It’s easy to get bored, to feel like life isn’t shaping up to be what you expected.

We look out and see the kinds of lives others appear to be living and we wonder why ours may not be quite what we want.

Perpetual Mid-Life Crises

Once upon a time there was a thing called a “mid-life crisis.” Perhaps you’re aware of this phenomenon. The stereotypical image that comes to mind for me when someone talks about a “mid-life crisis” is the 40-50-year-old man who buys a sports car, quits his job, leaves his family, or some combination of the three because he’s reached a point in his life and career that leaves him wondering if anything actually matters.

The reality is that men and women alike can experience mid-life crises, they can look wildly different for different people, and they don’t always happen in mid-life. But what they all do share is a common thread, a common feeling and posture.

Today, I think because of social media and our constant exposure to the millions of lives we could be living, we are always at risk of hitting what has formerly been called a “mid-life crisis.” I think the best way to describe this is simply as restlessness.

We’re a restless people, especially the younger ones of us. I see this in my peers. I see it on social media. I see it in my own heart.

Discontentment rules the day, and to give into it is culturally acceptable—chasing our dreams, being true to ourselves, and all that other self-aggrandizing, idolatrous foolishness we sling around as “inspiration.”

Restlessness in Vocation and Sanctification

Let me share a personal example of my own restlessness, specifically with regard to vocation.

I got married in 2013 after graduating with a degree in biblical literature and immediately went through seminary fully intending to go into full-time vocational ministry as soon as possible. I longed to pastor and intended to join a church staff as soon as I was done with seminary.

I graduated from seminary in 2017 and have never worked in full-time vocational ministry, like I had planned all along. Whenever I have stopped to dwell on this over the years, it has made me sad, no matter how content I may be with my current work.

This part of my life has not turned out like I planned, in part because of career decisions I’ve made and in part because the Lord has so graciously provided us with a local church we never want to leave. It’s hard to pursue a desire for vocational ministry when it means leaving the local church family you love!

I am hoping the Lord is preparing and softening my heart to fulfill this desire one day. I am sure I would have been a train wreck of a pastor in the last decade or so, and God has protected untold numbers of people from that. And so, for now, I find ways to do ministry in non-vocational ways and trust the Lord with the restlessness I often feel.

This unfulfilled desire can sometimes lead to a restlessness of heart for me with regard to my work, regardless of how much I enjoy my day-to-day tasks or the people alongside whom I labor. It can produce a sort of ache that isn’t easily salved. Maybe you know this kind of feeling?

For some, vocational restlessness can come about because of an unfulfilled dream or plans that were never fulfilled. For others, vocational restlessness can be the result of great success!

When we achieve some kind of grand accomplishment early in our careers we can struggle to find the next mountain to climb—David Brooks has a whole book dedicated to this kind of subject with The Second Mountain. I felt some measure of this when I wrote two books around the age of 30. I had always wanted to publish books of some kind, and I did it quite young. Very few people bought them (a few thousand), but I nonetheless accomplished my goal. And yet, restlessness abounds!

“Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun,” the Qoheleth says in Ecclesiastes 2:11.

I like what Cal Newport writes in Slow Productivity, “A key tenet of slow productivity is that grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.” Newport isn’t talking about restlessness or the vaporious nature of dreams quickly fulfilled, but I think his wisdom applies in this context.

It’s so easy, especially in our sort of hustle-and-grind culture, to push and push and push to the point of breaking our spirits when we either: a) don’t achieve our goals or b) achieve our goals and wonder what’s left that actually matters. “Damned if I do; damned if I don’t,” as the old saying goes.

It is almost as if the pursuit and fulfillment of our dreams cannot possibly be our source of hope and contentment!

Newport’s advice is good for more than just the work realm, I think. I don’t mean to over-spiritualize his work, but consider what he writes in the context sanctification: “steady…modest results over time. The path is long. Pace yourself.”

We can find comfort in Paul’s reminder in Philippians 1:6, “And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

And also in his encouragement to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 15:56-58:

The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Even as we can be easily discouraged and grow seriously restless in our vocation or our sanctification, it is imperative we don’t just pull some kind of rip cord and attempt to move on at the first feeling of restlessness or discomfort. Our labor is not in vain, even if our heart aches for some kind of unfulfilled longing.

We must not be lured into having feelings of a mid-life crisis every time we see someone else living out a dream we have had for ourselves or when we haven’t grown into the kind of person we want to be quite yet. We shouldn’t just run after another hope of fulfillment in a faraway place or a new line of work.

It Is Good to Just Show Up

Our church recently started hosting a Thursday night church service, and one of the women who serves in the children’s ministry on Thursday nights used to be one of the volunteer leaders in our youth ministry when I helped lead it as an unpaid, part-time staff member back in 2017-2020.

This volunteer said a younger mom showed up to Thursday night service recently who attended our youth group back in high school. I remembered the former student, and recalled her being at events, but often not seeming very interested in what I was teaching—who can blame her! ;)

The former student, now young mom seemed to have been out of church for some time and experienced some difficult life along the way. She said to the kids ministry volunteer she recognized from her time in youth group, “I knew coming back to this church would feel like coming home.”

Man. Praise God.

I can tell you that much of the time I was leading in youth group with my beloved co-volunteers from 2017-2020, it didn’t feel like we were making a huge difference. We weren’t seeing a bunch of kids get saved or commit their lives to Christ—we weren’t seeing a bunch of kids at all (it was a small youth ministry)!

I was not a great teacher. I was more spiritually immature then than I am now. I was restless, longing to be in vocational ministry. But despite the restlessness I felt and the myriad other imperfections in my leadership, we all kept showing up for the students.

Consistency is a virtue. When we get restless vocationally, spiritually, relationally, or otherwise, it’s easy to get discouraged and just move on to something else. It has become disturbingly acceptable, it seems, for us to get bored with where we are at and chase our hopes and dreams at the cost of faithfulness and consistency.

Our feeds have fed us the lie that life is meant to be exciting or entertaining at every turn, and when it’s not we think something is wrong.

It is boring to be consistent and faithful, and that’s okay.

Much of life is made up of unassuming rhythms and routine schedules, which is also okay.

You and I will not save or even measurably “change the world,” and that’s okay, too.

But we get restless because we aren’t getting what we want. We become discontent with God’s work in his own ways and in his own time.

Sometimes it’s good to just show up in the same place, over and over, for a long time, even if you’re restless. And God, in his kindness, may let you see the fruit of your faithfulness.

The Uncontrollability of the World is a sociological look into how we are constantly trying to grasp for more control despite the reality that life is best lived when the world is at least a bit unpredictable.

I have plenty I want to write about this book that I haven’t yet, and so you’ll see me referencing it a good bit throughout the rest of 2026.

Right at the outset of the book, Dr. Rosa gives us his hypothesis. He says this (bolding mine):

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life,” the experience of feeling alive and truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifests themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression.

Phew.

I think what Dr. Rosa has identified here, without putting it in such terms, is this:

We continue to believe the first lie: that we can be gods. And our pursuit of deity is making us miserable in all spheres of life, leading to desperate swipes for power, politically and otherwise.

Really what I think we see here is the crossing of the line from our creation mandate into our sinful pursuit of godhood.

Our God-Given Mandate to Steward Creation

God gives his image-bearers a mandate with regard to the rest of creation right out of the gate in Genesis, at the creation of all things. Genesis 1:26-28 says:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

On top of that, in Genesis 2:15, a similar—perhaps more intimate—instruction is given. It says:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

God gave his people, as a gift and a responsibility, a mandate to have dominion over and subdue the earth, tending and keeping it. God tasked we humans, we image-bearers—the crown jewel of creation—to oversee the rest of all he made. What an amazing gift and terrifying assignment! I’m not sure how we’re doing with all of that, but that’s not the point today.

There is, woven into our DNA, a desire for order and control. It is part of who we were created to be from the beginning—order makers, chaos containers, and careful tenders. So any desire we have to faithfully carry out this mandate, seeing ourselves as stewards under the ultimate cosmic lordship of Yahweh, is good and right!

Unfortunately, this God-given responsibility is easily twisted into self-serving sin.

Our Self-Serving Sin to Idolize the Self

The problem comes when our divinely-imprinted desire for goodness and justice and order are not held in open hands, full of faith, submitted to God. We run into issues when we take our mandate into our own hands, when we see ourselves as lords and not stewards. When we see ourselves as gods and not saints.

Part way through Eve’s conversation with the serpent in Genesis 3, we see the vicious, effective lie offered up by the evil one. In Genesis 3:5, the serpent says of the forbidden tree:

“For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

I don’t know why Adam and Eve found being like God to be so tempting, but I’ve been a sinner my whole life, so I have some ideas why the offer may have been appealing to our first parents.

Our self-serving sin is that we want to be gods ourselves. Part of the reason this temptation is appealing is because to be like God is to be like the only ultimately powerful one, and we trust no one but ourselves with ultimate power. We see injustices or other kinds of disorder and brokenness that we feel—though we would never say—God is taking too long to fix, so we take and eat the fruit over and over and over again.

But part of the reason this poisoned fruit is so appealing, at least for some, comes out of a deep desire to take our mandate to steward creation seriously. When we see the daunting task to tend to all God has created, it is easy to be so intimidated by the responsibility that we opt to seize power for ourselves instead of trusting God and his provision.1

When we detach our dominion from its source, we don’t stop worshiping, we just misdirect our worship outward into creation or inward into ourselves. As Paul writes in Romans 1:21-25:

For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

May God help us not be the kind of people who know him, but strip him of his rightful place as the one, true God and Lord of our lives and all of creation.

We Cannot Control It All—Praise God!

Hartmut Rosa is right: we try to make the world controllable at every level. We want to make the world more controllable because we think uncontrollability yields anxiety and controllability yields pleasure. Unfortunately for us, the inverse is true: the more we try to control life, the more anxious we become, and any measure of control we gain is not offset by the anxiety laden in our efforts!

This particular sickness is getting worse, not better, with time. The primary reason it’s getting worse is because technological advances—however good and healthy some of them may be!—make us increasingly feel like gods ourselves. The illusion of control grows more and more tantalizing over time. Our ability to be gods—bringing about justice and fulfillment and life in our own ways—is always just out of reach.

Satan wasn’t joking, or even lying, when he said the fruit would make us like God. We are like God! Devastatingly, though, the fruit also made it so that we are never like God enough.

Might we pray with David as he does in Psalm 131, yielding power and control to God, resting in his sovereignty:

O LORD, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

Throughout this spring, this new work arrangement has afforded me some significant flexibility with regard to where I work from home. Whereas I previously spent virtually 100% of my days working in the shed office we built in our backyard, I’ve been able to be a bit more adventurous this spring, working in different places that don’t have to be so quiet and optimized for video calls and such.

Likewise, we’ve had a pretty warm, dry spring here in Middle Tennessee—until the last few days, anyway. So, much of the last couple of months, I have often enjoyed the first few hours of my workday sitting at the large table on our back porch. I also spend the first bit of the day, before work starts, reading my Bible and watching the goings-on of the wildlife in our yard sitting at that same table.

A couple of years ago I read the book Turning to Birds. I was paging through it again recently and came across a great quote that I think explains a bit of my experience this spring. Author Lili Taylor writes:

One thing I’ve learned by watching birds is that there’s always a story. If you stay a few more moments than you’d prefer to, if you resist the urge to move on, get going, get busy, look at your phone—if you just keep watching the bird, that’s when it happens. The it is simply life: experiencing, imagining, feeling, breathing, sharing. Then you move on, and the bird moves on, but you have a new moment to connect with your other moments. And at the end of the day, that’s all we have: a life of moments, assembled as one.

Today, I just wanted to share a bit of those moments with you. I’ve taken a handful of pictures on my iPhone this spring, and I’ll try to include some relevant ones here where possible. As yet, I haven’t convinced my wonderful wife that we should spend thousands of dollars on an elaborate camera system for my amateur wildlife photography dreams.

Maybe one day.

So, for now, you’ll have to enjoy my zoomed-in phone photography and my ramblings.

The Setup

Here’s what you need to know about my setup. In our backyard we have:

• Three fence-mounted bird houses that are fixed to our back and side fence, roughly 30 feet apart—one was here when we moved into our house, and the other two have been added over time.

• Two large “hopper” style bird feeders—one with two suet cages is affixed to the sides hangs from our back fence, another sits atop a pole in the middle of the yard.

• Two Bark Butter Bites feeders that hang on shepherds’ hooks on the post in the middle of the yard, beside the large hopper feeder at the top.

• One window feeder that is suctioned to the window of my shed office.

• One finch feeder that hangs from the large tree on the side of our house.

• One Birdbuddy Pro feeder that hangs from the small tree near our gate—it is equipped with a camera (like a Ring doorbell, for instance).

• One cylinder feeder that hangs from the tree in the middle of our backyard.

• Three hummingbird feeders spread around in different places throughout the yard.

Virtually all of these feeders and houses, except the Birdbuddy, are in view from my seat at the table on our back porch.

Over the years, the kind of bird seed we buy has morphed. In the early days, we just bought whatever cheap stuff we could find at local big box stores, sometimes ordering some from Amazon.

Then, a few years ago, Wild Birds Unlimited opened a store in my town, and since then we’ve bought the vast majority of our seed and supplies from them. The seed is more expensive than what you’ll find at the big box stores, to be sure, but they have plenty of options that both: 1) allow you to deter pests and 2) attract different kinds of birds to your yard.

We still buy suet cakes in bulk on Amazon, to reduce cost, but most often our other seed is bought at Wild Birds. Jeff and Joann are our local Wild Birds owners, and we have loved getting to know them. I know they have enjoyed watching our girls grow up through our visits, even if they do cause a bit of a ruckus in the shop sometimes while we’re browsing.

