The next time you are facing change and feeling unmoored, distraught, confused, frustrated, terrified, or just plain out-of-sorts, go outside, take a deep breath, and look around. Then, tell of your wonders.

Courtney Ellis, Weathering Change

My wonders:

The dogwoods glow in the woods on our drive up Little River. I’ve never lived where there were fireflies, a phenomenon I’d love to see, but buttercream blooms dot the darkness of the forest and catch my breath every time, every one. I am like a kid at a theme park, wowed by the spectacles.

Little bursts of exclamations and sighs escape me and Tim doesn’t think I’m silly for it.

We follow the river for an hour and I cannot get enough of it. I am gaping at green moss-covered rocks impeding the waters, making a black and white river. It smooths out flat in places, and a lone goose paddles in a green quiet. “Why is he alone?” I wonder aloud, and Tim reassures me his mate is probably on her nest somewhere nearby.

Everyone needs their hour of solitude.

We reach the lake by 8:30 a.m. and it is flat as a pancake, still as silence. Fish are jumping, and we’ve barely gotten our boats out of the truck before Tim has his fly rod out, whipping the line in a graceful curvature. He will catch and release multiple rainbows this morning, trying out his several poles and flies and lures.

The trillium at the edge of the lake are fading to pink, bruising as they die another seasonal death.

We put our boats in the water, adjust our oars, and smile our happiness out as a goodbye! have fun!, parting ways like contented old people in love. We are together in our solitude.

I row myself to all the edges of the lake, investigating. I haven’t been here since I was a kid and I’m sure I didn’t appreciate it this much, back then. I’m sure I didn’t absorb every shade of green into my soul, through my eyes, like I am now. But maybe some came in through my skin and without notice. Maybe I was so soaked in it that I never worried it could all disappear—like a fish in his water, a bird in her air.

Ten years ago my dad stood in my living room alone, watching all 9 minutes of my daughter’s senior slideshow that I’d spent weeks making. I was in the kitchen prepping for her grad party, stressing for everything to be just so, and I had turned on the slideshow to run in the background.

Dad watched and I peaked around the corner at him, catching his watering eyes. This reminds me of taking you fishing at Skookum Lake, he said.

A year before this—60 pounds ago, before a new liver—he’d been bones and a weak heart in a hospital bed for months. His memories were still sketchy because of the prolonged illness, but they were coming back as energy, and only the antidepressants were keeping him from breaking down, he told me, as he watched videos of my daughter in her daddy’s boat and remembered me, in his.

I stopped scrubbing my house to its bones and came to stand next to him, as he watched a second round of the slideshow. His beard stretched and rolled and hid maybe a smile, as he remembered how I’d reeled a fish right up to the tip of my fishing pole; swung it right, swung it left. I doused it on each side of the boat and its possible I never really landed it at all. But he was smiling as he remembered, I’m sure of it, both of us watching the pictures of my daughter roll across the screen.

I row to the middle, where the three small fingers of Hemlock Lake stub out from. Two ducks glide by, unbothered, sliding stillness over the water. I pull up my oars and just sit, just look. Tears come to my eyes because it is so unbelievably beautiful, perfect, peaceful, felt, tangible, ease-y, enchanting, tranquil, mesmerizing, arresting, glorious, dark in a good way, light in the heavy sense, calm, wild; a pulsing cacophony of natural noises; a solitude that creeps in through my soul and skin and settles in my bones; deep depths. I cry. I am happy.

I have a book and a pen in my boat with me because that’s how I like to go fishing.1 I have two reads going on my Kindle—Emma M. Lion: Vol. 7 and Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies2—but I don’t trust myself to bring the Kindle out on the lake. On my desk at home are two towers of books, three of which are unread, so I grabbed the one that seemed appropriate for the day: Weathering Change: Seeking Peace Amid Life’s Tough Transitions by Courtney Ellis.

I open to the forward has written for the book and read, “I hope you bring this book along with you on a hike, or a kayak through still waters…” Well played, well chosen. I read from the center of the happiest place on earth. I am only distracted by squawks and croaks, a bald eagle overhead, ducklings bobbing on the border of the lake, and a distant cheer from my fisherman.

I think about how lucky these ducks are, the frogs, the fish—to be born here. To live and die here. And how lucky am I?

“Every pilgrim walks a path marked by beauty, adorned with hope,” Courtney writes. I underline it, drop my bookmark into Hemlock Lake by accident, and smile big and goofy.

Three hours later, we pull our boats out of the water. I look out over the lake, thankful for the perfect morning, and I think of the last line of the obituary I wrote for Dad in 2020:

“He is deeply missed and forever remembered by his family and friends, who will hunt and fish and hike this world in his memory.”

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Thanks for reading, friends. If you’ve made it to the end, here is some news for you:

My book will be published this Fall 2026!

I am very excited to be at this stage finally, and also very deep in all-things-book-publishing-related, with a handy dandy timeline of tasks from my publisher3 to guide me. It’s great! It’s nerve-wracking! Adrenaline makes me nauseous! I’m excited!

In the next several months I will be talking more and more about this book, giving some sneak peeks, and making some asks—books need readers, and my hope is that you will help spread the word, literally ; )

For now I can share that the title is tentatively:

How you can help

For now, you can “like” this post by clicking the heart. If you read my posts in your email, you’ll find the heart in the top right hand corner (or maybe at the bottom?). More likes = more eyes on my work, and that’s one of the necessary ingredients for this book to launch properly.

Sharing my posts in your socials or on Substack is another way to support me.

I am grateful for you, friends, and the ways you have encouraged me over the years. Thanks for being you. I am me and not a machine, not AI, and not a writer who will use AI to do the human work of creating for me—I am here for the resistance. Your readership means you are here for it, too. ✊

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You’d think a bunch of Christians would have this one in the bag.

What I think you will get from the essays this quarter is that sense of struggling to accept the ways you trust God or don’t; the ways you trust yourself or don’t; the way nothing in this world seems trustworthy, but Jesus is. I think these essays will come alongside you in your doubts. And if I know anything about my fellow Makers in this endeavor, their essays will settle you in a God of mystery who is worth continually seeking out, even when you don’t understand.

I don’t outright argue with God, but I have raged unanswered questions into what felt like the void a time or two. Why and how; why not and but you said. If You say You desire one thing but then You allow another thing to happen, what am I supposed to think? There have been times in my walk with the Lord that felt like I was being punked, like the joke was on me and yes there is a God and He laughs at my expense, or has deaf ears to my prayers, or preserves His word just so I can spend my life untangling its knots.

Ha! To the one who strives to make God explain.

Ha! To the person who wants everything nicely lined up.

Read my full essay here: For When You Want to Argue With God.

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“Before I even get out of bed I am filled with dread for all the beautiful things I want to do.”

~ Laura Boggess

This past week my thoughts have felt like confetti, like a million pieces of potentially beautiful things sprung into the air for a brief moment of joy, only to be cleaned up or considered litter in the morning. Nothing sticks together or feels all that important, sort of like a wasted extravagance. I go to the keyboard dutifully, or the notebook or the Notes app—I try not to be particular these days—and garbage comes out. The beauty dissipates as soon as I try to share it.

To be fair to myself, it’s probably not all garbage. The problem is that I am comparing my words with the gravity of a world on fire, and writing anything just feels like levity these days. And we need levity, breaths of air, breaks in the seriousness. But the question keeps coming back: what is the point?

When I read this from Laura this week—Before I even get out of bed I am filled with dread for all the beautiful things I want to do—I knew exactly what it meant to me. I knew the feeling of a day off and too many goodnesses to cram into not enough time. What a world! What a dreadful celebration of life.

Sometimes when I think about dying, which happens more regularly as we age, naturally—sometimes when I think about dying I am filled with dread for all the beautiful things I still want to do. If I didn’t believe in a resurrection, a good God, an eternity with a God who is capable of everything beyond all I can ask or imagine, that dreaded thought would make sense. If this life is the one shot then I’d better squeeze every drop of goodness out of it because the end is The End. This is all I get. I used to be sad to think of all I will miss when I’m dead and now I kinda think ya know, I’ll be happy to miss so much of this world. No more strife or struggle or tears seems pretty appealing.

But here I am in this life, with so many beautiful things I want to do and so much beauty requiring witness. I write words as an expert witness, multiplying views. Mine. Yours. We can look together, and the good things of earth can grow bright against the darkness, when we gather our perspectives together in the direction of goodness.

Like this story from Callie, ending with this line:

One perspective is that we must love the world God created and the creatures who inhabit it less if we are going to do our duty to love God more, as if we have a finite amount of love in our tiny Grinch hearts, rather than an infinite Spirit at home in us as we make homes in the world. As if we could only love “while supplies last”. As if love were oil that must be conserved.

I hold to another perspective: The love of God has been poured out on us abundantly by his Spirit—gushing, running greedily out. When you love more, you love more. All my heart, soul, mind and strength are enlisted in this love, and it comes from a renewable source.

It doesn’t really matter if confetti is an extravagant waste that falls to the ground and instantly becomes trash. For a few moments it was fun and exciting and brought delight to some soul, even if only to the one throwing it. That’s worth something.

Let the point be that there are still too many beautiful things to be done, too much goodness to sit on our hands.

