Or, if you’re Christine Caine, you got your motorcycle license. 

“I thought to myself, ‘I’m 55, I’ve got to do something new,’” Caine said, as if it’s the most obvious hobby for a full-time global ministry leader to pick up.

But in both her life and missions work, Caine always goes for the unexpected. She’s not interested in following the same path everyone else is taking. She’s on the lookout for the undiscovered path, the next step that lead to a new adventure.

It’s why, unlike most of the world, she has no desire for the world to “go back to normal.”

Moving Forward

“We are in a time that we all need reminding it’s time to move forward or we’re going to get stuck,” Caine said. “The one phrase I have heard more than any other phrase in the last three years is, ‘I just wish things would go back to normal.’ But I’m standing here thinking that we can’t do that. The world fundamentally has shifted in the way that we knew it. And not only that, but the Lord’s always doing a new thing.”

Caine has spent the last three years repeatedly hearing the message that God was doing a new thing in this season, which led her to write her latest book, Don’t Look Back.

She was reading Luke 17 one day when the message struck her. In verse 32, Jesus instructs the disciples to remember Lot’s wife. “It was like I had been hit in the head by a two by four,” Caine said. “I found out there are 170 women referenced in Scripture, either by name or in passing, but Jesus only told us to remember one woman: Lot’s wife. And he told us to remember her in the context of the world ending as we know it.”

Caine said she knew God was trying to show her a deeper message, which led her to Genesis 19: The world as Lot and his family knew it was burning down.

The Lord had rescued them out of Sodom and Gomorrah, and as it was all burning down, the angel of the Lord said, “Don’t look back.” But Lot’s wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt.

Through her studies, Caine quickly discovered why Jesus wanted people to remember the story of Lot’s wife.

“In the original language, the ‘looking back’ is like a longing, a wanting to go back,” she explained. “I was thinking how everyone has been talking about how they just want to go back to normal. They wish they could go back to the good old days, whatever that might mean. I thought, ‘Wow, there’s so much longing on the earth right now, even among believers, to go back to something, some sort of fantasy land that we think is awesome.’

“But Lot’s wife got stuck as a pillar of salt,” she continued. “She basically became calcified in a place she was only meant to be passing through. She was more attached to what she was leaving than what God had for her in the future.”

Caine realized that if we’re not vigilant, many of us can become like Lot’s wife — calcified in a moment for the rest of our lives. In fact, many of us have already become calcified, stuck in the past three years waiting for life to start again.

“We’ve been in a pandemic in sweatpants for three years, and it’s time to get your jeans back on and start stretching a bit and moving forward,” Caine said. “We are in a dangerous moment because there comes a threshold that if you don’t start at some point, you really do get stuck. And I truly believe that the time to act is now.”

“I think we are in a time on the Earth that we all need reminding that it’s time to move forward or we’re going to get stuck.”

Of course, sometimes the hardest part with moving forward is knowing how to take the first step. The world has changed tremendously over the last several years, and stepping into a new world is never easy, especially when the world seems like it’s heading down a chaotic path. But Caine wants people to know that we have to start somewhere.

“If you don’t start moving forward, you end up just in a holding pattern rehearsing and regurgitating the same old thing,” she said. “Otherwise, 20 years happen and you’re still dealing with the same problems. But you get to decide whether you’re going to move forward with that or whether you’re going to still be stuck.”

Caine chose to move forward by developing skills to transform her life, ministry and relationships: resiliency, tenacity and flexibility. It’s what led her to learn how to ride a motorcycle.

Caine pulled up to  a Southern Californian DMV fully prepared to leave with a small piece of paper that would let her drive a bike on the open road. Additionally, she left with a valuable lesson about looking forward to the future.

“The instructor would remind us, ‘Remember, where you look you go,’” Caine said. “And it was like something went off in my head. It’s so simple, but so true. If you keep looking back, you’re going to go backwards. And if you start looking forward, you can move forward.”

That simple bit of advice has become a mantra for Caine. She’s looking forward to what God has lying ahead for her, not focusing on what’s in the rearview mirror.

It is tempting to look back, she admits, but Caine is trying her hardest to keep her gaze on where she knows God wants her. Some days are easier than others, as some paths are easier to say yes to than others. She knows the future will have hardships and difficulties and unforeseen obstacles along the way. But she knows that ultimately, the difficult paths are always worth it.

“I’ve learned over the years that the pain of regret is greater than the pain of obedience,” she said. “I have to trust what I know about the character of God more than what I do not know about the future. That’s the only way I’m able to move forward.”

A Time for Reflection

As much as we may want change to happen overnight, we can’t wake up one day and no longer have a fear of the future. The problems we might be facing today don’t go away because we’ve got our sights set on what’s next. There is still a current reality that we have to learn to live in.

“If you keep looking back, you’re going to go backwards. And if you start looking forward, you can move forward.”

But, Caine warns, the key is learning how to navigate our challenges while still moving forward, not getting stuck in place trying to solve a solution.

“I don’t want people to think that they can dismiss or even bypass their pain and suffering by looking to the future,” Caine clarified. “But there is a difference between looking back on our circumstances to heal from them, like in a therapy session, and looking back to stay there, for good or bad reasons. There is a proper time to process it, and a proper time to move on from it.”

Caine points to Scripture for examples of Biblical heroes like Moses, Joshua and Saul aptly mourning their circumstances and then moving forward.

And that’s where Caine feels our world is now. We’ve spent three years lamenting a world that has passed away.

“Now, it’s time for us to start looking forward instead of backwards,” she said. “It’s almost like, OK, we need some permission now to say it’s OK to start looking forward towards the promise of God, the purpose of God. He’s still got a future. Our history doesn’t have to define our destiny. You can acknowledge what has happened, but not be defined by it.”

But what exactly does the first step toward the future look like? Caine has some advice for those brave enough to start a new journey. “The first step is always in your mind,” she said. “You have to decide for yourself because nothing changes until you change your mind.”

Think of your thoughts as if they’re a train, Caine explains. They take us from one place to a new destination, but you don’t get there if you don’t get on the train. By making the conscious decision to step on a thought train, you’re metaphorically stepping off the stationary platform.

“And then, be willing to go through the process,” she said. “You have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get unstuck, whatever hard work is required.”

For some people, getting unstuck may be beginning therapy. Or it might be blocking, muting or unfollowing certain people. It could be changing friend groups, careers, or leaving a draining relationship.

“Truthfully, there isn’t always one tangible next thing you can do,” Caine said. “But whether it’s mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, relational or financial, whichever area you feel stuck in, that’s the area that you have to begin to do the next right thing.”

Everyone’s first steps look different, as do their second, third and fourth steps. Sometimes they’re big, like moving across the country, and sometimes it can be as small as setting an early morning alarm. Whatever the step, the important thing is to keep moving.

“Nothing changes until you change your mind.”

“I think most of us have a hope of where we want to end up,” Caine said. “But we don’t know how to get there. We end up minimizing the value of the right next step because we think it’s too small and it won’t make a difference. And the truth is, the difference probably won’t show up right away. But it will a year from now.

“Unfortunately, because of the world that we live in, no one’s got any patience,” she said. “Everyone wants instant gratification. We all want change, but it’s not going to happen. This is not a self-help thing that with three steps and two weeks will magically unstick you. I wish I could say there’s no pain. But there is pain, so choose your pain wisely.”

Caine chose to step into the pain of obedience three years ago. And while it led her to newfound experiences — more travels, more friendships, and of course, a motorcycle license to accompany her cream-colored Vespa — it also led her to a deeper intimacy with Jesus. And of all the things she’s embraced over the years, she continually admits that’s her favorite step she’s ever taken. 

“I’ve been given the opportunity — well, we all have — to become more intimate with Jesus,” she said. “And it didn’t take me long to realize that’s about the only guarantee we have in this life. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He will never leave us nor forsake us. And I think coming out of the last few years, that’s about all I do know. He’s good; He won’t leave me; He is going to enable me to get through whatever it is, and in Him, all the promises of God are yes and amen.

“So despite what the past looks like, I can have hope, I can have faith, I can still have a glint in my eye, a spring in my step and look to the future with joy and peace and confidence,” she concluded. “Not because I know anything about the future, but because I know the One who holds the future in His hands.”

Surviving cancer gave McManus a fresh perspective — one in which he’s aware that a new generation is fighting new battles. As he wrote in his book, The Way of the Warrior, McManus is convinced that far too many people aren’t ready for the struggles that lie ahead because they haven’t fully dealt with the struggles within. McManus spoke with us about what he thinks people need to remember about saving the world, why he only wants to hire failures and how he hopes Christianity is coming out of its age of magic.

Where did you first start to come across the idea for The Way of the Warrior?

I’ve been a follower of Christ for 40 years, and I’ve seen so many people not make it. I’ve seen so many people crash and burn. Our community at Mosaic—just thousands upon thousands of 20-year-olds and they’re the most intelligent, gifted, talented, attractive human beings on the planet—and they are drowning in anxiety and fear and stress and panic attacks, thoughts of suicide, attempts of suicide, people ending their lives.

The paradox of opportunity with reality is at such a critical level of extremes that I felt like I needed to speak into the cultural issue that we’re losing this internal battle. We have all this freedom, all this opportunity, we have all this wealth but we don’t have the capacity to get up in the morning and face the problems of the day. We’re not just struggling. We’re tormented on the inside, and I actually think that we’ve done ourselves a disservice. … Sometimes I think Christianity’s in a transition. It’s still coming out of an era of magic, and we just added Christian language to magic rather than dealing honestly with the dynamics and the complexity of being human. I’m just trying to humanize the process of moving toward holiness.

It seems like there’s often a disconnect between knowing we’re not the kind of people we want to be and knowing how to become that person. 

Absolutely. A huge part of the problem in our culture is this overwhelming sense of powerlessness. What’s happened in our society is that we’ve created this dilemma where we don’t advocate ownership for our situation, our problems, our future, our internal health, our emotional stability. We’ve begun to project externally who’s to blame or what’s to blame for what’s going on inside of us.

What we don’t realize is that, if you don’t take ownership, you actually become powerless. You only have the power to change the things you take responsibility for. I have a lot of friends who are in the world of human development right now and one of the really catchy things to say is “there’s no such thing as failure.” I’ve looked at people face to face who’ve told me “I’ve never failed.” One of the things they need to realize is that the moment you say failure is an illusion, you become powerless to actual change. My life experience is brutally different. I feel like my life has been failure after failure after failure.

But when a person says there’s no such thing as failure it means that they have removed themselves from the arena of genuine evaluation. And if you don’t evaluate where you are, you can’t go where you want to go.

I remember years ago sitting in a room of young executives at a huge event that fell apart. I said, “I need to know who was responsible for the outcome of this event,” and every single person in the room said, “Not me, not me, not me, not me, not me.” And at the end of it, I said, “OK, I need you guys to go find the person responsible for this failure because that’s the person I want to hire.” Because really, you don’t belong in this room if you’re not the person responsible for the failure. There’s this intimate relationship between what you take ownership of and how powerful you are to bring change in your life.

Lots of people in this generation are moved by the causes they see in the world around them, so conversations about working on “yourself” can sound almost selfish.

I say those are the very ones who are struggling the most. That’s the irony. They end up spending way too much time on themselves because they’re not dealing with how to become whole. If you don’t deal with the stuff inside of you, it will eat you away and end up consuming your life. You can’t give the world—long term—what you do not have. You cannot bring life to the world if you’re not alive. You cannot bring wholeness to the world if you’re not whole. You’re going to end up using that cause to try to numb your own pain. I’d rather have you go try to change the world from a place of health and wholeness.

“You only have the power to change the things you take responsibility for.”

I guess I’m saying that you can’t really bring peace to the world unless you’ve found peace yourself. It has proven to be ineffective. I’m not saying you shouldn’t fight for world peace. I’m saying we’re trying to solve the symptom and not the cause.

And you would say once you’re able to do that, you’re going to be much more effective with the causes that are on your heart?

Well, life doesn’t give you a pause button. You don’t have to choose between making the world better or making yourself better. You’d better find the time to do both because you only get one life. The reality is the people who actually make an impact in the world take the time. It is odd, have you ever noticed that a person who doesn’t use their time well never has time to do something meaningful but the person who’s really busy doing a lot of good, they have the time to do everything that matters? I actually don’t worry about that person who’s actually trying to make the world better. They’ll find the time to have this conversation with themselves. They’re already having it.

When I was a kid, I heard that if you want inner peace, all you have to do is become a Christian and poof. It was like a magic spell that was the promise that was delivered to a lot of people and a lot of people were disappointed when they found out that it just wasn’t true. 

If you lost an arm and then you gave your life to Jesus, very few of us would believe that arm should grow back the moment you gave your life to Jesus, but if you have psychological brokenness and you give your life to Jesus everybody expects that all that psychological brokenness will be healed the moment you give your life to Jesus. We actually think our physical bodies are more human than our souls.

One of the great benefits of Instagram is I get to see a lot of clips of a lot of Christian speakers and leaders, and it’s amazing to me how overwhelming the language is about the devil. I’m in 2019 and every human problem is still attributed to the devil. Just from a theological perspective the devil is not the parallel of God. Satan isn’t everywhere at all times attacking everyone, knowing our every thought. The reality is, as long as you’re attributing every failure in your life, every struggle in your life, every weakness in your life, every internal storm in your life to the devil, it actually makes you powerless because you’re abandoning the battle that you’re supposed to take on in your life.

“You cannot bring wholeness to the world if you’re not whole.

It’s odd for me because I believe everything in the Scriptures. I do believe that there is a devil. I do believe in Satan. I do believe in the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness, I believe all of this. I just think that our language and our understanding of reality isn’t biblical, it’s actually more mythical. We need to start helping people realize that if you make bad choices, it creates a bad future. You make a bad choice, it creates a crack in your soul. You need to realize that the healing process takes time and it takes good choices. Your emotional health is as real as your physical health.

What would you say to someone who hears about this book and thinks, “Well, that sounds fine for people who have a lot of struggles but I don’t need that because my life’s ok”?

By a lot of measures in life, I’ve been successful, but every day I’m fighting for peace. Every day I’m struggling with stuff inside. I’m grappling with the core of who I am as a human being. If you actually don’t need this book, I wish you would write one and tell us how you got where you’re at.

Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you know it. Lloyd Dobbler, played by a fresh-faced John Cusack, boombox held aloft into the darkening sky, Peter Gabriel saying for him what his own words could not in an attempt to win back Diane. It might be pop culture’s most iconic image of a breakup. Which is a shame.

Because of all the many things you can do with a breakup, one of the absolute worst is to pine over what might have been, trying to reverse engineer a thriving relationship out of the lifeless husk of what once was. A breakup isn’t fun, so the natural inclination is to back out of one and try to go back to being in a relationship.

“A breakup is like a death only the person is still walking around in the world,” says Dr. Suzanne Lachmann, a clinical psychologist with an expertise in helping people navigate breakups. “Any time you are experiencing anything that’s like a death of someone that means something to you, it’s going to hurt no matter how progressive society gets. A loss is a loss.”

That means you’re going to probably go through some version of the seven stages of grieving a breakup. This is a process identified by Lachmann as a sort of road map for what the days, weeks, months and even years following a bad breakup will most likely end up looking like. These aren’t really steps, since they’ll happen naturally. Consider them more markers to help you get a rough idea of where you’re at and how to best navigate this season.

STAGE ONE: SHOCK AND DENIAL

Your instinctive reaction to a breakup will probably be a little different based on whether you were the one who initiated it or not, but one thing most breakups have in common is an initial stage of shock and denial in which you don’t fully grasp the reality of what’s happening.

If you’re breaking up with someone, this stage comes before the actual breakup, when you’re refusing to accept in your head what you already know is true: You need to break things off. This stage can last as long as you can hold the realization at bay, but the sooner you come to terms with the fact, the sooner that knot in your stomach will go away. Breaking up with someone is hard because you know it will cause them pain, but it will ultimately make it more painful for them if you string them along. Pray for strength and poise, and do the right thing.

If you’re on the receiving end of a breakup, denial looks a lot like a desperate search for answers. You convince yourself the person who dumped you isn’t in their right mind or is just going through a phase. You hunt for tangible reasons they dumped you, convincing yourself that if you can boil the reason down into one clear thing, you can fix the break and things will go back to being what they were.

This is what denial looks like. It’s a coping mechanism meant to shield yourself from the reality of the situation. Heartbreak, disappointment and rejection are brutal feelings, so our minds find ways around embracing them. It’s understandable, but reckoning with the truth of your situation is your first step toward healing.

STAGE TWO: PAIN AND GUILT

That acceptance is going to come with a sharp, brutal pain that’s known in the business as heartbreak.

You go from seeing someone every day and sharing your life with them to not having any interaction with them at all, other than some tortuous social media teases. (Seriously, an Instagram pic from that restaurant we used to always go to?!) It can feel like a death, as someone very close to you vanishes from your life—and the future you’d been envisioning is swirling down the drain.

There is one thing to remember during this stage and, unfortunately, it’s not particularly fun. It’s simply to accept the fact that you’re in pain. That sounds easy enough, but a lot of people struggle with it. They try to convince themselves that the pain they’re feeling is silly and juvenile, and attempt to undermine their own feelings by shutting their eyes and being a “grown-up.” There’s a reason why Ecclesiastes says there is “a time to weep” and “a time to laugh.” Everyone likes laughing, but sometimes we need a reminder it’s OK to just cry and grieve.

And yes, rejection is embarrassing and breakups can be humiliating, but that is no excuse to treat your emotions like they don’t matter. Admitting that to yourself and letting yourself feel the full brunt of the breakup is much more emotionally mature than keeping a stiff upper lip and pretending to be hurting less than you are.

STAGE THREE: ANGER AND BARGAINING

Anger usually doesn’t set in immediately. Initially, the feelings of loss and loneliness overwhelm any real mad energy, which is why people generally turn to ice cream and fried chicken immediately after a breakup. But the anger stage is when people start turning to stronger substances (do not do this) or aggressive activities like kickboxing (much better). Anger is when the initial shock of sadness dissipates and all you’re left with is rage.

Sometimes anger gets a bad rap. Sure, the Bible says we should be “slow to anger,” but it never says we should avoid it all together. Here’s the thing: Anger is actually a good sign. It’s the first sign that you actually are progressing through the stages. Even better, it’s a sign that you’re starting to take stock of yourself again. Depending on your temperament, you might be mad at your ex, their friends, the circumstances surrounding the breakup or maybe just mad at yourself.

You’ve got two options here. The first is to let that anger simmer and calcify into a bitter grudge. The second is to use it productively. Anger can be a great motivator. You can take that energy to the gym, a creative project or even some simple housework. Pretty much anything is better than sitting in your own anger, stewing on the one who got away.

A quick note: This is a stage where you might be tempted to start dating again, just to prove something. This is called a rebound, no matter how much you try and convince yourself otherwise. Avoid the urge at all costs.

STAGE FOUR: DEPRESSION AND LONELINESS

“How long will it be like this?” The thing to remember is that this stage does have an end. It may look like the entire future is a yawning chasm of loneliness, but the day is going to come when you wake up and you’re not thinking about your ex. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month. Maybe not even in six months. But it’ll come. The important thing is to not try to rush through this stage. Lachmann says that might just end up making things worse.

“I highly, strongly feel there should be no expectation ever about how anyone processes a loss,” says Lachmann. “All the different formulas only put pressure and make you feel bad.”

Well-intentioned friends will be there to try and talk you out of your funk, telling you to move on and snap out of it. That’s what friends are for, but it’s also important that you recognize these feelings aren’t something you can just turn on and off. There’s no set schedule for getting over stuff like this.

There are most definitely people out there who won’t reject you. You and this person were just not compatible in ways that you didn’t see. That’s all.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Stay plugged in to church and don’t hesitate to ask for prayer—it really does work. Also, remember that counselors are heartbreak experts, and having someone with the resources to help you process your emotions is more valuable than you might realize.

STAGE FIVE: THE UPWARD TURN

This is obviously a welcome adjustment to your emotional state, and it’s important to remember that it’ll come. Old routines start to set back in. You’re still sad about things—obviously there’s no event under which you wake up one morning feeling completely better—but there’s an organization and clarity to your thoughts that you haven’t had in a while.

You start having fun again, here and there, but don’t let this lull you into a false sense of security or, worse, make you feel like you should be doing better than you are.

“There’s no point at which you can look up and say, ‘I’m officially over this thing,’” Lachmann says. “Because you have no idea if you might have some association three months later that makes you melancholy for a minute. It’s not an exact process and the worst thing you can do is set expectation on your own grieving process.”

Allow yourself to have some fun and enjoy life, but also, take your time. Build yourself back up slowly.

STAGE SIX: RECONSTRUCTION AND WORKING THROUGH

As a feeling of normalcy starts to return, you’re going to have the emotional margin to start making some changes to your life. Start thinking about the things you want to improve about yourself and set some goals with realistic plans about how to achieve them.

Reach out to some friends you haven’t seen in a while or maybe make some new ones. Pick up a hobby (Remember the kickboxing thing?). You’re going to have some fresh energy and now is a great time to funnel it toward something proactive, but make sure you’re not using these new activities as a bandage. There will still be moments of pain.

“Breakups take as long as they take,” Lachmann says. “There are so many ways to distract yourself from feeling sad that we lose sight of the fact that grieving is actually part of the healing process.”

In other words, don’t rush yourself. If you don’t process this grief now, it won’t disappear. It’ll just show up later, stronger and more stubborn. Better to do the hard work now than wish you had later.

STAGE SEVEN: ACCEPTANCE AND HOPE

Acceptance doesn’t necessarily mean happiness. Sometimes the wound left by a breakup never completely goes away. Acceptance is about acknowledging that what happened, happened. The sting of rejection hurts, but it doesn’t have to define you moving forward.

This is the stage where, at long last, you’ll get through the day without thinking about your ex—and when you do, it won’t come with a wrenching pain in your gut. You’ll be able to move on and maybe start thinking about dating again. And, by this point, you might be an awesome kickboxer.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

Breakups are made out of two pains: loss and rejection. Both take time to heal, and Lachmann makes it clear that the stages she’s created won’t necessarily go in order. Life, like love, is messy that way.

“You can cycle through [these stages]” Lachmann says. “Go back and forth through them, under them, around them, through them, for as long as you personally, physically, emotionally need to.”

Remember your absolute acceptance by God is secure, and there is nothing any ex can do to change that. That won’t necessarily fix the way you’re feeling, but it can provide a true north in a disorienting season.

The important thing to remember is that feelings you experience on the heels of a bad breakup aren’t permanent. “Remind yourself that there are most definitely people out there who won’t reject you. You and this person were just not compatible in ways that you didn’t see. That’s all.”

The good news: There is a way out. This generation also happens to be more educated, geographically mobile and vocationally ambitious than any previous generation. In fact, no age group could be better equipped to handle the burden than those raised amid the Great Recession.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

Debt is insidious. Its gradual accrual means it’s hard to anticipate until the damages hit. But by anticipating some of the pitfalls many fall into while accumulating debt, it’s possible to make proactive changes now that can prevent financial constriction later.

The most common form of debt among 18- to 34-year-olds is credit card debt. Sixty-seven percent of Americans in that age group report credit card debt, compared to 48 percent reporting student loan debt. The issue here could be described as false projection or, curiously, a symptom of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

According to a recent survey by the group CreditKarma, 40 percent of millennials have spent money they didn’t have in order to keep up with the social life of their peers. There’s not only a social pressure at work, there’s a false dichotomy: If this person can afford to do X, and that person is similar to me in life stage, I should be able to afford X, too. Out comes the credit card.

“It’s easy to assume it’s fine to use debt to support current spending because ‘everyone is doing it,’” says Dr. Sonya Britt-Lutter, a personal financial planner and professor and researcher with Kansas State University. “The same applies to student loans and mortgages. If friends are using student loans to pay for college, it seems rational for us to do that, too. The use of debt cannot be an isolated decision. It is directly tied to current and future income.”

Isolated decisions often are based on emotions rather than common sense or critical thinking. When our primary reason for buying something is how we feel in the moment, that—no surprise here—is when we act our most rash and least logical. We’re thinking about our emotions instead of our values.

Financial expert Rafael Robert attributes this trend to a “culture of enjoy now and pay later.” The world tells us to keep up with our friends, please others and aim for instant gratification, but—again, not a shocker—that’s poor financial planning. Plus, that gratification often never comes at all.

“That culture actually brings us less joy,” Robert says. “Several studies have shown how the principle of ‘pay now and enjoy later’ actually leads to greater happiness. It’s a triple win. You enjoy the anticipation of having the thing you paid for, the thing itself because, being paid, it now feels ‘free,’ and you enjoy not paying for that thing for the next several months or years. So, a cultural shift toward delayed gratification would actually make us a more joyful people.”

So you were leading with your heart instead of your brain. You haggled and made justifications you shouldn’t have and made impulse purchases that are still nipping at the heels of your bank account. A cultural shift, as nice as that sounds, isn’t going to fix your problem. It’s time to make things right.

HOW DO I DIG MY WAY OUT OF HERE?

First off, it’s easy to see debt as evil, but in reality, debt can be a positive thing. Debt enables life-event purchases like a car or a home, things most people aren’t able to pay for in cash. The mindset, then, is to become the master of your debt instead of the alternative.

“A lot of people make debt the devil,” Robert says. “It comes from a good place, but it’s as misguided as saying, ‘Money is the root of all evil’ as opposed to, ‘The love of money is the root of all sorts of evil’ from 1 Timothy. A loan doesn’t inherently have to be bad. It’s just wise to be cautious with how we use debt, and to be honest about our own limitations.”

The key to wising up lies in foresight and communication (two things that might have been absent while your debt piled up). At the same time, you shouldn’t throw out everything you’re excited about in the short-term so you can clear the slate. Aggressive debt management shouldn’t come at the expense of a reasonable quality of life.

For starters, there are some general rules of the road to follow: Pay off your loans with the highest interest rate first so you’re paying the minimal amount in the long run, and if you have extra money, allocate it to paying off debt before savings because debt generally has a higher interest rate than savings.

From there, your actual strategy should fit within your personal means. Britt-Lutter advises budgeting an amount each month you’ll allocate toward debt repayment, but keeping that amount consistent even when a debt is paid off. So if you pay $250 a month to pay off a car loan and you manage to clear that debt, allocate that $250 a month toward your credit card debt next, instead of just banking it for more spending. That keeps you on a consistent monthly budget while maintaining a level of proactivity.

There are short-term, more fast-acting solutions, too. Britt-Lutter is an advocate of “spending diets” as a way to help you save a bit every month. Pick a weekend in which you won’t spend on entertainment, or take a month off from eating out or buying coffee from the morning drive thru.

“A spending diet is just like food dieting,” she says. “It’s hard to stay the course long-term because it’s just not fun. It’s easier to stick to it when you know it’s only temporary. Instead of going to the movies, find a new park you haven’t visited and pack a picnic.”

But it’s important to tap into your psychological needs as well, says Robert. If you can recognize when you feel rewarded or in control when it comes to money, and those are healthy feelings, tap into them so the process of paying off debt is better suited to you. This can free you from commonplace feelings of entrapment or worthlessness that can come from being burdened with debt.

For instance, if you like the gratification of completing a task or tackling things through small, easy-to-accomplish steps, maybe knock out your smaller debts with lower interest before orienting toward the big-picture, high-interest loans. Other people might need a total lockdown to keep themselves accountable.

“Debt causes us to struggle with ‘not-enoughness,’” Robert says. “It’s hard for many folks to embrace abundance and contentment when they’re struggling with debt. The key here is to have a plan to reduce and keep off that debt, then center ourselves in gratitude and generosity not defined by our financial circumstances. There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer. You have to know your story and own it.”

HOW DO I ENSURE I STAY OUT OF DEBT?

Debt management really is like nutrition, and harkening back to Britt-Lutter’s diet comparison, a “crash diet” strategy that takes a short-term extreme approach makes you suitable to relapse. In fact, Britt-Lutter says to expect a stumble.

“Realize that mistakes happen and move on,” she says. “You got out of debt once before, so you can do it again. The key is not feeling shameful and not hiding the issue to where it grows out of control.”

Confront yourself in the moments you do mess up, but then take proactive steps to make sure you don’t do it again. A radical approach needs to be augmented by maintenance plans to support both your budget and lifestyle. Clint Hodgdon, director of financial products and advice at brightpeak financial, encourages keeping a cash reserve to use on unexpected expenses and a general savings fund devoted to future goals like vacations or a car or a home, even if those things aren’t in your explicit plans yet. And of course, when it comes time to use debt, write down your plan to pay it off so you can see if the payments fit into your budget.

Hodgdon puts it simply: “Keeping out of debt requires planning ahead.”

For couples, it also requires communication, Robert says. Couples need to be in agreement about debt strategy before they start wheeling and dealing with the payments.

The solution is to go on a money date. Really. Every six months, sit down with your partner to review and refine your debt strategy together, come to an agreement, and when you do, celebrate with something definitively more date-like. Including trusted friends and partners in accountability-focused, intentional financial conversations is key, too.

“Accountability is critical to sustained success,” Robert says. “Be intentional and have a plan you’re likely to stay on because it fits your life and your story. If you stick with your principles, you’ll find you can continue to live, give and save the way you want today and tomorrow.”

“Many people have grown up assuming that is what the cross is all about,” says world-renowned theologian, scholar and author of The Day the Revolution Began, N.T. Wright. “And the awful thing is that this message about an angry God and an innocent victim has a lot more in common with ancient Pagan thought than with ancient Jewish or Christian thought.”

Wright thinks Christians are missing something important about their most holy day.

“When you start thinking about it, you realize that when people talk about the cross, usually they start by saying we were given this moral examination, and we all flunked it so now we all have to die,” Wright says. “And fortunately for us, someone else has died in our place. It’s better to believe that than to believe nothing. But it’s simply not the way that the Bible itself tells the story.”

We sat down with Wright to talk about what Christians often miss about the resurrection and why he thinks the real biblical picture is so much better.

If Christians are missing the point of the Easter story, where did the confusion set in?

It starts quite a way back, but is held in check until the Middle Ages when the Western church splits off from the Eastern church. The Western church retains the resurrection concept because it’s in the creed, but actually all the iconography and so on is all about “going to heaven.”

And when you get things like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso, then it’s clear that what we’re dealing with is something very different than what you find in the Bible.

The problem is that the last great scene in the Bible is not about saved souls going up to heaven as most of the medieval mystery plays would have it, but about the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth so that heaven and earth are joined together.

What’s the better, biblical formulation?

I think the critical thing is this: Most Christian theories of atonement have not really taken the four Gospels seriously at all.

They’ve tended to go for Paul and Hebrews and have put them into a different scheme because the four Gospels don’t appear to be addressing questions of the meaning of the cross in the way we wish they had done.

But what the four Gospels are doing is talking about the coming of God’s Kingdom. Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” When you look at the crucifixion narratives in all four Gospels, it’s all about Jesus being enthroned as king.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have very different angles on things, but they all converge on this: When Jesus is crucified something happens, and the result is the powers that have locked up the world in corruption, decay and death are overthrown. And Jesus is, from now on, running the show—even though it doesn’t look like it because we have the wrong idea of what power is and how it works.

If we take the New Testament seriously, we ought to see that the crucifixion of Jesus is the means by which God’s Kingdom is actually launched on earth as in heaven—because the powers are defeated, and this new world comes to birth.

You use the imagery of a revolution. That’s not commonly associated with the Easter story.

This goes back to the ancient Jewish expectation, which is rooted in Daniel and in the Psalms and Isaiah, that one day God Himself would come back and would overthrow the powers that have been running the world.

This is the great revolution, which like revolutions of our own day, is all about people who have been chafing under alien rule and feel their lives being squashed and crushed when they suddenly find that someone has done something to overthrow the tyrant.

It means that they—we—are now free to have the new life that they have always dreamed of.

That is precisely what happened when Jesus died on the cross. The “revolution” was secret for two and half days because it was only with Jesus’ resurrection that anyone could look back at His cross and say, “He’s defeated sin so the power of sin, the power of evil, has been overthrown.”

This is a genuinely revolutionary movement that happened.

What do you think that means for Christians today?

Learning to think historically and eschatologically is really difficult for people in our day and age because we tend to think that now that we live in the modern world, we’re it. But the Bible says, “No, sorry: World history turned its corner when Jesus died on the cross and then rose again three days later.”

Every generation has to go on asking itself the question, “How does that then play out in my world in my time?”

How do these ideas shape how we approach Good Friday and the Easter season?

If Jesus of Nazareth had stayed dead, then nobody would have given a second thought to giving His crucifixion any significance.

There were lots and lots of failed revolutionaries in Jesus’ day, often ending up on Roman crosses, and Jesus would have been just another one in that bunch.

The crucifixion means what it means because Jesus is raised from the dead after three days, and likewise, the resurrection means what it means because it is the resurrection of the crucified one.

This is part of the point of Easter that is very hard for us to think about: Easter commands us to think about a non-corruptible physicality, about a physical world that isn’t subject to decay and death anymore.

The resurrection pushes us back and says it’s all about the Kingdom of God. Go and read the story again and see throughout Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Jesus is confronting the powers—the plotting pharisees, the demons shrieking at Him in the synagogues, the puzzled disciples.

He’s confronting evil in all its forms, and He goes into the darkness in order to take its full weight upon Himself.

This is a very deep mystery, and I suspect we’ll never fully understand it. But the Gospels make it clear that He goes into the darkness as our representative and, therefore, as our substitute. Both of those are important.

You paint a picture of the church shaped by the cross.

We in the modern West have been conned into believing that Christianity didn’t really make any big changes in the world—nothing much seems to have happened.

Of course Christians have often gotten it wrong—and had crusades and inquisitions and burnt witches and so on—but look at the thousands and thousands of things they’ve gotten right.

And the reason they’ve gotten those things right is that the Easter events really did happen and really are being implemented.

N.T. Wright is a world-renowned theologian and author of The Day the Revolution Began. You can actually study with him online at ntwrightonline.org.

Now, 50 years later, supernatural horror movies have resurrected the intention of The Exorcist to create a legion of smarter (and scarier) fright flicks. Scare-driven blockbusters like those in The Conjuring universe or Sydney Sweeney’s latest flick Immaculate make up the spine of the new-horror skeleton while arthouse terrors like A24’s Hereditary or The Witch branch off into spindly limbs. These movies are out to scare you, and they do, but they’re also here to ask questions and provoke thought in the tradition of the horror film that started it all.

“The Exorcist has a balance between the psychological and the physical,” says Corin Hardy, director of The Nun, a prequel to The Conjuring. “It taps into our fears of religion and demons and possessions. It feels grounded. It can really shake you with this underlying sense of good and evil.”

What’s nice about genre is you can smuggle more difficult themes into the work…  [and] what first serves as a deterrent for the audience becomes a virtue in this other form.

Chad Hayes and his brother Carey wrote horror movies like The Conjuring, House of Wax and The Reaping. These guys grew up in a family of ministers. They’re Christians.

Chad says audiences are drawn to stories about faith and the supernatural in the same way he and his brother are.

“[At the time], The Conjuring was the second-highest grossing genre film ever, and first was The Exorcist,” he says. “So we have a possession story followed by another possession story. It makes me feel like the interest is worldwide. These stories cross over into virtually every religion. It’s good versus evil.”

The days of teenagers running from masked murderers and chainsaw-wielding hicks are long gone, for the moment. Scary movies are shouldering a spiritual angle, tapping into the universal fear of the unknown to figure out what it is about the great beyond that frightens us. Christians like Chad and Carey Hayes are beginning to tell these stories, too. In fact, Chad says their film The Reaping (which stars Hillary Swank as a former Christian missionary out to debunk supernatural occurrences) “was actually based on an aunt who had become a missionary in India. She served 10 years there.”

The Hayes brothers aren’t the only filmmakers who use their personal faith as inspiration in the genre. “I buy into [the supernatural]. I always have,” says Gary Dauberman, an outspoken Christian and screenwriter for horror movies like The Nun and the blockbuster It. “I gravitate toward things like this because it affirms death is not the end. It’s more of a paragraph break. I think it’s important to establish
there’s something else out there.”

For people like Dauberman, the supernatural elements of some horror stories are legitimate threats, but that’s part of what gives his job meaning. Sometimes it takes a near-death experience to change your perspective about life.

Psychologists say humans are born with two innate fears: loud sounds and falling. Everything else—spiders, snakes, deep water— comes from world experience. Over the course of our lives, our brains engineer themselves to be afraid of certain things we might or might not be aware of. In other words, we can’t control what frightens us, and that’s why horror movies can turn us into puppets.

Fear begins in a part of our brain called the amygdala, which scans the environment for threats. But the amygdala is paranoid. When it senses a threat, it orders the hypothalamus, which controls our emotions and nervous system, to tell the rest of the body to either defend itself or run away (psychologists call this response “fight or flight”).

It’s a useful survival tool, but the amygdala and the hypothalamus are irrational agents. They don’t give the brain time to consider context or circumstance, and that’s how scary movies manipulate us. The fear reaction doesn’t let us remember that what’s happening on screen isn’t real.

“If you hear whispering behind a door, you can imagine a hundred things that could be,” Hardy explains.

This is where smart horror movies distinguish themselves from the rest, because while most horror movies operate on this base psychological instinct, the best of them twist these primal instincts to orient audiences toward deeper, real-world ideas.

Hereditary is one of the most acclaimed horror films of 2018. On its face, it’s about a demon preying on a family, but according to director Ari Aster, those sinister overtones are a cover for the tragic family drama underneath.

“What’s nice about genre is you can smuggle more difficult themes into the work,” Aster says. “I wanted to make a serious meditation on trauma and the effect those extreme emotions have on the family. I wanted
to make a film that took suffering seriously. If you take that story and fit it into a genre, what first serves as a deterrent for the audience becomes a virtue in this other form.”

Horror manifests natural fears in unnatural ways. It embodies tangible threats like demons with intangible anxieties, and that surrogacy amplifies the scares. Hereditary is an excruciating movie. As the characters suffer, the viewer suffers because even the fantastic horror is grounded in something relatable. That means those irrational reactions of our brains are still frightening after we’ve processed them because even a rational look at the movie is scary and traumatic. A locked basement is scary, but if that fear is shown to be justified, it makes opening that door and descending into the darkness much, much worse.

