We’re on our way out of the last new gallery when I pause at a painting that feels familiar.

In a room full of loud, colorful, modern and contemporary art, this piece feels demure, quiet even. Beside installations with high contrast, bold strokes, and immediate punch, this piece invites slower contemplation. I look for longer than I’ve yet looked at anything else. Then I look some more.

Then, Ah! I check the name on the white info card. I google. Yes! Same artist.

The new Obamas painting (commissioned for display in the Chicago presidential library) is one of my all-time favorite portraits. Say what you like about the Obamas themselves (though I hope you’d be kind), this painting is extraordinary.

It’s not a painting precisely. Materials include: acrylic paint, colored pencils, charcoal, and transferred photographs. The artist, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, worked on the portrait for months (her process is technically complex and densely layered). I haven’t seen it in person yet, but when I do I will stare at it for an hour.

Bring on the slow art! Art made slowly. Art that slows. Un-scrollable. Arresting. Art that rewards curiosity and patient attention.

-
Last week the pope invited Hollywood to the Vatican so that he might make a speech about movies. Say what you like about the pope (though I hope you’d be kind), you can’t fault his eagerness to connect faith and culture.

To Kate Blanchett and Chris Pine and Spike Jones and a room full of movie-makers, he said,

The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what “works,” but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us, and sometimes, even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express.

I read this quote (the whole speech is lovely) just before watching the movie, Once. I watched it on a phone in a crowded airport, which is to say I watched it imperfectly, distractedly. But even still, the way it slowed me, the quiet, the empty space—my flight was delayed twice during the 86 minute run time and somehow I was unfazed—as if the slowness of this movie had altered my understanding of time, reducing my need to rush. Very little “happens” in this movie. There are no speeches. There is no “action.” There is only normal, human pain and normal, human courage.

And it is so, so beautiful.

I call my husband to report on having watched it. He and the girls watched it the night before. He tells me he wept. Later my daughters will say the same. London won’t be able to explain why—London who can always explain why.

James K.A. Smith describes what the Gerhardts are feeling upon watching Once in his (fascinating) book Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark:

To be still enough to hear oneself breathing; to be patient enough to keep uttering a syllable until consciousness finds a new key; to breath like one approaching the cosmos with cap held in hand—this is to become someone who is available. Stillness and silence center us in our longings and our fragility, our need and our yearning.

When I think of places where I have found such stillness—a silent haven that quiets my discursive mind, a hushed oratory that makes me aware of my longings and fragility—I think of the experience of watching some movies. Not, of course, the crushing noise and frenetic cuts of the Marvel cinematic universe; but rather films that demand something of the viewer, precisely because they refuse to participate in the distraction industrial complex, The sorts of films I’m thinking of risk veering into boredom in order to pull viewers into another mode of perception.

He then offers an example of a particular movie that had this effect and says of it:

It’s not really the story […] that remains with me. It’s the way that watching this movie lured me into a place I hadn’t gone before. The film demanded something of me; but in demanding something of me, it gave me something. The movie somehow made room—“in” me? Made room in my world?

This movie had, to quote Saint Teresa, dilated his heart.

Dilate. Verb. To become enlarged or widened.

-

Two years ago I found myself enlightened. I’d been thinking a lot about making space, about how being filled first requires being emptied. I’d developed a habit of fasting and a practice of silence, and in these rituals I experienced a miraculous kind of expansion. I found I had more room in my life for love.

During that time I stumbled upon Robert Gordon Anderson’s The Biography of a Cathedral—an impulse purchase at my local used bookstore. I went home and read about the construction of the Notre Dame cathedral. Anderson begins his tale in 52 BC. The cathedral will not be completed for another 13 to 14 hundred years. I read slowly. Beauty unfolds over generations.

Sometimes at night, fast asleep, I see a vision of a cathedral—just the ceiling. Pleated white stone, like a fan or a clamshell or a girl’s ironed skirt.

In the midst of this period of expansion, this dreaming of vaulting, I find myself worshipping alongside friends in a conference room in San Francisco. Jonathan and Melissa Helser of the band Cageless Birds lead worship. I don’t know them. I don’t know their songs. But when they lead this one…

Make my heart a cathedral
Make my soul Your temple

I am arrested. I can see the cathedral from my dreams, and I am aware, viscerally, that the cathedral is me—dilated.

At the end of the song, the band adds a verse from an old camp song, a song I sang a lot as a child. A song I’ve sung off and on for close to forty years. I sing and cry and feel the deep, deep beauty of a long, slow story:

Lord prepare me
To be a sanctuary
Pure and holy
Tried and true
And with thanksgiving
I'll be a living
Sanctuary, for You

-

Media today is quick, loud, and extreme. Images, video—everything needs to make an immediate impression, grab our attention, slow the scroll. I get it. You need to stand out.

Art though. Art is about truth and beauty, and truth and beauty are slow, often quiet, and rarely extreme.

Most modern stories teach us that change comes suddenly, that heroics are quick, that the world might implode or be rescued in an afternoon. Sometimes that’s true. But much more often change comes at a crawl, heroes persevere, and the world is rescued over generations.

Artificial things are fast.

Real things take time.

Like the Notre Dame cathedral, I am slowly becoming. I am (everything is) slowly coming into view.

If I am impatient, I will miss it entirely.

-JL

I have fallen ill with the plague infecting all think-piece writers on the Internet—the need to talk about Christopher Nolan’s latest movie. I’m aware that this is not my lane (though I did teach The Odyssey as a college world literature lecturer), and I’m aware that you did not subscribe to The Goodness in order to hear my opinions about Matt Damon’s acting. Unfortunately, I’m afraid I cannot recover from this flu until I’ve purged myself of these feverish opinions. You’re welcome to read them or skip them. They have something to do with Jesus if that greases the slide for you.

Here we go…

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is not Homer’s Odyssey (he’s said as much). It is instead a kind of trojan horse, using a story you think you know to sneak in a story Nolan believes is closer to the truth. I wonder if he’s not far from the kingdom of God.

A Very Human Hero

Homer’s Odysseus is a clever, lively, curious, charming, shape-shifting, god-kissed, heroic liar. Athena, Circe, and Calypso (all immortal goddesses) fall in love with him. Troy is fooled by him. His own wife struggles to recognize him. He shifts back and forth between appearances—young and old, weak and strong. He is what he needs to be when he needs to be it. He’s a kind of Loki (in a text-faithful adaptation, Tom Hiddleston would have been the perfect cast). Emily Wilson says of Odysseus in her introduction to Homer’s Odyssey, “He is a figure who possesses many attributes, and possesses them intensely.”

Nolan’s Odysseus is the opposite: static, faithful, beset, and weary. Matt Damon plays the part exactly as Nolan intends it—as if everything that happens over the course of his journey home emanates from and cements his Troy-earned guilt (a guilt he felt before he even left for war). Damon’s Odysseus is heavy. He drags himself through the plot as if his very self were a corpse.

Nolan skips Athena’s flirtatious behavior toward Odysseus, ignores Circe’s sexual relationship with Odysseus, and only gives glancing attention to Calypso’s romantic obsession with him. This makes sense, because Nolan’s Odysseus is not the kind of man goddesses fall in love with—a Nietzschean superman. Nolan’s Odysseus possesses one thing intensely: his humanity.

Critics have noted that this Christopher Nolan movie is much the same as his others, obsessed with the impact of our choices on civilization over time. In her New York Times piece, Alissa Wilkinson writes:

Like “Oppenheimer,” [“The Odyssey”] tells a story of the smartest man on earth realizing that he has won his battle but lost the war, and inalterably changed the course of humanity: a monumental burden almost too great to bear.

Nolan asks again and again and again, What happens when mankind overreaches?

In the comments section of Wilkinson’s article I noticed one reader’s suggestion that perhaps Nolan’s next project should be Paradise Lost (as he is, so clearly, obsessed with the fall of men and angels).

Which brings us to the primary difference between Homer’s Odyssey and Nolan’s: the nature and work of “the gods.”

Divine Intervention

Much has been made of Nolan’s removal of the gods. It’s undeniably significant. Every major turn in the Homeric text is enabled or prompted by Athena, Hermes, Zeus, Poseidon, or some lesser god. Athena helps Odysseus execute the trojan horse trick. Athena and Poseidon together thwart his journey home (Athena in order to draw out the adventure and enhance Odysseus’s glory, Poseidon as punishment). Athena prompts Telemachus to go to Sparta. Athena inspires Penelope’s weaving plan. Hermes warns Odysseus about Circe and offers him a plan to protect himself and free his men. Athena and Zeus decide when Odysseus should be freed from Calypso. Every page turns on the desires and preferences of the gods.

As Telemachus tells his mother early in the story, “Poets are not to blame for how things are; / Zeus is; he gives to each as is his will.” There is no Homer’s Odyssey without the gods. Everything happens according to their will.

If you’re of the Judeo-Christian persuasion, this sounds familiar. The prophet Jeremiah articulates it this way: “A person’s way of life is not his own; no one who walks determines his own steps” (Jer. 10:23). But it’s worth noting that Homer’s world is far from the Christian understanding of divine intervention and secure destiny. Homer’s gods are fickle, petty, and many. Humans often find themselves wounded by the shrapnel of one god’s war with another. Homer’s world is chaotic and unpredictable because of the gods.

Will Odysseus make it home? If he does, it won’t be because he fought valiantly and persevered no matter what. It will be because he pleased the gods and they happened to notice (and care) for long enough to get him there.

In Nolan’s story, however, Odysseus is skeptical of the gods’ power and presence. Yes, he carries Athena’s image (as a proof of life symbol for his wife) and appears to talk to her, but he doesn’t make sacrifices to her or actively seek her help as he makes plans. The only gift offered to Athena in this version is the trojan horse (which is not a gift).

Eliana Dockterman notes in her article for Time Magazine on Nolan’s “Odyssey,”

He often manifests Athena (in the form of Zendaya) and speaks with her, but later we discover that the woman he sees is not a goddess at all but in fact a priestess in the temple of Athena who was murdered during the sack of Troy. She is the symbol of all the cruelty he witnessed his men committing.

In this reading, the one god in the story isn’t a god at all.

We should have expected as much. The opening text screen (“In a time of apparent magic”) reveals what kind of movie this is going to be—a largely disenchanted one.

It’s been noted that all of the apparent magic in Nolan’s “Odyssey” happens before Odysseus washes up on Calypso’s beach, every bit of it narrated by a broken Odysseus straining to try and understand what’s happened to him. In this way, Nolan gives the viewer the option to embrace the magical parts of Odysseus’ story as mis-remembrances or hallucinations, consequences of a kind of PTSD. That reading seems most consistent with the greater storytelling arc in the movie (and in Nolan’s work at large).

In Nolan’s telling of “The Odyssey,” humans rise and fall by their own power, because humans are the only intelligence out there. Notably, Nolan does not depict his humans, even his heroes, as gods. There is no such thing as perfect power, perfect knowledge, or perfect goodness. There are no miracles.

Though sometimes miracles are apparent…

Surrender?

Consider the scene in which Odysseus finally breaks free of Calypso’s grasp. Ignore that Nolan’s Calypso is nothing like Homer’s. In this telling she functions as a kind of doula, helping deliver Odysseus’ guilt into a kind of active repentance (or perhaps just confession) in order to make him ready to return home.

When she’s finally weened him off the lotus flowers, she tells him to build a raft and surrender himself to Poseidon. She says,

You’re a man who needs to control his fate. But you cannot control this. You must give yourself to the storm, and take your punishment. Give up the fight, give up control, and live. It is a leap of faith you haven’t yet made, Odysseus.

Odysseus does as he’s told. He builds a makeshift raft, sets out on the waves, and promptly falls into the water. The scene ends with a sinking Odysseus, dropping deeper and deeper into the wine-dark sea. He is not swimming. His eyes are closed. He looks like he’s drowning.

And yet, somehow, he lives.

According to Homer’s story, he arrives at Ithaca thanks to the attentive care of Athena and Zeus by way of the Phaeacians and a gifted boat.

In Nolan’s story it appears Odysseus’ choice to “give up the fight” is all it takes. But if there are no gods, to whom (or what) is he surrendering? The most pivotal moment in the entire film is Odysseus’ “leap of faith.” But faith in what?

There are disenchanted answers—faith in mankind, faith that the future could be better than the past, faith that even in the wreckage of bad choices there’s something worth rebuilding. But these answers do not get Odysseus home. They feel good. They serve the story’s themes. And maybe they’re a legitimate sort of surrender, but all of those options still require Odysseus to open his eyes and swim. Or drown.

There is only one way to truly surrender all control and be transported from one place to a desired other place: You surrender to someone who can take you there.

Why it matters

It seems like every day civilization wakes to yet another fallen leader, some person we all hoped might be the answer to our crisis of cowardice, incompetence, and moral bankruptcy now disproven and disowned. Modern heroes don’t last for long before they’re found out—flaws tallied, failures identified, faults proclaimed.

It’s a shame, because humanity could use a hero.

In Homer’s Odyssey (and for much of human history) heroes were measured not by the complete consistency of their character but by the scale of their achievements in sacrificial service. Odysseus could sleep with goddesses and act pridefully and kill a houseful of suitors and still be worthy of song, because he led his men into victory at Troy, because he persevered to make it home to his family (despite offers of comfort and pleasure along the way), and because he could string an impossible bow (a bow he used to execute justice). No one expected perfection.

In modern America, we often do.

This is why Nolan had to tell a different story—the story of a flawed hero who can’t live with his sins, a hero so wracked with guilt that he exiles himself.

In the Nolan universe, God doesn’t kick Adam out of the garden, because there is no God. Adam exiles himself from a garden he made, because he eats the forbidden fruit he grew on his own tree.

There’s something lovely in Nolan’s Odysseus—compassion, honesty, vulnerability, accountability—but there’s a shadow side to this (very millennial) virtue-ing of guilt. It’s heavy. And in Nolan’s non-magical world, there’s no way to put it down. Every hero then is doomed to a life of exhaustion, misery, and punishment. The best one can do is wait for dawn, hoping that “our mistakes will be forgotten."

The other option is to ignore the shrapnel consequence of our human failures and press on toward the goal and glory; This is, of course, how villains are made.

Could there be another way?

Raised

Nolan has his Odysseus surrender to the storm. Take your punishment, Calypso says. And if he had taken his punishment, Odysseus would be drowned at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea.

But he is not. Why?

Because there is no Poseidon to drown him?

Upon first reflection, I saw Odysseus washing up on the shores of Ithaca as Nolan breaking the rules of his own disenchanted world. How does Nolan get his surrendered hero home in a world with no gods? Who resurrects him from the sea (there is no God-sent fish to swallow him and spit him up)?

But then I remembered Odysseus isn’t actually home. He will never return home. His guilt ensures his exile. He is a drowned man.

No going back to Eden…

And this is why I don’t love Nolan’s story. I believe in home, and I believe we can make it back.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the gods are to blame and the people suffer for it. That’s not the truth.

In Nolan’s “Odyssey,” the people are to blame and the people suffer for it. That’s closer to the truth, but it’s incomplete.

In Yahweh’s epic, the people are to blame and the blameless God suffers for them so that everyone—the God and the people—can dwell together in endless glory.

In Yahweh’s version of Odysseus’ story, Odysseus would surrender to the storm in confession and repentance. He would submit to drowning, dying in the waters of baptism, and Yahweh would bring him up and out, washed, raised to life, unburdened.

