Living a Rhythmed Life: What Do You Wish You Could Do?

Hi there, friends. 

Toward the beginning of our series on living a rhythmed life, I invited you to create a discernment tree to get a wholistic picture of all that’s happening in your world right now. And then yesterday, I shared that this week in the series, we’re starting to hone in on practicalities. 

At the end of the week, we’re going to start making some decisions. 

Up until that point, though, I’m going to invite you to add a few more components to your discernment tree. 

Yesterday’s component was that of calling. I asked, “Do you have a sense of call?”

If you do, add the truth of that calling to your discernment tree page — perhaps at the bottom of the page, underneath the fullness of your tree. It will serve as a guiding principle for you as you begin the process of making decisions later this week. 

(Sidenote: I spoke with a friend this morning who shared that her answer to the question, “Do you have a sense of call?” was “No.” However, she does have a very strong sense of important values that she wants to mark her life. If you have a sense of values that you want to mark your life, feel free to write those down at the bottom of your discernment tree, too.) 

Today, I want to ask you the question: 

What do you wish you could do? 

Our discernment trees are all about surveying what’s really “there” in our lives right now — all of our commitments, all of our daily routines, all of the pieces that make up the fullness of our reality. 

But what about the parts you can’t include right now? What about the hobbies you really love but just can’t get to, or simply haven’t? What activities have been sitting on the sidelines that you miss or wish you had time to explore? What aspects of life do you wish could be included in your daily, weekly, or monthly routine?

Today’s activity isn’t about looking at what is but allowing ourselves to voice what we wish could be.

It’s about dwelling in possibility.

Again, if you’re able, give yourself permission not to judge or make decisions about your particular wishes right now. Just write them down at the bottom of your discernment tree.

What things do you wish you could do?

Living a Rhythmed Life: When Your Life Is Not Your Own

So, I’d love to hear from the mamas and the papas on this one. 

Living a rhythmed life is such an intentional approach to life. As we’ve seen so far, it starts with learning our natural rhythm, looking at what is, and then considering the finite resource of time and the limits of our own selves. 

And then it’s about making some decisions. (We’ll be speaking to that next week.)

But what if you’re a parent, and you don’t have the luxury of so much intentional structure in your life?

What if you don’t know whether your young one will sleep through the night so you’re rested and ready for what tomorrow holds, or when she might need her next feeding, or if they’ll have a meltdown day (or if you’ll have a meltdown of your own)? 

What if you’re running to soccer practice, dropping off at piano lessons, picking up from school, and helping out with homework? Not to mention making dinners, packing lunches, and getting everyone woken, dressed, fed, and out the door?

From what I hear from my friends who are parents (speaking as someone who is not one), life can feel like a a sprint and/or a marathon every single day. 

Where does a rhythmed life fit into all that? Where do limits and natural rhythms and finite resources of time go?

And does a rhythmed life even matter if you’re a parent? Is it just a luxury for those who aren’t?

These are such good and legitimate questions. And I’m stepping onto what I know is holy ground here to even address them — especially since I am not a parent.

But as someone who majors in the subject of formation and how it shows up in our real lives, and as someone who has thought about (and lived) a rhythmed life for some time now, I will offer some perspectives for consideration.

(And then I’d love for the mamas and papas among us to chime in with their thoughts.) 

I’ll say first of all that you can, of course, choose or not choose to live a rhythmed life. 

This series isn’t meant to be prescriptive. It’s meant to be descriptive. We’re exploring the advantages of a rhythmed life in response to life’s often overwhelming realities and helping you consider what that might look like in your own individual life.

The second thing I’ll do is ask a question: 

What might it be like to model a rhythmed life for your children? 

What if they learned from you the reality of limits? 

What if they learned from you the value of yes and no? 

What if they learned from you that being tossed about by whims of culture and expectations and even peronal compulsions doesn’t have to be their unqualified fate? 

What if they learned from you how to live intentionally? 

What if they learned from you how to tune into their own natural rhythm and how to honor the natural rhythms of others?

I ask these questions quite honestly. What do you mamas and papas out there think?

PS: Have you signed up for the Cup of Sunday Quiet yet? The inaugural version goes out Sunday! Would love to have you join me in this special invitation. xo

Living a Rhythmed Life: How It's a Practice in Self-Care

Hi there, friends. 

Today’s post in the “living a rhythmed life” series is a bit of an extension of yesterday’s post about the reality of limits in our lives.

