If you haven’t yet had a chance, I’d suggest starting here with these essays before jumping into this week’s Field Notes so that what follows will make a bit more sense to you:

1. 🎉 Announcing our new series: Unlikely Spiritual Practices: This one is for the Quiet Time Drop-Outs

2. We are not trying to become worthy of grace; we are learning to live as though grace is already true: Unlikely Spiritual Practices Part 2 (Practices named: Deconstruction + Staying Open to God)

3. Today!

Hi friends,

I’ve been thinking of how best to structure this series so that it doesn’t inadvertently turn into another laundry list of “To-Do” things that leave us feeling inadequate. After all, too many of us have spent far too much time feeling like failures because of our challenges/questions/exhaustion with traditional spiritual practices. After all, we won’t find a good pathway to spiritual flourishing by simply updating shame tactics with cool new language or branding while keeping the same spirit of performance and earning in place. That was a big reason why I started us off last week by setting the table for this series as a relaxed one, hopefully establishing the heart behind what we’re doing here and why.

In that same hope, I’ve decided that rather than simply list out a bunch of practices for you to work on or treat as a measuring stick, I’ve decided to offer any specific practices I share with you as simple offerings or starting points under a larger idea that you can expand yourself. That way, there is a lot of room for you to integrate the approach without a lot of heavy-handedness about the method, if that makes sense.

So for instance, today I want to talk about the beautiful and unlikely spiritual practices of Wonder and Delight. I’ve got a few ideas for how that shows up in my own life but by talking more broadly about the invitation of wonder and delight, I hope that my few ideas only spark your own and that you will feel free to explore your own - likely already in place! - unlikely spiritual practices for how you experience wonder and delight in your own life.

Listen to this essay

The Secret Field Notes Podcast Episode 52 is up and waiting for you to listen to either through your web browser or through your preferred podcast listening app.

(Yes, that was a ringing telephone - landline! - in the background halfway through. I am nothing if not professional. 😐)

LISTEN

This week, we’ll cover the following

• Seriously?

• In praise of inefficient practices

• Despair is never just personal

• Jesus the Poet

• The First Step: Before the Wonder and Delight

• A Few Starting Points

• And our Reflection Questions

So let’s get started!

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This week, she is reading a piece published on 28 July 2026 called Wonder and Delight. It is Part 3 of our Unlikely Spiritual Practices summer series.

If you want to read along with the essay or share it, click here for the essay in…

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Welcome, welcome to the beginning of our summer series called Unlikely Spiritual Practices.

What, What?

If you missed last week’s announcement (which was technically Part 1 if the “2” up there was throwing you off), it has all the information you need. It’s right here for you including the what and the why of it all. I’d encourage you to read that introduction to get an idea for what we’re doing here especially the why behind it all at this moment

Listen to this essay

The Secret Field Notes Podcast returns! This episode is up and waiting for you to listen to either through your web browser or through your preferred podcast listening app.

Yes, yes, you could listen to the AI generated audio that is embedded with Substack but wouldn’t you rather listen to my Canadian self read/sometimes preach this essay while background noises distract you and I sometimes bump the mic because I’m talking with my hands even though no one can see me? Of course you would.

LISTEN

This week, we’ll set the table by talking about:

• A Confession

• Why Language Matters

• Certainty isn’t the point

• Our First Unlikely Spiritual Practice

• God is Already Here

• One more unlikely spiritual practice for you

• And our reflection questions

So let’s get started!

Read more

This week, she is reading a piece published on 21 July 2026 called We are not trying to become worthy of grace; we are learning to live as though grace is already true. It is Part 2 of our Unlikely Spiritual Practices summer series.

Read more

I’m excited to share that after listening to a lot of your feedback and comments, I’ve finally decided on our Field Notes summer deep-dive series.

Introducing: Unlikely Spiritual Practices

Below, you’ll find the background for this summer series, the details of how it works, and what you can expect as well as how to sign up to join in. So keep scrolling for all the info you need to anticipate what’s coming next.

🧐 Why Unlikely Spiritual Practices?

Like a lot of us, I was taught that if I wanted to be close to God that I should definitely:

1. go to church every time the doors were open,

2. get up early in the morning for “devotions” AKA devos,

3. read my Bible,

4. pray in an acceptable fashion, and

5. read a faith-based book and

6. maybe with a bit of “service” or “tithing 10%” tossed in as well.

If we did those things, we were promised we would experience spiritual growth, complete certainty in all things, success, a clear complexion, healthy relationships, sturdy mental health, and a cheerful disposition! Guaranteed!

Annnnnnnd cut to burning it all down in deconstruction.

(That part can take years.)

So now we’re here.

As we live into our evolving faith on the other side of that clarifying experience, we’re ready to start rebuilding. We’re ready to reimagine a faith that works, not only for us, but for this world that God so loves. A lot of us are experiencing a yearning to purposely reconnect with God that surprises us but somehow those old familiar pathways - read your Bible, pray this way using an acronym, read approved books - feel a bit hollow at best, maybe painful at worst. We need to find that elusive spot between ancient practices and new experiences, sturdy order and a bit of healthy chaos too.

We’re left wondering, how do I purposely make room in my life for the pursuit or experience of God without doing the same things I used to do? How do I feel “close to God” now? What spiritual practices are still available to me? Are there other ways to connect with God than the ones I was taught? There has to be something between Performing All The Spiritual Disciplines As Before and Doing Absolutely Nothing.

Basically, this series is for the drop-outs of Quiet Time. It’s for the ones who burnt out on carefully-completed Bible studies. The ones with a Bible highlighter. The ones with a stack of earnest journals from their younger years, filled with confessions and pleas and prayers that kind of hurt your heart to read now. The ones who were the Faithful Ones, the ones who were the leaders, the ones who were the Bible nerds and small group hosts and life group leaders and club presidents. This is for the ones who used to love their Bibles so much and now hardly ever cracks that spine open because of all the baggage it brings. The ones whose faith began evolving not because they were losing faith but because they were so incredibly serious about their faith.

I think it may be for you.

🕰️ And why now?

I don’t think any of us are under any illusions about how much of a demand the world is placing on us right now. In addition to all of the stresses and complexities of our own lives - and I know that we have a lot of deep needs in our community here, we’re also facing a lot of trauma, stress, demand, and intensity from the world around us. It feels like we’re all being depleted on the daily.

Basically, it is taking A LOT to stay a person right now.

So it’s no small thing to make room for any kind of unlikely spiritual practice that fills your soul back up. In fact, I’d argue that there is no better time to cultivate a rich, resilient, beautiful interior life than when everything else is on fire.

This series isn’t about earning stars on some mythical God Behaviour Chart that God is secretly keeping in heaven. This isn’t about earning a Best Christian Award. We’re not measuring spirituality or trying to win favour from the Bank of God. It’s not about going backwards in your own faith formation to try to reclaim one moment when you felt close to God because of a worship album on nightly repeat. No, this is about moving past survival during this season and making some room for your own soul’s practice and wisdom and energy to be honoured. It’s about honouring your own need for gentleness, faithfulness, and flourishing in these very days.

Our daily practices and our posture towards possibility genuinely do shape our souls. And I believe your soul deserves a fresh infusion of life, permission, grace, and even joy right now.

I’m excited about this series for a lot of reasons but chief among them is my hope that we can recover a sense of relaxation about our relationship with God: not striving, not earning, not performing but living within the reality of God’s presence and love. Julian of Norwich once described God as “completely relaxed and courteous.” I love that description because of it’s record-scratch reset for us: the notion of God being relaxed seems so far from our understanding of spiritual practice, doesn’t it? But it’s true.

So that’s the unofficial foundation for this series: relaxing into our relationship with God and making room for joyful, loving, beautiful, playful, and light spiritual practices - even if those practices look a bit different than we once expected.

📝 What’s the actual plan?

• You will receive a brand new, not-available-anywhere-else essay from me every week for the next 5-6 weeks. Each one will have one or two practices, some reflection/community questions, and an audio version.

• I’m aiming for Tuesdays but given the amount of study and writing this requires, don’t be surprised if it shows up on Wednesdays instead.

• To start us off next week, I’m planning on an essay about what makes something a “spiritual practice” and expand that definition a bit for our purposes. I’ll tell a bit of my own story, too and offer us a blessing for the beginning of this.

• Then we’ll spend a few weeks on that spiritual scavenger hunt together.

• We’ll wrap up with a big community conversation, maybe even a synchroblog/post prompt if you’re a fellow writer, and then a blessing over the whole endeavour.

I have a loose outline prepared for the series that is making me very excited about all that is ahead, but I’ll be writing these essays in real time as they arrive in your apps/inboxes, week by week so honestly, I may be as surprised as you at what develops over the coming weeks.

I am under no illusion that this will tackle every question, possibility, practice, and opportunity about spiritual practice. This will just be ordinary me, writing every week about the practices that have surprised me and been meaningful in my own life, not as theory or an exhaustive treatise but as my own practice and a neighbourly invitation. In fact, as we work through this series, I think half of what we’ll do here is simply name, honour, expand, and bless the ways you are already experiencing a spiritual practice.

My hope is to create something every week which will bring some goodness to your own faith practice, ask a few questions, open up a few new paths, and maybe even encourage you to give something new a try.

🎙️ The Secret Field Notes Podcast Returns!

Yes, indeed, I will dust off my old podcast mic and record the audio version for these essays for you. It will actually be me, reading - maybe preaching? - these essays for you. I know a lot of us prefer listening to reading these days so hopefully this will be helpful!

I’ll post the link for those episodes in every week’s essay along with instructions on how to listen to that in your preferred podcast app once they’re published.

💬 Plan on getting into that comment section

One of the best parts of series season around here is the comment section. So plan on leaving comments, replying to each other, and being part of the kindest comment section left on the Internet. I am always in the comment section, too, and we’ll have time every week for you to respond and reflect together.

🔑 How to Access This Series

This special series, like every deep-dive series, is exclusively for paid subscribers of Field Notes.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, you’re all set to receive this series: you don’t have to do a single additional thing. Well done, you. You will automatically receive new not-available-elsewhere essays from me along with the audio version from our Secret Field Notes Podcast in your Substack mobile app or email inbox, depending on your settings/preference. It will also live here at Field Notes in the archives. You’re set.

