I Guess I Haven't Learned That Yet: Discovering New Ways of Living When the Old Ways Stop Working

by Shauna Niequist

But I am, just as you are, living in a world that feels dry as a desert some days, like the very spirit has been leached away, leaving only bone and outrage. And I’m longing for life, living water, nourishment, and direction. I want to live a faithful, meaningful life. I want to feel God’s presence, bring about his kingdom, tell his story in every way I know how. And these are, quite simply, the things I’ve learned along the way as I travel the path of faith.

It’s about curiosity and compassion, and it’s about spiritual practices to weather the rough passages, but at the center it’s about leaving behind what needs to be left behind, accepting the spirit of the age. It’s about learning to stand alone, leaving behind the identities you believed you could never live without.

I guess I haven’t learned that yet. I wrote that sentence because I wanted us to have a common language for what it means to be a learner, a beginner, to be curious and make mistakes and get back up. To ask questions and figure it out as we go. I told the boys that each of us was going to say that phrase every single day about something, and that it was a good thing, not a bad thing. Not knowing something already doesn’t make you bad or dumb; it doesn’t mean you failed. Not knowing something doesn’t mean you’re falling behind or fundamentally flawed. It just means there’s more to learn.

A wise friend of mine says that true spiritual maturity is nothing more—and nothing less—than consenting to reality. Hello to here—not what you wanted or longed for or lost, not what you hope for or imagine. Reality. This here. This now.

I’ve been training all my life to pretend I’m fine and have let my body suffer for it.

I thought I needed a great army of friends, eleven sets of dishes, six pairs of boots, and two thousand books. I thought I needed an institution, a board of directors, a cozy blanket of like-minded, supportive people spread all over the country who would have my back in a heartbeat. Turns out you need three sweaters, rent money, and five really good people. You need eggs and coffee. A Kindle account, a metro card, and one good umbrella.

Last summer, I heard the phrase “let go or be dragged,” and I felt it in every fiber of my being. The phrase is a Zen proverb, and it put words to an experience I had over and over again in the last several years. There are some people who leave early, and others who have a tendency to overstay, and I am an overstayer of the most extreme kind and have lived that way for most of my life. One of the most central learnings of midlife is learning how to let go.

“I’ve been seeing worried parents for decades now. Parents worry, and kids are mostly fine. Just do this one thing: Be enchanted by whatever’s currently enchanting your child.”

It’s your responsibility as a creative person to actively put yourself in the path of inspiration.

One of my goals is to be a person who is easily delighted, who can find great cause for celebration in a fig or a familiar face. If you need fireworks and perfection in order to crack a smile, you’re going to be disappointed over and over when life fails to be spectacular on command. I want to live with an extremely low bar for delight. It takes almost nothing at all—a good song, a ripe piece of fruit, a perfectly packed tote.

You are allowed to love tiny, daily, ordinary moments in your life. You’re allowed to feel wild joy for the simplest and smallest of reasons.

When I read the Bible, I read story after story of love, of redemption, of subverting the status quo in order to love more deeply and powerfully. Jesus is a surprising and almost shocking person—one who breaks boundaries and rules in order to love people who haven’t been loved by the world around them. That’s what it means to be a Christian—to model your life after Jesus, the one who embodies love.

The next couple times, I prayed while I was walking in the city—union, protection, joy, sanctification. After that, I started using my own words that get at the same things—instead of union, support; instead of protection, blessing; instead of joy, delight; instead of sanctification, Christlikeness.

I noticed that I felt more connected throughout the day to those I was praying for. I felt more aware of my kids’ safety instead of taking it for granted. I noticed when Aaron said something about a friendship he appreciated or something that brought him joy in the course of a day. I became more attuned to them, to their lives and spirits and desires and frustrations, and I prayed for those things too.

Try praying every single day for a handful of people you love. Start with the four words, and then make it your own—your own words, your own rhythm, your own embodied and personal way of entrusting your family and friends to God through prayer, the way Jesus entrusted his disciples to his Father through prayer.

For a long time, I wanted people on social media to change—to be less cruel, to be decent, to be fair, to tell the truth. That would be lovely. But I’m not waiting around for that. I’m deciding who gets to enter my spaces, my heart, my mind, my living room, because I’m responsible for those places, no one else.

She talked about feeling the pressure to be a different kind of priest—more male, more white, more alpha. And then she said, “But I’ve decided that what God is asking of me—and what he’s asking of all of us—is for each of us to show up to the body of Christ as our own selves, whatever that means—whatever gifts, whatever weaknesses, whatever dreams, whatever callings.”

What does it mean to show up as deeply myself right now? What does it mean to give my whole self to my community instead of only the parts that feel acceptable and easy?

I was learning—slowly, begrudgingly—to let people who loved me enter into it, to let myself feel things and let people who loved me feel them too.

