I am a Hunger Games person. And if you ask me which Hunger Games movie is my favorite, I genuinely don’t know how I am supposed to answer that question. Because the truth is that all five (current) movies have something that makes them worthy of being the favorite. They aren’t interchangeable, and they aren’t great for the same reasons. Each one occupies a different emotional and psychological space. Each one does something the others don’t. Together, they tell a story that is far bigger than Katniss Everdeen surviving an arena.

So no, I cannot pick one. And honestly, I don’t think I should have to.

The Hunger Games has the particular magic of introducing us to a world that is horrifying precisely because it doesn’t feel entirely impossible. The Capitol is extravagant, ridiculous, beautiful, and grotesque all at once. The Games are presented as entertainment, which is perhaps the most disturbing part of all. Children are selected, dressed up, marketed, trained, and turned into television personalities before being sent into an arena to kill one another.

Then there is Katniss. What makes the first movie so powerful is watching an ordinary act of love become an act of rebellion. Katniss volunteers for Prim without knowing what will happen next. She doesn’t volunteer because she wants to become a revolutionary. She volunteers because she loves her sister.

That distinction matters. Sometimes resistance doesn’t begin with a grand political philosophy. Sometimes it begins with No. Not her.

The first movie also establishes one of the series’ most important ideas: that people can be manipulated into accepting horrific things when those things are packaged as entertainment. The audience watches because the Capitol tells them this is normal. Suddenly we’re watching too. That discomfort never really goes away.

Then comes The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which may be the easiest movie in the series to call a favorite because it takes everything established in the first film and makes the world substantially bigger.

The first movie is about surviving the Games. Catching Fire is about realizing that survival itself has consequences.

Katniss has become a symbol without ever agreeing to become one. The Capitol tries to control the story by controlling her image, her romance, her clothing, her public appearances, and eventually her entire existence. But something has already escaped their control.

Hope.

That is what makes Catching Fire so emotionally devastating. Katniss begins to understand that what she did in the first Games mattered. The berries mattered. Rue mattered. Her refusal to play by the Capitol’s rules mattered. People saw it. People remembered it. Once people realize that the system is not invincible, the system becomes much more frightened.

The Quarter Quell is also one of the most brilliant concepts in the series because the Capitol essentially weaponizes memory. It forces previous victors back into the arena, turning people who have already survived unimaginable trauma into entertainment again.

It is cruel. It is psychologically horrifying. And it makes the eventual destruction of the arena feel enormous.

Then there is The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1. And I will defend this movie forever.

It is quieter than the others. There are fewer Games. There is less spectacle. There is less of the visual extravagance that makes the first two movies immediately recognizable.

But that is exactly why it matters. Mockingjay – Part 1 is about what happens after the revolution starts. Katniss isn’t a triumphant superhero. She’s traumatized. She’s angry. She’s exhausted. She’s confused. She has nightmares. She doesn’t know what she is supposed to be anymore. She has spent years being used by other people, and now the rebels want to use her too.

The movie forces us to confront something that stories about revolution often ignore: liberation does not magically erase trauma. Katniss has survived the Games, but she is not okay, and neither is anyone else.

The destruction of District 12, Peeta’s hijacking, the propaganda campaigns, the bombing of civilians, and the realization that both sides are capable of manipulating people make Mockingjay – Part 1 one of the most psychologically complicated movies in the series.

It asks whether you can become a symbol without becoming somebody else’s weapon. It asks whether propaganda is acceptable when your side is using it for a supposedly good cause. It asks whether there is such a thing as a clean revolution. And it refuses to give us easy answers.

Then comes The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2, which might be the hardest movie in the series to watch—and perhaps the most important. Because this is where the story stops being about defeating the Capitol and starts being about what violence does to people.

The war is not glamorous. People die. Children die. Katniss loses people she loves. Peeta struggles to determine which memories are real. Gale becomes increasingly willing to justify horrific actions for the sake of victory. And Katniss is forced to confront the possibility that the revolution may simply replace one form of authoritarianism with another.

The ending (while I actually hate the Epilogue) is particularly powerful because Katniss doesn’t emerge from everything she has experienced magically healed. She carries it. She remembers. She grieves. She struggles.

Eventually she chooses something extraordinarily radical in a world built around violence: She chooses a life. That matters.

Then, years later (in our timeline but decades earlier in Panem), came The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, and suddenly the entire mythology became even more complicated.

This movie is brilliant because it forces us to look at the origins of the world we already thought we understood. And instead of giving us a comforting explanation for evil, it gives us something much more disturbing— people become who they are through choices.

Coriolanus Snow is fascinating precisely because we know what he becomes. We watch him make choices. We watch him rationalize them. We watch ambition gradually overpower compassion. Maybe the most unsettling thing about Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes is realizing that Snow isn’t born looking like a monster. He becomes one.

That makes the movie feel less like a prequel and more like a warning.

It reminds us that authoritarianism doesn’t always arrive announcing itself as evil. Sometimes it arrives as order. Stability. Security. Tradition. Pragmatism. Someone insisting that terrible things are necessary because the alternative would be worse. And suddenly the entire Hunger Games universe feels frighteningly relevant again.

Which brings us to Sunrise on the Reaping and its eventual film adaptation (I cannot call it one of my favorites yet, as it won’t be out until late November. I have very little doubt that it is going to be excellent. Partly because the source material gives the filmmakers an extraordinary foundation. But more importantly, the story is positioned to deepen one of the most compelling aspects of the entire series: what happens to people before they become the legends we know.

Haymitch has always been one of the most interesting characters in the original story. We know the broken, sarcastic, alcoholic mentor. Sunrise on the Reaping allows us to understand the person who existed before all of that.

That is exactly what The Hunger Games does so well. It takes people we might otherwise reduce to symbols and reminds us that they were human beings first.

That is probably why these movies have had such a profound psychological effect on people. They aren’t really about a girl fighting in an arena. They’re about power. They’re about propaganda. They’re about trauma. They’re about grief. They’re about class. They’re about inequality. They’re about what happens when human beings become commodities. They’re about what happens when governments control narratives. They’re about the seduction of comfort. They’re about how easily people can become spectators to suffering when suffering is presented as entertainment.

And they’re about rebellion—not necessarily the romanticized kind, but the messy, frightening, morally complicated kind. That is why people continue to recognize themselves in these movies. We recognize the Capitol in cultures obsessed with celebrity and spectacle. We recognize propaganda in the ways information is packaged and manipulated. We recognize the Games in the way human suffering can become content. We recognize Katniss in the person who never asked to be a symbol but becomes one anyway. We recognize Peeta in the struggle to remain compassionate in a world that rewards cruelty. We recognize Haymitch in the person who survived something that everyone else thinks should have made them stronger but instead left scars nobody can see.

And we recognize ourselves in the audience. That last part might be the most uncomfortable. Because the series repeatedly asks us: What are you willing to watch? What are you willing to accept? What are you willing to call entertainment? What happens when you stop questioning the system because questioning it makes you uncomfortable?

Those aren’t questions that belong only to Panem. They’re human questions. And that’s why I don’t think any of The Hunger Games is going away.

People will keep arguing about which movie is the best. They will debate Katniss and Peeta and Gale. They will analyze Snow. They will talk about Rue and Finnick and Prim. They’ll discuss the symbolism of the mockingjay, the berries, the dresses, the arena, the bread, the songs, the three-finger salute. They’ll find new parallels to their own political and cultural moments. They’ll introduce the movies to their children. They’ll watch them when they’re teenagers and then watch them again as adults and realize that they understood completely different things the second time.

That’s what makes a story last. Not perfection. Relevance.

The fact that you can return to it years later and discover that it has changed because you have changed.

So, yes, all five movies are contenders for my favorite.

I don’t need to choose.

Not the obvious choice. Not the whimsical first one with the giant sense of discovery. Not Prisoner of Azkaban, which everyone insists is the sophisticated answer. Not Goblet of Fire, with its dragons and teenage chaos.

No. Give me Order of the Phoenix. And I will defend this choice with the same unreasonable intensity that Harry defends himself against the Ministry.

First, there is the extremely important distinction I have made for myself between the art and the artist. I can love the Harry Potter books and movies while being completely, unequivocally opposed to J.K. Rowling’s current public statements and activism regarding transgender people. I do not support her views. I do not want to defend them. I don’t think disagreeing with her requires me to pretend that something that mattered deeply to me through difficult situations, or while the boys were growing up, never existed.

Art has a complicated life once it leaves its creator. And honestly, Order of the Phoenix makes that distinction feel particularly interesting because it is, at its heart, a story about who gets to define reality.

Harry knows what happened. The Ministry says it didn’t. The Daily Prophet says he’s lying. Umbridge says he’s a problem. The adults in authority would rather control the story than listen to the person living it.

And Harry’s response is essentially: “I know what I saw.”

There is something enormously satisfying about that. Especially because Order of the Phoenix is the movie where Harry stops being simply the boy who survived and becomes someone who actively chooses resistance.

This is not the Harry Potter movie about discovering magic. It’s the Harry Potter movie about what you do when the people in power are wrong. And that makes it, in my opinion, the best of the movies.

It has some of the strongest character development in the entire series. Harry is angry. He’s traumatized. He’s isolated. He’s frustrated. He’s not particularly pleasant for much of the movie. And I love that.

Because of course he’s angry. He has spent his entire childhood being abused and dismissed, survived Voldemort, watched someone die in front of him, and then been told that the entire thing basically didn’t happen.

And everyone seems surprised that he’s having some feelings about it. The movie lets him be messy.

It also gives us Dolores Umbridge, who may be one of the most horrifying villains in the entire franchise precisely because she doesn’t look like a villain. She wears pink. She has kittens. She smiles. She speaks politely. And then she calmly tortures children with a quill. Honestly, if there is a better cinematic demonstration that evil does not always look evil, I haven’t seen it.

Then there is Dumbledore’s Army. This might be my favorite part of the entire movie. A group of young people deciding that if the adults won’t prepare them for the world they’re actually living in, they’ll prepare themselves. They teach one another. They practice. They encourage one another. They become brave together. That’s beautiful.

When we get to the Battle of the Department of Mysteries, which is one of the moments when the series finally stops feeling like a children’s adventure, it reminds us that these kids are actually in a war. They are frightened. They are outmatched. They are imperfect. And they show up anyway!

This is why this movie hits differently for me. It understands that courage isn’t the absence of fear. Sometimes courage is being absolutely terrified and saying, “Fine. I’m still going.”

