While I was bent over the toilet in my Guatemalan cinderblock garage bedroom, the phone was on speaker beside me. My dad’s voice delivered the news of my parent’s divorce, the end to their trial separation—the beginning of what my brothers’ child advocacy lawyer would describe as ”the worst custody battle I’ve ever experienced.” I saw her years later in the aisle of our local food co-op and she reaffirmed it. In six months I lost 60 pounds. I came home without money, car, apartment, or resources. My friends were getting engaged or married, having babies or dating. New York state paid me $890 a semester to go to our local SUNY school and so I did. I juggled two part-time jobs and went to school there full-time for a fall and spring semester before moving to another state and university to finish.

In those early classes I read Emily Dickinson, Phyllis Wheatley, Flannery O’Connor, and W. E. B. Du Bois. I wrote papers and discovered a voice within me that I never knew was there. I thought I was only a reader but my professors would tell me, “No, Lore, you’re a writer.” And I believed them.

I will never forget reading Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird for the first time. I constantly felt like my inner world and the outer world were seeing two different things and I could never resolve the two. I would reason inward and perform outward. I would hear people say one thing and think, but it’s so much more than that. And also, but it’s so much less than that. I felt curious about the ways we saw things so differently and felt ashamed that when some people would say a thing was blue, I would see it was green.

I thought I must be wrong.

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I turned myself inside out in those years, trying to make my inner self see the world the way all these people around me saw it. I was in a conservative church environment, full-quiver, courtship, male headship, stalwartly republican, and anti-feminist. But that world, and those rules, only seemed to work for some people who came from families that embraced the ideals wholly—and even then, there were exceptions. Anyone from outside the frame was forced to fit themselves into it and many of us felt our out-of-place-ness acutely.

I remember being presented with my second subpoena from my father by a stranger at the bottom of my apartment stairs while upstairs the person I considered my best friend flirted with a besotted man before heading home to her family home where she had health insurance, car insurance, three meals a day, a car at her disposal, and two parents who adored her. After she left, I was still in shock, and her six foot one, soon-to-be boyfriend yelled at me and threw a cucumber at me. Not a baby cucumber, one of those foot long ones, fat and hard. I moved out of the way and I remember standing there in the doorway watching the green slime and white seeds slide down the wall and thinking, believing, I am the bad guy here.

He probably remembers the story differently. So does she. But I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that happened. Exactly as I described it. I remember what he was wearing, what she was wearing, what the man at the bottom of the stairs was wearing, and the weather that day. I remember it exactly. And I’m positive they remember it exactly and a different way.

A few years ago I shared a graphic here and a post about the different ways we envision an apple we can’t see in front of us. Some people see it technicolor, cinematic, like the kids say, and I’m one of those people. I see the whole apple, every bit of color and texture. I see the shadows and shades, the place where it sits, the space it takes up. I even taste it in my mouth, immediately, upon thinking apple, I taste Pink Lady apple, even though we mostly eat Golden Opal apples. Others, when asked to think of an apple, see nothing, just black. And then there is every kind of person in between. I cannot even fathom a person thinking apple and seeing nothing, but I imagine those people cannot even fathom a person thinking apple and seeing everything. I don’t think they’re bad people, though, maybe they were just made that way.

A few days ago, Nate and I were driving somewhere and I was sad about something I’d read that day. It doesn’t matter what it was, the point was, I was sad. And I realized I was sad because I’m hurting about things a lot of people have said about Christians who didn’t vote for Trump. And I had this moment where I realized: No one is ever going to say they’re sorry for saying or doing the things they said and did to me and others.

I don’t want anyone to apologize for their vote, ever. A vote is a very small thing in a very big world and I know people who’ve tipped the lever either way and regretted it immediately, who walked out of the booth with a pit in their stomach. Why would I ever hold a tiny action like that against someone?

No, what I realized I wanted, was someone to say, “I’m sorry for how I treated you after you tipped the lever the other way. I said you weren’t a Christian. I said you voted for demonic agendas. I said you were evil. I alienated you. I said you believed fake news. And now I am seeing some of the same things you saw all along, and I’m sorry for how I treated you.”

I realized no one was ever going to say that to me and maybe it would be helpful for me to simply imagine the apple. What if I could imagine the apology, their grief and sadness, their regret, even their still held values? What if I could imagine their tenderness, their wholeness, the reasons they voted the way they did, but so, so, so much more than that?

What if I could imagine them in front of me saying the worlds, “I gaslit you. I made you feel crazy. I made you feel unChristian. I made you feel insane, and I see how much toll that has taken on you”?

It wasn’t hard at all to imagine that. Not even a little bit. I inserted the beloved faces and hands and bodies of all the people I’ve loved over the years who tipped the lever that way and now regret it (and I understand there are many who don’t regret it, and I don’t need them to nor did I imagine them in front of me). I imagined them sitting in front of me and saying those words and something light happened in me. I felt, for a minute, just a little bit freer. Even more, I felt like I could truly love those people again in the way I used to love them and miss them.

When I got home, I wrote out what I imagined they’d say. I tried to be generous and true, using only examples from real life experiences I’ve had, not making them out to be monsters, but just humans with values and stories, just like me. I tried to empathize with who they are and why they made the decisions they made, and then I read through it, and I thought, If I needed to hear this, maybe someone else does too?

So I shared it. Maybe I should have thought through it more but I just felt so light in that moment, like, this exercise really helped me love my neighbor a little more than I did earlier today, maybe it would help someone else. And I shared it.

I shared it in two places: Instagram and Facebook.

I have never, not in over twenty years of writing online, gone viral. Going viral is extremely easy if you’re a half-decent writer, but I’ve never tried to go viral on purpose. I’m not interested in what makes someone go viral. I’m not interested in writing the kinds of things that go viral. I’m extremely not interested in being trolled by bots or humans. I don’t want to provide a place for anyone to show up and be their worst self in a comment thread. Not for me. I’ve stated that pretty publicly over the years and while all my writer friends had their viral moments, I kept my V card. (Sorry, had to.)

Within a few hours that post had over 100k views on Instagram. I did not mean to do that and would undo it if I could without deleting the post.

But here’s what happened instead:

On Instagram, despite my caption clearly saying that I did not vote for Trump ever, the progressives came out screaming at me.

No, they would not forgive me for voting for him. Can’t I see how I wrecked their lives and their faith? Was I aware of, you know, science? and facts? or was I stupid? Here was their screed of all the reasons I should be ashamed of myself. Here was their list of demands if I would ever deserve their forgiveness. I spent hours replying to their comments, asking them to read the caption, before finally turning off comments.

On Facebook, the exact opposite happened.

Here, the conservatives came out of the woodwork, calling me mentally ill, crazy, an ego-maniac, having given myself and my children over to mammon. They said doing something like this was insane, arrogant, prideful, and I don’t deserve their forgiveness. They pounded their keyboards with all the reasons I was a political zealot instead of a Christian and had lost my true way.

The exact same post, the exact opposite reaction.

I sat down this morning to do some comment management (i.e. deletions) and texted a few to Nate. He came downstairs a few minutes later and said,

“It’s like a real life Rorschach test, looking at the exact same thing and seeing something else entirely.”

And I thought of Wallace Stevens blackbirds and the thirteen ways we look at them. I thought about how we do things with goodness in our hearts and how once they leave our hearts and live in the world, they become turned by the weather and our fears and our “three minds” and our inflections and innuendos and indecipherable causes. How when everything is just in our imagination, it is safe, but when we chance to invite anyone else in, we chance the breaking of everything.

It’s why, I think, so many people—and on both sides, let’s please be honest—are so afraid of empathy for the true Other.

Because if we can allow ourselves to imagine the other as they are while also holding hope for who we wish they would become, we are putting ourselves at the risk of love, and love is so, so, so terrifying. It is the most terrifying thing in the universe which is why it is also the biggest thing in the universe which is why it is also the greatest thing in the universe which is why it is also God.

To fill ourselves with empathy, with imagination, with the possibility that there is more to the story than we have known or experienced or believed, is to chance an encounter with love and to chance an encounter with God.

I haven’t read the Law or the Prophets in a few years. Probably more than five years. And it’s on purpose. The prophets hurt my heart. They are so, so fiery and so, so full of love. They are the blackbirds cawing ahead of the storm. Away! Away! They are the blackbirds picking at the carrion carnage after the storm, I’ll stay! I’ll stay! They are the blackbirds showing us how human we are and how beloved we are and how hard it is and how whole we can become, and it all hurts my heart too much.

But it is their imagination that hurts the most, I think, their radical belief in something better, someone better, and the devastation they can predict with alarming specificity when we lose that belief in something better and settle for the worst of it all. Envision a black hole instead of even the outline of an apple, the hope of an apple.

The prophets encountered God, though, didn’t they? And in their stories, the blackbirds brought Elijah food outside the cave and told Noah of the dry land and became a symbol of care and provision and hope and sometimes death, but that is all a part of all this, isn’t it? That it’s all here, for us, for the taking, for the giving, for the imagining and the imagination, and how good it can be if we can just imagine it better until it eventually becomes better.

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Whenever I see the headline, “How Christians should respond to…” or “How Christians should think about…” I think how nice it must be to have all of life neatly lined up like shoes or ducklings, all the shoulds and should nots.

Life is not very much like that after all, despite what they tell you in Bible College, despite what they tell you in their articles, despite what they tell you so you’ll vote their way, despite what they tell you because when you do as they say to do, they remain powerful and you remain stuck.

I’m not going to say there is total moral relativity. I do believe, like MLK Jr., that there is a moral arc to the universe, but I also believe it’s a bit like a rainbow, impossible to hold in one’s hand.

In the introduction of ’s new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark, he quotes Emmanuel Levinas, a survivor of the Holocaust.

‘In the last analysis,’ he observes in Totality and Infinity, such philosophy imagines that ‘everything is at my disposal, even the stars, if I but reckon them, calculate the intermediaries or the means.’ Even the stars; even other human beings; even God: all is available for knowledge to master…How can I encounter the Other without reducing the Other to something available to be grasped, without shutting down their irreducible otherness or alterity?

When I found my home in the less than luminous neo-reformed spaces, we were fond of saying something like, “Who would want to worship a God they could understand?” The point being, God is inscrutable and somewhat unknowable and this is why we worship him.

But then the rest of the time we wrung our hands around shoulds and musts and tenets and distinctives. God could not be known, but as for me and my family, by all this [waves hands around] we would be known.

There is something about the unknownness of God, the inability to grasp our hands around God’s flesh, thrust our fingers into God’s side, that is appealing to me. The mystery of it all. But the mystery disappears or perhaps just dissipates the moment I try to put flesh on God, namely my own flesh. “Be the hands and feet of Jesus,” we might say. “Be the only Jesus they’ll ever meet,” we definitely said.

I understand why it’s appealing, though, it is awfully, awfully hard to get people to follow you when they can’t see, touch, or taste the carrot before their very eyes.

shared a roundup of resurrection poems on Easter Day and I’ve gone back to read through them slowly a few times since. Today I read this one, from Michael Minicucci:

How beautiful is that reminder? “Faith is always a place we wash up on weary, and without our weapons.”