Usually, we’re most commonly buying safflower seed for our large feeders, as it is relatively cheap and deters grackles, who tend to gobble up tons of other kinds of seed. For our smaller feeders, we buy some of the more expensive “no mess” seed varieties, as those smaller feeders are in areas we’d prefer not have tons of shells and other debris pile up. Bark Butter Bites must be bought at Wild Birds, so we get that feed there, too.

This year, I’ve had to pony up a little more money to buy some of the “spicy” seed because squirrels have been more frequent guests in our yard this year. While I don’t mind the squirrels hanging around, they eat so much seed so quickly that I can’t afford to feed them. So, we have bought some spicy seed, which they don’t like, and it has helped deter them a bit. More on the squirrels later.

Now, let’s get into the birds. First, we’ll start with the usual suspects who haven’t had any notable activity this year.

The Usual Suspects

Before I walk through some of the highlights of the backyard this spring, let me brief you on the usual suspects we’ve had.

As normal, we have had the typical cast of characters that stick around year-round, mostly. That cast includes:

• Cardinals

• Grackles

• Mourning Doves

• House, Song, and White-Throated Sparrows

• House and Carolina Wrens

• Carolina Chickadees

• Crows

• Brown-Headed Cowbirds

• Northern Mockingbirds

• Tufted Titmouses

• House Finches

• Blue Jays

• American Goldfinches

I really only have two brief observations I’ll make about this list, and then we’ll move on.

First, the Blue Jays haven’t been hanging around quite as much this year. I love Blue Jays. They’re so pretty. They’re large. They’re kinda bullies. But I love them. They have certainly passed through the yard and occasionally stopped by this year, but they are not hanging around as much as they have in years past.

In fact, one of our newcomers this year (at least to me in my observation) is the Tufted Titmouse. When I first saw the Titmouse flying around, I thought it was maybe a juvenile Blue Jay, as it has a similar mohawk-like crest and grey-blue coloring—but the Tufted Titmouse is significantly smaller, so that distinguished it pretty clearly.

Second, we have had so many more American Goldfinches this year. In fact, for the first time I can remember they were pretty prevalent in the backyard throughout the winter, too. I remember on one of our snowy days this year I saw a couple flitting between the trees, their yellow color sticking out against the white backdrop of snow.

That’s the report on many (but not all) of our usual suspects. Now: the highlights.

The Mostly-Absent Hummingbirds

Every Labor Day weekend, the 400-acre city park next to our neighborhood hosts a hummingbird festival. It’s a fun community event that hosts vendors of various kinds, and it’s a nice marker for the unofficial end of summer and the beginning of fall life.

One of the highlights of the hummingbird festival is getting to watch an ornithologist from the U.S. Department of the Interior catch and band hummingbirds in order to track their migration, growth, and overall health. In fact, this process has long been the centerpiece of the hummingbird festival and was the only attraction for a long time.1

Anyway, the vast majority of hummingbirds we get—like most who are west of the Mississippi River—are the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds. One of the reasons these birds are caught and banded around our neighborhood is because around Labor Day the hummingbirds have begun their migration from places in the north—like Michigan—and are making their way down to winter in the Yucatán Peninsula, and plenty migrate right through our neck of the woods.

Around the beginning of August, our backyard becomes overrun by dozens of hummingbirds every single day, buzzing between our feeders. These migrating hummingbirds don’t stick around long—the woman who bands them at the hummingbird festival says we likely aren’t seeing the same ones for more than a day at a time—but they get their fill and go on their way.

So that brings us to the spring. The hummingbirds who have wintered in the Yucatán make their way back up to the North around April or so (though a smaller percentage do end up settling and breeding here). However, despite our best efforts to attract these hummingbirds in all the same ways we do in the late summer—to the tune of dozens per day—we almost never see hummingbirds in the spring on their migratory journey back north. But every year we get the feeders set up in April and we try.

As I started writing this article, we had yet to see a single hummingbird come through the yard at any point this spring. However, Susie and I were sitting on the back porch once the girls were asleep on the evening of May 12th, around dusk, and I heard the unmistakable chittering of a hummingbird—a sound that is near constant in August in September. Then, we finally saw one flying around and landing on a willow tree in our neighbor’s yard. I kept a close eye on it, and I didn’t see it fly out of the tree, so I sort of wonder if maybe we do have a resident hummingbird this spring!

Update: I got a picture of one, finally! Here it is:

Anyway, it’s been a bummer to miss out on them—mostly—again this spring, but I know that we’ll be feeding dozens again come the end of the summer, as usual. For now, we’ll just have to enjoy the other birds.

Starlings All the Way Down

Except European Starlings. We don’t have to enjoy the Starlings.

These little punks, man. I’ll tell you what.

So, before I absolutely eviscerate these birds, I do need to say that I think Starlings are pretty. They’re not awful to look at.

Do they fly funny—almost duck-like—eat all of my seed, and make awful screeching noises? Yes they do.

But they aren’t, like, ugly. So I guess it could be worse.

Okay so here’s the deal. We have so many stinking Starlings in our yard at all times right now. They weren’t too bad at the beginning of the spring, but since the start of May they have just been taking over the yard. As I understand, this timing is typical.

They’re dominant birds, and they’re bullies. They outnumber everything else. I believe they have a giant nest, or community of nests, in the eave and/or attic of our next-door neighbor’s house, from which their screeching emits all day, every day. I know this not only because we can hear them while we’re outside, but because there is a gaping hole in the eave where they fly in-and-out constantly. Like bats or something.

Anyway, the core of my beef with these forsaken birds is mostly that they just eat—or scoop onto the ground—like all of my seed within hours of me putting it in the feeders. The rest of my beef with these birds is due to their nonstop screeching and bullying of other birds.

Now, this is why we typically by safflower seed, as Starlings don’t like it as much given its hard outer shell, which is hard for them to crack. However, two things: 1) that doesn’t always deter them, and 2) Wild Birds has been out of safflower pretty regularly this spring, so it has been hard to come by.

I bet I know why they’ve been out of it—I don’t get the sense that we’re the only ones with a Starling-shaped problem.2

So this spring it’s been Starlings all the way down and all around so far. I am hoping in the next couple of weeks I can acquire some safflower that will make them a little less interested in hanging around so much. But given that they’re always watching from the eave in the house next door, I suspect that as soon as I offer something that isn’t safflower, they’ll be over to gobble it up or scoop it onto the ground to eat later.

Our Baby Bluebirds

Without a doubt, the highlight of the spring so far has been playing host to a brood of baby Eastern Bluebirds in one of the three nesting boxes along our fence. As I write this portion of this essay—on Wednesday, May 13th—the Bluebird family has been moved out of the box for about four or five days. I am hopeful that we’ll have the same parents back for another brood soon, but it was really fun watching this first group grow.

Bluebirds and sparrows always seem to start fighting for residency in the nesting boxes along our fence as soon as the weather starts to turn warm around March or so. Historically, we’ve only had two nesting boxes along the back fence, but around the beginning of April this year we added a third back in the corner of the yard, a little distance away from the others. Both houses usually end up occupied, despite being a little bit closer than is probably recommended. However this spring only one has had any residents so far—the oldest one that was on the fence when we moved into the house a decade ago.

It was the Bluebirds who won the war for the house this time around, and they got busy quickly. It was sometime around the middle of April during one of my morning back-porch reading sessions that I first noticed a lot of back-and-forth activity around the nesting box. Apparently I had missed the birds preparing the nest, because by the time I noticed them, there were—to my surprise—already some hungry mouths waiting to be fed!

I was so excited!

Not long after I snapped that first picture, the back-and-forth feeding activity began to be accompanied by frenzied tweeting from the baby birds whenever mom or dad would arrive with some food. I remember being distracted many times while reading or working on the back porch when, seemingly out of nowhere, a bunch of small, muffled tweeting noises would happen all at once. It took a few occurrences for me to realize that it was the box of baby Bluebirds who had apparently found their voices and were clamoring to be fed upon the arrival of one of their parents.

Eventually, the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend, I went to go check on the box of Bluebirds and snagged this picture. I’m no ornithologist, but when I saw how big and crowded these babies had become, I knew they had to be fledging out soon.

Sure enough, on Mother’s Day Sunday I went to check the box again and the box was empty. It was unnerving at first. “Could they really be ready?” I wondered. “Aw man, I missed them. Will I ever see them again?” I thought next.

Ah, parenthood.

Since that Sunday, it has been hard for me to tell if the Bluebird family is hanging around except for a few signs.

First, the internet tells me that Bluebird families will tend to stick around wherever the brood was hatched and fledged out. So I have reason to believe I’ll see them about.

Second, I haven’t really been able to approach them, but a few times I have seen a handful of small birds—who could be our fledglings—all sitting together along the top of our fence in the backyard, taking turns jumping down to the ground to eat the seed the Starlings (GRRR) have knocked from the feeder to the grass. I can’t get close enough to see if these are our Bluebird brood, but they look to be about the right size, and they’re sticking together awfully close. I see them flee to one of the evergreens beyond our fence every once in a while So perhaps they’re living there.

Third, and finally, I did catch just the other day one of the Bluebird parents—theoretically—make its way back to the nest box where this brood was hatched. It looked like he or she just took a peek into the box and flew away.

Following the evacuation of the Bluebird family, I did some research and learned that it is actually good to clean out nesting boxes after a brood has left the nest because it signals that the house is open and ready to be used again. Bluebirds tend to have somewhere between one and four broods a year, so I’m hoping that these same parents use the box again to raise their next brood sometime soon!

The Bluebird family has been a highlight of the season so far. It’s been so fun to watch them, and I’m hoping for round two soon.3

The Squirrels vs. the Bluebirds

One more, short storyline to share about the Bluebirds before we move on.

Throughout the spring, as the Bluebirds were getting ready to bring their brood into the box, squirrels also became more frequent visitors to the backyard.

In the 10 years we have lived in our home, we have never really had too many squirrels, and we’re not sure why. I’ve always wondered if living so close to a massive forest has kept them away—given that, logically, my backyard would not be nearly as appealing as the forest.

But this year, we’ve had three or four squirrels hanging around our backyard every day, and until I started purchasing the spicy bird seed sometime in April, they were eating lots of my bird seed.

Given that the Bluebirds were bringing about their brood in the box closest to the bird feeder preferred by the squirrels, the Bluebirds were at war almost constantly with the squirrels. Here’s a brief video I snagged on my phone one morning.

It’s been one of my favorite storylines of the spring. It’s so funny to hear the little Blues snap their beaks at the squirrels and chase them away. I suppose the Blues think the squirrels pose a threat to the babies.

I can tell the squirrels aren’t interested in anything more than snagging some seed, but the Blues are going to be sure they don’t try to climb into the box. Go for it.

The Robins and Their Nest

As usual, we’ve had a lot of Robins this year. I’m guessing that if you live in America and you pay attention to birds in your backyard, Robins are probably one of the more common birds you see around. For all the ones we see a lot, they sure are among the prettiest.

A few mornings in late April I noticed the same Robin repeatedly collecting dead grass and other refuse from around the backyard. I’m no ornithologist, but I could surmise the bird was busy building a nest of some kind. So I decided to investigate.

It didn’t take long for me to find the Robin’s nest nestled precariously between two of the smaller tree limbs in the canopy of the largest tree in our yard. I couldn’t hear any tweeting from the nest, nor could I see any sort of occupancy, but the Robin was clearly working on it for some reason. I was nervous because I could tell that, despite the robust nest it was constructing, it wouldn’t take more than a stiff storm wind to knock it out. Its positioning between two smaller branches a good bit away from the trunk left the nest quite vulnerable to the elements.

(Don’t be fooled: those chirps you hear in the above video are not from baby Robins, but from the brood of Starlings living in the eave of the house next door—newly hatched and preparing to eat all my seed.)

Sure enough, a couple of weeks later after one of our only strong storms of the season, I found the nest lying in the grass directly below where it was in the tree. Thankfully, I didn’t find any baby birds or eggs in the vicinity, so they had either fledged without me knowing, or the eggs had not yet been laid. I suspect the latter, but it’s hard to say.

The internet tells me that Robins would likely not grieve the loss of an empty nest and would, if needed, soon start on building another—I’d like to believe that, so I will. So I’m keeping an eye out to see if they start rebuilding soon.

Also, in unrelated Robin news, I went out to get the mail just the other night and saw a fledgling Robin sitting smack in the middle of the road with its mouth wide open. Mom and Dad seemed to be taking turns bringing it food as it sat, immobile, in the middle of the road. As I walked down the driveway, I saw multiple cars barely miss hitting the bird amid rush hour neighborhood traffic—which, on our street, is no joke.

I quickly got my mail and grabbed a pair of gloves from the garage. I moved the fledgling Robin who was clearly dealing with some kind of broken wing to a bush in our landscaping. He or she was not too happy with me, chirping frequently, trying to wriggle free. I set the bird down and was unsure if it would survive the night.

The next morning, sure enough, the bird had hopped over toward our neighbors yard, still clearly unable to fly, but its parents continued to bring it food.

When I told Maggie, our six-year-old, at her bedtime that the bird would likely die soon, she asked that we pray for it, specifically, “that God would bring the bird back to life when he makes the whole world new—just like he will with me.”

Amen, sister. We can pray for all of that.

Will the Tree Swallows Move in?

Another fun development this spring was the presence of Tree Swallows. I’m sure for some reading this, Tree Swallows are common backyard tenants—this is not the case for us. I remember the first time I saw the Tree Swallows flying around the yard I thought they were either Purple Martins or Chimney Swifts, both of which I know live around us but are also not often present in our backyard. They have some similar coloring to Purple Martins and are acrobatic like Chimney Swifts—so apparently I’m not the only one who often mistakes Tree Swallows for one of these kinds.

Eventually I captured the birds’ call on my Merlin Bird ID app as Tree Swallows, which was then confirmed by my iPhone’s photo identification function after I captured a few pictures:

We added that new bird box on our fence this year, and for much of the spring a handful of Tree Swallows seemed to be interested in perhaps making a next there. For weeks I wondered, “Will the Tree Swallows finally move in?” Alas, they have not moved in. In fact, I haven’t seen them around as much the last week or so, compared to earlier this spring.

