Wes desperately wanted to please God.

He rose at 4am to pray. He fasted and gave to the poor. He read spiritual classics. He even became an overseas missionary.

Yet for all this, Wes felt like a fraud and a failure. God was a Consuming Fire, he was a scarecrow. If the invisible God wore a face, it was a face of disappointment. He knew Jesus died and rose and made a way to the Father, but that Father was an exacting master and he an embarrassing servant. The harder Wes worked the Way, the further from God he felt.

Then one night Wes reluctantly attended a meeting with sincere but slightly odd Christians whom he had first met on missionary travels. They sang with joyful fervor and trusted Jesus, not as a theological abstraction but as if he were a real person who might walk into the room — or who already had. 

At the meeting, someone read from an old theology book and Wes was caught off guard by… by something… something inside. It was a bodily sensation, an emotion, a warmth, an encounter. Stone cold tablets of law had shielded his heart from direct contact with the Father. This inner heat melted them away. He had always been God’s servant. Now, suddenly, he was a son.

After this, Wes was back at his intense spiritual practices. In some ways, they intensified. But the drive was different. Peace displaced anxiety. Grit gave way to gratitude. He still had his ups and downs, doubts and bouts of heaviness. But something had shifted. Some say he ​“got saved” that night. I’d say from that day forward Wes knew—knew in body and heart — God’s smile and continual saving grace. 

If you hadn’t guessed, Wes is John Wesley, the 18^th-century Anglican priest who sparked the Methodist movement. His story reveals that spiritual disciplines alone don’t lead to abundant life. In fact, without what you might call an ​“attachment event,” they can be downright debilitating.

There’s good reason to be suspicious of emotions and emotional highs. But the truth is that relational connection and lasting change often begin with an emotionally heightened moment. One clinically proven therapeutic model, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), sometimes calls these moments ​“softening change events.” In the context of EFT, this event involves one person in a couple letting down their guard of anger and blame and allowing their vulnerability and need to be known to another. One EFT study noted, ​“On average, five softening change events were found in the sessions of the successful couples and none were found in the sessions of the low-change couples.”

But we don’t need a therapeutic framework to see the importance of vulnerable moments of encounter. Read the Gospels. Time after time, encounter precedes fruitful long-haul obedience.

I think especially of Simon Peter who encountered Christ’s power on the boat through nets bursting with fish. Then later, after his devastating denial, encountering Christ’s compassion in resurrected eyes. 

Life with Jesus is a long road. Walking it requires effort and intention. But grit and guilt won’t sustain the effort. Love will. And love must be known, at least from time to time, through a heart strangely warmed by an experiential encounter with the living Christ.