But if you aren’t a paid subscriber yet, you will need to upgrade your subscription to access this series.

Field Notes costs $6 CAD/month, which is just over $4/month USD or - very, very good deal alert - $40 CAD/year, which is under $30 USD/year according to my rough exchange rate calculations, for the entire year of Field Notes, which gives you about five months of content for free.

Subscribe now

And as always, if you can’t afford a subscription, we have got you. Just email assistant@sarahbessey.com to put your hand up and we’ll set you up with a paid subscription, no questions asked and zero justification required. The paywall here isn’t meant to be a barrier, just a way to create a quieter corner for thoughtful conversations and to support me in creating this kind of more-time-intensive and demanding content for you.

(One note there: My inbox-helper processes all these requests in the edges around her actual full-time job, so don’t panic if it takes a few days to be confirmed! It’s coming, promise.)

You are also very welcome to give a gift subscription to a friend, too. ⬇️

Give a gift subscription

Okay, that’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with our first essay in this new series plus the audio podcast for you. I’m excited to relax into this summer series with you and I’m looking forward to learning from you all, too.

With the spiritual-disciplines-drop-outs,

S.

My Books | Field Notes | Instagram | Facebook | SarahBessey.com

• The Angry Breath Prayers: I refuse to believe that I have to tidy up my humanity to be in conversation with Creator.

• In Praise Of: A litany for today

• In which I visit the seashore in the dark and have a few thoughts about love: We do see through the glass darkly, that’s just true, but we are experiencing love anyway and it is utterly sufficient for me.

• Maybe this is why gentleness is a sign of God’s love: I am beginning to bless them all, even all the ways I’ve loved God without their permission

• This is for the things we don’t post: This blessing knows there are depths to which we descend alone.

  Share Sarah Bessey's Field Notes

One of the most popular posts I’ve written here over the years is an essay called Your Job Isn’t To Get Over Your Anger. I wrote it in the aftermath of another piece on whether or not we are still calling ourselves Christians because I just got so tired of being dismissed as “too angry.”

I believe that essay remains a Top Post here for the simple fact that not enough devout Christian women are honest about their anger, let alone encouraged to bring that anger to God, too.1

My own practice of breath prayer - a well-known one to readers of the newsletter2 - has always needed to be more than a pleasant exhale of gratitude or blissful surrender to the love of God, much as I love that for us all. No, for prayer to be true, it has to be honest and that includes being a full person with full emotions.

And at this moment in time, a lot of us are angry. FOR GOOD REASON. And rather than locking that anger up like we’re ashamed of it, I vote that we gather it all up and present it to God as an offering, inviting the Spirit into the cleansing work of integrating our fury with our faithfulness.

We hear a lot about God's anger in Scripture- and it's almost all of the same things that are stirring us up right now: cruelty to women, to the poor, to children, to the immigrant and refugee, to the vulnerable, broken promises, the triumph of evil or ascendence of the wicked and abuses of power on the backs of the oppressed or marginalized. We're angry for good reason.

But I am also a woman of faithful prayer.3

So now what?

Well, I bring that very rage to my prayers. Everyone needs to have a vessel outside of themselves for processing fury, you know. This is just mine. (I’ve known women who rage-knit, for heaven’s sake, or rage-run or rage-scream, anything to turn the anger from destructive inward-directed behaviours towards healthy outward expression helps, you know. I suppose Alanis brought her rage to her songwriting and performances; I bring mine to prayer. Same, same. )

I refuse to believe that I have to tidy up my humanity to be in conversation with Creator.

I refuse to believe that I have to perform a pantomime of holiness for the one who is well acquainted with our realities.

I refuse to believe that I have to tame the very emotions that the incarnate God embraced and redeemed and directed well.

As I wrote in A Rhythm of Prayer, “There is room for your whole self in prayer. You can bring your whole body to this altar, this place where you meet with God with words or with wordless knowing. You don’t need to pretend you aren’t angry, that you aren’t cynical or afraid, that you aren’t feeling a bit hopeless of uncomfortable or envious or tired. That’s how a lot of the Psalms came to be, after all. I believe that scripture gives us a more fulsome and complete view of prayer than we were perhaps taught…”

I bring my anger to God in order to keep bitterness at bay.

I bring my anger to God in order to name it and metabolize it and hopefully direct it towards healing.

This is one way that we turn towards trust, towards hope, towards love, even when we are angry.

I’ve found there is a redemptive arc in breath prayers that are born out of big emotions like fury or rage: like the Psalms, these prayers help us to name our complicated feels of anger - or exhaustion or loneliness or longing - and then direct us right into trust, into forgiveness, into action, into the redemptive work to which we are all called. Our anger is actually a call to love.

Some of what you read below may feel provocative to you. Good! I hope that jostles you into your own honesty in prayer. We are able to speak intimately with God and our own spirits.

So with that in mind, here are 33 breath prayers that I’ve written/prayed lately for the angry ones like me - you can borrow whichever one resonates and ignore the rest.

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Hi friends,

Well, let’s lift our voices, eh?

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Hi friends,

My husband had a work conference in Prince Edward Island last week and I tagged along. We added a couple of days at the front-end in order to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary: a proper Silver Anniversary celebration with a special dinner out at a farm-to-table place we have long coveted and a literary tour of L.M. Montgomery sites for the bookish kid I was (and let’s be clear: still am), long walks along roadside lupines and the sea, and just the simple luxury of uninterrupted time together. Brian travels a lot for work, I’m the “home base parent,” we have both had too-full plates lately, and so this exhale was a big treat for us. Our four kids and my folks all rallied to make it happen for us, never an easy task, so my gratitude was deep as we left Calgary for the north shores of PEI. We spent those few days like precious coins, doling each moment out with awareness of the privilege of both the place and the time.

Hours on the seashore that we practically had to ourselves. Windy red cliffs near bright white and red lighthouses looking out on the blue, blue water crashing into the rocks while shore birds swooped. Old inns with poky bedrooms and tiny en suites but magnificent wide porches and stocked libraries with comfy chairs for reading or socializing. Nary a chain restaurant or Starbucks to be found. Shops stuffed with wool sweaters I coveted like an unredeemed hobbit. Long conversations watching the stars come out. Every meal fresh and bright from the water, caught that day. Beauty like a blessing at every bend in the road.

But all good things come to an end and so we drove to the conference centre to earn our way here. On the final evening, Brian absolved me from Dutiful Spouse duties (after 25 years of marriage, he is more honouring of my inherent need for solitude than I am). At first, I sprawled in our hotel room, World Cup football on the television, debating the effort required to get up and go out again. I was tired. I thought of room-service and staying in. My better angels won the battle with a reminder that I could loaf any time: this was the last night in my favourite place and I was less than twenty minutes walking distance to the beach. Sometimes you just need to get a grip, girl, and get up and walk out the door. We were on the doorstep of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, so it was still bright day outside despite the late hour.

I grabbed a sweatshirt and my phone as a camera - there was poor reception away from the hotels, what a relief - and my constant sunglasses. I wear glasses and prescription sunglasses constantly, contact lenses only occasionally. In addition to being increasingly near-sighted, I have blue eyes so any amount of sunlight is a painful reminder that my ancestors built me for an overcast sky and cool climate. (No one looks at me and wonders my ethnicity, that’s what I mean, I look like I eat a lot of potatoes.) I wear sunglasses everywhere and I always have a sweater with me.

It was unsettled at the beach that evening. Well, of course it was, it’s June in Canada. Out west, where I live near the Rockies, we call this “June-uary” because after months and MONTHS of winter, you always hope it’s going to be warm and summer-y by now, but many days are cold enough for the jacket you hopefully packed away a week before the rain came back. You might as well accept that it doesn’t get properly warm until July around here or you’ll make yourself nuts.

Basically, I love this kind of evening.

I wandered on the beach for hours, walking up and down the red sand, searching for sea glass or interesting shells, choosing one only to discard it at the next to catch my covetous eye. Sat on driftwood to look at the dunes, the waves rolling in to the shore, the rocks. The sky was filled with dark clouds but the rain held off. I passed six people and a dog, every one said hello. Eventually every one else left and I was alone.

I live in the foothills of the Rockies where it is a different sort of beauty: we are wide horizon, big sky, towering majestic mountains, dry bright days. I don’t live near the water, let alone the sea, but somehow this place always feels like coming home to some unreasonable part of my soul.

As the sun dropped lower and lower over the horizon, I regretted my earlier choice of sunglasses. I wished I had brought my ordinary glasses. Everything was dark and growing darker but I didn’t want to leave the shore for even a moment, let alone for the twenty minute walk back to the hotel room and then another twenty to return.

So I stayed.

So the day gave way to the night and the sea disappeared into darkness.

So the mystery of the shore deepened.

It wasn’t as good as being able to see clearly but it was still pretty good, you know?

I remembered a line from an old translation of one of the Apostle Paul’s letters to the Corinthians: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Some of the best poetry in the world is in the Bible. “We see through a glass darkly” is just perfectly evocative to me. It is near the end of that famous chapter about love - the “love is patient, love is kind” one that always seems to be read at weddings or written in calligraphy on posters.

Nowadays I read different translations of the Bible than that one for many reasons, but when I am in the more ancient places, the old words always seem to find me first. It used to surprise me, how the old songs and formal language of faith would be the first to rise in my memory rather than whatever new and preferred and shinier version I was on at the time, but it’s common enough now that I’ve just accepted it. (I wrote to you a couple weeks ago about this very thing when it came to old songs and learned that I am not alone in this.)

I paced the shoreline in the dark, made darker by my choices, surrounded by the Holy Ghost dressed up like the wind, held in the deep murmur of a sea.

We do see through the glass darkly, that’s just true, but we are experiencing love anyway and it is utterly sufficient for me.

I would rather this beautiful, mysterious, powerful force under my feet and in my ears, whipping up my hair and taking my breath even if I can’t fully comprehend it fully.

I’d rather hear what is true and pure even if it’s not quite in 4K definition.

I’d rather a hint, a taste of grace than an absence altogether.

There is something elemental and ancient to this kind of knowledge, it doesn’t depend on scholarly articles much as I love them or seminary approved texts, much as I appreciate them.