And then Odysseus would return home to dwell with his God and his people. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

I wrote once about Bible “characters” and the way we’re so quick to turn them into heroes or villains. I said,

“Have you ever wondered why God included so many incriminating stories about his heroes in his book? Why tell us that David sleeps with Bathsheba? Why reveal Israel’s rampant idolatry? Why show Peter rebuking Jesus or Peter denying Jesus or Peter failing to fully include the gentile Christians after he was the very one to whom God gave the message of inclusion?

Perhaps it’s because God never intended for us to make heroes of them in the first place. Perhaps it’s because God wanted to make it clear: I’m the hero of this story. I’m the one empowering this impetuous boy to fight a giant. I’m the one who provides water from the rock. I’m the one who protected my people with an ark. I’m the one who filled the sky with fiery chariots. And, I’m the one who never stops fighting for the love of my people, no matter what they do.

Bible reading isn’t for shaming real men and women who happened to have their real lives exposed in the pages of Scripture. Bible reading is for discovering who God is when real men and women live real lives in his presence, wrapped in his unfailing love.”

Odysseus, David, you and me—we’re all just humans. We’ve tried and failed. We’ve hurt people. We’ve broken laws, disappointed the dead, and damned the future.

But praise God, this world is full of magic—magic not “apparent” but realer than real. Grace is no trojan horse made by men to manipulate their destiny. It is the language of the heavens, the oldest script, eternity’s song.

Open your ears to hear it. Put down your guilt and shame. Let Yahweh be the hero. And take your reward.

Sometimes people think that because I’m a writer, writing is easy, something like delivering a fifth baby—it might happen by accident in the car. Those people are mistaken. Writing is (almost always) like climbing a tall mountain in a storm. You have to have a very good reason to do a stupid thing like that.

I said to my husband in the car yesterday, “I’m so thankful to have grown out of my pride, but sometimes I miss it. It fueled a lot of writing.”

Vices do thrust us out into the world, don’t they? They keep us seeking—affirmation under bushes, identity in the tall grass, pleasure buried in the x-marked spot. I say, “It’s hard to write from contentment.”

(It’s easy to write when you’re hungry.)

-

Have you read Yesteryear? The book everyone’s talking about, the one about a “tradwife” influencer? Hate it or love it, one can’t help but find it fascinating. It’s a book about lots of things, but one thing it’s (unintentionally) about is the way vice thrusts you out into the world. For our protagonist, and for the women who ferociously consume her Instagram content, anger fuels a remarkable amount of activity. Anger builds a family, a farm, a career, an empire. And anger burns it down.

Yesteryear is one of those books you read in two days because the pace never lets up, because something is always happening, something is always being built or rebuilt or destroyed.

It’s Yesteryear I’m thinking about as I read Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, a book famous in certain Christian circles for its glowing presentation of a simpler way of life. The books don’t have much in common on the surface (Jayber Crow is slow-paced, told from a distinctly male perspective, and hopeful), but I think they’re actually sibling stories.

Both main characters, Natalie and Jayber, feel the absence of a parent. Both struggle to find their place in the world. Both feel uncomfortable in their faith community, even as they feel bound to their faith, and both turn to the ways of the past for hope in the present. At the end of each book, we find our main characters living away from civilization without running water or electricity. In Yesteryear, this ending is tragic (verging on horrific). In Jayber Crow it’s edenic.

Jayber says in the second to last chapter, “This is a book about Heaven.” Yesteryear is a book about Hell.

What makes the difference?

You might say, Jayber is a man and Natalie is a woman. Jayber is a bachelor and Natalie drags dependents behind her like chains. Jayber can live on his small garden and the kindnesses of friends. Natalie, who has no friends, is the metaphorical ever-nursing mother, every person around her expecting more and more from her. These are legitimate differences.

But the one I’m personally most interested in is this difference in fuel. Natalie is driven by vice; anger (and pride and selfishness and fear) make her hungry. She cannot stop seeking and chasing and wanting. Eventually she runs away, and her hunger becomes madness. Jayber, on the other hand, is driven by love. And love slows him. It roots him. Love plants Jayber like a tree beside a river.

Is there a version of Natalie’s story in which she might put down her anger and receive the gift of love? How does a tradwife influencer with a half dozen children live from love?

Maybe I’m asking because I didn’t like Jayber Crow. Not as much as I wanted to. Because it seemed to me that love made Jayber too content. That it stripped him of ambition and bounded the depth and width of his (and his neighbors’) potential joy. Maybe I didn’t like Jayber’s version of love, because I’ve noticed the same thing happening in me, a settling down turned atrophy.

Jayber says about Heaven, “It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself… it is like the reflection of the trees on the water.”

Yes. Beautiful.

But also, Jayber’s Heaven is something to observe, something he’s tiptoeing on the edges of (until one day when he’ll be fully ushered into the heart of it). I think Heaven is something to seek and cultivate and grab hold of and share. I think Heaven is less the reflection of trees and more the trees themselves—bark, leaves, roots, sap, and fruit. I want to take a walk in the forest and climb into the branches and pluck the orange, and then I want to eat it with joy and gratitude, my grinning face sticky with juice.

Enough of this looking out the window and yearning (and yawning). I want to be thrust out into world, because I’m hungry.

Can love do that?

-

I’m reading Isaiah in the mornings with coffee. Isaiah is a strange combination of Heaven and Hell. It’s written to Israel in a time of widespread disobedience and suffering. God has turned his people over to their multiplying vices. In their hunger they have sought out every pleasure, bowed down to every god, and devoured every blessing from the true God’s hand. Soon they will eat their own children as they wait to be devoured themselves by invading armies.

Hell is what happens when God lets us have what we want.

Of course, Heaven is the same.

You know that moment when Jesus asks the blind men, “What do you want me to do for you?” They know what they want and what they want is what they get.

I know what love has given me. I know all the ways it’s weaned me. I’m trying to pay attention to what love is teaching me to want.

Isaiah says, 
Listen to me, you who pursue righteousness,
you who seek the Lord:
Look… (51:1)

Four more times in five verses he tells them, “Look.” A few chapters later in Isaiah 55:6 he says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call to him while he is near.” And then Isaiah 58:2, a description of the Kingdom to come, of a people faithful to their God: “They seek me day after day and delight to know my ways, like a nation that does what is right and does not abandon the justice of their God. They ask me for righteous judgments; they delight in the nearness of God.”

Which is it? Do they enjoy God’s nearness? Or do they seek Him?

Can’t it be both?

-

I’ve been teaching Look to Love at my church, the book I wrote years ago about reading the Bible to fall in love with God. In it I talk about what it’s like to be married to the same man for 25 years (a man I met when I was 13), about how sometimes I think I know everything about him, about how I may know more about him than he knows about himself.

There’s something lovely about knowing him, about delighting in his nearness. It’s a kind of Heaven.

But it’s not all of Heaven, because he’s not only near. He’s not all near. He can also be sought.

Sometimes we’ll be out to dinner and I’ll ask a question and he’ll answer with a story I’ve never heard or tell me about a book he’s read that I don’t know anything about. On the luckiest days he’ll share some emotion he’s been feeling or some idea that has him wondering.

And I will grab at the fruit and grin while the juice drips down my chin.

A lover doesn’t wait patiently for the person across the table to reveal himself. Lovers are hungry.

-

It’s been a while since I sat down to write, and in just a few hours I have been re-romanced. I’ve been passively avoiding writing partly because writing happens alone in a room, and lately I have preferred being out amidst the action. I’ve been teaching and mentoring and helping shepherd my kids into adulthood. I’ve been hosting young couples for dinner and babysitting my friends’ kids. I’ve been meeting people who’re doing extraordinary things from and for love.

Around every corner, I’m discovering God in His people, and they are (He is) exquisite.

It’s hard to remember that God dwells in the writing, too. But He does. I sit at the table and God is here with me. I delight in His nearness. I am stilled and contented.

But I’m not just contented. Sentences materialize like breadcrumbs, and soon I find myself on a new path. I’m discovering and learning. I can see parts of God I’ve never noticed before.

There’s fruit in the tree. I climb up, reach, grab…

I eat and I’m satisfied.

I eat and I’m hungry.

-JL

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I rolled my eyes a little and felt a little judged.

But, of course, he’s onto something.

I could spend the next few paragraphs telling you about diminishing attention spans, rapid swipes, mindless scrolling, and the out-of-control pace of modern life. I could talk about how much we consume simply because we haven’t slowed down to notice what we’ve had (shows, food, clothes, music, “relationships,” affirmation…). I could tell you life is a smear.

But I don’t have to, because you feel it. You live it—everything in motion, quickness the expectation, burning effort and energy and capital like jet fuel…

Life is a spooked horse. If you’re lucky, you’re helpless in the saddle. More likely, you’re being dragged behind.

-

I have this way (read: compulsive obsession) of trying to elegantly align methodology and theology (practice and belief, behavior and faith, hand and head).

For example, I wrote the book Look to Love because I was convinced that the reality of a “greatest command” should have some impact on how I read the Bible. If my whole life is to be about one thing, shouldn’t Bible reading serve that one thing? In Look to Love I explored the “why” and “how” of Bible study given our purpose as beings made to love God: What’s our prime directive when we open the book? What does God want to show us? What questions should we bring to the text?

Recently I’ve found myself having tunneled further down the rabbit hole asking more questions about what Bible reading “should” or “could” look like in the Christian life—particularly in terms of goals and pace. I’m wondering whether our culturally-inherited ways of being (including a fast pace, high rate of consumption, expectation of quick pay off, and efficiency-forward ambition), are setting us up for fruitful or unfruitful encounters with God in Scripture.

More and more it seems Christians want to read and understand the Bible quickly—note the proliferation of read-the-Bible-in-a-year plans. They want immediate, measurable results from their Bible reading—a good feeling, a practical tip, or an answer to a personal question. And they want to confine that Bible reading to a 20 minute quiet time—fully expecting significant moral improvement as a result.

Can that work?

As I did while writing Look to Love, I find myself turning to what we might call “column passages” in Scripture, the key verses upon which our belief system rests—the ones outlining the fundamental physics of Christian life. All passages of Scripture are God-breathed and profitable. Some are more foundational—as evidenced by position, repetition, and context.

Psalm 1 is an example, a sort of key psalm in the collection—first in placement and first in principle, and it’s Psalm 1 that inspired my most recent reconsideration of my Bible-reading practices.

Here’s Psalm 1:1-3…

How happy is the one who does not
walk in the advice of the wicked
or stand in the pathway with sinners
or sit in the company of mockers!
Instead, his delight is in the Lord’s instruction,
and he meditates on it day and night.
He is like a tree planted beside flowing streams
that bears its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
Whatever he does prospers.

This imagery of man as a tree planted beside a river permeates Scripture. It’s a reference to our origin (Adam and Eve planted beside a river in Eden) and a glimpse of our destiny (“Then he showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month.” Revelation 22:1-2).

God gives the prophet Ezekiel a vision of a wide, deep river flowing out from the temple in Jerusalem. He tells the prophet, “There will be life everywhere the river goes” (Ezekiel 47:9).

The Old Testament message is straightforward and practical: find the river, stay there, and live.

Stay. Remain. Be planted. Meditate.

These are slow verbs, and a tree is one of the slowest nouns.

A tree fruits in time—not through effort but through sustained, committed stillness. The river feeds the tree. The tree receives the river. Every day, anew each day, year after year after year.

When I first imagined the concept for Deep Water. Slow Reading., I couldn’t stop thinking about this idea of being planted. What does it look like to approach Bible reading not as a “catch ‘em all” expedition (read all the books, harvest all the truths, answer all the questions, learn all the tips), but rather as a quiet settling in? What does it look like to open the Bible and plant yourself there?

It’s not the most natural way to read the Bible given our culture. It will take unlearning and retraining. But it seems to be the way God intended for us to experience His Word.

In light of all of that…

You’re invited to join me at Deep Water. Slow Reading. where we will attempt to be trees.

Starting officially on Monday, April 6th, we’ll plant ourselves beside the river of John chapters 14, 15, and 16 for 49 days, reading slowly and together. We’ll read 1-4 verses per day, letting God’s Word take up all the space (and time) it requires.

Subscribe to Deep Water. Slow Reading.

This section of Scripture is particularly appropriate for slow reading as it’s explicitly an invitation to abide in Christ—Christ who is river, spring, and living water, Christ in whom we dwell and Christ who dwells in us…

Jesus begins John 14 with a gentle word for His apostles: “Don’t let your heart be troubled.”

Calm down. Listen. Be still.

Abide…

And then, for three chapters, John’s gospel slows to a crawl as Jesus simply sits with His friends in their confusion and concern.

The river feeds the tree. The tree receives the river…

Subscribe to Deep Water. Slow Reading. today to receive updates this week with more details. Please, invite a friend or two to read along with you (together is better than alone), and be praying for God to prepare you for whatever’s He’s about to do in you. Scripture has power. Don’t get close unless you’re willing to be (gently) shocked. ;)

Godspeed,

JL

Subscribe to Deep Water. Slow Reading.

Justin surprises me as he says, “Love is walking on water.”

Mmm. I nod. That’s it—

Love is an impossible thing. A wonder. The apostle Paul calls it a supernatural gift (I Cor. 13) and a mystery that surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3). But of course it’s also the blood in the veins of any child of God. It’s the air we breathe. It’s our mother tongue. Love is a miracle, and love is the silver spoon with which we eat our Cheerios.

Justin asks the audience, “So how do you do it? How do you walk on water?”

And I realize my turn to talk is coming. Do I have an answer?

-
It was the morning before the marriage event, and we were going over our notes. Everything looked good, but the first session, the first of five, didn’t feel right. First sessions are notoriously difficult. You have to explain the theme, build tension, promise a resolution, and otherwise convince everyone to come back for more while also offering some actual meat.

We’d planned to talk about the concept of genre, that the kind of story you’re reading should clue you in to what’s coming.

If marriage is a love story, what should you expect?

But we had concerns about modern love stories and their cotton candy baggage. Justin said, “Marriage is definitely not supposed to be a Colleen Hoover novel.” He shook his head. “Or a Hallmark movie!”

So we decided we’d start with God’s love for His bride, first Israel, then the church. We’d explain how our little love stories grow out of (and testify to) the greater love story.

We jotted down new notes…

The part I still didn’t like was our definition of love. We’d been using it for years (borrowed it from a theologian we admired), but lately it didn’t feel right. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like it, so I asked Justin to look again and tell me what he thought. He re-read the definition he’d read a hundred times:

“Love is a rugged commitment to be with someone and for someone toward God’s will for that someone.”

“Huh,” he said. “Yeah…’

It wasn’t that the definition was wrong, per se. That is exactly what love looks like. As a diagnostic, the definition works perfectly. But as advice? It makes love look like yet another something to earn. A skill to master. A goal to strive for.

Be ruggedly committed.

Be with someone.

Be for someone.

Make God’s will for that someone your North Star.

Muster, Try, Do

As we talked we realized we wanted to say something different, something more like…

God is ruggedly committed to you (a gift!), and that commitment offers you security, grace, and peace. Because He loves you, you can offer that same faithful love to someone else.

God is with you (a grace!); His constant presence means you’re never alone. Because He’s with you, you can bravely offer yourself to someone else, unafraid of rejection.

