The One Who Knows What This Feels Like
Day 8 — Headwind: Isaiah 53:2-3 / John 13:18-21
Introduction
There are winds you can explain and winds you can’t. Disappointment — you can trace the shape of it, name what didn’t happen, identify the gap between the plan and the reality. Fear — you can usually point to the thing you’re afraid of. Even uncertainty has a logic to it: you don’t know what’s ahead.
But rejection is different. Betrayal is different. These are not winds that come from the weather around you. They come from people. People you trusted. People you served. People you loved, or worked alongside, or gave years of your life to. And the wound they leave isn’t just pain — it’s a particular kind of confusion that gets tangled up in everything else: Did I misread them? Did I misread myself? Did I do something that made this happen? Was I wrong to trust?
You can lie awake with that kind of question for a long time.
The first thing this wind does is make you want to shut down. To pull in. To decide that the cost of being open is too high, and that the safer version of yourself is the one who doesn’t let people that close again. That is a completely understandable response. It is also a very effective way to slowly die.
Before you get to any answer, I want you to know that the One you’re reading this with today is not outside this particular weather. He is not offering you a strategy from a safe distance. He is not handing you a theological framework for processing betrayal from someone who has never felt it.
He has felt it. In a room with twelve men. The night before He died.
Scripture
He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. — Isaiah 53:3 (NIV)
“I am not referring to all of you; I know those I have chosen. But this is to fulfill this passage of Scripture: ‘He who shared my bread has turned against me.’ I am telling you now before it happens, so that when it does happen you will believe that I am who I am. Very truly I tell you, whoever accepts anyone I send accepts me; and whoever accepts me accepts the one who sent me.” When he had finished speaking, Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, “Very truly I tell you, one of you is going to betray me.” — John 13:18-21 (NIV)
Reflection
What’s Happening in the Text
Isaiah 53 is a portrait of the Suffering Servant — written seven centuries before Calvary, describing a figure who would be rejected not by strangers, but by His own people. The language is specific: despised. Rejected. Familiar with pain. Hidden faces. Held in low esteem. This is not the language of distant contempt. These are the words of someone known, and turned away from anyway.
John 13 is the upper room the night of the Last Supper. Jesus has already washed the disciples’ feet — an act of scandalous service that Judas received along with everyone else. And now Jesus says, “One of you is going to betray me.” Then John adds four words that stop everything: Jesus was troubled in spirit.
Not just the disciples. Jesus. Troubled.
The theological weight of that phrase matters. Jesus is not performing the appropriate emotional response. He already knew — He had known for a long time. He named it aloud, John tells us, so that when it happened, the disciples would believe rather than doubt. This is not surprise. And it is still troubling. The foreknowledge did not protect Him from the wound. Likely made it worse.
But Judas was not the only betrayer. Peter would deny Him before the night was over. And all of the disciples would desert Him in His trial, His suffering, His death. That is not a stranger’s betrayal. That is the wound that comes from the inner circle.
Jesus lived with the sorrow, the troubled spirit, of these rejections and betrayals long before they were evident — and chose to love, serve, and forgive anyway. He washed Judas’s feet. He restored Peter on the other side of the denial. He appeared to the disciples who had scattered, and breathed peace over them rather than condemnation. The foreknowledge of what they would do did not cause Him to pull back. He moved toward them.
What This Means for the Reader
If you have been betrayed — genuinely, not just disappointed, but handed over by someone you trusted — then you know the specific quality of that trouble in your spirit. It is not grief about what you lost. It is something more disorienting than that: I thought I knew this person. I thought I knew myself well enough to know who to trust. I built something on that, and now the ground is gone.
That might have been a friendship that ended without explanation. A community that quietly moved on from you. A leader who used you and discarded you. A marriage. A family. The details vary. The wound has the same shape.
Here is what I want to offer — carefully, because it must be said precisely: Jesus is not simply a God who sympathizes with your rejection from outside it. He is a God who was rejected. Who was betrayed. Who sat in that room, aware of what all of them were about to do, and was still troubled in spirit by it. He carried your specific kind of wound before He carried the cross.
But He did not just survive it. He demonstrated what love does with it. He showed us — not as a principle but as a practice, in real time, with real people who really failed Him — that forgiveness is not the erasure of the wound. It is the covering that allows the wound to heal. There will likely always be a scar. The scar is honest — it says something happened here that mattered. But the pain does not have to be permanent. He proved that. And He is not offering you a technique. He is offering you Himself — the One who has already walked this road all the way to the other side of it.
The One who was most betrayed is the One who always loves, always forgives.
Grace Note
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet he did not sin. — Hebrews 4:15 (NIV)
He is not above the weather. He has been in it. Bring Him the wound today — not the cleaned up theologized version, but the version that still requires ongoing forgiveness, the one that still has a raw edge. He knows exactly where that is.
Prayer Prompt
Jesus, I want to start here, in this room, before I try to say anything else. You were troubled in spirit. You said so, and I believe You. The foreknowledge didn’t make it hurt less. And I think You included that detail because You knew there would be people like me reading this — people who have done everything they knew how to do, and still felt the ground go out from under them because of someone they trusted.
I’ve been carrying this one. The version in my life doesn’t look exactly like the upper room, but the shape of it is the same — something that should have been safe, and wasn’t. Someone I believed in. The confusion that comes after, the questions I ask myself in the dark about whether I was foolish to have opened that far.
I don’t need You to explain it today. I just need to know You’re not surprised by it. And I need to know that the trouble You felt in Your spirit didn’t make You shut down — that You washed his feet and went to the cross anyway, and that the same love that held through that is the love that holds through this.
Help me not to shut down. Not today. Hold me open just enough to keep receiving what You have for me in this, even when I don’t understand it yet. Amen.
Response
1. Name It Specifically (Written): Take five minutes with your journal and write the name of the relationship or situation this day is touching. Not a processing exercise — just name it. One sentence: This is the wound this wind is pressing on. Sometimes the most important thing is to stop moving around it and stand still in front of it.
2. Read It Aloud (Verbal): Find Hebrews 4:15 and read it slowly, twice. The second time, insert your own name before “weaknesses.” Let the specificity of our become the specificity of yours.
3. Carry the Week Forward (Connective): In Day 7, you were invited to find your footing on a moving deck — not to reach for solid ground, but to develop a different relationship with the motion. Today the motion has a personal face on it. Sea legs in a betrayal wind looks specific: it is the ongoing, sometimes daily choice to love and forgive rather than shut down. Not a single decision that settles the matter, but a practiced posture — the thing that keeps you upright when this particular weather moves beneath you. What would it look like to take one step in that direction today?
To read all the posts in this devotional series, visit: https://www.thisistheway.live/t/headwind
© Steve Peschke / This Is The Way