Also, aesthetically, Order of the Phoenix is just fantastic. The darker color palette. The Ministry. The prophecy room. The flying sequence over London. The fireplaces. The grimness of Hogwarts under Umbridge. The room full of glowing prophecies. And that magnificent moment when the statues in the Ministry come alive.

It feels like the wizarding world has grown up. Which brings me to another reason it is my favorite: Sirius Black. The entire emotional relationship between Sirius and Harry is devastatingly complicated. Sirius is the closest thing Harry has to family who actually understands what he has lost. He sees Harry as a connection to James, but he also genuinely loves him.

Harry desperately wants and needs that connection. So when Sirius dies, it isn’t just another character dying. Harry loses another piece of the family he has been trying to build.

Somehow the movie manages to make grief, anger, friendship, rebellion, magic, and teenage awkwardness coexist in the same story. That’s impressive.

Maybe the most important reason Order of the Phoenix is my favorite is also the least intellectual: It is the absolute perfect movie for lying in bed when you feel terrible.

There is something about being sick, exhausted, uncomfortable, emotionally wrung out, or just generally done with existence that makes Hogwarts feel like the ideal place to go. You don’t have to pay perfect attention. You already know what happens. You know the characters. You know the dialogue. You know when the music is going to swell. You know when Umbridge is going to make you furious. You know when Sirius is going to break your heart. You know when DA is going to make you feel hopeful again. And somehow that familiarity is exactly what you need.

When you don’t feel well, you don’t necessarily want something new. You want something known. Something that asks nothing of you. Something that can play in the background while you’re wrapped in approximately seventeen blankets, surrounded by water bottles, medications, tissues, chargers, and whatever food seems remotely tolerable. You want a movie that says, “You don’t have to figure anything out right now. Just lie here.” And Order of the Phoenix understands that assignment.

It is long enough to occupy you. Familiar enough to comfort you. Dramatic enough to keep you interested. Dark enough to match your mood. Hopeful enough to keep you from sinking completely into it. And, crucially, it contains enough British teenagers dramatically walking around a castle that you can periodically rapidly blink and focus your eyes, look at the television, and think: Yep. Still good.

So yes, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is my favorite.

I can separate the art from the artist. I can love what these stories gave me while being firmly opposed to the person who created them. I can recognize the flaws in the movies and still have a favorite.

I can simultaneously appreciate the themes of resistance, friendship, courage, chosen family, and standing up to unjust authority while also acknowledging that sometimes the deepest philosophical reason I put this movie on is: I feel like absolute garbage, and I would like to lie here and watch Harry Potter until I feel slightly less like absolute garbage.

Honestly, there are worse forms of self-care. Just don’t ask me to get out of bed. I’ve got approximately six more hours of Hogwarts to go.

Buckle up… this is going to be a multi-post series of my go-to movies.

There are movies I watched as a kid that I still enjoy as an adult, and then there is The Goonies, which apparently never left my personality.

I don’t know what exactly happened to me in the late 80s or early 90s, but somewhere along the way my brain decided that the ideal adventure involved a bunch of unsupervised children, a pirate map, a creepy old house, underground tunnels, booby traps, skeletons, questionable plumbing, and a legendary pirate named One-Eyed Willy.

And I thought this was completely normal. Or maybe I just loved it because I only watched it at Aunt Lana and Uncle Sid’s house.

That is one of the things I love most about The Goonies: the nostalgia isn’t just for the movie. It’s nostalgia for the version of childhood where I could disappear for an entire afternoon, and nobody immediately tracked me through a cellphone.

You just left the house to go. “Where are you going?” “Outside.” “When will you be back?” “I don’t know.” “Okay.”

WHAT?! Imagine trying that now.

I also love that these kids apparently had unlimited freedom and absolutely no adult supervision. They weren’t just riding bikes around the neighborhood. They were exploring abandoned buildings and elaborate cave systems while being pursued by criminals, and somehow everyone was like, “Well, they’ll probably be home for dinner.”

Meanwhile, modern parents get nervous if their kid walks to the mailbox alone.

Then there is the fact that The Goonies taught an entire generation that treasure maps were a perfectly reasonable thing to have in your attic. I spent a shocking amount of my childhood looking at old pieces of paper thinking, What if this is a map?

It never was. It was usually a grocery list. But I remained hopeful.

And the characters! Mikey was the earnest leader. Mouth was the smartass. Data was inventing technology out of things he probably found in a junk drawer. Brand was doing his best to keep everyone alive while simultaneously being an older brother, an unwilling babysitter, and a full-time victim of embarrassment.

And Chunk. Oh, Chunk. Chunk wasn’t comic relief because he was funny. Chunk was funny because Chunk was all of us. Chunk IS all of us.

He was scared. He was hungry. He was confused. He made questionable decisions. He panicked loudly. He lied badly. He ate everything. And somehow he still ended up being an essential member of the team.

Honestly, Chunk was the original neurodivergent survival strategy: “I have no idea what’s happening, but I brought snacks.”

And can we talk about the pirate ship? As a child, I apparently accepted that a fully intact pirate ship had been sitting underground for centuries and that this was not only plausible but the most exciting thing that had ever happened.

As an adult, I have questions. A lot of questions. Mostly: How didn’t anyone notice the GIANT pirate ship under the town?!

But I don’t actually want those questions answered.

Because that’s the magic of nostalgia. I don’t want to fact-check The Goonies. I don’t want to examine the structural integrity of the caves or the logistics of pirate treasure or the extraordinarily questionable decision-making of every adult involved.

I want to be the kid again. I want to believe that there are secret passages behind fireplaces. I want to believe that an old map might lead somewhere extraordinary. I want to believe that the weird kids, the loud kids, the awkward kids, the kids who don’t quite fit, can stumble into an adventure and discover that they were exactly the right people for it.

And I want to believe that if everything goes horribly wrong, someone will yell: “HEY YOU GUYS!” And everybody will come running.

Maybe that’s why The Goonies has stayed one of my favorite movies. It reminds me of a time when imagination was enough. When an afternoon could become an adventure. When friends were the entire world. When town kids (which I was in Sharpsville but not at my parents’) could ride our bikes or walk around until the streetlights came on. When “dangerous” meant scraped knees, getting yelled at by your parents, or possibly encountering a terrifying pirate.

I miss when the biggest problem in your life was figuring out whether the treasure was actually buried under the wishing well. I miss that version of the world sometimes.

Not because childhood was perfect. It wasn’t. But because there was something wonderfully uncomplicated about believing that adventure was always just around the corner.

Maybe that’s why, all these years later, I still love The Goonies. Because somewhere underneath the adult responsibilities, bills, schedules, worries, disappointments, and general nonsense of being a grown-up is still a kid who hears “Hey, there’s a treasure map” and immediately says: “Well, obviously we’re going.”

And honestly? That kid has pretty good instincts.

Them: … All okay with you? Pain level?

Me: … I am fine. I am always fine.

Them: I won’t question when you say “I am fine,” but I am assuming there are times you might not be. No explanation needed…

There is something deceptively small about this exchange. On the surface, it is just two people talking about pain. But the sentence “I am fine. I am always fine.” carries an enormous amount of weight.

“I am fine” can mean I’m okay. It can also mean I don’t know how to explain this, I don’t want to burden you, I am tired of being asked, there isn’t anything you can do, or even I need to believe this myself.

And then there is the second sentence: “I am always fine.” That is different. That sounds less like an answer and more like a survival strategy. There is a particular kind of person who becomes very good at being fine. Fine through pain. Fine through disappointment. Fine through uncertainty. Fine when the answer is terrifying. Fine when there isn’t an answer. Fine because other people need reassurance. Fine because explaining the truth would take more energy than simply saying the word. Fine because sometimes fine is the only socially acceptable version of I am barely holding all of this together. Most importantly, fine because you have learned that being capable of enduring something and actually being okay are two entirely different things.

What strikes me most about the other person’s response is what they didn’t do. They didn’t say, “But are you really fine?” They didn’t interrogate the answer. They didn’t demand an explanation. They didn’t try to convince you that you weren’t fine.

Instead:

“I won’t question when you say ‘I am fine,’ but I am assuming there are times you might not be. No explanation needed.”

That is a remarkably gentle thing to say. It respects the boundary while leaving the door open. It says: I believe you when you tell me where you are. And I also know you are a human being, which means there are probably places where you aren’t okay. You don’t have to prove either one to me.

There is tremendous intimacy in that. Because sometimes the most loving response to someone’s pain isn’t tell me everything. Sometimes it is I know there is more. You don’t have to tell me right now. I am not going anywhere.

And I think that is where the conversation becomes bigger than the conversation itself.

There is a difference between being seen and being examined. Being examined feels like someone is trying to extract information from you: What’s wrong? How bad is it? What happened? What do you need? Why didn’t you tell me?

Being seen can be much quieter. I know you. I know you say you’re fine. I believe you. And I also know that sometimes you’re not. You don’t have to perform either version for me.

That kind of knowing can be profoundly unsettling when you are accustomed to being the person who manages things. The person who reassures everyone else. The person who figures out what comes next. The person who can make something painful into a joke, turn uncertainty into a plan, and say I’m fine because there simply isn’t another useful answer.

There is also something beautiful about the phrase “No explanation needed.”

It removes the transaction. I don’t have to disclose my pain in order to deserve concern. I don’t have to try to explain my desire to just be hidden. I don’t have to laugh off my anxiety. I don’t have to provide a compelling reason for being overwhelmed. I don’t have to produce evidence. I can simply be a person who sometimes isn’t fine.

That is the thought worth carrying forward from the last twenty-four hours: “Fine” doesn’t have to be a lie to be incomplete.

I can be fine and not fine at the same time. I can be functioning and exhausted. Grateful and scared. Hopeful and angry. Laughing and hurting. Managing and struggling. Okay right now and very much not okay about what comes next.

Human beings are inconveniently capable of holding contradictory truths simultaneously. This is one thing that I absolutely hate about being a person—the ability to have absolutely dichotomous positions ringing out as absolute truth in my heart.

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop saying I’m fine. Maybe the goal is to know that when I say it, there are people who can hear the period at the end of the sentence and the things I didn’t say after it. People who won’t force the door open. People who will simply leave it unlocked.

So, yeah, I am fine. I am always fine.

There is something almost absurd about how many different reasons the human body can invent for refusing to sleep.

