Yet, there is something about being human that compels us to hide what hurts, to bury what frightens us, to turn away from the things we do not know how to fix.

I don’t want to bury the lead, so I’m going to make the point of this article as clear as a graveyard in the afternoon sun: the things we refuse to address, the things we keep hidden underneath the soil, become roots that grow strong enough to break the surface, fracturing everything above, no matter the damage.

Sorry if you came for some light reading:) Let’s go beneath the surface.

Hanging between heaven and earth ]

Absalom is hanging between heaven and earth.

In 2 Samuel, we read about how his hair is caught in the branches of a great oak. His mule has kept running beneath him. His feet no longer touch the earth, yet heaven feels impossibly far away. He is suspended there, waiting for the inevitable.

Absalom did not arrive there by accident. He’d been stuck, suspended, years before that oak had ever sprouted its branches.

His sister, Tamar, was raped by their half-brother, Amnon. David, the king and their father, hears of it. Scripture says he is furious. That’s it. As far as we know, there’s no acknowledgement or consequence beyond personal anger.

Absalom takes Tamar into his home. He watches his sister try to piece together what cannot be pieced back together. He waits for years.

Absalom is hanging between heaven and earth.

Two years later, he murders Amnon and flees.

His father mourns the loss of one son while remaining separated from another. Years pass before Absalom is allowed to return to Jerusalem. Even then, they live within the same city without speaking to one another.

Passing one another’s memories every day, knowing exactly what happened, knowing exactly why, and saying nothing.

Absalom is hanging between heaven and earth.

Eventually, Absalom burns down an entire field to force an audience with his father, so David finally calls for him.

We’ve been building up to this moment for years. Yet, the text only tells us one thing: “The king kissed Absalom.”

Then it moves on. There is no conversation about Tamar, no acknowledgement of Amnon, no words over the years that have been stolen from both of them.

Affection returned, but acknowledgement never did.

Absalom is hanging between heaven and earth.

Absalom wins the hearts of the people and declares himself king. He wages war against his own father, and David flees Jerusalem barefoot as the son he once held as a child pursues him with an army.

I imagine David remembering how it felt to carry his baby, shushing his cries as he commanded his men, “Deal gently with the young man Absalom for my sake.”

But Absalom never hears those words.

Absalom is hanging between heaven and earth.

While fleeing the battlefield, the same beautiful hair Scripture once took time to describe becomes caught in the branches of the great oak. The very thing that made him stand out leaves him helpless.

After years of never quite touching solid, steady ground, nor ever reaching freedom above, his inner world becomes visible as he’s physically suspended between heaven and earth.

David’s men took three javelins and plunged them into Absalom’s heart.

This is the moment that the silence finally breaks.

“O my son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you—O Absalom, my son, my son!”

I can’t help but wonder if David was grieving more than the son. I wonder if he was grieving every year that came before it. Every conversation swallowed, wound left untouched, averted eyes trying not to look at all the brokenness.

What would’ve happened if David had been brave enough to look Absalom in the eyes all those years ago? To weep with him and Tamar? What would’ve happened if the silence had broken years before his sorrow echoed through the forest?

Scripture never tells us the answer to that, but it does make it painfully clear: silence is never neutral.

Where is your oak?

Most of us, I hope, aren’t living through the tragedy of David’s household.

Our brothers are not murdering one another, our children are not declaring themselves king, we are not fleeing barefoot through the wilderness.

Yet I think we know this story better than we’d like to admit because all of us have something we’ve learned to live around.

A wound we’ve convinced ourselves no longer hurts. A relationship we’ve slowly let drift because confronting it felt too uncomfortable. Quiet bitterness we’ve given a comfortable chair in the corner of our hearts. A private shame we’re too scared to acknowledge, even within ourselves.

We bury things because buried feels safer than exposed, but what’s buried can do nothing except grow.

We tell ourselves we’ll deal with it later when life settles down, when the timing is right, when they’re ready, when we’re ready.

But roots never wait, and by the time they’ve broken through the surface, they’ve already spent years becoming impossible to pull up.

That is the real tragedy of David’s story.

The oak that caught Absalom began as something unseen, hidden beneath the soil, growing resentment in the dark.

So, what is your oak?

What conversation has been growing roots beneath the surface? What grief have you mistaken for healing simply because enough time has passed? What bitterness has quietly been stretching itself beneath your life while everything above appears fine?

On the other side of acknowledgement

There’s actually one detail in Absalom’s story that I hadn’t noticed until I reread it.

After everything had happened but before his own death, Scripture tells us that Absalom had a daughter.

He named her Tamar.

Then, almost as if God doesn’t want us to miss it, Scripture pauses to add one more detail: “She became a beautiful woman.”

The Tamar whose story began in ashes was never given another scene. We never find out what became of her. Scripture leaves her standing at the edge of the story, a desolate woman living in her brother’s house.

And then, almost so quietly you can miss it in the midst of the chaos, her name appears again.

Tamar.

Absalom, the brother who gathered his shattered sister into his home, refused to let her name disappear with her pain.

I’d like to imagine a little girl full of joy and beauty, running through the house as her father called her by the same name that once echoed through rooms filled with grief. The name that once carried unbearable sorrow became the name Scripture pauses to call beautiful.

This feels like a kind of redemption to me. This is the other side of acknowledgement.

The same Absalom who eventually allowed his own wounds to grow into an oak first did something profoundly right: he looked directly at his sister’s brokenness instead of averting his eyes.

He couldn’t undo what had happened to Tamar, but he refused to let what had happened become the end of her story.

Absalom’s story is tragic precisely because both things are true. He knew how to acknowledge another person’s pain, yet never learned how to surrender his own.

By the end of 2 Samuel, both brothers are dead. Yet one of the gentlest pictures of redemption in the entire story arrives through a little girl quietly carrying the name of a woman the world almost forgot.

Tamar lives on through new life.

This is the other side of acknowledgement: bringing something into the light so that what grows from it is no longer a graveyard, but a garden.

So pull up the roots

Roots don’t stop growing when we avert our eyes.

They become trunks, trunks become oaks, and before we know it, what was once buried breaks through the surface and becomes the very thing that leaves us hanging between heaven and earth.

I believe this is partly why Jesus calls us into the light. Not because He delights in exposing what is hidden, but because He loves us too much to let our roots become oaks.

Acknowledgment doesn’t erase the past; it simply refuses to let the past become prophecy.

The warmth of the sun still falls on gardens and graveyards alike.

So what will you do?

Will you bury your pain until the only thing left behind is a graveyard? A place where weeping breaks the silence, but only after it’s too late?

Or will you have the courage to look brokenness in the face, call it by name, and watch a garden grow in its place?

In those days, I would feel the spring in a way that only exists in the South. There’s a change in the weather, yes, but it’s more than that. The creatures sing louder now that the sun warms their backs. There’s a hint of humidity wanting to break in before summer opens the door to it. The breeze is perfect and the wildflowers peek over the grass that finally regained its color.

I would only stop if I found an open field or, even better, a hidden river. If I found an open field with a river flowing through it, it was like winning the lottery. With a blanket in hand, I’d find a spot among the tall grass and take in the beauty and the calm and the depths of what it means to be present and breathing and alive, surrounded by an ecosystem that’s present and breathing and alive with me.

And as quickly as I would breathe in and let the peace fill my lungs, the next breath would catch the overwhelming amount of pollen. A piercing buzz would fill my right ear, and I’d catch a glimpse of the biggest bee in existence, and pretty soon, a bright red wasp would appear above me. There’d be fifty fire ants on my blanket, and a random truck would park one dirt patch too close.

Nature would remind me that if I wasn’t comfortable with what it means to be held in it, then I'd better get a move on before the fire ants climb up my leg.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about lately: we say we want to be present, to be held, to be known. But what we really want is the river and the wildflowers, but not the wasps. We want to be held gently, on our own terms, when we’re ready. We want to belong but reserve the right to leave when it gets uncomfortable. We want love that sees us completely but rarely sneaks up, asking for anything difficult in return.

But being held, being known, being present doesn’t work that way. You can’t curate which parts get to notice you.

The Velveteen Rabbit has always been one of my favorite stories. In it, a toy rabbit in a child’s nursery asks the old Skin Horse, the oldest and wisest toy in the nursery, what it means to become real. The Skin Horse explains that it doesn’t happen all at once. Instead, becoming real happens when someone loves you for a long, long time. Not surface-level love, but the kind that actually sees you, holds you, refuses to let you stay as you are.

The toy rabbit doesn’t become real by staying perfect, by protecting himself from wear and tear, by maintaining his original form. He becomes real precisely because the little boy loves him so much that the rabbit gets dragged through gardens, held tight during nightmares, and carried everywhere until his seams come loose and his fur rubs off.

Being loved–being truly seen and held–wears you down, if you’re doing it right. It changes you. It costs you the version of yourself you’ve been grasping desperately to hold onto.

Today, we’ve built entire lives around avoiding this. We want presence without participation. We want to be held by something real while maintaining our escape routes, our “peace.” We want to lay our blanket down in a field, but jump up the second a wasp appears.

But those abandoned cabins I’d pass–tilted and splintering–they’re what happens when we refuse to keep walking on the floors. When we won’t pay the cost of staying. The foundation didn’t fail because change was too heavy; it failed because no one was willing to continue living on it, to continue repairing and renovating and refining when needed to ensure that the foundation held strong, no matter the change.

Being present means you’re subject to what holds you, to its beauty and its demands. You don’t get to be known by something that won’t also ask something of you. You don’t get to be held by God, by love, by community, by nature without surrendering control over the terms.

Maybe it’s a strained friendship, the marriage that requires more grace than you thought you had, the calling that won’t let you stay comfortable, the grief that won’t resolve on your timeline. That’s your proof. You’re being held. The question is whether you’ll stay long enough to see the beauty sneaking through.

The velveteen rabbit got shabby, a few fire ants climbed my leg, and the truck parked too close. And I had a choice: run from what it costs to be held, or stay in the field anyway.

We’re all making that choice, I think. Every single day.

Because the moment you lay your blanket down in that field, you’re in it. You’re seen. Not just by the beauty you’re taking in, but by the ecosystem that doesn’t ask permission before it includes you in its rhythms.

The fire ants climbing your leg aren’t interrupting your presence. They’re proof of it.

My cousin-in-law’s dad told me something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.

Here on the mountain where we’re staying in Zapallar, Chile, the developers waited years before building. They planted trees first—pines and eucalyptus mostly—and let them grow tall and thick before they even thought about drawing property lines. By the time they were ready to build, the trees had created natural fences, living boundaries between homes. The properties were more beautiful that way, he said. More intentional.

I love that. The idea that someone looked at a bare mountainside and said, “Not yet. Let things grow first.”

We hadn’t been to Chile in seven years. Seven years of trees growing taller, roots digging deeper, branches reaching wider. Seven years of my youngest cousins aging from ten to almost seventeen. Seven years of my other cousins scattering to Europe, to Korea, to lives I only see in Instagram stories now.

Seven years since I’d seen my grandma, who’s 92 now and moves slower but smiles just as wide.

Seven years since I’d seen my grandpa, about four years since he passed.

The Mathematics of Absence

There’s a specific type of math you do when you return to a place after years away. You count what’s grown and what’s gone. You measure the space between who you remember and who stands in front of you now.

My grandpa isn’t in his chair on the patio anymore, the one where he’d sit for hours with oil paint on his fingers and canvas propped against his easel. The air feels different without the smell of linseed oil, without the sound of his brush tapping against the palette. I keep looking for him there anyway.

