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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A friend of mine likes to joke: never tell God that you’re scared of or angry at a person, because He will absolutely make it a priority to heal that relationship—generally by putting you in close proximity with the other person.

I heard this joke a week ago, and ever since, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how applicable it is to my own life.

Self-Protection

Sometimes I’ll feel really hurt by someone and I’ll be scared to reach back out to them to try to mend fences, let they come after me again.

This happened a few months ago. I hadn’t talked to my friend John (not his real name) for a few years, because last time we interacted John bit my nose off over our political differences. But in church one day, I felt God inviting me to reach out to John. The conversation went a little bit like this:

God: “You should reach out to John. Right now. Ask him how he’s doing, tell him that you miss him, and ask if he’d like to hop on a call.”

Me: “God, you…uh…remember what happened last time, right? Getting insulted like that was not fun for me. I’m scared it’s going to happen again.”

God: “And so what if it does? I made you to be a peacemaker, and that includes bringing peace to people in pain. And anyway, if John insults you again, what of it? I love you. Compared to that, can any human insults really sting all that much?”

So I reached out to John, and the response was surprising. John responded almost instantly, saying that he was sorry for how he had treated me in the past and that he really wanted to work on our relationship.

And just like that, my fear and anger towards John was healed.

I’ll tell another story. Some of you know that I was abused as a child, and that around 6 years ago I made the difficult decision to cut off contact with the person who hurt me. A few months ago I felt God inviting me to reach out to them: first to forgive them, and then to ask them to forgive me for cutting them off, and then to invite them for coffee.

Just like with John, I was terrified. This person has a good heart but also never really healed from the mental illness that could make them lash out at the drop of a hat, and I was scared that I’d be putting myself in a position where they could hurt me again.

Just like with John, I felt God inviting me to overcome my fear and to make the effort. And just like with John, I felt God reassuring me that, if my abuser really did try to hurt me again, that He would still be there to protect me in the storm.

In Life Without Lack, theologian Dallas Willard writes that:

“Jesus taught us not to be afraid of those who can kill the body. He also discussed other fears people have, each of which he gently and intelligently dismissed. You can live completely without fear. 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.’”

So often when I want to keep someone at arm’s length out of a desire to self-protect, I feel God inviting me to reach out to the person, to try to heal the relationship…and to trust God to protect me from any fallout.

Boundaries

But there are also times when God invites me to set boundaries with people. I’m currently not talking much with someone I used to be close to, because they hurt me pretty badly and I don’t think they’re in a place to be able to talk about it in a healthy way. At this stage in our relationship, any attempt to get closer would likely just result in a blow-up: more discord, rather than more peace.

But even here, I feel God calling me to make peace with this person inside my own heart. I want to be angry at them, but I feel God calling me to forgive them. When we do talk (which is rare), I want to sting them, but I feel God inviting me to minister to them instead. I feel God calling me to pray for a spirit of love and grace towards this person, so that if they do reach out wanting to turn a new leaf, I can be there to help them on their journey.

I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: I begrudge no-one their healthy boundaries. I don’t think that God does either. But I also think that, even within the context of those boundaries, God is still inviting us to make peace with the people who we feel have hurt us. I like what the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 12:18: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone” (NIV).

Seeing the Best In People

Awhile ago I had a pretty dim view of a fellow Christian with whom I sometimes interacted. I didn’t think they were evil or anything, but they rubbed me the wrong way. I felt irritated by them and I looked down on them as being shallow in their faith.

Then, late last year, I had to ask them for a favor.

They immediately said “yes”, and that assent changed my whole opinion of them. I felt a deep upwelling of gratitude towards them that burned away my irritation. I also saw other statements they’d made in a new light, and I felt myself accepting a truth that God had been telling me for months (”This person is way deeper with Me than you think they are”). Now I have a lot of respect for them, and we’re getting closer as friends.

I’ve seen this happen over and over again. When I’m mad at someone, God’s not content to let me stew in my anger and judgement. Instead He’ll show me a different side of the person in question: how caring they are, or what a loving father they are, or how they have this amazing ability to remember important details about everyone they meet. When I want to see the worst in someone, God won’t stop until He’s shown me their best.

Putting it all together, I’m reminded of this line from James Catford, the founding chair of the Center for Christianity and Public Life: “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.”

Or to put it another way: I think God is a bridge-builder.

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Earlier this week, a friend of mine revealed a troubling fact: during a recent performance review, a Christian coworker (let’s call him John) absolutely trashed him. John attacked my friend’s performance in ways that were pretty nasty and (in my friend’s opinion, at least) unfounded. Adding insult to injury, John then texted my friend along the lines of “Sorry to tell your manager what an awful leader you are, but it’s for your own good.”

My friend brought this up because the insults were making him reflect on whether or not he lived his faith out at work. John, who apparently has a history of this kind of behavior, wasn’t living his faith out all that well, and my friend wanted to do better.

I suggested that if my friend was serious about living his faith out at work, then one place to start might be to minister to John. Perhaps he could sit down, thank John for his feedback and offer to listen to his concerns in more detail, and end the conversation by asking how he could bless his attacker.

My reasoning was simple: John seemed like the most broken person in the room. A lot of times, when we think about justice, we think about punishing or even locking away broken people so that they can’t hurt others. That can be important, but I think there’s another aspect of Biblical justice that we often overlook: ministering to the people who are most in need. I think that’s often where God’s heart is (Matthew 25:35-40).

My wife and I just rewatched The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I was struck (as I always am) by the story of Edmund. He begins his journey by turning traitor and promising to sell his siblings to the White Witch in exchange for sweets. By the end of the story, he is a king of Narnia, and Aslann dubs him “King Edmund the Just.”

What is it, exactly, that enables Edmund to rule so justly? I think it’s the fact that he understands what it means to be a villain. He understands the feeling of being kicked and spat on, and the desire for vengeance which that can produce, and he also understands just how foolish it is to pursue that vengeance. I imagine his reign as one where he sought out and ministered to the most broken people in Narnia. That, to me, is (a big part of) Biblical justice.

And I imagine that Edmund could only do that vital and necessary work because his prior fall gave him the ability to empathize with other people who are drawn to villainy. He could understand them, and help them, in ways that someone who had never played the villain themselves might really struggle to.

What, exactly, does all of this have to do with the problem of theodicy? Theodicy (the question of how an all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful God can allow evil things to happen in the world) is a subject that has captivated me. It’s probably no surprise why: I keep trying to make sense of the abuse I dealt with when I was younger.

I don’t pretend to have an answer to the problem of suffering. But I keep seeing bits and pieces of an answer, and today I wanted to share one of those pieces.

If I had lived a perfectly happy life and had never suffered, I’m not sure I could do prison ministry. I’m not sure I could minister to people who came from broken homes, or who used to be so full of rage that they wanted to burn the world down, or people who turned to drugs in order to try and fill the hole inside of them. I just wouldn’t be able to empathize with these folks’ pain. It’s just like Edmund: if he had never been a villain, he never could have been a just king because he never would have developed an understanding of why other people turn to villainy or how to help them.

That doesn’t make suffering magically alright, of course. But I do think that God redeems our suffering by using it to equip us to help other broken people in the world.

Here’s a prayer that perhaps all of us could pray this week: “God, is there anything in my suffering (past or present) that You want to use to equip me to help other broken people in this world?”

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My wife and I recently adopted our first dog. We named him Gondor. (Why Gondor? So that when he’s whining to go out at 2am, my wife can wake me up and say “Gondor calls for aid.”)

Gondor is a six-month-old puppy, and he’s a rescue. We don’t know what happened to him before we got him, but we suspect that it was something bad, because he’s scared of almost everything. He growled at me every day for the first few weeks we had him.

It occurred to me, as my wife and I have worked to rehabilitate him, that my relationship with Gondor has given me a little bit of insight into how I think God must see us humans.

1) Unconditional love

I’m not blind to Gondor’s faults. I know he growls at me when I make sudden movements or when I approach him when he’s cuddling with my wife. I know he’s not fully potty trained. I know he’s scared of pretty much everything.

But somehow, being aware of those faults doesn’t impact my love for him at all*.

I think this is how God sees us. I used to think that if I sinned less, then God would love me more; or, conversely, that if I sinned more then that would somehow make God love me less. But on balance, I don’t think that’s true. It’s not that God’s blind to my sins, any more than I’m blind to Gondor’s growling and desire to pee on the new bed that I bought him. It’s just that God’s knowledge of my sins doesn’t seem to have any bearing on how much He loves me. His love for me is unconditional.

*In the interest of complete honesty I should mention that this isn’t exactly true. Past a certain point, Gondor’s behavior would be a barrier to me loving him; say, if he were to try and take a bite out of my wife every time he saw her. As intense as my love for Gondor is, it’s still just a pale approximation of the intensity of God’s love for us.

2) Fear can be a barrier to accepting God’s blessings

When it comes to Gondor, my only goal is that he be happy and healthy and full of love and joy every day of his life. That’s it.

To that end, I’m constantly looking for ways to bless him. I offer him treats, I invite him to go on walks, I offer to cuddle with him and pet him and play with him. Whenever I’m around, I look for ways that I can invite him into something that will make his life better.

He wants very little of it.

A couple of days ago I had planned to take him for a hike. Gondor is scared of the noises of our apartment complex, but he also loves walking and being in nature, so I thought a hike would be something that he would really enjoy. He wanted none of it; as soon as I took down his leash from the wall, he ran and hid in his corner. My wife wasn’t home, and nothing I could do could entice him out.

I wanted to bless Gondor, but his fear wouldn’t let him receive it.

But it’s tough for me to judge Gondor too harshly, because I do the exact same thing. I know intellectually that God loves me deeply and that every single thing that He invites me into will, if I accept His invitation, make my life better. But I still hide out sometimes in my fear or in my sense of shame, too trapped by my own flesh to accept His loving invitation.

But here’s where the story gets hopeful.

An hour or so after my failed attempt to take Gondor for a hike, my wife got home. He let her put his leash on, and then he and I were out the door. I took him to a beautiful hiking trail and he had a wonderful time.

Gondor’s fear didn’t make my invitation go away. He rejected it the first time, but I loved him and I wanted him to be happy, so I kept inviting him until he said yes.

I think that’s how God operates with us.

In his video “You’re Not Running Out of Time,” theologian Jamie Winship says that there are two Greek words for time used in the Bible: chronos and kairos.

Chronos refers to our linear progression through chronological time.

Kairos refers to a life-changing event. Kairos is the invitations, big and small, that God offers us each and every day.

