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I remember it like it was yesterday. My friend said to me,

This wasn’t the first time I’d come across a statement like this, but never had it been thrown in my face with such enthusiasm.

Because of the way my mind works (e.g., because I’m a nerd), I decided to do a deep dive into the topic of divine healing. I read many books on the topic from a variety of perspectives: cessationists, Vineyard leaders, and Pentecostals. As you might imagine, I was reading vastly differing views on how God releases divine healing into the world today. The most influential book I read during this season was by far Michael L. Brown’s tome, Israel’s Divine Healer.

This is a nearly 500-page book with a bibliography nearing twenty pages, so it would be impossible to summarize it meaningfully here. If you’re interested in a technical, responsible, Pentecostal reading of the role of healing in the character of God, I highly recommend this book. But, and this is an important disclaimer, if you don’t like Hebrew and Greek words in your books, you might want to skip this one.

Brown affirms in his book that the words used for healing in the Old and New Testament are fully-orbed expression of wellness. They are not limited to spiritual healing or salvation, nor do they only represent physical healing. He further states that God promises to keep his faithful children in good health, again with health being defined in the broadest of terms.

Brown establishes this premise well, but it brings up serious difficulties for those of us who live in the real world. Indeed, this often-repeated promise from God has been the root of many gaslighting sessions, where someone is blamed for their own sickness. It often sounds like this: “You must have unconfessed sin, or you wouldn’t be experiencing this.” More on this later . . .

While Brown doesn’t land here, classic Pentecostalism holds that healing is available and guaranteed in the atonement of Christ. The primary verse used to support this perspective is Isaiah 53:5-6:

But he was pierced for our transgressions,

He was crushed for our iniquities;

The punishment that brought us peace was on him,

And by his wounds we are healed.

Classic Pentecostalism points to the last phrase of these verses and affirms that the wounds of Jesus on the cross heal our physical infirmities. A closer examination of these verses alongside an understanding of Hebrew parallelism paints a different picture, though. Stated as simply as possible, Hebrew parallelism is a form of poetry that rhymes thoughts rather than words. In typical poetry, the first and third lines might rhyme, and the same with the second and fourth lines.

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With Hebrew parallelism, the same concept is applied to thoughts rather than sounds. In other words, for this passage, the first and third lines are reflections of each other, as are the second and fourth lines. Let’s dive into the significance of this now and consider each pairing of rhyming thoughts together:

• The piercing of Jesus brought us peace. This feels like a great way to define what happened on the cross. Jesus was literally pierced in his hands, his feet, and his side. When he died from those piercings, we were offered peace with God. This is a recurring theme found throughout the Pauline epistles. As an example, Romans 5:1 states, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

• His crushing for our sins healed our wounds. This is where classic Pentecostal beliefs about guaranteed healing in the atonement begin to fall apart. By applying Hebrew parallelism to this passage, we can see that the Suffering Servant was crushed for sins, and that crushing brought healing. There isn’t a clear logical connection between physical crushing for sins and physical healing, but we can make sense of this if we consider this healing to be fundamentally spiritual. This pairing of rhyming thoughts is then very similar to the message of the first and third thoughts. Jesus healed the wounds from sin and re-establishes a lost connection with God.

Let’s circle back now to the story I opened this essay with. Is it possible that God was withholding some healing from my daughter due to my lack of faith? Before I answer, let me tell you where my daddy heart was at the time. I was praying all the time for God to heal her. I knew that God could heal her if he wanted to. There was a desperation to these prayers, because we were coming off two separate medically induced comas where Cindy was on breathing machines for a week each.

I tell you that only to say that I was not in a place where I was doubting God could heal my daughter. I was struggling with some anger that he was choosing, for some unknown reason, not to heal her, but I didn’t lack faith. I yearned for God to heal my daughter. I believed he could do it. I wanted him to do it. So, all that to say, my friend was objectively misdiagnosing the problem when she called out unbelief in me.

There is room for the idea that unbelief can be a barrier to divine healing, and I wouldn’t be doing my job as a budding theologian if I didn’t mention it. Matthew 13 tells us that Jesus was limited in his miracle-working power when he went to Nazareth. Many people have weaponized this excerpt against those who are struggling to hold onto hope, but a closer look at it might help us learn some surprising lessons. Let’s pick up the story in verses 54-58:

Coming to his hometown, he began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed. “Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?” they asked. “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?” And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home.” And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.

Two things are often missed when we look too quickly at this moment in the life of Jesus:

1. Jesus still performed miracles. His hometown people recognized his miraculous powers and called them out, doubting that it made any sense because they knew him and saw him grow up. But it’s not only in the declaration by the Nazarenes that we have evidence of Christ’s power. The last verse says, “he did not do many miracles . . .”, but that means he did some miracles. In other words, one conclusion we could potentially draw from this narrative is that miracles can only be limited by a lack of faith.

2. Lack of faith isn’t what we think it is in this passage. Too many times, people read the last verse and accuse others of lacking faith, but it has a very specific connotation in this story. The Nazarenes doubted that Jesus actually had the authority to do the very things that they were seeing demonstrated in front of them. The key phrase is “they took offense at him.” In this narrative, lacking faith is equated with taking offense at Jesus. I have never come across a single person in my nearly fifty years of life who is offended by the idea that God might want to heal them. It is my opinion that this description of lacking faith simply doesn’t apply in many situations where divine healing is sought.

So where does all of this leave us when it comes to people suggesting subtly or not-so-subtly that our unbelief is a barrier to God releasing his divine healing for a family member or us? Honestly, it leaves us in a pretty uncomfortable place. On the one hand, we can say with some certainty that physical healing isn’t guaranteed in the atoning work of Christ on the cross; salvation is guaranteed through the cross, but physical healing simply is not.

This leaves us with the heart-wrenching question, “Why won’t God heal?” and truthfully, there’s not a personally satisfying answer to that question. We know that the kingdom of God is both here right now and also not fully here (i.e., “the already and the not yet”), but that offers sparse comfort when our little one is ravaged by cancer, or we are fighting for our own lives against a genetic disease we did nothing to earn or deserve. God keeps his own counsel, and he doesn’t always or even often share it with us. Another way to say this is: Only God knows, and he’s not telling.

We are left with an eschatological hope though, the fundamental belief that grounds Christianity in optimism. At the end of days, God will right every wrong. Justice will be served. Every wound will be bound. There will be no tears. There will be nothing but the glorious intimacy of God with his people, and all sorrow will be banished. Sometimes, all we can do is look forward to that eschatological hope with anticipation and ask the Holy Spirit to grant us patience and courage as we wait for that wonderful day to arrive.

I know what it’s like when faith feels hard, to walk through seasons where the usual Christian answers fall apart. In my books and speaking sessions, I’ve wrestled out loud with the questions most people whisper:

• Where is God when the darkness doesn’t lift?

• What do I do when prayer doesn’t fix what hurts?

• How do I stay with God when it feels like He left first?

In all of it, I found something steady: God stays with us, even when life comes apart.

As a TEDx speaker, author, and seminary-educated ministry leader, that conviction shapes everything I teach. I help create a refuge where people can name what hurts, feel genuinely understood, and find a faith big enough for real life.

I would love to explore how I can support your community through my speaking ministry.

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Last week, I laid some foundations for my perspective on divine healing. You can find that essay here. It was largely a theological article, just to level-set the conversation and set some expectations. This week, I am going to walk you through the ways that God has and has not intersected my life and my family’s life with divine healing.

Let’s start with the really hard parts, where God didn’t choose to heal for one reason or another. My daughter has epilepsy (which is its own story of religious trauma because church people don’t always recognize the difference between Gospel narratives and 21st-century diagnostic tools), and she has had thousands of seizures literally in her life. But I will never forget her first seizure.

I came home early from work because, on the worst day of my entire life, I had been told my job was being eliminated in 90 days. My wife and I walked into the house, and all of a sudden, my daughter started shaking violently. Then she turned blue. My wife and I just stood there for a full minute, not knowing what to do. Eventually, one of us realized we should call 9-1-1. The paramedics came, gave her a seizure rescue medication, and left for the hospital. I was told that only one parent could accompany her in the ambulance, and my wife chose to go with them. I was left alone in the aftermath, and this is when my spirit finally activated from the shock.

I began crying out to God desperately for him to heal my daughter. I drove to the hospital as I prayed. But God didn’t answer that prayer for divine healing that day.

Instead, I walked into the emergency room to find a physician straddling my 14-month-old daughter, performing compressions to keep her breathing. She was quickly transferred via helicopter to another hospital with neurology specialists, which was 35 minutes away. I somehow beat the helicopter to the hospital without getting into a car accident (or getting a ticket).

My daughter was pretty quickly put into the pediatric intensive care unit because her seizures had still not stopped. I found out later from my wife that they were doing chest compressions on my daughter and breathing for her for the full flight over to the specialty hospital. What followed was one of the most harrowing weeks of my life. We learned that the rescue medication the paramedics gave to my daughter had shut down her respiratory system, but did nothing for the seizures. Over the course of the next 7 days, they tried to bring her “back to the land of the living” multiple times, only to discover she was still in a seizure state.

Eventually, the seizure stopped, and she somewhat stabilized on a new medication. But my distinct impression from that week is that God was largely absent from the terror my wife and I were experiencing. We put a brave face on, and we tried to embody faith, but as I look back on this season, I feel God’s absence far more than his presence. It was incredibly challenging to my faith at the time. I believed in the active, divine healing activity of God. Yet he did precisely nothing when we needed him the most.

This situation would repeat itself in various levels of seriousness over the next 15+ years. My daughter had another weeklong medically-induced coma before she turned two years old. In her second and third grade school years, she had 3-4 seizures most days.

I have stories of my daughter having seizures on metal stairs 50 feet in the air, where she almost flung yourself to the ground. There was a time she entered into a seizure as she was jumping into a swimming pool. My wife and I were on high alert for literally a decade. Sure, I can point to these moments and recognize that God kept her relatively safe, but it wasn’t and still really isn’t enough.

Not every experience with divine healing has been so disappointing, though. One Sunday, I had a word of knowledge that God wanted to heal someone with a chronically sore lower back. A woman came up to me after the service and said that the word of knowledge was for her husband. He couldn’t come to church because the pain was too severe for him to even get out of bed. But she was convinced that God was going to heal him because of my word of knowledge.

In one of the more dramatic declarations of faith I’ve come across in my life, she said something like this, “Before you pray, I want to mark down the time that you start praying for his healing. I am convinced that God is going to heal my husband the very minute that you begin praying.” She marked the time by looking at her watch and remembering the time. I’ll be honest, I didn’t know if I had enough faith to hold onto the somewhat radical idea that God could heal long-distance through my prayers. That’s Jesus-level stuff, after all. But I prayed for his healing still, and hoped for the best.

Four days after that prayer, I got a phone call from this woman. She told me that her husband started to feel heat precisely where his pain was centered at the very minute I began to pray for him. Further, his pain had disappeared and not returned.

Now, I sometimes think back on that and wonder if maybe there was some sort of psychosomatic healing that took place. I don’t know what his medical condition was, after all, and he hadn’t gone to a physician to verify that anything had changed. His back was better, but it felt unverifiable.