And, actually, our familiar Bluebird momma has been investigating that new bird box in the last few days—maybe she’ll move her next brood over there!

The Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks

Okay, beside the baby Blues, this is probably my favorite feature of our spring in the backyard. We had Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks for a number of weeks! They are so pretty! Here’s a nice pic I snagged of a couple at the feeder:

I had never seen these before, or even knew they existed, so when I first saw one I thought it was some kind of woodpecker given its similar coloring to woodpeckers we’ve had in the yard (more on them next).

The Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks do not stay in Middle Tennessee for much time at all. They simply migrate through here from their winter homes closer to the equator up to their summer homes in the northern part of the United States. I like to think that the three regulars we had in our yard throughout April may be heading for my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Unlikely, of course, but it’s fun to imagine.

It was a joy to feed the Grosbeaks for a few weeks in our yard. Perhaps we’ll catch them on their migratory journey in the fall. If not, maybe again next spring. Lovely looking birds.

The Woodpeckers

I think woodpeckers may be my favorite species of bird we get in the backyard each year. We usually have a few woodpeckers hanging around at all times of year, if I remember correctly. More commonly we have seen Downy Woodpeckers, but occasionally we will also have Red-Bellied Woodpeckers. This spring, we have had probably three or four regular Downy friends and I think two distinct Red-Bellied pals.

I love woodpeckers so much mostly because they’re just so funny to me—banging their faces against the trees at all hours of the day. It helps that they’re pretty, too.

My favorite woodpecker stunt this year is this one I managed to capture on camera one evening as I stood in the kitchen making dinner. Look at this goofball:

Here in late May, I haven’t seen them around as often as I did a few weeks ago, but I suspect I’ll see them again soon.

The Red-Tailed Hawk

We don’t get too many larger birds in our backyard. However I do know that we have a Red-Tailed Hawk and a Cooper’s Hawk who patrol the neighborhood with some frequency. They occasionally appear on my Merlin Bird ID sound identifier, and more rarely I’ll see them with my own eyes.

I haven’t seen the Cooper’s Hawk on anything but sound identification this spring, but I have seen the Red-Tailed Hawk with my own eyes a couple of times.

Once, I was in the shed that serves as my backyard office, and when I opened the door to leave the shed and go inside our house for something, a Red-Tailed Hawk took off from its perch atop the back of one of our patio chairs and flew across the backyard next to ours. It flew off so quickly I wasn’t able to get a picture. I barely even saw it in time.

Then, another time I looked up into the cloudless blue sky and caught a pic of it flying right over our yard, surely trying to find its next meal. I did get a picture of it this time:

I wish we had more of these larger birds around, but I’m sure they enjoy the woods and the nearby river. I still have never seen a Bald Eagle in real life, but I hear we have some in the area. One day soon!

The Bunnies

Finally, I would be remiss if I only focused on our bird and squirrel friends and did not mention our other furry visitors: the bunnies! Our backyard is a mish-mash of all kinds of greenery that serves as “grass.” We have abundant clover, a solid supply of wild strawberries, and all kinds of other grass-adjacent growths in all parts of our yard. I suspect this makes it an attractive restaurant for the rabbits.

Likewise, we have a ratty, old fence that is in dire need of replacement for a number of reasons—we just haven’t had the stomach to drop the serious cash it’s going to require to have it replaced. All around the bottom of this fence, in different parts of the yard, there are broken boards that allow for the rabbits to easily enter and exit the fence where they choose. I think that along all three lengths of fence in our yard, they probably have a solid six entrance and exit points. This is especially important because our almost-elderly goldendoodle, Rizzo, desperately wants to play with these bunnies. Every time he sees them in our yard, he whines at the back door until we let him out. Rizzo shoots out of a cannon and chases the rabbits around the yard, whining in anticipation of finally catching one.

Of course Rizzo has never caught one, and that’s quite all right with us. But it is a hoot watching him chase them around the yard until they finally decide to scoot out one of the broken boards along the bottom of the fence.

I suspect the rabbits live in or around the culvert pipe beyond the bounds of our fence, as that would likely be the safest place for them that would allow them to frequent our yard as often as they do. But I haven’t gone looking for them. For now, we’ll just keep our yard available for their feasting.

Thanks for Coming Along!

This concludes my longer-than-planned public journal of what I’ve been enjoying in our backyard this spring. If you’ve managed to make it this far, thanks for reading! I hope that my recollection, pictures, and notes brought you even some small fraction of joy this season has been for me.

Have a great summer!

Why Does Any of This Even Matter?

Maybe you’re reading this and you’re like, “Why does this guy who writes devotional reflections or essays about social media care about productivity and work culture stuff?” Fair question. Let me do my best to answer this if it’s bubbling up for you.

Like I will say in the article below: we only have one life to live, and many of us will spend much of this life working.

Because of that reality, if nothing else, we should take our work seriously! Not all of us work traditional jobs—some of us are keeping homes running, ferrying kids around town, and doing other kinds of work that doesn’t result in a paycheck—but for those of us who have careers, we are called to steward those careers well! Usually this means we need to be “productive” however that is measured in our specific lines of work. If we are not productive, or if we are not accomplishing the goals set before us in our work, we may not be employed very long.

So to be good stewards, as we’re called by God to do (Gen. 1:26-28, Matt. 25:14-30, etc.), we need to be “productive.” The problem is that much of what goes into how we work today is not actually productive it’s just busy.

One of the most common causes of busy unproductivity is operational bureaucracy—some call this “red tape,” “meeting culture,” or “busywork culture.” Some, like me, even call it “managerial theater” or “administrative theater,” likening it to security theater (looking at you, TSA).

Operational bureaucracy leads to people having meetings or operational processes without even knowing why they exist or how they promote the overall goals of an organization.

Operational bureaucracy is a spiritual problem. It’s poor stewardship. It’s at best foolish and at worst sinful. If that seems a bit extreme, remember that the master does not deal kindly with the man who buries his talent (see Matt. 25:14-30).

But I’m not here today to talk about the cancer that is operational bureaucracy—that will have to wait for another time. Today, I want to dive into how we actually get work done. How? By actually doing less.

Fermat’s Last Theorem and You

In the third chapter of Slow Productivity, called “Do Fewer Things,” Cal Newport writes about just that: there is wisdom in not taking on all that we possibly can manage.

Doing more can often actually make us less effective than if we decline to take on tasks and opportunities that may appear productive. Now of course there are guardrails to this. Neither Newport in his book nor I in this article are calling for laziness or sloth. That would be simultaneously foolish and outright against what God wants for his image-bearers who are called to work and steward creation!1

In this chapter, Newport shares about a mathematician and his pursuit of his lifelong goal.

Princeton University mathematics professor Andrew Wiles learned of Fermat’s Last Theorem—a centuries old math problem, basically—when he was 10-years-old. From that young age, he set a goal to provide a solution to the theorem sometime in his life.

Fast-forward to his time as a mathematics professor. Wiles came across another mathematical development artifact called the “Taniyama-Shimura conjecture,” that, if solved, could lead to his achievement of his lifelong dream: solving Fermat’s theorem. When Wiles discovers that his goal is within reach, his life dramatically changes.

Newport quotes Simon Singh in his book Fermat’s Enigma, who writes of Wiles:

Wiles abandoned any work that was not directly relevant to proving Fermat’s Last Theorem and stopped attending the never-ending round of conferences and colloquia.

Later, Newport explains Wiles and his focus:

To prepare himself to focus on a single large and meaningful project, Wiles limited large pursuits and commitments that would compete for his time. Crucially, he was systematic in this reduction. He didn’t resolve, in some generic fashion, to try to take on less; he instead put in place specific rules (e.g., no conferences), habits (e.g., work from home as much as possible, and even ploys (e.g., trickling out his already completed research)—all directed toward minimizing the number of big items tugging at his attention.

Whatever kind of job you have, it is likely that if you asked your manager for one, single “reason” or “goal” for your role, you could probably get one. Sure, most of us have a number of goals that may change quarterly or annually—based on sales, project completion, or some other kind of countable metric. But all of those cycling goals are usually manifestations of a singular goal—to increase revenue by driving more sales, or to prepare sixth graders to read literature and write essays, or to keep a production process running on-time and on-budget.

However, if you’re like me, you have been in a role that has a clear, singular objective, but that is also bound by all kinds of other requirements and tasks that may hinder your ability to pursue that singular goal.

For instance, I have had a job in which my goal and direction was clear. But the team, and the broader organization, required so many different processes and meetings and other forms of operational “red tape” that accomplishing the goal for which I had been hired proved to be functionally impossible.

That role was, without a doubt, simultaneously the busiest and least productive job I have ever had.

No one could have doubted that I was working at any time, but I also failed to have much fruit to show for my dozens of emails and weekly meetings on account of all of the sideways energy I was expelling in an attempt to fulfill process expectations in a sort of “performative compliance” that much of the “work” I was doing had no real bearing on the success of the mission I was given.

Andrew Wiles provides a hopeful example of what it can look like when we take the mission of our work seriously and we don’t let superfluous systems or tasks get in our way. Wiles had to be creative, to be sure, to make sure he didn’t get fired from his job for neglecting responsibilities the university had deemed important. But he pulled it off, and he accomplished his goal.

We can learn a lot from Andrew Wiles, I think, in his pursuit of finding a solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Just Say No…and Guard Your Time

Sometimes we just need to decline that meeting invite in order to get real work done.

Sometimes we need to look at internal processes and ask those in charge, “I understand why this process is in place, but do you know how this cumbersome process will keep us from accomplishing our objective?”

We only have one life to live, and as Christian workers, we are called to steward the gifts and talents God has given us for his glory and the good of other people. This requires us to take seriously the goals we have and the work we are called to do.

Sometimes this requires us to submit to authority and do what is required. Sometimes it means we must have the courage to call out how an organization’s operational requirements and other “red tape” have begun to hinder the shared mission of the team.

But as Newport says, “There are only so many times you can offer an unqualified no without either losing your job or being sidelined as an unreliable curmudgeon.”

And this is true! It’s a difficult line to walk. So what do we do? Newport makes a solid suggestion when he writes, “This leaves us with a more nuanced option for limiting projects: appeal to the hard but unimpeachable reality of your actual available time.”

Blocking time for projects on my calendar has been, without a doubt, the most important practical step I’ve taken to “do less in order to do more.”

Virtually all of the roles I have held in my career have not only been “knowledge work” roles, they have been creative knowledge work roles. I don’t know how much deep work time accountants or project managers need, but I can say as someone who has always lived at the intersection of content creation and creative marketing work, having large blocks of deep work time is absolutely essential.

It is nearly impossible to do effective creative work in 30-60-minute periods of time scattered between meetings on any given day—at least for me, anyway! My best creative work always comes within some kind of two-to-three hour window. It has always been most “productive” for me to dedicate a half-day to a creative project of some time.

It is not “less productive” for knowledge workers to block of windows of time like this to get projects done. It can actually prove to be much more productive in the long-run than sitting in a bunch of meetings, filling out even more forms, or responding to emails as soon as possible. That is all activity, but perhaps it is not productivity.

We have just one life to live. Most of us will spend a lot of this life at work. We have a lot to do. Praise God! This is good. But sometimes, to get a lot done, we actually have to do less. However we can best steward the work we’ve been given, let’s do what we can to make it count.

Slow Productivity was finally recommended to me enough times that I bought and read it last year.

This was my first exposure to Newport, perhaps somewhat surprisingly given he’s written books that run parallel to some of what I write about here—like Deep Work or Digital Minimalism.

Anyway, I really enjoyed Slow Productivity when I read it last year. I’ve spent my whole career as a “knowledge worker,” and I have seen it go poorly when some organizations (or individuals within organizations) try to measure the productivity of knowledge workers like they’re a part of an assembly line of some kind. I’ve seen the bad fruit of not letting creative people actually have room to think and produce good, creative work.

At the same time, I have seen abundant, sweet fruit when organizations and managers who recognize the need for knowledge workers (especially creative workers) to meander and putz around on their way to doing good work.

To borrow from and paraphrase Kierkegaard: sometimes the best thing you can do is just take a walk.

I can’t tell you how many times some of my best work ideas have come to me on my midday trips to the gym or a lunchtime walk around the neighborhood.

So, I’ve been meaning to share about this book for some time, but it’s slowly been pushed back in favor of other topics. This is the first of what will be a handful of pieces about the book and some key quotes I enjoyed.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Newport writes toward the beginning of the book in a chapter called, “The Rise and Fall of Pseudo-Productivity”:

If you can see me in my office—or if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly—then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something.

…

As the twentieth century progressed, this visible-activity heuristic became the dominant way we began thinking about productivity in knowledge work.

….

Long work sessions that don’t immediately produce obvious contrails of effort became a source of anxiety—it’s safer to chime in on email threads and “jump on” calls than to put your head down and create a bold new strategy.

My dad started working from home for IBM in the early 1990s, when IBM was a leading brand in home computing and working from home was novel. In fact, here’s a picture a local newspaper took in our home reporting on the phenomenon. That’s me on my dad’s lap in our converted dining room.

Because my dad worked from home virtually my entire life as a child, I understood two things from an early age: 1) remote workers are real contributors that do real work that matters, and 2) it’s awesome having your dad around to finish up work and immediately be home for coaching baseball games or otherwise being with the family.

So you can imagine when I took my first real job as an adult, I was disheartened to learn that the prevailing culture was, “If you’re not at your desk, you aren’t working.” This seemed to be the rule when I asked to work from my parents’ house while traveling for holidays, but it did not appear to apply when I was asked to work from my apartment on the weekends—strange how that works!1

Anyway, I’m so grateful to have had work experiences and managers in the last decade that are more interested in the product of my work than my busyness.