Jamie says that chronos passes (or, more accurately, we pass through it) whereas kairos is more like a moment that God is inviting us into. Kairos events are events that we can approach, but if we refuse to go near them, they don’t go away. Instead they’re just sitting there, waiting for us to go to them. As Jamie puts it:

“When God invites us into something, he’s not bound by time. He’s not saying to you, ‘You have x amount of hours to get here or this is going to disappear.’ He’s saying these kairos moments are ahead of you on your chronos journey in life.”

When we feel God inviting us into something but we’re too full of fear or guilt or shame to accept the invitation, we should take heart. God’s not going to give up on us. Odds are good that the essence of that same invitation will keep showing up as God keeps pursuing us and our good.

3) Fear is a liar

When I picked up Gondor’s leash to take him for a hike, he thought that I was planning to take him for a walk in our apartment complex. The complex is full of people and strange noises, neither of which he’s a fan of, and so he understandably went and hid in his corner.

But I wasn’t trying to invite him on a walk in our apartment complex. I was trying to invite him on a secluded, quiet hike with very few people and fewer noises. I think if I had had the capacity to show him what I was actually trying to do, he would have been a lot less frightened.

Again, I see parallels to my own walk with God.

When God invites me into something and my fear flares up, I have a choice: I can look to my fear for guidance, or I can look to God. If I look to my fear, I’m often prone to make the wrong decision or at the very least to miss out on an exciting opportunity. If I look to God, I’m much more likely to step boldly into something I’ll really enjoy.

My hope for Gondor is that, as he learns to trust me and my love for him more, he becomes more willing to turn away from his fear long enough to let me bless him. I suspect that God has more or less the same hope for me.

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There are, broadly speaking, two ways in which we try to help ourselves and each other to grow and heal. I think the more popular—and the more painful—of the two is also the less useful.

Path 1: Fixate On Our Flaws

I spent six years as part of a spiritual group whose overarching view of how to help its members could be summed up as: “let us help you figure out what’s wrong with you and why you keep screwing up.” Most meetings focused on identifying or digging into members’ flaws. Most of the feedback was around helping members to see the ways in which they were screwing up their own lives.

This fixation on our flaws can be helpful sometimes. For instance, if we’re getting in our own way (which most of us are, at least to some extent) it can be good to have an external perspective to show us the hidden ways in which we keep self-sabotaging. Every romantic relationship of mine in my 20s ended in the same way, and it was useful to have someone else point out that I was being codependent in those relationships.

But in my experience, this approach is both limited and risky.

Limited: in my time with this group, I watched people come in with a variety of deep issues: addiction, the scars of abuse, broken marriages, etc. Mostly, I watched those same people (myself included) struggle with these issues for months or years, never making much progress. Many of the folks left still in the grip of the same issues they came to the group for help with. When it comes to the deepest problems we grapple with, fixating on our flaws doesn’t seem to do as much good as we think it will.

Risky: my time with the group was marked by frequent bouts of suicidal ideation, as the group leader (with, to be fair, the best of intentions) cut me down or poked at vulnerable spots in my psyche. I already felt worthless and like I was screwing up almost everything in my life, and when I was told that I was also screwing up in ways that I hadn’t even considered, it did a number on my sense of self-worth.

I don’t mean to drag this particular group through the mud, which is one reason they’re going to remain anonymous. But I think a lot of us fall into the mindset of fixating on flaws when we’re trying to help ourselves or other people.

We fall into this mindset when we tell ourselves that what John or Jane really needs is for us to step into their lives and set them straight.

We fall into it when we beat ourselves up for sinning, and tell ourselves that this is the only way for us to stop sinning. I did this for years when I was addicted to porn: every time I would watch porn, I would hammer myself about how pathetic I was for falling back into the same trap, thinking that this time the self-beratement would actually help. It never did. This mindset reminds me of that old meme: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

I think the reason that fixating on our flaws is so limited has to do with what theologian Jamie Winship calls the trash pile.

Winship, himself a former alcoholic who’s helped many other addicts to get and stay clean, says that our false self (our fear, guilt, and shame) forms a metaphorical trash pile inside of us. To this trash pile, all kinds of rats are attracted. The rats are our sin: our watching porn, our turning away from God, our drinking too much, our snapping at the people in our lives who don’t deserve it.

When we beat ourselves up or fixate on our flaws, we’re often increasing our own sense of guilt and shame. We’re making our trash pile bigger, which in turn attracts more rats…which in turn makes us beat ourselves up even more for sinning, increasing the size of the trash pile even more. It can become a counterproductive and vicious cycle.

Path 2: Focus On Our Inherent Goodness

The alternative path is to focus on our inherent goodness. It’s to practice seeing ourselves the way that God sees us: as flawed people who sin, yes, but also as creations made in God’s own holy image, whom God calls inherently Good. The Daily Affirmation Prayer that Jamie and his wife Donna give to their clients puts it this way: “Thank You [God] that when You look upon me, You only see righteousness, worthiness, holiness, and purity because that is how you created me.”

I’ve only been practicing this second worldview for about a year, but already the results have been remarkable. My career and my marriage are in a better place than I could have dreamed. The suicidal ideation that I thought would plague me forever is mostly gone. The addiction to porn that used to be a constant drumbeat inside my skull is more or less vanished. I feel more at peace than I would have thought possible a year ago.

(It’s important to note that I pursued this second path under the guidance of a gifted spiritual director with a background in healing people from addiction. If you’re struggling with deep issues in your life, I highly recommend that you not go it alone. The spiritual director who helped me belongs to Jamie and Donna’s organization, Identity Exchange.)

The reason for the changes in my life are simple. The driver of my suicidal ideation and of my addiction to porn was: I felt worthless and defective, and I desperately wanted to be someone else (or, if that wasn’t possible, to be no more). As I marinated in God’s love for me, and practiced letting His perspective shape my perspective, those feelings of being worthless and defective have started to go away. In Jamie’s parlance: the practice of letting in God’s love is shrinking the trash pile, which seems to be reducing the number of rats who feel drawn to it.

I think secular psychology can also explain why this second path works.

Our minds naturally seek congruence. Behavioral psychologists understand this better than anyone. The behavioral psychologist who I followed for years used to say that, if you want to start working out more regularly, you shouldn’t wait for motivation to strike. Instead, just go exercise. The act of exercising will change your self-perception (say, from “I’m a couch potato” to “I’m an athlete”). Once your self-perception changes, action follows. Athletes work out, it’s what they do; and so, he would say, if you can see yourself on a deeper-than-conscious level as an athlete, then working out becomes the natural and logical thing to do. Our perception of ourself drives our actions.

When we see ourselves as foundationally flawed, then I think we’re naturally going to be drawn to all kinds of broken behaviors that are in line with that foundational perspective. If I see myself as an addict, then I’m going to keep watching porn. Why? Because I’m an addict, and that’s what addicts do. If I see myself as a rebellious child of God, then I’m going to keep turning away from Him. Why? Because I see myself as a rebellious child, and that’s what rebellious children do: they turn away from their parents.

But when we see ourselves as foundationally good, then I think we’re naturally going to be drawn to good behaviors. When we practice seeing ourselves the way that God sees us, as holy and worthy and righteous and pure, then we’re naturally going to act in line with that perception. We’re going to be highly motivated to draw closer to God, to cut back on sinning, to treat our neighbors with love and compassion and respect, in order to reduce any cognitive dissonance between our self-conception and our behaviors. At this point acting in Godly ways becomes cognitively light, and sinning becomes cognitively heavy; we may still sin, but it feels like swimming upstream.

If you’re struggling, I wonder if the solution might be less about cracking the whip and more about letting in God’s everlasting love for you.

That at any rate is what’s been working for me.

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In July 2024, shortly after the disastrous Biden-Trump presidential debate, left-wing political commentator Matthew Yglesias published an article titled “I was wrong about Biden.”

He wrote that for the past few years, he had been really convinced that Biden was sharp and with it. To explain how he could have gotten this issue so wrong, he used the metaphor of that old optical illusion of the rabbit and duck.

Before the debate, Yglesias said, he saw a rabbit: a president who gave a strong State of the Union address, sat for an hour-long interview with Howard Stern, etc. Because our brains have a hard time seeing the rabbit and duck at the same time, this view of Biden caused Yglesias to ignore or sweep under the rug evidence that Biden was really a duck (skipping the Super Bowl interview, rarely sitting down with journalists for in-depth interviews, etc). It wasn’t until after the debate, when Yglesias’s brain could no longer pretend that Biden was a rabbit, that he saw the duck.

A lot of people have pounced on Yglesias (as well as a raft of other left-leaning reporters and political commentators who all claimed that Biden was a rabbit), demanding to know why they didn’t see the duck. Interpretations and justifications range from a fractured media environment (these reporters never saw evidence that Biden was a duck), to the White House carefully managing Biden’s image, to the idea that most of these folks were in the tank for Biden.

There’s probably some truth to each of these explanations, but I also wonder if there’s a simpler and deeper—and more universal—explanation.

I have my own story of rabbits and ducks.

I used to be close to a guy who I was convinced to my bones was a rabbit. The reason I was so convinced was simple: I really needed a rabbit in my life. And so when I watched him behave like a duck towards me or towards people I cared about, my brain found elaborate ways to ignore, whitewash, or sweep under the rug those aspects of his personality.

Eventually I woke up and realized the truth: this guy was mostly duck. But I was only able to see that once my psychology changed such that I no longer needed him to be a rabbit in my life.

Maybe Yglesias and other left-wing political commentators and reporters were so terrified of the GOP and of the possibility of Trump 2.0 that they really needed Biden to be a rabbit. And what they needed to be true, their brains provided evidence for.

If that’s true, then it means that the reason we had a mentally unfit leader of the free world for several years is not naked corruption, or a fractured media environment, but—fear.

It all reminds me of one of the better explanations I’ve heard for why Trump got elected and re-elected: his voters know that he’s a fighter.

A lot of Trump supporters voted for Trump because they feel like they’re losing the country they love. A recent report from More In Common that analyzed the Trump coalition found that 87% of Trump voters agree that “Open borders, crime, and homelessness have pushed this country into crisis.” Many of them have suffered as globalization hollowed out their factory towns, as unauthorized migrants flooded their communities, as the opioid epidemic took friends and loved ones. And instead of feeling understood in their pain, many of them felt kicked and spat on by the left. The same More In Common report found that only 21% of Trump supporters agreed with the statement: “Democratic politicians respect people like me.”

When people feel like they’re being beaten and insulted when they’re already down, they’ll hire a fighter to protect them—and the fightier, the better.

So the left’s fear of the right gave us a massive cover-up and an existential danger to our world order (as Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper said of Biden, “It is not acceptable for a man who has some good days and some bad days to control the nuclear codes.”). The right’s fear of the left gave us Trump.

