The cashier asked if I’d found everything I was looking for, the way they always do, and for once I made an effort to be chatty — which, if you know me at all, does not come naturally. I told her I’d come in for a rotisserie chicken, but then the Tennessee in me spoke up and said that fried chicken looks awfully good.

She lit up. “Where in Tennessee are you from?”

“Murfreesboro.”

“Oh, I used to live in Maryville.” Then a pause. “Did you hear the sad news?”

“No, what?”

“Dolly Parton passed away today.”

I stood there holding a box of fried chicken feeling like somebody had reached inside me and removed something. It wasn’t only that a famous person had died. It was that a piece of my childhood had died. A piece of my home state had died. And in a very real sense, it had.

There’s something almost perfect about finding out that way — two Tennesseans a long way from home, recognizing each other across a conveyor belt, over fried chicken. Dolly would have liked that. It’s the kind of scene she’d have gotten a song out of.

Never country. Always Dolly.

Here’s my confession: growing up in Tennessee, I was never a fan of country music. Never took. I know that’s practically a citizenship violation where I come from.

But I was always a fan of Dolly.

Because Dolly was never only country. She was country and gospel and bluegrass and pop and Hollywood and Broadway and a theme park in Pigeon Forge. She wrote “Jolene” — reportedly about a bank teller who’d taken a shine to her husband — and then wrote “I Will Always Love You” the same week, which is a run of songwriting that ought to be studied in a laboratory somewhere. She sang “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers and made it sound like the two of them had just thought of it. She played Glastonbury. She read to children at the Library of Congress.

Every time somebody built a box for her, she put rhinestones on it and climbed out.

Doralee and Truvy

And then there’s the acting, which people forget to mention and shouldn’t.

She’d never made a movie in her life when Jane Fonda cast her in 9 to 5 in 1980. Fonda has told the story of driving home from a Broadway show, already sure she wanted Lily Tomlin, and flipping on the radio to hear Dolly singing “Two Doors Down” — and her hair standing on end. Dolly said yes on one condition: she got to write the theme song. She wrote it on set, using her acrylic fingernails for percussion, and it went to number one on the country and pop charts and got her an Academy Award nomination. Not bad for a favor she asked for.

She was good in it, too — that’s the part that surprises people. Rave reviews. A Golden Globe nomination. She followed it with The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas opposite Burt Reynolds, then Rhinestone with Sylvester Stallone, which was a genuine turkey and which she cheerfully made fun of for the next forty years. And then Steel Magnolias in 1989, where she played Truvy Jones, the beauty shop owner, and stole a film that also contained Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis and a young Julia Roberts. Sally Field said today that if there are angels on earth, we’ve just lost one.

She never really played anybody but a version of herself, and I’ve come to think that was the whole point. There was so much of her that a version was plenty.

Her second Oscar nomination, in 2006, was for a song called “Travelin’ Thru,” written for Transamerica — a film about a trans woman trying to repair her family. A Pentecostal preacher’s granddaughter from Sevier County took heat for that from her own camp, and did not budge an inch. Hold onto that; it comes back in a minute.

The Book Lady

But the music isn’t what I’ll remember most about her.

Dolly’s father, Robert Lee Parton, was a tenant farmer in Sevier County who never learned to read or write. By her account he was one of the smartest men she ever knew, and he was ashamed of it — he’d decided somewhere along the way that it was too late for him to learn, and he carried that quietly for the rest of his life.

So in 1995 she started the Imagination Library, and began mailing a free book, every month, to every child under five in her home county. About seventeen hundred kids that first year. Not the poor children — every child. No paperwork proving you were poor enough to deserve a book. It just showed up in the mailbox with your name on it.

The program went national in 2000, the same year her daddy died. He lived long enough to hear children call her “the Book Lady.” He told her it was probably the most important thing she’d ever done.

It runs in five countries now. The count has passed three hundred million books.

I’ve sat through enough policy arguments to know how this next sentence lands, and I’m going to say it anyway: she did more for the poor children of East Tennessee and Appalachia than most government programs ever managed. And she did it without a single hearing, a single means test, or a single condescending word about the people she was helping. She just mailed them books, addressed to them by name, like they were somebody worth mailing something to.

1910

I heard her talk about literacy more than once, and every single time I thought about my great-grandmother.

She was born in 1898. Her daddy pulled her out of school after the sixth grade, which would have been somewhere around 1910. Taft was president. The Titanic hadn’t sailed. Women couldn’t vote — Tennessee wouldn’t cast the deciding ballot on that for another ten years.

She told me that story more times than I can count, and she cried every single time she told it. Eighty years on and it still cut her.

She was also the reason I went to college. She made sure of it — quietly, stubbornly, the way women of that generation made sure of things. And she had a line she’d give me, always the same words:

“If you’ve got a good education, you’ve got something nobody can ever take away from you.”

That is exactly what Dolly spent thirty years saying, in a rhinestone jacket, to anybody who’d hold still long enough. Two women born fifty years apart in the same hills, who arrived at the same conclusion from the same wound.

The faith part

You can’t understand Dolly’s giving if you don’t understand where it came from, and where it came from was church.

Her grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher — hellfire and brimstone, the full artillery — and she’s said it scared her half to death as a girl. She found God for herself later, on her own terms, in an abandoned church house down below their place: a wrecked piano, graffiti on the walls, beer cans on the floor, and the old Bible verses still hanging up there among it all. That’s about the most Dolly image I can think of. The sacred and the scruffy in the same room, and her seeing no contradiction whatsoever.

Her faith didn’t come out of her as scolding. It came out as generosity, which is rarer than it should be — and it’s why she could write that Transamerica song without feeling like she’d contradicted a thing. She’d have told you love thy neighbor doesn’t come with a questionnaire attached. She put a million dollars into Vanderbilt for coronavirus research and it ended up helping underwrite the Moderna vaccine. She raised money for flood victims in her own county, more than once. She covered tuition, fees, and books for every one of Dollywood’s eleven thousand employees.

She said once that she believed God didn’t intend for her to have children of her own, so that everybody’s children could be hers.

And then she went out and behaved as though she actually meant it.

Hillbillies, not rednecks

One of my fondest memories of my grandfather: he’d fix me with a look of total earnestness — but with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye — and say, “Dave, remember: we’re hillbillies, not rednecks. There’s a big difference.”

I still laugh about it. I also still think he was right.

Dolly got asked about the hillbilly thing her entire career, and she never once flinched from it. She said she was proud of it. She said being that poor keeps you humble and keeps you good, and that no matter how hard you try to outrun it, if that’s who you are, that’s who you are — it’ll show up once in a while.

She never outran it. She never tried. She carried it with her to the Opry, to Hollywood, to Glastonbury, to the Library of Congress, and she was the same person in every one of those rooms.

Butterflies

One more, and it’s an odd one to have stuck with me.

There was a British sitcom called Butterflies that ran on the BBC from 1978 to 1983 — Wendy Craig as a restless housewife in Cheltenham, Geoffrey Palmer as her dentist husband who collected the things. The theme song was Dolly’s “Love Is Like a Butterfly,” a number one country hit from 1974, recorded for the series by an English singer named Clare Torry, who — in one of those small miracles of trivia — is also the voice on Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.”

Sit with that a second. A song written by a girl from a cabin in Sevier County, Tennessee, floating over the opening credits of a gentle English comedy about middle-class disappointment. That’s the reach of her. That’s how far a hillbilly got.

She put a butterfly in the Dollywood logo, too. She loved them.

Carl

And then there’s Carl.

She met Carl Dean outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat the day she arrived in Nashville. She was eighteen. He drove past and told her she was going to get sunburnt out there. They married on Memorial Day of 1966, a small ceremony in Ringgold, Georgia.

He wanted nothing to do with any of it. He went to exactly one industry event early on, came out afterward pulling off the tuxedo tie, and told her never to ask him to another one of those damn things again. She never asked. He never went.

Sixty years. Through the Opry, the movies, the theme park, the residencies, the whole rhinestone hurricane, there was a man in Nashville running an asphalt-paving business who just wanted his wife home for supper.

He died in March of last year. She said afterward that she was at peace that he was at peace, but that it didn’t keep her from missing him and loving him. She said she’d been with him sixty years and was going to have to relearn some of the things they’d done together.

She only had to relearn them for about seventeen months.

I don’t know what you believe about any of that. I know what she believed. And if she was right, then they’ve found each other again — and he still isn’t going to any of those damn events.

Chicken

I got the fried chicken.

I sat in the parking lot for a minute before I started the car, which I’m not in the habit of doing.

Somewhere tonight there is a three-year-old in Sevier County, and in Coventry, and in Alberta and New South Wales, who is going to get an envelope in a few weeks with a book in it and their own name on the front. Nobody had to prove anything to anybody to get it. That’s the monument. Not a statue on Music Row — a book in a mailbox, every month, addressed to a kid.

Rest easy, Dolly.

We’re hillbillies, not rednecks. There’s a big difference, and you knew it better than anybody.

He is sixteen, he is blind, and he wants to be a mechanical engineer. So the conversation runs to how things work — engines, bridges, whatever he has been reading about — until the audiobook wins and he falls asleep against the window mid-sentence, and then twenty minutes later he is awake again and picking up exactly where he left off. He is on the fourth Harry Potter. He has opinions about it.

I was driving him to move into the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind.

Alison was not with us, and that is its own small piece of this story. She teaches kindergarten, and it was the first week of school. So while her son was moving into a dormitory four hours up the state, she was standing in front of nineteen other people’s five-year-olds, who needed her that day and had no idea what she had going on.

We have a phrase for this. Divide and conquer. We have been saying it for twenty-seven of our thirty-two years of marriage, which is to say since the twins were born, and it is not a euphemism for one of us doing the work alone. It means there is more in front of this family than two people can be in one place for, so you take that and I’ll take this, and neither of us keeps score.

It was blue sky the whole way up. Then somewhere in St. Johns County the light changed, and the clouds stacked up ahead of us the way they do in Florida in August, and by the time we reached campus at half past five the heavens had opened.

So the move-in went like this. Isaac, dry and delighted in his new room, entirely unbothered. His father hauling boxes from the car to the dorm and back to the car and back to the dorm, soaked through by the second trip and well past caring by the fourth. Of the two of us, only one was having a hard afternoon, and it was not the sixteen-year-old.

I got him settled. I had dinner with friends who live locally, spent the night in a hotel, and came back the next morning for Isaac’s IEP meeting, which had to be finished before he could start classes. We got that done. And then he toodled off to his first class, and I made my way to the car.

That was the goodbye. It did not announce itself as one. He simply went — no last hug, no look back, nothing but a boy walking toward a classroom he had been waiting five years to get into. I was fine. I was genuinely fine, glad, certain we had done the right thing, positive about the whole business, right up until I got to the car and found I had a lump in my throat.

Some of the ease is his history. Isaac spent his first five years in an orphanage in China before he was ours, and children who begin that way often hold goodbyes more lightly than other children do. I do not expect homesickness. I do not expect tearful Sunday night phone calls. On the whole that is a mercy, and I am grateful for it.

But I should say plainly that the bill for it has not been split evenly. A child who learned early not to need anyone withholds most from the person working hardest to be needed, and in our house that has been Alison. Being Isaac’s mother has cost her more than being his father has cost me — more patience, more absorbed rebuffs, more love poured out at a wall with no way of knowing what was getting through. Whatever attachment he does have, and he has more every year, she built it.

So when I tell you I walked to the car with a lump in my throat, understand that I got off easy. I got the drive. She got nineteen five-year-olds and her phone face-down on the desk.

We tried this once before. Isaac enrolled at FSDB in fourth grade, right on the heels of COVID, and it did not work — not the school’s fault exactly, not ours, just a bad situation all around at a bad moment. He came home.

Five years later it is a different place. The atmosphere has changed completely. And he is a different kid: he was excited then, and he is more excited now, because he understands what is at stake in a way a nine-year-old could not.