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Turning Headlines into Heartbeats

What didn't make the news

I went to the grocery on the day POTUS said he planned on ending a civilization. It seems ludicrous that this is my response. I also put in a load of laundry, emptied and re-filled the dishwasher, and took out the recycling. I realize these are chores I have the privilege to confess. Like POTUS, I didn’t want to go to the grocery store but knew I probab…

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a month ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · Callie R. Feyen

Chasing the Blue Flower

On Waiting

The past few days I have been feeling a little lost, unfettered, and wild. The lilac blossoms are fading in the vase on the kitchen table, a memory of Easter. When the afternoon sun shines through the window their rich scent is warmed to life again, thick and breathing, and I can almost cup it in my hand…

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a month ago · 21 likes · 8 comments · Laura B.

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My dog has gone to investigate. The thing you should know about my dog is that she is a “bird dog” without a lick of ill intent in her lithe body. She will point, maybe chase, but never for more than fun and certainly not for catching. Mostly she chases shadows on the ground, which is endearing and embarrassing. Also butterflies. Endearing.

The turkey has moved off into the woods now, and Scout has come back to the porch for her praise. “Good dog. That turkey was so scared”. He is still gobbling and I wonder if I have read him wrong. Maybe he’s not trying to impress. Maybe he’s lost something. He is now haunting the woods around our house in a wild, ancient tale that I have reinvented for him, because I can. I can tell this story any way I like.

Last night the resident owl in our woods sounded as though he had landed on our third story deck to gack up a wood rat that had lodged horizontally in his throat, right outside our bedroom window. Have you ever thrown back a handful of vitamins, the volume and variety of which requires a Pill Suitcase, only to realize you left your water in another room? And you gack. And you’re a little scared and unsure if you should continue to gack, or attempt a whole-hearted swallow? That was Hooten the Owl last night.

I was in that deep-space-place of falling asleep (such a suitable phrase—falling asleep) when I heard the retching of the owl. I was floating heavy through the atmosphere of almost-a-dream, the way you think to yourself I must be dreaming because that was a really weird and dreamlike thought I was having but here I am, analyzing it, so I guess I’m awake? when I heard him. My eyes were dried up in their sockets (am I dehydrated?) and I am sorry now but I was too heavy with sleep—a sleep I was thankful to be drifting into after a very stressful conversation a few hours before bed—to get up and look for him out the window. Too tired. Eyes sealed shut.

My goal is to get him on camera again. I stood face to flattened face with him last summer, in broad daylight in front of God and everybody. I filmed and photographed him, his beady marbled eyes unbothered but very bothersome. Birds eat meat. I am meat. I got so close I could have touched him and the inverse of that thought is he could have embedded his talons into my skull but I was too entranced to think that, in the moment. I only thought about it later, when my daughter told me about this story. Shudder.

He is there every night. Sometimes I hear him during the day, asking Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?1 Part of me wants to dangle a mouse by its tail over the rail of our deck and feel the rush of a wild thing swooping into my domesticity, which I chalk up to the influence of reading H is for Hawk. This is what books do, even to adults. This is what wildness does to even very domesticated adults.

I think I want to capture the wild but I find myself only strutting when nobody’s around, chasing butterflies, a fairy tale in my head, a figment, a thought to analyze. What I mean is: I live very close to the earth with my physical body, but I live far above it in my spirit. What that means is: I am anchored but light. Embarrassed and endeared to embarrassing creatures.

I think everything I write is trying to define what I mean and I hope I never quite get there.

If this desire for wild things is The Problem, I’m going to give you The Solution that is correct 99 out of 100 times in every Sunday school class the western world over:

Jesus is the answer to the soul’s wild longing.

Anchored and Light, on the earth and above it all. Powerful in a way that draws you closer and scares you and then draws you closer still. A shadow on the ground you will never catch. Misunderstood.

You have told His story a hundred different ways and I hope you keep trying.

“But contentment is more durable than excitement or the quick thrill and, like rich soil that has been given necessary fallow time, may equip a person for a fuller harvest of satisfactions and a longer period of productivity than the synthetic quick fix of instant satisfaction.

But felicity includes something beyond simple contentment. Felicity not only accepts what is, acknowledging and cheerfully submitting to the limitations of one’s condition; it also unabashedly wills and seeks pleasure. Its pleasures are more subtle than sensational.

— Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, by Marilyn McEntyre

The sun has come out in Oregon and we have all crept from the woods, facing it like refugees from Plato’s cave. It’s been an unsettlingly dry winter and maybe it’s a sign of my age, but I worry about the summer heat. I am concerned for our forests, our rivers, our homes. It was just six years ago that our region was devastated by forest fires, and every year there is a level of fire damage. Yet we all become our best selves when the sun shines in the PNW.

It was 82° Wednesday. Town was packed with people buying spring essentials: potting soil, primroses and sweet peas, gardening gloves. The cynical among us noted the likelihood of snow still to come—our “snowmaggedon” came in late February 2019, and other snow storms have hit as late as April—and the realists among us recognize the need for snowpack. We need some reserves. It’s too hot, too dry, too early.

I am more concerned about these things than I used to be. As I age, it’s hard to know if my concerns have shifted because I have fewer people in my immediate care, and therefore more time to notice and worry about the world outside my home (which is where all those people I revolved around half my life now live), or if the things I am concerned about have actually become bigger deals, worthy of more concern. Wars, rumors of wars, a warming earth, early deaths1, corruption, deception, and that insistent ache in my lower back.

Or it’s possible my focus has been hijacked.

It’s no secret that our collective attention has been recruited by the highest bidders all over the internet, and the more time you spend online or with people who spend a lot of time online, the more niched your attention becomes. I remember several years ago asking one of our daughters if she’d seen the ads for such-and-such a thing on Instagram. She had not. I was baffled she’d never even heard of this thing, because it was everywhere on Instagram, and that’s when I learned how the algorithm had defined me into a box, based on my searches and likes and saves.2

Few things annoy me as much as being defined and boxed up. Today I am interested in owls and exercises for low back pain and why there are so many women named Mary in Jesus’ story, but do not assume that is all I care about. Do not even assume I will care about those things tomorrow.

I have always been fairly “lowkey”, but for whatever reason, midlife has me more concerned in general. “The scope of concerns has widened,” you could say, with a wide sweep of the arms.

But the joy of a seasoned life has also deepened. That’s what I really wanted to write about.

The contentment and felicity Marilyn McEntyre writes about in Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies feel like beautiful features in a life full of bugs, and when heartache, physical pain, worry, or cynicism loom like shadows on the cave walls, contentment helps leads me out, rather than keeping me stuck. Felicity establishes me in the season and time and place God has allowed for me, with eyes to see his goodness.

Life has to be boiled down. Time gets thicker, moments make memories, I can forget the fret of how everything can change in an instant and now becomes just wonderful as it is, with these people and this dog and the sun shining through dirty windows. I feel contentment when I notice small things. When I remember how life is made up of the miniscule. Stack up tiny treasures long enough and they become a “harvest of satisfactions”.

It’s about my attention.

Tim and I took a glorious vacation3 in January. Since then, I have been paying more attention to how small moments can feel the same as that time away, minus the white sand. I have been celebrating Tiny Vacations when we are together on a Saturday and have hours to use as we please; when we eat a good meal alone or with friends; in the mornings when it is still dark and quiet and we pretend there are no demands. This is the contentment and felicitous joy of a long marriage, and I don’t take it for granted that we enjoy each other’s company so much. I know many marriages feel like that cave, an entrapment, and I don’t claim that we have worked harder or been more faithful, and therefore, more blessed by God. We have worked hard. We have tried to be faithful to God’s work in our lives. We are blessed. But none of life is a formula, not even for people of faith.

“Felicity comes in lively, sustained conversation; in long walks on which one notices small changes in the landscape; in the silent companionship of an old friend or partner; in serving a good dinner to a family one loves. Felicity seeks happiness actively, but its actions are quiet and measured rather than flamboyant and impulsive. It deepens by having reflected enough on one’s own good to realize that one’s own good consists in appreciation and service of others.”

—McEntyre

I think felicity takes work, which might take the form of setting limits on myself. Less information, more formation. For me it will be a discipline of enjoying the sun today without worrying what it might mean for the future.

Here is a Tiny Vacation I invite you into, in the hopes that you recover some of your own felicity and contentment:

• Spend two minutes looking at the painting in this post, by Jules Dupre. Study the details and the motion and the colors (oh the colors!).

• Close your eyes and recreate the painting in your mind. Imagine yourself there.

• Ask yourself a dozen questions about the scene.

• Then go out into your day noticing your life in that same way.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever. Psalm 23:6 ESV

When we began planning our move into this house, knowing it would likely be for sale in the near future and not wanting to over-clutter it, I made an office space in the landing with my white desk, white lockers, white bookshelf, and white filing cabinet. Tim hung one picture over the desk for me and I added some plants, but for the most part it is a very practical and un-artsy spot. I pay bills, file reports, make schedules, and scrutinize sales reports there. I keep it pretty tidy. It will look good on Zillow.

My other desk is in the basement, arranged in an L shape beside a sewing table my mother-in-law gave me when she decided she was done with large quilt projects. Both desks are beginning to be gloriously cluttered with paper scraps and paints, journals and vintage books, and almost all my supplies are rounded up into one corner of the daylight basement, behind the piles and projects for finishing the house. I have an old metal shop stool that looks really cool pulled up to the art desk, but I am normally just standing while I play at making—which has not happened as often as I would like these last seven months. But it’s all there and ready. It’s the kind of mess you expect in a basement.