Sometimes we want — and try — to do more than we really can. We try to stretch time. We try to stretch energy. We try to stretch ourselves so that we can do everything we either want to do or feel that we have to do. 

That is a degradation of self.

When we push and push and push, trying to do it all, we’re ignoring the reality of our minds and bodies and spirits. We’re making “the thing out there” more important than the reality of the actual embodied and spirited selves “in here,” closer to home. 

We just can’t do it all. 

And so tuning in to who we are, how we’re made and wired, and what we’re meant to do — and honoring that truth with the way we live our lives — is a continual practice in self-care. Honoring the self you really are. Not pushing beyond your limits, but living within what’s real and true. 

What is it like for you to regard the rhythmed life as a means of self-care in this way?

Living a Rhythmed Life: Our Selves Are Finite, Too

Yesterday we began to think about the finite nature of time — that there are only so many hours in a day, and what we do with them impacts what we’re actually able to get done. 

The same is true for ourselves. 

Our bodies and minds and hearts and spirits have limits. 

Some of this has to do with the natural rhythm embedded in us that we discussed at the beginning of this series — how we are actually made in our true state of being cannot do things outside that rhythm very well. We can try, and perhaps succeed for a time, but eventually we will wear out.

In other words, how we are uniquely made to function impacts what we can and can’t do. 

And then there is the pure physicality of our limits. 

Our minds function optimally for a certain period of time each day before slowing down and then needing rest. And the same goes for our bodies. We need rest, down time, recuperation, and sleep to recalibrate and recharge our embodied batteries.

Our bodies themselves make a difference in what we can do, too. Because we have bones and muscles that connect in certain ways, we cannot do whatever we want with the bodies we live in. We are limited by their structure and connections. And then there’s the actual shape of our bodies — if we are tiny, we cannot lift gargantuan things; if our metabolism is fast or slow, that impacts our stamina and pace of life; if our muscles and bones are strong and firm, we can move around and do things with relative ease; if they aren’t, we have to take greater care.

Living a rhythmed life means paying attention to these realities of our finite selves. 

What can the reality of your finite self teach you about helpful or unhelpful rhythms and commitments in your life right now?

Living a Rhythmed Life: Our Time Is Finite

Hello there!

We’re diving back into the series on living a rhythmed life this week, and now we’re going to look at some aspects related to time: how much time there is, how we’re spending it (really), and what the implications of that might be.

So, I’ve created another video for you. :-)

If you can’t see the video in your e-mail or RSS feed, click here.

Also, as I mention in the video, I’ve got a handy-dandy chart/visual aid that you can download called the Time Catcher, which you’re free to use this week as we continue our discussion.

Click to download the Time Catcher 

xo,

Christianne 

Living a Rhythmed Life: What It Is

Limbs reaching up toward heaven. 

It creates freedom. 

It creates space. 

It makes your “yes” and “no” more clear.

And:

It relieves anxiety and worry.

It lets you settle in. 

It increases presence.

What’s more: 

It removes the ineffectual and unnecessary.

It creates a sense of purpose.

It generates life.

It invites joy.

Is there anything you would add to this list?

Living a Rhythmed Life: What It Isn't

It isn’t about rigidity.

It isn’t about conformity.

It isn’t about ignoring reality.

It isn’t about losing yourself.

Also: 

It doesn’t look the same for each person.

It doesn’t remain the same always.

It doesn’t suffocate you.

It doesn’t snatch away your life.

What’s more: 

There isn’t one right way.

It doesn’t require having your life figured out.

It doesn’t make your life perfect, with no spots or mess in it ever.

What about this list surprises you or reveals something about your assumptions?

Living a Rhythmed Life: What's Going On in Your World?

Hey there!

In yesterday’s post in this series, we did an interior pulse check of sorts to learn our most natural rhythm — the rhythm of life that is most native to us. This provides a great starting point as we begin to explore the different facets and realities of life and how we might best live intentionally within them. 

Today, we’re taking the very next step: looking at what’s here. 

And I have another video for you, recorded this morning:

(If you can’t see the video in your e-mail or RSS feed, click here.) 

If you happened to watch the video from yesterday’s post all the way through, you’ll remember that I mentioned an exercise involving a tree drawing that I created to discern my way through an overwhelming season of my life. Today, in the above video, I’m sharing more about that tree exercise with you and am inviting you to draw your own!

