A recent blog post from Renovaré (which is a wonderful organization, both for Christians who want to go deeper in their faith, and for folks who have been badly hurt by the Church and who are looking for an experience of God that’s more full of grace and quiet and stillness, rather than of legalism and stern obedience) challenged readers to create our own parable to describe the Kingdom of Heaven. How would we describe, the author asked, our experience of being on mission with God and of being with Him?

I call mine the parable of the waterslide.

The parable of the waterslide has three parts.

Gentle Pressure

First, imagine that you are at Water World. You’re at the top of a slide, and you can feel the water surging underneath you. For the moment, you are still.

In that moment, you have a choice. You can, if you so desire, throw out your arms and legs and block yourself from going down the slide. That is to say, you have free will.

If you choose to do this, then God will not force you down the slide. No giant wave will swell to knock you, screaming and flailing, the way that the slide would like for you to go.

What you will feel, however, is the gentle pressure of God: the persistent flow of water underneath you. You will feel a sense for how natural it would be to just relax into the water, to surrender and to let it carry you where it wants to go.

That’s often how I hear from God. It’s not orders or commands. Most often, it’s a gentle nudge, coupled with a soul-deep sense of rightness when I surrender my own will, tuck my arms and legs securely, and simply let God carry me where and when He wills it.

Fear

I used to be terrified of heights. Couple that with what used to be a pretty intense fear of almost everything (including water and the unknown), and I was scared of some of the bigger slides at Water World for far more years than I would like to admit.

Now, most of that fear has gone. But I still feel a tingle up my spine as I prepare to fall down a 60-foot mostly-vertical slide. Something inside of me is terrified that I’m going to fall off and splatter all over the concrete.

This mirrors how I sometimes feel about life with God.

The truth is that life on mission with God can be scary. I see this in my prison ministry: some of the guys I work with are both violent and unrepentant, and I’m aware that they could knock my teeth out if they felt like I was poking them the wrong way. Plus, some of them have pretty intense triggers, and I’ve got to be aware that saying or doing the wrong thing could provoke a disproportionate response.

And yet, I’m called into prison anyway.

But the fear of life with God doesn’t always (or even often) manifest as fear for my life. Far more often, the stuff that God is inviting me into is simply far outside of my comfort zone. Opening up to my wife a year ago about my struggles with porn was scary, for instance. I knew that God was inviting me into that conversation, but I was also frightened that my wife would leave me.

Even apologizing to people whom I’ve wronged can feel daunting. There’s always the fear that they’re going to hold it over my head.

And yet, part of the key to this parable is that, just like my fear of falling off the waterslide and splattering all over the ground, the fear that comes from being on mission with God is an illusion. The things of which I’m frightened don’t have to actually scare me. The simple truth is that, if I trust God and stay close to Him, I’ll be alright.

I love how Dallas Willard puts it in Life Without Lack: “God is the kind of being who, if you will place yourself in his hands, in trust, will ensure that nothing can ever happen to you that will make you say, ‘I’m afraid’ or ‘I don’t have enough.’”

Joy

The third piece of this parable is joy. Underneath the fear, of course, it’s quite simply exciting to go down a good waterslide. Anyone who views such an activity as a chore is approaching the slide in a very strange way.

And the truth is that there’s something deeply joyful about life with God. Sure, it’s scary at times, but it’s also wonderful and thrilling and full of love. Life with God is when I write the fiction that can rip my heart out, when I can be with an inmate in his pain and see some of the light come back into his eyes, when I can plan a fun scavenger hunt for my wife just because I know that it will make her smile.

I love how Bog Goff describes life with God in Love Does:

“Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It’s not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He’s made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, ‘Let’s go do that together.’”

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About a year ago, I made a new friend. My friend is into white identity politics and what’s known as “race realism” (the idea that there’s a genetic component to why different ethnicities have different average SAT scores and different rates of incarceration in the United States).

Recently I was describing my friend, and I called him a good man who believed some bad things. One of the people I was talking to pushed back: she told me that he was a bad person, and I could tell that because he believed bad things. I had been working to showcase my friend’s humanity, but she said that I should take a different approach: I should let him feel the shame of his badness, because that was the only way he was going to change.

When my interlocutor said this, it was like a bomb went off inside of me. I spent the next half hour fighting back tears (this is highly unusual for me; even my wife has only seen me get teary in this way once or twice).

I wondered why I was reacting so strongly. It wasn’t what the woman said. I barely knew her, and I also knew that she said what she said out of kindness and respect for me (and, perhaps even, for my friend).

The reason her comments hit me so hard, I finally realized, was because I felt like they summed up how I was often treated when I was a libertarian commentator in my twenties.

To be clear, many of my friends back then were kind and gracious about my political advocacy, even when they disagreed. I am deeply grateful for that. But some really did treat me as though I was a bad person for espousing ideas with which they disagreed. I think, just like the woman I spoke to, that some of them wanted me to wallow in shame for my beliefs.

Those people, few as they were, left scars.

One of the reasons that I’m so adamant that my race realist friend is a good man with bad beliefs, rather than a bad person as evidenced by his bad beliefs, is that I don’t want to make him suffer the way that I sometimes suffered. I don’t think that would be very Christian.

Indeed, I don’t think Jesus ever treated people this way. If he had lectured prostitutes and tax collectors about how they were bad people and they needed to wallow in their shame, I think he would have had a very different mix of disciples.

I’m reminded of the story of Zacchaeus, a wealthy tax collector who had fleeced a lot of innocent and hard-working people. When Jesus saw him, he didn’t condemn the man. Instead he told Zacchaeus that he would be staying at Zacchaeus’s house that night. Zacchaeus changed and became an honest and generous man, not because Jesus condemned him, but because Jesus reflected back to him the best of who he was.

Of course, Jesus convicts us. But He doesn’t shame us, and I think there’s a world of difference between the two.

As a quote attributed to Pastor Tim Timberlake goes, “The love of Jesus doesn’t wait at the finish line. It meets you in the wreckage and walks you home.”

One of the things I love most about Jesus is that, no matter how often I sin, He never condemns me. He never leaves me to wallow in my shame. Instead He reflects back to me the brightest parts of who I am (which is what ultimately helps me to change). If He’s willing to treat me this way, how could I do the opposite to my race realist friend?

But even apart from the morality of it, I think treating people with bad beliefs as though they’re bad people is bound to backfire on a practical level.

When I was a libertarian commentator, I wrote a piece for National Review arguing that we should privatize Social Security. I was 25 years old. Prior to writing this piece, I talked to exactly zero people who would be negatively impacted if Congress took my recommendation and privatized the program.

Now, was this boneheaded? Sure. And it was boneheaded regardless of what you think about Social Security, because I didn’t take the time to understand the human costs of the policy for which I was advocating.

But at the same time, I wasn’t pushing to privatize Social Security because I wanted to stick it to the elderly. On the macro level, I truly thought that Social Security would be a net loss for my generation and I wanted to lift what I saw as an onerous burden off of our backs. On the micro level, I was fresh out of college, grossing $35,000 per year while paying back taxes and student loans. I struggled to pay rent. Not having to pay into an entitlement program would have given me a little bit of financial breathing room.

Neither of those strike me as bad motives.

When people attacked me for my politics, their insults didn’t make me repent. Instead, they just made me feel unseen. That pushed me away from those people and deeper into my circle of libertarian friends, because I felt like the latter actually saw me. Inasmuch as critics tried to change my mind by shaming me, those efforts backfired.

I see this idea all the time in our culture: “So-and-so believes bad things, therefore is a bad person, and we shouldn’t love him and should instead make him feel shame for his beliefs.” I think it’s wrong both practically and morally.

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A few years ago, in one of my first conversations with a new friend, I found out that he was still single despite being several years older than me. And so, thinking myself magnanimous (which was sort-of true) and also all-knowing (which was definitely not true), I decided to use our first real conversation to help him get to the bottom of what I thought was the salient question: what was wrong with him that made him still single?

Yeah. It was rough.

The conversation went about the way you might expect. I came off as far more combative and insulting than I intended, he got his back up, and I consider it a minor miracle that we’re still friends.

I think most people could have told me that leading with unsolicited conviction with a brand-new friend was unwise. But what took me a lot longer to learn was that this approach can be destructive even between people who trust each other.

I’m certainly not saying that there’s never a place for unsolicited conviction. The Old Testament prophets convicted their leaders and the people of Israel quite often. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it bluntly in Life Together: “Nothing can be more cruel than the tenderness that consigns another to his sin. Nothing can be more compassionate than the severe rebuke that calls a brother back from the path of sin.”

And yet, it took me years to realize that this kind of rebuke can do immense damage, and that it was a tool that I ought to wield very sparingly.

Lately, I prefer offering unsolicited praise.

When I’m in conflict with someone, or if I’m just not seeing their full and God-given worth as deeply as I want to, I’ll ask God, “What do You want me to know about this person?” Almost always, the answer to that prayer enables me to see a better side of them than I saw previously.

