I try not to pay too much attention to my fitness watch. Still, it does remind me to pick up the pace while running, and I’ve heard often enough about the benefits of getting in a few thousand steps a day that I appreciate the accountability.

I broke my walking record in July when Jill and I took a summer Celtic pilgrimage. Ancient holy sites in Scotland and England were on the itinerary—Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island; Jarrow; Iona; Whitby. Of course there was a lot of walking, and one day I clocked 14,000 steps.

But walking has deeper meanings than steps counted. Walking can be a means of going deeper in your life, more reflective in your faith. A way to practice holiness.

There was a lot of walking back then if you were a Scottish or Irish saint. While some of the heroes of Celtic Christianity lived secluded lives in monasteries and convents, if you were a Columba or Cuthbert or Hilda or Aidan, you were on your feet a lot. You traveled. You moved among people. You did things at ground level, entering conversations face-to-face.

That became especially vivid to me during our pilgrimage.

On one leg of the trip, we traveled three hours by bus. The roads grew narrower and narrower, down to one lane for the last hour. Then we took a ferry to the Isle of Mull, followed by another, quicker ferry ride to Iona. By that point, as the picture below shows, Jill and I were getting a little nutty from being too long on the bus.

But what took us mere hours would have taken the early Celtic saints days.

Thinking about the way faith spread through these ancient lands, I said to our tour co-leader, Greg Rickel, who was sitting in the bus seat ahead of me, “The early saints traveled a lot, didn’t they? I assume it was all on foot.”

Yes, he said. They walked—and walked.

Well, they did sometimes get in a boat. A currach was a wooden frame over which they stretched cow hides to keep the craft light and tight and afloat. But for these saints, it was mostly foot traffic was where you practiced your faith. For walking allowed something more than simply getting from one place to another.

“There is something sacred in . . . choosing to love the world at the speed of walking,” writes Debra Dean Murphy. You notice more on foot.

And we saw panoramic beauty on the trip, by the way. The outlines of ruined monasteries that let a blue sky’s scudding clouds peak through. Staffa Island offered a sight not everyone sees—not even everyone who makes the boat trip to that isolated island. It was a hike up a hill to be sure, but then, all of a sudden, you see (at least we did) puffins proliferating there, remarkably unafraid of humans.

But I was most struck by the stories we heard and tried, in some small way, to relive in our imaginations—many stories of which had to do with roads and byways. Some paths were obvious and deeply and permanently worn down to soil. Others required courage or dogged determination, for the Celtic saints also suffered for their faith—even died.

Holiness at Eye-Level

I put the finishing touches on this essay on St. Aidan’s special day of commemoration (August 31—the day of his death in 651). Aidan was originally a monk at the monastery on the Island of Iona, founded by St Columba, one of our first stops. He went on to found and preside over the Lindisfarne island monastery in England. He spread Christianity to and throughout Northumbria.

And I love the story I heard more than once on our trip.

How King Oswin gave Bishop Aidan a horse decked out with finery. He felt that the bishop should ride to the far-flung parts of his diocese instead of walking, especially when Aidan’s health faltered.

One day Aidan, presumably atop the horse, met a beggar who asked for help. Aidan dismounted and gave the horse and all the trappings to the man.

Later, finding out what happened, the king chided Aidan—he had other, less valuable horses that the bishop could give to the poor.

Aidan’s response: “Is the child of a mare more valuable to you than this child of God?”

Walking slows us down enough to notice where we are and who we are around and what we might do.

Perhaps that was part of what made the walking of these saints so significant. They did not simply go. They had more to do than be a tourist in strange places. As they passed through villages and fields, they encountered strangers, people in need, the doubting person desperate to be reassured, the growing fellowships needing direction. They lived among those they served, making any simple path they trod holy ground. Their journeys were measured not in steps but in villages visited, lives helped, people invited to turn to Christ.

And maybe that is one reason walking can still be more than exercise. A walk can become a way of paying attention—to creation’s wonders, to other people, to God, and even to the paths that wise and kind people have walked before us.

Now, back home, unpacked and fitting back into my routines, I still think about those saints, doing good, sharing good news. How they met the vulnerabilities of people they met with urgency and kindness and conviction. And when I go for a walk in my neighborhood or in some new place, maybe I can pray with greater longing for the steps God will open in the days ahead, the people I’ll encounter. When I consider the larger course of my life, perhaps I can enter more willingly into its ordinary scenes, attentive to what God might want to accomplish—and to the places he might lead me, if I am willing to follow.

When you go on pilgrimage, you can count on seeing something you didn’t expect. So said my rector, Josh Condon, when I told him about our summer travel plans. He was right. Earlier this month, as Jill and I walked the footpaths of ancient Celtic saints in Scotland and England, more than one surprise awaited us.

One of the “high crosses” we encountered on Iona, an isle off the Scottish coast, became one such instance—a lesson that held something hidden at first, and then in an instant something momentous, moving. One of many insights on the trip.

***

Getting to Iona itself took some determination. After a long bus ride from Glasgow, you board a ferry to the Isle of Mull, travel on bus again across the island, and then catch a smaller ferry over the Sound of Iona. You have to want to get there.

As you approach, ancient stone buildings—including the many-centuries-old Abbey church—rise on the horizon. Even beneath a drizzly sky layered and weighed with pewter clouds, the island radiated a sense of holiness, the outline of the Abbey church conveying a simple majesty.

On our second morning, our guide, Greg Rickel, led us to one of Iona’s famous high crosses, towering some twelve feet above us. It was an appropriate place to stop. Medieval pilgrims, arriving by boat centuries ago, would have paused here to pray before making their way to Iona Abbey and the shrine of St. Columba. And here was the surprise.

At first glance, the cross is subtly striking in its beauty. Even with its being weathered by more than five centuries, spotted with lichen, you can see the intricate Celtic knotwork. And more than interlocking geometric patterns.

Look at the intertwining vines, our guide said, the interlacing foliage. Then he invited us to look at the other side.

I maneuvered around. And there I saw a rough-chiseled Jesus hanging on a cross. Hard-hewn, almost jarring in its jagged simplicity, conveying a stark picture of suffering.

The view from behind told a bigger story. The symbolism didn’t take much time to sink deep. On the one side, beauty, abundance, and fruitfulness greet the eye. On the other stands the agony that made such life possible. Behind the life and loveliness lay self-giving kindness. Behind the flourishing vines loomed the hard wood of crucifixion’s cross. Behind the promise of resurrection stood the ultimate sacrifice.

The victory over death announced by Jesus’s cross and the empty tomb is what makes the beauty on the front possible.

I already knew how the Celtic Christians admired the flowing, interlocking lines and winding vines of pre-Christian art. Instead of rejecting those familiar designs, they filled them here with new meaning. They adopted the unbroken patterns to suggest a new kind of eternity—a flourishing that could not be stopped by death. And this was no dull, endless existence. Their vision of eternity owed its meaning to the cross and the resurrection. The flourishing foliage grows out of the suffering Christ willingly endured. It stems from God’s extravagant giving of Son and self.

***

“Be sure to slow down at times,” my rector had said. “The more you notice, the more you will discover.” So I’m continuing to reflect on what I saw and heard. I’ll be sharing more in this space. But for now, I need to keep processing and continue praying to allow what I encountered not to slip away too quickly.

And I wonder: How might the trips you have taken and will take become not only a tourist’s trek but also a pilgrimage—a walking within and toward some insight God has been readying for you all along?

(Me, by another high cross on Iona, this one named St. Martin’s.)

Picking up a few things at my local Walmart, I noticed three T-shirt slogans in the span of five or ten minutes, each a variation on a theme.

One, worn by a young woman pushing a cart with a baby, read “This mama needs a nap.” Another, on an older man shopping with his wife and (I assume) grandchildren, proclaimed something like “Retired … But still tired.”

I can’t recall the third T-shirt, but it broadcast a similar sentiment: I’m worn out. Those few minutes made me realize just how much weariness has become a shared experience in our culture.

Some days we don’t feel fully alive so much as simply tired. Our exhaustion may be physical, but often it has emotional and spiritual roots as well.

Don’t a lot of us wish for more stamina, for alertness that doesn’t come merely from caffeine or a so-called energy drink? As Tish Harrison Warren writes in What Grows in Weary Lands, “All of us hit points in our lives where we’re out of steam, where we can’t get traction, where we feel lifeless or tired, disoriented and unsure of ourselves. Things seem hard, maybe harder than we think they should be.”

Sometimes it’s simple monotony that weighs on us. We feel stuck, as Kate Bowler put it, “in a Groundhog Day of the same, same, same.”

Or we worry, worry about all kinds of things, which leaves less emotional energy for what we face or try to get done. “Right now, circumstances have shaken up the snow globe,” wrote Anne Lamott recently, tongue only slightly in cheek, “and for nervous cases such as myself, it is hard to get my bearings.” The extreme polarizing takes a toll. The latest war news or political folly makes you toggle through more kinds of anxiety than you knew existed. For people in the “sandwich generation,” caught between caring for aging parents and raising children, the demands seem to drain the reserves needed to love others creatively or create something good.

We may sense the need for a kind of internal reset—a change in habits or patterns that have grown stale, musty. But from what little we’ve tried, we still end up tired. We worry that we have run out of possibilities. We settle into the doldrums, barely getting by.

How can you feel more alive when mostly you feel tired?

Spiritual resources help me here. Especially the Bible’s stories of blessed reversal, of outcomes that don’t rely only on mere human resources. Alan Koppschall, writing on Ploughstack, says “When you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.”