This morning I waited to see the sun get up over the mountains out the window, watching it begin to filter through the trees that surround us. The sky bruised at the edges, but the clouds are stubborn today and everything above is only gray now. I am at the tippy top of this great big house we never planned to live in, sitting at a plastic, fold-up Costco table that will not look good on Zillow, enjoying the gray world out my window. Facing east. Facing the sun somewhere out there, a future I can’t see but still trust.

I actually love this temporary spot for my temporary desk. I have been fighting against that word for months because we have lived in temporary places before, and that feeling of unsettledness can be endless gray, endless white. I want to root down.

shared an essay this week about partial solutions, mostly in regard to finding our friends. We can idealize who our perfect kindred spirit would be—usually a clone of ourselves and our interests and life stage—and that ideal can keep us from seeing the people God has already placed in our lives. She says,

It looks like continually keeping your eyes peeled for someone who fits the bill, but it looks even more like keeping partial solutions at the forefront of your mind when you yearn for companionship. Maybe God’s already answering this prayer; you just need to recognize who it is He’s really bringing to you.

“Partial solutions” was the phrase I needed to hear, for friendships and living conditions and desk placement and art tables, because waiting for everything to be perfect has kept me from so much goodness over the years. It’s kept me from starting things, finishing them, putting myself out there, taking good risks. Waiting for a more perfect time and place and person is the real definition of procrastination, whereas a partial solution makes use of what is in my hand and just does stuff.

Last Christmas we gave my mother-in-law one of Emily Lex’s watercolor workbooks. Knowing her hand and wrist were bothering her enough for her to give up large quilt projects, I thought maybe watercolor would be an easy creative outlet.

This week she showed me the nearly completed workbook, which sparked her interest in sketching, a trip to the second hand store, and a haul of several books on watercolor and drawing. She brought out her sketchbook full of birds and told us about the watercolor class she’s signed up for at the local college, starting in May.

None of that will enable her to quilt again like she used to, but the partial solutions are now new hobbies that feed her joy.

My ideal space would have my functional white desk and filing cabinet for all the admin stuff I do, my stand-up desk and sewing table for painting and art journaling projects, and a comfy chair for writing, all in the same room. The walls would be filled. The surfaces would be wood, not plastic. It would be my space alone and I would close the door if the house needed to be “more presentable”. Our last home had this space and I loved it.

This home has a different set of needs and rules, and that’s fine. It has views and spaces that our last home didn’t—right now I’m on the third floor, watching birds dive from the treetops to the ground below, and I can see the dogwood turning red with coming Spring. Giant pinnacle rocks across the road are snatching patches of fog.

My art space is as far as it can possibly be from my current writing space and the “inconvenience” means I have to be more purposeful, which never hurt anyone.

Partial solutions aren’t necessarily less than ideal—sometimes they are simply a different ideal. Someone dreams of having one single desk to do their work at, not to mention the time and resources to do it with. I am by no means complaining about where we live because it is a dream home and I love it here. The struggle is in how we are living here—temporary, a bit unsettled, not sure about roots, and far away from our people and work.

Reading over what I’ve written, my past self has come up to haunt me and give me a good dose of my own words. The future I couldn’t see when I wrote the following is the present I am struggling with now, so I needed this again:

Whether leaving or staying, our work is to risk the investment right here, right now, and to nurture what is before us as if it is all we will ever know. We can be shade and shelter, and we can leave beauty around to fill the pockets of future generations, as long as we are courageous enough to risk rootedness right in the middle of our unknown stories.

—excerpt from “Risking Rootedness” at Cultivating Oaks Press, June 2024

My partial solution is to settle in as hard as I can, while I can.

Speaking of balance. I’ve been out of whack for awhile in my reading but I’m solving it, slowly. This is how I’ve been out of whack: I have spent too much effort on it, always reading to get something. This is how I’m solving it: I’m reading to know someone. If it’s the Bible, I’m reading to know Jesus more. If it’s Substack essays, I’m reading to know that particular author—like they’re my friend, because my friends shape me. If it’s fiction (and Lord knows I am deficient in my fiction lately) I am reading to know what is possible. Because if someone thought up a character and put them in a situation, that person and scenario are a possibility, for better or worse. I could be that character. I could know that character. There are many lives available but I only get to live one (and I love the one I’m living), but I can know someone with a better imagination when I consider the scenarios that are possible. And when I’m reading nonfiction I suppose I’m taking Jesus and myself and all the people I know and trying to learn something about all of us together. Not sure if that makes sense but in summary: Foster hope by reading more.

As for me, there are no brownies on the menu but I will be drowning this cold in an icy, fizzy DPZ if Tim remembers to get me one on his way home, because I am sure that will help me get better.

Balance shmalance.

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If it sounds like I was a real joy to be around back then, I think the important thing to note is that I was in a constant internal struggle between doing what I thought I ought to do, and doing what felt lifegiving to me. This need to control an out of control life was fed by the homeschooling circles I immersed myself in online and through books, but it was also an attempt to manage life after giving birth to three children in three years.1 I was homeschooling my 12 year old stepson. My husband was self-employed in a very seasonal industry. Then we adopted our youngest son from India. Then we sold our home and moved into a camp trailer.2

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone fell in line with the schedule I made? Wouldn’t life run so smoothly?

On paper I was a Master Planner. In reality, I was always just trying to get everything checked off the list so I could relax and do the things I really wanted to do: read a good book, take my kids on a walk, learn to sketch and paint, make more with my hands than just our necessary food.

My kids grew. They took on more of their own tasks.3 I spent less time organizing them and more time enjoying life alongside them. We went for walks, sketched in our nature journals, and I even started to decorate my house a little. When you are hell-bent on utilitarianism and correctness and you know nothing about decorating, you can call your style “minimalism” but you are really just scared to do stuff. I painted walls red and left artsy little messes out and started to collect old books just because I love them.

As I focused on the life and the education I wanted for my children—one that involved a lot of time outdoors, a lot of good and rigorous reading, time making messes, exploring interests, and marvelling at all God was doing in the world—I began to see the hypocrisy of the life I was living. I had to be more than the planner who was diligently making a life of goodness and beauty and truth for my children. I needed to participate in this education towards beauty for myself.

I became more me, and less a version of the perfect me. My journals filled with vignettes and poems that eventually ended up on a blog I started in 2012, and I kind of embraced my quirks instead of straightening them all out. I won’t say I stopped trying to control everything because I still would like nothing more than to control life, but circumstances changed and kept changing, and my grip slipped more and more.

And in 2020 I realized just how little I could actually control. I realized that even the good things I desired were not guaranteed, even if God agreed they were good, even if I prayed everyday. When my dad died in August I lost control. Truth was too much to bear without beauty and goodness, and for too long I had neglected them in pursuit of the guarantees I couldn’t have.

So the book changed direction. Just like my life naturally shifted as my children aged, grief changed everything and my writing reflected that. I was three or four essays into the project by that time, and I had to set the essays aside and just write the grief for a while, just for me.

Through that writing I found a beauty that was beyond what was necessary. Excessive. Extravagant. Excruciatingly hard. Grief worked its way into the book and the essays became chapters in a story of changing my mind, because keeping my faith meant falling on the solid rock again and again and finding those blows do, indeed, change my perspective.

Beauty is not soft focus and radiant light and tranquil cottages, and it’s not a frivolity we can live without. It is in the darkness where you are never alone, where much of life is actually lived. God knows we need a Companion. We need light in the tunnel and not just a hope at the end of it.4

My last book update was in June 2025, and I thought maybe the book would be available by winter. Good friends read it and offered valuable feedback and encouraging words. I shifted the order around a bit, added some clarity, and had a pretty solid manuscript by November. I am happy with the book, and that in itself is success.

For the last few years as I’ve toiled away on it, I have thumbed my nose at the need for platform and followers, content to write the best story I can, self-publish my book, and not play the numbers game.5 I will not dance for you. But I want this book to feel and look a certain way, and I don’t want to cut her legs out from under her before she’s even taken a step, so I spent November and December putting together a book proposal and making a list of agents to query. I will not dance for you but I will nauseate myself with a third person autobiography and positive hopes for the market on this book. I will not dance for you, but I will put myself out there on behalf of a message I love.

I will not dance for you but I can be a fool in other ways.

The proposal and/or full manuscript is in the inboxes of several agents right now. I have heard positive things about my writing and the book’s premise from two agents so far, but the truth of the matter is the same: unknown authors without a large following do not sell books, and publishers are not in the business of taking obvious risks. We own two businesses, so I get it. I will give this querying process more time but I won’t let it discourage me or keep me from getting the book out, somehow.

I wanted you to know some of this because many of you have cheered me on in this project. A writer without readers is as good as a meal eaten alone, in a cave, when you are lonely and just wish someone could be blessed by the lovely salad you put together. I do the work of putting sentences together and presenting them here because you tell me it means something to you, and that means something to me.

This slow work is the best I can do, and it is what feels lifegiving to me. The old struggle of what I ought to do will always be with me and some of it is good—I need pushed and challenged. But, in large part because of my years spent writing, I have a better understanding of what is mine to do. I hope something in my process encourages you in yours, and thank you for walking this slow way with me.