Those abstract ideas—loss, trauma— can be elusive, but these spiritually adjacent horror movies are designed from the ground up to build a bridge for viewers between the story on the screen and the ideas in your head.

Grace Yun served as production designer on Hereditary. She oversaw everything from set construction to the prop design and visual framing. She knows what makes you afraid.

“We wanted to create environments that harness an unsettled feeling,” Yun says. “The house is almost like a doll- house, and the characters are being played with. They’re under the spell of a more powerful force they can’t break away from.”

That’s why when you watch Hereditary, you might feel in a subconscious way like you’re being played with, too.

In The Nun, the protagonists—a priest and a Catholic novitiate—battle a demonic force that manifests as the titular nun. Nuns are beautiful, says Jennifer Spence, the movie’s production designer, but there’s a way to warp the serene image of a devout sister to make her frightening.

“For the Demon Nun, we elongated her face and set her eyes back,” she explains. “We made things longer and more gaunt. We lengthened her nails.”

Indeed, the nun of The Nun is terrifying, but in indelicate hands, she could be an offensive, exploitative symbol. That’s why a script should give nuanced, complex reasons to position the characters (and the audience) against something like a “Demon” Nun.

With honest intention on that front, even a satanic sister can serve a redemptive purpose, explains Demian Bichir, who plays Father Burke in The Nun. Father Burke is a known demon fighter, but in this movie, his spirit is wracked by doubt and anxiety. He’s fighting a real external evil, but also has a spiritual war raging in his heart. The Demon Nun emerges to make that internal struggle tangible. By fighting this physical threat, Father Burke can also fight the battle for his soul.

For Christians, these parallels work on two fronts. Yes, the supernatural and evil do exist, but so do forces like doubt, skepticism and feeling distant from God.

“Horror films are always about the fight between good and evil,” Bichir says. “It’s fantasy, but it has a lot to do with things we deal with daily. Those demons are our own fears, our own weaknesses and our own flaws, and we constantly have to fight those inner ghosts and demons in order to survive our daily lives.”

As the forces on-screen compel the characters to confront the weakest parts of themselves, the horror movie asks the same thing of the viewer. Hereditary positions the audience alongside the grief of its tormented protagonists. The Nun compels viewers to consider the same questions as the characters: How strong is your faith? Do you question the Lord? How much are you willing to fight for Him? There’s conviction at work, but there’s also hope. After all, if the characters can win, so can you.

“Sometimes you want a film that acknowledges how dark things can get, and that makes you feel less alone and seen in your pain,” Aster says.

Horror movies aren’t the black sheep of cinematic storytelling anymore. They represent a rich soil for complex ideas and difficult topics, even with, maybe especially for, faith audiences.

“People out there might pre-judge and say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to support horror movies. They’re about darkness and the devil,’” Chad says. “Well, this is about beating the devil … Horror movies are scary, but they’re still truthful.” In a paradoxical way, horror movies are safe. The real world is unpredictable and complicated, but being able to enter a movie theater and watch real-world struggles, maybe your real-world struggles, made manifest through a piece of entertainment is in a sense a comfort. Because every horror movie has the same ending: You leave the theater. You survive the experience. Maybe in a small way, you’re stronger for it. Now you can exorcise demons of your own.

Editor’s Note: A similar version of this article appeared in 2017. 

We spoke with Acuff about his book, the power of overthinking, and how you and others can tap into potential.

When did you start writing this book?

Jon: I started working on this back in 2008, when I was stuck in my career. I had hit a ceiling, which you don’t want to do when you’re 32. It was really terrifying. I had started a blog, and then somebody out of the blue asked me to speak at their event. I didn’t even know that was a thing. But I had this tiny little new thought that I could be a public speaker.

And so I really started to go, okay, I’m going to work on that thought and turn it into action and then see what happens. It ended up changing the whole course of my life. But the book itself, I really started to go a couple of years ago, do people overthink too? Am I the only over thinker? So I asked Dr. Mike Peasley to help me research my books, which has been a great help to me, because then it’s not just an idea in my office, it’s something we test first. 

We asked 10,000 people if they struggle with overthinking, and 99.5% of people said yes — and this was before the pandemic. 2020 was catnip for overthinking. Everyone is overthinking because now everything is a thing. Now everything you do in life has extra layers of overthinking capability. But I’m not in the sense of thinking everyone in the world actually needs this book because everyone is overthinking.

Define some terms for me here. When you say overthinking, what’s the metric we’re using there?

Overthinking is when what you think gets in the way of what you want. A common question a lot of people ask is how do I know if I’m overthinking versus I just like to be prepared? Here’s how you know: Being prepared always leads to an action. Overthinking always leads to more overthinking. So be prepared, detailed, organized, analytical, but ask what did that turn into?

That’s the big difference. There are already a bunch of great books about the topic, but most of them say, stop [overthinking]. And I kept thinking, why would I ever turn off this amazing thinking machine? I’m very good at thinking. What if I just fed it with thoughts that pushed me forward, not thoughts that pulled me back? Most people don’t understand they can choose their thoughts and can work on their thoughts. They think a thought is something you have, not something you hone. And when you realize you get to choose the thoughts you have, which end up choosing the actions and choosing the results, it changes everything. 

What sort of disciplines then need to be implemented?

Really simple ones. The heart of the book is this: You retire your broken soundtracks — and a soundtrack is just my phrase for a repetitive thought, something that tends to play automatically in the background of your life — replace them with new ones, and repeat the new ones so often they become automatic. 

An example of that would be, you talked to somebody the other day and they said you got fired years ago. Now, every time you see a door closed on a meeting you think, “I’m not invited in, I’m going to get fired.” But that happened five years ago. Overthinking steals time, creativity and productivity. So 10 minutes a day, every time you see a door closed, multiplied over years — that person has lost years of really great creativity to imagining “I’m about to be fired.” So you have to decide if that soundtrack helps you by asking three questions: is it true? Is it helpful? Is it kind? You find that soundtrack and go, “okay, that’s not one I want to have. What can I replace it with? How do I repeat it to make it an automatic new one?”

Is there any part of this that involves learning how to think more positive affirmation-type thoughts? 

The funny thing is, we never found somebody in the research who over-thought compliments about themselves. No one was like, “my big problem is I think I’m such a good dad.” I actually didn’t want to explore positive thinking. Every time I see someone who’s like, if you say a desire, the universe conspires to help you—No, it doesn’t. The universe is busy being the universe.

This weird thing happened to me where I started to talk to really successful people that I looked up to and I’d ask what they thought about positive thinking. They all had some positive affirmation practice. So I thought maybe there is something there.

And here’s the thing, on a simple level, I’ve never walked away feeling bad after I’ve encouraged somebody. I’ve never walked away feeling good when I’ve discouraged them. So at a basic human level, when you go, “hey, let me encourage you,” it feels better to my entire day and then you back it up with science. There’s reams of research about the thoughts you put into your head. There was a study that came out from UT about even just hearing positive news versus negative news for five minutes a day, changes your belief in the world. The things you put into your head, and whether you say affirmations, declarations, pep-talk, whatever, the thoughts you have, have physical ramifications on how your life goes.

You touched on something there that I want to come back to, which is the compliments for encouraging other people. It feels like it’d be one thing to implement this for yourself, for your own internal life. But if you’re trying to set a culture for your family, your business, your community or your church, what does that look like?

Company culture is just a group of soundtracks everybody’s listening to at the same time. I think one of the most important things you can do as a leader is create a space where people can talk about those soundtracks. And as a leader, you have to be open to the fact that they might not be the ones you think. If you’re defensive, you shut down the conversation and what they’ll learn is to tell half-truths. It’s important to have a willingness to create a space where people can say, either here’s a soundtrack we have or here’s a soundtrack we want. 

One [soundtrack] I’ve given a lot of companies this year is “be a tourist.” This is new for all of us. Another soundtrack I’ve given people is you should say, out loud, “this is my first global pandemic.” I keep talking to people, parents, for instance, that’ll be like, I’m bombing virtual school. I’m doing such a bad job of virtual school. And I’ll say, “yeah, you should be. You should suck at that. You’ve never done it. You’re probably terrible at hang-gliding too. I bet you’re the worst hang glider.” But there’s this thought of “I should be doing better at this.”

So I think whether you’re an individual saying, “this is my first global pandemic” or you’re a team going, “we’re tourists. We’re headed to a new place that we haven’t gone to before,” you can then admit that this is new and you’re going to have the mindset of a tourist. Because what do all tourists have in common? They ask questions. They find experts and go “you know something I don’t know. Can you help us?” They have fun. They make mistakes. They don’t pretend to be experts. If you pretend, you don’t get to learn. The goal of the book isn’t that you have a bunch of new thoughts, it’s that you turn them into actions, which turn into new results. 

It seems like this is the sort of thing where it would really help to have mentors or guides who you could follow in their footsteps on. What are some people or companies who others can model their initial soundtrack situations after? 

Signet Jewelers owns jewelry stores in every mall in America. They’re a client I’ve worked with and one of theirs that I think is great is “match the pace.” They say to themselves, “We match the pace of the person coming in the door.” So some people have a speed pace. Some people have a story pace. Some people have a value pace.

So I would take that and as a church, I’d ask what’s the pace of a preschool parent? Because, as a church example, some churches get it wrong, where they go, “Jon, we’re having a hard time having our preschool parents show up to all our stuff” and I’ll say, “yeah, exactly because they’re preschool parents. They’re barely keeping their head above the water. You adding three new events isn’t helpful. Match their pace. It’s a different pace.” What’s the pace of a teenager? What’s the pace of an introvert? Most welcomes at a church are based on an extrovert, seven people telling you hello. If I’m an introvert, maybe I don’t want anybody. So what if a church said, “okay, we’re going to have an introvert.”

Another one is to ask the people in your life what their soundtracks are from a mentor perspective. You might use a different word, like “what’s a rule you live by?” or “what’s something you think about?” 

Do you think that some of those things that you picked up, or maybe in some cases you’ve helped other people pick up, are going to continue to influence the way these people’s lives or their companies are?

A hundred percent. I’ve been telling people, this is the year of the heart. When I talk to a company, I do a pre-call to kind of figure out the audience and what they really need. And 90 percent of the time they’re like, “land on like 80 percent instruction, 20 percent inspiration.” But this year it’s flip-flopped. People have gone, “we need heavy inspiration, low instruction because people are hurting.” People are isolated. People are stuck at home. So I’m seeing companies lean into their people and go, “you’re a full human and you’ve gone through a challenging thing, how do we support you in that? How do we help you in that?” I think those are the kind of healthy structures we’re going to see companies invest in for sure years going forward.

Soundtracks: The Surprising Solution to Overthinking is available here.

Jonathan decided to sneak away to get a closer look at one of the enemy outposts. So the prince and his bodyguard crept down this narrow pass, and then Jon delivered the best action-movie line of all time.  Forget Braveheart or Black Hawk Down. Forget Rambo. Jonathan turned to his bodyguard and said,  “Let’s go across to those heathen. Perhaps the Lord will do a miracle for us. For it makes no difference to him how many enemy troops there are!” (14:6, TLB). 

Don’t miss this: Jonathan moved forward on a perhaps.

But that’s not even the craziest part.  In response,  Prince  Jon’s bodyguard said,  “Do as you think best;  I’m with you heart and soul, whatever you decide” (verse 7, TLB).

I’m literally screaming right now at how gangster that is. The Bible doesn’t say so, but in my imagination, heaven was a  little caught off guard.  (According  to  the  Gospels,  Jesus  often  marveled  at  expressions  of   great  faith,  so  it’s  not  a  completely outlandish notion.) I can almost see God yelling, “They said what? Wait— where are they going?” Even though He’s never really surprised,  I bet He still gets excited every time somebody says “Perhaps the Lord will” and moves forward in faith. 

Maybe you’re deeply risk averse.  Reading  1  Samuel  14  gives you hives. You like your life predictable, consistent, and safe.  You  say  things  like  “Rome  wasn’t  built  in  a  day”  and  “The tortoise wins every time.” You govern your life, family, and work with measured care, and it has paid off insofar as you’ve never had a major setback. But you’ve also never had an exponential success. 

Or maybe you’re highly risk-tolerant. You’re all about the big leap. In fact, either you’ve just jumped or you’re getting ready to do so,  because you love leaping—almost  (but not quite)  for its own sake.  It’s thrilling.  You  say  things  like  “God’s got this” and “We’ll fix it in postproduction.” Some of the time your leaps pay off,  but you’re no stranger to uncontrolled free fall either.  Somehow,  so far,  you’ve managed to bounce back from failure. But who’s to say whether the next leap will be your last?

What if there’s a third option? What if inertia isn’t an inevitable side effect of wisdom? What if recklessness isn’t the only way to take a leap of faith?

Faith isn’t blind. It has weight and mass. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (NKJV).

As bold and eager as Jonathan was, he didn’t just run full speed toward the  Philistines’  outpost, swinging his sword over his head. He devised a plan to move forward far enough to be seen but not far enough to be in harm’s way. He and his bodyguard would show themselves and, based on the enemy’s response, decide whether to continue moving forward or run for their lives. (You can read how their gamble paid off in 1 Samuel 14:8–23.)

“I’m with you heart and soul, whatever you decide” sounds reckless, but what if the prince’s bodyguard had been watching him take wise risks for years?  If he had seen Jonathan balance risk-taking with strategy and godly counsel time and again,  it’s no wonder he was so confident in his leader’s decision-making ability.

Wisdom and leaps of faith aren’t opponents; they’re dance partners.  Risk and strategy aren’t adversaries; they’re comrades. You can be risk averse and still learn to take leaps of faith that feel comfortable. You can be drawn to every risk that you see and still be intentional in your journey. Taking a risk doesn’t have to mean throwing caution to the wind. In fact, when I contemplate a risk, I start with the worst-case scenario and plan from there. What if this is an absolute disaster? Can I live with the consequences? How long would it take to recover from a setback? (If recovery is unlikely, it’s not a risk; it’s self-destruction. I won’t do it.) What can I do now to mitigate some of the fallout if it all goes horribly wrong?

When I decided to hire Destiny Church’s first staff members, we didn’t have the monthly revenue to cover additional employee salaries.  However,  I was reasonably certain that adding ministry staff would eventually, among other things, increase congregational giving. But what if it didn’t? Could I ask someone to leave a reliable source of income for their family and just trust that it would all work out? No. I couldn’t ask someone to risk a setback they would struggle to recover from. So I waited to hire staff until we had one year’s salary for each new employee in our savings account. Hiring was a risk, but we had more than a wish and a prayer. We had wisdom plus peace plus godly counsel, which is the formula for a confident leap of faith.

Excerpted from Stop Waiting for Permission: Harness Your Gifts, Find Your Purpose, and Unleash Your Personal Genius. Copyright © 2022 by Stephen Chandler. To be published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, on September 27, 2022.

But you know how it goes. Genesis and Exodus go pretty well. Leviticus and Numbers are a little more difficult, but you power through. But then by the time you hit Deuteronomy, you’re starting to wonder if you’re really cut out to read the Bible all the way through in a single year, and it’s not even March yet. You decide to try Infinite Jest again instead. 

That’s understandable. Contrary to popular belief, the Bible is a complicated book. We take classes on how to read Shakespeare and Dickinson — it’s not surprising that reading the Bible might take a little extra effort too. But one thing that might be tripping up your Bible reading has less to do with the content itself than the way we approach the content. It’s a way of reading the Bible through a collectivist lens — something that would have been second nature to the Bible’s original audience but is utterly foreign to most contemporary Americans. But if we can learn how to shift our perspective away from individualism and see the Bible through collectivist eyes, we might not only find a richer understanding of the Bible, but a healthier overall spiritual life too. 

That’s the theory of Dr. Randy Richards, provost at Palm Beach Atlantic University. He co-authored Misreading the Bible With Individualist Eyes, which applies his years of experience and research towards helping Western Christians understand some of their own internal biases that shift the original meaning of some significant biblical teachings. 

“The Bible really matters,” Richards says. “It is the Word of God, and it needs to have authority over our lives. If that’s true then I need to read it better. And since it was written by collectivists to collectivists, then understanding collectivism better will help me to read the Bible better.” 

“It doesn’t mean I turn into a collectivist,” Richards continues. “But I do want to try to read The Bible well.”

Richards is an avuncular man, a born professor with a knack for illustrating complex ideas with metaphors and stories. He’s generous too. He doesn’t want people to think he’s “bashing” the idea of the West, which he says is a “gift” to the Church in many ways. But he says there are “certain things we would understand better” if we could learn to use a collectivist approach to the Bible. 

Individualism

“I have a friend who said the easiest way to find out if you’re a collectivist is to answer the question: Would you allow your parents to arrange your marriage? If the answer is no, you’re an individualist.”

Richards says the U.S. and Great Britain are so individualistic in nature that “we make the rest of the individualist cultures look collectivist” in comparison. 

Richards says another way to tell you’re an individualist is to think about how you tell people about yourself. Most Americans start off with whatever’s unique about themselves: their job, their hobbies and interests. 

“But Collectivists will talk about what group they’re a part of,” Richards says. “For example: ‘I’m the son of so and so, and the son of so and so. I’m from this clan and I’m part of this major group.’ Things that aren’t ever going to change.”

As an example, Richards talks about a time when he was in Asia, addressing a group of college students. He wanted to tell them to “toughen up” but realized that their culture not only had no word for that idea, but no real interest in it. Conversely, being “tough” or having “grit” is seen as a moral value in the U.S.

Richards says that having an individualistic context actually can be helpful for understanding certain parts of the Bible, especially when it comes to deeply personal concepts like forgiveness. But in other ways, hyper-individualism distorts some of the original intentions. 

Collectivism

“We use metaphors to illustrate things, but collectivists use them to explain things,” Richards says. “Jesus uses parables not to illustrate some point he made. It was his point.”

This is where the lens of collectivism can help readers understand the Bible and their relationship with God in a bigger way. Richards says that while we tend to approach parables looking for a personal takeaway, the writers of the Bible aren’t trying to tease out a metaphor. They’re referring to cultural moments that would have been widely understood. 

As an example, Richards refers to Jesus’ words in John 17, when he tells the disciples “I no longer call you slaves, I call you friends.” 

“We think, ‘Oh, isn’t that sweet? Jesus is my friend. He’s the old buddy from out of town that I pat on the back,’ Richards says. “But ‘friend’ meant a lot of things in the ancient world. Almost never ‘your best buddy.’”

Instead, Richards says that the disciples would have understood “friend” in a much different way. “It’s a lopsided friendship,” Richards says. The idea of moving from “slave” to “friend” was common in the ancient world. When masters freed slaves, the slaves would often remain in the family as a “freedman.” 

“They just had a new relationship in the family. They were now a freedman — that’s what Jesus was referring to — but we misunderstand it because we read the term through our individualistic sense of, ‘He’s my friend.’” Richards says a better english word might be “client” or even “patron.” 

“They were expected to be grateful and they were expected to be loyal,” Richards says of freedmen. “That’s why, every morning, I should be at this friend’s door, asking what he needs of me. It’s that kind of relationship.”

This idea of long term loyalty isn’t just unusual in our individualistic culture — it flies in the face of our notion of things like freedom and liberty. But in a collectivist culture, being freed into a new understanding of servanthood makes sense. 

“I was in a conference in Beirut of Middle Easterners and Westerners,” Richards says. “And it was on this idea of patronage or being a patron in the Bible. The Westerners always talked about patronage negatively, and the Middle Easterners always talked about it positively. The Westerners wanted to figure out: How do we, as Christians, get rid of it? And the Middle Easterners were asking: How, as Christians, do we use it? It was fascinating. But Paul was using those terms to indicate what our relationship to God is like.” 

New Eyes

As more and more people immigrate to the U.S., collectivism will become a bigger part of the American identity. And while the Americans aren’t always known for humility in the presence of other cultures, Richards says the American Church has a lot to learn from the growing number of collectivists sitting in its pews. “If we’re going to be good neighbors, we need to understand them,” he says. “We don’t need to expect them to turn into us. We don’t turn into them, either. But we need to try to understand them.”

“We want to try to understand and value and treasure the parts they bring to us,” he continues. “The Lord’s table has plenty of room for all of us.”

This is key to understanding Richards’ point. He doesn’t expect people to become collectivists, or even to read the Bible exclusively as a collectivist document. He just thinks American Christians should learn to use collectivism as another lens to use for their Bible reading. 

“The idea is if we can read the text better, then we can understand The Bible better, and we can become better followers of Jesus,” Richards says, “which is the ultimate goal.”

So when you tackle your Bible reading plan and you’re finding it all getting a little stale, consider a new perspective. It won’t change what you’re reading, but it might just change what it does to your spiritual life.

Perhaps some of you reading these words will say, “There can’t be a god with all this injustice, suffering, and ugliness, and if there is, he can’t be powerful and loving.” I get it. I understand. Please, just keep reading. Because whether or not you realize it now, your anger, disappointment and desire for the ugly realities of our broken world to be fixed are a longing for the beauty of God. 

How do we know something is unjust unless we believe there is a standard of justice? 

Why do we get angry and hurt by suffering unless we know it shouldn’t be that way? 

How do we know a line is crooked unless there is a straight line to compare it to? 

If we long for goodness, beauty and justice, there must be One who created these things. That Creator must exhibit those things because you can’t give away what you do not possess. As we yell and shake our fists at all the wrongs in the world, we are longing for God to make the sad things untrue, to make the ugly beautiful, to heal the hurt. We are joining in the song of the ancient Jewish people when they sang, “He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the Lord’s unfailing love” (Ps. 33:5). We join the Jewish prophet Amos when he wrote, “But let justice flow like water, and righteousness, like an unfailing stream” (Amos 5:24). 

The One True God, that is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, made creation good and we messed it up. We introduced death and decay. But God didn’t leave us in our mess. Amazingly, he joined us in our brokenness. He even allowed all the sad things that have happened to us to happen to him on the cross. 

He does this so his resurrection can birth a new creation right in the heart of the old. The righteousness and justice we long for walked out of a tomb in Jerusalem. In Jesus of Nazareth, the triune God became an actor in his own play, and through the power of the Holy Spirit, he wants us to become actors in the divine drama of redemption. We become his agents of redemption. 

Healing can only happen if we are willing to act. The good life is a life that answers God’s call to make a positive difference in the world, to be a giver, not a taker. How different will the world be because you existed? You don’t have to be famous to make a difference—you just need to be faithful. God doesn’t need your ability; he just wants your availability. 

Think about this—you are the answer to someone’s prayers. Someone is praying right now, and God wants to use you to answer their prayer. The justice the world longs for is found in you. The King of heaven gives you his righteousness so you can express it to the world around you. If Jesus can lay down his life for us, who are we to keep our lives? Paradoxically, when we lay down our lives in service to others, we find the true good life. Happiness is making another image-bearer’s life better. 

Happiness is found in meeting another’s need.

Happiness is found in healing a hurt.

Happiness is found in becoming God’s paintbrush to create beauty where there is ugliness, hope where there is despair, and salvation where there is condemnation. 

God cares about the whole person and for all of humanity right here and now. It’s hard for hungry people to hear the gospel over the sound of a grumbling stomach. It’s hard for people to hear “Jesus loves you” when they see Jesus’ people being unloving. The early church embodied Jesus’ practice of caring for the whole person. It was what they were known for. 

Author Rodney Stark, in The Rise of Christianity, writes: 

“Christianity revitalized life in the Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded family. To cities torn by violent strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.”

Tertullian (AD 155–220), a North African church leader, wrote: “It is our care of the helpless, our practice of loving kindness that brands us in the eyes of our opponents . . . they say how they love one another!” 

Jesus, in the Beatitudes, said, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matt. 5:6). Jesus takes a common human feeling and connects it to God’s kingdom. In the ancient Jewish world, people knew what true hunger and thirst were like. Food and water were not as abundant then as they are now. In the Jewish context of the first century, to thirst and hunger for righteousness was to love God with all your being and to love your neighbor the way you love yourself. Jesus understood covenantal faithfulness to the Torah as love for God, self, and neighbor (Matt. 22:37–39). To hunger and thirst for righteousness is to long for love and embody that love at school, at work, in relationships, in parenting, in everything. 

Just as a person can’t live without food or water, we cannot live without God. We were made to be fueled by God’s life and love. He is the only food that will nourish us and the only drink that will satisfy our thirst. As the author of Scripture, Jesus has Isaiah 55:1 in mind: 

“Come, everyone who is thirsty, come to the water; and you without silver, come, buy, and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without silver and without cost!” 

The food and water we need to live and thrive are free of charge—we simply must come. Our love for God doesn’t originate in us; it’s a response to his gift of eating and drinking at his banquet. He freely feeds us and gives us all we need to be conformed to the image of Christ. 

Happy people are people who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they will be filled. 

Adapted from The Good Life. Copyright © 2020 by Dr. Derwin Gray. Published by B&H Publishers, Nashville, TN. Used by Permission 

“It was totally on purpose,” Gardner said with a laugh. “I posted online to our fans: ‘Anybody who’s coming to see our tour, DM a screenshot of your ticket and we’ll just send you a Dropbox link.’”

It’s a bold move for an indie band. After months of teases, advertisements and buildup for sales, to leak your own album a mere few days before the release is, frankly, unheard of. But it’s also Kings Kaleidescope’s MO. They’re not looking to play by anyone’s rules. Instead, they’re forging their own path forward, even if they’re the only ones doing it this way.

For the entirety of their decade-long career, Kings Kaleidoscope has had to straddle the line of being Christians in a band. Not by their choice, but by culture’s desire to find a label for everything. It’s often made Gardner feel like a bit of a broken record.

Enter his sarcastic robot voice: “We’re Christians, but we’re not a Christian band.” He gets why people have trouble categorizing them.

“For me, Kings Kaleidoscope has always been so clearly a band that makes music about faith for people that need help to have faith,” he explains. “In my mind, we are a full-on Christian band — always. I don’t care if people think that makes us corny, or whatever word you want to fill in the blank. Kings Kaleidoscope is a Christian band.”

Gardner likens the band to Hulvey, a rapper who is quickly becoming one of the most popular Christian artists.

“Hulvey is awesome because he’s doing his own thing, which is basically worship rap,” Gardner said. “It’s so cool because he’s so unpretentious. He just is who he is, and I want there to be just plain Christian artists like that.”

The current Christian music landscape is in two similar but distinct camps, at least the way Gardner sees it. There are artists like Hulvey who are making point-blank Christian music. Then, there are other artists who are distinctly just Christians making music.

Both are needed, Gardner says, but from his perspective, he wants Kings Kaleidoscope to be unapologetically Christian music, no matter what anyone may think of that label.

“In the last few years, I’ve come to fully accept and celebrate that I’m a contrarian in a lot of ways,” Gardner said. “And I think that’s good. I think God makes contrarians to push things around. I just feel like I’m made to just push things around. It’s kind of like I’m a little bulldozer.”

Gardner’s contrarian ways are probably most evident in Kings Kaleidoscope’s music. Each studio album is distinctly different from the last, not only in theme but also in sound. Many people have had a difficult time categorizing the band sonically over the years — Are they pop? Worship? Hip-Hop? Emo?

The short answer is all of the above. Gardner wants the band to expand their sound to every genre possible.

For their most recent record, Kings Kaleidoscope, the band spent weeks together at an old studio located on a retreat center creating dozens of songs with no clear through-message to tie them together.

At the time, it was simply a place for the band to get away from the chaos of the world — the lingering effects of the pandemic, daily responsibilities, the constant scrolling through social media — and create not only exciting music but also memories. The group would spend an hour in the studio, challenging each other to create songs in as many different genres as they could, before going to play a game of basketball.

Initially, the group walked away with 14 “serious songs” that would be released on their fourth studio album, Baptized Imagination.

“That album really stemmed from the isolating time we’d all just been through,” Gardner said. “For me, I was seriously wrestling with the root of my lifelong anxiety disorder. So Baptized Imagination really captures my narrative of that time. It was a difficult album to create, but we found a way to still infuse surrender and hope into the songs.”

The band released Baptized Imagination in October 2022 and quickly began touring their new music. But soon, they realized that they’d left something special on the cutting room floor — a second album full of pure joy, excitement and love.

“It became clear that this album was self-referencing to the fact of how our band encourages each other,” Gardner explained. “The songs are very interpersonal. They’re not like our other albums, where I’m wrestling with God and my faith in very dramatic gestures. These are lighthearted songs of encouragement.”

Gardner describes the songs as “awkwardly fun,” probably because of the way the music came together. Early on, the band decided to embrace cheesiness and corniness as often as they could.

One night, for instance, Gardner had been working on a song for hours when an idea popped in his head that he never had before.

“The song had this big double drum version that was all wrong, and suddenly I realized what the song needed instead: congas, because everyone hates congas,” Gardner said. “So I drove as fast as I could to Guitar Center, bought a set of congas, and came back to the studio to finish the song.”

It became a fun challenge for Gardner and his bandmates to push themselves in a new creative space like they never had before. To everyone’s surprise, it was the most freeing experience they’d had making an album together.

“It’s funny, but that’s freedom,” Gardner said. “Changing the perception on what is corny or too cliche was a lighthearted, fun challenge.”

Hearing Gardner describe his own music as corny may not seem like a good thing, but he only sees it as a positive.

“Everything is corny for a time and everything is not corny for a time,” he explains. “Kind of like the idea that all things are permissible. Nothing is off the table when it comes to our music, even corniness.”

But it wasn’t just a fun, cheesy sound the band was seeking after. Even lyrically, the band gave themselves permission and the freedom to have fun making nonsensical lyrics.

Take “Forever Again,” for example. Sonically, the song is incredibly joyful. But taking a closer listen to the lyrics, you can audiably hear Gardner’s joy in singing the line, “you’re living and it’s awesome.”

“It’s like the silliest lyric ever,” Gardner says. “But it also could mean so much if you just shifted your mind on it. And that became the one through-line on the album: What is fun? What makes us smile? What makes us think, ‘that’s actually ridiculous’? And then we went in on that as hard as we could.”

The album is a noticeable departure from the band’s deeply emotional discography. But after a handful of albums wrestling with hope, identity, faith, family — all things Gardner has never had a problem talking about — he wanted to focus on something lighter. Something that fans could breathe in with ease.

“There’s a sort of pressure valve release in a lot of these songs,” Gardner said, “where it’s just very free and communal. We experienced a lot of joy making this record, and it’s fun to listen to these songs and tangibly hear it.”

That’s not to say there hasn’t been joy in previous records. There’s pockets of it here and there, mixed in with philosophical wonderings (Zeal), lament (The Beauty Between), or even raw conversations between Gardner and God (Beyond Control). But the band has been known to create music for Christians in the middle of a fight. Fans who are wrestling with faith and hope to come out on the other side in one piece.

It’s a feeling Gardner resonates with all too well.

“I don’t think my friends walk around and think, ‘Oh, Chad is just so hopeful,’” he admits. “I think I actually have an intensity to me and, there’s a sharpness to the way that I view myself and the world.”

Underneath the exterior, though, is the joy and hope that appears in Kings Kaleidoscope’s music. It shapes Gardner’s ultimate worldview, so why wouldn’t it shape his work?

“It doesn’t surprise me when I write a song full of surrender and a very hopeful outlook,” he said. “That’s just what I long for. It’s probably the deepest desire of my heart: for the gospel to be real, and for Christ to feel more alive and true in me than anything else in the world. It’s for me to feel like my existence is on purpose and beautiful.

“It’s sort of inevitable that the music is going to end up there because it’s what I want more than anything else in the world,” he continues. “But it’s a choice, too. Life is so hard, and I’ve gone through so much in my life up to this point that I can’t imagine just sitting with it with no hope on the other side of it.”

Gardner knows firsthand how difficult life can be, but he’s also discovered the joy and peace that can only come from following after God. It’s not an easy view to balance, but it is an honest one.

Perhaps his earnestness is what helped Kings Kaleidoscope to earn a dedicated fan base. Fans resonate with the band’s music on a deep level, whether the songs they listen to are about fighting for hope or rejoicing in salvation.

It’s definitely why Gardner doesn’t regret leaking his album a week early. “These songs are the pockets of joy that we had together while everybody was sort of at home facing their demons the last couple of years,” he said. “And I know we weren’t the only ones feeling that way who needed a reminder of joy and hope.”

That doesn’t mean it was an easy decision to make, Gardner clarifies. Because to him, Kings Kaleidoscope is not simply a group of multi-talented musicians. The fans are just as much a part of the group as the members themselves.

“We have a great, almost cult-like thing going with all of our fans, and they’re just so diehard,” Gardner explained. “So we thought, why not take care of them before we take care of a music chart statistic?”

But then things changed. Her priorities forcibly shifted after one pivotal moment in 2018.

“I was forced out from my job at The Talk, where I was co-host and the moderator for the last eight years of my life,” she said. “When I lost that job and was forced to step down, life as I knew it was like a snow globe turned upside down. And that made me go through a ball of emotions.

“There was a lot of anger,” she continued. “There was fear of what was going to become of me, my future, who I am. I was having this identity crisis because I was so wrapped in my identity as a broadcaster. I felt lost.”

But in the midst of her darkest moment,  light broke through in one tiny email. Moonves’ aunt reached out to her to share that a friend from back home in New Jersey was praying for her. It was a small act of kindness from a complete stranger. And it changed Moonves’s entire life.

She’d been thinking about attending church for a few months leading up to that moment. She’d never been interested in religion prior to that, although on nights when she had trouble sleeping as a kid she would repeat a prayer she’d heard on Little House on the Prarie. She had a negative view of Christianity after witnessing the rise of televangelism in the 1980s.

“For a long time, when I heard the word ‘Christian,’ I would think of people like Jim Bakker or Jerry Falwell,” Moonves said. “I had this image of Christians as judgmental, Bible-thumping people who didn’t accept others unless they were white. I’d say it wasn’t a good image.”

Yet as the pressure of work, rumors surrounding her husband (CBS honcho Les Moonves), and life in general were getting to be too difficult to handle, there was something about believing in something bigger than herself that had a bit of an appeal. After reading the email from her aunt, she knew what she had to do.

On a Thursday morning at 8:40 a.m., after dropping her son off at school, Moonves walked into a church near her house.

“I didn’t even know if I could go in if no one was there,” Moonves said.

She was the only person in the sanctuary, but there were a few candles lit around the room. Before she was even seated in a pew, she broke down.

“I immediately began sobbing and asking God to help me,” Moonves said. “I asked Him to show me why this was happening to me and to show me some light, love and hope.”

Moones then began attending church regularly, although she admits it was more out of obligation and hoping that something would eventually click.

And during 2020, it did.

Days before the pandemic began, Moonves was facing a major life change. Her father had unexpectedly died in a tragic accident, and her mother moved in for a few days to be around family while they grieved. What was supposed to be a 10-day period turned into six months of lockdown with her mother.

During that time, Moonves and her mother leaned on each other, and on God. She shared that during the time of grief and instability, God walked with the two of them and taught her some major lessons she’s carried with her since.

“I grew so much during lockdown,” Moonves said. “I learned you can’t hide your feelings from God. I learned God knows what’s in your heart, so you can’t fool Him. I learned that God loves all of us, even my enemy. He doesn’t play favorites.”

Most importantly, she discovered that God had a greater purpose for her life.

“God created us each with a different talent and purpose and a gift,” she shared. “No matter what that talent or gift is, it can serve Him and serve one another. So there is no such thing as a secular job. Whatever your talent is. You know, own it, run with it, and serve Him and serve others.”

Before she began her faith journey, Moonves described herself as “selfish” and “career-driven,” because she’d make her career an idol in her life. Now, she tries to maintain a new mindset when it comes to her work, one that thinks of others before herself.

“I have a level of gratitude that I don’t think existed before because I thought I had earned all that,” she said. “Now I’m thanking Jesus for everything. Acknowledging that I am just a small speck in His world.”

“God knows what’s in your heart, so you can’t fool Him.”

Moonves began incorporating that mindset into her work ethic. Instead of spreading herself thin, trying to achieve career highs, she’s taking things one step at a time. She realized quickly that the platform she had could be used for something greater.

“As I became more mature in Christ, I became more mature as a human — as well as more understanding, patient, empathetic and sympathetic,” she said. “So, I went from someone who was more self-serving to someone who wants to serve others. I just know that in so many different ways, I could be of help to someone.”

Now, she wants to remind others that the love of Christ is transformational. She’s even sharing that love with millions of people on every Big Brother episode.

“We need community and we need each other and we need to love one another, which is how I sign off Big Brother,” she explained. “That’s the second greatest commandment, the first being to love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind. And right behind that, love one another. You can’t say you love God if you don’t love everyone else — even the person who gets on your nerves.”

In 2020, Moonves decided to read through the Bible in a year, hoping for an audio version to make it more digestible. Although when she discovered all the audio versions “sounded like Shakespeare,” she reached out to her contacts at Simon and Schuster Publishers, offering to read the NIV version for free if they wanted to record it for use. They declined, instead asking her if she’d be interested in creating an audiobook of her own faith journey.

“I didn’t think anybody would be interested,” she admitted. “But they reminded me that everybody has an interesting faith walk. Whether or not people realize it, they’re on a faith walk. They may not know it, they may not acknowledge it.”

She began the project, eager to share what she had learned in a short amount of time while also cautiously recognizing that she still has a long journey ahead.

“Now, I’m about five years into my walk with Jesus, so I’m probably like an elementary school person,” she joked. “I started out crawling, learning how to walk. And now I feel like a third grader who still has so much more to go.”

In 2023, Moonves released But, First God: An Audio Memoir of Spiritual Discovery. She shared that as much as she enjoyed tracing the big and small moments over the last several years, she hoped it would help others see the way God is working in their own lives and the world around them.

“It was divine timing because coming out of the pandemic, it was such a shaky time in history for all of us, especially as a nation,” Moonves said. “It wasn’t just COVID, but also a very, very tense election and the Black Lives Matter movement. There was so much division going on. And I thought that we needed to find common ground. We needed unity. We needed God.

“I want everyone to know that if you feel hopeless, you need not because God is there, but you have to take the first step towards him,” Moonves continued. “My life verse is James 4:8: ‘Draw nearer to God and He will draw nearer to you.’ This is the right time for me to talk about all of this because I think the pandemic gave us a lot of time to reevaluate our lives, to really look at how we’re living, and to see, and to say to ourselves, is this the way I want to be living, and what is my purpose? For me, this is my purpose.”