I think that’s one way to think of what happens in a miracle: Another way opens up. More than the merely human intervenes. You find through that infusion an unexpected (or desperately needed) ability to re-engage the work at hand. And I don’t mean that we expect only big showy miracles, but I mean also the little gains, the small surprises.

I see this miraculous aliveness in the New Testament’s accounts of Jesus’s resurrection. The overcoming of death (his traumatic death) was so dramatic and breathtakingly complete that, at first, his followers seem stunned, a little uncertain on their feet. But then reality begins to dawn—in a good way. Shock gives way to elation, and energy positively bursts from the pages. That just as true in the stories of what happens next.

There’s a lot of running, for one thing, in the resurrection aftermath. In every one of the Gospels, in fact. (If we’re being picky, Mark only says they “fled,” but close enough.) Take Matthew’s Gospel: “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary … left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell [the] disciples.” No stroll here. No draggy sense of duty.

Or Luke’s account: Peter ran to the tomb when he heard about the tomb being empty. An amble won’t cut it.

And look at John’s account: Mary Magdalene “ran” to Simon Peter and John with the news, and then those two “were running together” to the tomb.

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This isn’t what we mean by running around. It’s running with caution thrown over the shoulder. I see Jesus’s followers driven by curiosity and determination to see for themselves, to get to the bottom of what they feared was only an “idle tale.” Jesus’s followers simply can’t sit still now. There’s no shortage of energy.

For adults, running in that day and age was undignified. But it’s exactly what happens when you stop worrying about appearances and yearn to move toward hope. You feel drawn onward.

Of course, running is not without its risks. Spiritually, I mean. We get excited about some movement in our devotional practices, some answer to prayer, some stride forward in our life with God spilling into our life with others—and then comes a setback. Seasons of deep closeness with God can give way to a dark night of the soul. We falter or even stumble. We lose focus.

It struck me as a small irony that I was reading these resurrection stories the day after I fell while running on the Greenway not far from here. I had been pushing myself to go farther and faster. A glance at my Garmin fitness watch distracted me. Or perhaps a tired foot simply got stumbly. I skidded across the pavement ahead, bruising my hip and scraping my palms, elbow, and knee. I’m fine, but not before hobbling around the house a bit, waiting for healing.

Even so, the desire to run hasn’t left me. Already I’m counting the days until I can get back out there.

Immense in Meaning but also at Hand

The resurrection of Jesus, I’m seeing, places in our line of vision pictures that remind us to keep keeping at it. To be clear: The resurrection of Jesus was unprecedented. Here is something so immense in meaning it’s impossible properly to fathom. But what if the power unleashed that first Easter has never stopped prodding and empowering, never ceased bringing renewal? What else could Paul mean when he writes, “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you”? Sometimes I mentally remove the sentence’s opening if. Stripped of Paul’s rhetorical setup, it reads simply: “The Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you” (Romans 8:11).

Alive in us. Still helping.

That doesn’t mean every illness is healed or every disappointment disappears. I think of caregivers living with a profoundly disabled or chronically ill loved one, where the work never stops. Or those struggling with addiction or compulsive behavior. Or church leaders burning out. Or someone whose prayer life feels desert-like.

The resurrection does mean we never face those realities with only our own resources. A stab of delight pokes through an exhausting schedule. A pinprick of light assures us that that God isn’t finished yet, that all ahead is not dark. When doomscrolling we tell ourselves a power still, still moves in the world. In our own weariness we see a glimpse of the divine doing what cannot be humanly done.

Then we see how the resurrection life of Jesus is at work—not just on Easter Sunday but on this ordinary weekday. And we get back on our feet with a little more within us to keep moving forward.

^{Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash}

I thought it would be a mundane excursion one Saturday.

That morning my mom, my dad, Kevin, and I piled into our Chevrolet station wagon. We left behind the cars and smog—the stale emissions and haze hanging over our suburb. We drove toward a semirural setting a couple of hours out, hoping for some quiet, some escape.

I don’t remember everything we did during our one-day outing. Certainly a stop at a California town with quaint bakeries, maybe a fudge shop with sugary smells, a place to get a burger. On the return trip home, I stretched out in the back. This was before you had to wear seat belts, and the rear of a wagon could be your personal nap space. I could see, through the back windows, the night sky. Not just any glimpse, though. The glow of city lights had always dimmed the stars back home.

But now, in a canopy washed clean of pollutants, I saw the Milky Way. In the dark backcountry, I could see the stars spattered in a vivid, twinkling band. Pinpoints to my eyes but also scintillating specks of light. I glimpsed a lit hugeness above.

I didn’t have the words then to understand everything I was sensing. I might have pointed and said something to my brother Kevin, probably dozing in the bench seat in front of me. But mostly I held the experience close, kept it to myself. The majestic beauty I witnessed would have been hard to put into words anyway.

Any child experiences the world as big, with things happening above, having always to tilt a head when around the adults towering above. Maybe you looked up in other ways—at treetops, skyscraper heights, or mountains. But in this glimpse, in a scene so panoramic, the effect so dramatic, I see it as one of my first awarenesses of God. You might call it awe at first sight. I don’t know if what stirred in me was exactly praise and prayer, but I felt an awakening to wonder. I laid out under a shimmering quiet radiance. It felt like the universe was showing off, giving a kind of cosmic light show.

I think the vast sky opened a sensitivity in me I hadn’t had before.

Miracles Every Day

I cannot trace with unbroken lines what I saw to how I inhabit the world now. But I think people interested in creativity and writing often find within a sensitivity to beauty and everyday wonders. “Artists discover miracles every day,” writes Mako Fujimura. Yet while we live in a Presence-saturated world, even people creative in other ways can find themselves limited by dulled vision, moving through life distractedly. What if one of the most important spiritual disciplines for people wanting to grow more profoundly is simply learning (or re-learning) to see?

Lots of us have experiences of nature that stir a feeling in us. But some know to go further. The poet Emily Dickinson, say, became galvanized. What she witnessed compelled her not only to feel but also to well up with words aching with imagery, to grab a pencil stub and an envelope flap or chocolate candy wrapper (where many of her scrawled snatch of verse got netted) and try to express some deeper reverence:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee.

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

Revery, yes, but also elation, when she also wrote:

Write me how many notes there be
In the new robin’s ecstasy

To sort through her longing for the Divine, or live through grief when death robbed the family of a loved one, she often expressed herself through the material glories of Creation: A robin, a dust speck, a moon hung in a night sky, and yes, that oft-quoted “certain slant of light.” Emily’s special genius had to do with making Grand Ideas vivid with almost granular images, hard realities that sometimes detonate with their depths.

Philosopher H. Martyn Evans writes of wonder as an experience that does more than fill us, it changes us, leading to an “altered, compellingly intensified attention to something that we immediately acknowledge as somehow important.” With the help of Emily’s sometimes heart-stabbing images, her beauty-immersed imagination, her delight in a wider world, I’m more alert some days than I would be otherwise. I more readily nod when I read the Psalmist exalting, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.”

The Longer You Look, More of the World, More of God

Flannery O’Connor was addressing a group of writers, but she could have been talking to any Christian when she said, “[T]here’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer … can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.”

I was told as a child that staring is poor manners. But gazing has its rewards. For, she said, “the longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it.” And, she surely wouldn’t mind my adding, even more of the divine, the hand behind the handiwork.

Might not a grain of humility she mentioned, lead us to reverence as we traverse a wider world? Could it not open up our souls to insight and new delights we will miss if eyes stay glued only to our digital screens? We instead practice turning our eyes to our world (including other people) with a lingering, leisurely look.

And wouldn’t I would look more reverently if I didn’t often forget that we live in a God-suffused, Presence-saturated universe? I once heard Andy Crouch, author of books on technology and faith, say how he tries every day, at least for a few minutes, to get outside and look around and look up. I’ve thought of that often, on the days—most days—I try to do the same. Isn’t summer a perfect time to notice more? To feel the breezes that makes clouds on high scud across, to see the majesty of pines and oaks and tulip poplars ringing my cul-de-sac. To notice even the earthworms and grubs that aerate and forage our soil. To say nothing of a night sky, even in suburbialand.

What practices of holy attention help you resist bland seeing, instead cultivating an awake, reverent gaze that enriches your life and soul? (Consider replying to share yours.)

(I’ve adapted the opening starry scene from my book Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes.)

My website has a new look! Feel free to drop by (and sign up for my webpage’s email newsletter): www.revtimothyjones.com

A few Sundays ago, teaching on the love of God we see in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I pushed back against the notion that the Spirit is the “shy” member of the Trinity.

Only yesterday did I realize one place where I may have heard the idea: Leafing through one of Eugene Peterson’s many books on my shelf, there it was. (Eugene was himself quoting a New Testament scholar.) Reading Eugene’s explanation didn’t change my mind, as I’ll explain.

And let me be clear: The late translator of The Message, the beloved author, and the renowned pastor-professor could run writing laps around me. When profiling him for Christianity Today, I visited him and his wife in his Montana cabin; I still can recall not only the pristine lakeside mountain air but their storied hospitality. Peterson modeled an impressive holiness. He even wrote gracious endorsements for my books.

And to be fair, the “shyness” reasoning goes like this: The Spirit’s work “often goes unnoticed and unremarked,” as Peterson says in Practice Resurrection. So, by way of contrast, in creation, in the Father’s handiwork, we see an “attention-getting, dramatic quality.” And through the Son, well, the salvation story is nothing if not brimming with miracles and movement and trauma, followed by death’s reversal. Besides, doesn’t the Spirit mostly work in unobtrusive ways through ordinary folks?

