Lately I’ve been experiencing a lot of conversation enders. Many of them are related to my new field of study in clinical mental health counseling. While the cultural stigma of mental health counseling is beginning to wane, there are still some stronghold convictions against it. Often, I am met with a catchphrase that closes the conversation, a resolve that seems values based, or maybe even as a warning. These are phrases many can encounter when they aren’t even seeking mental health counseling but trying to share with a confidant something that harmed them that they are still trying to make sense of.

I thought I’d do a few posts addressing some of these conversation enders. Today, I want to unpack the expression, “I don’t want to live in the past.” At face value, it may seem wise. They could be saying, I don’t want to be emotionally stuck by something that happened in the past and I choose to move on. But isn’t that what the person sharing about their past trying to do? The reason they are bringing it up is because one doesn’t magically erase the impact of harm from the past and step into the future unscathed. Harm disorients and fractures us. The experience needs to be integrated into our narrative—we need to be able to make sense of it, name it, name the impact, and process our feelings with a witness that can help us retell it with meaning.

But a proclamation that you don’t want to live in the past as a way not to talk about it, or to sidestep being a witness for someone else to talk about it, isn’t moving on. It’s avoidance.

And avoidance actually keeps us stuck.

Processing trauma and negative experiences is a part of growth. Research (Bowen et al., 2024; Kashdan & Kane, 2011) shows that facing our past harm helps us develop adaptive coping skills, broaden our perspectives, cultivate meaning-making, and seek more beneficial resources. Those avoiding harmful past experiences report less growth. Emotional non-acceptance, avoidance, and suppression are maladaptive emotional regulation strategies, inhibiting adaptive habituation and cognitive processing. While it may feel better short-term because we don’t have to face the impact and do the work to process it, this avoidance intensifies autonomic arousal and psychological distress over time. Long-term effects of this avoidance feed into a maintenance of hyper-vigilance and intrusive symptoms and increases the risk of developing other psychological disorders (Sequeda, et al., 2026). If we expose ourselves to facing the harm, working toward resolve and integration of these painful memories, appropriate therapeutic modalities contribute to long-term outcomes of psychological flexibility, reduced physiological arousal, and sustained recovery—getting unstuck.

There is much advancement in learning the neuroscience behind how therapy can help to rewire our emotional charges while reconsolidating and integrating our past experiences into a coherent narrative. Keeping much of our painful experiences in the realm of implicit memory fuels bodily sensations that are driven by the amygdala, stimulating autonomic arousal. Without explicitly processing them through our hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, our memories lack temporal context, giving us the sensation that they are still present, happening now. Being able to recall our memories within a safe relationship with someone who is an attuned and empathetic witness enables us to organize these events in their proper time and space and assign linguistic meaning to them.

We are made to be relational creatures. Healing comes through connection, not the rugged individualism valued by our culture. But it must be with another person who is also doing that work for themselves and able to hold your big emotions in the room with you. Therapy isn’t the only answer. Many of us have people in our lives with whom we can share and connect. I want to be one of those people. Minimizing the effects of our past pains (and we all have them) or pretending they don’t impact us does not make them go away. They stay right in the forefront, which takes me back to the quote I shared from the popular Buddhist teacher, Lama Rod Owens, “If we don’t do our work, we become work for other people.” Those we love pay the cost for what we do not face in our stories. If you are more of a podcast listener, Adam Young is a helpful resource to learn how engaging our stories are so important for growth.

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Article References:

Bowen, A. M., Calder, R., Neale, J., Meynen, T., & Gilchrist, G. (2024). Emotion Regulation in the Association Between Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Substance Use: A Systematic Review With Narrative Synthesis. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. https://doi.org/10.1177/15248380241306362

Kashdan, T. B., & Kane, J. Q. (2011). Post-traumatic distress and the presence of post-traumatic growth and meaning in life: Experiential avoidance as a moderator. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(1), 84–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.08.028

Sequeda, G., Durán-Rondón, S., Acosta-López, J. E., Torres-Santos, E. A., & Rivera-Porras, D. (2026). Experiential Avoidance and Psychoactive Substance Use: Systematic Review. European journal of investigation in health, psychology and education, 16(2), 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe16020022

Last week, Matt and I were preparing for the new season of Ted Lasso by rewatching season three. This is a show that offers much character growth throughout its seasons. And Roy Kent is one of those characters whom we get to see develop much more richly than the stereotypical self he presents as at the beginning of the show. And yet, after all the work he’s put into himself, he brings a question to The Diamond Dogs—a group of men at work who come together to listen to one another’s problems and help with advice. Can people really change? Because he’s just done something really stupid that made him question if he is capable of real change. He says that after all the work he’s put into himself in the last year, he’s still an idiot.

People don’t change. We hear that a lot. Is it true?

I took a Diagnosis and Psychopathology class over the summer, and as we were learning about personality disorders and other conditions, I thought a lot about what the goal is in therapy. The various psychological theories have different approaches. Some are more behavior-focused, while others are focused on meaning-making. Some focus on helping clients to accept what they cannot change while making new commitments in how to live adaptively in their context. Others look at the systems that keep us in old narratives, helping to enact agency in writing new chapters for our lives. The way we tell our stories is more powerful than we think.

All this led me to wonder, is change merely moving from maladaptive states to adaptive ones? This can be a worthy goal in therapy, especially when struggling with mental health issues that aren’t just going to go away. I think it is a good beginning. Because we do need to accept all the parts of our selves.

Maybe change is in digging up the best version of you. Maybe it is in answering that question, Who am I? What do I really care about? I believe it takes change to get to that person. But maybe not the kind of change that we first think of.

There are so many parts of Me. Which ones are true? Which ones do the Narrating Me listen to? How do I talk to them?

There’s the Me that has needs. I hate her. She’s vulnerable and I shut her up every chance I get, telling her I am Fine. I hide her as best I can.

There’s the Desiring Me. And as much as I try to tame her, at 50 she still has a lot she wants to do, is afraid she’s running out of good time, and is starting to get the zoomies.

There’s the Ideal Me. Ugh, she thinks she is so important, but she is totally vanilla. Except she’s also sinister. To fit her picture of the Perfect Me, she stuffs a lot of the other “undesirable” Me-s into a big, black bag that I must carry behind me all the time. She’s The Cleaner. But she can’t get rid of the Undesirable Me-s, so she makes us pretend like they don’t exist. And yet everyone can see what’s in that bag; we aren’t fooling anyone. It’s exhausting to hide these other Me-s and I can’t contain them. They escape out in the worst ways. I project them onto other people and try to zap them “out there.” I find their matches in other people’s black bags all the time. It causes trouble. They summon other’s Greedy Me or Angry Me and strike!

As the popular Buddhist teacher, Lama Rod Owens put it, “If we don’t do our work, we become work for other people.”

What if we were to take the time to do the work and look in the bag? What are those parts of Me communicating about Myself? Maybe Angry Me is telling me there is an injustice that I need to address. Maybe Needy Me has a point. Why do I struggle with vulnerability? Maybe some parts of Me have become maladaptive because I will not look at them.

Elizabeth O’Connor talks about Our Many Selves. I’ve written about it before, but it keeps coming up for me. We tend to identify as one kind of self when we are made up of a cacophony of selves in disarray. We are complex beings. Realizing this is so freeing, because now we can see that a certain negative part of Me isn’t all of Me. A negative thought or feeling or desire isn’t the total of who I am. But how do we distance ourselves from the powerful influence of these negative selves and become more integrated into distinct persons who grow and enjoy communion with ourselves, God, and one another? O’Connor challenges us to clean up our own inner households if we want to have good relationships and community in belonging. Instead of ignoring all these selves, as she calls them, we need to face them with curiosity:

“If I respect the plurality in myself, and no longer see my jealous self as the whole of me, then I have gained the distance I need to observe it, listen to it, and let it acquaint me with a piece of my own lost history…”

What are we really asking with the question, Can people change? Change to what? Some other personality? Can we become better versions of our selves? Selves. Daniel Siegel defines mental health as integration. Perhaps growth starts by looking in the bag and recognizing all the Me-s that we are trying to pretend don’t exist anymore. We can’t will them away. What if change isn’t about getting rid of all the undesirable parts, but rather has to do with changing the relationship that we have with them? What if change is about our Narrating Self—our Wise Self, as some like to call it—taking responsibility to face all our parts, all our story, all our wounds, in love and compassion?

Roy Kent has an Idiot Self. In all the work he was doing, he inadvertently gave it more power by pretending it wasn’t there anymore. But he is changing, because now he sees it and he asked for help.

What do you think—can people change? Have you? What goals do you have for that? What does change look like for you?

And on another note, a big part of change in our own selves is coming to terms with the fact that we cannot change other people. Maybe that is one of our Me-s that needs addressed when we complain that people don’t change.

It is so difficult not to write about all that is happening in politics, religion, and our country. I mentioned in my earlier post that I want to be careful about how I speak about politics and faith, as I don’t want any future clients to feel like they cannot come to me and share their own values due to my ideologies. And yet, there is another side to this. In my first class for Social and Cultural Foundations, we read an article, Why social justice is a counseling concern (Crethar & Ratts, 2008), and were asked to discuss in small groups whether we agreed with the authors that counseling is not a values-free process. We were asked if we agreed with their echoing of the past president of the ACA that counseling is political, and so is all theory.

The authors (Crethar & Ratts, 2008) argue that to take a neutral stance is akin to saying everything is good the way it is. But if we want to be advocates for our clients, as our ethics codes call us to, and therefore also advocates for a healthier society, we must recognize the relationship between social justice and mental health. People do not come for counseling isolated from the contexts they live in. Isn’t ignoring the fact that oppression exists just another form of gaslighting? When does a counselor’s so-called stance for neutrality become a privileged person pathologizing the oppressed? The authors say,

Political neutrality is virtually impossible within the work of counselors. We find it troubling that almost anytime someone speaks out for or with people who are not well served by these Eurocentric and androcentric perspectives; the advocate is immediately labeled as “political” and “divisive.” These labels are seemingly built upon the presumption that things are as they should be in the world. We believe that a stand for the status quo is every bit as political as one that calls for change. It is quite ironic to label only views with which one disagrees as “political” while considering one’s own views to be normative.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since the beginning of last spring semester, and particularly how that challenge transitions into my overlap now as a continuing writer and future counselor. I’ve been for the most part playing it safe trying to avoid any future harm. The world doesn’t need to hear my stance on every issue. But I am not neutral, I don’t think the status quo is how things should be, and I think about what kind of person a client will feel safe with. So at times I do speak out about social justice issues. It seems like something catastrophic to human dignity happens every day lately, coming from positions of power. How often, and when do I share? I don’t see my role as calling all these times out. But something happened this week that again challenged me to think about who we are safe with. It is difficult and alarming to see people whom you typically know to be loving participate in conspiracy theories and so-called jokes that perpetuate racism and misogyny. And instances of seeing that play out this week provoked that feeling of unsafety within myself.

First, I have written many things that I am not proud of, and that is sure to harm future clients if they dig long enough on the internet. I’ve also laughed at and made jokes that were demeaning and disrespectful. I feel shame over that. Maybe that was part of the reason I cried when I saw the deplorable repeated declaration that was made by a UFC fighter on the White House lawn during his victory interview, emphatically adding before he exited, “Michelle Obama is a man! Am I right, America?” And Joe Rogan, who conducted the interview, our President, and everyone else there smile and continue on business as usual. I also cried because this lie that black women are men has been perpetuated since early slavery to justify the backbreaking labor they were forced to do. How devastating is it that we are still here? Think what you want about Michelle Obama’s politics, but her education and status are a threat to many men. As a woman. As a black woman. Studies (also here and here) are revealing that intelligent women are a violation of gender norms to many. And there were also tears because, at a significantly lesser level, I have experienced that unsafety and misogyny. Pastors and elders have shared a meme of me as a trans woman. They have posted on social media dissecting my looks, saying my femininity is withdrawn and that I look butch—for all my kids and friends to see on Twitter.

What does this all mean? What does screaming, “Michelle Obama is a man!” at a UFC event mean?! Does it mean that it is okay to beat her in the face as they do to each other? Does that absurd accusation discredit the work she has done? Her degrees earned? Her motherhood? Her status as the former First Lady?

What does joking with a meme suggesting that I’m trans mean? That I deserve all the same ridicule dished out to the trans community? That the trans community deserves to be treated like trash? That we can all be discounted from being human? That we do not deserve dignity? That our work doesn’t matter?

