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

by Shauna Niequist

Being a writer means being committed to paying attention, to walking through the world as a noticer. It means finding language for the seemingly unspeakable, using words to bridge the divides between us, telling stories that narrate and renarrate who we are in the world and what the world means to us.

Because that’s how life is—interconnected and multifaceted. We carry around our whole selves—our past and our parents, our loves and our limitations, our dreams and our grocery lists and our wounds. That’s how it always is.

Self-compassion is letting yourself off the hook, letting yourself be human and flawed and also amazing. It’s giving yourself credit for showing up instead of beating yourself up for taking so long to get there.

the energy of self-compassion fuels so much more lasting change in our lives than shame or guilt or self-loathing ever could. We find the courage to change when we feel loved. It unlocks our ability to move forward and grow. The best way to start practicing self-compassion is to tap into the kindness you show other people. So many of us are voices of love for the other people in our lives, and it’s when we learn to speak with that same voice of love to ourselves that we’re able to make meaningful change. Self-compassion is learning to say, I guess I haven’t learned that yet.

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 believe in seeking out beauty absolutely every chance we get, as an act of prayer, as an act of worship, as an act of resistance. I believe in going out of our way if it means getting to see the water or the mountains or the sky streaked with colors. I believe in attending the sunset the way some people buy fancy theater tickets.

Whenever possible, walk out of your way for a few minutes and take a few deep breaths somewhere beautiful—whether that’s a forest clearing or a French bakery or a path through a prairie or a cobblestone street. Take the long way sometimes, reveling in the discovery of beauty, noticing everything you can—what it smells like and the slant of the light and how the sounds remind you of recess or Rome or Grand Rapids. In the recovery movement, you often hear the phrase “it works if you work it.” I feel the same way about faith, about inspiration, about joy. It’s a gift, and also it’s a giving, a receiving and extending, a partnership of effort from both parties. I buzz the beach because I take my role in a joy-filled life very seriously. I want to be a person of great joy, and I’m not waiting around for someone else to deliver it to me. I participate in my own healing, in my own inspiration, in my own practice of hope.

I buzz the beach because even on the worst days, even on the darkest days, the waves still come in and then recede, the wind still blows, the sun—that drama queen—still puts on a performance every night.

When you don’t know how to help yourself, help someone else. Loss or pain or suffering can turn you inward. It’s all-consuming sometimes. But it’s so helpful sometimes to show up, even in small ways, for someone else. Serve someone. Help someone. Give something to someone, and the doing so will remind you that the world is still turning beyond your loss. It is, even when it seems like it can’t be.

Look for the good, even in the dark—especially in the dark. Once you train your eyes for tiny glimpses of goodness, you’ll get better at seeing them, and you’ll see more and more and more. And they’ll keep you company and keep your heart tender as you long for daylight. I am not at all suggesting that you should say, I’m so glad this happened, because . . . I’m talking about being the kind of person who asks, even as you are grieving the death of many beloved things, even in the night, Who has cared for me well? Who has been kind? Where have I felt able to rest or be seen? In the middle of the darkness, where have I seen redemption or bravery or tiny bits of hope?

The healing is in the trying.

Practice your vocation or calling, whatever you understand that to be, because the practice of it will keep you connected to your own deepest self and to the God who planted those gifts inside you. Because this is how life is. We get stuck in the dark, sometimes for a long time. We ache for morning. And sometimes it seems like it will never come. But this is also how life is. Dawn always breaks. Morning always comes.

Resilience is, simply put, getting back up. It’s getting back up, not just after the first fall, but the ninth and tenth and seven hundredth. Resilience is feeling your exhaustion and choosing to move forward anyway. Resilience is watching your lovingly made plans fall to dust in your hands, grieving what’s lost and making (yet another) plan. It’s being willing to lay down your expectations for what you thought your life would be, what this year would be, what this holiday season would be, and being willing to imagine another way. I had to learn a deeper level of resilience skills in the last few years, and this is what I know: It gets easier. It gets easier to get back up the more you do it. It gets easier to grieve what’s gone and look honestly into the face of what remains the more often you have to do it. This is the way through. Every single time throughout your life that you’ve hit the ground hard and fought to get back up will help you now. And every time you get back up in this season, it will build inside you the resilience you’ll need for the next season, whatever that is. It’s good news / bad news. I’m sorry we’re having to learn so much about resilience right now—that’s the bad news. The good news: nothing is wasted. Your discipline, your creativity, your stubborn hope—they’re changing you, little by little. And the next season of great pain and challenge will be just a little easier because of these hard choices you’re making now.

there are no quick fixes, no overnight successes, that everything good and worthwhile takes time, and generally way more time than we like to imagine. Good things take time.

