Earlier this week, after listening to me describe how things have been going since our last time together, my spiritual director commented that it seemed that I had come through winter and am now experiencing a spiritual spring. I liked the very familiar imagery, and it felt comforting to have in internal reality so closely match the outside season. That doesn’t always happen.

The comment also made me curious … what is happening in my life that is fostering and sustaining this sense of newness and growth? And how can I remain open to God’s work in my life through this lighter season, as well as the heavier ones? These are questions I’m sitting with lately.

These questions also are accompanying me in my exploration of culture creation. Thanks for joining me for the last of these conversations on the topic, though I suspect I’ll be thinking about it for months, even years, to come.

Here we go!

Forty Days in the Desert

During an unusually low-key day recently, a Wednesday when I didn’t work and actually had time to make dinner (and enjoyed doing so), I felt like I should be more relaxed and energized. Instead, I was keenly aware of the hum of worry that had been growing in recent weeks.

I could point a finger at the general upheaval in the world. On a good day, I keep up on the news a little too much, but add in immigration raids, mid-term elections, a wobbling economy, and now a war, and my need for news has become obsessive. Then there’s the looming state and local tax reform that will deeply impact my work as a librarian, and may even bring it to an abrupt halt. Plus the normal challenges of middle age and the maybe-a-little-too-thorough healthcare providers that want to run “just one more test,” which means I’m left waiting for just one more result. Throw in parenting young adults, with all the high stakes decisions and opportunities they are wading through, and my unease seems perfectly reasonable. Expected even.

Except I don’t want to be a person who is constantly reacting to what’s thrown at me. I don’t want to be a person whose spiritual life rocks up and down with the times. I don’t want my internal peace to depend on world peace—whatever that actually means these days.

The Bible talks about a kind of soul-deep peace that comes to us through our relationship with Jesus: a peace from and with God, a peace to and with other people, a peace that casts aside fear, a peace which “surpasses all comprehension” (Phil. 4:7). This peace comes from our God, who is called “our refuge and strength a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1), and from Jesus, the “Lord of Peace” (2 Thes. 3:16), and from the Holy Spirit, our comforter whose fruit in our lives produces, among other things, peace (Gal. 5:22). To access this peace, we find lots of instructions: be still, cast your cares on him, pray, forgive, encourage one another, and many more. Romans 14:19 seems to tie it all together simply: “So then we pursue the things which make for peace and the building up of one another.”

So peace, the kind of soul-peace many of us crave, is available and waiting. But what does this have to do with creating culture?

::

In times of personal or cultural upheaval, when making sense of the world feels essential and listening and joining in on cultural conversations, non-negotiable, we will be incapable of any kind of meaningful contribution unless we first take a step back and attend to something even more needful: “To be of any use to the world in these times, we have to practice the spiritual disciplines that make us different from the world” (Crouch, p. 279).

There are plenty of people who are reacting in fear and responding with outrage. The power grabs and manipulation are just part of the landscape now. What if instead, when some asks, “What do you think about this issue?” we respond, as Crouch has suggested “Well, why don’t I take forty days in the desert and then let you know?” (a particularly interesting response since we are still just a few weeks away from Lent). In other words, Crouch is inviting us to know and be with Jesus—not just as another identity we try on but as a deep reality of who we are in Him—as a prerequite to engaging with the cultural issues of the day. Otherwise, Crouch says, when we react and respond to what’s going on around us, we’re simply “recapitulating, reinforcing, and accelerating existing things” (Crouch, p. 281). We’re also risking our own spiritual health in the process.

I love the way Kari Leibowitz says it in her book How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, Or Difficult Days: “Cultural change happens when people change” (p. 257). Here, Leibowitz is hinting at the ways subtle shifts in mindset about winter can change how an entire culture feels, thinks, and acts. But I’m suggesting something different, something deeper. Rather than changing ourselves first so we can then change culture, what if we put ourselves in places and create for ourselves habits and practices that allow us to be changed by God? And what if, as we allow him to make in us the kind of mindset changes he desires, we become the kind of culture creators who can truly make a difference, who are of great use to the world?

Beyond the spiritual disciplines that form us into the kind of people who can create and change culture, we can also approach our culture creating activities as a kind of spiritual discipline of their own, redeeming our callings to create good work that glorifies God and continues to form us in his image. We write, we paint, we drive, we prosecute, we legislate, we orchestrate as an offering to the one who created us, who called us to create, who himself is a Culture Creator of the highest order. We create to be blessing. We create because “somebody has got to create our culture for the next 50 years and I want it to be you.”

::

There’s a paradox at the center of all this: we desire peace, which is what compels us to try to make sense of the world in the first place. But we can’t really make sense of the world—at least not in a way that benefits the world and doesn’t harm us in the process—until we have peace.

We need peace before we can work toward peace? Huh?

Yet, as I see it, the solution is as simple as it wondrous: true peace comes from God. When we rest in him as the “author and perfecter of faith” (Heb. 12:2), when we understand that he is “before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col. 1: 17), we can look expectantly at our culture that is in such desperate need of repair to ask, confident in Him, “what is not even being thought here? What’s not being imagined here? And therefore what could be made here? Or what needs to be made here?” (Crouch, p. 280). We can take the risks of creating new things because He remains the same “yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

I wonder … do you struggle with worry? What kinds of things seem to keep you from experiencing deep peace? What spiritual disciplines are forming you? In what ways do you see your creative calling(s) as a kind of spiritual practice? How does God’s unchanging character give you confidence to take risks in your creative life?

Leave a comment

Works Cited

Crouch, Andy. Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling* (Expanded Edition). IVP Books 2023.

Leibowitz PhD, Kari. How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold Dark, or Difficult Days*. Penguin Life 2024.

Four Types of Christian Cultural Engagement

This article, “Four Types of Christian Cultural Engagement,” by Mere Orthodoxy’s Editor-in-Chief, Jake Meador, is a helpful primer on the ways many Christians are seeking to engage or create culture. I really like the way Meador highlights four “quadrants” based on intersecting spectrums to explain the various approaches. It made it easy to find myself among them, but also it helped to see the pitfalls and to understand the risks of the ways I personally engage culture. I hope this article will be helpful as you continue to consider this topic with me.

READ NOW

The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street

For a recent meeting of my book club for 2nd - 4th graders at the library, we read the first book in Karina Yan Glaser’s Vanderbeekers series: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street*. It’s a wonderful book about a family with five kids who live in a Harlem brownstone. The children have a Basset hound named Franz, a cat named George Washington, and a rabbit named Paganini. Their parents are loving and attentive, though the children also have lots of adventures on their own (the oldest children, twin girls, are 12 in the first book), made possible because of the tight-knit community of business owners, neighbors, and friends that live in the few blocks surrounding their home.

I am enamored by the book series, continuing to read books two through seven on my own even though we’re not talking about them in bookclub. And Glaser, who’s more recent book The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli* is a new favorite, has become someone I’d like to emulate as an author because of the gentle yet profound way her Christian faith influences her writing. In a 2022 New Times Times that Glaser did with another favorite author of mine, Tish Harrison Warren, I was particularly struck by this comment as it relates to the culture creation that Glaser is doing through her work.

Do you feel like you are writing a world that you know or a world as you would like it to be — a better world that you envision in your mind?

I think I do both. There are elements of the books that are very similar to our own lives, and there are elements that I want to model to my kids.

I also found this exchange very helpful in thinking about faith as an important part of her characters’ lives, just as it is for her own.

In your books, faith is not centered in the story but it’s not absent. I found that to be an intriguing creative choice to have faith in the background of these characters’ lives. Can you speak to that, and how you made those choices?

The Vanderbeeker family emulates my own family. And a big part of our family is our faith, so it felt very natural to include those moments in the books. The book isn’t all about it, but it incorporates it as part of family life. Faith instructs me as a mom and how I make decisions. Also, the things that we do to help others is often a reflection of our faith.

Check out the whole interview and consider reading one of Glaser’s books with a young person in your life (or on your own … I won’t tell!).

READ THE INTERVIEW

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

*These are affiliate links, and if you purchase books using these links, I will get a small commission from Bookshop.org, a platform that gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

In Bozeman, Mont., where my brother and his family live, they woke up to about five inches of snow yesterday, the most they’ve gotten at one time all winter. Not that it’s winter anymore, thankfully, and today here in central Indiana, I’ve enjoyed a sunny, 79 degree day off by visiting a local art museum with a friend and strolling through the gardens. The only word I can think of to adequately describe today is “delight.” I hope wherever you are, even if it’s in snowy Montana, that you have experienced some degree of delight today.

In this issue of The Wonder Report, I’m continuing a short series on culture creation. The world often feels upside down these days, and since culture creation at its simplest is really just about making sense of the world, then this seems like an important way for all of us to forge ahead during some steep uncertainty. Thank you for thinking about these things along with me.

Let’s get back to it!

The Courage to Jump In

When I was a young writer, I would take assignments from any source I could get: a church’s newsletter, a guest post on an individual’s blog, an online magazine. Sometimes, the recipient of my work would take it as it came, publish it, and give me credit. But increasingly, I sought out places where my work would be reviewed, edited, and made better by the input of others. Despite my desire for such input, in those early days I was still tender to the suggestions of editors, even the kind ones. (Perhaps I still am?) And as a personal essayist, my work was so, well, personal. Critique of the work felt like a criticism of my life, my choices, me.

That’s exactly how it felt when I wrote a very personal story about our family’s decision to move to a new house about a year and a half after my husband and I were married, a heart-wrenching decision to uproot him and his boys (now our boys) so I could feel more at home in a place of our own. In those paragraphs, I had revealed weaknesses, desires, even flaws which I had never told anyone. Essentially, I had shed the blood of my soul onto the page. Nevertheless, the editor, though sympathetic to my sacrifice, came back with a comment akin to this: the story is too small, unrelatable. “It’s just about you and your family,” he said. “Try connecting it to some artifact. I think that will break it open, make it more universal.”

At first I reeled at the suggestion. Of course it’s about me and my family, that’s what I write. But with a little time and a little reasonableness, I went back to the work. I thought about a collection of essays I had read recently by Rebecca Solnit called Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, and particularly the one about how our homemaking efforts often reveal our desire to be in control, or to at least control our own lives if not the lives of others. I waded into her words like an explorer mining for something valuable, something that would imbue greater meaning into my own words. Eventually, I struck gold. I wove Solnit’s bigger, more universal thoughts into the small story of my family and me. And after a few more rounds with a copy editor to finesse the prose, I found myself with something good and true: a new artifact I had made to help me make sense of the world.

I had created culture.

::

This is the beauty of creating culture: it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Culture creation contributes to a conversation, an ongoing exchange that happens over time and space. In that way, it’s “cumulative: our cultural products become part of the world that a future generation must make something of,” both literally, as in repurposing the resources and artifacts of others, and figuratively, as we seek to understand how the work of others helps us find our place in the world (Crouch, p. 26).

It’s this conversation with both living and dead culture creators that pushes us toward something beyond the small and personal. It invites us into a developing story, mutual meaning making, and maybe most importantly, a shared language.

In his 1979 essay, “The Specialization of Poetry,” farmer, poet, and philosopher Wendell Berry unpacks this concept even further. Culture making is not just aided by a connection with the work of others; it’s dependent on it. “Remove this sense of continuity,” he writes, “and we are left with the thoughtless present tense of machines” (p. 20) (A prescient comment in light of the present phenomenon of “AI slop.”) In this way, the past—even the recent past of contemporary artists, writers, and creators whose artifacts we engage with—”is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it” (Berry, p. 20).

Culture not only connects us to the past through this kind of cumulative conversation. To be part of a culture, artifacts need an audience, or other participants who will engage in the conversation. “Culture making requires shared goods,” writes Andy Crouch. “Only artifacts that leave the solitude of their inventors’ studios and imaginations can move the horizons of possibility and become the raw material of culture making” (Crouch, p. 40).

I can spend hours critiquing a play in my journal or perfecting an invention in my garage, and while both of those activities might satisfy my curiosity and contribute to my own well-being, they are not culture-making activities. And that’s okay. In his advice to young authors, poet and priest Malcolm Guite says that the unprocessed stuff of our lives might be important for us to write about, but it’s more the stuff of a journal rather than a cultural artifact.

But when an idea is ready to share, “I have to go from this particular to the universal,” Guite says. “There has to be something in me, which I’ve noticed because of a depth in me, which is then communicable to the other person, and I don’t have to explain it to them.” He goes on to say that the way this happens is through engaging with the artifacts of the past: In his case as a poet, “by loving and reading lots of poetry” and “by following Shakespeare’s advice where he says [in A Midsummer Night’s Dream] ‘Imagination bodies forth the form of things unknown. The poet’s pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy a local habitation and a name.’”

This is why a person may be a consumer of culture and not a creator, but the opposite is not true. It’s also why those who only consume and never create risk stunting or diminishing the cultures they are part of. They let the conversation falter.

::

I don’t know about you, but for me there’s a degree of comfort in knowing we never have to start from scratch when we are creating.

“There’s a sense in which all English literature is a reply to earlier English literature,” Guite says. We could say the same about music, film, art, even science and technology. He goes on: “People say, ‘Are you afraid of the blank page,’ and I say, ‘What blank page?’ There’s just a long conversation. And I listen to it long enough to have the temerity to jump in.”

As we consider our own call to culture creation, Guite has offered a two-pronged approach for us: listening first, then jumping in. The first seems to require discipline, patience, and humility: when our desire is to create, taking the time to first encounter the work of others can feel like shackles on our process. But I know this from its opposite, too. When I was in graduate school to become a librarian, all I had time to read were the articles and textbooks for my courses and research projects. My response to those artifacts was rich and detailed, but the writing I do here and in other places, writing that’s more personal and spiritual, dried up. Why? I was no longer listening in on the conversations that fed my writing. Without hearing what others were saying, I had little to offer from myself.

But culture creation doesn’t require only the discipline, patience and humility of listening. Eventually, it requires the courage, the temerity as Guite calls it, to jump in ourselves. To add to the conversation in whatever ways we can. As a writer, I related deeply to his idea that there is no “blank page.” I almost never begin drafting on a blank page (or blank screen). Instead, I start with the quotes, the anecdotes, the metaphors I’ve heard and connected with, and I type or paste them onto the page. This is what I’m responding to and exploring when it’s my turn to speak.

It shouldn’t go without saying that we won’t all contribute to the conversation of culture in the same way or to the same degree, of course. Just like any conversation in person, some will speak more and others less. Just like in those conversations, though, the volume or amount of someone’s contribution does not measure its worth.

Also, so that my examples as a writer don’t overshadow this discussion and make it seem that culture creation is just what one does with words, I look across the height and breadth of our culture and find musicians, engineers, chefs, programmers, biologists, sculptors, politicians, podcasters, knitters, video game designers, and so many other makers who have listened and jumped in to the ongoing conversations in their own fields and in the wider cultures they are part of.

At its core, there’s a certain hopefulness about being invited into culture creation. While our contributions may or may not contribute to potential cultural changes (hopefully for the good and possibly for the long-term), we ourselves are regularly shaped and formed and even transformed by the cultural work we do, and as a result, so are our families and our communities. That’s how the conversation continues.

I wonder … how are you contributing to the cultural conversation going on around you? In the culture of your family or your workplace? What about your community or even your state? In what ways do you listen first before you step in and create? How are you “adding something better to” the cultures you are part of?

Leave a comment

Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. “The Specialization of Poetry” in Standing by Words*. Counterpoint 1983.

Craig, Charity Singleton. “A House for Birds” in Curator Magazine, December 8, 2014. https://www.curatormagazine.com/charity-singleton/a-house-for-birds/

Crouch, Andy. Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling* (Expanded Edition). IVP Books 2023.

Trinity Forum Conversations. “On Epic Beginnings with Malcolm Guite.” Episode 132 Season 11. https://ttf.org/podcasts/episode-132-on-epic-beginnings-with-malcolm-guite/

Playing Bach on the Mandolin

Last Friday, my husband and I had the pleasure of attending a concert by Chris Thile, arguably the best mandolin player in the world. I knew just a little about him before the concert, mostly that he is one of the founding members of the band Nickel Creek. But from our second row seats, even a newcomer to the mandolin could see that Thile was doing something very special with it. What I particularly wanted to highlight here is Thile’s work on interpreting Bach for the mandolin (Bach seems to be an emerging theme in this series!). In other words, Thile is joining the cultural conversation Bach was part of 400 years earlier and is creating new artifacts and making new meaning of the world in the meantime.