My wife and I prayed for a woman who had a kinked intestine one day when we were at a conference. She had a scan scheduled for the next day as a pre-surgical confirmation of the already-verified medical condition. As we prayed for her, she said that she literally felt an intense pain and movement in her stomach, followed by a release of all the abdominal pain she had been feeling for months. She went to the scan the next day, and the kink was completely gone! God gave my wife and me a medically verified miracle, just in case we were wondering if he was actually performing healing in today’s day and age.

Probably the most important moment that happened in my life related to divine healing carries elements of God’s absence and his presence. In 2015, I developed a seizure disorder. I was having partial complex absent drop seizures 3-4 times every single day. For those of you who don’t know me personally, I am a 300-pound, 6’7” man, so me falling suddenly to the ground is quite the event. Our house had many dents, and I had many concussions, to prove it. As soon as these started, my wife and I started praying for God to heal me. We had all the confidence in the world that God would heal me. Except he didn’t.

Instead, I lost my job because of the impact of these seizures on my daily workload. More specifically, I went out on short-term and eventually long-term disability. But the important thing is that I couldn’t hold down a regular job. This shattered my sense of self and threw me into some very dark headspaces. I’m certain this is a big reason that I ended up in the psych ward in 2018 for suicidal ideation and again in 2020 after a suicide attempt. I had lost my way.

Eventually, my wife and I came to a confusing conclusion: these seizures were wrecking my life, but God wasn’t interested in healing them. We slowly and methodically just stopped praying for healing, and stopped asking others to pray for healing. Instead, we settled into a new, dissatisfying form of life that we had nevertheless grown accustomed to. I was on disability, and would remain there for the rest of my life. I would fall 3-4 times every day for the rest of my life. These were just the facts.

We attended a church leadership meeting. At the end of the meeting, the lead pastor said that he felt the Lord was ministering to two different groups of people: those who were exceptionally weary, and those with long-term chronic illnesses. He asked for those who connected with either of those words of knowledge to stand up and be prayed for. I stood up, not for healing, but because I was absolutely exhausted.

My campus pastor saw me stand up and the Lord whispered to him, “Go pray for Chris for healing.” It had been a long day, so his initial response was a bit whiny. He reluctantly came over and asked if he could pray for my healing. For my part, I wasn’t exactly excited to have someone pray for me for healing. I had so many bad experiences with these types of prayers, but I reluctantly said, “Yes,” because I trusted my campus pastor. He prayed a very short prayer, something like, “These seizures have wrecked Chris’s life. Lord, would you heal him and restore him in Jesus’s name?” Then he walked away.

In the moment, I felt something significant happen that I couldn’t describe for some time. I hadn’t even realized it, but over the last decade I had been overcome by crippling anxiety about when my seizures would happen. Would I have a seizure while walking across a street and potentially become a road hazard? Would I fall down stairs (again)? Would I burn my skin on hot asphalt? I was constantly stressing out about the next seizure. I just accepted it as normal, so I never considered it as anything uncommon. The moment my pastor said, “Amen,” all that anxiety disappeared, never to return. That was the first clue that God had done something remarkable.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I began to slowly allow hope to have some space in my spirit. Was it possible that God might have healed me on January 31, 2024? I tentatively shared this hope with a few close friends, but I was careful to preface it with doubt, something like, “But maybe I’m just getting a reprieve from my seizures.”

Then 60 days passed. Then 90 days. I’m now sitting at over two years without a single seizure. I am officially off disability and back into the workforce. God has redeemed the darkness of my seizure history and replaced it with a story of his goodness. But still I ask, “Why did you have to wait a full decade before you acted, God?” I can certainly see some good things that happened in my life during that decade, but also there was a suicide attempt and a second psych ward visit—not good things.

Nevertheless, this experience has been a foundational component of my perspective on divine healing. This is why I believe that God’s sovereignty is the most important piece of every healing. God chose January 31, 2024, as the day to heal Chris, so it happened on that day. I didn’t really have any faith to speak of as I was prayed for, and my pastor didn’t even want to pray at all. Yet God in his sovereignty did it anyway.

This is also why I believe that faith has a mysterious and often confusing correlation with healing. I didn’t have a tremendous amount of faith; neither did my pastor, necessarily. I mean, he had enough faith to be obedient, but he didn’t come over and claim some great victory for the kingdom either. I don’t know exactly where the faith was in this moment, and that’s sort of the point.

I’d love to hear from you. What have been your experiences, positive or negative, with divine healing? How have those moments impacted your theology and practice related to divine healing?

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For the next little bit, I’d like to explore the theological and practical dynamics associated with divine healing. I am sure that among my readers are those who run the full gamut of opinions on divine healing. There are most likely those who believe that the atoning death of Jesus provided right-now divine healing for all who have accepted Christ as their Savior. I would guess that not everyone holds to that opinion, for a variety of reasons.

I’m also imagining that some of you who read my essays might feel like God is almost anxiously waiting in the wings to bring his divine healing into different circumstances, and others might be less certain that God is that active, so you might encourage people to look to medicinal methods for health. There might even be a few of you who doubt that God is healing today; sure, he can heal, but he just doesn’t do it very often for one reason or another.

Let me say something up front that is always true, but might be particularly important in this conversation we are going to have.

Over the course of the next few essays, I will talk about each of these perspectives in some detail. At some point in my life, I have found myself in all these categories, so I have some insight into what the practical and theological implications of these beliefs are. To start our exploration of this topic today, I want to share some of the guiding principles that I hold to related to divine healing. Each of these principles may end up being its own essay, as I have a lot of thoughts on each of these. But for today, I would like to introduce the four guiding principles that inform all my thoughts on divine healing.

1. God is actively involved in bringing divine healing today.

This first guiding principle might be considered controversial. In a world that is filled to overflowing with pain and darkness, I dare to say that God is actively involved in bringing divine healing? Yes, and without shame. I have seen too many instances of God inserting himself into hopeless situations to believe anything less. Here’s just one example.

About 20 years ago, the administrative assistant at my wife Barbara’s work was hospitalized. Barbara found out that it was very serious. Her co-worker had been told to call her family and have them come into town to tell her goodbye. To make a long medical history simple, her body was shutting down, and the doctors couldn’t do anything for her.

Into this despairing moment, my wife felt that the Lord wanted her to go pray for her co-worker in the hospital. Barbara asked me to go with her. We went to the hospital room, talked about the sort of nothings that you talk about in hospitals for a while, and then Barbara asked if we could pray for her co-worker. Barbara prayed a simple prayer, asking for God to miraculously heal her co-worker. A few minutes later, we left.

Honestly, we expected nothing to come of this moment, but that wasn’t God’s intention.

Three days later, Barbara got a call from her co-worker’s daughter, who asked, “What did you do to my mom?”

Come to find out, she was on the road to complete recovery and had been since Barbara prayed for her. In other words, God showed up in a moment where there was no real reason to hope.

Friends, this is not the only instance that our family has experienced of God’s divine healing. More of these stories will come out as these essays continue, but suffice it to say at this point that there is a regularity to these divine healing moments intersecting with our lives. And it’s not because Barbara or I are special or have an anointing for divine healing. I am convinced it’s because God is actively involved in bringing divine healing into the world today.

The kingdom of God is the methodology that informs God’s interventions and actions toward divine healing. Put differently, it is because the kingdom of God is advancing that divine healing is available today. This brings us face-to-face with the most common question around divine healing: If God wants to heal, why doesn’t he do it more?

My understanding of kingdom of God theology offers a theological answer to this question, though I admit it doesn’t bring any sort of practical comfort (we will talk more about this in another essay). Many theologians have talked about what is commonly called “the already and the not yet” of the kingdom of God, and I’m going to try to break that phrasing down into everyday language today. We sit between the times in a very real sense, where the true King of the world—Jesus—has started his reign on the earth, but in an equally real sense his kingdom has not been fully established.

What this means practically is that sometimes we experience the already of the kingdom: the powerful presence of the Holy Spirit during worship, sweet and tender communion with other believers where we can choose transparency, and moments where the divine healing of God is undeniable. But sometimes, we experience the not yet of the kingdom: the painful loss of a close and godly friendship, the very existence of illnesses like cancer, and those horrible moments when parents have to say goodbye to their children who have died far too soon.

Both the already and the not yet are present in our daily lives. We have to grapple with these twin realities when it comes to divine healing. Sometimes, God will exercise his sovereignty and heal a person in an instant, like with Barbara’s co-worker. Other times, we will pray earnestly and with faith, and nothing seems to change at all. Despite this pain, I am convinced that Jesus brought the kingdom of God when he initiated his earthly ministry over 2,000 years ago. It has been expanding every day since.

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2. Faith plays an undefined role in divine healing.

Let’s name the elephant in the room when it comes to faith and divine healing right now. There has been so much harmful theology around this concept of faith and divine healing that has ruined people’s faith, and more importantly, their lives. Too many people in too many churches have been told some version of this statement: If you just have enough faith, God will bring his healing into your circumstance.

I have a friend whose faith was shipwrecked by this brand of theology. Her first husband was diagnosed with cancer, and the pastors of their church gave them this toxic theology. For them, it sounded like this: If you pray long enough and believe enough, then God will remove this cancer. Both my friend and her first husband prayed with a purity of faith that was unmatched, and the church family joined in these earnest prayers.

Here’s where the story takes a dark turn. Her first husband died, and the church did not offer comfort. Instead, one of the church leaders told my friend that she must not have believed enough, since God didn’t heal her husband. He gaslit my friend so that she felt responsible for her own husband’s death. I met her about five years after this horrific exchange with toxic theology, shortly after she married her second husband. She was still not okay with God, and who could blame her?

Here’s where I land with the concept of faith and divine healing. Firstly, I don’t believe for even half a second that faith for healing is something that can be measured. There is no magic amount of faith that results in a guarantee of healing. Conversely, there isn’t a distinct lack of faith that guarantees healing won’t happen. I just don’t believe faith is a measurable construct.

Secondly, I don’t believe that we can underestimate the importance of God’s sovereignty when it comes to divine healing. God heals who he chooses to heal, when he chooses to heal. Those are the facts, pure and simple. We can’t do anything to force God’s hand to heal. No matter how pure and righteous our faith might be, if God doesn’t will for a healing, then there won’t be a healing (we will also talk more about this in another essay, I promise).

Thirdly, I don’t think any one person bears responsibility to hold the faith for divine healing. The Gospel accounts vary wildly when it comes to who seems to hold the faith for divine healing. Sometimes, Jesus is clearly the one who has the faith. Other times, the person coming to Jesus holds the faith. Of particular note in this regard is the woman with the decade-long hemorrhage; she was healed when Jesus wasn’t even paying attention to her at all. There is at least one instance where friends of the ill person are credited with having the faith that brings forth the healing.

The Gospels show zero consistency from healing moment to healing moment, so we are left with a sense of mystery about the correlation between faith and divine healing. Anyone who says differently just might be bringing their interpretation to the stories they read, instead of being guided by the Scriptures.

3. We as Christians are conduits of the Holy Spirit to bring divine healing.

Time for another controversial statement—Jesus didn’t perform his miracles because he was the Son of God, but because he was filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s very clear in the Synoptic Gospels that Jesus began his ministry when he was baptized and filled with the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the best description of his ministry is found in Acts 10:38, which says, “And you know that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. Then Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”

We are so quick to say that the ministry of Jesus is completely unachievable for any typical human being because he was the Son of God. But amazingly, that’s not the testimony of the Scriptures. He operated in the power of the Holy Spirit. Throughout the Gospels, we see the phrase, “Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit…” did something.