I think if we want to restore our democracy, we have to stop being the reason that people across the aisle are scared.

What does that look like?

It might look like not dunking on the other side on Facebook or on X/Twitter, and instead trying to genuinely understand where they’re coming from.

It might look like reaching out to that person across the aisle whom we know is in pain.

It might look like having a thoughtful conversation with someone who voted differently than you did about your perceived differences (Braver Angels, the national depolarization nonprofit, actually offers structured 1:1 conversations with thoughtful folks of different backgrounds. I’ve done a few and they’re amazing.)

It might look like being willing to call out what we see as the insanity and overreach on our own team. If you’re on team X, you might be surprised by how much criticizing what you see as the overreach of X can make people on team Y feel safe and understood around you.

If we can stop being the reason that our political opponents feel scared, and start being the reason that they feel safe, then I think we stand a good chance of rebuilding our faltering democracy.

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I’ve been writing a lot lately about the idea of “co-laboring with God.” It sounds nice (albeit a little cliche in certain circles). But what does it actually mean?

A couple of weeks ago I had a wonderful experience that showed me, at the nuts and bolts level, what this phenomenon actually means, and I thought I’d try and share it with you.

God, Please Save This

It was a Tuesday, which meant that I was doing prison ministry. My co-facilitator had just finished their session, which meant that I was up. Prison is a hotbed of triggers and temptation, and my goal was to lead a discussion in which I could encourage the inmates to lean on Christ for strength and guidance to do the right thing in those moments when doing the wrong thing seems so tempting.

I stood up, and within a minute I felt like I was crashing and burning. I was trying to help the inmates to introspect about their own choices, but the opening example I gave made everyone think that I was the one who needed their help (more on that in a moment). One of the guys asked me a pretty basic question that I had no idea how to answer. None of my questions seemed to land with the men I was working with, and I felt like the discussion wasn’t going anywhere.

I felt awkward and tongue-tied and like I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was primarily conscious of the feeling that I was completely whiffing on this incredible opportunity I’d been given to help some of these men.

And so, as I watched the discussion spiral out of control, I prayed, right then and there: God, I feel like I’m screwing everything up.Will You please come in and save this situation?

And within seconds, the tenor of the discussion changed.

One of the inmates picked up on the theme I’d been trying to get to and gave an incredible testimony. He had been a drug dealer in prison before he had an encounter with the Holy Spirit and became a Christian, and he told the story of how someone who owed him money had recently refused to pay. If this had been a year ago, the speaker said, he and one of his buddies would have snapped the debtor’s neck. But now, with Christ in his heart, he forgave the debtor and offered him a Bible verse.

It was exactly the lesson I’d been trying to impart, encoded in a story that was too visceral to forget.

Then another man started talking. He said that he’d been in prison for decades, and over that period a lot of different men had wanted to kill him. Each time, he said, he relied on the Holy Spirit and somehow he was protected. He never fought back or tried to get even with his would-be murderers; he just relied on God’s wisdom and guidance, and suddenly there was peace.

The entire conversation was incredible. I think it had a real impact on the other inmates, too: a few weeks later, one of them told me that he’d had the opportunity to pick a fight with a man who had wronged him, and he chose peace and reconciliation instead. It was exactly the kind of heart change that I went into prison ministry hoping to facilitate (or at least witness).

And it had nothing to do with me.

I don’t mean that to sound pejorative; it’s the simple truth. I believe that God would have worked in these men’s lives even if I simply stayed at home and put my feet up.

One of my friends is a professional musician, and he says that writing music is like having a front-row ticket to a fireworks show: there’s awesome stuff happening right in front of you, but at the same time you know that you’re not the producer of the fireworks. You’re just excited to be there to witness it.

So that’s the first lesson I’ve learned about co-laboring with God, these past few weeks: it’s REALLY not on my shoulders. I’m not the cause of the fireworks; I’m just excited to be in the front row when God starts moving.

Daniel

I mentioned above that I wanted to help the men to introspect and to look at their own triggers and temptations, but that the opening example I gave made everyone think that I was the one who needed their help. That’s true. I told a story about how I would be spending a lot of time with someone who was kind of a pain, and how I knew the right thing to do was to love him but that at some point in the course of our interactions I’d be tempted to give him a verbal smack upside the head.

In particular, one man seemed to really think that the other inmates and he needed to rally around me and help me to find the strength to tend to my difficult friend with love and compassion. Let’s call this inmate Daniel (not his real name).

When Daniel redirected the conversation to me and my problems, I was mortified. I thought I was failing as a facilitator. Part of that was ego: I didn’t want these guys to think I needed their help. Part of it was a more pure motive: I wanted them to introspect, not focus on helping a man who already has his own support structures. I tried to (politely) tell Daniel that I didn’t need his help, but he was insistent.

But here’s the thing that I missed, in my ego and in my belief that I was crashing and burning: in that interaction with Daniel, God was already at work.

When I first started facilitating, Daniel seemed like he barely cared. He slept through most of the first class.

But over the past week or two, Daniel’s been a lot more engaged. He thanks each of the facilitators, sincerely, for our time and effort running the class. He speaks up. He answers questions. He seems to genuinely like being there.

And the change seemed to happen right around the time that he tried to help me.

I explained this situation to my wife and to one of our wise Christian friends, and their response was along the lines of: “Well, obviously.” They explained: imagine being the kind of person who society tells has nothing useful to contribute (as far as society’s concerned, the best thing Daniel can do is to go away). Then suddenly a guy walks into your life and actually seems to invite your help. That guy thinks that you have something to contribute. Wouldn’t that motivate you?

So that’s the second lesson I learned: even when we think we’re failing, we never know what God’s doing with it all.

This Place Is A Mess

Outside of my classroom, the prison where I volunteer is one of the most messed up systems I’ve ever seen. There’s heroine—lots of heroine. There are inmates who want to kill each other. The inmates are dehumanized in a thousand ways, from the brutal to the petty. The food is terrible.

There are people in the prison system who will never see the outside. Some of that’s required: I’m not especially soft on crime, and there are murderers and rapists in prison who absolutely need to be behind bars. But people also change, and I know men serving 100+-year sentences for crimes they would give anything to take back. I know Seminary students serving life without parole. I know men who have genuinely turned over a new leaf, but have no opportunity to show that to the prison system, because their next parole meeting isn’t until the 22nd century.

Mostly, when I walk into prison I see a system designed to dehumanize everyone involved in as many ways as possible. I see a system in which almost everyone is scared (often justifiably) and where so many people are drawn into a zero-sum worldview of “Me and mine against you and yours.”

For the first few weeks that I walked into the prison, the darkness and the dehumanization got to me. I would come home and that would be all I wanted to talk about. I felt heavy and bleak, like I was walking around in a jacket lined with lead weights.

Then I spoke with my spiritual director, who’s been doing prison ministry for years, and she helped me see that the source of my heaviness was that I felt like I was responsible for fixing the whole system. I was carrying the weight of it on my shoulders.

At her suggestion I asked God what it would look like to co-labor with Him in this area, and an image came to me: of me walking into the prison, facilitating my class, and walking out again without carrying the brutality of the prison with me. Of me doing my part, and letting go of the rest.

I asked my spiritual director if that sounded lazy. Her response: “No. It sounds like trust.”

Since that conversation I’ve been able to walk in and out of the prison, and do my small part to help the inmates, without taking on the emotional burden of feeling like I have to fix the entire system. I’ve taken on the weight of the tiny part of the problem that I can carry, and left the bigger problem in God’s hands. It’s left me lighter and more free, and more able to minister to the inmates without burning myself out in the process.

I think that’s another piece of what it means to co-labor with God: to carry the small part that we were actually designed to carry, and to leave the rest in the capable hands of the Divine. To trust that He can handle problems that are way too big for us, and to know in our hearts that He will.

To let the weight of the world fall off of our own shoulders, and to put it back on the shoulders of the only being strong enough to carry it.

Or to put it another way: co-laboring with God feels active and engaging, and leaves me spent in the best way…but it never feels like toil.

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For the past few months I’ve been wrestling with a conundrum.

On the one hand, the God I follow is the Prince of Peace. Whenever I or someone I love is in conflict, the way that I’ve been able to resolve things is through an open hand, not a raised sword. To put it another way: I’ve resolved conflict by helping the people I care about to set boundaries, or by gently helping the aggressor to find a healthier way of expressing themselves. I’ve never successfully resolved a conflict with a raised sword; cutting people down to size just doesn’t seem like it’s the way of Jesus.

On the other hand, I’ve loved martial arts since I was eight years old. I love training, I love sparring, I love knowing that I can defend the people I care about in a dangerous situation. The duration and intensity of this love suggests to me that this, too, comes from God.

But how can both of these things be true? How can I be a warrior who follows the Prince of Peace? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with.

Part of the answer, of course, is obvious: there are dangerous people in the world, and being able to fight helps me to protect myself and my loved ones from predators. My preference is to resolve conflict peacefully, but some people just want to hurt others, and I’d rather not be helpless if I come across someone like that.

But I felt like there was more to this question, so I kept praying over it.

And eventually I realized:

I don’t train to fight so that I can hurt other people. I train to fight so that I can resolve physical conflicts peacefully.

Essentially, I train so that I can be like Uncle Iroh in Avatar: the Last Airbender.

This realization made me get a lot more serious about my martial arts training.

Why?

Because, if someone throws a punch at me, it actually takes a lot more skill to gently put them on the ground and in a situation where we can talk about what’s going on in their life, than it does to send them to the hospital.

This seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. If someone throws a punch at me, it’s relatively easy for me to respond by shattering their windpipe, or gouging their eyes out, or breaking their knees. Many of the most brutal techniques for ending a fight can be learned in the first six months of training.

By contrast, it takes a lot more skill to catch the punch, gently throw the person to the ground, and pin them there in a way that neither of us ends up badly hurt.

We have a saying in my dojo: the most dangerous person to spar with is a white belt. This, again, feels counterintuitive: aren’t black belts the ones who know how to twist an attacker into a human pretzel and throw them on their head? Well, yes. But the black belts I know also have the skill and restraint required to guide an attacker through being pretzelized and thrown on their head in such a way that the other person doesn’t actually get injured.

By contrast, a white belt is much more likely to panic and break someone’s knee, often by accident.

I think this is true in emotional conflict as well: it takes a lot more skill to resolve a conflict peacefully than it does to resolve it by hurting the other person so much that they stop wanting to fight.

We think that when someone insults us or our beliefs, that it’s a sign of strength to hit back and to crush them. We think we’re being strong when we cut the other person down to size.