Sometimes it is anxiety. The mind decides that midnight is an excellent time to review every conversation, every possibility, every mistake, every uncertainty, and every hypothetical catastrophe it can possibly manufacture. Things that seemed manageable at 2 p.m. become enormous at 2 a.m. The future feels closer. The past feels louder. And somehow the brain believes that if it just thinks about something long enough, it will eventually solve it.

Sometimes it is a bad dream. You wake up with your heart already racing, carrying the emotional residue of something that never actually happened. Your rational mind knows you are awake. Your body hasn’t quite received the memo. The room is dark, the house is quiet, and your nervous system is apparently preparing for an emergency that exists only in your sleep.

Sometimes it is excitement. Which feels unfair. You can be looking forward to something so much that your brain refuses to power down because apparently tomorrow is simply too important to wait for. Children understand this instinctively. Christmas Eve. Birthdays. Vacations. The first day of school. We grow older and somehow discover that adult excitement can be just as effective at destroying sleep, except now the exciting thing might be a phone call, an opportunity, an answer, a change, or a possibility that could actually alter the direction of your life.

And then there is apprehension. That peculiar space between I hope this works and what if it doesn’t?

Change is particularly good at producing that kind of sleeplessness. Even good change can be frightening. We talk about wanting things to change, but rarely acknowledge that change means surrendering the familiar. Even when the familiar is difficult, painful, or exhausting, at least we know its shape. The unknown has no edges. It gives the imagination an enormous amount of room to misbehave.

Then there is pain. Physical pain has no respect for bedtime. It doesn’t care that you have been exhausted all day. It doesn’t care that you have obligations tomorrow. It doesn’t care that you desperately need rest. It simply announces its presence and settles in.

And discomfort. The pillow is wrong. The blanket is wrong. The room is too hot. Now it is too cold. One foot is outside the blanket, which is somehow simultaneously necessary and unacceptable. The sheets feel strange. There is a tiny itch somewhere that you cannot locate. You turn over. Now the other side is wrong.bYou adjust the pillow. Now your neck is wrong.

Eventually you find yourself lying completely still, staring into the darkness, wondering how something as simple as sleeping became an engineering problem.

And beneath all of it, sometimes, is grief. The past has a way of visiting at night because there are fewer distractions. Things we successfully outrun during the day can catch us when everything gets quiet. Memories. People. Things we wish had happened differently. Things we wish we could change. Things we know we cannot change.

Nighttime has a strange relationship with memory. It can make yesterday feel impossibly close while tomorrow feels impossibly far away.

Then there is the future. What happens next What happens if it works? What happens if it doesn’t? What happens if everything changes What happens if nothing changes? What happens to the people we love? What happens to us?

There are questions for which there simply aren’t answers at midnight. And yet midnight is apparently when we most desperately want them.

Maybe that is one of the hardest things about sleeplessness: sometimes we aren’t actually trying to fall asleep. We are trying to feel safe enough to let go. We are trying to convince ourselves that tomorrow can wait until tomorrow.

That the problem doesn’t have to be solved tonight. That uncertainty can remain uncertainty for a few more hours. That the past cannot be rewritten at 3:17 in the morning. That the future does not require our supervision while we sleep. That our bodies are allowed to rest even when our minds haven’t figured everything out.

Maybe sleep isn’t always about achieving perfect peace. Maybe sometimes it is simply surrendering our need to have everything settled before we close our eyes.

There are nights when sleep comes easily, and there are nights when it has to be coaxed, negotiated with, chased, or accidentally stumbled into.

And perhaps on those nights, the goal isn’t to make ourselves sleep. Maybe the goal is simply to stop fighting the night. To breathe. To adjust the blanket. To accept that the temperature will never be exactly right. To let the thoughts come and go without following every one of them down its rabbit hole. To remind ourselves: I don’t have to figure this out right now.

Tomorrow will still be there. The past will still be the past. The future will still be the future. And for a few hours, perhaps, we are allowed to simply be a tired human being in a dark room, doing our best to rest in the middle of a life that is still unfolding.

There are nights when I don’t have words —
only a pulse that trembles with the ache of wanting God
to be close enough to touch the dark.
“Be near, O God,” I whisper,
not because You’ve gone anywhere,
but because I have.
I have wandered again —
into my own noise,
into the hollow rooms of fear and shame,
into the belief that silence means abandonment.

But You are here.
Even when I can’t feel the warmth,
even when Your name catches in my throat,
You are near enough
to hear my unspoken prayer
and hold what my faith has dropped.

This song — it feels like a cry from inside my ribs.
Like the Psalmist’s heart still breaking open
centuries later in my chest.
The words are a desperate reaching:
for mercy, for comfort, for home.
And the music —
it trembles like a confession,
a surrender I didn’t mean to make
but needed to.

“Be near, O God.”
Because distance feels like death,
and nearness feels like breath.
Because I have tried
to fill the space with noise,
to build ladders of goodness,
to climb my way back to You —
and every time I fail,
You simply come closer.

You do not shout from the heavens,
You whisper in the wounds.
You do not demand perfection,
You offer presence.
And that is somehow enough —
that the Holy can be so humanly close,
that the Infinite would bend low
just to be near me,
Again.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about justice because we tend to imagine it as a scale that must tip one direction or the other: judgment or mercy, consequences or compassion, boundaries or grace. But Christian theology refuses to let us separate them so neatly. Judgment and mercy are not opposites competing for control of justice. They are, in a very real sense, two sides of it.

Judgment says, This matters.
Mercy says, You matter.
Justice needs both.

Without judgment, mercy can become indifference. If nothing is ever named as wrong, if every harm is explained away, if forgiveness means pretending that damage did not happen, then mercy becomes another form of injustice. The person who has been harmed is essentially told, Your pain is less important than everyone else’s comfort.

But without mercy, judgment becomes punishment for punishment’s sake. It can become the satisfaction of being right rather than the work of making things right. Judgment can become a way of protecting ourselves from vulnerability: I have determined what you deserve, and therefore I no longer have to wrestle with your humanity.

And God seems unwilling to choose between the two.

Throughout Scripture, God judges. God names injustice. God confronts oppression. God is not endlessly permissive. The prophets are full of God’s anger at people who exploit, exclude, abuse, and neglect others. Jesus himself is hardly allergic to judgment. He overturns tables. He calls out hypocrisy. He tells difficult truths. He draws lines.

And yet the same God who judges is relentlessly merciful.

The God of Scripture is constantly doing something that feels almost impossible to us: holding people accountable without reducing them to the worst thing they have done.

That is much harder than either judgment or mercy by itself.

Maybe that is part of what makes Christian discipleship so difficult. We are not simply called to be nice. We are called to become people capable of both truth and grace.

And I find myself wondering where the line is. When is a boundary an act of justice, and when is it an act of judgment? When am I protecting something sacred, and when am I simply protecting myself? When does refusing access to someone become wisdom? When does it become resentment? When does mercy mean leaving the door open? When does leaving the door open simply give someone permission to keep hurting me?

These questions are particularly difficult because Christians have sometimes been taught that mercy means having no boundaries. We are told to forgive seventy times seven, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies, to be gracious, to give people another chance.

All of that is deeply Christian. But nowhere does Jesus say that loving someone requires allowing them unlimited access to you.

Mercy does not require the removal of boundaries.

Sometimes the most merciful thing we can do is establish a boundary because boundaries tell the truth. This behavior is not acceptable. This relationship cannot continue in this form. You cannot keep hurting me and call it love.

That can be an act of mercy toward the person being harmed. It can also be an act of mercy toward the person causing harm, because consequences sometimes tell us what explanations and excuses never can. And perhaps this is where justice becomes more complicated than simply deciding who is right.

Justice asks not only, What did you do? It also asks, What happened to you? Who was harmed? What needs to be repaired? What would make things more whole? What does accountability look like? What does restoration require?

Sometimes justice means consequences. Sometimes it means reconciliation. Sometimes it means distance. Sometimes it means forgiveness. Sometimes it means saying, I forgive you, but I cannot trust you.

One of the hardest lessons is that those statements are not contradictory. Because forgiveness is not the same thing as restored trust. Mercy is not the same thing as access. Grace is not the same thing as pretending nothing happened. And judgment is not necessarily condemnation.

That last distinction matters enormously. There is a difference between saying, What happened was wrong, and saying, You are irredeemably wrong. Christian judgment should be capable of naming the first without claiming ownership of the second.

Because Christians are not God. We do not know every motivation. We do not see every wound. We do not understand every circumstance. We rarely even know the whole story. Which makes judgment dangerous. But mercy can also be dangerous when we misunderstand it.

I think I struggle with mercy in a particularly strange way: I find it much easier to understand judgment when I am the one who deserves it. There is something almost reassuring about judgment when I know I have failed. Judgment creates a predictable equation: I did this, therefore I deserve that. There is something orderly about it.

Mercy is much harder. Mercy interrupts the equation. Mercy says, Yes, you did this. Yes, it mattered. Yes, there are consequences. And still, you are not beyond love. That can be almost impossible to believe when the judgment feels obvious. Especially when I have already judged myself.

I can accept a God who says, You made a mistake. I struggle more with a God who says, And I still love you. I can understand consequences. I have a harder time understanding grace. Judgment feels earned. Mercy feels like a gift. And gifts are harder to receive when we have spent a lifetime believing that love has to be earned.

Jesus’ command to love our enemies is so radical. Christianity asks us to resist the temptation to make ourselves the judge of someone’s entire story. But Jesus does not ask us to become doormats. He asks us to become people who can hold truth and compassion simultaneously.

Maybe that is what it means to reflect the character of God: not choosing judgment over mercy or mercy over judgment, but learning to carry both. To say— This was wrong. And— You are still beloved.

This boundary is necessary— And I do not wish you harm. I cannot continue this relationship as it is— And I hope you become whole. You are accountable for what you did— And you are more than what you did.

Maybe the deepest work of justice is not deciding who deserves mercy. Maybe, just maybe, it is recognizing that mercy was never about deserving it in the first place. And maybe that is why receiving mercy can be harder than receiving judgment.

Judgment confirms what we already believe about ourselves. Mercy asks us to believe something different. It asks us to believe that God’s final word over us is not necessarily the worst thing we have done, the worst thing that has happened to us, the ways we have failed, or even the ways other people have judged us. It asks us to believe that justice can tell the truth about us without abandoning us to that truth.

God does not have to choose between judgment and mercy.

God holds them together. The wrong is named. The wound is seen. The sinner is not discarded. The boundary does not have to disappear. The consequence does not have to become condemnation. And mercy does not erase justice.

It completes it.