“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.”

Since sleep doesn’t come easy every time, when I tuck the boys into bed, I tell them they can throw me all their worries, the way kids throw kisses in clenched fists. I catch them, one by one, and tuck each one of them into the pockets of my bathrobe. They don’t tell me what the worries are; they just throw them over to me. And then, of course, the obvious corollary: when I lie down after tucking them in, I empty my pockets of their worries and mine—dear God, dear God, dear God. One of the central jobs of a parent is to hold anything too heavy or hard for their child, and also, that’s just exactly what God does for his children, for us. Prayer is grabbing those worries in our fists and throwing them to someone who can hold them for us while we rest.

one of the greatest gifts we can offer one another is a commitment to caring for ourselves with the same intention and tenderness we use when we care for our kids. Healthy, whole people don’t become healthy and whole on accident; it’s because they make the small, daily choices that build on each other. These little things won’t solve everything, but you might be surprised at how much difference they really can make—for our little ones, of course, but especially for our weary and wounded grown-up selves.

I remember my therapist reminding me that grief is somatic, that it locates itself in our bodies and, therefore, needs to be worked out of our arms and legs and chests with movement. For me, that meant walking.

Maybe walking is the speed of the soul, the exact right pacing for our bodies and spirits and hearts and minds to reconnect, to dwell together again. The soul doesn’t thrive in absolute stillness because of what the body holds that needs to be worked out—that grief, that anger. But too high a rate of speed, especially over time, violates the soul, and it’s the walking that knits it back together.

Inspiration is my responsibility. Inspiration is part of the job description. It doesn’t strike like lightning. I lay myself open to receive it. You can’t manhandle it or make demands of it, but you can put yourself in the path of it. You make yourself available to it. It’s my job as a writer to live in such a way that every time I sit down to write, I’m inspired, not in the moment necessarily, but in my life, as a way of life. What this means is that it’s my job, literally, to go to art galleries and read poetry and go for walks and spend time with interesting people. It’s part of my work to read widely and learn new things and be curious and ask questions and wonder and doodle and dream, because living inspired is a requirement for rich creative work.

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. You’re allowed to be unreasonably delighted by spicy pickles or a perfect apple or a joke your teen tells you. You’re allowed to be bewitched by your partner, even after all these years, to yearn to be close to him, to bury your face in his neck. You’re allowed to feel joy for almost no reason, except that you walked by the candle that your mother sent you and even when it’s not lit, just seeing it there on the hutch makes you happy. You’re allowed to hold memories in your mind and play them over and over like an old-fashioned slideshow—click, click, click.

I’m learning to choose myself instead of giving the best of myself to people and relationships and institutions. Loyalty to myself. Belonging to myself. Looking for joy just for myself. I need a disproportionate amount of care right now, and the one who is responsible for that care is me. I can’t assume that someone else will do it; it’s my responsibility to create a rhythm for my life that nurtures me, that brings me joy, that allows me to flourish, even given the weight of things I’m carrying.

A question though: If you take a long look at your anger, might there be grief underneath it, like a small child hiding behind a warrior? When it comes down to it, it takes more bravery to be sad than to be angry, but anger is a way of self-protecting—an armor we sometimes choose when sadness feels too scary.

One way you realize you’re healing: For a while, what you’ve suffered is the biggest thing you can imagine. In your pain and suffering, you twist reality around your own wound and you see the whole world through the lens of your pain. For a time, what you’re facing really is the biggest, ugliest, cruelest thing that anyone could ever be allowed to experience. And then over time, as you fight to heal, as you move forward, one foot in front of the other over and over again, you begin once again to see other people’s losses as weighty and real—as real, even, as what you’ve lost. This is good. This is healing. Your pain is being rightsized—still real and still tender and still awful, but not the biggest, hardest thing in all the world. You start to have the emotional energy to offer to other people in empathy, seeing what they’re carrying instead of hoarding up all your resources for the cavern of your own loss. Empathy is a sister to compassion. It’s a willing cracking open of the heart, over and over, an intentional tenderness of spirit. It takes discipline and bravery to practice empathy—it’s far easier to demonize the other when we focus on the differences and the distances, when we separate people into us versus them. Empathy is what allows us to be gracious with our kids in those quarantine moments when they’re driving us up every wall—because they didn’t choose this either, because their lives have been upended too, because they’re lonely and scared too. Empathy is when...

