I made the move for a few reasons:

One, I like the luxury of the option of giving away some pieces for free and letting some be for paying subscribers only. Writing has never been free for me to do and I mostly haven’t minded that, but it is my job and jobs should pay, otherwise we should quit them. Moving to Substack gives you the option of throwing a penny or ten my way.

Two, speaking of paying, I no longer wanted to pay an ever increasing amount of money and skills to both Squarespace and Mailchimp. I pay for Substack, but the way it’s set up is easier for me and my no-math brain. And the backend of Substack is almost no work for me to maintain, so I no longer have to devote design time to MailChimp and Squarespace.

Three, I really like and support what Substack is doing and want to put my money where my mouth is.

What any of this means for you:

Pretty much nothing. If you were subscribed to sayable.net, I migrated your email over to lorewilbert.com as a free subscriber. Still your option if you want to pay. I’m keeping sayable.net up because there’s twenty years of archives here and some of you still delve into them on occasion.

lorewilbert.com is the new S A Y A B L E. Same me, different house.

There’s something a little anticlimactic about the leveling down process, it happens slowly, the water seeping out like a leak you can’t find or air from an inner tube. It’s gradual and calm even, your boats rocking gently. But the leveling up process is anything but. The water rushes in from the front of the lock in whitewater waves, the pressure from behind the dam making it impossible to go slow. All you can do it sidle your kayak up against the concrete walls, hold onto the ropes on the side, and wait it out. It’s either scary or thrilling, depending on your disposition.

Faith is a little like all of this. We eagerly put ourselves into it along with everyone else and then the terrain changes and the current gets a little more swift, but we’re in it for the long-haul. We meander around the bogs, through shallow water and small inlets, exploring the unexplored—or rarely explored—off the beaten path. Then we backtrack to wider spaces, but with stronger currents. We know what we’re up against now, but we are strong enough to keep going.

But somewhere along the way, we find ourselves boxed in by something. Maybe it’s grief. Maybe it’s hurt. Maybe it’s doubt or paralyzing fear. Maybe it’s rejection or confusion or something worse.

Whatever it is, we feel the walls closing in on us, we feel the air leaking out of us. We’re still afloat, we haven’t lost our way, but it sure feels like it. And, in some ways, we’ve come to the end of ourselves. The lowest we’ve been, and it can be a bit scary to turn around and face the tsunami that we know is about to bowl us over when we engage the fear and grief, anger and doubt we need to engage to get back home.

All we can do is hold on for dear life.

The thing about water is it’s a very predictable thing. If one knows their way around it, on it, through it, if they understand weather and rapids and currents, water everywhere acts exactly the same. That doesn’t mean that what the water is doing is always safe. Just because the way a thing is is predictable doesn’t mean it feels or acts predictably.

A few weeks ago, Nate and I watched a kayaking documentary on HBOMax called The Edge. It was about three elite kayakers who endeavored to paddle the most difficult stretch of water in the world. They went about halfway through the planned 11 day trip that had turned into 28 days, and (spoiler alert) they failed. They couldn’t do it. The water levels were too erratic, the boulders too dangerous, and the camaraderie too fragile. Later, though, I reflected on the reality that though they may have failed to complete their mission, they did not fail entirely. They understood water so intimately that they knew being airlifted out was the only way they would come out alive.

Our artificial rapids in the small lock in an Adirondack river in no way compare to their endeavor. But it all does compare to faith.

Faith in God is the most predictable thing in the world. Christians believe with their whole hearts that God is establishing a kingdom and nothing, nothing, will prevail against it. Practicing our faith may be difficult, but the Object of our faith is sure.

But there will always come times in our lives when we feel boxed in by what we know and what we think we know, and maybe we begin to get lulled into an easy faith, a simple faith. The sort where we accept easy answers or ask easy questions because we’re terrified of what will happen if we ask a hard one. I’m not even talking about easy questions like, “Are you real God?” or “Are you good God?” because everyone knows those are just the entry level questions in a faith crisis.

No, I’m talking about the questions like, “What do I believe about suffering?” “Is hell real? “What does God’s word say about sex/money/tithing/LGBTQA issues/politics/gender roles?” “Is God really like this role model who failed?” Or the questions God is asking us like, “What have you done?” “Do you love me?” “Do you believe me?” These are the questions our faith is made or broken over. These are the questions we have to hang onto the side through and just trust our way through.

What I mean to say is, if you will trust what you know about the water and trust what you do know about God, the questions will not leave you submerged and gasping for air—though things might get rocky, they might get wobbly, you might even overturn a time or two.

The way through is all the way through. We don’t live in bogs or rushing currents. We don’t live with stunning mountain views or shallow water. We don’t live in locks. We pass through them. This is the way we go.

I have no concerns about deconstruction, faith crises, or renovations. I know everyone everywhere must have them and I know they are good for us. We must risk the first question and move through to the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, until we get to the question Jesus asked Peter on the shores of Galilee, “Do you love me?”

“Do you love me?”

“Do you love me?”

And we must not, when the time comes, give the answer we think he wants, but the answer that is true, even if it is no, or maybe, or I want to, but can’t.

“That’s okay,” he says, “I am the water of life and I know the route home and I will not let you go.”

Jesus will not let you go.

Love,

Lore

Tomorrow my second book A Curious Faith releases into the world. I made it for you—you just starting out, you in the bogs, you in the beautiful views, you in the lock, and you in the boat. I made it for the believers and the doubters and the halfway in or outers. I made it for the ones who want to believe there is a way through.

Today is the last day you can preorder it and receive some beautiful preorder gifts in the mail if you fill out the preorder form.

Why preorder?

Because preorders are one of the best ways you can help support authors who are releasing a book in the world. Preorders tell booksellers to promote visibility of new releases, therefore helping our books reach more readers. No one needs to tell you that our world is heaving with a faith crisis in 2022, and I can’t think of a better time for someone who’s struggling to read this book. Please preorder! You’ve got through midnight to do so (Plus, you lock in the lowest price.).

When you preorder one copy, you get:

• The book

• Four printables from the book

• A digital copy for stickers with four crucial questions on them

• Early access to four guided meditations from me!

If you preorder TWO copies, you get:

• The book

• Four printables from the book

• Four beautiful stickers with four crucial questions on them mailed directly to you

• Early access to four guided meditations from me!

In conclusion: 

Pros of buying ACF at Amazon:
Higher rankings for me
More independent booksellers stocking ACF
Ability to write and post a review on Amazon
Free shipping
Delivery of book on release day

Cons of buying ACF at Amazon:
Supporting the Amazon-model
Giving more of your hard earned cash to Bezos
Perpetuating the catch-22 authors find themselves in

Pros of buying ACF at Baker Book House:
Free shipping
40% off list price
Book arrival immediately (cutting out middleman)

Cons of buying ACF at Baker Book House:
No review option
No ranking option

Pros of buying ACF at [local/independent] bookstore:
Supports your local economy
Helps them know faith books are of interest
Gets you out in the community
Supports (hopefully) some best business practices

Cons of buy ACF at [local/independent] bookstore:
May take longer than other suppliers
Will pay full price
No review (for local bookstores, online a possibility)
No ranking

I hope this is a helpful bit of information for you. Almost every author you read faces this predicament—especially Christian authors because often times their publishing houses don’t have the marketing budget many bigger houses have for their secular writers. Some authors don’t care if you buy at Amazon or anywhere else, for many reasons. Some do. I’m one of them. This is my attempt at walking in integrity. 

. . .

Wherever you preorder A Curious Faith from, there are some fun preorder bonuses.

If you order two copies of ACF, you’ll get mailed a pack of stickers (pictured above) with questions from the book on them + digital printables + a special audio gift in advance of release day.

If you order just one copy, you’ll still get the printable + the audio gift, but the stickers will be a digital file for you to print on your own. Here’s the link to fill out the form for preorder bonuses. You have until August 1st to do so!

We do not have big emotions in our house. We do not have yelling or outbursts of tears, we do not have unquenchable laughter or sadness that won’t dissipate. If there is a gauge for demonstrative, Nate and I fall somewhere below a quarter of a tank. And so when something recently happened to us that left me crying so hard I vomited into a garbage can and Nate so hurt he called one of our dearest people with red hot anger burning in him (not at them, just in him), we didn’t exactly know what to do. We are not adept at big emotions here.

I don’t think it was always this way. Growing up in a houseful of boys, my emotions were foreign and usually fodder for teasing, if not downright punishable. Somewhere along the way I learned to remain indifferent, even stoic. Just the facts ma’am. And phrases like “feelings aren’t facts” crept their way into my mind and heart, even if not my mouth. There was always some question about whether the things I thought and felt mattered.

The less I felt like they mattered, the better listener I became. I listened to girls talk about boys and boys talk about girls. I listened to pastors talk about rejection and people talk about mistrust. I listened to friends talk about their days and strangers talk about their dirty secrets. I became the best listener I could be, always at the ready with a question intent on delving into the recesses of another’s heart. The problem was, though, I never let myself be mined for what was in the recesses of my own heart.  Whole hours would go by in which I would only listen to my friends and never answer a question about my own life. Whole weeks would go by without taking the opportunity to inspect my own life and heart.

Years ago a dear friend sat across from me and said, “Lore, you know me better than anyone, and I trust you with everything, but the more time that goes by, the less I trust you. It’s not because you’re not trustworthy, though, it’s because you won’t let me in” 

When she said those words, my heart cracked. She was right. I had prided myself on being impermeable because, from childhood, that’s what I thought people wanted from me. But here was one of my dearest people telling me she didn’t want impermeable Lore, she wanted vulnerable, knowable, tender at the core Lore.