But in my experience, this kind of “You hit me so I’ll hit you back” approach is more often a sign of emotional insecurity than of true strength.

I’ll use myself as an example.

A few years ago, I expressed mild support for a conservative position in the culture war and one of my progressive friends lost it on me. She started insulting me and attacking me. This continued, on and off, for a few days.

Eventually I responded by telling her that I needed to take a break from our friendship.

At the time, it felt like my response was an act of strength. And setting boundaries certainly can be an act of strength, especially for those of us who are recovering people-pleasers. I begrudge no-one their healthy boundaries.

But at the same time, my response reflected a lack of skill and of emotional maturity on my part. I didn’t know how to handle this friend’s anger, so I shut down the discussion. I lacked the tools to empathize with her and to minister to someone who was clearly hurting. I also took her comments personally, which put me into the fight-or-flight mode that made me walk out the door.

I would do things differently now.

When someone insults us and we try to cut them down or make them hurt, we’re often doing it in order to make ourselves feel strong.

But I actually think that the way to build real strength and to show that strength—both to ourselves and to others—is to try to resolve conflicts peacefully.

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“You’ve never been in here before, have you?”

It was my second week doing prison ministry, and the man who asked me this question was an inmate serving a life sentence.

“No,” I said.

He nodded.

“I can tell. You seem nervous.” Then he said something that floored me: “We’re all just people, you know.”

We’re all just people. I had been looking at the inmates like they were an alien species. Some of them had murdered people. Some of them were addicted to heroine. Some of them had been dealers. Some of them, in a twist I hadn’t seen coming before I started volunteering behind bars, were still dealing.

Even though I was in here to help these folks, on some level I had convinced myself that we didn’t have a lot in common.

But once my friend pointed out that we’re all just people, I started to see the inmates in the classroom where I was a facilitator differently. Some of them had girlfriends or wives on the outside. Some had family members who wouldn’t talk to them, and they were desperate to be better so that they could heal those relationships. Some were grappling with guilt over things they had done. Some were exhausted because they slept in a single cell next to their toilet and it kept flushing at odd hours of the night and waking them up. Some were in seminary school. Some weren’t remotely sure about this whole “God” thing.

A lot of them were lonely.

It turns out that folks in prison and folks on the outside aren’t all that different. We all have hopes and dreams, shames and regrets. Most of us are just trying to get by in a world that can feel pretty rough sometimes.

I think sometimes we can psych ourselves out when it comes to talking to people who seem like they’re different from us.

“He’s a Republican, I don’t have anything in common with him.”

“She’s homeless. Even if I wanted to talk to her, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“That guy’s Muslim. Our faiths are too different for us to have a real conversation. I don’t even know what we’d talk about.”

But I think the truth is that we’re all pretty similar. We all want to feel seen. We all want to feel understood. We all want to feel loved. We all want to be free of our fear and guilt and shame. We all want our children to grow up to live safer, happier, healthier lives than we ourselves have lived.

Which is to say, we’re all human.

Next to that, I’m not sure that our differences are all that important.

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Modern life is hard.

This is one of those statements I would have scoffed at a few years ago. After all, I have a supercomputer in my pocket. My parents are in their 60s and aren’t dying from the Bubonic Plague or old war wounds or a common cold that medicine has not yet learned how to treat. By historic standards, those of us living today have it pretty good.

But nonetheless, I think there’s something intensely hard about modern life that isn’t often captured in traditional metrics of a society’s health.

One aspect that makes modern life so hard is that many of us struggle with burnout. Writing for BuzzfeedNews, Anne Helen Petersen calls burnout “the dominant millennial condition, regardless of class or race or location.” She describes burnout like this: “Burnout is of a substantively different category than ‘exhaustion,’ although it’s related. Exhaustion means going to the point where you can’t go any further; burnout means reaching that point and pushing yourself to keep going, whether for days or weeks or years.”

Sound familiar?

One of the big problems with modern life is that each of us has a to-do list seven miles long. Each individual task might feel easy—I can schedule an oil change online, with the click of a button—but there are also so many tasks.

This feels especially acute around the holidays. The holidays are supposed to be a time of rest and relaxation, but few of us feel this way. There are chores to do and meals to prep and gifts to buy and the holiday spirit to share with our loved ones. There are complicated relationships to navigate and ruffled feathers to smooth over and cleaning and dusting and cooking and cleaning in order to host friends and relatives. There are endless errands to run. All of this on top of our regular jobs. Even if each individual task is easy, the cumulative load can feel exhausting.

This sensation might be most visible during the holidays, but for many people it’s a year-round phenomenon. There’s always more to do.

In You Are Not Your Own, philosopher Alan Noble chalks this phenomenon up to the fact that so many of us are trying to self-optimize. We’re trying to chart the course of our own destiny. We’ve internalized the idea of being all that you can be (as Noble puts it, the goal of humans in modern society is to “Use all of the techniques and methods perfected by society to improve your life and conquer your obstacles”). This idea sounds noble, and encouraging, and self-affirming, but in practice it leads to exactly the kind of endless to-do lists that so many of us struggle with.

After all, if the goal of our life is to be all that we can be, then every moment is an opportunity to be better. Every moment is an opportunity to spend more time at the gym, or lose a little bit of extra weight, or invest more in our children’s education, or push harder at work, or do more to build our brand, or optimize our investments, or fix something around the house, or or or….

There’s never any down time. There’s never any time to just be. Because every moment of simply being—every moment of what Josef Pieper calls Leisure—is a moment in which we could be self-optimizing and we’re not.

For Noble, the deeper problem that leads to an ethos of trying to be all that you can be is what he calls the philosophy of “I am my own and I belong to myself.” Essentially: we’re trying to chart our own course in life.

The problem, as Noble and countless other theologians have pointed out, is that charting our own course is existentially terrifying. When we let the weight of the world rest on our shoulders, we find that it’s heavy indeed.

I’ll use myself as an example. Suppose I wanted to chart the course of my own life. I would have to take responsibility for seeing and preventing every major and minor obstacle that might come my way. Here’s what that life might look like (all examples below are based on things I’ve actually done, before God showed me a different way).

I’m doing prison ministry, so I should probably train 20 hours per week at martial arts. What if one of the prisoners attacks me? I need to be ready.

I have a good career as a freelance author, but I should be using my free time to seek out more clients. What if I lose a client? I need to be ready.

I make good money, but I should be using my nights and weekends to earn more. My wife and I want to have kids in the next couple of years, and what if that’s more expensive than we think? I need to be ready.

I’m a good bridge-builder, but I should be spending more time sharpening my skills. What if at Christmas dinner someone says something bone-headed, and tensions flare? I need to be ready to smooth things over.

The problem with trying to chart our own course is that life is inherently unpredictable. We can’t plan for every contingency, and our attempts to do so can suck up every spare moment and then some.

The problem with trying to be all that we can be is related. We can always be a better version of ourselves. Our attempts to be better—all the time, in every way—can suck up all of our spare time and energy and still leave us feeling inadequate.

Both mentalities lead to burnout.

So what’s the cure? For Noble, the cure to burnout is to turn our lives over to God.

There’s something profoundly easeful about turning our lives over to the divine. For one thing, I don’t think God wants us to suffer from burnout and exhaustion and a to-do list seven miles long. Theologian Jamie Winship talk about the Sabbath, not as a single day of rest amid a turbulent week, but as a model for how we ought to live our lives. In “Find Rest and Purpose on a Monday“ he says that “the Sabbath day is to remind you how you should be all the time. At rest.” The idea is to work “from a place of rest, mirroring Jesus’ peace in the midst of a storm.”

In describing life with Him, Jesus offers us words of reassurance that feel, if anything, even more necessary now than they must have to his first-century followers:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30, NIV).

This has been my own experience. When I orient myself towards being closer to God—when I decide that that’s my only real goal for the day, and that whatever else I do will have to flow out of that desire—life becomes easeful. I find peace, and comfort, and relaxation. The important things of the day still get done: I still make enough money, for instance, for the simple reason that God isn’t going to invite me into a way of living that leaves me and my wife bankrupt. But the unimportant things simply slough off of my back.

For example, when I orient myself towards being closer to God rather than towards trying to handle all of life’s burdens on my own:

I still train at martial arts, but I don’t spend 20 hours per week trying to be the best fighter around. Why not? Because God tells me that my skills and my strength and my reflexes aren’t where my protection comes from when I’m volunteering in prison, and I believe Him.

I manage my existing clients, but I don’t obsess over bringing in more. Why not? Because God tells me not to worry about it; my clients like me, and if one does fire me, then He’ll have a plan in place at that time to guide me into something better.

I make good money, but I don’t spend nights and weekends trying to bring in more. Why not? Because I know that God has a plan for my wife and I to have children. When the extra financial burdens that accompany children become relevant, He’ll guide us into a solution.

I don’t waste time worrying about what I’ll say if tensions flare up at Christmas dinner. Why not? Because I worship a God of peace. If tensions do flare, and if God wants to invite me to co-labor with Him to heal things, then the right words will come at the right time (Matthew 10:19-20). There’s no need to stress beforehand.

To be clear, by no means am I perfect at living this kind of easeful, unburdened life where I surrender my will to God and everything important gets done at the proper time. I can and do screw up. Sometimes I spiral worrying about losing clients or about what to write; I know that said spiraling is counterproductive, but somehow I do it anyway. Noble and every other theologian I’ve spoken to say the same thing: surrendering completely to God is the work of a lifetime, and none of us are perfect at it.

But for all that I’ve only taken a few halting steps down this path of surrender, it already beats the brakes off of my old way of trying to manage all of life’s vicissitudes under my own power.

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Often when I bring up the idea that God speaks to us, someone will ask me some variation of this question: “But how do I know if what I’m hearing is really from God?”

It’s a good question.

First, because over the centuries any number of scammers and frauds have claimed to hear from God. I heard a story once of a pastor who told his congregation, “God told me that if we don’t raise enough money today, then He’s going to take me home [i.e. kill me].” This seems less like a case of Divide guidance than like greed dressed up in faith.

Second, God can often call us into weird and counterintuitive things. When one of my friends was a police officer, God told him to de-arrest a guy who had committed robbery and knocked out a fellow officer. My friend de-arrested the man, and it turned out to be an excellent decision, but it was pretty hard to explain to his boss. I think it’s very helpful in these situations to know if what we’re hearing is actually from God or if it’s just our minds spinning.

To be clear, I’m no expert on hearing form God; I can and do mishear. But over the past few years I’ve picked up a couple of “tells” that indicate to me when what I’m hearing is from God, versus when it’s just my own mind. The stronger any one of these tells, of course, the more faith I think we can have that what we’re hearing is from the Divine.

