“As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away.”

Matthew 27:57-60 (NIV)

Holy Saturday has got to be one of the stranger days in the Christian calendar.

From the outside, it looks like nothing.is.happening. No really. Jesus’ body lies in a borrowed tomb. His friends all ran away in terror. The Roman empire carries on as if the execution of one more troublemaker has settled the matter.

It is a day of total silence.

But in creeds that stretch back to the second century, Christians confess that on this day, Christ “descended to the dead.”

This is what the tradition calls the Harrowing of Hell.

Which, if you did not grow up with Mennonite farming in-laws, let me explain it to you. The word harrow is borrowed from farming. A field is harrowed when a blade tears through the soil, breaking it all apart. What once looked smooth is suddenly overturned. Clods of earth are kicked up. Stones appear. Old roots are exposed. Last year’s growth is ripped out of the ground.

If you walk past a freshly harrowed field, it can look like devastation.

But the farmer knows something the passerby might not.

This is the beginning of something new.

The soil has to be broken open before anything new can grow. Harrowing loosens the earth. It clears away what cannot live anymore. The field is not being destroyed—it is being prepared.

Beloved Quaker writer and activist wrote a poem called Harrowing about his own life being harrowed with bouts of deep depression. He ends with these hopeful lines:

Whatever’s been uprooted,
let it be seedbed
for the growing that’s to come.

That is the strange, hidden work Christians believe Christ was up to on Holy Saturday.

While the world saw only devastation and hope snuffed out, a sealed tomb and a finished execution, something else was happening beneath the surface.

Christ was descending into the depths.

Icons from the early church show him standing in the shattered gates of death, reaching into the darkness and pulling Adam and Eve into the light.

Which means something extraordinary for all of us: there is no place so dark that God refuses to enter. No place too far that is outside of God’s loving reach. No place we can fall that God will not catch us.

The love of God does not stop at the grave.

Holy Saturday is the day when everything still looks ruined.

But beneath the surface, something is being prepared.

The ground is opening. The seedbed is ready. Resurrection is coming.

May the places that feel like endings
become the ground of something new.
May the hidden work of love continue in you,
until joy surprises you again.

As we come to the end of this Lenten journey together, I’d love to hear from you.

During this season of Lent, what idea or insight stayed with you the most—and where might it be preparing new growth in your life?

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“He said to the Jews, ‘Behold your King!’ They cried out, ‘Away with him, away with him, crucify him!’ Pilate said to them, ‘Shall I crucify your King?’ The chief priests answered, ‘We have no king but Caesar.’

So he delivered him over to them to be crucified.

So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them.”

—John 19:14b–18 (ESV)

Good Friday is the day everything falls apart.

Jesus is arrested, beaten, mocked, and nailed to a cross. His closest friends scatter. The crowd that just a few days ago shouted “Hosanna” now cry for his execution.

On Good Friday, God does not remain distant from human suffering. In Jesus, God enters it fully—experiencing betrayal, humiliation, injustice, exhaustion, pain, and death itself.

In other words, God joins the losing team.

This is complex theology that people have argued about for centuries. But it should also be comforting. Because it means there is no place we suffer that God has not already gone.

No hospital rooms.
No gravesides.
Not even in the embarrassing loneliness we don’t want to admit.

Good Friday tells the truth about the world as it is: fragile, unjust, painfully unfinished.

“My God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus cries out, a phrase pulled from Psalm 22, something those in earshot would have recognized, and may have even cried out themselves. Jesus was left alone in agony in order to gather us, and restore our dignity by giving us his own. And ultimately, to destroy death. But now we’re getting ahead of ourselves…

For now, let us reflect on the truth that Jesus understood our despair and entered our darkest dereliction. A reminder that no matter what you are facing, you are not alone. Jesus understands.

To the cross, that’s where love led you.
So that’s where we come too,
to stand and grieve with Mary and John,
your mother and your closest friend,
overwhelmed that it should come to this:
powerlessness and utter loss.
Blessed are we who remain here in wonder,
in the stillness, with the silence of death
so heavy upon us,
asking again, “Jesus,
is this how it goes?
Is this how love wins?”

(From Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!)

Jesus’ violent death stands in front of us as an impossibility. How can the savior die? And, really, how can the ugliness of death visit each of us? The feeling is one of horror. Allow yourself to think about the horror of it for a moment without turning away.