Here are two videos you might enjoy. The first is an interview with Thile upon his acceptance as a MacArthur Fellow in 2012. The second is his arrangement of Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G Minor, BWV 1001 on the mandolin.

Standing By Words

“My standpoint here is defined by the assumption that no statement is complete or comprehensible in itself, that in order for a statement to be complete and comprehensible three conditions are required: 1. It must designate its object precisely. 2. its speaker must stand by it: must believe it, be accountable for it, be willing to act on it. 3. This relation of speaker, word, and object must be conventional; the community must know what it is.” – Wendell Berry in “Standing by Words”

In an age where words seem to function either as weapon or deception, either powerful or meaningless (and sometimes both at the same time), I deeply appreciate Wendell Berry’s essay, “Standing by Words” (from his book, also called Standing by Words*) and this quote particularly. He goes on to say that when we talk to people we encounter “in our ordinary dealings with each other, we take for granted that we cannot understand what is said if we cannot assume the accountability of the speaker, the accuracy of his speech, and mutual agreement on the structures of language and the meanings of words.” He believes, however, that we can no longer hold such basic expectations for language in the larger culture.

In his 1979 essay, Berry’s essay was primarily calling out the “specialized” language of academics and other institutional agents that he saw as “fundamentally impractical,” that did “not propose as an outcome any fidelity between words and speakers or words and things or words and acts.” In our day, I see two areas where the “fidelity” of language is equally at stake: the doublespeak of political, religious, and corporate leaders to justify actions that are otherwise unpopular and unthinkable, along with AI slop that produces language that is incoherent, decontextualized, and completely meaningless.

As we contemplate jumping into the ongoing conversation of culture creation, one of the first things we must do is rehabilitate language so that it can once again both carry meaning and be meaningful to those who use it.

I wonder … what do you think of Berry’s assumption about language? How much do you value precision, accountability, and agreed-upon definitions when you are communicating with others? How do you think these criteria would contribute to you joining the conversation of culture creation?

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

*These are affiliate links, and if you purchase books using these links, I will get a small commission from Bookshop.org, a platform that gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

We are in the first few days of Eastertide, and I am grateful for a season of hope and renewal after the 40 penitential days of Lent. It’s good to be reminded of our death, to be open to the ways that sin rupture our lives and our relationships, and to find ways to train ourselves to say “no” a little more. We need to remember the Good Friday reality that “sorrow and love flow mingled down.” But mine is always one of the loudest “alleluias” on Easter Sunday morning, knowing we can once again turn our focus toward the light and life of resurrection.

Among the many things being renewed this week is The Wonder Report. I’ve taken almost a year hiatus while I vacillated strongly between totally packing up shop and jumping in feet first to go all out. As usual, I’ve landed here today somewhere in between. I won’t bore you with another litany of reasons why writing is different for me now. Instead, I’ll commit again to show up as I can, always trying to honor your commitment of time and attention with what I offer here.

At the same time, this issue of The Wonder Report does offer a small glimpse into why the call to write just won’t let me go. I’m beginning a three-part series today on culture creation, which seems like a beautiful way to work back toward some true thoughts about wonder as one of the purest reactions we can have as we try to make sense of the world.

I’m glad you’re here! Let’s get started!

Somebody’s Got to Do It

We sat in the hushed sanctuary of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church listening to Bach’s Concerto in C Minor and his Simeon cantatas on Candlemas Sunday. Thankfully, the program included an English translation from the German so that we could follow along with the baritone, tenor, and bass parts. The music undulated between Aria and Recitativio, Allegro and Adagio.

These old pieces of music echoing off the tall gilded ceilings felt made for this moment, a sound and message of joy and hopefulness in a world filled with pain, disappointment, and death.

“I look forward to my death;

Ah, had it already come about.

Then I will escape the distress

That [had] bound me yet in the world.”

“An incomprehensible light fills the entire circuit of the earth.

There resounds powerfully far and wide

A most desired word of promise:

Who believes shall be saved.”

Though I was seated in a pew with my husband and friends from church, I didn’t take for granted that the audience in general shared my beliefs or understood the significance of these musical masterpieces celebrating the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple, also known as Candlemas. It was, after all, a public concert. We don’t attend St. Paul’s ourselves. And the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra is a civic musical group, not a religious one. Yet here we were, listening to the work of one of the world’s greatest composers, who four centuries earlier set his attention on a little-known passage in the Gospel of Luke to create a piece of music that would be performed and enjoyed for centuries.

What compels a person to compose and create like that? Did Bach have any idea at the time that he was creating something with such longevity? Who chooses what will last … and what will not? And who is creating our culture today?

Could it be me? Could it be you?

::

I’d had this idea of culture creation on my mind for a couple of weeks by then. It started when I was driving to work one morning listening to NPR. Host Steve Inskeep was interviewing Kristen Stewart from the blockbuster vampire series, “Twilight,” fame. Stewart recently embarked on a new creative endeavor as writer and director of the film adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology Of Water.

During the interview, Inskeep cut to a clip from the movie. Just as I was navigating a narrow corner of the County Road I take to work, the one that usually requires my full attention, I heard Jim Belushi, playing Ken Kesey, author of the counterculture classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, say this: “I want you all to be winners. I want you to be warriors. Somebody has got to create our culture for the next 50 years and I want it to be you.”

I doubt I’ll see Chronology of Water or read the memoir, for reasons I won’t elaborate on here. Even so, that one line from the movie has stuck with me for weeks. It has consolidated my many thoughts about the tension of being a consumer and a creator. It has reminded me that our creative callings, talents, and interests have value beyond the personal – whether we realize it or not. It has nudged me to think about the cultural creators I am influenced by, as well as those that seem to be weak or missing. And it’s pushed me to ask myself this: Should it be me? Should I be one of those people who create culture for our time?

Of course, this provocative movie line has also prompted me to ask more rudimentary questions too, like what is culture? And what does it actually mean to be a culture creator?

In the context of the movie, the main character was taking a writing class, and the instructor, Ken Kesey, was pushing the students to write masterfully and transformatively. As a writer, this encouragement felt tailored made for me, especially as a writer in transition, who has struggled to pursue her craft after several major life changes.

But however this idea might have landed with me personally, especially in this one important area of my life as a writer, it found purchase in my imagination beyond that. Take you, for instance, dear reader. What if, like Ken Kesey, I said this to you: “Somebody has got to create our culture for the next 50 years and I want it to be you.”

How does that land with you?

::

For me, the word culture often implies capital “C” Culture, as in high culture, the arts, opera, ballet, and of course those Bach cantatas we listened to on Candlemas. “They are so cultured!” we might say about New Yorkers or Parisians. Or culture might also encapsulate the language, clothing, foods, holidays, and traditions of other people from other places, like many of the vibrant immigrant cultures we celebrate on Lunar New Year or Carnivale or Cinco de Mayo. I rarely think of my own family’s turns of speech, special recipes, or handed down skills as a culture.

But it all counts. High culture, pop culture, immigrant culture, minority culture, dominant culture, rural culture, counterculture, urban culture, work culture, subculture, or whatever kind of culture we find ourselves part of. It all counts. All of us are participants in a culture–often many overlapping cultures. And in the modern world, it’s easier than ever to participate in culture digitally and even privately as consumers of culture. We watch, we listen, we like, we share.

We do not have to be satisfied with being only culture consumers, however. We also have the ability to be culture creators, too. The digital world makes that easier than ever, of course. In the days leading up to this year’s Grammy awards, I heard several news pieces about the role of TikTok in creating new musical stars. But you don’t have to win a Grammy to have created culture on TikTok. Culture is not just what human beings make in the world. In fact, “culture is not just what human beings make of the world” either (emphasis mine). Culture “is in fact part of the world that every new human being has to make something of” (Crouch, p. 25).

As a point of distinction, Andy Crouch, in his book Culture Making, insists that we don’t actually ever make culture. “We make omelets. We tell stories. We build hospitals. We pass laws” (Crouch, p. 28). In other words, we create cultural artifacts or goods that, over time, evolve into our culture. And these contributions themselves are never created in vacuum. Rather, they are created out of and for the culture or cultures we are part of. At their heart, these artifacts and goods create culture by revealing how artists and writers and makers of all kinds see the world, what they make of it, how it moves us individually and corporately.

But my interest in culture making does not rest only with my work as a writer. As a librarian, I have a specific calling to be a curator and caretaker of culture. In my profession, we gather these artifacts and goods together in a place, both physical and digital. We expend great energy to reach as far and as deep as possible so that our collections represent the widest swath of our overlapping historical and contemporary cultures. Specifically as a public librarian, we want our collection to be an evolving picture of the interests, beliefs, and ideas of those in our community. When a person comes to the library, we want them to see themselves there.

Ironically, as we work to collect culture for a community, we too become culture creators, pairing resources in new ways, inviting our members to read and respond, even welcoming culture makers to use our resources to create culture themselves.

::

I don’t have any delusions that the culture I create now will be available 400 years from now to audiences around the world like Bach’s Concerto in C Minor. But I also have determined that that kind of longevity represents a poor measure for the importance of being a culture creator with whatever gifts, talents, and resources I have. The world needs making sense of now as much as ever. Those of us who are paying attention have a mantle to take up. “Somebody has got to create our culture for the next 50 years and I want it to be you.” And me. Let’s do it together.

I wonder … how do you define culture? What role(s) do you play in the various cultures you are part of? Consumer, critic, curator, collector, creator? What scares you or confuses you about our wider culture in this moment? How are you making sense of that?

Leave a comment

In an effort to minimize the cognitive load of hypertexts within my essays, I’m going to try to offer minimal internal citation with fuller citations at the end. I don’t want my work to feel academic or inaccessible, but I also feel the strain of having endless opportunities for distraction. If you have an opinion about this format, let me know!

Works Cited

Crouch, Andy. Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Expanded Edition). IVP Books 2023.

Inskeep, Steve; Harrell, Phil; Depenbrock, Julie. “’I want to make tiny little movies that don’t seem tiny,’ says Kristen Stewart.” NPR Morning Edition Jan. 15, 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/15/nx-s1-5605461/chronology-of-water-film

Think about Culture Creation with me?

As I do a deep-dive into this idea of culture creation, I’m reading (and in some cases re-reading) several good books which have a lot to say about this topic. If you’d like to think through this topic for yourself or in conversation here at The Wonder Report, consider buying or borrowing some of these books:

• Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies by Marilyn McEntyre. Eerdmans Publishing Company 2009.

• Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life* by Makoto Fujimura. IVP Books 2017.

• Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Expanded Edition)* by Andy Crouch. IVP Books 2023.

Enduring Culture: Bach’s Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C Minor BWV 1060R

Here is a beautiful rendition of the Back Concerto for Oboe and Violin in C Minor (BWV 1060R) that my friends and I enjoyed several weeks ago.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

*These are affiliate links, and if you purchase books using these links, I will get a small commission from Bookshop.org, a platform that gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

We are in the final days of Eastertide, and our Easter decorations are still doing their good work of reminding of us of this season of resurrection and hope. And now, anticipation has heightened in our readings, our prayers, and our imaginations during this short 10-day period between Ascension Day and Pentecost as we “are waiting, praying and letting our desire intensify,” as Bobby Gross describes it. “We are waiting for the Spirit. We need his revelation of truth, his protection against spiritual darkness and how power for witness and service.”

On Sunday, when the Bishop was visiting our small congregation to confirm several new members, he reminded us that “God’s intention is that we would live in the power of the Spirit our whole lives.” While I’m not always sure what that means, I expect that we need look no further than our own acts of love, courage, and goodness—and those of our brothers and sisters—to see glimpses of that power. He’s at work even now!

In the installment of The Wonder Report, I want to focus a little more on what it means to do good … especially as it relates to the theme of time that we’ve been circling around for months.

Let’s wade in!

Ain't Much to Waste

Recently, I was reading one of Kate DiCamillo’s newest books, a fairy tale called The Puppets of Spelhorst*, as a possible pick for my elementary-age book club at the library. As the title implies, The Puppets of Spelhorst is a story about puppets. But as any book written by Kate DiCamillo implies, it’s about so much more, too. It’s about dreams and hopes and friendship. It’s about wonder, risk-taking, and love. And interestingly, as I found myself absorbed by the world of the girl, the boy, the king, the wolf, and the owl, I discovered it’s also a story about time and the opportunities it provides.

“Well. Nonsense coming and nonsense going,” Jane said. “Ain’t it just?”

There was a long silence in the blue room.

“I was thinking, though, about the time in between,” said Jane. “And how there ain’t that much of it to waste.”

And with those words, the character Jane, a real person in the story not a puppet, makes a choice—a big choice in her otherwise small life—and soon after the book ends with readers breathless about what that choice might mean for all the other characters in the story, especially for the puppets. And maybe even for the reader herself.

Because Jane is right: Time is precious. And the opportunities feel endless.

::

I’ve written so intermittently here over the past few months that you would be forgiven for not realizing there’s actually been a theme I’m exploring. It’s a theme I’ve thought a lot about over the past several years, and more intensely the past few months. That theme is time and how it shapes me and how I wrestle against it and what a gift it is. I’ve written about time-keeping as a spiritual practice, about the inevitability of time, and most recently about the limits of time. But today, in what I think is the last of this series, I want to explore the opportunities of time, or maybe better, time’s possibilities.

While the 24 hours we have each day, and the 365 days we have each year, and the 70 to 80 years we have in a lifetime can certainly feel like a constraint—especially as we use up the bulk of our days and the number left grows smaller than the number behind us—imagine all that can happen with the time! Think of all the ways we can spend and invest and use it for good … or squander or misuse or waste it, as Jane fears.

Say what you will about modern life, it’s certainly full of options. Just in my one small and inconsequential life, I’ve gotten married, helped raise three boys, cared for an aging parent, held dozens of jobs, taken hundreds of trips, written or contributed to half a dozen books, lived in numerous apartments and houses across many different cities and states. I’ve attended four colleges in addition to the two from which I actually earned degrees. And those are just the bigger things on the list.

But life isn’t just the sum of our big decisions. It’s about all the little decisions we make from one minute to the next too … decisions that hardly even feel like decisions because we have to do them one way or another. It’s all the hours I’ve spent cooking and eating by myself, with family, or with guests. It’s the hours I’ve spent walking and running for health, for pleasure, for transportation. It’s the hours spent writing at my desk alone, and the hours spent reading, which are more numerous still. It’s even the 30 minutes each morning and the 10 minutes each night I spend showering, brushing, washing, and changing.

When I look back on all these big and little choices, I stand behind most of them, recognizing them as the life I’ve built, one decision at a time. But there’s some regret hidden among them, too, as I remember … achingly … all the hours spent scrolling through my phone or watching shows I don’t really even like or worrying about possibilities and outcomes that never happen.

The regret of time wasted seems like it’s about time’s limitations, about how few minutes, days, and years we actually have and how precious that makes them. That’s what DiCamillo’s Jane seems to be saying too, “how there ain’t that much of it to waste.” But the more I consider the idea of wasting time, it’s got to be about more than just throwing away a few minutes here and there that I can never get back. And while it might also seem like wasting time is about wasting opportunity, I think there’s more to it than that, too. It’s about more than just trading a few minutes of television watching for a few minutes of exercise or doing the dishes. Though that might be a good trade for most people most days.

As I see it now, the real problem with wasting time is that it’s one of the few tools we have to counter evil in this world. And being careful to spend our time the way God wants us to—by doing all the things that reveal his goodness to the world around us—is one of the wisest things we can do. It’s why Paul cautions us in Ephesians 5:15-17 to “be careful how you walk, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil. So then do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.”

::

What is the will of the Lord, though? And how can we understand it?

While God’s will is surely to be sought in a career path, a potential spouse, the decision to become a parent, or a For Sale sign in the yard, there’s so much more to it than that. By appealing to “how we walk,” Paul seems to be saying that how we spend all our time (little “t”) is in the realm of God’s will for us that we must take care over and exercise wisdom. In every area of our lives where we have control—from the cross-cultural calling to the cross-bearing sacrifice of caregiving—these are the places where the good we do can triumph over the evil of the age. And once again, we find ourselves back to Annie Dillard’s insight that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And God cares about it all.

But to be clear, I do not think God is calling us simply to a better accounting of our time for the sake of efficiency or profitability. He’s not calling us to “work smarter not harder.” He’s not calling us to increase our influence or only do the things that will bring us greater likes or shares. In as much as these are the guiding principles of our age, these might even be part of the evil days Paul warns against. It’s too easy to float along with the current, even if it’s taking us in the wrong direction. Rather, by contrasting “making the most of our time” with the evil of “today” (whatever age that might mean for Paul’s readers), God is calling us in every epoch and in every season to think carefully about our time so we can use it for what is good.