In case we’ve forgotten, we have the Holy Spirit within us, an indwelling gift and promise of our future inheritance from God.

Paul won’t let us forget it either. He tells us in Romans 8:11, “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you.”

Paul actually lifts the bar even higher by reminding us that the Holy Spirit who was responsible for raising Jesus from the dead is inside of us.

We have the same capacity to do all the things Jesus did in his ministry. As a matter of fact, we are quite literally commanded to do exactly that. In what we commonly call the Great Commission, Jesus commands his first disciples (and subsequently us) to make disciples who obey all his commands. His commands included praying for the sick and raising the dead. In what might be a surprising turn of events, this makes being a conduit of divine healing to our broken world more an issue of discipleship than anything else.

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4. Praying with confidence for healing and not seeing it every time we pray is not a reason to stop praying.

It might seem impossible, but we are perfectly able to hold fast to the reality of the present movement of the kingdom of God while holding in tension the reality that God doesn’t always heal, and we won’t usually know why healing doesn’t occur. I have personally been doing this exact thing for decades now. If anything, I believe that the consistency in praying for people to get healed is part of the reason I have so many divine healing moments in my life.

I believe that many people have a different reason altogether for not wanting to pray for healing when they aren’t assured of the outcome. We can convince ourselves that if we go “all-in” on praying for healing and God doesn’t “show up,” then we have brought shame to God’s name somehow. This goes back in many ways to what we talked about earlier with the mysterious nature of faith and divine healing. We might feel as though we didn’t believe hard enough for the healing, and that the onus for that faith resides wholly and only within us. Rest assured, friend, if God wants to heal someone, then he is going to heal them.

Let’s instead approach this from a wildly different perspective.

It demonstrates that we care enough to step off the carousel called life long enough to invest in someone else. It also affirms that God is equally interested in that person. If that person walks away feeling loved by us and perhaps touched by God, then this is a win. Not an embarrassment.

I anticipate in the coming weeks that we will talk through many things related to divine healing. We will do a deep dive into the biblical narrative around the presence of faith for healing, and we will also talk about how sometimes theological understanding doesn’t bring much practical comfort. I will also revisit some theological perspectives that I don’t ascribe to.

I will be sharing some more of my personal experiences with divine healing. Just as a teaser, I have been miraculously healed by God in an instant of a medical-therapeutic condition that had stumped the medical profession…but that healing only came after a decade of begging God to bring healing…and I still have other unhealed chronic health conditions. More to come!

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One of my good friends asked me last week how to apply the concepts of holy curiosity to a church small group setting. I am essentially writing this essay for an audience of one, but I hope that you also find it helpful. Needless to say, this essay is specifically written to those who are leading, or hope in the future to lead, small groups in church settings that embody the ideals of holy curiosity.

As an aside, this is a beautiful intention, as it aligns so well with the goals God has for the Church. But there are challenges. Before we can talk about how to lead your group into holy curiosity toward each other, we have to address head-on two barriers that will keep you from making this easy.

1. A desire from your group members to “fix” each other’s problems. This desire comes from a legitimately good headspace most of the time. We don’t want to see others in pain. It is hard to see people hurting, right? Let’s limit that pain by providing solutions to our friends who are struggling with something.

What’s so wrong with that, you might ask yourself? How else is someone going to move past their frustrating circumstances if they aren’t given the keys to solve their problem, after all? Unfortunately, it’s just not that simple. We’ve talked about this a little bit already, but if we choose to settle into expert mode too quickly, what actually happens is that we steal the floor from the person who has the pain. We make it all about ourselves. This teaches that person, and everyone else in the group, that sharing pain isn’t a helpful exercise, but rather it opens the floodgates for everyone else to “share their wisdom.” Usually before the full story is out in the open.

2. The reality that church spaces are often not as transparent as we’d like to imagine. We like to pretend that Christian spaces are by default open places where people share their specific struggles, but that’s just not the truth, sadly. There are a variety of social norms that have been ‘caught, not taught’ in these circles. The most relevant one is that we should put our best face forward for Jesus—after all, He did die for our sins, so the least we can do is have our lives together for Him. This creates a pretty unique set of pressures, where literally everyone sitting in a church small group at a given moment might be struggling, but nobody wants to ‘go first’ and share because of predictive spiritual shame.

How in the world are we supposed to overcome the fix-it, non-transparent places that many church small groups have evolved into? It might seem like an overwhelming task, and the truth is this: It will take a long time, a great deal of intentionality, and a willingness from your small group members to participate in the particular form of life that you are promoting.

You will probably lose some people along the way as you choose to lean into holy curiosity, because not everyone will be ready to risk in the specific ways you will model and expect from your group. But take heart—this is a reachable and valuable goal, and you can get there. I’d like to now share some of the things that have worked for me over the last few decades of building small group communities that embody a stance of holy curiosity amongst most of the group members.

Before we dive in, I want to highlight something I just said, because it’s too important.

I said building small group communities that embody a stance of holy curiosity amongst MOST OF THE GROUP MEMBERS.

We must accept, on the front end, that we will never have 100% acceptance of this approach to small-group life. There will always be hold-outs, those who won’t engage in holy curiosity but also won’t step away from your group for whatever reason. It’s just something we must accept at face value. But we can still challenge the majority to step toward holy curiosity in three key ways.

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1. Open every single group night with language around slowing down the conversations.

It won’t be enough to say it once, because maintaining space for deep listening or holy curiosity is not the default way that anyone approaches a conversation. We have been trained to speed through conversations, to push them quickly to an end, to resolve them within an unidentified period of time. Holy curiosity has a different pace. My suggestion is to say something like this as part of the opening lines of every meeting: “This group fundamentally exists to provide support, love, and community to everyone who shows up. Sometimes, that means a (hopefully) great teaching session. Other times, that means taking a deep dive into someone’s struggles. Either one honors God and aligns with our values as a group. Let’s stay open to where the Holy Spirit might be leading us as a group.”

Another option is to quote “experts” on this topic. Kosuke Koyama beautifully captures this concept, and you could easily quote them as a starting point for your small group one week:

However you choose to engage this topic, it has to be a reminder for every single meeting. Anything less, abd people will fall back into old, comfortable habits of half-listening or listening in order to talk back.

2. Intentionally practice holy curiosity every single time it presents itself to the group.

This all feels like a beautiful sentiment, doesn’t it? But what might it mean in the context of a small group? Not surprisingly, it starts with our mindset as the leader of the group. We have to be willing to set aside any destination we intended to reach by the end of the group if an opportunity to step into holy curiosity presents itself. Once we’ve decided that holy curiosity is more important than any teaching goal, we have done the hardest work. We still need to model this decision when holy curiosity can make itself at home in our groups.

This can be simpler than we might imagine. So often, we escalate small group moments into insurmountable barriers, but the truth is that things are rarely as difficult as we make them out to be. Here’s some sample language to try out the next time you sense holy curiosity might want to make an appearance in your small group:

Odds are good that we will have to police our group a little bit in the beginning stages of modeling holy curiosity. Inevitably, someone will put on their expert hat and try to solve the problem before the group has fully explored it. We have to balance grace for the “expert” with grace for the person choosing to share their struggles, and this does pose a challenge. My suggestion is to lean more toward grace with the person struggling than the person who is acting like an expert. Typically, a simple redirect is sufficient, something like this:

If we aren’t consistent in practicing holy curiosity whenever an opportunity shows up in our groups, we run the risk of unintentionally creating a have/have-not dynamic. Someone might feel like their struggle isn’t ‘worth exploring as a group,’ which will only serve to heap shame upon their spirits. This will likely never come up in the group or even in personal conversation, but it will impact the group. So we have to be on the lookout every time we gather as a group for the chance to express holy curiosity. This might realistically mean that we need to de-prioritize any teaching that we wanted to cover and instead pick up the mantle of creating safe community as the overarching goal of the group.

3. Don’t give up if you feel like your group is trying to overwhelm you with their “expert hats.”

This is a particular challenge in men’s group, in my experience. Men are trained nearly from birth in so many American subcultures to a) have the answers and b) hide their weaknesses. Therefore, when a man in the group chooses to confess his weakness (because any struggle is viewed through the lens of confession), this already makes some in the group uncomfortable. To make things worse, we are asking our group as a whole to just . . . sit in the discomfort. This is literally the development of a new instinct for many in our groups, and they might push against it. They might even gang up on you, so to speak, by continuing to offer their “expert hat” opinions, one after another, in succession. Even trying to lightly redirect might be ineffective.

If this is where you find yourself, don’t give in and let the “experts” win. The tenderness that is being displayed by the person choosing to share their struggle is evidence of the Holy Spirit wooing someone in your group. You want to cultivate that. If a simple, single redirect the first time someone puts on their “expert hat” isn’t sufficient, it’s time to pull out the big guns.

You have to stop this before it continues for too long, or everyone in the group will learn that being transparent only opens you up to getting everyone’s opinion on how to solve your particular problem. They will also learn that it’s not safe to share about a weakness, and this, friends, is contrary to the message of the gospel. If your group is unraveling at the idea of sitting in the discomfort, address it directly. Here is some suggested language:

I won’t lie to you and give you the impression that developing an environment that is conducive to holy listening is an easy process, because it’s not. It will take a great deal of intentionality and practice. There will be mistakes, and you will even forget to practice deep listening yourself as you learn this skill. But hear me when I say this: the fruit of investing in developing small groups that will embody holy curiosity is life change for all who will engage and the creation of a safe space in an often-dark world. In other words, it is well worth it.

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Recently we’ve been talking about holy curiosity. I’ve compared this to active listening, I’ve touched on a good definition of holy curiosity, I’ve identified some keys to pushing conversations deeper when they’re staying in shallow waters, and I’ve even made the case that holy curiosity should be considered a spiritual discipline. Last week, we touched on how to stay engaged with others in a world full of digital distractions.

Now, we will get super practical and answer the single biggest question about holy curiosity and transparent conversations—How do we prove we are worth being trusted with another person’s secrets?

For others to open up to us in transparency, we have to demonstrate we are a safe space, someone who can be trusted with tender moments and memories. There are any number of ways to communicate this, including some we have already discussed, like keeping your smartphone out of sight, but I want to zero in on some excellent, proven tactics to demonstrate we are a safe space:

• Make a joke out of it. This feels inappropriate at first glance but hear me out. In the mental health groups that I run at our church, we begin every class with this statement:

  This group is like Las Vegas; what happens here, stays here.

  To my astonishment, that cheesy line has resulted in so much transparency. And I know it’s a direct cause of the deep sharing that takes place, because people have referenced “Las Vegas” before sharing a scary part of their mental health journey with the group. My suggestion isn’t to make light of your conversation partner’s potential struggles, but to say something very similar to my Las Vegas line out loud. Maybe Las Vegas isn’t your vibe, and that’s alright. Another comparison could be Alcatraz (once something gets in here, it never gets out). You get the idea.

• Simultaneously practice being direct and gentle in your speech. Depending on the person in front of you, Las Vegas or Alcatraz might dampen the conversation. It’s up to you to decide if that’s the case. If you read that humor won’t be well-received, another approach is to be both direct and gentle in the way you offer to listen to their story. It might sound something like this:

  I can just tell somehow that there’s more to this story, and that maybe you’re holding back for some reason or another. I don’t blame you. Trusting someone with your history is scary. Let me put you at ease, though. You can trust that I will give you my full attention, and that whatever you share won’t go anywhere. I’m not a fan of gossip, so this stays between us. But I don’t want to make you feel forced into anything either.