This is what we do during Holy Week: we do not flinch from the truth.

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“After he had said this, Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, ‘Very truly I tell you, one of you is going to betray me.’

His disciples stared at one another, at a loss to know which of them he meant. One of them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, was reclining next to him. Simon Peter motioned to this disciple and said, ‘Ask him which one he means.’

Leaning back against Jesus, he asked him, ‘Lord, who is it?’”

John 13:21-25 (NIV)

In the ancient world, foot washing was the job reserved for the lowest servant in the household. Just picture it. The roads were unpaved and dusty. Sandals were basically ancient Birkenstocks. And everyone was unclean—both metaphorically and literally.

And yet here is Jesus—the one the disciples call Lord—on the floor with a basin and towel.

Peter protests immediately. Of course he does. The whole scene feels wrong. Teachers are not supposed to wash the feet of their students. And certainly not the feet of the ones who will betray, deny, and abandon him before the night is over.

But Jesus insists.

Because this is the shape of the kingdom of God. This upside-down world where the king of the universe kneels. Love stoops low enough to touch the dirtiest parts of our lives. Where grace shows up ready to serve.

Later that evening Jesus breaks bread and shares wine, telling his friends that this meal will become a remembrance: his body given, his blood poured out.

And then he gives them a commandment.

Love one another.

Which sounds simple until you realize what it requires: loving people who misunderstand you, disappoint you, leave you, or hurt you. Loving in the way Jesus loves—kneeling, serving, giving everything.

Maundy Thursday reminds us that God meets us in our vulnerability—in shared meals, in small acts of service, and in the fragile, stubborn work of loving one another even when we don’t fully understand what it might cost us.

We don’t know it, Jesus,
but you will feed us, wash us,
serve us, save us.
And we will do our best to set you aside.
But this is your great stubbornness:
how you give us what we need, even as we
refuse it.

(From Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day!)

If you imagine yourself at the table with Jesus that night, who are you in the story? The one asking questions, the one unsure, the one being served?

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The theologian Jerry Sittser faced that question in the most devastating way. In a single, tragic car accident, he lost his wife, his young daughter, and his mother. Three generations of his family gone in an instant.

For years, he wrote and spoke about what it means to live after such losses—not how to explain them, but how to keep living when despair feels like the most honest response.

At one point he found language for it tucked in Wendell Berry’s novel Hannah Coulter. In the story, a woman who has endured deep loss realizes something almost reluctantly:

Life was requiring life of her.

Not understanding.
Not resolution.
Not even peace.

Just life.

One of you beautiful people in this community made a similar realization a couple of weeks ago in one of your comments. shared that she lives under the sword of Damocles with a slew of genetic illnesses in her family:

“I live waiting for one of these two curses to drop on me. I am doing my best to live healthy knowing it may not make one bit of difference. Your version of Lent every year gives me a respite from the constant bravery, a chance to live with my fear. And as I wrote this I found myself amazed at how many times I see the word ‘live’. I am fucking living in the waiting. And I never don’t find Jesus standing right beside me. It is strange and wonderful.”

Life demanding life.

Even in grief. Even after devastation. Even in fear. The sun still rises, asking something of us.

Joy, I think, helps us live into this.

Not as denial of sorrow or a cheerful refusal to notice the world’s fractures. But as something closer to a stubborn “YES” to life when so much else is shouting no.

Because the world will continue to ask something of us. Tomorrow will arrive whether we are ready or not.

And sometimes the most faithful response we can offer is simply this:

Yes. I will live and keep living.

What a privilege. What a task.

What does life seem to be asking of you right now?

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(Also hi, hello. 🇨🇦 Joyful, Anyway releases in my beloved Canada TODAY. I can’t wait to be with you all in Winnipeg tomorrow and Toronto on Thursday. I cannot wait for this book to make its way into your hands and hearts. Thank you so much for all of your support during this book launch season.)

This is a lenten blessing for Palm Sunday. (And yes, I know it’s Holy Monday. But I hope the thread of this truth can carry us forward through the holiest of days.)

Oh God, why do the days feel so short and the minutes so long?
Take hold of time, and order it once again.

On Palm Sunday,
time is marked
as one small donkey
plods toward Jerusalem,
and one with a face set like flint
walks forward
toward the eastering of all sorrow
—not in the power of horses
and swift victory,
but in small, toddling steps.

Blessed are all those
walking forward,
into the great small work they do.

