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

by Shauna Niequist

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.

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.

She talked about loss and change and suffering and how we don’t yet know the end or the meaning or the moral of the story, the tidy conclusion. But we keep going in the middle, the long, difficult middle, knowing we’ll know later.

you can love someone and learn from them and be deeply grateful for them for a season, and then bless their future.

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.

Anger is active, powerful; it buoys us along and gives us something to do and focus on and sharpen. Anger makes us feel like we’re in control again, because loss is, at its core, loss of control, or the myth of it anyway—I

If strangers kept coming to my door, asking to be let into my actual house to tell me everything they ever thought about me and my life and my family, I would move. Why have I allowed strangers into my mental living room and my mind and my heart?

Because our hearts are the wellspring, the center from which everything else flows, and it’s up to each of us to tend to our heart and protect it.

It was equal parts beautiful and disruptive—not the afternoon any of us expected, but an entirely different thing, entirely out of our control. It lifted us out of whatever we’d had planned and plopped us down into a snow globe, lovely and strange.

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.

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.