Circa40 Update (November 2026)

For almost fifteen years, this blog has served as a quiet place for me to sort out tangled feelings about our given times. Circa40 also has been a space to try out ideas that feel like minority reports and experiment with different voices and writing genres. It has felt like a private garden protected by known readers like you, and I am grateful.

More than once, I’ve thought about transforming this garden plot into a more public platform. But recognizing how important the gift of such protected support and generosity has been to my writing life, I’ve decided to keep Circa40 as a private garden that sometimes serves as a personal test kitchen.

With that said, I’m planning to launch a public presence on Substack where I will broadcast somewhat more considered and academic takes on technology, race, and faith. While Circa40 will keep humming along with its usual random assortment of posts, it will also serve an off-broadway function of rehearsing here portions of writing that will later be featured in more polished form on Substack. In this way Circa40 will continue to be what it always has been: a sort of she-shed for first takes.

I have set aside all other contract work to focus on a new book manuscript for the remaining 2026 calendar year. This means I’m reading too many books at once and accumulating unwieldy piles of notes scribbled on random pieces of paper and digital files. For the rest of this year, Circa40 will be dedicated to stirring and simmering over various texts that I come across. Below is a brief sample of what is to come!

What Do You Do All Day?

They asked Thomas Merton, “What do the monks do all day?” He answered: “Fall down. Get up. Fall down. Get up.” ¹

“You’re always practicing something. Some of us are practicing leaving all the time, we’re practicing hiding, we’re practicing what habits we have that we think keep us safe.

Practice the ones that make you grounded….You don’t ever arrive at a space where we aren’t bothered, we aren’t harmed, where we aren’t uncentered, where we’re not creating harm. But we do get better at re-centering. We get better at coming back to…our ideals and who we want to be and how we want to relate to people.” ²

The next time I engage in obligatory small talk and am asked, “So, what do you do all day?” I will most likely not have the courage to answer: “Fall down. Get up. Fall down. Get up.” Nor will I be brave enough to say, “I’m practicing habits that make me grounded. And you?”

But, these options surely would make for much more interesting conversations than my usual mumblings about my prior career or the never-hospitable mention of book-writing. (No one’s face ever lights up with, “I’m in the middle of working on a book manuscript too!”)

I am struck by Merton’s assertion that the order of everyday life begins with falling down when so much of my inheritance has taught me to wake up each morning ready to climb. Whether it be faithful spiritual ascent, scaling the career ladder, or bracing oneself against the odds, I have long trained in assuming a life motion of “Get up. Fall down. Get up. Fall down.”

And there’s no getting around the quirky headache-inducing juxtaposition between Merton’s imagery of getting up and Hemphill’s call to practicing habits that “make you grounded.” (I thought I was already “grounded” when I am on my butt after falling?)

Still, it is a splash of cold water to be reminded that we are always practicing something. And it’s rough when we consider how perhaps we’ve have gotten good at the practice of leaving or hiding. But there is a tenderness in acknowledging that we may practice avoidance, not because we are bad or weak, but because we think those responses will keep us safe. And Hemphill suggests that, for a lot of us, instead of vexing over whether we are being good or bad, strong or weak, we should work on the practice of getting grounded. Getting up after falling down. Breathing in and breathing out. Calling the friend who will remind us that we are loved. Being quiet enough in our body and mind to discover a deep wail that needs sounding. Taking a nap.

Because Hemphill is engaged in social activism, working amidst those weighed down with such longing to make right what is so wrong in our world, these seemingly mundane admonitions strike a different tone because the goal is not some world-neglecting lifestyle of self-improvement by the kombucha bar. Like the cloistered monks who all day practice “fall down, get up, fall down, get up,” they do so not because they are special or privileged. But because getting good at getting grounded is the path to becoming more able to tend to the needs of the world.

And you?

1. Father Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging, p. 100 ↩︎
2. Prentice Hemphill on book tour, Becoming the People podcast, Season 1, Episode 6, Aug 12, 2024. ↩︎

The End of Wandering

This is #40 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

Last spring, I opened a drawer and came upon a surprising discovery:

I had stopped wearing my watch.

There it lay in a ceramic bowl with stray hair ties and a barrette, ignored and largely forgotten.

Since childhood, I’ve been a watch-wearer, strapping various timekeeping pieces onto my wrist to manage my days and therefore my life (evoking here the clear-eyed observation from a poem “How We Spend Our Days” by the great Annie Dillard who we recently lost – RIP). And here in my mid-life moment, as someone who at her core doesn’t know how to take to a sabbath, I had managed a form of neglect that felt like my purest victory over modern capitalism’s (and every other idolatrous system’s) erosion of our capacity to feel in our bodies the reality of time as something that issues from the breath and being of God.