  Saying the quiet part out loud often gives our conversation partners the permission they didn’t know they needed to be more transparent.

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• Keep it short and sweet. A third option is to just come right out and say that you’re a safe space for them. It might sound like this:

  I commit right now to being a safe space for you to share whatever might be going on in your head or emotionally. You can trust me.

  In my experience, this is most effective when we are talking with someone who we already know well and have a good history with; it won’t fly with a new friendship or a work acquaintance.

• Ask another open-ended question. There will be times when directly communicating our safety won’t bring the results we might hope for. In these circumstances, oftentimes the best way to approach the conversation is with more open-ended questions. In other words, we demonstrate we are safe by continuing to be present and engaged with our conversation partners. Examples of open-ended questions include:

  You mentioned x, how did that make you feel? What was your initial emotional response to hearing y? I wonder how z makes you feel now, looking back on it all these years later?

  When asking open-ended questions, we have to guard against turning them into leading questions. A perfect example of a leading question would be: Have you considered counseling for all this trauma that you’ve experienced in your life? This question isn’t really a question; it’s a declaration of what we think our conversation partner should do next.

  Choosing a leading question will actually break the trust that is being earned through holy curiosity faster than anything else. Similar to the misplaced empathy we talked about earlier, a leading question changes the direction of the conversation. Instead of honoring your conversation partner’s story and engaging in understanding the depth of how it has impacted them personally, you have put your expert hat back on. But it’s worse than just an expert hat normally is, because you’re combining an expert hat with a touch of passive-aggressive activity.

• · Ask for permission to share some advice. When we ask for permission to share some advice rather than a leading question, we continue the natural back-and-forth that is a part of every healthy conversation. More importantly, we make sure that the direction of the conversation continues to be essentially managed by the other person. Let’s be honest, we’ve all had moments where the last thing we want to hear is a potential solution to the problems we’re talking about with someone else.

  We want to vent, or we want to hear the problem out loud for the first time, or we just need to know we aren’t crazy for feeling the way we feel. We don’t have any appetite for the “right answer” right now, and if somebody tries to force it upon us, we will shut down. This could be precisely where our conversation partner is with sharing their history, and we want to honor that stance. It’s important to ask this in such a way that the other person can comfortably tell us no though. Here’s some suggested language:

  I have some thoughts that might help you sort through what’s been happening. Would you be open to hearing them? Before you answer, it’s okay for you to tell me no. I don’t have a burning urge to solve your problems, just some ideas that could support you right now.

  I hope that these simple suggestions will become the fuel and the motivation for you to begin practicing holy curiosity. I

  am convinced that this is part of what will help turn the tide against the epidemic of loneliness that is plaguing this nation right now.

  Refuge for the Weary is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Even when we do our best to practice active listening and even when we capture the heart of God and can express holy curiosity, there are some practical challenges to staying focused in a longer conversation.

By far, the biggest distraction is technology. We are surrounded by it. Technology is constant. Technology interrupts us regularly, and we allow it to do exactly that. Think about this for just a moment. Many of us already have our personal emails, work emails, social media accounts, and news or sports alerts coming into our phones at all times of the day. One day around 2014, the Apples and Samsungs of the world decided that we were too distanced from all our alerts, so they created smartwatches with haptic alerts on our wrists.

The crazy part? In the first decade of the Apple Watch, Wired estimates that 281.2 million Apple Watches have been shipped.^[i] Further, ElectroIQ states that “The number of connected smartwatches worldwide is expected to exceed 1.1 billion devices in 2025.”^[ii] As a world, we agreed that we needed to be closer to alerts. Granted, fitness is a primary reason that many use a smartwatch initially, but most eventually succumb and include those pesky alerts too.

So, how are we supposed to stay focused on the person in front of us when our very wrists are conspiring against us? Even if you don’t have a smartwatch, it’s almost a certainty that you have a smartphone, and this can be equally obtrusive. So the question remains: how do we maintain our energies attached to the person right in front of us?

It starts with some intentionality, rooted in a combination of “old-school common sense” and recent scientific findings. Generations ago, we would have never considered something as distracting as having an electronic device out during a conversation, but it is absolutely a common practice today. Younger generations tend to say that such a no-phones approach is best left for the older generations, but a 2014 study by Shalini Misra et al shows differently.

In other words, every person, regardless of any identifying factors about that person, feels a stronger connection to the person sitting in front of them if a phone is not visible. The most interesting finding of this study was that it was irrelevant whether the smartphone was actively used in the conversation. Even when the smartphone was never touched, the respondents to this study indicated that they felt less empathy in the conversation because of the presence of the smartphone.

Now, this study predates the worldwide acceptance of smartwatches, but I would hazard a guess that the same reaction would be felt. If a smartwatch is vibrating throughout a conversation, the other party to the conversation will inevitably feel as though they are taking too much time from a busy individual.

This brings us directly to the question: how can we, in a distracted world, communicate to the people we are expressing holy curiosity toward that they are worth our time and energy? The answer is alarmingly simple, but takes some intentionality to implement. When we realize that we are entering into the holy territory of someone’s heart, we can demonstrate a commitment to hearing their hearts with language like this:

Picture hearing this from someone in the middle of a conversation. How would you respond to such a direct statement of your worth? It’s almost embarrassing, isn’t it? That’s exactly the point. We want to make a serious statement about the value we are placing on someone’s story. This is a demonstration of the holy curious heart of God, which we ought to reflect as disciples or learners of Jesus.

This type of behavior causes me to reconsider I Peter 3:15: “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” In a distracted world, we choose to revere Christ as Lord by echoing his holy curiosity to the person right in front of us. This may very well cause the person we are talking with to inquire why we are giving them the time of day, or to give the reason for the hope that we have. And there is no more respectful or gentle way to show someone dignity than to intentionally set aside and hide our smart devices with language similar to what I mentioned above.

I’d love to hear back from my readers after you try this – what happens? Let me know in the comments.

^[i] Adrienne So, “The Apple Watch just turned 10. Here’s how far it’s come,” Wired, April 24, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/apple-watch-turns-10/, accessed July 25, 2026.

^[ii] Pramod Pawar, “Smartwatch statistics,” ElectroIQ, March 31, 2026, https://electroiq.com/stats/smartwatch-statistics/, accessed July 25, 2026.

^[iii] Shalini Misra, Lulu Cheng, Jamie Genevie, Miao Yuan, “The iPhone effect: the quality of in-person social interactions in the presence of mobile devices,” Environment and Behavior, July 1, 2014, DOI:10.1177/0013916514539755, accessed July 25, 2026.

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We are continuing our essay series on holy curiosity or deep listening. If you haven’t read the other essays, here are the links to them:

1. The power of deep listening

2. Why deep listening is a spiritual practice

3. My path from active listening to holy curiosity

4. What is holy curiosity?

One of the questions I receive over and over again in the context of holy curiosity is this—how do I keep the conversation going practically? It’s not easy work to travel from a surface-level, “How are you doing?” conversation to one where another person is choosing to trust you with an uncommon level of transparency. Most of us are trained by society to be something less than honest most of the time.

It starts with an intention, and the importance of this cannot be understated. Thinking back to the definition of curiosity from last week’s essay, we have to be ready to exercise patience in a conversation. This is easier said than done, for the simple reason that patience requires time, something that is often in short supply in most of our lives.

We must decide ahead of time, before even engaging in a conversation with another human being, that they are worth an investment of our time. For me, this stems from a conviction that every human carries a spark of the divine because they are created in the image of God. Every single image-bearer is worth our time.

There are some practical implications of this conviction that flow out of my life. The biggest change that I have started taking much more seriously is to build margin into my life. By margin, I mean doing everything I can to just slow down.

I try to avoid setting back-to-back-to-back meetings in my day job. I try to show up at places 5-10 minutes earlier than necessary, just in case a great conversation is waiting for me. I cannot tell you how many times those margin-based decisions have removed urgency from my heart and created space for me to engage honestly with another human being.

So it starts with our hearts and our schedules, but there’s more to cultivating holy curiosity than wanting to start and freeing our calendars. At the end of the day, holy curiosity is a spiritual practice that requires two people most of the time. (There is space for taking a posture of curiosity toward ourselves, but that is a topic for another day.)

This probably goes without saying, but just in case…not every person we come into contact with is going to be interested in holy curiosity. There are any number of reasons for this, ranging from their own calendars to personal trust issues and everything in between. This brings us to the next mini-skill that we need to develop to initiate holy curiosity. We need to read the nonverbal cues of the person in front of us.

Things like tone of voice, eye contact, and body language will help us gauge whether a person might be open to being on the receiving end of some deep listening. For example, if you are small-talking with someone and they are avoiding your eyes consistently, there’s a possibility that they are yearning to engage in a deeper conversation. If their tone of voice is quivering or wavering, this is another potential clue that there may be an opportunity to practice some holy curiosity. Nonverbal cues can also be misread, which leads to the next idea.

At all points in these exploratory conversations, we have to exercise caution and gentleness. It’s never appropriate to try to force someone into a deeper conversation; this will almost always cause more harm in the end. Instead, we want to kindly invite another image-bearer toward transparency.

For me, often this comes in the form of a simple question. Maybe after I’ve asked an acquaintance how they’re doing, and they reply with “Fine,” I might ask, “Are you sure? It’s okay to not be okay, you know.” I continue to be surprised by how effective this simple practice is—it’s opened the door to many heartfelt conversations with people who were struggling and needed a friend in the moment. Other ways to approach this invitation to a deeper conversation include:

• You’ve been on my mind lately. How are things going, really?

• God brought you to my heart to pray for this week. How can I specifically pray for you in this season?

• You don’t seem quite like yourself lately. Is everything going alright?

You can find your own way to approach these questions. I’m just sharing what has been useful for me.

Many times, the initial response to this simple question will be a broad statement. Maybe something like, “I’ve been struggling with some things at work lately.” If we aren’t careful, that could be the end of the conversation, and we will have missed an opportunity to practice holy curiosity.

In my experience, people share a general statement like this almost as a trust exercise. Before they decide to share too much, they throw a test sentence out to see if we’re really interested. As you might imagine, not responding well to this trust exercise is a huge barrier that keeps us from having opportunities to practice deep listening. Our first instinct when we come across a general statement like this is to empathize by responding with something like, “I’ve had some tough jobs too.” After all, we want to empathize with others, right?

Yes, but not yet. Here’s the thing: we don’t actually know what we are empathizing with yet. All we have is a topic, and that’s not enough.

If we choose to try to empathize at the start of the conversation, we are unintentionally misrepresenting our hearts. We are communicating that we want this moment to be about us and our problems or our history. That will more often than not shut down any future sharing.

To pass the trust exercise, we want to turn the attention back to the other person by asking for more details about the circumstances they’ve just expressed. In our example, that would look like, “What’s going on at work, if you don’t mind me asking?” It’s important to always remember that we are earning the right to listen to others, every step of the way. We never want to assume that someone will open up all the way just because they shared one piece of the puzzle. By asking this question with a sincere heart, we are intrinsically communicating the empathy that our wrong response earlier was trying to make obvious.