From that conversation on, I began to see how lopsided every single one of my friendships was, how unknown and lonely I felt with all of them. And all along, I thought they were feeling known and intimate with me, but because they barely knew what was under the surface, they felt far from me.

I began a series of conversations that have changed me from the inside out. I said to each of my dear friends, “Our friendship has always been like this,” and I described the one-sidedness of it, “But I am working to actively repent for my way of being and to change my ways. One way you can help me is to begin asking me questions, and not settling for the surface answer I give. It’s self-protective and a form of sin for me.”

One by one, those friendships changed. Some of them changed because my friends weren’t willing to go there with me, they enjoyed what they received from my listening more than they wanted to engage in the asking. But some of them changed because my friends tenderly walked with me through the change.

And something happened. I began to love, like, really love these people. Something I had never let myself do before, not ever. And I began to feel really loved by them. And the thing about love is that once you really have it for someone and they have it for you, it’s nearly impossible to imagine losing it.

That day I told you about? The day I cried so hard I vomited? It was because I was faced with the possibility that someone I have loved nearly my entire life, someone with whom I have warred through far away seasons, heartbreak, hope, tears, and moves, would choose to leave me.

“What was that?” she asked a few weeks later, probing gently, so gently, for what was under the surface. “Why did that thought make you react so viscerally?”

I teared up immediately because I knew the answer: “It’s because I love you. It’s because the thought of you not in my life by choice feels unfathomable to me.”

It was not idolatry, I told her (“I know,” she said), instead it is the cost of what this shift over the past several years has done in me. It has made me truly vulnerable. Vulnerable to hurt, vulnerable to being hurt, vulnerable to the possibility that someone I deeply and profoundly love and respect would hurt me. But it’s also made me permeable, permeable to love, to goodness, to feeling my feelings when it’s right to feel them. “It’s actually a good thing,” I said (“I know,” she said.), “It means that this wound that’s been there as long as I can remember is finally being healed.”

“I know,” she said.

This is a story about me, but in some ways it’s a story about many of us and God. Maybe we learned when we were small not to question God or the Bible. Maybe we learned more recently that our questions were a sign of faithlessness, that intimacy with God is impossible. Maybe we learned that when God asks questions, he’s only doing it because he’s cruel and exacting. And when Jesus is doing it, it’s just confusing.

But I don’t think that’s true.

I’m proof that asking questions can heal us. That making ourselves vulnerable to being asked them or making ourselves vulnerable to asking them—these things heal us by degrees. They peel back the masks and the skins and the charades we all have, and get to the meat of the matter, the core. The more we peel, the more it hurts, but eventually we realize the hurt is actually doing something good. The hurt is where we know the healing. “The crack,” Leonard Cohen wrote, “is how the light gets in.”

And maybe that’s cliche, but if it is, it’s because it’s true.

I know it’s hard to be vulnerable, to name the ways we’ve doubted or questioned or hurled our words into the cosmos and heard the sound of nothing coming back. I’ve been there before, friends, and the only way through is through.

I want to invite you to a little community for A Curious Faith. Yes, yes, it’s just a plain old regular launch team. The same old tasks and the same old cheers. But maybe it could be a little different for you this time? Maybe, like my friendships in recent years, it could become something beautiful? A tangible means of goodness through the possibility of question?

To join (and I would love to have you!) just preorder the book and then fill out this form. You’ll get details right away about the group and then once all the spots are filled, you’ll get all the details, including a free early release copy of A Curious Faith! Make sure you keep your receipt or the number on your receipt.

Feeling tender about your big questions in a roomful of strangers? No worries. Really. You don’t have to say a word in there if you don’t want.

This group is not just a group for doubters and skeptics, because that’s not what A Curious Faith is about. It’s a book about learning to trust God with all the things we don’t know for sure. 

It’s not the entire journey, it’s just the first step.

Will you join me?

August 2nd is creeping up on us, which means A Curious Faith will be in your hands very, very soon. I wanted to let you know about some gifts we’re giving away for those who have preordered. (Preorders are really helpful for authors as we try to get the word out to folks about our work.)

I say in the book that God made us curious because he wants to be found, and I truly believe that. But I also believe that the enemy wants to snuff out our curiosity, for us to stuff our questions down and pretend easy belief. One of the ways the enemy does that is by keeping us busy or distracted. Another way is by not putting people in our lives who ask us difficult questions, helping us to become more contemplative.

As I thought through these realities, I tried to think of things that are around us everywhere, almost like passive reminders to engage. And I don’t know about you, but my water bottle is plastered with stickers. We also have a few on the back of our car and I have a few more on the front of my planner and journal. Every time I see those stickers, a memory comes back to me and I take a moment to reflect. And so I thought, what better way to insert reminders of the goodness of questions than to make the questions accessible to you wherever?

If you preorder two copies of A Curious Faith and fill out this form, we will send you a pack of die-cut stickers that pose questions like, “Where are you?” or “Who told you that?” You can stick them to your water bottle, journal, car, laptop, or fridge. Wherever the reminder would be helpful to you. We have a limited amount of these to mail out, so fill out the form asap!

If you preorder one copy of A Curious Faith, we will send you a digital file of the stickers, which you can print on your own. Again, make sure to fill out this form.

For all preorders, no matter how big or small, we will be sending out a file of prints containing different quotes from A Curious Faith, more reminders that the Bible is a permission slip for our questions. You can print these anywhere!

All you need to do is fill out this form and your gifts will be delivered to you in early August.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, friends. Truly.

It has me thinking about the importance of feeling safe and how critical that is to our healing. I don’t think I knew how very unsafe my body has felt most of my life. I have words now for the state of my body in its previous forty years—freezing, fleeing, fawning, and sometimes (rarely) fighting—but for a long time I just thought this was how a body was meant to feel in the world.

Not all of us can change our home or relationships or location to move into a safer space, but if you are wondering if this is how it is meant to be for you or always will be, I hope you can remember the actions of Jesus with the woman “caught in the act of adultery” in John chapter 8.

I write about this narrative in A Curious Faith:

Naked, vulnerable, revealed, her body very likely used more for the man’s pleasure than her own. Quick and nasty, caught and then brought. Dragged out into the street for the pleasure of some more men, religious men who want to catch someone else in a dirty act too, Jesus himself.

“‘Teacher,’ they say, ‘This woman was caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him.” (vv. 4-6)

We will perhaps never know what it is that Jesus wrote in the dirt at the woman’s feet, but it is one of those questions I plan on posing to him when I see him someday. Do you know what I believe, though? I think Jesus was giving them a chance to see how foolish their plans were. I think Jesus was being long-suffering, maybe stalling. I suspect he was thinking to himself, “Surely they see what a fools errand they’re on, but maybe I’ll give them a minute.”

Not to be caught in error, though, they continued on questioning. So Jesus straightened up and said, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” (v. 7)

And then the men scattered.

Jesus turned to the woman and said some of the most beautiful words in the whole of the Bible: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” (v. 10)

Christians love to talk about the last part of this passage, after the woman answers Jesus’ question in the negative and he says, “Go and sin no more.” (v. 11) I’ve heard that line ten thousand times in my life, in sermons and debates and defenses and apologetics. Christians love to talk about how the Christian life is one of turning away from sin, doing right actions and being right before God. But I can’t help but notice that the first concern of Jesus was not that she turn from sin, but that she felt safe.

The woman’s sin was of secondary concern to Jesus in that moment. He wanted her to know a few things: 

First, he didn’t condemn her. 

Second, he was under no illusion that her sins were worse than the Pharisees who threw her at his feet. 

Third, Jesus wanted her to say it, right out loud, “No one, sir.”

No one condemns me. He doesn’t.  They don’t. And I don’t.

I will say this again and again for the rest of my life: Jesus is safe. Jesus is the safest human to have ever walked the face of the earth. And until we believe that in his presence we’re not condemned, the words, “Go and sin no more,” have no power. They’re just a method of behavior modification. They’re the route straight to becoming a white-washed tomb, sparkly clean on the outside and stinking of death inside, which is why the irony of this narrative is it was the religious leaders who caught and brought the woman to Jesus. They were pointing at her and Jesus pointed at them instead.

Preorder A Curious Faith now and get the rest of this chapter.

Some more words, beauty, or thoughts I’ve found this week:

Alan Jacobs writes about Keeping Things On His Chest this week.

These stunning woodcuts for The Swiss Family Robinson.

Ella’s words on a traveling art journal.

This piece in the Times about climate change’s effects in Utah.

I’m always on the hunt for faithful believers who are wielding their pens with grace and prophetic insight, and Sara Billups is one of those without a doubt. I hope you’ll consider adding her Bitter Scroll to your regular reads (and bookmark her book Orphaned Believers, coming from Baker Books next year!).

The story of the lame man at the sheep gate in John 5 had never really meant much to me before, but standing there, on the edge of the pools of Bethesda in Jerusalem, something moved in me. Something became real for me. My faith became bolstered in a place.

Most of us probably don’t admit the ways that superstition plays into our faith these days. We joke about Karma or hoping good things come back to good people. We make connections between our actions and outcomes all the time. Part of that is just humanness, but part of it, I think, is hope.

We’re people of places and times and spaces, and we’re concrete and real and touchable and tangible, and all the things we do have outcomes, sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re meh, but we keep on doing and hoping for all the things to turn out okay. That’s hope. That just plain old human hope. We plant seeds and raise kids and say yes to a second date and feed our pets good food and offers vows at the altar and give money to charity and put other money in savings accounts—that’s hope. It’s the belief that if we do these things in certain orders and ways, something good will be the outcome.