A few weeks later, I realized that I had also inadvertently stopped making to-do lists. Again, unplanned and lacking intention. It just sorta happened.

Somehow, I have so severely cleared off the decks of my life commitments that my daily aspirations now involve only one or two notable activities a day. It seems that is all I can handle. As such, my digital calendar is like a set of almost-bare cupboards, at times with only one standing weekly phone call with a friend and one with my dad.

Such representation make my days appear small and lacking when measured against the usual yardsticks of productivity outcomes. So, I must work at not feeling small and lacking when I consider the contrast between these bare-cupboard days and my ample digital calendars of yesteryear.

Such malleability in a life is unsettling. And oddly hopeful.

The imprint of two books I taught this summer linger upon me: Kelly Kapic’sYou’re Only Human and John Swinton’s Dementia: Living in the Memories of God.

Both books grapple with our limitations–the ones that God gifts us as creatures with bodies who inhabit time and space, and the ones that stem from all that is broken, tragic, and sorrowful.

Unintentional again, it feels apt to be meditating on the nature of human limitations while the social media world is insistent on feeding us notifications of the newest “maxxing” phenomenon. Indeed, I am increasingly moved by the possibility that God loves and values us, not because we maxxed anything, but simply because we are His delight. Full stop.

At the start of this Wilderness Wandering series, I think deep down I was fixated on the “wilderness” aspect of my journey, anxious about what would become of me “in the wilderness.” But, at this closing, I’m more curious about the “wandering” part. Perusing the entries from the last two years, I see this:

Wandering has been letting myself get lost.

Wandering has been climbing over theological fences and peeking through sectarian hedges to inspect the fruit on the trees found on the other side.

Wandering has been learning to be less afraid of grief.

Wandering has been trying on new stories that better explain my experience.

Wandering has been allowing myself to stop trying so hard.

Finally, wandering has led to arriving at no clear destination and that seems like win.

Thank you for coming along for this ride. You have been very patient and kind, and I am so grateful for your public and private words of encouragement. In this upcoming year (2027), I am feeling ambitious about hatching a new series of forty posts here on circa40 AND launching a new blog on Substack. I hope you will stick around and maybe also come visit me on Substack! Details to come in the next post on what I will be writing about on these separate platforms!

Speed Limit

This is #39 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

For so long I’ve lived life like I drive: careful at first, then once familiarized with the road, I push to the max. Learning to drive in New Jersey, I was functionally taught to interpret speed limit signs as indicating the minimum speed I should be driving and only when exceeding 15 mph over that number does one court attention from a police officer with a radar gun. More recently, while driving in Southern California over the last decade, I learned that a speed limit of 55 mph actually meant at least 75-80 mph in the passing lane. And then I moved to Oregon.

We live right off Interstate 5 and, after eighteen months of observations, I am still astonished by the fact that the greater majority of local Oregon drivers actually drive the speed limit as marked. Actually. Honestly, it’s really something!

What really gets me is seeing drivers in the right lane regularly drive slower than the speed limit—not just because one hinky driver is holding up everyone else with their pokey pace. No, right-lane drivers just seem to all want to drive 5 mph slower than the speed limit. It’s absolutely remarkable.

When I first arrived in Oregon, I actually tried the right lane for a bit. When in Rome, I thought! Just for kicks…right? While I did have to consciously shift my internal posture into a chill zen mode, the experience was largely positive because it brought my blood pressure down and I was more calm just minding my own business rather than searching for my optimal path through traffic. And then there were the days when the right lane’s pokey pace made me feel so crazy on the inside. Unable to tolerate it anymore, I would cast off my curiosity mindset and hurriedly signal left to get into a middle lane, and maybe even scoot all the way to the passing lane to flirt with the risks of a speeding ticket.

Having lived life like I drive, I have occasionally discovered an invitation to live a different way–some equivalent of driving in the right lane–and I try it out because I’m curious. There will often be benefits to that new way of living, but after a while, I start wondering why the heck I am poking along with this ridiculously inefficient experiment and I go back to my trained way of existence: testing the limits of how much I can get done before the life-police turns on the siren and orders me to pull over and issues a penalty for living dangerously.

But I’m beginning to realize that sometimes it’s not the law that will keep me driving the speed limit. I am learning that the car that is me—that is, my body—will actually start falling to pieces in the middle of the highway—engine, brake pads, side mirrors, fenders, all of it just sheering off like panels flying off a rocket that is blazing too fast through the atmosphere. And, with this year’s diagnosis of an autoimmune condition, it’s felt like an unfunny version of a Mel Brooks scene when the seventies van is precariously barreling down the hill and the driver is frantically trying to regain control of the vehicle by manually manipulating the transmission with the tall trigger shifter. But with all the friction, the entire rod is torn right out of the car and the driver is left staring aghast at the now useless shift stick waggling in their hand.