But I have a different take, one apropos to today as I write—celebrated as Pentecost Sunday in many churches worldwide.

Where the Spirit shows up—sometimes erupts—I’m seeing possibilities for more like electrifying epiphanies than mild nudges. Encounters less like gentle and more like galvanizing. Sometimes the Spirit unsettles the soul and stirs up repentance. And the third Person is not shy in another way, which I’ll also get to.

So, to give an example of the Spirit’s rousing side, at Jesus’ baptism “he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove”—nerve-tinglingly present.

The Spirit was key in Jesus’ resurrection, too: Though put to death on the cross, Jesus was, astonishingly, “made alive in the Spirit.” Still elsewhere, the apostle Paul burst out with an acclamation that the Holy Spirit lay at the heart of Jesus’ resurrection: “That [Spirit’s] power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead” (Ephesians 1:19-20).

When we look on the scene at Pentecost in Acts 2, we see the Spirit charge the air. There’s an energizing voltage. Many of the images for the Spirit are concrete and even visceral: fire; a dove descending; a blustery, even violent, wind. The disciples can’t sit still or stay quiet. The Spirit freed the first preachers from their fears and doldrums and propelled them into the public square.

And their open-air preaching electrified the crowd, leading bystanders to assume the speakers had had too much to drink, so intoxicated did they seem with vibrancy and joy. And the words themselves! Ignited with fire. If they came around today such Spirit-fueled fiery preaching could set off smoke alarms. You would have felt hair-on-your-neck-standing-up sensations.

The picture shows us not just showy movement or things you sense, but also that you feel. In the Bible, while one of the key terms for the Spirit is breath, it is the breath of love, and that love comes from a divine Person. Here is a love that, as the New Testament says, “is poured out” into our hearts (Romans 5:5), that bowls over the hurting and broken with intensity, that leads to tears, that expands in someone a transformed expectation. Yes, I will acknowledge the “still, small voice.” But if the Spirit is not a third-position stand-in or gentle byproduct of God, but a vibrant Person in his own right, then we stay open for more than the current inertia.

And yet another way the Spirit moves: helping the infinite become intimate.

The testimony of many believers is that the Holy Spirit is the most “intimate ‘contact point’ between the triune God and human beings,” as one scholar argues. And here I find the second shortfall of the “shy” imagery. We see not only a force to reckon with, but a highly personal persuasion to convince us, against our worst doubts, that we are loved. That we face anything accompanied by a grand Another. And the Spirit helps make that all real, vivid.

And here is help when we need vastly more assurance than is available from our typical diversions or distractions. “I am reminded again,” writes Episcopal priest Caroline Devitt, “that the Holy Spirit has always had a habit of hovering around human vulnerability. Around ache. Around the places we cannot fully explain ourselves.”

So, I wonder: Have we gotten so used to holding the Spirit at arms-length that we forget to expect much, expect more? Is the shyness not on the Spirit’s part, but our part?

To that question I add another: How have you found the Spirit making your life better and more vital? More charged with vibrancy? Are there ways you wish the Spirit would?

I’d love to hear.

A podcast I’m on, just out: For Real with Kimberly Stuart (she’s a great interviewer/host): https://www.kimberlystuart.com/podcast

Photo by Nik Shuliahin 💛💙 on Unsplash

Sometimes we feel stuck.

Who doesn’t, on such days, long for movement—for some sign of momentum? Yet we may keep circling the same issue. Maybe it’s a job whose days we trudge through; I’ve known seasons like that, yearning for a new opportunity. Or maybe a relationship seems caught in the same bruising patterns, replaying old hurts and disappointments. We long for growth that seems far off.

Our experiences of slowness and setback not only hurt, but hem us in. They shrink our sense of what could happen. In those moments, life can feel as though it’s contracting around us. Such moments leave us restless, even desperate for at least a glimmer that change might be possible.

Thomas experienced something of that. Thomas, the disciple who stands center stage in one of the resurrection stories in John’s Gospel, shares in that ache of stuckness.

That’s not how we normally think of him.

He’s been given a less-than-flattering nickname for ages: Doubting Thomas. But I think it more accurate to call him Despairing Thomas. Thomas the Stopped-in-His Tracks. Thomas the Traumatized.

The other disciples in the story are talking with bated breath, with a glow of wonder, saying, “We have seen the Lord!”—the risen Lord! (John 20:24). And Thomas doesn’t buy it. I think deep inside he wanted to. But he can’t allow himself to believe.

So I want to offer another way to view his story. Not just a movement from doubt to belief but also from despair to reconnection. From trauma to repair. From reeling from hurt to glimpsing the resurrection as real, as able to help. I see in John’s account Thomas opening to an encounter that could change things, change him.

For as the drama unfolds, Jesus offered him a gift, a glimpse of a new way to live precisely when he felt stuck, felt unable to move. For I would argue that Thomas isn’t just skeptical. He’s locked up, shut down. And yet, I’d argue, not totally closed off.

And I see promise there for us, too.

No Accidental Detail

I don’t think it’s an accidental detail John shares when he notes how Thomas wasn’t there with the other disciples to start with. Did he go off alone to nurse in private his shredded hopes? Did he find it painful to spend time with these friends—dear as they were—who reminded him of the loss? “Helplessness and isolation are the core experiences of psychological trauma,” Judith Herman wrote in her monumental Trauma and Recovery.

What Thomas suffered while watching his Jesus die counts as trauma. Crucifixion was designed to instill horror in those watching it. It was dehumanizing and shameful. It stripped the crucified of agency, rendering them helpless, utterly hapless.

And those witnessing it, especially when it’s someone you loved, would feel the crush and overwhelm of grief. For a time, the disciples would still entertain the painful tortured images imprinted on their memories—a stunning reversal of what they’d put hope in. Life looked like it was going nowhere.

Thomas and his fellow disciples had given up everything to follow Jesus, but Jesus did not inaugurate the kingdom people expected. Instead, he was brutally executed. And for all Thomas knows, Jesus is still dead. Very dead. And so also, then, is his own calling. His ministry. His plans. All stalled. Stuck.

Thomas on the Threshold

Maybe Thomas is saying to himself, “Why bother to hope for anything other than today’s cold, ugly reality?” It feels like there’s no help to be had. He’s off by himself, at least till this moment. A moment when something enters his deadness. When there appears a “wow” moment. For as we’ll see, he’s not only Thomas the Traumatized, but also Thomas on the Threshold.

And I’m suggesting something hopeful for us, in the middle of our feeling of being stuck. Our feeling like we’ve had a gut-punch of doom and the dismal when reading the latest news. Or anxious from results from a medical test we didn’t expect.

To my surprise, with a little research I discovered that psychologists talk about how getting stalled will affect you: this feeling that life is on hold, moving too slowly or not at all. They have a term: functional freeze mode. Quite a term, that! This is not just frustration but also a loss of motivation. It’s hard to rouse yourself to do something, or on especially bad days, anything. Functionally frozen.

So there might be fear, uncertainty about moving ahead in, say, a relationship or a project or a task. What’s the use anyway? Or, Why bother? we say with a shrug.

One reason Thomas and others are traumatized is because something happened to them that they couldn’t change.

In our settings, this resignation gives a different feel to our personal goals, our family life, our bodies with the normal diminishments of aging. Or when we look at a hurting, violent world, maybe we get bewildered by the bloodshed and injustice, so much so that we worry that God has skipped town (or planet earth). And we feel baffled.

And what goes on inside affects the seemingly little things: There’s a letter or email you should write but you postpone it yet again. A cause that could use your insight or volunteered help, even just a neighbor needing a casserole. A hurting friend needs your undivided attention but you are tending a wound in your own soul and you hesitate.

Or you carry around an old hurt, a rejection from those close to you, thinking you cannot expect anything more than being ghosted.

And in our faith—we can get in a rut there too: Feeling distant from God, wondering if God has left the premises.

But I see hope in our Gospel. Thomas keeps asking. And he keeps watching.

A part of him is willing to have opened in front of him a doorway out. His questions feel to me less like doubting defiance and more like an aching for a corner to turn. And Jesus met Thomas there at the place of his discouragement and disconnection. Jesus guided him back to faith. Back to a relationship.

So, we read, “A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, [there’s stuckness!] … Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’” I wonder how Thomas could even begin to picture peace amid his beaten-down hopes. But Jesus, the incarnate God, got physical. He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”

Such a tenderness there. Yes, Jesus does say, “Do not doubt but believe,” but I’m not seeing Jesus chiding Thomas. Rather, he’s inviting him to look again, to see the reality of Jesus’s return from death for what it is—reality.

And he speaks through the ages to our discouragement and stuckness. Forever after, we glimpse rays of dawn in the dark deadness of despair. And this speaks to the hard personal things, too.

In my book, Fully Beloved, I decided I would share some personally vulnerable stories. Some grew out of brokenness in family relationships, out of a time, for instance, when I was a young adult and my parents rejected me. I had gone off to grad school, and they sent a letter asking me to send back my house key.

I told the story to underscore how human how estrangement is part of what it means to be human. What has struck me has been how many people have told me how they too have faced broken relationships, moments of feeling isolated, cut off. I have heard of traumas large and small.

But I also tell such stories to point to how God’s love meets us in those hard experiences. Even in the traumatic moments. For divine power is at work.