Every should is a weapon, I think. Every reduction of the Other is one, too. Every time we try to be Jesus or the Father or the Holy Spirit instead of getting out of the way, that’s a weapon too. I don’t know how we learn to set them down and wash up weary, but I feel close to it most in the moments I marvel at the moral arc instead of trying to stand in its way and grab ahold of it.

Below is your monthly Link Love and there are some beauts in there. Hope you like what I found for you this month =)

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The best hours of my fretful sleep patterns come between five am and eight am. I know people who are already awake and doing their best work at five am, but my best work is impossible unless I sleep and I find it difficult to do deeply until after five. I always wake hard though, startled, head thick with vivid dreams, the tendrils of which I carry with me through my morning, wondering how much of it all was real. I woke hard Sunday morning with the words, “Moving at the speed of trust,” still floating in my frontal lobe.

The night before we watched a new documentary on an old cult, called Trust Me: The False Prophet. If you’ve seen it, you know how brilliant the title is, how many meanings it holds for the participants involved. If you’ve seen it, you know how the filmmaker—the most trustworthy of them all—never says the words because her work is not to have the women trust her, but trust themselves. If you’ve seen it, you know the exact moment you see mothers and daughters and wives and children wake up to their autonomy, resilience, and ability to trust themselves. I sobbed near the end. I thought it was a true crime documentary but it was so much more.

I count on my fingers to our therapist a few weeks ago:

1. This rupture

2. This rupture

3. This rupture

Three relationships, one half my lifetime, one a few years, and one a few months, the tendrils of each rupture still carried with me today, woven into my bones and inert muscles.

One a mentor, one a friend, one a mentee. Above, beside, below. In the church this is the way we tell women to be with other women, find a mentor, be a mentor, have a friend. They teach classes on this. They write books on this. They sell out conferences on this.

What they don’t teach you is how to befriend your own self, how to trust your own heart, how to ask questions of your own experience and intellect and soul, how to wait for the answer that was always there, echoing within you. Instead, we hear, “Trust me.” We say, “Trust me.”

Trust is earned, though, not required. And when it is required, it renders itself untrustworthy.

I have been untrustworthy.

I have also struggled to trust myself because what I felt deep within me did not meet and meld with those who demanded my trust of them. There was always a gulf and I blamed myself for this, thought if I just trusted them more, I could fill in this chasm with the soil of certainty. Instead the space only grew.

The other day, a pink square with red writing on it comes across my feed. It says, “I think midlife is just being who you were at 16, but loving her this time.”1I think I agree except that at 16 I already didn’t trust myself. Neither did I at 13, nor even at nine, or even three. I remember being one year old and screaming for help because I did not trust myself to help myself. Is this a learned behavior or an innate one? Most of this past decade has been tuning out the thunderous static in my head and closing my heart to what they say and slowing my breathing and asking myself the question, what do I say?

Sometimes the answer comes in the night and even though God and I struggle to be on speaking terms these days, I cannot control what God does in the night or between five am and eight am in the morning. Even the Bible says God counsels in the night and who am I to object?

Perhaps it is God and not my dreams that are carried with me in the tendrils of my day. I like that idea. God as silken thread, God as ribbon rainbows, God as fiberoptic flutes through which goodness flows in the form of light.

When I forget to be still, to tune out the thunder, I judge myself hard. I judge myself for not trusting people who say they are trustworthy. I judge myself harder for not trusting people who don’t say it but just act trustworthy which is to say they are trustworthy. I judge myself for not moving faster, not sharing more, not saying yes to the invitation to friendship. For being afraid they want me to be a mentor or they want to mentor me or they just want to be my friend because remember the ruptures? I am still hurting.

A friend asks me, “Do you trust yourself?” and I say, “I am learning to,” but I have always been learning to and I want there to be a terminus to it: yes, I do trust myself.

I felt surprised when the Artemis II capsule Orion splashed down in the Pacific, when plumes of red dropped her into the deeps within a mile of the projected target. The space they’d been allotted was 5,524 square miles and they fell within one mile of their target within that allotment. But it wasn’t even that that surprised me the most. What surprised me was how it was all over so soon.

Hadn’t they just shot through the stratosphere, into the solar system? Hadn’t they just shown us the collective work of healing from the pit of grief by naming a new crater Caroll? Hadn’t they just shown us all the colors of the moon? Hadn’t they just gone farther than any human has gone before? How could all of that happened in less than ten days?

I’ve gone to see Project Hail Mary twice in the theaters and I’ll probably go again. It’s a movie that should be seen to be believed and be seen on the big screen just because.

I remember when Nate and I listened to the audiobook, we were driving from New York to Florida the morning after our stepfather stood up, held his chest, and then died. And how the day before the funeral, I got the call that my brother had been removed from his home, would be arrested, and from there it all splinters, everything splinters.

Two of those ruptures from above, but more of them everywhere, blinding lights of anger, rage, grief, sadness, fear. I remember making impossible decisions, I remember looking for the light, groping in the dark, I remember becoming an enemy not because I wanted anyone to trust me but because I wanted women to trust themselves, children to know trustworthy adults, and men who said, “Trust me, I know it wasn’t that bad,” when it absolutely was that bad, to shut the hell up.

I still want them to shut the hell up.

I want everyone everywhere who says that to shut up.

But even more than that, I want this journey to be over.

I want to have gone farther than I’ve ever gone before and then returned to earth, to the perpetual plod of the everyday, to feel grounded to the land beneath me. I want to trust the gravitational pull of being here, with all its terribleness and tyranny, with its wars and politicians who can’t keep it in their pants, but also with its goodness and light, its tomatoes and books and grand canyons and honeybees and various shades of ocean water and humans doing beautiful and hidden acts of altruism and making art and sharing it with the world and people who ricochet around the moon and come home anyway, who wrap their arms around one another the day after they land and say, “We are just a mirror reflecting you.”

Which is, I think, another way of saying, “Trust you.”

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The speed of trust is slower than I thought it should be, slower than I was taught it would be, slower than I wish it was. The speed of trust comes, like the poet said, “taking the time it takes.”

Trust does not come by demands for trust, trust that seems given to those who demand it is not real trust, it’s perverted, twisted, turned allegiance, sometimes blind. Probably blind. Blind trust is said to be what faith is, believing in what we cannot see. But if God is true and the world is made and everything in the universe is God’s and therefore ours too, then the evidence is everywhere, but mostly within us. Within you and within me because we are God’s too and God is within us.

I can’t prove that to you but why would I try? That’s just asking you to trust me and I won’t do that, not anymore.

Instead, we go, slow, turning off the thunderous noise, tuning into the stillest and smallest sounds within us, moving at the opposite speed of light but perhaps at the speed of the truest kind of light. The light of God within us.

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I moved to Texas three autumns earlier with the dogs of unbelief yipping at my heels, and there was a place and a people there who offered a seeming relief to my persistent doubt. God, it seemed, could be encapsulated, theologized, understood, and defended. The gospel, it seemed, was a simple matter of math: We, sinners; God, angry; the cross, a bridge; Jesus, the cosmic sacrifice. All of it equaling eternal union with a God who forgave Jesus in lieu of forgiving dirty, sinful, wormy us. I woke up to this gospel and it enlivened me, for a while.

But Texas threatened to suffocate me in its dusty earth, spun up by constant highway construction and little rain. I hated it there from my first breath of Texas air until my last. Sometimes in the armpit of summer, I would echo the Israelites forty year wander: why did you bring us here to die? Except I knew if I hadn’t gone there at all, it was my faith that would have died.

Instead my faith floated and floundered and sometimes flew. My love for Texas, though, never grew, not even by a little.

In the fall of 2013, I was in the middle of a broken engagement that wasn’t entirely broken except that I’d given the ring back the week before, ostensibly to be resized or cleaned or something, except that I knew I’d never put it on my finger again. I was thick with grief and indecision and would be for another four months. But a writer’s group I was a part of was holding their annual writer’s retreat and I’d been signed up to go.

I drove through the kind of blinding rain that in the north is normal but in middle Texas is deadly, the kind that causes flash floods and terrible mudslides. I drove six hours from Dallas to the sort of places with thousand acre ranches and ten foot fences and speed-limits east coasters can only dream of. My tires were near bald and I probably should have slowed down but I drove through tears and the sounds of Bebo Norman, who had always been my breakup buddy. I arrived near evening to the top of the canyon.

I did not know what was waiting for me next.

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When I was a child, we would spend hours at the public library. I was homeschooled and the library was one of the places we could spread out and exercise independence in public. I would beeline for the back corner, the YA stacks.

My friends were reading Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club, slim paperbacks in pastel pinks and baby blues, stories of girls our age in the real world. But my mother would inventory my stack of books before I marched up to the counter with my library card, picking and choosing what I was allowed to read. I would stack my checkout pile high with The Giver and Hatchet and The Bridge to Terabithia, but I would sit on the musty floor in the stacks and sneak chapters of Kristy, Claudia, Mary-Anne, and Stacey.

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I don’t remember how or why I pulled a brand new copy of Troubling a Star off the shelves, but I remember exactly where it was and what it looked like. I remember how it felt to read this character who felt so like me, so twisted up inside, compelled by art and science and faith, who longed for adventure but loved quiet corners and her own space.

Other girls liked Elizabeth Bennet, Jo March, Anne of Green Gables, but no other character in literature has ever felt as much like me as Vicky Austin and when I found her, my life changed: I am a writer today because of Vicky Austin, because Madeleine L’Engle wrote her and I found her and she gave voice and reason and frame to what I felt about life as a young teen. I began collecting every book L’Engle wrote, children’s fiction, adult fiction, memoir, poetry, spirituality, and more.

After L’Engle died in 2007, a longform expose from a few years earlier resurfaced and parts of it, much like the story of the Austin family, floored me and then rooted itself in me.

My hero, my mentor, my role-model, exposed.

Controversial Memoirs

If you have your ear to the ground on the literary and memoir scene, you know about three things happening recently.

One is that the breakout memoir of 2025, The Tell—story of a wealthy woman who ‘recovers’ memories of being the victim of s*xual assault as a teenager—had the rumblings of something far worse than plagiarism of another’s work, but the plagiarism of someone’s life. There is a lawsuit against the author for stealing, embellishing, and then profiting off of a classmate’s story.

The second is around the release of Lindy West’s (author of Shrill, which was made into a Hulu series) memoir, Adult Braces, where she chronicles the process of her husband “opening up” their marriage because he wants to date other people (and already is, behind her back), which she struggles with, guilts herself about, and then finally succumbs to begrudgingly because its the only way she can keep her husband and then surprise! they become a polyamorous couple with his new (thin!) girlfriend. The press this book is getting is just awful and the throuple is not doing themselves any favors…unless…maybe that’s the point?1

The third, is around Raynor Winn’s breakout bestseller from 2018, The Salt Path. The book sold well over the past near decade and then, when a film released about it, The Observer reported that much of the memoir had been fabricated or outright lied about.