Having spent too many years disregarding the blinking signals of fatigue on the dashboard, my poor body—this sweet hard-working buddy of mine—has turned in its resignation letter. “No thank you,” it has said. “I quit.” For someone who grew up on a steady diet of “Little Engine that Could” exhortations— “I think I can, I think I can”—this notion of such limitations was simply not imaginable. It might be a barrier for others. But, not me. Of course, maybe I’d slow down at times when trying to pull all that unexpected cargo up the hill, but I never thought my body would just break.

I keep a mental folder of wildly successful people who suddenly veered off the Express Lane and smoked through five lanes in order to desperately reach the exit ramp. Early blogger and political commentator Andrew Sullivan was told by his doctor that he had survived HIV only to now be on track to die from trying to keep up his 24/7 blogging career. He wrote brilliantly about it in an essay titled, “I Used to Be a Human Being.” That was ten years ago. Now, Sullivan keeps up “The Weekly Dish” on Substack with over 192,000 followers describing himself as “recovering blogger.”

Media titan Ariana Huffington, founder of Huffington Post, collapsed on the floor after years of intense productivity and career success. Since then, she has dedicated her efforts to promoting well-being and resilience, evident in her subsequent books Thrive and The Sleep Revolution. Huffington started a new company called ThriveGlobal to monetize her new gospel message. Clearly, she and Sullivan haven’t exactly decided to live out the rest of their days poking along in the Oregonian right lane of the highway.

I wonder how long it took between their “Come to Jesus” moment and their decision to resume a modified version of the same life. I wonder to myself what will happen when, Lord willing, I am no longer the hapless driver in the unfunny Mel Brooks movie barreling down the hill with a broken transmission shifter in my hand? Even when I might be able to move past this intentional season of letting my fields lay fallow, will I have the luxury to keep driving in the right lane, watching everyone blow past me? Will I have the courage to continue exploring what it feels like to be anti-capitalist in my meaning-making, to let go of tethering my worth and significance to my productivity, to stay long enough in this state of free-falling in order to find out if some form of sublime freedom really lies on the other side?

Eastertide Dance

This is #38 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

I recently started talking to God again.

I had been on hiatus
A broken-down selah 
With no clear path back.

What is there to pray, expect, or hope from God when you realize that sometimes losing the battle might be what simply happens and nothing more. Sometimes you just don't get the win and, even if it seems that every moral fiber in the universe should have worked towards that win, it’s never going to happen. At least not anytime soon.

What is there to say
What is there to plead?

There was no despair, resignation, or cynicism
There was no dark night of the soul
No stormy feelings of anger towards God
No shaking of fists
No “where are you, God” shouts

It was just silence from me
Breathing in, breathing out
But it wasn’t silence from God.

Occasional reassurances:
I see you, daughter.
You don't need to try to do anything.
Convalesce. Recover. Hush.

And then, during Holy Week, a question
terrifying and intimate:
Stay. Will you stay with me? 
Stay in the uncomfortable
Don’t run looking for relief
Don't be excitably looking for portals, looking for ways out.
The others have fallen asleep
Will you keep watch and stay with me?

In her 1992 book Trauma and Recovery 
Judith Herman wrote 
“Only through mourning everything that she has lost 
can the patient discover her indestructible inner life.”

I don't yet know much
about an indestructible inner life 
But much time has been spent 
Mourning 
A lot of things lost
 
Wondering
How do we learn to dance
This eastertide dance
In the uncomfortable 
In the unresolved

In our bodies
What is this dance?

Playing the Mob on Palm Sunday

This is #37 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

Palm Sunday approaches.

As one of the most psychologically complicated holy days in the church calendar, Palm Sunday evokes a jumble of emotions in me.  

For years, while attending Episcopal parishes, we observed Palm Sunday with a corporate recitation of the Passion narrative. (If you are unfamiliar, here’s an example.) Like a play, various members of the congregation would stand in front with pre-assigned roles. The lucky ones got to be the Narrator, Peter, Jesus, or the centurion. Someone less lucky had to be Pilate. Teenaged acolytes might get to play the servant girl, the soldiers, or even the high priest. And whoever got to say Judas’ lines must have been vetted and cleared as someone secure enough in their faith to handle the hot potato.

And what about the rest of us? The nameless people in the pews who showed up and unwittingly found ourselves roped into an exercise of community theater?

We were allotted two roles: first, we were the crowds on the street leading to Jerusalem, proclaiming Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah and King: “Hosanna, Hosanna in the Highest!” And then much later in the drama, we would stand again and play the role of the bloodthirsty mob shouting: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

sheesh.

so uncomfortable.