We live in a poor rural county. The services a blind student with orthopedic needs is owed on paper are not the services available in practice, and everyone involved knows it. Isaac knows it best of all. He has worked out that this school is his best chance — probably his only chance — at the education and the independent living skills that get him to college, to engineering, to a life he runs himself.

So he is not being sent away. He is going. That difference is most of why the day was a good one.

Some background on our family, because the rest of this doesn’t work without it.

Alison and I have six children. Our twins, Theo and Ben, are twenty-seven; they were born three months early, at twenty-seven weeks, and Ben has cerebral palsy as a result. Henry is twenty-four. Then three from China: Lily, eighteen, born with a cleft lip and palate, who this year underwent major jaw surgery this summer — the latest in a long line of operations and years of speech therapy, all of it aimed at building a mouth that could do what mouths are supposed to do. Lucy is thirteen, hard of hearing in her left ear. And Isaac, sixteen, blind, with a significant orthopedic impairment, now a student in St. Augustine.

Hold onto that list.

The Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind opened on February 2, 1885, on five acres donated by a local hotelier, in three wooden buildings that cost the state a little under thirteen thousand dollars. Eleven children came the first year. Parents had to be persuaded; it was some time before Florida families would trust the place with their children.

A hundred and forty years later it is tuition-free, state-supported, PreK through 12, residential, eighty acres — the only school of its kind in Florida and one of a handful in the country serving students who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind or visually impaired, or deafblind. Ray Charles was a student there. So were a great many people you have never heard of who learned to read and to navigate and to work and, eventually, to leave.

Here is the detail I cannot get out of my head. When it opened, the school was called The Florida Institute for the Blind, Deaf and Dumb.

That is the vocabulary of 1885. It is also, nearly word for word, the vocabulary of a hymn stanza Charles Wesley wrote in 1739 — a stanza Methodists have spent the last several decades quietly declining to sing.

You know the hymn. Charles wrote it for the first anniversary of his conversion, and it opens our hymnal: number 57, O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing. Seven stanzas. We sing one and two and four with gusto. Then we come to the sixth:

Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ; ye blind, behold your Savior come, and leap, ye lame, for joy.

Now go back to my list.

Hear him, ye deaf — that is Lucy.

His praise, ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ — that is Lily. In our house “loosened tongues” is not a poetic flourish. It is a surgical description. It is what the surgeons and the speech pathologists have been working at for eighteen years.

Ye blind, behold your Savior come — that is Isaac, whom I left in a dormitory in St. Augustine this week.

And leap, ye lame, for joy — that is Ben, twenty-seven years old, born at twenty-seven weeks. And Isaac again.

Four clauses. Our table.

Nobody has removed the stanza, and I want to be fair about that. It is still printed in the Methodist Hymnal, and I suspect the editors knew that cutting a stanza of Charles Wesley outright would be a bridge too far. But look at the page. The stanza carries an asterisk — the editors’ polite notation for this one may be omitted. And in my experience it usually is. It has been asterisked, and then it has been skipped, and a skipped verse is a deleted verse with better manners.

For my whole ministry I have made a point of singing it. Since Ben was born, I have made rather more than a point of it.

I understand the discomfort. I want to say that plainly rather than wave it off, because the people who flinch at that stanza are usually flinching for a reason worth respecting.

The reason is this. Scripture and hymnody have a long habit of using blindness and deafness as metaphors — for unbelief, for hardness of heart, for spiritual dullness. Having eyes, do you not see? And if you are a blind person in the pew, or a Deaf person watching an interpreter, and the congregation around you is singing lustily about how blindness is what sin looks like, that is a real cost paid by real people on a Sunday morning. It is not oversensitive to notice it. I would notice it. My children would notice it.

But that is not what Wesley is doing here, and the flinch has caused us to misread him badly.

Look at where the stanza falls. The one before it is He speaks, and listening to his voice, new life the dead receive. Wesley has been building through the whole hymn toward what the arrival of Christ actually accomplishes, and in stanza six he stops speaking in metaphor and starts naming bodies. Deaf ears. Silent tongues. Sightless eyes. Legs that do not work.

And then — this is the whole thing — every one of them is addressed in the imperative. Hear. Behold. Leap. Wesley is not talking about the blind. He is talking to them. A metaphor for spiritual dullness does not get the second person.

He is not saying you are a symbol of my sin. He is saying you are going to get your body back, and here is what you will do with it.

That is not a slur. That is an invitation to a party.

Charles’s brother preached the theology of it. John Wesley’s sermon “The General Deliverance,” on Romans 8 — the whole creation groaning, waiting for the revealing of the children of God — argues that what Christ came to set right is not merely the human soul but the entire wounded order of things. Wesley goes further than most of us are comfortable going; he thinks the animals are in on it too. The point is the scope. Everything the Fall broke, God intends to mend. Not compensate for. Not spiritualize into a lesson. Mend.

So: cerebral palsy. Blindness. A cleft palate. An ear that doesn’t work. And beyond our own household — cancer, famine, war, the hurricane that takes the roof off, the scan that comes back wrong.

And, I have come to think, the other thing too. The stanza names ears and tongues and eyes and legs, but the deepest wound in my son is not on that list. It is whatever happened in the first five years of his life in a room where nobody came when he cried. If the promise does not reach that, it is not much of a promise. I believe it reaches that.

Stanza six is not a description of anybody’s deficiency. It is a promise, addressed by name to the people with the most riding on it.

Now, the obvious objection, and it is a serious one. If God is going to fix it all in the end, why fight so hard about it now? Why drive four hours? Why argue with a school district?

Because Methodists have never once waited. You do not sit in an IEP meeting in St. Augustine at eight in the morning because you have given up on the world being put right. You sit there because you haven’t.

John Wesley founded Kingswood School in 1748, outside Bristol, for the sons of colliers — the children of coal miners, which is to say the children nobody else in England was troubling to educate. Ben went to that school. It sits above Bath now, and my son with cerebral palsy studied there, and then took a bachelor’s and a master’s in business at Florida Southern, and has worked alongside me at the church for ten years, first as my preaching assistant and now as our church administrator.

Florida built a school in 1885 for the children the state was not educating either. Isaac enrolled in it this week.

That is the same instinct, a hundred and thirty-seven years apart. Longing for the day when God sets all things right has never been a reason to accept things as they are. It is the reason you cannot. You build the school because you know what the world is supposed to look like.

Ben is the most remarkable person I know — and I am aware that fathers say this, so let me be specific instead. He is a Wesley-educated man with two degrees who runs the business of a church. When Ben and I sing stanza six together, and we have sung it together for years, he is not singing it out of some deficit that needs filling. He has a life. He is singing about a day he expects to arrive.

And I cannot sing it standing next to him without noticing something uncomfortable about myself.

He longs for that day. He wants it, the way you want a thing you have been waiting on for twenty-seven years. And I — able-bodied, reasonably healthy, good life, full calendar, comfortable chair — do not want it the same way. Not really. I say the words of the Creed about Christ coming again to judge the living and the dead, and I mean them, and I do not ache for them. If I am honest, some quiet part of me would like the Lord to hold off until I have finished a few things.

Which may say more about the state of my heart than any verse in the hymnal could.

The people in Scripture who cry Maranatha — come, Lord — are never the comfortable ones. They are prisoners and exiles and the sick and the poor. It turns out that longing for the restoration of all things is a discipline the afflicted are simply better at, because they are not being asked to give up as much.

I don’t think the answer is to manufacture suffering in order to want heaven more. I think the answer is to stand next to people who already want it, and let their longing correct yours. God has been extravagant with Alison and me on that front.

Isaac is in St. Augustine tonight, on a campus named in 1885 with the same rough old words Charles Wesley used in 1739, listening to Harry Potter and thinking about vehicles. He is learning to read and to move through the world and to become, eventually, a man who does not need his parents. The school has been doing that work for a hundred and forty years, and it is good work, and I am grateful to every person on that campus doing it.

And it is not the end of the story. It was never supposed to be the end of the story.

So sing the sixth verse. Don’t skip it because somebody printed an asterisk beside it. Sing it especially when there is someone in the room for whom it is not a metaphor — and then look at them while you sing, because they are the ones who know what the words mean.

Ye blind, behold your Savior come, and leap, ye lame, for joy.

Amen. Come quickly.

There was a lady in that congregation named Faye. And Faye would not come to the Lord’s table.

I asked her why. She told me plainly: she was not worthy of it.

I tried to talk her out of it. I want the record to show that I tried. But I did not have the knowledge, or the experience, or the words, and I could not reach her. She stayed in her seat, Sunday after Sunday, while the bread went past her.

I never convinced her. Not once in all the time I served that church. I was young, and I did not have the maturity or the knowledge or the confidence to say the thing that might have reached her. As far as I know she never came.

That is not a story with a good ending, and I am telling it anyway, because I have carried it for thirty-six years.

Here is what I did not understand back then, and understand now: Faye was not being humble. She thought she was. Everyone around her thought she was. But she had it exactly backwards, and I did not know enough to tell her so.

What à Kempis knew

This week our congregation comes to the first half of Book Four of The Christian’s Pattern — the book on Holy Communion. It is the strangest and most intimate section of the whole work, because à Kempis abandons his usual voice and writes a dialogue. Christ speaks. The disciple answers. And what they mostly talk about is exactly Faye’s problem.

The disciple keeps protesting that he is unworthy. He piles it up. He is dust, he is a sinner, he has nothing to bring. And Christ does not contradict him. That is the part that surprises people. Christ never says oh, you’re not so bad.

He says come anyway.

That is the whole argument of Book Four, and it is why à Kempis put the section on the sacrament at the end of the book rather than the beginning. You have to walk through the humility of Book One, the interior life of Book Two, and the dark valley of Book Three before the table means what it is supposed to mean. À Kempis is not interested in getting you to the altar with your head held high. He is interested in getting you there empty-handed.

Empty-handed is the only way anyone has ever come.

Wesley’s answer to Faye

John Wesley read à Kempis as a young man at Oxford and never got over him. He translated him. He edited him. He published him for the Methodists in 1741, which is the edition this book comes from. And when Wesley wrote his own sermon on communion, he took up Faye’s objection directly.

He wrote: “You say, ‘I am unworthy to receive it.’ And what then? You are unworthy to receive any mercy from God. But is that a reason for refusing all mercy?”

Read that again slowly, because it turns the whole thing inside out.

Wesley is not arguing that Faye was worthy. He agrees with her. He agrees with her more thoroughly than she does — she is unworthy of the bread, and also of the air in her lungs and the morning she woke up to and every other mercy she has ever received without once asking whether she had earned it. Unworthiness is not the exception at this table. It is the entrance condition.

So the question is not am I good enough to accept this pardon. The question is: having been offered a pardon, on what grounds am I refusing it?

Faye was refusing a pardon on the grounds that she needed one.

Three things I did not have room for on Sunday

First — Wesley wasn’t guessing. Scholars who have gone through his diaries figure he received communion about once every four or five days, from his ordination until his death at eighty-seven. Sixty-some years of it. Over four thousand times. He took it in cathedrals and chapels and private homes, in fields when bishops locked him out of pulpits, on the road, and when he was sick. When he couldn’t find a priest to administer it, he wrote letters complaining about the shortage. Whatever else you make of the man, he was not casual about this.

Second — the Wesleys ranked it. John and Charles published a collection of one hundred and sixty-six hymns on the Lord’s Supper in 1745. In one of them, Charles runs through the means of grace — fasting, hearing the word, prayer, all of them good vessels for drawing grace out of salvation’s well — and then says that none of them draws out what this one does. He calls the sacrament “this choicest instrument.” John said the same thing in prose: the grand channel. Two brothers, two forms, one conviction. Of all the ordinary ways God has arranged to get himself to his people, they thought this was the deepest well.