God is for you (a wonder!). He is your Helper, Comforter, Savior. What you need, He offers—in part, so you’re equipped to be for someone else.

And God is loving you toward the goal of your glorification. Love pulls you deeper and deeper into the fullness of Christ. We are drowned in love. We are washed in love. We are reborn in love, remade in love. We abide in love forever…

God’s love is a spring inside you. No matter how much you pour out, He’ll fill you up.

Then Justin said, “But we can’t just leave it at Love is a gift. They’re heard that before and they don’t know what it means.”

-

“How do you walk on water?”

I take a breath, lift my microphone to speak, and before I can stumble into an answer, Justin is talking again. His answer is better than mine.

He says, “I don’t know how. You just step out and do it.

…Peter got out of the boat and he walked on water.”

-
Justin and I ordered Pai Thai for lunch. The driver got lost; while we waited for him to figure out the location of our in-the-woods Airbnb, we continued to prep for the marriage event, still searching for a way to describe a mystery. We talked about the “rugged commitment” language in our definition, about how for a long time we thought staying married was about striving and straining to reach the goal of commitment when all along commitment was a gift to receive.

I said, “I can’t explain it, but commitment is the gift and commitment summons the gift. Right?

It is the gift, because commitment invites me to practice loyalty and loyalty results in beautiful fruit: trust, hope, grace. Because we’re committed to one another, we’re safe together. It’s like a forcefield.

But it’s also like commitment draws me out into the enchanted world where the gift lives. It’s this wild impossible thing that requires power I don’t have. If I’m going to love one man my whole life, I’m going to need supernatural assistance. And that can be overwhelming and hard to get my head around in principle. But in practice—it’s like, you just…

It’s like how God says there won’t be a temptation you can’t bear, and maybe you believe that or maybe you don’t, but then you find yourself in the moment, tempted and feeling like you can’t say no, but you pray and somehow, you can say no. God just makes it possible.

It’s like that. I don’t know how we do love—the logistics of wielding the superpower—I just know that when I need it, and when I’m willing to try it, it’s here and it works.”

-

It’s my time to speak now. I go back to the passage I read a moment ago, before Justin started talking about walking on water. I read it again:

“I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3: 17-19).

How do we walk on water?

I say, “If you are filled with the fullness of God, love is a spring inside you…”

We walk on water because it’s what He did. We walk on water because that’s what we do (even if we don’t understand quite how). We walk on water, we love, because it’s our destiny, our purpose, the music of what happens when we get out of the way and let the spring bubble and gush and spill.

-JL

The Storied Marriage

If you’re interested in having Justin and I bring The Storied Marriage to your church, nonprofit, or school reply to this email, and I’ll get you all the details. We’ve incorporated this set of messages, conversations, and exercises into retreat weekends or single day events, and both work well.

Here’s a quick outline of the content (each session is delivered in tandem by Justin and I, each session is rooted in Scripture and story, and each session involves audience participation):

Session 1: It’s a love story

How understanding the genre of the story you’re living together enables healthy expectations and empowers you to live the part you’ve been given

This session is almost entirely about the gift of love—how to receive it from God and how to give it like God.

Session 2: Dragons, Tempests, and the Monsters Within

On embracing conflict as an essential part of your story together

This session looks at how God might use hardship, weakness, failure, disagreement, or dis-alignment in your marriage to demonstrate His glory, transform you into His image, and bind you together as partners in hope and perseverance.

Session 3: The Power of Moments

Why and how to engineer and integrate high stakes, memorable scenes into the rhythms of your marriage

Paying attention to the spectacular, surprising way God loves Israel and the church, we spend this session discovering how to “punctuate time” with dates, parties, meals, experiences, altars, music, traditions, setting, etc.

Session 4: Tell Me About It

On the power of remembering together and dreaming together

Rooted in God’s love letter to Israel in Hosea chapter 2, this session considers the way God woos Israel and offers a pathway to reconnection and long-term commitment.

Session 5: On Display

What it looks like to let God use the story of your marriage (whatever that story might be) to bless His people and bring Himself glory

This session explores how to share what God’s done (and is doing) in your marriage, offering practical suggestions and helpful examples.

Justin and I LOVE teaching this material and learning from the couples in the room. We are the biggest fans of marriage—as an institution, as a system, as a tool, as a model of God’s love, and as the most delightful gift.

Two Weeks to Deep Water!

On April 6th we’ll begin our second Deep Water study of the year, this time in John 14-16. This section of Scripture is often called Jesus’ Farewell Discourse, so we’re calling the study “Farewell.”

Should you participate? Only if…

You want to read Scripture slowly and deeply.

& You want to know Jesus’ heart.

Here in John, we get an intimate glimpse at Jesus’ last words to His best friends. What mattered most to Him? What did He want for His people? What did He repeat over and over again to be sure they remembered?

Jesus’ first words in John 14 are “Don’t let your heart be troubled.” The speech that follows is an invitation into faith, hope, love, mission, comfort, and glory. If you’re feeling troubled lately, if you ever wonder why Jesus left, if you’re waiting for God and He hasn’t shown up yet (at least not in the way you expect), there’s something for you here.

I don’t make many declarations about favorite passages of Scripture (my “favorites” change every time I open the book), but I think it’s safe to say, this section of Scripture has shaped the practical expression of my faith more profoundly than any other. I am the kind of Christian I am because of Christ’s instruction in these chapters.

Wade in with me, won’t you?

Subscribe to Deep Water

Subscribe now to receive a few pre-study essays in the next couple weeks.

I’m very much looking forward to this.

With love, In love, By love,

JL

Do you know him? Ah, you really should.

Last year, aware I’d be spending Saint Patrick’s Day in Derry, Northern Ireland, I picked up a Patrick biography and read it (alongside some other early church history and Irish history) on a train from Dublin to Derry, beside the River Foyle in Derry, in one of the earliest Irish churches (also Derry), beside a lake in County Donegal, beside the Sea in County Donegal, in a church in Dublin after meeting the son of U2’s long-time chaplain, and finally, on the way to climb Croagh Patrick.

Patrick’s story is a testament to what happens when God calls you to do the unthinkable and you, in faith, say yes.

A wealthy British Roman, Patrick was captured by pirates as a teenager and forced into slavery in Ireland. In slavery (as a shepherd), He met God, spending hours and hours of each day in prayer. Eventually Patrick fled his slave masters (at God’s prompting) and made his way safely back to Britain. Later he would be called by God to bring the gospel to his former captors and would return to Ireland as a missionary carrying courageous love, unshakable faith, and 24 carat integrity. All Christianity in Ireland today owes a debt to the life of Saint Patrick.

Toward the end of our time in Ireland (we’d come to tour the Holy Ghost Stories Creation show), my family made a pilgrimage to Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. We did not climb the mountain as pilgrims do in June—barefooted—because it was March and freezing. But we did climb with a powerful sense of God’s presence; primarily because the mountain was wrapped in a cloud. Every step up was a step further into milky, misty mystery. I was delighted (as you can tell):

At the top, Justin pulled out a copy of one of Saint Patrick’s most famous prayers, and together we prayed it, he and I, London and Eve. We prayed it like people possessed, like people who’d been soaking for hours in the mist of God. The wind whipped. The freeze-y rain pelted. And we huddled outside a locked chapel at the summit smiling wide and practically yelling (the only way to be heard) words we’d learned from the saint who supposedly spent 40 days up here listening to God.

After we prayed we headed down. We’d taken something like 2 and a half hours to summit. The way down would be quicker but more treacherous. The entire path was made mostly of softball-sized rocks, quick to shift underfoot. I warned the girls to be careful. It wasn’t fifteen minutes before I slipped, pinned my foot between two larger rocks, lost my balance, and fell.

I knew immediately, I would not be able to stand on my ankle. I couldn’t even move it. How exactly was I going to get down this mountain?

My family rushed over as I considered my options. We could call for help—no cell service. I could wait for Justin to descend and get help and come back—the sun would set before he made it and I was already soaked and cold.

Justin made it to my side and immediately he knew—we were not going to solve this on our own. I said, “We’re going to need to pray.” My daughter London volunteered. She put her hands above my ankle and began, and while London’s prayers are most coveted I knew what she was praying wasn’t what I needed. I stopped her. I said, “Baby, we need a miracle here. This is that kind of prayer.” And before she could start again, Eve had started praying and was picking up a head of steam. I’d never seen her pray like this before, like the wild-haired conductor of a hurricane, but that was how she prayed. Threaded through her prayer were the words we’d just prayed from Saint Patrick:

Eve prayed,

Heal my mom with your mighty strength

By the power of Christ

Patrick prayed,

I arise today through a mighty strength…

Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,

Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,

Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension

Eve prayed,

Heal her

By your power in this mountain

The power in this mist

The power in these rocks

Patrick prayed,

I arise today, through

The strength of heaven,

The light of the sun,

The radiance of the moon

Eve prayed,

Heal her

By the power of the faith of every pilgrim who’s climbed this mountain

Patrick prayed,

I arise today

Through the strength of the love of cherubim…

In the prayers of patriarchs,

In the predictions of prophets,

In the preaching of apostles,

In the faith of confessors,

In the innocence of holy virgins,

In the deeds of righteous men.

Eve prayed and Patrick prayed,

Christ with us…

Christ in us…

And I arose.

Actually.

Literally.

I interrupted Eve’s prayer: “Now! Help me up!” Because suddenly, shockingly, I couldn’t suppress the urge to stand.

I stood up and walked down the mountain. Not without pain. Not without help. But down I went. We made it to our car just as the sun set. Then we drove to a pharmacy, bought a brace, and a month or so later I could walk without wincing.

I told a Northern Irish doctor friend the story, and he said, “I guess I’ll be prayin’ then before I do x-rays.”

Was I healed on the mountain? I don’t know. Maybe the bone was broken, and God turned the break to sprain. Maybe it was always only sprained, but God gave me the power to get down the mountain despite it.

I don’t know, but I do know what Patrick knew—this I think was his superpower—that though we will feel small and fragile and weak and broken there is a way to rise:

I arise today, through

God's strength to pilot me,

God's might to uphold me,

God's wisdom to guide me,

God's eye to look before me,

God's ear to hear me,

God's word to speak for me,

God's hand to guard me,

God's shield to protect me,

God's host to save me..

Christ with me,

Christ before me,

Christ behind me,

Christ in me,

Christ beneath me,

Christ above me,

Christ on my right,

Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down,

Christ when I sit down,

Christ when I arise…

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day! May you always journey with Christ and in Christ. May you arise again and again and again.

-JL

114 weather app checks (How cold is she? Is she doing pushups in the snow?)
48 postcards. 48 stamps. 
32 “We’re so proud”s. 
28 “Press on”s. 
15 “You’re so brave”s. 
Many, many, many hand-scrawled “I love you”s. 
Four letters from the recruit,
Two that made us weep
Tears unmeasured (but possibly in the gallons). 
At least twenty middle of the night prayers. 

Tomorrow I’ll see her again. Maybe for an hour. Maybe for 30 hours. There’s snow coming, and the higher ups (they have official titles I don’t know or understand) aren’t sure about off base liberty. They make her decisions now.

(Small losses feel like slaughter.)

But she’s graduating, even if there’s snow. And she can text soon.

(Small gains feel like conquest.)

All I can do is what I’ve been doing; I wait.

-

Do you know that Gen Z likes DVD players and iPods and wired headphones and film cameras and scrapbooks? My girls tell me they like things you can touch. Everything seems so abstract, so ephemeral—it’s nice to hold something in your hands.

It’s how I felt when I held London’s first letter from boot camp, one sentence scrawled across scrap paper: “Send hair gel ASAP.” Proof of life.

It’s how I felt holding the flag I purchased at the company merch table an hour before London’s graduation. Look, a blue and yellow flag! Proof this isn’t all a dream.

And it’s something like how I felt a week earlier, standing on the White House lawn, praying for our country.

What is a country? How do you hold it in your hands? What would make it feel real?

I said to my friend Zach (we were staying with him and his wife and their baby girl) I said, “Zach, give me a reason to root for America.” I asked him this because he works for the current administration, and because I’ve not loved much of what’s happened under the current administration (not that I was a fan of the last). I asked because just that week a woman had been shot by ICE officers, because friends leading churches in Minnesota were posting images and stories I couldn’t understand or explain. I asked because the day was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and I’d spent hours walking through Washington D.C. reading quotes from MLK and reading Lincoln’s speeches on the marble walls of the Lincoln Memorial. I couldn’t help but wish—wishes for more wisdom, more love, more civility, more… slowness?

Do you ever long for the day when the president had to sit at a desk and write with a messy pen, each sentence punctuated by the long breath of a quill dipped in ink?

Anyway, I was feeling like I didn’t know what America was anymore, like it was rushing ahead too quickly, like I didn’t have time to decide if I was still onboard, so I asked Zach to help because I trusted him and because it seemed like he had an answer.

Zach said good, wise things. And that helped a little. But then he invited us to see his office in the White House complex and we went and we found ourselves on the lawn, maybe 500 feet from the Oval Office. The president’s motorcade waited for him outside. The soldier stationed at the door proved he was inside.

And Zach said, “Do you want to pray?”

-

For my birthday Justin bought us access to the National Theater’s 2021 version of Romeo and Juliet starring Jessie Buckley (of Hamnet—my favorite movie of the year) and Josh O’Connor (of Wake Up Dead Man—my second favorite movie of the year). We watched it in New Jersey in a hotel room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean waiting to find out whether London would be granted off base liberty after graduation. She’d called to say it wasn’t guaranteed. That the coming snow might mean she’d need to stay in the barracks.

We’d planned for her to come “home” with us to celebrate Christmas (she’d missed it during boot camp and we’d skipped it in solidarity).

We’d picked this hotel suite just for her. It had a kitchen; Justin was making her favorite meal, chicken pot pie. It had a living room, space for opening presents. It had a big, claw footed tub so she could take a long bath and put on the White Christmas pajamas I’d bought for her and her sister. And it had a view of the ocean from the couch for cuddling and gazing.

But maybe she wouldn’t ever see it.

So we watched Romeo and Juliet.

I’ve watched the Baz Luhrmann version with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes at least six times, every scene luxuriously psychedelic. Romeo is handsome. Juliet, innocent and perfect. Their deaths couldn’t be more picturesque—flawless bodies piled upon an altar, surrounded by a field of blooming candles, all that beauty a sacrifice to the hungry god of love. Luhrmann’s version says love is a drug, but perhaps it’s a drug worth taking.

That is not the point of the Buckley, O’Connor staging. Perhaps it’s the cast (older actors in the titular roles, both less traditionally beautiful). Perhaps it’s the set (minimal, some scenes staged as a rehearsal, others as a lightly costumed opening night). But this version of Romeo and Juliet isn’t about romance. It’s about the tragedy of haste and the virtue of patience.

The opening prologue asks the audience to attend with “patient ears.”

Lady Capulet asks impetuous Tybalt at the Act 1 party, “Why how now kinsman, Wherefore storme you so?” When Tybalt reveals that a Montague has infiltrated the party, Capulet (older and wiser) encourages restraint: “Content thee gentle Coz, let him alone … Be patient, take no note of him.”

In Act 2, Romeo, newly in love with Juliet, rushes to the friar and asks to be married. The Friar says to Romeo, “Go wisely and slowly; they stumble that run fast.”

Later, when Romeo is banished after the impulsive revenge-killing of Tybalt, he again goes to the Friar and again the friar recommends slowness. He says, “Be patient for the world is broad and wide.”