This liturgical one-two combo made my blood run cold every year. It was always confusing and soul-withering to feel the final words leave my lips.

What a treacherously brilliant practice of embodying the fickleness of the human heart through the very words we were given to mouth! Being relegated to the role of the capricious crowd gave us a structured opportunity to perceive that perhaps, as human beings, we are not so much born into (or riddled with) depravity. Rather, it is more that we are foolish and fearful creatures prone to groupthink, seeking safety and satisfaction by any means possible.

Through the dramaturgical exercise, however briefly, we might have also experienced the exhilarating but ultimately dangerous form of collective effervescence when hearing our voice among all the other voices chanting for the state-sanctioned death of the One we had just celebrated a few minutes ago. We blushed not because we necessarily saw our individual shortcomings more clearly. We blushed because our hearts beat an uneven rhythm of moral intuition, recognizing how our fundamentally social nature makes us vulnerable to collective delusion and group lust for violence when the energizing sensation of the collective promises to grant us access to its naked muscular power.

As a person in the pew, I have long experienced Palm Sunday as an occasion to reflect on the nature of power. The “lesson” usually highlights our very human, but very mistaken presumption that the solutions to our intractable problems lie in the use of coercive power (e.g., the military might of a triumphant messiah). The cringy juxtaposition of the royal procession to Jerusalem and the impending Way of the Cross reminds us that there is a wildly different form of power whose main ingredient is Love (not control) demonstrated by a God of the Universe who relinquishes raw power and chooses to become the scapegoat, the victim of wrongful conviction and state-sanctioned violence instead.

But in these troubled and taut days when it feels as if our only options are to choose between one collective consciousness or another, call it “echo chambers” or “tribalism,” it seems there is yet another lesson for all of us when we—in these Greek-chorus roles of shouting “Hosanna!” in one instance and crying out “Crucify him!” in another—discover that coursing through our own veins is a willingness to actually play the mob, to clutch for coercive power when loyalty to a particular group promises us and our people safety through control.

With such a lesson taken to heart, we are likely to feel run through with the sword of truth. It’s too bad churches aren’t more like the Red Cross who makes us sit on a cot and munch a few Oreos to make sure we aren’t going to pass out before being allowed to make our way back out into the world. Instead of “I gave blood” stickers, we nameless people in the pews should wear “I played the mob on Palm Sunday” stickers.

The other day, I watched an Instagram reel where a stand-up comedian observed that a key feature of being a Christian is knowing that you are better than other people. Why? “Because our sins are forgiven and everyone else is going to hell.”

sheesh.

so uncomfortable.

again.

Maybe I was just feeling particularly earnest that day, but wow! her joke stung even as I laughed wryly. Her observation landed so hard because it felt so true. I felt genuinely embarrassed as if she had just exposed to the entire world some dirty little secret that we Christians can’t bear to even whisper to ourselves.

I’m guessing the comedian has never been to an Episcopal service on Palm Sunday though. Because, while one might reach all kinds of conclusions about Christianity and Christians from that liturgy, it sure is hard to conclude that Christians are full of themselves when everyone in the pews nervously shifts from one foot to the other as we stand to play the role of the bloodthirsty mob.  

While Palm Sunday typically marks the end of Lent, it feels more like its culmination. For any of us who made it through Lent still feeling remotely smug about ourselves, it’s a final liturgical jab in the ribs that is meant to be a little bit bruising and a little bit heartbreaking.

It feels intended to make us a little bit more motivated to pay attention to the arc of Holy Week in order to finally reach that opening moment in Easter Vigil when a lone voice cuts through the haunting silence and darkness, intoning:

“The Light of Christ!“

And craning our necks to see the faint flame atop the Christ candle, we stir as if awakened from a long sleep, curious to find strange tears of relief in the corners of our eyes. Tentatively, we sing back:

“Thanks be to God!”

And so begins a cosmic sounding, a deep calling to deep:

The Light of Christ!

Thanks be to God!

The Light of Christ!

Thanks be to God!

We are children playing Marco Polo in the pool. But instead of keeping away, we are sloshing through chest-high waters trying to draw nearer. So, until the end of the ages, we keep on listening for a voice calling out and we keep on singing out our hope:

The Light of Christ!

Thanks be to God!   

The Light of Christ!

Thanks be to God!   

New Year’s Resolution 2026

This is #36 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

Do you remember your New Year’s resolution from way back…over two months ago? That was before you considered taking on a lenten discipline. Before you celebrated the Year of the Horse. Before your social media feed reminded you of Black History Month. Before A Lot of Things Happened in our world.

Let’s be honest, it feels like a really long time ago. And, for sure, requisite high-fives for those of you who are still riding strong in your New Year’s resolution rodeo. But for the rest of us happy slackers, let it be known that the one resolution I could muster for 2026 was to commit to wearing sweats at home every day this year.