To call her a man says everything about the people saying it and really nothing about Michelle Obama. It says even more about those in power who enable it and the culture of those sharing the joke and laughing along. That speaks volumes. Michelle Obama isn’t the one who is unsafe or ill-equipped. What does it mean when women and minorities can show the receipts, when there are countless witnesses, and your own family members or church members are in on the “joke?” Who is safe? That’s the question that was rumbling in my body as I watched this violence towards her.

And all the women and all the black men and black women hear the message that comment sends, loud and clear. Things are not right in this world. And personhood seems to be very much a political matter. So does safety.

I’ve been kind of quiet on here. I have a lot I’m working through that is a bit hard to articulate for me at the time. Plus, taking four grad classes spring over semester was a lot!

But I’m also thinking about where I fit into this Substack now. I love to write, and I love this community. Thank you for following along with me. Also, I believe deeply in the work of my last book on developing our truest faces before the face of God and one another.

A difficult part for me lately is just the whole culture of evangelical writing. I do not consider myself in that category anymore. And yet, I’m finding something hard to exist in, even for those writers who are on the edges or fully broken away from evangelicalism. And that is the whole influencer space. There is a lot of self-importance attached to it. It just seems like such a hustle to write. And to write about the latest thing.

I don’t know about you, but my nervous system is jacked up from every latest thing. Of course, I care about all of it—both politically and in the church and how they are connected. But I need to think about what I post now and how that will affect future clients when they look me up. Do you see all the intricacies involved? And I also wonder what you readers care to follow.

I need to think about where I am going. And I am not going in the direction of becoming a so-called Christian therapist. I am in the direction of becoming a therapist who is a Christian, but who will bracket that to help each client live according to their values. And this is important to me. I think our spirituality is important and plan to incorporate that into my practice, but conversion has no part in my future vocation. I believe in a God who is bigger than that. And I have seen way too much with the damages done in “Christian” counseling. That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the good ones out there. Man, I need to keep listening to them. Praise God for them! But that is not where I am directed to practice.

I wrote a post a bit ago about my desire to be a door opener, and then a more granular follow-up on why that is so damn hard. And that will always be on the forefront of my mind and heart. But how that may transfer into my vocation as a counselor in training and as a writer is not dogmatic. I need to trust God to reveal himself when he wants to. And that is a loaded sentence because I have wanted him to reveal himself to me so many times when he knew it was in my best interest to be hidden. I freaking hate that. But I see the work that is done there. I exist there more than I want to admit.

Proving his realness isn’t my vocation. My vocation is looking for and opening doors.

So I want to be transparent with where I am for any supporters and subscribers. This is my direction—I am wanting to reach the disillusioned and also those just transitioning in life. I want to be a door opener. There is another real story than the ones so many of us are telling ourselves. It’s full of wonder, mystery, risk, and imagination. We have one life. What matters? Who matters? What or is there anything after we leave this world? Is it here now? How does that change the way we live? Where is beauty? What is the weight of it? This is where I am moving to those who want to stick around. That, and maybe some reflections I am having as a student of clinical mental health.

Someone else rode on a donkey, challenging Israel to change the direction of their hearts. This is what I think about on Palm Sunday. And I am convinced it was on the heart of Jesus when he was riding on that donkey:

He Can’t Look at Her Face

She escaped once.

We learn this through the voice of a man.

But he came for her “to speak to her heart in order to bring her back” (Judg. 19:3 LSB). What does this speech sound like? We never get to hear it. She never hears it. Or perhaps she did and we aren’t privy to it. We do know this: his private expressions of care mean nothing in contrast to the collective harm heaped on her. We see him and her father working out the exchange, spending time together. We see men meeting with men who think and behave like men and who make the decisions to give, take, stay, leave, or sacrifice.

Sacrifice her, not them.

We struggle to find the face of the unnamed concubine in Judges 19. We never hear her voice. We get one glimpse of her agency. Using her last moments of freedom, her last bit of strength, as the light was breaking into the darkness of her nightmare, she makes her way back to the Levite, her master, and collapses at the threshold of his sacral duties.

What has he done? He acquired. He came for her to reclaim her. And he seized her, throwing her out to the wicked men in the city. There he is in full vigor, set to leave alone after sacrificing her body and soul to be ravaged and raped in his place. In his place. All night long. As long as her body can bear it. Now he is forced to look at her. He didn’t expect to see her as he opened the door to leave alone that morning. What does her face demand? Metaphorically, she serves at the entrance of the tent of meeting. Look into the bronze basin, Levite, made up of the mirror she reflects back to you. Of who you are, whom you love, and what you will do next.

Now he cannot look at her face.

Is she dead or alive? We do not know. Maybe the language gives us a clue. She is lying at the doorway. The threshold. Maybe that’s the threshold of life, of what he will do—love or liquidate. Will he be the reaper of revenge, against all but himself?

There she lies. “Get up,” he says. “Let’s go.”

“But there was no response” (v. 28).

Can it get worse? The Levite will now use his carving skills to sacrifice her again. He throws her on his donkey and takes her home, not to be put to rest but to be sacrificed for war and for pride. “When he entered his house, he picked up a knife, took hold of his concubine, cut her into twelve pieces, limb by limb, and then sent her throughout the territory of Israel” (v. 29). Did he send her face? What did he do with it? No matter. There will be war.

In the words of Phyllis Trible:

Of all the characters in scripture, she is the least. Appearing at the beginning and close of a story that rapes her, she is alone in a world of men. Neither the other characters nor the narrator recognizes her humanity. She is property, object, tool, and literary device. Without a name, speech, or power, she has no friends to aid her in life or mourn her in death. Passing her back and forth among themselves, the men of Israel have obliterated her totally. Captured, betrayed, raped, tortured, murdered, dismembered, and scattered—this woman is the most sinned against. In the end, she is no more than the oxen Saul will later cut (ntḥ) in pieces and send (šlḥ) throughout all the territory of Israel as a call to war (1 Sam. 11:7). Her body has been broken and given to many. Lesser power has no woman than this, that her life is laid down by a man.

How will the Israelites respond?

Trible reveals how we miss the imagery in our English translation when they respond, “Think it over, discuss it, and speak up!” (v. 30). She explains that “strikingly, the first command is actually the Hebrew idiom, ‘direct your heart,’ followed by the phrase, ‘to her.’” Well, this is familiar! “Long ago the man was supposed to speak to the heart of the woman, though he did not. Now Israel must direct its heart to her, take counsel, and speak.”

But that is not the response. If we read through the end of this story in Judges 20, the violence against women continues as “the rape of one has become the rape of six hundred.” The Israelites swore they would not give away their own daughters as wives to the surviving men of Benjamin’s tribe. And they’ve already killed all the women of Benjamin. So they took four hundred virgins from Jabesh-gilead after murdering all the married women there. But that was still not enough. They took two hundred young women who were dancing at the annual festival in Shiloh. “Israelite males have dismembered the corporate body of Israelite females.” Does God approve of this? Are we to condone such violence against women? How can we bear this darkness? Why is it in our Scriptures? I ask you, what do we do with one of the most horrific and evil portions of God’s Word?

We must lament it. We should wail over it.

Scripture takes us through this darkness and vile evil carried out by God’s so-called people. The coldness of the narrative moves us in outrage and gut-heaving sadness. Do we see what these men wouldn’t? Do we feel what these men wouldn’t? Can we look at her face? How does that change us? How does that help us look at the faces before us now? What does it draw out of our own faces?

The canon of Scripture directs us to further direct our own hearts to the woman. The Hebrew Bible follows Judges with the story of Hannah (1 Sam. 1:1–2:21), and the Greek Bible follows it with the story of Ruth. Through the telling of the stories of these women during this same time when the judges ruled, we see a different and redemptive narrative. These women are seen, named, revered, and have agency. They give life. The men direct their hearts to them. And this thread of the story leads to Christ, who directs his heart to his bridal people, takes on flesh, and weeps over death—his body, given for many, for the love that burns for her.

Greater love has no man than this.

The unfolding message in Scripture presses us to see what the woman’s face reveals.

How we treat our women reveals our eschatological anticipation of joy.

**This is an excerpt taken from my book, Saving Face. It is chapter 15. I’ve published part of it before when talking about dismembering the corporate body of women in the church.

The first mirror is the face of another human.

We cannot see our own face. This is a metaphor that points to a deeper seeing. We cannot know ourselves without other human beings. Lots of them too. How strange it is that before the face of the other—in the very otherness of the other—we find our own strangeness in all its glory.

Thinking about this gives more meaning to me about the first person in the creation story. With the creation of each animal, God was teaching Adam about his humanity and how it is not good with just one sole self. Not even in paradise. Adam also learns in the making of woman that beholding the face of another requires sacrifice. A death of sorts. Death to his sole self.[1] Death in the creating from his side. He’s from the dirt and returns to the dirt, put to deep sleep, for the creation of woman who is not from the dirt. “At last,” he says when he first lays eyes on her. Now, before her face, he knows more of who he is. Her face summons his own to move towards her, for her. That’s part of who he is, he is for another. With another. And he can’t know himself in any other way. Not even what he looks like.

And that’s just it, isn’t it? I can look in a mirror and get a sense of what I look like. I can try to peer into my own reflection of my eyes and see if I can penetrate into what my own soul looks like, what kind of person I am, and what kind of character I have. But I can’t get to it. I don’t just want to see myself; I want to see how other people see me. I want to see the me that they draw out. That’s how we learn about ourselves, the eyes of others bear witness to our personhood. Our uniqueness. Our glory. And they summon our truest face. Cole Arthur Riley says it like this:

We need other people to see our own faces—to bear witness to their beauty and truth. God has made it so that I can never truly know myself apart from another person. I cannot trust myself to describe the curve of my nose because I’ve never seen it. I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another’s behalf.[2]

To look at my face, I have to gaze into your face. Into many faces. What I see in the mirror is one dimensional. I can’t get to the side of it or behind it. I can’t see my own back. Or the reality of the curve of my nose. But this is metaphorical to my insides—my character, my soul, my intellect, my sense of humor, even my narrating self.[3]

Richard Rohr contemplates on the faces of others as mirrors, even as we are seeking the divine face. He says that God was given a face in Jesus Christ. And he uses the faces of each other to beckon what the commandments alone can’t: empathy and love. Christianity is more than a moral matter; it is a mystical one. Rohr suggests maybe this is why the public image of Christianity is tainted with so many “mean” Christians. We depend on our commandments for transformation, while bypassing the heart and soul. Commandments speak to our wills, but the mystical, “authentic I-Thou encounter” gives us more of a picture than a measuring stick. To encounter a face delighting in our own speaks to our longings, “giving us the face we can’t give to ourselves.” These encounters are less measurable, but far more impactful to soften our hearts and beckon our souls to love.

“It is ‘the face of the other’ that finally creates us and, I am sorry to say, also destroys us. It is the gaze that does us in! Now surely you see why a positive and loving God-image is absolutely necessary for creating happy and healthy people. Without it, we will continue to create lots of mean Christians who have no way out of their hall of negative mirrors.”[4][kc1]

This is an excerpt from my book, Saving Face. The next part of the book gives an illustration of the hall of negative mirrors that I found myself in:

I’ve been down a hall of negative mirrors. Or more like a maze of them. I’ve found the mean Christians. I’ve been one too. Follow me for a moment, on a little creative journey. A young adult, stepping into this house of mirrors, seeking a path to mature spiritual life, seeking guidance, teaching, and community. It is welcoming. Look in these mirrors to find your face and the halls open for travel. You’re not alone, but among peers. They’ve entered with the same search to study their faces in the mirrors. Looking for others in the reflections. Over there, you see the faces lit up of some of the elders of the place, speaking the things of God. These are mysteries of which you want to learn more. If only you could get to them. If only they could see your face. See your face looking at theirs. Maybe then they would invite you in.

So you stumble about, banging into mirrors that you thought were openings. Everywhere you look, your own reflection seems to mock you. Because the people you encounter who live behind the mirrors won’t give you directions to move forward. And your feet only remember backward. You find yourself stepping in small shuffles, trying to navigate without another embarrassing collision. The mirrors are like invisible fences. You notice the stacks the elders are holding. They seem to be reading from them. The commandments of the house of mirrors. And you mistake them for a map. You abide. You’re with your peers. Your steps become more confident now that you have the map; you find some narrow openings and are allowed to sit at the elder’s feet. But if you open your mouth or show any curiosity, they stuff additional commandments in it. You’re choking and gasping for air. They don’t notice that you can’t breathe.