My youngest cousins tower over me now. They have opinions about things, futures they’re thinking about, relationships they’re navigating. When did that happen? In my memory, they’re still kids running through the house, sticky-handed and loud. But seven years is a long time when you’re growing up. It’s not long at all when you’re trying to hold on.

My aunts fill every room they enter with laughter that spills over like wine. They’re cool in a way that makes “cool” feel like an inadequate word. They’re funny and caring and so completely themselves that you can’t help but want to be around them. My uncles are gentle and firm in equal measure, the kind of men who will challenge you to think deeper and then sit at the piano after Christmas dinner, singing old songs like they’re prayers.

The wild flowers here don’t exist anywhere else. They’re specific to this soil, this climate, this exact stretch of Chilean coastline. Even if I saw them anywhere else on this earth, they would still be different. Less wild and bright. I’ve been trying to learn their names, but they grow so abundantly that new ones appear every time I look.

This Christmas, something happened that no one planned. My grandma’s three youngest grandchildren—teenagers now, old enough to choose for themselves—decided they wanted to be baptized. Just like that, right there in the Airbnb pool.

So my dad and brother waded into the water and baptized them while the rest of us stood around the edge, taking videos we’ll watch for years to come. My grandma sat in her chair watching the faith she planted decades ago bear fruit she might not have expected she’d be able to witness herself.

That same day, we dedicated three babies to the Lord. My nephew, my cousin’s son, and a three-month-old. My grandma got to see it all. Four generations in one afternoon—planting, growing, bearing fruit, planting again.

The trees on this mountain weren’t planted randomly. Someone had a plan. They knew that if they waited, if they let things grow first, the landscape would shape itself into something more beautiful than anything they could force.

Family is like that, I think. You can’t force the roots. You can’t rush the growth. Sometimes you have to plant things and then step back and let time do what time does.

The trees are taller. The property lines are clearer now, shaped by branches and shade. But it’s all connected underneath by the same soil, the same mountain, the same roots drinking from the same water.

What Remains

I’ve been counting trees since we got here. It’s become a kind of meditation, a way of paying attention.

But really, I’m counting other things too.

The number of times my aunts have made me laugh. The meals shared around tables that are never quite big enough to fit us all. The stories about my grandpa that get told over and over because we need to keep hearing them. The way my grandma’s eyes light up when all her grandchildren are in the same room. The inside jokes that have survived seven years of distance. The babies who didn’t exist last time we were here.

This place has grown without us, but it hasn’t outgrown us. That’s the strange part. Life continued here while we were living our separate lives thousands of miles away; birthdays and holidays and ordinary Tuesdays. The trees kept growing. The flowers kept blooming and dying and blooming again. But somehow, it still feels like home.

The babies dedicated don’t know it yet, but they’re being planted into something that started long before them. My grandma’s grandma probably sat in a chair much like hers, watching her own grandchildren grow, marveling at how fast and how slow it all goes.

I think about that every time I look at my family. None of this was rushed. My grandparents planted things in my dad, who planted things in me, who will plant things in my nephew. It’s slow work. Patient work. The kind you might not see the fullness of in your lifetime.

And that’s the point.

The trees on this mountain weren’t planted for the people who planted them. They were planted for us. For me, standing here right now, grateful for shade I didn’t earn and beauty I didn’t create.

My grandpa painted knowing I would see his work after he was gone. My grandma prayed prayers that are being answered in her great-grandchildren. My parents built a new foundation we can build on.

That’s what family is, if you do it intentionally. A bunch of people planting trees they might never sit under, trusting that someone they love will find shade there someday.

I also keep thinking about those trees creating natural boundaries between properties. How the years do the same thing, they create space between us, mark where one family begins and another starts. My cousin has his own home now, his own sons, his own rhythms. My other cousins have built lives in countries I’ve never visited. We’ve found our own bits and pieces of land to tend.

But the roots hold even when the branches scatter, the boundaries that years create don’t divide; they define. We’re all a part of the same landscape, the same story, the same mountain.

That’s why I love counting trees in Zapallar.

Because the practice of noticing, of trying to see what’s being planted and what’s growing and what’s bearing fruit, is the closest I’ve come to watching God keep His promises in real time.

Find your mountain. Start counting.

I've been thinking about this for years now, turning it over in my mind like a smooth stone I can't put down. It's an idea that feels both revolutionary and deeply commonplace, one I'm still ironing out but can't stop wrestling with.

One day, I want to dig into this properly, but for now, these are some of the thoughts I’ve collected on the most well-known subject in the world: suffering.

The historical question of why suffering exists is one that has been asked for generations and will continue to be asked for generations to come. But at the end of the day, suffering will continue to exist, so I’m much more interested in our relationship with it.

What if pain—the very thing we spend our entire lives trying to avoid—is actually sacred?

Last month, I got one of those random stomach pains that always makes me think I'm about to have appendicitis. For those five minutes, it was like my entire body was screaming alarm bells. I couldn't focus on anything else, couldn't sit still, couldn't think about anything except the sharp, twisting sensation that felt like it might split me in half.

Fifteen minutes later, it was completely gone. I went back to scrolling Instagram like nothing happened.

This is what we do, isn't it? The moment discomfort passes, we immediately return to our carefully curated lives of pain avoidance. We take ibuprofen at the first sign of a headache, blast the air conditioning the second we feel too warm, skip difficult conversations that might make us uncomfortable. We've become experts at creating buffer zones between ourselves and anything that doesn't feel good.

But here's what struck me: if my faith is true, if this earthly existence is just the opening chapter of an eternal story, then that stomach pain was a once-in-forever experience.

The way it made me double over, the brief panic that something was seriously wrong, the relief when it passed—none of that will exist in heaven.

That momentary agony was as unique to this life as the second that just passed as you read this word.

Running From Our Only Shot at This

Psychologist Dr. Steven Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, found that our attempts to avoid psychological pain often create more suffering than the original pain itself. We end up suffering twice: once from the actual experience, and again from our resistance to it.

But I wonder if we're missing something even deeper.

As a Christian, I believe this life is the only existence where I'll ever feel the weight of sadness pressing against my chest when someone I love dies. The only time I'll experience the particular ache of disappointment when dreams don't unfold as planned. The only existence where I'll feel like I’m about to blackout when I break a bone.

I broke my pinkie a few years ago (everyone in my life has heard this story and is probably sick of it by now), and now it's forever crooked. For weeks, every time I bumped it or tried to bend it, I was reminded of its brokenness. But what strikes me now isn't just the pain I felt then, it's that the specific sensation of a healing bone, the particular ache of something knitting itself back together incorrectly, is something my glorified body will never experience.

Even deeper than physical pain is the weight that settled in my chest when my grandma passed away. She was one of my favorite people, and losing her felt like someone had reached into my ribcage and removed something essential. But that crushing weight, that specific ache of missing someone who shaped you, that's also unique to this existence.

There is a sort of sacredness in that.

The Theology of Temporary Suffering

Scripture doesn't shy away from this reality. "In this world you will have trouble," Jesus said in John 16:33, almost matter-of-factly. Not might have, not could have, will have.

But he follows it immediately with, "But take heart! I have overcome the world."

There's something profound happening in that conjunction, and it hinges on the tense of Jesus's words. He doesn't say, "I will overcome the world"—future tense, something yet to be accomplished. He says, "I have overcome the world"—past tense, already completed.

Pain is promised for this life, but it's also contained to this life, and more importantly, it's already been defeated.

This means that every ache, every heartbreak, every moment of suffering we experience happens within the reality that Jesus has already conquered it. Scripture promises that in eternity, "there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

We're not just waiting for rescue, we're experiencing temporary pain from a position of ultimate victory.

Paul writes in Romans 8:18 that "our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." He's not minimizing our pain, he's putting it in cosmic perspective. This hurt, this discomfort, this struggle you're walking through right now? It's temporary in the most literal sense.

I think about Job, who experienced suffering that makes most of our daily discomforts look trivial. But even in his darkest moments, he said, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" (Job 13:15). There's a kind of holy defiance there, a refusal to let pain have the final word.

What People Who've Walked Through Fire Know

For nearly 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been producing data and lessons on how to live longer, happier, and healthier lives. George Vaillant, who directed the study for decades, discovered something fascinating: six factors measured by age 50 were excellent predictors of those who would be in the "happy-well" group at age 80: a stable marriage, a mature adaptive style, no smoking, little use of alcohol, regular exercise, and maintenance of normal weight.

That "mature adaptive style" caught my attention. Vaillant described mature defense mechanisms as "primarily adaptive techniques to help us to cope with tense or stressful situations." People who aged well didn't avoid suffering, they developed healthier ways of meeting it. They used humor to endure situations where they lacked control, practiced humility by lowering expectations and focusing on others, and found ways to make their pain serve not just themselves but those around them.

This isn't romanticizing trauma or suggesting we should seek out suffering. It's recognizing something profound: people who've endured unimaginable pain often develop a relationship with their suffering that the rest of us can barely comprehend.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, wrote that "suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning." He wasn't suggesting we seek out pain, but that when it inevitably finds us, we have a choice in how we meet it.

The Art of Not Running

I'm not advocating for seeking out pain. But what if, when discomfort and suffering inevitably finds you, you could meet it with something closer to curiosity than our usual instinct to immediately make it stop?

This is where metacognition becomes crucial. Metacognition—simply put, thinking about your thinking—allows us to step back and observe our own mental processes. When pain arrives, whether physical or emotional, most of us get caught in what psychologists call "pain catastrophizing" which means we spiral into thoughts like "this is terrible," "I can't handle this," or "this will never end."

But research shows that our beliefs about thinking about pain can significantly impact how much we worry or ruminate when pain increases. The ability to observe your own thoughts about suffering—to notice when you're catastrophizing, when you're running, when you're resisting—creates space for a different response.

What if the next time you feel that familiar anxiety tightening in your chest, you paused and thought: "This is the only existence where I'll ever feel exactly this sensation. My future self in eternity will never experience this."

That meta-awareness—that step back from the immediacy of suffering—doesn't eliminate the pain, but it changes our relationship to it.

The stomach-dropping feeling when you get bad news. The embarrassment of failure. The loneliness that settles in your bones on quiet Sunday afternoons. Even those random stomach pains that make you convince yourself you need emergency surgery, only to disappear completely an hour later.

All of it, every uncomfortable sensation, every difficult emotion, is temporary not just in duration, but in availability.

A few months ago, I had the flu and felt like I was actually passing away. My whole body ached, I couldn't keep anything down, and every breath felt like work. As I lay in bed feeling absolutely miserable, a strange thought occurred to me: "This is the only life where I'll ever feel this sick." And somehow, that reframe shifted something. I wasn't grateful for the flu (let's be clear), but I was struck by the uniqueness of the experience.

The apostle Paul learned to be content in all circumstances including hunger, need, and plenty (Philippians 4:12). Maybe part of that contentment came from understanding that every experience, comfortable or not, was just a tiny thread in the tapestry of his earthly existence.

The Weight of Real Suffering

I need to pause here because this conversation becomes more complex when we consider the depths of human suffering. Right now, in Gaza, children and families are dying, many from starvation. Their pain is beyond what most of us can imagine, and I want to be crystal clear: I am not saying their suffering is good or meaningful or something to be grateful for. That would be obscene.

The horror of war, the agony of losing a child, the desperation of hunger—these experiences push against everything I've been exploring here. How do we hold space for the sacredness of temporary pain while acknowledging that some suffering is so profound it feels blasphemous to call it anything but evil?

I don't have clean answers. But I wonder if even in the darkest valleys of human experience, there's something significant about the fact that these feelings belong only to this existence. Not because they're good, but because they're real, and temporary, and part of what it means to be human in a broken world.

I’m not saying the point is to find meaning in every form of suffering, but instead to recognize that this profound capacity for pain exists only in this temporary existence.

