A lady bravely stood up and said she and her husband were trying, with no luck, to have a baby. The onlooking women gently nodded, a few with tears that held that same grief. One woman, a pastor I think, asked if we could pray for her, and all of us knew what to do next: she bowed her head and turned her hands upward, ready to receive, as the rest of us circled around her—the closest layers touching her physically, the others extending an arm. The pastor prayed for her in a powerful and charismatic way, over her ovaries and womb and fallopian tubes, carried by a chorus of Amens and Yes Lords—and somewhere in the back of the circle, I stood with an extended hand, wondering if she and her husband might end up adopting a kid if they couldn’t have their own.

Five years ago, I might have thought this with a sense of superiority that I had deconstructed a magical view of prayer or something, but that wasn’t my heart. This woman was incredibly brave and humble. There’s something beautiful about surrounding a person in prayer, physically and spiritually. And I deeply respect people who possess bold faith.

But the reality is, the most faith-filled people don’t get everything they pray for, prayer doesn’t work like a vending machine—even for worthy causes—and sometimes miraculous things happen even when we don’t pray for them. The quality of a prayer is not proven by a favorable outcome.

Brilliant scholars have written about prayer from theological and Biblical perspectives, thank goodness, so I can ramble about my own experience like a true postmodern woman. Like this morning, I prayed in my car about a pain-in-the-butt work thing, and it occurred to me how much lighter I feel when I pray because it breaks any illusions that I am in control. Prayer is a practice of neediness, humility, and naming my own limits. When I pray, I teach myself that God is God and I am not. It puts me in my place, sort of like when I’m looking at a mountain or staring at the ocean, keenly aware of how small I am in the grand scheme of things.

Maybe you tense up at that kind of language because you’ve only ever heard it from angry pastors who really need you to know that you’re a dirty rag compared to God. I get that. I read a Fr. Gregory Boyle book last year and he wrote something like, “There is nothing you can do to earn the love of God” and I wept on the plane because, in the framework of a loving theology, this is a weightless, liberating truth. In the framework of a fear-based theology, though, one might read “There is nothing you can do to earn the love of God” as compounding interest on your shame—like you are so.terribly.bad. and nothing you do could please him without the blood of Jesus covering you because you are so offensive to him. Or as a threat—there is nothing you can do to earn it, so you better hope he predestined you!

I texted my friend a picture of the page and said, “It’s crazy how you can return to the same truths under different frameworks, and they go from weights to buoys.”

I used to wrestle with my teenage ego and shame myself into remembering how small I was. I would literally take myself to planetariums as an act of defiance against my pride. Repent, Savannah, by looking at Mars! Maybe I was fighting sin in my heart, but also I was trying to fight natural human brain development.

Now, I crave moments where it sinks into my bones that I am not the most important thing in this world. My career is a breath. My problems may be real, but they are temporary. My life is a wave crashing on the shore, soon to return to the ocean. Water to water, dust to dust.

This is the gift I find in prayer. It is not a way for me to regain control, or a tool to manipulate the Spirit to open up a door that slammed in my face. Well, not totally true. I still ask for what I want. Just today, I asked for money, for God to help Todd with a work thing, for a specific opportunity, and for a wave of nausea to go away. I also asked for God to put me on someone’s mind so I could write with a musician I love (why not!). But then, maybe in an answer to my prayer, a friend sent a wrecking-ball update about her family. Another friend texted a GoFundMe link to support someone with cancer, a few years younger than me. I saw a friend share that he lost his job and needed a replacement soon to support his young family.

Then I prayed for those people. I don’t know if my prayer will unlock something for them, but that’s not the point, at least at this stage in my life. Right now, prayer is about reminding myself that I am small and I need God. And my friends are small and they need God. And none of us can do this on our own. And we are not in full control of our lives.

For years, my prayers were tied to specific outcomes, and if they didn’t happen, I would jam a square peg result in a round hole of my theology, sanding down its edges until it fit. This was unsustainable. Now, I practice prayer where an outcome is secondary. I still ask for things—see my money request above!—but I am more interested in the part of prayer that unclenches my white-knuckled grip on life, hands opening up to God. I don’t know if this is a good/theologically impressive way to think about prayer, but in our ego-inflating circus of a society, this is what keeps me praying.

Oh! Before I forget! I started with the fallopian tube story because I was wrong about everything. That lady ended up getting pregnant not long after we gathered. Prayer is “powerful and effective” in the words of James, and even though my framework around prayer is focused on practicing smallness, that doesn’t mean it’s the only valid one.

Maybe the moral of the story is that whatever keeps you praying, you should keep doing it.

Sending love,
Savannah

The Bible does not have a single worldview. It was written over the course of a thousand years—and I want you to slow down and think about that, okay?

Imagine if you started writing a book in the year 1026, when the most technologically advanced society was the Song dynasty in China. No matter where you were on earth, you would have probably worked in agriculture because the Industrial Revolution wouldn’t come for another 700 years. You would have lived and died without traveling more than a few dozen miles from the place you were born, and if you survived childhood (many didn’t), managed to avoid an infection (no antibiotics), and stayed full (lots of famines), you might have lived to see your 55th birthday.

If you were Christian, you weren’t Protestant, because the Reformation hadn’t happened yet and Protestants didn’t exist. There were very few copies of the Bible in the world, and if even if you got your hands on one, you probably wouldn’t have been able to read it because most people were illiterate.

But let’s just say you were a lucky, literate monk that started writing a book in 1026 from a monastery in, I don’t know, Constantinople. You dipped a goose feather quill pen into a pot of ink and scratched Greek words onto animal skin. And then, over the next thousand years, a few dozen other people wrote their own contributions from countries you had never seen, and in languages you had never spoken.

The printing press happened. Electricity happened. Antibiotics happened. Literacy happened. The internet happened. And then imagine the final part of this book was written by me, a 35-year old woman, on July 29, 2026, in the English language on a MacBook computer at a coffee shop in the United States of America.

How different is the world of a monk in Constantinople from a millennial at a coffee shop? How differently might they think about technology, marriage, church, or politics? How different would the viewpoints be, even if they shared the same religious devotion and God?

Because the Bible is on our phones, at our grandma’s house, on our bedside tables, and in hotels, it’s easy to miss how magnificently complex it is. We forget that it is a collection of many books, told in several languages, over the course of many generations. Even if you hold to an idea of Biblical authority or inspiration, like me, the Bible does not exist in a cultural vacuum. Like, the Bible did not drop down from heaven without any human fingerprints. It was written in human languages, in human genres, and with human personalities (read Jeremiah and then 1 John and notice how different their voices are). It tells stories about shepherds, vineyards, fishing nets, wheat and weeds, olive trees, kings, empires, and Roman coins because those were the images that filled their everyday lives.

Maybe my thesis is this: The Bible does not present a single cultural worldview that can simply be applied to every modern issue (ie: “Biblical Worldview on AI” or “Biblical Worldview on Money”).

Take something important like marriage, for example. The Bible contains arranged marriages, marriages negotiated through families, marriages involving bride-price and dowries, laws permitting virgin war captives to become wives, levirate marriage, polygamy, concubinage, royal marriages made for political alliances, and New Testament instructions written to first-century households under Roman rule. The biblical world did not generally understand1 marriage as a voluntary commitment between two people who have fallen in love and wanted to build a life together, as we do in the West in 2026.

That’s not to say there isn’t wisdom in the Bible as it pertains to marriage, or that Western marriages are bad. That’s not to say the Bible is irrelevant as we consider what a Christian marriage ought to look like. But I am trying to show how there is not one way to understand marriage in the Bible, because the Bible does not have a single, uniform perspective.

Maybe you want to say, “Well, God didn’t endorse polygamy.” Which is a fine interpretation to have, although you would be hard pressed to see any explicit condemnation in the text. Or maybe you’ll point to 1 Timothy which talks about a man being the husband to one wife as evidence of “God’s intention” for marriage. But that reiterates my point, which is that the Bible contains many voices that sometimes exist in tension with one another. And our job is not to figure out what the “biblical worldview” on *big cultural issue* is. It’s to get in the ring with the Bible and our communities and religious history and experience and figure out how to honor God in our own contexts.

One beauty of the Bible is that it isn’t a dead rulebook, frozen in time. If the Bible was a simple list of rights and wrongs handed down thousands of years ago, it wouldn’t have influence today (when is the last time you read through Leviticus and thought, “I need to get rid of my wool-linen blends because they’re against the law”?).

Instead, it is a diverse, complicated, beautiful collection filled with evergreen wisdom. It is sacred—not because it is solitary in its voice, but because it shows God’s persistent, gracious way of working with so many voices—so many cultures, people, languages, and viewpoints.

This isn’t a weakness of the Bible, but a strength. It’s evidence that God’s redemptive work in the world includes all of us, and that we are invited to join in the Christian tradition as we thoughtfully engage with the text, and the God to whom the text points, in learning to embody the way of Christ and carry his Kingdom forward.