You look in their faces and see judgement. Contempt. Cruelty. And you realize, you’re not the disillusioned one. Your feet were right; you need to backtrack your steps on out of there. You can barely see the light at the entrance. Can they see it too? Are they looking past those piles of documents? If only you can get them to look at your face, maybe they will see hope. Maybe they will come. And move past the commandments to what they were trying to show us. To see the real goodness of them. Out of the dead ends. To stop looking in the mirrored walls and look at the real faces. He is there! The Beautiful One! But they are pointing and accusing: Wicked! Defector! Now your feet are moving with a determined cadence, out of this hall of negative mirrors.

That’s my story of looking for belonging in the church. My story of looking for Christ’s face and my own too. Rohr described it exactly; it was a hall of negative mirrors. Have you been in a fun house before? Why are they called this? They aren’t fun at all. They are terrifying. But that’s just it, I entered full of wonder and joy, wanting spiritual formation and growth and community. And I was first met with smiles. I didn’t realize how the mirrors were positioned. It took me so long to see that the people inside had separated the commandments and laws from the face of Christ. No, it’s not a fun house at all but, rather, a house of disillusionment. And now I sit with the grieving of what I thought I had. I sit with the trauma of being reviled by those appointed as Christ’s under-shepherds. With the loss of what I thought would be lifetime friends. And this is still my journey: looking for Christ’s face in the faces of others. Finding my own face.

I don’t want to end on a downer note, my book doesn’t. But it also isn’t one, big, happy ending. I think it is necessary to sit in witness to the weight of the harm that the church can do. I basically described anti-church. But aren’t we seeing this all around us still? While I am thankful to know there are still Spirit-filled churches and people out there, I am feeling the weight today of the mean Christians with no way out of their hall of negative mirrors. Perhaps you can write your own creative version.

And remember, your face is a mirror!

[1] See Malcolm Guite, “A Grain of Wheat” from Parable and Paradox: Sonnets on the Sayings of Jesus and other poems (Norwich, Canterbury Press, 2016).

[2] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories that Make Us (NY: Convergent, 2023), 81.

[3] Curt Thompson M.D. refers to the awful narrating self in, Curt Thompson, MD, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2015), 58.

[4] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Franciscan Mysticism: I AM That Which I Am Seeking, disc 3 (Center for Action and Contemplation: 2012), CD, MP3 download.

https://cac.org/daily-meditations/the-face-of-the-other-2019-01-31/

Do you think becoming a therapist will harm your faith?

This was a question I was asked when I decided to apply for a masters program in clinical mental health counseling. My answer was kind of snarky:

Do you mean like how the church has?!

Whomp, there it is. I am approaching the six year anniversary from publishing Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and boy is that title still holding strong. I remember as I was working on that book, a Presbyterian professor friend of mine asked, “Aimee, what would be the worst thing for you to lose once this book releases?” I thought it was an extreme question.

He knew. He knew.

But I couldn’t hear it then. I still had the naivety to believe that what I had to share could produce fruitful conversation in my church, my denomination, and those adjacent. Sure, I knew there would be many to challenge and disagree with my writing, but I also still had the naivety of assumption that church leaders were emotionally mature and could hold that tension.

My church. That was my answer. I thought that would be the worst thing to lose. I also thought, that’s not going to happen.

I didn’t even think to say, my friends. How was that even possible? I didn’t think to answer with the many things I lost (including the knowledge that I never had them). But I had no category for thinking the trauma of it all would rupture through to my view of church, of God, and crackle right into my faith.

And when I finally realized that I was in the middle of some serious spiritual abuse and needed to step back and concentrate on healing, I was naïve enough to think, this might take a whole year!

Almost 6 years and 3 additional books later, I am realizing the weight behind that professor’s question. And the silliness behind the well-meaning Christian’s question about therapy harming my faith.

One of my classes this semester is Social and Cultural Foundations. Our textbook is Counseling the Culturally Diverse. This week, one of the chapters we discussed was on the role of spirituality in counseling, the diverse faiths and spiritualities among our potential clients, indigenous and cultural methods of healing among People of Color, and the limitations of Western treatments. Let me tell you, it is a breath of fresh air to be in a class that nurtures and promotes sensitive conversations such as these. We need to be prepared to help every person who seeks our help. And we need to see the dignity in every person who seeks our help.

And the beautiful thing is, no professor or student there is trying to change or challenge one another’s faith. We respect one another, just like our future clients. We respect that there are different faiths and spiritualities in the room. We hold them to be of extreme value to one another. But we are encouraged to do some serious self-examination regarding how our own convictions are not to be imposed onto a client. Secular therapists are to recognize and value the sacredness of spirituality and its relationship with the psyche without indoctrinating. We are to recognize the harm that we can do. We are to know our lane, but still educate ourselves, collaborate or refer out where needed, and give our clients a trusted space to be able to integrate their faith and traditional healing practices with their mental health and wellness.

Here is my question. If that is threatening to one’s faith—if our faith can be harmed by the respecting of others’ spirituality—how secure is it, really?

The thing is, I have had to ask the question whether God is who I thought he was. I had to ask what story I tell myself about who God is and what he wants from me. Because my church leaders, my coworkers in the parachurch, and my friends treated me without love. Without beauty. Without dignity.

I understand that part of the church’s job is to indoctrinate. And there are many conversations and establishments on that. But in too many cases, church leaders are not recognizing the harm they can do. And they do not know their lane. They won’t question their own rigidity. And they don’t trust God to help them to love the people they serve. Maybe they are afraid of what that love requires of them.

And that silly question reveals such a fear behind it. A fear that God’s love won’t follow me. A fear that my unity in Christ is not real. That my faith is too weak to look at all the cracks. Too weak to see the beauty in all the other broken people who aren’t in the Christian faith. And too weak to name the ugliness of the broken people who are.

I’m not afraid to ask God if he is there. I think he likes the question. Sometimes I can’t find his face. A lot of times. All I know is that he’s worth the wait. And my cracked faith has taught me a lot.

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How do we talk about goodness? This is something I need to think about more because I am also way off the mark. So often talking about goodness turns into pious snobbery and shaming of some sort. And I have to say, we Christians are master artists of this.

But it isn’t only Christians. I want to share from Angela Flournoy’s novel, The Wilderness, because she reveals it so well. In one section, the character Nakia (a restaurant proprietor and chef) is struggling with the performative righteousness that she sees in her friend’s newfound career as an influencer. Her friend tries to assuage her by saying they are all interested in doing the right thing, and that’s what matters.

But Nakia wonders what doing the right thing even means. She thinks of another friend who faithfully feeds the unhoused every week and how she is probably the best person she knew. And she notes that this friend doesn’t ever talk about goodness, “or the concept of goodness at all; she simply was.”

Nakia then remembers a group of poet friends she hung with in college, and how they had to insert their code of morality into every conversation. She thought, “they fixated on ‘joy-seeking’ in a way that made it performative, a ‘praxis.’ Sapped the fun right out of it. They were so loudly intentional about everything that they struck Nakia as robotic.” And she wondered if she was any different. For her, she felt “the difference came down to style…Even as a young adult she was wary of people who seemed not to be able to think about the world, messy as it is, outside of their own integrity and ‘purpose.’” Goodness becomes “a brand…a way to differentiate themselves.”

It goes something like this: My actions are sanctioned and blessed, because I am good. And that’s the heart of shaming, isn’t it? It’s not, you did a bad thing. It’s you are a bad person. And when a good person says or does something heinous, it’s completely forgivable, because that is not who they are. (I can’t help but think of the reactions to a recent celebrity evangelical author finally fessing up to an 8-year-long affair with another married woman.) And who decides who’s good and who’s bad? Much of it is performative. And sexist. And racist. And privileged. But here I go on my own high horse of goodness…

I resonated with Nakia’s contemplation on performative goodness. And we can substitute her poet friends inserting joy into every conversation with the way we Jesus juke. I felt the struggle of it all many times. And I have to say, it is one reason why I am transitioning from writing books and speaking in the evangelical culture to becoming a mental health counselor. That might sound funny, because one can certainly become attached to the identity of helper in the medical health profession, and that can become another type of performative goodness. But one of the key ethical components of counseling is that you bracket your own values to help the client recognize their values and to live accordingly. You meet other versions of goodness, and your clients are humanized. You don’t have to agree. But you do see outside of your own self.

I’ve so often struggled with the hustle that a writer needs to gain a readership. And the evangelical hustle may be the worst with the goodness we attach to it. Some fair well, offering hope and balance. But for me, well, it’s been wearing down my soul.

When I first encountered the extreme public shaming and harassment from pastors, academics, and elders in my former denomination (and adjacents), it was shocking. Here was extreme public shaming of the worst kind, going after my character and morality. I am godless. I am the great whore of Babylon. Even more shocking was how acceptable it was. Learning that over two years of trying to address it was truly disillusioning.

But I also had to look at myself as I looked around the whole culture of evangelicalism. Shaming is everywhere, in different forms. I go online and it’s most of what I see. And it is so easy to do right now, because there is so much corruption that really does need to be named. But how do we differentiate and communicate goodness?

I haven’t posted much about political issues or even a lot of faith issues. And believe me, I’ve wanted to. But I am entering a profession in a couple years in which it will harm my accessibility for those seeking help to open up to me if they see my take of everything online. I need to think about that more now. But that is not all, I have close friends and family who see things very differently than I do. It is incredibly hard for me, as I feel strongly where I stand and feel so misunderstood. And yet, I know they are not bad people. It’s so much easier to think in terms of good and bad people, but it isn’t that easy. It isn’t even that true.

A big differentiation taught in counseling is that all of us do or think in ways that are incongruent with who we are. You may have done something that you are ashamed of, but that is not all of who you are. That was just a thinking or acting part. It may reveal something that needs named, processed, and worked through. Integration is the goal for mental health. And spiritual health, really. And that requires being honest with ourselves first. We have this image of goodness that we want to be or attain, so much so, we can ignore any conflicting messages from our own psyche and behaviors. And others can then see our incongruency with more clarity than we can. But if we become curious about it, we can disarm it of its power over us.

Maybe that is why Scripture is so brutally honest about God’s people in all their complexity. We don’t see put together lives. Any performative goodness we see is a red flag. But we see many transformative encounters with Goodness.

Anyway, that section of The Wilderness described my own wilderness to me: I resonated with Nakia because I too am so put off by all the performative goodness. And yet, I wrestle with it in my own soul. And I refuse to tidy this piece up with something that can’t really be answered in 1,000 words.

**Before hitting “publish” on this post, I read these words by David Lovelace from his memoir Scattershot: My Bipolar Family:

We get this chance once a year. A chance to reflect on where we are and where we are going. A chance to reflect on who we are and who we are becoming.

2025 has been a year! For me, 2026 is a building year. I’m kicking it off taking 4 classes in my clinical mental health counseling program while working a day or two a week as a mixologist. I also get to start the year preaching a sermon while our pastor begins her family leave. One thing I love about our church and our pastor is how they empower all the people there, trusting the Holy Spirit works through more than the ordained. Perhaps this is a key part of ordination: appointees for looking for the Spirit working and helping us to join in. But, I’m going down a rabbit hole here.

Something I’ve been working on is identifying what I need to put down and leave behind. Sometimes you don’t realize what you’ve been carrying for so long and how it is weighing you down—or how old coping mechanisms don’t serve you anymore. And I’ve noticed that they can be hard to let go of. I still get something out of them, like a comfort blanket that is getting dingy. So, I want to also acknowledge that I am not just going to go cold turkey; this leaving behind is a process. It sounds good to write down, but it is harder to actually do.

I was just reading in Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning about all the potentialities in our lives that we may never actualize. Perhaps we like them better as “maybe one days.” Possibilities feel good. But they can be scary to pursue. Freedom has another side to it: commitment and response-ibility. To actualize is to commit to a path, to go for it, with all it’s consequences. It is to choose which potentialities to bring to life, or to stay behind while the maybe one days slowly all become could have beens. As Frankl put it,

“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

That’s what I love about the New Year. It’s an existential invitation. As I am actualizing some potentialities, there are others that snuck in that I want to de-actualize. So here are a few of my not favorite things that I want to work to leave behind in 2026.

Leaving behind should.

A friend once told me that should is an asshole, and that was very clarifying for me. I live with a lot of shoulds. But I want to leave them behind. Who wants to keep companions with assholes? I also put shoulds on others, especially my family. I keep catching myself. There’s a lot of work to do here, but I’m working on my asshole detector.

Leaving behind rigid parts.