This is the lame man at the pools of Bethesda.

And this was me, two thousand years later, leaning over the edge of the pools of Bethesda.

The man is there, lame for 38 years. The lame among the lame, the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the outcasts, the ones for whom the investment did not come back good. They wait there, day after day, for the pools to fill, for the angel they envision who stirs the waters, for someone to put them into the waters, to be healed.

Our tour guide told us there is actually an artesian well feeding the pools and there is a very scientific reason why the waters rise and fall. There is no angel stirring the waters. There are no healing properties to the waters, not really, no more than there are healing properties to stepping foot on the land where Jesus once walked or spending time in the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s a superstitious hope, an action that we do with the desire it will lead to something good.

And this is where Jesus met the lame man with his misplaced hope.

I love this Jesus. I love that he doesn’t shame the man for coming day after day to this ordinary powerless place. I love that he doesn’t shame him for keeping company with other hurting people. I love that he doesn’t question the man’s malady, he doesn’t try to understand the intricacies of its nature. Jesus just asks the question: “Do you want to be made well?” (John 5:6)

As if it wasn’t painfully, painfully obvious that the man wanted more than anything just to be well, Jesus still asked the question. 

Why? Why was the question important?

I think the question matters because part of our journey of faith is moving through the doubts and putting ourselves in a place where the outcome we desire is possible. Even if the place itself is powerless and even the people around us are powerless too. Wanting to be well is just as important to God as doing everything we can to be well. Wanting God to answer our questions and satisfy our curiosity is just as important as involving ourselves in the answers. There must be action to our faith, but faith always starts with hope.

Even this man, lame for 38 years, got himself to the pools. Even though the object of his faith was just ordinary water powered by ordinary means, he still laid himself down by it. Even though no one was there to put him in the water when it stirred up, he still waited. And Jesus showed up.

Do you want to be made well? 

Do you want the spaces in you that are empty, hopeless, meaningless, confusing, out of place, broken, hurting—do you want Jesus to heal them?

Everything in me wants to sit with you, reader, while you answer that question, to let you linger far away from the places and people and scenes that may aid in your healing. I want you to stay as long as you want in your head, wrestling with questions and not puting into action the hope of being made well. But I can’t do that. I have to say to you: if you want to be made well, are you willing to do ten-thousand things that make you look and feel and seem foolish in order to meet Jesus in that place, to answer his question, “Do you want to be made well?” with a resounding, “Yes!”

Places don’t heal us, but they help us.

Places don’t fix us, but they remind us.

Places don’t put us back together again, but they can be a holding space for the God who does.

Maybe it’s a church sanctuary. Maybe it’s your hometown. Maybe it’s a mountain. Or a valley. Maybe it’s a NICU or a graveyard or your high school or an airplane or Israel or leaning over the rails of the ancient ruins of an artesian well. Maybe Jesus wants to meet you right there, with your faulty hopes and superstitious claims and your weak self. And maybe that’s where he’s going to answer your “Yes, I do want to be well,” with “Pick up your mat and walk.” (v. 8)

And you will.

Adapted from A Curious Faith. Preorder now.

. . .

Would you like to go to Israel with me?

Select International Tours has asked me to lead a trip with them November 24-December 4, 2023. I know that’s a bit away, but maybe the amount of time will help you save your pennies so you can come along with us.

We will have an English speaking tour guide who will keep us on schedule and lead that part of the trip, a nice bus, great hotels, the most amazing food, and eleven days together in Israel. I will lead the spiritual aspect of the tour, drawing out narratives from scripture that you find in A Curious Faith, including this chapter excerpt from above. We will spend time in Galilee, Jericho, Jerusalem, and more. We will visit historic ruins, the location of the Sermon on the Mount, historic churches and more. We will also have some time built into the schedule for contemplation and personal reflection at various sites.

I’m really excited about this trip for a lot of reasons and really grateful to be asked, especially as a Protestant! SIT has historically structured their tours with leaders from the Roman Catholic tradition, but they are trying to branch out and I am delighted to be a new shoot on that branch.

I never thought I’d be someone who said being in Israel changed my life, but I am and it did. I hope you can come along with us and chance a place changing your life too.

Who is it for? Men and women, 18+, able to walk a good amount each day.

For the complete itinerary and trip details, as well as to register, click here or on the image below.

I’ve come to really appreciate newsletters these days. I like the almost sly passivity of them. I don’t mean they’re sneaky or lazy, I just mean, they just show up in my inbox and wait for me to have time to read them. They don’t shout at me from social media or make me click through and save if I want to read but can’t right then or get lost in amongst all the other noise. They just sit there quietly, like hens on an egg or my pup on the porch or the pregnant buds of the my Irises, waiting for whatever comes next. And I like that. (I think it might be different if I let my inbox get out of control, but by God’s grace, it’s the one inbox in my life I aggressively maintain.)

Here are some newsletters I love:

James K. A. Smith’s, A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud is one of my favorites. I never get tired of it and I always find something interesting in it. Smith makes me think, he always challenges me, but he also always blesses me. I feel akin to him in some ways.

Grace Olmstead’s Granola. Grace writes about the land, preservation, home, restlessness, the earth, and more. She always has a pile of links that end up as open tabs on my browser for (sometimes) weeks. Lots of good food for thought here.

David French’s French Press. I read it every Sunday and I would share it every Sunday if I didn’t think that would get annoying. May his tribe increase.

Emily P. Freeman’s One Last Thing. I just like Emily. Emily’s voice is the voice I want in my ears when I get an MRI or a mammogram or am carsick. But I also just like her voice in my life when I’m sitting on the porch or drinking good tea or need a friend.

Tsh Oxenreider’s Five Quick Things. I don’t know why I wasn’t subscribed to this one before, but I’ve come to love it since I subscribed. I really like newsletters that link me to other cool things and thoughtful pieces because then I spend less time on social media which is just good for me. Tsh always has a great roundup of thoughtful things to share.

Michael Wright’s Still Life. He shares art and poetry and existential questions about life and faith. I always save his until I have a spate of time to savor and soak.

Jen Pollock Michel’s Post Script. Jen has long been one of my favorite contemporary thinkers and writers. She really just gets into whatever life is serving her and wrestles the goodness and truth out of it. We need more writers like her.

These aren't newsletters, but I always make sure to read Esau McCaulley and Tish Harrison Warren’s op-eds whenever they show up.

I hope you find one or two or all of these helpful additions to your inbox.

Also, I wanted to let you know about an upcoming retreat some of you may be interested in. Craft & Revision is offering an intensive writing weekend rich with craft instruction, spiritual direction, and creative community. Hosted by Image’s Creative Nonfiction Editor, Lauren F. Winner, along with as Amy Peterson and Charlotte Donlon, the retreats are open to applications until June 15. Find out more here here. I hope you’re able to participate.

I struggled with this at the time. I try to be an inclusive person, but I’m also someone who struggles to say “No” to people without feeling guilty. To see a good desire for inclusion in someone and to not invite them felt smarmy to me. But to not be able to talk about a good and life-giving thing also felt smarmy. It was a clear case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Last night I arrived home from five days in a lakeside cabin with a few writer friends. It was, without question, one of the best things I have ever done vocationally and one of the most life-giving times I’ve had in a long time. We ate simple food, hung out in our sweats and yoga pants, took naps, kayaked a bit, drank hot beverages and wine, and had four full days of meaningful and purposeful engagement with one another about our vocations, bodies, spirits, and minds.

One of the things we talked about is how do we talk about this time together? We were faced with the choice: either be silent about the goodness of this time or talk about it, risking the envy or longing of those who weren’t included or who don’t have the same kind of thing in their life. Ultimately, I’ve decided to talk about it. But I am not going to share much of what we discussed or what was done in us or through us. That, in a very real sense, is holy and sacred work, and not for public consumption or opinion.

However, the best part of taking these online relationships into offline intimacy is that is replicable in your life too. While adding more people to our small and intimate gathering would negate the intimacy of it, it doesn’t mean that others cannot engage a group of three or four in the same exercises and reap similar goodness.

The value of taking online relationships offline for a time, confessing, encouraging, comforting, and building up one another cannot be overstated. All of us couldn’t stop talking about how very good it was to be able to dialogue about the things we wrestle with in online spaces with vulnerability and accountability.

In the spirit of sharing, then, I just wanted to share what we did in hopes that you can steal this idea and do it in your own life.

First, start with finding two or three others in your similar age bracket. I am all for inter-generational relationships, but the value of gathering with a few who have lived a similar amount of years in the world as you is that you see the world similarly. There is value to gathering with those who see things differently, but we’re aiming for intimacy and a space for vulnerability here, which means you want as few roadblocks to that as possible. You’re not looking for people who are the same as you, but people who are similar to you.

Next, say to the one you feel the closest to, “I feel the need for some intentional gatherings to talk about our vocations as XYZ, but also to come as whole people with whole experiences. How do you feel about joining me in that?” If they are excited about that, mention the two other folks you’d like to include, while keeping your hands open if they suggest a different person, or if they don’t feel completely at home with one of those people. The aim here is deep vulnerability, not networking or hob-knobbing. This isn’t an Instagram photo-shoot or a group for one’s resume. This is a group in which all of you will feel comfortable going deep with without much self-censoring.

When you have settled on your group (again, keep it under four—intimacy is the goal), make a group text and begin to plan your where and how. Stay flexible. (If it helps, know that this is the third group I’ve been hoping for this kind of momentum forward and the first one to actually have it.) We planned our first week at an old farmhouse in January and ended up canceling the day of because of some COVID stuff. It meant losing our deposit on the AirBnB and the flights that were booked. We were all sad, but we rallied and put another date on the calendar as soon as possible. Four months later was the soonest we could all gather, and sadly, one still had to back out at the last minute.