Her purpose is already bearing fruit, too. Moonves shared that after making what she considered a few minor changes — wearing a cross necklace, signing her emails in “In Christ” — other Christians on set at CBS have shared they’re more comfortable sharing their own faith. And everyone has started taking notice of the new Moonves.

“People at Big Brother have come up to me and said, ‘There’s something different about you,’” she said. “‘There is a peace about you that wasn’t there before.’ Because I used to sweat the small stuff all the time. It’s live television, so when something went wrong I’d have this internal explosion of just frustration. And now it’s like, Well, that thing didn’t go as scripted, and I can just laugh about it.”

“I thought I had a very full life. But looking back, I realized now it was actually pretty empty because I wasn’t listening to God.”

Moonves is still working through myriad things these days – strengthening her prayer life, rethinking her idea of what it looks like to be a good spouse and parent — but she’s got her priorities straightened out. For the first time in her life, she is confident in her purpose, and she won’t let anyone derail it.

“Honestly, I’m coming into my own,” Moonves said. “I can be used as a vessel to promote His word and to spread His word. And a big part of that is letting people know it’s never too late to start a personal relationship with God.

“I waited until I was 48 years old, and I thought I knew the world,” she continued. “I thought I had a very full life. But looking back, I realized now it was actually pretty empty because I wasn’t listening to God. I didn’t make room for Him in my life. I didn’t acknowledge Him.”

Moonves is refreshingly honest and vulnerable about where she’s been and where she’s going. Part of it is because she “can’t help but be honest,” but a bigger part of that is because she knows the power that truth holds. She experienced a radical change in life because someone was honest with her about their prayers for her. They took a step of faith, and it changed her life.

She now hopes that by being honest about her own faith journey, others can discover the truth about God, too.

No matter where they find themselves on their journey, Moonves believes wholeheartedly that God is ready and willing to meet them at any moment.

“I know I’m repeating myself, but sometimes people need to hear this over and over again until they get it: It’s never too late,” Moonves said. “He is our only true source of hope. You need to invite God into your life, and you really need to spend quiet time with Him. You need to sit still. Only then can you hear Him and learn how to study His Word.

“It’s a journey that, once you get on the track, never ends until he brings us home,” she continued. “There will be ups and downs and stumbling blocks, but when that happens, you’re going to have hope and you’re going to know that God is going to get you through it and that you are not alone.

“He either allowed it or ordained it, and you have to grow stronger from that with His help guiding you, holding your hand. It’s never too late. It’s the best relationship you’re ever going to have.”

At his core, the “Reckless Love” singer has to live his truth, for better or worse.

That doesn’t mean he’s rude or steps on people’s toes, but it does mean he’s going to do what he feels called to do, whether you like it or not.

That’s what gave him the confidence to release an album unlike anything he’d released before. Pioneer isn’t like his past worship albums. In fact, it’s not really a worship album at all.

There’s a clear country influence to it, although a country fan might hesitate to call it a country album. Instead, it bridges the unique crossroads of Americana, folk, country and worship.

“We actually called it The Bridge Project,” Asbury explained. “It’s a bridge from one way of doing things to another, but not necessarily because I plan on becoming a country guy. It’s just because I love the tradition of the beauty of country music writing. I think there’s such value to that and even bringing that back into this world over here.”

Asbury isn’t too concerned about what people will think of his new music (and even his offbeat social media humor) because he’s happy with where he’s headed.

It’s been three years since you released an album. What’s been going on since then?

I mean, a lot has happened, but one of the biggest is that my wife and I came out of nearly 18 years of full-time ministry at a church. This is the first time we’ve not been on staff at a church.

We just attend church, and it’s been refreshing. We’ve been processing life and what the past 18 years of ministry have looked like for us — some of the difficult things, some of the things that were painful about it — and letting the Lord talk to those things and heal those places. It’s been really beautiful. It’s been really powerful.

We’re not post-church or anything like that. But there’s stuff that happens that’s real, and if you don’t address it, don’t hit it head-on, you’ll live in bitterness and offense.

We processed a lot of life and ministry, and the Lord met us in the middle of that; even the past two or three years since we’ve been here, it’s been really sweet.

Why did you decide it was time to get back into music?

The idea that I took a step back from music is probably not quite accurate. I took a step back from being public with music. I needed to do some deep heart work. And in the middle of that, I was still writing a ton of music.

So yeah, it has been three years since I released music, but I needed to withdraw a little bit and feel and process and decompress.

This project seemingly has an added layer of vulnerability. Is it easy to be honest in your music?

I don’t think I can’t. I can’t not be honest. I listen to some Christian music, and I’ll think, Is that really how you feel? I hear some songs and everything wraps up by the bridge, and everything is amazing again. And I think, “Dude, I know your life. It’s not like that.” I know my life isn’t like that. It’s really difficult for me to write songs that aren’t just 100% out there, wide open and honest because it’s what I need.

And if it’s what I need, then it’s probably what a lot of folks need. It’s our job as artists to give language to the stuff that we feel on an everyday basis, whether it’s losing a friend, a family member, someone getting married, losing a baby, a marriage dissolving after years.

If I’m experiencing it as the leader guy who sings cool songs and receives from God, then I’m guessing that “regular people” are probably experiencing it as well. So, I prefer someone I know and trust would write about that.

You’ve got a lot of country influence in your new music. Where’s that coming from?

I love organic instruments — guitars and stringed instruments. I think they’re beautiful. There’s something so special about actually playing the instruments. So much of our music is processed. It’s synthesizers, keyboards, all these digital sort of sounds and samples. When I go to a show, I want hear people play instruments.

I grew up listening to that kind of music. Even in North Carolina, there’s a country vibe and influence where bluegrass is big. I think I fell in love with that sound, but it felt like in Christian music, when I first started making music, you sort of had to do a very specific sound and style, a lot of pads, a lot of soundscapes.

But these instruments bring such emotion. There’s such evocative, emotional, something unquantifiable to it. I returned to it and was like, man, I love this kind of music. I wonder if we could produce this record more along those lines.

Everyone’s calling me “Country Cory” now on social media, and I don’t even think it’s fully in that lane. But even if it was, I wouldn’t mind.

Being in Nashville didn’t help that penchant, of course. If anything, it made me want to go after it more, but it felt like it fit the music because the songs are very story-driven.

That’s the tradition of country music. You’re telling a story, you’re bringing the listener in, and hopefully you’re giving them a lesson through this story, whether you’re talking about someone else or telling your own tales.

Aside from your burgeoning country career, you also have a lot of fun on TikTok. What do you like about showing a different side of yourself on social media?

There’s something to the rawness of TikTok that appeals to me. I think it appeals to a lot of young people because no one wants the fake veneer. Everyone wants it real and honest. That’s the beauty of TikTok. It doesn’t have to look cool; it doesn’t have to even feel cool.

It just is what it is, and there’s something raw to that. That fits my personality. I’m just going to say it to you how it is. And if that hurts your feelings, I’m sorry, but I’m just going to say how it is.

I think people just want real right now. They don’t want you to fake something. They don’t want you to fabricate something.

I use humor because I think comedy was created to be a social commentary. You think of the court jesters back in the day: it was literally their job to poke fun at stuff and then to bring social change because of it.

@coryasbury God’s love is #not #reckless ♬ original sound – Cory Asbury

That’s what they were created to do, and the king would go, “OK, you’re right. You’re poking fun at the poor for this, and you’re poking fun at the rich for this. I might make a few changes here” And they were allowed to say it as plainly as they wanted using humor. For some reason, you know, that’s just the way it was.

And there’s something to that, creating a social commentary and being able to say this and that about different things and have people receive it. Because I’m not railing against something. I’m not screaming and yelling, I’m not cussing, I’m not freaking out, I’m just pointing out, “This is funny the way this is, don’t you think?” And people realize it is.

Would you say that TikTok is your favorite social media platform?
Yeah, but I can’t say that too loud, or else people get mad.

After taking a few years off to truly consider what a Cold War Kids album could (and should) sound like, frontman Nathan Willett decided that it was time to try something new.

He just hopes others will join them for the ride.

“I know that our hardcore fans will be with us through whatever music we release because they’ve been doing that since the beginning,” Willet said. “So to try something new and vulnerable at this point in our career is a bit risky. I like that we’re willing to take that risk.”

But the band is used to taking risks and trying new things. If they weren’t, they would never have gotten their start in the first place.

Formed in 2004, Willet and Matt Maust met in La Mirada, California on the campus of Biola University. The private Christian university wasn’t exactly what one would consider to be the birthplace of an influential rock band, but for Willet and Maust, it was the beginning of their musical journey.

“This group of friends met and were drawn to each other at a Christian college, and we started the band in a strange environment where we realized, what are we all doing here?” Willet said. “We came from a place of growing up, listening to music, and going to shows, and there’s a type of sweetness where we were sheltered from the music industry or wanting to be successful at any cost.”

Since their early days, Cold War Kids has known not only who they are but who they want to be. Even during the most recent process of reinventing themselves, Willet says he never strayed from that vision.

“The band started out with four guys who have very specific tastes and styles, and now it’s mostly me making the records in a way I love and have always envisioned,” Willett says. “The sound of Cold War Kids has always been there, and I wanted this record to be the ideal, best version of all those things we’ve always been.”

Enter Cold War Kids. The self-titled album is something the band has been inching toward for the past two decades. Willet says he pushed himself to a new creative minidset to ensure the band’s 10th album was their best one of their career.

“If I’ve got five songs done that I’ve worked on in a certain way, I tend to want to put them out as an EP and go do some shows around it,” Willett explained. “Continually as my brain would go to that place, I’d go, no, just wait, and really put together a full-length record. I needed to approach things very differently and work with some new people in a way that was a little uncomfortable. But this album is where I’ve most felt like I was the executive producer of everything.”

It’s surprising to hear an artist with Willet’s catalog talk about trying new things. Surely if the band has maintained success through an era of physical CDs, radio charts, streaming platforms and, as of lately, TikTok, they should feel confident creating another album. But that’s not how Willet sees his career.

“For so many years, we were white-knuckling it and feeling like we were imposters,” Willett admits. “I realized that I can’t think that way. If I’m not sure I can listen back to something and know that it’s great, then I shouldn’t be putting it out.”

A lot of that uncertainty is due to the time when Cold War Kids got its start. Willet explains it was a rather difficult time in music. As they were coming up, critics were looking at music in an “academic way,” nitpicking every note and lyric a band used, looking deep into context in ways no artist could properly prepare for.

“We kind of got beaten up around all that critique in the beginning,” Willet admits. “Eventually we realized we had to keep going, keep writing, recording and touring on our own terms.”

Now, Willet doesn’t look at what reviewers have to say about the band or their music. It doesn’t matter. They listen to their fans, but even more importantly, they listen to themselves. That’s a lesson that they have learned not only with age, but also from up-and-coming artists.

“They just don’t care what people think of them,” Willet says with a laugh. He enjoys the lack of cynicism that’s entered the music scene these days. Whereas Cold War Kids had to fight it’s way through a “rigid, holier than thou, ‘nothing is cool’” mentality, there’s more optimism and space to do whatever you want, however you want.

“We were really nervous about our music being perceived as silly, or something like that, because of how critical everyone was,” Willet said. “So it’s nice now that everyone’s just doing whatever they want and they’re finding their own lane.”

That doesn’t mean that Willet is any less intentional with the band’s music. If anything, he’s trying harder. But not to receive recognition from critics. Rather, he’s trying harder to enjoy his music and the whole process in general.

“I think you have to knock down the whole seriousness and studiousness of music in order to get something new,” he said.

That’s much easier said than done, and Willet knows it. Having grown up in an era of “pretentious music,” Willet struggled charting Cold War Kids path among some of their contemporaries.

“There was this moment where everyone was trying to be Ivy League-y in their music, “ Willet said. “And no offense to bands like Vampire Weekend or Dirty Projectors who that worked for, but I always felt outside of that.

“I was always kind of critical of that that and how into itself it was,” he continued. “There’s no easy way to say this, but spiritually, it didn’t ascend to something higher. It felt like very much the sum of its influences were the product. And that doesn’t do anything for me.”

Willet has always looked for something that inspired others, as opposed to creating something that was inspired by others. While other bands at the time were looking to “be the smartest people in the room,” Cold War Kids wanted to be the ones evoking the most emotion.

For Cold War Kids, they’ve always just wanted to be their own band, making music they’re proud to release. And if that means reinventing themselves from time to time and trying new things, they’re willing to do it.

“The biggest driving force for our music is, is it good?” Willet says. “Does it move you or not? And that is so intangible and so hard and so subjective that sometimes as the artist we don’t really know.”

Yet, despite the ever-evolving music industry, Willet is excited about where everything is headed.

“The whole culture around music has changed so much in the last 20 years, like stuff like reviews and fans drilling into the meaning and message and artist,” he said. “It’s very different. And I don’t think we sort of are put through a microscope in that way.”

Willet sees the freedom the music industry offers as both a curse and a blessing. After nearly 20 years of calculated music-making, he can step into a raw, vulnerable place he’s never allowed himself to creatively explore.

“Anytime you put out as much music as we have, you run the risk of people not having context for your story and knowing how to contextualize like this piece of music and what this means to the artist and that’s why it has a certain emotion or power. I feel like pop is really good at that. You have to know what that person is going through in their life in order to hear a new song through that lens. But for where we come from, I haven’t done that.

“I haven’t tried to really share my personal life and connect it to the music because that hasn’t really been the most interesting thing to me,” he continues. “To do that 10 albums in is funny because I don’t know if people will even notice or care. But that is what made me want to do it.”

Cold War Kids, in many ways, is an album 20 years in the making. Two decades ago, Willet sat around with his bandmates wondering who they could and should be as artists. Ten albums later, they’ve finally got their answer.

That is, until their next album.

Minor has spent the last several years working through the hurt he experienced after witnessing the hypocrisy of the church up close and personal, both from the hands of his pastor but also the people who were supposed to be his “brothers and sisters in Christ.”

“I mean honestly, there was a time when I was done with ‘church people,’” Minor says. “I tried my best as far as music is concerned to find any way away from Christians. I felt like I needed to find something else to do besides be around this. And in that isolation, as I was in different places, I realized you can leave the Church, but you still are faced with the fact that people aren’t perfect.”

On the outside, Minor was cautious of what he let slip out. But on the inside, he felt like his faith had been completely shaken.

“Religion and faith is the innermost part of us,” he said. “Whether you’re religious or not, whatever that thing is that you hold, that faith that you have that there is no God, that’s a core essential part of your being as much as it is my faith that I do believe there is a God. And when you’re shaking at your core, that gets all shaken up. You’re like, man, I’ve got to get out of here.

“So you go somewhere else and you find out those people aren’t perfect,” he continues. “And then you go somewhere else and you find out they’re also not perfect. Then you look in the mirror and you say, well, ‘I’m not perfect either, so what’s the point?’”

That’s the question Minor has spent the last few years seeking an answer for: what is the point of all this? The triumphs and turmoil, the infinite and the finite, the love and despair in our world. Surely someone out there has the answer… right?

Living Authentically

Minor has spent his entire career carving out his own path and determining what works for him. Born Derek Johnson, Jr., he co-founded the hip-hop record label Reflection Music Group later signing to Reach Records in a joint venture in 2011. After releasing two studio albums with Reach, Minor announced he would no longer be working with the label.

For years, Minor lived as a nomad on his own. He felt like he was on an island, trying to get off through his own strength without letting people know he was stranded.

“Truthfully, I think people could tell something was up,” Minor laughed. “I’m pretty honest all the time, so they knew something was going on. They just didn’t know exactly where I was.”

Minor struggled with maintaining his identity as a Christian hip-hop artist while questioning not only his faith but also his life calling.

“For so long, I was so busy trying to make it as an artist and I was so busy trying to be a good father and a good husband while trying to figure out my place in this world that I was so stressed out I wasn’t achieving any of those goals,” Minor said.

It wasn’t until Minor began creating his latest record, Nobody’s Perfect, that he began to find healing.

“I had to have a come to Jesus moment just as a human being,” he said. “As I began healing and working on my process, I had to let the people around me into my process.”

Part of that process was working through the loss of his dad. Minor’s relationship with his father was complicated, he shared. When he died, Minor was left feeling unsettled, longing for conversations they’d never have and wanting answers to questions he could never ask. But thinking back on the conversations they did have, Minor realized something not only about his father but also about everyone.

“I know that he loved me, but he was an imperfect man,” Minor said. “And to be real, he needed therapy. He’d been through some traumatic stuff that just had been bottled away. And when you bottle things up, it just spills out in other ways. For him, it spilled out in addiction and in fear. Fear crippled him, so he thought it was better to keep his distance from people.”

Inadvertently, Minor had picked up that same fear from his father. Instead of leaning on others through times of uncertainty and confusion, Minor would bottle his thoughts up as best he could.

It’s why he felt hesitation to share his full thoughts on social media about presidential elections or political uprisings. He might let some jokes slip out on occasion, even make a few pointed comments, but it took him a while to decide he wanted to speak fully on issues that were important to him, whether it be media, finances, racial discussions or faith.

It hasn’t been easy. In fact, many people within the Christian community have hurled insults at him and cast doubt over his faith. But Minor knows the truth about his journey.

“It’s not like I’m lukewarm,” he clarifies. “When you look at my life, I would say that I definitely bear fruit as a Christian in my life. But I know that I don’t fit the typical infrastructures that have been created for Christian creatives to thrive in.

“But I’ve discovered that the more vocal I’ve been about the position where I’ve lived for the past decade,” he continues, “the more I find that I’m not alone, that I’m not strange. There’s a large group of people who love God, and they don’t know how they fit within Christian structures.”

Through his tours, album release listening parties and even daily social media posts, Minor has discovered that there’s a large group of nomads out there who have been wandering, lost in the middle of a culture they no longer recognize and a church system they struggle to find footing in.

“I’m one of them,” Minor declares. “I love God, I believe in Jesus. I try to live as best I can according to his word, but as the structure of what I believed didn’t line up with what was reality, I didn’t know if or where I fit.”

If he’s being honest with himself, he admitted, he still isn’t entirely sure where he fits. But now, he knows he’s not alone.

“What I’ve started to realize is that we’re still a part of the Church. But we need a space where we can talk and actually be seen and not judged. There’s people on different levels of their journey. Some people are killing it and fully walking in their purpose. We need them as much as we need the people that are still figuring out their purpose. And when the body of Christ comes together like that, then you get the power.”

Over the last several months, Minor has realized his place in the world and the Church is among the nomads.

“I found my purpose in helping other people find their purpose,”  he said. “And it’s been a reawakening for me as far as creatively. I intend to speak to them and help them feel seen.

“I’m going to show them how to be vigilantes.”

The Christian Batman

There’s a scene at the end of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight where Batman, one of pop culture’s most well-known vigilantes, has the realization that in order to bring about the hope and peace he desires, he has to take on an image that people will hate; an image that they won’t understand and will conflict with the good guy persona the hero has built up thus far.

In lieu of the reality of Harvey Dent’s deception, Batman accepts that his place in Gotham isn’t the path of a traditional hero, but of a complicated anti-hero. In the eyes of the people of Gotham, he’ll be seen as a bad guy, but he knows it’s what has to happen in order for hope to live on in their world.

It’s how Minor sees his own story these days.

“That’s kind of where I land,” Minor says. “If being honest and authentic is going to make me the ‘bad guy,’ but it pushes culture to a place where the other people that feel like they don’t fit can actually say that they found something they could latch on to, then I did my job. And I’m going to let God sort out the rest.”

Minor doesn’t necessarily see himself as the poster child for being a vigilante, but he does know what it takes to become one.

“When you look at what a vigilante is, it’s a person who takes the law into their own hands,” Minor said. “They normally are normal people, but they do amazing things. Although, they don’t always do everything right. They have great successes and great failures. I really resonated with that concept.”

Vigilantes, Minor explained, don’t have to do commit a crime to get that moniker. Rather, they’re doing something counter-cultural. Whether it’s a man who has been married for 25 years and raising a family or someone who is choosing to use their finances to benefit others more than themselves, anyone can be a vigilante.

“I think sometimes we can overlook the superpower of being a decent human being is,” Minor said.

And Minor realized, if living an authentic life makes someone a “vigilante,” there needs to be a place for vigilantes to learn from and lean on one another. It’s what led him to create Vigilantes United, an online community for people who love faith, music and media to come together and find common ground. Through online discussions and events, people around the globe come together and speak about their faith, music, media and the challenges they face daily.

“I wanted to create this movement that inspired people because I feel like Christians are drawn to the sensational things,” Minor explained. “You’ll hear about a guy who prayed for 72 hours straight and think, ‘Wow, he must be a real Christian.’ That is amazing, but there are tons of other people who may not fit the structures but are doing amazing things that go unseen.”

Minor’s goal is to reach real individuals who are making changes in their communities, from their immediate family to their local church. The rapper wants everyday vigilantes to be encouraged to live the counter-cultural lifestyle they feel called to, whatever industry that’s in.

Each week, Minor sends out “an encouraging video message” that speaks to a struggle people are going through. From negative self-talk to breaking the cycle of shame to even simple life advice, no topic is too big for the vigilantes to address. Then, throughout the week, Minor facilitates conversations online via the Vigilantes United website and on social media where users are encouraged to be raw and authentic.

“I really want to equip people that are in their everyday life, that are vigilantes in their own right,” Minor said.

This doesn’t mean Minor is looking to start a brand-new church — “The title of a pastor is terrifying to me,” he said — but he wants to create a space where people can grow in their faith at their own pace, getting encouragement for their daily lives while finding solace from the chaos.

Minor, himself, has already experienced newfound growth through the initiative. Vigilantes United is just as much a space for him to be honest and authentic as anyone else.

“In the past, my honesty has been taboo for some people,” Minor explained. “But now, I’m walking boldly in my honesty, because what I realize is being honest is helping others. That friction is helping grow people, and it’s helping grow me. It’s helping me grow to be able to speak my mind in a way that is God-honoring and powerful, but also at the same time, it’s helping people who have never been exposed to someone with this level of honesty. It’s helping them stretch, and making them even feel able to be more free and less guarded.”

For the first time in a long time, Minor sees freedom and power in his future. He knows he’s not the only one walking toward that these days. His fellow vigilantes are walking alongside him, arm-in-arm as they pave their own unique path forward.

“That’s the goal,” he said. “That’s the body. That’s what we should be doing. That’s the church. Bringing our full selves to the picture and loving one another, ultimately with the goal of improvement and progress towards being more like Jesus. That’s all I want for my life.”

While filming an acoustic set for her latest album, Eight, Ligertwood had almost started the recording when the studio’s owner approached her with an old microphone in hand.

The crew had already set the stage up and the sound was exactly what everyone wanted, so she was confused about what the owner intended to do with the old microphone.  Little did she know, it wasn’t just an ordinary microphone.

“He walked right up and asked if I’d be willing to switch the microphone out for I Do,” she said. “He told me, ‘My grandfather was Billy Graham’s right-hand man. This microphone was Billy Graham’s microphone and it still has the original ribbon. I’ve had it at my house, and I’ve been saving it for when it felt like the right thing to have somebody record it on. And I felt like this shoot today, and you were the right person to use this microphone.”

With no hesitation, Ligertwood and her crew agreed. The artists gathered around a microphone in the middle of the room, focusing on the importance of not only the present moment but the moments that led up to this recording.

“We just talked for a moment about what that microphone represented, about the voice, the life of obedience that voice had spoken into, and also the words that had been spoken into that microphone, which is of course the Gospel,” she said.

“It caused us all to pause for a minute and think about the heritage that we are all standing in. Truthfully, none of us would be standing here if it wasn’t for people like Billy Graham and the generations who have gone before us who were faithful with the Gospel and their generation.”

As the day progressed, Ligertwood continued to reflect on Graham’s legacy and how his obedience led to millions of people coming to know Christ. In fact, obedience is something that she’s been thinking a lot about these days.

“I think I’m naturally a reflective person,” she said. “I think a lot about what it means to live in obedience and the consequences of that.”

Ligertwood had been spending a lot of time digging into the life of Dr. Charles Stanley after he passed away last year, when she came across his thoughts on obedience.

“One of my favorite things he said was, ‘Obey God and leave all the consequences to Him,’” she shared. “An obedience of consequence happens when you obey God without regard for the consequence, which I think is a pretty counter-cultural way to live. We’re often a real results-driven culture, but what a beautiful and freeing thing it is to live a life of faith that really trusts God with the results and leaves the consequences to Him.”

It’s a concept Ligertwood has been trying to implement in her own life. After decades of learning how to surrender to God in obedience, it’s not too hard for her to follow His lead. But when it comes to letting go of the consequences, that’s where she’s still figuring things out.

Take her second solo worship album, Eight. If it had been up to Ligertwood, she would have waited a few more months — maybe even years.

While she obeyed when she felt the Lord calling her to write new music, she wasn’t ready for people to hear them. She wasn’t ready for the consequences that could potentially come from letting everyone in on some of the darkest and most difficult moments of her life.

She still isn’t.

“In all honesty, I really wanted to wait to put this out until I’m on the other side of this incredibly difficult season where I can go, ‘I’m through it and this is how I got through it,’” she admitted. “Because that’s not my story right now. This is a record from right in the middle.”

When Ligertwood began working on this album, her life was already on a rollercoaster. Still adjusting to life post-pandemic, Ligertwood stepped away from Hillsong UNITED as the worship collective redefined itself in light of major changes at the megachurch.

Then, as Ligertwood and her family were still trying to find their footing, tragedy struck. Her mother-in-law came down with a sudden illness and died in a short amount of time.

The loss became an essential part of the album’s theme.

“It’s vulnerable to talk about because I’m still going through this season, but what I can testify to is that even in the darkness and the grief of the last couple of years for us, Jesus has been the sweetness and the sustenance and deep goodness,” she explains. “His mercy has bathed everything and detoxified the poison.

Ligertwood speaks with reverence for her current struggles, acknowledging that this project was likely more for her own journey rather than anyone else’s.

“Eight brings with it like a lot of my own grief, but an equal amount of surrender and gratitude,” she said. “It’s been healing to make, but sometimes it’s a bit traumatic to talk about. Still, it has been a really beautiful process and a redemptive process.”

She trusts that there’s a deeper reason for this season of life she’s found herself in, leaning heavily on God and her community throughout her pain and confusion.

“When I’ve tried to figure everything out on my own, I’ve just caused myself more wounding,” she said. “But when I’ve brought it to him and let him into these places of tumult in my soul, I have found his healing to be unutterably profound and sufficient.”

While she waits to see what the future holds, she’s relying on the truth of her past experiences with God to give her peace. While the amount of grief she’s working through is unlike anything she’s walked through before, she’s had plenty of practice following God’s lead through uncharted waters.

Like on her first solo record, Seven. Ligertwood said that she had no intention of ever releasing a worship album on her own. After a solo pop career as “Brooke Fraser” in her 20s, she believed that the music she created as a worship artist was meant to stay in a group dynamic.

“I think it’s so important that I’m always part of something that’s bigger than me and not just about me,” Ligertwood says. “I love being part of a team. That is my happiest spot.”

So when she realized God was pushing her to create a solo album, she was surprised.

“The Lord brought all of these songs into my life in a very short period of time, and let me tell you, I’ve been making albums long enough to know when you have a group of ten songs versus when you have a group of ten songs that belong together and are a collective statement,” Ligertwood said. “But I definitely was not trying to make an album.

“In many ways, it was my worst nightmare, but when the Lord asks you to do something, He prepares you for it. He softens your heart, He changes things. And then in the case of Seven, He spoke very clearly and very quickly.”

At the time, Ligertwood wasn’t sure if creating a solo worship album was a fun side project or something God was calling her to for a greater purpose. Months after the album was released, she found her answer.

“After Seven came out, some really devastating things began to unfold in my church community,” she said. “I’m not saying that was the whole reason why God called me on that path, but I began to maybe understand why He had started to lead us this way.”

Ligertwood admits that while she is “grateful for the shepherding of God,” she is still working through a lot of what came up during that season.

“I still get sad about it sometimes,” she said. “This is not my dream, because I love being part of a team.”

Thankfully, Ligertwood has figured out a way to maintain a spirit of collaboration, even as she pursues a widening solo career.

Later this year, she’ll also be returning to her roots and releasing new music under Brooke Fraser.

“It’s a little bit crazy, but I get to do so many fun things with my whole Brooke Fraser team,” she said. “We’ve been working together for nearly 20 years, and when you have relationships that are that deep, there’s such a comfort to that. You trust each other.”

That trust is something Ligertwood is looking far and wide for these days. While her family is still moving forward from a shaky season with the church, her team and friends have been a rock to support her through it all.

“The Lord assembled us all together in a way that only He can,” she said. “We’ve been friends for many, many years just through ministry. So it’s such an honor to do all of this with my friends, which is the best part. There’s a lot of love and a lot of trust there.”

These days, Ligertwood is laser-focused on all things honor. Over the years, she’s grown disinterested in things that have fake hype or a shiny gloss. She wants to pursue things that are real.

“When I was fully immersed in my mainstream lane as Brooke Fraser,” she said, “one of the things that I was always hesitant about was how easy it is for worship artists, and even Christians in general, to use spiritual language to load God’s name on stuff. A part of that stemmed from immaturity over the things I didn’t understand. Another part of it was also pride because I thought that I knew things that I didn’t know.

“But I was always so aware of it happening in Christian and ministry spaces,” she continued. “Now, I’m even more aware of because I’ve been around it so much, so I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to use fluffy Christian words in my ministry.”

On Eight, Ligertwood worked hard to speak the truth about her situation without adding in “fluffy Christian words.” There’s still worship and praise, obviously, but there’s also an honesty and vulnerability throughout the album that she was both terrified and excited to share.

“I’m really grateful that I get to take these songs and bring my own expression to them and bring them to life in a new way,” she said.

Ligertwood writes her music with as much intentionality as she can muster. She’s not interested in making a chart-topping megahit — not that she’d mind if she did. She’s more interested in creating music that cultivates “a hunger for Jesus.”

“I mean, that is always the highest goal,” she said. “My hope is that this record becomes a tool people can really use on their own journey with Jesus.”

Ligertwood intentionally added instrumental moments throughout the album to allow listeners to sit and hold a conversation with God. It’s a time to reflect on the good, bad, ugly, hard, easy and everything in-between moments they’ve been experiencing.

“Honestly, some of those moments are awkwardly long,” she joked. “But I’ve deliberately done it because I want people to have that time sitting with God.

“Worship is a conversation,” she explained. “Worship is seeking God through singing and speaking, but it’s also listening.

“The whole record just exists to serve you in your relationship with Jesus,” she continued. “That’s it. I don’t care if you stream the songs once or a hundred times or never. I just hope that it could perhaps fuel somebody’s hunger for the Lord.”

For Ligertwood, she’s actually not focused on creating a long-lasting musical legacy. She said if she never writes music again after this year, she trusts it’s because God has something better in store for her.

“I’m not trying to build anything,” she said. “I’m not trying to build up a legacy as Brooke Ligertwood. At this point, it’s just obedience and surrender, obedience and surrender on repeat every day of my life.”

She chooses to walk in obedience with God, taking one step at a time. Sometimes the step is toward a dream she’s always had, or sometimes it’s a step in a direction she would have never taken on her way. Wherever she’s led by God, though, she’s happy to stay along for the ride.

“If He told me to wrap up my music career after Eight, then I’m fine with that,” she said. “I’ll do whatever he wants me to do. Maybe I’ll be a baker, or I’ll become a full-time reader. I’ll become a librarian. I’ll do something else. But I’ve always said I don’t mind what I do for the Lord. I’ll do whatever He wants.”

This mindset isn’t new. It’s one Ligertwood has been putting into practice for years. She even sang about it years ago, in a worship song called “New Wine.”

In the chorus, she sang, So I yield to You into Your careful hand. When I trust You I don’t need to understand. Make me Your vessel. Make me an offering. Make me whatever You want me to be.

“I don’t want to cling to my idea of how I think God will use me,” she said. “I want Him to use me however He wants to, because ultimately, that’s the place where I will find the most fulfillment and satisfaction this side of Heaven.”

Of course, it helps that Ligertwood is a naturally inquisitive person. She’s constantly asking questions, researching answers, adding to a seemingly never-ending pile of books to read (“I’m reading five different books right now, and they could not be more different,” she said) all in the pursuit of truth. She’s inspired by King David, who she considers a fellow kindred spirit when it comes to an insatiable curiosity for God.

“David was absolutely a person of inquiry,” she explained. “He was not a perfect man, but he had a heart after God. One of the beautiful ways we can see that throughout his life is that he just kept, he never stopped inquiring of the Lord.”

In the Psalms, David has seemingly thousands of questions for God: “O Lord—how long?” (6:3). “What is man that You are mindful of him?” (8:4). “Why do You hide in times of trouble?” (10:1). “Lord, who may abide in Your tabernacle? Who may dwell in Your holy hill?” (15:1).

It’s why Ligertwood isn’t afraid to ask God questions, either.

“I made that decision a long time ago, and it’s something that I’m committed to,” she said. “I never want to assume what the Lord wants. I always want to ask Him, ‘what do you think about this Lord? What do you want?’ He’s usually pretty good at putting up a giant red flag or a wall or a green light or opening a door or a window. He’s really faithful in the way that he leads us.”

There is one question, however, that Ligertwood knows she doesn’t need to ever ask God.

“One thing I don’t think we ever have to question is are we called,” she said. “Because the answer is emphatically, ‘Yes!’ If God has saved you, He has called you. We are all ultimately called to one thing, which is what we call the Great Commission.”

Of course, how that calling manifests in one’s life is a different issue. For now, Ligertwood knows that she’s been called to lead worship. Yet even within that calling, she feels an exciting pull in many directions.

“That single calling that we all have — which we are graced for, which we are filled with the Holy Spirit for, which we are led into and which sanctification helps us kind of stay on track with — that calling also can have multiple assignments,” she said.

“I think sometimes we put pressure on ourselves to determine if that calling means we have to choose one vocation or choose one thing that we do,” she continued. “And I just don’t know if it’s always that simple. For some people, it might be, but I always just think like, I won’t be doing this forever, but when I’m not anymore, that doesn’t mean I’m any less called.”

During this season, Ligertwood is embracing the opportunity to be a voice for a generation seeking after God. Some days she still can’t believe that’s her calling.

“I’ve been so honored to get to write even a single song that a church would sing,” she said. “It is so crazy to me that I have been able to be part of so many songs over the years, both through my own church community and then other church communities. It’s a complete honor just to serve, and then they can do with it whatever they want.”

Ligertwood is still taking the time to figure out when that calling could change, but until then, she’s resting in the present, knowing that God will reveal the consequence of her obedience when the time is right.

“One day, I’m going to be the old weird lady in church going up to the young people asking if they need prayer,” she joked. “And I cannot wait because I know that will be my assignment in one season. But for now, I have peace knowing that if I give my attention to yielding to the Lord and getting to know Him more, and if I genuinely desire to be in His will, it’ll be really hard for me to miss that assignment. Because when you’re asking for it, it’s actually really hard to miss it when it’s the desire of your heart.”

It’s a surprising admission from an artist whose band has released eight studio records. Over the years, NEEDTOBREATHE’s signature blend of rock, folk and alternative has earned them a devoted following, critical acclaim and widespread international success.

And now, two years after releasing Into the Mystery, the rock band dropped their ninth album, CAVES — 14 songs of self-reflection, melancholic moods and gratitude-filled lyrics.

CAVES emerges as a notable moment in their career, blending the band’s rootsy sound with a newfound connection to storytelling. The album’s name itself alludes to the idea of a hidden refuge, a place of introspection and transformation — a theme that resonates deeply with much of the human experience.

We sat down with Rinehart to discuss what inspired their latest project and what he hopes fans take away from their music.

Your latest album is called CAVES. Is there a reference to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?

It’s interesting. I love that, and I’m aware of it, but I don’t think the inspiration was from it. But I’ve read more on it since we wrote the song, and I see how it fits. It honestly was just a feeling I had. I spent a lot of time in the last year and a half while we were making this record diving into what we do in art and why we do it.

I don’t agree with the notion that you must have this horrible life to be a good artist. I think that’s totally bogus, but our job is to wrestle with the tougher things.

As humans, you want to move on from that as fast as possible, most of the time, unless you’re in therapy or something. I think for us, it really came down to the fact that we get a year to write songs and spend time in our subconscious and wrestle with why we’re doing what we’re doing, what our motivations are, and what our failures are, instincts that have come from trauma.

All that stuff is the source of what we do for music. And so, for me, that felt like a cave in a lot of ways.

If you’ve ever been to a studio, that’s exactly what it is. It feels like we were working in studios with no windows and 10 days at a time.

So I think that’s where it came from, this idea of, and writing a song about, that’s why we do it and that it’s important to do that, but more of the songs are actually about coming out of this cave-like scenario. So, for me, that’s what putting a record out feels like.

That’s the first track on the record. It feels like, OK, now we can actually enjoy these songs we wrote and stop wrestling with them. It is a very existential self-exploration.

Is there a message or theme connecting the songs on this album?

There is, which is funny because we never do that beforehand. I think that limits some of the writing in a way. So, it’s always been about getting into the emotion you’re in that day, writing the thing that’s the truest to you to that day, and then figuring out why you wrote it later. It can be difficult to connect that way to planned things, almost like you’re teaching a class. We don’t want the music to ever feel like that.

I think I probably hear thankfulness when I listen to the album. Well, actually, there’s a couple of things. One, this band still gets to make music in a relevant way. We have a career in which we can have a lot of freedom, which is incredibly rare. We went through COVID together as a band. We’re in a world right now that, to me, is just hurling towards this inferno. It’s like this division that we have, and AI is coming and all these really heavy, heavy things.

But I feel like the music, at least when I listen to the album, is not weighed down by that. That was a little bit surprising to me. To me, my career in the past with the band has been like, “I’m trying to write the darkest lyric possible inside of a song that’s not so dark.” And I was surprised at how there was a lack of that. And I’m proud of that. It felt like sometimes those statements can be very selfish.