Third — there is a name for what Methodists believe. We do not hold that the bread stops being bread. We also do not hold that it is merely a symbol, a visual aid, a memory device with a nice meaning attached. We hold a third thing, and it has a name: receptionism. Christ is truly given, and truly received, by faith, in the act of receiving. The presence is real. It is located not in the elements sitting on the table but in the encounter between the risen Christ and the person with open hands. Richard Hooker taught it in the English Reformation; Wesley inherited it and never let it go.

The late Theodore Runyon put the Methodist instinct about as compactly as it can be put: the Spirit brings Christ to us, expressing the grace and love of God toward us through the means of bread and wine.

Notice the direction. Calvin taught that the Spirit lifts us up to where Christ is. Wesley believed the traffic runs the other way. Christ comes down. He always has. That is the entire shape of the gospel in one preposition, and it is why nobody at that rail has to climb.

Why two Sundays

Our congregation normally comes to the table on the first Sunday of the month. This week and next we are coming anyway, out of rhythm, on purpose.

The reason is simple enough. It struck me as thin to spend twenty-five minutes preaching about a meal and then not eat it. À Kempis wrote a dialogue instead of an essay because he understood that the sacrament is not a doctrine you agree to. It is a thing that is done to you. Wesley took it every five days for sixty years not because he had settled the theology but because he was hungry.

So come hungry. That is the whole invitation, and it is the only qualification anyone has ever met.

And if you are a Faye — if you have been letting the bread go past you for years because you know yourself too well — then I want to say to you what I did not know how to say in Rickman, Tennessee, in 1990. You were never worthy. Not one of us has ever been worthy. That was never the requirement.

The table is not for the satisfied. The table is for the hungry.

Come.

This post accompanies Sermon 11 of our summer series, “Come Hungry: Recovering Wesley’s Vision of Holy Communion,” and the first half of Book Four of The Christian’s Pattern (Invite Press, 2026). Wesley quotations are from Sermon 101, “The Duty of Constant Communion.”

Previously, I told you about six days, forty-seven miles, six little Derbyshire chapels, and a string of people I’d never met who kept turning up with a bed, a casserole, or my own luggage waiting for me at a door I hadn’t reached yet.

Today I’m asking you to be one of them.

The Kickstarter for Walking the Edges is open.

👉 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jdjuliano/walking-the-edges

The short version, if you missed Friday’s note: Instant Apostle is publishing the book in the UK on 6th November. A fledgling author with a small press does his own launching — which means buying books up front and getting myself across an ocean to actually be there when the thing comes out.

I’ve costed it honestly. It comes to $8,850:

• $3,500 — books

• $1,700 — flights and travel in the UK

• $3,650 — Kickstarter fees, launch events and the rest of it

And I want to be plain about what this is, because I’m a pastor asking people who know me for money and I’d rather over-explain than have anyone wondering. This is not a donation drive. It’s a pre-order. You choose a level, you get a book — and at some levels, the Pilgrim’s Playlist, a Walking the Edges illustrated map and much more. If the campaign doesn’t reach $8,850, Kickstarter charges nobody a penny and I’ll find another way. There is no version of this where you hand me money and get nothing back.

Three things would help, in this order:

1. Back it today. Not Thursday, not when you remember. Kickstarter’s own machinery watches the first couple of days and decides from that whether to start showing the project to strangers. A pledge today is worth several a week from now.

2. Send it to one person. Not a mass forward — one person you actually think would read this book. That’s how small campaigns find the people who aren’t already in my address book.

3. Watch the video. It’s three minutes, and it’ll tell you more about the walk than I can here.

Forty-seven miles across the Peak District taught me a few things, and the one I’m still worst at is asking. I’d rather carry my own bag up the hill and arrive wrecked than let somebody help me. That instinct is most of what was wrong with 2024.

So: I’m asking.

Thank you — genuinely, and in advance.

Solvitur ambulando.

— David

Somewhere on the second day of the Peak Wesley Way, I came round a bend expecting the worst — a climb, a stile, another hill my shins had strong opinions about — and instead found my bag sitting at a chapel door.

I hadn’t carried it. Malcolm had. Or Julie. Or Graham. I honestly lost track of who was doing it by the end, which tells you something about how often it happened. Six days, forty-seven miles, six little Methodist chapels through Derbyshire, and at nearly every point where I was about to run out of whatever I was running on, somebody I had never met showed up with a bed, a casserole, a key to a locked chapel, or my own luggage waiting for me like it had walked there by itself.

I started calling them Methodist angels. It was meant as a joke the first time.

I should back up and say why a sixty-one-year-old Florida pastor whose only regular exercise is jumping to conclusions was out on those hills at all.

2024 was, to borrow from a certain late Queen, my annus horribilis. Nobody divorced me and my house did not burn down, so I want to keep this in proportion. But a thing I’d been promised fell through, a friendship I trusted broke in a way I still don’t fully understand, and — worst by a distance — my own stubborn pride had put a continent’s worth of silence between me and my son Henry. I had spent ten years pastoring one church, twenty without a sabbatical, and if you had asked me that summer to name one part of my life that was going well, I’d have had to think about it a good while and then change the subject.

As we say back home, I felt lower than a snake’s belly.

What I did about it was walk. Which sounds like a punchline, and was in fact a very old idea: solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. Augustine said it, the desert fathers and mothers lived it, and John Wesley put 250,000 miles on it, mostly on horseback and mostly in weather. My church approved the sabbatical, my wife Alison gave me two weeks and took the whole weight of our family onto her own shoulders without once making me feel it, and on the last day of May 2025 I started walking north from Matlock with my friend Jorge — and, for the first day, with Henry beside me.

That first day mattered more than the other five combined. You can guess why.

I didn’t keep a journal. I meant to. I packed a nice leather notebook for the purpose and never opened it, because at the end of each day the only ambition I had left was horizontal. Months later, back at my desk in Sebring, people kept asking what I’d discovered out there, and I kept saying things like it was amazing and hearing how hollow it sounded.

So I wrote it down. All of it. And found that the writing was its own kind of walking — the meaning had been there the whole time, waiting to be remembered.

That’s the book. It’s called Walking the Edges, and Instant Apostle is publishing it in the UK on 6th November.

I still find that sentence hard to type. Nicki at Instant Apostle turned it down the first time I asked. I pushed back — politely, I hope — and she took another look, and then she took a chance on an unknown American with an unsolicited manuscript. Anyone who knows publishing knows how rarely that happens.

Here’s the part I’ve been putting off writing.

A first-time author with a small press does his own launching. That means books to buy up front, and a flight across the ocean to actually be there when the thing comes out — in the country that has been in my blood since I was a boy reading about King Arthur instead of playing outside like a normal child. I’ve costed the whole business out honestly, and it comes to $8,850.

So on Sunday I’m launching a Kickstarter. It’s not a donation drive; it’s a pre-order with a few things attached, and if it doesn’t fund, nobody pays a penny. I’ll spare you the pitch — you’ll get one soon enough.

Today I’m asking for something smaller and free.

Would you go to the pre-launch page and click “Notify me”?

👉 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jdjuliano/walking-the-edges

It takes about ten seconds and costs nothing. But everyone who clicks it gets an automatic message the moment the campaign opens, and on Kickstarter the first day decides almost everything — a campaign that moves early gets shown to strangers, and one that doesn’t, doesn’t. Ten seconds from you on a Friday genuinely changes what Sunday looks like.

I wrote a whole book about being carried by people who had no particular reason to carry me.

It feels only fair to admit I need it again.

Solvitur ambulando.

— David

I drove up from Sebring with the kids to see family. It’s a long haul — Florida flatwoods, then Georgia, then that last stretch on I-24 where the land starts to roll and you know you’re close. I’ve made this drive enough times to have a private set of landmarks along it. Fewer of them are there every year.

My brother and sister-in-law still have forty acres in Christiana. Our mother bought that land, and it holds like an oasis holds — the tree line where it’s always been, the same long view, nothing out there to tell you what year it is. I slept better than I have in months.

Then my brother mentions the thirty new houses that went in down the road. You can’t see a one of them from the yard. But once you know they’re there, just past the trees, you can’t unknow it, and the quiet stops being a fact and starts being a reprieve.

Forty acres is a lot of land until it’s not a lot of land anymore.

It was never true in our community that we knew everybody. Even when I was coming up, Murfreesboro was too big for that. But you knew everybody’s people, which is a different thing and maybe a better one.

Somebody would give you a name and you’d ask, without thinking about it, who are her people? — and the answer placed her. Not on a map. In a web. She was so-and-so’s girl, and so-and-so married one of the boys who farmed out past Barfield, and their mother taught school for thirty years. Once you had that you knew a great deal, some of it fair and some of it not. Nobody sat you down and taught you the system. You picked it up in the back seat, listening to your grandma work it out with somebody on the way to somewhere else.

And there was a shorter test. Three place names, and you’d know inside a sentence.

Murfreesboro, said carefully, all the letters — Murf-rees-boro — meant you were from off. We said Murfiss-boro and always had. Eagleville was Igga-vul, and if you’re reading that and thinking it can’t be, that’s the point. And Versailles, out past the knob, was Ver-SAYLES. Say it the French way and you might as well have handed somebody your driver’s license from another state. It had been Ver-SAYLES since before anybody could remember why, and the locals had no interest in France’s opinion about it.

Nobody corrected the newcomers. That would have been rude, and un-Southern. But you were most definitely, quietly judged, and placed in the category of outsider — and the placing was the whole point.

That was the operating system. It ran quietly underneath everything: how you got a job, how you got forgiven, how you got looked after when your daddy was sick. It never announced itself. You only notice a thing like that once it’s gone, and by then noticing is all you can do.

The numbers are easy to find and I’ll only make you sit through them once.

The county had a little over 84,000 people in 1980. It has around 386,000 now, on its way to being the third-largest in Tennessee. Between 2014 and 2023 Rutherford lost more than 22,000 acres of farmland — more than any other county in a state that ranks third in the nation for losing it. The number of farms fell from 1,414 to 1,270 in five years. Developers pay up to $40,000 an acre, and there is no version of hay or cattle or soybeans that competes with that.

The school system is building its way toward 56,000 students. It opened its fifty-third campus this month.

I don’t put those figures down to indict anybody. I put them down because I want to be honest that what happened here was not a crime. It was a market.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how it looks in the middle of happening.

Drive out any of the pikes now and you see the cuts before you see the houses. A hillside opened up and laid back. Red clay turned to the sky, topsoil scraped into a long berm, the whole raw thing wrapped in orange silt fence like a bandage over a wound nobody intends to heal. It sits that way for months. It rains, and the clay runs down into the creek, and the creek goes the color of a scab.

Then the frames go up. And here’s the part I have trouble forgiving — not the building, but the forgetting. Six months later I could not reliably tell you what that field grew or whose family owned that farm for six generations. The ground gives up its history faster than you’d think.

The signs all use the same word.

Luxury apartments. Luxury townhomes. Luxury single-family homes from the low 400s. Luxury living. Luxury leasing now. Luxury coming soon, on eighty acres of what was, until March, in hay.

Luxury at what cost isn’t a rhetorical question — it has a number, and the number is on the sign. Forty thousand an acre is what a developer can pay and a farmer can’t refuse. And I want to be careful here, because it’s tempting to make the farmer a martyr and he isn’t one. That land was his retirement. Nobody offered him a better deal, and nobody was going to. A farmer’s field is his 401(k) in a business that doesn’t have one. What looks from the road like surrender was, up close, simple arithmetic.

But notice what that word is doing. Nobody ever called it luxury when it was a farm. It didn’t need a name. It was just the place. Luxury is what you sell to people who have no relationship to where they’re standing — a promise of insulation. Granite, a gate, a pool, a clubhouse. Everything you could need, so that you never have to go out into the county and discover you don’t know a soul.

Malvina Reynolds wrote a song in 1962 about houses on a hillside, all the same, made of ticky-tacky. She was after conformity — she thought the sameness of the boxes made the people inside the same. Sixty years on, from the interstate, the Blackman subdivisions look exactly like the song. But she had it slightly wrong for here. The trouble isn’t what people become inside the boxes. It’s what was under the hillside before.