If Jesus was indeed set free from the grip of death through the power of God, he’s able to speak peace to our agitation and our wounding. Able to jar us loose from our stuckness.

Christianity is about a living God, active in Christ, who can do more than we can by ourselves. Maybe you feel locked in a room like the disciples, scared, wary.

Maybe you are so used to struggling that you’ve stopped expecting anything to change—reluctantly concluding that this is just how life will be.

But now, post-Easter, the way forward isn’t about what some call toxic positivity, papering over pain with a too-easy optimism.

The way forward is about what happened to Thomas. He encountered a risen Jesus. And that changed him. Most of the time, that’s how change happens for anyone; we let the divine presence catch our attention. We stay long enough in God’s closeness to be noticed and known and steadied. We give him room to draw near. We let a word of peace fall on our ears.

Until, almost without noticing it at first, something begins to shift. There’s hope again for movement.

Perhaps that’s how the path ahead can begin again for you, too.

While my book’s been out in the world a few weeks, I felt inspired by his post to give a sketch here of my book, offer a couple of thoughts on how it might benefit you, and suggest how you can help others discover it. I also share below some early reactions to my book from Amazon and Goodreads reviews.

The What (and Why)

Fully Beloved begins with a simple, searching question: Am I loved? Maybe no question nags at us more; perhaps no question matters as much. We live in times when loneliness seems epic, even epidemic. Surrounded by people, we may still feel cut off, ghosted—distant from one another, unsure where we belong. We can even feel disconnected from God, our prayer times dry.

The Christian story dares to answer the question about our belovedness with a God who draws near, who shows up in Christ to share in the brokenness of our lives. Here is a striking and often overlooked vision of God: not solitary, but richly relational,—a triune communion of love. And not just in God’s own eternal being: Already God’s been delighting in us. Doing all that can be done to invite us and draw us close again.

So what can seem abstract or confusing turns out to be vividly personal: before we ever existed, God was already in relationship, already delighting in love that now gets shared—with us.

In my book, lean heavily on stories, one reason I think a number of online reviewers pegged the book as quite readable. I interweave contemporary stories, biblical wisdom, my own raw experience, and ancient insights to help readers discover a more relationally rich faith. Some of the stories I share feel intense, and, as one reader put it, unflinchingly honest.

I offer the book hoping readers will discover the steady care of a Father, the self-giving love of the Son, and the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit—inviting us, even in our aches and longings, into the very life of divine love.

The Who

I have found that many Christians have more or less given up on the Trinity, thinking it too complicated and too intimidating, except for brainy Bible study leaders or a brave soul with a PowerPoint diagram. I have found, in contrast, that the biblical picture of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit warms, not complicates our view of God. This ancient picturing of God can help our prayers flourish and mature. It can bring to our faith more settledness and greater expectancy. And the picture of an intimately loving God heal us in our brokenness and fears (as one commenter on my book testified, as noted below). God in God’s three-personed self profoundly answers the question about weather God cares—whether we are God’s beloved.

For this reason, I believe the book will help the traditional church-goer in need of fresh insight and real help in praying. But I also envision readers on the fringes of church communities or the Christian faith finding encouragement here. A friend suggested he even found me “winsomely evangelistic.” Additionally, I see Fully Beloved as a resource for Bible studies, adult Sunday school classes, or other small groups. (A free guide for reflection and discussion ideal for groups is found on my website, and I’ve written for Bible Gateway a downloadable, concise survey of biblical passages.)

How You Can Help

The world of publishing has changed.

There are plenty of books coming out but fewer readers. And the traditional ways of getting a book passed along (bookseller recommendations, ads, magazine reviews) are less reliable. As Alan Noble says, “Basically the only way [a] book gets into the hands of the people it can help is if you share it, tell someone about it, hand it to them, buy them a copy, or review it on Amazon and/or Goodreads. … The most important thing is people who read and love books telling other people that they read and loved a book.” Word of mouth, in other words, makes the difference. Perhaps you will feel moved to highlight my book. Or tell your pastor or friend about it. Or give it as a gift.

And if you are active on social media, perhaps you will check out (and recommend) my posts on Facebook or X. Or visit my website and Substack. “Liking” them, forwarding them, just getting the word out helps so much. And especially consider telling your own followers what you found helpful in my writing.

Reviews from Others on Amazon or Goodreads (just a smattering):

* “[A] wonderful book. It is written very well and is easy to follow and understand. It is perfect for anyone struggling with life’s many troubles or just wants a fresh awakening to God’s deep love for His children.”

* “I loved this book! One of the best I’ve read when it comes to navigating what we actually believe about God’s love for us through dark, dry, and disappointing seasons. In particular, I thought the breakdown of Love in the three persons of the Trinity was profound. Extremely insightful and beautifully written!”

* “I think even the most fervent Christians have moments where they doubt God’s love, and it’s really no question as to why. … Especially those of us who had difficult, unloving childhoods. I grew up moving around, raised by a mother who tolerated my presence, but made it clear she’d have been happier without me. Now, as an adult heading into middle age, I still deeply struggle with my self-worth and my relationship with God.

“This book has already made me cry multiple times, and I’ve felt a release of pain that I’ve been holding onto for years. [The author’s] writing is down to earth, understandable and compassionate. He uses his own experiences, biblical references, and writings from well-known authors to help weave an understanding of a loving, compassionate and relational God, our Father (and the Trinity).”

* “Fully Beloved is a deeply meaningful and encouraging book that speaks directly to the heart. … Through personal stories, biblical wisdom, and reflections from spiritual voices like St Augustine, Julian of Norwich, and Emily Dickinson, this book creates a rich and comforting journey toward understanding God’s love in a deeper way. … What makes this book especially impactful is how it acknowledges both heartache and hope. The author does not shy away from pain or struggle but instead shows how brokenness and intimacy with God can exist together. This message feels both honest and uplifting, offering reassurance that even in difficult seasons, Gods love remains steady and transformative.”

As always, thank you for reading my Substack musings and updates. Coming soon: A post on “Thomas the Traumatized.”

I thought, too, how many of us find meaning in disciplines for Lent—things we do without, the fasting we take on, perhaps good deeds we decide to add. We get intentional. But then Easter morning arrives, radiant, to be sure, but how quickly it’s over. Why not adopt an Easter discipline? Why not “practice resurrection,” as the poet Wendell Berry put it?

I’ve been asking, then, What are some ways to get intentional about observing what the church for centuries has called the Great Fifty Days of Easter? How about some habits appropriate for that season?

As in: Live with less fear and more joy—even if it’s haltingly? Maybe pick up the smart phone fewer times so we doomscroll that much less? Why not greet a seemingly impossible conversation with a little more trust? Or soak our weakness and weariness in images of Jesus’s risen reality? And yes, such new habits may not come readily. Yes, they may take practice. But wouldn’t they give what we face a new lift?

I think about these matters especially when I pause to consider my normal human mortality. I’m at an age when I think about it more.

As one who jogs regularly and watches cholesterol in the hope of avoiding the heart disease that took my father’s life, I believe in caring for our bodies. But the urgency of our digitally tracked workouts and our high-ticket nutrition supplements take on a zeal with roots in what looks like a determined, desperate effort to avoid the truth that we are creatures of breath and dust and ash. Sometimes we don’t just bump into the realization, we trip over it, get shaken awake by it, collide with it. Writes Frederick Buechner, “It is no longer just in my mind that I know I am rather a good deal closer to the end of my time than I am to its beginning. I know it in my stomach.”

I heard about a lecture by the noted authority on care for the dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. She asked the gathering, “How many here are terminally ill? Raise your hands.” A few did, prompting her to say, “My dear ones, we are all terminally ill.”

Rather than depress or dispirit me, however, thinking about my limited life span is a tonic for the soul. Might Easter practices change how we see what the psalmist called our life span as a mere handbreadth?

Awareness of my limited days need not shrink my world. It doesn’t need to make me grasp more or grow anxious over what days remain. Such imagery instead reframes ordinary things: how I spend an afternoon, the patience I extend or withhold with a coworker, the small choices at home that accumulate into a life. I’m staying more awake to weekday signs of goodness bringing life and delight, sometimes hiding in the course of a day’s events.

And with Easter still fresh, I consider the glimmering, glittering possibility that God can take my human frailty and fill it with the fragrance of eternity. Wouldn’t God love to plant within me a more durable delight, however many (or few) birthdays I have left? Easter truths help here. Leave me more alive than ever.

Lately I’ve been struck by what it all might mean for, well, today, even as I write these lines. I think of a couple of sometimes-overlooked passages of Scripture. But the boldness of what they claim now astonishes me, and I’ve been pondering their impact, their import. I can barely take it in. But I can try, and I hope you will also.

I mean a verse like this: “If the Spirit of [God] who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you,” the apostle Paul wrote, “he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies” (Romans 8:11). Paul was saying that the power that erupted in the resurrection of Jesus—that victory over the forces of evil and injustice and death— is moving around, flexing some muscles. Christ is doing something in the world as we know it. The world as we hope it. I guess I could see how it might seem simpler to picture it happening in “religious” settings. But Paul is not content to leave the power at work confined to the “heavenly.”

So again, he drove home the point (in another passage) about God’s incomparably great power for us who believe. God’s power in us and around us, Paul wrote, “is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 1:19-20). Strength when we get wearied.

For what transpired in the risen Jesus has to do with the everyday, not just the eternal. I forget how daily such a truth can feel. God is working in the big things and little. The massive and seemingly microscopic. And not just in some future eternity, but here and now. In the relationships that seem stuck in distance or stalled in hurt. In the temptations we can’t seem to navigate. Maybe in our work and callings.