At some point, all the details that are needed will be shared in our conversation. This is when the next problem point comes. With holy curiosity, we are not comparing trials or solving problems. Rather, we are confirming to the person in front of us that they matter, that their story is worth listening to, and that we specifically care about them and their plight.

We also need to resist the urge to do what I call “putting on our expert hats.” When we put on our expert hats, we assume that we know precisely how the person we’re engaging with should respond to the situation they are dealing with. This might be based on a similar experience we had, or it might be based on our education, or it could even be a vibe or sense we get.

Expert hats are the antithesis of holy curiosity. Think about it this way: God is omniscient (a fancy theological way to say that God knows everything), and even God rarely put on his expert hat when he engaged with humanity. If that’s not the go-to play for God, we should be that much more reticent to make it our go-to play.

Of course, this brings up a very legitimate question: what am I actually doing during the conversation if I’m not trying to solve it or comparing stories? This is where empathy through listening does come into play. Let’s define this term, though, as it’s too important to get wrong.

Dynamic unfolding is a recognition that empathy develops over the course of the conversation, rather than at a defined moment in time.

“A collaborative process [is called one] because it (a) achieves something that is not individually attainable and (b) relies on them both participating in the relevant conversation.”^[2]

Mutual perspective reshaping might be the most important aspect of empathy through listening that is often overlooked; this concept means that both parties to the conversation are changed because of the conversation. Put differently, we aren’t agents of change for the person we are listening to; instead, we’re engaging in a transformative conversation with them.

When we choose to practice empathy through listening, we allow the interaction to draw both parties toward a mutually improved situation compared with the beginning of the conversation.

This brings us to a final question: how do we end a conversation where holy curiosity has been exercised? There’s no single right answer to this question. Sometimes, we can pray for the person in that moment and invite the presence of the Holy Spirit to continue the work that was begun in our conversation with them.

In some conversations, this will feel wholly inappropriate, and I’d encourage you not to force it when it doesn’t fit. I have offered to check in with a person in a few days or a week to see how things are progressing. This can be meaningful, if and only if you actually follow through on the offer, because it communicates that your holy curiosity was not a one-time blip on the radar.

Other times, I have asked them to reach out to me if anything practical comes to mind that I might be able to help them with in the context of this struggle.

What other questions do you have about how to actually practice holy curiosity in your daily lives? I’d love to answer them, either in the comments or in future essays.

^[1] Seisuke Hayakawa & Katsunori Miyahara, “Empathy through listening,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Volume 11, Issue 2, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2024.12.

^[2] Seisuke Hayakawa & Katsunori Miyahara, 2024.

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Most likely, your first response when reading this question is, What makes curiosity holy? After all, didn’t it kill the cat? To adequately answer that question, we have to start with a different question: What exactly is curiosity? Most of us probably have an idea or an image in our head when we think of the word curiosity.

What is curiosity?

For some of us, maybe that image is of a child who is sneaking into a room she’s not supposed to be in, distinctly because she’s not allowed. Maybe for others, the image is of a bookworm, someone who spends their days constantly searching for new knowledge to assuage an insatiable desire for more information.

Both of these images are valuable, but they also underscore something surprising—a robust definition of curiosity is hard to come by. The Cambridge Dictionary gives a simple enough definition: “an eager wish to know or learn about something.”^[1]

There are elements of this definition that are satisfying, most notably the word eager. All of us would likely agree that anyone curious has an eagerness about their approach to learning. But something feels lacking in this definition, something maybe we can’t quite put our finger on. Other dictionaries provide similarly empty definitions of the word.

Psychology has made various attempts to understand curiosity as well, but has fallen similarly short of a clearly delineated definition of the concept. Cognitive science researchers Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Y. Hayden lament, “Despite its pervasiveness, we lack even the most basic integrative theory of the basis, mechanisms, and purpose of curiosity. Nonetheless, as a psychological phenomenon, curiosity—and the desire for information more broadly—has attracted the interest of the biggest names in the history of psychology. Despite this interest, only recently have psychologists and neuroscientists begun widespread and coordinated efforts to unlock its mysteries.”^[2]

My working definition of curiosity

This might come off as arrogant, but I want to propose a detailed, descriptive definition of curiosity to serve as the basis for the remainder of our conversation. For our purposes, curiosity has five elements:

1. An eagerness to understand something new or novel – This part of the definition is taken from the dictionary definition introduced earlier. It’s important to note that eagerness is the starting point for true curiosity, but it does not capture the complete picture of what makes a person curious.

2. A willingness to put forth effort – To truly express curiosity, there must be a willingness to put effort into gaining the new information. Without this element, curiosity might be considered an idle pursuit, but I am convinced that curiosity in its purest form is always active.

3. A willingness to set aside personal agendas – There is a selflessness contained in curiosity. Whether the focus of the curiosity is an intellectual exercise or another person’s perspective on a situation, preconceived notions around the topic at hand must be set aside. Otherwise, curiosity descends into something more like an echo chamber.

4. A potentially inordinate amount of patience – Satisfying curiosity takes time, pure and simple. Whether it’s doing a deep dive into a research topic or having an extended conversation with someone, there are no shortcuts to satisfying curiosity.

5. A desire to grow personally – This might actually be the secret sauce of true curiosity. If we aren’t willing to grow or change as a result of what we’ve learned, then we were never curious in the first place. We were just hungry to support our pre-existing opinions.

Now that we’re armed with a descriptive, detailed definition of curiosity, let’s consider why it’s in short supply in today’s world for just a moment. Quite honestly, a quick reversal of each aspect of our working definition of curiosity can help us gain some perspective. Consider these questions:

• How many people can you think of who don’t have a sense of eagerness to learn something different or new, but are instead content with what they already know?

• How many people don’t seem to have the energy in their lives to learn something new, whether that’s expressed in rarely reading a book or something different?

• How many people are unwilling to let go of their preconceived notions, even to the point of pushing legitimate facts aside to hold onto what they “already know to be the truth?”

• How many people exude patience in their interactions with others, compared to those who are rushed or seem to be inconvenienced by other human beings?

• How many people seem to be willing to change their opinions, their actions, or their lives based on gathering new information?

If your life is anything like mine, this thought exercise was more than a little disturbing. Perhaps you thought of specific political, religious, or ideological theories that seem to embody everything except curiosity. I don’t want to point fingers or call any particular groups out, but it seems to be popular and nearly revered in some circles to lack curiosity, to be unwilling to engage with new or different ideas, and to never let anything change your opinion. What would you say if I told you that such a mentality actually offends the heart of God?

What do we mean when we use the word holy?

Now we move to the fun part of the conversation – where in the world do I get the idea that curiosity is holy? As with curiosity, we have to start with a definition of the word holy. Most of us automatically move to good behavior when we think of the word holy, but that misses the root meaning of the term.

In both Hebrew and Greek, the words we translate as holy refer to the concept of being set apart for a unique and sacred purpose. This helps us gain a better understanding of why the lampstands in the Tabernacle were considered holy, as one example. It had nothing to do with moral purity, but instead it referenced the fact that these lampstands were only to be used in the Tabernacle. Their purpose was unique and sacred.

Another important component of the word holy comes to light when the term is applied specifically to God. Let’s start with the obvious—it’s weird to apply a unique and sacred purpose to God. Beyond that, it’s almost meaningless. What unique and sacred purpose would God be set apart for, and who exactly would set him apart for it? When applied to God, the word holy highlights his otherness.

Now, otherness is another weird word, so let me describe it for you. God’s otherness means that he is entirely separate from and distinct from creation, that he lacks any flaws, and that he has zero limitations. This is another way of saying that Yahweh isn’t just a bigger version of a human who happens to live in heaven; no, he is made of completely different stuff than us.

When we combine these two ideas, we arrive at an idea of holy that is very meaningful for our purposes of exploring curiosity. A holy activity might be described as one that is otherworldly in its purpose and unique in its function. Said differently, something might be considered holy if it’s something we could imagine God doing.

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Is God a curious God?

I’m guessing that you’ve never asked that question before. Until very recently, I hadn’t either. But once I did ask it, I was astonished at exactly how curious God is throughout the narratives of the Old Testament. We already talked about how curious God was with Abel and Hagar a few weeks ago, so I won’t rehash that in this essay. But these are not the only instances of God demonstrating curiosity in his interactions with humans. I would contend that God’s desire for intimacy and his curiosity are very closely related.

Think about the creation narrative with me for just a few moments. God asked Adam to name all the animals. At first glance, this might seem like a tedious chore that God was just passing off to an underling because he didn’t want to do it himself. After all, he is God and has more important things to do. But a closer consideration of this gives us room for a completely different interpretation.

I know that I am making an argument from silence, and I’m very aware that there is no way to prove my presupposition, but what if God asked Adam to name the animals because God was curious about what Adam would do? I understand the omniscience of God tells us that God knows all things, but there is a vast difference between knowing something and experiencing something. What if God wanted to experience Adam naming the creatures because God was curious about it? I believe there is room to imagine that God was taking this unique opportunity to learn something about his new creation, Adam, by giving Adam a never-to-be-repeated task.

Curiosity and Job

Maybe you’re not convinced yet. Maybe you need more than an unprovable hypothetical to believe that God is a curious God. After all, the idea of his omniscience is a serious hurdle to overcome. Going back to our definition of curiosity, it starts with an eagerness to learn something new. If God already knows everything, what could he possibly learn?

Rather than engage in a philosophical debate on this potentially unanswerable question, I’d like to counter with another moment from Scripture where it certainly seems like God is curious. In the opening stanzas of the book of Job, Satan comes to visit God in heaven. God asks Satan if Satan noticed Job and declares him blameless and full of integrity. Satan responds to God by stating that Job only honors God with his life because God has blessed him. God permits Satan to harm Job in any way Satan can imagine, except that Satan cannot physically hurt him.

In the course of moments, Job’s wealth is taken away from him. Even worse, all his children die in a tornado. Job responds with overwhelming grief, but chooses to worship God even in the midst of these terrible events. Chapter 1 ends with the amazing statement that Job did not sin by blaming God for these tragedies.

I believe that God knew in one sense that Job was blameless. He understood that Job loved God with his full heart. But he also recognized the legitimacy of Satan’s accusation that it’s easy to bless God with a full stomach and a fat bank account. God was curious to see if his knowledge about Job would prove to be true in the crucible of darkness, so God let Satan try to wreck Job’s life.

Holy curiosity in action

This moment from the life of Job underscores something important about God’s curiosity that is worth discussing here briefly. God never truly learns anything new intellectually. That would be impossible because God already knows everything. But God experiences new things because of his curiosity. We can do the same; even if we haven’t learned anything new through a conversation with someone, we can still experience something fresh and different through that conversation.

Let’s end where we began, with our definition of curiosity. As we engage others in conversations, we can express genuine, holy curiosity by applying our definition of curiosity to the conversation.

• We can come into a conversation with eagerness, rather than reluctance. Everyone knows when a person doesn’t really want to hear a story, or when they are being a burden to someone else. That’s the worst feeling in the world. Let’s decide today to do everything in our power to never be reluctant listeners. After all, each person we come across has the image of God stamped upon them, and they are therefore worth our attention.

• We can choose to step forward with effort in our chats with others. Instead of approaching a conversation with resignation or irritation, we can decide on the front end that learning more about the person in front of us is worth whatever effort it might require.

