If this is your first time here, welcome! I’m on sabbatical for the month of May, but I have guest posts scheduled in my absence. Enjoy them and hope you’ll check out the archives as well!

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I am a church baby, raised on two Great Commandments (love God, love your neighbor) and on the Great Commission (go and make disciples), and I am still trying to figure out what it all means. I know this: my commission is not aggressive. My job is not to force entrance to homes so I can indoctrinate the inhabitants and tear down offensive idols. I am not an imperialist or a crusader. But I know this too: love is not timid or passive. God gave us action verbs. Go. Love. Make.

I am also a philosopher, and the philosopher has a Great Commission, too: question everything. Go ye, therefore, and ask. This was hard, the hardest thing I have ever done. I naturally incline toward tolerance and letting-be, but that’s not how philosophy works. Forget faint praise; in philosophy, there really is nothing more cutting than faint criticism. If philosophers refuse to discuss your ideas, you can kiss your academic career goodbye. If philosophers respect your ideas, on the other hand, prepare for argument.

It’s painful to be on the receiving end of that respect, of course. But it’s equally difficult to be the one paying this curious tribute to another person. You can’t just pull criticism out of thin air. First, you have to listen; then, you have to think; finally, you have to respond. And I know it’s hard to believe, but the point is not to destroy. The best philosophers ask because they want to know. Their questions are intended to help you articulate your ideas in the best way possible so that both of you can see what those ideas are really made of.

I’m learning that this kind of active listening is part of what it means to live love and to go forth, especially in an academic setting. Sometimes to love is to respect. And sometimes respect consists in this philosophical midwifery of ideas, this drawing of unclear thoughts into the light.

I’m not talking about a timid tolerance here. I’m not talking about a passive letting-be. I’m talking about iron selflessly sharpening iron, and I’m talking about letting your own agendas go while you put on someone else’s worldview and walk around in it and let them know—hey! it pinches here, and it’s pretty loose over here!, and have you ever thought about trying a different leather for the sole? And once you’ve done that, I’m suggesting letting someone try out your own view. Because this robust discipleship is not one-way—it’s not an invasive colonization of a foreign land. It’s a collaborative discovery of something we human beings were always intended to share: the truth for life, in life.

Will it be easy, this collaboration?

Ask the lover and his beloved. Ask the questioned and the questioner.

Is intimacy easy? Is it easy to speak clearly or to stop and listen thoughtfully?

And they will tell you, in the way of practiced lovers and philosophers, that the best way to find out is to simply begin, that before arriving at the fullness of the answer we have to live our way (inquisitively, deliberately, lovingly) through the questions.

If this is your first time here, welcome! I’m on sabbatical for the month of May, but I have guest posts scheduled in my absence. Enjoy them and hope you’ll check out the archives as well!

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Thom writes over at Everyday Liturgy, which is one of my favorite places to visit for, you guessed it, everyday liturgy. He teaches English at Nyack College and is the Senior Editor of Generate Magazine. He also writes for The Curator, The Englewood Review of Books and The Other Journal. I have loved reading everything I’ve read on his blog and sometimes his short morning liturgies stop me enough to help me coast for the rest of the day on his insights. 

If this is your first time here, welcome! I’m on sabbatical for the month of May, but I have guest posts scheduled in my absence. Enjoy them and hope you’ll check out the archives as well!

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Leigh writes about all sorts of things, from singleness, to starting over, to grieving, to baseball, and does it with an engaging presence and a hope-filled voice. I hope you enjoy what she has to say here today and that you’ll visit her blog! Oh, she’s in the process of finishing her first book, so that should be fun! 


Hope is breaking: My Hope bracelet, to be specific. After four months of daily wear, the leather cracks and stretches and begs for mercy. But I won’t take it off. It will stay on until it falls off. Until Hope reaches its limit and I must find a new way to carry the symbol with me.

The parallels did not escape me. I noticed a particularly worrisome crack in the bracelet the same day I sobbed over reading a friend’s pregnancy announcement on Facebook. I had reached my capacity when it came to rejoicing for others.

It wasn’t just that day. That whole week pummeled me. I couldn’t sleep, I canceled plans, I cried copiously. I avoided friends because it’s too hard to explain the swirl of emotions and because sometimes we need to deal with the root on our own.

Nothing triggered this dark period. Perhaps a pile of mini-triggers but there was no specific moment breaking the camel’s back. Every year or so I find myself in this Black Cave of Emotion. I’ve read this is common for my personality type (INFJ), which makes me feel only slightly better about my annual dark night of the soul.

I never know when it will happen until I’m in the middle of it. It’s not depression. More like a pervading sadness. It’s best to hunker down and see what my subconscious is trying to teach me. What are the lessons I need to learn? I am so used to listening to others that I sometimes forget to listen to myself. And eventually it all must be processed. This is how my body says when.

Of all that I face during these times, the hardest is residual self-esteem issues I’d thought long since resolved.