And blessed are we
joining the crowds waving palm branches
to shout ourselves hoarse:
“Hosanna! Save us! Save our world.”

Blessed are those who have learned to walk in the light of your presence. (Psalm 89:15)

Amen.

What are you carrying with you this Holy Week?

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But there’s another kind of risk. One that is harder earned. It’s the risk that comes after you know how fragile things are.

After illness or a heartbreak of any kind. After watching something you loved unravel in your hands. When you’ve already seen how fragile everything is—the body, the plan, the future you assumed was guaranteed—and you choose to try anyway.

Some people’s reality meter is turned down wayyyy too low. They need to believe the world is wide open. That they are the master of their fate, captains of their soul, etc. etc.

Other people have the dial turned up so high they can barely move. Why try? What’s the point? Everything breaks in the end.

I wish we talked more about that dial.

I’m not describing bravado. Or the fantasy that nothing bad will happen.

I mean the opposite.

It’s the acceptance that something bad might happen. And strangely, a high tolerance for fragility can make you…braver.

When you stop pretending the world is sturdy, you stop being shocked by its instability. You stop organizing your life around avoiding loss at all costs. You understand that precarity is the precondition for love. For art. For parenthood. For friendship. For any beautiful thing.

The people I admire most are not the ones who believe they cannot be broken.

They are the ones who know they can be.

And still they open their hearts to something new.

May you welcome joy even when it cannot be kept.
And when the world feels breakable, may your heart stay open anyway.

If you imagine that dial in your life—the one that measures how fragile things feel—where is yours set these days? How do you notice it affecting what feels possible?

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But since this was someone I loved and trusted, I went with it. And I’ll never forget what she said.

“Sometimes we just wait and wait, hoping God will say ‘Go.’ We’re looking for the nudge. The green light. The burning bush,” she told me. “But what if you just go… and wait for God to say ‘Stop’ instead?”

I don’t know about you, but I have spent long seasons of life waiting. Waiting for some sort of sign. Waiting for things to feel right. Waiting for certainty. Waiting for some internal alert to ding and say: This is the path. The time is now. Proceed with confidence.

But what if instead of waiting for the GO, you say yes to the small, lovely thing in front of you — the project, the conversation, the trip, the risk, the delight — and trust that if it’s not right, life will tell you otherwise? (Life is rather good at intervening.)

Yes to the new hobby or new friend. Yes to the ambitious goal you’ve been dreaming up in secret. Yes to being someone who goes on walks or reads for pleasure or volunteers. Yes to starting a family or going on that dating app or adopting a new pet or going back to school. Yes. Because the world is full of nos. And who knows, maybe that small yes will put yourself in the pathway of joy.

Blessed are you who dare a small yes in a world of hesitation.
May you trust the step beneath your feet,
and the God who is not afraid of your forward motion.

Where in your life are you waiting for a clear “Go,” when perhaps you could take one small faithful step forward and trust that God is capable of saying “Stop” if needed?

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“Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue,” wrote poet Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet. “Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

To live a question is to stay with the discomfort and remain curious about what may still be possible.

Lent, of all seasons, feels like practice for exactly this. Living the questions that may not have easy answers (or answers at all). Because of course, Lent reminds us that we are finite, and, no matter how hard we try, we cannot force growth.

Bless you living inside this unresolved, unfinished middle.
And when the questions feel heavy, may you find that they are not empty,
but rooms where God is already waiting.

So today, I wonder:

What question are you inhabiting? And what would it mean—not to solve it—but to live inside it?

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That line is often attributed to Martin Luther, though historians aren’t entirely convinced he said it.

Luther lived in an age that genuinely felt as though the world was unraveling. You’ll remember him as the German monk who nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in 1517—the spark that ignited the Protestant Reformation. He defied papal authority and translated the Bible into German. He pastored during outbreaks of plague. He was a theologian writing in the shadow of peasant revolts that turned violently against the very reforms he helped unleash. He was a public figure whose words contributed to both liberation and terrible harm. The printing press had accelerated ideas beyond anyone’s control. Political powers were shifting. Empires consolidating. The old religious certainties were splintering.

Sixteenth century Europe may have felt like the world was going to pieces. And yet, we plant.

I am struck by how wonderfully boring that image is.

The slow, agricultural work that takes years—decades to see the fruit of. Fruit you might never get the chance to taste. “Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest,” writes poet Wendell Berry, the mad farmer himself.