• We can intentionally set aside our preconceived ideas about any given topic as we engage with another person. This is truly a lost art in the world of social media anonymity. Others will notice when we decide to honestly hear someone else’s perspective, especially if we disagree with them. Here’s a related question for you: when is the last time you sought out someone that you knew you disagreed with on a particular topic, just to understand why they think the way they do on that topic?

• We can ask God to give us patience as we seek to understand and empathize with another person. This can be challenging if the person comes from a different background from ours or has a prickly personality. Trust me when I say this—the effort will not go unnoticed, especially in these types of situations.

• We can choose to hold loosely to our ideals and instead engage honestly with another person. This type of humility will be readily apparent and will change the tenor of every conversation.

It can be a bit overwhelming to try to add the full package of holy curiosity into our lives at once, so maybe start with one aspect of our working definition of curiosity. Which will you implement in your life first?

^[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/curiosity. Accessed July 14, 2026.

^[2] Celeste Kidd, Benjamin Y. Hayden. “The psychology and neuroscience of curiosity,” Neuron, 2015 Nov 4;88(3):449–460. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2015.09.010. Accessed July 14, 2026.

I began my journey toward holy curiosity by learning about active listening in the context of being a mental health coach. Indeed, one of my certifications is fully focused on the skill of empathetically listening to another person’s story. Active listening is a profound skill that is difficult to master, and it has borne great fruit in my ministry as a mental health coach.

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According to UC Berkeley Exec Ed, “Active listening is the practice of being fully present in a conversation. Not just hearing words, but absorbing meaning, reading context, and responding with intention. It requires setting aside distractions, quieting your internal dialogue about what to say next, and focusing on understanding the other person’s perspective. Unlike passive hearing, which is automatic, active listening is a deliberate choice that signals respect and opens the door to deeper insight.”[i]

I first started exploring active listening because I saw the evidence of deep loneliness all around me. Whether at church, at the workplace, or in the community, people are desperate for relationships in a way that I’ve never seen before. I wanted to do something about this growing loneliness, and active listening was part of the answer for me.

Learning about active listening today is relatively easy. Definitions and descriptions of this skill can be found in leadership circles, in Christian literature, in therapeutic applications, and many other spheres. The consensus across these spaces is fairly summarized in the quote above. Of course, gaining the information isn’t the hard part of active listening; the real challenge comes in practicing the skill.

Over several years, I honed my ability to listen intentionally to those around me. I convinced myself that active listening was a recently discovered skill, found in psychological or therapeutic research, which created an internal struggle for me.

I pride myself on being a deep-thinking Christian, someone who can combine modern practices with biblical and theological insights. This is a vital part of my self-image, and the importance that active listening continued to have in my mental health coaching concerned me because it seemed to be divorced from the biblical narrative.

Because of this presumption, I took it upon myself to dive deep into Scripture, hoping to find active listening. Honestly, I didn’t expect to find much because none of my reading on the Internet seemed to draw biblical comparisons to deep listening. What I uncovered astounded me and changed the way that I practice active listening and even what I call it.

God asks over three thousand questions in the Bible. In Job chapters 38-41 alone, God confronts Job with more than sixty questions. God’s questions here are mostly rhetorical and intended to remind Job that God is the sovereign Creator of the universe, rather than any human. Surprisingly, this flurry of questions from God is in response to Job’s seemingly legitimate complaints about the terrible events that recently occurred in his life. As a reminder, in a single day, Job lost his livestock, his property, and his ten children. It seems reasonable from where I sit to engage God in dialogue to understand the reasons behind these tragedies, but God doesn’t see it that way in the book of Job. Instead, God elects to pose an unending series of questions that cannot be answered by Job.

Thankfully, not all questions from God in the Bible are rhetorical (though we could certainly argue that God knows the answer to every question He asks before He asks it). Many times, God invites humanity into an honest conversation through his questions. One example of this is found in Genesis 4, where God asked Cain where his brother Abel was. God definitely knew the answer to this question, and indeed, later in the narrative, He stated that Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. God asked Cain this question to encourage Cain to confess his sin.

It is easy to look at this story and presume that the cursing of Cain was predestined as soon as Abel was killed, but a more careful reading shows us that God gave Cain a choice. Genesis 4:7 captures this choice beautifully:

The offer from God in conversation with Cain is acceptance and presumably forgiveness, and it all starts with an open question. God practiced active listening in this moment with Cain, and it’s not the only time we can find this pattern.

Another profound interaction with humanity when God practices active listening is found when Hagar left Abraham and Sarah the first time because she was being treated poorly. In Genesis 16, God calls Hagar by name, then asks her where she has come from and where she is going. God initiated an active listening session with Hagar by calling her name. This simple moment gave a woman who had no power or authority a voice and an identity. God listened to Hagar’s answers to these questions, then gave her specific guidance for the next phase of her life. Because of God’s tender care, Hagar gives him the name El Roi, which translates as “the God who sees.”

God did not have to communicate in any way with Hagar. She and her son Ishmael were not a part of the line of promise that would later come through the birth of Isaac. Hagar was nothing more than an Egyptian slave, but God noticed her, and more specifically, He noticed her despair.

Then he chose to engage her in an open conversation that gave her hope and a future, both for herself and her son. We can trace this pattern of God engaging humanity with questions throughout the Old and New Testaments. It finds its full fruition in the ministry of Jesus.

As I uncovered the degree to which God practiced active listening with humans, I had a change of language that reflected a change of heart. I stopped referring to this practice as active listening, but instead I started calling it deep listening. This small shift may appear insignificant, but trust me when I say it’s not. While most definitions of active listening include the concept of removing distractions, it is only a part of the definition.

Deep listening centers this focused intention on the speaker in a way that the term active listening simply does not do. In my opinion, removing distractions is the core component of deep listening. It is what sets deep listening apart from everyday, typical listening. And more importantly, deep listening reflects the way God engages with humanity over and over throughout the pages of Scripture.

As I pondered this revelation about God, I realized that I was not fully modeling the nature of God in the way I practiced deep listening. I was still fundamentally listening to respond. I wanted to understand the person I was listening to, and that was better than not listening at all, but I still wasn’t reflecting the way God engaged with humanity in the Scriptures. I needed to interact with others out of a pure concern for their welfare, because that is the way God did it in the Scriptures. But I still wasn’t sure precisely what it was about God’s interactions with humanity that I was missing.

That’s when I stumbled upon the idea of holy curiosity. God consistently demonstrated a level of curiosity about others that was unbelievable. When God discussed with Abraham His plans to destroy Sodom, He first talked with the angels about whether He should share His intentions with Abraham or not. Ultimately, He decided to talk with Abraham about the impending destruction of the city, and the narrative seems to indicate that He did so because He legitimately wanted to hear what Abraham had to say about it.

Even more surprisingly, Abraham seemed to encourage God to be more generous and more forgiving than He initially intended to be with Sodom. The city was still annihilated, but that doesn’t diminish the enormity of the conversation God had with Abraham. God shared His heavenly intentions with Abraham only to see what Abraham might have to say about those plans. This trend can be traced through both the Old and the New Testaments, to the degree that I am comfortable saying that holy curiosity is a character trait of God.

When I realized that holy curiosity was a defining characteristic of God, it dramatically changed the way that I practiced deep listening. Since I could trust that God was listening deeply to the conversations I was having with other people, I adapted the practice of listening on two levels. Instead of only listening intently to the words coming from the other person, I now also listen to the Holy Spirit simultaneously. I try to discern what God might be saying in the middle of the conversation, what He might want to insert into the midst of things.

[i] “The Art of Active Listening,” UC Berkeley Exec Ed, accessed July 7, 2026, https://executive.berkeley.edu/thought-leadership/blog/art-active-listening.

This might seem like a very strange follow-up to my essay on deep listening, but hang with me. I promise I am going somewhere very meaningful with this. I contend that deep listening IS a spiritual practice, but in order for that to make any sense, we have to understand what a spiritual practice looks like, what it accomplishes, and how it impacts us and those around us.

Richard J. Foster was one of the progenitors of spiritual disciplines many moons ago. Renovare, which is part of his legacy, defines spiritual disciplines in the following way:

Some are more comfortable with the term spiritual discipline to spiritual practices, but I choose the latter term because it gives us the freedom to move beyond the traditional virtuous activities of the Christian life and to explore other dynamics.

Perhaps the great key that we see in the quote from Renovare is in that first sentence – the practices of Jesus. For something to be considered a spiritual practice, it must be readily found in the life of Christ. This is affirmed by a consideration of the classic list of spiritual practices or disciplines. Let’s take two as examples, turning our thoughts first to prayer.

Jesus was regularly seen in the Gospels retreating away from the crowds to sequester himself in prayer. He was even known to spend the night in prayer. One specific instance that comes to mind is the evening before he chose the twelve disciples. We find this in Luke 6:12-13—

“One day soon afterward Jesus went up on a mountain to pray, and he prayed to God all night. At daybreak he called together all of his disciples and chose twelve of them to be apostles.”

Another key moment in the life of Jesus where prayer intersects with his decision-making can be found in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus steps away from his disciples and prays in isolation. He cries out to the Father to take the cup of suffering from him, and is so distraught that his sweat could be compared to great drops of blood. Some people even suggest that Jesus might have had a panic attack in this moment, though I’d have to see his blood pressure readings to know for sure. Regardless, he submits his will to God and moves forward toward the cross. There is no question that prayer is a key component of the life of Christ.

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Let’s turn our eyes to another classically celebrated discipline, service. Does this spiritual practice make itself known in the life of Jesus? Consider John 13 in this context. Jesus is about to begin what we know as the Last Supper, that Passover meal immediately before his crucifixion. Jesus was the rabbi, the spiritual leader of his troupe of disciples. There was no expectation or reason for him to take on the role of a servant, but this is precisely what Jesus does.

He dons a towel and washes the feet of each of his disciples, mostly shockingly even Judas Iscariot’s feet (whom he seemed to know would betray him). A poignant moment comes when Jesus gets to Peter. Peter refuses Christ’s offer to wash his feet and is quietly rebuked, being told,

In typical Peter fashion, he then responds by saying that Jesus should wash his hands and head too. Jesus politely declines.

There is much to be learned from this interaction between Jesus and Peter, but let’s narrow our focus to this simple question: Does Jesus demonstrate service in his life? The answer is a resounding yes. Throughout his life, he could have claimed privileges as a traveling rabbi, but he never did so. Instead, he remained humble and served those around him. His compassion led him to feed thousands miraculously when he could have distanced himself from their needs. Jesus was always leading out of a heart of service.

Does deep listening meet this qualification as a spiritual practice?

As a reminder, deep listening has five steps: validation, focusing on understanding, reflecting and clarifying, declaring the good news, and providing other resources.

Can we find compelling proof of Jesus listening deeply during his three years of ministry? The answer is a resounding yes, and the evidence is dispersed throughout the Gospels. Let’s carefully consider several moments when Jesus demonstrated deep listening in his ministry.

There is perhaps no better place to begin this exploration of Christ’s ministry than in John 4 with the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus understood quite well the racial prejudices against Samaritans held by his people. Beyond that, there were strict rules guiding conversations between men and women in this culture. And yet, Jesus engaged this nameless woman in a prolonged conversation. It started simple enough, with Jesus asking for a drink from the well by the Samaritan woman.