As I mention in the above video, this is just a starting point.

We’re not going to try and figure out our lives all at once in drawing these trees right now. Instead, I’m inviting you to take an afternoon or a couple days or even a week to draw your tree and just be with the reality of what your life really looks like right now. 

And so try, if you can, not to judge your tree and all that it contains. You may feel it has too much on it. Or that the branches and little twigs and smaller branches you chose to include are silly. Or that perhaps your tree is not full enough.

Try, to the best you are able, to set aside those judgments.

This is not the day for making decisions about your tree. This is the day for simply seeing and being with what is. 

What is it like for you to do this tree exercise?

Living a Rhythmed Life: A New Series

Kirk’s desk.

When we celebrated a year of being faithful in this space a couple weeks ago with an open call for topic requests, one reader requested some meditations on cultivating the spiritual disciplines in our lives. Specifically, Terri said: 

“I’d love it if you covered more on the journey of cultivating spiritual disciplines. It seems as though writing this blog has become something of a spiritual discipline for you and I’d love to hear more about the obstacles you encountered and what was required of you to push through those obstacles.”

I’ve been musing on this request since receiving it, and that musing has formulated itself into a new series I’m going to offer here about living a rhythmed life. 

So much of learning to write faithfully in this space has been due to cultivating a rhythmed life. Rhythms have always been a part of my life in some way, but it’s only been in the last couple years that I’ve realized how much I truly need rhythms in order to thrive. And so — especially in this last year — I’ve become much more intentional about the way I live and spend my time.

And now I’ve realized that I have quite a bit to say about all this. :-)

The way this series is shaping up on the pages of my brainstorms about it, we will cover more ground than just my experience of growing into a life of greater faithfulness through the experience of writing posts for you in this space, though it will definitely include reflections on that experience. We will cover things like:

• The rhythms of our online lives
• The rhythms of our households
• How a rhythmed life cultivates self-care and love for others
• Exploring our personal rhythms
• Obstacles to the rhythmed life

Some parts of this series will delve into the spiritual realities of living a rhythmed life. Other parts of it will be more practical, more tactile, more down and dirty in the nitty-gritty dailiness of our lives. But I often find God in those nitty-gritty spaces, too. 

Will you join us in this new series? 

What questions, challenges, or even frustrations do you have about this idea of living a rhythmed life?

Finding God With and Within

I read a quote by St. Augustine this morning that helps illuminate our path to God. He wrote: 

Late have I loved Thee, O Beauty so ancient and so new. Late have I loved Thee. For behold Thou were within me, and I outside; and I sought Thee outside, and in my unloveliness, fell upon those lovely things Thou hast made. Thou wert with me and I was not with Thee. I was kept from Thee by those things, yet had they not been in Thee, they would not have been at all. 

I keep marveling at this sense of being outside ourselves that he mentions — how God can be found when we go interior, inside ourselves, but how we often flee that level of intimacy and knowing and being known by casting about outside ourselves. 

Or the way, too, he mentions God being with us but our not being with God. 

It is so easy to avoid presence, isn’t it? Presence with ourselves and presence with God. So we go outside ourselves.

It’s such a visceral picture to me — this going outside ourselves — as though we are leaving our real habitat, our real encasement, leaving it as an empty shell while we seek something elsewhere. Except as we are seeking that something else, we’re only a half-being because we left ourselves back with God.

Visceral, isn’t it? 

Can you relate? 

What is it like for you to consider finding God by going inward or finding God right there next to you?

A Turn in the Suffering :: When It's Bigger Than We Understand

I have felt so aware throughout this suffering series that this subject is vaster than any bits and pieces of a blog series — even a whole lot of those bits and pieces strung together in a month-long series — can cover. 

I told Kirk that writing this series has felt like offering a tiny taste of perspective each day on one of those tiny pink plastic sample spoons you get at Baskin Robbins when you want to try an ice cream flavor before ordering your scoop. Each and every post of this series has felt like a tiny pink tasting spoon like that, and I feel like I could write whole book chapters on each post — each post that examined how suffering can affect us, and each post that has examined ways we might hold the suffering and learn what it can teach us. 

Not to mention all the perspectives that weren’t included in either side of that exploration yet.

This subject is just so big and vast. 