This past week we’ve talked about despair, limited agency, tiny acts of survival, shared endurance. And perhaps this imagery of planting an apple tree belongs in that same register—not grand hope, not resignation, but participation in a future we cannot guarantee.

A person in a field, fingernails caked in soil, hoping beyond hope.

Bless these hands that press hope into the dirt.
Bless the courage to begin (or continue) without guarantees.
And may love outlive your certainty.

What is one small thing you are planting right now—an act, a habit, a kindness, a commitment, a relationship?

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No one pretends the oar isn’t heavy. No one gives a lecture on proper rowing technique. You just pull.

(I actually had the chance to be a coxswain for the Duke women’s rowing team last year. I briefly wondered if yelling into a microphone might be my spiritual gift. Turns out those boats go very, very fast. It was terrifying. Actually, they had to restart the race multiple times because I kept steering us in the wrong direction and someone would clear their throat and remind me: “Kate, this boat costs $50,000.”)

There are seasons when I am the one carried. When my prayers are thin. When my optimism peters out. When my faith feels weak.

And there are weeks when I’m steady enough to row for someone else. That reminds me of something Patrik Hagman learned during long seasons of caregiving for dying family members. They had a simple family rule: anyone was allowed to have a bad day—but they had to take turns.

It’s extraordinary wisdom for hard seasons.

This is why interdependence is both necessary and deeply countercultural in our do-it-yourself, pull-yourself-up-by-your bootstraps culture. We were never meant to row alone.

So my dears, may your bad days be met with mercy.
May your good days carry someone else.
And may strength rotate gently among you.

So today I’m wondering: Who rows for you when you can’t? Maybe there is someone whose oar you can hold this week instead.

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Mental health is having the right feelings at the right time and managing them effectively.

Not constant happiness. Not perfect peace. Not being “above it all.” But emotional accuracy.

If something is sad, sadness makes sense.
If something is frightening, anxiety sounds exactly right.
If something is unjust, anger is absolutely appropriate.

We live in a culture that treats unpleasant emotions like clerical errors. Oops. That shouldn’t be there. Delete. Replace with gratitude. (And you already know my feelings about gratitude.)

But emotional wellbeing is about matching our feelings to what is actually happening. Lisa is an expert in the mental health space, especially when it comes to teenagers. And I think this wisdom is not only helpful for ourselves, but for anyone who cares about young people.

Your teenager is anxious before a big exam? That may be proportionate.
You feel grief after a loss that still stings years later? That sounds honest.
You feel unsettled reading the news? That may be you being THE MOST sane.

When we expect ourselves (or our kids) to feel peaceful in chaos, confident in uncertainty, or cheerful in grief—we aren’t asking for resilience. We’re expecting dissonance.

So today, instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this feeling?” maybe the better question is: Does this feeling make sense? And if it does — can I let it stay?

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Here is a Blessing for Feeling It All. (This one appears in The Lives We Actually Have):

Blessed are you who need reminders
that your emotions are not bad or good.
They’re just information.

You feel angry because this is unjust.
You feel sad because this is awful.
You feel tired because this is exhausting.

Your emotions are not wrong or bad or lying to you or the full truth.
They’re giving you a bit of data that you shouldn’t ignore.
We love and lose and fall and get back up and fail and try again.

This is what it means to be human,
to feel the pain, the grief, the stress, the risk, the fear, the heartbreak.

Here is your permission slip to feel it all,
to feel the joy and delight and excitement and the sorrow and fear and despair.

All the yellows and pinks and violets and grays,
because you are the whole damn sky.

I go on and on about it because the lie on one side is that everything is possible. And the lie on the other side is that nothing is.

Wellness culture promises total transformation. Reinvent yourself. Optimize your morning routine. Become a better parent, better partner, better citizen, better core-strength-having human by Tuesday. If you’re not flourishing, perhaps you haven’t tried waking up at 4:30 a.m. to manifest more enthusiastically.

Despair, on the other hand, tells a different story. Why bother? Nothing will change. The future is sealed. Any effort is meaningless.

But most of us do not live at either extreme. We live in the space between.

It’s not true that everything is possible. We have bodies that keep trying to kill us. Bank accounts that disagree with our dreams. Children who lose their shoes while wearing them (that will never stop surprising me). Grief that doesn’t evaporate because we downloaded a mindfulness app.