Prayer is a way to entrust the people we love to God, especially when things feel out of our control.

In the New Testament, Jesus prays for his disciples, the group of people he loves, about four specific things: union, protection, joy, and sanctification.

living with a broken relationship to someone I care about so much bothers me every day. It’s like having a splinter in your heel that you feel with every step. You never forget. You’re always carrying the weight of this broken relationship. And so I began to pray for them. What I love about this pattern of prayer is that it isn’t a free-for-all, and it can’t be turned into a laundry list of what I think is right. Dear God, please help this person to see the error of their ways. Dear God, please open their eyes. Dear God, please give me patience to deal with the mess they’ve made . . . I didn’t do that. I prayed for union, that my friend will be connected and supported and that at some point I’ll be a part of that with them again. I prayed for protection—that they will be kept safe, body, spirit, heart. That nothing will cause them pain—not even me. I prayed for joy. I asked God to bring joy into their life every day—I thought about some things that they love, experiences or moments that I know would be joyful for them, and even though I won’t be a part of them, I asked God to bring those moments and experiences into their life. And then I prayed for their sanctification—that they will be brave and kind and generous, growing in tenderness and love for others and being willing to stand up for what’s right. I prayed every day for this person. I wish I could tell you that while I was praying for them, the phone rang and the silence between us was broken. Or that I opened my ey...

When we pray for people with whom we have difficult or painful relationships, God works lovingly and powerfully inside us, rebuilding and restoring us, shaping us into the kind of people who forgive and repair and give second chances—the kind of people we all want to be but can’t always get there on our own. This is what prayer can do. This is what God can do. 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. And now here’s a challenge: include someone with whom you have a complicated or broken relationship. I’m not an expert in prayer or friendship or anything, but I do know that just a couple weeks of this way of praying has loosened something inside me that has been clenched like a fist for a long time. Prayer changes us—it’s God’s sacred tool, able to transform and rebuild us from the inside out, day by day, breath by breath, prayer by prayer.

“Guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Proverbs 4:23).

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. I’m responsible to protect my mind, my heart, my family. I can’t change anyone else. I can’t make them kinder or fairer or more measured or less cruel. But I get to decide which voices I listen to and which I don’t, and when to put down my phone and protect my own life.

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. Andrew, my beloved therapist, encouraged me to set aside a time every day to feel the sadness. I knew the power of the magic desk, but I forgot for a couple days, so I went back and wrote out the questions: What’s happening inside me? What’s happening around me? What might I need to learn or unlearn or face right now? Am I offering deep kindness and forgiveness toward myself, deep kindness and forgiveness for others? Am I tending lovingly to myself and others? What do I need to walk away from or walk toward? What requires my participation or voice?

Hospitality is powerful. It can move us. It can heal us. It can remind us that we’re loved, that we matter, that someone cares we’re alive. When I think about extraordinary hospitality moments and experiences, I don’t think about fine dining or perfect meals or high-end artwork in fancy homes; I think about a card table outside a car wash, and how my friend Sarah communicated love, care, and thoughtfulness so powerfully to me in that moment.

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.

Let’s all agree not to go back to that old way where the house has to be perfect and the food has to be perfect and the dishes have to be perfect. Get a sheet pan and a picnic blanket and have everyone bring a handful of things from their own kitchens. Because it never was about the food. It never was about the dishes or the fancy kitchen tools or the complicated techniques. We just wanted to connect. This is how deeply the value of hospitality is planted inside us. Look how creative we’ve gotten. Something miraculous happens when we gather. There’s a connection, a healing, a nourishing that goes beyond the nutrients and calories and vitamins and minerals. There’s a nourishing of spirit, and if we’ve learned anything at all through the pandemic, it’s that we really need that connection, all of us. We need to see each other’s faces and hear each other’s voices. We need to laugh together and cry together and sit in silence together. We were made for connection, for sitting shoulder to shoulder, for carrying one another, walking together.

Being a Christian means devoting ourselves increasingly to the purposes of God on earth, to bringing the kingdom of heaven to earth in big and small ways.

life is hard enough without walking around with something on your body that makes you feel bad.

My friend Hannah and I walked along the Hudson River one fall morning, and she said, “The church is a mess—in its own right, politically, in terms of gender and race—and it’s getting so much wrong. How do you stay?” “I see all that,” I told her. Of course I do. But there’s a stubborn part of me that is absolutely unwilling to starve my own heart because some other people have gotten it wrong. My faith is one of the most nourishing, healing, restorative parts of my life, and I’m unwilling to go without it as a protest. 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.