Who’s Telling the Truth?

I have always been a little bit obsessed with the truth, finding it, getting it, telling it, being believed about it. To be a liar (a thief or plagiarist of words or stories), is the worst thing I can imagine doing. I have had it done to me and it feels awful, but nowhere near as awful as if I had done it myself.

I am interested in the ways we write what seems true to us—even if it only seems true in the moment we’re writing it. Because if it feels true, isn’t it, in a sense, partially true? If I feel angry, I am angry, and therefore my feeling is true, even if the object of my anger, the story of why I’m angry, may not be? This doesn’t excuse making up stories or stealing the stories of others (a la The Tell), but it does get a little bit gnarly. Sometimes we can’t even get to the truth of something until we’ve written it through.2

It is impossible for us to separate facts from fiction if we’re trying to write truthfully because truth relies on the union of the two. It requires us to become brutally vulnerable, thin, fragile, honest, and also brutally strong, willing to say what feels unsayable, sometimes unthinkable, but still fact. None of us, though, is capable of telling the whole truth, as Marion Roach Smith, wrote in her short book (required reading for any person trying to write true stories), “While all of these experiences I chronicled are true, not one of them is the whole truth. Going for the whole truth is a fool’s errand.”3

In The Understory, I say,

The vocational call on the writer is to tell the truth as close as possible while also exercising as much poetic license as necessary (and sometimes more) to keep the identity of others and the specifics of some stories protected.

In that sense, a writer—whether of nonfiction or fiction—is going to be telling the truth and telling something of a story at the same time. That’s the tension writers must work with.

The tension a reader must work with is to be aware that it’s happening and not to hold too much against us if we write a story a little differently than they remember it or a little slant from what it really was.4

The point is, for the writer, we often have to write all the things and then sort through what’s true, good, and beautiful and what’s false, evil, or ugly. And sometimes that’s hard work.

However, as one of the authors linked above wrote, “Selling a memoir does not depend on its trustworthiness.” In fact, drumming up plenty of negative press these days, seems to be a marketing ploy.5

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Wholeness is Always Made Up Of Parts

In Cynthia Zarin’s longform piece on L’Engle in The New Yorker that I reference above, she writes:

L’Engle’s children and grandchildren—who love her deeply, but with a kind of desperate frustration spliced with resentment—revile “Two-Part Invention.”Indeed, L’Engle’s family habitually refer to all her memoirs as “pure fiction,” and, conversely, consider her novels to be the most autobiographical—though to them equally invasive—of her books. (Naturally, L’Engle’s children are not the only writer’s children who feel that by using them as copy their mother or father has mortgaged their privacy.) When Josephine Jones read “Two-Part Invention,” she thought, Who the hell is she talking about? Alan Jones, the dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, who was married to Josephine for many years, told me, “The matriarch of the family is the guardian of the family narrative, and if that person is a writer . . . One of the things Madeleine used to say to me is ‘It’s true, it’s in my journals,’ which was a hilarious statement. Some of her books were good bullshit, if you don’t know the family. Spaghetti on the stove, Bach on the phonograph, that’s all true. But there was this tremendous fissure.” Maria Rooney calls “Two-Part Invention” “a lovely fairy tale.”

• Love / spliced with resentment.

• Pure / fiction.

• Spaghetti on the stove / tremendous fissure.

• In her journals / a lovely fairy tale.

Later in the article, one of her grandchildren says, “One thing I respect about Gran is that she’s seamless. She is able to put many complicated things together and make them whole.”

Zarin again: “Time, for L’Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated, ‘When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t exist until it’s folded—or it’s a story without a book.’”

The work of writing a book and then the work of editing—leaving truth and lies alike on the cutting floor—is splicing, piecing, folding, making seamless, making whole. We’re storied people and we have to make sense of our lives and we do that by telling ourselves stories and telling those stories to others. We tell them online or in therapy or to friends or in testimonies or over drinks or in bed. We tell them slant and we tell them true, both at the same time because can’t not. We’re all doing it, all of the time, the moment we stop, we’re dead. Even those in memory care with the worst cases of dementia are still telling themselves stories, it’s how our brains survive and I fault no one it.

Even the profiting off those stories—however fissured—is part of how we make sense of the world. Maybe we don’t make millions off books, but we profit off those stories in social capital, by becoming part of communities and friendships. We tell common stories and uncommon stories, we tell them by marching in protests and by writing poems, by shopping at this store and not at that one, by reading this publication and not that book. It’s all story, all the time. Sometimes it’s true but it’s never the whole truth and never, ever objective truth.

L’Engle’s son-in-law is quoted in the piece as saying, “Think of it, the confirmed construction of the self by means of narrative. Golly, what a job.”

Well, that’s all our jobs. We’re narrating our way to our idea of wholeness.6

Fool’s Errands

I wonder sometimes if I should unshelf all these Madeleine L’Engle books I have accumulated over the past three decades, throw them in the bin. It’s what I would do if I had The Tell on my shelves. It’s what I still intend to do with The Salt Path, once I find it. It’s what I’ve done with some other books by other authors who were found to be plagiarists or abusers, frauds or philanderers.

But then I also think about the thousands and thousands and thousands of words I’ve written in my life, starting at age 13, starting when I finished my first Vicky Austin book. I think about the many different versions of me I have been, about the “construction of [my] self by means of narrative.” I think about the books I’ve written that I wouldn’t write today or the things I’ve said that I wouldn’t say today. I don’t think I’ve ever intentionally lied, stolen from, or plagiarized anyone ever, but I do know that I see the world differently—hopefully more wholly—than I did a year ago or a decade ago or five minutes ago. And in that way, I have written fiction perhaps more than fact, even if it was a fiction I thought or felt or believed to be fact.

I don’t think I’ve done that, but I still know I have. Because that, more than anything, is the work of the writer, to tell truth. And then tell truth about the truth we thought we told. And then to keep on doing it, even if it hurts.

When we stop doing that, we’re in danger. When the profit of the truth we thought we were telling becomes more important than making seamless, making whole, making good, well, then we’re just grifters and I can’t think of anything worse.

One of the reason Madeleine is still one of my heroes, is because I do believe that until her last breath or at least her last published work, she was trying to tell the truth. And she also knew it wasn’t the whole truth, that “the whole truth was a fool’s errand,” but by golly, she’d happily die a fool in search of it.

I’d rather be a fool than a grifter, in search of the bottom line, protector of my image, public relations for my brand, profiting off my (or others) pain. I’m learning that the hard way, the backwards way, the upside down way and it sucks, I won’t tell you otherwise. But I think—as best as I can in this moment—that it’s a true way.

Like Madeleine, though, I reserve the right to change.

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The attic space had three windows, but two of them—the only two in the entire house, faced south. The sun streamed in all day long, splitting light in slants across the space.

My current office was freshly cobbled together in one of the second floor bedrooms but the lack of sunlight on the ground floor and the second floor was getting to me. By three months in, I felt a kind of hum beneath my skin, the sort of itch you can’t scratch but threatens to drive you quite literally crazy. I was doubling up my vitamin D, getting outside when I had the chance, but it was nearing winter and I couldn’t drag my desk out there to work.

We made a plan and hired two young guys from an app to help us. Every book, every stick of furniture that could fit up the narrow Victorian attic steps, every plant and poster, knick-knack and piece of nostalgia, it went up to the third floor.

I bought cheap shag rugs to cover the cold floor and held my nose and purchased flat pack chairs and a terribly uncomfortable couch. I scoured facebook marketplace for bookshelves that could nestle up against knee walls and haggled good-naturedly with a shop owner to buy one they used for display. I hung every stitch of art I’d collected over the years, organized my books by subject first and then by color because I am the boss of me, took apart my desk and screwed it back together for the ninth time since I’ve had it and probably the hundredth since it’s been in existence.

I finally bought a monitor for my laptop since my eyesight was (and is) still not playing nice. I unfolded a folding table and stuck it in the corner, filled it with art supplies I’d never had room to sprawl out with before. On the vaulted ceilings, I stuck sticky notes for book drafting and in the windows I hung holograph clings, plants, lights, and prisms. I added a disco ball in a few months later and it was the best decision. I give it a spin every morning when I come up the stairs and it keeps on spinning, even til its last turn and sway, spreading breathing spots of light across my wall.

Every morning, I come downstairs into a dark house. The scrap of sunlight we get comes for one hour in midafternoon this time of year. By May, it will not come at all. I eat my breakfast and then move, as if called by the light, to my space on the third floor.

Someone asks me if I am doing the best work of my life in this space and I don’t know how to answer them. The truth is that I feel I have done the worst work of my writing life in this space. I feel bad saying it because I know what a stupid and absolute privilege it is to have this “room of my own.” It is the envy of writers who are squeezing their words in from noisy coffee shops and during toddler naps and from their chronic illness beds.

I should be doing the best work of my life in this space.

But mostly I am taking to heart ’s advice for writers who don’t appear to be doing anything at all, “My subconscious is hunting for a solution.”

At least that’s what my subconscious is telling myself.

I am making art, though. At least that’s what I call it. It’s collage, which is my favorite art-form but has always felt a little like cheating, even, perhaps a form of plagiarism. I’m dabbling in watercolors and tiny sketches in tiny sketchbooks. I’m learning book-making, and by that I mean, not the kind of book making I have done in the past—writing words to put in books—but actually making books from paper and thread, glue and ribbon. I am reading a lot of prose and a lot of poetry too.

I am sitting in a chair and staring at the wall or staring at art other people have made or listening to my husband on meetings in his office below me or looking at my dogs who come up with me every single morning and stay with me between their many potty breaks throughout the day.

I am trying to write words.

These are words, this thing I’m writing now. But they aren’t the words I thought I would be writing at this juncture of my life.

I wanted to be sage and seasoned, rested and sure. Instead I’m antsy and humming and thrumming and wondering. I feel at the end of something and on the cusp of something but in between the two for a very, very, very long time. I feel like I have to admit I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I don’t know how to approach the page or the words or the work or the worth of it anymore.

When I read something wonderful and want to engage it with words, I ask myself, “Why? Why does the world need my words in addition to these already wonderful words? Why not just leave it to speak for itself?”

When I read something awful and want to engage it with words, I ask myself, “Why? Why draw attention to more of the awfulness that already exists in the world? Isn’t the world heavy enough?”

I look around me at this space that’s mine, all mine, and I can’t believe it’s mine.

I’ve been writing from armchairs in the middle of the night and desks shoved into corners and coffee shop nooks and the kitchen table for all my life. Those are the only places I’ve written and I’ve tried to fill them with words worthy of the spaces themselves.

And now here I am in a dream of a space and I think…well, a lot of the time I don’t think. I just try to think. I jot down half-baked ideas and quarter sentences, quotes from people who say things I like, quotes from people who are brave enough to say things at all, brave enough to say the things I used to be brave enough to say.

Someone asks me if I’m doing the best work of my life in this space and what I say, after I have discovered I have nothing else to say, is that “I think I have lost my nerve.”

