The Cross Examination
I spent months preparing for my cross-examination. Hours perfecting twenty questions designed to expose contradictions, reveal manipulations, document the timeline of bad faith. I knew every exhibit number, every date, every inconsistency in the narrative I was meant to dismantle. I was ready to be brilliant in my destruction of the case against me….armed with facts, logic, and righteous anger.
…But It didn’t occur to me until I was sitting in the courtroom: I had spent far more time preparing my cross than my testimony.
The cross-examination felt important because it represented my opportunity to fight back, to demonstrate competence, to prove that I could see through the manipulation and document the hypocrisy. This was where I would show everyone—the judge, the court, myself—that I was capable despite being unequipped, that representing myself pro se was not evidence of foolishness but of determination.
The night before trial, when I should have been reviewing my testimony, I was still refining my cross-examination. I was preparing for battle when I should have been preparing for witness. The cross felt active, powerful, like something I could control through superior preparation. My testimony felt passive, vulnerable….. like simply standing there and hoping that truth would be self-evident.
It wasn’t until the judge asked me direct questions during my testimony that I realized what actually mattered. The cross-examination I’d spent months perfecting was important, but my testimony was what the judge needed to assess my fitness as a parent. The facts I could present about someone else’s behavior were useful context, but the facts about my own efforts, consistency, and engagement were the actual case.
The theological parallel should have been obvious.
Especially to someone with my training. But apparently I needed to learn it through litigation rather than through seminary. I had spent months preparing to expose sin when what the court actually needed was evidence of faithfulness. Not perfect faithfulness, but ordinary, consistent, present faithfulness.
Paul wrote about putting no confidence in the flesh, about counting his impressive credentials as loss compared to knowing Christ (Philippians 3:4-8):
4….. If someone else thinks they have reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more: 5 circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; 6 as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless. 7 But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8 What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ.
I had been putting enormous confidence in my ability to document someone else’s failures while underestimating the importance of simply testifying to my own ordinary day-to-day doings. Yet the gospel is not primarily about exposing other people’s sin, however accurately documented. The gospel is about testimony to faithful presence despite inadequacy. Jesus didn’t spend his time cataloging the Pharisees’ hypocrisies in systematic detail, though he certainly named them when relevant. He spent his time demonstrating an alternative way of being human, bearing witness to the kingdom through presence and relationship and the ordinary work of showing up consistently for people others had abandoned.
The deeper irony is that I felt utterly unequipped for all of it.
Both the cross and the testimony. I am a pharmacist. Not an attorney. I had no business conducting cross-examination in a custody trial. Every legal professional I consulted told me this was a terrible idea, that self-representation in high-conflict custody cases was functionally self-sabotage, and I might as well start to kiss my parenting time goodbye.
And yet there I was, because hiring an attorney wasn’t financially possible…..and because sometimes you do things you’re unequipped for simply because they need to be done and you’re the only one available to do them. Which, again, feels uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has read (or lived) the parts of scripture where God keeps calling manifestly unqualified people to tasks that require competence they don’t possess.
Moses couldn’t speak well. Gideon was hiding in a winepress. Jeremiah was too young. Paul had the wrong resume for apostleship. The disciples were fishermen and tax collectors being asked to establish churches. The pattern seems to be that God specializes in using people who are obviously inadequate for their assignments, perhaps because their inadequacy makes it clearer that whatever gets accomplished isn’t primarily their doing.
I am not claiming divine calling for custody litigation. That would be presumptuous and probably theologically dubious. But I am noticing that the feeling of being utterly unequipped for something important, of being forced to do work that should be done by professionals with proper training, of preparing obsessively while knowing your preparation is inadequate—this is not unfamiliar territory for people who take faith seriously.
Most of us spend significant portions of our lives doing things we’re unequipped for.
Parenting children with no manual, navigating marriages with no training, making career decisions with incomplete information, managing mental health with inadequate resources, caring for aging parents while working full-time…. is all trying to follow Jesus while being demonstrably human.
The temptation in all of it, however, is to focus on documenting what’s wrong, proving we’re right, demonstrating that the problems aren’t primarily our fault, and frankly…. building cases for why the difficulties we face are the result of other people’s failures rather than our own inadequacy.
We spend enormous energy on exposure—documenting sin, proving theological points, demonstrating that we understand what’s wrong with the world and with the people in it. This work feels important and may even be necessary in some measure. But what actually demonstrates the kingdom is testimony to faithful presence, the ordinary work of showing up consistently for the people God has placed in our lives, the unremarkable faithfulness that doesn’t make for dramatic stories but does make for actual life.
This focus feels productive because it provides clear targets for our preparation and gives us something concrete to control when most of life feels uncontrollable. But what actually matters—in courtrooms and in most of life—is testimony. Can you demonstrate faithful presence despite obvious inadequacy? Can you document ordinary consistency rather than extraordinary performance? Can you simply show up and tell the truth about being there, even when your efforts feel insufficient to the demands being placed on you?
Maybe that’s as close to gospel as custody court gets.