I used this prayer when I was struggling to see the good in an atheist friend of mine, and after praying I suddenly saw how his criticism of the church, that I had taken so amiss, actually reflected a bone-deep love for his neighbor. If I saw the church that he saw, I realized, the most loving thing for me to do would be to warn people away from it.

I used this same prayer with a friend of mine who has frequently attacked me. As I prayed, I found myself suddenly remembering things this person said to me about their work, about their family, about the pain that they were in. I remembered remarkable acts of kindness I watched them enact towards others. I found my opinion of them changing: away from a thoughtless or dismissive person, and towards a person with a good heart and immense inner strength, who sometimes got overwhelmed by the brutality of their circumstances.

Very frequently, I will share the results of this prayer with the person in question.

This feels much safer than sharing unsolicited conviction because even if I’m wrong, the worst that will happen is that I’ll brighten someone’s day. I’ve even felt comfortable sharing the results of this prayer with my atheist friends. Back when I was atheist, a Christian telling me that, “I prayed about you, and God told me that you’re going to Hell / doing XYZ wrong with your life” would have been immensely hurtful. It would have neither helped me out of my fear and guilt and shame nor moved me closer to God. But a Christian telling me that, “I prayed about you, and what I heard from God is how deeply you care about loving your neighbor,” is the kind of thing that, whether or not it moved me towards being Christian, would have meaningfully improved my life or at least my day.

I think most of us are in more pain than we would like to admit to people around us. And, I think—again, whatever we may say on the surface—that we’re more achingly aware of our own faults than we are of our own virtues. Maybe what we need more of is not someone telling us what we’re doing wrong, but someone willing to reflect back to us the best parts of who we are.

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I’m feeling more and more called into criminal justice reform (in addition to bridge-building), and this podcast is a reflection of that. I hope to host police trainers, prison chaplains, policy experts, and more to talk about how the system can be improved. I also hope to host defenders of the current system to talk about what the system does well (that reformers might be missing). I’m aiming to develop, and to share, something like a holistic understanding of the criminal justice system.

I’ll also be talking about God a fair amount, because my faith is at the very center of my prison ministry and the reforms that I hope to help accomplish in the system. As you can tell, this podcast lives on a separate platform from Heal the West. That said, where it feels appropriate, I might send occasional episodes to my main Heal the West audience if I think y’all will appreciate it.

The podcast is called Humanizing Inmates, because that gets to the heart of the reforms that I feel most called to fight for in our current system. I want prison to be a place where broken people go to find their humanity and to heal. Too often it seems like the current system dehumanizes inmates, which I think is both counterproductive (shame seems likely to me to be linked to increased recidivism) and also deeply un-Christian.

Here’s a link, if you want to sign up to get new episodes delivered right to your inbox: https://www.healthewest.org/s/humanizing-prisoners

This first episode was a real joy to record. I spoke to my friend Richard, who goes by the handle Fallen Ape-Theist. Richard works in counterterrorism, and we became friends by talking about political partisanship and how it can lead to dehumanization.

He’s also a prominent atheist apologist. He spends a lot of time debating Christian apologists, which is what he’s actually up to this weekend.

Our conversation ran the gamut. We talked about whether or not murderers who repent and find Christ should ever feel joy. We talked about what drives some people away from the church. We talked about the messiness of the human experience, and how none of us have all the answers.

I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation half as much as I enjoyed having it!

Heal the West is 100% reader-supported. If you enjoyed this article, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or becoming a founding member. I greatly appreciate your support.

I recently had a conversation with a woman who wasn’t Christian and who was curious about my faith. In particular, she was highly intrigued by the fact that, being a Christian myself, I will sometimes curse.

That intrigue led to a deep conversation about theodicy, and it left me with a sort of strong but loosely-held conviction about how we as Christians can use language to better face—and, perhaps, better minister to—the brutality of the world.

In short: I actually think we should swear more.

The Case Against Swearing

To be clear, I think that I as a person should probably swear less. My biological mother swore like a sailor, and I’ve gotten better but I’m still prone to cursing in completely inappropriate situations.

There are a few reasons why I want to limit my swearing, and which make me sympathetic to the notion that Christians in general shouldn’t swear. First of all, it’s just crass. Dropping the f-word in casual conversation is just not in line with my goal of being a gentleman. Swear words also carry a certain tone: when I swear, people are likely to hear more anger or bitterness in my words than I intend.

This is particularly something that I want to work on before my wife and I have children. Telling my computer to “f*** off” when it’s being slow, however casual and anger-free my tone may be, is a habit that I want to break. It’s certainly a habit that I want to break before I have a young child watching my every move in an effort to figure out how to behave in the world.

The Case For Swearing

That said, I do think there are cases where swearing can be appropriate and even helpful.

In my twenties, I was pretty broken. And two types of music really resonated with me: Christian songs, and Eminem.

Even though I was an atheist, Christian music gave me a glimpse of something holy, something pure and something hopeful—something that I knew, deep in my soul, that I wanted. I would blast Matthew West or Brandon Heath and just feel a little bit better about my life and about the world.

But Eminem was the artist who I felt actually understood me. Our childhoods and our experience with addiction rhymed, and his profanity-laced lyrics conveyed anger and bitterness, but they also conveyed something else: that here was a man who actually understood the brutality of what I was dealing with.

The church—or at least its music—offered me hope for a better world. Eminem offered me the feeling of being deeply seen in my brokenness. I think sometimes how wonderful it would have been for me, as an atheist struggling with addiction and suicidal depression and an Everest-sized mountain of self-loathing, if I had been able to find a church that offered both of those things to me.

To be clear, I’m not saying the church is always bad at seeing and ministering to broken people. Just last weekend, my wife and I went to a conference by a Christian organization called Renovaré that was amazing at ministering to people on the mountaintops and also people in the valleys. I know at least a couple of people who came in feeling very broken, and who left feeling understood and with the first vestiges of hope and healing.

But that generally wasn’t the church that I experienced in my 20s. Far more often, I saw a church that was too consumed by its own piousness to actually meet broken people where they were. When I showed up—crass, raw, and looking for someone who could understand me—I felt out of place far more often than I felt seen. Part of that was that my language just didn’t gel at all with the language of the average church-goer.

I saw the church’s piousness. What I didn’t see was a church that was able to, or interested in, actually understanding someone in as much pain as I was in.

As the church, we’re called to glorify God. We’re called to be different from the world.

Both of those things seem to lead us away from swearing. All well and good.

But we’re also called to minister to a broken world—and sometimes, a key part of that is having the vocabulary to frankly acknowledge the brutality of what that world can do to people.

What Is the Purpose of Language?

As I was brainstorming this piece, I started to wonder: is there a broader point about language that might be explored here? I think there is.

One case in which I think that language really matters is in how I refer to the inmates whom I work with in prison. I don’t call them “offenders” or “convicts.” The reason is simple: I don’t want to reduce them to the worst sins that they’ve committed. I would find it neither humanizing nor psychologically helpful if people referred to me as “sinner Julian,” and so for the same reason I’m not going to refer to “convict James.”

Humanizing and kindness aside, I’m also just trying to be accurate. The truth is that each of us is far, far more than our worst mistakes.

At the same time, some of my co-volunteers refer to inmates as “residents.” I refuse to do that, and after thinking about why, I realized that it’s for the same reason that I will sometimes deliberately swear.

“Residents” just sounds so…bloodless. “John’s a resident of XYZ correctional facility.” It sounds like John’s staying at a five-star resort. There’s nothing about the term “residents” that sears the soul.

But when we think about prisons in the United States, I think our souls ought to be seared.

I prefer the term “inmates” or “prisoners” because I think they’re more honest. “Inmates” summons up a series of images: of cramped one-room cells with bars on the windows, of gang fights that can break out at the drop of a hat, of being thrown in the hole for two weeks by guards who don’t care. It summons images of men who haven’t seen the mountains or tasted free air for more than a decade.

All of which happens. All of which is so disturbingly common that it took me awhile before I could do prison ministry without the brutality of the situation breaking me.

I think that’s my argument against euphemizing language (calling homeless people “unhoused,” calling inmates “residents,” saying that someone “died by suicide,” etc.). Advocates of this softer language are well-intentioned. And sometimes, the language that we use to describe a group of people who are struggling really is dehumanizing, and we should fix that.

But the world can also be a brutal place, and I worry that this kind of euphemistic language can hide that from us—that it can soften the sharp edges of the world, not in reality, but perhaps in our own minds. To the extent that it does that, it makes these problems all seem a little bit less urgent and a little bit less soul-searing. I’m not sure that that’s good for anyone—least of all the people who most desperately need our help.

I guess the through-thread for me of swearing, of refusing to call inmates “convicts,” and of refusing to over-euphemize language is this: language is a tool that ought to help us to accurately describe the world. When we can see the world accurately, all kinds of good things flow from that.

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A few weeks ago, I asked a Christian brother to pray for me. For years, I’ve struggled with an addiction to porn, and while I haven’t watched porn in a year or so, the desire has been a consistent drumbeat that steals my attention away from things I actually care about. That night, I felt as though I was being prompted by God to do something about it.