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I have watched readers of Wendell Berry, Marilynne Robinson, and Leif Enger rave about this book. I’ve seen trusted voices interview the author on their podcasts and in their publications. I’ve seen fellow writers Threading and Facebooking their love of the book. I shelved multiple copies at a few weeks ago and it never sticks around for long.

People are saying the book made them cry, it made them laugh, it made them reconsider their lives and want to be like its protagonist. It made them want to change their lives, starting now.

Me? I could barely get through the first ten chapters, almost DNFed it multiple times, until getting to the last five chapters and skimming my way through to its predicable conclusion. At a writers retreat a few weeks ago, I caught myself almost yelling about how much I hated the book to my friends and had to apologize for my intensity later. I have not felt so strongly against a book in my recollection. I read another book almost immediately after I read the first one, a book that also had an elderly protagonist, one a bit less likable, but also one with some unfinished business to do, and it’s the only book I’ve talked about more than the first book since then.

What is it about the first book that has hit such a sore spot in me? Why can’t I shut up about it to everyone I know? And why—this is what I’m really asking myself—do people just really love this book?

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There is a line near the end of Mary Oliver’s poem, Heavy, that I think about often. Heavy is a poem about grief, about the pain of it, the length of it, the bending, near breaking of it. But the line, the line I think about a lot, it is one about laughter, the surprise of it, how it “comes, now and again, / out of my startled mouth.”

I love that line. Grief is many things and sometimes it is the surprise of laughter in the midst of all that darkness.

I thought of this while we watched Hamnet again. There is this final scene. Do you know the one? I hope you know the one. Where the grief across the face of a mother is so potent, so full of angst, it is palpable. You can taste it, the tears, the dirt lined crevices of her face, the ache you know sits just behind her tongue, in her larynx, her throat, caught, it seems, and never to release.

And then, in the next moment, the very next moment, her face widens and she laughs. It isn’t even a smile, peaceful, placating. It is a wild and unbridled laugh, the kind that can only come from a place where the ache has just recently been voided.

It is a vulnerability to laugh from a place like that.

We have two friends who we love and we go out to eat sometimes over exotic or ordinary food. One of them has asked me to pray over the meal twice now, to bless the food we are about to receive.

“I can’t,” I’ve told him twice now, each time the can’t stuck in my larynx, near where the grief is also stuck. Because the truth is, I can’t. It isn’t that I won’t or shouldn’t or don’t want to or am afraid of what the words in my prayers might look like or sound like to me or you or God, it is that I simply just can’t.

A few weeks ago, a night or two after he last asked me to pray and I said I can’t, we were all gathered together with writers we love, all of us reading aloud some piece or poem or prose of words we’ve cobbled together. I was one of the last to read. I couldn’t.

But then I remembered another line from Mary’s poem, “So I went practicing.
Have you noticed?” And I remembered a piece I’d written almost exactly a year ago about practicing and so I read that. The whole time I read, I felt my windpipe closing, a live coal caught in my throat, burning and blocking, the strangulating work of trying when everything in me said, “I can’t.”

This, I suppose, is the work of practicing.

A few nights ago, I was near sleep and something alerted me awake hard. The dogs were sleeping, so was Nate, the fan was sounding and so too the humidifier, no traffic sounds on the street below us. I lay there in the nighttime sounds and did not know what had woken me.

I should remind you now that I am not given to belief in the miraculous. I find stories of healing rare and wanting and, to my shame, the story of the resurrection improbable on some days. I have never experienced God’s provision in some inexplicable way, nor have I heard God’s voice, but once, and even that came in the words of a poet, not the scriptures. When I hear others speak of God’s protection or provision or providence, my brain translates without my trying: luck, fate, or accident.

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Maybe it’s me.

Parker Palmer defines violence like this: “Any way we have of violating the identity and integrity of another person.” To call the other a monster, even while knowing that to them, we may seem like monsters too, this is violence. This is violence not only to the other, but also to ourselves. We dehumanize when we categorize them, ourselves, anyone, into sides or factions or colors upon a linear scale.

We scrape at the scales we’re covered in, like Eustace in the dragon’s cave, trying to find our political identity. Are we red? Blue? Moderate? Neither? Both? Little of each? But not like that. Even if we identify with the person of Jesus, it comes with all kinds of political baggage we may abhor, but it also comes with belonging to certain groups and institutions we may find value in.

What do you do then?

I have three friends and between the four of us, we’ve published a bunch of books and have a lot of thoughts on current events in the world. In life, though, each of us are coming from very different environments.

One is from rural Appalachia and worked in conservative Christian organizations most of her life. One lives in the city limits of Seattle, a place where natural beauty and city life intersects. And the third is a Duke Divinity graduate who thinks a lot about tradition, food, and holistic living. Then there’s me, raised in conservative fundamentalism in a region known for its non-violence and political pacifism, but a still strong commitment to social justice.

Despite all we don’t have in common, we have this in common: we are facing the political landscape of 2026 and asking one another, “What should we do?”

So we just starting asking each other the questions:

• What are you doing?

• What is motivating that action?

• How is it helping you or your community?

• Also, what are you not doing?

• What’s guiding you in this contentious time?

We just started talking about it together and then starting talking about talking about it with you all together and then somehow that turned into what happens when white women get together wringing their hands and asking, “What should we do?” The answer was obvious then, of course: we should start a podcast ;)

None of us identify as conservative or progressive or moderate or even necessarily, “third way.” None of us have voted one way the entire way. All of us feel free to critique candidates we haven’t voted for and the ones we have. All of us want to find a better way forward not only in how we act on individual policies in government, but also how we act in our own communities, with our actual neighbors.

And we thought, I don’t know, maybe you’d want to listen in to some of those conversations.

Introducing:

The Side Aisle: Surviving the Either/Or Divide

We don’t want to make our home on the line between either and or, we want to find our home on the margin. Not a third way as it is often practiced—avoidance of side taking or action making, a kind of both-sideism, but a true and active, decisive and care-full way of being in the world that honors “the identity and integrity of every person” we encounter—no matter whose “side” it benefits.

We don’t do it perfectly, but we have learned and are learning spiritual practices that help us (and others) survive being given the side aisle.

This is a limited series, just six episodes. We’ll have an intro episode and an outro episode and four in between where we will have a conversation together about:

• Engaging Family across the divide: How do we (or do we?) engage our families when it feels like we’re each living in completely different realities?

• What is the good life when the good life doesn’t work for everyone: How do we pursue care of our bodies, families, and homes holistically when it feels like caring about this stuff slots us into a political silo we don’t support?

• Faith, Communities, and Institutions: How can we stay tethered to our faith, churches, local communities and institutions, when earthly empire seems to take precedence over the kingdom of Jesus?

• Vocation, Public life, and Social Media: How do we talk about what we believe in public spaces without losing sight of the imago dei in ourselves and others?

Listen on Apple here.

Listen on Spotify here.

Send us your questions!

We want to hear your questions, anonymously of course. You can submit them at any time here on our website, where it says, “Submit a question.” Or, you can follow each of us on Instagram where we’ll put out a question box on our stories a few days before we record each episode. We’ll try to get to as many questions as possible.

Follow Sara here.

Follow Amanda here.

Follow Kendall here.

Follow Lore here.

Our hope is this limited podcast will help some of you feel less alone on the side aisle, but even more, that it will help encourage you to have more of these kinds of conversations with the people in your communities. The first episode will be live March 18th on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts

Thanks for joining us on the side aisle,

PS. Want to tell your friends about it? Share this post by tapping the button below or sharing this👇🏼 reel on your Instagram stories.

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When I was a four year old child and probably when I was 25 and 35, I thought wisdom, when finally arrived, arrived with the full and final answer. I thought wisdom was being sure enough of yourself that you could impart surety to others. I sought this.

I don’t mean I sought this surety for myself. I mean I sought it in others.

In fourth or fifth grade, my mother sent me orienteering. They gave us cheap plastic compasses, thin paper maps, and whistles we would wear around our necks. I remember getting lost and it being thrilling. It was the unknown of that thrilled me, but it was also the possibility that we would surprise a bear or the sun would set or, perhaps, that we would locate ourselves in the thick Pennsylvania woods and break, sweaty and exhilarated, into some clearing not with a story of being lost and then found, but of being lost and finding ourselves.

When I was a young adult, my family moved to a new state and my mother bought a road atlas where the roads were enlarged enough to run your finger along as we, once again, learned to become lost and locate ourselves again.

I have lived and traveled all over the world since and never felt lost. There is an internal compass within me, an innate sense of which direction I face at all times, even with my eyes closed. I know how to get home—even when I haven’t known where home was anymore.

But wisdom, she is an illusive thing and not a fixed point. She cannot be found with a compass or map. She cannot be lost, and yet, can only be found.

And so it was that a week ago, a scheduling mishap put us in the way of it.

“How have you learned to make peace with your doubt?” I asked, facing someone double my age and triple my sage.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a short bit about the ache I have regarding being mothered in these days. A few days later, someone shared a link to sharing some of the same sentiments. I loved it. I immediately subscribed. Liz is a religious ethicist at Northwestern, “despite having no religious affiliation of [her] own.”

In her piece on her mother, Liz writes she is, “religiously curious,” a sentiment I share despite having spent all my life in the church. If anyone should have answers about being religious, it should be me and people like me. Raised with felt-boards and storybook bibles, creationism, James Dobson, Bob Jones, Vision Forum, among the Gothardites and religious right, but also Heaven’s Gates and Hell’s Flames and a constant terror of dying before I ever got to live.

Weighing out an eternity spent singing How Great Thou Art on repeat in a crowd of white robed saints or burning alive in perpetuity, I’ve never been sure which seemed worse.

Judge me if you want, I’m just telling you continuing to stay curious about religion/faith is practically a miracle at this point.

A few days ago, Nate and I were in the car and talking about church, religion, faith, and prayer, and he said to me, “I think you have to be an incredibly resilient person to have stuck with it after [specific year’s long experience with a particular brand of faith], most people would have just turned their back and gone on their way.” I don’t know if I’m resilient but I don’t have a lot of quit in me and maybe that’s the same thing.

A friend told me yesterday, “Even if you become an atheist, you’ll still be my friend.”

“I don’t think I could ever be an atheist,” I replied. “I have too much faith to be an atheist and too little faith to not struggle with doubt all of the time.”

Staying curious about religion (faith, Jesus, God, etc.) is the only way I’m able to stay here.

Once I’d subscribed to , I was happy to see this piece just a few days later. What If Trevor Noah Is Right About the Left and Religion? As of writing this, her post has 6k likes and nearly 800 comments. It is resonating with many people and it resonated with me.

The post is long and you should read it, but the salient point is that the Left lacks the tools and training for imagination that the Right has by nature of religious upbringing. Christians are taught to believe in someone we could not see, touch, taste, feel, etc., and taught to believe in the possibility of outcomes we cannot see, one terrible (hell) and one beautiful (heaven).