When Juliet is too-quickly engaged to Paris by her hurrying mother (despite being already secretly married to Romeo) she begs her father, “Hear me with patience.” She begs her mother, “Delay this marriage, for a month, a weeke.” The marriage will not be delayed (as the first one wasn’t), and so Juliet fakes her own death.

When Romeo hears Juliet has died, he commits himself to suicide, but the messenger encourages him, “I do beseech you sir, have patience.”

But by now, we know he won’t. Life is a runaway train, and none of our characters seem capable of finding the brakes. This helplessness is capably acted by both Buckley and O’Connor—eyes wide, hands open, mouths agape. It’s as if Romeo and Juliet witness their life rather than live it, dragged along behind a plot that (to the lovers) seems inevitable.

But the audience (and author) know—that’s not true. At any moment someone, anyone, could choose to simply wait. And in waiting, the plot could be rewritten.

Go wisely and slowly…
     …Be patient for the world is broad and wide.

-

Last year during Lent I practiced waiting for the sun to rise. Every day I’d wake in time to watch the sky turn from navy to sapphire to orange-rimmed forget-me-not. Sometimes I prayed. Sometimes I read. A few times I sang. Always the sun showed up right on time.

It was not perfect practice for life, I’m afraid. Metaphorical sunrises come in their own unpredictable time. I am still waiting for long-set suns to one day rise.

But it was fine practice, nonetheless. Good things come to those who wait.

Or so I’ve heard from the Psalmists:

“Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; yea, wait for the Lord!”

“Our soul waits for the Lord; he is our help and shield.”

“Wait for the Lord, and keep to his way, and he will exalt you to possess the land.”

And other words like these, 15 times more in just the Psalms…

James confirms in his epistle: “Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rain. You also be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.”

-

The snow came to Cape May, New Jersey. Six inches. Which doesn’t seem like so much, but it was enough to delay our flight home by two days. Enough to keep London holed up at bootcamp three days past graduation. But, praise God, not enough to keep us away from her. We got the call after Romeo and Juliet—London would be granted 29 hours of off base liberty.

The next day we arrived on base. We watched her march. We listened to speeches. We clapped and smiled and hooted and hollered when they called her name. Then it was over and we’ve never moved so quickly. We grabbed her. We held her. We gazed at her admiringly. We gave her flowers. We went to the exchange and bought Coast Guard merch because now we are Coast Guard people. Who would have guessed? And then we took her away from that place and hugged and cuddled and prayed and sang and ate chicken pot pie and watched the sun set.

In the morning we celebrated Christmas. It was January 24th. We’d waited almost a month.

Two thumbs up. Ten out of ten. Would do again.

-

Time stopped on the White House lawn as my husband, my daughter Eve, my friend and I prayed for our country. I don’t remember everything we prayed for. I know Eve prayed for the strangers and the least of these. I know she prayed that God would bless America in order that America might be a blessing to everyone else. I know Justin prayed for our friend Zach and people like him—wise Jesus followers trying to be Daniels in the messy halls of power. And I know I prayed for Donald Trump by name, because we’d all said amen when I realized we hadn’t actually mentioned him, and I wanted to take him to the Father specifically.

That moment on the lawn surprised me. It felt material—real like wired headphones and film cameras. For just a second I could receive the width and the depth and the height of God’s faithful love for Americans, immigrants, refugees, Christians, people who aren’t Christians, ICE agents, protestors, and Donald Trump.

Practitioners of contemplative prayer (of whom I’m one) describe these moments in terms of “unknowing.” It’s as if we put down our need to solve and fix and know, and discover instead our place and peace inside the good and beautiful love of God. It’s when in waiting for the arrival of God we become of aware of his already here-ness.

Martin Laird writes in his book Ocean of Light, “When the flower of awareness blooms, breaking open into midstream, we both embody and body forth our witness to the fact that we sit in silence at one with the entire world; there is a great unmediated unity, a solidarity, a grounding union in the groundless ground of God in whom ‘we live and move and have our being.’”

In other words,

When the world rushes ahead and you can’t make sense of things

Or when things go wrong and you can’t fix them as quickly as they’re breaking

Or when everything seems outside your control

You don’t have to rush to act. You don’t have to keep up. You don’t have to know the answers.

You can wait for the Lord.

And in waiting, you may discover He’s already here.

And in waiting you may discover a better way to live.

-

London is gone again. She graduated more than a month ago. She’s at sea now. I hear the waves are ten or eleven feet high. I’ve discovered that the life of a sailor’s mom is a life of waiting. I’m glad I’ve had practice.

Today I went into the family prayer closet (which doubles as a pantry) and saw a new prayer pinned to the board. London must have written it the last time she was home (when she came to get her things). She begins, “God bless these swallows, these ridiculous pilgrims in whom you are well-pleased…”

She’s quoting Psalm 84:

How lovely is your dwelling place,
Lord of Armies.
I long and yearn
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and flesh cry out for[a] the living God.
Even a sparrow finds a home,
and a swallow, a nest for herself
where she places her young—
near your altars, Lord of Armies,
my King and my God.
How happy are those who reside in your house,
who praise you continually. 
Selah

We’ve adopted the swallow as a kind of family identity (we call this house “Swallow’s Nest”). We will be people who build nests near the altar, people who reside in His house.

But here’s the thing about swallows: they’re pilgrims. They leave the nest and travel vast distances. What happens when they’re away from home?

The next bit of the Psalm says,

Happy are the people whose strength is in you,
whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.
As they pass through the Valley of Baca,
they make it a source of spring water;
even the autumn rain will cover it with blessings.
They go from strength to strength;
each appears before God in Zion.

Swallows take home with them. They carry God’s presence and blessing inside them—even through valleys of trouble.

London goes on to pray, “I ask for unity with You and with each other as we explore what this extension looks like… Give us a sense of home far greater than this house.”

It’s just the prayer I needed today, a reminder that as I wait for London to come home again, I can be assured that London is home, that we’re all home together right now in Christ.

Maybe London’s prayer is for you, too—a reminder that you don’t have to get caught up in the chaos of things not right. You don’t have to feel unmoored in the valley of trouble, cast about, straining for some perfect answer or exact right action.

You don’t have to be worried and frantic, grasping and impetuous like love sick teenagers doomed to haste.

You can wait assured. You can slow down, wait for God, and be reminded: He’s already here. With you as you wait. Turning troubles into springs.

You can pray with the surrendered, wisely and slowly,

“Your kingdom come, Lord.

Your will be done, Lord.”

Be with us as we explore what extension looks like…

-JL

Hi!

It’s been a bit since I last wrote here; I’ve been busy over at Deep Water. We wrapped up our 42 day meditation on Hebrews 11 in February, and in just a few weeks we’ll start a 49 day mediation on John 13-16.

I LOVED reading the Bible slowly and together with an amazing group of people from all over the world. Can’t wait to do it again. Maybe you’re looking for a slower, more contemplative approach to the Bible? Follow along at Deep Water.

Also…

Today marks the launch of Season 8 of Holy Ghost Stories! This time we’re telling the story of Joseph over twelve chronological episodes.

Joseph was never my favorite Bible person. He was just so hard to root for—favorite son, swoon-y good looks, never does anything wrong, bragging about the dreams… But lately I’ve wondered if I had it all wrong. After all, Joseph is a Christ figure, and I do really like Christ. I haven’t read the whole season yet, but so far, I can already feel my heart changing.

And finally…

We’ve begun fundraising for the second season of The Happiest Saddest People. Launching February of 2027, it’s a totally true, very sad, very happy story about parenting, marriage, and financial disaster. Hopefully, it’ll enable you to bring your own story of struggle into the light of God’s love.

If you’re interested in helping Hazefire Studios tell and distribute this story, reply to this email.

Godspeed,

JL

Scratch that. Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. I don’t know what day it is. It’s been a long month. My kids is in bootcamp. She has pneumonia. And she’s not a kid anymore.

I went to look at Christmas lights with friends a couple nights ago. Their four-year-old daughter, June, sat down beside me, her hot chocolate between her mittened hands. “Where’s Landon?” she asked.

“London?”

She nodded.

I said, “She’s a grownup now. She doesn’t live here.”

“But when is she coming back home?”

I said, “I don’t know. She has her own home now.”

I took a sip of my latte. June took a sip of her hot chocolate. We listened to the girl across the way strum her guitar and sing, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas.” Lights in the trees twinkled.

June asked, “Does she have a husband?”

I smiled. “She doesn’t. But she has a cool uniform with a hat.”

June said, “Oh. I’d like to see that.”

So we Googled images of Coast Guard uniforms, and for a moment the material reality of a white twill hat helped us get our heads around London not coming home.

-

My burden is light. But sometimes it feels very heavy. I have friends carrying their own heavy loads. I try to help carry theirs as they try to help me carry mine.

I have a friend with cancer, diagnosed over Thanksgiving break. She’s my age. She’ll spend the whole of the holidays waiting for new years action—surgery, regimens… Going to war.

I have another friend struggling to keep her mind from unravelling. She goes to therapy. She takes the medicine. But past pains rise from graves, and she is haunted.

I mentor a girl who did everything right. She aced the tests and made the grades and still every school said no. And now she’s got to go home and argue with her parents about the future that isn’t and wade into the fog of the future that is.

An old neighbor is newly divorced and feeling very alone. An old friend has two jobs and still can’t pay the bills. A friend of my daughter’s is in love with a girl who will never love him back.

And these are just the people I know. A sampling.

We have not yet mentioned Christians in Nigeria or children in hospital wings or enslaved girls walking the streets of our own cities.

On the way to dinner with friends last night my husband joked, “Nobody act weird.” Grief will do that to you—make you weird. I keep steering conversations toward the burden of poverty and the evils of AI. And look! Now I’ve infected your holiday inbox.

What can I do? There’s something about suffering that opens our eyes to other people’s suffering. Once they’ve been opened, it’s very hard to close them.

-

So I’m suffering. And he’s suffering. She’s suffering. They’re suffering. And maybe you are, too.

I’ve written quite a bit about suffering at Christmas, about how Christmas is the light in the dark holiday. It’s a promise that even though things are bad, Jesus is coming, and what’s to come will be better than what is. Christmas is about hope. Christmas says, You’re not alone here in this pain. Immanuel came, and Immanuel comes. Christmas is about love. There’s joy to it, too. Christmas says, even in the dark there are things to celebrate. And peace—Christmas promises an end to anxiety and strife.

Hope, love, joy, peace. The four candles of advent.

I wonder if there’s one missing.

This year I’m thinking a lot about the “waiting” component of Advent. Naturally.

I read this from Henri Nouwen and can’t stop coming back to it:

“Zechariah, Mary, and Elizabeth were living with a promise that nurtured them, that fed them, and that made them able to stay where they were. And in this way the promise could grow in them and for them […] They know that what they are waiting for is growing from the ground on which they are standing. That’s the secret. The secret of waiting is the faith that the seed has been planted, that something has begun.”

The secret of waiting is faith—faith that something has begun.

-

Your life needs an engine. I tell this to the college students I lead in small group. I tell it to my daughter at home beginning a career.

Lives are powered by things—ambition, desire, envy, revenge, greed, proving our parents wrong, getting the girl. A life is only as big as its engine can handle. Most engines don’t have the horsepower to get a person through the ups and downs, the slings and arrows, the sea of troubles. They have to be rebuilt or exchanged.

The best engines are eternal things, things that have stood the test of time, longings that rage like bonfires. Things like hope and love.

And faith.

Faith is, I’m finding, a most reliable engine. It works in the dark. It works off road. In the rain. It’s what you need to keep going when you do not want to keep going.

I do not want to keep going today, but I cannot turn this engine off.

In Hebrews 10, the author encourages the church to “hold fast” “without wavering,” “for you have need of endurance.” How will they muster that endurance? How will they wait for the second coming of Christ and suffer in the meantime? The same way they did before “when you endured a hard struggle with sufferings”:

“My righteous one shall live by faith… we are not those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.”

The next line is famous: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for…” It’s the first verse of Hebrews 11 (the famed “hall of faith”). The heading for chapter 11 in my Bible is the two word phrase, “By faith.”

The rest of the chapter is a long list of lives empowered by the engine of faith. What were they capable of? Anything.

I know people living by faith. It’s wild to watch them go and go and go—the way they walk as if they see something no one else sees, upheld by an invisible bridge.

My daughter, London, is one of those people. It’s why she joined the Coast Guard at 17, because she was sure God was asking her to. It’s how she’s surviving bootcamp—“He put me here. He’ll get me through.”

I want to be one of those people. I need to be one of those people. There’s no surviving this world without an engine like theirs. I don’t want to be one of the ones who shrinks back and is destroyed. I want to keep going.

-

What does it mean to live by faith?

And what is faith, really? Is it just believing God exists? Is it more than that?

Why is the engine of faith so reliable?

What does engine upkeep look like?

It’s easy to say, “Live by faith” and you’ll have what you need to power through. But I suspect most people don’t know what that means. I bet a lot of people think it means, “Keep your head down and keep going.” It does not.

Because a new year requires new power, and because I am keenly aware of the suffering all around me, I’ve decided to start January with a study of Hebrews chapter 11. You’re invited to join me. We’ll spend 42 days in one single chapter of the Bible asking our God for revelation—Show us what faith is. Show us what faith does. Fill us with faith. Fill us with faith again. Empower us to hold fast without wavering.

I’m a big proponent of reading Scripture slowly, so we’re calling this method of study, “Deep Water. Slow Reading.” The Bible rewards close reading. Sometimes, in our efforts to read across its width, we miss its depth. Let’s not.

So, 42 days in Hebrews 11 starting on January 5th. I’ll send you a reminder closer to time, but for now, consider subscribing to the Deep Water Substack.

-

Christmas isn’t easy. I’m sorry it’s hard, sometimes harder because it’s supposed to be merry and bright. But I do hope you’ll find some consolation in knowing that one night, a long time ago, the sky was unzipped and human beings caught a glimpse of the glory of the Heavens. The angel told the shepherds, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.” And though it would be a long time before the Messiah grew up and died on a cross and rose again and even longer still before He’d come back and reclaim his people and reign with them forever, though the shepherds wouldn’t live to see it all play out, they “[knew] that what they [were] waiting for [was] growing from the ground on which they [were] standing.”

May you wait for what’s already begun with faith. May your good God give it to you—the gift of faith, eyes to see the unseen, hosts of angels proclaiming good news.

Deep Water. Slow Reading.

Reading Scripture together & taking our time

By JL Gerhardt

It was terrible. Heavy. Like carrying a mountain on your back.

But also unspeakably beautiful.

That’s how it is to meet God. Even the prophet Daniel can’t handle it. Practically melting, he has to ask Yahweh to give him strength enough to withstand the proximity.

Yep.

Praise Him for meeting us. Praise Him for not standing too unbearably close.

I wonder, did I experience Yahweh like this before Holy Ghost Stories?

Yes? Maybe? No…

-

We didn’t decide to quit our jobs and move away from friends and pull the girls out of school to make Holy Ghost Stories. We quit our jobs and moved away from friends and pulled the girls out of school on a hunch. Back then we wouldn’t have said the Lord was calling us. We would have said, “It feels like God has something for us” or “Perhaps God is leading us into something new.” And even just that—a hunch, a feeling, a perhaps—it felt enough like the voice of God to siren-wreck the ship of our lives. Like Spurgeon wrote, “I have learned to kiss the wave that throws me against the Rock of Ages.”

