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

by Shauna Niequist

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 confession, prayer, longing. Once you build this shelter, you bring it everywhere you go.” This is the process of a lifelong faith. Born again. Again. Again. You won’t have to unravel and rebuild in such a comprehensive way every time—it seems to me that most people have several faith disruptions over a lifetime. But there are smaller quakes along the way too, and what a gift we would give ourselves if we could normalize this process. The Christian tradition is inherently in motion—a people walking through the wilderness, a Savior walking the road to Calvary, an ongo...