5

If you are interested in the platform discussion, especially in regards to Christian publishing, started her series on it this week and the first post has already stirred up a lot of thoughts and feelings.

Beautiful Discipleship

Is Christian Publishing Bad For the Church?

This is Part 1 of a series on the history and challenges of the Christian publishing industry. This series is based on significant research and my own experience working in Christian publishing in a …

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3 months ago · 46 likes · 35 comments · Tabitha McDuffee

I have been disconnected from certain tethers for the last month. We celebrated Christmas later than normal, didn’t celebrate the New Year or Tim’s January birthday at all, and then left for almost two weeks of vacation. My normal week of slow entry into a new year, that glorious time between Christmas and January 1, was lost.

Obviously a long vacation was nice and we had a wonderful time, fully relaxing into sugared beaches and clear, salty waters. We snorkeled and napped, swam and explored, walked a lot, and renewed rhythms of prayer and reading that we needed. But there has been no big-picture planning for the year ahead, no review of the past year, and no chosen focus for the next few months. These aren’t world-ending issues, but it has felt like a lack of attention for me. Since we’ve been home though, I have been furiously writing notes and connecting dots.

I am busy but not overly so, and I am learning to not be ashamed of the fact that my day to day life generally has space and solitude and margin. I don’t live at a frenetic pace. Even when we were in the thick of homeschooling and sports and my work tutoring, there could almost always be an hour found if I needed it badly enough (4 a.m. works for awhile). I know people who live their whole life in a frenzy, who seem to naturally operate with too much on their plate and who tell themselves they thrive that way; people count on them; people dump responsibilities on them; people avoid them because they feel stressed around them, or lazy, or incompetent. My mission is to be a counterbalance and evangelize for a quiet and peaceable life.

The exception to this was the first couple years of getting the deli up and running. I think my body is still recovering with the help of some bloodwork and supplements and a doctor who listens, but my mind is taking more time. My attention is taking longer to return.

There is a difference between a frenzied mind and a mind restfully employed, and in between those two spaces is probably something like a mind on a treadmill, continually going nowhere but afraid to stop. The treadmill seems better because it contains the frenzy, focuses the action. The mind shifts down to auto-pilot. Some important things get done. We look busy, and busy is a fruit of the spirit of the age.

But the key to being on a treadmill is to not pay attention to the world around you. Noticing things will remind you how miserable the treadmill is. You have to look at what’s right in front of you, and that is all.

I don’t live at a frenetic pace and my mind has rarely been frenzied, but the treadmill is a comfortable metaphor for the place I hang out when I am overwhelmed or can’t think of what to do next. The downtime at the beginning of a new year is usually time for me to refocus, and I know I’m off the treadmill when my attention starts to magnetize.

In Slow Theology, A.J. Swoboda and write about the “disciplines that teach us to receive the presence of God”. Discipline sounds like a bad word but its root is disciple, which means a student, and I love being a student. The authors contend that the discipline we need in order to receive the presence of God (or, I would say, to notice and pay attention to the presence) may not be found in gritting our teeth to read the Bible more. Rather, it’s in becoming the type of person who cultivates a “lifestyle and a rhythm” that doesn’t prevent us from hearing God when we do read the Bible.

On a treadmill, it’s pretty easy to cultivate a lifestyle and rhythm that prevents me from hearing God. It’s pretty easy to have my phone in my hand. It’s easy to numb-out. It’s easy to be formed by the times, as writes about.

All that keeps me from hearing God because it employs my mind in a way that feels pseudo-satisfying, just like being on an actual treadmill will check the exercise box but absolutely not fill the need for fresh air and sunshine and birdsong. Just like telling someone in a crisis “let me know if you need anything” feels like being a good friend but doesn’t actually require much of me and therefore, isn’t real friendship.2

“Silence, solitude, introspection, grappling with questions, embracing discomfort, observing Sabbath rest, and learning to wait patiently aren’t the things we add to reading the Bible. They are the practices we do so that we can hear God in the Bible. These are the disciplines that teach us to receive the presence of God.”

Silence, solitude, and introspection are easy for me, or at least they are desirable, as my natural tendencies. But rarely do my own inclinations actually produce godliness in me and if I lean into all the contemplative practices I so easily gravitate towards, without grappling with questions, embracing discomfort, and learning to wait patiently (ugh it’s the worst), my attention will be numbed and I may just be formed to the apathy or rage of the times. Reading the Bible becomes a box I check.

As Oldfield writes,

I really want - really desire - to be becoming the kind of person the world needs now, to be becoming braver and more loving, more resilient and more peaceful, more honest and more free. This process will be largely dependent on who I am watching. Whose desires, whose model of a good life am I letting shape me. What does a wise person want, and how do I learn to want it to? I surround myself with them, pay attention mainly to them.

I want a more hopeful apocalypse than the one Yeats gives in his poem The Second Coming, but there is truth in the lines:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Paying attention is exhausting and I don’t want to fall prey to the passionate intensity that is spouted by the worst of us. I need the reminder from Oldfield that I can choose who I pay attention to, and that will shape who I become.

And in the face of Yeats’ doom that the “centre cannot hold”, I grapple with discomfort and questions, pay attention to my attention, and receive the presence of God in the very center of me.

I am taking notes. The center does hold, and it is magnetic.

But life is so much more complex at any given moment than any list can suggest, how is one to gather it all in?

—May Sarton, At Seventy, January 2nd.

I am reading all your end-of-year lists with joy. I am looking at your lists-to-start-a-year with interest. I love these things, even if they are all generally the same batches of what to read and watch and do. I love to read and watch and do. Thank you for summarizing what worked and what didn’t—I learn that way. If you can make a mistake and share the results with me, it might save me a step.

I, on the other hand, accidentally didn’t write for three weeks.

Other than lists, of course. I am always writing lists to-do, to-think, to-read, to-make. I like lists. I don’t feel tyrannized by them, even when they are long and delusional. There is more abounding goodness available than I could ever possibly take full advantage of in one lifetime, and keeping lists helps me remember that. God knows we all need reminded.

Do I feel bad that I didn’t write for three whole weeks, when I have a proposal waiting to be polished and sent? When I have a manuscript with just a few more tweaks to make? When the best advice is that writers write and here I am wondering if I’ll ever be the consistent version of myself I want to be?

No. And that is one way I can mark growth. My anxiety is proportional.

Another way I can see that I have grown is my resistance to all the great programs available this time of year1. There are zoom webinars and workbooks and 3 steps galore right now, and many of them are great and helpful I’m sure, but I’ve been around that block so many times I should be teaching. I don’t say that to brag. It’s just that I have hacked the life out of the lifehacks for women who want to have their best year, their most productive, most physically fit, most peaceful, most successful year/quarter/month/week/day.

I have also slowly realized over the last few years that a lot of the classes and webinars offered for writers are aimed at new writers, or young writers, and I don’t fit in with those campers anymore. Lots to learn still, most definitely. And lots of writers younger than me who are farther along and have much to teach me, for sure. But I am no longer a beginner.

It’s not that I don’t know what to do. I just get tired of making myself do it, you know? I just need a little break, so I’ve taken one. No goals, no word of the year yet, no more/less list. I haven’t broken a big project down into quarterly targets. Haven’t reverse-engineered my year or reviewed the last year. I don’t know my targets. And it’s just fine. Maybe my “January reset” will start in February. Or next Monday.

I turn 50 in April can you tell?! It’s not that I don’t care anymore. I probably care more than ever, because the numbers I’ve passed are more than the numbers ahead, even if they are just numbers and my brain still thinks I’m 30. My body knows it’s not.2 The days matter, and life is indeed “more complex at any given moment” than any list or program or schedule could account for.

These are wild times, and no amount of perfect living or optimized people will make them tame. When I pray, there are long lists and I depend on the Holy Spirit to sort them out. But I keep praying, and it’s an ebb and flow of connection and forgetting that I am connected, of hope and feeling the rope slip. I keep holding on, even when hope is that sick feeling just below my ribs that reminds me how little control I have on outcomes.

Jesus has a tight grip, I remember.

Man I wish our only concerns could be how we are going to smash our goals this year, how fit we’re going to be, how organized, how published, how well-read. It’s fine that those are on our lists, but we all have bigger fish to fry than just optimizing our own selves into a better version. Still, we make the lists and it’s good that we do.

Some of my list from the last several weeks:

1. Amelia Grace was born December 17, making us the grandparents of five (!!) whole persons. I just don’t have words for this. Still working on my Funky Grandma era.

   

2. We went for two epic hikes, “epic” being a word that, as a midlife woman who is out of shape, I define by the views. But our Christmas day hike was also epic because it marked the start of a new empty nest tradition, and also we could have died.

3. I was asked to share a devotional at a small gathering of women and I practiced this mantra: do not let a five minute talk turn into six days of anxiety. I kept the anxiety proportional.

4. We gathered at our home after Christmas, and though not everyone could make it, it was joyous chaos and I loved it.

5. New bookshelves were installed in the living room and I unpacked books I’ve been looking for since August.

6. This weekend (maybe today?) I will begin sending my proposal to agents. I’m not sure how to keep this anxiety proportional because I know it is generally a long process full of rejections…send help?! Send your agent my way?