Which of course begs the question: What is good? And what is good in my life now? How do the decisions of a day reflect that goodness that God is calling us to? What if the decisions we spend the most time on—decisions about the big stuff—are actually less important than discerning what is good and how we move toward it with our time?

In Psalm 37, David reflects deeply about goodness, especially since a look around made him think that evil was the real winner of the day. When David says (probably to himself as much as anyone), “Do not fret because of evildoers, be not envious toward wrongdoers,” I feel like he’s talking to me, too, right here in central Indiana in the year 2025. Because sometimes it feels like evil is the winner of the day from where I’m sitting, too.

It’s not enough just to stop our fretting and envy, though. David also paints a picture of what goodness truly looks like in a life with these rich, active verbs:

• trust in the Lord

• do good

• dwell in the land

• cultivate faithfulness

• delight yourself in the Lord

• commit your way to the Lord

• rest in the Lord

• wait patiently for Him

Of course it takes wisdom to figure out the specifics of doing good in each of our lives, and wisdom to recognize the evil in our days, too. It’s why Paul tells us to “walk, not as unwise people but as wise.” As we do, however, making the most of our time becomes a blessing rather than a burden. It’s constraints serve as conduits; our wrestling with time helps refine us. And perhaps most importantly, we discover that nothing is ever wasted, especially our time, when “the steps of a man are established by the Lord, And He delights in his way. When he falls, he will not be hurled headlong, because the Lord is the One who holds his hand.” (Psalm 37:23-24).

::

A train entered the staion with a great rumble.

Jane Twiddum smiled.

She stood. She looked down at the trunk.

“Well, then,” she said, “the moon and the stars and the sun and the great wide world are waiting for us, dearies. We should be off.”

I wonder … how do you decide how to spend your time? Do you ever feel time has been wasted? What is the evil that you are resisting in your life right now? What good do you feel God is calling you too?

Leave a comment

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s latest book, The Serviceberry*, is a wonderful reflection on the ethic of reciprocity and the idea of a gift economy. Wall Kimmerer uses the serviceberry, a tree known by many other names around the US, including shadbush, shadwood, juneberry, saskatoon, sugarplum, wild-plum, and chuckley pear, to talk about all the ways that sharing, giving, and receiving connect us to one another and help build communities in ways that financial transactions never can. The book refutes the scarcity mindset, the notion that we all have to fight for the little bit that’s ours, and builds on the idea of shared abundance, that there will always be enough when we take only what we need and share what we have with others. It’s an idea with echoes in Paul’s writing in 2 Corinthians 8:14: “at this present time your abundance will serve as assistance for their need, so that their abundance also may serve as assistance for your need, so that there may be equality.” If you’ve read and enjoyed Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World*, you’ll find a lot to enjoy in this book, too.

Women’s Devotional Bible: The Message

Several years ago, I was invited to participate in a large-scale writing project to create a women’s devotional Bible based on Eugene Peterson’s The Message. This project was a joy to work on, and after years of review and editing, it’s finally coming to fruition! The Women’s Devotional Bible: The Message* will officially be released by NavPress on August 5, and you can preorder a copy now. A shorter version of just the Gospels and their accompanying devotions also is available now*. An index in the back helps you locate which authors wrote which devotions. I’m excited to celebrate this project along with dozens of Christian women authors from around the world who contributed!

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

*These are affiliate links, and if you purchase books using these links, I will get a small commission from Bookshop.org, a platform that gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

It’s Good Friday, and I am grateful for another opportunity to consider anew the depth of Christ’s sacrifice and our great need of it. It was a gift to have the day off of work and an even greater gift to have had some quiet time to reflect and write here in this space. Thanks for joining me as I continue to work through the theme of time in its various forms.

Let’s get right to it!

The Burden of Humanity

I sit down at my computer, glance at the clock, and notice that the hour I had set aside to write has already dwindled to 15 minutes. Did those few minutes checking the news, the one last trip to the kitchen for a cup of tea, the text messages I needed to respond to, the email that required all the logging in and taking action, did they really rob me of time? Or did I relinquish those minutes willingly, robbed by my own lack of focus and self discipline?

This is at the heart of how I think of time: limited, restricted, easily squandered. Each part of my life vies for the minutes, the hours–a tug and pull of desires, needs, and priorities. Because I know, as deep as I go, that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing,” as Annie Dillard has famously written in The Writing Life*. And if we want a say in those things we are doing, then we need a schedule that “defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”

A schedule is life. That’s what Dillard is saying. And if you know me, you know I’m all in on that philosophy. I am nothing if not a meticulous scheduler, often scribbling my intentions by the hour, painstakingly fitting the pieces of life together like a puzzle so they will all fit. They have to fit. All of them. For what is our life if we are not doing the things we want, the things that matter?

On many weekends in our shared life together, I push my husband to the limits of his patience by creating a to-list so long we can’t possibly do it all and maintain our sanity. “What sanity?” I say. Steve has a different idea. He calls me a schedule crowder, and he’s right. If I have one hour, I’ll spend it four different ways before it even starts. There’s so much to do! So much life to live! And the only thing keeping us from it is a lack of a good schedule.

But behind the self-discipline of making the minutes count and good intentions of a schedule that allows everything to fit is a fitful resistance to the limits that time places on my life. It doesn’t matter to me that we are all allotted the same number of minutes and hours each day, that we all have the same opportunity to use or squander our time. Honestly, it wouldn’t matter if I got an extra hour each day, and extra day each week. My resistance to time circles around the fact that no matter how it’s measured, there’s always a limit to it. A limit that’s hard to accept.

::

The theme of limits has surfaced often during my Lenten reflections this year. I first noticed it as I was reading the account of Jesus’ wilderness temptations just after Ash Wednesday. As I read about Satan’s enticing offers of bread, glory, and immortality to a hungry and weary Jesus, I realized that what he was really offering was relief from the limits of Jesus’ incarnation. Follow me, Satan said, and you can be released from the burdens of humanity. Oh, that would have been tempting. At least for me.

But in his resistance, Jesus not only validated the provision, power, and plan of God to send his Son on a cosmic rescue mission, he also validated the worth and wonder of being human. Limits are part of the package. They reveal our creatureliness and ensure our dependence. They provide a context for our lives and situate us into a story. Limits offer us the who and the what, the when and the where that makes us who we are. If Jesus said “yes” to any of Satan’s temptations, not only would he have aligned himself with the Prince of the Air, he also would have betrayed the children of man.

Accepting our own limits has a similarly humanizing effect on us. When we recognize that we don’t have the time – or the energy, resources, or money, for that matter – to do everything we want whenever we want to do it, we accept the limits of being a person. Physically, we know we can’t do it all. Just stop by our house on a Friday evening after a busy week at the library. I am spent. But according to James Martin in The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, accepting our human limitations is also important to us spiritually: “it enables us to surrender to ultimate reliance on God, which leads to freedom” (p. 209) and “saves [us] from being a ‘human doing’ instead of a ‘human being’” (p. 210).

In her book, Reclaiming Quiet*, Sarah Clarkson writes about one of her young family’s favorite fall books, The Ox-Cart Man* by Donald Hall. Set in the Colonial era, the story is about a man and his family who gather up all their hand-made wares and farm-grown produce from throughout the past year to take to market early each fall. Clarkson writes about the litany of items the farmer brings to sell, along with the tools of his various trades that are purchased with his profits and carried back home for another year of family productivity.

Clarkson revels in her children’s love for The Ox-Cart Man because it is reminiscent of her own love for it as a child herself, when “the very same book held an almost enchanted hold over my imagination,” she writes. “That story kindled a deep sense of capability in me as I glimpsed a way of life that was fundamentally and lavishly creative even while drawing on the free things of the world: earth and seed, weather and dirt, hard work and goodwill” (p. 77).

But as an adult, Clarkson sees the extreme limits of such a life: “the marriage of the farmer and his family to this single piece of land, these few apple trees, this undulating field, these seasons, this house, this fellowship of blood and work” (p. 77-78). She recognizes these limits in her own life as a mom at home with young children. “I, too, live in a world of severe limit, but my ease within it is less complete. I am troubled by this book even as I taste its invitation,” she writes. “Each time I’ve read it this year … two questions have risen, urgent and wild: Could such a life be enough? Can I accept such limit? And I am dismayed in the slowness of my soul’s answering” (p. 78).

Asking myself the very same questions, I settle into a similar dismay.

Enough is a word I so seldom use.

::

Today, on Good Friday, after walking the stations of the cross this morning and enjoying a hearty brunch out afterwards, Steve and I visited the lush gardens of Newfields, the campus that includes the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It’s “peak tulip season” according to the marketing emails from the museum, and as is our habit most years, Steve and I were eager to visit for a meander through beds of colorful bulbs, copses of flowering trees, and the occasional gurgling brook and arching fountain.

As part of our annual spring visit to Newfields, Steve and I both snap tons of photos, kneeling down or leaning in for just the right shot of a tulip or hyacinth. We admire each other's perfect shots–and maybe even admire a few of our own–and since neither of us has much of a social media presence, we text the photos to friends and family so they can enjoy the beauty too. During today's outing, though, it struck me as ironic that we were going to such great lengths to document the vernal beauty on our smart phones when the whole point of going now, during peak tulip season, is because this is both a time-sensitive and fleeting unveiling. If the tulips were here all the time, we’d grow used to them. Probably ignore them. But because they are here for only a moment, a few days or weeks each spring, we cherish them, are in awe of them. That kind of wonder can never be documented in a photo.

I paused among the tulips to relish that truth for a moment, to breathe a little more deeply, to take it all in with my senses, not just my iPhone’s lenses. I looked around at the stunning fuschia and tangerine tulips. I marveled at the perfect magenta poppies and the exquisite red bleeding hearts. This won’t last, I thought. There’s a limit here that crashes into our reality. And I felt a little bit sad about that. But I also felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude, because nestled throughout those gardens was a beauty that can be anticipated but never scheduled. A hope that can be counted on but never forced into a crowded calendar. A wonder that can be felt but never captured.

That’s what makes it so amazing.

I wonder … how do you feel about the limits of time? Does the pace of your life attempt to defy those limits? Or do you easily accept them? Do you think accepting our limits makes us more human? How?

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Good Friday: Stations of the Cross Sonnets

As I’ve mentioned before, it’s my habit during Lent to spend a few minutes each Friday walking the stations of the cross at a beautiful outside garden in my community. For most Fridays, I reflect on the first 12 stations, but on Good Friday, I add the final two stations, where Jesus’ body is taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb. This year, I brought along Malcolm Guite’s Stations of the Cross sonnets as my companion, and it made the experience so rich. If you have time today, or anytime this weekend to listen, I commend these sonnets to you.

LISTEN NOW

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

*These are affiliate links, and if you purchase books using these links, I will get a small commission from Bookshop.org, a platform that gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

We are in the fullness of spring now, both its verdancy and its violence. The trees are heavy with blossoms now, even as thunderstorms and tornados ripped through our area earlier in the week. (Thankfully we only suffered minor damage to our roof, though we are praying for others who endured much worse.)

There’s much about spring that straddles the contradictions of life, the hope and dread that both propels us and holds us back. It’s into that contradiction that I am writing today, even as I flit about the edges of our ongoing conversation about time.

Let’s dive in!

The Green Days of Spring

In my work as a children’s librarian, I am preparing for a spring storytime next week, a tea party of sorts, with tiny cupcakes, real China teacups, and a harpist to strum beauty over us all. There will be bubbles and lollipops for the children to take home, and a craft project to color and glue, and of course, lots of books about spring (because what kind of librarian would I be without books?).

In anticipation of the event, I have read dozens of spring-themed picture books. Most of them begin with snow and darkness and end with daffodils, flowering trees, and dappled light. Some feature the activity of animals that seems to increase with the lengthening and warming of the days. Others highlight children, weary of the cold, drab days, who look for the signs that spring is coming. Most of them seem to circle in one way or another around the theme of “will spring ever actually get here?” I’ve asked that exact same question myself, especially now that we’re a few weeks past the spring equinox and I’ve still got the space heater running.

Thankfully, though, we’re finally in the green days of spring, when green rises over the earth like rays of sun. Green shards poke up from the ground. Green foam shrouds the trees and bushes. Green haze reflects in the swollen ponds. Green comes this time of year, and we cannot – wouldn’t even want to – stop it. Green comes, which means spring comes. And boy, have we been waiting for spring.

Interestingly, the green wave always comes as the days of Lent seem to stretch on and on. Despite Ash Wednesday’s message of memento mori (“remember you must die”), I find that the early days of Lent carry with them the pastel hint of spring coming, the hope that all will, indeed, be well. I always have the grandest intentions for Lent, penitential intentions in which my sins are confessed and repented and ultimately left behind, forgotten. But Lent is nothing if not a season to remind us how very present sin still is in the world and in our lives, a reminder of its own of how very much the coming Passion and Resurrection of Jesus is our only hope for this life and the next.

So it seems, that just about the time we are coming to terms, again, with the fact that this will not be the Lent when we finally put away sin for good, the mighty green wave comes, reaching into every thicket and knoll, every patch of grass and even the tiniest trees. We know there will still be the occasional dips below freezing, the nip of buds which may have sprung too early, the white frosts covering the bright green growth of the grass. We know spring will be over as quickly as it comes, haunted as we are, by the reality of the shadow of death we know is never far behind. But for a green, green moment, when spring does come, we feel its deep, deep relief.

::

If children’s picture books capture the impatience of a spring that seems to come much too slowly, the realities of middle age remind me of an inevitability about the seasons that’s deep and reassuring, especially when so much else in our world feels unexpected and unprecedented. A thousand times a day things don’t go as they should: The car won’t start. A child wakes up sick. The basement is flooded. The dog gets loose. The price of eggs goes up … again. A spouse walks out. The diagnosis is bad. Yet without fail, sometime in March the daffodils will bloom and the daylight hours will grow longer and the birds will start flitting about in pair. And we remember, again, that spring is not the only inevitability we can trust in.

“The earthly powers of kings and cities is dwarfed by the might of nature and even more feeble when compared to the power of Christ and wyrd,” writes Eleanor Parker in Winters of the World: A Journey Through the Anglo-Saxon Year*. Sometimes rendered as “fate,” this Old English word, wyrd, often has a more quotidian connotation, which Parker describes as “the inevitable forward movement of time.” In a culture that values youthfulness and living in the moment, there’s a certain harshness to wyrd, a stark reality that we’re not as much in control as we’d like. It stokes the nihilism of “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” It feeds the platitude that nothing good lasts forever. Inevitability, as it turns out, can lead to impotence, hopelessness, and inaction.

Yet there’s something more to wyrd, something below the surface that reminds us that this inevitability runs by design, it cycles on mercies that are new each morning, and it’s ordered by Love. Like the rising of the sun, the rotation of the earth, and the persistent seasons of the year, which we can’t control but “can observe them, describe them and come to understand the place they … occupy in the world,” writes Parker, so too, God’s invisible hand in the world and the light of his love operate in an inevitable and observable way. We can recognize their givenness. We can receive them gratefully. We can acknowledge them with the humility of our creatureliness. And even as we wrestle with time–try to squeeze it dry of every minute and fight against its incessant tyranny–we can find a much needed place of rest in this concept of wyrd. Its inevitability insinuates a predictability we long for. Its continuity points to an overseer we can trust. Even in its harshness we find an equity that seems lacking all around us.

::

The green days of spring remain in full force here in central Indiana, accompanied now by the blasts of white and pink, yellow and purple, that arise through the bursting of the bulbs buried deep in the soil and the birthing of blooms on trees that have sat in silent witness all winter.

But Easter is still two weeks away.

As I walked the stations of the cross again today (my Friday habit during Lent), I felt again the sadness of leaving Jesus still abandoned there on the cross in the 12th station. Sometimes it feels too heavy, this season of sitting with the harsh realities of the world and the deep suffering we all experience at one time or another. It just drags on, this season of looking honestly at ourselves, remembering why Jesus hung on a cross in the first place.

But whether we feel the itch of impatience or the dread of inevitability for what’s ahead, we can find a companion for these days whose name is Jesus. The creator of time–of sun and moon, seasons and days–subjected himself to the constraint of waiting and trembling. He humbled himself to the wyrd of a world he holds together by his very hands. If we feel an ache at leaving him there on the cross, how much more must he have felt the pain of his own abandonment. Yet he stayed there for us.