This is the experience of love that holds the whole universe, this is the love that is holding you in the darkness. It is the burning bush. It is the sea that parts. It is the storm that ceases. It is the beloved child turning towards home. It is the outstretched arms and a woman preaching resurrection and all that is nearby but unnamed shaping us in the dark. It is all the ways we are loving each other the best we can right now.

We do see through a glass darkly when it comes to love, it’s true, but we still experience love and that it is enough.

I’d rather the shore and the sea in the dark than anything less in the light, you know. I may not understand the full beauty of it but I can perceive a lot in the dark, more than you might think. I can feel the water and the wind, I can sense the grandeur, I can smell the salty air. Basically, this isn’t love as explanation, it is love as salvation.

These mysteries, these ancient places, even something as silly as literally looking through darkened glass at the sea, reminded me that even when we see the through the glass darkly, we are given the gift of experiencing it just the same.

This is what we know of love and sure, it’s incomplete and imperfect and sometimes selfish but even so, the glimpse is better than the absence of any of it.

Someday, in an age to come - whatever that even means - I do believe that we will know love more fully in all that love bears and believes and hopes and endures. Maybe it is the difference between seeing the sea in daylight with proper glasses versus wearing sunglasses on a stormy night or maybe it’s the difference between staying on the shore and running out into the waves with your arms outstretched.

I suppose I just wanted to say to you: 
however you are seeing and experiencing love right now, 
even imperfect and imprecise; 
however you are catching a glimpse of grace and mercy and forgiveness and beauty,
even faded and out of focus; 
however you are offering compassion and healing and profound decency 
to a world intent on cruelty and stupidity and consumption, 
even when it feels small and ridiculous; well,
you are proclaiming and prophesying and demanding that yes, 
"faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

God is in the darkened glass and God is in the clarity, God is in the sunlight and God is in the night, God is in all you can’t even imagine and God is the making all things right just over the horizon. Love is never futile. Love through a glass darkly is still love.

I suppose I just wanted to say that even though I couldn’t see much that night, I felt it all and I heard the song of the sea and it was enough.

I suppose I just wanted to say that even if you only see love through a glass darkly, you will feel it all and you will hear the song of Love and it will be enough for your soul to keep the faith.

Brian wandered down to the shore after his evening event had ended. He found me on the shore, staring out at the sea in the darkness, seaglass in my hand. He pulled the sunglasses from my face and folded them carefully. Withdrew my glasses from his jacket pocket and placed them on my freckled nose, tapping it lightly with his finger.

“There,” he said. “Now you can see everything.”

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I can overthink anything,

S.

My Books | Field Notes | Instagram | Facebook | SarahBessey.com

• Hope is a team sport: An interview with K.J. Ramsey about The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir Of What Joy Can Survive

• Maybe this is why gentleness is a sign of God’s love: I am beginning to bless them all, even all the ways I’ve loved God without their permission

• From tv shows to food, music to reads, these are all the good things of right now: + you can weigh in on the topic of our next deep-dive series

• This is for the things we don’t post: This blessing knows there are depths to which we descend alone.

• Everything, All Of It: I would walk any aisle in any church now and say, yes, I want to re-dedicate my life to this kind of love all over again.

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I am so excited to welcome K.J. Ramsey to Field Notes! For those of you who don’t know her yet, is an increasingly feral mystic (Sarah: same, same!) who is utterly devoted to the joy of being alive. She is a body-centered licensed professional counselor specialized in trauma recovery and an acclaimed author of prose and poetry, including The Book of Common Courage, The Lord Is My Courage, and This Too Shall Last (all of which, I have loved/underlined/dog-eared) K.J. advocates for fellow autoimmune patients and lives in Colorado with her husband Ryan, a hospice chaplain, and their two velcro dogs.

Her new book is The Place Between Our Pains: A Memoir Of What Joy Can Survive and that book is the reason why I invited her to one of the very few author interviews we have here at Field Notes. There are very few stories from those of us with chronic illness, even less with dark humour and a defiant joyfulness that refuses to “pretty things up” for the sake of anyone, including ourselves. Even though our stories are quite different, KJ makes me feel a little less alone.

KJ’s memoir “invites us into the unlikely places where joy lives. … This is a love letter to every life seared by pain or autoimmune disease and a fierce permission slip to show up in the stories we never would have written for ourselves.”

I had a chance to read her book a few months ago and to offer a few words of endorsement - along with many others that I know a lot of you know/love/respect like Dr. Hillary McBride, Cole Arthur Riley, Jeff Chu, Kathleen Norris, and David Gate among others. As I wrote then, “an antidote to cynicism and despair in the midst of suffering, Ramsey generously offers all of us a hard-won story of how to deepen our capacity for joy, even when nothing has turned out as advertised.”

I asked K.J. to join me here at Field Notes for a little chat because I believe many of us know this kind of joy and/or suffering (usually both). She is a good companion to all of us who are part of the company of unanswered prayers.

We cover a lot of ground and KJ was incredibly generous with her answers so please go grab yourself a cuppa and settle in for a good read that I know you’ll want to save/bookmark and return to again and again.

A Conversation with K.J. Ramsey

SARAH: A lot of Christian books tend to follow the arc of testimony: yes, here is the hard/bad/difficult thing that happened but then Jesus! And now it’s all better! But your book is decidedly different than that. Your story is still unfolding and you’re almost defiant about writing the story from the middle, rather than a tidy ending. I think that’s incredibly brave but also beautiful. Can you tell us a bit more about what compelled you to write from the middle of the story rather than a manufactured happy ending?

KJ: Thank you for calling me defiant. It’s one of my favorite adjectives, by necessity. A large dash of defiance is why I am still alive.

The truth is, none of us are traveling through tidy storylines, even though HGTV and most bestselling books have trained us to trace the shape of our stories and their worth by the trajectory of the almighty Before and After. We’d all prefer our stories to resolve like an Agatha Christie novel, minus the arsenic. We want mysteries unmasked, pain gone, and prayers clearly answered.

That’s not my story. That’s not most of our stories. Being honest about the lack of “healing” in my life is how I have found the strength to survive my story—and even experience untamed, fierce joy right in the middle of pain.

This is slightly hilarious and embarrassing, but while I was writing The Place Between Our Pains, I was actually afraid of what you might think of my choice to write with open wounds. I once read an essay of yours, where I believe you were interacting with Nadia Bolz-Weber about writing from our scars not our scabs. You, wisely, encouraged folks to not rush the telling of their stories and to allow ample privacy and space for perspective to emerge. It’s not that I expected you to judge me—that’s not who you are—it’s that I knew in my gut that a story with more perspective wasn’t what could have sustained me in life-shattering sickness. I needed to see someone else’s shards to trust that something beautiful could still be made from mine. (Sarah: I am SO GLAD you wrote from the middle!)

Stories are sustenance. And stories are bridges. Stories can bridge the gap between an unbearable present and an unimaginable future. Rarely, if ever, are we given a large enough glimpse of someone else’s grief to imagine that goodness can co-exist with our groans. I wanted to show others how shattered I was by life-threatening sickness—even as a trauma therapist, even as someone who had previously written books full of trust in God and a nuanced incarnational theology of embodiment—because we all struggle to see the most shattered, scared parts of ourselves as beloved and our crumbling lives as still sacred, unless we see our stories reflected back to us in someone else’s.

I defiantly wrote from my wounds because brokenness this encompassing demands either a burial or a bridge. I know too well how dark and heavy despair and disappointment actually feel. It took everything I had to not give up on my life. I wanted to give others the bridge I wished I had—f bombs, rage, body dysmorphia, unhinged humor, and seeming-faithlessness included. I wanted to be honest enough about my darkness to pierce yours with some light.

SARAH: Can we take a minute to talk about how beautiful the cover is?

KJ: Aw, thank you. And, yes, please! I am the daughter of a master seamstress. One of the most enduring ways my mom showed us kids love was through thread—stitching dresses and my figure skating costumes together year after year. She can mend or make anything. When I set out to write a book about joy—not knowing my life was about to fall apart at the seams—I started to think of joy not as a task but a thread.

Too many of us have had “rejoice always” used against us, aimed like a sword against our sorrow, cutting us off from the grief that is actually a gate into joy. My book cover’s embroidery is a nod to my book’s main message that joy is not a prize for overcoming pain but a presence surrounding every person—woven beneath us, holding us together even when we cannot hold on. Like mycelium under the forest floor connects and nourishes every tree you can see, a sustaining web of love and connection is woven beneath us, even when we cannot see it. Joy is simply the sense of that web, the perception of the presence that is actually between us all in every moment.

The moon and sun on the cover are an expression of another continuous metaphor in the book—how the shadows and sun in our lives are part of one essential and beautiful whole. High-dose steroids play a large role in the story, and one side effect of them is something called moon face. My face during this story became such a full moon that my phone’s face ID no longer recognized me. The moon on the cover is a nod to the truth that like the moon, we are always whole, even when we cannot see our whole selves.

There’s also a hilarious-to-me moment in the book when my best friend, Mish, was doing embroidery next to me while I was in the ER. (Who doesn’t do a little bit of arts and crafts in a medical emergency?) So, between the metaphors and my dearest humans, I proposed a cover featuring embroidery and after a long, opinionated fight, we landed on a cover I adore. Just as my mom can sew anything, joy is a creative force that can mend and make existential aliveness for all of us—anywhere we are willing to be present, even in ache that may never end.

SARAH: I loved the title The Place Between Our Pains - what does that mean to you now?

KJ: I’m so glad to hear that! My husband was afraid people would confuse it too much with the stellar Ryan Gosling film, The Place Beyond the Pines, but seeing as my story doesn’t feature a hot man on a motorcycle but rather a steroid-laced sick lady joy-riding through airports on her mobility scooter, I was pretty sure no one would confuse us... I’m autistic and alliteration isn’t just a stim for me—it’s how my brain forms thoughts. So, I am rather happy this title stuck!