There’s a version of this essay that reaches for the war. And I should say, for anybody reading this from off: when somebody down here says the war, with no adjective in front of it, they do not mean the one with Hitler in it. There’s only ever been one war that needed no modifier, and it ended in 1865.

This county was in it. Stones River, the last day of 1862 into the first days of 1863 — twenty-three thousand dead in three days, in fields people still farm. Then a long occupation. Rosecrans tore down houses and cut timber for miles to build his fortress, and if you’d stood in a field here that spring you’d have sworn nothing would ever grow again.

But it did. That’s the thing. The fields came back. The war was terrible and the war was temporary, and the land outlasted the men who wrecked it.

Nothing comes back from 110,000 residential units. That’s the difference, and it’s the only comparison I’ll make. Not that prosperity was worse than the war. It’s that prosperity is permanent.

What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

I’ve heard Mark 8:36 preached my whole life as a warning to individuals, and it is one. But a county can make the trade too. Rutherford has gained the world by every measure the world uses — jobs, wages, growth, amenities, a Publix within reach of nearly everyone. It’s the second question that stays with me. Verse 37 is about the exchange rate. What did we take for it? And who was at the table when the price got set?

Nobody voted for this. It happened one rezoning at a time, and every single one of them, taken alone, was reasonable.

Out at Barfield there’s a little white clapboard church — Farris Chapel. Methodist. Built in 1880, which is seventeen years after Stones River. The men who put it up had watched the fields come back. Some of them had done the plowing that brought them back.

My great-grandmother had a sister, Aunt Nettie, and Aunt Nettie married Uncle Dewitt. Uncle Dewitt’s grandfather started that church.

Read that sentence again, because it’s the whole thing. That man is not my ancestor. There’s no blood in it anywhere — he’s my great-grandmother’s sister’s husband’s grandfather, four links out through a marriage, and I can still carry the chain in my head without effort, because somebody handed it to me once in a car and I never had to write it down.

It’s still standing. A hundred and forty-six years, and it survived all of it.

It sits now at the intersection of four-lane highways, and the traffic goes around it at fifty miles an hour, all day, every day.

I sat at that light for two cycles this week and watched it. White paint, a few cars, a small sign. Nobody else was looking.

I want to tell you I felt something clean and literary there, and I didn’t. What I felt was my chest going tight, the way it does now every time I come home and take a good look. Grief and something closer to panic, rising together in equal measure, and no way to tell them apart. I sat there until the light changed twice and then I drove on with the rest of the traffic, because that’s what the road is for.

I’ll go back to Florida in a few days. And somewhere past Chattanooga I’ll catch myself planning the next trip up, the way you do — who I’ll see, which roads I’ll take — and every landmark I’m counting on will be provisional, but I’ll count on them anyway.

That’s the trouble with an elegy for a place. You can mourn it and still have nowhere else to be from.

South Dakota, 1997. We had spent the day on the Red Rose Reservation doing the holy, unglamorous work of a church youth mission trip — hammers and paint and dust and teenagers — and I was somewhere past exhausted, contemplating nothing more ambitious than a folding chair. That’s when Matt burst into the room, the keys to our rented 15-passenger van already in hand, wearing the expression peculiar to an eighteen-year-old — that liminal creature, no longer quite a boy but not yet fully a man — who has just had an idea and has no intention of examining it first.

“Dave, jump in the car. We’re gonna chase the sunset to get the perfect picture.”

He said car. What we actually had was a rented fifteen-passenger van — a vehicle designed for hauling teenagers and luggage, not for pursuing beauty across the Great Plains. It handled like a barge and smelled of corn chips and puberty. We took it anyway.

I should tell you who Matt was. Not long before, I was a young and uncertain youth pastor — new to the church, new to the whole enterprise, doing my level best to look like I knew what I was doing — standing at the edge of a lake in Florida when an eighteen-year-old kid came rowing up in a kayak. He introduced himself before he’d even climbed out of the boat. We hit it off immediately; I hired him onto my youth ministry staff practically on the spot. I had no earthly idea, watching him drag that ridiculous little boat ashore, that I had just met one of the great friendships of my life.

Now, a word about sunsets on the Great Plains. They do not behave like sunsets elsewhere. There are no mountains to catch them, no trees to soften them. The sky out there is a cathedral with no walls, and when the sun goes down it goes down everywhere at once — the whole horizon on fire, three hundred and sixty degrees of glory. And Matt’s theory, as best I could understand it at highway speed, was that somewhere just over the next rise was the perfect vantage point. The shot. The one.

So we chased it. West, of course — you can only chase a sunset west, which any theologian will tell you is also the direction of endings. Every hill promised the perfect view and every hill delivered us to another hill. The sun, for its part, declined to wait. We never caught it. Of course we never caught it. That’s the thing about sunsets: they are not catchable. They are only chase-able.

We did get a picture, though. It’s the one at the top of this essay. And here is the detail I want you to sit with: over the years, every other photograph from that era of my life — the trips, the youth groups, the pastoral ministry, the weddings, the decades — got sorted into boxes and carried up to the attic, the way memories do. But this photo never made the climb. It has lived in my desk drawer all these years, close at hand, for reasons I don’t think I could have articulated until recently. Some part of me knew, I think, that the chase wasn’t over.

And here is what else I remember, nearly thirty years later. A young pastor and a kid on the very threshold of manhood, in an absurdly oversized van on an empty road, thirteen empty seats behind them, laughing at their own ridiculousness, watching the sky burn down around them like the end of a very good day at the end of the world.

It turns out that evening was doing something to us that neither of us understood at the time. And it took science almost three decades to explain it to me.

The arithmetic of friendship

A few years ago, a researcher at the University of Kansas named Jeffrey Hall set out to answer a question that sounds almost too simple to be a study: how many hours does it take to make a friend? His answer, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, was surprisingly precise. Roughly 50 hours of time together to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 more to reach genuine “friend” status, and more than 200 hours before someone becomes a close friend.

Two hundred hours. When I first read that, I did some arithmetic on Matt and me, and the math should not have worked. We didn’t get decades of Tuesdays together. We got a handful of intense years — youth group, mission trips, road trips, late nights — and then twenty years of Christmas cards. By Hall’s accounting, our friendship should have quietly depreciated like an old car.

But Hall’s study contains a footnote that I think is really the headline. It’s the quality of the time that’s key — joking around, singing as he played the guitar, meaningful conversations, catching up — these are what speed friendship along. Hours matter, but not all hours are created equal. Some hours weigh more than others.

Which raises the real question: what makes an hour heavy?

What the scientists found in the sunset

Over a century ago, the sociologist Émile Durkheim noticed something that intense emotional events reinforce the social bonds between people who experience them together — he called it the phenomenon of collective effervescence, and modern researchers have found it everywhere from concerts to protests to sporting events. Just recently, a meta-analysis confirmed his hunch: people in shared experiences who felt higher emotional arousal reported feeling more connected to others and more committed to their group. A 2024 study in Royal Society Open Science pushed it further, wiring up pairs of strangers and finding that emotional intensity bonds people even when their emotions aren’t perfectly synchronized — sharing the moment in a weaker sense was enough.

In other words: it isn’t the calendar that forges friendship. It’s the voltage.

And here’s the part that stopped me cold, because it explains the other half of my friendship with Matt — the half that wasn’t sunsets. Psychologist Brock Bastian and his colleagues ran a series of now-famous experiments in which strangers who shared painful experiences — ice water, leg squats, even eating a ferociously hot chili pepper — developed more trusting relationships and cooperated more than those who shared painless versions of the same tasks. The researchers’ conclusion has a phrase in it I can’t shake: pain, it seems, has the capacity to act as social glue. A follow-up study sharpened the point further — pain experienced alone does nothing for connection; it only becomes glue when it is shared.

Soldiers know this. And, in a quieter way, so do I. Some years after that sunset, I had the honor of standing with Matt on the happiest day of his life, presiding as he married Betsy. And then, in time, I stood with them both on the saddest day of theirs, when we gently laid their baby girl to rest. I won’t say more about that here — it is their story to tell, not mine — except this: you do not walk with someone through both of those doors, the one that opens onto joy and the one that opens onto grief, and ever fully let go of each other again. Some bonds are forged in joy. Some are forged in sorrow. Ours was forged in both — and those are the friendships that have been tested at both ends of the human experience.

So the science, as I read it, comes down to this: the friends who last are not necessarily the ones we spend the most time with. They’re the ones we spend the most formative time with. The weddings and the funerals. The births and the hospital waiting rooms. The mission trips and the midnight conversations. The sunsets chased and never caught.

Matt was eighteen when he rowed up in that kayak. In the grand scheme of a life, we didn’t log that many hours together. But the hours we logged were load-bearing.

Rowing back

Here is where the story turns, and where I have to confess that this essay is really a thank-you note in disguise.

After twenty years of held-breath Christmas cards, Matt and I found each other again this summer — and the way it happened still feels a little bit holy to me. Unbeknownst to me, he had been reading my words right here on Substack. Reaching toward me through a screen. Meanwhile I had been working up the courage to write him the email I’d been composing in my head for years. We were both turning toward each other at the very same moment, each assuming the other had moved on.

So I wrote the email. He answered. We talked — really talked, faces on a screen, an hour that erased two decades. And I can report that the science holds up: two hundred hours of formative time, it turns out, does not expire. The bond was exactly where we left it, like a van parked on a prairie road, keys still in the ignition, pointed west.

I’ve been thinking about why we let these friendships go quiet in the first place, and the thinking has taken on a certain urgency of late, because I have just crossed the threshold into one of life’s more significant decades. (Which one? A gentleman never says. Let’s just note that the AARP has my address and seems very fond of me.) Milestones like that have a way of taking inventory for you, whether you asked them to or not. And here is what my inventory shows: I have been an extreme introvert all my life. Crowds drain me; solitude restores me; and true close friendships — the load-bearing kind — I could count on one hand and still have fingers left over. That used to feel like a deficiency. From this side of the threshold, it looks more like clarity. When the friendships are that few, there is no mistaking what they are: treasures. Not to be filed away in the attic with the other boxes, but kept in the drawer, close at hand — nurtured, cherished, valued while there is still light in the sky.

As for why we let them go quiet: I don’t think it’s neglect, exactly. I think it’s that a deep friendship can feel finished in the way a good book feels finished — complete, safe on the shelf, no urgent need to reread it. But friends are not books. They are more like sunsets: not catchable, only chase-able. The moment you stop pursuing them, they slip below the horizon — still burning somewhere, just no longer where you can see.

So here is my advice, offered free of charge, backed by peer-reviewed research and one rented fifteen-passenger van doing its lumbering best on a reservation road:

Somewhere in your life there is a Matt. Someone you shared the heavy hours with — the formative ones, the joyful ones, the ones that hurt. The science says that bond is still there. The Christmas card is a held breath; at some point you have to exhale.

The kayak crossed the water first. The van chased the light. All that’s left is for somebody to make the next move.

Jump in the car. The light is fading.

Chase the sunset anyway.

It’s been quiet around here, and I owe you an explanation. For the past several weeks, nearly everything I had went into finishing and releasing The Christian’s Pattern. Somewhere in the fog of edits, endorsements, and launch week, this Substack slid onto the back burner. I’m sorry for the silence — and grateful you’re still here.

So let me relaunch with the image that stopped me in my tracks this week, even though I’m the one who wrote the chapter it appears in. That’s the strange grace of working with Thomas à Kempis: you never really feel like the author. You feel like a courier.

The image

À Kempis says that simplicity and purity are the “two wings” by which we rise above all earthly things. Simplicity is about what you intend — what you’re aiming for. Purity is about what you love — the will of God and the good of your neighbor.

Two wings. Not one.