When telling my friend Daniel about my work on my new book—the demands, the effort, and the stretching, and particularly the chapter about the resurrected realities of the living Jesus, he reminded me, “That power you are writing about can also move through you and what you write.” It got me wondering about how many of our tasks could be infused with a life beyond our own. A vitality that has to do with an eternity that stretches backward and forward. A power not intimidated by turns and forces that make us cower or grieve or worry.

I heard about a plumber, active in his church, overflowing with God’s life in his own praying, who said as he carried on his trade, “There are some prayerfully laid pipes in this area.” I love that picture of a daily life infused with God’s risen life, a person practicing resurrection!

And I wonder: What might that same power mean in your daily work? Your uncertainties? Even your heartaches?

Adapted from my new book, Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes, Nelson Books, 2026.

Where You Can Find Me

• Near Nashville:

Book signing / Meet the Author The Rabbit Room (North Wind Manor), Wednesday, April 15, 1-4pm (link to RSVP here) Come just to hang out at the wondrous North Wind Manor, too! https://www.rabbitroom.com / 3321 Stephens Hill Ln, Antioch, TN 37013

• In New York City:

Breakout session Presenter at Mockingbird’s annual conference, with the theme, “Wow to the Deadness, Wonder for the Weary.” Registration still open! My talk will be “More Than a ‘Like’: When Grace Calls Us Beloved.”

• In Nashville:

Preaching at 7:30, 8:45, 11 am services, with book signing at 10:05 am, Sunday, May 3, St. George’s Episcopal Church, 4715 Harding Road 37205.

Preaching at the 9:30 am service, with book signing to follow: Sunday, May 31 at 10:45, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, 4800 Belmont Park Terrace, Nashville, 37215.

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At first, as we walked the gravel road that crisscrossed the marshland of the refuge,

I saw only blank, stretched out sky, clumps of dry reeds, and a few ducks. I wasn’t impressed.

But my friend Merle knew birds. “Look—there!” he would say, pointing to the sweeping wings of a great blue heron in flight. There was a soaring black-shouldered kite. With the help of Merle’s sharp eyes and binoculars, I glimpsed roseate spoonbills with broad beaks and bony legs preening in a distant pond.

Merle pointed out every kind of duck and mallard imaginable, more than I could name or now remember. He had me listen for the rasping, eerie call of grackles perched nearby.

With Merle along, a world opened to my senses.

And I see here a reminder that I cannot live well without help. None of us can.

There are things you are not seeing, I’ll wager. Important things, there all along, but you and I miss them. We are surrounded by the holy and numinous, but assume they’re just ordinary. God acts and we’re too distracted to notice. You walk by what is charged with meaning, until someone says, “Look!” Until God manages, somehow, to open our eyes.

My newfound vision in the wildlife sanctuary was a gift and grace. Something enabled me to see. Someone outside of myself reoriented me. Gave me new eyes.

I Once Was Blind

That experience puts me in touch in a small way with a long story in John’s Gospel read in many churches recently: the story in chapter 9 of a sightless man coming to see.

Blindness was more common in the ancient world than today. It was common in the Middle East, caused partly by infections of the eye and partly by the sun’s pitiless glare.

It wasn’t unusual to see eyes crusted with matter, flies constantly settling on them.

Healings of the blind were one of the hallmarks of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus showed simple kindness in healing the blind man in John’s story.

For the man likely sat by the roadside begging. He must have lived in humiliation—an outcast. So Jesus heals him not only of his physical condition but frees him from social stigma. The man would be able to rejoin the normal goings-on around him. Jesus opens his horizons to the possibility of a new way of life.

It took Jesus’ intervention. It took Jesus giving sight.

Jesus makes a mud plaster of saliva and soil and applies it to the man’s eyes. I can just imagine him applying the salve with gentleness. Jesus then sends the man to the pool of Siloam. The pool provided water for the worship ceremonies in the Jerusalem temple. It held huge significance. Jesus simply tells the man to wash there.

But there’s deeper meaning here.

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The Gospel writers, with all the stories they tell of Jesus healing the sightless, declare how such healing points to what Jesus does in even profounder ways. Points to how he can help us.

For it’s true for us, too, that in situations in our lives we miss what we should see. I mean ways we are oblivious to what is obvious in our relationships, our workplaces, our living rooms, our churches, our world. Even in our relating to God.

Because we live in a fallen world, skewed by sin, because of our spiritual near-sightedness, because we have attention deficit disorder of the soul, we see through a blur. So the solution is a spiritual one. We bring our poor eyesight to Jesus and beseech him to help us see what we’ve missed.

But I’ve only just lately noticed a second truth in this healing story in John. The gift of seeing is not only just that—a gift. It’s also a practice. While it took the grace of healing for the man to see. It also took, on his part, cooperation.

When he tells him to wash in the pool, Jesus gives him something to do to play a part. “Go, wash,” he says.

So I’m thinking this: We come to Jesus saying, “Help me in my struggle to see,” but then we also keep on looking. Wise old St. Augustine said, “it is of no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed.” Glory may glow up where you are, but what if you aren’t paying attention?

We examine our own part—our self-deception, our defensiveness, our reluctance to face facts that challenge our self-centered aims. And we confess those things.

Lent can help us here. This season helps us clear away the wider messages that cloud our ability to notice. We put down our hand-held computers and smart watches for a time so that we can better watch. We root out some of the distractions that make life a blur. We really look into the faces of people we love. We keep looking. We watch for wayside graces. We wait a little longer in a space of quiet and look with more attention.

And especially we ask Jesus to help us see him for who he is. Because we can get that wrong.

John reminds us in this healing story of the religious leaders of Jesus’s day, who missed apprehending who Jesus was altogether. They are so busy getting furious about a blind man’s receiving his sight, jealous of the attention Jesus is getting, that they miss seeing that Jesus is doing the work of his Father.

And the cross, which is to come, does require some sanctified gazing, pondering. This is our Savior and the Son of God, but you could look at the cross and see only shame and folly and foolishness.

Crucifixion made the one punished despised and despicable. The cross loomed above any byway as not only an instrument of torture; it was, as someone has said, an open-air theater of humiliation.

Crucifixion intended, given how distasteful it all was, to erase the crucified from memory—forever. It led to “nothing in his appearance,” as Isaiah had already prophesied, “that we should desire him.”

Or so the Romans thought.

While some turned away from the cross and its shame, others kept watching, moved and hopeful, able to perceive God’s great sacrificial love on display here. In Christ, in the pain and and horror, God makes his love vivid and visceral, plain and glorious both. What seemed to be the worst thing transfigures into the best news.

So we keep looking. And we keep praying: “Help us, God, not to miss seeing what you are doing.”

Isn’t that a prayer God loves to answer?

Adapted from a sermon I preached at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Houston, March 15, 2026 (36 minutes in).

Where You Can Find Me

Near Nashville:

Book signing / Meet the Author The Fellowship Coffee House 2944 US-31W, #105 / White House, TN, Saturday, April 4, 9-11 am.

Book signing / Meet the Author The Rabbit Room (North Wind Manor), Wednesday, April 15, 2-4pm

https://www.rabbitroom.com / 3321 Stephens Hill Ln, Antioch, TN 37013

In Nashville:

Preaching at 7:30, 8:45, 11 am services, with book signing at 10:05 am, Sunday, May 3, St. George’s Episcopal Church, 4715 Harding Road 37205.

Preaching at the 9:30 am service, with book signing to follow: Sunday, May 31 at 10:45, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, 4800 Belmont Park Terrace, Nashville, 37215.

A book that I’ve thought about, researched, prayed for, worried about, got exhilarated over, and struggled with releases today! Fully Beloved is officially out. I’m grateful to Sandra McCracken for these words: “Tim names the ache of loneliness and our lifelong quest for belonging. … With honesty and relatability, he invites us to encounter the God of divine love.” That’s my hope for this book: that it names the ache we all feel and invites us into encountering triune, divine love.

Where to get your copy:

📚 Amazon

📚 Barnes & Noble

📚 Bookshop.org

📚 Available as a paperback, e-book, or audiobook

If you read it and it speaks to you, I’d be grateful if you’d tell someone about it who needs to hear they’re fully beloved. Thank you for being here on launch day.

I have a granddaughter, near Boston, in an all-girls school.

Here is loss and heartbreak multiplied many times over—in families, their community, that whole region. News outlets talk of the war “widening,” the Middle East becoming “engulfed.” The world’s on fire, we sometimes say, and that feels too literal today.

When I was leading a church men’s retreat that very Saturday, talking about God’s love that awes us in and through the Trinity, someone asked the old, old question about why evil persists. Why such horrible heartaches confront us.

The good news, I said, is, “You are not alone in wondering.” Theologians have for centuries wrestled with this, I said. Okay, so the bad news? With all that reflection, with the countless pages in book after book and too many words in sermon after sermon, I still cannot give a simple answer. No one can.

But, as our conversation that morning unfolded, we did affirm and stand on what we can say: God accompanies us—me, you. And God somehow was there that morning of the bombing.

I repeat that word somehow. God was, in ways I don’t want to be glib about, not AWOL. Not missing, even as parents waited outside the heap of concrete and crushed flesh and bloodied backpacks. “I cannot understand,” one dad told a reporter, while he waited for his daughter’s body to be extricated, “how a place where innocent children learn can be bombed like this.” After all, he said, “We are talking about small children who knew nothing of politics or wars.”