While this book is truly a memoir—storytelling through and through—truths about being human revealed themselves while writing, mainly that to be human is to be interdependent and that joy is not the prize we get for being self-sufficient or successful but rather what emerges in the space between us. We often see pain as an obstacle to joy, but what I’ve encountered—and dammit, I wish it weren’t so—is that pain is a prompt into connection. The space between my pain and your pain, between my grief and your grief, that is actually where we encounter the most stunning and sturdy joy. The title is not really about having breaks in between pain—that has literally never happened for me one day in my entire adult life (ha!). It’s an expression that the place between my sorrow and yours is where love and joy live. Pain is part of being human and when we embrace pain’s presence in our life, we are prompted to love and be loved in ways we cannot fathom when we are exhausting ourselves trying to avoid or abolish everything that hurts.

As I wrote towards the end of the book, “From the forest to my own fragility, I have been shown that love is like mycelium, the web beneath all we see, and joy is simply the sense that we are woven, never truly isolated but ever interdependent. Joy is not the opposite of sorrow nor the absence of grief, but the surprise, sensed over and over, that the truest fact about who we are is that we are connected. Joy is the feeling of finding that underneath your life, no matter how far you’ve fallen nor how much you hurt, the web of love still holds.

I think I’ll spend my whole life sticking a spade into that soil.”

SARAH: You write that “hope is a team sport” which is one of my favourite lines in the book. Who is on your team right now?

KJ: This question is filling my eyes with tears, which is slightly funny because my right eye has literal shunts in the tear ducts right now. My team has been playing so hard for me in this season. I’m writing to you from the sun-filled atrium of Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in between specialist appointments. I’m one week post-op from a massive surgery to remove a Godzilla of a tumor that destroyed a large part of my face in less than three months and to reconstruct my nose from my skull.

Book launches are a marathon for every author, but when I found out I had an extremely aggressive tumor one month before The Place Between Our Pains came out, I had to surrender to the truth I had encountered living and writing my own book. I couldn’t race to a bestselling book launch. I had to race to Mayo Clinic to keep the tumor from reaching my eye and brain.

Words from my own book have haunted me into a strange hope and even feral joy during this season. It’s effing brutal to have another rare, extremely bad medical challenge happen to me after all I’ve already endured. (Folks, when you read my book you will not believe that this happened after everything else that did. It seriously seems fictitious.) But because of the kindness that sustained me writing this book, I now live with an unshakable, embodied trust that my joy is not dependent on my life getting easier nor is it dependent on my own capacity to conjure up hope.

Both the hope that I’ll get to stay alive longer and somehow be okay existentially despite how hard it all is and the joy of finally publishing this book but being too sick to actually enjoy it—they are too heavy for me to lift on my own. Both hope and joy are too heavy for any singular person to hold. We cannot hold them on our own, nor do we have to.

Yesterday my in-laws left after five days of my mother-in-law quite literally dressing my surgical sites, dripping saline onto my delicate bone and cartilage grafts, taking me to the ER, feeding me in bed, and making sure I didn’t forget to take my meds. She took over after my husband cared for me the first few days after surgery, so he could go back to work. This morning, one of my readers who lives here in Rochester picked me up at 6:20am to bring me to an early morning appointment, even though she had never met me before and is a patient herself. She’s coming to my next appointment, even though we just met, because I’ll be re-facing one of the most medically traumatic parts of my story and she knows intimately how much less traumatic those moments are when they aren’t faced alone. She offered to be on my team. And I let her play. Readers and author friends all over have stepped up to help with my book launch, featuring my book on their substack like you have so graciously done or sharing on social media while I’m, rightly, pouring that energy into caring for my own body.

This book launch season hasn’t been what I wished, but I can’t deny that it’s also been beautiful to let others be on my team and carry the weight that is too heavy for me for now.

SARAH: For people who feel like they lack a “team” for hope, what are some of the unexpected ways we can keep an eye out for that possibility?

KJ: This question is so important. People typically hate my answer. So many of us lack a team of hope and care around us, and it can feel cruel to not only need support but to have to be the person who seeks it out for yourself and even educates others on how to show up for you. Your joy is worth the pain of seeking and risking connection, including the rejection and pain that will come from the people who are currently unable or unwilling to show up for you with the respect and constancy you are worthy of receiving.

Therapy is an important place we can give ourselves room to practice being loved and supported in ways that we may have never experienced before. I know some of you are rolling your eyes about a therapist recommending therapy or the fact that I’m telling you to pay for support, but I’d rather give you actual tips that work than pretend this isn’t hard and utterly essential. Most of us have not received enough support in life. Most of us have wounds upon wounds, cringing through life both from the small and massive traumas we have endured and the secondary trauma of not being adequately believed, seen, and held through our pain. Therapy is a place where our bodies can learn to rest in kindness that is safer and truer than we may have ever felt before. Therapy is a place we can practice skills for seeking out what we truly need and for tolerating the emotional pain of showing others our vulnerability. If you don’t have a team, please value yourself enough to give yourself a team while you yearn for a larger one.

I also highly recommend the magic of looking up in mundane moments. In a few minutes when I go upstairs to see the allergist, I intend on looking the receptionist in the eyes and asking them how their day has been. Earlier, I saw a woman have a seizure right in front of me. (I am at Mayo, after all.) It was heartbreaking, but I watched as people sprang into action to help her, even surrounding her with privacy sheets while the paramedics stabilized her. That sounds extreme, but what I am talking about is simply what Mr. Rogers preached: look for the helpers. Extend the simple kindness you wish someone would give you. Look people in the eye. Ask them about their day. Risk connecting with a stranger. Let yourself be nourished the small kindnesses. They are more sustaining than you probably expect.

And, for chronically ill baddies like me, consider following other patients online. There are tons of patients like me who share our stories so that the extreme isolation of being sick and disabled doesn’t have to be quite so demoralizing. There are places I must visit alone and things no one else can endure for me, but the truer truth is that I am far from the only one suffering in extreme ways. Remembering my vital connection and kinship to others in pain of all kinds quite literally sustains my spirit. Let it sustain yours. Seek it out.

SARAH: There are a lot of us who are part of what I call “the company of those with unanswered prayers.” And yet - you pray and I pray, even though it looks differently than how many people may understand it. What does prayer look like for you these days?

KJ: I’m not sure I can express it better than I did in my book:

“When I say I’m praying for you, what I mean is, I’m imagining you standing in the light of a setting sun, smile stretched across your face. I’m visualizing love like a mycelial web, threaded beneath you in joy and in sorrow, pulsing electric with kindness and strength you couldn’t create. I’m gathering up the grace that has carried me through my hardest griefs and letting it travel from my lungs to my lips, breath deep and slow, bridging the miles between us. I’m picturing the pain in my body and soul like a storm, lightning splintering energy across a giant sky, and hoping you, too, will face your squalls with feral awe. I’m naming the reality of evil and naming you as good. I’m saying your name aloud multiple times a day—with a huge smile, and sometimes, with tears. I’m stopping to smell the lilacs, pressing my face into their soft mounded petals, willing you to pause. I’m chopping green onions and popping in a bite, blessing what is sharp as the bringer of flavor, trusting you will taste it. Now, when I say I’m praying for you, what I mean is, I’m holding you as beloved in the hidden imagination of my heart.”

SARAH: Listen, our culture is absolutely terrible at dealing with chronic pain and illness. We give metaphorical trophies to people who “get over things” quickly. What kind of trophies would you like to give to people who suffer without a happy ending?

KJ: The Badass Biatch: I would like to give a very light (cuz, we are very fatigued) but massive trophy to every patient who has had to learn how to give themselves IVs and injections, who do things weekly without much complaint that most people get queasy at. You have no other choice but being a badass. Your normal is other people’s nightmare. No one has given you a prize, but you deserve more than a medal. You’ve got my fiercest respect.

Grief Gold Stars: Other people wish you’d get over what’s happened to you, but your sadness is more honest than any strained smile. Sometimes you wonder if something’s wrong with you—because you feel the weight of what’s wrong in this world more deeply than most. I’m here to award you with the affirmation that your ache is not a symptom of weakness but of wholeness. Sadness is the soul’s way of saying, “This mattered.” And you—you remind the whole world of what matters. No one wants to be given the vocation of grief, but it is a vocation as essential as teacher, doctor, or pastor. The ache you can’t avoid or abolish carries medicine for the whole world.

Undiagnosed and Unwilling to Quit: In the absence of answers, you haven’t stopped seeking to live as full and rich a life as possible. Doctors have dismissed you. Diagnoses have eluded you. Sometimes you aren’t sure you can keep trying to get help, but you haven’t given up on yourself. You have believed your own body even when no one else has believed you, and that is one of the most courageous things anyone on this planet can do.

Dynamically-Disabled and Dazzling: You didn’t want to become disabled and, sure, it may have taken years and the death of several dreams to accept that you actually are disabled, but you did it. You accepted reality. You accepted help. You learned how to use assistive devices not as a sign of failure but a symbol of showing up fully in a world made for the well. Your grief deserves a gold medal. Your perseverance to endure the sideways glances and judgement of others is nothing short of Olympic. Your willingness to move through the world differently is stunning. You haven’t given up or given in. You’ve outgrown the shallow end of selfhood that says perfect bodies and self-sufficiency are what matter in being alive. Like a magician with a deck of cards, you dazzle us with your wild tenacity to strip life of the illusion that needing help makes us less human instead of more. Never be ashamed of needing assistance. You show the entire world that dignity rests not on productivity or the privilege of health but on our sheer existence, breath after labored breath.

SARAH: At one point you speak of struggling to speak of the sacred with the language you used to speak so fluently. You are in this place of fewer words but deeper presence. That resonated so strongly with me. Can you speak to the transformation of your faith and where you are experiencing that presence of Love right now?

KJ: It was vulnerable to write those words. I’ve written whole books full of words about God, Christ, and prayer in the midst of suffering. And, yet, when this amount of sickness shattered my life, I found myself thrust into a dark silence that many may have judged as faithlessness.

The best decision I ever made in the dark was to not judge the existence of the light. The biggest permission slip inside my book—besides welcoming salty language and being an unabashed weirdo for the joy of it—is to relinquish judgement of ourselves and maybe even God when everything is upside down. When God seemed absent and both prayer and scripture felt like a farce, I decided that if the strange story of Jesus is true, then it will rise back up from the dead in me when it damn well pleases. And until then, I would count my survival as sacred enough.