7. I plan to distract myself from #6 by regular writing, and working out a map for my next book idea. Gluttony to the maxxxx.

I do have goals and I will make my more/less list, but for now I need the lists of things that are pure delight and no discipline. Thankfully there are plenty.

My husband prefers a museum—clean lines, lots of whitespace, photos and objects with meaning, zero dirt. I prefer a carefully curated used bookstore—overflowing bookstacks, a jungle of plants, interesting little nooks, good coffee and comfy chairs, but plenty of clean horizontal spaces for working. Also no dirt.

We land together in the middle somewhere, and I will speak for both of us and say we’ve learned to love the benefits of each setting. I’ll call our style The Museum Bookstore.1

Life is constantly managing clutter and stuff.

Love is living with your person’s version of clean.

I finished a short little book this week titled Finding Your Walden: How to Strive Less, Simplify More, and Embrace What Matters Most. Before I’d made it to the end, I was recommending it to Tim because I knew it would spark some good discussion for us. He has 2 hours of commute right now, seven days a week between work and church, and he’ll finish the audiobook on his drive this morning.

Aside from doggedly fangirling Thoreau and slipping in some Buddhist mindfulness practices, the author does a good job lining up the parallels between Thoreau’s escape to Walden pond and our 21st century chase of a simpler life. We are all still chasing Eden I suppose.

We have just been through a major declutter and house move and yet…and yet. Life is constantly managing your stuff, which can be in boxes in a basement or in habits ingrained in the patterns of your days. In theological terms, we want the joy and peace Jesus promises and all those things He does “exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think” (Eph. 3:20 NKJV), which is a maximalism of sorts. But paradoxically, less absolutely can equal more when we are looking for the good life with Jesus.

This week a new edition of Cultivating is ready for Christmastide at Cultivating Oaks Press. I wrote about paring down our belongings and remembering my real belonging, and about the things I need to tend to in order to give the kinds of gifts I want to give.

New essay at Cultivating Oaks Press

Also at Cultivating:

Andrew Roycroft’s beautiful essay on Mr. Tumnus’ everyday bounty in a “never-Christmas” world.

“But God also sees and blesses your own quiet work in private lodgings, the little comforts that you appeal to daily, the personal balms that just get you through – but get you through they do!”

Matthew Clark’s writing always astounds me, and my only comment is the eloquent “sheeeesh”.

“The Maker of the Star-gardens once dove headlong toward earth to be received by a womb in this world, and to those meek souls who receive Him still, He will make of this world a womb, bounded as a lake in the cup of His hand.”

And this delightful essay from Jordan Durbin—let this be the season for yes and celebration!

“I saw and felt the disappointment I was handing out in a steady stream of “no,” but more importantly, I questioned the why of it all.”

This is the week all of our plans become hinged on a baby’s arrival—our newest granddaughter should be making her way to the world any day now! Christmas babies may be the poor recipients of “bad timing” but what a way to practice and remember what we are waiting for. Adventus: the arrival.

All that is calm is about to explode into song and I am here for it.

When I was first working on my manuscript in 2019, I was worried it would turn into a book about homeschooling and I really didn’t want it to be a book about homeschooling. “It’s not a book about homeschooling,” my writing friend assured me after reading some early drafts. “But homeschooling is a part of you, so of course it’s going to be in the book.”

In its current iteration, I have said it’s not a book about grief. “But of course grief is threaded throughout the book,” another friend tells me after reading it.

Six years later I’m pretty settled on what I’m writing about in that book, and They are right when They counsel you to start with a map. Make an outline for goodness’ sake.

I have tried to lean away from parts of my life, as if that would make me unique or interesting (everyone is writing about XYZ so I don’t need to). Which is silly because homeschooling is still fairly unique and niche…which is also why I don’t write a lot about it. Is it so niche no one cares? It’s a vicious cycle of bias—I think everyone is writing about XYZ because I am reading a lot about XYZ.

In reality, homeschooling has occupied nearly half my life so it’s fitting that some of what I write will be about homeschooling.

In the early years of teaching your children, you are everything. Every letter sounded out and every bean counted is a minute of your life ticking by; bye, bye. Everything is you. You are Teacher.

Around sixth grade, you become less Teacher, more Guide. They can read, follow directions, move on to the next assignment, ask you for help with math so you’ll stop what you’re doing and come stand beside them as they instantly solve the problem on their own, the minute you arrive by their side. You are less, but you probably have more children to teach so it never really occurs to you that your job is changing.

In high school, your kids become less your Students and more your Research Assistants. They will fill you in with fun facts you didn’t ask for. They will fact check you. Pro tip: Assign them books or courses you wish you had time for yourself, and then require a narration to grade their understanding. In ten minutes you can have a pretty thorough overview of the War of 1812 or The Renaissance. This is better than an audiobook or those sad, sad apps that give you a condensed version of someone’s life work, summing up their whole book in 5 minutes (the fact that this is legal blows my mind).

High school is lower teacher involvement, higher return on investment. It’s the vista you climbed to see.

If your kids attend college or trade school or any specialized programs, and you yourself only finished two years of community college (but 23 years of homeschooling someone give me a degree) they will share whole new worlds and experiences with you, lives you never lived. You will be offended by their professors but redeemed by your kids’ success. They will write essays about The Best Teacher they ever had and you will be the star. They will get “real diplomas”.

Even with Google and AI and all their degrees, they will text you with questions they trust you have the answer to. They will ask you first, because you were their first teacher—even if you have to “use your resources” as we say, and Google the answer yourself. It’s fine. They want to hear the answer from you.

After School

It’s been almost two years since I was responsible for anyone’s education but my own, and I’m just now starting to really process that. This is why I will never be good at hot-takes, thank God. It takes me awhile to realize what’s going on because there is just so much going on.

The transition from homeschooling to not homeschooling was less monumental than I ever imagined; or more likely, I just never really imagined it. It’s like many shifts in life—you work and work and work and one day you don’t buy diapers anymore. You don’t have to cut anyone’s food. You are done with phonics, gradually everyone grades their own math lessons, nobody needs your help with chemistry, and no one needs reminded to correct their essay and return it to you. One day you sign your last child’s homemade diploma and put their grades on their high school transcript and you are done homeschooling.1 Voila.

You throw them a big graduation party but forget to celebrate yourself.

For us, the grandkids came before we finished homeschooling our youngest child. I was adjusting to being Grandma as I was transitioning to life After School. In the years from 2020 to 2023 we endured the pandemic, my dad died, three of our children were married (in a 6 month span), we remodeled and opened another business, our youngest graduated homeschool, three kids graduated college, and we became grandparents.2 It was the best and worst and blurriest of times.

You work and work and work, and one day you realize how much the work has shifted, and how thankful you are for its gradual change. How the slow change from being Everything, to being Someone You Can Call, allowed you to pick up some of the books and skills and pursuits you used to wish you had time for.

For me, buying the deli was probably the biggest help in transitioning from the homeschool years to this After School time. I have poured myself into writing but if writing were all I had, I think I would be spinning my wheels too much. I need to be busy, but with the freedom to be flexible. I need a project to keep me focused. The deli has taken a lot from me, but it’s also been key in my formation I believe.

I can no longer frame my life and schedule around my children’s, but all the parenting and homeschooling has taught me how to take a wide open freedom and tame it into a place I can flourish. Throw in some huge responsibilities, like running a business with 15 employees and helping my husband with his business, and my days are pretty full.

I’ve loved every stage of parenting and I can honestly say we are now loving this empty nest and grandparenting stage. We talk for hours in the morning, eat small dinners at night3, and go to bed whenever we choose.4 We hang out with our grandkids as much as we can and oh my goodness, do we enjoy our children’s children.

I haven’t really had to figure out what I’m doing After School because the seasons of life have overlapped so naturally. I see the same thing in my homeschooling friends who are in this stage of life—some have turned hobbies into businesses, or taken up travel, or followed a passion into a ministry. Our lives didn’t end when our central role as Homeschool Mom ended, because we took the time to nurture our own brains in the midst of teaching algebra and literature.

This is important for any mother. The goal is to move your children into their independence, little by little. Do not shelve all of your own interests for later. Let your children see you being a real person, with real interests and pursuits that do not necessarily have anything to do with them, and one day they might even be your biggest cheerleaders.

After School is a time of transition for moms, whether you homeschooled or not. When your kids are done with their formal education and your home starts to empty, what do you do?

And hey. If you’re in the thick of it, remember you can always narrow the hustle down to this: read good books together; talk or write about them; go outside. 5

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Every mountain is beautiful, some for their starkness or their sheer rock faces, others for their million spires pointing to the sky. These mountains of the North Umpqua are beautiful for their lakes and the pinnacle rocks jutting out of the middle of a dense treeline, and a million trees of all kinds of species.

The Way Back to Ourselves focused its literary journal on the mountains for their most recent issue, and I am thankful to have an essay accepted there. I wrote about a few different mountains that are special to us, and about the way I seek answers and God reminds me to seek Him.

I hope you’ll follow the link to read the whole essay, as well as the other essays and poetry (including this one by my friend ) found in this issue. The folks at The Way Back to Ourselves are doing a good work in pointing to Jesus and the truth, goodness, and beauty that abounds.