Why Managers Get Scared

When it comes to knowledge work, we need to be much more interested in results than we are in activity. A lot of managers bristle at this. Why?

Because this posture requires more of managers!

It requires managers to have a firm understanding of what they want their teams to produce, and it requires managers to recognize when they have given their teams too little (which can lead to laziness or inactivity among the team) or too much (which can lead to bad results or turnover).

When managers maintain a posture of “if you’re not at your desk, you’re not working,” it doesn’t necessarily produce better results from the team, but it does give the manager a feeling of absolution—the manager may not have any idea if the team is doing good work, but at least no one’s doing the laundry between meetings!

Lazy managers struggle with people who don’t appear busy because their team’s busyness is the only way they can know work is getting done. It requires active, tapped-in managers to trust teams to produce results without the appearance of busyness. It requires regular meetings, active communication, and trust.

Where We’re Headed

The world of knowledge workers is ever-changing, and the onset of AI in the workplace is perhaps going to be the most earthshaking experience we’ve had yet. The cornucopia of AI tools at our disposal have the ability to make knowledge workers more productive than we’ve ever been, while at the same time busying us with tasks that may look innovative and clever, but not actually produce any better results.

Employees in knowledge sectors are reporting feelings of burnout at high rates, and despite promises that AI will help knowledge workers, perhaps even leading to four-day work weeks, it sounds like many who are adopting AI in their workplaces right now are doing so out of a sense of obligation or fear of being replaced.

Wherever we go next, it is going to be important for us to consider that busyness and “productivity” are not always related.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is not responding to all of those emails immediately or crafting an even more robust prompt for ChatGPT.

Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is go for a walk.

David decides that instead of turning tail and outright fleeing Saul again—it clearly isn’t going particularly well so far—he will invade his camp. He asks who will go with him, and a man named Abishai volunteers. Abishai is one of David’s nephews.

David and His Saul Problem

The men get to Saul’s camp. Saul and his commander-in-chief (and cousin) Abner are asleep, vulnerable, and in range of attack. Then we read in 1 Samuel 26:8-10:

Then Abishai said to David, “God has given your enemy into your hand this day. Now please let me pin him to the earth with one stroke of the spear, and I will not strike him twice.” But David said to Abishai, “Do not destroy him, for who can put out his hand against the LORD’s anointed and be guiltless?” And David said, “As the LORD lives, the LORD will strike him, or his day will come to die, or he will go down into battle and perish.

Saul is guilty of murder in his heart. He is everything you could ever want in a terrible king. He wants nothing more than to kill David to eliminate the threat he knows David is to his throne, and his constant pursuit of David dominates David’s life every single day.

And here, David has yet another opportunity to kill Saul and take care of this problem once and for all. Abishai pushes him to do it. He even says that God is the one who has given Saul over to David—implying that God is not only blessing, but perhaps even orchestrating this murder that he should totally commit.

Abishai wants David to take matters into his own hands and solve his problem—in fact, Abishai says, it seems that God wants you to take matters into your own hands and solve the Saul problem.

But David says he won’t do it.

David does not think it is right to exact justice on Saul. Instead, David says that he trusts God to take care of Saul for him, one way or the other. It would be wrong for David to murder Saul, even if it may solve the problem at hand.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Solve the Problem Ourselves

I am the kind of person who typically grabs the bull by the horns, gets in the mud, and solves problems as soon as possible—so long as I feel equipped to do so myself. I don’t like to let problems linger. If I see something I think I have the ability to fix, I want to fix it as soon as possible.

That is to say, I see Abishai’s perspective here. I could easily see myself pleading with David in the same way Abishai does.

“I mean sure, David, it’s murder. But he’s like a terrible person, who hunts you every waking hour of every single day. And plus, I mean God literally delivered him to you on a silver platter…AGAIN! How could you not take care of Saul right here and right now?”

But sometimes solving the problem isn’t worth the cost.

As David says, it would be wrong for him to murder Saul, even if it would be justifiable in the eyes of some. He hears the observation Abishai makes about how God may be delivering Saul to him, and he lines that up with what he knows of God and he knows the two don’t align.

David recognizes that not every opportunity to efficiently solve a problem is justifiable before God. Sometimes, as David says, we need to let opportunities to solve our own problems pass before us and trust God to work things out in his ways and in his time.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, it is easy to feel angry right now about all manner of evils in our world—whether they be happening around the globe or around the corner. But even if we were provided solutions to these ills that seem to enact swift justice, those solutions may not be right.

An Oasis or a Mirage?

I think that our technological age, in part, has made it so that we feel like we should be able to solve problems with great efficiency.

Solutions to our problems—obesity (GLP-1s), lack of energy (energy drinks), financial insecurity (gambling and prediction markets)—seem as convenient as ever. But sometimes efficient solutions can sometimes be deceiving. Of course, sometimes these solutions can provide real help, but sometimes they can exacerbate our issues by tricking us with an illusion of a solution—like a mirage of an oasis in the desert.

Because solutions to our problems feel so easy to come by, the persistence of evil on the cosmic- or community-level feels even worse today, I think. When it’s beginning to seem like there’s an efficient solution for everything…what happens when there’s not? We grasp and grope and hope to find a solution that isn’t really within reach at all.

David gives us a good reminder in 1 Samuel 26: sometimes our problems are best given to God in faith that he will act how and when is best. One way or another, David says, God will take care of it.

Sometimes, we aren’t meant to solve our problems even if it seems like God has give us the solution. Sometimes we are meant to let God handle it when and how he will.

We scrapped and saved enough for a meager down payment during those first two years of marriage, and we were ready to buy a house and settle down somewhere. We just weren’t exactly sure where.

By the time the new year rolled around, in early 2016, we had two options: 1) I could accept a new role with expanded responsibilities at Lifeway, or 2) we could begin looking for ministry opportunities closer to home, somewhere around the Midwest (our original plan).

After some consideration, we decided to take the new opportunity at Lifeway and stay put in Middle Tennessee for at least a little while longer. We decided we would buy a home and put real roots down. Our two-year stint in the South would be extended…for at least a little bit.

The question we had to answer once we decided to stick around was pretty simple: where can we afford a house that won’t require an extensive remodel?

The Smiths

At the time, we were living in an apartment in Hermitage, an area of Nashville just east of downtown—close to the airport and the Opry Mills Mall area. It wasn’t a bad area, but we didn’t particularly love it either. We also just didn’t have great community. A lot of our best friends that we had made through work or otherwise weren’t within a 20-minute drive of where we were living. As a newlywed couple in a completely new place, we were watching a lot of Netflix and not getting together with friends very much.

Earlier in 2015—I don’t remember exactly when—Susie and I went to coffee with Brandon and Christa Smith in Nashville. They were considering a move to Nashville so Brandon could help lead the launch of the Christian Standard Bible, but they were unsure about moving to a place they had never lived and so far away from family. Brandon and I had become friends through bantering on Twitter—as you do—and so when they were in town for one of Brandon’s interviews, we got together with them to talk about our experience as transplants in Nashville far away from home.

The Smiths eventually moved to Nashville in 2015. They had us over for dinner in the fall of 2015, just a few days before our terrible wreck on I-65, and were singing the praises of this college town they settled in called Murfreesboro, about 30 miles southeast of downtown Nashville. I was aware of the city, but it wasn’t really on my radar when we were talking about places to settle down until we were talking to the Smiths about it.

So, when we began seriously looking at houses in the spring of 2016, we considered Murfreesboro. I had to convince Susie to consider the suburb, mostly because it would significantly increase our commute time to the city—which was a worthy concern, to be sure. We had been driving about 15-20 minutes each way from our apartment to our offices in downtown Nashville, and this move would triple that commute time (on a good day).

Eventually, based on our new friends the Smiths living in Murfreesboro1 and the fact that Murfreesboro more and better houses available in our budget range, I was able to convince Susie that we should zero in on Murfreesboro.

The Hunt

I recognize that “the housing market” has been “kinda crazy” in a lot of places for a long time for a lot of reasons. But the housing market in the Nashville area in the spring of 2016 was unlike anything I knew could actually happen in a housing market. Houses were not hitting listing websites before they were being snatched up by all manner of aspiring renovators, Airbnb entrepreneurs, and transplants from around the country.

Buyers were paying all closing costs. Houses were being bid up beyond their listing prices by tens of thousands of dollars. It was bananas. We could barely go look at houses before they would be sold and unavailable. And even if we could go see a house that was actually still on the market, we wondered if we would be able to compete in any sort of bidding war that would almost certainly ensue.

The Nashville area was hot.

Eventually in March, we made the drive down to Murfreesboro after work one day and looked at something like three or four houses. After not loving any of the ones we saw initially—”Great bedrooms, tiny shared space”; “Lovely house, no yard”; etc.—our realtor suggested we look at just one more house. I remember being pretty fed up and ready to go home for the night. It was Friday and we had some West Wing to binge back at our apartment. But we went the last house.

We walked through the house. We loved it. We thought it was the perfect starter home. But it was a solid 10% more than the top of our “budget range.”2 We had no clue if we could make it work financially, let alone if it would still be available by the time we got back to our apartment to formally make an offer.

Given the nature of the market, we knew we had to make a decision fast.

The house went on the market on Friday morning, March 4, 2016 at 8am. We toured the house around 4pm. We put an offer in by 8pm.3 The offer was accepted by 8am Saturday morning.

We were moving to Murfreesboro.

The Move

We moved to Murfreesboro on Saturday, April 23, 2026. Some family and a handful of friends from the Hermitage area were kind enough to help us load the truck at our apartment. We knew we had some friends waiting for us to help us unload in Murfreesboro, but we didn’t really know.

It took just a touch less than an hour to get from our apartment to our new home—which we had spent painting much of the weekend before our move.4

Not long after we arrived with the moving truck and our cars full of everything we owned, still plagued by the smoke smell of our next-door neighbors in the apartment, we were greeted by the handful of friends we knew would be meeting us at the house—the Smiths, Trevin, Aaron, and a couple others.

What we didn’t realize is that the Smiths had invited about a dozen other people from their church to help us move into the house. Susie and I were floored. We had never met these people in our lives, and they were taking orders from Susie and me about where to put all manner of furniture and boxes. Susie often says when we talk about the move, “All I know is that I never lifted a box.”

They had us all moved into the house in under two hours, as I recall, aside from a couple of pieces of furniture we were letting air out in the front yard to keep from bringing the stale smell of secondhand cigarette smoke into our perfect, beautiful new home—a gift we inherited from our apartment neigbors.

We figured we were going to check out the Smiths’ church among others, once we moved to town. But after the church provided a small army to help us move in and get the house all set up, we weren’t sure we’d ever even check out another church.5

The Last Decade

As of last Thursday, we’ve been in our house for 10 years. The “perfect starter home” has become the home we may not ever leave, and not just because we have a primo mortgage rate.

We never planned to settle down in Middle Tennessee. Susie and I are simple midwestern folks through-and-through. Pass the ranch. Yes, for the pizza.

But we love the city of Murfreesboro and the people with whom we get to share it.

Of course there is our church community. We have walked through all kinds of life experiences with the people of our church. In our church family here we see the kindness of God made manifest in so many different ways. We are grateful for a community of brothers and sisters who are tender when they need to be tender and tough when they need to be tough.

The people of our church make me want to be more like Jesus because they point me to him in their words and in their deeds. They steward the gifts and talents God has given them for his glory and others’ good—and my family has been the recipient of that faithful stewardship so many times. We are so grateful for the ways we have been cared for and loved by the people of our church family, and we hope that we have mirrored that care in all the ways we know how.

Beyond our church family, we have been so grateful for the teachers and staff of Maggie’s school, now that she has entered kindergarten. As I’ve written about before, Maggie attends a pretty rigorous public school in our area, and this first year of school has not been without its challenges for both student and parents alike. But the teachers and administrators at Maggie’s school have been so helpful and kind. We have all grown this year, and while we are eagerly looking forward to a break from all the homework, I am excited to see how she continues to be stretched next year in first grade.

On top of all of this, we enjoy so many other blessings.

Maggie and Daisy have been learning music theory and piano from a local teacher since they were just beginning to walk.

The girls have gymnastics teachers they adore.

We walk to a massive city park next to our house multiple times a week where we have informally adopted a pet turtle named Helga (Maggie took her American Girl doll to meet Helga last week).

We are blessed with lovely neighbors, one of whom is named Miss Bonnie. She works at the park and is fighting cancer. Pray for Miss Bonnie if you would. We love mis Bonnie.

We get all manner of birds feeding at our feeders in the backyard, and we’ve become friends with our local Wild Birds Unlimited owners, who are amazing and love seeing our girls cause a ruckus in their store.

We enjoy some incredible Thai food and Middle Eastern food from local, family-owned restaurants on a regular basis.6

We’ve been able to watch teenagers we led in youth group grow up into full-fledged adults. And we have seen those adults to be some of our girls’ favorite people in the world. It’s so sweet.

God has been so good to us and provided us so much more than we could have asked for or imagined.

We are so glad to be home in this place and at this time. We would have never thought to be in Middle Tennessee for this long. And now we can’t think we would ever leave. But we don’t get to plan such things. So for now, we will just be glad to be home, here.

3

I included a heartfelt note to the homeowners about how Susie and I were excited to raise a family in the home. I think it helped.

I won’t post the whole psalm here—you can go read it if you want to read the whole thing—but here are the first 15 verses (with a few of my favorites bolded):

Of David.

Fret not yourself because of evildoers;
be not envious of wrongdoers!
For they will soon fade like the grass
and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the LORD, and do good;
dwell in the land and befriend faithfulness.
Delight yourself in the LORD,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.

Commit your way to the LORD;
trust in him, and he will act.
He will bring forth your righteousness as the light,
and your justice as the noonday.

Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him;
fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way,
over the man who carries out evil devices!