The lies astound me. They tap into whatever my current insecurities may be and because I’m depleted, I have little left to fight them. I resign myself to listening to the lies, to see if there’s a shred of truth. And in doing so, I remove their power over me. It’s no easy feat but I’m an old pro at these dark nights of the soul now. I know the storms will come and I’ve learned to ride the waves until they carry me.

It’s not pretty. I cannot romanticize this. It’s hard and I generally want it over yesterday so I can feel normal again. But that would be ignoring the gift of these dark periods- and there are gifts.

I emerge with a clearer sense of who I am and where I’m going. I realize which relationships require work, which might be time to let go, and which deserve a little more nurturing and care. I also carry myself more confidently because I’ve faced the lies and found them lacking.

Greatest of all, counter-intuitive though it may seem, the darkness teaches me to hope. Because through the tears and frustration, pinpricks of light accompanied me. I did not have to face any of this alone.

God spoke to me through song lyrics and book passages, TV shows and pictures, ever ready to counteract the abyss. I’d struggle with a friendship in one moment and then read a passage from Shauna Niequist’s Cold Tangerines that perfectly spoke to the situation. A lie would arise and an unprompted memory would surface, revealing truth.

And in those moments when I couldn’t do anything but cry or rage, I’d glance down at the bracelet on my wrist and remember. Hope. This dark night of the soul would not be the end of me. There’s purpose to our pain and disappointments, if we allow ourselves to see it.

No matter how tenuous my hope, it was there all the same. I may not know the outcome of certain situations or how my dreams will unfold. But I could not give up then and I won’t give up now.

This hard, hard thing reminds how tenacious I am when it comes to my dreams. I may have needed to curl up for awhile and regroup but I’ve come out of it stronger and more certain that life and adventure are there for the taking.

I’ll let my bracelet continue to stretch, just as I’ve been stretched the last few weeks. Though it will eventually break, I won’t.

No matter what comes next, Hope will carry me through. It can’t be broken. Not really.

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Guy is just a dad of three littles who has experienced deep, deep loss in the past few years. He writes about grace, patience, parenting, and grief in tangibles. One of the things I look for in blogs to read is a sense of the raw and Guy never fails. But I also look for a deep sense of hope and Guy presses on, faithfully, transparently, and gracefully. He is truly a life that has been changed by grace. Oh, and he just finished writing a book!

18 inches of trust.

If a tree falls in the forest, yet no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  Does the tree actually fall if no one stands in observation?  Is there a tree actually at all?

Does it even matter…at all?

A simple yes is as profound an answer as one could give.

It all matters.  

To say it doesn’t is neglect and most prideful.  We were not there, the moment not experienced.  Trees fall every day and they make sounds we may never hear.

Life is realized as we live it, but not defined by us.  It remains in front and all around, happening and in motion.  We tread heavy and dumb footed in life when all is made to be about us, our perception, our needs, our realities.  These act as filters straining truth through our experiences, our condition and predicament.

A falling tree.  
A burning bridge.  
A collapsing belief.

Yes, it all matters.  Not because we stand in observation validating truth and reality and giving just cause to all things happening, but because life is and God is.  What is, life and truth and God, stands resolute and resolved.  What I mean completely is that to reduce truth to a relative measurement is a rather fickle and unending endeavor.  The man pontificating, closing in on truth, his, rethinking again and circling.  Truth escapes with ease when all bets are off, all doors are open and nothing is tied down.

Meanwhile, life continues, always.

“Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

When we open our eyes in holy wonder, not hollow wander, we see Kingdom come, life as it sets and unfolds before us and Truth guides through thickening and thinning, and rising heights and depths descending.  Too often, and too quickly, our eyes mature to a point not seeing ahead into the unimaginable good.  Instead, they gaze fixed only on what can be made sensible.

Hands reach for what can be had, the allure of knowing and not needing.  No different than the first mistake made when truth bent in the hearing, ringing right and free causing exit to all that God provided in Eden.  The fruit of reaching, the yield of bending truth turns our back to simply trusting and living with sustained abandon.

In the distance between heart and head lies life living or dying.  Life measured in mere inches.  A man is made in the in between; the communication between what is heard and what is held on to.  Truth must sink from the surface, the head to heart.

The longest road a man must travel is the length shorter than one stride.  It is the 18 inches between the heart and the head.

And life mostly has to do with trust.

So often life is lost in those 18 inches.  Truth is maligned, abused in the desert distance guessing, shaped by home brewed half truths and composite philosophies.

Question everything and all doors open for exploring to an unending expanse.  Roaming wanderers hungry to know.  Knowledge, the satisfying treasure said to verify existence and settle seething hearts discontent with maybe.  But questions not tied into absolutes swing from empty to empty no matter how ornate.  What does it mean to intelligibly ask if all you do is shuffle in circles?  All is for naught.

Life must be accepted.
Question to find not to lose.  Look to have, not leave.

Trust is a journey both into oneself and out of the shifting wasteland of one’s life as center and end.

You are neither center or end in life.  Begin there and trust becomes a necessary result and normal activity in all facets of life.