She expressed surprise that he, as a Jewish man, was interacting with her in any way. In that moment, Jesus had a decision to make in the conversation. He could have stayed distant and demanded a drink, but that is not the choice Jesus made. Instead, he cryptically invited her to find living water. He turned her curiosity up to ten, in other words, by reflecting and clarifying as she spoke. She didn’t understand how he intended to pull water from the well without a rope or bucket, and asked if Jesus was greater than Jacob.

Again, Jesus chose to step deeper into conversation by inviting her to drink of his water, and then he upped the ante. He told her to go get her husband, knowing full well she didn’t have one. There is a moment here for Jesus to judge her harshly, but he bypassed that moment and instead invited her to enter into true worship of the Messiah in the Spirit. Through deep listening and meaningful conversation, Jesus turned an everyday conversation into a revival in Samaria.

Before we can comfortably say that deep listening is a regular practice of Jesus, we need more than one story, though. We find another in Luke 8. Jesus was on his way to heal the daughter of Jairus when he felt power go out from him in a mysterious way. He stopped and questioned the surrounding crowd who had touched him, and would not quit until he found the answer. Sheepishly, a woman who had been hemorrhaging for over a decade confessed that she touched the hem of his prayer shawl because she was convinced that doing so would bring healing to her problem.

At first glance, this feels like an inconsequential story with no bearing on deep listening, but some more background in Jewish laws can shed light on its implications. Because she was bleeding, she was considered unclean. According to Jewish law, she was supposed to separate herself from crowds and stay in isolation. Otherwise, she risked making others unclean by her blood.

As with the Samaritan woman, Jesus could have stood on religious customs and reprimanded her for making him unclean. Jesus did nothing of the sort. Instead, he engaged her in conversation to understand her story. He invited her to explain her reasons behind grasping at his prayer cloak. After hearing her narrative, he stepped back from any judgment or disdain. Instead, he simply told her that her faith had healed her. After listening to her story, Jesus affirmed her choices. He validated her actions, which is one of the elements of deep listening. Jesus seemed to walk in the regular practice of deep listening, especially for those who were disenfranchised.

Let’s consider one final moment from the ministry of Christ through the lens of deep listening. After the death and resurrection of Jesus, two disciples were walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus. We pick up this story in Luke 24. Cleopas and another (perhaps his wife Mary) were walking home and distressingly talking about the death of Christ. Into this distraught moment, Jesus inserted himself in a disguised form. He could have immediately reprimanded them, revealed himself, and commanded them not to lose heart. But this was not what Jesus did. Instead, he entered into their story. He asked what had them so distressed and listened intently to their experience of his death.

Only after he had heard them, Jesus began to reframe their grief by teaching them about the suffering that the Messiah had to suffer. Aligning with the elements of deep listening, he declared good news into their despair, but again only after listening to their experiences. The entire time, his identity was hidden from them in some mysterious way. Cleopas invited him to join them for dinner, and Jesus seemed to begrudgingly accept. Then Jesus took the customary role of the host by breaking and praying for the bread.

In that moment, his identity became clear to Cleopas and his traveling companion.

They said to each other, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us as he talked with us on the road and explained the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).

Once again, Jesus demonstrated deep listening as a core practice in his ministry.

I am comfortable based on this brief review of the life of Christ that deep listening is a spiritual practice that was core to the way he walked on this earth some two thousand years ago. What is the implication of this revelation?

It is the same as every other spiritual discipline or practice that Jesus embodied—we ought to emulate him in our lives. Deep listening IS a spiritual practice, one that we must emphasize, grow in, and learn how to model in the same ways that Jesus practiced it in his life.

[1] https://renovare.org/articles/what-are-spiritual-disciplines-practices. Accessed June 23, 2026.

Trigger warning: This essay candidly discusses a suicide attempt. If that is a problem for you, please skip this essay.

For the next several weeks, I am going to explore a topic that is profoundly important to me, one that literally saved my life – deep listening. Deep listening is legitimately part of the reason I am still here today, and it started in the least likely place ever, in a psych ward after a suicide attempt.

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In the summer of 2020, I found myself overcome with depression and suicidal thoughts. I found myself highly depressed, I slept a lot because of my depression, I wasn’t actively doing anything to combat it, and I acted as though I was fine. I had moments when healthy practices helped me overcome my depression, but if I’m honest, more days were down than up. Then things came to a head.

The day after my youngest son’s birthday, we were having a good time laughing about something downstairs. I had an intrusive thought at that moment that said, Your pills are waiting for you upstairs. Now might as well be as good a time as any to take your life. Shocked by the suddenness of this thought, I just accepted it as truth.

As I look back, I’m embarrassed and sad to say that I didn’t question this statement in any way. Even though we had a good time as a family, even though no emergency stressed me out, and even though everything was wonderful at the moment, I just accepted the thought as gospel truth.

I excused myself from the family and headed upstairs. I typed and printed two letters to my wife. One letter contained a series of instructions to help her put the pieces back together practically, covering things like website passwords and how to use my phone to pay bills. The second letter had an apology. I told her how much I loved her and how much I wanted to continue to build a life with her, but that I felt overwhelmed with sadness and grief about so many things and couldn’t see a way through the pain. I tried to tell her it wasn’t her fault, that I didn’t blame her, and I wasn’t unhappy with the life we had built together. I just needed the pain to stop, and I didn’t see any other way.

Then I downed about fifty pills, a combination of psychiatric medications and anti-seizure meds. I thought I knew from the research I had done earlier that this would be enough to kill me, and I needed to die in this moment.

Some time later, my wife came upstairs to check in on me. She had assumed I had gone to bed because sometimes it was normal for me to go to sleep in the middle of the day without warning for no reason. She walked into the bedroom and saw the open pill bottles first. Then she saw me strewn across the floor, clearly having overdosed. Barbara told me that initially, she found herself fueled by anger. I had promised her after my last psych ward visit that I would never attempt again, and here just two years later, I went through with the suicide attempt in the same way I had threatened to do it previously. She considered leaving me on the floor and letting the cards fall where they may, but eventually love won out over anger.

Her next dilemma: how to get me to the hospital. She wanted to avoid telling the kids that I had tried to die by suicide, so she tried to get me into the car on her own. As a frame of reference, I am 6′7″ and nearly three hundred pounds, and my wife stands tall at 5′2″. Quite the monstrous challenge. She managed to get me down the stairs with a little help from me, but my body gave out at the bottom of the stairs, and I collapsed. She had no choice but to call 9-1-1 at that point because she couldn’t deadlift me to the car. The paramedics came and took me to the hospital, but because of COVID, nobody could go with me. As a matter of fact, they couldn’t visit me at all in the psych ward for the same reason.

I slowly replayed the suicide attempt in my head. I’d tried to overdose using a few medications that I mistakenly thought would end my life. I tried to die by suicide within a couple days of my son’s birthday, I realized with a dull wince. He’ll have that memory forever superimposed on his birthday.

I felt like an utter failure. And the worst part? I found myself angry I was still alive. My pain, confusion, unresolved grief, and anger still waited for me. Nothing had changed. I can’t even die by suicide right, I thought, adding that to the list of things I had angry thoughts about.

I felt so lost in the psych ward, in such a daze that I couldn’t function. I went through the motions of taking whatever medications they placed in my hands, eating the food put in front of me, and zoning out in front of the television outside of required activities.

A few days later, my pastor visited me in the psych ward. When I heard he’d come, I found myself incredibly nervous about what he would say to me. I recalled the previous conversations I’d had with other pastors about mental health, and how poorly they’d gone. Surely this would be more of the same—only worse because I’d actually attempted suicide.

I rehearsed these thoughts and prepared for the worst while walking down the hallways to the visitor room. I felt sick to my stomach, and I’d convinced myself that my pastor only came to heap condemnation on me. As a matter of fact, I almost turned around and headed back to my ward before I even reached the room. I only kept going because my current pastor seemed to be the type of guy who might not kick a brother when he’s down. But if I’m being honest, I wasn’t sure if I judged him rightly.

When I got to the room, Pastor Marty gave me a fierce bear hug. Then he said, “I’m sorry things got so rough for you that you felt you had nowhere left to turn but to try to end it. I’ve been closer to that place myself than I’d like to admit, and I know how it feels.”

I wasn’t expecting that. We talked some about the psych ward, if I liked the food (I didn’t), and if I liked the people (they’re okay). Then Marty got down to business. I could see his demeanor change, and I prepared myself to be bulldozed again by a Christian leader. Only the bulldozing never came.

Instead, he looked me straight in the eyes and said,

“We can’t have this happen again. Your family needs you. Your church needs you. We need you. Our church isn’t the full church without you in it. And God’s not done with you yet.”

I could have taken this as an attack, but I knew exactly how Marty meant it. He wanted me to remember that the church was my family. It changed my life forever. My pastor called me back to belonging, to a place called home. He reminded me that my world is bigger than I’d felt it to be when I attempted suicide. Beyond that, he brought the reinforcements of hope and family to my soul and called me into a stronger sense of self-worth. I’m forever grateful to Marty for those words because they put a boundary line in my spirit that will keep me from attempting suicide again.

This is the power of deep listening in action. I am convinced that deep listening holds up our world. Deep listening carries people through difficult times and inspires them to get back on the path to better mental health. Even in the darkest times, deep listening can make a tremendous difference.

We often feel helpless to support those around us who are suffering. We convince ourselves that without professional training, we might do more harm than good. Hear me when I say this, though: the most powerful thing we have to someone who’s struggling is something we already possess. By leaning in with authenticity, by not judging or trying to “fix” a situation, we offer people what they need from us most.

This feels counterintuitive. After all, we live in a society that values quick fixes and strong opinions. When faced with someone’s mental health struggles, our first instinct is to put on our expert hats or offer four quick steps to solve the problem.

But what exactly is deep listening? What does it mean to show up for someone? Let’s start with the obvious. Deep listening is NOT our default way of listening.

Think about it. You’re at a dinner with friends, and someone starts to tell a story. Without realizing it, you’ve moved into a half-listening phase, and you’re thinking about what to say next. You might have a similar story to share or a joke. Regardless, you aren’t giving your full self to the listening process.

That, at its core, is a good definition of deep listening – to give yourself fully to the listening process. It is to be present with someone as they talk, suspending judgment or responses until you are certain you have heard the other person. Showing up involves hearing more than the words of the speaker. Deep listening is done with the heart as well as the mind.

Deep listening has five stages. It’s something we can all practice. The first step is validation. With validation, we acknowledge and agree that the internal and external responses the person is having to their circumstances make sense. We might even react the same if we were in their situation. This simple act of validation lifts an enormous weight of shame and self-judgment. It is truly a gift we give to those we’re listening to.

The next two stages happen at the same time: focusing on understanding, and reflecting and clarifying. To focus on understanding, be intentional.

Train yourself not to formulate a reply at all. Instead, ask yourself this: “If I were in their shoes right now, what might I be thinking, feeling, and experiencing?” As you grapple with this question, pay attention to the unsaid. What does body language tell you about the story? Does the tone of voice teach you anything? What topics is the person avoiding or emphasizing?

As you’re focusing on understanding, reflect and clarify what they are saying by using phrases like “What I’m hearing you say is...” This ensures you’ve understood correctly and shows you’re actively engaged. This might take some time, and your reflection statements might be wrong. Just be patient with yourself and keep going.