You know, as a writer, it feels like you haven’t worked this problem out, but you’re just kind of judging people for not understanding it or not feeling the way you feel. That sort of condescension is missing from the record in a really great way.

Thankfulness is especially present in the music video for “Everknown,” where you asked fans to share the “humble heroes” in their lives. What inspired you to write that?

You know how in therapy, people talk a lot about the negative voices we hear? Even if you haven’t been in therapy, you know what I’m talking about. Well, I’ve always enjoyed looking back on relationships that have made a big impact on my life — like a coach or a teacher who wasn’t around for very long — and I’ve always been blown away by how many positive voices I’ve had in my life.

It’s surprising where they come from. A lot of times it’s my parents, or sometimes it’s the coach I had for a period of time. And for me, it’s also been very small interactions with people that made these impacts on my life that live on forever.

I think it’s been surprising to me; I don’t know why it would be, but it is a little bit surprising how ready everyone is to tell their stories about the people that have impacted them in their life. It’s shocking; it’s like you can ask almost anyone, and they’ve got an answer right away. They just want to be thankful about that thing.

I feel like it’s cool that the song gives people an opportunity to do that. It’s obviously that so much of our culture right now is just so jacked about fame and all the ridiculous things. But it feels, to me, these people that actually make the biggest difference in our life are kind of humble here. They’re loving on people in very small ways that are making huge impacts. And I want to be more like that.

Were there any other songs you were especially excited to share with your fans?

There were a lot. Honestly, I really do genuinely love this record, which I don’t say every time. I might be proud of it, but I might not love it. There’s a song, “Temporary Tears,” on the record that feels like I could have written it when I first started. You learn a lot about the craft of songwriting and some ways it gets streamlined. It’s like songs become more about the structure than the actual thing. And that song is like that. It’s just a moving song to me. I would play it at my funeral. So I’m excited about that.

“Dreams” is another one I was excited to share with everyone, because it has a crazy deep connection to us. It’s a song I wrote with Judah from Judah and the Lion. He’s been a buddy of mine for a long time, and I’ve watched their careers as they’ve been coming up. He told me a story while we were writing the record that blew me away.

He called me one night and said, “I have this story you probably don’t know.” When he was 16 or 17, he saw us at Cannery Ballroom in Nashville. And he told me, “I literally went home and decided I’m going to make a band.”

That blew me away. I’ve known him for a long time; I didn’t know that. So he asked, “What if we wrote a song about how it’s a dream that I’m getting to go on tour with you?” And I just thought that’s heavy but humbling and awesome and all those things. So, we wrote a song that was thankful to both of our audiences.

That’s something that, like any band, needs a lot of grace. And if they’ve made nine albums, you can get lost along the way. A lot of times, you make tons of mistakes. Both of us have incredibly loyal fan bases that care about the records we make and live their lives to them. The last line in the chorus is, “Fools like us are only here to prove that you make dreams come true.” And it’s that. I can’t believe we’re in this big band. We’re both rock stars. And how did this even happen? It feels ridiculous to us in a lot of ways, but we’re so thankful for it.

And then there’s Jamie. Ever since she was a kid, she knew she wanted to get a law degree at Harvard. (Legally Blonde clearly had an impact on her life choices.)

She spent her entire academic career studying for hours, spearheading student council meetings and volunteering at local shelters to boost her application. When she finally made it to Harvard, she couldn’t believe it. She experienced a different kind of disbelief on her graduation day when she felt empty while looking back on her accomplishments.

Years later, she still isn’t quite sure if the sacrifices were all worth it.

Maybe you can relate to these stories, or maybe you have a different story of trauma. The point is, whether it’s made a big or small impact on your life, you’ve likely dealt with some level of trauma. And if you think to yourself that you don’t have any trauma, think again.

“In this exact moment, so many different people are going through hard situations,” Mike Todd, pastor of Transformation Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, explains. “Especially since 2020, so many people have been discouraged in business, in parenting, in relationships, you name it.”

As Todd puts it, we all have our different versions of trauma. It’s not just tragic events. It can be anything that has a major impact on your life and alters your perspective.

For Todd, he’s been through a lot of trauma, but one of the biggest was the “trauma of success.” In this mindset, Todd couldn’t just let things be good; they had to be great. The pressure to do more and better constantly ate away at his joy and his confidence.

Eventually, Todd found he was stuck in a cycle of constantly questioning his life’s value. His trauma paralyzed him and kept him from walking into his true calling. And through prayer and community, he was able to break the cycle of trauma and experience true freedom in life.

Now, he’s helping others do the same. In his latest book, Damaged But Not Destroyed, Todd walks readers through a journey of healing and learning that there’s a whole new world to experience on the other side of trauma.

Where did the message in Damaged, But Not Destroyed come from?

I wanted people to know that value is still in you. I’m looking at so many different people right now who’ve gone through hard and disappointing situations — people whose faith has been disappointed or people have disappointed them — and it’s taken something from them. They feel like their worth has been challenged, their identity has been scarred and maimed. They’re wondering, “Do I still have value?”

But when I look through the Bible, it’s amazing to me how many people God uses who had damage in their life, whether it was jacked-up families or messed-up decisions. He chose to partner with people who are not perfect. He used their damage to be a gateway to their destiny.

In our culture, people try to make you feel ashamed by saying things like, “Man, you messed up. That’s who you are.”

But what you do is an event. Who you are is who God says you are.

I want people to know, no matter what has happened to you or how damaged you think you are, there’s value still in you. God has put value in you that nobody can take away. You have to believe it to start actually dealing with some of the trauma and that’s when you can turn all that trauma into triumph.

What you do is an event. Who you are is who God says you are.

In your book, you share how we can “turn our trauma into triumphs.” Why is that a message we need to hear today?

The message of the book is: The value is still in you, because every day people are trying to devalue you, like they’re trying to force their opinions on what you feel like you’re supporting. They do this in comments, emails and especially through  passive-aggressive communication.

Ever since 2020, a lot of people have become more pessimistic than positive, and they’re not really looking at the bright side. They say things like, “I’m just keeping it real,” and “This is 100% facts.” But, while yes, I believe we have to be real with where we are, that’s not where we have to stay.

I believe that faith begins where understanding ends. We need faith after it doesn’t make any sense. “Peace that passes all understanding” — that means in my understanding, this doesn’t make any sense. But now God’s peace works in, and things start clicking.

So many people, specifically since the pandemic, have been discouraged in business, parenting, and in what they believe they can have in relationships.

But I need people to understand that how you see it is not how God sees it. He sees past the valley. He sees the mountaintop. And sometimes He doesn’t deliver us from it. We have to go through it.

Many times, in my own life, I’ve had to go through trauma, but I didn’t stay there. That damage wasn’t against me. It was a gateway or an opportunity to go back to God and allow Him to take everything that was broken about me and turn it into something that he could use for his glory.

Before we go further, let’s define something: when you talk about “trauma,” what does that entail?

The Mike Todd definition of trauma is simply “anything that impacts you greatly.” A lot of times, people think trauma is just bad things. But in this book, I talk about the trauma of success, because that impacted me greatly.

I think that trauma can be anything from the coach not letting you play when you were in seventh grade on the basketball team to a brother and sister always telling you, “Stop touching my stuff,” to not being accepted into the college that you wanted to attend, to graduating the top of your class but not actually loving what you spent all that time doing.

On the other side of your greatest hurdle is a great victory.

Trauma can happen through anything. It reminds me when the Bible said, “In this life you will have trouble.” I like to say, “In this life you will have trauma.” Trauma, like the trouble, will cause trauma, but the truth of the matter is every trauma, every trouble, is actually an opportunity for you to learn something about yourself and learn something about God.

Unfortunately, a lot of times people use the trauma as an excuse to stay where they’re at instead of the platform to go to where God has them to go.

I can think in my own life how many times my greatest problems in one season became my greatest victories in another. For example, I used to have an addiction to pornography. I remember being so deep in that valley of perversion and thinking, “Will I ever be free from this?”

And actually, saying something about it, confessing to the community I was around, letting the people who actually cared about me know — that was the hardest battle for years. But once that dam broke and I was able to release that, help started coming. Now it’s been a decade and a half that I’ve been away from that addiction.

So I can relate to people now who are still in it. It became my platform. And that’s what I’m just trying to tell everybody: If you face the pain, face the trauma, face the hurt with God’s help, it actually turns your pain into your platform. On the other side of your greatest hurdle is a great victory. Every fail has the potential to turn into something in your favor.

What’s a practical first step for someone who wants to start their healing journey?

The truth of the matter is, most people are so aware of everybody else’s problems that they won’t admit their own. But we’re all damaged. We live in a fallen world. We are surrounded by sin every day. My flesh wants to do the wrong thing every day that I wake up. If you don’t acknowledge something, you’ll never change it.

Many times, acknowledgment is the first step to actually getting healing. So I would just encourage people to look at your life. Look at why you hold on to things. Look at why you don’t answer phone calls when people are trying to get close to you. Look at the things in your life that are normal for you and just trace it back and see, is there any reason why this is happening, and could this be a result or the fruit of something that I haven’t really dealt with?

In the church, we’ve done a bad job of just telling people to pray about it. I do believe prayer is a catalyst and it is the ointment around all of the hard work that we have to do. But I don’t think it’s a cure-all fix-all one time thing. It’s not, “I prayed at the altar or I prayed with my small group person and now I’m done.”

I can’t tell you when I was in youth ministry, how many people were like, “Oh, I feel different now.” And I was like, “Yes, you feel different now, so do a different step now. Go to counseling, go to therapy.” Like now that you feel different, cut those people off. But a lot of people try to walk into the same lifestyle after a moment or an encounter with God.

It took a journey to get where we are, and it’ll be the journey out of it.

What are ways the Church can help other believers on their healing journey?

We’ve got to listen better. When we get people to actually open up to us and tell us that they’re struggling with lustful thoughts or infidelity or abuse as a kid, we don’t have to solve it. We’re not the savior. Most people feel intimidated by people’s problems because they think they have to fix it. You don’t have to fix anybody’s problem. You just have to point you to the One who can fix the problem.

Next, I think that all of us have to do a better job at doing our own work. I’ve found the more that I’m doing my own work — go to counseling, participate in small group, talking and processing things with my wife — it’s easier for me to be there for people who are going through the same thing.

Whether it’s loss, transitions or minor changes, I think that helping somebody means helping yourself. If you start there, that will be so helpful for everyone.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve been able to help with counseling because my wife and I have been in four years of intensive counseling. I know language now, I can refer books to them, I can do those different things.

The third thing is, point them to the hope that Jesus can change your situation. We have literally tons of examples in the Bible of people being demon-possessed, of people being literally stoned and cast out of communities, and Jesus still touched them. He still went to their situation to heal them.

We know in situations that look dead, things that we have thought there’s nothing that can be done about it, we can have hope that Jesus he can perform a resurrection.

Hope is the fuel for faith. We’re called to encourage people to hope, and not just for a moment. It’s supposed to be sustainable. If you want sustainable healing, it has to come from a place of being accepted and loved and dealing with your issues and being able to be comfortable to keep walking through it. Because we know that our journey with Christ is about progression, not perfection.

For someone who has to take a big step, like leaving a relationship behind, how can they do that in a healthy way?

The first thing I would say is that considering yourself is a great first step, because many people live their lives only considering what others think of them and what others will do. But it is hard to do. The Bible says you can only love your neighbor at the level that you love yourself, and sometimes the greatest thing you could do for everybody around you is to get yourself in a healthy place.

Something that’s important to remember is that what’s not transformed is transferred. If you don’t deal with your trauma, it’s going to someone else.

The Bible talks a lot about the sins of your fathers and the things that are passed down. A lot of times because it was not transformed in you, it’s transferred to another generation. If you can’t figure out how to deal with your issues for yourself, consider the ones you love and actually deal with it for them because There are people on the other side of your healing, as well as on the other side of your damage.

You’ve clearly gone through a lot of healing on your own. What’s it been like on the other side of that journey?

The one thing that I can say at 36 years old is I feel like I’m really living now. I’ve gotten to see how beautiful life is, and I’ve gotten to be more grateful. I’ve gotten to slow down and notice how full of favor my life is because I’m not trying to white-knuckle my way through everything anymore. If something hurts, I acknowledge that it hurt.

It’s almost like you’re watching something in black and white, and then the color comes in. That’s what life is on the other side of healing.

Then you’re able to see other people on the journey and think, “Oh, I know where they’re at. I know they’re in denial right now. They don’t think nothing’s wrong with them, and so I’m not going to tell them nothing’s wrong yet, but I’m going to love them until they trust me.”

Then I could throw a seed and somebody else can water and then it’s God who adds the increase. Basically, and I know it’s cliche, but the journey is better because there’s joy on the other side of it. And it’s a joy that is unspeakable.

And if you ask Rainn Wilson, he’d say a “spiritual revolution.”

“Things are falling apart in our world. From our political climate, to racism and sexism, to income inequality to climate change. More and more young people are feeling this new anxiety, which has turned into a full-blown mental health epidemic for their generation. And there are solutions to be found through spirituality and the tools of spirituality, but we’re not discussing them,” The Office actor explains.

He knows everyone is likely thinking: “Why is the guy who played Dwight writing a book about spirituality?” he literally said.

But it isn’t just a one-off thought Wilson had. It’s something he’s thought about deeply for years, culminating in his latest book, Soul Boom.

“This topic is not just a side hobby of an unemployed actor,” he jokingly said. “It’s really, really important. We need a spiritual revolution.”

Wilson is tired of witnessing people try but fail at solving life’s problems outside of spirituality. Everyone seems to have a different solution, but Wilson sees the clear hole that’s missing in our society.

“We’re talking a lot about positive psychology and how to be happier and more grateful,” he said. “That’s great, but doesn’t seem to be working very well or helping very much. We talk about electing different political figures and politicians and maybe that’ll help if we pass some legislation. That doesn’t really seem to be helping, either.”

Instead, he explains, he wants humanity to “go back to the basics” and begin asking fundamental questions about our purpose on Earth.

“Why are we here? Why are we alive? Why is there something instead of nothing at all in this universe? How should we treat one another? These are essentially spiritual questions as much as they are philosophical ones,” he said.

Going Deeper

Of course, when speaking on spirituality, that can encompass a wide spectrum of opinions, depending on who you ask. Is it all about finding philosophical meaning? Does it only pertain to theology? What does it have to do with yoga and meditation?

Wilson explains that he’s got a much simpler definition than that: “Spirituality is about heart and soul.”

For Christians in particular, he says, spirituality is discovered and cultivated by the Bible and in the Church. And when it comes to a spiritual revolution for Christianity, Wilson wants everyone to take a renewed look at what essentials of our faith need a renewed focus.

While there are countless ways to answer that question, Wilson believes one key path is to emphasize what he calls “divine virtues” — things like kindness, compassion, humility and honesty — in our daily lives.

“These are not virtues that benefit us in any way,” he said. “Those things aren’t going to help you get ahead, right? But these are aspects of the self that are spiritual that can be cultivated through work and through focus. These virtues can help us on an individual level, thinking about the mental health epidemic that’s going on right now, They can give our lives richness and meaning and focus. They can also help us collectively as a species on the planet.”

Wilson knows this from personal experience undergoing a spiritual revolution himself. After growing up in a religious household, Wilson walked away from faith in his 20s.

“I left anything to do with religion hard,” he said. “I turned my back on spirituality and morality and God and religious practice and building community through religion — all of it. I just wanted to go be an actor in New York. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it. And I didn’t want anything kind of holding me back.”

As he would quickly find out, his life became full of chaos, spurred on by a variety of addictions and a range of mental health struggles.

“I got very depressed and anxious,” he said. “I had very severe anxiety disorder. I was dabbling in addiction, drugs and alcohol. I was really lost and unhappy.”

After a few years of stumbling around in the dark, Wilson slowly came back to his faith by revisiting and reimplementing the religious practices of his youth.

“It has given my life a tremendous amount of meaning, focus, hope, love and perspective,” he said.

It’s clear to him how his personal journey reflects what’s happening in culture at large. Studies show that society’s interest in religion is on the decline. Only 16 percent of Americans agree that religion is the most important thing in their lives, according to a 2023 report from the Public Religion Research Institute.

Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, believes the data reflects another trend in American religious life: “Americans are increasingly likely to become religiously unaffiliated,” she said.

Wilson believes our culture is at a critical moment as it experiences a crisis of faith, particularly for younger generations. But he’s not losing hope just yet.

We need a spiritual revolution.

“As things continue to disintegrate, I do think young people especially are more and more open to thinking about spiritual ideas,” Wilson said. “They’ve been thinking, ‘There’s been so much corruption involved in religion and so much shame and judgment and crimes committed and perpetrated by religion. We’ve jettisoned it.’

“But I think they’re now realizing, ‘Maybe we’ve thrown the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. Maybe there is some truth to be found in the holy texts and some sense of transcendent purpose for us human beings on this planet that can actually practically make our lives better and make the world better.’ Because if it doesn’t do that, then we should jettison it. But if spirituality does make our lives and the world better, then we should focus on that and work toward that.”

A Step Forward

However, acknowledging a need for a spiritual revolution and taking steps to make that happen are two separate things. Once you realize that you need a spiritual overhaul, there are a few ways to begin that journey.

One of the first ways, Wilson explains, is to focus on cultivating a hope-filled mindset by not only remaining joyful but also through spreading that joy to others. Creating positivity and working toward a tangible goal may seem like an insignificant task, but it actually has far-reaching effects.

“If we’re cynical and pessimistic, then nothing gets done,” Wilson said, “and the forces of chaos and confusion, of materialism and of hopelessness and despair, they win.”

Squashing cynicism is also often easier said than done. Just look at news headlines on any given day or take a quick scroll through social media. Negativity and despair are rampant, and it’s easy to convince yourself that nothing will ever change.

Wilson admits that even with years of practice, he still struggles with it.

“It’s really easy to get pessimistic and cynical,” he said. “I find myself falling into that position a great deal. So, on a daily basis, I decide to foster joy and squash cynicism. I tell myself that not only am I going to attempt to feel joy and connect with joy, but I’m also going to spread joy. I’m going to give joy to someone else as a service.”

If we’re cynical and pessimistic, then nothing gets done.

The trick, Wilson shared, is to change your pattern of thinking when it comes to cynicism.

“You’ll never completely get rid of negative thoughts,” he said. “So when that voice comes up — the one that tells you nothing will ever change, this sucks, where humans are just buttholes, it’ll never get any better — we’ve got to squash that impulse and recognize it for what it is and say, that’s not gonna lead to anything good to just to dwell in that. So feel it, acknowledge it, and then let it go and focus on joy.”

Notice how he didn’t say to ignore the negative emotions? Wilson explains that one of the ways our culture has distorted spirituality is by making it all about the good things. Focusing only on happy feelings means we’re ignoring an essential part of our heart and soul.

“The ‘negative emotions’ are there to help us,” he shared. “They’re there to guide us. We live in a state right now, especially with young people, where they’ve convinced themselves they shouldn’t be feeling these negative emotions. They shouldn’t be feeling depression, anxiety, overwhelmed, disconnection, loneliness. But those ‘negative emotions’ can be very valuable teachers.”

It’s a thin line to balance, Wilson said, to focus on cultivating positive virtues while maintaining awareness of the negativity of the world. But how else are we supposed to know where our society needs help if we ignore the hurt, he asks? How are we supposed to push back on the negative forces at work in the world if we don’t acknowledge they’re even there in the first place?

“In a way, it’s a really good time to be pessimistic,” Wilson joked. “The mental health epidemic is off the charts. Climate change is terrible. Political systems are corrupt and divisive and hate-filled. Our culture is more and more just materialistic every day. It’s a good time to get depressed.

“But there are two forces at work going on in the world right now: the forces of integration and the forces of disintegration,” he continued. “It’s really easy to get stuck looking at the forces of disintegration. Things are falling apart. They’re getting more disunified. So what to do is shift your focus ever so slightly to where integration is happening. There’s plenty of content on social media, websites, grassroots organizations, people working to make a better world. It’s easier said than done, but we have to focus on the integration and start to let the disintegration go.”

For the last several years, Wilson has made a concerted effort to be part of the force of integration. He’s partnered with several nonprofit organizations, including LIDÈ Haiti, an educational initiative he established that uses the arts and literacy to build resiliency and empower adolescent girls in rural Haiti, helping them to transition into academic or vocational education; ArcticBasecamp, an organization focused on bringing awareness to the melting polar caps (Wilson did his part by briefly changing his name to “Rainnfall Heat Wave Extreme Winter Wilson”); and through SoulPancake, a digital media company that created inspiring, uplifting online content.

If we all do our little bit, one step at a time to make the world a better place.

“We created over 3,000 pieces of content,” Wilson said. We got over a billion video views, and it was an amazing run. We were one of the very first to be making videos on mental health. We did a documentary on the intersection of mental health and comedy,  and a science-based show on the study of positive psychology. We even made a kid president.”

Suffice to say, Wilson knows what he’s talking about. By making minor changes to focus on the light in the world each day, he’s able to experience joy and peace in the midst of disorienting chaos. He can find laughter and happiness even when the world is surrounded by deep sorrow. And if “that guy who played Dwight” can do that in his own life, why can’t everyone?

“I know some people will read my book and think, ‘But I’m just one person, so how much difference could I make?’” Wilson said. “But the truth is, we all need to partake in a spiritual revolution. We don’t make a difference out in the world if we don’t start with ourselves first.

“If we all do our little bit, one step at a time to make the world a better place.”

It wasn’t always this way. As recently as 2016, just 39 percent of Gen Z said they were Nones, while 41 percent said they were Catholic or Protestant. But it’s been a complicated few years, and the exodus from organized religion that began with Millennials has accelerated with Gen Z.

Now, as Gen Z enters the workforce, those who are still Christian see their faith, the Church and the world around them in a very different way than previous generations did. They have a unique perspective, shaped by economic recession, digital relationships and political roller coasters. In the past, the American Church has been slow to adapt to the changing values of upcoming generations, and doing so has been costly. And now, facing the first generation in memory in which Christians are a minority, the Church faces a challenge. If the institution digs in its heels and refuses to evolve, the decline will continue to accelerate. But if it allows the upcoming generation of Gen Z Christians to take the lead in reaching a new generation, its best days may well be yet to come. 

What Makes Gen Z Different

Gen Z is the most diverse generation in history, racially, sexually and theologically. Because of this, they take things like diversity and tolerance as a given. Millennials may be upset by a lack of representation, but Gen Z is more likely to be wholly mystified by it. The world as they know it is naturally full of people of different races, sexual orientations, immigration status, genders and religious beliefs. They’re connected to these people online, and they expect to see that reflected IRL. 

They’re also a deeply independent generation, who see financial security as an important life goal in a way millennials did not. You get the sense that they saw millennials burn themselves out on passion careers, but Gen Z — forged in the fires of economic uncertainty — wants a stable job that will give them the means to provide for themselves and enough left over to invest in causes they believe in. 

“Their goal is not simply economic security,” said Dr. James Emery White, author of Meet Generation Z. “They are marked by a strong sense of wanting to make a difference and thinking that they can. They want to be social entrepreneurs.” According to Barna Research, 70 percent of Gen Z want to orient their lives towards making a difference in the world. 

And they expect the same from institutions they’re a part of and the brands they follow. In the past, for-profit companies and institutions like churches could skate by without taking a stand on social issues, but two out of three members of Gen Z expect companies to have a position on social issues and 72 percent say brands need to care about things like the environment, humanitarian causes and social issues. 

Why the Church Is Losing Them 

This is where the Church is running into trouble with Gen Z. Nine out of 10 Americans say the American Church is “too judgmental.” Nearly as many say it’s hypocritical. Seventy percent of Americans say the Church is “insensitive to others” and a third say the American Church is characterized by “moral failures in leadership.” 

This is a serious problem for the Church in general, but it’s a particular problem for Gen Z, who will simply refuse to align with institutions that don’t share their values. In the past, the Church could count on an assumed measure of authority. Many church leaders believed that whatever people’s misgivings about religion, churches were still broadly viewed by the American public as the de facto place to turn to with spiritual problems. But with Gen Z, that’s no longer the case. According to Springtide Research Institute, Gen Z gives the Church a 4.9 out of 10 on a level of trust. The Church doesn’t have much cache with this generation because there is neither a sense of trust nor is there a perception that the Church shares their values. 

That’s why Gen Z is taking their passion for making the world a better place elsewhere, to places where they feel a genuine sense of belonging. In 2019, a UK study found that Gen Z was more likely to volunteer than any other generation. They’re distrustful of privatization and think the government should be doing more than wealthy individuals or corporations when it comes to solving problems. That means they’re politically active, demonstrating in the streets for causes they care about and voting in droves. 

In other words, they don’t really see the Church as being a part of the justice movement, so they’re taking matters into their own hands. 

This may sound bleak, but the facts speak for themselves. And once the Church can accept the context, it can better understand what Gen Z has to offer, and how it can see a new generation not as an obstacle, but a gift. 

How the Future Can Be Different

So how can they be convinced to stay? For Levi Lusko, author and pastor of Fresh Life Church, a multi-site church with locations across the country, the question of how to retain younger generations is something he’s taking very seriously. “I think if we’re not asking that question, church leaders, we’re crazy,” he says.

For Lusko, a big key is maintaining a presence in the transitional periods of life: from high school to college, from college to graduation. He says this is when people tend to shed their associations with church, and he’s trying to figure out how to maintain a relational presence in their lives. As well he should.

In 2018, a Cigna study found that Gen Z is easily the loneliest generation of Americans. 46 percent of Americans feel lonely some of the time, but that number climbs up to 69 percent with Gen Z. Moreover, 68 percent of Gen Z feel like nobody knows them well. 

That lack of connection can’t be met by a brand, a corporation or even an institution. But it can be met by people who reach out to them with empathy, love and understanding. If the Church starts empowering the members of Gen Z in its own pews to build relationships with their peers, they’ll not only be building relationships with America’s loneliest generation, they’ll be proving that American Christians are truly interested in the people outside of their buildings on Sunday mornings. 

Lusko has also started stressing something else in trying to equip the next generation for ministry, and just because it’s a little old fashioned doesn’t mean it’s not effective: it’s the Bible. He knows that in his life, the verses that he memorized and internalized as a very young kid in church have been there for him when not much else about the world made sense. He says they’re “coming up in an age where their lives are online and that we have the truth of God’s word to combat the oftentimes treacherous way we feel.”

He’s aware, of course, that everyone has the Bible a few swipes away on their phone now, but Lusko feels the Church can be a place where people can connect to something more real and tangible than the website. He encourages people who work with younger generations to buck the trend and use actual Bibles. “It’s impossible [to read the Bible on a phone] with the notifications coming through,” he says. In other words, there are some times where instead of leaning into technology, the Church can see itself as a haven from it — a place for members of Gen Z to escape the constant notifications and intangible data and instead engage with something real.

But doing this will involve seeing Gen Z as much more than just the future of the Church. Current leaders must see Gen Z as the present of the Church — a generation with real value and wisdom to bring to the Church today, and not just in the future. Their values of diversity, boldness and inclusion are more than just quirks to tolerate — they’re markers of the way the world is changing, and how the Church can be equipped to meet it. 

If the Church truly wants to reverse its trend of decline, the answer lies not in coddling Gen Z nor in inviting them to join. It lies in going to where they are and taking part in the work they’re already doing. The real secret for the Church will be learning that their mission is not simply to shape Gen Z, but also to be shaped by them. That takes a level of humility that might involve some growing pains but, hey, at least there will be growing. 

William Fitzsimmons is coming off a fight with his daughter. For most of her nine years, Fitzsimmons and his ex-wife have detangled her hair — a process she has come to resent. On this occasion, she decided that she’d rather cut all her hair off than detangle it again. 

“Preaching to the choir on that one,” Fitzsimmons chuckles, rubbing his own hair-less dome. He’d told her as much, which he says went over “not great.” His daughter is bi-racial and self conscious about her hair. 

“You don’t want to invalidate the feelings but you want to teach them to count the blessings,” he says. 

That’s something Fitzsimmons specializes in. He’s crafted a quietly compelling career out of moody folk music that marinates in heartache, loneliness and betrayal. Before music, he’d built a career as a therapist after getting his degree in counseling, but switched to music after a handful of early tunes exploded in popularity online. His music caught the attention of fellow songwriters like Brooke Ligertwood and Ingrid Michaelson. 2008’s The Sparrow and the Crow was iTunes’ pick for the best singer-songwriter album of the year. Plumb placement on shows like Private Practice, One Tree Hill and Teen Wolf followed, and Fitzsimmons’ career has been followed by a modest but fiercely devoted collective of fans who spend his live shows singing along with every single word. 

All that being said, he still sees his current career as being closely aligned with his former work as a therapist. 

“Music, in some ways, is actually faster than therapy,” he says. “Because you’re not actively working it out and talking about it. You can just hear a line or melody and you just start crying.”

Fitzsimmons is intrigued by the ways that music can sneak up on you and, in a way that’s a little hard to quantify, help you find healing. In fact, he says it happened to him the very morning of our conversation. He had the Godspell soundtrack on and, well, he got ambushed. 

“I’m sitting there making turkey sandwiches and I just started to cry,” he says. “Part of it’s nostalgic. But the music is so good and it’s meaningful to me and my worldview. It hit me. I heard it like it was the first time and it just knocked me to the floor. Not a lot of stuff can do that.”

It’s an interesting topic. The subject of mental health is ascendant these days as we collectively take an assessment of our pre-post-pandemic lives. Fitzsimmons says that everyone is a little “frayed” like an old pair of jeans. We all need a little therapy, and he’s seeing a licensed one regularly. But while he doesn’t think music is a substitute for therapy, he does think the two can work in tandem. It’s helping him, at least. And he hopes that his new album Ready the Astronaut can help provide a little therapy for others. 

A Light, Not a Door

Fitzsimmons is a Pittsburgh native, raised by two recreational musicians who taught him to play a host of instruments. Fitzsimmons’ parents are blind, something bullies latched onto. He struggled to fit in until college, when he found confidence, community and acceptance through his music. It made him feel distinct. 

“I mean, a white guy with a guitar. That’s not that different,” he acknowledges. “But at the time in the culture that I was in, it was. All of a sudden I was like, ‘This actually is cool. I’m glad I’m not on the football team and dating a cheerleader.’” 

Eleven studio albums later, Fitzsimmons’ music is still a source of belonging for him, even as it’s been used to chart some of his most difficult experiences — divorce, unfaithfulness, the failure of his parents’ own marriage. But furthermore, Fitzsimmons’ music is obsessed with our interior lives and the way they’re shaped by the things that happen to us. He credits music with helping him identify his own impulses, and providing context for what he was going through. 

“I think music is good at uncovering emotions that you need to process,” he says. “But as far as getting to the next step, maybe it’s done that for a lot of people. It’s never done that for me. For me it’s like, ‘There’s something I need to work on.’” 

In other words, if you’re feeling stuck in a dark room, music probably isn’t the way out — but it might be a light to help you find the door. And if listening to music is capable of providing that level of self-reflection, just imagine what writing it can do. 

More Honest

“I liken it just to journaling,” Fitzsimmons says of songwriting. “It’s the mirror that happens in therapy …I’ll write a line and then come back to it the next day and think, ‘Holy crap. That’s true. That’s exactly how I’m feeling.’” 

Fitzsimmons says that keeping his feelings inside “rots” him, and songwriting is a way of exorcizing his emotional demons. He thinks everyone should be writing more, in some capacity. For him, it’s writing music. For you, it might be a journal, a blog, whatever. The important thing is that you do it.

“There’s something about it being inside your own head that means it never changes. It stays there,” he says. “It’ll eat you up, man. It’ll eat you up.”

He says songwriting also helps short-circuit our tendency to self-censor around others. He pulls out an interesting analogy about how we can tend to live like we’re in line to speak to the bereaved at a funeral. There are two or three people ahead of us, offering their condolences, and we’re second guessing what we’re supposed to say. 

“There are things that we say,” he says. “Some of them are neutral, some are helpful and many are not helpful at all. Like, ‘God must’ve needed another angel,’ or something like that. I’m like, ‘Nope. Don’t say that.’” 

There might be some value to having that level of self-editing at a wake, but Fitzsimmons says we’re far too censorial when it comes to our own thoughts and feelings. “I think writing — it doesn’t have to be music, but just writing in general — allows me to be more honest,” he says.  “And to reflect on that honesty.” 

And for Fitzsimmons, honesty often means being honest about his own grief. 

“I feel zero guilt about that whatsoever,” Fitzsimmons says when asked about the general melancholy tone of his music. 

“‘When are you going to write a happy record?’” he says, mimicking conversations he’d heard. “‘Why don’t you write something more upbeat or uptempo?’” He rolls his eyes.

“I mean, look,” he says. “The answer is: I don’t know. I like writing about hard stuff. I get joy from that. I get release from that. I don’t really understand happy music.”

It should be noted here that Fitzsimmons does not come across like a sad person, although he’s certainly gone through his fair share of difficult things. Maybe that’s because he writes about the trials he’s been through. He channels his struggles through his art, and is rewarded with a reasonable degree of emotional stability. 

“I think what I’m presenting is actually, for the most part, who I am,” he says. “Might not be the entirety of who I am. I love laughing. I think that I’m kind of funny but I don’t know. I like gut-punches, man! Those are the lines that get me.”

Fitzsimmons is well-versed in gut punches. He’s weathered a couple divorces now, which he’s detailed through his music. He may not feel like the things he’s been through have made him a one-note person, but he is aware that he gravitates towards stormier seas in both his creative work and his own relational life. 

“When I sit down by the piano or pick up the guitar,my mind just goes to the more difficult stuff,” he says. “I do that in conversation too. If I’m at the merch table after the show and somebody starts talking to me about psychology or some hard thing …If they’re like, ‘Yeah, my dad died two years ago and your song really meant a lot to me,’ well, let’s talk about it! That’s the stuff for me. That’s where life is.”

Fitzsimmons says he’s jealous of people who can write music without having some sort of difficult experience that pushes them into a season of songwriting. He says he needs something external to push him into a songwriting phase. “Neil Diamond, Carole King, they can just sit down and write an awesome song! I can’t do that,” he says. “I have to have gone through something that I need to get out of my chest. Doesn’t mean it’s going to be good, but that’s the only way I can do it.”

But then, maybe this is part of Fitzsimmons’ own therapy process. He’s writing music as a way of working through his life — the way you might use journaling. And, yes, that might make for more despondent music in general. But then, it’s also proved to be a key part of his healing process. And who knows? Listening to it might be part of yours too.

“I want to believe in you!” Michelle Zauner hollars on “Be Sweet.” “I want to believe in something!” 

It’s a standout track on a new album full of standouts. Jubilee is one of the year’s great indie pop albums, and Zauner — better known as Japanese Breakfast — comes across as exuberant, reveling in the joy of new possibilities. In this song, “I want to believe in you” doesn’t sound desperate as much as hopeful — a belief in the possibility of learning to trust again. True to its title, Jubilee is a much-needed shot of elation following a year of global hardship, loss and difficulty.

It’s extra surprising coming from Zauner, for a few reasons. For one thing, Japanese Breakfast’s two previous albums were excellent, but not exactly known for their cheerful, positive vibes. For another, Zauner herself is coming off her own extraordinarily difficult season following the loss of her mother after a long battle with cancer, an experience she chronicles in her memoir, Crying in H Mart.

“I had written two records, largely about grief and loss, and purged everything I needed to say about that experience in this book,” she says. “I literally closed the book on that part of my life and started this new chapter.” 

“And I thought that the most unexpected and exciting thing to write about would be something totally different,” she continues. “Like joy.”

You get the sense that it took time for Zauner to feel like she could honestly express this energy. She had to dwell in her darker seasons, process them and express them through her writing and music before something like Jubilee really made sense. The result is a cohesive album that sounds earned in every way. Given the road Zauner’s taken to get to this point, that’s no surprise. 

Winning the Lottery

Zauner was born in Seoul, the daughter of a Korean mother and a Jewish-American father. Her parents came to the states before she turned one and Zauner was raised in Eugene, Oregon, eventually attending Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. It was around this time that she started getting involved in music, playing with indie pop and emo acts until her mother’s diagnosis brought her back to Oregon to move in as her mother’s caretaker. It was during this time that she started recording music on her own, confronting the grief and pain of losing her mom, along with her own feelings of guilt about their relationship. Japanese Breakfast was born, releasing a debut album in 2016, two years after Zauner’s mother passed away.

Zauner was working a corporate job as a sales assistant when her debut Psychopomp released. “I was obviously not very happy there,” she says. “But I had tried to be a musician. I’d worked at being a musician for six to seven years already. And I felt like if it hadn’t already happened for me, it was probably not going to happen to me. And it was time to move on.”

Psychopomp was supposed to be a “private little record,” but it performed well. About that same time, an essay she’d written was selected as Glamour’s Essay of the Year. Music labels and literary agents started knocking on her door about the same time, wanting another album and a full book. It was gratifying. But it was a lot. She decided to pour herself into music because, as she puts it, it frankly seemed like the more realistic career choice. 

“Becoming a writer seemed even more impractical and like winning the lottery to me than a career in music,” Zauner says. “I knew booking agents. I knew labels. I knew bands that had made it. I didn’t know any writers.”

Zauner’s sophomore album Soft Sounds From Another Planet released to enormous acclaim, catapulting her to a new level of success. From the outside, Zauner’s success looked meteoric. For her, it was the long-awaited payoff of years of hard work. 

“We slept on the floor at people’s houses for the first two headlining tours,” she says. “And then by the third one, it was four of us piled into a Holiday Inn. And now it’s like, ‘Oh, we get two Holiday Inns.’ And then we get to get three Holiday Inns. It has felt like a real climb.”

She decided to take the forward momentum as a sign that it was time to expand the essay that had attracted Glamour’s attention and turn her experience with grief and loss into a full book. It turned out to be far more difficult than she’d expected. 

“I went in thinking I’m going to revisit some really beautiful memories that I have of my relationship with my mother and revel in those, because it’s the closest way that I can recreate being with her,” Zauner says. “I wanted to expose how difficult it was to live as a caretaker and just how real that struggle was and purge it from my life in a way and bare the wounds of that experience.”