Knowing that God will use even our deepest hurt for our ultimate good and His glory means we don't have to run from what He promises to redeem.

The Space Between Avoidance and Pursuit

I'm still working through this idea, still finding the balance between acknowledging pain's temporary sacredness and not romanticizing genuine suffering. There's a fine line between acceptance and passivity, between embracing our full human experience and minimizing the very real negative effects of it.

I’m exploring the idea that maybe it’s worth recognizing that every sensation—pleasant or unpleasant—is part of what makes us uniquely alive in this particular existence.

The next time you stub your toe, feel your heart break, or experience the sharp edge of disappointment, remember: you are feeling something that eternity will never offer you again.

In a strange way, that makes even our pain a kind of gift. Not because it's good, but because it's ours, and it's temporary, and it connects us to every other human who has ever winced, worried, or wept.

The question isn't whether you'll suffer. The question is how you'll choose to deal with it when it comes.

For months, I was obsessed with a five-minute video that didn’t yet exist.

Pre-production stretched across weeks: ensuring the script held every emotional detail necessary, casting calls for three different actors to match three different life stages, location scouting through suburban neighborhoods and dozens of parks, searching for spaces that could hold the weight of someone's testimony. Deciding whether the kitchen scene needed morning light or afternoon shadows. Equipment lists that grew longer each week, shot schedules that accounted for the logistics of aging a character across decades.

Filming took days across multiple locations. The careful choreography of moving lights and cameras between a childhood bedroom and a summer camp and a hospital room. Take after take as our actors found their way into someone else's memories, learning to hold their shoulders the way grief holds shoulders, to let their faces carry the particular exhaustion that comes after years of carrying weight. The sound engineer capturing not just dialogue but the ambient texture of each space; the hum of fluorescent lights, the distant murmur of a waiting room, the specific silence of a house that’s usually filled with shouting.

Then weeks of editing: building the story frame by frame, color-grading each scene to match not just the lighting but the emotional temperature, layering in music that had to support without overwhelming, cutting and re-cutting until the pacing felt like breathing, like the natural rhythm of someone finding courage to speak their truth.

The final video was a five-minute testimony reenactment that somehow contained the weight of an entire life: moments of breakdown and breakthrough, the slow accumulation of wisdom through suffering, the particular grace that emerges when someone finds words for experiences that feel unspeakable.

Yesterday, I typed eight words into an AI video generator: "Old man sitting pensively on vintage train car."

Seventeen seconds later, I was staring at footage that looked like it had gone through the same meticulous process; the perfect lighting, the weathered hands, the same melancholy weight in the man's expression. The AI had somehow intuited the collared shirt, the silver watch, even the way memories should play across an elderly face.

The process—all of it, the writing and scouting and casting and filming and editing—had simply vanished. Ceased to be necessary. To even exist, for me at least.

As I watched the AI-generated video loop on my screen, I felt something I couldn't immediately name. Not quite loss, not quite wonder. Something closer to vertigo, the sensation of standing at the edge of a cliff you didn't know you'd been approaching.

We are witnessing what might be called the extinction of process, that messy, transformative space between wanting something and having it, between conception and completion, between the self who begins a journey and the self who emerges at its end.

The Space Between Wanting and Having

Process is the invisible curriculum of being human.

It's the struggle that shapes us while we think we're just trying to get something done. It's what happens when you learn to drive stick shift instead of automatic, not just a different way of controlling a car, but a different relationship with the machine, with attention, with the dance between intention and response. Your body learns something that your mind could never have planned.

Most of our ancestors understood this intuitively. They lived in a world where almost everything required process. Bread took time to rise. Letters took time to compose, copy, and send. Skills developed slowly, through repetition and failure and the gradual accumulation of understanding that lives in the hands as much as the head.

Think about Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures, the prisoners that seem to be emerging from stone, half-formed figures caught between marble and flesh.

Art historians often treat these as incomplete works, but I wonder if they're actually perfect representations of process itself: the moment when becoming is visible, when you can see both what was and what is struggling to be.

Your grandmother's bread recipe that could never be quite written down completely is another example. The way she could tell by touch when the dough was ready, by smell when the oven was perfect. Knowledge that lived in her body, accumulated through years of small failures and adjustments, impossible to download or transfer except through the slow apprenticeship of working alongside her.

I feel it when I paint portraits. There’s always a turning point—after hours of sketching, layering, adjusting—when the face shifts from flat to dimensional. As I work in the undertones of skin, mixing tiny gradients of warmth and shadow, something stirs. The cheek catches light just right. The eyes begin to reflect something back. It’s no longer just paint on canvas; it’s someone becoming. Half the portrait still unfinished, the other half quietly alive. In that moment, my brain lights up in a way I can’t explain. It feels sacred to witness something I’ve labored over begin to exist beyond me.

This is what we call process: not just the steps to get somewhere, but the journey that, over time, becomes imprinted inside you.

Today we prompt, we wait, we receive. The middle disappears.

Your Brain on Sacred Struggle

There's something almost theological about how our brains respond to difficulty.

Neuroscience tells us that challenge literally rewires our neural architecture, not just adding information, but creating new pathways, new capacities, new ways of being. The brain that has struggled is structurally different from the brain that has been given easy answers.

Carol Dweck's research on growth mindset reveals something profound: the brain doesn't just solve problems, it's changed by the process of solving them. Students who believe intelligence can be developed through effort show increased neural activity in regions associated with attention and persistence. Their brains literally grow stronger through struggle.

But here's what the research doesn't capture: the spiritual dimension of this process. Anyone who has pushed through genuine difficulty knows there's something sacred about the moment when confusion gives way to clarity, when the impossible becomes merely hard, when you discover capabilities you didn't know you possessed. It feels less like learning and more like resurrection—the self that emerges is genuinely new.

Research on creativity reveals something similar: breakthrough insights almost always emerge from periods of what psychologists call "productive failure." The brain that has hit dead ends, explored false paths, and sat with genuine confusion develops a different relationship with problems. It learns to see opportunities where the untested mind sees only obstacles.

Austin Kleon writes about this beautifully in his exploration of constraints and creativity: “Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want—that just kills creativity.” He also notes that the doing must include failing, pivoting, and discovering that your original plan was wrong. The constraint isn't just about limits, it's about the particular kind of discovery that only comes through working within those limits over time.

This is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow,” those moments when hours disappear because you're so completely absorbed in navigating the edge between your abilities and the challenge at hand. Flow isn't a shortcut around difficulty; it's what difficulty becomes when you've developed the capacity to dance with it.

When we skip straight to the solution, we skip the dance. We get the answer, but we don't get the brain that would have been capable of finding the answer.

When We've Lost Process Before

This isn't the first time efficiency has threatened to eliminate something essential about human formation. History is littered with moments when we've had to choose between convenience and cultivation, between what's faster and what forms us.

Consider the medieval scribes who spent their lives copying manuscripts by hand. When the printing press arrived, it seemed like an obvious improvement—faster, cheaper, more accurate. But something was lost that we're only now beginning to understand. The monks who copied texts weren't just reproducing information; they were entering into relationship with it. The slow, meditative process of forming each letter created a intimacy between mind and meaning that couldn't be replicated by mechanical reproduction.

Research on handwriting versus typing reveals something similar: students who take notes by hand demonstrate better comprehension and retention than those who type. The physical process of forming letters activates different neural pathways, creates different kinds of memory, establishes a different relationship between the learner and the material. When we write by hand, we think with our fingers.

Matthew Crawford, in his meditation on manual work and meaning, describes what was lost when craftsmen were replaced by factory workers. It wasn’t just a change in employment; it was a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and their work. The craftsman’s knowledge lived in his hands, developed through years of attending to materials, learning to feel the difference between wood that would split and wood that would bend.

As Crawford writes in The World Beyond Your Head, “The appeal of magic is that it promises to render objects plastic to the will without one’s getting too entangled with them. Treated from arm’s length, the object can issue no challenge to the self. According to Freud, this is precisely the condition of the narcissist: he treats objects as props for his fragile ego and has an uncertain grasp of them as having a reality of their own. The clearest contrast to the narcissist that I can think of is the repairman, who must subordinate himself to the broken washing machine, listen to it with patience, notice its symptoms, and then act accordingly. He cannot treat it abstractly; the kind of agency he exhibits is not at all magical.”

Factory work eliminated that intimate knowledge in favor of efficiency, but it also eliminated something essential about human dignity: the satisfaction of seeing a project through from conception to completion, of knowing that your hands had shaped something real.

We're seeing something similar happen with GPS and spatial memory. Researchers at University College London have found that people who rely heavily on GPS navigation show decreased activity in the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for spatial memory. We can get anywhere we want to go, but we never learn the lay of the land. We never develop the kind of spatial intuition that comes from getting lost and finding your way home.

There's something profound about knowing where you are versus being led to where you're going. The first creates a kind of belonging; the second creates dependency.

What Dies When We Skip the Middle

The tragedy isn't just what we lose; it's what we never develop in the first place.

David Hockney, the 86-year-old artist who has painted through every technological revolution of the past six decades, has long explored the relationship between tools and perception. Though he’s embraced digital mediums like the iPad—creating vibrant, time-lapsed works—he’s also spoken candidly about how traditional methods offer something fundamentally different.

This is the artist's dilemma in miniature: the difference between making and directing. When Hockney paints, his hand encounters resistance from the canvas, unpredictability in the paint, happy accidents that couldn't have been planned. These encounters change the painting, but they also change the painter. The final work is as much discovery as creation.

When we direct AI to create, we get our intentions back refined and perfected, but we don't get the education that comes from wrestling with materials, from having our plans changed by the encounter with reality. We get what we asked for, but we don't become more than we were.

Paul Graham, in his essays on startups and innovation, makes a crucial distinction: breakthrough companies almost always start by doing things that don't scale. The founders don't figure out how to systematize their solution until they've spent months or years understanding their problem intimately, manually, inefficiently. Instagram's founders personally curated early users. Airbnb's founders went door-to-door photographing properties themselves. They could have tried to automate these processes from the beginning, but they would have automated the wrong things.

The same principle applies to human development. We learn judgment by making bad judgments and living with the consequences. We develop intuition by being wrong repeatedly until we start to recognize the patterns that lead to rightness. We build character through making choices when the outcome is uncertain and the stakes feel real.

Medical education provides a stark example. Students who learn diagnosis through pattern recognition software can identify diseases faster and more accurately than those trained through traditional methods. But something crucial is lost: the development of clinical reasoning, the ability to think through complex cases when the pattern doesn't quite fit, the intuitive understanding that comes from examining thousands of patients with your own hands.

When the AI fails or encounters an edge case, the diagnostician trained on patterns has no deeper understanding to fall back on. On the other hand, the doctor trained through process has developed what physicians call "clinical sense,” a form of embodied knowledge that allows them to notice what doesn't fit, to be curious about outliers, to think beyond the algorithm.

This pattern repeats across disciplines. Engineering students who rely on software to solve problems can get the right answers without developing mathematical intuition. They graduate able to operate tools but unable to think from first principles when the tools don't work or when they encounter problems the tools weren't designed for.

The deeper loss is empathetic. Struggle is one of the few universal human experiences, and it's often our primary teacher of compassion. The person who has never experienced genuine difficulty—never been lost, never failed at something that mattered, never had to persist through confusion or discouragement—lacks something essential for understanding others. Post-traumatic growth research shows that people who have navigated significant challenges often develop increased empathy, deeper relationships, and a more nuanced understanding of human resilience.

When we eliminate struggle from human development, we don't just create people who are less capable; we create people who are less able to connect with the struggles of others.