Sending love,
Savannah

On Thursday, June 11th, I woke up, brushed my teeth, drank a matcha, read my Bible, and promptly thought, “There’s no way this is real.”

By “this” I mean Jesus and Christianity and all the stuff I believe in (in other words, The Whole Thing™).

I thought about how different the Biblical world is to mine. How if any New Testament writer was transported to present-day Nashville and taken to some church down the street, they wouldn’t recognize our religion or God. I don’t mean this entirely disparagingly—part of the beauty of Christianity is its ability to stay alive across many cultures and time periods. None of us are living like 1st century Jesus followers, and maybe that’s okay. None of us live in the 1st century.

I dropped into a memory of playing telephone with my 2nd grade Sunday School class, when we started with something like “Ice cream with rainbow sprinkles” and ended with “It’s a good day for getting out wrinkles!” If Jesus’s message is the sprinkles one, I wonder how often I say the wrinkles one.

I opened a cabinet to find my supplements: iron, vitamin D, fiber and magnesium. Jesus’ words scrolled like a headline before my eyes: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” I am reminded again that I live in a wealthy city in the wealthiest country that has ever existed. I am the rich man.

These thoughts shadowed me all day. I’m probably wrong about all this. There’s no way this is real.

When I have doubts about The Whole Thing™ I don’t get as anxious as I used to, but part of me envies my younger, certain self who dreamed of living (and dying) as a missionary in North Korea for the sake of the Gospel because Jesus was realer than the realest thing.

One time in college, I thought God told me to give $500 to a woman I saw driving down the highway…so I did. I honked my horn and told her to follow me off an exit. I gave her a wad of cash in a gas station parking lot, hugged her, and didn’t think twice about it.

But for every good day, I had a dozen horrible ones where I was underwater in shame and fear. My faith in God was only as stable as my latest emotion—buoyed by confident apologists who made God make sense, and capsized by a single podcast from someone like Bart Ehrman (lol) that poked a hole in what I believed. I was wildly earnest, and I was terrified of being cast into a fiery pit for watching porn or doubting the theology I inherited. I was arguing with people on the internet because I knew that I knew that I knew I was right. I was unflinchingly positive about who was good/bad, orthodox/heretical, in/out. My faith was like a manic roller coaster ride with a toxic high school boyfriend—I was always searching for the next high to keep me going.

I had the zeal, but I lacked the character to sustain it. I would have died for Jesus, but I didn’t know how to live like him, or be with him, or abide in him.

On the aforementioned June 11th, Todd and I watched a documentary after dinner about a woman who was senselessly murdered by her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. The deceased woman’s parents were interviewed and at the end, the father spoke about forgiveness. He pointed to his faith in Jesus as the reason they chose to forgive their daughter’s murderer.

That is real.

Then I heard a story about a man who nearly died in a cliff-jumping accident. He leapt into the water, and his friend went in right after—but misjudged the landing spot and came down right on top of him. His spine was shattered and he should have died, or at the very least been paralyzed. But after months and months of physical therapy, he healed. And here’s the magic: he invited his guilt-ridden friend to go cliff jumping with him again, to redeem the horrible experience they had. Afterward, he told this story to a couple hundred teenagers to talk about the life of God and what they’re invited into when they say yes to Jesus.

That is real.

and I recorded an episode of The Subtext this week about deconstruction (per a listener’s request), and it helped me name a gift that my unraveling has offered: a faith that is in Jesus, not my certainty about Jesus. It’s normal to wake up and wonder if any of it is real. It’s normal to not be certain about a God we cannot see.

I know there will be many more June 11ths—days where I wake up and try to nail my faith like jello to the wall with no success. But there will also be forgiveness and redemption and beauty and second chances. My neighbor’s kid will come over and explain the difference between Sonic and Super Sonic. My other neighbor will drop off a fresh loaf of sourdough. A friend will be brave enough to get the treatment she needs. A daughter will forgive her mother. A stranger will cover a grocery bill. Another person will drop off food at an elderly widow’s house. None of these prove with certainty we’re reading the Bible perfectly or that Jesus was real or that Christianity is right, but all of these are reasons to believe.

Sending love,
Savannah

That memory came to mind on a walk this week and surfaced an itchy feeling of conviction I’ve had about the tone I’m carrying in my writing.

After years of spitballing theology and overindulging in the details of my personal life on social media, I’ve worked to write from a more focused place. Through trial and error, I bumped up against my own boundaries and slowly decided that I don’t want to live under the constant “influencer” pressure of mining my life for content, or having my phone ready for every funny/scary/exciting moment. I want my work to reflect my personal life without depending on it, which means my writing has intentionally shifted to center around faith and culture. But the downside of this shift is that I’m less vulnerable and self-deprecating in my writing—which, for me, is a vital dam to protect my tone from being flooded by criticism and arrogance.

After my last piece, a few people noted that I had an arrogant tone. I read their comments and winced because I knew they were right.

I went back and read some of my newsletters and realized my tone has become sharper than I am comfortable with or even mean. My heart is softer than my words currently portray. As I read through, I thought about Jesus’ warning: “For the judgment you give will be the judgment you get, and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”

I want my writing to bear good fruit. Sometimes good fruit is prophetic and stings, a little like those comments stung me. But other times, self-righteousness hides behind words like “prophetic” and “justice”—and my feet are wandering awfully close to that line.

I deeply admire the prophetic writing of so many authors, past and present. There are many things in our world that deserve our righteous anger. I am grateful for the witness of prophets whose words burn like fire.

And for me, Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things comes to mind, in which he traces the maturity of prophets as moving from rage to lament and then, ultimately, to compassion. My sense is that, at least for now, my rage-against-the-machine is sufficiently stoked, and I need to cultivate more compassion and humility alongside it.

Sending love,
Savannah

The first time I saw Braveheart was in elementary school, around fifth grade, at my grandparents’ house after church. My whole family huddled together in the basement to watch Mel Gibson lead a Scottish rebellion against England, just to get betrayed and disemboweled in the end, while famously yelling, “Freedom!” For the next few years, Braveheart was a reliable sermon analogy on Sunday mornings.

A few weeks later, my little brother and I got in a tiff outside and I yelled, “What the hell is wrong with you?!?” My mom overheard from the kitchen and ran outside, mortified. She asked where I learned that word and I had to fess up…it was Drew Carey from Whose Line is it Anyway?

Within days, we had a TVGuardian installed to filter profanity. It was extremely effective. When we turned on TV Land to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show, we heard, “The [BLEEP] Van [BLEEP] Show! Starring [BLEEP] Van [BLEEP]!”

We could watch people shoot each other, but we certainly couldn’t hear them say “[BLEEP] you!” while doing so.

In my religious environment, swearing was criticized but violence was not. Sex was criticized but greed was not. Feminism was criticized but misogyny was not.

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This weekend, Nate Bargatze attended the White House-hosted UFC Freedom 250 fight. Bargatze is a “clean” and “family friendly” comedian who famously refuses to swear. He has become a safe, Christian-adjacent celebrity—a safe harbor from the rocky seas of profanity.

I have no interest in making a judgment on Bargatze’s intentions or heart. This isn’t about Nate Bargatze. All of us are part of the “filthy, rotten system” as Dorothy Day called it, and all of us negotiate with our convictions. What I am interested in is the selective moralism framework that allows a vocal Christian like Bargatze to attend the UFC Freedom 250 fight.

A selective moralism that draws the line at saying “shit” but is comfortable supporting unethical and greedy billionaires, men credibly accused of abuse, warmongers, and misogynistic, racist celebrities.

A selective moralism that criticizes the “damn” in someone’s mouth, but not the dollar in their pocket.

A selective moralism that says sex is explicit but publicly supports men accused with sexual abuse.

This kind of framework is toothless and insufficient for our times. It’s like putting TVGuardian on a world full of violence, greed, and dehumanization, then calling it “clean.”

In Matthew 23, Jesus tells the Pharisees: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint, dill, and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others”

Jesus doesn’t tell them to stop tithing mint. He just critiqued them for confusing their tithe for weightier matters. They conflated easy obedience for the whole of righteousness.

I support Bargatze’s choice not to swear, but there are weightier matters this kind of framework fails to reckon with. A wealth gap that rivals the Gilded Age. Poverty that is crippling families. Wars that grind on with no end in sight. AI development blazing forward with no regulatory guardrails. Betting markets expanding into every corner of American life, also unregulated, extracting money from people who can least afford to lose it. The list goes on with climate change, immigration, and healthcare—all perpetuated by the people who put on, and attended, the UFC Freedom 250 fight.