That was the goal, but what Zauner found surprised her. Not just memories, but unexplored feelings and unresolved tensions. “I think I always lived with this real guilt that I was such a difficult child and teenager,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much I felt like I would learn about my mom and about myself.”

In particular, much of Crying in H Mart deals with Zauner learning to cook the Korean dishes her mother loved. Zauner and her mother came from, as she has it, “very different cultural backgrounds,” which made for a very “nuanced, complicated love.” 

“It’s not something we see in mainstream media very often,” she says. “It feels very new.” 

That created tension in their bond, but Zauner says writing the book helped her sort though some of those perceived obstacles, even as she strove to be as unsparing in her analysis as possible.

“I came out of that with such a profound appreciation of my mother and understanding of why I am the way that I am,” she says. “It’s in a way that I couldn’t have even anticipated.”

But writing the book was therapeutic for Zauner, and gave her a way to work through her own grief in a tangible way. She not only learned new things about her relationship with her mom. She was able to find grace, too. “I was really able to forgive myself and see it from a totally different perspective.”

The experience gave Zauner a different way to think about the grief of others too, as grief often does. She has compassion for friends who just didn’t know what to say. She knows people feel the need to speak into the hurt in ways that will bring some healing and respite, and she doesn’t judge people for feeling that way, but she does urge them to understand that words have limited power in moments of loss. “I think so much of it is just not necessarily saying something, but showing up,” she says. 

She remembers an impulse that she calls a “really sick thing” to go sell her mother’s belongings at a flea market. “I really shouldn’t have done that,” she says ruefully. “I really should have just like, I don’t know what I was trying to accomplish by doing that. I think that it just felt like I had to do it. I don’t know.”

In the midst of a moment she deeply regrets, Zauner cherishes the presence of a friend who simply offered her presence. “She sat there with me and would let me do things like that,” she says. “Would just show up and be there. Not necessarily try to come up with anything to say, but just be an understanding person that knows I’m going through a really difficult time in my life and that she has to be there in order to support me.”

She also credits her husband for, in her words, simply “sitting there.” 

“He would just sit there sometimes,” she muses. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if he wasn’t sitting there.”

It’s clear that as profoundly devastating as the loss of her mother was, the ensuing journey has had moments of remarkable gratitude, both in terms of her coming to terms with her relationship with her mother and discovering new depths to her relationship with herself and the people she loves. All of that has helped pave the way for Jubilee. 

Jubilee

“It was actually a real relief to explore this new part of myself,” Zauner says of writing the new album. “It’s such a broad theme. I think I just wanted to fling myself to the other side of the spectrum of human experience.”

Jubilee isn’t entirely one-dimensional. There are moments of anger, betrayal and hurt. But the overall attitude is one of celebration. As she puts it, even the songs about sadness end up sounding joyful — a juxtaposition that comes from the maturity of realizing how many layers every experience is made up of. 

Compared to writing a book, writing the album was a breeze. “A wonderful experience,” she says. It felt familiar, even comforting to return to the art she’d cut her teeth on. But she’s still excited to get back to writing more books. “I definitely feel like there’s another book in me,” she says. “Just not right now, not for a while.”

But she doesn’t need to do anything for a while. After the seasons Zauner has endured, a break feels well-deserved. But she’s not done. Not by a longshot. In fact, the things she’s endured have ended up making her feel more capable, not less. “I learned so much from this experience,” she says. “I’m really excited to apply this sort of lessons that I learned.” 

“Everything kind of seems possible.”

There are degrees to how we contribute to the decay of society. Passivity and avarice are dangerous contagions. We fall prey to them when we assume that our lives and work have no adverse impact on the people around us. Add to that assumption our arrogance in thinking our ideology is inevitably right, and we have a problem. 

So, while we can each richly contribute to the flourishing of a blessed society, let’s first get centered. Let’s see ourselves rightly, not thinking of ourselves more highly than we ought. Only then will we know our real ability to give good to those around us.

What is good? How do we center our creative contributions? God has told us what is good. Those good instructions are “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” He gave more instructions too — “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” These instructions have two facets: inward devotion and outward duty. The Christian faith is one both of mind and of body. It is cognitive and corporeal. No one is excused from these commands.

The command to love — in all the fullness and justice of that word — is laid on all, from politician to painter. With every policy pushed, every stroke of the brush, we put forth what we believe about God and about good. With what we make, we affect the world. For better or for worse.

To build a good culture, you need a good memory. To be a good artist, you honor the past and learn from those before you. Strangely, this sense of where our culture has been sets us free to chart our course into the future. There is nothing new under the sun except those who are renewing their minds under the Son. When “progress” rejects the past, we all lose.

We all want our work to matter. We all want to create from a deep place, a good place. And this is how we start well: It should be a daily practice to look back with wisdom while looking forward with optimism. That perspective helps us ask the important questions: How can knowing history help me make better contributions tomorrow? Do I use my work for good, or is the outcome avarice, shame or demoralization?

Each of us is creative. Each of our lives becomes a canvas displaying what our idea of good is. But without humility, we make terrible gods. The same talent that can help us shape the world for Christ can be used to carve dark idols. We all live with an 

image of the Chief of the tribe. Sometimes that image is just a slightly bigger effigy of ourselves. We all have gold and shadow—the light and the dark sides of our creativity. We all carry a bit of sensitivity about our work, beliefs, and identity. We desire to create a world that would honor and protect those aspects of us. That desire is often admirable, but our methods can be dangerous.

The creative life seeks to produce or restore the blessings of a truth that benefits more than just ourselves. It seeks to reform our souls and society. It recognizes the evils around us while not allowing them to paralyze us. To do this work well, we must always be doing inventory on our hearts and hands. Why are we making, and what are we making? The creative life honors the Spirit that inspires us while fixing our eyes on a redemptive future in which God has invited us to participate.

Again — we all are creative in some way or another. No matter the work, it can contribute to the good of society. But we still need to ask how we can fully live into our creative calling, how we can find transcending principles that will help mature our creative life.

If I can make it plain, as my dad would say, “All money ain’t good money.” Dare I say it? All work ain’t good work.

Adapted from HE SAW THAT IT WAS GOOD: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair A Broken World © 2021 by Amisho Baraka Lewis. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, on May 18, 2021.

That was the genesis of her red hot career. Leanne and her brother Steve launched Restored by the Fords, which became one of HGTV’s breakout hits. In spring of 2021, the show was repackaged as Home Again, where Ford’s sparse but playful aesthetic has attained a new stratosphere of rabid fans drawn not just to her unique style but also her reasons behind it. 

You know how some celebrity designers know how to design a space that looks almost too good? Like you shouldn’t be allowed to live in it? When Ford works on a home, you can tell she’s creating a place for people to be themselves in — a place for people to entertain guests, read books, cry, pray, dance, fall in love, nurse a broken a heart — all the things we do in our homes. It sounds like a no-brainer but if anybody could do it, Ford wouldn’t be in the demand that she is. 

In a conversation with RELEVANT, Ford opened up about finding her footing in the design space, the surprisingly in-depth benefits of taking care of the space you live in and a few tips on things we could all do to make the places we live just a little more livable. 

As I understand it, you never really planned on a career in renovation and home design. Do you mind recapping how you found yourself in this space? 

I have always decorated my spaces. Down to my dorm rooms and my childhood bedrooms, you name it. So it’s funny that I never thought to do design for a living! But once I finally owned my own house and was able to rip out walls and play… it was ON!  People started calling and asking me to help them with their spaces. And I always say yes to new and exciting opportunities.

Can you remember an early project that really confirmed you were moving in the right direction?

Our first project ever—a one room schoolhouse was in Country Living Magazine. Eight glorious pages of it!! I still remember that team in my house moving cameras and tables around and thinking, “WOW. This is big!”

Once you started doing this, how did you know this was an area you really wanted to commit to? Were other people giving you positive feedback, or did you feel a sense of inner fulfillment? 

I was working in fashion before I was in design. So really there was about a five-year overlap of doing both. Just doing whatever could pay the bills so I could do more design and “hone in” on my craft. I knew it was time to pick one career when everything got too busy. And design totally filled me up! I love creating spaces for families and people to enjoy. 

What do you think is unique about how you design spaces? What sets your vision apart? 

You know, there’s nothing new under the sun. So once you realize what you’re doing is lovely but not totally new — you can relax and just enjoy the process. I think, if anything, what sets me and my designs apart is the casual joy of it. Design isn’t precious. It’s art. It’s meant to be fun and joyful. It’s the joy of creation! 

Obviously, you get a lot of creative fulfillment out of doing this. But how do you feel like the work you do impacts the people who live in these spaces? How does having a well designed home shape the mood, outlook or headspace of the people who live in it? 

When you love your home it helps your mood, and when you’re happier you’re kinder to those around you. It’s a pretty simple formula. The more people that love and are proud of their space the better. And it can be as easy as making your bed, or maybe some paint, or maybe some thrifting! It doesn’t have to involve money, just an open mind and some care. 

In your opinion, what are some simple, inexpensive things most people can do to make their living spaces more beautiful without calling in an expert?

Ha! See above. Play with your furniture placement! Move things around the room to see how they feel! Paint, paint, paint! I love using white paint to make a room feel fresh. And purge! Get rid of anything you don’t love. It’s just taking up space. 

Beyond just seeing your awesome work and your art, what do you hope your fans take away from following your career? What do you hope your impact is? 

I love that question — I hope people know to follow their North Star — that you’re never too old, or too uneducated, or too anything to NOT follow your dreams. God puts something on your heart for a reason. Listen and pursue it joyfully and wholeheartedly! Don’t be afraid to fail. You will! Who cares? Get up and go again. You got this. 

You’re doing some great work with World Vision. Can you tell us a little about your involvement with them and why it matters to you? 

I love World Vision! My family sponsored kids growing up and I have sponsored kids there since I got my very first paycheck. I’m thankful to be able to help in some way. And I’m thankful there are people like the team at World Vision that I trust to use our money wisely and for the better good of the planet and its people. 

Editor’s Note: A version of this article ran in Issue 108 of RELEVANT Magazine.

Ever since the pilgrims sat down with Indians at the first Thanksgiving, kicking off the Great “Actually, We’re Not Indians, We’re Native Americans Fight of 1621,” our nation has kept alive a great tradition of ruining an otherwise great meal with some of the ugliest and stupidest debates the English language is capable of producing.

Of course, not all traditions are worth keeping alive, and some should get a turkey baster through the heart. So, if you’re interested in burying one of the lamest national holiday traditions this season, enjoying your meal and having some actually pleasant, or at least generally not-terrible, conversations around the table, read on. Here are your best bets for actualizing peace on Earth and goodwill toward men in your holiday season.

Start the Day Off Right

The easiest way to clash with your uncle who thinks God told him to donate $10,000 to buy some televangelist a jet or the cousin who seems to have invested his parents’ life savings in Hot Topic apparel is to just show up for dinner and start eating. When the only context for your relationship is “let’s just get through this,” you’re going to butt heads.

As long as your most contrarian family members aren’t actively verbally abusive, it’s worth trying to engage them before the turkey’s carved. This doesn’t have to be a long, heartfelt conversation, in case you’re worried your kid brother is just going to start bringing up bands you’ve never heard of with names like “Nightmares of Fallen Empires.” There’s no harm in bringing a good game, a soccer ball or even a couple episodes of a solid TV show to get things off on the right foot. You’re establishing fresh context for a relationship based on something other than wrestling over the same turkey leg or debating whether or not Bernie Sanders would have won. A more solid, inoffensive foundation at the outset is going to save you a lot of time and energy in the future when you’re trying to steer a conversation away from dicier topics. You’ll actually have something to talk about that doesn’t involve violently opposed opinions.

Ask a Lot of Questions

If you get stuck next to your dad’s stepsister and her dinner-long monologue about how much healing she’s found through energy crystals, it’s only because you let the conversation get away from you. When talking to relatives who are prone to conflict, pre-empt some of the potential hostility by asking them questions about safe, mutually enjoyable topics. Are politics going to be thorny? Talk about sports. Think sports might lead to some contentious conversations about Colin Kaepernick? Talk about your favorite Christopher Nolan movies. Everyone has a favorite Christopher Nolan movie. If all else fails, just ask about their favorite moments of the year or a favorite holiday memory.

This serves a double purpose. The first and most obvious is to keep your talk away from anything that might end with you wanting to press your head into the gravy bowl until you pass out. But more important, you’re learning things about your family that will reveal more about who they are as a person and not just a debate partner. As you probably know from Facebook, it’s easy to lash out at someone else’s opinions when you don’t really know them. The more you grow to see them as an actual three-dimensional human being, the easier it will be to engage them on contentious issues without things blowing up in your face.

Be Ready to Redirect

With family, the natural pull of conversation can be toward the contentious. There’s no scientific explanation for why this is the case, but scientists know it’s true just as well as the rest of us. In fact, they fight about it with their families over the holidays. That’s why your mom keeps asking when you’re finally going to settle down and give her some grandkids (You’re 19 and single.). It’s also why your dad brings up some study he read on a flyer he found on the street about how the moon landing is a hoax perpetuated by the New World Order.

That’s why you have to be ready to redirect. As good as it might feel to clap back with some withering snark, (“Maybe I’d have some kids by now if Jason hadn’t dumped me after Dad threatened him with a shotgun last Thanksgiving, Mom.”) it’ll be better for all involved if you try to steer your chat back to calmer waters.

This will require some sharp improvisation on your part. No matter how good your intentions, suddenly changing the subject can look less like peacemaking and more like a seizure if done poorly. Remember, you’re not necessarily trying to evade certain topics, you’re just trying to keep certain topics from becoming a source of needless conflict.

Someone wants to talk politics? Take the conversation to local elections, where opinions can often be less feisty. Someone wants to bring up their conspiracy theory about the globalist origins of the climate change theory? Talk about the weather. The more peaceable members of your family will be grateful for subtle segues that keep the dinner table calm and provide opportunities for everyone to engage.

Know When to Stand Your Ground

There are times, of course, when redirection isn’t an option. Some opinions go beyond aggravating or argumentative, and right into being offensive. At times like this, there is some value in kindly but firmly offering real correction and rebuttal.

There’s no hard and fast rule for when this is but if you hear a family member or someone at the table say something you think might be worth calling them out over, you could try asking  yourself these questions:

1. Does this really need to be called out?
Is this an opinion that just bugs you, or is it really causing harm? You might disagree with Uncle Mike’s negative assessment of the new Taylor Swift album but it’s probably not worth throwing dinner plates over unless you are Taylor Swift, in which case, thanks for reading. However, if Uncle Mike thinks the new Tay Tay album is bad because women are getting too uppity these days and really need to lay off all the talk about equality, that opinion could very well be doing damage to communities, families and even Uncle Mike’s own soul.

2. Does this need to be called out now?
Just because something should be corrected doesn’t mean it should be corrected immediately. Christmas dinner is a special time when the whole family gets together—for a lot of people it’s the only time they get with their extended family all year long. This may or may not be a huge deal to you, but it could mean a whole lot more to your parents or grandparents. That’s why it’s worth asking if addressing whatever you’re considering addressing is really worth doing on the spot. Is this something that should perhaps be handled discreetly? If so, then follow through and actually have the conversation later—or take the passive-aggressive approach and post about it on Facebook so the family member definitely will see it later.

3. Does this need to be called out by me?
This is a tricky one, because social media has taught us all to speak our minds at all times, about all things, to anyone who happens to be in earshot. That’s fine when you’re tweeting about how much you hate Mondays, but when it comes to correcting your cousin’s boyfriend’s opinions about “fake news,” it’s a little dicier.

Consider the context of your relationship with the person you’re talking to, and how it might be perceived. Does your relationship have a foundation that will help guarantee you’ll be heard? Is there already too much hostility between you two for your point to really get across? Consider whether or not you’re the right person to address what’s going on and if not, consider the possibility that you’re just not the right person for this particular fight. That said, there are some opinions that are just going to have to be called out, no matter who you are. Displays of blatant racism, bigotry and offensive slurs are in everyone’s wheelhouse.

Know When to Just Be Quiet

Unfortunately, sometimes you can follow all of this advice to the letter, and things will still go south around the dinner table. Part of having a family—part of having a life, for that matter—is unavoidable conflict.

Jesus said, “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and He said it to a group of people who were no less prone to conflict than we are. But being a peacemaker—someone who actually makes peace—can look like a lot of different things. Usually, it takes action on your part—thoughtful, loving communication to dispel needless anger and create some lasting calm in its place. But sometimes it might look like standing down, swallowing your pride and letting something go.

After all, you’ll have more time to eat if you’re not shouting.

Chad Veach is adamantly a people person. As pastor of Zoe Church in Los Angeles, he sort of has to be interested in the thousands of people who listen to his quarantine-era sermons online. But Veach also believes in a bigger definition of “people person” — one that isn’t defined by whether or not you’re an extrovert, an influencer or a natural in the spotlight. God is into people. So it stands to reason that we should also be into people. What that means looks a little different for everyone but, according to Veach, it will look like something. 

We live in an age of fearing others. Some of these fears — like, say, exercising caution about catching or transmitting a potentially deadly disease — are understandable. Others — like, say, mistrusting someone because of their nation of origin or the color of their skin — are not. But in all cases, the need for everyone to be a People Person remains as vital as ever. Veach has some ideas about how we can do a better job at it. 

Your book Help! I Work with People: Getting Good at Influence, Leadership, and People Skills isn’t exactly the sort of thing I’d expect a pastor to write about. 

I grew up with two parents that have unbelievable people skills. My father is an introvert, kind of a type B personality. My mother is an ultra type A, kind of loud, flamboyant personality. But both of them are uniquely gifted with people. My dad had a church of maybe 500-600 people. Our house was just always filled with people in our church, who were plumbers, and musicians, and other pastors visiting.

I just watched how my parents served people. The reason why I didn’t want to go into ministry was because I saw how much they invested into others. I ran from the call, not because I was, “I don’t love God.” I was just, “That seems like a lot of work.” Because I just watched my parents serve people. My favorite subject and my favorite thing about life is people, so let’s write about the subject of how to work well with others. 

Is a People Person born or made? 

The reality is I love this Enneagram era that we’re in, right? Everyone is uniquely gifted and graced by God. We believe that. When it comes to leadership, I believe leaders are made. My mom and my dad are a great example, to go back to them. Both of them are uniquely fantastic leaders, and couldn’t be more opposite as far as personality.

Leadership is never limited to personality. Leadership is the ability to get people to buy into what you’re trying to do. Leadership, at its core, is influence.

I know people that have a very quiet personality with massive influence. Look at some of the greatest artists and musicians, these are all very introverted people. It doesn’t have to be someone that’s loud, or someone that’s gifted as an orator, even. It has to do with the definition of influence. Can you influence others to get them to go to where you’re trying to take them?

Where people can go wrong on something like this, I think, is that they don’t necessarily know what influence they’re trying to sell. 

You’ve got to know your why. The reason why that is so hard is because if you are striving to be in competition with somebody else, you’re never going to win. You’ve got to define the mark. What is success? What are you going after? And the better you can do that, the easier life will be. The hardest part about leadership is not leading others, the hardest part about leadership is leading yourself.

And getting healthy, getting secure, working with your childhood trauma or your issues of defense mechanisms and insecurities that we all have. All of us are wounded. All of us are broken. So how do I work through those things so I can serve others? Because that’s what leadership is about. Leadership is about improving and bettering others more than trying to create a fierce loyalty to myself. I think it’s funny, anybody that wants loyalty, never gets loyalty. But anybody that’s always willing to be fiercely loyal to others, it’s a boomerang effect. It always comes back to that. I think that’s why it’s always the hardest person to lead is yourself, because you’re beating down your motives and your intentions.

We have a very culturally defined idea of what a people person looks like. They’re really gregarious, loud and the life of the party. But in gospel terms, a people person can be quieter. That doesn’t mean that they don’t love their neighbor any less. 

I just think God uses every type of person to love His people. Listen, the reason why I wrote this book is what God is passionate about most, I want to be passionate about most.

God is so passionate about people that He sent His one and only son for people. Not for a church. He’s using His son to build a church, but He’s obsessed with humanity. So the origin of this book is really to go, “Hey guys, you realize what God loves the most, right? It’s humans.” I just don’t think God’s going, “Okay, all you guys that are quiet over there — back of the line, I’m only using the loud ones.” That’s not God. 

It goes back to a gospel issue. That God will, even if I’m introverted, even if I have social anxiety, at least in my heart, give me a love for others. Maybe I express that through technology, through email, maybe I express that in other different ways, but at the core of who I am, I love people. It goes back to the gospel.

Where do you feel like people tend to go wrong in loving other people well?

I always think we get ourselves in trouble if I am the main source of everything. I think shared equity, shared ownership, that’s what Church is all about. God says, “Hey, I’m going to give you apostles and prophets and evangelists and pastors and teachers. I’m going to give you all this so you realize that there are no superheroes.” These offices are only to build other people up to go do the great stuff. That’s just the way God works. I think we get ourselves in trouble when we try to be heroes. 

Influence looks like stepping down, being a servant, raising other people up. That’s very counterintuitive, and I think even once you believe it, it can be really hard to live it out.

I think about me all day long. I’m really about me at the end of the day. And I’ve got to get that out of me. I think you need some daily things in your life that just help you go, “Oh yeah, that’s right. It’s not about me.” Because if not, you just kind of drift into Me-vile.

It takes a long time. Because ultimately you’re leading yourself to the best version of yourself. What is the best version of yourself? The best version of yourself will always be the servant version of yourself. It might sound cliché, but I really believe the gateway into greatness is through the servant’s gates. Why do we admire Martin Luther King Jr. or Mother Teresa or Billy Graham, these household names? Because they served their generation the greatest. 

And they were all very different kinds of people. 

The Apostle Paul says “I become all things to all people.” And the truth within that is you can’t win people that don’t like you. Some people look at me and they go, “I hate the way that guy dresses. I hate the way that guy preaches. I hate the way he talks. He’s too loud. He’s too this, that.” But you know what? There’s some people that go, “I love the way he preaches. I love the way he dresses.” And so people I can’t reach, you can. But we’ll never reach them if our heart doesn’t love people.

But I definitely didn’t set out to go against the system when I created IF:Gathering, a nonprofit for women who desire to equip and unleash our lives for the glory of God and the good of people.

It began as more of a hunch than a vision.

I entered the business of Christian publishing a few years before the birth of IF. But I soon found my faith felt threatened by the business and structure of it all. All the while, a quiet road off in the distance beckoned. But it would require leaving behind the kind of institutions that seemed to hold up most things that had ever succeeded.

Sometimes, following God’s call means leaving behind established paths. Jesus certainly traveled the wilderness road and pursued people while He was here. He left the easy path and went after all kinds of people, because all people need Him.

While the Truth of God and His Word never changes, cultures do. The Spirit and work of God continues to move in fresh ways through new methods. This is exactly what Paul meant when he said, “I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” (1 Corinthians 9:22).

God had to nearly force me to the wild, new path He had for IF. But now, I’m compelled to call as many of you as possible to the roads less traveled, the places we can find those who may have rejected the traditional institutions of Christianity.

So if you desire to forge a new path—whether in the form of a business, nonprofit, ministry or whatever else, here are a few tips:

1. Expect resistance. Actually more like upheaval. From the outside, IF may look like it’s been an easy journey. But behind the scenes, in one year we have endured more conflict and difficult conversations than one should have in a lifetime.

2. Embrace the fear. Quit looking for footprints to follow. At first, it is paralyzing to head into the wild. Learn to differentiate between the anxiety you feel when you are doing the wrong thing and the good butterflies you feel when you are braving new territory.

3. Give up on maps. There is not a right way to pioneer new territory. It is a step-by-step journey, completely dependent on God, who usually only gives you the next step. I still crave a map and a guide, but I am learning to lean into the Spirit and God’s Word when I feel alone and lost, and He has yet to forsake me. But do seek the counsel of those pioneers who have gone before. Their bravery can inspire the strength you need.

4. Don’t make a god out of being a rebel. Nothing stays new. As soon as you think you are cutting a new path and people follow, the paving crew comes behind and turns your little path into a six-lane highway. Let following Jesus be your goal, not being a contrarian. There is nothing special about wilderness paths in themselves. It’s the enjoyment of the God you love and the people who meet Jesus that makes it all mean something. Don’t lose sight of the point.

For all of us striking out, our greatest temptation will be to conform and choose an easier path, rather than live in the unknowns of a life without maps and plans. My prayer is that God’s voice is the only one we hear whatever path we find ourselves on.

For a good part of the last 12 years that I have been a follower of Christ, I have struggled to feel peace about what being a “Christian” is supposed to look like. Since I was an adult when I accepted the Lord, I felt like I had a lot to catch up on.

I started to have conversations with friends—quietly and nervously at first—about whether they ever wrestled with the sense that when it came to living out their faith, they weren’t sure they were “doing it right.” But about a year and a half ago, the Lord really started to challenge me in the way I was approaching my faith. He revealed a perspective I hadn’t ever been able to verbalize for myself, and it changed the entire way I now live out my faith.

In essence, I realized that I wasn’t really “following” God or “walking with Him” so much as I was chasing Him.

When you are chasing the object of your affection, there is a keen sense of the possibility that you might not ever reach it. More than that, when we see ourselves as the pursuers instead of the pursued, we live out of the desperation that comes from feeling that it’s our effort that leads to relationship.

The problem is, I think many people are chasing God without even realizing it, and I want to challenge believers to dig into basic questions about their view of who God is—who I am in light of Him? What are my “responsibilities” as a Christian?—and some much more difficult questions, as well: What if I sometimes doubt this is real? Does that mean I’ve missed the boat on how to live out my faith well?

The bottom line is this: When we try to fill the gaps of our faith with religion, we are chasing God. We place upon ourselves and others more rules, more stacks of what’s required and the driving realization that we might never experience Him the way we long to.

It’s easy to measure with the wrong ruler and feel you’ve come up short, and it’s equally easy to spend our efforts pursuing things the Lord hasn’t asked us to pursue.

If you’ve ever created false expectations from the Lord or if you’ve lived with a nagging sense of, “Will I ever really catch up with Him?” I have wonderful news: You, friend, were never meant to chase God. He pursues you relentlessly, offers you everything and declares you His in every sense of the word.

And yet, a good portion of us insist on chasing despite the truth. We say to ourselves,”How could a God so good come for me? How could He love me? There must be something I can do to make it feel more fair.”

But that isn’t the way He designed it, and the more of our days we spend searching, the fewer we will have at the end of it all to say we genuinely walked with Him.

The goal is, and has always been, true communion with a God who desires it, not a fumbling, desperate, disappointing attempt to “do the right thing” and hope it leads to at least a glimpse of Him.

Following someone indicates that you identify them as being ahead of you and you have committed to stay on the path being carved in front of you. On the other hand, chasing after someone leaves you out of breath, searching every chance you get for a sign that you’re heading toward the goal.

Following instead of chasing is simple, but not easy. So what do you say? Are you ready to stop chasing God?

Unconcerned about what others might think, I logged reflections, took note of new dreams that began to emerge. Second, I was sleeping better than ever. My full night’s sleep routine kicked back in almost immediately. I stopped scrolling through my social media apps before bed, so my body and brain were better prepared for sleep. If I woke for a moment in the middle of the night, I refrained from checking my phone, knowing it might keep me awake.

Third, I pursued learning again. Every choice to peruse social media was a choice not to do something productive with my time, and in that extra time garnered by fasting from it, I read more books, and listened to more podcasts and talks. Years of consuming the media, opinions and experiences of others had created a deficit. Now, without all those inputs, my brain was hungry for growth.

Far too many of us race through life full throttle from photo to photo, achievement to achievement. No wonder we are stressed!

A month into this experiment, this rest from social media, I was driving home at sunset through the rolling hills of Franklin, Tennessee, where we had moved from New York. My eyes welled up at the beauty. Normally, I would have pulled over to the side of the road and angled for the perfect shot to share on Instagram. Even before I reached for my phone, I realized I didn’t have it with me—and I didn’t care.

I drove on, reflecting on this change of heart, mind and soul for a few more minutes. That’s when God reminded me of the truth I needed to hear: You are worthy to receive something beautiful, and you don’t have to share it. That’s when I pulled over to the side of that country road. I stared across the amber sky and started to ponder, Why do I feel so compelled to share everything? Whose validation am I seeking?

Somewhere along the way, I’d decided that anything I did just for me felt indulgent, and I didn’t believe I was worthy of indulgence. What began as a break from the constant churn of social media became a fundamental lesson in worthiness. I came to see that my worth is not found in approval “out there.” It is found in the loving gifts God gives to me, in the intimate invitation of a sunset.

Far too many of us race through life full throttle from photo to photo, achievement to achievement. No wonder we are anxious and stressed!

Resting from technology slows us down, makes space for us to examine our blind spots and gives us greater capacity to be present to the moment right in front of us.

At least, it did for me.

For the most part, we know this. Nobody expects to be in six-pack summer shape without a healthy diet and rigorous workout routine. And more and more people are waking up to the fact that getting into a mentally and emotionally healthy place means finding a counselor who has the resources to help you sort through your personal issues. Even solid financial health takes some real work: getting a budget, sorting through your expenses and making some changes.

But for some reason, people forget the importance of work when it comes to spiritual health. There is a popular idea in the American mindset that being spiritually healthy just means doing whatever comes naturally, along with some vaguely good intentions sprinkled on top, as if the key to lowering your cholesterol was just eating whatever you want.

Now, just like with mental or physical health, it’s important not to shame anyone here. But if you’re finding your spiritual life is in a rut and can’t quite figure out why your connection with God isn’t where you want it to be, it’s worth asking: What are you doing to improve it?

The Bible and several millennia of church history have plenty of suggestions for how to get into spiritual shape. Unfortunately, a lot of these practices have fallen out of fashion. Sometimes because they’re weird. Sometimes because they’re hard. Often because they’re both.

“I do feel like a lot of this is telling people stuff they already know,” says Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary. “If you want to know Jesus, then you have to read the Bible, go to church and pray. You knew that as a 3-year-old.”

Warren thinks it’s time for a return to older “unsexy” spiritual practices precisely because they’ve been around for so long. They’re tested.

“The Christian life is thousands of years old,” she says. “We’re not going to discover a new product that’s going to take it to a new level.”

Prayer

Let’s start with an easier one: daily prayer. Based on research, it’s fairly likely you’re already praying with some regularity. According to Pew Research, about 39% of millennials say they pray daily, and that number jumps up to about 61% if you’re talking about black millennials. So if you’re among them, congratulations, you’re already taking good care of your spiritual health. And if you’re not, don’t worry: It’s not too hard to implement it into your daily routine.

Praying daily looks different for different people, but one thing it probably doesn’t look like if you want to be serious is “praying on the go.” Yes, God is always there and ready to listen, and you should pray anytime you’ve got the inclination, but that’s not really the kind of prayer we’re talking about building into your daily routine here.

This prayer will take a chunk of time out of your day. It’ll involve intentionally setting aside at least a few minutes to really meditate on what’s on your heart, and listen to what God is speaking to you. It’s more than just a laundry list of today’s worries and wants. It’s a conversation in which you’re opening yourself up to God speaking to you.

Set a timer. Start with something manageable, like 10 minutes. If you find yourself getting easily distracted, get a notebook and write your prayers down. After a while, try upping the time in small increments. Like any good discipline, it’ll be difficult at first, but as you keep doing it, you’ll find it coming easier.

Bible Reading

Chances are, you’ve done this before—or at least tried to. Maybe you committed yourself to reading the entire Bible all the way through. You got through Genesis and Exodus, which are pretty good. Leviticus gets a little dry, but at least it’s interesting. And then Numbers and Deuteronomy just seem to slam the brakes on the entire plot, so you give up and turn on Stranger Things.

That’s understandable. People dedicate their entire lives and academic careers to making sense of the Bible. It’s an old collection of books written in a variety of genres and languages over the course of thousands of years. Nobody should be surprised if it’s not exactly easy reading. People have to take classes to learn to read Shakespeare and Sun Tzu. You can be gentle with yourself when it comes to reading the Bible, too.

Fortunately, there are thousands of easily accessible resources to help you navigate the Bible. Concordances, commentaries, studies and guidebooks abound, and you’ll be amazed at how many of them illuminate the Bible in ways you never thought possible. Even those dusty old passages in Leviticus and Numbers can come to life if you’re willing to put in a little extra work to understand some of the cultural context around them.

The value this will bring to your spiritual life is immense. The Bible spells out the character of God and the divine arc of the Gospel. And it’s a big and dense enough book that even if you feel like you’ve spent your whole life reading it, any reread can still offer new insights.

Find a good book about the Bible and spend about 20 minutes each day with it as supplemental reading to your actual Bible study. You’ll be shocked at how much you learn.

Fasting

Here we go. Fasting is an incredibly common teaching in the Bible. Everyone from David to Esther to Paul to Jesus Himself spent extended periods of time without food. But in today’s culture, fasting is very rarely taught as a spiritual discipline.

Somewhat ironically, fasting has become somewhat in vogue among holistic health nuts. “People are spiritually hungry,” says Warren. “People are questioning some old orthodoxies about the best way to live and what does it mean to be holistic. “

“The problem with a lot of this is that spirituality is so vague that it can’t ask anything of us. It can become another consumer project of something we use to make our life the way we want it.”

So, first, a few details about biblical fasting. It’s never just fasting. It’s a supplemental spiritual practice. The idea is that you abstain from food as a way of clearing space in your life to invest in other spiritual practices, like some of the other ones described in this article.

Second, fasting is often associated with specifically seeking God’s guidance. In Acts, the early Church fasts as a way of seeking God’s will for electing their very first leaders. In the book of Jonah, the entire city of Nineveh fasts while seeking forgiveness from God. In other words, fasting often has a specific goal in mind.

If you decide to fast, make sure to set some reasonable goals. Consider a simple 24-hour fast, to start. Try not to make a big deal about it. Drink plenty of water. And most importantly, spend whatever time you would have spent eating praying, reading the Bible and seeking God’s face.

Church Attendance

This one sounds a little “no duh,” but it’s worth bringing up here for a few reasons. The first one being that going to church looks very different for us in pandemic season, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t do it safely online. And we should. There are few spiritual practices more critically taught in the Bible than being an active part of the Church. The second one being, it’s not a particularly popular practice, even among American Christians. About 58% of white evangelical millennials say they attend church once a week, according to Pew. That number drops to about half among Black Protestants and 32% among mainline Protestants.

You might be a little over church. You might feel like it’s all a little “been there, done that.” After all, can’t just hanging out with friends be church?

Maybe so, but a solid church can provide all kinds of opportunities for spiritual growth you can’t get on your own: resources to serve others in the community. People who are different from you who can mentor or even be mentored by you. Connections to communities in other parts of the city that need your money, time and prayer. The Church is a lot more than just a Sunday morning service. At its best, it’s a transformational community.

Now, many people have valid reasons for being skeptical of going to church. You may have been hurt by a church or church leader in the past. You may have very real stories of wounds you’ve received from the Church, and hesitation about going back is completely understandable.

Just know that there are churches out there who will welcome you, take care of you and champion you. When you’re ready to give it another shot, they’ll be waiting for you.

My favorite song to sing with her was “Here I Am, Lord”: Who will bear My light to them? / I will go Lord, if You lead me.

I didn’t understand the words I was singing. But early on, this song was planted within me. It was a song I would cross paths with again.

Inadequate to Be Used

One of my greatest struggles in life continues to be the feeling of being completely inadequate.

Whether it was playing football at recess in the fourth grade or speaking in front of my communications class in college, I felt inadequate.

In my appearance, gifts, skills and expertise, I’ve always been quite average. Everything I could do, someone else could do much better.

Even in my adult years, I have felt disqualified from being used to do anything important, particularly by God.

In a world filled with billions of people, it’s easy to feel quite average. And when you feel ordinary, average or less skilled, it’s always easier to play things safe, isn’t it? Don’t raise your hand. Don’t step out. Take no chances. Don’t try to be used by God.

To be honest, “safe” is where I wanted to stay.

Why risk failing if you don’t have to? Why take the chance of looking stupid if it’s not required?

Speak the Words

Some years passed by, and on a visit home from college, my mom pulled out the hymnal and we sang “Here I Am, Lord” again.

Who will bear My light to them? / Whom shall I send?

My answer: Someone else.

I wanted to be used by God, but what could He do through me? I wanted to “bear His light,” but I figured I’d probably cause more harm than good. My anxiety level rose just thinking about it. Sitting on that piano bench, a tug-of-war took place within me.

As we sang on, however, I heard my soul speak the words: Here I am, Lord.

It wasn’t much, but I prayed the words and meant them. I was wanting and willing to be used by God.

I still didn’t fully understand what the words meant, and I still felt 100 percent sure God couldn’t use me. But a small part of me was willing to say yes. Something in me couldn’t say no any longer.

Wanting to be used by God, but not sure where to start? Unsure of what to pray? Just let God know. Speak the simple words: Here I am, Lord.

Long-kept dreams

Within each of us, there’s a desire to be used by God. We want to take part in something great, to make a difference for good. We want our lives to matter.

Ask a person, “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” and long-kept dreams will flow out. The person will seem to come alive right before your eyes. It’s like they begin to glow.

Whether it’s a 65-year-old retiree, a young stay-at-home mom or a seemingly successful person at the top of his career, the story is always the same. When I meet someone for coffee, I’m likely to hear a secret aspiration pour out:

“I’ve always wanted to be a school teacher.”

“I’ve always wanted to write a book.”

“My whole life, I’ve wanted to make a difference in the lives of others.”

“I want my life to matter.”

When we think of doing “great things,” we typically picture a story that will make the news or get shared in a book.

But I’m beginning to realize that with God, anything can be a big thing. In the Bible, we see that through an act as simple as opening up our homes for guests, we might be entertaining angels. Sometimes the smallest things make the biggest difference.

What’s the long-kept dream within you? What keeps you up at night in the best way possible?

We Are Inadequate, but God …

A few more years would pass before I sang “Here I Am, Lord” again. I had finished seminary and was being ordained. The church was filled with people. At the very end of the ordination service, of all songs, we sang: “I will go Lord, if You lead me.”

I was overwhelmed by God’s faithfulness. For years He had been preparing me. He wanted to use me.

The truth is that, on our own, we are inadequate. In every way. On our own, we are disqualified from being used by God.