My friend prayed for me, and over the next few days I noticed something remarkable.

It wasn’t that the desire for porn decreased in any way, shape, or form. But suddenly I was aware of the desire underneath the desire.

My desire for porn stems from a yearning to be pretty much anybody else. I used to pass random people on the street and wish that we could trade lives. I still feel envious of lots of people.

This desire to be someone else is strange, because the truth is that I have an amazing life. I have a beautiful and wonderful wife. I have amazing friends and family. I have my dream career and an ever-deepening relationship with the divine.

What I seem to mean when I say that I want to be someone else is not that I want a different present; it’s that I want to have had a different childhood. Mine was chaotic and unstable and marked by abuse. I yearn to have had something more stable, more secure. When I look at strangers and feel envy, it’s not that I want to trade our present circumstances; it’s more like, I wish that I could trade pasts and memories with them.

For years, I felt a desire to watch porn because the pain of being me felt both inchoate (why, exactly, did I want to be someone else?) and also too great to bear. And so I hid out. Porn was a numbing agent.

But after my friend’s prayer, I felt as though I had a new clarity on what exactly I was so unhappy about. With that clarify came the strength to face it.

And so I faced down my grief over my childhood.

This was not easy. The truth is that there are many things that we can change, but the past is not one of them. And rather than hiding out or wishing that I had a different childhood, I felt as though God was inviting me to face my grief over how I grew up head-on.

I spent a lot of time crying on walks, mourning a reality that was never going to change. Some days it felt like I was drowning in an ocean, the grief so enormous that I couldn’t see a shore. I was barely conscious of the presence of God. It was like the ocean swallowed up all of my attention, leaving relatively little for work or for relationships or for my walk with the divine.

But as I swam in that grief, I began to notice three things.

First, I no longer had much of a desire for porn. I was now conscious, on a bone-deep level, of what I actually wanted, and as a result I could no longer hide from the fact that porn would be no help to me. I could have watched porn every day for a decade and my childhood pain wouldn’t have budged one iota.

Second, the grief started to shift. It started to shrink. And as it diminished, the desire for porn did as well.

Third, even though God often felt distant, I felt as though I was somehow on the right spiritual path. As though what I was doing was growing me closer to Him in the long run. I think part of the beauty of the book of Lamentations is that it reminds us that there can be something holy about grief. So often, our culture encourages us to numbness in the face of pain. In the short-run, numbness can feel preferable, but when I found the strength to lean into my pain, I found healing.

I don’t know if the desire for porn is gone for good or if it will at some point come back. What I do know is that I have discovered something that many people have discovered before me: there is something cleaning and powerful about letting ourselves grieve.

P.S. the title is a homage to C.S. Lewis, excellent A Grief Observed, which I inhaled during this season and which seemed to give me permission and space to feel my own grief. Since I’m no Lewis, a self-deprecating spin on his title seemed appropriate.

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I’ve been thinking lately about how I see my faith.

I’ve written in the past about how the essence of my faith is surrender to a higher power. But how, exactly, do I see that higher power?

God is both infinite and mysterious, which means that a lot of us who call ourselves Christians see (or, perhaps, merely focus on) different aspects of Him. I know Christians who focus on God’s glory, or on God’s justice.

I suppose for me, there are two aspects of God’s character that strike the deepest chord with me. I wouldn’t presume to say that these are the most important parts of God; that would be hubristic in the extreme. But they are the aspects that are most likely to bring me to tears of gratitude, or to (what I hope is righteous) anger when they’re violated. That suggests that perhaps these are the aspects that I ought to lead with, when I’m describing my faith to other people.

1) No-One Is Beyond Redemption

The deepest Christian I know is currently serving a life sentence for murder.

I don’t know if this man was raised a Christian or not. I do know that, in prison, something happened to him. When he’s not working, he mostly just sits in his room praying for people or reading the Bible. He’s on a prison salary, which means he makes about $15 per month (inmates don’t get paid minimum wage), and he’s still excited to pay back the $300,000 restitution his case imposed on him.

When a new guy came into the prison and quickly racked up a bunch of debt to some pretty dangerous people, my friend asked the new guy to let him help. My friend’s plan was simple: he was going to visit each of the guy’s debtors and pay them off out of his own (very meager) savings.

I work with a lot of inmates who might still deserve to be in prison. In my opinion, this man emphatically does not. God has transformed him from the inside out.

Nor is this man’s story unique. I’ve known more than a few men in prison who have deeply changed, and are now being punished for a crime they would never commit today.

Which hasn’t made me soft on crime. I’m a fan of cops, prosecutors, and (sometimes) long prison sentences. I have plenty of stories from prison of men who desperately need to be locked up.

But at the same time, my friend’s story drives home a reality to me: none of us are beyond God’s redemption. None of us have done anything so heinous that God cannot transform us into someone new.

This is the story of Moses, a murderer turned leader. It’s the story of Paul, the most notorious killer of Christians in the New Testament, who went on to become the most successful missionary of all time.

It’s the story of John Newton, a slaver turned abolitionist. It’s the story of Chuck Colson, hatchet man for Richard Nixon turned founder of Prison Fellowship. It’s the story of every Christian, if we’re being honest; I sin a thousand times per day, but each time, God is there to welcome me back and to encourage me to become better.

2) God Loves Us All Equally

I love how Father Gregory Boyle, who runs Homeboy Industries (the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world) puts it in Tattoos on the Heart: “The wrong idea has taken root in the world. And the idea is this: there just might be lives out there that matter less than other lives.”

In his early days, Boyle used to ride his bicycle between different gang neighborhoods, trying to orchestrate treaties and ceasefires. I imagine that the work was extremely dangerous. As Boyle puts it, everyone spoke highly of the peace process when it was just their gang talking to him, but the minute that members of the other gang entered the scene, “they couldn’t resist posturing in high gear in front of one another.” I think it’s a minor miracle, given how many of these situations that Boyle attended, that he was never hit with a stray bullet.

And yet, this is as good a picture of the Christian life as I can come up with: a (then-)unknown priest, riding his bicycle every night between gangs, desperately encouraging peace even at the risk of his own life because he knows in his bones that there’s no such thing as a less-valuable life.

Love and redemption. Those are the most moving aspects of the God I want to spend my life growing closer to.

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Writing fiction is one of those activities that feels foundational to who I am, both as a Christian and as a human.

As a human, fiction writing has been with me since the beginning. I first thought I might like to be a writer when I was eight. I started my first novel at 12, and it was a vital respite from the more brutal aspects of my childhood. By the time I was a teenager, I was pitching my novel to agents and was convinced that I wanted to be a professional author.

When I found God, my desire only deepened. On the one hand, I realized that I didn’t need to be a professional novelist: I had other callings, and as long as they still gave me plenty of time to tell stories, I was happy to let those become the ways that I earned money. But I also saw more deeply why I’ve felt called to write fiction all of these years: I want to write in the style of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling, which is to say, I want to use my stories to help people find God.

One of those people I want to help, it turns out, is me. I’ve been writing stories for over two decades now: first as an atheist, and then as someone who dabbled in Eastern spirituality, and then as a Christian. But looking back, it feels as though God has been using this foundational thing about me all along to teach me more about Him.

Here are four things I’ve learned about God, and about my walk with Him, through telling stories.

1) Expect the Unexpected

When I write, I’m usually going off of a loose outline. But pretty often, when I actually sit down to write, that outline gets blown to Hell…and something much better takes its place.

I’ll give you an example. For the past two months, I’ve been writing a character who washes up in a strange village full of people who he’s heard terrible things about. These villagers have also heard terrible things about his own people. In my outline, I focused a lot on this character winning over the villagers and becoming friends with them. But then as I sat down to actually write, I realized something: he actually has his own intense hatred of, and distrust for, the villagers. That distrust takes a lot of time and energy to work through.

As a result, my outline for this part of the story got blown up. What I thought was going to be one simple scene turned into six, and there are still traces of dislike towards the villagers that makes a lot of things harder. When I let myself lean into that instead of trying to stick to my rigid plan, the story became a lot deeper and more authentic.

This has primed me to see God a new way, too. So often, I’ll have plans for the day. God will have other plans. His plans are better than mine. And when I surrender my plans and simply let Him guide me where He wants (which can lead me to some pretty strange places)...my life can start to look pretty wonderful.

2) Unexpected Wisdom

The woman who taught me how to write fiction (via her courses, not 1-on-1) was named Holly Lisle. She used to talk about “muse bombs.” The idea goes like this: you’re plugging along, writing first draft, and suddenly you feel called to write something into the scene that’s completely unexpected. Maybe it’s a particular character’s necklace that you can’t stop describing. Maybe it’s that a new character just walks onto the scene. Maybe a character casually mentions the Mourning Mountains, which until this moment you as the author didn’t know existed.

