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A good friend of mine once looked me in the eye and said, “God is constantly appearing to you disguised as your own life.” This was hard to swallow and maybe even a little bit offensive, but also I’ve grown to believe that it’s absolutely true. My guest today, Joshua Luke Smith, would agree, but he’d say it this way. The life you long for is hidden in the life you already have. Joshua is a songwriter, author, community builder, and the founder of Orphan No More and the Psalmist, a charity helping incarcerated men through creative expression and spiritual formation. He and I talk about his years working in prisons and the profound things he’s learned there about suffering, belonging, freedom, creativity, and the spiritual life. We talk about writing Psalms, embracing limitation, and why the main event of life may not be somewhere else waiting for you, but hidden in your own life now.

If this conversation touches you in a deep way and you want to go deeper, be sure to order Joshua Luke Smith’s book aptly titled This Is the Main Event. The link will be in the show notes as always. I’m John Mark McMillan and this is Flirting with Enchantment, a podcast about meaning making and Christian spirituality.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words, false starts, and minor repetitions have been removed. No substantive language or meaning has been altered.

Do I belong, and does any of this matter?

Joshua Luke Smith

absolutely. Bro, this is so live for me. Yesterday, I was in prison yesterday. I’ll tell you a bit more about that context, but I was in this session that is going to live with me. It’s going to stand out for a long time because like any sort of pastoral ministry context, you have most of the time it’s something you are kind of getting through and showing up to and not always experiencing the reality or the manifestation of what you hope that context would be. So even in prison, week after week, it’s like I imagine what it’s going to be and I’m imagining some of the conversations that we might have that very rarely actually happen. And yesterday though, one of those conversations happened and we were talking about what it means to be a child.

We’re talking about Jesus in Matthew 18 of you must change and become like a child to inherit the kingdom.

And so we’re having this conversation. Imagine with a bunch of guys that are doing long sentences and they’ve lived very painful, complicated, traumatic lives. And I just threw the question out of, if you imagine holding a picture of yourself as a little kid, what do you see in that child? And the conversation’s going around and then one of the men says, and to put a bit of context to this guy, he’d made it. He was running drugs and trafficking in London for a long time. He lived in a penthouse, he had material wealth. And he said, “I look at that kid and I think what he’s feeling above everything else is, do I belong and does any of this actually matter?” And you fast-forward like 20, 30 years and he’s at the top of his game and he’s like, “And I’m still feeling that or I was still feeling that.”

And then someone else around the table quotes Ecclesiastes.

They’re trying to find the language for it, but he’s literally quoting Ecclesiastes. Doesn’t it say somewhere that he’s put eternity in us? He’s put eternity in the hearts of man. And it just birthed this incredible discussion of the homesickness we feel for a home we haven’t had, the yearning to know someone that we’ve never met or be reunited with someone that we’ve never met. And the Welsh have a word which literally means to long for a place you’ve never been to. And so we just spent the rest of the session talking about that and going back to being kids and saying some of the most formative memories of being a child is like, I don’t belong here. Where do I fit in the world? And then you just fast-forward throughout our life and it’s like we’ve all been just trying to answer that question, whether it was with crime or not.

In any respect, you could have the most legal, holistic, beautiful, external reality to your life. And it’s still just be an attempt to answer that childhood, do I belong? Where do I exist in all of this? So yeah, bro, I’ve been really thinking about that and how if that’s not answered in your childhood, or at least if you’re not given a compass to follow in your childhood, the stakes only get higher as you go on and suddenly you’re 60 or you’re 70 and you’re looking back of all I’ve done is architecture. I haven’t felt, as you put the container, I haven’t felt or filled it with any spirit, any sense of meaning or any sense of substance. Yeah. So it’s a very live thought, bro.

Writing Psalms in prison

John Mark McMillan

I love when I first texted you for this interview. This is a text I got back. Bro, so sorry. Been in prison. And then I realized quickly you weren’t incarcerated. You were a visitor. When did you start working with incarcerated men?

Joshua Luke Smith

I first went in when I was early 20s, so over 10 years ago, this old couple in my church and their son was in prison, a different prison, but they had this beautiful heart to reach the men that were in there. And one Sunday they invited me to come in and just share a poem. And I went in and what kind of struck me initially when I got there was seeing this little woman I went in with, Gloria Weir was her name, and five foot three, tiny woman. And watching her walk in and both galvanize and gather the men like she had all the authority in the world. And then also see these men soften to her, straight away soften. And suddenly all your kind of preconceived ideas of what that room is and who they are shatters. And I saw her step in like, oh my goodness, I want to inhabit this place not as an observer, but as a participant.

And then they invite me to share a poem. I shared the poem and it just resonated. Just something about it stylistically resonated. And so I went back the month after and the month after that and then realized, well, the next step would be just to write poems with the men. So we started doing poetry workshops and I don’t know when it was, it might’ve been a year or two later. I just had the light bulb moment, which is very obvious to say it now. And I thought, man, I got to incorporate the Psalms into this because the psalms are the unsanitized prayers. The psalms are what lead us to speak to God in our actual voice. And my conviction was if David had written Psalm 51 now, he would’ve been writing it with us in prison.