Thankfully, it’s not about who we are. It’s only about who God is. It’s about His gifts. His abilities. His strength. His wisdom. And His potential. Not ours.

Oddly enough, the only time we can’t be used by God is when we think we are adequate.

Again, it’s about God, not us. It’s about trusting Him more than we trust ourselves. God only requires us to be willing, to simply say: Here I am, Lord.

Not once or a few times in life, but daily.

Say Yes and Take a Step

One of the clearest ways I can see that someone is growing in his or her relationship with God is the person’s willingness to say yes to God—to big and small things. And particularly to things that don’t make sense or are out of one’s comfort zone.

Whether it’s seeing a need and filling it, applying for a job, submitting a proposal or telling someone about Jesus; be willing to say: Here I am, Lord.

When you start saying yes to Him and actually take a step, God will begin to do the impossible in and through you. Things that blow you away. Things that will leave you completely speechless.

When you’re willing to say yes — and take action — with the small things, God will give you opportunities to say yes to big things. This is the story of my life.

The best part is that when God does the impossible through average people, we clearly know it’s all God. It’s because of His abilities and not ours. Only He gets the credit. Only He gets the glory.

What is God Preparing You For?

Looking back, I’m amazed by how God continually prepares us for the question, “Whom shall I send?”

When I was a kid, my mom and I volunteered at a local nursing home each Wednesday. She played the music and we both sang for the folks living there. At first, I was terrified by the “old people.” They were excited to see me, but I was scared to death to see them.

But as the people slowly wheeled themselves into the room, Mom would begin playing the piano as I handed out the songbooks. Before long, I loved helping people find the right page so they could sing along.

I didn’t like hospitals or funeral homes. They were depressing and smelled weird. During college, I heard about a flower shop that needed a delivery boy. How hard could it be? I had no idea that most of a flower shop’s deliveries go to hospitals and funeral homes.

Many of the flowers sent to hospital rooms were ordered by loved ones who couldn’t be there in person. Before long, instead of dropping off the flowers and leaving, I often asked the patients how they were doing.

Sometimes I commented on how pretty their flowers were and mentioned that I would be praying for them. Even though this was a small, simple gesture, I left feeling that I had made a difference in people’s day.

Who would have known that years later I would take a job that would require me to be comfortable in nursing homes, hospitals and funeral homes?

With God, all things are big things. He’s constantly at work, shaping and preparing us for the next adventure that will take us to the places we least expect.

And just think: All you have to do is ask.   

“It wasn’t very crazy by your average college student standards,” she says. “But as conservative Christian kids, we felt like complete degenerates.” 

She continued to drink in the years following her graduation. Although she says she has drank to excess “plenty” of times, she was never particularly troubled by her relationship with alcohol. She was like most people she knew. A few glasses of wine here and there after work, maybe a little more on the weekends with friends or Netflix. It didn’t feel at odds with her faith and it wasn’t like she was getting drunk. 

But at some point in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, something clicked. 

“I was taking out the glass recycling and I was almost embarrassed,” she says. “Like, we drank all this?” 

She decided to make some changes. 

She’s not alone. 

Younger generations of Christians who came of age at the Moral Majority’s peak largely rejected the abstinence of their parents, with many Christians incorporating beer, wine and cocktails into their lifestyle without feeling any sort of compromise with their faith. Statistically, that isn’t likely to change any time soon. But what might change is the terms of that relationship, with younger Christians joining a broader movement that seeks to be more mindful of their alcohol consumption. They’re not going cold turkey, but they’re drinking less than they used to. And in doing so, they might be getting a little closer to understanding real biblical teaching around alcohol. 

The Prohibition Party

American Christianity’s relationship with alcohol has always been complicated. In Colonial America, alcohol was a regular part of most people’s diet, since clean water was hard to come by and milk was valuable. But by the 1820s, a broader temperance movement had begun to take hold, with Protestant Ministers urging more moderation in the consumption of hard spirits. The Second Great Awakening had sparked belief in a utopian society, and many Christians considered the eradication of drunkenness a key part of the vision. Groups like Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists took the idea even further, explicitly tying spiritual obedience to physical health, and that included temperance, if not total abstinence. 

During the period leading up to the Civil War, the temperance movement started to overlap with other social causes like the abolition of slavery and women’s sufferage. Advocates started pushing for not only moral reform, but legal action prohibiting the sale of alcohol as well. The movement towards Prohibition had begun and would culminate in 1920, when Congress passed the 18th Amendment, banning the sale of alcohol. 

It’s easy now to look back on Prohibition as the actions of uptight Puritans who simply didn’t want anyone to have any fun but, at the time, “drinking” was very different than we think of it today. Scholars estimate that by the 1890s, Americans were drinking  three times as much alcohol as they were during the 2010s. Alcoholism had become a real epidemic, and was closely tied to domestic violence. Women who were married to alcoholics had little legal recourse and, even if they did manage to secure a divorce for reasons of abuse, they rarely retained custody of their children. Because of this, the push for Prohibition was almost entirely led by women, many of whom felt like they were fighting for their lives. No less an icon than Susan B. Anthony took up the cause. 

Prohibition would be repealed in 1933 with the passing of the 21st Amendment. While employers and educators were able to point to some positive outcomes, those were overshadowed by the economic toll Prohibition took during the Great Depression, costing thousands of jobs and giving rise to illegal bootlegging. 

Alcohol would return to the U.S. But Prohibition’s impact continues to shape the way Americans — and Christians in America in particular — think about drinking today. Many members of the Moral Majority picked up where the Prohibition left off, frowning on drinking. Billy Graham urged Christians to avoid alcohol altogether. So did Jerry Falwell Sr. — publicly, at least. However, the future generations of Christians have come to think of alcohol differently. 

The March Towards Mindfulness

A Pew Study found that 51 percent of American Protestants and 60 percent of American Catholics drink alcohol. White Mainline Protestants (66 percent) are more likely than White Evangelicals (45 percent) and Black Protestants (48 percent) to drink but, for the most part, Christians who abstain do so by choice, not because they think drinking is a sin. Only about 16 percent of Protestant Christians see drinking in moderation as morally wrong.

But drinking in excess is another matter. Binge drinking is rare for most American Christians. The Pew study defined binge drinking as four or more drinks for women and five or more drinks for men in a single sitting. Only 15 percent of Protestants and 17 percent of Catholics binge drink. 

That study was published in 2015 — a long time ago in pandemic  years. In February of 2021, the American Psychological Association found that one in four adults reported drinking more to cope with stress during the pandemic. Researchers are only beginning to understand how COVID might have transformed the way Americans drink, but it’s clear something is afoot. 

In September of 2021, Numerator analyzed data from Insights and TruView and found that both Millennials and members of Gen Z who are over 21 are less likely to purchase alcohol than older generations. About four in 10 of both groups are “mindful” of how much they drink, while three in 10 are “actively limiting their intake.” And the trend appears to be towards more moderation. Berenberg found that Gen Z is drinking around 20 percent less per capita than Millennials were drinking at their age. 

Researchers are just starting to understand why this might be. Some of it can be attributed to the rise of “mindfulness” — a greater focus on self care has led to less interest in getting wasted. There’s also the simple fact that Gen Z lives in a less stable economy, and alcohol costs more for them than it did for older generations at their age. Both Gen Z and Millennials lag far behind older generations did at their age in terms of disposable wealth, and drinking gets expensive. This hasn’t led to a mass rejection of drinking. But it has made drinking more of an indulgence: an occasional treat instead of a normal part of socializing and unwinding. 

In other words, yes, younger generations drink. But they are drinking mindfully. 

Generation One and Done

Mindful drinking can look like a lot of different things. 

For many younger generations, it means the return of a phrase some of their parents used: “social drinking.” Members of Gen Z are more likely to drink as a way to socialize with friends than to relax or unwind at home. Social drinkers may not keep alcohol in the house, preferring to only buy a drink when out at a bar or a restaurant. 

Others are choosing different ways to unwind at home. States that legalized marijuana saw a 12 percent decrease in alcohol sales compared to states where weed remains illegal. It may be that some would simply rather get high than get buzzed. 

And still more haven’t drawn up any strict lines around when they do and don’t drink — they just know they’re paying attention to when and why they drink. 

Jesus’ very first public miracle involved turning water into wine at a wedding. You probably know the broad strokes, but the details are interesting. When Jesus’ mother Mary hears that the wedding party is out of wine, she asks her son to get involved, and he does, albeit reluctantly. “My hour has not yet come,” he tells her in John 2. 

But he relents, and asks the servants to pour water into large, ceremonial jars. When they pour the water back out, it’s been transformed, to the shock of the host. “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink,” he marvels. “But you have saved the best till now.”

This reveals a few things about the party. First, the host had a refined palette. If you’ve ever been around a wine snob friend, you know the type. Sure, it can be a little bourgeois, but it also reveals a certain level of sophistication. This host wasn’t just crushing wine out of the box. He wasn’t partying. He was savoring it. 

And, maybe more importantly, so was Jesus. We’ll never know the mechanics of this miracle, but it’s clear that, for the Son of God, any old wine simply wouldn’t do — even if the evening’s plan called for the wine to be a little downgraded for some of the sloppier guests. Jesus cared about what the guests were going to drink. He didn’t want people to go without wine — not while there was still a party to be had — but he wanted it to be special too. He wanted people to enjoy their drinks. 

We can’t create new, better wine at a party. But maybe there is something to  learn from the kind of wine Jesus served. It was something that could only be appreciated by people who were paying attention to what they were drinking — people who hadn’t drank so much that they wouldn’t miss the quality. 

It’s a testament to mindfulness. 

Well, maybe not a full-blown crisis. But the band has been on an existential journey over the last few years, and it’s all detailed in their new self-titled album.

“I think the pandemic put a lot of things in perspective for a lot of people, and we were no exception,” said lead vocalist Charles.

In a wide-ranging conversation, ARIZONA opens up about their growth as artists, the creative process behind their latest album, and the recurring themes that tie their songs together: change, reflection and the existentialism that emerged during the pandemic.

The band reveals the creative process behind their thought-provoking and introspective songs, while injecting their signature fun, energetic and witty style.

How do you feel like you’ve changed as artists over the years?

Labuguen: I think we changed in the way of letting go. We had such a strong desire to feel like how we felt when we first started. You know, before this we were all producers and songwriters.

ARIZONA was supposed to be our artist project that died after, like, three songs. Thankfully it didn’t, and now we’re here.

I kind of asked myself the other day, ‘OK, now that you’re here, what do you want out of this?’ And I think since the pandemic, we’ve all just come back to wanting to have that same kind of vibe from when we first started.

I think we care a lot about our creativity, and we care a lot that what we put out into the world feels true to us. But at the same time, I think we’ve learned to let go of a lot of things that honestly didn’t even really matter. That’s part of us getting older and fighting our perfectionism, because ultimately that can really just be a path to procrastination.

What was it like creating your new album?

Labuguen: This album is funny in the sense that a lot of the songs were written in different stages. Some of them were written when we were getting off the road in early 2020, and we were trying to finalize the album around then. But then the world shut down, and that opened up an opportunity for us to revisit a lot of songs that we loved but never really found a home for in our previous albums. Or maybe like a song that we loved certain parts of, but couldn’t really break through to getting that feeling that it was finished. We really gave each other space to go down tangents and then come back together in a way that I feel we haven’t really done before.

Charles: We let the process have space. We had more time, too, for better or worse. I think even if we didn’t necessarily have the time, if we weren’t given the time by circumstance, I think we probably would have taken it anyway. I think it was about that time that it was big for us to try those things that we knew we needed to explore, but never really got the chance to because of how busy things were pre-COVID.

And when it comes to the way that we were doing it before COVID, we were just racing ourselves, and that didn’t produce any results. Nobody gets ahead when you’re racing yourself, really. So slowing down and trying to figure out where that space came from was a good process for us moving forward.

Is there a recurring theme or story that connects all the songs together on this new project?

Labuguen: If I had to identify a common thread throughout the album, it would be a life-and-death existentialism. Seriously.

It’s been a long time since we’ve been out and about, releasing music and touring. This has led many people to ask, “Are you guys still around? What are you guys up to?”

The album artwork features us holding gravestones. When we started ARIZONA, we were at the end of one chapter in our lives. We were working as creative contractors for other people, and we were so burnt out from pouring our heart and soul into things that weren’t ours. We thought we would just get desk jobs.

Now, it’s funny to think that some people have forgotten about us. But we’re not dead yet! We’re picking up these gravestones and moving on to use this music to help others.

What’s up with all the existential dread?

Charles: I think the pandemic put a lot of things in perspective for a lot of people, and we were no exception. I mean, we came off the heels of five or six years of living the craziest type of life possible, compared to the lives we had beforehand in some ways. It was a very big change, very opposite from what we’re used to, and six years straight of it. And then all of a sudden, we got another dose of this huge, big shift when COVID hit.

We had to take that time not just to create, but also reflect. You know, we were young guys that knew what we were doing in some ways and didn’t know what we were doing in a million other ways. We didn’t know we’d be learning in a very weird way over the next six years that we didn’t pick, it picked us.

I think you have a moment, like around when I turned 30, where you kind of wake up and you’re like, “How am I still here?” You know what I mean? You just kind of recollect everything that’s happened and you’re like, “How did I make it out of that?”

And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not like you want something to end up being broken or destroyed, but you’re just a little shocked that you’ve taken so little inventory of it over the years, the same way that we do with our own individual lives sometimes.

That creation of this album, I think, reflects that in many weird and maybe non-contextual ways.

What was the inspiration behind “Pray to God”?

Labuguen: In a weird way, we were writing this song about leaving Los Angeles. We were like, “Let’s air out all of our stuff about LA.”

I remember seeing the “Jesus Saves” sign downtown near the Ace Hotel. I grew up in a church, so that really resonated with me.

Personally, I’ve also gone through a bit of deconstruction, reconstruction and honing in on my own faith. There’s a little bit of a sense for me of killing the old self, refreshing and becoming something different.

I think that also rang true for us in an industry way. When you’re in Los Angeles, you’re constantly bombarded with the idea of success and fame. It’s easy to get caught up in that and lose sight of who you really are.

We came back to the East Coast, where things feel more genuine. We caught ourselves getting caught up in the LA lifestyle, and we had to take a step back and say, “This isn’t who we really want to be.”

I think that’s the message of the song. It’s about letting go of the old self and becoming the person you were always meant to be.

“I can’t say no to these doors because they may not be there next time,” the worship singer said.

Whether it’s joining TAYA, Tasha Cobbs Leonard and Natalie Grant for a huge female-led worship tour called “It’s Time,” or writing a new worship song after hearing a powerful sermon, Raine is always prayerfully considering her next steps. And she’s been taking some pretty exciting steps lately.

From performing on the Grammy stage to selling out arenas with Maverick City Music, to releasing her new solo album, Raine is learning to say yes to the opportunities in front of her. And she wants to encourage others to do the same.

Raine spoke with RELEVANT about wanting to help future women in the worship industry, and how she hopes her new album, Cover the Earth, inspires listeners to open their hearts to God in new ways.

What advice do you have for younger female worship leaders?

I would say keep going. Be the best worship leader, singer, artist, guitarist, drummer, or whatever it is, because there are so many spaces to lead worship in this industry. Just be the best that you can be. Do it with your whole heart toward the Lord, and I believe that the Lord will place you exactly where you need to be.

It’s interesting. I was having a conversation with someone about this. I am so blessed. I have been on stages that many worship leaders, even big artists, have never been on. For a second, I almost took it for granted. I was like, wow, God did this. But then I remembered that most women don’t get this opportunity. This is not something that is often afforded to women.

I don’t have the luxury of passing on a tour like “It’s Time” or passing on an opportunity to do something like this again to make space for other women. I can’t wait for that space to be made for me; I have to make it. Since I’ve gotten this opportunity, I’ve been blessed like this. So, okay, how can I make this opportunity for other women?

So, I would say don’t get discouraged. Keep going after the dreams that the Lord has for you. Be prayerful, because there are women in some of these spaces who are now saying, ‘How can I open the door for other women? How can I open the door for other people?’

Many industries in the world are male-dominated. But we have an opportunity to come in and not to shrink back from those spaces, but to go, ‘Okay, how can I add to this? How can I be who God has called me to be in this area for His glory?’ And shine my light so that younger girls see it and go, ‘Okay, I can do that.’

Obviously, I try not to be bitter about where I am. But I can sometimes make me forget that there are other women that don’t have these opportunities.

So now I’m starting to go, ‘Okay, how do I look at this objectively? How do I not complain and be miserable and bitter in it, but also create opportunities for other people?’

I had to change my perspective. When I was looking at it for what it was, I could get disgruntled. I don’t want to do what I love unhappily. I want to serve the Lord with gladness and open spaces for other people to serve Him with gladness.

What was the inspiration behind your new solo album?

This project is really about the glory of God. It’s all for Him, all to Him, all about Him. But in different lights, it’s like we get to see God’s glory in a different light, a different facet of who He is.

It starts off with a song called “Cover the Earth.” The idea behind that is a scripture where Jesus says to the disciples, “Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Every time I read that scripture, I’m just blown away by it. But as I continued to talk to the Lord about it, I realized He was saying, “Be the best that you can be. Shine your light, do it as brightly as you can. Do it so much so that people would see it and go, ‘Man, that can’t be her. That has to be God.’”

So that’s literally how I try to live my life. I’m like, “Okay, Lord, I want to put my heart, my soul, my skill, my talent, but also my obedience into my life so that light can shine and that people would go, ‘Wow, it can’t be her, it has to be God.’”

Where did the inspiration for the songs come from?

I think sometimes we, as artists, get in the way of His story. I don’t want my story to get in the way of God’s story. I want to show who He is: His work, His power, His move in my life. So the whole album is all about that. It’s a worship project, and I think it’s beautiful. There are some really personal songs on there that I would use in my prayer closet, just talking to Jesus.

The first single is called “One Name, Jesus.” And at the end of the song, I’m literally shouting “Jesus” for 10 minutes. Just calling on His name. There’s just so much power in who He is. There’s a song on the album called “Costly,” and it’s basically saying, “Let my worship be costly. Let everything that I do be for You, not for myself.”

My favorite song is called “Drink Offering.” It literally says, “Let my life be a drink offering for You only, ever pouring. May my life speak of Your glory, pour it out, pour it out.” And I just want to pour it out for You. It’s about surrender and all the things.

“We Agree With Heaven” has also become a bit of an anthem. What’s the story behind it?

I went to my friend Tim’s church to minister. And when I was there, they were singing that chorus. He had written that chorus and they just had, “We agree with heaven. Oh, heaven.” They kept singing it over and over and it just hit me. And I told him afterwards I had to write something with that, and he was like, “Naomi, that’s a song the Lord gave me. Do whatever you need to do with it.”

So as I was listening to it more, I brought it to one of my co-writers and said we have to figure something out. And sometimes in those moments, I’m just praying to the Holy Spirit. I’m like, “Holy Spirit, what do you want to do with this? Like, what is this about?”

Eventually, I realized it was about prayer. It was about coming into alignment with the way God wants us to live and the way that he’s prescribed for us to do things. And I realized, what happened was all of the things that I see on social media and everybody’s opinions online was exposing to me how much Christians — I’m talking actual believers — don’t know about what a godly life looks like.

And I’m not talking about gray areas. I think sometimes we focus on drinking and smoking and stuff like that, right? But there’s a bigger thing here.

So a lot of this song came from realizing, “Oh, You’ve called us to live a life where we lay ourselves down.”

And I’m talking about stuff like how we’ve got Christians that say things like, “Well, if you’ve got a problem with me and I don’t know about it, then we don’t got a problem.”

In my Bible, it says if your brother has an ‘ought’ against you, you go to him and ask what’s wrong. That’s if he has an ‘ought’ against you. Because we only read the part that says, if you have an ‘ought’ against somebody you go to them. We don’t keep on reading, but this is how Jesus is calling us to live. It’s about character and kindness.

But I don’t see us operating in that. And I get concerned, so I want to ask the Lord, “How can I put my gifts, my skills, what I have and who I am to contribute to the solution? Oh, I’m gonna write a song.”

So there’s a line that says, “Counting up the cost of picking up our crosses we love not our lives even unto death,” because nobody’s singing that. We don’t want to sing that we don’t want to die, but that’s the call. That’s what we’ve been called to do, to crucify our flesh and to carry our crosses.

Does AI have a role in our congregations? Can it possibly enhance our faith experiences moving forward?

Technological advancements are happening, rapdily, whether we like it or not. And the Church doesn’t have the luxury of waiting to join the conversation.

Navigating the Disruption

Faith and technology have not always been viewed as harmonious companions. Some may see AI as a threat to traditional religious practices, raising concerns about the erosion of human connection, the dilution of spirituality, or even the potential for moral dilemmas.

However, rather than shying away from these tensions, the Church has an opportunity to engage in thoughtful dialogue and discern how AI can align with its core teachings.

As we explore the intersection of faith and technology, it becomes crucial to understand how AI can enhance rather than replace the human experience, allowing the Church to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing world.

While AI may not change the core tenets of faith, it can influence how people perceive and engage with their beliefs.

“ChatGPT gave people an opportunity to interact directly with an AI system, and it led to this interesting anthropomorphizing of technology,” said Dr. Derek Schuurman, professor of computer science at Calvin University.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched the AI conversation into the mainstream earlier this year.  Since then, the AI race has escalated to a speed we’ve never seen before. At the time of publication, more than 1,000 AI-powered apps were being launched each week, offering every possible tool you can imagine and disrupting virtually every industry. And the Church is no exception.

“The Christian faith comes with a very important notion of what it means to be human,” Schuurman said. “Then following that, the call to use technology in a way that shows love to God and our neighbors. So how do we actualize and operationalize that with some of these tools?

“In our churches, we’re going to need to talk about discernment, about spiritual formation and nudges from these sorts of things,” he continued. “Then in the wider public square, we have to join the dialogue to talk about common good. Like, how do we build tools for the common good and what does that look like?”

Schuurman sees AI as an extension of creation, a new aspect worth exploring.

“The question is, how are we going to use these tools and how are we going to apply them in ways that lead more to flourishing?” Schuurman asked. “Are we going to direct it towards weaponizing it for propaganda or misinformation, or are we going to harness it for helping others?”

With AI, society has the ability to achieve more than we ever thought was possible. However, there are obvious limitations to what AI can’t do. While some developers are working on creating human-like AI tools, many technological ethicists are pushing back on this so that the rest of humanity can process what’s best for the world.

“At the end of the day, a machine is completely incapable of showing empathy,” Schuurman said. “So this worry that AI will replace pastors or therapists or friends is a bit unmerited. It may be able to mimic those emotions for a while, but eventually, we need a real human response. We have to ensure we’re not building machines that pretend to substitute for jobs where people — humans — are uniquely qualified.”

Debunking Some Misconceptions

Brian Paige, vice president for IT at Calvin University, explains that AI didn’t just pop up overnight. Rather, it’s something that’s been a long time coming.

“We’ve used AI for years,” he said. “It’s in our phones, our search engines, our Amazon checkouts. When we think about AI, we have to remember it’s not some computer overlord. It’s simply a technological tool.”

Paige, of course, understands individuals’ fears about the future of AI, but he’s not nervous about the real future of AI advancement.

AI aims to amplify human capabilities and automate mundane tasks, he explains. Often, it involves the processing of data to learn, problem-solve, predict trends, answer questions and provide recommendations based on analyzed data.

“When it comes to AI, or any technology, I think it’s good to be discerning, but we don’t have to be scared,” Paige said. “I think there’s a lot of media hype at this point that’s playing into fear. But for every dark side of technology, there’s a lot of positives, too.”

This doesn’t mean we should dismiss any worries, Paige said. Rather, it should cause us to question why we’re afraid, or exactly what we are afraid of.

Paige said he regularly asks himself, “If God is in control and God is not fearful of this, what is it? What is causing this fear? Is it because somehow I’m not in the right relationship with God or am I not in the right relationship with technology?”

Paige points out that at one point in our society, we were scared about how phones, televisions, the Internet and more would change our world for the worse. And while each advancement in technology can have its drawbacks, overall, it’s brought the world to a more intelligent, higher functioning place.

He also looks to the story of Babel as a reminder that God is in control of technology, even when it seems like it has the power to take over our world.

“Babel was a place where there was this human construction of a system, a place where humans tried to use technology to be like God,” Paige said. “And God humbled humanity — but it wasn’t because technology was a threat. It was how humanity was using it. And if we’re not careful, we can turn AI into an idol that will require God to humble us.”

As Christians, we should think deeply about the ethical boundaries of AI and consider its impact on human dignity and work. By actively participating in the conversation, we can ensure that AI is developed and deployed responsibly.

Embracing AI in the Church

As the Church integrates AI into its practices, it must maintain a human-centered approach, upholding ethical considerations and preserving the values that underpin its teachings. This entails an ongoing evaluation of how AI aligns with principles such as empathy, inclusivity and the dignity of every individual.

The Church must actively participate in shaping AI’s development, advocating for fairness, transparency and accountability in its algorithms and systems. By actively engaging with AI, Christians can help influence the technology’s trajectory, ensuring it aligns with its mission to foster love, justice and spiritual growth.

AI tools can offer new avenues for reaching people with the message of Christ and connecting them to faith communities.

Aaron Senneff, the chief technology officer of Pushpay, explores some practical ways in which AI can enhance the spread of the Gospel and the health of the Church:

1. Personalized Outreach

AI-powered chatbots can be developed to provide personalized outreach and engagement with individuals seeking answers about faith. These chatbots can answer questions, offer guidance, and connect individuals with local churches or faith communities. By leveraging AI, the Church can extend its reach and provide support to those in need, regardless of geographical limitations.

“AI won’t replace pastors or members of the Church,” Senneff said. “But they can help organize communication efforts to ensure that people don’t slip through the cracks. Church is all about connection, and AI has the ability to make connecting easier than ever.”

2. Media Creativity and Outreach

AI offers exciting possibilities for media creativity in the realm of faith-based content. It can be used to create compelling visuals, videos and graphics that convey the message of the Gospel in innovative ways (especially for smaller churches that can’t afford a creative team on staff).

AI-powered algorithms can analyze audience preferences and trends, enabling the creation of engaging and impactful content that resonates with diverse audiences.

For Zachary Appletgate, the director of digital media and technology at Sandals Church in Riverside, California, the media ministry team has been able to further their reach with the help of a few simple AI tools.

“Every day it seems like there’s some new AI tool that comes along and makes our lives easier,” Applegate said. “We’re constantly looking for ways to grow our ministry and outreach, and in the last few months, AI has helped us grow faster than we ever imagined.”

Applegate’s team relies on AI to help create content for social media, including sermon clips and study guides. The team has even used tools like Midjourney to create engaging graphics that church members can use and share to effectively bring nonbelievers in.

“It’s hard to wrap my mind around how much AI has helped our church out, and we’re just getting started,” he said.

3. Sermon Writing Assistance

AI can assist pastors and preachers in writing sermons by analyzing biblical texts, historical contexts and theological resources. This technology can help generate sermon outlines, provide relevant scripture references and offer insights into interpretations.

“I don’t know if AI is ready to take on all the roles of a pastor,” Senneff joked, “but it is ready to help pastors get back to their strengths. Writing a sermon can take a lot of time away from other important roles. If AI can help give them time back, they could restructure their whole ministry.”

By leveraging AI in sermon preparation, pastors can save time and enhance the quality of their messages.

4. Community Building and Data Management

AI can facilitate data-driven insights and predictive analytics that inform decision-making processes, guiding church leaders in identifying community needs and implementing effective strategies for outreach and ministry.

By understanding the needs and preferences of their congregation, churches can tailor their programs to better serve their members. Additionally, AI can help streamline administrative tasks, such as organizing data, managing schedules and facilitating communication.

“For churches with small or limited capacity staff, AI can completely restructure your whole organization,” Senneff said. “Instead of hiring a huge team to manage daily tasks or projects, AI lets you accomplish all your goals for a fraction of the cost.”

Beyond daily uses for AI, advancing technology gives Christians the ability to spread the Gospel in a whole new way. Just as previous technological advancements revolutionized the spread of the Gospel, AI holds the potential to transform how the message reaches the masses.

Imagine this: you’re in a foreign country and you come across someone who speaks a completely different language than you. By simply downloading an app, you can have a full conversation with someone in their native tongue. And it doesn’t have to be a superficial conversation.

AI can facilitate the translation of the Bible into various languages in real-time, enable innovative approaches to sharing Jesus with people with different backgrounds, and provide support and hope to those in need. It could even assist in answering questions about faith and connecting individuals to local churches.

In the face of rapid technological advancements, the Church has a unique opportunity to embrace the future and explore how artificial intelligence can enrich and deepen our faith experiences. By navigating the tensions, harnessing the transformative potential and adopting an ethical and human-centered approach, the Church can proactively shape the integration of AI while remaining true to its timeless values. The intersection of faith and technology beckons the Church to reimagine its role in a digitized world, ultimately enabling it to continue its mission of spreading love, hope and faith in new and innovative ways.

Today, an announcement like that wouldn’t grab anyone’s attention. But at the time, the decision was met with some excitement and a heavy amount of skepticism. Some said it was pointless and wouldn’t work. Many didn’t see the purpose or the vision. Virtual church wasn’t real church, people argued. 

And then 2020 happened. Suddenly, churches around the world were scrambling to make online church “a thing.” Many didn’t have a clue where to start, so they looked to Churchome for help.

“In a way, we were prepared for the pandemic,” Smith said. “Looking back, it does feel like God was leading us to a place we had no idea we’d be going.”

Taking the Risk

In a world where comfort zones reign supreme, the spirit of risk-taking is a rarity. Yet, the legacy of visionaries throughout history stands as a testament to the extraordinary power unleashed when individuals dare to defy the norm and step into the unknown.

Smith, a visionary in his own right, understands the weight and significance of taking big risks.

“There is a significant cost implicit in all of this,” Smith said. “I think that’s where a lot of this conversation begins, but it’s also often where it ends. The cost could be reputation, social status, attendance or even finances.”

Indeed, the cost of risk can be steep, and Smith is under no illusions that taking risks is easy. It’s something he and his wife Chelsea understand well.

“Counting the cost is so important, and it’s different for everyone,” Smith said. “But like Jesus said, ‘What does is it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his soul?’ If we’re not regularly asking ourselves that question, I fear that pieces of our souls will start to break off, and we’ll end up losing the wholeness and buoyancy that God designs for every leader and person.”

Within this cost lies a hidden treasure — the potential for personal growth, extraordinary achievements and a life that extends beyond our wildest imaginations.

“Truthfully, I don’t think we fully understood what we were stepping into when we launched Churchome Global,” Smith said. “We knew it’s where God wanted to take us, so we followed His lead. It’s what we’ve been doing since the beginning, and here we are now.”

In just over five years, Churchome has grown immensely. Over 300,000 people from around the world tune in to Churchome’s online services each week. The megachurch has a presence in 82 countries, including a new branch in the Ukraine.

Smith shared how a pastor in Kyiv met with the pastoral team about his mission to spread the message of Jesus in the midst of a war-torn and seemingly hopeless situation. Without the technology available through Churchome, he wouldn’t have been able to receive that message himself.

“It’s stories like this that remind me why we took that risk in the first place,” Smith said. “I mean, how many times have we prayed for Ukraine and its people, and never knew that there would be a Church at Home group on the other side of that, of people gathering to participate in church and community together?”

Risks don’t always look like exciting new developments in foreign places, though. Sometimes it simply looks like stepping out of what society says is the norm to achieve a greater goal or make your dream a reality.

However, more often than not, it feels much safer to take the tried and true route. Why rock the boat when the waves are big enough already? The fear of the unknown, failure and rejection can be paralyzing.

And for all the difficulties that can come with taking risks, the reward is often much greater.

Focusing on the Goal

Of course, the reward of a risk rarely comes without some sort of sacrifice. For the Churchome pastors, they’ve had to sacrifice time and resources, energy and even a few relationships in order to accomplish their goal.

“It’s been a fun leadership challenge to decide what we’re going to focus on,” Chelsea joked.

In all seriousness, Chelsea clarified, the Smiths are learning how to readjust their priorities to achieve their goals in a healthy way, setting up their risk-taking decisions for as much success as they possibly can.

Judah said, “I know some people just see the two of us as some crazy West Coast couple doing our own thing, but Chelsea and I just want to be a couple who challenges the status quo. We want to question our methods, procedures and approaches to church so that everyone feels welcome. We believe that all people are of equal value, and we want to make sure that everyone feels like they belong at church.

“We don’t want to get so caught up in the here and now that we forget about eternity,” he continued. “We are passionate about sharing the love of Jesus with others, and we’re committed to doing whatever it takes to get the message out.”

The Smiths aren’t the only ones willing to risk everything for the sake of their calling. They understand that while there may be times you have to follow a path on your own, it’s always better to take a leap of faith surrounded by people who not only believe in you but are also willing to take that risky step with you.

“We know that there are other people who share our passion, and we’re excited to work with them to spread the message of Jesus,” Judah said. “We believe that culture creators and people of influence have a unique opportunity to do something different in this world, and that’s what we want to be part of.”

It also helps, Chelsea added, when you’re taking a risk with peace and confidence, resting in a power greater than yourself.

Hebrews speaks of “laboring to enter into rest,” a seemingly paradoxical notion that underlines the value of work done from a place of peace and a lack of striving. In this perspective, rest is not postponed until retirement; rather, it becomes an integral part of the journey, a source of strength to carry on.

Chelsea described how understanding this piece of Scripture shifted everything for their family. When they first began to change and grow Churchome, the family was stressed out and stretching themselves thin.

“Back in our day, we were running all those services on the weekend and flying down to L.A. with our kids on the weekdays,” she explained. “And if I look back on my theology, I thought the salvation of people depended on us. It depended on us showing up, facilitating a service, running the right kind of ministry.

“And I’m embarrassed to look back and admit that I had that full view, because I know as a Christian leader, you’re not allowed to say that,” she continued. “But in this season, we’ve really learned to let that go. And it’s been really freeing.”

Earlier this year, the Smiths took another risk by readjusting their roles with Churchome to better accommodate for their mental, physical and spiritual health. They both admitted it’s been an adjustment, partially because they feel as if America’s idea of a pastor is something they’re working against in a variety of ways. But at the risk of looking like “the weird pastors,” they each shared they’ve found more freedom on the other side of things.

“Now, we’re working from a place of peace, from a lack of striving, knowing that Jesus has already done the big part,” she said. “He’s done the heavy lifting. We just get to be facilitators and do what He asked us to do.”

The Smiths have their path and goals laid before them. They feel as if they know where God is leading them — and, more importantly, where He isn’t leading them. But they know that they aren’t the only ones who have been called to take a risk and think outside the box when it comes to church. And they want to encourage the next generation to boldly take their first step into something brand new.

“I believe that each successive generation has a responsibility to carry the story of Jesus in their own way,” Judah explained. “Each successive generation’s interpretation of the greatest story ever told, the story of Jesus is fascinating. And I predict that our generation will tell the story in so many different ways, perhaps more than any other previous generation.”

He explained that the next generation has the opportunity to use media to make the story of Jesus more accessible. Whether it’s a social media platform or entertainment or art, he’s hoping younger people are willing to transform the Church completely.

“We are already seeing this in the movies and shows that are being produced,” Judah said. “Chelsea and I want to be a part of this by getting involved in productions, movies and shows to help tell the story, sometimes in a subtle way where people may not even realize they are hearing the story of redemption and forgiveness, which is almost exclusively the story of Jesus.”

That’s not to say that it solely relies on young people’s shoulders to take risks. Rather, Judah hopes the younger generation takes their dreams and visions seriously enough to turn them into realities.

“As we get older, we tend to dream less,” Judah explained. “However, there is a phenomenon that occurs in spiritual communities like the church, where older people begin to dream again. Young people, on the other hand, tend to live in the moment and not see the future or what is possible.

“I believe that when Jesus is central and focal, these two groups begin to dream again,” he continued. “Old people begin to dream again, and young people begin to see visions of what is possible for the duration of their time on earth.”

The call to take risks demands courage, resilience and a willingness to shed preconceived notions. Yet, the rewards are immeasurable — personal growth, societal transformation and a chance to leave an indelible mark on the world.

As Judah puts it, “The power of God is truly unleashed when we step out in faith, take risks and trust in His guidance. It is in those moments that we truly discover who we are and what we are capable of.”

“Maybe I’m just a dreamer,” he continued, “or maybe I’m just a wild artist with no concept of the confines of theology, methodology and philosophy. But I’ve seen some wild things happening. I already see other things happening. We can see the evidence bubbling up to the surface. There are churches, ministers, leaders, thinkers, writers, singers, dancers, creators and artists who are already making big and small changes. So why would we stop dreaming and trying new things now?”

Halfway through performing their fourth album for the first major label they had just been signed to, the studio’s executives walked out of the room, telling the band they wouldn’t release that album under their name.

Switchfoot was moved to a smaller branch of the label. Over the next two weeks, the band tried to process the setback, ultimately deciding they still wanted to move forward with the album.

“I’m so thankful even for that moment, because I feel like out of that moment of rejection, we had to come together and decide, do we believe in these songs or not?” said lead vocalist Jon Foreman. “That was an invaluable lesson that has stuck with me from then until now.”

On Feb. 25, 2003, Switchfoot released The Beautiful Letdown. The landmark album debuted at number 16 on the Billboard 200 chart and has since been certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

The album’s singles “Meant to Live” and “Dare You to Move” were both Top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Over the last 20 years, the album has solidified itself as one of the most successful Christian rock albums of all time, and it helped to solidify Switchfoot’s place as one of the most popular bands in the world.

Twenty years later, the band revisited the album that helped to define them. The band released the 20th anniversary edition of The Beautiful Letdown, featuring a new recording of each song, note for note.

“It’s crazy listening to the songs we wrote when we were 25,” Foreman said. “I feel more relatable to them now than I did. It was a really nostalgic experience. I think I learned a lot from a version of myself 20 years ago.”

The project allowed the band to revisit songs they haven’t played live in over 20 years, reminiscing on who they were then to who they’ve become today.

“It was cool to reflect on how much I’ve learned since then,” Foreman said. “It’s a handshake. You’re always learning new things and you’re always forgetting things. And this was a chance to marry the two.”