I keep thinking about how a bird with one wing doesn’t fly half as far. It doesn’t fly at all. It circles. And I wonder if that’s why so much of our spiritual life feels like circling — sincere intention without purified affection, or warm feelings without a single aim. One wing beating hard, going nowhere.

Why we don’t fly

Here’s my honest confession: I want God’s will plus my comfort. I want my neighbor’s good plus my reputation. I’m rarely aiming at one thing; I’m managing a portfolio. We live in a world that rewards this — nuance, strategy, multiple platforms, multiple personas. Simplicity feels naive. Purity feels almost quaint.

But à Kempis makes a promise that cuts through all of it: “If you intend and seek nothing but the will of God and the good of your neighbor, you will enjoy true inner freedom.” One goal, not ten. One concern, not a hundred competing priorities.

Real freedom, it turns out, is not having more options. It’s wanting one thing.

Iron in the fire

The image the old writers loved for this is iron in fire. Iron covered in rust looks dead and useless. But put it in the fire, and the rust burns away. It comes out bright, useful, transformed. That’s what happens when we turn ourselves wholly toward God: the spiritual rust — apathy, lukewarmness, disordered loves — burns away. We’re purified and changed into His likeness (2 Corinthians 3:18).

I can’t purify my own motives. I’ve tried. Self-examination alone just makes me a more sophisticated hypocrite. But I can bring the iron to the fire. That part — the willingness, the turning — is mine.

A confession from the 80s

My musical tastes were formed in the 1980s, which means I cannot hear the phrase “two wings” without Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings” starting up somewhere in the back of my mind. (If you know, you know. If you don’t, ask someone with gray hair.)

And honestly? The song works. It’s a plea to take what’s broken and learn to fly again — to be carried by something like love. That’s not far from where à Kempis lands. Our wings are broken. Simplicity gets tangled in a hundred competing desires; purity gets rusted over by comfort and self-protection. The gospel isn’t advice for strong flyers. It’s fire for rusted iron and healing for broken wings.

Try this

I’ll leave you with the practice from the end of the chapter, because it’s the simplest and hardest thing I know:

Before your next act of service, check your motive. If it’s mixed — and it will be — do it anyway, and ask God to purify it.

Don’t wait for pure motives to serve. Serve, and let the fire do its work.

So that’s the prayer of this post, and the reason for its title. Not a lyric this time — a petition:

Lord, take these broken wings. Give me the simplicity of one intention. Purify my affections. Burn away the rust. Teach me to fly again — not through my effort but through your fire. Amen.

This post draws on chapter 23, “Pure Motives,” from my new book The Christian’s Pattern, a fresh rendering of Thomas à Kempis by way of John Wesley’s 1741 edition. If this image of the two wings stirred something in you, there are 89 more chapters where that came from. You can get the book on Amazon and inviteministries.org.

A couple of times last week I mentioned, within earshot of my son, that I was going to sit down and read my own book.

He looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

“Dad — what do you mean, read it? You wrote it.”

Fair point. And yet.

Here’s something I’ve never quite been able to explain to people who aren’t writers, or preachers, or anyone who’s ever had to listen to a recording of their own voice. Most of us have a deep, almost physical aversion to encountering ourselves played back. The sermon on the church livestream. Your own singing. The sound of your voice on a voicemail. That’s what I sound like? Surely not.

For me, reading my own writing falls squarely into that category. I’d written every word of The Christian’s Pattern — modernized all four books, all 88 chapters of Thomas à Kempis, added the reflections and the prayers — and yet the thought of sitting down and reading it as a reader, devotionally, day by day, filled me with the same low-grade dread as hearing myself preach.

So I put it off. For a while.

And then I finally did it. I started reading my own book the way I’d want a stranger to read it — a chapter a day, slowly, prayerfully.

Two things surprised me.

The first — and I say this with all the humility I can muster — is that it doesn’t suck. I know that’s not exactly a ringing literary endorsement. But after months of editing and re-editing, of staring at sentences until they stopped meaning anything, of that particular authorial certainty that everything you’ve written is secretly terrible — it was a genuine relief to read it back and think: oh. This actually works.

But the second surprise was the one I didn’t see coming.

I was convicted by my own book.

And I can tell you the exact moment it happened.

It was Chapter 22 — à Kempis on “Being at Peace.” I read it first thing one morning, already knowing that later that same morning I was going to have to have a difficult conversation with someone. And it hit me like a freight train.

It’s a chapter about the gap between trying to fix everyone else and actually being at peace yourself. And then there’s the line that stopped me cold — à Kempis’s, carried through Wesley, modernized by my own hand:

“If you want people to put up with you, you need to put up with them too.”

I knew exactly what conversation was coming. And I knew exactly how I’d been planning to walk into it — case fully prepared. All the ways they were wrong. All the things they should have done differently. My defenses up, my grievances lined up like soldiers. I wanted to be put up with. I had not the slightest intention of putting up with them.

And now Chapter 22 was just... sitting there. In my chest. Refusing to be ignored.

If you want people to put up with you, you need to put up with them too.

I had written those words. That morning I had read those words. And in a couple of hours I was about to do the exact opposite of those words — and there was nowhere to hide.

That’s the thing about being convicted by your own book.

When someone else’s words convict you, there’s a sliver of wiggle room. Well, they don’t know my situation. They’re a little harsh, maybe. You can hold it at arm’s length, because it came from outside you.

But when you read a line you wrote yourself — and it’s still sitting in your chest hours later as you walk into the very conversation it was made for — there’s no distance left. No “they don’t understand.” Just the slightly horrifying realization: I wrote that. I know exactly what I meant. And I clearly wasn’t writing it for the reader. I was writing it for me.

That conversation went differently than it would have. Not because I’m a good man, but because a book I’d written had ambushed me with my own words that very morning and wouldn’t let me off the hook.

I think this is what à Kempis understood six hundred years ago, and what Wesley understood when he kept returning to this little book his entire life. The truest spiritual writing isn’t the writer instructing the reader from a position of having arrived. It’s one struggling soul leaving honest notes for another struggling soul.

And sometimes the writer turns out to be the reader who needed it most.

So yes, son — I’m reading my own book.

Not because I have it all figured out.

But because, as it turns out, I still have a great deal to learn from a man who’s been dead for six centuries — even when his words reach me through my own.

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day is available now from Invite Press and Amazon.

This is the final post in a series introducing my new book, The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day. It releases today — June 16th — from Invite Press.

Six weeks ago I told you about a book that sat on my shelf for over forty years.

I told you about a burned-out pastor who picked it up during a sabbatical and couldn’t put it down. About a 15th century monk named Thomas à Kempis who wrote something so searingly honest about the human soul that it’s been read continuously for six hundred years. About a young Oxford don named John Wesley who loved it so much he translated it, published it, and pressed it into the hands of every Methodist he met.

I told you what Book One did — holding up the mirror and asking what your life is really about, not what you say it’s about.

I told you what Book Two did — reaching past your religious resumé into the actual interior landscape of your soul.

I told you what Book Three did — opening up a dialogue between the soul and Christ that reads less like theology and more like two people who know each other deeply, talking in the way only very old and very close friends can talk.

I told you what Book Four did — recovering Wesley’s shockingly high vision of Holy Communion that most modern Methodists have quietly lost.

And last week I told you what writing this book did to me. How à Kempis reached through the manuscript and got his hands around my throat — in the best possible way. How I am not the finished product of this book but a work in progress who spent a year inside something that refused to let me stay the same.

Today is June 16th. The book is out.

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day is available now from Invite Press. You can order your copy here:

Order The Christian’s Pattern from Invite Press

I want to say one more thing before I let the book speak for itself.

This is not a book for everyone. À Kempis said so himself and I’ve said it throughout this series. If you’re looking for light inspiration, easy encouragement, or a quick spiritual pick-me-up — there are plenty of books that will serve you well. This isn’t one of them.

This book is for the person who knows something is missing. Who’s tired of spiritual junk food. Who’s had fits and starts in their devotional life and is ready for something that will actually hold them accountable to going deeper. Who suspects that thirty years of Sunday church attendance has left them more informed about Jesus than actually transformed by Jesus.

If that’s you — this book was written for you.

Wesley read The Imitation of Christ throughout his entire life. He found new depths every time he returned to it. My prayer is that The Christian’s Pattern becomes that kind of companion for you — not a book you read once and shelve, but one you return to season after season, finding that it meets you differently each time because you are different each time.

À Kempis prays a prayer in Book Four that Wesley made his own, and that I’ve made mine over this past year:

“Strengthen my faith. Increase my hope. Set my love on fire — and keep it burning.”

That’s it. That’s the whole book in one breath. Stronger faith. Greater hope. Love set on fire. The journey of a lifetime, taken one chapter at a time.

Thank you for walking this series with me over the past six weeks. Thank you for subscribing to Walking the Edges and for being the audience I didn’t know I had until a few months ago when I launched this newsletter with no idea what I was doing.

Now — go get the book.

Order The Christian’s Pattern — $19.99 from Invite Press

This is the sixth in a series of posts introducing my new book, The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day, releasing June 16th from Invite Press. This week: what the book did to the man who wrote it.

I should tell you something about writing this book.

I didn’t expect it to change me. I expected to produce it — to do the work of modernizing Wesley’s translation, adding reflections and prayers, shaping it into something accessible for contemporary readers. Good, meaningful work. Important work. But work.

That’s not what happened.

Somewhere around the third month, I realized that à Kempis was not letting me off the hook as his editor. The book kept reaching through the manuscript and getting its hands around my throat — in the best possible way.

There’s a line in Book One that I must have read fifty times in the process of writing the reflection for that chapter:

“What good does it do to argue brilliantly about the Trinity if you lack humility and thereby offend the very God you’re discussing?”

Every time I read it I thought about my thirty-five-plus years of ministry. The sermons. The degrees. The books read and written. The theological conversations. And à Kempis just kept asking: but are you humble? Not — are you knowledgeable. Not — are you productive. Are you humble?

I didn’t always like my answer.

There’s a chapter in Book Two — on loving Jesus above everything else — that rewired something in me. À Kempis draws a sharp line between loving Jesus and loving Jesus plus the hundred other things we cling to. Between faith as undivided devotion and faith as self-improvement with religious vocabulary added on. I had to sit with that distinction for a long time. Because I am, if I’m honest, someone who has occasionally used faith as a tool for self-improvement. For becoming a better, more successful, more respected version of David Juliano.

À Kempis is not interested in a better version of David Juliano. He’s interested in the death of that project altogether and the rise of something — Someone — else in its place.

That’s a hard thing to write a devotional guide about when you’re not sure you’ve fully signed up for it yourself.

Book Three’s dialogue format did something unexpected to me. Reading Christ’s words to the soul — written by a 15th century monk, translated by an 18th century Anglican, modernized by a 21st century Florida pastor — I kept having the disorienting experience of feeling personally addressed. Not historically addressed. Not theologically addressed. Actually, directly, uncomfortably addressed.

In Chapter 36, Christ says to the disciple:

“What you don’t understand when you read, you’ll know when I visit you.”

I’ve read for over thirty-five years. I have a graduate degree in theology, a study lined with books, a Sunday rhythm of preparing and preaching. I know things by reading. But Christ in Book Three is saying something else: there’s a kind of knowing that doesn’t come from reading at all. It comes when he visits. The question is — have you been visited? Have you sat still long enough to let him show up in the place where real change actually happens?

Working through Book Four on Holy Communion changed how I lead worship. I preside at the table differently now. I prepare differently. I receive differently. I can’t unknow what à Kempis taught me about what Wesley believed was happening at that table — and I can’t go back to treating it as a ritual to be managed efficiently.

Here’s what I want to tell you honestly: I am not the finished product of this book. I am a work in progress who spent a year inside a book that refused to let me stay the same.

Which is, I think, exactly what à Kempis intended. And Wesley. And the God who prompted a burned-out Florida pastor to reach for a battered book on his shelf during a sabbatical in the Peak District of England.