Anyway, we didn’t know what we were doing, but it felt inevitable, like God had picked us up and I guess we’ll know where we are when He decides to put us down. So we told our church we were leaving. Justin said to each of the eight elders, one at a time in eight successive coffee meetings, “I want to lead people into fresh encounters with God.” To be abundantly clear, that was the whole plan. There were no steps or action items. It was such a non-plan that it wasn’t even sketched on the back of a napkin.

Was it reckless to leave what we had (a good church, meaningful work, friends, a beautiful home) to set out on a plan-less adventure with God? It didn’t feel that way. It felt like the safest possible future.

After Justin told the church we were leaving, he had an idea, the idea that became Holy Ghost Stories. He thought it might be a good first project. Now it’s his full time job. And in a way, mine.

But it’s not just our work. It’s our proof of things not seen.

Because we didn’t know what Yahweh would do. And we took a step anyway. And look…

People all over the world are meeting God in His stories—70+ countries, closing in on a million downloads, people coming to faith, people coming home after decades away.

I’d always read that first line of Hebrews 11 like a definition. Faith is: “the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen.” But lately I think it’s more a description. I think the Hebrews writer is saying, When people have faith, when they listen to the call and act on the hunch, that courageous leap is proof to everyone watching that the hoped for things, the unseen things are real.

I hope you hear me: Following Yahweh at the end of 2020 to leave just about everything behind and begin the work of telling His stories was an act of faith (faith given not earned) and that act of faith, more than almost anything else in my life, has proven to me that my invisible God is present, active, material, and good.

And it’s proven it to our girls, too.

Ask them.

They learned to trust God on the job.

-

In some ways Holy Ghost Stories upset our lives. God asked us to give up so much. The girls especially. Their friends, their school, their church, a brand new beautiful house. London even had to give away her cat. They cried a lot those first few months. It was terrible and heavy, like carrying a mountain on your back.

But it was also unspeakably beautiful. Yahweh gave more than He took. The girls found friends. They loved homeschool. They traveled the world. Our family grew closer than we ever might have imagined.

And then there was Holy Ghost Stories itself…

Eve has listened to every episode at least three times. She weeps while she listens. She knows Who Yahweh is because of these stories. She knows who she is because of these stories. And now she tours with world-class musicians, singing and playing piano, lending her voice and her heart to the stories she loves, inviting audiences to meet Yahweh where she’s met Him, to let Him change them like He’s changed her. Thanks to Holy Ghost Stories, our daughter Eve glows like Moses on the mountain.

London will say her life changed in Londonderry, Northern Ireland after a Holy Ghost Stories telling of the Ezekiel story of God breathing life into the bones. Yahweh stepped through the story like a man walks through a door and suddenly, London saw everything that God had been trying to show her for years. She put down fear and picked up an identity, one that culminated in her decision this year to take her own giant step of faith following God’s call into the Coast Guard.

Would she have done that if her dad and I hadn’t gone first?

Would she have done it without the stories?

-

A few days before that last night with London, our little family gathered in a cabin in the Texas Hill Country to grab a few precious moments of connection. We checked in on a Sunday and met in the living room that night for a time of communion and worship. Eve led us in song, and London shared a message. She read from Hebrews 11, “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed and set out for a place that he was going to receive as an inheritance. He went out, even though he did not know where he was going.”

I listened from my chair, wrapped in a blanket. A candle glowed on the coffee table. I looked over at Justin, smiling, tears on his cheeks.

I wonder, did I experience Yahweh like this before Holy Ghost Stories?

In a way, yes. He’s always been close. He’s always been good. He’s always been at work.

But also, no. This is new. This fuller measure of exposure. These eyes that see.

I have seen the glory of God, because when we were called we obeyed, even though we did not know where we were going. Upon arrival, I have discovered an inheritance—stories like the ladder in Jacob’s dream, stories ferrying me across the waters and into the terrific, beautiful presence of God.

THAT is why I don’t mind asking you to give today to support the work of Holy Ghost Stories. Because I know what Yahweh will do with His stories. Because my family is proof of concept.

GIVE TO HOLY GHOST STORIES

Follow along with us over on Instagram today (@holy_ghost_stories) to hear more testimonies to the life change happening as people listen to Yahweh’s most cherished stories.

Godspeed,

JL

I teepee the large logs, create a nest of twigs and leaves beneath them, and light. Sparks. I poke and blow. Move this stick there. That twig here. I rearrange things. I wait. I poke and blow again.

Soon my fire is glowing. Then blazing. Justin applauds. The girls stagger out of the tent, then gather round with Bibles and breakfast.

Five minutes later, the fire is practically out. I put down my coffee and head off into the nearby woods to gather sticks and twigs.

-

“Quiz me,” London says from her camp chair. She hands me her index cards. On the first, a title: “11 General Orders of a Sentry.” She has to memorize these for boot camp. She’ll be at boot camp in 37 days. Who’s counting?

I’m counting! And her father is counting. Her sister, her grandparents, friends, family-friends… We are all counting the days until London leaves us for the Coast Guard. We are counting days and hoarding them. Which is partly how we ended up here in the woods, camping—sometimes you just have to snatch your children up and run away.

Also, this weekend is the Feast of Tabernacles, and we have always wanted to celebrate it as a family—to go out into the wilderness and experience the presence and provision of God.

I ask London, “What is the second general order of a sentry?” She says, word for word, “To walk my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert, and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing.”

I smile, “Perfect, baby girl.”

I look at her proud face, her messy hair, the way her long, muscled legs tumble over the side of her chair. I observe everything.

The fire has died down again. Unfortunately, my chair is low to the ground, and I am 44 and arthritic. I inelegantly roll out of it. The girls laugh. Justin says, “Well done.”

Back to the woods…

More sticks and twigs. More logs. More poking and blowing and moving things around…

-

Cards. A nap. And then we hike. We climb to an overlook and descend to a creek. London catches tadpoles in her bare hands. Some look like fish. Some look like frogs. Some look like Frankenstein’s monster—neither one thing nor another. Becoming.

We sit, and the water rushes past us. I run my hands over the rocky creek bed, lifting smooth stones, examining them, skipping them across the water, accelerating their downstream pace.

London is still hunting creatures. Eve finds a stick and pretends it’s a whistle. I smile as I let out a happy, heavy breath. They’re children.

But they don’t look like children. They look like women. Like river sirens. Like they might stun a sailor and wreck a ship.

We hike up, back to the overlook. The creek looks small from here. I take pictures of the girls with their father. We finish the hike and pile onto the bench seat of the truck. It is much too small for our four grown bodies.

-

To my left, Eve is reading Hemingway—a book about a civil war. She watches soldiers blow up a bridge. To my right, Justin sings and plays guitar:“I’m just a poor wayfaring stranger, trav’ling through this world below…” I sing along.

London memorizes orders.

“What is the 11th general order of a sentry?”

“To be especially watchful at night, and during the time for challenging, to challenge all persons on or near my post, and to allow no one to pass without proper authority.”

The Bible in my lap is open to Thessalonians. The Apostle Paul tells the church, “We do not belong to the night or the darkness. So then let us not sleep like the rest, but let us stay awake.”

A phone beeps in the tent. We ignore it. Justin sings,

“I’m going there to see my father…
I’m just going over home.”

-

Night falls.

Justin tends the fire this time. He’s better at it.

We prep sweet potato and onion for steaming in the fire in foil pockets. I push the sharp knife through resistant starch. Cubes of orange and then purple pile on the plate. I’m on my third potato when the knife cuts into the tip of my thumb. London takes my hand in hers and staunches the blood. She finds the first aid kit, cleans the wound, and wraps it. Bandaids, medical tape, love. She sends me to to sit patiently while she finishes cutting the potatoes.

When dinner is done we gather around the fire again, this time to tell stories. It’s the Feast of Tabernacles, so we tell wilderness stories. And they are not easy (loss, disappointment, rejection, loneliness, heartache, and despair populate the cast list). But they’re good stories nonetheless. God was there, and look, now we’re here. Stronger somehow. Better for having had things (beautiful things) stripped away.

I realize this is the point of telling these stories, to remember how hard it was and how good it is. I tell a story. Justin tells a story. London and then Eve. And together we remember that the wilderness brought blessings—manna, trust, revelation.

Stories light the dark. Torches in the hands of sentries.

-

I’m on my second coffee, feeling fully and pleasantly awake.

To my left, Eve is reading Hemingway.

London memorizes orders.

“Number five?”

“To quit my post only when properly relieved.”

The fire fades. Justin puts down the guitar and rises to collect more wood, branches but also the little things, leaves and twigs, used paper towels—tinder. He rebuilds again. Stokes again. Calls the embers to greatness.

And then he grabs his phone from the tent, to check on the beep. A text. Our friend has died.

We knew it was coming. We hoped it wouldn’t come so soon.

Justin returns to the fire, and tells a story about the friend we’ve lost. I tell another. We laugh. And then we tell the girls about his wife, about how faithful she’s been to stand by his side as the embers of life cooled and faded, knowing she couldn’t bring him back, and yet… praising God in every sent text, on every call. For His kindness, for His faithfulness, for moments of grace…

Justin lifts the guitar, agitates the strings. A song appears like the fire did, stoked into being. He sings, “Were creation suddenly articulate…” and at that very moment, the air stirs—wind. The trees encircling us let go of the leaves they’ve held so tightly, like sentries relieved. As we sing, we are showered in gold.

-

There is a second purpose to the telling of stories, but it’s not the second. It’s the first.

Yes, stories help us to remember, to light the dark with trust and hope—torches, campfires. But stories, the telling of our lived experience of the presence and work of Yahweh, are more than that. They are creation articulate. They’re burnt offerings, flames blazing on an altar. Said and sent, stories race life wildfire, taking territory in the name and to the glory of God.

How is the devil defeated? By the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony.

-

We pack up the campsite. We teach the girls how to take down a tent. Together we pull up the pegs, undo the poles, wipe the dirt away as we fold the nylon into thirds… We are priests packing up the tabernacle, taking it with us as we go where we’re told. Further up and further in…

The fire has died out, but we are freshly stoked and happily aflame. Everywhere we go, we will carry the fire.

I am keenly aware that the next time we unfold this tent, London will likely not be here to help. She’ll be somewhere else doing something else without me, as I’ll be here with this tent without her.

Because I have not forgotten the wilderness stories, I know there will be something good to come from her leaving, even though I hate the idea.

But also.

Because of this weekend, because I helped her memorize the orders of a sentry, because she cleaned and wrapped my cut thumb, because we sang together and hiked together and held tadpoles together, because we told stories and lived stories for the glory of our God…

Because we tended the fire together…

There is no me being here and her being there. Not really.

There’s just this one Spirit, one animating Wind, dwelling in both of us, blurring the lines between us, making us one—one body, one mind, one hope, one faith, one destiny.

One tabernacle on two hills.

For now

-JL

I’m Counting on You to Comfort Me

My daughter, London leaves for boot camp on November 18th—smack in the middle of a Holy Ghost Stories tour we planned well before we had an official boot camp date. She’ll be along with us for the first half of the tour, but it’s not going to be easy to say goodbye on the road. WHICH IS WHY we’ll need you guys to come out and show us some love.

[Holy Ghost Stories is an Old Testament storytelling effort from Hazefire Studios—I’m a partner there and the manuscript editor for HGS. My husband, Justin, is the creator/writer/producer.]

Get Tickets

This year we’re touring the Creation show with our friend Adam Montgomery, a singer/songwriter/worship leader from Derry Northern Ireland. We’ll also have some guest appearances including acclaimed cellist Kendall Ramseur (our season 4 composer) in Austin. Plus, my daughter Eve will be joining us on stage for all three shows, and that’s reason enough to come (at least that’s what people keep telling me).

If you’ve never been to a Holy Ghost Stories show, might I say, you are absolutely missing out. Or maybe, you have something wonderful waiting for you that you’d be crazy not to grab.

Are Holy Ghost Stories shows entertaining? Absolutely. The beauty of it, the fully inhabited talent, the power of story, the exquisite craftsmanship—Yes, you will be delighted.

But that’s not really the point. Holy Ghost Stories shows are primarily doorways. Attending one is like stepping through the wardrobe and into a better, more enchanted world. It’s like standing beside Moses on Sinai, watching as the glory of God is unveiled. Things HAPPEN at these shows.

I like the word “show” for these events not because we’re “putting on a show” (in the trying-to-impress-you kind of way) but because it’s a form of “show and tell.” The idea is to get you in a room, and then show you what we’ve seen. And when we do, God shows up again, and you see Him for yourself. The proclamation of the revelation becomes a revelation of its own.

We have three show dates/locations for the tour:

November 16th in Austin, TX

November 20th in Fayetteville, AR

November 22rd in Nashville, TN

Please come. If for nothing else, to give me a hug.

I’m listening to my friend. She’s telling me about a breakup, about how it hurts and how it’s good and what she’s learning. We eat Cava, bowls of brightly colored tomatoes, pickled onions, corn, and avocado—a treat. I give her a hug, tell her she’s wise.

I’m drinking coffee with my friend. She’s been to Ireland for a conference—life changing. I tear up as she tells me about the moment when the speaker prayed for her, when other attendees gathered round and carried her to the Father. I tell her about work I’m doing. Sentences I’m writing. She tells me about two poems she’s written—they seemed to come from nowhere. Her eyes twinkle.

A walk in the morning with a friend my age, a true peer, a very best friend

A lunch midday with a friend 23 years younger, a mentee, sure, but also a light, someone giving me hope, showing me new things

A coffee in the afternoon with a friend 30 years my senior, a mentor, sure, but also a colleague, someone who speaks the same language

Treasures

I pray, Who am I, Lord God, and what is my house that you have brought me this far? (I Chronicles 17:16)

Praise be to God!

-

Five years ago, my family left our home of more than a decade to travel abroad. After two years on the move, we landed in Northwest, Arkansas. We didn’t know a soul.

A few weeks ago we threw a party at the house, and fifty people came.

To make friends (people I want to sit with and walk with and work with) at my age is miraculous. I don’t mean that as hyperbole. I mean it as fact. In the flesh, it is impossible to make the kinds of friends I have made in midlife.

But in the Spirit…

Some of my new friendships are deep. Old friends deep. Go over to their parents’ house for Sunday dinner deep. Talk them through a possible engagement deep. Emergency contact deep.

Some of my new friendships span gulfs—age, income, nationality, race, politics. I have as many friends who think I’m mistaken as I do friends who think I’m right.

All of my new friendships feel like springs of fresh water.

I take none of it for granted. I take pride in nothing, either. I know this is uncommon. I know Americans are mostly lonely. I know many of my readers live in a kind of friendship poverty.

So what am I doing? Bragging?

No.

I just thought maybe you’d want to know, In Christ

Friendship is possible.

&

Friendship is worth the effort.

I am not naturally good at making friends. You could say I’ve been quite bad at it. But God is good at it.1 It’s one of the things He’s always doing—connecting people, teaching them to dwell in unity, resolving conflict, spanning gulfs, accelerating intimacy. Though I have been a bumbling idiot in many a relationship, I’ve found, the closer I get to Christ, the closer I get to His people (and the closer I stay).

Christ in me is a kind of magnet—drawing those with Christ in them, creating attraction and bond.

