The Wonder Report: April 24, 2026

Being of Use to the World

Apr 24, 2026

Happy Friday!

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?

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.

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