It was important to me to show you my own silence and spiritual disillusionment—knowing some readers might be concerned by how much I’ve changed from previous books or how irreverent I might seem—so that you can consider counting your disillusionment not as a curse nor a failure but as an immersion into wholeness. It’s baffling, I know.

I write these words with tenderness, fingers trembling at the holiness of what has happened inside me as kindness has surrounded me. What seemed dead did come back to life.

Right now, the presence of Love looks like the woman who pushed me in a wheelchair all day through Mayo Clinic—April—whose face is as swollen from steroids as mine was in the stories in The Place Between Our Pains. Love looks like solidarity in suffering. Love looks like my new priest, who keeps texting me to see how I am doing, who read my new book in one sitting because he wanted to honor my story and then offered to pay for my flights to Minnesota because he knew how much sickness had decimated our finances. Love looks like remembering me and offering care that I wouldn’t have asked for on my own.

Love looks like laughter. It looks like wearing Groucho Marx glasses into the operating room over my tumor-ridden nose and laughing so hard at the absurdity of everything that I was too delighted giggling with my nurses and husband to be scared about my massive surgery. Love looks like my husband’s willingness to make any mundane moment a chance to enjoy the fact that we are together. Recently on a long drive to see a specialist, I apologized that I was too sick to drive myself. And he responded, “It’s okay! It just means all the more time I get to spend with you.” And, he meant it. Love looks like recognizing the ineffable holiness that there is a kindness and goodness that endures in human hearts and that it emerges often right when I need it the most, if I am willing to receive it in the shape in which it wants to arrive. (Which is, usually, not what I would have picked.) Faith looks like beginning again, in this new and even more bruised body, to recognize that love is still, somehow, even after all of these crosses, carried in flesh and blood and sky, holding the real presence of Christ.

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My thanks to K.J. for writing her lovely book and for this stunning conversation. You can find K.J. online:

• K.J.’s website is a good hub to learn more about her, her work, and all the places to connect

• is her newsletter here on Substacak

• And make sure you follow her on Instagram.

I’m glad we’re on the same team,

S.

My Books | Field Notes | Instagram | Facebook | SarahBessey.com

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• Maybe this is why gentleness is a sign of God’s love: I am beginning to bless them all, even all the ways I’ve loved God without their permission

• From tv shows to food, music to reads, these are all the good things of right now: + you can weigh in on the topic of our next deep-dive series

• This is for the things we don’t post: This blessing knows there are depths to which we descend alone.

• Everything, All Of It: I would walk any aisle in any church now and say, yes, I want to re-dedicate my life to this kind of love all over again.

• The Worst Marriage Advice: And hopefully some better advice instead

I am seven years old, standing in the front row of the church in the Canadian prairies. Our congregation is a simple one, just a few dozen of us in a community centre clapping along to the repetitive and simple praise choruses about the exodus of Israel or the blood of Jesus or repeated proclamation of Hosannas. Three tambourines in a small room make quite a racket. The ladies wave banners, the children dance. I throw myself into the ecstasy we know together and sing loudly to God, As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after You. I mean every word.

I just got my driver’s license and I immediately drove to the mountains with my friends. We are sitting on the warm dirt in front of a campfire in Kananaskis country’s dark sky preserve. The Milky Way is our cathedral. I’m sitting on the ground, leaning back against the legs of a boy sitting on a felled tree, his hand is tracing circles on the back of my neck. I have no shame about the way I kissed that boy earlier in the day, my body alive with longing. We’re all tanned and we smell like sunshine we’ve been soaking up all day. Now, the conversation has slowed and we are all staring into the fire and up into the night sky. I feel held by those stars and by the Spirit, like I belong in the wonder.

I’m standing in a gigantic stadium in Tulsa, thousands of people surrounding me. The music is loud, deafening. It’s dazzling – all of the noise, all of the anthems. We sing songs of the victorious, the conquering, we are being rallied to a cause greater than ourselves. I am singing along. In the moment, I feel like crying, feel like jumping, feel like running. I feel alive, every cell thrumming with passion. Look at us, so young and beautiful and so easily manipulated for an agenda. Someone on stage calls us an army but I have no idea what that means and even less interest in finding out. Later, I find out. I do not last long in this world.

The liturgy of my childhood church is empty to me now. I’m tired of the performance and the answers and the politics and the certainty and the declarations and the who’s-in-who’s-out and the demand for more more more. Every unanswered prayer once began with God, we just want….

God, I just can’t hear you here anymore.

Maybe I never did.

I am still wanting.

I’m laying flat on my back beside a creek in the woods home in the Rockies, holding hands with the boy I’m going to marry someday. The clouds drift through the sky. We aren’t talking and yet we are saying everything. He thinks he wants to be a pastor and I think that’s great. I have no idea what that means for either of us.

I’m in my mid-twenties, standing in my backyard in south Texas, smoking a cigarette in the dark and praying in tongues. I’m married to a pastor and every Sunday, I want to skip church. I listen to k.d. lang crooning from the stereo, tapping ash into the flower beds, and long for home. In the living of it, I don’t know what to call this season of my life but someday I will know that I was grieving, I was growing, I was evolving. I was deconstructing, which sounds so much more forensic and purposeful compared to what I was feeling: tangled, impossible, a liability, a doubting skeptic, an arched eyebrow, a backslider, an apostate, a problem.

I was a mess but I was honest at last. What a relief.

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This week, it’s time for our quarterly SHARING OF THE GOOD THINGS but before we head into that little respite together, I wanted to ask you for an opinion on our upcoming series here at Field Notes.

What deep-dive series should we do next?

For the uninitiated, I typically write a deep-dive series of essays or devotionals here at Field Notes a couple of times a year from Advent to Lent to our Unexpected Jesus series. But it’s time for something new as we head into June and I’d love to know which idea resonates with you the most right now. We’ll likely start next week.

Here are the options I’ve got on my short list:

1. Unlikely Spiritual Practices. I’d love to explore some of the spiritual disciplines/practices beyond the old faithfuls that many of us were taught (i.e. morning devotions with a Bible, set times of prayer etc.). I hear from people a lot that they have run out of gas or have some hang-ups around more traditional disciplines but have a lot of interest in cultivating a healthy spirituality within their daily life. So what are the unlikely practices that cultivate spiritual health in us?

2. My Mixtape Faves. Remember mixtapes in the 90s? When we would create an offering on a tape or a CD for someone in order to explain our taste in music and basically our whole origin story as a condition of friendship? I’m thinking something similar but for Bible stories or Gospel moments. In this series, I want to deep-dive four stories/moments in the Bible that were deeply formative for my own theological development. If this was a mixtape in the 90s, these essays would be the first few songs on my offering to you to explain why I am the way I am.

3. Parables, Reimagined. The stories Jesus tells always fascinate me and as my faith has evolved over the years, I’ve been shocked by how often I misunderstood them (or, more accurately, was taught a version that wasn’t entirely complete or nuanced). I thought it might be fun to look at a few parables through a new lens together.

4. Psalms of Hope Devotional. This would be a more traditional “devotional” format with questions, journalling options, and a much shorter essay/reflection rooted in the topic of hope through the Psalms.

5. Or something else entirely? Chime in through the comments if there is something else you’d like to propose. I’m open!

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Just an FYI, I’m not looking for a “winner” here - it’s quite possible I’ll pick something that did not receive the most votes but I’d love to get an idea for where your own hearts are at right now. All of these ideas are a possibility, if not now then in the future.

Thanks so much! I always love hearing from you all. Your input has shaped and guided a lot of what I do here at Field Notes and you rarely steer me wrong together, so I’m deeply appreciative.

Now? The Good Things

Once a quarter or so, we take a little break from everything to talk about the small - or maybe not-so-small - things which are bringing a bit of goodness or relief or joy to us.1

For me right now that includes a new television series that is bringing me immense joy, two albums I’ve got in steady rotation, a couple good recipes, reels that I sent to my friends (I’m old, I don’t do the TikTok), a new dress for the summer, the knitting pattern I have promised you for eleven months, my favourite Substack articles lately (DO NOT SLEEP ON THESE), and even more good things.

Then you get to share your own good things in the comments and my own list grows ever longer.

And just as a reminder, this is a sponsored-content-free zone. These are all things I genuinely experienced myself organically and/or paid for myself, so I feel good talking about them with you.

📖 A Good Line Worth Holding Onto

💖 Your Top 3 Favourite Reads

(AKA the most popular Field Notes since the last time we did this round-up)

📚 Reading

For my fellow bookworms, our latest Book Corner is right here with all my favourite recent reads. We’re having a great chat in the comments about books there, too!

📺 Watching

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This blessing is not simple.
It does not have a section in the 
drug store's greeting card aisle.

This blessing is not uncomplicated.
It is for the things that are happening
or happened, or will happen
far away from the highlight reels.

It does not come with hashtags or
comment sections or 'girl, you've got this!'
blithe encouragement in text messages.

This is a blessing for the things you do not,
cannot, post or sometimes even name.
This blessing is for the heartbreak 
unvoiced in public spaces,
far from the neck-craning on the highway of consumption.

This blessing will never say, 
"Well, at least you have...."
or "On the bright side..."
So, it's a small mercy, I guess.

This blessing is for the ache in your chest,
the tears you cry in the car so no one can see you,
the stories you never tell out loud,
the secrets you keep,
the harder details behind the general answers you offer
for public consumption because you've learned the hard way
some things just can't be said to everyone.

This blessing knows there are depths 
to which we descend alone. 
People can come with us so far, but no further,
and so here you are, with this blessing.

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Hi friends,

When he was in kindergarten, his first pair of glasses were navy blue and there was a little green squid along the arm of them. At his graduation from high school last week, I couldn’t stop thinking of that little face and those silly squid glasses and the unique kid who wore them, all the stories only we know together. All day, I kept welling up every time I looked at him. I keep my children’s stories private, I know, but his has expanded and deepened every corner of my life. Now he towers over me in his cap and gown, his university acceptance letter is in my keepsake drawer. Loving the particularity of him has set up a thousand altars for encountering Emmanuel, the one who is God with us. God spare us all from sentimentality over raising children, when what we need and have always needed is a sturdy, steady, humble love. I have made an offering of my life to this work.