And so I started this process with the men of let’s write the Psalms that we need to announce, but perhaps others need to pray because Psalm 51 is written by one man in his moment of collapse and crisis and then has been prayed by billions of people after.

So what if there are still Psalms to be written? And the reason that these psalms have escaped us is because we haven’t lived in that confessional place. Well, the guys in prison are living in that confessional place every day. So I started this project called The Psalmists. And now bro, literally a year next month we got charity status, we got nonprofit status, which meant I got a bit of funding, which meant I got to grow the team. And so now we’re in three prisons every single week doing this. And I’m in two prisons each week. And it’s become the sort of pastoral earthing of everything that I do. Eugene Peterson said in his book, Running with Horses about Jeremiah, he said the pastor and the poet have the same mandate to speak into the chaos.

And what I was saying about your work, you’ve been doing that for so long in terms of speaking into the chaos, particularly of the internal landscape and the spiritual landscape that we’re walking. And my walk in prison feels like an extension of that where I’m giving the men some simple tools to speak into the chaos of their life and their story. So we move through the Psalms like lament, name your pain, repent, face the truth because not only have you suffered, but you’ve added to the suffering. And then ascent, live beyond your suffering. And bro, it’s been amazing. It’s hard, but it’s rewarding and it’s fun. Do you know what I mean? It’s joyful. I have the best time in there. And the question that we’re talking around in terms of meaning making and meaning crisis, I’m like, “Well, that’s it, bro. That’s literally what it comes down to.

You give an eight-year-old a meaning to his life and you give him a compass to follow, and the story ends completely differently.” So I feel like I’m trying to do some of that work retrospectively with them.

Earth is crammed with heaven

John Mark McMillan

Yeah. Man, that’s so beautiful. I’m going to read this part of this poem. I know you know this poem, and I want to tie it to your prison ministry, and I want to bring up a difficult question that I have had a hard time answering. I want you to help me answer because I need some wisdom. Earth is crammed with heaven and every common bush of fire with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes. The rest sit around and pluck the blackberries. And when I was thinking about you and this conversation, I was thinking Joshua is not one to just sit around and pick the blackberries.

Joshua Luke Smith

Bro, I would love to say it’s true, but I don’t know if it is. I feel like it’s the wrestle of my life. You know what I mean? I think I gorged on the blackberries to the point that it made me ill and I realized there’s got to be a better way. I’m a glutton, bro. That’s my passion. I’m a glutton. I want it all. I want to consume. I want to taste everything all the way to the bottom of the barrel and to the bottom of the bottle. And yeah, I feel like I’ve already, I’m 36 and I’ve already maybe three times in my life been confronted with how damaging that pursuit is, how damaging that unrestrained pursuit is. And so what’s her name? Elizabeth Barnett. Elizabeth Barrett.

John Mark McMillan

Yep. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yeah.

Joshua Luke Smith

Yeah. I feel like what she’s doing there, like an elder in the wild is giving this commission or this kind of compass of there is a different way to live. And growing up in the church or growing up in the faith, that context to knowing God wasn’t my earliest invitation in terms of stepping into the mystery of God and the contemplation of God. Stepping into a God who inhabits your actual life. God was another thing to be gluttonous about. You know what I mean? The spiritual experience was something to consume. And there’s a writer, oh my days, Darcy. Nancy Darcy, is it? Who says, God comes to you in your actual life. God comes to you clothed in your life, dressed in your life. And it took me. Bro, I remembered a moment I heard the interpretation of that story in Exodus being an invitation into your life.

God is speaking to you in the suffering and in the mundaneity of your life. And it just was like, how did I not hear this earlier? Why was God always somewhere else just that I was striving to get to, that I was longing to reach rather than seeing him inhabited right where I was? So that’s a convoluted answer of I long to see the bushel blaze with fire and more recently have, but I don’t know if that has been my default. I think my default has almost been the opposite, which is why I’ve made the pursuit such a defining pursuit in my life.

John Mark McMillan

Yep. Well, when I spend time with you, when I talk with you, it always inspires me to take off my shoes. And even just sitting here and hearing your passion about working in prison and thinking about so many people don’t think about prison. I mean, I drive by one often and I don’t even remember what it is. And there are people, there are lives in that place that I never think about. And you see it and you take off your shoes and you find joy with those people. Those people that maybe others have forgot. You see God in that place, in a place that most people either don’t see or would struggle to find God. When I look at you, when I think about you, that’s who I think about. And that’s why this popped into my brain. And I want to talk a little bit about the main event.

I am so stupid. I did not realize you released another book.

Joshua Luke Smith

it’s coming out in the summer. So I’m going to send it to you, bro, because I would love to get your eyes on it. But yeah, I’ve just handed it in. So it’s going to be, I don’t know when this conversation will be live, but pre-save it now because it’ll be pre-saved, but pre-save it

John Mark McMillan

All.

Joshua Luke Smith

Yes.