Which leaves me with a question I suspect I will keep wrestling with: Can I learn to extend the kind of mercy that does not deny justice—and receive the kind of mercy that does not require me to earn my way back into God’s love?

There is something strange about walking through illness openly.

On one hand, there is an incredible gift in not having to pretend. I can say, “This is hard.” I can admit that I am afraid. I can talk about the exhaustion, the uncertainty, the appointments, the bad days, the disappointment, and the questions that don’t have answers. I can tell people when I am hopeful and when I am absolutely not. I can let people see something of the reality instead of carefully constructing a version of myself that is easier for everyone else to look at.

But openness has its own vulnerability.

When you let people walk beside you through something this enormous, you don’t just share the struggle. You also share the hope. And sometimes I wonder if that makes hope feel like a promise.

I have told people about treatments with excitement. I have shared possibilities that seemed like answers. I have allowed myself to believe that maybe this will be the thing that changes everything. And then there is the quiet fear that comes afterward: What if it doesn’t work?

What if I disappoint everyone?

It is a strange kind of pressure to carry when people love you. I know that isn’t what they are asking of me. I know the people who support me aren’t waiting for me to succeed at being sick. They aren’t measuring my worth by scan results or treatment responses. They don’t love me more if I get better. They love me because I am me.

And still, sometimes I feel like I am carrying the responsibility of everyone’s hope along with my own.

The truth is that none of this comes with guarantees. Treatment can manage. It can slow things down. It can buy time. It can relieve symptoms. It can give me another season, another month, another birthday, another ordinary week. But management is not the same thing as a cure. There is a particular kind of grief in understanding that distinction.

I want to be positive. I really do. I want to be the person who says, “We’re going to keep fighting,” and means it. I want to celebrate every possibility. I want to believe every promising development is the beginning of something better. I want to wake up every morning determined to make the most of whatever time I have.

But sometimes positivity is simply not available to me. Sometimes the most honest thing I can say is, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know if this treatment will work. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know how much time there is. I don’t know whether I will feel hopeful tomorrow. And somehow, I am learning that honesty does not make me hopeless… it makes me feel guilty about talking about it.

There is a difference between refusing to give up and pretending I am not afraid. I can be hopeful and terrified at the same time. I can be grateful and angry. I can laugh with my friends and cry when they leave. I can make plans for the future while knowing the future is not promised to me. I can believe that today is worth living fully without pretending that tomorrow doesn’t scare me.

Is this what it means to walk through illness openly?

Sometimes I need to say that I am doing okay. Sometimes I need to say that I am not. Sometimes I need encouragement. Sometimes I need someone to sit beside me without trying to encourage me at all.

And sometimes I need to be allowed to be completely ordinary. I need to talk about something stupid. I need to laugh until my stomach hurts. I need to complain about an inconvenient situation or a ridiculous television commercial or something else that has absolutely nothing to do with cancer.

Because I am still a whole person.

Illness is part of my life, but it is not the entirety of my life. There is another strange contradiction here, too: knowing that I am surrounded by people who care about me and still feeling profoundly lonely. Those two things can exist together.

I can know that people are praying for me, checking on me, loving me, encouraging me, and willing to help—and still experience a loneliness that nobody else can quite enter.

There are parts of this that belong only to me.

Nobody else feels my body from the inside. Nobody else sits in my appointments with the same questions. Nobody else lies awake with my particular fears. Nobody else has to live inside the uncertainty of my future.

That doesn’t mean I am unsupported. It means that being supported and being lonely are not opposites.

Sometimes the loneliness comes from knowing that the people I love cannot fix this for me, and I don’t want them to try to. I don’t need someone to promise me that everything will be okay when neither of us knows that it will be. I don’t need someone to manufacture certainty where there isn’t any.

I don’t know what the next treatment will bring. I don’t know which possibilities will become realities and which will quietly disappear. I don’t know how many times I will have to gather myself up and try again. I have a terminal illness; everything I do will still fall short of a cure.

I do know this: I don’t want to spend whatever time I have pretending. I want to walk through this honestly. I want to tell the truth about how hard it is, but also the truth about how beautiful life can still be. I want to acknowledge the fear without allowing it to erase the joy. I want to accept help without believing that needing it makes me weak. I want to celebrate hope without turning it into a guarantee.

And when something doesn’t work, I want to remember that it wasn’t my failure. I did not disappoint anyone because my body didn’t respond the way we hoped it would. I am not responsible for making my illness have a happy ending. I am only responsible for being honest about where I am, receiving the love that is offered, and continuing to live as fully and authentically as I can.

This is what hope in my life looks like now. Not certainty. Not optimism. Not believing that everything will work out exactly the way I want. I am simply refusing to let uncertainty have the final word about how I live today.

And maybe continuing to walk through illness openly means allowing people to see all of it—the hope and the fear, the gratitude and the grief, the laughter and the loneliness, the courage and the exhaustion. Not because I have figured out how this story ends, but because, for as long as I am here, I don’t want to hide while I am living it.

When I sit at my desk, I can hear a beep. It is not constant. But it does come in sets. I have asked Derek if he can hear it, and he looks at me like I have lost my marbles. I have never heard it while Lu is home, so she has escaped this insanity… for now.

I swear it is some sort of psychological torture. I cannot hear it in the den— ten feet away. I can barely hear it in bed— five feet away. It only seems to occur between 8am and 2pm. But let me tell you what this experience feels like at least once a week.

It starts innocently enough. Beep. I stop. You look around. Nothing.

Then, because I am a semi-reasonable adult with absolutely no reason to distrust your own ears, you assume there must be an explanation. Microwave? Nope. Smoke detector? Silent. Phone? No notification. A car? Nothing close enough to hear. Refrigerator? Apparently also participating in the conspiracy.

Beep. I freeze again.

Now I am no longer casually existing in your home. I am conducting an investigation.

I walk from room to room like a detective in a very low-budget crime drama. “What was that?” Nobody answers.

I ask another person, “Did you hear that?” He responds just like the week before, eyes rolling, “No.”

Interesting. Beep. I stare at them. He stares at me.

At this point, he has begun to wonder whether you are hearing things. I have begun to wonder whether he can hear things at all. Suddenly, this is no longer about a beep. This is about credibility. Specifically, MY credibility.

I start identifying potential suspects. The smoke detector: suspicious. The thermostat: questionable. The refrigerator: definitely capable of something. The washer and dryer: known repeat offenders. The television: always beeping about something. Some mysterious electronic device you bought in 2017 and have not thought about since: prime suspect.

And then comes the most humiliating part: trying to locate a sound that may not actually exist.

I stand completely still. I hold my breath. I wait. Nothing… maybe I am imagining things. Maybe my ears are playing tricks on me. Maybe I am crazy.

You move three feet. Beep. “AH-HA!” I spin around. Silence.

Now I am angry. I begin thinking about unplugging things. “Fine! If one of you wants to beep, you are all going down.” I am thinking about inanimate objects as if they care about being unplugged… I am going crazy.

Then it hits me: what if the beep is actually outside? I fling open the side door… NOTHING to hear here.

I have essentially searched the whole house and have no answers. I have accused the outside with no luck. And I am faced with the potential humiliation of someone coming across me like this and asking, “What are you doing?”

“I heard a beep.”

“What beep?”

I pause just a little too long. “The beep.”

“What beep?”

And there it is. The moment when you realize you have entered the final stage of this experience: arguing with another human being about an imaginary noise. Or even worse, arguing with myself over the beep.

Eventually, I stop looking. I return to whatever I was doing. I relax. I begin to accept that perhaps it was nothing.

And then, from somewhere deep within the walls: Beep. I slowly turn my head. “Oh, absolutely not.”

It’s time to move my desk. It is the only logical solution at this point.

The Bible often talks about it as though it is obviously a good thing—as though enduring hardship automatically makes us stronger, wiser, better, or more faithful.

And sometimes, when you are exhausted, that message can feel almost insulting.

The Bible has a lot to say about perseverance. James says, “the testing of your faith produces perseverance,” and Paul talks about suffering producing endurance, character, and hope. Hebrews tells us to “run with perseverance the race marked out for us.” Romans tells us to “be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” Over and over again, Scripture seems to say: Keep going. Don’t give up. Endure.

And honestly?

I hate it.

Because perseverance sounds beautiful when you’re standing at the beginning of something hard. It sounds noble when you’re talking about somebody else’s struggle. It makes for wonderful sermons and inspirational wall art and Bible studies.

But perseverance feels very different when you are the one who has been persevering for years.

There is a point where “keep going” stops sounding encouraging and starts sounding like, How much more am I supposed to take?

I don’t want another lesson in perseverance. I don’t want another opportunity to demonstrate faithfulness through suffering. I don’t want my pain to keep producing character. I don’t want to be told that this is making me stronger. Sometimes I don’t want to be stronger. Sometimes I want things to be easier.

And I think that’s an important distinction because the Bible itself doesn’t actually portray perseverance as cheerful, effortless endurance. Biblical perseverance is not pretending that everything is fine. It isn’t smiling through suffering because you’re afraid that admitting you’re tired means you’ve failed God.

Look at Jesus. In Gethsemane, Jesus didn’t say, “I’m excited about the opportunity to persevere.” He said, essentially, “I don’t want this.” He was distressed. He was overwhelmed. He asked for the cup to be taken from him. He prayed again and again. He sweated. He wept. He was afraid. And then he kept going.

That’s a very different picture of perseverance. Perseverance isn’t necessarily wanting to continue. Sometimes perseverance is continuing while desperately wishing you didn’t have to. Sometimes faith isn’t saying, “I can do this.” Sometimes faith is saying, “God, I absolutely cannot do this, so you’re going to have to carry me.”

And maybe that’s why I hate perseverance. Because perseverance reminds me that there is still something in front of me— Another appointment. Another decision. Another morning. Another hard conversation. Another day of being tired. Another day of figuring out how to live inside circumstances I never would have chosen.

Something is embarrassing about being praised for surviving something you desperately wish you had never had to survive. People say, “You’re so strong.” And sometimes I want to scream, “I didn’t ask to be strong.”

I didn’t choose this particular curriculum of endurance. I didn’t sign up for the spiritual growth opportunity. I didn’t volunteer to become an expert at surviving. And yet Scripture keeps whispering: persevere.

But maybe the invitation isn’t actually, “Try harder.” Maybe it is, “Don’t let go.”

Those are different things. Perseverance in Scripture isn’t always about producing more strength from inside ourselves. Sometimes it is about continuing to reach for God when we have absolutely nothing left to give.