First, it’s important to note that sometimes we hype the idea of hearing from God up into this enormous, difficult thing that must take years of study to even begin to learn. The theologian who taught me to pray explained it like this: point your attention to the divine, ask your question, and then listen to the free flow of thoughts, ideas, images, and sensations that come back in response. I think part of his point was, if we really are made by God and made in God’s own image, then hearing from the divine feels as natural as coming home. It’s a language we have to learn, but also a language we were hardwired from our moment of conception to understand.

Which is to say: this doesn’t have to be complicated.

But that said, sometimes I’ll point my attention to the divine, ask my question, and the answer that comes back is definitely from my own mind. So I think it’s still useful to try and articulate how we can be confident that what we’re hearing is really from God.

God’s Tone

The first “tell” is what one of my friends calls God’s tone. How God speaks to us may vary: He may speak in images, in sensations, in words similar to an inner monologue, in words audible to our actual ears, and in a thousand other ways. He can speak to us through other people and through surprising coincidences, through nature and through industry.

And, what he can say to us may vary according to who we are and the needs of the moment.

But for all that, God’s tone remains (in my experience, at least), consistent. When God speaks to us, He speaks in a tone of infinite love, joy, peace, and connection.

I didn’t pluck these words out of the air. The Bible teaches that “God is love,” (1 John 4:8, ESV), and so it makes sense that when He speaks to us, we feel a sensation of love filling us with His words. The Apostle Paul calls God the “God of peace” (Philippians 4:9, NIV) and says that “the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:7, NIV), and so it makes sense that when God speaks to us we feel a sense of peace filling our minds and bodies. Joy is one of the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22, NIV), and something that I’ve seen over and over again in people who are deep with the Lord. Connection is simply the sensation that comes when we experience the God who made us and who knows everything about us—every hair on our heads, every thought in our hearts—and who loves us utterly and unconditionally.

When we’re asking whether or not what we’re hearing is from God, perhaps the biggest “tell” is: in what tone did God speak? If what we’re hearing makes us anxious, or depressed, or feel worthless or unloved or isolated, then that’s probably not from God. On the other hand, if what we’re hearing invokes in us a sense of love and peace and joy and connection, of being a child basking in the infinite love of a perfect parent, then that may well be from God.

God’s Invitation

Another “tell” that what we’re hearing is from God can come in the content of what we hear.

Is it an invitation? In my experience, God doesn’t speak to us via demands or harsh commands. Instead, God seems to speak to us via a loving invitation. When I ask God for guidance or for help, I’ll often feel the divine hand reaching out to me to invite me from where I am into something better.

This is true even when I’m trapped in sin and I want to be free. In those cases, I’ll ask God what to do, and the answer comes back in the form of an invitation: something along the lines of “I love you just as you are (though I don’t love your sin), but if you’re willing to take my hand and follow me, I’ll lead you into something so much better for you and for everyone around you.”

By contrast, if what I’m hearing feels like a whip at my back, or like I’m being ordered to clear an impossibly high bar, then that’s probably not God. That might be my fear or guilt or shame, dressing up as the divine in order to keep me trapped and hopeless.

If what I’m hearing leaves me feeling imprisoned, and dejected, and stuck, and like I can never get out or be any better than I am now, then that voice isn’t from God. If what I’m hearing is a loving invitation to take God’s hand and to let Him lead me out of my current circumstances or way of being and into something better, then that’s much more likely to be from God.

There’s another piece to this too. God can absolutely invite us into hard things. But even when what He’s inviting us into is hard, there should be an underlying peace and joy and lightness to the whole thing.

For example, I struggle with a desire for porn, and a couple of months ago I felt God inviting me to come clean to my wife about my struggle. This terrified me. I was scared that she would leave me. I was in a state of panic for most of the day or two before I told her.

But underneath that fear, there was a sense of peace. Of lightness. There was a sense from God along the lines of: “I know this is terrifying for you, but if you’re willing to do this, it’s going to usher in a better life than you can imagine” (as indeed telling my wife did).

What we’re hearing from God can absolutely scare us, or daunt us, but it should also come with an undercurrent of lightness and peace. If it’s teeth-clenching all the way down, there’s a good chance that that’s not from God.

The Content of What God Invites Us Into

We’ve talked about God’s tone, about how he speaks to us…but what about judging based on what He says?

This is much trickier, because the simple truth is that our ways are not His ways (Isaiah 55:8). Some things that God’s invited me into are frankly confusing. They seem to make me a better person, and to make the lives of the people around me better, but they’re not the kind of thing I would have come up with on my own.

But there are two clues I think we can use to help us discern whether or not what we’re hearing is from God, based on the content of what we’re hearing.

First, everything that God says will align with the Bible (or, in the many cases where God gives us guidance on matters that are too personal to find answers to in the Bible, like what career we should pursue, His words to us will at the very least never contradict His written word). But, in my own experience at least, this can be a little bit fraught. The blunt truth is that interpreting the Bible is hard.

I’ve talked to people who insist that the Bible justifies slavery. I’ve talked to people who claim that Jesus was a racist. One of my friends, who’s a Biblical counselor, once had to take a session with a man who beat his wife and who wanted my friend to quote Ephesians 5:22 (”Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord” NIV) to her so that she would submit to his beatings instead of filing for divorce.

If we just read the Bible without any training, we can end up with a pretty skewed idea of who God is.

Rather than trying to interpret the Bible completely on my own, I’ve found it useful to do two things: first, to pray and to ask God what He wants me to get out of a certain verse, and second, to let my understand of Scripture and of God be influenced by theologians whom I respect and admire.

For example: right now I’m reading the book of Jeremiah. To my layman’s eye, the book makes God sound impatient, judgmental, and eager to punish people who don’t do as He says. Maybe that’s the truth of the book, but that doesn’t align at all with either the God I’ve come to know or the God who I see described by theologians like Dallas Willard, C.S. Lewis, and Jamie and Donna Winship.

And so, as I was reading Jeremiah, I asked God: “What do you want me to know about what I’m reading?” And the answer came back: “for you, it’s about the dangers of letting idols keep living in your heart.” This answer fits with my understanding of God (who is relentlessly focused on trying to help me stop sinning), and with the God portrayed by different theologians whom I admire, and so I accept it.

The second clue as to whether or not what we’re hearing is from God is: does what we’re hearing bring us closer to God, and does it make the lives of the people around us better?

This one can be tricky too, because the ways that God invites us to serve others can often feel counterintuitive.

This past summer, for instance, my wife and I were struggling financially and I was looking for a new job. Well-meaning friends and family encouraged me to apply to 20 job posts per day on sites like Indeed. At the same time, I was talking to my friends in the bridge-building industry (where I knew I wanted to work), and they were saying that there weren’t any jobs in said industry.

In the middle of this uncertainty, I felt God inviting me to simply rest and to trust Him. This was nerve-wracking, because my wife does not like financial insecurity and part of me felt like the right way to serve her would be to go out and pound the pavement until I found a new job.

I rested, and trusted God’s providence, and it’s worked out beautifully for both of us. I found two high-paying clients in the bridge-building space who help me provide for our family while leaving us a nice financial cushion every month. I found work that leaves me free for plenty of date nights, and which also excites me and that lights me up, which means I have more energy on said sate nights.

It turns out that trusting God was the best thing I could have done to serve my wife. But boy did it feel counterintuitive at the time.

* * *

This is far from a be-all-end-all guide on how to know whether or not what we’re hearing is from God. Theologians who have been doing this work for decades have written whole books on this topic. But while it doesn’t claim to be comprehensive, I do hope that this guide can provide at least a little bit of clarify on a topic that can feel very murky.

As we walk into this next week together, I’m curious: what’s one thing that you hear God telling you or inviting you into?

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Source: https://www.tvinsider.com/show/frasier/

I’ve been rewatching Frasier (the original show, not the remake) lately.

For those who don’t know, Frasier is the story of a smart and caring psychotherapist (Frasier Crane) who continually gets in his own way. He has a big heart and a strong moral code, and he can dispense incredible wisdom to the other characters. But he’s also loudmouthed, abrasive, arrogant, and he leaves a string of broken and burned relationships (mostly of the romantic nature) behind him.

It took me a long time to square these two sides of the character. How could a man this smart and this devoted to doing the right thing cause so much harm, both to himself and to others? Finally it clicked: whatever his other virtues, he suffers from an acute sense of shame (by shame, I mean Dr. Brené Brown’s definition: “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging”).

The source of Frasier’s shame is easy to see if you know the characters. Frasier got brutally bullied in prep school. His father was also a stern and generally unloving figure, too focused on his career as a cop and his role as a macho man to show much love to his two nerdy and unathletic boys. Frasier recounts one road trip that he and his father took to his brother Niles, which more or less sums up the father-son relationship at the time: “I remember a car trip we took when I was nine? We drove from Seattle to Spokane. The only thing he [Dad] said to me was, ‘I think we’ve got a problem with your brother Frasier.’”

Frasier’s sense of shame runs deep, and it shows up in all of his worst interactions. He lies to women (and invariably gets found out) because he doesn’t think that he’s good enough to be loved by a woman for who he is. When someone says something that pokes at his pride, he lashes out and hurts them. He’s arrogant and talks as though he’s smarter than anyone else, but the reason he acts this way is simple: it’s a cover to hide from the fact that, deep down, he worries that he might be worse than anyone else. He doesn’t listen because he doesn’t feel listened to.

I think a lot of us are at least a little bit like Frasier Crane. If we’re honest with ourselves, a lot of us feel—at least a little bit—like we are “flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”

So how can this insight help us to heal our society?

I see at least two ways.

First: it can help us to offer each other a little bit more grace.

When we see someone behaving badly, either towards us or towards our political or religious ‘team’, we can practice seeing them as Frasier Crane: good-hearted, but clearly insecure and acting out. We can see their insults or personal attacks, not as barbs that we have to internalize, but as the defense mechanism of someone who’s feeling hurt and powerless. That’s a powerful way to avoid taking the other person’s words or even actions personally, which can also help us to avoid lashing out at them in return.

Indeed, when we practice seeing the inner pain of people who act arrogant and loud-mouthed, we can even practice ministering to them. We can feel sympathy for the insecurity lurking behind their arrogance, for the feelings of powerlessness underneath their barbs. If it’s true that hurting people hurt people, then this mindset shift can help us tend to a hurting person’s pain instead of reacting ourselves and potentially compounding said pain. When we start tending to the hurting people in our society (which I think is most of us), we start to take the steps that will knit our great society back together.