This book changed me. I believe it can change you too.

Not by adding more religious activity to your life. But by asking the questions that cut beneath all the activity to what’s actually there.

Are you ready to find out?

The Christian’s Pattern releases June 16th from Invite Press. One week to go. Next week — the final post, the link, and everything you need to get your hands on a copy.

This is the fifth in a series of posts introducing my new book, The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day, releasing June 16th from Invite Press. This week: Book Four — and something about John Wesley that most Methodists don’t know.

I want to tell you something about John Wesley that might surprise you.

Actually — it might embarrass you. It embarrassed me.

Most modern Methodists celebrate communion monthly. Some quarterly. Some less. We think of it as a memorial — a symbolic remembrance of what Jesus did at the cross. A nice moment. A meaningful ritual. We receive the elements, we reflect briefly, we move on with our Sunday.

Wesley would have been appalled.

In 1787 — fifty years into his ministry, near the end of his life, having preached 40,000 sermons and ridden 250,000 miles on horseback — Wesley published a sermon called “The Duty of Constant Communion.” And in it he argued, passionately and without apology, that every Christian should receive communion as often as possible.

Not monthly. Not quarterly. As often as you can.

He and his brother Charles were so convinced of this that in 1745 they published a collection of 166 hymns — all about Holy Communion. Not about the cross in general. Not about salvation broadly. Specifically, entirely, about the Lord’s Supper. One hundred and sixty-six hymns.

You don’t write 166 hymns about something you consider optional.

Book Four of The Christian’s Pattern is entirely devoted to Holy Communion — and it’s the section that reveals most clearly why Wesley treasured this book above all others except the Bible. À Kempis writes about the sacrament with a devotion and intimacy that most modern Christians have never encountered. He stops in the middle of one chapter and says, in effect, look at what’s happening here:

“The God who spoke and created everything — who commanded and it was done — is giving himself to us as food. This is love without limit. Grace without explanation. Power and tenderness in the same moment.”

Power and tenderness in the same moment. That’s what the Wesleys couldn’t get past. That’s why Charles wrote those 166 hymns. Communion isn’t a symbol of something Christ once did. It’s an actual means by which Christ continues to meet, forgive, strengthen, and transform his people.

Wesley called communion a “means of grace” — one of the primary ways God meets his people. Not the only way. But a real way. A powerful way. A way that Wesley believed most Christians were tragically underusing.

Here’s what convicted me while writing this section. I’ve been a Methodist pastor for over thirty-five years. I’ve presided at communion hundreds of times. And if I’m honest — there have been Sundays when I’ve gone through the motions. When the words were familiar enough to say without really hearing them. When I distributed the elements efficiently rather than reverently. When I treated the table as a box to check rather than a throne to approach.

À Kempis has a word for that. In Chapter 84, the disciple confesses to Christ:

“When I think of people I know who come to communion with their whole hearts — tears streaming, on fire with love for you — I’m ashamed of how cold and flat I come. I show up dry. Unmoved.”

I show up dry. Unmoved.

That confession has been sitting with me for months. Because it’s mine. It’s changed how I preside at communion. It’s changed how I prepare to receive it. It’s made me hungrier for the table in a way I haven’t been since I was a new Christian.

Book Four of The Christian’s Pattern is the richest, most devotional section of the entire work. It’s also the most challenging — because it assumes that the Lord’s Supper is one of the most important things we do as Christians. Not a footnote. Not an add-on. A feast.

Wesley knew this. À Kempis knew it six centuries before Wesley.

The question is whether we’re willing to recover it.

The Christian’s Pattern releases June 16th from Invite Press. Next week: what writing this book did to the man who wrote it.

This is the fourth in a series of posts introducing my new book, The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day, releasing June 16th from Invite Press. This week: Book Three — and something unexpected.

Something shifts in Book Three of The Christian’s Pattern.

The first two books are addressed to you — the reader. À Kempis is speaking, instructing, challenging, holding up the mirror. It’s demanding and rich and at times almost unbearable in its honesty.

Then Book Three opens and everything changes.

Suddenly you’re not reading a devotional manual. You’re listening to a conversation.

Book Three is written as a dialogue — an intimate exchange between the Christian soul and Christ himself. The believer speaks. Christ responds. Back and forth, chapter after chapter, the two voices weaving together in what à Kempis imagined as the interior life of prayer. Not prayer as a monologue you aim at the ceiling. Prayer as a conversation with someone who actually answers.

It opens with a posture that stopped me completely:

“I will listen to what the Lord God speaks within me.”

Not — I will tell God what I need. Not — I will present my requests and wait for results. Just: I will listen. I will position my soul to receive rather than demand. I will be quiet enough to hear.

That’s countercultural in any age. In ours it borders on revolutionary.

We live in the noisiest moment in human history. Our ears are bombarded constantly — notifications, news, opinions, entertainment, the endless scroll. And in all that noise, something gets crowded out. À Kempis names it plainly:

“Blessed are those ears that don’t listen to external voices, but to the truth which teaches inwardly.”

Blessed. Not disciplined. Not impressive. Blessed — as in, deeply fortunate, genuinely alive, walking in something most people never find. The person who has learned to hear God’s voice above the noise of the world is blessed in the most profound sense of that word.

Book Three is the longest section of The Christian’s Pattern — and in many ways the most beautiful. Christ speaks to the soul about humility and love and suffering and peace. The soul responds with confession, longing, honest struggle. It reads less like theology and more like a love letter — or rather, like two people who know each other deeply, talking in the way that only very old and very close friends can talk.

There’s a moment in Chapter 35 where the Christian cries out to Christ:

“Don’t let me hear the word but not do it, know it but not love it, believe it but not obey it.”

Don’t let me hear the word but not do it. Know it but not love it. Believe it but not obey it.

That line broke something open in me. Because I am someone who is very skilled at hearing the word, knowing it, and believing it. Over thirty-five years of ministry, a graduate degree in theology, a lifelong love of books and ideas. I can hear, know, and believe with the best of them.

But the doing. The loving. The obeying. That’s where I keep falling short.

That’s what Book Three keeps asking — through the soul’s own honest confession to Christ. Not “can you talk about this?” but “are you doing it? Are you loving it? Are you obeying it?” Have you sat still long enough to let God’s word actually move from your head to your hands and feet?

In our noisy, distracted, endlessly performing age, this section of the book felt less like ancient wisdom and more like urgent medicine. We don’t need more information about God. We need to hear from him.

And according to à Kempis — he is speaking. All the time. The question is whether we’re listening.

The Christian’s Pattern releases June 16th from Invite Press. Next week: Book Four — and the thing about John Wesley that surprises almost every Methodist who discovers it.

This is the third in a series of posts introducing my new book, The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day, releasing June 16th from Invite Press. This week: Book Two — the inner life.

If Book One of The Christian’s Pattern asks what your life is about, Book Two asks something harder.

What’s going on inside?

Not your theology. Not your church attendance. Not your spiritual resumé. The actual interior landscape of your soul — the fears, the hungers, the secret motives, the places where you’re still running on empty no matter how busy your religious life looks from the outside.

Book Two is where à Kempis stops talking about what we do and starts talking about who we are. And it is, without question, the section that got under my skin the most while I was writing this book.

Book Two opens with à Kempis’s thesis for the entire section:

“The kingdom of God is within you. Turn to the Lord with all your heart, leave this miserable world behind, and your soul will find rest. Learn to turn away from outward things and give yourself to inward things, and you’ll see the kingdom of God come within you.”

The kingdom of God is within you. Not out there. Not in church attendance, religious activity, or impressive behavior. Within. We’d rather work on the externals — they’re visible, measurable, useful for performance. À Kempis says the real territory of the Christian life is the one place we can’t show anyone.

Book Two has a chapter on loving Jesus above everything else that stopped me cold when I first read it in our modernized version. À Kempis writes:

“Jesus won’t share you with anyone else — he wants your whole heart and will rule there as king.”

Read that again slowly. Jesus doesn’t want to share top billing. He doesn’t want to be one option among many. He wants the whole house, every room, including the rooms we’ve kept locked. When Christianity becomes Jesus plus our comfort, Jesus plus our success, Jesus plus our reputation — when he becomes a tool for becoming a better version of us rather than the Lord who calls us to die to ourselves — we’ve already missed him. He won’t share. It’s all of you, or none of you.

That’s not a comfortable message. It wasn’t meant to be.

There’s also a chapter on spiritual dryness that I found almost unbearably honest — because it describes something every serious Christian experiences and almost nobody talks about. Those seasons when God feels absent. When prayer feels hollow. When the disciplines that once fed you now feel empty. When even good things — wise friends, spiritual books, beautiful music — offer no comfort.

À Kempis doesn’t offer easy answers. He just says:

“The only move left is patience and surrender — giving your will to God and waiting.”

Not a program. Not a technique. Just patience. And surrender. And waiting.

I confess I wanted something more actionable than that. I’m a pastor — I like solutions. But the longer I sat with this chapter, the more I recognized its wisdom. Some seasons of the soul can’t be fixed. They can only be endured, with hands open and will surrendered.

Book Two ends with a chapter on carrying the cross that is as demanding as anything in Christian literature. À Kempis writes that Jesus has many people who love his heavenly kingdom — but few who are willing to carry his cross. Many who want comfort, but few who will accept suffering. Many who want to celebrate with him, but few who will fast with him.

I read that and thought of the church I’ve served for twelve years. I thought of myself. And I had to sit with the discomfort for a long time before I could write a single word of reflection.

That’s what Book Two does. It doesn’t let you perform. It doesn’t let you hide behind activity or information or religious busyness. It just asks: what is actually happening in your soul?

If you’re willing to find out, this book will help you look.

The Christian’s Pattern releases June 16th from Invite Press. Next week: Book Three — and a format unlike anything else in Christian literature.

This is the second in a series of posts introducing my new book, The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day, releasing June 16th from Invite Press. Last week I told you the story behind the book. This week: Book One.

Thomas à Kempis doesn’t ease you in gently.

The very first chapter of The Imitation of Christ goes straight for the jugular. Not what do you believe, not what church do you attend, not how often do you read your Bible. Just this: what is your life actually about?

Not what you say it’s about. What your actual choices — how you spend your time, your money, your attention — reveal it’s about.

I’ve been a pastor for over thirty-five years. I’ve sat across from a lot of people in a lot of conversations. And the gap between what people say their lives are about and what their lives are actually about is often — not always, but often — enormous. I include myself in that observation.

À Kempis opens with one of the most quoted lines in Christian literature:

“What good does it do to argue brilliantly about the Trinity if you lack humility and thereby offend the very God you’re discussing?”

You can have impeccable theology and a cold heart. You can know everything about God and barely know God at all. That sentence describes Wesley himself before Aldersgate. He had been ordained, served as a missionary in Georgia, read every spiritual book he could find, and still felt he lacked the faith that would save him. A theologian without transformation. A minister whose outer life outpaced his inner one.

Book One is about exactly that gap. Every chapter asks the same underlying question in a different way: are you becoming more like Jesus, or just more informed about Jesus?

There’s a chapter on reading and study that particularly convicts me. À Kempis warns against the person who accumulates spiritual knowledge as a form of pride — collecting insights about God instead of actually encountering God. Wesley himself, in a letter to a colleague, put it bluntly: “Beware that you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.”

An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

There’s a chapter on silence that feels almost radical in our age. À Kempis asks: “Why are we so eager to talk, when we rarely return to silence without some damage to our conscience?” There’s a chapter on self-knowledge that holds up a mirror and doesn’t let you look away. And there’s the chapter that closes Book One — about going all in. No half measures, no spiritual hobby, no comfortable Christianity that costs you nothing.

À Kempis says it plainly:

“We make the most progress and receive the greatest grace where we most overcome ourselves and deny ourselves spiritually.”