“Now that we know what we have—Jesus, this great High Priest with ready access to God—let’s not let it slip through our fingers. We don’t have a priest who is out of touch with our reality. He’s been through weakness and testing, experienced it all—all but the sin. So let’s walk right up to him and get what he is so ready to give. Take the mercy, accept the help” (Hebrews 4:14-16, The Message.)

I wonder … what is your typical posture about the future, impatience or inevitability? How does Jesus sit with you as you wait? In what ways are you currently anticipating Easter?

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Lenten Companions

This year for Lent, I have reading a few books that have become helpful and inviting companions during this penitential season. I wanted to share a brief word about each in case you might find them helpful in this season.

• Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention* by Sarah Clarkson. This is the first book of Clarkson’s I’ve read, so I came to it expecting the wrong things. I had thought it would be a book about setting aside my smart phone. Instead, I found a thoughtful and beautiful reflection on why my soul tends toward distraction in the first place. Clarkson is a writer who is both accessible and elevated in her prose. She’s understandable, but I wanted to reread each sentence because it was just so exquisitely constructed. I actually took the time to journal through the discussion questions at the end of each chapter, and that practice added richly to the reading of this book.

• Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God* by Bobby Gross. To be fair, this book has become my companion through all the seasons this year (did I mention this book last time?). But the themes Gross touches on for Lent—temptation, pride, prejudice, and possessions—have been especially helpful for self-reflection. I initially tried to read this book a chapter a week, since it’s organized by season and then week throughout the church year. However, each week’s reading includes deep and insightful reflections on five to six Bible passages, so now, I read one a day and spend time studying and reflecting in my journal.

• The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything by James Martin. I have been reading this book for six years! No joke. But the chapters on The Simple Life and Surrendering to the Future, which I’ve read over the past few weeks, couldn’t have been more timely. If you’ve ever been curious about Ignatian Spirituality, and practices like discernment, examen, contemplation, and more, this book might be a worthwhile read for you.

I wonder … what books have you been reading lately? Do you choose books specifically for the seasons? Have you ever read so slowly that you spend years reading one book?

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Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

*These are affiliate links, and if you purchase books using these links, I will get a small commission from Bookshop.org, a platform that gives independent bookstores tools to compete online and financial support to help them maintain their presence in local communities.

For as long as I can remember, the issue of time and how to make the most of it has been a struggle for me. I’ve been reading and considering the reasons more carefully for a while now, and I’d like to invite you into a conversation about the topic over the next several months. Today is a bit of a start in that direction with a few reflections on the liturgical calendar, specifically how it gives me sace to feel all my feelings and how it sets a pace of life for me that’s more attuned to the reality of being human.

Here we go!

Growing Season, or the Season of Disappointment

Three Sundays ago, I was with the kids during our church service, trying with little success to convince eight 2- through 9-year-olds to sit quietly on the green felt squares I had scattered around the floor. Some of the kids sat on the squares as intended, but some wadded them up beneath them, others used them like small blankets.

“Does anyone remember why our felt squares are green again this week?” I asked, trying to get their attention so we could start. We coordinate the colors of the felt squares with the table linens on the altar and the vestments the clergy wear based on the liturgical season. Purple for penitential seasons like Advent and Lent. White for Holy days. And green …

“Because it’s growing season?” one of the older girls guessed.

“Yes! It’s officially called ordinary time, but it’s a season of growth,” I said. “You’re exactly right.”

The little ones grew interested for about 15 seconds, and then they were back to using their felt squares as hats and even balls. So I left my explanation at that and dove into our lesson on Psalm 23. But as I did, I considered the idea of “growing season,” thinking how ironic it is that a season in the middle of winter might be represented by green and have anything to do with growth.

I could have lingered on the idea longer, if I hadn’t had children to tend to and a lesson to present. But later, as I reflected again about this idea of a growing season, I wondered how it might connect to what I’d always thought of these weeks after Christmas, what I often refer to as “the season of disappointment.” There’s always so much expectation leading up Christmas, and then there’s the let down … of gifts that don’t quite fit and food that doesn’t quite taste like mom’s, of candles that drip on the table cloth and beef tenderloin that sets off the smoke detectors. Then there’s the broken Joseph. This year, I knew the minute Joseph flew off the end table and crashed to the floor that this was going to be an especially disappointing post-Christmas season.

::

Advent hadn’t even begun when I decided that this was the year that I would update my Nativity set. For the past several Christmases, I’ve gratefully displayed Mom’s Willow Tree Nativity, a beautiful barn with some sheep, a donkey, and the majestic figures of Joseph holding a staff and Mary cradling the newborn King.

Mom gave me the cherished set before she died, in the years when displaying it in her small room at the nursing home was not possible. Upon her offer to give the set to me, I insisted on only borrowing it “until you can use it again,” I’d said. I’m pretty sure we both knew that wasn’t going to happen.

I love the set’s simplicity with just the holy family and a few animals in the stable, but as I become more acquainted with the liturgical calendar, and we celebrate the incarnation not just for one day, but as a series of 12, preceded by Advent and followed by Epiphany, I’d begun to miss the other characters who were part of Christ’s birth narrative. I wanted shepherds to watch over their flocks during the weeks leading up to Christmas. I longed for wise men to travel from the East, arriving not on Christmas, but twelve days later on the feast of Epiphany. I thought more animals in the stable would better represent the lowly and not-so-quiet night that Jesus was born.

So, I got online, found the same vendor that Mom had ordered her nativity set from, and placed an order for the Three Wise Men and Shepherd and Animals sets, all 30 percent off with a coupon.

Within a few days, the wise men arrived, along with some cards and wrapping paper I purchased from the same company. But no shepherds. When I called to inquire, the representative acknowledged the mistake and agreed to send them right away. In the meantime, I discovered that the wise men, and soon the shepherds, were half the size I expected. After a little research, I discovered that Mom had purchased a special, oversized Nativity that included only the figures I had. The others I’d ordered this year were part of a smaller, and more complete, Nativity. So now I had tiny wise men, and soon would have tiny shepherds and animals, with an enormous Mary and Joseph towering over them. That wouldn’t do.

So, I got back online, ordered another smaller set of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus, and hoped against hope that they would arrive in time for Christmas.

The days ticked by. The shepherds showed up at our door just a day or two before our oldest son arrived home for the holidays. I checked on the rest of the order, and Mary and Joseph were still en route. By the time our second son arrived home with his wife, I’d put the wise men in the eastern-most room of the house to begin their journey, and the shepherds were, as they should be, watching their flocks on the end table. As for Mary and Joseph, a FedEx update told me they were still on their way, with a possible arrival date of December 23. I held out hope.

I was doing the final holiday baking during the mid-afternoon two days before Christmas when I heard our dog barking. This wasn’t her usual bark and stop, bark and stop to tell us a walker was passing by on the sidewalk or a bird was fluttering out of the tree in the front yard. This was the incessant barking of a delivery.

Mary and Joseph were here.

::

Because of complicated family dynamics and a slew of scheduling conflicts, our family of five gathers annually for a Christmas celebration on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. This year, all the boys were coming as usual, along with our new daughter-in-law, plus my father-in-law and my husband’s aunt and uncle from out of state. We would be a group of nine.

On Christmas Eve morning, the kids all arrived early and were helping with last minute breakfast prep. The cinnamon roles were just out of the oven. One son was cooking the bacon, another the scrambled eggs. The third was keeping us company while he enjoyed his coffee. The tree was twinkling. The table was set.

Steve was watching the door, hoping to avoid the ringing of the doorbell, which makes our dog even crazier than the arrival of the FedEx man. When our last few guests arrived, he was there to greet them. As they came in, coats were shed and laid on the chair in the office. Packages were piled around the tree, and pans were hauled into the kitchen. Hugs were given all around. There were compliments on the delicious smells and congratulations for the newlyweds. And of course, the dog was barking.

In all the hubbub, I’m not even sure how it happened. The swish of a coat being removed? The bump of an armload of presents? Or, as is most likely the case, a vigorous wag of Harper’s tail? However it happened, I heard the gasps and turned just in time to see Joseph and his staff lying on the floor, broken, after less than 24 hours in our home.

Disappointment filled my heart, though I willed myself not to cry. Despite all the holiday activity swirling around me, I stopped what I was doing and dug through the closet to find the super glue. Brunch could wait a few minutes: I needed—with an unexpected urgency on an otherwise shimmery holiday morning—to fix the holy father. It seemed like the least I could do under the circumstances.

In quick order, the repair was successful. I had reattached the staff and lined up the broken edges with little sign of the calamity. If you didn’t know he’d been broken, you wouldn’t know. But I did. As I set Joseph back with his family in the manger, I whispered to our son, the one who knew how eagerly I’d waited for their arrival: “What would Christmas be without a little disappointment, huh? Somehow, this just feels more like Christmas now.”

::

I used to feel guilty about the wave of disappointment that always follows Christmas. There was always so much emphasis on the “true meaning of Christmas” and “Keeping Christ in Christmas” and “It’s more about giving than receiving.” By letting myself feel less than ecstatic, I thought I was somehow being shallow or petty. But there are so many expectations to manage, too, in a season that’s known as “The most wonderful time of the year.” Not to mention the exhaustion and overwhelm, since the season also seems to be “the most busiest time of the year.” And for a lot of us, the rituals of the holiday set us squarely outside our skill sets and comfort zones. How is it possible to choose the best gifts for every person on our list and host the perfect gatherings with matching linens and candles that never drip and spend extended time with family we see only once a year and not feel a little broken ourselves by the time it’s all over?

In recent years, however, I’ve tried to let go of the feelings of guilt, and instead, have come to accept my perennial disappointment as a natural and expected reaction to a string of stressful, if not joyous, holiday events. You could even say that disappointment, along with the whole range of emotions we experience during particularly challenging seasons, are actually built into the annual cycle of seasons and holy days known as the church, or liturgical, calendar. A feature, not a bug.

Despite the name, this all-encompassing way of keeping time extends far beyond the church pews into our homes, neighborhoods, and even workplaces, inviting us to linger in the hard and holy places that sometimes get glossed over with twinkle lights and tinsel or Easter grass and chocolate bunnies. The penitential seasons of Advent and Lent, for instance, welcome us to into weeks of fasting and prayer, taking time to consider our frailties and faults long before we ever enter the celebration and abundance of Christmas and Easter. A string of three feasts commemorating the martyrdom of Stephen, John, and the Holy Innocents in the first few days of Christmas remind us how broken the world was — and still is — when Jesus arrived in the manger. And after 40 days of Lent, slowing down to consider the events of each of Jesus’ final days before the betrayal and terror of his crucifixion casts a pall over our souls that only the wonder and mystery of resurrection could ever hope to dispel.

So, with the 12 days of Christmas long behind us, we’re in ordinary time again—ordinary as in “ordinal” or counting time. But with the help of the children, I’ve started thinking of it more and more as growing season, even if the post-Christmas disappointment is still lingering a little and the cold, gray days of winter seem to mock the whole idea of growth. But I also know that this, too, shall pass because Lent is coming, and eventually Easter, and rest assured, “The nights of crying your eyes out [will once again] give way to days of laughter” (Psalm 30:5, The Message).

I wonder … Do you experience disappointment this time of year, a sort of let down after the busy holiday season compounded by the cold and darkness of winter? How do you weather it?

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The Human Pace of the Liturgical Calendar

Over the past few months since finishing grad school, and likely even before that — Since Mom died? Since I got married? Since my cancer diagnosis? Possibly since I was born? — I’ve struggled to know how to account for the time I’ve been given, to “number my days, that I may present to God a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90:12). How do I wrestle the life out of each minute so I can accomplish all I’ve been called to? How do I make the most of each 24-hour day I’ve been given? How do I measure the worth of a week, a season, a year, especially as the pace of life quickens and coalesce’s through technological integration, automation, and even artificial intelligence? To really pull off my plans for this “one wild and precious life,” as Mary Oliver described it, I’ve felt the pressure to sleep less, plan better, and accomplish more. And if I don’t take advantage of every possible tool and resource at my fingertips, it’s my loss.

What, then, should I make of this rhythm of time keeping known as the liturgical calendar that brings us again and again, year after year, back to the same old story, back to the same rituals and holy days, back to Jesus who’s born again in the manger, presented again at the temple, tempted again in the wilderness, praying again in the garden, dying again on the cross, and rising again from the tomb? And what do we make of this Jesus who’s waiting again and again and again for us to meet him there, to know him there, to slow down enough to be changed by him there?

As I’ve been looking for a way to jump off the ever-faster treadmill of modern life in exchange for a pace that feels right for me, that feels more human, I’ve come as close as ever to finding it here …

… in the days of penitence and waiting during Advent and Lent.

… in the darkness and terror of Holy Week, followed by a 50-day celebration (50 days!) of resurrection in Easter, dripping with all of the joys of spring.

… in the festivity of Christmas, when it’s not a one and done celebration and then onto Valentine’s Day, as the big box stores might have us believe, but lingers for 12 days and includes, wisely, its own opportunities for disappointment and grief.

… and especially during “growing season,” as the children call it, two extended times each year when we encounter the mysteries of our life of faith through the quotidian realities of every day—realities that test our patience, demand our attention, and truly make our lives count.

I don’t follow the liturgical calendar perfectly, though I’m grateful to be part of a church that listens to its rhythms and holds me back from the rush I’m tempted toward in every part of my life. And I certainly don’t follow the liturgical calendar as a religious requirement or at the expense of my relationship with Jesus, as I might once have assumed of others. Rather, I experience it as an acknowledgement that life’s griefs and joys and disappointments connect us to something bigger, to Someone greater. And over the years, it has become like a “map we carry in our hearts,” as James K.A. Smith writes in How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now, as an “attunement that calibrate[s] the spiritual timekeeping we carry in our bones.”

I wonder … how do you resist the temptation to let the speed of life get faster and faster? What habits or practices do you engage in to help you slow down?

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Resources about the Liturgical Calendar

Over the past couple of years, as I’ve been learning more about the benefits of observing the liturgical calendar and the ways it keeps me centered in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, several resources have stood out as particularly helpful. I’ll share three here:

• Sacred Seasons: A Family Guide to Center Your Year Around Jesus by Danielle Hitchen — This is a practical guide for integrating everyday life into the rhythm of the liturgical calendar. It also includes a brief history of the various seasons and festivals, activities for observing, and even recipes. I also really appreciate the notes and bibliography of this book, which has helped me progress in my own research.

• Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God by Bobby Gross — This book explores the seasons and their themes through meditations on various scripture passages, many taken from the Revised Common Lectionary. It’s divided into weekly chapters, so it can be used devotionally. This book also offers thorough introductions to each of the major seasons in the liturgical calendar that includes information about traditional practices and disciplines that are often observed during specific seasons.

• Hearthstone Fables by Kristin Haakenson, an artist, writer, and farmer in the Pacific Northwest. In this Substack, Haakenson offers creative support for seasonal, local, and liturgical living through her art and writing. She also explores the agrarian heritage of the church calendar, and how its ancient traditions can be weaved into our own lives & landscapes.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

Sometime last week, our new library janitor, I’ll call him Daniel, stopped by my desk to gather the trash. As he was about to walk away, he paused.

“I see you’ve got a picture of my brother,” he said pointing to the frame just behind me.

I paused for a second, clearly confused. I only met Daniel about nine weeks ago, and our interactions happen primarily around daily encounters involving the care for our building. I’d say I know him pretty well, given the circumstances, but not well enough to have a picture of him, much less his brother, on my desk.

What does he mean? I thought, turning around to see where he was pointing.

Then it hit me. In one of our first conversations, Daniel told me that he was in the U.S. Marine Corps when he was a young man, and I shared that I just happen to have a Marine in my family, too. When he saw the uniformed picture propped up on my desk, Daniel made the connection.

“Ah yes,” I said, handing the photo to him for a closer look. When he gave it back, he grabbed his phone and pulled up a snapshot of himself 45 years ago, dressed in his combat utility uniform, just back from Japan.

I don’t know how long ago Daniel was discharged from the military. I need to ask him. But the connection to others that his service created is deep and rich, extending over decades and generations, crossing barriers like race and gender, and creating a brotherhood only the few and the proud can really understand.

It’s the kind of connection I’ve been taking special notice of lately.

Early in the summer, we had a big church potluck dinner to celebrate the retirement of our vicar. We brought in tables and chairs to set up in our rented sanctuary, and each family contributed a crock pot, casserole dish, or cake pan filled with something delicious. As church potlucks often are, this one was abundant and entirely satisfying, with just enough desserts that a person could have a little taste of all of them. I know I did.