Nate Bargatze will have a rough few weeks, but his career will be fine. This isn’t about him. It’s about us. What kind of selective moralism have we settled for? Is “family friendly” Christianity comfortable smiling next to dishonorable oligarchs? Is “clean” entertainment supportive of men beating the crap out of each other, then spewing racist and misogynistic speeches to celebrate?

Our times call for a Christianity that names the powers of this world instead of sitting ringside with them. A morality that treats poverty, abuse, and violence as the real profanities… not just “shit.”

Sending love,
Savannah

My third grade teacher was the first person to tell me I talked too much. After a lesson on constructive criticism, she had us write anonymous feedback for our classmates, fold it into envelopes, and read it later that afternoon. One of mine said I talked too much and I knew it wasn’t from a classmate because the handwriting was too good. My cheeks got red and my eyes filled up like a river and I quickly asked for a bathroom pass so no one would see me cry.

She had no way of knowing I was being abused that year, and that when I did use my voice it was ignored, and speaking was courageous, and being listened to was a lifeline, but over the years, I collected comments about my voice like quilt patches, stitched them together, and disappeared inside them.

Research suggests women don’t talk dramatically more than men, despite common tropes, but women do consistently rate themselves as more talkative than men. Among young adults, that self-perception gap is about three times wider than the actual difference in words spoken. Meaning, many women believe they are far more talkative than they actually are.

One researcher found that women’s contributions were viewed as “equally balanced” when women spoke 25% of the time or less. When women spoke as much as 30% of the time, they were perceived as dominating the conversation. In mixed-gender conversations, whether in a church or board room or restaurant, men talk 70% of the time. Another study found that when women talk more than men in professional settings, observers (both male and female) rate them as less competent….but that penalty doesn’t apply to men.

After The Subtext launched, we got some early feedback from our older audience that my voice was hard to listen to. I shared my response to this, but what I didn’t say is that my Enneagram 5 wing took over and I uploaded the transcript of every single episode we recorded and had them analyzed for who talked the most. I was convinced that I was dominating the conversation, but it was almost always even, and when it wasn’t, my cohost, Lee, talked more. Seeing that data helped me ground in reality.

I have learned to be afraid of my own voice, and even in my 30s, I feel myself shrinking back to accommodate a misnomer about women.

I saw a bearded middle-aged pastor post a video about repealing the 19th Amendment because, in his view, women have ruined quite literally everything: the nation, the church, the economy, and the family. This struck me as ironic because women don’t actually dominate anything. Women make up 51% of the US population but hold only a third of Congressional seats. Only 13% of churches are led by women. Women earn around 84 cents to every male dollar and hold around 10% of Fortune 500 CEO positions. At home, they perform roughly twice the labor of men.

What I’m trying to say is, women are not talking too much, no matter what the confident pastor on Instagram tells you.

In my early 20s, I read through Genesis and ran into the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. All my life I’d heard it was a condemnation of homosexuality, or perhaps a warning about Lot’s wife looking back. But no one — not once — mentioned Genesis 19:8, where Lot offers his daughters to a mob to be assaulted. In the interpretation I had been handed, everyone was at fault except the men who were actually at fault.

What else had I been taught that wasn't the full picture? Where else were women's stories being hidden?

Sometimes I over-explain like a nervous witness on the stand: I spend four hours writing and reading in silence! I am introverted and love being alone! I am chatty because you’re the first person I’ve seen today! Todd is actually much more talkative at home! I am loud because I grew up with four siblings! Anything to offset someone’s belief that I might talk too much. That I might, God forbid, take up space in the world.

But lately I’ve been trying to zoom out, then out, then out some more— where there is no witness stand and I am not on trial and I don’t need to defend being a woman who talks.

An 80-something-year-old woman walked into a counseling center for the first time last year. Her therapist asked why she was there. She explained that when she was a young teenager, she was assaulted after school, but never told a soul.

At the end of her session, the therapist asked how she felt. She said for the first time in her life, she could hear the sound of her own voice.

Sending love,
Savannah

PS: I made a reading guide to go through the Gospels this Summer. If you’re looking for a devotional, click the button below and join me.

Summer in the Gospels

I want to live in a Christian nation.

By Christian, I mean Christ-like. And by Christ-like, I mean Jesus-y. And by living in a Christian, Christ-like, Jesus-y nation, I mean I want to live somewhere the poor are blessed. Where it would be unthinkable for the richest 1% of households to hold the same wealth as the bottom 90% of households combined. Because in a Christian nation, we would take Jesus’ words about the love of money to heart, daily sobered by his warning that it is easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the Kingdom.

I want to live in a Christian nation whose stories make despised and vulnerable outsiders insiders in God’s family. The Good Samaritan comes to mind, told by Jesus in response to a smarty-pants lawyer who wanted to define the limits of neighborly love. In the parable, Jesus said a man was robbed and left for dead on the side of the road, when two men walked by: a priest and a Levite. These were all-stars in their religious circles, but they neglected to help the half-dead man. Then came the “Good Samaritan,” an oxymoron if you were in Jesus’ audience. Samaritans were anything but good. They were despised and unclean, seen as “half-breeds” who worshipped idols. But in Jesus’ story, the horrible, no-good Samaritan stopped and helped the man, tending to his wounds and forking over the cash to set him up somewhere safe. Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, makes this despised outsider an insider in God’s story. I want to live in a Christian nation whose stories do that.

I want to live in a Christian nation where violence is so unfathomably far from everyday life that children only encounter images of guns in history books. Where “war” becomes a word historians use to describe the whims of men in antiquity. Where schools no longer require active shooter drills, and six-year-olds no longer require bulletproof backpacks, and teenagers no longer send panicked “I love you” texts to their parents. Because a Christian nation models itself after its Christ, who, despite having authority over legions of angels, laid down his life and submitted to death. It heeds Jesus’ words when he said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword.

I want to live in a Christian nation where the walls of hostility are broken down between Gentile and Jew, slave and free, undocumented and documented, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, Black and white, female and male. Where we take “you are all one in Christ Jesus” seriously by demolishing xenophobia, racism, and hate in our hearts, and dismantling them in our systems.

I want to live in a Christian nation where the first are last and the last are first; where greatness is defined by service and strength by humility. Where it would be unthinkable to be governed by violent, self-centered, or uncooperative people, because those elected to leadership would be the most humble. A nation whose public life is formed by a Christian imagination that insists on the common good, holding the wellbeing of every person, every creature, and the earth itself together in view.

I desperately want to live in a Christian nation where the end-game of incarceration is restoration. Where anyone burdened by economics, loneliness, illness, abuse, or addiction has access to the resources they need not just to survive, but to find peace. A nation whose children dream of beauty and goodness, not salary and benefits. Where justice rolls like a never-ending river. Where it is uncontroversial to protect victims. Where victimizers are held to account and restored. Where no child falls asleep on an empty stomach. Where the idea of burnout is shocking, because in a Christian nation, rest is not a reward but a right.

I don’t care if the Ten Commandments are posted in school hallways, if kids have to hide underneath their desks as the alarm bells ring. I don’t care if the President reads 2 Chronicles from his desk, if my tax dollars are funding unnecessary wars and padding the pockets of billionaires. I don’t care if we sing worship songs in Washington, DC, as long as our laws keep protecting the rich and silencing the poor. I want to live in a Christian nation. And by Christian, I mean…

Sending love,
Savannah

I’ve had three conversations this week about why I have not cut certain people out of my life despite fundamental disagreements. Each conversation partner had their own complicated story that reminded me how difficult relationships are, forget the unprecedented times (and unprecedented stress) we find ourselves in. While there are a handful of people I don’t have a relationship with for reasons I do know, and there are likely others for reasons I don’t know, I’ve worked hard to establish a generally peaceful ecosystem.

Part of this commitment stems from a decade ago, when I lost my mind during Trump’s first presidency.

I felt like I was going crazy as I watched the elders who shaped my faith bend a knee to Trump. I thought if I argued enough, or argued better, or argued LOUDER, they would see the light and change their minds. The last ten years have shown this isn’t true. My guess is that my early argument style only served as weight to dig in their heels even deeper.

When I was in the thick of my own self-righteousness and resentment, convinced that everyone else was a problem except me, I read Dorothy Day’s quote: “I really only love God as much as the person I love the least.” And it occurred to me that I did not love God as much as I thought. My 2016 method was not only ineffective at persuasion, but it produced rotten fruit in my heart. It was a lose-lose, and I had to change.

I grew up in an extremely controlling environment where you had to agree in order to belong.

I sincerely cannot think of a single time I saw theological or political disagreement modeled well. In my mind, disagreement meant I was unsafe or at risk of being kicked out. Disagreement was always personal and escalated. Disagreement put your relationship on the chopping block, and the only thing to stop the knife was unanimity.