This is related to should. I’d like to identify old roles that aren’t really helping anyone anymore. For example, as a first-born daughter I’ve taken on an unconscious role as the fixer. And guess what? Fixers can be super-annoying growth inhibitors. My fixer part maybe can back off a little, let people feel uncomfortable. Let them struggle. There are better ways to be helpful. Maybe my fixer part can take on a new role of sitting with, or asking good questions, or empowering others.

Leaving behind I can do it myself.

I don’t think I’m ready for this yet. But I am recognizing it. I want to keep it all together. Myself. I have the hardest time asking for help. I love my “I can do it myself” part. I’m sure she’s protecting something very vulnerable. But that part lives on an island. She has crazy expectations. And she is holding onto a falsehood.

Here’s what I want to bring with me into 2026:

Encounter

The existentialists call it the “I/Thou” moment. It’s a presence moment, whether an encounter with beauty, God, or a face. It’s a connection. How many real encounters have I had this year, when I’ve paused in gratitude and received? How many times have I dropped my own mask and spoke soul-to-soul with someone? How many times have I really seen the amazing, wonderous world and people around me? This is the juice of life and I want more of it.

Helping my kids know their value

Sometimes I feel like I am all about this and then others I feel like I’ve really lost the plot. What treasures I have! I want them to know it all the time! They are all young adults now and I am amazed by them. Words are important. But so is my face lighting up when they enter a room. I want my kids to feel like it is always good to see them. I can give them that—our body language says so much. So does listening. And just showing up for them when they need me.

Friendship

This is true wealth—good friends. I’ve been through some humdinger betrayals in the last five years, but I have an abundance of richness in the friends that remained and actualized (my new word for 2026, if you haven’t noticed). Of course I want to be a good friend, whatever that is. I think it is mainly about showing your face and showing up. It’s about being curious and being silly. It’s why Stranger Things is such a success (besides the fact that the 80’s makes us all happy): It displays the friendship we all long for. Friends don’t lie. But we do. Friends don’t break promises. But we do. Friends look out for each other. But we fail. And yet, friends do the work of repair. That’s where we grow. That’s what makes a good friend.

One more: Answering life/response-ibility

Back to Victor Frankl. We can spend our time asking what the meaning of life is, feeling safe in the vagueness of it all, or we can begin responding to what life is asking of us specifically. We all have specific vocations we are called to answer. Frankl asserts that each one of us is being asked a question by life to which only we ourselves can answer. He says that “[we] can only answer to life by answering for [our] own life; to life [we] can only respond by being responsible.” And, as Angelica from The Rugs Rats said, “I’ve got sponserbilleries!”

I’ve been learning about legacy burdens and how they are handed down. Misogyny is a huge legacy burden that is handed down in our families, communities, and even our churches (don’t I know it!). And sadly, women are often hander-downers! One thing I like about Dorothy Greco’s latest book, For the Love of Women, is that it not only examines the facets and effects of misogyny, but points us in a direction for the love of all people. Here is a short excerpt from Dorothy’s book that she is sharing with my readers this week.

Healing from a systemic and ongoing injustice like misogyny can be such an incremental and slow journey, that it’s sometimes difficult to discern if we’re making any progress. We can gain encouragement and comfort along the way if we know how to identify certain signposts. These include reconciliation, growing in empathy, and feeling a sense of agency.

Scripture tells us Jesus came to reconcile all things and that anyone who follows him is called to be a reconciler, to the extent that they are able. Reconciliation is needed wherever we’re estranged from others, from God and his creation, or from ourselves. Misogyny not only estranges men from women (external estrangement) but leaves men and women estranged from themselves and their bodies (internal estrangement). Both were true for my friend Natalie. Over the course of the last twenty years, she has pursued healing from self-hatred that flowed downstream from familial misogyny.

Natalie admits to being cut off from her body as she was going into marriage. She explains, “I felt neutered for the first forty years of my life.” She even told her fiancé, “I will never have children, and you cannot make me.” Eight years into marriage, she was the mother of three but struggled to bond with them. Then she attended a healing conference where the speaker gave two talks that spoke to her wound: the first was on having a sense of well-being and the second was on misogyny.

Natalie stood in an arena full of people but had a very intimate experience with Jesus that felt dialogical. She sensed him ask her, “Natalie, what came out of my side when I was hanging on the cross and they pierced me with a sword?” And I said, “Water and blood.” And then he asked, “What comes out of a woman’s womb when she’s given birth?” And I responded, “Water and blood.” He responded, “Natalie, do you see the correlation? Life pours out of a woman’s suffering as she gives birth. Life poured out of me in my death. I am speaking life over you. There’s no need to hate how I created you.”

In that moment, Natalie said, “I understood for the first time why I felt the way that I did about not wanting to have children. It was related to my own mother and how she was unable to connect and bond with me.” As Natalie was growing up, her mom was cold and distant with her. Natalie continued, “During the conference, the Holy Spirit basically said, ‘She could not give you what she lacked. And you can’t give to another generation what you don’t have.’ It seemed clear that God wanted to connect me to myself.” Part of that reconciliation was emotional and spiritual, and part of it was physical. Natalie realized she’d been unable to embrace her womanhood, and specifically her womb, because of the misogyny her mother had passed on to her. “This experience began the context for healing my self-hatred. It was very powerful.”

To grow in empathy, we must first accept ourselves—and each other—as complex, complicated people with strengths and weaknesses. If we refuse to self-reflect and accept our own limitations, it becomes far too easy to judge or blame others when they are suffering. Men who hope to become kind and safe will need to stop ignoring and dismissing misogyny and stop reacting defensively to women’s pain. A man who refuses to empathize with women who have been harmed by misogyny has more healing work to do.

As we walk out our healing, we begin to move away from victimhood into a greater sense of agency and empowerment. This will help us gain insight about when it may be time to leave spaces or relationships that routinely harm us. Knowing when to quit or move on can be complicated. American culture favors empirical knowledge (facts and data) and devalues the more intuitive ways of knowing. Because of this bias, we are discouraged from trusting our instincts. Women also carry the responsibility to fix broken relational dynamics, even if we lack the authority to do so. And as discussed in the workplace chapter, speaking up about misogyny might have harsh consequences. All these factors may incline us to keep quiet and stay put.

Author and acquisitions editor Katelyn Beaty knows this territory. After serving as the youngest and first female managing editor at a top Christian publication for five years, she chose to leave, partially because of toxic workplace dynamics. In a conversation with me, Beaty noted that “knowing when to leave is both an intuitive and embodied decision for each person” and added that “learning to distinguish the myriads of voices that are pulling us in different directions is crucial.” Beaty took time to be still and listen to the Holy Spirit. She sensed God saying, “You don’t have to stay to be a good Christian. You don’t have to stay just because you believe in the mission when it’s negatively affecting you.” Beaty also met with a life coach who knew her and had some understanding of what she was going through.

The combination of discerning God’s voice, receiving good counsel, and paying attention to shifting circumstances ultimately allowed her to walk away from what was initially a dream job. Beaty encourages women to “pay attention to how much you are sacrificing for the sake of the mission, especially if the feedback you’re receiving is that you’re not doing enough. No woman should sacrifice her mental and spiritual well-being trying to win a game that’s rigged against them from the outset.” (Leaving is infinitely more complicated if the disabuse is connected to one’s livelihood or one’s marriage.)

In certain seasons, the healing journey can feel so slow or even Sisyphean that it may seem like it’s not worth the effort. We may feel like the finish line keeps moving or that we’re going backward. If we come to understand that the pursuit of healing is a normal, ongoing part of life, it should help us to be patient and stay the course. The freedom and wholeness we’re moving toward will allow us to walk in greater integrity and authority, which we need if we hope to diminish misogyny in our families, communities, and churches.

Dorothy Littell Greco is the author of three books. You can find more of her work on her website or over at Substack.

Taken from For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America, by Dorothy Littell Greco. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.harpercollinschristian.com

In less than two weeks, I turn THE BIG 5-0. When I turned 49, I boldly stated that 49 was my power year. I had a lot of life-pivots that I wanted to make, setting me in a purposeful direction for my 50’s and beyond. Leave it to me to embrace midlife transition with existential gusto. Leave it to me to overestimate how long I will live and think 49 is the year for birthing the second adulthood version of myself. (But in all fairness, 40 is basically the new 30, and launching kids and perimenopausal symptoms are good middle adulthood triggers.) Leave it to me to think I know about power.

To sum up all that was to happen while 49:

· Start seeing a therapist

· Put house on the market, sell, and buy a new Byrdcage.

· 2 daughters moving out of the house

· Launch book #8

· Instead of writing another book, apply to grad school for clinical mental health counseling program

· Meanwhile, take a few classes to get my foot in the door and see if it is for me

· Daughter getting married

· Keep wearing fun pants

· Think about going for bucket list part-time bartending job

No big, right? Just a few, major life upheavals. I was going to be brave, as I saw that the power was in me to decide how I want to live in these life transitions. I concluded my post about my upcoming power-year saying:

Who knows if I will be accepted into this limited program at my hometown college, but the power year is about taking risks. It’s about a lived life. And that is what is pointing me in this direction. Real power is not about “getting in” or arriving and it’s not measured against others. Real power is recognizing your present agency and how it is life-giving, soul-caring, creative, door-opening. Our faces are mirrors for others to find their own. This is how God made us, as we long for that ultimate blessing to have his face shine upon us. If I don’t get into this program, well, then I keep looking for doors. That’s where I’m at. That and fun pants.

I’m left with about a week and a half to squeeze out of my 40’s, and some new lessons about power. Things didn’t all go as planned, of course. Selling the house was a huge stress and putting together a wedding with all the things around that at the same time was a lot. We found a house that we fell in love with, but the seller was difficult. We ended up renting for 5 weeks in between selling and buying—during which time was our daughter’s wedding.

But get a load of this: we rented our realtor’s basement apartment. Sounds crazy, right?! We were surprised to discover it was such a beautiful respite spot (the exact kind of parking space I was asking God for and not really knowing what I was asking for). We could have never imagined it, or this place we get to call home now with front and back mountain views. But when we sold our house and moved into the rental, we still didn’t know if we would get the house with the difficult seller. It was a big risk to keep going for it.

And let’s talk about moving. In the last year, we moved one daughter out and into her own place, then the next, then our now son-in-law out of his college apartment, our son into his college apartment, and ourselves out of our house of ten years, into a rental, out of a rental, and into the new hopefully forever house!

Also, I took two graduate classes last spring as a non-degree seeking student while I applied to the counseling program. Most of the students are around the ages of my own kids. I’m even older than the professors. It was scary! But I fell in love with the program and found myself thriving in class. That made it even more of a blow when I didn’t get accepted into the program for the fall. It was humbling, devastating, and confusing. Was I disillusioned in my own self-evaluation? Was this foolish? What do I do now and was this all a big waste of time and money? Should I have worked on another book instead? What did I have to show for myself? And how can this be my power year if I just don’t have the agency to do what I want?

Another brave thing I did last year was enter therapy. I went for two reasons: trauma work and help through these big life transitions. I underestimated how much trauma work I still had to do. I thought I was moving along, but the body keeps the score. A couple months before my last birthday, I began experiencing chronic back pain, and I knew it was more than my scoliosis. Every scary step this year has been through constant pain that screamed at me to just stop doing any of it.

So I began asking people: my husband, my therapist, my professor, my friends…should I take my loss and move on? I want to become a therapist; I felt like that was what my soul was saying to me. But I don’t have to be a therapist to be happy. This is hard anyway. I can try to be a normal person. Can someone show me the door for normal? My therapist and professor seemed angrier than me that I didn’t get in the program. I didn’t let myself think about getting angry. And I learned that there were only 15 spots available for an overwhelming number of qualified applicants. So, with their encouragement I took another humbling risk: I signed up for one more class that I am taking this fall semester and applied again for spring 2025. The applicant/acceptance ratio was just as bad. A few weeks ago I received my acceptance letter—I’m in!! It’s real!!!

I also finagled my way into a part time position as a mixologist at my favorite distillery bar. It has a speakeasy feel to it, is Maryland’s first certified organic distillery, we make all our own syrups, we serve amazing, “elevated” cocktails, it’s located in a great spot downtown, and it’s just plain cool. But again, Miss 49-Year-Old here is the old lady of the joint. My manager is 28. She’s a total badass, though. Memorizing all the recipes, what glasses they go into, what is strained or double strained, which bitters go with what drink, how to work the Toast ordering system, and learning the art of shaking drinks (I can totally do two at a time now...) made me feel my age. But now that I am getting the groove, it is so much fun. I love the busyness; I love the peopling; the vibe; and it feels great to not be in charge. It’s a good gig during school, but I really respect my coworkers who are doing this for real, and I am learning a lot besides bartending. I can’t imagine not doing it now (especially with the discount on bottles I’m getting!).