I’ve been reading the same Scriptures for weeks now, steeping myself in the Sermon on the Mount. I want to know what Jesus means when he says blessed are the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful. I want to know what peacemaking looks like in a world like ours, and why, in the sermon, it comes between the pure and the persecuted.

I think form matters.

I think Jesus climbed up that mountain and delivered his message thoughtfully—to those who would climb with him and listen. I don’t think his teaching was a random smattering of good ideas, all lumped together. The order, the form, the delivery method, the climb to get there—it all matters. I read different translations of Matthew 5 through 7, and my questions linger, but from the middle of the sermon, this stares at me:

Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you (Matthew 6:33, CSB).

Read the full essay "My Kingdom"

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I was a good student but not passionate. I wanted good grades more than I wanted to know and understand the material, and school rewarded my desire, priming me for the checkbox-life and performance-driven adulthood. When I became a Christian and a wife and a mom, all within about a 5 year span, I traded good grades and scholarships for completed to-do lists and perceived approval from God.

Then I found “Christian self-help”.

Then I found parenting books.

Then I found home education.

Then I found blogs.

It was a slippery slope to becoming a Lifelong Learner.

It sounds virtuous to be someone who wants to learn and understand better, and to recognize how much I still don’t know. Being a learner has always seemed like a much better posture than being someone who knows it all. But as I’ve said before, I use maybe and possibly and probably as insurance against assurance, and one of the pitfalls of always learning is never coming to knowledge of the truth (2 Timothy 3:7). I have to land somewhere, and be unafraid of changing my mind later.

Another pitfall of lifelong learning is lifelong not-doing. Preparation becomes an excuse to avoid starting, and because I am afraid of doing things wrong, I avoid the friction of action. I also avoid the friction of learning things I don’t want, but probably need to learn.1

And of course there’s the problem of thinking that learning stuff will help me be correct, and being correct will let me finally feel approved. I’m already approved. God calls me “good” and has this inexplicable grace to cover all the ways I could never be enough.

Learning is a bottomless pit made ever wider by the resources available to us. 25 years ago, the endless resources for home education came in giant catalogs in the mailbox, numerous opinions and options on blogs, and later, plenty of programs available for online education at home. I was inundated with information and to someone who wants to do everything right, that was overwhelming. I couldn’t afford—neither in time nor money—to test out every good resource and find the absolute best, for every child in every stage forever and ever. And the fact that there are so many free resources available is not a bonus, in my opinion. More is not better.

It took a few years but I began to funnel the resources and narrow the options. I unsubscribed from every catalog and stopped reading all the blogs, and I chose one good spine to guide us (The Well-Trained Mind by ). I spent more money on good art supplies and less on promises and guarantees.

Every 3 months there was some new and exciting resource that would creep its way into my view, but when I was overwhelmed and overstimulated with the idea of all the greener grass, I came back to the basics: read good books, write or talk about them, and then go outside.2

There was good friction in the limits I imposed.

Our resources enable us to feel like we can learn anything, and most of it for absolutely free. Apart from homeschooling, I have free or inexpensive courses piled up on photography, writing, embroidery, art journaling, ancient history, home economics, small business management, Bible study, calligraphy, self-publishing, accounting, platform building, DIY furniture, DIY MFA, sewing, exercise programs, time management, productivity, and my newest obsession: oil painting. There is a free tutorial, online course, or YouTube rabbit hole just waiting for any spark of interest I might have. And if I don’t have one, the algorithm will present one for me.

The options are limitless but I am not. The internet will present me with every possibility, but I am not everywoman. I am narrow, niched down, funneled. And that’s good.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.

Psalm 19:1-3 ESV

There is something spiritual in the desire to be a lifelong learner. This world is an amazing place to be plunked down in and I want to squeeze all the drips of wonder out of my place in it, because it helps me pay attention. Paying attention to what God created is what God deserves from me. Give me all the nature poems and plant identifications and every name of all the species lurking in the woods. Tell me how to attract the birds. Show me how to photograph the mist in the trees and the floating leaves and please please please can someone help me attract the wild animals so I can get their pictures but not be in danger?

Help me take better care of my dog, so she can enjoy the world with me longer. How do I make my home a place my grandkids beg to come to? What’s the best way to game the travel points system so Tim and I can enjoy traveling the world together once in awhile? There are so many good things to learn.

There is something spiritual in learning, but it is threatened with the shadow of always wanting to be better and make things easier, of acquiring knowledge for the sake of knowing, without taking action on that knowledge.

A few days ago I read an article I had saved about writing better personal essays. It was touted as a “beginner’s guide”, which highlights another vice in me when it comes to lifelong learning: I am not a beginner but I still wanted this information. That’s hard for me to say because I know I have room for improvement in my writing and thinking. But I have been consistently writing for 13 years. I have tutored dozens of children and teenagers in writing oodles of essays. I have read great books and taught through wonderful courses on essay writing. I know enough about essays to make me at least an intermediate, yet I fell for the promise of some shiny and new insight.

On top of all that, I am highly suspicious the article on writing better personal essays was written with AI.3 Double womp.

When I encounter the friction of a blank page or meandering thoughts that won’t fall into line, I look for ways to make the writing frictionless. Some key insight. Some fancy tools. A hack to make things easier. As a lifelong learner, if I do not take care to limit and develop my learning towards virtue, something frictionless like artificial intelligence could be a huge temptation.

wrote a very human piece this week about her fall off the no-AI wagon and it made me ache with that sense of understanding you get when someone screws up in a way that you know you are prone to. Because of imposter syndrome. Because communicating is hard. Because we want hacks and shortcuts to greatness, or ease, or recognition. AI promises those things, and it may be easy to spot now but I suspect it is only getting better.4

The life we want is one full of the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Each one of those has a friction in it because there is an opposite fruit we could choose or allow. We make choices with friction. In the absence of it there is just freefall. Friction slows something down, and Lord knows we need to slow the heck down.

says we need “frictionfulness” for the good life we seek.

“All of us can look back and acknowledge it was through the hard and tough times in our lives that we grew and matured the most as a person. Likewise, it is through engaging and persisting with friction that we further mould our lives to conformity with the good life. Persisting with the friction is also a means by which we create, preserve, and enjoy the good and valuable things of this world — the things that may last into eternity.”

This morning I chose a Pilates workout to do. I have done lots of workouts in my life but it’s been awhile since my core muscles were taxed, so I chose a “beginner” course. I’m not a beginner because I don’t know what to do; I’m a beginner because I haven’t done it in awhile and muscles get flabby faster and faster these days. By reason of steady use I can eventually progress to an intermediate course.

Being a lifelong learner is not a bad thing, and neither is being a beginner. But it’s the friction of doing things that makes the learning embodied. Join me in funneling the options down and adding some good friction.

In the wise words of Mrs. Frizzle, “Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!”5

I’ve spent the week preparing for company and plugging away on my book proposal, so here’s a quick review of what and how I’ve been reading lately, instead of another essay:

1. Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep, by Tish Harrison Warren. I’m about halfway through this book but I have so many highlights. Harrison frames the book around the nighttime prayer of Compline, working through specific griefs in her own life as well as the griefs faced by others. I can always use help with prayer, and this book has given me good reason to look to the written prayers of church history to find words when life just really bites.

   I’m reading this one on my kindle paperwhite at bedtime. I prefer a paper book forever and always, but the paperwhite is great for reading in the dark without disturbing Tim. I use the highlight feature excessively, bookmark the table of contents, and review review review—this helps me remember what I read the night before because bedtime-me is not great at retention. When I finish I write the best highlights on index cards for my commonplace box.

2. The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien. I homeschooled all my children without ever reading this book, so I am mending my ways. It’s as good as I’ve always been told—friendship, danger, moral determination and self-sacrifice. All the good stuff. I’ve watched bits and pieces of the movies and I can do without the visual imagery on screen. The book is better.

   This is a library book and so far I’m on renewal number two…thank God for my library’s auto-renewal, and the grace that they no longer seem to charge overdue fees? I can’t mark this one up with my pen and so far I haven’t been disciplined enough to copy sentences or passages that are brilliant, and there are many. I am simply reading and enjoying it.

3. Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life by Maggie Smith. I loved You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Smith talks a little about her process with that book, and really has several practical exercises and ideas for shining up your writing. My favorite suggestion was to type all the sentences from a piece of writing as separate lines, to see the flow and structure of each sentence and find any repeated syntax.

   I listened to this one because it was free with with my Spotify subscription. I really don’t suggest the audio. This is a book you need in your hands. Also, Smith’s narration is lovely but her voice and diction are very “poetic” and it glazed me over a bit.

4. The Soul Tells a Story: Engaging Creativity with Spirituality in the Writing Life by Vinita Hampton Wright. I am at the very beginning of this but it looks promising, with some practical exercises and a lot of wisdom.

   This is a real paper book I own so I am marking it up freely. Lot’s of nuggets so far, like this one: “Creativity is God’s way of teaching us to pay attention, to think and to dream.” When I finish this book I will go back through all my marginalia and underlined sentences and write the gems on notecards.

In an ideal world all my reading would happen with physical books I own, held in my hands, with lots of underlines and notes in the margins. But I am thankful I have other options because that ideal life is not real life—the Kindle is great for reading in the dark, library books save money, audiobooks are a gift on my long commutes, and physical books I own are marked up and well loved. That’s my real reading life.