I did not learn how to disagree well until I went to seminary and realized that regulated, mature adults can passionately argue about things that matter while maintaining relational trust. For four years, we disagreed about things like war, capitalism, atonement, abortion, the Bible, racism, LGBTQ+ inclusion, politics, gender roles, and how to respond to abuse. Sometimes we raised our voices. Sometimes we cried. Sometimes we went too far and had to apologize or forgive. But ultimately, our commitment to each other as the people of God counterbalanced the weight of our arguments. Like, nobody ever questioned another person’s salvation or something ridiculous, even if they vehemently disagreed with their stance. It didn’t devolve into pettiness.

One situation stands out in my mind, where a veteran turned pastor argued for the benefits of a war he fought in with a die-hard pacifist professor. This pastor spent years in a desert seeing untold violence, watching his friends die, and doing his best to serve his country, while my professor maintained that war—even that war— is never justified. I remember holding my breath, planning an escape if the conversation got too ugly. But they committed to holding the tension together in love. And they did, even though the stakes were high and the cost was personal.

Our beliefs don’t matter more than our love.

Years ago, I worked on marketing a podcast centered on conversations between people with deep political and/or religious disagreements—a father and daughter, a husband and wife, and two friends. The response was fascinating. Some listeners were deeply encouraged. Others argued that maintaining such relationships was complicity in the harm those beliefs can cause. Someone commented that even by hosting these conversations, we were contributing to harm.

I’m not suggesting that everyone should maintain every relationship, or that there aren’t situations where it’s appropriate to cut ties with someone because of harmful beliefs. I am not saying that you should not cut people out of your life. I am not saying these beliefs don’t have real-world consequences, or that they shouldn’t be challenged.

But for me, I haven’t see the good fruit in cutting people out of my life because we disagree. Even if their stances are anti-Christian in the name of Christ. Even when their thoughts are harmful or conspiratorial or bigoted. I haven’t seen it change anything for the better. In the best-case scenario, I would call them out and tell them how horrible their beliefs are, lose whatever relational equity I had, and end up reinforcing their sense of being attacked or victimized.

It reminds me of Jesus’ questions in Luke 6: “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.”

Of course, love doesn’t mean having no boundaries. Love doesn’t mean tolerating abuse. Love might mean calling someone out and challenging their beliefs. At the same time, followers of Jesus are challenged to go beyond the limits of what feels easy and love those who are difficult to love. Anyone can love someone who goes to the same church as them, votes the same way they do, and sees the world through similar eyes. But what credit is that to you?

Before Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, Christine Blasey Ford testified to being sexually assaulted by him at a party in the 1980s. Blasey Ford, and at least two other women, accused Kavanaugh of abuse, but it made no difference. He was confirmed and stands as one of the most powerful arbiters of justice in our nation. When the slew of testimonies came out against him, I remember feeling personally betrayed by every person in my life who disbelieved them. Dismissing them felt like another dismissal of my own sexual abuse. I had visceral anxious responses when I heard friends and family mention the “smear campaign” against a beloved conservative justice. I couldn’t separate myself from her.

Part of this is good. Injustice should feel personal, because a society that habitually dismisses the cries of women and abuse victims is harmful for everyone. I want to maintain a tender heart towards the weak because I know what it’s like to be powerless and unheard. I know what it’s like to be blamed for telling the truth.

AND it was not realistic or healthy for my body to endure perpetual re-traumatization every time a new story of abuse came out. I had to enter a new phase of healing to create separation between my own experience and others. My response to Blasey Ford was not really about her— although I desperately wish she (and all of Trump’s accusers, and the victims in All the Buried Women, and everyone in the Epstein files, etc. etc. etc.) had been believed. My rabid response was to my own abuse.

I needed to go back and do the deep work of healing my own abandonment wounds. Of inviting Jesus into each abuse memory and finding Hagar’s “God who sees.” I had to forgive those who should have known better and let go of what “should” have been altogether. I am not saying this to congratulate myself, but to point out that many of my big reactions directly stem from unhealed wounds. Healing has not created any sort of ambivalence towards injustice, but it has created healthy space between my own wounds and my work in the world. It has allowed me to engage with brokenness with an open heart and healed scars. My rage battery is not charged at 100%. I am not a mine field ready to explode when someone steps on me the wrong way. I have a greater tolerance for complexity.

I am not a walk in the park to be around every day. I can be complex, self-righteous, self-centered, hypocritical, irritating, and avoidant. I say hurtful things. I use the wrong words. My money supports corporations that fund causes I disagree with. Some of the cheap t-shirts in my closet were probably made by child laborers picking cotton in Pakistani fields. Every time I eat meat or fly on an airplane, I hurt the environment. I am complicit in all kinds of harm. Tax day was the newest reminder of how every single dollar in my pocket is dirty, funding violence and greed and the whims of unethical billionaires. Nobody gets out of this as a purist.

And for all the work I’ve done to not cut people out of my life, they have not cut my complicated self out of theirs either.

This is a humbling realization. While I have tried to navigate difficult relationships with grace, my people have done the same for me. They stay in my life, knowing I do not see the world like they do. I vote different. I protest against their leaders. I write newsletter like this. I have hypocrisies they see clearly, and they hold the scars of graceless reactions at the edge of my unbridled tongue. This is not a story about an angel named Savannah being kind to the emotional terrorists of the world. This is a story about one complicated human sticking it out with other complicated humans. Do I hope that my grounded, loving witness will disrupt beliefs that I see as toxic or harmful? Sure. Have some beliefs or political allegiances affected the dynamics of my relationships? Sure. But is agreement a prerequisite for my love? No.

There are so many qualifiers I am tempted to add here, to soften any way this might be taken as a weapon to pressure people into staying in harmful relationships or maintaining connections they genuinely don’t want. That’s not my intention and this is not a prescription for anyone to follow. I am just sharing my own experience and commitment. And I don’t do it perfectly— it is not idyllic or less-than-human. It is messy and mundane in practice. The internet tricks us into believing we are a flattened version of our most extreme political and religious opinions, but we’re not. In reality, everyone is more complicated than that. This is an effort to add nuance to the binary as we seek to love each other better.

Sending love,
Savannah

Dread: On the morning of my 35th birthday, the President of the United States of America said a whole civilization will die tonight.

Gratitude: A half day earlier, the Artemis 2 mission successfully saw four astronauts around the moon, breaking the record for the farthest human spaceflight. They named two new craters Integrity and Carroll: Integrity to honor their spacecraft, and Carroll to honor the late wife of one of the astronauts who died of cancer.

Dread: Erick Erickson, a conservative Christian broadcaster who prides himself on choosing truth over tribe, responded to Trump’s threat to wipe out a civilization by saying, “No, this is not an unhinged President. It’s a man playing a role as a negotiation tactic.” And it reminds me of my childhood church and all the excuses people made for the pastors’ poor leadership because every explanation was an option except them being wrong. Cult leaders don’t have to break their devoted followers when they’re willing to break themselves.

Gratitude: Todd and I woke up early to get a matcha at my favorite coffee shop, and as we reflected on the last year, a little girl stormed inside with the force of a confetti cannon and stood in line with her arms crossed. Her mom caught up thirty seconds later and asked, “What are you thinking?” She gave a crescent moon smile and her eyes lit like stars as she whispered, “Whipped cream.” I think of Jesus’ words in Luke 12 about considering the lilies and how God clothes them even though they don’t work. I consider this confetti cannon girl and how brave and unbothered and bright she is.

Dread: I have eleven unread birthday texts wishing me well and asking how I plan to celebrate. I don’t want to be a downer, but I plan to celebrate by calling my representatives and asking them to do their job and hold our president accountable for, well, war crimes among other things

Gratitude: I watched the live feed of the Artemis 2 Mission while doing my hair and makeup. The astronauts profusely thanked the ground team for all their hard work. The ground team celebrated the astronauts’ bravery. When one of the astronauts heard his family had arrived to watch him, he smiled at the camera and pointed to a bracelet his kid made him. I stand in awe of humankind’s ability to demonstrate profuse humility, intelligence, strength, and teamwork.

Dread: I can’t help but wonder why we don’t put people like this in charge of our nation instead of the unserious, self-inflating warmongers lighting fires in our world every hour of every day.

Gratitude: I’m still writing at that coffee shop, when the manager walks up and says, “A girl named Brenna sent you these.” My friend from NYC called in and bought 4 pastries and asked them to give it to “one of your regulars who is about 5 ’10 with brown hair and a VERY enthusiastic demeanor.”

Dread: Sam Altman, AI pioneer, is facing a renewed lawsuit from his sister over sexual abuse allegations from their childhood. She says the abuse started when she was 3 and he was 12, and continued for a decade. He is countersuing for defamation. It reminds me of the Epstein files, which have disappeared from the public eye because it seems nobody was concerned with protecting women or children in the first place. I think about how Trump’s name is in the files more than 30,000 times— more than Harry Potter in all 7 Harry Potter books, more than God in the Bible. I wonder how many men controlling the foreseeable future of our world are standing on the bodies of women they have abused or silenced.