This is the main event

John Mark McMillan

Do it. And I’ll put a link in the show notes if you’ve got one to pre-order the book. But there’s a thread here. Talk about taking off your shoes. You talk about what is the artist, the psalmist looking into the chaos into the prison and finding joy and finding life there and finding meaning and purpose. And you’ve got this concept of the main event I want you to talk about. And I don’t want to get too far ahead, but this is the conflict I run into. I think a lot about this, about the idea of God showing up disguised as your life, as you just said. I think about this all the time, and it’s so good for me and for my inner life. And I remember having a moment where I realized I had everything I ever wanted. This is crazy. This is going to make me sound so privileged.

I’m just throwing my privilege out here because privilege can be very revealing too. And everyone has a little bit of privilege and everyone has a struggle. It’s a spectrum. But I realized at a point I had everything I ever wanted. I had a beautiful wife, not just a beautiful wife. She’s the girl I always wanted. You know what I mean? I had my children who are challenging but wonderful. I own a house. I had the career that I wanted. I was traveling the world. I wasn’t a superstar by any means, but I never really wanted to be. But I did tour the world with my best friends, playing songs that I wrote. And it was literally like I was living the dream.

Joshua Luke Smith

And

John Mark McMillan

I don’t want to say I was miserable, but looking back, there was a time I didn’t enjoy any of it. And I had this moment where I realized I am watching my life slip away. I realized I was not seeing my life correctly. I ended up writing a whole album about that concept called Peopled with Dreams. And the whole idea is that your normal life is a miracle. And everything that we call common was at one time a miracle before we cursed it as common.

Joshua Luke Smith

Yeah. Well, good. And

John Mark McMillan

Like you said, your normal life, your ordinary life is significant. But this is the pushback always give. What about suffering? How do you talk about the main event? So maybe explain what the main event is. Then how do you talk to an incarcerated individual about the main event? What is that conversation like?

Joshua Luke Smith

Oh bro, it’s such a good question. And if I’m honest, it’s kind of the question I’ve long to be asked. The way you’ve connected that is I’m grateful. I mean, the main event, the early monastics had what they called the sacred phrase, which we use this all the time. It was just, you can see it more personified in those early centuries where a phrase that would send them into the center of prayer and contemplation at any point because they were constantly meditating on it. So the kingdom of heaven is within, and suddenly that would be this invitation back into this place of prayer and contemplation of God.

And probably, I don’t know, six years ago, little six, seven years ago, my wife and I really went through our first shared bereavement that just rocked us and scattered our faith in all these different directions and really was one of the formative moments of our life isn’t going to go to plan.

And we all have moments of that growing up. I can think of mine as early as four years old, as I’m sure you can, where you just realize that there is a fly in the ointment. But there was something about it in our 20s. Some bro, it’s more like 10 years ago now I’m saying it. It’s actually about 10 years ago. When you’re in your 20s and you are starting to build the life that you think you’re going to inhabit for the rest of your life with the people that you’re going to run with and with the things that you’re going to create. And it was shattering in that respect because it suddenly felt like some of the architecture that we had built was falling apart and it was really painful. And at some point in that time, that phrase just spilled out of my mouth like this is the main event.

It was this understanding that I had an impulse to run away from the center of my life. In the center of my life, if I was really honest, there was disappointment, there was disillusion, and there was a slow dulling indifference. There was this things that my wife once said to me, “Bro, this is one of the most painful things.” She said, “You’re losing your wow.” And how when she first met me, I’d always be like, “Wow.” And she said, “I feel like you’re losing your wow.” And we would ask each other this question on our anniversary. We still do. What is the most attractive thing about me that is most neglected by me? You know what I mean? What’s the thing that you love most about me that I’m perhaps less connected to? And she said that one year around that time. It’s like you’re losing your wow.

And that terrified me, and it still does. And alongside that, I was facing some of this gluttonous behavior that I’ve referenced where, oh no, I want a long leash or I want to be off the leash, and I want what I want when I want it, and as much of it as I can possibly consume. And that’s another story. I’m happy to go into it. But those two things were colliding. And I just said that phrase once, this is the main event. His moment here, this moment of unthinkable sorrow, or this moment of facing the characteristics that seem only to reveal depravity. This is the main event. This is my actual life. And it was like that sacred phrase. It just pulled me back into an actual conversation with God. And I feel like I’d start praying.

And as musicians, in fact, one year I remember, I think it was on the Peopled with Dreams Tour, I opened up for you.

And any show context you go to, there is a support act, and then there’s the main event. And the support act is good and it warms you up, but really you’re excited for John Mark McMillan. And I realized that it was just so easy to live. Something is going to come and it’s going to validate this moment. There’s going to be something that makes sense of it. There’s going to be something that brings some reason or beauty to what’s happening now. And just realizing I was always living for there. And then it was just the irony of there’s only here. And when I get there, there will just be another here. It’s just a little further down the road. So I would just say it, and then my wife would start saying it, “This is the main event.”

And bro, then we start having kids and it would be like three in the morning and the baby’s screaming and we’d be in the pitch blackness.

