Tracks Cut While We Slept

On the good mornings at a cross-country ski center, the trail is already made. In the night a machine has pressed two parallel grooves into the fresh snow, and the first skier out need only drop the skis in and push off. Some of us would rather have the open snow. But out in untracked powder the skis wander and the poles sink; the track is not where freedom ends but where it finally moves. The work of making the way was done while we were asleep.

Ephesians 2 turns on two small words: “But God.” Paul has just spent three verses on us as we were—“dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (Ephesians 2:1)—and dead is the word that matters. Dead people do not improve; they are not the subject of any verb. So the next sentence starts elsewhere: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:4–5). Loved, made alive, raised, seated—the main verbs of verses 4 to 6 are all of them his; the one thing said of us is passive: “you have been saved.” Then Paul says it twice, which is how you know he expected an argument: “by grace you have been saved… not your own doing… not a result of works” (Ephesians 2:5, 8–9). A gift with the price tag torn off. And the track was cut by one who had no track. Christ went into the dark ungroomed and forsaken, down into our death, and came up. No one after him breaks trail into death; we move because we are in his groove.

Having shut that door twice over, Paul’s very next sentence is about works. “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). The little “For” is the tell: this is not a retreat but an explanation of what such a gift produces. The Greek, poiēma, means a made thing; our word “poem” comes from it, and the echo is worth hearing even if Paul wasn’t reaching for it. We are not the poets. We are the poem—a new creation, made by the God who creates from nothing. And a made thing does what it was made for—not to become what it is, but because it already is.

So notice where the works sit. Not before grace, as payment, and not behind it as the condition on which grace is kept; they hold nothing up—though a life with no tracks under it might fairly wonder whether it was ever set down on the course. If our tracks look thin, the answer is not to look harder at the snow but at the One who cut it. They come after: “prepared beforehand,” cut in the night. The kindness we could do this afternoon, the apology that is overdue—not our fee for acceptance, but the course God groomed for a people he had already made alive.

That order changes how a Tuesday feels. When we get it backwards, every good deed becomes a payment on a house we are afraid of losing, and we obey the way a debtor pays, keeping score. Which is why Paul wrote, “so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:9). Some of us would rather have the open snow—the same error inverted: we will not be told where to go, and so we do not go. When we get it right, the same deed is a glide down a track someone else cut: not to earn the morning, but because the morning has been given, and a groove is where a skier finally moves.

So let us stop paying for what has been paid. We do not have to find the tracks; we wake already in them, cut while we slept by a Father who does not sleep (Psalm 121:4), and the day’s obedience is simply pushing off.