As the band revisited their music, they fell back in love with the album, remembering why they felt it was worth taking a risk on all those years ago.

“I’m so thankful, because I have friends whose big song was about some girl that they don’t know anymore or a relationship that doesn’t mean what it meant,” Foreman said. “And I’m so thankful that I don’t feel the same way about these songs, you know? Some of my friends have to cringe through their big songs, but I feel like I can sing every lyric on this album and mean it, and that is a gift. It’s not one I take lightly.”

When Foreman talks about the album, there’s an air of pride in it. Not in a way that comes off as cocky, but rather in a sense of genuine love and appreciation for a compilation of songs that led him around the world. Pretty remarkable considering it was an album that almost never happened. But even the letdown of the label set the band on a path that Foreman is ultimately grateful for.

“I don’t know that we’d be a band today without that setback,” Foreman shared. “It really brought us together as brothers and had to really focus our alignment and move forward. I think if the label hadn’t dropped us and just thrown a bunch of money at us and the songs got heard that way, it would mean something totally different than people taking the songs, making them their own and kind of fighting for us and making mixtapes and CDs and everything.

“So, I would take that story any day. Yeah, even looking back, I am so thankful we got dropped,” he concluded.

It seems backwards to say that losing out on a bigger label deal was the best move for a band, but for Switchfoot, it was a lesson that they have carried with them throughout their long-lasting career. Experiencing failure at the beginning has allowed them to celebrate their wins even more.

“In life — not just as an artist, but truly everyone — we will experience failure 10 times, 20 times, I don’t know how many more times than success,” Foreman said. “Success is rare, but failure is common. It doesn’t matter who you are. I think that every single one of those instances is an opportunity.

“That’s something that I’ve learned. It’s hard to see it in the moment, but it’s an opportunity to pivot, to grow, learn new strength, discover things about yourself that you didn’t know you had,” he continued. “And I think that theme has found its way into our music. Looking for light in the midst of darkness and singing from the ashes of adversity, I think that’s something that resonates deeply with us because we relate to it.”

Success has looked different for Switchfoot throughout their career. The band has felt the most accomplished when they’re able to connect with fans who have been impacted by their music.

“When you look at the meaningful things that make life worth living, the standard metrics of success — things like ticket sales, record sales or even Spotify numbers — all pale in comparison to the idea that the relationships we have and the moments and the beauty of the present tense,” Foreman shared. “I think even as a musician, sometimes you can get lost on what success is because you’re looking for something else.”

Foreman compares it to creating an entire album and basing its success on “some digital number on a screen,” instead of seeing the new sound you’ve created or the poetic way you’ve just described a universal feeling.

“You just created this thing of beauty but you’re holding it to the standard of some number,” he said. “Some imaginary digital number on a screen and somehow the beauty pales because this number wasn’t as big as you wanted it to be. I mean, we all do that with whatever it is, but when I remind myself that that’s a metric of success that is no less real than beauty and experience and the present tense of relational living as humans, it reminds me that I don’t have to let anyone else define what success looks like. I have to do that myself.”

Foreman, of course, knows that’s a lesson that’s much easier to say than live out. It’s certainly not something he understood so poetically at 25 when he was navigating the label drop. But with each passing year, Foreman has grown to understand when the present seems hopeless, there’s always something good just waiting around the corner.

“We’re such strange creatures in how we’re able to appreciate time the way we do — understanding the past and the future. The ties from the past are often wonderful memories, but sometimes memories can bring shame. And in the future, there’s hopes and fears happening simultaneously.

“I think so many times we become paralyzed to live in the moment by the shame of the past and the fears of the future,” he continued. “And then a year goes by and you think, oh my gosh, I missed the year because I was paralyzed by these two things that exist only in my imagination: You know, the past did happen, but the shame that I have is in my head. And as for fear, well I can be afraid of all sorts of things that will never happen.”

Foreman is still learning to push through those fears and let go of the shame. It’s a lesson he said he’ll be learning for the rest of his life. But for young artists who are just at the beginning of their career, who look at bands like Switchfoot and long to follow their path, Foreman encourages them to not rush the process to success. Instead, embrace the small wins and the big setbacks. Ultimately, those steps lead to the greatest moments of their lives.

“I think something that really resonates within the space of a young band or a young artist is the idea of do or die, make or break, as the most important thing,” Foreman said. “So, like, whatever big opportunity that’s in front of you, the thing that you’re supposed to say yes to in order to get to the next big place in life, I think it’s usually a lie.

“The real story, the important one, is the one that’s being written, and it tends to move a lot slower. It’s not the big ups and downs. It’s the one that’s hidden between those peaks and valleys. And it’s a longer story. That’s the good one, and that’s the one to be focused on.”

In 2020, the 31-year-old singer-songwriter, known for her bright clothes and even brighter personality, was struggling to make sense of her reality. Division, protests, political turmoil, a global pandemic, hopelessness — it was enough to make the normally optimistic Daigle question, well, pretty much everything.

So Daigle did what she knew best: she started writing a record.

A New Beginning

“During COVID, there was so much despair,” Daigle said. “I started writing these songs because I needed these songs to pull me out of that. I needed God to come and breathe on this experience for me, to remind me of how life can begin again.”

Over the next six months, Daigle slowly worked through her doubts, fears and frustrations to create her fourth studio album, Lauren Daigle.

Released five years after her breakout hit Look Up Child (which reached No. 3 on the Billboard charts), Daigle continually refers to her latest project as a sort of rebirth, a new beginning, a new chapter.

“This album is self-titled because it was definitely a new beginning for me internally,” Daigle said. “This was a new beginning for me to simply begin again. It was a step for me to say, ‘Okay God, I see places in my life that I have let go of and now I get to start over and regain the things that I thought I lost.’”

Daigle’s music feels like listening to one-part inspiring message, one-part personal journey. In a way unlike 2015’s How Can It Be and 2018’s Look Up Child, her new album is perhaps her most vulnerable.

“If I’m honest, this record is in a world of its own as far as how it relates to me,” Daigle said. “This record is the reflection of a new beginning of something transformative that took place in my life. God came in and whispered to me that I have this purpose and a reason for what I do, and I don’t have to lose myself along the way.”

Part of discovering this new beginning was going back to her roots. Daigle explained that her first album was all about figuring out how to make music. Her second album gave her the chance to explore her voice. And her third album allowed her to find the sound she’s been waiting to make her whole life.

“This record felt very natural, very organic,” she said. “I was surrounded by people who were in world-class positions of their own. So they didn’t have any need for me to be somebody. They already had their thing going, and then we got to partner together. I think that was really new and really fresh.”

Daigle refers to her producer Mike Elizondo (who’s worked with artists ranging from Fiona Apple to Carrie Underwood to 50 Cent) and Shane McAnally, a Nashville-based songwriter known for working alongside Kacey Musgraves and Kelly Clarkson.

“Looking back, I can see how God had orchestrated the right people at the right time, because here I was in a season where I felt completely powerless, completely voiceless because of the the state of the world at the time — but also because of things that have been taking place in my personal life,” she said. “But He surrounded me with people who were so confident, that used their voice for the right things, that knew who they were, that weren’t intimidated by the world. And I don’t think that was coincidental.”

A New Vulnerability

Of course, starting a new chapter can be a scary feeling for any creative person.

“I feel like that was something that was really hard in the beginning,” Daigle admitted. “How do I overcome the fear of a bad idea?”

At the beginning of her career, Daigle had to push past her fear and insecurities to say what she wanted to say. That inevitably meant there would be times when people would critique her or try to change her opinion, but she’s been learning to push past all of that, shifting her focus to something that she can actually be excited about. Instead of letting her fear silence her, Daigle’s chosen to let her authenticity speak loudly.

“Truthfully, I feel like authenticity is simply a by-product of who I am,” Daigle joked. “I always catch myself over-sharing in moments. But I love things that are authentic, and I’m definitely at a place where I want to sing about those authentic moments in my life.”

That doesn’t mean her previous albums were inherently unauthentic, she clarified. But with her new album, she wanted to push herself to be more vulnerable than she’d ever been before. “I feel like I talk about things that I haven’t talked about before lyrically,” she explained.

The album certainly has Daigle singling about themes we’ve never heard from her before. “Don’t Believe Them” dives into the struggle of determining truth. “Ego” where Daigle lets listeners into the battle she faces with her own pride. Her lead single “Thank God I Do” was written just weeks after she’d dealt with her own difficult COVID diagnosis.

Not the common themes fans might expect from her album. But, that doesn’t mean it’s an album full of despair. It is still Lauren Daigle, after all. So while she does dive into the messy and disruptive parts of life, her music is still full of much-needed hope and optimism.

“The darkness does not overtake the light,” Daigle said. “I mean, look at Revelation. In the end, Jesus comes back and wipes every tear. That’s a celebration after a time of despair. And that’s what we did with this record.”

Daigle explained the story arc of the album, beginning with “Thank God I Do” which “sees despair with the glimmer of hope.”

“So we acknowledge the despair there and then end at ‘These Are The Days.’ That song sheds light on how we might be in intense times, or we might be in moments where people are like, how much darker is the world actually about to get? What is going on? This is all crazy. But that song is to remind people that, no, there are so many good things on the horizon. There are still good things ahead.”

Daigle hopes that by the time listeners get to the end of the record, they feel more alive than they did when they began listening to it. It’s the same journey she went on creating the album.

From starting with a cry of desperation to releasing an album that reminds others good things are already here on earth, Daigle fully believes this is a message humanity needs to hear over and over.

Old, Familiar Faces

For all the ways that Daigle has changed in the five years since her last album dropped, there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, and it’s something that Daigle is fighting hard to make sure she keeps with her throughout her career.

“It doesn’t matter how big I get, I will always do what I can to make sure people know they are loved by me and by God,” Daigle said.

Daigle is excited to kick off her tour this summer and come face to face with people. Anyone who has spoken with Daigle knows that the faster she talks about a topic, the more passionate she is. And when it comes to talking about meeting her fans, she speaks about a mile a minute.

“We’re all looking for connections to people,” Daigle said. “And what we’re really looking for boils down to this: Can I relate to you, and can you relate to me? Or in an even simpler form than that, we’re asking, Can I love you, and are you capable of loving me? So how do we get to the simplest expression of that?

“Well, I think the simplest versions of connection are the purest versions of connection, when we can just look into someone’s eyes and say thank you!” she continued. “When we can look into someone ‘s eyes and say, ‘I see you.’ That does something so beautiful — not just for me, not just for the person next to me, but for humanity as a whole. Those are the experiences I long to bring into the world.”

That mindset has shaped all of Daigle’s decisions for her tours. Daigle wants to bring fans together, not just with her but with one another, creating spaces and experiences for them to connect in a deep and impactful way — a way that would allow a fan to show up and experience a radical amount of love.

Daigle knows how life-changing that love can be.

“I remember when I was a teenager, hearing stories about people who are really lonely and committing suicide wasn’t a thing in my teens as much as it is now,” Daigle said. “Obviously it happened, but it was either kept under wraps or few and far between. And I remember thinking that I can’t imagine what it would be like to be in this world that is so full of beauty and kindness and be so lonely.”

Daigle didn’t fully understand that loneliness until she was placed in isolation for nearly two years while it seemed the world was moving “900 miles an hour.”

“I now know how loneliness can feel, and knowing there are people who do not have a single friend, not one friend in the world, actually aches me to my core,” she said. “And so, I never know in those interactions with people at shows or even interactions with people in the grocery store or interactions with people that you see walking along the street, you just never know what kindness can do for just one person.”

On a recent flight, Daigle herself was reminded of how much one person’s kindness can make an impact.

“People need to hear the fact that there are still good people in the world, and there are still good exchanges happening in the world,” she said. “And I was sitting on a plane one day after that season where all of those videos were coming out about people getting in fights on planes, people getting kicked off of planes, all this stuff that’s like bombarding my brain, right? I remember getting on planes and feeling anxious for some reason.”

All of a sudden, Daigle began having a panic attack on a plane. She’d never experienced one before so she wasn’t sure what to do to stop it.

“Tears are falling down from my eyes and I don’t know what’s going on, so I go to get off the plane because they hadn’t closed the door yet,” she said. “But the person next to me just grabbed my arm and said, ‘Hey, I’ll do this with you.’ And I didn’t know this person, but she said, ‘Everyone will get to the other side, I promise. You just sit next to me. I’ll get you to the other side of this fight. Just trust me.’

“And there was this moment of looking at her and thinking, ‘Wow. for the past two years, we have been berated with information to not trust a single person around us because of the intensity of the time, or they might think politically different than you or you might trigger them and something might happen.’ And we’ve just been shown all of this information of why we should not trust people and why we shouldn’t talk to people anymore. But I’m sitting next to a woman who was telling me to trust her and she will get me to the other side. And so I said ‘Okay,’ and she got me through to the other side.”

Daigle’s interaction with a stranger on a plane is the perfect example of what the singer is all about. Community, compassion and unearned kindness. It’s something she hopes she can encourage others to pursue.

“People need to know at this time that people are still good,” Daigle said. “There are still people that are kind out in the world, that are trustworthy. You can lean on your neighbor, you can lean on people around you.”

The last few years have been some of the most tumultuous times in recent American history. Pandemic aside, the country has grown increasingly divided, in a way that caused Daigle to step back and figure out where her place was in everything.

“The animosity that erupted in the country shook me to my core,” Daigle admitted. “I was terrified of every person, not because of their belief system, but more because I didn’t know how reactionary people were going to be to me. Did I say something that was going to cause a visceral response?

“And that was paralyzing because it was unsafe in so many ways,” she continued. “Like, personal interactions became unsafe. And you see how much I longed for human connection. So that was a really tricky position for me to be in. So all that to say, I feel like the message people need to hear is that people are still good and they need to see and feel love.”

And while the pandemic was a difficult time for Daigle to navigate her feelings of disconnectedness and despair, she’s ready to get back on the road and spread some good old-fashioned love and kindness.

“You know, I’ve seen their shirts and stuff that say, ‘BE KIND!’” Daigle laughed. “And sometimes when a message is thrown in your face so much it gets watered down. But I feel like kindness is one of those things that doesn’t matter how many T-shirts are printed, it is always going to be just as impactful to the actual action of kindness. People need kindness. The world needs kindness, especially now.”

For the first time, Daigle’s passionate speech slows down a bit, because she begins to get emotional talking about how much she wants people to know they’re loved and cared for by someone in this world.

“Whenever I go to my shows, it’s like, this is the one chance that somebody might have to feel love,” she said. “They might not have had a hug for a year. Who knows the last time that somebody has looked them in their eyes? You just don’t know what people’s stories are. So I don’t care how big I get — I don’t even have a desire to be famous because it makes me really uncomfortable — but I deeply long for people to feel loved and I don’t ever want that to change.”

Surprisingly, a group of influential Southern Baptist pastors from Tennessee penned a letter in support of Gov. Lee’s proposed gun reform law. However, their endorsement faced immediate backlash from members of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

The pastors expressed their support for the law as a means to “strengthen our state’s order of protection laws to protect the broader population from those who are a danger to themselves or others.” They commended Gov. Lee’s approach, stating that it safeguards citizens’ constitutional rights while also offering protection to potential victims of dangerous individuals. To bolster their stance, the pastors cited scripture and resolutions from the SBC.

However, the letter sparked controversy among many Baptists, particularly those who staunchly support Second Amendment rights. The issue of gun control in the United States has long been a fiercely debated topic, exacerbated by the frequent occurrence of tragic shooting incidents. Nearly halfway through 2023, gun violence has claimed the lives of 19,532 individuals, with an additional 16,500 people injured. So far, 2023 has had the highest number of mass shootings in American history.

In light of the statistics, it is evident that change is urgently needed. However, amidst the prevailing rhetoric about gun reform, is there a third conversation that should be taking place? One that seeks to find common ground and practical solutions? Is it possible for Americans to engage in a peaceful and productive dialogue about gun reform?

The existing debate on gun control in the United States has become polarized, presenting a false dichotomy between staunch support for the unrestricted right to bear arms and advocating for an absolute ban on firearms. But does this binary approach truly represent the more nuanced views held by many Americans?

Author Brené Brown captures the plight of those who find themselves in the middle ground, stating, “I exist in that lonely space between all guns and no guns — a space that [feels] defined by criticism and judgment.”

There are individuals who grew up in households with firearms, appreciating the rich history of sportsmanship and personal freedom, while also recognizing the need for responsible gun policy reform. They believe that the conversation on gun control should transcend simplistic slogans and encompass a comprehensive and thoughtful evaluation of existing policies.

The conversation on gun control in the United States must transcend the current divisive rhetoric.

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed that 53 percent of Americans are receptive to stricter gun laws, even among gun owners. This demonstrates a recognition within this group of the necessity for sensible regulations, such as universal background checks and higher age requirements.

Taylor Schumann, a survivor of the April 2013 shooting at a college in Christiansburg, Virginia and author of When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence, suggests that a third conversation on gun reform is already underway.

“A third conversation is already happening, we’re just not hearing about it,” she said. “I talk to people all the time about the conversations they’re having with family members and friends where they realize they’re not actually that far apart on the issue, or they find some unexpected common ground — maybe on Red Flag Laws or expanded background checks or closing a loophole.”

On an individual level, people seem willing to engage in nuanced conversations about reform. However, when the media enters the picture, these discussions often crumble.

“Unfortunately, we don’t hear about these conversations, and we’re not encouraged to have them, by the voices we listen to in the news or in politics,” Schumann laments. “We are largely told by the news media how extreme the other side is, how far apart we are on issues, how we can never find common ground. This serves ratings and keeps our politicians in office. But it also keeps us firmly in our political camp and believing the worst about those on the other side.”

Moving the conversation forward on gun control is no easy task, but it is crucial to acknowledge the emotionally charged nature of the discussion and approach it with a genuine interest in understanding everyone’s perspectives. Active listening should be prioritized, ensuring that the conversation remains focused on identifying common ground and achieving the shared goal of saving lives.

When engaging in conversations about gun control, it is essential to begin from a place of agreement. Recognize that both parties share the desire to reduce the loss of life due to gun violence. This common objective can serve as a foundation for exploring potential solutions and finding common ground.

Schumann points out that research indicates Americans are open to change. She highlights a poll conducted by Fox News in April, which found that 87 percent of voters favored requiring criminal background checks for all gun buyers, while 81 percent supported raising the legal age to purchase firearms to 21. Additionally, 80 percent of voters supported allowing the police to disarm individuals deemed a danger to themselves or others, and 77 percent supported a 30-day waiting period for all gun purchases.

It is worth acknowledging that changing someone’s stance on gun control may not occur in a single conversation. However, by challenging extreme views and sowing seeds of alternative perspectives, individuals can contribute to a positive shift over time.

Christians have a unique role to play in the conversation surrounding gun reform. The Church should be at the forefront, providing wisdom, clarity and solace to those impacted by gun violence. Unfortunately, the Church has often remained silent or failed to address this contentious issue adequately.

Schumann hopes that the Church will champion the value and dignity of individuals within the gun control debate and recognize the opportunity for personal sacrifice.

“Too often, this conversation sends people to the furthest ends of the political arena, which is understandable since politics is largely how we accomplish things in the United States and how we act on our beliefs,” she says. “But if anyone should be advocating for protecting lives and limiting human suffering, it’s the Church.”

Schumann envisions churches and community organizations sponsoring gun buyback programs or facilitating safe opportunities for people to relinquish their firearms voluntarily. She envisions individuals deciding that preserving lives and reducing gun violence outweigh personal attachment to guns, even without legal compulsion. While legislation is desirable, she firmly believes that meaningful work can still be accomplished even without its immediate enactment.

“If anyone should be advocating for protecting lives and limiting human suffering, it’s the Church.” – Taylor Schumann

Though the issue of gun control reform may appear overwhelming, there is reason for hope. Progress has already been achieved in some areas, with states implementing red flag laws, extending background check periods and enacting assault weapons bans. Grassroots initiatives and community-led efforts, such as gun buyback programs, also have the potential to make a substantial impact.

Schumann’s hope lies in the ongoing commitment of individuals, not just institutions, to advocate for change.

“My hope really is that we wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on legislative action but that we would see more action at individual and community levels,” she asserts. “I would love to see more people decide the safety of their neighbor is worth more than their guns.”

The conversation on gun control in the United States must transcend the current divisive rhetoric. While the path to change may be challenging, individuals and institutions, including the Church, have a critical role to play in bringing about constructive reform. By engaging in conversations with wisdom, compassion, and a focus on preserving lives, Americans can move toward a future that combines peace and productive gun reform.

In a world where artists often wear their hearts on their sleeves, there are few who exude an infectious joy quite like Grammer. Whether he’s talking about his upcoming album, Behind My Smile, or how he’s excited to turn 40 or what he’s learning in therapy, Grammer is optimism personified.

“If you asked me three years ago how to describe myself, I would give a pretty simple answer,” he said. “I’m just a really happy guy.”

But then the pandemic hit, and Grammer realized there were some things deeper within himself that needed to be explored.

“It’s like, life throws you through the washing machine hard enough to where you have to get a little more realistic and accepting to have a broader understanding of who you are,” Grammer explained. “There’s lots of pieces to who you are. And through the process of therapy, I’ve learned to own the wide spectrum of who I can be as opposed to just carrying the happy flag.”

One of the easiest ways for Grammer to explore these new layers of himself was to dive into his music. Soon enough, his music became a full studio album, Behind the Smile, which releases later this fall.

“This is a really cool, special collection of songs,” he shared. “Throughout the process of writing this album, I was able to actually view myself differently.”

It becomes evident that Behind My Smile is not just another project for Grammer; it is a deeply personal exploration of his own identity and growth as an artist.

For the album, Grammer shed his persona of the never-sad singer to delve into topics you may not expect from him: depression, greed, self-love. And while he still looks for the best in the world, he’s learning that there’s also a beauty to embracing the struggle. 

“I still tend to try to look at the optimistic side of life,” he said. “But I’ve realized that when you go through tests, they are there to help you grow for something greater down the line.”

The pandemic taught Grammer more about community and self-love. As a self-described “super extrovert,” social distancing and isolation left him in an emotional state unlike anything he’d ever experienced.

Initially, he tried to have a positive mindset about the situation, but eventually he had to face reality. That’s when he had a breakthrough.

“It was so hard because I’m the happy guy, but I’m suddenly feeling depressed,” he said. “I had to work on those two seemingly not fitting things together. But it got me to a deeper understanding that I’m much more three-dimensional than I may admit.”

Through both therapy and songwriting, Grammer has continued to wrestle with deeper issues. On Behind My Smile, he explores the battle of self-love — the joy that comes from it and also the struggle to feel it day by day.

“The idea of self-love is something that I was not expecting to have been a cornerstone of this record,” Grammer shared. “I did not see that coming at all.”

Of course, looking back Grammer sees it clearly now. In his therapy sessions, he had to work through feelings of loneliness, comparison and feeling pleased with himself and his work. It was a task much easier said than done.

“It sounds funny to admit out loud, but I realized that self-love was an area I needed to take more seriously,” Grammer admitted. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m a dude or what, but I’d hear the phrase ‘self-love’ and just dismiss it. But then it was kind of placed right in front of me and I was told, You cannot look away from this. This is something that you need to deal with.’

“And that’s been some weird, hard, amazing work,” he continued. “But it’s ultimately good. I’m grateful I was able to put in the work.”

Grammer hopes his hard work pays off for more than himself, too. On the album, he invites fans to see a whole new side of him not only for the sake of authenticity, but for encouragement.

“Because if the happy guy can be depressed, maybe that will make someone feel less alone,” he said.

Spreading the Love

Grammer delves into other thought-provoking themes on Behind My Smile. He’s spent a lot of time growing increasingly fascinated with society’s relationship with money, examining its value and the potential dangers of becoming consumed by its pursuit.

To Grammer, society’s love of money is tangled up with the complicated relationship between society and love.

“In a way, it all ties back into self-love,” he explained. “Americans are looking for value in their lives. And where we should be turning to self-love, we’re turning to money.

“Truthfully, I can’t say that I haven’t done that either,” he shared, “so I really am talking about all of us. But I wanted to dig deeper.”

“Love is the New Money” is the culmination of Grammer’s exploration. The song, inspired by a poem Grammer wrote years ago, digs into the value Americans place on money over, well, just about everything.

“I know we need money and it’s what makes the world run, but I think it’s worth asking ourselves what is the actual value of it,” Grammer said. “We need to parse it out and figure out the place it holds in our lives.”

Grammer shared he’s still figuring out not only what place money holds in his life, but also the power it has over all of his decisions. 

“I’ve started asking myself, what’s underneath the thing I want?” Grammer said. “Because I think that money is often seen as the thing that will get you what you want. I’ve come to realize the pursuit of money is simply a slippery slope. If I focus too much time on it, I can feel myself getting unhappier.

“Now, I don’t want to downplay anyone’s struggle,” he continued. “I’m not delusional enough to think that love is going to pay your bills. Money is a necessity, but we have to check ourselves and not put too much emphasis on gaining productivity or economic wins.”

These days, Grammer is trying to focus on the bigger picture, the things that matter to him.

“I don’t want to be 85 thinking about how I missed out on making a few more bucks,” he joked, “but I do want to make sure my decision, my energy and my time are focused on the stuff that really matters.”

So, what exactly are the things that matter to Grammer?

“Creating spaces for love is the thing that makes me the happiest,” he said earnestly. “I’m fully aware I operate in this space, but it’s just true! In my life, when I think about where am I going to be able to receive and give love and how do I take steps to actually create spaces for that? That’s when I’m vibrating at my highest.”

Grammer created Behind My Smile in part to process his newfound emotions and experiences, but also to create a space for people to be reminded of the love of the world. It’s a message that he thinks the world can’t hear enough of.

“It’s harder to find spaces to just connect with each other and share love than maybe it’s ever been in the past,” Grammer said. “We are really siloed in algorithms and in our devices. When you add all that up, there’s less connection occurring at the moment when connection is the thing we need the most right now.”

Grammer is constantly thinking of different ways to break down walls and create genuine connection. Music is a big bridge-builder for him, not only as a personal outlet for his thoughts but also a means to connect with others through shared ideas. He believes the power of music can be used to create spaces for love and deepening relationships.

He has a tradition with his band while out on tour. Each night, one of the seven band members sits in a chair in the middle of the circle while everyone else shares what they love about the person.

“Everyone cries — it’s a whole thing,” he laughed.

Grammer is relying on his optimism to create a space for love in this world, one person at a time.

“There is a river of love that is happening under all of us and we just need a little more space to share it,” he said. “My real mission currently is to figure out how to create more and more of those spaces.”

“That’s just how life goes, right?” the folk-rock singer asked. “We can have days and weeks where we experience the highest of highs and lowest of lows in the same, small period of time. There’s a certain beauty in the tension of the way our lives actually work.”

He’s not upset or frustrated about being on a rollercoaster. Sure, he admits, life would be easier if it was one smooth ride. But as he’s getting older, he’s learning to embrace the twists, turns and loops that get thrown at him. And he’s inviting others to join him on the ride.

At least, that’s the message behind Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors’ new album, Strangers No More. The band’s eighth studio album invites listeners to embark on the up and down intricacies of the human experience. In a world that often seeks to neatly compartmentalize emotions, experiences and music genres, Strangers No More blends themes, feelings and sounds into one cohesive album.

“I didn’t want to make a record that was just a fun, hope-filled, live-show record,” Holcomb explained. “But I also didn’t want to just put out a quiet, ‘life is so hard’ record either. Because those two things are both real and they interact. I wanted them to interact with each other.”

Holcomb wrote the album along with a team of collaborators — his bandmates, The Highwomen’s Natalie Hemby and Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor — over the course of nearly two years. He took the time to dig deeper and get philosophical, something that was new for him, he admitted.

“This record is more of me looking at myself and the world and sort of coming out of the cave with some sort of general thoughts about getting older, friendship, expressing gratitude and other things like that,” Holcomb said. “On previous albums I would say I’ve always been more personal, but there’s a lot of bigger ideas explored on this record that aren’t necessarily tied to specific people and narratives in my life.”

Holcomb said that turning 40 led him to an introspective and retrospective place. He began processing different parts of his past while planning out what he wanted his future to look like.

It’s easy to see the tension Holcomb wrestles with throughout the album: finding the right community, expressing gratitude, processing a global pandemic while growing older and feeling like a failure and a success all at the same time. Holcomb weaves together an album that doesn’t leave you feeling unsettled, but does leave you thinking about, well, everything.

Take “Troubles,” for example. Holcomb works through the heaviness of wanting to hide from the violence and pain of division we all live through day in and day out. It was written right after the Uvalde Elementary School shooting in May 2022.

But by the next song, “That’s On You, That’s On Me,” the rock song focuses on the way we mythologize ourselves and hype ourselves up. The feeling that, despite everything going on in the world around us, there’s plenty of things happening in us that are worth acknowledging and even celebrating.

“To me, I find those topics to be importantly interchangeable,” Holcomb explained. “You can’t really have joy without sorrow. They go hand in hand. As I’ve gotten older, learning to be present and available to yourself and to your world and to your friends while holding those two things in tension is a very important part of maturing and becoming self-aware.”

Holcomb tosses back and forth between light and heavy experiences and emotions throughout the album. It was important to him to not have too much of one emotion; he wanted the full gamut of humanity represented.

“Gratitude” is perhaps the best example of Holcomb figuring out exactly how to balance that tension. The song is about acknowledging the struggle in front of you, but choosing to find the light in your situation instead. Holcomb sings, “Try and hold on to your hands in the garden, the smile of a child, swimming in the river, walking the last sweet mile, the first crack of thunder, the heavenly rain, all that gets taken and all that remains.”

“While I was making this album, I kept thinking you can’t really be grateful for the good if you don’t know what the bad is like,” Holcomb said. “You can’t find the light unless you also know what it’s like to have something taken from you, or to have something lost. And you don’t know what light is until you’ve experienced darkness. In my experience, you can’t really hold onto hope until you’ve faced the reality of despair.

“I tend to be a personality that’s going to look the hardest thing in the eye, and I’m going to grieve whatever that thing has taken from me, but then I’m not going to let it knock me over and win,” he continued. “And I think for me, music has been a big part of that. Some of the ways that I’ve been able to chase the light has been because of other people’s music. I just think that there’s a lot in music to help people sort of unwrap that tension of hope, despair, light, darkness, joy, sorrow. And that’s why I wanted to do this in the first place, to be a part of that conversation.”

Holcomb really comes alive when he talks about his love for music. Whether it’s discussing his favorite albums that have influenced each of his own records — Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run or Tom Petty’s Wildflowers — or how music gives him the ability to create new stories, it’s clear Holcomb is in the right business.

“There’s so many beautiful ingredients in music that connect with everybody in different ways,” he said. “There’s so many different bands that connect with different people and everybody’s got their own experience. But in this beautiful way, music brings people from all ways of life together.”

That idea of community, of connectedness, is central to Strangers No More. Through all the ups and downs of life, community is, ideally, the one constant a person has in life. Holcomb hopes that when fans listen to his music or show up to his shows, they feel connected to one another. By listening to his music together, they’re no longer strangers, they’re friends.

“The name of the album comes from the song, ‘Dance With Everybody,’” Holcomb said. “The song is completely an ode to the audience.”

Holcomb shared the song is about the “smorgasbord of people” that make up an audience — a room that’s like a sea full of strangers crashing on the rungs. But by the end of the night when the band finishes playing, they’re all strangers no more. “We’re at a really scary time in our lives,” Holcomb said, “but I think if we can just remember that there are good things in the world, like good music and good people, we’re going to make it out alright in the end.”

It was pretty trite stuff, but the book somehow ended up being one of those things that sticks around even as you misplace far more important things. Every now and then, I’d mindlessly flip through it when I should have been studying. I can’t remember any of the quotes now, but the vaguely positive affirmations made me feel good.

“Freedom.” It’s such a nice thought. Flip through a few pages and let the quotes wash over you. Amazing vibes. 

If you think about it, that’s probably how a lot of us end up using the Bible. We don’t ignore it exactly. We know it’s pretty important. But our engagement is limited to thumbing through the pages and looking for a few quotes that make us feel good. Or, if not feel good than at least feel something, before setting the Bible aside and continuing on with our day.

There are a lot of reasons for this, and one might be a little bit of unclarity about what the Bible actually is. This year, Gallup found that just 20 percent of Americans think the Bible is the “actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.” 

That’s a record low, and a four percent drop from 2017. Meanwhile, a record high 29 percent of Americans say the Bible is an “ancient book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man.”

That leaves nearly half of Americans somewhere in the middle, saying the Bible “is the inspired word of God, but not everything in it should be taken literally.” For Christians, this opinion seems reasonable enough. We agree that there’s divine importance to the Bible but there are obvious elements that were intended to be taken as metaphor. 

The tricky part is knowing which parts. Obviously, not every dragon in the Book of Revelation is literally waiting in the wings to attack the earth anymore than the hair of Solomon’s bride was literally a herd of goats. 

But it’s not always quite that obvious, and that’s where things get tricky for us. We don’t always know what to do with ancient Levitical laws of questionable modern day relevance (why weren’t the Israelites allowed to wear mixed fabrics?) and even offensive contemporary application (Paul exhorting an escaped slave to return to his master). 

Faced with such complications, many of us probably find it easier to think of the Bible as a big book of occasionally inspirational quotes. We sift through the stuff we don’t understand until we find something to highlight in yellow that feels suitably uplifting. But is this really the extent of the Bible’s usefulness for modern-day Christians? 

A Crash Course

“Many read the Bible ‘in the flat’ as though any word or phrase, taken out of context, can and should ‘speak’ directly to us,” says N.T. Wright. 

Wright is a New Testament scholar, one of today’s leading experts on the Bible. He says many well-meaning Christians go wrong by thinking of the Bible as strictly direct communication with the reader, full of bon mots for any curious Christian looking for a moment of inspiration.

“Now, God in his mercy can make that happen,” Wright says. “But loving God with our minds means that we should
be prepared to understand the book He has given us as it is — which will stretch our minds and understandings — rather than just expecting that a spoonful of ‘Bible verses’ at random will meet all of our needs.”

This way of thinking about the Bible has been handed down over a number of generations by well-meaning people who taught us to think of the Bible as “God’s love letter to you” or “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” implying direct, personal and immediate resonance to every stray verse that inevitably ends up disappointing when you come across a verse that doesn’t fit the bill. 

“Many Christians, alas, remember rather inept Sunday School lessons or children’s talks, and now when they think of the Bible that’s all they can imagine,” Wright says. “Such people need a crash course in a more mature, adult approach.” 

History Book

The Bible, as Christians know it today, developed over millennia — both in terms of the actual books being written and in terms of the Church determining which writings made the cut. Most of the Early Church was made up of Jewish people who already accepted the Hebrew Bible (what Christians now call the Old Testament) as direct wisdom from God. They began passing around copies of Paul’s letters and the “memoirs of the Apostles” — the Gospels — as early as the second century. 

A first century theologian named Marcion of Sinope was the first to propose an actual canon — an accepted list of Christian writings accepted as divinely inspired. His proposal for such a canon was ultimately rejected and the man himself was excommunicated and branded as a heretic, but his idea stuck. In fact, the idea that the Church should have an accepted canon was at least partially a response to Marcion’s own rejected attempt. 

Over the second and third centuries, the New Testament canon took shape. Early Church Father Irenaeus believed that four Gospels should be accepted as canon, to correspond with the “four quarters of the earth.” 

By the third century, the 27 books that make up our New Testament canon were in wide circulation and acceptance among Christians. Though various councils declaring various canons sprung up throughout Christendom in this time, a meeting called the Synod of Hippo was likely the first group of Christians to canonize the New Testament more or less as we know it today — though a few books, like Revelation, weren’t accepted until later. 

This arrangement was fairly well accepted among the Catholic Church for centuries, until a guy by the name of Martin Luther started to make a scene in the 16th century. The Protestant Reformation hinged on Luther’s sharp disagreement with the prevailing Catholic Church leaders on a lot of subjects, including the Bible. Luther put his own canon together, shuffling seven Old Testamentbooks into the Apocrypha (“not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read,” he wrote). 

In opposition to Luther, the Catholic Church convened the Council of Trent in 1546, which approved the present Catholic Bible. The many Early Church fathers bickered about the exact makeup of the canon. Luther wasn’t exactly a fan of the Book of James, claiming it focused too much on good works. Augustine liked the Book of Hebrews but wasn’t too sure about its anonymous authorship. 

“The whole bible forms the multi-layered god-given vehicle through which we come to know Jesus.”

But over time, broad consensus settled in, and the Bible took shape. 

The reason a little understanding of biblical history is important is because it can help correct us of the notion that the Bible is a single, simple, straightforward narrative. Its compilation was complex, and took place over time. 

Instead of thinking of the Bible as a single unit, it’s helpful to think of it as a collection of books written across history by different authors with different degrees of education, income and cultural backgrounds. It’s not just an instruction manual, although certain books do have instructions. It’s not just a love letter, although some books blossom with romantic poetry. It’s not just a novel, although there are terrific stories. It’s not even just a theological textbook, although there are certainly reams of doctrinal instruction. 

It is, as the late Rachel Held Evans once called it, a library. Or, as Wright puts it: “The Bible is the collection of books that emerged from the life of ancient Israel and then from the Early Church, the first being seen as the divinely warranted foundation and guiding document for Israel’s life and destiny, and the second being seen as the authoritative testimony to Jesus — seeing him precisely as the fulfillment of Israel’s life and destiny, as the launch of the creator God’s new covenant.”  

He continues, “Christians have always believed that the whole Bible — Old and New Testaments — forms the multi-layered God-given vehicle through which we come to know who Jesus was and is and understand his achievement in overcoming evil and launching God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven.” 

So What? 

That all helps us understand what the Bible is, but what does the Bible do? Like, what is its actual function in our lives today? 

“All believers should at least attempt to read through the Bible regularly, with their understanding and application being framed and energized by personal prayer, Church teaching and fellowship with other believers,” Wright says. “Ideally all should read some portion or portions of scripture daily, to foster the personal love of God with heart, mind, soul and strength.”

Doing this can be a lot more rewarding when we stop thinking of Bible reading like a scavenger hunt for the next verse to go on a sticky note on our bathroom mirror. When we start taking the Bible on its own terms instead of the ones we’d prefer, the Bible opens up. 