The life you long for is hidden in the life you have

Joshua Luke Smith

And you’d just hear one of us be like, “This is the main event.” And I suddenly felt like I was stepping into the lineage of my tradition. This is Jacob. Surely God is in this place. In what place? This place where the stone has been made a pillow, where there’s angels descending and ascending on a ladder that’s just propped up against this ordinary in between transitional moment of his life. This is it. This is the main event. The life you long for is hidden in the life you have. And so Josh, go into the floor rather than go into the heights or width of your life. Go deeper into your life. The unexamined life is not worth living as it’s been said. And it was just this sense of like, Lord, I don’t want to escape from my life anymore. And a recovery journey, a 12-step journey came alongside that.

I realized I had an addiction to gambling, bro. I just gambled constantly. And some of that was nuanced and some of it was really overt. And I just wanted an addiction to risk. I wanted to believe that at some point I could roll the right numbers and all of life would make sense. And that did exist financially, but it existed in all the areas of my life. And what part of that journey of the main event was this journey of learning to live a sober life and to live one day at a time. You can’t live with this is the main event if you’re not living moment to moment. And any pursuit of sobriety distills life into its most attainable elements of minutes, moments that you’re living in. And I remember talking to God once and saying, “I feel like I’m just on a leash all the time.

I can’t move anywhere.” Really practical changes to my life. So I couldn’t make some decisions on my own autonomy. I’d need accountability or I need someone else to approve it and things like that. And that felt really painful, but I just felt him once say, “If you are walking on a leash, then you’re walking closer to my side. You’re right next to me now.” The dog, we always had dogs. And my dad was an authoritarian with the dogs and he disciplined them, but they were good dogs. They would heal. So heal. And the dog would walk by its master’s side or walk by my dad’s side. And I felt God reframe that for me of heal, H-E-E-L. But H-E-A-L, like heal, son. A heal. Walk alongside me, walk close to me. This moment here, the life you long for, it’s hidden in the life you have.

Liberation in limitation

Joshua Luke Smith

And slowly I found that true liberation and the limitation in my life. And yeah, so that’s been part of the main event journey. And just to move it into prison, bro, part of that experience in prison defined my perspective outside. This is about five years ago. I meet a guy who’s doing a long sentence and we have a small group and we’re going through the discussions, we’re doing writing. And every time this guy talks, it’s like I just lean in like everyone leans in. Wisdom, like spiritual authority, fathering. And I said to him, “How do you sustain your life in here? You have such peace and you have such a sense of depth. And I just want to glean from you. How has that been cultivated?” And he said to me, “I have become a man of prayer.”

And he said, “I realized not too long into my sentence, the life of someone in prison is not dissimilar to a monk in a monastery.

We both have a cell. And the Latin for cell,” or one of the roots for that word comes from the Latin idea of a small heaven. So the monk’s inhabiting a small cell, a small space that became their interaction and embodiment of heaven. And he said, “My cell has become my sanctuary. Bro, this is in prison.” And that started reframing it for me of I need a cell in my life. I need my life to become a cell, a restrained and limited place where I can actually encounter God because right now I can do what I want whenever I want, and it’s not introducing me to the God of Jesus. And so when we talk about suffering or we talk about the experience that these men are in, I would almost flip the conversation on its head. How do you pursue the main event when you’re in suffering?

The phone or the cross

Joshua Luke Smith

And my thought would be it’s actually only because of suffering that we could have that revelation. And here’s the tragedy. You can pursue it now. You can say, “I want to change the architecture of my life so I live in pursuit of the bush of blaze with fire, not just blackberries. I want to seek the Lord. I actually want to seek God and not just consume.” You can do that or you can deny it and you can live in dulled indifference. But at some point the walls will close in. The road will run out. The friend will die. The diagnosis will happen. At some point or another, your life will start closing in. But I got given one of these earlier in the year, just these little pocket crosses, and just started carrying it around in my pocket. And just a beautiful little reminder.

Put my hand in my pocket, just feel the shape of the cross and a reminder of the suffering of Christ.

And when it became most apparent how much I needed it was when I realized how much I was going into my pocket to get my phone when I didn’t need to get my phone. Well, I wasn’t getting my phone out to make a phone call or send a message. I was just getting it out as a comfort blanket. And I’m standing in a coffee shop line like I do every day. And all I have to wait is five minutes to get to the till to order. And I go into my phone and I feel the cross or I feel the phone. And I though, my goodness, isn’t this the metaphor? You can choose one or the other right now. You can be Bilbo Baggins or Frodo and escape. Put that ring on your finger and just disappear for a moment. Take the phone and just disappear.

Or you can feel the outline of the cross. And in the outline of the cross, there’s an invitation where back into your life. And so then I choose to suffer. Then I choose for five minutes, bro, to suffer, to stand in a line. I know what this sounds like. I know this sounds like the most privileged form of suffering, but it is. That’s my point. I’m just going to stand here for five minutes and I’m going to feel my feelings and I’m going to think my thoughts and I’m going to let my mind wander and I’m going to pray. And that compounded in all these different scenarios of your life, I think forms you into becoming someone who sees a bush of blaze with fire and the earth crammed with heaven. Oh, I’m beginning to pay more attention.