The next step is to declare the good news in the situation. This isn’t some generic, pie-in-the-sky good news that doesn’t connect with real life and its pain. On the contrary, it starts with the bad news that is so readily evident and then moves to its opposite. This good news acts as tangible hope for a better future.

The last step is providing other resources in the community for support. This might include counseling, community groups, or even a helpful book.

Deep listening isn’t the answer to every mental health problem, of course. There are plenty of times when what someone might need, more than a friendly ear, is a trained one. Deep listening can’t keep longstanding trauma from influencing a person’s daily life. This is where EMDR, DBT, and other therapies can be part of the solution.

Deep listening isn’t the cure for unsafe or codependent relationships either. In these situations, the person often needs to make a radical shift in their life circumstances to facilitate changes in their mental health.

Deep listening also isn’t the answer for true crises. If a person is in a suicidal crisis, showing up is definitely part of the solution, but there’s more at play here.

We never want to discount anyone’s suicidal claims. Deep listening can act as a soothing balm for anyone battling a mental health challenge, but we need to guard against getting in over our heads.

Remember the power of deep listening and do your part to hold up the world. Have the courage to step beyond the everyday conversations we have with each other and dig deep into someone’s life. Give your undivided, uninterrupted attention. Validate their experiences. Focus on understanding what they’re going through. Reflect and clarify their words. Declare good news to them. Offer resources to support them. You just might save their lives.

I am very excited to share that the Life Bible App from Tyndale has given me the opportunity to create a 5-day Bible study based on my book Resilient and Redeemed. The Bible study talks through really intense topics like:

• Why doesn’t God seem to show up in my grief?

• Where is my reason to hope when I can’t feel the presence of God?

• What can we do when our spiritual leaders give us objectively bad advice about our mental health?

I’d like to invite you to read this 5-day Bible study plan with me, starting this Thursday. Together, we can explore these questions and so many more difficult topics that the church is sometimes afraid to talk about. Here’s the link to join me:

Resilient & Redeemed Bible Study

I hope to see you inside the Life Bible app, so that together we can talk about some of these tender topics. We can also use this short essay as a center point for conversation as well.

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We have each offered up a mental health resource for everyone who enters this giveaway. Plus, one lucky person gets a MacBook Air. What a deal, right?

Here’s the link to enter the giveaway but the giveaway ends tonight. Don’t miss your chance!

(IMPORTANT: The Soft Start Summer Giveaway ends May 21, 2026. One winner will be selected via KingSumo and notified on May 22, 2026. This giveaway is not sponsored or endorsed by Substack or Amazon. By entering, you agree to receive emails from the contributors; you may unsubscribe at any time. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Open to U.S. residents, 18+. All entries must be confirmed through KingSumo to be valid.)

Hi, friend!

If you’ve been carrying a lot lately, I wanted to share something with you.

As we head into a new season, a group of us came together to create something gentle, honest, and actually supportive for your mental and emotional health.

Soft Start Summer is a 3-day opportunity to help you step into summer feeling a little lighter and not overwhelmed.

This includes:

• The Soft Start Summer Care Kit: A collection of meaningful resources—devotionals, guides, reflections, and tools—from voices you can trust

• A chance to win an Apple MacBook 💻

👉 Enter here

No pressure. No pretending. Just support for wherever you are right now. You don’t have to go into this next season exhausted. Grateful you’re here 🤍

P.S. Here’s the link again so you don’t have to scroll

IMPORTANT: The Soft Start Summer Giveaway runs May 19–21, 2026. One winner will be selected via KingSumo and notified on May 22, 2026. This giveaway is not sponsored or endorsed by Instagram or Amazon. By entering, you agree to receive emails from the contributors; you may unsubscribe at any time. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Open to U.S. residents, 18+. All entries must be confirmed through KingSumo to be valid.

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I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about it by now, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet. I wanted to jump in today and let you know that God Is Good - Even Now kicks off on Tuesday!

This totally free event features 14 amazing speakers who are ready to explore God’s goodness and faithfulness in this broken world. Who doesn’t want a companion on this road?

You’re going to hear from me on May 12 about When God Seems Silent as well as some amazing experts like Lisa Stanton, Dr. Michelle Reyes, and Bisi Gbadamosi.

Each presentation will be available to you for 48 hours, but you can also get lifetime access (along with some other amazing bonuses) by grabbing the DEEP JOURNEY PASS.

If you have any questions at all about the summit or the DEEP JOURNEY PASS, reply to this if you’re reading it in email or drop a note in Substack. I’d love to chat with you!

Get your free ticket to God Is Good - Even Now!

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One of the things I’ve noticed about faith, especially in seasons of tension or uncertainty, is how quickly we try to move through it. To find the answer. To resolve the question. To get back to something that feels steady again.

But deep trust doesn’t usually form that way. It takes time.

That’s part of why I’ve joined the God is Good – Even Now Summit the way we have.

The sessions are available for 48 hours, so there’s space to engage, not just consume.

But even that can feel quick when you’re holding something that’s been with you for a long time.

Which is why we also created the Deep Journey Pass. It’s not an “upgrade” in the typical sense, but is a way to:

• Return to the sessions at your own pace

• Sit longer with the parts that resonate or stir questions

• Use guided reflection materials to process more deeply

• Let this be something that forms you over time—not just something you attend

Because this kind of work, learning to trust God in the middle of real life, isn’t something most of us want to rush through.

If you’ve been craving more space to go deeper… you’ll have the option to explore that after you register.

[GET YOUR FREE TICKET]

I’m really looking forward to stepping into this together.

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Hey friend!

We spend a lot of time talking about the difficult seasons of faith, the moments when everything isn’t sunshine and roses. One of the things that can make seasons of doubt or tension feel even heavier is the sense that we’re the only ones asking the kinds of questions that arise in these moments.

Too often, it feels like everyone else has found a way to feel steady and certain, and we somehow missed the obvious way forward. But that’s not actually true. It’s far more likely that the people you admire are dealing with the very same struggles you are and wonder just like you when everything is going to “click.”

There are so many thoughtful, faithful people wrestling with the same questions. People who love Scripture deeply and still find parts of it difficult. People who trust God and are still learning what that trust looks like in the middle of real life.

And that’s a big part of what makes the God is Good – Even Now Summit so meaningful. The goal for this summit is different from most. This summit is a Scripture-based exploration of God’s goodness and faithfulness designed for people navigating tension, doubt, and real-life difficulty.

It engages both difficult biblical texts and lived experience without rushing to resolve them or treating struggle as failure. Through teaching, prayer, and community, it creates space to reflect, wrestle, and remain grounded in God’s character.

For 3 days, May 12–14, Sarah Howley of InspiritEncourage is bringing truly spectacular but thoughtful presentations from 14 authors and podcasters who will explore how God’s goodness and faithfulness hold up to the real tensions of Scripture and life. You’ll engage topics ranging from difficult biblical passages—including violence attributed to God—to the everyday pain, disappointment, and long-term loss many of us carry.

For example, I’m going to be talking all about When God Feels Silent! I explore the twin themes of God’s abundant blessings and God’s apparent absence throughout the whole of the Bible, and how we can maintain any sense of momentum in the face of these apparently contradictory facets of our existence.

The best part? It’s totally free!

There’s more I’d love to tell you about this summit, but I’ll let you check out all the details for yourself.

Get your free ticket for the God is Good — Even Now Summit today!

Please click the Share button below and pass this onto your friends who might need some encouragement, hope, and strength today as well.

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I have been prayerfully considering a bit of a pivot with my writing. Don’t worry—I will continue to share my thoughts on the intersection of faith and mental health.

This is too important a topic to stop talking about, if only because not enough people are having these discussions. There are too many churches that have not done the work of understanding what it means to serve and honor those who are battling mental illnesses.

Too many people continue to believe that every answer for mental health is found in the pages of Scripture, as though the joy of the Lord is the answer to major depressive disorder or prayer is the antidote for anxiety.

Myths continue to abound in Christian spaces about mental health, and these myths continue to harm those who are most vulnerable among us.

Instead of looking to offer support to the hurting, these people and these churches place unfathomable burdens of shame and guilt on top of the mental illnesses. Situations like this remind me of the words of Jesus, when he says that it would be better for the person who causes a little one to stumble to have a millstone tied about his neck.

I don’t mean to stoke anger, but I am completely convinced that God’s heart breaks every single time a mentally ill person has an additional weight placed on them due to poor theological constructs.

I can’t and I won’t stop talking about these things. As a matter of fact, I have new material I am still preparing that talks about the specific myths Christians believe about mental health. I am also putting the final touches on what you might consider an expansion of my TED Talk, where I explore the ways in which deep listening can revolutionize a church’s mental health ministry.

But I don’t want to only talk about faith and mental health. There are a number of other topics that are tangents to this intersection, but are vital to explore together. I have significant things that have occurred in my life over the last few years that I want to discuss the theological significance of.

For starters, I am developing a series on divine healing, how it works, why it doesn’t always work, what we are supposed to do in the meantime, and what it means (or doesn’t mean) when God does (or doesn’t) heal us from our ailments. This is a complex topic that has too often been painted with broad strokes rather than with the nuances it deserves.

I also want to talk about emotions and prayer. While this is usually unintentional, we are many times taught that we need to “manage” our emotions when we come into prayer. It’s almost as though God can’t handle our emotions, or he can’t manage us at our worst. Yet even a perusal of the Psalms and the rest of the Scriptures gives us an entirely different picture—those who loved God well often expressed extreme emotions in their prayer lives.

So friends, a pivot is coming. Maybe I should really call it an expansion. We will talk about many things over the coming months. I hope you continue to find real value in my words on mental health and faith; and I hope you stick around for everything else too.

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Our final focus for this series of meditative moments is on labeling. Labeling is when you attach negative, emotionally charged language to yourself, to others, or to events. Examples include: “I’m a failure,” “He’s a loser,” and “What an outrage.”

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What happens when you use this type of language is that you short-circuit any ability you might have to process the emotions and facts around a circumstance. You’ve already made all your decisions around how you’re going to react to the circumstance by labeling it, so you have to work backwards to un-label it before you can actually process anything in a healthy way.

Here’s an example from my own life. My father called me a while ago and ended up telling me that my depression and anxiety weren’t real. He told me that they were a figment of my imagination, and that if I had a stronger faith in my God, they would go away. I immediately started labeling: “I suck,” “He’s a jerk,” and “I’m never going to get better.”

I was devastated by his words, and I couldn’t exactly figure out why. As I mentioned earlier, he was abusive when I was being raised, so I’ve learned not to apply much weight to the words he speaks over me. But for some reason, this conversation wounded me deeply. I didn’t immediately know what was different about this conversation.

Eventually, I realized it was the labels I had attached to him and myself that made the difference. By attaching these labels, I had kept myself from being able to effectively process the conversation I had with my father. I had instead moved straight to judgment without even thinking about it at all.

I had to untangle my mind from these labeling thoughts before I could even begin to process what he actually said to me. Once I separated myself from the tangled web of my labeling, I was able to see that what he said didn’t hold any real value. I was able to pull away entirely from the damage he did. But it was a process for sure.

This is why we want to try to avoid labeling as much as possible, because they are very dangerous. There’s truth in what Henry Ford said – “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”