Another understanding that can help us understand the Bible better is to accept an obvious but rarely stated fact: The Bible is often hard to read. It’s complex, requires a certain level of cultural familiarity and is talking about what is undoubtedly the most incomprehensible subject in all reality. 

So it’s perfectly understandable if you’re not always clear what’s going on. People get PhDs to understand Shakespeare and Proust. You’re not simpleminded for needing a little extra guidance with certain parts of the Bible. Fortunately, there are several centuries’ worth of resources to help guide you through the reading of the Bible’s most complicated portions. 

But what about parts of the Bible that just don’t line up or even seem to contradict each other? Wright says such verses do indeed exist, but cautions against getting too hung up on them.

“There are minor surface ‘contradictions’, for instance between some aspects of the story of Jesus in the four gospels (did Jesus cleanse the Temple at the start of his public career, as in John, or at the end, as in the other three?),” he says. “These can sometimes be resolved (perhaps Jesus did it twice? Or perhaps John was aiming for more of a literary rather than a historical effect?); but such puzzles seem to miss the main point of the texts, which is not to point to themselves but to point to Jesus himself.” 

“All should read some portion or portions of scripture daily, to foster the personal love of God with heart, mind, soul and strength.”

In other words, part of taking the Bible on its own terms is focusing on its focus: who Jesus was and what that means for us. Hiccups in the narrative might raise our eyebrows, but they have little bearing on the Good News of Jesus. 

Freedom

So when we read the Bible, we should by all means be on the lookout for verses that especially move us or inspire us. There are plenty of them that have offered peace and strength, wisdom and guidance, direction and comfort to Christians over the course of history. 

But we should free ourselves of the idea that that’s all we’re looking for. The Bible is much more than a book of inspirational quotes. It’s a history book, a book of poetry, a book of doctrine, a book of prophecy and dozens other things you’ll find if you, like Augustine, “take up and read.” You’ll never know how much the Bible can do for your life until you embrace all it has to offer. 

Eat Beforehand

No wedding in the history of weddings has ever taken place at a convenient time. Sure, the ceremony may only last an hour, but where they get you is that Lord of the Rings trilogy-feeling wait between the ceremony and the reception. You can’t be expected to Cha Cha Slide if you haven’t been given the proper Cha Cha Slide nutrients. This is why you need to eat a full meal before you leave your house. That way, the worst case scenario is just that you’re too full to go through the buffet line again.

Choose the Right Outfit

When it comes to choosing an outfit for a wedding, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, you want to make sure that your outfit is appropriate for the occasion. Double check — maybe even triple check — the invitation to find out the dress code. Second, you want to choose something that you feel comfortable and confident in. And finally, you want to make sure that your outfit doesn’t clash with the bride’s dress. It was funny when Kelly Kapoor wore white in The Office. It’s never as funny when someone does it in real life.

If you’re not sure what to wear, a good rule of thumb is to err on the side of caution. A simple, classic outfit is always a safe bet. And if you’re still not sure, ask the bride or groom for their advice.

Buy Comfortable Shoes

Guys, get some black shoes that aren’t those shiny bowling shoes. Ladies, those giant heels are cool, but you don’t have to worry about Yao Ming trying to dunk on you during a candle lighting ceremony, so slip on some comfy flats and save your feet the agony of balancing on leopard-print stilts for nine hours.

Be Respectful of the Couple’s Wishes

The couple has put a lot of thought into their wedding, so it’s important to respect their wishes. Be on time because punctuality is important, especially on a wedding day. The couple has put a lot of time and effort into planning their special day, and they don’t want to have to wait for their guests to arrive. Also, if they’ve asked you not to take photos or videos, please respect their wishes. And if they’ve asked you to dance, please don’t say no.

Have Fun, But Remember the Photographer

By all means, enjoy your day by cutting loose, but remember, this is an event with a professional team of photographers and dozens of relatives all snapping photos like paparazzi watching Taylor Swift give CPR to a beached dolphin. You don’t want the biggest takeaway from the day to be that your dance moves look utterly insane on camera.

When All Else Fails, Just Buy a Gift

Your friends want you to attend their wedding, but in the same way that love covers a multitude of sins, a nice gift masterfully replaces the fact that you couldn’t attend their ceremony. No one has ever said, “Wow, that was so nice of Harold and Rebecca to attend our wedding even though they didn’t bring a gift.” If you buy a new couple a Roomba, they won’t care if you returned their RSVP letter covered in dog hair and baby spit. After all, that’s what wedding season is really all about: getting a Roomba.

“With time, you learn to be better,” Lotterud says. “When you get some space from everything, I think that’s healthy.”

She leans on her music to help her process life, and fans have latched on to her vulnerability. Through her music, she’s discovered a way to blend dream-pop and subtle electronic production with impactful lyrics that are both honest and empowering.

“I want to make music that can suit every emotional feeling,” she says.

Lotterud has been making music for over a decade, but it was her 2017 debut album, Lovers, that caught the attention of the masses.

Since then, Anna of the North has released two more albums, Dream Girl and Crazy Life, both of which showcase her ability for crafting captivating soundscapes and honest lyrics.

We sat down with Lotterud to discuss her new album, how she uses music as her personal therapy and how she’s constantly reflecting on her past to make her future look better.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What was the inspiration behind Crazy Life?

Anna: I think for me like I’ve been doing music for a while now, and I have two albums out that I’m really proud of. But I think somewhere I just wanted to merge those two albums together, and take the best parts of both of them.

You know, it’s weird, my first album, Lovers, came out six years ago now. When I put it out, It was almost embarrassing, but now I’m like, “Wow, it’s really good. It’s aged really well.”

It’s fun looking back on things you were insecure about. It’s so easy to put out something and immediately overthink it, and you feel scared. But then eventually, when you get some time apart from it or from whatever you’re doing, you appreciate it more.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to embrace with Crazy Life. Instead of just embracing that I’m doing music, and instead of being scared of doing the right or wrong thing, I just want to live in it and do what feels good for me. And I think my previous albums taught me that, with time, you learn to be better. I guess what I’m trying to say is, when you get some space from everything, I think that’s healthy.

Yeah, I think a lot of people can relate to needing time to process.

Definitely, and learning to not be so hard on yourself. A lot of time, at the end of something, you’re so hard on yourself. And then it’s a shame because the journey is supposed to be fun.

So on this album, I decided I’m going to just enjoy doing what feels right and not think too much about it. And hopefully listen back to this album in five years time and think, “Wow, still good.”

This album is very honest and vulnerable.

Were you nervous letting fans see this side of you?

I’m a really open person. I talk a lot, and I’m not insecure about talking about my feelings. I’m really lucky in that way. That, or maybe my problem is I say too much. But I feel like writing this album really helped me process things. It’s just different, listening to yourself saying and singing it. And I kind of realized that a lot of songs, I just had this need to write them. Kind of like, I don’t really know why those words come, but when I listen to the song after I’m like, “Okay yeah, I get it.”

Music is really good for me to process stuff, so I guess that’s a big part of it. But I’ve always been like this, ever since the first album. For me, the writing process is more inwards than outwards.

Your songs are definitely vulnerable, but they’ve got a positive, upbeat feeling to them, too.

Yeah, I like a happy set. I like the songs that you can bring and listen to wherever you are or whatever you’re doing. Like if you’re happy, then you can listen to it and you’re still happy. If you’re sad, you can listen to it and find some happiness. That’s something that I’m striving to do in every song. I want to make music that can suit every emotional feeling.

How do you feel like you’ve grown and changed as an artist over the years?

Oh a lot, for sure. I think I’ve definitely become way more comfortable with being a musician and being a songwriter. I remember in the start questioning, “Am I even an artist?” And now, I feel way more comfortable in my role, even as a live artist.

But then again, I feel like some of the vulnerability has gone away, for better or worse. That was what made Anna of the North — that was the reason why it all started, because she had something really special to say. I’ve definitely come a long way from when I started, becoming better and better every day.

But there’s this little part of the “Lovers Anna,” the girl who was so scared of everything — scared of singing in front of people and scared of writing music — there’s something about her that I’m trying to find.

I want to find her again because there was some really emotional stuff in there that I still want to explore. Like, you struggle to move forward in life and then you tend to forget where you were. So these days, I’m kind of looking back at who I was, and trying to just process.

It seems like as you’re reflecting back on your music, you feel really fond and almost nostalgic for it.

Definitely. Of course, there were some difficult moments, but at the same time I’ve done so much I’m proud of. I think for me most of all, as a live artist I’ve grown so much. And to look back at the concerts I have done, and things I’ve done, it can be easy to remember how horrible I felt or how I felt really scared.

But then, I realize I wouldn’t have been here without going through those things. I like being more proud and happy about the entire journey than trying to forget something because it was scary. Everything happens for a reason, and because of everything I’m where I am today.

He remembers telling himself, “I’m going to fix this; I’m going to see every specialist.” However, things just kept getting worse.

He spent 10 days in the hospital over the period of a year. “It just got ugly—ERs, panic attacks—and at every turn everybody told me I was perfectly fine,” he says looking back.

Finally, it came to a head, and his life began to unravel. “I had to stop every speaking engagement, stop traveling, stop working,” he says.

One Sunday morning, as he was getting ready for church, his wife saw the agony he was in, and suggested that he try something non-traditional. As a resident of California, he could semi-legally visit a doctor who could give him a medical marijuana card that would allow him to purchase cannabis. He skipped church, went to see a doctor—who he admits was “shady”—who, over a Skype call from an office park, gave him a prescription.

The experience wasn’t great. Back then, dispensaries weren’t sophisticated operations with staffs trained on wellness and the medical specificities of different strains of cannabis. He remembers a scary looking guy with a gun standing at the door and the cashier suggesting he go somewhere else unless he’s looking for something that “will f****** get you high.”

Gross passed, saying the experience was just too overwhelming—especially for a guy like him. “I had smoked maybe eight cigarettes in my life, been drunk on my 21st birthday and one other time,” he says.

So, he looked elsewhere for relief, though what he found didn’t really help him. For the next several years, Gross struggled with debilitating headaches. But in places like California and Las Vegas, laws were changing. The marijuana industry was undergoing a rapid evolution with new decriminalization measures. Soon, the pot business was moving away from weird, storefront “doctors” and scary head shops to a highly regulated industry that allows consumers to purchase products for recreational purposes.

While attending a conference in Las Vegas with his ministry, Gross decided to visit one of the city’s larger, more polished dispensaries. With the help of staff members, he purchased a small box of edible, cannabis-infused mints. He took one, went to the hotel spa, and for the first time in years, his mind started to slow down.

“Man, I took this thing, it lasts a couple of hours, and I got myself in a different space,” he remembers.

Today, Gross regularly goes to a spa near his house—and sometimes with the help of his “Relax-a-Mints”—gets himself back to that place.

“I can kind of stop and things can just kind of connect more in the heart space and shut my body down,” he says.

Now, Gross is on a mission.

A GRAY AREA

Marijuana remains in a strange state of legal flux in the United States. Though it is technically “legal” in 11 states, officially it is still very much illegal. On the federal level, it is still a “Schedule 1” controlled substance, the category reserved for drugs so dangerous that they can’t even be used for medical reasons.

However, unlike drugs like heroin (another Schedule 1 drug), marijuana is largely considered pretty safe. Though because of its Schedule 1 classification, unlike Schedule 2 drugs like methamphetamine, it can’t be officially medically tested for safety in the United States.

You read that correctly: The federal government gives pot a more dangerous classification than drugs like meth, cocaine and fentanyl. Unlike those drugs, you can’t overdose on marijuana. It’s also considered non-physically addictive by most experts.

As states across the country change their own laws—in conflict with federal law— high-level drug enforcement officials have essentially decided to look the other way. This means that dispensaries and weed stores can be legal in places like California, but illegal in the United States. It’s confusing, and that’s the problem. And that’s why things might soon be changing.

With more and more states ignoring federal laws in favor of their own, it may only be a matter of time before pot becomes a highly regulated, accepted, legal and extremely profitable part of the American economy like alcohol and cigarettes. That means it’s an issue that more and more churches are going to need to be equipped to deal with.

“Fred,” a pastor from Georgia [not his real name], has seen that the topic is still too taboo for many churches to deal with. He is a regular user of cannabis, but many people in his congregation don’t know that.

“We have to be an underground church, so to speak, in this area,” he says.

Fred has been a Christian for more than a decade, and says that if God asked him to stop regularly smoking weed, he would. But, to Fred, pot is a gift and a part of creation.

“I believe Genesis 1,” he says referring to the story of God creating all life on Earth. “He called it ‘good’ and ‘very good.’” Like Gross, Fred uses it to slow down, especially when the busyness of life and ministry becomes overwhelming.

“It’s like somebody just called a time out,” he says. “I can take a breath, and I can actually gather my thoughts.”

In fact, for Fred, it’s become an important part of his spiritual life.

“Over 90% of the use is for spirituality,” he says. “I’m either going to read the Bible. I’m going to listen to worship. I’m going to play my guitar and sing to the Lord.”

Fred has heard all of the concerns: The shaky legal status, the scary messages you hear about pot from anti-drug activists. However, he seems unmoved by them.

“I always laugh at the negative connotations,” he says. “They always say, ‘Cannabis or marijuana is a gateway drug.’ And I am always like, ‘Yeah, it’s a gateway to Jesus Christ.’”

PROCEEDING WITH CAUTION

You can walk across the street from Pastor Jeff Lacine’s church in Portland, Oregon, and buy a pre-rolled joint for just a couple of dollars. As a teen, Lacine was a daily marijuana smoker, but believes “God rescued me from the distorting clutches of marijuana abuse.”

He has some clear concerns and reservations about the Christian consumption of recreational marijuana, but he also sees the danger in being too quick to dismiss pot, especially in its medicinal use, as something that should be labeled sinful or flatly off limits. Lacine doesn’t want churches to repeat mistakes of the past.

“I think that evangelicals have largely recognized mistakes that the Church has made in reference to alcohol in the early 20th century and even into the mid- and late-20th century, as far as attitudes toward alcohol that were unbiblical and mainly, unbiblically restrictive,” he says. “Unbiblical restrictions have actually reduced our credibility and our witness.”

However, Lacine says that as pastors, there is still an obligation to “protect the flock” and offer leadership and insight when it comes to an issue that could potentially lead to destructive attitudes and behaviors.

“We need to be especially on guard against any claim that chemical-induced spiritual experiences draw us closer to Jesus,” Lacine says. “That practice is more akin to witchcraft than it is to any form of historically and biblically orthodox Christianity.”

But, instead of simply issuing a blanket prohibition of pot, Lacine believes that Christians need to look at the larger narrative of Scripture and understand where a substance like pot fits into it.

Marijuana remains in a strange state of legal flux in the United States.

According to Lacine, this approach means asking, “What is the biblical, theological understanding, as we understand God’s redemptive plan through the whole Bible, and not just proof-texting the verses for or against?” he explains. Though, he says that after counseling many churchgoers who use recreational cannabis, “there is not a single case that I have come across where I have found it beneficial in an individual’s discipleship to Christ.”

For Lacine, it starts with understanding God’s desire for people to overcome the haze of the fallen world, and to actually see God as He really is.

“The promise of the Christian—the goal of redemption— is to see things as they really are,” he explains. “To see with clarity. That is ultimately seeing God as He really is.” With that understanding, does marijuana lead us to God’s design for redemption?

“I think the God-given place of substances in this world is to help us along that journey with our broken bodies,” Lacine explains. He points to coffee, which can help us wake up and think clearly. Similarly, he sees a scriptural place for proper alcohol use, which the Bible uses to help us understand ideas like celebration and abundance. That’s why he thinks pot needs to be discussed with such nuance and understanding.

“My hope is to push the Church, particularly the local church … to ask these questions with this redemptive, historical framework,” he says. “The question we need to ask with marijuana is, ‘Is it being used in a way where it’s clarifying or where it’s distorting?’ And that’s not a question that I can answer across the board. That’s the place where the local church is needed.”

Part of answering that question is understanding how pot is used, bred and sold. There are two primary components that make marijuana, marijuana: THC and CBD.

CBD (cannabidiol) is the part of the cannabis plant that is typically sold in oil form or edible candies that can be used for everything from pain management to treating insomnia. According to the World Health Organization, “CBD exhibits no effects indicative of any abuse or dependence potential.” CBD also doesn’t affect mental clarity.

THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) is the psychoactive ingredient. In other words, THC is what gets you high. Different strains are bred with different amounts of both components. Oils like Charlotte’s Web has the benefits of CBD without any kind of intoxicating effect of THC. But many dispensaries sell weed specifically bred to contain more THC. The effects that different types of pot have on people—from a cancer patient using pot to alleviate the pain of chemotherapy and a parent using Charlotte’s Web to treat a child’s seizures—vary wildly.

That’s why Lacine believes that it’s important for local pastors to understand what exactly they are being asked about when they are asked about their thoughts on pot.

Ultimately, he sees a need for pastors and churches to understand the nuances of the issue and the individual circumstances of members of their congregation. Because of the complexities of the topic—recreational vs. medicinal uses, unclear legal statuses, differing effects on different people—things are more effectively handled on a relational level, when Christians can know the specifics of people’s needs and the kind of pot they are thinking of using. But that’s also why he believes pastors using marijuana in secret is concerning.

“Nine times out of 10, the people in their community hear that, just like I’m hearing it: This brother is self-deceived,” Lacine says. “He’s using chemicals, in a way, to find an escape from real issues that are to be battled by God’s grace, not by silencing out reality, but by welcoming accountability, the means of grace through Scripture, through prayers with brothers and sisters.”

Because, as Lacine explains, trials should be expected. “While the Gospel imparts to us great comfort in this life, it is not a comfort absent of trials,” he says. “Our goal as Christians in this world is not to escape every painful trial, but to glorify God in the midst of difficulties. God employs trials and difficulties to work what is pleasing to Him in his children … How many Psalms would have not been written if David would have silenced all that was going on inside of his heart with substance abuse?”

THE FUTURE IS NOW

Recently, Craig Gross launched a new venture: ChristianCannabis.com. The name is meant to be somewhat ironic. (“I don’t like the labels, because I think that just means we do everything B-rate or C-rate,” Gross said.) Instead, he sees it as a place where Christians can discuss the issue, get resources about pot and, soon, buy actual cannabis products.

Gross says the idea came after talking to so many people who find themselves in a spot where they just don’t know what to think about the issue, and many don’t have a safe place to discuss it at all.

Time after time, he heard the same response when he asked a pastor what he thought about pot. “And every answer from everybody I’ve talked to for the last year was, ‘I don’t know,’” he says. “Not just, ‘What would Jesus say? What would my boss say? Am I allowed to? Do I have freedom to do it?’”

Gross says he wants to dispel misinformation. “I think it’s dangerous for Christians with microphones or pulpits or even Facebook channels to talk about things they have no experience with or knowledge of.”

Gross says pot changed his quality of life, positively affecting his spiritual life and relationship with God. Not because pot changed what he thought about God; because it’s changed how he thinks.

“As people ask me, ‘Hey, how has this changed you? I would say, ‘The spirit lives in my heart and our hearts as believers, but I’ve been in my head.’” Now, he’s found a way out of it. Pot helps him quiet his mind, but as more churches deal with cannabis in their own communities, they’ll need to decide if that’s the kind of high God wants them to start chasing.

I feel the tremors in my own heart. I’ve developed a posture of narrowing my eyes at people, looking for holes to poke, searching out the underbelly of any given position, interpretation, group identification, personal narrative. Certainly, diversity of opinion has always existed, but we never had such access to the array. And, as it has always done, our humanity convinces us that different equals wrong and signals our defense mechanisms to kick in.

So we are prepared to burn whatever “offends” us to the ground.

I crave a spiritual community that can hold tensions with more kindness, more stamina. When you pull one way and I pull another, yes, the line is taut; it would certainly be easier to drop the line altogether. I could better coexist with people of constant like-mindedness, where there is virtually no tension to hold at all. Holding tension stretches me spiritually and emotionally, which involves discomfort, effort and energy. This requires relational work, and I’m already too busy.

But the cost of dropping the line outweighs the cost of hanging on. What beauty for a watching world to see a Christian community committed to holding tension. Be it theology, denominations, spiritual practices or just personal preferences, any tribe that cherishes unity in essentials (of which there are so few) and grace in nonessentials (of which there are so many) is truly rare. Plus, the stretching is good for us; it enlarges our perspectives and strengthens the family. It relieves us from being right and prioritizes being present.

I think often of Charles Spurgeon’s words on John Wesley, his theological antithesis:

I can only say concerning him that, while I detest many of the doctrines which he preached, yet for the man himself I have a reverence second to no Wesleyan; and if there were wanted two apostles to be added to the number of the twelve, I do not believe that there could be found two men more fit to be so added than George Whitefield and John Wesley. The character of John Wesley stands beyond all imputation for self-sacrifice, zeal, holiness and communion with God; he lived far above the ordinary level of common Christians, and was one “of whom the world was not worthy.”

We can disagree and yet honor one another. We can make opposite choices and yet hold on as brothers and sisters. We can experience tension and remain in community.

It is possible through humility and deference, choosing to build up rather than tear down, clinging to the upside-down Kingdom in which our mouths are full of blessings and the meek will inherit the earth.

It won’t grant us clicks or headlines, perhaps. It won’t be the sensationalized story of the day, but it is the way of Christ. In a world that can no longer hold any tension at all, may we demonstrate a gracious unity that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things.

Let’s hold the line.

The two best friends, known as indie pop duo Royel Otis, began remixing songs and messing around on guitars and vocals in their homes back in 2020. Both Maddell and Pavlovic had dabbled in music on their own, although neither had taken it seriously as a career.

Pavlovic’s father played guitar, and growing up he wanted to mimic him. He picked up a guitar as a kid and quickly developed a love for music. Eventually, he stopped trying to learn others’ songs and started working on his own.

Maddell, on the other hand, was picking up a guitar for the first time for a very different reason.

“Well, I got in a lot of trouble at school,” Maddell admitted sheepishly. “I started seeing a school therapist who was also a music teacher, and through our sessions I just ended up playing music. It started as a way to occupy my mind and then became a bit of therapy. Sort of like a meditation.”

Despite living just one block away from each other, the two didn’t meet until they were both out of school. Maddell and Pavlovic met on a night out in Sydney.

It didn’t take long for the two to hit it off, bonding over their love of music, and eventually confiding in one another that they wanted to make their own music.

At first, they spent their time having fun while remixing old tracks they both enjoyed, sort of DIY-ing beloved songs. After a while, the Australian indie-pop duo stopped rehashing other people’s stuff and spent time developing their own sound. Soon, they began to write their own songs.

But just as they were offcially forming Royel Otis, Covid hit and Australia implemented an intense lockdown.

“Perfect timing, right?” Pavlovic joked.

The pandemic didn’t stop Royel Otis from making music, though. Despite the lockdown and restrictions, the duo found a way to create music from the safety of Maddell’s home studios. It didn’t take long for their music to get noticed.

In just two short years, Royel Otis has been named a band to watch by countless music publications, amassed over 10 million streams and been featured on numerous BBC Radio and Apple Music Radio stations.

The duo have also steadily released upbeat and energetic indie-pop EPs each year: Campus in 2021, Bar & Grill in 2022, and later this month, Sofa Kings. With each new album, the duo has honed their sound into something warm and bursting with infectious energy.

“We try not to take it too seriously,” Maddell said. “We just try not to overthink it, and now it just feels like we’re having a good time.”

The duo creates an environment where they give each other space to experiment, throw out all their wild ideas and learn from their mistakes.

“It can be kind of vulnerable,” Pavlovic said. “But we’re having fun. You’ve just got to agree to back each other.”

Maddell and Pavlovic each bring their own unique taste to their music, pulling from a wide variety of genres to create their songs — and they do have a wide variety. The duo each spoke of a ton of artists who have influenced them over the years: R&B artists like Frank Ocean and Rihanna; rock bands like The Cure, Joy Division and Velvet Underground; pop legends like Sinead O’Connor and Kylie Minogue.

It can be easy to assume that a mixture of those artists would sound like pure chaos. But Maddell and Pavlovic have an impressive ear for creating a sound that is fresh and exciting, with peppy and effcient melodies that draw listeners in and keep them hooked.

Take their single, “I Wanna Dance With You,” for example. The guitar-driven indie-pop song has fun with layered vocals and shimmering piano runs while encouraging listeners to gather the courage and get their significant other on the dance floor.

“Gather the courage to tell someone how you feel but muck it up like Frank Spencer on roller skates,” the band said of the single. “Put that image to the banjo scene from ‘Deliverance’ and you have yourself the recipe for ‘I Wanna Dance With You.’ Just play it all off as intentional and you’ll be alright.”

Or there’s their breakout hit, “Oysters In My Pocket,” which was a song the duo created as “a way of showing appreciation to the bivalve molluscs that put some boost in our juice.” On paper, the song seems like it won’t work. There’s no deep meaning or message behind the song. And yet, when it all comes together, the infectious beat and nonsensical lyrics are all a part of Royel Otis’ appeal.

“We’re making sure that we’re not overthinking stuff, which is a feeling that becomes infectious when we work with people,” Pavlovic said. “Some music can be so serious, or deep and meaningful, but with us, everyone is invited to the party.”

Speaking of parties, Pavlovic and Maddell are gearing up to bring the party on the road. Royel Otis will open up for alt-J on an Australian tour, but the best friends shared they’re ready to travel the world playing music anywhere and everywhere. Even if that means packing everything up in a car and driving across continents, Maddell joked.

“There’s so many places we want to go to, and cool venues we want to play at,” Maddell said. “I hope we’ll get to travel soon, but it will just take some time.”

But for now, they are focusing on making more music and exploring their future careers together — and having plenty of fun along the way.

“We’ve made sure that we’ve got no back-up plan beyond making music,” Maddell said. “I trust Otis on such a deep level. With him, everything is just so easy.”

For over a decade, the lead singer of Fitz and the Tantrums has had fun working with his bandmates to create their unique sound, blending soul, funk and pop in a way that could easily come off as too much, but somehow sounds just right coming from them. Yet, instead of sticking with one sound or influence, the band has looked to every genre, from Motown to punk rock, to explore their creativity.

Perhaps that’s why, in a time when everyone else was freaking out about a pandemic and lamenting a normal life, Fitzpatrick took it as an opportunity to embrace change and try something new.

During lockdown, Fitzpatrick embraced his new normal, working from home like everyone else while exploring new sounds and writing new songs.

A hundred new songs, to be exact.

After some careful consideration and collaboration with his bandmates, Fitz and the Tantrums had a new album: Let Yourself Free. To no one’s surprise, the album sounds much different than their previous records.

As the band has evolved over the years, they’ve strayed away from their indie sound and leaned further into high energy pop projects. But one thing that won’t change is their ability to make a catchy song you can’t get out of your head.

We sat down with Fitzpatrick to talk about the inspiration behind Let Yourself Free and how he’s constantly evolving as an artist.

Let Yourself Free was written post-Covid. How did the pandemic impact your creativity as an artist?

Michael Fitzpatrick: We had been on tour for two months as I was reading the headlines about this disease spreading. I remember telling my wife, “You better go do a big shop at Costco.” She’d be like, “What are you talking about?”

And she went — and this is like literally a month before anybody else, because three weeks later you couldn’t find toilet paper anywhere. And I was on tour, but the last couple of shows of our tour got cut short. So I came home, and as a touring musician, there’s all this fear that started in me.

So for me, the crazy thing was, I’m stressed out from not working and not making any money. I can’t tour, I can’t perform. This is how I make a living. All the stress added on from the hills of L.A. literally burning on fire, crazy floods, social unrest, Black Lives Matter. It felt like the world’s melting before our very eyes and disintegrating.

So there’s all this external stress, all this environmental stress, all this financial stress, and yet at the same time, for me, as a guy who’s been on the road non-stop for years, it was the first time in 15 years that I got to go to bed in my own bed every day. I’d wake up in my bed every day, see my kids for breakfast and drop them off every morning, put them to bed and give them a kiss goodnight every single night.

For me, after the first two weeks, that was a world’s record of me being at home uninterrupted. To have a year-plus of just being at home, focusing on my wife and my family… it was a stressful time, but it was also, at least for me and my career, kind of the best time in my life.

Where did inspiration for the album come from?

Every song kind of has its own path and its own journey. Some will start with a big concept, and that’s where you jump off from. Sometimes you’ll start with a cool drum beat or a piano part, or maybe you’ve been humming this melody, and then you kind of build around that.

There’s so many times where I sit down and tell myself, “Okay, today I want to write an upbeat tempo banger that says something fun,” and then halfway through it’s turning out to be like a sad melancholy song. What I’ve found in doing this for this long now, is that it’s really important to sort of let the song take you where it wants to take you.

To me, I always believe that a song is kind of a living organism of its own. If you try to manhandle it, it just kind of bristles you off of its shoulders, and you usually end up with something that’s not that good. But if the song starts taking a direction that’s different than what you set up, but you have enough trust and willingness to follow where the song takes you, it usually takes you to somewhere pretty magical.

Every choice you make affects the mood and the aesthetic and the interpretation of the song. And most of the guys in my band are far superior musicians than I am. They spent their life practicing one instrument, becoming the best of that one thing.

And me, I’m not as good of a musician, but I would say that I have a great ability to have a macro overview of what we’re doing, and in terms of those choices, aesthetic choices, that’s where I really shine and try and mix different genres in the way that we’ve kind of been known to do.

How do you feel like you’ve personally grown as an artist?

I work with a lot of amazingly talented musicians and incredible song writers. And there’s some people that are just born with this God-given talent that I could just strangle them for because they could just hear a melody instantly.

But I come from more of the school where I’ve had to just grind and learn and keep honing my craft to get to a place where I feel like now I might be decent. Like I’ll write nearly 100 songs per record.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that artists make is that they think that everything they do is awesome. But let me just tell you one thing: cool is not gonna pay the bills. More so than that, they just kind of believe their own hype or the hype of everyone around them, and they won’t put in that effort.

For me, I’ve always been incredibly hard working, but also totally fearful of failure. So with every record, I double down and I write as many songs as I can, because invariably, myself and the people I work with, we can write a song any given day, but the question becomes, “Is this an OK song, a good song or a great song?”

So I write a ton of music, at least 80 to 100 songs, and then I’m sitting there with this collection over the course of six months to a year as I’m writing the record, and over time, the cream of the crop rises to the top. Then I’m left with 40 songs that have potential and then I’m gonna cut it down to like 25, and eventually you cut it down to 12 to 15.

And when I’m in that final stretch, that’s where the theme of the record reveals itself. That’s where the arc of the whole entire album starts to reveal itself. The more you hone that, then you start to see the themes on the record.

How would you describe the theme for Let Yourself Free?

I think what sort of emerged from this was this collective experience that we’ve all had — not just in LA, not just in the United States, but the whole world. The whole world just walked through a pandemic, and what a journey with so many downs, but even some surprising ups for me that I was not expecting.

This journey has been so challenging for everybody. Nobody’s been able to escape it. Whether you’re Red, Blue, you live in an open state, a closed day, China, Europe — you’ve had to deal with this experience.

There were so many weird things about that time. So many missed opportunities: missed weddings, delayed weddings, missed graduation, didn’t get to have their senior year, didn’t get to have that freshman year a college experience, so much lost community and family.

For this record, we were debating on two of the track titles as the title of the album: the opening track that’s called “Good Intentions,” and then there’s “Let Yourself Free.”

And at the end of the day, it had to be “Let Yourself Free” because this is about a celebration of going out and doing all the things. We’d all been cooped up for so long, we’ve all held back, we’ve all lost so much. So this is the moment to shake off those cobwebs and chase those things you want and go be the fullest best version of yourself.

The movement, initially sparked by pastors Chuck Smith, Lonnie Frisbee and Greg Laurie in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was characterized by its emphasis on a personal and experiential relationship with Jesus Christ, rather than adherence to formal religious practices or theological doctrines.

It was a religious and cultural phenomenon that emerged as a response to the countercultural and political upheavals of the era, as well as a reaction against the traditional mainstream Christian churches.

The 1970s were the perfect time for a Christian movement like this to emerge. The country was at war, experiencing just as much turmoil and unrest inside of its borders as outside of them. Culture was changing quickly, and many churches struggled to keep up with the times. Many dug their heels into their tried and true ways, refusing to budge on their practices, leading younger believers to turn elsewhere.

Sound familiar?

Fifty years later, and a strong case can be made that things are back where they started. Church attendance is in decline as pastors struggle to adapt to cultural and technological changes grabbing the attention of their members. More churches are closing their doors than opening them year after year. It’s easy to think that Christianity is fading away.

But just like the Jesus Revolution in the ’70s, things can turn around in an instant. All it takes is one spark.

Jonathan Roumie, who portrays Frisbee’s character in the new film Jesus Revolution, believes this movie can be that spark.

“We hope this movie can contribute to a new revival because I think, at least culturally, we’re at a place where people are searching,” Roumie said. “They’re searching hard, and they’re looking in all the wrong places. I think it’s going to resonate with so many people for that exact reason.”

This isn’t the first project Roumie has joined that’s sparked something. For the last three seasons, Roumie has portrayed Jesus on the popular TV show, “The Chosen.” He’s drawn to projects that give him the opportunity to say something substantial and use his talents to draw others in.

“I always check with the Spirit and discern everything,” Roumie said. “Should I be doing this? Should I be in this next project or a relationship with this person. And God shows me what’s right through continual confirmations during every step of the process.”

When asked what confirmations he received during the filming of Jesus Revolution, he told multiple stories: From the bells of a church ringing immediately after a prayer, to discovering an image he painted of a dove with an olive branch in its mouth matched a painting Lonnie Frisbee had created decades before. But the biggest confirmation came on set, the day the cast and crew were filming a baptism scene out in a lake.

“This woman walks up to me in the middle of the scene as we’re rolling,” Roumie shared. “She’s wading through the water to get to me. And she said, ‘I have to tell you something.’ And the cameras are rolling, at a distance, but they’re rolling. And she gets closer, so I ask, ‘What do you want to tell me?’ And she said, ‘I want to do this for real.’ I said, ‘You want me to baptize you?’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, can we do that?’”

Roumie, of course, said yes. With the cameras rolling all around them, Roumie prayed with the woman and baptized her in the water. And she wasn’t the only one. Roumie baptized nearly a dozen other people that day on set, all captured on film.

“The whole movie was just something of a mystical experience,” he said.

It’s easy to see why the cast and crew felt like this story needed to be told now. But beyond the message of hope and salvation, the movie touches on another issue our culture needs to hear right now: unity.

“The theme is loving the other, creating a place of belonging, compassion, understanding, empathy for people that don’t look like you, maybe don’t carry the same beliefs as you,” said director Brent McCorckle.

Joel Courtney, who takes on the role of a young Greg Laurie, was drawn to the film when he saw that at its heart, it was a story that sought to unite everyone.

“I was very attracted to the script and the message of hope that the film brings,” Courtney said. “It’s not an old school Christian film that kind of alienates and judges or is cheesy and lighthearted. It’s heartbreaking. It’s powerful. These are real people’s stories. I connected to the redemptiveness of it.”

Courtney studied Laurie’s sermons and was able to speak directly with him. Laurie was even on set some days to watch the film play out, which added a bit of nerves to Courtney’s performance.

“Oh, it was definitely nerve-wracking having [Laurie] on set,” Courtney admitted. “But after a few days, it was actually nice to be able to speak with him and ask for direction. I got to learn a lot from him and he helped me figure out a way to connect with people better, on screen and off.”

For Courtney, getting to be part of Jesus Revolution was a bit of an answered prayer.

“I’m a Christian and an actor, so getting the chance to do something that combines the things I’m passionate about is like a dream come true,” he said. “And to be part of something with such a powerful message makes it even better for me.”

Turning the story of the real-life Jesus Revolution into a film took years. Back in 2015, director Jon Erwin came across the story after discovering an old TIME magazine from June 21, 1971, on eBay with an image of Jesus on the front, underneath the headline “The Jesus Revolution.”

“I found this magazine on eBay, and I was like, ‘What is this?’” Erwin said. “Jesus was on the cover of TIME magazine, four years after there was a TIME magazine cover that just was very bleak, it said, ‘Is God Dead?’ Four years later, Jesus is on the cover of TIME, and there’s this 10-page article that just talks about how God swept this country at a time of despair and division. Sounds pretty familiar.”

The TIME story detailed the rise of the movement, diving into the appeal of the revolution and the spark it created.

“There is an uncommon morning freshness to this movement, a buoyant atmosphere of hope and love along with the usual rebel zeal,” the author wrote. “Their love seems more sincere than a slogan, deeper than the fast-fading sentiments of the flower children; what startles the outsider is the extraordinary sense of joy that they are able to communicate.”

Reading about the love and hope that connected with a generation in need pushed Erwin and his collaborators to make the story into a film.

“For a long time, we were just dreaming of being able to make this movie, and it’s a miracle that Lionsgate let us make it, a movie called Jesus Revolution,” Erwin said.

As Erwin began working on the film, he looked to Laurie’s own words for more inspiration. In 2018, Laurie released a book, Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today, to share his perspective on what happened so many decades ago.

“I think this is the right time for the story to be made,” Laurie said. “This story has never been told. Other stories of the ’60s have been told, but never this story. This is a significant story that changed our nation and in many ways changed the world.”

Just as he did decades ago, Laurie’s hope is that another spiritual movement would happen in the next generation.

“In America, we’ve had four great spiritual awakenings,” Laurie said. “The Jesus Movement was the last one, and now I feel like we’re overdue for another. And I’m hoping that this film will inspire people to pray, ‘Lord, do it again.’ Because the fame of revival spreads the flame of revival.”

Of course, it’s hard to force a revival to start, much less predict when one could happen. And yet, somehow, the week that Jesus Revolution premiered in theaters, an outpouring broke out in a small town in Wilmore, Kentucky. The Asbury Outpouring brought in thousands of people from around the world, and has created a ripple effect that has lasted long after the revival shut down.

The crew felt like it was just one more confirmation from God.

“I just think there’s a divine hand on the timing of the film,” Erwin said. “And the reason we made it was … the thing that we’ve said for years is, if it happened then, it can happen now. If it happened once, it can happen again.”