She writes,

“Faith gives you capacity to believe ‘this current state isn’t the end’ without needing a peer-reviewed study proving the future will be better. It’s not irrationality. It’s a different kind of rationality altogether, one that can juggle complexity and ambiguity and hope all at once without dropping any of them.”

I would add that we were always very clear about what hell was (hot, burning, flames, torment, very, very bad) and always very unclear about what heaven was (not cherubs; angels though? with many eyes, maybe? clouds probably. Jesus on his throne, definitely. singing, endless; white robes, something about being prostrate for eternity. how can we know? who can know? no one can know.). So while we may have had the training ground for imagination, the binary was very simple and also very lopsided: put yourself in a constant state of repentance that will render you anxious, ashamed, feeling unloved by God for the mere possibility of…something. Or, alternatively, HELL.

Perhaps some Christians can work themselves through the binary and find a mid space where hell is merely annihilation (you’re punished until you’ve paid your price for all the sin you did) and heaven is actually a new earth, this one here, but better (a la N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope). But, as children, when our brains are at their most pliable and when most core memories are formed, the nuance is nearly impossible. So I would agree with Liz, Christian kids are taught the impossible is possible and have it branded into them in such a way that they contain the “cognitive and emotional framework that lets you stare directly at how bad things are while still organizing toward how things could be.”

It’s true. And it’s in this exact place that my struggle with doubt was born as a four year old child and remains and why I am still curious about religion despite having had every reason in the world to forsake it and pursue reason alone.

It is a kind of near self-gaslighting that we participate in, right? We stare right at the badness and think, “But still! Good!”

I heard an interview with Alex Honnold a few days after he scaled Tapei 101 without ropes or harness on live broadcast. He was asked, “Don’t you have any fear?” And he said something like, “Of course I have fear. Of course I’m afraid of dying. I don’t want to die. I want to live. But I also want to climb really tall buildings without safety harnesses.”

You have to do some real mental gymnastics to acknowledge that fear, let yourself feel it, and then say, “I’m going to do it anyway.”

That’s what being a Christian is like for many of us. Not all of us, I know there are a lot of very good people out there who never doubt the existence of God, the goodness of God, or the love of God. But for many of us, our faith is not a happy-clappy kind of easy believism, our imagination is not exercised toward goodness, it is extremely occupied by how bad things are and then forcing ourselves to say, “But good,” despite still actually believing maybe not good [?].

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I don’t know if the Left lacks imagination or needs more of it. I don’t even know where I fall on the political spectrum despite where I may have voted the last several elections. But I do know that the kind of imagination the Christian Right has is not the kind of imagination I want for my life anymore. Despite calling itself “imaginative,” it actually lacks imagination because it limits itself to mostly two options of everything: good or evil, red or blue, faith or doubt, friend or foe, heaven or hell, in or out, with me or against me, the list goes on. We see evidence of this binary everywhere on the Christian Right.

Someone will probably chime in and say the binary exists on the Left too, but I keep thinking about this thing Ezra Klein said in a conversation a few months ago. He said,

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Growing up in Quakertown, in a state named for Quaker William Penn, in southeastern Pennsylvania, a place proliferated with the anabaptist (Brethren, Amish, Hutterite, every kind of Mennonite, and Quakers too), the lore of pacifism was commonplace to us. We understood the role these kinds of believers took during the history of our country’s most glaring blight: enslavement of people made in God’s image. The underground railroad, religious exemption from the military, a refusal to “take either side” because both sides were complicit, either in direct enslavement (the south) or in profit from enslaved people’s labor (the north), and more. In every way, these peaceful people were anything but passive. They operated vast systems of rescue and recovery, opened their meetinghouses for prayer and makeshift hospitals, and practiced non-violence, even as violence was done to them.

They were known then and now as “The Friends.”

You remember the Quakers too: Susan B. Anthony, Levi Coffin, John Woolman, George Fox, Johns Hopkins, John Greenleaf Whittier, and so many more.

Over the weekend I finished a book called Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. It has no author byline except “The Friends of Attention.” The title and subtitle speak for themselves, but it is the “friends of attention,” I want to talk a little bit about today. Especially one term they spoke about and why I think it’s such a helpful metaphor for those of us who feel captive to the attention economy.

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My fellow writer is releasing her newest book soon, Weathering Change: Seeking Peace Amid Life’s Tough Transitions. It’s a book about the weather but also a book about how to meet it instead of fight it. I had a chance to read the book early and write its foreword. It’s a beautiful follow-up to her first book, Looking Up. I’m happy to offer this adapted excerpt from Courtney on Sayable today.

Nature is brilliantly adaptable. If autumn signals a colder winter, ermine and rabbits and squirrels will grow thicker coats of fur. Tear down a bird’s nest and it will build another. Moles, once decidedly forest-dwelling, have learned to thrive in suburbia where verdant lawns hide succulent earthworms, termites, and grubs. We’ve all seen a dandelion sprouting through a crack in the sidewalk. Against all odds, creation finds a way to carry on.

But everyone has their breaking point.

There are so many ways our robust but delicate ecosystems are being pushed to the brink because of the pain of climate change. Storms have become more frequent and severe, temperatures break records over and over again, frosts come later—or not at all. To say that this is not our fault is to miss the point entirely. 97% of actively publishing climate scientists agree that humans are causing climate change.1

It’s near-impossible to find consensus that strong anywhere, but here we are. This is the bed we’ve made.

Contrary to popular belief, a changing climate doesn’t just mean warming. Many weather patterns are becoming stronger and more unpredictable, including cold snaps, deep freezes, and phenomena we have invented new phrases for like “bomb cyclones,” “superstorms,” and “Arctic blasts.”

Creation is resilient, but it is also finely calibrated. While a child with a high fever may be quite ill, one with a very high fever can end up brain damaged—or worse. While one degree of warming or one fewer rainstorm per season may sound small, in reality, each change taxes our planet. Eventually the camel’s back is broken with just one final straw.

It raises the question: what are we to do when facing change that is beyond our control?

Often our agency amidst changes of all sorts is far less than we would prefer. The job we’ve given our best efforts to suddenly informs us that we’ve been made redundant. Our spouse tells us that the marriage is over. A natural disaster rips through, leaving us suddenly, unexpectedly homeless. Where is God when our world careens into chaos? When all we thought was stable and secure is rocked and broken? We may echo the cry of the Psalmist:

Why, Lord, do you stand far off?

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?2

Nowhere may this feel more pressing than when we look closely at the state of our warming planet. What, Lord, are we to do now?

A few years ago, I attended a lecture at Calvin University’s Festival of Faith and Writing by the writer and professor Marilyn McIntyre. It was entitled “Writing Through a Fog of Fear.”

“Be a gentle alarmist,” she advised the gathered writers in the room. There are things faith and foresight tell us are too important to stop pointing towards. The scientists among us are responsible to prophetically witness to what they see coming while the rest of us heed their research and their warnings. We are all tasked with working for the common good for today and tomorrow and all that lies beyond it. It is not too late until the apocalypse truly arrives. I appreciated McIntyre’s emphasis on doing this hard, good work of raising the alarm with tenderness. Berating, scapegoating, or shaming will rarely win us an interested audience, but if we tread kindly, we may yet bend the ears of the uninterested, the unbelieving, or the apathetic. Even the decided non-virtue of self-interest can potentially wake people enough to care.

When I was in eighth grade, my parents tried to take my sisters and me on a hike in Banff. Our packs were filled with snacks, water bottles topped off, sunscreen applied. As we stood at the trailhead adjusting our sun hats, a cheerful forest ranger came bounding down the trail.

“You may want to reconsider the trail today,” he said, pointing back the way he’d come. The way we were headed. “There are grizzlies just up there. A mama with cubs.” We remained frozen, slowly digesting his words. The campground we were staying at required the viewing of a fifteen-minute safety video that should have been titled, “WHEN BEARS ATTACK” My youngest sister hadn’t slept for days.

“Big ol’ mama,” the ranger concluded, tipping his hat toward us. “Well, enjoy your day!” As he disappeared around the other side of a park service truck, my sisters and I practically climbed over one another to be the first back into the family van. Self-interest can be a powerful motivator.

Gentle alarmists don’t despair, but neither do they let off the gas. The work is too essential. The coming pain too real. We must steward our planet well not simply because we love God’s natural world—which alone should be more than enough reason—but because creation care is one more way of spreading the Good News. As Kyle Meyaard-Schaap notes in, Following Jesus in a Warming World, “In a world wracked by the devastation of rising seas, more extreme weather, and a more unpredictable and dangerous future, this means that practical steps to address the climate crisis are, in fact, acts of evangelism.”3

Creation care is people care, too, another long-term strategy in following the Lord’s imperative: Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the Fatherless; plead the cause of the widow.4 It is the poor who often feel the greatest effects of the climate crisis. Advocating for creation however we can—and living out this care in our own lives, too—is one more way of following Jesus wholeheartedly. One more way of slowing down our march toward this painful, global change.

For the unholy split we often see between faith and science is not of God. We are beautifully entwined with the earth, ourselves just one part of God’s good creation, and we ignore that symbiosis at our own peril. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer quotes environmental activist Joanne Macy: “Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”5

Sadly, the inverse is also true: the more we ravage the earth, the more destitute we will become.

Despair can beckon when we really learn what we’ve done—and continue to do—to our fragile ecosystems. Between fires on the west and east coasts (not to mention in Canada and Mexico), hurricanes along the eastern seaboard, floods in the Midwest and the South, heat domes in the Pacific Northwest, nationwide droughts, and tornadoes from Oklahoma to West Virgina, there are no real climate havens remaining. The crisis knocks at each of our doors. Sooner or later, it will touch us all.

At least some of the despair we may feel around the climate crisis can stem from the helplessness we feel around it. So much of the problem is massive and global, on a scale far out of our control. The state of our climate is largely shaped by the decisions of governments and the short-term, profit-driven choices of massive corporations. We may do what we can, recycle and grow native plants, compost and keep the air conditioning to a minimum, advocate for better policies for the earth and vote our consciences, but our participation is still only a small drop in a very, very big ocean. Watching national and even global choices made that will impact our air, water, plants, and animals negatively can be excruciating. And when we know it didn’t have to be this way it can be much harder to acquiesce to difficult change.

But while the climate crisis may be relatively recent, when viewed in light of the epochs of human existence, the brutality of change outside of our control is as old as humanity itself. We need only look to Scripture, the church mothers and fathers, or the canon of literature to see that this is true. James Baldwin put it this way:

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.⁠6

Artist Makoto Fujimura calls this the “common curse” a cousin to our more well-known common grace.⁠7

We are united in our helplessness. United in the rawness of our need.

There is a weird sort of hope to be found in knowing that we have always existed on the razor’s edge; that humanity has always been close to dooming itself through plague or famine, nuclear winter or global meltdown. Together we must resist the temptation to retreat into apathy or despair, and instead do all we can when we can to address the crisis—and then, somehow, courageously go on living our normal lives. This may sound strange, and yet it is ultimately the ordinary stuff of life that helps tether us to what is true and right and good.