I read that line and felt the weight of it. The places I most want to avoid — the hard conversations, the patient endurance, the quiet daily death to self — those are exactly the places where the most grace is waiting. We’d rather find spiritual progress in the easy, comfortable corners. À Kempis says it’s the other way around.

This is what I mean when I say this book isn’t for everyone. If you’re looking for easy inspiration, keep looking. But if you’re ready to ask the hard question — what is my life really about, and does the answer match what I say I believe? — Book One will meet you there.

And it will not let you go.

The Christian’s Pattern releases June 16th from Invite Press. Next week: Book Two — where it gets even more personal.

On June 16th, my first commercially published book releases from Invite Press. Over the next seven weeks I want to introduce you to it — not with a sales pitch, but with the story behind it. This is where it started.

There’s a book that sat on my study shelf for over four decades.

I first read it at nineteen — a young man hungry for God, not quite sure what he was looking for. It met me in that hunger. Then life happened. Ministry happened. Six children, two countries, over thirty-five years of pastoral work, and somewhere along the way the book got buried under everything else.

In 2025 my church gave me a sabbatical. Ten years as their pastor, no real break in twenty, and the honest truth was I was running on fumes. I needed to stop. To breathe. To remember why I started.

Coming out of that sabbatical I made a decision: I was going to be more intentional about my daily devotional life. No more fits and starts. Something steady, something real. I looked at my shelf and my eye went straight to the small, battered volume I hadn’t touched in years.

Thomas à Kempis. The Imitation of Christ.

I took it down and started reading a chapter a day. And the first thing I thought was: wow, this is hard. How had I ever gotten through this as a twenty-something? The language was dense, the demands were uncompromising, the medieval framework was — to put it gently — not exactly written for someone living in Florida in the age of doom-scrolling.

And then the idea hit me.

John Wesley had done this before me. In 1725, a young Oxford don named Wesley picked up The Imitation of Christ while preparing for ordination. Something in it grabbed him. He read and reread it throughout his life — calling it a book “next to the Bible” and pressing it into the hands of every Methodist he met. He published his own edition twice. First in 1735, in a more academic translation. Then in 1741 — after Aldersgate and at the dawn of the Methodist Revival — he reissued it for ordinary readers, carefully adapted for Protestants, translated into plain 18th-century English, and made accessible for the early Methodists who were hungry for guidance in the spiritual life.

What Wesley did for his generation, I wanted to do for ours.

What if someone took Wesley’s translation of à Kempis — all four books, all 88 chapters — and modernized it for contemporary readers? Added reflections connecting each chapter to the world we actually live in? Prayers to help you respond to what you’ve read? A guide for people who know they need something more but aren’t sure where to start?

That’s the book I spent the last year writing.

The Christian’s Pattern: A Simple Guide to Follow Jesus Every Day releases June 16th from Invite Press.

It’s not a quick read. It’s not light inspiration. À Kempis himself said as much — this book is for people who want to go deeper with God, who are willing to face uncomfortable truths about themselves, and who are ready to pursue holiness with seriousness and joy.

But if you’re tired of spiritual junk food. If you’ve had fits and starts in your devotional life. If you know something is missing but can’t quite name it — you might be exactly who this book was written for.

Over the next six weeks I’ll take you inside each of the four books — what they contain, what they challenged in me, and why I think Wesley was right that this is the book every Christian needs after the Bible.

For now, mark June 16th in your calendar.

The book that waited forty years on my shelf is finally ready to meet you.

Five months.

That’s how long it took me to answer the questions people kept asking after Jorge and I limped off that train, blistered and triumphant, having walked forty-seven miles through the Peak District in six days.

“How was it? What did you discover? How are you different?”

I tried. I said things like “amazing” and “transformative” and “I learned so much.” But even as the words left my mouth they felt hollow, like trying to describe a symphony by humming a few random notes.

The problem was I hadn’t kept a journal. I’d packed a nice leather-bound notebook specifically for the purpose. But at the end of each day, after hours of walking and climbing and negotiating with my knees, all I wanted to do was collapse. So I didn’t write a word.

I took photos instead. Lots of them. Stone walls, sheep, dramatic skies, Methodist chapels. But photos, I was discovering, are terrible at capturing the interior journey. They show you what things looked like. Not what they meant.

As the months rolled by I was struck by a terrible fear: I was going to forget it all. Not the big moments maybe. I’d probably always remember the emu in Derbyshire. But the texture of it — the specific ways those six days had worked on my soul — was fading like morning mist in the valley.

So I decided to write it down. Everything. The blisters and the burning shins. Jorge’s Niagara Falls sleep app. The metal-framed cots. The Methodist angels who ferried our bags and fed us casseroles. The murdered newlyweds at Winnats Pass and the twenty-year-old communist who changed England by refusing to stay off the moors.

I thought I’d forgotten most of it. I was wrong.

Sitting down to write, something extraordinary happened. I remembered far more than I thought I would — not just the events but the emotions, the connections, the moments of insight that had seemed so fleeting at the time. And as I wrote, those questions people kept asking finally began to find their answers.

So here they are. What I discovered on the Peak Wesley Way.

I discovered that beauty matters. Not as a luxury but as something fundamental to being human. The Victorians built cement works that looked like pearls set in emeralds. They gave their factories and public toilets the same architectural attention they gave their cathedrals. We’ve forgotten that. We build spiritual deserts and call them efficient.

I discovered that rights must be claimed and defended. Those public footpaths didn’t appear by aristocratic generosity. They exist because ordinary people kept walking them until the walking itself became law. Benny Rothman and 400 working-class walkers climbed a forbidden mountain and went to prison for it — and reshaped a nation’s relationship with its own landscape. Every stile you cross connects you to that history of resistance.

I discovered that hospitality is holy work. Graham and Sue, Julie and Malcolm, Martyn and Helen, Sheila at Baslow — Methodist angels who materialized exactly when we needed them, offering beds and casseroles and encouragement to strangers they’d never met and would probably never see again. They did it because that’s what Methodists do. They connect. They care. They create networks of grace that catch weary travelers.

I discovered that physical pain teaches spiritual lessons. The burning shins, the walker’s knee, the blisters — they weren’t obstacles to the spiritual experience. They were the spiritual experience. Pain strips away pretense. It makes you honest. You can’t think your way to renewal. Sometimes you have to walk your way there, one painful step at a time.

I discovered that the journey itself is the destination. There’s no cathedral in Edale. No shrine, no relic. Just a small Methodist chapel in a valley that holds exactly as many people now as it did two hundred years ago. The six chapels along the way — those are the shrines. The edges and valleys — that’s the sacred space. The act of walking itself is what makes it holy.

Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. Not after walking. Not when you arrive somewhere. In the walking itself.

And I discovered that when you’re stuck, when you’re burned out, when you’re lower than a snake’s belly and can’t see a way forward — sometimes the answer isn’t to think harder or pray more or try to muscle your way through.

Sometimes the answer is simply to start walking.

The problems don’t disappear exactly. But they become more bearable. The questions don’t all get answered. But they become less urgent. The darkness doesn’t vanish. But it becomes something you can walk through rather than something that crushes you in place.

So if you’re reading this and you’re tired — if you’re burned out, if you’re standing at a crossroads wondering which way to go — I can’t tell you the answer. I don’t know your path.

But I can tell you this.

Solvitur ambulando.

It is solved by walking.

Not perfectly. Not permanently. Not in the neat tidy way we’d prefer.

But solved nonetheless.

One step at a time. Along the edges. Through the valleys. Toward home.

Walking the Edges: A Peak District Pilgrimage will be published by Instant Apostle in November 2026. If you’ve enjoyed this series and you’re hungry for more — my first commercially published book, The Christian’s Pattern: A Modern Paraphrase for Methodists, releases June 16th from Invite Press. More on that next week.

The morning of our final day began with Jorge’s socks.

They’d become a topic of conversation over the previous days. Not a pleasant topic. So while he was getting ready, I slipped out early to the hiking shop next door and bought him a proper pair of merino wool socks. I would like to portray this as an act of selfless love and pilgrim solidarity. The truth is there was a good deal of self-interest involved. His comfort was directly correlated to my sanity for the final five miles.

This is what six days of pilgrimage does to you. You become deeply invested in your companion’s foot comfort, if only to preserve your own peace of mind.

Graham Souch — our final Methodist angel — collected us and drove us to his home for breakfast. And there it was, sitting in the hills above Castleton: the barn conversion of my dreams. The exact kind of place I’d fantasized about two days earlier while staring at an abandoned barn in a field. Beautiful stone, immaculate restoration, a spaniel puppy named Hazel, and Graham’s wife Sue with hot coffee and pastries ready and waiting.

It turned out Graham hadn’t always been a Methodist. He’d become a Christian just a few years ago through an Alpha Course at Castleton Methodist Church. Before that — a distinguished career in the RAF, followed by retirement and a second career as a commercial airline pilot.

Hence the barn conversion that was definitely not affordable on a minister’s salary.

We lingered longer than we should have. Then Graham showed us out the back garden gate and pointed us toward Mam Tor.

Straight up.

The Shivering Mountain earns its name. The entire eastern face is in a perpetual state of geological anxiety — layers of shale beneath layers of sandstone, the shale becoming slippery when wet, which in England means approximately 364 days per year. The old A625 road used to cross Mam Tor’s face. Engineers fought a 160-year battle against the geology, repairing and re-laying until the layers of tarmac reached two meters thick in places. In 1979 they finally admitted defeat and closed it permanently. The broken road still sits there — chunks of asphalt tilting at drunken angles, cracks zigzagging across what was once a smooth thoroughfare — a monument to the hubris of thinking you can tell a mountain where to put itself.

Cold rain spat sideways as we climbed. My shins burned. The temperature hovered somewhere between unpleasant and why did I think this was a good idea.

But at the summit the views opened up in every direction. And descending toward the Edale Valley, I found myself thinking about something I hadn’t expected to think about on a Methodist pilgrimage.

Benny Rothman.

In 1932, the Peak District’s finest moorlands were owned by wealthy landowners who kept them exclusively for grouse shooting. Of 150,000 acres of mountains and moorland, less than one percent was open to the public. Workers from Manchester and Sheffield could see these hills from their factory windows, could reach them by bus or bicycle, but were forbidden to walk on them. Signs reading “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” were everywhere. The ramblers called them “wooden liars” — trespass itself wasn’t actually a criminal offense, but the Duke of Devonshire’s gamekeepers had sticks and didn’t care about legal technicalities.

Enter Benny Rothman. Twenty years old. Son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. Trainee mechanic. Secretary of the British Workers’ Sports Federation. Furious.

On April 24, 1932, around 400 people gathered at a quarry near Hayfield and set off toward Kinder Scout. Halfway up, they came face to face with the Duke’s gamekeepers. There were scuffles. Sticks were raised. But the ramblers pressed on, reaching the forbidden plateau where they met another group who’d come up from Edale. They exchanged congratulations, sang songs, and held a meeting on the forbidden moor.

Then they marched back down — and the police were waiting.

Six young men were arrested. Five received prison sentences of up to six months. Benny Rothman got four months. But the sentences were so obviously vindictive they backfired spectacularly. Public outrage was immediate. Ten thousand people attended an access rally at Winnats Pass within weeks. The Ramblers Association was founded in 1935. The Peak District became Britain’s first National Park in 1951. The right to roam became law in 2000.

The Peak Wesley Way I’d just walked only exists because Benny Rothman and 400 working-class walkers decided they had a right to climb a hill. Every public footpath is political. Every right of way is revolutionary. Every time you cross a stile marked with that little green arrow, you’re benefiting from someone who refused to stay off the moors.

We descended into Edale, past the Coffin Road at Hollins Cross — that haunting ridge path where, for three centuries before Edale had its own church, grieving families carried their dead over the mountain to Castleton for burial. Coffins hoisted on shoulders, over a thousand feet of elevation, in all weathers. I felt slightly guilty about complaining that my shins were burning.

And then — there it was. Edale Methodist Chapel.