Gratitude: Some friends are coming over tonight to grill steaks. I’m going to get meat, Worcestershire sauce, and poppi’s from Trader Joe’s in a couple hours.

Dread: In a recent episode of The Subtext, my co-host Lee Camp asked what would have happened if Christians in Germany refused to support Hitler. I have been thinking of that a lot— how different our world would have been if Christians shrugged him off for being an immoral lunatic. If nobody listened. If people scoffed at his hatred and xenophobia instead of letting his words fall like seeds into the soil of their souls and take over.

Gratitude: These lyrics from Stephen Wilson Jr.’s song about his late father: “I’m the words that’ll hit you that’ll get you where you’re going so you never go there alone / I’m the melody glued to the memory that you can’t shake when it comes on / I’m the part of you that you listen to riding in the radio all night long / I’m a song.”

Dread: I cannot control nuclear weapons.

Gratitude: I cannot control nuclear weapons.

Dread:

Gratitude: I turned in the manuscript for my first book yesterday. I wrote 70,432 words about every question Jesus asked! I am going to be a published author in one year!

Dread:

Gratitude: I have what I need. God loves me. God holds my life.

Dread:

Gratitude: God really loves the world. The men who think they are in charge of this world are not. Love is more powerful than death. Life echoes in the aftermath of destruction. This counts for something.

Sending love in a classic melancholic birthday medley,
Savannah

I don’t have judgment towards women who get cosmetic work done. Many of my friends do it, and I get why. It’s scary to look in the mirror and see time chipping away at our youthful armor. The other day I was getting dressed and looked in the full length mirror. I saw my legs and noticed how the sides were beginning to droop. Yikes, I thought. Can’t stop gravity.

I keep typing away but occasionally glance over the top of my screen at a lady and her daughter sitting outside. Every time she laughs, her forehead scrunches up like a slinky and I think about how ancient she looks. Not old, but ancient. Like her slinky forehead is a relic from a thousand generations ago where women couldn’t conceive of freezing their skin in time.

Then my mind drifts to Lindsay Lohan and how pretty she looks. Some people say it’s a facelift, or a stem cell face lift (whatever that is). Others say it’s just your typical nose job, upper blepharoplasty, brow lift, and fillers. In the comments of a plastic surgery account assessing Lohan’s work, one person noted, “You’re not ugly… you’re just poor.” And it’s true. She looks pretty and rich.

Some say that if getting cosmetic work makes a woman feel more confident, why should we criticize it? On one hand, I get this. If a person resents their appearance and can alleviate it with botox or filler or a facelift, I sincerely see the value. Women are constantly criticized for everything they do and don’t do. And I don’t think I should dictate what someone else does with their appearance.

On the other hand, I want to know what kind of culture we have created that women feel more confident when they press pause on their skin and slow down any signs of aging. I want to know why women feel better about themselves when their noses are narrow. I question a culture that values a certain type beauty, and celebrates how “young” women look. Why are some treatments being sold as “preventative” to women in their 20s and 30s? What exactly are we preventing? Who benefits from a society where looking young is a compliment? Who gets left behind?

With women accounting for 92% of plastic surgeries, what does that stark imbalance reveal about our cultural messaging around femininity?

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I want to hold these questions in one hand and my complicated admiration in the other. I actually teared up watching the woman outside with her relic forehead, and I think Lindsay Lohan looks amazing. I suppose I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I want to name my concerns while reserving the right to get botox if I panic in my 40s.

My husband and I talk about this a lot. I tell him I don’t want to do anything to my face. I want to accept the gift of getting older with grace. I want to be grateful for my years and refuse the commodification of women’s bodies or beauty or age as our value barometer. I want to do all of these things but I also want to be pretty. I want to feel good about myself. I don’t want someone to look at me after a decade and think, Yikes. Can’t stop gravity.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this over the last year, as my skin and body are showing signs of aging. I am noticing my own hypocrisies in doing things like dying my hair, for instance, to hide my greys. Or wearing makeup so I look “prettier” and “put together.” Or using face cream with retinol because it promises to boost collagen and tighten up my skin and blah blah blah.

And I keep wondering how my faith might come into play. Some questions I’ve been asking myself are: What might Jesus have to say about this? Where does vanity come into view? Or wealth? Or control? Or fear of death? What fruit would cosmetic work produce in me?

Maybe this sounds over-spiritual to you… and maybe I am being over-spiritual! I certainly don’t want to turn this into a moralistic conversation in which I police other women’s choices, or even my own future choices. This isn’t a moral verdict, just me processing in public. But no lie, the woman outside just started crying and her forehead is doing that slinky thing again and her daughter grabbed her hand to comfort her. I want to finish my book but I can’t stop staring. I don’t know what I’ll do later in my life. But I’m really glad her forehead still moves.

Sending love,
Savannah

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Last night, I had a listening party for my new record. This is a piece I wrote to start off the night. If it resonates with you, listen to Songs of Peace in Times of War anywhere you find music.

For much of my life, I felt like a scared witness at a police station, scanning a lineup of men behind a one-sided mirror, desperately trying to decide which one was God.

The lineup looked something like this: First, a bearded old man in the sky, sitting on a gold throne, propped up by billowing clouds and the praises of his people. Next, a prophet yelling on a city street corner, megaphone in hand, telling onlookers to repent or burn in hell. Beside him, a pasty man wearing a long white robe and blue sash with a lamb slung over his shoulder. Then a television evangelist, selling magic oil in exchange for financial blessings from heaven. A hundred others come after. A warmonger. A hippie. An American. A political revolutionary. A slain lamb.

A–
Well, you get the picture.
What does God look like?

This question has haunted me from the moment I thought to ask it.

In my search for truth, I found a breadcrumb in John’s Gospel: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”

Another in Colossians: “For in Christ all the fullness of God lives in bodily form.”

And again: “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God.”

Last, in the audacious claim of Jesus: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

In other words, any image in my mind’s lineup that falls short of Jesus, simply isn’t God. There is not another God hiding behind Jesus’ back. Jesus isn’t the nice version of God. Jesus is God. And when we see him, we see God’s fullness.

A professor in grad school put it this way: “God looks like Jesus.”

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It’s so simple, really, that I’m not sure how my faith got twisted in any other direction. Maybe it seems too good to be true. Or maybe it’s just scary— because a God that good is out of my control. A God that loving might love people I don’t. A God that compassionate might show mercy where I have none to give. A God that kind might include people in the story that I would rather leave out. A God that just might confront my own collusion with systems and behaviors that harm my neighbors.

A God who looks like Jesus is costly. Not in the way a king costs his soldiers their lives while he eats grapes in the safety of his castle. But costly in the way of a friend who sees through your defenses and asks another question. Costly in the way of a parent who, as you brace for punishment, pulls you close instead. Jesus costs your ego, your self-righteousness, and any notion that you can work hard enough to prove your belovedness– as if that wasn’t endowed on you since the dawn of time.

Since before you could speak or perform or prove or impress, you were already loved by a love who won’t stop loving.

This is your invitation to imagine a world under the reign of a beautiful King. A world where God might be better than you imagined. A world where everything isn’t nosediving to hell in a handbasket, but quietly resurrecting with each passing breath. A world where you are defenseless to love.

Sending love,
Savannah

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When I was in my early twenties and wanted to know everything there was to know about God, I followed the work of famous Christian apologists who, conveniently, knew everything there was to know about God. They were smart men. Good debaters, educated, and charismatic. Many of them sincere in their quest for truth. But that’s not what drew me to these all-knowing demi-gods, no— the reason I studied at their feet was because their confidence anesthetized my anxiety.

They were like vending machines and my doubts were like quarters that I could deposit again and again and again in exchange for answers.

Like:

Noticing tensions in the Bible? Deposit your questions, press A7, and eat the chocolate of certainty. That’ll knock the edge off.

Bothered by violence and wondering what Jesus might say to a nation– or to a church– who is populated by more guns than people? Deposit your apprehension, press C4, and snack on the sugar of the myth of redemptive violence.

Frustrated by how many women, children, and men are not believed when they speak up about being abused in their churches? Or how quickly their abusers are sent on a month-long wilderness retreat out West, then quietly replatformed, while their victims are left to pick up the pieces? Deposit your divisive thoughts, press E9, and eat the salt of submission.

Concerned about ways Christianity has been hijacked by power-hungry politicians who sink their fangs into voter bases they don’t actually care about, then suck dry the talking points of moral issues they don’t actually care about, all in the name of a Christ they don’t actually care about? Deposit your concerns, press B12, and eat the sweetness of partisanship.

Adam and Eve had a tree, but I had my apologist vending machines, where I could gorge myself on all the knowledge, information, and answers my heart desired. Then I became a vending machine for others. Have questions about God’s sovereignty? I’ve got the perfect book. You don’t understand suffering? Here’s a YouTube video that makes it clear. There was nothing I couldn’t know.