Holly stressed that you shouldn’t try to stifle these “muse bombs.” Instead you should pay attention to them. She was an atheist, but she had a bicameral theory of the mind, and she said that your muse often knew a lot more about the story than it was letting on to your conscious mind…and if you were willing to tug on the thread of these muse bombs, you could find gold. The necklace that your muse insists that you pay attention to might have hidden powers. The Mourning Mountains might be a group of sentient, miserable peaks in which the main character gets trapped.

In the story I’m writing now, I’ve seen this too many times to count. So often, I’ll think that I’m going to spend my day thinking about X part of the story. But instead, God pulls my attention to Y aspect. That doesn’t make sense to me, but if I’m willing to take a leap of faith, I’ll find that exploring Y is an extremely profitable thing to do. It’s the bicameral theory of the mind, only instead of the muse knowing the story very well and only sharing tiny pieces with my conscious mind, it’s God.

This theory of writing has trained me to take leaps of faith even if they don’t make sense to my conscious mind. I’m a recovering porn addict; and long before I had a conscious theory for why watching porn would be bad for me, I felt God inviting me to fight the addiction. On a happier note, last summer when I was looking for a job, I felt God consistently inviting me to rest. That didn’t make much sense to my conscious mind, but it turned out to be the best thing I could have done (both for my career and for my relationship with the divine).

There’s a mystery to writing fiction, just like there’s a mystery to my walk with God. When I learn to accept that mystery, and to tug on threads without really knowing what they’re going to lead to, really cool things start to happen.

3) Work and Belonging

This is a hard article to write, because the truth is that writing fiction hasn’t come as easily lately. I’m knee-deep in a theological epic fantasy romance story, and the first couple of sections went swimmingly. I was writing 3-4 scenes, or about 10,000-15,000 words, per week. But for the past couple of months, what was once a firehose has come only in fits and spurts. Last week I wrote two scenes, and I only kept one of them. This week, all I did was rewrite the one scene that I didn’t keep. I like what I’m getting, but it’s been dispiriting to feel a trickle where I’m used to a river.

I don’t think I’m alone in this dispiritment. I think in the West we’re prone to conflating our work with our worth: I did a lot this week, therefore I have worth. I suspect this can be especially tempting for those of us who feel we are on mission with God, and who regularly see God show up in our work. I’m so used to co-laboring with God on this story, of feeling connected to Him when I write, that in my current semi-drought I feel adrift and disconnected from His love.

But even here, I feel as though God is working. Because the truth is that I’m not disconnected from His love. I could never write a single word of fiction again, and I would still not be disconnected. In this period, I feel as though God is reminding me that I am His, whether I currently feel that way or not. This is quite the gift.

4) I’m Not Made for This World

I think writing fiction, like reading fiction, is inherently escapist.

But I don’t think that’s bad.

When accused of writing escapist fiction, Tolkien responded that there are two types of escape:

“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.”

One way I’ve come to think about this distinction: when I escape from XYZ circumstances in my life, does the escape make my eventual return to XYZ more or less bearable? When I was using porn (which is escapist in the “Flight of the Deserter” sense), after each binge I’d come back to earth knowing that I had made my life concretely worse. By contrast, when I escape into fiction and I there find God, I return to my earthly circumstances to find that I’m much more equipped to handle them. Writing fiction makes writing nonfiction, being a good husband, and being useful to prison inmates all infinitely easier.

It’s the Escape of the Prisoner, but it’s an escape out of secular materialism and into something much more true.

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Three months in, I realized I didn’t have any stories that painted me as the hero. I chalked this up to me being new.

I’m over half a year in now, and partway through a prison chaplaincy training program, and I’m realizing that I’m never going to rack up stories like this. Because they don’t exist.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve seen some very cool stuff happen in prison. But in each of those stories, I’m not the hero. God is. I’m just the guy who gets to watch.

One of the men I work with in prison used to be a very violent drug-dealer. Now he’s found Christ and he’s incredibly peaceful. He mostly sits in his room and prays for people, because he says that God’s given him everything he needs. This man is repentant, humble, and is willing to forgive infractions that he would have stabbed his fellow inmates for in years gone by.

This man became a Christian before I joined the ministry. So one day I asked one of my co-facilitators, who had worked with him for longer, what my co-facilitator had done to help this man change. My co-facilitator’s answer (paraphrased): “It wasn’t me. It was all Jesus.”

I made a meme that more or less sums up how I view the division of labor between myself and God when it comes to helping other people.

How I thought God would speak to me when I started doing ministry:

How He actually speaks to me:

I think sometimes those of us in ministry can start to kid ourselves that we’re the ones doing the hard work of advancing the Kingdom. We can tell ourselves that it’s our toil and our devotion that help people to find Christ.

This is bad for our humility. It’s also bad for our well-being and mental health. I knew one spiritual coach who told me that he beat himself up constantly because “What if I said the wrong thing?” This man was convinced that he could do irreparable harm to his clients if he screwed up.

But luckily, the idea that the weight of the world rests on our shoulders isn’t just bad for us: it’s also untrue.

I know in my case at least, if I stayed at home and watched TV instead of going into prison, God could just raise up a stone to do the job instead (Matthew 3:9). As the great English poet John Milton put it over three centuries ago, “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts.”

God doesn’t partner with us because He needs us. He partners with us because He loves us and enjoys doing things with us. Maybe it’s time that we let some of the weight of our ministry fall off of our shoulders.

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There’s something about “muscular Christianity” (essentially, everything from medieval popes who acted like earthly kings, to a video from the recently-renamed Department of War in which Pete Hegseth intones the Lord’s Prayer over images of aircraft carriers and bombing runs) that turns my stomach.

I don’t mean that supporters of these folks turn my stomach. I know lots of wonderful and deep Christians who are Trump supporters. I mean: whatever else one may think of the Trump administration, there’s something about employing Christianity as a buttress for aggressive wars that runs contrary to how I see my faith.

Which got me thinking: what do I think of as the essence of my Christian faith? God is infinite, and summing Him up in a single sentence (or even ten thousand sentences) would be impossible; but in my own life, what do I see as the cornerstone of Christianity?

I think it comes down to a willingness to surrender. I’ve been especially drawn lately to Matthew 16:25: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it” (NIV).

I think this surrender comes in two forms: vertical and horizontal. We surrender our lives, our will, and our treasure to God (vertical); and we surrender our lives, our will, and our treasure to each other (horizontal).

Vertical

I love how Richard Foster puts it in Celebration of Discipline:

“The first act of submission is to the Triune God. At the beginning of the day we wait, in the words of the hymn writer, ‘yielded and still’ before Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The first words of our day form the prayer of Thomas à Kempis, ‘As thou wilt; what thou wilt; when thou wilt.’ We yield our body, mind, and spirit for his purposes. Likewise, the day is lived in deeds of submission interspersed with constant ejaculations of inward surrender. As the first words of the morning are of submission, so are the last words of the night. We surrender our body, mind, and spirit into the hands of God to do with us as he pleases through the long darkness.”

In my own life, I tend to fluctuate between two ways of being. The first is where I prioritize my own will. On these days I tell God, essentially: “I know there are things you want to do with me today, but I have work to do first. Maybe I can listen to you after?” On these days, I try and fit God around the tasks of my day-to-day; to let Him fill in the cracks, so to speak.

These days are generally disasters.

Partly, of course, that’s because God is much wiser than me. There’s something profoundly silly about telling the maker of the universe, in essence: “I’m going to ignore Your plans for me today, because I know best.”

But I also think these days are so rough because I’m starting from the wrong baseline assumption. The truth is that my life, like my time and my treasure, are not my own; they belong to God. When I act as though these things belong to me, I become selfish and irritable. My own self-centeredness crowds God out.

By contrast, my days go much better when I work to adopt the mindset that Richard Foster describes above. When I surrender my will and my day to God, I find that the truly important things get done. More to the point, I find myself much closer to the Divine than I would otherwise be.

A pastor once told me that there are two ways for us to see God: as an incredibly gifted secretary who can help us to accomplish our own ends, or as the master of the universe whose ends ought to be all that we focus on. I want to live my life the second way. Muscular Christianity strikes me as way too much of the first way; it is the temptation, not only that I am trying to avoid, but that I think all of us ought to try and avoid.

Horizontal

The second type of surrender is horizontal: I think we are called to be willing to surrender our lives, and everything in them, in order to serve one another.

To be clear, this is not something at which I pretend to be perfect. I can be self-obsessed and self-centered. As one example among many: I’m pretty good at tithing my time, but I’m not at all good at tithing my money.

But with that said, whenever I do surrender of myself in order to serve another human being made in God’s own image, it brings me much closer to God. Saint Theresa of Avila said that we are called to do two things with our lives: to love God, and to love each other. Of these, she said, the better metric for determining the depth of someone’s faith was how well they loved their fellow man.

Again, this runs headlong into muscular Christianity. If the purpose of our lives is to serve, then in muscular Christianity I see something different: a faith that says that the purpose of others is to serve us. That feels theologically dangerous, not least because I can see how it tempts my own heart.