And it’s not true that nothing is possible. There is almost always a small square footage of choice available to us. A next right thing (with a nod to my dear ). A conversation we can have. Closing the 47 tabs open in our brain (or at least 3 of them). Going to bed without scrolling. Making the doctor’s appointment instead of googling your symptoms. Going for a walk or at least sitting outside with the sun on your face for a few minutes.

Our work is to find that space—not the fantasy version of our lives, not the catastrophic version—but the most honest one.

May you be freed from “everything.”
May you be spared from “nothing.”
May grace meet you in the middle.
And DEAR GOD may tomorrow wait its turn.

What is possible today?

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So when he says, I’ve struggled in my life. I wouldn’t have known it from the outside. (Don’t we all look so shiny on the outside? Or at least we try to?)

I was moved by his candor about his descents into clinical depression. Not just “feeling lost in the dark,” he told me — but becoming the dark. That distinction has stayed with me. “When you’re lost in the dark, you can negotiate the darkness,” he told me. “Maybe there’s a door here. Maybe there’s a window shade over here. Maybe there’s a light switch somewhere. I can find some way to kind of deal with the situation I’m in and keep a little hope alive…But you’ve become the dark, there is no negotiating it. You’re it. It’s you. That’s all she wrote.”

Depression, at its worst, is not just an emotion or mood. It can feel like the only way of being.

Parker, of course, has spent a lifetime writing about vocation, community, and courage. But what moved me most wasn’t just his body of work, but a tool he used to get through those dark days.

He kept a journal of tiny, tiny, tiny achievements. Which don’t feel tiny when you’re in the muck.

✓ Getting out of bed.
✓ Turning on a light.
✓ Riding a bike for ten minutes.

In a culture that measures worth by productivity and reinvention, it helps to reconsider what counts—especially in those seasons where agency is incredibly limited. Eventually, those tiny achievements start to add up.

And this wisdom isn’t only for those living with clinical depression. It’s for anyone staring at an impossible to-do list. For the late-night doomscrollers. For the person quietly overwhelmed by caregiving, or uncertainty, or by the heartbreaking noise of the world.

And if you are struggling deeply, please reach out for help — in the U.S., you can call or text 988. You don’t have to manage this alone.

May the smallest faithfulness sustain you.
May quiet persistence carry you.
May mercy meet you in your appropriate smallness.
And may enough be enough for today.

For today, what might make your tiny list of achievements?

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P.S. You can listen to my full conversation with Parker Palmer on Apple, Spotify, or watch on YouTube.

He does.

And only then does the bridge appear—solid, reliable, and completely disguised.

That scene feels like a joke about faith. And also, uncomfortably, like the truth.

The book of Hebrews tells us that faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith, by definition, leans toward what we cannot verify yet.

My colleague Stanley Hauerwas says it even more plainly: “The ability to live well is the ability to live without explanation.”

Which is not the version of faith most of us were hoping for.

Because if we had all the answers, we wouldn’t need faith at all. We would just call it certainty. Faith only exists where there is real risk, real not-knowing, real vulnerability.

A life of faith requires us to choose to remain present when the future is opaque or when the ache remains. It asks us to resist the urge to invent explanations just to calm ourselves down.

So still, we walk.

Because faith was never meant to give us explanations—only the courage to take the next step. And then the next.

May you be freed from the need to explain your life.
May you find courage where certainty is absent.
And may the next step be enough for today.

Where are you being asked to Indiana-Jones your way forward right now?

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Cristian Tomasetti is a cancer statistician. His research has helped uncover something both obvious and revolutionary: that a significant number of cancers are not caused by genetics or environment or lifestyle choices, but by sheer bad luck. Random mutations. Cells misfiring. The biological equivalent of being struck by lightning.

When he looked at me and said, very kindly, “Oh I’m so sorry, but you’re just very unlucky,” I felt… better.

Which is not what we are taught to expect.

We live in a culture that is deeply uncomfortable with randomness. We want reasons. Explanations. Moral accounting. If something terrible happens, we instinctively ask what could have been done differently. What warning signs were missed. What lesson is being taught.

I experienced this firsthand. After I wrote about my diagnosis publicly, people flooded my inbox with theories about why this had happened to me. They wanted to know how many children I had. Whether it ran in my family. What kind of faith I practiced. Whether God was refining me or punishing me or preparing me for something bigger.