The Deeper Questions

All of this raises questions that go to the heart of what we think about humanity.

Aristotle understood something we've forgotten: we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence isn't an act but a habit. Character isn't a decision but a pattern of decisions sustained over time. Identity isn't something we discover but something that’s largely created through the accumulated weight of our choices and our responses to difficulty.

This is why process matters so much: it's not just about getting better at doing things, it's about becoming the kind of person who can do those things. When you learn to play piano, you're not just acquiring a skill; you're becoming someone whose fingers know music, whose ear can hear harmony, whose patience has been stretched to accommodate the slow development of muscle memory. The music you can eventually play is just the visible result of an invisible transformation.

Contemporary neuroscience confirms what Aristotle intuited: repeated action literally shapes the structure of our brains. The London taxi drivers who spend years memorizing the city's streets develop enlarged hippocampi. Musicians' brains show increased connectivity between motor and auditory regions. Meditation practitioners show increased cortical thickness in areas associated with attention and sensory processing.

We become, neurologically and spiritually, the sum of our practices.

But what happens when our practices become prompting and waiting and receiving? What kind of people do we become when our primary relationship with difficulty is to avoid it, to delegate it, to optimize it away?

There's wisdom across cultures about the necessity of difficulty for human flourishing. Buddhist practice speaks of "right effort,” not the avoidance of challenge but the cultivation of the kind of sustained attention that can meet challenge skillfully.

The Christian story doesn’t glorify suffering, but it does tell us that Jesus carried a cross, and then invited us to take up ours and follow Him. The way of the cross isn’t redemptive because pain is good, but because it’s the path where love, obedience, sacrifice, and transformation meet.

The Stoics built an entire philosophy around the radical reframe: obstacles are not impediments to the path, they are the path. Marcus Aurelius wrote, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." This wasn't masochism; it was recognition that human character develops through response to difficulty, that our greatest capacities emerge only when called upon by necessity.

Viktor Frankl, writing from his experience in Nazi concentration camps, made a crucial distinction between unavoidable suffering and chosen difficulty. While we should eliminate unnecessary pain, we should also recognize that some forms of struggle are essential for human development. As Frankl observed, “In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” The person who has never chosen to do anything difficult has never discovered what they’re capable of.

This connects to what psychologists call "self-determination theory,” the idea that human well-being depends on feeling autonomous, competent, and connected. The autonomy piece is crucial: we need to feel that we are the authors of our own actions, that our choices matter, that we can influence our circumstances through our efforts.

When AI takes over more and more of the difficult work, we risk creating a kind of learned helplessness. We become consumers of solutions rather than creators of them. We lose the deep satisfaction that comes from seeing a project through from conception to completion, from knowing that our efforts shaped something real.

There's a profound difference between "I made this" and "I had this made." The first builds identity; the second builds dependency.

What We Might Gain

But perhaps I'm being too nostalgic, too focused on what we lose without really considering what we might gain.

History shows us that when technology eliminates certain forms of human effort, it doesn’t always diminish our humanity—it often reorients it.

The invention of the camera, for example, didn’t kill portraiture; it transformed it. When artists were no longer tasked with perfectly replicating a person’s likeness by hand, they were freed to explore abstraction, symbolism, and emotion; to paint not just what someone looked like, but what they meant. The mechanical eye captured precision; the human eye turned inward.

Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s research on household technology shows a similar dynamic. These tools didn’t eliminate work so much as transform it. As physical labor was offloaded, attention shifted toward emotional labor: child development, family coordination, community care. The efficiency gains in one area created space for more meaningful forms of engagement in another.

AI might offer a similar opportunity. If we can automate the truly repetitive, soul-numbing aspects of work—the parts that don’t contribute to growth or connection—we may find ourselves with more capacity for the things that do: relationship, creativity, wisdom, care.

Musicians like Grimes have written about AI music creation tools not as replacements for human creativity but as collaborators that can handle technical execution while leaving space for artistic vision and emotional expression. She describes using AI to generate backing tracks that she then shapes, layers, and imbues with meaning. The AI provides the technical foundation; she provides the soul.

Writers with dyslexia have described similar experiences with AI writing assistants. The technology handles the mechanical aspects of text production that have always been barriers for them, freeing them to focus on the ideas, narratives, and emotional resonance that represent their actual gifts. The AI doesn't replace their creativity; it removes obstacles to the expression of their creativity.

There's something beautiful about the democratizing potential here. Throughout history, many forms of human excellence have been limited by access to tools, training, or physical capabilities. AI might level some of those playing fields in ways that expand rather than diminish human potential.

Kevin Kelly, in his meditation on technology's trajectory, suggests that the highest form of human-AI collaboration won't be replacement but augmentation, AI handling the computational aspects of problems while humans provide meaning, context, ethical judgment, and creative vision.

In this model, we become more human, not less, because we're freed to focus on the things that humans do uniquely well.

The Choice Before Us

But this optimistic vision requires something from us: intentionality and self-discipline. The benefits of AI will come not automatically but through conscious choice about how we engage with these tools.

Cal Newport, in his writings on digital minimalism and deep work, offers a framework: we should be as selective about our cognitive tools as we are about our physical ones. A carpenter doesn’t use every tool available; they choose the tools that serve the work they’re trying to do. Similarly, we need to develop wisdom about when AI serves human flourishing and when it undermines it. As Newport emphasizes, “Digital minimalists see new technologies as tools to be used to support things they deeply value—not as sources of value themselves.”

The key question isn't "Can AI do this?" but "Should I let it?"

Some struggles are productive; others are just tedious. Learning to distinguish between them might be one of the most important skills we can develop. AI should eliminate monotony, but it shouldn't eliminate challenge, because challenge is where growth happens.

This means we need to get comfortable with voluntary inefficiency. There will be times when we choose the slower path, not because it produces better results, but because it produces better people. We'll choose to cook from scratch, not because it's faster than ordering delivery, but because something happens in the kitchen that doesn't happen when we're passive consumers. We'll choose to learn difficult skills not because they're economically necessary, but because they're humanly necessary.

The slow food movement offers a model here. It's not anti-technology; it's pro-intentionality. It recognizes that the speed and convenience of industrial food production comes at the cost of flavor, nutrition, culture, and connection. The movement doesn't reject all efficiency, but it insists on preserving the practices that contribute to human flourishing even when they're not the fastest option available.

We're seeing similar movements emerge around other aspects of life. The resurgence of analog photography among young people who grew up digital. The popularity of vinyl records despite the convenience of streaming. The growth of maker spaces where people choose to work with their hands despite the availability of digital alternatives.

These aren't Luddite reactions; they're conscious choices to preserve forms of engagement that develop human capacities that can't be developed any other way.

Sherry Turkle's research on children and technology points toward the stakes involved. She's found that young people who grow up with AI tutors and digital assistants often struggle with tolerance for frustration, persistence through difficulty, and the kind of deep focus that develops through sustained engagement with challenging material. They become accustomed to immediate feedback and perfect answers, which leaves them unprepared for the messiness of real-world problems that don't have clear solutions.

The question for parents becomes: How do we prepare children for a world that includes AI while still helping them develop the human capacities that AI can't replace?

Part of the answer might be what educators call "productive struggle,” deliberately designing experiences that require persistence, creativity, and problem-solving. Not artificial difficulty for its own sake, but the kind of challenges that stretch capabilities and build confidence.

A Personal Decision

This isn't just a cultural or educational question; it's a personal one. Each of us needs to develop our own theology of difficulty, our own framework for deciding when to embrace efficiency and when to choose the harder path.

I've been conducting what I call a "process audit" of my own life; examining where I use AI and other automated tools, and asking whether that use serves my development or undermines it. Some patterns are clear: I use AI to handle routine email responses and basic research tasks, freeing time for writing and thinking. But I've also noticed places where I've started reaching for AI assistance too quickly, bypassing the productive struggle that leads to insight.

For example, I used to work through difficult ideas by writing them out longhand, letting my thoughts develop through the physical process of forming words on paper. The slowness forced me to think more carefully; the inability to easily edit pushed me to be more intentional about each sentence. When I started using AI to help structure my arguments, I gained efficiency but lost something harder to define: a particular kind of intimacy with my own thinking process.

Now I try to write first draft outlines by hand again, then move to digital tools for revision. It's slower, but it produces different thinking. The hand teaches the mind things it doesn't learn when the process moves straight from thought to screen.

This might seem like a small rebellion, but I think it’s practice for larger questions. In a world where more and more can be automated, what will I choose to do myself? What struggles will I preserve because they preserve something in me?

The answer will be different for each person, but the question itself is crucial. We need to become conscious of the relationship between process and formation, between efficiency and humanity.

The Sacred Weight of Choosing

The AI train footage still haunts me, not because it was bad, but because it was so good. So fast. So effortless. No scouting. No casting. No direction shouted over the sound of cicadas or traffic. No human learning how to become someone else. Just a few words typed into a machine, and a scene appeared fully formed, emotionally calibrated, unnervingly perfect.

It made me realize: we’re nearing a threshold. A point where almost anything can be automated, where efficiency replaces experience, where results emerge without the slow, shaping force of process. The question isn’t whether we can skip the journey—increasingly, we can. The question is whether we should.

Because here's what I know: our humanity doesn't solely live in what we can create, but in what we choose to struggle toward. Not in the destination, but in who we become along the way.

In a world where anything can happen instantly, the things we choose to do slowly become sacraments. In a culture that eliminates friction, the difficulties we voluntarily embrace become acts of resistance. In an age of infinite optimization, the processes we refuse to optimize become spaces where the soul can still find room to breathe.

Maybe the most radical thing we can do in an age of artificial intelligence is to stay present for the full arc of human experience: the confusion and the clarity, the failure and the breakthrough, the long middle of not knowing and the brief moment of understanding.

What’s dying isn't the process, but our willingness to sometimes choose to go through it.

Because something happens in the journey that can’t survive in the shortcut.

Something sacred lives in the stretch between desire and fulfillment, and if we keep skipping that space, we may lose the becoming that only happens in the messy in-between.

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Big shoulders, a heavy conscience, and bright blue eyes like cracked glaciers—eyes that seem to measure the world before fully letting it in.

Though he grew up in Argentina, the old country lives in him. His parents had left Friuli, Italy with only faith and a grit that didn’t rust. Argentina raised him, but the north of Italy shaped his soul.

By the early 1950s, he and his twin brother were in their early twenties, two wiry young men full of muscle and mischief, studying engineering, working odd jobs, sharing everything.

Though they were fraternal, you could tell they were twins—same quick wit, same steel behind the eyes—but my grandfather carried himself like the world owed him an explanation, like he’d thrive in whatever it threw at him while he waited for one.

Around that time, there was a peculiar military rule in place: if twin brothers were of age, the one who came out last would be drafted. Why? Because he was considered to have been conceived first.

By that standard, his brother was the one who had to go.

But that didn’t sit right with my grandpa. He turned to his brother—his best friend, his mirror—and said, “This isn’t fair. Just because you were born a few minutes after me? No. Let’s flip for it.”

I don’t know exactly what that moment looked like, but I picture it happening at night, in the narrow courtyard behind their apartment—a cracked concrete space hemmed in by laundry lines and rusted pipes. The city hummed low in the background, maybe a colectivo groaned down the avenue, maybe someone on the second floor was arguing over a radio still playing tango. The air probably carried the smell of frying oil from someone making milanesa, the bite of cigarette smoke, and that thick, dry heat that sticks to the back of your neck in Buenos Aires long after the sun disappears. I imagine they were passing a chipped enamel cup of maté back and forth, quiet for a moment, letting the weight of it settle.

My grandpa reached into his pocket, pulled out a coin.