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath!
Fret not yourself; it tends only to evil.
For the evildoers shall be cut off,
but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land.

In just a little while, the wicked will be no more;
though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there.
But the meek shall inherit the land
and delight themselves in abundant peace.

The wicked plots against the righteous
and gnashes his teeth at him,
but the Lord laughs at the wicked,
for he sees that his day is coming.

The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows
to bring down the poor and needy,
to slay those whose way is upright;
their sword shall enter their own heart,
and their bows shall be broken.

Psalm 37 hit with new force this time around, and I think it took me a minute to figure out why. But honestly, I think it just comes down to two factors:

1. We have no shortage of evils about which to be angry today.

2. We have no shortage of people telling us to be angry at the evil all around us today.

What are you angry about today?

Are you angry about something the President of the United States posted on social media?

Are you angry at some kind of unjust practice you’ve observed in the human resources department in your company?

Are you angry at the lengths to which people will go to deny the sanctity of unborn life?

Are you angry at some arbitrary rule an administrator in your child’s school has decided to enforce out of the blue?

Are you angry at the perpetuation of war in the Middle East?

What are you angry about?

Are you angry about real injustices being committed at a global scale to the detriment of countless people?

Are you angry about the perpetuation of pet peeves that pile up and derail the contentment you’ve found throughout the day?

What is it? Does it feel small and personal? Does it feel big and global? Does it feel within your grasp to affect or totally and frustratingly out of your control?

Here’s the thing: it doesn’t really matter what it is.

The bigger question is this:

Do you have faith that God can handle the object of your anger?

Do you have the faith to suppress your rage, no matter how righteous it may be?

Do you have courage to trust that the God of your salvation is also a God of justice?

To suppress rage is not to be ignoring or uncaring. To suppress rage is to have faith that God is just and good and sovereign.

It isn’t (always) wrong to be angry—“righteous anger” is real. But, sometimes we are angry and wrong at the same time. Sometimes we can be in the wrong even if we are angry about the right things.

But something I gleaned from David in Psalm 37 this time around is that it is never wrong to set aside our rage in favor of faith. It takes immense courage and humility to take whatever rage we have against evildoers—of the local or cosmic variety—and entrust their fates to the God of the universe.

What are you angry about today?

Let go of it and entrust it to the God of perfect justice.

Have the courage to turn your fists into open hands that are ready to receive the goodness of God.

Some think AI is a wonderful technological advancement that will lead to unmatched productivity and economic growth, leading us into some sort of new industrial age of wealth, prosperity, and freedom.

Others think AI is a scourge on society, a threat to jobs that will drive further disparity between the haves and the have-nots, and that it has the ability to demolish much of what it means to live a fulfilling live as a finite being on an amazing planet in an infinite universe.

Most, it seems, find themselves someplace in the middle of these two poles, perhaps seeing some value of AI’s ability to automate parts of jobs that no one seems to enjoy while also feeling a bit squeamish about how artificial intelligence could eventually do more harm than good in ways we may not yet even be able to fathom.

I haven’t written much about AI, and I still don’t plan to make any attempts to be an “AI though leader” of any kind, but as I wrote a bit in this newsletter last summer, maybe my greatest concern about the relentless adoration of AI right now is how it seems to have catapulted “productivity” to the top of many priority lists.

Before we go any further I want to make clear that I am impressed with how I have seen AI augment productivity. I just started a new job last month, and I have been using Claude a good bit to help me brush up on some skills that I haven’t used in a while. Without a doubt I have seen the benefit of AI in some aspects of my work, even as I take great care to not become overly reliant on it in any part of my job.

What I mean to say is that I see the appeal—the performative boost and administrative support provided by artificial intelligence is not just smoke and mirrors, even if some of the marketing seems a bit blustery. AI has real utility that I have seen and experienced myself.

At the same time, one of the best cautions I’ve read about AI is some version of, “Don’t use AI to augment any skill you hope to improve,” and I think we would be wise to heed cautions like these, too.

The most common case I see others make for the proliferation of AI—in Christian circles and otherwise—is how integrating artificial intelligence into our lives and work will “lead to levels of productivity and utility that mankind has never seen in its history.”

And I just don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing.

Utility Is Not Paramount

While I am not one to deny that AI has great utility, I think what concerns me is the degree to which it seems we have started to prioritize utility above all, perhaps because AI is so useful.1

Like with so many technological advancements, so it is with AI: perhaps our concern ought not to be with the product of the technology but with what using the technology does to us.

In his keynote speech last fall at the Dragonsteel Nexus conference, sci-fi/fantasy author Brandon Sanderson shared a quote from Oscar Wilde’s prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Sanderson goes on to say that one of his greatest concerns about AI is that it “seems to be too focused on the product and not the process,” which is another caution and concern we ought to heed.

Something is lost when we prioritize yield over the toil and experience it took to produce the yield—certainly in the case of art, but also in the case of other kinds of work!

Like Sanderson, one of my greatest concerns regarding the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence its inherent appeal to eliminate friction. This concern may not be as strong in the area of accounting as it is in the world of art.

Art Is Meant to Be Born Through Struggle

The best art is more than what it is.

The best art finds at least some of its beauty in the scars it took to become its finished self.

The best art is born out of friction and struggle, not in spite of it.

When we use artificial intelligence to shortcut the creative process, we produce less art and more content—these two things are not the same.

Content is meant to be consumed, art is meant to be felt.

We live in a time in which it has become widely acceptable to consume everything all of the time.

Like vacuums we suck up all the content we can, filter out what we don’t like, and never process anything that may be too difficult for us to handle.

All the impressive AI models we see today can create content more content for us than we could ever hope to consume, but they cannot create the kind of art that can make us feel. Such art requires us to connect with the struggle and the friction that had to be endured by the artist to create the art we engage. And the frictionless experience of plugging in a prompt leaves no scars to adorn the beauty of the finished product.

Even more, as Sanderson highlights, creating art does something to the artist. In a sense, he says, “You are the art,” and without the creative process, the artist is not transformed by the work.

Art is fruit that sprouts along the twisting vines of expression and vulnerability born in sweat and tears and struggle.

Art is not efficient, nor is it often useful.

And that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

Maggie is a puzzle pro, and because of my pretty severe colorblindness, I am definitively not a puzzle pro, so Maggie patiently lets me help her work puzzles. Usually I’m tasked with getting all of the edge pieces together to make the frame, but this puzzle has no such pieces given that it is in the shape of a literal rooster. Because of this, I felt particularly helpless on this puzzle.

We sat and talked and puzzled at the kitchen table for a while as the snow began to fall, and by the time we had finished probably two-thirds of the giant rooster, Daisy called from the uppy-stairs:

“Maggie! Come uppy-stairs and pay wif me!?”

Maggie called back something like,

“No, Sissy. I’m doing a puzzle with daddy right now!”

Then Maggie turned to me, and said,

“I’m having fun with you, and that’s all I care about right now.”

Maggie can struggle to stay on task at school sometimes, especially if reading a story brings to mind a story of her own she wants to share. But when she spends quality time with people she loves, she is relentlessly present. She gets this from her mother more than anyone else.

May I learn from her even as I do what I can to help her learn.

—

Many days, when it’s nice outside, our family will spend the afternoon hours after Maggie gets home from school and before dinner playing out in our front yard or on our driveway. Often we’re riding bikes, scooters, or maneuvering the other toy vehicles that take up one bay of our two-car garage. Sometimes we’re playing kickball or hitting a tennis ball back-and-forth.

A few weeks ago, some flowers and trees had just begun to bloom and violets were poking up through the barely-alive grass and other assorted weeds. Our family pickup kickball game was abruptly paused when Maggie began picking the violets out of the grass and collecting them in a bug net—Daisy, as always, followed closely behind.

At one point, Maggie shouted toward Susie and me, as we were sitting in the garage watching them pluck, and said:

“Mama, we’re so lucky to live in a place where flowers grow!”

Most of us live in places where flowers grow. And I suspect that, unless we are passionate gardeners, most of us aren’t stopping to smell or otherwise enjoy the flowers around us very much. Certainly most of us mow over the violets that crop up in the middle of our grass along with whatever other kinds of weeds invade.

What I love most, I think, about Magnolia is her unmatched ability to fully and completely enjoy everything about the world around her. She is often unconcerned with where she needs to be going. She is rarely in any sort of rush. She is constantly taking in her surroundings, curiously examining every sight, sound, and smell, and either enjoying what she loves or asking questions about what she doesn’t understand.

Now, does this make her difficult to teach sometimes? Yes, we hear that it does. Does it also make her difficult to parent sometimes? Absolutely. And we are doing all we can to give Maggie a bit more urgency and discipline without suffocating her curiosity and appreciation of every last bit of her world.

I think it’s fair to say that all of us have some remarkable qualities that inevitably come with some costs we wish we could eliminate but that are inseparable from whatever it is that makes us remarkable. Growing in discipline requires us to embrace the beautiful parts of who God has made us to be while also recognizing we live in a world with other people we are called to consider more important than ourselves.

That said, I’ll take being late from time-to-time if it means I can move about my world with a heart that is grateful to live in a place where flowers grow. And as a restless, tired, father of two little girls who just happened to both be named after flowers, I would do well to stop and be a bit more appreciative to live in a place where flowers grow.

Happy golden birthday, Maggie. I am so grateful you are one of the flowers I get to watch grow.

I know that sounds weird—because it kind of is—but it’s true, and I figure I should be honest with you about it.

I’m at that weird age and stage of life (35-years-old with two young children) in which I vacillate between feeling invincible and inescapably fragile in a matter of hours.

One day I may feel invincible, totally forgetting that death will one day come for me. And then the next, I may be physically and mentally aching, totally and painfully aware that one day my kids will bury me—hopefully well after they are adults themselves.

Death fascinates me for a whole host of reasons we won’t dive into today, but death becomes a front-burner topic in my mind around Holy Week each year for obvious reasons: the Savior of the world died and then de-clawed death by rising from the grave.

Obviously I don’t want to die anytime soon mostly for personal, selfish reasons like wanting to see my girls grow up or enjoy a long life with my wonderful wife. But I never fear death less than I do when I am reminded of Christ’s conquering of it, and how temporary it really is.

Death and resurrection are baked into the fabric of the cosmos, and our greatest hope in life is the life that awaits us on the other side of death.

Death and Resurrection: Threads in the Fabric of the Cosmos

In his book The Hope of the Resurrection, Patrick Schreiner has an entire chapter dedicated to how the realities of death and resurrection are woven into the fabric of the whole cosmos. He writes specifically about how we can see the resurrection in our backyards (bolding mine):

For example, the life cycle of an oak tree is one of death to life. An oak tree doesn’t reach its peak acorn production until it is about fifty to eighty years old. Its acorns contain seeds protected by hard wood shells. When an acorn falls to the ground, it is alive. But once it is disconnected from the tree, the outer shell slowly dies so that the life in the seed can sprout through the shell. An acorn’s potential is never realized until part of it dies. After an corn sheds its outer shell, new life bursts through.

The Scriptures say that this reproduction cycle points to a resurrection reality. When asked about the resurrection, the apostle Paul turns to seeds to explain it (1 Cor. 15:35-38). People in the first century were just as shocked by the idea of the resurrection, so he uses nature as an analogy for it. He says we are foolish if we don’t recognize what you sow into the ground does not come to life unless it dies (1 Cor. 15:36). Paul asserts that our earthy bodies are like seeds planted in the ground. You are to your future resurrection body as an acorn is to an oak tree. Today you are an acorn, but the acorn must die. In the resurrection you will be an oak tree.

Schreiner also shares a great Martin Luther quote that reads, “Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.”

The movement from life to death to life-to-the-full is true of us, the pinnacle of God’s creation, and echoes of this truth are woven throughout the fabric of all of creation. How awesome is that? Even the acorns cry out to testify of God’s work in creation to bring about new creation.

I have sometimes been a part of Holy Week services in different church communities that are somber in tone—like Good Friday services—and I’ve just always had a hard time play-acting grief when in such a service—for two reasons, I think.

First, it’s hard for me to pretend that Christ has died and not yet resurrected. It’s hard for me to get into that mode, I guess. I live in a post-Easter-Sunday world, and it’s hard for me to mentally transport myself to the night of Good Friday or the silence of that Saturday.

Second, I guess I find myself asking the question, “Would I have rather Christ not died?” How could I genuinely grieve one of the most important elements of the greatest news the world has ever received? While Christ’s death was unjust and awful, I find it hard to make myself grieve it—without it, we don’t have resurrection! The two feel so inextricably connected to me that it’s hard for me to deeply grieve Christ’s death without immediately being comforted and overjoyed by his resurrection.

The only reason death doesn’t scare me—even as much as I would like it to hold off for as long as possible—is because Jesus conquered it and showed us that real life awaits us on the other side of death. In going up on the tree, he fell from the tree like the acorn, bringing forth new life that could only come from death. This is what awaits us. This is our ultimate hope.

What Is the Ultimate Hope for the Christian?

In their tremendous work The Gospel Way Catechism, Trevin Wax and Thomas West answer the question “What Is the Ultimate Hope for the Christian?” in this way, in part:

Answer: Our hope is in Jesus Christ. We believe he will come again to reign over and restore the world, delighting to dwell with us and grant life everlasting, forever filling us with wonder, love, and praise.

“A man who believes is a man who hopes,” claimed Nicholas Sarkozy, former president of France. “Secular morality always risks exhausting itself because it is not backed up by a hope that fulfills man’s aspirations for the infinite.”

Our world wants to hope but doesn’t know how.

….

We were created to live for God and to hope in God.

….

The ultimate hope for the Christian is embodied in Jesus Christ. He is not just the fulfillment of God’s promises; he is our hope. Christians look back at the fulfilled promises of God and look ahead to the eventual return of Jesus Christ…The new heavens and earth will one day be our eternal home. We will be free from suffering and sorrow. All that will remain is the presence of God filling us evermore with wonder, love, and unending praise.

