the cosmos is watching

When I was about 12, the people I most could not stand in life were other kids my age who acted like know-it-alls. Ironically, I think the main reason they bothered me so much was because I was convinced that I knew it all—or at least knew better than they did—but I didn’t have the skills to assert my voice with confidence. I felt a strong sense of injustice that the people who pretended to know it all were the ones being heard, and I—the one who, in my view, actually knew it all—was being ignored or passed over.

Oh, 12. It’s not an age I miss.

What I do miss sometimes is the certainty of being right. Being sure that my perspective is the best one, that I’m the one who has considered all the contingencies, that I can righteously claim that if Jesus were to come comment on XYZ topic, He and I would be pretty well aligned. The older I get the less space there seems to be for self-righteous self-certainty. I think I expected the opposite.

I recently read this quote from Anne Lamott: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

That quote makes my evangelical bones shiver a little. Didn’t I take half a dozen “spiritual gifts quizzes” that told me I had the gift of faith—precisely because of how I answered questions about certainty? It was never hard for me to believe what I was supposed to believe, and to also believe that I was 100% right. Did that make faith my spiritual gift? Or might my certainty have been a spiritual handicap?

To ask the questions differently: Has my spiritual gift atrophied as I’ve grown older—despite the fact that my walk with Jesus has grown in length and depth—because I’m less of a know-it-all at 31 than I was at 12? Or was I mistaking my propensity to take refuge in knowledge as an unalloyed strength, when it is sometimes my Achilles heel?

Looking back across the churches I’ve lived in over the last few decades, my sense of injustice is still a little bit activated—no longer because I’m convinced I’m the one who really knows it all, but because I think we as a collective may have a know-it-all problem.

Like I measured my “gift of faith” by how much certainty I had, many Christians and congregations measure the genuineness of people’s faith by what they factually “know.” Rather than placing the value on knowing Christ and Him crucified (experientially and actively, as well as propositionally), the unspoken litmus tests for these churches sound more like end-of-year school examinations. How well do you know (and can you spontaneously rehash) your specific church’s statement of faith—right down to its stance on the controversial culture war issues of the day? That’s how we know if you’re a real Christian. That’s how we know if you belong here.

Add to this the fact that all different denominations or non-denominational churches will have a slightly different set of these implicit test questions, and a different set of answers to them, and it’s no wonder the know-it-all problem in Christianity has become a unity problem as well. We are a movement shattered into a million shards.

If the goal is Jesus, then what truly matters is knowing Jesus, recognizing His voice, and faithfully following His lead. But if the goal is being right (and displaying how right we are), we will struggle mightily to exercise our faith in a way that makes space for the Spirit of God to do His work in us and in the world.

When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith would not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

1 Corinthians 2:1-5

I believe this is one reason why moving into the Anglican tradition has been such a relief for me. We say the Nicene Creed together every week before we participate in communion, and all the rest we discuss amicably, over coffee and snacks or a feast with mulled wine, as the less-than-primary issues they are.

When Jesus was about to face Pilate, and with him the powers and principalities of darkness, His prayer to the Father was “that they [believers] may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).

Unity within the Church, and between the Church and the Trinity, is our testimony to the cosmos. All of Creation and its inhabitants are watching.

Do we look anything at all like the One we claim to represent?

peace, be still

As I have discovered the value of the written and well-loved prayer, one of my favorites has become a prayer “for quiet hearts,” found in the Book of Common Prayer:

O God of peace, who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be our strength: By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Often when I sit down to write here, my heart is not remotely quiet. There’s a lot of tension, disquiet, a sense of striving—for the right idea, the right words, the right way to explain myself. There have been times I’ve asked God if it’s time to be done, if after 15 years of writing on the Internet I have said as much as I need to say and the world has heard enough from me.

This morning in prayer, I asked again what the Spirit had to say to me. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

I hoped for something obvious, like “Stop writing,” or “Keep going.” Instead, He said, “Be still.”

As translated by the NASB in Psalm 46:10—cease striving. I’ve spent a lot of time mulling that phrase and the Hebrew words it comes from. I picture a child’s sleeping body, utterly limp, or the perfectly still surface of a pond—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

As spoken by Jesus to the turmoil of the storm—peace, be still. Or perhaps a booming command of “Silence!” would capture the nature of His words more accurately. “And the wind died down and it became perfectly calm” (Mark 4:39b)—no tension, no motion, no bracing.

Or, as put by Moses in the face of a battle against the Egyptians—you need only to be still. To stop talking, to say nothing, to let God fight instead.

And so I release my own bracing for the impact of writing the wrong thing. I release my tension around disappointing the people I value. I am quiet, restful, limp in the hands of God, waiting to receive the word He might give me and refusing to willfully dig it out on my own strength or my own clock. Waiting for Him to do battle on my behalf.

Words keep failing me, and maybe it’s because words must fail eventually. Maybe it’s because it’s not possible to capture God and His heart and His work in the space of a few paragraphs of cold letters on a page. This has to be lived, embodied, touched, felt, known, seen, shared—for the first time I’m realizing I cannot have this walk with Jesus alone. I cannot have it online. I cannot have it only in my head, as if my truest self were just my mind, divorced from my body and heart and gut.