And this morning, as I was walking along the beach in prayer with Jesus and talking with him about all this, I felt so aware of the truth of this. It was like he looked out across the vast ocean stretching out for miles beside us and swept his arm out toward it, as if saying, “See this? This is its vastness. It’s true.” 

Sometimes our actual experience of suffering feels like that, too. 

There’s a vastness to it. An imperceptibility because it can be so all-consuming and great. An inability to pull back and see or even comprehend anything rational when it comes to what we’ve suffered or seen others experience. 

Sometimes it’s just too big to understand. 

And I think, in those places, we sometimes just keep walking — that that’s all we can do. Keep holding the tension of what is hard and what seems necessary. Keep living. Keep feeling. Keep knowing God and ourselves. Keep trusting that something in all of this matters, even if we may never know why. 

I think there is dignity in this way of holding our experiences. 

Because just because something doesn’t make sense or cannot be held in our minds doesn’t mean our experience of it is less valid or that there’s no meaning in it at all. Who are we as we live inside that inexplicable complexity? What will we choose to believe? What will it make of our faith? What will it make of our lives?

These are some of the questions suffering’s vastness invites us to hold, I think.

A Turn in the Suffering :: When We Can Consider Forgiveness

It took me a really long time to get to forgiveness. 

I knew forgiveness was pretty important — Jesus makes that really clear in the Gospels. But I also had gone through enough of the process of learning my heart to know what was really in there. I couldn’t fool myself into believing I’d forgiven when I really hadn’t.

Besides, I knew that wasn’t what Jesus wanted, either. He’s the one who taught me the importance of the heart. He’s the one who helped me learn that our hearts are the key players in relationship with God.

I couldn’t just play lip service to forgiveness. Neither Jesus nor I would be fooled. 

So what do you do when you know forgiveness is important but you just aren’t there? 

You ask God to help you get there, and you be with the truth of the mess in the meantime. 

I’m serious. This is what I did. For years — literally, years — I consciously asked God to help me learn forgiveness. And then I would look at the reality of my heart and know that forgiveness wasn’t in there yet. I was still reeling. Still in shock. Still picking up the pieces of brokeness. Still learning what happened because of all that brokenness. 

Still learning what Jesus could do with all that brokenness, too. 

I read so many perspectives on forgiveness over the years, and none of them penetrated me.

Forgiveness is a choice, they said. It’s a choice you keep choosing and choosing and choosing each day. Or they said, Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting what happened or saying that it’s okay. It means wilfully choosing not to hold that against someone anymore. Or here’s another one: Unforgiveness is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the other person to die. 

These things may be true, but none of those declarations or platitudes meant anything to me. They just didn’t compute. And they annoyed me. 

What got me to forgiveness was being with the pain. Examining it. Learning from it. Figuring out how it had formed me. Allowing Jesus to take me on the long journey of reckoning. 

And then getting to a place where I saw new things. 

The thing that helped me the most with forgiveness was having been with Jesus through that long season of darkness and scratches at healing. That long season helped me realize Jesus could handle everything that had happened to me. Even more, he could bring me through it — teach me new things, make something new.

I became more identified with Jesus and what he was making of me and my life than with the broken circumstances that had brought me to him in the first place. 

That’s when I could finally consider forgiveness.

When I didn’t need to hold the wrongdoings so close to my chest anymore. When Jesus had given me something more.

A Turn in the Suffering :: Let It Take as Long as It Takes

When I think about “turns in suffering,” my mind immediately flies back to the first major turn I encountered in my own experiences of suffering. 

I had been walking in a very intent way with Jesus for about 10 years. Ten years was about how long it took for me to find myself steeped in my belovedness, to be rooted and grounded in that identity of love. I’d spent many long years encountering the truth of my heart — learning what my heart even was, and then learning what was true of it — and then combining that with the process of learning who Jesus was and how to bring the truth of my heart into relationship with him. 

In those 10 years, I’d discovered and acknowledged the wounds in my heart. I’d been through the anger mill. I’d grieved a lot of losses. I’d allowed myself to admit what I didn’t know. I’d allowed myself to learn.

And it wasn’t until about 10 years into that sacred journey that I experienced my first turn in the suffering. I guess healing — or preparation for healing — just takes that long sometimes. It did for me, at least. 

And when it did, I was ready to receive some new perspectives. 

Let it take as long as it takes. I’ve learned from experience that the wait is worth it.

What is it like for you to let the suffering and healing process take as long as it takes?

A Turn in the Suffering :: It's About the Heart

Hi, friends. 