In his 1948 essay, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” C.S. Lewis writes that the first action we must take in the face of potential catastrophe is to “pull ourselves together.” He continues: If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.8

To exist in a time of climate crisis is to follow Wendell Berry’s prescription to be joyful, though we’ve considered all the facts. This is far easier said than done. To rejoice in the face of real tragedy is possible, of course, but we are not called to fake happiness. Often the path to joy despite pain runs right through a biblical paradigm that we don’t talk about as often as we should.

The path to embracing joy leads first through lament.

We all have much to lament when it comes to the climate crisis, but other, less global changes may drive us to lament as well. God does not bar us from bringing requests about anything, big or small. It’s a minor tragedy when we decide not to open our hearts in lament because we’ve decided we shouldn’t feel a certain way about something, or that it’s too inconsequential to bother the Almighty with. God is eager to hear our cries, whatever their size. Ready, always, to receive our prayer.

Nearly every change will bring grief along with it, good change as well as bad. We may rejoice at our wedding but lament the loss of the single life we enjoyed or former roommates we loved. We can delight in the birth of a child but mourn our lost nights of sleep. God instructs us to rejoice, but not as a replacement for the vital practice of lament.

Both are part of weathering change.

Sometimes we adapt only because we have to. There is no choice set before us. We all face changes we did not choose; disasters we did not welcome. We will watch as our planet heats and spins, approaching a tipping point that may send us toward our earthly doom. The grief can be crushing. Yet here, too, we will find the Lord. Scripture describes Jesus as a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

We are not alone in the pain of change. The knowledge of this closeness will not solve our suffering, but it can make it less lonely, less isolating. James Baldwin continued his reflection on the universality of suffering by acknowledging the way our pain can connect us to one another: “Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people,” he wrote. There is grace in the ache, not only for us but for those our lives will touch.

We cannot look away. But we must also keep looking up.

Weathering Change releases on February 17th. You can purchase it using this link which will support , our favorite independent bookstore.

Adapted from Weathering Change by Courtney Ellis. Copyright (c) 2026 by Courtney Ellis. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com

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We are there for a lot of reasons that aren’t anyone’s business but our own. But we’re also there because we finally grew tired enough of the spiritual flailing we’ve both been doing, often at the cost of the other. You can interpret that however you want, the important thing for you to know is that we have work to do and we’re doing it.

The thing about doing this sort of work, though, is it comes with a near constant desire to be either out of it or through it. Everything in us aches to avoid the discomfort of whatever this is, and wants to return to the old ways of functioning in the world even though we know what we really want is a whole new way of functioning in the world.

One of the tensions for us is around how we functioned for many years [before and after marriage] in community with other people. We led small groups, we led in recovery environments, we did pre-marital counseling with younger couples, other people wanted to meet with us for wisdom and direction and we offered it. When we were single we’ve lived with multiple roommates and when we married, we had young people live in our home with us. We opened our house for holidays and our table for meals several times a week. We practiced the gift of affirmation during birthdays and the gift of prayer during times of indecision and the gift of tears during times of grief.

We were, for lack of a better word, gatherers. We were not the party house, though. We were always the broken but becoming house.

Then some things happened. It wasn’t a big thing, but a series of small things. Small erosions to our sense of calling and selves as gatherers, practitioners of intimacy, basins for grief and suffering. There was an onslaught and in all honesty, it had been held at bay for years, waiting to be unleashed. When it finally was unleashed, it was followed in mere weeks by pandemic lockdowns.

One of my guiding quotes from 2025 was from Bell Hooks, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation.” I’ve heard others say things like, “If you’re harmed in community, you have to be healed in community.”

The thing about harm and healing, though, is that often both happen slowly. They’re not things we decide are happening or can dictate the time and place of their occurrence.

They just happen. And they happen to us.

We were hurting and then, like so many of you, were thrust into a time of social isolation. However you look back on 2020-2022, with disgust or indignation, self-righteousness or incredulity, the truth is: none of us, not even the experts, knew what to do. We were all doing our best. I truly believe that. I believed that then, even when friends and loved ones were making different choices than I was, and I believe it now, when I look back and wish I could have made some different choices. What is it Kierkegaard said? “Life can only be understood backward but can only be lived forward.”

Faced with the choice between gathering or staying home, practicing restraint or practicing indulgence, we took the more conservative approach (though it’s not lost on me that it was also the more politically liberal approach). We isolated.

We also moved to the other side of the country, worked our fingers to the bone renovating an abandoned house, couldn’t find a church, and faced one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever faced resulting in the loss of almost all the relationships I formed throughout my twenties and had for half my life.

Good things happened in those years too though, we became detached from church as social security, faith as identity, and certain doctrines as right thinking. We needed isolation in order to detach from the things that hemmed us in before.

But Bell Hooks and others were right, that’s not healing. It’s a part of it, but it’s not finishing it. Finishing it happens when we grow brave again and begin to entrust ourselves to people again, engage ourselves to the lifetime of work that true faith is, and learn to attach healthily without putting all of our hope in people and institutions again.

Back to our therapist’s couch.

“What if,” he asked us, “part of the work of healing wholly for you two is for you to once again become gatherers?”

Immediately I felt sick rising up in me, tension in my shoulders, and I shuddered. “No,” I said. “I never want to do that again. I never want to put myself in a place of authority again, nor do I want anyone else to put me there either.”

He didn’t say anything right away but then, as therapists often do and I have done myself, he said, “I wonder if it would help you to sit with that feeling this week?”

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Never again, I’ve told myself, will I covenant myself to an institution or a constraint of beliefs prescribed by a denomination or parachurch organization or submit myself to a team of male elders or pastors who call themselves “first among equals.” Never again will I wholeheartedly endorse organizations or non-profits without visible evidence of their “long obedience in the same direction.” Never again will I recommend spiritual writers or their books simply because we’re chums on social media. Maybe that seems extreme to you, but apart from all my other objections to the above, I’m also an approval addict and those are all the places I can find it in short-term supply, enough to lure me in and then turn me into an acolyte and I won’t do it again.

My faith in God is too important—and too fragile—to do all of that again.

But. (And this is a bit but.)

But I do believe in good people doing good work. And I do believe that people coming alongside one another and doing good work together is what will heal our land and usher in a renewed earth and world. I believe in the Good Light of God going out through the voices and pens and hands of the people made by God. And I don’t want to give that up. Harmed in community or not, people are imago dei, the image of God, the beloved likeness of the maker of the universe. And I can’t deny that. To deny that is to deny God.

I am learning to find and build community in new ways. Sometimes harder ways. But also, I think, healthier ways.

• I’m not leaning into approval—mine or theirs—but wholeness, asking the question: is this a space where I can show up wholly me and they can show up wholly them?

• I’m not leaning into hierarchy, but mutuality, asking the question: is this a relationship where we both feel a generous spaciousness around our beliefs, practices, history, and future?

• I’m not leaning toward a persistent feeling of guilt or shame that showed up in many of my relationships before, but instead asking the question: is this a friendship where I have abundant grace for them and they for me?

• I’m not limiting hospitality to a place (namely, my home) but asking the question: can I be a human who embodies hospitality in my person and who enters into the hospitality that others offer in their persons?

And whether we ever become the gathering place again or not, I am still gathering all the breadcrumbs I can find when faithful people around me drop them. I am not hoarding them for myself anymore, but spreading them again behind me for you and you and you to find.

As we continue to detach from empire and institution, we still see the goodness and value of the work of Christ-bearers in the world, and in our participation with them/their work.

I wanted to share some others who are dropping breadcrumbs behind them for the rest of us. The prophetic people crying out in the wilderness. The ones who help remind me that even when so many have given themselves over to mammon and the empire of FOX news-TPUSA-Christian nationalism or Name it, Claim it, health and wealth capitalism, there is still goodness growing:

• Jon Guerra: The Kingdom of Jesus has played an embarrassing amount of times on repeat in my ears and on our speakers while I meal prep every week.

• : Every year for the past six years I’ve read Let Your Life Speak. It is always on my desk, within reach. It has been balm and salve, vision and hope.

• : I’ve read Sarah for sixteen years and she still compels me toward the person of Jesus. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been ready to hang it all up and then she writes something that reminds me of Jesus and his tenderness and strength, and I’m in again.

• Jason Upton: When I was 22, I worked for a charismatic non-profit worship organization and we toured with Jason for a few weeks. I lost track of him for years and then found him again when he released his Table Full of Strangers I & II albums. Those albums carried me through the past decade. He is the real deal.

• : Her entire oeuvre has been a companion to me, especially in recent years. Learning to Walk in the Dark and Leaving Church especially.

• Madeleine L’Engle: How could I not mention Madeleine. More so every year I grow older. Her words are still teaching me, compelling me, grounding me, stirring me. Especially her lesser known stuff.

• Fernando Ortega: I spent some time with Fernando during a weekend retreat years ago. He was the realest person there and that’s saying something. I will never forget his practice of vulnerability with Nate and me. His voice is the soundtrack of my faith trajectory.

• Scott Erickson: Scott is one of my favorite people to follow on Instagram. Not just for his art, but for his candidness around faith and doubt especially. He has been a helpful reminder that there are good men doing good work in the world still.

• : Austin might be the sleeper here, he doesn’t wear his faith on his sleeve online. But I am so encouraged by him and his consistent faithful work in the world. His encouragement to just do art has been what I’ve needed over the past few years.

• : I rarely listen to podcasts but when I do, I listen to OnBeing, and I have never, ever walked away unnourished.

• John Green: John is another one who doesn’t wear his faith on his sleeve, but he is a person of faith who wrestles with science, politics, belief, and shows his work. And I think that’s brave.

I’m curious, who has dropped some sustaining breadcrumbs for you?

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When people reflect who I am to them back to me, they use words like peace, calm, warm, safe. When I reflect back to myself, I use words like twisted, factions, unrest, angst, and turmoil. The serene duck on water, feet churning furiously below, comes to mind.

The most I have ever identified with a sitcom character was when Chidi from The Good Place says to Eleanor, “You know the sound a fork makes when it gets stuck in the garbage disposal?” She nods. He continues, “That’s the sound my brain makes all the time.”

I have known people who do not live with this internal tempest within them, those who receive life as either a gift or a curse, with little variation between the two. Or those for whom faith comes easy or politics come clear, where the world functions for them in black and white, good and evil, dark and light. I don’t mean to say their lives are without friction, I only mean to say the inward battle is not a constant for them, it’s an occasional.

In weeks like these, when 40% of my fellow Americans are screaming across the void and if you’re not screaming with their same intensity and persuasion, you’re not doing enough, I remind myself again of the 60% of the rest of us:

Those for whom protest is equal parts shoveling the walks of our neighbors, holding new babies next to their big brothers, donating to the food pantry, making soup for new friends, hugging someone who needs it, saying what hurts right out loud so it can be safe for others to say their hurt aloud too. I think of a local friend who bikes everywhere and another one who walks everywhere. I think of a friend who begins a job as a pastor soon and another one who ended his tenure pastoring recently and faithfully. I think of people who write poetry and make art and leave voice-messages and heart text messages and call when they have twenty minutes of quiet. I think of mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, and the motherless, fatherless, estranged, or alone. I think about all the calls we all made to congresspeople these past few weeks. I think of the immigrants down the street and the ones in the city food court, making our food with cheer. I think about our friends making a bookstore on the corner of Orange and Prince. This too, I remind myself, is revolution. This too is protest.