To me, the essence of Christianity is not proper doctrine, or proper liturgy, but proper heart posture. The most salient question, to me, is: “Who is my life intended to serve?” If the answer is God (and through God, all of the human beings with whom we interact who are made in His own image), I think we’re on the right path. When the answer is ourselves, I think we’re in hotter water than we may yet realize.

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I love asking people questions.

For most of this past year, my favorite question to ask was, “What’s the best thing that’s happened to you this past week?”

After a particularly moving session at the Braver Angels national convention, I started asking people, “What’s something beautiful in your life right now?” That question earned blank stares more often than not, so I shifted to something that I thought was more intuitive to understand: “What’s the best thing in your life right now?”

I ask this question of almost everyone I meet. The person at the grocery store who’s checking me out. The line chef making my Qdoba or Chipotle. Corrections officers and the inmates I work with in prison. Bosses and random people on the street.

The breadth of answers I’ve gotten has been completely humbling.

People have told me about their lives. One person, a world traveler who worked as a line chef at Garbonzo’s, told me how excited he was to visit a new country next month. People have told me about their children, about their relationships, about going off to college and finding new roommates.

Not all of the answers are happy. Asked what the best thing that happened to her last week was, one line chef at Qdoba said, “Nothing. My husband just died.” I was honored she chose to confide that in me as a perfect stranger, and I felt incredibly blessed when circumstances lined up so that my wife and I could listen to her story and pray with her.

Another person told me that his friend had just committed suicide. Someone else said that they had just had to leave a friend group that was in danger of getting them in trouble.

All of these answers—all of these stories—convince me of two things.

1) There’s no such thing as a boring person.

We all have gems inside of us, if our interlocutor is willing to dig. We all have hidden worlds, worlds which fascinate us and excite us, world that terrify us and make us cry. There’s no such thing as an ordinary human being.

(Of course, there can be people who come across as ordinary. But I attribute this to a lack of skill on my end: if I was able to build more trust with them, they’d open up more about the deeper and most fascinating parts of themselves).

It all reminds me of that Neil Gaiman quote:

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them... All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”

2) Most people are lonely

I love asking these questions of retail workers especially. Retail workers tend to be invisible in our society, which I think is a profoundly un-Christian way to treat the men and women who make so much of our world run. They’re also at the bottom of what the popular TV show How I Met Your Mother calls the “chain of screaming” (essentially: when we’re having a bad day, we take it out on people who can’t fight back). From the responses I’ve gotten, I think relatively few customers treat retail workers like they’re human.

But it’s not just folks in retail. I think a lot about the woman who told me that her husband died, or the man who told me that his friend committed suicide. They didn’t have to open up. Neither one really knew me.

I thought for a long time that they must have other people they could have confided in. But maybe they didn’t. Our society’s atomistically individualistic, and according to a 2023 report from Pew, 8% of Americans (roughly 27 million of us) report having no close friends.

Even if these people did have close friends, their pain was still boiling over such that they felt the need to confide that pain in a perfect stranger.

I think there’s something about modern life that can feel profoundly difficult. So many people are overworked and close to burnout. So many people are struggling to make ends meet or to find their purpose or to find a sense of belonging. So many people are suffering intense pain that’s compounded by the fact that, in our busy and phone-addicted society, we so rarely take the time to truly listen to each other.

It all reminds me of something that a friend of mine who’s a spiritual director told me years ago: “Most of us are lonely and just want to be heard.”

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At the tail end of a convention a couple of weeks ago, a very nice woman approached me. She knew from a previous conversation that I was Christian, and she wanted to hear about my faith.

We chatted for an hour or two, and afterwards, I felt like the conversation had gone pretty well. I had been calm and relaxed, and I felt like I had pretty reliably heard and said what I felt God inviting me to say to her so that she could understand His endless love for her.

But then panic hit me.

I had done alright in this conversation, I thought. But God’s been putting more and more folks like this in my path. What if the next time someone asks me about my faith, I’m too in my head? What if I’m too full of fear and guilt and shame to hear what God wants me to say to them, and they leave thinking that Christianity might be a nice idea but it’s probably not for them—or worse, they leave so offended by something I said that they swear off the whole faith forever?

I was working myself into a state of panic. What if I failed the Kingdom? What if people who truly needed to know God’s infinite and unrelenting love for them didn’t—because I was a bad messenger?

That would be awful.

And then, as I prayed to God for guidance about what to do with my fear, I found myself thinking of the story of Judas.

Accounts of Judas’ betrayal differ, but for myself, I have a hard time imagining that Judas went into his ministry planning to betray Jesus. Probably what happened, I imagine, is that he was torn: part of him really wanted to follow Jesus, but another part of him didn’t. Maybe he struggled with greed, and his greed overcame his faith. Maybe he wanted Jesus to overthrow the Israelites’ Roman conquerors, and he grew frustrated when Jesus didn’t behave the way that he expected him to.

But no matter what, I imagine that there was a war within Judas, between his faith and his flesh.

And his flesh won.

And from that moment of greed and betrayal … came the greatest victory that mankind has ever known.

If Judas hadn’t betrayed Jesus, then Jesus wouldn’t have been crucified. He wouldn’t have died for our sins. He wouldn’t have risen from the dead to usher us into eternal life.

The world would be a much darker and grimmer place.

From the absolute beginning of time, Jesus knew that Judas would betray him. Would fail him. And so He had all of eternity to plan how to turn that failure 180 degrees into His triumph.

Which makes me worry about my own possible failures a whole lot less.

After all … if Judas getting Jesus crucified and killed couldn’t throw off God’s plans, what chance do my own sins have to derail the Kingdom? There’s nothing I can do, no way that I can fall short, that God hasn’t seen coming since literally the dawn of creation. And, just like with Judas, I’m guessing He’ll use my failures to bring His light and love to the people who most need Him.

Which doesn’t mean that I want to fail. I’m certainly going to keep trying to do right with God. But the reason is because I love Him and I want to be close to Him, not because I’m terrified that there will be existential consequences if I screw up.

Which is to say: pressure’s off :)

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On a regular basis in my bridge-building work, I’ll come across someone or some group of people who are convinced that toxic polarization is the fault of Those Bad People Over There. The problem is Evangelicals (say non-Evangelicals). The problem is young men (say commentators who are neither young nor men). The problem is Donald Trump (say never-Trumpers). The problem is Democrats or Republicans (say, respectively, non-Democrats and non-Republicans).

I get this impulse, because I’ve fallen prey to it myself. As a Never Trumper, I’m tempted to blame Trump for the sorry state of our political discourse. I’ve also gotten a lot of hate from Social Justice Fundamentalists (SJFs) (Tim Urban’s excellent term for woke folks), and so I’ve been tempted to pretend that they’re responsible for 100% (or at least 90%) of our toxic polarization.

But as understandable as this impulse is, I think it’s a cop-out. The truth is that we’re all to blame for toxic polarization.

We’ve all said things to people in the out-group that we know weren’t helpful. We’ve all shared insulting jokes about those people over there with our in-group. We’ve all struggled to love people in the out-group as much as we love people in our in-group.

I know I have, at least.

It might sound bleak or angry to say that we’re all to blame for our broken politics, but I actually think this idea is hopeful for at least two reasons.

1) As someone who’s contributed my fair share to our toxic politics, I can take comfort in the fact that I’m not alone. We can all cringe at how we’ve sometimes treated (or even thought about) members of the out-group. But we can hopefully also all laugh a little, the relieved laughter of knowing that our behavior puts us in good company.

I watched Eddington last year, a surreal half-horror story about a small town that was torn apart by toxic polarization during the pandemic. As a film, it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved what I saw as the core message: “Let’s be honest, we all went a little bit nuts during COVID-19.”

2) If we’re all responsible for our toxic polarization, then each of us is in a unique position to do something about it. If SJFs were the sole cause of the problem, then that would mean that I’m helpless to help fix our great country, because I can talk about SJFs until I’m blue in the face but I can’t actually change their behavior.

But if I’m responsible for toxic polarization? I can do something about that.

We can all choose to take a step, however small, towards being a vector of peace in our politics and away from being a vector of conflict. We can choose to sit down and truly listen to that person across the aisle, without trying to win the argument. We can choose to (gently) call out our in-group when they say something insulting or offensive about the out-group. We can choose to take the first step towards repairing a relationship in our own lives that’s been fractured by politics.

Probably my favorite step to take is to ask God how He sees this or that group or person who belongs to a different tribe from me.

I’ve used this strategy with atheists (who I often have enormous difficulty wanting to bridge with, owing to my own insecurities around my faith), with Social Justice Fundamentalists, and with friends or family members who have badly hurt me. The results never cease to amaze me. Each time I pray this prayer—God, how do You see XYZ person?—I feel a profound upswell of love and understanding for them. It reminds me viscerally of what James Catford says: “Wherever we draw the lines in society—about who is acceptable and who is unacceptable—Jesus is to be found on the other side of the lines.”

We celebrated America’s 250th yesterday, and for me it was a bittersweet moment. I love our country and our Founding Fathers deeply, and in that sense it felt wonderful to celebrate them. But that feeling was also tarnished by a deep fear that America might be in her sunset years. We might not last another 250 years.