Let me tell you what happens. You realize that the institutions and structures and systems you’ve been trusting all your life aren’t actually going to save you or keep you safe—that they never were going to, that they never could. And you start to fall, and it’s terrifying. It’s awful and dark and you don’t know where the bottom is or who’s going to catch you and then one day you realize you are there, on the bottom. And under it all—under all the institutions and plans and systems, under all your fear and longing and tears, under absolutely everything—is love. Picture yourself on the ocean floor after all that falling, having left behind your successes and triumphs, your ego and shiny self, your deal-making and false assurances. At the bottom of it all, there is love. “What you do,” I told my friend as we sat in the grass, “is you stay there on the bottom of the ocean for a while. And little by little, you begin to build a little shelter for yourself, built on a foundation of love. You build with a prayer and then maybe a poem. You build a window and a door and a roof out of love and honesty and compassion. You ask the wisest people you know, and the kindest. “You reread the words of Jesus and the Psalms. You trust that love will hold it all together, and over time you realize that this tiny shelter you’ve built around yourself suits you much better than those grand institutions ever did, because this one was built out of pain and loss and disillusionment, forged by confe...

She showed me during those years that faith is something you tend to, something you nurture, something you dismantle and rebuild, something you wrestle with because it matters that much to you. And watching our church’s elders marked me too. It would have been easier, maybe, for them to insist on appearances, on business as usual. But they didn’t. I’m sure they had to answer hard questions about it from time to time, and I’m so grateful they were willing to care for our family in that way—it was the harder choice, but the better one.

I am allowed to heal. I am allowed to be happy. I am allowed to do work I love, to celebrate, to feel joy and delight, to laugh. I’m allowed to invest in my own healing, allowed to protect myself, allowed to tend lovingly to myself in all sorts of ways. I recently watched workers put up scaffolding on the side of the chapel at the seminary. My little desk in our apartment looks out at the courtyard and the chapel, so I’ve spent at least a thousand hours admiring the stained glass windows, the red brick. 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. I feel this truth reverberating through my life, because bricks and glass crumble and crack without that scaffolding from time to time, and human hearts crumble and crack too without deep work and intentional care. 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. Sometimes people equate self-compassion and self-care with being selfish or overly self-focused and believe it’s somehow in opposition to faith. But God’s fundamental orientation toward us is love. He made us with love, watches over us with love.

Maybe what makes a day good or valuable or worthwhile is not what you accomplished, what work you did or thing you fixed or task you checked off a list. Maybe there are other metrics—pleasure, connection, caring for someone, learning something new, experiencing delight. Increasingly, when I think about how to measure a day, a season, a life, I’m committed to different metrics, to abundance instead of scarcity, to care instead of competition, to meaning instead of measuring. If all you value is work, then productivity is the metric. But if you can shift out from under the weight of that, then the world refracts against itself like a kaleidoscope again, again, again. Not what did you make, but what did you heal from? Not how far did you go, but how hard did you fight to be free? And you will start to see that time is worth something different, and minutes and hours are ticked out differently—for joy, for play, for another chapter of a book, for setting up for a dinner party with a friend, or for another hour at the table.

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.

One thing I have learned though—you don’t have to know the reason; you just have to trust what’s in front of you.

I explained it all to my therapist, and he reminded me again that my body and my spirit have a knowing that my mind doesn’t have. My mind thinks it’s the boss of things, and for many years it was, but so much of my growth over these past years has been about learning to listen to my body and my spirit, to trust them instead of using my mind and my anxiety like a taser, electrifying them to life, pushing my body and my spirit to go and perform and move, no matter what they need or desire. I’m proud of the work I’ve done, learning to listen, learning to rest, learning to feed myself in truly nourishing ways, learning to tend to my spirit and body in loving ways instead of the harsh ways so many of us were taught along the way.

When Aaron and I were dating, he asked a friend whose marriage he admired, “How do you know if the person you’re dating is the person you should marry?” His friend said, “Is she a grower? Is she a person who’s willing to learn, willing to listen, willing to get it wrong but make it right? That’s what marriage takes. Marry someone who can and will grow.”

All these years later, I can see with greater and greater clarity how wise that friend’s words were: marriage is about a lot of things, but one of the most central is a deep willingness to grow together—toward one another and for one another.