Christ in me is a kind of bullet proof vest—helping me to endure the unintentional barbs of another person’s humanity.

Christ in me is a sort of balm—healing those I unintentionally hurt.

Christ in me is a kind of sun—enlivening anyone who gets close.

Christ in me is a kind of chlorophyll—turning the light in my friends into life in me.

I’m nothing. But in Christ, I’m a blessing to the people around me.

My friends are nothing. But in Christ, they’re everything to me.

It’s a kind of magic. An enchantment. Supernatural.

I am not naive. Friendship is hard. It takes patience, perseverance, grace, hope, love… Just the things God promises to give. I’m convinced, one of the ways He hands out these capacities is in the daily work of tending to the garden of friendship. He gives you what you need when you need it. Which means, we have to attempt friendship before we’re capable of it.

I have no elegant ending for this quick essay, just encouragement:

Go make friends!

Sure it’s hard. But it’s possible, and it’s so, so good.

Godspeed,

JL

I tilt my head. Huh. That might be true.

I do love a good confession. I love confessing, and I love being confessed to (even when it hurts, it’s the best of hurts). I love confession like I love dawn. 

I suppose that’s uncommon.

I haven’t always loved confession. I’ve been afraid of it. I’ve been skeptical of it. I’ve mishandled it. I’ve had my own confessions exposed, magnified, and ignored. But somehow, somewhere along the way, I received the gift as gift.

Hidden truth is heavy. Shared truth, well, it’s like any shared load—it’s lighter.

-

A few weeks ago my family watched the animated movie K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix. We’d intended to watch it ironically, something silly to laugh about, cuddled close on the couch. But then, to our great shock, it was extraordinary. Funny, clever, beautiful and true. Straight art. 

But not just art—theology!

Never underestimate South Korea. 

Here’s the premise:

Throughout time, the forces of good have been fighting the forces of evil, winning and protecting hearts through the power of song, specifically through the efforts of generations of Korean demon hunter girl bands. When our movie opens, our three demon hunters are members of a world-famous k-pop group, and they’re oh-so-close to finally saving the world once and for all. But (twist!) the demons have caught on and created their own boy band. 

To further complicate matters (SPOILER), we discover that one of the demon hunters, Rumi, is actually half demon! She’s been hiding all along, concealing the characteristic marks of demon-ness (they call them “patterns”) beneath long sleeved shirts and jackets.

Will Rumi reveal her marks to her bandmates? If she does, will they kill her? What about the fans?

And then! Will Rumi fall in love with the lead singer of the demon boy band? If she does, will she save his soul? Or will she lose hers? 

This is good plot. 

The magic is in the way the movie handles this central tension in identity–Is the demon hunter a demon? Or is she a hunter? Can she be both?

-

My grandfather, rather famously, hated the phrase, “We’re all sinners.” I can still hear him saying to my uncle in the Barnes and Noble cafe, “Maybe you’re a sinner, but I’m not.” (He was never one to pull punches with language.) 

What he meant, I think, was that Christians no longer identify as sinners.1 Though we may sin, those sins don’t define us. They’re not who we are. Consider Romans 6:

• We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? 

• Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. 

• For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace.

Peter summarizes the tension this way, “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

Sin is plot, my grandfather might say. But it’s not character—it’s not who you are. 

In the language of K-Pop Demon Hunters, we may be half-demon (fallen, marked by sins we can’t fully put away), but we have been chosen to be demon hunters, called out of darkness and into the light. That chosen-ness is our inheritance and identity. 

But then what do we do with the marks? What do we do when we feel the pull in Paul’s words in Romans 7:

Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am!

What do we do about that second law? About the wretchedness? 

I think that’s what my uncle was wondering when he told my grandfather, “We’re all sinners.” I think he wanted to know what to do with the temptation and the sin as he waited for his full transformation into the image of Christ. Maybe he wasn’t a “Sinner,” but he was sometimes sinning. And it hurt to hold that in. I think he wanted my grandfather to give him permission to be a little broken. I think he needed a safe space to bring his mess. 

-

King David prayed, 

Have mercy on me, O God,  
according to your unfailing love; 
according to your great compassion    
blot out my transgressions.
Wash away all my iniquity 
and cleanse me from my sin.
For I know my transgressions, 
and my sin is always before me. (Psalm 51:1-3)

He prayed, 

My wounds fester 
and are loathsome 
because of my sinful folly […]
I confess my iniquity;
I am troubled by my sin. (Psalm 38:5, 18)

He prayed,

Blessed is the one    
whose transgressions are forgiven,    
whose sins are covered. (Psalm 32:1)

When David prayed about sins, he prayed as if they were both the worst thing and the most inevitable— extraordinary in their effect and ordinary in their frequency. David knew that all people sin, that sin separates us from God, and that separation from God is the greatest tragedy. He also knew that Yahweh forgives sins, and that being forgiven feels like being covered—like a long sleeved shirt. 

I can’t help but think of Adam and Eve, suddenly aware of their nakedness, hiding. And I can’t help but think of Yahweh covering them in animal skins, a flesh and blood blanket and shield. 

And then Peter’s word to the church, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins” (I Peter 4:8). 

It’s hard to walk around with everyone knowing all your crap. It’s hard to mess up and feel every eye turn your way. Sometimes you just want to wear a giant metaphorical sweatshirt and be ignored. 

Especially when you’re someone like David, someone famous, someone under a microscope. 

Especially when you’re an international K-Pop star like Rumi. 

Or maybe especially when you’re just a normal person posting pictures of your day on the Internet. 

The distance—between who we are and who we want to be, between who we are and who we were made to be—it’s an ocean. Who can handle the whole world looking? Knowing? Judging? 

You can see the value in covered sins. 

But notice: Who covers the sins? 

Not the sinner.

-

Back to K-Pop Demon Hunters. As Rumi wrestles with the duality of her being, her mentor instructs her to hide. Hide until the war is over, and then the marks will go away. Until then, “until your patterns are gone,” she says, “Nothing can change.” 

Rumi tries. But it hurts. More every day, because the hiding seems to give the marks power. Covered, they grow. 

And as they grow, they steal her voice, and without her voice, how will she ever save the world?

Can she be who she was made to be before the patterns are gone?

How, I ask you, has an animated movie about K-Pop crawled up inside potentially the greatest struggle of the Christian life?

What do I do with this sin?

This sin that does not own me. This sin that does not define me. This sin that cannot have me.

This sin that’s threatening to burn everything down. 

-

The three central songs in the K-Pop Demon Hunters catalogue (“Golden,” “Free,” and “What It Sounds Like”) together tell the story of trying to live authentically as both an imperfect person and aspirationally as a person stepping into a higher destiny.

In “Golden,” Rumi sings,

“Waited so long to break these walls down
To wake up and feel like me
Put these patterns all in the past now
And finally live like the girl they all see”

Here at the movie’s start, Rumi reveals her desire to be who she isn’t yet. She wants to be the girl everyone sees on stage. She sings, “No more hiding, I'll be shining like I'm born to be.” And it’s heartbreaking, because you know she thinks these patterns are holding her back, preventing her from being the hunter with the strong voice.

In “Free,” Rumi has begun to realize that in trying to hide her half-demon-ness she’s avoided actually confronting it. She sings (in a duet with a demon considering switching sides), 

"All the secrets that keep me in chains…
What if we both tried fighting what we're running from?
[…] We could be free, free
We can't fix it if we never face it"

And it’s here that Rumi begins to understand what King David did. 

“When I kept silent,    
my bones wasted away    
through my groaning all day long…”

Maybe silence, hiding, distance—maybe it’s not the best way. 

She sings, “Let the past be the past 'til it's weightless” and the lyrics bounce against the walls of my heart, echoing…

She’s almost there.

Then, in “What it Sounds Like,” Rumi discovers the miracle of confession met with love. 

In the movie’s final epic battle, Rumi steps toward the great evil armed with a microphone and her confession. Her patterns uncovered, she sings, “Nothing but the truth now…”

As the battle ends she sings, “Truth after all this time, our voices all combined / When darkness meets the light, this is what it sounds like.”

King David once sang something similar:

“Then I acknowledged my sin to you    
and did not cover up my iniquity.
I said, “I will confess    
my transgressions to the Lord.”
And you forgave    
the guilt of my sin […]
You are my hiding place;
you will protect me from trouble
and surround me with songs of deliverance.”

And the Apostle John: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”

At the end of the movie, Rumi’s demon patterns have turned to silvery scars—like stretch marks. She is no longer half-demon. The marks have no mastery over her. She does not cover them up. 

This is not a story about calling darkness light or embracing brokenness as identity. This is a story about bravely acknowledging brokenness and finding power in proclaiming the truth, particularly in proclaiming the truth together. 

How do we live in a world that isn’t yet what it will be? How do we walk with authority in shoes we can’t yet fill? How do we let God make us golden and glowing with this sin nipping at our ankles, taunting us and soiling us? 

Confession is a start. 

-

Can real life be like K-Pop Demon Hunters? It will be. But is it now? Could it be? Because in my experience, confession is risky. 

Here the truth can shatter lives like a hammer to glass.

Here revelations repulse like a same-poled magnet, field lines clashing, too alike to be together. 

Your confessions may be mishandled. 

And yet… it’s the only way. 

I have no interest in wrapping this up cleanly. I think the power of confession is a messy mystery. But I do know things about confession that are probably worth sharing–ways to help it go right, paths to walk in, currents to ride as you reach to take hold of the gift.  

(If practical steps are bothersome to you, go watch K-Pop Demon Hunters on Netflix.)

I’ll leave you with four cardinal directions—truths I rely on for orientation as I practice the gift of confession. If I remember these four things, confession has the chance to be what it was always supposed to be–the path to freedom:

1. God is a safe place to tell the truth. Always. 

He wants you to come to Him uncovered. He will take your broken pieces exactly as they are and help you put them together in a new and more beautiful way. 

He will handle your sin for you. He’ll wash you of it. He’ll remove it. He’ll make you sturdy for the inevitable consequences of it. And then He’ll cover you in the softest of sweatshirts. 

He is the way to walk in your identity. He is your refuge and your protection and the one who is ever making you new. Confession in His care is like putting every single heavy thing down and being wrapped in light.

The quicker you confess, the faster (and freer) you run. Never put off a good confession. 

2. Be gentle with your confession. 

Our sin hurts the people around us. There’s no avoiding the physics of it. Sometimes our confessions are easy for others to receive, especially when our sin is obvious. The hurt has already happened and confession appears as what it is–a step toward healing. But other times our confessions are crushing, because they’re also revelations, moments when our friends and family discover they’ve been hurt and so are hurt. Confession can be a knife to the gut of the person we love. 

And so what do we do in those moments? We remember we’re not the victim, and we don’t expect the person we’ve hurt to be the one who binds our wounds and helps us recover. We give space for the ones we’ve hurt to hurt, and we turn to God for the healing we need. We use language like, “I hurt you,” and “I should never have done that,” and “I’m making changes to ensure I never do that again,” and “I’m sorry,” and we avoid heaping our own pain onto the shoulders of the ones we’ve injured. We also listen. We listen for as long as the person we’ve hurt needs us to. 

3. Be a safe place for someone to confess. 

Remember that confessing sin isn’t sinning. Confession is the prodigal son at the gate. Confession is flicking the lights on. Confession is dawn. Welcome it. 

This is not the moment for a sermon about what’s wrong with the sin being confessed–they already know it’s wrong. This is not the time for finger wagging. This is the moment for hugs and prayer and listening (and if it’s appropriate, offering forgiveness). 

[Practical tip: As parents, my husband and I always separate confession moments and punishment. We never talk consequences in the moment when a child comes to us with something they’ve done wrong. That can wait. This moment is a good moment. Similarly, when my husband comes to me with a confession, I do my best to respond with gratitude first. Later I come back around to discuss how I may have been hurt or what we need to do differently in the future.]

Can you always do this perfectly? Of course not. Do what you can. Let the Spirit do the rest. 

4. Confess to the right person. 

Confess to God. Confess to the people you’ve hurt. Confess to the people who love and lead you. But know, you don’t have to walk around naked in a world seeking your destruction. Keep in mind: the point of confession is freedom. If somehow you end up in a relationship where confession feels like slavery–something is off. 

Confession isn’t martyrdom. It can be—there are times when you will need to “die” for the love of the people you’ve hurt. Or “die” for the love of someone who’s taken the blame for your mistakes. But you don’t have to die on every cross. You don’t have to broadcast every sin. It’s okay to seek safety. 

And also, please don’t saddle people you barely know with stacks of struggles, especially if you’re using confession as a way to create false intimacy or generate codependence. 

-

So Justin says I have the gift of confession. Maybe. You can, too. All of us can. It’s a good gift. Free! A steal, if you ask me.

What I loved most about K-Pop Demon Hunters was the way they captured the act of confession in that final battle scene, this practice of simply telling the truth about what is. Rumi on that stage with her bare arms and her determined face—she knew she was doing something important. She understood the power of the truth. Was it dangerous? Definitely. Did it matter? It couldn’t have mattered more. 

May you hunt demons with truth, friends. And may your truth telling lift your head and lead you home. 

-JL

I don’t know how to hold this.

I was once a little girl at summer camp on a river. My little girls were little girls at summer camp on a river, too.

Rivers are supposed to be safe places, places to root yourself beside, places where everything lives. I have planted much on the banks of rivers, including the plot of my own life.

And yet…

When I pray, as I do every morning, I don’t know what to say about the little girls at Christian camp, sleeping, now swept away, so I say to God, “I’m going to put this on the back burner, and let it simmer. I haven’t forgotten about it. I can’t forget about it.”

I press on praying. It is a privilege to have anything else to talk to God about. There are mothers praying somewhere in Texas who do not have the same luxury.

I read Psalm 139 aloud, “Before a word is on my tongue, you know all about it, Lord…”

-

Feet together, toes pushing against cold rock, knees bent, I raise my arms above my head and jump. My hands pierce the surface of the water, making way for my body. It’s cold down here. Cold and dark. But also electric and quiet and tender. Eyes closed, self surrendered, I glide and merge and become. I am the river.

This is my favorite feeling.

It only lasts a moment. When my head pops up, back into the unswaddled wideness of life above water, my 16 year-old daughter, Eve, yells, “Mom. Teach me how to dive.” Her sister, London, is curious too. She’s headed to the Coast Guard in the fall and though she is a strong swimmer, her dive is weak. She’s less eager to try than her sister, less eager to do it wrong. But they both line up at the edge of the rock to practice. Their father joins the lesson next. He knows how to dive, but he’s new to it, and, as is his way, he’s excited to be better.

I have taught them all to dive before. Several times. I first taught Eve and London on the dock at the Christian camp by the river. They remember, but they don’t. I taught Justin at the pool down the street from our house in Texas. He was 40 and finally ready to enter the water in a more elegant fashion. He was terrible at diving until he wasn’t. Today he dives from the rock like the Greek men we swam with in Santorini, like diving is his birthright.

Eve is initially less capable. She flops. London is initially less coordinated. She kicks and flails. But over and over and over they dive. I offer corrections, encouragement, not that, try this… And the dives begin to look like dives.

Eve enters the water like it’s home—easy, natural, graceful. She’s smiling as her head breaks the plane, her eyes happily closed. She awakes and asks, “How was that?!”

“How did it feel?” I ask. “Wonderful,” she says like a girl who’s still dreaming.

