot waves. Rip currents. It was his first rescue.
Somebody filmed it, and the video went around the world, and what people kept pointing to was that he did not let go. He had hold of Nathaniel Rai and he stayed attached to him the whole way in.
Weeks later a television crew brought Ryder and his parents onto a set in Los Angeles and gave him a jacket and called him a real life hero. One of the actors said it sounded like it had been a fairly typical day for him.
What Ryder said afterward is the part I would keep. He said he was grateful to have had the opportunity to return the child to his family safely.
Not that he was brave. That he got to hand a boy back.
There is no version of that story where he stays dry.
Now go back to the second century, when two teachers in two different cities were selling something that people very much wanted to buy.
One of them taught that the Saviour had no real body at all. No birth. No shape. Only the appearance of a man, so that nothing physical ever touched HIM.
The other went further. He taught that Christ never died on that cross. A man from Cyrene, pulled out of the crowd to carry the beam, was made to look like Jesus and killed by mistake, while Jesus stood nearby wearing that man's face and laughed at them.
Two cities. Two systems. One instinct underneath both of them.
GOD would not get in the water.
That instinct is not dead and it is not ancient. It lives in the assumption that GOD deals with your soul and not with your body. That HE is interested in the spiritual part and not in the part that is tired, or sick, or drinking too much, or lying awake at two in the morning with your heart going.
Open the ninth chapter of John.
There is a man who has been blind since the day he was born. The disciples see him and ask a question people still ask. Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind.
Jesus refuses the question outright. Neither this man nor his parents.
Then watch what HE does next, because it is one of the strangest sentences in the Gospels.
He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay.
HE spat on the ground.
HE worked the dirt with HIS fingers until it was mud, and then HE put HIS hands on a man's face and smeared it across his eyes.
Every word of that is physical. Saliva. Dust. Fingers. A stranger's skin.
HE could have spoken and been done with it. HE had done that before and would do it again. On this day HE crouched in the dirt of a road and made something with HIS hands.
That is the exact thing those teachers could not accept. GOD with dirt under HIS fingernails.
The mud does not explain anything. It does not answer the question the disciples asked. A man born blind is given no account of why he spent his whole life that way, and he is not offered one either.
What he is given is a pair of hands on his face.
And it is the reason the cross is not a costume. When the sixth hour came and the sky went dark and HE cried out, nobody was standing in the crowd laughing. HE was on it. The veil in the temple tore from the top down, and it tore because something real had happened to a real body.
There is a father in Mark who brings his son to Jesus and says the truest sentence a person can say.
Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.
Both halves at once. He does not clean it up first. He does not wait until his faith is presentable to bring it into the room.
And his son was healed anyway.
The father did not get a better grade first. He said the thing out loud, in the middle of a crowd, with his boy on the ground, and Christ went ahead and did it.
Whatever is wrong with you today is not too physical for GOD, and not too ordinary, and not too far along.
The body you are tired of dragging around is the kind of thing HE has handled before, with HIS hands, in the road, in front of people.
Ryder Williams got wet.
Christ crouched down in the dirt and made mud.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has been told your problem is too physical to bring to GOD.
- 🙏 To the one who has been asked whose fault it was.
- 🙏 To the one whose faith and whose doubt are in the same breath this morning.
- 🙏 To the one waiting to be presentable before you say any of it out loud.
Grace and Peace.