Find a place to gather where you’re not going to be distracted by nightlife or tourism or noise. A pathway to intimacy is a quiet heart and mind, so you want a place that can cultivate that.

Make a plan for your time together. Don’t wing it. It can be tempting to wing it because you want to stay flexible, but you’re going to have limited time together and a lot of free space can end up leading to unfruitful conversations. We made a shopping list of easy meals (lots of snack plates, toast, and salads), we made a schedule for every day together, and we stuck to it all. This was our schedule. Feel free to steal it.

8am: breakfast as we woke, and then personal and morning prayers (adapted from BCP) together

9am: Physical, Spiritual, or Mental check in. We structured it with a timer. So on day one, physical check-in, it looked like this. A timer for 15 minutes was set and one person began to talk about their body, how it was feeling, how they were feeling settled or not, what was hurting or healing, etc.. When the timer went off, they finished, and the timer was set for five minutes of silence. When that timer went off, it was set again for 15 minutes, during which the other two people directed all of their attention toward the first person again, asking them questions, clarifying things, helping them go deeper. After the timer went off, we would both pray for the first person, and then we would begin the process all over again for the next person. While the timer might feel constrictive to some, it is necessary to help build trust among the group. If no timer is used, someone will invariably talk much longer than someone else, and stories will begin to be swapped, and the whole point of active listening is derailed. The timer never felt intrusive to us, it felt like a safe boundary line, knowing it would be honored.

11am: Break for bathrooms, refills, stretching, dressing, etc.

1pm: Lunch (we all just grazed) and then free time. We’d catch up with our families, get some work done, go kayaking, taking a walk or nap, talk more, or whatever.

5pm: Dinner prep and dinner.

7pm: Another round of processing, this time one evening for each person. That person could bring whatever they wanted to talk about for the evening and all our attention was on them for then next few hours. Each of us chose to talk about vocational work, but this could be different for you. We talked about big decisions we needed to make, future projects we’re thinking about or working on, struggles we’re facing in our current work, etc.. Each of us made a short list of what we wanted to process knowing it was a judgement and envy free zone. We talked money, social media, integrity, difficulties, etc.. All of our attention was directed toward whoever’s night it was. It wasn’t a time for swapping stories or comparing our own lives to theirs, we asked clarifying questions, issued challenges, spoke life where death had reigned, built up where doubt had made a home, and affirmed one another in their particular calling in life. There were no whiteboards or planners, this was spiritual work, more than physical work. Big and beautiful things happened in this space.

10pm: This wasn’t intentional, but each night the conversation rolled around to some more potent topics. We talked about how to talk about gender and sexuality, we talked about the social media practices of people we admire and the social media practices of people we struggle with, and articulated our own sins of idolatry or judgmentalism. We spoke about how to navigate talking about retreats like these online when it can often feel like a who’s in or who’s out club. We talked about perimenopause and sex. No topic was off-limits. And then we went to bed far too late for a bunch of mid-life women…

You can steal this schedule or make your own, but I do recommend plenty of space for each person to be able to talk without interruption and space for each person to be asked deep questions without moving the conversation too quickly to “Your story reminds me of this story of mine…” which can really derail attention. Intentionality is key.

Commit in your heart to praying for and with one another. Bathe the whole time together in prayer.

Commit in your heart to not gossiping. Let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth. This isn’t a space for griping about the church or your family or your work. It’s a space to spur one another on to love and good works.

Commit in your heart to holding the words said and work done in you. It is not for public consumption. God could very well move in a profound and deep way in this time (as he did in ours), but it is each person’s own story to share in their own time. Trust is deeply important in order to make this work.

Commit in your heart to showing up as your full self. Forego makeup, don’t curate your outfits for photo-shoots, don’t pretend to have all the answers, don’t act like you do. Just show up “soul-nekked” as one of my professors says.

Make a plan for the future. Monthly zoom calls? A Voxer group? Next year’s retreat? Whatever it is, commit to continuing to show up for and with one another. Remember, this isn’t about networking. What you’re not promising to do is chatter about the others online, promoting them and their work, gushing about them all over the place. This is about an ongoing practice of humility, accountability, vulnerability, and authority in one another’s life and vocation.

Share the goodness! I mean, don’t share what’s not yours to share, but don’t secret away the goodness of a group like this. If someone shows interest or seems envious of your time, say, “You too can make this happen in your life!” There’s nothing magical or mystical about this. It took intentionality, some work, and a willingness to show up and be seen in totality.

And it was good.

And you’re invited to participate in that goodness in your own life.

It occurred to me this morning that many of these authors were authors I was once warned about. Eugene Peterson and “his watered down Message translation,” with the translation always put in air quotes to signify some disdain. Brian Zahnd and the echoes of “emergent” back in the early 2000s. Books from Saints and about Saints when “Aren’t we all saints? Why do they get a special dispensation?” Criticism of liberalism found in Brown and Bruggemann, criticism of literalism found in some of the story-book bibles (ironic, if you think about it).

These are the friends who light my way in some ways. It is not so much that I was in the dark before—although what is dimness if not a little bit of darkness and what is sanctification if not growing a little bit clearer, a little bit brighter? I realize now, when I survey the stack, that many of these writers and thinkers point often to their former selves or younger selves and have a tenderness toward themselves for what they did not know then. That same tenderness can lend, if we’ll let it, to a tenderness toward our future selves, too, knowing we’ll know more then than we know now.

When we first moved back to New York, for about a year we heard the rumblings of slander and gossip about us, that we were not to be trusted, that we did not take God’s word seriously, that we didn’t take sin seriously, and that we had a liberal agenda. I found this incredulous at first, because anyone who knows us knows we take God’s word more seriously than anything—including the United States Constitution and church membership covenants. Anyone who knows us knows we are almost too introspective about sin—our own and others. We deeply care about sanctification, truth, righteousness, and grace. Yesterday Nate took me by the shoulders and said, “I would like you to stop apologizing for not doing anything wrong,” to which I replied, “I’m sorry.” We are many things, but none of the above.

My incredulousness, though, led quickly to grief. A kind of grief I haven’t shared too much about and won’t. But a grief that also led to life eventually, and not death. Oh, it led to death for sure, death of some relationships, hopes, conceptions, and more. But ultimately it’s leading to life, a different life than I expected, but a better one in some ways. A slower one than I wanted, but a deeper one.

I realized recently though, that even though my name belongs nowhere near the names of the aforementioned scholars, saints, and servants, progressive sanctification means eventually you will change and if those around you are slower to change or just haven’t gotten there yet or maybe never will, the charge against you will be of some kind of apostasy or heresy or liberalism or legalism. You will be reviled and falsely accused. If the Kingdom of God is ever widening, ever progressing, ever growing, while still remaining grounded and rooted and firm, Christ followers will eventually receive the revulsion of those who only want the kingdom to be one or the other.

After years of eschewing The Chosen for stupid snobbish reasons with no basis in anything, Nate and I watched both seasons in the weeks leading up to Eastertide. I will never forget the scene in the last episode where Jesus gives Matthew the map to himself. It won’t have the same power if you just watch this clip without having watched the entire two seasons before (which you should, right now, because it’s free). But when he turns to Matthew and says, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you,” well, I just don’t know how to talk about that without crying.

It’s been making me think of all the people I’ve heard reviled, all the voices who were learning their faith one step at a time, who were sniffing out the way, finding the people who looked like Christ, all the pastors who changed, all the parishioners who pivoted, and all the writers who regretted, but who kept on going forward into what God had called them.

And I felt strangely comforted.

My literary agent, John Blase, reminded me of a section in Winn Collier’s biography of Eugene Peterson this morning, where Winn shares a reflection of Peterson on a poem by Denise Levertov. Here is the poem:

Let’s go — much as that dog goes,
intently haphazard. The
Mexican light on a day that
“smells like autumn in Connecticut”
makes iris ripples on his
black gleaming fur — and that too
is as one would desire — a radiance
consorting with the dance.
Under his feet
rock and mud, his imagination, sniffing,
engaged in its perceptions — dancing
edgeways, there’s nothing
the dog disdains on his way,
nevertheless he
keeps moving, changing
pace and approach but
not direction — “every step an arrival.”

And here was the reflection:

"The imagery spoke to him so deeply because he had been that dog for decades. His life and work had been more like tracing a scent rather than following a map. Discovery, not direction. In all those 55 years, Eugene never truly mapped his future, never tried to lay some ordered path toward a clear career goal. Intent? Sure. But haphazard, too. The whole meandering journey had been a dog sniffing the wind, the next whiff being the only real clue."

“Intently haphazard,” John reminded me this morning, this is the way we go. This is the way of faith. It is not that we have a roadmap the disciples didn’t have and so our journey should look clearer or cleaner than their fumbling footsteps. No, they had the scriptures and they had God incarnate with them. And we have the Bible and we have the Holy Spirit with us.

We’re still sniffing it all out, we’re still engaged in our perceptions, and we’re still, with every step, arriving. This is the work of the Christian in the world. To arrive today, to arrive tomorrow, and to keep on arriving, despite what others say about us along the way.

When I asked myself what I missed out on by either leaving certain spaces altogether or by minimizing who I followed, the biggest loss I anticipated apart from connection with other writers, was the ease of clicking on links shared. My typical practice has been to resist most links shared until I see them shared a few times. I assumed since cream and heat rise, so would the good pieces. This has worked well for me but it never occurred to me that someone somewhere was the first to share that cream and heat, meaning someone somewhere was going right to the source instead of waiting for peer pressure to tell us what everyone else was reading and liking.