I don’t think my fears last night have to come true. Whether our country lasts another 250 years, or collapses within the next 30, is ultimately up to us.

But I think that if we want to renew our democracy and build the kind of vibrant pluralistic society that most of us want, we have to start leaning more on God’s wisdom. We have to start asking Him how He wants us to think about—and treat—the people whom we cannot stand.

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I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter series, which is one of my favorite stories of all time. It’s also a very Christian story. J.K. Rowling actually said that she didn’t disclose her faith while she was writing the story because she worried that said disclosure would make the ending (a man dying for everyone he loves, and then coming back from the dead to defeat evil) too easy to guess.

But the theme that moves me the most isn’t how Harry grows up to die for the world and so save it. Instead, it’s how Harry is treated in the very first book.

For the first ten years of his life, of course, Harry is horribly mistreated by his aunt and uncle. He’s an orphan who is bullied by his cousin and is locked in a closet for the most minor of offenses. And then a half-giant named Hagrid shows up and invites Harry into a brand new world.

Two things about this aspect of the story stand out to me.

First, Harry is as welcome in Hogwarts as anyone else. Headmaster Albus Dumbledore doesn’t care that Harry’s an orphan, or that he was raised in an awful home, or that he’s never had a real friend. Dumbledore welcomes Harry into Hogwarts the exact same way that he welcomes everyone else. In this magical new home, Harry’s former status as an outcast is never held against him (well, not by any of the good guys, anyway).

Second, there’s the sheer lengths to which the magical world goes to track Harry down. When Harry first gets a letter inviting him to attend Hogwarts, Uncle Vernon destroys it. So more letters come. This time Vernon boards up the mail slot. Then he boards up the entire house. So letters come smuggled in the weekly delivery of eggs. Eventually Vernon moves the whole family to a tiny hut on a remote island in the middle of a storm to try to stop the magical community from reaching Harry. But even that doesn’t work. At exactly midnight on Harry’s birthday, Hagrid knocks down the door of the hut to tell Harry about his invitation into a new life.

I think this story highlights what I see as two of the most wonderful things about God.

First, God doesn’t care a whit about our past. He doesn’t care if we’re the loneliest, most miserable outcast eking out a living on the margins of society. He doesn’t even care if we’re in this position entirely due to our own mistakes. He welcomes us into His kingdom anyway.

Second, He is completely obsessed with tracking us down. I’ve seen this in my own life. I had a pretty rough decade before I became a Christian. I spent a lot of time wanting to die. I spent a lot of time hating God. I seethed with anger towards any being who could have presided over the worst parts of my life. But through it all, God kept loving me. Patiently and tenderly, He showed Himself to me in whatever small ways I was willing to accept. Over and over and over again.

In Experiencing Father’s Embrace, Jack Frost tells the story of how he ran away from home when he was a teenager. His father eventually found the drug-addled store where Jack now lived and drove there every single day, hoping to see his son. Jack had his issues with his father, but that daily act of love stuck with him. Eventually they were reconciled.

Jack tells that story to illustrate a simple point: if his own father, flawed as he was, spent so much time and effort trying to show Jack that he still loved him, how much more does our heavenly Father pursue us? How much more does the One who made us endlessly track us down, not to override our free will but simply so that we will know how much He cherishes us?

I’ve been lucky enough to know many deep Christians in my life. But probably the most touching Gospel moment came courtesy of a friend I knew from high school. This woman moved to a different state after high school, but for years every Christmas she would come home to be with her family.

And every Christmas she would invite me to be with them.

These invites meant the world to me. At this point my folks had moved to another state, and holidays were very difficult for me. I suffered from intense depression and an addiction to pornography. I was single and very lonely. I looked like a success on the outside—that is, I had a good job and I could pay all of my bills. But on the inside I felt like an outcast. I remember bitterly wishing, so often, that I could just trade lives with almost anyone else.

Those Christmas invitations made me feel welcome. As awful as I felt so much of the time, those invitations made me feel, just for a few hours, like I might actually belong.

I suppose they were my first taste of what life with Jesus is really like.

P.S. the title is a reference to one of my favorite Christian songs, So Will I (100 Billion X). If you haven’t heard it before, I highly recommend giving it a listen.

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For most of this past year, I’ve wrestled with intense anger towards a certain person in my past. This past weekend, I felt that anger wash away in a flood of forgiveness and goodwill, and I actually found myself earnestly praying for this man’s welfare. Moreover, this new state of mind seems to be durable: this entire week, I haven’t found myself wishing anything other than this man’s health and well-being.

Of course, forgiveness is an ongoing journey, and I won’t pretend to have mastered it. This feels more as though I’ve turned a much-needed corner on the path. Nonetheless, the experience of what finally worked to help me turn that corner me was cool enough that I wanted to try and put it down on the page.

A quick note: as always when I’m talking about someone from my life, I’ll take pains to provide as few identifying details as possible. I loathed cancel culture when it was ascendent in our culture, and one reason is the Christian idea of grace: I simply don’t like the idea of someone being judged forever by their worst sins. In the same way, while this person hurt me and others I care about pretty badly, I would hate for that to be how they’re known forever.

That said, I also believe that a good story needs to be specific rather than vague. What details I do include, I did so because I didn’t see a way to make the story as useful without them.

The Problem

So, why did I have such a hard time forgiving this man (let’s call him James)? I can think of at least two reasons.

First, he hurt me pretty badly. I used to go to him for marriage advice, and the advice he gave me made my new marriage concretely worse. There are things that he recommended that I do that were stupid and which hurt both me and my wife. He also had a habit of cutting me down and poking at deeply vulnerable spots in my psyche which could leave me sobbing, feeling broken, and (often) in so much pain that I no longer wished to live. This happened more than a few times.

To put it another way: this isn’t the kind of pain I felt like I could just wash away or sweep under the rug.

The second reason is logistical. This man is pretty firmly in my past. We haven’t really talked in a year. When I reached out to him, he expressed complete disinterest in hearing why I felt so hurt by him. I’ve also talked to other friends of mine whom he badly hurt, and towards whom he hasn’t expressed any contrition.

Which is to say: the kind of forgiveness that comes after reconciliation doesn’t feel remotely on the table. If I was going to forgive this man, I was going to have to do so without any help from him.

What Worked Part 1: Being Made Whole

I saw a video from a theologian friend of mine who talked about forgiveness this way:

1) We feel angry at so-and-so because we feel as though they have stolen something essential from us, something which we need in order to feel whole.

2) When we feel whole again, forgiveness flows naturally.

This left me with the question: what essential piece of myself do I feel like James took?

The answer didn’t come down to bad marriage advice. My wife and I are thankfully doing very well right now. Plus, I take seriously the idea of Heaven and of eternity, which means I don’t really get bent out of shape over a couple of bad years.

It also didn’t come down to suicidal ideation. I wasn’t thrilled with how James talked to me, but my suicidal ideation also vanished as soon as I ended our relationship. It’s now something bad that happened to me, which is different from something essential that I still feel as though I am missing.

Nor did it come down to the fact that James treated some of my friends terribly. I am prone to what I hope is righteous anger on behalf of people I love who are hurt by so-and-so, but I’m not trying to fool myself: whatever righteous anger I may have felt towards James was eclipsed by bitterness. For much of this past year, James lived rent-free in my head, which I don’t think is a characteristic of righteous anger.

No. What I felt had been stolen from me went deeper.

What bothered me the most about my relationship with James was a level of (intentional or unintentional) emotional manipulation that I’ve rarely experienced before or since. Each time that he said something that made me hate myself and want to die, I found myself apologizing to him for being too much of a snowflake. Almost every time that we would have disagreements, he would respond by accusing me of some combination of: misremembering what he had said, misinterpreting what he had said, or simply being defensive. During a typical disagreement, he texted me: “You can believe what I tell you, or you can believe the story you make up about me in your head.”

I think this style of communication would probably bother most people, but it cut me especially deep. The reason is that part of the abuse that I dealt with as a child made it so that I have immense trouble trusting my own perception of the world. I’ve slowly pieced together a certain amount of faith in my ability to accurately see and remember what has happened in my life. James’ emotional manipulation (again: intentional or not) shook that faith to its foundation.

Or to put it another way: what I felt like James took from me, and which I didn’t feel whole without, was my willingness to trust my own perception of the world.

So what changed, such that my trust in my own perception was restored? A few things.

First, I shared some of the stories of my more unpleasant interactions with James with other people, and without exception they were horrified. I’m not going to tell those stories publicly for pretty obvious reasons. But it was validating to see that my reactions weren’t off-base: the kinds of things that horrified me also horrified my friends and people whom I trusted.

Second, as I’ve developed closer relationships with other Christians in my life, I’ve started to get a sense for what relationship in the Kingdom looks like. The small group that my wife and I joined has been a huge example of this. As our small group laughed together and encouraged each other and went deep together, I started to see a sharp contrast between Kingdom relationships and the relationship I had with James. On some level, I was terrified that my relationship with James would just replay itself over and over again with other people in my life, because I was the problem, and so seeing a marked contrast between that relationship and other, more healthy relationships helped me to ground myself.