Everyone, it seemed, was desperate for my suffering to make sense.

But the truth—that sometimes cancer is the result of bad luck—released me from the exhausting burden of self-blame.

Accepting randomness doesn’t mean life is meaningless. It means meaning doesn’t have to be wrung from suffering like a consolation prize. It means we can stop interrogating the wounded and start being with them.

So, my dears, may today remind you of this: life is shaped by luck more than we like to admit

(For more on this, listen to my conversation with sociologist Mark Rank).

Sometimes people are very lucky. Sometimes we are heartbreakingly unlucky. And neither tells the whole story of who we are or what we deserve.

May bad luck lose its moral weight.
And may today be a little gentler than yesterday.

Where have you been taking too much credit—or too much blame?

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Which is true, of course. Faith deepens and expands us. It offers us a fresh perspective.

But when I read that, I heard something slightly different

Faith makes us old.

Old as in weathered and wisened. Old as in having seen enough to stop being impressed by easy answers.

I think about some of my spiritual heroes. Sometimes they are actually older than me, but beyond their literal age, there is a tone or posture I have come to recognize. It is a quality of restraint that makes room for uncertainty and paradox and the unfinishedness of being human.

Faith refuses to let us stay young in the ways our culture prizes most: endlessly optimistic, endlessly certain, endlessly convinced that the next quick fix will finally make everything make sense. This “long obedience in the same direction”1 slows us down. It trains us out of urgency. It introduces us—again and again—to disappointment, to waiting.

Maybe faith has a way of giving us crow’s feet around our soul. A sort of softening or steadiness. A sense that we have walked this road before, even if the details are different. A rootedness to the long story of God’s love.

So faith makes us old.

And in a culture obsessed with youth, that might be one of its greatest gifts.

May you grow steady enough to hold all that is unfinished or unknowable.
May you make room for paradox.
And may God meet you in the long story.

How old do you feel?

Not in your body—but in your spirit. How many seasons have you lived through? How many times have you been disappointed and kept going anyway? How many prayers have changed you even when the answer didn’t? I’d love to hear.

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It is a real one. A valid one. A delightful one. I wish you many, many experiences of happiness. But it is still a mood.

Happiness is what happens when your coffee is still hot when you remember where you set it down (and why is it always on some random shelf you never use?!). When the meeting gets canceled and no one reschedules it “just to check in.” When your photos actually do sync to the cloud and you didn’t have to go through a seven step password recovery process.

Joy is… not that.

To help clarify, I’ve prepared a very scientific* quiz. (*Not actually scientific, do not come after me, IRB).

Are You Experiencing Happiness or Joy?

1. Your happiness disappears when:

   • A) Your blood sugar drops

   • B) Your phone dies

   • C) Someone ruins the vibe

   • D) All of the above

2. Your joy disappears when:

   • A) The story doesn’t resolve

   • B) Someone is still sick

   • C) You feel sad and grateful at the same time

   • D) Trick question—joy coexists with all kinds of circumstances.

3. Happiness prefers:

   • A) Good news

   • B) Clear outcomes

   • C) Positive energy only

   • D) A decent night’s sleep

4. Joy prefers:

   • A) Honesty

   • B) Companionship

   • C) Surprise

   • D) All of the above

If you recognized yourself anywhere in these answers, congratulations—you are human.

Happiness is responsive. It reacts to circumstances. It rises and falls based on comfort, success, relief, and momentum. And again: this is not bad.

Joy is something different, though. Something sturdier. Joy does not require things to be better. Joy surprises us, accompanies us, carries us, and sustains us through all of life’s highs and lows.

Because you can’t always be happy, but you can be joyful, anyway.

And if today’s topic resonates, then you’re going to love my new book. Joyful, Anyway comes out on April 7. You can order a copy whenever books are available. There are a handful of seats available at the Joyful, Anyway Book Tour or you can join us for the Virtual Event. I’d love for you to join me.

When was the last time you felt joy bubble up? That sustaining, sometimes nonsensical feeling that didn’t require things to improve. I’d love to hear about it.

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I am reminded of this every Lent.

For the last six years, we have made a Lenten devotional—free, carefully written, prayerful, full of attention and care. It takes our team hundreds of hours. And every year, a certain kind of feedback rolls in.

“What a bummer.”
“I was hoping for something more uplifting.”
“This was depressing.”