Later we’ll dry off, change, and drop the girls off at work. They sell snow cones. As they get out of the car for their shared shift, they say, “Today was the perfect day.”

-

I can’t stop thinking about my girls gliding through the water, swaddled. And I can’t stop thinking about the little girls in Texas, taken captive by the water, shrouded.

How can both things be true?

-

I read Scripture at church on Sunday with my husband and one daughter (one missing from the stage because we’d sent her to camp that morning—I tried not to imagine her not coming home). We stood together and read Psalm 136, alternating lines as the church read aloud the repeated chorus. Justin said, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.” London said “He alone does great wonders.” I said, “He led his people in the wilderness.” And twenty-six times the whole church affirmed, “His faithful love endures forever.”

During the sermon, our preacher encouraged us to write our own Psalm 136—How has God provided for you? Where have you witnessed the wonders of His creation? How have you been saved? Write it down. Tell Him.

I think of my happy family.

…His faithful love endures forever…

I think of the river beside my childhood camp, of manatees and clear water and learning to dive.

…His faithful love endures forever…

I think of the time I almost drowned in the Pacific Ocean but didn’t.

…His faithful love endures forever…

I think of standing beside my twenty year old brother’s coffin.1

…His faithful love endures forever…

-

What does forever mean? It’s like everywhere but in time.

Yahweh is everywhere.

Yahweh is always.

Yahweh is everywhere always.

-

This morning I’m studying for women’s Bible class and the author of my study tells me to read Psalm 139 aloud. So I do. I hear myself reading, praying,

“Where can I go to escape your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.”

Then I pray the Psalm in my own words:

When I swim in the lake with laughing daughters, you are there. 
When 27 of your daughters drown...  

It’s hard to say “You are there.”

I say it anyway.

-

I saw a video this morning of the girls who survived the Camp Mystic flood being driven away in a bus. You could see the wreckage out the windows, and I couldn’t help feeling like that was too much, like these precious children shouldn’t have to see that. But then I remembered they’d been in it, that, whatever comes, some bit of it will probably always be in them.

So much darkness. Enough to gobble a person whole.

Surely the darkness will hide them,
and the light around them will be night…2

I have the sound off on my phone, so it isn’t until I see a music note in the caption that I realize they’re singing. I turn up the volume. They sing, “The Lord of love has come to me…”

Even the darkness is not dark to you.
The night shines like the day.3

-

Do they mean it? About the love of the Lord?

The girls on the bus?

…His faithful love endures forever…

The people in the pews at my church?

…His faithful love endures forever…

The poet who wrote the Psalm?

…His faithful love endures forever…

All of the people who for all of the years, in everything, everywhere,

saved in the river,4

drowned in the river,

chanting the chorus 26 times and then 26 times again?

…His faithful love endures forever…

Do they mean it?

I return to the simmering prayer on the back burner—it’s thickened, intensified. I’m ready to pray it.

I remember the laughter and the diving and the perfect day.

I remember the valley of the shadow of death.

I said, “all your breakers and your billows have swept over me.”5

I say, “Give thanks to the Lord for He is good.

His faithful love endures forever.”

-JL

These days the gravity is significant.

Which is why I haven’t written much in these past few months. All my children are in the final stages of growing up and going out.

London is 17 with her sights set on the sea. She’ll take a test tomorrow that may or may not open the door she desperately wants opened. I have given hundreds of hours to prepare her for this moment when she’ll put her hand on the knob and turn. I cannot turn it for her.

Eve is 16 and recently graduated. She has a job and an internship. She’s driving. She has a dozen close friends. Her life has never been bigger or more complex. We talk for hours some nights. I sit on the bed with open hands receiving burdens. Then I give some version of the same speech I always give and she nods and mouths the words as I speak them.

One of the girls is texting a boy (who’s really only a week away from being a man), and this is normal and proper but new and also labor intensive.

And then there’s the book I’ve been writing which turned into a podcast and now exists out in the world without me. The Happiest Saddest People is an adult, too.

Soon, my proverbial nest will be empty, but it is not empty yet. I find myself living in the twilight, looking back and ahead, straining to just be here.

I wrote this poem the other day to try and sort what I’m feeling as this massive undertaking called motherhood approaches its next movement.

Voila 
by JL Gerhardt  

What I'll miss when the girls are gone
is the trick of turning broken things unbroken
making missing things unlost
the magic of repair
the white rabbit of redemption

Wiping spilled milk with a kitchen towel
the jug heavy, the cup waiting, the pouring
tears washing her eyes new
as she reaches
and slurps and grins

Holding out the brush—Baby girl!
She turns, Oh Thanks! I didn't know I left it. 
She grabs the unearthed treasure
found because I know
all the x-marked spots

Crying, because of what he did, because of what she said
Not the crying, but the sitting while she cries
as she sinks into my folds
this body turned pillow—
when she leaves I'll hit the gym

But not yet.

The hat is not yet vacant.
The jug is chilled and full.
The brush is on the counter.
The girls are at the table,
eating bread and drinking blood—voila

Have a beautiful week. May you have eyes to see the goodness all around you—even when it’s tucked inside something that may seem, at first, not-so-great.

Godspeed,

JL

P.S. Have you listened to the Holy Ghost Stories creation series?! You simply must. 12 episodes devoted to Genesis 1 and 2. You’ll marvel.

He brought gifts—an olive wood nativity, a gold ring, a shofar. He listened to the girls share every single detail of their ordinary teenage lives. With him sitting there across the booth at our favorite Mexican restaurant, everything was made right, exactly as it should be.

Friday morning I made breakfast, we cuddled on the porch and watched birds, and then the girls woke up, and we moved into the presentation part of homecoming. We sat on the couch, all four of us jockeying for blankets and space, and we watched the tv as Justin led us through pictures from the trip—pictures of places we’ve read about our whole lives but have never seen. There’s what might have been the cave of Adullam! There’s the valley of Jezreel! And then the valley of Elah (Where David killed Goliath? Yes!) En Gedi, putty colored everywhere but then goats and trees and springs! We watch and listen to stories and ask questions and receive history lessons. This lasts for two hours. We break for lunch.

After lunch we’re in Jerusalem and the emotion of it is almost too much. I know this city. But I don’t. I’m hungry for every detail. Another hour passes in happy contemplation. I pull my blanket up to my chin and settle in.

He’s talking about Hezekiah’s tunnel when I first feel it—that sweet pull of sleep. Like gravity. Like a current. It tastes delicious. This has been a perfect day. What could be more perfect than ending with a nap?

But we’re not done. He has more to share. And I want to hear it—all of it. I stretch my eyes. But I don’t sit up.

He’s explaining to the girls some part of tunnel construction that I already know, his back turned in my direction. So when I feel the pulse of sleepiness again, this time I indulge a little. I have a second before he’ll turn back around. So I let go, fall into the peace of sleep, and the next thing I know I’m blinking and Justin’s looking at me and he’s crestfallen.

“I think you need a nap,” he says. I say, “No! I’m loving this! I’m so excited to hear about this!” He says, “No. It’s okay. We can finish another time.” But I know it’s not okay. I know I’ve broken something perfect. It’s like I’ve dropped the porcelain plate of the day, and now it’s in pieces on the floor.

-

On Friday night we attend a Good Friday service with friends. The minister asks the question, “What makes the cross good?” and then tells us to let God show us the answer. We pray together, Come Holy Spirit. I bow my head and hold out my empty hands.

The minister continues preaching, but I don’t follow, because I’m being invited somewhere else. I can see it up ahead—a hillside overlooking a valley outside a city… I know this place. It’s the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. My husband was here just a few days ago. I fell asleep looking at pictures...

Oh.

I already know why I’m here.

Jesus is here. He’s talking to Peter and James and John, but I think (I know?) He’s talking to me too.

Before I hear him, I’m crying. He says, “Couldn’t you keep watch with me for one hour?”

Couldn’t you?

Could I?

Yes.

Maybe?

But I didn’t.

-

I’m writing this on the Saturday before Easter, so I know there’s almost no chance you’ll read it in time to match the mood of the liturgical calendar. The cross passes quickly. Resurrection’s reign is long. Praise God.

But maybe I’ll find you in your own personal mood and maybe this little reflection will be a blessing.

Here’s all I want to say:

Being a human being is so stupid hard.

I am constantly disappointing the people I love the most. I want to be kind. I want to be generous. I want to love them and protect them and give them every good thing and all of my self.

But then I fall asleep while my husband is sharing pictures from his once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Or I say something too blunt about my daughter’s outfit.

Or I wait too long to make dinner and I’m so hangry and there are no groceries in the house and I snap at anyone who gets too close.

Jesus asks his apostles, Stay with me. Pray with me. Love me. And they want to. They really do. But they can’t.

I mean, maybe they could. But also, they couldn’t.

It was late after a long day. They’d worked hard to prepare the Passover meal. They’d feasted, had a couple glasses of wine. They’d listened to Jesus preach (for who knows how long) about complex things they couldn’t quite get their heads around. They’d discovered one of their friends was a traitor. Peter had been rebuked. Luke says they were “exhausted from sorrow.” But now it’s dark and quiet. And the grass is soft. And sleep pulls like gravity, and it tastes so sweet.

They should have stayed awake. That’s true. Jesus says so. But they didn’t. And maybe that’s okay? Or maybe it’s not okay, but… inevitable?

Jesus says about his sleep-prone friends, The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

When He comes back from praying a second time, he sees “their eyes [are] heavy” and lets them sleep.

-

What makes the cross good?

Maybe an answer is, The cross picks up the pieces of the porcelain plate.

I want Jesus to fix my humanness, to keep me from dropping things and hurting people. And, in a way, He does. He shapes me in His image. He fills me with His Spirit. He guides me into truth. He shows me what it looks like to stay awake.

But also.

I want Jesus to fix my humanness and, in a way, He doesn’t. I remain imperfect and unable—sleepy and weak. Instead of making me perfect with a wave of His wand, Jesus lets me stumble my way through the tension of not-yet. Maybe to help me have compassion for others. Maybe to remind me to depend on Him. Whyever He waits, He waits, takes His time with my completion. In the meantime, He offers grace for mistakes and redemption for the consequences.

And that is what makes the cross good—First Jesus forgives us for putting Him there and then, miracle of all miracles, He uses our failure (our hate and envy and pride and selfishness, our murderous hearts and hands) to save the world.

So maybe it’s not so bad to be weak and make mistakes and fall asleep and break the plate?

It would be better to be perfect. It will be better one day.

But for now, the shame can be wiped away, like tears in a handkerchief. And the broken pieces can be surrendered—offered up for a glorious second life.

-JL

P.S. We are now only three episodes away from the end of The Happiest Saddest People. I highly recommend you jump in. It is a porcelain plate in the hands of God.

Here’s today’s missive at HSP—it’s standard fare for our weekly rundown of the latest episode:

I’m standing at a table talking about Hazefire Studios and the work we do—telling stories for the glory of God. It’s hard sometimes to measure the success of a story. Do you measure the time it took to make? The breadth of praise? Download totals? Five star Apple Podcasts reviews?

I say to the assembled group of potential partners, “We’ve taken to measuring success a different way…”

It all started with an email in the middle of the first season of Holy Ghost Stories. A listener said the Rahab episode had left her bawling in the cereal aisle at the grocery store. She thanked us. Another listener emailed to say she couldn’t listen on runs anymore because she was crying so hard she couldn’t breathe. Another listener texted Justin to say he listens to Holy Ghost Stories in the same coffee shop every week, and every week he sits on the same couch, headphones in, crying. He said, “Surely they have a nickname for me by now—What’s going on with Cry Guy?”

When we launched The Happiest Saddest People, more of the same. Crying on the lawn mower, crying in the car, crying at the sink doing dishes. Three separate people have told me about crying on the rowing machine at the gym.

Hazefire listeners do a lot of crying.

I say to the table, “We know we’ve done our job when listeners cry, because tears are the body’s worship.”

There’s no conscious choice to cry. It just happens. Tears bubble up from some unseen place—deep calls to deep, a spring unstopped, the mysteries of the heart made visible. You don’t cry because you want to. You cry because you have to. Like the stones.1

We saw in the closing scene of this week’s episode that tears are a kind of double anointing—a way of blessing God that also blesses us, messy glory like glitter, getting all over everything.

I hope Chapter 8 anointed you and Him and everyone close.

You can listen here:

In the Episode…

Sadness is wise.

This line stood out to me the minute I saw it on the page:

Man, this has been so true.

And it’s not just sadness. It’s weakness. It’s pain. Owning those states, acknowledging them, saying out loud, this is the truth of the matter—whew. It’s just teleportation into the presence of Jesus who is, in His very being, the Truth.

Oh! Don’t forget guilt—that knife of conviction, slicing you open and revealing your heart. I meet God as powerfully in confession as I do in worship.

A Glutton for… food, just literal food

I hope you heard my honest confession of gluttony in this episode. I don’t share it because it’s one of those sins that’s not really a sin. I share it because I suspect lots of people struggle with it, and maybe some of them (some of you?) need to be convicted of sin.

It took me forever to realize that I was using food as a way to avoid my pain and even longer to admit I struggled with self control. I don’t use food like that anymore, but even now I can hear the lies—a faint voice promising that a pumpkin muffin will make me feel better about some fundamental problem in my life. Gluttony starts as “little treat” syndrome and, in time, grows into “eat-a-whole-pizza” cancer.

If you’re succumbing to this kind of temptation, the first step is to take it to God with complete transparency. Tell Him what you’re doing and ask Him to reveal the why. Let Him shine light on the shadows in your heart you didn’t know were there.

Because gluttony is primarily about pleasure and escape, it will be hard to put it down without learning how to be comfortable with discomfort. This is something only God can help you do.

By the way, we should be very reluctant to diagnose other people with gluttony based on an outsider’s view of things. I am not a skinny woman these days, but I eat a measured, balanced diet and practice self control. During my epic eating days I weighed twenty to thirty pounds less than I do now.

These days I am more tempted by new boots. New boots are also empty promises.

The Athens News-Courier

This is the paper I wrote for way back in the day. I wrote a feature on traveling to Europe for cheap, and it almost got me fired. Our publisher said, and I quote, “The people in this town aren’t going to Europe.” But then his wife told him it had been her favorite article so far this year. She said, “The people in this town can dream.” Thank you, Denny’s wife, for saving my job.

Talking to my mom

Just a plug for saying true things to the people you love. It’s terrifying. And then it’s not. And then it’s possibly (probably) amazing.

London’s Playlist

You probably know this song already. That doesn’t make it any less good. :)

Tomorrow I’ll lead you in the spiritual practice of Ignatian reading, but instead of reading the Bible we’ll be reading our lives. It’s like going into the pensieve with Jesus. It’ll be fun! See you then.

Subscribe to The Happiest Saddest People

To Be Continued,

JL

You can find episodes 1 AND 2 on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen.

I don’t know what to say to make you want to listen to Season 1 of The Happiest Saddest People (In all honesty, I hardly feel compelled to convince you, because I love it so much, and can’t you just take my word?), but I’ll take a shot anyway.

Here’s the instagram summary:

That description is fine. But I have a better one: The Happiest Saddest People is the story of how far God will go to be with His children. But that’s a bit of a spoiler. It takes us a few episodes to get there…

If you’re thinking of The Happiest Saddest People like a podcast, you probably have the wrong idea. Unless you’re thinking of Holy Ghost Stories. It’s actually quite a lot like that, just fast forward a couple thousand years.