In the absence of social media over the past few months, I created a little (and growing) bookmark folder I idealistically named “Daily Reads.” Of course I do not click through the bookmarks daily, nor do I read every new piece on the sites I saved; it’s aspirational and I’m okay with that.

A good thing must be shared, though, right? If I was endeavoring to spend less time on social media, I’d have to find some other way to get others in on the goodness that’s just floating around the World Wide Web waiting for more people to love it. I’ve been doing Link Love for probably a decade here, though with no sense of regularity or schedule (and I don’t anticipate changing that), but I stumbled across Instapaper recently and I like the format there. I simply add pieces I’ve read or want to read, and when I heart them, they go to my public page, where anyone can view them.

Of course it isn’t as flashy as sharing on social media, where likes and retweets and shares are the currency of one’s merit, but if we’re going to be revolutionaries, we have to do the uncommon things. So this is one uncommon thing I’ve begun doing. I will still share the best of what I’ve read here on my occasional Link Love, but the bulk of what I’ve read and liked, will show up on that page. If you’re interested, you can bookmark this page and view it on your own time. Remember, it’s not more of my writing—which I hope will interest you even more than if it were!—but it’s some of the thinkers and writers who are influencing me as I muddle through faith and works and theology and formation here on Sayable.

Speaking of muddling through. We got the first review back on A Curious Faith and they called it “meandering and muddled,” which made me feel really great inside (sarcasm), until I realized, well, that’s exactly what practicing a curious faith is. It’s not neat or incisive or very polished at all—and I’ve never endeavored to be any of the above. In fact, I think most of you probably hang around because of that very quality about me. So while the review was disheartening, I’ve had to swallow that disappointment and trust that there is someone out there who very much needs someone to meander along with them through the mushy and muddy middle of wherever they are. I hope the book, and so I, can be that for them. It releases on August 2nd, but you can preorder wherever books are sold.

Here’s what a few wonderful folks have said about it so far:

“Stepping into the beleaguered shoes of the prophets, the psalmists, and the perplexed disciples, Wilbert invites readers into the human experience of faith. Her words are a salve to those of us who wonder, who wait, who impatiently watch for the One who is—and is yet to come.”

— Jen Pollock Michel

“We need more writers like Lore Ferguson Wilbert, ones who gently guide us into the grooves of a well-worn faith, the kind acquainted with doubt. Her words invite us to spread our arms out wide beneath the canopy of curiosity, to take a walk along the curved pattern of the question mark, and to breathe in deep the mystery of God.”

— Emily P. Freeman

“In a world filled with people who think they have all the answers, we desperately need more individuals who know the importance of asking the right questions. Lore Ferguson Wilbert is just such a person. As Lore shows both through her life and in these pages, a strong faith doesn’t just allow questions; it demands them.”

— Karen Swallow Prior

“A Curious Faith is a beautiful culmination of Lore’s ministry. For years she has invited readers to probe the depths of God—and to engage in self-reflection—with a courage that could only be Spirit-led. This book does not provide definitive answers on every musing but does offer a winsome theology of curiosity, of questioning, and of faith that the answers will come.”

— Jasmine L. Holmes

“Lore is innately curious, unafraid of hard questions. She follows her curiosity like a sort of map, sometimes discovering firm and solid answers, sometimes discovering more questions. But time and time again, her curiosity seems to lead to the same conclusion: even in our uncertainty, or doubt, our confusion, there is a God who welcomes us into his love—questions and all. That’s what this book is all about.”

—Seth Haines

Being off of social media for four months was, in some ways, a study in my own self, in becoming more self-aware. My impulses and inclinations, my resistance and compulsions. The impulse to share everyday mundane things quickly dissipated. I listened to birdsongs without needing to share them, looked at sunsets without needing to find my camera, had a thought without needing to get it down before it disappeared. It was almost an out of body experience in some ways. I wrote about it here and here and here. Who are we when no one is observing us?

This isn’t a new question, philosophers have been asking it for generations. Gregg Ten Elshof in his book, I Told Me So, wrote, "The philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte emphasized in his work the fact that we exist at all times both 'for ourselves' and 'for others.' While we have a certain view of ourselves, we're also interested in being viewed, and in how we're being viewed, by others. Sartre calls our attention to the amazing capacity we have to disregard our own view of ourselves when the view of others better serves us and to disregard the view of others when our own view is more attractive."

I didn’t intend to spend a lot of time thinking about this theme during my time away, but it happened and so I did spend the time thinking about it. It matters, after all, and I knew it would especially matter as I came back to those spaces after Easter Sunday.

It led me to incorporate some changes in how I’ll be using those tools both for work and for my own personal use. But it also led me to some serious thinking about how Twitter especially is used. In the thread I lost, I named three options we all have in our social media use.

The first is that we will fill our feeds with those who think very similarly to us. We have similar interests, politics, theology, concerns about the world and convictions about how to live in the world. The benefits of this choice is that we can build community with others quickly. The old quote from Lewis comes to mind, “You too? Me too!” The danger, though, is that we will create—even unknowingly—an echo chamber for ourselves where we’re all running around congratulating others who are congratulating us congratulating them. Researchers have long noted that in these silos of thought, what ends up happening is that we move further to the extreme of our original views.

The second option is that we will do our best to fill our feeds with the best thought-leaders from a broad spectrum of ideas, politics, race, gender, theology, etc.. The benefit of this is that we can hear well-articulated thoughts and ideas from all sides of every issue. The downside, though, is that because we’re not following whole conversations and interactions, the ideas seem fragmented and lack context and holistic helpfulness.

The third option is that we can follow without much concern for who we’re following at all. More the merrier. The benefit being that we can have our cake and eat it too—we can make friends with common thinkers, while also following thought-leaders as well. The downside, though, is that humans just aren’t capable of absorbing that much content and our brains can’t follow that many conversations cohesively and convictionally.

There are also two other viable options. One is to unfollow everyone, which can often get one accused of being uber-elite and/or privileged. The other is to leave these social media spaces entirely, which also risks the same accusation but also doesn’t matter because who are the trolls going to tell? Your mom?

I think these are all morally neutral options, although all have their pros and cons. The real important thing is that we’re aware of the choice we’ve made and don’t pretend we’re exempt from the cons—which is a real temptation, i.e. Ten Elshof’s observation above, “The amazing capacity we have to disregard our own view of ourselves when the view of others better serves us and to disregard the view of others when our own view is more attractive.”

If there is any future at all in social media use for the Christian who wants to be spiritually formed, I think we have to reckon with these things. We have to have the self-awareness that each of these options is forming us and deforming us.

I don’t plan on leaving Instagram anytime soon, but I’ve drawn some seriously stringent boundaries over how I’m using it myself, as well as Facebook (which if it wasn’t for pics of my cute nieces and nephews, I’d have probably left a long time ago). But I am wondering how seriously I can continue to use Twitter in particular knowing what I know now. I just don’t think any of us are capable of using it in a truly neutral and healthy way and, even if we truly are, most of those we follow or engage with or are engaged by, aren’t.

I used to believe that social media could form us for our good, but more and more I’m convinced it’s only deforming us—even if some good fruit has come from it in our lives (like friendships or connections, or readers (like you!) or conviction or consolation or…you get me…), I’m not sure the good outweighs the bad when we consider the whole of how we use it and it uses us.

I wrote this in twenty minutes after losing the thread I’d probably spent twenty minutes on, so please take it all with a grain of salt, but also, like salt, let it season the meal of how you think about your own media usage.

This was not the question I entered the past four months asking precisely, but my soul was still asking it, deep beneath the other questions percolating in my spirit. I have not learned my way through that question yet, but I have been learning that our work is not so much to resist the urges but to respond to the invitations. This is a nuanced work because an invitation to share can masquerade as an urge to fill space, or an invitation to silence can feel like a silencing thrust upon us. But this is the way of learning new ways.

One of my professors recently said that often times our spiritual disciplines can at first feel almost hypocritical. He clarified by saying they were not hypocritical, but that they can simply feel that way because we are unaccustomed to using those particular muscles or exercising that particular restraint or our world isn’t used to us shifting our form in that particular way. In other words, we’re learning to respond to a different invitation, a different party, a different gathering than we’ve always had before.

That’s a helpful picture for me because I am not, by nature, a disciplined person. My besetting sin is sloth, but not of the laziness kind. It is a slowness to move into uncomfortable spaces, preferring instead to keep doing the same thing that sort of kind of works (but not really) for a long time. If something feels uncomfortable to me, my radar is activated and my receptors alerted. “Danger” is the first thing they notice, though subconsciously. Of course it’s not dangerous (not usually) but my body feels that it is and preserves itself by taking the path of least resistance.

The path of least resistance looks an awful lot like gut responses to various urges and I noticed this at work in a lot of the writing I was reading or seeing or feeling pressured to engage in. Whatever war du jour was brewing around me felt like the siren call to engage. “If I don’t say something,” I would think to myself, “am I neglecting the prophetic nature of this work? Am I disobeying God to resist that urge? Am I silencing myself or others by refusing to participate in the alerts of the day? Am I participating in violence by being silent?”

These aren’t just hypothetical questions. These are real accusations toward many (I’d even say most, these days) writers who inhabit various platforms upon the world wide web and in print. If one says a part of something but not the whole of something, they are accused of overlooking. If we make a point about one thing but not everything, we are accused of minimizing. If we don’t add our two cents in some form to every traumatic and horrific news of the day, we are accused of ignorance or doing violence with our silence.