The ultimate hope for Christians is in the finished work and future return of Jesus Christ.

Death is, in the eyes of most, the worst thing that can happen to humans—it is the cessation of life itself. But, because of Christ, death is not the destination for the Christian. Death is but a brief layover on a connecting flight that shortly arrives at eternal, joyful life in the presence of the God who created, saved, and loves us.

No one wants to die before they’ve lived whatever it is fulfills their version of what it means to “live a full life,” and this is understandable. It’s good for us to want to experience the variety of beautiful experiences and wonderful graces that God provides for us throughout our decades of heartbeats and deep breaths.

At the same time, we can see death not as a cessation of life so much as a changing of mode.

Death doesn’t press stop on life, it just moves us to the next final, beautiful, unending song.

Whether we’re rooting our hope in the eventual return of Christ in glory or the eventual reality that we will join Christ in glory, the ultimate hope for the Christian is found in the person and work of Jesus Christ. It is because he defeated death that we don’t have to fear it.

The Impenetrable Armor of Resurrection Life

A prayer titled “Retrospect and Prospect” in the Puritan prayer book The Valley of Vision says:

I am not afraid to look the king of terrors in the face,
for I know I shall be drawn, not driven,
out of the world.

Until then let me continually glow and burn out for thee,
and when the last great change shall come
let me awake in thy likeness,
leaving behind me an example that will glorify thee
while my spirit rejoices in heaven,
and my memory is blessed upon earth

Whatever sort of terror it is we face—whether some sort of spiritual oppression, a cancer diagnosis, a relational catastrophe, or something else—we can face it without fear. We can “glow and burn out” for the Savior who gives us hope. Perhaps if the terror overcomes us and we find ourselves joined to Christ in glory earlier than we would have preferred, we could leave behind an example of Christlikeness and gospel-rooted hope that it glorifies God.

Finally, to zoom in a bit more closely on the idea that our hope is untouchable, that no earthly terror and even death itself cannot take away the hope we have in the finished work of Christ, let’s look again at something Patrick Schreiner writes in The Hope of the Resurrection:

…the resurrection is satisfying because it confirms that nothing can finally harm those who are in Christ. The resurrection affirms that the Christian cannot be destroyed in the ultimate sense.

….

Even if people maim a body, they can’t reverse the resurrection. What a comfort this is. Satan is incapable of destroying us. We’ve been given impenetrable armor.

….

If Jesus did not rise from the dead, then there is always the chance that someone can take everything away from you, including your life. However if Jesus did rise from the dead, then everyone in Christ has a satisfying end to his or her story.

No one can take everything away from us because everything we have been given are gifts of God that are not ours to hold for our own sake, but are ours to steward faithfully for the glory of God and the good of other people.

Our only hope in life is death and the untouchable, unending, and unmatched life that comes after. But even as we look ahead through the dim glass of death to the life that is to come, let’s enjoy this one, too.

The Qoheleth writes in Ecclesiastes 9:7-10:

Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.

Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.

Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Amen. Christ is risen! Christ will come again.

Genesis 2:5-17 says:

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

In his commentary on Genesis 2, Warren Wiersbe writes:

God planted His garden “eastward in Eden” (Gen. 2:8). “Eden” means either “delight” or “place of much water” and suggests that this garden was a paradise from the hand of God. Bible history begins with a beautiful garden in which man sinned, but the story ends with a glorious “garden city” (Rev. 21-22) in which there will be no sin. What brought about the change? A third garden, Gethsemane, where Jesus surrendered to the Father’s will and then went forth to die on a cross for the sins of the world.

We are people of the garden. We find our beginning in a garden paradise infected by an idolatrous parasite. We find hope in a future garden city consumed by the presence of God and the glorious goodness that overflows from his presence and into our hearts. And that hope was purchased for us because of Christ’s bloody, tearful submission to the will of our Father in a garden of twisted olive trees.

But there is yet another garden, one that grows between the garden of Christ’s prayer and the the garden-city of God’s presence.

Yet Another Garden and Its Gardener

Following the death of Jesus, Mary and Mary made their way to his tomb to tend to his body.

Of course when they arrive they are astonished to see the stone already rolled away. John writes about Mary Magdelene in John 20:1-16:

Now on the first day of the week Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, while it was still dark, and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” So Peter went out with the other disciple, and they were going toward the tomb. Both of them were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. And stooping to look in, he saw the linen cloths lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples went back to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept she stooped to look into the tomb. And she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had lain, one at the head and one at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” Having said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher).

The exact burial site of Jesus Christ is debated, with the two most likely places either being the famed “Garden Tomb” site or the location upon which the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built.1

Regardless, that Mary Magdelene mistook the risen Christ for a gardener tells us that the burial site was in the midst of a garden. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make much sense for her to mistake the voice of a man in her midst as the gardener.

Here we have a fourth garden—the garden into which Christ was buried and from which he rose. And was Mary Magdelene, in fact, mistaken, to think the man was the gardener? I suppose so, as she didn’t think it was Jesus. But in a sense she was not mistaken.

Mitchell Chase writes in Resurrection Hope and the Death of Death:

She thought the voice was the gardener’s. She did not realize Jesus had spoken to her. And yet Jesus was, in a more important sense, a gardener indeed (see Gen. 2:15). He was the last Adam, not returning to dust but risen and tending to matters of new creation.

Mary Magdelene was mistaken to think that the man who spoke to her was merely a gardener, and we would be mistaken to overlook that Christ is, in fact, a gardener.

The One by whom God created everything out of nothing is renewing everything for himself as the gardener who rose from the grave.

People Want Oblivion

Toward the end of the last Daniel Craig James Bond movie, No Time to Die, Bond confronts the villain Lyutsifer Safin1 (Rami Malek). In the confrontation, Bond is attempting to talk Safin out of his grand plan to infect the world with his biological warfare weapon. Bond talks with Safin about how neither of them really had a chance to live before their families were taken from them, and that the millions of people Safin intends to kill shouldn’t be subjected to such evil.

Safin responds to Bond like this:

The thing that no one wants to admit is that most people want things to happen to them.

We tell each other lies about the fight for free will and independence when we don’t really want that.

We want to be told how to live, and then die when we are not looking.

People want oblivion, and a few of us are born to build it for them.

Here we have a fictional villain delivering some nonfictional truth.

We live in a time in which So Much Happens that we cannot help but be subject to things happening to us. Even the most offline person has a hard time avoiding oblivion.

No matter how much we try to avoid being “current events” men or women, it feels increasingly hard not to be smacked in the face with some kind of Horror of the Day.

Brokenness is everywhere, and it happens to all of us in one way or another. The sad reality is that many of us just let it happen. We see the train coming down the tracks and we don’t let ourselves get out of the way. We, as Safin says, “tell each other lies” about our desire for independence and free will without actually acting like we want those things.

We talk about the desire to scroll feeds less and go outside more, and yet our screen time reports continue to testify against us.

We talk about working for change and resisting injustices—signaling our virtues or carrying around a hollow husk of optimism—only fall in line with the status quo and not have the courage to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

As much as we say otherwise, our lives often reflect those of people who want to coast along in comfort, hoping to avoid the injustices or issues we detest instead of doing something about them.

Safin hits the nail on the head when he concludes, “People want oblivion, and a few of us are born to build it for them.”

Here I see oblivion as clearly analogous to our current cultural posture of scrolling ourselves to death—a posture we simultaneously eviscerate and embrace.

Oblivion drops the world and all of its problems into our pockets and only provides us with the illusion of doing something about it. Oblivion makes us grand spectators, deciding to consume the lives of others instead of cultivating lives of our own.

Silicon Valley executives recognize that the people want oblivion, and they believe they are the ones who have been born to build it for them.

The Trough of Oblivion

Over the last couple of decades, a group of brilliant psychologists and computer scientists dedicated their lives to setting up carefully curated troughs of oblivion to be consumed such that we feel infinitely informed, endlessly entertained, and unwittingly enslaved. Our attention is worth hundreds of billions of dollars per quarter.

Invading the core of the human heart and swapping beauty with oblivion is a profitable venture.

When we passively consume content on our feeds, we perfectly embody this spirit of people who want things to happen to them, as Safin describes. We verify our identities (even as we forget who we are), open our phones, approach the blue-light trough, and keep our noses down, consuming until time runs out or we begin to feel ill.

Eventually, we fattened livestock have consumed so much from the trough of oblivion that we can be harvested. But the beautiful profitability of it all, is that when our attention and data are butchered from our selves, we continue living, unlike other butchered livestock. By giving ourselves over to troughs of oblivion, we endure a kind of death, even as we yet live.

Feeding from the trough of oblivion isn’t free, even if it never hits our wallets.

Somehow when we finally find the courage to lift our heads from the trough and see the beauty of the night sky or the promise of open fields, we squint with skepticism. What might be out there that we cannot control?

We continue to consume out of fear of being consumed. The trouble is we run headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We want oblivion. We want to be told how to live and how to think and how to spend and how to believe…and then die when we least expect it. We clamor for free will and independence bound to feeds by chains we purchased ourselves, only able to be freed by keys we’ve willfully misplaced.

Life is meant to be lived, not consumed. And so, by consuming, we ourselves are consumed. Safin is right: we do want oblivion, and we’ve no shortage of people who believe they were born to build it for us.

We are not promised plenty, but we are promised to be blessed in our need.

We are not promised health, but we can discover the grace of God amid our illness.

We are not promised power, but are pointed toward the centrality of humility.

Following Jesus is not easy, but that’s okay once you realize that ease was never the point. The problem is that Comfort is an appealing god that we often attempt to furnish with a second throne. Threats to Comfort lurk around every corner, and the rampant evil that plagues all of creation has arguably never been as visible and apparent as it is right now. These realities yield predictable fruit.

Scarcity in Abundance

I try to live under a rock a little bit more these days than I have in the past, not ignorant of the brokenness of the world, but also not captivated by it as I have been before. Every once in a while when I stick my head out from under my rock1 I encounter two dominant realities: fear and scarcity—the first of which usually follows in the wake of the second. Let’s start with the second.

More than any other modern phenomenon, the coronavirus pandemic brought our scarcity mindset to the fore, almost exactly six years ago (!!!) when toilet paper and other household items were disappearing from store shelves despite no real indication that any shortages were afoot. The panic buying of these items ultimately acted as self-fulfilling prophecies—the unfounded fear of a future scarcity led to panic buying and stockpiling, which then actualized the scarcity everyone feared.

Since then, this scarcity mindset hasn’t really gone away, even if it isn’t at the forefront of our minds as it was back in the throes of the pandemic.

For years, homes have been hard to come by, as Boomers live longer and longer, holding onto their homes, young families like my own sit tight in “starter homes due to advantageous mortgage rates, and new home builds can’t keep up with first-time homebuyers trying to find an affordable house. Oil (and gas) prices are spiking as we wage yet another war(?) in the Middle East.

A housing crisis and conflict-fueled energy price spikes? Even pop punk music has been resurrected—I’m seeing Yellowcard on tour this summer, for goodness’ sake! The early-2000s nostalgia is in full-swing, for good and for ill!

Used cars were scarce for a while, and may still be, which has caused the used car market to be pretty overpriced in recent years. Even simple things like Pokémon cards are next to impossible to find unless you want to pay nearly double the retail price at small card shops or with aftermarket dealers.2

On top of those abundant scarcities, it’s getting harder and harder to find a job as the job market looks weaker in basically every sector except for healthcare, and the comparison between annual average salary versus home price in the United States is…concerning:

Then, of course, how can you have any conversation about anything in 2026 without asking, “How might AI play into this?” And for that I have to share a recent graphic from the Financial Times relaying research done by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, depicting how AI could: 1) create a tech singularity that ends scarcity as we know it, or 2) create a tech singularity that leads to human extinction, or 3) set us on a modest AI-boosted GDP growth path of roughly 2.1%, in line with how the GDP has grown for over a hundred years:

I’m sure that if I took the time, I could probably come up with a handful of other examples of how scarcity manifests in other areas of life right now, beyond the ones I’ve listed.

These real, varied scarcities, join up with other factors to yield real, widespread fear.

Fear Itself

We do not lack opportunities to be fearful.

All the scarcities I’ve listed above are worthy causes of concern, depending upon how acutely any particular person or family feels the squeeze.

We bear witness to regional wars3 and endure rumors of world wars.

Some here in America understandably fear an increasingly authoritarian state marked by violence and mass surveillance on a scale we perhaps have not yet seen.4

And, thanks to social media and the smartphone, we have a front seat to all of it. I scrolled past a half-dozen videos of missiles and drones falling across the Middle East this past weekend while checking Twitter over breakfast.

I shared this screenshot of a tweet recently, and I’ve seen some version of this on social media a handful of times in the last month or so:

This tweet is obviously a bit cheeky, but it is an accurate representation of how too many of us are probably trying to handle the feelings of scarcity and fear that we carry. Some of us are just trying to scroll through it, but what’s actually happening is that we are scrolling ourselves deeper into the fear and/or rage we may be trying to escape. (I plan to write more about this next week.)

We fear our neighbors. Depending on our persuasion, we either wonder if they’re illegal immigrants who intend to harm us, or we wonder if they’re the kind of people who want to deport anyone who looks like they may not be from around here.

We fear our bosses or our workplaces, wondering if there is ever anything we can do to provide an untouchable sense of economic security so that we can remain employed and ward off any threats of scarcity that may arise.

We fear artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies and what effects these new frontiers may have on everything from our ability to work to the mental health of our loved ones who develop unhealthy relationships with chatbots.

This all leads us to feeling like cornered rats, afraid of everything, ready to lash out at everyone. So often what leads us into that corner are moldy, poisoned bits of cheese that we pick up as we tap and flick our screens in hopes of finding something that nourishes us and give us the hope we so desperately long to deliver us from our fear.