The next day, I woke up to my new morning routine. I begin by feeling the unfeelable feelings and thinking the unthinkable thoughts. Second, I forgive. I forgive the night. I forgive the people who have hurt me. I forgive the world for not being what I wanted. I forgive myself for all the ways I feel like I’m failing. Then I make space for desire: What do I want? I want healing. I want to move through the pain and leave it behind. I want lightness and freedom of spirit.

It’s easy to want everything we do to be productive or valuable in an immediate way—like maybe I was going to discover some sort of profound but latent talent at forty-four years old and all of a sudden watercolor would be my life. That’s grind culture, hustle culture, productivity culture, that voice that tells us we are what we make, what other people can see, what we can monetize.

Hospitality is holding space for another person to be seen and heard and loved. It’s giving someone a place to be when they’d otherwise be alone. It’s, as my friend Sibyl says, when someone leaves your home feeling better about themselves, not better about you.

This spring I’m letting go of the past I’d been holding, and the future too.

We’re responsible to help create a world that values questions more than answers, that celebrates learning and not just knowing, that sees failure as a part of the process of success.

They’re at the beginning of so many things, and I’m in the rough and ugly middle, plenty of regrets and scars and mistakes, months and years I can never get back. But also, everything led us here. Could it have been any other way?

There are a million ways to be a Christian. There are a million ways to live your faith. It can be so difficult sometimes to find fellow travelers who speak your same language of faith, but it’s worth it to hunt for them.

I see the church’s failings. I’ve seen many of them up close, much closer than I’d like. But show me something that hasn’t been corrupted by human hands. And my hands are as fallible as any. I still believe that the way of Jesus, even poorly done, is a better way than any other.

The Christian tradition is inherently in motion—a people walking through the wilderness, a Savior walking the road to Calvary, an ongoing journey—life, death, rebirth.

We have regular conversations these days with our kids about the process of faith, not just the fact of it. We tell them it’s something that changes over time, something we have to tend to. We talk with them in age-appropriate ways about how doubt is a part of faith, about how questions are normal, about how our faith stretches and expands inside our hearts over time, about how it’s not the same in every season.

There are a million reasons not to stay. I could list several hundred thousand, at least. Many of our churches are sick, infected by racism and patriarchy. Many use shame and fear as ways to control. Many use manipulation and charm. There are so many reasons to walk away. But nothing gets healed or restored or brought back to life unless those of us who still believe in hope, in honesty, in confession and prayer and the sacred reality of the church gathered keep gathering, keep working, keep praying, keep making changes. And so I stay.

I felt disappointed when I first saw the scaffolding—it’s ugly, and the work is loud. And then all at once, I realized that the scaffolding and the repair work are ways of caring for this building I love. You put up with ugly and loud for a while because you’re committed to preserving something of great value. Without the scaffolding and the work, this precious building would crumble and decay.

We only heal by investing in the difficult and ugly work, even if it isn’t pretty, even if it looks like a mess for a while.

But our stories, our living-and-breathing, flesh-and-blood, toss-and-turn-all-night, hit-the-snooze-seven-times lives don’t ever fit into the formats we’ve chosen, and I guess I haven’t learned that yet—and not for lack of opportunities. This is a stubborn one for me: Life doesn’t follow us. We follow it. We run after it, fight against it, catch up to it, make sense of it, get used to it—but it happens to us, not the other way around.

While we all love a before and after, that’s not how life is. Most of life is before and after and back to middle and OMG! worse than before and tiptoe to middle and then amazing is-this-the-after? We think, I’m doing it! I’m a star! And then—another crash. We struggle and learn and forget. We change and change back and change again.

We’re strong and we’re not. We make progress and then we falter and we show up anyway. We show up anyway, again and again and again, and when we tell the truth about what we’re carrying, it makes us feel less alone and less stuck, and when we show up anyway and tell others about what we’re carrying, it makes everyone feel less alone and less stuck. You just do all of it right in the middle of your normal, messy life.

There’s no quick fix. There’s no overnight success. There’s no silver bullet. There’s just starting where your feet are, letting yourself be a beginner, showing up anyway, over and over and over.

We live in a world that loves flashy and fast and fake. But none of that lasts; what lasts is the long game. The legacy. The love that you build day by day. It’s about choosing to be present, today and then tomorrow and then the next day. It’s about getting up after a fall, over and over.

The story of my life is not a fairy tale. It’s not a horror story. It’s just a story like most stories—dark and light and beautiful and terrible and still being written.

There’s more to learn, more to taste, more to discover. There’s more to experience, more to leave behind, more to grasp with both hands. And I’m going to. I’m going to keep walking, keep loving, keep writing, keep praying. I’m going to keep learning, keep forgiving, keep apologizing, keep moving forward. I’m going to keep inviting, keep listening, keep opening my arms to all of life—terrible and beautiful.