Let me clarify, I am not complaining. I started out saying that the work of the writer is prophetic in a sense and we all know prophets have no respect in their hometowns (or anywhere else, it seems). Nobody likes pointing fingers but also nobody likes when the fingers are pointed in their direction and also nobody likes when there are no fingers also pointed at their enemies. It’s a dysfunctional system to be a part of and therefore it’s a difficult system to break away from. But it’s not impossible and that’s what I’m endeavoring to do these days. And what I hope more of my compatriots will do too.

How does one do this? We do it like any other spiritual discipline. Lift our weary hands and strengthen our feeble knees, dress for action, and do the work. We notice the urges to react and respond quickly when they come and we resist them, waiting instead for the peace of God to settle in our spirits, for the gentle invitation to participation in his redemptive work. Of course there will be times in our lives when some swift action is called for (when vulnerable ones are being abused or refugees are being refused or power is being misused), but I am speaking mainly of our work as writers—which in the public square is more reflective than active. We pay attention to the quiet invitation of God into the work instead of to the madding crowd demanding somebody’s head on a platter, eventually our own if we don’t speak up quickly enough.

There’s a cost to this writing gig that many of don’t speak of—threats against our families, public slander and lies we can’t dispute, cancelation if we dissent or disagree, but the cost, I have found is mostly to our own souls. It is a slow erosion of our attunement to the voice of God over the voice of the clamoring crowd. And we have to get alone, get away, get tired and hungry and a little bit desperate, like Elijah in the cave after he defeated the prophets of Baal. Even God’s prophet had forgotten the sound of God’s invitation.

When the invitation came, we all know the story, it didn’t come with pomp and circumstance, greatness and hurrah, viral shareability and quick growth. It came small, still, quiet, an invitation to reenter the world he’d left, but to renter it remembering he was only a single and small mouthpiece for God and not God himself. That it was God’s work to complete and Elijah’s work to listen to God.

This is my work and if you’re any kind of writer or thinker inhabiting the public square, it is your work too. You are a prophet but before a prophet can speak the truth of God to anyone, they have to get alone and really listen to the truth of God for themselves. That means, in the words of Saint Eugene, resisting the urge to stay where the action is, and responding to an invitation to a place where whispers are the most powerful words in the room.

Today I’m asking a different question about my vocation of writing. It is no longer “What does God want me to say to others?” and it is becoming, “God, what do you want to say to me?" All the great men and women of the Bible, those myriad of mouthpieces of God, needed God’s words for themselves first and foremost. Jonah, David, Esther, Mary, Nehemiah, Elijah, and even Jesus Christ himself. As I leave the cave I’ve been in recently, that is company I want to join.

This should have been the first sign something was awry.

I have spent my whole life overcompensating for the wicked and deceitful heart that beats inside of me. I have done it by mainly thinking of myself in reference to others, their approval, their love, a semblance of peacefulness between us. “Are we okay?” has been my barometer for “Am I okay?” If the people around me found no fault with me—I would convince myself—then surely I was doing okay. I learned to deeply mistrust my own heart, my own inclinations, my own beliefs, and my own convictions. It wasn’t that I so much trusted others hearts, inclinations, beliefs, and convictions, but that I looked at them as arrows pointing to true north in my disorientated world. If I kept going that way or this way, then surely I would stumble into truth or goodness or righteousness or God.

I read about a study several years ago—and then conducted a completely informal study of my own to see if it was true—that about 50% of people generally think they’re right until proven wrong and the other 50% of people generally think they’re wrong until proven right. My completely informal poll garnered the exact same results from its 800 or so respondents. I couldn’t believe it was true because I always assumed everyone was like me, wholly assured of their wrongness until proven beyond doubt they were right.

This study dislodged a question in me that I’ve always been too afraid to ask: What if I’m right?

I began to tentatively apply the question to almost everything in my life. What if my political instincts were right? What if my ecumenical persuasions were right? What if my thoughts about the character of Jesus were right? What if my ideas about an ever narrowing and ever widening kingdom were right? What if telling the truth about my own story was right? What if that situation in which it seemed that everything went horribly, horribly wrong wasn’t because I was wrong, but because I was right? What if my gut sense that something misguided was about to happen was right? What if my heart is not so wicked, untrustworthy, and deceitful as I believed my whole life? What if the Spirit had tuned my heart to sing of God’s grace? What if it is more true that I am loved than I am hated?

David Benner, in his book, The Gift of Being Yourself, writes, “Some Christians base their identity on being a sinner. I think they have it wrong—or only half right. You are not simply a sinner; you are a deeply loved sinner. And there is all the difference in the world between the two.”

What if an unloved heart cannot be trusted, but a deeply loved heart can?

I have been memorizing Psalm 16 recently, and these words roll through me with regularity: “I will praise the Lord, who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me.” Is it true? Is it possible? Can the God who loves me give me a heart that instructs me with goodness? Can my heart be trusted to choose right, even if the reference points around me—other people—may think I’m choosing wrong?

We have been in a season that I sense many others are in as well. A season of hiddenness or aloneness or loneliness or, as I’ve come to think of it, a season where my former reference points for righteousness are muted. In the past, I would have felt unmoored and reached out my hands for something solid to hold onto, a pastor’s counsel, a friend’s feedback, a leader’s affirmation, a mentor’s permission. But instead, I have been learning to trust my own heart, the one God formed and made and filled and put in me for his good works through me.

What this has meant is that I don’t quite belong in the same spaces I always have. I don’t fit in, nudged between the opinions of others or the approval they gave for doing as they did. I used to find safety in numbers and said I believed that a particular kind of church membership or a particular sort of submission or a certain kind of surety was right. But the truth, the real truth, the truth I actually believe with my whole (good and God-made) heart is that sometimes God does his most beautiful work in our most lonely seasons. Sometimes he takes us out into the wilderness to teach us not only his sufficiency, but also our ability to hear Him most clearly when all the clatter and clutter is swept away.

These days, instead of asking the question, “Will this relationship be okay if I do this or that?” I am learning to ask, “What would I do here if I really believed I was loved by God and he made me very good?” I don’t do this well yet. This past week I had two opportunities to ask it and in the heat of the moment I didn't, and regretted it later. But I am learning. I am learning what it means to trust my very good and very loved and very God-made heart.

In each space, multiple people asked how my sabbatical has been going and I said the same thing: I am resisting the urge to quantify or define how it has gone, but there have been a few elements I will treasure for always. The principle one being a return to play, delight, joy, and desire. I don’t know that I need or want to share more about that publicly at this point, but as I stood looking at the room set up for the birthday gathering to begin, it felt, in some ways, like the culmination of this hidden time. So much work done in quiet ways, so much planning and purposeful dreaming, so many elements prayed over, and so much help to do well. My fingerprints were all over the gathering, but none of it could have happened without the gift of time from God.

This is how this time away from the watching world and even my own watching self has been. It has been quiet, both vocationally and in my mind and heart. It has been purposeful and a dream. It has been bathed in prayer. None of it could have happened without the investment of others, both in my life as a whole and in their willingness to give the gift of distance during this time. And it has been a magical delight, warm and joyous, full and playful.

Much of my spiritual work is to differentiate myself from who I am in reference to others. But for that work to be done, I must sometimes mute the voices of others in my life, to return to hearing the voice of God more clearly and even my own voice too. I will exit this time feeling more sure of my identity in him than when I entered it. One thing I told nearly every person who asked about my sabbatical, was that if possible, everyone should take one. And the second thing I told most of them was to not be surprised if all their best laid plans get upended in more beautiful ways than they can imagine.

I had great intentions for hours of reading theology and poetry, deep times with the Lord in lectio divina and Bible study, plenty of quiet and reflection, journaling and listening. Instead I spent hours learning about camper-van build-outs, cutting and gluing bits of paper into an art journal, taking virtual tours of museums around the world, compiling folders on my desktop of beautiful art, reorganizing closets, cabinets, and corners. I listened to the same worship album on repeat for weeks on end and watched BBC mysteries. I (mostly) stopped apologizing for delays in responses on email and text messages. I spent hours and hours putting together invitations, favors, menus, plans, and gifts for the birthday gathering. Every single thing I touched over the past three and a half months, everything I did, has felt like a gift to me straight from God, a long exhale of joy, and not a bit of it was what I expected of this time away.

Saturday night, in a last minute moment of total silence and aloneness, as I surveyed the room for the gathering that was about to begin, I felt like the gift I was giving to my friend was in actuality a gift from God to me. I don’t mean to make it about me, truly, it was all about her, but it felt like God was saying to me: this love you have for her is like the love I have for you. And as you are hoping she is able to receive all of this evening in fullness, that is how I want you to receive all the beauty and joy and delight I have for you.

I have often talked about Norman Wirzba’s words about hospitality being about “liberating others into their lives,” and recently wrote about how I was seeing God’s own hospitality for me like that. That is what this sabbatical has been for me, a liberation into beauty, joy, delight, and play. He set a table before me and has fed me full with his goodness. And it has been good. Very good.

What I mean when I say I admire those who think that way is that there is a constant churning within me that sees the merits of many different views, that can appreciate those who vote one way or those who vote the other, that can see the goodness of being in one church or another. It is not that I think that truth itself is relative, it is that I think people themselves are fallible. We’re all doing our best, according to our experiences, beliefs, practices, parentage, and historical, geographical, and social location. But we all see through a glass darkly and we ought to beware those who pretend to not. We ought to do what seems right, but not pretend it is perfect.