That’s right, this would not be a year of new fitness regimes or healthy dietary ambitions. In fact, it would not be a year of trying to do better in anything, really. Instead, I thought it would be quite something if I could manage to wear blanket-like garments daily—sweatshirts, sweatpants, soft cozy sweaters, warm comforting clothes that cumulatively signal to me the admonitions I have such a hard time heeding:

Slow down.

No need to gallivant about running errands all day.

It’s ok to curl up on the couch and take a break.

Let’s just stay in and try to remember to breathe, can we?

Lest you think that I’m merely being clever and cute with this “anti-resolution” and can imagine me trotting about town looking oh-so-sophisticated in some elegant athleisure wear or posh tracksuit, sorry nope. That’s not happening, folks. My 2026 truth: I am logging record-breaking hours on the living room couch next to the fireplace, covered in blankets, literally wearing a knit stocking cap.

This is me looking courageous.

“Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world—dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizing principle—there are such times in every human life, times when the entire system seems to cave in and curl up into a catatonia of anguish and confusion, difficult yet necessary for our growth. In such times, the most courageous thing we can do is surrender to the process that is the pause, trust the still dark place to kindle the torchlight for a new path and vitalize our forward motion toward a new system of being.”

– Maria Popova

I’m not sure if Maria Popova had ever imagined that such “surrender to the process that is the pause” could involve the curious “discipline” of lounging in cozy sweatpants. But strangely enough, in my wacky internal world, it does.

As a tomboy, my childhood self was never one for soft fuzzy sweaters, big fluffy slippers, or stuffed animals of any kind. In fact, these cozy comforts irritated me. (Yes, I promise to go seek therapy to undo that bizarre knot.) By my college years, the occasional pair of sweats was mainly worn when playing flag football or shuffling around with a low-grade fever. Weekends and downtime in my adulthood were mainly spent in jeans, t-shirts, and oversized button-down or flannel shirts. The point is: it’s really A Thing for me to have a daily regimen of comfort-forward clothes and planting myself on the couch. This is not just a case of a middle-aged woman “letting herself go”  in the way that one might when stress-eating an entire carton of ice cream at midnight. (Trust me, I’ve interrogated myself on this possibility.)

Weirdly enough, resolving to spend this year curled up in sweats on the couch is a daily reminder to calm down, to stop steeling myself against the world (and even myself), and to trust that I am allowed to be someone who needs to be comforted and held. To believe that these times in our larger world and the hardships of our personal lives sometimes warrant burrowing under a cozy blanket for longer than usual—and maybe that means you’re stricken with the blues, or maybe it simply means that your body is done for the day and it’s a good time to use that Doordash coupon for dinner tonite.

In a culture thick with selling self-help and wellness, what occurs to me anew is how one person’s lifeline might be another person’s demise. While a resolution of daily sweatpants on the couch might be a curiously helpful “practice” ( am I allowed to call it that?) for someone bizarrely wired like me at this given point in my life with my particular story, it might be incredibly unhelpful, wrong-headed, and even damaging to someone else who has other demons to slay and other mountains to climb. So, consider this my disclaimer: Don’t (necessarily) try this at home, kids.

With us it is impossible, but not for God.

Only God can save us.

– New Zealand Book of Common Prayer

One of my strengths has long been the propensity to live with intention. But I am starting to understand how that otherwise positive impulse can mask an iron-grip need for control. And wow, I feel really uncomfortable when things are out of control. But, I’m slowly learning to allow myself to feel those uncomfortable feelings–instead of brushing the emotion aside or condemning myself for having done something wrong–and to understand that, yes, it makes a lot of sense to feel uncomfortable when things are out of control. And that it is OK to be unable to gin up inner peace or equanimity. And that it is OK to not know what to even pray or to not even feel like praying. Because, sometimes, things will in fact be impossible for me. Actually. So maybe I should stop trying to white knuckle it through this season and submit to moving through it, and letting it move through me. Maybe I can trust that, sometimes actually, only God can save us. And there’s nothing I should be doing to grease the cosmic skids.

Thus the semi-regular fixture that I’ve become in our living room: a human pile of blankets, fluffy fleece pullovers and sweatpants. Sometimes, that pile is wondering what this non-muscular, not-even-contemplative form of Christian faith is. It doesn’t seem like the desert. Nor does it match the dark night of the soul. (Not sure if it is the cloud of unknowing, I haven’t read that book yet.) In the best moments, however, that pile knows better than to wonder too hard about these matters and encourages herself simply to be grateful for having enough safety and support to be a pile on that given day.