The following week, as I was helping set up before our Sunday service, one of the younger members of our congregation, a four-year-old I’ll call James, walked over to me and said: “Remember last week when we had a big feast?” He then went on to tell me about all the delicious food he had eaten, and since I had been there, too, I told him about my own favorites. At some point, we talked about a particular dish, I think it was sweet potatoes, that had marshmallows melted on top. And of course, that got him to thinking about s’mores. We agreed they are delicious.

Before long the service had started, and about 30 minutes into it … just about 35 minutes after James and I had been talking earlier … it was time for the Eucharist. I was helping to serve the cup, holding the chalice at a 45 degree angle for each person to dip their small wafer. When James walked up for his turn, before I could even catch a breath, James whispered, “Remember earlier when we were talking about s’mores?”

“I do remember that. I do,” I whispered back, as I crouched down on one knee and held out the cup to my little brother. “James, this is the Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation,” I said, as he dunked his wafer right in, popped it in his mouth, and headed back to his seat.

Somehow, these two moments feel connected to me, moments of shared experiences and shared memories and an openness to say out loud what brings us together. In a time of divisiveness and open hostility, these small encounters remind me what it means to be human, in the very best sense of that word. We don’t have to agree on every issue or have the same background or even know a person’s name to make connections, though that last one certainly helps. But we do have to open ourselves up a little so that the things we have in common create strong enough ties to bolster us against incorrect assumptions or ignorant biases. And we have to have the courage to say, “Yes, that’s how it is for me, too,” even if everything about the other person isn’t so recognizable or comfortable. Sometimes, it just takes the one thing in common for us to find a brother or sister staring back at us.

I wonder … what connections have you made with people recently? What similarities have you found with people who might otherwise be very different from you? How did it make you feel to be connected in that way?

“Why a stranger's hello can do more than just brighten your day”

I have love the research in this NPR article about the ways that “even the most casual contacts with strangers and acquaintances can be tremendously beneficial to our mental health.” According to several studies highlighted in the article, “the richer the mix of different relationships in people's daily conversations, the happier and more satisfied they felt.”

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“Betty’s Diner” by Carrie Newcomer

Singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer is a favorite in our family, and her song, “Betty’s Diner,” feels like the perfect musical version of what I’m trying to communicate in this newsletter. If you want to take a listen for free, you can find the song on the artist’s YouTube channel linked below. You can also read the lyrics here.

10 Years of On Being a Writer

As I’ve been making my way through a new season of life and discovering how to still be a writer, I thought of the book I co-wrote with Ann Kroeker back in 2014. We wrote On Being a Writer: Simple Habits for a Writing Life that Lasts for writers at all stages, but I particularly had writers like myself in mind, writers who want a long and sustainable writing life through all the stages of life. When I pulled my own copy of the book off the shelf, I discovered that it holds up in this new season. I also realized it’s been 10 years since we launched the book out into the world. Happy Anniversary, little book!

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

It’s been a long while since you last heard from me. I took a lengthy hiatus while I worked full-time and went to grad school full-time. I certainly missed this space to share and think together, and once I turned in the last class assignment, I turned my sights toward writing here again. But I’ve struggled to know where to start. So, based on the good advice of my spiritual director, I decided to start where I left off … and to write a little bit about how I’ve gotten to this new place in life.

So for now, we’ll just jump back in and sort out the particulars later. Here we go!

Planned Detours

During the summer construction season here in central Indiana, we often found that even our normal driving routes were disrupted with orange cones and white- and orange-striped barriers. A road on the way to Dad’s was closed as we headed to his 4th of July pool party. The road we take to the pharmacy and our favorite Mexican restaurant was barricaded for weeks. Recently, even the back way to work that I drive most days was suddenly closed, and instead of a right turn, I was forced to go left, hoping that my sense of direction would serve me well in getting to work on time. Thankfully, it did.

The last couple of years of my life have felt a little like summer road construction season. Shortly after my mom died in August 2021, I sensed God calling me to a new vocation, even after decades of working toward the professional writing career I was finally enjoying. As many of you will remember, after months of discernment, I enrolled in graduate school to pursue my Master’s of Information and Library Science degree, and I began a new job as a marketing assistant at my local public library. All after moving to a new home in a new town and seeing our youngest son leave the nest. It felt a lot like setting up orange cones and “Under Construction” signs all around my life, saying “no” and “not now” to everyone who braved this detour around my life.

Now, on the other side of earning my degree, which I finished in June, and beginning a position as a children’s librarian, which I began in January, the signs are down and the cones are gone, but the way forward doesn’t feel the same as it used to. Somehow, I thought that after working full-time and going to school full-time for two years, I’d just drop back into my old ways of doing things. The Saturday after I turned in my last graduate school project, I got out of bed early and made breakfast for my husband, Steve. When he came into the kitchen, I kissed him and said, “Hi, remember me?” as if I’d just returned from a long trip.

It’s not that I thought everything would be the same, especially since many of the circumstances of my life had changed. Before, I worked at home full-time, mostly by myself, with lots of focus and quiet. Now, I work 40 hours a week away from home in a very busy and bustling library. Before, if I forgot to pull something out of the freezer for dinner, I could just pop down from my upstairs home office and grab what I needed. Now, I’m often scrambling to figure out what to cook after being at the library all day. Before, I could start and end work whenever I wanted to, spending long leisurely mornings reading and praying. Now, I rush in to work early to get things ready for storytime or to feed the fish before my shift at the reference desk.

No, I knew things would be different.

But I guess I thought I’d be the same.

And I’m not.

Over the past two years, I’ve learned things and experienced things and suffered things and delighted in things that have changed me. I've developed new habits and made new friends and gone to new places that have formed me into someone different than I once was. I care about things I never used to care about. I use words the didn’t used to be part of my vocabulary. And God has used all of it to help me grow and change into someone new, someone different — maybe even someone better — just like the newly paved road with the reinforced shoulders that I drive to work on most days. The pain and inconvenience of construction season really paid off there, but growth and change always come at a price. Yes, what’s ahead is good and welcome, but what’s left behind needs to be grieved before I can move on, before I can find my way back.

So in a season where life has opened up a little, and there’s suddenly room at the end of most days, I’m still pressing pause and continuing to say “no” to a lot of things for a while. But here’s what I am doing: I’m taking more naps and walks. I’m reengaging in some better eating and exercise habits. I’m reconnecting with friends, going on hikes, and reading lots of great books — none of which have been assigned to me! In a phrase, I’m chasing wonder again. If anything will help me find my way back, it’s wonder.

Mostly, I’m asking God again and again: Who have you formed me to be in this new season? And quietly and slowly, he’s beginning to answer.

I wonder … what has happened in your life the past couple of years, both the big and little things? How have they changed you? Who has God formed you to be in this new season?

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A Blessing for When You’re Different Now

I love this blessing from Kate Bowler for when you’re different now than you used to be. It came into my inbox at just the right time as I’ve been sorting through all that’s changed and all the ways I’ve changed. I hope you can receive this blessing at the place you are now.

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How to Show Up for Your Grieving Friend

I didn’t stopped writing entirely over the past couple of years. In fact, an article I worked on for InTouch Ministries was recently published. It’s called, How to Show Up for Your Grieving Friend, and I wrote this one straight from my heart and my experiences, both as a griever and one who wants to help. I hope this might be a helpful resource for you, too.

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What to Expect from The Wonder Report

I’ll admit that I’m wading back into public writing with a little trepidation. I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to commit to it. I’m concerned about keeping my writing life separate from my day job. I’m uneasy with the way online writing can be twisted and weaponized.

Would it surprise you to know that I actually wrote most of this newsletter two months ago and then nearly hyperventilated at the thought of sending it out? It’s true. I’ve spent the past couple of months trying to discern where to go next. To be sending this out now is the result of a lot of prayer and listening.

Not to mention: Not only am I different after the past two years, Substack has changed considerably since I was a regular user here back in 2022. When I first started using this app, it was mostly a way to send out a few thoughts by email, have a conversation about them, and keep an archive of it all. Now it’s a full-fledged social platform, with functions and features I’m not even sure how to use. As someone who’s found my way off most social media the past two years … and lived to tell about it … the changes here feel overwhelming and unwieldy. And in some ways, unwelcome. So I’m not promising to jump in wholesale to this “new economic engine for culture.” I’m just here to chase wonder … with you. The more you can take what you find here offline, into your homes, communities, and in-person conversations, the more I’ll feel like my work here is succeeding. I hope we can talk more about this in the days to come.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. You can also leave a comment over on the Substack app. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

It’s been a few months since I last popped into your inbox or showed up on your Substack feed. While the extended break was unintended, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. For my second semester of graduate school, I doubled my course load but found that the amount of time needed to meet its demands more than tripled. I’ve been chasing my tale since January trying to account for the missing hours.

But as we finish up the month of March and prepare to enter Holy Week, I wanted to say “hi” and share a few thoughts from my Lenten experience this year. Let’s jump in!

A Practiced Faith

My life just doesn’t shimmer anymore, I explained to my spiritual director a few weeks ago. Nothing specific was wrong; I just felt depleted, uninspired, exhausted.

Since my dramatic shift last summer from caregiver and work-at-home freelance writer to graduate student with a full-time library marketing job, the rhythm of my life and structure of my days still feels foreign to me. My slow and leisurely morning routine of coffee, reading, and exercising has been compacted by the need to pack my lunch and race to the office. I now drink my coffee in a to-go cup, if that tells you anything. My practice of exploring creeks and trails in the evenings and weekends has been replaced by listening to lectures and working on class projects. We didn’t even buy a state park pass this year. And the sense of integration between each area of my life—almost to a fault for someone who spent all her personal, social and professional life at home—now feels disjointed and disconnected.

While I don’t regret my life’s changes—and in fact, I feel even more committed to this new calling from God—what’s missing is the sense of delight and wonder that often popped up in my everyday life. I miss the introspection required by my writing life to make sense of the things I read and saw and listened, too. And I long for the shimmer of a connected, considered life again, where epiphanies fell like the steady rains of late spring, nourishing my creative life and watering the work of God that grows in my soul.

Maybe you should try something different, my spiritual director advised, since the life-giving tasks of reading, writing, and reflecting are now delegated to my life as a student rather than creative and spiritual pursuits. Think about other ways you could connect with God during this season of life.

With Lent just around the corner, I considered how I could practice my faith differently during this season of preparation. As usual, I began Lent with better intentions than I’m ending with. My fasting plan was overly ambitious, my desire for reflection was often overtaken by the exhaustion of full-time work and graduate school, and my habit of slowly decorating the house for spring and then Easter fell by the wayside. If anything, I’m limping into Palm Sunday rather than riding in victoriously.

But there were a couple of bright spots, shimmering moments that felt surprising and healing.

At the beginning of Lent, I ordered Malcolm Guite’s Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter and have read it diligently throughout the Lenten season. Not only does Guite offer a poem a day—either his own or another poet’s—he also provides some reflections about each, specifically about how the poem relates to Lent and its traditional themes and practices. While I love poetry and have read it often throughout my life, normally I spend my reading time with novels or essays. The economy and intensity of words in poetry was exactly what I needed right now, though. I read each day’s poem first thing in the morning, and then read the poem again in the evening along with the reflection. It’s offered such a a significant boost to my spiritual life that I hope to continue the practice beyond Easter.

I also have walked (or at least prayed through, when the weather prevented me otherwise) the Stations of the Cross each Friday of Lent. While the Stations are not new to me—I’ve occasionally prayed through them with church groups on Good Friday in the past—I learned from Esau McCaulley’s Lent that some Christians use the Stations as a weekly Lenten practice. After doing a little online research, I discovered an outdoor Stations of the Cross path near the library where I work and have made it my habit to stop on my evening commute each Friday. It’s hard to overstate the depth of God’s work in my life through this practice; reflecting weekly on Jesus’s sacrifice and love on the Cross feels like a necessary new practice for me beyond Good Friday.

I’ve learned over the past few weeks that the shimmer I long for is not something I can manufacture or conjure, but it is something I can show up for. It’s something I can remain open to by being attentive and intentional. I call it a shimmer, but what I’m actually talking about is the moving of God’s Spirit through faith that’s practiced and lived out. It’s the work of God in our lives as we regularly drawing near to him in faith.

As Paul says, “Our lives are gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him” (2 Cor. 3:18, The Message).

May the grace of God shimmer through your lives during Holy Week and Eastertide.

I wonder … what do you call the feeling or experience of God’s palpable work in your life? How you foster it? How do you feel when it’s missing?

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More to Think About

• Stations of the Cross Resources

A couple of years ago, I put together a series of prayers and scripture readings, along with paintings by French artist James Tissot, as a Stations of the Cross reflective practice for Good Friday. Friends also shared these: Malcolm Guite’s audio readings of his own Stations of the Cross sonnets (scroll down for Stations 1-12) and these artistic meditations from Spiritual Director Deb Gregory. If you’re looking for a prayerful way to spend time reflecting on Good Friday, I commend all of these to you.

• “Libraries Aren’t Safe, but They Are Good”

As I work toward my Master of Library and Information Science degree, friends and acquaintances often bring up the ways libraries and librarians often end up in the news lately. I found this article from Christianity Today to be helpful to me as a Christian library professional and as a way to explain the importance of my calling to this field. Maybe this would be helpful to you, too?

• “To Reignite the Joy of Childhood, Learn to Live on 'Toddler Time'”

This article from NPR offered some helpful tips for living a slower, more intentional life. It also made some wonderful connections to James K.A. Smith’s How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now, which I still hope to write about sometime in the future. Here’s one nugget that especially caught my eye:

"We don't have a single perception of time," says Peter Tse, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College. "We have a perception of time in the moment — perceptual time, you might call that. And then you have how you regard time by looking through your memories."

"If you're paying attention, you're actually processing more units of information per unit of objective time," says Tse. And that makes time feel subjectively longer.

• The Poetry Reading by Ivan Gregorovitch Olinsky

It’s possible I’ve shared a picture of this painting before, but on a recent trip to the Indianapolis Art Museum at Newfields, I came across The Poetry Reading again and felt the same stirrings in my soul that happen with each viewing. There’s something about the closeness of these women (who appear as mother and daughter to me) and the significance of their reading together that makes me miss my own mom and want to keep reading with others.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I try to always respond.

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Until next time,
Charity

P.S. I fully expect there will be a next time, though I still can’t promise when or how often. Thank you for sticking with me!

The holiday season finally caught up with us, and over the past few days, we’ve been meeting ourselves coming. But even with the quickening pace, I’m doubling down on the final days of Advent waiting. What more can we do to prepare for Christmastide? What more can we do to prepare our hearts for our King’s return? That’s what I want to talk about this week.

Silent Night?

One of my favorite moments each day happens before I even change out of my pajamas. After feeding the dog and pouring myself a cup of coffee, I sit down with my Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Within in first two pages of the daily office, I recite the confession of sin, asking the Lord to forgive me for the things I have left undone that I ought to have done and the things I’ve done which I ought not to have done. And then comes my favorite part—this simple prayer of release:

Grant to your faithful people, merciful Lord, pardon and peace; that we may be cleansed from all our sins, and serve you with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

We know our world is a noisy place. According to acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, true silence hardly exists at all anymore. During his years of researching sound, he’s developed a “list of the last great quiet places,” which he defines as a place with a noise-free interval of only 15 minutes during daylight hours.

“At last count, here in the United States, there were only 12. None of them are protected,” Hempton says.

But in his study of noise and sound, Hempton has found that there is a difference between quiet and silence. Quiet is “not the absence of sound,” he says. Rather, he talks about quiet as the absence of the sounds of modern life, which typically can be found in nature’s wild habitats.

I’ve found the same thing to be true in my own experiences in the woods or the prairie, places I often go to quiet my spirit. It’s definitely not silent. The birds are singing and the squirrels are squeaking. The wind rustles through the tall grasses, and the river gurgles over the rocks. But even though it’s not silent, it’s quiet. Away from the noises of modern life, I begin to hear again—with my ears, but also with my heart and my mind.

I think this sense of quiet was what the author of the carol “Silent Night” had in mind. Of course the world wasn’t completely quiet that night. Bethlehem was no doubt humming, more crowded than usual with visitors piling in for the census. Even in the nearby fields, there were probably sheep and other livestock baaing and braying, with their shepherds and herders talking quietly. But over the hum of human and animal life, a heavenly peace had settled over them that night, a Peace swaddled in a blanket and lying in a manger. And the noise and chaos of sin had given way to an unexpected calm, brought to earth by love's pure Light.