That turn in our exploration that I mentioned previously is here.

We’ve spent a long time wading into the deep marshes of pain, haven’t we? My heart has carried two realities at once as we’ve journeyed together: sadness at the heaviness of the pain, and a fierce emboldenment to make room for the reality of it and protect this space to honor it.

Today, as we begin to shift our position to look at suffering from some new angles, I want to go back to where we started. What began this exploration? 

It was a poem about the beauty and intricacy of the heart: 

I Promise

Has not the Architect, Love, built your heart 

in a glorious manner,

with so much care that it is meant to break 

if love ever ceases to know all that happens 

is perfect?

And where does anything love has ever known 

go, when your eye and hand can no longer 

be warmed by its body? 

So vast a room your soul, every universe can 

fit into it.

Anything you once called beautiful, anything 

that ever

gave you comfort waits to unite with your 

arms again. I promise.

— Hafiz

Suffering comes from a brokenness of heart. A marring of the perfection of love we once knew creates a detachment, a fracturing, a shattering, a disintegration of being. 

It’s pain.

The pain of suffering can be experienced in the body, yes. But even the pain of bodily suffering affects us at the heart level. It crowds our hearts with questions of love, worthiness, significance, meaning, care.

Let’s explore, together, how the heart might subsist in suffering, and how the heart might mend.

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How It Defeats Hope

Early in our series, Kirsten shared in a comment her experience of suffering: 

It leaves me expecting the worst. It leads to distrust. It leaves me always waiting for the other shoe to drop. In a way, it defeats hope.

I’ve been thinking about her response a lot these days, and I really resonate with it. It’s a lot like what I wrote about how suffering can shut us down on a heart level. It leaves us protected against life. Our guard goes up, and we’re just waiting for the next hit to come.

There’s something about hope that always conjures itself in my mind like a bright point of light ahead. That’s what hope looks like to me. And in receiving Kirsten’s words, I connect suffering to a response of turning away from that bright point of light, turning away and crouching away from it, eyes closed tight against its invitation. 

We become crouched against life … against possibility … against openness … against hope. 

In what ways has suffering defeated hope in your life?

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How It Invites Guilt

On Friday, I mentioned that I sensed a turn in our exploration of suffering toward some alternative perspectives. But I realized over the weekend that’s not true.

There is still more sifting to be done.

There is still more sitting in this place of taking the suffering seriously and giving it its due weight. So today, we’re continuing forward into the painful realities of suffering. 

A dear friend of mine shared an aspect of her own struggle with suffering that invites guilt:

“I think one of my biggest struggles with suffering is the idea that it’s my fault, that I’ve done something wrong,” she said. “Not that I’m being punished, but that I’ve been unwise or imperfect and done something to cause my own suffering.”

Isn’t this the truth?

I can just see so many of us working and re-working events in our minds. If I’d just done this one thing differently … if only I’d said or did this instead … if only I had all knowledge and perfect action, perhaps this suffering never would have come about, or perhaps it simply wouldn’t hurt quite so much. 

We begin to feel responsible for our suffering. And then, as my friend so attentively noticed, “Not only am I suffering, but I am bad for having caused it.” Suffering compounds suffering.

Has suffering caused such an effect in your own life?

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How It Invites Grief

Hello, friends. 

We’ve been on a rather intense journey these past two weeks, haven’t we? I didn’t see an in-depth exploration of suffering coming our way when it did, but I’m really thankful for the chance to have slowed down the metronome of life for a bit to say, “Wait. Let’s look at this. This is real. This is hard. Let’s give it its worthy due.” 

I’m sensing that Monday will begin a new turn in this exploration. We’ll continue to look at suffering, but from different angles than we have been. For instance, it has felt really important to me that, thus far in our exploration together, we just sit with the reality of the pain — not gloss over it, not move too quickly to the consolation, not try to look on the positive side or potentially redemptive aspects of suffering just yet. 

That’s been really important to me here because I want to honor the reality of our pain. 

I’m coming to believe the deepest, purest healing happens when we let ourselves go into the depths of pain, when we allow ourselves to see and acknowledge the truth of it and how it is affecting or has affected us.

And so today, although we have not by any means exhausted all the ways that suffering impacts us, I want to take a minute to look at what we have noticed:

• Suffering forms us. 
• Suffering makes us angry.
• Suffering shuts us down.
• Suffering magnifies our aloneness.
• Suffering exposes injustice.