And then, one day, it stopped working. I pressed the button and ate the chocolate– just like I did before– but this time, I felt sick. Sick with self-righteousness and arrogance. Sick with a hardness of heart towards people who didn’t think like me. Sick with a fear of death. Sick of shoving every doubt and question to the bottom of my stomach, undigested, until it burned like acid in the rings of my throat.

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick,” Jesus said. “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

And yikes, did I need to repent.

One of those apologists I followed in my twenties died after a short battle with cancer. His name was Nabeel Qureshi. From his hospital bed, he recorded a video that clarified his legacy. These are his last public words:

“I think it’s very important that we discuss matters of truth, but at the end of the day, that is supposed to be undergirded by love and by peace. When we talk to people about their beliefs, we should do it through a lens of love… My whole point in teaching is for love to reign. And so, as you consider my ministry, I hope it leaves a legacy of love. Of peace. Of truth. Of caring for one another… If at any point, I said anything that seems to contravene that, I do apologize. And I hope it’s not the legacy I leave behind…Our God is a God of love, and that should be what keeps us driven. That should be foremost in our minds. Whether you’re talking to a Hindu, a Jew, a Muslim, a Christian– whoever you’re talking to, may it be out of love.”

I think about that video often. Nabeel was certainly an apologist, but he was also markedly humble and kind… different in texture from some of the others I had followed. But for a man who built his ministry by making good arguments and winning debates, he reached for none of that in his final days. The closer he got to death, the clearer love’s supremacy became. As if everything else had been scaffolding, and this was the building underneath.

The certainty I gorged myself on in my twenties gave me the feeling of solid ground, but ultimately left my soul empty and stiff. The fruit of a vending machine spirituality is a mechanical faith. A religion of transactions. I do this, you do that. I read this, I get that. I say this, you give me that.

But life is more complex, and a vibrant faith more organic, than this. I’ve had long stints where I was kept alive by mechanics— doing the right things, plugging into the right content, looking the right way, operating in the right fashion— all with a barely beating heart underneath. All without leaving space for the breath of God, or trusting the presence of God to animate my life. Why would I need God when I already had all the answers? Why unplug from the IV drip of certainty and see if I can believe without assistance if I don’t have to?

The thing is, when you’re plugged into so many machines, you’ve exchanged safety for freedom. It’s hard to leave the box you’ve built when you’re tied to a specific set of answers just to survive. But this is the invitation of an organic faith, of a beating heart. It is more vulnerable, yes, and more susceptible to pain and uncertainty. But it is alive… and far more free.

Sending love,
-Savannah

I’ve been thinking about Zacchaeus lately, the wee little tax collector who betrayed his own people to cozy up to a violent Roman Empire. He lined his pockets by swindling fellow Jews out of their hard-earned money and was, for all intents and purposes, a traitor. He caused real financial harm, and likely violence by proxy. He benefited from the dirty, rotten system, choosing an Empire over a marginalized people.

I’ve been thinking about how wild it was for Jesus, then, to invite himself over to Zacchaeus’ house.

Many religious influencers, along with scholars and church leaders, rightly remind us that God stands with those on the margins. This is true. It is an unignorable reality not only in the Gospels, but throughout all of Scripture.

And!

There are also key moments where Jesus reaches toward oppressors. People bound up in systems that are devastating not only for the world, the poor, and the broken, but ultimately for themselves. This is Zacchaeus’ story.

It is also true for Paul, who once killed people in the name of God for holding the very beliefs he would later proclaim. It is true for the rich young ruler, whom Jesus invited to loosen his grip on wealth in order to find something eternal. It is true for Nicodemus, whom Jesus taught about the Kingdom in the shadows of the night. It is true for the Roman centurion, a military officer within an occupying army, whose servant Jesus healed.

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It is also true that the rotten traitor Zacchaeus, after meeting with Jesus, got saved. I don’t mean that he fell to his knees and accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior. Luke’s Gospel says nothing like that. I mean that he made his wrongs right. He swore to give half of his possessions to the poor—the very poor his greed helped create—and he promised to repay anyone he had cheated four times over.

When Zacchaeus promised to do these things, Jesus made a bold claim: “Today salvation has come to this house.”

When I think about salvation, my mind still defaults to heaven and hell, but in this story, Jesus didn’t even gesture toward an afterlife. Instead, Zacchaeus was saved from his own greed and exploitation. He was liberated to live justly instead of self-interestedly. He was freed from the lie that his survival required exploiting others, or that his needs were more important than his neighbor’s.

We’re living through another chapter of the great unraveling of our modern world, and the chaos has a way of clarifying how badly we need salvation. The poor need salvation from systems that sit on their chest like lead blankets. The rich need salvation from greed that spreads like sepsis in their souls. The self-righteous need salvation from the bondage of moral elitism. Racists need salvation from the lie of ethnic superiority. Most of us need salvation from our phones. And all of us need salvation from the lies of consumerism, vanity, xenophobia, violence, and domination.

Each of us is a traitor in our own way, guilty of perpetuating systems that exploit others for our own gain. None of us has a clean dollar in our pockets, as Greg Boyd once said in my seminary class. All our tax dollars have contributed to war crimes, fraud, illegal deportations, and immorality…long before this presidency.

And!

If we are willing to get curious about Jesus’ just Kingdom—if we are willing to put ourselves out there and crawl up our own sycamore trees—he will invite himself into our homes. Not to paint crosses over the powers that bind us, but to disrupt our lives in ways that might lead to salvation.

Zacchaeus’ story is a reminder that salvation is not a soul preservative meant to ensure our survival in the afterlife. It is the slow, costly work of making wrong things right. It is freedom from the greed, sin, evils, and exploitation that hold us captive. And in that sense, even if you’re a Christian, you need to get saved.

Sending love,
Savannah

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There was a shooting at Brown University which I read about on my phone just blocks away from a stabbing of a mother with her baby at Macy’s in New York City that same weekend. Hours later, the news broke of a mass shooting in Australia that killed at least 15 people. In the middle of the night, I grabbed my phone and saw a notification that Rob and Michele Reiner were stabbed to death in their home, and the person of interest is their own son.

It goes without saying that each of the perpetrators of this violence is ill. But my guess is, in their illness, some of them feel justified. Like killing another person was right or deserved or the only answer. And that is not just their problem, but ours, because we perpetuate the myth of redemptive violence left and right.

It always baffles me how, after shootings, politicians claim violence has no place in America while we continue to pump money into our military-industrial complex and champion our newly named Department of War and refuse to enact gun laws.1 Violence does have a place in our country. We give it the biggest room in our house. We need to stop acting shocked when people turn to violence in a culture that keeps teaching them violence is the answer.

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After Cain murdered Abel and had a reckoning with God, Cain said: “My punishment is greater than I can bear… I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” In the ancient world, a clan would avenge the death of one of its members. Here, Cain assumes that will be his fate—that an extended family member might seek revenge for Abel’s death by killing him. This is what happens with violence. It turns into more violence, recycling over and over through the generations. But in Genesis 4, God said, “Not so!” and put a mark on Cain to protect him from being killed. A gracious end to the cycle Cain started.

I’m afraid of our cultural callousness towards violence. It’s like a virus. Every time an act of violence occurs, its effect multiplies. Taking life. Numbing us. Traumatizing bystanders. Hardening resentments. Fueling anger.

How do Christians participate in God’s “Not so,” refusing to let violence be the final word? What practices might form us into people of peace who absorb shock rather than pass it along?

I read a post this morning that I was certain was AI. Then I double-checked on Truth Social and was shocked to discover it was actually real, and—even worse, that the most powerful person on our planet wrote it: “A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”

Reading Trump’s words, the lights turned on and I was reminded how upside down our reality is. How normalized this administration’s behavior has become. How, generations from now, theology students will write papers trying to understand what spell the Church was under to remain silent or, worse, to align itself with state power. How it doesn’t occur to us to be bothered by such cruelty and soullessness because we are drowning in a sea of empty talk. How violence isn’t remotely related to the Kingdom of God or the way of Christ, yet we will forget these headlines in a few weeks. How this post would have been unthinkable coming from a President even thirty years ago, but we will shrug and move on because abortion or Israel or whatever hot button issue remains. And how each one of these micro-experiences is like a tiny drip out of a faucet landing in the center of our foreheads, numbing our minds and consciousness to the possibility that a better world is possible.

In this Upside Down, we’re trained to mistake cruelty for strength and empathy for naivety. But following Christ is a commitment to renew our minds out of conformity with the world’s violent patterns and into alignment with the self-sacrificial love of God. It is a commitment to lay down our swords and take up our crosses.