The Greek word often translated as perseverance or endurance—hypomonē—carries the idea of remaining, staying under, enduring rather than running away. And that can be both beautiful and brutally difficult.

Because sometimes all I can do is remain. I can’t conquer the mountain. I can’t find the lesson. I can’t manufacture hope. I can’t summon gratitude. I can’t turn suffering into something beautiful.

I can just remain— Still here. Still breathing. Still praying, even when the prayer is only, “Help.” Still reaching toward God, even when I don’t feel God. Still choosing tomorrow, even when tomorrow feels like an enormous amount to ask of me.

Maybe that counts. Maybe perseverance doesn’t have to look heroic. Maybe sometimes perseverance looks like getting out of bed. Maybe it looks like accepting help. Maybe it looks like admitting you’re angry. Maybe it looks like crying through church. Maybe it looks like saying, “I don’t understand why this is happening.”Maybe it looks like refusing to pretend that suffering is good simply because God can bring good out of it.

This is the part only of perseverance I can live with: I don’t have to love the road to keep walking it.

I don’t have to call it beautiful. I don’t have to be grateful for every hard thing. I don’t have to turn my suffering into a testimony while I’m still in the middle of it. I don’t even have to feel particularly faithful.

I just have to remain. And when I can’t remain on my own, I can let God hold me there.

Because perhaps the deepest promise of biblical perseverance isn’t that I will eventually become strong enough to carry everything. It’s that I was never meant to carry everything alone.

Honestly, even after writing all this about perseverance, I still hate it.

I don’t have to love it. Maybe I just have to trust that when I finally run out of it, God hasn’t.

Now, if I could just come up with a couple of really good examples of perseverance to complete my thought task…

I think “What makes you happy?” is surprisingly difficult to answer because it sounds like such a simple question, but it actually asks us to stop and pay attention to ourselves in a way we aren’t always accustomed to doing. It is often much easier to identify what hurts, what we’re worried about, what needs to be fixed, what we’re afraid of, or what we’re responsible for than it is to identify what simply brings us happiness. Our brains are remarkably good at keeping track of problems and much less practiced at keeping an inventory of delight.

I also think we sometimes make happiness far more complicated than it needs to be. We expect an answer to sound profound: My friends make me happy. My faith makes me happy. Traveling makes me happy. But sometimes happiness is much smaller and quieter than that. Maybe it is coffee in the morning, a song that hits exactly right, laughing until your stomach hurts, sitting outside, watching a sunset, being near water, finding the perfect sentence while writing, or having a conversation with someone where you don’t have to explain every part of yourself. Those moments may not feel like some giant, unmistakable emotion called HAPPINESS. Sometimes they are simply moments when something inside you relaxes and thinks, Oh. This is nice.

There can also be something uncomfortable about admitting what makes us happy, especially when life is difficult. When we’re carrying grief, fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, or circumstances that are much bigger than us, happiness can almost feel frivolous. It can seem easier to talk about what we need than what we enjoy. We can explain what is wrong with remarkable precision, but ask us what makes us happy and suddenly we’re staring at the ceiling like we’ve been given an essay question we didn’t study for. There can even be guilt attached to it, as though we need to justify our happiness by making sure it is productive, meaningful, healthy, or useful to someone else. But sometimes something makes us happy simply because it makes us happy. It doesn’t have to accomplish anything.

Maybe that’s why “What makes you happy?” isn’t actually the best question. Maybe the better question is, “When do you feel most like yourself?” Or, “What makes you forget, even briefly, that life is hard?” Or perhaps the simplest one: “What are the moments when you think, ‘I really like being alive right now’?” Those questions seem to leave more room for the complicated, ordinary, imperfect kinds of happiness we actually experience.

Because happiness isn’t always the opposite of sadness. Sometimes you can be grieving and laughing at the same time. You can be scared and still be delighted by a beautiful sky. You can be exhausted and still find something hilarious. You can know life is incredibly hard and still have a moment where everything feels strangely, wonderfully right. Maybe happiness isn’t a permanent state we arrive at. Maybe it is simply those little interruptions in the heaviness—the moments when pain isn’t the only thing you can feel, and you remember that there are still things in this life that you genuinely, deeply love.

Long story short, here are some things that I am sure make me happy, like myself, at peace, or have a sense of well-being:

• Reading. It is one of the simplest pleasures life has to offer. And now that Libby exists… the books, newspapers, and magazines are endless. I can always collect more information.

• Being understood without having to explain myself. I love when someone sees the complicated version of me—the funny and sad, spiritual and skeptical, exhausted and hopeful—and doesn’t ask me to simplify it or compartmentalize it. I am a complex person. And I am not sorry.

• Making people laugh. Humor is my favorite form of survival. I like that I can find the ridiculousness in CVS checkout lines, unmade beds, socks with evil toe seams, and the general absurdity of being a human being. Making someone laugh makes me feel useful in a particularly satisfying way.

• Pokemon. It makes me happy to look at cards, think about cards. Search for cards. Draw Pokemon. Sort Pokemon. Play PokemonGo. You get the point.

• Writing. Not just writing well, but finding the sentence that finally says the thing I’ve been carrying around. I take a very satisfied deep breath when something inside you goes from “I don’t know how to explain this” to “YES. That’s exactly it.”

• Deep conversations. Small talk probably has limited nutritional value for me. Give me a conversation about God, grief, identity, love, church, death, hope, trauma, meaning, or why humans behave like complete lunatics in pharmacies, and I am MUCH more interested.

• Nature. I think there’s something different that happens to me around water, mountains, sandstone, dunes, sunsets, and sunrises. I don’t have to perform there. I can simply notice. And I’ve talked about finding God in those places in a way that sounds much more like sanctuary than religion-as-an-activity.

  • My hammock. Subcategory number one— my hammock holds a very special place in my heart. A place of nearly total relaxation and escape from the world. It is a place where I almost always feel at peace.

  • Camp Garry. If you know, you know. How do I even put this into words? It is a liminal space where the magic and wonder of the supernatural touch earth. It is a place to look out at trees, to close your eyes and breathe deeply, to let time pass how it will, to take a trip down to look at the water, a place to simply be exactly who I am… nothing more and nothing less. It is a place of no expectation and the weight of glory at the same time. It is a place where time is compressed and stands still simultaneously. It is a place where my brain can shut off and be more active than ever, but not in an oppressive way.

• Music that punches straight through your defenses. I am someone who doesn’t merely listen to a song—I interrogate it, feel it, connect it to my own life, and occasionally let it completely wreck me in church. The songs that make me happiest probably aren’t necessarily cheerful songs. They’re the ones that make me feel seen. My favorite band (The Gaithers) is not something I “should” like as an elder millennial. But they make me happy. I know that their music is objectively not good in so many ways and their theology doesn’t necessarily reflect my own, but dang(!) there is something about turning the Gaithers on that will change my day.

• Church at its best. Not the programming, pressure, clocks, procedures, or expectations I’ve talked about in past writing—but the moments when church becomes people loving each other, music fills the room, somebody tells the truth, and God feels close.

• Being needed without being used. There’s an important distinction there. I think helping people, mentoring people, writing for people, creating things for people, and showing up for people gives me genuine joy. I strongly desire to make other people’s lives a little better.

• A sweet treat. I feel just a bit giddy when there is ice cream available for general consumption. Or a homemade chocolate chip cookie. Or cheesecake. I was never meant to be thin…

• People I can be weird with. One of my happiest environments is somewhere I don’t have to monitor myself. I can make the inappropriate joke, cry five minutes later, talk theology, make a ridiculous observation, and nobody thinks these things are contradictory.

• Small ordinary comforts. A good cup of coffee. A really good meal. A clean bed. A funny text. A beautiful sky. Finding the perfect song. Someone bringing me something without being asked. Taco Bell (don’t judge me). A really good shower. Laughing until your stomach hurts. Those tiny things seem to matter to me more than grand gestures sometimes.

• Feeling hopeful. Not fake optimism. Real possibility. I seem particularly energized by the feeling that there might still be something ahead—a treatment possibility, a writing opportunity, a trip, a meaningful project, another birthday, another beautiful day. Hope seems to give you an almost physical adrenaline rush. I said several times this weekend that I felt recklessly hopeful… and there is something that feels really good about that.

• Being loved without having to earn it. I think this one may be deeper than the others. There seems to be a profound happiness in simply being someone’s real friend—being remembered, checked on, hugged, chosen, welcomed, or cared for when I am not particularly productive or entertaining.

At this age, I have somehow reached the point in life where I can have serious conversations about mortgages, medical appointments, retirement accounts, and the general existential crisis of middle age… and then immediately become emotionally invested in whether I can find a Quaxly rare art, holo, or cosmic card just by chance.

And honestly? I have no regrets.

There is something delightfully ridiculous about being a fully grown adult and having favorite Pokémon. Not favorite in the casual, “Oh, Pikachu is cute” sort of way. No. I have favorites. I have opinions. I have preferences. I have apparently developed a collection strategy.

Quaxly has my heart. There is just something about that ridiculous little duck with the impeccable blue hair. Quaxly looks like a Pokémon who has somewhere important to be and is mildly disappointed that the rest of us aren’t ready yet. He has the energy of a tiny aquatic gentleman who has a 9:00 appointment and would like everyone to please get organized.

Then there is Shinx. Shinx is different. Shinx is tiny, electric, adorable, and looks like it could simultaneously destroy your entire day and then demand a snack. Which, frankly, feels relatable.

So naturally, I collect both (along with all the rest, but I seek these two— and their evolutions out).

Because apparently at 42, this is who I am now: an adult wandering through stores scanning shelves for tiny fictional creatures on collectable cards while thinking, “I don’t need this, but I gotta catch ‘em all.”

The Eeveelutions are where things get dangerous. I tell myself I don’t have an Eevee problem.

This is a lie.

I have a perfectly reasonable interest in Eevee and its many evolutionary possibilities. There is a distinction. Eevee is basically the Pokémon equivalent of standing in front of a Cheesecake Factory menu and realizing you have an unreasonable number of choices. Do you want water? Fire? Electricity? Psychic powers? Ice? Darkness? Flowers? A mysterious fairy situation?

WHY NOT ALL OF THEM?

And so begins the slippery slope. One Eeveelution becomes two. Two becomes three. Suddenly I’m looking at a $4 card with an Umbreon on it, thinking, “Well, technically I don’t have this Umbreon version.”

This is how it happens. This is how perfectly respectable adults end up with Pokémon cards in multiple places in their bedroom.

