Resisting the Urge to Say Anything Directly

Despite there being much that needs to be said

Writing the end of a book is always more difficult for me than writing the beginning of it. I have a deep internal resistance to tying up anything with neatness and finality. On a paper I turned in for grad school, our TA replied, “Sometimes I think you know you what you think about something but don’t want to say it directly.” Touche. And also, yes, deeply yes.

I keep pulling the tendrils and hoping they’ll lead me where I want to go or letting my feet follow breadcrumbs, hoping they were left by some muse who’d been this way before. But each time, I meet a dead end of sorts, something saying, “This isn’t it. Not yet, not this.”

I resisted writing a full proposal for this book because, as I said to my agent when I first started writing it, “Writing, for me, is so much about letting my curiosity lead me and when that curiosity is mapped out, it loses the magic.” That has been all fine and well and good for 80% of the book, but ten-thousand words from the conclusion and I’m still not sure of the destination. E.B. White (Yes, that E. B. White.) wrote that “Writing is an act of faith,” words I have scrawled on a piece of card-stock and set before me on my desk—a reminder that faith isn’t faith if I can see where I’m going.

Adapted from Bill Gallen, Foothills and Treelines

In any case, I wrote a few thousand words on Monday and then, while Nate stayed home nursing a cold, I spent Wednesday tromping through a nearby old-growth forest in the pouring rain with my fellow old-growth nerd friend Philip. We oohed and ahed over ferns and moss and lichen, and bush-wacked the entirety of our hike back to a beaver’s bog and then back down alongside a cascading waterfall brook.

Around midway I started to feel decidedly unwell and thought it was just a touch of dehydration, but that night I spiked a fever and the next day I lost my sense of smell and the next day I lost my voice and the next day we both took Covid tests and they were both positive. It’s been three years since I’ve had it and this is Nate’s first foray into it, so I suppose we were owed it eventually.

It’s terrible timing though, awful, horrible, no good, terrible timing. The last time I had it, the effects took months to wear off, even a year for some of them. I am praying (and beg for your prayers, too) that it’s not the same this time. I need my brain firing on every cylinder right now.

Until then, though, in my brain-addled state, I have been cruising the web—which I’ve had little time for over the past few years. I’m on a mission to dust-free our house. As most old-home owners know, it’s hard to fight a hundred years of dust mites. Our house feels perpetually dusty despite regular vacuuming with the world’s best vacuum cleaner and cleaning with micro-fiber cloths. The spiders take up residence faster than we can swipe them away and no sooner do I dust our dressers does another layer land. We don’t have central air, nor do we have ceiling fans or vent fans, so the lack of air circulation is a whole thing. I’m replacing a few of our high-pile rugs with flat weaves and I am 100% determined that this will be the summer I finally seal up all the gaps and paint our stairs, and install a runner. I bought a few air purifiers and will try to refrain from grooming Harper in the kitchen (mea culpa). It’s just such a small house and the options are few, see?

Why was I sharing that? I forget. See? Brain fog.

Anyway, here’s some things I read or watched recently that you might be interested in:

𓆸 Here’s a post from

Anne Helen Petersen

on grieving her dog that I had to gulp back tears a few times while reading.

𓆸 I’ve had reason to be thinking about the stories we tell and our effort to tell them truthfully and tell them slant, and reread this piece on Tara Westover (author of Educated—a memoir that echoed my own upbringing in striking similarity) and her family.

𓆸 As someone for whom church has felt…I don’t have the word and suspect if I did, someone would attribute their own meaning to it and it wouldn’t suffice anyway, but someone for whom church has felt not like it used to, I appreciated this piece from Plough.

𓆸 My friend Amy Peterson at

Making All Things New

has a short piece here about wounded trees and I loved it.

𓆸 A few years ago Nate and I read the source material for Apple TV’s new show, Silo. We are admittedly post-apocalyptic geeks, but we started watching the show this week in our Covid-induced stupors and it’s really quite good on its own merits.

𓆸 I finished

Maggie Smith

’s new book You Could Make This Place Beautiful last week in one reading. It’s worth the hype, friends. Also, Kate Bowler had a lovely conversation with Maggie on Everything Happens a few weeks back. Give it a listen.

𓆸 This house tour on HGTV Handmade was all the things. I used to have dozens of houseplants and then, well, five cross-country moves later, I feel a bit less tethered to having them. But this home made me remember again how much I do love having green life everywhere.

As indicated above, I’m at the part of this writing gig when all my good words and word-smithery are going to the book, so if you made it down here, thank you. You’re true blue. I hope you found something good in here to hold onto or carry with you. I hope you have a beautiful week.

Something you found interesting in this? Share it with a friend and invite them to subscribe for more of me not saying anything directly. JK. JK. Sometimes I do.

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Have you ordered my latest book? A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and Wish Someone Would Ask Us. Available now, wherever books are sold: Amazon | Baker Book House | Bookshop

Also available: Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

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