Or to put it another way: I experienced darkness, but then I experienced light, and by experiencing light, I felt more confident in my assessment that the darkness was bad.

Third: I was struggling with a part of my life that’s pretty important to me recently. James used to give me lots of advice on this area, and even though I knew intellectually that his advice was bad, there was an insecure part of me that thought: “I’m clearly screwing up this part of my life, maybe James’ advice to me was good. Maybe I’ll never be successful without him in my life.”

Because my anger was tied to my own insecurity, the more insecure I felt, the more angry I became at James. But when I was able to address this area of my life through applying God’s wisdom and Christian principles, I felt my insecurity vanish and my anger abate.

What Worked Part 2: Love and Sadness

Notice that I said that my anger “abated”, not that it “vanished”. Feeling more whole, on its own, actually wasn’t enough to heal my bitterness.

The next step happened when I was in church this past weekend. I had a powerful sense of God’s presence, and it occurred to me: in all the time that I knew James, he very rarely seemed close to Jesus. That struck me, suddenly, as so deeply and unutterably sad*. And so I asked God if He would make Himself known to James.

This was one of the big hurdles that I faced when it came to forgiveness: I simply didn’t know what it might look like to earnestly pray for God to bless James. For example, I know that James would like for his advice to reach more people, but I couldn’t pray for that in good conscience because I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of giving James a bigger platform to potentially hurt more people.

But praying for James to know Jesus? That I could do.

1) Of all of the gifts that I’ve ever experienced, a personal relationship with God has been by far the best. Praying for someone else to receive this gift feels profoundly prosocial.

2) I believe that a personal encounter with Jesus is one of those things that cannot fail to make us into better human beings. Our relationship with Him transforms us, and the people I know who do the most good in the world all say that it’s due to their relationship with God: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, NIV). Praying for someone to know Christ is sort of like praying for them to become a better person, and I don’t know a single person on God’s green earth about whom I am not comfortable praying that prayer.

As I prayed for James to know Jesus, it became an opportunity for me to bless him in a way that I am almost certain will make him less likely to hurt other people in the way that he hurt me. I was able to see his wounding me as a natural outgrowth of his own hurt, which made me both love him and feel very sad for him. Love and sadness are both powerful antidotes to bitterness, and as they filled me, I found that I just didn’t have room or interest in my heart to be angry at James anymore.

What Worked Part 3: Prayer

The third thing that worked to help me to forgive James and to let go of my bitterness towards him was prayer. I confessed my rage at James to my small group, and one of the other men prayed that God would help me to find freedom.

I think this prayer actually made all the difference.

I’m training to become a prison chaplain, and one theme that’s been hammered in my class so far is the idea that God is the one who transforms us. We cannot transform ourselves; instead our transformation is a gift from the only One who can actually change our hearts. As Paul puts it in Ephesians: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God.” (Eph. 2:8a, NIV).

I don’t fully know how this relates to the rest of the essay. I don’t fully understand the division of labor between myself and God when it comes to forgiveness, just like I don’t fully understand it in other areas of my life. But it felt like an important lens to view this whole thing through.

Forgiveness is hard. “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, NIV) is one of the hardest verses in the Bible for me to live out. If you’re struggling too, it might be time to take a more clinical approach: what do you feel like the other person took from you that makes you no longer feel whole, and how can that thing be restored?

*To be clear, I certainly don’t mean to imply that James’ poor behavior was a consequence of his not being Christian. I think many of my non-Christian friends are closer to God than they (or, perhaps, than some Christians) think they are. But that said, there are people of every faith and non-faith tradition who are genuinely far from God’s infinite love and goodness. I think those people inflict a great deal of pain on others. In my experience, they also live in a great deal of pain themselves. James was one such individual.

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This past week I took my first full weekend off all year.

It felt incredible.

This year I’ve been letting work seep into Saturdays and even Sundays. As I added going back to school to become a prison chaplain to my plate, the situation got worse. I was loving everything I was doing, but I was also skipping date nights and working straight until 5pm some Saturdays.

Over the past couple of weeks, I felt like God was telling me: No more. Every time I opened the Bible, I would find myself reading about the importance of the Sabbath. The topic of the Sabbath came up as a discussion in my small group. On a call with my spiritual director last week, I felt God inviting me to close my laptop on Friday night and not open it again until Monday morning.

So I did. And a weekend without work was wonderful. My wife and I got to plan a great celebration for her mother. We also reconnected, and with the benefit of time to actually connect, she was able to tell me how frustrating it had been this year to feel like I put work and school so consistently ahead of our relationship. That was a hard conversation for us to have, but it felt important.

This week, I’ve been trying to do things differently.

I still got my work done. But I also made time each day for breaks to hang out with my wife, whether that meant hearing about her day or just taking our dog for a walk together. I set a firm rule that I wouldn’t work past 6pm on our date nights. I’m writing this piece on Friday night, but after I schedule it, I’m going to close my computer and not look at work again until Monday morning.

Partly, I made these changes because I love my wife and I want to make sure that she knows she’s a priority in my life. But I also felt a sense of what Saint Ignatius calls “consolation” (essentially, the love, peace, joy, and connection that rises in our hearts when what we’re doing is bringing us closer to God) every time I took a break from work to spend time with my family. For the first time in months, I feel like I’m living the life that God has always intended for me.

To be clear, I love my work, and I’m not planning on slowing down too too much. I think that good work can be a powerful way for us to live into God’s calling in our own lives.

But I also think there’s something foundationally wrong with how we think about work in the United States. We worship the grind. We talk about building our empires. We answer texts and calls from work 6-7 days per week. In a lot of circles, we try to one-up each other by talking about how insanely busy we are.

Best case, I think we can get so focused on a career that lights us up that we end up neglecting other aspects of our lives. Worst case, we sacrifice our time and our relationships in the empty hope that the corner office or a higher paycheck will finally make us happy.

I think God has something better in mind for us.

It all reminds me of that oft-quoted Bible verse, Isaiah 55:8: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (NIV). That verse gets thrown around a lot, probably in some ways that are more helpful than others, but lately I’ve been thinking about it especially in the context of values. In the United States, we prioritize working hard and being busy above pretty much anything else. But I don’t think that’s God’s way. I think that God cares a lot more about the quality of our relationships than He does about how much time we’ve spent in the office.

None of us are going to get to our death beds and wish that we’d spent more time working. Probably, our regrets (if we have them) will be around relationships and missed opportunities: we’ll wish we had caught our kid’s Little League game, or that we’d gone on an extra vacation with our spouse, or that we’d made more time for our parents or siblings. I think our regret over missing those things is another sign that they’re a lot closer to God’s heart than how much money we make.

Maybe it’s time for us to rethink the grind.

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Gondor and I hiking up St. Mary’s Glacier. Photo taken by my wife.

My rescue dog, Gondor, loves hiking more than he loves anything else on God’s green earth (except for my wife). Watching him bounding through a foot of snow in the mountains, you get the sense that there’s never been a happier dog in the history of the world.

He’s also very anxious, and scared of most things. Especially the vet. A couple of weeks ago, my wife had to take him to the vet. After that, he decided that he did not like being in the car anymore.

So this past Sunday, we bundled him into the car so we could go for a hike. We were going to St. Mary’s Glacier, which is not only a beautiful hike, it also had plenty of snow for him to bound around in.

And he was panicked. He didn’t have a clue where we were going; all he knew was that the last time he had gotten in our car, he had ended up at the vet and had hated it. He was literally drooling with terror the entire drive up to St. Mary’s Glacier.

My wife and I tried everything to ease his fear. Among hundreds of other statements, one thing I said stuck with me: “Buddy, if you knew where we were going you wouldn’t be so scared.”

As soon as I said it, I wondered: how often does God think that same thing about us? I know you’re frightened right now, but if you knew where I was taking you, you wouldn’t be terrified; instead, you would be over-the-moon thrilled.

This has certainly been true in my own life. When I was working a corporate job, a new boss came in who was a nightmare. Like Gondor, I was panicked. But that boss turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me: God used him to get me out of a soul-sucking job and to start building my dream career as a freelance author instead.

A couple of years later, I fell into what some theologians call a Dark Night of the Soul. I was in the phase of life that, to borrow C.S. Lewis’ phrase, “hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense.” Again, like Gondor, I was panicked. But I was not being taken to the vet; I was being taken to the mountains, and while it took some time, that experience turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I don’t mean to imply that as Christians we’ll never suffer. Jesus warns us that we’ll have troubles. But we also worship a loving God, whose delight is to dote on us and to bless us.

What if we assumed, next time that we’re panicked or we feel like we’re in a situation where the walls are collapsing around us, that that’s what He’s doing?

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A few months ago, I found myself talking to a card-carrying white supremacist. I don’t mean that he opposed Critical Race Theory or voted for Trump or whatever other ridiculous definition some folks on the too-online far-left think constitutes white supremacy. I mean that he genuinely believed that African Americans represented an intellectually and morally inferior species as compared to white people.