Last week, I hit SEND on a milestone edit for my new book. I printed off the manuscript so my husband could finally read it - we are old, we still like paper - but then I ended up in the chair near my desk to read it myself, one last time. I actually like it. I think some of my best writing ever is in here but who can tell at this point? It is the seventh book I’ve written and after this, I am taking a little break of sorts, so I want to make sure these pages contain everything I am desperate to say about loving the world even when it breaks your heart. It’s a weird thing to keep offering up your deepest stories and truest beliefs for people to review on Amazon. I’m not sure I pulled off what I hoped for entirely, but I believe in books and in telling stories and in loving our God, our neighbour, ourselves through these pages. I have made an offering of my life to this work.

Okay, I am realising now that last week was actually a big one - no wonder I’m tired today - because we also celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We fell in love when we were 19; married when we were barely 22 years old. We grew up together. Now his hair is salt and pepper and I am reading books about menopause. Our eldest daughter is wildly in love with her sweetheart and so she keeps reminding us “you were engaged at my age!” like it’s an endorsement and we look at each other in disbelief, I guess we were that young once? How did our parents let us get married? Who could have stopped us? We have built a whole sanctuary in twenty-five years. Again, nothing about real love is sentimental and it’s not a fairy tale but now, all these years later, I think this ordinary mystery may actually be our true vocation. We have made an offering of our lives to this work.

In the mornings, I often get up early with our sweet dog, Lucy. Feed her and our remaining cat, Amy; Rory our giant ginger softie having gone where all good cats go in the end. I change their water and make the first pot of coffee for us all. I open all the blinds even though it’s been daylight since 5:30 a.m, put the dog in the yard to stretch her legs, crack open the windows even though it’s still cold outside because I like a little fresh air. Once all the creatures are settled, I get my coffee and sit down with my old Bible and my journal along with whatever book on spiritual formation I’m reading at the moment. The rest of the house will wake up soon, but I still like the idea of quiet time, bless my own heart. Right now, I’m re-reading Howard Thurman’s classic book Meditations of the Heart and it is even better now, when I am 47-years-old, than it was when I last read it at just 35.

I’ve got a list of names in my journal of the people I hold in prayer: remember this one, God, hold them close like the good Mother you are to us all. I’ve written the names of my friends and their children and grandchildren; countries; leaders; enemies (always a good reminder); my children; my parents; my sister and her family. Hold us all close, Jesus, I say. I still like making direct eye contact with God in the morning, re-entering the conversation we’ve been having all my life. It’s old-fashioned and even a bit cringe or performative to some folks, I know, but I keep making my mornings an offering.

I haven’t been open, online or otherwise, about how hard the past year and a bit has been on me, physically. I’ve had repeated relapses of chronic illness and flare-ups of fibromyalgia in a way that I thought had been managed (LOL). Bodies rarely cooperate with our plans. And I still hate talking about it so please don’t ask me about it and do not expect me to mention it again, but I suppose, after fourteen months of it and the fact that I am finally emerging from the fog of it, I should at least make an acknowledgement of this: it hasn’t been great. Also I have a teeny bit of arthritis in my hands now and just whatever, man. I am trying but mostly failing to dedicate this part of life to God, too.

Lately, I keep thinking of those old lines from the Bible as I first learned them: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.1

Jesus, man. Every time. And what a sentence. Some things just need the old King James, don’t they?

What a gorgeous vocation. What a simple and completely impossible thing. What an offering. I could walk any aisle and make a declaration of fidelity to such a thing.

“The answer to all this reaction of deep anxiety and anguish is, says the poet: “thy life to God an offering make, and to Him dedicate.” And the meaning of this?” writes Howard Thurman. “If I make my life an offering and a dedication to God, then this dedication will include all of my entanglements and involvements. There follows, then, a radical change over my entire landscape and miraculously I am free at my centre. It is for this reason that it is well, again and again, to re-establish my dedication, to make repeatedly an offering of my life. I must keep my dedication up to date with my experiencing.”2

These lines, I underline. I dog-ear the page. I write the lines out in my little earnest journal. This is three pages over from another list of petitions I’m holding up to God like a promissory note I want honoured by the management.

Everything, all of it, is an offering. And our dedication to offering our lives to God has to keep up with our experience of our own lives. Thou shalt love God and love thy neighbour and love thy life. Make an offering of it all.

When I was little, growing up in the church, the elder saints often referred to an altar call as an invitation for “dedicating your life to God.” I rolled by eyes at that language for a decade or two but now I like it all over again. I keep dedicating my life to God, over and over again, not because I’m afraid of hell - which I don’t believe in anyway - but because I am learning how to love God and love my neighbour and love my self in real time.

I am dedicating this, everything, all of it, all of me, to God. I am offering it all like a gift even when it feels more adjacent to a curse sometimes. I am offering up my joys and my pride, my wins and my losses, my worries and anxieties, my best work and my memories of little boys in squid glasses, my ordinary life. I am running down the aisle of my life like it’s a church and in return, God keeps telling me to love it all.

It’s hardly optimal but it is beautiful.

That cheeky eldest daughter also has a little white board in her bedroom for her uni schedule, her assignments, and her reminders. In her girlish printing, she has included the lines from 1 John 4:16: “God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” Every time I wander into her room to rescue dirty dishes or find a lazy cat who needs to be fed again, I see those words and I am brought up short again. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

Well, hallelujah to that.

I would walk any aisle in any church now or any avenue of trees that does the same kind of holy work of leading us to an altar of sorts. And I would say, yes, I want to re-dedicate my life to this kind of love all over again.

I’m not afraid, I’m not anxious. I am, in Thurman’s word, often “centred down” in a way that I wasn’t when I was younger. In fact, I am filled with love and gratitude for it all today. Right now, anyway.

It turns out that it is actually an abundant life when it has the capacity to break your heart and mend your heart at the same time. It’s all an offering. I’ll keep re-dedicating it all, including me. I’m just trying to keep the hope of it all up-to-date.

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From the middle of it all,

S.

My Books | Field Notes | Instagram | Facebook | SarahBessey.com

• The Worst Marriage Advice: And hopefully some better advice instead

• 25 New Breath Prayers: The liturgy of loving others / is a joy to me

• The Books I’ve Been Reading Lately: My recent ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ reads plus all the books I finished recently

• You Asked, I Answered: Our yearly Q&A on everything from making time for rest to the practices for staying gentle, from skincare to Instagram follows to why Christians believe differently about things and beyond

• I am going to live like there is hope: I’ll act like the underdog of love always comes from behind to win by total upset.

My husband Brian and I are celebrating a milestone anniversary today: our 25th wedding anniversary.

It sounds like such a grown-up one, doesn’t it? I mean, your parents and their friends had things like “silver anniversaries.” How do we qualify? This sounds like we are properly middle-aged. Which…I guess we are!

In the lead-up to this milestone, we’ve had so many good conversations reminiscing about our beginnings and many milestones, all the versions of us that we have each been over the years, where we started and where we are now as well as where we dream of being someday. It’s been the most beautiful experience of my life to be Brian Bessey’s wife and partner; I’m greedy for another twenty-five, fifty, years. There isn’t a day of my life that I am not grateful for the sanctuary of us.1

A few weeks ago, a friend of ours, Jeremy Duncan said, “The miracle isn’t that we fall in love, the miracle is that we find a way to stay there.” And that got a big YES, SIR from me. The miracle of us doesn’t feel like simply “congrats on STICKING IT OUT FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF HARD WORK, GUYS.” No, the miracle is that we have stayed in love for all these years and, as he said, this somehow “hints at the kind of love that holds the universe together.”2

But then that reminiscing somehow led to laughter - and some groans and disbelief - over the worst marriage advice that we had absorbed in the early years of our relationship. Between marriage-obsessed family-first churches and marriage conferences run by unqualified experts, premarital counselling and ‘wisdom’ from twenty-two-year-olds-who-have-been-married-all-of-ten-minutes, saints preserve us.

Alas, commemorative plates for the silver anniversary have gone out of fashion but unhelpful and unhealthy advice about marriage remains ever in fashion.

So this week, I thought I’d share some of the unhelpful/untrue/worst advice about marriage that we picked up in evangelical church culture, you know, for funsies!

Sometimes it feels like the bad advice about marriage is like a lie, it can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.3 So rather than just saying what isn’t great, I wanted to make some room for some better advice or something more helpful, too so I’ve tried to counter some of the unhelpful advice with some possibly better perspective or practice.

Worst Advice: Marriage isn’t supposed to make you happy, it’s supposed to make you holy.

This was a popular one for sure. This is a classic of seemingly church-y language disguising a harmful idea. I mean, I do believe marriage can make you holy. Our relationship has certainly made both of us holier; by which I mean, marriage has absolutely developed love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control in us. It’s just that… marriage has also made us happy.

Making it seem like holiness is to be preferred over happiness or somehow pitting them at odds with one another instead of a cooperative relationship is a way of glossing over red flags, opportunities for growth, and invitations to deeper intimacy. This kind of language wants to reward people for staying miserable instead of pursuing joy. When our sadness, grief, discontent often leads to resentment more than holiness. In my experience, if someone is trying to convince themselves to stay married with an argument like this, both the happiness and the holiness are already gone. It’s more fun to be married when both people involved are happy, promise. And if one person isn’t, don’t dismiss it with spiritual sounding platitudes: chase after rediscovering and enjoying happiness together.

Better Advice: Happiness does matter and it particularly matters in your marriage. Don’t give up on being both happy and holy.

Worst Advice: Divorce or separation is always a failure.

I have never forgotten a conversation with my own mother (herself happily married for more than 50 years to my father) when I was a very young woman. One morning, I was reading a news article about some Hollywood actress who had gotten married and divorced in less than a year. I rolled my eyes at the kitchen table and went on a sanctimonious rant about how “nobody takes marriage seriously anymore” and “what about a covenant before GOD?” and “that’s the problem with this culture” and all that know-it-all language from the wisdom of what it takes to be married from my vantage point of, oh, twenty years old and a born baby.