Meanwhile, the wedding was amazing, we love our new son-in-law, and now my other daughter is engaged, and we are planning another!! But newly married daughter “surprised” us with her new puppy and I’ve been suckered into helping out with him. As I type, Kofe is going at it with my dog, Moose…

The new trouble-maker

All this reflection and sharing is to say that I’ve learned more about power. First of all, do not tell anyone that this year is your power year! It’s like praying for patience. While what I wrote earlier about power is all true—and it has certainly been a life-giving, soul-caring, creative, door-closing and opening year—I’ve learned a little more about the faith that must accompany power, which means that there is a cross to bear.

A little over a month ago, my pastor was preaching on faith the size of a mustard seed and I realized that is about all I had this year, but boy did that take me on a ride! Faith is scary! We Christians talk about faith either as a sentimentality or puffed and dressed up as piousness. No, faith is what is there when you are stripped down—of your pretenses, persona, pride, and even agency. But that little dang mustard seed left helps you meet God.

That tiny mustard seed is the parking space. And the launching pad.

Because sometimes you don’t think anyone cares that you’ve been fishing all night with nothing to show for it, and then a stranger tells you to cast your net on the other side of the boat. Sometimes you’re leaving town in your disillusionment, and the one person who seems like they’ve been sleeping under a rock speaks things that make your heart burst within you. Sometimes you are incapacitated, and you just give up, but your buddies open the roof to get you to Jesus. Sometimes you are minding your own business drawing water from a well in the middle of the day and run into someone who sees your face.

The stripping down has to happen first for you to see it. There can be many distractions camouflaging a powerful mustard seed. But often we want those distractions because sentimentality and piousness cost less. Depending on how you look at it.

This is the question, isn’t it? This is what we all want—The Good Life. But do we even know what it is? How would you define The Good Life?

I’ve got an interesting combination of reading going on right now. I am reading Carl Rogers’ On Becoming a Person, as well as the latest biography of Bruce Lee: Water, Mirror, Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, by Jeff Chang. I’m also listening to a novel that I’m not ready to talk about yet, as I don’t even know if I want to finish it. Interestingly, there is some overlap in all three. It is this question about what The Good Life is all about. Lee was on a quest for what he thinks that was. He is existential in his quest for a philosophy of the life of the martial artist—what is the meaning of it all? His ego often gets in the way, even as he is constantly working to ascend in wisdom and practice. He copiously takes notes of his reading, thoughts, ideas, and techniques. Here are some quotations from some other writers that he recorded:

Fame is climbing a greasy pole for $10 and ruining trousers worth $15.

The essential thing is not to find, but to absorb what we find.

Some of us might find happiness if we would quit struggling so desperately for it.

It is always the secure who are humble.

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

Nothing is so aggravating as calmness.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

Maybe those are some tips that move us closer to The Good Life. Rogers has a chapter in his book titled, “The Therapist’s View of The Good Life.” Now, there’s a question we don’t think to ask our therapist! Their answer to that question will tell us a lot about the work we will be doing there. And I think Rogers is onto something. He contends that the good life is not a fixed state, but a process. It’s not about whether we are happy, reach some virtuous plateau, or even if we are content. No, that’s not it, because the good life is not a state of being. He defines the good life as a direction, not a destination. It is a direction in which one has the psychological freedom to move. Agency—that is a major proponent of the good life. Of course, there is the obvious obstacle of oppression from the outside. But how often it is that we are our own inhibitors? Rogers goes on to reveal characteristics that he observes in those who are living the good life.

Openness to experience. Good lifers are not defensive, not closed off to the feelings going on within themselves in all their subjectiveness.

Increasingly existential living. Living fully in each moment. Presence, fluidity, participating in the moment instead of trying to control it or impose one’s own structure to it—the absence of rigidity.

An Increasing Trust in One’s Organism. That’s a clunky way of saying that good lifers trust themselves to respond well to any given situation. Why? Because they have experienced their full range of emotions. They are not afraid of all their parts, and therefore are able to integrate them properly. They know how to listen to themselves well, and so become wise guides for themselves.

And so Rogers summarizes this process of functioning more fully. The more psychologically free the person, the greater their direction in “becoming a more fully functioning person.” This person has greater access to the full range of their nervous system, can sift through feelings and the evidences it reveals, is “completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself, and thus discovers that he is soundly and realistically social.” This self-awareness leads to engagement, creativity, and trustworthiness.

Bruce Lee says something so similar:

“If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.”

He insists over and over again that self knowledge is the most important knowledge for the martial artist. He says, “martial art means honestly expressing yourself,” and that not lying to yourself is very hard to do.

It’s got me thinking more about how many in the church indoctrinate us not to trust ourselves. After all, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jer. 17:9). We take that one verse and clobber everyone with it. There is no psychological freedom, no looking at oneself as gift. No trying to understand it. Instead of curiosity over our fears, anger, resentment, jealousy, and the many other parts of our selves that we don’t want to face and own, we learn to stuff them down, down, down. Deny them. Shame others for having them. We learn rigidity. We do not learn compassion. We do not learn self-management. We are not like water; we are like concrete. Concrete with spray-painted smiley faces telling other people about The Good Life. Egads.

Are we afraid that we will be without values if we begin to look within? Are we afraid that God is not in our very souls? What if we were in tune to that truth as well when we study his word? How does the Spirit work? It’s funny that to many in the church this would sound mystical, but those same people believe that God gives us himself in his word and in consecrated bread and wine. Christians are mystics!

Anyway, what do you think—how objective is the good life? Do we arrive? Is it a state of being? Is it that one block of your life lived when things were going most your way? Is it earning the degree, the house, the family, kids, and dog? A good retirement? Is it in the number of people we bring into the faith? All the notches on our spiritual belts that we have at the end of a life lived?

Or is it in having the faith—even if the size of a mustard seed—and living the faith, in all its trepidation?

I proposed the question at a dinner this weekend with some friends. We had just hiked about four miles together, capturing all the peak autumn beauty, and we were eating takeout at one of their houses. One friend said, “I’m pretty sure we are experiencing it right now!” And he was right. All of us mid-lifers, transitioning life stages in all our own autumnal glory, pretentiousness falling with the leaves, living in the raw moment with one another, fully present and enjoying one another’s company.

Withness.

I think that’s the socialization Rogers was talking about—first we must practice withness with our own selves, and then we are able to for and with one another. And then you come to know—you are gift. God’s companionship is gift. It mirrors and it echoes off our faces if we will just be still and look.

I have a really cool update from what I shared in my last post about The Good Me, who was really a crappy friend. Before sending that chapter to the publisher, I had my friend read it. I wanted to make sure I honored her well and that she was okay with its publication. We’ve been reconnecting as best as a long-distance friendship can over the last couple of years. And it just so happened to turn out that her son is now living in D.C., and—as we know they can do—things got weird at the church he and his fiancé were attending. This put them in need of an officiant for their wedding.

(And dear reader, let me interrupt this update to inform you that I was with my friend in the labor and delivery room with her when she went to battle to have this child.)

I haven’t been around him much, as they moved and he grew up in Florida. They asked me if I would be interested in officiating the wedding! It was an intimate ceremony held at the National Mall inside the D.C. War Memorial last weekend. What an honor!

The groom and his bride collaborated with me to pick the verse for the wedding homily. They chose 1 John 4:12:

What a powerful verse! It is a weighty verse, one that seems to contradict itself. No one has ever seen God. Is that a declaration, or a question? And so I asked the friends and family attending, along with the bride and groom—Have you seen God?

Because the verse goes on to tell us how to look for him—no—it tells us something much more surprising! Not only does it tell us about coming into the presence of God, it speaks to how we participate with God. How to be with God. In an intimate way in which he abides in us. It tells us Love’s full expression is a participation in the divine!

Isn’t this our great need and longing? Rather than casting my gaze at your status, ideologies, your values, or if I even like you, what if I recognized your face as an authority to awaken me to love?* As a summons to join God in that? What if I believed John’s promise—his surprise—that in doing this, I am participating in bringing God’s love to full expression in myself? What if I believed that in doing that, you would indeed see God, and maybe participate too? And maybe show him to me?

Just two verses earlier, John tells us that “This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” This is real love: his givenness to us to be in union with us. And us together in union with him. We are love’s crown—the beloved.

Do you see it? Love has a direction of givenness. Our faces are to awaken one another to this. There’s a power there—not my own love, not because I love you, or even because I love God, but that he loves me. And you. And so, v. 11 beckons us, “Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other.”

This is all very exciting, but I needed to tie this into marriage. And never do we get more love practice than in marital union, which is a picture of the union of Christ and his people. Along with this verse, the engaged couple also shared this poem with me, called Love’s Apotheosis, by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

Love me. I care not what the circling years

To me may do.

If, but in spite of time and tears,

You prove but true.

Love me—albeit grief shall dim mine eyes,

And tears bedew,

I shall not e’en complain, for then my skies

Shall still be blue.

Love me, and though the winter snow shall pile,

And leave me chill,

Thy passion’s warmth shall make for me, meanwhile,

A sun–kissed hill.

And when the days have lengthened into years,

And I grow old,

Oh, spite of pains and griefs and cares and fears,

Grow thou not cold.

Then hand and hand we shall pass up the hill,

I say not down;

That twain go up, of love, who ‘ve loved their fill,—

To gain love’s crown.

Love me, and let my life take up thine own,

As sun the dew.

Come, sit, my queen, for in my heart a throne

Awaits for you!

(If only you could have seen the emotion in the groom’s face while I read this!)

We could also call Love’s Apotheosis, Love’s Glorification, Love’s Divinity, Love’s Power, or Love’s Triumph.

I probably connected with this poem in a different way this young couple did, being further along in this whole growing older part. I shared with the gathering that I turn 50 next month and I’ve learned a few things. I was trying to ascend closer to God. I thought by the time I turned 50, I’d be in pretty good shape knowing about love and being loving. I thought I’d be living a good picture of what a close relationship with God is about. Maybe I could even give these newlyweds some secrets about marriage. After all, I’m going on 29 years of it.

So much of what I thought that matters doesn’t matter. But I long to see God. I long to be with God. And, I long to be loved. Love me, the poet says. Please, prove but true. This is our plea in marriage. Why is this longing so strong? Even after 29 years?

Love me, and over the years, then, we will not decline. We will see God. And so, we ascend. How is Love’s Apotheosis any less than divine, eternal union? Because no matter how close you get to one another in marriage, it’s not close enough. And then I told them that here’s the crazy part: despite this longing, you often will run from even being seen by one another. We hide our faces from one another! We long for love and don’t think we can bear it. My advice was to be brave and show one another your face—your real face— each day. Hear the call from each other’s face: love me. I shared that’s what they both need—to be awakened. Not by your own love, but in being loved.

Then, you “shall pass up the hill.” You will see God, even. Together, you will “gain love’s crown.”

But, if y’all know me at all you know that I had to work the Song of Songs into this. So I briefly shared that this book in the center of our Bibles is an allegory of Christ’s love for his people and the individual soul of every believer. And in chapter 3, we have the wedding scene. Verse 11 bids us to gaze at Christ on the day of his wedding, the day of his heart’s rejoicing, when his crown is bestowed on him by mother Zion. Here is the end of our longing. That is us! We are his crown. That is love’s full expression, and we shall see God.

But love’s power is strong, stronger than death, the Song shares with us. And so we get glimpses of him now. We get to participate with him every time we love. And we feel the ache of that line from the poem as our own longing groans, “Love me.” That is what our faces reveal and the authority they have to awaken one another.

Marriage is a picture of our longing and hope. Of a vulnerable and powerful union. Of that ascent of love, even as we age and decline. Even as our facades fall apart, and we realize we didn’t know much of what we were doing after all. Love is a withness and participation through it all.

We had that picture before us right there in the faces of these glorious newlyweds last weekend. That was the third wedding that I have been asked to officiate and had the honor of accepting. My favorite way to end the ceremony is to join with God in sending them off with the marriage blessing from the Father to his Son and Bride in Song of Songs 5:1: “Eat, friends, drink, and be drunk with love!”

*The “naked face” having the authority to awaken us to love is a major theme of Emmanuel Levinas in his book, Is It Righteous to Be?

Our birthdays are only four days apart. I am the elder, but she is the wiser, the much more adventurous and creative. Jess has been my friend as far back as memories go.