One reason I think it’s helpful to understand our specific personalities is because it’s going to inform the way we absorb information and then disperse it again. Some absorb information and use it to help others. Some absorb and use it to correct injustice. Others absorb and use it to prevent dangerous situations. Still others use it to try to understand the world in a more exacting way. None of those are necessarily better or worse than the others, and each of them are necessary in order for our world to be healthy and whole. Paul said as much to the Corinthians, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don’t need you!’ And the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don’t need you!’…Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”

My specific personality tends to see all parts of the body as both equally and unequivocally necessary. I don’t find more virtue in a hand than in an eye than in a foot or a neck. It is difficult for me to see how even a hand that has been used to harm isn’t still capable of healing. Ronald Rolheiser wrote, “We are better persons when we carry tension, as opposed to always looking for its easy resolution.” It is easier to resolve the tension wherever we find it, to reduce, distill, and refine—all of which are another way of saying “to make smaller.” But it is better, I think, to stay in it.

I am still thinking about Lewis’s words that I shared a few weeks back, “Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.” This is what Paul was saying, I think: hands and eyes and feet and necks are all completely distinct from one another, and no one would confuse one with the other, but they are still all good and the moment we forget that, we leave the tension necessary for our growth and our worlds good.

And yet I persist in thinking and acting like, if for instance, I am a left shoulder, the hands are better and more right than me, or if I am a right knee, the left elbow has more purpose than me. Even though I believe we are all needed and necessary in order for the world to move increasingly toward the coming King, I still can’t help but worry that my particular place in the world is somehow left better rendered invisible. It is the settlers who build and the rooted who have a home, it is the cities that rule and the capitals that make law, the societies that influence and the medias that inform—these are the spaces of real change, real action. Yet, in my soul, I agree with Peterson that “the pastoral itch to be where the action is should be resisted.”

Much of the last few months have been me relearning to hear and value my own voice. Some of you might blanche at that, whisper among yourselves, “Is this the start of her mytruthing all over everything? Is this how it begins?” To that I say, Lord, no. What I mean is that I can so admire those entities above for what they do in our world, how they inform, rule, build, and root, that I can forget there is value too in the strangers among us, the exiles, the wanderers, the outsiders, the marginalized, and immigrants. And not just in the very real sense of the marginalized and immigrants, but in the spiritual sense as well because I believe if we’re followers of Jesus, we’re all exiles and immigrants and aliens in this world.

So the hand of a Christian looks very different than the hand of an unbeliever, and what it does in the world looks different too. It is sometimes willing to act like a foot or a head or diminish itself to a pinky finger. The body of a believer does not always look like the body of an unbeliever, but sometimes it does not even look like the bodies of other believers. (You should be carrying Paul’s allegory of the body forward with us here because of course all hands look more or less alike.)

Returning to the beginning, I admire the sure and certain, but I have found that admiration to actually be a downfall of mine, and this time of hunkering down and retreating back has reminded me of that. I find myself jarred now when I encounter people shoulding all over everyone else now because my ears have been tuning themselves into the still small voice of God in my own life and work, and I feel more purpose around my own work.

As I consider entering back into the fray of work, emails, media, interviews, writing, and releasing a book, I’m asking the Lord to keep my ears tuned continually to him and not to culture wars and performative allyship and click baits and marketing means and whatever words are being used to grab the attention of passers-by. I’m too easily convinced that what happens in the cities of our world matters more than what happens in the gardens. And if the past few months have taught me anything, they’ve taught me the very great value of a quiet and hidden and dying seed in a scape of skyscrapers.

I have been a part of the problem.

I don’t have an answer to that.

I haven’t learned that yet.

I thought I was doing the right thing then, but now I wish I had known better.

I see now that my own unresolved sin, trauma, and story informed how I engaged this situation.

I have no words, but can I sit with you for a while?

I should have learned more about other perspectives before forming such a hard stance on this issue.

I’m here to just listen.

I was wrong.

Even though we disagree, I can see how important this is to you and I want to understand all the reasons why. Can you help me?

I value this entity, doctrine, local church, denomination, or leader dearly, but I can also see how you have been harmed by it/them and so I want to evaluate what I value and why.

It’s okay if our relationship needs to change.

I haven’t seen what you’ve seen but I believe your experience caused you pain.

I’m so sorry.

Here is some soup or tea, and here is a chair, and you are welcome here, just as you are today.

I wish all of these statements and questions were always a part of my vernacular, just as I wish many of them were a part of the conversations many have had with me over the years. These are things I needed to hear and things I needed to say, but many of them I just hadn’t learned yet. Another thing I’m learning is that that’s okay. “Things take the time they take,” Nate reminded me last night, quoting Mary Oliver. “How many roads did Saint Augustine take before he became Saint Augustine?” I finished for him.

We don’t know what we don’t know until we know it. And then once we know it, it takes a long time to get it in our guts deep enough that it becomes a part of who we are, and not just what we know. In the meantime, though, we’re a lot like the kid in that movie with the tattoo emblazoned across his clavicle, reading, “No Ragrets,” thinking we’re getting it right while all the while our indiscretions are obvious to anyone who really has already gotten it.

What is to be done, though, with the space between the not having learned it yet and the learning of it and then the second nature of it? There is so much space there and we are all in it together, at varying markers along the way, each of us interacting with all the others as if we’re at the same place, having learned the same thing, and having very little patience for those who aren’t or haven’t.

I thought, as I drifted to sleep last night, about all those roads Saint Augustine took before he became Saint Augustine. James K.A. Smith, writes in On the Road With Saint Augustine, “When you've realized that you don't even know yourself, that you're an enigma to yourself, and when you keep looking inward only to find an unplumbable depth of mystery and secrets and parts of yourself that are loathsome, then Scripture isn't received as a list of commands: instead, it breaks into your life as a light from outside that shows you the infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.”

The infinite God who loves you at the bottom of the abyss.

It seems to me that being able to say any of those above statements and meaning them truly and deeply, means we have taken all those other routes that seemed to make sense and have finally encountered that God at the bottom of the abyss. We have truly encountered a God whose love for us frees us to be wrong, to say “I don’t know,” to wish we had done something better or differently, to listen without defending ourselves. We know the only way through is not clawing at the clay on the sides of the abyss, desperately trying to get ourselves back on solid ground, but by standing on the back of Christ, love himself, and being lifted out through no power of our own.

Dallas Willard said, “We need teaching that will keep people remembering such things as: I'm not righteous because I do this. I'm not earning points. And when I fail, at whatever—solitude, fasting—I have not sinned.” I appreciate that because we are not sinning, at least not intentionally, if we don’t say those statements above or if we haven’t learned them yet. Those are statements that take discipline to say and to mean. We have to practice them, and we have to remember that the saying of them doesn’t make us righteous, they don’t give us points in the kingdom of God. The only thing they do is remind us of our own abyss, Christ’s back, and the love of God.

Saint Augustine took a lot of roads before he became Saint Augustine. He got it wrong again and again and again and again. But eventually that restlessness found its home in the love of God. Did he have regrets? I don’t know. But I hope not. I hope he can rest easy knowing that his myriad of roads have shown us it’s okay to not have learned something yet and that, once having learned it, the journey is still a hard one to take before it gets all the way into us.

But perhaps today one of us can start with this, “I am loved by God, held secure in him, known, cared for, and kept by him. I am freed from needing to feel like God or be like him, and so I am freed to confess I don’t know everything yet. But I want to learn. I want to learn.” Perhaps that is the road you or I will take today, on our way to become whatever God is making of each of us.

Last summer we arrived home from a sudden and sad trip to Florida, and found our neighbor lost three trees in a wind storm that took some real beauts down around our neighborhood. The wind roared down the river and his home took its landfall brunt. I have sometimes lamented that our home was built tucked in the corner of our property, when the better river view is less than thirty feet away, but its builders were wiser than I, going more for stability in a storm than a pretty view.

Across the river from our home, if you know to look for it, you can see how the wind storm took a whole swath of trees down in its way, most of them broken in a singular point along the horizon, thirty feet in the air. I know a healthy forest will do its own maintenance by adapting, creating mulch, and feeding its offspring with their ancestor’s decomposing matter. There is indeed a secret life to these trees and what looks like destruction to my human eyes is still very much a part of a healthy and whole life.

I read this from C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce last week:

“We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the center: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision. Even on the biological level life is not like a river but like a tree. It does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good”

This seems to me to be a perfect paragraph and one I won’t forget. I have wrestled mightily in the past few years with goodness and unity and uniformity and evil. This morning the New York Times opined that we are in the beginning years of World War III and though their writers can sometimes be given to hyperbole, I wonder if there’s truth to that particular opinion. War isn’t just happening in the Ukraine, it is happening on Facebook with our neighbors. I know this because for a brief moment I had to log onto Facebook yesterday and download a few photos. I scrolled my timeline for less than ten seconds and the war du jour was over a recent Pixar Film. No fewer than six of my Facebook friends were postulating one way or the other. You may think I need new friends but I think it’s more likely that I just need to get off Facebook in a more permanent way. Maybe we all do.

If good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil, but also from other good, I have to ask myself often if there is a better way to go about making good in the world than signaling to others of my particular lines in the sand. Is there a hiddenness to our good? Perhaps a secret-ness? Is it hiddenness that contributes to our making good? (Yes, reader, I understand the irony of writing these thoughts publicly. This is not a new conundrum to me.)

Dallas Willard writes that “the discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions…we are liberated from slavery to eyes, and then it does not matter whether people know or not…Whatever our position in life, if our lives and works are to be of the kingdom of God, we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must loving allow people to think whatever they will. We may, if it seems right, occasionally try to help them understand us and appreciate what we are doing. That could be an act of life. But in any case we can only serve them by serving the Lord only.”