As our lives grow noisier over the next few days, filled with parties and family visits and all the trappings of a busy holiday season, may you find a patch of unexpected calm for yourself, away from the sounds of modern life, where you can quiet your heart and mind before the Lord.

I wonder … how do you quiet yourself in a noisy world? Do you have a place where you block out the sounds of modern life? And this: what are the benefits of a quiet mind?

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O Antiphons

As we enter the final few days of Advent, the O Antiphon prayers offer a final appeal to our coming King to help us prepare ourselves for his arrival. According to the Church of England, the O Antiphons “are addressed to God, calling for him to come as teacher and deliverer, with a tapestry of scriptural titles and pictures that describe his saving work in Christ.” I’ve included the prayers and a Scripture passage for your daily meditation over the next few days.

• December 17 - O Sapientia: O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High, reaching from one end to the other, mightily and sweetly ordering all things: Come and teach us the way of prudence. (Ecclesiastes 24:3)

• December 18 - O Adonai: O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel, who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush and gave him the law on Sinai: Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm. (Exodus 3:2; 24:12)

• December 19 - O Radix Jesse: O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples; before you kings will shut their mouths, to you the nations will make their prayer: Come and deliver us, and delay no longer. (Isaiah 11:10; 45:14; 52:15; Romans 15:12)

• December 20 - O Clavis David: O Key of David and scepter of the House of Israel; you open and no one can shut; you shut and no one can open: Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. (Isaiah 22:22; 42:7)

• December 21 - O Oriens: O Morning Star, splendor of light eternal and sun of righteousness: Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. (Malachi 4.2)

• December 22 - O Rex Gentium: O King of the nations, and their desire, the cornerstone making both one: Come and save the human race, which you fashioned from clay. (Isaiah 28:16; Ephesians 2:14)

• December 23 - O Emmanuel: O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver, the hope of the nations and their Savior: Come and save us, O Lord our God. (Isaiah 7:14)

For Further Reflection

• The great Advent hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel, is based on the O Antiphons of Advent. I love this version from New Zealand singer and recording artist Anna Hawkins, filmed in Israel and sung in both Hebrew & English.

• In The Case for Silence, author Luke Burgis considers how society might be different if people stopped clamoring for more noise in their lives and instead took Blaise Pascal’s advice to “sit quietly in a room alone.”

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. This will be my last newsletter of the year, and I want to end this year by sincerely thanking you for sticking with me over the past several months! It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together. I look forward to doing more of the same in 2023!

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

My first semester of graduate school is under my belt, and I have to say, it feels great! It’s been 20 years since I was last a student, and I’m grateful to the Lord for helping me jump back in.

The day my class ended, we celebrated the Feast of St. Nicholas at church with a potluck dinner and a few carols. I’ve long known that the tradition of Santa Clause is based on the life of St. Nicholas, but I didn’t know that Nicholas was a bishop in Myra, a seaside city in what’s now the country of Turkey, and that he was part of the council of Nicea, defending the doctrine of the trinity against heretics. The Nicean Creed, which our church recites each week as part of the liturgy, emerged from that council in AD 325.

That little bit of history has added greatly to my experience of Advent this year, along with some continued reflections on nature, which I’ll share below.

Here we go!

All Is Calm

On an evening walk this past week, I found myself coaxing our 3-year-old chocolate Lab Harper along, the sidewalk even though she’s usually she’s the one pulling me. During this one stretch of the path, she seemed particularly interested in sniffing and smelling.

It was supposed to be a quick walk—I’d just gotten home from the library and Steve was finishing up a last minute project for work. Then we’d head out for some dinner. Plus it was getting dark. As midwinter approaches, with the shortening of days and dimming of light, I grow more fearful of being outside. As the minutes ticked by I felt my anxiety rising.

Finally, when Harper stopped for the eighth time, I stopped too. And noticed. Harper was pulling me toward the marshy area of the park, where tall reeds and grasses grow. In the summer, I often see red-winged blackbirds perching on cattails in that space. Even now, when all around the trees are empty and the grass is folding over, this little patch of nature, nestled among the paved parking lot, concrete sidewalks, and painted pickleball courts, feels whole, thriving. When I took it all in, I found myself breathing a little more deeply at the end of a hectic day.

When life feels difficult and chaotic, I often turn to nature to settle my soul. When I was quarantined at home during cancer treatment nearly 15 years ago, I dreamed of planting a garden. When I moved my mom into a nursing home a few years ago, I pulled open the curtains to look at the courtyard and saw a cardinal in the tree, and the sadness became a little more diluted. During the first Christmas of the COVID pandemic, I picked up pinecones and seed pods to decorate our Christmas tree, because the normal sparkling baubles just didn’t feel right. And last year, after Mom passed away, I spent hours walking through woods, working through grief in the only way I knew how.

Research confirms that time in nature, especially among trees, “promotes lower pulse rate, blood pressure and concentrations of cortisol–and greater parasympathetic, and lower sympathetic, nerve activity–than do city environments.” It also lowers “mood scores for ‘tension-anxiety,’ ‘anger-hostility,’ ‘fatigue-inertia,’ and ‘depression-dejection.’” But beyond the measurable levels of body function and the reported feelings of wellbeing or calm, science can’t really tell us why nature is so good for us.

I have an idea, though.

When we find ourselves among the oak trees and the chipmunks, the cattails and the red-winged blackbirds, we remember that we, too, are creatures, created as the masterpiece of our loving Creator God. But more than that, while the world around us seems to fall apart—and more each day—nature provides us with glimpses of transcendence, unexplainable beauty, reminders that all God’s creation will one day be set to rights, when Jesus comes again.

I love the words of the Prophet Isaiah, connecting creation with redemption, the work of our Creator God with the promise of the coming Messiah:

God’s Message: The God who created the cosmos, stretched out the skies, laid out the earth and all that grows from it, Who breathes life into earth’s people, makes them alive with his own life:

“I am God. I have called you to live right and well.
    I have taken responsibility for you, kept you safe.
I have set you among my people to bind them to me,
    and provided you as a lighthouse to the nations,
To make a start at bringing people into the open, into light:
    opening blind eyes,
    releasing prisoners from dungeons,
    emptying the dark prisons.
I am God. That’s my name.
    I don’t franchise my glory,
    don’t endorse the no-god idols.
Take note: The earlier predictions of judgment have been fulfilled.
    I’m announcing the new salvation work.
Before it bursts on the scene,
    I’m telling you all about it.”

— Isaiah 42:5-9, The Message

Then Isaiah tells us how all of creation will respond when Jesus’ final advent is complete:

“So you’ll go out in joy,
    you’ll be led into a whole and complete life.
The mountains and hills will lead the parade,
    bursting with song.
All the trees of the forest will join the procession,
    exuberant with applause.
No more thistles, but giant sequoias,
    no more thornbushes, but stately pines—
Monuments to me, to God,
    living and lasting evidence of God.

— Isaiah 55:12-13, The Message

I wonder … what do you experience when you encounter nature? How do these passages from Isaiah help you think about the role nature plays in the final coming of Jesus, for which we also wait during this season?

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For Further Reflection

• I love the hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter,” which is from the poem by the same name by Christina Rossi. You can find the lyrics here, and a particularly beautiful rendition by Keith and Krysten Gerry.

• I always appreciate the humor and insight of Margaret Renkl’s New York Times columns, and this one about collecting acorns felt especially appropriate this week. (I wonder … what role do you think we have, both collectively and as individuals, in caring for God’s creation?)

• I’m not sure exactly how this essay from Kate Bowler fits in this week’s issue, except to say that I believe it does. In The Roof Always Caves In Why there is nothing wrong with being doomed, Bowler pieces together how the inevitable difficulties of life draw us toward God and others, which feels exactly like a message for Advent.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report, albeit one that showed up on a Tuesday instead of a Friday. Thanks again for joining me! It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

As we ate the final Thanksgiving leftovers earlier this week, it dawned on me that Christmas is less than a month away and I hadn’t bought a single Christmas gift yet … hadn’t, in fact, even made my shopping list. In the last couple of days, I’ve remedied that situation, placing a few online orders and making a plan for pulling things together over the next couple of weeks. In some ways, Christmas shopping is a casualty of being a person who celebrates Advent. I just don’t think too much about Christmas until much later in December. On the other hand, Advent is all about preparing ourselves—our homes, our families, our bodies, our souls—for the holiday. In that way, even Christmas shopping can be a spiritual act in this season.

This week, I’m continuing my nature-inspired Advent reflections by writing about light and dark. I’m glad you’re here!

Darkness Comes

Since about the time daylight saving time ended in early November and the dark of night began arriving an hour earlier each evening, we pulled our curtains half-closed and that is where they still hang during these ever darkening days of December.

It’s counterintuitive in some ways, to partially block out what little light remains of these late autumn days. In summer, for instance, we open wide the curtains each morning, pulling them back as far as they’ll go to let the sunlight stream in for hours each day. But as winter approaches, it feels futile to resist the changing rhythms of light and dark.

The natural world actually takes its cues from the shortening of days. Long before fall temperatures cool, plants begin to adapt for winter because of the reduction of sunlight hours. Chlorophyll production slows down and eventually stops. Light also triggers migration among birds and is one of the cues for hibernation and brumation for mammals and amphibians.

Into these waning days of light, Advent arrives. Even as we approach the winter solstice and prepare for the year’s darkest day (in the northern hemisphere, at least), we are reminded anew of the bleakness of the world, of the darkness that blinds so many, of the great need for the Light that will give light to all.

Gayle Boss calls the timing of Advent “Christian tradition at its best, moving in step with creation.”

When the sun’s light and heat wane, the natural world lets lushness fall away. It strips down. All energy is directed to the essentials that ensure survival. Engaging in Advent’s stripping practices — fasting, giving away, praying — we tune into the rhythms humming in the cells of all creatures living in the northern hemisphere. We tune into our own essential rhythms. (from “All Creation Waits”)

Interestingly, while Advent begins in the ebbing light of fall, it ends on the other side of the year’s darkest day. About the time we place the baby Jesus in the creche each year, daylight is growing longer by as much as a minute a day. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

I wonder … how do you adapt to the changing light throughout the year? Does it affect your mood or spirit? Do you change your habits because of the changing light?

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A Winter Song

I heard the tentative song of a cardinal as I walked in the park today. I looked up and saw a female perched among the naked branches of a small tree. I almost missed her, her pale feathers blending in with the brown of the tree and gray of the sky. But the sweet notes of her song gave her away.

Cardinals don’t migrate in the winter, so the shortening days and the dropping temperatures portend the hard work of survival over the next few months. Somehow, knowing that she’s preparing for a hard season made her song that much sweeter.

I wonder … how do you bolster yourself for winter—practically, emotionally, spiritually? What song are you singing as you prepare for hard seasons ahead?

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For Further Reflection

• Victoria Emily Jones wrote about Rembrandt’s “Holy Family at Night” and the poignancy of chiaroscuro, the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, in her Advent, Day 6 reflection on Art & Theology.

• Does winter make you want to sleep more? Why don’t you, then? In this New York Times column by Tish Harrison Warren, she makes the case for a modified human hibernation. It might be just what your soul needs.

• If you regret that you weren’t more organized a month ago and bought yourself an Advent book to read through this season, then I’d like to recommend the resource I’m using: The Light Has Come. This packet of 25 illustrated prayer cards by David O. and Phaedra Taylor covers Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. There aren’t enough to do one every day, so there’s no pressure to have already started. And though there are a few date-specific ones, like the St. Nicholas card I’ll pull out next Tuesday on St. Nicholas Day, most could be used any day of the season. Plus the best news is that they are on sale at The Rabbit Room.

• Finally, I loved hearing the Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” sung in the Ojibwe language.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

We’re still stuffed to the gills with our Thanksgiving bounty and ever-so-grateful to be entering the season of Advent. It takes diligence in our culture to resist the earlier and earlier surge of Christmas momentum for a slower season of reflection and waiting, and we don’t always succeed. This year, I’m looking to nature for clues. I hope you’ll join me.

Fields and Floods, Rocks, Hills, and Plains

During a children’s program last week at the library where I work, someone asked the children what season it is. They all shouted: Winter! And no one corrected them.

Of course they could be forgiven for being wrong about the season, especially considering the temperatures had been dipping into the 20s and their parents were already bundling them up in their tiny parkas and tightly knitted stocking hats. But the calendar has us still firmly in autumn, with the winter solstice still a month away.

Experts call this the difference between the astronomical seasons—those based on the position of the earth relative to the sun, that change slightly each year—and the meteorological seasons—the ones based on historical temperatures changes and aligned with our months for better record keeping.

According to nature, though, the line between what has been and what’s to come is never drawn so starkly. How many times—despite our memories and ideals about the perfect spring day or the perfect winter afternoon—have our days been more of an amalgam of the seasons: hotter than usual, record-setting cold, snow in June, shirtsleeves in February? So often that we’re frequently left in the curious position of trying to figure out what to wear and whether to cancel or continue on with our plans.

We’re in a similarly curious position as we once again celebrate Advent. We wait anew for the birth of Jesus, though he long ago came to save the world. We long for him to return in the glory of his kingdom, even as we look around at a fiery sunset, the faces of our children, or the sacrificial love of friends and know that it has already come, at least in part.

In nature, we find this familiar tension between what is and what’s to come beyond just the changing seasons and alternating weather patterns. The Nicene Creed, which we recite each Sunday, reminds us that “through [Jesus] all things were made,” perfect and whole, though corrupted by sin. Then in Romans 8:19, we remember that all “creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” when “the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” As we wait again for Messiah, both as baby and as king, nature itself shares in our longing. Or as the hymn “Joy to the World” describes it, the “fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, repeat the sounding joy.”

I wonder … what is one sign from nature that you’ve noticed recently that might help you navigate the already/not yet of Advent?

For Further Reflection

• “All Creation Waits” by Gayle Boss offers a beautiful overview of the historical roots of Advent that were tied to the cycles of nature and the fears and hopes that come at the beginning of the dark season.

• The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris invite readers to reconnect with nature through art, poetry and wonder. The book is technically for children, but I am using it to help me wait this Advent season.

• “Making the House Ready for the Lord” by Mary Oliver invites all of creation to prepare the way for Jesus.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

P.S. I mentioned last week that I plan to write about Jamie Smith’s new book, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now. I decided to start that in earnest in the new year so that I can ease back into a regular writing practice with some reflections on nature and Advent. That will also give you time to buy and read the book if you’re interested in joining me.

If it felt like I fell off the face of the earth about six weeks ago … let me start by saying I’m sorry. Full-time work plus graduate school plus a couple of out-of-state trips left me with little time for this newsletter that I love so much. Then after a few weeks of just not showing up in your inbox, I began to wonder whether I should even write a newsletter anymore. There were also a couple of weeks where I considering ditching The Wonder Report for a new format altogether. Finally, after a weekend retreat with my fellow Redbud Writers Guild members, God showed me a path forward for my writing life that included continuing on here, only at a smaller scale and a more intermittent pace. Also, without trying to keep up with a paid subscription option or the latest in marketing funnels.

I won’t always show up with the same predictability or regularity I’ve offered in the past, which is a reality that’s been difficult for me to accept. But if you’re still open to hearing from me occasionally and conversing with me deeply and chasing wonder wherever we can find it, then I think I’ll just keep plodding on.

This week, I’d like to conclude my Livable Life series by reflecting on an important reality that had me waffling and reconsidering and ultimately ending up right back where I started: Adapting to new things takes time.

Let’s get started.

The Time It Takes

On Thursday, Steve and I raided the freezer searching for any little thing we could find that might satisfy a sweet craving. Sometimes I squirrel away extra cookies or a spare muffin, and we were desperate for something—anything—at the end of the day. I dug through freezer bags filled with leftover pulled pork and packages of sausage wrapped in white freezer paper. I found a small Tupperware bowl with vegetable soup, which will be perfect for a lunch next week, and I was happy to discover a bag of leftover brown rice that will help with dinner prep.

But then I hit the jackpot: a foil pan double wrapped in freezer bags.

“It’s Aunt Pat’s banana cake with caramel frosting!” I said. “I think you’ll like it. It’s so good. It was Mom’s favorite.”

“I’ll take it,” Steve said.

“But it’s frozen.”

“Who cares? It’s cake!”

Steve huddled next to me as I slowly unwrapped each layer of freezer bag and foil. The cake looked perfect. I grabbed a knife from the drawer and found it surprisingly easy to cut. When we each had a piece on a paper plate and were eating forkfuls covered in thick frosting, I tried to remember how long the cake had been in the freezer.

“I think it’s more than a year old,” I said, suddenly worried that it might have gone bad.

