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

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

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

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

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

Vertical

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

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

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

These days are generally disasters.

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

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

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

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

Horizontal

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

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

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

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

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

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I love asking people questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It all reminds me of that Neil Gaiman quote:

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

2) Most people are lonely

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then panic hit me.

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

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

That would be awful.

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

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

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

And his flesh won.

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

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

The world would be a much darker and grimmer place.

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

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

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

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

Which is to say: pressure’s off :)

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

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

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

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

I know I have, at least.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Problem

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

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

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

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

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

What Worked Part 1: Being Made Whole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Worked Part 2: Love and Sadness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Worked Part 3: Prayer

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

I think this prayer actually made all the difference.

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

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

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

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

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

It felt incredible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think God has something better in mind for us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I think that’s okay.

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

I could be open-minded about him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

/ But if you take into consideration the bitter hatred

/ I have, then you may be a little patient

/ And more sympathetic to the situation

/ And understand the discrimination”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Lord,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Who Was I Before I Was Saved?

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

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

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

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

As they say, it takes one to know one.

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

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

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

Whose Suffering Makes Me Sad?

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

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

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

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

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

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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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