Fear and scarcity hold our hearts in a vice, and we tighten it by our own hand.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. It really doesn’t.

People of Joy and Generosity

I recently accepted a job offer to work for a ministry dedicated to publishing resources that help people connect with others in their local churches and grow to become more like Jesus.5 When I was interviewing with this ministry, they asked me to review their core values and share about which one resounded with me the most.

One of the core values they have is, “Joy and generosity transform.” As I reviewed the values I knew immediately that this is the one I wanted to highlight in my conversation with the team.

This value stood out to me because of everything I’ve written about fear and scarcity above. One of the best ways to loosen the vice grip that fear and scarcity have on our hearts is to live a life marked by joy and generosity rooted in the overflowing goodness and grace of God we see in Christ.

Philippians 4:4-7 is the most instructive passage that comes to mind when I consider the centrality of joy and generosity in the life of the Christian. Paul writes:

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

In a time when it is easy grapple with scarcity and be driven to fear, Christians will be set apart by how they engage their neighbors in joy and generosity.

Our graciousness, our generosity, is to be known to everyone—this is not easy (or possible?) when we are gripped by feelings of scarcity. Who wants to overflow to bless others when they fear they already lack so much?

We can find comfort in the nearness of the Lord, Paul reminds us—we don’t have to worry. If we find ourselves in need, we present our requests to God. We can choose to cry out to God instead of lashing out in fear.

If we can manage this, Paul says, if we can overflow with grace, remember that Christ is near, and take our needs to God, then we may find the peace we long for—the peace that surpasses all understanding, the peace that fulfills the scarcity, the peace that drive out the darkness of fear.

In a conversation in my community group recently, some were grappling with these feelings of scarcity and fear, and it allowed us to have a good conversation about how we might live right now in light of Everything Going On and the tenuous feelings we may have about so much of it.

Eventually the conversation led to the question, “So, like, as Christians, what happens if authoritarianism and fascism takeover in our lifetime here in America? What happens then?”

I said something like (I don’t remember the exact words), “We die. Or rather, we image Christ until we die.”

We don’t need to be afraid. We really don’t. Paul writes just a few chapters before the passage above in Philippians 1:21, “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.” He is not being cute or trite, but mortally serious.

Joy and generosity transform. They transform us, to be sure, but they also transform others and point them to the source of our transformation—the Spirit of the living God in us. When others are being shaped by their fear and scarcity, driven to lash out at others or spiral into despair, we can take hold of otherworldly hope by way of joy and generosity rooted in the finished work of Christ.

In response to an expert in the law who asks Jesus which of the commands is most important, Jesus replies:

He said to him, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

One of the best, most practical ways we can obey this second command to love our neighbors is to overflow with joy and generosity when scarcity is in abundance and fear itself is most terrifying. In doing so, we may see ourselves and our communities transformed.

The book was one of my favorite reads all last year, and I found it to be well organized and full of helpful guidance on how to handle the gospel in our current cultural moment. Unlike other multi-contributor books I’ve read in the past, the chapters flowed together well and complemented one another nicely, without repeating the same information over and over in different ways.

I’ve been holding onto a number of article ideas from the book for months now. So, as I have time, I want to share bits of the book with you along with a smattering of thoughts I have here and there. I would definitely recommend you pick up the book if you’re able. It is a fantastic primer for how to share the gospel in our time.

In his chapter on “the goal” of cultural apologetics, reflecting a bit on Romans 1, N. Gray Sutanto writes:

First, apologetics is not about moving non-Christians from ignorance to the knowledge of God but about unmasking the fact that non-Christians already know God. The problem is suppression, not ignorance. This means apologetics is a moral enterprise as much as it is intellectual; it is as much pastoral as it is philosophical.

Second, unbelief isn’t primarily an intellectual problem but an affective one. Failure to acknowledge God isn’t due to the lack of arguments, evidence, or awareness of the knowledge of God but due to the corruption of our hearts. We don’t want God to exist, for acknowledging his existence and glory means simultaneously acknowledging our maximal vulnerability before him (Rom 1:32)….intellectual objections we raise against Christian faith, while real, are motived by the heart’s resistance to God.

Earlier in the chapter, Sutanto shares a quote from Johan Bavinck’s exegesis of Romans 1. Bavinck writes:

We need to keep a sharp eye on the fact that there is something distorted in the human condition. People have have been resisting, suppressing. They have done so unconsciously. But they do so all the time, moment by moment always unaware that they are doing so.

Bavinck shares a related thought in a different quote Sutanto cites later:

Man has repressed the truth of the everlasting power and the divinity of God. It has been exiled to his unconscious, to the crypts of his existence. That does not mean though that it has vanished forever. Still active, it reveals itself again and again. But it cannot become openly conscious; it appears in disguise, and it is exchanged for something different.

The core flaw of the human condition is the desire to worship the self, and this makes the reality of one, true God feel more like a threat than a hope.

My pastor often talks about how our default posture with regard to the truths about God and his lordship over everything is that of someone attempting to hold a beach ball underwater in the pool.

It takes constant, even if unconscious, effort to hold back the truth that is continually breaking through about creation and its Creator. Try as we might to keep the beach ball underwater, it will always find a way to fly up and hit us in the face.

This attempted suppression is not only a futile effort of the unbeliever, let’s be clear. Even those of us who believe what Scripture says about God and trust Christ to save us from ourselves can engage in this foolish effort to suppress what we know. Sutanto writes toward the end of his chapter:

…apologetics is necessary not just for those who don’t yet believe but also for those who believe. The human heart holds deceptive secrets, and believers must continue to be vigilant from the ways they too continue to nurture the self-defensiveness, fear, and pride that cause us to resist the exposing and sanctifying witness of the gospel. Indwelling sin continues to trouble the believer. And if apologetics unmasks the discrepancy between what one professes and what one knows deep within, then Christians need to be exposed just as much as those who don’t yet believe.

…

God refuses to leave himself without a witness in the heart of every person. It is exhausting to keep suppressing what we know in our heart of hearts. Jesus calls us to his rest, for his yoke is easy, and his burden is light (Matt. 11:30).

Amen.

May God help us have the humility to join in with the confession of the father whose son was healed of an unclean spirit, saying, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24).

This situation makes the 'current-events man' a ready target for propaganda. Indeed, such a man is highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents; lacking landmarks, he follows all currents.

He is unstable because he runs after what happened today; he relates to the event, and therefore cannot resist any impulse coming from that event. Because he is immersed in current affairs, this man has a psychological weakness that puts him at the mercy of the propagandist.

A current-events man is that relative on Facebook constantly posting about the latest news coming out of the Oval Office. It’s the co-worker who was an expert on public health in 2020 and has insights on immigration policy and enforcement this week. It’s the pastor who can’t help but hook every sermon to a headline.

I have been a “current events man” at times, especially early in my adult life, when I first was developing a significant readership online. It is incredibly tempting to be a current-events man when doing any sort of public thinking or online content creation, in part because tying your “expertise” into the news of the day is one of the best ways accrue and monetize attention. Christian content creators—pastors, self-described “thought leaders,” “columnists” (i.e. “bloggers”), and others—are arguably as guilty as anyone else of being current-events men or women.

These days, though I pay for subscriptions to a number of national publications and am as interested in current events as I ever have been, I try not to be one who is “highly sensitive to the influence of present-day currents,” in the words of Ellul. When I have been active in writing about social media and its influence on us, I do what I can to connect the transformative power of social media to examples in our everyday lives without attempting to ride the wave of headlines or topics about which I am uninformed. But the temptation persists.

For me to avoid being a current-events man does not require me to be ignorant of what all is going on in this world—to be so ignorant could probably be described as unhealthy in its own way.

To avoid being a current-events man requires me to cling to timeless truths rather than reach for real-time hope.

It is good to care about the flourishing of our world without being wholly captivated by it.

Has it ever been easier to be a current-events man than it is today, or to justify being so? With timelines and notifications galore, the atrocities appear in our pockets on-demand. And, after all, we don’t want to be ignorant—heaven forbid.

Because it has arguably never been easier or more acceptable to be a current-events man, carried along by the whitewater of who-knows-what-will-happen-next, it is ever important that we remember our role as ambassadors from a foreign land.

Second Corinthians 5:17-20, unsurprisingly, has been especially helpful for me in this regard. Paul writes there:

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

Also, Paul’s words here in Philippians 3:20-21 are helpful:

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.

These images of ambassadorship and citizenship have been important to me for as long as I can remember, but they are especially helpful in our present environment when So Much is happening and it is easy to slip into some sort of perpetual discouragement or nihilism out of a sense of duty we feel to be Aware.

As ambassadors from and citizens of the kingdom of God sent to the foreign lands of temporal existence generally and our own geographical contexts specifically, we are tasked with caring for the good of our assigned Time and Place without being consumed by the evil that crouches at the door.

To be a current-events man is to slip into thinking I am a citizen of my Time and Place, forgetting I am an ambassador and that my citizenship lies elsewhere.

We are wise to advocate for the justice of God to prevail and for the love of God to abound without being carried along by the fears that follow in the wake of ever-present brokenness and sin. It is in this way that we resist the siren song to become current-events men and remember our role as ambassadors with an otherworldly citizenship.

Anyway, here are five of my favorite reads from 2025 and a few words about why for each.

1. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Is this my favorite fiction book ever? Maybe!

A couple of years ago I bookmarked the list of Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction in my web browser, and each of the last couple of years I’ve tried to read at least a few of the award-winners. I’m so glad I read this one early this year.

Why do I love this book? I think it’s because of how it feels like Catcher in the Rye if you actually loved and wanted to hug the main character rather than punch him in the face. Demon has so many similarities with Holden—Kingsolver even alludes to this in the book!—but I just found myself pulling for this kid in a way I never did with Holden.

Kingsolver does such an amazing job of capturing the simultaneous wisdom and folly that intermingle in the mind and actions of a teenage boy.

I almost never re-read fiction, but I could go back to this book in 2026 without any hesitation.

2. Everything Is Never Enough by Bobby Jamieson

No doubt my favorite nonfiction book of the year. Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible, and I’m always looking for new ways to unpack it. Bobby Jamieson proved to be one of the best guides through the winding wisdom of Qoheleth I’ve had in some time.

My friend Trevin summarized it well when he gave this book his top honor of the year:

Like its biblical counterpart Ecclesiastes, Jamieson’s book is something of an enigma, but the kind that stirs up curiosity and wonder rather than confusion. Jamieson offers us memorable pictures, well-crafted sentences, and thoughtful questions so that we see life on earth as a gift and look to our Creator for redemption and restoration.

Indeed. This book was insightful, well-written, and is one of my favorite books on Ecclesiastes. Pick it up for yourself!

3. Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth

I had never read Paul Kingsnorth before picking up his latest release this fall, and I think I will need to remedy that in 2026.

Against the Machine is not as plainly an anti-technology book as its title may make it sound—but it is at least partially an anti-technology book. What Kingsnorth is after is helping us see how the life of modernity (technologically, economically, and otherwise) we’ve been sold is preying on us and ultimately not out for anything but its own malignant expansion.

Smart Christians have levied fair criticisms against this book, but I think read wisely and with a firm grip on some solutions that may be better than those suggested by the author, the questions and concerns raised in Against the Machine are worth consideration. And he’s just such a great writer.

4. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

What a lovely book.

At The Gospel Coalition annual meeting earlier this year, I had the pleasure of sitting at the same table as Allen Levi for a writers’ gathering during the conference, and I believe I told him that Theo of Golden was sitting atop my stack of books to read next.

It’s a good thing I hadn’t read Theo before meeting Allen because if I had I may have attempted to embrace him and sob in his shoulder.

If you’re looking for some feel-good fiction that will inspire you and sorta break your heart all at the same time, read this.

5. Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

I bought this book back in May just a day or two after it released, I think, and it probably took me until about October to finish. Chernow is one of the best living biographers, and has been one of my favorite authors for some time.

This is maybe just the second of Chernow’s books that I have read with my eyes, as I have read most of his works via Audible in the past when I used to commute to Nashville multiple days per week. His works tend to be quite long—this one is 1200 pages—but I think his pacing is solid. There were only a couple of stretches of this work that felt a bit slow to me, and I am so happy with how much more I know about this American icon.

For most people, I’d only feel comfortable recommending this one as an Audible read for long drives or commutes, but if you’re an avid reader you would do fine with this one!

I hope you read some great books this year! If you have a top five or any recommendations at all, feel free to share them in the comments below.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I am going to refrain from sharing here about how we intend to handle Santa Claus with our kids, as it isn’t really the point of what I want to explore here.

So far this season, questions about Santa haven’t come up much, but the other day Maggie did ask me why we don’t have an elf at our house like some of her friends at school do. It took everything in me to simply say something like, “Well everyone has their own ways of celebrating Christmas,” instead of saying, “The elf of the shelf is a bastardization of all things Christmas and each one of them should be thrown in a pile and burned.” God granted me grace and patience at an opportune time for her sake and mine.

But all of this had me thinking about something I haven’t really thought about before.

How is the myth of Santa Claus still alive in 2025 for anyone over the age of like…five?

I wondered this first because of the advent of AI use in popular culture. I entered “is santa real” in a handful of the most popular generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc.), and all of their answers would spoil the imaginations of children around the world.

So then I tried plain ol’ Google. “Surely,” I thought, “Google will have some kind of cheeky, kid-friendly response at the top and then real answers tucked away someplace. Nope. It also told the truth about the jolly old fellow right at the top of the results.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics in 2021, 97% of kids from ages three though 18 have some kind of internet access.

So I ask again: How is the myth of Santa Claus still alive?

I remember when I still believed in Santa Claus in the late 1990s, I spent much of Christmas Eve refreshing Netscape Navigator on the NORAD Tracks Santa webpage, surely clogging up our dial-up connection for the whole day. If Google would have existed then, you better believe I would have gone looking for the truth.