“Heads, I go. Tails, you go.”

A coin held between trembling fingers, under a flickering streetlight in Buenos Aires.

He tossed it.

Time held its breath.

The coin hit the stone.

Heads.

Fourteen months later, he was stationed far from home, counting days by scratches on walls.

He never once says he wishes the coin had landed differently.

That moment has lived in my family like a quiet parable. One no one really teaches from or talks about frequently, but everyone remembers.

The older I get, the more it messes with me. Not just because of the drama or the sacrifice. But because of what it says about justice, randomness, and what we could do with both.

Most of us are raised to think of justice as mathematical. Fairness as transactional. Like if A = B, then all is well. But there are stories in Scripture and stories in our families that seem to live in the space between A and B. The truth is—we live in a world full of flawed equations. A world where the math doesn’t always add up.

In Ezekiel 18:25, God confronts the people:

“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?”

Even God seems to be saying: your definition of fairness is broken. Because fairness by the world’s standard often serves the one with more power, more logic, more language. But divine justice? It sees the heart. The hidden. The unbalanced scale.

We want the world to be fair.

But the world was never promised to be fair.

God never said it would be.

What He did say, again and again, is this:

Choose mercy. Choose the cross.

And that’s what my grandpa did that night—without knowing it, he chose the shape of the gospel.

He chose to carry something he didn’t have to carry.

He chose to make himself vulnerable for the sake of someone else.

He chose to question the rule, and still submit to the cost.

And then—there’s the randomness.

The coin toss.

There’s something almost scandalous about it. That something so important could be left to something so uncontrollable. But maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe randomness is only terrifying when we assume no one is in control.

“The great thing, if one can,” wrote Scottish author George MacDonald, “is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own,’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is, of course, that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life.”

My grandpa’s story isn’t just an anecdote. It’s a holy interruption. A quiet parable about the sacredness of small decisions.

Because that moment behind an apartment in Buenos Aires—a tossed coin, a shared look, a silent nod—shaped the trajectory of his life. Not because the military made him a man, but because the coin revealed the kind of man he already was.

And he’s still here.

Ninety-two years old. Still steady as a boulder. Still sharp. Still the kind of person who remembers the weight of that moment like it happened last week.

Still the kind of person who would flip the coin again.

The story doesn’t end with the coin toss.

It continues every time someone decides that their comfort isn’t more important than someone else’s peace. It lives on in every relationship where the rules say you don’t have to but the heart says you should. It whispers into our choices: When was the last time you risked something for the sake of someone else’s burden?

It makes me wonder:

• Have I built a life where I only follow the rules that benefit me?

• Am I willing to carry something heavy if it means someone I love gets to breathe a little lighter?

• Would I have flipped the coin?

And if I did… would I have obeyed it?

In a world obsessed with outcomes, maybe we need to come back to the holiness of how we choose.

Not the result. But the heart behind the decision.

Because here’s what I’m starting to believe:

Some of the most sacred moments in your life won’t be shouted from a mountaintop. They’ll look like small choices made in quiet spaces. A coin in the air. A conscience at rest. A soul that says yes.

Notice this:

• What coin flips have shaped your life?

• What “fair” systems are you quietly being invited to question?

• Where might God be inviting you to give something up, not because you have to… but because it’s beautiful to do so?

Sometimes what looks like randomness is actually an altar.

And the moment you step forward and say, “I’ll go,” something in heaven takes notice.

You may never be applauded for it.

But your soul will know: this is the kind of person I am.

And that will be enough.

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An older woman was walking in front of me, heading toward the entrance, wearing headphones. As she passed a parked van, its trunk suddenly began to open, nearly hitting her. She flinched, annoyed, as it barely grazed her. From a distance, a middle-aged couple—seemingly kind, harmless people—had opened the trunk with their key. The moment they saw what happened, they both exclaimed, “Oh wow, I am so sorry!”

But the woman didn’t react. She didn’t look at them, didn’t acknowledge them at all.

The man, now louder, called out, “We’re sorry!” Still, no response. And then, almost as if needing to correct the silence, he filled it for her—mocking her lack of acknowledgment, sarcastically saying, I’m sorry, no it’s okay, that happens.

When she still didn’t respond, he turned to his wife and immediately launched into insults, calling her all sorts of names for being rude, for not giving him the social contract of a nod, a wave, a “No worries.”

Just moments ago, he had been apologetic and warm. But when he didn’t get the response he expected, that warmth turned to resentment. And that resentment turned into something uglier—something I think we all recognize because we see it every day, in ourselves and in the world around us.

I kept walking, but for some reason, the interaction sat with me.

In the grand scheme of things, it was nothing. No one was really hurt, no real harm was done. But it was also everything.

It was a perfect microcosm of where we are—maybe where we’ve always been—and where we seem to be heading even more: a place where we don’t meet each other’s gaze with the intention to see—to see people as they are, to let them see us, to find ourselves somewhere in between.

Instead, we see people through the lens of how they fit into our world—how they should behave, how they should respond, how they should meet our expectations. And when they don’t, we don’t just see the moment, we see them as the problem. And that’s when they stop being a person to us. That’s when they become something else.

When People Become Symbols

There’s a moment in every disagreement—whether political, religious, personal, or philosophical—where we stop seeing the person and only see the problem.

They aren’t an individual anymore; they are representations of everything we think is wrong with the world. They are one of those people. And the second we categorize them like that, we’ve already lost any chance of real understanding or transformation.

But here’s the part we don’t like to admit: the same thing is happening on the other side.

The moment we decide that someone is beyond reason, beyond redemption, beyond even basic human understanding, we don’t just reduce them—we change ourselves. We become exactly the kind of person we claim to stand against. The ones who refuse to listen. The ones who dehumanize. The ones who believe themselves to be unquestionably right while failing to ask the one question that could actually lead to transformation: What am I not seeing?

Fyodor Dostoevsky once wrote, “To love someone means to see them as God intended them.” But love like that requires effort. It requires us to step outside of our assumptions and recognize the fullness of another person, not just the part that interacts with our reality.

And let’s be honest—that’s hard.

It’s much easier to reduce people to something manageable, to fit them neatly into our existing beliefs about the world. It’s easier to see them as a symbol, a type, a category. But the second we do that, we stop seeing them at all.

Because the truth is, the older woman at Walmart probably wasn’t being intentionally rude. Maybe she couldn’t hear them because of her headphones. Maybe she was having a bad day. Maybe her mind was somewhere else entirely.

But none of that mattered to the man in that moment.

She was no longer just a woman walking into Walmart—she was an example, proof of a larger problem in his mind. And when that happens, empathy dies.

The Disappearing Act

This isn’t new. We have always found ways to reduce people down to ideas. To turn human beings into placeholders for what we think they represent.

In theology, this has been challenged time and time again.

Jesus, in particular, had a way of breaking this habit in people.

The religious leaders of his time had clear rules about who was worthy of acknowledgment and who wasn’t. They had categories for everything. You didn’t eat with tax collectors. You didn’t speak to Samaritans. You didn’t show kindness to prostitutes or lepers or the outcasts of society.

But Jesus looked at them and refused to see the labels.

He didn’t ask, What side are you on? He asked, Who are you?

He saw people before he saw their reputations. Before he saw their politics. Before he saw their social standing. And because of that, he restored their humanity and made space for them to step into redemption.

As a Christian, the moment I start trying to take care of the problem before taking care of the human, I need to stop and examine the posture of my heart.

What did Jesus do?

He stopped the execution of an adulterous woman by making her accusers confront their own sin. He dined with sinners and called them by name, not by reputation. He healed a Roman centurion’s servant, despite the fact that Rome was the oppressor of his people. He welcomed children with open arms, reminding us that no one is too small or insignificant to be seen and loved.

He even saw Judas.

In the garden, with betrayal fresh on his lips, Jesus still called him “friend.”

Because he knew: the moment we stop seeing people for who they truly are is the moment we not only lose them, but also lose ourselves.

Breaking the Cycle

The most dangerous part of dehumanization is how easily it spreads.

When we see someone as a symbol instead of a person, we treat them accordingly. We get defensive. We get dismissive. We get cruel. And in response, they do the same.

Here’s the point: When we stop seeing others as human, we stop being human too.

Dehumanization isn’t a one-way street. It doesn’t just hollow out the person we refuse to acknowledge—it hollows us out too.

The moment we reduce someone to an object, a problem, a symbol of everything wrong with the world, something happens inside us. We shrink. We become thinner versions of ourselves, stripped of the very things we claim to value—compassion, wisdom, humility.

We imagine that in dehumanizing others, we retain our own fullness. That we can devalue someone else while remaining intact. But that’s a lie.

The more we strip others of their complexity, the more we lose our own.

The more we make someone “less than,” the more we diminish our own capacity for love, for grace, for understanding.

And if we do it long enough, we don’t even notice that we are disappearing too.

Every time we meet someone with disdain instead of curiosity, every time we label someone beyond redemption, every time we assume we have nothing to learn from them—we lose a little more of ourselves.

And if no one is willing to break that cycle, then who will?

That’s what haunted me about that moment in the Walmart parking lot.

No one in that situation was “wrong.” No one was the villain. That man and his wife didn’t mean to open the trunk on the older woman. The older woman didn’t mean to be in the way. They both acted in a way that made sense to them.

And yet, instead of leaving the situation unchanged, the man walked away angrier, more resentful, more convinced that the world was full of rude, ungrateful people.

But it wasn’t just the older woman he stripped of humanity.

It was himself.

He didn’t just reduce her to a symbol of everything frustrating about the world—he became something smaller in the process.

And isn’t that what we all do, in a million different ways, every single day?

We misunderstand each other. We assume the worst. We react from emotion instead of curiosity. We let tiny fractures grow into deep divides. And without realizing it, we slowly disappear into the very thing we claim to stand against.

But what if we didn’t?

What if, the next time we feel that instant flash of frustration, that gut-level certainty that someone else is the problem—we paused?

What if, before assuming the worst in someone, we looked them in the eyes and saw ourselves reflected back?

What if we chose to see—not just what was done, but who they are?

Maybe then, they wouldn’t disappear.

And neither would we.

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When the ban actually happened, it felt like stepping into a different world. I suddenly had all this extra time, and I didn’t know what to do with it at first. I got a full night of sleep for the first time in ages.

Then, as I got home after church, I instinctively opened TikTok. And it was back. Just like that, my quiet little bubble of solitude popped. That same mix of emotions came rushing in—joy because an app I genuinely love was working again, but also dread because I knew exactly what would happen next. Within minutes, I was scrolling again, caught up in that dopamine loop that feels so good in the moment.

TikTok is a lot of things. It’s a source of knowledge, entertainment, creativity, and opportunity. But it’s also too much sometimes. Too much connection. Too much noise. Too much of other people’s lives filling up the space where my own thoughts should be. And the truth is, I don’t have the willpower right now to resist it. I can tell myself I’ll take a break, but my thumb always finds its way back to that little icon.

That experience got me thinking about how hard it is to be alone in today’s world—not just physically, but mentally. Even when I’m alone in a room, my mind is rarely mine. It’s filled with voices from a screen, with trends and tutorials, with someone else’s version of life.

A Lack of Stillness

For so many of us, being alone has become something to avoid. We’ve filled every crack of our day with activity and noise—texts, notifications, playlists, shows, podcasts. Silence is uncomfortable because it forces us to be with our thoughts, and maybe we’re not ready to hear them.

In another way, our interconnected culture has made solitude feel like wasted time. If you’re not multitasking, you’re missing an opportunity. You could be listening to a podcast about investing. You could be watching a tutorial to improve your skills or catching up on that new show everyone’s talking about. The art of multitasking has been crowned king in the past few years, and we’ve been conditioned to believe that if we’re not consuming, learning, or achieving something every second, we’re falling behind.