And you know what? There are far worse things to be obsessed with.

At 42, I have learned that adulthood is largely an elaborate exercise in pretending you know what you’re doing. We pay bills, make appointments, remember passwords, buy groceries, and occasionally stare blankly into the refrigerator wondering how we got here.

So what if collecting tiny Pokémon brings me a little joy? Give me the Quaxly. Give me the Shinx. Give me the Eeveelutions.

I have survived enough actual adult problems to earn the right to spend an unreasonable amount of time being delighted by a tiny fictional duck. Besides, maybe this is one of the secrets of growing older: You don’t necessarily become less ridiculous.

Some people collect wine. Some people collect antiques. Some people collect expensive handbags. I collect brightly colored cards of fictional animals who have elemental powers.

And honestly? Quaxly would probably be offended if I didn’t.

So here I am. Forty-two years old. Still catching Pokémon. Still getting disproportionately excited when I find a Shinx. Still maintaining what I insist is a completely reasonable relationship with the Eeveelutions. And still absolutely willing to defend the life choices that brought me here.

Because adulthood is hard. Bills are annoying. Bodies are weird. The future is uncertain. But somewhere out there, a tiny blue-haired duck is waiting to make my day.

Gotta catch ’em all? At this point, apparently I have taken that personally.

I went to the pharmacy recently for what can only be described as the holy trinity of barely holding it together: an anti-anxiety prescription, Tums, and melatonin.

Which feels like a fairly accurate summary of my life. I need medication to calm my anxiety, medication to calm my stomach after my anxiety has upset it, and medication to make me sleep after worrying about both of those things.

Honestly, I wasn’t shopping. I was assembling a survival kit.

And because nothing about going to a pharmacy is ever simple, I was greeted by the modern miracle of digital check-in.

You know the routine. You walk up to the little kiosk, and it asks you approximately 47 questions:

• “Are you here for the pharmacy?” Yes.

• “Are you picking up a prescription?” Yes.

• “Are you a human being?” Increasingly uncertain, but yes.

• “Would you like to receive your receipt digitally?” Sure.

• “Would you like to update your communication preferences?” No.

• “Would you like to save 37 cents by joining our rewards program?” I have levels of anxiety that are indescribable, and you are trying to get me to commit to a loyalty program!? No.

After successfully completing the digital check-in, the screen informs me: Please see a pharmacy associate.

Ah. Ok. Of course. Because apparently digital check-in is just the pharmacy’s version of an icebreaker. It doesn’t actually check you in. It merely confirms that you can operate a touchscreen before requiring you to interact with a human.

So now I stand in line. And this is where CVS really becomes an anthropological study.

There is always the person who has apparently been waiting since 1997.

They are standing at the counter with a stack of papers, three prescription bottles, a coupon, a driver’s license, and the determined expression of someone who intends to understand every transaction that has ever occurred in the history of CVS.

There is the person who is furious about their insurance. Not mildly annoyed. FURIOUS. You can hear them explaining to the pharmacy technician that their insurance covered this medication last month, and therefore, by the laws of both God and common sense, it should cover it today. The pharmacy technician has clearly heard this exact argument 900 times and has developed the thousand-yard stare of someone who has seen things.

There is the person who is picking up a prescription for someone else and has absolutely no idea what they are doing. “What is the patient’s date of birth?” Silence. “What is their last name?” More silence. “Do you have their ID?” “I thought you had it.” Ma’am, this is not an escape room.

There is also the person who has decided the pharmacy counter is the perfect place to begin an entire medical history. “Yes, I’ve been having this cough for about six months, and then last week I started getting this rash, and my doctor said—” Sir, there are twelve people behind you. This is a pharmacy, not a podcast.

And then there is me. Standing there waiting for my anti-anxiety medication, Tums, and melatonin, wondering if perhaps I should just move into the CVS because apparently I am going to be spending enough time here to justify paying rent.

Eventually, I make it to the counter.

The technician asks for my name. I give it. Date of birth. I give it. Address. I give it. They pull up my prescriptions. “Do you have a copay?” Yes. Of course I have a copay. The universe would never allow me to leave without paying something.

And then comes the most confusing part. “Would you like to use the card on file?” Yes. “Okay, I’ll need your card.” But... You just said you had my card. This is the sort of interaction that makes me understand why people eventually just stare blankly at the ceiling in public.

Finally, transaction complete. I walk away with my tiny bag containing three completely unrelated medications that, taken together, tell a remarkably comprehensive story about my life.

Something for anxiety. Something for my stomach. Something for sleep. If someone found that bag without knowing me, they could probably reconstruct the entire plot.

Honestly, yesterday I walked out of CVS laughing. Because pharmacies are one of those places where we have somehow managed to combine cutting-edge technology with aggressively inefficient human interaction. We can send a prescription electronically from a doctor’s office. We can get an automated text message telling us our prescription is ready. We can check ourselves in digitally. We can scan our rewards card from our phone. We can pay electronically. And yet, somehow, I still have to stand in a line behind a person arguing about their insurance company while another person explains their six-month cough to the pharmacist.

This is progress. Apparently.

Maybe that’s what pharmacies really are. Little reminders that adulthood sometimes just feels like I am walking around collecting medications for problems caused by other medications, waiting in lines, answering the same questions repeatedly, and trying to remember why you walked into the store in the first place.

And sometimes you leave with exactly what you came for. Anti-anxiety medication. Tums. Melatonin. Three bottles of pharmaceutical evidence that you’re doing your very best.

That’s enough. At least until CVS texts me again to tell me my prescription is ready. Which I will already have picked up, but apparently I enjoy being reminded.

Not because you have become a more disciplined person. Not because you have discovered the life-changing benefits of starting your day with a tidy bedroom. Not because some motivational speaker on the internet convinced you that making your bed is the first step toward becoming a successful human being.

No. I make my bed now because I have to look at it.

This is apparently where my character development has led me.

As a child, I never made my bed because it wasn’t expected of me. Nobody came into my room demanding military-grade bedding. The bed was where I slept, and once I got out of it, it was no longer my problem. This seemed perfectly reasonable. Also, isn’t it just a waste of time if you are going to get back into bed at the end of the day? It just doesn’t make sense.

Then came college, when I discovered that I could live in a room with approximately seventeen things on the floor and somehow consider it a functional environment. Making the bed seemed especially ridiculous when there were papers, clothes, books, shoes, and God knows what else competing for visual attention. Why spend valuable time making a bed when the entire room was clearly committed to the aesthetic of “a raccoon lives here but pays tuition”?

Then I became a single adult. I still didn’t really make the bed. Why would I? Nobody was coming into my bedroom. Nobody was inspecting my sheets. Nobody was sitting in there judging the decorative arrangement of my pillows. The bed could remain exactly as I had abandoned it because, frankly, I was the only one who knew.

And if no one sees it, does an unmade bed technically exist? Philosophy.

Then I got married. Surely this would be the point when I became a responsible bed-making adult. Nope.

I was usually the first one out of bed. Which meant my spouse was still sleeping peacefully while I wandered off to start my day, leaving behind whatever spectacular evidence of nighttime had occurred. By the time anyone else was awake, I had already mentally moved on.

The bed was yesterday’s problem.

But now? Now my bedroom is directly off the den. And suddenly, I have become the victim of a floor plan.

I can see my bed from the couch. I can see it from the chair. I can see it when I’m watching television. I can see it when I’m getting something from the kitchen. I can see it when I’m doing absolutely nothing.

And apparently, my brain has decided that this is unacceptable. An unmade bed used to be a private matter between me, my mattress, and whatever shame I was willing to tolerate.

Now it is basically a giant billboard in my living space advertising: WELCOME. I HAVE GIVEN UP.

So I make the bed. Every morning. Not beautifully. Not with the precision of someone who owns decorative shams and understands what a bed runner is for. I am not suddenly the person who folds the corners of the sheets with mathematical accuracy.

But I pull up the quilt. I straighten the pillows. I make it look like a person lives here who has at least some vague understanding of civilization.

And honestly, it makes me laugh.

Because after all these years, after childhood bedrooms and college apartments and single-adult independence and marriage, the thing that finally convinced me to make my bed wasn’t discipline.

It wasn’t maturity. It wasn’t productivity. It wasn’t Pinterest.

It was visibility.

I finally became a bed-making person because my bed was suddenly in my line of sight all day, and apparently I cannot tolerate looking at my own mess anymore.

Maybe that’s adulthood.

You don’t necessarily become more responsible. Furniture is arranged in a way that forces you to confront your choices.

And maybe there is something deeper in that, too. Sometimes the smallest things become strangely important when life gets complicated. Making the bed doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t change circumstances. It doesn’t make tomorrow easier. It doesn’t accomplish anything particularly impressive.

But there is something satisfying about taking one small, completely manageable piece of the world and putting it back in order. Especially when the rest of life feels decidedly less cooperative.

So yes, I make my bed now (mostly begrudgingly). Not because I have evolved into a person who always makes their bed. Let’s not get carried away.

I make my bed because I have a direct line of sight to it, and apparently I am not emotionally prepared to spend the entire day being irritated by my own bedding.

This is growth.

Petty, practical, furniture-induced growth (hilariously stupid growth), but growth nonetheless.

After months of waiting. Months of uncertainty. Months of “we’ll see,” “there aren’t many options,” “let’s hope this works,” and “I’m sorry,” the phone rang.

Baltimore. I can go. I can receive the treatment—not the 50/50 of a double-blind trial. I GET MEDICINE!

For just a few seconds, everything else disappeared. I don’t remember the next couple of minutes because my brain immediately turned into confetti.

I wanted to tell everyone. I wanted to call people, text people, shout it from the rooftops. I think I managed a coherent sentence or two before dissolving into something between laughter and tears. People who have walked this road with me know that these moments have been painfully rare. Cancer has a way of conditioning you to brace for disappointment. Every scan, every appointment, every phone call trains your nervous system to expect bad news.

So when good news finally arrives... Your body doesn’t know what to do with it.

Mine apparently chose adrenaline. It felt like someone had plugged me directly into a power outlet. My heart raced. My mind sprinted ahead six months and then a year. I started mentally packing bags, mapping routes, making lists, imagining possibilities I had almost stopped allowing myself to imagine.

There was a treatment. A real one. Not a miracle cure. Not false hope. Not something someone found in a Facebook comment section. An actual option.

After living in a season where so many conversations seemed to end with “there isn’t much else we can do,” hearing “yes” felt almost foreign.