And in the midst of those glimpses, I want us to notice this truth: 

Suffering invites grief. 

Do you allow yourself to grieve how you have suffered?

I really respect what one of our readers, Bonnie, shared in a comment earlier this week. She shared that she is in a season of suffering right now and said this about her experience: “I know I need to sit with it, I cannot hurry it along and no one else can either … I cannot be cheered up right now, and in fact, I do not want to be.” 

Grief is so painful. And yet, it also dignifies the pain. It pays respect to what was lost: something of great value to us.

How does your own suffering invite you into grief? 

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How We Are Alone In It

I’ve been thinking about the loneliness of suffering. 

The reality is, no other person can be completely inside our experience.

One of my best friends lost her son at 16 days old. Sometimes I sit and think about the reality of the loneliness of her experience. No matter how many other mamas she meets who also lost children to congenital heart defects or for any other reason, no matter how many friends will sit and be with her for as long as she needs to talk or simply cry and cry and cry, there is a fullness of suffering specific to the particulars of her own heart that no one will ever fully know but her.

It hurts my heart to know that.

There’s always separateness between us and what others know of us in our suffering.

I felt a loneliness like that when I went through a marital separation and divorce in 2003-2004. I was the only person among my married friends who knew separation and then divorce, so I felt like an awkward, sore thumb sticking out among all of them. I had many close friends who were single, and here I was, having moved into marriage and then beyond it.

Even those in my life who did know divorce didn’t know my experience of it. They had their own particular experiences of it, their own process of living through it to the other side, their own sense-making process for their own experience that was not my own.

I walked through that experience carrying a whole world inside myself that no one ever fully knew.

Do you know this aloneness in your own suffering?

Taking the Suffering Seriously :: How It Shuts Us Down

At ages 5, 6, and 7, through a string of unrelated events that felt like they were cut from the very same cloth, I learned two things:  

1. The world is not safe.
2. People will harm you in your most unguarded, vulnerable moments. 

I don’t need to go into the details of what happened. Just imagine the innocence of a 5-year-old girl, put her in a natural, commonplace setting, and then introduce cruelty, manipulation, and humiliation aimed directly at her.

And then imagine the same thing happening to her at age 6. And then age 7.

I was a pretty quick study, and so I wisened up after that. In what I’m sure felt like an incredible act of maturity at having learned a thing or two about the world, I shut my heart down completely.

Closed. Out of business.

No unguarded moments. No vulnerability. No trust. Just caution and vigilance. 

No freedom. No joy.

The collateral damage was pervasive. I grew into a young woman who lived more like an automaton than a vibrant, alive, healthy human being. I couldn’t let people in. I kept myself small. I stayed invisible. I didn’t know the first thing about being honest with myself or others about the truth of my experience of life.

I was completely shut down, for the world had shown itself cruel. 

Suffering teaches us many things. One of the things it teaches us to do is to shut down.

Have you ever experienced this?

Taking the Suffering Seriously: A New Exploration

Yesterday, I wrote a post that I’ve found difficult. It asked us to consider whether everything that happens — even the pain — is just as it should be. 

I struggle with this question. 

I’ve struggled with it on a personal level at specific times in my life, due to experiences that formed me not-for-the-better. And more recently, as I’ve shared here in glimpses, I’ve struggled with it on a more global level as I grieve the mass atrocities and events of evil in our world’s present and far-off past. (I recently began a series exploring this struggle on another blog dedicated to just such questions.)

But we know we aren’t alone in struggling with this question. So many souls for so many ages have wrestled with it, too. The idea that “everything’s as it should be” has even turned many a soul from God.

It’s hard for us to fathom a God that allows suffering. 

I’m not one for Sunday-school answers. They lack real heart and flesh. They’re impersonal, more interested in the answer itself than the struggle that provoked the question. And so I’m not going to give you any of those here. 

What I am going to do is explore the question. With you. Out loud. Over the course of several installments. 

I’ll seek to make this exploration as human as I can — to put real flesh and faces on it. My sense is that this exploration of suffering will include stories of my own and how my understanding of those stories has developed over time. My sense is that it will also include ways of thinking about pain and suffering that are not, in myself, fully formed yet. 

But since this is a space called Still Forming, that’s quite appropriate here, isn’t it? 

What questions or struggles related to pain and suffering do you have that we might explore as we go?