This is the Way, showing us it doesn’t have to be this way.
And friends, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Sending love,
Savannah

For all my life, I’ve equated being liked with being safe. I can trace it to an alchemy of things: childhood abuse, a codependent family system, being a girl raised inside a conservative religious environment, and the broader cultural messages that train women to be agreeable at all costs. Alongside my Flintstone vitamins, I ingested the idea every day that if people liked me, I wouldn’t be abandoned.

Well, I wouldn’t be abandoned by anyone except me.
That’s the part nobody tells you.

In order to be liked by everyone, I would have to strip myself of any disruptive quality or inconvenient thought… and, God help me, I was born full of those. I’ve never had a small footprint. I am big, despite wishing for a majority of my life that I wasn’t. I cannot tell you how many times and ways I’ve desperately tried to shrink myself to a miniature size that people would find palatable. I wanted to be the pixie girls on TV who mysteriously sit in the corner of the room and have their indie music taste and soft voices and relaxed energy. I am like that for approximately five seconds until I get excited about a dog in the next room. Then I open my mouth and— yep, there she is.

When I was sixteen years old, two of my best friends took me to the Starbucks next to Publix on Old Hickory Boulevard and told me they didn’t like me, that nobody else in my grade liked me, and they didn’t want to be friends anymore. They left in a car together while I wept in the corner chair. A young barista (Mitchell, I still remember his name) came over to me and said, “High school sucks. I heard what they said and they suck. Do you want alcohol?” I laughed and said no because I didn’t drink, but I was grateful he saw me.

I drove by that Starbucks today and thought of that moment— my undeveloped brain and wired nervous system taking in the pain of being told I was disliked, and then watching my friends leave in the only car we had. It confirmed the script: when you are disliked, you are abandoned.

Except Mitchell was there, God bless him. And a girl named Elizabeth was there. She went to a different high school but watched the whole thing, and when we met years later, she recognized me as “the girl from Starbucks.” She apologized for not saying something, and said she prayed for me the whole way home. I wasn’t actually abandoned.

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The reason I’m talking about high school is that equating being liked with being safe is a juvenile logic. I don’t mean juvenile as an insult, but rather a young survival instinct. It helped me exist in spaces where I didn’t have real agency. It protected the younger me who didn’t know she wasn’t responsible for everyone else’s happiness.

And for a long time, it worked. But now, it doesn’t. Now, to live in a way that I am only okay if everyone likes me means losing my integrity and voice and self.

Brené Brown has this practice where you get a one-inch by one-inch piece of paper and write down the names of people whose opinions of you matter. And you can’t write down Maggie from Instagram. The people on your miniature paper square, she says, have to know and love you in all your vulnerable messiness.

Some days, my piece of paper is more like a poster board that any ol’ person can write their name on to make their opinion of me matter. Sometimes my own husband’s name is missing from my poster board. When he says he loves me and I’m not crazy and I’m very likable, I insist he doesn’t really know me. Makes sense, except that we’ve been married almost a decade. He’s watched me cry at Publix commercials, spiral over our kitchen cabinets, get an emergency appendectomy in Florida, and untangle the knots of my inner world in therapy. If anyone has seen the full range, it’s him. But when I’m in my high school brain, I’m convinced the stranger on the internet knows more about me than him.

And then there’s God, who knows how many strands of hair are on my head. God, who understands the inner workings of my heart. God, who was there for my birth and 8th grade graduation and the Starbucks incident and my wedding and the days I remember and the days I forget.

This is what it comes down to, isn’t it? That there is a God who loves me, in whose love I exist, and there has never been a moment I was abandoned.

At some point, we have to choose whose voices we let shape us.

I can keep contorting myself to fit every room, or I can live rooted in a deeper truth of being loved and known as I am, not as I think people want me to be. This doesn’t mean I shouldn’t adapt or change when my behavior hurts people. Like recently, my husband pointed out this thing I do that really hurts his feelings. I apologized and told him I was going to work on not doing that. Why? Because I love him. But that’s not the same thing as erasing myself to make sure no one ever feels upset. There’s a difference between changing in love and contorting myself to avoid rejection. One honors who I am and who I’m becoming, the other abandons me entirely.

In last week’s episode of The Subtext, Lee and I talked about Wicked, specifically how Glinda attached herself to false realities she hoped would make her happy. Underneath it all, she just wanted to be loved, but she ran down some misguided paths trying to get there.

Lee said if your idea of happiness depends on everyone liking you, then you’ll never be happy because not everyone is going to like you. I laughed and said, “I can try,” and he responded with this: “You are welcome to try and get to the end of your life and realize Lee was right. I should have listened to him 40 years ago, but alas, I was dogged in wanting everyone to like me.” Attaching your happiness to something that can never be accomplished, he said, is a “sad loss.”

That idea of a sad loss is sticking with me. It’s a loss of freedom because you can only be free if you’re courageous enough to be disliked, as Kishimi and Koga wrote. It’s a loss of worth, because people’s opinions rise and fall like waves. It’s a loss of peace when I keep hitching my wagon to the changing tides. And ultimately, it’s a loss of self-belonging. If I’m only okay with me when everyone else is okay with me, how could I ever be at peace in my own skin?

Coming to terms with being disliked is on my bingo card for this year. It’s a shadow on the wall I am terrified of, but need to face. It isn’t about becoming indifferent or callous. It’s about trusting that love doesn’t require me (or you, or anyone) to disappear.

Sending love,
Savannah

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Close your eyes, he said. Imagine God has a picture of you in his wallet. What would that picture be?

I love visual practices like this. I find it easy to connect to God through imaginative prayer, and it seems like a better use of my brain than anxiety which competes for the same mental space but leaves me in a much worse condition than it found me.

I close my eyes and breathe. My mind becomes boiling water as I wait for something to rise to the top. I try to control the outcome a few times— maybe it’s that Christmas photo where I got a brand new American Girl Doll? Maybe it’s the image of me playing the piano at church? Maybe it’s my wedding photo? Maybe it’s—

Suddenly, an image of me taking a nap on the couch rises to the top.
I am an adult. I am in my fluffy pink robe. The sun is out. It’s the middle of the day.

I immediately start crying. For most of my life, I didn’t nap. It felt lazy. I could be working or cleaning or writing. I could be productive. Then last year, I burnt out because it turns out I’m not a Human Doing. After quitting most of my NINE (not kidding) jobs, I began napping. I couldn’t control it. I felt shame. I actually considered that I was dying of some rare disease because the idea that I— a machine!— needed rest seemed less likely than Kleine-Levin Syndrome.

I tell the man who led this prayer practice about my photo. He laughed and said, “I love that rest is God’s aspiration for you.”

I always thought I was going to do big things for God. I grew up in a charismatic tradition, and any time prophets came through town and ministered at our church, my grandparents, the pastors, asked them to prophecy over their grandchildren. I still have a collection of mine, and most of them say I am going to change a lot of people’s lives. One says I will travel the world sharing my words. Another— one that is 22 years old— says the “key to my anointing” is singing, and that it will be used to open up the hearts of people across the nations. Sounds big.

In high school and college, preachers exhorted my generation to live radically for the Gospel and dream bigger and do more and leave nothing on the table. I cried and told God I would do anything. I would go to North Korea as a missionary. I would become a famous worship leader. I would start a nonprofit. I would be focused every minute of every day. I would tell as many people as I could about Jesus. I would—

There it is again. The image of me taking a nap on the couch rises to the top. I am an adult. I am in my fluffy pink robe. The sun is out. It’s the middle of the day.

I have a friend who just quit her job. She has been pastoring at a megachurch, responsible for nearly a thousand students and leaders. She is really good at this… and God has been nudging her to leave. I went to support her last week as she announced her exit and it occurred to me how, for eight years, she has been doing really big things at a really big church. But when we set up shop at her house for Halloween and the neighbor’s kids came over and she playfully talked to them about their days and costumes, she said, “This is it.”

I know what she means.

It’s not that “big things” aren’t also it. Just that sometimes, God’s aspirations for us are smaller than our own. Sometimes God wants us to dream on the ground. And sometimes you think he’s proud of the stages and platforms and money and job titles and book sales, when he’s actually carrying a picture of you being present to your 5-year old neighbor in a butterfly costume in his pocket.

I used to think the holiest thing I could offer God was my ambition, my drive, and my willingness to do big things. But the fruit of that framework hasn’t always been good in my life. When big things become my goal, all the small problems and disruptions and people begin to look like obstacles in the way of my Very Important Kingdom Work. Thank God, God doesn’t have this mindset. I have never once asked God for his attention, for him to look distractedly at his phone as he drafts his next viral post. I have never asked for God’s mercy, for him to exasperatedly sigh and say, “Fine. But I have to be moving on now.”

Love doesn’t rush.

I quit doing big things for God because God is never too preoccupied with big things for me. I wonder if, at least in this time and place, the holiest thing I could give to the world is my slow presence. My rest. My humanity. My attention to small things.