As I was talking to this man, I realized something. I wasn’t going into this conversation with a particularly open mind. I wasn’t going to reasonably evaluate his evidence or agree to meet in the middle on the issue of whether or not one race is genetically inferior to another. I’m opposed to the theory known as “race realism“ and I wasn’t going to budge on it.

To put it another way: I was close-minded on this topic…and I was okay with that.

I think a lot of us have issues like this. I have friends who know undocumented immigrants, and they’re just not going to budge on the question of whether or not ICE is doing a good job. I have other friends who have worked with battered women, and they’re simply not going to budge on the question of whether or not trans-identifying males ought to be allowed in women’s shelters.

And I think that’s okay.

But if I couldn’t be open-minded about the issue of “race realism” in my conversation with my white supremacist friend, what could I be open-minded about?

I could be open-minded about him.

I could choose to write him off as a one-dimensional villain. Or, I could choose to listen to his story and to let his experiences and his pain and his humanity influence how I saw him.

As we talked, I got the sense that he had had a lot of bad experiences with black men and women growing up in the inner city. I got the sense that he had been genuinely frightened by some of these people, possibly at a young age.

Hearing this man’s story didn’t change my perception of the black community. But it did change my perception of him. Away from a one-note bigot, and towards a man trying his best to process what were probably some brutally painful experiences.

I don’t think hate is the kind of thing that grows in a person naturally. I think we have to be hurt into hating each other. As I focused less on this man’s hate, and more on the hurt that spawned it, I felt myself develop a new perspective towards him.

I’ll give another example, a little bit more removed.

One of my favorite rappers is Eminem. In his track Rap God, he says of his critics that:

“They’re askin’ me to eliminate some of the women hate

/ But if you take into consideration the bitter hatred

/ I have, then you may be a little patient

/ And more sympathetic to the situation

/ And understand the discrimination”

Eminem’s known for his misogynistic lyrics, and while some are almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, others reveal a real bitterness towards the fairer sex. But his formative experience with women was also, by all accounts, terrible. His mother was a drug addict. She was abusive to the point that his eight-year-old brother was taken away to foster care. When Eminem became famous, his mother sued him.

My point is not to adjudicate Eminem’s broken relationship with his mother. My point is: if my formative experiences with women included a mother who sued me and who was abusive to the point that foster care took away my brother, I would probably have a strained relationship with women too. In Rap God, we see a man who’s asking for what most of us want: understanding of his complexity as a human being and of the pain that formed his personality, rather than simply judgment towards his actions.

It all reminds me of something that the national depolarization nonprofit Braver Angels says: “Our goal is not to change people’s views of issues, but to change their views of each other.”

I think we can all stand to see see a little bit more of God’s image in those people across the aisle. Maybe we can do this even if we never budge on the actual issues.

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Update 4-12-2026: as one commenter pointed out, while Christians do often practice the Dayenu, it is actually traditionally a Jewish prayer.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, the Dayenu is a traditional Christian prayer recited (or sung) during the Passover Seder. The word means “It would have been enough” or “it would have been sufficient.”

The Dayenu is traditionally 15 lines describing God’s deliverance of the Jews from Egypt in the Book of Exodus. However, in the TV series The Chosen, the woman who follow Jesus write their own Dayenu, which inspired me to take a shot at writing my own as well.

Dear Lord,

If You had given me the gift of stories to help me deal with the rough parts of my childhood by giving me a way to escape into something both true and magical, but hadn’t given me loving and wonderful parents, it would have been enough.

If You had given me amazing parents, but hadn’t helped me to find and know You by writing fiction when I was at my lowest, it would have been enough.

If You had shown me how to find You by writing fiction, but hadn’t introduced me to the right spiritual group at the right time to pick up the broken pieces of my life, it would have been enough.

If You had introduced me to the spiritual group but hadn’t helped me to escape from a soul-sucking corporate job, it would have been enough.

If You had helped me to leave corporate but hadn’t taken away my fear of intimacy, it would have been enough.

If You had taken away my fear of intimacy but hadn’t introduced me to my amazing and beautiful wife, it would have been enough.

If You had introduced us but hadn’t made our marriage deeper and more beautiful this last year than I could have imagined, it would have been enough.

If You had strengthened our marriage but hadn’t ushered me into my dream job of writing for a living, it would have been enough.

If You had helped me find my dream job but hadn’t helped me to find rest and peace in You this past year, it would have been enough.

If You had helped me to find rest and peace in You, but hadn’t given me amazing clients who teach me a ton about my industry and give my wife and me financial security, it would have been enough.

If You had given me financial security but hadn’t given me an amazing opportunity to witness Your work in prison every week, it would have been enough.

If You had enabled me to volunteer in prison every week but hadn’t laid a pathway for me to train to become a prison chaplain, it would have been enough.

If You had opened a way for me to eventually become a prison chaplain but hadn’t cut away the root cause of my sense of shame, it would have been enough.

If You had removed (most of) my shame but not helped me to know Your love and to enjoy being Your child, it would have been enough.

If You had helped me to know You but hadn’t promised me heaven for all eternity, it would have been enough.

* * *

In our transactional culture, we are (or at least I am) prone to thinking about God in terms of “What have you done for me lately?” Among other wonderful benefits, I think this Dayenu prayer is a good way to pause, reflect, counteract that impulse if we have it, and instead grow closer to God by seeing all of the wonderful ways in which He has already blessed us.

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I think one of the reasons that God put each of us on this earth is so that we can be of service to other hurting people. I like how theologian Shane Claiborne puts it: “When we throw our hands up and say God why don’t you do something? He says, I did. I made you.”

But I don’t think we can help the entire world, for two reasons. First, that’s a quick route to burnout. Second, we aren’t gifted to help everyone. There are some groups of people in the world who I feel peculiarly qualified to help. There are other groups who, even though I see their suffering and I can sympathize with their pain, I don’t have the first clue as to how to help.

So how can we find the groups whom we’re called to help? I think asking three questions can help us to find these people.

Who Was I Before I Was Saved?

For non-Christians, an easy translation of this idea is: “Who was I when I was at my worst?”

This question comes straight from the Apostle Paul, who suggests that “Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Corinthians 7:20 NIV). I think one of the reasons that Paul urges us in this way is that, having spent time in this situation, we’re best equipped to understand the pains and desires and struggles of other people who are still in said situation.

For example, before I found God I was a pretty pissed off young man. I had a rough childhood and I was mad at God and at the world. Additionally, I felt like my anger had no place or outlet in modern society, and so I bottled it up until it was corroding my bones. I remember reading fantasy novels in which a character had been mistreated until she wanted to burn the world to the ground, and thinking that yeah, she was pretty right.

Spending my teens and 20s this way gave me some insight into how to help other struggling young men. I know what it’s like to feel like society hasn’t given me any tools to channel my anger, which gives me some insight into how to help young men who don’t know what to do with their fury. I know what it’s like to feel like God must hate me based on the situations that He put me in, and so I understand how to help young men out of that false belief. I know what it’s like to see the world as a dangerous and unjust place, which helps me know how to walk other folks who feel that way into the safety and justice of life with God.

As they say, it takes one to know one.

Who Doesn’t Scare Me (But Who Scares Other People)?

This insight comes from a friend of mine. She grew up with drug-addicted parents. After she found God she built a life as a very successful addiction coach. Why, of all the people she could have helped, did she choose addicts? Because, unlike most of us, she wasn’t frightened of them. When a client blows up at her, she doesn’t take it personally; she just realizes that their brain is craving a fix it’s not getting, or that they’re being forced to confront deeper wounds for the first time.

In Batman Begins, the crime boss Carmine Falcone tells a young Bruce Wayne that, “You always fear what you don’t understand.” I think the inverse is also true: when we truly understand someone, we’re no longer afraid of them. When we’re not afraid of them, we can much more easily help them.

Whose Suffering Makes Me Sad?

This question comes from theologian Jamie Winship. Jamie says that sadness is an expression of love, and as such it’s from God. He recommends that we ask, “Lord, what did You make me to be sad about in the world?”

When we hear an answer to that question, Jamie says, “This is where your passion will be. This is where it will be directed.”

I know the plight of certain people groups weighs on my heart a lot more than the plight of others. I don’t think that makes me callous, though (well, I hope not). It’s just that we can’t care equally about everyone, and if we try we’ll burn out. Instead, I think the heavy weight that the plight of certain groups of people has on my heart is a sign that I’m supposed to help them.

I see this when it comes to bridge-building. Objectively, there are bigger problems in the world than an adult child cutting off contact with her parents over their political views, but something about that situation tugs at my heart strings. It makes me sad on a deeper level than other problems do. I take that sadness as a signpost that God’s inviting me to do something about that problem.

Who do we understand, who doesn’t scare us, and whose plight makes us sad. I think a lot of times all three of those questions will point us to the same group or groups of people. Those are the folks whom I think God might be calling us to help.

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