But here’s the thing: true solitude isn’t wasted time. It’s not unproductive. It’s not empty. In fact, solitude—the kind that makes you sit with yourself and realize that silence is never really silent—is one of the most valuable things we get to give ourselves.

Take it From Woolf & the Monks

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.” - Virginia Woolf, The Waves

The power of solitude is not a modern discovery. It’s a practice that has shaped human thought, spiritual growth, and creativity for centuries. When you look at history, some of the most profound wisdom and transformation has emerged from moments of deep solitude.

In countless traditions—Buddhist, Christian, and beyond—monks have devoted themselves to solitude as a pathway to enlightenment and inner peace. Monastic life revolves around silence and contemplation. They understand that being alone isn’t about isolating yourself from the world but about finding deeper connection to it. In silence, they’ve discovered truths that go beyond the noise of everyday life.

“The world of men has forgotten the joys of silence, the peace of solitude, which is necessary, to some extent, for the fullness of human living.” - Thomas Merton

Jesus himself modeled the importance of solitude. Time and time again in the Bible, we see him retreating from the crowds to be alone in prayer. Before beginning his ministry, Jesus spent forty days alone in the wilderness, fasting and resisting temptation. He didn’t rush into the noise of the world without first anchoring himself in silence. That time alone was critical—it prepared him for the challenges and purpose that lay ahead.

“Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” - Mark 1:35 NIV

These examples remind us that solitude is more than just a break from the chaos; it’s a spiritual discipline. It’s in those quiet moments that we gain clarity, strength, and perspective. Silence creates space for reflection, for connecting to something bigger than ourselves.

Even outside of religion, solitude has been the secret weapon behind some of humanity’s most extraordinary ideas and creations. History is filled with visionaries who understood that stepping away from the noise wasn’t a luxury—it was a necessity. Henry David Thoreau didn’t just wander into the woods at Walden Pond to write; he did it to strip life down to its essentials, to hear the unspoken truths that only silence could reveal. His time alone wasn’t just about nature—it was about seeing himself clearly for the first time.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote about the need for “a room of one’s own,” not just as a physical space, but as a state of mind. She knew that creativity thrives when you carve out space for your thoughts to breathe, away from the expectations and interruptions of the outside world. Solitude wasn’t an escape for her—it’s where true creativity began.

Solitude has always been more than just a pause—it’s been the wellspring of deep thinking, self-awareness, and discovery.

The irony is that today, what monks, Jesus, and artists once sought intentionally—silence and solitude—is what we actively avoid. We glorify multitasking, distraction, and connection at the expense of our own creativity and clarity. But if the greatest minds in history found value in stillness, maybe it’s time we start listening to what the quiet has to offer.

Relearning the Art of Being Alone

Reclaiming solitude in a world that’s constantly connected isn’t easy. It’s not something that happens naturally anymore; it’s something we have to choose, often against the pull of every app and notification designed to keep us hooked.

Start small. Leave your phone in another room for an hour. Sit in silence and let your thoughts wander without judgment. Take a walk and really listen to the sounds around you. Maybe you’ll notice how your breath feels in your chest or how the ground feels beneath your feet. It might feel uncomfortable at first. You might even feel restless or bored. But that’s okay. Those feelings are part of the process.

Over time, you’ll start to notice the quiet. Not just the absence of noise, but the fullness of it. You’ll hear the thoughts you’ve been avoiding, but you’ll also hear the ones that bring you peace. You’ll feel the weight of the world lift, even if just for a moment, and remember what it feels like to simply exist.

Even if it’s by Force

When TikTok came back after those twelve hours, I felt like I’d been jolted out of a dream. I love the app for everything it brings—laughter, knowledge, creativity, connection—but I also know it takes more than it gives if I’m not careful.

The truth is, the art of multitasking and hyper-connectivity is only a piece of the bigger picture. Productivity is important, yes. Learning is important. But if we lose our ability to sit still, to be with ourselves, to simply be, what are we left with when all we have left is silence?

That’s why I’m going to find balance, even if it’s by force. Because as much as I love the world online, I don’t want to lose the world inside and around me. I don’t want to forget how to be alone, how to sit with myself, how to listen to the quiet.

My 2025 Digital Rules

This is why, at the beginning of January, I created four digital rules to live by:

• Balance consuming with creating

• No scrolling for the first hour I’m awake

• No screens after 11 pm

• No doom scrolling on Sundays

Some may view these as too simple or obvious, but I've already broken every one of them— and we're only 22 days into the year. As technology continues to weave itself more deeply into our daily lives, our greatest challenge will be setting boundaries to prevent it from overtaking our personal lives.

If you’re feeling the same way, know this: it’s okay to step back. It’s okay to turn off the noise and let yourself be still. The world will keep spinning, even if you pause for a moment.

As Virginia wrote, sit with bare things, your coffee cup, your knife, your fork, things in themselves, yourself being yourself. In the stillness, you’ll find a version of yourself you might’ve never met.

Do you have any digital rules you want to implement this year?

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It feels as if the past five years have been a slow unraveling—like gently tugging at the edges of a foggy, mysterious gift I didn’t even know was waiting for me. Each decision, each stumble, each breakthrough was like pulling away another layer of uncertainty. Then, as I entered the month of turning 25, it was as though that gift of clarity was suddenly placed right in my lap, resting on the seat of my mind.

The haze lifted, and everything finally felt fully real. It wasn’t a moment of dramatic revelation, but rather the quiet realization that the clarity I had been unknowingly working toward finally materialized.

I literally can’t explain it, but I just feel even more alive. I’m not second-guessing myself as much. I’m not getting anxious over the small things or obsessing over how other people perceive me. It’s like this freedom has been tucked away in the crevices of my frontal lobe, waiting for the right moment to emerge and revel in a second act.

I love it.

If every year brings more wisdom and clarity, I’m eager for what’s ahead. I’m excited to know that my mind is becoming even more present, more attuned to the world and its intricacies. Our culture is so consumed with running away from aging—don’t get me wrong, I have a growing skincare routine—but what a gift and blessing it is to have another year in the books. Each one strengthens our grit, grows our synapses, and teaches us what it means to live fully and freely, no matter the circumstance.

As T.S. Eliot wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” That’s what growing older feels like—a return to myself, but with a richer understanding of who I am and the world around me.

We’re all one year closer.

No matter your age, whether you’re headed towards turning 7 months old or 76 years old, we’re all moving toward something—closer to a deeper understanding of life, closer to clarity, closer to the person we’re becoming.

25 things I’m one year closer to:

1. Having an even deeper relationship with Jesus

2. Loving others more generously

3. Writing a book in every genre

4. Taking care of my body not out of vanity but gratitude

5. Becoming fluent in another language

6. Becoming a morning person

7. Going to a new country

8. Being an extra in a movie

9. Falling in love

10. Being less afraid of failure and more excited about growth

11. Buying a house

12. Meeting Harry Styles

13. Being more present in every moment

14. Laughing until I tear up even more with people I love

15. Learning how to cook the best steak

16. Actually finishing The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

17. Selling a screenplay

18. Finding a new favorite movie

19. Having a room that’s just for oil painting

20. Seeing my nephew grow up

21. Teaching my dog a new trick

22. Leaving a legacy that reflects love and kindness

23. Learning something new that changes a part of my worldview

24. Creating more than I consume

25. Feeling even more alive than I do right now

Though most of these might not happen in this new year—and God might have another plan for some of it—the beauty of today is that for all I know, I am one year closer to all of these things and more.

So, what are you one year closer to?

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In today’s world, a world of endless scrolling and carefully curated feeds, this hunger has grown more pronounced. We exist in an era where visibility feels like currency, but it’s not enough just to be seen—we’re consumed with how we’re seen. The aesthetic of our lives has become its own form of self-surveillance.

We don’t just want to be noticed; we want to be palatable. We post pictures, we tell stories, and we craft digital versions of ourselves that are designed to be consumed. It’s not simply, “Do you see me?”—the question has morphed into, “Do you see me the way I want you the majority to see me?” It’s a subtle but profound shift.

The goal is no longer visibility for visibility’s sake. It’s about controlling the narrative, shaping perceptions. We’re not just showing the world who we are; we’re constantly asking, What will they think I am?

Margaret Atwood captured this internal tension decades ago when she wrote, “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” In today’s world, we are no longer just one person with one internal critic. We’ve become thousands of eyes watching ourselves—crafting, editing, refining our identities.

We are our own voyeurs, yes, but now we are also the audience of everyone else. It’s not just the gaze of a single “man inside” watching us; it’s the imagined gaze of our followers, the strangers who might stumble across our page, and the society at large, constantly evaluating how we measure up to the aesthetic standards of the day.

And those standards are suffocating. Everything must be aesthetic now, or anti-aesthetic in a very specifically designed way. Our food, our homes, our relationships, even our activism. It’s all subject to scrutiny, to the question of presentation. We live in a world where even moments of raw emotion—grief, joy, vulnerability—are filtered through a lens of performance. The sunset isn’t just enjoyed; it’s staged. Love isn’t just felt; it’s posted. And behind every post is the gnawing question: What do people see when they look at me?

Increasingly, we don’t even know how we feel about something until we check the comments. A photo, a news story, a thought piece, pop culture, art—we pause, unsure of our own emotions, waiting for the hive mind to guide us. We let others define what’s beautiful, what’s right, what’s worthy. And so, our need to be seen is constantly tangled up with the fear of being seen incorrectly. The more we perform, the less we know how to feel without an audience.

The irony of our digital age is that in being constantly visible, we’ve never felt more invisible. The more we perform, the less connected we feel to the people watching. Because visibility doesn’t equal intimacy. The likes, the followers, the comments—they’re not feeding our need to be known. They’re feeding our fear of being misunderstood. And so, we curate. We refine. We become brands.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the more we chase the aesthetic ideal, the further we drift from ourselves. We become personas, locked into the expectations of what we believe others want us to be. The digital world tells us that our value is in how we present ourselves, not in who we are. And so we become performers in our own lives, trapped in a loop of self-presentation that offers no escape. We’re trying to control the narrative, but in the process, we lose control of our authenticity.

At the heart of it all is a fear that haunts us: What if no one ever really sees me for who I am? What if all they ever see is the version of me I’ve created for them? Or worse yet, what if I don’t even know the true version of myself? The uncurated version?

The hunger to be seen is as ancient as humanity itself. We’ve always wanted to be acknowledged, to have our stories heard and our experiences validated. But what’s new is the pressure to make that visibility pleasing to a majority that could show up at any time and leave just as fast. We’ve exchanged genuine connection for curated consumption. We no longer just want to be understood—we want to be approved of.

In a world where everything is designed to be seen, the pressure to perform is relentless. Even our most intimate moments are subject to the question: How does this look?

The truth is, no amount of external validation will ever fill the void we feel—not unless it’s rooted in genuine connection. The likes, the followers, the views—they’re temporary dopamine. We don’t just want to be seen, we want to be known. Known in a way that goes beyond the aesthetic, beyond the curated images, beyond the performance. Known in a way that embraces our messiness, our contradictions, our full humanity.

But to be known, we have to be willing to show up as our whole selves, not just the edited version we think the world wants to see. It requires vulnerability in a world that prizes perfection. It forces us to be still for more than a second, to keep our eyes away from distractions, and to spend time getting to know ourselves. It means risking actually seeing ourselves and being seen as we are by that majority, not as we’ve constructed ourselves to be.