And I see that in the men in prison, not all of them, not all of them, but here’s another one from Felton Prison I was in yesterday.

One of the guys in there a few weeks back said one of the guards was abusing him, verbally abusing him. And he said at the end of this kind of just tyranny of words, he said, “And look where you’ve ended up in prison.” And this guy looks at the guard and he says, “I’m not in prison. You are.” And he had been mocking him because you’d call him the God squad. He was mocking him because every day he goes to the chapel. And he’s like, “I’m not in prison. You are.” And when he said that in our session, bro, it blew my mind. I started clapping my hands. I was like, “Bro, that’s it. You found liberation in limitation.” So the main event isn’t some just nicety or little phrase to put a smile on your face. It’s an invitation into the way of the cross.

It’s an invitation to live into the center of your life.

Jesus did not come to save you from your life

John Mark McMillan

I’ve had this phrase in my mind for about the past year. Whenever I’m feeling like you’re feeling anxious, what I do is I say this phrase. It’s like your main event phrase. My phrase is, “Hey, JM, Jesus did not come to save you from your life. He came to save you in it.” Yeah,

Joshua Luke Smith

Come on. A hundred percent, bro. And the thing that scares me or the thing that puts me off is I know that the first thing, the first step in that process is grief. And on every level, grief that I’m not getting what I want when I want it, or the grief that lives in your body that you’ve been avoiding. And bro, I’m not just trying to blow smoke, but you have in your writing, you gave language and expression for lamentation and grief long before it was a common expression in the church. It is more now the expression of lamentation. And I remember connecting with your song so early on because of that. But I still see it in my life as the thing that I run from most instantaneously. There is this gut response to run from feeling the hard thing. And so there is no way back into your life without grief.

There is no way, that’s the door. The door is through sorrow of just life hasn’t turned out the way that I want. And I talk about with my wife of it’s like the paper cuts and the battle wounds. And there’s Paper cuts where it’s just, dang, I don’t know.

I don’t want to make anything sound more trivial than it actually is. But yeah, I didn’t get the results on that test that I wanted. I was studying for, which could be more than a paper cut. Or I got a ticket for parking in the wrong place all the way to I have this diagnosis. And there’s all these little grief invitations back into your life. And the other option, the phone option, if that’s your drug of choice, is an anesthetic. And the issue with the anesthetic is you don’t have the precision of a surgeon to anesthetize one part of your soul like you can your body. You can anesthetize your arm and separate it from anesthetizing your legs. But if you anesthetize any part of your soul, your whole soul goes dull. And so when you’re talking about not escaping your life, that’s it.

Because if you escape one part of your life, you dull every part of your life.

If you anesthetize your sorrow, you anesthetize your joy. You anesthetize your pain, you anesthetize your passion. So when my wife was like, “You’ve lost your wow,” that wasn’t because I didn’t find things as interesting anymore or I wasn’t innately as enthusiastic as I was. It was because I wasn’t willing to face my sorrow. And that’s why I love that it’s the passion of Christ. You know what I mean? Bro, when we get to that week of the passion and we walk through the journey of Christ to the skull, it’s such a powerful demonstration of a full life. Christ’s passion is his joy. Christ’s passion is his sorrow. Christ’s passion is his friendship and it’s his betrayal. And it’s like the whole human life is embodied there in that. And it’s whatever you choose to dull will dull. It will beget. It will dulling one area begets another.

And that terrifies me, bro. That scares me. That’s why I’m thinking about this and writing about this and waffling on about this so often because I know that I have the potential of being someone who just eats blueberries for the rest of my life.

The burden that gives you rest

John Mark McMillan

Jesus said two things that are almost contradictory. He said, “All you who are weary, come to me and I’ll give you rest.” And then he said, “If anyone will come to me, he’ll take up his cross and follow me.” I’m like, “Jesus, I like that first one a lot.” But then he says, “Take up your cross.” I’m like, “I don’t like that part of it until I realize the two are one and the same.” Come

Joshua Luke Smith

On, bro.

John Mark McMillan

His true rest is found when you embrace your life as it is. When you embrace whatever suffering you have in your life, right? Take my yoke upon you and learn from me what is the yoke? What is the burden? It’s by carrying a worthy burden. You find freedom. People think of freedom as the ability to do whatever you want. But I’m like you, if I can do whatever I want, I’m going to die.

I don’t mean spiritually. I mean actually die. If I eat everything I want to eat and drink everything I want to drink and I can do all the things that I want to do, I’m going to die. I’m not going to live very long. And there’s something about what makes a living thing living is that your cells are organized. My body is limited. If my body is unlimited, that means my cells are dispersed. If I have everything, I’m literally nothing. I’m literally gone. And so it’s actually our limitations that makes us a living thing. And we find life in those limitations. And so the cross is literally the path to life.

Joshua Luke Smith

It’s so good, bro.

John Mark McMillan

Bro, it’s so

Joshua Luke Smith

Good.