Same age, same church, same elementary, middle, and high schools. We spent long hours investigating the cornfield behind her backyard, making up stories with the treasures we found; making “slime” from all the soap, shampoo, and beauty products in her house, pouring it on her bushes to see what happened; devising disgusting pranks that no one fell for, such as making soap ice cubes out of our shared bath water. We grew up together sharing gossip, teenage dreams, and even experiencing our parents’ divorces around the same time. Jess first, as she always was. We knew one another front, back, and inside out. So I thought.

Turns out I really didn’t know myself. Those middle school years are brutal to one’s sense of self. I was a bit timid, loved fashion, and was a late bloomer. With all the anxieties that stirred up, it felt pretty good when the more assertive new girl, who also loved fashion and was tiny like me, wanted to be besties. Over-the-top besties. She was a plotter, planning who we would talk to, what we were going to wear, when we were going to match outfits, which boys were important, who we would like, and who we wouldn’t like. I went along with it.

Fully developed Jess was posing a problem to our relationship. Not really, but according to my new bestie, Jess had a list of troubling attributes that were cramping our style. And according to my new bestie, I needed to write Jess a letter telling her all the reasons I cannot be her friend anymore.

And I did it.

I don’t understand those people who say they have no regrets in life. Why did I wear that ridiculous rainbow- explosion of a shirt on picture day, what was I thinking dating that guy, and that guy, and that guy, why didn’t I listen and engage better in my history classes, why didn’t I play a real sport instead of excel in cheerleading, why didn’t I pay more interest and time in friendships with those who weren’t as popular? And I haven’t even gotten to the college years and beyond. So many regrets. But this one with Jess haunts me. How could I do this to my friend? I let a new bestie dictate the words as I wrote them down. We probably folded the letter into its own pretty envelope, as we did then, to obscure the cruelty inside it. We probably slipped it into her locker or some other cowardly delivery instead of a face-to-face handoff.

The pain I must have caused her haunts me still.

I don’t know how long she let it sit. The heaviness on her, the arrogance of me. But my next memory, besides the continuous pit in my stomach, is Jess looking me in the eyes and saying, “This isn’t you.” She knew me. She gave me grace. She restored us. And she gave me freedom.

FOOL ME TWICE . . .

Fast-forward through many more glorious Jess memories to me being her maid of honor in her wedding. Had she not given me that grace in middle school, we would have missed out on so much. My redheaded, adventurous friend moved to the other side of the country when we turned eighteen. We never did live close by after that. And she moved around more in her new, married life. But for the next ten years, we kept in touch through letters and long-distance phone calls, gradually getting cell phones that still weren’t equipped with the social media we have today. But I didn’t know that Jess’s marriage was falling apart until it was almost over. I heard some things that I did not verify with Jess—maintaining The Good Me face—and I couldn’t believe Jess was going to let this happen after what we went through together with our own parents. We knew of the brokenness.

The Good Me decided to write Jess a letter. What the hell is the matter with me, I do not know. The me me was quiet as a mouse and let The Good Me take over. I thought I was her. I had the audacity to use the words of the Puritan Samuel Rutherford to tell Jess how she was not being The Good Jess. I didn’t say that, but that’s what I said. It’s all so humiliating to share—me humiliating her again. As an adult this time. No empathy. No curiosity. Convinced that her goodness and happiness was in “making it work.” No idea what was really going on in her life. I was going to save her with this shaming letter.

She called me, letting me know some of these things. Pleading with me to see. But this time, she couldn’t say, “This isn’t you.” The Good Aimee was fooling us all, strong in her convictions, certain she knew what was best for Jess. Our thirty-one-year-old selves were in two different dimensions. For the first time, we couldn’t find each other.

Two of my deep life regrets are letters to Jess. But they are so revealing. Of my ugliness. My cruelty. For My Good Name.

Over time, when I saw it, she accepted my apology. We’ve mended some. But we are not the same Aimee and Jess. I put a deep fracture in the relationship. Who can blame her, after a second letter like that, for thinking I was just trying to fool her twice? For not trusting that the real Aimee isn’t The Good Me? And The Good Me is cruel and destructive.

THE GRAVE BIOGRAPHY

There’s memoir in Ecclesiastes. Of course it’s in the book wrestling with everything under the sun being futile. Our philosophical, spiritual guide in Ecclesiastes seems to adapt an Egyptian literary form known as grave biography, which had been used for at least two thousand years. The name is self-explanatory. The deceased were remembered with writings on funerary monuments or the walls of their tomb. Our teacher in Ecclesiastes uses all three elements of a grave biography in his memoir—“a recitation of accomplishments, a collection of ethical maxims that had guided the deceased through an exemplary life, and exhortations to visitors to reflect on their own death and live accordingly”—but with a twist. As Ellen Davis points out, “Whereas the Egyptian grave biographies testified (truly or falsely) to successful lives, [our teacher] produces a poignant admission of fail- ure.”1 I like this guy. While the Egyptians are pleading their case before the people and the gods of why they should be remembered on earth and welcomed into eternal bliss, our teacher tells us that God has given him a miserable task of futility as he pursues through wisdom all that is done under the sun (Eccl. 1:13–14).

In a sense, we are all writing our own grave biography. We want them to be spoken through weeping tears at our funerals. We labor to build our resumes of a good name. What is it? We often think we are pursuing virtues only to find we are constructing an imaginary self that is built on shadows. We cannot grasp the goodness because there is no substance, only a dark silhouette of virtue. I don’t want to find myself standing in the shadows when I meet death.

What is my grave biography? If we ask this question from the wisdom gleaned in Ecclesiastes, we will think less about what good name we are trying to create and more about what our souls, like cisterns, have been holding inside all our lives. What is in there, and what did we gain? Who do we impact with it? What does it do to others? What is its eternal value?

When we begin to learn to do the work of looking into what our cisterns hold, we find our secrets. The ones we’ve been keeping from ourselves. And we begin to look at what we really think about God and are afraid he might do to or ask of us. When Paul encountered the risen Christ, he went blind for three days. And then scales fell from his eyes (Acts 9:1–19), including all those accomplishments he listed in his letter to the Philippians: “circumcised the eighth day, of the nation of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; regarding the law, a Pharisee; regarding zeal, persecuting the church; regarding the righteousness that is in the law, blameless” (Phil. 3:5–6). He built the good name, and it resulted in killing off God’s people. We can safely say that he missed the juice. He missed Christ. Turns out Paul’s cistern was dark, blind, and full of loathing. It was full of fear and scarcity. Until Christ held up the mirror.

If we are willing to tell our secrets and face our regrets, we can begin to learn what our cisterns hold. The futility is in letting them hide and fester, not realizing how they are working for the Egyptian grave biographies full of faux importance and not the memoir before the assembly of the “book of incongruities”2 that is Ecclesiastes. The thing is, we are masters at hiding these secrets, even from ourselves. We can face our own incongruities and the incongruities of this world and lay them before God. Doing memory work is one way to get to our secrets. In it, we come face-to-face with ourselves and how we perceive our story. Interpersonal neurobiology is finding that our ability to make sense of our own stories and how they affect us determines our mental and emotional well-being and integration far more than the events themselves that happened in our past. In learning to name what we were going through, name our fears, insecurities, different relational attachments with our loved ones, disappointments, and desires, we gain the empowerment of resilience in our narratives to remake and begin to love others more truly.

So why am I looking at these memories of Jess? They are fractures to my face. To my sense of self. To what kind of person I want to be, what kind of friend. And frankly, I miss her. I miss us. I hate what I did to her. I still carry the sadness and loss. Jess drew out a part of me that only she can. She holds so much of my history.

And why did I do it? The simple answer is that at the time I was valuing the wrong things: superficial belonging and popularity in middle school, and superficial righteousness in my thirties. That’s getting somewhere, but it’s deeper than that. Why did I value those things? Go deeper, Aimee. They were shielding my fears. In middle school, the fear was humiliation and invisibility. Middle school is so awkward. Full of mean, hormone-fueled prepubescents vying for place. I feared humiliation, so I humiliated my own friend in my place. I feared being invisible, so I erased my friend. That wasn’t my intention, but it was my impact. Deep down, I was willing to sacrifice her.

Oh, the battle I am doing in my own heart and head right now. The incongruity with the story I’ve been telling myself all this time: I was the kind kid in middle school, not like the others. I stood up for the girl who smelled from peeing herself as everyone followed her around, making the noise, psssssss. Do you see my competing selves? I defended the disabled and the marginalized while cruelly erasing my best friend and listing all that was supposedly wrong with her.

As an adult I feared abandonment. Jess’s divorce triggered that fear big-time. We went through those feelings of abandonment together as children without naming them. There we were, about ten years into our marriages, and she was going to repeat the cycle. I wore such the coat of self-righteousness not to face that fear. The cages that I put around my loved ones. I would not be that. I was so far from that. That was not going to happen to my family. How was anyone able to live with me then? I do not know. Jess sure couldn’t. She needed a friend.

Reflecting on my accomplishments must include being able to uncover secrets and face them. Because I want to love better, truer, freer. Because these are my ethical maxims. Because this is what I value. Because death is letting our fears steer the wheel that leads us into futility. The fracture I caused speaks loudly to my soul—no longer to shame, but to resurrect and develop a face worth showing.

**An excerpt from my latest book, Saving Face, published by Zondervan Reflective.

My Inner Basilisk

Medieval writers loved to compare the soul to a garden, a greening and ripening place as one grows in love. But as the fourteenth-century pastoral work The Book of Vices and Virtues describes, into this holy verdancy slithers envy, a basilisk who seeks to “restrain” this lush abundance.10 An enormous serpent with a crest, or a cock with a snake’s tail, the basilisk kills with one glance. It is so overwhelmingly venomous that its breath scorches the earth: “No greenship can endure near him neither in grass, nor bush, nor trees.”11 The basilisk of envy desires another’s holy green to crackle and stiffen in death.

In college I was stung by a stingray in the warm waters off Puerto Peñasco. As I bled in the ocean, I thought it was an ordinary cut—until I passed out amid the molten sharpness of venom creeping up my toes toward my heel. I had a similar experience years later in a disorientingly different context. Scrolling though social media, I discovered that an author further along in their career than I am was publishing something that included Julian of Norwich, my favorite medieval writer whom I have studied for years. Promptly I began grousing in my spirit.

Bold of you to write on Julian as a nonmedievalist.
Stay in your lane.
I hope it sucks.

The last thought in particular twanged dissonantly, which caused me to pause. Why would I want someone else, a talented and thoughtful person I respect, to fail? Then, a scalding moment of clarity: I am envious. Envy initially felt like an ordinary cut, something my mind could justify. But the vicious wishes spread without check, as venom in a bloodstream, smoldering and necrotic.

Like covetousness, envy entails the desire for something one does not possess. But this desire does not stop there. John of Damascus (d. 749), the Arab monk and polymath, wrote the most enduring definition of envy, used by nearly every prominent writer of the later Middle Ages. Curiously, he describes envy as a kind of pain: “Envy is pain over the good fortune of others.”12 Along with some other medieval thinkers, Thomas Aquinas describes this pain as “sorrow.”13 The English Carmelite friar Richard Lavynham, in his little treatise on the vices, puts it like this: “Envy is the sorrow which one creature has when another fares well—or the gladness that he fares evil.”14 (Like my pathetic “I hope it sucks.”) The envious person is not content simply to observe that the grass is greener on the other side; envy wishes that grass to wilt in the exhale of its poisonous breath.

This element of inward or outward sorrowing and rejoicing is the key to understanding envy. Envy extends into something personal, a sideways statement about the respective values of the envier and the envied one. Envy compares. This is also why envy feels so wretched, like a cheese grater taken to the soul. My superiority is proven through your failure. You don’t deserve that car/job/spouse/ trip/recognition, but I do. Envy distracts the envier from their own feelings of inadequacy. In other words, envy hits too close to home for us to wish to examine it, for it is wrapped up in our deepest personal discontents or insecurities about our lives. It’s easier to lash out at another person than to deal with one’s own feelings and fears.

I used to pretend I wasn’t an envious person. The colorful fifteenth-century penitential aid Jacob’s Well tells me I am not the only one. The anonymous author observes that envy is seldom confessed to friends or to spiritual advisors because its hold on our spirits is tight.15 Even from ourselves, we hide envy, shrouding it in other, more reasonable, less humiliating emotions or rationales. Such cloaking is relatively easy because envy promotes stupidity or an excess amount of “false judgments,” in the words of The Book of Vices and Virtues.16 One begins to begrudge things that are ridiculous objects of grievance—I don’t own Julian of Norwich. In envy, judgment sours and curdles like old milk. If it weren’t so painful, it would be funny.