“It still tastes good,” Steve replied.

“And it’s not like there was any nutritional value to be lost anyway,” I added, taking another bite. Suddenly it hit me: “I think we’ve had this cake since before Mom died.”

I felt my breath catch and time collapse on itself. Mom was still alive when this cake was baked. It seemed like forever since I’d last held Mom’s hand and told her I loved her. So much has happened since she left us, so much of life I never thought would be possible without her. How could there still be cake from before then?

My hesitation wasn’t really about the cake, of course. It was about the months —and soon to be years—it’s taken to feel some level of normal without Mom. And I’m not there yet. When I put the cake in the freezer two summers ago, it seemed like a safeguard against losing her. If there’s still cake to eat, then maybe Mom can’t really be gone. But the freezer has powers that the rest of life lacks: the freezer can stop time. It can produce a perfectly delicious piece of cake 16 months after it was baked. Unfortunately, the rest of life just keeps on going. And the time it takes to adapt? Well, it takes as long as it takes. And sometimes it takes a painfully long time.

::

Last night, I dreamed that Steve and I moved into a home where I’d lived as a child. It was an A-frame house built into the side of a hill, with six acres of yard and woods to tickle the imagination of children and invite a sense of wonder even in the oldest adults.

In real life, the house held many charms: a connecting closet between the downstairs bedrooms, a storage closet in the upstairs balcony that became my playhouse, an upper loft in the point of the A that was my brother’s room. But it was also a dark and difficult place to call home: it’s where we lived when my parents divorced, when my grandmothers died, when my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer, when I once tried to run away from home.

In my dream, the house held just a many horrors. The real trickle of a creek that ran through the holler out the back porch when I lived there between the ages of 7 and 14, become a raging river in my dream. And the water was running through the house, too, creating puddles and streams along the walls and on the floor. Mom was there helping us move—Mom at the age she’d been when we actually lived there. And in that weird way of dreams, I was older than her now. When I reached out to her, she held me as I cried about the destruction of the house. Strangely, I felt she understood that I was crying about all the things that had devastated my childhood home, too.

Again, time collapsed on itself. It’s been the strangest part of grief: remembering Mom at all the ages she’d ever been. I spent my last few years as her caregiver grieving the losses of old age, but it’s only been in these last few months that I’ve remembered—and lost all over again—the Mom I’d known as a child and as a young adult. When I went back to work at age 51, I remembered Mom’s own return to the workforce in her 50s. When I think about parenting our sons now in their 20s, I remember that Mom was already mothering young adults in her 40s, a whole decade before me.

When I awoke from the dream, I felt the tender pain of grief again.

::

It’s not just adjusting to losses that takes time. All the changes that come to us—even the joyous additions of new jobs and new homes and even new babies—can throw us off-kilter and leave us wobbly and uneasy. When I was younger, I embraced the chaos of a constantly changing life. But in hindsight, what seemed like simple adaptation to a new place or a new role was really just a shallow expression of an unlivable life.

Now that I’m older, and the trails of my thoughts are more established and the grooves of my habits run more deeply, I find change takes more time for me. I can’t course correct as quickly. I have to sit with my options longer. I have to walk around with a decision for a while before I actually decide. Then, I have to give myself time to reconsider, too. Often, my first choice is the right one, even if I have to try on others before I make it official.

Maybe this is the result of being older, or maybe it’s just part of learning how to really live. Because the time it takes for life to catch up to the changes—both those we welcome and those we do not—is the time it takes, even if that time feels longer than we’d like. It’s a way of understanding time that’s less about managing it or spending it, and more about ordering it and honoring it.

It’s the kind of time that the Bible often refers to as “the proper time” or “such a time” or Daniel’s “time, times, and half a time” (Dan. 12:7). It’s a time outside of chronology that can’t be counted or mastered. It’s the wisdom of learning to number our days aright, as Moses prayed (Ps. 90:12).

I wonder … what’s taking time in your life right now? How are you giving it time? What’s tempting you to rush through it? Have you ever given yourself too much time to adapt to change?

Keeping Time: Christ the King Sunday

Advent begins next Sunday, which seems completely impossible since we just celebrated the 4th of July. (At least that’s how it feels.) But even as we dust off our wreaths and order this year’s candles, first, we celebrate Christ the King Sunday tomorrow.

As someone who came to the church calendar later in life, I was always curious why we’d celebrate the reign of Christ in his Kingdom just one week before we’d begin our Advent waiting for the baby Jesus to be born incarnate. But then I learned that the church calendar is actually a perennial rehearsal of the life, ministry, death, resurrection, and reign of Jesus, with Christ the King Sunday actually falling at the end of the year and Advent beginning the new one.

Observing the church calendar, which sits askew of the Gregorian system we follow today, helps keep us aware that time is ordered differently in the Kingdom of God.

I wonder … do you follow along with the church calendar? Does your church? Has it benefited you spiritually? How?

Many Moons

I’m not sure why I’ve paid such close attention to the moon this year … maybe it’s the launch of Artemis that kept us waiting for months before it finally happened last week, or maybe it’s our gorgeous view of the night skies afforded by our new neighborhood. But for some reason, I’ve paid special attention this year to supermoons and the lunar eclipse and even the melodious names of the phases of the moon.

I love the connection that ancient cultures made between time and the moon, a connection that God ordained in the creation narrative when he said on the fourth day, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years” (Gen. 1:14). We still determine the date of Easter by marking the first Sunday after the full Moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox.

We don’t typically measure of our lives by the moon anymore, but by paying attention to the “lights in the sky,” we can orient ourselves to a different way of measuring time.

I wonder … do you pay attention to the moon? How does the night sky or other parts of creation help you to order your days?

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How to Inhabit Time

How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now is an important new book by James K. A. Smith. I’m in the middle of reading it now, but I already know that the next several issues of the Wonder Report will be oriented around Smith’s observations and thoughts about the ways we grapple with time. If you’d like to read along with me, I’d encourage you to pick up a copy at your local library or bookstore.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for sticking with me as I take the time I take to adjust to all the changes life has brought in the past several months. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

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Until next time,
Charity

We’re officially in my favorite month of the year. If the only thing October had going for it were its brilliant skies, I think I’d still like it best. But add to that the brisk air, the colorful leaves, all things pumpkin, … oh, and my birthday! Well let’s just say that I totally resonate with all those people who break out the famous L.M. Montgomery quote from Anne of Green Gables this time of year: “I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”

October is also a complicated month for me … 15 years ago this very day I first learned that I had an aggressive stage 4 cancer that cost me so much … and almost my life. Even as I embrace the joys and beauties of October, I can’t help but remember its griefs. It’s a month of birth, near death, and renewed life my doctors still don’t understand. It’s also a month where I tend to do my best soul searching: Who did God create me to be? What is my purpose? Why am I still here?

As you can see, I haven’t quite finished thinking about this theme of a livable life … will I ever be finished? I don’t know … but let’s dive back in for at least one more week.

Ready?

Be Careful What You Call Yourself

In the book I co-wrote with Ann Kroeker, On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life that Lasts*, the first chapter is called Identify. In it, Ann and I talk about important moments in our writing lives when we began calling ourselves “writers.” We also reflect on the connection between identifying as writers and doing the work. For me, the work came first—years of paid and volunteer writing for myself and others—before I ever thought of myself as, much less told anyone else I was, a writer.

For the past decade, though, being a writer has been an organizing principle in my life. Not only was writing my full-time job, it was also my favorite hobby, the way I made friends and professional connections, a way of thinking about the world. I often weighed choices and took on new obligations based on their impact on my writing life. Even the way I kept house, parented, and cared for my Mom during her final years were made possible because of my writing.

I am a writer. A writer is who I am. Or at least who I was.

Because now, though I still write as much as ever—as part of my job, for my graduate school course, here in this newsletter, and even on a couple of freelance projects I’ve continue with—I don’t really call myself a writer. Partly it’s because writing is no longer my primary job. When people ask what I “do,” I tell them I work at a library. It’s not only true; it’s a joy. I love my job and the people I work with. I also no longer organize my life around my writing. Now I have “work hours” and “vacation time.” When I make an appointment or schedule time off, I think about work meetings, homework assignments, and how much PTO I have available, not my writing works-in-progress.

But I’ve also quit calling myself a writer because I’ve recognized that “writer” became a limited identity I fashioned for myself rather than a reflection of all God made me to be. By thinking of myself so narrowly, I forgot about all the other parts of me that don’t fit so neatly into the writer package. You could even say that being a writer—or at least thinking of myself as one the way I did—made my life less livable.

::

In case you’re wondering, I still stand by everything I wrote in that first chapter of On Being a Writer. I think there are a lot of reasons for new (and even established) writers to take their writing lives seriously enough to claim the title. Telling someone, “I’m a writer,” can help a person see their work as important enough to commit time and resources to. It can bolster one’s courage and confidence to send work out to publishers. It can also help a person weather the rejections and failures that inevitably come.

But if any part of who we are becomes all of who we are—if being “writer” or “parent” or “boss” becomes the fullness of how we think about ourselves—we end up living an inauthentic life. And the surest way to know if we’ve overemphasized one part of our life to the detriment of all the rest is to have that part end or be taken away. If all we’ve been is “mom” and now the nest is empty, if all we’ve been is “boss” and now retirement has come, if all we’ve been is “writer” and now a new job pays the bills, and we’re not even sure who we are anymore, then the title was more than just something to put on a business card.

Now, we look in the mirror, and we’re not so sure who we’re seeing anymore.

::

That’s where I’ve been living the past few months. And it’s tempting—really tempting—to replace “writer” with a new job title or career plan. It would be very easy to organize my life around a new skill set or specialty. But then I’d just be back in the same boat: squeezing the fullness of all God made me to be into a tiny little, one-dimensional life.

Instead, I’m trying to remember what a multi-faceted life looks like. What it means to belong to God beyond what I do or how I spend my time. In fact, I want to think about what I do and how I spend my time based on all God has made me to be, not just how I make a living.

As someone who tends to “do” more than “be,” the writing life has been especially treacherous at times. After all, a creative life is always only as good as the next creation … the next essay, the next issue, the next book. So it may take me a while to see my life and myself as valuable apart from what I create. But to live a truly livable life, to honor God in all I do, I think it’s the only way.

I wonder … what do you call yourself? Are you ever tempted to think of yourself too narrowly by one part of who you are? How do you maintain a larger sense of self according to all that God created you to be?

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You Are Not Your Own

If you’ve been reading The Wonder Report since the early part of 2022, then the theme of a livable life may seem strangely familiar. I spent the first few months of the year writing about the theme of being human based on Alan Noble’s book, You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World*, which touches on similar topics. Noble’s work continues to be one of the most influential books I’ve read in years, and I'll admit I’m still thinking about it as I move into this new stage of life. I recently discovered that he has a Substack newsletter, which I’d like to commend for your reading list. The You Are Not Your Own Substack has a paid option, but like The Wonder Report, most of the posts are available for free.

Read More

A Less Livable Life

I can’t stop thinking about this recent article from NPR, “Personalities don't usually change quickly but they may have during the pandemic,” which explores the ways the COVID-19 pandemic left many of us less able to navigate life and relationships.

“The first year [of the pandemic] there was this real coming together,” says study author Angelina Sutin, an assistant professor of behavioral sciences and social medicine at the Florida State University College of Medicine. “But in the second year, with all of that support falling away and then the open hostility and social upheaval around restrictions ... all the collective good will that we had, we lost, and that might have been very significant for personality.”

Particularly, the later years of the pandemic left us with “declines in the traits that help us navigate social situations, trust others, think creatively, and act responsibly,” the article noted, all traits necessary for a livable life. Young adults were particularly affected, researchers said.

I wonder … how do you think you’ve changed in the past three years? Do you think you are more or less equipped to pursue a livable life?

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The Restoration of the Human

I’ve been noting with interest the many conversations and resources that are springing up around this notion that our humanity, that our viability as people, is somehow being diminished by modern life. To that end, Comment Magazine, a publication I’ve been following for years, has a new issue that explores the question, “What does it mean to be fully human?”

Anne Snyder’s editorial introduction on the topic was enough to convince me to subscribe for a year just so I’d have access to all the essays in this issue. You can read her thoughts online for free, but I wanted to leave you with this one passage that really sums up what we are facing:

“While there have always been threats to human beings fulfilling their plenitude, a new tsunami appears to be barreling toward the beach. The currents aren’t necessarily in sync, but they are merging: advances in biomedicine and artificial intelligence that are rushing past basic questions of human freedom; ideologies that essentialize individual uniqueness into group-based caricature; an instrumentalist culture that idolizes efficiency, productivity, and technique at the expense of persons and a transcendent telos; social media and its scaled-up distortions; coarsening language from leaders at the tippy-top; more time spent interacting with a screen than with people; temptations toward single narratives that essentialize, especially narratives of power. And then of course all the enduring sins of selfishness and hard-heartedness that can wreck the relationships that fashioned us in the first place.”

Read More

I wonder … if this is the world we’re living in, how do we still live full and meaningful lives in service to God and others?

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

Thank you to all who’ve grieved with me after the loss of my dog, Tilly. She was a good girl (most of the time!) and her absence is palpable. She never quite got used to me going to work each day — after I worked at home for the majority of her life. So before and after work each day, she was always right by my side. I’ve missed being able to reach down and scratch her ears or give her a kiss on the top of her head.

One thing about Tilly that I didn’t share last week is that she was my dog of hope. I first found out that Tilly needed a home just weeks after I said goodbye to my first black Lab, Precious. I also was just a couple of years out from a stage 4 cancer diagnosis and an even more recent recurrence. I wasn’t sure I should even get another dog with the precariousness of my health. But then a friend told me about a coworker who had black Lab puppies for sale, and the rest, I guess, is history. I brought Tilly home as an act of hope that I might live long enough to take care of her. And I did … for her whole life.

When I decided to write about her unexpected death last week, I forgot that I’d already typed out the title of the newsletter, A Livable Life, expecting to write about something else. It wasn’t until Saturday morning that I realized my mistake. When I went back in to change the title, though, I realized that the message of last week—that life unfolds before us in a kaleidoscope of pain, joy, suffering and hope—is actually part of what it means to lead a livable life. So instead of changing it, I simply added “Part 1” to the title. This week, we’ll continue with Part 2 … and who knows, there may even be a part 3 next week.

So let’s get right to it.

Viability

When I was a senior at Taylor University, I took a class called Contemporary Christian Belief. Part of the class was spent exploring the philosophical underpinnings of our faith in Jesus. But the majority of the time we explored how Christianity compared to other religions and philosophies. Particularly, we learned how to identify logical fallacies and to evaluate belief systems.

Among the many criteria we used to evaluate whether a worldview is true or not is the viability test: Is it livable? Practically speaking, the viability test simply asks whether a person could consistently follow all the teachings and principles of a belief system in contemporary life. If not, then it can’t be true.

We could probably have a good debate about how Christian belief does (or doesn’t) pass the viability test. (I happen to think it does.) But before we go too far down that path, I’d like us to apply the viability test to something a little less abstract: our regular, ordinary lives. Is it possible, with any consistency, to truly live the lives we’ve created for ourselves, lives filled with relationships, affiliations, and possessions; with multiple jobs, side gigs, and hobbies; complete with passions, opinions, and obsessions; not to mention a bevy of subscriptions, streaming services, and memberships; plus all our possessions, keepsakes, and treasures.

Or to say it more simply, is it possible to consistently live our own lives as we’ve constructed them? And more importantly, what are the consequences if we cannot?

These are questions I’ve been asking myself for a while now, but especially the past four months when several personal and career changes have given me the opportunity to reconfigure the shape of my life. In some ways, this season has been one of continual loss, as I set aside the work, rituals, and even the relationships that have been part of my life over the past 10 years. Of course I’ve also taken on new roles, habits, and relationships, but in receiving my new circumstances primarily as limitations—what I’ve had to leave behind—the pendulum has swung too far. I’ve scaled back too much. I’ve trimmed away too many things. For life to be viable at this point, I need to add some things back in.

Strangely, the things I miss the most are not the things I gave my life to over the length of my career: the hustle, the deadlines, the accomplishments. If anything, I miss a version of me that used to want those things, but not the things themselves. Rather, the absent things that are making life feel unlivable right now are actually those habits of beauty I turned to in my grief last year, in the days and months after I lost Mom. Things like spending time outside, painting and drawing, reading good fiction, baking pies and cakes, journaling about nature, giving myself extra space and time just to be. These were the gifts God used to keep me from falling and eventually to bring some measure of healing to my life. I went without them for years, before grief brought them back to me, but now that I’ve had them again, life feels unlivable without them.

