The Understory: Release Week Starts Now!

An invitation to where your feet are right now

Today is the day that (hopefully!) The Understory lands in your mailbox and hands. It looks like Amazon’s warehouse ran out of copies but you should be able to order from Bookshop or Barnes and Noble or Baker or anywhere else you get your books. If your local bookstore doesn’t carry it, give them a call or stop at the information desk and ask if they’d get you a copy, and ask them to order an extra for anyone else who might want one!

Throughout this week you can still get the free gifts—the art print from Stephen Crotts and the companion guide (links to both below).

Every generation must bear the weight of her time. There are wars and rumors of wars. There are earthquakes and fires, attacks and illnesses. I am under no illusion that our time is any better or any worse than another. We have some things better and some things worse. But there will always be a unique before and after of every generation. I suspect that just as any American born before 1980 can likely remember exactly where they were when the September 11 attacks happened, anyone born before 2010 will remember where they were in 2020.

The answer, for most of us, was at home.

But for many of us, home was not a haven, it was not a safe place. Perhaps the four walls of our actual house may have been, but the home of our faith, the home of our community, the home of our church, even our own sense of what being home meant—these were all shaken to their foundation.

In the past four years more peers than I can keep track of have ended their marriages, left churches, become estranged from their families, left their vocations, even left their faith. Without fail, every single week I learn of another divorce or death or disillusioned pastor or parishioner. We’re the walking wounded, trying to find stable ground again. The things we thought would stand forever fell down or fell apart. The beliefs or institutions or people we viewed as impermeable, immoveable, impenetrable—crumbled before our eyes. Even our own selves crumbled.

This is the theme of The Understory. It’s the clawing, climbing, and clinging process I went through as it all fell down around me. It’s how I discovered it’s not permanency we need, but place. It’s what Jason Gray called “Death Without Funerals.” It’s what Saint Paul said about carrying around the death of Jesus in our very own bodies. It’s what Robin Wall Kimmerer said, “We have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again.”

We have to die in order to rise—all of dying, the loss, the stink, the decomposition, the reordering of cells, the whole new composition of matter—we need it all. It’s a fool’s errand to try and rebuild, to make anything “great again,” because again means the same old thing over again. We’re not after the same old thing. We’re after a new thing.

N.T. Wright writes, “God can do new things with dust,” and that’s what The Understory is about. It’s about taking what is decimated and breathing the dust of stars on it, cupping handfuls of what is decomposed around new growth, letting the scrubby overgrowth go wild, knowing something beautiful is being incubated in the shade below it. It is about befriending our pain, our grief, our story, even—and maybe especially—the stories we never asked for, didn’t want, and would never wish on anyone.

I made it for you. I made it for me. I made it for us. And I hope you like it.

You can still get that 👆🏼 high resolution printable I AM HERE art print from Stephen Crotts through the end of the week here 👇🏼

And you can still get that 👆🏼 free companion for The Understory through the end of the week here 👇🏼

I’m simultaneously floored by the number of you who are already reading it and loving it, and totally bummed by the number of you who ordered from Amazon, who hoped to have it in hand today and don’t. I’m really sorry about that and I hope they’re able to move things through their warehouses quickly and get you the book as soon as possible.

I’m so deeply, deeply grateful for every single one of you. Thank you for being here.

Love,

Lo

PS. Tell me all the things! What’s sticking out to you? What are you liking? What questions do you have?