Because of our ingenuity in masking this humiliating vice, envy can be hard to identify. To counter this blindness, medieval penitential manuals have lists of envious behavior meant to act as mirrors to our hearts and minds that goad readers into recognition of our envious behavior. Envy proceeds along a well-worn human path: causing certain ways of speaking and bitterness of heart; unbinding friendships; sowing discord, scorn, accusations; putting impediments in the way of those who wish to do right; and finally, inspiring acts of malignity like property damage or public slander.

For many of us, rarely do things progress so far in our envy that we burn down the house we long for, steal the boyfriend or car we want for ourselves, or murder the person we’re jealous of, though the envious do all those things. Instead, we idly wish these or lesser evils in our heart or with our lips, which is, as Jesus reminds us, still the sin (Matt. 5:22). Envy tends to surface in the way we think or talk about other people when they are not around. Medieval writers divided these modes of thinking and speaking into a marvelous triad of envious language: backbiting, grouching, and murmuration. Grouching and murmuration both sound exactly like what they are: ongoing low-level resentment of someone else’s success voiced either in loud complaints to a friend (grouching) or malicious sideways whispers couched in quiet (murmuration). Chaucer’s Parson explains at length the habits of the envious backbiter:

Some man praises his neighbor but with wicked intent, for he always makes a wicked knot at last end. Always he makes a “but” at last end, that is worthy of more blame than is worth all the praising. The second species is that if a man be good and does or says a thing to good intent, the backbiter will turn all that goodness upside-down to his malicious intent. The third is to reduce the bounty of his neighbor. The fourth species is if men speak goodness of such a man, then will the backbiter say, “by my faith, such a man is yet better than he,” in dispraising of the man that men praised. The fifth species is this: to consent gladly and harken gladly to the harm that men speak of other folk.17

Chaucer’s list makes me laugh and cringe. The “but” we add to the end of the sentence after Trojan horse praise, the comparisons snuck into conversation, the silent pleasure in others’ trash-talking—they are all too familiar. One Latin fourteenth- century preacher’s handbook describes it well: “Honey in mouth and words of milk / But gall in heart and fraud in deeds.”18 And to think that neither Chaucer nor our preacher compiler had ever seen backbiting, grouching, or murmuration in their perfected form on social media!

Envy weeps when others rejoice and rejoices when others weep. In envy there is no fruit or fellowship or growth—only opposition. The primeval paradigm of envy, Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, still haunts us (Gen. 4). Envy is the “mother of death.”19 In stark contrast, love is the giver of life (1 John 3:14).

The devouring and comparative self-loathing of envy is destroyed only by the creative capacities of love. Love weeps with those who weep and rejoices with those who rejoice (Rom. 12:15).

Taken from Ask of Old Paths by Grace Hamman. Copyright Grace Hamman© (September 2025) by Zondervan. Used by permission of Zondervan, www.zondervan.com.

About the Author

Grace Hamman, Ph.D. (Duke University) is a writer and independent scholar of late medieval poetry and contemplative writing. She is the author of Ask of Old Paths and Jesus through Medieval Eyes. Her work has been published by academic and popular outlets, including Plough Quarterly and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Grace hosts a podcast called Old Books with Grace which celebrates the beauty and joy found in reading the literature and theology of the past. Grace holds a doctorate in English, specializing in medieval literature and theology, from Duke University. She lives near Denver, Colorado with her husband and three young children.

https://gracehamman.com/

10. From the text of BL Royal 18 A.X, Two Middle English Translations of Friar Laurent’s Somme le Roi: Critical Edition, ed. Emmanuelle Roux (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010), 12.

11. Royal 18 A.X, 12.

12. John of Damascus, An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1899), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight, Book II, Ch. 14, accessed November 24, 2023, https://www. newadvent.org/fathers/33042.htm.

13. ST II-II.36.1. 56

14. Richard Lavynham, A Litil Tretys, ed. J. P. W. M. van Zutphen (Rome: Institutum Carmelitanum, 1956), 13.

15. Jacob’s Well: An English Treatise on the Cleansing of Man’s Conscience, ed. Arthur Brandeis (Oxford: Horace Hart, Printer, 1900), 86.

16. The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the Somme Le Roi of Lorens d’Orleans, ed. W. Nelson Francis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 23.

17. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parson’s Tale in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), ll. 493–497.

18. Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 173.

19. Book, 22.

https://www.instagram.com/oldbookswithgrace/

Medievalish with Grace Hamman

Meditations on literature, history, beauty, and faith

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310167205/

There’s a woman who lives in the space between who I am now and who I’d like to be.

This is a paraphrase from a line that jumped out at me in Suleika Jaouad’s, The Book of Alchemy. I like the me who I am now, but she’s got ideas. This last year, she’s been pivoting her vocation, location, and relationships more towards the woman she still wants to be. And I’ve learned that the woman I am now is brave and adventurous.

Who is the woman I want to be? She’s a grandma, maybe a traveler. She’s eccentric and worries less about acceptance from others. Her soul is shining through. She’s more educated and helping people tell their stories and restory them as a therapist. She’s still a hiker, a reader, a writer, a plant hoarder, and a friend. She probably still drinks a good bit of bourbon. Maybe she’s found a small group to meet and intentionally discuss spirituality with again in a way that is passionate and full of wonder. Grace is on her face. And she still has strong arms and wears fun pants.

I just began listening to a book called Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life, in which author Sharon Blackie resurrects ancient folklore about the “wise woman,” revealing the treasure and dynamism of women as elders. She shares that the old women in these stories are forces of nature, not the fairy princesses of which women are portrayed in contemporary myths.

“They are elemental beings, storm hacks, firekeepers, grandmothers of the sea. They show us how to live when everything we thought mattered to us has been stripped away. They teach us how to stay rooted in the face of inevitable death. They teach us how to stand firm in the face of all of culture’s bullshit. And laugh.”

I couldn’t help but recall the “wise woman” in 2 Samuel 20 who intervenes while her city is being sieged, negotiating directly with King David's general, Joab, as his army is battering the city wall. She then gets her city's people to behead the rebel Sheba, whom Joab was after, and throw his head over the wall. In return Joab withdraws his army. A hagitude that saved the city.

Blackie laments that there are no contemporary stories that teach us how to transition into a rich and meaningful elderhood, a picture of women who hold up a mirror of clarity for the nature of our life journeys.

“Characters who pull the strings, weave the webs, test or advise the heroes and heroines. These elders are usually presented as wise, though they manifest their wisdom in very different ways. What, then, is the nature of an elder woman’s wisdom? And how might myths and fairy tales offer us insight into the ways in which each us can uniquely embody it?”

We have diverse examples of these women even in our Old Testament Scriptures—the midwives in Exodus, Jael, Deborah, Huldah, the widow of Zarephath, to name a few. Hagitude.

We’ve lost the value of the elder in general, much more so the wise woman elder. We need to story her back. We need to become her. The woman I want to be.

But shout out to the woman who lives in between. That’s me tomorrow morning. She’s got her work cut out for her. Good work that she likes. She’s living out the gap. She’s noticing and she’s purposeful. She’s risk-taking and she’s present in the moment. She is a life-giver because she is a life-liver. She is most of my life because if I want to keep growing, I will keep pushing the woman I want to be to new horizons. She needs to journal more and journal better because there’s still a lot to dig out. Plus, there are many groovy moments and discoveries she doesn’t want to forget. Her work is pivotal.

Who I am now has set up a decent foundation. She’s a risk-taker and a question-asker. Hopefully she can strengthen her attunement, maybe talk a little less and listen a little more.

Frederick Buechner turns this thought around and around a bit in his sermon on “Faith and Fiction.” A novelist and a preacher, he discusses the similarities between faith and fiction and brings up a character in a series of his books, Bebb. Although Buechner did not set out to do so with this character, he comes to realize Bebb is a saint. But he wasn’t a particularly virtuous character. In fact, Buechner doesn’t believe one can accomplish sainthood this way—by building virtue. That’s how we think of it, right? Because virtue is good. So we pursue the virtues themselves: chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Sounds like a well-rounded saint to me.

But Buechner says that holiness is not a human quality like virtue is. “If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something God does in them…It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who are not virtuous at all, at least not to start with.” Bebb wasn’t, that’s for sure.

So I stop and think for a minute about the call to holiness in Scripture. What does that mean, then? When Peter says, “But as the one who called you is holy, you also are to be holy in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘Be holy, because I am holy.’ If you appeal to the Father who judges impartially according to each one’s work, you are to conduct yourselves in reverence during your time living as strangers” (1 Pet. 15-16). What does it mean to be holy in our behavior? To be consecrated to God in it?

Here’s the thing. If we are pursuing holiness by pursuing virtue itself, we are going to pursue the virtues as we see them. Yet it’s not only our behavior that is amiss, but also our seeing. And we miss the realness of virtue. “If you’re too virtuous, the chances are you think you are a saint already under your own steam, and therefore the real thing can never happen to you.” Holiness is all around us, but we have trouble seeing it. We cannot make holiness real. Holiness helps us to see the realness. In me. In you. In my oat cake with mascarpone cheese and my dog Moose cuddling up next to me.

There is a mysteriousness about truth. It’s the Godness of it. Hidden in plain sight. Pilate asks, “What is truth?” And Jesus is silent. You must listen and look. You must see and hear. Attune to it. He’s right there.

Buechner said that this sketchy character in his novels was without pretense. A risk taker. “He was good company. Above all else, he was extraordinarily alive—so much so for me anyway that when I was writing about him I could hardly wait to get back to my study every morning. That’s when I began not only to see that he was a saint, but to see also what a saint is.”

Yes, that’s the difference. Life-giving verses life-taking. There seems to be a notion of scarcity in pursuing holy behavior itself. What we think that is, anyway. Because we have to compare all the time to measure it. So that we are holier than that person or the person I was yesterday. There’s an element of taking—and faking—when we compare. And compromising ourselves, of course, because we can never live up to our own measures. So we lower our bars and raise those of our neighbor.

Be holy. The realness of it. The trueness of it. The mystery of it. Consecrated, set apart, to God. A foreigner and stranger to others, not so much by your virtue, but by seeing the life to which virtue echoes. It’s a call to look and listen. Buechner defines grace as “God in his givenness.” And faith as the response to this givenness. “Faith is given a glimpse of something, however dimly. Men and women of faith know they are strangers and exiles on the earth because somehow and somewhere along the line they have been given a glimpse of home.” We’ve seen it and heard it. Right? Have you? Do you still have these moments? They’re what keep me going the many times when I don’t see. Barbara Brown Taylor tells us that “Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on alters.” And I believe it.

When you do see, you want others to see as well. It’s too much to keep to yourself. It doesn’t take. It’s so abundant. So you begin to take risks, attempting to walk into it. Maybe, just maybe, we can become life-givers. Grace-givers (is there anything more holy than grace?). Looking together.

“By grace we see what we see. To have faith is to respond to what we see by longing for it the rest of our days; by trying to live up to it and toward it through all the wonderful and terrible things; by breathing it in like air and growing strong on it; by looking to see it again and see it better. To lose faith is to stop looking. To lose faith is to decide…that all you ever saw from afar was your own best dreams.”

Yes, that’s it.

*Revised and reposed from January 2024. Turns out I needed to revisit this topic.

A year ago at this time, my existential crisis began. I could feel the rumblings of all the change that was to happen in my life. Much of it I welcomed. My girls were getting ready to move out on their own. One of them just got engaged, so we were in the beginning stages of planning a wedding and gaining a son-in-law. Meanwhile, the news was out that the glorious corn field that our backyard backed up to was going to be developed into a 51+ community—meaning we had less than a year to get the heck out of dodge before construction began. Additionally, I turned in my final edits to Saving Face. And while excited and proud of that book, it felt like a finale. Empty nest, book launch, moving, wedding…

The rumblings were also inside me—that it was time for a vocational change. While I love the writing, discovery, and connections, the hustle of the marketing and the evangelical subculture surrounding it wears on me. I escaped from the abusive culture, but I’m constantly reminded of how many victims there are, the latest scandals, and then the everyday challenges to the integrity in participating in the whole Christian writing ecosystem.

And yet I keep yearning for a deep spiritual life—in my inner life, family, friendships, and in a church.

A year ago, it was just a few months before my 49^th birthday, and the rumblings of transformation and uncertainty were reverberating in these multiple facets of my life. I reevaluated what my values are, what matters to me, and seriously thought about how I want to spend this next stage of my life—what do I want to do, where do I want to live, who do I want to spend my time with?