The second opportunity I see around shame is for us to realize when we ourselves are acting from a place of shame. When we feel weak and powerless, we’re more prone to lash out in order to feel strong. When we’re in a conversation and we feel our core insecurities get poked, we’re more likely to snap at our interlocutor in order to protect our wounded parts.

When we’re in pain, our attention can narrow and constrict so that we don’t even see the harm our actions are causing to other people. Plenty of times in the show, Frasier is blind to the real pain that he’s causing the people in his life.

But when we realize that—like all humans—we experience shame, and that this shame can make us act in ways we wouldn’t normally act, then we can take steps to be better. We can work to heal from our shame, which is a tremendous gift to offer not only ourselves but also the people we care about.

I’ll use myself as an example. As a freelance writer, I’ve had some hard financial seasons, and in those times I felt a lot of shame around my (in)ability to provide for my wife financially. When my wife and I would talk about finances, I would feel poked and I would either shut down or lash out. As a result, those necessary conversations were painful for both of us.

But as I was able to connect more deeply to the divine and to let go of my sense of shame, I stopped taking our financial problems so personally. Money became, not a tender spot in my psyche, but simply a problem that needed to be solved. At that point my wife’s and my financial conversations started to get a lot less painful and a lot more productive.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the notion that we’re our brother’s (or sister’s) keeper. The terminology is Christian, but this idea shows up one way or another in all of the great spiritual traditions. If we truly are our sibling’s keeper, how would that fact inform how we think about shame?

First, we would see through the arrogant or insulting actions of our sibling to the pain underneath. Instead of feeling hurt by them and lashing out in turn, we would feel sympathy for them. Instead of passing judgment on them, we would minister to them. With a new mindset we could use their bad behavior as an opportunity to care for them, rather than as catalysts for yet more conflict between us and them.

Second, we would take seriously our obligation to heal from our sense of shame. We would realize that that “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging” isn’t just painful for us; it’s also painful for our siblings. And with that in mind, we would take steps to heal.

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Love, by Alexander Milov. Source: https://wherecreativityworks.com/love/

“I forgive you. I still love you, and I would like a relationship with you.”

That’s the message that I recently sent to the person who abused me as a child (let’s call her Emily, not her real name).

Emily wasn’t, deep down, a bad human being. She had a good heart. But she suffered from intense mental illness, compounded by drug addiction, and her inner pain and turmoil would often spill out onto me in ways that were profoundly painful. In early 2020, at 29 years old, I made the difficult decision to cut off contact with her so that I could heal. Now, almost six years later, I finally felt like I was strong enough to reach back out.

I had burned a bridge, albeit one that many people might say that I was justified in burning. And now I was going to attempt to rebuild that same bridge.

This prospect was terrifying for at least two reasons.

First, because Emily never actually healed. She is still deeply mentally ill. Last I heard, she still does drugs. Cutting myself off had been a way to protect myself: to wall myself off from someone who had the power to hurt me, to build a fortress around my heart so that I didn’t run the risk of falling to pieces after one of our interactions.

Removing those walls left me feeling immensely vulnerable. By attempting to rebuild that relationship, I was baring my heart to her. I was deliberately taking off my psychological armor, knowing that she might cut me and that those cuts would hurt more for my vulnerability.

One possible cut that I anticipated was that she could simply meet my overture with silence. She could decide, despite our long and once-loving relationship, that I was no longer worth having in her life. I knew that that reaction had the potential to cut me deep.

But what if Emily responded? I knew that that could be fraught to. My abuser suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). I once heard BPD described as “unstable moods.” That’s an accurate description, in the same way that it’s accurate to describe a tornado as “a bit of wind.” I knew that if I reached out, there was a nonzero chance that my overture would be met by a storm of raging hostility.

And then, what if Emily actually agreed to meet for lunch and try to reconcile? The danger wouldn’t be past. She can go from “It’s wonderful to see you again, I’ve missed you so much” to “You’re dead to me” in 0 seconds flat. By opening myself up to that relationship again, I knew that I was taking an enormous risk.

A quick aside here: why would I want to reach out to someone who had hurt me so badly, and who would potentially do so again? I saw three reasons, and I think they might apply even to people estranged from friends and family who were never abusive.

First: we sometimes talk about forgiveness as a gift that we give to ourselves. The idea is that I forgive you so that I might be free of the resentment and anger that I’m carrying towards you. I think that’s true and useful, but it’s also only part of the truth. I think it’s more accurate to see forgiveness as a gift to both parties. It’s a gift we give ourselves, and also a gift that we give to the other person. I think that sometimes when we forgive someone, that can give them permission to forgive themselves. In that way we can sometimes contribute to lifting a great weight from their shoulders.

Second: in spite of the past pain and the risk of future pain, I do still love and care for Emily, and if I’m honest with myself, I want some type of relationship with her. When I left, I never intended for our estrangement to last forever; I only wanted it to last until I felt strong enough to come back.

Third: Emily has lived a very hard life. Her childhood was awful, and BPD is a brutal mental illness to live with. From getting to know her over the course of years, I know that there’s a lot of darkness in her life. I wanted to be able to shine a light into her life, and to lift the darkness from her soul in some small way. Letting her know that I was open to being in relationship with her again was my way of doing that.

Now that said, good intentions aside, reaching out to Emily was scary, and not just because of what she might do to me. The second reason that reaching out to Emily scared me was that I knew that I had also hurt her. I could justify my abrupt decision to cut her off in 2020 all I wanted, but deep down I knew that I had caused Emily pain. There was a part of me that didn’t want to face that.

I heard a quote awhile ago along the lines of: “Some people are still mad at you for things they did to you.” I think that when we hurt someone, it can be hard to be reminded of our actions. It sucks to have to reflect on the fact that we’re not a saint. The other person becomes a walking reminder of our capacity to hurt others, and I think it can be a lot easier to keep that person—and that reminder—at arms’ length rather than to seriously grapple with our worst behaviors.

As Russian author and philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes:

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an uprooted small corner of evil.”

This is one of those uncomfortable truths which none of us want to face. It’s so much easier to pretend that we are all-good, and that all of the badness in the world is located in people in the out-group. We want to pretend that there is no “uprooted small corner of evil” lurking in our own hearts.

But we can only maintain this fiction by refusing to seriously grapple with the bad things that we have done. The minute we face our own worst actions, the fiction crumbles and we are forced to admit that—just like in everyone else—there exists inside of us the capacity for evil.

Our culture has an epidemic of bridge-burning. A recent poll found that 50 percent of respondents on the left, and 11 percent of those on the right, considered it acceptable to cut off contact with a family member over politics. A lot of what happens seems to be: we convince ourselves that the other person is a Bad Person (™). We tell ourselves that they are racist, or sexist, or even downright evil because of who they voted for. And then, as Good People (™) ourselves, we cut off contact with the other person.

And sometimes, we really do need to cut off contact for our own mental health. But sometimes, I think that we maintain the separation because building bridges with estranged loved ones is hard. We maintain the separation because it’s scary and vulnerable to lower our walls, knowing that we’re building a bridge the other person might use to cross and (perhaps accidentally, perhaps not) to hurt us.

I think some of us also maintain this separation because, when we cut off contact, we know that our actions hurt the other person. Often, what precipitates the estrangement is a blow-up fight in which we say things that we’d rather not have to defend.

If we really faced our own behaviors, then we would have to admit that Solzhenitsyn was right about us just like he was right about every other human being who ever lived. That’s a hard fact to face, and so we hide from it—and from the person whom we hurt and whose presence therefore threatens to remind us of Solzhenitsyn’s insight.

But for all that it was terrifying, and for all that the outcome right now is uncertain (my overture’s been met with silence for a couple of weeks now), I’m deeply grateful that I chose to try to rebuild a bridge with this mentally ill person whom I once loved.

For one thing, it did force me to grapple with the fact that I had hurt Emily when I abruptly cut off contact. I actually reached out to her and apologized for that, and asked her to forgive me for the hurt I caused her. That action was teeth-pullingly-hard, but it made me more of the man I aspire to be.

I’ve also noticed that I feel more at peace since making my overture. I feel like a great burden of anger and resentment has been lifted from me. I forgave Emily, and that’s been an incredible gift to me.

Finally, I’ve also been more able to forgive other people in my life too—people who didn’t hurt me nearly as badly as Emily did, but towards whom I still harbored some lasting bitterness. It turns out that when you forgive the great white shark who mauled you, it’s a lot easier to forgive a few minnows who nibbled at your wetsuit into the bargain. I feel more free and light now than I did even a month ago.

I understand why people cut off contact with friends or loved ones. Sometimes it really is a matter of physical or psychological safety. Sometimes it’s our way of trying to impose our own rules on a chaotic world. A lot of us feel afraid, and like our world is spiraling out of control, and anger and self-righteousness can make us feel strong and powerful. Imposing boundaries can give us a sense of control over our world.

Sometimes, especially for people pleasers, imposing healthy boundaries can be an act of self-care and even of personal growth.

I begrudge no-one their healthy boundaries.

But take it from someone who’s done both: it takes a lot more courage to build bridges than it does to burn them.

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There’s a great line from comedian John Mulaney’s latest stand-up special, Baby J:

“The past couple years, I’ve done a lot of work on myself. And I’ve realized that I’ll be fine as long as I get constant attention.”

Mulaney is being tongue-in-cheek, but as a former addict, he’s also being serious. And I think he’s put his finger on one of the defining problems in our society.

In You Are Not Your Own, professor and philosopher Alan Noble argues that most of us feel inadequate and defective to some degree or other. We feel like there’s a hole inside of us. And we try to fill this hole with attention.

We can see this phenomenon everywhere. We can see it on social media, where everyone’s competing for the acclaim of millions of strangers. We can see it in the online influencers who, as Freya India points out, turn their most intimate moments into livestreamed events in exchange for views and Likes.

I think we can see this offline too. How many of us have chased praise from our boss or coworkers or even parents, hoping that feeling seen and affirmed by another human being will fill the hole in our hearts? How many of us have pursued the corner office, thinking that once we achieve status in the firm that we’ll finally feel complete? How many of us have tried to do good, not simply out of a desire to help, but ostentatiously—out of a desire to be seen helping? How many of us have tricked ourselves into thinking that if we receive the attention and acclaim of our community—our families, our church groups, our peers—in just the right way, that we’ll finally feel satisfied?

I know I have. I spent my 20s feeling desperately alone and defective, and I tried to fix this feeling by acquiring status. I was status-obsessed as a writer. I think I drove my old agent nuts, because I was constantly pushing her to pitch my pieces to bigger and bigger outlets. I was convinced that if I could just receive enough attention—the praise of a prominent professor in my industry, or one million views on one of my articles, or a byline at the New York Times—that all of that attention would finally make me feel like I wasn’t so painfully and utterly broken.