Words fail, don’t they? But also give us pointers, at least. God does not simply look from afar, a bystander, a neutral observer. Thank goodness. No, he draws near as one who shares our griefs. Who will come also as Judge, who will set things right. I think, as I pray in full view of the grief and fear this war stirs up in us, that God burns with holy ire against perpetrators of wanton killing. On whatever (or no) side.

But I also moved along, as the morning with the men went on, to Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity Who, as I said to them, not only suffered physically in his journey to the Cross but also, plumbing the depths of humankind’s worst, was rejected utterly. The cross beams served not only an instrument of torture, but, as someone put it, a theater of humiliation. He cried out to God in seeming forsakenness. He died.

There’s mystery here. And miracle. For he did it for us, in face of revolting evil. He came into a war-seared world. Came amid our stupid, unfathomable meanness. That scene centuries ago, as we will soon ponder on Good Friday, doesn’t answer all of the questions about rejection and loss and suffering and death. But we know because of it that we are not God-forsaken.

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Jesus insists he can come close. His willingness to enter our pain makes a difference. And because of what we see at Calvary, even picturing the past weekend’s wreckage, we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus.” (The very last prayer recorded in the Bible, by the way.) He has come, we believe, but we need to feel him even closer, don’t we? And we long for him to redeem and make right. So we keep praying, through our tears: Come—please! This world needs to see and experience him again. I do. We all do.

BOOK RELEASE NEWS

My book, Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Hopes, continues some of the themes the my post above. Available for preorder now, it releases March 17.

Among the events surrounding the release, I’ll be preaching at St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston, Sunday, March 15, 9, 11:15 am (and signing books), and speaking at Houston’s Saint John the Divine Wednesday, March 18, 6:30-8 pm (signing books).

And a book reading/signing near Nashville:

The Fellowship Coffee House / 2944 US-31W, #105 / White House, TN, Saturday, April 4, 9-11 am.

More events to come (and podcasts, too!)

And if you are tempted to find that a tiny bit comical, know this: By the stirring response Bekah felt from the little life within, they were convinced that, even then, little Eva could recognize that someone was addressing her.

I love that thought. Right there, coming from outside her, were voices I’ll wager she listened for. For the parents, a kick from inside signaled the wonder of a person poking and elbowing her way into conscious existence, delighting in some primal way in a safe place to grow. Her parents knew a life was growing wonderfully within and they wanted to ready her even then to find joy in the conversations that would later unfold.

How did our parents carry us? It could have been that way with you and me too. We begin as a gestating, curled-up question mark, waiting to be ushered—or pushed—into the answering open. We had a lot to take in. I can’t imagine the kaleidoscope of sensations— except that I get a little hint when I watch Eva, now a toddler, wide-eyed with curiosity, intently staring at the world around her—especially the faces.

Next time you see a baby or toddler, notice how they soak up everything and everyone around them, like a sponge, or like tiny explorers scanning new territory at every glance or sound. And while the glint of sunlight or a sudden movement of some object catches their attention (with Eva it’s our cat, Gilly scooting by), they especially watch for ways to connect. Aren’t they on the lookout for more than a mild face, but a smile and warm eyes?

And there is something even deeper going on here. Isn’t a longing and stirring already at work that will eventually lead us to the One who made us?

(Excerpted and adapted from my forthcoming Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes).

Not exactly soaring prose, just short, one-syllable words, and a question mark. I thought about starting with “Does God care?” Similarly brief, aiming at what we feel or worry or wonder about.

But the version my editor and I ended up with seems both more personal, and closer to home, more likely to hit at the heart: Am I loved? We can ask the line this way, too: Are we loved?

Maybe no question nags at us more. Perhaps no question matters as much.

We can move into the territory of cliché here, of course. Or overdone sentiment. And I don’t mean just a cozy emotional feeling, as Frederick Buechner once put it.

My efforts to answer the query, where I’ve been taking that question, you might not think of as promising.

But I’ve been discovering a surprising source that helps me, grounds me. I mean an ancient portrait of God: The picture of a God known to us as Father, Son, Spirit. (I note that my three-word question has a three-named answer.)

For here I find depth and grittiness and richness and—especially—tenderness.

Lots of us, I know, lean toward thinking of the belief in Trinity as complicated, confusing, even intimidating.

But I’ve long suspected there’s more to this ancient picturing of God. That it could lead to more joy. Lend more depth and vitality to our praying. Leave behind a settled conviction that we are beloved.

The Trinity, the way it paints a scene of a loving God who communes and converses, offers us an invitation to a life more fully convinced of God’s kindness. We find ourselves rooted in a love that doesn’t just make us feel better, but gives us more to share with others.

Not that we’ve experienced this view in all its fullness. Or can, or ever will. But what if getting a conviction here might help us—immensely?

“I don’t think,” I heard a preacher say not long ago, “that people, for the most part, tend to like themselves.” He was speaking from the vantage point of years of ministry, walking with people through their disappointments, temptations, and heartaches.

They live—we live—with the pressure that comes from a restless, driven need to self-improve and, well, prove something. We know the feeling: “The embarrassment of a Christian I knew myself to be,” as Kate Gaston put it wryly. “The final letdown in a long line of letdowns, and God was up there somewhere, shaking his head in mild, paternal disappointment.”

Sometimes it’s the littlest oversight that stains (or stings) our conscience, making us doubt whether we can be loved for who we are. Maybe it’s the “big” deal, the colossal failure, the thing we fear makes God mad, that we worry can separate us from any hope of mercy.

But all of us—whatever our imagined innocence and accomplishments, our human shame and regrets— need more than affirmation from peers, friends, or parents. We also need a divine, overflowing affection. As Julian of Norwich put it, with medieval flourish and elegance, “Our courteous Lord does not want his servants to despair even if they fall frequently and grievously. Our falling does not stop his loving us.”

And we secretly, at least on our best days, pine not only for moral instruction but for transformation. Grace is, well, great, of course. Amazing. But we also long for more than forgiveness. Also, please, help to keep going strong. Assistance to stay in the race.

Through the Trinity, God shows up with the patience of a father for his wayward children, to be sure. We see the redeeming grace of Jesus our Savior. Also, I would stress, the power of the Holy Spirit to make it real. There’s a richness there. The fellowship of the Three comes alongside. And we get hope for not only reassurance, but also new beginnings.

It’s in situations like this where I see the Trinity as more than an interesting puzzle or fodder for mere human curiosity.

Whatever the Trinity means for God in God’s very self (and there are mysteries here), it also gives an offer of extended, extravagant hope for what we could never do alone. The arrival of what John Donne called the “three-personed God” becomes less like health food supplements and more like an emergency room intervention. Not a pleasant hobby but a lifeline, given how much is at stake. I like how my friend Charlie Peacock puts this need: “As it turned out, [mere] transcendence as I understood it was not what I needed. … I needed real-time, earthbound rescue. I needed forgiving, reconciling, restorative love.”

Might we all find in the picture the Trinity gives us a love and a hope that does for us what we couldn’t even dream of doing for ourselves? In the Trinity, the Bible says, we see a God who doesn’t simply love but—on every level possible—is love. Lives in radiating love. Who draws astonishingly close in Christ. In every circumstance.

When we say God made himself vulnerable by taking on flesh, that’s what we mean. God appeared on earth as something as fragile and breakable as a human being. God came to a place where sin reigns, without every piece of protection from divine armor. For us and for our sake. But he did. And came out on the other side, bringing us along.

There’s lots more to be said. Sometimes our growth in such love meets challenges. We doubt the impossibly good news. Scoff when have trouble believing it includes us. Even kick it away. Sometimes our sin catches up with us or with those we love, no matter how filled with nurturing love God’s work in the Trinity seems. No matter how often we, in various ways, sing “Jesus loves me.”

But I’m seeing how the whole picture also offers resources (and resilience) for growth in goodness and holiness, and oh, thank God, hope. What if the three words rolling around in our heads were these: “You are loved.”

Broken as we are, as worrying as our situations are, saving and empowering grace appears. The possibility of more to come stands before us, awaiting an accepting, willing response.

[This Substack essay is cross-posted with my blog at www.revtimothyjones.com.]

Where I’ll Be …

January 4, 11, 18, AND February 15 (four Sundays):

St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Nashville: four-part adult Sunday school class, 10:00 am.

Saturday, February 28: half-day men’s retreat

St. George’s Episcopal Church, Nashville (more details to come).

March 16 (Sunday):

St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Houston, Sunday, preaching at the two traditional morning services and teaching the adult forum in between.

March 18: Wednesday, 6:30:

St. John the Divine, Houston, evening Lenten Speaker Series.

March 22: Sunday, 9 and 11 am:

Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Columbia, SC, where I served for some years as Dean: preach and teach.

March or April:

St. George’s Episcopal Nashville, Book-signing event in Date not confirmed

Wednesday, March 11:

Author book signing event at North Wind Manor (www.rabbitroom.com), 2 pm.

Thurs-Sat., April 23-25, New York:

Mockingbird Conference. www.mbird.com or https://tinyurl.com/3s32ucpp

ALSO: I have been and will be recording podcasts surrounding the release of my book. Stay tuned!

NOTE: Preordering a book helps an author and communicates to the publisher the value of the book’s message (and how many books to print). See preorder links below.

Preorder at Bookshop.org. Preorder at amazon.com

Good, a writer famously said, is the enemy of great. Don’t settle for “just fine,” in other words, when you can lose sleep and achieve excellence.

