I have been a Christian for over 35 years now. I came to Christ excited by scripture, and I fell deep into the waters of theology and church history. I have been reading and thinking about who God is and who we are ever since. In a rather strange turn, the more I studied, the harder I found it to pray. Maybe the cliches were true: I knew too much to do any earthly good.
I just wasn’t certain that the words I uttered in any given moment really shaped the course of my life or anyone else’s. I still believed in God. I still believed in a God who is moving and active in the world. But this sense of powerlessness only intensified over these years of police violence, Christian nationalism, proto-fascism, climate disaster, and near-constant crisis. What did my words matter in the face of such realities?
I taught and wrote out of a sense of hope. Teaching and writing were my spiritual practices. Reflecting on how faithful people in the past managed to see God work helped me to see how God could be present in the moment. Theology was also a kind of critique. I was serving the church by helping us to see the patterns of unfaithfulness in our midst. But my spouse was a pastor, and she had a responsibility to people’s daily lives. She had to say something to ground people every week. Living with her led me to suspect that constructive critique could only go so far.
I offered the occasional sermon or Bible study. I tried to help my students begin to stitch together something of a theology that could help them to see God as one who wanted their flourishing and who worked toward it. Meanwhile, my own spiritual life was not what I would call particularly rich.
But things changed with an invitation I received. One could even say it was an answer to a prayer I was uttering only in groans that even I had not quite discerned. I was invited to begin writing for the century. At first it was a lectionary reflection, then a feature article. Eventually it became the regular column you are reading now. And in this regularity, something began to grow: a habit of attending.
When I knew that my next column would be due soon, I found that the world around me began to speak. Or maybe it was that my eyes and ears became more open to the world. I saw God moving in the exuberance of a puppy or in my own frustration and tiredness. I saw leaves falling and found myself in living cycles of life and death. I felt the leaves of my own life flaring into colors of fire and then shivering in the barrenness that followed, all the while anticipating the green that would come.
Sometimes the words came easily. In other moments I was wrestling with the page, writing multiple emails apologizing for the lateness of my column, praying to see something worthwhile to write about. Praying. Maybe not quite with the formulaic structure of my Southern Baptist days, but I was praying. Every day I found myself looking for something that God was saying in the world around me. I was looking for ways my life was intersecting with what God was doing, ways it was bending toward or away from God’s work. Prayer began to mean attending to the world in a new way and looking for ways to participate in it. Praying was looking when there was no light, listening when everything sounded like noise.
I am so deeply thankful for the gift of the Century and its editors giving me the opportunity to share parts of my journey. I am thankful for the ways that writing this column has invited me to discover what it means to live a prayerful life, to attend to the invitations God extends to us in our everyday. The writing I’ve been able to do in these pages has opened up an imagination for more books, more ways to think with and about God. In the midst of this, I have also realized that those hopes will be difficult to follow within the rhythms of the regular deadlines this column requires, so this will be my last column for the century. I look forward to contributing articles of other kinds in the future and to a continued relationship with the magazine in the coming years.
As I leave you, I pray that you will be open to God in your everyday. I pray that you will attend to the nudges and the hammers, the whispers and the cries within you and your communities, and that your lives might create spaces of belonging. God is in them all, whether they are slivers or wide open plains.