Kindergarten Punk

This is #35 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

For so long, I had told myself it was because of my older brother’s influence. He’s the one who listened to British punk and New Wave. He’s the one who introduced me to The Smiths and explained how Joy Division became New Order. He’s the one who told me about CBGBs, the club in New York where all the punk legends performed.

If I could’ve, my adolescent self would’ve worn all-black, styled my hair into a raw egg-crusted mohawk, and clomped around in army boots. I would’ve spent weekends trying to get into CBGBs, or at least hung around outside trading notes with the other disaffected teenagers from the suburbs.

Instead, my high school years were spent turning the knob of my clock radio like a thief intently set on cracking a safe. Hours were spent finessing a way past the static obscuring the distant New York City college radio station that delivered contraband music to my bedroom from the other side of the Atlantic.

For a girl who felt stuck in New Jersey where the cliched mediocrity of Top 40 hits and the smell of under-aged smoking on the heavy metalheads in the hallways reigned, British punk and New Wave was a pathway to another world outside. It validated my instinct to think that all those adults who would blithely say things like, “High school is going to be the best years of your life” were simply idiots. And for so long, the story I told myself was that I had cultivated this taste for the alternative, a critique of all things mainstream, because of my brother.

But it took a couple years after a therapist had invited me to relocate this 17-year-old self in me that I was surprised to recollect two much-earlier memories in a new way.

I loved Mrs. Christian’s kindergarten class. It was where I received my first box of chunky crayons and had a metal cubby labeled with my name. It was 1977 and we regularly marched around the room singing “America the Beautiful.” I would be so pleased when it was my turn to lead the procession, waving the flag.

That was the class where Mrs. Abner, the music teacher, would come twice a week and distribute old painted-blue wooden sticks to teach us rhythm as we tapped our sticks repeating after her “ta-ta-tee-tee-ta.” On the other days, beautiful Miss Hoepner would clip-clop over the linoleum tiles in her sassy high heels, pushing her magical cart of art supplies and give us wondrous projects of pipe cleaners, macaroni, and enormous plastic jugs of Elmer’s glue.

It was in this class that Jeffrey came in one day with a guitar slung around his neck. He walked in with cowboy boots that day and if he didn’t actually have a flock of girls hanging off his elbows, that’s how I remember it. Basking in the adoring glow of his entourage, Jeffrey sauntered in, sat down on a chair, and performed an Elvis song.

I watched from afar, peering over the top of a desk with my friend Laura. We watched as the girls fawned over Jeffrey as if he was fluffing $100 bills into the air. Laura and I thought those girls were idiots. And when Jeffrey got up and started strutting around, singing another forgettable song with the cooing girls processing like it was “America the Beautiful” but with more twang, we thought Jeffrey was a total fraud. Laura and I rolled our eyes.

There was another day in that class when the boys were in one area of the classroom–barricaded by the upright piano and circle of desks–building and knocking down tall structures of wooden blocks. The girls were in another area playing kitchen. While standard 5-year-old flirting was happening all around us, I was part of a klatch who decided that day to “poison the boys” (cue 5-year-old girls giggling). After much scheming, we pretend-stuffed the plastic fruits with our chunky crayons and threw them into a metal colander.

We went over to the boys area and offered our poisoned colander of plastic fruit in our best sing-songy voices, “Hiiiiiii boyzzz! You all must be Sooooo Hungry. Look! We made you something to eat! Do you want any?” When the boys looked up, puffed out their chests to receive what the women-folk had prepared, and naively began to pretend-eat the poisoned fruit, we girls howled in laughter, loudly announcing the hilarious truth to the boys.

While another therapist will need to help me unpack these core kindergarten memories, there was clearly something deep inside that understood my location to be outside: outside the norm, the popular, the mainstream, the powerful. But more than this, from a very young age, I had positioned myself against those who gathered attention to themselves and thoughtlessly presumed higher status. These categories of people were suspect–even pathetic. They warranted subversive attack.

Somehow, sewn into the inner lining of my personhood were these countervailing questions: Just because everyone liked Jeffrey, why would I? How might we cleverly bring those ridiculous boys down a peg or two? Why would I want to be a part of the crowd, jostling for the limelight?

Even as a very young child, there was little logic or persuasion in bandwagons, trends, or popularity. Instead of vying to fly closer to the sun–unsure when to stop, uncertain when you’d fall–keeping watch from the solid ground always seemed the better choice. Seeing things from a different angle always seemed like the winning strategy. And more mischief and fun could be had from the sidelines, off center stage.

I had apparently gone punk long before my brother brought British punk into our house. Some kind of felt otherness and instinct to fight lay deeper beneath that adolescent angst, some deeper forest that has yet to make it onto the map.