Maybe you feel drawn to that kind of determination. Maybe you feel its tug at this still-young new year. For a part of us thinks, Yes, I’m tired, but no matter. There’s another achievement to notch, another way to impress people.

But a compulsion to produce something stellar and near-perfect can weigh us down, angst us out, leach life of joy. And it keeps us from, well … I’ll say more about that hidden loss in a moment.

Such a voice doesn’t just murmur within us, it also accuses us. We sweat, writes David Zahl in The Big Relief, from “the pressure to succeed or to produce or to be a certain kind of person that our culture esteems.” Someone who brims with “influence and initiative and purpose.” All that, and a clean email inbox.

We feel compelled, Zahl continues, “to justify our lives and demonstrate that we’re worthy of the air we breathe.” Which is a lot to pin on this morning’s day planner or dinner plan. The voice inside us isn’t saying, “Try your best.” It’s saying, “Prove that you are worthy—exemplary.”

And we apply this in lots of places. We aim to be chipper, exceptional caregivers to kids or aging parents. We picture being mysteriously self-sufficient people who never need to turn to someone for help—but somehow also get praised for teamwork.

Or we feel haunted by the need for a diet shorn of sugar and carbs, while we count gym hours like merit badges. And oh, our hobbies should impress strangers. Yes, I drink coffee, but I roast my own beans. We use a burr grinder, of course. Someone we know bakes bread but it’s artisanal.

Or maybe the drivenness comes simpler: there’s that letter or email that someone needs from us, but we feel stymied about what to say, worried we won’t get it right. We put off sharing it. Or don’t send it at all. And that person in need loses out because we haven’t overcome our fear.

Creativity is often messier than picture-perfect.

So I have a twist on the slogan: Whatever the place of greatness, perfection is the enemy of creativity.Or I should say perfectionism is the enemy—the enemy of art, or poetry, or flourishing at the office, or a good conversation at an elegant (or pizza) dinner—all kinds of deeply important things we do or try.

For insisting that what we attempt or make is near-flawless has hidden, fateful, even fatal costs.

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Its slow leak of joy even brings a paralysis that keeps us from sharing or showing or posting. That is the hidden cost that may matter most.

I mean that when we get hampered and hamstrung by thinking we always and everywhere must produce the pristine best, we may give up too soon. I mean that obsessing over impressing makes it harder for what we do and make to emerge into the light, find its home. We weigh ourselves down and emotionally tie ourselves up so much that we don’t share what we have created. We keep it to ourselves, feeling like we have to shield it from the maybe critical gaze of others.

When I stand in front of a group of people (or write an essay like I’m doing now), the siren voice whispers something like this: a modest effort won’t be sufficient. Glitches or verbal stumbles will obliterate any impact. Get it just right.

I’ve just spent the better part of three days in a Nashville studio recording the audio for my forthcoming book. A joy, and I’m grateful I get to. But there’s nothing like hours on end of reading out loud your own writing to begin to see the limitations of your attempts at eloquent language. But I also think of how much I long to share what I’ve been discovering.

Breaking Up with Perfect

So this new year finds me thinking about another way. Maybe recovering, say, some of the joy of writing I used to feel—the delight of arranging new combinations of words. The surprising rhythms that appear. The stories that come together to make a big idea more engaging or accessible when I teach.

And I mean letting my hobbies have a different feel, too, a little less intensity. And the relationships with all kinds of people I live with or meet with or share an elevator with? A little more lightness, perhaps.

I got to thinking along these lines because of a New York Times essay, “The Quest for Perfection Is Stunting Our Society.”

The author, Jonathan Biss, a musician—a classical instrumentalist, no less, where adhering to the notes matters a great deal—hones his craft, to be sure. He has to. But precision, he finds doesn’t always make the most moving music. Technical mastery alone will not make art that transports and transforms. A more heartfelt but rough-hewn rendering might matter more. You want to leave room for the spontaneous, the expressive, the personal. And the not-perfect.

And there’s something important here for all of us. Rather than trying too hard in this new year, maybe we try differently.

Yes, we learn and grow and get better—I’m all for that. I want that. But how about launching in without the nagging pressure to turn all we do into performing. Into yet another good (or poor) grade. For what Biss discovered is true in more than music.

Watching gifted people online (or in person) preach or act or write or artfully manage a staff meeting can intimidate. We see celebrities, having perfected their moves or lightning-fast riffs or brilliant canvases and think, How can I ever do that? Perform that? Sculpt that? Lead like that?

I feel that temptation when I consider my long-time hobby in music. I’ve been drawn to Appalachian melodies, to rhythms brought over by my Irish immigrant forebears or passed around from the hills and hollers and plantation hovels of the American south. I’ve written articles about old-time music, as my subgenre of choice is called. I’ve interviewed gifted (even modestly famous) players and singers.

But even more significantly, I’m learning to play this quirky roots music on the banjo, signing up for workshops, getting with friends for picking sessions.

I’m not mastering intricate jazz arpeggios. (Bless you if you are.) My instruments are fashioned with natural walnut and steel wire, one of my banjos stretched taut with rustic calf skin. I’ll get in front of a modest crowd with musical friends—at a church picnic, say, or at a music camp with fellow students—and share songs and tunes. I’m more often struck by the generous response of our listeners than by my flair or talent.

And writing? A heads up: I’ve decided that in this little essay I’m not holding out for pitch-perfect eloquence. I will try to be content with a respectable line or two mixed in with whatever falls short of flights of fluency, with some parts less than they might be if yet more caffeine (or the Spirit) was given more time to kick in.

I’d better let that be enough, though. Or I may not click the “post” button at all.

My friend Jenna Badeker, a writer herself, and musician and songwriter with Wild Harbors, put it well on an Instagram reel: Because of our wavering loss of nerve, because we overthink and ruminate, because we (let’s face it) get scared sometimes, “There’s lots of art that never gets made, or maybe art that gets made but never shared.” So, she says, sometimes we say to our inner critic: “I need you to be quiet for a moment so that I can put this thing out into the world.”

When we do, you and I won’t always wow the crowd or woo people into the kingdom or move folks to tears. And what we share won’t always land. (And then perhaps we learn from what doesn’t.)

And here is where reconnecting to our spiritual sources matters. Our belovedness in Christ matters (see excerpt from my book, below). We depend on God in our hesitancies here. We live more consciously with a God who willingly becomes our collaborator. Who isn’t put off by our flubs. That’s key.

And such prayerful grounding helps us learn to mute that judgy message that becomes the enemy of fashioning what’s good enough, what’s as good as I know to make. We offer the thing, flaws and all, to the world. And why not invite God into the process big-time, front-end and closing line, and let it go from there out to another?

An excerpt from Fully Beloved (releasing March 17):

If we start with our belovedness [in God], we see something clearer about our identities: We are not our job titles, bank accounts, or the random accomplishments we throw on a résumé to sound like we’ve got everything in hand, right on schedule, thanks very much. … Because I’m created by a loving God, my chance to live and flourish was not wrested but gifted. If we all come from some place, we also owe life to a Someone. Our making grew out of a the divine company of the Trinity; we have a connection that overarches us and grounds us.

I still get weighed down some days by the achievement-oriented household that oohed and ahhed at recognition and awards and accomplishments. I’m not sorry I got my Eagle Scout award from Boy Scouts. I learned good skills and made new friends as I earned what they called merit badges. I am grateful I learned the difference between a square knot and a granny knot. Out in the woods, I can spot poison ivy in a flash. But I also felt what I did sometimes as a pressure. Almost as a compulsion to prove my worth—merit proved by badges. In glimmers of the Trinity, though, the community we see there, the work done by Father, Son, and Spirit, we can let go of thinking it’s all up to us. If we are truly beloved, maybe we can loosen up a bit, lighten up a lot. “Wag more, bark less,” as one bumper sticker says. Obsess less, perhaps.

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And visit my website, too, at www.revtimothyjones.com for updates on my speaking and preaching and blogging.

For Christianity also takes seriously our desire to act—to make a difference in a world so bent toward self and sin.

Author and priest Fleming Rutledge recently pointed me to a New Testament verse that helps here, that shows us how we face into these realities: “What sort of persons ought you to be?” the passage she referred to in 2 Peter asks. The answer found in that set of verses, she says, comes down to just two words.

We are to be, Peter wrote, “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God” (3:11–12). Waiting and hastening—both at once! Each working together. Guarding quiet and stillness, yet leaning forward.

We wait because God has up his sleeve things we don’t want to miss. We don’t rush in. We need guidance, for one thing. We don’t get agitated and anxious to do something, anything. No, prayer keeps our actions from being blind stabs in the dark. And, for another thing, we find a staying power that only Father Son, and Holy Spirit can offer. Opened to the Spirit through worship, we move, act, and reach out with a power beyond ourselves. The incarnate God goes with us. How essential! A powerful goodness, not our own, lives in us.

Which leads to the second word: Hasten can mean, as one dictionary put it, “to move hurriedly.” But speed isn’t the point, is it? This isn’t about hurrying about. For hasten can also simply mean “to cause something to happen sooner than it otherwise would.” We put our hand to the work to be done not frantically but trustingly.

And here is where our efforts come in when it comes to God’s longer game. God enlists you and me in what unfolds. Perhaps you sense that already you are under the Master’s orders to do something—to write a letter or make a gift or go volunteer. Maybe you sense it’s time to speak out, even if it means stepping out in faith. But because of who goes with you, perhaps you will then say, “I didn’t know I could do that.” And without God you couldn’t.