Built in 1811, twenty years after Wesley’s death, for £300. Simple, beautiful, gorgeous in its understatement. The same valley population of 350 people it was built for. Still 350 people today, two centuries later. Something oddly comforting about that.

Inside, a modest lectern stood where a tall commanding pulpit once rose. The building had been designed for a preacher who could address the full congregation — gallery included — with presence and authority. Now there was just this small lectern, adequate for the handful who still gathered but woefully mismatched to the architecture around it. From a movement that challenged the spiritual and social order of England to a dwindling remnant meeting in a building that functioned more as a museum than a house of worship.

I felt the melancholy settle over me like the morning’s mist.

Jorge looked at me. “Ditch the script and just talk,” he said.

I’d planned to film a promotional video here with a carefully prepared script. His admonition to put more of David Juliano into my projects had been building for days. So I ditched the script. Stood in that 213-year-old chapel and just talked. Whether anyone will ever see it I don’t know. But I did it.

Graham drove us the short distance to Edale station — a covered plexiglass enclosure next to some tracks. On the bench beside us sat a fair-haired youth with an Australian accent and the cheerful demeanor of someone who hasn’t yet discovered that life is complicated.

“Camped on top of Mam Tor last night,” he said casually. “Bottom of my tent was completely flooded. Proper miserable.” A pause. Then a grin. “I’m not going to tell my mum though. She’ll just worry.”

At nineteen I’d never have had the courage to camp illegally on top of a mountain in the rain. But at sixty-one I’d just walked forty-seven miles across the Peak District, climbing mountains despite burning shins and a Methodist minister’s fitness levels.

It’s never too late for an adventure.

In Sheffield, Jorge and I hugged — a proper hug, the kind men give each other when they’ve shared something meaningful and aren’t embarrassed to acknowledge it.

“Thank you,” he said, voice thick with emotion, “for inviting me to share this journey with you. I am deeply honored, my friend.”

I watched his train pull out toward London. Then I boarded my own train to York and found a window seat. As the countryside rolled past — green fields, stone walls, sheep entirely unaware they were living in one of England’s most beautiful landscapes — I thought about what we’d done.

Forty-seven miles. Six days. Six chapels. One Foghorn Leghorn impersonation, repeated approximately 200 times.

It was ours. And it was enough.

Next week: The Epilogue — what six days of walking actually taught me.

There’s a particular melancholy that comes with leaving a place where you’ve been happy.

Not the dramatic, soul-crushing kind — just a gentle reluctance. A desire to linger in the memory of a good evening a little longer before moving on to whatever comes next. Hathersage had been that kind of place. The George, the good food, the conversation, Charlotte Brontë’s ghost somewhere in the background — it had been one of those evenings you want to bottle.

But pilgrimage involves leaving. So we packed up, bought sandwiches from the post office, and set off westward.

The first section followed the River Derwent, and something about walking beside a river changes the quality of thought. The constant motion of water, the play of light on the surface, the sound that isn’t quite silence but isn’t quite noise — it conspires to put you in a meditative state. Wordsworth knew this. He wrote about the Derwent of his childhood — a different Derwent, in the Lake District, but the same idea — asking whether the river had shaped him from the beginning, flowing along his dreams.

I was thinking about rivers and time when I saw the barn.

It sat in the middle of a green field, fifty yards from the path. Built from Peak District gritstone, two centuries of weathering had given its walls that gorgeous palette of grays and golds and browns that you simply cannot manufacture. Moss crept up the northern face in velvet patches. Lichen painted abstract patterns across the stone. The wooden door had long since rotted away, leaving a perfect rectangle framing the field beyond.

I stopped. My brain began spinning fantasies.

I could buy this barn. Do one of those beautiful conversions — big glass doors, exposed beams, underfloor heating, a sleek modern kitchen that somehow doesn’t clash with 300-year-old stone. Me and Alison in retirement, occasional visits from kids and grandkids. Christmas with a fire roaring and snow falling softly outside floor-to-ceiling windows.

Perfect. I could see it all.

“Are you coming?”

Jorge’s voice snapped me back. I looked at the barn again with slightly clearer eyes. First problem: I couldn’t afford the pile of rocks, let alone the renovation. Second problem: no road, no driveway, no utilities. I’d be like John Smedley building his castle on a hilltop — my own folly, visible for miles, a monument to impractical dreaming.

The fantasy collapsed like a badly made soufflé.

“Oh well,” I said. And we walked on.

Then — just past the village of Shatton — we encountered something entirely unexpected. An emu.

Not just an emu. Also turkeys. Several turkeys, strutting about with that peculiar gait that suggests they’re either very important or very angry, possibly both. The emu stared back at us with that unblinking, vaguely reptilian gaze that large flightless birds specialise in. The turkeys made their gobbling sounds — which always sound to me like an argument nobody can quite remember the cause of.

“Why is there an emu in Derbyshire?” I wondered aloud.

“Why not?” Jorge replied. Which is actually a pretty good philosophy when confronted with life’s minor absurdities.

We walked on through Bamford, Aston, and Hope, the valley widening ahead of us, Castleton and Peveril Castle gradually coming into view. Along the way we passed the Hope Cement Works — gleaming white against the green valley, Victorian industrial architecture at its finest. There’s a lesson in that building, I think. The Victorians understood that even a cement works could be beautiful if you cared enough to try. We’ve built so many spiritual deserts since then.

We entered Castleton footsore and grateful, knees filing formal complaints with management.

That evening, wandering through the village, I passed a Blue John jewelry shop. Blue John — a semi-precious fluorite with distinctive purple-blue banding, found only here in Castleton. I went inside to look for something to bring home to Alison and the girls.

And standing at the glass case, I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years.

It was 2012. We’d brought the family to Castleton on a day trip — me, Alison, and four of the kids including our twin boys Theo and Ben, then thirteen. Ben was born three months premature and has cerebral palsy. He walks, but with crutches.

We decided to visit the Blue John Mine. Two hundred and forty-five steps down into the hillside. The same 245 steps back up.

The guide looked at Ben and his face showed clear doubt.

We went anyway. Ben at the back, taking each step carefully, working out the biomechanics of crutches and stone stairs and a body that doesn’t always cooperate with what the brain is asking it to do. The mine was extraordinary — dramatic formations, veins of Blue John in the walls, the peculiar deep silence of being underground. Ben made it to the bottom. Exhausted but triumphant.

Then we climbed back up.

At the top, near the exit, was a rusty metal folding chair with a cigar box full of coins for tips. I was so grateful — for the guide’s patience, his kindness in not making a fuss, his dignity in treating Ben as someone capable rather than someone to be pitied — that I dropped in a five-pound note.

The guide gasped. Actually gasped.

“Do you want change?”

“No,” I said. “We’re just grateful for your kindness. You made it possible for my son to see the mine.”

He insisted on taking us to the gift shop. Insisted on giving both boys a piece of Blue John. Wouldn’t hear any argument.

“Thank you,” he said, shaking our hands. “For coming. For bringing your family. For letting him try.”

We still have those pieces of Blue John. We still talk about that day.

Standing in the jewelry shop twelve years later, I bought three small Blue John necklaces — one for Alison, one for each of our daughters. Tucked them carefully in my pack.

Ben is twenty-seven now, thriving, independent. The Blue John Mine was just one moment among thousands. But it was an edge — literally and figuratively — and he crossed it. Which is all any of us can do, really. Find the edge. Trust ourselves to cross it. Accept the grace of strangers when it comes.

One more day tomorrow. Castleton to Edale. The final push.

Next week: Day Six — the last miles.

We started Day Four with a proper cup of coffee.

This might seem unremarkable. It was not. Each Methodist chapel had provided a kettle, which is brilliant if you’re a tea drinker. Instant coffee, on the other hand, is not coffee. It’s a vague coffee-adjacent beverage that tastes like disappointment and broken promises. So the postmaster at Baslow’s village shop stepping up to operate the Keurig for us — clearly the general public couldn’t be trusted with such advanced technology — felt like a genuine act of mercy.

Fortified, we turned up School Lane and began what the guidebook cheerfully called “climbing up to the famous Edges.” Guidebook writers have a particular talent for understatement. “Climbing” sounds so much more pleasant than “ascending at an angle that makes your calves question their life choices.”

But gaining height in the Peak District rewards you almost immediately. The world rearranges itself below — fields revealing themselves as an elaborate patchwork quilt stitched by centuries of farming, property disputes, and boundary disagreements that probably date back to when someone’s great-great-grandfather’s pig wandered into someone else’s turnips.

On the moors above Baslow stands the Eagle Stone — a massive boulder that, by local tradition, served as a test for young men wishing to prove themselves worthy of marriage. Climb it unaided and you’re husband material. I spent a moment contemplating this straightforwardly practical approach to courtship. No awkward dinner conversations. No meeting the parents while trying to remember which fork to use. Just climb a large rock and you’re in.

Further along the edge stands Wellington’s Monument, a tall obelisk commemorating Waterloo. And here’s a story almost nobody knows.

Arthur Wellesley — the Duke of Wellington — very nearly didn’t exist. His family were distant relatives of the Wesleys of Epworth. A wealthy, childless member of the Anglo-Irish branch, Garrett Wesley, wrote to the Reverend Samuel Wesley asking if one of his sons would like to move to Ireland and become his heir. Charles Wesley — then a student at Westminster School — apparently gave it serious consideration.

Think about that for a moment. Charles Wesley, contemplating a comfortable life as a landowner instead of itinerant preaching and hymn-writing. Eventually he declined. Garrett went elsewhere and eventually adopted the man whose grandson became Wellington — the man who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.

Charles Wesley wrote “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and about six thousand other hymns instead.

What would have happened if Charles had said yes? One of Christianity’s greatest hymn-writers gone. And without Wellington at Waterloo — well, everyone in Britain might be speaking French today.

All because a young Methodist preacher looked at a comfortable inheritance and said: thanks, but I think I’ll keep walking around England writing hymns.

We descended from the edges toward Padley Chapel — a place easy to walk past without realizing its significance, which is very English. They don’t put up massive signs saying IMPORTANT HISTORICAL TRAGEDY OCCURRED HERE. A small weathered notice board will do.

On July 12th, 1588 — the same year the Spanish Armada threatened invasion — government forces captured two Catholic priests hiding here: Nicholas Garlick and Robert Ludlam. They were taken to Derby and executed twelve days later. The method was hanging, drawing, and quartering, which was the Elizabethan state’s way of communicating its very serious feelings about Protestantism.

Standing there, I tried to imagine the terror of that night. The knock on the door. The priests knowing exactly what their capture meant, but facing it anyway. That kind of courage — whatever you think of its object — commands respect across the centuries.

We shuffled into Hathersage late afternoon, every muscle, joint, and tendon having filed formal complaints with management. And then we saw it: a road sign. A white triangle. Two black silhouetted figures — an elderly couple, both bent forward, one with a walking stick.

OLD PEOPLE’S CROSSING.

Jorge and I stopped immediately. This required photographic documentation.

After the edges and the moors and the climbs and the descents and one final vindictive hill, we were definitely those people. Extremely old people. Decrepit, even. We crossed the road with exaggerated elderly gaits, fully committed to the joke.

That evening, six of us gathered around a table at The George — a 500-year-old coaching inn where Charlotte Brontë once sat and borrowed the name “Eyre” from a local family for her heroine. Martyn, Helen, Julie, Malcolm, Jorge, and me. Good food. Better conversation. And Martyn, somewhere over his pint, quietly suggesting that perhaps a retired American pastor with British DNA and an English wife might consider serving a circuit here someday.

I reminded him I had five children in the States.

He nodded. We both knew it wasn’t going to happen.

“Still,” I said. “It’s nice to be wanted.”

The edges strip away the unnecessary and leave you more yourself than you were before. That’s what I’m learning out here.

Tomorrow: Castleton. More edges, no doubt. More history. More climbs that will make my calves regret every pastry I’ve ever eaten.

Next week: Day Five.