It would be nearly impossible to do some kind of study on if kids are disbelieving in Santa earlier today than they did 20 or 40 years ago. Logic would suggest that they are disbelieving earlier, because of the early age at which so many are given unfettered internet access, but it’s hard to know in an empirical way!

So I guess I want to ask you, dear reader. Among the kids you know—your own, ones in your school, etc.—is belief in Santa still alive and well? Have you seen kids disbelieve sooner than before? I’m curious!

My own ambivalence aside, as a parent who isn’t sure how far to take it, I don’t wish for the death of the myth at all. Santa is a fun feature of the holiday. I just wonder how much longer he’s got.

It was November 29, 2015. I was in my second year of seminary and struggling mightily with my Hebrew class, and I asked Susie to take over driving the rest of the way home so that I could sit in the passenger seat and study my vocabulary flash cards on my phone.

We sat in about 90 minutes of traffic around Elizabethtown due to an accident, but after that cleared, we were able to get going again. For being 7:30-or-so in the evening the Sunday after Thanksgiving, the traffic was mercifully light. According to the GPS we would be home close to 10 o’clock, which was fine with us—we didn’t have kids yet and could handle sliding into the apartment pretty late after a trip back home to Indiana.

We were listening to the newly-released Purpose album by Justin Bieber. The back seat was full with Thanksgiving leftovers like Amish peanut butter, Babee’s chicken and rice, and probably some desserts. My Playstation 4 sat on the floor of the backseat. I had taken it home because back then we still had plenty of free time when visiting home without children, and there was a new Call of Duty waiting to be played over the break.

The Accident

Around mile marker 67, just about a half-hour south of Elizabethtown near Munfordville, the rain had picked up again. “The Feeling,” by Justin Bieber (featuring Halsey) was playing in the 2009 Toyota Camry we had recently purchased from my parents.

Here’s what I wrote about what happened next, back on December 7, 2015:

Susie was behind a car and the “wake” of the rain spitting off of it was making it difficult to see. So, she moved into the left lane and sped up just a bit to get around the car so she could see more clearly. Shortly after moving into the left lane, we hit a deep puddle, spraying water up onto the windshield. Susie couldn’t see, so she attempted to slow down, which caused her to lose control of the car.

“Oh no!” she said through a terrified, cracky voice as we began to swerve. I said nothing (she tells me, I have no recollection), and held on tight: I knew what was coming. I tightened the grip of my right hand which was already on the bar above my passenger window, and clung to my iPhone in my left hand, which was doubling as a music box and a study tool.

I squeezed my eyes shut tight like a little boy does when he thinks you can’t see him because he can’t see you, and I shut my mouth like you do when you jump into a pool, only more forceful. I felt us hit the wall, but listening to the sound of the shattering glass distracted me from our flip onto the roof of the car.

I opened my eyes, and before I could process my aliveness, I looked through my blurry vision out my absent window because I’ve seen enough TV to know what happens next. When I saw headlights out my window, I closed my eyes and my mouth for what I was certain was coming: another car or three.

After what could have only been a few seconds, I opened my eyes again to hear Susie saying nothing but, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” through her tears. Feeling virtually no pain myself, I didn’t even think about the fact that one of us could be seriously hurt. I just knew we had to get out of the car no matter what. My iPhone was still in my hand (yes, it was), so I turned on the flashlight.

Being in our car on its roof reminded me of how I used to feel being in my school outside of normal school hours. It’s some sort of pseudo-reality in which something totally familiar feels totally foreign.

Anyway:

Susie unbuckled herself easily, and I claimed I couldn’t unbuckle my seatbelt. In my disorientation, I thought my buckle was on my right side, but as I was the passenger, it was on my left. I told Susie I couldn’t undo my seatbelt, so she did it for me. At this point, help began arriving at the car. A woman, Lisa, I believe, approached Susie’s side of the car, and a man, Kyle, was on my side.

They were asking how many people were in the car and if we were OK. I feel bad even now, but I feel like I remember them asking this a number of times, and eventually I responded in frustration, “It’s just the two of us, we’re fine, just get us OUT!”

“Turn off the car!” Kyle said, and that’s when I realized why. “Oh no,” I thought, “This car could explode. Maybe it’s already on fire.” Instantly, getting out of the car wasn’t the next step, it was a matter of survival. I began to panic when neither Susie nor I could turn the car off. Both of us just started looking for the easiest way out.

One way or another, my door was pinned shut. However, the window was completely blown out and gone, so I tried to slide my legs out that way. No dice—only about half of the window was not against the ground, so nothing above my knees fit through.

At this time, Susie realized what is, without a doubt, the scariest part of the ordeal for me. As she attempted to maneuver out of her door, Susie realized her hair was pinned under the car. The sunroof of our Camry also blew out in the crash, and somehow, as the car flipped and/or slid, her ponytail went through the sunroof and about half of the hair on her head was pinned between the roof of the car and the ground below it.

Susie screams, “I’m pinned by my hair,” which I relay to Kyle outside my door. People began asking around for scissors or a knife. A few seconds later, someone handed me what had to be something like a six-inch hunting knife, which I had not business handling in my current state. As I was looking at Susie’s hair to figure out the best way to safely do the deed, Susie frantically began yanking her hair. Eventually, she yanked most of it free, opened her slightly sky-facing door, and crawled out of the car. I followed just seconds behind her.

After Susie and I hug and make sure each other is OK, Lisa (a former ER nurse, by the way) is tending to Susie, asking the others who have stopped for more coats, blankets, etc., as it was rather cold and wet.

I use my iPhone flashlight to examine myself a bit, as I talk with the others there about if we hit anyone else and if my face looks OK (relatively speaking). I see only minor cuts on my hands, and my lip was swollen, as I had nearly bit through it. Susie is obviously shaken, but truthfully she was in a worse mental state than she was a physical one.

After what seemed like hours, but was only probably 15-20 mins, Kentucky State Troopers, a couple of firetrucks, and an ambulance all arrived on the scene. Without fail, each safety official who arrived on the scene went straight to Susie, who was surrounded, sitting on the ground with coats and blankets to keep warm in the standard Midwest 40º drizzle of a November night. I stood by talking to those who stopped and examining myself thinking I had to be more injured than I actually was. At one point, Susie was so mad at all of the attention she was getting and the lack of attention I was getting that she sternly said to the troopers and firefighters, pointing at me, “HE WAS IN THE CAR, TOO! PLEASE CHECK ON HIM!”

This happened once or twice with different responders. Each time, they looked at me, and I just said, “I’m fine.” Because I really was, to everyone’s surprise, it seemed.

It was the first night on the job for one of the state troopers. He told me someone wrecked because of that same puddle the night before, and that the construction company working there had been warned. Eventually, when the ambulance arrived, we climbed in, they checked our vitals, and asked if we wanted to go to the hospital. My only hesitancy was that I know it can cost a ton to ride in an ambulance, and it didn’t seem like we needed treatment. But we decided to go anyway. Better safe than sorry, we figured.

Almost all who responded. The EMTs, police officers, firefighters, and emergency room personnel seemed to be looking at us with wide eyes and confusion. A sort of, “You sure you’re really OK? Like, for real?” It was a regular reminder of how fortunate we really were.

We were briefly examined in the ER—we actually wish they would have done more than they did—and eventually a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the hospital to take us to a Super 8 for the night.

Fun fact: about two weeks later, the state of Kentucky shut down that portion of I-65 for a time because they couldn’t figure out how to get it to drain water properly amid all of the construction. I like to think the sternly-worded email I sent to the construction company helped play some role in that decision.

Reflecting on the Accident 10 Years Later

This past Saturday, November 29, 2025, we drove the same stretch of I-65 in the middle of Kentucky. This time with two little girls, a dog, and plenty of leftovers, again, in tow.

This time we drove through mile marker 67 in the early afternoon, under overcast skies. I was listening to Christmas music. Susie was napping. Maggie and Daisy were watching two different movies in their seats. The dog was panting in the third row, looking forward to stretching his legs once we got home.

I do most of the driving to and from Indiana these days, which I’m happy to do. And while Susie was a bit more spooked by the 10-year anniversary of our accident than I was, I would be lying if I said making the same drive on the same date didn’t give me a touch of the heebie-jeebies. I was tempted to put the same Bieber song on the speakers as we drove over the spot, but for Susie’s sake I refrained.

If I’m going to be honest, I don’t think about the accident as much as I would like. What I mean is that I wish I had a firmer grasp on the overwhelming sense of gratitude I had immediately following the accident. Today, the accident has faded into the realm of life of events that I know I experienced but that feel like were part of another lifetime—like playing high school football or moving into college.

It was a violent accident. We basically rode a wave of water up a temporary concrete barricade on the left side of the left lane on I-65 and rolled over onto the roof of our car, landing in the middle of the interstate, and we came out with more mental scars than physical ones. I consider that borderline miraculous.

The most terrifying part of the experience for me to remember is when I opened my eyes after the car stopped moving. I looked out my blown-out passenger window toward oncoming traffic. My glasses were on, but had slid down to the tip of my nose, so all I saw were blurry, astigmatism-ified headlights headed right for us. I still vividly remember closing my eyes and waiting for impact. I remember, too, thinking it would be the last thing I saw. My life didn’t flash before my eyes or anything, but I was aware of what I thought was about to happen.

By God’s grace, traffic wasn’t dense enough for this to happen. No other cars were involved in our accident. Somehow the traffic behind us was able to stop in the ponding water without hydroplaning. The first two people who approached the car were a retired ER nurse and a guy who lived like 10 miles from us (we were still a couple hundred miles from home). God’s hand was so evident in the small details surrounding the accident that night. Not just in our immediate protection, but in so many small graces we experienced in the immediate aftermath. Our church family and employers were gracious and so supportive. I haven’t experienced a ton of hardship in my life, and this traumatic experience still reminds me of how important it is to have community.

Life has changed so much since the accident. Yes, I do most of the Indiana driving now, and we don’t leave super late on Sundays to come home from Indiana anymore. These are small parts of life that have changed. But of course we have children now, too, and a dog, and I can’t even imagine experiencing something similar today.

Perhaps the most impactful fruit of the accident is how it affected Susie mentally. Susie has struggled with some measure of anxiety since she was little, but Susie really struggled after the accident with believing we were actually, physically unharmed. Understandable, really.

Eventually, about eight months later in the following summer, this came to a head with a bout of panic attacks and anxiety that weren’t rooted in the accident, but were triggered by it. Working through Susie’s anxiety together has been a major part of our marriage and lives for the last 10 years, and though it hasn’t been easy, I’m grateful for it—not for the anxiety, but for God’s timing in using the accident to cause it to boil over. The anxiety bubbling under the surface for Susie was bound to spring up sometime and in some way, and that the accident was the tipping point was honestly a grace, at least in my mind. Life has only gotten more chaotic and inherently stressful since then, so to be able to work through the earliest stages of that struggle in that season was a gift.

Between the accident in the fall of 2015 and Susie’s panic attacks in the summer of 2016, we moved out of our apartment east of Nashville and into our home in the suburbs. We joined a church with a robust counseling ministry and developed a relationship with a counselor in Nashville. That Susie’s long-bubbling anxiety came out in full-force in that season of life rather than, say, now, is a blessing. It gave Susie plenty of time to work on her own struggles before we had children, and it led to a fruitful career for her, as she eventually went to work for her counselor, using her gifts and helping others struggling in similar ways.

Of course, I wouldn’t wish for the accident to happen again, but it is fair to say that in the events surrounding and resulting from the accident I have seen God work in some of the most impactful ways in our lives and our marriage, and I’m certain we are better people for the experience than without it.

November 29, 2015 was the night everything could have changed, but it didn’t. But some things did change—in difficult and beautiful ways—and for that, I’m grateful.

Data is, of course, important. If someone has a job, they work for a business.

And every business from the non-profit that serves homeless people in your community to a trillion-dollar company in Silicon Valley needs to pay attention to financial data to make sure their bills can be paid.

Sports teams have to pay attention to the data collected by their statisticians and analysts to know which pitcher to put in the game to face the slugging lefty that comes up to bat with the game on the line.

Parents need data to understand how their children perform at school, so they can know if some sort of tutoring or remedial work is necessary to ensure their child doesn’t fall behind the necessary requirements for students their age.

Data has always been important, but it seems that it has maybe never been as influential in decisions as it is today. Much of the reason for that is because novel technologies have been developed that allow us to quantify—or turn into numbers—parts of life that were never able to be quantified before.

I’ve never been much of a “math” guy—I’m more of a words guy—but I have always loved statistics. I struggled in my high school geometry class, but aced the college-level statistics course I took my senior year of high school. So don’t come away from this thinking “Chris thinks data isn’t important.”

I do think data is important, and I love analyzing data to find meaning in the numbers. If collecting data is quantifying reality, I love to do the work of taking data and de-quantifying it, turning it back into meaning that can be acted upon in the real world, outside of a spreadsheet.

But I think we’ve come to care too much about data, perhaps expecting it to be able to deliver more value than it actually can.

I heard someone say recently, “The things that make life meaningful are not so easily measured.”

I am concerned that we become unhealthily interested in that which we can measure solely because we can measure it and not because it is what matters most.

This is especially true in ministry, is it not?

Of course in a for-profit business enterprise that exists to make a profit, what matters most is making a profit, and this is definitionally quantifiable.

But in a ministry or more general non-profit setting that exists for a purpose that may not be so easily quantified, the temptation to invent data that measures “success” is a strong one.

We should not attempt to quantify Christlikeness, for example.

Do you have data to demonstrate the value of your friendships? Your marriage? I hope not.

That the things which matter most cannot be quantified is not a bug—it is a feature.

The ability to quantify and track the effectiveness of various parts of our life is a gift, so long as we can resist the draw to care more about that which we can measure than that we cannot.

We should learn from what we can measure even while we invest in what we cannot measure.