The dominant feeling in me lately is one of unrest. It is the opposite of calm, the opposite of warmth, it is rage, rage. It is a litany of we told you sos and when is enough, enough? It is anger, precise and pointed. But, though dominant, it wars with what is beautiful still, with what is growing and alive and good, truly good in the world. It is what my friend calls, “A counterweight.” It refuses to ignore the evil but equally refuses to make evil the point.

I have been trying to make peace with myself my entire life, to stop the warring factions, to unite the disparate parts, to bring together the dark and light, to soften the hard edges, to mesh the extremes, to remind myself and others that we are not the worst of what we see in the world, but actually the best.

But the older I get, the more I wonder if this is my whole work in the world, and I do mean whole. I wonder if a willingness to go to war with the sides I see is where my wholeness comes. That without that churning within me, I would not be me and would not have work to do. That in order to be faithful, I must continue to churn my feet below the surface, embrace the fork in its endless grind, fight with myself in order that when I open my mouth, write my words, say my things, I am one less person fighting with you.

Link Love is one of the ways I try to counterweight in my work. Below you’ll find links to articles, books, documentaries, podcasts, and projects I loved lately. These are, as always, behind a paywall. Consider joining Sayable and getting a glimpse at what’s helping me counterweight my world.

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I was a born Republican, raised to the rhythms of the January March for Life, the sneering sarcasm of Russ Limbaugh and a never ending chorus of white cassette tapes crying the End Times. We were red, white, and blue, standing in the frigid temperatures watching reenactments of Washington crossing the Delaware near where my mother was born, near where I was born too. We knew the story of the American Revolution and lived in the lands of our country’s birth, her independence, her flag, her bell, her hall where the Declaration was signed. Other kids have The Alamo, Freedom’s Trail, or nothing at all, I was raised in the republic. There was nothing more central to our identity than God, homeschooling, and republicanism.

I was a born radical.

I’m not sure my father thought through the implications of not giving us social security numbers, and I hated him for it all through my teens, when my friends were getting jobs, driver’s licenses, and preparing for college.

I was ineligible to vote until I procured a SSN, at age 21, and then the world became real and accessible, my oyster. I could drive a car with a license and insurance, I could get a job, I could go to college, I could live on my own. I could also vote, but I didn’t. I was too busy slurping the salty mantle released from its prison shell.

When, finally, it occurred to me that I could vote and should, it was 2008, I was a month away from turning 28. I drove in a car with four others from my church to press the lever or fill in the blank or color a circle, or however it was one was supposed to vote—I didn’t know. The car was—except me—vocally unanimous: we were Christians, Barak Obama was evil, a snake, a Muslim, a baby killer, our vote would be for McCain.

I don’t know what happened, though, when I moved behind that plastic shield, when it was only myself, a black marker, and a sheet of cardstock.

My vote. My vote.

I voted for Obama.

I believed myself, the evidence I had not seen of Obama being a snake, the freedom of religion in America to worship whoever you wanted, the facts that under democratic administrations fewer abortions occur, more children are fed, that if there were higher taxes as a result, it was only because there were more federal programs helping more people to get the food and shelter they needed. I believed myself and the message of HOPE that felt real to me, far more real than the angry, ranting, arrogance of the “Moral Majority.”

I held my breath on the way home, a short drive, terrified the whole time that someone would verify, ask us all if we followed through. No one did. Why would they? We had agreed. Unanimously. Without question, without doubt, without objection. We were Christians. There was only one choice.

We forgot, though, didn’t we? The power of the individual, the point of the revolution, the ingrained belief and universal permission to be radical, to dissent, to do it differently. We forgot that no matter which way the tide turns, however much they lie to us, gaslight us, telling us the other side is a snake, evil, when it is just you and the black marker, you can be whoever you want to be.

I see it happening before my eyes once again. The marriage of Christianity with Republicanism, the belief that only the GOP holds the keys to morality in the United States, complicated ideals being distilled to talking points and gotcha moments, and to vote or act against the Right is wrong, to choose siding with the devil, the demonic, in liege with evil. These are the words coming out of Christian influencers and podcasters and the mouths of pastors. They are not mincing them.

They want you to be terrified to make a different choice.

But I think there is nothing more powerful in the world than a person who believes what they see and not what they don’t see.

Nothing more beautiful than a person who—despite their upbringing, despite their family of origin, despite the other four people in the car, and even the possibility that maybe they’re getting it wrong—makes the only decision they know they can live with.

Nothing more beautiful than a person who refuses to be gaslit, lied to, ridiculed, or pandered to, but who can stand in the fullness of who they are and what they know to be true and say, “I choose different.”

Your vote is your vote and I won’t ridicule you for it.

The day after 2024’s presidential election, when I was shell-shocked and sad, a friend came over and told me she’d voted for Trump. I didn’t even feel surprised. I just listened to her reasons why, asked her how she was feeling about it the day before as she walked into the booth and how she felt about it now. I asked if she would have done differently, and she asked me the same. I will never, ever, ever try to make someone believe that simply because I have voted this way, they must also.

But I will say, “You are the only one in charge of you.” Not your church. Not your pastor. Not your group of friends. Not your parents. Not your spouse. Not the Christian lady influencer. Not the Christian bro podcaster. Not your readers if you’re a writer. Not your coworkers. Not your kids. Not your neighbors.

Not even the you you were last year or ten years ago or even the you you were born to be.

And that’s true freedom.

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We spent one night in a little rental unit on the east side of the city and in the morning, walked to a food truck for a biscuit breakfast.

While we waited for our food, I opened my phone up to an email that sucked the breath out of me. A person who had harassed me for years was escalating her harassment to stalking levels, telling us she knew our address and we should watch out. I showed the email to Nate and we ate our food in shock. While we were talking about the email a few hours later, I got a text from a friend with the most awful, shocking, and bewildering news about one of our church leaders, news that hadn’t yet been made public yet. We decided to cut our weekend short and head home. On the way there, I checked the news again and saw another mass shooting tragedy had just unfolded in our country.

We landed at home exhausted and hurting, feeling pressed in from all sides. Neither of us wanted to go to church in the morning, especially this place we had once loved deeply and now felt bewildered by in many ways. But, we thought, we will go. Surely something will be said, even if it’s just about one of these things. Surely we can mourn together.

There was a guest preacher that morning. He cracked jokes, he tried to warm up the room, I don’t remember anything specific he said, only the absence of what was not said. I remember the feeling of hot growing up from my stomach to my throat to my forehead. I remember leaving, feeling in shock. I remember the sense in my gut that our time there was done, the finality of the moment. I remember turning to Nate as we drove home and saying, “We can’t go back.” I remember him taking a deep breath, swallowing hard, and nodding.

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The feedback on the Reader Survey thus far was pretty overwhelming, especially on this one point. You all still love Link Love. Which is great. I didn’t know! Thank you for letting me know.

Because of the nature of sharing links, it leads you away from Sayable, which is fine and good—I don’t want you to spend all your time here ;) But leaving Sayable to look at something good also means there’s less engagement on those posts (fewer comments/likes), which means from my end, it looks like you pretty meh about LL, when really, the opposite is true. You’re actually reading and appreciating the links. Thank you for letting me know! See, this is why we have to talk about such things.

I am going to be tweaking how I deliver these links, though. In the past I’ve had anywhere between 5-20 links per category. I have been thinking about merely sharing six, one in each category, but making sure each one is the best IMO. In addition to the categories we already have (Read, Listen, and Watch), I also want to add a few: Make, Appreciate, and Practice—as I think this will drive you even more offline and hopefully inspire you in other ways!

This Link Love is a free one for all, so all you free readers can know what it’s all about, but generally, these are behind the paywall.

This piece from The Atlantic made the rounds last spring and I shared it then, but it felt like a good time to reshare it. Nate and I have met a lot of great people since moving to Lancaster, but the touchpoints felt few and far between. We have been working hard to make those visits with the few more frequent because I think it’s true, We’ve Probably Already Met Our New Best Friends.

When I was in my mid-twenties I traveled to Nepal with a group of friends and it was an unbelievable trip. I will never forget aspects of it, good and bad. I watched this documentary last week and was thrown back into the mid-aughts when this girl’s story began. Bring your handkerchiefs, friends, this one is gonna make you cry. Between the Mountain and the Sky.

I guess this is technically a watch, but I listened in the background while doing other things. Hope is a big one for me this year. I’m over cynicism, I’m over despair, I’m over raging every single damn day about things I can’t change. I can change one little thing and it’s to react with hope instead of *all that*. I scribbled this in my journal a few weeks back, maybe it will be helpful to you too. But anyway, I really appreciated this antidote to despair that John Green offered. Maybe you will too. Hope is not a feeling.

Listen, you already know that 2026 is the year of the analogue. We’re listening to mixtapes, we’re making papier-mâché, we’re collecting tiny little things to stick in printer’s drawers, we’re folding origami, we’re habituating our lives with an eco-system of planners and journals, we are collecting the stickers! But, in case you ever stopped doing this, we’re making vision boards with actual paper and thumbtacks and hanging them up where we can see them every single day. Here’s on how to make one, in case you need “a lantern while looking for yourself.”

PS. I recently read that that quote from Emily Dickinson was actually literal. She wrote it in a letter to a friend after moving, describing how she was scrounging through all her still packed belongings, looking for what she needed. And I don’t know, I just loved that.

I don’t know how possible it is for many of us to practice this right now in our lives, but I loved this piece in the NYT from fellow substacker, , on communal living in her 40s. I confess I vacillate between wanting to live in a commune and wanting to live on 40 acres in a tiny house with my husband and dogs and absolutely no one else. But the practices she writes of in here, especially loosening grips on preferences and prioritizing relationships, I need this. Her third recommendation feels terribly scary but you can make your own judgement on that. Gift link to the article here.

This is the sort of thing I think to myself, “I want to do that. I could do that. I’m going to do that,” and then, someday, when the time is right, I do that. I love a high friction, high reward project like this one.

Okay, friends, that’s it. Let me know how you feel about this format of Link Love. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this in some form for a decade and a half. Time is weird and the Internet is fathomless.

Don’t forget to make a vision board. Who cares what everyone else thinks? Your inner 12 year old will be so impressed with how cool you still are. Here’s mine, but don’t look too closely cos it ain’t your business.

If you’re reading this in email (which 98% of you do!), consider pressing the heart (♡) at the bottom or top of this email. It helps my work get more eyeballs on it, which is nice for me and kind of you!

While I want Sayable to work for you, it has to work for me first. And as I took stock of 2025 (and really 2024 as well, since last January was the first in more than a decade that I hardly took stock at all—I had the flu for five weeks), I realized there are some things that just don’t work for me here any more and I want to shift as we go into the foreseeable future.