John Wa, can we spend one more minute on that? One more minute because one more minute. Bro, I just love the way that you’ve paired that. I had this conversation yesterday on the way back from the prison with one of the guys on my team, and they were just saying, “Do you feel like it’s sustainable doing two days a week in the prison?” And I really though about it. I was like, “Man, I do struggle with it.” Some weeks I’m like, “Oh.” And I said to her, I was like, “Bro, what am I going to do? Sit in a coffee shop and write poems?” There’s only so much of that. And then it’s like, “Oh, give me, Lord, what’s the burden?” And I just brought me life hearing the way you paired that. Frederick Buechner talks about God is calling you to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet.

And sometimes all you prioritize is your gladness or the world’s hunger and you fall apart on both ends. But when you find that spot of like, what’s my calling when my deep gladness and the world’s hunger come together? And the Matthew 11 piece is so profound because Jesus was a carpenter. And they talk about perhaps there was a time where over his workshop, it just said, “Excellent yokes made here.” As a carpenter, he was carving yokes. And the idea of a good yoke was that when it yokeed the oxen, it made the burden feel like it was half as heavy. And when the carpenter put the yoke on the oxen, they might say, “The yoke fits you well.” And the great aim of my life is to carry a cross and hear Jesus say, “That cross fits you well.” You’re carrying the cross that I, the carpenter carved for you to carry.

And you don’t carry it in your own strength. You carry it as I’ve called you to carry it. And you could even extend that of your life fits you well. You know what I mean?This is the life that you were meant to carry. And there’s this rabbinic story of a rabbi walking across, finding this young boy with his baby brother on his shoulders. And he walks past him and the rabbi says to the boy, “That’s a heavy burden you’re carrying.” And the boy says, “No, it’s not. It’s my little brother.”

The best things in life are unnecessary

John Mark McMillan

That gets me. There’s this quote, this is one of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes. Friendship is unnecessary like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself for God did not need to create. It has no survival value. Rather, it is one of those things which give value to survival. And this kind of love, we see most clearly the nature of the gift love. Here as nowhere else, we see a love which has no natural biological function. And I’ve been thinking about this, how the best things in life are unnecessary.

Joshua Luke Smith

Yeah. I was thinking about how often in the moments where I feel most glad I feel most grief. Recently, I’m sitting around a table and the food’s laid in and we’ve got the good drinks flowing, amazing conversation. It is not uncommon that I will have a pang of what I would call grief. And I’m like, what is it that I’m feeling there? And I think it’s the sorrow of its temporary nature of like, man, this is what I want to last forever. And I don’t know, I love the way you put that. Unnecessary, yes. But necessary to point us to the deeper, truer story at work in our life. And that’s what Lewis was always the master of, you know what I mean? Of unnecessary, yes, but necessary to speak to the reality was actually going on.

And potentially I’ve misused those moments of feasting and all the different expressions of it as a kind of a gluttonous activity in times.

Now with a slightly more sober disposition, I’d see it as these four tastes of whether it’s art or feasting. I mean, like Lewis again, Lewis talked about two quick Lewis quotes where he spoke around the idea of the atom bomb, the potential of the atom bomb coming and just decimating the entire world. And he just said, “Whether it comes or not, we don’t have much control right now, but if it does, then on that day, may they find us in the pub. May they find us having good conversations with friends. May they find us baking. Let them not find us all huddled together in a fearful room. Let them find us doing meaningful and ordinary things.” And he was interviewed on the radio in the war around the men in trenches and sort of saying, “Well, what good is it to be writing stories now when these men are in the trenches and on the front line?”

And he said, I’m probably paraphrasing here, but he said something to the effect of, “Well, they’re reading stories and I just want to make sure they’re reading the good ones.” And I think about just all those elements altogether is really what does make the meaningful life.

The unnecessary is the deeply meaningful. Go and kill the fattened calf. Go and waste the fattened calf on the prodigal son. That’s the nature of God. Go and turn the water into wine when everyone’s already had enough to drink. That’s the nature of God.

John Mark McMillan

Yeah. Well, I look at there’s a lot of people who, for instance, aren’t having children. You don’t need children. They’re not necessary. Now, I mean, I could make another argument for long-term they’re necessary for the survival of the human race. But in general,

Children are almost unnecessary and they’re a massive, massive investment. I remember thinking I could write so many more songs. My career, there’s so many more things I could do if I didn’t have kids. And I have that thought for a second. And then the very next thought is, but I don’t know what songs I would write. I don’t know what I would have to write about. It’s so true. And that doesn’t mean that people who don’t have children don’t have meaning and purpose. I got a lot of friends who don’t, some can’t have children, some have chosen not to for other reasons. But for me, it’s like my children are unnecessary in one sense, but they’re also the most necessary thing in my life.

Joshua Luke Smith

And

John Mark McMillan

The other thing that I’ve realized recently is I have these buddies that I hang out with every Thursday night. They’re really smart guys, but they’re not in the industry. There’s no networking really. Really smart. I can learn a lot from them in a number of different ways. But for the most part, we just hang out every Thursday night. And when it’s not too cold, we sit outside around the fire, smoke the cigar. We talk about deep things and not deep things. And I realized over the past 10 years, this little thing has been a sustenance for me.