My mother let me rant and then, very quietly but very clearly, she told me I didn’t have the first clue about marriage and to take several seats. She said something like, “You have no idea how long a single day is when you are miserable or being treated poorly or are trapped. No idea. So for that couple, maybe a year a felt like twenty years. You don’t know. Nobody knows what goes on in a marriage. But you don’t get to judge just because you have no clue, little girl, that when you are dying inside, a day feels mighty long.”

I shut up rather quickly.

Now the longer I’ve been married, the more compassion I have for those whose marriages needed to end. And as a devoted wife and mother, I’ll just tell you: some marriages do just need to end. It’s not a failure, it’s reality and God can meet us there, too. In fact, the longer I’m happily married, the more freedom I want for others. If it isn’t good, I don’t want it for you, me, or anyone. Witnessing friends of mine be set free from unhealthy marriages - not simply abusive ones, but those too - has been revelatory. God’s goodness met them in deep pain: it was death and resurrection somehow. Not every marriage is good for everyone. Admitting that takes a lot of courage.

Better advice: God’s grace is there for endings, as well as beginnings. Some marriages need to end. And that is not always a failure, it’s often very real and tangible grace in the end.

Worst Advice: The husband is the head of the home.

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“God can take my most fumbling, faltering prayers and make something lovely of them.”

- Madeleine L’Engle

Hi friends,

As our title indicates, it is once again time for a few new breath prayers. If you’re a newer subscriber to Field Notes, I usually share a little round-up of my own breath prayers every quarter or so. Last time we did this, it was breath prayers For when your heart is heavy but your resistance is steady.

As usual, these prayers are rooted in some of the things I’ve been working through or meditating on in my own life. For context, it’s been a rather busy season on this side of the computer between the usual things plus work deadlines (my new book’s final development edits are due in a matter of days - prayers much appreciated!) and family life (our Joe is graduating high school! can you believe this? I cannot. Please do not make eye contact with me about this if we encounter one another in the wild or I may well up and become a cliche about “days are long but years are short” which every mother of tinies loathes to hear from us more seasoned parents).

All of which is to say that breath prayer is, as always, the faithful companion to me in daily life. Kingdoms may rise and fall, but still a beloved son has a milestone, the weather is changing to spring, work deadlines loom, family dynamics must be navigated, ordinary altars spring up, heartbreaks splinter, and the load from the dryer needs to be folded for the love. In those moments, breath prayers travel with me through tasks and turmoil and turning points alike.

But because these are the ones that I wrote from my own life right now, they may not meet you where you are at. If that’s the case, I hope you jump into the comment section to share your own prayers. It’s a gift you all often offer to one another - and to me!

First, A Reminder: How to Practice Breath Prayers

Breath Prayer is an ancient form of prayer, passed down through the Church in many streams and still widely practiced today. It is easily adaptable and you can find this type of prayer in almost every faith tradition in some form or another.

Simply choose one or two lines to meditate on and inhale and then exhale through them in a way that feels steady to you. It really is that simple.

• You can pray a breath prayer literally anywhere without any special rituals or whatever. I used to like to find a quiet corner for a few minutes and I’d start by lighting a candle, being quiet and getting all centred in my soul. But these days? Man, I pray them in the street, in the minivan, on the train, at the courthouse, wherever.

• Take a moment to quietly become aware of your body. Sit in a way that is comfortable for you, a position that will allow you to take a deep breath in and out. Close your eyes.

• Breathe slowly and deeply for a moment to slow your racing thoughts.

• Then begin to pray, one line for an inhale, one line for an exhale. You can do this internally or aloud, I’ve done both. You’ll find your own rhythm of how this works with your own breath. I promise you do not need to overthink it.

• Pray the prayer on the inhale and then the exhale.

• And then simply repeat this practice with five good breaths in and out.

• I like the repetition to really help the words sink into my own heart for the day or the moment.

As an example, one historic form of breath prayer is known as The Jesus Prayer. So, with that as our basis, here’s how it works:

Inhale. Fill your whole self with breath. Feel the air in your lungs. And then pray aloud or to yourself:

“Jesus Christ, son of God,”

Exhale slowly and fully.

“Have mercy on me.”

And then simply repeat this practice. Start with the five good breaths in and out, with the words being spoken aloud or quietly held in your mind, it’s up to you.

New Breath Prayers

Each couplet of inhale/exhale stands is its own stand-alone prayer. Don’t see this as a litany of words to just gallop through as a huge recitation, but simply pick one or two that speak to you and adapt it you like for your own prayer practice.

Inhale: The liturgy of loving others
Exhale: is a joy to me.

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It’s the quarterly “let’s talk about books!” edition of Field Notes this week. First, a warning: it is a truth universally acknowledged by all who have read this newsletter for even a hot minute that I never read more books than when I myself am under a book deadline. It is a quirk of my nature that I read a lot of other books in order to write a lot myself. The less time I have? the closer the deadline? the more demanding our home life? the more I read. The math doesn’t math but here we are.

I understand this makes zero sense.

I also understand that at a certain point one must simply accept, nay embrace!, the idiosyncrasies of the self. This is just how I work when I am stressed out and overwhelmed. Some people turn to drugs and drink and deep-dives of real housewives, I turn to the library. Case in point: my poor little sister has never recovered from watching me blithely and belligerently read novel after novel in our dorm room, all while knowing that my senior paper was due in a matter of weeks. The second-hand stress of it nearly did her in. My husband chooses to believe this is part of my process and not avoidance, bless his optimistic heart. Alas, I have not changed in that habit at least in twenty-six years: the busier I am, the more I read and then the more I get done. If it ain’t broke etc.

As such, this is the warning: I have been working on my own book edits over the past few weeks all while experiencing a higher level of demand in our off-line life (all is well, just you know, LIFE) in general.

Basically, today you must brace yourself for too many books. I’m sorry. This is just how I am.

But before we jump into all that, an invitation!

Life is Hard, Being Honest Helps

I’ll be in conversation with the beloved content creator and fellow Canadian author Libby Ward at Found Books in Cochrane this May 13th. We’ll be discussing her bestselling memoir Honest Motherhood: On Losing My Mind and Finding Myself. I hope a few of you can join us to say hello!

You do need a ticket to attend and they are going fast so if you’d like to join us, grab a ticket for you and a friend. (Your ticket includes a signed copy of the book.) We’ll see you there!

Tickets for Libby Ward Event

Busy? No time? Deadlines? Demands? Apocalypse? Ans: Read more.

In these quarterly book posts, I like to share (most of) the books I’ve been reading lately along with my honest thoughts. (Hence, the paywall below.) If you’d like to get an idea for my taste, you can check out my favourite books of 2025 or last quarter’s bookish round-up right here which includes a bonus rant about why reading matters still/always.

Open up your library’s Request Hold page or your online retailer of choice,1 let’s get chatting about books!

My Two Tip-Top Favourites This Quarter, Non-Fiction and Fiction

Non-Fiction Fave

Joyful, Anyway by Kate Bowler ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ It is not fair, truly, that Kate is both so wise and so funny. She is so deeply loving and yet unsentimental, kind and big hearted with a dash of vinegar. For the sad and the aching who somehow still know how to laugh, this is the masterpiece. I know I might not be the most unbiased reviewer2 but how can I help but trust someone who calls me out like this: “…even though I openly despise toxic positivity, I usually lie to people about how terrible I feel.” DAMMIT, KATE.

“Joy can come in when you least expect it. But it is more than just a feeling, it is an argument for life itself. Joy is the idea that, yes, it is good to exist - even now.” - Kate Bowler

Fiction Fave

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Hi friends,

In what has become an April tradition1 it’s Q&A time. Earlier this week, I opened up ye old question box on my Instagram Stories and my Facebook Stories for your enquires to help build this week’s Field Notes. Hundreds of questions rolled in - far more than I can answer in this newsletter, I’m afraid - but I tried to choose a good cross-section that represents frequently-asked questions as well as a wide spectrum of topics, so buckle up.

In the spirit of AMAs, these responses are pretty “off the top of my head” answers with the intention of quick-takes. Plus I am making my best *attempt* at keeping each answer short and to the point in order to answer as many as possible: brevity has never been my strong suit but I’m trying! All of which is to say, each of these could be their own Field Notes essay altogether but I’ll keep it moving today. You are very welcome to chime in through the comment section to offer more perspective, too.

But first: Faith Without Certainty

There is a new podcast episode with Kate Bowler, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and yours truly now available! I love these two women so much. I think we forgot that we were recording a few times but whew, this was just what I needed on that day and I hope it brings some goodness to you too. It’s available everywhere you listen to your podcasts or you can watch it on YouTube.

Now to the AMA… You asked:

• If we all (Christians) have the same Spirit in us, how do we land so differently on big issues?

• What’s your current knitting project?

• What practices help you stay soft (open, kind, gentle)?

• We are in the middle of a potential house move. How have you coped with life’s transitions?

• As a fellow ORU grad who also had to “detox” do you keep in touch with college friends?

• I struggle to make time for rest and play. Any tips? (Fussing at myself just doesn’t work…)

• Why do you delete posts from Instagram?

• Best marriage advice?

• Tell me more about your affirming LGBTQ+ journey in the church.

• Favourite cookbook for family life? tired of making the same things.

• What is so life-giving about Elizabeth Goudge?

• Can you drop some scoop from your alchemy weekend? Like the notes about shows, makeup, etc.

• What is your college degree in and do you wish you had studied something different?

• Canmore or Banff for vacation with adult children/spouses and one baby?

• Helping connect teenage boys with God when their friends are not interested?

• Who are you rooting for in the Stanley Cup playoffs?

• What’s bringing you hope lately?

I answered

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Dear friends,

Well, against all odds and advice from experts, I’m going to live like there is still hope. In fact, I’m going to be downright ridiculous about it. I’ll be defiant and stubborn, an absolute curmudgeon for hope.

I will be gentle with all my fears and heartbreak, the anxieties of being a person in this age at this moment. I’m going to take deep breaths and relax my jaw. I will remember that the Gospel is not in danger; it has survived everything from fascism to Christian nationalism to tradwives discourse before. The Good News isn’t nervous yet.

I will abandon everything that whispers that it’s best to give up, to stop trying, to give in to the despair. Everything holy has a bit of dirt on her chin and blood on her knuckles anyway.