We planned to put the house on the market by March 1. I decided not to write a book this year, but to try and get into a grad school counseling program. Meanwhile, I was going to take a couple classes as a non-degree seeking student to get some experience and see if it’s what I really want to do. Between the lines of the last two sentences is a middle-aged woman going back to the classroom which she hasn’t been in almost 30 years, in which her professors will be younger than her and her classmates the age of her daughters. Not scary. Not scary at all. I can do this. I’ll be a much better student now, as a mature adult. I’ve totally got this. I’m excited. But also freaking humbled and terrified.

It's like I was starting all over again. But I like risk-taking. I love adventure. I was tapping into the agency that I did have as a going-on-49-year-old woman. After writing Saving Face, I was finding more of my own face, wanting to go for it—for all of me. And to shed the fractures of my face that I was still wearing. I wanted to be more purposeful in my life in my friendships, and with my family. Writing that book was transformative; I needed to keep living it.

And that’s when the chronic back pain showed up. My mind was reasonable, encouraging, and collected. My body wasn’t buying it. My nervous system went into fight or flight. It was a lot at once, and no matter what my mind said, my body was holding the fear and uncertainty. After all, it still had a good bit of trauma to recover from.

I’m a journaler. And I highly recommend this practice. I committed to writing raw, digging up my fears, disappointments, excitement, dreams, and anxiety. I think my physical pain was communicating and I needed to listen. Here is one of my excerpts:

It is a scary time with so many unknowns. But I also am seeing how my best plans and goals are getting subverted. How I am being made to wait in uncertainty. And I’m trying to see the freedom in that, the possibility, the need for faith, and the revealing of what/who Aimee is without all these things. I hope it’s a time of discovery.

During this time a year ago, I was sitting on the front stoop of our last home and experienced a visit from a hummingbird that left a big impression on me. It flew straight in front of my face and just stared at me for a few seconds before flying away again. It seemed like a comforting messenger, God’s way of telling me I was going to be okay. This special visit imprinted a message to me—was it God? Was it my own attempts at trying to assign meaning to it? I don’t know. But it was three grounding words that I’ve been assuring myself with through the year:

Love your people.

Simple, I know. But it put things in perspective for me. I am blessed with a wonderful family and friends. Love the people God has put in my life and he will take care of all the things. However things turn out, I have what matters. No regrets.

This morning, I still sit with some of these rumblings. My daughters moved out, our son is home for the summer—home—as in we did it, we found our place. Now we are having many pool parties, painting rooms, changing light fixtures, and all the things. It feels good. But it was a rollercoaster to get to, including a short-term rental for five weeks. During those five weeks we threw a helluva wedding, and now have a married daughter and a new son-in-law. I loved being a student again over the spring semester, aced my classes, but did not get into the fall program I applied to. Apparently, there were only 15 spots, and I overestimated the value of my maturity and experience over the young Psych. Grads with amazing internships. I’m trying again for the spring semester now that I have two classes under my belt and am taking one more class in the fall. I will likely apply to other schools this time as well. A set back—a humbling one—but not enough to give up yet. Saving Face is in the world, and I am proud of that book. My chronic pain is probably 80% better.

I’ve taken more risks. Going back to school made me want to do more peopling outside of the echo chambers of my vocation. I’ve always joked about opening a speakeasy. But I don’t really want to run another business. Why not work in one? One that is the first organic certified distillery in Maryland? Why not try it out? Why not?!

I was thinking about that hummingbird visit, the two “reminder visits” I received thereafter, and those three grounding words that have comforted me and helped me to move forward in all these transitions. I looked back at my journal entry. When I wrote about it, I received it as a benediction. I felt seen and blessed by God. I felt his face shining upon me in my anxiety. And I felt empowered that in all the uncertainty and risks, I can love. I can take notice. And I am so blessed.

(My view!!!)

May the Lord bless you and protect you; may the Lord make his face shine on you and

be gracious to you;

may the Lord look with favor on you and give

you peace.

—Numbers 6:24–27

*I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this benediction at the end of a worship service. It goes so far back in my memories, recalling when I first learned it would be like recalling when I first learned the alphabet or the “Now I lay me down to sleep” bedtime prayer (that for the longest time, I thought began, “Now I’m Aimee down to sleep . . .”). This blessing is like turning the pages of the days of my life. I grew up Southern Baptist, and this benediction could be counted on to close us out of the service as much as the doxology we sang after we gave our offerings.

It was the background noise that I didn’t pay attention to at first; it meant the service was ending. But I did pick up on the sacredness of it. We were being blessed before we left. I held still like I did when my grandma was pinning one of her brooches on me or when my mom was braiding my hair. You need to stay in the flow. Moving may cause unintended pain. Let the masters do their work. And walk away beautified.

Later, I began to think about the words. God’s face shining upon me—this was the blessing. And yet it was so elusive. So was the man saying it. The closest I ever got to my pastor besides that awkward handshake or smile on our way through the exit door was when I was baptized at eight years old. I was nervous about screwing it up somehow and of the holiness of it all. Until I saw my pastor, the man I only ever saw in a suit, with his comb-over perfectly hair-sprayed into place. He was standing in our church bathtub, where many others before me gave themselves to the Lord in baptism, wearing knee-high rubber boots over his pants. I never knew about the boots. You don’t see those from the pews. It’s insider knowledge.

I gained more insider knowledge: there’s a bar in the tub that you lock your feet under so they don’t decide to whirl themselves into the air as you’re dunked. While everyone else watches you clothed in your white robe die to your old life and rise to a new life in Christ, they don’t see you afterward in the bathroom blow-drying your hair, chitchatting with the other newly baptized, reprimping to return not-so-nonchalantly to the worship service with your new glow, ready to be the one shaking hands after the service. My friend Jess and I saw things differently after we were baptized. We giggled about the rubber boots, whispering all of our behind-the-curtain revelations to one another. Those rubber boots humanized our pastor. But they also kept him a little too dry, still separated from our full immersion. After all, he didn’t have the time for postbaptismal primping during worship. Now we were insiders.

That’s when I began thinking about the face of God shining upon me. Where was it? I knew it was important. I needed it. I’d gone through the community’s rites of passage to receive it. But no one ever talked about it. What was this big deal that was never discussed? To be honest, there could have been whole sermons about it, but I was too busy imagining what my pastor would look like if he combed his hair the other way, or what it would be like to swing from the chandeliers off the balcony, to pay proper attention. I can tell you that now, many years later, visiting numerous churches in search of a place to belong, it’s shocking to find the lack of benediction given. And it’s sad. I need—long for—this blessing.

*This is an excerpt from the beginning of the chapter, “God Showed Us His Face” in my book Saving Face. After writing the book, I am still spending much of my time thinking about the face of God, benediction, and blessing. One big take-away for me is our vocation in that benediction given in Numbers: May the Lord make his face shine upon you. We are sent out as a congregation with this benediction—our bodies vessels of the Holy Spirit. I think about the wonderous revelation that St. Theresa of Avila made, that since God dwells within us, our souls are intertwined with heaven. Within each of our souls is a paradise where God finds delight!

Therefore, in this benediction, we understand that we are to be this blessing to one another, to be the Lord’s face shining upon one another. And what a powerful gift this is! What if I thought about this more in my encounters with those he puts in front of me throughout my day? That God, dwelling and delighting in my own soul, leaps like the Holy Spirit did in Elizabeth’s womb, at the face and soul before me? To join in this blessing of the other person in recognizing it is good that they are here before me! Think about how that collaboration with God blesses our day! Think about how this is God’s face shining upon us!

This isn’t an easy practice, as we must be attentive. I’m better at it in the morning and in contemplation than I am as the day begins to take over. It’s the whole, “Be still and know that I am God”(Ps. 46:10) part that I need to pay attention to throughout the day. To pause and celebrate as the day is moving.

Not just to be God’s smiling face, but to receive it from others.

And that is the other part that I am taking-away from my writing and this verse. I wrote about how as a child, I knew there was a stillness in receiving the blessing, comparing it to getting my hair braided or my grandma pinning a brooch on me. I am learning this in new ways this year and I want to write about this more. I’ve made some changes in my life that have taken risk and courage—taking graduate classes, applying for counseling programs, selling our house, buying and moving into a new one, getting a part-time job at my favorite local distillery (I know, I haven’t even written about this yet!!)—and big life changes are emerging in our little family with my children launching and the big wedding we had this summer. It is a lot of change at once! On one hand, I’m working hard, doing all the things, trying to embrace the agency I have in all these transitions.

But there is something else—the agency I don’t have. The being still in all the lifiness that is around me to receive the blessing. And in seeing that blessing in the faces of others: In my young adult children taking their own risks, contributing to society, and yet still returning to the nest wanting time with us. In the much younger classmates I am surrounded by and all they have to teach me. In the freaking amazing views and sunsets and sunrises at my new house. In my husband as we are being reintroduced to one another as middle-aged people (how did that happen to us?!). In my parents as they too are transitioning into retirement while grandparenting young adults and children at the same time. In the faces and stories of my coworkers and clients. And in my new neighbors. The background noise is the insider knowledge. It is the blessing. It’s all over the place!

Are you there, God? I’ve always assumed so. And it’s curious to consider how I have looked for you and talked to you. Prayer was introduced to me as expressions of gratitude before a meal and my last connection before falling asleep. What would happen if I didn’t “pray my Lord my soul to take” if I died before I wake?

How did I ever go to sleep after contemplating that I could die before I wake?

You were also the God I asked to bless all my family members and friends each day. You were the one who heard my inner thoughts, whom I petitioned as a preteen, teen, and young adult. You saved my father’s life and got me through wearing a back brace in middle school. I lost sight of you a bit in my own anger and sense of justice after my parents’ divorce. But you came for me.

You came for me when I was definitely not looking for you, and it was real. My whole body and soul knew it was you and that you were real—overwhelming, real and good and beautiful.

So, I started looking for you—in church, in the Christian bookstore, and on the Internet. Along the way, I confused looking for you with being a good Christian. I think a lot of us have, not wanting to be a bad Christian, of course, or even a mediocre one. And we learn that we are being transformed into your likeness, so we want that to show in goodness. But we’ve got our own ideas about what a good Christian is. We think it’s so simple, all right there in your word. Measurable. We’ve been working on the secret formula for centuries, and the church tells us how to belong. I long for that belonging. I talk to you about it. You know.

And yet it has been elusive to me. I’ve given others this little light of mine so that I don’t have to be responsible for it myself. Leaders, they are called. And boy have they tried to blow it out. I’ve stirred up trouble with my curiosity. I’ve been shown the door. Even after leaving the spaces I was in, they still keep my name on the list of those God does not love. Not a good Christian; not even “inside the faith.” The new spaces I try to enter are better in some ways, and yet it is as if I am on the outside looking in. Are you there, God? It’s me Aimee.

My prayer life has changed too. All the ways that I’ve been taught in my growing into adult Christianity seem transactional and performative. The theological words that I used to speak feel like a costume. I’m back to digging up my inner thoughts that seemed so intimate and with you. Like you were showing me myself.

I’ve looked to the Internet far too much for you—to find the community and answers that I could not in church. To share my own voice as well—to join in. But I hardly can look anymore. It’s not that there aren’t some fabulous people reaching out on social media; I have some wonderful friends there. I’ve found real connections and people sharing resources and much needed critique. But there’s so much noise about how to be a good Christian. And who is good and who is bad. I easily get distracted and

I long for real communion. I long for encounter.

And for church to be a place where we not only find you in the stories of Scripture, but in our own stories. Where we can dig them up and share them with one another, discovering you hanging out in our secrets. Because, God, I think that is where you are.

Are you there, God? I almost caught up with you the other day on my walk. You left me that feather to find and I knew you were there. And I saw you at the Market over the weekend when that woman walked by and I could tell her stomach was hurting. I saw you behind her face and we talked. When I get into my car after a good hike with a friend, I know that we have communed with you as well. And that hummingbird that flew right to my window and hovered, looking right at me. She had a message of some sort from you. You are teaching me to look for you. You are.

Are you there, God?, our beloved childhood storybook character asks. It’s so grounding, so real. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like you are. I can lose you and mistake you for another kind of god. And I lose myself then, too. It’s me Aimee. It helps to say it to you, God. Because you know her and can show her to me. And you are right there with her. I find you together. The question is a reminder.

Anyway, you were with me through those tumultuous years of adolescence, helping me transition into early adulthood. I’ve stumbled, crashed and burned, and find myself both with many treasures and much dross to sift through still. I’m transitioning life stages again, and yet finding my thoughts, questions, and wonders from early Aimee life all the more valuable. I think my prayer request mirrors that little character Margaret: