The Slow Way: On Longing For What We Already Are

Miraslov Volf says, "When the fragile identity crumbles, we are finally free to be ourselves."

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

Hi! I’ve been taking a break as I’ve healed from a health scare. (More below.) Thanks especially to my paid subscribers who have stuck around while I’ve been quiet for the past six weeks. I will be easing back into posting, starting with one Slow Way Letter every other week. So grateful to be better and to be back here with you!

I woke up April 24 with weak, aching legs and tingling fingertips, then spent the next few weeks struggling to walk, going to doctors, self diagnosing from reddit posts, getting blood draws and an MRI, walking shakily downstairs, holding on my big boys or my husband when my legs felt too weak. Trying not to consider the scariest possibilities of what my symptoms might have been pointing to.

I slept a lot. I cried. I tried to be at peace. I tried to read but lacked the focus. I tried to pray.

Our bodies are miraculous things and sometimes one thing goes awry, and the body enters crisis mode. For me, it was a severe side effect of medication. A medication I had to slowly wean from my body, then wait for it to leave me. In early June, six weeks after my weak legs arrived, I caught a ball, ran a couple of steps, and passed it, recognizing that using my legs again was miraculous. This could have been a very different story.

I’ve taken a break since I got sick, focusing on doctors appointments, eating healthy foods, getting sleep, and avoiding things that lead to stress. (Read: Social media and writing deadlines.) The first weekend of June I took Ace to Disneyland for his birthday, which was my goal back in early May when I struggled to walk around the block. Last week, I spent an entire afternoon and evening hosting my niece and her bestie throughout New York City, my legs as strong as they had been in March before the med that poisoned me. Today I’m guiding my youth group on a mission immersion trip, in charge of ten kids for the week and sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a room of teenage girls.

I figure if I’m well enough to do that, I’m well enough to show back up here and say hello.

So there’s a few things I want to say as I poke my head out of my hidey hole:

One, there’s a clarity that comes from illness. This is a lesson I’m learning and relearning since my chronic migraines began in 2019. It’s the ever deepening reminder that I don’t have control of much. I can make plans but I can’t be certain they will come to be. I can depend on my body, and care for her, but I can’t control her response to the world she lives in. I’ve learned that I am not invincible, and maybe I’m no longer a “high capacity person.” I’m learning to let that way of defining myself go.

Two, I was reminded again of what I call “following the anxiety.” A friend tells me that podcaster Tim Ferriss calls this “fear setting.” For some it might be a thougt experiment; for me it’s a spiritual practice, using my imagination in the presence of God to move out of the chronic repetitive fear that my mind is playing like a record scratch. When I follow the anxiety, I allow myself to imagine the very thing I don’t want to imagine. In May, that meant following the string of my scariest symptoms: What if I am losing my ability to walk? What if I have a degenerative neurological disorder? What if I can no longer pick up Ace when he needs my help, or I lose the ability to ever run again? What if I can’t walk up my stairs and we need to install a chair rail? What if live the rest of my life in a wheelchair? What if the life I’ve built around quickness and packed schedules, physical play with my boys and independence—what if I lose that life? What is still true then?

This practice almost always lands me in the same place, whether my fear is losing a loved one or stepping into a season of weakness. What is true? The practice never brings me a sense of peace that the bad thing won’t come. It simply asks me what is true if it does. Who will love me? What will be meaningful in my life? Who will help me through my grief? Who will care for my physical needs? Will I be strong enough to face this suffering?

I found the answer through the kindness and care of Chris and my kids who stepped in to help. Even through Ace’s nonverbal frustration as I struggled to be with him in the ways he had always expected. Flowers came from family and friends as I lay in bed for the first couple of weeks. Food arrived from my favorite home-chef/husband. And help showed up in the form of childcare when friends and family arrived to give me and Chris a break.

A couple of weeks ago, Miraslov Volf spoke on Amy Julia Becker’s podcast about his newest book The Cost of Ambition: How Striving To Be Better Makes Us Worse about the dangers of status and competition. He spoke about longing for what we already are, a lovely idea of contentment that still clings to yearning as a necessary human state. I told Chris about this phrase last week as we drank coffee on the porch together. “What do you think that means?” he asked.

Valid question. It’s a pretty abstract idea. What does it mean to long for what we already are? I think of that phrase I used so often in Blessed Are The Rest of Us—God’s dream for the world–-and how we are living in what Jesus called “the kingdom of God” when we’re becoming what God dreams of for us. Still, that’s a convoluted answer. I answered Chris saying something like: “Maybe it means the ache of becoming who God has always longed for us to be?”

That feels like a holy process to me. To join in the longing of God, who aches for us to be our truest selves, the selves God has always intended. We don’t enter that longing out of success or dominance or even being “high capacity.” We enter through limits and longing. Our own ache and weaknesses points us to the good life.

In that podcast conversation, Amy Julia brought up something Volf wrote early in the book, how “striving for superiority is a dominant theme in the story of human suffering and wrongdoing.” She asked him what the human story looks when we reimagine a different social order, one where superiority isn’t the dominant theme.

He responded with a series of realities that would change in the world if we were to release our need to strive for superiority. He said we would no longer be deriving our identity from “achievements that can be overtaken at any point.” We won’t cling to a “a fragile identity that at any moment can crumble.” That’s when, “I can breathe the fresh air freely and be who I am.”

That felt like something close to what I’m holding as I move out of this season of illness and weakness and find myself returning to the body I had before. While much of the past decade has been a lesson in seeing my value outside of capacity or achievements, it continues to be a slow and painful letting go. There is a part of me that still wishes to be person who doesn’t need sleep, who can jump from commitment to commitment, writing professionally, working in my part time church job, all while navigating the family doctor appointments and insurance challenges and financial goals and emotional needs of my people. I often think I’ve released my need for both professional and relational achievements, but life continues to prove otherwise. It’s a lesson I am learning again and again.

As Volf says, when the fragile identity crumbles, we are finally free to be ourselves.

What does it mean to allow our fragile identity—the identity that is built on accomplishments, work, skill, capacity, or success—crumble?

Richard Rohr’s new book The Tears of Things, says this in the book's introduction: “God is still in the very slow process of disenchanting us out of our love of winning and succeeding.”

I like that word disenchanting, a word that acknowledges the powerful (almost magical) pull that success has on us. The work of releasing that enchantment is long and slow. That’s the story I’m living. Winning and succeeding—whether in parenting or ministry, friendships or my writing career—are fragile attempts to hide the real fear at the end of the anxiety: Am I worthy? Am I loved? Will I be okay? Will my loved ones be okay?

How do we answer these questions except to practice longing for the realer, truer thing at the end of every worse case scenario—Do we believe that God is Love and that Love awaits us, that Love knows us, that Love is bringing us into wholeness?

A Slow Practice

Let’s practice Following the Anxiety.

Consider the heaviest reality of your life, the anxious thought or possible scenario that arrives in your mind in the middle of the night. This is the thought I want you to explore.

Begin by acknowledging God’s presence with you, and as you do recognizing that God as Love is the hope of your life. Your hope is not ease, your hope is not health, and it’s not power or success.

Pray something like this: You, Holy One, are the reason I am here. All goodness comes from you and belongs to you. Help me see what is true.

Now, using either your imagination or a journal, allow yourself to walk through the door you’ve held closed. What if this thing you most fear, the worst-case scenario does happen? Answer these questions:

• Who will show up to help?

• Who will love me?

• What will still be true?

Allow yourself to sit with these answers as long as you need to, asking the Spirit of God to guide you through the fear. And once you have sat with them, ask the Spirit for peace to hold what is true right now alongside what will always be true.

End with this prayer: Even in my greatest fear, you remain, Spirit. You are Love and Love awaits me in every future.