The real revolution in this aesthetic-driven age is to let go of the need to control what we’re seen as, and to instead embrace who we are—messy, raw, and real, filled with chaos, contradictions, and moments of both vulnerability and resilience, where we navigate life as imperfect, flawed, yet evolving beings, driven by passion, intuition, and a restless desire to find meaning through existence.

And yet, this is the risk worth taking. We’ve spent too long believing that our worth is tied to how aesthetically pleasing our lives appear to others. But what if we flipped the script? 

Because here’s the truth: real connection comes not when we perform, but when we reveal. What if we let go of the obsession with being seen and instead embraced the beauty of being understood? Even if that means our audience looks away.

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What would that entail? Maybe a different haircut, definitely a whole new wardrobe, an updated vocabulary would be a nice touch, and moving to another city would probably complete it.

Do we all have it? This incessant itch for change?

Or is this a symptom of our ever-changing culture? The slow drip rapid stream that flows out of our phones, out of social media, out of the movies we watch, the tv shows we consume, overwhelming us with serotonin, making us wish for a different life(style) every two seconds.

The truth is, if I had moved to Vermont last fall when I kept getting “my day in Vermont” tiktoks, I probably would have loved it the first two months, then very quickly begun to miss the muggy and humid Florida weather a week into Vermont’s snowy winter.

I don’t want to pretend that this overwhelming feeling of needing to live and experience every lifestyle ever created is special to our generation. In fact, the concept of the phrase "the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" can be traced back to the poetry of Publius Ovidius Naso, also known as Ovid, who lived from 43 BC to 17 AD.

Ovid wrote, “Fertilior seges est alenis semper in agris,” which translates to "the harvest is always more fruitful in another man's fields.” Ovid probably had no idea that his proverb would not only still be used more than 20 centuries later, but would be mistranslated and stripped of its poetic beauty.

Or maybe somewhere deep inside, he knew he was able to put into words a truth so deep and intertwined into the very bone marrow of human nature that it would survive until the end of time.

I mean, didn’t our very world fall at the itch that Eve couldn’t help but scratch?

Adam and Eve—who existed in the very definition of a perfect world, who physically walked through the garden with God himself—could not help but bite into the possibility of change, to sink their teeth into the idea of existing within a new paradigm.

This might be the true original sin - an insatiable yearning for something more, even when you have everything you need.

Ovid likely wrote that proverb during the height of the Roman Empire's expansion, a time when people were constantly exposed to new cultures, lifestyles, and the allure of wealth. Now, imagine if Ovid had access to today's technology and discovered that the Han Dynasty, Parthian Empire, Kushan Empire, and Aksumite Empire were also thriving across the globe. What if everyone in Rome could instantly see videos of how people from these distant lands were living?

He might’ve ripped up that little proverb and moved to China.

The forbidden fruit is now always a finger tap away for us. Today, we allow ourselves to be consumed with the endless possibilities that are out there.

You can actually see what life looks like as a digital nomad, urban professional, rural homesteader, minimalist, entrepreneur, artist, environmental activist, tech innovator, stay-at-home parent, luxury traveler, comedian, remote worker, fitness guru, social media influencer, academic scholar, on, and on, and on. Oh, and on.

If we’re being honest, is the anxiety of imagining how your life could be better more overwhelming sometimes than the stress of your actual circumstances or the fear of what could go wrong?

In the past two years, God has been very clear with me. He wants me to stay planted where I am right now for the foreseeable future. Does that make that itch to go go go any less irritating? Ask Eve.

However, knowing that my feet are planted on a truth deeper than the desire that is intertwined in my flesh is more stabilizing than following my every whim.

Am I saying you should never move or rebrand yourself or want change? Of course not (I also wouldn’t set us all up for failure like that). When the time is right, there’s no other choice than to change.

What I am saying is this: The harvest is always more fruitful in another man's fields. So either be happy for them, make the changes you need to get there, or focus on tending your land. Otherwise, you'll never stay planted long enough to see any harvest in your own field.

So, all this rambling has led us here. My prayer is that our desires themselves start to change towards finding the peace in contentment that exists within our own garden.

And on, and on, and on.

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I’ve driven the same way to work and back more than 700 times in the past year. Some days, it feels like my eyes are glazed over until I park and suddenly realize I made it home.

That’s the sort of stagnant routine most of us experience in life, a set of patterns etched so deeply into the grooves of our brain that we no longer have to be present to experience a second of it.

Then, there are moments when time stands still, and every single cell in your body is forced to wake up and pay attention.

At 12 am on what could’ve been a Tuesday or Friday, I was taking Finley out to do what he does best (p&p). No one else was on the street (I should’ve been in bed), but I began to hear a faint clapping sound every 5 seconds. I looked around, couldn’t see anyone, and reminded myself to stop waiting until midnight to take the dog out.

Unfortunately, the clapping started getting louder, which can only mean whoever’s hands those claps belonged to were getting closer. Even more unfortunate than that, Finley was only now starting to contemplate doing his business.

I looked around again and saw what no one wants to ever see if at all possible: the silhouette of a man at the end of a dark street.

He would clap, take five steps, stop, clap, take five steps, stop, clap. Somehow, this man was getting closer and closer way faster than I expected even through all that stopping and clapping.

Finley finally decided he found a good spot to poop, but it was taking forever for him to finish so I couldn’t just sprint away. Also, at this point, I had shaken every cell in my body awake and they were letting me know that if I ran this man would probably run after me (I had just finished watching Planet Earth btw).

I can confidently say that at that moment, every part of me was present. Mind, body, soul, and spirit were all accounted for as that man came closer and closer. The claps were like sirens, and he was five steps away from being shoulder-to-shoulder with me. I accepted my fate as I watched Finley not even be close to done somehow.

The man clapped, took five steps, stopped, turned to me, and screamed, “YOU MURDERED ALL MY FRIENDS.” Turned back, took five steps, stopped, and clapped.

Now, there was a lot for me to process at that moment.

1. What just happened

2. What a wild thing to scream at me

3. Who did I remind him of

4. Can I remember committing murder recently?

5. How is Finley not done yet

As I watched his silhouette continue down the street, I thought about how awake I felt, and how I couldn’t wait to tell everyone this story until they were tired of hearing it.

Life can be split between routine and unusual experiences (especially when you live in Florida). But it shouldn’t take a random man screaming that I murdered his friends to pull every part of me to the present moment.

If I hadn’t noticed a faint clap, I wouldn’t have realized it was getting closer and I probably wouldn’t have snapped to attention until he was halfway down the street.

This year I’ve been trying to notice the unusual in every moment, not only when a strange man is in the perimeter.

The other day I looked outside of my office window and noticed toilet paper falling from the sky.

On my drive back home I noticed a bird hanging from the exhaust pipe of the car in front of me (this was horrifying).

When watching waves crash on the beach I noticed two little boys racing each other to see who could escape the tide from touching them first.

While playing tennis I noticed how the sky began changing colors above us as the sun set.

I fed my dog last night and noticed how he waited to make eye contact with me before touching his food.

While putting on moisturizer I noticed I have a line in my skin right under both eyes (I put on extra moisturizer).

My friend was telling me a story and I noticed she would giggle after every four words.

I called my grandpa and noticed how he lights up every time we start talking about history (especially Native American history).

I was thinking about everything I had to do this week and noticed what a blessing it is to be in this specific season of my life.

In the quiet art of noticing, we unveil the extraordinary within the ordinary, turning the mundane into glimpses of what it means to be alive in every moment.

The opposite of noticing is overlooking, forgetting, disregarding. It’s living a life with our eyes glazed over until we feel ourselves putting the car in park.

It’s in the subtle strokes of attention that life's truths reveal themselves, patiently waiting for our gaze.

I’m starting to think that noticing and noticing and noticing is all we have in this life.

What I’ve noticed lately: picture edition

• Plane overhead

• Sunrise shadows

  

• Stingray by the pier

  

  ---

I want to hear some of the things you’ve noticed today!

Okay love you

until next time

xoxoxoxo

Instead, I’ll say that this year has been marked by unfinished art and broken glass.

I’ve had a huge canvas sitting in my closet for a whole year. Half of it is slathered in yellow oil paint, the kind that hurts your eyes to look at, and the other half is covered in shades of blue. This was the result of having a free Saturday and the urge to reclaim a hobby I haven’t touched in about four years.

These are the reasons I gave up halfway through: I forgot how long it takes to finish a painting, my tiny wooden easel kept falling over at the slightest breeze, and I decided to paint a sun setting over the ocean (do you know how much blending it takes so that it doesn’t look like something your great aunt would hang up in her beach-themed vacation home?). So now all I have is an eyesore in my closet that reminds me of all the other unfinished goals I have in my life due to a lack of patience, persistence, and vision.

But life keeps going and maybe one day I’ll take that canvas out and finish what I started, but it won’t be anytime soon. That’s okay, because for now, all I know is there’s unfinished art waiting in my closet, and there’s a sort of beauty and expectance in what it might someday become.

Our lives are made up of unfinished artwork, most of it might be stored away because it hurts to look at or acknowledge, but some of it is constantly in action.

some unfinished art for your viewing

those who witness

One quote I haven’t been able to stop thinking about is by Hanya Yanagihara, “Why wasn't friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn't it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. Friendship was witnessing another's slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person's most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”

This is not to say I don’t yearn for romantic love (especially now that the sun seems to set before it even rises), but sometimes we forget to stare in awe at the depth and vibrancy found in friendships. The new friendships I’ve made or deepened this year are constantly overlapping, blending together, creating new shades and meaning.

In a way, these are the people who we allow to be witnesses to our often hidden, messy, unfinished works.

a never-ending search

For many, the eye sore hiding in your closet is an unfinished understanding of what your calling or purpose is.

I bet most of you read that sentence and already want to close that door back up, but I want to encourage you to dust that thing off and take a good look at it. We often make the idea of purpose so lofty and unreachable. We think that maybe if we don’t answer the right phone, calling will pass right by us. But I tend to believe that if we seek that calling on purpose, we’ll end up in the middle of both.

So, stare at that wonky, confusing painting and notice the aspects that light up your nervous system. What colors bring serotonin running through you? What shapes inspire you? What lines sustain you? Which shades fulfill you?

This year I’ve learned to bring that lofty question down to where I can meet it eye-to-eye and carry it around in my pocket. I believe that through every experience, God will add a hue, every time I do something that inspires me a shape will appear, every time I find comfort a line will be drawn, and every time I create something I love a new blank space will be shaded in.

All I’m saying is that maybe, your purpose won’t magically appear fully developed on your doorstep. Maybe God doesn’t want to show you a masterpiece if you’re not ready to understand its depth and meaning. Maybe, your purpose and calling will be found in the cadence of examined authenticity, where each step you take becomes a signpost that will intersect with what the world desperately needs.

watch where you step

I have never broken more glass than I have this year. In fact, there are still shards of glass behind my TV stand from a vase I dropped five months ago (I’m noticing an ongoing persistence problem but that’s a self-improvement goal for another year & another newsletter).

In a lot of ways, broken glass is the perfect opposite of unfinished art. It’s the result of finished art that got destroyed into jagged edges; edges that can break skin if you’re not careful. When glass breaks, the first thing you do is check to see where each shard landed and watch every step on the way to the broom.

Broken glass means knowing that there’s danger ahead and not knowing if you picked up every piece until you step on it five months later.

a midnight call

There's nothing worse than getting a call late at night. That’s the only type of news that can’t wait. Watch your step.

When I answered that midnight call back in August, my mom let me know they had just found colon cancer in my grandma. Broken glass.

Two days later I flew to California when she got admitted to the SICU for Pneumonia. Shards everywhere.

One day later they could take the respirator off, her eyes sparkled, she asked about my dog. Picking up the pieces.