To have these things again means more loss. While a livable life isn’t measured only by limits, they exist nonetheless. With only so much time in a day, I can’t possibly do it all. There’s nothing viable about that. But perhaps the thing that makes this life the most livable is that in the midst of it, I keep learning. I keep listening. I keep hearing from God how to tweak and trim and turn in a new direction.

Ultimately, following Him is what makes a life truly livable. And oh, how I want to truly live.

I wonder … does your life pass the viability test? What do you need to remove to make it more livable? What do you need to add?

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Enough Is Enough

This recent article from the LA Times captures at least one part of what it means to lead a livable life. It’s about actor and director Jonah Hill, who has announced that he will no longer do live publicity appearances related to his work because they cause him to have anxiety attacks.

On the one hand, this article is about a slow but needed correction in our culture to acknowledge and care for people’s mental health as much as we do their physical health. But deeper than that, this article seems to be about the decisions we often need to make in order for life to be more viable, more sustainable.

Hill acknowledges that not everyone is in a position to make choices like his. I feel the same way about my own life: I live in a place where art and nature and time are available to me, at a cost I’m capable of paying. At the same time, I think many of us have the opportunity to say no to some things in our lives that would make room for better yes’s. It’s up to us to figure out what those are.

Read the Article

I wonder … what do you think about Hill’s decision? Are there things you need to say no to, even things that might otherwise feel like nonnegotiables, in order for your life to feel more livable?

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Rule of Life

A practical way to ensure our lives are truly livable is to develop a Rule of Life. A Rule of Life is an ancient practice that establishes guidelines for what we will add and what we will remove from our lives to most fully live the way God intends for us. It includes spiritual rituals, like Bible reading and prayer, but also other kinds of habits that ensure we are in right relationship with the people, places, and practices that make us who we are.

I have a Rule of Life that is now completely obsolete, since I haven’t taken the time to update it in several months. It’s one of the things I need to make time for in the near future. If you’re interested in developing your own Rule of Life, here are a few resources to get you started:

• Writing a Rule of Life: A Timeless Tool for Decision-Making by Tsh Oxenreider for Public Discourse, January 13, 2021

• There’s No Such Thing as Time Management by Jen Pollock Michel for Christianity Today, December 29, 2021

• Writing a Rule of Life by Jen Pollock Michel on Substack, August 15, 2022

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

You may have noticed that I didn’t show up in your inbox last Friday despite my best intentions. But honestly, it was an unrealistic hope at best. I typically write these letters on Sunday mornings now—under my new work/school schedule—and knowing we were arriving home late Saturday night after a tiring and emotional cross-country trip to celebrate with our youngest son, it really was unlikely I’d feel like writing. But then it got worse.

Sunday morning when we picked up our two dogs, Harper and Tilly, from where they were boarding, we found a very sick and dehydrated Tilly. A trip to the vet initially pointed to a microscopic parasite, so we dispensed medicines, cleaned up messes, and cared for her for a week and a half under that assumption. But when she still wasn’t better—and was actually worse—we returned to the vet to discover the worst possible news: Tilly had an aggressive cancer that was causing her symptoms and she was suffering more than we knew. Unfortunately, we had to say goodbye to her that evening, and we are so sad to have lost her.

I had still hoped to find the time and energy to write this Week’s Wonder report. There’s a topic I care very deeply about that I hoped we could discuss. But this is not the time. After the emotional whirlwind of the past three weeks, I need a chance to rest and recover. I need to catch my breath again.

This, too, is a wonder … that life unfolds before us in a kaleidoscope of pain, joy, suffering and hope. That despite all our efforts, there’s much to life we cannot control or predict or even stop. It just keeps coming. Yet somehow, in His love, through our faith God ushers us through it all.

“A bent reed He will not break off And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice” (Isa. 42:3).

We’ll pick up here next week.

I wonder … what joy and sadness are you holding together in your own life right now? How do you do it? How does God meet you in both?

Leave a comment

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

As I’m writing, it’s Labor Day Weekend here in the US, and for my husband and me, it’s also the start of a week of vacation, when we’ll finally get to see our youngest son after a summer apart. That means the past several days have been filled with anticipation. In many ways, those are the best kinds of day, when each completed task becomes a marker—one step closer to the goal.

Anticipation holds high value in my personal ethos. I like to plan and look forward to things ahead. It’s also a spiritual practice Jesus taught his disciples — in the Lord’s pray (“Thy kingdom come”) and in the sacrament of the eucharist (“I shall not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.”).

But anticipation also is something Jesus warned against, especially when anticipation turns to worry — “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matt. 6:34) — or pride, as in James 4:13-17.

One way I set boundaries over my anticipation is through the regular habit of examining my life, which helps root me in present realities, and reckon with both the good and bad of now. The examined life leads me to make observations and connections; it helps me see where God is at work in and around me; it heightens my own self-awareness. But there are pitfalls and dangers with the examined life, too, especially in our digital world.

So this is what we’ll talk about this week: the examined life. Let’s get started!

Hands On

For someone who’s never been accused of being athletic, I’ve had a surprising number of sports-related injuries this summer. Actually, now that I think about it, injuries are probably pretty common when a non-athletic person decides to play sports. But I digress.

The first injury happened during an evening of pickleball and cornhole with two of our sons. The games themselves can be mild enough … people of all ages play and enjoy both without injuring themselves. But in a competitive streak, I played hard and ended up with terrible knee pain. I limped around for a week or so, had a day where I felt better, then developed a painful cramp in my calf. Eventually, I went to the doctor.

The second injury happened less obviously. I had a slight pain in my foot while jogging one day, then the next day I felt the same pain when I walked a little farther than usual for work. After a few more days, all walking and standing was painful, and my foot was swollen and red at the end of each day. Eventually, I went to the doctor for that injury, too.

In both cases, the doctors ordered lab tests: an ultrasound of my leg and an Xray of my foot. In both cases, the findings on those tests were inconclusive. But that wasn’t the end of it. Instead, when each doctor did an examination— observing the swelling and bruising, touching the injured areas with their hands, asking me for a precise history of when the pain started and how it progressed—they were able to come up with a diagnosis and a treatment plan.

::

Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” referring to his method of interrogating his own beliefs, where questions lead to wisdom. Socrates supposedly uttered this phrase during a trial in which he was accused and found guilty of leading astray the youth who followed him though his “Socratic method.” In his own self-defense, he claimed that he would rather die guilty than give up his life of philosophical inquiry.

The Apostle Paul also talked a lot about the examined life throughout his letters to the early church. In Paul’s case, the examined life was less philosophical and more spiritual. In the Kingdom of God, the examined life helps us reflect on God’s work in us and in the world. Here are a few instances where Paul encouraged others to examine themselves:

• In 1 Corinthians 11:28, he says, “But a person must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup.”

• In 2 Corinthians 13:5, he tells his readers to “test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves! Or do you not recognize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you—unless indeed you fail the test?”

• In Galatians 6:4, he writes, “But each one must examine his own work, and then he will have reason for boasting, but to himself alone, and not to another.”

• 1 Thessalonians 5:21-22, he invites us to “examine everything” so that we can “hold firmly to that which is good, abstain from every form of evil.”

::

I am a person with an examined life. I regularly question myself, my beliefs, and my motives. I look for connections and interpret meaning out of what I see. I read widely and compare my own theological and philosophical beliefs against what I read, making adjustments when necessary. I’m always learning something new about how I exist in the world and where God is present. But what I’ve learned during the past couple of months—when I took an extended break from the personal writing that I do here and in other places—is that most of my self-examination is for the purpose of having something to write about, not necessarily to grow in self awareness so that I can love and serve God better. And when I’m not writing, I’m not all that good at examining myself either.

I don’t think writers alone are guilting of leading an examined life with the specific purpose of producing content. Social media has made content creators out of most of us. With the camera focused intently back on ourselves and with a platform inviting us to share our inmost thoughts, we have the appearance of heightened self-awareness, but the reality of self-centered performance. To paraphrase Socrates, the examined life that leads only to more reach or followers is not worth living.

The examined life that truly is worth living looks less like a mirror and more like a window. It’s less about the seemingly deep but one-dimensional x-ray, and more about the hands on evaluation informed by years of practice. The examined life may result in revelations worthy of an essay or newsletter, but it’s more suited for a personal journal, a private conversation, or a whispered prayer.

I wonder … do you live an examined life? How does it add to your personal satisfaction? How does it help you grow spiritually? Do you struggle to keep your examined life private rather than performative? Besides social media, what other areas tempt us to jump too quickly to share our self revelations?

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Tools for the Examined Life

There are many ways to examine oneself. The daily examen is an ancient practice of prayerful self-reflection that can help you look with both gratitude and repentance over your day. This outline from Intervarsity will help you use the practice as part of your spiritual journey.

Other frameworks of questioning can work just as well, even ones that may not appear as “spiritual.” For instance, the nature journaling expert John Muir Laws offers three prompts for people when they want to record their experiences in nature. I think these would work just as well when prayerfully examining of lives:

• “I notice …

• “I wonder …

• “It reminds me of …”

I also found another three-fold outline from Atlantic columnist Arthur Brooks, the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. In “The Meaning of Life Is Surprisingly Simple,” he makes the case that people who know their life’s meaning “enjoy greater well-being than those who don’t.” Citing psychologists Frank Martela and Michael F. Steger from The Journal of Positive Psychology, he offers these three ways of thinking about our lives:

• Where do I see coherence? or “how events fit together.”

• What is my purpose? or “the existence of goals and aims.”

• What is my significance? or “life’s inherent value.”

Whatever questions or prompts we use, when we commit our self-inquiry to the Lord, inviting him to make us grateful for all He’s given us, repentant for every sin, and open to his continued leading, the examined life becomes a Kingdom life, a life that fully and eternally worth living.

Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

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Until next time,
Charity

It’s been about two months since I last popped into your inbox, and I’ve missed our time together each Friday. For those of you who have newly subscribed this summer, I’m sorry for the delay in sending you the weekly content you signed up for. Over the past four months, my life has changed pretty dramatically, and by the end of June, I realized I needed to take a short break to give myself a chance to adjust. When I decided to hit pause on The Wonder Report, I had no idea when I’d be back. And I’m happy to say that today’s the day.

It’s been a great summer and a difficult summer, a summer of learning and relearning, of trying new things and learning to appreciate the old.

As a young adult, I changed jobs (and sometimes cities) every year or two, and found the transitions exhilarating. I liked exploring and meeting new people; my young brain was agile and eager to learn. I adapted quickly and found myself thriving in continual flux.

Now, as an older adult (I’ll turn 52 in October), change isn’t as easy, especially the dramatic kinds that have happened in the past 12 months. I lost my mom, whom I’d cared for for years following her stroke. My husband and I moved into a new house in a new town. Our youngest son graduated high school and almost immediately headed off to boot camp, leaving us with an empty nest. I wrapped up a 10-year freelance writing career and began a new full-time marketing assistant job at my local library. And just two weeks ago, I started a graduate program to pursue a master’s degree in library and information science. Oh, and I took up crocheting.

The changes have been dramatic enough, but the real challenge was creating new habits and rituals to support these changes. A week or two before beginning my new job, I realized that the way I carried out my freelance life over the past 10 years or so would be insufficient to support a life of going to an office five days a week. I needed new clothes and shoes. I needed new morning and nighttime routines. I needed a new meal plan for dinners. I needed a lunch box.

And now that I’ve added graduate school in the evenings, the needs have shifted yet again.

But even though I’ve lost slow, lazy mornings and the opportunity to meal prep between assignments in the afternoons, though I miss working alongside my husband in the home office and taking our dogs for their lunchtime walk, I’ve gained coworkers I admire and enjoy working with, a new opportunity to use my gifts and creativity, a profession that excites me and pulls together many of my experiences and interests, and the reminder that we’re never too old to have new experiences and develop new habits, especially when God is calling us to step into a new stretch of the path.

Oh, and I also gained a new trophy: I won the first cookie baking contest at work by baking up a batch of these King Arthur Gluten-Free Peanut Butter Cookies and popping a Hershey Kiss on top of them after they baked. These kinds of fun activities with fellow employees has been a balm to my soul after nearly a decade of professional loneliness working at home by myself.

So for now, my life has resumed a predictable enough structure that I feel comfortable stepping back into the habit of The Wonder Report, but I’ll admit I’m still not exactly sure what form or rhythm it may evolve into. I’m hopeful for a slightly condensed version every Friday, though it’s possible I’ll miss a week here and there if time gets especially tight. Mostly I look forward to reconnecting with you, to thinking together about what we’re reading and experiencing, about the art that inspires us, about the natural world that leaves us in awe, and about our faith in Jesus that helps us make sense of it all.

I wonder … what changes have happened in your life since we were last together? Have you won any trophies? Is your nest suddenly empty? Have you lost someone you love? I’m looking forward to catching up with you. Thanks for sticking with me while I took some time off!

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Writing Letters

I’ll admit that taking a break from The Wonder Report left me feeling a little bit like a failure. I wanted to be the kind of person that could keep all the balls in the air, even as new balls were being thrown at me. When I lamented this sense of failure to my friend Jenni, she offered me a different perspective. While I wasn’t writing in this space, I was actually doing some of the most important writing of my life: drafting letters to our son at bootcamp.

If you’ve never had a family member enlist in the military, you may not realize that during their initial basic training, they are removed from all the normal comforts and rhythms of life — including all phones, computers, and other forms of electronic or telephonic communication — and indoctrinated into the life of their military branch, battalion, and platoon. That means the only way we could communicate with our son for the past couple of months — our son who just graduated high school and had never really been a way from home — was through letters. So we spent many evenings this summer writing funny stories from home, copying quotes from his favorite author, and telling him how very proud we are of him. And when we got letters back from him, scribbled in the tiny margins of time his drill instructors gave him, it was the highlight of the week.

I wrote other letters this summer too: to my nephew when he graduated eighth grade, to my aunt during a health challenge, to a friend who was going through a hard time. The hardest letter I wrote was to my mom, on the first anniversary of her death. Of course that one won’t be delivered or read, but it was an important letter for me to write anyway.

This summer of letters reminded me why I’ve always loved to write and receive letters. And it also reminded me why I’ve always wanted this newsletter to feel less like a sales pitch or a highly polished publication and more like a letter from a friend. Whatever other changes may happen, that’s one aspect of The Wonder Report that will always stay the same.

I wonder … do you like to write or receive letters? What letters have you written recently? Who could you write to today who would love getting a letter from you?

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By the way, if you also like writing letters, you might be interested in Gracy Olmstead’s recent Substack about letter writing. Her August challenge is over, but her thoughts on letter writing are inspiring.

Asking Good Questions

On the June 23, 2022, episode of the On Being podcast, Krista Tippett talked with adrienne maree brown, an author and activist, who’s been described as “a student of change and of how groups change together,” which made her an interesting guide for my summer. Brown is known for asking great questions … of herself and others … and several really intriguing ones emerged while I was listening to the podcast.

• What are my most persistent spiritual practices?

• What am I moving toward? What am I moving away from?

• How does successful life function for me now?

• How can humans be in a better relationship with each other?

• What does it look like “to imagine a future where we all get to be there, not causing harm to each other, and experiencing abundance?”

• How do we “get in a right relationship with change that allows us to harness and shape things, towards community, towards liberation, towards justice?”

• What “unthinkable thought” am I willing to consider?

• “What time is it on the clock of the world?”

Because asking (and wrestling with) good questions is another thing that will never change about The Wonder Report, I hope we might be able to take some time in the coming weeks to consider some of these (and other) questions together.

I wonder … what questions are you asking yourself in this season? How are you going about answering them?

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Well, you’ve come to the end of another Wonder Report. Thanks again for joining me. It’s a privilege to share this space with you and to enter into these conversations together. I’ll close with a few photos of the summer: a recital and a road trip, a polo match and a pond full of water lilies, a new home for our small church and my first day of grad school.

As always, if you’d like to send me a note or ask a question, you can hit reply and end up in my inbox. Or you can also leave a comment on this newsletter, which will live in the archive over on Substack. I can’t always respond quickly, but I always respond.

Leave a comment

Until next time,
Charity

P.S. After writing that last paragraph above, I feel I owe some of you an apology for failing to respond to a few of your very kind messages when I announced I was taking some time off. While I normally do respond to every message, those arrived during an especially difficult time. I received each of them as a gift but was not able to respond. I’ll just say thank you and I’m sorry and I promise to try to do better in the future.