Because nothing is actually as small as we think. Every person you’re lucky to meet is a universe of unrepeatable wonder. You could search a billion galaxies and never find another version of them. Every flower holds the beauty of God. Every moment is a new opportunity to connect with love. And every breath you take is a tiny reminder of resurrection, God’s own life rising, then falling, then rising again in your chest.

-Savannah

I know that feeling well, too. My friend loves God and church. She has been an active part of a faith community in the twenty years I’ve known her. But there are many Christianities emerging in America, all claiming the same name while playing by entirely different rules.

It’s not shocking for someone like her to have a crisis of conscience, then, when a dominant Christian expression merges with, say, the dominant political party which celebrates “killing the right people” and how “we’ve run out of bombs” at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Annual Leadership Summit.1 Particularly when Jesus famously told his followers to put away their swords, for whoever lives by them dies by them. Whoever lives by bombs will die by them, too.

It is not surprising for folks to question their faith identity when an increasingly popular Christian pastor— one whose words are reposted by the current Defense Secretary— identifies women as “the kind of people that people come out of.”2 Particularly when Jesus, a man, spoke to women as equals public3, celebrated them as equal disciples4, protected them from societal and religious shame5, and remarkably never told a single woman her divine purpose was to become a baby factory.

It is not surprising for folks to look around and wonder whether or not we’ve lost the plot when, days before SNAP benefits were set to expire, a conservative pastor and influencer6 tells Christian husbands to go to the grocery store with their wives, while carrying guns, because the 40+ million Americans might be desperate and… attack their wives? Steal their food? It is unclear. But of all the things to worry about, millions of hungry kids, women, and men did not make the top of this pastor’s list.

Years ago, a gardening teacher said if I wanted to plant mint, I needed to use pots because otherwise it would take over everything. I didn’t take it seriously until we bought a house on 3 acres not long after. The first time we mowed the lawn it smelled like mint. I couldn’t figure out why until our neighbor said their neighbor planted mint years ago and it took over everyone’s yards. Acres and aces of mint. “Might as well embrace it,” he said. It’s scary how fast a good thing can be overrun.

The mint of political idolatry and power and misogyny and violence have taken over the fields of American Christianity. And if you are looking around, cautious to even identify with Christianity anymore, I understand. Some people will say this is lazy or liberal or a copout— or that we need to get on our hands and knees and pull the weeds, rescuing it from being overcome. But to me, there has to be a grieving process first. “They have taken my Lord away,” Mary said. “And I do not know where they have put him.” I don’t know where God is, but I do know he isn’t in the empty tomb of our current political-religious apparatus.

Every week on my way to church, I see this sign:

And every week, I wonder if people know about the ten verses that come before that statement. The ones that talk about Jesus being humble. Not considering equality with God something to be grasped. Suffering. Becoming a servant. Running into the arms of death. Making himself nothing.

Right now, the dominant form of Christianity will gladly tout “Jesus Christ is LORD” without mentioning the ten verses that precede it. They will sell a crown with no mention of the cross. They are glad to be part of a Christianity without a humble Christ— which is, in my view, just power-hungry politics that borrows Jesus’ name for divine credibility.

If you are feeling increasingly disenchanted with it, perhaps even wondering if you are Christian at all, you are joined by many others. You are not alone or crazy or on a slippery slope. What could be more of a slippery slope than power hunger, violence, disdain of the poor, fear of the other, and misogyny?

Don’t be bullied by folks who define Christianity as a narrow house built on a foundation of American Evangelical ideals that have only been around for a hundred years. That is a new build. Christianity existed before the American Empire and it will long outlast it. There are houses built on stones that pre-date the very language you speak, full of people seeking to follow Jesus, love their neighbors, and do good to those who harm them. If you want to follow Jesus, you still can.

If you want to stay Christian, there is room for you.

Sending love!
Savannah

Lots of people say Jesus is offensive because he stands against certain groups of people or sins or political parties, and if you stand against those things, too, the world will hate you. This framework operates on the assumption that Jesus’s greatest command was to defend truth, no matter the cost.

But Jesus’s greatest command is far more demanding: Love.

Jesus rarely answered questions directly, but when a lawyer put him to the test and asked which commandment in the Law was greatest, he was clear: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Well, mostly clear. Instead of naming just one command—Love God (Deut 6:5)—Jesus tied it to a second command of loving your neighbor as yourself (Lev 19:18). Almost like the two were inseparable. “Do this,” Jesus added, “and you will live.”

But we haven’t gotten to the offensive part yet.

Jesus had a habit of expanding on, and sometimes even correcting, parts of the Law. Leviticus 19:18 commanded God’s people to love their neighbors as themselves. Everyone would have known this law. But Jesus took it a step further in Luke’s Gospel by saying, “Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them… But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back…Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.”

If you love those who agree with your political beliefs, what credit is that to you?
If you do good to those who share your convictions around gun control or inerrancy or LGBTQ inclusion or abortion or any other hot topic, what credit is that to you?
If you listen to those who exist inside your echo chamber, what credit is that to you?
If you are kind to those who are kind to you, what credit is that to you?
Anyone can do that.

But you who claim to follow Jesus? Love your enemies. Do good to your enemies. Be generous to your enemies without expecting anything in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of a God who causes the sun to shine on the just and the unjust (Matt 5).

It costs little to “stand up for your beliefs” online. That’s apprenticeship to the algorithm. But discipleship to Jesus begins with costly, confronting, and radical love. Love of God. Love of neighbor. And love of enemy.

-Savannah

Nine years ago, Todd and I were newlyweds in Atlanta, falling asleep to The Office reruns with dirty dishes in the sink and two guns tucked away in our nightstands. I shot pumpkins at his childhood home for target practice, a skill I thought was necessary since he was a touring musician and I was home alone more than half the year. At night, I imagined which window or door an intruder might enter, and what my plan of action might be: if he comes through the bathroom, I run out the front door. If I hear him in the hallway, I shoot a wall to scare him. If I hear a window shatter, I grab the gun and—

Well, then my faith fell apart and I was too busy to think about guns.

For the next few years, I let go of God, clung to God, let go again, reached back out, then finally saw the important part: God had never let go of me. In time, that realization drew me back to Christianity through the Anabaptists, a distinctly nonviolent Protestant tradition. I was introduced to the “Myth of Redemptive Violence” which is, as defined by Walter Wink, “the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence.”

We are indoctrinated to believe this myth from a young age, with cartoons showing the “bad guys” creating a problem for “good guys” until the “good guys” defeat the “bad guys” (often through violent means) to restore order by the end of every episode. This narrative dominates our storytelling in films like The Avengers or Taken or even The Lion King. We are taught to see violence as entertainment in films like John Wick or Mad Max. Even video games turn controllers in the hands of our children into weapons on a screen. We are consistently trained to be uncritical of violence and see it as necessary to create order.

But after steeping myself in the Anabaptist tradition, I realized I could not imagine Jesus holding a gun and shooting someone in his house. Further, I could not imagine Jesus telling me to hold a gun and shoot someone in my house. Something had to change.

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Todd and I talked about it for a year, going back and forth about the typical “what-if” scenarios: What if someone kidnaps me? Is Todd supposed to just sit there and let me be taken? What if we had kids? What if the worst happens? We read statistics and learned that these scenarios, while horrendous, are also rare. We learned that even the presence of a gun increases gun-related deaths from accidents to homicides to suicides. The very thing we thought would defend us would actually increase the likelihood of violence in our home. We also learned the difference between nonviolence and nonresistance. In other words, there are ways to resist violence without creating more of it.

The Las Vegas shooting happened, killing 60 people and wounding over 400 others. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting happened, killing 17 people and injuring 18 others. A pastor I loved died by suicide.

And it occurred to me that the Kingdom of God is not filled with weapons. Heaven does not have safes stocked with AR-15s. Jesus does not sleep with a pistol in his nightstand. And if I was meant to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God, living under the lordship of the Prince of Peace, I had to change some things.

So we got rid of our guns.

This choice will not change our country (there are 500 million firearms circulating in a country of 345 million), but it did change us. I am not here to tell you what to do or to even convince you to get rid of your guns. But, to use a very Christian word, I am here to share my testimony. All I can say is I no longer think about which door an intruder might break in through or which wall I would shoot if I heard a window shatter. I didn’t realize the heat a gun placed on our home- like we were a pot of water on the stove, always close to boiling.

Years later, Todd and I witnessed a public suicide and we both grieved that we ever owned a gun. We grieved that this young, burdened man had access to a gun. That his girlfriend will forever have to live with the ramifications of gun violence. Because it’s easy to think about shooting an intruder until you actually see someone’s skull blown to pieces on a car window, and you realize that nothing holy is bound up in that violence. That experience solidified our commitment to being weapon-free.

If you are on the edge or quietly reconsidering your view of guns, I hope you will listen to that nudge. We have never turned back.

Sending love,
Savannah