The convenient thing about an intellectual faith, a faith built on righteousness by good doctrine and knowledge of the Bible, is that it’s fairly self-sufficient and immensely scalable.

The inconvenient thing is it bears almost no resemblance to Jesus’s vision of the kingdom of heaven.

One is a formula I can watch on YouTube from the comfort of my home. The other is a fully embodied experience of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus that can’t be mass-produced, faked, bought, or sold.

And so of course words fail—words, which I love so much! Words which I have spent my life honing, crafting, and using to express my deepest thoughts and feelings as I learn and grow. But words can’t help but fall woefully short of the truest reality unless they, like Christ, become flesh.

Israel had many words. The Ten Commandments are called, literally, the “Ten Words”—and they had hundreds and hundreds more commands than that. They had a whole history of kings and prophets recorded in writing. And still, the Word had to become flesh.

The knowledge had to become life.

The truth had to become human.

What good have I done, if I write a dozen profound books about Jesus but fail to live and walk with Him in my real, offline life? He says “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”—and His examples are feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, not writing brilliant essays of what it’s like to feed the hungry or clothe the naked.

God didn’t tell me “Stop writing” but neither did He say “Keep going.” He said, “Be still.”

So in returning and rest, I follow Jesus, and I learn to bring my whole self—not just my head—into communion with Him. It is not scalable, nor even really shareable. But it’s all that matters.

I hope you're happy

Have you seen those “I met my younger self for coffee” reels? They’re based off a poem by Jennae Cecilia, from her book Deep In My Feels, but they kind of took on a life of their own a few weeks ago, as viral trends do. I didn’t make one, but I saw them from nearly every influencer, brand, or business owner in my feed. In all the ones I saw, the predictable pattern was an older, wiser, less anxious “self” showing up to comfort a scattered and scared younger one, who was eminently grateful for the hug, tears, and pep talk.

The question that kept popping into mind for me was, “Doesn’t anyone have a younger self who is disappointed in what their future self has become?” (Or am I the only one whose younger self was a jerk?)

If I met my 21-year-old self for coffee today, she’d be so uncomfortable I think she’d clam up and refuse to speak to me, or—more likely—nod along with me agreeably while inwardly screaming “ARE YOU TELLING ME WE TURNED INTO A HERETIC?!”

I know her so well, but she doesn’t know me at all. She can’t fathom the changes wrought by heartbreak, sleep deprivation, or depression—the chipping away and continual molding of marriage, motherhood, and parenting. In her worldview there is no circumstance in which exiting her evangelical world and returning to liturgy makes sense; there is no universe in which questioning complementarian theology (let alone rejecting it) is anything short of a moral failure. There is certainly no space in her imagination for a day when she would contemplate the legitimacy of baptizing infants, chuckle a bit at the timeline of the end-times she drew in the back of her study Bible, or—God forbid!—sit in pews with people whose beliefs are varied and unknown to her, and haven’t been screened out by a lengthy “statement of faith” on the church website.

If she found out she would one day be the topic of concerned whispers by the elder board or disappointed remarks by mentors and friends, I think she’d have crawled into a hole and died (maybe after shaking me violently and screaming “HOW DARE YOU TURN INTO THIS?! HOW DARE YOU RUIN MY LIFE?!”).

But I hope she would be able to find, somewhere inside, the piece of her that was always there—compassionate and thoughtful and not-quite-a-clean-fit to the world she was trying so hard to fit into. I hope, like Glinda at the end of Wicked, she’d find some capacity to say, “I hope you’re happy”—even if she couldn’t imagine following me off the ledge.

Because that’s what I’d say to her. I don’t want to scold her, or rush her, or talk down to her about her narrow thinking and fear of the opinions of others. There’s so much life in between, so much of God’s slow and patient cultivation. If I spook her now I could interrupt it all.

So—I do. I hope she’s happy. I know she was, in many ways. But I know now there’s a certain depth of flavor missing from happiness when it hasn’t yet been seasoned with sorrow.

I wish I could tell her not to be afraid when things change, life hurts, and people hurt most of all. I wish I could tell her not to flinch when she hears the voices saying, “Look at her! She’s wicked! Get her!” But I can’t, she’s not ready. I’m not even ready—I still flinch at the thought of the labels they’d give me now.

All I can do is reassure her that the road she’s on still leads to Jesus, even if it’s lonelier sometimes. Her delight in the Scriptures and desire to share their wisdom with others won’t change, and in fact will only expand and deepen as she follows the guidance of the Spirit. The God she has known since childhood will prove Himself changeless and trustworthy, and He will provide gifts of reassurance that He is not simply waiting on high for her to screw something up—that His character is always to have mercy.

And I’d try to tell her that she’ll find God only gets bigger and more beautiful the more she explores Him and gazes upon Him—even when the path that leads “further up and further in” makes some turns she won’t see coming, some risks she doesn’t quite want to take but also can’t resist. She will taste freedom and never want to go back.

So, to my 21-year-old self, the one who would be deeply disappointed in me: I hope you’re happy, my friend.

I know I am.