Joshua Luke Smith

come on.

John Mark McMillan

But it’s also very unnecessary. I don’t need it in my life. It gives me no survival value. In fact, I got to make sure on Thursday night I don’t stay out too late because I got to get up on Friday and do my stuff. And I’m probably going to do a whole podcast on this, but people are not having friends anymore. Friendship is on decline. There’s a lot of things that are on decline because they’re unnecessary and technology has allowed us to not do things that we used to have to do. And I’ve been reading that Gen Z is drinking less, they’re having less sex, fewer teen pregnancies, fewer broken bones. And then on the surface, a lot of this is very good. I don’t want my kids to have addictions. I don’t want my kids to get hurt. The subtext here is one reason that Gen Z is not doing these things is because they’re so anxious.

And a lot of the trouble you get into is you get into it because you have friends. And so this is another little bit of a complex conversation. I know earlier you were talking about you had an issue with gambling, but also isn’t there an element of risk to meaning making?

Is wellness alone the key to a meaningful life? Or are there things in life that are worth pain and risk?

Suffering is the great-grandfather of hope

Joshua Luke Smith

come on. Yeah, bro, I remember a counseling session I had where a guy said, “Look, I understand the journey of sobriety, but you have vilified the role of risk in your life. And it’s time not to let him drive the car, but let him sit in the front seat with you.” You know what I mean? A couple years ago, we were having Christmas and sat with my grandmother at the table. And my great-grandfather, so her father was a prolific artist, an unbelievable artist. Linocut, woodcut, watercolor, sketching, sculpture to an incredible degree. So I literally grew up around his art. It’s in all the walls of my grandma’s house, but all the walls of our house and my auntie’s and uncle’s house, immensely prolific. I never met him. He died long before I was born. And so this one Christmas, I asked her about him.

I was like, “Tell me about Bappy because I know him through his art.” And what I knew was that if you try to buy his art now, it’s expensive. It’s auctioned and it’s expensive. And in London, a few years ago, they did an exhibition on him and all this kind of stuff. I’m not telling me about him. And she tells me how he was initially married to a woman that died of the Spanish Flu, but he remarries. And when his second wife is giving birth, she dies in the throes of labor. So he’s literally at the house with her, holding her in his arms as she dies, as well as his unborn child. So now you have this young man who’s lost two wives, and then he marries my great-grandma, Nana, and then the First World War breaks out and he goes to war.

And during the war, he gets shot and the bullet just rips apart his leg and he falls in no man’s land between the trenches and he’s believed to be dead.

And so he lies in no man’s land for three days believed to be dead, except he doesn’t die. And he survives, but he comes back without his leg. So he’s just got this stump. And so she’s telling me how she’s grown up with this man with this wooden stump, and she would play with his stump. And my mom then chimes in as her granddad. They would knock on the stump. And then my grandma says, “But every day, his wife, my great-grandmother would wring out a cloth, wring out the blood that was wrapped around the stump that went into the wood.” So he never took a step without feeling the pain that he went through. And I asked my mom and my aunties and uncles, “What was he like? What was he like to be around?” And they said, “He was kind and he was tender, and he was always sketching, always sketching.

But if you looked to see what he was sketching, he was always sketching what was happening around him.” And my grandma said one day they were at the ballet and he was sketching. And she said, “You’re not looking at the ballet.” And he said, “No, I’m seeing it.” And she looked at his pad and he was sketching the ballet. And I went away, bro. I was thinking about this, thinking about this story. And the few days after I thought about that, the sequence in Romans. So Paul says, “Suffering produces endurance, endurance character and character hope.” And I had this thought, bro, of suffering is the great-grandfather of hope. This man is my great-grandfather, my great-grandfather who suffered in this intense way, but then learned how to endure. And in his endurance formed this character that my mom and her siblings are saying is kind and tender.

And then it results in hope, like the hope of beauty, the hope of expression, the hope of living beyond yourself. And the kind of great reality of there is no hope without suffering in a life that, as you are describing with the newer generations, crafting an artificial life. It’s the curated life. It’s a curated artificial life, void of suffering, and therefore void of the ability to endure, to grow in your character. And I don’t mean some just bootcamp David Goggins, grow your character. I mean being a formed human being, and then finally to have hope. And so I just had this thought of what is hope? Hope I used to think was how you viewed the future. And now I’m like, hope is how you have governed and stewarded your suffering. You know what I’m saying?

If there’s no suffering that you are working with every day, whether it’s the suffering of being in a friendship group that costs you some of your pride or whether it’s the suffering of taking a creative risk or the suffering of intimacy, you’ll ultimately be bankrupt of hope.

And that’s kind of the invitation back in. You know what I mean?

John Mark McMillan

100%.