Off for round three of breakfast!

Fall, around here:

I am not here to throw any of my kids under the bus. They have all turned into pretty unique and wonderful adults who support themselves and whom we enjoy hanging out with, and their teen years were fairly mild (as far as I know1). But I did have some hypothetical scenarios to give this friend.

Hypothetically, if your teenager has always been mostly truthful but you feel like they might be lying about xyz, sometimes all you need to do is appeal to their conscience. Yes, some people will refer to this as a guilt trip, but call it what you will—by appealing to their sense of right and wrong, you let them judge their own actions and hopefully build discernment. People like nothing more than to make their own decisions.

If it turns out they are indeed guilty of some dishonesty or infraction, a short leash is their tether to good choices for a while. Keep them close. Let them loathe it or love it, but pray they learn from it.

I didn’t mean to give parenting advice. Who am I becoming?

I meant to write about my own need for tethering. Sometime in the last week I made a note that said “short leash” with a few sentence fragments beneath it, so it’s been on my mind to consider limitations—short leashes I intentionally give (or need to give) myself.

wrote a thoughtful essay titled, “Not Everything is Demonic. Just Some Stuff.” and it got me thinking about discernment. I commented that it was a nice essay but a list would have been a lot easier. I am sarcastic and sometimes I don’t filter (one of the leashes I need), but thankfully he understood my sarcasm. A list of dos and don’ts is always easier than trying to use discernment on issues of consumption—what music, film, books, food, and beverages are okay for us to partake in? What holidays are okay to celebrate? Which people are we safe listening to?

The premise of my book is that I wanted to live by lists and rules so I would know I was doing things right, but God gave me a life full of unanswerable questions and unpredictable circumstances, so that I would learn to be satisfied with His presence.2 It was the work of beauty that won me over, and beauty doesn’t fall in line with lists and rules.

A few days ago I saw a new post in my inbox from , titled “Learning No”. I didn’t read it that day but I’ve been formulating its premise in mind, prejudging it and figuring it would feed this conversation I’ve been having with myself about short leashes.

One of my children who survived the teen years without too much need for discipline (i.e. without getting caught) called me this week to ask my opinion about a toddler who has superhuman strength, and enjoys yeeting himself from his crib at naptime. Did I ever experience that as a parent, and what did I do with that hypothetical child? Learning no is a painful experience for parent and child alike—and I mean that as it applies to a toddler escaping his crib, to a parent trying to teach a toddler not to escape his crib, and to a parent who has freedom, as an adult, but still needs to tell themselves no.

I had children who pushed the boundaries. I had children who were “easy” but pushed boundaries in other ways, ones that didn’t necessarily look like discipline issues. I had children who were sneaky and ones who were so blatantly obvious it made me nervous. But one thing I’ve noticed about them as adults is that they are all incredibly self-disciplined, even if they draw their lines in different places.

The short leash of discernment sometimes stretches too far, and now and then I have to draw myself back to the tether of God’s good plan. Sometimes the freedom that I think I want—which is mostly a freedom of time and activity, to do the things I like and avoid the things I dislike—is too long a leash for me to be a whole and happy human being. I need boundaries and constraints. I need some of that stuff I don’t like.

My aging body is a short leash. I can care for it and strengthen it and feed it right, with food and rest and the bajillion grams of protein everyone says I need, and it is still an aging body. (See this post from for solidarity.)

Energy is a leash. I only have so much and that much is dwindling.

Finances are a leash, and even if they were unlimited, discernment draws me towards responsibility and charity.

The deli. My family. My place in the world. My dog. Romans chapter 14 and 1 Corinthians 13. The fact that the sun sets every single day and will soon be setting at 4 p.m. The Holy Spirit, who sometimes tells me to keep my mouth shut and sometimes tells me to speak up which is the worst. The love of God.

All these things tether me to the goodness of a God who has entrusted me to tell myself no sometimes. Freedom comes with the responsibility to make those decisions.3

I read Swoboda’s essay this morning. He begins with a student’s question about why God would put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—the “off-limits” tree—right in the middle of the garden. (Gen. 2:9) God made a short do and don’t list and humans still couldn’t keep it. The real question is, Is God tempting us?

God, in his wisdom, put the tree in the middle of the garden because he needed the most powerful beings in the garden—the humans—to be constantly taught the gift of restraint and self-control. Why? Because power without these things will destroy Eden. We are seeing right now what power without restraint looks like. And it looks like hell.

God is not tempting us. (James 1:14-15) He’s just giving us a really large and overwhelming responsibility to tether ourselves with a short leash to His goodness. It’s a choice I have to constantly remake, but it’s for my good.

It’s been more than 20 years since I broke free from the bondage of my box of index cards, with its sections holding cards for each month and each week and tabs for days 1-31, plus seasonal sections for stuff like cleaning air filters and washing the walls. Every day had multiple index cards, and every day the promise of rest or fun came at the end of the stack I never reached.

My! how you’ve grown. When that way of living became unsustainable (#life) I ditched the cards, but in truth, I have always been trying to find a way to control things through organization. I am still sure there is a system that will work for me.

For a week I carried an index card around each day, writing easy lists and random thoughts as they came to me. “Your life is not boring” was an incomplete thought I had while in town one day, and I wrote it down to ring a bell about something more specific, something with deeper meaning. Maybe it was about the way I am always struck by the web of human connections, how each person is moving through time and space, touching every other person’s time and space, and we are all an infinite depth reverberating stories we don’t have time to develop. Your life is not boring but you need to take the time to tell it. You are a bell that needs rung once in awhile.

There is a writer in my Notes feed who has been posting photos of a kestrel falcon that has come to visit her porch everyday for over a week. She and others read all kinds of meaning into it—”Focus. Clarity. Foresight. Action. Balance.”—and I have decided I want a falcon (and focus, clarity, foresight, action, and balance please). I have the perfect porch for one at our new home, surrounded by forest.

I read H is for Hawk last year but I’d forgotten all the brutality. I googled “how to attract a hawk” because I want to be Nora in New York, and the main suggestion was to attract smaller birds first, as food for the hawk.

We haven’t put up our birdfeeders since our move but I’m having second thoughts. I would gladly dangle a rodent from the porch to attract an American kestrel, but not a bird1. I know this is how nature works and I’m no good for valuing a bird over a mouse, but these are the choices I make, the hierarchy I’m willing to submit to: rodents at the very bottom, songbirds at the top. Maybe I would be willing to sacrifice a few birds in the wild for the gift of a kestrel’s daily visit, but I will not be purposefully attracting one with little goldfinch or chickadee bait.

It’s exciting to think of a daily visit from a bird. It’s frightening to think about the cougars who for sure live in the woods around our new home. Once, from the safety of my car, I watched a mama cougar and two babies traipse across Wildcat Road, where we used to live. Bobcats don’t bother me, but I could go my whole life without seeing or hearing about another cougar please and thank you. Everything I want is on some hierarchy and it’s frustrating that some of the things I want—maybe most of them?—require the presence of something I don’t want, or am too lazy to care enough about. This is probably the root of my schedule-and-organization worship.

I just want something a little more exotic than the blue jays and wild turkeys who roam like rodents all over here. Even the albino turkey is old news now. I know there are wild things in the woods, and I want to see everything but the cougars. I want to be Nora in New York but I definitely do not want to live in New York and I probably don’t want many other parts of Nora’s life. But I do, I think, want her bird.

Today, “make pie for Sunday” was written in my planner, which is the one organizational tool I will never part with. I had lit my fall candle and was making an enjoyable task out of an apple pie, when Scout started growling and pacing. She is normally sleeping in one of her several beds or standing on my feet, begging to go for a walk, and barking is not normal. I went to the window to see what her fuss was about, thinking it was probably the deer at the apple tree again. I looked out the window and caught the last few galumphs of a galloping black bear, headed for the woods.

For a week I carried an index card around to capture to-dos and schedules and fleeting thoughts, trying to organize my life and gather pieces to make some kind of meaning. For a month I color coded my google calendar into productive little rectangles. Nothing exciting happened within those tightly controlled windows.

My life is not boring, but my schedule is. I am a bell that needs rung once in awhile.

(I didn’t get a picture of the bear but you can please refer to me as Tresta in the Treehouse now, and hope with me that Pooh will visit again and I can get a photo.)

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Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily, they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.

Dogberry, Much Ado 5.1.225

If comedies end in weddings and tragedies end in funerals, Much Ado About Nothing stops by the morgue on its way to the chapel, giving readers and viewers that dose of real life that is a mix of the two. No one gets all comedy. No one lives a total tragedy. Shakespeare has written to entertain us with an exaggerated form of our own realities, with things we can relate to and scenarios that show the discomfort of our own nature. And like Hamlet’s famous line from the play named for him—the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king. My conscience is caught by Much Ado. 

Claudio has returned from war and fallen in love with the beautiful Hero. Everything has been set for them to be married, and Claudio is intent on breaking with his fellow soldiers and risking the ridicule of being concerned with feminine things—setting himself up for potential heartache and humility, because everyone in Messina knows women can’t be faithful.  He’s in love, and I can cheer for him because he is man enough to admit it, unlike his friend Benedick who only mockingly longs to be "so converted and see with these eyes”—to fall head-over-heels as Claudio apparently has. Benedick will fall in love, but only when he is tricked into believing that Beatrice, the object of his turmoiled affection, is first in love with him. 