Hope can be surprisingly disorienting when you’ve grown accustomed to survival mode.

I made phone calls to celebrate with people. I text people who would want to know.

Then… I had to lie down. Not because I wanted to. Because apparently that’s how my body celebrates life-changing news.

It turns out the adrenaline wears off. Quite dramatically, actually.

It’s almost comical how the human body works. One minute you’re mentally climbing mountains, looking at flights, and planning your trips and how many crabcakes are healthy to eat in the 24-48 hours you plan to be in Maryland. The next minute you’re just lying there like a blob with your phone still in your hand.

My body looked at all my excitement and simply said, “Congratulations. Now we’re exhausted.”

Honestly, that’s been one of the funniest parts of this whole experience.

Life has robbed me of the ability to respond to exciting news the way I used to. Years ago I would have gone out to celebrate, stayed up too late talking about the future, maybe started packing immediately.

Now I receive potentially life-changing news and need a snack and a rest.

It’s objectively ridiculous. And somehow, wonderfully human.

There is another irony I can’t help but laugh at. For months I’ve been trying to convince my body to cooperate with ordinary life—showers, grocery stores, walking across the room without negotiating terms and conditions. Now I’m preparing for repeated trips to Baltimore.

Life has a strange sense of humor.

The same body that argues with me over unloading the dishwasher is apparently about to become a frequent traveler. If that’s not proof that none of us are really in control, I don’t know what is.

But underneath the laughter is something much quieter.

Gratitude. Gratitude for physicians who don’t give up. Gratitude for researchers who devoted years—decades—to creating treatments that once seemed impossible. Gratitude for friends who have refused to stop believing there might still be another door to open. Gratitude for every person who has prayed, donated, encouraged, driven, checked in, or simply sat beside me in the uncertainty.

None of us arrive at hope alone. This opportunity belongs to an entire community.

It also comes with reality. Treatment means travel. Travel means expenses. It means long days, unfamiliar hospital rooms, airports, hotels, waiting rooms, needles, side effects, and all the complicated emotions that accompany another chapter in a story I never asked to write.

Hope doesn’t erase hardship.

Sometimes it simply gives hardship a destination. Baltimore isn’t just a city on the map anymore. It’s possibility. It’s the next faithful step. It’s evidence that even when one chapter seems to be closing, another one can unexpectedly begin.

I don’t know exactly what waits for me there. I know this treatment isn’t guaranteed to work. I know there are no promises. But after months of feeling like every path was narrowing, I have somewhere to go.

Sometimes hope isn’t certainty. Sometimes hope is simply having a plane ticket instead of a dead end.

So yes, I’m excited. I’m relieved. I’m grateful beyond words. I’m also tired after receiving the biggest news I’ve had in months. Let’s just say it like it is— I am a mess as usual.

Which feels oddly appropriate.

Because if this journey has taught me anything, it’s that joy doesn’t always arrive looking triumphant. Sometimes joy shows up in a phone call, crying happy tears, texting everyone you know, thanking God over and over...

...and then resting for three hours.

I’ll take that kind of joy every single time.

I am convinced that somewhere in the universe there is a committee dedicated exclusively to minor inconveniences. They do not cause real suffering. They do not create actual emergencies. Their only assignment is to whisper, “What if today the seam on the toe of the sock felt… wrong?”

Suddenly a fairly functional adult is standing there contemplating whether to remove the sock, adjust the sock, replace the sock, or simply abandon civilization altogether.

The sock seam is perhaps humanity’s greatest overreaction-per-square-inch ratio. One tiny ridge of fabric, and we become philosophers of injustice. We can survive heartbreak, taxes, and waiting on hold with customer service, but a crooked sock seam convinces us the entire day has shifted onto the wrong timeline.

Then there is the bar of soap. You drop it once. It ricochets off the shower floor like it has entered the Olympic gymnastics finals. You bend to pick it up, your knee pops, the water temperature changes unexpectedly, and somehow the soap is now farther away than when you started. By the time you retrieve it, you’ve performed a yoga pose no physical therapist has ever recommended.

A hangnail deserves its own category of annoyance. It is the smallest possible injury with the largest possible opinion of itself. It catches on every shirt, every blanket, every towel, and every shred of dignity. You tell yourself, “I’ll ignore it.” Five minutes later you are negotiating with nail clippers like a hostage mediator.

Humanity is astonishing in these moments.

We do not simply experience inconvenience. We narrate it. “Of course this would happen today.” “This is exactly the kind of week I’m having.” “Nothing is going right.”

Nothing? Really? The house is the right temperature, the laundry is mostly done, the roof is intact, heck even the dishwasher is running. Yet, the universe has apparently collapsed because the headphone cord caught on the doorknob.

Other members of the Minor Inconvenience Hall of Fame include:

• Pulling a trash bag out of the can only to discover it has suctioned itself to the bottom with the strength of a thousand suns.

• Opening a cereal box from the wrong end.

• The fitted sheet that refuses to acknowledge basic geometry.

• Forgetting why you walked into a room and standing there like a confused nincompoop.

• The microwave countdown that somehow becomes unbearable during the final three seconds.

• Typing a long password incorrectly because the keyboard has temporarily become a foreign language.

• Peeling a banana and having one string cling to it with emotional attachment issues.

• The shopping cart with one wheel that has chosen chaos.

• Getting a paper cut from a document you didn’t even want to read.

• When the blanket corner slips out from under your foot at 2 a.m. and now thermodynamics is your enemy.

The fascinating part is how dramatically humans respond. We sigh with the depth of ancient prophets. We stare at inanimate objects as if they have personally betrayed us. We mutter speeches that would sound completely unhinged if transcribed.

“Really? A stapler? You’re going to jam now!?” As though the stapler has been waiting for this confrontation.

And yet there is something strangely beautiful about it.

These tiny irritations reveal that most days are not actually defined by catastrophic events. They are stitched together by sock seams, soap bars, hangnails, tangled chargers, and lids that refuse to align with their containers. The ordinary world is full of microscopic rebellions, and humanity meets them with equal parts frustration, creativity, and theatrical exaggeration.

We invent elaborate techniques for opening plastic packaging. We develop strong opinions about the correct way toilet paper should tear. We can identify the exact squeak in a floorboard that only appears when we’re carrying something heavy.

Perhaps that is our real superpower is turning the absurdly mundane into a full emotional experience.

So the next time the soap escapes, the sock seam revolts, and the hangnail declares independence, remember that you are participating in one of humanity’s oldest traditions—dramatically surviving things that are objectively not that serious.

Honestly? That might be one of the funniest things about being human.

I think one of the most striking things about “Empty and Beautiful” is that Matt Maher doesn’t ask us to become beautiful before God can use us. He asks us to become empty.

For most of my life, I have spent so much energy trying not to be empty.

Empty felt like failure. Empty felt like depression. Empty felt like losing pieces of myself. Empty felt like cancer taking another thing from me.

If I’m honest, I don’t feel beautiful much these days. I see ugly and unfamiliar. I see a stranger in the mirror. I see an uncooperative body. I see medications on my dresser. I see phone calls that need to be made, appointments that need to be kept, arguments with insurance I don’t want to deal with.

Beautiful isn’t the word that comes to mind. Empty is.

Yet this song gently suggests something I have spent years resisting: maybe emptiness isn’t always the enemy.

There is a difference between being emptied by life and choosing to be empty before God.

Life has emptied me in ways I never volunteered for. Cancer emptied me of certainty. Pain emptied me of independence. Grief emptied me of the future I thought I would have. Loss emptied me of so many versions of myself that I loved.

There are mornings when I wake up and wonder what is left.

Then Matt Maher sings, “I’m empty and beautiful.” At first, those words almost feel contradictory. How can something empty still be beautiful?

Our culture tells us beauty is found in fullness—in accomplishment, productivity, health, youth, strength, independence. Beauty is measured by what we possess, what we produce, and how well we hold everything together.

The Kingdom of God seems to operate in the opposite direction: Blessed are the poor in spirit. The last become first. The least become greatest. Seeds must fall into the ground and die before they bear fruit. Christ Himself emptied Himself.

Perhaps heaven has always recognized a kind of beauty the world cannot see.

One lyric has stayed with me— “You fight the fight in me.”

That line has become more prayer than lyric. Because there are days I simply don’t have much fight left, and yet I still find a way to fight against the things I need the most, it seems.

People love stories about bravery. About staying positive. About warriors. About beating impossible odds.

What they don’t often talk about is the profound exhaustion that comes from fighting every single day.

The Christian life has never depended on the strength of my grip on God. It has always depended on His grip on me. When I cannot fight, perhaps Christ fights for me. When I cannot pray, perhaps the Spirit intercedes with groans too deep for words (Romans 8). When I cannot believe, maybe Jesus continues believing His promises over me. When my hands finally open because they are too tired to keep clinging, maybe they become empty enough for God to fill.

But how do I get there?

I have often thought faith meant trying harder. Reading more. Praying better. Holding on tighter. Life has dismantled that theology piece by piece.

There have been days when faith looked less like certainty and more like simply whispering, “Jesus... that’s all I’ve got today.” Some days that single name is the entirety of my spiritual life.

And somedays I don’t even have that. Somedays there are no words. No prayers. No thoughts on what faith is. Somedays there is just moving from my bed to the couch. Somedays it is not even that.

And somehow... it has to be enough.

The song also confronts another uncomfortable truth. God rarely fills things that insist they are already full. Our schedules are full. Our opinions are full. Our plans are full. Our self-sufficiency is full.

My life used to be incredibly full. Ministry. Camping. Road trips. Work. Friends. Projects. Productivity.

None of those things were bad. But I wonder now whether I left very little room for dependence.

Now dependence has become unavoidable. I depend on doctors. On friends. On rides. On texts. On people praying prayers I don’t have the energy to pray myself.

I HATE that dependence.

Yet dependence has also become one of the places I’ve encountered God most intimately.

Maybe that is what makes emptiness beautiful. Not the pain itself. Not the disease. Not the loss. Those things are not beautiful.

But the strange, holy space they create. The space where pride no longer fits. Where pretending becomes impossible. Where masks fall away. Where all that remains is a soul saying, “I’ve got nothing.”

And God smiles—not because He delights in our suffering, but because finally there is room for grace.

Maybe beauty is found in being deeply loved by the One who made me. Maybe beauty is found in scars that tell stories of survival. Maybe beauty is found in hands that are too weak to hold themselves together but are still held by Christ. Maybe beauty is found in empty places where God chooses to dwell. Maybe beauty comes from this dependence that I despise.