Extravagantly wasteful

Joshua Luke Smith

Can I indulge and give you a poem as we close that I feel like touches on some of the things that we’ve talked about? Yes, absolutely. All right. The first time I saw my father cry was after his father died. We laid to rest in a garden where he lays next to his child. So tell the reaper to wait a while and be a gentleman. Don’t come up here in Satan style. I’m spending time with my brethren. Let me talk to God and shake the nile, play with my child and break a smile. Wake up and paint in the skies with the colors of my favorite eyes. We miss so much looking back on it, waiting for that rapture or getting our phones out to capture it. But the photos on the camera roll, they tell the story of an anxious soul. You and I are growing old.

Those fields of green are turning gold. And as the days turn into night and the sun sets over our home and it’s time that we say goodbye, bro, I pray that we say nothing at all because I’ve told you everything you meant to me. And sometimes I get a temper, that’s because everything is temporary. But that’s when I remember what he said to me. Before you rest your head and sleep, son, be grateful that you get to breathe because the irony in it all is the most anxious thought in my mind is about missing out on what is already mine. And joy is so hard to find, but only because I’m blind. When I open up my eyes, I find it everywhere I look. And I don’t know how this story ends, but I pray they find me grateful and say I was extravagantly wasteful with the love I had to give as if I learned to live like it was never running out.

Links & Resources

· This Is the Main Event, Joshua Luke Smith’s book https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/this-is-the-main-event

· The Psalmists, creative and spiritual formation work in prisons

https://www.thepsalmists.org

· Joshua Luke Smith, music, writing, and current work

https://www.joshualukesmith.com

· Listen to the full conversation, Flirting with Enchantment https://linktr.ee/johnmarkmcmillan

As a kid, I always wondered why Good Friday was called “good.” I’m sure it has some historical and liturgical meaning, but it seems more reasonable to call Sunday “Good Sunday.” However, Friday always seemed like it should be called “Bad Friday,” because only bad things seemed to happen.

I mean, Jesus was crucified on “Good Friday”? It’s often puzzled me why anyone would describe the day that God died as “good.” Okay—maybe, for my theological purists in the room, let’s say God didn’t exactly die, just His perfect, innocent, beautiful lamb of a human self-expression on earth. Splitting hairs if you ask me, but thanks for keeping us in line. Also, thanks for making Friday seem even less “good.”

I digress. But even applying the most transactional interpretations of Scripture, “the day the rent comes due” has never felt like a good one—even if you live on 60 acres by the sea.

So… “Good”?

I’d like to share an observation. I’m a big fan of all kinds of fiction. Over the years, I’ve noticed that it’s not the strength of a character that endears me to my favorites. For example, laser eyes, X-ray vision, and flight make Superman exciting, but not really interesting. The real reason popular culture has been obsessed with him since 1938 isn’t because he’s strong. No—it’s because of his one major weakness, which we all know… Lois Lane.

See, his powers perpetually place the person he loves in jeopardy, and that makes him weak. It also makes him believable, accessible, and even lovable.

Maybe it’s our yellow sun that gives Kal-El his abilities, but Lois is the only reason any of us give a darn about him, almost a century after his introduction. She’s his kryptonite (see what I did there), and she’s always been his only real superpower. Because it’s his weakness that gives us access to him. His weakness is the door into his story. Otherwise, he’s just a program running in the background, as inhuman as the elements themselves, and we’re but ants in his arboretum.

Without Lois, Superman is dead on the page.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

On Good Friday, God didn’t just die; it was also the moment He began to actually, in one sense, truly…

exist?

The moment God died the way we die, all of a sudden, He could be alive in a way that actually mattered to cosmic bugs like you and me. No longer just a pagan-style, tit-for-tat, “means to an end,” little “g” god, but an actual companion through the great, painful mysteries of life.

If there’s any confusion here, let me shoot straight. I have little use for an all-powerful deity who chooses to experience the brutality of His world from a box seat with a bag of chips and a TallBoy.

I just don’t know how to justify the God who’d force me to watch my sweetest aunt Barbara die of cancer, my joyfully boisterous, larger-than-life friend Larry waste away in a hospital bed, or allow me to have so many wordless conversations with people I love who live with the ghosts of their lost children.

There is almost zero chance I can have a meaningful relationship with a God like that.

Sure, I can bend the knee and say the magic words. I can sign on the dotted line. I can pray. I can serve. Maybe this God could even be my Lord—but not my Savior, because we could never be friends. Unless…

Unless there is one who is willing to step down from the stars, descend the stairs of His penthouse, and fellowship with our sufferings.

I can love a God like that because, while I can only make deals with one who heals, I can actually give my heart to one who feels my wounds.

And this is what I truly believe: God must be all-powerful expressly because He also must bear the weight of all the suffering that has ever transpired. I’m sure this makes Him both the most joyful and sorrowful being in the multiverse.

The God who hangs between the earth and sky. Taking responsibility for all of it. The whole damned thing. Our successes and failures. Pain and elation. Honor and humiliation. Love and loss. Absorbing it into His God-flesh, right there at the intersection of all things—appropriately upon a cross.

Certainly, this is who He has always been. God has always loved us, but in Jesus—the strength of His weakness—we can now fully love Him back.

And maybe it’s why this ugliest of days is also “good,” because Jesus redeemed the whole world on Sunday, but on Friday, He kind of “redeemed” God.