And I get it. Lent can trick you into thinking it is a season of self-improvement. Reflection. Intention. Keeping your paws off chocolate or alcohol or meat on Fridays. But then we arrive at the inconvenient truth at the heart of it all: Jesus does not die peacefully or symbolically. It gets dramatically terrible. His friends abandon him. He is humiliated, tortured, and murdered.

So, of course, people want to skip ahead.

If we could get a happier Savior, believe me, we would ask for one. It would be far more marketable, frankly.

But that is not the story we were given.

The season of Lent refuses to cooperate with our desire for a feel-good meditation. It does not help us “look on the bright side.” It does not rush us toward closure.

Yes, Easter is coming. There will be resurrection. Christianity is stubborn about that.

But the season of Lent invites us to sit with the more uncomfortable realities too. Here, we are reminded that God is not offended by our despair. That our long seasons of doubt and disillusionment and silence fit in this long story of faith too.

So today, let’s resist the urge to skip ahead and allow ourselves to sit with the uncomfortable bummer-ness of it all too.

May you resist any pressure to turn pain into progress.
May your questions and doubt and uncertainty be met with kindness, not advice.

What helps you feel less alone in hard seasons?

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We want causes we can point to. Reasons we can learn from. Moral equations that reassure us we’re still in control. If something good happened, we earned it. If something bad happened, surely there was a mistake we could have avoided.

But as sociologist Mark Rank reminded me in a recent conversation, so much of life simply does not work this way.

He calls it the lottery of birth—the staggering truth that where you were born, when you were born, to whom you were born, and what happened next were shaped by forces you never chose and could not predict.

Illness.
Job loss.
Poverty.
Opportunity.
Even survival.

Many of the turning points that define a life arrive through chance—missed connections, random mutations, unexpected crises, a phone call that came or didn’t. And once we admit that, something unsettling happens: the story that everyone gets what they deserve starts to fall apart.

But something else opens up too.

Rank argues that acknowledging randomness doesn’t drain life of meaning—it cultivates humility and makes room for empathy. If I didn’t get here on my own, then neither did you. If bad luck can strike anyone, then suffering deserves care, not explanation.

When we stop insisting that everything happens for a reason, we may finally be able to say something truer—and kinder:

Lots of things happen.
Lots of things hurt.
And not a single one of us are alone in this fragile, unfinished story.

May you be spared the burden of explaining what cannot be explained.
May humility soften you rather than humiliate you.
May empathy grow where certainty once lived.

What’s one thing in your life that changed because of timing, chance, or circumstance rather than effort?

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Listen or watch my conversation with Mark Rank on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.

Capable of great kindness—and astonishing pettiness.
Moved by love—and ruled by fear.
Trying our best—and messing it all up anyway.

If you ever doubt this, just wait for a crisis. Pressure has a way of stripping away our careful self-concepts and shows us, sometimes uncomfortably, who we are.

The political dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn learned this the hard way. Writing about his years in Soviet forced labor camps, he rejected the comforting idea that evil belongs over there—with the villains, the regimes, the other side. Instead, he wrote something far more unsettling:

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”1

In other words: the problem is not that some people are terrible and others are wonderful.

The problem—and the miracle—is that we are both.

That line, Solzhenitsyn says, shifts. It oscillates. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, he noticed, “one small bridgehead of good is retained.” Which feels both sobering and strangely hopeful.

We have been living through a long season of collective strain. A time when our patience thinned, our tempers flared, and our best intentions didn’t always survive contact with reality. Many of us have seen sides of ourselves (and the people we love) that we’d rather not catalog.

But Lent, inconveniently and mercifully, gives us a way to tell the truth about this without despair.

It reminds us that there is no cure for being human. No version of faith that finally resolves us into pure motives and perfect behavior. What there is—again and again—is the invitation to keep noticing. To keep choosing. To tend the small bridgehead of good that remains.

Not by pretending we are better than we are.
Not by collapsing into shame.
But by staying honest, connected, and willing to be changed.

So today, let’s resist the fantasy that we will one day become uncomplicated. Instead, let’s look for beauty and truth and goodness right here—in the middle of our mixed motives and unfinished lives.

May you tend the good that still lives in you (and in them).
And may grace meet you exactly where you are.

Do you ever make up stories about how your life was supposed to be? I have this elaborate story in my mind about how I work for the United Nations and I speak French and I’m a diplomat.

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