I’ve even seen this trend—of trying to use our status and recognition to fill the hole inside of us—in quasi-spiritual groups. For years I belonged to a quasi-spiritual group, and with the encouragement of the leader of the group I would post daily check-ins about my career successes. The idea was that, if I could internalize my own competence, then my sense of shame would erode. i.e. “My mind thinks that I’m defective as a human being, but I can’t possibly be defective—[X FAMOUS AUTHOR] just said that they like my work.”

I don’t wish to criticize this particular group or leader, which is why both are going to remain anonymous, but I tell this story for two reasons.

First, I think this idea really is pervasive in our society. Noble suggests that the drive for status and attention is a huge part of the foundation of the modern West.

Second, this practice from the quasi-spiritual group didn’t actually work, any more than it did when I tried more or less the same thing in my 20s. I think the reason is that our accomplishments and our skills aren’t who we are. If I got a bad concussion tomorrow and I couldn’t write anymore, I would still be the same man I am today—because my ability to write is a skill, not an identity. But if our skills and our identity are separate, than reifying our skills can’t actually change our perception of our identity. If we perceive our identity as fundamentally defective, then merely reminding ourselves that we’re good at XYZ isn’t going to change that faulty perception.

But there’s something else that did help me to change my faulty perception of myself.

Starting around the middle of this year, I noticed that something was shifting inside of me. I was becoming quieter. I was posting less on X. In the old days, when someone famous followed me on X, I would shout it from the rooftops, but in the past couple of months, I’ve noticed a couple of famous people in my industry start to follow me and my reaction has been to shrug, wonder idly how that happened, smile for a moment, and then go about my day.

Lately I can watch someone get up on stage, with all of that glorious attention focused on them, and not feel jealous of them. That didn’t used to happen.

I think what changed was: I started to deepen my relationship with my Creator. I started to feel seen, and known, and loved, on a deeper and more intimate level than I ever had before.

And that started to fill the hole inside of me in a way that nothing else ever did.

It turns out that I don’t need to be seen, or known, or loved by millions of strangers. All I need is to be seen, and known, and loved, by one being: the one who created me, who knows everything about me and who loves me deeply and unconditionally.

And that’s enough.

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I heard a story recently that stuck with me. A man was working in a community of sex traffickers, trying to help them find Jesus and in so doing to make better decisions. Someone asked him if he wasn’t scared of being killed by the traffickers.

He answered: “They’re not traffickers. They’re my neighbors.”

His answer didn’t mean that he was excusing the traffickers’ awful decisions. To the contrary, he was literally risking his life in order to stop them from trafficking. His answer just meant that he wasn’t willing to label these men and women according to their worst sins.

I think too many of us in modern society are eager to label people according to their worst thoughts and behaviors. He’s a bigot. She’s a drug addict. He’s a convict.

But when we do that, we make a cardinal mistake: we forget that the person we’re describing is made in the image of God. At Identity Exchange, Jamie and Donna Winship have a Daily Prayer of Affirmation that reads in part: “Thank You [God] that when You look upon me, You only see righteousness, worthiness, holiness, and purity because that is how you created me.” When we label people by their worst mistakes, we forget that those words apply just as much to the person we’re labeling as they do to us. We forget that the offender we’re condemning is one of God’s precious children, and we turn our back on trying to see him or her the way that God does.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t hold people accountable for their actions. We absolutely should. But I think we should impose those consequences with sorrow rather than with gleeful judgment, knowing that the person we’re locking behind bars (for instance) is still one of God’s precious children. I think, in short, that we should rediscover the crucial distinction between “John holds this terrible idea” or even “John did this terrible thing” and “John is a terrible human being.”

How would our society change if more of us remembered that distinction?

For one thing, I think it would dramatically change how we treat people on the outskirts of society. Jesus taught that “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40, NLT) and “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me” (Matthew 25:45, NLT). I don’t think He was just talking about orphans and widows and the destitute, though He certainly was talking about them. I think He was also talking about people who have experienced such unutterable pain that they grow up to do terrible things. I think He was talking about the young man who joins a gang because his father was sadistic and abusive. I think He was talking about the trafficker who lures young women into traps because she was herself lured the same way, and this is the only life she feels like she deserves now.

I think a lot of us write these folks off as beyond helping. But one thing I’ve learned is that no-one is beyond saving. No-one. I’ve heard stories of terrorists, sex traffickers, and gang members who, when someone took the time to minister to them, started to be better people and to make better decisions. I think that if more of us were willing to condemn actions rather than people, we might find that we could do a lot to help these broken souls.

I also think about the distinction between “bad thoughts/behavior” and “bad people” in the context of our toxic polarization.

A recent survey from The Argument chilled my blood: it found that fully 50 percent of respondents on the left, and 11 percent of those on the right, considered it acceptable to cut off contact with a family member over political differences. In my work as a bridge-builder, I’ve seen what that looks like on the ground. It looks like parents, hurt and bewildered that their adult children will barely speak to them. It looks like once-close siblings who now only talk at family reunions. It looks like people telling family members who have loved them since the day they were born that “I’m not comfortable talking to you unless you vote the way that I do.”

Part of what leads to these severed relationships is that one party labels the other. One person decides that the other person is bigoted or hateful or otherwise a Bad Person, and that the only responsible thing to do is to cut off contact. Even where the person we’re condemning does have genuinely awful political views, we make the cardinal mistake of conflating those views with the other person’s humanity. We make an unjustified leap from “John holds sexist views” to “John is a bad person with no good inside of him”—and it’s the latter view that makes us feel justified in cutting John out of our lives.

I think that if we could get back to seeing John as God’s precious son who is made in His own image but who has said or done some bad things, rather than seeing John as a terrible human being, we might be a lot more reticent to cut ties with good people who love us over differing political views.

I heard a story of another man who worked with people on the outskirts of society. Someone asked him: “Are you friends with racists?”

He responded: “Of course I am. I’m friends with racists. I’m friends with sexists. I’m friends with drug addicts and thieves and people who have cheated on their spouses.

“And I try to point every one of them towards Jesus.”

I think that’s a better model for how to treat people who have made terrible decisions than simply judging and condemning them.

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I think sometimes we can feel like we need to save the world, and we can end up exhausted and burned out as a result.

This is understandable. For every person we help, ten more need it. Every dent we make in a vital cause makes us aware of just how much more work needs to be done on that cause. Plus, there are 100 other noble causes, all jockeying for our time and attention. It turns out the world is a pretty broken place.

I think this is part of why so many of us who set out to do some good in the world end up burned out. I have friends who work 80 hour weeks and are haunted by how much more work it seems like there is to do. I have friends who run themselves ragged ministering to other people 24/7, because there’s always another person who needs their help.

I’ve seen this in my own life. As a writer, I don’t think my work is particularly life-and-death, but I can still get so caught up in using my words to try to help people that I end up white-knuckling my labor in order to try to turn giant projects around faster.

I don’t think God is calling us into life like this.

I get why so many of us feel the weight of the world on our shoulders. In Christian circles, we talk about being “co-laborers” with God. But sometimes I think we have a distorted sense of what that term means.

Here’s how my wife describes it. Remember in The Two Towers movie, there’s a scene of Treebeard and the other ents storming Isengard, and Merry and Pippin are sitting on Treebeard’s shoulders and throwing rocks at the orcs?

Merry and Pippin are, in that moment, co-laborers with Treebeard. They’re contributing to the fight. They’re getting to flex their muscles and do their part to take down evil.

But at the same time, let’s not kid ourselves. If Merry and Pippin decided to sit on their hands instead of participating in the battle, Isengard would still have been sacked.

I think co-laboring with God is a little bit like being Merry and Pippin, riding on Treebeard’s shoulders.

When God invites us to co-labor with Him, in some ways it’s a gift to us. We were made to advance God’s kingdom; in Revolution Within, theologian Dwight Edwards says that “we were created and redeemed to mount up on God-given wings…and to abandon ourselves to the high adventure of warring on behalf of God’s kingdom in this dark world.” It feels good to have a purpose and to work towards that purpose. It lights up our souls. It feels especially good to be doing this work with God.

But if we chose not to co-labor with God…His vital work would still get done.

I’ll use myself as an example. I write in part so that I can help people out of their fear and guilt and shame. Lately, God’s laid on my heart an especial passion for political extremists, and for helping them to let go of their inner pain and to instead find meaning and purpose and joy in life. Writing articles designed to help political extremists is part of my work. It’s joyful and enlivening. It feels, to me, very much like “the high adventure of warring on behalf of God’s kingdom in this dark world.”

But if I opted to sit around my house playing video games all day and never wrote another word, God would not be stymied. He would not be sitting there flummoxed and saying to himself “Well Gosh darn it, I really wanted to save these political extremists. But Julian’s not cooperating. What am I going to do now?”

If God did that, He wouldn’t be master of the universe. He would be neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He would actually be pretty weak and sad.

The truth is that, if I don’t cooperate as a co-laborer in God’s grand design, that design will still be accomplished. I am simply not big enough for my refusal to stymie the God of the universe.

And this is an incredibly liberating idea, because it takes the weight of the world off of my shoulders and puts it back where it belongs, on God’s shoulders.

Now to be clear, I’m not denigrating the wonderful and important work that people do when they co-labor with God, whether they call themselves believers or not. I know therapists who have turned broken men’s lives around. I know pastors who have saved marriages. I’ve heard of people performing all kinds of miracles that transform the lives of the people in their orbit.

But I was at a conference of pastors last week***, and one of the speakers said that there are two ways that we can approach co-laboring with God.

The first way is to say, essentially, “God didn’t start working until I got here, and He’s going to stop the minute that I stop.” That mentality, the speaker stressed, is a short route to exhaustion and burn-out.

The second way to approach co-laboring with God is to say, essentially, “God’s grand design was already working before I came on the scene, and if I leave the scene it will keep working. I’m just humbled and honored to be included in that design.” That mentality, the speaker said, is a path to inner peace and rejuvenation. It’s how we avoid burnout and exhaustion.

It’s also more Scripturally accurate.

I forget who taught me this, but one thing I like to ask God when I’m feeling exhausted or stressed out is: “God, what am I carrying that you never asked me to carry?”

Jesus teaches that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30, NIV). If I ever start to feel like I’m sweating and straining under the weight of a heavy burden, then there’s a good chance that I’m carrying something that Jesus never asked me to carry.

Next time you find yourself exhausted or stressed out or struggling with burnout, take some time and ask God if you’re carrying anything that He never asked you to carry. And if the answer is “Yes,” consider either setting it down or giving it to Him.