I’m Not Your Gal

This is #34 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

Shortly after post-pandemic travel and gatherings had resumed normalcy, I flew across the country to speak at a Christian conference in the American South. Looking at the long roster of invited speakers, I couldn’t help but feel that I was enabling the organizers to check two diversity boxes on their list: female, Asian. And when I listened to the other non-white speakers give their talks, I shifted uneasily in my seat because they seemed to represent a “certain kind” of diversity–one that did not make anyone else in the fairly homogeneous audience shift uneasily.

My mouth and throat grew dry as I wondered what would happen if I “came out” as not-the-right-kind of person of color and said things on stage that they did not expect (or want) to hear. It was too late to find out; there was no time to change or add to my talk– and I definitely didn’t trust myself to speak extemporaneously.

No matter how gently I could try to name the inequities and harms exacted from racism and spaces of white normativity, and no matter how much non-anxious presence I could muster when suggesting that maybe it’s time to hand over the reins of power to those on the margins of establishment religion so that the “palatial church” can be more like Jesus—the One who fraternized with the disinherited on the streets—I was pretty sure I’d come across like an uber-woke Joan the Baptist who had burst out of the desert with her clothing of camel’s hair, and fistfuls of locusts and wild honey.

After my talk, three women came up to me. Their initial comments pertained to digital technology–the topic of my talk–but very quickly, it became clear that they didn’t come to talk technology. Instead, they expressed how moved they were by the refreshment they felt by my presentation and then proceeded to lay out their frustrations–one even grew teary with desperation–about being women, wives, or mothers in their particular faith community.

It was all rather unexpected because my talk had said nothing about gender, but here we were: experiencing some nascent bond of unexpected sisterhood that seemed like the tiniest of streams in the desert that these women otherwise walked. It was as if my 18-minute presentation was a violin performance that somehow had struck a harmonic that only four of us could hear.

These women clearly felt alone; they were living interior lives that hummed a tune that felt unwelcome in their communities. Looking back, I can only smile weakly at realizing that I felt exactly the same way that day–at least, up until they became a part of my day.

“I’m not your gal.”

These are the words that I often want to say when I’m in an exchange with someone–usually at church or some Christian setting–and they say something that is often meant as a cheerful nudge that expresses: “we’re on the same team!” but inside, I’m feeling like I suddenly became aware of the fact that the neck hole on my shirt is too small and I’m forgetting to breathe.

Wanting people to like me, I am prone to reciprocate positive vibes. But, increasingly, I am realizing that I actually can’t reciprocate those warm “we’re on the same team!” smiles a lot of the times. Some of those lines of non-reciprocity have always been there and I’ve just been too insecure to live into them. Even since I was a very young child, I’d often feel that a lot of people around me just didn’t have it right. They wanted me to join them in chasing dumb things. They wanted to be someone I had no interest in becoming.

Feeling insecure, I figured I was probably wrong in my perception of the world, and wrong even, in my perception of myself. I was afraid of the head-turns or the questioning looks I’d receive if I let out what I really thought or felt. So I stayed quiet, waiting to be enlightened and brought more fully into the fold. But, always still, I ran a parallel track internally, underground–furtively cultivating my own wonderings while second-guessing those very intuitions.

Now in my fifties, I am aware that my appearance in person and my story on paper presents a certain self. To be fair, it is reasonable to infer certain things about who that certain self is. Still, when I feel people presuming that I am on their team, I increasingly ponder appropriate methods of letting them down. In those awkward interactions, I can feel the swirl of words coalescing like a verbal hand to the face that longs to stop the otherwise unquestioned flow of conversational traffic: “Actually I’m not your gal… anymore.”

I haven’t had the guts to utter those words yet. I haven’t even come close.

Perhaps in the fullness of time.

The End is Near

This is #33 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.” – Gal. 4:4-5

The end of wilderness wandering. Is it possible to know that it is coming to an end? To feel that you no longer need to wander, but have an appetite to start forging a path in a certain direction?

Such realization might be borne out of necessity: when circumstances force your hand, like stepping onto the outside deck of a ferry that’s flying through the sound. The splashing flecks of cold wet and wind suddenly shock you into the reality of the preciousness of life and how our days are numbered. How the things we take for granted aren’t always going to be accessible to us: our physical health, our financial stability, the relationships we cherish, the people we love, the soundness of our own mind. It can all disappear without prior notice.

And, in the same heartbeat, wilderness wandering can feel like coming to an end when we find our rucksack now full of observations, oddities and sundries. And we feel ready to not just keep rummaging through the bag anymore, but feel a desire to set them on a shelf, put them to good use in a home, use them in care for a neighbor. The sack is full. The potential uses are clear. Let’s go about planting gardens, building trellises, and making music with what we’ve got.