Okay deep breath:

TLDR: Take the 2026 Sayable Survey Here, please. Whether you’re a free, paid, or comped reader, doesn’t matter. I want to hear from ALLLL of you 👇🏼

2026 Reader Survey

Now the nitty-gritty for the ones who care:

Paid Memberships: As it is now, paid subscribers are loosely promised monthly zooms, bi-annual book-clubs, link loves, and lots of other nice perks (like first to hear new news, private posts, commenting privileges, and for founding members, a copy of my newest book in the year it releases with a personal card from me to you).

I have absolutely zero qualms about having a paid membership tier on Sayable (You can read why here). Some people see the paid membership as a way of having access to paid posts, others see it as a way of merely supporting me as a writer, regardless of my output here or the perks I offer. I prefer to have readers who fall into the latter category because I don’t view any one piece here a mere supply of whatever it provides. I view the work here as a holistic thing, nothing standalone. If you pay for one piece, you’re only getting 1/1000ths of the story. I reject that model of consumption in most of my life and I hope you find ways to reject it as well. This is one reason why I offer so many complementary subscriptions AND why I offer such a low subscription cost, period. I would rather have less money and you have more access, than to have more money and my readers be more piecemeal and consumeristic.

“If you’d rather that,” you might say, “then why not be entirely free?” Glad you asked. Because I value true engagement and the ability to keep out trolls or those who have absolutely no buy-in (even if it’s merely the cost of asking me for a comped subscription—that takes a lot of humility and therefore I see it as buy-in), paid and/or comped subscriptions solves that problem. And, I’m not going to lie to you, your subscription provides me enough salary that I can continue to tweak this novel. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s enough to keep us afloat while I write. (PS. Thank you for that. Like, seriously, thank you for that.)

In that vein, I’m extending the 50% off a year of Sayable I offered in December as a way to put my money where my mouth is👇🏼

50% off a year of Sayable

Monthly Zooms: I realized last year with novel writing that the monthly zooms fell totally apart. I just couldn’t keep up with them and find myself with a lack of desire to continue them. It’s mostly philosophical and less anything else. I just don’t want to be seen as an authority of a lot of the stuff that we talked about in those zooms. They were mostly pretty chatty spaces, but I just feel uncomfortable with the whole idea these days. At least for the time being, we’re going to nix these.

Book Club: I have really loved the book clubs we’ve done in the past. The conversations are always warm and personable, and I love the repetition of people who show up at them. I’ve gotten to know a handful of you quite well through them! That said, we often have over a hundred+ people sign up for them, each paying the $7 for the extra work I do for them, and then only about 12-20 show up regularly. That says to me that either, they’re not very good book clubs and people aren’t actually interested OR people are very interested but life catches up with them. Whatever the reason, I need to consider the amount of work I put into them (high) as well as the cost for you (mid), and the benefit it’s offering to both you and me (low, it seems). I’m not sure it’s a perk that, on the whole, is worth keeping for paid subscribers.

Link Loves: I’ve historically really loved the round-ups of links that I’ve tried to do monthly. However, I think in the past I viewed them more as “Here, let me do the work of mining or milling for the best bits and then share them with you,” and now, in the year of our Lord 2026, we are absolutely glutted with information, links, and content. I’m not sure it’s serving me or you to continue to do that as I have…unless the majority of you still find it helpful and/or enjoyable. I am constantly saving links as I read things online. I’m also constantly adding things to my Favorite Things list on my Notes App. I’m not going to stop doing that, it’s a way for me to remember and cite what I’ve read, watched, heard, or otherwise. But I am wondering if it’s a perk you want to continue to receive—or perhaps if we can tweak the delivery of it somehow.2

Other tidbits: I’m still keeping commenting privileges almost entirely behind the paid tier. I have too much experience with trolls and/or unkind people over the last 25 years of writing online. I’m just not opening my nervous system up to that again, nor am I providing one more spot for YOUR nervous system to be knocked off kilter. That’s hallow ground as far as I’m concerned. If you want to comment and engage, I ask for you to pay the piper (Again, if you use this link, it’s about twenty bucks a year, one of the cheapest Substacks I know of.).

Some shifts you might have seen/felt over the past year

Faith/theology: I haven’t been writing about it as much. Maybe you haven’t noticed a shift, but I know I’ve written less about it (except my sexuality series—which I’m still getting messages from some of you about. Thank you!). Some of that is intentional. My head is thick in the novel which is not a theological story (except, of course, in the ways everything is theological). I’m not reading theology or really a lot of books on faith right now, therefore it’s not showing up in my output.

I’ve also made it no secret that I’m in a season of doubt/grief, and after enough years of writing online, I know now that what I need for a season like this is not to externalize that process for the public, but to externalize it for only a few. I’m not lying to you about the work that’s being done behind the scenes though. It’s work, it’s hard, and it’s happening with my partner, my closest friends, my therapist, and my local community.

Politics/culture: I’m thinking about this stuff a lot and often. And if I’m honest, politics especially has taken up an outsized space in my head over the past several years. The reasons why for that might surprise you. It’s not because I’m raging about whatever thing this administration is doing (although I probably am). It’s more because most of my family is pro-this-administration and the amount of work I have to do in my internal body to speak up about the injustice I see, knowing it is costing me relationship with them every time I do, it’s a lot.

It’s likely you haven’t heard me even say that out loud before. But one of my goals for myself is to acknowledge the tension I feel (which is true), bless the ways it’s showing up in me, and then say what I believe to be true anyway, regardless of the cost. The cost of doing this has been insurmountable for me since 2020—most of you don’t know this is the reason we eventually had to leave our little home on the river, but it was and I’m not going to say more about it here now.

Writing/reading: I’m a writer who reads. Or rather, I’m a reader who writes. Either way, this isn’t changing here on Sayable. I’m going to keep writing about writing and reading and continue doing both on my own time as well.

Personal/memoir: This is the sort of writing that most of you seem to really love here on Sayable. It may be because it’s a particular strength in my writing, but also it seems to touch a nerve with many of you.

It has been like pulling blood from a stone over the past five years, though, because of the very direct cost some of that writing has had on my life. Again, I’m not going to say much about this here now, but it is not an exaggeration to say that what I have written here in the past five years has resulted in the loss of almost every significant relationship I formed in my early twenties. The ones who remain are the most important people in my world and our relationships have only grown deeper and better, but the hundred “deaths without a funeral”3 I have had to navigate over the past five years feels at times insurmountable. I have not been able to resolve the tension here in a way that feels maintainable. I would like to do more of this here on Sayable, but I am committed to only writing within my window of tolerance so that I can heal.

Alrighty, have you made it this far?

Having read all of that, I would love if you would take this reader survey. It’s for free, paid, founding, or comped readers. If you’re reading Sayable, however regularly or sporadically, I’d love for you to fill out the survey. It shouldn’t take you long. The last time we did one of these—in 2023—it became an immeasurably helpful resource to me over the ensuing years. I hope you believe me when I say that:

2026 Reader Survey

Finally, I just want to say thank you to each of you.

I have been writing some iteration of Sayable since 2001. Some of you have been here since then. Some of you over the last fifteen or ten years. Some of you in more recent years. I do not take any of that lightly. Every single time I open a card4 or read an email or comment or meet one of you in face to face, I want you to know I carry the weight of what that means for each of us. It is vulnerable for you to show up to me and share that I have been meaningful to you. And it is vulnerable for me to face you, in human flesh, without the ability to edit myself. And when two vulnerable peoples connect, beautiful things happen.

I am thankful for every single one of you and so, so, so many of you by name. You have shown up in the acknowledgement section of my books, you have been my beta readers for books, you have given me feedback I’ve asked for and sometimes haven’t 😂. You have prayed for me, encouraged me, actually loved me. You have stuck with me when you’ve disagreed with me, disagreed with me without attacking me, and sometimes decided you needed to leave Sayable, and thus me, for a time and then come back.

I want you to know that as much as it’s within my power to see you, I see you. I value you. Your presence matters to me. Your faces and names are coming to my mind right now, Leah, Amber, Lauren, Joy, Jennifer, Steven, Amy, Brent, April, Anna, Chris, Rebecca, Billy, Carolyn, Maci, Kaylin, Mel, John, Emily, Sara, Sally, Stephanie, Hillary, Phil, Seth. Okay I need to stop, but SO many of you.

Thank you for that. Really. Thank you. Sayable is about making things sayable, but things said without people to hear them make little difference in the grand scheme of things. You have been here to hear them, and to then say what you need to say in your world too. That is no small thing. This is how we all heal and become a little more whole a little at a time.

I love you.

PS I am keeping comments open on this one because of the nature of the post, but God help me, if the trolls be trolling, I will be blocking =)

Plagiarism is something that happens on purpose. It has intent behind it. The intent might not be to steal, exactly, perhaps it is merely to get ahead, to gain eyeballs. It is almost always used as a shortcut from here to there, from a smaller audience or lesser grade to a greater audience or better grade. The way we avoid plagiarism as writers is not to not write, but instead to write at our own pace, to not rush, to avoid the freneticism we perceive around us and believe is necessary if we want to move ahead.

All the best writers you can name aren’t plagiarizing. And the way you become a better writer is to not plagiarize. It’s very simple to avoid:

• Find a place to write down things you read that you like and attribute the person you read it from. Source and page numbers are helpful.

• When you write, cite widely. You have nothing to lose by naming your sources and it only increases your legitimacy as a writer.

• Question yourself—especially when churning out short, pithy quotes. If it’s a short, pithy quote, chances are it’s been said before. Find the earliest source you can and cite that, if you can’t find a source but are pretty sure you’re not the source, write something like, “I’ve heard it said that…” Again, this only helps your credibility, it never hurts it.

• And last of course, just to reiterate, slow, honest work over time is a better service to you and your readers than quick, dishonest work resulting is viral growth spurts. Get that into your brain, say it to yourself often, and then if you want to write, write!

When you’re a plagiarizer or a thief or an imposter, writing is hard, very hard—it’s your subconscious or your conscience trying to say, “Hey, maybe this isn’t for you. Maybe there’s something else for you.”

When you’re a writer, writing is easy, and only becomes easier the longer you’re doing it. Sure, there are moments of difficulty (I’m in second draft edits on my novel currently and, yeah, there’s a hundred other things that feel less hard), but that initial rush of writing? It should feel easy, smooth, like you’re doing the thing you were made to do. If it doesn’t, don’t look for shortcuts. Look for a different profession.

Okay, I know that felt very pedantic and whatever, but I hope you can hold all of that with what I really want to write about. It has to do with the announcement many of you read on CT this morning. Beloved author, member of The Chrysostom Society (alongside writers like Eugene Peterson, Madeleine L’Engle, Lucy Shaw, Walter Wangerin, and more), potent encourager of those of weak faith (like me), Philip Yancey shared of his eight year affair and how he is subsequently withdrawing himself from writing, speaking, and social media.

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