Early Invitation to The Understory Launch Community!

And a crazy grateful thank-you to the community that's here for life

I have lots of complicated feelings about launch groups and preorder bonuses and all that jazz, but I have not one complicated feeling about my desire to bring The Understory into the world within a community of people.

This past week I asked a tough question on my Instagram and the comments just poured in. I stayed up way past my bedtime reading each and every one of them. And, guys, I was just so floored.

Years ago, my friend

Seth Haines

gave me some advice I’ve carried close to my heart ever since. He said, “Bring your readers with you, Lore.” He was talking about the moves and shifts and maturity and mistakes we experience in the life of faith, and how we can either spring those things on faithful readers or we can do the painful, sometimes humiliating work of bringing them along with us of our own journey of growth. I’ve worked hard to do the latter.

And I’ve worked really stupid hard to make my online spaces places where we begin by listening, checking in with our own hearts and the Holy Spirit, spaces where we pause or consider another viewpoint or check our own biases. And those comments made me believe that we’ve done it! We’ve done it together. On my Instagram stories that same day, I wrote, “I’m going to get a lot of things wrong in life and I’m grateful for people who stick around long enough for me to figure it out.”

You are those people.

And that is why I am so, so grateful to offer The Understory—which is a book about grieving our own complicity in broken systems, welcoming the wildness of the unknown, thanking former systems for what they gave us and sometimes broke in us, and moving forward into sometimes the unknown—to you, my messy-middler community, first.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be slipping out some invitations to join our (non-Facebook) launch community where we’ll be doing things a little differently than I’ve done them in the past. There will more opportunities for walks in the woods, conversations with people in our neighborhoods, and some gentle slow invitations into living the story beneath the story.

If you want to be first in line for the limited spots we have in the launch community, you’ll want to follow these four steps asap:

Know what I’m MOST excited for about this launch group? The weekly Zooms together. I’m a little tired of all the virtual meetings, but I never, ever, ever get tired of seeing the faces of all of you beautiful, complex, wonderful, vulnerable, and profoundly powerful humans.

In one of my chapters I wrestle with the idea of being here, forever, like, literally, always here. As in the fact that we’re made from the dust of stars and clay and soil and cellular rearrangements and still somehow beautifully and fearfully made in the image of a good, good God. I believe it. It’s crazy. But I believe it. I guess that’s my way of saying I think you’re stardust, every one of you—a wonderful paradox of soil and stars, sparkle and mud ✨✨✨ and I’m grateful you’re willing to get in the mud with me.

Have you preordered my latest book? The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor?

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