How did the people of Israel know that their forty years of wilderness wandering was over? How did Elijah know it was time to return to the fray? And if Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days, how did the Spirit lead the way out? What did that feel like? Did they all just wake up one day and KNOW?

For so long, I imagined the end of a wilderness wandering like the end of a timeout, after-school detention, or grueling boot camp. The day would come when someone thought you’d sufficiently licked your wounds and learned your lessons, and they’d let you out into the world again with fresh eyes and renewed purpose to start your ministry, put on your mantle again, claim your Promised Land. In this picture, the wandering is a kind of punitive season, a sign of faith confusion, a required purgatory of sorts before the next rung of the ladder can be attained. Something broken needed to get fixed. Something untested needed to be thrust into the fiery pit and proven worthy. When it ends, it’s only because someone has judged you worthy to leave your wandering.

maybe.

But, perhaps there’s an alternative picture to consider: a wilderness wandering that is closer to convalescence. A doctor’s orders to the seaside. An undetermined stoppage time in the middle of the soccer game in order to let the players regain their senses after an overwhelming collision. The unknowable time it takes for a withered plant to be quietly cajoled back to believing it could ever produce a new leaf again.

And even though the wilderness is a desert, populated with untamed beasts, where the scapegoat is banished when the community gates close, it is striking that the Scriptures always mention The Lord and the angels present, tending in the wilderness. Wilderness wandering is uncivilized in the purist sense, but it is not void of Love.

Taking these parameters to heart, the end of wilderness wandering might not mark the end of a spiritual incarceration or period of simply being subject to the consequences of one’s own folly. On the fortieth day, I’m guessing there was no trumpet sound that tore open the skies for Jesus or Elijah. It’s not as if Israel woke up one day and, after forty years of arguing over their maps, the Gen Z of their day finally figured out that the Boomers had held those dang maps upside down all these years and now everyone finally understood why these mountains were here and those plains of scrub bushes were over there.

I’ve always thought the wandering would end because The Next Thing would be made clear. I had presumed that the wandering would end with some equivalent of someone giving me a new scroll with fresh new marching orders or the next treasure map to explore. But, I’m starting to think it doesn’t work that way.

Maybe the wandering ends because you are ready for it to end. You still might not know what to pack for the journey, or even know where exactly you are going yet. And even though you might look the same from the outside–still apparently aimless, achieving apparently nothing–on the inside, you know it’s time to start making a move. Where? Undetermined. But, you feel it deep inside: it’s time. It’s time in a way that is not compulsive, not driven by fear or need for control. It is simply the experience of that beautiful mysterious phrase: in the fullness of time.

For the last seven entries of this Wildnerness Wandering series, I’m going to keep it short. I hope to sweep up stray writing scraps from my notebooks and plant them as seeds, staking out possible terrain for new crops, new flowers, new streams that run in new directions. We’ll see where we end up at Entry #40.

A Slight Breeze

This is #32 of the 40-piece series, “wilderness wandering” — thanks for joining me on this circa40 journey!

“One of the hardest things in the world is to stand up for someone who not only cannot improve your material life, but whose mere association could keep you from your goals. As my friend, anthropologist Jacqueline Nassy Brown, quoted her minister, ‘It is about convenience versus commitment.’ Truth, after all, requires effort–to both find and hold on to….. It is a risk to undertake the imposed loss of credibility that brings with it a loss of influence, when we challenge power directly.”

-Sarah Schulman, 2025

“I know many white evangelical pastors who were justice oriented in 2020 but became anti–social justice crusaders as soon as the political winds shifted and 2021 rolled around. Similarly, I know of Christian ministries that did away with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in early 2025. Much like the rich young ruler who walked away from Jesus after realizing he couldn’t cast aside his great wealth (much of which was likely tied to a privileged status in the Roman Empire), these Christian leaders, it seems to me, also chose to walk away from Jesus’s ways when confronted with the personal cost of giving up their power, comforts, and privileges.

-Rev. Joash P. Thomas, 2025

“By the time we got to the summer of 2020…people seemed ready and willing to make change. But when the seasons shifted, not much else did. …It seemed as if everyone had come to the edge of the precipice, held hands, but failed to jump. The change that was needed required more than many were willing to give.”

-Prentice Hemphill, 2024

It is always unsettling when the seemingly disparate things you pick up and read within a 24-hour period all seem to usher you to the same seat that has a “Von Trapp family”-styled pine cone waiting for your bottom.

Hello, Operator? Can you patch me through to the Holy Spirit?

Yes, I need to ask if she is trying to get a message through to me….

Actually…wait. Can you hold up a sec?

I’m not sure I’m ready for this truth yet.

Uh yea…um…can I call you back later?

*CLICK*

Geez…why does the wind seem to have picked up suddenly?