Here’s what you’ll find if you listen:

• A girl who’s aching to feel safe in a world that isn’t

• A woman who wants to hold on but can’t stop losing

• A story that might have ended one way but then God

• Love lost and found

• A little bit of drowning, a dunk of baptism, death, and (somehow) abundant life

• Questions like flares and Hail Marys

• Hope. But not the blinding kind. The star-over-Bethlehem kind.

• A prophecy

• Time jumps (because what is time, really)?

• A love letter to Florida. It couldn’t be helped.

• Bunnies

• Shoutouts to Virginia Woolf and Victor Hugo

• Meditations on “God’s silence”

• Happiness and sadness—so much of both

To be entirely clear, The Happiest Saddest People is a STORY. It’s a true story. It’s a story told out of order. It holds back and leaves you wondering and doesn’t always say everything in the most straightforward way. It gives you space to remember and wonder and hope. It’s not just about the facts of things—it’s about what it feels like to try to understand the mysteries of death, life, faith, love, and Yahweh.

And here’s the last thing I’ll say:

I don’t know anyone who loves God more than I do (though I know plenty of people who love Him just as much). That’s not a brag. It’s a gift. This is the story of how God won my heart.

I hope He uses it to win yours.

-JL

At the table, after the mmmms and wows and that’s amazings, after the catch up questions and answers, the wheres and whats and whos, I asked permission to pilot the conversation for a bit. “I have this Christmas carol lyric stuck in my head, and I want to see how it hits you.” I asked, “Tell me about a time when you felt ‘the thrill of hope.’”

-

Four days before Christmas Justin and I and the girls met Justin’s sister Jamie and her daughter Scarlet at the movie theater. We snuck in late to see Mufasa. Jamie and Justin and I had all seen The Lion King together as kids, way back in 1994, and loved it—obviously. Unfortunately, Mufasa is no Lion King. We spent most of the movie trying not to giggle too loudly.

But there was this one thing…

The whole movie is driven (the plot, the character development, the conflict—all of it) by a longing for, as Wikipedia calls it, “a mythical land” called Milele. Mufasa’s parents sing a song about it just before he’s separated from them. It goes like this:

Beyond the horizon
Beyond the last cloud in the sky
There's a place I know
Imagine a kingdom
The water flows
The grass is high
It's not a dream
Someday, we'll go

Throughout the movie, Mufasa struggles to hold onto to his faith in the place, but at every turn it’s Milele that guides his choices and inspires his perseverance.

And I couldn’t help wondering what it would look like to hold that tightly to a promise, to live bravely into a hope, to risk everything for an unseen kingdom.

And I couldn’t help wondering why so many of us, descendants of the King, destined for the Kingdom, don’t.

-

At the table, we tell stories about presents, snow, trips. We tell stories about waiting and planning and wondering.

My sister-in-law tells a story from when she was a little girl about waiting for family to come from out of town. She says, “I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. The excitement was kind of out of control and the only way I could calm down was to tell myself that a hurricane might hit and then they wouldn’t be able to come.” Justin exclaims, “Wait a minute! What?!” She explains, “I don’t know. I guess the possibility of something bad happening took the edge off. It helped me sleep.”

We all laugh at the threatening hurricane that helped eight year old Erin make it through the night.

Sometimes hope is scarier than a hurricane—especially big hope, the kind we bet everything on.

Sometimes hope feels like the first big climb on a rollercoaster. If rollercoasters came with brakes, most of us would use them.

To help us sleep.

-

In less than two weeks I’ll be releasing my newest project, The Happiest Saddest People. I have a lot of hopes for it. I don’t think I realized how many hopes until yesterday.

I was on a walk with Justin, looping our town lake, when I asked, “Are you concerned about the level of my expectations?” He said a quick, “No.” But then smiled and cocked his head. “What exactly are your expectations?”

Up until that point I hadn’t told anybody what I was hoping—not even myself. But I guess I knew it was a lot—because of what I asked Justin and because of the way my whole body tensed when he said “What exactly…”

As I began to answer, I thought I might throw up.

It’s a good thing we were walking in the woods away from the path, because what happened next was the kind of thing you need a little cover for. I heaved and cried and vomited up every dream and hope and expectation in my heart. When I heard myself saying what I was saying, I shook even more, terrified. It all seemed like much too much hope.

I said to Justin, while hyperventilating, “I don’t need all of this to happen. I’m totally fine with whatever happens. But I want it to, and I think God wants it to. I’m so scared to want it. But I’ve been scared to hope for a long time, and right now I think God’s hoping I’ll hope for more.”

I had to stop walking, because I couldn’t breathe.

A cloud of starlings filled the sky.

Justin put his hand on my shoulder and laughed, “This is the thrill of hope.”

-

I got a new Bible for Christmas. I lost mine recently, left it somewhere—a hotel room, an airplane, who knows. The new one is leather and smells alive. I read from it for the first time this morning—Isaiah. Promises spilled from every verse.

“Your light will shine in the darkness and your night will be like noonday” (58:10).

“You will be like a watered garden and like a spring whose water never runs dry” (58:11).

“The Lord will shine over you, and his glory will appear over you” (60:2).

“Then you will see and be radiant, and your heart will tremble and rejoice, because the riches of the sea will become yours” (60:5).

“Violence will never again be heard of in your land” (60:18).

“The Lord will be your everlasting light” (60:19).

“The days of your sorrow will be over” (60:20).

“You will see, you will rejoice, and you will flourish like grass” (66:14).

It sounds a little bit like Milele.

But it’s not a dream.

Someday we’ll go. Someday He’ll come.

These promises were first delivered to Israel during a siege. I’m sure they felt ridiculous, like a pipe dream, as the city fell and Israel’s sons and daughters were marched off to Babylon.

Maybe they feel ridiculous to you as you barely scrape by, as you carry the weight of your child’s rebellion or your mother’s disease or your own shame.

Or maybe the promises are too thrilling, too good to believe because you might find out they’re untrue. Maybe you’re imagining a hurricane to help you sleep.

All I can say is what I think Isaiah’s saying to Israel: God’s promises are real. Hold on. Don’t hit the brakes.

It’s okay if you feel like you might throw up. That’s just the thrill of hope.

-JL

Thanks for reading The Goodness from JL Gerhardt! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Short Things to Read this Week:

1. In case you missed it, I wrote a piece for Christianity Today called “All My People Died at Christmas”—it’s about what it looks like to experience the presence of God. Thanks to everybody who eagerly shared it—it was trending on the site all last week!

   

2. I read THIS article by Bonnie Kristian aloud to my family on Christmas Day. It’s an anthem.

3. I’ll surely write more about this in the coming weeks, but I’m still reeling from reading THIS article in The Cut. I deeply appreciate the Christian perspective that drove the author to question emerging modern viewpoints.

   

   4. And finally, if you haven’t yet read The Alchemist (a little fable of a book that has my family all fired up about living our “personal legends”), might I recommend the audiobook read by Jeremy Irons available on Spotify. It’s four hours of perfection.

I feel it when I eat my fifth Christmas cookie of the day—a nativity camel. I feel it when I realize, wrapping presents, that one child has two less items than the other and instead of letting it be (I spent roughly the same amount of money on each girl), I head to Amazon for another couple items probably made by modern day slaves. I feel it when I realize I’m watching my second mindless Hallmark Christmas movie of the night. I don’t have little children any more but I used to feel it when I tried to cram memory-making into an hour or two after school, yelling at the kids to get in the car and stop fighting so we can drive around town looking at the same Christmas lights we did last year. (Did you know that in an effort to make Christmas special parents stay up past midnight an average of six times in the month of December? Most pull at least one all-nighter.1) I feel it when the days are full of end-of-year work and the nights are full of events and it’s haaard to wake up a little early to pray for Christ to come.

But that’s what we’re doing this Advent—waking up thirty or forty minutes early, rolling into the living room yawning, plopping on the couch, and praying. We’re barely awake, we’re wrapped in blankets, but here we are.

It started because we are bad at Advent habits. We’ve tried ornaments and devotionals and calendars, but we never, ever finish. We lose the book. We leave the calendar at home while we’re traveling. The ornaments thing was boring. We never have the time at night we think we will…

This year, a day before Advent started, I made a suggestion: What if we just wake up early and pray? No accessories to lose. No book to order. No worries that something will pop up and displace our practice (we are not morning “goers” or “doers”). Let’s just carve out a spot, plant a flag, think about what it would look like for Jesus to come, and then ask Him to.

So that’s what we do. We each share one place/family/space/arena/sphere where we’d like to see God come in power, and then we pray that He would. Four prayers a morning. Each person prays. And after each prayer we say aloud, “Come Lord Jesus, Come.”

We’ve only slept in once so far, and in that case we prayed in the car on the way to church.

I don’t want to preach at you. I get it. I feel it. Modern life is exhausting—full of too many responsibilities and obligations and costs. I just want you to know: It’s nice to be with God. We’ve loved praying together in the mornings. We’ve loved remembering that with Jesus things might still turn around. And we’ve loved the way the day unfolds differently when we make space for meeting Yahweh.

God doesn’t want to be one more thing on your pile of have-to’s. He actually wants to help you slow down, do less, and make space. Space for what? NOT more space for more acts. Just space for Him. Space for hanging out. Space for getting to know one another. Space enough to dream about what might happen if He came. Space enough for Him to arrive and settle in and stay.

-JL

Oh hey—the show!

If you’re interested, we still have a few tickets for the Nashville Holy Ghost Stories Christmas show on Tuesday, December 17th. I read the script today and bawled like a baby. So good. ALSO my daughter Eve wrote a song for the show, and it also made me cry. So I guess I’m saying bring tissues. But mostly I’m saying this show is beautiful, and if you come you’ll meet God. Grab some tickets HERE.

I almost forgot—I’m telling a story at the show this year, too. It’s a story about my family, enduring through super hard things, believing God’s promises, and the unexpected beginning of Holy Ghost Stories. Find me after the show and say hi! I love to say hi.

Trying to explain Holy Ghost Stories can be difficult, because it’s unlike most podcasts. It’s fully scripted not conversational. It’s narrative but nonfiction. It’s dramatic, but it’s not “acted.” It’s Bible Stories but for adults not kids. It’s Bible Stories, but it’s not preaching or teaching or moralizing. It’s Bible Stories, but it’s not PG. It’s not feel-good content, but it is earnest and hopeful. It may make you cry (odds are high), but you may not understand why.

It’s a bit like trying to describeYahweh—it’s what you expect and what you least expect…

Here are six reasons I think it’s the very best way to use 25 minutes in your podcasts app (This is not an ad btw—the podcast is free. It’s more of a benevolent rant.):

1. It’s full not empty.

I am so decidedly sick of people talking about nothing. The proliferation of podcasts may be the cause of climate change—so much hot air.1 Many of the many, many words thrown into the air these days are repetitive, shallow, overwrought, undercooked, boring, sensational, or otherwise lacking in substance or gravity.

Holy Ghost Stories is not that. Every word is carefully chosen, every bit of music considered. There’s both nothing wasted here and nothing spared. Each episode takes between 40 and 60 hours to create. The research is meticulous. The writing is gorgeous. It’s like every sentence is a glass of really good wine—you want to smell it and swirl it and let it sit on your tongue. There’s something to experience here. Healing water to soak in.

2. It’s beautiful not chaotic and messy.

If one more person yells at me OR takes me on a wild goose chase of a conversation with no real destination and no actual wisdom OR refuses to do the simple work of choosing a good microphone before they launch words into the ether (like a person refusing to wear hard pants to work), I might scream. I won’t scream—you don’t need that. I’ll just quit listening. The world is chaotic enough. We don’t need more stirring. We need sorting. We need someone to do the work of making things as they should be. We need order and (boy do we need it) beauty. Real beauty. Not shallow, empty beauty. We need a glimpse of Heaven. That’s what an episode of Holy Ghost Stories feels like. You feel safe inside it—like your time will be stewarded in a way that leads to peace and harmony and life. My pulse changes when I listen to Holy Ghost Stories.

3. It’s true not true-ish.

The idea behind Holy Ghost Stories is to tell God’s stories the way He told them—as stories. We do that (Justin does that) partly because stories are better vehicles of complex truth than sermons, classes, conversations, essays, or debates. Not surprisingly, narrative text accounts for 43% of the Bible (almost double the amount of prose teaching). If you think of God as good at telling the truth, consider how He does it.

It’s interesting to me that Jesus calls Himself The Truth and reveals that Truth to perpetuity through the story of His life. Jesus’ story is told four times in Scripture—over and over and over and over again.

This is not how we usually think. We think truth travels best in lists and arguments. We’re wrong. When I listen to Holy Ghost Stories I find God revealing things I’ve never seen, teaching me things I didn’t know, casting light on the dark places in my heart, casting light on the dark places in this world. Holy Ghost Stories does the unimaginable—it changes my mind.

4. It’s not trendy or even trend-conscious.

I am aching for timeless these days. I don’t need another take on the election. I don’t need another reminder that shiplap is out of style or that I need to switch my skinny jeans for wide legged ones. I just need something that’s always been true, something good today and good next year and good for the grandchildren I don’t yet have. I want to listen to a story like Crime and Punishment or Beloved or Romeo and Juliet. Good for all of us. Good for always. That’s Holy Ghost Stories.

5. It feels new and fresh.

Which is bananas, because I’ve read most of these stories twenty or thirty times. I’ve heard them told. I’ve heard them preached. I’ve seen flannel-board versions and animated versions and VBS skit versions. I’ve read commentaries and other kinds of Biblical scholarship. I have a minor in Bible from Christian college. I write about the Bible for my job. And still, somehow, I can listen to the story of Yahweh calling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and feel something I’ve never felt before.

I can’t explain why Holy Ghost Stories feels like something new. It is inarguably old. There are no “reimagined” details for dramatic effect. Still. The reviews agree—this feels fresh.

6. I meet Yahweh there.

This is the reason I love Holy Ghost Stories. For me, it’s a portal into another world. Every single time I listen, I encounter Yahweh. I see Him more clearly. I feel empathy for Him. I like Him. I long for Him. I’m moved to surrender or holy fear or love. These episodes fix my eyes on my God. They pull me away from the distractions creating distance and suck me into intimate encounter. Sometimes I put off listening to an episode because of the intensity of the experience, because I’d rather not swim in water so deep. But then I remember how good it feels—how when I’m listening I don’t think of anything else in the world, how my self awareness disappears inside His memories. So I pick up my phone and put on my headphones and walk through the veil…

Listen to Holy Ghost Stories wherever you listen to podcasts.

Oh—one more thing. We have live shows coming up. A Holy Ghost Stories Live show is an opportunity to encounter Yahweh in one of His stories alongside a hundred or two hundred other people. And here’s the thing about crowds of Spirit-bearers—they carry the Spirit with them into the room and when the worship starts it’s like everyone’s little spark meets up in conflagration. These shows have me in tears every single time. I love the stories. I love the cello and violin—heartstring music. I love the voices lifted in worship. And I love Yahweh—always at the center of the gathering.

Join us for a Christmas show in Bella Vista, AR on December 12th or in Nashville, TN on December 17th. Get info and grab tickets here.

Thanks for indulging me, friends. Have a beautiful week.

-JL

P.S. This is my beautiful husband. He’s a modern day Bezalel. I can’t believe God chose Him for this work. And also, I kinda can.