Seven days later I stood by her hospital bed as she took her last breath. The jagged edges break my skin.

There’s no pain like losing someone, especially when it comes out of nowhere. Even as time passes and you think you’ve picked up every single annoying, sharp piece, you unexpectedly find one behind the TV stand and it hits you like a wall again.

Ever since that first phone call, it’s been a process of glass breaking, and then its fragments shattering into smaller pieces throughout time.

But, in her last hours on this Earth, I saw a glimpse of a complete, breathtaking work of art in front of me. Surrounded by generations of life she created, by close friends who witnessed every small moment leading up to this one, by a husband who loved her until her very last breath.

Every person in that room had their head bowed, their hands stretched out to physically feel her. I’ve never heard such a deep silence before, and as I took a step back I saw the human instinct to have reverence toward death. There was so much dignity in her last breaths.

At that moment, for the first time in my life, I saw a finished masterpiece in the midst of broken glass. A mosaic of a life well lived. Of loving others well and being loved back. A new aspect of purpose and calling was revealed to me.

So, as we continue in this life full of unfinished art and broken glass, I pray God gives you the people who will witness it and help you through the mess of it. I pray He gives you the strength to face it, even when it hurts your eyes, and to carry those sharp pieces with you, even when it breaks the skin.

Even more importantly, I pray you get glimpses of beauty in both.

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you probably forgot you signed up for this, but the wait is over!!!! I'm finally writing the third newsletter in a year (i didn’t want to overwhelm you). i always find myself writing these when sitting at an airport. there’s something about being surrounded by strangers that are all waiting around to get to their final destination that makes me feel introspective—it’s like we’re all in some sort of purgatory together.

anyway, this year is almost over, and it marathon sprinted past me. i didn’t even get a glimpse of him catching his breath or stopping for water. i’m that one runner who decided to sign up for the race last minute and thought fast walking a mile two days before was enough training.

one thing i’ve learned while living in florida for a year (isn’t that insane), is that seasons are crucial in my life. without them, i’m in a constant state of summer, which means a year here feels like one of those months that just seems a little longer than usual (january). the only seasons florida knows are seaweed, jellyfish, and hurricane (which all pretty much take place over the summer).

for all of you living in a place where your year is marked by deep red leaves, frosty lawns, pollen in your nose, and burning car seats — count your blessings. some of us only get the last one (we do have the beach year-round though, so don’t be too thankful).

either way, i’ve officially lived in florida for a year, so it’s time for a list!!!

things i didn’t know then

1. don’t waste your life waiting for that feeling.

most of us are waiting for a feeling, and a lot of us can waste the majority of our lives preparing ourselves for it when it magically arrives and decides to stay.

that feeling can vary person to person.

feeling loved. settled. seen. appreciated. known. desired. respected. needed.

at a deep level, i think we all know that these feelings are flighty and fragile.

at an even deeper level, however, i think we believe there will be a moment in our lives when we’ll be able to catch that one feeling that we think will make life feel seamless and stick it so tight against our souls that it will never slip away.

this year i’ve come to realize that there’s beauty in the instability.

we have the opportunity to feel loved, settled, seen, appreciated, known, desired, respected, and needed in the course of a week. in the same breath, the weeks or months in which we feel uneasy, invisible, or forgotten might also come, but they will soon pass us by just as quickly and without a trace.

2. nothing good ever happens after 2 a.m.

some of you might have seen my cast out and about on social media (i hear it’s becoming a fashion trend?)

the rumor weed has been LOUD when it comes to how i broke this baby, but let me be clear: i did not fall down the stairs outside of my apartment. i guess it’s time to cement the story of how this happened in history once and for all.

one stormy night in september, i decided to wait a few hours for the rain to clear before taking my dog out to do his business. however, i ended up falling asleep and not waking up until 4 a.m. something in me (probably the holy spirit, a guardian angel, common sense, or the ghost of christmas past) told me to nOT go outside, but i felt bad for finley, who had been holding it since 5pm. so, i shut down the wise counsel and call in the troops (my crocs).

as soon i step outside of my apartment door, i look to my left. brace yourself.

two doors down, one of my neighbors (a guy in his 30s) is sitting butt naked on a chair. we make eye contact immediately. now, this is wilton manors (look that up if you’re confused), so i thankfully was not scared for my life.

however, the man is SHOCKED. he stands up and sprints into his apartment. this made it worse, bc witnessing a naked figure running through the night is a lot more to to think about. i immediately turn around and one step in i slip on a puddle and fall to the cement, breaking my finger and spraining my ankle. surprisingly, finley doesn’t run away but sits next to me.

this night was a lot to process, but it taught me an important lesson: you truly never know what you’ll see if you go outside after 2 a.m.

anyway, the cast is gone now, but my pinky looks wrong. it’s bent at a weird angle and now i have to go to physical therapy twice a week. i’m not sure how many of you have had a broken a finger (or anything else close to a joint) but once you have a cast on for a long time, whatever joints are in that cast freeze up, so now i can’t really bend it either. my therapist says we just have to retrain it, but something about my broken finger seems so final.

it took a second to break, a month to heal, and now it might be at a slightly different angle forever. whenever i send the signal to my pinky to make a fist, no matter how hard i stare at it, it refuses to go down all the way. i no longer recognize or understand a part of me that i was born with. i’m not quite sure what that means yet.

3. lets tremble at the beauty

one of my favorite books ever is Telling the Truth by Frederick Buechner and i recently reread it in one sitting. have you ever read something that makes your insides sway and scream and jitter so much that it’s almost painful to keep reading? that’s what this book does for me. i recommend reading it aloud for full effect.

anyway, this one excerpt made me realize that maybe we should dare to tremble at the beauty instead of trying to dampen its effect:

When they brought Jesus to the place where his dead friend lay, Jesus wept. It is very easy to sentimentalize the scene and very tempting because to sentimentalize something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can.

To sentimentalize something is to savor rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats. Not just as preachers but as Christians in general we are particularly given to sentimentalizing our faith as much of Christian art and Christian preaching bear witness—the sermon as tearjerker, the Gospel an urn of long-stemmed roses and baby's breath to brighten up the front of the church, Jesus as Gregory Peck.

But here standing beside the dead body of his dead friend he is not Gregory Peck. He has no form or comeliness about him that we should desire him, and as one from whom men hide their faces we turn from him. To see a man weep is not a comely sight, especially this man whom we want to be stronger and braver than a man, and the impulse is to turn from him as we turn from anybody who weeps because the sight of real tears, painful and disfiguring, forces us to look to their source where we do not choose to look because where his tears come from, our tears also come from.

something about the way Buechner writes makes me want to pull each sentence out and wrap them around my bones (especially the broken ones). once again, pick a day and just sit in your bed or couch and read this book aloud. it will shift something inside of you.

well, this list could be way longer, but you’re probably tired of scrolling and i can’t stop thinking about another line where Buechner says, “They are laughing because laughing is better than crying and maybe not all that different.” are you kidding? i’ll be thinking about that for the next month, thanks.

until the next time i’m at an airport.

byeeeeeee

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my 22nd birthday was this past saturday (the 18th), and i originally meant to send this out ON my birthday. that obviously did not happen. but now a few days have passed and i’m on a five-hour flight, so this is the perfect time to write up this silly little thing.

finding old friends in new faces

something i’ve been chewing on lately is the way moving to a new state as an adult shakes your insides. the mind takes a while to catch up with the body, and for the first few weeks in florida i found myself wanting to drive ten minutes to a friend’s house before remembering that the drive would now take twelve hours. there was also this strange confusion at not seeing mountains or rivers everywhere. i was surprised to be longing for the small southern town i’ve been urgently fighting to leave for the past fourteen years. i had to remind myself that i willingly traded country roads for city streets and rivers for oceans. isn’t that how it always goes.

every time i meet someone new there’s a part of me that’s searching for a sliver of home in their eyes. and i usually find it. i see parts of those i’ve loved in the way they squint their eyes, round out their vowels, are quick to laugh. this tendency to seek out old friends in new faces is one that might slowly fade away (i hope it never does), but for now, i find beauty and comfort in it.

sorry for being gross and senti, but it’s my birthday week so i’m allowed to do whatever i want.

my taylor swift era

i just turned 22, and it really does feel like i’m entering my swiftie era. i don’t really know what that means exactly, but if i suddenly start putting out hit albums with deep meanings featuring celebrity exes (adam driver would be one of them) do NOT be surprised.

part of me is sad that i will never be able to tell someone i’m 21 when they ask, but i’ve felt that way about every age since turning 17. and 22 is still incredibly young, but for some reason, i feel like i’m less than five years away from retirement? anyway, i spent my 22nd birthday in the back of my prius for 12 hours, which gave me lots of time to reflect on what i want 22 to look like for me. there’s lots of things i pray this new year brings: longer lashes, a better posture, not having to check my balance every time i go through a drive-through, an understanding of fractions, a deep and meaningful friendship with andrew garfield, and miraculous hair growth for pitbul (the singer, otherwise known as mr. worldwide). however, for the past few weeks, i haven’t been able to get this poem out of my mind, and i’ve decided that it’s a better goal than any of the ones i’ve listed (except, of course, pitbul’s head, which has been prayed over for decades and deserves redemption). It’s a poem by raymond carver, and you can read it as a conversation between two people or a conversation with oneself:

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

short poems like these have a chokehold on me, and this one is no different. what does it mean to call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth? well, i think it means something different for every person. i’ve been thinking of moments in my life when i feel beloved: old ladies calling me sweetie or dear, my dog choosing to sit next to me, laying under the palm trees, seeing my family all together, randomly finding a river while driving aimlessly, having to keep myself from falling on the floor from laughter, staring at the ocean. the list is longer, and in this new year, i want to keep adding to it, so that when all is said and done, even if all my wishes don’t come true, i can call myself beloved and know all the ways in which i have felt beloved in this life.

just a few hours ago, as i was writing the beginning of this newsletter in the atlanta airport (i’m now in the plane flying over what i can only guess is a simulation bc i still do not understand how planes work), the lady next to me asked if i could watch her belongings while she went to the bathroom, and when i said yes her eyes lit up and she thanked me for way longer than she should’ve for the small way i was helping her. i wonder if she felt the least bit beloved in that moment. i did.

when do you feel beloved? (if you didn’t give me a birthday gift this year, you are legally bound to send me your answer).

since it’s my birthday, i’ve decided to share my constant favorite things from the past year, my gift to you:

o   “I think I like when it rains” by WILLIS has been my constant song this year, and i cannot get enough of it!!

o   i’ve been in love with this youtube channel called “the skin deep” for years. think “we’re not really strangers” but in video form. this channel has been making these raw, emotionally open, beautiful, and human conversations come to life for years. sometimes it’s uncomfortable, sometimes it’s full of love, sometimes it’s full of anger, but it’s a window into the human experience of being in relationship with one another. here is one of my favorites from the channel but there’s hundreds so cry & enjoy

o   this blurry picture i took with finley on my birthday that makes him look like an absolute GIANT??? i love him so much:’)

o   i’ve been reading Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens and it’s SO good, makes me wanna go into marshland and spend my time studying bird feathers. highly recommend.

o   the podcast Bank Robber Diaries had me sobbing every episode, and even though i listened to it half a year ago, i still cannot stop thinking about it. it’s about Joe Loya, who was once the most prolific bank robber in California, and his story is so tragic, beautiful, and redemptive. it’s one of those podcasts that made me wish i had a part in creating it.

that’s it for now! please feel free to respond to this email with the answer to my question and let me know what you think of the list above!! or what you think about absolutely anything in this life. also, feel free to share this newsletter with anyone you think would enjoy it:)

love you! see you next time!!!

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