But with God in you, you join the hastening. You get a part in the kingdom-coming. Our brown-paper wrapped efforts and everyday offerings become what our aching world needs. And we pray as we move and act, pleading, in the words of a prayer in Revelation, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (The last prayer in the whole Bible, by the way.) With our cooperating while we say such prayers—with both our doing and our interceding—good things will come more quickly. And come with a power that surprises us. And surpasses what you or anyone can manage alone.

(Photo of rushing man from Unsplash, courtesy of Andy Beale.)

Don’t forget to visit my website, too, for ongoing updates about my new book, due in March, Fully Beloved: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes.

But waiting is also a way to ready ourselves for something more, something better. If waiting is one of our common human challenges, it is also a lesson in learning we don’t—we cannot—endlessly curate and orchestrate our lives. Much of our waiting is filled with our own preferences, of course. But we can’t always know the outcome of the thing that so worries us, the thing that in prayer we plead for. Waiting can mean we learn to hold a little more loosely our convictions about what must happen. We let go of insisting to God or to others that a certain thing must happen.

And the season of Advent helps us here. It is all about making a turn in our longing and watching. Our painful yearning, at least for moments, transforms into something more like trust. Or at least an experience with a little less stress. We begin to get a glimpse that that new possibilities lie ahead, whatever the particular result or however the next stage of the thing unfolds. There’s a soberness, but also anticipation.

Advent also makes us realize that more than certain outcomes, we want an encounter. We want to meet a loving God who will walk us through whatever we will face. “But it is for you, O Lord, that I wait,” we read in a psalm. “It is you, O Lord my God, who will answer” (Psalm 38:15). That kind of waiting posture may require practice. It may not seem natural, especially when all we want to do is make something work out in the way we deeply prefer.

A woman I know wrote a book titled Graceful Waiting, dealing with her struggles to be patient with God when hard things happened. “My waiting was anything but graceful,” she told me. “The grace was on God’s part.”

So we factor in grace—God’s good purposes, God’s ever-present help. We recall how much good God has in mind for the world. We don’t just wait, we also watch, as God directs our eyes to a Presence who may not work out his plans on our timetable. We approach life with open, even emptied hands, not clenched fists. And then as you watch, you “stretch out your hands,” as Henri Nouwen put it, “and wait again for the gift that gives new life.”

Note: These paragraphs adapt an Advent meditation I wrote for the parish Advent guide created by my church, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Nashville.

I am not alone in feeling the soul expand when threading through nature’s splendors. And it doesn’t have to be a greenway or mountain trail or a streaming sunset. Sometimes snow washes the city air and freshens the pavement, making it all seem even clearer, cleaner, imbued with goodness. And I’ve long thought that glancing out a window can be an aid for awareness.

Research using EEGs and other ways to measure neural activity shows that being in nature spurs our ability to pay attention. It can heighten our senses and will often catalyze deeper creativity. People feel measurably less afraid—deeply calmed—after a walk in a natural environment compared to an urban one.

Nature writing is booming as a genre because so many of us feel cut off from this natural world. We crave a deeper relationship to the world’s wider web. It makes sense that people still return to Thoreau’s Walden (with a big PBS special on the American naturalist coming in March). Outdoor gear retailers like REI, built around getting people outside, keep thriving for the same reason. We want to do better at cherishing the world—held captive, as we often seem, by our blue-glowing screens. The scent of honeysuckle and the immensity of oaks carry on all around us, even if we sometimes manage to miss it all.

It’s not just the orange-pink streaks of dawn air that stir us, too, not just the majesty of rocky peaks; it’s also the vividness of the small and miraculous. Once, on a vacation, the Oregon tidepools amazed me with the finger-like, ticklish tentacles of sea anemones. Or there was the litter of mewling kittens born—to our surprise!—in our basement early in our marriage—that was a wonder! And most miraculous of all: a baby born squalling from the attraction and interaction of two people. Sometimes a dimension, there all along, emerges into clear view, right where we are. And that’s good. Moments like those need cultivating and deserve a little internal party.

I might be tempted to say, then, that we can unreservedly commend our culture’s recovery of the delights of an enchanted world. What’s not to like in a sheer delight under the Milky Way’s starry display?

But I also feel something else nagging at me, especially when talking to folks who say, “I experience God mostly when in the woods or on the golf links.” I hear that as a defense for skipping church or shunning organized religion. But I wonder: “Why stop with the majestic view?” Isn’t there, at the heart of the cosmos also a vibrant Presence? Amid the mysteries and miracles of beauty what about also what someone called our ache for cosmic specialness? Why, then, just stand in awe when we are also hearing an invitation to intimacy and praise, especially when life feels, like it sometimes does, broken?

The whole universe—and our little world—has more depth and interrelatedness than we may first realize. And deep down we hunger to reconnect to that.

I think of Emily Dickinson, more than a century ago, rhapsodizing about the mind-settling goodness of earth. We love her poetry for that. But she also welled up with words that long for connection. She grabbed a pencil stub and an envelope flap or chocolate candy wrapper (where many of her scrawled snatches of verse got netted) to express (with a playful wit) some deeper sense:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee.

And revery.

The revery alone will do,

If bees are few.

Revery is not that far from reverence—and delight. If she crammed poems with images of a robin, a moon hung in a night sky, and that oft-quoted “certain slant of light,” Emily found everyday images simply the stage, a warm-up for more. She knew those glimpses in themselves could not be enough. Earth’s signs and wonders, she kept reminding us, do not have to end in themselves. She sorted through the world’s little details in ways that sometimes detonate with their depths. It was she who pined,

My period had come for Prayer—
No other Art—would do—
My Tactics missed a rudiment—
Creator—Was it you?

The Creator, not just the created, she knew, animates the cosmos. Who’d want to miss that Presence, then? Even more poignantly, she goes on,

Infinitude—Had’st Thou no Face
That I might look on Thee?

Even better than the universe’s canvas, then, she kept watching for a Face. The infinite—can it also become intimate? For all that she still sometimes hesitated in prayer, she longed for more than big skies or alpine heights. She wanted not just to respect what is above and around us, but to connect.

And here lies part of what’s missing in our wider culture’s veneration of the natural order, its yearning for a re-enchanted world: A deeply personal dimension. When you are grieving, you need more than a marvel or magnificence. Can you ask the glistening sun actually to listen? The forest can’t turn a kind ear to your prayerful cries when you feel crushed. When we are reduced to weeping, the woodland floor might absorb our tears, but it cannot lovingly notice them. There is movement out there, the steady, unstoppable turning of seasons, the cycle of life, yes, but what of our wish for, well, conversation and communion?

I recall a woman, an atheist, who’d been hiking the Swiss alps, writing to a friend, “I long to make some small sound of praise to someone, but to whom?”

We want to make a sound of praise that we hope gets heard.

We might be tempted to think we’re “closer to God” out in a woodland glade, closer than when witnessing a less-than-inspired sermon or an off-key worship anthem. But you can’t say to the universe the words I sometimes pray from the Psalms: “O Lord, in the morning you hear my voice; in the morning I plead my case to you and watch” (3:5). What is on the trail ahead does its best work when it leads us to find the personal dimension of a truly relational being.

Augustine, centuries ago, captures a conversation he imagines having with the natural world: “And what is the object of my love?” he wonders, his soul’s longing piercing him. “I asked the earth,” he wrote of his quest to know where his love and longing pointed, and the earth said: “‘It is not I.’” He goes on, “I asked all that is in [the earth]; they made the same confession. . . . I asked heaven, sun, moon and stars; they said: Nor are we the God whom you seek.’ . . . And with a great voice they cried out: ‘He made us.’” God the Maker made him. The One even deeper and higher and better than the best of earth’s miraculous mysteries. This may be harder to grasp, but it outdoes the richest sentiment offered by any scenery.

For the big story behind the universe gets even better, even more full of grace and possibility. And there’s even more reason for thankfulness at the sights of Creation: God in God’s very self comes by. Visits the neighborhood. Offers to come and reside in our heart. Stretches out a hand of invitation. Promises to feed and strengthen us.

Later in my morning run, I saw a late-fall acorn on the path. It wasn’t terribly special at first glance; thousands might be strewn about, a primary food source, the Internet tells me, for the gray squirrels scampering about. But I also noticed, as I picked up another one, a stem sticking out from the nut’s little hat. The oak tree seed had found its life from the connection it had with the huge tree that had fed it, fostered it, shielded it.

I saw a little parable here of our own connecting.

God not only flung expanses of beauty across a morning sky; as the biblical story unfolds, he also became, for me—like a nurturing, nourishing heavenly Father. Mother Nature can’t hold a candle to a God who pays relentless attention to you and

me. “Written into the heart of the universe,” writes Julie Canlis, “is open and free conversation between us and God; [a certainty] that the universe is personal; that time rushes over a bedrock of love.”

That dimension of love is key. The beauty I witnessed amid November’s extravagant show of sun-lit foliage did remind me of something, but even better turned me expectantly to beauty’s Source.

One more thing from my run. One of the prayers that came naturally to me as I kept jogging was a request for grace: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.” It’s a simple prayer, and an ancient one. I find it easy to say and repeat. It frames what I need so well. For its request for mercy isn’t just about the gift of forgiveness, as vital as that is; the prayer feels bigger than that. It’s asking also for help. As in, Lord, I need you! And please, be close! Bring help, in other words, right in the thick of my particular life.

We ask, then, for a mercy that draws intimately close and fills us with its goodness. Like only a loving God can promise. Like only the personal God who hears my cries can give.