Nate and I have been working slowly through the Netflix series Chef’s Table, and last night he starts an episode called Jeong Kwag. If you’re unfamiliar with Chef’s Table, its normal fare is to craft a story from the life and work of famous chefs. Most of them are chefs at multiple Michelin star kitchens, world-renown artists whose restaurants fill the best lists of the world. This episode, though, is on the life of a Buddhist nun called Jeong Kwan, who has lived and worked at a monastery in South Korea for fifty years. The recipients of her artistry are her fellow nuns and novices, and occasional visitors to the cloister. She works in relative secret. She does not use onions or garlic or leeks. Her main ingredient, one critic says, is time.

She uses soy sauce that has been passed down for generations and ferments vegetables long past a normal fermentation process. She methodically plates the meals she serves her fellow sister monks with as much care as the plates she serves to Michelin star chefs who come to visit. One chef says, “Jeong Kwan has no ego,” and Jeong Kwan herself says, “Creativity and ego cannot go together. If you free yourself from the competing and jealous mind, your creativity opens up endlessly. Just as water springs from a fountain, creativity springs from every moment. You must not be your own obstacle. You must not be owned by the environment you’re in.” Working with food, it is obvious, is an act of worship for her.

I am not a Buddhist and believe there is more to being truly free than an open mind, but it seems to me that a prerequisite for believing the gospel of Jesus Christ is an open mind. And the way of the gospel is an open heart. Not so open that it catches every little wind of doctrine that blows past, but open enough to fully receive and live in the freedom for which we have been set free. As a Christian I cannot stake my life on the freedom we have in Christ and then live in such a way that my rigidity and surety in every single thing communicates to others that this freedom ain’t actually free. This is a space of tension, I know (I hear you naysayers but-but-but-ing already…), but I think Lewis is onto something when he says for goodness to be truly good it must be discernible from other goodness. In other words, Ben and Jerry’s Mint Cookie Crumble might be delicious and fresh squeezed orange juice might be sublime, but nobody in their right mind would mix them together and call it good. In other words, freedom in Christ means we will live equally good though drastically different lives.

The wood debris has broken free of its ice obstacle and begun its float downstream, by early afternoon it will crest the falls in town and probably break free from one another then. Who knows where it will go then. Perhaps to the seaway and then even to the gulf of St. Lawrence and perhaps even the Atlantic Ocean. I doubt it will all make it that far, but even if it just catches on a shoreline somewhere, it becomes an essential part of this living environment. Even in its death, it gives life to other living things.

I wonder sometimes if true freedom in Christ is incompatible with the current environment in which we live, where our every thought and experience has the opportunity for display and therefore, whether we intend for it or not, creates a pressure for others to meet our idea of what is uniformly good instead of a diversity of good. Perhaps it is possible to cultivate a kingdom kind of goodness by in fact going the way that seems best to us in the moment, having cultivated an interior life that is strong and vibrant and full of the Holy Spirit, so much so that two of us can choose different or opposite things for our lives without either of us making a moral judgement on the other.

Perhaps we do this for a long period of time, perhaps looking seemingly dead and untended to the naked eye, and yet cultivating a whole forest beneath our roots. Perhaps. I don’t know. I suspect though.

My mother-in-law sent us a photo of her standing in the blushy blooms of a Japanese Magnolia she planted on the family land 25 years ago and it was my first reminder of the season that elsewhere spring has already begun to inch her way into the northern hemisphere. I read a piece on winter last month from which a line repeats often in my head now: “It really is quite hard to sustain the illusion that there is anything good about winter after the hundredth day or so of temperatures below freezing.” The writer continues with a thoughtful meander through the virtues and curses of living in a less than temperate climate.

Our dainty pup has a bit of a seemingly irrational fear of water, including puddles, which means that as the snow melts, she fences herself into a smaller and smaller arena to do her business on the leftover snow. She does not dare to venture into the scary, scary possibility that the inch deep puddles surrounding the grey patch of snow might be fathoms deep. I wish I didn’t understand her irrational fears (although she would say they’re quite rational as twice she’s fallen into a swimming pool), but the truth is, I do.

In A Curious Faith I wrote a chapter on the question Jesus asks his disciples in the boat during the storm: Where is your faith? I teased out the truth that nearly one hundred percent of the time, our faith is in the rational things. We trust that cars go on green and stop on red. We trust that if it rains we will get wet and if the sun is shining we will stay dry. We trust in our tastebuds and in our hearing or our sight. We are very rational creatures with finely tuned instincts for survival. And so when Jesus asks that question during a storm in which these seasoned fishermen know could be deadly for them, I guess I understand the object of their faith in that moment: it’s in what they know to be true about the world. I’m like that too.

Even if we trust in what is not seen (like the snowdrops that are right now beginning their process of waking up), we derive that trust from what “we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched.” Even the disciple whom Jesus loved put his faith in what he could see and touch. Even Thomas needed to thrust his hand into Jesus side and inspect the wounds in his hands.

Christianity seems irrational to many folks and if it’s simply understood as a pie in the sky, ethereal trust in some cosmic being, I can understand why. God did not create us to believe in the unbelievable. He made us rational and so he made himself available in human form, the Word made flesh. This is why I am suspect of people who talk endlessly about having faith and praying for more of it without the constant coupling of it with the life of Jesus himself. I think God wants to give us proof. I think he scatters it liberally around the world and gleefully waits for us to see it. And I think he is patient with us when we don’t.

I think he is proving it in the snowdrops and in the Japanese Magnolia and in the puddles surrounding the snow and in the snow itself and he is proving it in my pup and in the ways I will help her see that this water is not as scary as she thinks it is. And I think he wants to prove it to you too.

Everyone I do talk to asks me, “How is your sabbatical going?” to which I usually say something short like, “Great!” and that’s pretty much it. I’m resisting the urge to produce a measurable or quantifiable outcome from this time, proof that I did the work or the work did me. Most days I’m simply paying attention to whatever invitation God offers to me in the moment and then showing up to that invitation. I am learning to not reward my work with play or numb my desires until they’re ravenously hungry, but to let desire and play and joy be the steed upon which I explore the terrain of this time. Some of you may gasp at the hedonism of that statement, but I suspect most of us in the midlife of our faith-journey understand its necessity and I also suspect that those who gasp do so because underneath it all they need to feed the God-given gift of desire too.

March has come in, as she does, all liony and loud, dumping another six or eight inches of snow on newly shoveled paths and making the house sing with blinding sunshine. I love the brightness but I’m counting on the lamb-like end of March as the outdoor projects mount (a garden bed I want to ready for planting later in the spring, an overhaul of our garage that has never functioned for us, the finishing of our front porch, etc.). Instead I try to appreciate these lingering temperatures and finish all the indoor projects still to be done, like painting our downstairs wardrobe Scandinavian Pink (Will she regret it? I don’t know, we’ll have to see.).

As I anticipate the work ahead, I am asking myself, “What makes the difference between work that is anticipated and work that isn’t?” Anticipation can’t be the only thing that sets them apart, right? Why do I look forward to pulling every single item out of our garage, building shelves, hanging hooks, and putting it all back in again, but I don’t look forward to painting our stairway steps and trim? The first is clearly more work, more labor, more money and the second is less of all three.

I think there is something about outcomes that are a bit essential to our work and its anticipation or lack of. I know that painting our stairway is going to mean we have to carry Harper up and down it until it seals properly and even then, it’s a high traffic space that will chip and dirty quickly. It may be a different color after I paint it, but it will still be the same space with the same issues. Whereas the garage will feel entirely new (In my head at least. Realistically, there’s only so much difference lipstick on a pig makes, no matter how rosy.) when we finish its cleanup. And the garden bed we lay will be entirely new, as will the porch it borders.

Ah, I realize, it is the sense of newness that sets the work apart. The creation of something that was never there before. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground,” and I wonder if that is because a garden, even with all its tasks, is essentially a place of creativity—making it whatever we want it to be—while the playground of heaven is the place where everything good already exists? We image God on earth by playing, by creating and recreating, making and remaking, all of it a dress rehearsal for the ultimate delight to come.

This is what I mean about letting desire and joy and play invite me into whatever God has next for me in this time, and it’s a quality I hope I can carry with me after.

For reasons I don’t need to share here, I learned to despise play as a child and the memories that come directly to mind around play are not pleasant ones. And then my early twenties, while my peers were spreading their wings and enjoying all that life suddenly offered them, were wrought with grief over my brother’s death, my parent’s divorce, my siblings’ custody battles, poverty, court appearances, and more. While my friends navigated college and dating and wilderness expeditions, I put my nose to the ground in a very serious way, worked twelve different jobs—some of them three at a time, put myself through a four year degree in three years, and still ended my twenties almost penniless. I did not ever learn that play and delight and desire could be a good thing because I didn’t have the margin to let it be a good thing.

Play is a bit of a luxury, but desire is given to everyone. I wish I had known that I had the option to explore those desires as I grew up instead of viewing all desire as either sinful or inaccessible to me, only for my more privileged peers with stable families and solid provision. I wonder what I would have discovered if I had rejected some expectations on me and moved toward the good gifts God was holding out to me? I wonder what newness might have been found if I’d followed those gifts?

I feel I am learning some of these things too late, now into my forties. But I also know that we all learn something when it feels too late. A friend of mine is learning to be quiet and another friend is learning to be restrained and another friend is learning to trust. We all come into the world into a story that is already unfolding. We don’t ask to join that story, we simply take our place in it, dress the part of our character, act the script we’re given, and it’s a different one for all of us.

This is mine. Yours is different. The question for us all is the same though: What goodness is God inviting me into today?