But before the wedding of Claudio and Hero, there is a deception. Claudio is led to believe his bride-to-be has already been untrue, and his instinct is to protect his own pride.  His first response to this gossip is not to question its source, to question Hero, or to believe what he knows of her character and conduct. His response is to believe a lie—to believe what he’s heard and thinks he’s seen.  

In an interview with On Being host Krista Tippett, psychologist Daniel Kahneman tells about having dinner with his wife and some friends. At home afterwards, as they were getting ready for bed and discussing their evening, Kahneman’s wife said something strange.  She was admiring one of the guests because, as she said, "He doesn’t undress the maid himself.” This shocked her husband, both because of his manly pride and because it was out of character for his wife to say such a thing. Turns out, his first hearing of her was wrong, and after a little investigation he realized she had actually said, "He doesn’t underestimate himself." 

Throughout Much Ado, intentions are misinterpreted, words are twisted, information is gained by eavesdropping, and Claudio becomes a perfect illustration of the folly of jumping to conclusions, as Kahneman was first tempted to do. I am easily deceived when led by my pride, and I too often fail to admit that I may have come to my conclusions through my own misinterpretations. This is what bandwagons were made for, and I jump too quickly to ride along with the flow of whomever may entice me with their version of what is true. 

In her book On Reading Well, says that “If justice is making right, then seeing people rightly is a form of justice.” Claudio has a history with Hero, but to a man more concerned with his image than with the truth, history means nothing. He publicly shames the innocent Hero on their wedding day to save his own fragile pride, and the shallowness of Claudio’s love, his quick leap to his deceiver’s conclusion, is truly an injustice that only leads to more deception.  

Scripture is full of this kind of deceit, from the serpent to Tamar to Judas Iscariot. What the Bible tells me about human nature is that we are all capable of grand deceptions, and of being tricked by grand deceivers1. What Shakespeare tells me—what all good literature shows—is that God is right. Though my senses and perceptions can deceive me, and though I tend to believe what I want to believe and hear what I want to hear, a little investigation goes a long way towards learning the truth. So does a little history, a remembrance of the past. 

Claudio has seen Hero on her balcony in the embrace of another man. He is an eyewitness, and we want no better proof than that of a firsthand account. Claudio’s greatest fear—that women truly can’t be faithful and that he is a fool who falls in love—seems to be confirmed by what his eyes have seen. His public shaming and false accusations of Hero (a sharp contrast to the honorable way Joseph sought to deal with Mary) leads her to fake her own death, but not even her death by heartache can prompt Claudio to reconsider his accusations against her. What he saw mixed just enough truth with deception to convince him that Hero was not faithful, in the same way the serpent mingled truth with a lie to manipulate Eve in the garden.

Had Eve truly weighed what she knew of God’s character and benevolence, she would have reconsidered the serpent's deceptive “Has God indeed said...”, or so I like to think. And had Claudio remembered his history with Hero and not been clouded by his fears, by the “much ado about nothing” in the rumors and traps, he would have dug a little deeper and found the truth of her love and faithfulness. James says we are led away by our own desires and enticed, and Claudio’s desire is first and foremost to protect himself.2

The greatest lesson for me in Much Ado About Nothing is that I cannot view the world through my fears and expect to see it clearly. Fear is self-fulfilling—if I stoke my fears, they will be validated. When it comes to the people in my life, I have to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe all things, as 1 Corinthians 13 outlines. Otherwise, I am doomed to live on my misinterpretations of others and my fear of potential evil. 

We can question Shakespeare’s intent but his plays are clearly full of biblical elements, and good literature shows us the truth, goodness, and beauty of even a fallen world. Characters like Dogberry, with his continual malapropisms and innocently backwards sentences, reveal the truth to those who think they are wise.3 Hero’s life seems to end in her tragic death, but she reappears for a wedding. Deceivers are punished. Mourning turns to celebration. Love allows us to view everything in a new light. From beginning to end, the story is a range of human emotions and reactions. My conscience is pricked by my own distrust and self-protection, but my hope is stirred by the final revelation of truth, by reconciliation, by a wedding.  

The best stories always end in a wedding and a feast. One day we will feast on truth, delight in goodness, and never find an end to beauty, and all of our misinterpretations will either be set right or completely forgotten in the folds of eternity. In the meantime, may our consciences be caught by stories old and new.

This essay was originally published on my website in 2019 but I spruced it up a bit and reposted it here. In 2019 I was tutoring whip-smart high school kids and having great Socratic discussions once a week, which is why I was reading Shakespeare. Those years of tutoring were a wonderful part of my Homeschool MFA and I do miss them.

Subscribe (v.): The meaning “promise to contribute money to” is by 1630s; and that of “become a regular buyer of (a publication)” 1711; both originally literal. But you can subscribe for free, too, and never miss a post.

Following someone or something you trust is important in the wild, but even more so on the internet. The Internet is a flatland, where it’s easy to make caricatures of people for better or worse, and it’s easy to forget that people online are not all-good or all-bad. Some people writing or posting content online have outright ill intentions. Others of us are just making stuff up as we go, making mistakes by accident or ignorance, trying to do right and backtracking when we can.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell who to trust because really—this is all new to all of us. No one has already lived this day. There is no one coming back from the future to tell us how to choose our own adventure wisely.

Except Jesus, of course. He referred to himself as the way, so we could have a path to follow into the unknown future which he knows fully. He is an eternity behind and before us.

Earlier in the week I hiked a new trail with a friend. Neither of us had been there before, but it was a loop trail around a reservoir so we just chose a direction and took off, trusting it would lead us back to the start. It didn’t matter if she was in front or if I was. We alternated, one following the other at different times, but both of us trusting the way we were following.

If everyone were on the same way it would be easy to choose who to follow, or when it was okay to take the lead yourself. And if it were easy to know what way everyone was going, it would be easy to know who to follow. Who is headed the way you want to go?

I’ve read and listened to some good stuff this week from people who are strangers to me, and from people I know in real life. Some of the people I read or listen to are those who are not exactly on the same path as me—meaning, they are not disciples of Jesus. Even some of the ones who are on the same path are not ones who walk out their discipleship in a way I want to walk. But if I know this, I can still listen to them, still take what they say and what they know into account2, because I have the Holy Spirit to lead me into all truth (John 14:16-17).

Probably the best question I have pondered this week was put into words by , and I hope, if this topic interests you, you’ll take the time to read what she has to say here:

Becoming by Lisa Hensley

Who is discipling you?

It’s been a wild few weeks in public life in America. Outside of writing last week’s post, which was about Scripture more than anything else, I’ve been watching and listening, listening and watching. It’s been…alarming, to say the least. Over and over, I’ve come back to the same idea: this is a discipleship issue…

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8 months ago · 26 likes · 8 comments · Lisa Hensley

Who is discipling you?

Our kids were each 16 or 17 when they got their first smartphone. This was about 10 years ago, which feels like a lifetime in internet years. I was the one to encourage them to get on Instagram, and back then it felt light and innocuous. I remember opening the app, scrolling through my friends’ photos, and reaching the “no new content” message. There was an end to it, and you closed the app and walked away.

Eventually our home turned into one with phone rules: no phones at the table, no phones during a movie, no phones when we’re trying to have a conversation. This applied to all of us, and though I would bemoan walking into the living room and seeing everyone with their face down in a screen, I was/am just as bad. Now Instagram and every other app is an endless scroll with a billion side roads that we don’t walk away from—we circle the drain endlessly.

But I remember thinking back then: Someday we will all burn-out on this. And we are, thank God. The drain we feel ourselves sinking into is serving to wake us up.

Many of us effectively followed complete strangers into a dark wood and we need to find our way out, and I don’t think the answer is to blindly follow another complete stranger. The answer is to follow Jesus out, and if he feels like a complete stranger to you, ask the Holy Spirit to show you the way through his word, the Scriptures. Ask him to teach you from strangers and your children and your parents and even your dog. The point is to be discipled to Jesus and to not go anywhere blindly.

Some things that discipled me this week:

• You clicked through and read Lisa’s post, right? : )

• This one, from . “I can have the tough conversations with friends in real life, the ones that never go well on social media.”

• Read this one, and then read the comments because and her readers show that you can actually have civil disagreements online (at least they have remained civil as of this writing). I still believe these conversations are best had in-person, but good writing online can spur our flesh and blood conversations.

• The Case for Quitting Social Media, from Cal Newport on YouTube (oh the irony). Cal Newport is a computer science professor, author, and productivity expert. His books and podcasts have discipled me to a life more like Jesus, even if Cal doesn’t claim Christ. He’s a stranger who I follow judiciously and gratefully.

• “The heart of what Jesus is telling us, I believe, is that when Christ is centered—and what he says is centered—then it will often have the effect or impact of fracturing false tranquility among human beings.” , Facing Toxic Tranquility. (See also: my post from last week “You keep using that word”, about peacemaking.)

• This new hike and the conversation along the way:

  

  Are you finding life off the internet? One way to do this: If you read something or hear something you disagree with online, have an offline conversation about it with someone you respect. Even better if it’s someone who thinks differently from you.

  The way out of the mess is not the same as the way in. Pay attention to who and what is discipling you.

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