So today, I won’t pretend to feel beautiful. I don’t.

But I understand being empty. I understand what it is to have life strip away illusion after illusion until all that remains is a quiet heart and an unwhispered prayer.

Maybe that is enough.

Perhaps emptiness is not the opposite of beauty after all. Perhaps it is where beauty begins.

Because when I have no strength left to fight, I remember the promise hidden in that song: I am not fighting for God. God is fighting the fight in me.

Somehow, even on the days when I feel like there is almost nothing left, that is enough to believe that the empty places in my life are not abandoned. They are simply waiting to be filled by the One who has never been afraid of broken vessels, weary hearts, or trembling faith. He has always made His home there.

For today, I will try (desperately) to believe.

YouTube Empty and Beautiful

There is a difference between sanctuaries and sanctuary.

One is a place we build. The other is a place we find.

I have spent much of my life inside sanctuaries. Beautiful buildings with stained glass that catches the morning light, wooden pews polished by generations of faithful hands, organs that shake the walls, and altars that have held countless prayers. I love them. I always will. Some of the holiest moments of my life have happened inside those walls.

But sanctuaries, for all their beauty, are still built by people. Because they are built by people, they inevitably begin to reflect us.

There are schedules to keep. Bulletins to print. Children’s ministry volunteers to coordinate. Sound checks. Meetings. Budgets. Sermons. Clocks on the back wall reminding everyone that the service needs to end on time because another one starts in fifteen minutes.

Even our worship can begin to feel rushed.

We ask the God who created galaxies to fit neatly inside a sixty-minute service. We expect the Holy Spirit to move between announcements and the closing benediction. We organize mystery.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Organization serves people. Programming can create opportunities for grace. Communities need structure.

But sometimes I wonder if we mistake activity for intimacy.

Sometimes I leave church having attended a sanctuary but never having found sanctuary.

Then there are the places no committee ever planned.

The red sandstone cliffs of southern Utah that seem to glow from within as the evening sun settles across them. The endless dunes along Lake Michigan where every gust of wind quietly reshapes the landscape, reminding me that creation is always becoming something new. A sunrise breaking over still water. A sunset painting the sky with colors no artist could ever quite capture. The hush after fresh snow. The rhythm of waves refusing to hurry. The smell of pine after rain.

No bulletin. No countdown clock. No expectations.

Just the quiet reminder that God has been here long before I arrived. Nature has never once seemed concerned with my schedule. The sun has never risen early because I had somewhere to be. The tide has never hurried because I was impatient. Wildflowers bloom without asking whether anyone notices. Mountains stand in silent worship without ever preaching a sermon.

Creation refuses to be rushed.

Perhaps because its Creator never is.

Throughout Scripture, God consistently meets people outside the places they expected. Moses removes his sandals in the wilderness. Jacob dreams with his head resting on a stone. Elijah hears God not in wind or earthquake or fire, but in the sound of sheer silence. Jesus withdraws to mountains, deserts, lakeshores, and gardens whenever the crowds become too loud.

Again and again, sanctuary isn’t found inside carefully constructed walls.

Sanctuary is found wherever God’s presence interrupts ordinary moments.

Maybe that’s why I breathe differently outside. My prayers become simpler. I stop trying to sound eloquent. I stop trying to produce something meaningful.

I simply become.

The dunes do not ask me to perform. The canyon walls do not expect me to have answers. The water never asks whether my faith is strong enough. Creation simply makes room for me.

And somehow, in that spaciousness, I become more aware of God than I often do amid microphones, projectors, and carefully planned liturgies.

Maybe because creation never competes for His attention.

It simply reflects it.

The heavens really do declare the glory of God—not because they are trying to, but because they cannot help it.

I don’t believe we need less church. I believe we need churches that remember they were never meant to replace creation as God’s first sanctuary.

Our sanctuaries should point beyond themselves.

Their stained glass should teach us to notice the sunrise. Their hymns should help us hear birdsong as worship. Their prayers should send us into forests, deserts, shorelines, and fields with eyes open to the God who refuses to be confined by brick and mortar.

Because God has never been limited to buildings. Before there were cathedrals, there were mountains. Before there were pulpits, there were shorelines. Before there were sanctuaries, there was sanctuary.

Perhaps that is why my soul often heals more quickly beneath an open sky than beneath a vaulted ceiling.

Not because God is absent from churches. But because creation reminds me that He was never only there. The world itself has always been His cathedral.

Maybe sanctuary is less about where we go to find God than slowing down long enough to discover He has been waiting there all along.

God didn’t wait for me to be in a church pew

Didn’t hide inside hymns or holy books

Didn’t speak in the languages I’d been taught to call “truth”

No–

God showed up in Utah

Where the air was dry

And my heart was tired

From more than a year of pretending

God showed up in sandstone

–layered like my grief–

And in a canyon silence

So wide it swallowed every hurting version of me

There were no altars there

Just sky

Just red rock

Just the ache of this journey

I didn’t pray much

I didn’t sing

But I looked up and didn’t feel forsaken

I cried by the side of the road and didn’t feel weak

I whispered,

“God, please show up…”

And the wind answered– not with certainty but with presence

God was waiting

In the cracked earth

In the way the light comes back long after you think it is gone

In Utah,

God is not a doctrine

God was the dirt

The open road

The stranger that waved as he passed

God was the part of me that stayed when every part wanted to run.

And for that–

–the wilderness that didn’t abandon me

– the holiness that met me uninvited

– the quiet places that held my undoing

I say thank you

Not to the God I was taught to fear

But to the got I met in rock, dust, dirt and sky

In the fragile and miraculous gift of staying.

Thank you, God, for living in Utah.

It doesn’t begin on the mountaintop. It begins where so many of us actually live—with trembling ground, fading hope, exhausted faith, and hearts that can’t seem to find their rhythm. It begins in the place where life has fallen apart enough that worship is no longer an emotional response but an act of defiance.

I think that’s what I love most about it.

The song never asks us to pretend that life is good. It simply asks us to believe that God is. There is an important difference.

For more of my life than I care to admit, I chose to believe that God’s goodness could be measured by something tangible. If prayers were answered, God was good. If healing came, God was good. If life made sense, God was good.

But what happens when the scans aren’t clear? When grief outlasts the casseroles? When anxiety wakes up before you do? When your body becomes unfamiliar territory? When the future you spent years building quietly disappears?

For me, those aren’t hypothetical questions anymore.

Over the last two years, my life has been reduced and expanded all at once. Reduced by diagnoses I never saw coming. By surgeries that changed my body forever. By treatments that stole energy I once took for granted. By the countless losses that don’t fit neatly into a medical chart—the loss of independence, the adventures I didn’t know would be my last, the work I loved, the ability to trust my own body, the certainty that tomorrow would look anything like today.

There are days when taking a shower requires negotiation with my body. Days when making it to church feels like an accomplishment. Days when the weight of appointments, medications, scans, and uncertainty threatens to eclipse everything else.

And yet...

There I was. Standing in church.

Crying.

Months ago, I would have been embarrassed. I spent years believing tears belonged behind closed doors, something to apologize for or hide until I could regain control. But illness has stripped away so much of my ability to perform strength. I simply don’t have the energy to pretend anymore.

So I cried. Not because one thing was wrong. Because everything and nothing was wrong all at once.

I cried for what I’ve lost. I cried for what I’m still grieving. I cried because my body is tired. I cried because God has somehow remained faithful even when I haven’t felt particularly strong. And I cried because there was something profoundly freeing about realizing that worship doesn’t require composure.

Sometimes worship looks like raised hands. Sometimes it looks like a voice full of confidence.

Sometimes...

It looks like tears soaking the collar of your shirt while everyone around you keeps singing. I think God receives all of it. Maybe even treasures the tears a little differently. Because tears are often the most honest prayer we have left.

As the congregation sang, “God be the glory,” I realized those words have become much more expensive than they used to be.

Anyone can say, “God is good,” when life is unfolding according to plan.

But to whisper those same words after a terminal diagnosis... To sing them when your future has become uncertain... To believe them while living something so unplanned... To hold onto them after your prayers for healing have been met with silence instead of answers...

That is a different kind of worship. Not better. Just deeper. Because those words have been tested. Either God’s goodness was never dependent on my circumstances, or it was never real to begin with. We know which is true, even when it doesn’t feel good.

Pain has forced me to decide which I believe. Some days I decide with confidence. Other days I decide with tears.

Both count.

This song speaks of beauty from ashes, strength from weakness, healing from pain. It echoes Isaiah’s promise that God is in the business of redemption. But I no longer believe redemption always arrives on my timeline.

Sometimes the miracle is physical healing. Sometimes the miracle is waking up with enough strength to make jokes. Sometimes the miracle is laughing with friends after a week of devastating news. Sometimes the miracle is letting people carry you when you’ve always been the one doing the carrying. Sometimes the miracle is discovering that your body can be breaking while your soul is somehow becoming more whole.

I have spent so much of this journey asking God to change my circumstances.

Lately, I’ve begun asking something different:

If You don’t change this... don’t let it keep me from You.

If You don’t heal my body... heal whatever fear still lives inside my heart.

If You don’t remove the pain... don’t let pain remove my capacity to love.

Perhaps that is redemption too. Perhaps “God be the glory” isn’t something we say after everything has worked out. Perhaps it is something we cling to while everything is still unraveling. Perhaps it is less an answer than a declaration.

A refusal to let pain become the loudest voice in the room.

Cancer has changed my body. It has changed my calendar. It has changed my relationships. It has changed my understanding of time.

But it does not get to define the deepest truth about my life. The deepest truth is still that I belong to Christ. The deepest truth is still that I am loved (even when I don’t feel it or believe it). The deepest truth is still that hope is not measured by prognosis. And the deepest truth is still that God remains worthy of glory—not because I understand His ways, not because I have received every answer I’ve begged for, but because His character has remained steady while everything else has shifted beneath my feet.

Maybe that’s why this song undid me. It gave language to what my heart has been trying to say for months. I am still grieving. I am still afraid sometimes. I am still asking difficult questions. I still long for healing.

But underneath all of those honest realities is something quieter and stronger that refuses to die. A faith that is no longer built on certainty, but on Presence. A hope that is no longer rooted in outcomes, but in Christ. A love that is growing larger than my fear.

So if tears are all I have to bring, then tears will become my worship. If a cracked voice is all I can offer, then let it sing anyway. If all I can manage is one trembling sentence because of the lump in my throat— “To God be the glory.” Then that has enough.