Today, I will trust in the wisdom of elders who have seen it all and still speak of hallelujahs. I will assume faithfulness wins. I won’t forget that the outsiders are God’s insiders.

I’m going to make the coffee in the morning and hug my tall beautiful complicated children. I’m going to love these people in this house on purpose, with particularity, in completely ordinary ways. Watch my eyes light up when they walk in the room.

I’ll remember that I’m not alone, not by a long shot, because you are here and you are here and you are here and we are all doing our best to tip the scales towards goodness still. I’ll make plans like the world will survive us.

Today my friend became a grandmother and so I am going to pick out the yarn to knit that baby a sweater. It takes so much hope to have a baby, at the very least such a choice deserves a tiny sweater.

I’ll bless my appetites and my own hunger, I’ll gulp in the north wind that purifies and cleanses us. Then I’ll order some bedding plants for the garden because I still believe spring is coming.

I’m going to live as if everything will actually be made right someday and justice will prevail, tears will be wiped away and every exile will lead the dancing. Oh, I’m going to live my life like God is trustworthy. I’ll act like the underdog of love always comes from behind to win by total upset.

I’m going to say yes to the possibilities of participating in the renewal of all things even when they wear very small, ordinary disguises. I’m going to stay informed and stay sane at the same time.

I’ll keep loving this world until it breaks my heart and then I’ll sit in the pieces, holding onto love.

Today, I’ll write a poem and I’ll pray like it matters. I’ll practice resurrection1 and I’ll build a habit of peacemaking and I’ll remember to take the meat out of the freezer for supper later.

I’ll go for a walk and when I see the bare trees beginning to bud after this long cold winter, I will consider a whole sermon. My heart will wave hankies and I just might shout Amen! at the clouds in the sky.

Today, I’m going to live like there is hope. It’s all I have and no one will take this from me.

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Love S.

My Books | Field Notes | Instagram | Facebook | SarahBessey.com

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• 70+ Favourite Books for Kids: By request: our family read-alouds for little and big kids, a few faith-based books, and even the solitary reading faves for quiet afternoons

• For the Congregation of Veronicas: A few thoughts on Holy Week, collective tears + rage, still caring, and everywhere we can see Jesus right now

• How to carry all the heavy things: A conversation about Counterweights with author Shannan Martin

• Keep Not Quitting: Sometimes the greatest act of faith we have in our arsenal is our stubbornness

• The Prayer You Wrote For Each Other: We have all offered something to this prayer, even if it was simply our willingness to be present to it

Share Sarah Bessey's Field Notes

Over the years of writing Field Notes,1 I have grown to love this rhythm of sitting down, every week, just to write you a note from life or share a big old-fashioned essay or even explore a few things together. I’m here in Calgary this morning with my favourite tea beside me, our dog curled up on my feet. Snow is STILL falling outside the window (how long, O Lord??). And like you, I do have a few complicated and big thoughts swirling in my head about the topics of our days from the current memoirs discourse to politics to Artemis II to existential dread - what else is new? all of which has resulted in about six half-finished essays in my Drafts folder. But I’m also aware that last week’s essay was a more demanding read for everyone.

So with that in mind, I thought we could take a breather through this email together and talk about our favourite books to read-aloud.

What prompted this? Well, a few days ago, I shared this on social media:

Reading aloud with my children is an old favourite pastime. They grew up in old books and pictures books, library books and graphic novels. I have one last baby - fine, she's in middle school - who still likes a read aloud and I tell you I am *cherishing* it. We finished another novel last night together. Listening to her laughter over the escapades of the characters, their now familiar foibles, comforting her tears over fictional characters, the satisfying melancholy of the words "The End."

The world is changing so fast these days, most of it worries me. It feels like such a hard time to be a person, let alone raise one or four. But the rites of readers are still intact.

Stories still work magic, empathy, wisdom, courage, grace. Sometimes it just takes a snowstorm filled spring break, a head cold to ground me at home, old children's lit favourites, a snoring dog, and a kid who keeps saying, "One more chapter??" to make my heart steady again.

May your weekend bring a good book your way.

And then a few folks asked via comments, emails, and messages for our favourite family read-alouds.

Twist my arm, eh? and so here we are at today’s missive.

Honestly, my sincere thanks to you all for this prompt because I wandered over to the keepsake children’s lit shelves in our family library and promptly lost myself in memories and good stories. What a joy it was to read aloud with my children, every night before bed and throughout their days! Some of my best memories.

These books on our shelves have broken spines and sticky fingerprints and battered edges but they are among our treasures.

These are the books that were beloved by my own four kids 2in various measures and stages (not every book is for every kid, obviously). You’ll see that I clearly steered towards classics that I loved myself for our reading time often plus these were all readily available books at thrift stores and libraries.3 If you have newer or other titles/authors to share, please do so in the comment section for everyone’s benefit.

I could write a paragraph about each one of these books - how little Anne memorized Madeline in its entirety when she was two years old; how our Joe loved Ferdinand because he felt so “seen” as a kid who also enjoyed the beauty of the world rather than stereotypical competition with peers; how we laughed over Ramona Quimby’s antics; how I changed the names of the Owl Babies for the kids’ names - but I’ll keep this to a simple list for the sake of your sanity and hold my memories in my heart.

What to Expect Below

I’ve shared a few of our favourites for

• Big Kid read-alouds - 23 total,

• Little Kids read-alouds - 30 there,

• 6 faith-based books that won’t give your kid religious trauma,

• 11 Solitary Favourites that the tinies used to spend literal afternoons paging through because the illustrations or information were so riveting, resulting in a quiet house for a tired mother, a win all around.

(If this cuts off in your email inbox due to length, just head over to the post itself to finish reading it.)

Let’s talk about children’s lit for today, shall we?

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Hi friends,

During Holy Week, our church typically sets up make-shift Stations of the Cross1 in our sanctuary. Anyone is welcome to simply come throughout the week, whenever you have a moment, no appointments needed, and just move through the stations at your own pace. There are little clusters of chairs and benches before each station so you can sit as long as you like before each modern day icon, meditating on the moment it represents. The room is quiet, dimly lit, even holy. This is meant to be an intentional slow down pause in a week that most of us like to skip in an eagerness to get to the Easter joys.

It had been a few years since I last did this exercise myself but two of our teenagers were keen to experience it all for themselves. So last year during Holy Week, we three showed up at church; I figured I’d trail behind the kids while they moved through the stations and we’d be on our way.

But, as always, God has other plans.

Before long, I was balling up shredded tissues in my hands, quietly weeping before each icon, overwhelmed once again by this ancient story that disrupted everything, including me.

But it took me a year to understand my tears that day.

At the midpoint, one icon in particular caught my eye: Saint Veronica. I couldn’t remember ever paying much attention to Veronica. But now? that evening? I couldn’t seem to move on from her station in the pilgrimage.

Prior to my journey into the traditions of the Church in my thirties, I had never heard much about Veronica since her story is an extra-biblical or apocryphal one. But as you may recall from our Unexpected Jesus series, I do love learning the stories of women in the Church whose names or stories have been lost to us.2

Veronica was a widow from Jerusalem who happened to be standing alongside the road when Jesus, carrying his cross, beaten and bloodied and already condemned, passed by. She was deeply moved with compassion for Jesus and she offered him her own veil to wipe his forehead for relief.

After wiping his face with her veil, Jesus thanks her and moves on but the legend tells us that her veil now bore an image of his face. It’s a relic known as the Veil of Veronica which has its own interesting legends.

Me being a low-church sloppy Protestant to my bare feet, I’m not too fussy about relics, so that miraculous part of the story isn’t actually what caught my imagination that day.

Instead, it was Veronica’s simple act of defiant courageous ordinary care in the midst of great suffering that took my breath away. I stood before that icon in our unfussy sanctuary for what felt like an age, unable to even name what it stirred up in me.

The kids had finished their own journeys and retreated to the youth room in the church basement with their pals. Eventually I kept moving through the stations, becoming more emotional at each icon, letting myself enter into the experience of our Jesus in a way that I hadn’t done in a long time.

To be honest, I’m still processing a lot of that evening’s pilgrimage, a year later, for all that it seemed to heal in me, the permission it unlocked, and even the path I’m still walking now at a time of great suffering in our world.

More of that experience began to come into focus at last just a few weeks ago. My husband and I went out for the rare treat of dinner just us two and a concert at the Jubilee Auditorium here in Calgary. This was supposed to be a fun time of rest and music and joy, a Christmas gift looked forward to for weeks until that night

Instead, I cried my heart out in the booth at our local sushi place.

Why? Because of the Epstein files.

(How many women have done this? hundreds. millions. legions. congregations. arenas. parliaments. flocks. broods.)

I lacked the fortitude to read the files themselves but a couple days prior to our evening out, I had decided to read an overview of the details from trusted news sources. And even just those few high-level stories, the few photos that I wish to this day that I hadn’t seen, the stories that just kept coming in the days afterwards, all of it was enough to absolutely break me.

Throughout the days, I could not stop crying about these girls. I could not stop thinking about what they endured and what they still endure. I could not stop lamenting and raging about men and power and all they get away with and the grotesque horror of it all.

At the restaurant, I kept trying to articulate to my husband the betrayal and grief I felt for the women and girls who had endured this evil, who still live with it, and my rage over the men in power who just keep using and abusing women, always have and it seems always will, without any consequences, let alone justice. I kept trying to say, “it’s not just this, it’s all of it, it’s all of it.”

I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I wanted to burn down everything. Like Florence + The Machine, I wanted to dig a hole just to scream into it. I wanted to unknow everything I knew about it all. I knew I would never forget it. I haven’t. I had nightmares for a while.

So I cried with rage and sorrow at our little booth in the restaurant, balling up tissues like I had over the Stations of the Cross a year previous. I couldn’t seem to stop verbally processing everything I had learned about this particular evil and my rage over the systems - the powers and principalities - that continue to gobble up and devour the vulnerable without consequence. It all poured out of me and he listened, kept passing me more thin paper napkins, kept saying, “keep talking, it’s okay, say it all.”

Now it is Holy Week again.

A year after my tears over the Stations of the Cross, particularly at the icon for Veronica, and weeks after that moment in the restaurant, and all that in the context of, well, everything. And I think I might know why.

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