WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

Life is never made unbearable by the road itself but by the way we bear the road. It’s not the hard roads that slay us; what actually slays us is the expectation that this road isn’t what we hoped it to be.

Deserts are not places where God deserts you but a place deserted of noise so you can hear a word from God. Every wilderness holds God’s tenderness, and the driest of deserts can be the holy of holies. Deserts aren’t places to fear: Deserts are trust greenhouses. [...] Deserts are not places of despair—deserts are sacred spaces of divine dialogue

Because our fall was detachment from God, our restoration is found only in attachment to God.

Buy the lie that your life is supposed to be heaven on earth, and suffering can be a torturous hell. But life is suffering, and suffering is but the cross we bear, part of earth’s topography to cross on our way to heaven. I wouldn’t know it for years: Screens sell pipe dreams. Every screen is trying to sell the lie to you—from Hollywood

The soul’s greatest lack is lacking confidence in God.

The best place to let your broken heart spill is always at the feet of Abba Father.

Prayer isn’t giving God information to act upon but God giving us intimacy to rest in.

heaven being as near as the next breath

Do we live more like God is a master merely interested in obedience from us, instead of trusting that God is a lover whose ways are all about forming deep attachment with us, covenanting to always suffer with us?

Turns out you can be about bankrupted, shamed, walked out on, labeled, ghosted, slandered, diagnosed, abandoned, cut off, humiliated, guilty, fired, vilified, charged, destroyed, ruined, devastated, grieved, wrecked, and left for dead in a million ways, and this is the ocean floor, this is at its base: When you know you are fully known and still fully loved, nothing can still scare you.

Prayer only happens when we are unmasked and soul-bare before God, letting Him touch and know all the parts of us, letting all of us be wholly loved by Him, not as we pretend to be, but as we truly are.

I will be glad and rejoice in your [hesed-attachment] love, for you saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul. (Psalm 31:7)

what you want most deeply is to be deeply wanted as a person, valued and needed, seen and safe and known.

I decide to believe in the strange truth of it: You can say there is suffering only if you believe there is a God.5 If there is no God, there can’t be suffering, only life and the harsh reality of survival of the fittest. To believe there is suffering implies there is injustice. But if you believe there is no God, there can’t be any injustice; there can only be pain and the natural outcome of natural selection. But if you believe there truly is unjust suffering, if you believe that babies shouldn’t die and diagnoses shouldn’t devour dreams and violence shouldn’t violate hopes, your very conscience is appealing to a higher moral law. How else do you explain the indignation over the wrongness of suffering, except that the indignation itself seems to explain that you know there is rightly supposed to be more?

But there’s Moses standing still, attentive to God, arms stretched out cruciform—and God, in a tempest of love, with a blast of His nostrils, splits the sea in two to make a way out of bondage and into bonding, and the people of God reject the notion of drowning in fear, the paralysis of questioning, the bitterness of feeling abandoned, and they walk one fierce faithing step after the other, deep faith calling for deep waters, and you only find a way through waves when your faith, your trust, your relying, isn’t as fickle as waves but is in the Way Himself.

Because God is Love Himself, He is the greatest and longest sufferer of the universe.

We are all the grafted. Cut and wounded. Joined at the places of loss. United and always growing together. Hearts scarred and bound and carved into one.

I keep stroking the back of Shiloh’s hand, watching her eyes because we’re all looking for eyes looking for ours and every fighter deserves a witness. [...] When anyone has to bear pain, they deserve someone to at least bear witness to it.

How in the name of all things good does God work for us and keep us safe when the dreaded phone call detonates, or the shrapnel of shame shreds everything that looks like hope, or the sky lashes round and swallows your dreams whole, or the claw of death guts deep, and how do you stagger forward hiding your bloody entrails? Evil hisses that if God really is love, then we better get roads without any suffering. And we shake off the lie and crush it with truth: Because God really is love, then we get roads with Him, and because God really is love, we are always soul-safe

The only outcome that matters is that we come to Him. If death is the outcome, we still get to come to Him. If pain, or shame, or flames, or chains, or graves are the outcome, we still get to come to Him.

There’s a way of life that looks harmless enough; look again—it leads straight to hell’ (Proverbs 14:12-13 MSG), and the only way through is to find the curve and bend of our own hearts and come bend the knee to a realer and better love [...] Bonding or bondage, those are always the two ways to choose in every moment.

my heart takes the way of incurvatus in se, this curving in toward self—self-sufficiency, self-protection, self-comfort, self-interest. It’s the bent way of being human: We’re wired for attachment, for dependence on God, but our inclination toward incurvatus in se turns the direction of our dependence towards destructive things, and our attachments go awry. All addiction is an attachment in the wrong direction. Name your pain, name the way you try to make the pain go away, and you name your addiction. Name your default direction. Name the way you turn for comfort—a glass, a screen, a plate, a sweet, a drug, a page, a voice, a click, a hit, a rush, a bottle—go ahead and name what you curve to, to comfort your ache, and you name your Egypt that looks like ease.

I stay quiet all day. Traumas can bend us away from reaching for, or trust taking, any comfort from anyone. Nobody tells you that the shields you throw up to protect your heart end up being more like a prison that leaves you alone.

And I don’t even know when my days start or end, heartsick babe in arms, waiting for an appointment with the cardiologist, waiting for her next breath, waiting to read some epiphany about attachment in the books that I’m burning the midnight oil to read. Is he tired of me? Maybe I’m tired of being me. Or maybe we’re both just really dog-tired. As painful as it is, it’s easier for me to bear witness to all of this, if it will spare even one other soul from bearing the weight of what happens next. Keep burying how you feel and you'll end up digging your relationships a pretty big grave. If you don’t speak your fears and questions aloud, they only grow louder in your soul.

Marriage and adoption have legal implications, but they are more than only a legal reality. Marriage and adoption are meant to be a lived reality, a lived attachment [...] ‘But the marriage is for the sake of a life together, and the adoption proceedings’ for a life together. And it’s true too: from the moment I first held her photograph and looked into Shiloh’s eyes under that starry Texas sky, I knew she was mine and I’d die for her. She was sealed in my heart as mine long before my hand signed on any dotted line.

It was 1993. I was eighteen years old when I walked into my first therapy appointment in a stifling hot upstairs office with one window, no air conditioner, to see a counselor with teased bangs and a frizzy bleached perm. Mama had just signed herself into a psychiatric ward for the fourth extended treatment, each months long at a time. Dad had fallen into a vortex of depression [...] I tell myself this, try to believe this: no past can earmark you when you’ve heard the divine whisper of who you can still become.

Therapy is a gym for the mind. Not ashamed to have a membership

And this peace sacrifice, it is actually eaten by those who sacrifice it, almost like a shared meal, almost like a feast between man and God [...]’ ‘Wait—’ I interrupt the guide, touch his shoulder before he moves on. ‘Sacrifice—doesn’t mean give up or lay down or go without or let go of?’ ‘No, no, no….Sacrifice doesn’t mean that at all. Sacrifice in Hebrew is korban.’ Aerie flips the pages of his worn bible to show me. ‘See. Sacrifice, korban, comes from the Hebrew root, K-R-V, which literally means to come near, an approach, a moving closer, to move into a closer relationship.’ Sacrifice is not losing something but moving closer to Someone. Sacrifice isn’t about loss—sacrifice is about love. Surrender to love. Sacrifice is about detaching from one thing—to attach to a greater thing.

Hopelessness rises when the pain of the past floods all of the future