***To clarify: no, I’m not a pastor myself.

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Jamie Winship is one of the most successful people I’ve ever talked to. He spent decades in active war zones. He’s helped thousands of militant extremists to find Jesus and to lay down their weapons. He’s spoken at Harvard and in front of Congress. He and his wife Donna have raised three very successful children. After retiring from the field, the pair launched a spiritual training and consulting agency that’s helped thousands of people to transform their lives.

If you had to guess Jamie’s secret, you might guess that he grinds 80 hours per week. You might guess that he works all the time, that he sleeps four hours per night, that he’s one of those rare human beings who has forged an iron will and who can run himself into the ground over and over and over again in service of his work.

In fact, Jamie says that the secret to his success is…rest.

In Christian circles, we often think of the Sabbath as an opportunity to rest and to recharge our batteries before jumping back into the grind. We think of the Sabbath as a respite from the other six days of the week. But Jamie describes the Sabbath differently. In “Find Rest and Purpose on a Monday“ he says that “the Sabbath day is to remind you how you should be all the time. At rest.” The idea is to work “from a place of rest, mirroring Jesus’ peace in the midst of a storm.”

I’ve seen the power of this in my own life.

I usually start my day with prayer and meditation. A couple of weeks ago, I felt God inviting me to extend that period of simply being with Him through the entirety of the morning. I immediately pushed back. My argument went something like this: “God, you don’t understand. That sounds great but I have work to do. I have to make money.”

I tried to cut short my meditation and just get on with the day’s work. But I had put myself into a state of stress and white-knuckling. And as much as I tried, pretty much nothing got done that day. I tried to write for hours, and I only got a trickle of words.

Paradoxically, the harder I tried to make things happen under my own power, the less successful I was.

Contrast this to how I was the day afterwards. I woke up and fell into my customary two hours of meditation and prayer. Afterwards, I felt God inviting me into a third hour. And so, even though I had deadlines looming, I just sat there and kept praying. Then I felt God inviting me into writing fiction. The words simply poured out. The came nonfiction, and again it was like someone had opened up a faucet inside of me. When I grounded myself in a place of rest and of trusting God’s providence, everything that I needed to do somehow got done.

This is the only way that I know to be really productive. It’s the only way I can write 4,000 words in a day and still have time and energy for martial arts and date night at the end. It’s how I was able to spend all day traveling and at a conference this past Monday, and then sit down and write two articles in the evening without feeling wiped out.

I think being at rest simply means being with God. Because when we are with God, when we are completely reliant upon His protection and His providence and His holy grace, then the weight of the world falls off of our shoulders. We are simply communing with our creator. And in that place of perfect rest, God can do much more through us than we could ever hope to do on our own.

I think of it like this. Imagine that you are a boat on the open ocean. You are at point A right now, and you’re trying to make it to point B (point B could be a finished project, a successful presentation, a productive conversation with a coworker or direct report, etc).

You could row to B (that is, you could try to get there under your own power). That’s hard work. It’s slow, and it’s exhausting. But it might work, providing that point B isn’t too far away and that the seas are calm.

But, if God actually wants you to reach point B, then there’s another way for you to get there. In addition to oars, your boat is also equipped with a sail. And a mighty wind is blowing.

The wind is God: God’s infinite wisdom, infinite strength, infinite fountain of wonderful ideas that can help you knock whatever it is that you’re trying to do out of the park.

And instead of spending all day rowing, you could spend just a little bit of time setting up your sail.

There are two pieces to catching the divine wind. The first is to actually rig up our sail: to put away the oars and instead to place our faith wholly in God to get us to point B. This is part of what I think Christians mean when we say to God “Not my will, but yours be done.” Essentially, what we are saying is: “I surrender my strength and my will and my goals and objectives for the day. I invite You into my life to take charge, and to lead me in whatever way and towards whatever destination You know to be best for me.”

That act of surrender is setting up the sail.

Then there’s actually adjusting the sail to catch the divine wind. This is how I spend a lot of my time. If I’m in a funk, or stressed out, or full of fear or shame, then it’s a sign that my sail might be rigged up but that it’s not adjusted properly to catch God’s wind. If that’s the case, then the most important work I can do for the day—far more important than just trying to grind at my desk—is to do whatever it takes to adjust the sail. That might look like going for a walk. It might look like exercising. It might look like pushing back from my desk and praying, or playing video games for 30 minutes while my brain relaxes. But adjusting the sail is imperative. Because once the sail is set up and adjusted to actually catch the wind, that divine gale will blow me towards B faster than I could have imagined.

If you find yourself consistently feeling busy, or tired, or worn out, or burned out…maybe it’s time to set down the oars for a day and instead try to catch God’s wind.

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.

Author’s note: I’m sorry for sending this out on Monday as opposed to last week. I normally aim for a weekend publication schedule, but my wife’s birthday was on Sunday so we spent most of the weekend celebrating.

I watched In Whose Name? this week, the new documentary about the decline and fall of Kanye West. I found the whole drama to be incredibly sad.

I think one reason is that I used to quite like Kanye. I discovered West in my 20s, and I was immediately drawn to his ridiculous, over-the-top braggadocio. At the time I was pretty scared of almost everything, and there’s something about bumping “Stronger” or “No Church In the Wild” that makes it hard to feel too frightened. If my terror and intense sense of shame was one end of a spectrum, then lines like “You should be honored by my lateness / that I’d even show up to this fake shit” are on the opposite end of that spectrum. And somehow listening to Kanye pulled me towards a healthier middle.

The other reason I really liked Kanye was that I saw in him a deep and thoughtful artist. He was accused of being a narcissist, but after listening to “Runaway” I disagreed; how many narcissists will put their own worst sins on blast to an audience of millions? I loved “Power” because it was ridiculously over-the-top (”Screams from the haters got a nice ring to it / I guess every superhero needs his theme music”) but it was also a thoughtful look at the dangers of power to Kanye’s soul and artistry.

I never felt like I knew Kanye. But he helped me. And I looked up to him; if not as a person, then certainly as an artist.

Watching his fall from grace was therefore very sad.

In Whose Name? is cut from 3,000 hours of footage (director Nico Ballesteros was invited to shadow Kanye from 2018-2024), most of it intensely private, and it documents the unraveling of Kanye’s life.

His mental health spirals. You see him lash out and start yelling at close friends and allies over trivial offenses. In one scene, you see Kim confront him during one of these tantrums. He says that acting out is part of his personality. Through tears, she rejoins that these episodes used to be few and far between, rather than happening every single day.

You see Kim divorce him and take the kids. It’s difficult to blame her.

You see his mental state deteriorating precipitously. He rants to Kim about how he’s a modern-day slave. He says that anytime someone tells him what to do, it’s as if they reached in and physically manipulated his brain. He shows up to one interview wearing all silver reflective gear, looking like some monstrous blob with only his eyes showing. The interviewer mentions that Forbes puts Kanye’s net worth at $2 billion. But Kanye doesn’t like Forbes, and even after the interviewer tries to make amends, Kanye storms out of the interview in a huff. Kanye was always a rough personality, but it’s hard to watch scenes like these and conclude that he didn’t used to be better.

And then of course there’s his antisemitism. The documentary is pure uncut footage from Ballesteros shadowing Kanye (now Ye), and there’s no voiceover or attempt to make sense of his sudden turn. I’m not sure what kind of sense could be made; I don’t think racial prejudice is something that most people arrive at rationally. I was close to someone who held antisemitic and white supremacist views for years, and suffice to say that they did not come by their views through any kind of traditional logic. I think Ye’s mental illness—-perhaps exacerbated by his belief that he’s always right and by his intense unwillingness, at least in the past few years, to suffer criticism—had more to do with it than anything. But in any case: he went “Defcon 3” on the Jewish people, for reasons which probably only he knows, and the remainder of his life melted down. He lost sponsorships and deals. He was banned from Instagram and X. He went from internationally respected to internationally loathed.

By the end of the documentary, he still has plenty of money. But in every way that counts, he—and his life—are a shell of what they once were.

So what can we learn from this story?

For me, the key lesson is that hurting people hurt people.

Throughout the documentary, we see Kanye do immense harm to those around him.

This is true on the micro scale. He hurts Kim enough that she leaves him and won’t let him see his kids anymore. He lashes out at everyone around him.

It’s also true on the macro scale. His comments about Jews hurt millions of people. I have Jewish friends who once admired Kanye, and who now feel betrayed by him. I get why.

But watching his life, it’s hard to see him as a mustache-twirling villain. He didn’t set out to hurt anybody (in fact, he actually started a church with the goal of ushering in world peace). But his untreated mental illness seems to have done a number on his ability to make good decisions. Or to put it another way: I think all of the pain he caused others was simply his own inner pain boiling out into the world.

I wonder what would change if we saw more people through this lens? What if, when we saw someone saying or doing something terrible, our first response was not “Wow, what an awful human being” but rather, “Wow, that person must be in a lot of pain?”

This doesn’t mean that we can’t impose consequences on people who say and do terrible things. I’m glad Kanye lost his deals and his endorsements and his platform after his antisemitic comments. It’s probably good for both Kim and his kids that she left him.

But what if we paired these consequences with a recognition of the profound pain that the other person must be battling? How might that change how we saw them? Could it make us less judgmental, and more willing to minister to the people in society who most need our love?

We are our sibling’s keeper, after all. What if we acted more like it?

But there’s another side to this too. Early in the documentary, Kanye says that mental illness is just like physical illness, except that the injury is to your brain. That’s a useful lens if we want to destigmatize mental illness, which we should. But it’s also incomplete. If I broke my leg tomorrow, the only person who would really suffer is me. Sure, there would be ripple effects (my wife would have to take more time to help me around the house), but those ripple effects would be pretty small.

Mental illness isn’t like that. Untreated mental illness can cause profound anguish in the mentally ill person, but it can also boil out and cause pain to those around them. The person who abused me did it because she suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder. When I burned through a slew of friends in my 20s, it was because I was deeply depressed and codependent.

This past winter, I went through a period of such intense depression that I actually considered divorcing my amazing wife because I couldn’t see how life with me could do anything other than hold her back. Had I given into my depression instead of seeking help, I would have hurt a lot more people than just myself.

I think the other piece of being our sibling’s keeper is that we owe it to those around us to work on ourselves. I don’t mean to imply that every mental illness is treatable to the same degree, or that we can never have hard times and bad days. But we owe it to the people we love to work every day to be the highest and best versions of ourselves. As Kanye shows us, when we let the devil on our shoulder run the show, we can do a lot of damage.

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