Don’t Miss Your Moment

Eighteen years ago, I stood on a sidewalk in Manhattan and turned down free tickets to the Late Show with David Letterman.

A stranger walked up to me, handed me an opportunity that required nothing, cost me nothing, and asked nothing in return. And instead of seizing the moment, I said, “Maybe … Let me check with my friends.”

By the time I found my friends and we went back to find the guy, he was gone. Lost somewhere in the sea of people moving up and down Broadway. I missed it. And I’ve thought about it probably a thousand times since.

Here’s why I told that story on Easter.

The Man Who Had Everything

The Apostle Paul was not a man who missed opportunities. He was sharp, relentless, and laser-focused. Born into the right family, educated under the right teacher, climbing the right ladder — Paul was on track to become one of the most powerful religious figures in all of first-century Israel. He had one goal, and he was closing in on it.

And then something happened that changed everything.

When the followers of Jesus refused to stop talking about his resurrection, Paul became their most dangerous enemy. He had Christians beaten, imprisoned, and killed. Every act of persecution earned him more status, more credibility, more of the thing he’d spent his whole life chasing.

But on the road to Damascus, the resurrected Jesus appeared to him.

Not a vision. Not a feeling. A personal encounter with the living Christ, so undeniable, so overwhelming, that Paul’s entire life reorganized around it. Everything he had spent decades building, his credentials, his reputation, his achievements, he counted it all as loss. Rubbish, in his own words. Not because those things were worthless in themselves, but because he had found something so much better.

“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” — Philippians 3:8

That is not the language of a man who made a calculated religious decision. That is the language of a man who encountered something real.

Everyone Missed It

Here’s what strikes me about the first Easter: almost everyone missed it.

The religious leaders thought they had finally silenced Jesus. The Roman soldiers went back to their barracks. Even the disciples, the men who had walked with Jesus for three years, who had watched him heal the sick and raise the dead, even they went home that Friday assuming the story was over.

They were wrong.

Early on Sunday morning, the tomb was empty. And over the next forty days, the resurrected Jesus appeared to hundreds of people. Not just to close friends, not just to people who were looking for him, but to crowds, to skeptics, eventually even to Paul, the man who had been doing everything in his power to destroy his legacy.

The resurrection is not a metaphor. It is not a symbol of new beginnings. It is an event that really happened n history. And it turned grief-stricken fishermen and tax collectors into bold missionaries, that transformed the empire’s most dangerous opponent of the church into its most tireless evangelist, and that is still turning lives upside down today.

Don’t Miss This One

I’ve spent almost twenty years wishing I had taken those Letterman tickets. A small thing, I know. But the regret of a missed moment has a long half-life.

Don’t miss this one.

The resurrected Jesus is not hard to find. He is not lost in a crowd on Broadway. Right now, he is doing what he has always done, offering himself to anyone willing to receive him. Not to the people who have it all together. Not to the people who have earned it. To anyone.

Just like Paul. And just like me.

The resurrection changes everything. But only for the people who respond to Jesus’ invitation.

Don’t look back twenty years from now wishing you had.